made
for a happy day
Thoughts
design | drugs
| energy |
media | politics
| property
| religion |
war
Design
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We're
all living downstream
All the unhelpful consequences we create for this world will,
in time, arrive back in our laps.
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The
death of Quality
Why, when commentators continually tell us how 'robust' things are, are
so few things built to last?
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Drugs
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City
of London money-laundering unlimited
How far has the market’s love of inward investment allowed the UK
to become the international criminal’s ‘laundry of choice’?
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What are illegal drugs, except another commodity to be traded?
Either our drugs policy is stupid or crafty. I suspect the latter.
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Letter
to Mark Lancaster, MP
With respect to the control of drug production and trafficking, what useful
purpose do you believe our troops are serving in Afghanistan?
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Energy
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Bush:
Before and After
Before we enjoyed his cheeky grin, his straight-forwardness, his comical
abuse of the queen's English. 7 years later, with energy prices at an
all time high, liking the President is hard.
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What's
spooked the fat controller?
It's easy for those under our sphere of influence to forget just how unpleasant
life could be without our protection. Sometimes the protected need reminding.
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Iran
attack: why it's in the pipeline
We’ve been here before. In the early 1950s the Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company AIOC, later renamed British Petroleum, was in control of Iran's
primary source of income: oil.
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Oil
leaks, fires & explosions
Leaks, fires & explosions, cataclysmic system failures. Suddenly our
oil and energy facilities built in the 60s and 70s are starting to look
highly vulnerable.
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Oil
price rises break market rules
Would you bet on the price going up if you felt that pumping more Iraqi
oil would solve the shortage of supply?
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Nuclear
is no substitute for cheap oil and gas
What we're running out of very fast is cheap oil (currently $70 a barrel,
up from around $25 in 2000.
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Nuclear
Power's Limitations
I think we have to be honest about nuclear's limitations.
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Working
out how to profit from sunshine
The potential for greater use of the sun's energy as it hits the earth
is clearly there, and the time to put it in place is NOW
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Media
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Banned
by Google
Is this censorship of selective amnesia on the part of Google?
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An
Inconvenient Truth - the perfect antidote to media spin
928 peer-reviewed papers say global warming is fact, yet most commentators
have preferred to present fact as 'theory'.
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Growing
the propaganda model
'Flak' is definitely there, but I think 'partial pictures' and 'double-talk'
and 'pre-emption' are also areas you might consider from my own notion
of the propaganda model.
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Reporters
report. Detectives investigate
Career journalists quickly learn the rules, discover the boundaries and
grasp the acceptable boundaries within which a debate or story may unfold.
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Why comment is never free
I am coming round to the idea that The Guardian's Comment Is Free website
is tolerated, neigh encouraged, to allow a lot a very angry people like
us to let off steam safely. In short, it is a substitute for action.
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BBC4's John
Humphrys beats Blair's war drum
Listeners can not have failed to be sickened by John Humphrys bellicose
attitude to the Christian Peacemakers (BBC Today Programme, 25 Mar).
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9/11:
nobody dares go there - the extra journalistic mile
Our reality is being made and shaped as we sleepwalk, ruminate, debate
semantics...
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Politics
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Chavez
is a good action man
Did you know that you can buy an Action Man made in Chavez's likeness
which makes long speaches from a speaker sited somewhere near its arse?
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When Katrina hit Cuba
When Katrina hit Cuba it killed 2 people. When it hit the states 1,577
died in Louisiana alone.
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Hands
Off Cuba!
Cuba is far from perfect, but far more perfect than numerous latin american
countries the US has 'helped democratise'.
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Voted
for Labour. Got a Tory
How many fewer than 3 in every 10 eligible voters have to vote before
it is recognised that UK politicians increasingly govern without popular
consent?
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Galloway
and Respect
Galloway beat the Telegraph newspaper in court, he squared with a US senate
committee and exposed them as dunces, and this morning I heard him calling
Blair and Brown the two cheeks of the same arse. In short the man is CHAMPION!
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Coin
flipping to decide elections
Rennie's idea of everyone coin-flipping (a random result) in a multi-party
election is an entertaining proposition and might make for some very positive
change
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Property
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Reflections
on the Great Depression of 2010
The financiers were certainly not preparing to queue at the fuel pump.
Ideas were floated. Depopulation? WWIII? Penury? They had already decided
which they preferred.
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UK
financial crisis 2007 | 2008. Where to next?
The UK is experiencing a downturn as the various wheels of fortune which
have kept the credit boom going grind to a halt.
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Sharing could
be the answer
Can any of damaging trends affecting the world today be reversed by other
nations adopting our western way of life?
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UK house price crash - quiet
before the fall (2007)
There is an uncomfortable quiet right now. Like in the film Zulu, it is
the quiet just before the embattled British soldiers catch sight of a
massed army rising up across the horizon....
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UN
vote to end private land ownership
Today the United Nations, in defiance of powerful vested interests, voted
unanimously to return all land, worldwide, back into public ownership.
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It’s
growing: the gap between rich and poor in the UK
Few high powered execs step up to the podium to
brag that their profit-making talent is actually dependent on less privileged
workers being paid as little as 11 cents per hour.
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Too
much money (UK 2006)
We used to invest for the benefit of current and future generations. Now
we are addicted to laying bets in a game of bluff - sometimes called casino
capitalism.
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Boom
Bust - UK housing bubble set to burst
The last time house market crashed in the UK was 1989. 17 years on, the
prognosis does not look good.
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Religion
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Muslim
parents and terrorists ignored
Blaming muslims collectively for an act of terrorism is plain silly. Blaming
parents collectively is even sillier.
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Muslims
are rapists - Fact or Fiction?
American author Mark Twain made the observation that there are three types
of commonly recognised untruth: "Lies, damn lies and statistics."
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War
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When
is a truck bomber not a truck bomber?
Is the much hyped 'sectarian' violence in Iraq being stoked and orchestrated?
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Want
to rule the world?
The UK's leading defence contractor IMPERIAL OUTREACH
is recruiting Management Trainees. Full training provided.
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Iraq:
what's it worth?
Any advances on a pile of dollars 95 miles high?
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During foot and mouth, we counted the
corpses
Persecution by Saddam's secret police, punishing UN sanctions, domination
by foreign troops. Now the dehumanisation of Iraq's resistance is complete.
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Knocking
back progress: pacifying the tribes
Israel's army chief of staff put it bluntly to Hezbollah - our military
will "turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years".
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Force,
pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary
Tony Blair's foreign policy advisor's recommendations to Tony Blair sound
like nostalgia for colonialism
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We
are right to be sceptical about Iraq
You know the going is getting tough when, with impeccable timing, Zarqawi
or Bin Laden are wheeled out of retirement.
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Suicide
bombers may be misunderstood
Do you know the 'Legend of the Yumiri' - native Indians of Cuba?
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Terrorists
hate our interference, not our way of life
Leaders of western democracies won't accept that the hateful cancer which
struck in Madrid last week may be the result of their own bad behaviour.
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