Consie

There are some problems with this argument. First of all, it is pure myth that the world is overpopulated in terms of basic resources necessary for survival. The green revolution/science/technology have ensured that there is plenty of food for all 6 billion of us. Most researchers believe famines only happen because of a failure to distribute food (not because of a lack of food). As Amartya Sen famously said, "famines don't happen in democracies" because they are generally better as distributing food. Hell, the way Europe and the US overproduce food (thanks to outrageous farm subsidies), there will be plenty of it available for decades to come... Also, I have to point out that you hope no Brits/Americans/Australians die, but also assume that a decrease in population would lead to less pollution and natural resource depletion. The problem is, well, it's us that use the most! A billion poor people in the third world may not slow climate change as much as a million in the developed world...

It's a good question... I think it's just a compromise society has to make. If a woman ends up costing more because of maternity leave, so be it. While it isn't quantifiable, the burden of pregnancy/birth/early childcare falls on women. That's certainly worth something.

What? Taiwan? No such country exists... :) The China-Taiwan debate is one of the most interesting, though it has really been out of the news for a while since China has simmered down a bit. There are even quite a few direct flights now to Taipei and there is quite a bit of economic cooperation. Still, I believe China still sends a missile right over Taiwan once a year or so just to show its continued claim of propriety over the island. The US has actually passed a bill that states "There is only one China." But it deliberately doesn't state whether that China is the PRC People Republic of China (mainland China) or the ROP Republic of China (Taiwan). For more info, check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-China_policy FYI - Taiwan is not a member of UN but they do have a seat somewhere to participate as some kind of non-member-state actor.

Agreed, I'm not sure why it isn't a huge smash. It's far better than Irreplaceable which was an enormous success for her a few years back. As much as I love If I Were a Boy and Single Ladies... I think Halo would have made a better leading single, then following up with the guaranteed-to-be-huge Single Ladies and releasing the unconventional but sweet IIWAB 3rd...

You could do it through the schools. I had to complete 100 hours of community volunteering in order to graduate high school at 18. However I admit the system really shouldn't be implemented universally, as many students have jobs and no doubt many others will drop out of school simply because they didn't complete the service volunteering. Individual schools or local authorities could try it out on a school-by-school basis. How decentralized is the UK school system? Are there city- or district-level authorities or do they all report to a federal ministry of education?

I want to get loaded and go see this and scream and heckle and throw popcorn at the screen.

Eminem proves that it doesn't pay to release a song straight out of 1999, even if it is a comeback. Making fun of celebrities while chatting about how great you are? Come on... no one does that any more. Try again.

Has anyone here seen Ingrid Newkirk's will? It is definitely worth a read: http://www.peta.org/feat/newkirk/will.html

Ok am I crazy or are all the clips totally sped up? Like when you double click on a track for a 30 second sample... they're all sped up, WEIRD!!

The new itunes cost structure just went live. Many songs are now $1.29 (up from $.99). I wonder if it will affect sales...

Ok, one more article. It's long, so I'll only post a clip. The whole thing can be found here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/mi...ai-1664368.html It's a disturbing read... perhaps the worst part isn't the illegal labor, Draconian laws... it's the Western expats. You have to read their comments to believe them. The most racist, disgusting, lazy, pathetic group of people you could imagine: VII. The Lifestyle All the guidebooks call Dubai a "melting pot", but as I trawl across the city, I find that every group here huddles together in its own little ethnic enclave – and becomes a caricature of itself. One night – in the heart of this homesick city, tired of the malls and the camps – I go to Double Decker, a hang-out for British expats. At the entrance there is a red telephone box, and London bus-stop signs. Its wooden interior looks like a cross between a colonial clubhouse in the Raj and an Eighties school disco, with blinking coloured lights and cheese blaring out. As I enter, a girl in a short skirt collapses out of the door onto her back. A guy wearing a pirate hat helps her to her feet, dropping his beer bottle with a paralytic laugh. I start to talk to two sun-dried women in their sixties who have been getting gently sozzled since midday. "You stay here for The Lifestyle," they say, telling me to take a seat and order some more drinks. All the expats talk about The Lifestyle, but when you ask what it is, they become vague. Ann Wark tries to summarise it: "Here, you go out every night. You'd never do that back home. You see people all the time. It's great. You have lots of free time. You have maids and staff so you don't have to do all that stuff. You party!" They have been in Dubai for 20 years, and they are happy to explain how the city works. "You've got a hierarchy, haven't you?" Ann says. "It's the Emiratis at the top, then I'd say the British and other Westerners. Then I suppose it's the Filipinos, because they've got a bit more brains than the Indians. Then at the bottom you've got the Indians and all them lot." They admit, however, they have "never" spoken to an Emirati. Never? "No. They keep themselves to themselves." Yet Dubai has disappointed them. Jules Taylor tells me: "If you have an accident here it's a nightmare. There was a British woman we knew who ran over an Indian guy, and she was locked up for four days! If you have a tiny bit of alcohol on your breath they're all over you. These Indians throw themselves in front of cars, because then their family has to be given blood money – you know, compensation. But the police just blame us. That poor woman." A 24-year-old British woman called Hannah Gamble takes a break from the dancefloor to talk to me. "I love the sun and the beach! It's great out here!" she says. Is there anything bad? "Oh yes!" she says. Ah: one of them has noticed, I think with relief. "The banks! When you want to make a transfer you have to fax them. You can't do it online." Anything else? She thinks hard. "The traffic's not very good." When I ask the British expats how they feel to not be in a democracy, their reaction is always the same. First, they look bemused. Then they look affronted. "It's the Arab way!" an Essex boy shouts at me in response, as he tries to put a pair of comedy antlers on his head while pouring some beer into the mouth of his friend, who is lying on his back on the floor, gurning. Later, in a hotel bar, I start chatting to a dyspeptic expat American who works in the cosmetics industry and is desperate to get away from these people. She says: "All the people who couldn't succeed in their own countries end up here, and suddenly they're rich and promoted way above their abilities and bragging about how great they are. I've never met so many incompetent people in such senior positions anywhere in the world." She adds: "It's absolutely racist. I had Filipino girls working for me doing the same job as a European girl, and she's paid a quarter of the wages. The people who do the real work are paid next to nothing, while these incompetent managers pay themselves £40,000 a month." With the exception of her, one theme unites every expat I speak to: their joy at having staff to do the work that would clog their lives up Back Home. Everyone, it seems, has a maid. The maids used to be predominantly Filipino, but with the recession, Filipinos have been judged to be too expensive, so a nice Ethiopian servant girl is the latest fashionable accessory. It is an open secret that once you hire a maid, you have absolute power over her. You take her passport – everyone does; you decide when to pay her, and when – if ever – she can take a break; and you decide who she talks to. She speaks no Arabic. She cannot escape. In a Burger King, a Filipino girl tells me it is "terrifying" for her to wander the malls in Dubai because Filipino maids or nannies always sneak away from the family they are with and beg her for help. "They say – 'Please, I am being held prisoner, they don't let me call home, they make me work every waking hour seven days a week.' At first I would say – my God, I will tell the consulate, where are you staying? But they never know their address, and the consulate isn't interested. I avoid them now. I keep thinking about a woman who told me she hadn't eaten any fruit in four years. They think I have power because I can walk around on my own, but I'm powerless." The only hostel for women in Dubai – a filthy private villa on the brink of being repossessed – is filled with escaped maids. Mela Matari, a 25-year-old Ethiopian woman with a drooping smile, tells me what happened to her – and thousands like her. She was promised a paradise in the sands by an agency, so she left her four year-old daughter at home and headed here to earn money for a better future. "But they paid me half what they promised. I was put with an Australian family – four children – and Madam made me work from 6am to 1am every day, with no day off. I was exhausted and pleaded for a break, but they just shouted: 'You came here to work, not sleep!' Then one day I just couldn't go on, and Madam beat me. She beat me with her fists and kicked me. My ear still hurts. They wouldn't give me my wages: they said they'd pay me at the end of the two years. What could I do? I didn't know anybody here. I was terrified." One day, after yet another beating, Mela ran out onto the streets, and asked – in broken English – how to find the Ethiopian consulate. After walking for two days, she found it, but they told her she had to get her passport back from Madam. "Well, how could I?" she asks. She has been in this hostel for six months. She has spoken to her daughter twice. "I lost my country, I lost my daughter, I lost everything," she says. As she says this, I remember a stray sentence I heard back at Double Decker. I asked a British woman called Hermione Frayling what the best thing about Dubai was. "Oh, the servant class!" she trilled. "You do nothing. They'll do anything!"

Yeah and quickly get them all in the Eurozone so its value drops and the US dollar regains status as the premier world currency! :lol: None taken of course! While I actually don't like the film Love Actually (which is surely a crime in the UK :lol:), the scene where Hugh Grant stands up to the US president strikes such a chord because... imagine if Tony Blair had made a powerful speech condemning the Iraq war, condemning torture, condemning illegal interrogation and disregarding the Geneva Convention and all the atrocities of the Bush administration. I really think it would have made a difference. Americans really respect Britons and I really think Bush got away with much of what he did because it was perceived that the older, wiser brother (so to speak) was on board with all of it.

This is a French tradition, dating back to de Gaulle. The French were bold enough to tell the US to get fukked just a few years after the Normandy invasion! It helped a lot to rebuild the French state's strength and independence, but didn't earn them many friends on this side of the Atlantic :lol: The row over the new head of NATO really worried me. Turkey initially tried to block the Danish man's appointment because of Denmark's refusal to ban the Mohammed cartoon a few years back. It showed that there is still a tremendous divide in terms of attitudes and beliefs in the areas of religion, press freedom, etc. But they eventually did let him in, so that shows maturity. To be honest, I'm not sure why the US would want Turkey in the EU (they're already in NATO which makes them a useful military ally). Maybe because the inclusion of Turkey would weaken the EU's economy?

THE TORONTO STAR Dubai: How not to build a city A cross between Vegas and Mississauga, Dubai is in danger of becoming a ruin-in-waiting DUBAI – If this really is a city and not some sheikh's mad idea of what a metropolis should be, it's a city despite itself. Its vast wealth notwithstanding, the things that make Dubai liveable are those that happened when the planners weren't looking. But life will out, even in a city built by oil-fuelled hubris. To most, the image conjured up by Dubai is one of superlatives: This is the location of the world's tallest tower (the Burj Dubai), the world's most expensive hotel (the Burj Al Arab), the world's richest horse race (the Dubai World Cup), the world's ... Well, you get the idea. And not to be outdone, there's the brand new The Tiger Woods Dubai, a golf course in the desert that requires four million gallons of water a day to stay green. This in a country built on sand. It's also the site of some of the planet's worst congestion. It's not just that everyone here drives; everyone drives badly. In March 8 of last year, for example, three people were killed and 277 injured in a highway pile-up that involved more than 200 vehicles. Still, it's hard not to be impressed by what has been accomplished here. The extent of this ruin-in-waiting is truly mind-boggling. The question is where to start. The main street, Sheikh Zayed Road, may be as good a place as any. It runs through the city and continues on to Abu Dhabi, Dubai's quieter, richer cousin, and capital of the United Arab Emirates. This, the road where the accident occurred, reaches 14 lanes in places – and that's in the heart of the city. Speed limits exist, but only to be ignored. In neither city are pedestrians welcome anywhere near the street. But in Dubai, the visitor realizes in nanoseconds that this is a city dedicated, enthusiastically, if not slavishly, to the car, the bigger the better. People just aren't meant to be pedestrians here, but drivers. According to a recent story in Abu Dhabi's new English-language newspaper, The National, locals overwhelmingly view traffic accidents as the major cause of death and injury among children. No kidding. Anyone crossing a road in these parts is fair game. To step out means taking your life into your hands. And if SUV sales have collapsed in North America, Emirates remain as committed as ever to driving the biggest set of wheels they can find. Hummers, Escalades and Cayennes abound. Dubai's traffic, like its wealth, depends on oil, a commodity that's already running out. It's Abu Dhabi, back down the road, that has the vast bulk of the U.A.E.'s oil reserves – 95 per cent. Dubai has less than five per cent, and it is not expected to last more than a decade. The economy relies on real estate, tourism and Abu Dhabi, the emirate that is reported to have invested upwards of $10 billion (U.S.) in Dubai's economy. The truth may be that this city will be obsolete in less time than it takes most communities to figure out who and what they are. But at the moment Dubai is famous for its architecture. Landmarks such as the Burj Al Arab hotel, which sits in the water off the city's waterfront, have become designated icons, reproduced endlessly in kitsch souvenirs sold everywhere. In another context, such a building, despite its glorious bad taste, would still be a monument. Here it's just another symbol of built excess, one of hundreds, if not thousands. The most interesting aspect of the hotel is the helipad that extends conspicuously from the top of the sail-like structure. Though obviously intended to convey a sense of riches, it actually addresses the underlying frustration of trying to get around by car. To be fair, Dubai is now constructing a new above-ground metro. It will be the region's first serious attempt at public transit, not including bus lines that serve the huge immigrant underclass brought here to do the dirty work. Keep in mind that fully 90 per cent of Dubai's population comes from somewhere else, typically Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines. As for those skyscrapers that crowd Sheikh Zayed Rd., each more outrageous than the next, they have the strange effect of cancelling each other out. Each becomes unexpectedly meaningless, rendering any discussion of architecture irrelevant. One is reminded that as much as anything architecture derives much of its significance from its context. There's no better example than the Burj Dubai, which, but for the fact it's the tallest building in the world, couldn't be less interesting. What's so curious is that it's enough simply to be the tallest; there's no pressure to aspire for excellence. For all the difference it would have made, it could have been designed by engineers. As a result of this frantic race to outdo the guy next door, architecture has been turned into a sideshow attraction. Starchitecture is the least of this city's problems. Dubai resembles nothing so much as a cross between Mississauga and Las Vegas, but on a massive scale; it's not that there's no there there, but that there are so many. Despite everything, Dubai is a thriving city of 1.4 million, the overwhelming majority being expatriates. To wander the streets of the quarters where these guest workers live and work – Bastakiya for example – is to encounter something that approximates what urban Canadians would recognize as neighbourhoods. They don't resemble anything North American, but there's life at street level in shops, restaurants and so on. Walking may not be any easier in these parts, but an urban sensibility prevails. It couldn't be further from the malls, freeways and sprawl of suburbia as we know it, or from "downtown" Dubai for that matter. Where traditional cities have evolved over centuries, sometimes millennia, Dubai was built in decades. Not much was happening here before the 1960s, a mere blink ago in the life of a Paris, London or Rome. By U.A.E. standards, even Toronto seems positively ancient. Though there's something undeniably exciting, even exhilarating, about the idea of Instant City, a place unencumbered by the past and free to embrace the future, the reality says otherwise. Indeed, this isn't so much a city of the future as a city in denial of the future. The old Jane Jacobs' notion of the city as organized complexity – the sense that order can be found underneath the apparent chaos – becomes almost precious in this context. On the other hand, informal networks of various sorts have been created, self-organized, mostly by foreigners. A small but vivid example is a grassy verge that visiting workers have adopted as an informal meeting place. The expatriates can be seen sitting in groups, large and small, once the heat of the day has subsided. Mostly, however, tradition seems more an intrusion. The most obvious instance, perhaps, is the Muslim call to prayers, which cuts through the din five times daily, literally a voice from the past. Perhaps even that will fall silent once this city has become the "colossal wreck" of which Percy Bysshe Shelley spoke in his famous sonnet Ozymandias. Only the desert will remain, and the sand that covers every surface. Source: http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/613885

I like that last graph (with Al Gore) because it shows how the world successfully lowered CO2 emissions in the 1970s during the oil shocks. It is possible to reverse the trend!

I'm sorry but there are so many problems with this single post, I don't know where to begin. Cows emit CO2 by breathing, yes, but what you probably meant was that the methane produced from cows and their manure is of concern because methane remains in the atmosphere longer than CO2 (trapping heat and warming the temperature of the earth). However, it is false that methane emissions from cows is a worse problem than CO2 emissions from cars and other fossil fuel burning. In 2001 for the Kyoto Protocol, the UN calculated fossil fuel burning lead to an emission of 6.3 pg petagrams of carbon per year in the 1990s. Source: http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipc...tar/wg1/097.htm The same source found all methane emissions (natural and unnatural) to be about 0.6 pg of methane per year in the 90s. Animals ("ruminants") account for only 15%-19% of total methane emissions (most methane emission comes from plants, of course, especially rice harvesting). Source: http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipc...tar/wg1/134.htm As for "people produce more CO2 than cars," that is of course when taken in the aggregate. It may be true that total human breath of CO2 exceeds total vehicular emission of CO2. But a human doesn't produce as much CO2 as a single vehicle with the engine running. And anyway, you can turn a car off, you can't tell someone to stop breathing. Further a vegan would hardly be wrong or a "hypocrite" to tell people to prevent climate change by giving up meat because there wouldn't be half as many cows in the world (and there weren't 100 years ago) if it weren't for live-stocks and the millions of people who eat beef every year (I am one of them... mmmm cheeseburgers :) ) Methane emission has actually declined in the US in the past decade because it is possible to contain and control. So why say "Cows cause climate change, so it doesn't exist." How about, "Cows cause climate change, so let's try to reduce methane emission and work to reduce CO2 emission through our own actions." There's room for improvement in both areas. Source: http://www.epa.gov/methane/sources.html None of the doubters here have cited any sources, it's all hearsay or sound bites from tabloids or something. The world scientific community is united and the field has said almost unanimously that climate change is happening, humans are playing a huge role in its exacerbation, and we must act to stop it. Try walking into the biology department of a respected university and making your claims - I guarantee you will be laughed out of the building.

Sort of funny because the last we all heard of Christina Aguilera, she was in trouble for blatantly ripping off GaGa last fall, claiming to have no idea who "it" was (Lady GaGa), and then promptly disappearing after a lackluster comeback single essentially flopped.

I think I Kissed a Girl a couple months after Bleeding Love may have matched Leona's chart success, not sure. But you're right that singles as huge as Poker Face only come around often... EDIT: Wow Biblioteque beat me to it... :)

Listened to this song for the first today... At the end I sort of felt violated... but I could not stop smiling! It's either utter $h!t or some kind of genius, not sure, I'm still recovering... I'm quite sure I like it, whatever it is.

If I lived in London, I'd be there. I wonder if it will get as crazy as Battle of Seattle 1999...

Thank you, thank you... I think about the only Catholics left in the world with any credibility or understanding of the church are the liberation theologians... specifically the nuns and priests in Latin America who actually stand up for justice, peace and basic human needs (and are all too often tortured and killed for it).

:lol: Like the people who stole the $10,000 statue from scammer Bernie Madoff's house and then returned it a week later with a note "lesson: return stolen property to its rightful owners!"

Do I need to add more to this scathing commentary? Nah, but I will. Benedict is an absolute lunatic, a sociopath who reminds me of George W Bush in his ability to appear paradoxically sinister and maliciously sophisticated, yet utterly brainless. How can anyone say something so stupid and so evil at the same time?! I'm an atheist but I was raised Catholic and I learned a thing or two about Catholicism. Assuming Christ did exist, there's one thing that is undeniable about him: he was as liberal, hippy, leftist, scuzzy, and anti-establishment as any single human who may have ever lived. He ditched all his belongings, devoted his life to the poor and the sick and the outcast and the sinners, he protested not just the Romans but, to the chagrin of many, the JEWS. He said it is harder for a rich man to go to heaven than it is for a CAMEL TO GO THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE. Now we have Benedict, who notoriously fancies $500 Italian shoes and waltzed around in fukking golden robes while people kiss his goddamned hand and treat him like a godamn king (remember Christ was born in a barn and didn't wear shoes at all). Christ never mentioned a THING about abortion, a THING about homosexuality, a THING about contraception, for f***s sake, he came to earth specifically and explicitly TO TELL THE JEWS THE TORAH WAS f***ING WRONG, so whenever someone calls back to Leviticus or some god forsaken old Testament text, remember that Christ said it was all BULL$h!t, the commandments are all BULL$h!t, what matters is to love each other like you would want to be loved yourself. SO simple and yet it all seems to have been forgotten. When you look at Benedict's face, do you see love? Didn't think so. The Catholic church as it is now is absolutely the ANTITHESIS of what Christ intended, he'd be SHOCKED and APPALLED and ASHAMED to see such nonesense coming from Benedict, the gold and the waltzing around and the beautiful clothes and the nonsense horse$h!t rhetoric about sex... all this to praise a poor, lowly CARPENTER??? It's ASTONISHING and INFURIATING, what the Catholic church has become and how much damage it has caused, death and misery around the world. Would Christ have said better to die of AIDS than use a condom? Give me a fukking break.

But Google street view and CCTV are completely different, CCTV intentionally surveys the actions of people and can only be viewed by so-called "authorities." Google street view merely makes public streets (which anyone can see anyway) easier to view via the net. The intention of Google has always been to make all public information available to all and easy to access. Now I agree that people need to be blurred, as far as I can tell Google is cooperating and blurring those who request it. It's sort of amusing that the UK, the country with by far the most CCTVs in the world, is suddenly up in arms about Google street view. Where was the outrage when they installed 1 CCTV for every 10 Britons?

How about conditional cash transfers? They can only receive a weekly check if they complete certain tasks, e.g. get a job, attend a gym, etc. It works pretty well in the developing world. Although people in poor countries lack something called ENTITLEMENT.