Blair, the new Mideast Envoy

This now seems a certainty. Apparently, the USA, the UN, Russia and the EU representatives will meet up in Jerusalem tomorrow to seal the deal.

I cannot think of a more nauseating, wrong thing to do.
Blair, bringing peace to the Mideast...
Which is of course why it's going to happen, yes?!

Robert Fisk puts it to words nicely:

I suppose that astonishment is not the word for it. Stupefaction comes to mind. I simply could not believe my ears in Beirut when a phone call told me Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara was going to create "Palestine". I checked the date - no, it was not April 1 - but I remain overwhelmed that this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar, a trumped-up lawyer who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands is contemplating being "our" Middle East envoy.

Can this be true? I had always assumed Balfour, Sykes and Picot were the epitome of Middle Eastern hubris. But Blair? That this (soon-to-be) ex-prime minister, this man who took his country into the sands of Iraq, should actually believe he has a role in the region - he whose own preposterous envoy, Lord Levy, made so many secret trips there, to no avail - is going to sully his hands (and, I fear, our lives) in the world's last colonial war is simply overwhelming.

and so on

So, they agreed on the EU treaty, then!

After all the posturing and spin and threatening and stuff, seems they did it after all.

I wonder if they'll hold another referendum in the Netherlands or in France, or anywhere else
(bwahahahaaaa of course not!)

The article says the Netherlands sees this new treaty as a triumph.
No, we dont. Balkenende does. But he was pro-treaty from the word go, and pushed fanatically for a yes vote which he did not get. He's the worst person to be representing us in this issue, and any agreement that has his enthusiastic approval will be greeted with the utmost suspicion from me.

I dont like our pm, I dont trust him and by rights, after the last election, he should not even be representing the Netherlands in this.

The USA had already gone too far with Guantanamo,

but now they have really crossed every possible line!!!

The White House acknowledged Friday that a meeting to discuss the future of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility had been planned but was canceled late Thursday, and confirmed that the United States is helping build a prison in Afghanistan that would take some prisoners now at Guantanamo Bay.

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the country is utterly amoral and should be internationally isolated.

Barry Commoner's Four Ecology Laws

1. Everything is Connected to Everything Else

2. Everything Must Go Somewhere

3. Nature Knows Best

4. There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

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We forgot this for a while...
I hope we remember soon.

Happy birthday Aung San Suu Kyi

62 years old today...
and still locked up.

Zombie

seeds.

European scientists are going to try to develop zombie seeds.
For real... from EU tax money, it seems.

Have they gone stark raving bonkers???
Can you imagine the effects of contamination?

Now, I dont know the nuts and bolts of thow they plan to get this specific functionality in the plant but I imagine there would be at least one gene that needs to be switched on with a proprietary chemical, before the plant will grow.
If that gene were to sneak out of there and live in other plants, those would also need that chemical switch to be flipped before it would grow. Anyone who thinks this is not very probable, hasnt taken a good look at the staggering level of GM contamination in American crops these days.

What damn bunch of fools thought this would be a good idea, huh?
Bloody irresponsible bastards... and I include our politicians who wont regulate this shit.

"Zombie" GM crops - so called because farmers will have to pay biotech companies to bring seeds back from the dead - are being developed with British taxpayers' money.

The highly controversial development - part of a £3.4m EU research project
... (snip)

Zombie crops would also be engineered to produce sterile seed that could be brought back to life with the right treatment - almost certainly with a chemical sold by the company that markets the seed. Farmers would therefore have to pay out, not for new seeds, but to make the ones they saved viable.

(snip)

The three-year EU research programme, called Transcontainer, which involves 13 universities and research institutes and is partially funded by taxpayers in Britain and other EU countries, says that it is developing the technology to try to "reduce significantly" the spread of GM genes to conventional and organic crops.

Such contamination - long denied and downplayed by the industry and its supporters - is now accepted to be one of the main obstacles to the advance of modified crops.

(snip)

The Transcontainer project insists that it is "specifically targeted at European agriculture and European crops". But it admits that such technologies "may become a problem for farmers in developing countries."


Source

United States of Europe???

If the new EU treaty is pushed through, this is what Sarkozy is pushing for:

Tony Blair as the European Union's first full-time president!

A president???!!!!
Bloody hell!!!

And it seems that Sarkozy is planning to push this treaty through in France without a referendum this time, seeing that it was voted down last time by the pesky citizens. I am getting the impression, so is Balkenende in the Netherlands.

Thankfully, for now, it looks as if the treaty won't go through.
But, you never know. There is such a push for it behind the screens, I think it won't matter any more what "we the people" want.

But, a single fulltime president?? Of the United States of Europe??
No, no, no. I don't bloody well think so.
Not Blair, not anybody.
I won't accept an European president, even if it's ceremonial.
I simply won't.

A pale blue dot

I look at the news today,
what's going on in
Afghanistan
Palestine,
Iraq,
and
I

think of this pale blue dot...

Palestine... civil war

This is a situation entirely of our own making, the UN's De Soto Report, published (leaked) the other day makes it quite clear too
Hamas won the elections, a clear victory
The West decided (USA and Europe too), that this was unacceptable and closed off all possible money streams to Palestine
Even money that was legally theirs
We squeezed and squeezed and squeezed
Meanwhile Israel arrested elected officials, time and again.
When you put that much pressure on people who cannot get away from it,
add grinding poverty and desperation of a situation that looks like it will only get worse, never better...
something's going to give.
It always goes to a further extreme, eh
Never to centre.
Pressure will do that

I think, this is the end of Fatah.
We had an opportunity after the elections, we did not take it.
Analysts warned of this.

It's been said before, the road to peace in the middle east runs through Palestine.
It's just been set back quite a bit. Again.

Amerikanen waren dus niet de enige...

Nederlanders ook al?
We zakken steeds verder weg.

Zo stiekum een bericht dat in het niet verdwijnt. We zouden het moeten gillen van de daken!!!!
Ik word hier echt verdrietig van. En boos.

De verhoormethoden die Nederlandse militairen in Irak gebruikten, stonden „op gespannen voet" met „de internationale mensenrechten".

Dat constateerde de directeur Juridische Zaken van het ministerie van Defensie in maart 2004 in een interne nota.

In diezelfde periode meldde de Militaire Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst (MIVD) toenmalig minister Kamp (Defensie, VVD) dat er gevoelige foto’s bestonden van de ondervraging van gevangenen.

Kamp, nu lid van de VVD-fractie in de Tweede Kamer, heeft het parlement hierover niet geïnformeerd.

en

Op 19 mei 2004 meldde de toenmalige directeur van de dienst, generaal-majoor Bert Dedden in een brief aan de minister dat er in het archief van de MIVD twee foto’s waren aangetroffen van gevangenen die door de MIVD waren verhoord. De twee mannen dragen afgeplakte skibrillen. Eén man is duidelijk nat gegooid met water. „Gelet op de recentelijke (negatieve) publiciteit omtrent de mishandeling van Iraakse detainees door Amerikaanse militairen” vond generaal Dedden het nodig de minister hierover te informeren. De generaal waarschuwde dat er ook „door het Korps Mariniers [...] (mogelijk gevoelig) foto- en videomateriaal is gemaakt”. De inlichtingendienst raadde Kamp aan „dit nader te doen onderzoeken”.

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Alweer angstpraat....

oooh aaaahh

Mijn oma zei altijd: "als de lucht valt, dragen we allemaal blauwe rokjes"
Zo voel ik hier nu ook over!

"Als er volgende week geen overeenkomst komt over de weg naar een nieuw Europees verdrag (voorheen de Europese grondwet genoemd), dan komt Europa in een crisis terecht." Dat zei de voorzitter van het Europees Parlement, Hans-Gert Pöttering, dinsdag.

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Familiefeesten

zijn fun.
Vermoeiend, maar fun :)

50 jaar zijn ze getrouwd.
Hoera!

And the beat goes on....

...terwijl mijn eigen salaris al een paar jaar vast zit. Tegen een plafond aan.
Terwijl ik steeds meer werk krijg, steeds meer verantwoordelijkheden krijg, steeds meer geld verdien zodat ze bij mijn bedrijf ook deze bonussen aan de top kunnen betalen.

En ik word steeds meer boos...
En ik vraag me af - zwaait de pendulum weer helemaal tot aan de guillotine terug?

De topinkomens in het Nederlandse bedrijfsleven zijn vorig jaar met twaalf procent gestegen. Dat blijkt uit het jaarlijkse onderzoek van de Volkskrant naar de ontwikkelingen van topinkomens.

De salarissen zijn vooral gestegen dankzij de hogere bonussen die de bestuurders ontvingen. Over 2005 bedroeg de stijging van de topinkomens tien procent.

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This is NOT the Europe I want to live in!!!

Totally unacceptable.
and yes the Dutch government also went accord to this, by turning a blind eye.

Within weeks of 9-11, the agreement was signed. Within weeks!!!!

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Despite denials by their governments, senior Polish and Romanian security officials have confirmed to the Council of Europe that their countries were used to hold some of America's most important prisoners captured after 9/11 in secret.

None of the prisoners had access to the Red Cross and many were subject to what George Bush has called the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation, which critics have condemned as torture. Although suspicions about the secret CIA prisons have existed for more than a year, the council's report, seen by the Guardian, appears to offer the first concrete evidence. It also details the prisons' operations and the identities of some of the prisoners.

The council has also established that within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, Nato signed an agreement with the US that allowed civilian jets used by the CIA during its so-called extraordinary rendition programme to move across member states' airspace. Its report states: "We have sufficient grounds to declare that the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA's illegal activities on their territories." The council's investigators believe that agreement may have been illegal.

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The 19-month inquiry by the council, which promotes human rights across Europe, was headed by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator and former state prosecutor. He said: "What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice."

His report says there is "now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA [existed] in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania". Mr Marty has told Channel 4's Dispatches, in a report to be broadcast on Monday, that the jails were run "directly and exclusively" by the CIA. This was only possible because of "collaboration at various institutional levels of America's many partner countries".

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

...Mr Marty concluded: "All the members and partners of Nato signed up to the same permissive - not to say illegal - terms that allowed CIA operations to permeate throughout the European continent and beyond ..."

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The second council report will be found here if approved (more or less four hours from now), it is presented today.

I am still so very furious, even more than before because there are no consequences. NO consequences to those who collaborated. we should be having fucking trials and convicting the politicians, burocrats and all others who were involved in this.

TNT vervolg.

Ik kan het ook niet laten.
Kreeg vandaag weer een van die nietszeggende TNT mailtjes in mijn mailbox, ik dacht "genoeg hiervan, ik meld me af!".

Toen werd om een toelichting gevraagd, waarom ik me van hun oh zo informatieve mailbericht service wou afmelden.
Die gaf ik graag:

Ik kreeg vandaag van u mail met titel "Wat vindt u ervan?" en toen ging ik toch een beetje over mijn nek. Ik heb u laatst een klachtenbrief gestuurd over de nieuwe tarieven die kant noch wal raken, en ik kreeg een antwoord in de trant van "wel, dit is hoe het nu is en niet anders, niet zeuren!". TNT Post praat en adverteert nu meer over klantenservice dan het bedrijf het ook echt doet. Dat moet u zelf weten, maar dan hoef ik niet meer aandacht te schenken aan uw mailtjes over wat voor fantastische service u nu weer biedt. Want het is toch kletspraat.

(tja. er werd een toelichting gevraagd!)

Kinderachtig, mischien.
Maar ik word het zat dat het OK is, dat we in een wereld leven waar we een advertentie realiteit worden voorgeschoteld dat een ieder weet, helemaal onjuist is. Maar we aanvaarden het gelaten en zo wordt het een klein beetje waarheid.