It was fifty years ago today that the manned space age started, as Yuri gagarin became the first human in orbit. Shouldn’t we have been on Alpha Centauri by now?
Scrap Iron Man — want!
China Miéville has a modest proposal for a new superhero series:
An extraordinary figure in bizarre makeshift power armour the colours of rust and hazard-warning yellow has appeared, fighting burglars, thieves, drug-dealers, graffiti-taggers. Flashback: he’s Dan, an ex-worker in one of the high-tech heavy defence plants, horrified at the social breakdown, going through the many scrapheaps of the town and cobbling together his suit from industrial junk, trying to save his home.
Dan smashes up a crack house, but while most of those within run, one stays and jeers at him, calls him a bully. Dan knows her: Louise was the union rep at his factory. He’s ashamed: he always liked her. They get talking. ‘You really want to do right by Flinton?’ Louise says eventually. ‘By all the other Flintons? Then quit messing with symptoms. It’s time to take down the real villain.’
[…]
The crew take their places at the controls. Dan puts on the battered welding helmet that disguises his identity and, in a burst of rust, launches into the sky for New York, to face down the sociopathic authoritarian fascist arms-dealing corporate billionaire responsible for so many countless deaths, in the US and around the world: Tony fucking Stark.
Want!
Dutch police’s takedown notice for “Al Quida magazine” is illegal
Public Intelligence hosts issues of Inspire, supposedly a magazine run by Al Quiada. For some reason the Dutch police took offence to this and demanded they remove the magazine from their server:
he National Crime Squad (DNR, Dienst Nationale Recherche) of the Dutch National Police (KLPD; Korps landelijke politiediensten) has threatened to shut down Public Intelligence if we do not remove the issues of Inspire magazine which are made available on this site. In a request made to our hosting provider in late February, the Dutch National Crime Squad demanded that we remove all issues of Inspire magazine from our website and refrain from distributing any further issues of the publication. The notice describes the magazine’s content as “illegal” under Dutch law: “Due to the content of this magazine which is considered illegal according to the Dutch law due to the inciting content related to Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, we would like you to remove this magazine from your website.” The notice goes on to state that if the content is not removed from this site, the Dutch police “will under the force of circumstances take down your website on the dedicated server in the Netherlands according to Dutch Law.”
It’s unclear why Dutch police thought it needed to take action against a foreign website for hosting an allegedly dodgy webzine –it’s not as if they’ve solved every crime in the Netherlands or even manage to keep up with bicycle theft– but one thing is clear: this demand was illegal. First, if this was an official demand, it would’ve needed to have been authorised by the officier van justitie (Dutch equivalent of a D.A.) but after a rechter-commissaris had granted permission for this authorisation. This hasn’t happened in this case. Second, Dutch police are not allowed to asks people to voluntarily do anything that they normally would need jucidial authorisation for. Otherwise it would be very easy for police to intimidate people into doing things they have no right to ask from them because they wouldn’t have been able to get judicial authorisation.
In this case this demand wasn’t authorised and quite likely wouldn’t be, so the Dutch police acted illegally and against guidelines set out by the ministry of justice by asking Public Intelligence to take down this “Al Quida magazine”. The responsible people for this therefore need to be slapped on the wrists.
(More at Arnoud Engelfriet’s excellent internet law blog. (Dutch))
Being grumpy about Bendis’ Avengers
Old school Marvel fan moose n squirrel dissects Bendis’ Avengers over in the comments section of one of Tim O’Neil’s posts:
It has Spider-man and Wolverine in it, and its method of storytelling was less “let’s tell a story” than “let’s run out the clock between a series of strung-together crossover events, which by their very nature must be Important.” Since comic book readers have been trained to only care about the top-selling characters, and in particular to only care about them in high-profile crossover events, the decision to market the Avengers books as a vehicle for promoting a string of hastily-churned-out publishing events was a bit of crassly cynical genius. That it managed to sell as well as it did while attached to Brian Bendis, one of the single worst writers in the history of the medium, testifies to how grotesque and debased the industry and its readership has become. New Avengers has given us a glimpse of the ideal form of Late Stage Corporate Supercomics: fifty monthly comics featuring Wolverine and Spider-man and Captain America and Deadpool all stumbling in circles and mumbling gibberish, while random explosions, splash pages and supporting character deaths assure us that what we are witnessing is Important.
Remember that three part Fantastic Four story back in 1991 or so where the Fantastic Four had supposedly been murdered and Spider-Man, Wolverine, the then grey Hulk and still hot Ghostrider formed the “New Fantastic Four”? That was meant as a parody, but Bendis’ Avengers is what you get if you took that idea seriously and you just shoehorn in popular characters regardless of how well they fit. If Spider-Man had been meant to be in the Avengers, he would’ve been in issue one, volume one.
No more imperialistic adventures for Holland
The current Dutch government has decided the department of defence needs to save one billion euros on its budget to help pay for the bankers crisis, which in concrete terms means that the current support for NATO’s airwar in Libya is Holland’s last imperialistic adventure for the foreseeable future. To pay for its deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade the Dutch army already had had to cannibalise itself, selling of equipment like the brand new Panzerhaubitze 2000 only afew years after they had been taken into service. Now the army is going to get rid off even more stuff, including all its remaining tanks and nineteen more F-16 fighters, as well as four out of ten minehunter ships, not to mention a fair few airforce and army bases. More importantly, 10,000 jobs will disappear: some through natural wastage, others by not filling in vacancies but most, some 6,000 in total will be through redundancies.
It will be hard on these people of course, not to mention on the towns and cities dependent on the bases threatened with the chop. Yet I can’t help but wonder, as I’ve done before, why we’re keeping an army anyway if we’re not willing or able to spent the money to support it properly. What do we really need an army for when the chances of war breaking out in our corner of Europe are the lowest they’ve ever been in the past two thousand years. Is it just there to, like we did the past decade, tool about in other people’s countries in service of some vaguely worded humanitarian interests everytime the US or UK ask us to? Now we can’t even do that anymore the moment is there to give it the chop entirely, transfer those few elements we might still need to the police forces, then spent the money we would’ve spent keeping useless armour in service to retraining our soldiers for more useful vocations.