(Copiapo, Chile)
It is one of our worst nightmares as human beings, a fear noted by many horror writers and film directors, and yet for many miners being buried alive is a very real occupational hazard. Right now thirty-three Chilean miners are trapped seven kilometres underground. They have been there for weeks; they will be there for months before being rescued.
Inevitably the mining company and the Chilean government are being accused of negligence in the affair, but once more we should look inwards to find the people responsible for tragedies of this magnitude. Our desire for gold and diamonds leads people in poor countries to play with their lives just to scrape a living. Once again, we are guilty.
Monday, August 30, 2010
La purification ethnique
(Paris, France)
Over recent weeks President Sarkozy of France has ordered that the Roma people living in his country be sent home. It is unclear where a nomadic people should be sent to, but M Sarkozy has opted for Romania and Bulgaria. It is also unclear why they should have been forced out of their homes in France, although a French government statement declared their homes to be "sources of illegal trafficking, of profoundly shocking living standards, of exploitation of children for begging, of prostitution and crime", leaving no doubt that they believe poverty to be the fault of the people.
France has a history of sending people away to wherever they were supposed to have come from. The Jews were expelled in 1182, and in 1306 and again in 1394. The Protestants known as the Huguenots were evicted in the seventeenth century.
Of course the French response to Jews was part of a Europe-wide Semitic pogrom, and their response to the Protestants was another facet of the Catholic persecution of “heresy” from the Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century. The Inquisition in its various forms killed hundreds of thousands of people; the crusade against the Jews killed millions.
The Romani people also suffered in the Holocaust, and it is clear that this latest episode in anti-ziganism is simply another chapter in a long book of persecution and murder dating back to the earliest appearance of this people in Europe. It is ethnic cleansing – there are no gas chambers this time, but Sarkozy is making sure that hatred of the Roma is fuelled and that they are expelled from rich countries and sent to poor countries where they cannot bother “decent” people.
Nothing will happen to Sarkozy – white male leaders of rich Western countries are never brought to book for their crimes against the people. Perhaps worse than that is that nothing will happen to prevent the French government from doing what it wants to the Roma – rich Western countries hate immigrants, nomads, gypsies, poor people and anyone else who does not conform to our own racial and social type. We are all guilty.
Over recent weeks President Sarkozy of France has ordered that the Roma people living in his country be sent home. It is unclear where a nomadic people should be sent to, but M Sarkozy has opted for Romania and Bulgaria. It is also unclear why they should have been forced out of their homes in France, although a French government statement declared their homes to be "sources of illegal trafficking, of profoundly shocking living standards, of exploitation of children for begging, of prostitution and crime", leaving no doubt that they believe poverty to be the fault of the people.
France has a history of sending people away to wherever they were supposed to have come from. The Jews were expelled in 1182, and in 1306 and again in 1394. The Protestants known as the Huguenots were evicted in the seventeenth century.
Of course the French response to Jews was part of a Europe-wide Semitic pogrom, and their response to the Protestants was another facet of the Catholic persecution of “heresy” from the Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century. The Inquisition in its various forms killed hundreds of thousands of people; the crusade against the Jews killed millions.
The Romani people also suffered in the Holocaust, and it is clear that this latest episode in anti-ziganism is simply another chapter in a long book of persecution and murder dating back to the earliest appearance of this people in Europe. It is ethnic cleansing – there are no gas chambers this time, but Sarkozy is making sure that hatred of the Roma is fuelled and that they are expelled from rich countries and sent to poor countries where they cannot bother “decent” people.
Nothing will happen to Sarkozy – white male leaders of rich Western countries are never brought to book for their crimes against the people. Perhaps worse than that is that nothing will happen to prevent the French government from doing what it wants to the Roma – rich Western countries hate immigrants, nomads, gypsies, poor people and anyone else who does not conform to our own racial and social type. We are all guilty.
Friday, July 16, 2010
It will never take off
(Payerne, Switzerland)
On the morning of the 8th July a solar plane piloted by André Borschberg and financed by billionaire Doctor Bertrand Piccard landed after a 26-hour flight. Through its 12,000 solar cells it had collected enough solar energy to fly all night, becoming the first plane to do so.
To quote directly from the website:
But we succeed! Not only in staying airborne right through the night, but in making our discourse credible.
At the sun came up, there were still several hours of energy reserves in the batteries. Yes, renewable energies and cleantechs can do the impossible! We were right to bet on our conviction.
It is no surprise that this plane has been designed, built and tested entirely with private money. Governments do not have that sort of money; nor can they justify such supposed extravagance at a time when people are losing their jobs and banks are putting people out of their homes. Not only that: billionaires can be entrepreneurs who develop systems like this and then make phenomenal amounts of money selling the idea to governments, but from the other angle it can be said that governments wait around for people with enough money to do what they can’t afford to do and then take the expertise off them. It is yet another form of taxation.
Neither will it be a surprise that this idea will never become commercial. Solar power, tidal power and wind power can all be harnessed in many more places than fossil fuels, simply to different degrees of efficiency depending on the geographical location, and even though coastal areas do belong to governments wind and sun belong to no-one. They do not exist in limited quantities under the land of states with smaller armies than the USA or the UK and will therefore not be coveted by greedy Western governments.
In short, without the incentive of making profitable wars Western governments will never allow this scheme to take off.
On the morning of the 8th July a solar plane piloted by André Borschberg and financed by billionaire Doctor Bertrand Piccard landed after a 26-hour flight. Through its 12,000 solar cells it had collected enough solar energy to fly all night, becoming the first plane to do so.
To quote directly from the website:
But we succeed! Not only in staying airborne right through the night, but in making our discourse credible.
At the sun came up, there were still several hours of energy reserves in the batteries. Yes, renewable energies and cleantechs can do the impossible! We were right to bet on our conviction.
It is no surprise that this plane has been designed, built and tested entirely with private money. Governments do not have that sort of money; nor can they justify such supposed extravagance at a time when people are losing their jobs and banks are putting people out of their homes. Not only that: billionaires can be entrepreneurs who develop systems like this and then make phenomenal amounts of money selling the idea to governments, but from the other angle it can be said that governments wait around for people with enough money to do what they can’t afford to do and then take the expertise off them. It is yet another form of taxation.
Neither will it be a surprise that this idea will never become commercial. Solar power, tidal power and wind power can all be harnessed in many more places than fossil fuels, simply to different degrees of efficiency depending on the geographical location, and even though coastal areas do belong to governments wind and sun belong to no-one. They do not exist in limited quantities under the land of states with smaller armies than the USA or the UK and will therefore not be coveted by greedy Western governments.
In short, without the incentive of making profitable wars Western governments will never allow this scheme to take off.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Supremely guilty
(Al Amarrah, Iraq)
This week the British Supreme Court ruled that British troops are not protected by human rights laws on the battlefield, concluding a case in which the family of a private who died of heatstroke argued that the government was responsible for protecting their troops in foreign wars.
An army is an organisation which is sponsored by a government to kill civilians in other countries. If you join an army you are declaring that you are prepared to go to another country and kill somebody you have never met before on the whim of a politician you have never met before either.
Armies are on a par with governments and organised religions as organisations that show the utmost disdain for human rights, but they are perhaps the most effective at actually suppressing those rights. The British army has trampled over the rights of millions of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan during the last decade, killing hundreds of thousands of them.
However, while it is difficult to summon any sympathy for a man who takes a gun to another country and kills a family in an unprovoked attack – whether the private who died of heatstroke did this or not is moot because individuals are complicit in the murders of a homogenous group – it is true that the ultimate responsibility for the welfare of the employees of the state lies with the state.
The faceless – and shameless – bureaucrats who send young men to a pointless and unjustifiable war should not be allowed to throw off the responsibility for the deaths of either their own soldiers or of the civilians murdered by their soldiers. They should be brought to justice for any deaths, be they from a bullet or from the heat of the desert.
The judges who fail to recognise this are as complicit in these deaths as the politicians and are guilty of perverting the idea of justice, and here the Supreme Court is supremely guilty.
This week the British Supreme Court ruled that British troops are not protected by human rights laws on the battlefield, concluding a case in which the family of a private who died of heatstroke argued that the government was responsible for protecting their troops in foreign wars.
An army is an organisation which is sponsored by a government to kill civilians in other countries. If you join an army you are declaring that you are prepared to go to another country and kill somebody you have never met before on the whim of a politician you have never met before either.
Armies are on a par with governments and organised religions as organisations that show the utmost disdain for human rights, but they are perhaps the most effective at actually suppressing those rights. The British army has trampled over the rights of millions of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan during the last decade, killing hundreds of thousands of them.
However, while it is difficult to summon any sympathy for a man who takes a gun to another country and kills a family in an unprovoked attack – whether the private who died of heatstroke did this or not is moot because individuals are complicit in the murders of a homogenous group – it is true that the ultimate responsibility for the welfare of the employees of the state lies with the state.
The faceless – and shameless – bureaucrats who send young men to a pointless and unjustifiable war should not be allowed to throw off the responsibility for the deaths of either their own soldiers or of the civilians murdered by their soldiers. They should be brought to justice for any deaths, be they from a bullet or from the heat of the desert.
The judges who fail to recognise this are as complicit in these deaths as the politicians and are guilty of perverting the idea of justice, and here the Supreme Court is supremely guilty.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Figures go boom in government's face
(Dublin, Ireland)
The Irish government has published figures through the Quarterly National Accounts which it claims demonstrate that the country is out of the recession.
This claim is based on the fact that a “recession” is defined as two consecutive quarters of falling GDP. One quarter with a positive percentage is deemed not to be a recession – would that make it a boom?
The two previous quarters returned a fall in GDP of 7.4% and 7.9%; the last quarter apparently yielded a rise of 0.3%. Bang goes the boom.
According to the government’s own “seasonally adjusted” figures unemployment stands at close to 14%. This figure is appalling enough were it not for the fact that their figures show that around 450,000 people out of a population of 4.5 million are jobless, making a mockery of their figure of 14% unemployment.
The reality in Ireland is that the people are still in a recession and will continue to be for some time to come. There are no jobs; there is no money. The government will continue to fiddle the figures of course – right up until the next election, when the only figures that matter to them will blow up in their faces.
The Irish government has published figures through the Quarterly National Accounts which it claims demonstrate that the country is out of the recession.
This claim is based on the fact that a “recession” is defined as two consecutive quarters of falling GDP. One quarter with a positive percentage is deemed not to be a recession – would that make it a boom?
The two previous quarters returned a fall in GDP of 7.4% and 7.9%; the last quarter apparently yielded a rise of 0.3%. Bang goes the boom.
According to the government’s own “seasonally adjusted” figures unemployment stands at close to 14%. This figure is appalling enough were it not for the fact that their figures show that around 450,000 people out of a population of 4.5 million are jobless, making a mockery of their figure of 14% unemployment.
The reality in Ireland is that the people are still in a recession and will continue to be for some time to come. There are no jobs; there is no money. The government will continue to fiddle the figures of course – right up until the next election, when the only figures that matter to them will blow up in their faces.
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