Foreign Aid Or War Profiteering

Canada's reputation at home for being generous to the developing world is a myth. Under Chretien the Liberal Government adopted the motto of Body Shop Inc. ; "Trade Not Aid". And despite the high profile pronouncements of his successor; Paul Martin, we now have our aid directed towards helping the American Empire in the Middle East. The result is war profiteering not humanitarian aid.

Canada has a mediocre record on helping the world's poor, thanks in part to its weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and miserly foreign aid, says an exhaustive ranking released yesterday.This country stood 10th among the world's 21 richest nations, according to the assessment by the Centre for Global Development and Foreign Policy magazine.In 2004, the latest year for which figures were available, Canada donated $72 million to Iraq — its largest support for any country. But Iraq and the other top recipient, Afghanistan, aren't even on the list of 25 most-needy priority countries designated by Ottawa.Canada failing world's poor, report says

Despite the photo ops of Bono and Paul our investments in Africa as trade or aid have decreased. And Canadian foreign aid was not enhanced by either the Liberals or the Harpocrites, it was in the NDP pre-election Budget. Which the Harpocrites kept in their budget.

DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE
• Canada pledged to double development assistance to
Africa between 2003-4 and 2008-9. In 2003-4, Canadian
development assistance to Africa was $637m, which would
increase to $1.275b in 2008-9.
• Once multilateral payments are averaged over the two
years, between 2004 and 2005 Canadian development
assistance to Africa decreased by $10m, from $854m to
$844m.41 Canadian NGO’s are confident that data for
fiscal year 2005/06 will be stronger with aid to Africa
continuing on an upwards trend.
• In January 2006 Prime Minister Harper pledged to increase
development assistance overall to the OECD average GNI
percentage level which was 0.47% in 2005, but should be
significantly greater in 2010. Harper did not specify what
portion of that would go to Africa, but if he kept to the
approach adopted by the G8 since Kananaskis, which we
would encourage, then he would be making an increased
commitment to Africa over his predecessor Prime Minister
Martin. Harper also pledged support for the 0.7% goal
during 2005. We await timetabled plans to meet this goal
by 2015.
• Canada still ties 43% of its development assistance, which
severely reduces the efficiency of Canadian bilateral
development assistance flows.
• In order to stay on track with its commitment to double
development assistance to Africa, Canada must increase
ODA to Africa in 2006 by not less than $144m, to a total
of $988m.

Also See

AFRICA

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Who?

Bob Rae understands the golden rule, dem wit da gold rule; Laxer Wrong

And the rush towards his camp begins with those least known like this guy. Maurizio Who? Maurizio Bevilacqua dropped out of the Liberal leadership race Monday to throw his support behind former Ontario premier Bob Rae.

Also See:

Liberal Leadership Race


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Frigid Harper

Our homophobic PM would rather hide out in the north giving a, prdictable and not particularly timely, speech about Arctic Soverignty and act like a macho War-Monger in Chief, than attend the opening of the International AIDS Conference. Harper promises to defend Arctic sovereignty Of course if he can't have centre stage he would rather be somewhere else, and he probably knew he would be upstaged by these guys...The two Bills share centre stage


Also See

AIDS

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Xena Versus Pluto

Will the newly discovered planet like body called Xena displace Pluto....scientists gather to discuss this weighty matter.....Experts meet to decide Pluto fate

In fact they have no 'definition' of what a planet is..... New find further muddles definition of 'planet'


and Pluto was predicted to exist before it was found....sort of like what some folks call magick or presdigitation...

Planet Killers (August 24, 2005).

In 1930 the discovery of Pluto was regarded as a great achievement, for the effort to find Pluto was spurred by theoretical predictions of a ninth planet. But Pluto is embarrassingly small, too small to be the predicted ninth planet. Now we are finding more and more Pluto-sized objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. We should take the hint, remove Pluto from the list of planets in the Solar System, and simply consider it as one of the largest planetoids in the Kuiper Belt.

Brian Marsden
It's time we admitted that accepting Pluto as the ninth planet was a big mistake. The announcement from the Lowell observatory in 1930 that a distant new planet had been found in accordance with the prediction by the observatory's founder was a brilliant exercise in public relations. Little heed was paid to critics who soon pointed out that the object was much smaller than Percival Lowell had claimed and that there was no way he could have made a meaningful prediction.

But Velikovsky predicted a tenth planet and it has been speculated about since the 1980's. Apollonius.Net - Speculations On "Planet X"

'Real' scientists like Lowell dismissed Velikovsky's theories about Venus and Pluto and its origins and about a tenth planet. Yet Lowell's own predictions were also flawed. Something Velikovsky sceptics overlook.

When Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision, he became the victim of most vehement and scurrilous persecution. To all of us plebes who tread streets of concrete, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference how the Solar System came to be in the shape it is in during our mayfly lives. One story is as good as another as long as it stops the kids from asking `How come?' when you want to put them to bed.

Academic Freedom, Free Speech, and Harlow Shapley (February 23, 2005).

Harlow Shapley was one of the leading astronomers of the early 20th century. In 1950, he was at the center of astronomy's most infamous episodes, when he and the astronomy community attempted to suppress the publication of Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision. This episode is a nice illustration of the restrictiveness of academic freedom as compared to free speech, and it is a warning on how not to engage the public over bad science.

Velikovsky's contributions were cosmic catastrophism as well as the heresy that the universe was electro-magnetic, that plasma and electro-magnetic energy was as important, if not more important, than mass and gravity. It was a theory that open minded scientists took seriously, such as my physics prof at the University of Lethbridge. Velikovsky was given an honorary degree from the U of L. Which itself elicited more controversy.

The controversy has had many striking facets. One has been the large participation of the public. It continues to increase. Velikovsky has managed to talk to people about mythology, archaeology, astronomy, and geology, without doing injustice to those disciplines, in an amazing and unprecedented manner. Socrates, Aristotle, Galileo, Freud, and Einstein - to name a few thinkers who were implicated in 'crowd phenomena' - were not public figures in the sense here taken. His public - a well-behaved, educated, well-intentioned and diversified aggregate - has supported Velikovsky on every possible occasion. That he was a foreigner with a Russian accent, a psychiatrist, unequivocably a Jew, denounced by some of the most respected scientists of America and Britain, unbending in his person and in his allegiance to science and in refusing every opening for support from demagogic or religious quarters: these facts hardly disturbed the favourable reception granted him by a large public.
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE
Alfred de Grazia
January 1978

These pictures of the surface of the planet Pluto were released by NASA March 7. The pictures, taken from the Hubble Space Telescope with the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera, were made in June and July of 1994 and show that Pluto is an unusually complex object with more large-scale contrast than any other planet except Earth. The two smaller inset pictures at top are actual images from Hubble. (REUTERS/Handout)


Also See:

Horus Set

Lagrange 5

Desert Moon

Climate Change...On Jupiter

Is God A Cosmonaut

Wow

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

Icky Icke

Science or Tourism

The New Space Race for the Red Planet

Mysterious Explosion

The Morning Star

You Are Here

Happy Birthday Mom

Mutualist Economics of SETI

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Gates On AIDS

Give women power to fight AIDS, Gates says
In a swipe at controversial U.S. AIDS-funding policies that encourage abstinence and discourage drug use and prostitution, they said prevention requires distributing more condoms, working with sex-trade workers and giving addicts clean needles. "We need tools that will allow women to protect themselves," Mr. Gates said in a speech to some of the 24,000 delegates to the International AIDS Conference."This is true whether the woman is a faithful mother of small children or a sex worker trying to scrape out a living in a slum. No matter where she lives, who she is or what she does, a woman should never need her partner's permission to save her own life."

This is why the PM did not attend the conference it would have been used against him by his social conservative religious base. Who don't believe in womens rights gay rights, workers right to form unions, or come to think of it human rights period. Since they are man made and not given to us by God.

Also See

AIDS


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The enemies of my enemy

Israel has made new friends.....from old enemies...though the new friend is less than enthusiastic.... could be because the Zionist States existence in Palastine is a reminder of the poltics of Lebensraum...


Israel's Air War in Lebanon and the German Press

Victimized by its enemies and misunderstood by the world, Israel needed the help of its few remaining friends, notably Germany, to defend itself. It would make him “happy,” Mr. Olmert said, to see Germany protect Israel’s security by sending a German Schutztruppe (peace keepers) to Lebanon which for the Germans would also be a particularly meaningful task. He ridiculed, as just a reflection on their “desperate situation,” Hezbollah’s recent offer of a cease fire for humanitarian reasons: “Hezbollah is no longer a threat for us. We have never begged for compassion or a cease fire but said: To hell with you! We will take the hardest measures against you.”

Already, the beginning of this war appears shrouded in the mists of politicized historical memory: Who provoked whom? Who has or will have the power to determine the provocation? How urgent is the issue of Israel’s security after almost a month of bombing granted by the US in several installments of “one more week or so”? Why has there been so little discussion of the legal aspects of Israel’s preemptive strike? And why Israel’s new emphasis on its “cordial” relationship with Germany? The German reactions to Mr. Olmert’s statements were cautiously neutral across the political spectrum, But Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Shimon Stein, called it a “Novum” and a “historic statement”; never before had an Israeli Prime Minister explicitly welcomed the engagement of German soldiers in the stabilization of the Middle East—a great Vertrauensbeweis (proof of trust). The German government, as reported in the press, did not seem to share Mr. Olmert’s happiness, aware of their over-extension in dangerous places like Afghanistan and the historical complications of German-Jewish relations.

Aso See:

Israel

Zionism

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Advice for the Empire

If you are going to act like the Roman Empire then act like the Roman Empire says conservative historian...

Laina Farhat-Holzman: Military power and the world's press
It seems to me that the only way that today's superpowers could prevail over even the nastiest of guerrilla death cults would be to be as ruthless as the ancient Romans were when they maintained power and peace for half a millennium. Utter ruthlessness and total censorship over a press armed with little cameras and big ideologies is certainly not possible today. But the day may come that we have to choose between prevailing and world order or surrendering to the forces of chaos, totalitarian ideologies, and a return to truly dark times. At the moment, we don't seem to have the stomach for it.

Yep the minute you do that you become the totalitarian state.

Opps that already is happening.....

The land of the free - but free speech is a rare commodity

It used to be said that academic rows were vicious because the stakes were so small. That's no longer true in America, where a battle is underway on campuses over what can be said about the Middle East and US foreign policy.

Douglas Giles is a recent casualty. He used to teach a class on world religions at Roosevelt University, Chicago, founded in memory of FDR and his liberal-inclined wife, Eleanor. Last year, Giles was ordered by his head of department, art historian Susan Weininger, not to allow students to ask questions about Palestine and Israel; in fact, nothing was to be mentioned in class, textbooks and examinations that could possibly open Judaism to criticism.

Students, being what they are, did not go along with the ban. A young woman, originally from Pakistan, asked a question about Palestinian rights. Someone complained and Professor Giles was promptly fired.

Also See

Bush

Imperialism



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Whose Victory in Lebanon

Once again the neo-con plan to drag Iran and Syria into war failed. The actions of Amerika's surrgoate in the Middle East have borne poisoned fruit; Hezbollah leader a hero to many Arabs

Aso See:

Israel


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Ha, Ha, I Am Not Dead

Happy Birthday, Comrade Comindante.

Cubans wish absent Castro happy 80th birthday

Fidel Castro: I Feel very Happy Today

Oh did I mention I was in a Cuban hospital, not a Yankee one. I pity you Yanqui's your lack of healthcare, whereas we in Cuba get it for free......

A series of four photographs of Fidel Castro appeared in the paper

Comrades I am lounging in my Adidas sweats. Note well comrades, Adidas sweats Not that U.S. Imperialist child labour sweat shop capitalist Nike sweats. Nope Adidas. I will expect the celebrity endorsement cheque in the mail, pronto.

The following statement, attributed to Cuban President Fidel Castro, was published this morning by Juventud Rebelde, Cuba's Communist youth newspaper.

Today is Castro's 80th birthday.

The newspaper also published this photograph, which is said to show Castro with yesterday's edition of the Communist Party newspaper Granma, with headline proclaiming that he has been "absolved by history."

The photo is the first released of the Cuban leader since he became ill with what officials described as an acute intestinal crisis.

********************
Dear compatriots and friends of Cuba and the rest of the world:

Today, the day of the 13th, I attain the age of 80 years.

To say that my stability has considerably improved is not lying.

To state that the recovery will take a short time and that there is no risk would be completely incorrect.

I ask all of you to be optimistic.

And, at the same time, to be ready to face any adverse news.

To the people of Cuba, infinite appreciation for your loving support.

The country is marching and will continue marching on perfectly.

To my comrades in the struggle, eternal glory for resisting and conquering the empire, proving that a better world is possible.

Today, August 13, I am very happy.

For all those who care about my health, I promise to fight for it.

Also See:

Cuba

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More Christian Abuse

Ok go figure, the logic of this stuns the rational mind. Of course being a preacher-man means he is far from rational. A Eastern Cape pastor, charged with having raped his adoptive daughter, kept videotapes showing the alleged victim naked in a bath, The Herald Online reported on Friday.He pleaded not guilty to rape and other charges, but guilty to incest. What?! It's not rape if the step father commits incest? Huh? Get thee behind me Satan.


Also See:

Christianity Is Child Abuse

Christian Killers and Rapists

Private Day Care Abuse

TAGS
child abuse
Christianity
Priests

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