34 of the MEPs elected in June this year have signed the Free Software Pact:
Of the 232 candidates for the European Parliament that pledged their support for free and open source software, 34 have been elected, from Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
The Free Software Pact commits MEPs to support free software; the list of those who’ve signed is here. The UK MEPs who signed are Caroline Lucas and Jean Lambert of the Greens and Nigel Farage of UKIP. On behalf of the Pirate Party UK I’d like to thank Lucas, Lambert and Farage for supporting some of our principles.
The Independent and Mark Wadsworth both point to the accountancy firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers, who are helping the Conservative party by sending some of their staff to work as researchers for the party’s shadow Treasury team. At the same time PWC are reducing their support for Labour
PriceWaytoolongnameCoopers are doing this for two reasons. Firstly they want to write Tory policy. More importantly, they anticipate that in return they’ll get a share of lucrative £4 billion consultancy contracts.
The truth is that both Labservative parties have their tongues rights up big business’s arse. And big business in return has it’s tongue up the Labservatives’ arse. Bribes, researchers, and non-executive directorships flow one way, and lucretive contracts flow the other.
The only ones who lose out are the British people, who’ll continue to lose until the stop voting the Labservatives into power. Instead I suggest that people vote for the Pirate Party, who make it their business to fight bloated corporate and government interests.
UPDATE: Craig Murray has also come out against this scandal, saying:
The Tories’ dependence on these people should shatter any illusions that the Tories will better control the financial services sector. The financial services sector will, as always, control the Tories,
Newly elected Norwich North MP Chloe Smith was of course one of those seconded from the sector – from Deloitte – to the Conservative Party. It is an instructive case. After university, Smith worked for two Tory MPs, Gillian Shepherd and James Clappison – the latter famously bought 156 trees at taxpayer expense to mark the boundary of his country estate.
Chloe’s theoretical “Transfer” to Deloitte – while still in fact working for the Conservative Party on secondment – appears to be not only a subvention from Deloitte in taking a full time Tory hack onto their books, but a deliberate attempt to build up Chloe’s CV by making it appear she had not only worked for the Conservative Party.
Animal farming is by far the most environmentally destructive identified practice on the planet. Do you believe that? More greenhouse production than all transportation combined. It is also the major single source of water pollution on the planet. It is incredibly destructive. The major reason reefs are dying off and dead zones exist in the ocean—from nutrient run-off. Overwhelmingly it is the largest driving force of deforestation. And the leading cause of biodiversity loss.
And if you think I’m bullshitting, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN, whose job is to promote agricultural development, published a study, not knowing what they were getting into, looking at the environmental impact of animal farming, and it is a beautiful study! And the bottom line is that it is the most destructive and fastest growing environmental problem.
Matthew Yglesias writes about Canadian band Metric, who are publishing thair music on the Internet without a record label:
One obvious response to the challenge the Internet is posing to traditional music industry revenue models is for artists to try to disintermediate the record labels whose comparative advantages in distribution and promotion are less relevant in the contemporary world.
Metric, an alternative band from Toronto, finally got several offers from the big record companies. But the band declined to sign after concluding that the labels were asking for too many rights and not offering enough in return.
With help from a grant from the Canadian government, the band cut its own album in April, “Fantasies,” and started selling it directly to fans on services like iTunes, where it has scaled the popularity charts.
Here’s a video:
A message the Pirate Party needs to get across is we want bands to be successful, we just don’t want the repressive apparatus of the IFPI/RIAA copyright-industrial complex, with its repressive laws banning freedom on the internet.
This sort of behaviour does the police’s reputation no good. I have friends — middle-aged, middle class people, not chavs — who think the police are uniformed thugs.
We need a law making it a crime for the police to arrest anyone for filimng them, unless the filmer is clearly commiting a crime.
Just one problem, you have too many rooms. ‘What to do?’, you ponder, Ping! you’ll ’save it for best’!
Oh yes in-fucking-deedy. Who’s the daddy now Clive at number 37? You, that’s fucking who. There are two ways to do this though, the less common secret dining room that is sealed off like a crime lab from the rest of the house and only ever used for bestest best, or the more common second living room. You opt for the second.
Plans are afoot for the dining room…
This is where the suburban nightmare really begins. You see, in the suburbs people need two living rooms. One for the telly and the family and watching Match of the Day, the other for when people who need impressing come to tea. This ‘lounge’ is shut at all times and is filled with utter fucking wanking shit. All the best chintz goes in there, there isn’t a telly, there aren’t books, there isn’t a computer. Large collections of tiny, tiny china figures of badgers playing guitars or some such bollocks line shelf after fucking shelf.
France’s culture minister, Frédéric Mitterand, recently admitted that he has two internet connections, just in case he gets cut off by HADOPI. He also admits that his son downloads unauthorized content often.
