The Unbearable Tiresomeness of Google

So it's come down to this!

It started gradually. With little things. Changing the whole format of the Youtube and Blogger pages for the worse, degrading both look and functionality. Then constantly harassing you every time you sign in, nagging and nagging "We don't like your name ... would you like(?!) to change it?" On and on and on.

Then - without asking you of course - they set up a shell G+ account under your identity.

Then they stop you from commenting on Youtube.

Then they stop you from adding or removing from your Blogroll.

Then they stop you from 'liking' or even subscribing to other Youtubers.

What next in the litany of coercion? Not much hope that the EU will grow a pair and help those of us who aren't just happy to knuckle under and do Google's bidding as willing pawns in their Advertising Empire.

If this is my last post here, I won't be surprised.

Goodbye, and thank-you to any who have commented.

Sticking Plasters on Running Sores

This video illustrates brilliantly what is wrong with the Food Bank concept from its very basis.

Own Goal with Devastating Consequences?

Who are the real denialists?

Sail World is a pretty straightforward publication with an audience of sailors wanting to know about their hobby. Their interest is in being totally objective.

So, here's what a Sail World news item of 19th August reported about this year's Arctic ice season:

"In 2013 there has been a 55% increase in Arctic ice since this date last year". And they have maps based on satellite imaging to prove it.

So when the Mail on Sunday tells us that their newspaper has received a leaked final draft of the IPCC's latest report, showing that the world is warming far less than the international panel have long been predicting, things really are starting to look increasingly bleak and chilly for the single issue climate protesters.

Trouble is though that the, so say, climate crisis has been the most over-promoted environmental issue - even amounting to what some have described as "the great climate change hijack" - one which has diverted almost all the public and policy-makers' attention to itself and narrowed down all debate to one issue alone; that of global warming. The climate obsessives have marginalised and side-lined all the other huge ecological, or rather socio-ecological problems we face, like overpopulation, habitat destruction, massive losses of biodiversity both wild and cultivated, erosion and degradation of soils, freshwaters and seas.

Many scientists have also tied themselves, and their science, to the climate bandwagon in the public mind.

If the whole thing does prove to be plain wrong, then not only environmentalism but even science itself will suffer a massive blow to its credibility, and humanity could be facing a new age of reaction against science, against reason, and against the natural world.  

Divided by a Common Language

Tom Slee at P2P Foundation blog:

"When differences are papered over and confused.

This seems to be the case with peers.org, that presents itself as a grassroots organisation but is directly influenced by sharing ‘business platforms’ and with a clear aim of fighting against regulation ..."

"The language changes, the mask slips. Participants become customers, sharing becomes buying. The phrase “across verticals” reminds us that Douglas Atkin is an advertising executive. Now the sharing economy is about loyalty programs and cross marketing? Not the kind of sharing I want to be part of. I don’t have a problem with commerce, but what I do object to is commerce wrapped up in, and appropriating, the language of solidarity ..."

Tom also adds a comment underneath the piece: "I do have a feeling that there is a Euro-North American split, in which community-minded Europeans don’t realize that their partners across the pond are libertarian-minded Americans using similar language."

As someone living in Europe, I think Tom is broadly correct about the Euro v USA split. Look at the discourses on lots of topics - all sorts, from vaccination, fluoridation and autonomous / off-grid lifestyles through to attitudes to Bilderbergers, state control and various conspiracy theories, and you will very often find that beliefs held by left-wing people in Europe are held by ultra-right "libertarians" in the US.

What this results in, in this era of internet and global communications, is that Europeans and USAmericans frequently get our wires totally tangled because we think we are after the same goals, we are even using similar language, but underneath all that we are actually on diametrically opposed sides!

A recipe for some disastrous interaction ...

More than GDP

Robert Costanza is Professor of Public Policy at Australian National University and in his interview at the 6th Ecosystem Services Partnership conference in Bali this August he explains the work that's being done to increase our understanding of the immense and irreplaceable value provided to humanity by Earth's ecosystems. To give you some idea, we're talking trillions of dollars each and every year.

Watch the video here.

Fake it Till You Take it All

The Cupboard is Getting Barer

"The amount of raw materials needed to sustain the economies of developed countries is significantly greater than presently used indicators suggest ..."

"Humanity is using raw materials at a level never seen before with far-reaching environmental impacts on biodiversity, land use, climate and water," says lead author Tommy Wiedmann, Associate Professor of Sustainability Research at the UNSW School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

"Now more than ever, developed countries are relying on international trade to acquire their natural resources, but our research shows this dependence far exceeds the actual physical quantity of traded goods"

"In 2008, the total amount of raw materials extracted globally was 70 billion metric tons – 10 billion tons of which were physically traded. However, the results show that three times as many resources (41% or 29 billion tons) were used just to enable the processing and export of these materials."

Read more at Constantine Alexander's blog.

The Age of Impoverishment

The Age of Ignorance

Disturbing and beyond sad that young people largely do not even begin to comprehend what we are destroying for ever:

"Recent analyses of the history of fishing off the California coast, as seen through interviews with three generations of fishermen, produced startling findings. The youngest group (age 15-30) had no idea that it was once common to fish right off the coast. They didn’t view the coastal zone as being overfished because, they said, there were no fish in this zone."

"The oldest group (age 55 and above) could recall eleven species that had disappeared from today’s far offshore fishing ground, whereas the group between age 31 and 54 could recall seven, and the youngest group only two. Sixty years ago the oldest group could recall catching 25 goliath groupers per day, but by the 1960s the number had plunged to eleven, and then to only one a day in the 1990s. Tragically, only ten percent of the youngest group believed that stocks of the grouper had disappeared because they didn’t think they were ever there to begin with."

From Brent Blackwelder. Read more at the Daly News blog from the Centre for Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

(Before it's too late!)

Bye Bye Google

Google seems to have been reduced to an imitation of Facebook.

Mission Creep Online

A very thoughtful short essay from Stuart Staniford; "Snowden and the Toxicity of the Internet".

Meanwhile some others seem to be saying it's all a journalistic hash-up in a brewery ... or is it ...?

Afterthought: missed this one earlier, but it's worth a read.

Democracy, Thatcher Style

This one had me laughing at the absurdity, from today's Guardian:

"The former prime minister, whose son, Sir Mark, was convicted in a South African court of involvement in the attempted 2004 coup, allegedly told [Simon] Mann at a meeting at her Belgravia home: "I'm sure it's going to work".

It is claimed that Thatcher likened the need for radical change in the oil-rich Equatorial Guinea to the way London's Docklands had been redeveloped during the 1980s.

She is also alleged to have encouraged Mann to talk to a group seeking to overthrow the then president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, with the words: "We must always look after our friends, Simon …"

What was that woman on?

Femen - Follow the Money

Amazing how often things are not at all what they appear to be on the surface. Take feminism for example. Most people seem to associate it with left-wing thought, but when you start looking closely, feminism actually seems to link in with deep veins of conservative and authoritarian thought a lot more frequently than you might expect.

For at least a decade some British feminists (see here for the Telegraph's Toby Young and Julie Burchill, a match made in heaven) have been nurturing what appears to be a savage intolerance against transsexual women, who they take it upon themselves to try and define out of existence as not "real women" . This sort of biologically deterministic and reactionary approach to sex and sexuality is of course familiar to us from Roman Catholic doctrine, and has been filtering into feminism via Janice Raymond, a former nun and author of "The Transsexual Empire: the Making of the She-male". Raymond in turn was a pupil of theologian Mary Daly who studied at the College of Saint Rose, Saint Mary's College, and the Catholic University of America, topping it off with teaching at the Jesuit-run Boston College from 1967 - 1999.

So now when you see yet another group of feminists attacking this time both sex workers and Muslim women you start asking what these targets have in common. Little surprise then that they are both hate figures of the religious right. And when you take a look at the group's website it transpires that 'Some of the goals of the organisation are: "To develop leadership, intellectual and moral qualities of the young women in Ukraine" and "To build up the image of Ukraine, the country with great opportunities for women",' bells really start ringing loudly.

PoPourri

From the early medieval papal forgeries and power grabs of my previous post, jumping straight up to the modern day ... despite omerta in the msm, the cybersphere is buzzing with tantalising tidbits concerning Pope Benedict's shock resignation, a dereliction unheard of for centuries past.

Now obviously most people had at least a suspicion that there is a lot more to this than meets the eye. And now it turns out that some events may be afoot which put the wind so far up the Pope's backside that he has taken fright and started building his defences against the coming storm - as best he can.

Check out the ITCCS website, the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State:

"Founded in the spring of 2010 at a conference of survivors of church torture in Dublin, Ireland, the ITCCS presently comprises organizations in fifteen countries (see list of founding sponsors and affiliates below). It was founded because of the refusal of existing courts and governments to charge and prosecute churches guilty of genocide and crimes against children, and because of the active complicity of these state agencies with such criminal church bodies.

The ITCCS Central Office is in Brussels, Belgium, with affiliate centers in London, Dublin, Rome, New York and Vancouver.

The Acting Field secretary of the ITCCS is Rev. Kevin D. Annett, M.A., M.Div. Its legal advisers include members of the Kuala Lampur Human Rights Tribunal, Andrew Paterson, a common law consultant, members of the American and Canadian Bar Associations, and lawyers with the prestigious Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City ..."

These guys sound like they mean business.

Best wishes to them in their action.

Fraud, Forgery and Terrorism: The Popes and the Invention of the West

To Cut a Long Story Short

The history and development of what we blithely like to call "Christianity" is murky.

Very murky.

By the time of Emperor Justinian (527 - 565) the Roman Empire had long upped sticks and moved East to Constantinople (now Istanbul). Justinian set about recreating the old glory days, re-conquering lost territory and codifying Roman law. This put the Bishop of Rome aka the Pope in a panic because the Latin Christians had by that time developed such a megalomaniac power complex that, in their own minds the Pope has automatic entitlement, as Head of the Church of Rome to be Supreme Ruler of the World. Unfortunately for them the Emperor thought different. As did the Patriarchs and Greek Christians of the East.

So the Popes and the Latin church dreamt of a Cunning Plan. They needed to develop an alternative power base, outside the control of the Emperor and the Greek Christians, so the Popes looked West, and had the idea of turning the barbarian peoples of Iberia, Gaul and England to their purpose. The Roman church had already forged documents claiming that St Peter had bequeathed the "binding and loosing" powers that he had received from Jesus (Matthew 16) to the Popes in perpetuity, and despite making a muddle of supposedly giving the powers to Clement when it is otherwise recorded that Linus was the first Pope after Peter, they got away with it.

To give themselves maximum authority another crucial document was forged. Calling it 'the Donation of Constantine', the Popes claimed that Emperor Constantine (c. 272 - 337) had become a Christian and simply given away his all-important powers, both regal and sacerdotal, to the Bishop of Rome. Just like that.

Armed with these spurious powers that they had either faked or usurped or both, the Papacy was in contact with Pippin, a Frankish official under the Merovingian kings who himself wished to usurp the kingship from his master. In a very handy arrangement the Papacy backed Pippin to be king, while Pippin in turn subordinated himself and gave his fealty and support to the Papacy. Under Pippin's son, Charlemagne and his successors, the relationship between the Frankish kings and the Popes became ever deeper, each bolstering the other in their expanding power.

This process necessarily involved also the firm inversion of the Germanic tribes' native governance systems in which power came from the people and was temporarily given to leaders of the people's choice and where the people could remove leaders who weren't doing what people wanted them to do.

Instead, under the Latin Christian system, power comes only from God [sic] and it is passed directly from 'him' to the Pope, who then 'graciously' crowns kings as he likes, Deo gratias. The king in turn passes power down through a hierarchy, as conveniently expounded by Pseudo-Denys. People under this system of Theocracy were thus forbidden from any say in governance at all.

Under the Frankish ecclesiastical hierarchy the forgeries continued apace, now aimed at buttressing "the hierocratic thesis by surrounding it with the halo of antiquity".

More in "Medieval Political Thought", Walter Ullmann (Peregrine 1975).

This was only the early stages. Once this system had been set up, the Papacy in alliance with the newly Christianised Barbarians and Viking Pirates such as their strong-arm enforcers, the Normans, could move forward, terrorising and subjecting people in the West to their domination, before then expanding their Rule of Terror further to attack the Byzantines and the Middle East ...

Q. When is Rape Not Rape

Following on the all too often socially condoned 'when is a crime not a crime' trope ...

A. When the person raped is of a low caste or class.

Rape is often seen primarily not as a crime against the person but as a crime against property. It has been so in England. Even today upper class and whiter women in UK are cared about more than lower class and darker women. Poor women are seen as having no honour and called names like 'chav'. Poor women's sexuality is seen as coarser, less refined than upper class women's, therefore rape of poor women does not count as rape.

Here's Bojja Tarakam, senior advocate, activist based in Andhra Pradesh commenting on the recent furore over one gang-rape in Delhi. Video from DalitCamera.

And also on DalitCamera, Sujatha Surepally, working on land and anti people's development models, environment, human rights and women's rights. Video.

Rape can be seen as a useful tool for controlling the lower orders if they show signs of getting 'uppity'. Perhaps most famously to us now in the story of Phoolan Devi (see Vidya Bushan Rawat's August 2012 interview with PD's sister, explaining how she has been dumped back in poverty by the Samajwadi Party, here if ye ken Hindi). Has also been used historically in a huge variety of permutations, as well as against men, as example here.

 

The United States of Alienation

John S Wilkins in Oz talking about his son who has an Aspergers diagnosis:

"[H]e has been bullied persistently by students and teachers and gangs because of this difference. Once, because he had seen it on TV that you had a right to defend yourself, he showed a pocket knife, sheathed, to some bullies physically attacking him at school, for which he was suspended and the bullies merely chastised. Actual violence was condoned by that school, while an attempt to stop it, however misguided, was punished. This is the lot of the Aspie."

So the debate is why did Adam Lanza, a young man who may have had Aspergers, and who lived in the USA with a mother who, like many Americans, was so alienated, paranoid and screwed up with fear of other people and about what they might do to her, that she felt it necessary to surround herself with a massive arsenal of weapons, why would the poor lad up and kill her and a bunch of other people?

This latest case in a long, nauseating catalogue reminds me of Ed Gein and his mother Augusta, where he has gone down in history for his bizarre and ghoulish crimes. According to Wikipedia:

"Augusta despised her husband, but the marriage persisted because of the family's religious belief against divorce. Augusta Gein operated a small grocery store and eventually purchased a farm on the outskirts of the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin ...^"

"Augusta Gein moved to this location to prevent outsiders from influencing her sons. Edward Gein left the premises only to go to school. Besides school, he spent most of his time doing chores on the farm. Augusta Gein, a fervent Lutheran, preached to her boys the innate immorality of the world, the evil of drinking, and the belief that all women (herself excluded) were prostitutes and instruments of the devil. She reserved time every afternoon to read to them from the Bible, usually selecting graphic verses from the Old Testament dealing with death, murder, and divine retribution."

"A shy, effeminate boy, the younger Gein became a target for bullies. Classmates and teachers recalled off-putting mannerisms, such as seemingly random laughter, as if he were laughing at his own personal jokes. To make matters worse, his mother punished him whenever he tried to make friends ..."

"Gein tried to make his mother happy, but she was rarely pleased with her boys; she often abused them, believing that they were destined to become failures like their father. During their teens and throughout their early adulthood, the boys remained detached from people outside of their farmstead, and so had only each other for company.^"

With an upbringing like this why would anyone be surprised at what some brainwashed and tortured individuals may turn to?

As for Lanza, my feeling, as someone who lives in the UK where pretty much the only guns around are those in the hands of criminals, and who is familiar with Aspergers, is that the Lanza case appears very much a mental health issue.

First of all the mother seems to have fallen under the grip of a cult; namely the Preppers, who are preaching Doomsday millennialism and fear on a grand scale. Secondly, the son seems very much the victim of his mother’s delusional state, one which, if he was an Aspie he would be especially vulnerable to.

I really like John's OP though, especially as he is one of the few to correct this false impression about Aspies somehow having no empathy.

If anything, it is the USA’s love affair with the gun which is a symptom of their widespread mental ill health. In mainland Europe there are many countries where guns are widely held by the public, but they do not constantly misuse them in the way USAmericans do.

As for tkieler’s idea about bundling up all the non-neurotypical youngsters together and putting them under surveillance what a shameful notion. It reminds me of the Apartheid era pencil test where if your hair was a bit too curly you were suddenly classified as “coloured” and exiled from your family.

If the USA doesn’t wise up and learn some compassion - and deal with their religious nutters - they will keep on tearing themselves apart.

Video - why the deranged US population are unlikely to accept having their toys taken away from them.

Little Boxes & Big Fat Wallets

A plea from Stravaiger John:

"There are hundreds of thousands of properties, residential, commercial etc. standing empty across Britain.

Would it not make more sense to take over and renovate these before building anything else?

People in real need of a home could be given a government loan if they were prepared to take over a property and do it up themselves, as could community groups and social housing associations.

This would surely be a better solution than having speculative developers wrecking the countryside."

No John, that would be too much like common sense, which as we all know is something only common people have.

Respectable HNWIs (High Net Worth Individuals, to those who matter) don't use common sense, common decency, or anything else common to think with, they use their wallets because that's all that matters, going forward.

A commenter responds, "Yes ... As the law stands an owner can leave their property empty for ever as long as they maintain it! I know cos we have one around here that has been empty for 15 years and I wrote to the council and they said there was nothing they could do unless it was derelict!"

But is this true? I don't reckon it is.

So, sorry to say I think the council may be lying ... haha ... surely not?!?

I heard functionaries discussing this at a "Neighbourhood Partnership" meeting once, talking about all the slippery tricks that property owners use to avoid facing up to their responsibilities. Presumably the legislation - like a lot these days - was inadequately drafted, either by accident, or call me pessimistic, borne out of long experience, by design.

This is what one useful website has to say on the matter:

"Empty Dwelling Management Orders (EDMOs) were introduced by the Housing Act 2004 and the powers subsequently made available to local authorities two years later.

A substantial body of technical information exists on how they are supposed to work, but to date very little practical help based on the experience of those who have actually used EDMOs has been available. We hope this guidance goes some way to filling that gap.

Drawing on the practical experience of empty property officers across the country, we have attempted to distil the most useful and important advice available. The guide includes a flow chart, a step-by-step guide to the process, top tips, pitfalls to avoid, detailed advice notes on each stage, and a set of model documents to use and adapt to your own circumstances."

I agree with both Stravaiger John and his commenter, there are hundreds of thousands of buildings out there that could be brought into use, or better used, given the political will, but I fear that that is what is lacking. With the plutocratic, kleptokratic crony government that we are groaning under now it makes far more profit for them just to hand their mates among the big feudal landowners (yes, they're still alive and kicking - especially in Devon) and the big housebuilding consortia some nice fat contracts.

There's also the issue of VAT which, despite long complaint by us "little people", is still extorted on refurbishment materials and work, but not payable on new build.

And, for My Next Prediction …

To be honest, I don't think you needed to be a genius to work out that the ludicrously unsustainable debt bubble built up during the Noughties would lead to major, major problems, but for those who did foresee the brown stuff hitting the fan Ann Pettifor must surely be a bit of a heroine; an economist bravely swimming against the tide and getting the truth spoken on public platforms inaccessible to the rest of us. Despite the (inevitable) dismissals and ridicule visited on those with unwelcome news she insisted on administering the warning - many times in fact. Here for example:
 
Wednesday 17 May 2006

“There are many among the world's financial elites aware of the danger of housing and stockmarket "bubbles" financed by borrowing; of debt "imbalances"; of the potential of a crash and prolonged crisis … This is a terrifying lose-lose game. We are in it, because of the reckless abuse by the private finance sector of the powers granted them through deregulation and liberalisation.”

Sunday 28 January 2007

"Tottering on the brink: The inherent instability of the giant Ponzi schemes underwriting the world economy means financial meltdown is a huge threat."

And how right she was then.

Now with the appointment of former Goldman Sachs banker Mark Carney to govern the Bank of England she's at it again with the dire predictions:

Monday 26 November 2012

“So be very afraid. Business-as-usual will prevail. And nothing will be done to constrain the City, and therefore to prevent the next collapse of the financial system.” Check out what she has to say at The Guardian, or her blog here.

Back in November 2010 I observed that Wikipedia was calling it "The Financial Crisis of 2007 to present", but they have now separated the crisis into two discrete pages called "Financial Crisis of 2007 - 2008" and "2007 - 2012 global economic crisis". But soon we'll be into 2013, then 2014 and so on.

What will it morph into next?

Gdzie Miejsce to w Northampton?

Trochę quizu

Evangelical Black Ops

Don’t tell me this drivel cost $5 million. Every single thing about this piece of crap - and its originator - is dodgy, and it has resulted in the deaths of several people already, with no doubt more to follow, including in Benghazi, the first serving US Ambassador to die in office since Arnold Raphel, in Pakistan, 1988. Curiously enough, Raphel was “killed along with Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq and Brigadier General Herbert M. Wassom when their plane mysteriously crashed shortly after takeoff from Bahawalpur.”

So in Libya the inevitable bloody chickens are coming home to roost on yet another episode of insane US ideological adventurism stirring trouble in Arab countries and attempting to enforce their political system on others. Will it make them think again on their involvement in helping Islamists (once again, their purported enemies) in Syria? I doubt it, the Yanks really are that dumb!

Nice Guns, Nice Blood

Even the Daily Mail can’t resist taking the piss out of SOFEX 2012, comparing the beards, dark glasses and oversized military peaks on prominent display to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Dictator film. I still feel let down though, as these guys just aren’t putting up enough bling. More gold braid and tinsel please gents, you look like de-feathered cockerels compared to the glorious Ruritanians of past ages.

And, as a nice counterpoint, Femail continues its breathless reportage on the spectacular air balloon rise of the Middleton family now that Sis is assimilated into The Firm. Let all that be some consolation even if, as a mere brood mare, Kate will forever have to face being relegated to an inferior position at events, behind the likes of Beatrice & Eugenie, who as ‘blood princesses’ - ie real princesses, not yer poncy middle class nouveaux - must, naturally, be shewn all reverence due to their royal blood as it trickles down from Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne. Yes folks, this really does matter!