A Great Article By Naomi Klein.
8 steps to a bloody mess...

1. Enter Iraq,
2. Fire 500K state workers,
3. Try sell off state owned companies
4. Starve Iraq companies of contracts so you can sell them cheaper
5. Give the contracts to foreign Companies
6. Foreign contractors come into their country and do their jobs while they watch and starve.
7. They kidnap and kill contractors.
8. A Big bloody mess!

British Court Decision Undermines Global Torture Ban how come we havent heard anything about this on the news?

"There are lots of things the intelligence community knows and other people ought not to know." (FBI Spokesperson)
From this compelling article by Greg Palast
More allegations as per Farenheit 9/11 that The Bush Crime Family (Copyright Mike Malloy, sic.) are a little too friendly with The House of Saud.

A good indicator of cost of the war for the yanks, or this one
I wonder if we have a similar comparison in the UK?

Russia- the failure of communism.....
United States- the failure of Capitalism - the "consume more than you can afford" culture is not sustainable...

Should we not have a sensible balance between the 2 extremes?

Sensible consumption, sensible resource allocation, sensible living...?

British think tank is pessimistic about Iraq's future.

The breakdown of Iraq would have dire consequences for the region as well, the report said, giving religious extremists greater freedom and threatening stability in neighboring countries. For instance, militant Sunni Muslims operating from Iraq could undermine the regime in Saudi Arabia. Kurds gaining independence in Iraq could invigorate Kurdish movements in neighboring Syria, Iran and Turkey, and possibly prompt a Turkish military response. If Shiites emerge dominant in Iraq, that could create conditions for an attempt to consolidate the Shiite communities in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

This is an interesting piece from Dom Stasi:

" I neither earned, nor did I contribute a lifetime of tax dollars expecting that in the end so much as one penny of my taxes would be used to incinerate children. However, acquiescing to George W. Bush’s horrific demands in the absence of genuine, direct, supporting evidence of our enemy du jour’s capabilities and intent will mean just that. …and that would be the truest manifestation of spinelessness imaginable.” – Closing passage from the pre-war essay DEAR FELLOW AMERICAN, By Dom Stasi, February 23, 2003. "
... continued

Modern Life is Rubbish?

A recent Radio 4 discussion programme, Mid-summer Sins, invited the public to vote for an 8th, deadly sin.
Their choice?

"Apathy."

It's certainly a good one to add but what will ever drive us out of this apathy? Since I've been a wee boy I've always been interested in space and the idea of aliens etc. Sometimes I think that the discovery that there are other worlds out there with intelligent life living on them is the kick up the bum that the world needs to buck it's ideas up. Bizarrely, the late
Ronnie Reagan famously thought this too :

Reference -

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0102/25/cgs.00.html

" REAGAN: Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war? "

(It took me a while to find a legitimate quote for this amongst all the UFO/Conspiracy web sites, I had started to wonder if he really said this).

Such a discovery would also certainly put the wind up religious folk in particular.

Similarly, the previously mentioned article on Bush's strength being the simplicity of his vision ties up with this desire for something simple to aspire to in an increasingly complex society. A lot of people don't want choice and complexity and want to return to a simpler world with less complexity. Without religion, it's hard to get that sense of being shown the way. To me this is also played out in the trend towards packing in your job and going traveling or starting a farm or self-sufficient "Good Life" type lifestyle - The desire to be in control and to deal with less complexities is coming to the fore more the more complex we make our lives.

It could be argued that religious fundamentalism is a desire to see the world in a black and white simple way, and to live your life according to a few simple rules rather than have to deal with the myriad choices that modern life presents us with. Living used to be hard as a matter of hunter/gathering survival - Now, we make it hard for ourselves by buying into a system that enslaves us into a cycle of work to finance purchases that don't make us any happier?

Bush-Bashing
Bush-bashing is all too easy a habit to fall into for us Europeans especially. This interesting article
is a good one for making even the most ardent Bush-critic have a think about why it is that this guy seems to be appealing to at least half the voters in the USA. I suppose we'll find out for sure soon enough, provided the voting machines don't mess up or there isn't any dodginess...

Glasgow Under-Age Club Nights
A depressing bit of notoriety for my home town of Glasgow in this article.
I'm not sure if these clubs are unique to Glasgow, I understand Edinburgh has them too but they really don't seem like a sensible idea. Facilities for teenagers and young people should be a community thing IMHO, not something commercial that leads kids to hang about city centres on a weekend.

It's a Sin (So it is) (As we say in Glasgow)

An interesting wee programme has just finished on Radio 4.
A discussion about the seven deadly sins which concluded with the public voting for a new, 8th deadly sin.
The upshot of this was that Apathy was chosen as the top choice for a new one.

Apathy is certainly a good choice, at the end of the day, although the world is undoubtedly a better place now than it has been in the past, it's got a long way to go to be as good as it could be. And it's certainly true that it will only get worse if we don't buck our ideas up. Nothing good will come to pass if we stick our collective heads in the sand. Then again, what I am doing to change the world other than anonymously waffling away on a Blog that only other like-minded people I know will read? Hmmm.... ; )

Republican Party Convention

Excellent piece in The Guardian by Simon Schama (Hey, you know me and tha Guardian by now if you read this thing) on the GOP convention. Grand? No way! Old? Too true... Stupid white men in abundance. (Alternative GOP link :)