War on Iraq – Page 18

Sunday Breakfast Lunch Mixed Bag

Published on January 21, 2007

A selection of interesting, silly and disturbing things to look at with your Sunday ~~morning breakfast~~: afternoon repast:

Wow, so much we still don’t know.A new form of life has been found in Arctic waters. How many other of these unknown new forms have we already destroyed inadvertently?

How’s that democracy-spreadin’ goin’, guys? The FBI says laxity in recruiting means gangs are joining the military and may spread US gang culture worldwide. A bit late to be worrying about that surely?

How happy is your country? Check the World Happiness Map

Video: how the US Army is selling reenlistment to the troops in Iraq

“All you ever wanted or needed to know about kitten-huffing.

Health warning: mass kitten- huffing may be 'armful.

My first thought on reading this is oooh, ooh I want one – the pen that remembers what you’ve written:

I left CES with around 20 free pens. I went a little crazy with it. “Hmm, yes, that’s very interesting…eh, do you have any pens?” I’m thinking of starting a pen blog where every entry is scanned in after being written with the pen I’m talking about. People could send in their unusual pens from around the world for review. I’d call it “Pengadget.” One for a rainy day I suppose. The best pen I saw at the show was not for walking away with. The Wowpen Memo requires the user to clip a little device to the top of any sheet of paper of any size. The writer then does their thing, taking notes, sketching, whatever. Once done, the little clip device plugs into the USB port of your computer, where it transfers all your notes and other doodlings to your PC, ready to be viewed onscreen. I think it uses a technology called “magic.” You can even convert your notes to text providing you have handwriting recognition software.

But think what a boon to ‘law enforcement’ iit could be… perhaps not, then. Not that the innocent have anything to fear from the police. Heaven forbid.

The stairway to cat heaven.

Remember the orange Bavaria beer pants that all the cloggies were wearing at the World Cup? Wel, they continue to turn up in some unlikely places.

Scrappy Chinese manufacturer, Wang Ming, saw an opportunity where others saw a crisis and pressed the excess pants into service as props in a baffling looking board game named Smack The Lion.

I dread to think what the rules of that board game are. Oo-er, missus.

Eat your bacon or sausage sandwich before you read this.

The official hairstyle of the ’08 Presidential Election

China – what’s more important to the Chinese population, democracy or stabilty? ( h/t Blood & Treasure)

Video: an octopus in a maze

Whiter than white: the utra-brite of beetles.

Ultra-brite beetle

Where Are All The Kids At?

Published on January 20, 20072 Comments

The kids are all right

Today’s Comment of The Day is at Hullabaloo and is a somewhat testy response to a post by Poputanian and subsequent commenters’ wondering what it will take to get today’s youth to rebel:

what kind of youth movement would satisfy you sanctimonious boomers? how would you like us to express our outrage? we live with a terrible future hanging over our heads, where we will be paying for YOUR social security, YOUR healthcare, and THIS FUCKING WAR! adults have spent nearly three decades consolidating their own wealth and now kids are supposed to feel guilty for not being able to stop an illegal war that the entire world couldn’t stand in the way of???

in 2004, voters below 30 were the ONLY age group in the nation that voted for Kerry. i firmly believe that before you can start telling us about political activism, you should straighten out your own fucking generation.
Utica | 01.20.07 – 12:18 am | #

Go Utica! God, how I loathe boomers and I’m not even a kid.

I was born in 1959 which makes me an in-betweenie; neither Boomer nor Gen X. We’re not hippies: we’re the generation of disco and punk, the generation that were left no crumbs to scrabble for once the entitled generation their greedy mitts on the money and the levers of power. Once elected, for the boomers it was ‘get all you can and after that pull up the ladder’.

They had free schools and universities, the NHS, riches through property and the welfare state: we got unemployment, a housing shortage, double-digit inflation, insane rightwing government, death squads, drugs and the threat of nuclear war. And now Iraq, Tony Blair and George Bush. And for our own children it looks to be even worse.

Cheers, boomers.

The Watergate and Vietnam scandals that they harp on about so much happened when we were in our early teens; mostly, to us it was all so much background noise – and it’s not as though they got the rightwing out, anyhow. The movement was a failure.

No, the defining political events of our times were Iran-Contra, mutually assured destruction and the death squads and the cynicism of those times has informed our politics for ever. As a result, we’ve never trusted anyone in politics and we’ve taught our kids to do the same – so is it any wonder they don’t want to be politically involved in the formal channels provided, when it’s plain for anyone to see that the existing political institutions are so irredeemably corrupt?

There is an assumption made (t’s common wisdom now, it’s been repeated so often) – that leftists are dirty hippies. No, no and again no.

Our rebellion started in the eighties, against Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet, to whose rightist legacy Bush et al are the heirs. We created our own political space by being early adopers of technology – we were posting to listservs, bulletin boards and usenet and chatting via IRC before the web was even a glint in anyone’s eye.

I feel so sorry for my children’s generation – not only are they expected to be well-rounded individuals, successful in their careers and in their personal lives, but they’re expected to also somehow sort out the mess their grandparents have made of the world – to clean up Washington, solve global warming, rescue the environment – as though there’s some sort of generational magic wand that would wipe the slate clean, if only those damned kids would take their attention away from MySpace and show some gumption for once.

For one thing, why the hell should they? They didn’t break it, why should they be expected to fix it? They’ve got enough to do just surviving.No, fuck that, let the boomers clean up their own messes.

Secondly, it’s all very well for bloggers of a certain age to pontificate to the young for their inaction – but who is it on the barricades at G8 protests, blocking the gates at Faslane nuclear base, pie-ing politicians or putting their lives on the line by lying in front of bulldozers in Palestine? Who is it that’s the mainstay of the antiwar movement? It’s not middle-aged bloggers continually harking back to the sixties.

My sons’ generation, those in their teens and twenties now, are taking the use of technology for political purposes much further than we could ever have concieved of. Just because young people don’t choose the political channels the boomers choose and the boomers can’t see them doing it, doesn’t mean they’re not political, or active.

Perhaps those complaining about political inactivity and apathy on the part of the young should stop reading the likes of ageing fake-liberal HuffPo and Salon and take a look at the Social Forum movement or Globalise Resistance or Schnews, or Indymedia. That’s where the kids are: they want to change the system, not just become more vote-fodder for the existing parties.

Get over yourselves, boomers. You are not the sine qua non of political activism to whom all later activists must genuflect – those days are long gone and so have those outdated modes of protest.

What the younger generation is looking for from you is active leadership and support, not envious blog-criticism.

Linky, Linky

Published on January 18, 20071 Comment

Mineralia:

Why carbon offsetting is just as another money making scheme exploiting liberal guilt.

How does Bush define victory? It’s the oil, stupid:

Under the new American-drafted law, the Iraqi government will offer contractual concessions up to 30 years’ long to foreign companies, using a system known as a PSA (Production Sharing Agreement). In other words, American and other Western oil companies are being allowed to exploit Iraq’s current predicament and negotiate self-serving, one-sided oil PSA’s that will legally commit the entire country of Iraq for the next 30 years.

Animalia:

3 cat videos –

Hot cat on turtle action!

The cat that likes to floss

Just Say No! Cats and the demon weed

Vegetalia:

Professional chav Jade Goody’s racism gives a fading reality show a popularity injection and the nation something to talk about. (Pssst, don’t mention the war!)

These white women, behaving like bitchy schoolgirls in the playground, have reduced Ms Shetty to tears on several occasions, accusing her of wanting to be white, having facial stubble, being “a dog”, making their skin crawl, touching their food (“you don’t know where those hands have been”), and have signally failed to get her name right, calling her “the Indian” at one point.

They might not have been quite as motivated by group tyranny as Orwell described – that “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture . . . that seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current” – but there seems no doubt that their pack behaviour was offensive to Ms Shetty and damaging to our desire to be seen as a tolerant nation. Remember the message: without intellect we are lost. Clips of those lumpen women are being broadcast round the world as typically British, voicing British sentiments; by default we are all cast in the same mould of molten ignorance; all reduced to the racist drone of a thousand pub conversations.

Marginalia:

Madison Guy has links to some of the best street fashion photoblogs on the web, courtesy Avedon’s comments section.

James Wolcott asks why are are British sex scandals so much more interesting than American ones? Short answer, for our politicians the illicitness is 75% of the fun and the danger of being caught adds more spice. American politicians do it from a feeling of entitlement rather than in the spirit of titillating adventure, so it’s more about the greedy consumption of a ‘luxury’ sexual product like high-class call-girls (or rough trade or kids as the case may be) than the eroticism and thrill of the chase. Though the erotic aspect falls down somewhat in light of the four-year liaison between former PM John Major and ex-health Minister Edwina Currie – “By the way, Edwina, that was a not inconsiderably satisfying orgasm”. Ewww.

Resolution? What New Year’s resolution? For your sweet tooth, here’s Fanny, a French patisserie chef who blogs in English at Foodbeam.

Read the recipes and patisserie reviews, drool over the pictures, and get baking. I made her Petits carrés au caramel et au chocolat, known to us commoners asmillionaires shortbread, last weekend using white chocolate ( because that’s what we had) and it was very, very rich and absolutely delicious.

Did we time travel back to 2002 or what?

Published on January 17, 2007

Atrios calls out that stupid fucker Kevin “I thought Kenneth Pollack was smart” Drum on Drum’s amnesia about the war debate and asks:

..adding, as I meant to say in the original post, there are also numerous obvious bad consequences to killing a bunch of people for no good reason. So, yes, there were numerous reasons to oppose this war and no good reasons to support it. Why are we still arguing about this?

Because the idiots and criminals who conspired to get the War on Iraq going, have not had to pay for their crimes yet. Worse they’ ve been rewarded for it. As long as that is the case, as long as having been wrong about the War on Iraq carries no cost, people will be able to argue that having been a supporter of the war was the right thing to do.

In this case, Kevin Drum is just self aware enough and still possesses a rudimentary sense of shame, so he’s unable to argue with a straight face that he made the right choice at the time, but what he can do is rubbish his then opponents.

For this to stop, people need to start losing their cushy thinktank jobs and pundit gigs. People like Peter Beinart or Kenneth Pollack should at the very least be laughed of television when they open their big fat mouths.

Read more about:
Kevin Drum, War on Iraq, chickenhawks

“It Wasn’t Me”

Published on January 13, 2007

As part of his increasingly Spinal Tap-esque “Legacy Tour” ( Who does he think he is, Eric bloody Clapton? I bet he’s even had a tour t-shirt made.) Tony Blair made a speech on a naval ship my hometown yesterday in which he blamed, in front of an invited audience of military, academics (and for some obscure reason 30 local schoolchildren, who must’ve been bored out of their poor little skulls) everyone in Britain but himself for the inescapable fact that his illegal war in Iraq is one supersized clusterfuck and his tenure as Prime Minister a complete disaster for the country.

Somehow he managed to do all this without mentioning Iraq or his host city’s increasing toll of local military war dead even once. The grim faces of his audience on the video say all you need to know about how it was received, yet to read the local rag, the execrably bad Evening Herald, you’d never know it – the Herald never ever questions the staus quo unless it’s to complain about bus lanes or old dears slipping on dogshit – for instance you’d think a picture of Blair and the local Labour MP and professional sycophant and busybody Linda Gilroy, snogging, would be front page news:

But no, that would be hoping for too much. Evening Herald? News and comment? Don’t make me laugh.

Luckily The Independent has parsed Blair’s speech for us so we don’t have to read the whole self-justifying, narcissistic transccript at No 10’s webiste:

Tony Blair’s spin unspun

By Colin Brown

* BLAIR SAYS: “The parody of people in my position is of leaders who, gung-ho, launch their nations into ill-advised adventures without a thought for the consequences.”

ANALYSIS: No amount of lectures will erase the fact that Iraq is now a mess because of the failure to plan for the peace after Saddam was toppled, and it has made Iran the dominant force in the region.

* BLAIR SAYS: “Public opinion … will be constantly bombarded by the propaganda of the enemy … to the effect that it’s really all “our”, that is the West’s, fault.”

ANALYSIS: Mr Blair is losing the propaganda war over Iraq, but blaming the media for covering the reporting of the horror of daily life in Baghdad is a sign of his desperation.

* BLAIR SAYS: “The risk here – and in the US where the future danger is one of isolationism not adventurism – is that the politicians decide it’s all too difficult and default to an unstated, passive disengagement, that doing the right thing slips almost unconsciously into doing the easy thing.”

ANALYSIS: Mr Blair appears worried that after handing over power to Gordon Brown, his successor may come under pressure to do the “easy thing” and bring the troops home before the ‘job is done’.

* BLAIR SAYS: “The extraordinary job that servicemen do needs to be reflected in the quality of accommodation provided for them and their families, at home or abroad. So much of what is written distorts the truth.”

ANALYSIS: Mr Blair is clearly irritated not only at the media but also at defence chiefs for criticisms of the “overstretch” of the armed forces.

* BLAIR SAYS: “September 11 wasn’t the incredible action of an isolated group. It was the product rather of a worldwide movement, with an ideology based on a misreading of Islam.”

ANALYSIS: Mr Blair still linked September 11 with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But there is no evidence that Iraq was used as a training ground for terrorism. It is now.

If you watch the video you can see with your own eyes the depths of delusion and head-in-the sand-ism Blair has sunk to. He’s gone beyond self-parody and way off into total denial of reality territory and he’s becoming increasingy shrill, nervy and twitchy with it.

This is a man who looks temperamentally and psychologically unsafe to be in control of a car, let alone a country.

Read more: UK politics, Blair, Linda Gilroy, Defence speech, Plymouth