He's got a point

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Littlejohn on Michael Foot
Foot's ocean-going hypocrisy is matched only by that of those New Labourites singing his praises this week. He stood up for what he believed in, they say. He was the true voice of dissent, unafraid to express his pacifist, socialist opinions. Yet when Walter Wolfgang, a near contemporary of Foot, had the audacity to heckle Jack Straw over Iraq at a Labour conference, these same people had him thrown out by the police.

And when a poet started reading out the names of Iraq and Afghanistan war dead at the Cenotaph, they had her arrested under an act introduced deliberately to crush dissent. If Good Old Footy turned up at the Cenotaph these days and started spouting his pacifist protest slogans, he'd get the collar of his donkey jacket felt before his wreath had touched the ground.

Corruption? Surely not.

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11-year-old spends $44 million in Dubai
Even by the standards of a city that celebrates extravagance, it was a spectacular shopping spree: In just two weeks early last year, an 11-year-old boy from Azerbaijan became the owner of nine waterfront mansions.

The total price tag: about $44 million -- or roughly 10,000 years' worth of salary for the average citizen of Azerbaijan. But the preteen who owns a big chunk of some of Dubai's priciest real estate seems to be anything but average.

His name, according to Dubai Land Department records, is Heydar Aliyev, which just happens to be the same name as that of the son of Azerbaijan's president, Ilham Aliyev. The owner's date of birth, listed in property records, is also the same as that of the president's son.

Infographics

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14 Visually Stunning Animated Infographics
Infographics are visual illustrations communicating information by means of signs, symbols, icons, maps and diagrams. When these graphics are animated they can be used to represent complex situations and tell stories, or they can address social comment, satire and subversion. At their best, infographics in motion can be informative, involving, funny and at times surprisingly touching. This post brings together fourteen examples of these stunning animations.  Here's an example.



Via Nicholas Patten

J Street, Liberal Jews and Israel

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Informed Comment: The Decline of the Israeli Right and the Increasing Desperation of the 'Anti-Semitism' Charge
The reactionary parties of Likud, Shas, and Yisrael Beitenu have nothing in common with the vast majority of Jewish Americans, who voted for Barack Obama and are generally more progressive than non-Jewish Americans. The establishment of a liberal Jewish lobby, J Street, which supports a two-state solution (Israel and Palestine side by side), is a manifestation of the increasing unease of progessive Jewish Americans with the policies and aggressive wars of rightwing Israeli governments. Jewish Americans have been key to the securing of many of our civil liberties in this country and a major voice for peace and for culture and the arts, and a thug like Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister surely makes many of them uneasy. It is no accident that the Likud government has snubbed a delegation of US Congress members to Israel who support J Street. The Netanyahu government is all about colonizing more of the West Bank and preventing the rise of a Palestinian state.

Guilt trip

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sp!ked review of books | A depletionist view of history and humanity
Do we believe that future generations can carry on and develop human civilisation by developing science, technology, the arts and culture? Or do we simply see the future as an era of limits, where we will gradually exhaust the planet and fail to create and construct a better world? Our children’s futures have not been stolen by the baby boomers. The future is there for the taking if the world of adults takes its moral responsibilities more seriously, and properly prepares young people for their freedom and authority.

Getting Away With Murder

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The Palestine Chronicle: 
Check this out. Here's a story of two countries from the Middle East. One is an ancient civilization with a rich history that goes back five thousand years. It’s a functioning democracy with free elections held at regular intervals. It’s a huge country of 70 million people. It has remained within its borders and hasn’t attacked any country in the last 100 years. It is pursuing a nuclear power program, which it insists is for peaceful purposes.

Second country also claims to be a democracy. In this democracy though you get citizenship and voting rights not on the basis of your origins even if you were born in this land but on your ancestry.

This country was founded on the land stolen and forcibly taken from its original inhabitants. It has fought at least three wars and is locked in permanent conflict with its neighbors on all sides. It has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and other state-of-the-art killing machines. It pursues assassination as a state policy and regularly sends death squads around the world to take out people it doesn’t like.

Which country do you think is a real threat to world peace? The first country that has no history of aggression or the second state that has killed tens of thousands of innocent people in wars of aggression against neighbors and in coldblooded executions?

Meaningless, yes, but still significant

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First they came for the neo-fascists… | spiked
By threatening a political organisation with civil legal proceedings unless it changed its constitution – a constitution which reflected that group’s beliefs – the state is effectively deciding the nature of opposition in the political sphere, what views can be tolerated, and what views can’t.

That the object of state-enforced configuration is the BNP ought not to detract from what is a serious affront to democracy. Yes, the BNP holds obnoxious views, and yes, its membership and employment policy was repellent – but freedom of speech, and its accompaniment, the freedom to associate with those whom one agrees with, ought not to be negotiable. Just because in this case it’s the freedom to hold racist opinions, and to associate with those who hold similarly abhorrent views, it does not mean that fundamental democratic principles should just be abandoned.

Where are the real victims?

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Cutting Clare Short By William Bowles
What I can never escape from is the knowledge that in spite of all the hot air that gets expended and all the ‘breast-beating’ done by conscience-stricken politicians, the Iraqi people are nowhere to be seen in the ‘debate’. They figure not at all whilst the privileged members of the fourth richest country in world ‘debate’ the workings of the imperium.

Bugger me!

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Cranmer - Catholic education – Douglas Alexander's bare-faced hypocrisy
It appears that the Secretary of State for International Development met with Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday ‘to thank him for the Church's role in international aid, especially for the earthquake victims in Haiti’. Quite why Douglas Alexander should presume the need to express gratitude to the Pope is unknown, but Cranmer finds it quite incredible that he also thanked His Holiness for the ‘Catholic Church's unique role on the world stage – particularly at the grassroots level delivering health and education service
Yeah, but the real question is, did Alexander thank the Catholic Church for its services to paedophilia and choirboy buggery?

OP in, TP out

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Machine To Turn Your Office Paper Into Toilet Paper
Do you think that there is too much paper being wasted in your office? Well, the smart folks over in a Japanese company called Oriental have come up with a machine called White Goat. If you’re wondering what a machine with such a funny name does, it converts your normal paper into toilet paper.
At $100,000 you'd have to be a really big shitter to make this economically viable. Perhaps Tony Blair should get one?
Via J-Walk

I suppose they'll make it illegal too

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Ridiculing the obese is the new gay bashing
My son begged me to switch the show off. “It’s too cruel,” he said. But that seemed to be the point of Fat Families. “You make me feel sick,” said the smug presenter as the obese couple looked forlornly at their takeaway supper. Later they were stripped naked — she weeping, he head bowed — while the camera boggled obscenely at their bodies. I hope they were well paid, this good-hearted pair, who clearly loved their kids and each other. What price to be paraded as an object of hatred and disgust.

A public health message? No, this was the All-New Fat & White Minstrel Show. The obese are the last group — should you feel enraged today by a parking penalty or Blair — at which you can vent your fury with legal and social impunity.
Yes, it's nasty. And yes there is no excuse for being offensive to people, no matter what their size. But there is a fundamental difference between homophobic and racist remarks and 'fatist' ones. With very, very few exceptions people are fat because of the lifestyle decisions they have made. It is this obvious and undisguisable manifestation of those decisions which is derided.