Tag: Politics

Whacko of the Week

International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell who is to give 19 million hard-earned taxpayers pounds to UNRWA.

The UNRWA was founded in 1949 to deal with the refugee crisis caused by the invasion of the new State of Israel by five Arab armies. 61 years and billions upon billions of pounds later, it has demonstrably failed. The Arab refugees of Palestine have been kept in misery by the neglect of the states in the region, the intransigence of Arab States in refusing to recognise the State of Israel and the pouring of billions of pounds into armed attacks on that State, instead of into the provision of basic necessities for refugees and the means for them to remedy their own misfortunes by their own efforts. I present the example of Cyprus, a small country burdened with a huge refugee problem by an Invasion by a foreign Country in 1974. Find a refugee camp in Cyprus. Find refugees from Famagusta or other areas occupied by Turkey still living in squalor and poverty. Hint. You can’t.

Another 19 million pounds of British tax-payers’ cash flushed down the toilet.

ESC 2010

120 million viewers all over Europe (mostly) watched the finals of the 55th annual Eurovision Song Contest, live from Oslo, Norway, last night. As usual, there was satisfaction and grumpiness, depending on which camp one was cheering for, but overall it was a big, colourful, fun party. According to veteran UK commentator Sir Terry Wogan, ‘Eurosong’ is not a contest at all. It’s a music fair; a gathering for European countries to showcase and celebrate their music to the rest of the continent. There is an element of competition thrown in, to keep things interesting, but deep down it’s a party, meant to be fun and not taken seriously.

For the record, here are the results, including snippets from the top performances of the evening, for the Sunday recreation of the rest of the world.

Continue reading “ESC 2010”

White Guilt 2

It will be 55 years this December since one of my heroes, a lady, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a man. It’s 40 -odd years since the sufferers of the religion of White Guilt imported a distorted version of the Civil Rights campaign, of which she became an icon, from the United States and began the great shaming of white England as one condition of the founding of a new social equality. The other condition was, of course, the shaming of non-white England into sharing the ridiculous and totally unfounded belief that somehow the colour of their skin made them incapable of competing in society on the same level as the white majority. Frederick Douglass had it about right a century and a half ago: What did he have right?

Ambidextrous alliance?

I can’t find any photo evidence, but I think Nick Clegg is right handed. (Strange really, pictures of politicians used to frequently show them signing important documents, but very few do these days) Apparently David Cameron is believed to be the first left-handed Prime Minister since James Callaghan.
Does that make this new political situation an ambidextrous alliance between Conservative and Liberal Democrats, or that we’ll have a situation where the left hand won’t know what the right is doing?

No More Nobel

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nomorenobel/

Al Gore and The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) shared a Nobel Prize in 2007. Since receiving the award, a UK court has ruled that An Inconvenient Truth, the work for which Al Gore received his half of the prize, contained nine factual errors. Some have identified even more:

http://www.hootervillegazette.com/LordMonckton.html

Recently, it was discovered that the UN IPCC 2007 Report, the work for which it received its half of the 2007 Nobel Prize, contained false information regarding the risk of glacier melt, species extinction, sea-level rise and natural disaster in an effort to frighten the public and goad politicians into taking action. By signing this petition, you are sending a clear message that you wish for Al Gore and the UN IPCC to be stripped of their 2007 award.

In signing, you are also asking that the 2007 prize be awareded to Irena Sendler who risked her life daily during WWII to ultimately rescue more than 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis. Irena Sendler was among those up for the prize in 2007 that Gore and the IPCC won.

If you prefer a candidate other than Sendler, please note it in the comment section. For more on Sendler, visit the bottom link below. Thank you.

Worth a moment of your time, I would have thought.

Taxpayers’ Cash Paying for Politicians?

This is another of my earlier blogs – which seems quite forward thinking, two years after the fact 🙂

Not with my bleedin’ cash they ain’t!  We are now informed by our lords and masters that the way to avoid any more scandals like the recent cash for honours nonsense is to fund political parties from general taxation.  Let’s examine this proposition.  At bottom it means that the government will confiscate a sum of money from me and give it to a political party which I might otherwise not support.  It is a forced donation over which I will have no say.  Since I must work to get this money, what is being proposed amounts to the imposition of forced labour on behalf of the largest party, with no say in how that party should represent me, or what policies I am prepared to support – unless that is, I happen to be a supporter of that party.  It seems to me that this is in direct violation of the rule; ‘No taxation without representation,’ whcih, if I recall correctly, led to an insurrection by British citizens against the then government in the 1770’s and early 80’s, (1775 – 1783, to be exact.)
Continue reading “Taxpayers’ Cash Paying for Politicians?”

Slavoj Zizek – A Philosopher of Our Time

Slavoj Zizek

Until recently I haven’t found many that impress me among contemporary political and social theorists, but Slavjo Zizek is cut from an entirely different cloth.

At first glance the man is hard to listen to, he has a slight lisp, an East European accent and an over active mind that his ability to relate can’t keep up with. Physically he is a bear of a man, looks like an unkempt slob and could easily be dismissed as a total crank.

Here is a man who believes in the purity of film as a medium for social aspiration. An uncluttered dreamsacape in which anything is possible, given the right articulation. He believes it is the purest form of aspiration.

Zizek is also a man who against the flow predicted the economic crash based upon the greed of capitalism and the intensive farming of shareholders. He is a man with many confounding and conflicting ideals but he is right.

Continue reading “Slavoj Zizek – A Philosopher of Our Time”

The Afghan Chronicles

The Afghan Chronicles

I was struck by how MyT has re-filed all of my blogs and any page references to stories on ‘Afghanistan’ have been suppressed and tucked away in obscurity. In locating them and reading back I am amazed at how relevant and fair these accounts are of some of the key issues of the day and how they continue to be topical points of discussion in the war on terror. I thought it would therefore be worth publishing the back catalogue here for DNMT (Dynamite) bloggers to enjoy, so I have grouped the page links together in date order and I hope this will help to stimulate our own debate in light of the current London conference. If you are going to attempt these all at once, get yourself a nice coffee and allow yourself a bit of time – you have been warned!

Continue reading “The Afghan Chronicles”

Questioning the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949

I have given some thought to how I can promote my new political reference database and give my full support to the blogging content and community here at Definitely Not MyT (DNMT or ‘Dynamite’, as I fondly refer to the acronym!).

I therefore intend to post a short notice of new political blog content here, with a link to my site and a related blog for those interested in serious political debate about issues of UK political reform.

Any non-political blogging will be done here directly.

Release information:

New content has been added covering the UK Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 and related political reference information; for those interested in them and their content and their effects on the British Constitution.

The Blog: “Questioning the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949“, is now also available for comment.

The content of the blog and supporting site reference material can be found at:

http://wordpress.enfranchise.com

Political blogs will be copied over to this site after a week or so of exclusive preview and then will be available for general comment, discussion or ridecule. I will try to leave links thereafter leading to this location from  elsewhere after that. This means original content will still appear here, so you won’t miss it (as if, you’d care to! LOL!)

I intend to support this as the main blogging site for the ‘Dynamite’ community, waifs and strays. My site isn’t designed to compete or act as ‘Blog Central’.

Do We Have a Right to Self Determination?

The original concept of Athenian Democracy was to give the citizens of the City-State a say in key policy decisions of the nation.

Should we have that same right today? Or is it right that parliamentary democracy acts in what others believe are our best interests?

Let’s have your views.

I hope this makes for an interesting debate.

You can read background source material on the structure and methods of Modern Parliamentary Democracy and about the Athenian System on my http://wordpress.enfranchise.com political site resource.