Blair’s Thugs Rough Up 82 Year Old Protestor

The Labour Party (I was going to write “Blair’s Labour Party” but it looks like the membership is going away from him) is holding its annual conference in its own Green Zone in Brighton, South England. When one member shouted a comment during a speech on foreign policy about a claim over Iraq. He was roughly bundled from the hall as was another delegate who protested about the way he was being treated.

So who was this threat to the safety of the Great Myopic Greaseball Jack Straw? One Walter Wolfgang, an 82 year old who had fled Nazi Germany in 1937. He joined the Labour Party in 1948, before Bliar was born. He was bundled out of the hall for shouting “nonsense” at one of Straw’s claims or as The Times narrates it:

Mr Straw continued “We are in Iraq for one reason – to help the elected Iraqi Government build a secure, democratic and stable nation – and we can and will only remain with their consent. “

At that point, a delegate at the back of the hall jumped up and shouted “That is a lie!” The man was quickly bundled out of the hall by security guards to shouts of “shame” from other delegates. Another delegate sitting nearby, later identified as Steve Forrest, chairman of the Erith and Thamesmead constituency party, shouted at stewards: “You must be joking.” He too was bundled out and is thought to have had his conference accreditation confiscated.

Later Mr Wolfgang was seen on TV being told he must leave the conference centre by the smaller of the two shown in the above picture who still towered above him. He was grabbed by the arm and forced through doors. The cameras try to follow him but were stopped by a gang of Labour Party officials blocking their way. Mr Wolfgang’s cries of pain or distress could be heard and later he sat in an obviously shaken state giving details to a policeman.

This is how they treat one elderly man who had presumably been a loyal member for 57 years and a senior officer in a local party who objected to the way they were treating him. The true face of “new Labour” is slipping from behind Bliar’s grinning mask.

Update [2005-9-28 12:29:32 by Londonbear]: There are now reports that the two were intially detained by the police under the Prevention of Terrorism Act

Treating Depression in Children and Young People

The UK’s “National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence”  – abreviated to NICE – issued guidelines on treating under-18s with depression. NICE is intended to give doctors best practice in treatment. In part this is driven by a cost saving for the National Health Service by not giving outdated or inappropriate treatments that have been shown not to be as effective.

Although the advice is intended for UK doctors and can include references to medical structures not present in the USA – it can be really useful background reading for  parents whose children have illnesses. In this case there is also some useful advice for teachers and other similar professionals in identifying children with depression. The most important recommendation certainly has relevance to the US scene. It is that drugs alone should not be used. To quote the press release:

o Children and young people with moderate to severe depression should be offered, as a first-line treatment, a specific psychological therapy (such as cognitive behavioural therapy, interpersonal therapy or family therapy of at least 3 months’ duration).

o Antidepressant medication should not be offered to children or young people with moderate to severe depression except in combination with a concurrent psychological therapy and should not be offered at all to children with mild depression.

o Healthcare professionals in primary care, schools and other relevant community settings should be trained to detect symptoms of depression, and to assess children
and young people who may be at risk of depression.

o Attention should be paid to the possible need for parents’ own psychiatric problems (particularly depression) to be treated in parallel, if the child or young person’s mental health is to improve.

Now I am not intending to offer you advice if you have already consulted a doctor. What you might want to do is look at the recommendations and the advice that is available in the various booklets. This page lists those and the formats they are available in. The formal guidelines have some interesting flow-charts about treatment decision but I will re-iterate the caution that some references are specific to the organisation of health treatments within the UK. Also remember these are also based on assessments of benefits against risks. There are considerable benefits and no health risks from talking therapies whereas the medications do carry risks of physical harming. Also note that even the recommended drugs are not licenced for use with children in the UK. If you investigate, you are likely to find the same applies in the USA.

The papers do point out a problem in the UK of a lack of  trained therapists and I suspect a similar position for those specialised in treating the young will be similar in the USA. I also get the impression that anti-depressants are far more widely prescribed for children in the USA than here.

The guidelines do point out that medication alone is far less effective than in combination with a talking therapy. If anything, it will provide ammunition to argue with insurance companies etc about the best forms of treatment for your children. Simply pointing out the long term savings may well be enough to sway them to provide best practice.

UK Liberal Democrats’ Conference – Some Thoughts

The Liberal Democrats held their Annual Conference in Blackpool this week. I am not going to pretend to give a complete analysis of all the debates but maybe an impression of the main themes and some of the tricks the MSM and other parties are getting up to so they can subvert coverage.

First, a quick background on the party and the lead-up to the conference and then I’ll get to the themes and tricks.

(Crossposted from EuroTrib)
The LibDems are a marriage of the Liberal and Social Democratic parties. The Liberals have a very long history but fell out of government after the first World War when the (old)Labour Party grew. By the 50s the party had fallen into the doldrums and it was only in the 1970s that it started to pick up any great deal. The SDP was formed by a group of Labour MPs (the “Gang of Four”) who were disillusioned with the extreme left-wing influence in Labour (It should be said that the “looney left” at that time included such firebrands as Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Ken Livingstone.) The two co-existed and fought elections together, first under a sort of non-aggression pact and later under a joint “Alliance” manifesto). Although there were huge intial gains in popularity, this did not translate to votes at important elections and the two eventually merged. At the this year’s General Election the party got the highest number of seats since the Liberals in 1928. In Scotland, where the Parliament is elected by Proportional Representation, the LibDems are in coalition with the Labour Party in the Executive. Key policies on health and education have been implemented that are more generous than in England and Wales

The history is important to understand the two strands in the party. There is the historically radical, green, unilateralist, pro-gay/civil rights Liberals who stereotypically are the wooly jumper, beard and sandal wearing hard bitten campaigners who knit their own muesli; know the words to “The Land” and enthusiastically give a clenched fist flourish while singing it(guilty). Social Democrats are the suit and tie wearing “economic liberals” concentrating on “electability” who either mouth “The Land” at the Glee Club party while rocking their glass of red wine or by then have sneaked back to their digs in their Volvo estate cars. The story of the week in policy terms has been the defeat of the righter wing by the rank and file who tend to the more radical Liberal wing. The most important one was the defeat of a central party proposal to include as policy the privatisation of the Royal Mail to finance the Post Office network.

LibDem conferences tend to be heavy on policy consideration although the press like to concentrate on personalities. This year the MSM were playing was “The LibDems are pretending this as a celebration of the election but really there are questions about the Leader because they should have got more”. Charles Kennedy, the party leader, had a bit of a wobble in the middle of the campaign when his wife gave birth and the came back after a short break to an early morning press conference. Unfortunately the new baby had kept him up most of the night so he  was a bit shell shocked and this was spun by the MSM as “does not know his own policies”.

The “incompetent leader” line meant all the press coverage of the conference tended to concentrate on that rather than the policy issues. The Liberals were the first UK party to have a “question the Leader” session at a conference. Unfortunately a badly phrased question about how to get people to ask about policies  over personalities when campaigning was cut to imply the leadership was being challenged. Part of Kennedy’s problems are due to him being more consensual and taking people with him than Paddy Ashdown, his predecessor. The phrase “chairman not leader” was used. In case you recognise the name, Paddy Ashdown is now the UN High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina. As an ex-Special Boat Squadron (the naval SAS) officer and a diplomat, he had an “action man” image compared to Kennedy’s laid back approach. Kennedy’s main keynote speech at the end of conference was ammended to address this supposed split in the party.

Today, instead of coverage being on that speech, the Times has published a potentially damaging story about campaign finances. The gist of this is that a Swiss based company with a London office gave a very large donation. There is some question over whether the company was trading in the UK at the time. If not, the donation would have to be returned as outside the rules and would leave a big hole in the finances. The investigation by the Electoral Commission is as a result of a complaint. That complaint was almost certainly made by another party who leaked the details. As noted in recent diaries; Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the Times, is rather friendly with a resident of Downing Street so it is not difficult to guess which party leaked the story.  

Valerie Plame – Bloggers’ Hypocrisy

Bloggers on Booman Tribune and Daily Kos as well as elsewhere have rightly made a great deal of the Bush administrations’s revealing that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent. But diaries in the past few days have shown up some sheer hypocrisy of many in criticising the journalists involved in this.

 
There are obvious reasons for the US to have laws against the identification of CIA agents. For a start, it negates their usefulness in the field but there is a far more pressing reason for doing so. By revealing their identity, some agents could be placed at risk of their lives while working in the field. Rightly, many have taken up the case of Plame’s exposure apparently by a senior Bush official as a cause celebre.

Yet the same bloggers who have revelled in the discomfort or right-wing journalists seem to have no problem with showing pictures of the two SAS soldiers doing undercover work in Basra who were captured by Iraqi police. I believe I was the only one to point out that the UK media pixillate out the faces of anybody involved in the special forces and strongly hinted that this was the reason for the MoD’s request rather than the stated position that it was to protect their families. I would suggest that protection of their identify for their physical safety in future operations is even more pressing than that for Ms Plame.

Clearly those bearing the most blame are those agencies which have carried the pictures and footage released by the Iraqi police. Since it very soon became obvious that this organisation has been infiltrated by some of the militia or their sympathisers, should not they have questioned whether to publish the pictures in a clear form?  Nevertheless, I believe I am the first to raise this question in relation to their dissemination in various diaries.

This does of course raise questions of to what extent self-censorship should be exercised by the blogging community. This undeniably happens. Where for example are the uncensored picures of the contractors’ burnt bodies hanging from the bridge in Hallabja? There is a case for such restraint. As far as I am aware, no UK media have published the pictures from Basra of the British soldier in flames jumping from his Warrior APC. Censorship or not wishing to give succor to the right wing who would be demanding oppressive action against the whole civilian population, when the numbers involved in the protest were maybe 0.1% or less of the people in the city?

New Orleans: Police “Evacuate” Frail Elderly Woman

The current main lead on Sky News in the UK is this video. I hope the link works.

In case the link is broken, this is the story. A female reporter from Sky was accompanying a group of California Highway Patrol going door to door. In a house that looked completely untouched by water they found an elderly woman. She was adamant that she did not want to leave. She refused to let the police in but as the only woman in the group, she let the Sky reporter in to see her.

The police barged their way into the house and started to barrack the woman that she had to leave. She did not want to because of her two dogs and anyway she had stockpiles of food and water. Her response was that the scene was the reason she did not want the police to come in and they should leave. She was carrying a small handgun (by the barrel) and a kitchen knife in her hand and had been throughout. The police saw the gun and three jumped her, pushing her to the floor and into a corner of her kitchen.

The police let her sit down to recover from the shock which is when she explained to the Sky reporter about the dogs. When they had got her outside she was so distrustful of the police that she whispered to the reporter and asked her to collect her medication, money and cigarettes. She only agreed to leave when the police agreed to take her two dogs with her.

Upsetting as this may be, a more distressing incidence was reported in passing on the BBC. Recovery of the dead bodies is taking a new urgency as they are clogging some of the pumps draining the city.

Bush Policies Will Kill 4.4 Million Children A Year

Although you might have missed it, two reports were issued by the UN today ahead of the upcoming meeting of the General Assembly. One has received huge publicity because of some disgraceful corruption by a few officials at the UN. The other is being pushed into the background but it has far greater implications for the future of the welfare of the planet’s children.

The report on the oil-for-food program rightly criticises the corruption and points the need for UN reform. Just such reforms are being proposed by Kofi Annan but the Bush hitman has issued a late list of 750 changes they want to see. Among these are a proposal to exponge the Millenium Goals from the UN’s agenda. The other report today points out just what effect the existing poor progress will have, let alone trying to ignore them all together.

The Human Development Report 2005 lists just what the existing progress on the MDG’s will have. The starkest figure is that if the current rate is maintained, at least 4.4 Million children will die un-necessariy each year.
One reason this may not be getting much publicity is that the United States has dropped from 8th to 10th place in a league table showing each country’s “Human Development Index”. The overview in Chapter 1 (page 11) is extremely worrying:

For most of the past 40 years human capabilities have been gradually converging. From a low base, developing countries as a group have been catching up with rich countries in such areas as life expectancy, child mortality and literacy. A worrying aspect of human development today is that the overall rate of convergence is slowing–and for a large group of countries divergence is becoming the order of the day

The MDG’s did not seek to extinguish extreme poverty, only halve it. On present trends, that will not be achieved. The starkest condemnation for a President so keen to promote a “life culture” is that the policies his appointee has presented will have this effect:

The projected gap between the 2015 target and the outcome that would take place if current trends continued represents a huge loss of life. It translates into an additional 4.4 million child deaths in 2015 above those that would occur if the MDG target were achieved (figure 1.18). Charting a linear trend from the cumulative cost of additional child deaths for 2003-15 provides an indicator for the annualized gap between target and outcome. The cumulative cost of that gap represents more than 41 million additional child deaths between now and 2015–almost all of them in developing countries (figure 1.19). These are lives that would be saved if the targets were met.

A lot is said about the inquity of income within countries but the global inequality is even more so:

On the (conservative) assumption that the world’s 500 richest people listed by Forbes magazine have an income equivalent to no more than 5% of their assets, their income exceeds that of the poorest 416 million people.

Now the USA has real problems with the fallout from Katrina. Just as you can now see the fallacy of moving funds away from infrastrucure to the war machine in the name of “security”, not addressing the needs of the world’s poorest is going to store up trouble for the future. Terrorism might not be born from extreme poverty but it is certainly fed by it. The report opens with the words of FDR at his second inauguration in 1937, I can write no finer words to close.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

The British Plan for London Flooding

I posted this after midnight BST on Kos but then got a sniffy response merely remarking that I was over the 1 diary a day limit. That site seems to work on PST but as this information will I hope prove a resource, if only one of last resort I have cross posted here where the time is shown in GMT which means I will not breach the same rule here!

You probably know that London is in danger of flooding. The banks of the Thames were raised in the 1960s and a moveable barrier built just below Greenwich. That is going to have to be replaced or supplemented in the future. The national and local governments, emergency services and other agencies have however done planning in case the Thames Barrier is breached. In that event our major financial centre would be under water and half a million households flooded.

A few more details below the fold but I have also found a couple of sites that you might want to keep in mind. These are UK based and one is co-sponosored by the insurance industry so they have a lot of superflous information BUT the general advice about preparedness and importantly for a lot of people, information about cleaning up etc is on them.
This was prompted by a piece on Murdoch’s Sky News in the UK about how London would cope with a flood like New Orleans. That is not as unlikely as it may sound. The Thames Barrier is designed against storm surges off the North Sea. Much of London is below the sea level of such a surge so contingency plans have been made in case the Barrier is breached or overtopped.

There have been practise exercises to assess the preparedness of the different riperian local authorities (the London Boroughs and the Londonwide authority) and the emergency response services. Plans have been made to evacuate people from the affected areas and to arrange where the over 500,000 people affected would be evacuated to. These detailed plans are linked on the Environment Agency site I will show below. it also has advice on a “flood kit” to keep in case you might be affected.

The second has a lot of advice about clearing up and re-occupying. This is jointly sponsored by the insurance industry in the UK on the basis that advice to help aleviate damage reduces claims. There is therefore some irrelevant things like “phone your insurers” but again the general advice  may be of help. These really are two sites to browse later and get information from as and when but if your government cannot provide it, why not get some that might be of help from a country that does plan?

Preparing for Emergencies (site also has information on other risks like CBN terrorist attacks)

Repairing and restoration of buildings following floods – the insurance co-sponsored site.

Also of interest will be this link which describes advice on all sorts of things that have been planned in the event of an emergency in London. There is a lot that can be extrapolated for both industry and individuals.

Give Us Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses

Their plight must by now be obvious to the good people who currently occupy French Loisianna. Their part of the world, since desperate financial problems forced the Republic to sell the remaining parts of French North America to Washington, has been one of exploitation of their natural resources to the sole benefit of the replacement colonising power.

I would therefore like to suggest a solution which may very well find favour with those citizens. That is that they collect the amount paid by Washington, suitably adjusted to take account of inflation in the Franc and Euro, and repurchase the area to return it to France on the understanding that there will be a program agreed between them and guaranteed by the UN Anti-Colonisation Committe to grant independence following a referendum, which would take place within five years and every five years thereafter if a “Non” vote results.  
First of all you would of course need to know what your immediate status was. Unless of course the individual chose otherwise, you would immediately gain French and therefore EU citizenship. Those wishing to retain their previous citizenship would of course be free to do so and be granted special residence rights in the new French Overseas Departments of North America. Unusually these would be semi-self governing and therefore only have representation in the Senate in Paris and not in the European Parliament. Full re-integration back into France would also be offered at a later stage if the Frennas (French North Americans) wished it or alternatively accession as an independent nation to the EU (providing of course the other 33 or so agreed and the candidate fully met the acquis and other conditions of entry)

There would also be guarantees that the income from the exploitation of the Departments’ natural resources would not be repatriated but would be used to establish the health, social services and infrastructure that every French citizen has come to expect. Payroll and income taxes would also rise to pay for this but these would offset the huge sums paid to buy insurance from companies based outside the region. Adoption of the Euro would protect them from the imminent collapse of the dollar. With the associated off-shore oil and fisheries that would of course be part of the resources of the Departments and the income from providing sea port facilities to Washington, the mone available to purchase these infrastructure projects would be enormous.      

SNCDA (the Societe National de Chemin de fer des Departments Americain) would be charged with building high speed rail links between the major cities and local metros or light rail systems within them. The Dutch would be asked to use their expertise to build defences round New Orleans sufficient to withstand any force 5 hurricane’s impact. Civilised lawa regarding  the siting of casinos would mean they were no longer  vulnerable off-shore barges but situated well inland behind the natural barriers to storm surges like forests and swamplands that would be re-established.      Those civilised laws of course also include proper investigations carried out under the direction of qualified examining magistrates before trial. The and judges would of course be appointed on the basis of their experience and skill rather than being political appointees.

They would of course benefit from the structure of the French school system and have access to Universities in the same was as their fellow countrymen. University education would be provided at the existing (US) state establishments or they could go elsewhere within the EU like the UK or Ireland. Suitably brought up to date, French schoolbooks can be rapidly translated. Others will tell you the details but free education is available from an earlier age than in the USA. The Frennas would have a more highly educated workforce than the countries to the north or south of them and therefore be more likely to get skilled highly paid work than before.  

Now this may at first seem unviable as there are obvious language difficulties but these could easily be overcome. Television would change though the national channels would still buy in some Hollywood made programs, there would be locally made programs to reflect the lifestyle of the Departments. The National Channels (TFA/E1 and TFA/E2, the initials standing of course for Television Francais Anglais/English) would be in English. Major series brought from the BBC would not of course need to be dubbed for broadcast as they are in metropolitan France.

You will realise there are some problems in that one of the existing US states has adopted the name of the whole area. There is already a precdent over what to do in this event. “Great Britain” is so called to distinguish it from the French region Breteyne. “Great Louisiana” is thereforethe obvious choice.

(With some apologies to George Bernard Shaw)

Drug Addiction and New Orleans Survivors

I will try to broach this as carefully as possible but there is no easy way. I do a bit of informal counselling of a alcohol/substance abuser (long story resulting from childhood abuse). He informs me that New Orleans is well known as having very great drugs problems, I believe with mostly with methamphetamine but cleary the whole cocktail will be used.

This raises a possible reason for some of the violence that is reported and poses some challenges for the communities receiving Internally Displaced Persons from the city.
We have to face it that from the favellas of Brazil to the slums of US cities, the way of aleviating the misery of poverty and deprivation is to blank them out by substance abuse. Along with everything else, the people addicted to illegal drugs (and abused legal ones Mr Limbaugh) will be cut off from their supply network. Even those who rescued their “stash” will be suffering withdrawal symptoms. It could account for the TV reports of people fitting in front of the crew.

I do not want to raise the subject to condemn the individuals afflicted. What I do want to do is float it as a subject that should be addressed. Some will use the break in supply as an opportunity to come off. Others will be increasingly desperate both to get supplies and to raise money for it. The only way for them to do this will be by crime unless it is possible to intervene now. Along with all the other necessities, they will need appropriate replacement/recovery programs. The alternative is for them to sink into the underworld of poverty housing and crime in the cities they are relocated to. Once they establish a new supply they are unlikely to return to NOLA.

As I said, don’t condemn but do not ignore. Just as the mother “loots” to feed her starving child, an addict will steal or prostitute themselves to feed their addiction. Being compassionate to both in these circumstances is difficult but must be done if they and the communities they are moved to are not to go downhill.

MSM Censoring Devastating Oil News?

Something strange appears to be happening. I was going to post about a report of the suspension of oil exports from the Kirkuk oil fields today. The report is now no longer on the list of stories on the phone site which I accessed it on. As it was an AP feed, I tried to find it on the AP “newxsday.com” site. Nothing.

I now have another dire story listed from the AP report the head of the International Energy Authority warning of a worldwide energy crisis. This is not on the AP site. I have also searched the BBC and CNN sites for both stories.

The news may be so bad, we may have official or unofficial censorship to stop panic
 
Update [2005-9-3 14:11:57 by Londonbear]: The stories are available online but need to be searched for. The headline maybe should read “MS Broadcast Media” as I certainly have seen nothing about either story on CNN but will check BBC News 24 later. One factor may be that their business news staff are off for the weekend when no trading happens in the main markets.
I have a “third generation” mobile(cell) phone on which I can access the latest or most significant stories. These are relays of AP feeds. One I read about 3 hours ago on the bus to go shopping was about an explosion in Iraq early this morning US time. The report went into detail about the capacity of the two parallel pipes taking oil from the northern oilfields round Kirkuk with a capacity of about 1.1 million barrels per day in total. All exports were said to be stopped. This struck me as particularly significant as I seemed to remember that this was the amount of “slack” in the total world production before Katrina.

Now this story is on the phone but not the ordinary sites. I will have to transcribe it so please excuse errors.

BERLIN (Reuters)

The head of the West’s energy watchdog said in an interview on Saturday that Hurricane Katrina could spark a worldwide energy crisis if damage to the US refineries led to a big increase in US purchases of European petrol [gasoline]

“If the crisis affects all products then it’s a worldwide crisis. No one should thing this will be limited to the United States” Claude Mandil, head of the Paris-based Ineternational Energy Agency (IEA) told German daily Die Welt. “They are already buying gasoline in Europe. If the refineries are damaged, that will increase. Then this will become a worldwide crisis very quickly”.

Mandil told the paper that high oil prices represented a risk for global economic growth and urged consumers to alter their behaviour to save more energy and limit the fallout.

Poor countries were bound to suffer most from a recent surge in energy prices, which has been aggravated by Katrina and the sortages it has cause, he said.

On Friday the IEA launched a rescue plan to ease these shortages, saying its 26 members would release two million barrels per day of oil over a 30-day period.

US gasoline prices have spiked by nearly a fifth over the past week, pushing up prices around the world.

The interview itself was obviously before the bombing in Iraq but is still available in German on Die Welt site

Seems that either these two stories are being submerged in the Katrina coverage and the reports of the at the pump prices or something more sinister is going on. Could there be an unofficial agreement to downplay the story until after the Labor Day weekend in the USA?

By the way, I am sure like a lot of Europeans, I will be royally pissed off if our strategic reserves are only being sold or donated to the USA just to keep the pump price down and then we see huge traffic lines on CNN on either Labor Day or Thanksgiving.