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Archives for: November 2006

The state of the world

by mf_london @ 28/11/2006 - 20:10:22

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?


 
 

Super Mary Poppins that's all we needed

by mf_london @ 27/11/2006 - 22:46:17

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

marypoppins

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.

Privatising the world

by mf_london @ 23/11/2006 - 20:17:45

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?

A simple question

by mf_london @ 22/11/2006 - 17:10:00

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?

Watch videos online

by mf_london @ 18/11/2006 - 18:52:26

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 :D

Don't switch your TV on

by mf_london @ 07/11/2006 - 19:19:28

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.

Thinking about Madonna

by mf_london @ 06/11/2006 - 21:17:29

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.

Guy Fawkes

by mf_london @ 05/11/2006 - 20:12:45

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.

Who is the enemy?

by mf_london @ 03/11/2006 - 19:46:25

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"

2014 AD

by mf_london @ 02/11/2006 - 18:35:51

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.

1984_3_george_orwell

Who can I sue?

by mf_london @ 01/11/2006 - 18:46:31

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.


 
 

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