Wis[s]e Words – Page 610 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

Bijlmerramp

Published on October 4, 2005

On October 4th, 1992, at 18:35 in the evening, an El Al Boeing 747 freight plane landed on two flat buildings in Amsterdam South East, in the Bijlmer district. At least 43 people died in this disaster. It was a disaster that struck hard in the poor, close knit Bijlmer community, with many people losing nnot just a friend, family member or co-worker, but also their homes. A horrible tragedy, but nothing special: aircraft accidents do happen after all. However, there’s more to it than that…

Some months after the accident, rumours leaked out and were published in the newspapers about men in moonsuits having been on the accident site. Though later research would officially state that these rumours were just confused eyewitness reports about rescue workers, doubt kept existing about these sightings.

After the accident, the Amsterdam health care organisations arranged aftercare for the survivors of the disaster and the people living nearby. They started noticing that a lot of people came to them with strange physical complaints: sleeping disorders, chronical pulmonary infections, impotence, bowel and stomach pains. At around the same time, it became known that the Boeing carried depleted uranium as counterbalance weights; not unknown in airplanes but not very reassuring to the people suffering from those complains. Official reactions to questions about this stressed that no toxic, dangerous or radioactive cargo had been on board of the plane. However, what kind of cargo the plane carried exactly was still unclear. Officially it was all harmless stuff: fruit, perfume and “machine parts”, but there were other rumours.

Especially when it turned out that much of the cargo had not been checked, with not even the
documentation spot checked. Rumours that this cargo did contain dangerous elements therefore kept appearing. And then it became clear that the depleted uranium probably did release harmful toxins during the crash and resulting fire, with medical research done on survivors in march of 1998 showed they had higher levels of uranium in their bodies then was normal.

So what was El Al hiding and why did the Dutch government seem to support them in trying to cover
this up?

Well, we still don’t really know, though we do now know that the plane’s cargo was not as innocent as it first seemed. It’s only in 1999, seven years after the disaster that the whole truth becomes known. It turns out that there was some 6,5000 kilogram of dangerous substances on board, mostly flammable substances of one kind or another, as well as some toxic substances. Alos on board are two shipments of military cargo destined for the Israeli army. This cargo would largely consist of spare parts for DC3 cargo planes. More interestingly, the cargo also contained dimethyl methylphosphonate, a precursor chemical for the production of Sarin nerve gas… No wonder El Al tried to hide this.

All of this finally came to light during the parliamentary inquiry held in 1998-1999 (PDF report in Dutch here), after more and more had been reported or rumoured in the press and earlier inquiries. But is was only due to the consistent badgering by survivors and their supporters in the press and parliament (with my own party, the Dutch Socialist Party playing its part) that the inquiries came so far. If it had been for the then governments, El-Al and the aerospace establishment, all this would still be hidden.

Because that’s the default for the powers that be. With almost any disaster there will be hidden sides to the story, things They don’t want us, the public to know: because they fucked up, because of corruption or powerful commercial interests doing the wrong thing, deliberately or not. Politics will always play a role and if the victims are poor, they will be screwed over…

Reactions to Labour’s treatment of the heckler

Published on September 30, 2005

The BBC have, as is their wont, been collecting responses to the treatment of that 82 year old heckler at Jack Straw’s speech at the Labour Conference. Some interesting points were made and much of the usual know-nothing rightwing blather was absent. Sure, there are some confused souls who think political speeches are like sermons and it’s impolite to heckle, but the overwhelming majority is both angry and scared at the treatment of this man, especially his subsequent arrest under the prevention of terrorism act.

The following response I thought hit the nail on the head:

The key issue here is that laws promoted as defending us from murderous fanatics are already being used to suppress anti-Government opinion. To look at this issue as being about anything else – the quality of stewarding, the rights and wrongs of heckling etc – is to dangerously miss the point.
Chandra, England

All in all, even with the swift almost-apology issued by Tony Blair, it seems Labour has shot itself firmly in the foot with this incident, awaking a lot of people to the dangers of this government which preaches a lot about democracy and respect, but does not practise either.

Blogs will not revolutionise the world

Published on September 29, 2005

At least not the way the hypemasters want you to think. Tom Coates is using a small controversy about bloggers trying their hands at viral marketing to spew his gall about the incessentant hype about how the latest New Internet Thing is going to change the world forever:

I’m totally fed up of people standing up and waving a flag for the death of institutions based on sketchy information and a vague belief in the rightness of their cause – and I’m also slightly sick of more moderate voices being drowned out under the revolutionary fervour of people fresh with their first wave of excitement about user-generated content on the web. Weblogs suffer from this enormously. Someone said that every journalist that writes about weblogs thinks that the year they discovered them is the year weblogs went mainstream. I’ve watched this for almost six years now. I now need people to think about what’s more likely to happen – that big media organisations, and governments and businesses will dry up and evaporate, or that some of them will adapt and change to a new ecology, renegotiate their place in the world and have a role in fashioning and supporting whatever it is that’s coming?

Whatever is on the horizon – social software, social media, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, technology everywhere, permanent connectivity, media distribution, mass amateurisation, disintermediation – it’s going to have an enormous impact on our lives. But that impact will probably seem relatively subtle and gradual to those people living through it, and its true effects will probably not be fully recognised for a hell of a long time. So let’s try and be a bit humble about the whole thing, eh? Let’s get excited about possible futures, let’s argue for the changes we think should happen, let’s present ideas and theories and ideas and business models and look to the future and test them and explore them. But please, no more religious wars of us versus them, big versus small, old versus new… We’ve got enough entrenched dogmatic opinions in the world already without creating new ones…

Hear hear. I’ve been on the internet since 1994, not that long compared to some, and I’ve seen so many of these hypes come past. The internet itself, the web, push technology (remember this?) Java, Linux, Open Source, blogs, RSS, etc. etc. None of these things changed the world “forever”, but all of them (except push) changed the world in ways we still barely understand and won’t understand until at
least half a century or more has passed. Just like Zhou Enlai said of the French Revolution, it is still “too early to tell” what the impact of the internet is.

Science fiction magazines as innovators?

Published on September 29, 2005

I’m reading The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, a collection of deadly serious essays aimed at an audience aware of, but not that familiar with science fiction. It includes the usual history of the genre and the chapter on the sf magazines ends with the following statement:

A magazine was like the small independent film as opposed to the Hollywood blockbuster, which has to meet the expectations of the broadest possible audience. Magazines have subscribers and more-or-less guaranteed space on newsstands. Books must be promoted. Even now, well after the heyday of the magazines, most innovation within the field takes place in the remaining magazines or in their contemporary equivalents. The latter include small press volumes, semi-professional publications and on-line publishers.

In the first place does this analogy not hold water. Written science fiction in any form is a niche market; a profitable niche market, but still small peanuts. To compare any book publication to a Hollywood blockbuster is just absurd, as the pressures on a science fiction book to perform well are several magnitudes less than they are on even a “cheap” Hollywood film. This comparison is needlessly disparaging.

I consider myself reasonably well read within the genre, but I do not see the innovation within magazines that is supposedly not present in books. The best modern sf writers, like Iain (M.) Banks, Ken MacLeod, China Miéville, Liz Williams, Lois McMaster Bujold or Jon Courtenay Grimwood, started primarily as novelists, not short story writers and skipped the magazines more or less entirely. In the last five years or so I can only think of Charlie Stross as a writer whose reputation was largely made through his short stories.

Looking at the magazines, or at least at the various Year’s Best anthologies I do not see the innovation there. These anthologies should have the best in short fiction published in science fiction in a given year and should therefore particularly showcase innovative works, should they not? But looking at the stories published in them first seen in the core magazines (Asimov, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Analog and Interzone) there are quite a number of good stories there, but nothing as gloriously new as the best novels of MacLeod, Banks, Grimwood, Williams, Stross or Miéville.

So am I missing something? Or was this just so much blather?

Handling criticism with dignity: the Labour way

Published on September 28, 2005

At the Labour conference today, an eighty-two year old man was dragged from the conference, his conference card taken away and arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, all for heckling Jack “boots” Straw during his speech on Iraq. Another man underwent the same treatment after protesting this spectacle:

Jack Straw was heckled today as he told the Labour party conference Britain was in Iraq “for one reason only: to help the elected Iraqi government build a secure, democratic and stable nation”.

A delegate, who was 82 years old and has been a Labour party member for 60 years, was bundled out by security guards after he shouted, “That’s a lie,” during the foreign secretary’s keynote conference address.

The outburst came during one of the few mentions of Iraq in the conference hall this week.

A second delegate was expelled for complaining at the treatment of the first heckler.

Fascistic, petty and arrogant this action was, it is also an unmistakable symptom of Labour’s weakinging grasp on reality and power. A confident party does not need to be this heavy handed. As unpleasant as it was for the persons involved –the main victim actually came to the UK from nazi Germany in 1937– I can’t help but gloat over this…