Derek on BBC news 24, 8.30 tonight on bird flu

yes, if I don't get trapped by the tube...more from Caroline Lucas and Colin Hines on the links between possible future flu pandemics and factory farming here .

Shell photos attacked at Natural History Museum

Protesters smeared oil-like liquid on the entries in a wildlife photography competition in the central hall of the west London museum.

Camp for Climate Action said their aim was to highlight Shell's "attempts to greenwash its reputation".

The museum said it was pleased to work with Shell saying the firm was taking environmental protection seriously.

The exhibition was closed for cleaning after Saturday's afternoon attack but was expected to re-open on Sunday.



Camp for Climate Action is calling on the museum to end its sponsorship arrangements with Shell.

"This is not an attack on the work of the photographers," said activist Dan Baker.

"Shell does not deserve to have its name associated with their beautiful images."

Companies with operations that threaten the planet look to wildlife as a way of maintaining their image.

Shell and the rest are wrecking our planet's climate. Direct action campaigners will I guess be stepping up their activities against them.

Read more here.

Big politics, small planet

Green politics means looking at everything differently. We have to break oil addiction, respect animals, localise the economy, fight poverty and replace the corporations with mutually owned institutions. None of this is easy and it cannot wait for decades, we have to start now. This means spreading green ideas and rethinking our culture from worm bins to zero waste. It means getting Greens elected. It means using direct action to stop Heathrow expansion or joining trade unions to encourage green production. This is big politics, it's far more than the big brother game of leaders and a push button electorate. We all need to get involved, think deeply about green ideas, recruit members and do more.

More from my message to the Green Party of England and Wales here

FCUK vista microsoft

William Morris, 1884..2007...ecosocialism without apology, the same vision!

vista microsoft...lets re state the economics of this...







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The future is geek
Derek Wall

November 2005


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Why pay out good money to Microsoft and the big corporations when you can get the computer software you need for free? Derek Wall hails the open source revolutionaries



If I am anything to go by, the last people to hear about the open source/free software revolution are activists and writers. Yet there is no doubt that something very big and rather radical is occurring that challenges corporations just as much as the anti-capitalist protests that have erupted since Seattle.

�

Switch on your computer and click on the web and you will use a browser to enter the site you want. Ninety per cent of computers come pre-packaged with Microsoft Explorer. So when you bought your PC a proportion of the cost went to Bill Gates. Yet open source internet browsers like Firefox can be downloaded for free and are generally agreed to do a better job than purchased products. OpenOffice, a free office software suite with almost 50 million downloads, does more than its commercial rivals. The open source movement produces programmes, designs and an ever expanding range of other forms of information that are developed, passed around and continuously adapted and improved.



This stuff isn’t just for geeks. Rasmus Nielsen, a Danish IT expert, has produced Vores Oel, or Our Beer, a recipe that can be used and adapted by anyone. Resisting Carlsberg, who copyright their lager to prevent ‘stealing’, the open source principle has allowed Danes to reclaim their drinking heritage. Vores Oel is, in the words of legendary beer drinker and free source pioneer Richard Stallman, ‘free as in freedom, not free as in free beer’. This means that if a small brewery goes online and makes Vores Oel it can sell the beer but it cannot sell the recipe.



I learned about open source within days of finishing my book on anti-capitalism, Babylon and Beyond, took a look on the computers at work and found all of them connected to the internet with Firefox. Students and teaching colleagues whose computer skills don’t necessarily extend beyond email and web browsing are all keen advocates of open source software.



While the terminology is disputed, open/free source is based on two key principles. First, packages of information are free for use, although sometimes cash is generated by selling allied products or services. Firefox is provided by Mozilla, which generates income via donations to the Mozilla Foundation and work with corporate users.



Participatory production is the second key theme. Individuals are encouraged to adapt and change products – an approach that underlies the development of the world wide web itself. Tim Berners-Lee, who is widely credited as being one of the two main inventors of the web, combined pre-existing software to create it and insisted that it be based on royalty-free use so that it could grow quickly. While Bill Gates is probably the richest man in the world, the web upon which his wealth is based was made for free. This apparent paradox provides a puzzle for conventional economists and indicates that a very different notion of economics is possible.



Economists tie themselves in knots trying to explain open source. To cut a long and complicated story short, traditional capitalist economics assumes that greed is good. If Tim Berners-Lee had charged for every click on the world wide web, he would long ago have bought out Bill Gates and built the first dacha on the moon. Explaining why things are done for free is challenging for a discipline that insists that human beings are always motivated by material self-interest.�



With open source, however, people produce things simply for the satisfaction of doing so. Computer geeks don’t think ‘career first’ but get on the net for the sheer hell of creating something new and ironing out some bugs in their mate’s software. Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is written, edited and available for free. Articles have no named authors, so note even prestige can be seen as the motivation – people just go online and contribute for the satisfaction of doing so.



Some more conventional economic benefits arise from this. Free software development pushes down labour costs and is helping to attack monopolies like Microsoft, earning open source a following among right wing liberatarians. And it has also gained their support as part of what the legal theorist Yochai Benkler terms social sharing. The Economist magazine, in a move that is almost as startling as George Bush converting to Sufism, admits that social sharing is an entirely new form of economics that does without the market and the state.�



But this has obviously progressive implications too. The ‘free’ market is actually built on the principle of enclosure – converting previously unowned, shared resources into paid-for commodities. This is a process that can be seen in one of its most blatant forms today when corporations try to patent naturally occurring seeds so that peasants who have previously used them for free have to pay for them – a process that leads to economic expansion on the one hand and increased poverty and restrictions on freedom on the other. A similar situation applies with computer software, where the capacity for creative sharing is reined in by the enclosure of computer code as corporate intellectual property.



Open source challenges this approach and returns software to common ownership. This is far from a new idea. Commons regimes, where local communities share the use of common land through rationing, are found throughout history. The term ‘usufruct’ is used to denote this process, whereby a resource can be borrowed and used as long as it is put back in its original state. Open source means it is put back in a better state than it started out.



Attempts to produce for free, to share and to make resources serve the community will always be resisted by corporations, which are invariably keen to promote renewed enclosure. The non-corporate vision, however, is that the free use of productive resources will facilitate the creation of a society that is both ecologically sustainable and equal, based on participation rather than command. The future of radical politics, then, is inextricably linked with the fight for an open source or free society. One day our descendents may even say with amazement that their grandparents used to work for money rather than for pleasure and necessity.



Derek Wall is currently running for the post of Green Party principal speaker. He has just published Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements, which can be bought from the Red Pepper website for the special price of �12.99.

climate deniers, david irving and the weather

climate change report today, yet the deniers still speed us on to heat death,

thanks to Richard for this, get involve, ok they fry but so do we


If anyone you know ( or any of you personally ) can make this picket with ccc london branch and hopefully quite a few others from the stop climate chaos coalition for some or all of the morning it would be great.

Obviously now we get to be near the real problem merchants to make as much peacful fuss as possible at short notice.

Phil Thornhill and one other of us have got tickets and will be in there getting stuck in .................................!?! ( and millbank too !)

come to the heart of the beast ....................................

romayne has promised to get this out on the london list tonight saturday, hopefully.

Onwards and upwards, Natural power to the people

best regards, Richard Trevan From: Phil Thornhill Reply To: To: Subject: Urgent - Climate Disinformation Meeting, Monday Sent: 02 February 2007 19:56:08
Campaign against Climate Change


Urgent Alert : Climate Disinformation Meeting this Monday 5th

9.15 am to 1.45 pm

At the Atrium Restaurant, 4 Millbank, London.

This is basically a disinformation exercise in response to the IPCC report (the one that says the rate the planet is warming is even faster than scientists had previously predicted etc…). It is organised by a Canadian organisation, the Fraser Institute, an Exxon Funded 'free-market' oriented group with a history of supporting climate-denier "scientists" etc….

'Guests' include : Nigel Lawson, Dr. Andrei Illarionov, the advisor who tried to stop Putin ratifying Kyoto, and Bellamy.

More info on the Fraser Institute and the "report" they are pushing at the meeting below:

Here is some background on the fraser institute:
http://www.desmogblog.com/fraser-institute-ipcc-london-report

Here is the report detailing the fools involved:
http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/DeSmogBlog%20note%20on%20the%20fraser%20institute.pdf

Also check out the Fraser Institute website at www.fraserinstitute.ca

The timetable for the event is:

Media advisory 10.00 am
Registration: 11:45 am Lunch: 12:15 pm Presentation: 12:45 pm Adjournment: 1:45 pm

If you can, please make it along ! Its important to counter this disinformation – it may seem laughable but it IS damaging

With Brian Haw and Miranda

Sea Shepherd; Eco terrorists I like

The president of a militant anti-whaling group has vowed to "do whatever it takes" to disrupt a Japanese fleet planning to harpoon nearly 1,000 whales in the waters off Antarctica.
Sea Shepherd, notorious for its aggressive tactics, has two ships and one helicopter stalking the Japanese vessels in the Ross Sea, south-east of Australia. Japan, which has been whaling in the area since mid-December, aims to catch up to 935 minke whales and 10 endangered fin whales this summer, supposedly for scientific research purposes.
The Canadian-based conservation group, which Japan has denounced as an "eco-terrorist" organisation, is promising a major confrontation. But first it has to find the fleet, which it says is using a new satellite tracking system to elude it.
Sea Shepherd has offered a $25,000 (£13,000) reward to anyone who can provide the ships' coordinates. It has also appealed to the New Zealand government, whose air force has filmed the fleet, it believes. But it has not yet received "anything conclusive", Paul Watson, the group's president and founder said yesterday.

great article on Sea Shephard's campaign under the good Captain Paul Watson to sink the whalers in the Independent today