Nabbed from this MSN BLOG (wordpress ate the html, sorry):
Why our Government will attack Iran before March 20
On March 20- Iran will do what Iraq and Venezuela were PREVENTED from doing by U.S. Interference.

“On the start of the Iranian New Year- March 20, 2006 on our calendar, Iran intends to open its own commodity market for oil and gas. This new bourse will be similar to markets in NY and London with one critical exception…

Trades will be conducted in Euros, not dollars.”

from www.isecureonline.com/reports/mtr/emtrg206/home.cfm

This is why Dick Cheney and the Bush administration are rushing to validate some kind of attack on Iran, not the supposed Nuclear capability. It’s another red herring to prevent an Oil power from going Petro-Euro on the U.S.Dollar. Ever since Nixon refused to pay Gold in exchange for the Dollar, The American dollar has been been backed by an agreement with OPEC to price oil exclusively in U.S. Dollars. So in effect, Oil backed the U.S. dollar since that time.

This is one of the primary reasons Foreign countries like China have been hoarding U.S. Treasuries for the past 20 years. At this time last year, China was spending 7.8 million an hour, 187 million a day, buying U.S. treasuries and dollars and holds in excess of 120 Billion in U.S. treasuries, not to mention what the Saudis own as well.

This is the ONLY reason our economy HAS NOT Collapsed into a major recession for the past ten years. The foreign money has been propping up our economy as we rack up record National Debt and Trade deficits under the “Conservative” policies of the Bush administration.

Saddam threatened to pull the plug on the U.S. dollar in 2000 and we ousted him. Venezuela’s ambassador spoke to Russia of doing the same in 2001. Within a year there was a coup attempt against Chavez, reputed to be supported by the CIA. The coup failed, but Chavez pulled back against moving to the Euro.

……

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/011733.html

Doesn’t say anything new, but at least people are paying attention.

Call for applications for the
MP- Scientist Pairing Scheme 2006

Are you a scientist with an interest in politics?  The Royal Society is currently inviting applications from scientists to take part in the 2006 round of its successful MP-Scientist pairing scheme.

The scheme helps build bridges between parliamentarians and scientists in theUK. MP and scientist pairs spend time together in the laboratory and the constituency followed by an opportunity for scientists to go behind the scenes at Westminster gaining first hand experience of how science policy is formed.

We are looking to recruit post-doctoral scientists either with a research fellowship or working at a Research Council institute and a proven interest in science communication and matters relating to science policy.

[…]

I would apply, only I have no interest in politics….

Do I?

Dear Irdial,

President George Bush has come to Congress – to the American people, really – to ask for another $65 billion for war in the Middle East. It’s the fourth time in three years the Administration has asked for extra, unplanned billions to be taken from other needs. What will he do with the money? We’re told this $65 billion (in addition to the $241 billion spent so far¹) will be used to “stay the course.”

Problem is, no one – not Mr. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney nor Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – seems to know what “the course” is. All citizens are offered is more of the same policies – the same policies which have led Iraq to the brink of civil war and bogged our troops in a hopeless quagmire.

Enough is enough!

Let’s tell Congress that it’s time to use their Constitutional auth […]

Blah blah blah, whine whine whine…

If you don’t want this, DONT PAY FOR IT YOU IDIOTS.

Would you losers keep going to Wendy’s if they consistently forgot to put the burger in your bun every time you made an order?

Of course you wouldn’t, and this is no different. Stop shopping at McWarMachine!

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 (Xinhuanet) — The U.S. government has agreed to pay 300,000 U.S. dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by an Egyptian swept up in the New York area after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The Egyptian was among dozens of Muslim men that were swept up in the New York area after the attacks, held for months in a federal detention center in the city, and deported after being cleared of links to terrorism, the report said.

The settlement, filed in federal court late Monday, is the first the government has made in a number of lawsuits charging that non citizens were abused and their constitutional rights violated in detentions after the terror attacks.

The settlement, which removes one of two plaintiffs from a casein which a federal judge ruled last year that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller and other top government officials must answer questions under oath, requires approval by a federal judge in Brooklyn.

Lawyers for the government filed an appeal to that ruling last Friday. They said in the agreement that the official were not admitting any liability or fault, and in court papers, they said that the Sept. 11 attacks created “special factors,” including the need to deter future terrorism, that outweighed the plaintiff’s right to sue.

Lawyers representing the Egyptian and another plaintiff, a Pakistani, who is still pursuing the lawsuit, said the outcome was significant.

“This is a substantial settlement and shows for the first time that the government can be held accountable for the abuses that have occurred in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and in prisons right here in the United States,” one of the lawyers was quoted as saying.

The lawsuit accuses Ashcroft, Mueller of personally conspiring to violate the rights of Muslim immigrant detainees on the basis of their race, religion and national origin, and names a score of other defendants, including Bureau of Prison officials and guards at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. […]

 http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-02/28/content_4240628.htm

Compulsory ID cards are nothing new in the UK. They were issued to all British civilians during World War II. That is until one ordinary man said no.

Clarence Willcock, a 54-year-old dry cleaner from suburban north London, must rank as one of the unlikeliest Davids ever to take on a Goliath.

Mr Willcock was stopped on December 7 1950 while driving his car along Ballard’s Lane by uniformed police constable Harold Muckle, who demanded to see the motorist’s identity card.

Mr Willcock refused. Pc Muckle told him to produce the compulsory card at the local station with 48 hours. “I will not produce it at any police station,” Mr Willcock replied.

With this act of defiance, Mr Willcock brought crashing down a giant bureaucracy which had, since the outbreak of World War II in 1939, forced an identity card on every civilian in the UK – man, woman and child.

When Willcock v Muckle eventually reached the High Court in 1951, Lord Chief Justice Goddard said the continuation of the wartime ID card scheme was an “annoyance” to much of the public and “tended to turn law-abiding subjects into law breakers”. […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3129302.stm

[…]

A BLOGDIAL post from April 24th 2004
And I add today, from the same article:

“Let us have the credit for ‘setting the people free’,” wrote one Treasury minister in 1952, though he was really gleefully looking forward to “the consequential staff economies”.

The demise of the system was forecast while the fight against Hitler was still fierce. In October 1944, Registrar General Sir Earnest Holderness said that he did “not believe that public opinion will stand for the retention of [national registration] in its present form”.

Sir Ernest reasoned that once law-abiding citizens no longer needed to provide details of their address to ensure their ration allowances, they would not bother to keep their ID cards up to date merely because the government asked them to.

And what, my dear friends, is the difference between the British of 1952 and the British of 2006? Just what is it that they have been putting in the water that has turned a population of real people into sheeple?

How did they do it?

How much lower can they all sink before they are literally turned into cattle?

Everything says “this should not be happening” but it is, and…I can’t wake up!

The Justice Department submitted a declaration by Philip B. Stark, a researcher who rejected the privacy concerns, noting that the government specifically requested that Google remove any identifying information from the search requests.

“The study does not involve examining the queries in more than a cursory way. It involves running a random sample of the queries through the Google search engine and categorizing the results,” Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has staunchly resisted the Justice Department since receiving a subpoena last summer, setting the stage for the current legal battle.

The case has attracted widespread attention because it has underscored the potential for Internet search engines becoming tools for government surveillance. A hearing is scheduled before U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Jose March 13. […]

Yahoo News

Wether the data is stripped of personally identifying information or not, its MY DATA and GOOGLE owns it. The DOJ could at any time, go back to Google and ask them to reveal the person who searched for XYZ once they have the anonymized data. Philip Stark must know this. If he does not, he should not have allowed himself to be trotted out as an apologist for this mass violation.

Academics without morals; the most dangerous men on the planet.

You will no doubt have read about CITGO selling cheap (ie Venezuelan government subsidised) oil to poor US households.

Whilst this undoubtedly shows off Chavez in a good light versus Bush, it lets the US regime off the hook and continue its real business concerns as normal, such as subsidising US oill companies as reported by Oligopolywatch:

Big petroleum companies are showing record profits through windfall gains thanks to supply shortages and increased demand. Top oil companies announces record profits, while consumers and businesses outside the energy segment, both big and small, suffer from higher energy prices.

Yet it turns out that US is giving away $7 billion in royalty payments for natural gas and oil the federal government owns in the Gulf of Mexico.. This money is going to major oil companies over the next five years […]

Technorati Tags: venezuelan, oil, subsidies

American Civil Liberties Union: Stop the Abuse of Power

Dear Friend,

Americans continue to be outraged by the Bush Administration’s illegal NSA spying program.

But when you look deeper an even more troubling pattern is clear: this president really believes he is above the law. The illegal spying is just a small part of a pattern of abuse that’s undermining the Constitution and abridging our civil liberties.

Unauthorized domestic wiretapping…illegal detentions and flagrant violations of human rights at Guantanamo…secret CIA kidnappings that transport victims to countries that engage in torture…the use of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to chill peaceful dissent…the refusal to hold high-level officials accountable for abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

I’m writing to ask for your support in our work to uphold the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, in the face of this ongoing abuse of presidential power. By donating now to the ACLU, you can help break this pattern of abuse and deliver a clear and unequivocal message: no one — not even the president — is above the law…

This is wrong headed of course.

Look at each of the illegal doings listed above; each one of them involves spending taxpayers money:

• illegal NSA spying program. Funded by US TAXPAYERS
• illegal detentions Funded by US TAXPAYERS
• flagrant violations of human rights at Guantanamo Funded by US TAXPAYERS
• CIA kidnappings Funded by US TAXPAYERS
• FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to chill peaceful dissent Funded by US TAXPAYERS
• abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib Funded by US TAXPAYERS

It’s clear that if you cut off the funds for these nefarious deeds, that they could not take place. If the ACLU is not willing to address this, then they will fail, just as all pressure groups have been failing since ‘The VietNam War’.

The ACLU should be funded so that they can execute a plan of financial strangulation; the cutting off of funds supplied by the 50% of Americans who want a permanent end to all the shenanigans that uncle sham has been getting up to. Anything less is a waste of time; the pointless marching, petition writing and lobbying has to stop, and be replaced with action that has a concrete and real effect.

I’ve said all this before of course.

Furthermore, the Federal Reserve and its printing press must be shut down. That is where they get unlimited funding for their adventurism, no matter what anyone says or how loud they protest.

Does this infringe european human rights legislation?

No European is against ID cards; they are all like battery chickens, completely inured to them, unable to see or understand what we are talking about.
Imagine going to the EU court of justice, and arguing against ID cards; each of the judges will absolutely have been issued one, and will have been carrying it all their adult lives. By saying that there is an argument against ID cards, they will be admiting that their own countries and citizens are not free. They will never do that.

The free British are alone on this matter, and it is up to us to demolish this nonsense.

That’s what happens when you get people from birth; you don’t even have to brainwash them, they are born into slavery, and know nothing different; in fact, they say that YOU are the one with the problem since you don’t want ID cards.

As for those actors, I would love to know what the response was to the question “are you going to make any more political films?”.

This part was interesting:

He says he was initially questioned at the airport’s baggage pick-up area and taken to a separate room when he demanded to know why.

What this does is send a clear message; if you make any kind of stand for your rights, you will only make it worse for yourself.

The pigs who carry out these on the spot interrogations know that there is zero chance that they will come to any professional harm if they misbehave. That is why they are so routinely cavalier in their treatment of the public.

If they knew that one out of place word or act of violence or out of procedure action could get them either fired or gaoled, they would be MUCH more careful, sadly, there is no chance of any such balancing legislation being passed. The only way you can resist these monsters is to starve them of their oxygen, which means the fruit of your work.

It goes without saying of course, that the only reason there is such outrage is because these guys are actors. What about he 40,000 other people wrongly detained under this new legislation? Where is the BBQ reporting on all of these people? There is not even a counter for this at BBQ (as if there would be!).

As for your shiny new passport AK, you are completely correct about the arbitrary expiration date. Also you should consider that ‘your’ passport does not belong to you, but in fact, belongs to HMG. It can be withdrawn at any time, and you can be made to renew it at any time, and of course, you will have to pay for the privelege.

Another interesting facet of these documents is the reaction of the brain dead bimbo behind the counter, who, upon seeing that your passport / drivers licence has expired, says “have you got any VALID ID?”. These retards deny you service because your card has expired, not realizing that the card is there to prove that ‘you are who you say you are’ the date on the card is irrelevant as long as its you in the picture.

People will become non-persons simply because their documents have expired, their identities expiring with them. The obedient staff who are ‘just following orders’ are the second rank monsters in all of this; a sigle one of them coming in contact (shop girls for example) with THOUSANDS of people, vetting them one by one, demanding ID one by one, multiplying the pressure to cave in geometrically.

The perfect response to this is, “if my identity expires just because my card expires, then all of my ‘responsibilities’ expire also, and I am not under any obligation to obey anything that I do not want to obey”.

Actors (from left) Waqar Siddiqui, Rizwan Ahmed and Arfman Usman with Michael Winterbottom and detainee Rhuhel Ahmed

The actors who star in movie The Road to Guantanamo were questioned by police at Luton airport under anti-terrorism legislation, it has emerged.The men, who play British inmates at the detention camp, were returning from the Berlin Film Festival where the movie won a Silver Bear award.

One of the actors, Rizwan Ahmed, said a police officer asked him if he intended to make any more “political” films.

….

‘Excuse me sir, is that your beard? Come with me, please.’

The idiots stopping people like this do nothing but exhibit themselves as stoopid, blinkered bigots.

Feeling safer now?

….

I have been wondering about my freedom to travel in the near future. I just got a new passport, valid until 2016. Under current proposals, I won’t have to submit to the NIR until 2016 when I renew this passport. Voluntarilry, of course!

So when I get a new passport, I assume I will be able to opt out of ID carding, as the system is voluntary.

Except we all know I won’t be able to opt out, as voluntary is only a word bandied around to appease the spineless gimps on the Labour backbenches who apparently cannot distinguish between ‘voluntary’ and ‘must submit to data-rape if you apply for a passport’.

So, it’s voluntary unless I wish to leave the country.

So far so clear. Now, we all know I won’t be getting an ID card. But where does that leave me regarding international travel? Is my government, the people who serve me, going to keep me under ‘home-nation arrest’ until I let them scan my retina and sample my DNA?

Does this infringe european human rights legislation?

Is an passport any less of a valid travel document just because it has an arbitratry expiration date? One day in 2016 I can go where I like, the next I am a prisoner.

This post is vague. It was in my head as I couldn’t sleep last night.

Bu tit’s the thought that counts.

There is a very good write up of this in the Evening Standard whcih I will copy here; in the mean time, take this from The Independent:

The new laws were largely justified by the UK Government as a necessary response to the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Commentators have remarked on the irony that the first challenge involves the City and has nothing to do with terrorism. […]

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article346840.ece 

and this is a surprise to who exactly?

Mr Burnham said the radio technology was being introduced to meet international regulations enabling identity documents to be read by scanners at airports. It was “nonsense” to suggest the frequencies could be used to monitor people’s movements.

“This kind of scaremongering is designed to whip up fears about the ID cards scheme. I hope people will see it for what it is.“

…

George Monbiot doing his best Irdial impersonation. But he holds himself back too much. Although this bit is pretty good…

‘So the police won’t even have to be there. Someone sitting in a control room could fly a tiny drone (some of them are just a few inches across) equipped with a receiver over the heads of a crowd and, with the help of our new identity cards, determine who’s there.‘

…

The ID card debate seems to be boring the populus into submission. It, as many other issues, has been transformed into a neo-liberal dinner party discussion and taken as far as possible out of the context of most citizens futures. Nobody I speak to really cares, nobody shows any passion one way or the other. The ‘nothing to hide: nothing to fear’ response prevails. Tis the way of the modern world.