Wednesday, June 9, 2004

Legacy 

David Aaronovitch: "Reagan's legacy to the world may be the fallen wall, but it is also the third-world landmine."

Comment On This Page

Tuesday, June 8, 2004

She works for me 

The energetic people behind FaxYourMP, DowningStreetSays and other great political sites have launched TheyWorkForYou. Like another south London weblogger, Tessa Jowell works for me. I, however, like Tessa.

Transit of Venus 

I tried to see the transit of Venus this morning with a home-made pinhole viewer, projecting the image onto another piece of board. Perhaps my fabrication methods were too crude, but I ended up with a poor image of the sun and nothing really visible.

Fortunately, the European Southern Observatory came to my rescue. Lots of wonderful images and QuickTime videos to watch for this once-in-a-lifetime (excepting 2012) event.

Monday, June 7, 2004

How the Patriot Act is being used 

One of the more obscure things I subscribe to is a book arts mailing list. Most of the postings are on issues like archive-quality paste or finding bookbinders in Portland. Today, however, came something very different from a book artist called Beverly Schlee:

"As some of you know, I make artists books as a member of a group called Critical Art Ensemble. Besides books, we also make videos and do performance art. Lately, the topic of much of our artwork has been to make people aware of genetically modified food. Recently, Hope Kurtz, who wrote most of the text for the books, died suddenly of heart failure. Her husband, Steve, is also in the group, called 911. The paramedics saw some of the props for our performance art in his house, including petri dishes and a machine that analyzes food for genetically modified ingredients, and called the FBI. The FBI, armed with the Patriot Act, searched Steve's house, office, took his artwork, his wife's body, and even locked up his cat. Steve is a professor of art at SUNY Buffalo. He is going to be indicted before a grand jury on June 15 on charges of possessing materials that can be used for bioterrorism. The rest of the group has been subpoenaed. So far, I have not, but the FBI was in my neighborhood on Saturday, asking the neighbors about me. The whole story can be read at caedefensefund.org."

If I didn't have a good idea of how perverse the Justice Department seems to be these days, I'd think this posting was a particularly unusual piece of agitprop performance art.

After reading Richard Clark, it's quite clear there is a vast amount the government should be doing to combat terrorism. Pursuing the Critical Art Ensemble shows that instead of concentrating on the important tasks, the FBI is sinking lower than the days when they hounded such potent threats to American society as my father (see below) for his anti-war activities.

Postscript: The New York Times has good coverage of the case.

D-Day + 60 

I spent a good portion of yesterday watching the coverage of the D-Day commemorations. There's no need to add to the encomia for the soldiers who made the decisive step in the liberation of Europe 60 years ago. But I have a personal reflection.

My father was one of those soldiers, landing at Utah Beach in the first wave as a first lieutenant in the 4th Infantry Division. It was always clear to me that his participation in D-Day and many subsequent battles in the Second World War was a matter of great pride. But, perhaps characteristic of his generation (and certainly characteristic of my father), he rarely, rarely talked about his experiences. It was natural reticence, but I suspect now it was also because the experience remained too overwhelming to really talk about.

I knew about D-Day, I knew he became captain of his company when his captain was killed by a sniper in Normandy, I knew he was wounded later in the Normandy campaign, recovered in a hospital near Oxford, and rejoined for the liberation of Paris, the Battle of the Bulge and, ultimately, the liberation of Germany. I have his Bronze Star and Purple Heart medals. But details or anecdotes were scarce.

My father went to the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day landings, twenty years ago. I remember him saying that he thought it would be the last of the big ceremonies, since many of them wouldn't survive until the fiftieth. I now feel an extraordinary loss for not having seized the opportunity to go along with him in 1984.

The numbers I watched parading yesterday were, as my father predicted, far fewer than 20 years ago or even ten years ago. My father died in 1990. Although in my lifetime he was a great anti-war campaigner, particularly against the American folly in Vietnam, his small role in ridding the world of fascism was still a signal achievement. At his request, he was buried with a military tombstone, as was his right as a proud veteran.

Friday, May 28, 2004

Wandering lonely as a cloud (with family in tow) 

I'm away in the Lake District next week, so I will be unconnected to computers and this weblog.

Brilliant parody 

Felix Salmon does a perfect parody of The New York Times's fluffy piece on weblogging. "Writing about blogs is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few."

Thursday, May 27, 2004

MTV and the Core-Gap thesis 

Thomas Barnett, purveyor of the Core-Gap thesis, has become a voluminous weblogger and a must read for those interested in geopolitical instability.

First gem from today:

"Good tidbit from my old Pentagon boss Art Cebrowski: he says he was invited recently to brief Bill Gates and a host of his business friends from around the world. He gives them the Core-Gap thesis and describes the military-market nexus (the Decalogue). The response? As always, the business world gets that stuff intuitively. That's why I say this new vision I push is not mine but the world’s: it’s a reality I capture, not a dream I concoct. It’s happening and will happen within the Defense Department not because people like myself advocate it, but because the environment simply demands it from us.

"And if you think that makes me an economic determinist, you’re right. Doesn’t mean I ignore irrational actors. In fact, it just means they are naturally cast as the enemy in this grand historical process. To not 'get' this reality is simply to be irrational on some level, unless you think it’s some grand accident of history that the global economy has developed and spread around the planet in the manner that it has over the last century and a half."

And slightly more way out, on the relationship between MTV and globalisation: "When MTV steps out ahead of the pack (but not much, considering Bravo and Showtime) to announce a new network aimed at gays, it pushes the envelope not just within our borders, but ultimately -- through its inevitable extension -- throughout the Core. And yes, like McDonald’s or other key content 'global' networks, the spread of MTV (and all its regional variants) around the world is a decent proxy measure of globalization’s advance—namely, the extent of the Core."

Server change 

I've changed the host of Davos Newbies, and there are a few problems as the change propagates through the Domain Name Server system. I hope normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

A challenge to Alpine climbers 




I could spend days staring at the extraordinary photos coming from the Mars Express. Olympus Mons is three times the height of Mt Everest and at its summit the caldera (above) is up to 3km deep.

Terrorism tracks the constitutional order it attacks 

Via John Robb, this observation from Philip Bobbitt, author of The Shield of Achilles: "Terrorism tracks the constitutional order it attacks. National liberation movements tracked the 20th century nation-state. Movements like al Qaeda (networked, outsourcing, providing infrastructure but not much else, decentralized) track the 21st century market state."

Better honesty 

The New York Times's mea culpa for its pre-war coverage of the Iraq crisis shows once again a particularly admirable side of the best of American journalism.

"We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged – or failed to emerge."

The Times does, of course, take itself immensely seriously. There's little of the inventiveness and fun that the better British newspapers display. But British papers are worryingly loath to admit to their own errors.

An excellent piece by Toby Moore in the Financial Times Magazine (subscribers only) dissected the problem. It isn't only The Mirror's faked Iraq photos, according to Moore. He lists a number of incidents in The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph where fabrications were uncovered and then swept under the carpet.

Honesty and openness is a far better policy if papers want to retain any of their readers' trust.

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

More bad news 

Stuart Hughes writes that the International Institute for Strategic Studies annual report reaches the following conclusions:

Al-Qaeda has fully reconstituted and set its sights firmly on the US and its closest western allies in Europe.

Al-Qaeda must be expected to keep trying to develop more promising plans for terrorist operations in North America and Europe, potentially involving weapons of mass destruction.

There appears to be little chance in the immediate future that the security vacuum that has dominated Iraq since liberation can be filled.

The war against terror and the Iraq conflict has led to diplomatic underinvestment in the Middle East peace process.

And to think that I was puzzled today as to why I was feeling a bit gloomy.

Return to Long Bow 

For the politically interested of a certain generation, reading Fanshen was one of the rites of passage. I haven't a clue how William Hinton's book would stand up to a rereading in light of what we all now know about the tyranny of the Mao years in China. But Hinton's life story, as recounted in The Guardian's obituary, certainly bears the telling.

Here's Hinton in rural China in 1947: "Over the course of the next year, he gathered a thousand pages of notes, packed with earthy detail, on the struggle against landlords -- and between different strata of peasants -- in the village of Long Bow. Much later, he would recall 'the lice, the fleas and all the hardships, and eating that terrible gruel out of an unwashed bowl while a young girl lay dying of tuberculosis'."

Old age doesn't seem to have dimmed his involvement in rural issues. "In 1995 [aged 76!], Hinton moved to Mongolia with his third wife Katherine Chiu, when she was appointed to the Unicef office in Ulan Bator. He lectured on no-till farming -- the technique of leaving the soil untouched from planting to harvest, which he had developed on his own farm in Pennsylvania -- and proudly announced that he had 'grown a prolific vegetable garden for home use'."