This is my new online journal.
 
I liked my old one quite well but, apparently, so did Google.

I find it rather irritating that I have to start a new one but, in the greater scheme of things, I'm sure it's no big deal.

News and funnies will be public; commentary and opinions will, for the most part, be private. Photos generally will be, too.

Please leave a comment if we know each other in real life and you'd like to be added.

listening to: Not much...

Reposted from: euro|topics: 16/04/2009

Correio da Manhã - Portugal
Instead of fighting the pirates on Somalia's coast we should declare war on the bankers and politicians, Domingos Amaral writes in the daily Correio da Manhã: "In a world that is used to terrorists who crash airplanes into buildings it is difficult to describe the pirates of Somalia as barbaric. So far they have not killed anyone. They have captured ships and demanded ransoms, and once the ransom was paid they freed the ships and their crews. This is why I find this global campaign against the pirates so surprising. According to Captain America Barack Obama we must fight against them. While he launches his new US foreign policy and reconciles with Iranians, Russians and Hamas he needs to find a new enemy. Instead of punishing other pirates who do much more damage to the world, such as irresponsible bank managers and other evil-doers like politicians, the United States and the world are prepared to destroy a few anarchists from Somalia." (15/04/2009)

listening to: the video below

Listening to: Nothing





With love from http://www.rainbowpuke.com/ ... a happy place for sad rainbows.

Listening to: the vid below, but only half of it... I don't think I can even make it all the way through.

I realize this is funny, but I'm too cranky to appreciate it fully.

Thanks for posting, bellafiga !

Listening to: The video below

Listening to: nothing, really...

History has shown us that uncertain crowds desire "strong" leadership.

Hello Fascism!

... Didn't anyone pay attention in Grade 10 World History class?

Reposted from: euro|topics (18/02/2009):

Correio da Manhã - Portugal
Domingos Amaral on the effects of the economic crisis
In a commentary for the Correio da Manhã Domingos Amaral paints a bleak picture of the current economic crisis and the havoc it may wreak. "The worrying originality of this economic crisis is that it seems to be immune to traditional solutions proposed in economic texts. Past crises have taught us that central banks must sink key interest rates and governments must invest more to get them under control. This has all been done lately. ... But the current crisis is like a car stuck in the sand whose wheels keep digging themselves in deeper. The frustrating truth is that today governments and central banks are unable to control the global crisis. The globalisation of finance has created a monster that no country can tame. This monster is like a gigantic fire that is suffocating the economy. In its fury it leads to a spiralling unemployent and growing frustration that can call everything into question in the short term: international trade, the euro, the European social model, political regimes and parties and who knows, perhaps even democracy." (17/02/2009)

Listenig to`: The And One video below

Listening to: The video below

Listenign to: The video below...

Listening to: The Album Leaf

Public Revolt Builds Against Rip-off Rescue Plans
by Naomi Klein, The Nation, February 5, 2009
 
Watching the crowds in Iceland banging pots and pans until their government fell reminded me of a chant popular in anti-capitalist circles back in 2002: "You are Enron. We are Argentina."

Its message was simple enough. You—politicians and CEOs huddled at some trade summit—are like the reckless scamming execs at Enron (of course, we didn't know the half of it). We—the rabble outside—are like the people of Argentina, who, in the midst of an economic crisis eerily similar to our own, took to the street banging pots and pans. They shouted, "¡Que se vayan todos!" ("All of them must go!") and forced out a procession of four presidents in less than three weeks. What made Argentina's 2001-02 uprising unique was that it wasn't directed at a particular political party or even at corruption in the abstract. The target was the dominant economic model—this was the first national revolt against contemporary deregulated capitalism.

It's taken a while, but from Iceland to Latvia, South Korea to Greece, the rest of the world is finally having its ¡Que se vayan todos! moment.

The stoic Icelandic matriarchs beating their pots flat even as their kids ransack the fridge for projectiles (eggs, sure, but yogurt?) echo the tactics made famous in Buenos Aires. So does the collective rage at elites who trashed a once thriving country and thought they could get away with it. As Gudrun Jonsdottir, a 36-year-old Icelandic office worker, put it: "I've just had enough of this whole thing. I don't trust the government, I don't trust the banks, I don't trust the political parties and I don't trust the IMF. We had a good country, and they ruined it."

Another echo: in Reykjavik, the protesters clearly won't be bought off by a mere change of face at the top (even if the new PM is a lesbian). They want aid for people, not just banks; criminal investigations into the debacle; and deep electoral reform.

Similar demands can be heard these days in Latvia, whose economy has contracted more sharply than any country in the EU, and where the government is teetering on the brink. For weeks the capital has been rocked by protests, including a full-blown, cobblestone-hurling riot on January 13. As in Iceland, Latvians are appalled by their leaders' refusal to take any responsibility for the mess. Asked by Bloomberg TV what caused the crisis, Latvia's finance minister shrugged: "Nothing special."

But Latvia's troubles are indeed special: the very policies that allowed the "Baltic Tiger" to grow at a rate of 12 percent in 2006 are also causing it to contract violently by a projected 10 percent this year: money, freed of all barriers, flows out as quickly as it flows in, with plenty being diverted to political pockets. (It is no coincidence that many of today's basket cases are yesterday's "miracles": Ireland, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia.)

Something else Argentina-esque is in the air. In 2001 Argentina's leaders responded to the crisis with a brutal International Monetary Fund-prescribed austerity package: $9 billion in spending cuts, much of it hitting health and education. This proved to be a fatal mistake. Unions staged a general strike, teachers moved their classes to the streets and the protests never stopped.

This same bottom-up refusal to bear the brunt of the crisis unites many of today's protests. In Latvia, much of the popular rage has focused on government austerity measures—mass layoffs, reduced social services and slashed public sector salaries—all to qualify for an IMF emergency loan (no, nothing has changed). In Greece, December's riots followed a police shooting of a 15-year-old. But what's kept them going, with farmers taking the lead from students, is widespread rage at the government's crisis response: banks got a $36 billion bailout while workers got their pensions cut and farmers received next to nothing. Despite the inconvenience caused by tractors blocking roads, 78 percent of Greeks say the farmers' demands are reasonable. Similarly, in France the recent general strike—triggered in part by President Sarkozy's plans to reduce the number of teachers dramatically—inspired the support of 70 percent of the population.

Perhaps the sturdiest thread connecting this global backlash is a rejection of the logic of "extraordinary politics"—the phrase coined by Polish politician Leszek Balcerowicz to describe how, in a crisis, politicians can ignore legislative rules and rush through unpopular "reforms." That trick is getting tired, as South Korea's government recently discovered. In December, the ruling party tried to use the crisis to ram through a highly controversial free trade agreement with the United States. Taking closed-door politics to new extremes, legislators locked themselves in the chamber so they could vote in private, barricading the door with desks, chairs and couches.

Opposition politicians were having none of it: with sledgehammers and an electric saw, they broke in and staged a twelve-day sit-in of Parliament. The vote was delayed, allowing for more debate—a victory for a new kind of "extraordinary politics."

Here in Canada, politics is markedly less YouTube-friendly—but it has still been surprisingly eventful. In October the Conservative Party won national elections on an unambitious platform. Six weeks later, our Tory prime minister found his inner ideologue, presenting a budget bill that stripped public sector workers of the right to strike, canceled public funding for political parties and contained no economic stimulus. Opposition parties responded by forming a historic coalition that was only prevented from taking power by an abrupt suspension of Parliament. The Tories have just come back with a revised budget: the pet right-wing policies have disappeared, and it is packed with economic stimulus.

The pattern is clear: governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited agenda will not survive to tell the tale. As Italy's students have taken to shouting in the streets: "We won't pay for your crisis!"

This article was first published in The Nation.

[... we've gotta keep fighting]

Listening to: the vid below

Listening to: The very fantastic video below

Listening to: Not much...

Reposted from: euro|topics 26/01/2009

Jornal de Notícias - Portugal
Rafael Barbosa on irresponsible demands to consume
In the daily Jornal de Notícias columnist Rafael Barbosa calls it irresponsible to ask people to consume in answer to the economic crisis: "The contradictions you see today are astonishing. One day we hear that thanks to the lowering of the prime rates and the decrease in inflation we will have more money at our disposal, and so we will be able to keep our jobs. The next day we are told that the unemployment rate has gone up again and that consequently there are more people with no money at their disposal. The day after we are informed that consumption must go up to overcome the crisis. And the day after that we hear that an increasing number of people aren't able to pay off the money they borrowed to spur consumption. It's enough to drive you crazy. ... The call to consume echoes far and wide. Renowned economists go so far as to say that these calls should above all be directed at the middle classes because they are more susceptible to advertising. In a nutshell: at a time when we should hear the call for frugality and thrift, we are called on to be irresponsible. Instead of saving for the future we are called on to spend as though there were no tomorrow." 

Listening to the vid below...

Listening to: Branvan 3000

;-)

Listening to: I dunno... sounds like the baseboard heater is going to explode...

Thanks for the post that led me to this,

lookforthewoman ...

Reposted from: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-06/forgotten-bush-scandals/

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, George H.W. Bush congratulated his son on running a “clean operation." Bush apparently wasn’t paying very close attention. Everyone remembers weapons of mass destruction, the US attorney firings. But historians will note that those are only the beginning of the Bush administration scandals…

The Bush administration will leave the annals of presidential disrepute several times thicker than it found them. There’s Iraq, the hospital visit to John Ashcroft, the US attorney firings. But historians will note that those are only the beginning of the Bush administration scandals. Does the name Jeff Gannon ring a bell? Boxgate? What about the anti-prostitution AIDS tsar who purchased the services of—wait for it—the D.C. Madam? The Daily Beast has put together 20 of Bush’s greatest forgotten scandals.

 Interior Department officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives."

Sex and Shoplifting

1) In March 2006, Claude Allen, Bush's top domestic policy aide, was arrested when he tried to return items he had shoplifted from Target for cash refunds. Allen, who made $161,000 a year, blamed stress from Hurricane Katrina.
 

2) In 2005, bloggers pricked up their ears when a reporter named Jeff Gannon asked a softball question at a Bush press conference. Some sleuthing turned up nude photos of Gannon—real name: James Guckert—on male escort websites.
 

3) Randall Tobias, Bush’s AIDS tsar, mandated that organizations must oppose prostitution in order to receive American aid. It later emerged that Tobias purchased services through the notorious D.C. Madam, though Tobias maintained he only bought “massages.”

4) The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service would not seem to be the sexiest government agency. But a departmental investigation last year found that officials had “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”
 

Where’d the Money Go?

5) When testifying before Congress in 2007, L. Paul Bremer, the former head of reconstruction in Iraq, was unable to account for as much as $12 billion—about half of his budget—as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority between May 2003 and June 2004. According to a report by Rep. Henry Waxman, contractors brought bags to meetings in order to collect shrink-wrapped bundles of money.
 

6) In 2004, Pentagon auditors found that Halliburton had not adequately accounted for $1.8 billion of the bill it sent to the United States government for its work in Iraq and Kuwait.
 

7) Also that year, Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting officer, charged that KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary, unfairly received billions of dollars worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq. Greenhouse was demoted in 2005.
 

Disappearances

8) In 2002, Canadian citizen Maher Arar was detained at an airport in New York and spirited away to Syria, where he was tortured and held for 10 months by his captors before being returned home. Canadian officials investigated Arar's case, declared he was innocent, and paid him $9 million in compensation. American officials refused to admit the mistake and instead kept Arar on a terrorist watch list.
 

9) Army Captain James Yee, a Muslim chaplain in Guantanamo Bay, was hooded, shackled, and detained in solitary confinement for 76 days on charges of espionage. Within a year the case against Yee had collapsed and the Army tried to save face by charging him with hoarding pornography.
 

All the President’s Wordsmiths

10) In an email to friends, Danielle Crittenden, the wife of White House speechwriter David Frum, bragged that her husband had written Bush’s famous “Axis of Evil” line. The e-mail leaked to Slate, causing a minor scandal.
 

11) Part of the self-created mythology of White House speechwriter Michael Gerson was that he composed his speeches in longhand. But as fellow scribe Matthew Scully later noted: “At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John [McConnell] and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.”
 

No Administration Friend Left Behind

12) First there was Columnist Gate: In 2005, USA Today reported that conservative commentator Armstrong Williams received a $240,000 contract from the Department of Education to promote No Child Left Behind on his television show and to sell other African-American journalists on the legislation. Later, The Washington Post uncovered a similar deal with columnist Maggie Gallagher to promote a marriage initiative for the Department of Health.
 

13) A Defense Department report in 2006 urged the military to end its practice of paying Iraqi journalists to publish pro-American stories in their newspapers, arguing the tactic would "undermine the concept of a free press."
 

14) According to The New York Times, Karl Rove scored lobbyist Ralph Reed a lucrative contract with Enron in 1997 to gain his support in the 2000 presidential race.
 

15) David Safavian, the former chief of staff of the General Services Administration, was convicted of helping Jack Abramoff on a shady land deal as well as concealing a "lavish weeklong golf trip" paid for by Abramoff.
 

16) As head of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz was forced to resign in disgrace after he helped his "female companion," Shaha Riza, score a $60,000 pay raise and promotion—and then tried to cover it up.
 

Down the Memory Hole

17) Bush fundraiser Lurita Doan's gig as chair of the General Services Administration went down in flames when she was accused of asking agency staff to help Republican candidates win elections. Doan denied any wrongdoing. When witnesses said she asked her staff at a meeting, "How can we use GSA to help our candidates in the next election?" Doan claimed she had no memory of the presentation.
 

18) Though Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, was suspected of being the anthrax mailer, that didn't keep Bush and Cheney from openly speculating that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks and even going so far as to pressure FBI officials to come up with a bin Laden connection, according to the New York Daily News.
 

Mission Accomplished

19) In 2003, Bush went to a warehouse in St. Louis to give a speech titled “Strengthening America’s Economy.” But the boxes laid out before the presidential podium bore the label "Made in China." The labels were then obscured with white paper. The White House blamed an "overzealous advance volunteer.”
 

The Last Word

20) The administration ethos was nicely summarized during the investigation in the firing of US attorneys, in a testy exchange between former White House Political Director Sara Taylor and Sen. Patrick Leahy. Taylor: "I took an oath to the president…And I believe that taking that oath means that I need to respect, and do respect, my service to the president." Leahy: "No, the oath says that you take an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States. That is your paramount duty. I know that the president refers to the government being his government—it's not."

Listening to: tummy grumblies...

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5124184/the-russian-bear-slashes-a-social-network

Listening to: The Teenagers

I hope it's voodoo...

---

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, December 22, 2008 - 16:13

WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush has undergone an MRI of his left shoulder in an attempt to understand why he has experienced pain recently.

Bush had the exam Monday during a visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to see soldiers recovering from severe injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

White House physician Richard Tubb performed the MRI.

Bush spokesman Gordon Johndroe says the results may be available later Monday.

The activities of the 62-year-old Bush have not been restricted by the pain.

Tubb says the problem is probably the result of wear and tear.

Listening to: someone shovelling snow...

Reposted from: http://www.thestar.com/living/article/555539
by Antonia Zerbisias, Dec 19, 2008 04:30 AM

Exactly 40 years after the women's demonstrations that spawned the derisive label "bra-burners" – although no undergarments were set afire – we've come a long way, baby.

Trouble is, our shoes are higher-heeled than ever – and our feet are killing us.

Sure it's been an exciting political year, filled with promise. We witnessed two women, Hillary (sometimes Rodham) Clinton and Sarah Palin, come this close to the Oval Office. In the Great Pink North, the "socialists and the separatists" nearly took over because, among other things, Stephen Harper's Conservatives tried to kill pay equity.

Today, women have reproductive freedom. More women are independent, thanks to affirmative action hiring that gave them access to better-paying jobs. More women with more money helps them escape abusive relationships, as evidenced by the drop in reported femicides.

And the future looks bright.

Women outnumber men in most university faculties and, reports BusinessWeek, are better suited to the knowledge economy, "which rewards supposedly female traits such as sensitivity, intuition, and a willingness to collaborate. "

This while traditionally male jobs, in construction and manufacturing, are disappearing.

Could this explain the backlash women felt this year when, for example, media commentators resorted to misogyny when discussing Clinton and Palin? Are they and their legions of keep-the-little-woman-down fans actually afraid of girls gone wild with power?

Here in Canada, the year started off with feminists marking the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision R. v. Morgentaler that gave women the right to choose. But, for the rest of the year, the pro-forced-pregnancy faction, which prefers to be called pro-life although it cares not about the life of the female baby incubator, fought against choice.

First they – most Conservatives and many Liberals – voted to pass Bill C-484, which, according to legal and medical experts, could have conferred legal personhood on zygotes. Then they protested the appointment of Henry Morgentaler to the Order of Canada. Finally, after the Harper government backed down on its own bill because it did not want to "re-open the abortion debate," the party's convention put it right back on the agenda.

Things could be worse.

In the United States, it looks as if health-care workers at federally subsidized institutions – from physicians to pharmacists and even to the orderly mopping the hospital room floor – will get their "Conscience Rule," courtesy of lame duck President George W. Bush. This would give them the right to refuse to provide any procedure or medication based on their moral, ethical or religious beliefs.

This means emergency contraception could be denied to rape and incest victims if a druggist is pro-forced-pregnancy. It also means counsellors can withhold information about contraception. As well, it means that doctors can refuse to perform artificial insemination.

Anything to keep women hostages to biology, which is where God reportedly decreed they should be.

This would not be so annoying if it weren't for the mentally colonized women who have benefited from feminism while rejecting the label. (Sarah Palin had a love-hate thing with the word.) They say unbelievably stupid things such as – and I quote – "I believe in equality for everyone, not just women. Also, I believe in equal rights, not one group getting more than others."

Statements like that betray not only ignorance, but also the women who fought for our hard-won rights to speak out and make ignorant statements.

It wasn't so long ago that women, like children, were supposed to be seen and not heard.

So here we are, at the end of 2008, and "feminism" is still not only misunderstood and deliberately misinterpreted, it's still an f-word.

Count on me in 2009 to keep flipping the misogynists the bird.