The blog with no name

As it's Christmas and if someone feels nostalgic here you can find several old radio versions of the Charles Dickens classic story.

A sad read

The U.S. administration promised Iraqi women a better life with new opportunities, but the reality after three-and-a-half years of occupation is far different. Iraqi women were promised 25 percent of the seats in parliament. As it turned, out, the Iraqi National Assembly has 85 women in a total of 275 members following elections held Dec. 15, 2005. But that has not translated into more rights for women across Iraq.

"We are just a part of the décor arranged by Americans who wanted to convince the world of the 'tremendous' change in Iraq," a female member of the Iraqi parliament said on condition of anonymity. "Our (women's) voice is never heard inside or outside parliament."

Full article

And today the Independent tells us that:

The Government's case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

I can't even pretend to be surprised.

Tonight this blog is not working for me, it's extremely slow, my PC seems to be fine with other sites so I assume the problem is here or all in my head.
I've found this simulation which I've decided I'm going to try to play, you have to be a uni student and survive. I don't know how it ends yet, I know I will end up badly as usual.

Something is moving at last. I've been saying a lot in this blog that with faster broadband connections and we've had for a while the technology for watching movies on the net. But there is hardly anything to watch for us poor Europeans. Yes there are lots of full movies that can be streamed in the many video sharing communities that imitate YouTube but I'm talking about legal content at a reasonable price. By reasonable price I mean either a monthly subscription that allows you to watch as many movies as you like or a pay as you go system which has to be considerably cheaper than renting a DVD from a shop.

Channel 4 is launching this new on demand service. And these are my first impressions. I've just downloaded and installed the software that goes with it. Everything works fine but the choice of things to see is still very limited. Plenty of Merchant/Ivory movies, Withnail and I basically all the Channel 4 productions such as Mona Lisa and that's it. TV wise well the usual culprits, Jamie Oliver, Wife Swaps a few fairly interesting documentaries but nothing that makes me go WOW I need to rent that now. There are a few thing that can be downloaded for free while TV programs are 99p each to rent for 48 hours and movies are £1.99.
I suppose I have to patient, there is this problem with rights and soon or later they will wake up and realise they have to provide a legal way to distribute movies and TV programs over the net just like the music industry had to realise a few years back.

I wondered what happened to Hotmail? there was a time when everyone used it not it seems to have faded in the background. I've never really liked it, I just opened a couple that I never really used, but I'm very curious and have to try everything. I was reading this article and I am very curious now about this free email service. So I've opened a free email account which is mf_london@abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com
I don't care if I get spam as I don't think I will be using it much somehow, I was just curious.

From the Guardian

The central premise of the government's anti-poverty strategy, that work is the best route out of poverty, is questionable given that half of the 3.4 million children living in poverty have a parent already in paid work, the same proportion as in the late 1990s, the study concludes. A low-paid couple, it says, can only avoid poverty if both are working.

The big fall in poverty among pensioners, especially single pensioners, has been a major success of the anti-poverty policy, the researchers say. The poverty rate for pensioners overall has fallen from 27% in the late 1990s to 17% in 2004-05, and among single pensioners the rate has halved from 33% to 17%. But for working adults, the poverty rate remains unchanged since Labour took office at 19%, reflecting Britain's low wages.

I don't consider myself particularly intelligent but I had the pleasure to work in low paid jobs in London, years ago under the Tories with no minimum wage. In 1991 I was getting paid £1.90 gross per hour in a pub which in London considering that a room at that time was about £45 a week was nothing at all. The minimum wage might have helped to cut down the most extreme cases but to be paid minimum wage in London you are still too poor to raise a family full stop. Now the average bedsit in London is about £100 a week. If you look at job ads in the Jobcentre Plus website you find that lots of jobs are paying just the minimum wage and yet they ask for experience. So that means that if you are a barman or a kitchen porter in a few years your pay will be basically the same. What I am saying is that you cannot escape from poverty by working if your job keeps you poor. Yes, I know there will be those that say that you should improve yourself, study become a kitchen porter plus, a supervisor, a manager etc.
Well firstly there is never the need for that many chiefs. Secondly, OK Alfred is a kitchen porter gets an Open University degree and becomes an accountant, buys a car and does not feel poor anymore (can't afford to buy a house in London anyway). But someone else has to do Alfred's old job. It's always someone's turn to be poor. No, I don't have a quick solution, although I see lots of things that are really unfair and someone should have the political will to do something about it (have you recently seen in what conditions some people in London live? And they are paying good money for it,they spend most of their wages on it, why are some fat rich landlords allowed to make a fortune out of properties they are not prepared to put a penny in to maintain properly?)

Colette Marshall, UK director of Save the Children, said the government's strategy of getting low-income families into work was "clearly failing". "The government needs to address the issue of low pay but also acknowledge that work is not possible for all."

Instead of having me ranting about something for a change.
These are the 46 most useful free softwares, I think there is something for everyone, it's not just the list that is interesting (I actually hate lists but I feel compelled to read them, we are in a list driven world after all) or the links, but the lengthy reviews for each type of software. Since I've had a PC (10 years now, time flies) I must have tried hundred of freeware which I deleted, in most cases, ten minutes later. But I need to try everything, I can't help it.

We are approaching the end of yet another year and as usual this is the time when everyone writes those the best 10 lists.
So I found this site that has a few already. Funny how nobody ever agrees.
For people that are really into lists, and they like to tick things they have done, seen and places they have been I suggest to visit this website.

I don't normally talk about personal things, well I only do it occasionally and in passing, but I have to write about something that seems to permeate through every aspect of my life at the moment: disappointment.

I'm disappointed at the way things go generally, just looking at the papers, I'm also disappointed at many other things some not that important but I cannot stop thinking at how much effort I often put into things only to end up disappointed.
I don't like feeling sorry for myself, and I normally don't but I seem to go through a period that has a main theme and that theme is disappointment.

Maybe this is the phase that I have to go through before I turn into a grumpy old man?

Partly because I'm getting softer with my increasing age partly because the quality is so much better here than YouTube (unsurprisingly as the file is 248.4 M, well I've decided to place a link to a video. And then as an amazing coincidence I used to love this when I was 14. Well I still do really. I would never admit though that I don't feel like writing today.

Conservative leader David Cameron has told his party it must back his drive to modernise or face a fourth consecutive general election defeat.

Mr Cameron told the Daily Telegraph it was "tough" if traditional Tories concerned by the direction he is taking the party were annoyed "along the way".

He said the party had to "change to reflect changes to British society".

Full article of someone else. Without mentioning any names of course.

I've found this article that I invite anyone, who is interested in the way this old planet of ours is going, to read.

The failure of socialist theory is much more than matched by the failure of capitalism because the latter has the entire responsibility for keeping the status quo functioning, and it has no intellectual basis for doing so. The crisis that exists is that capitalism has reached a status of most destructiveness, and no opposition to it exists.

This malaise involves foreign affairs and domestic affairs - vast greed at home and adventure overseas. If the foreign-policy aspects are largely American in origin, the rest of the world tolerates or sometimes collaborates with it. Its downfall is inevitable, perhaps imminent. The chaos that exists, much less comes, will exist in a void. No powerful force exists to challenge it, much less replace it, and therefore it will continue to exist but at immense and growing human cost. Visions to create alternatives are, for the moment at least, mostly cranky.

It is nothing new and is something that I think lots of people have come to realise, but it makes me feel better to read someone else saying it so that I know I'm not going mad. Because I feel that world has gone bonkers or maybe has always been like this. It's just that now they try to make us believe we are having it so good. Are we really? But at what cost?

A team of "supernannies" is to be sent to some of Britain's most deprived areas to help parents control antisocial children, Tony Blair revealed today.

The parenting experts will be sent to 77 areas with high levels of unruly behaviour, teenage pregnancies and truancy from school.

The £4m scheme will also force the parents of disruptive children to attend parenting courses.

Writing in the Sun newspaper, the prime minister claimed the initiative would tackle the root causes of crime and disorder.

Full article from the Guardian

What do we have here?
Do we have any reasons to believe that this is actually going to work? Or is it just another move to please the Sun and the Daily Mail's readers?

The plans coincide with a government-commissioned Mori poll revealing that 85% of people think bad parenting is responsible for bad behaviour.

Are parents always the root of all evils? As a parent myself I would like to believe this is the case, I would like to have some degree of control over my offsprings. As I think I'm quite a reasonable and responsible individual then I should not have any problems. But I'm not that naive. There are too many factors that I cannot fully control that affect my children's behaviour.

I know that there are some very bad parents out there, not just around the corner in the council estates, but also among the well educated workalcoholics for instance. But can people be taught how to be better parents? You can definitely teach people how to change nappies or improve how to manage small crisis better, but how do you teach them how to bond, how to care, how to be respected and how to be less selfish? I don't think you can teach those things unless the person wants to change. I don't know, I'm always cynical about any form of social engineering and nanny state syndrome. Especially when the state does the nanny bit only when it's convenient.

I was reading this article and as usual found something I did not know. Every day I find out lots of things I don't know which makes me feel good one way as I feel I achieve something and bad the other because I know very little after all.
Well stop digressing, I've found out of the existence of this company called Globeleq which provides a private supply of electricity in 16 countries of the developing world.

Ok, the thing is that the company was set up by the Department for International Development which is part of the British government therefore it is a company that promotes privatisation of public services in other countries but belong to another country's government. How weird is that?

Is it me getting old (I've never got this old before so I don't know whether this is a side effect of aging) or everything this government is doing just seems to be so twisted?

I've not worked much in the past two years due to health reasons. I'm now ready to find a full time job again and at the first interview with a recruitment agency I'm told that my chances might be hampered by my recent medical history, companies might not be too keen to offer me a permanent contract because they are afraid that I get ill again and have to pay me sick pay.

Now, is the government really sure that it can send people on incapacity benefits back to work and keep people working until they are 67?

In my current quest to abolish TV completely and watch things online I've come across quite a few videos sharing sites, mainly YouTube clones but some have some different features.
I'm going to list them all here, this is not going to be a comprehensive list by all means, there are so many sites like this out there.

Guba
Netscape Video
Go Fish
YouTube
VidiLife
OneWorldTV
ZippyVideo
Pickle
IFilm
Panjea
Revver
Yahoo Video
JumpCut
eVideoShare
VideoWebTown
Veoh
OurMedia
Google Video
Grouper
DailyMotion
ManiaTV
Vimeo
Pixpo
EyeSpot
VSocial
MySpace Video
BuzzNet
Bolt
MSN Video
Sharkle
Blip.tv
Fliqz
ClipShack
MotionBox
FLURL
VMix
Ovao
PutFile

That's enough for now, I'm bored with this

There is actually quite a lot to watch here including George Orwell's 1984 the full movie (I love the book as I've said in other occasions, I'm not sure about the movie but I like John Hurt)

I think, and again I said it many times that we need to have an affordable and legal way to watch movies and TV series online as
this is happening and this is just as unbelievable.

So far there are some services available in the States that rent out movies online but either they do not have an interesting choice or like the one Amazon offered has more terms and conditions than your mortgage.

No, I don't really think about Madonna much if at all but I heard the usual conversation about her adoption today the one that goes something like "black children should be adopted by black people, social services don't like that and so on".

Yes, social services always know best. But is race that important? Besides the argument I've heard many times that white people don't know how to comb black children's hair. I can see that being adopted by a family of the same background might help but besides the obvious does it really happen? How can you tell which family is the best for a little baby?

(I have a friend who was adopted. He is white and was adopted by a white family. But he is very artistic and very much into music while the family he lived with were not into music or art or even books. They were good to him but he felt he never belonged, he was not very happy with them. When he was in his early twenties he tracked down his biological mother who, surprise surprise, turned out to be an artist.)

Therefore I wonder whether race is really such an important factor or there are maybe many other factors that cannot be foreseen and a happy adoption is just something that can happen no matter what the experts say or do. Maybe anything to do with human bonding and relationships does not answer to any set rules.

Is it bad everywhere or is it just bad wherever I live?
There is a house down the road into serious pyrotechnics for every occasion: Diwali, New Year's Eve, Chinese New Year, Guy Fawkes, in the middle of August for no apparent reason (somebody's birthday?)etc.
They are going mad tonight and I have not seen my cat for two hours must be hiding under the bed.

Interesting to see that 75% of Britons believe that George W Bush is a threat to world peace.
Yes the usual ICM poll. Osama Bin Laden scores higher but that's his job, he is supposed to scare us all. George W Bush is supposed to be the leader of the free and democratic world at least he thinks he is. He is supposed to be good to be on our side (not maybe we are on his side) but 75% of people in Britain do not trust him and think he is dangerous.

The US leader and close ally of Tony Blair is seen in Britain as a more dangerous man than the president of Iran (62% think he is a danger), the North Korean leader (69%) and the leader of Hizbullah, Hassan Nasrallah (65%).

But strangely enough

Contrary to the usual expectation, older voters in Britain are slightly more hostile to the Iraq war than younger ones. Voters under 35 are also more trusting of Mr Bush, with hostility strongest among people aged 35-65.

I overheard a conversation between two elderly ladies on a bus a couple of weeks ago that went a bit like this:

"-when there were the Russians they would have never done it, now they think they own the bloody world
- ...and that Blair followed them"

The ill effects of being poor or living in economically disadvantaged areas have been demonstrated before, but it is unusual to consider both factors in the same study. When Marilyn Winkleby and colleagues at Stanford University in California did so, they were surprised to find that death rates in four Californian cities were highest for poor people living in the richest neighbourhoods (American Journal of Public Health, DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2004.060970).

They offer two possible explanations: poor people living in rich areas may have to pay more for housing and other services, magnifying the effect of poverty; alternatively, their health may suffer from stress caused by continually being reminded that they are at the bottom of the economic pile. “I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive,” says team member Catherine Cubbin, now at the University of California, San Francisco.

New Scientist Article

Interesting because it confirms my belief that poverty is relative, being poor in a place where everyone else is also poor will never be pleasant but it is never as bad as being poor in a place where most people are rich.
It reminds me of the bit of news last week that council tax might raise up to four times in nice areas, you know good postcodes with good schools. This has since been denied by the government but there are other "forces" that seem to be creating more class divisions that ever.

This and todays news is convincing me more and more that George Orwell only got the date wrong, it was not 1984 it was 2014.

This made me laugh:

Rosalie Druyan wants to stick the Rolling Stones between a rock and a hard place with a $51 million lawsuit.

"People came from all over to see the Stones," she said. "When you talk about travel expenses, hotel and baby-sitting expenses, that's not a cheap day."

Druyan said she received a Ticketmaster e-mail on her BlackBerry notifying her of the cancelation when she was a few miles from Atlantic City. By then it was too late to junk a $300 reservation at the Trump Taj Mahal and too rainy to drive back to Brooklyn.

"We were bored for nothing," said Druyan.

Full article

OK, let's see around $1000 expenses minus the cost of the tickets which is refundable and a bit of boredom=$51 millions?
If I had to sue everyone that disappointed me, annoyed me, made me waste time and so on I would be the richest man on earth by now.

This is not serious stuff, this was a competition to find who could make the most viral website, a website with most visitors and most talked about.
Needless to say some of these 60 websites are very very weird but they can be quite entertaining if you have some time to kill.

The annual press freedom index is out for 2006 and can be seen here. Europeans countries do well in general although the UK does not do that well. But a lot better than the States.

The United States (53rd) has fallen nine places since last year, after being in 17th position in the first year of the Index, in 2002. Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of “national security” to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his “war on terrorism.” The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism.

Freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf was imprisoned when he refused to hand over his video archives. Sudanese cameraman Sami al-Haj, who works for the pan-Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera, has been held without trial since June 2002 at the US military base at Guantanamo, and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein has been held by US authorities in Iraq since April this year.

These are the criteria used to compile the list.

According to HM Revenue & Customs these are the top ten excuses given by employers for not paying the National Minimum Wage.

He doesn't deserve it - he's a total waste of space
But she only wanted £3 an hour
I didn't think the workers were worth NMW
I didn't think it applied to small employers
He's disabled
They can't cope on their own and it's more than they would get in their own country
She's on benefits - if you add those to her pay, it totals the NMW
He's over 65, so the national minimum wage doesn't apply
The workers can't speak English
I only took him on as a favour

If you have not seen it yet, this is an interesting video..

Video: GuardianFilms and BBC Newsnight present ...

Sean Smith, the Guardian's award-winning war photographer, spent nearly six weeks with the 101st Division of the US army in Iraq. Watch his haunting observational film that explodes the myth around the claims that the Iraqis are preparing to take control of their own country.

Within 100,000 years the divide between rich and poor could lead to two human sub-species
HUMANITY could evolve into two sub-species within 100,000 years as social divisions produce a genetic underclass, a scientist said yesterday.

The mating preferences of the rich, highly educated and well-nourished could ultimately drive their separation into a genetically distinct group that no longer interbreeds with less fortunate human beings, according to Oliver Curry.

Dr Curry, a research associate in the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science of the London School of Economics, speculated that privileged humans might over tens of thousands of years evolve into a “gracile” subspecies, tall, thin, symmetrical, intelligent and creative. The rest would be shorter and stockier, with asymmetric features and lower intelligence, he said.

The Times Article

This is really scary. Provided the human race manages to survive that long, with the current death wish I somehow doubt it.

I've just downloaded and tried it. It is quite a change from all the previous versions this feels a lot more like Firefox and it's faster than the old IE.
I don't use IE normally, well sometimes I have no choice as some sites still require it but I've been using Firefox for a long time and more recently Flock. I don't think that I will switch to IE 7 but I'm too curious and have to try anything new. I definitely like the RSS feeds function similar to the one that Flock has. I enjoy trying stuff like this but then I go back to my good old bloglines.

We have all heard stories of people that got the sack because they wrote something about their employers.
Now we have this:

In addition, Google’s corporate blogmistress admitted that the company has a special e-mail list where employees send personal blog posts for “vetting.” (Sadly this detail didn’t make the final article.) She also said Google routinely reads the blogs of potential employees before hiring them. Yes, we all know this is true on a common sense level, but it’s another thing to have someone officially admit it.

Full article

Is it acceptable to read someon