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| Monday November 30, 2009 | |
| The European Commission analysis of ACTA's Internet chapter has leaked, indicating that the U.S. is seeking to push laws that extend beyond the WIPO Internet treaties and beyond current European Union law (the EC posted the existence of the document last week but refused to make it publicly available). The document contains detailed comments on the U.S. proposal, confirming the U.S. desire to promote a three-strikes and you're out policy, a Global DMCA, harmonized contributory copyright infringement rules, and the establishment of an international notice-and-takedown policy. |
Nasa's James Hansen was the first to point out the perils of climate change to the US Congress. Here, he begins a heated debate with experts from around the world, from China to the threatened Maldives, and argues that our leaders must be shaken out of their complacency. But will they show enough courage at next week's Copenhagen summit to take the first steps to saving the planet? 
Canada has long been admired around the globe as a nation of high ethics, human rights and respect for law.
But Canada's sterling reputation is being seriously degraded by the spreading scandal over involvement in torture in the increasingly sordid Afghan conflict.
Should we use taxes to deter financial speculation? Yes, say top British officials, who oversee the City of London, one of the world's two great banking centers. Other European governments agree - and they're right.
Unfortunately, United States officials - especially Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary - are dead set against the proposal. Let's hope they reconsider: a financial transactions tax is an idea whose time has come.
A site for rolling polling numbers. For political junkies only.
Concerns about U2 have been growing in Africa for a while. One Western aid blogger testified to the Commission that his teenage kids found U2’s music “cheesy.” The Mandela Commission proposed that U2 follow a series of steps to recover its Edge:
1) Hire African consultants to analyze U2’s “poverty of music trap”
2) Prepare a Band-owned and Commission-approved Comprehensive U2 Reform Strategy Design (CURSD)
3) Undertake a rehabilitation tour of African capitals to field-test and ground-truth proposed reforms
4) Subject all songs to randomized experiments in which the effect on wellbeing of control and treatment groups is rigorously assessed.
Mandela expressed optimism that the Commission’s report and proposed reforms had come in time to stave off terminal crisis in U2, and restore its effectiveness in the 80s arena rock field.
Nearly 17,650 species of animal, including corals, crabs and starfish, were identified living in the depths untouched by sunlight, a marine survey found.
The findings, made public on Monday, were the result of nearly 10 years of research by more than 2,000 scientists from 80 countries taking part in the first global census of marine life.
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Stephen Wicary
A scathing message attacking Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff appeared today on the Facebook site belonging to Janine Krieber - the wife of Mr. Ignatieff's predecessor, Stéphane Dion.
The message, a copy of which was obtained by The Globe, says the party "is falling apart, and will not recover." It also blames "the Toronto elites" for being out of tune, arrogant and unrealistic.
Until a parliamentary subcommittee stepped in to look into the matter, the government had deployed a lot of heavy legal artillery to prevent Colvin from telling his story to a more private inquiry held by the independent Military Police Complaints Commission.
Why?
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the Army Corps of Engineers' failure to properly maintain a navigation channel led to massive flooding in Hurricane Katrina, a decision that could make the federal government vulnerable to billions of dollars in claims.
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A British documentary has alleged that any future Conservative government will be disproportionately influenced by a powerful pro-Israeli lobby in the country. Channel 4's Dispatches programme on Monday said that at least half of the Conservative shadow cabinet are members of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), one of a number of pro-Israel lobby organisations. |
might have been a good 'stimulus' project. oh well...
Image via Wikipedia
Canada's new immigration guide traces a national portrait that may be unfamiliar to many Canadians, one that draws heavily on historic symbols long exiled from the national consciousness.
The monarchy and the military, dominant themes through the middle of the 20th century, are given much greater prominence in this new document.
The land, the environment and health care, mainstays of Canada's self image through the past two decades, are largely ignored.
"Throwback to the 1950's": New Citizenship Guide Presents "Tougher" Image of Canada | Mostly Water
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.
In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well.
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Overthinking It has a thought-provoking chart (view at full size here) that pits the declining quality of rock music against the declining amount of oil production in the lower 48 states. The remarkable similarity between the arcs of U.S. oil production and songs in Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” by year is staggering. Some of their analysis:
Notice that after the birth of rock & roll in the 1950’s, the production of “great songs” peaked in the 60’s, remained strong in the 70’s, but drastically fell in the subsequent decades. It would seem that, like oil, the supply of great musical ideas is finite. By the end of the 70’s, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, the Motown greats, and other genre innovators quickly extracted the best their respective genres** had to offer, leaving little supply for future musicians.
Mere correlation? Dastardly causality? What would this look like if it used best-of data from a magazine that hadn’t ignored the majority of hip hop, electronic music, and the American underground for the last three decades?
Via Gawker.
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By Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris
It’s crunch time for Planet Earth.
The climate change negotiations in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit seem to be deadlocked.
“America indicated yesterday that a legally binding agreement was probably impossible, and acceptance is growing among both rich and poor countries that no binding deal will be reached in Copenhagen next month, and that talks could drag well into 2010 or beyond,” The Guardian reports.
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The Small Boy and the Mouse by D H Maitreyabandhu
When he closed his eyes and asked the question,
he saw an egg, a boiled egg, lodged
above his heart. The shell had been broken off,
with a teaspoon he supposed, it was pure curd white
and still warm. Inside – he could see inside –
there was a garden with rows of potatoes,
sweet peas in a tangle, and a few tomatoes, red
and green ones, along with that funny sulphur smell
coming from split sacks. There was an enamel bathtub
in the garden, with chipped edges, a brown puddle
staining around itself, and a few wet leaves.
He could see down the plughole, so the sun must have shone,
and he heard his father digging potatoes,
knocking off the soil, and his mother fetching the washing in
because the sky promised a shower. There was a hole
or rather a pipe under the tub, where the water went,
and down at the bottom was a mouse – its ribs were poking out,
its damp fur clung together. The mouse was holding
a black-and-white photograph of a boy
who might have been three or four years old;
the boy was playing with boxes, or were they saucepans
from the kitchen? – he was leaning forward and slightly blurred.
And what was strange about the picture,
apart from being held by a mouse who sat on his haunches
and gripped it in his forepaws, was that the space
around the boy, the paleness around him, expanded,
got very bright and engulfed the mouse, the bathtub, the garden,
and the egg with its shell cracked off.
After that there was nothing, apart from the dark
inside the boy's head and a kind of quiet
he'd never had before. He opened his eyes. All the furniture
looked strange, as if someone had rearranged it.
In the face of total global economic collapse, the prospects of a massive international war are increasing. Historically, periods of imperial decline and economic crisis are marked by increased international violence and war. The decline of the great European empires was marked by World War I and World War II, with the Great Depression taking place in the intermediary period.
Currently, the world is witnessing the decline of the American empire, itself a product born out of World War II. As the post-war imperial hegemon, America ran the international monetary system and reigned as champion and arbitrator of the global political economy.
To manage the global political economy, the US has created the single largest and most powerful military force in world history. Constant control over the global economy requires constant military presence and action.
Now that both the American empire and global political economy are in decline and collapse, the prospect of a violent end to the American imperial age is drastically increasing.
