Last Straw

Pat Condell:

Religion is now completely out of control. It’s already got it’s hands around the throat of the United Nations and it’s pushing for a world-wide blasphemy law to protect people from hearing words that might crowbar their tiny minds out of the stone age.

Click through for the video.

As some of you may have noticed I’ve been having a bit of a tidy up around here recently. Last Straw now has a classy new grid-based design called Basic Maths by Khoi Vinh. I’ve also blown a few cobwebs out of the backend involving categories and whatnot. All of which should make browsing my rants endless pearls of wisdom infinitely more pleasurable. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a new photo/video gallery too.

As email subscribers will have already noticed I’ve also overhauled the mailing list system, switching to MailChimp. Note that this will now come as a weekly digest instead of individual emails.

While switching I was reminded of how many friends and family I’ve surreptitiously subscribed over the years. Not the most polite thing to do. Honestly, unless you really want to receive these emails, please unsubscribe. There are other more modern ways to follow a blog these days anyway.

In the mean time you might like to check out another website overhaul I’ve been working on recently.

There have been a number of inquiries into the 2003 invasion of Iraq but as someone commenting on the European Tribune website put it, they

… are not intended to reach a finding that the public find credible, they exist to provide a smokescreen for a few years to cover the establishment for a few years in the hope everyone forgets about it.

The Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war is already running a propaganda campaign that it “won’t be a whitewash.”

But you only need to realise that its members were appointed by Gordon Brown—one of the perpetrators—and read the terms of reference to realise this is a whitewash before it even starts.

For those of you subjected to the unfortunate idea of having Tony Blair as first president of the EU you’ll pleased to know the war criminal never came close.
No Right Turn:
The European Union has its first permanent council president—and its not Tony Blair. Instead, EU leaders have chosen Belgian Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy for [...]

Monbiot on peak oil and food production:
If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling … If we are taken by surprise, if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had [...]

Sounds like the U.S. has been playing silly buggers with oil production forecasts.
From a senior figure at the International Energy Agency, who has now left but is unwilling to give his name:
We have [already] entered the ‘peak oil’ zone. I think that the situation is really bad.
It’s worth listening to the audio in the above [...]

On this day we remember. We especially remember all the young men, women and children who have fallen in unjust wars because the rest have failed in our job to stop young men and women being shipped off to fight unjust wars.
On this day we say sorry to those we have failed. Sorry to the [...]

Jacqui Janes believes her son is dead because the war in Afghanistan is under-resourced.
He’s not. He’s dead because he was fighting an unjust war.
The stated aim of the invasion of Afghanistan was to find Osama bin Laden and other high-ranking Al-Qaeda members. On 14 October, 2001, the Taliban publicly offered to hand over Osama bin Laden [...]

Labour (UK) have had twelve years to do this:
A fierce debate within the government on how to tackle entrenched wealth inequality … is to be ignited by a report ordered by Harriet Harman, the Labour deputy leader and the minister responsible for equalities.