David Knopfler Blog

What price decent drinking water?

2010-07-03T09:52:00.000+01:00

My tap water tastes of undrinkable chlorine (supposedly a health alert anyway) and is additionally, anyway officially technically illegal in terms of the contaminants it contains... I think it's over the line for nitrates. But plastic-bottles used for spring water sold locally is also said to be hazardous, and actually it tastes like plastic contaminants if it's not super-fresh refrigerated. Much of it anyway comes from a Nestle subsidiary apparently successfully sued in 2003 for $10million (out of court) for all kinds of un-speakables. To quote from Wiki...

"In June 2003, Poland Spring was sued for false advertising in a class action lawsuit charging that their water that supposedly comes from springs, is in fact heavily treated common ground water.[8] The suit also states, hydro-geologists hired by Nestlé found that another current source for Poland Spring water near the original site stands over a former trash and refuse dump, and below an illegal disposal site where human sewage was sprayed as fertilizer for many years.[8] The suit was settled in September 2003, with the company not admitting to the allegations, but agreeing to pay $10 million in charity donations and discounts over the next 5 years.[9] Nestlé continues to sell the same Maine water under the Poland Springs name."

Is it too much to ask in "the land of the free," to have a safe source of drinking water without spending $1000 plus the cost of a plumber, to fit it, for a water filter? And would it solve the problem?

David Knopfler Blog: Oh what a tangled web... meetings with Israelis

2010-02-01T14:38:00.000Z

David Knopfler Blog: Oh what a tangled web... meetings with Israelis

Oh what a tangled web... meetings with Israelis

2010-02-01T13:37:00.000Z

Blair mentioned (in studied passing) to the Chilcot inquiry last week, that while at Crawford seeing Bush in 2002 to discuss possible invasion of Iraq that they had "meetings with Israelis." Would this be to check if they'd be down with it, if more scuds fell on Tel Aviv during the invasion of 2003? or to reassure them that all the talk of WMDs was froth and not to worry because the weapons inspectors had cleared the ranges? As Sir Walter Scott put it... "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."

It seems to me, unlikely Blair would have mentioned it by accident. More likely he was confident that this information would come out at some stage anyway, (in Bush's memoirs perhaps ;)) so better try not to look like a conspiracy was afoot. It seems, thus far, he may have over-estimated the panel's facility. Maybe Sir Roderick still has a trick or two up his sleeve, but I'm not holding my breath.

Another year on and now what...

2010-01-21T20:02:00.000Z

I don't expect to change anyone's minds about anything - conservatives will remain conservative and visa versa. We read opinions largely to confirm our own prejudices but I read somewhere today the boggling fact that the US spends more than any other nation on Health but it plainly has less to show for it if comparative reports are to be believed. If you spend, per capita, more than twice the French, but get substantially less for it... something is seemingly rotten is it not? Can it be sensible to have to phone an insurance company if you need an ambulance? Extraordinary for an outsider to see how impossibly mired the US has been for decades with this one. Almost every Administration has tried and failed to make much headway with it.

As a Mr Smith looking in from the outside, it seems to me ending the billions wasted on lobby flab in Washington could be a good place to start reform, rather than the usual voices of "reason" in the media insisting long suffering low income groups must expect less social provision if State spending is to be reigned in. I'm not saying that the whole sprawling ineffective system of State and Federal Government isn't in dire need of new vision and better administration, but I am saying that when effectively their decisions are being made, based on the biggest spends of the lobby, true Democracy, for the people, of the people and by the people can't hope to begin to work effectively can it? No doubt there are other so called elephants in the room but that one seems hard to miss.

And one year on, exasperated voters, who believed Obama's message of change and hope are disenchanted by his failure to throw them a bone or two. His rhetoric has been nothing short of stunning but in practice, he's not yet demonstrating any sharp shift in policy from the eight years that preceded him. He's looked for bipartisanship instead of nailing their failures to the mast and as a reward been saddled by the Republican opposition with blame for all the sh*t they pulled. Meanwhile where are the stringent regulations on Wall Street? Where is even a glimmer of Roosevelt's New Deal when it's most needed? Where's the repeal of the Patriot Act? Why is the Peace Prize winner who opposed the War in Iraq sending drone bombs to Pakistan and Yemen, illegal detentions continue... and on and on. If he really has liberal convictions then why do almost none of his appointments reflect it? Why is the Pentagon seemingly able to call more shots than him? He has another mere ten months before the awful multi-billion dollar campaigning starts all over again... If he doesn't read this slap in the face in Massechusetts correctly, the electorate plainly will vote him out... if only through the apathy of non-voting.

Barack Obama

2009-09-25T00:47:00.000+01:00

What a difference a year makes: The results may not yet add up to a great deal in terms of shifting the values of the various Government officials but the unequivocal way that Obama has set out his stall at the UN this week, putting increasingly confident distance between himself and the previous US regime has to be respected. I hope he can inspire some more of those "bought and paid for" Senators and Congressmen to start doing what their electors hoped they might when they elected them.

Well they would wouldn't they?

2009-05-31T23:48:00.000+01:00

Alistair Darling stands accused of flipping four second homes and using tax payers money to finance the operation. The Liberal Democrats have called on the Chancellor to be sacked over his expenses, saying "his moral authority has vanished." Mr Darling said the allegations were "untrue" and according to the BBC, Lord Mandelson called them "cheap jibes." Would that be unelected Trade Secretary Lord Mandelson, who used tax payers money to help tart up a house no longer needed for official duties in Hartlepool, presumably so he could up his personal margin of profit? I assume he called them "cheap jibes" from his new two and a half million pound house in Regents Park... which, according to the Mail, was partially paid for with funds of which he has yet to reveal the source. Brought in to shore up Brown's ratings, his own personal liability has no doubt contributed to the further ten point drop that has accompanied the stench of the gibbering corpse of the jaw dropping attempted resurrection.

Where is that other Mandy, when you need her? and which part of "totally" and "discredited" is it that self-serving Peter Mandelson, (not Foreign Secretary), doesn't get?

Dear Mr President - Habeas Corpus

2009-05-23T15:04:00.000+01:00

“It’s a messy situation. It’s not easy,” Obama told C- SPAN in an interview. “We’ve got a lot of people there who we should have tried early, but we didn’t. In some cases, evidence against them has been compromised. They may be dangerous, in which case we can’t release them, so finding how to deal with that I think is going to be one of our biggest problems.”

The problem Mr President, is that you know perfectly well, you don't lock people up for crimes you think they may commit, you can legally only lock them up for crimes a court of law has proven beyond a reasonable doubt they did commit... You can remand people up to a point... but eight years???!!!! No one is proposing to go kidnap you and keep you locked up indefinately, in case, like your predecessor, you decide to illegally kill people by invading their country without a fig leaf of legal justification. That would be a crime. Seems to me you need to stick to plan A ... close GITMO and then allow due process to take care of the rest. Charge them all - if you must - but if there isn't suficient evidence to convict - then you will let them go when a court of law finds the case against them unproven... whatever the outcry from Fox News and the defeated former CEO of Halliburton. It worked perfectly well for hundreds of years and terrorism is as old as humanity. The problem you have of course, is that 90 of your Senators appear to have misplaced their spines and will require you to re-insert them... forcibly from the rear if necessary.

Father's Day

2008-06-15T22:18:00.000+01:00

In 1939 Britain found itself unavoidably in a real war, not the phoney war against a noun, Blair illegally dragged us into. My father, blonde haired and blue eyed, arrived in the UK that year, having been in occupied territories of the Third Reich as a fugitive, and instead of being interned here at immigration as a possible terrorist mole for the Soviets, or Fifth Columnist for the Nazis, and shipped off to a secret gulag to be tortured for intelligence, he was welcomed with a headshake and given £5 pounds, which would have been a week’s wages in those days. He was then allowed to travel North to Newcastle, given a free university place to study.

He came out with a First Class Honours Degree and never ceased to be grateful until his death, for the tolerance and fair-minded liberal values he encountered here in those genuinely difficult times. I’d like to think the debt to the nation has been repaid by his three children in their contributions financial and otherwise, and equally so by the refugee children he was escorting out of Czechoslovakia when he arrived, most of who’s parents were probably killed as “terrorists.”

What a falling off was there: Here we are, sixty plus years on; scores of civil liberties, men and women fought and died to protect, torn up under a raft of regulations that have more in common with the persecution my father was fleeing, than the land of the rule of law where he found asylum, Great Britain. And how has it come to this that it takes a conservative shadow home secretary David Davis, to draw attention to this sleep walk to authoritarianism?

I hope the decision of the Supreme Court in the US, and welcomed by Barack Obama, finally means the one British Citizen, who was illegally kidnapped and interned with the connivance of the UK authorities, and is still locked up at Guantanamo Bay, can finally get the sensible protections under the law, we once all took for granted and that allowed me a life to live to write this.

John Pilger's take on Chávez

2006-05-14T11:47:00.000+01:00

Timely piece in yesterday's Guardian

Guantanamo Bay

2006-05-11T05:41:00.000+01:00

"The existence of Guantanamo Bay remains unacceptable...iit should close... The historic tradition of the United States as a beacon of freedom, liberty and of justice deserves the removal of this symbol."

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith

Torture "widespread" under U.S. custody: Amnesty

2006-05-04T10:27:00.000+01:00

Torture "widespread" under U.S. custody: Amnesty

"Rendition" from within EU no longer hypothetical

2006-04-19T17:17:00.000+01:00

"we have received official acknowledgment of “handing over” individuals to foreign officials through procedures which ignore the standards and safeguards required by the European Convention on Human Rights and other legal instruments of the Council of Europe"
Terry Davis, Secretary-General Council of Europe. Text of press release (link) http://www.coe.int/T/E/Com/Files/PA-Sessions/April-2006/20060412_Speaking-notes_sg.asp

Ban on glorifying terror comes into force

2006-04-14T09:59:00.001+01:00

I've nothing to report about the US/UK axis of peace and their heroic efforts to bring democracy and freedom to far flung foreigners.. mostly flung by the impact of our bombs. It's apparently no longer legal to glorify such Governmental conduct. For further bulletins about what freedom means in this context you'll have to go to Fox News. Pop another christmas tree on my file there's a love, and list me for a nice visit to Room 101, along with the majority of the UK public who don't think you can have a war against concepts. Winston Smith has had enough.

Professional conflicts of interest

2006-04-13T08:12:00.000+01:00

An interesting report in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle called Now Powell Tells Us and reprinted at Common Dreams has Colin Powell pinning the Iraq war entirely onto Vice President Dick Cheney.

Halliburton make literally billions in contracts following US military interventions and the motives of their number one lobbyist and former CEO, Dick Cheney, whom they still pay literally millions aren't terribly hard to fathom. Like another infamous neo-con, Richard Perle, he appears to be, and is, completely professionally conflicted and quite properly gets booed when he makes public appearances but if Powell knew the pitch (no pun intended) for invasion was all poop as he asserts, what did he think he was doing selling it for all it was worth on the floor of the UN and coaxing in the UK Government too, by using his own department's experts report (after it was "sexed up" at Downing Street) and calling it British intelligence? That would presumably be why he resigned? The so called "PhD thesis" was in reality written, as anyone who bothered to source it's author online could have easily discovered, by the guy the US Government used in Iraq War One to classify all the documents they captured, who worked in Powell's Department and lectured at the School of the Americas. What is it about all this people can't get?

Another political rant

2006-04-11T18:26:00.000+01:00

I've got Myspace.com or knopfler.com for my music - so I figure this is the place for a good political rant and here's a line I read today that is gagging for a reaction...

"Even the Europeans are fed up with them" ... says former Whitehouse advisor and neo-con, Richard Perle on the present Iranian Government. Uh... What's with the Even Richard? Are we normally jerk offs then? And speaking of jerk offs - will someone just remind me why Perle had to resign? Something about conflict of interests ... isn't it ever when there's a lot of money swilling around. I guess when the BIGGEST REACTIONARY ASSHOLE in Washington tries to kill the story of award winning journalist from The New Yorker, then I guess the idea is everyone will stop worrying about US troop build-ups on the Iraq side of the Iranian border. You have to wonder if Iran was always in the trigger sights? And hey, won't all the media be relieved when it's just a conventional invasion ... it'll seem so moderate and reasonable

As it happens the democratically elected PM of Iran is an ignorant jerk too and a racist one at that... but at least he's an elected jerk...and presumbly someone who Saddam Hussain would have had no qualms about taking out, in the days when Saddam worked for the CIA and was being armed to the teeth by Rumsfeld and co.

When the US national debt is 4 trillion a year and according to the Financial Times yesterday, almost 50% of it is due to the spike in oil prices (great news for Bush core constituents in Texas) is this really what is in America's national interest? Okay I'm done here before I really get started.

Windmills

2006-03-24T10:37:00.000Z

Apparently a wind generator makes enough energy to power 250 homes. I was just imagining if every little village parish council voted to have just one on their nearest hillside the cumulative effect could be quite significant. Why not?

I really liked the Clinton speech on the environment I just watched at the BBC website

Two thirds down the above page is a picture of Clinton and a Watch the video link

To euphemize isn't wise.

2006-02-26T10:52:00.000Z

Tony Blair has announced in today's Observer that he's not illiberal. Whether Tony Blair cares to admit it or not, the fact is, sadly, his appetite for authoritarian positions is a matter of record and repeatedly so. Spinning the accusation to something it isn't and partially defending those aspects he prefers to, is effortless work for a trained lawyer like Blair. Personally I've had enough of it... time's up. Who, going to watch "Goodnight and Good-luck" could seriously imagine Blair understanding, or acting to protect the issues those journalists held dear? That junior senator from Wisconsin on the other hand?.. To euphemize the illegal detention and torture of detainees at Guantanamo as "an anomaly" year after year will not wash and shouldn't. As Martin Luther King put it, "a right delayed is a right denied." Does Blair also think the Bellmarsh detainees an anomaly? By their deeds... and Blair's principle deed, or rather misdeed, however forced he believed his hand to be, was undoubtedly his intemperate alignment to the US Neo-Con' agenda in Iraq, the upshot of which is a profoundly racist, profoundly ignorant PM swept into power in Iran ... always a bigger threat to vested western interests in the middle east than Iraq. Eisenhower had a position on illegal detention - quoted in the aforementioned movie - - he said "We are proud because from the beginning of this nation man can walk upright. No matter who he is or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend or his enemy and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot here without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the Habeas Corpus Act and we respect it."

Halliburton apparently tell lies at their website

2006-02-26T10:26:00.000Z

Halliburton say at their website they really care about community relations. An issue that will affect all the communities where they invest would be global warming I'd guess, and the impact of oil dependency on global warming seems pretty much established science, so I looked up "global warming" in the search engine at their website to see what innovations they are bringing to bear to help the problem - but they didn't have a single entry. Hmm.. they had 176 for "oil" (surprised it was so few actually). So then I looked up their energy page to see what they had to say about alternative energies supplies - but they only seem to operate in the field of oil and gas extraction. Don't they even have a picture of a happy kangaroo like Chevron - or a fig leaf maybe?

This too shall pass.

2006-02-24T11:03:00.000Z

In 1997 New Labour on civil rights could have been speaking from Amnesty head office. Kate Allen's sense of betrayal in the piece Kate Allen: How Labour has betrayed the promises it made in 1997 is, I suspect, justified: Jack Straw's recent expressed indifference to the torture inside the US run gulag at Guantanamo Bay, demonstrates the same integrity as Foreign Secretary he displayed as Home Secretary and affable and likeable though Tony Blair can be in a press conference, looking out at the world from inside George Bush's rectum, no wonder the world to him appears upside down. For him to weasel further from his constipated inverted pulpit on issues like torture, must soon be reaching it's epiphany? This too shall pass.

I wonder however if Kate is correct when she says "It is of course true the threat of terrorist attack is far greater" Granted it certainly "appears" to be greater; indeed it "feels" greater but is it?

Human rights: a broken promise

2006-02-23T14:02:00.000Z

Not since the seventies have Amnesty International lambasted a UK Government as fiercely. Their new 70 page report is posted at their site

The summary is here

and the full report is here

Plant a tree or three

2006-02-21T14:55:00.000Z

At the Chevron website the words global warming are nowhere to be found, not even at their environmenal section which helpfully has provided a nice picture of a kangaroo - isn't that cute? Instead I found this... "But consider that in the next 20 years, the world will add almost 1.5 billion people and you begin to understand the magnitude of our challenge. By 2025, world energy consumption is expected to grow by over 40 percent. Over that timeframe, conventional hydrocarbons - oil and natural gas, as well as coal - will continue to meet roughly 80 percent of that demand... Global demand for oil will increase from 84 million barrels today to over 105 million barrels in 2025, or 1.4 percent annually. But even more dramatic will be the growth in demand for natural gas, which is projected to rise over 2 percent annually in that time." George L. Kirkland Executive Vice President, Chevron Corporation 2006

Seems on googling a number of sites, that carbon extraction is too expensive as a mechanised process... how about planting a few trees then? I failed GCSE level chemistry so maybe I'm missing the point, or perhaps I'm wondering why the Emporer is walking down Mainstreet naked? As I understand it, deciduous trees do photosynthesis really well and since any fool can plant a tree or three - or failing that, just neglect to mow the lawn for several years - which at the end of the day has the desired effect i.e. CO2 - C = O2 .... better for everyone. What am I missing?