Category: David Tubthump

I am pretty annoyed. Quite aside from the current arguments about humanitarian help for the beleaguered rebels, in my opinion this is Cameron and Sarkozy’s war, and its about Libyan oil. (The biggest reserves in North Africa). Italy’s ENI are the biggest players, followed by Germany’s Wintershall, and France’s Total. The US have only started getting back into Libya since 2005 – the famous Blair handshake. The UK government has been working behind the scenes trying to get Shell and BP into this market for over a decade – Blair and Major before him (Major representing US company Carlyle).

The UK want the rebels to grant us oil rights in gratitude. The French are in there protecting Total’s investment.  The Germans and Italians know better what war is all about and don’t want to be a part of it.  What’s going on is all about the oil, just dressed up in humanitarian/democratic arguments: if it was really about the latter we’d be enforcing NFZs over Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, and there’d be more than just Qatar and UAE on the UN ticket sanctioning action.

Tomahawks – the US navy’s cruise missiles (which they only sell to the UK navy), of course, are made by Raytheon – a US/UK arms company, and have control systems made by BAE.  The Brits bought a load of the new ones in 2004 and have just used up a load of their old ones on Libya.  A little googling turns up some really quite wild conspiracy stuff!

Funnily enough – the Turkish Prime Minister agrees “Using incendiary language directed at France in a speech in Istanbul, Erdogan said: “I wish that those who only see oil, gold mines and underground treasures when they look in [Libya’s] direction, would see the region through glasses of conscience from now on.”

STOP PRESS:
26th August 2011

Sept 1st Update:

And so the bidding begins, with French and British companies set to do well.

Feb 10th 2012 Update:



http://www.cartoonmovement.com/cartoon/2196

I went to school at Eltham College in the 1970s, where the Headmaster and Chaplin gave lectures in morning assembly against the ‘evil sin of homosexuality’. I suffered some pretty horrific homophobic bullying from my peers, too. As a result I failed my A-levels, and didn’t get to University til 10yrs after leaving school. Now I head-up the leading Research Centre at the University of Salford, and Peter Tatchell is giving a guest lecture to the sixth form College Society, today.

What with :

• the Tea-Party – the Taliban of the American Right – gaining power in the US Republican Party
• the Tories finishing what Thatcher started, wearing a dapper LibDem hat to confuse us
• Darth Ratzinger landing the Death Star on British Soil spitting hate at women and gays, with an army of paedo’s hidden in his skirts…

…it feels like the world is still going to pot since Bush stole the White House, despite the blip of hope when Obama got there to weather the wake…

We seem to be staring at least a decade of austerity and right wing rule in the face, and I have to say, I for one, with memories of my 80s radicalism stirring in my heart, am finding it increasingly necessary to ‘take sides’ in the debate – to radicalise my own thinking in the general drift toward polarisation: the usual effect of right wing rule.

As John le Carre put it, once the Cold War against the failings of Communism had been won it was time to focus on the failings of capitalism. Instead there are those who still believe they should be able to get away with being better off than everyone else at everyone else’s expense, and happily deploy the most insidious strategies to ensure we gleefully beg for them to take more. With bread (in the form of palatial supermarkets) and circuses (yes those theatres of dreams) our ‘owners’ marshal their populations carefully to avoid unrest, driving engines of mass slavery to keep us too occupied to realise who we are, let alone why on earth we are playing this deadly game for people we don’t even know…

I guess one outcome of becoming more radicalised by a political environment shifting to the right, is that I am likely to become more outspoken.

OK so here’s my anti-Marketeering rant for this year. Confused.com have really pissed me off. I made an enquiry about Life Insurance – the kind with critical illness cover. I guess I was getting worried that one day – heaven forbid – the pesky back might really go awol and cripple me. It’s not likely, tbh, I’ve been managing it well for more than two decades and this was just a bad year, but I thought I’d investigate the prices, etc, anyway. So after loads of paperwork and emails and phonecalls, eventually I get a reasonable quote, am
reasonably satisfied, and prepared to go ahead. Then all of a sudden the insurer sends another letter saying they’ve thought about it, and decided not to cover me for ‘disability’ of any kind. Basically, they won’t cover me for the only thing that’s likely to even potentially be a problem. No point in having the insurance then, really. So in the next phonecall I tell the girl I’ve decided I don’t want the policy after all. I’ll repeat that – I TELL THE GIRL I DON”T WANT THE POLICY AFTER ALL. She starts into trying to persuade me different and I keep saying NO. Then the signal goes and the call dies. She leaves a message, while the signal is dead, saying she’ll send the paperwork anyway. Then, I go away to Peru. I leave an answerphone message for any callers – “i’m in Peru, won’t be taking or making any calls until September.” Yep. You’ve guessed it. Two or three mornings a week, for the next three weeks, and I mean 4am in Peru, she calls me. She sends text messages asking me WHEN I want my policy to start. I respond to the text messages, but these are clearly generic and not getting
back to her. She calls again. Of course I don’t answer – would you answer the phone at 4am?? There’s more text messages. I write to the email address I got the emails from – to no avail. Confused.com reserve
the right, clearly, to contact you in whatever way they see fit, by email, text, and by phone, but the only way you are allowed to communicate with them is by phone, to their phone number, which at International Roaming Rates I am NOT prepared to pay, when all it is is to say AGAIN that I DO NOT WANT THE POLICY.

Home at last, I find a letter from them, which arrives the day after I return, wanting me to tick boxes and add comments, suggesting they’re not going to contact me anymore unless I want them to. At last! So I tick the boxes saying NO, and leave a terse message reflecting my annoyance at the way they have harrassed me whilst I was away on holiday. And this morning, still fighting jetlag, having got to sleep at about 5am, they call again, at 9.15am. Of course I didn’t answer. I will never have ANY THING to do with confused-dot-anything ever again – and will tell anyone who cares to ask that this company will HARASS YOU TO THE GRAVE if ever you dare give them your mobile phone number.

I have created a silent ringtone in GarageBand on my Mac, and transferred it to my iPhone, and made it the custom ringtone for the ConfusedLife phone number they always ring me on. I will never hear them call me again.

UPDATE: 3/10/10
===========
Got a letter from Confused.com apologising, with £50 of Capital Bonds vouchers to spend as an ex gratia payment to sweeten the apology. Credit where credit’s due, I think they’ve done very well with this, as I didn’t expect anything – just wanted to register my annoyance! Clearly they want to maintain their image as a caring company, and I am assured by their letter that they have learnt lessons from my experience. Good!

OK so Copenhagen was a failure, but there’s hope at least of some grassroots reaction to get on with it anyway. And then all eyes turn to Haiti. And yes despite silly actors queering the pitch for serious debate there is considerable support for the idea that global warming science links climate change with increased incidence of earthquakes. At this crucial time of fundamental change, our nerve fails at our peril.

We seem to be discovering, at the same time as we warm up our own planet to dangerous levels, that billions of years of ago Mars was possibly as habitable as the Earth used to be till we started mucking about with it.
It suggests that there is evidence ‘next door’ in the solar system of
the dangers of climate change. This at a time when, as a community, the human race are making momentous decisions about our long term future. And yet some are arguing for us to abandon the Earth and try and set up home on Mars!
Let us hope that as the coming weeks unfold, the people on whose watch this crucial time has fallen have their feet on the ground – for all our sakes.

Continue reading “Jan Moir”

The world’s climate scientists are warning that in our lifetimes,
there could be five degrees of warming. Such a change would make our
planet uninhabitable for the 6 billion people now populating our world.
Very few of us would be able to survive. This December, there is a
chance for us to spare ourselves this fate. This petition urges the
Prime Minister to ensure that in Copenhagen, when creating a replacement
for the Kyoto Treaty, the world resolves to make substantial and
binding cuts to keep our global ecosystem from collapse. The EU Market
mechanism of carbon trading, and so many other initiatives, have proven
to be missed opportunities. Copenhagen could well be our last chance, a
final opportunity, NOT to be missed. So please, Make Copenhagen Count.

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/last-chance/

Continue reading “Liberated Iraq Abuses Freedom to Kill Gay Men with Abandon”

When I signed up to write a blog post about a woman in technology whom I admire, I knew straight away it would be Julie Howell. Born in Hampshire, UK in 1971, Julie was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) at the age of 19. Her first impact on the internet was described in Louise Proddow’s book ‘Heroes.com: the names and faces behind the dot com era’, (2000) lauding Julie for creating and developing an award-winning online social network of people with multiple sclerosis – Jooly’s Joint. Founded in 1995, membership of Jooly’s Joint now exceeds 20,000 world wide, and was named ‘Best Online Community’ at the New Statesman New Media Awards (2000) and ‘The Mirror Readers’ Choice’ at the Yell UK Web Awards (2000).
Julie Howell is currently Director of Accessibility at digital design agency Fortune Cookie. Before this she was Digital Policy Manager at RNIB.
Julie has spent much of the last decade working with businesses and government agencies to ensure the usability by disabled people of digital information services – probably the most vocal and effective champion of Web Accessibility in the UK. She is Technical Author of BSi’s specification for accessible web design, ‘PAS 78‘ and Chair of BSi’s Web Accessibility Technical Committee, that will hopefully soon produce a British Standard for Web Accessibility. I am not, of course, the first to applaud her work. Julie held the New Media Age Effectiveness Award for ‘The Greatest Individual Contribution to New Media 2005/6’ and in 2007, Julie received ‘The Special Lifetime Achievement Award’ at the Imperatives Digital Awards. Deservedly so!
I first met Julie in Preston in 2002 at one of her many seminars on Web Accessibility, and, inspired and enthused by her to the cause, immediately made it my own cause, too, and by April 2006 I was pleased to meet her again, as co-chair of a meeting of the Manchester Digital Accessibility Working Group  to which we had invited her as part of her tour promoting PAS78. She has since become one of my Facebook friends where we talk about the much more important issue of cats : ) Not only is Julie a woman who has contributed a great deal to the world of information technology, she is also a very friendly and fun-loving person.