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Tuesday, July 8, 2008 |
This is the holiday season, time for a few happy items.
In Tokyo there's a Cat Café Calico, きゃりこ、where you can cuddle cats for ¥800, or less than $8, per hour. Pet ownership is very restricted by landlords in Tokyo, so this is a splendid business opportunity. You can cuddle a cat while having a cup of coffee or cocoa.
The cats have names like Choco, Mimi, Rara, Maruko, Ichigo, etc. and there is even a dog, Moka.
A few video clips.
Click on 'text sample' on this link for some more information.
3:53:28 PM 
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Independent: "Sometimes you hear a stray sentence on the news that makes you realise you have been lied to. Deliberately lied to; systematically lied to; lied to for a purpose. If you listened closely over the past few days, you could have heard one such sentence passing in the night-time of news.
As Ingrid Betancourt emerged after six-and-a-half years - sunken and shrivelled but radiant with courage - one of the first people she thanked was Hugo Chavez. What? If you follow the news coverage, you have been told that the Venezuelan President supports the Farc thugs who have been holding her hostage. He paid them $300m to keep killing and to buy uranium for a dirty bomb, in a rare break from dismantling democracy at home and dealing drugs. So how can this moment of dissonance be explained?
Yes: you have been lied to - about one of the most exciting and original experiments in economic redistribution and direct democracy anywhere on earth. And the reason is crude: crude oil. The ability of democracy and freedom to spread to poor countries may depend on whether we can unscramble these propaganda fictions.
Venezuela sits on one of the biggest pools of oil left anywhere. If you find yourself in this position, the rich governments of the world - the US and EU - ask one thing of you: pump the petrol and the profits our way, using our corporations. If you do that, we will whisk you up the Mall in a golden carriage, no matter what. The 'King' of Saudi Arabia oversees a torturing tyranny where half the population - women - are placed under house arrest, and jihadis are pumped out by the dozen to attack us. It doesn't matter. He gives us the oil, so we hold his hand and whisper sweet crude-nothings in his ear.
It has always been the same with Venezuela - until now. Back in 1908, the US government set up its ideal Venezuelan regime: a dictator who handed the oil over fast and so freely that he didn't even bother to keep receipts, never mind ask for a cut. But in 1998 the Venezuelan people finally said 'enough'. They elected Hugo Chavez. The President followed their democratic demands: he increased the share of oil profits taken by the state from a pitiful one per cent to 33 per cent. He used the money to build hospitals and schools and subsidised supermarkets in the tin-and-mud shanty towns where he grew up, and where most of his countrymen still live.
Western governments cannot simply say: 'We want the oil, our corporations need the profits, so let's smash the elected leaders standing in our way.' They know ordinary Americans and Europeans would gag.
So they had to invent lies. They come in waves, each one swelling as the last crashes into incredulity. First they announced Chavez was a dictator. This ignored that he came to power in a totally free and open election, the Venezuelan press remains uncensored and in total opposition to him, and he has just accepted losing a referendum to extend his term and will stand down in 2013."
Britain is one of the huge stakeholders in oil. And the British government has an interest in Russian oil. So here the same principle holds: if you want oil and influence in a foreign country you accuse it of all kinds of fabrications and you lie till kingdom come. The Litvinenko case is a tool of MI6 to destabilize the Russian government. Litvinenko probably was an MI6 agent involved in nuclear trafficking and this case has a relation to the Chechnya rebellion. The interest of the British establishment in all this is clear.
BBC: "The murder of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko was carried out with the backing of the Russian state, Whitehall sources have told the BBC."
Notice the careful wording and quotation marks used by the BBC.
The involvement of MI6 in this case of nuclear trafficking is very probable.
Britain is involved in more dirty games. Why after all does Britain have an active SAS and a few large mercenary companies, like Aegis Defence Services and Erinys (not incidentally the company Litvinenko visited in London!), who are escaping democratic control?
GlobalResearch: "In September of 2005, the southern Iraqi oil city of Basra, under British occupation since the 2003 invasion, was the scene of an extraordinarily controversial incident, which has since exposed the anatomy of the Anglo-American 'dirty war' in Iraq, and in fact, the relevance to the wider 'War on Terror'.
On September 19, 2005, two white men, dressed as Arabs, obviously suspicious to the British-trained Iraqi police, were pulled over in their car as they approached the city center of Basra. As the Independent reported, 'the two men had been driving in an unmarked car when they arrived at a checkpoint in the city'. What followed was a confrontation between the two men and the Iraqi police, with shots fired and an Iraqi police officer killed and another wounded. The men were then detained by the Iraqi police and taken to the central jail. As it turned out, the two men were members of the British elite SAS Special Forces.
The British, for nearly a century maintaining a destabilizing presence in the region, notably in Basra, have not given up their Empire's long-standing tradition of 'Divide and Conquer'. From the two SAS terrorist, to their dramatic 'rescue', the destruction of the Serious Crimes Unit and eventually, the liquidation of the Basra Intelligence Ministry, the British have maintained a position of being above the law and beyond moral restraint."
11:05:36 AM
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After several decades of neo-liberalism, or global neocon economy, what are the results? Privatization and deregulation were supposed to lower prices and increase welfare all over. Instead prices for food and commodities have gone up (if it weren't for China we'd pay even more); energy prices have skyrocketed; transport has become more expensive and unreliable; postal services are in shambles; hospitals are having difficulties to cope or are closed; housing prices skyrocketed, then when a tiny slump was noticed they called it a 'crisis' - it is a crisis, for the mortgage takers and some banks; housing projects are of bad quality; inflation is going up; banks are in trouble; the dollar has gone down. In the meantime the companies involved in health care are making huge profits, building companies too (and all the sub, sub-sub etc. contractors are all making profits until you come to the worker who is paid a pittance - so in fact for the same work as before (usually worse) for the same price of actual labour the main contractors get much more money). Health insurance has skyrocketed. In short what was proposed to us as as huge step forward, actually is a huge step backward. And then there are the wars, the illegal wars for which our governments lied and schemed to get them going, destroying democracy in the process. Privatization and deregulation are wreaking havoc. We have again been lied to. Latter-day capitalism is disaster capitalism; some parts of it, like the hedge funds, can be compared to scavengers who thrive by other companies' problems. Companies like Enron artificially created energy shortages to drive their prices up. Profit by any means.
DailyStar: "The world has not been kind to neo-liberalism, that grab-bag of ideas based on the fundamentalist notion that markets are self-correcting, allocate resources efficiently, and serve the public interest well. It was this market fundamentalism that underlay Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and the so-called 'Washington Consensus' in favor of privatization, liberalization, and independent central banks focusing single-mindedly on inflation.
For a quarter-century, there has been a contest among developing countries, and the losers are clear: countries that pursued neo-liberal policies not only lost the growth sweepstakes; when they did grow, the benefits accrued disproportionately to those at the top.
Simply put, in a world of plenty, millions in the developing world still cannot afford the minimum nutritional requirements. In many countries, increases in food and energy prices will have a particularly devastating effect on the poor, because these items constitute a larger share of their expenditures.
The anger around the world is palpable. Speculators, not surprisingly, have borne more than a little of the wrath. The speculators argue: we are not the cause of the problem; we are simply engaged in 'price discovery' - in other words, discovering - a little late to do much about the problem this year - that there is scarcity.
But that answer is disingenuous. Expectations of rising and volatile prices encourage hundreds of millions of farmers to take precautions. They might make more money if they hoard a little of their grain today and sell it later; and if they do not, they won't be able to afford it if next year's crop is smaller than hoped. A little grain taken off the market by hundreds of millions of farmers around the world adds up.
Defenders of market fundamentalism want to shift the blame from market failure to government failure. One senior Chinese official was quoted as saying that the problem was that the US government should have done more to help low-income Americans with their housing. I agree. But that does not change the facts: US banks mismanaged risk on a colossal scale, with global consequences, while those running these institutions have walked away with billions of dollars in compensation.
Today, there is a mismatch between social and private returns. Unless they are closely aligned, the market system cannot work well.
Neo-liberal market fundamentalism was always a political doctrine serving certain interests. It was never supported by economic theory. Nor, it should now be clear, is it supported by historical experience. Learning this lesson may be the silver lining in the cloud now hanging over the global economy."
10:27:51 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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