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scéalta aibhsithe
international / environment Dé hAoine Meán Fómhair 20, 2019 00:43 by1 of indy
An earlier version of this article was written but unpublished back in 2008 and it has now been revised and published to take account of various changes since then. The case is made for the provision of free public transport in every major town and city worldwide for a multitude of reasons. It has always been a good idea and should have been done a long time ago, but now with three major issues of our time; resource depletion, including oil, pollution and the climate crisis; they make it imperative that we move to such a system, both to conserve dwindling supplies of cheap energy, to reduce the use of vast mineral resources to make hundreds of millions of cars and to dramatically reduce our carbon emissions because climate change is happening faster than expected.The Earth's climate has turned out to be more sensitive and complex than anticipated as evidenced by the recent dramatic record breaking summer ice melts in the Arcticc1 in 2007, 2008, 2012 and basically every year since then. With such a large change in the albedo or reflectivity over a huge area of the Arctic, this signifies the jump into positive feedback of the climate system, although it is not the only positive feedback. Combined with preliminary reports that frozen methane is beginning to be released from the Arctic sea floor and tundra and given that methane is 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas, it is clear we are probably at the point of things running out of control. Emissions need to be cut drastically, starting about 20 years ago. Moving to free and well-designed public transport allows society to deal with these problems in the least disruptive manner and to do so in the most equitable way and it would increase the shared sense of everyone working together to cope with what are essentially going to be permanent problems. Free public transport is not the full solution but is definitely an important first step. Switching to public transport has the potential to achieve large scale reductions in fuel use and it can be done immediately without further research or perfection of any technology. The current status quo plan to replace all the petrol and diesel fuelled cars with electric ones still leaves us with the problem of massive resource usage, a replacement of oil wars for lithium wars, traffic congestion, deaths from air pollution , high accident rates and actually high energy use. It does not matter if the heavily promoted so called solution of producing millions of electric cars is run on renewable energy because it would require vastly more wind farms, solar farms and whatever else compared to a transport solution based on highly efficient, globally deployed free public transport system which would only require a fraction of energy and resources of a car based one.
national / elections / politics Déardaoin Bealtaine 23, 2019 22:18 by1 of indy
These local elections on Fri 24th May are more important than ever. The reason is that up and down the country Fine Gael with help from Fianna Fail have allowed corporate vulture funds through various government breaks to them to buy up valuable tracts of land and to buy up thousands and thousands of apartments and homes. And the result is they are screwing people for rent. In this feature a case study for South Dublin of how they corporate takeover has occurred and driven prices sky high and priced out ordinary people from ever buying a house or apartment. Found out what is happening in your council area and how FG and FF councillors encourage this madness because it is happening in towns and cities all over the country. The European elections are this Friday on May 24th and there are good reasons to consider your vote very carefully because it does make a difference because practically every bit of law passed in the EU has to be adopted by Ireland at some point. It is a great way for politicans here to say the "EU forced us to..." So what have the present MEPs done in their last term in the European Parliament? Well for one the Fine Gael MEPs are consistently backed the corporate, pro-military, anti environment and internet censorship agenda whilst all the Left leaning and Sinn Fein MEPs have consistently been against corporate control, anti-military, pro-environment and for internet freedom. The only FF MEP managed to be absent for most of the votes mentioned here and it would seem, has been playing the line of being non-committal until the party gains more strength and can then openly go back to supporting the status quo. And least anyone is in doubt, the status quo is anti democractic and pro corporate domination of society. The sections below will give some examples but it should be clear that it by voting for FG you are voting against your own interests. The only reason anyone has ever voted for them or will is because the election marketing machine is so effective and marketing works extremely well. Just think of all the junk people constantly buy that they do not actually need.
international / rights, freedoms and repression Dé hAoine Aibreán 12, 2019 21:53 by1 of indy
Julian Assange who helped setup Wikileaks and in one of the first set of leaks revealed the murderous campaign of the US military against innocent civilians in Iraq amongst many other leaks showing the systematic criminality and inhumanity of the US government was betrayed this morning by the right wing corrupt president Lenin Moreno of Ecuador. Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa – whose government granted Assange asylum in 2012 – branded his more pro-US successor Lenin Moreno the “greatest traitor in Ecuadorian history” for rescinding the asylum claim and allowing British officers to enter his country’s embassy.
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international / anti-war / imperialism Déardaoin Feabhra 14, 2019 20:57 byW
Yet again the United States is brazenly pushing for the overthrow of an elected president -in an election which former US president Jimmy Carter said was extremely fair -to be replaced by an unaccountable, un-elected business man who is clearly the pawn of the 1% of Venezuela and the elite and intelligence apparatus of US capital. And regrettably most of the leaders of the EU and our own lackeys have no minds of their own, and acting as the true vassels they are, following the US line. So it is in this vein, that the press release from the workers party brings focus to this completely undemocratic move by the US and Irish government ostensibly for democratic motives!
The Workers’ Party have accused Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney of prioritising Donald Trump’s foreign policy ahead of Irish neutrality. Cllr. Éilis Ryan, the Workers’ Party candidate in May’s European Parliament elections, said:
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