A cautionary tale for bloggers (and politicians!)

Nathalie Lubbe Bakker probably regrets posting under her own name; hopefully Mr. De Crem is feeling a bit chastened as well:

Current Belgian Minister of Defense Pieter De Crem apparently stumbled into a Belgian bar in New York City on Monday evening with his entourage. Following his visit, bartender Nathalie Lubbe Bakker blogged about their visit (in Dutch), talking about how disgusted she was of how drunk De Crem was and how embarrassed she was about his behavior. Worst part, she wrote, was the fact that one of the politician’s advisors admitted to her that the meetings they were there for on taxpayer’s money were in fact canceled because the UN was meeting in Geneva (which is about 330 miles from Brussels). He reportedly told her they had decided to come to NY anyway despite being aware of the cancellation because the policital situation here was ‘calm’ and that he’d ‘never visited the city anyway’.

A couple of days later, someone from De Crem’s office had a telephone call with Nathalie’s boss, after which she was promptly fired. This was initially denied by the politician, and it remains unclear if her termination was a direct result of the call or the blog post in question.

From TechCrunch. I've been a bit nervous of this myself; I started to get paranoid about employers finding this blog at some point, which is why I've been periodically going through bursts of moving posts about my own life to my LJ.

George Monbiot takes on Shaun Spiers on wind farms

Here's a nice interview where Monbiot corners Spiers, the head of the "Campaign to Protect Rural England", regarding that organization's focus on wind farms as a "blight on the landscape" even as it ignores open pit coal mining.

Investors betting against GM

The bailout may be too little, too late:

General Motors Corp. Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner said the biggest U.S. automaker got “what we asked for” with $9.4 billion in U.S. loans over the next 24 days. Investors bet that it’s not enough.

GM slid 6.8 percent today in early New York trading to extend yesterday’s 22 percent plunge. Credit-default swaps on the company’s bonds jumped 2 percentage points in a sign of increasing concern that the Bush administration’s bailout may end in a default.

The stock-price slide erased the 23 percent gain on Dec. 19, when Detroit-based GM received a federal aid package to help the automaker stay in business until March 31 while it crafts a plan to shut plants, shed brands and reduce debt.

“It’s almost impossible for a management that invested in the assets, that hired the people, that put forth the strategy, to change so dramatically in such a short period of time,” Edward Altman, a New York University finance professor who created the Z-score formula to measure bankruptcy risk, said in a Bloomberg Television interview.

There is a “high” likelihood of a GM bankruptcy, Standard & Poor’s said yesterday in reducing the rating on the company’s unsecured debt to C, or 11 grades below investment quality. Robert Schulz, an S&P analyst in New York, said creditors can expect “negligible recovery” should the automaker default.

GM has slashed output and won union concessions since saying Nov. 7 it may run out of operating cash by year’s end. The automaker said it would need as much as $18 billion in aid or face a possible bankruptcy.

From Bloomberg. No information about Chrysler, but then it's no longer publicly traded so they don't have to disclose as much information. Ford is apparently doing considerably better; they could well end up being the last survivor of the American automakers. But all of the automakers are hurting; even Toyota is facing its first operating loss in 70 years. The brutal truth is, cars simply can't continue to occupy the central place that they occupy in today's economy. The energy, environmental, and infrastructure demands are too great. They won't go away, of course (many people still live in areas where public transit is unfeasible) but they're going to have to be much more of a niche item than they are now. Which means a lot fewer people making their living building them.

Some folks don't like getting their pictures taken...

... like cops, for instance:

I snapped another picture. The cops noticed this time. One of them strode directly over to me.

“You can’t take pictures of this,” he said. His tone was aggressive.

I slid my camera back into its case.

“Okay,” I replied.

“Erase it,” he ordered me.

“What?”

“I said ‘Erase it’!” he said, “I work undercover and I don’t want my picture anywhere.”

I really didn’t want to erase my picture. Not unless I had to. Besides, if he’s so concerned about keeping his undercover identity secret, he shouldn’t walk around in a police uniform.

“Do I have to?” I asked.

“I told you, I don’t want my picture anywhere.”

“Is it the law?” I asked.

“I asked you nicely,” he said, but he didn’t say it very nicely. It sounded threatening to me.

“Is it the law?” I repeated.

“I asked you nicely,” he said menacingly as he stared down at me, “Are you refusing?”

I looked at him. Maybe if we were in a dark alley with no witnesses, I would have deleted it. But here? In broad daylight, surrounded by witnesses, with a tiny, bleeding, unconscious, handcuffed woman lying on the street? He was probably in enough trouble already.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m refusing.”

“Real nice,” he said in disgust, “Thanks a lot.”

And he turned around and started to walk back to the knot of officers and the unconscious handcuffed woman.

From here, via skdadl at pogge.

Seems the downturn is hurting all kinds of people...

... including drug dealers:

Sammad’s got a problem. The recent downturn in the economy means that he can’t drive his car; he’s racking up a ton of debt, and soon, he might lose his livelihood.

“Pretty soon I’ll have to get a regular job,” he says with a chuckle.

Sammad’s not the typical victim of financial turmoil; he’s not a factory worker or a car dealer; he’s a different kind of dealer.

Sammad sells cocaine from his apartment in the suburbs of Vancouver. What used to be a lucrative profession is going south for him and the economy is primarily to blame.

It might be surprising, but the saleability of Sammad’s product really does depend on how well the economy is doing, and in particular, how well males between the ages of 18–40 are doing in that economy. A lot of uneducated male workers are losing their jobs, and for Sammad, they are his prime clienteles. Compound this with police in the United States intercepting a major shipment from South America destined for BC, and you get a product with a skyrocketing price and a market that can’t afford it.

“A kilo of coke used to be 18 G’s, now it’s 42,” he complains. “I can’t even make a profit unless I sell these chinsy little bags. My half-grams used to cost $25; now they’re $40 and even then I only make, like, five bucks off each one.”

From here. Thanks to highryder in this babble thread for the link.

Harper hoping WTO kills wheat board for him

Remember how Harper was trying to stack the Canadian Wheat Board? Well, the farmers weren't buying it; they voted strongly in favour of directors who back the single-desk system. But Frances Russell warns that Harper may get what he wants anyway, courtesy of the World Trade Organization:

Harper has an out. He can abandon his dirty tricks campaign against the CWB and still "walk over" democracy by turning to the World Trade Organization. The WTO's Doha Round, if it survives, is more than prepared to dispatch the pesky marketing agency for him.

The day after the CWB director elections, Crawford Falconer, New Zealand's WTO ambassador and agricultural chair, released a new text that would declare the CWB illegal in 2013, the deadline for a new agreement.

The CWB is isolated at the WTO. The former Australian government abolished the world's only other single-desk wheat board. And the WTO draft text contains a footnote exempting New Zealand's kiwi fruit exporting agency from the CWB's fate.

Dustin Gosnell, the CWB's director of strategic planning and corporate policy, says the WTO "is one step closer to cementing language that would cause us to lose the single desk and how it's happening is really most discouraging. It's really the chair railroading it through."

National Farmers Union president Stewart Wells says the WTO is a "most undemocratic organization." Canada isn't even in most of the meetings involving agriculture. They are dominated by the U.S., European Union, Argentina and Brazil.

From the Winnipeg Free Press. I find it particularly galling that the Kiwis want to nail the CWB, but want to protect their own analogous agency. Not to mention the fact that Harper probably isn't even going to bring this up with the WTO.

A miracle - Mother Teresa cured woman of her theism!

Really:

Livermore describes the order as a sect and has written a book, Hope Endures, chronicling her experiences.

Mother Teresa's mistake, says Livermore, was in thinking that obedience was more important than compassion.

"That's not something that's widely known and not part of what the media says about her. It was dictatorial. I should have got out sooner," she says, shaking her head.

When she finally left, she turned to the medical degree she had spurned when she joined the sisters and became a doctor, working in Timor, the Northern Territory, the Congo, Sudan and
Darfur.

One casualty of her time with Mother Teresa was her religion.

"I ended up an agnostic," she says. "I just couldn't believe it any more but if, as when I was in Timor from 2000-2003, you can do something for the kids, then for some people at least, you can make a difference."

Livermore blames no one but herself for what happened.

"After all," she says, smiling, "no one handcuffed me. It was my own silly choice. My mother told me I was a drongo but once I was in there, I couldn't get free.

From the Brisbane Courier-Mail.