Saturday, December 31, 2005

factoid android

OK, some festive season lightness of a sort.

The love of decontextualised facts is useful for winning pub quizzes, but destructive for making people think they are knowledgable and intelligent when actually they're not.

Still, I do love headtwisting factoids.

- Pink Floyd's Nick Mason holds the record for making the world's largest ever crumpet.

- Mick Jagger's dad wrote Know The Game: Basketball, the UK's best selling book on how to play the sport.

- The USA was the first country to use napalm in warfare - they dropped it on France, the cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

- John Peel was at the front of the press conference where Texas police first showed Lee Harvey Oswald to the public - he can be seen in archive footage standing between Oswald and Jack Ruby, the man who assassinated Oswald the next day.

So I commend unto you the BBC's 100 things we didn't know this time last year, which features gems like;

- Ernie Wise made Britain's first mobile phone call.

- the Little Britain wheelchair user and friend Lou and Andy are named after Reed and Warhol.

- it takes 75kg of raw materials to make a mobile phone.

- devout Orthodox Jews are three times as likely to jaywalk as other people.

- whilst what we call Arabic numerals (actually invented in India) have been in use for nearly 2,500 years, but we didn't get the = sign until it was invented by a 16th century Welshman.

Then there are several great morbid ones, like;

- you can bet on your own death.

- the day when most suicides occurred in the UK between 1993 and 2002 was 1 January, 2000.

- nettles growing on land where bodies are buried will reach a foot higher than those growing elsewhere.

Thursday, December 29, 2005

midnight ukulele disco

Once again I've sat at the screen and said out loud 'this is why I love the internet!'.

You need a bit of broadband time and your speakers on for Midnight Ukulele Disco, but oh sweet Christ on a unicycle how it's worth it.

The site is, as the name semi-implies, a repository of video clips of songs performed on ukulele. Hundreds of them.

It appears to be a low-budget US TV show where people send in clips of themselves doing songs on ukulele. Utter fucking genius. There is, as you'd expect, some folky tunes like Dirty Old Town. But there's a lot more besides. The very first thing they posted was Wild Thing!

I'm a sucker for an incongrous cover version, and whilst I'm spoilt for choice at Midnight Ukulele Disco, I have to say the ones that really wet my whistle and tickled my fancy were Turning Japanese, Live To Tell, the great group performance of My Best Friend's Girl, and a different ensemble doing an instrumental version of Staying Alive that's already my second favourite cover of the song, better still than the one by Dweezil Zappa and Donny Osmond. (My favourite, by quite some distance, is the flat-out grindcore version by a band who not only do the best cover of Staying Alive but also have one of the best band names ever, Anal Cunt).

However, back on Midnight Ukulele Disco, all the above mentioned toweringly magnificent ukulelistic efforts are themselves dwarved by the stunning halfway-to-a-proper-video thing of a serious rock dude doing Enter Sandman, complete with distortion pedal, Fender amp and, if I'm seeing it right, an Ovation ukulele!

Off to never-never land indeed.

Friday, December 23, 2005

the puppy killing philanthropist

Oliver Letwin, Tory front-bencher and a man who shoots puppies for fun, has declared that the Tories want to see a redistribution of wealth.

Mr Letwin, who is one of Mr Cameron's closest advisers, says that there is now a moral and social imperative for tackling inequality.


I love that use of 'now'. Inequality and poverty were morally acceptable until just recently, then.

Has Mr Letwin had chance to consider issues of wealth before? Just a tad, as Jim Bliss told us in a pre-election musing last April:
[Letwin] was a bigwig at NM Rothschild financial megaglomerate. But he didn't have a Road to Damascus experience and decide to dedicate his skills to public service. Like fuck did he! In fact, it's only a year and a half ago that the tories were able to convince him to resign his position. Eventually he got the message, it might be a conflict of interest to be running the nation's budget, setting taxation policy, regulating the financial sector, and what have you, whilst still a director of NM Rothschild. Just might be a conflict of interest.

And this is something that more people should be talking about. Most of these tory spending plans that are being bandied about at the moment are the work of a man who was working for NM Rothschild whilst formulating them. It is safe to assume therefore, knowing as I do the workings of corporations at high levels, that these plans are first and foremost the plans of a Rothschild director, and second the plans of a public servant. You just don't exist at that level of a corporation if you're playing for any team but the home one. Feel free to deny this if you choose. You will be wrong though.

A tory vote, therefore, should be cast full in the knowledge that your hopes and dreams need to coincide with those of NM Rothschild if you expect your MP to address them.


You've got to wonder what he was doing during the Thatcher years, as the gap between rich and poor got wider than it had ever been, whilst British champagne sales more than doubled. The rich got richer because they took it from the poor. That extra champagne that Letwin and friends were quaffing was bought by the sell-off of state owned industries and tax cuts handed out at the expense of public services.

But now, in rejecting the inevitable result of Thatcherism, he's saying that he's some kind of benevolent cuddly guy not out to enrich the wealthy any more, abandoning his party's raison d'etre and the aims of his old job at Rothschild's .

Next week, Letwin announces Tory plans to nationalise all the utilities and banks. 'If Labour don't want Clause IV then we'll take it off their hands,' he says.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

really though, nothing to fear

From The Independent (reproduced here in full cos they tend to pay-archive their articles)

From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 22 December 2005

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.

By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate "reads" per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.

Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.

Senior police officers have described the surveillance network as possibly the biggest advance in the technology of crime detection and prevention since the introduction of DNA fingerprinting.

But others concerned about civil liberties will be worried that the movements of millions of law-abiding people will soon be routinely recorded and kept on a central computer database for years.

The new national data centre of vehicle movements will form the basis of a sophisticated surveillance tool that lies at the heart of an operation designed to drive criminals off the road.

In the process, the data centre will provide unrivalled opportunities to gather intelligence data on the movements and associations of organised gangs and terrorist suspects whenever they use cars, vans or motorcycles.

The scheme is being orchestrated by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and has the full backing of ministers who have sanctioned the spending of £24m this year on equipment.

More than 50 local authorities have signed agreements to allow the police to convert thousands of existing traffic cameras so they can read number plates automatically. The data will then be transmitted to Hendon via a secure police communications network.

Chief constables are also on the verge of brokering agreements with the Highways Agency, supermarkets and petrol station owners to incorporate their own CCTV cameras into the network. In addition to cross-checking each number plate against stolen and suspect vehicles held on the Police National Computer, the national data centre will also check whether each vehicle is lawfully licensed, insured and has a valid MoT test certificate.

"Every time you make a car journey already, you'll be on CCTV somewhere. The difference is that, in future, the car's index plates will be read as well," said Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).

"What the data centre should be able to tell you is where a vehicle was in the past and where it is now, whether it was or wasn't at a particular location, and the routes taken to and from those crime scenes. Particularly important are associated vehicles," Mr Whiteley said.

The term "associated vehicles" means analysing convoys of cars, vans or trucks to see who is driving alongside a vehicle that is already known to be of interest to the police. Criminals, for instance, will drive somewhere in a lawful vehicle, steal a car and then drive back in convoy to commit further crimes "You're not necessarily interested in the stolen vehicle. You're interested in what's moving with the stolen vehicle," Mr Whiteley explained.

According to a strategy document drawn up by Acpo, the national data centre in Hendon will be at the heart of a surveillance operation that should deny criminals the use of the roads.

"The intention is to create a comprehensive ANPR camera and reader infrastructure across the country to stop displacement of crime from area to area and to allow a comprehensive picture of vehicle movements to be captured," the Acpo strategy says.

"This development forms the basis of a 24/7 vehicle movement database that will revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis," it says.

Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. "Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism," he said.

"The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don't have access to. It's part of public protection. If the security services did not have access to this, we'd be negligent."

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.

By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate "reads" per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.

Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.

Senior police officers have described the surveillance network as possibly the biggest advance in the technology of crime detection and prevention since the introduction of DNA fingerprinting.

But others concerned about civil liberties will be worried that the movements of millions of law-abiding people will soon be routinely recorded and kept on a central computer database for years.

The new national data centre of vehicle movements will form the basis of a sophisticated surveillance tool that lies at the heart of an operation designed to drive criminals off the road.

In the process, the data centre will provide unrivalled opportunities to gather intelligence data on the movements and associations of organised gangs and terrorist suspects whenever they use cars, vans or motorcycles.

The scheme is being orchestrated by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and has the full backing of ministers who have sanctioned the spending of £24m this year on equipment.

More than 50 local authorities have signed agreements to allow the police to convert thousands of existing traffic cameras so they can read number plates automatically. The data will then be transmitted to Hendon via a secure police communications network.
Chief constables are also on the verge of brokering agreements with the Highways Agency, supermarkets and petrol station owners to incorporate their own CCTV cameras into the network. In addition to cross-checking each number plate against stolen and suspect vehicles held on the Police National Computer, the national data centre will also check whether each vehicle is lawfully licensed, insured and has a valid MoT test certificate.

"Every time you make a car journey already, you'll be on CCTV somewhere. The difference is that, in future, the car's index plates will be read as well," said Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).

"What the data centre should be able to tell you is where a vehicle was in the past and where it is now, whether it was or wasn't at a particular location, and the routes taken to and from those crime scenes. Particularly important are associated vehicles," Mr Whiteley said.

The term "associated vehicles" means analysing convoys of cars, vans or trucks to see who is driving alongside a vehicle that is already known to be of interest to the police. Criminals, for instance, will drive somewhere in a lawful vehicle, steal a car and then drive back in convoy to commit further crimes "You're not necessarily interested in the stolen vehicle. You're interested in what's moving with the stolen vehicle," Mr Whiteley explained.

According to a strategy document drawn up by Acpo, the national data centre in Hendon will be at the heart of a surveillance operation that should deny criminals the use of the roads.

"The intention is to create a comprehensive ANPR camera and reader infrastructure across the country to stop displacement of crime from area to area and to allow a comprehensive picture of vehicle movements to be captured," the Acpo strategy says.

"This development forms the basis of a 24/7 vehicle movement database that will revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis," it says.

Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. "Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism," he said.

"The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don't have access to. It's part of public protection. If the security services did not have access to this, we'd be negligent."

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

the innocent have nothing to fear

Instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards as the Tory Right demand, let that money provide thousands more police officers on the beat on our streets
- Tony Blair, Labour Party conference 1995


Of course, extra coppers and ID cards are actually part of the same thing. Seeing the energy crisis looming, the government is putting in place the necessary provisions for dealing with civil unrest.

Once we no longer have the comfort of an energy surplus and affordable food, the have-nots will resent the haves and so the haves will use whatever force it takes to protect themselves.

Why else are we getting all the new 'anti-terrorism' laws? They were being put in place before 9-11, with the Terrorism Act 2000 (under which wearing the wrong T-shirt is punishable with 12 months in jail).

As I've said elsewhere, if you fly a plane into a building, blow up a barracks or shoot a politician you are already seriously breaking the law. If you help or encourage such people, you are already breaking the law. There is no need for any new legislation on this stuff, so we should be automatically suspicious of new ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation.

Similarly, the peaceful protest of Brian Haw is the supposed target of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. Can a bloke sat on the pavement asking for peace really be 'serious organised crime'?

When Foreign Secretary Jack Straw asserted to his party conference that the invasion of Iraq was about liberation, Party member Walter Wolfgang was ejected for saying 'nonsense'.

Thing is, Wolfgang was questioned under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Had he dared to say 'nonsense' twice, he could have been prosecuted under the Protection From Harassment Act 1997.

Section 1 (1):
A person must not pursue a course of conduct-
(a) which amounts to harassment of another, and
(b) which he knows or ought to know amounts to harassment of the other.

Section 7:
(3) a "course of conduct" must involve conduct on at least two occasions.
(4) "Conduct" includes speech.


That law was brought in supposedly to protect women from nutter ex-boyfriends, yet has been primarily used to prosecute politicial dissent.

And so to ID cards. The innocent have nothing to fear, we're told. Which would be a great excuse for any surveillance measure you can think of. CCTV in your bedroom? Full online publishing of transcripts of your phone calls? A guy in black suit and shades following you everywhere mumbling into a radio about everything you do?

In 1994, in an attempt to discover the problems caused by ID cards, Privacy International compiled a survey containing reports from correspondents in forty countries.

Slightly strangely, it was cited by anti-ID Republicans in congressional testimony when Clinton tried to introduce ID cards in the USA.

Amongst the gravest of problems reported was the over zealous use or misuse of ID cards by police - even where the cards were supposed to be voluntary. One respondent wrote :

On one occasion I was stopped in Switzerland when walking at night near Lake Geneva. I was living in Switzerland at the time and had a Swiss foreigner's ID card. The police were wondering why I should want to walk at night to look at the Chateau de Chillon. Really suspicious I suppose, to walk at night on the banks of the lake to look at an illuminated chateau (I am white and dress conservatively). I had to wait for 20 minutes whilst they radioed my ID number to their central computer to check on its validity.

Correspondents in most countries reported that police had powers to demand the ID card. A correspondent in Greece reported:

In my country the Cards are compulsory. If police for example stop you and ask for identification you must present them the ID or you are taken to the police department for identification research.

Police were granted these powers in the late 1980s, despite some public misgivings. Non European countries reported more serious transgressions, In Brazil, for example:

They are compulsory, you're in big trouble with the police if they request it and you don't have one or left home without it. The police can ask for my identity card with or without a valid motive, it's an intimidation act that happens in Brazil very, very often. The problem is not confined to the police. Everybody asks for your id when you are for example shopping, and this is after you have shown your cheque guarantee card. We also other similar cards. Nobody trusts anybody basically.

Predictably, political hot-spots have seen widescale abuse of the card system:

One problem that Afghans encountered carrying these "tazkiras" (ID cards) was during the rule of the communist regime in Afghanistan where people were stopped in odd hours and in odd places by the government's Soviet advisors and their KHALQI and PARCHAMI agents and asked for their "tazkiras". Showing or not showing the "tazkira" to the enquiring person at that time was followed by grave consequences. By showing it, the bearer would have revealed his age upon which, if it fell between 16-45, he would have been immediately taken to the nearest army post and drafted into the communist army, and if he refused to show, he would have been taken to the nearest secret service (KHAD) station and interrogated as a member of the resistance (Mujahideen), imprisoned, drafted in the army or possibly killed.

Many countries reported that their ID card had become an internal passport, being required for every dealing with people or institutions. In Argentina, according to this correspondent, the loss of the ID card would result in grave consequences:

I got my first personal ID when I turned seven. It was the Provincial Identity Card. It looked like the hardcover of a little book with just two pages in it. It had my name, my photograph, the fingerprint of my right thumb, and some other personal data. I never questioned what was the logic about fingerprinting a seven-year old boy. It was suggested that identification was one of the major purposes for the existence of the Police of the Province which issued the card. It was required for enroling in the Provincial School I attended. Attending the primary school is compulsory, hence everybody under twelve is indirectly forced to have the Card.

Well, this Book was required for any sort of proceedings that the person wanted to initiate, e.g. enrol at school, buy a car, get his driving license, get married. Nobody could do anything without it. In addition, it became a prerogative of the police to request it at any time and place. Whoever was caught without it was customarily taken to jail and kept there for several hours (or overnight if it happened in the evening) while they "checked his personal record". In effect, Argentine citizens have never been much better off than South-African negroes during the Apartheid, the only difference is that we Argentinians did not have to suffer lashings if caught without the pass card. As for daily life without the ID, it was impossible.

Of greater significance is the information that ID cards are commonly used as a means of tracking citizens to ensure compliance with such laws as military service. Again, in Argentina:

The outrage of the military service was something that many people was not ready to put up with. Nevertheless, something forced the people to present themselves to be drafted. It was nothing more or less than the ID. In fact, if somebody did not show up, the army never bothered to look for them. They just waited for them to fall by themselves, because the ID card showed the boy to be on military age and not having the necessary discharge records by the army. Provided that in the country you could not even go for a walk without risking to be detained by the police, being a no-show for military duty amounted to a civil death.

Another respondent in Singapore noted that many people in his country were aware that the card was used for purposes of tracking their movements, but that most did not see any harm in this:

If that question is put to Singaporeans, they are unlikely to say that the cards have been abused. However, I find certain aspects of the NRIC (ID card) system disconcerting. When I finish military service (part of National service), I was placed in the army reserve. When I was recalled for reserve service, I found that the army actually knew about my occupation and salary! I interpreted this as an intrusion into my privacy. It might not be obvious but the NRIC system has made it possible to link fragmented information together.

The consequences of losing ones card were frequently mentioned:

A holiday in Rio was ruined for me when I was robbed on the beach and had to spend the rest of the brief holiday going through the bureaucracy to get a duplicate issued. One way round this (of dubious legality) is to walk around with a notarized xerox copy instead of the original.

The Brazilian experience shows that the card is often misused by police:

Of course violent police in metropolitan areas of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro love to beat and arrest people (especially black/poor) on the pretext that they don't have their ID card with them.

Phew. At least our coppers are all fine upstanding guardians of justice and would never sink to the harrassment, intimadation and abuse of power shown by their colleagues elsewhere. The innocent have nothing to fear.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

kill me to save me

Wildlife conservation organisation WWF have come up with this great money-spinner:


In Zambia's Kafue Flats, WWF has helped the government forge an important link between development and conservation... Trophy hunters pay to hunt animals, and the money raised is reinvested in community development and wildlife management.


Next week, Barnado's pimp children and use the cash to build new orphanages.

Monday, December 12, 2005

commercial break

From the dependably excellent John Vidal's Eco Soundings column in the Guardian:

Seen those BP ads on TV and in the press? Impressed that the oil giant is getting the message on climate change? Think again. BP is also running a big advertising campaign in the US to coincide with the Montreal climate talks. Both versions have the same graphics, the same nifty tune, the same style. But whereas we Brits are told to "work out your carbon footprint - it's a start", the American consumer is told: "We're investing $15bn in finding new oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico - it's a start."

Thursday, December 08, 2005

remembering john




I still believe in love. I still believe in peace.
- John Lennon, 8 December 1980


John was really against war. We both were. It's crazy how a situation like that repeats itself. Peace is so very important. More than ever, we shouldn't be afraid of saying we want it.
- Yoko Ono, August 2005

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

the spirit of the material

A long long time ago in a publishing coolective far far away I published a book about my time at the Newbury Bypass protest.

My friend Jim was another of the protesters, and in the last couple of weeks I've been honoured to be one of the proof-readers for his newly finished memoir of the time he spent at Newbury, Stanworth Valley and Fairmile in the mid-90s.

It's a thoroughly absorbing, warm, insightful, intelligent, compelling book that balances the politics with the spiritual and philosophical drive behind the campaigns, the wider intent with the impact on the inner lives of those involved and his own personal story.

You can be sure I'll be plugging it here once its published, but in the meantime, here's an extract.

It may well be a good thing that more people don't live in the woods - the damage of human activities on such sensitive habitiats is not hard to imagine. And as more woodland is destroyed, or is degraded by nearby developments, the ones that remain become more and more precious for the species they support. But there's a lot to be said for experiencing life in such a delicate context and being made aware of the repercussions of our every action.

Before the arrival of farming, people would never have stayed in one place for so long anyway, so the problem of impoverishing an area like this would never have arisen. In England since then, nearly every square inch of land has been subject to human habitation at some point or another, and it's a testament of our ability to cohabit and the endurance of an underlying culture of respect that our countryside has survived with all the richness that it has. Which makes it all the more tragic that so much is now being denigrated and swept away by men who have no understanding of the fundamental connection that was still enjoyed by most poeple not more than two or three generations ago.

Many woods in Britain could actually do with a stronger human presence - in particular those needing coppicing, which apart from anything else helps preserve a species-rich series of habitiats. If traditionally managing indigenous woodland like this could be made commercially viable again, then it would actually help preserve the woods that are left - and give rise to the planting of more. For centuries there was a strong culture of people living in the woods in this way, using trees to make products that were a part of everyday life. Now everyone is surrounded by pieces of plastic and the woods that are left have largely gone quiet.

Our material surroundings define our world in a way that most of us can only begin to suspect. With a little more wood in our lives, and a greater respect for the spirit ingerent in natural, physical things, we might begin to shift the world back to something like balance. Our understanding defines the world we live in; the world we create is borne out by the world we have already created, or allowed to transpire, in our minds. Until we address our connection with the spirit of the material, and in doing so come to grasp that manufacturing a thing like polystyrene or plastic is an actual act of violence, then attempts at restoring environmental balance will be rootless, however goodwilled.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

we're all rosa

It was 50 years ago today that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus. A great act of courage and dignity, although, as I mentioned when she died, it wasn't the 'one tired woman' spur of the moment thing it's commonly portrayed as. It was just one of many premeditated acts of deliberate criminal defiance that were going on at the time.

Whilst Rosa is a genuine hero, there's always a danger of deifying such figures and so making their acts look inimicable to us.

When an environmental activist recently evoked Ghandi in conversation with a senior Greenpeace manager, the manager nervously giggled and said we couldn't aspire to that.

Why the hell not? Ghandi, Rosa Parks, the Spanish Anarchists of 36 and so many others get talked of in these awed terms which go beyond admiration for their actions and into hero-worship. By focusing on a few individuals we see the achievments of an entire movement as being the works of a few superhuman people. So we end up disempowered, believing we could never aspire to something that, in fact, ordinary people readily achieved.

All these idolised figures were just people doing what they could, just part of a much wider movement who we remember almost none of by name. Rosa was just one of many equally brave and uncompromising activists.

The power Rosa had is power we all have. In denying our power we cede it to those who would rule over us. Recognising that we have it is, in itself, an act of reclaiming it. With that recognition comes the attendant duty to use it. It makes us see the huge overlap between dreams and possibilities, and dares us to fight for what we dream of. That may unsettle us from comfort zones, but it also gives the only chance of the radical changes so desperately needed.

Rather than statues and deification of Rosa herself, seeing her as one of us and us as ones like her would be a more honest and befitting legacy.

'If we cannot see the possibility of greatness, how can we dream it?'
- Lee Strasberg

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

criminals and outlaws

From Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins:

The difference between a criminal and an outlaw is that while criminals are frequently victims, outlaws never are.

Indeed, the first step towards becoming a true outlaw is the refusal to be victimised. All people who live subject to other people’s laws are victims. People who break laws out of greed, frustration or vengeance are victims. People who overturn laws in order to replace them with their own laws are victims.

We outlaws, however, live beyond the law. We don’t merely live beyond the letter of the law – many businessmen, most politicians, and all cops do that - we live beyond the spirit of the law.

In a sense then, we live beyond society. We have a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the nature of society.

When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe.

We even raise it a little bit when we fail.

Saturday, November 26, 2005

public safety warning

I've previously happened upon a sign in a street that made me advise continuous caution.

This, however, is in a league above that one.



How incredibly nerve-wracking for any road user who acts on the warning, being in a constant state of trembly vigilance.

But surely the sign exaggerates, there must be some road somewhere that doesn't have the risk of playing host to deer activity. I've been walking the streets of inner city Leeds for many years (not continuously, admittedly) and have never seen deer.

Still, another one for the list. Watch out of deaf cats and, whenever you're near a road, marauding deer too.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

the real price of gold

The Independent continues to run a series of startling front covers about issues the others ignore.

Sadly, they do a pay-archive. Fortunately for you, I think it's worth splashing out occasionally on some of them.

Mining for rare minerals is one of those things that I've always known is damaging, but most of the hard info on mining I've seen is about corporations like RTZ getting copper and whatnot.

Yet it stands to reason that rare minerals - not only gold and silver, but also minerals for electronics, and also the healing crystals popular with those who otherwise think themselves environmentally responsible - are hugely destructive. They surely require many times their own volume in waste products to be dug out, and will have meant some bit of wild land has been dynamited.

The facts about gold as given by The Independent are considerably worse than I'd imagined.

The real price of gold

It weighs 1oz. It costs £1,000. And it creates 30 tons of toxic waste

By Daniel Howden


The lust for gold has reached record levels worldwide as India and China have joined developed nations in demanding more jewellery. On the back of this surge, gold prices have reached a 17-year high, and yesterday rose $7.70 (£4.30) to more than $474 per ounce. But the world's remaining gold deposits are microscopic and the environmental costs of extracting them are profound.

A £1,000 wedding ring - equivalent to one ounce of gold - creates up to 30 tons of toxic waste. To produce that single ounce, miners have to quarry hundreds of tons of rock, which are then doused in a liquid cyanide solution to separate the gold. Payal Sampat, the campaign director for Earthworks, the mining watchdog, told The Independent: "Gold mining is arguably the world's dirtiest and most polluting industry."

A growing alliance of conservationists and local communities affected by mining operations is pushing governments, corporations and consumers to consider the real cost of gold. "The industry has not been under public scrutiny and people don't really know where their gold is coming from," Ms Sampat said. "The mining industry could be making changes which could provide consumers with a product which is far more clean."

Writers from Shakespeare to Shelley have lamented the lure of this precious metal, but today's gold fever neither seeks to bolster empires nor underpin currencies. It is fuelled by our desire for jewellery.

Of the gold mined today, a total of 80 per cent is produced to feed the demand for status symbols. Campaigners are trying to dissuade shoppers from buying "dirty gold", which is extracted using cyanide leaching. But they face an uphill struggle. Newly affluent consumers have pushed jewellery sales to a record $38bn this year, according to the World Gold Council.

With the best ore already mined in most developed countries, the industry is turning to the poorest countries in the world. Up to 70 per cent of gold is mined in developing countries such as Peru and the Philippines. Vast tracts of the developing world are being laid to waste, leaving a multibillion-pound toxic time-bomb.

Environment agencies in the US have described disused heavy metal mines as an equivalent to nuclear waste dumps, which must be secured and maintained for the foreseeable future. America's Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the costs associated with the clean-up of metal mines could rise to $58bn, according to The New York Times.

The mining industry argues that it is bringing much needed investment, infrastructure and jobs to the poor. And it is an argument that is backed by the World Bank, which has pushed more than 100 governments into making tax breaks and subsidies to big mining companies.

A flood of complaints, protests and lethal spillages prompted the bank into a two-year moratorium on financing mining in 2001. That resulted in calls for the mining industry to reduce the use of cyanide and stop dumping toxic waste.

However, these calls were dismissed by the industry as impractical and the World Bank is now giving multimillion-pound loans to multinationals. The first loan after the moratorium went to the Canadian company Glamis Gold, for a project in Guatemala that has faced heavy opposition from Mayan Indians.

At the root of the environmental problem is the industry's reliance on old mining technology called "heap-leaching". Leach mining allows miners to coax tiny flecks of gold from low-grade ore. Cyanide is the chemical of choice and more than 90 per cent of the 2,500 tons of annual global gold production is extracted in this way.

In a typical heap-leach operation, huge quantities of rock are crushed and stacked on top of clay and plastic liners to create piles the size of pyramids, which are then drizzled with the cyanide solution for years. As the chemical passes through the rock layers, it teases the gold out of the ore, where it is collected at the bottom and processed further. As little as one ounce of gold can be extracted from 30 tons of low-grade ore.

Cyanide is a toxic chemical - one teaspoon of 2 per cent cyanide solution is enough to kill a human being. This dangerous chemical is used in gold extraction operations from Peru to Ghana. And it has left a toxic legacy in its wake.

The cyanide waste produced from gold mining is stored in reservoirs. Spills from these lakes have made their way into water systems with fatal consequences for the environment, wildlife and local communities.

Just such a leak in Romania in 2000 led to the worst environmental disaster in the region since the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. Tons of cyanide-laced water broke through a dam and poured into the Tisza and Danube rivers from the Aural gold mine near Baia Mare. The results were devastating; more than 1,000 tons of fish were killed, while plantlife and birds along the river were devastated.

The Tisza disaster has been replicated at mines all over the world. In the five years since the Baia Mare accident, mines owned by international corporations have been responsible for spills in Ghana, Western Australia, Papua New Guinea, China, Honduras and Nicaragua. During that time the UN Environment Programme has been locked in negotiations with the mining industry to produce a self-regulatory code.

Desta Mebratu, a Unep official, admitted that the mining industry's activities presented a serious environmental hazard but said they were working towards lessening this. "We're working with the mining companies to help prevent the occurrence of accidents," he said. But the code, which was finally unveiled this month, has been dismissed by environmental watchdogs as toothless. A review of the voluntary code by Bankwatch and Friends of the Earth Europe said the code was "greenwashing intended to create the appearance that mining companies are addressing environmental issues".

Australia's remote Lake Cowal in New South Wales is the latest battleground between mining multinationals and indigenous peoples. Neville Williams, 61, who represents the Mooka traditional owners council clan of the Wiradjuri nation, says the fight is essential, although he knows the odds are stacked against them as the mining companies enjoy government backing.

"We have no resources but we are taking the fight for all the peoples because of the prospect of cyanide poisoning."

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

cloisters and closets of oxford

I was at People & Planet's annual chinwag Shared Planet over the weekend, hosted by Oxford Brookes University.

In the 1990s the government decided all the polytechnics should lose the stigma of being seen as some sort of second class option for higher education and join the esteemed ranks of the universities.

As most cities had a poly and a uni, it meant they had to come up with names to differentiate them. One wag of my acquaintance suggested that the polytechnics should be called 'The University of...', and the universities should become 'The Real University of...'.

This wasn't taken up by any of the institutions as far as I know. Instead, they all came up with their own different answers.

In Leicester, they named themselves De Montfort University, after the medieval Jew-slayer Simon De Montfort.

In Liverpool they decided to give students a clear vision of the intellectual heights to which they may aspire by naming themselves John Moores University, after the man who founded Littlewoods department stores and catalogues. I suppose if you're going to get a degree, you might need a nice cardigan to wear while you do it.

North London Polytechnic toyed with the idea of giving students the choice of name, until it became clear that they'd end up being Karl Marx University. Having a degree in philosophy from Karl Marx does have a certain ring to it. Better than a degree in philosophy from John Moores, at any rate.

Newcastle Poly was on course to be City University of Newcatle upon Tyne until they spotted the acronym.

I'm not entirely sure who Oxford Brookes is named after, and I can't quite be arsed to find out.

Universities have long and venerable histories, their belief in learning and intellectual improvement reinforced by the upkeep of age-old traditions. Nowhere can this be more obvious than in comparing the ancient hallowed cloisters of Oxford University with Oxford Brookes University.

I am pleased to report that Oxford Brookes have met the challenge of overcoming the wet-behind-the-ears aspect of their newish university status by honouring tradition. Their Headington Campus toilets have classic graffiti-friendly formica partitioned cubicles.

It's sad to see how many other establishments have foiled the graffiti writer with a move over to stainless steel or tiled walls. I remember being in the bogs at Kings Cross station in the early 1990s where there was a massive 6 or 8 paragraph descriptive and detailed epic from a guy who explained that he'd moved to London and was staying in his uncle's bedsit and was really enjoying wanking while watching his sleeping his uncle's white Y-fronts glowing in the moonlight. It's an experience becoming rarer by the day. (The reading of such things on toilet walls, that is; I wouldn't hazard a statistical guess about the incidence of wanking at uncles).

But at Oxford Brookes this weekend I was pleased to read in just one cubicle 'smell my cheese, you nobber' alongside 'Dolphins are just and kind beings. Gay sharks are evil.' And then, above that foot-high gap before the floor peculiar to toilet cubicle doors, the classic 'beware of gay limbo dancers'.

Honouring intellectual tradition, feeding eager young minds and encouraging them to intelligently express their thoughts and ideas in this way, Oxford Brookes may hold its head as high as the gay limbo dancers bend low.

Friday, November 11, 2005

no thanks, i don't do the horse

As my friend Justin has pointed out, 'due to the alarming rise in humans partaking of ketamine, the black metal-enhancing drug which rightfully belongs to horses, the equine kingdom has decided to wreak its boozy revenge':






Ketamine is a weird one.

It's commonly used as an anaesthetic for horses (not merely a tranquiliser as is commonly said). This is stuff that makes animals the size of horses so out of it that you can cut them up with knives and saw into their heads or delve around inside their guts without them noticing. The slightest misjusgement in your dose and you are rendered immobile.

There are facets that hold great value for the intrepid mongonaut. It's dissociative, so it pushes boundaries of space and self and can give mad visions. Unfortunately, this can objectively manifest as spending hours drooling whilst sat in a curdling pool of someone else's sick.

The other day, in the first piece of overheard conversation I felt compelled to rush-transcribe since that day in St Helens, a friend was on the phone saying, 'K hits me really hard, I was a bit of a puddle, I did that line without thinking and next thing I knew it had all gone... I was in queer 1930s Berlin in a writhing mass of people of indeterminate gender... It was great, actually'.

Doing it without thinking was how I last did K. I was DJing at a festival last summer and did a nice set of soul, disco and pop for munters at sunrise. The people on after me asked me to show them how the decks and mixer worked, so I ran them through it. They then dug a key into a small paper packet and pulled it out with a little cone of white powder on. Placing it less than three inches from my nose, I was asked the one-letter question, 'K?'.

Caught by surprise, like a fool I did the obvious. Two minutes later I was useless. The rig I'd just been using for two hours was a minefield of buttons and faders. And that was on one little toot. My colleagues, who'd been hoofing great snorts, were having trouble getting a CD out of its box. And there were two of them trying.

Their set opened with them randomly flicking a fader between a 7inch single of Brown Girl In The Ring and a CD of industrial noise. I don't mean industrial noise as a musical genre. I mean really industrial noise, like wearing a fleet of hoovers gaffa taped round your head while clinging on to the underside of a speeding train.

Why did I take that toot? It's one of those things like poppers. Amyl is never, never, never a good idea, and if someone suggested buying some you'd mock them into the floor for their buffoonery. But if that same person already has the poppers and gets it out, approaches you with their thumb covering the open top, well, it takes a peculiarly self-disciplined and puritanical presence of mind to decline.

But what the fuck is the point? You feel like someone's pulling a balloon over you scalp for ten seconds, then have a sharp headache for half an hour. At no point is it fun or anything else that could remotely approach qualifying for the label 'worth it'.

Ditto K at parties. As a psychedelic voyage, or as a way of being cosy on a comedown fair enough, but really, at something where it's all about interaction and energy, taking something that dissociates isn't going to fit with the vibe.

Indeed, so well does it break a sense of bouncy unity that it could almost be designed as such.

The CIA put crack into American black ghettoes in the 1980s.

At the same time in the UK, just as the tories turned on travellers as their enemy a cheap and plentiful supply of heroin found its way on to travellers sites across the country.

By the same token, I do wonder about the appearance of ketamine in dance culture. The establishemnt was terrified of dance culture when it began. A generation were growing up not drinking alcohol, not going to profitable mainstream drinking clubs, but were instead doing free warehouse parties and festivals and taking ecstasy.

The response took many forms. Despite the tosh in tabloids, alcopops were never aimed at schookids. Schoolkids don't have a lot of spending power. Like street drinkers, their primary and probably only concern is maximising the cost:alcohol ratio. At £1.20 a bottle, why get an alcopop when you can get white cider in double the quantity and strength for the same cost?

Alcopops were a way to sell alcohol to a market that had never forced themselves on to drinnking at 16 years old and thereby acquired the taste. They were aimed at the E generation.

Simultaneously, they massively increased the penalties for holding illegal rave parties, jumping at a stroke from £2,000 to £20,000 and six months in jail (an Act introduced by Tory MP Graham Bright; the head of his local Conservative Association was - what a coincidence - a director of Whitbread).

They arrested ravers again and again. A single party in Yorkshire in 1990 had 836 arrests, one of the largest mass arrests in British history. And just for the criminal activity of dancing in a field.

Then they brought out the Criminal Justice Act 1994, which actually defined the music it opposed, 'sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats'. It was outlawing the predominant youth culture. It's as if the UK was run by that 1950s Alabama White Citzens Council who published the 'Rock 'n' roll will pull the white man down to the level of the negro' posters.

By contrast, in Berlin in the early 90s they began the Love Parade, 300,000 people in one big dance music party. The authorites not only allowed it, they had it technically defined as a demonstration in favour of world peace; a party would saddle the organisers with the large clean-up bill, whereas a demonstration made it a government responsibility.

If the British government - the same one's who'd used MI5 to break the miners, the same ones who'd got smack to travellers - were so ardently opposed to rave culture, there's no reason they wouldn't also do the CIA/crack, travellers/smack thing. Ketamine would be ideal.

In many ways, ketamine is the opposiite of ecstasy. People on pills hug and dance and talk to each other, enthusing and listening. People on K, if they can move at all, stumble oblivious and bewildered, like an arthritic pensioner on acid.

Where E encourages euphoria, enthusiasm, communication, a sense of unity, love and empathy, K subdues, dissociates, dislocates and makes then user effectively absent from where they are.

If you wanted to break that strong bond of people at ecstasy-fuelled parties, if you want to make all-nighters look really ugly, stick a load of K up the punters noses. That'd send anyone with the urge for a sociable good time back into the pickpocketing hands of the mainstream drinking culture.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

america, fuck yeah!

Sometimes I'm a bit to busy to click all the links people send me. They sit and fester in my inbox until I get an idle moment.

Recently, after a hard day's night at the computer, I thought I'd wind down by clearing some of the backlog.

One was a link to a .swf video file, and the email said, in its entirety, 'I refuse to be the only one that was made to watch this'.

Bear in mind my psychologically precarious 3am computered-out state, feeling tired and like my brain had been ironed flat. The video is for a generic be-mulleted American rock dude doing a song that was like America, Fuck Yeah! from Team America. Only it was serious.

Like the bastard that originally sent it to me, I to decided not to suffer alone and sent it out to half my address book.

One of them was my friend Kirk who got back to me with some with hard facts. The song is called America We Stand As One, and was written and sung by Star Trek stunt co-ordinator Dennis Madalone. There is a much better quality version of the video on the official website.

Even better, someone has set Team America's America, Fuck Yeah! to the video, with hilarious results. You can download the video, or check it out online.

Funny, frightening, depressing and surreal all at once. Fuck yeah!

Sunday, November 06, 2005

your money or your life

In the year he promised climate change would be one of his big priorities, Blair's belief in economic growth at the expense of humans being able to survive strengthens by the day.

"People fear some external force is going to impose some internal target on you ... to restrict your economic growth," he said. "I think in the world after 2012 we need to find a better, more sensitive set of mechanisms to deal with this problem."

And we know that 'more sensitive' means less drastic, less enforcable.

Can we get away with that? Was Kyoto perhaps a bit stringent?

It promised a 5.2% cut in CO2 emissions (with loopholes for some of the most polluting industries like transport). The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - hardly a bunch of alarmists - say we need 60%-90% cuts now or climate change will kick in hard.

The prime minister said that legally binding targets to reduce pollution made people "very nervous and very worried".

We can either:
A) take the only route to sustainable living, or
B) encourage global weather patterns to change so that we're unable to feed a serious proportion of humanity within a generation or two and quite possibly make the planet uninhabitable to humans and a significant number of other species within a couple of millennia.

Which one should make you 'very nervous and very worried'?

Thursday, November 03, 2005

more whores & narcoleptic tiddlywinks

A couple of new things to be found elsewhere.

With characteristic eloquence, Jim Bliss wrote a piece on his blog about Brian Eno selling Music For Airports to be the soundtrack for an Orange phones TV ad.

I've taken his point, and most of my previous post about Taylor Mali, and written an article about the use of good music in advertising. It's called The Most Evil Concept Ever.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

There's a newbie in the Other People's Blogs section of my sidebar. Rhythmicginger! is the blog of my companero Adam, the funniest man alive, the prime force behind Radio Savage Houndy Beasty, the greatest drummer I know of and - more relevant for blogging interest - a man who relishes absurdities of language.

Right there in the first post on his blog he lets rip with his failed googlewhacks. I do love it that there are a plural quantity of webpages that you can hit with the phrases he came up with:


narcoleptic tiddlywinks

bamboozling diplodocus

multifarious manhandlers

discombobulated protohominid

pandemic pottymouth

pandemic ululators

ululating masticators

ululating protohominid

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

another whore at the capitalist gang-bang

Claire Fauset is a performance poet of such talent and power that she commonly has audience members in tears. When I first went to her blog, there was a link saying simply 'God'. I had to click it. It took me to the site of Taylor Mali.

I'm largely unfamiliar with slam poetry, but Claire and all others I know of who are involved talk of Mali in these awed, untouchable tones. He wins national poetry slams in America year after year.

Not knowing much about him, my first click was naturally enough to the biog page. It told me how he makes his living these days as a voiceover artist, and was the voice of Burger King.

What? A poet of such passion, honesty, idealism and clear vision as Claire Fauset is in awe of a Burger King voiceover guy? Not just that, but one who is so proud of it that he believes it warrants a mention given a few short paragraphs to describe himself?

Despite Mali's enormous talent and unarguable prowess as a poet and performer, what does it mean if he willingly dresses himself in puppet strings? How can we believe anything he ever says? Not only will he say anything he's paid to say with just as much conviction as he delivers his poetry, but what if he had a point to make that conflicted with the interests of his corporate paymasters? Would you trust him to speak up?

Trust is the real issue here. His voice is not trustworthy. When he so readily says things he doesn't believe, who's to say what parts of what he says can be trusted?

Mali's poems talk of his dayjob as a teacher, proudly declaring

So I finally taught somebody something,
namely, how to change her mind.
And learned in the process that if I ever change the world
it's going to be one eighth grader at a time


Then he goes out, one entire nation of kids at a time, and changes their minds. Any work he may have done about getting people to think for themselves or to sharpen their intelligence is undone millions of times over as he makes them buy junk food, stuff that - as we've seen in Supersize Me - literally makes its consumers stupid.

He talks of how, when challenged by a lawyer to say what he makes, he replies that he 'makes a difference'. He certainly does. He makes people buy things they don't want by lying to them.

Oh, but surely he doesn't make them buy things. They have a choice, don't they?

Burger King, and Mali's other employers, know they will sell a lot more of their product if he does the voiceover. If that were not the case, they would not employ him in the first place. His powers of persuasion, honed on the from-the-heart slam poet stage, are very strong. He does indeed make the audience buy the products he's selling.

He is, his biog says, a 'voiceover artist'. What is the art in 'voiceover artist'? It's the art of sounding enthused, authoritative, knowing, wise, cool or passionate about something when you're really not. It is the art of lying. Not lying for any greater good, but lying to people so they give your paymaster their money and you get a tiny cut of the take.

He says you have to 'speak with authority', but what does it mean if that power and conviction is the same voice that he uses to sell us superfluous consumer goods that we don't need to enrich people we don't like?

Someone who says whatever the corporation pays them to is no longer an artist, they are a billboard. Whatever is paid to be pasted up is what goes up, they have abdicated their believability. The real origin of what they say is not in their heart, but in the advertising executives offices.

Mali does a poem addressing his voiceover work. It is a clever ratatat collage of snippets but it offers no explanation of why he does it, or even much meaning beyond 'I do this because I can'.

In 'What Teachers Make' Mali says ‘if you got this [taps head] then you follow this [taps chest]’.

To the untrained observer, it may seem like the latter gesture indicates the heart. To those who know what Mali does with his time, it’s clear he’s indicating the inside pocket of his jacket where he keeps his wallet.

He's proud of teaching in private schools. Private schools will always find good teachers. If he really wanted to 'make a difference' he'd put a teacher of his enthusiasm and commitment in a public school. Poor kids have as much potential as the rich kids he teaches, but they are offered less motivation and less opportunity. Light is needed where it's darkest, and just one torch can light up a vast darkness.

Taking the easy money of doing adverts is symptomatic of a deeper malaise in an established artist. By surrendering to the pressure to become just another brand, just a saleable commodity, or - less even than that - a mere sales tool for vacuous or actively destructive commodities, they tell us a lot about themselves.

They tell us their work is not paramount to them any longer; their view of the original reasons for doing their work has become obscured; their conscience is gagged; they don't mean enough to themselves any more.

That being so, how can they mean anything to us?


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‘Here’s the deal, folks. You do a commercial, you’re off the Artistic Roll-Call forever. End of story, OK? You’re another corporate fucking shill, you’re another whore at the capitalist gang-bang, and if you do a commercial there’s a price on your head, everything you say is suspect and every word that comes out of your mouth is now like a turd falling into my drink.’
- Bill Hicks

Monday, October 31, 2005

power to the people

Whilst at the Big Green Gathering this summer, I learned about the ecological devastation caused at Cefn Croes wind farm, which opened near Aberystwyth in June.

Wind farms are portrayed as environmentally sound, yet at Cefn Croes they'd drained a peat bog - a rare habitat of undegraded moss which releases massive amounts of CO2 once dried - and trees had been felled as each turbine needed over 60 surrounding acres tree-free.

This week I learned that the controversial Romney Marsh wind farm is to go ahead, with all the attendant carnage for bird life.

And whilst we have to get ourselves off fossil fuels pronto, we cannot switch to wind farms for anything like a full solution.

As George Monbiot explains,

Wind farms, while necessary, are a classic example of what environmentalists call an 'end of the pipe solution.' Instead of tackling the problem - our massive demand for energy - at source, they provide less damaging means of accommodating it.

Or part of it. The Whinash [wind farm] project, by replacing energy generation from power stations burning fossil fuel, will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 178,000 tonnes per year.

This is impressive, until you discover that a single jumbo jet, flying from London to Miami and back every day, releases the climate change equivalent of 520,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. One daily connection between Britain and Florida costs three giant wind farms.

By those figures, even three Romney Marshes wouldn't offset that single jumbo jet.

So, what's to be done if wind farms won't do enough? The most important thing by far is, as Monbiot says, reducing demand. Encouraging energy efficiency would help greatly too. The problem with those measures is they're unprofitable. People consuming less discourages economic growth.

In their 1997 election campaign, Labour promised to remove VAT from energy conservation materials (thermostats, insulation, etc). We were in the ludicrous position of having 5% VAT on fuel and 17.5% efficiency materials, effectively encouraging energy use and penalising conservation.

The tax thing might contravene the EU Sixth VAT Directive but they'd do it anyway, Labour said in opposition, citing the Belgian government as having done precisely that in 1995 with no repercussions whatsoever.

'VAT on the installation of energy saving materials under existing grant schemes, such as the Home Energy Efficiency Scheme, will be cut from 17.5% to 5%in the Spring Budget of 1998,' Gordon Brown told the House of Commons in his pre-budget statement that year, getting a huge cheer from his back benches.

But in the end Labour did nothing of the sort. When challenged about it, Labour's junior scumpig Dawn Primarolo said it wasn't possible because they had to obey the EU Directive they'd promised to contravene.

The matter was brought up again in parliament this year, and Primarolo gave the same response, saying the government had 'a long-standing commitment to pursue an amendment to the EU Sixth VAT Directive to permit a reduced rate of VAT for the purchase of energy-saving materials'.

'Long standing' means they've done fuck all to push it forward and aren't going to start any time soon.

Not expensive enough, doesn't consume enough.

Tony Blair said earlier this year

if we put forward, as a solution to climate change, something which involves drastic cuts in growth or standards of living, it matters not how justified it is, it simply won't be agreed to.

Think what climate change could mean. Think what he means by 'it matters not how justified it is'.

He's recently reiterated the point

The truth is, no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem.

In Blair's party conference speech, he made clear that he was angling to make nuclear energy the solution to the growing energy crisis. Even consuming alternatives like massive efficiency measures and micro-generation (kitting out people with wind generators, solar panels, etc directly on their houses) don't get a mention. He wants a grand, centralised, big profits for big corporations solution.

Faithful ex-Minister of Energy Brian Wilson swiftly agreed about the nuclear plan, and the propaganda campaign builds by the day.

The government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, has recently declared that he cannot give opinions that are 'politically unrealistic', whatever the scientific truth. As he now just gives the government the answers it wants to hear, he too has come out in favour of new nuclear build.

The Science Minister, Lord Sainsbury, tells us that nuclear energy counts not only as low-carbon, but as 'renewable'.

The Blair government's push for new nuclear power stations ignores several crucial factors. Firstly, nukes are of course not renewable. The fuel source is uranium, a rare and finite mineral. Also, the idea that using that source reduces the need for fuel imports is nonsense. Uranium mines do not exist in the UK.

Secondly, they are enormously expensive, several times the present cost of electricity generation. Who's going to pay if we move the majority of power production across to nukes? It's also uninsurable - the cost of cleaning up any accidents would be borne by the taxpayer.

Thirdly, most importantly, it is incredibly dangerous. Even without reactor explosions or meltdowns - the chances of which increase with every new installation that's built - there is the production of waste that's lethal for 20,000 years. That is an almost unimaginable length of time. It is, by an order of magnitude, longer than a culture or even a language lives. There is no way we know of to make the waste safe. But it is being proposed that we vastly increase the quantity we generate and leave a thousand future generations to deal with our mess.

The plain fact is that our way of life is unsustainable, that this generation and its predecessor are blips in humanity and before then nobody needed this huge energy supply.

Furthermore, there is no renewable energy source that can supply our demand. A society that permits passenger aviation and private cars is simply not interested in having sustainable energy.

We have to relocalise our lives, everything from food production to holidays, we have to repair and reuse items instead of landfilling them as soon as they have a cosmetic blemish. We have to understand that perpetual economic growth is not only undesirable but actually impossible. 'Economic growth' is a synonym for 'accelerated consumption of mostly finite resources'. It doesn't take a particularly great mind to work out why you can't indefinitely consume finite resources at an ever increasing rate.

The longer we perpetuate the myth of perpetual economic growth, the harder the crunch will be when it comes and the worse mess we leave behind us. As if climate change wasn't enough, we now wish to bequeath as much nuclear waste as we can create.

"We are not saints, we are elected officials," the politician said. "Our job is to represent, unfairly and with unethical prejudice and forethought, the powerful and influential citizens within our respective constituencies to whom we owe our political careers, trading in the long-term good of the people for short-term material and political gain, for the ill of all. And that's what evil is all about."
-
The Onion

Thursday, October 27, 2005

get up stand up

Just a word on the death of Rosa Parks.

The popular version of her story makes out that she was just a quiet citizen who got tired of being moved on the bus. This is not true. She was a civil rights activist. She was on the bus that day with two friends, both of whom moved when asked. Rosa was told to move or the cops would be called. Her arrest was a deliberate stand.

Nowadays the cause she fought for is so self-evidently right that even the likes of Bush have to pay lip service to her. Let that be a lesson to those who would conflate legality with morality, and a spur to action to those of us who recognise legal immoralities.

I remember after my first arrest being sat in the cell thinking, 'this is it? All those times I held back from what was right, I did so only because I was scared of this? Of sitting in a room reading a book?'

And let us also be clear that the veneration of the likes of Rosa Parks or Nelson Mandela or whoever is often the cause of a distorted and disempowering picture. They could only be figureheads because they had the backing.

As Noam Chomsky said in the documentary Manufacturing Consent

In history books there’s a couple of leaders, George Washington or Martin Luther King or whatever. I don’t want to say that those people are not important, Martin Luther King was certainly important, but he was not the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King can appear in the history books cos lots of people whose names you will never know and whose names are all forgotten were working down in the South.

When you have active activists, and people concerned, and people devoting themselves and dedicating themselves to social change then people like me can appear, and we can appear to be prominent but that’s only because somebody else is doing the work.

My work, whether it’s giving hundreds of talks a year or spending twenty hours a week writing letters or writing books is not directed to intellectuals and politicians. It’s directed to what are called ordinary people. And what I expect from them is in fact exactly what they are; that they should try to understand the world and act in accordance with their decent impulses, and that they should try to improve the world. And many people are willing to do that.

Friday, October 21, 2005

maoist foodstuffs

If you're selling a repulsive foodstuff - such as dairy industry effluent processed into a synthetic goo that looks like it should be on its way to reprocessing at Sellafield rather than heading down your gullet - a good consumer-capitalist would give it a name that implies light, love and even holiness: Angel Delight.

However, if you are to adhere to the Maoist principle explained in the previous post - discourage someone from buying something in order to show you're not telling them about it because you'll profit from a purchase - a Maoist fast food outlet would have to demonstrate their impeccable credentials by naming themselves in Mao's language with words that denote revulsion in ours.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

yoda, aguilera, eminem and mao

I've previously mused on these pages about how Chrisitan websites can be so barking as to make you wonder which ones are real and which are spoofs.

It's not just the monotheists. There's hours of 'are they for real?' fun to be had over at the Maoist Internationalist Movement.

Not for them merely ranting about what they'll do to all us infidels After The Revolution. They give us Maoist reviews of a Star Wars computer game, concluding

All in all, the Cossacks/Knights of the Old Republic is one of the most manipulative pieces of software ever devised. It leeches morality of young minds and prepares them to kill their peers to prevent a revolution. After all... the strong fascist knight shall always win.

Their Eminem: To Be Banned page says

As Communists we are open about our intentions of instituting a dictatorship - the dictatorship of the proletariat. Under socialist government we want to promote revolutionary and progressive culture and squash out old reactionary ideas and behavior. We would not allow fascists to hand out leaflets calling for the gassing of all Jews or the re-institution of chattel slavery. By the same token we would not allow pro-patriarchy groups to hand out leaflets calling for the disenfranchisement of womyn or an end to the right of womyn to divorce their husbands. So why would we allow sexist, and homophobic garbage like Eminem to put out his records?

...All of it should be banned and Eminem should be one of the first people put into re-education camp.

They also want to tell us what they think - and what we should think too - about Christina Aguilera:

Her ideas are the perfect reflection of traditional views of many Amerikan pseudo-feminists, certainly appreciated by bourgeois males: wimmin's liberation amounts to the ability to have orgasms. Probably this is why most Amerikkkan wimmin have no qualms about having multiple partners, but still hesitate to major in math and science

The thing that baffles the casual observer is the review has links to buy Aguilera's albums from Amazon.com. Why would the Maoists be encouraging you to culturally pollute yourself and give profits to such a capitalist behemoth?

There is a reason. Under the Amazon Associates program, if someone clicks a link to Amazon from your site, you get up to 10% of what they spend. Thus, there is a clear incentive for a reviewer to praise the item under review and thereby encourage greater sales and more dosh for themselves.

The Maoists give themselves the hairshirt of only reviewing things they actively hate, thus denying themselves the available revenue and asserting their ideological purity, valiantly upholding the revolutionary communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism despite the onslaught of crap pop music seeking to dissuade them.

Friday, October 14, 2005

you stick around now it may show

From The Independent:

GM Crop 'Ruins Fields For 15 Years'

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor

GM crops contaminate the countryside for up to 15 years after they’ve been harvested, startling new government research shows.

The findings cast a cloud over the prospects of growing the modified crops in Britain, suggesting that farmers who try them out for one season will find fields blighted for a decade and a half.

Financed by GM companies and Margaret Beckett's Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the report effectively torpedoes the Government's strategy for introducing GM oilseed rape to this country.

Ministers have stipulated that the crops should not be grown until rules are worked out to enable them to "co-exist" with conventional ones. But the research shows that this is effectively impossible.

The study, published by the Royal Society, examined 5 sites across England and Scotland where modified oilseed rape has been cultivated, and found significant amounts of GM plants growing even after the sites had been returned to ordinary crops. It concludes that the research reveals "a potentially serious problem associated with the temporal persistence of rape seeds in soil."

The researchers found that 9 years after a single modified crop, an average of two GM rape plants would grow in every square metre of an affected field. After 15 years, this came down to one plant per square metre - still enough to break the EC limits on permissible GM contamination.

Last night Pete Riley, the director of GM Freeze, said; "It is becoming clearer and clearer that it is going to be impossible to grow GM crops in Britain."

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

vivienne westwood

I've got such huge respect for so much of what Vivienne Westwood is and has achieved.

Oh come on, it's just clothes, no sensible person is interested in clothes are they?

If you think that, try going about your day dressed in rubber shorts and your gran's nightie, see if you feel any different and if any of your not-judging-anyone-by-their-appearance friends treat you any different.

When Frank Zappa got some US Marines to dismember a doll on stage, one of the audience shouted 'get those uniforms off the stage'. Zappa replied, 'Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform,and don't you forget it.'

I will be at the front of the queue to agree that fashion obsession is a substitute for having a meaningful focus of attention and that most of what goes on in the world of fashion and textiles is not only meaningless, irrelevant snobbery but incredibly dull-witted too, but that doesn't mean great work and ideas don't come out of it. By the same token, car design doesn't really interest most of us but it takes a measly mind to deny the genius of Alec Issigonis.

For as long as she's been doing it, Westwood has been the most radical prominent thinker in her chosen profession, using her work and position to challenge preconceptions, to be bold and dare us to be equally bold, simultaneously showing up the lavishly praised small minds that saturate the field.

Like Brian Eno she is unashamed of her clear English voice, that slightly posh tone that is actually a declaration of her unpretentiousness, neither aspiring to the aristocratic, nor pretending to be street. It declares an authenticity and honesty in what she says, at least inasmuch as she really means it when she says it.

But every time she does something that amazes, she then does something really stupid to utterly deflate it. It's rather like Prince Philip serving a term as president of WWF whilst being a big hunter: build 'em up then shoot 'em down.

I suspect I like Vivienne Westwood more than she deserves, like someone trying to hold on to their respect for Eno if he suddenly started managing boy bands.

At the unveiling of her autumn/winter 2005 collection, her show notes for the audience said 'The more you consume the less you think'.

What a great slogan, and it's double-plus-great to be saying it to the vacuous superficial style-twats who will have made up a clear majority of the audience.

Unfortunately, it's a tad rich coming from a woman who was in the process of launching her Hardcore Diamonds range of expensive jewellery. She says that the range - featuring £10,000 necklaces and, oh how punk, £400 diamond encrusted safety pins - is 'affordable'.

Hypocrisy isn't a bad thing in itself, but this totally unjoined thinking is impossible to swallow, even for someone like me who really wants to like Westwood.

Of course, wildness of ideas and unpredictable changing of position is common in creative minds, but for some reason if it's a creative woman - think not only Westwood but Bjork and Sinead O'Connor - then rather than point out the inconsistency we tend to dismiss them as hatstand, no matter how great their good work is.

But anyway, in an interview with The Independent last month, Westwood said

The world suffers from three evils: nationalism, which has taken the place of religion; organised lying; and non-stop distraction. The most pernicious of these is non-stop distraction. These three things can be summed up in one word: propaganda.

I want to say to young people that every time you look up a word in the dictionary you are changing the world. Propaganda is about manipulating words and using big, abstract terms to affect people emotionally. Propaganda subverts language. If you look up a word in the dictionary, not only do you start to think more but you are actually fighting propaganda because you are finding out what these words have meant in the past and what they in fact still mean.

Great stuff again. And how does she manifest her avowed wish to see us think for ourselves?

When France had a referendum on the EU Constitution in May, Vivenne was lending her support to the Vote Yes campaign with a stirring appeal to the electorate's powers of intellectual appraisal.

'Don’t bore yourself reading all 800 pages and just vote “yes”. It’s very important,' she said.

The European Union is an idea at odds with itself, so much so that to simply say yes or no to the Constitution is to misunderstand it. Paradoxically, to say 'yes' or 'no' to the constitution is to say yes and no to your ideals, whereas saying 'yes and no' to it is the only consistent position.

But to declare that others should do so too without even knowing what they're saying yes to is to manage the impressive feat of being even more absurd than the yes/no referendum itself, and dollop a big helping of insulting patronisation on top for good measure.

In her autumn/winter collection there's a T-shirt with PROPAGANDA in massive Frankie Says style letters.



From that Independent interview:

I wanted to reactivate my World's End shop. I have so many ideas and I don't like letting them go so I thought I'd do them in different fabrics and sell them there, maybe for half price, you know, cutting out the middle man. I wanted it to be for kids, affordable, so I did some T-shirts too.

Affordable; that word again. For the kids. A £65 T-shirt.

I think we must know different kids.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

cunning linguist

I was recently given a bottle of beer from the Faroe Islands.



Look, I know the Faroes have the enormous seabird population you'd expect of a bunch of islands in the middle of the ocean, and I understand that seabirds will therefore have a sizeable place in the Faroese psyche, but that thing on the label is quite blatantly not a gull. It's a sheep.

The front label weirdness is, however, dwarfed by the quote on the back of the bottle.



It seems to rhyme doesn't it? I never knew John Lennon spoke Faroese. But even if he didn't and it's a translated quote, how utterly bizarre is it to quote him on beer?

Most tantalising is the question it raises, what quote is it?

Faroese, as it happens, is a North-Germanic language, part of the same family as Danish, Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian and Nor. Full respect to the people for keeping their language alive with a population of only a few thousand and centuries of pressure to change to the language of their Danish colonisers.

But it doesn't help me with the Lennon quote thing. No online translator I know gives Faroese to English.

I do love online translators. It's a great idea, and a valiant effort has been made in making them, but languages just aren't the mechanistic blueprints that devices like Babel Fish imply.

Languages are nuanced, they are the product of the cultures that invented and speak them, they do not simply overlay one another. There are several areas that illustrate this clearly.

Swearing tells you a lot about the taboos of a society. There are no swearwords in Japanese. The culture puts so much emphasis on social correctness and politeness that swearing is simply impossible. Whereas there are certain forms of address in some Australian Aboriginal languages where it is impossible not to be swearing.

Welsh had its swearing purged as the church brought its influence and became all but the custodian of the written language. You have to do elaborate constructions, but even then it's usually biblical and translates as 'you ugly devil from hell'.

Their word 'cont', clearly from the same root as 'cunt' is a friendly word for women, such as your mum might call the woman next door. My mum shouting over the fence, 'hey you cunt, how's it going' would create an altogether different atmosphere.

Another area of evidence is where a language has nicked words from another language. A concept is so sudden and new, it hasn't been in the culture so the language needs a swift off-the-peg word. It amuses me no end that the English have had to pinch words for chic, joie de vivre, and zeitgeist, being the frumpy miserable stick-in-the-mud neophobes that we are.

Online translators can actually help to give you a feel for how different languages are constructed. The best way to illustate this is to take a piece of writing you know well and understand, translate it into a language, then back into English.

You always get some accurate stuff, some comedy gobbledegook, and then a few bits that really show nature the language/culture.

Let's take the first and last verses of Ace Of Spades.

If you like to gamble I tell you I'm your man,
You win some, lose some, all the same to me,
The pleasure is to play, it makes no difference what you say,
I don't share your greed, the only card I need is
The Ace Of Spades

Pushing up the ante, I know you've got to see me,
Read them and weep, the dead man's hand again,
I see it in your eyes, take one look and die,
The only thing you see, you know it's gonna be,
The Ace Of Spades

Put it into French and back again and it's really quite similar, as you'd expect from us both being Roman occupied lands, and then England becoming part of the Norman empire.

(Killer fact time: To this day, an Act of Parliament only becomes law in the UK once it's had 'Royal Assent'. This entails the monarch's representative standing up in the House of Lords and declaring in Old Norman French that the monarch approves of the law; 'le roy le veult' if we've got a king, or 'la reine le veult' if we've got a queen. We're still partially the unfree subjects of the Norman empire).

Anyway, from centuries of colonial despotism to Motorhead:

If you like to play me you say that I am your man,
you gain some, lose some, all the same one with me,
the pleasure must play, it does not make any difference what you say,
I do not share your avarice, the only chart that I have need is
the ace of the thimbles

Raising the ante one, I know you have to see me,
read them and cry, the hand of the man still died,
I see it in your eyes, take a glance and stamps,
the only thing which you see, you know that it will be,
the ace of the thimbles

German has, as one might expect, a greater air of precision in the language:

If you may play me explain to you the fact that I am your man
wins you some, loses some, all same to me,
who pleasures are,
it plays differentiates between none that you to say,
I divides not its having craze, the only one map,
which is I Karo As

Ante pushing up, white I, you, me see to have,
it read and, the dead hand of the man again,
I sees it in your eyes, takes a view and a cube,
the only thing, which you see, you knows to cry that it will be,
Karo As

Italian gives us:

If appreciate to play them you say that he is your man,
you gain some, you lose some, all the same ones to me,
the pleasure you must play,
it not fairies difference that what you say,
I not shared yours greed, the only card I have need of are
the ace of the staples

Pushing towards the high the ante, know have got to see it,
that you read to them and that you cry,
the hand of the out of order man still,
I you see it in your eyes, you take to a look and dice,
the only thing you see, you sapete that is going to be,
the ace of the staples

What it would be in Faroese is, as yet, unknown.