The Tories are indeed running true to form.
The Public Whip (via Charlie Brooker on Twitter) reveals that Theresa May, Britain’s new Home Secretary and Secretary for Women and Equal Rights (including gay rights) has voted ‘moderately against’ gay rights during her career as an MP.
Is it even possible to be ‘moderately’ homophobic? Homophobia strikes me as the height of immoderateness, in and of itself, whatever qualifiers are appended.
Hydrothermal vents have been compared to oases. That’s a good description. Oases are lush areas in a desert based on a water source. In a similar way, a vent is an oasis: it is teeming with life in the middle of the nearly barren ocean floor. A vent spewing microbe- and mineral-rich, super hot water is this oasis’ water source.
Vent communities are an ecotone. They are a transition zone between the hot water emerging from the vent and the cold environment of surrounding sea water. Just 15 centimeters (6 in.) laterally away from the vent, the seawater is cold, yet the heat and chemicals rising from it can be measured with powerful thermometers for many miles.
The life forms we see are truly bizarre, and some are very ancient. The vents probably predate life on earth. Scientists believe vents have been around for 3.5 – 4 billion years, and life in them probably began soon thereafter. We saw vents for the first time fewer than 25 years ago, in 1977.
I first came across the issue of seabed mining rights when studying maritime law in the early nineties and I thought then that the lack of international legal safeguards against exploitation meant that here was a disaster waiting to happen.
Well, that disaster’s here:
Nautilus Minerals, a small Canadian company backed by the giant mining company Anglo-American, has just received an environmental permit from the government of Papua New Guinea to conduct the world’s first deep-sea mining in the vent fields of the Bismarck Sea.
Giant undersea excavators will be built this year, and ore could be rising from depths of 1,600m by 2012.
Conservation biologist Professor Rick Steiner, formerly of the University of Alaska, was called in to examine the company’s original environmental impact assessment study.
He is concerned about the dumping of thousands of tonnes of rock on the seabed and about the danger of spillages of toxic residue, but his real objection is more fundamental.
He explained: “The site that they mine, they’re going to destroy all these vent chimneys where the sulphide fluids come out.”
The HyBIS submarine captured images of the vents on cameraHe added that it could cause the extinction of species that are not even known to science yet.
“I think that, from an ethical stand-point, is unacceptable,” he said.
Steven Rogers, CEO of Nautilus, said that he accepted that the mined area would be damaged, but said he was convinced that it could recover.
He believes deep-sea mining will be less damaging to the environment than mining on land.
He said: “I think there’s a much greater moral question…. here we have an opportunity to provide those metals with a much, much lower impact on the environment.”
The success of the Nautilus enterprise is dependent less on questions of morality than of profit.
Steven Rogers estimates that this first mining site could yield anything from tens of millions of dollars up to $300m in value.
But Professor Steiner believes that success in the Bismarck Sea will provoke a “goldrush” at vent systems around the world, most of which have yet to be properly studied.
Vent systems are fundamental to life on this planet, each one a fully functioning ecosystem that supports the web of life on the planet in ways we are only just beginning to understand.
“….deep-sea mining will be less damaging to the environment than mining on land.” says Steven Rogers; what he actually means is “If I can’t actually see the damage, it isn’t actually happening”.
What the hell are New Guinea thinking, letting these profiteers destroy the vent fields?
And that’s only within their territorial waters. There’s nothing to stop similar profiteers doing the same in the open ocean. No governmental permission is required. How long before the profiteers destroy the mid-Atlantic Ridge vent fields and their associated fauna and flora?
Not very long – plans are already in hand. Pass me a hanky, please.
Excellent and sensible drugs news from Argentina
The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption.
The decision follows a case of five young men who were arrested with a few marijuana cigarettes in their pockets.
But the court said use must not harm others and made it clear it did not advocate a complete decriminalisation.
Correspondents say there is a growing momentum in Latin America towards decriminalising drugs for personal use.
The Argentine court ruled that: “Each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state.”
Supreme Court President Ricardo Lorenzetti said private behaviour was legal, “as long as it doesn’t constitute clear danger”.
“The state cannot establish morality,” he said.
From The Guardian comments pages –
UpsideDownCakeEater
19 Jun 09, 1:02am (about 6 hours ago)Seen the claim from the PM and the Speaker when both attended ████████ in █████████ paying £ ███.██ just to watch two █████████. Both claimed £ ████.██ as though they actively took part ?
Shocking.
What’s █████████ ? We might well ask.
If it weren’t for the Daily Telegraph’s uncensored leaks, for all we’d know of it █████████ could have been anything, from a Harrods rocking horse to a box of man-size Pampers to an Agent Provocateur gimp mask.
At least if you’re on holiday and it rains this week there’s no need to be bored; you can always play redaction bingo and insert your own words. All those blacked out spaces leave lots of scope for the imagination and reading censored expenses claims is much more entertaining that way. Holiday fun for all the family!
America may have a Democrat president charming the rest of the world but at home Cheney’s heirs are still in charge. And they’re still gaily torturing away willy-nilly, with judicial approval.
After police lost or contaminated an already willingly given DNA sample, Niagara County Court Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza issued an order requiring the suspect to provide another. Not so unusual, you might think except the order was issued ex-parte – which meant defence counsel had no chance to object.
Odd. Why ex-parte? Why would the defence object to a DNA test? It’s a quick and painless operation. Well actually no, it’s not. Not the way Niagara County does it. William N Grigg describes what happned to Ryan S. Smith of Niagara Falls, New York, a 21-year-old charged with burglary:
Smith was brought in handcuffs to the police station and informed that the investigators had been authorized to use physical force. Although nobody intended to harm him, Smith was told, the sample was going to be surrendered; it was just a question of how much he wanted to endure before it was. Smith still refused to comply.
Confronted with an intransigent suspect who refused to provide critical evidence, the investigators reluctantly strapped the handcuffed Smith to a downward sloping table, covered his face with a towel, and waterboarded him. He broke within seconds, and meekly permitted the DNA sample to be taken.
On the basis of the DNA evidence, Smith was hit with a 24-count criminal indictment. He was also charged with “criminal contempt of court” for forcing his interrogators to torture him.
When Smith’s defense counsel filed a motion to suppress the evidence based on Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections, the same Judge who issued the ex parte orders produced a ruling validating the use of waterboarding as means of forcing compliance, as long as it’s not done “maliciously” or to “excess.”
This account is true and accurate in every detail, save one – the specific torture protocol that was used to compel Smith to surrender a sample of his DNA.
He wasn’t subjected to water torture; instead, he was given a brief taste of electroshock torture by way of a Taser that was used to inflict a “drive stun.” This involves placing the prongs of the device directly on the body of the victim for a brief, painful, paralyzing charge.
Oh, so that’s why it was ex-parte. I think should think the defence would have been sure to object if they’d known their client was to be tortured into compliance with a taser.
It may have been only a tasering (!) and not an actual waterboarding but that’s hardly the point. It was no abberation; those were no bad apples or rogue cops acting on their own warped initiative. The official torturers were acting on the direct orders of both a DA and a judge.
As Detective Lt. William Thomson would later testify, Assistant Niagara County D.A. Doreen M. Hoffmann, who is presiding over the prosecution of Ryan Smith, instructed the police that “we could use the minimum force that was necessary” to force the suspect to submit to a DNA test.
Now, think carefully about that formulation: In principle, it authorizes the use of any amount of force needed to extract the sample, since the critical term is “necessary.” As long as the police were reasonably careful in calibrating the duress the applied, they could continue escalating the level of force until it broke the suspect; wherever they end up would obviously be the “minimum” necessary to accomplish their objectives.
Exactly. It doesn’t matter what method of torture the official torturers use; it’s almost irrelevant, though there’s something particularly distasteful and reminiscent of Pinochet’s Chile about Tasers. Torture is torture is torture. You’re using pain to make someone do something. Once that’s been judicially ordered the dam is breached and torture is official policy. In no time at all physical coercion becomes the norm – never the last option, but always the first. It’s practical everyday fascism; it may be red in tooth and claw but it’s always covered by the paperwork.
This week we’ve seen waterboarding reportedly used in London against drug suspects by the Met. Bad apples, say the police. That time it wasn’t, thankfully, court-ordered and was entirely unofficial – but given that British police methods slavishly follow the US as night follows day, it can’t be long before it is.