Simon, of The Dossing Times had the ingenious idea of responding to Enda Kenny’s suggestion to drug test schoolchildren with a petition to drug test Dail Eireann.

Then Damien Mulley had the brilliant idea of coming up with a logo to spread the word. So here it is, put together by myself, for anyone to use.

Feel free to grab the logo and put it in your sidebar of your website or blog, or put it in a blog post, or wherever you think it might be handy.

At the bottom of this post you will see three different sizes, 200 pixels wide, 150 pixels wide and 100 pixels wide. One of those should fit in your sidebar.

Please, please, please download them and put them on your site with a link to the petition so we can get as many signatures as possible to show Enda what we think of his suggestion.

If you have any difficulty in using them leave a comment and I’ll try to help you if I can.

There’s even an EPS version of the logo (900k) available for those who know what that is - so you can print out posters if you felt inclined!

Just spotted on Damien Mulley’s blog that Enda Kenny wants to drug test schooldkids and that there is a petition online which calls for politicians to be also drug tested.

If Enda Kenny is seriously suggesting this, then I absolutely think the same should be done in the Dáil. What insanity.

According to quotes, Kenny thinks drug testing will discourage drug taking due to peer pressure. This is a stinker of an idea. As several other have asked, what happens when a child is tested positive?

There must be a better way, as one commenter said over on politics.ie, incentivising those who could voluntarily produce a clean result might be a better approach. I certainly don’t see any benefit to going after schoolkids who are taking drugs - it will surely only lead to further alienation, resentment and truancy to avoid testing. Simon over on Irishelection.com makes a few good points on his post about it.

To quote a another commenter on Politics.ie:

40 years of criminalisation, hectoring, screeching, actual real wars, locking people up, cant, hypocrisy, and creating a powerful wealthy and violent criminal empire - while all the while drugs become cheaper, more available and more widely used - and what is your answer? We have to “accelerate” our right-wing codology and start criminalising our children. FFS. Catch a grip.

I’m sure nobody who knows me will be surprised to hear I would be against drug testing schoolchildren, but I also just finished reading the Corner - a book which highlights the failure of Americas ‘War on Drugs’. Let’s not make all the same mistakes over and over.

Is this just designed as an easy way to get concerned conservative parents emotionally invested in Kenny for the elections…?

Get a button for your sidebar and spread the word…!

Help the the biggest citizens action against global warming!

The “Alliance pour la Planète” (national group of Global Warming foundations) is launching a message to all the citizens. 5 minutes for the planet : all people shut down your lights, television… on February the 1st between 19h55 and 20h00.

The aim isn’t to win 5 minutes of energy only on this day, but to alert citizens, medias and politicians about the Global Warning (which is also the aim of Global Warming Awareness2007 SEO contest), and urgent need to act.

5 minutes to help the planet is nothing for you, it costs nothing, and it will prove to the future president of France that Global Warming is an important topic.

Why February the 1st ? A new report from a group of specialists on Global Warming will be released this day. This event will take place in France (edit: but why not make it international right?): that’s why you must be involved in it to show how the Global Warming alert is important!

If we are all involved in this event, it will have a real impact on medias and politicians, and we are less than three months from the presidential elections. Please talk about this message on your web sites and newsletters

Remember, its GMT + 1 over there.

Here’s the official website, but it seems to be down at the moment:
http://www.climatecrisiscoalition.org/
Cheers,

Daniel

This is in relation to Franks post below, re Capitalism. You can apply this to one of many food types produced but one that mystifies me is a sweetener called ‘High Fructose Corn Syrup’ (HFCS). HFCS was developed in Japan (circa 1970’s) and adopted by the Corn Belt of the USA as a stable and cheap method of obtaining sweetener. It is more complicated to make than cane or beet sugar, but is cheaper in overall end-cost and easier to manipulate, transport etc.

I got to wondering why, when I pick up something produced in Europe you rarely saw HFCS on the label and it seems that every food stuff you pick up and read from the States has HFCS?

Well after a bit of digging I found out that in the EU, HFCS is very rarely used as an ingredient because the price of natural sugar is at market level. So cheap natural sugar in the EU is supported and encouraged. It seems to me that the strong Farmers Union in the USA have lobbied to have HFCS used in food production rather than change or adopt other sugar types due to economics. Now I know the reason why so much of the food from the States has HFCS and apparently these companies are now trying to relabel HFCS as a natural sweetener!! Reasoning, it comes from corn. But if you actually look into how HFCS is made it is far, far from natural and totally genetically modified. HFCS is linked to under development of children, obesity, diabetes and coronary disease.

People now complain that natural food has become more expensive. Isn’t it funny how in a few short years convenience food has flipped from a luxury to cheap stable? But once again it is simple economics, supply and demand. All done for the corporate greed, due to an invented and facilitated need for the convenience of living the fast life. When you shirk your responsibility for the food you eat, and pass it on to a corporation, what do you expect. Inadvertantly for some of us our jobs are related to fat cats like these. But when I go home, I eat my own food and support the farmer as much a possible. You can’t avoid these things all the time and it seems everything will kill you these days. But watch out for HFCS kids, because even in the States it’s not allowed in baby food. Now what does that tell you!

This is my first post on current affairs. I was going to post in under ‘Film & TV’ but I decided that probably undermined the importance of the message of this piece by Robert Newman who, according to Wikipedia, is a comedian and writer with a social conscience.

I’d never heard of him before I stumbled across this Google video of his entitled ‘Robert Newman’s History of Oil’. It’s well worth a watch, puts a lot of current world affairs in perspective in a humourous and entertaining fashion.

I have to admit, I sometimes wished it was a bit slicker, sometimes wished that he didn’t milk the gags, sometimes wished that the gags took me by surprise more often - but I watched it right to the end all the same.

When I did some searching for his stuff I found that he has done quite a bit of stuff on the BBC and wrote this article for the Guardian on Climate Change which had some lovely quotes:

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. [...] The corporation will outflank every puny law and regulation that seeks to constrain its profitability. It therefore stands in the way of the functioning democracy needed to tackle climate change. Only by breaking up corporate power and bringing it under social control will we be able to overcome the global environmental crisis.

I like him already.

Presenting serious issues in a humourous fashion is a great way to get a message out. I have to admit that I don’t know a huge amount about peak oil issues, or climate change, but it sure seems like the tide is turning and the public are starting to get worried about such little items… but what are we actually doing about any of it?

It’s fashionable among a lot of us now to discuss odd weather patterns as the result of global warming, it’s now even fashionable for many to admit that the US invaded Iraq for Oil, but what are we doing?

I know I’m not doing anything. Except maybe not driving, which doesn’t count because I get taxis everywhere anyway.

Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the c*nts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up. To get himself a cheese sandwich before the food runs out.

At least I watched the video…