You Tube Off Line

YouTube has a new free sub, lasting 6 months, where you can download videos to view off line. Very useful for people like me who like to watch/listen on a smartphone in a wifi zone. It means you can watch/listen to stuff out and about, where using 3G connection would, in my case for example, soon exhaust my monthly subs limit. It also means you don’t get the stop/start stutter when watching/listening in the wifi zone.

Climate change will destroy the planet! – Really?

Full of the evangelism of reading This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein (for my book group), I made the mistake recently of telling a friend how capitalism and its consequences would destroy the planet. He told me I was wrong. Of course he is right.

Non-fiction Book Group

With a few friends I recently started a Book Group to read non-fiction books and meet once a month on a Friday evening. On the agenda so far (but not necessarily read by all!): -

I am Malala

I read this over Easter* and broadly agree with this Guardian review. I hadn’t realised Malala was already an international star long before her attempted assassination: she’d already won a national peace prize and written a blog for the BBC that was meant to be anonymous but didn’t really remain so for long.

 

The Taliban shooting must be one of the most back-firing attacks in history. The Taliban catapulted Malala to international superstardom. Violence can sometimes be the most counter-productive thing a terrorist can do. To give another example relevant to this story, it’s like the CIA funding and backing Al-Qaeda (after the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) which back-fired in that it helped create both the Taliban and the suicide bombers who were able to bomb the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001. 

Poem on dialysis

Days and moments slowly dragging

Only two more hours to go

Some days that can seem a lifetime

some say it’s a friend,  but it feels like a foe

Since WW2 USA has bombed 21+ countries: New Internationalist

Since the Second World War
THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
has bombed 21 countries

Green Party Election Broadcast 1997

 Still eerily pertinent today