The Guardian has a really interesting article on organ donation which interviews everyone involved in the donor trail, from the mother who chose to donate her son’s organs, to the recipient, the transplant surgeon and on up to the top transplant person in the Department of Health.

It’s an enlightening read, revealing all sides of the debate on increasing the availability of organs for transplant, which is currently going on in the UK. The government is in favour of an opt-out system where you are assumed by default to be an organ donor unless you specifically choose not to be, though that has the potential to be extremely hard on grieving family members.

A preferable system, which gets a mention in the article, is the one employed here in Australia. When you apply for, or renew, a driving licence, you are given the option of ticking a box assenting to the donation of your organs. You’re also given the option of choosing to only donate certain organs.

Ticking this box results in your licence stating that you are an organ donor, and is legally binding in the event of your death, overriding the wishes of your family. It seems a far more sensible solution as the wishes of the deceased are upheld, which is infinitely preferable than having a bureaucratic decision foist upon a grieving family.

I ticked the box. Might as well, I certainly won’t be needing my organs after death.

Australia has switched its position and voted against Israel on two resolutions which it had previously supported. Howard spent his term voting in lockstep with the US, but some common sense has now prevailed and we are starting to take a more principled stand.

In the weekend vote in New York, Australia supported a resolution calling on Israel to stop establishing settlements in the Palestinian territories and a resolution calling for the Geneva Conventions to apply in the Palestinian territories.

The resolutions on the Middle East peace process are held annually and the Howard government had backed both from 1996 to 2002 but in 2003 began to vote against or abstain. It was a move that aligned Australia with only the US, Israel, the US Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau and Micronesia and put the country at odds with Britain, Canada, New Zealand and France.

Australian officials told the UN the Government had changed its position because it supported a two-state resolution of the conflict to deliver a secure Israel living beside a viable Palestinian state and that Australia believed both sides should abide by their obligations under the Road Map for Peace.

The Guardian has a piece on Seymour Hersh in which he intimates that there’s a whole can of worms waiting to be exposed once Bush leaves office…

A Democrat who truly despises the Bush regime, he is reluctant to make predictions about exactly what is going to happen in the forthcoming election on the grounds that he might ‘jinx it’. The unknown quantity of voter racism apart, however, he is hopeful that Obama will pull it off, and if he does, for Hersh this will be a starting gun. ‘You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next president’s inauguration],’ he says, with relish. ‘[They say:] “You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.” So that is what I’ll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.’ He plans to write a book about the neocons and, though it won’t change anything - ‘They’ve got away with it, categorically; anyone who talks about prosecuting Bush and Cheney [for war crimes] is kidding themselves’ - it will reveal how the White House ‘set out to sabotage the system… It wasn’t that they found ways to manipulate Congressional oversight; they had conversations about ending the right of Congress to intervene.’

Should be interesting.

Ehud Olmert, Israel’s ousted Prime Minister, has given an interview to an Israeli newspaper in which he admits that, in order for there to be a lasting peace with Palestinians, Israel will have to withdraw from almost all the Occupied Territories, and will have to concede to a split of Jerusalem.

We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories,” Olmert said. “We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace.”

Contrast this with a report from a group of leading NGOs claiming that no progress is being made despite the involvement of the US, the EU, the UN and Russia.

The report says that despite the Quartet saying in June that such progress was vital to building confidence in the negotiating process, it has failed to press home its own calls on Israel for a freeze on settlement building, an improvement in the movement of Palestinian people and goods, and a revival of the collapsed economy in Gaza.

On settlements it says there has been a “marked failure to hold the Israeli authorities to their obligation under the [internationally agreed] road map and international law”. It urges the Quartet to go “beyond rhetoric” and take “concrete steps” in the face of a “marked acceleration” in settlement building since Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were kick-started by the Annapolis summit last year.

So Olmert recognises that Israel will have to give back occupied territory, but while in power he accelerated the building of illegal settlements on the same land.

Good Math, Bad Math has a post entitled Economic Disasters and Stupid Evil People which provides a nice summary of how the US financial system got to be in such a mess.

What we’ve been seeing over the last couple of weeks is the same basic scam as the mortgage mess, but on an even larger scale. Lending money is a profitable business. Bundling loans into investment vehicles is an incredibly profitable business for producing what appear to be high-yield, low-risk investments.

Naturally, when there’s a big opportunity to make lots of money, there’s a ton of people looking to get in on it. Of course, just like with the mortgages, there’s a limit. Realistically, there’s only a certain amount of money that can be loaned at any time to people who can pay it back. But there was so much money to be made that as the high-quality loans ran out, they started looking for other things that they could wrap up as investments. Of course, since people who buy these kinds of investments are typically looking for something really safe, that means that they can’t just give money out any-which-way; they need to have some plausible way of saying “This is really safe”.

And here’s where the stupidity really started kicking in.

How do you take a bunch of loans that might not be repaid, and turn them into something that’s safe? Well, what do you do if you had a lot of money tied up in a piece of property that you could lose in an accident? Like, say, a car or a house? You’d buy insurance!

That’s basically what the investment firms did. They gave out shit loans that any sane person should have known couldn’t be repaid, and then they bough insurance on them to guarantee that at least the principal would be safe.

So who did they buy insurance from? Mostly each other.

The whole article is worth a read, as are his earlier pieces on the Subprime Crisis: Part 1 & Part 2

Looks to me like the Republicans are acknowledging that Sarah Palin isn’t fit for the job. The Independent covers their attempts to change the format of the VP debate to minimise the chance of her being made to look foolish by Joe Biden.

Under pressure from Republicans, the organisers of the debates have tweaked the format of the vice-presidential debate between Joe Biden and Republican Sarah Palin set for St Louis on 2 October to limit significantly the time available for free-flow debate and direct challenges to one another. Because of Ms Palin’s star power, that debate may be at least as big an audience draw as the presidential clashes.

Aides to Mr McCain had insisted on the more structured format because of concern that Mrs Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, might be put on the back foot too easily by the more seasoned Senator Biden. Advisors to Mr Biden gave no indication that they objected to the change, however, possibly a reflection of concern on their side about their candidate’s famous capacity for loquaciousness and gaffes.

You’d think that the last thing anyone would want would be a VP who’s unable to argue her position and restricted to pre-canned answers!

The Guardian has an article covering Sarah Palin’s first TV interview last night in which she put forth her foreign policy credentials.

A hawkish and occasionally combative Sarah Palin warned last night she might commit US troops to a war against Russia in defence of Georgia and Ukraine in her first interview since John McCain chose her as his running mate.

Palin, who admitted last night she made her first trip outside North America last year…

Palin’s interview was carefully stage-managed to counter criticism that she lacks foreign policy experience…

In sometimes tense exchanges, Palin demonstrated a more bellicose posture towards Russia than the Bush administration during the conflict with Georgia. She also supported military action against Islamist extremists in Pakistan even without the support of the Islamabad government.

So she might commit troops to a war against Russia, which still has probably more nukes than the US, and she also advocates conducting military operations on Pakistani soil without the support of the Pakistani government? That’s all we need. Another fucking idiot in the White House who thinks that bombing the shit out of things is the answer to everything.

BTW, I’d hate to see what she’d come out with on a non-stage-managed interview!

George W. Bush, as promised, “has vetoed a bill”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/10/usa.humanrights which would have outlawed the CIA’s use of waterboarding to torture suspects.

Bush said that any attempt to restrict CIA interrogators would weaken them in the fight against al-Qaida. He claimed the CIA had used its own secret methods to foil several attacks, including plans to attack Heathrow, to fly a plane into the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles and to hit the US consulate in Karachi.

In the UK meanwhile, there are growing demands for an independent inquiry into the use of UK territory by the CIA’s rendition flights after it emerged last week that flights had landed at Diego Garcia.

Last month, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, apologised to MPs, admitting that contrary to "earlier explicit assurances" two flights had landed at Diego Garcia, the British Indian Ocean territory where the US has a large airbase. He said the flights had refuelled there, and each had had a single detainee on board who did not leave the aircraft. British and US officials have refused to give details about the two detainees other than that one was in Guantánamo Bay and the other had been released. Miliband said he had asked his officials for a list of all flights on which rendition had been alleged.

Well it looks like the global economy is finally going in to meltdown. It’s been a long time coming, but yesterday seems to be the final realisation that the house of cards is on shaky foundations. The Aussie sharemarket dropped 7% yesterday, along with significant drops around the world, and it’s now down 24% since its high of November.

I moved my superannuation out of shares and into diversified fixed-interest back in September, only to watch the share market go up by 10%, leaving me worrying that I’d made the wrong decision. Now however, with the market down 17% from when I got out of it, things are looking a bit more rosy. For once I’ve made a financial decision which hasn’t cost me money!

The Financial Times has an article on why the American recession will be hard to shift, explaining that reserve banks’ dropping of interest rates isn’t an instant fix to credit worries.

Interest rate cuts work their way through to the real economy by a number of transmission channels. During the 2001 recession in the US, the most important was housing credit. The rate cuts came at a time when the housing market was already booming. They turned the boom into a super-boom. Inflationary expectations were low. People expected interest rates to remain low. It was a great moment to take on extra debt, and this was precisely what Americans did.

The current US downturn could not be more different. House prices are falling, and have further to fall before reaching a more sustainable level (in terms of the price-to-rent ratios as well as several other measures). Core inflation has been above the Federal Reserve’s comfort zone for some years now. There is no way that either the Fed, the Bank of England or the European Central Bank could, at this stage, create another housing boom even if they wanted to. Housing downturns have a strong dynamism, which is not easy to break. This is not a great time to take on debts, but to pay them off.

What about the other channels?

The corporate credit channel works more slowly. A company faced with an acute downturn in demand for its products is not going to start investing immediately when interest rates fall. At the very least, it would only do so if it expects variable interest rates to remain low for some time.

For that to happen, inflationary pressures have to be well contained, which they clearly are not.

Captured while fighting for the Taliban in 2001, and held illegally in Guantanamo Bay ever since with the complicity of the Australian Government, David Hicks was finally freed from prison today

“Right now I am looking forward to some quiet time with my wonderful Dad, my family and friends,’’ Hicks said.

“I ask that you will respect my privacy as I will need time to readjust to society and obtain medical care for the consequences of five and a half years at Guantanamo Bay.

“I have been told that my readjustment will be a slow process and should involve a gentle transition away from the media spotlight.’’

It is widely believed that Hicks was tortured while at Guantanamo, and finally pleaded guilty to charges of ‘providing material support for terrorism’ in order to get out of the place, but since he’s under a gag order until the end of March, he won’t be speaking opening about his detention and trial until then at the earliest.
Hicks is under a gag order until the end of March,

I was surprised just how French Montreal actually is. Sure, I knew everyone speaks French, and are proud of their French heritage, but I still wasn’t prepared to feel as though I had landed in France itself. In comparison to Vancouver, it’s a much older city (about 300 years older), so it has a lot of classical European architecture which is completely missing in Vancouver, and almost all other North American cities. The ethnic mix is completely different too, as there are a lot more North Africans and Muslims than in Vancouver, which I suppose makes sense when you consider the location of France’s ex-colonies. I’d imagine that anyone arriving to start a new life in Canada from the stretch of coastline between Lebanon and Cote d’Ivoire would naturally gravitate towards Québec from a language perspective at least. Add French street names such as Rue Saint-Denis, and suburbs like Verdun… though there are some concessions to Canada’s bi-lingual nature, like Rue University instead of Rue Université

Despite my schoolboy French laying dormant for years, I was able to make myself understood enough to order food and metro tickets without encountering any blank looks! We’d been told that people wouldn’t speak English to us, either because of inability, or a simple refusal, but of course it never happened. Everyone we met was friendly and helpful, and quite happy to talk English, though I still made the effort to start conversations in French. I might even sign up with the Alliance Francaise once I get back to Sydney.

Another thing which stood out is how many churches there were. There seemed to be one every few blocks; the Cathédral Marie-Reine-du-Monde is on one side of Place Canada, with St. George’s Anglican on the other, with construction of both starting in 1870. I also went to Notre Dame Cathedral and took a few photos. An usher had to come over and tell me to take my hat off. I’d completely forgotten, so the years of indoctrination as a kid are clearly wearing off. Mum won’t be too happy though ;-)

Photos: [on foot] – [by bike]

This is an awesome summary of all that’s wrong with the world today: Seven Minutes of Truth.

Via Effect Measure

In the U.S., there are regular arguments about whether or not there should be a mandatory waiting period between purchasing and receiving a gun. Some states have a waiting period, some don’t. In contrast, Amsterdam’s mayor is proposing a three-day wait before you can buy magic mushrooms!

Mayor Job Cohen wants to require the wait period to allow mushroom buyers to fully understand exactly what it is they are purchasing, ANP news agency reported today.

The proposal seeks to prevent impulse purchases and follows several incidents that have occurred in the city involving tourists who have eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms.

A couple of good articles this week have commented on the ramifications of Joe & Josephine Public’s lack of intellectual curiosity.

First up is David Colqhoun, whose article Science in an Age of Endarkenment was picked up by the Guardian Science site. He comments…

The enlightenment was a beautiful thing. People cast aside dogma and authority. They started to think for themselves. Natural science flourished. Understanding of the real world increased. The hegemony of religion slowly declined. Real universities were created and eventually democracy took hold. The modern world was born. Until recently we were making good progress. So what went wrong?

The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable. This matters when people delude themselves into believing that we could be endangered at 45 minute’s notice by non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

It matters when reputable accountants delude themselves into thinking that Enron-style accounting is acceptable.

It matters when people are deluded into thinking that they will be rewarded in paradise for killing themselves and others.

It matters when bishops attribute floods to a deity whose evident vengefulness and malevolence leave one reeling. And it matters when science teachers start to believe that the earth was created 6000 years ago.

He then goes on to bemoan the increasing popularity of quack medicine such as homeopathy and crystals despite any hard evidence for their efficacy.

In a similar vein, Charles P. Pierce’s article in Esquire, entitled Greetings From Idiot America, was originally written back in 2005, but has even more relevance today. He tours through the nonsense surrounding creationism, and the onset of the Iraq War, while lambasting modern society for valuing gut instinct over fact and showing a willingness to believe what they’re told without applying any critical thought to the matter.

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents — for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

Richard Dawkins also has a new documentary entitled Enemies of Reason which is now showing on Channel 4 in the UK. I’ve downloaded the torrent of the first episode to watch later tonight. Should be interesting. Beats the reality shite hands-down!

The Register has a great, sarcastic article on the recent ‘terrorist’ attacks in the UK. The amount of media space given to this was ridiculous. Even here in Vancouver, CNN covered the Glasgow side of things almost non-stop for over an hour before the room was clear and I could go out and turn it off.

It might be a test of ministerial mettle if thousands of British Muslims were burning cars every night, as has happened in France. But what we seem to have here is some foreigners burning just one car and failing to burn two more owing to almost unbelievable incompetence.

The mindset of a man who’s willing to set himself on fire to make a point – as one of the Glasgow terror-clowns seems to have done – but not to spend any effort at all on researching methods is a difficult one to understand. Even if these jokers were illiterate or had no internet access (seems unlikely, one of the suspects is apparently a doctor) they could have at least done a test. In my part of town, fun-loving teenagers burn out a car or two down by the canal every week or so: nobody would notice another one with some nails in it.

Given the current idiot in charge, and the wanton refusal to engage in any form of international diplomacy that doesn’t serve an extremist right-wing agenda, it’s easy to forget about the many good points of American life. Today’s Observer has an opinion piece outlining the less visible side (at present) of American life:

God-bothering is, of course, a pain. But at least it is kept out of state schools so no parental piety – real or otherwise – may snaffle a choicer education from a more deserving child. And speaking of children: we only hear of the one who runs amok in West Virginia; from the other 58 million, we have lessons to learn. Even in deprived, no-go-after-dark downtown, teenage boys stand to look you in the eye, call you ma’am and have no familiarity with the language of the monosyllabic grunt – if only because their mamas, white and black, will have it no other way, not because the government is sponsoring ‘initiatives’ on ‘respect’

HBO recently aired a documentary entitled Hacking Democracy which looks at the secrecy surrounding electronic voting machines in use within the US, particularly those manufactured by Diebold; how do the machines work, how are votes counted, how are they audited and why is the whole process so secret?

It follows a group of concerned citizens as they try to break through the veils of secrecy and figure out exactly what is going on with these machines, and uncovers some ugly incidents: Gore being counted a total of -16,000 votes (yes, minus votes) in 2000, differences between official ‘on-the-night’ audit trails from Ohio 2004 and those published later, and those official trails ending up in the garbage; the official record of the public’s vote being deliberately thrown out?? It closes with a demonstration of how easy it is to fix an election by pre-loading votes onto the memory card before the election starts. The voting machine doesn’t pick up any tampering and duly certifies a rigged election.

Although it’s 1h20m long, this doco is well worth a look as a testament to what basically the death of democracy in the very nation which proclaims itself the greatest democracy on the planet.

See it on Google Video

Here we go again. The Miami Herald and KFDM-TV are reporting ‘glitches’ in electronic voting machines. Funnily enough, those glitches all seem to be in favour of Republicans!

Early voting runs through Friday, November 3rd. KFDM continues to get complaints from Jefferson County voters who say the electronic voting machines are not registering their votes correctly.

Friday night, KFDM reported about people who had cast straight Democratic ticket ballots, but the touch-screen machines indicated they had voted a straight Republican ticket.

Ars Technica has a round-up of the problems surrounding voting machines, including step-by-step instructions for casting multiple votes on a particular brand of machine, without hacking it!!

What a farce!

Run for the hills, the terrorists are trying to attack our freedom… well not quite, it’s not terrorists, it’s just George W. Bush. He has signed a bill which will allow him to declare martial law and deploy US troops on US soil to supress public disorder.

President Bush seized this unprecedented power on the very same day that he signed the equally odious Military Commissions Act of 2006. In a sense, the two laws complement one another. One allows for torture and detention abroad, while the other seeks to enforce acquiescence at home, preparing to order the military onto the streets of America. Remember, the term for putting an area under military law enforcement control is precise; the term is “martial law.”

I bet Osama’s laughing his ass off. We seem to be doing all his work for him.

Wil Shipley has an excellent post up on the emergency in the US, entitled Thank God For George W. Bush:

In eighteen days we have a chance to elect a majority in both the house and senate who will oppose Bush for the next two years, and stop this insanity. I am urging you to do what you can. Even just showing up and watching for voter fraud would help. Take a laptop to your polling place and blog what you see. We’ve had the last two national elections stolen from us, and if we let it happen again we are to blame.

This is the real national emergency. Compare the number of Americans who have died for no reason in Iraq (2,279), by Bush’s order, to the number who died in the 9/11 attacks (2,973). What are we doing? How is this worth it? Why are our priorities so far out of whack?

Why are we giving up our civil liberties, spending trillions on wars, and sacrificing our kids’ lives at Bush’s behest? Every year more Americans die of cancer (190x), AIDS (4x), heart disease (309x), and car accidents (20x) than died in 9/11. What are we so afraid of? Why are we willing to spend trillions to depose a puffed-up dictator on the other side of the world but not a couple million to educate our kids in music and art?

We have let the fear of violence against us turn us into animals. We’re so frightened by those images of jets crashing into skyscrapers that we’ve forgotten that being the victim of a terrorist attack is, in fact, among the least likely of the bad things that can happen to us. We have to stop.

It’s worth reading the whole post.