Topics

The scene: Late August, at the St-Louis-de-Blandford warehouse in Quebec.

Street value of the loot: $30 million.

The target: The Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve.

The. Global. Strategic. Maple. Syrup. Reserve.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/03/maple_syrup_reserves_hit/

Commodity markets worldwide and pancake-gobbling North Americans have been left reeling by the news of an audacious theft which may have seen as much as five thousand tons of maple syrup burgled from planet Earth's "global strategic reserve" of the sticky gunge.

A searing announcement from the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers revealed the facts to an astonished world late last week. The largely Francophone Canadian province is responsible for as much as 80 per cent of world maple syrup production, and fully two-thirds of Canada's output is exported to feed the insatiable demands of pancake-noshing breakfasters in the Dominion's vast southern neighbour.

This is even better than that time I discovered that China had strategic pork reserves.

...if you want to read Gary Brecher, you're going to have to pay for it.

And, more specifically, you're going to have to pay NSFWCorp the princely sum of $3 a month.

Also, Mark Ames has finally admitted that Gary Brecher is in fact John Dolan:

It was exactly ten years ago that I first proposed the War Nerd column to my writing mentor, Dr. John Dolan. My former partner Matt Taibbi had just left Moscow and The eXile, and I needed a new columnist to fill the void. Everyone was talking war in 2002, but it was clear to me that no one was talking honestly about war—and if one person could, it was John Dolan.

We were only a few months into the War On Terror, and the talk by amateur war dorks was getting out of hand: If you remember, the major magazines and newspapers were slobbering all over each other for a new superlative to describe America's military dominance. It wasn't enough anymore to call America "the world's only superpower"—by 2002, they were inventing super-bosso playground words to describe America: now it was a "hyperpower" rather than a mere "superpower"; they claimed that the American Empire was the most powerful empire that mankind had ever produced, putting the Romans and the Mongols to shame. America had achieved "full spectrum dominance" they boasted. The only thing that prevented America from completely subjugating every last human being on earth was America's own benevolence and sense of restraint. Thomas Friedman, with his narrow little shoulders, his jowly face and his ridiculous mustache, stormed into the Charlie Rose Show and dared the Arab World to "suck on this!"

In sum: we were fucking ridiculous. All the cheap triumphalism and affected gravitas of all these middle-aged men striking grim "look at my steely-yet-anguished expression as I make tough decisions while dressed in my dark suit" poses for the covers of all those Woodward hardback jackets—it screamed "comic foil," the big setup before the fall, and yet there was no one in pundit-land to capture the mean humor of it all.

What was lacking from all of the tough-guy martial talk in DC and Manhattan was the plain, flat, obvious, comical truth: These wars were a godsend to millions of Americans, mostly males, whose dull, dreary lives aren't worth protecting, let alone remembering. For them, this war—other people's wars, other people's deaths and glories and massacres—was the closest to a meaningful existence they'd ever get.

Dr. Dolan had already invented the expression "War Nerd" in a column he wrote shortly after 9/11 for The eXile, under his own name. But for the new War Nerd column, Dr. Dolan insisted on using a pseudonym, to release the War Nerd column from any of Dr. Dolan's own personal baggage. So he invented a character, Gary Brecher, based entirely on Dolan's own real war-nerd experiences and analyses, only with a simplified biography, in a voice that's best described as a sort of "cheerful nihilism."

It quickly became the most popular column that The eXile ever ran, with thousands of fans—mostly male, mostly nerdly— the world over. Dr. Dolan once confided to me, "People like the War Nerd better than they like me—and you know, to be honest, I agree with them. I like Gary Brecher better than I like myself."

You know, I've been waiting for this profile for a long time.  Long before McArdle made the stupidest move of a very stupid career by picking a fight with Mark Ames and Yasha Levine over the origins of the Tea Party.  I'd been aware of McArdle's earlier days as "Jane Galt" on the internet, wishing to get rid of corporate taxes entirely and wanting to beat antiwar protestors with pieces of 2x4, before she remade herself as a "serious" and "sober" business and economic correspondent for The Atlantic.

That anyone could take her seriously with that kind of background seemed utterly preposterous.  But here we are, several years on, and "Jane Galt" is still regurgitating her libertarian word-vomit over the wider internet, and somehow getting paid for it.  Though at least she is gone from The Atlantic (too late, the damage is done, James Fallows and Ta-Nehisi Coates are the only people worth reading in that rag), the Daily Beast are gainfully employing her, meaning she'll still be shitting up internet political writing for years to come.

Anyway, enough about that, here is the link

http://exiledonline.com/the-daily-beasts-megan-mcardle-a-covert-republican-party-activist-trained-by-the-billionaire-koch-brothers/

Includes such delicious quotes as:

"Borrowers were not brought down by predatory lending. . . . Borrowers were brought down by a willingness to gamble on rising home prices–exactly the same thing that knocked out Lehman Brothers. At least Lehman Brothers had the excuse that ten years of rising prices had completely screwed up their default models."

Yeah, homeowners caused the economic crisis, and took those poor, defenceless bankers for a ride.

"I also disagree with the notion that the concentration of wealth is a large political problem. ... while the wealthy certainly have the ear of politicians, and also give a lot of money to those politicians, it's not clear to me how tightly these things are linked on matters of broad national policy."

Yeah, whenever in the history of humanity has large concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few ever led to political power?  Certainly not in recent history.

Am I suggesting that the Iraqis should pay for occupation expenses? Nope. We can afford it, and there's something repellent about making impoverished Iraqis pay for a war foisted on them by an evil dictator. But most of that $2t, if it is any sort of a real number, will be stuff for Iraqis: roads, schools, hospitals, government buildings, power plants and sewers and all the good stuff that lets us live like citizens of the 21st century. That stuff should come out of Iraqi oil revenues.

"HAHAHA, look at the antiwar retards.  Don't you know the Iraq War will pay for itself? Once those grateful Iraqis are done throwing flowers at us, they'll use their massive oil wealth to rebuild the country themselves."

"For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman; this seems to be an important feature of the institution. We should not go mucking around and changing this extremely important institution, because if we make a bad change, the institution will fall apart."

Ladies and gentlemen, Megan McArdle, "libertarian".

Also documented is McArdle's long history of having virtually everything ever paid for by the Koch brothers, who at this point should be considered polluters of public discourse, the fly-tippers of internet blogging.

I've been saying this for about the last two years.  Elements within the USA and in Mexico are backing the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico's "Drug War" against the other factions, cartels and gangs fighting for control of the border crossings and transit/distribution networks in Mexico.

Evidence comes in the form of a comment by a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel, whose story is corroborated by an email from a Stratfor source, leaked online several months ago as part of the "Global Intelligence Files".

MX1, a Mexican intelligence agent detailed with fighting the cartels on the US side of the border, was revealed by Stratfor emails to be Fernando de la Mora, operating under diplomatic cover in the Mexican consulate in Phoenix (he was previously in a similar role in El Paso, Texas). 

MX1 liased with American law enforcement and intelligence personnel on the drug issue, of course, and was present at a secret summit in Fort Bliss, Texas, to discuss how to improve communication between the US, Mexican intelligence assets and enforcement, the military etc.  In a particular email sent by MX1, he details how the Mexican government generally deals with the cartels:

The Mexican strategy is not to negotiate directly.

In any event, "negotiations" would take place as follows:

Assuming a non-disputed plaza [a major drug market, such as Ciudad Juarez]:

• [If] they [a big narco-trafficking group] bring [in] some drugs, transport some drugs, [and] they are discrete, they don't bother anyone, [then] no one gets hurt;

• [And the] government turns the other way.

• [If] they [the narco-traffickers] kill someone or do something violent, [then the] government responds by taking down [the] drug network or making arrests.

(Now, assuming a disputed plaza:)

• [A narco-trafficking] group comes [into a plaza], [then the] government waits to see how dominant cartel responds.

• If [the] dominant cartel fights them [the new narco-trafficking group], [then the] government takes them down.

• If [the] dominant cartel is allied [with the new group], no problem.

• If [a new] group comes in and start(s) committing violence, they get taken down: first by the government letting the dominant cartel do their thing, then [by] punishing both cartels.

But then he describes what he sees as a different strategy from the Americans:

... This is how "negotiations" take place with cartels, through signals. There are no meetings, etc. ...

So, the MX [Mexican] strategy is not to negotiate. However, I think the US [recently] sent a signal that could be construed as follows:

"To the VCF [the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes] and Sinaloa cartels: Thank you for providing our market with drugs over the years. We are now concerned about your perpetration of violence, and would like to see you stop that. In this regard, please know that Sinaloa is bigger and better than [the] VCF. Also note that CDJ [Juarez] is very important to us, as is the whole border. In this light, please talk amongst yourselves and lets all get back to business. Again, we recognize that Sinaloa is bigger and better, so either VCF gets in line or we will mess you up."

I don't know what the US strategy is, but I can tell you that if the message was understood by Sinaloa and VCF as I described above, the Mexican government would not be opposed at all.

In sum, I have a gut feeling that the US agencies tried to send a signal telling the cartels to negotiate themselves. They unilaterally declared a winner [the Sinaloa Cartel], and this is unprecedented, and deserves analysis. If there was no strategy behind this, and it was simply a leaked report, then I will be interested to see how it plays out in the coming months.

In another email, MX1 notes:

We believe that when the US made an announcement that was corroborated by several federal spokespersons simultaneously (that Sinaloa controlled CDJ [Juarez]), it was a message that the DEA wanted to send to Sinaloa. The message was that the US recognized Sinaloa's dominance in the area [Juarez], although it was not absolute. It was meant to be read by the cartels as a sort of ultimatum: negotiate and put your house in order once and for all.

One dissenting analyst thinks that the message is the opposite, telling Sinaloa to take what it had and to leave what remains of VCF. Regardless, the reports are saying that the US message to the cartels was to negotiate and stop the violence. It says that the US has never before pronounced that a cartel controls a particular plaza, so it is an unusual event.

Note, these are the assessments of a Mexican intelligence officer, the equivalent to MI6 or the CIA.  Furthermore, MX1 isn't just any Mexican spy, he was hand picked, to be the "tip of the spear" of the Mexican efforts against the cartels in the USA.  In other words he's a very serious and credible person.

So when Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, a senior trafficker for said Sinaloa Cartel, currently being held in Chicago awaiting trial, says there was a deal between the USA and the Sinaloa Cartel, and that deal reads suspiciously like the one outlined by a high ranking Mexican intelligence officer...well then, you have to start questioning just how much validity that proposition has.

And lest anyone has forgotten, some of the guns that "walked" during the "Fast and Furious" operation ended up in the homes of Sinaloa Cartel members.  How perfectly coincidental.

I used to imagine that making fun of people was a constructive act, in a way — that it would influence them toward kind of a banal crisis of self-reflection in which, at least briefly, they'd be able to see themselves as a reasonable Other would see them, and maybe be forced to think about the limits of their received worldview, and the pitfalls of ideology, and so forth and all that sort of thing. Then I guess I grew up a little and realized that I was just making excuses for making fun of people all the time. That it was really all about my own deficiencies, about pointing out faults in others as a way of working out issues that I was unwilling to explore in myself, or sometimes even to name.

Then I guess I grew up more, because I stopped worrying about why-this and why-that, and began to pay greater attention to the how and what of things, amidst this grand and unencompassable opera, for lack of a more ready metaphor, that we call life. Specifically, how shall I make fun of people on the internet so they look really ding-honk stupid, and what shall be my specific conceit toward this end? Technique, in other words. Architectonics. Stupidity is, therefore it will be made fun of, on the Internet, by me.

That's really an ontological statement, yet one which negates ontology, if you see what I mean. I imagine that it's what Aleister Crowley was getting at with the phrase, "the fall of Because," and what mystics of related traditions refer to as "crossing the Abyss." First there is no joke about internet tough guys masturbating glumly to bodybuilding magazines, and then there does exist a joke about internet tough guys masturbating glumly to bodybuilding magazines. Forget about 'why' for a moment: How is something created out of nothing? How do you, as it were, get from one side of the Abyss to the other? I imagine it as what they call the demiurge, which in itself obviates the question of 'why,' if you follow how that goes. And so on through the topic, etc.

But what I'm getting at is, okay, what's actually happening here — or, if you would, what a reasonable Other can be imagined as perceiving — is that we have to come up with something new and clever each time someone runs through the room burping the alphabet, while all the idiots have to do to keep up their end is to intake sufficient calories to sustain motor function, and to pop a vitamin now and then to stave off rickets and/or scurvy.

They could, for instance, type ERIS POOPY and send it blazing through the Internet, via the energy expenditure of one poking index finger, and that's, you know, just idiots being idiots again, like usual. They could type nothing, and you'd still know — you would know — that they are out there somewhere thinking something nutrageously bonky that they might as well have typed up and put online, for all the difference between their public utterances ("Heh heh, I have just cracked the secret that will bring down The Good Reverend Roger") and what other people would call daydreaming and wishful thinking ("Heh heh, I'm a secret agent with a watch that can stop time"). Idiots doesn't have to do, it is only necessary that they exist.

*the title, like the cake, is a lie.

"Group sex is better than one-on-one because, as in any sort of collective work, you can shirk off."

If Vladimir Putin did not exist, he would have to be invented.

Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, business magnate, funder of anti-Communist causes around the world and knower of the locations of many corpses with tales to tell, has finally died.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19459604

Self-styled messiah Sun Myung Moon, whose Unification Church became famous for marrying thousands of people in a single ceremony, has died, aged 92.

Moon set up the Church, whose members are often called Moonies, in the 1950s in the South Korean capital, Seoul.

He claimed to have millions of members, many in the US, but was accused of brainwashing and profiteering.

Moon was also a fervent anti-Communist and set up newspapers and media businesses around the world.

Not so much of an anti-Communist to not invest heavily in China and own one of North Korea's two automative manufacturing and sales companies, but of course don't expect the media to dwell on that contradiction.

Especially since that media includes UPI....owned by the Unification Church. 

Also that the Unifcation Church was a front for the KCIA, the powerful Korean intelligence agency that made and deposed Presidents before democracy in the South, and was used to exert influence over US politics, will not get much mention.  Even less likely will it be mentioned that the KCIA itself was run from Langley for most of its existence.

Nor will Moon's prominent role in Iran-Contra draw much attention, because Iran-Contra never happened.

Perhaps some of the media will mention Moon was the financier behind Jerry Falwell, and that Falwell had been a vicious critic of the man, until he bailed him out, and that after that, Falwell never said a word against him.

But they will probably not mention how he funded George Bush (the elder's) campaign. 

Moon's illicit dealings with the Japanese underworld, and in particular the fascist-gangster Ryoichi Sasakawa, will most certainly be ignored.  As will the fact his top lieutenant was in Boliva after the CIA-backed, Klaus Barbie-supported Cocaine Coup, and that Moon's organization was subsequently discovered to have funded the coup to the tune of $4 million.

And I could go on and on.  But what would be the point?  Everyone knows people with real political power are selected in fair, free and anonymous elections every four years, and the only networks of power are both institutional and officially sanctioned.  Moon was neither, and so will be remembered as nothing more than a rich religious crank, a Korean, 20th century Tom Cruise, rather than the dangerously influential and connected figure, financier and organizer he was in reality.

...Yeah, well, about that...

http://antiwar.com/blog/2012/08/31/us-backed-yemeni-regime-collaborates-with-supports-al-qaeda/

Foreign Policy reports there are "many Yemenis who have come to suspect that their government is not fighting, but helping cultivate, jihadi activity in their country."

According to sources in Yemen's Interior Ministry and Defense Ministry, as well as independent Yemeni analysts and journalists with intimate knowledge of al Qaeda in Yemen, the Yemeni government is fully aware of a number of al Qaeda cells — and their existence is tolerated and their crimes covered up.

Indeed, this phenomenon is well known in Yemen. As Jeremy Scahill of Nation magazine wrote after visiting Yemen earlier this year: "Since the mujahedeen war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and continuing after 9/11, Saleh has famously milked the threat of Al Qaeda and other militants to leverage counterterrorism funding and weapons from the United States and Saudi Arabia, to bolster his power within the country and to neutralize opponents."

Abdulghani al-Iryani, a Yemeni political analyst, has said has much about the Saleh regime and he told Foreign Policy that the collaboration between the new US-supported Yemeni regime and al-Qaeda militants continues. "At all levels of Yemen's political elite you have collusion and cooperation with militants and terrorists," he said.

Why?  Well, it's quite simple.  Keeping Al-Qaeda at a boiling point keeps US arms and money flowing in.  Arms and money secure the leadership.

US counterterrorism policy = 169% 0WN3D.

Hahahaha no

Teh Beeb:

Pakistani police have arrested a mentally disabled 11-year-old girl after a mob accused her of desecrating pages of the Koran.

The mob demanded the Christian girl's arrest and threatened to burn down Christian homes outside the capital Islamabad, local media say.

Officials said the girl could not properly answer police questions.

Her parents have been taken into protective custody following threats and other Christian families have fled.

It is thought that the girl has Down's syndrome.

Paul Bhatti, Pakistan's minister for National Harmony, told the BBC that the girl was known to have a mental disorder and that it seemed "unlikely she purposefully desecrated the Koran".

"From the reports I have seen, she was found carrying a waste bag which also had pages of the Koran," he said.

"This infuriated some local people and a large crowd gathered to demand action against her. The police were initially reluctant to arrest her, but they came under a lot of pressure from a very large crowd, who were threatening to burn down Christian homes."

He said more than 600 people have fled from the Christian neighbourhood.

How much must it suck, being in charge of "National Harmony" in Pakistan?  You do your job right, and you're the next Salmaan Taseer.  Play it safe, and...well, you're not really doing your job.

Meanwhile, India is accusing Pakistan of using bulk text messaging to help spread panic and violence in the province of Assam, which has driven out tens of thousands of migrant workers.

A bunch of Shias got slaughtered by religious extremists, the Taliban nearly blew their way into a major air force military installation and a suicide bomber took out a military checkpoint in Quetta and this is only the news from the past seven days.

If there was ever a country more fucked than Pakistan....well, it's either North Korea or Somalia.

http://90days90reasons.com/06.php

There is a now iconic picture of Obama and a young boy in the Oval Office. The president of the United States is bowing, bent at the waist so the young boy can touch his hair, so the young boy can feel that he and the president have something in common. When I first saw the photograph I knew I had finally voted for someone who would affirm my faith, who would live up to the audacity of promising hope.

Sometimes, all hope requires is one moment and that moment, that photograph of the president and a young boy is what I most needed to believe my hope in Obama was well placed, to believe that while the president is just one man, the presidency is so much more when held in the hands and heart of the right man.

And even more, Obama cured that little boy of scrofula!

Of course, this becomes a lot more horrormirthy if you juxtapose the above paragraph with a picture of the latest mosque a CIA drone bombed.

Well, I wasn't going to go to sleep anyway, but I'm certainly not after reading this:

The men came from different walks of life on two continents: a children's puppeteer in Florida, a hotel manager in Massachusetts, an emergency medical technician in Kansas, a day care worker in the Netherlands. In all, 43 men have been arrested over the past two years in a horrific, far-flung child porn network that unraveled like a sweater with a single loose thread.

In this case, the thread was a stuffed toy bunny.

The bunny, seen in a photo of a half-naked, distraught 18-month-old boy, was used to painstakingly trace a molester to Amsterdam. From there, investigators made one arrest after another of men accused of sexually abusing children, exchanging explicit photos of the attacks and even chatting online about abducting, cooking and eating youngsters.

Authorities have identified more than 140 young victims so far and say there is no end in sight as they pore through hundreds of thousands of images found on the suspects' computers. They are also trying to determine whether the men who talked about murder and cannibalism actually committed such acts or were just sharing twisted fantasies.

In May, authorities arrested Michael Arnett of Roeland Park, Kan., after finding pornographic photos he allegedly produced. Agents discovered the pictures when they searched the computer of a Wisconsin man who had been chatting online with Mikelsons.

What they found on Arnett's computer was unlike anything some of the investigators had ever come across: long, graphic, online chats about his desire to abduct, kill and eat children. They said he had also made photos of a naked 2-year-old boy in a roasting pan inside his oven. The child and two other boys Arnett allegedly abused and photographed were later identified and found alive.

In July, authorities arrested four men they say had online discussions with Arnett about kidnapping and eating children. Those arrested included Ronald Brown, a children's puppeteer from Largo, Fla. (A YouTube video shows Brown during an appearance on a Christian TV kids show in the 1980s. In the video, he tells a child puppet that he did the right thing by refusing to look at "dirty pictures" some other youngsters tried to show him.)

So, this is a thing.

A thing which is like listening to talk radio, in 1993. In text form.  Badly formatted text form.

Interspersed with adverts from various companies trying to curry favour with the Boston PD.

Celebrity marriages are unstable!

Snoop Dog does drugs!

Banks are engaging in systematic fraud!

I don't know if I can take many more of these shocking revelations. 

I bet you didn't know France had it's own special interwebs, huh?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18610692

Many years ago, long before the birth of the web, there was a time when France was the happening-est place in the digital universe.

What the TGV was to train travel, the Pompidou Centre to art, and the Ariane project to rocketry, in the early 1980s the Minitel was to the world of telecommunications.

Thanks to this wondrous beige monitor attached to the telephone, while the rest of us were being put on hold by the bank manager or queueing for tickets at the station, the French were already shopping and travelling "online".

Other countries looked on in awe and admiration, and the French were proud.

As President Jacques Chirac boasted: "Today a baker in Aubervilliers knows perfectly how to check his bank account on the Minitel. Can the same be said of the baker in New York?"

Chirac was speaking in 1997, exactly half way through the life-cycle of France's greatest telecoms innovation.

At the time, he could be forgiven thinking it would last forever. This was the high point, with nine million Minitel sets installed in households around the country, an estimated 25 million users, and 26,000 services on offer.

But of course, the story was already written. The internet was moving in

On the one hand, the sad march of universal progress blah blah blah.

On the other hand, it does show that an alternative to the internet can exist....albeit with state backing.  That may be an important thing to remember, in 20 years time when we can no longer access "unapproved" internet sites, assuming FaceGoogle doesn't buy the internet and scrub all mentions of Minitel from existence before then.

Your Surpreme Court is a Death Panel: discuss.

(10 points)

I've been re-reading Zizek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real, one of the good bits of politic-social criticism he did, before deciding that outright trolling Sensible Liberals was a more profitable and interesting use of his time.  There are a few good bits from the start of the book I want to quote here, because I think they are worth discussing.

At this point, of course, an obvious cricitism imposes itself: is not such tolerant Hollywood wisdom [Spielberg's A Land Before Time] a caricature of truly radical postcolonial studies? To this, we should reply: is it really? If anything, there is more truth in this simplified flat caricature than in the most elaborated postcolonial theory: at least Hollywood distils the actual ideological message out of the pseudo-sophisticated jargon.

Today's hegemonic attitude is that of 'resistance' - all the poetics of the dispersed marginal sexual, ethnic, lifestyle 'multitudes' (gays, the mentally ill, prisoners ...) 'resisting' the mysterious central (capitalized) Power. Everyone 'resists' - from gays and lesbians to Rightist survivalists - so why not draw the logical conclusion that this discourse of 'resistance' is the norm today, and, as such, the main obstacle to the emergence of the discourse which would actually question the dominant relations?

So the first thing todo is to attack the very core of this hegemonic attitude, the notion that 'respect for Otherness' is the most elementary ethical axiom:

I must particularly insist that the formula 'respect for the Other' has nothing to do with any serious definition of Good and Evil. What does 'respect for the Other' mean when one is at war against an enemy, when one is brutally left by a woman for someone else, when one must judge the works of a mediocre 'artist,' when science is faced with obscurantist sects, etc.? Very often, it is the 'respect for Others' that
is injurious, that is Evil. Especially when it is resistance against others, or even hatred of others, that drives a subjectively just action.

The obvious criticism here is: do not Badiou's own examples display the limit of his logic? Yes, hatred for the enemy, intolerance of false wisdom, and so on, but is not the lesson of the last century that even - and especially - when we are caught up in such a struggle, we should respect a certain limit - the limit, precisely, of the Other's radical Otherness? We should never reduce the Other to our enemy, to the bearer of false knowledge, and so forth: always in him or her there is the Absolute of the impenetrable abyss of another person. The twentieth century's totalitarianism, with its millions of victims, shows the ultimate outcome of following to the end what appears to us a 'subjectively just action' - no wonder, then, that Badiou ended up directly supporting Communist terror.

This, precisely, is the line of reasoning we should reject; let us take the extreme case, a mortal and violent struggle against a Fascist enemy. Should we show respect for the abyss of the radical Otherness of Hitler's personality beneath all his evil acts? It is here that we should apply Christ's famous words about how he has come to bring the sword and division, not unity and peace: out if our very love for humanity, including (whatever remains of) the humanity of the Nazis themselves, we should fight them in an absolutely ruthless and disrespectful way. In short, the Jewish saying often quoted apropos of the Holocaust ('When somebody saves one man from death, he
saves the whole of humanity') should be supplemented with: 'When somebody kills just one true enemy of humanity, he (not not kills, but saves) the whole of humanity.' The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save victims, but also - even more, perhaps - the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims.

The recent Dreamworks animated blockbuster Shrek (Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, 2001) expresses this pre-dominant functioning of ideology perfectly: the standard fairytale storyline (the hero and his endearingly confused comic helper go to defeat the dragon and save the princess from its clutches) is clothed in jokingly Brechtian 'extraneations' (when the large crowd observes the wedding in the church, it is given instructions how to react, as in the faked spontaneity of a TV show: 'Laugh!', 'Respectful silence! '), politically correct twists (after the kiss between the two lovers, it is not the ugly ogre who turns into a beautiful prince, it is the beautiful princess who turns into a plump ordinary girl), ironic stabs at feminine vanity (while the sleeping princess awaits her saviour's kiss, she quickly arranges her hair so that she appears more beautiful), unexpected reversals of bad into good characters (the evil dragon turns out to be a caring female who later helps the heroes), up to anachronistic references to modern mores and popular culture.

Instead of praising these displacements and reinscriptions too readily as potentially 'subversive' and elevating Shrek into yet another 'site of resistance' , we should focus on the obvious fact that, through all these displacements, the same old story is being told. In short, the true function of these displacement and subversions is precisely to make the traditional story relevant to our 'postmodern' age - and thus to prevent us from replacing it with a new narrative. No wonder the finale of the film consists of an ironic version of 'I'm a Believer', the old Monkees' hit from the 1960s: this is how we are believers today - we make fun of our beliefs, while continUing to practise them, that is, to rely on them as the underlying structure of our daily practices.

In the good old German Democratic Republic, it was impossible for the same person to combine three featurcs: conviction (belief in the official ideology), intelligence, and honesty. If you believed and were intelligent, you were not honest; if you were intelligent and honest, you were not a believer; if you were a believer and honest, you were not intelligent. Does not the same also hold for the ideology of liberal democracy? If you (pretend to) take the hegemonic liberal ideology seriously, you cannot be both intelligent and honest: you are either stupid or a corrupted cynic. So, if I may indulge in a rather tasteless allusion to Agamben's Homo sacer, I can risk the claim that the predominant liberal mode of subjectivity today is Homo sucker: while he tries to exploit and manipulate others, he ends up being the ultimate sucker himself. When we think we are making fun of the ruling ideology, we are merely strengthening its hold over us.

There are two lessons to be drawn from this ideological constellation. First, we should be careful not to attribute to the Other the naive belief we are unable to sustain, transforming him or her into a 'subject supposed to believe', Even a case of the greatest certainty - the notorious case of the 'Muslim fundamentalist' on a suicide mission - is not as conclusive as it may appear: is it really so clear that these people, at least, must 'really believe' that, after their death, they will wake up in heaven with seventy virgins at their disposal (recall the story of a suicide terrorist who, before going to accomplish his mission, even sprinkled himself with perfume, so that he would smell nice for the virgins)?

What if, however, they are terribly unsure about their belief, and they use their suicidal act as a means of resolving this deadlock of doubt by asserting this belief: 'I don't know if I really believe - but, by killing myself for the Cause, I will proof in actuality that I believe .. .'?

Similarly, we should avoid the conclusion that Aleksandr Fadeyev, the arch-Stalinist writer and president of the Soviet Writers' Union who shot himself after hearing Khrushchev's secret report at the Twentieth Congress, must have been an 'honest believer': in all probability, he was fully aware of the utter corruption of the system; what he believed in was the big Other, that is, the public appearance of the socialist New Man, and so on. Consequently, he did not kill himself because he learnt anything new in Khrushchev's report; none of his illusions was shattered - what was shattered was his belief in the 'peformative force' of the ideological illusion itself.

Interesting results from the Tobin Project's sponsoring of a Yougov poll to American views on foreign policy.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~benv/files/poll%20responses%20by%20party%20ID.pdf

So far, we have learnt Americans would prefer a low growth world where America remained on top, rather than a high growth world where they are behind China, that more Americans think the economy is the most important factor in foreign policy, as opposed to military might, and that Britain is the US's most valuable ally, followed by Israel (or by Canada then Israel, among Democrats).

There are also some very disturbing answers to questions 25 and 64.

...what exactly is the difference between Obama's "kill list" policy and the policy of the Serbian Army at Srebrencia?

Just thinking about it, the policy of the latter was that any "military-age" male be seperated from the population at large, then killed as a possible enemy combatant.

Obama's policy is that any "military-age" male in a "strike zone" (defined as: most of the Middle East and South Asia) is a combatant, unless it can be proven afterwards that this is not the case, and that drones be used to do the killing.

Except for scale, I'm having problems finding the point of departure between these two methods.

Remember, nothing of interest ever happens at private meetings of some of the world's most powerful people.

http://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/participants2012.html

I expect lots of media sneering at the idea that heads of state, CEOs of major corporations and banks and editors of chief media outlets all meeting in the same place and having lots of private discussions could ever have an effect on the world stage.  You know, Henry Kissinger, the chairmen of Goldman Sachs and the Vice President of the World Economic Forum just have lots of spare time and nothing to do except attend elite get-togethers.  It is certainly not the case that they cleared five days in their very busy schedules to ensure they could be present at the kind of event where deals are made, alliances secured and the world's major issues are debated and settled - but in secret.

Because that is crazy talk.  Shame on you for even considering it.

Just days after the Florida "face-eating" incident, we have this...

http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2012/05/31/man-denied-bail-after-dismembered-body-parts-found-in-home/

A Morgan State University student who lived in the same home as a missing Joppatowne man now feared dead was charged with first-degree murder after parts of a human body were found inside the house and in a nearby dumpster. Now the suspect has admitted to eating portions of the man's body parts, including his heart and brain.

["He was intellect... He was war! That is what they are! Do you not see? With every heartbeat they war against circumstance, with every breath they conquer! They walk among us as we walk among dogs, and we yowl when they throw out scraps, we whine and whimper when they raise their hands..."]

Busy with other stuff.  This isn't a fully realised and carefully thought out essay, its something I knocked off in the last half hour, in hope of stimulating discussion more than anything else.



"He was intellect... He was war!  That is what they are!  Do you not see?  With every heartbeat they war against circumstance, with every breath they conquer!  They walk among us as we walk among dogs, and we yowl when they throw out scraps, we whine and whimper when they raise their hands..."
- Cnaiur urs Skiotha, The Thousandfold Thought, R. Scott Bakker

The difference between war and civil peace is only a relative lack of open violence in the latter, with the contention between forces possibly boiling over into new war or revolution, which may in turn result in a new settlement. Indeed, from the inversion of Clausewitz, Foucault concludes that "the final decision can only come from war, or in other words a trial by strength in which weapons are the final judges".
- Mark G.E. Kelly, The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault

The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent.
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

In the trailer to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the viewer is asked "how do you find an enemy who is hidden right before your eyes?"  Not a bad question, for those who work involves questions of trust and espionage.

A more relevant question, however, would have been "how do you fight an enemy you don't even know you have?"

As the 21st century was born, a deadly mix of global connectivity, reliance on highly complex systems and the emergence of non-traditional modes of warfare has made it that the old, traditional methods of fighting have been rendered obsolete in many circumstances, while the opening the door for a new and entirely more insidious method of conflict.

The nature of the conflict is such that the first shots in this new kind of war may have been fired, and yet we will remain unaware of them.  This is the coming age of 5GW, or perhaps it could also be called "Invisible Warfare".  It will also be the last great transition in how humanity fights its wars.

Conflict can be seen, broadly speaking, as falling somewhere on a line, with total warfare (genocide) at the one end, and pure politics (non-violent, vocal conflict) at the other.  While it is hard to generalize about such a thing, as a rule the kinds of war we have experienced throughout history keep moving towards the political end of the conflict spectrum.  As such, warfare has become more discriminate and more undefined in terms of combatants and theatres of conflict. 

A full realization of this would be a war that hews as close to the political end of the spectrum as possible, manipulating political, religious and social contexts and themes to bring about an outcome preferable to the strategist in question.  Violence may be needed for elements of that, but ideally it should be kept to the minimum necessary to order the context on your terms.

The problem is, of course, if such manipulation were blatant, many would find it offensive and feel prepared to work against it.  Furthermore, it allows your enemy to formulate counter-strategies to defeat your attempts, or just target and destroy you outright.  Therefore, we come to the most important qualification of this new kind of warfare – that it must practice deception at the Grand Strategic level.  Your enemy can never know that they are your enemy in the first place.  Thus, invisible warfare. 

The importance of perception not only exists in how the 5GW must be planned and executed, but it is also the focus on how to defeat the enemy.  If you can convince an enemy they are not your enemy, and to act in a way that does not harm (or in fact benefits) you, then they are not an enemy, are they?

It also makes this new kind of war intensely intellectual.  Not only will the strategist(s) in charge of such a campaign be required to have a near encyclopaedic knowledge of the society they wish to subvert, they will have to take an approach that is somewhere between intelligent guerrilla warfare and intellectual Aikido, using the cognitive processes of their enemy against their own designs, attacking from unknown mental territory, using new cognitive scripts to obtain the element of surprise which is so vital to success.  Those who think fastest, and have the most accurate mental maps and are the most creative...victory will likely be theirs.

And this is where the problem comes in.

Every mode of conflict contains in and of itself the contradiction which allows warfare to mature to a newer gradient – much like the process of Hegelian synthesis, contradictions arise in how that mode of warfare is handled, which are then resolved via a newer model of conflict.  For example, nuclear weapons made large-scale conventional warfare obsolete.  Therefore, proxy wars waged by guerrilla forces, special forces and paramilitary arms of intelligence agencies, came to replace large-scale warfare.  One can see this in Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or the current war on terror.

If 5GW is reliant on intelligence and secrecy as its key attribute, then there is at least one obvious problem here.  Or two, depending on how you want to look at it.  That is, what happens when you add self-modifying intelligences which can optimize themselves, into such a mix?

I am, of course, talking about artificial intelligence.

At once, you can see the temptation, I am sure.  If a nation builds up a 5GW infrastructure, eventually it will want an AI or something that is functionally similar, to help with computations, planning the strategy of the campaign, analysis of what targets need to be eliminated, which ones can be spared and, in short, how best to achieve the goals of the strategists.

However, an AI which is more intelligent than a human is fundamentally untrustworthy.  Its goals cannot be really known, or understood.  Given the speed at which it could work, and the modifications it could make to itself, it may be impossible to figure out where it is misleading you. 

The obvious solution is to not use an AI at all.  But that will then put nations who refuse to use them at a comparative disadvantage to those who do.  Once Pandora's box is opened, it cannot be closed again.  Once machines take over the vital war-making functions from human strategists, we are entering what is entirely unknowable territory.  Will AIs compete, or cooperate?  How will they view humans?  What would their goals actually be?

This Sixth Generation of Warfare will mark the end of the human era of conflict.  To be sure, if humans are still around, they will fight.  But will they do it because they have chosen to, or because they have been carefully manipulated into believing it is in their best interest by an intelligence far beyond them?

Of course, this may never come to happen.  AI technology may not even be theoretically possible, in the sense that most of us understand it.  But there is another path this can take, with similar outcomes.  And that is transhumanism.  I can understand the desire to transcend our biology, to optimize our physical selves through a variety of methods, to be the best possible sentient being that we can.

But the same problems apply.  If transhumans are created which are more intelligent than the average human, that self-secrete "smart drugs", that have far denser and larger brains than the average person, then they can also manipulate human strategists to their own ends.  And as with AIs, the temptation to create such transhumans for short term comparative advantage will overcome all objections to such a plan, regardless of how many bioethics treaties are signed.

Or, transhumanism is also, fundamentally unfeasible.  Either on a theoretical level, or because our planet is becoming more and more resource-strapped, and the vast amount of effort this would require may not be worth the payoff, given the choices available at the time.

Regardless of scenario, it is fair to say we have now entered the last great age of human warfare.  It will be messy, it will be confusing, and you will not know it when you see it.

...the UK would readily accept a Gaddafi-like dictator if it meant an extra bank holiday and more bunting in the street.  Especially if they made them feel fuzzy and vaugely patriotic, for not doing anything. 

We could have huge debates on how the Sisterly Leader of the Union Revolution brings in fifty gajillion dollars of revenue from tourism each year (while ignoring that the Palace of Versailles frequently gets visitors in such numbers they have to shut down entry before midday, and no-one at all lives there).  We could bestow ridiculous titles on the various bastard offspring of the dictator, and give them plush jobs where they waste public money in positions they are entirely unsuited for.  And we could get police to thrash anyone who is being insufficiently cheerful near the public celebrations.  The state-run TV station could then run wall-to-wall, propagandistic coverage of the whole thing, using terms which would make Goebbels blush insincerely.

If a third world nation acted like we are now, we'd call it a cult of the personality and start the calls for regime change. 

Seriously though, if the French want to impose their model of government on us, I'm fully willing to go along with that program. 

Check this out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-wAzlqzXH0

Just imagine how much money Ubisoft must be making, and planning to make on this in particular, if they're willing to drop a 20 minute, live-action trailer for a video game. And it's a pretty exciting trailer, too.  I'd watch a film of this, no problem.

Interesting to see most of the technology is near-future plausible, too.  Then again, Tom Clancy was involved, and he's usually pretty impressive on the technical issues.  I'm sure I heard some US military officers made a game of reading his books, looking for technical errors.  It usually took quite a while to find them.

I've been following the Quebec student protests for a while.  However, things have turned pretty ugly recently, with the adoption of Bill 78, which it makes it illegal to protest without police permits. 

To give you a flavour of what is going on

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hNjE-ZE749PnLytbzGAz5Os-Jk-Q?docId=325f9d81a1b7412eba74a1a660b87036

Quebec's generous social services date back to sweeping reforms in the 1960s, a period of intense nationalism. Yet many Quebecers look back at the "Quiet Revolution" with regret over one unfulfilled promise: free higher education.

That sentiment is fueling Canada's most sustained student demonstrations ever. It has been anything but quiet.

Some 150,000 students in more than a dozen Quebec colleges and universities have been on strike since February to protest the provincial government's plan to raise tuition fees. Street protests in Montreal have ended in clashes with police and mass arrests.

A strict new law designed to stop the demonstrations has only broadened the movement to include separatists and Occupy protesters, and triggered a wider debate over public freedoms. The students are threatening to persevere through the summer, just when the city traditionally awakens from its dark and frigid winter for jazz and comedy festivals that draw in millions of dollars in tourist revenue.

The French-speaking province's average undergraduate tuition — $2,519 a year — is the lowest in Canada, and the proposed hike— $254 per year over seven years — is tiny by U.S. standards. But opponents consider the raise an affront to the philosophy of the 1960s reforms that set Quebec apart not only from its U.S. neighbor but from the rest of Canada.

"The whole consensus around education was built around the Quiet Revolution," said Pierre Martin, a political science professor at the Universite de Montreal. "That consensus would tend toward a tuition-free model in the future. That was a promise."

As a result, he said, Quebecers don't compare their tuition rates to those in the U.S. or English-speaking Canada, but to those in European countries where higher education is free.

Quebec Premier Jean Charest, who has vowed to shake up the debt-ridden province's finances since he was elected nearly a decade ago, has refused to cave.

More than 2,500 students have been arrested since the demonstrations began more than 100 days ago, including nearly 700 this past Wednesday alone. The total is five times the arrests during a period in the 1970s when soldiers were deployed to the streets in Quebec because of a spate of terrorism by a group demanding independence from Canada.

The tuition hike is part of a broader effort to shift Quebec's fiscal burden away from taxpayers — the province has some of the steepest personal income taxes in North America and the highest per-capita debt in Canada— and onto the shoulders of each person who uses a service.

"Every citizen has to do their part," Quebec Finance Minister Raymond Bachand told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "This is the 21st century."

Bachand said the students want more money in their pocket to the detriment of others. He noted that the government has expanded student grants so that middle and lower income students can more easily afford the increase.

"We're talking about 50 cents a day so basically it's moved from a question of tuition fees to a question of a social movement like you've seen in other parts of the world," Bachand said. "We're not used to this as Canadians. We're used to sitting down, disagreeing, negotiating and coming to an agreement."

In an effort to restore peace, Charest's government passed emergency legislation on May 18 restricting protests and closing striking campuses until August. The law requires that police be informed eight hours before a protest begins, including details on the route of any demonstration of 50 or more people. It also prohibits demonstrations within 50 meters (165 feet) of a college and declares that anyone who incites or helps another person break the new protest regulations can be fined.

This is the perspective of a political science/IR professor at Université du Québec à Montréal:

What is at play in this conflict is no less than the fate of social-democratic expectations in Quebec. These expectations are actively discouraged and discredited by the current political elite. The demands for a tuition freeze by sizeable portions of Quebec's students are considered unreasonable in many quarters, and seen as a plane expression of bad faith and overindulgence by a majority of Canadians, seemingly stuck in a Stephen Harper induced stupor. The words 'pragmatic', 'realistic' and 'rational' have been duly appropriated by the partisans of deregulation, free-enterprise and individual responsibility. Any suggestions that the latter orientations are based on an ideological choice are ridiculed; they simply express a sounder and more logical way to manage society.

Up to now, there seemed to be a dour resignation to the decimation of our social programs. This young generation of Quebecers, which many had touted as completely apathetic and apolitical, has taken a resolute stand against restricting access to a public good, against the further commodification of knowledge and against the uncompromising law and order approach of an arrogant and irresponsible government. Those that have taken to the streets day after day and sacrificed their terms and put their professional lives on hold for the students that will come after them, have shown extraordinary resilience and bravery. It came as a surprise to many, because they did it on their own, with little or no help from their political science professors, who have long abandoned critical thinking for functionalist replications of reality sanctioned by government money.

Bowing to public pressure and repeated calls from the opposition, Line Beauchamp, the province's education minister who has since resigned, invited student representatives, union leaders and university rectors to negotiate a settlement. After gruelling overnight negotiations, which involved the tried and tested wily tactics of sleep deprivation and shift negotiation, the government announced that a deal had been struck. The result was a highly convoluted, technocratic and most importantly conditional agreement over the notion that some money "could" be saved from a more efficient management of University budgets and that these savings could be used to reduce the ever-increasing administrative (not tuition) fees. In what some heralded as substantial gains for the students, the government also proposed improvements to loans and bursaries.

The next day, Prime Minister Jean Charest, the object of passionate dislike by important sections of Quebec's population, made yet another faux pas by displaying more than a hint of triumphalism in front of the TV cameras. Worse, state officials and rectors publicly expressed their doubts about the already severely underfunded Universities' ability to find extra money. As the agreement was diffused in the media and studied a little more closely, muted enthusiasm was replaced by incomprehension and disappointment verging on anger. The student representatives took the proposal back to their respective assemblies and the answer was a resounding NO.

As a result of the government's obstinate refusal to go back to the negotiation table, students initiated a series of night protests in Montreal's downtown core. The government's response to the student's determination was to pass Bill 78, a blatantly anti-democratic measure that flies in the face of our fundamental right to associate and demonstrate and of our socio-political culture. Under this new legislation, demonstrations are restricted to 50 (10 in the original proposal) people and an itinerary must be provided to the police eight hours in advance. Draconian fines are to be imposed for students and organizations that violate provisions of the law. An individual blocking access to a CEGEP or university could face a fine anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000. Student leaders could be charged up to $35,000, while student associations and federations could face a penalty of up to $125,000.

The language used by government officials to describe the principled stance of some sections of the Student movement is equally troubling. Quebec's minister of Public security minister, Robert Dutil, claimed that civil disobedience was just a pretty word for vandalism. Raymond Bachand, Finance minister of finance, came out saying that the student movement was led by a handful of radical Marxists. Most of the big corporate-owned media outlets (Journal de Montreal (the equivalent of The Sun in the UK), La Presse, etc.) have been pumping out disinformation, twisting statistics and putting out inflammatory editorials. It would appear that Quebec's establishment dramatically underestimated the resolve and conviction of the youth. The current generation's sensitivity to diffused power and to surreptitious prejudice turns into an appreciation of the full force of the state apparatus. Many young Quebecers now know what the state does when it is shaken to its core. In a desperate attempt to preserve its own biological existence against adverse life forms, it convulses and lashes out. One thing is certain, there nothing like police brutality to politicise and radicalise a whole generation.

It is difficult to see what the future holds. The government is now showing signs of faltering as a majority of Quebecers expresses its indignation with Bill 78 and mass arrests in the Province's main cities. Quebec's reviled minister of Education, Michelle Courchesne, has confirmed that talks would re-open with Student Associations in the next few days.

In spite of Wednesday's mass arrests, people have come out in force again tonight in a massive show of civil disobedience. In clear defiance of Bill 78, no itinerary was given to the police. Thursday's demonstration was the biggest and most diverse yet; we seem to have reached an apogee of enthusiasm and popular support for the students. If Bill 78's purpose was to silence protest, it has failed miserably. Since the weekend, Quebecers from various corners of the province and various parts of Montreal have also embraced an old Chilean protest method against Pinochet's dictatorship, by banging on pots and pants from 8pm to then swell the ranks of on-going or impromptu noisy processions.

It's a hot day, the kind of oppressive heat that seems to radiate from every surface.  There is no wind to give any relief and it feels just the same whether you're inside or out. 

I normally prefer the cold, but I find myself enjoying today.  I haven't felt heat like this since Peru, or perhaps when I was gambling in Montreux.  It's sometimes hard to remember you're living in a banana republic when the weather is cold and miserable, after all.

All government is violence.  This troubles some people, I know, though I am not in theory opposed to it.  Sure, we dress up that violence in the language of economics – government debt is really nothing more than a useful claim of the share of future profitable violence, when you think about it – and it is of course beneficial for a many great deal of people to allow the economics of the situation obscure the underlying reality.

That alone does not make a banana republic, of course.  It's the configuration of monetary and political interests, aligned with violent government power.  In particular, the difference between the nominal electorate and the necessary winning coalition, and the extent to which the former have a say over the latter is the crucial relationship, often forged through monetary channels between the treasury and nominally "private" actors.

As such, wherever there is money, there is also violence.  When those who control the flows of money within a society are only dependent on a small coalition for their rule, they can be more free in the violence they use.

All well and good, of course.  But what does that have to do with today?

Well, if money is violence, what happens when £9.2 billion of it is pumped into a city for a period of three weeks?

To be sure, the stories have already started.  13,500 soldiers are to be on duty.  SAM batteries are being placed on the top of people's property.  Supersonic weapons are to be mounted on boats which will patrol the Thames.

But these are only the obvious manifestations.  Like a shaman who claims to be able to discern the influences of the spirit world behind mundane manifestations, with the right training, it is possible to see the "security world" behind the boring activities of everyday life.

The police are more edgy than ever.  People with bags are being singled out for "stop and search", and often treated roughly in the process.  More cameras are being put up, and unlike most CCTV, these are active and have humans behind them, tracking the movements of suspect individuals through the streets.  Metal rails and locks are arriving in large number.  Private security contracts have been finalised, with the government long ago and now with the various high-end hotels and similar establishments, where there has been a steady increase in nonchalant bystanders in brand-free clothing and the poise of someone with combat training.  Armoured vans and less conspicuous but no less heavily armoured limousines are becoming a far more common sight on certain streets.

This city is preparing for a lockdown, for a war, for everything and for nothing.  It's a blazing heat outside, and it's only due to get hotter. 

Not even joking

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/kodak-reveals-it-had-secret-nuclear-reactor-for-30-years-7754328.html

The company that gave us the Instamatic has acknowledged that for 30 years it operated a small nuclear reactor in a basement on its corporate campus in Rochester, New York, unbeknown to almost everyone save a few scientists and engineers.

Kodak, which began operating the device, called a californium neutron flux multiplier (CFX), in 1974, insists there was nothing unsafe about it.

None the less, it came pre-loaded with nearly 1.5kg of uranium enriched up to a level of 93.4 per cent, which is just about right for an atomic warhead.

Goddamn I love living in the future.

This is so hilariously short-sighted and stupid I don't even know where to start

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/11/house-passes-bill-bar-spending-political-science-research

By a vote of 218-208, the House Wednesday night backed an amendment that would bar the NSF from spending any of its 2013 funds on its political science program, which allocated about $11 million in peer-reviewed grants this year. Explaining the amendment on the House floor Wednesday evening, Flake said that given his colleagues' reluctance to slash the agency's overall budget -- the House defeated his earlier amendment by a vote of 291 to 121 -- Congress should ensure, "at the least, that the NSF does not waste taxpayer dollars on a meritless program."

In hunting for programs that the government should not spend its precious dollars on, Flake said, "I can think of few finer examples to cut than the National Science Foundation's Political Science Program."

The agency is spending more than $80 million, he said, on about 200 active projects -- and three-quarters of those funds, he added, "were directed to universities with endowments greater than $1 billion.... Think about it. Three out of the four of the grants awarded by the NSF Political Science Program go to the wealthiest universities in the country."

More troubling than who received funds from the program is what they were spent on, Flake argued -- before launching into what has become a rite of spring in Washington, in which members of Congress list academic projects whose titles or subjects strike them as unworthy.

Some of the topics that set Flake off seem predictable, given current politics here; "$700,000 to develop a new model for international climate change analysis," for instance.

The Monkey Cage, a political science blog, lists some of the studies which have been made possible by NSF funding

We'd like to point out some of the past and current research findings that NSF supported—some of which established what policymakers and scholars now view as conventional wisdom—that may justify such spending.

    Violent insurgencies—including ethnically-motivated ones—tend to set on not because of religious or ethnic differences, but rather because a state's weakness permits them to. Thus the outbreak of civil wars is driven by low state capacity and the inability to deliver public goods to the population. This finding, although not without its critics, has informed a great deal of policy practice with regard to capacity-building in weak and failed states (for more on James Fearon and David Laitin's project, click here).

    Terrorists are generally rational actors whose behavior often responds in predictable ways to different policies. For instance, after a spate of airline hijackings, most airports installed metal detectors, which drastically reduced the number of airline hijackings. However, many terrorists simply switched to kidnappings—an example of the so-called "substitution effect"—which is a cautionary principle that informs a great deal of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism policy today (see some more work by Walter Enders and Todd Sandler).

    Citizens in democratic countries remain supportive of democratic values in the face of terrorism when policymakers issue reminders about core democratic values, which help to keep citizens from losing confidence in democratic practices. However, citizens of illiberal democracies—i.e. many of our allies—are much more vulnerable to support non-democratic practices in the face of terrorism (see Jennifer Merolla and Elizabeth Zechmeister's book). This research helps us to better understand how societies may remain resilient and avoid overreaction to terrorist threats.

Additional projects investigate questions such as:

    Which factors influence attitudes on U.S. national security policies post-9/11?

    Which factors influence the decision by rebel groups to use terrorism during ongoing civil wars?

    How can governments best reduce domestic terrorism?

    Which factors lead armed combatants to use gender-based violence during ongoing wars?

    Which factors lead to radicalization and de-radicalization in Indonesia and Egypt?

    Do international criminal tribunals increase or decrease violence against civilians?

This is but a small sampling.

NSF-funded research has also provided extraordinary public goods to those of us who study political violence and terrorism through the creation of data sets on civil war, repression, and terrorism. Researchers turn to these data sets routinely to better understand the causes and responses to political violence. In fact, without some of these data sets, it would be difficult to imagine where the field of international relations would be today. To name just a few:

    The Correlates of War/Militarized Interstate Disputes Datasets

    The Minorities at Risk Project

    The Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Database

    Visual maps and profiles of relationships among militant groups in key countries of strategic importance to the US

    Data on patterns of violence during the Rwandan Genocide

    The Ill-Treatment and Torture Data Collection Project

Such datasets are clearly good investments. Once released, other researchers use them to investigate important questions related to the causes and responses to political violence. The data sets above (and many others funded by NSF) have returned countless articles on a variety of issues directly related to international security—and at very low cost relative to what private security consulting firms would charge for the same product).

In addition, NSF grants, often quite small in nature, have supported fieldwork in strategically vital regions and countries. Indeed, a short list of projects funded this year in these areas would include:

    Driscoll's study of Al Shabaab's provision of security and governance in Mogadishu, Somalia

    Lust's investigation of Egyptian, Moroccan, and Tunisian elections during the "Arab Spring" and their respective transitions to democracy

    Beissinger's study of energy and water cooperation between five Central Asian states

    Ermakoff's study of the formation of armed self-defense groups in rural Sudan

So, you know, nothing important.

Top democrats are in favour of gay marriage.  Again.

I bet they'll stop the war in Iraq and investigate torture, too 

In Japan, the Yakuza rose to prominence through corruption from the vast arsenal and storehouses of the US military after World War II and the Korean War...
- John M Hagedorn, A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture, page 158

To a large extent [...] the yakuza were considered "reliable", because it was felt that organized crime could be used to control "disorganized crime" and at the same time buttress the power of the existing political and economic elite. 
- Mark Galeotti, quoted in James O Finckenauer, Organized Crime, foreword

Through their control of drug trafficking, prostitution and employment in the building sector and public works... organised crime has invaded the real estate cooperatives (jusen), the leading brokerages and the shareholders meetings of certain large companies [...] After having speculated on the upside, the yakuza then speculated on the downside.
- Guilhem Fabre, Prospering from Crime: Money Laundering and Financial Crises


The Yakuza need no introduction.  Having been the subject of countless films, books and other productions, the Japanese organized crime syndicate is fairly well known to all.

Or, so it would seem.  Yet, the history of the Yakuza is not so well known, which is unfortunate, as their history illustrates how organized crime can quickly come to determine the political and even economic fortunes of a nation.  Indeed, that the history of the Yakuza is obscured is not entirely by accident – one of the standard texts on the group, Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld by Kaplan and Dubro – had its entire inventory shredded by book publisher Robert Maxwell, likely as a favour to his friend and financial backer Ryoichi Sasakawa, a Class A War Criminal with ties to Japan's ultranationalist scene and criminal underground.

The Yakuza, as many such gangs, claim they grew out of local self-defence initiatives, during a period where traditional authorities were unable to provide it.  As the Tokugawa shogunate assumed power, peace descended over Japan, its incessant, 200 year long civil war drawing to a close.  As with all wars, the restoration of peace meant a large number of armed men left without a profession and legitimate employment.  Many of these groups, known as hatamoto-yakko, took to banditry and plunder as a way of life.

They were opposed by the macchi-yakko, from whom the Yakuza claim descent.  The macchi-yakko loosely translates to "defenders of the town" – ordinary villagers and townsfolk who took up arms to defend their home against roving bands of decommissioned warriors.  The macchi-yakko were considered by grateful Japanese townsfolk as Robin Hood figures, gentlemanly lawbreakers dedicated to the common good.

Naturally, the idea that the Yakuza emerged from such origins is a lie.

The Yakuza did not emerge until a hundred years after the death of Chobei Banzuiin, a near-mythical leader of the macchi-yakko in Tokyo.  Instead, they derived from street hustlers, gamblers and peddlers, who organised themselves as to divide up territory and spoils better, and generally recruited from the lowest classes of society.  The gamblers and peddlers in particular were courted by certain Japanese authorities and given a measure of official sanction in return for helping with criminal issues – a relationship which helped form the basis of the political corruption of Japan.  However, such a relationship was mostly opportunistic, not political or structural, and remained this way until after the Meiji Restoration.

The Meiji Restoration, like all efforts at industrialization and modernization in what was an authoritarian and isolated society, produced a certain... backlash, of a nationalist bent.  And there is where our story truly begins, with a man by the name of Mitsuru Toyama.  Third son to a poor family of middling samurai rank, Toyama idolized the warrior past of his ancestors, to the point of taking part in the final samurai uprisings of the Meiji period.  After leaving prison, the streetwise Toyama gathered around him the unemployed youth of Fukuoka, organising them into a fighting force used to keep order at the nearby mines.  He also enlisted in his first nationalist organisation, the Kyoshisha, in this period.

Keeping order in the Fukuoka slums and mines, Toyama became influential with the local political elite, earning both their respect and fear.  In 1881, he decided to expand on his samurai-derived, ultranationalist ideals with the founding of the Genyosha, better known as the Dark Ocean Society.  Acting as an umbrella organization for ultranationalist groups, Toyama drew them into the world of organised crime as well as political activities, and frequently blurred the two.  The Dark Ocean Society favoured authoritarian rule at home and expansion abroad, and set about undertaking activities to ensure those goals were met.

The Genyosha assassinated, blackmailed and threatened their way to the very top of Japanese society, in particular gaining strong support among the Japanese military's officer corps and bureaucracy.  They acted as bodyguards for politicians, hired muscle for underworld crime lords, as legitimate labourers where needed.  They also operated sophisticated schools where members were trained in martial arts, weapons and languages, and dispatched these agents abroad, where they fed information back to the Dark Ocean leadership.  Essentially, the Society was Japan's first modern intelligence service, and the first modern manifestation of the Yakuza.

1892 saw the first official cooperation between the Genyosha and nationalists in government – the former unleashing a terrorist campaign in support of the latter.  In the preceding years, the Dark Ocean Society had murdered, bombed and maimed more than a few liberal politicians in Japan, so such an alliance was hardly unexpected.  However, the boost it gave to the Genyosha led to them being used directly by the Japanese political elite not only domestically, but in their overseas ambitions as well.

In 1895, five Dark Ocean Society assassins infiltrated the Korean Imperial Palace and killed the Queen, acting on a direct order from the Minister for War.  The Queen had been a dangerous opponent of Japanese plans for expansion onto the peninsula, working out agreements with the Russian Empire to train troops for the Korean Army and counter Japanese influence in other ways.  This event, of course, precipitated the Japanese takeover and annexation of Korea.

The success of the Dark Ocean lead to a proliferation of secret societies in Japan.  Some had official backing, some achieved power through organised crime.  However, the traditional gambler and peddler groups known as the Yakuza, and the Genyosha inspired nationalist organisations, both found they had shared interests in defeating encroaching leftism and the breakdown of the traditional Japanese feudal order. 

Eventually, a successor to the Genyosha emerged, a fusion of the criminal yakuza and ultranationalist elements.  It was founded by Ryohei Uchida, the right-hand man of Toyama and was called the Amur River Society – better known abroad as the Black Dragon Society, for an alternative reading of the characters that made up its name.  The Black Dragons were nothing if not ambitious – their immediate aim was to drive Russian influence out of Asia, and their eventual plan was to place all of Asia under Japanese rule.

The Black Dragon Society mobilized bandits and Chinese insurgents in Manchuria, passing on intelligence and laying the groundwork for what would become the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5.  When the Japanese Army invaded, the Black Dragons members acted as guides, translators and intelligence operatives for their forces.

By 1919, the dividing lines between the Yakuza, ultranationalist groups and government had eroded entirely, with the founding of the Great Japanese National Essence Society.  With over 60,000 members, this was set up by Toyama and the Minister for Home Affairs, Takejiro Tokunami, acting as an internal paramilitary force that broke up strikes, attacked unionists and killed "subversive elements" with impunity – often working directly alongside Japanese police and military officers.  This group eventually evolved into the paramilitary arm of the Seiyu-kai, one of the two dominant political parties of the period.  The opposition, the Yamato Minro-kai, had their own paramilitary arm – also made up of Yakuza.  In such an environment, liberal and socialist opposition learnt to stay out of politics, lest they end up dead.

When Japan declared war on America, the power of the Yakuza was broken.  They had moved society as far right as business, the military and the ultranationalists in government had required.  Ultranationalists and gangsters would from now on be required to wear a government uniform – that of a soldier or of a prisoner, their choice.

After the war, and with the American occupation, some within the civilian bureaucracy were rightly concerned about the release of these ultranationalist elements into wider Japanese society, and how they might aim to hinder the occupation through acts of subversion and insurgency.    General Whitney, heading Government Section of the Occupation machinery, felt the best way to inhibit Japanese war-making ability was to empower the left – the unionists, socialists and even Communists.

Whitney was bitterly opposed, however, by General Willoughby, chief of army intelligence, better known as G-2.  Willoughby directed G-2 to direct aid towards ultranationalist and criminal elements within Japanese society.  Initially, MacArthur toed the line between these two different approaches, breaking up Japanese monopolies and enshrining human rights, while on the other hand tolerating the yakuza's control of the Japanese black market (at a time when the Occupation forces were not too concerned about securing the food supply to the population, the black market provided food for the population and a good little earner for American GIs).

In 1948, due to the situation in China, things changed.  It was decided that harnessing Japanese economic and (reduced) military power to counteract Soviet expansion was necessary.  Equally, American businessmen looking to influence or control Japan's latent economic might felt far more comfortable with a situation where the Japanese Communist Party in particular and unionists and socialists generally were kept under the boot by ultranationalist elements.

Willoughby directed G-2 to give as much aid and intelligence as possible to support the yakuza in this effort.  There was more than just a professional element to this action, of course.  Willoughby was known among the Japanese Occupation forces for having extreme right-wing views.  He concocted far-fetched conspiracy theories about Communists and had voiced agreeable opinions about General Franco and his regime (whether he was paid to do so is still up for debate).  He also sprung known Japanese ultranationalists from prison, to work in G-2's "Historical Section", or else a number of private intelligence groups he had set up.

Not that Willoughby had any compunctions about getting his own organisation dirty at times.  He coordinated the kidnapping of a Japanese author, Wataru Kaji, by G-2 personnel, who then handed him over to the CIA for torturing.  He was kept in CIA custody for over a year.  But most of the work, especially when it came to strike-breaking and killing unionists, was done by rightists in tight with the Yakuza.

More worrying than the increasing violence of the Japanese far right was the release of Yoshio Kodama in 1948.  Kept in a secure facility for accused Class A War Criminals, Kodama had run a private intelligence agency for the Japanese military during WWII and, like all such men, was deeply tied into the ultranationalist network of secret societies.  His particular speciality had been the buying and selling of various materials – namely, buying natural resources in Manchuria and Korea by threatening to shoot the seller in the head if they did not accept his pitifully low prices, then selling them in Japan for massive mark-up.  He also had a lucrative side-operation in heroin.  His company, Kodama Kikhan, had a working capital of $175 million in 1945, at the end of the war.

Shortly before his capture, he managed to give the vast majority of this wealth to Karoku Tsuji, another well known right-winger, though in this case not one with a background that would give the Americans cause to arrest him.  At the time, American intelligence reports referred to Tsuji as the "mystery man" of Japanese politics, able to give lavish donations to various groups and individuals.  Tsuji also put Kodama's money to work by using it to fund the founding of the Liberal Democratic Party – Japan's conservative party, which has had a nearly unbroken hold on Japanese politics up to the present day.

After Kodama's release, he was able to use this backing to give him a huge power base in Japanese conservative politics, to the point that Kodama was considered the most powerful individual inside the LDP.  The LDP also had funding from another source – the CIA, who poured millions into the party to prevent any socialist or Communist victory in Japan's elections.  Not that this was by any stretch the full extent of the CIA's relationship with Kodama – in fact, they paid him $150,000 to smuggle a cargo of tungsten out of China.  Kodama double crossed them on the deal, claiming the cargo sunk, pocketed the money he'd been paid and then sold the tungsten on.

Meanwhile, criminal elements flocked around Kodama, and he gave them his support.  Kodama acted as the middle man between G-2 and the yakuza, moving money and intelligence and leading the yakuza in battle, when necessary. 

By 1952, Japan had returned to its pre-war norm, with the Yakuza, ultranationalists and government all working together and really running the show in Japan.  Most influential in mainstreaming Yakuza influence, somewhat ironically, was the Minister for Justice, Tokutaro Kimura.  Under him, plans were laid down for creating a 200,000 strong anti-Communist task force, entirely of Yakuza and ultranationalist elements, called the Drawn Sword Regiment, using, as almost always, a "patriotic youth organization" as a front for the Regiment's activities.  This plan only failed because Prime Minister Yoshida vetoed it, fearing the American response to learning about such a group.  This hardly stunted Kimura's career in Japanese politics, however.

Because recounting the full history of the Yakuza's postwar activities would easily triple the size of the essay, I shall attempt to quickly sum up their fortunes since then: Yakuza power has waxed and waned according to the particular individuals in power within the LDP and the national and international situation.  However, despite their re-creation as a bulwark against Communist expansion, the Yakuza have survived the fall of Communism, continuing to exercise influence on a national level, through boardrooms, real estate and, yes, political corruption.

The Yakuza provide what is perhaps the pre-eminent example, outside of Sicily, of how organized crime and political ambition can quickly seize control of the fortunes of a nation.  That the Yakuza were not only instrumental in helping cause the Second World War, but thrived in its aftermath shows an ultimately flexible and adaptable organisation, one that is able to weather Japan's course in the 21st century.  The Yakuza are still more than just influential on the Japanese ultranationalist right as well – who are only one international incident or economic crash away from renewed popularity.  Even without that, the LDP is still the major political party in Japan, with decades at the helm of government.  How many high ranking members are corrupted?  Who is backed by companies flush with Yakuza cash?  No-one can really say.

Does anyone else have the problem of browsing the online Kindle store, just aimlessly, then finding tons of interesting books for relatively minor sums, then abusing the hell out of "one-click delivery" to be able to instantly read them?

A need for instant gratification and large amounts of disposable income is a bad mix. I shall buy ALL the interesting ebooks.

AKA Why Politics Will Make You Stupid

I consider myself something of a political professional.  I've devoted several years of my life to understanding politics, at a fairly high level.  This has involved a lot of reading, debating, critiquing and attempting to discover models which can reduce political activity to some sort of regularity...which has often meant grappling deeply with the intersection of politics with history, economics, warfare, sociology and biology.

Academic politics still tends to have certain party political assumptions about it.  I know for example, in the USA, a vast majority of political scientists self-describe as liberal.  Still, those assumptions are known, are frequently criticized and the focus is more usually on finding out how people act and what they do, instead of arguing about who is "right".  Or, in the case of international politics, where the stakes are rather higher, the question of what to do is not considered in such starkly party political terms, instead hewing closer to the somewhat different theories of global politics, which can cross party lines (such as the Neoconservatives and Liberal Interventionists of different parties having more in common with each other than with the Realists who nominally part of the same party as the Neocons, to give but one example).

As such, the world of internet political debate and blogging is something of a shock to me.  It seems to me, putting it bluntly, that when people who are not primarily interested in learning about politics argue on the topic, they become a bit unhinged and, well, stupid.  Not every, but a good majority.

Political arguments are very hard things to carry out in a calm and rational manner.  There are a number of reasons for this, which I hope are obvious.  Still, I will mention them:

As a species, humanity is a social animal, with a kind of basic hierarchy – open to revision though it is.  Therefore, humanity is a fundamentally political species.  As such, especially in the ancestral environment, our political choices could easily have a huge impact, in terms of lifestyle, mating opportunities and security.  Especially for the losers.  We get all wound up and upset about politics because in the far past, if we lost, we got killed.

Furthermore, a very basic kind of ethnocentrism seems to be hardwired into the human brain.  Some of you may be aware of the Robbers Cave experiments.  Essentially, a large number of boys were split into two arbitrary groups, and chose names.  Very quickly, and without any guidance from those performing the experiment, they formed powerful group identities and negative conceptions about the other group.  The only thing that was able to overcome this was the possibility of a third group, which forced cooperation on the two teams.  This strong need to identify with a tribe and denigrate opposing tribes is especially prevalent in partisan politics, and one reason I tend to look down on it as a mode of expression.  (This also has implications for the choice to go to war in democratic societies and the utility of the "national security discourse", a subject for another time).

The nature of the internet itself adds to this problem.  The Greater Fuckwad Theory strongly suggests that an audience + anonymity means people will act with less regard as to the consequences of their actions.  We've all seen it; an argument on the web spirals out of control because there are no reputational issues involved in going over the top when on the offensive.  Especially where political issues are concerned.

Conversely, many feel they can make a name for themselves on the web, especially by pandering to base sentiment and engaging in hyper-partisan attacks.  Some of these people are in fact covert activists for a political party, though they may pretend to be "neutral" or "apolitical" or support a non-threatening minor party, such as the "Libertarians" or "SWP".  Some are just idiots, willing to be used by political strategists because they truly believe in the case, and they welcome the notoriety it brings.

In either case, they help contribute to a coarsening of political rhetoric, because their job is to ensure their side wins.  You may be aware of the saying by the Prussian General Clausewitz, "war is the continuation of politics by other means".  This is true, but the opposite is also true.  Politics is war without the dead bodies (normally...depending on your jurisdiction.  Or chosen political issues.  Just ask anti-Mafia campaigners how bloodless democratic politics are).  And war is about winning, about inflicting a crushing defeat on the enemy so they will accept your terms and act in your interests, not their own.

One of the major ways a democracy differs from a dictatorship is that power is too widely spread to allow for private bribes to create a ruling coalition.  Instead, politicians, especially those who are not in power, must rely on propaganda.  It is no coincidence that the Prime Minister in the UK right now used to work in PR, or the close relationship between the media, pollsters, spin doctors and political power that has arisen in a number of liberal-democratic states in recent years.

A veritable industry of PR men, advertising experts, media workers, campaign strategists and, yes, political scientists, have risen up, devoted to the art of "selling" a narrative to the public.  Even in non-democratic societies, such as China, control over information and the official narrative is considered critical – there are suspicions that the ambitious princeling Bo Xilai was deposed precisely because his actions suggested he wanted to take control of China's sophisticated information management system (also known as "The Great Firewall of China").

All modern wars use propaganda.  And most propaganda...well, it shows the enemy as weak, vicious, cruel, stupid and inferior in every possible way.  While going too far in politics can incur penalties, using armies of trolls and covert propagandists can give plausible deniability to an individual or group, while planting the suspicion in people's minds that the opposing political side really are not very nice people.  It works on the irrational biases of human nature, as detailed above, because winning the war is everything, and every argument, every potential voter is a weapon that, if not acquired, must at the very least be denied to the enemy.

This essay could go on and on.  But that would be tiresome.  But as we can see from above, there are two basic reasons why discussing politics in a rational manner is hard: our hardware is not suitable for this kind of thing, and because the existing political arrangements are designed to take advantage of that fact.

Not even satire, I'm afraid

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/05/01/presidential-proclamation-loyalty-day-2012

In order to recognize the American spirit of loyalty and the sacrifices that so many have made for our Nation, the Congress, by Public Law 85-529 as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as "Loyalty Day." On this day, let us reaffirm our allegiance to the United States of America, our Constitution, and our founding values.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2012, as Loyalty Day. This Loyalty Day, I call upon all the people of the United States to join in support of this national observance, whether by displaying the flag of the United States or pledging allegiance to the Republic for which it stands.

Being loyal to America probably precludes taking part in "international poor people break shit and go on strike day", I'm thinking.

Check it

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/world/middleeast/chances-of-iran-strike-receding-us-officials-say.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=all

At the same time in Israel, the conservative government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been rocked by a series of public comments from current and former Israeli military and intelligence officials questioning the wisdom of attacking Iran.

The latest comments came from Yuval Diskin, the former chief of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security service, who on Friday said Mr. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak should not be trusted to determine policy on Iran. He said the judgments of both men have been clouded by "messianic feelings." Mr. Diskin, who was chief of Shin Bet until last year, said an attack against Iran might cause it to speed up its nuclear program.

Just days before, Israel's army chief of staff suggested in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the the Iranian threat was not quite as imminent as Mr. Netanyahu has portrayed it. In his comments, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz suggested that he agreed with the intelligence assessments of the United States that Iran has not yet decided whether to build a nuclear bomb.

Iran "is going step by step to the place where it will be able to decide whether to manufacture a nuclear bomb. It hasn't yet decided whether to go the extra mile," General Gantz told Haaretz. He suggested that the crisis may not come to a head this year. But he said, "Clearly, the more the Iranians progress, the worse the situation is."

Last month, Meir Dagan, the former chief of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, said he did not advocate a pre-emptive Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear program anytime soon. In an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," Mr. Dagan said the Iranian government was "a very rational one," and that Iranian officials were "considering all the implications of their actions."

While on the one hand it's nice to see some people in Israel with power and influence who are not obviously crazy, this still doesn't exactly bode well for Israeli politics, in the long-term.

Israel's opposition has made the same points - but its the security peeps who are controlling the terms and making the moves on this debate.  There's obviously a big issue here: security policy should be under civilian control, and subject to democratic checks and balances.

While the military and security forces becoming more independent may be the lesser evil - especially when one considers the results of a strike on Iran in economic terms - it still doesn't exactly bode well for Israeli politics or society, that the only people with the clout to speak out effectively against Bibi's insanity are unelected officials.

[illegal]

But, apparently, it is illegal for me to do so.

As that is the case, let me just say, the UK military are NOT placing surface-to-air missile batteries on top of people's houses, without permission, which, if ever fired, would shower supersonic, hot, metallic shards over areas where civilians might be concentrated.

Because that would be irresponsible. 

And by "fan club" I of course mean "has inspired a political party".

http://www.parteidervernunft.de/

"Join our revolution. Ron Paul has shown the way in the US. He too has supporters from all social classes and his central demands are the elmination of the central bank and elmination of the income tax. In the US is no longer just a utopian pipe dream; it has become mainstream.  Surveys show that half of all Americans want to eliminate the Fed. It will no doubt take us Germans a bit longer to come to this inisght.  But there is nothing more powerful than idea whose time has come, as Victor Hugo so beautifully put it."

In reality, the "Party of Reason" has attracted cranks, goldbugs, UFO enthusiasts and holocaust-deniers.  It's essentially a splinter of the FDP, hoping to capitalize on increasing Euroscepticism to lure members and supporters away.

So, as you're probably aware, Alty is kindly setting up a political forum for me to run.

Here, I want to solicit ideas and opinions about what you'd like to see.  Honestly, I haven't been giving it too much thought because a) personal drama, which is none of your business b) reading c) odd sleeping patterns making it hard to sustain thoughts more complex than "check emails" and "acquire coffee".

Here is a very rough plan I came up for of the forum, as I'd like it to be.

Main

General Political Chat – stuff is happening.  Talk about it, if you must.  Threads from here might be promoted to other forums, as the situation develops.  Otherwise, consider this a catch-all forum for things that don't fit elsewhere

The Dismal Science – the place to talk about the economy, and related issues

The Foreign Office – place for discussing foreign policy and regional/global affairs.  Please note, your benevolent overlord will likely be keeping a close personal eye on this section.

Related Specialisms

History – some stuff that happened a long time ago, which probably isn't relevant

Religion – you're only going to discuss it anyway, so consider this your ghetto for C+Ping arguments from Dawkins and Deuteronomy.

Science – I want jetpacks, and I want them now

Speaker's Corner

The Partisan Divide – this is the place for where all "my political party can beat up your political party" threads go.  Because they're boring, and so are you for engaging in them.

My Elected Representative is a Lizard, Your Argument is Invalid – if you start to jabber on about David Icke or insist on posting links from Prison Planet, your threads will end up here.

Off-Topic

General Discussion – I'm just dying to read about what you're listening to right now

Housekeeping– because I know I'll get thousands of confused and angry emails if I shut down the forum for 20 minutes to do a routine software update without telling anyone first

You'll note, I'm trying to keep the number of excess forums to a minimum.  This is intentional, as nothing is more ridiculous and off-putting than a forum with thirty sub-sections, and less than 20 posts in each.  My hope is to later expand them, adding sections for things like military and security issues, cyber-issues, rights, geopolitics and parapolitics, political science and maybe some others, but for now, to keep it down to the bare basics.

The descriptions and names of forums are not ones I'm especially insistent on having either, chosen mostly for amusement factor.  However, they should convey the general idea for how I envisage that area to be used.  The main is designed for the meat of discussions...it is ideally where most of the posting should be taking place, and be the largest section of the forum.

Specialisms is for things that are related to political discussion, but may not necessarily directly impact on it. I would like to encourage a higher calibre of posting in those and have it be less busy than main discussion.

Speaker's Corner is the dustbin of the site, for things that annoy me and that I want to discourage.  I fully realise that giving them their own ghetto may just encourage such behaviour, but I'm hoping shame and mockery will provide sufficient incentives to discourage these things, for the most part.

And then there is the obligatory off topic and forum announcement sections, which I have merged.  Should the site attract enough traffic, I would possibly split Off-Topic into several sub-topics, based on broad genre, but for the moment that is mostly certainly unnecessary.

I haven't given a huge amount of thought to the rules yet, but what I'm hoping to do is to encourage intelligent political debate with a minimum of partisan bickering or posturing, and facilitating education on political issues.  As such, things like personal attacks, trolling etc will be stamped on pretty heavily, as will people posting obvious disinformation and using sources where the bias is obvious and unquestionable.  I am going to think more about my exact aims and how to implement them here, but feel free to jump in if you have some ideas on that front.

Or, indeed, any other.

I for one applaud these community-minded citizens for standing their ground and defending property against nefarious unknown interlopers

http://www.ajc.com/news/couple-held-at-gunpoint-1423138.html

The Newton County Sheriff's Office is investigating why a couple was confronted at gunpoint by neighbors and then arrested and forced to spend the night in jail when they tried to move into the home they had just purchased, Channel 2 Action News reported.

The Kalonji family had just closed on a foreclosed home and were told by their real estate agent they should go over to the house and change the locks.

But when Jean Kalonji and his wife, Angelica, started working at the home, an armed man and another person who appeared to be the man's son allegedly confronted them.

"He say to put the hands up and get out from the house, otherwise he would shoot us," the husband told Channel 2.

The neighbors didn't believe the couple when they told them they had bought the home and called the Newton County Sheriff's Office. The Kalonjis didn't have the closing papers with them, so deputies arrested them, charged them with loitering and prowling and took them to jail.

Obviously just one big mistake, but you can see how it could happen.  I mean, black people, owning property?  Clearly ludicrous.

Francois Hollande, France's Most Boring Man Ever, has taken the lead in the first round of votes, beating Sarkozy by 1.5%....which doesn't sound too great, until you realise that no French President has ever lost the first round of voting before.

Meanwhile, Jean Marie Le Pen's sockpuppet, Marine Le Pen, brings in the largest vote ever for the Front Nationale at 18%, making them third.  Which leaves poor, poor Jean-Luc Mélénchon struggling at 12%.  Lets not even talk about Bayrou, whose support has collapsed a massive 10 percent since 2007.

Mélénchon is my preferred candidate in the election, because, although he's a bit Mr Lefty McLeftWing on some issues, the Front de Gauche is at least not the Socialist Party, whose institutionalism, bureaucracy and general air of corruption make them...unpleasant to work with.  That he may seize enough of the vote that the PS, whom he used to be a member of (a senator, in fact), are forced to work with him, could help mitigate their more unpleasant aspects.  Maybe.

However, with such a victory for Hollande, they may feel secure in their way of doing things.  Sarkozy will probably grab 10% of the FN vote, with Hollande scooping up the Left Party members who are capable of holding their noses and voting for him and what remains of Bayrou's supporters splitting between the two.

Turnout is about 3% lower than for the 2007 elections at 80%.

Seems to be emerging.  At the very least, it promises to be somewhat amusing, which makes the utter pointlessness of the next 7 months somewhat more bearable:

Though it was obvious to almost no one at the time, Thursday, April 5, may have certified a momentous change in contemporary politics. It was that day when Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus was quoted saying that the Republican "war on women," a favorite liberal talking point, was a creation of Democrats and the media—no more reality-based than a Republican "war on caterpillars." It probably wasn't the most outlandish comment a GOP operative uttered that hour. Yet, by lunchtime, Obama Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter had denounced Priebus for suggesting that reproductive-health issues had all the cosmic significance of larva. Soon Cutter's aggrieved response was all over the Internet and cable television. When I spoke with one strategist close to the White House the next day, he was utterly disbelieving: "The-war-on-caterpillars thing, I'm shocked it's getting any legs."

Welcome to the Obama campaign, version 2.0. If, as Mario Cuomo once said, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose, then running for reelection may be something akin to grunting at regular intervals. In 2008, Obamaland prided itself on rejecting such brass-knuckle politicking, much of it perfected by Bill Clinton. "We don't do war rooms," was a Team Obama mantra, as one veteran of the campaign and the administration recalls. These days, by contrast, there are dozens of operatives raring to pounce on the slightest Republican misstep.

The outsized war-room capabilities are hardly the only Clintonite technique the Obama apparatus has adopted. President Obama has rewarded his mega-donors with frequent trips to the White House. And, just as Clinton did in 1995 and 1996, Team Obama has lashed a moderate GOP front-runner to right-wingers in Congress and portrayed him as a mortal threat to the welfare state.

Far from a badge of dishonor, though, the new ruthlessness is actually a sign of maturity. "It's not like Bill Clinton created a war room because he had the personality for a war room," says the Obama administration veteran. "He did it because that's what you have to do today to respond to the crazy shit that comes your way." What Obama and his team have accepted is that, while there's a lot to be said for changing politics and elevating the discourse, your most important job as president is to defend your priorities. And the way to do that is to win.

You might not be able to afford bread before the year is out, but the circus is definitely still working.

Oh goddamnit

http://isnblog.ethz.ch/international-relations/israel-the-oil-power

In late 2010, the World Energy Council estimated that Israel had reserves of up to 4 billion barrels of oil shale. More recently, the 'Israel Energy Initiative' estimated that Israel is actually sitting on reserves of 250 billion barrels (to put this number in perspective, Saudi Arabia's reserves mount up to 260 billion barrels of conventional oil). If proven, this would make Israel home to the third largest oil shale deposits after the United States and China. So how come this story is not making the headlines?

Oil shale is an organic-rich fine-grained sedimentary rock containing kerogen from which liquid hydrocarbons, called shale oil, can be produced. Unlike conventional oil, it has to be heated up to a sufficiently high temperature in order to reach a liquid state. Up until now, the extraction of oil shale has been branded as a dirty business that causes a wide range of environmental problems. Additionally, the availability of relatively cheap conventional oil has prevented the production of unconventionals from being economically viable.

New technologies, however, are being deployed to extract Israeli oil shale. The 'In-Situ Conversion Process' used by the Israel Energy Initiative enables the extraction of oil from the rocks without mining by separating the shale rock 300 meters underground. The company claims that this method is cheaper and circumvents major environmental concerns. Having received a license from the state to carry out geological survey drilling in 2009, the project is currently in its pilot phase, which aims to demonstrate the technological capability, the economical viability and the environmental feasibility of the enterprise. If everything runs smoothly, the company expects to produce commercial quantities by the end of this decade, with an estimated production capacity of 50'000 barrels a day.

If the project is successful, it could have a huge impact on the global oil market. Spreading the technology around the world could mean a shift in production focus from the Persian Gulf, thereby reducing dependency on authoritarian regimes. Due to Israel's geopolitical importance, the already strong economic and political ties the country enjoys with the West are most likely to deepen even further. Nonetheless, the project still remains controversial with many environmentalist groups already raising objections. Accordingly, it still might be a long time before Israel has a dominant role in global energy matters. Indeed one might also ask if it's not too short-sighted to build on yet another fossil fuel based resource instead of diverting investments to a more sustainable form of energy.

Prediction: this will not lead to "deepening ties", instead, it will lead to Israel being even more obnoxious, show more contempt for international law and human rights, and probably undermine what is already a somewhat shaky democracy.

Part two of the epic Atlas Shrugged trilogy is GO GO GO

http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/20/on-the-set-of-atlas-shrugged-part-ii

Production is now underway on the second installment of the movie adaptation of Ayn Rand's famous novel.

Official critical reception wasn't so great—though normal folk seemed to like it better than the credentialed tastemakers, according to fim review sites such as Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. For a brief moment even Rand-inspired businessman Aglialoro, new to filmmaking and brought to the business through his love of Rand and desire to bring her message to a movie audience, was discouraged. He told critics last April "you won" and said he was reconsidering whether or not to move forward with filming parts two and three.

By January, buoyed by what he calls encouraging DVD and video-on-demand sales, and the partnership of four other Rand-inspired financiers to help bear the production and marketing costs, Aglialoro and his production partner from Atlas Shrugged Part I, Harmon Kaslow, decided they were ready to finish what they started. At Reason Weekend, the annual event held by the Reason Foundation back in February, they announced Atlas Shrugged Part II was a go.

"Normal folk" loved it so much it took in $5 million at the box office, despite costing $20 million to film.

This is a Huge Victory for Libertarianism.

In a move that might prove controversial to fans of Part I, this new movie has been entirely recast—not a single actor reprises their role.

Part I had fans?  This is worse than we thought.

During my time on set I watched the shooting of another scene that is, in a way, the lynchpin of the entire novel: the subtle attempt by Francisco D'Anconia (played by Esai Morales, most recently seen as Caprica's Joseph Adama) to convince Rearden to abandon this world of statist control, by reminding him that Rearden never wanted to devote his life's energies and creativity to "looters who think it's your duty to produce, and theirs to consume. Moochers who think they owe you nothing." (Yes, Rand fans, "looters" and "moochers," both delivered seriously in mainstream movie dialogue.) Morales delivers the iconic line about what he would tell Atlas if he saw him bleeding and suffering, trying to bear single-handedly the burden of the world: "To shrug."

Truly, a stirring moment, speaking to the most noble and greatest characteristics of humanity.

Atlas Shrugged Part II is scheduled to hit theaters in October 2012

Lolz.

"The elements of this movie is so relevant to everything going on in this country, it's a natural fit" for 2012, Scott says. "People will watch this movie and say, 'This is what's going on.'"

I know having my magic metal being stolen from me by a government scientist is definitely relevant to my life.

A rare occurence took place: a mainstream media outlet wrote about trolling and did not conflate it with griefing, flaming or online bullying.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mind-your-language/2012/apr/19/trolls-where-come-from

From goat-hassling monsters to online nuisances, trolls have had a bad press. But they are not the same as bullies – recent stories have created a linguistic muddle

The story, if apocryphal, is at least a fair approximation of the truth. In 1840, a delegation of Russian investors paid a visit the UK to watch the construction of the London and South-western Railway. The station they visited was Vauxhall; and because they confused the word on the building with the name of the concept, ever since that day, the Russian word for a large train station has been vokzal.

Before you laugh too hard, bear in mind that English speakers may be about to do exactly the same thing.

You must have noticed that there's a new meme in town. After a slew of cases of people using online forums and social media to insult, racially abuse or harass high-profile figures – Louise Mensch, Fabrice Muamba, Noel Edmonds and now the Guardian's own Grace Dent – the media have taken it upon themselves to foist a new word upon us: troll (n: online bully. v: to bully in a discussion group or social network).

Granted, the term has cropped up in the mainstream before; the first use in the Guardian in something like its current sense seems to have been in 2002, the year, perhaps not uncoincidentally, after Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. But now that MPs, judges, and even Noel Edmonds know what it means, "troll", in its shiny new sense, seems to have reached its tipping point.

There's one problem. According to a vocal minority of veteran internet users, we've got the wrong word. Troll, they say, does not mean bully, and trolling does not mean harassment. And the evidence seems to back them up.

James Ball, in a recent piece for the Guardian, described "trolls" as "a small and specific subset of online communities who write provocative and offensive posts specifically to elicit reaction". Knowyourmeme.com gives: "Any behavior that is meant to intentionally anger or frustrate someone else." The OED's draft entry on the subject reads: "Computing slang. A person who posts deliberately erroneous or antagonistic messages to a newsgroup or similar forum with the intention of eliciting a hostile or corrective response."

Hmm. Not quite the same thing as a bully, then. In fact, the objectors point out, there are other perfectly good internet slang words that do mean bully, such as "flamer" and "griefer" (not to mention some in everyday use – such as, er, bully). And the distinction has been clearly drawn for years.

To give some example, a troll might constantly change the subject of a discussion topic for the hell of it; a "flamer" would insult someone because he disagreed with them. A troll might suggesting that a previous poster in a forum was using an argument popular in Hitler's Germany; a flamer would call the poster a Nazi. The difference between a troll and a flamer, to use a simile from a bygone era, is somewhat akin to the difference between a prank caller and a heavy breather.

I recommend we invade the comments and suggest his article is the kind of thing someone would have written in Nazi Germany, as our way of saying "thank you".

Something I came across in a BBC article on autistic schools:

For reasons that aren't fully understood, diagnosis rates for autism have gone steadily upward in America in recent years. New Jersey is at the forefront of the trend. Latest figures put the autism rates among boys in New Jersey at one in 29 (rates for girls tend to be much lower).

Despite its increasing levels of diagnosis, autism is still poorly understood. Indeed, it is not clear if the real rates of autism are climbing. Some say there are more cases due to improved detection, or, some believe, an overly expanded set of criteria.

1/29 still seems amazingly high.  Improved detection may play a role in this, but that would still be far above the average. 

The CDC statistics would seem to back me up, here.  http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html

About 1 in 88 children has been identified with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) according to estimates from CDC's Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network.

Studies in Asia, Europe, and North America have identified individuals with an ASD with an average prevalence of about 1%. A recent study in South Korea reported a prevalence of 2.6%.

It could be that an overly expanded criterea, plus increased detection methods are both contributing to the inflated numbers in New Jersey in particular.

We know ASD is mostly genetic, but the pre-natal environment may also play a role.  I doubt New Jersey varies highly from the rest of America in a genetic sense (guidos aside) or in terms of pre-natal care.

I guess I'm asking are there any valid theories beyond better detection and misdiagnosis which could explain such a large number of ASD attributions in the state?

From the 1950s through to the late 1980s, Italy was in the grip of a frenzied and violent terrorist campaign, the likes of which few western democracies have ever endured*.

The bombings were small scale at first, and mysterious in their origins.  As the years rolled by, and minor players in these plots were apprehended, it became more and more clear that Italian civil society was being targeted by neo-Fascist organizations.  Bitter at the death of Il Duce, the loss of the war and the subsequent occupation by American forces, Italian nationalists carried out small raids, shootings and bombings, in addition to many acts of sabotage.

But as the 60s rolled around, the violence had undergone a qualitative change.  The bombings became more prolific, more violent and more obviously targeted.  The far left also took up arms, partly in response to an economic recession that left many University educated students unemployed but with heads filled with Marxist rhetoric, and partly because the far left bore the brunts of the far right's terrorist tactics. 

As the 60s dragged into the 70s, the violence became ever more extreme.  Journalists were assassinated frequently, as were state prosecutors and judges.  Even the Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped and murdered.  The violence threatened to spiral out of control, as the terrorist groups relinquished all attempts at strategic moderation, and bombed and killed almost indiscriminately.  It was now the far left who carried out the majority of the attacks, though the right was still present in various forms.

What was widely suspected, but unprovable at the time, was that both the far right and the far left were being armed, directed and in some cases directly controlled by elements of the Italian state security, to achieve domestic policy goals and secure the centre-right Christian Democrats against both a Communist-Socialist alliance and a Fascist-Nationalist alliance (the Christian Democrats included many "reformed" Fascists amongst their number, it should be pointed out, but they were really were moderate, when compared to some in the Italian Neo-Fascist movement).  Even more worryingly, some of the terrorists seemed to have international connections which informed their activities.

Italy was not the only one to suffer mysterious and violent terrorist attacks, either.  The assassination of Julian Lahut, the charismatic leader of the Belgian Communist Party in August 1950, was only the first in a rash of unsolved murders and bombings in the country.  While secret service ties cannot be definitely linked to Lahut's death, that the Belgian stay-behind group was operational at the time is unquestionable. 

A number of weapons went missing from a Belgian police station that had been taking part in a NATO training exercise.  A Belgian Gladio trooper and a number of US marines were due to the attack the station, but were stood down at the last minute.  Yet someone attacked the base, killing a warrant officer, and taking a number of weapons which later ended up in the hands of supposed left-wing terrorists, the Communist Fighting Cells (whose leader, nevertheless, was also involved heavily in far-right terrorism).  The government insisted that the attack had been the work of unspecified "terrorists".

There were also the Brabant Massacres, 16 armed assaults on supermarkets, shops and factories in the area around Brussels, which occurred between 1983 and 1985.  Masked killers assaulted these areas, taking paltry sums of money, which were later found dumped.  They were especially brutal in their methods, and seemed to take a certain delight in ambushing and killing police officers.  Belgian Senators investigating these attacks requested names from the Belgian stay-behind forces, but their request was declined.  Evidence emerged in subsequent investigations that the killers may have been members of a far-right paramilitary group, cooperating with the secret soldiers to destabilize the Belgian government in preparation for a right-wing coup.  The group suspected was the Westland New Post, which was made up of Gendarmerie officers who were members of the far-right Front de la Jeunesse.  Martial Lekeu, a member of the WNP, testified that elements of the security services were involved, which the Belgian parliament agreed with.  That the WNP had previously stolen sensitive NATO and Belgian army documents, yet were acquitted by military courts, and claimed they had been given the documentation, leads further credence to these accusations of state sponsorship.

In West Germany, from the early 1950s, large numbers of men, many former Waffen-SS, or else German military with Neo-Nazi tendencies, were being trained in paramilitary and sabotage techniques by a mysterious American, referred to only by the name Mr Garton.  A repentant member of the group gave himself up to the German police, telling them he was part of a "political resistance group" that was being trained to resist a potential Soviet invasion, which he agreed with, but he felt alienated by the "terrorist preparations" the group was undertaking.  This group was not only to target Soviet troops in the case of invasion, but also undertake activities against the KPD and SPD, the Communist and Socialist parties of Germany.  Police raids led to large quantities of arms being seized, along with assassination lists drawn up for "day X", presumably the date of a Soviet invasion.  This list included not only Communists, but members of the more moderate, and politically popular, SPD, and left-leaning journalists as well.  Nevertheless, the Supreme Court demanded the release of all men arrested by the investigation of the clandestine group.

Confirmation of a secret network of covert partisans operating in Germany also comes from a most unexpected source – reports in the KGB's archives.  The common language and culture of East and West Germany made each nation's intelligence services far easier than normal to infiltrate, and Soviet records confirm the existence of parallel network hiding within NATO and West German intelligence.

Another chief scandal was the discovery of up to 34 arms caches in the forests near the village of Uelzen.  The caches were huge, holding over 14,000 rounds of ammunition, 156kg of explosives, 50 anti-tank guns and over 500 anti-personnel devices and grenades.  That such weapons could have been acquired legitimately is impossible, yet there were no reports of thefts or misappropriated equipment from German or American military depots.  After the first cache was unearthed by forest workers, police arrested a far-right militant by the name of Heinz Lembke, who led them to the rest, and it was claimed all of them belonged to him and his militant group.

Some of the stash of weapons had been used, though, regardless of their provenance.  In 1980, terrorists detonated a bomb during the Oktoberfest, the annual beer festival in Munich, killing 13. The bomb was highly sophisticated, and in the opinion of the investigators far beyond the skill of the supposed bomb-maker, who conveniently was one of the 13 killed by his device.  It was discovered, in the light of these arms caches, that some of the material for that bomb had come from these weapons that the right-wing terrorist, Lembke, knew about. 

In Greece, the US had had a powerful presence since the Greek Civil War, in which US and British assistance had been a critical factor, and indeed supplied the prototype for American interventions throughout the Cold War.  In particular, the Americans supported a far-right paramilitary force known as the Hellenic Raiding Group during the conflict.  After it ended, as with other NATO partners, US assistance meant shared intelligence collecting and military cooperation.  Much of this involved coordinated activity against leftists in the country.

But in 1963, the right's stranglehold on power was broken by a centre-left coalition, led by George Papandreou.  Working with the King, royalists, right-wing military officers and Greek intelligence, the CIA Chief of Station, Jack Maury, conspired successfully to order Papandreou out of office via royal perogative.  While this only got rid of the man himself, a series of bomb attacks, carried out by members of the Hellenic Raiding Group, who were themselves advised by a member of Greek intelligence, helped create a climate in which the right could seize power again.  However, the centre-left coalition held on until 1967, with the charismatic leadership of Andreas Papandreou, son of George.  In fact, it was scheduled to have a massive victory in Parliament.

Because of this, elements of the Hellenic Raiding Force took over the Defence Ministry, rolled into Athens and took over.  10,000 people were arrested, including of course members of the ruling coalition.  The constitution was suspended.  People could be arrested without charge, and be brought in front of military tribunals.  Demonstrations and strikes were outlawed.  Torture was routine, indeed systemic.  The regime eventually collapsed, due to a near total lack of internal support, and an ill-planned coup on Cyprus, which helped facilitate the Turkish invasion and partition of the island.

In Portgual, a secret unit going under the unusual name of Aginter Press was set up in 1966.  It was led by Yves Guerin Serac, a French veteran who had also been a member of the OAS terrorist organization.  He quickly set about offering the regime his skills, in return for protection from a vengeful French government, and set up what can only be described as an advanced training school for right-wing terrorists all over Western Europe. 

Serac set down clear guidelines for how the Communist threat had to be confronted.  "In the first phase of our political activity we must create chaos in all structures of the regime.  Two forms of terrorism can provocate such a situation: the blind terrorism , and the selective terrorism.  This destruction of the state must be carried out as much as possible under the cover of "Communist activities".  After that, we must intervene at the heart of the military, the juridical power and the church, in order to influence popular opinion, suggest a solution, and clearly demonstrate the weakness of the present legal apparatus... Popular opinion must be polarized in such a way, that we are being presented as the only instrument capable of saving the nation."   Serac was even more explicit about the need to infiltrate and manipulate left-wing groups to blame the violence on the Communists.  To this end, Serac's group was heavily funded by Portuguese intelligence and the CIA, and sent to wage war in the colonies.

Their war did not stop in Africa, though.  Aginter Press training materials were found among Italian neofascist terrorists responsible for the Piazza Fontana massacre in 1969, a bloody series of bombings that were initially blamed on Communist groups, despite internal Italian intelligence reports suggesting just the opposite – that it had been carried out by the right, with American support.  Serac's troops also took part in killings in Guatemala, during the "counter-terror" operations of 1968-71.  Aginter agents were also present during the 1973 coup in Chile. 

When the "Revolution of the Flowers", led by a left-leaning faction of the Portuguese military, occurred in 1974, Aginter Press prepared to take over the Azores with regime loyalists and use it to launch a civil war on the mainland.  But for various reasons, their plans went unrealised, and police units were dispatched by the new regime to raid Aginter Press safe-houses.  They were abandoned, almost entirely stripped down.  The remaining few documents showed the clear relationship that existed between Aginter Press, PIDE and the CIA, but as the new regime prepared to publish the documents relating to the organization, the dossier and all related files were somehow stolen, never to be recovered.

Guerin Serac and most of Aginter Press made their way to Spain, and found sanctuary with the Franco regime, where they offered their expertise in terrorism and assassination to be used against ETA in return for protection.  They also undertook a campaign of false-flag bombings, implicating the Algerian opposition in them.  One bomb, in Germany, failed to explode, allowing investigators to get a very good look at it.  They were astonished to discover it was made with C4, a US military explosive, rather than the more crude methods of various "anarchist groups".  When Franco's regime collapsed, Aginter Press fled to Chile, and have not been seen since.   

"Emperors soon found it convenient to use these frumentarii (military couriers) as an internal security service both within Rome and in their home provinces, and they became notorious as spies and even assassins."
- The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, Volume Six.

"History teaches us that many more princes have lost their lives and their states by conspiracies than by open war."
- Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy

"Good propaganda, to be effective, as Hitler and Goebbels had learned from experience, needs more than words.  It needs deeds, however much they may have to be fabricated. [...] For six days Alfred Naujocks, the intellectual S.S. ruffian, had been waiting at Gleiwitz on the Polish border to carry out a simulated Polish attack on a German radio station there.  The plan had been revised.  S.S. men outfitted in Polish Army uniforms were to do the shooting, and drugged concentration camp inmates were to be left dying as "casualties"."
- The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer

"Conspiracy theory" is a term of near-universal insult.  Once someone is labelled a "conspiracy theorist" they are automatically beyond the pale, not worth taking seriously, not even to be listened to.  Their mere presence can be seen as a distraction, if not an insult, and their ideas may not be challenging, but are frequently dangerous and dangerously wrong in their insinuations.

This is not an entirely unfair reaction.  Listening to David Icke describe the giant lizards he claims rule the world, or some Stormfronter quote re-hashed versions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion*, or Alex Jones go on yet another tirade can quickly make most of the above appear true.  After all, the accusations of conspiracy have been used in the past to promote anti-Semitism, sectarian violence and pit nations against each other.  It devalues the real work of political analysis, leading to a fundamentally flawed and warped understanding of history, society and the power brokers in society which can threaten the workings of representative and democratic government (consider the ease at which the acceptance of The Protocols in the Muslim world leads to anti-Semitism which then leads to support for Islamist parties opposed to the State of Israel).

However.

It is worth noting people who one should, on the balance, not be considered entirely trustworthy are very comfortable with using the insult of "conspiracy theorist".  For instance, Tony Blair, whose many distortions and deceptions have been catalogued over the years, has said this of people who disagreed with the idea of invading Iraq as "reasonable".  This was in 2010, long after the revelations of the Downing Street Memo, the "fixing of facts around policy", the debunking of the 45 minute claim, the revelation of an MI6 disinformation campaign being run in the press and similar.  And that is just on this side of the Atlantic.

Another person comfortable with the "conspiracy theorist" smear is Margaret Chan, director of the World Health Organization, who denied her organization's close links to the pharmaceutical industry in any way influenced how they reacted to a recent influenza scare, despite an investigation by the British Medical Journal uncovering WHO experts which had "declarable financial ties and research ties with pharmaceutical companies producing antivirals and influenza vaccines."

The New York Times runs semi-frequent pieces about Pakistan, asserting that belief in conspiracy theory is rife in the region and that people think America is secretly plotting ways to undermine the state which do not rely on open warfare.  But the truth is that the Obama administration did consider the full range of options when it came to Pakistan, including open warfare, but decided against them because of practicalities like the Pakistani nuclear arsenal and population concentration.  Instead they preferred to rely on drone strikes and assassinations, all while building strong strategic ties with India, suggesting the truth is more complex than the New York Times is willing to admit.

More controversially, there is the question of 9/11.  Truthers are fair game for everyone, even members of this site.  Everyone from FOX News to The Huffington Post automatically excludes Truthers from the discussion.  Yet, only recently, two former Senators have claimed that there was a cover-up of sorts concerning the role of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, who they believe played a direct role in the attacks.  The final 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission's Report, which dealt with the possibility of foreign support for the hijackers, was censored in its entirety, on the orders of one George W. Bush.

The question of conspiracies is clearly more complex than the simple case of "all conspiracies are spread by misguided or hate filled fools".  But it is also more complex than "everyone is lying to you", the world-embracing paranoia of an Icke or an Alex Jones.  This kind of conspiratorial view of all of history is what the philosopher Karl Popper referred to as the "conspiracy theory of society", which he rightly condemned as complete nonsense.

What many of the so-called debunkers of conspiracy theory, such as the British journalist David Aaronovitch, overlook is that conspiracies have an objective and historically provable existence.  By selectively choosing straw-men arguments and only particular case studies, he wrote a perverse "study of conspiracy theory" which completely avoided even admitting the existence of hard questions that may challenge his own world view.  This is to be somewhat expected, given his role as a justifier of the politics of New Labour, whose political legitimacy involves distancing itself from "radical" elements and ideas of all kinds.

And on the other end of the spectrum, you have the likes of Vigilant Citizen, who would have you believe everything from the music you listen to, the games you play and the politicians you vote for are hand-picked by the mysterious powers that be, likely a short-lived and ultimately futile political conspiracy that existed in Germany during a turbulent period two centuries ago, but had an incredibly impressive name.

The tragedy, of course, is that the two are more similar than either would care to admit.  Their world-view is black and white, all or nothing, you accept their conclusions or you are disqualified from speaking with any kind of authority.

Yet there is still a middle ground, one that needs to be explored and fleshed out.  For this twilight zones, that lurks in the gap between conspiracy theory and respectable political discourse, I prefer the term "parapolitics".  The name is suggestive of the political, which is to say the distribution and balance of power within society, but set aside from it, related to it but not quite the same.  In academic discourse, parapolitics has the specific meaning of relating to the clandestine, far-reaching and apparently structural relationships between state-security, terrorist groups, organized crime and "gaps" in the international state system, such as failed or unrecognised states.   This certainly relates closely enough to our interests, I feel, for the term to be appropriated.

The denial of this area as a conceptual field of inquiry allows that important ground to be ceded to the likes of debunkers named above, whether they be well intentioned idiots, or have a more pernicious agenda.  It also cedes the other side of the argument to the cranks and crackpots, who, along with the debunkers, create an informal and unintended system that nevertheless acts to police the acceptable bounds of debate.

With my next pieces, I will attempt to show why it is critical for this system to be broken, and the effects such clandestine networks can have on the political and social fabric of a nation.



















* As far as can be told, the actual origin of the Protocols is someone within the Okhrana, the Tsarist-era Russian Secret Police, and was released first of all to ultra-nationalist supporters of House Romanov, known as the Black Hundreds, who used it to associate all attempts at reform and republican rule as a Jewish plot.  In other words, the production of the Protocols was a conspiratorial act.

The Guardian has an in-depth report today on things long suspected, but hard to prove:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes

Thousands of documents detailing some of the most shameful acts and crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments, an official review has concluded.

Those papers that survived the purge were flown discreetly to Britain where they were hidden for 50 years in a secret Foreign Office archive, beyond the reach of historians and members of the public, and in breach of legal obligations for them to be transferred into the public domain.

The archive came to light last year when a group of Kenyans detained and allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion won the right to sue the British government. The Foreign Office promised to release the 8,800 files from 37 former colonies held at the highly-secure government communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire.

The historian appointed to oversee the review and transfer, Tony Badger, master of Clare College, Cambridge, says the discovery of the archive put the Foreign Office in an "embarrassing, scandalous" position. "These documents should have been in the public archives in the 1980s," he said. "It's long overdue." The first of them are made available to the public on Wednesday at the National Archive at Kew, Surrey.

The papers at Hanslope Park include monthly intelligence reports on the "elimination" of the colonial authority's enemies in 1950s Malaya; records showing ministers in London were aware of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya, including a case of aman said to have been "roasted alive"; and papers detailing the lengths to which the UK went to forcibly remove islanders from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

However, among the documents are a handful which show that many of the most sensitive papers from Britain's late colonial era were not hidden away, but simply destroyed. These papers give the instructions for systematic destruction issued in 1961 after Iain Macleod, secretary of state for the colonies, directed that post-independence governments should not get any material that "might embarrass Her Majesty's government", that could "embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others eg police informers", that might compromise intelligence sources, or that might "be used unethically by ministers in the successor government".

Among the documents that appear to have been destroyed were: records of the abuse of Mau Mau insurgents detained by British colonial authorities, who were tortured and sometimes murdered; reports that may have detailed the alleged massacre of 24 unarmed villagers in Malaya by soldiers of the Scots Guards in 1948; most of the sensitive documents kept by colonial authorities in Aden, where the army's Intelligence Corps operated a secret torture centre for several years in the 1960s; and every sensitive document kept by the authorities in British Guiana, a colony whose policies were heavily influenced by successive US governments and whose post-independence leader was toppled in a coup orchestrated by the CIA.

The documents that were not destroyed appear to have been kept secret not only to protect the UK's reputation, but to shield the government from litigation. If the small group of Mau Mau detainees are successful in their legal action, thousands more veterans are expected to follow.

But some files were retrieved

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/18/colonial-office-eliminations-malayan-insurgency?intcmp=239

The "elimination of ranking terrorists" was a repeated theme in secret monthly reports on casualty figures circulated by the director of intelligence in British-controlled Malaya during the 1950s.

Long-lost files from the "emergency" period, when insurgents attempted to drive out colonial occupiers, reveal how the protracted jungle war was fought to drive communist groups into submission and deprive them of food and support.

The first tranche of documents belatedly transferred from the Foreign Office depository in Hanslope park, near Milton Keynes, to the National Archives in Kew, show how British officials in Kuala Lumpur interpreted virtually all anti-colonial protests as evidence of a planned communist takeover.

But many potentially embarrassing documents, including probably some of those relating to the alleged 1948 massacre by Scots Guards of 24 villagers in Batang Kali, appear to be missing.

These missing papers could have been among scores of files listed for destruction in the colony's final months.

A compensation claim by relatives and survivors of the killings – described by some as the "British My Lai massacre", after the US troop killings in Vietnam – is due to come to trial in London in May.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/archives-diego-garcia?intcmp=239

The extent to which successive British governments set out to hoodwink parliament and the public over the decision to give the US a military base in Diego Garcia and force out the islanders is laid bare in files released on Wednesday.

The base, on the largest island in the British Indian Ocean territory, was established after the UK bought the Chagos archipelago from Mauritius in 1965. It has been used by long-range US bombers in attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan, and would almost certainly be used in the event of any American air strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, British officials say.

Diego Garcia was used by the CIA as a refuelling stop for flights secretly rendering terror suspects to jails, including a Libyan dissident flown to Muammar Gaddafi's Libya in an operation involving MI6.

The aim behind the decision to control the islands, noted a Foreign Office official in a document dated September 1966 and marked "Secret and Guard", was to build "defence facilities ... without hindrance or political agitation".

In 1970, the Foreign Office told its officials at the UN to describe the islanders as "contract labourers" engaged to work on coconut plantations. "The merit of this line," it noted, "is that it does not give away the existence of the Ilois [the indigenous islanders] but is at the same time strictly factual."

Officials reported the prime minister, Ted Heath, as saying: "Any discussions between the United States and ourselves must remain confidential."

A year later, most of the islanders – about 1,500 in total, of whom 500 lived on Diego Garcia – were deported, mainly to Mauritius and Seychelles.

The Chagos Islands in particular is a very special stain on British history.  We deported an entire population, turned their home into an international torture chamber, and then mocked them when they organised themselves and protested to have their land back.

And we were spying on Obama's father

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/barack-obama-father-colonial-list?intcmp=239

The name of Barack Obama, the father of the American president, is on the top of a list of names revealed in a hitherto secret British colonial file of Kenyans studying in the US.

The file notes that the US state department had told British officials in 1959 that they were concerned Kenyan students in America had a reputation for "falling into the wrong hands".

US officials complained that Kenyan students were becoming "anti-American and anti-white" just at the time Barack Obama Senior was given a grant to study in America.

British colonial administrators in Nairobi expressed concern about the calibre of Kenyans receiving scholarships to go to US universities, claiming they were "academically inferior" to their contemporaries who stayed in Africa to study. They criticised a US-based body, the African American Students Foundation, which gave Obama Senior grants to study business administration at the University of Hawaii, Honululu. Supporters of the project included the singer Harry Belafonte, the actor Sidney Poitier, and the baseball player Jackie Robinson.

Up until now, the monopoly on cool sounding names in politics has been held by warlords, usually in central Asia or Africa.

But Greece, blazing the trail in all things post credit-crunch, has them beaten.

My personal favourites are:

Summer Entropy Commandos

Destroyers of whatever is left of social peace

Nikola Tesla Commandos

Conspiracists for the realization of insecurity

Speedy Arsonist Agency

Carnivalists in the tune

I only mention this because you might want to start thinking of cool names for when America turns into a Greek like post-austerity wasteland.

I'm sick of squatters and travellers, pop music, the BBC, surveillance cameras, my rotten pension, terrorists, Anglican bishops, and having no money, and I just want to die. My country, which I loved, is ruined. It will never be happy again."

Never again!  Woe!

Feel free to guess the paper, though with a list like that, it shouldn't be that hard.

Maybe!

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/10/bush_aide_blasts_torture/

One traumatic experienced often overlooked — overlooked because it appeared in Stephen Hayes's stenographic biography of Dick Cheney — was that the Vice-President's daughter was (falsely, it turns out) told that her house with her children in it had tested positive for anthrax. Similarly, Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were told that they and others had been exposed to an extremely lethal toxin in a particular area of the White House — and might soon die as a result. "The alarms did not stop and they too were not abstract ... The pressure on Bush and his senior advisers was so direct because so much of the response had to be invented and improvised," the article reads.

To be honest, this could explain a lot.  Not justify it, but certainly at least.

Of course, they could have also taken away from it the importance of false alarms and the panic they generate, and to not put other people through that....but this reaction might explain the near personal vehemence Dick Cheney had about him, when talking about the one percent doctrine and similar.  That kind of stress could lead to changes in patterns of behaviour and thought, making one far more risk adverse and hold highly negative opinions of those percieved responsible, ie; Islamist terrorist groups.

I've been reconsidering some of my more reflexive political positions of the past few years.  This essay is the result of one of them.  It is something I rushed off quickly, so there may be some typos and errors I missed - however, all the statistics reported are correct, and taking either from reputable polling companies (UK Polling) or news organisations (Channel 4).


A lot of stupid shit has been said about Islam and Muslims in the past decade or so.  In fact, if all the ink spilled on asserting ridiculous conspiracy theories with Muslims as the main characters were gathered up in one place, it would probably be enough to drown a small city in.  At the very least.

Such stupid shit has, of course, provoked a backlash. In the UK, the political left has divided fairly neatly into pro-and-anti Muslim factions –usually the pro-Muslim factions are critical of our interventionist foreign policy, the erosion of civil liberties and of American counter-terrorism generally, while their opposites argue for the necessity of such measures.  As the shine has worn off interventionism, asserting the natural superiority of Enlightenment values, puffing up a civilizational war etc the left in the UK has generally gone to the pro-Muslim position, at least in the mainstream.  Most recently, the maverick politician George Galloway secured victory in the Bradford by-election through shameless pandering to the Muslim community there – especially on the topics of Palestine and Iraq.

The problem with that is this: in protecting Muslims (quite rightly too) from unwarranted attacks, vicious smearing and complete stitch-up jobs by Special Branch, the left over here has overlooked the obvious problem with a large number of Muslims in this country: that they are odious shits, with 14th century views on the place of women, homosexuals and apostates/atheists, and that their political influence is only to set to grow over the next two decades, and that they are providing political cover for them by refusing to discuss these issues.

According to the most standard projections, the UK will have a 10% or so Muslim population by 2030 – well below what the "Eurabia" conspiracy theorists suggest, but a not insignificant figure.  Furthermore, the distribution of the Muslim population will not be equally spread out through the country.  Instead, it will be concentrated in places like Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham and my own dear North London (the infamous Finsbury Park Mosque is only a short stroll from my apartment).  Areas where numbers can plausibly be turned into political representation at a national level, in other words.

Islamist terrorism has long been considered the major risk to the UK.  This view suggests that small cells of poorly coordinated plotters, often supported by training camps in Pakistan or Yemen or occasionally Somalia, and their bombs, represent the pre-eminent risk to the British state as we understand it.  This view is clearly flawed.  While nations like Pakistan, Iraq and Syria may fall to Islamist fundamentalism and terrorism, the UK is not so weak, nor so defenceless.  With a surveillance state that would be the envy of Stalin, the world's third biggest military budget, a mostly homogenous nation with long-entrenched political institutions (and a powerful, if mostly unseen, secret security apparatus) is not going to fall because of a fraction of 3% of the population have been reading updated versions of the Anarchist's Cookbook.

Instead of the Middle Eastern scenarios mentioned above, I would like to consider the model presented to us by the United States.  In the post-war years up until the early 1970s, organized religion had little say in the political affairs of the nation.  Sure, Catholics and Evangelicals might organize competing "get the vote out" contests in this or that race, but by and large, on a national level, religion did not have a say.  However, the collapse of support for Democrats in the South, followed by Nixon's Southern Strategy meant one particular political party had to suck up heavily to the religious sensibilities of the Southern States, especially in its more ugly and racist forms, to secure electoral victory.  This opened the door to large-scale infiltration of the right by religious, fundamentalist elements who had no respect for the more pluralistic, secular strands of US political history and thinking, and who violently opposed social liberalism and freedom on a number of grounds.

While Americans panicked about the far left and the far right carrying out assassinations and bombing plots, it was the non-violent extremists who managed an electoral coup, seizing control of much of the machinery of the Republican Party, leading it to its current sorry state.  And helping to lay the groundwork for the destruction of more than a few countries, the environment, civil liberties and health issues along the way.  A sign of how far they have gone in framing the debate is how many Republicans have signed up on the current war on women's reproductive rights.

My fear is that while everyone in the UK focuses on the terrorist threat, and attempting to tar every Muslim with the "terrorist brush", organised groups seeking greater political power will increasingly have the power and resources to set the agenda, or at least force concessions on government in line with their fundamentalist views, in return for some kind of support or another.

This is no idle fear.  One third of British Muslims seem to think killing apostates is acceptable.  Getting a divorce under Sharia Law is almost impossible for a woman (legal divorce is still an option, but for many devout Muslim women, Imams will outright ignore their concerns or issues in favour of the husband, regardless of the situation, making an Islamic divorce all but impossible).  Over a third want Sharia Law implemented fully in the UK.  Over 60% think insulting Islam or the Prophet Mohammed should be a criminal offence.  In Pakistan, where the majority of Muslim immigration to the UK originates from, support for sanctions such as stoning adulterers to death or chopping hands off of criminals are in the high seventies, or even higher.

While many older Muslims are more moderate in their views, and indeed there is almost no support for Islamist terrorism among the British UK population (below 10%), these are still disturbingly high numbers.  More worryingly, much of the Islamic community in the UK seems to prefer to pander to these extremists instead of the more moderate population.  Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, for example, one of the most influential Muslim scholars in the UK, agrees that apostates should be executed.  Saudi Arabia furnishes Muslim schools and learning centres with anti-Semitic texts.    The chairman of the Muslim Association of Schools agrees with killing apostates.

While this is a minority of troublemakers right now, their numbers are set to increase.  Some would point to the BNP as a similar fringe group, but the BNP's support is at about 2% of the UK – they do not even have seats in Parliament, and their accounts are in a shambles.  By contrast, support for these kind of views among Muslims is in the double digits.  Furthermore, on certain issues, they will almost certainly be able to build alliances with existing political blocs – one can easily imagine Muslim MPs of a fundamentalist bent agreeing to cooperate with Nadine Dorries and other Tory backbenchers to launch an assault on abortion, as just one example.

As I say, it is the US model which worries me.  There is a clear precedent for a fundamentalist, non-violent minority seizing a major slice of power in a democratic, secular state, and using it to advance their deeply illiberal agenda.  So long as the UK left continues to wear rose-tinted glasses when it comes to Muslim illiberalism in the UK, a similar scenario could be played out here. 

I don't know exactly what the answer is.  The solutions I was schooled in tend to be of a more permanent kind than are normally allowed in contemporary European politics (and make a terrible mess, too).  If I had to hazard a guess though, I would say it would be something like this: stop protecting these people from the consequences of their own nasty worldview.  Push back, and hard.  Don't support hate speech legislation, especially where the possibility exists that it can be used to squelch legitimate criticism.  Don't allow yourself to be intimidated into silence by religious bullies and thugs.  Apart from that, I'm open to suggestions.