Believe it or not India and Bangladesh have been fighting over a lousy piece of rock (3 by 3,5 km in size) situated in the Bay of Bengal for nearly 30 years. There were no people living on this tiny island, no structures of any kind, no valuable natural resources, just a remote piece of rock in the ocean, called New Moore Island.
Finally God got fed up with the utterly pointless bickering and sunk this pitiful little island into the ocean.
I think oceanographer Sugata Hazra summed it all up pretty nice:
"What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming".
What has to be Sweden's least popular politician at the moment, the notoriously incompetent, spiteful and integrity-hating minister of (in)justice Beatrice Ask (M), has gone ahead and done it again. The video below speaks for itself, as this sorry excuse of a politician goes on record suggesting that the families and neighbors of suspected sex buyers should be informed what they might have been up to:
Mind you this is a suggestion to penalize (no pun intended) potentially innocent persons in the most barbaric, medieval way for a petty crime that has no victim. We're not talking about trafficking, rape or child abuse, those crimes are taken care of by other and much harsher laws. We're simply talking about consenting adults exchanging favors for money that Swedish politicians only recently decided were morally unacceptable, and thus should be criminalized.
Today, after days of increasing criticism, Ask herself comments on her ridiculous suggestion:
- Ja naturligtvis och javisst gör jag en pudel. Det var klumpigt uttryckt eftersom det kan och har missuppfattats.
Say what? She's sorry her suggestion was misinterpreted??? Does she think the Swedish public are that stupid? The message was loud and clear Ask, without room for any kind of misinterpretations: We should put the presumption of innocent until proven guilty to the side and permanently stigmatize anyone suspected of buying sex from a consenting adult.
That's the Swedish (not the Iranian or Chinese, in case you were wondering) Minister of Justice, ladies and gentlemen.
Svd.se has an article today on how Spotify makes money and how this money is distributed (or should I say heavily filtered?) to the artists. And we all know how the artist's cut looks these days.
My proposal is a "Kravmärkt" version of Spotify. An ethical, ecological if you will, version that distributes the money directly to the artists without any costly and highlyunethical intermediaries. Not only would I not hesitate to use such a service (as opposed to my reluctance to use Spotify today), but I would gladly pay 99 SEK per month for the premium version knowing that my money went to the artists I'm listening to. Something like this:
The Swedish Minister of Injustice, the notorious Beatrice Ask (M), continues her crusade to make Sweden a less safe place to be. Now she wants the police to be able to do randomdrug tests on kids without the consent of their legal guardian.
She doesn't see any risk of the police taking this opportunity to harass innocent youngsters, because clearly the police have better things to do:
Lagrådet har också varnat för att urinprov under tvång kan användas av polisen som en slags bestraffning. Den kritiken avvisar Ask och menar att polisen har viktigare saker för sig än att ägna sig åt att trakassera unga.
Riiiiiight... Perhaps you should get your head out of your ass and start reading a newspaper every now and then, Ask. And yes, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, which I probably shouldn't, you disgusting piece of totalitarian garbage.
Couldn't have said it better myself. There is no way to uphold copyright laws on a non-commercial scale without introducing fascism. Which is exactly what is being introduced in Europe and the US at an increasing speed these days.
This sounds too ridiculous to be true, but nothing surprises me anymore when it comes to the "intellectual property" dinosaurs of the world:
According to the International Intellectual Property Mafia Alliance, an umbrella group for the infamous criminals over at MPAA and RIAA, the use of, hell even encouragement to start using, open source software is equal to software piracy, or even anti-capitalism or possibly terrorism.
A joke you say? Unfortunately not. It's the copyright mafia doing what they do best.
I can't stress this enough: Don't feed the monsters. Stop the cashflow.
The infamous corruptcop Jim Keyzer, bought and later employed by the entertainment mafia is back in business, this time looking for employees to battle computer crimes. You know, dangerous stuff like 14 year old kids sharing their music with other 14 year old kids. How this buffoon can still be employed by the police is beyond me, and it just contributes to the extremely badimage this institution is very rightfully struggling with at the moment.
Anyway, Keyzer is looking for people who can identify with the "police values", presumably taking bribes from large corporations. So if you feel like taking bribes and hunting down kids, go for it.
As if deleting blogs due to a claim of copyright infringement and censorship in China isn't enough, Google are now even censoring critics of the US government.
Seriously, Google, that "don't be evil" motto just seems out of date. Why don't you just change it to something more believable, like "don't be free" or "be censored"?
Apparently Moderaterna, the Moderate party in Sweden, are prepared to throw their single selling point down the drain, with minister of finance Anders Borg being prepared to raise taxes:
"Det finns starka skäl att överväga skattehöjningar", säger finansministern.
And my personal favorite:
Höjda skatter är avgörande för att behålla en stabil ekonomi i framtiden, framhöll Borg. Och att ett normalt skattetryck för Sverige bör ligga på 35-45 procent av BNP.
In other words, being the most heavily taxed country in the world is the recipe for a stable financial growth. That's certainly new coming from Moderaterna.
Areas that will be affected if Moderaterna get their way is, among others, a "green" tax on CO2 emission (like we don't have enough of these already), even higher taxes on tobacco and alcohol, and certainly no further tax relief on the unfair housing tax (better known as the "Stockholm tax"). The common denominator for all these taxes are that they are not in any way related to your actual income or wealth, meaning they strike people with lesser money much harder than those with more money. Very nice, Borg, that's gonna win you the Östermalm and Djursholm votes, at least.
So my question is quite simply, how exactly do Moderaterna expect to win the elections when they're throwing away the only political issue that separates them from the red and green coalition: A healthy and manageable tax level for people as well as businesses? The way things are looking today they might as well join this red and green coalition, making it a rainbow coalition and front it with the following slogan:
The rainbow coalition: More surveillance and higher taxer - for a safer and healthier society.
