The net income of the richest 100 billionaires would be enough to make extreme poverty history four times over.
That’s a pretty extremist statement. A headline from The Morning Star, The Socialist Worker or Marxism Today you might think? Nah. It was from an Oxfam press statement released on 19 January 2014.
Continue reading Income of the 100 richest people could end global poverty 4 times over!I’ve just come across this website by accident. It’s called “Spiral of Hope: My Programming Style“.
I do a bit of coding myself, usually in anger to fix something that’s gone wrong, so am always interested to find out how others do it. Particularly if they do it for fun! Because doing it is one thing, and having FUN doing it is something else.
I get a kind of fun hacking through the code undergrowth and shaking out the bugs. So much fun that sometimes I forget what I was doing in the first place. So I’m interested in finding out how other people deal with that. Do they tell themselves enough is enough, or do they carry on resolutely determined to go the whole way with it? No matter how much it costs and how long it takes? Here’s the page that first caught my eye:
Continue reading The Year of Code. What’s that all about then?Of all the coverage of the Ukraine situation we’ve seen so far, this report from Democracy Now makes the most sense:
It features a leaked phone conversation between top American State Department official, Victoria Nuland, and America’s Ambassador in Kiev which, according to Stephen Cohen, Professor of Russian Studies and Politics at New York and Princeton Universities, shows that the Obama administration plotted “a coup d’etat against the elected President of the Ukraine!”
WTF!!! That’s pretty important information which puts President Putin’s response in a completely different light.
Continue reading What’s really going on in Ukraine?Would you believe it? The Rolling Stones are playing the du Arena in Abu Dhabi tonight!. Yes tonight! Friday 21st February 2014 – which should be about the same time the rest of Britain will be watching Holby City. Are they crazy? Haven’t they heard of IS? Who is doing their security I wonder? Pray to God it’s not the Hell’s Angels.
But, crazy or not, they’re still doing it, as this video attests:
So how will that go I wonder? Mick and the boys playing next door to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, in the same neighbourhood as Iran, Iraq and Syria, with Mick introducing himself as the Devil, while Keef, Charlie and Ronnie whip-up blitzkrieg and the bodies continue to stink.
Continue reading Would you believe it? The Rolling Stones are back on the road … Again!!!In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfil its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.
Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.*”
Who do you think said that? Some ‘ranting conspiracy theorist’ like Alex Jones perhaps? Who else thinks governments deliberately deceive the people to take them to war in foreign lands?
So it’s a bit of a surprise to discover those words were the rulings of a Supreme Court Judge, Justice Hugo Black, in the landmark decision in June 1971 protecting the right of the press to publish government secrets in the Pentagon Papers leaked by the whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.
Continue reading What supporters of government press regulation want us to forgetThe day after Npower beat the government into submission with a record-breaking 10.9% price hike, ScottishPower eases the pressure down to a modest 8.6%. Well they would do wouldn’t they? Npower‘s shock-and-awe attack had already won the Big Six campaign. Any more would only add insult to injury and risk drawing attention to the £8.5m ScottishPower were ‘fined’ the day before yesterday for what many might call fraud and deception.
Continue reading ScottishPower’s 8.6% price hike is a relief – well it would be, wouldn’t it!
Watching Jeremy Paxman interview Russell Brand last night my first thought was that Paxman has way too much of that laconic Oxbridge arrogance the BBC thinks made Britain great, and Brand has way too much of that street-smart wit and charisma the BBC posh boys really hate.
But the more I thought about it “in my nut today” the more I agreed with The Artist Taxi Driver when he said: “Listen to what Paxman’s saying. You can’t change things. This is how things are.”
Continue reading Don’t worry about Russell Brand, worry about Jeremy Paxman“Jeremy Paxman is like the voice of the entire centre ground of the country, which is virtually everyone bar f****ng extremists.
Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? The implication that green levies brought in by the last Labour government are to blame for rising energy prices, subtly implanted in the backs of our minds a month ago, finally came into the open today when David Cameron joined up the dots. Dismissing Miliband as a “con man” for promising to freeze energy prices, Cameron sounded like he could have been reading from a script written by Energy UK:
Continue reading Cameron surrenders to Big Six lobby and Labour takes the blame again!Just one day after Npower‘s record 10.4% price hike you might have thought that this morning’s announcement by energy regulator, Ofgem, that Scottish Power is the third of the Big Six to be found guilty of misleading the public, with investigations against Npower and E.On still ongoing, would have been top of the BBC News headlines. So why wasn’t it? Why did it hardly get a mention? Why did it largely sink without a trace?
Continue reading ScottishPower’s £8.5m ‘fine’ for mis-selling stays out of the headlinesLess than a week after British Gas topped the energy price league, beating rivals SSE by a comfortable 12% margin to set a new high of 9.2%, Npower surges an extra 13% ahead of British Gas and a spectacular 27% ahead of SSE to set a new record of 10.4%
Why would any company want to do that? Competitors are supposed to win customers by lowering prices, not by driving them up! Unless they knew something the rest of us didn’t know: that by the time we’d struggled through the maze of tariffs we’d find ourselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.
If final proof were needed that privatization doesn’t work, this should have been it. So why didn’t we get the message? Why did we just shrug and move on? Continue reading Npower hikes energy bills 10.4% – are they trying to take the pi$$?
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