Fans make Liverpool takeover move

"Thousands of Liverpool fans have already demonstrated their dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs," said Mr Taylor."Large amounts of debt often devolves onto clubs newly purchased, but the fans know that in the end, it will be they themselves who will have to pay it off through increased ticket prices and other schemes."In such a case, why not simply buy the club yourselves?"

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Yay! Older people's play area!!

"The UK's first playground specifically for older people has opened near Manchester.

The "older people's play area" in Dam Head Park, Blackley, in north Manchester, features six pieces of equipment - featuring the slogan "Never too old to play" - designed to provide gentle exercise."

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It's the forties you need to look out for

"Only in their 50s do most people emerge from the low period. But encouragingly, by the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20-year-old. Perhaps realising that such feelings are completely normal in mid-life might even help individuals survive this phase better."

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Jérôme Kerviel

"'He was your ideal son-in-law,' said 62-year-old client Martine Le Pohon, who remembers Jerome helping his mother out on Saturdays at Un Monde Imagin' Hair. 'And if it turns out that he has stood up to the system to the tune of €5m, well, as far as I am concerned, that makes him even more ideal.'"

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The Pursuit of Profit

"An industry that socialises losses while privatising profit, and that has the capacity to create booms and busts alike, has to be as closely regulated as any utility."

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Chomsky interview

"Take this recent Annapolis meeting about Israel-Palestine. Why did they pick Annapolis? Is that the only meeting place in the Washington area? Well, Iranians presumably notice that Annapolis is the base from which the U.S. Navy is being sent to threaten Iran. You think they can’t see that? American editorial writers and commentators can’t see it, but I’m sure Iranians can."

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Watch this - zeitgeist movie

Its long. About 2hrs.

But there's a convincing interpretation of imperialist formation from pagan religion to the federal reserve to climates of fear.

Granted some holes exist too - 1)ethnocentrism of subject matter, 2) where are all the whistle blowers who would have been needed to carry out the activities outlined by video. & 3) im not sure about the nano technology stuff at end...

that said its worth watching

zietgeist movie

Social inequality and contemporary stratification

"Addressing the real conflicts of interest will be a complex matter, but one thing is clear: the government has long taken the position that the wealth of those at the very top doesn't matter to the rest of society. They have concentrated their energy on helping those at the bottom. It isn't enough. We are all social beings, and we assess our worth by looking at those around us. Labour should be bold enough to start by increasing taxes on the very wealthy - simply because, as a society, we can't afford to make that the standard against which the rest of us are measured."

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War at sea over whaling

"Yesterday evening a nautical drama was being played out between seven ships deep in the heaving, wild and normally extremely lonely Southern Ocean on the edge of Antarctica. The Nisshin Maru, a large Japanese whaling factory ship, was steaming due south at 15 knots in heavy seas with a crew of 80 and with the carcasses of possibly 50 whales aboard.

Two miles behind it, in full sight but not in radio contact, was the Esperanza, a Greenpeace vessel converted from a Russian navy fire-fighting ship with a volunteer crew of 21 nationalities and a Dutch captain. The Esperanza is well equipped, as you would expect from a large and well-resourced operation with more than 200,000 members, but it looks tiny beside the vast whaling vessel.

Steaming towards both ships, and due to meet them in possibly a day or two among the icebergs and the fogs, is the MV Steve Irwin, the black-painted flagship of Captain Paul Watson and the California-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the world's most uncompromising environmental enforcement group. His crew is smaller, but - like that of the Esperanza - made up of brilliant and committed seamen. Discipline is everything at sea and both sets of volunteers, male and female and drawn from just about every country, respond magnificently to the challenge and the danger.

Yesterday afternoon the MV Steve Irwin was 60S 78E, roughly 2,500 miles south-west of Fremantle in Australia, pursuing a group of four small whaling ships that the Japanese are this year using to kill nearly 1,000 whales in the Antarctic whale sanctuary. This little taskforce is thought to be heading towards an as yet unknown rendezvous with both the Nisshin Maru and a supply vessel to offload any whales they may have harpooned and pick up stores.

But the chase is in particular earnest because one of these smaller whalers, the Yusshin Maru No 2, has already clashed with the Irwin and is now running from it with two of the Sea Shepherd boat's crew. In an act of extraordinary courage - or stupidity - Giles Lane from Brighton and Benjamin Potts from Australia leapt aboard the Yusshin Maru No 2 from the Irwin to deliver a letter to the Japanese captain requesting him to leave the whale sanctuary. The Japanese, not believing their luck, promptly held them captive and sped over the horizon. Now there is an international diplomatic incident, with the Japanese saying they will only hand them back if Sea Shepherd agrees to certain demands, and Watson saying this is "an illegal act of hostage-taking".

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the end of the world...

"On Tuesday, in Madrid, politicians, non-governmental organisations and civil society leaders from across the globe begin two days of dialogue aimed at addressing the growing polarisation between nations and cultures worldwide. The objective is not only to promote cross-cultural understanding, but also to create and develop partnerships and joint initiatives aimed at promoting an “Alliance of Civilisations”.

This is, in my view, an honourable objective, and one around which we should all unite. But in doing so we need to ensure that the voice of the weak and marginalised is heard. A striking characteristic of the modern era is the rapid diffusion of ideas and values from the centres of global power to the rest of humanity. Unfortunately, there is a tendency among the powerful to expect the rest to accept their world view without question. This is not always possible, nor is it desirable.

Non-western civilisations and cultures have their own unique history, traditions and theology, which often embody ideas and values that are fundamentally different from what the west has to offer. Nowhere is this divergence more apparent than on issues pertaining to religion."

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The Naturalisation of Capitalism

"Marco Cicala, a Leftist Italian journalist, told me about his recent weird experience: when, in an article, he once used the word "capitalism," the editor asked him if the use of this term is really necessary - could he not replace it by a synonymous one, like "economy"? What better proof of the total triumph of capitalism than the virtual disappearance of the very term in the last 2 or 3 decades? No one, with the exception of a few allegedly archaic Marxists, refers to capitalism any longer. The term was simply struck from the vocabulary of politicians, trade unionists, writers and journalists - even of social scientists"

From Slavoj Zizek

What if we shut down the 750 U.S. overseas bases?

"What if the US just packed up and left Iraq and Afghanistan, and brought the troops all home, shut down the 750-odd overseas bases we operate around the globe, and slashed our military budget by 75 percent? That would be an instant savings of roughly $365 billion per year."

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That's No Moon...

But it's SO FUN to quote movies all the time... (XKCD comic).

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Google's Knol experiment to rival Wikipedia?

"I would compare Knol to Blogger, and eventually, I think it will have Digg-like elements. Knol is like Blogger because it's a personal publishing platform. It's all about giving authors a platform for writing. It's just a like a blog, but much more structured. If you like a Knoller, you'll likely want to read more written by that person, or even subscribe to his work."

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Santa arressted

"An Imperial Stormtrooper commando broke into Santa's Factory in the North Pole yesterday evening, killing an undetermined number of elves, arresting the owner and confiscating his sled."

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Cheneys Shares up 3281%

An analysis released by a Democratic senator found that Vice President Dick Cheney's Halliburton stock options have risen 3,281 percent in the last year. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) asserts that Cheney's options -- worth $241,498 a year ago -- are now valued at more than $8 million..

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Word Bank: US No Longer Top Donor

Yesterday, the World Bank reported that the US has lost its status as the largest donor to the Bank’s main fund for poor countries, as Britain secured a record amount of aid with a pledge of increased funding.

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Lewis Hamilton vs The Stig - Who Won?

the Stig's best lap time is challenged by the F1 rookie phenom Lewis Hamilton.

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Letter in NYT about Embedded Anthros

"Its authors note that, far more and far less than “etiquette lessons,” as you put it, are being sought from anthropologists. The Human Terrain Teams are to provide military commanders “a culturally oriented counterpart to tactical intelligence systems.” The teams integrate anthropologists with security clearances with tactical intelligence officers and aim to “fill the cultural knowledge void by gathering ethnographic, economic, and cultural data pertaining to the battlefield” (p.12). The article explicitly likens the Human Terrain Teams to the CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) program from the Vietnam War. This should send a chill down the spine of anyone from your generation, since it is well known that the CORDS teams were linked, under Project Phoenix, to the targeted assassination of thousands of Vietnamese. Anthropological research was used in Vietnam to help select victims for assassination, and we fear that this misuse of anthropological research may be repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite whatever humanitarian intentions the anthropologists and other cultural experts may have for participating. Further evidence of both kinetic and non-kinetic Pentagon goals for the anthropological knowledge sought can be found in a number of places, including one high-ranking Pentagon briefing posted on the Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ website; this briefing says of Human Terrain Mapping that it “enables the entire kill chain.”

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9 Words That Don't Mean What You Think

NonplussedPeople think it means: Unperturbed, not worried.Actually means: Utterly perplexed or confused. It comes from the Latin non plus (a state in which nothing more can be done).The misunderstanding would seem to stem from people making semi-educated guesses as to the word's meaning, which kind of sounds like it means "unruffled" or something like that. "

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