McCain is preparing a war with Russia should he be elected

OK, that's just speculation, but you have to agree that this article really looks like McCain is seizing the opportunity for a shock therapy opening given to him by Putin, who also wants an opportunity to apply shock therapy on the Russian people!

Geeezz isn't the world depressing today...

When the shock therapists of the world were submitted to votes (without wars) they always lost the elections or at a minimum fared very poorly in the popularity polls (Pinochet, Thatcher, Yeltsin, etc.). The neoliberal reforms they wanted (which amount to a privatization of profits and socialization of costs), were not in favor with the people, they needed something to suspend democracy.

Pinochet repeatedly used state terror (the real terrorism!), killed thousands of people to avoid losing elections, Thatcher invented[2] a war[1] for a piece of rock that nobody really wants and then crushed the unions at home with the same arguments used in the war and Yeltsin just took power directly by surrounding the parliament with tanks and setting it on fire.

Whatever they use, they try to first shock people into obedience (remember the post-September 11 wimpy democrats?) and then unleash a set of policies that hijack all rights the people may have gained through the democratic process -- in the process making huge profits! (Remember Dick Cheney as a board member of Haliburton which got billions in payouts from the government? -- yes, because taxpayers would certainly not pay Halliburton, when the soldiers don't even get decent medical care!).

People of the world, be ware of your governments, if they shock you don't fall for it!
The Spanish people should be seen as the real heroes in the crisis of March 2004, when the government wanted to shock them, they said no and took democracy seriously!

[1] " The fact is this regime had no need to generate consensus among the Argentine population, for it was a highly repressive authoritarian regime. The dirty war had created a climate of fear so strong that civil society essentially fell apart. The press was censoring itself out of fear caused by the “disappearances” of several journalists who had criticized the regime." -- in http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2004/nov/mcclureNOV04.asp

[2] "From a political point of view, the war helped the reelection of Margaret Thatcher (who was losing popularity before the conflict started)" -- in http://www.yendor.com/vanished/falklands-war.html

Calling on Naomi Klein to set her book about Disaster Capitalism free (creative commons license)

I urge Naomi Klein  (Google cache in case the site is overloaded) to make her book, The Shock Doctrine, the Rise of disaster Capitalism (Google cache), free. Free for all to read and listen to (Audiobook).

This is a book too important to be kept under the shackle of the ' (one-dollar one vote) capitalist system. This book needs to go democratic (one-person one-vote), it needs to be available to all of the people in the world that need to read it in order to avoid the real catastrophe that Disaster Capitalism describes. Their very life is at stake, as illustrated by what happened in Chile on September 11th, 1973 and the subsequent years.

I urge you, Naomi to consider the benefit to the world that this book could bring.
I cannot ask you to rescind your copyright, nor do I want to. By all means continue to sell the paper book to sustain your writing efforts, we need you to continue investigating and writing.

But consider donating the copyright to the democratic populace of the world that needs to listen to your ideas, to read your accounts that make our heart bleed with rage against the so called (and self-titled) leaders of the world.

Why not make the text (and the text only) of your book free for reproduction in Wikibooks.org or a similar site? I'm sure that in no time you would receive a large ammount of volunteer work to translate your book into many languages (see wikipedia as an example), and to bring this important information to the people that will never pick up the paperback in english or any of the major languages in which it wil, no doubt, be published.

Request donations from your site to support your future book projects (maybe even non-fiction documentaries?), continue to request payment for the paperback book, but let your text free, the world needs to listen and to read this book!

Here's to hoping that his letter has an impact.

The "unpeople" want peace, says Chomsky

Chomsky succeeds again in clearly stating that "We want peace, not war".

The government of Iran merits severe condemnation on many counts, but the Iranian threat remains a desperate construction of those who arrogate to themselves the right to rule the world, and consider any impediment to their just rule to be criminal aggression. That is the primary threat that should concern us, as it concerns saner minds in the West, and the unpeople of the rest of the world.

Iltasanomat continues its campaign to promote Stubb for the next Finnish presidential race

Iltasanomat(IS) (which belongs to the same company as Helsingin Sanomat) continues its overt campaign for Alexander Stubb, perhaps in preparation for the next presidential campaign.

In this article IS exaggerates and falsifies the conditions in which Stubb landed in Tbilisi, Georgia, stating that he is "well, even if the airport was being bombed before he arrived".

Well, the reality is (according to Reuters), that there was one (yes, one) bomb dropped on a near-by military airport and it happened (same article) hours before Stubb and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner arrived at the airport.

Surely Finland has enough brave and corageous people, we don't really need to invent a false event to believe that Stubb (and all others that will run for president, I'm sure) is courageous. If you agree with this, then you must also agree that the conditions were falsified to give undeserved attention to one detail (the perilous arrival of courageous Stubb) as opposed to focusing on the issue, Stubb (as OCDE chairman) was traveling to represent Europe in the cease-fire efforts.

Maybe IS (just) did a pitiful journalistic job and took at face value the statement by Georgian's president that Russia had bombed the airport "just half-hour before they [Kouchner and Stubb] arrived".

Or maybe IS just "believed" the Interior Ministry spokes person that stated that the bomb fell only 200 meters away from a runway (yet no damage was caused).

Of course, they could have checked google to see the AFP release (here's another)

If the author of the IS article had spent some time checking the sources (as should be done), the "other side of the story" could also have been found. Turns out, of course, the "other side" is not that reliable either, which makes the journalist's difficult enough as to prevent it from making categoric affirmations of danger to our "beloved" Stubb. But such is life, and IS had no problem putting the news item in the first page of their paper version today.

I guess the SPD should wake up and start putting it's candidate on the press already. Stubb is not losing any time -- the race for the next president in Finland has started.