Tuesday 20 November 2018

#Saveourinternet

The EU is flawed. All acknowledge that, but for europhile nats surely this story is inconvenient in its timing. EU reforms of copyright systems are behind a threat to video freedom on the web. By making hosts like Youtube liable for copyright from the moment a video is posted, they would force then to block lots of stuff whose making certain of its content's copyright. This will stifle art. This is Youtube's campaign: www.youtube.com/saveyourinternet/>www.youtube.com/saveyourinternet/">www.youtube.com/saveyourinternet/

Meanwhile: deal Brexit, hard Brexit, People's Vote, indyref2, vote of confidence, election - anyone asks me or you what is going to happen, next there is only one honest answer! NO IDEA !

But the polls are hardening against an indyref2, for all the anger and pressures for it that are increasingly coming from the fundamentalist nats in parliament (Patrick Harvie) and in tge comments sections on the National newspaper's site and FB page. There are No leads of 4 to 10 points at present. Not an encouragement to Sturgeon to gamble !

Tuesday 30 October 2018

there there let's support you, now do as yer told

From the British budget rather than the Scottish, in context of the announced end of austerity, an announced new spend of £10 million on mental health for ex-army. The Daily Record reported this, around their high suicide rate.

Which matters. Matters a lot to human life. Trauma of the whole military scene and experience, for all history it has been a bad aspect of the world that it exists. They printed a story of a life ended at age 28 by this impact. The more the need to care about it chips away at the brutal nature of what it is, the better for the whole condition of life.

But - problem. Daily Record is a powerful media, a world of its own, can print what it wants. It spun the solution, predictably, as being this higher spending. "need to know support will always be there." There is no way to make it print a word on the civil liberty danger behind what it advocates. The danger that the support turns into forcing things on them and ordering them to make personal changes unrelated to why they came for support.

The things said by the Record and govt are only common sense if the support shall not have that unsupportive oppressive dangerous power !

At the session of the UN Human Rights Council, High Commissioner Zeid Ra’adAl Hussein again called for the exclusion of psychiatric coercion, as an absolutely unacceptable violation of human rights. That is already for years the position of the UN Committee on rights of Disabled People. This latest step in human rights is publicly supportable thus:
civilsociety@ohchr.org InfoDesk@ohchr.org Tel +41 22 917 9220
OHCHR address:
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Palais Wilson, 52 rue des Pâquis, CH-1201 Geneva, Switzerland.

Monday 8 October 2018

This is what 100K looks like

This photo from last year's events in Barcelona elpais.com/elpais/2017/10/03/inenglish/1507033493_729669.html. This is what a crowd of 100 thousand looks like.

It's not what the crowd at the nat's "All Under One Bannner" Edinburgh rally looks like in the photos, the 2 days of photo page spreads in the National, or looked like if you were there. The figures that match what it actually looks like are 6 to 10 K.

They were clumpily and thinly spread out. They were surrounded by wide tracts of empty meadow, which they were all on one side of. It was far smaller than their last couple of years' Glasgow Green rallies. Smaller event and smaller crowd.

The 100K figure then is fake news and nonsense. Yet it is repeated in Lesley Riddoch's Scotsman column. The Disqus commenters know what to ask? Where were the coaches or cars parked, needed to bring a crowd of that size?!! Good minds to think of that. With no temporary toilets set up where were a crowd of that size peeing? Desperate to invent a momentum that's not there, while the polls remain unsafe for them to call a ref, and the infighting over it is audible between rally speakers.

Wednesday 1 August 2018

Marchmont and Morningside

This National story, on "Yes surveys" by local groups in hope of getting through to undecideds and "mibbes" - comes from the experience of a local group in a No-voting and affluent part of Edinburgh - from Yes Marchmont and Morningside, Of interest because they also have a guy claiming expertise in international law, who was on their Meadows Festival stall.

So as well as doing the surveys they can put in writing anything that voters need put in writing. Specifically, that guy can get Yes to issue in writing in Scottish govt's name, what he told me only in unrecorded speech at the Meadows Festival. That our treaty obligations in Europe, to Council of Europe not just EU, will guarantee that citizenship by parental descent will be unrefusable. That the strand of nats who are racist against that, who were the dominant voice in ref1, won't get their way.

History is full of states breaking treaties: I can't take his word that any treaty will enforce it. Can only be sure you will observe it when as an internal action within Scotland you directly write it into our proposed state's red line human rights standards. According to him you have to. But can he put your pen where his mouth is? That is my survey question back to Yes Marchmont and Morningside.

Sunday 27 May 2018

No new case for nowt

Right - now that we've seen it online, we know it contains nothing but economics. Economics shown to be opinion, as it is argued over by columnists from both sides. The more militantly optimistic nats feeling let down by its recommendation that we go for a fiscally powerless unauthorised use of the pound, which they had not thought good to argue for in indyref1! Clearly the hired opinion makers for a new case for optimism have run scared of optimism in the fiscal cost + potential austerity of committing to try to create a currency.

Anyway - "Scotland:a New Case For Optimism" IS NOT A SECOND WHITE PAPER. The Herald had tried to bill it as one, ahead of it coming out. It contains no plans for a Scottish state outside its economic strategy. Mpst importantly it contains nothing on rules for citizenship. While it has a pro-immigration sentiment, it says nothing about remofing the bigoted racist atrocity against a section of Scots, that was in Yes's offer last time round, + making citizenship by parental descent unrefusable.

So it has changed nothing, as yet, around that moral reason to vote No. That supervenes over all the document's economic thoughts regardless of their merits.

Sunday 6 May 2018

nat rally pathetically fading

Yesterday's annual, intended to be mass, nat rally at Glasgow Green was shrunken and declined in every way, compared to last year. Smaller turnout, fewer stalls, fewer performers, even pathetically few speakers, only 2 who the public have heard of, Tommies Sheppard + Sheridan.

Farcically, nats on Facebook are now slagging the Sunday Herald for Unionist spin to play down the rally. Like saying they showed the wrong photo of the encounter with Union Jack demonstrators, that failed to show Saltires streaming back down the road. But the Sunday Herald is famously the nat- supporting Sunday! Yes, NATS ACTUALLY SLAGGING THEIR OWN PAPER THE SUNDAY HERALD + ACCUSING IT OF UNIONIST REPORTING !!

When even the Sunday Herald has to go with a count of only 35K marchers, you know it was a flop and the TREND IS DOWNWARDS.

All ths SNP deputy leader candidates declined speaking invites, to the compere's frustration, + chose not to be there. No Greens or SSP either - clearly "All Under One Banner" is exactly what it's not. It's just a ritual by one set of the nat faithful, not driving any momentum towards anything.

Under the M8 footbridge at Garnethill, traffic jammed up chaotically at crazy angles was stopping a sirening ambulance from driving.

Tuesday 17 April 2018

bridge parting troubled waters

The absurd declaring unsound and closing of 2 modern road bridges on the Forth-Clyde Canal, breaking the through navigability of the canal, and even trapping some boats in the middle section unless they can be removed overland, and no word on timely repairing of modern built bridges that must be repairable! Whwt a shambles of running a country that is not yet the state they want it to become! To break up one of its travel networks, the one associated with the engineering star of the Falkirj Wheel!

It shows they can't be planning to need canal boat owners' votes in a ref any time soon.

Saturday 24 March 2018

in bed with the Tories !

Since the indyref, nats of all their parties have repeated and repeated unto infinity their wrong accusation that Labour damaged itself by being allied to, or "in bed with", the Tories in the No campaign. Keep repeating something to generate a left wing doctrinal peer pressure to accept and believe it.

Today the now annual demo of Scottish feeling against Brexit was held at Holyrood. The speakers included Joanna Cherry, SNP, Patrick Harvie, Green, and - Struan Stevenson, Tory. The organisers the European Movement in Scotland praised cross party working for the objective of trying somehow to stop Brexit. Cherry thanked Stevenson for his participation and celebrated that she had shared a banner with him in this demo.They celebrated their working together on a single issue.

They were right to do that. But by it, they proved Labour also was right to do it in the No campaign. TO ANYONE WHO HEARD OR RECORDED WHAT THE NATS SAID AT TODAY'S DEMO, THEY HAVE EXPLODED AND FINISHED, UTTERLY REFUTED, THEIR MALICIOUS JIBE ABOUT LABOUR JOINING WITH THE TORIES IN THE INDYREF. THE SAME AS WHAT LABOUR DID, THEY ARE NOW DOING THEMSELVES BY THEIR PUBLIC ADMISSION.