A Different Drummer

Among the myriad of September 11 conspiracy theories, one such theory is based on the idea that BBC News, among many others, reported that the third building (known as WTC 7) had fallen down long before it really did. Or something like that - I don't pay much attention to 911 conspiracy theories, and I'm not about to start now...

To respond to the growing referencing of BBC World's reporting of 911 in conspiracy circles, the News Editor of the BBC World service has written a posting on the BBC Editors blog, explaining that the BBC is not part of some grand 911 conspiracy. Whatever. The interesting, and pretty unbelievable thing for me, is actually in another story altogether, revealed in his post:

"4. We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy). So if someone has got a recording of our output, I'd love to get hold of it. We do have the tapes for our sister channel News 24, but they don't help clear up the issue one way or another."

Am I reading this correctly, that BBC has lost all the tapes it has from its 911 broadcasting? The most important "live" televised event of the 21st Century, probably one of the most important days to ever be covered so thoroughly on news TV - and they are asking the readers of their blogs if they have any tapes of what they broadcast?

This just soundly unbelievably incompetent. More than a cock-up, it sounds like a major major disaster. How can this happen? I would have imagined that this type of stuff is archived 6 different ways - especially in the digital age. Amazing....

Welcome to Egypt, random animal rights fuckwit:

"A man dressed in a bright yellow chicken suit protesting against cruelty to animals outside a fried chicken outlet in downtown Cairo was knocked down and had his chicken head yanked off by restaurant staff before being hustled away by police, witnesses said......

As photographers and bystanders crowded around Baker and another PETA activist, Nadia Montasser, a scuffle broke out and Baker was knocked down by KFC employees yelling, “He’s not an Egyptian!” which they subsequently proved by removing his chicken head....."

Never get between an Egyptian and their dinner, especially if you are a random khawaga (foreigner) acting like a cock (no pun intended).

"Israel is negotiating with the United States for permission to fly over Iraq as part of a plan to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.

To conduct surgical air strikes against Iran's nuclear programme, Israeli war planes would need to fly across Iraq. But to do so the Israeli military authorities in Tel Aviv need permission from the Pentagon." (The Daily Telegraph)

Thank god Iraq has regained its freedom and national dignity. Must have been a bitch back in the days when it had a say in whether its own airspace could be used to start WWIII...

"In a statement released Feb. 18, Ash Wednesday, KFC said its president, Gregg Dedrick, sent a personal letter to the pope asking for a papal blessing for the KFC's new Fish Snacker Sandwich, noting that the fast-food item “is ideal for American Catholics who want to observe Lenten season traditions while still leading their busy, modern lifestyles.”

The company’s statement noted that Vatican officials confirmed receipt of the request concerning the $0.99 (USD) sandwich, adding that KFC 'is hopeful to get the pope's blessing this Lenten season.' "

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is one of the best writers going around at the moment. His flaying of the Bush Administration's proposed 2008 budget is fantastic - the perfect balance of funny, righteously furious and right-on-the-mark analysis. Check it out.....

"Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period......

...That's not only bad government, it's bad capitalism. It makes legalized bribery and political connections more important factors than performance and competition in the corporate marketplace. Beyond that, it's just plain fucking offensive to ordinary people. It's one thing to complain about paying taxes when those taxes are buying a bag of groceries once a month for some struggling single mom in eastern Kentucky. But when your taxes are buying a yacht for some asshole who hires African eight year-olds to pick cocoa beans for two cents an hour ... I sure don't remember reading an excuse for that anywhere in the Federalist Papers."

The Australian government has made a truly enlightened decision - no seriously - an announced that they will phase out old fashioned incandescant light bulbs within three years, to be replaced by energy efficient compact fluorescents. This is being quoted as expecting to reduce CO2 emissions by 800,000 tons per year - which isnt that much, but its a decent old chunk - the equivelant to the total amount put out by Eritrea or Belize.

This is not the biggest move, but its a smart, obvious low hanging fruit to be picked. Everyone should do it.

This also fits well with my general feeling towards sustainability. Pushing sustainability as a "punishment" - you cant have this, do less of that - just will not work. It might even be the truth, but it will not achieve the intended goal. Sustainability should be associated with a better deal, not a worse one (and no, not a better deal in the broader, intangible sense of "saving the planet"). Better in terms of just a plain better moment to moment experience.

Things that are efficient and well designed and don't belch and burn and crank and generally chugg along like industrial revolution era machinery are cool. Silent, smooth, clean, smart things are cool. Burning huge piles of coal or massive volumes of natural gas isnt just bad for the environment. Its dumb and ugly. Nuclear, wind, geothermic power.....they are cool for way more interesting and important reasons than that they reduce greenhouse emmissions.

Little things like light bulbs are important because they are such everyday visualisations of the technology that surrounds us. While they are still just filaments heated white-hot by electricity, pretty much as Edison designed them, it says something. Now look at the insides, and the outside, of a compact fluorescent bulb. You'll know what I'm talking about. Just plain cooler.

Anyhow, hats off to the Aussie government on this one. I wouldnt have expected it, coming from them. Even if it is some cynical political manouvering or whatever, it is still great.

The rantings of some crazy man with a beard on Al Jazeera? Nah.

Its from a statement issued in the name of Ben Bridges, a US Republican Party member in the Georgia state parliament.

It is talking about the heretic fantasy that the earth revolves around the sun. This is so awesome. It just doesn't get any better.

Malta linked to Iraqi insurgency - apparently, sketchy Maltese businesspeople have shipped over 500,000 guns and 10 million rounds of ammunition to Iraq in recent years.

My current obsession with the imminent bombing of Iran takes second place to the real priority - dont bomb Malta! Leave them alone, they have such pretty accents and solid Mediterranean sensibilities. No blood for pastizzi!

p.s I can't make a post like this today without sending some big time props to Thea, who moves to Algeria today. Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, Algeria - she is an unstoppable force of living-in-amazing-places! Check out her flat out unbelievable photostream on flickr, and keep your eyes on her blog to find out more about life in Algiers.

Say what you will about Hugo Chavez, but he knows how to dish the insults.

I really think that describing George Bush as "More dangerous than a monkey with a razor blade" is a perfect, beautifully descriptive analogy. Spot on. Anyone know if this is a common turn of phrase in Spanish? Never heard it before in English...I laughed out loud when I first read it.

It goes right up there with Clive James' comment on Arnold Schwarzenegger, that Arnie resembles "a brown condom stuffed with walnuts". Abstract but laser-accurate, I wish I could come up with lines like this...

Behold. The weird look on my face is my attempt at Pirate Face. The Kitten on my shoulder is my attempt at Pirate-Parrot-on-Shoulder. The beard is my beard. The picture could also be called "Ode To Horeya" (thats a little in-joke for the Cairo crowd)

So after months of innuendo and suggestion that Iran is backing the Iraqi insurgency, and more than a year of fearmongering about Iran's nuclear program, the US has finally actually put some cards on the table, and shown to the world conclusive evidence of Iranian meddling in Iraq.

Having learned the lesson from 2003, where almost no evidence of Iraqi WMD was presented, and the evidence that was presented turning out to be fake, the US government has decided to take a far more open, transparent course this time round.

Well....kind of. The Washington Post on yesterdays briefing by US officials to the media:

"The officials said they would speak only on the condition of anonymity, so the explosives expert and the analyst, who would normally not speak to the news media, could provide information directly. The analyst's exact title and full name were not revealed to reporters. The officials released a PowerPoint presentation including photographs of the weaponry, but did not allow media representatives to record, photograph or videotape the briefing or the materials on display."

Ummm....OK then.

The WaPo continues:

"With so much official U.S. buildup about the purported evidence of Iranian influence in Iraq, the briefing was also notable for what was not said or shown. The officials offered no evidence to substantiate allegations that the "highest levels" of the Iranian government had sanctioned support for attacks against U.S. troops. Also, the military briefers were not joined by U.S. diplomats or representatives of the CIA or the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Although the administration has made many assertions about Iran's nuclear program, its role in Iraq and its ties to groups on the State Department's terrorism list, the U.S. government has never publicly offered evidence proving the allegations. The briefing was the first time during the Bush administration that officials had sought to make a public intelligence case against Iran."

For me, the most hilarious bit is this: They are saying that the precise machining of the parts and the high quality metals used in the "shaped, concave lid" of the explosive means it must have come from Iran, because it is apparently too complicated to have been made in Iraq. It's hilarious to hear the same US administration who three years ago were telling the world that Iraq had a WMD capacity that represented a grave threat to the whole world, now saying that Iraq basically can't manufacture a concave piece of high grade metal.

Read more about this in the New York Times or Washington Post, and you see just how lame and absurd this really is. But does it really matter? They could have paraded a bucket of KFC to the media and we'd still be bombing Iran in 6 months time....

My alternative headline for this article in The Age would have been "Israel a malicious, cluelessly destabilising force in the Middle East". The Age went for something a little more softly spoken, but hey, that's why I'm not Editor of a major newspaper...

"Israel calls to keep ban

THE Israeli Government is lobbying the international community to continue the financial and diplomatic blockade of the occupied territories following last week's unity deal between the two main Palestinians factions."

Because nothing is more awesome than the "international community" pushing Palestinians into civil war to make Israel happy....

According to this little report, the Chairperson of the Wikimedia foundation (the trust which "owns" Wikipedia) told an audience recently that:

“At this point, Wikipedia has the financial ressources to run its servers for about 3 to 4 months. If we do not find additional funding, it is not impossible that Wikipedia might disappear”

In my opinion, Wikipedia is one of our finest cultural achievements, and probably the greatest single actualisation of the potential of the internet. It is a Wonder that earns us major civilisation points.

Two reasons why the cry for help is basically bullshit:

1 - There is not a chance that people will stand around and see wikipedia die in the ass. Some rich philanthroper would be crazy not to bankroll it - Soros? Gates? Google Guys?

2 - It is probably one of the most valuable advertising venues on the internet - a contextual advertisers wet dream, with all that content neatly organised into categories....Rupert Murdoch mentioned the other day that MySpace earns $25 million per month in advertising revenue - with Wikipedia only needing something like $5 million per year, we are talking chicken change.

I understand why they would prefer to stay ad-free - it would be great. But I think we all know that when the choice comes between being ad-free and closed, or open with a million-dollar-a-month advertising scheme, it is pretty obvious which option they would take.

Anyhow, it's still far more likely that a Sillicon Valley gazillionaire will step in and become the Wikipedia sugardaddy, in my opinion....

This General Motors ad is getting a lot of shit from suicide support groups, who arent happy with a TV ad depicting a robot worker committing suicide after getting fired - they say that it isnt cool for a company to present suicide as a viable option for someone who has lost their job.

The immediate reaction I had was a bit different - which idiot marketer thought it would be a good idea to poke gentle fun at the topic of post-layoff depression and suicide, in an advertisement for a company that has fired more than 70,00 workers since 1997?

And the end of the ad is just creepy. After seeing the robot jump to his death, we see him wake up. It was all a horrible dream - and the voiceover tells us that GM's new 100,000 mile warranty is something all its workers are thinking about.

Awww, thats funny. They have nightmares of killing themselves after being fired for making small mistakes. Gee, GM really sounds like the place to be right now...

Remember that period in the months and months leading up to the Iraq war? All of a sudden people became hugely concerned about all the atrocities committed by Saddam and how dangerous his country was. Right thinking people everyone were suddenly concerned for the rights of Iraqi's to lead a better life, and worried about the huge threat Iraq resembled to the post-911 world. It really just popped up out of nowhere, and to question it was seen as de facto support for Saddam Hussein.

Even though war seemed inevitable, there was a few-months-long charade where the US said that if Saddam changed his tune - let inspectors in, etc - conflict could be avoided. Everyone knew it was bullshit, but the game was played anyhow, for the requisite minimum amount of time, and then the horrible, inevitable war began.

Doesn't it feel almost the same right now with Iran? It seems to be that you can say pretty much whatever you want right now about the evils of Iran and it is taken as some sort of self evident truth. The conventional wisdom seems to be that Iran is Bad and Must Be Stopped.

The fact that Iran is meddling in Iraq is viewed as some horribly unacceptable example of below the belt terrorism. But wouldnt any country with a massive devastating occupation and civil war right on it's borders be fairly interested, and interventionist, in seeing the end outcome of said war end up being one favourable to it?

Do you think if Venezeula invaded Mexico and inspired a massive Communist vs. Capitalist civil war, that the US would just sit around and let each side fight out out without getting involved in any way? Of course not. Its absurd, and just as absurd to think that Iran is going to sit around and watch as its biggest and most dangerous neighbour falls to pieces under the occupation of an aggressive foreign enemy.

Regardless of what I think is pretty justified Iranian meddling in Iraq, there just seems to be no evidence getting shared for any of Iran's supposed international menacing. Evidence of a nuclear weapons program? Evidence that they are running terrorist operations in Iraq? Evidence that Hezbollah is a "front" or forward operating base for Iran? Is there any actual evidence that Iran was involved in any of the recent attacks on US or Iraqi troops? Maybe there is, and I am just hopelessly ignorant of it. If anyone knows of this kind of evidence, or where I can read it, please let me know.

Even the billion-times-repeated line that Ahmadinejad said he wants Israel "wiped off the map" is basically bullshit. The hardcore pro-Israeli translation service MEMRI translates him as saying "This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history". So first, he was not saying Israel, he was saying the Israeli regime, and second, he is using a common Farsi idiom that does not mean "wiped off the map" in a military sense as everyone obviously imagines. Shouldn't there be some accountability for the hundreds and hundreds of news organisations and pundits who keep misquoting what is becoming a pivotal line in the justification of attacking Iran?

The worst thing is, I hate Ahmadinejad. I think he's a cock, for a number of reasons. Would love to see the guy eliminated from the pages of history. Same goes/went for Saddam. I just can't stand the idea that by flat out lying and misrepresentation, and pure, outright sophistry, it is looking more and more likely that a few hundred thousand Iranian civilians are probably going to suffer and die through conflict in the coming years.

This Guardian piece about a woman with "Body Integrity Identity Disorder" (BIID), well headlined as "I won't be happy until I lose my legs" is surreal and disturbing. If it was an excerpt from a Monty Python skit I would be laughing, but this is reality, and it's weirder and more out there than anything you could make up:

"Most people want to change something about themselves, and the image I have of myself has always been one without legs......

There is no instruction manual for those who want to remove their own limbs, but I always knew I would do it. I had eventually, told my husband that one day I would lose my legs. It took many years for him to understand why, but he did realise it was part of me, and I suppose he accepted it."

Read the rest - it gets much weirder, and much worse. Great work by the Guardian to find a story like this and a person willing to tell it - and great work by the consistently awesome BoingBoing for delivering it on a plate to me along with the rest of their daily dose of wonderful things....

My home is now more connected to the outside world that it has been in any point in my life. As of 2 days ago my apartment has a landline (first time in almost 4 years), satellite TV (first time ever) and 1 megabit internet (fastest. internet. ever...).

Its all just wonderful, and feels kind of like I've finally joined that normal world that everyone else with normal apartments has been living in while i've been dodgying it up in random places.....

Best thing about the satellite is getting Al Jazeera English - totally the kind of 24 news that I want to see - it sounds cliche but it really is global in a way that no other TV news I have seen is. The headlines just now on the 12:30 news were breaking stories from the Phillipines, Russia, Israel, Afghanistan and Liberia. I'm all about it - theres even a frigging cricket story on right now!

Even the landline is cool. I don't know why, but it's cool. What do you use a landline for again?