December 2009
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Month December 2009

Entries 10 Total

Congratulations New Zealand

Dec 18, ’09 8:08 AM

You can rest assured that when your grand­chil­dren ask you what you did when you were warned of man-made cli­mate change you voted into gov­ern­ment a bunch of self-centred old men and fin­an­ci­ers try­ing to squeeze every last dol­lar from their invest­ments in out­dated indus­tries who then went to Copen­ha­gen and com­mit­ted New Zea­l­and to fuck all.

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War criminals looking after their own

Dec 16, ’09 11:32 PM

Soli­citor Daniel Machover, after politi­cians — includ­ing Gor­don Brown — hatch a plan to insu­late fel­low politi­cians from uni­ver­sal jur­is­dic­tion:

I feel hon­est revul­sion at the idea of a case where a judge has gran­ted an arrest war­rant and a politi­cian gets on the phone and apo­lo­gises. They have got to stay out of indi­vidual cases and legal decisions.

Of course Gor­don Brown and the gov­ern­ment he is a part of played an integ­ral role in the inva­sions of Iraq and Afgh­anistan. He’s just look­ing out for his own kind.

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What if you could video record your entire life?

Dec 16, ’09 1:05 PM

I’ve just been updat­ing some pho­tos on Flickr and it struck me how much we record and pho­to­graph children’s lives these days. Look­ing back on pho­tos and video is a great way to remin­isce. But what if one day you could video record your entire life and play it back? Freaky.

Edit: Watched a film called Code 46 the other day, in which you can upload your memor­ies to a device and play them back in video.

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Climate change and intergenerational warfare

Dec 15, ’09 7:40 AM

Alex Stef­fen of World­chan­ging puts his fin­ger on one of the more damning aspects of the polit­ics of cli­mate change, the vast chasm of per­spect­ive between the gen­er­a­tions, Copen­ha­gen and the War for the Future:

To be young and aware is to know you’re being lied to; to know that a bright green future is pos­sible; to know that we can reima­gine the world, rebuild our cit­ies, redesign our lives, retool our factor­ies, dis­trib­ute innov­a­tion and cre­ativ­ity and all live in a world that is not only bet­ter than the altern­at­ive, but much bet­ter than the world we have now.

To be young and aware is to sus­pect that, in the end, the debate about cli­mate action isn’t about sub­stance, but about rich old men try­ing to squeeze every last dol­lar, euro, and yen from their invest­ments in out­dated indus­tries. It is to agree with the envir­on­ment­al­ist Paul Hawken that we have an eco­nomy that steals the future, sells it in the present, and calls it GDP. It is to begin to see your eld­ers as can­ni­bals with golf clubs.

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Lip reading Star Trek

Dec 14, ’09 10:28 PM

Hil­ari­ous. Click through for the video.

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Change blindness

Dec 14, ’09 10:16 PM

Spooky. Click through for the video.

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Former Director of Public Prosecutions: Blair is a deceitful sycophant

Dec 14, ’09 7:43 PM

Ken Mac­Don­ald, Dir­ector of Pub­lic Pro­sec­u­tions between 2003 – 2008, writ­ing for the Times:

The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes stead­ily clearer. This was a for­eign policy dis­grace of epic pro­por­tions and play­ing foot­sie on Sunday morn­ing tele­vi­sion does noth­ing to repair the dam­age. It is now very dif­fi­cult to avoid the con­clu­sion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarm­ing sub­ter­fuge with his part­ner George Bush and went on to mis­lead and cajole the Brit­ish people into a deadly war they had made per­fectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increas­ingly hard to believe even he found truly credible.

Hind­sight is a great temp­tress. But we needn’t trouble her on the way to a con­fid­ent con­clu­sion that Mr Blair’s fun­da­mental flaw was his syco­phancy towards power.

Since those sorry days we have fre­quently heard him repeat­ing the self-regarding man­tra that “hand on heart, I only did what I thought was right”. But this is a narcissist’s defence and self-belief is no answer to mis­judg­ment: it is cer­tainly no answer to death.

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The Guardian’s new iPhone app

Dec 14, ’09 11:49 AM

The Guard­ian has just released an iPhone app. It’s only avail­able U.S./UK/Ireland for now but they’re work­ing on other countries.

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Blair admits intention to commit war crimes

Dec 12, ’09 4:22 PM

Tony Blair has admit­ted on TV his inten­tion was to com­mit the inter­na­tional crime of uni­lat­eral war for regime change. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Asked if he would have gone on had he known there was no WMDs, he replied:

I would still have thought it right to remove [Sad­dam Hus­sein]. I mean obvi­ously you would have had to use and deploy dif­fer­ent argu­ments about the nature of the threat.

Two world wars, tens of mil­lions dead, the sub­sequent entrench­ment of inter­na­tional law under the Charter of the United Nations and Tony Blair thinks that the decision to go to war should come down to his own per­sonal beliefs about right and wrong.

Click through to read more and view a video excerpt of the interview.

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Actually Obama, America did seek war in Afghanistan

Dec 11, ’09 9:34 AM

Obama accept­ing his Nobel prize:

… per­haps the most pro­found issue sur­round­ing my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is wind­ing down. The other is a con­flict that Amer­ica did not seek …

Except that Amer­ica did seek armed con­flict with Afgh­anistan.

In Octo­ber of 2001 the Taliban pub­licly offered to hand Osama bin Laden over 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. Bush rejec­ted this, put­ting an end to any pos­sib­il­ity of a poten­tially peace­ful, legal res­ol­u­tion to the events of 11 Septem­ber 2001, and opened up the way for the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Afgh­anistan, Iraq and the threat of inva­sion of Iran, along with the mil­lions who have lost their lives or had them des­troyed as a result.

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