February 2009
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Month February 2009

Tony Benn’s Interview With Saddam Hussein

Due to being in Iraq at the time I missed this inter­view with Sad­dam Hus­sein. Fascinating.

Time to ditch Facebook?

Have you ever thought it was a bit creepy that Face­book, a profit-driven organ­isa­tion, has such an intim­ate know­ledge of you, your friend­ships and fam­ily links? Ever con­sidered leav­ing Face­book because of such creep­i­ness? Maybe now is a good time.

Tony Blair gets payoff from Zionists

War Crim Tony Blair has been awar­ded a prize from Zion­ist organ­isa­tion Dan David Found­a­tion, amount­ing to $1 million.

Pre­sum­ably for his efforts to ensure Israel can con­tinue its eth­nic cleans­ing of Palestinians.

NZ National/ACT government: slash and burn

While the rest of the world attempt to stim­u­late their eco­nom­ies with gov­ern­ment spend­ing, the ideo­lo­gic­ally ham­strung National/ACT gov­ern­ment of New Zea­l­and is arbit­rar­ily slash­ing depart­mental budgets by 10%.1

No Right Turn:

And it looks like the slash and burn has already begun, with con­firm­a­tion that the gov­ern­ment is plan­ning to slash 500 to 1000 people from the Min­istry of Social Devel­op­ment - the very people who are going to be needed to help oth­ers dur­ing the reces­sion. But as usual, they’ll be told to “do more with less”. In the 90’s, that philo­sophy — of impos­ing arbit­rary budget cuts in pur­suit of some arbit­rary fiscal tar­get — led to crum­bling schools, roads, and hos­pit­als, to chron­ic­ally under­paid doc­tors, nurses, and teach­ers, to grow­ing pub­lic health wait­ing lists and high bar­ri­ers to get­ting social sup­port. It also led to a gov­ern­ment which out­sourced core func­tions to highly paid con­sult­ants while let­ting its internal capa­city wither — to the extent that it was even­tu­ally unable to run an elec­tion prop­erly due to the rel­ev­ant people not being budgeted to do it. Even after nine years in power, Labour was unable to heal all of that dam­age. And now it looks like National is going to do it all again…

So, when your local school starts fall­ing down and you can’t find a doc­tor, just remem­ber: that’s the price you pay for elect­ing a National government.

Notes:
  1. Such acts are designed to make any­thing fun­ded col­lect­ively by the tax­payer inad­equate, so that people lose faith in demo­cratic pub­licly fun­ded ser­vices and turn to the private sec­tor. []

NZ Parliament passes unbelievably crap copyright law

Some­how copy­right hold­ers have man­aged to roy­ally trump all other interests in get­ting an unbe­liev­ably crap copy­right law through Par­lia­ment; giv­ing New Zea­l­and the most dra­conian copy­right law in the world, which allows people and organ­isa­tions to be dis­con­nec­ted from the inter­net simply on the basis of accus­a­tions of “copy­right infringe­ment.” No courts involved. “Guilt upon accus­a­tion,” as Juha Saar­inen puts it.

Here’s Rus­sell Brown’s take, and David Farrar’s (although pre­dict­ably defens­ive of National) and Juha Saar­inen for Geekzone.

You can blame both Labour and National for this screw up. It’s a reveal­ing glimpse into the author­it­arian streak that runs through both these parties. The Greens (as usual) and the Maori parties were the only ones to sens­ibly vote against this crap.

Really, if you vote Labour or National take this as a good reason to con­sider other parties when you vote next time.

The best way to deal with this screw up is to repeal the law.

Pace of climate change exceeds estimates

Pace of cli­mate change exceeds estim­ates:

We are basic­ally look­ing now at a future cli­mate that’s bey­ond any­thing we’ve con­sidered ser­i­ously in cli­mate model sim­u­la­tions,” Chris­topher Field, found­ing dir­ector of the Carne­gie Institution’s Depart­ment of Global Eco­logy at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity, said.

… emis­sions from burn­ing fossil fuels since 2000 have largely out­paced the estim­ates used in the U.N. panel’s 2007 reports.

Unex­pec­tedly large amounts of car­bon diox­ide are being released into the atmo­sphere as the res­ult of “feed­back loops” that are speed­ing up nat­ural processes.

UK government covers up torture

For­eign Office link to tor­ture cover-up

How do these people sleep at night?

Passionato

And now for some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent, for those of you who like to listen to clas­sical music. I’ve been mean­ing to blog this for a while:

Passionato.com — this is how digital music dis­tri­bu­tion on the net should work: decent length pre­views, DRM-free (mean­ing no restric­tions on which devices you play your music) and avail­able in lossless file format (mean­ing the files are com­pressed without sac­ri­fi­cing the integ­rity of the audio, as hap­pens with lossy formats like MP3).

They could improve their search func­tion, but the show-stopper is price: if I find an album I like what’s to stop me from pur­chas­ing the CD for cheaper? I’m not a huge buyer of music but I would be if digital dis­tri­bu­tion com­peted with CDs.

Check out more on their about page.

Free-market ideology is dead

Free-market ideo­logy is dead, and none too soon:

The pat­tern is clear: gov­ern­ments that respond to a crisis cre­ated by free-market ideo­logy with an accel­er­a­tion of that same dis­cred­ited agenda will not sur­vive to tell the tale.

I just hope the same can be said for New Zealand.

Must-read from George Monbiot

hezel_blearsIf you read noth­ing else about polit­ics today read this:

George Mon­biot: Just what exactly do you stand for, Hazel Blears — except election?

For some con­text in the lead up to this piece check out No Right Turn’s links on the mat­ter.