Brian's Corner

[Brian]

I don't get too excited by conspiracy theories, each to his own I guess.
Although I don't hold any position of administration on this forum I would hate it if it got bogged down with bullshit.

So did a lot of people when they first heard 'nuts' say soldiers' body parts were just being disrespectfully dumped in land-fill. Then much later the story came out in Reuters (unless you consider them 'conspiracy nuts' too).

I find the 'conspiracy' angle that you're running with a bit kooky...

I can understand that a lot of people would initially call a statement like that 'nuts' - it just couldn't happen, the government just wouldn't do that. And then it's found to be true. All I'm saying is, that sometimes, the truth is more 'nuts' than we can imagine, and that one shouldn't dismiss things to quickly.

I don't get too excited by conspiracy theories

Of course, none of us should.

[Brian]

Brain, have you ever heard about the way the media 'sells' its 'news'...
by reporting the routine things rarely and the rare things routinely.

I don't even understand this.

I was trying to say common and trivial things, like the lives of movie stars ect (maybe what you call 'routine') are mostly what is shown on mainstream TV news, and that real news stories are rarely shown, if at all, unless they aren't too political or racial in any way.

I don't understand what you relate to as 'routine', and what is 'rare' in your above statement.

Did you mean the 'routine' things routinely and the 'rare' thing rarely?

[Risto the Great]

Brian, I have never seen a person feel compelled to name a forum thread after himself. What drove you to such self gratification?

[Brian]

Brian, I have never seen a person feel compelled to name a forum thread after himself. What drove you to such self gratification?

LOL - I know, it can look like delusions of grandeur, or some sort of strange intent, but like a lot of things, the truth is often much more simpler, much like myself. The first post pretty much says it all - having something to say, but not wanting to pollute a valid thread.

If you read post 2, and compare it to my post in the "occupy" thread, you may notice that the two postings are very similar. In fact, I first wrote out post 2 and then deleted many parts that I thought were not quite on the topic and possible pollution. None-the-less, the deleted parts (I think) were interesting enough to be said, and I really had no where to put them.

The NWO is more than a fart in someones head - even multiple presidents and the Pope have made many reference to, or actually called for, a NWO. It then becomes an unavoidable thing with many current, and possible future events/topics. From my past readings I noticed many different posters have talked on the subject, but it also pushes us towards the thin ice, and sometimes conversations have expanded and strayed off the topic of a thread.

It is also possible, in a valid discussion, to say something which may spark a tangent discussion, which may be very interesting to the two (or more) participants, but way off topic and out of line within that thread, but not worth opening a whole new thread each time to do it in.

"Brian's Corner" is nothing more than a 'scratch-pad' for side notes/discussions. In fact, I probably wouldn't have even thought of it (I'm not that smart) if I had not seen "Makedonska_Kafana". I know the poster, Makedonska_Kafana, primarily uses it for posting music and songs, but from time to time, he also posts about places and people in Canada who are leaders in some way, or others who he sees as villains, but he doesn't open new threads each time he wants to talk about something more than music.

Like I said at the beginning, it was all for simple reasons,eg like the F'you Papandreou video clip. I hope I haven't unintentionally done anything wrong. There is nothing there that is so valuable, so if it's out of order, the thread can be deleted.

[Brian]

Just an after thought. If the reasons for having it are valid, ie a 'scratch-pad', but the name's a bit self glorifying, maybe it can be renamed to the MTO Corner. Just an idea. I really don't mind if you delete it.

[Soldier of Macedon]

There is no reason to delete the thread.

[Brian]

For those who were wondering 'what's going on', read on. For those who still don't believe, just look it up on the net - no, not just the 'nut' sites but also mainstream / reputable media. There are a lot of thing that never make the evening news (deliberately?) and a lot of things you wont find in your local daily newspaper, but it may be in somebody's (different part of the world) newspaper. The Internet gives all of us the opportunity (if we bother) to scan what is being said around the world and get information we may otherwise miss-out on, and in doing so construct a clearer picture of 'what's going on' in the world.

Taiwan's Foxconn to use one million robots by 2014

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-taiwan-foxconn-million-robots.html

August 1, 2011

Taiwan IT giant Foxconn -- hit by a spate of suicides at its Chinese plants -- plans to replace 500,000 workers with robots in the next three years, state media reported.

Foxconn -- the world's largest maker of computer components, which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia -- plans to use one million robots to do "simple" work, China Business News quoted chairman Terry Gou saying.

Gou announced the plan to 10,000 staff at a company event in Shenzhen on Friday, various media reports said.

Foxconn currently has 10,000 robots doing painting, welding and assembly tasks. It will increase that number to 300,000 next year and to one million in 2014, the report said.

A Foxconn spokesman could not be immediately reached by AFP for comment.

At least 14 workers have died in apparent suicides since last year, most of them in Shenzhen. Activists blamed the deaths on tough working conditions and have called for better treatment of staff.

You have to love the name "Foxconn". A 'fox' is considered a smart but sly, cheating person, and 'conn' is short for convict (maybe their workers) or conn job ie trick or deceit.


Update of this story - now all the workers are considering suicide.

1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1

It’s hard not to look at the nets. Every building is skirted in them. They drape every precipice, steel poles jutting out 20 feet above the sidewalk, loosely tangled like volleyball nets in winter.

The nets went up in May, after the 11th jumper in less than a year died here. They carried a message: You can throw yourself off any building you like, as long as it isn’t one of these. And they seem to have worked. Since they were installed, the suicide rate has slowed to a trickle.

My tour guides don’t mention the nets until I do. Not to avoid the topic, I don’t think—the suicides are the reason I am at a Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, a bustling industrial city in southern China—but simply because they are so prevalent. Foxconn, the single largest private employer in mainland China, manufactures many of the products—motherboards, camera components, MP3 players—that make up the world’s $150 billion consumer-electronics industry. Foxconn’s output accounts for nearly 40 percent of that revenue. Altogether, the company employs about a million people, nearly half of whom work at the 20-year-old Shenzhen plant. But until two summers ago, most Americans had never heard of Foxconn.

That all changed with the suicides. There had been a few since 2007. Then a spate of nine between March and May 2010—all jumpers. There were also suicides at other Foxconn plants in China. Although the company disputes some cases, evidence gathered from news reports and other sources indicates that 17 Foxconn workers have killed themselves in the past half decade. What had seemed to be a series of isolated incidents was becoming an appalling trend. When one jumper left a note explaining that he committed suicide to provide for his family, the program of remuneration for the families of jumpers was canceled. Some saw the Foxconn suicides as a damning consequence of our global hunger for low-cost electronics. Reports from inside the factories warned of “sweatshop” conditions; old allegations of forced overtime burbled back to life. Foxconn and its partners—notably Apple—found themselves defending factory conditions while struggling to explain the deaths. “Suicides in China Prompt Damage Control,” blared The New York Times.

I seem to be witnessing some of those damage-control efforts on this still-warm fall day as two Foxconn executives—along with a liaison from Burson-Marsteller, a PR firm hired to deal with the post-suicide outcry—lead me through the facility. I have spent much of my career blogging about gadgets on sites like Boing Boing Gadgets and Gizmodo, reviewing and often praising many of the products that were made right here at Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory. I ignored the first Foxconn suicides as sad but statistically inevitable. But as the number of jumpers approached double digits, latent self-reproach began to boil over. Out of a million people, 17 suicides isn’t much—indeed, American college students kill themselves at four times that rate. Still, after years of writing what is (at best) buyers’ guidance and (at worst) marching hymns for an army of consumers, I was burdened by what felt like an outsize provision of guilt—an existential buyer’s remorse for civilization itself. I am here because I want to know: Did my iPhone kill 17 people?

My hosts are eager to help me answer that question in the negative by pointing out how pleasant life in the factory can be. They are quick with the college analogies: The canteens and mess halls are “like a college food court.” The living quarters, where up to eight workers share rooms about the size of a two-car garage, are “like college dorms.” The avenues and boulevards in the less industrial parts of the campus are “like malls.”

For all their defensiveness, my guides are not far off the mark. The avenues certainly look more like a college campus than the dingy design-by-Communism concrete canyons I half expected to find. Sure, everything on the Foxconn campus is a bit shabby—errant woody saplings creep out of sidewalk cracks, and the signage is sometimes rusty or faded—more community college than Ivy League, perhaps. But it’s generally clean. Workers stroll the sidewalks chatting and laughing, smoking together under trees, as amiable as any group of factory workers in the first world.


But “college campus” doesn’t quite capture the vastness of the place. It’s more like a nation-state, a gated complex covering just over a square mile, separated from the rest of Shenzhen’s buildings by chain link and concrete. It houses one of the largest industrial kitchens in Asia—perhaps the world. Shenzhen itself was developed over the past three decades as one of party leader Deng Xiaoping’s Special Economic Zones—a kind of capitalist hot spot. The experiment was a rousing success. Millions of workers, gambling that low but dependable wages would be more readily found in Shenzhen, migrated from the poor, rural western provinces, packing into the tenement complexes that soon riddled the city. Factory work offered a chance to change their lives and the lives of their families back home, but it offered little in the way of security. Many companies did not supply housing, leaving workers to find shelter in dodgy slums or encouraging them to sleep on the assembly line. When they did provide lodging, it was typically a dorm room crammed with bunk beds.

According to company lore, Foxconn founder Terry Gou was determined to do things differently. So when the firm built its Longhua factory in Shenzhen, it included onsite dormitories—good ones, designed to be better than what workers could afford on their own. Terry Gou built on-campus housing, I am told, because Terry Gou cared about the welfare of his employees.

Up went a factory, up went a dorm. Up went an assembly line, up went a cafeteria. While other companies’ workers fended for themselves or slept under the tables they worked at, Gou’s employees were well fed, safe from the petty crime of a growing metropolis, and surrounded by peers and advocates.

It rings as unalloyed munificence—until a man puts his foot on the edge of a roof, looks across the campus full of trees and swimming pools and coffee shops, and steps off into nothing.


Foxconn executives compare their plant to a college campus, and they aren't far off—the facilities contain everything from dormitories to counseling centers.
Photo: Tony Law
In the part of our minds where Americans hold an image of what an Asian factory may be, there are two competing visions: fluorescent fields of chittering machines attended by clean-suited technicians, or barefoot laborers bent over long wooden tables in sweltering rooms hazed by a fog of soldering fumes.

When we buy a new electronic device, we imagine the former factory. Our little glass, metal, and plastic marvel is the height of modern technological progress; it must have been made by worker-robots (with hands like surgeon-robots)—or failing that, extremely competent human beings.

But when we think “Chinese factory,” we often imagine the latter. Some in the US—and here I should probably stop speaking in generalities and simply refer to myself—harbor a guilty suspicion that the products we buy from China, even those made for American companies, come to us at the expense of underpaid and oppressed laborers.

From what I can tell, though, the reality is more banal than either of those scenarios. This is what it’s like to work at the Foxconn factory: You enter a five- or six-story concrete building, pull on a plastic jacket and hat, and slip booties over your shoes. You walk up a wide staircase to your assigned floor, the entirety of which lies open under unwavering fluorescent light.

It’s likely that your job will require you to sit or stand in place for most of your shift. Maybe you grab components from a bin and slot them into circuit boards as they move down a conveyer. Or you might tend a machine, feeding it tape that holds tiny microprocessors like candy on paper spools. Or you may sit next to a refrigerator-sized machine, checking its handiwork under a magnifying glass. Or you could sit at a bench with other technicians placing completed cell-phone circuit boards into lead-lined boxes resembling small kilns, testing each piece for electromagnetic interference.

If you have to go to the bathroom, you raise your hand until your spot on the line can be covered. You get an hour for lunch and two 10-minute breaks; roles are switched up every few days for cross-training. It seems incredibly boring—like factory work anywhere in the developed world.

You work 10 hours or so, depending on overtime. You walk or take a shuttle back to your dorm, where you share a room with up to seven other employees that Foxconn management has selected as your bunkmates. You watch television in a common room with bench seating, on an HDTV that seems insultingly small compared with the giant units you and your coworkers make every day. Or maybe you play videogames or check email in one of the on-campus cybercafes, perhaps sharing a semiprivate “couple’s booth” with a girlfriend or boyfriend.

In the morning, you clean yourself up in your room’s communal sink or in one of the dorm’s showers, then head back to the production line to do it all over again.

A report by the UK’s The Mail on Sunday in 2006 accused Foxconn of forcing workers to pull long shifts to meet unrealistic quotas. That report prompted an audit from Apple, which found “no instances of forced overtime” but noted that “employees worked longer hours than permitted by our Code of Conduct”—over 60 hours a week. (Apple has performed such audits every year since.)

Last April, the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekend sent a young reporter into Foxconn to work undercover for a month; he returned with bleak tales of hopelessness and “voluntary overtime affidavits.” An October report by Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, a Hong Kong-based labor rights group, found that workers at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant worked 13 days straight, 12 hours a day, to produce the first generation of Apple’s iPad. Foxconn has denied the reports and said it complies with all Chinese regulations regarding working hours and overtime.

That 17 people have committed suicide at Foxconn is a tragedy. But in fact, the suicide rate at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant remains below national averages for both rural and urban China, a bleak but unassailable fact that does much to exonerate the conditions at Foxconn and absolutely nothing to bring those 17 people back.

But the work itself isn’t inhumane—unless you consider a repetitive, exhausting, and alienating workplace over which you have no influence or authority to be inhumane. And that would pretty much describe every single manufacturing or burger-flipping job ever.

I walk one afternoon to the brassiest concentration of Shenzhen’s manufacturing power, the SEG Square electronics market in the Futian district. My Taiwanese guide, Paul, has spent the better part of a decade in Shenzhen as a steward for Western electronics companies seeking to procure components or goods from one of the city’s thousands of suppliers. Here in SEG Square, the products of those suppliers fill glass cases and hang from pegboards in vast, low-ceilinged grottoes that would echo if they weren’t crammed wall to wall with vendors’ stalls. Elsewhere in Shenzhen, such markets are stocked with bamboo knickknacks and counterfeit puffy vests; this one is filled with obviously fake iPhone chargers.

SEG Square’s markets are crowded, loud, and mildly mephitic from cigarette smoke and the odor of fresh-baked electronics. Whole floors are dedicated to knockoffs, not just at-first-glance-perfect clones of popular products but also cargo-cult evocations, like FM radios cast from a third-generation iPhone mold that probably wasn’t convincingly accurate in the first place. It all looks like so much junk, but there is something touching about it. Each item was once the moment’s work of a human being.

Paul has seen his share of factories in Shenzhen over the years. I ask him about Foxconn, and he echoes the sentiment I’ve heard from others: Whatever problems Foxconn has, it’s still one of the top places to work in the area. “In terms of infrastructure, Foxconn is by far the best factory in China,” he says. We stop to haggle with a vendor over five nonfunctional dummy iPhones (in mythic white) that I want to buy as gag gifts for friends back home. “But how much of that is a facade?” Paul asks, citing the LCD monitors that grace the company’s assembly lines—ostentatious symbols of modernity that provide little benefit to the worker. “Pointless waste of electricity.”

As for the Cyberfox Café, Foxconn’s onsite Internet lounge, where I recently ate a fine bowl of bitter melon soup? “It might look huge, but considering the size of Foxconn’s workforce,” Paul says, “it can’t even serve 5 percent of the employees.”

Even if it is one of the better places to work in Shenzhen (at least for entry-level factory jobs), by the middle of 2010, after `, it was clear to Foxconn management that they were no longer running an anonymous manufacturing company. Foxconn was now a billion-dollar avatar of globalization, and they were feeling the rubbernecked gape of international scrutiny.

The living quarters on the Shenzhen campus were recently handed off to property management companies that are more experienced at addressing the living needs of employees. Foxconn hopes the outside firms will be quicker to respond to tenant complaints, although some critics suggest that the company hopes to outsource some of the blame as well. (When Foxconn constructs new inland factories, the living quarters will be managed in partnership with local governments.)

Foxconn has also built onsite counseling facilities, which are staffed by psychologists and counselors. I toured two such facilities. One, sharing storefront space on a busy avenue, has agents who can help workers replace lost keycards or buy prepaid mobile-phone cards to call home; this place was fairly busy. Another, off the main drag, was a full-on care center with music-therapy rooms, private counseling, and lounge areas; when I visited, it was nearly empty. In one room, a life-size Weeble Wobble with a scowling face could be smacked with a padded baseball bat. (It relieved my own stress for a moment.)

But the most ambitious effort to address worker morale is a modest-looking electronics store on the Foxconn campus, right next to a shop selling fresh fruit. It’s called Ten Thousand Horses Galloping. (I’m assured the name has more pizzazz in Chinese.) Inside, you can buy rice cookers and desk fans and phones. It’s like a RadioShack without the DIY components, or a Best Buy without the large appliances or racks of media. And according to Foxconn executives, it’s the future of their company.

Foxconn campuses already have company stores where workers can buy the products they manufacture at discounted prices. Ten Thousand Horses Galloping is designed to be an electronics store for the rest of China. Foxconn plans to offer franchises to employees and even grant them a little startup capital.

The idea is to give some lucky, hard-working employees a way to bring a touch of entrepreneurial spirit back to their home provinces, especially in the poorer west. The workers get to own their own businesses; Foxconn gets to supply the stores with goods. To date, Foxconn has granted franchises to 60 employees and several more to outsiders.

Foxconn positions Ten Thousand Horses Galloping as a new direction for the company, one that allows it to shift into retail while tapping into the cream of the roughly million-strong workforce it has cultivated in China. But the store also offers another benefit to Foxconn, one that wasn’t even needed until recently: employee retention. In recent years, factories have been sprouting up in China’s interior to take advantage of cheaper labor. Workers aren’t flocking to Shenzhen as they did a decade ago, when it was one of the only places to get a manufacturing job. “Now that work opportunities are increasing in the interior regions of the country, would-be migrants are willing to take a lower salary at home to stay with their families,” says Benjamin Dolgin-Gardner, general manager of Shenzhen CE and IT Limited. Even Foxconn itself is building a facility in Hunan, after being lured by multibillion-dollar tax and investment incentives from the provincial government.

Shenzhen may soon relinquish its role as the stoked furnace of the Chinese dream. But will that mean even greater expansion of the middle class, with commensurate benefits—or just the same old system shifted a thousand miles to the west?


The Foxconn counseling centers provide employees with everything from life-size punching bags to music therapy— employees can even reload their calling cards.
Photo: Tony Law

Since Foxconn installed nets on all buildings at its Shenzhen campus, the suicide rate among employees has declined dramatically.
Photo: Tony Law
In America, we have wrestled with the idea of divine sanction since the country’s inception. Some of us believe we have a God-given dominion over the earth; others argue that we’re bound to a larger Gaian system and are, at our best, caretakers.

My heart is with the caretakers. But I believe that humankind made a subconscious collective bargain at the dawn of the industrial age to trade the resources of our planet for the chance to escape it. We live in the transitional age between that decision and its conclusion.

In this middle age, the West built a middle class. It’s now eroding and may be less enduring than the American Dream itself—a dream we exported to the rest of the world by culture and conquest. Nevertheless, most Americans have food, cars, gadgets. How can we begrudge a single person these luxuries if we want them ourselves?

By many accounts, those unskilled laborers who get jobs at Foxconn are the luckiest. But eyes should absolutely remain on Foxconn, the eyes of media both foreign and domestic, of government inspectors and partner companies. The work may be humane, but rampant overtime is not. We should encourage workers’ rights just as much as we champion economic development. We’ve exported our manufacturing; let’s be sure to export trade unions, too.

I’ve written thousands of posts, millions of words, about things. Usually things with electricity in them. Doing this for a living, on and off, for the better part of a decade, has greatly—perhaps fundamentally—changed how I perceive the world around me. I can no longer look at the material world as a collection of objects but instead see interfaces, histories, and materials.

To be soaked in materialism, to directly and indirectly champion it, has also brought guilt. I don’t know if I have a right to the vast quantities of materials and energy I consume in my daily life. Even if I thought I did, I know the planet cannot bear my lifestyle multiplied by 7 billion individuals. I believe this understanding is shared, if only subconsciously, by almost everyone in the Western world.

Every last trifle we touch and consume, right down to the paper on which this magazine is printed or the screen on which it’s displayed, is not only ephemeral but in a real sense irreplaceable. Every consumer good has a cost not borne out by its price but instead falsely bolstered by a vanishing resource economy. We squander millions of years’ worth of stored energy, stored life, from our planet to make not only things that are critical to our survival and comfort but also things that simply satisfy our innate primate desire to possess. It’s this guilt that we attempt to assuage with the hope that our consumerist culture is making life better—for ourselves, of course, but also in some lesser way for those who cannot afford to buy everything we purchase, consume, or own.

When that small appeasement is challenged even slightly, when that thin, taut cord that connects our consumption to the nameless millions who make our lifestyle possible snaps even for a moment, the gulf we find ourselves peering into—a yawning, endless future of emptiness on a squandered planet—becomes too much to bear.

When 17 people take their lives, I ask myself, did I in my desire hurt them? Even just a little?

And of course the answer, inevitable and immeasurable as the fluttering silence of our sun, is yes.

Just a little.

And...

Xbox 360 workers reportedly threaten mass suicide

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57357444/xbox-360-workers-reportedly-threaten-mass-suicide/

January 11, 2012
(CBS News) A dissident website is reporting that 300 employees at a plant in China that makes the Xbox 360 threatened earlier this month to commit mass suicide after being denied promised compensation.
The report in anti-government website China Jasmine Revolution (via Want China Times), claims that the protest took place Jan. 2 at a Foxconn plant in Wuhan, China. A tragedy was avoided after the town's mayor got involved and talked the workers out of their threat, the report said. (Another website, Record China, reports that the incident resulted in a plant shutdown.

In addition to Microsoft, Foxconn also builds iPhones, iPods, and MacBooks for Apple. Dell and Hewlett Packard have also sourced products from Foxconn.

In a comment to the website Kotaku, a spokesman for Microsoft said:

"Microsoft takes working conditions in the factories that manufacture its products very seriously, and we are currently investigating this issue. We have a stringent Vendor Code of Conduct that spells out our expectations, and we monitor working conditions closely on an ongoing basis and address issues as they emerge. Microsoft is committed to the fair treatment and safety of workers employed by our vendors, and to ensuring conformance with Microsoft policy."

Over the years, several articles have reported the existence of bleak working conditions at Foxconn. However, Foxconn parent Hon Hai Precision Industries has repeatedly denied forcing employees to work long hours for low pay under stressful conditions. Still, in 2010, 14 Foxconn workers committed suicide amid complaints about the working conditions. (There were reports that Foxconn employees were being required to sign contracts promising not to commit suicide.)

[Daskalot]

Very interesting news Brian, are Foxconn themselves going to build these robots or are they purchasing them?

[Daskalot]

There is no reason to delete the thread.

Nor renaming it, keep it as it is.

[Brian]

Very interesting news Brian, are Foxconn themselves going to build these robots or are they purchasing them?

I don't know, but if I find out, I'll post it.

[Brian]

The Albanisation of Macedonia

The Census

What's the difference between a census and an electoral list? Only adult citizens can be on the electoral list - right?. But if the ethnic Albanians can manipulate the census so badly, how much confidence can we have in the electoral list?

The demands made by the ethnic Albanians are constant and ongoing. They have openly said in the past that they want autonomy or full secession. Any statements like 'we want to work with the government' or to that effect, are lies. They showed their cards previously. Pulling them away and claiming they are different cards does not make it so.

The key points to Macedonia's problems-
1. SDSM and other Macedonian traitors
2. ethnic Albanian separatist ambitions
3. other minorities nominating (willingly or by force) as Albanians and how they vote
4. external enemies supporting the ethnic Albanians by creating and (threatening physically to) enforcing laws (ie the FA)
5. the disarray of minor parties/groups/activists
6. the piss-weak government too afraid to enforce existing laws.

I hate the government for their inaction in enforcing existing laws. Do they think they are buying time by not confronting the ethnic Albanians with existing laws. Buying time for what? Delaying a conflict? By allowing the build up of the Albanian's positions (we want so many people employed in government including key positions, we want greater decentralisation of government power (ie read autonomy), we want our own school teaching in our own language, we want to illegally build all over the place, we want freer borders with Albania/Kosovo) will only hasten a conflict the faster they feel powerfully enough. Smashing their power by enforcing the law on everything, even the smallest things, is the only way to prevent a conflict because they know they don't have the numbers. Why is it the Albanians can (and do) kick up a fuss for the tiniest thing - didn't they recently hold up Parliament about the budget because something wasn't written in Albanian? Because they know it is the little things that matter - you either shove someone a mile back with a war or you make them step back a mile one inch at a time peacefully. Are our politicians to stupid to understand this? If not, then why the inaction?

The minority parties/groups/activists need to solidify for the ultimate common good - the saving of Macedonia. Personal bitchiness needs to be put aside and for a 'third force' (ie not just government vs opposition). On their own they may be too insignificant to do anything. Even combined they may be too small to run the country, but they could be big enough to 'bend the ear (and will)' of the government. Because they are small they need to choose one of the major parties and offer to back them as a solid group on the condition they will have influence. I wish it wasn't the current government they would have to turn to, but SDSM are not an option.

By just tearing up the FA, Macedonia could be inviting the wrath of external forces because they love 'the rule of law'. If the FA says because they are 25% then you must do this, that and the other thing, then what if they're not 25%, does it mean Macedonia does not need to do this, that and the other? Use 'the rule of law' against them, and voice it to the world. They will have no other choice then to back-off or admit they do not respect the rule of law and are acting illegally.

The key to countering the FA is proving the truth - not only by showing the ethnic Albanians are 17% or so as some say, but also by tearing away other minorities (forced?) who falsely identify as Albanians, and thus further diminishing their numbers, and hence, powers. The Macedonian Muslims and Romi and others need to know their future is with the Macedonians, but they also need to see some gains.

There's not much to say about the ethnic Albanians, we know where they stand. I seriously doubt many, if any, can be convinced that Macedonia understands they have needs, as any person would, but that their demands are way beyond anything anyone would call reasonable and they need to work with the Macedonians for the betterment of Macedonia, the place they call home.

SDSM are creatures. Core SDSM supporters will never change and should die with the party they support. But, some people go with the 'what's in it for me' and 'what's popular' and as much as I hate traitorous, mercenary sluts that they are, even if they swell the ranks of the Macedonian side in an election because it's the 'popular thing to do', then Macedonia needs to let them stand to win the 'numbers war', but never truly forget who they are.

Only because there is no one else (and I wish there was), with such a swell of support, they government might grow some balls and take action as needed.

Ever which way you look at it, all the problems stem from the census, and for this reason it should be, and must be, our collective focus for bio-metric ID cards which include a photo in the card like the Australian drives licences (not that they are bio-metric). The census is some time off and between now and then Macedonian activists within the Republic, and out, need to focus their attention on this most urgent matter. A false result will only make things worse (to the point of no return?) and waiting another 10 years for a new census could be too late. This is the time it can be done and (like it or not) this is the generation that carries the burden and must do it.

[Soldier of Macedon]

By just tearing up the FA, Macedonia could be inviting the wrath of external forces because they love 'the rule of law'.

Can you elaborate on that? Who are the external forces, what will they do and how will they achieve their objectives?

[Brian]

I don't know all the ins-and-outs of the events of 2001, but didn't the West threaten Macedonia if they didn't stop hostilities when they surrounded the Albanians? I think, if left to our own devices then, we would not be having this discussion today.

I don't know what form, and if any, the threat would take if the FA were just torn up today. What I'm saying is that, given the situation is such that the census is due anyway, it is an opportunity to strengthen Macedonia's position to tear-up the FA.

It is a wrong document, there is no doubt, but just tearing it up opens a debate about was it a wrong document, did the Macedonians act lawfully, are the Macedonian racists/anti-Muslims/anti-minorities, do the Macedonians respect civil rights, ect. What if you were presented an opportunity to make the FA void because the evidence shows that what is written in it does not mach the reality on the ground? Basically, if this, then that. But, what if there is no this?

All I'm saying is that many of Macedonia's woes stem from the FA, which hinges its power from the census result. Taking steps to defeat the false census results, particularly since truth is on our side, seams like not only a simpler solution , but more conclusive since it eliminates further discussion after the FA is torn up.

[Soldier of Macedon]

I don't know all the ins-and-outs of the events of 2001, but didn't the West threaten Macedonia if they didn't stop hostilities when they surrounded the Albanians?

I would be interested to see the evidence and justification for such a threat. Macedonians were merely protecting the sovereignty of Macedonia and weren't like the people of Bosnia where they were carrying out massacres against minority populations.

It is a wrong document, there is no doubt, but just tearing it up opens a debate about was it a wrong document, did the Macedonians act lawfully, are the Macedonian racists/anti-Muslims/anti-minorities, do the Macedonians respect civil rights, ect.

The FA doesn't need to be simply torn up, it needs to be replaced with something more adequate based on the civic model where it concerns the rights of individuals. In addition, minority rights must be secured but so too does the prevalence of Macedonian culture and language.

[Phoenix]

Brian, in regards to your foxconn post...

I don't think there's any conspiracy...
There was an event in the 18th century that has gone down in history as the Industrial Revolution...today it's called simply industrialisation.

No new world orders, crystalized honey, flesh eating royals, UFO's or Skynets with 'terminators'