Open Kamer

Open Kamer is een nieuwe website die inzicht geeft in het handelen van de Tweede Kamer.

Wetsvoorstellen worden als tijdlijn weergegeven waarin alle bijbehorende documenten, besluiten, moties, amendementen en stemmingsuitslagen in chronologische volgorde zichtbaar zijn.

Een voorbeeld is het wetsvoorstel over orgaandonatie: https://www.openkamer.org/dossier/tijdlijn/33506/

Open Kamer (openkamer.org) is gebaseerd op het gelijknamige open source project openkamer.

Drone camera captures Argentina's #8N protests

Hooray they are finally doing what we were thinking about quite some time ago. Too bad they didn't have these in Egypt. From this article:

 

America can't be considered a civilized country - Part V

The School of the Americas, the CIA and the US-Condoned Cancer of Torture Continue to Spread in Latin America, Including Mexico

While the whole article is an indictment to the disgusting and evil foreign politics the US conducted and still does in Latin American one part got to me in particular, rarely do I read something that scars my psyche as bad as this excerpt:

In fact, Everardo, Harbury discovered, was kept in a body cast to keep him constrained while he was tortured for more than two years before being executed, all the time with the full knowledge and likely operational involvement of the CIA.

Such a short paragraph that elicits such terrible imagery and suffering in my mind. Though I had considered it, I had never read about this kind of torture actually being carried out. A full body cast, so zero movement for two years, while being tortured even more in unspecified but undoubtedly horrible ways. The horror, I would actually prefer rat torture over this.

See the previous installments of this series on why the US can't be considered a civilized country here.

Als een nacht met duizend sterren - Joeri Boom

Het boek waar ik het gisteravond over had. Ik heb het nog niet uitgelezen maar ben nu op ongeveer 2/3e en heb tot op heden elke keer moeite gehad om het boek weg te leggen.

In Als een nacht met duizend sterren toont bekroond journalist Joeri Boom hoe ingewikkeld het is om de krankzinnige werkelijkheid van een oorlog te vatten. Zeker als daar militairen uit eigen land bij betrokken zijn, en voorlichters over je schouder meekijken. Tijdens de Nederlandse missie in de Afghaanse provincie Uruzgan (2006 – 2010) ging Boom mee op levensgevaarlijke patrouilles en zocht hij vergeefs naar resultaten van opbouwprojecten. Hij raakte in de ban van het soldatenleven en worstelde met (zelf)censuur en de eenzijdigheid van embedded-verslaggeving. Pas toen het hem lukte los van Defensie in Uruzgan te werken, merkte hij hoe onvolledig zijn beeld van de missie was geweest. Met pakkende en schokkende voorbeelden laat Joeri Boom zien wat er allemaal verborgen ligt achter het zinnetje: 'Dit artikel is gecontroleerd door Defensie, er is niets in gewijzigd.'

Over de schrijver: Joeri Boom

gayhomophobe.com

Counting the number of days since the last prominent homophobe was caught in a gay sex scandal. Briliant site...

America can't be considered a civilized country - Part IV

See parts I - III of this series here. A bit from QI on American prisons.

Jimmy Carr keeps it quite funny, but these stats are very depressing, and they don't even mention the capital punishment, which out of all the OECD countries besides Japan (vary rarely) only the USA still uses.

See also the following wikilinks Prison-Industrial-Complex, Incarceration in the United States, Global Distribution of Capital Punishment.

I would write more on the disgusting ways in which the prison industrial complex works, but I don't have the time to dig in and read all the articles for references.

Photo of the year?

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011.

Statistisch onderzoek en de PVV

Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway?

The US actor and the Libyan leader have produced some choice lines recently.

Can you distinguish between them? Take the quiz here.

My score was 8 out of 10 correct.

Cairo Crowd Estimates

Let me first say that the real events in Egypt are much more interesting and important than this post and I support everyone on the streets there, but my thingy for numbers made me investigate the crowd estimates a bit more.

Al Jazeera is reporting up to 2 million people have gathered in Cairo's Tahrir square, some reporters even get extremely excited and say at least 2 million people have gathered. 2 million people is 40x the Lowlands festival!

This image shows one of the edges of the crowd, to get an idea of where the crowd ends,

Here is a visual overview of crowd densities. A density of 1-5 per square meter is possible, although 5 is extremely dense. Let's take 4 per square meter, which is already very high,

Now lets look at an area of 100,000 square meter in Cairo,

About 400,000 people could stand on this area, although 200,000-300,000 is probably more realistic if there are no naked women handed out for free in the centre. Also keep in mind that the full Washington Mall is 15x larger, 1.5 million square meter.

Even if we take the high estimate of 4 people per square meter, an area 5 times larger than the one shown above is required for 2 million people.

Too bad there are no good overview images (RC helicopters, where are you?!) so I can't make any serious estimate, but I would be surprised if "even" 1 million people are in and around the square. My guesstimate would be 100,000-400,000.

Still a lot of people, especially for Egypt, and I hope enough.

Egyptian Riot Compilation

These are some powerful images, much respect for these people protesting while facing such a repressive regime.

Also read this post about a journalist and many others being apprehended, brutally beaten up and tortured.

Rechtse Hobby

Had to kill some time in Rotterdam due to yet another railway disruption, this caught my attention,

Nederlandse Grondwet Artikel 120

"De rechter treedt niet in de beoordeling van de grondwettigheid van wetten en verdragen."

Volgens wiki is dit alleen in Nederland en Finland zo (van westerse landen). Artikel 120 zorgt dat de democratisch gekozen wetgevende macht meer macht heeft dan de rechtelijke macht.

Ik vind het maar vreemd om zoiets in je grondwet te zetten.

British students know how to riot

Yesterday, in central London, thousands of students and others gathered to protest as Britain's Parliament met to vote on a proposal to raise university tuition fees significantly - nearly tripling them - as part of a continuing set of austerity programs. During the protest, several clashes took place between police and protesters, resulting in numerous injuries and 43 arrests. Late in the demonstration, a group of protesters attacked the car of Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall as the couple were inside, being driven to the London Palladium. The car was slightly damaged, the royal couple unharmed, though a bit shaken by the incident. Parliament did end up narrowly approving the measure, and the fee increases are set to take effect in 2012. Collected here are images from London last night. 39 photos...

Or is it just that the British police incur more violence? The students do seem to be getting an even rougher deal than the Dutch students.

"Vrijheid en verantwoordelijkheid" - deel 1: Drugs

• Coffeeshops worden besloten clubs die alleen voor meerderjarige inwoners van Nederland toegankelijk zijn op vertoon van een clubpas.
• Er komt een afstand van tenminste 350 meter tussen scholen en coffeeshops.
• De minister verscherpt het landelijk beleid en ziet erop toe dat gemeenten het afstandscriterium en de overige relevante delen van het landelijk beleid in hun vergunningen handhaven.
• Het kabinet komt met voorstellen zwaardere straffen te stellen op de (voorbereiding van) in- en uitvoer, teelt en (georganiseerde) handel van drugs en tot aanpassing van het onderscheid tussen harddrugs en softdrugs.

Formatie duurt nu langer dan gemiddeld

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RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism

In this RSA Animate, radical sociologist David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane?

RSA animate makes great clips of summaries of lectures held at RSA. More...

Change we can believe in?

Balkenende kondigt vertrek uit politiek aan

Voor degene die het vertrek van Balkenende uit de politiek gemist hadden: