Red Ensign

Terrorism in the UK

2006-08-11T00:57:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-09T12:27:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-07T16:02:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-05T14:28:00.000-07:00

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...

2006-08-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

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...

2006-08-01T13:43:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-01T13:30:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-07-29T02:43:00.000-07:00

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.

Who watches the watchmen?

2006-07-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

I don't know whether to file this as funny or sad....

Two Oakland police officers working undercover at an anti-war protest in May 2003 got themselves elected to leadership positions in an effort to influence the demonstration, documents released Thursday show.
The department assigned the officers to join activists protesting the U.S. war in Iraq and the tactics that police had used at a demonstration a month earlier, a police official said last year in a sworn deposition.

Funny, because its reminiscent of how the East German opposition organisations would be so riddled with government spies that often there were more of the agents than legitimate members.

Sad, because its a dark day for democracy and freedom when the government feels it has to infiltrate protest groups. Its one thing to keep an eye on the protests, its another to infiltrate the group with spies.

... and its something altogether when the spies get themselves placed in positions of power in the group.... positions where they can manipulate the group to their own ends, either emasculating protest, or enciting illegal acts. Thats something that happens in "other countries". It shouldn't be happening in the bastions of democracy and freedom.

Fortunately there are some voices....

2006-07-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

From James Wolcott:

I feel confident that if U.S. support for the Israeli campaign results in violent blowback, our politicians, pundits, and editorialists will once again don the American bridal veil of innocence, and profess bewilderment that anyone would want to harm us.

Strange silence from America

2006-07-27T09:31:00.000-07:00

I've noticed a strange silence from many of the big-name American left-wing blogs about the war in Lebanon... some, like firedoglake, Dailykos and Americablog act as though nothing is going on, while others like Eschaton and the Poor Man Institute wash their hands of it, arguing that there are more important wars going on (e.g., the Ethiopan incursion into Somalia) though strangely finding plenty of space to talk about the Leiberman vs. Lamont race in Conneticut as though Leiberman is actually someone relevant anymore.

I don't want to speculate on why the American left (at least the ones I've noticed) are being so quiet, but I would hope that they realize that US made weapons bought with US military aid dollars are killing Lebanese civilians, and that as far as the rest of the Arab world is concerned, Israeli foreign policy and US foreign policy are joined at the hip. Unless they make some sort of noise, the world (for right or wrong) will view the US left as complicit.

Ginger Beer

2006-07-27T07:07:00.000-07:00

Hot summer days call for ginger beer, and with the heatwave showing no signs of letting up, I've decided to try and brew my own.... yes, brew... as in sugar and yeast, not ginger flavoured syrup and artificial carbonation.

For centuries true ginger beer was fermented in much the same way 'real' beer was - it brewed quickly, could be done in small containers, and didn't require any aging like 'true' beers. All you needed was sugar, water, ginger, and ginger-beer plant... the latter being a complex mixture of yeast and bacteria that was kept in a jar and 'fed' regularly much like sourdough starter. By the Victorian age, just about every household had some and ginger beer was a regular part of everyday life, much like coke and pepsi are today.

Unfortunately, times changed, tastes changed, and new laws regulating the home production of alcohol came into effect, and by the 1930's, home production of ginger beer had ceased and the last ginger-beer plant had died out. Its now no longer possible to make the same ginger beer the Victorians did, but fortunately a close approximation can be made by using regular brewers yeast instead.

The other side effect of the decline of ginger beer is that the recipes got lost. True, the basic ingredients were always the same - sugar, water, ginger, yeast - but different families and different areas added their own local touch, often including other plant and fruits (e.g., dandelion, lemon, rhubarb), varying the brewing time, and using different amounts or types of sugar. Do any search for ginger beer recipes on the web and you soon find that no two recipes are the same.

For my own, I did a fairly basic recipe:

10L water
200 grams diced ginger
4 tbsp lemon juice (2 lemons equiv)
1 kg white sugar
brewers yeast.

Boil the sugar, ginger and lemon (to dissolve the sugar and sterilize the ginger), top up in brew bucket to 10 L, cool to 20-25 degrees, then add yeast and wait. Some authorities recommended waiting only a day and then bottling, others gave it three days. Personally, one day seems a bit short... the yeast won't stop fermenting just because they are now in a bottle, and you run the risk of a dangerously high buildup of CO2 (think exploding bottles). Wait too long and the yeast will run through most of the sugar by the time they get bottled, and you won't have any carbonation (unless you 'prime' the bottles with sugar). I'm guessing 3 days is a happy medium and will take a chance on that.

I'll post in three days how it turns out.

-Red Ensign-

Born on the First of July

2006-07-26T17:19:00.000-07:00

Dammit!

Harper is now wanting to reconsider who is a 'true' Canadian... Personally, I thought it was very simple. If you have a Canadian passport, or a certificate of citizenship, you are a Canadian citizen and your government (the people who work for YOU!) should be there to help you in case everything turns pear-shaped overseas and you need to escape.

But Harper has other ideas... and if you are like me and live abroad, you may find yourself on some dock having a debate with a civil servant from foreign affairs on the equivelance of your passport while shells burst overhead.

Canada still has a good reputation overseas... I can't count the number of times that some yob wanting to pick a fight with a yank has suddenly become my best drinking buddy on finding out I come from north of the border... and I'm worried that Harpers desire to hook his wagon to the failing Bush train is going to trash that reputation and the goodwill it provides. Canadians abroad are some of the best diplomats for our country, and now that we will need them more than ever, a decision to review citizenship for us ex-pats will mean less of us will look to moving overseas, less foreigners will come in contact with us, and our good reputation may become a thing of the past.

Something that won't help us stranded Canadians when the rescue ship sails off without us.

Rest in Peace

2006-07-26T14:45:00.000-07:00

They have identified the dead Canadian soldier as Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener, a 20 year veteran of the Canadian Forces and a member of the Princess Pats.

Harper is saying that he is "saddened" by the death, but believes it was an accident.

Draw your own conclusions.

Ugh... this wasn't supposed to be a political site...

2006-07-26T14:27:00.000-07:00

Somewhere between Norway and the UK I lost the login and password to my old site, Thinking for Food... now that I have some time on my hands, this was to be a revival. Of course, the lack of continuity is annoying... there is some good stuff on Thinking, at least, if your interested in obscure invertebrates.

Ah well, visit the old site or look up the animal that inspired it all.

sigh

2006-07-26T14:19:00.000-07:00

This is what you get when Fox news is beamed into your country.

Canadians back Israel

Font: * * * * Mike De Souza, CanWest News Service
Published: Tuesday, July 25, 2006
OTTAWA -- Strong support among Canadians for recent Israeli combat actions in Lebanon highlights the divide between Quebec and the rest of the country, a new poll has revealed.

The survey, conducted online by Ipsos-Reid for CanWest News Service and Global National, found that 64 per cent of Canadians believed Israel's military action in Lebanon was either somewhat or completely justified, while 57 per cent of Quebecers believed the Israeli response was "not at all justified."

The text of my letter

2006-07-26T09:35:00.000-07:00

I invite all other ex-pat Canadians to write to our only representative in government and remind him that we depend on our reputation for fairness and that we would hope our government is there for us in a crisis.

Mackay.P@parl.gc.ca
Dear Mr. Mackay,

I am disturbed by the recent statements by Mr Harper supporting the Israeli invasion and bombardment of Lebanon, particularly given the 50,000 Lebanese-Canadians who are in danger and the recent and apparently deliberate bombing of a UN mission in which a Canadian soldier was killed. I am also disgusted that despite the death of a Canadian soldier, there has been no official statement by Mr. Harper acknowledging the soldiers sacrifice. As a Canadian who frequently has to work abroad, I have found that our countries long and proud tradition of international fairness and peace-keeping has immense currency in dealings in foreign countries. I would hate to see this international reputation destroyed by Mr Harpers short-sighted attempt to gain cheap political points with Mr. Bush, and would remind both you and him that 5 years of linked foreign policy has failed to gain Mr. Blair any concessions. I would also like to think that in a situation where Canadian lives are endangered, your priorities would be in protecting Canadians, not in encouraging the very people threatening them. Or are the 50,000 Lebanese-canadians in Lebanon not 'real' Canadians in your eyes?

Sincerely,

-The Red Ensign-

Has Blair taught you nothing?

2006-07-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

In a fit of stupidity, my country is trashing its long standing tradition of fairness and is backing Israels invasion of Lebanon... clearly an attempt by Stephan Harper to latch onto some of that Bush goodwill that Blair has seen so much of recently...

...maybe if Harper is really good, Bush will say "yo, Harper" at the next softwood lumber talks.

Anyway, I wrote a nice little letter to the minister of foreign affairs to remind him that 50,000 Canadians are currently in Lebanon so it might be a good thing not to encourage the Israelis to kill them. I probably should have sent it sooner though... they've already killed a Canadian soldier in what appears to be a deliberate and sustained attack on an unarmed UN outpost.

-Red Ensign-

The Red Ensign!

2006-07-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

First post is always the hardest, mostly since no one ever reads it.