Out of the corner of my eye

So, I’ve taken the plunge and launched an internet radio station playing a selection of electronic dance music. Inspired by seeing my friends playing on SubbassFM, Afterdarkradio etc. and wanting to see our group of friends do something with our skills and determination to DJ, Liquifi Radio was born and launched on friday with a 5 hour show featuring dancefloor, liquid & tech dnb and house. Check us out and tune in sometime!

From the BBC:

He is expected to unveil soaring public borrowing and details of the worst recession since World War II ended.

Tax rises and spending cuts from 2011 are likely as Mr Darling sets out his plans to restore public finances.

Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has admitted it made a mistake when it claimed the UK faced a £200bn bill for bailing out the banks.

A Treasury spokesman said the figure had been issued in the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report in error.

Difficult times to try and balance your budget admittedly, but it has to be pointed out that Labour have been in power throughout the timeline of this boom and bust cycle. Headline of the Daily Mail (which I normally despise) yesterday was touting Labour’s failure of working class children in our education system, something that’s true and quite upsets me.

What are they going to do about this, other than throw more taxpayer money at the banks?

It’s that simple. Donate your TV Licence Fee to the Gaza DEC Appeal.

I have.

It’s time to drive the final nail into the coffin of laissez-faire capitalism by treating it like the discredited ideology it inarguably is. If not, the Dr. Frankensteins of the right will surely try to revive the monster and send it marauding through our economy once again.

…

We’ve got to do everything we can to make sure there will be no sequels to this political horror. The blame shifters cannot be allowed to make their case without the truth being pointed out at every turn. It’s time to relegate free market fundamentalists to the same standing as Marxist ideologues: intellectual curiosities occasionally trotted out as relics of a failed philosophy.

– Arianna Huffington, the Huffington Post

I could not agree more. We’ve been living under the illusion that our society is build upon regulated, centrist market policies, when in actual fact the banks and big corporations have robbed us blind, our politicians are complicit, and the whole damn ship is sinking. A return to economic conservatism that does not give Capital itself the reigns but instead works for the people. If a company isn’t contributing anything to society, but instead allows a tiny elite class to milk the world’s wealth before fleeing to their tax havens — then what good is it?

Do we defend globalisation, with its laissez-faire allowance of the exploitation of cheap mobile labour (see the construction workers shipped in with no rights and horrible pay to work on the building projects in Dubai for an extreme example), because of a liberal hang-wringing urge to shout about racism and xenophobism?

This is not nationalism, it is about the fair treatment of labour, whether the underpaid mobile labour from abroad or the passed over local workers at home. The only people winning in the stinking rat race of globalisation are the multi-nationals who get to treat people like slaves to make a cheap buck off their backs.

Welcome back to Victorian Britain, Mk II.

Internationalism versus Globalisation:

“While internationalism would celebrate the achievements, struggles and creativity of the poor, and the equal rights of all peoples of the world to develop in dignity, sufficiency and security, globalisation and global capitalism requires the humiliation of hundreds of millions of people and keeping them in constant insecurity, pitting them against one another in a competitive struggle for survival.

We are all globalisers now. The insistence on globalisation has eclipsed and usurped internationalism; indeed sometimes masquerades as if it were the same thing. It is time to rescue what internationalists have always worked for from the clutches of a rapaciously expansive and ultimately, colonising, globalisation.”

Update:

Just read this comment on the Guardian CIF:

Ex 3/ Burj Dubai built with imported “en masse” Indian and Filipino workers who live in same conditions, and have passports removed so they can’t go on strike and can be deported, and are typically not paid on time, while Dubai residents go skiing in their enclosed “Green” refrigirated ski run.

This is not “free movement of capital and labour”. This is the cynical tactic of “divide to rule” to break the rights of workers everywhere by shipping in foreign workers “en masse” and creating “closed systems”. This enables two birds to be killed with one stone: a) the imported workers are lost in a foreign environment, can’t communicate locally on the job market, and are frightened to assert their rights as human beings, and b) this enables workers protected in the UK to be conveniently circumvented.

 (Written by Klendathu)

I’ve just started reading Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, a kind of autobiography about his experience of the fire bombing of Dresden, “The Florence of the Elbe”, in the Second World War. Early on the book describes how he went to visit one of the men he served with, and finds his wife is angry with the idea of him writing the book.

Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. “You were just babies then!” she said.

“What?” I said.

“You were just babies in the war - like the ones upstairs!”

I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.

“But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.” This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.

“I-I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, I know,” she said. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”

So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

There have been 15 wars since 1945.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, apparently.

My own comment in the complaint to the BBC:

I am disgusted and saddened by the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the DEC’s Gaza appeal under the pretense of ‘impartiality’. Regardless of the politics of the situation in the Middle East, it is a cold hard fact that thousands of people are living in refugee camps, thousands have had their homes and civilian infrastructure destroyed, and thousands are without basics such as food, water & medical supplies. I have always supported the ideal of the BBC and believe it can be a positive force in the world, but if you continue to block this appeal I will be forced by my values to cancel my TV license for the foreseeable future as I do not want such a cold hearted, vacuous organisation receiving any of my money.

Someone else backs the issue up with some facts on previous campaigns broadcast by the BBC:

 I have never posted a comment on this site before but I am moved to do so now because I am so appauled by the BBC’s decision not to air the DEC appeal for humanitarian aid to Palestine. The BBC has lost all credibility with this decision. To watch senior members of BBC staff such as Thompson and Thomson flailing around trying to justify their decision is both laughable and heartbreaking.

Some appeals the BBC have broadcast for “controversial” conflicts are:

Gulf Crisis (1990)
Former Yugoslavia (1994)
Rwanda (1994)
Sudan (1998)
Kosovo (1999)
Liberia (2003)
Sudan - Darfur (2004)
Darfur & Chad (2007)

By not broadcasting this appeal the BBC, rather than preserving it’s impartiality, is revealing it’s partiality.

Shame on you BBC - you have really shot yourself in the foot over this. Reconsider now before it’s too late and masses of people, including myself, decide that they would rather not pay a licence fee to such a politically motivated organisation.

(quoted from a poster on the Urban75 message board)

Please use the BBC’s webform to send a complaint. This is much more important than the Ross/Brand affair.

You can also telephone them at 03700 100 222 option 3.

• You bomb civilian areas with White Phosphorus  (Image)
• Your IDF ignores rulings by your own country’s Supreme Court on allowing journalists access to Gaza
• You break the ceasefire (of which you did not fulfill the terms of anyway) then blame Hamas
• You ban political parties in your own country because “they support terrorism” and do not recognise Israel as a democratic state (irony)
• In retaliation for 31 Israeli deaths in 2008, you have now massacred more than 1000 Palestinians, including more than 300 children

Israel, how far you have fallen from your ideal of a peaceful, just and secure homeland for Jewish people.

I am so angry at what has been done to the people living in Gaza and in Israel. Our generals claim we need our Trident nuclear weapons to “maintain influence” on the international stage, but what do we do with this influence? We remain silent. We save this “influence” for when we want to invade nation states under the pretence of “keeping our own people safe”.

Do you feel safer tonight as a result of the Iran-Iraq war? The Gulf War? The war in Afghanistan? The war in Iraq? The “war” between homemade rockets that rarely hit their targets and the precision guided missiles and illegally used white phosphorus weapons in Gaza? Between the civilian population, and the F16s, tanks and “boots on the ground”?

I don’t. We are planting the seeds of hatred. How would you feel if your entire family was killed in an air strike? Just ripped away in one cold, calculating “strike”? Now imagine how many people have felt this, experienced this, as a direct result of our interventions, our “moral crusades” in pursuit of “justice” (has anyone found Bin Laden yet, by the way?).

(Idea from Anne van Kesteren)

Nottingham, UK
Oban, UK
Glasgow, UK
Paris, France
Marseilles, France
Tokyo, Japan

This is covered in a few places for divs but the problem I had was with the top level web page getting a disabled vertical scrollbar that was unnecessary. Funny thing is, in quirks mode it doesn’t appear, and it happens in IE7! (99% of my IE struggles are with 6…)

To get rid of it, apply overflow: auto to the html element. (My original attempts to style the body element got me nowhere)

Something like:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01
Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css"> html {overflow: auto}</style>
</head>
<body>
<p>Content here...</p>
</body>
</html>