Wis[s]e Words

Deepsea dentures

Published on September 26, 2005

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.

Suspicious behaviour: if he was Brazilian he would be dead by now

Published on September 26, 2005

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…

The long arm of US imperialism

Published on September 19, 20051 Comment

Antonio Bento Bembe

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.

Asbo nation

Published on September 14, 2005

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…

Leftist political maturity

Published on September 5, 2005

For some reason, when I wanted to post a comment to this post at Reading A1 it was forbidden, so I’ll post it here. First, some context.

Michael at Reading A1 took to task Marc Cooper, yet another pseudo-Democrat who was wringing his hand on the lack of “viable alternatives” coming from the anti-war movement for the mess in Iraq. Michael correctly pointed out that it’s not the anti-war movement’s job to do this: we’re not in power,
we’re not listened to by Bush and co anyway and the only way that we can get any traction on this issue is to keep on calling loudly to get the troops out. So what is the motive for Cooper to criticise the anti-war movement for being too shrill as well as having the wrong elements in it?

Reading A1 hints at the answer in the last part of the post, which is what set me off:

Check out the update Marc Cooper thoughtfully added to his post, if you want to see a more unmediated version of his real politics:

Some of the more delusional responses [to the Juan Cole essay] predictably enough come from the
Idiot Right who accuse Cole of being a traitor. And, yes, also from those who want immediate,
unconditional, un-thought-out withdrawal on the Unrepentant Idiot Left. One of the more prolific buffoons from that corner — Louis Proyect the self-described “Unrepentant Marxist” — can offer no better response than to compare Cole with Dick Nixon and then further suggest I undergo a lobotomy for having linked to Cole and to cure what he diagnoses as my incipient Hitchens Syndrome (Ahh.. for the good old days of the Show Trials when prosecutor Vishinsky would end his feverish closing statements with a call to “Shoot these mad dogs!”). Oh well… I suppose every day that political Neanderthals like this have their mitts far, far, far from any levers of power is, at least, an OK day. For that I give thanks.

Still fighting the anti-Communist battles of the fifties, I see. And how are those “Neanderthals” (I make no endorsement of Proyect, by the way) any closer to power than you yourself are, Marc? And how close to power do you really think gloating over their lack of it is going to get you, or the people you endorse?

Of course, Proyect is right in saying that any sort of managed withdrawal of the sort Cole proposes and Cooper endorses is making the same mistake as the US did in Vietnam. Vietnam should’ve taught us that there are times when even the US cannot go against the tide of history: exactly the outcome it feared happened, only with many more lives lost than if it had not interfered.

Since Cooper is yet another beltway flack, this is of course far beyond his ken as none of these people has any sense of history or any desire to learn from it.

And it’s not even that his wishes for socalled “viable alternatives” is correct but mistimed, it’s that they’ve been wrong from the start and still wrong in their analysis of this war. Again this is from a lack of historical insight and a dependency on Beltway wisdom rather than real critical analysis.

What it all comes down to is that policy is nothing without ideology and people like Cooper have long let go of even their watered down version of liberalism for a misguided “realism”. This is the greatest disease afflicting the Democrats right now: the party’s elite no longer beliefs in anything but electability. Which is how abominations like the war on Iraq happen.