November 2009
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Month November 2009

Aggressive Atheism

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.

Last Straw’s new design and a note to email subscribers

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.

Inquiries into invasion of Iraq are a smokescreen

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.

Chilcot Inquiry into Iraq War is a whitewash before it starts

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.

Blair loses, audible sigh of relief heard around world

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…

Monbiot on peak oil and food production

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…

Peak oil swept under the carpet?

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 fallen are not honoured by waging aggressive wars

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…

Jacqui Janes is wrong about why her son is dead

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…

Better late than never?

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.

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