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19 December 2010

Obama and US Senate lift gay soldier ban. Special Report

Obama and the U.S. Senate have repealed the 1993 "Don't ask, don't tell" law.

10 comments:

stefz said...

cf. PEOPLE TO BE KILLED BY TANK COMMANDERS LISTENING TO STEPS

National heroes of the past such as Monty and Lord Kitchener would be tossing and turning in their graves if the British army ever followed suit

The Antagonist said...

I sometimes wonder what material Hicks would be doing today, had he lived.

Or maybe he thought of that.

Which is why you can listen to Gays in the Military, or his Iraqi Weapons skit, or just about anything else he did today and it still has the same insight, relevance and poignancy.

The Antagonist said...

My own comments on my own blog, filtered as spam in my own mailbox.

FFS.

When I say 'own', of course I mean various magical mystical cloud-services.

The Antagonist said...

But wait, there's more.

You've already gifted chunks of your data here and there to private corporations, now they want every last bit of it.

stefz said...

Governments and corporates have been dreaming about herding us all into 'the cloud' ever since mainframes died on their arse

I doubt that Chrome is going to be wot does it though...

Chrome OS dead in 2011: Gmail creator

Android might though

So much effort to gather in so much of the inane crap that passes for most people's private data. I hope the feckers choke on it

The Antagonist said...

In an ideal world of doing no evil, everyone would be using Google's Chrome OS and Chrome Browser, along with an Android (Google) phone, all connected via at least partially-Google owned Internet infrastructure, creating and storing documents in GoogleDocs, searching the Internet/books/maps/scholarly papers using the Google search engine, all on virtually diskless Netbook/pad/phone style devices so that ownership and access to bits and bytes is removed in just the same way ownership and access to the land was taken from under the feet of the people who happened to live on it.

Only quicker.

Whose bitch do you want to be today?

/he said, on a Google-hosted blog.

The Antagonist said...

"The technology industry has also been alive with talk that the Google $100 machines will be less like a standard home PC and more like a television: in effect, one of the first convergent devices betweem [sic] the internet and television."

Some of us were saying that long before The Times article of 2006. Ten years before.

It was a "conspiracy theory" back then.

If you're any doubt that all you're really meant to have is a relatively dumb terminal on which you just click buttons like a telly box, only more portable and slightly more interactive, check out laptop/monitor display resolutions.

Even on higher-end, higher-priced machines, all the way up to 18" laptop screens, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops -- and pay through the nose -- to find/customise one with a screen resolution that competes with off-the-shelf screen resolutions from 10 years ago.

The Internet - the modern day, slightly quicker large-print Teletext.

Anonymous said...

Net Neutrality?

More like Net Neutering.

Anonymous said...

Was going to post a comment completely different to the one I'm posting but the word verification word was 'nonces' and I laughed so much I forgot what I was going to say.

Jane said...

Join the Bank Run, on Revenge Wednesday, 26 Jan 2011.

Thousands of people across the UK will be attempting to hit the banks where it hurts, by starting a bank run.

Everyone is welcome to take part and to encourage others to take part. This action is totally legal.

For details, click here.

Please spread this news by any means possible.

BANK RUN ON REVENGE WEDNESDAY, 26 JAN
=====================================

On Wednesday 26 January 2011, thousands of people in the UK will try to cause a bank run by withdrawing money from their bank accounts, in person, at high street bank branches.

The hope is that the movement will snowball.

Everyone is welcome. Just print out the form below, fill in your details, and take it to your bank, preferably around lunchtime, e.g. about 1pm. Even better, print out multiple copies and hand them round. Use email, Twitter, Facebook too.

When the first bank branch says it won't pay out people's money, let everyone know, using every means possible. Take photos. Use mobile phones, send tweets, get the journalists in on the picture. This movement is decentralised. It is what you and we make it.

Note that this idea was tried last December, after being suggested by Eric Cantona. Unfortunately it didn't go very far, mainly because the organisers asked people to "sign up" online. We're not asking you to sign up to anything. In particular, you do NOT have to give any personal details to anyone. The form below is just for giving to your BANK.

If you can only afford to withdraw 10 pounds, please do it. If you can afford to withdraw thousands of pounds, do that too. EVERY LITTLE HELPS. Banks cannot withstand everyone withdrawing even a tenth of what they've got in the bank. LET'S SEND THESE PARASITES A MESSAGE THEY'LL NEVER FORGET. It's an open secret that they're holding the country to ransom. Let's kick 'em where it hurts.

This is the financial system's MAJOR WEAK SPOT. That's why the Dutch government is considering making it illegal to call for a bank run. Because they're SCARED. In 2009 there was a bank run against a Dutch bank. This was considered to be a particularly unpleasant bank, which had been encouraging millions od Dutch people to get into debt who couldn't afford it. People did a run against it, and it went bankrupt. How sad.

In Britain, you'd be hard pushed to name a bank which DIDN'T try to get people into massive debt they can't really afford.

Here's the bottom line: THE BANKS HAVE GOT IT COMING TO THEM.

So please take part. Spread the news. Distribute this leaflet. Print your own. Just do a little bit to help, and we'll be strong and we'll blast the damn banks like they've never been blasted before.

Please print the following, complete the details, and hand it to your bank around 1pm on 26 Jan 2011.

**********************************
NAME: __________________________
ADDRESS:_____________________________
________________________________
ACCOUNT NUMBER: ___________________
SORT CODE:______________________
NAME OF BANK:_____________________

To: the Branch Manager
Dear Sir,
I wish to withdraw ____________ pounds from my account in cash, immediately.
Yours sincerely,
__________________ (signed)
**********************************

Could people please start "tweeting" this to help build up momentum? Send out tweets saying something like:

*****************
Hit the banks where it hurts: BANK RUN on Revenge Wednesday, 26 Jan 2011. Info at: tinyurl.com/bankrun2011
*****************