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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.
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 the top job. His chief virtues? He’s from a small state actually committed to the European project (unlike the UK), and he’s a consensus politician, rather than a divisive autocrat (unlike Blair). Plus of course he’s not a war criminal — always a bonus when you’re trying to run a state committed to peace and international law.
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 last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.
Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester on to nearby fields. He’s replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.
We practically eat oil.
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 linked article too.
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 millions who died in vain to end all war. Sorry for allowing Remembrance Day to become “just show business.” From it’s original purpose as a warning about the awful cost of war, hijacked by jingoists who have recast the dead as soldiers in just wars, defenders of a free world.
Sorry to those who continue to this day to be sent off to fight and die in unjust wars.
Edit: I’ve had some comments in other forums and I want to add the following note to clarify what the above is about.
It was a war to end all wars. But it didn’t.
It is surely abhorrent that politicians have turned Remembrance Day into “show business,” as Harry Patch described it. As they “honour” the fallen of WWI they simultaneously wage aggressive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s two-faced. How can you possibly take heed of the awful cost of war that Remembrance Day is meant to signify and honour the millions dead by actively ignoring exactly the lessons learnt as a result of WWI and WWII?
The same goes for ordinary people like ourselves living in our so-called democracies. How can we genuinely honour the millions dead on Remembrance Day when we haven’t even honoured our end of the bargain by ensuring politicians do not ship our young men and women off to fight and die in aggressive wars?
(The title of this post has also been changed from “On this day we remember and say sorry” to “The fallen are not honoured by waging aggressive wars.”)
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 to a third country, provided the U.S. halted the illegal bombing of Afghanistan and produced the necessary evidence about involvement of bin Laden or any of his associates in the 11 September attacks.
George Bush junior dismissed this offer and continued with the offensive, putting an end to any possibility of a potentially peaceful, legal resolution to the events of 11 September 2001.
The United Nations Security Council never authorised the invasion of Afghanistan and it certainly wasn’t an act of self-defence. It was an act of aggression, the supreme international crime.
Neither George Bush nor Gordon Brown had to go off to war, but Jacqui Janes’ son did, and now he’s dead.
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.