I just signed the Euston Manifesto

Its here. You lovely peeps out there may be interested in reading it and signing it too.

I find it fascinating that my country has no simple constitution or statement of values or a manifesto such as this (the mere idea of Blair accepting its tenets is laughable). The only thing that worries me is that it lacks a profound endorsement of secularity. . . . Hmmmmmmmmm, methinks I will email them to suggest such a 'ting.

:)

Bligh & Dyer

I spent 2 hours tonight putting my lipid quantification data into excel and the result? -BULLPOOP!

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Bollocks to this assay.

The Palestinian apartheid degenerates into a simple slaughter

GGGGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

This shit makes me ANGRY!

What can I do? I might as well rub my own shit on my face as write to my MP about this.

I fucking hate the UK's political system.

machismo and peace keeping

Interesting article from openDemocracy regarding the prevalence of machismo in international diplomatic forums.

I can't help but think that testosterone incites the majority of diplomatic breakdowns. I remember a conversation I had with my MRes supervisor about endocrine disruption and whether or not the prevalence of xenoestrogens in the environment could benefit society by changing patterns of male behaviour. Certainly in societies with a patriarchal culture the unassailability of the male ego can simply halt the application of common sense to many of the challenges of peace-keeping.

Another interesting anecdote came from a family friend who was posted to Bosnia with the RAF. As an air-traffic director she had to liaise between the different local and international forces to manage access to the contested airspace, not to mention tiptoe around the variety of inflated male egos that inevitably dominate such conflicts with their petty territorial squabblings. I remember her recounting how she was deployed in many deadlocked situations as a conflict breaker as in the Balkan culture it is inconceivable that a women is superior in any way to a man. In such situations she was introduced to negotiations and then authorised to offer minor concessions to the opposing delegation- whose egos would not let them be outdone by a mere woman- and who would promptly attempt to outdo these concessions and subsequently engage in an escalation to the point where she could get them to dance naked on a table if she was so inclined!

Another example comes from my own country where it appears that the job of bailiff is being taken by more and more women (I think it was a BBC article but I can't find it, grrrr). It appears that many tense situations are dealt with in a far more diplomatic and less aggressive manner by the fairer sex, possibly because they come across as less threatening (?).

Politics

I am continually enraged by some people's ability to condemn my entire progressive philosophy with a single syllable. "Left" or "Right". Such absurd polarisations do nothing for any debate on politics as I am convinced that such generalisations lost any real meaning at the end of the Cold War. Is it not clear that modern policy requires elements of both these political paradigms? Does not the European social democracy model occupy the high moral ground that should be the goal of every progressive civilisation that does not aspire to mediaeval moral standards or environmental holocaust? On the other hand I believe that our democracy, in the UK at least, is fatally flawed. President Blair was elected by less than a fifth of the population! How this degenerate little toerag can drag our nation's credibility through the pile of excrement that is Iraq and still retain his position of leader of our nation eludes me. Substantial reform along the lines of compulsory voting policy is essential if the substantial socially and culturally deprived section of the white lower classes are to be made to participate in the democracy in which they live. I believe that everyone has a responsibility to engage with their society. What, if not that, does the word society mean?

3 posts in a day You lucky, lucky peeps, you!

I just wanted to get my hattrick in by linking to Johann Hari's most recent article. Its a nice piece of insight into the subtleties of American politics. I like Johann's writing- he's good at picking out important detail such as this.

This week I have been mostly discovering . . . Sam Harris!

He's a fascinating chap if ever I've heard of one, and a good, upstanding antitheist. Apparently-

"At age 19, he and a college friend tried MDMA, better known as ecstasy, and the experience altered his view of the role that love could play in the world. ("I realized that it was possible to be a human being who wished others well all the time, reflexively.")"

Well, that just goes to show the power of ecstasy really. If anyone is under any misapprehensions regarding my stance on the issue I have consumed ecstasy recreationally for many years and can enthusisatically corroborate Sam's experience. There is little less harmful than consuming ecstasy recreationally (a respected neurologist once commented that it was "safer than aspirin"- much to the fury of the conservative press). Anyway, with MDMA you don't have to inhale smoke, you don't have to burn anything, you don't get angry, woozey, trippy, anxious, depressed or nervous- you just feel amazing and wonderfully empathic. Its like having a mental link with all of your friends. The come down is a little low but compared to a hangover its nothing! Rather like being a little forgetful and a littl etimid. There's little to criticise about the experience.

Well, I've just got Sam's 1st book and I'm going to have a little read and let you know what its like. I just finished Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and it was marvellous so although this may be a bit like reading the same material again I'm attracted to the subtleties that might differentiate the 2 works.

why hasn't Tony been impeached or otherwise dismissed from office yet?

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=6736

It says it all.

Every day I read another commentator demanding to know why, in the face of incredible evidence against him, Blair remains in office. Why is the little shit still smiling back at me with that grim little "the world's woes are on my shoulders" look every time I watch the news?

The bastard needs to go. My MP hasn't even replied to the last letter I sent her. This whole government needs to go. Screw the Tories too, VOTE FOR A FUTURE! VOTE GREEN!

I love it- pastafarianism rules! AARRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, me hearties

a few small steps closer to Christian suicide bombers

Harry's Place brought this to my attention. As Harry says, "this is some scary shit!" Be afraid peeps, be very afraid. The God Squad are tooling up and preparing for Armageddon and even if you don't want it they're going to bring it about one way or another: Either you're on the side of Jesus; or you're damned.

Fortunately for this Pastor Becky Fisher I'm not a fan of capital punishment. People like her are desperate for Armageddon as they think they have the power of Jesus on their side and anything up to that level of conflict is just pandering to satan. My question is: "As the Islamic fundamentalism of children is universally condemned, how are you any different by doing the same thing?" This fat psycho-bitch's plans are laid all to clear on her own website . She speaks of children evangelicising their friends and of laying hands on sick people to heal them in the name of Jesus and- my favourite- "raising the dead". And people are actually taking her up on the offer of skullfucking their children royally and paying her little cluster of superstitious speakers in tongues and snake charmers for the privilege!

I have been reading up on the whole anti-evolution, anti-progress, neo-con right wing christian fundamentalist death cult and I've decided to engage a typical advocate of such dark age society in lucid discussion of their values and beliefs so for the enxt few days I will be attempting to lock horns with one of these hate-preachers. Follow my progress here to find out how successful I am. :)

Pakistan's ailing dictatorship

oD carried this story.

As the bloody insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq grow more and more violent and bloody it seems that few eyes are watching this nuclear power drift steadily further into confusion and instability. The oD article is an unnerving indicator that Pakistan is on the verge of a sudden shift in power structure. The US backing of Pervez Musharraf hamstrung the man's rule from 11th September 2001 onwards. As a result, although the Pakistani military appears to have been superficially aiding Bush's war on common sense the truth of the matter is that support for the Taliban has mushroomed in the anarchic tribal regions that lie between Afghanistan and Pakistan proper. NATO troops in Afghanistan are facing the product of this absurd piece of gunship diplomacy by the US- an revitalised Taliban insurgency and now a pair of countries with grassroots hostility to NATO's mission.

I am deeply concerned that this support for anti-western politics will, 10 years down the line, result in a Talibanesque Pakistan. With nuclear weapons. Just as in Iran and Iraq, the US are throwing guns and technology at the Pakistanis, hoping that this will help their mission but they failed to notice that much of the Pakistani military didn't really want to work against their kinsmen. As the oD article points out:

"Elements within the Pakistan military and intelligence communities have long been known to be sympathetic to the Taliban and al-Qaida ,and the question has simply been how widely this sympathy was shared within the military government itself."

Once again US foreign policy is built around the premise that you can achieve yuor goals through coercion and outright bribery. This works to great effects within the US administration so it is no surprise that successive administrations attempt to export the practice. The truism quoted in the oD article is horribly apposite.

"for a man in possession of a hammer all problems look like nails"

Praise the Lord Johann, for he tells It like It is.

http://www.johannhari.com/index.php

Honestly guys- how can anyone possibly believe in religion when you're faced with such incredibly succinct and rational arguments for it all being a fairy tale. The one thing I take issue with Johann for is describing religion as a "hallucination". I have had plenty of wicked hallucinations and I have also experienced religion 1st hand thanks to my forced attendance at chapel every week whilst I was at school and they are very, very different. I will email Johann accordingly.

Israel threatens nuclear strikes against Iran

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1157913657029&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter

The fuckers have gone and done it now! If they deploy nuclear weapons then they will have to suffer the consequences of their actions. I can see no response to this except military action under the UN flag to seize and destroy Israel's nuclear arsenal. There is no excuse for such overtly offensive action whilst there remains no evidence whatsoever of Iran attempting to develop, let alone actually possessing, a nuclear warhead.

The question is, are the Israelis so out of touch with reality that they think the rest of the world will let them get away with this? I believe that the answer is no. However, the mere threat of nuclear weapons in a serious discussion of the 'Iranian issue' chills me to the bone.

the rise of the anti-atheism in the UK

Everyone child in the UK should be made to watch this.

Most of the adults too.

The pot or the kettle? US House Intelligence Committee branded "outrageous & dishonest" by IAEA

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5346524.stm

Its all there.

You'd think that once Bush government realised it had lost all moral authority to preach to others that they'd make some poorly disguised attempt to buy themselves back into favour. Some sort of aid package, maybe. A few trade concessions, perhaps.

No.

Instead they've gone and got themselves a soap box from which they're directing obscenities at anyone who comes close enough to hear. Idiots!

light reading for the weekend

Not much time here, it being 1600 on a Friday afternoon so I'll make this brief. Just wanted to draw attention to these two fascinating articles on openDemocracy:

What happened to the new world order

The SWISH Report

Have a good weekend!

- Le Scare

Israel uses nerve gas against its enemies

No, I didn't believe it when I read it either but then I found this. If any of you haven't heard of James Longley he's the guy who directed the film Gaza Strip. He's lived in Gaza for years, documenting attrocities committed by the IDF and generally being a humanitarian legend. Anyway, I couldn't sleep (its 01:18 and the kittens keep waking me up just as I'm about to drop off) so I came down and started checking for more stuff on the "mystery weapons" and I happened to read through the page I linked to below about the dodgy fundamentalist website with the interview with the doctor and I realised that below it was the text of a report from a site called Wayne Madsen Report that alleged that Israel fired nerve gas shells into Lebanon during the genocide. Now, I've already said that this site rang a few bells in my objectivity centres- the language it used, the english was bad and reports were pasted in from other sites (the text referred to a picture but there wasn't one). However, the gas allegation seemed well written so I tracked down the original report and, lo and behold, there it was- a picture of an IDF soldier carrying a dirty great finned projectile. The text stated that "a former U.S. weapons expert who served in Iraq" had identified it as "a chemical weapon delivery device".

Now, I know that Israel probably has chemical weapon delivery systems (American ones, methinks) and I have no doubt that it would be relatively straight forward to find a picture, like the one in the report, regardless of where it was actually taken (on exercise, at a military base, wherever) and start shouting "look the Israelis are using nerve gas!" But the picture is not the convincing evidence at all and neither is the unsubstantiated statement regarding "gas dropped by the Israelis in villages in southern Lebanon" which " has resulted in severe vomiting among the civilian population". The convincing evidence is the document that I first linked to in this post from James Longley which contains his own eye witness report of the IDF firing gas shells into the Khan Younis refugee camp in 2001 and the subsequent trauma of the civilians, including children, who were exposed to it. I quote:

"As I made my way through the wards of Amal and Nasser Hospitals that day and for many days afterward, I observed many patients that had been brought to the hospitals suffering from these symptoms. Room after room, women, children, men. Some were vomiting. Some alternated between a coma-like state and violent convulsions, their entire bodies twisting and arching, members of their families struggling to hold them down on the beds. On and on, for days. One boy, who had inhaled a large amount of the gas in question, suffered in the hospital for an entire month with recurrent convulsions. It is difficult to describe the sensation of sitting in a room for hours and days with people suffering so terribly, and knowing that this was done by human beings."


So there it is people. And it wasn't even the only reference I found, from Longleyor from other websites.

"How," I hear you cry, "can these animals get away with such abuses?"

"How can they elude the justice that they so clearly deserve?"

Longley offers a convincing explanation that, when heard in conjunction with the knowledged imparted in the document by the Harvard professors, that I linked to in my last post, regarding the power of the Israeli Lobby to silence or bury dissent, makes convincing reading:

"The incident went largely unreported. No articles were written in major US newspapers. Fox News and 60 Minutes did not produce special reports. The story gradually grew old and fell through the cracks. Out of sight and out of mind – and who would believe that the Israeli military would do such a thing to civilians in a refugee camp?"


I don't know about you guys but I'm putting together a letter to my MP regarding Israel's multitude of war crimes that go uncondemned in this country. Now it is time for bed, sweet dreams children. Sweeter, for sure, than the average Palestinian.

Kenyan museum condemned by religious bigot for carrying evolution exhibition

I can hardly believe that anyone would be stupid enough to condemn an exhibition of some of the oldest and finest hominid fossils in the world. But that's exactly what this idiot, Bishop Boniface Adoyo (stupid name warning!), is trying to do by drumming up feeling amongst other peddlers of mediaeval superstition in an attempt to have the exhibition "removed or, at least, moved to a less prominent location"!

Here's a real money quote from the man himself:

"When museums put it out there that man evolved from apes, theologically they are affecting many people who are Christians, who believe God created us,"

"It's creating a big weapon against Christians that's killing our faith," he said, calling the evolution theory an "insult" and dangerous to youths.

"When children go to museums they'll start believing we evolved from these apes. This is not the truth,"


I'm sorry? Did I read that correctly? (!) Let's just repeat a few of those alarmingly absurd phrases, shall we?


"he said, calling the evolution theory an "insult" and dangerous to youths"

For a start Darwin's work is no longer a "theory". The entire biosphere is testament to the truth of his work. It should be called "Darwin's law" and I shall henceforth refer to it as such. Secondly, how is the truth going to be dangerous to "youths"? Are they incapable of dealing with "the truth"? (I could rant on but I think I've made my point.)

"It's creating a big weapon against Christians that's killing our faith"

It may be killing your faith, sunshine, but that's because your faith is based on a bunch of fairy tales. Get some sense you twat.

"When children go to museums they'll start believing we evolved from these apes"

So when children go to museum's they will learn stuff about the world they live in. Yeah. Really bad, that is.

I am happy to consider such absurd ejaculations to be a marker of religion's impending fall from grace. It can only be a matter of time before the rationalist movement gains further footholds amongst the world's ignorants through the presentation of incontrovertible fact. I fear, however that blood may be shed in its pursuit.

"mystery injuries" to victims of Israel's latest brutality in Gaza

The Independent carried this story today with few details but I fear that this represents a new outpouring of Israel's frustration over their humiliating failure in Lebanon. I dearly hope they have not been deploying phosphorous munitions in Gaza but I wouldn't, for one second, put it past them. The Gazan authority did a good PR job of shaking their spears by proclaiming that the Israelis were using "unprecendented" projectiles with "radiant" substance. I understand this to be an accusation of the deployment of depleted uranium shells from their tanks. But, as the article I linked to states, this accusation has no evidence whatsoever to back it. DU shells are fairly radioactive but they are not nearly dangerous enough to cause the sort of bizarre injuries reported.

I consider it far more likely that they have been using phosphorous muntiions- grenades or otherwise. One can only hope that this turns out to be a false alarm and will only serve to draw attention to the cause of the Gazan people. My heart tells me otherwise.

Should it be determined unequivocally that phosphorous has been used against Palestinians- miltants or otherwise- then I have no hesitation in declaring this to be a war crime of the most heinous kind.

Hello sustainable development, goodbye "War on Terror"

Lovely piece of analysis and associated comment on why fighting terrorism is a waste of time:

"The Cato Institute (a conservative thinktank) has released an outstanding paper, A False Sense of Insecurity (PDF), which makes the point that in any rational assessment, terrorism is really just not that big of a threat to the average person. For instance, about as many Americans have been killed by terrorists as have been "killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts." Whatsmore, many WMD threats are overblown and largely preventable. Indeed, with exhaustive research, the authors can conclude that:

"Assessed in broad but reasonable context, terrorism generally does not do much damage.

The costs of terrorism are often the result of hasty, ill-considered, and overwrought reactions.

A sensible policy approach to the problem might be to stress that any damage terrorists are able to accomplish likely can be absorbed, however grimly. While judicious protective and policing measures are sensible, extensive fear and anxiety over what may at base prove to be a rather limited problem are misplaced, unjustified and counter productive"

"