From Terry Pratchett’s latest, Thud!:
Vimes had never got on with any game much more complex than darts. Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks around, the whole board could’ve been a republic in a dozen moves.
Courtesy of Outside a Dog
Pharyngula answers the age old question: how is it squids can bite so hard without an internal or external skeleton?
If you think about it, though, cephalopods don’t have a rigid internal skeleton. How do they get the leverage to move a pair of sharp-edged beaks relative to one another, and what the heck are they doing with a hard beak anyway? There’s a whole paper on the anatomy of just the buccal mass, the complex of beak, muscle, connective tissue, and ganglia that powers the cephalopod bite.
I just love this kind of stuff.
PC plod hasn’t learned much from the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes it seems, as the experiences of David Mery, arrested for suspicious behaviour on the Underground, shows:
7.21 pm: I enter Southwark tube station, passing uniformed police by the entrance, and more police beyond the gate. I walk down to the platform, peering down at the steps as, thanks to a small eye infection, I’m wearing specs instead of my usual contact lenses. The next train is scheduled to arrive in a few minutes. As other people drift on to the platform, I sit down against the wall with my rucksack still on my back. I check for messages on my phone, then take out a printout of an article about Wikipedia from inside my jacket and begin to read.
The train enters the station. Uniformed police officers appear on the platform and surround me. They must immediately notice my French accent, still strong after living more than 12 years in London.
They handcuff me, hands behind my back, and take my rucksack out of my sight. They explain that this is for my safety, and that they are acting under the authority of the Terrorism Act. I am told that I am being stopped and searched because:
- they found my behaviour suspicious from direct observation and then from watching me on the CCTV system;
- I went into the station without looking at the police officers at the entrance or by the gates;
- two other men entered the station at about the same time as me;
- I am wearing a jacket “too warm for the season”;
- I am carrying a bulky rucksack, and kept my rucksack with me at all times;
- I looked at people coming on the platform;
- I played with my phone and then took a paper from inside my jacket.
This is not a list of suspicious behaviour, this is a list of pretexts under which anybody can be arrested. In fact, one of those criteria, keeping a “bulky rucksack” with you at all times is in direct conflict with what every Londoner has been taught for over twenty years, to always keep your luggage with you in case it is mistaken for an IRA bomb! If you can be arrested for that, you can be arrested for anything and any pretence at living in a free society is gone.
What is worse, as the article makes clear, this whole incident will be kept in police databases, in the UK and abroad for an unknown period of time, marking Mery as a suspicious character –in other words this wrongful arrest will in itself make it much more likely Mery will be arrested again! No smoke without a fire after all and if the police stopped you once, they must have had a good reason…
There are so many outrages being committed every day it is easy to miss them, so I’m grateful to the local free rag Spits for alerting me to this one. And quite an outrage it is too:
Antonio Bento Bembe is the secretary-general of the FLEC, which has at its aim the liberation of Cabinda, a small Angolan enclave within the Democratic Republic of Congo, which used to be a Portuguese colony independent from its Angolan colony; the FLEC was active against the Portuguese before it had to fight against the MPLA, the Angolan independent movement. The FLEC and the MPLA/Angolan government have been fighting for decades ever since the MPLA first invaded Cabinda in 1975.
Before Cabinda had become a Portuguese colony, it had been a Dutch trading post, which may explain the continuing interest of the Dutch ministry of foreign affairs in the region; it has been acting as a neutral peace broker. It was in this capacity that Antonio Bento Bembe was invited to come to the Netherlands for peace talks. when he did so, he was arrested…
Turns out the United States, once it had learned Antonio Bento Bembe was in the Netherlands, had asked for his extradiction, allegedly because he was involved with the kidnapping of an American pilot in 1990 or 1991. So when he came to the Netherlands in June of this year, he was promptly arrested.
At first glance this just seems to be another example of American cack-handedness; favouring domestic concerns above foreign political realities. Tactless and stupid, but not actively malicious. A second look however reveals that there might be more to the story. As per usual, the whole affair might just revolve around one little word:
Oil.
It turns out most of Angola’s oil production is coming from Cabina, of which the American oil company Chevron has the lion’s share (39.2%, according to Wikipedia). Angolan oil –as noted, largely Cabinan– at the moment also accounts for 4% of the US’ oil imports. The Angolan government is very favourable towards the US and Chevron, a newly independent Cabina might not be, especially since little of the oil profits flow into the province itself, the industry causes huge pollution within it and Angola is harsh in repressing any “unrest”.
Now that pilot that was supposedly kidnapped, was working for Chevron at the time. Who else was working for Chevron before she became Bush’s handler? Guess who signed the extradition request?
It would be just like the Bushies to fuck up a fledgling peace process by wanting to arrest one of the participants, just to make sure America (and Chevron) gets that all important oil…
Maroc.nl has a good overview of the affair, though sadly only in Dutch.
The asbo, antisocial behaviour order, is one of the more odious pieces of social control Nu Labour have managed to bring in. As it is a civil procedure, it has none of the safeguards of criminal proceedings, can be brought against people to disallow behaviour that is not criminal in itself, but carries criminal penalties. You could find yourself in jail for something as innocuous as walking down the wrong street or wearing your underwear where people can see it.
The BBC News Magazine has done an occasional series on asbos handed out, some of which are plainly ridicolous, some of which are responses to things that are indeed serious nuisances, but all of which are basically NIMBY responses: Not In My Back Yard. Play loud music, attempting to commit suicide, addicted to petrol sniffing? We don’t care, we just do not want you to do it here. It’s the institutionalisation of Mrs. Grundy, with the government in the role of social arbiter. It is the ultimate in symbol politics, as it only treats the symptoms of “antisocial behaviour” rather than its causes.
It is also dangerous, as at least one attempt (scroll down) has already been made to penalise free speech…