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…

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…

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…

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

If 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.

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