« January 2007 | Main | March 2007 »
February 23, 2007
Ministry of Defence psychic research - remote viewing has "little value"
There's echoes of Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats in recently revealed UK MoD research into the use of psychic phenomena. In these experiments:
The previously secret tests - conducted in 2002 - involved blind-folding volunteers and asking them about the contents of sealed brown envelopes...Most subjects consistently failed to establish what was in the envelopes...most subjects produced guesses that were not close to the correct answer and one subject even fell asleep while he tried to focus on the envelope's content.
Not exactly a shocking result - cost £18,000 of UK taxpayers' money to find out, though.
Anyway, hopefully the MoD will take this as a conclusive study. Aside from the need to avoid wasting (additional) money, the goats of Britain clearly need protecting.
Posted by jon_mendel at 04:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 21, 2007
UK Iraq troop withdrawal - now is not the time to 'move on'
It was announced today that the UK is withdrawing about 16,00 troops from Iraq, and hopes to withdraw more over time. Surprisingly, I find myself with mixed feelings about this. The partial withdrawal may be a sign that, having dug ourselves into a deep hole in Iraq, the UK is at last stopping digging - or, at least, is digging more slowly.
However, I'm also reminded of a 2004 article by Naomi Klein. Klein is very critical of attempts to find easy 'closure' for those responsible for the invasion of Iraq and the problems that followed; she argues that "[m]oving on...is supposed to come after [a] reckoning."
At the same time as welcoming moves to stop making the situation in Iraq worse, I would therefore also emphasise that the terrible situation in Iraq - a situation for which the Blair government bares a significant degree of responsibility - is not something that we should quickly move on from. Instead, there is a need for a fuller attempt to compensate Iraqis for the damage which was done to them by the invasion and the bungled attempts at reconstruction which followed it.
Part of Blair's legacy is the bloody and deteriorating situation in Iraq at the moment. Making - or trying to make - recompense for this dismal legacy is something that really could take generations.
In the interests of squeezing more political theory into my blog, it seems appropriate to end with a quote from Slavoj Zizek: the Left should be
the tombstone which just marks the site of the dead…it must preserve the traces of all the historical traumas…which the ruling ideology of the ‘End of History’ would prefer to obliterate – it must become itself their living monument, so that as long as the Left is here, their traumas will remain marked.
It is now more important than ever that - rather than 'just' celebrating moves towards withdrawl - the Left should continue to remember and re-mark Blair's traumatic legacies in Iraq and Afghanistan. These unforgotten - unforgettable? - traumas should remind us both of our continuing responsibility to those who have been and are being harmed by UK foreign policy, and of the reasons to avoid future wars.
Posted by jon_mendel at 11:54 PM | TrackBack
February 17, 2007
bird flu update - problems with hygiene at Bernard Matthews
The DEFRA report on the birdflu outbreak at Bernard Matthews points out that the firm had been warned several times before about hygiene lapses. There were several possible avenues for bird flu to move from imported turkey meat to its turkey flock:
"- Pest control workers noted last month that large numbers of gulls attracted to uncovered bins full of trimmings from turkey breasts
- This had also been a problem last year
- Gulls were observed carrying turkey waste away and roosting on the roof of the turkey houses 500 metres away
- There were holes in the houses that could have allowed birds or rodents in
- Polythene bags containing residue of liquid waste could have blown around the site
- Plastic-covered bales of wood shavings used as bedding were kept outside"
UPDATE (to the update) - interesting BBC radio programe broadcast today, suggesting that the birdflu outbreak may give impetus to calls for agricultural reform, and looking at ways this reform could take place.
Posted by jon_mendel at 12:26 AM | TrackBack
February 16, 2007
Ex-BNP man with large arms stockpile - update
I wrote a few months back about a large cache of arms found by UK police, with a man with links to the BNP. This has now gone to trial in Manchester, and is getting a bit of media coverage. Still, very little attention compared to that received by Muslim extremists, though: the ex-BNP man allegedly "held explosive chemicals in anticipation of a civil war wanted to shoot Tony Blair". To reiterate, these chemicals included "rocket launchers, chemicals, BNP literature and a nuclear biological suit [and] 22 chemical components recovered by police [which is] believed to be the largest haul ever found at a house in this country". I'm still having to hunt around for the odd story on this arms find, though - whereas when radical Islamists are found with much smaller arms caches, it's headline news everywhere.
Is the threat of far-right terror somehow seen as 'better' than the threat of Islamist terror? Or less worrying?
Posted by jon_mendel at 12:17 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 15, 2007
When the BBC hits the blogosphere (or should that be the other way round?)
The BBC's Profile programme recently ran a show about the political blogger 'Guido Fawkes'. The show was broadly positive, but the BBC's Nick Robinson was critical about the style and accuracy of the blog.
This appears to have caused something of a collision between 'old' and 'new'. Fawkes posted a blog entry criticising Robinson - nothing much wrong with the blog entry (Robinson did seem to be looking at the 'reliability' of the beeb through rose-tinted spectacles), but it's the comments that are really telling. People really are getting the knives out for Robinson. Here's a nice example (edited a bit for language) - on the extreme end, and not a representative sample, but it made me smile:
I cant tell you how much I hate this slap headed cock! Filter what you f*ckwit? Guido is what Guido is, unlike you he has had the foresight to understand that there is gap in the market for the truth not a load of patronising lies and bollocks regurgitated by some twat. Oddly enough most people actually recognise bullshit when they are having it fed to them, that is why some of us visit this blog and ignore the likes of you. Slaphead, the days when tossers like you get to pick up a fat pay cheque for spewing propaganda are numbered. I hope you die of starvation. Now I am going to devote some time to finding out some of your guilty secrets, then publish them. Filter that you c***!
It seems like I've spent too much of my life reading dry academic articles about media filters. It's certainly nice to see different types of bias and filter - and their use in 'new' and 'old' media - generating a more sharper, more passionate response: flaming about media filters has a certain, definite appeal.
Posted by jon_mendel at 12:29 AM | TrackBack
February 13, 2007
Google Earth in Iraq again - survival by satellite?
According to a BBC story, the Iraqi League has included Google Earth in its advice to Iraqis on how to survive the ongoing sectarian violence in Iraq. Iraqis are advised to "draw up maps of their local area using Google Earth's detailed imagery of Baghdad so they can work out escape routes and routes to block.".
Somewhat depressing that this is becoming necessary. However, it does at least show that - as well as having possible uses in the planning of violence - Google Earth can play a more positive role.
Posted by jon_mendel at 09:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 12, 2007
Arming the Iraqi insurgency - who's responsible?
The Bush administration is currently emphasising that weapons are coming from Iran to Iraqi insurgents, and arguing that this is happening directly with Iranian government approval. In itself, this is pretty feasible, although it may be hard to establish any clear chain of evidence (as the US and Pakistan knew, when supplying Afghan anti-Marxist insurgents, it is often possible to do this while maintaining at least some veneer of deniability). Also, bearing in mind that there's now (hard to verify) evidence that the Iraqi insurgency is self-financing, there's a real possibility that many of these arms were bought on the open/black market.
If the US seeks to use the Iranian supply of weapons to Iraq as a 'justification' for military action, they face an additional problem. Weapons were "FREE FOR THE TAKING" after the invasion of Iraq:US military commanders in autumn 2003 estimated that Iraqi military sites contained 650,000 to one 1,000,000 tons of various types of munitions", and these sites were not adequately secured. However many weapons are smuggled across the porous Iran/Iraq border, it seems incredible that anyone could have smuggled across anything like the quantities of munitions which Operation Iraqi Freedom made pretty freely available to all takers in Iraq.
Posted by jon_mendel at 11:55 PM | TrackBack
February 09, 2007
bird flu and globalisation
I'm sitting here shivering with a big box of tissues, so issues around (bird) flu are looming larger in my mind at the moment. Bird flu (the H5N1 strain) has been found in turkeys in Suffolk in the UK, and it's starting to look like this may have came into the UK when processed turkey was transported from Hungary.
Intensive farming has been presented as relatively 'safe' in terms of bird flu - based on the logic that birds farmed this way will be permanently locked inside and therefore won't be able to come into contact with wild birds. However, in this case it looks like (poor) practices associated with the intensive farming and then long-distance transport of food may have itself worked to spread bird flu.
A tempting 'theoretical' response to this is to recall Virilio's account of how - when faced with complex problems - politicians are now tempted to reach for a techical solution; however, these 'solutions' will themselves only multiply the possibilities for accidents. A more mundane response is to note that the problems associated with paying staff poor wages to raise and process animals in lousy conditions may itself - unsurprisingly - increase the possibility of things going wrong.
Although the production of 'cheap' meat might seem to be a brilliant technical solution to a range of problems - from providing affordable nutrition to preventing contamination or infection of animals - this 'solution' may well turn out to be extremely expensive in the longer term.
Posted by jon_mendel at 05:14 PM | TrackBack
February 08, 2007
Independent Jewish Voices on Israel
Interesting move towards more critical British Jewish stances on Israel. It looks like the debate on this will run - both on how open UK Jewish communities are to critical positions on Israel, and on what type of stances towards Israel are/are not politically productive.
Posted by jon_mendel at 10:36 PM | TrackBack
February 06, 2007
Fukuyama "could not understand why everyone was applauding"
An interesting interview with Francis Fukuyam was published weekend. He's talking about his turn against neoconservatism (the subject of his After the Neocons book). It starts by describing
a dinner attended by rightwing thinkers at the Hilton hotel in Washington. Krauthammer remembers giving a "fairly theoretical" foreign policy address. Fukuyama, listening, seems to have experienced an epiphany. The speech "treated the war [in Iraq] as a virtually unqualified success", he remembered later. "I could not understand why everyone was applauding the speech enthusiastically, given that the United States had found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, was bogged down in a vicious insurgency and had almost totally isolated itself from the rest of the world."
Fukuyama goes on to argue that
America's support for Israel's strategy in Lebanon...highlighted an obsession with old-fashioned overwhelming force in a world "where military power is just not a good instrument to use against non-state actors that are politically embedded". The same goes for the president's "surge" of troops in Iraq and murmurings in Washington in favour of attacking Iran. "Some [neoconservatives] insist that Iran poses an even greater threat than Iraq did," he writes, "avoiding the fact that their zealous advocacy of the Iraq invasion is what has destroyed US credibility, and undercut America's ability to take strong measures against Iran."
Hell, it's getting hard to find a neocon who's 'sticking to their guns' about Iraq nowadays. Anyway, the interview ends on an almost-plaintive note:
Washington waits for inspiration; Iraq spirals towards implosion; and former advocates of war keep themselves sane by avoiding the subject. "On the whole, I'd say I'm still friends [with many neocons]," Fukuyama says. "We manage this situation by not talking about Iraq."
If it weren't for the mass killing and so forth, you could almost feel sorry for the (former) neocons nowadays....
Posted by jon_mendel at 03:46 PM | TrackBack
February 04, 2007
"Operation Persian Freedom is drawing ever closer"?
Interesting story about British troops in Basra in Private Eye no 1177, p9). They report that British troops in Basra are finding and arresting Iranian nationals - suspected of involvement in the insurgency - almost daily. Iranian weapons have also been used in insurgent attacks.
There's also reports that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is regularly crossing into Afghanistan, and that Iran is training fighters to become involved in the violence in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Apparently, "The scary view from Camp Bastion is that Operation Persian Freedom is drawing ever closer."
All I can say is, please no. Surely not even this US and UK government would do that? Not with the situations now being faced in Iraq and Afghanistan...they wouldn't want to dig any deeper...
