Terrorism in the UK

I really hope that the latest terrorism scare, of mad bombers with explosive liquids in their hand-luggage, turns out to be true.... I really hope that this isn't another Forest Gate fiasco and that some innocent people have been fitted up by dodgy tipsters and a police force desperate for results... or that some kids talking large on myspace.com haven't been transformed in the minds of the police into international terrorists bend on destroying the Western World.

If I seem a bit cynical about these events, its because we've been through it before... the Menezes shooting, Forest Gate, Red Mercury... and in the background, the constant exhortation to give up our rights, our freedoms, our privacy... give up the very fundamentals of our Western Democracy that we are supposed to be defending from the ravenous hordes of Islamic fascism in the name of homeland security.

We aren't, as Reid put it, facing "the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of World War Two"... we never demonized our Irish populaton throughout twenty years of 'the troubles', we never made voicing support for communism illegal despite 50 years of the cold war and the constant threat of thermonuclear death from the skies. We don't need to remake this country into some surveillance society with ID cards, cameras, and car monitors to track our every move in order to defeat terrorism.... good basic police work and an unwillingness to embark on imperial adventures abroad would do far more good in protecting the citizens of the United Kingdom.

Something amply demonstrated today, if it turns out there really was a plot to blow up british airlines.

The politics of abortion

Big Blue Wave, the Canadian Blog Exchanges resident anti-abortionist, recently posted about a US bill to ban abortion that everyone, including its most fervant supporters, knows is going to fail... as she puts it, "I strongly doubt it will pass, as this is the House that wanted to fund embryonic stem cell research."

Now for many of us who have had first hand experience with the religious right (for myself, 5 years spent in the American midwest) this is a pretty standard political tactic... get elected on a wave of single-issue voting by promising to fight abortion - but once you are in power, churn out bills that have no possibility of being passed in order to keep the voters happy while using your post to pass laws that hurt (economically) the very people who elected you.

The anti-abortion wing of the US government has no interest in actually banning abortion - they would lose the very cause that gets them elected every four years. Take any population of anti-abortionists and you find that they are not all raving fundies, but can come from a range of backgrounds, have a range of comfort zones when it comes to abortion, and have often very different reasons for opposing abortion. What unites them is an inability to consider a candate in favor of abortion as electable... in much the same way that you and I would consider a pro-torture candidate as unacceptable, no matter what his other views.

I'm often surprised by how the anti-abortion lobby is unable to realize that they are being taken for a ride... if the political right wing seriously wanted to ban abortion, they would have done so in the 80's under Reagan. Twenty five years since the Reagan revolution began, all they have achieved is small concessions, while the main prize remains as elusive as ever. The result is an Orwellian litany of broadcasts from 'official sources' (Agape Press, for one) about the continuing battle, listing small victories here and there, pressing the faithful for more support, more money, more votes, and promising them that victory is just around the corner. But Oceania will never defeat Eurasia, the battles will never end, and the faithful of a new generation will waste their time, energy, and money fighting for a cause their own leaders don't believe in.

As an aside, I found it interesting that in reply to a comment of mine, Blue Wave cited Pat Robertson as an example of a virtuous defender of the faith... I suspect she is unaware of Pat Robertsons support for Charles Taylor, the bloody former of ruler of Liberia, in exchange for gold and diamond mines. I cannot imagine that a woman so concerned about the fate of people in their first nine months would condone Pat Robertsons support for a man best known for having womens and childrens hands cut off. If she is aware, I can only repeat that people will only start taking the anti-abortion lobby seriously when they start showing the same degree of concern for a person after they are born as they seem to show for a person in the first nine months since conception.

Speak Truth to Power

I'm not a big fan of Galloway, but this man demolished in 8 minutes the mealy-mouthed excuses our leaders have been foisting on us since this conflict began.

A must see (courtesy of pickled politics).

Skål

Unfiltered drinking water is something you expect in India or Africa, but in Norway, one of the most modern countries in the world? Last year I was floored to find out the water I had been drinking for 2 years in Bergen was unpurified... fortunately only figuratively. Over a thousand Norwegians were floored literally from the Giardia epidemic that swept the city.

Bergen has since installed filtration systems, but many other Norwegians are still drinking hazardous water, resulting in 2,600 cases of water-based infections in a country of only 4 million. Is it any wonder that Norwegians drink so heavily? Its safer!

(I should add as an aside, when Bergen was in the throes of the Giardia epidemic and warnings were going out from the government not to drink the water, English language versions of the warning were not released until a week after the Norwegians were all informed.... and this despite a large foreign population in Bergen. This should give prospective emigrants an idea of how the government values the non-Norwegian portion of its population.)

If you can't attack the message, attack the messenger...

This is an old tactic in the US, but its still disturbing to see it being done in the UK:

A right-wing British website which claims that the mainstream media coverage of the war in the Lebanon has been anti-Israeli and, by implication, pro-Hezbollah, has launched a fierce assault on the veracity of major international news agencies.



It accused photographers from agencies such as Associated Press and Reuters of not being "too fussy" about "adding to the shock value" of pictures which showed bodies being removed from the rubble in Qana. The burden of the complaint was that the photographers had been guilty of staging events for greater effect and adduced as evidence a sequence of date stamps on their picture captions.

I sense that the right-wing propaganda machine is getting a bit desperate in its defence of the indefencible.... they can't deny the dead children at Qana, and the 'human shields' and 'they are all Hezbollah' argument has lost traction, so now they are complaining that the whole thing is a Hezbollah photo-op by deliberately mis-understanding the role of time stamps in wire photos and claiming that the differing time stamps indicate the photos of Qana were staged.

Its an argument that won't change any minds... whether or not Hezbollah had any hand in helping the photographers get a photo (and its clear from the article and the AP that they did not) it doesn't change the fact that an Israeli bombardment killed 56 civilians including 34 children. This is purely a rationalization for those who can't imagine that Israel can do anything wrong, and are desperately trying to view every civilian killed by the IDF as somehow anyone elses fault but that of the invading Israeli army.

George, Tony, meet Stephen...

The Globe and Mail is showing that only 32% of Canadians approve of Harpers stance on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon...

Maybe he should have looked at Bush's and Blair's poll numbers before signing on to the neo-con dream....

Beery goodness

While the ginger beer has been bubbling away in the fermenter, I've been looking through more recipes. They basically come down to two types of ginger beer... low-alcohol over-carbonated, and high alcohol... depending on when the beer is bottled.

The low-alcohol versions are using the fermentation as a method to carbonate the drink... the amount of alcohol produced is going to be negligable as the fermentation is stopped early, and the drink will be sweeter as a result. After about a day of fermentation, the ginger beer is bottled and then soon after refridgerated... this stops further fermentation and prevents bottles from exploding from too much CO2 buildup.

Personally, I wanted to try a higher alcohol ginger beer so I ran the fermentation to completion (4 days) using brewers yeast and then topped up the bottles with a little sugar for carbonation after bottling... the result is a little drier, more alcoholic, and unlikely to explode even when kept at room temperature.

10 litres of Red Ensign ginger beer, for around two pounds worth of sugar and ginger. Why would I ever shop at Morrisons again?

Were the Canadians a target?

There is a credible argument going around that the UN post was deliberately targetted because they would have seen an Israeli flanking movement deep into Lebanon. If true, rather than the 'accident' that Harper is calling it, this would be a cold-blooded and deliberate murder of a Canadian serviceman. Given the disgustinly mealymouthed response by our Prime Minister, and his willingness to let the Israeli army investigate itself, I don't expect we will ever find out the truth.

You can read more analysis at Blood and Treasure and the Yorkshire Ranter.