The Adam Smith Institute are telling anybody listening that today is Tax Freedom Day. Her Majesty’s Treasury were goaded into rebuttal mode. ‘Tax credits not included!’ snarled a spokesperson for Gordon Brown’s Fiefdom.
This morning BBC Radio 4 were broadcasting new statistics on AIDs . An estimated 65 million people in the world have been infected with the HIV virus since it was first identified…and 25 million have since died. With the world population at 6,519,891,630 today this means that less than one percent of the population (0.6135%) is HIV positive. 98% of babies born to HIV positive women are virus-free.
The situation in England is six times better than this global average with less than a tenth of one percent of the population infected. The latest figures are 65000 HIV positive and 7000 new cases a year…half homosexuals and half black male immigrants infected before arrival in the UK. The Terence Higgins Trust…a reliable source on homosexual AIDs and HIV…estimates that one in eight sexually active homosexuals in London are HIV positive.
The Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan and Labour’s Overseas Development Minister Hillary Benn have both gone public with their complaints that the United Nations still officially refuses to call a spade a spade and plays down the significance of homosexuals, prostitutes and drug users in the spread of the HIV virus.
Tom Greco and I have known each other for almost twenty years after getting together in Zurich in 1986. Tom has just started writing a couple of weblogs. His technical one Beyond Money may not be to your taste but his more chatty and humorous News and Views is well worth checking out. Several colleagues have questioned my devotion to blogging so an explanation is in order. The best statement of where I am coming from is from this recent exchange with Tom Greco. It was prompted by my dismay at finding that his bloghosts were not offering a RSS feed facility.
'I went to both your blogsites to set up an RSS feed to my personal online newspaper. This means that your blogs would automatically be fed to my own My Yahoo! home page...together with columnists from The Guardian and my Climate and William Shepherd weblogs. Once you have this facility set up on your blog sites people like me can receive your blogs automatically within a few hours of them being posted...and then read them the next time we log on to read our own online newspaper. A Colombian colleague based in Mexico City has done this with my William Shepherd weblog for instance.'
'This is the best way to progressively bypass the edit 'n spin operations of the Politico-Legal-Media Complex that is throttling freedom of speech...and jeopardising fact collection and distribution. In effect each of us builds our own personalised daily newspaper with content from people whose articles, weblogs and insights are worth our attention. It was with this in mind that I suggested earlier this year that John Papworth should send me his Letters to The Times each time he writes one in response to something he reads in the daily press for me to post to a blogsite.'
'This same approach can be used to create an online Fourth World News. Content would be a public version of these personal newspapers based on RSS feeds gathered from approved sources such as yourself. We could also arrange to have the RSS reader with its approved feeds set up on the Fourth World website for FWR readers to download behind a password…given out once they have paid their subscription. As my original Stockholm-based bloghosts did not provide the RSS syndication facility I went searching until I found the Berlin-based operator I use now.'
'So I suggest that you either change bloghost or ask your current ones for the RSS feed facility. It may be an add-on service costing a few dollars a year. This is well worth having as the ability to syndicate in this manner is the key to localising and repersonalising the media. Incidentally I have a second My Yahoo! page for my financial operating arm William Franklin & Sons Limited which brings in feeds for currency rates, share prices and te like in real time.'
Magna Carta II will be a People’s Charter. The idea is to add to each of the sixty three (unnumbered) clauses of Magna Carta I some remarks about the context of the original clause and its relevance to a 21st Century setting and then open up the weblog posting for anybody anywhere to add their comments. In this way an Open Online Conference will be permanently convened on the Local Neighbourhood Charter in the months leading up to the Radical Consultation in September. The job of the conference participants will then be to sift through the internet postings and agree the wording of the charter to put up to the Final Plenary for for its enthusiastic endorsement.
