All I Want For Christmas...

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Italy's PM Silvio Berlusconi gets punched in the face

He gets a couple of teeth knocked out. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Oh, wait, I forgot Blair for a moment.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been hit in the face and knocked to the ground after a political rally in the centre of Milan. Two of his teeth were broken and he received a minor nose fracture and cuts to his lip after being punched or hit with an object, initial reports say.

Payback?

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Demos, national service and the community ideal

"Citizenship itself is a reactionary ideal. It formulates a collective, equal relationship between people who are not equal in status or power, and for whom key interests are opposed. It elides the economic inequalities that are the key to the ’social fragmentation’ which the report seeks to challenge. It is also a reactionary manner in which to motivate people to address problems resultant from inadequate social spending in areas like education. To give an example, the report suggests civic service could include young people mentoring at primary schools or in lower school."
Via Though Cowards Flinch

Obama and the 7 deceptions

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Answering Obama's Afghanistan deceptions
Barack Obama's December 1 nationally televised address to announce a further escalation of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan cemented his role as a war president who bears responsibility for the U.S. war on that country. It also marked Obama's assumption of the task of providing the justifications, alibis and obfuscations needed to cloak U.S. military aims in an aura of legitimacy.

Eric Ruder goes through Obama's speech and counters seven of Barack Obama's worst half-truths and lies about Afghanistan.

Global warming is the future

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The great green land grab
The environment was outside the big tent. Now it’s inside and it makes absolutely no difference what opinion polls or referendums say. It matters nought that the Green party has singularly failed in every democracy. It doesn’t matter that they’re all as boring and righteous as goodness. It doesn’t matter that scientists fake messages and bury statistics, that they do everything in secret. None of this matters now. It doesn’t even matter if it’s actually going to happen. All that matters is that the people who matter think it matters.

Can't we just disown this cretin?

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 A dedicated foe of tyranny... until there's a £90k speaking fee up for grabs

I met Mr Blair before he was famous and concluded that he was an empty-headed soap actor, chosen by the Labour Party to be the plausible front-man for its slow-motion coup d’etat. Then I had to watch the ludicrous transformation of this man, who to my personal knowledge did not know in 1997 that they spoke Portuguese in Brazil, into a supposed World Statesman, the victor of Kosovo and the scourge of Saddam.These two wars, one dubious, the other indefensible, were conducted on the basis that Mr Blair is a dedicated foe of tyranny. Quite a lot of people still believe this piffle. But how can they now, after Mr Blair’s trip to Azerbaijan, there to open a formaldehyde factory?

The speech which he gave was such concentrated, congealed drivel that it probably had to be carried into and out of the room in a spittoon. That is not all. Far worse than this piece of prostitution (he is said to have been paid £90,000 for his appearance) is the fact that he consorted, while in this sinister little country, with its President, Ilham Aliyev. Like Mr Blair, I have been to Azerbaijan. Unlike him, I met opposition politicians and heard about its miserable history of censorship, repression and despotism.
Tony Blair told by Azerbaijan victims: 'Give your £90,000 speaker's fee to charity'

Tony Blair is under pressure to give to charity a fee of at least £90,000 he was paid for making a speech in Azerbaijan, which is notorious for its human rights abuses.


Your best friend is yourself

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It's a long piece but well worth the read if, like me, you are cynical about the whole online 'friendship' kick.

Faux Friendship
They call them social-networking sites for a reason. Networking once meant something specific: climbing the jungle gym of professional contacts in order to advance your career... Commercial society did not eliminate the self-interested aspects of making friends and influencing people, it just changed the way we went about it. Now, in the age of the entrepreneurial self, even our closest relationships are being pressed onto this template. A recent book on the sociology of modern science describes a networking event at a West Coast university: "There do not seem to be any singletons—disconsolately lurking at the margins—nor do dyads appear, except fleetingly." No solitude, no friendship, no space for refusal—the exact contemporary paradigm. At the same time, the author assures us, "face time" is valued in this "community" as a "high-bandwidth interaction," offering "unusual capacity for interruption, repair, feedback and learning." Actual human contact, rendered "unusual" and weighed by the values of a systems engineer. We have given our hearts to machines, and now we are turning into machines. The face of friendship in the new century.
Via John Brissenden

Out of the mouths of babes...

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Hey! It just the science, man. There is no ideology driving climate change organisations and activists, is there?:

"We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public's imagination... So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." - Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports

"Unless we announce disasters no one will listen." - Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC

"It doesn't matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true." - Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace

"We've got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy." - Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

"No matter if the science of global warming is all phony... climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world." - Christine Stewart, fmr Canadian Minister of the Environment

"The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe." - emeritus professor Daniel Botkin

"We require a central organizing principle - one agreed to voluntarily. Minor shifts in policy, moderate improvement in laws and regulations, rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change - these are all forms of appeasement, designed to satisfy the public’s desire to believe that sacrifice, struggle and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary." - Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

"Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsiblity to bring that about?" - Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme

"A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation." - Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies

"The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are." - Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

"Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control." - Professor Maurice King

"Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class - involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not sustainable." - Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit

"Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it." - Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute

"The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet." - Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation

"Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." - Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University

"The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil." – Sir James Lovelock, BBC Interview

"My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world." -Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!

"A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal." - Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor

"... the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion." - Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind

"If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels." - Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the World Wildlife Fund

"I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems." - John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

"The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing." - Christopher Manes, Earth First!

"Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing." - David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club

Via here, here and here