The blog with no name

I was trying to lighten up this sort of blog a bit, but whenever I look for something I always end up reading depressing things and these are things that cannot be ignored.

I found another article from Jonathan Cook, the same freelance journalist I mentioned a few weeks ago.
He does not say anything that is completely new, he is quite angry though.

And to protect that plan -- to preserve the Middle East as a giant oil pump, cheaply feeding our industries and our privileged lifestyles -- those who care about the suffering, the deaths and the wars must be silenced. Their voices must not be heard, their loyalty must be questioned, their reason must be put in doubt. They must be dismissed as "Islamic fascists".

One does not need to be a psychologist to understand that those with no legitimate way to vent their rage, even to have it recognised as valid, become consumed by it instead. They seek explanations and purifying ideologies. They need heroes and strategies. And in the end they crave revenge. If their voice is not heard, they will speak without words.

If we were barbarians this would make more sense, you have what I need to maintain my standard of living and I pillage and destroy you to get it. No morals, no rhetoric. I'm bigger than you and end of the story. I would not agree with it but at least I would feel that the objective was clear. But I object to this moralising, arrogance, badly justified aggressive behaviour, twisting the truth, pretending to be morally superior and pretending to free the world from evil.

In a world where nothing seems to be certain anymore, something still is

It's a cruel world, this is about US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's reactions to the UK security emergency.

Chertoff's demeanor and body language belied any notion that there's a serious emergency. This means either that US officials are quite underwhelmed by the UK's evidence of a feasible terrorist plot, or that the US government's casual indifference toward catastrophic loss of life and property, as exhibited when New Orleans was destroyed, is the new American attitude.

In favor of option one, we have a recent history of British eagerness to announce breakthroughs in the struggle against the forces of darkness, with nothing to show for it. We have Jean Charles de Menezes shot to bits at point-blank range for behaving oddly just after the 7/7 atrocity. We have the imaginary ricin plot. We have the imaginary chemical bomb plot. And we have the imaginary red-mercury suitcase nuke plot.

There's been a lot of crying wolf in London, so it should surprise no one to find that the Americans have heard enough of it. (Although, to be fair, Washington has trumpeted its share of counterterrorist breakthroughs involving semi-harmless losers, but that's no reason for them to buy into anyone else's.)

In favor of option two, we have Hurricane Katrina, heckuva-job-Brownie, and government indifference toward mass suffering, death, and property destruction on a scale that makes 9/11 look like a garden party. This suggests that 9/11 served its purpose by leading to endless mass suffering, death, and property destruction in Iraq, which is all it ever was worth to the Bush Administration.

According to this hypothesis, phony agonizing over 9/11 got Junior his longed-for war in Iraq, so there's no further need to shed crocodile tears and whine publicly about the blood of innocents. To a government willing to brush off the destruction of an entire US city, and to preside over the destruction of a foreign nation, a few planes blowing up over the Atlantic is small potatoes.

Whether we're seeing the true Bushie callousness laid bare, or a healthy American skepticism toward HMG's repeated exhibition of a phony terrorist menace as a pretext to introduce the Kafka-esque legislation favored by Tony Blair and John Reid, will be answered by and by. There will be successful prosecutions, or there will be official excuses verging on an apology, but not quite amounting to one.

We will see. ®

Full article from the Register

And this as well

Postcode lottery- a term normally used when services (especially health services) are not equal across different regions.

A few examples of postcode lottery that I can find:

Access to a potentially life-saving treatment for heart patients is a postcode lottery, a study suggests.
A University of Southampton study in the British Medical Journal Online looked at the use of defibrillators which are implanted inside the heart.

It was found that the English regions with the highest heart disease death rates use the lowest number of devices.

Full article

First Minister Jack McConnell has pledged to "take action" against councils failing to properly deliver free personal care for elderly people.
He was responding to opposition claims that there was a "postcode lottery" in elderly care services.

Full article

Deafblind people in Scotland face a "postcode lottery" of services, it has been claimed.
Falkirk man Michael Anderson, who has the condition, said there was a shortage of trained professionals, known as guide communicators.

Full article

The government still has a long way to go before the "unacceptable" postcode lottery on cancer treatment is eradicated, a committee of MPs says.
The Commons public accounts committee said people in northern England were twice as likely to die of cancer than those in parts of the south.

Full article

ALMOST nine out of 10 patients who suffer a stroke in Wales are not getting to hospital quick enough.

A damning audit of stroke services in Wales has found that emergency services are still not up to standard.

Experts last night said it was shocking that patients are still suffering a postcode lottery of care as it emerged that the number of dedicated stroke beds in Wales has fallen in the last two years.

Full article

Healthcare spending is subject to a postcode lottery, with some areas paying out more on cancer, heart disease or mental health than others, a new report says.
Primary care trusts are charged with buying healthcare to suit the priorities of their populations, but data from the King's Fund, the independent health foundation, finds that even taking into account varying needs, there are large and sometimes surprising differences.

Full article

Patients face "disturbing" differences in the quality of their National Health Service care depending on where they live, the top medical adviser said on Friday.

In his annual public health report, Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson condemned the "postcode lottery" which persists in the NHS, despite government pledges to tackle the problem.

"There are too many variations that cannot be explained by the needs of patients," he said. "Inappropriate variation runs contrary to the moral contract agreed in 1948 between the NHS and the public."

Donaldson challenged health chiefs to "reaffirm their commitment to the principle of equity" to give patients across the country a fairer service.

Full article

Thousands of elderly people across Norfolk and Suffolk are being faced with the prospect of funding their own care due to an NHS postcode funding lottery, according to campaigners.

Figures released by the Department of Health show that the former Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire (NSC) Strategic Health Authority area is the third worst in the country when it comes to older people getting state funding for care home fees they are entitled to.

Full article

And so on