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So this is it. I am officially saying goodbye to all my readers here. It's been a long haul, I guess more than eight years in total. There is a new president in the US and my hopes are that he will be able to make a start with a better America. I don't envy him, it's a tough job.
This blog will still be in the ether for about a month or so from now. Then it will disappear in limbo.
Thank you all and the best of luck for the future. Have a great autumn, and a fine Christmas and New Year.
For me these blogging years were the worst of times but also the best of times. So long!
"UserLand has decided to close the Radio UserLand and Salon Radio services as of December 31, 2009."
This will mean that I will have to find an other host for this blog. However, my main reason for starting a blog was George WMD Bush. He is gone now. There is a new president, though I expressed my doubt about his performance just now. Nevertheless, let's give him some more time. If he turns into a Bush Lite, I may continue this blog with an other host or create a new blog with iWeb or Sandvox. I don't know yet. There is still time to think things over.
When I have made a decision I'll let you know. So for now blogging here will be only for emergencies or things you really must know. You can of course, if you speak Dutch, go to my Dutch weblog, with lots of pictures of flowers and little critters found and photographed in my neighbourhood.
AfterDowningStreet: "President Obama has no legal authority either from the United Nations or the U.S. Congress under the War Powers Resolution(WPR) to escalate the war in Afghanistan, a distinguished professor of international law says.
'President Obama's surge of 21,000 troops now engaged in combat in Afghanistan comes on top of the 60,000 we already had there,' says Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law at Champaign."
AfterDowningStreet: "Press reports have revealed that the Obama administration is considering the creation of a prison and court complex on US soil to process and hold current and future terrorist suspects. It would include a facility to indefinitely detain people held without trial or any other constitutionally mandated due process rights."
GlobalResearch: "A soldier who deserted the Georgian army and has now fled to Russia says US instructors are currently training Georgian soldiers for a war - just as they did before Georgia[base ']s assault last year on South Ossetia.
Eduard Korotkov also spoke about Georgia's military provocations against Russian peacekeepers prior to the Georgia-South Ossetia conflict, the weapons that the US supplied to Georgia, and Georgians' shooting of POWs during the conflict."
SMH: "The Wall Street gravy train is gathering speed again as banks only just emerging from financial crisis lavish billions of dollars on their employees.
Announcements over the past week by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley of a return to mega compensation pools are seen by some as a sign of health. For others, they mark a worrying throwback."
There are indications that Obama is using the goodwill he received and his capabilities to mislead the world, in particular China and Russia, to continue the same dirty politics America has already stood for. If he doesn't manage to reform health care and Wall Street he will become a failed president.
NYTimes: "The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency's director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday."
RollingStone: "The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup - which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibilliondollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in goldenparachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailedout insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman - not to mention ...
This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going."
JC: "The JC has revealed plans developed by Jews For Justice For Palestinians (JFJFP) to cause maximum damage to Israel by extending boycotts.
At the anti-Israel organisation's recent annual meeting, activists discussed a survey of its members which showed clear support for a comprehensive boycott. More than 400 JFJFP activists responded to the survey."
JustWorldNews: "The Israeli authorities are continuing with their campaign to expel Palestinians from East Jerusalem and replace them there with Jewish settlers.
At some point before dawn this morning, black-clad Israeli riot police evicted 53 Palestinians, including 19 children from two homes in the occupied part of the city."
AfterDowningStreet: "Naomi Klein's recently completed visit to Israel had a galvanizing effect on the "boycott from within" movement here, which has endorsed the Palestinian call for BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions]. Her public meetings, in Ramallah, East Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa drew hundreds of people to hear her clear-eyed analysis of why it is time for a full boycott of Israel until the occupation ends, Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel have full and equal rights, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees is fully realized under international law."
RawStory: "A group of doctors in the UK are mounting a legal and political campaign to overturn the suicide verdict in the death of a British doctor who was found dead shortly after exposing falsehoods about the justification for the Iraq war.
Dr. David Kelly was found dead in 2003 in a forest near his home in Oxfordshire. An inquiry into his death concluded that he had bled to death during a suicide attempt.
But 13 UK doctors are now challenging that assertion - and in doing so, renewing suspicions the doctor may have been murdered after it was revealed he was the mole for a BBC report that said evidence used to launch the Iraq war had been 'sexed up'."
SottNet: "A new photo released on the fourth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks in London appears to contradict the government's official story that Muslims with backpack bombs were responsible for the Tube and bus bombings which killed 52 people.
The image seemingly dovetails with a survivor's eyewitness statement that the bombs on the Tube trains were placed underneath the carriage and that suicide bombers were nowhere to be seen.
The fact that the ID's of all the so-called suicide bombers were found in pristine condition right next to where the bombs went off strongly suggests the planting of evidence to frame patsies. The ID's would have had a reasonable chance of surviving relatively unscathed if the bomb was not in the backpack with them, but underneath the train."
TheYesMen: "A new, beautifully-designed line of bottled water - this time not from the melting Alps, nor from faraway, clean-water-deprived Fiji, but rather from the contaminated ground near the site of the 1984 Bhopal catastrophe - scared Dow Chemical's London management team into hiding today.
Twenty Bhopal activists, including Sathyu Sarangi of the Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal, showed up at Dow headquarters near London to find that the entire building had been vacated."
DutchNews: "Poet, writer and artist Simon Vinkenoog has died in Amsterdam at the age of 80, just one month after having his right leg amputated.
Vinkenoog, who described losing his leg as 'an experience' and filled his website with pictures of his fellow patients, died of a stroke.
The poet, famous for his flowing grey hair, was a symbol of the 1960s and was friends with beat poets such as Alllen Ginsberg, whose work he translated. Last year a collection of his correspondence with Hugo Claus in the 1950s was published.
In 2004 he was chosen as Dichter des Vaderlands, or Poet Laureate.
In 1965 he served six weeks in jail for possessing marijuana, a drug he continued to enjoy until he died. At the 2006 general election he stood for election for a party calling for the legalisation of cannabis."
Guardian: "New powers to prosecute war criminals living in Britain who have committed atrocities dating back to 1991 were unveiled today by the justice secretary, Jack Straw.
He proposes closing a gap in the law so that prosecutions can go ahead against British nationals and residents accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity."
It's the vacation season again, so I am taking it easy for some time. Have a look at my neighbourhood, the park, the lake.
And noodle around a bit on my YouTube channel.
IslamicObservations: "One poll conducted before the election by two US-based non-profit organizations forecast Ahmadinejad's reelection with surprising prescience. The survey was jointly commissioned by the BBC and ABC News, funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and conducted by the New America Foundation's nonprofit Center for Public Opinion, which, 'has a reputation of conducting accurate opinion polls, not only in Iran, but across the Muslim world since 2005'. The poll predicted an election day turnout of 89%, only slightly higher than the actual 85% who voted (that's a difference of fewer than 2 million ballots). According to pollsters Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, the 'nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin - greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.'"
Podcast feed details are provided by the individual podcasters.
So this is it. I am officially saying goodbye to all my readers here. It's been a long haul, I guess more than eight years in total. There is a new president in the US and my hopes are that he will be able to make a start with a better America. I don't envy him, it's a tough job.
"UserLand has decided to close the Radio UserLand and Salon Radio services as of December 31, 2009."
