Voorstanders van ACTA schermen ermee dat de tekst zogenaamd niet meer geheim zou zijn. Dit is wederom gewoon bedrog. De tekst van het verdrag is welliswaar vrijgegeven, maar hoe die tekst geinterpreteerd moet - en ZAL gaan!! - worden is nogsteeds hardstikke geheim. Uiteraard worden we pas daarmee geconfronteerd na de ratificatie van ACTA

Waarom zouden die voor interpretatie en uiteindelijke implementatie essentiele onderhandelingsstukken nou zo koppig en angstvallig geheim worden gehouden? Je mag 1x raden: Exactemundo -> het is niet voor niets dat AMNESTY oproept tot het boycotten van ACTA


Ergo: ACTA is gewoon een Paard van Troje. Aan de buitenkant ziet het er wellicht relatief onschadelijk uit, incl. wenselijke aspecten, maar wat er echt in/achter zit is essentieel en tegelijk hardnekkig en strikt geheim. Er is i.m.h.o. maar 1 correcte manier om met een paard van Troje om te gaan: buiten de muur laten staan en er twee dozijn brandpijlen in schieten! Dus expliciet niet: binnenhalen, en daarna maar kijken wat ervan komt.
-> opgeruimd staat netjes, en dat zal europolitici meteen leren om in het vervolg dergelijke onderhandelingsprocessen open te houden, zoals het ook hoort.

PS: de truuk om ACTA langs het hof te sturen is niet alleen tijdrekken. Wat het hof gaat doen is niets meer dan op instigatie van de EC - om even binnen de illustratie te blijven - de buitenkant van dat paard van troje onderzoeken op oneffenheden: de EC bepaalt namelijk volledig het wat en hoe rond de vraagstelling aan het hof. Waarna uiteraard een verder onzinnige legitimatie volgt dat er in ACTA zelf niets juridisch/ongrondwettelijks staat.
Die voor interpretatie essentiele onderhandelingsdocumenten blijven namelijk 1.) geheim, en 2.) in dit onderzoek buiten beschouwing. Wederom bedrog dus...

Vaclav Havel “Civilization's Thin Veneer”
Commencement address at Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
May 1995

Dramatist and dissident, Mr Havel dedicated his life to the Czechoslovak intellectual opposition during the years of Soviet occupation. For standing by his convictions he spent five years in prison. He was elected president of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and of the Czech Republic in 1993.

30 Major Corporations Paid No Income Taxes In The Last Three Years, While Making $160 Billion | ThinkProgress

Former Communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev told an audience at Lafayette College on Wednesday night that the United States’ economic problems heralded the need for a new American “perestroika,” defined by a “new world order” and a system of “global governance”.

Speaking to a crowd of 3,600 people during an event that was broadcast live nationwide, Gorbachev made reference to riots and demonstrations that have swept the world over the last two years, including the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States.
“The world needs goals that will bring people together,” he said. “Some people in the United States were pushing the idea of creating a global American empire, and that was a mistake from the start. Other people in America are now giving thought to the future of their country. The big banks, the big corporations, are still paying the same big bonuses to their bosses. Was there ever a crisis for them? . . . I believe America needs its own perestroika.”
How will this American perestroika manifest itself? As a “new world order” characterized by a system of “global governance,” according to Gorbachev.

Would you believe this could be the new look of solar power?
7th grader Aidan Dwyer was walking in the woods during the winter, and looking up, he noticed something about the bare branches above him. They didn’t appear to be growing randomly. So he took some measurements of the angles of the branches, crunched some [...]

"Mexico’s carnage is that of the age of effective global government by multinational banks – banks that, according to Antonio Maria Costa, the former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, have been for years kept afloat by laundering drug and criminal profits. Cartel bosses and street gangbangers cannot go around in trucks full of cash. They have to bank it – and politicians could throttle this river of money, as they have with actions against terrorist funding. But they choose not to, for obvious reasons: the good burgers of capitalism and their political quislings depend on this money, while bleating about the evils of drugs cooked in the ghetto and snorted up the noses of the rich.

So Mexico’s war is how the future will look, because it belongs not in the 19th century with wars of empire, or the 20th with wars of ideology, race and religion – but utterly in a present to which the global economy is committed, and to a zeitgeist of frenzied materialism we adamantly refuse to temper: it is the inevitable war of capitalism gone mad. Twelve years ago Cardona and the writer Charles Bowden curated a book called Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future. They could not have known how prescient their title was. In a recent book, Murder City, Bowden puts it another way: “Juarez is not a breakdown of the social order. Juarez is the new order.”

The Nano House
Designers in India have built a tiny building with bamboo walls, fiber roof and a mud floor which means it can be built anywhere using local materials for $315 (£197). (Pics)

 
Mahindra, the Indian automobiles to defence multinational company, designed the house as part of a Harvard design challenge to build a house for under [...]

Corporations mined space, time, and now they're mining perspective. Also, quality background on the EIC.

NYU Professor Nouriel Roubini warns that a “perfect storm” could hit the global economy.
Nouriel Roubini, a Professor at NYU  has seized the headlines again this morning.  Roubin is warning that a “perfect storm” of economic disasters may clobber the global economy in 2013.
 
Roubini’s perfect storm consists of four factors:
-The U.S.’s basket-case of an economy and budget deficit,
-A [...]