So Long and Thanks for the Fish...10 Years of Personal Activism & End of this Blog

Hi all. If you were checking this blog you might notice that its been a bit quiet of late here. Well, shit happens in life and I've been busy on other stuff. But other things have been going on and I've decided that its time to end this blog. Its been fun and a blast but this blog has run its course. I want to move on to other things and do other stuff, including to focus more energy on climate change issues and media work and to have a big think about how I put my time into this sort of stuff...

First of I have come to hate the work 'activism' as it implies that those of us to put time into trying to push society into a direction we see as positive are somehow different from normal people; we are not. I have the same money, family worries as anyone else - it's just that as well as the normal things of life - spending time with friends, family on hobbies, household chores and work - I also put some time into things I believe in.

That aside, about 10 years ago I started on a political path that has had a number of twists and turns and while on this path ended up involved in lots of campaigns for things I cared about; human rights, environmental justice, equality - protesting at events like Mayday, G8, Fairford airbase and against things like corporate power and war. Ten years on seems like a good time to take stock of things...

(and when I say we I broadly mean my interpretation of the anti-capitalist movement)

What we got right:

Equality - It has now been proved that there is a causal link between almost every single social problem and the gap between the right and the poor. In the UK that gap has grown in the last 40 years and so, it seems, have our social problems. Each group of politicains that take power propose superficial 'solutions' to the problem but because none of them can ever take on the rich - because they are part of the same elite - nothing will chance.

The casino economy - The anti-capitalist movement argued that the gobal enconoomy was built on nothing real....and we were right. After billions of $/£ on bailing out the banks - that we will have to work for decades to pay back - the bankers are once again on multi-million bonuses. Where is a popular rage?

Iraq and Afghanistan - After 911 much of the anti-war movement turned into a peace one. First Afganistan and then Iraq - we argued that the war-approach, especially one driven by oil-hungry Neo-cons was doomed to fail. After the Taliban melted away in 2001/2 the Sun triumphantly attacked the anti-war voices as wrong. After the fall of Saddam the crowed again. Yet 9 years later, hundreds of thousands of dead and trillions of dollars later both wars grind on.

(Some of) Human nature - People can co-operate, and often humanity is at it's best when we do. Anarchism is first and foremost a philosophy of cooperation and many of the problems that beset us can't be solved with competition or war. We have to find collective ways to work it out else doom future generations to the hell-on-earth depicted in 'The Road'.

The Environment (especially climate change) - We have been arguing that life and ecology are one and the same. That either ignoring, socialising the cost of damage or trying to greenwash it all way is not a viable or adult way to deal with the real limits imposed by nature. Climate change is that issue made flesh - globaly we are trying to dig ourselves out of the hole by privatising the air (carbon trading) and refusing to consider any solution that does not involve continued economic growth. Nature does not do bail-outs. The elite have been using climate change as a political football to beat the miners with in the 80s and now to flirt with crazy-as-shit conspiracy theories now. Climate change is, despite the rush of denial and media fatigue, going away. The climate didn't get the memo that all the CO2 we've been dumping into it is not supposed to have any impact.

What we got wrong:

Mass action? - We've had a series of huge political shocks; the financial collapse, expenses scandal and now the phone hacking. These should reach into the political and financial heart of the establishment and yet no that much has changed. Yes, mass action helped to push for action on all 3, but nothing very radical. So why has the radical left/anarchists failed to make head-way? So if you're from the right you'll be saying that because the ideas they left has are rubbish. Yet the right has failed too. The BNP collapsed right as they hoped to make the mass-popularity break though. The Tories failed to win outright in the elections and had to bully the LibDems to push though their right-wing agenda. While most people seem to agree with the broad thrust of the left's ideas here; make the bankers pay, nobody has managed to turn that into any radical form of mass action.

Islamic Terror - not totally, because I remember distributing sticks from the Afed after 911 reading, Nether Bush nor Bin-Laden, but not enough focus of the hateful idiotic and nasty creed of fundamentalist Islam allowed the right to claim to be for liberty in trying to fight for control of oil and on the streets of the UK via groups like the EDL, when the ideas of the far-right have much more in common with fundamentalist Islam than the left. Not good and we should have been clearer about our opposition to it.

(Some of) Human nature - and this was always a tricky one for me as I believed once you removed oppressive hierarchies (such as the state) from human relations, we could move to mutual aid. I have had this belief knocked from two angles; First evolutionary psychology's view of in and out-group behaviour, as in how we behave towards people who we consider part of our 'in-group' and 'out-group'. There are huge differences (both positive and negative) but ultimately it makes our knowledge human interaction much more complex that 19th century theories of it supposed; humans are both co-operative and combative, irrational and logical. To quote Stephen Pinker; "As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike? This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist)."

Predictability over the Unknown - While I still think that the current system will have to change, I don't think it will be because our societies will happily change. While lots of ideas (e.g. mutual aid, Parecon) they suffer from the issue that they are unpredictable. In theory they are fine but they have to wade though the mass of human nature, cultural and enviromental variables before they will work. They might end up with a fair, sustainable world. You might get something falling apart like Somalia. Us humans like predictability, we're creatures of habit and so we'll tend pick the unfair unequal predictable over the unknown that might be better, but might not. If we want radical ideas of how to organise to work, we have to show then in action - and it does happen - but we're not there yet in practical examples, and more thought is needed about how to make them work long term. For all the faults of capitalism (and there are loooots) it has proven to be a durable system that does (for all its ills) generate lots of innovation in technology (in combination with the socialised system of Universities). Would the same rate of technology development exist without the motive of profit? Don't know, and that's the problem....

Structureless - So many radical groups are run on an ad-hoc basis with volunteers and the like. It tends to be the same few people over and over who do most of the work. Plenty of people will tell you how you should be doing it, but only a handful will get down to it with you and help make it happen. This leads to vaguely structured groups often dominated by either the loudest or the ones with the most time to turn up to meetings. It leads those with kids or other responsibilities at a disadvantage. Not that is this a new issue, the Athenian version of democracy where all free men got a vote and could take part - as well as excluding slaves and women - also meant that the rich, who didn't have to work as much, had more time to take part and so shape politics to suit them.

All Radical Political Movements Often Get Nasty - John Gray's work, a British philosopher, who identified a number of 'isms' as being secular branches of a religion, with a creed and a utopia at the end of a struggle. He mainly takes aim at neo-conservatism and communism in his excellent book 'Black Mass' but the belief in a heaven-like state if certain (sinful) conditions are removed. Now his book is a vicious attack on Neo-conservatives and Communists yet when I read it I realised it points also apply to anarchism. His ultimate and most devastating point is that all utopian political experiments leave behind a vast wreckage of human lives; the 'democratising' of the middle east by Bush and Bliar with the Iraq invasion, the Great leap Froward for examples. Millions died trying to see a pure radical vision implemented in the messy real world. The assumptions we all make about how others will behave based on how we would, just don't work out. Humans are messy thinkers who like to think they are logical and yet are illogical tribal and emotional even about supposed factual subjects (just look a climate denial!)

The state is not all bad - Ok, deep breath.... Now when anarchist ideas emerged a couple of hundred years ago, the function of the state in most people's lives would have been an oppressive. It enforced taxes to the rich, enforced monarchy, land ownership by the gentry etc. Its easy to see at this point how it's removal would have benefited most people. Now however, as we live in much more complex societies with a greater population, the state no longer has an almost entirely oppressive role. For me it offers the a national health service, and a year or so ago having been though a tough time when a close family member and then a few months later, a close friend both died, the involvement of a semi-centralised system providing ambulances, emergency rooms, care and staff that tried unsuccessfully to save then both, showed me that the solution to human relations can forgo all centralised structures. Would we want to rely on volunteers voting to help or not at that point? The right hates these social aspects of the sate because they want us to pay for our own care. Yet the NHS, for all its ills, is full of people doing a job because they care and helping all who come in regardless of race, gender or wealth. That's anarchist ideas in action! The welfare state, for all its ills also provides for basic social dignity and there was a reason the post-war Generation voted in 1945 election not for Churchill but for Labour. Take a look at the BBC's experiment The Street that Cut Everything, where residents essentially became a self-managed collective. The right hated it (e.g. 1 and 2) because they claimed it was not accurate, but they hated is mostly because cos they hate the social functions of the state. This program showed how we have to have a joint co-operative means to care for those less fortunate and the rich and grumpy can't be allowed to opt-out.

Though I must stress that anarchism offers many, many valuable tools to help us progress; it's critique of the current system, it's enlightened struggle for equality and it's questioning of how the state monopoly on violence works - all valuable stuff!

So where next? I don't know, but I'm working on new ideas and planning new things and thinking... lots of thinking... still in it for the long term, just not here....

Sceptical Scientist Confirms Climate Change is Real, Climate Deniers Go Mental

I've been a bit busy of late and so not been able to blog as much as I'd like here. However this news was just too fun to miss! The background to the story is that a group of independent climate sceptics embarked on a project called 'Berkeley Earth' to re-analyse all of the temperature data so provide conclusive proof either way of global warming. The project lead, a physicist Dr. Muller, has in the past made sceptical noises about climate change and the temperature data so naturally the deniers liked him and were supportive of his work. Here's what popular deniliart climate blogger Anthony Watts had to say:

And, I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise. So let’s not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results. I haven’t seen the global result, nobody has, not even the home team, but the method isn’t the madness that we’ve seen from NOAA, NCDC, GISS, and CRU, and, there aren’t any monetary strings attached to the result that I can tell. If the project was terminated tomorrow, nobody loses jobs, no large government programs get shut down, and no dependent programs crash either.

He even provided them with data from his own non-peer reviewed analysis of surface temperature. Other deniers offer support too. The denier funding oil-magnate, Koch, threw them cash for the project (but so did climate realists funding groups too). Then the denier politicians invited Dr. Muller to testify before congress. It was all looking sweeeeeeeet. Problem was, this is what Muller said at the hearings:

"The Berkeley Earth agreement with the prior analysis surprised us, since our preliminary results don't yet address many of the known biases. When they do, it is possible that the corrections could bring our agreement into disagreement."

Yes, the results they prodiced agreed with the results climate sciencets prodiced. There earth is warming. Here's what it looks like:



Ooops for denialists! So how did Watts respond to the confirmation of climate change? Did he accept whatever result they produced, even if it proved his premise wrong? Did he fuck!

With his testimony, Dr. Muller has totally destroyed any credibility he might have had with me.

Denial in a nutshell! (Also see here, here and here) Now the wolves of climate denial have rounded on Dr. Muller as they mount 'Operation Shoot the Messenger'.

Climate Denier Smashed by Simple Analogy

A simple analogy has stumped the vitriolic but scientifically illiterate Telegraph blogger, James Delingpole - heehee.

The Telegraph blogger is not on the receiving end of an acerbic Jeremy Paxman or belligerent John Humphrys. He is questioned by the new president of the Royal Society, the distinguished geneticist and Nobel prize-winner Sir Paul Nurse. I have not seen the programme, but Delingpole apparently complained to the BBC afterwards that he had been "intellectually raped" by Nurse. More about that later.

Such a confrontation is perhaps inevitable in a programme about why public debate and science sometimes seem so far apart. Scientists have always had to argue their case, and rightly so, but Nurse believes they are now fighting a more fundamental battle – one for public trust. As the programme blurb puts it:

Key scientific ideas – such as climate change, MMR vaccinations and genetically modified foods – now polarise public opinion; it's clear that scientific opinion and consensus isn't always supported by the public. Sir Paul sets out to investigate how this gap between scientists and the public has developed, meeting leading investigators and well-known critics of some of the world's most contentious scientific theories.

Among others, Nurse talks to Tony, an American with Aids who is not convinced that his disease is caused by the HIV virus. So, instead of receiving clinically supported anti-retroviral treatments, he treats himself with yoghurts and his own nutritional programme.

And then there's Delingpole.

Nurse told me that he simply presented Delingpole with a hypothetical question: if a dear relative was suffering from a fatal disease, would he opt for the "consensus" treatment recommended by doctors, or advice to drink more orange juice offered by a fringe maverick quack? In terms of the science of climate change, that fringe maverick is analogous, of course, to Delingpole's own position.

Delingpole apparently found the line of questioning too much to handle and was purportedly lost for words. He at one point, according to Nurse, asked for the film crew to stop filming.

Global Warming Denier Tells it like it is!!!!

I love this article. Amamzing conspiracy theory that is soooooooooooo crazy that it makes a box of frogs look sane. It argues that security restrictions on air travel are being driven by a global warming agenda. Yes. But it is the first line of the article that is the most fun:

I have no proof to support my opinion on this….read on and let me know what you think.

Yes, he opens his argument admitting that there is no evidence only opinion and with a stroke underlines the approach of most global warming denial. 0% Evidence 100% Opinion.

Top 10 Anti-Christian Acts of 2010? Get a Grip...

Jebus H Mice. Some American Christian's are sooo self-obsessed and obsessed with homosexuality. Here is their take on how persecuted they are... about 9 examples of 17-odd supposed examples of 'anti-Christian' acts seem to be about gay sex. Guess what is not on the list? The evisceration of Iraq's Christian community. Yes, Iraq has churches that date from the 7th Century and yet the Christian community being killed and exiled in the waves of violence and fundamentalism unleashed by the botched US-led invasion. An invasion the US Christian Right cheerled for.

Iraq's defence ministry has said that the army will be on high alert this Christmas. It said it had received intelligence indicating Christians could be attacked. On Wednesday, two people were killed when a bomb exploded outside a church in the northern city of Mosul, one of the latest in a series of attacks against Christians there in recent months. According to some estimates, half of Iraq's Christian minority have left their homes since the American-led invasion in 2003.

Should that not be on the list? I'll let them know... see if it makes it.

(Hat-tip to RationalWiki)

WikiLeaks: Royal Bank of Scotland Shocka!

Now remember before I continue that there are people arguing that we should not know the information in the WikiLeaks cables.

Ok, so Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) collapsed during the finaincal crisis and had to be bailed out using our money. Just prior to the collapse chief executive Fred Goodwin gets £700,000 per year pension award from RBS. Then a month later RBS announced that its 2008 loss totalled £24.1bn, the largest annual loss in UK corporate history.

So who was to blame for this? Turns out - nobody! Like rain or loosing a sock, itturns out it was just one of those things..

The Financial Services Authority is poised to announce it has closed its investigation into Royal Bank of Scotland and will take no further action against any of its former directors – including chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin – despite the £45bn bailout of the Edinburgh-based bank.

The City regulator appointed accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct a detailed analysis of the events that took place in the run-up to the near-collapse of the bank in October 2008. They are understood to have concluded that while management made poor judgments, there are no grounds to take enforcement action against the individuals involved.

Then comes WikiLeaks and in private conversations it was revealed that perhaps somebody was to blame after all..

The cables sent from the US embassy in London, report that [RBS Chairman Philip] Hampton told a visiting delegation of politicians that one of the biggest mistakes made by the bank was its takeover of Dutch bank ABN Amro just as the credit crunch began in the autumn of 2007. This acquisition left the bank with a wafer-thin capital cushion and ultimately led to the £45bn taxpayer bailout of the bank in October 2008.

But again, there are some who argue we should not know this information...

WikiLeaks Expose - Fighting for Democracy with Feudalism

Now remember lots of people in the ruling elite don't want to us to know this kind of stuff!

Outrage of the day;

The post-Soviet state of Uzbekistan is a nightmarish world of "rampant corruption", organised crime, forced labour in the cotton fields, and torture, according to the leaked cables.

But the secret dispatches released by WikiLeaks reveal that the US tries to keep President Islam Karimov sweet because he allows a crucial US military supply line to run into Afghanistan, known as the northern distribution network (NDN).

So because of the fight for freedom in Afghanistan our rulers are willing to spend our money propping up a violent despotic feudal regime.

Nice.

We are All WikiLeaks

This is it folks! This is the moment that web technology promised, but that never arrived - until now. We can now say no to the Man. The Man wants to keep us in the dark about His wheelings and dealings. We say NO, WikiLeaks gives us the power to say no.

I'm with I Heart WikiLeaks in downloading the Insurance Torrent.

We are all WikiLeaks now;

WikiLeaks has never been charged with a crime, let alone indicted for one or convicted of one. A consensus of legal experts agree that prosecuting the organization or Julian Assange for any of its leaks would be difficult in the extreme. Despite those facts ... Just look at what the U.S. Government and its friends are willing to do and capable of doing to someone who challenges or defies them -- all without any charges being filed or a shred of legal authority. They've blocked access to their assets, tried to remove them from the Internet, bullied most everyone out of doing any business with them, froze the funds marked for Assange's legal defense at exactly the time that they prepare a strange international arrest warrant to be executed, repeatedly threatened him with murder, had their Australian vassals openly threaten to revoke his passport, and declared them "Terrorists" even though -- unlike the authorities who are doing all of these things -- neither Assange nor WikiLeaks ever engaged in violence, advocated violence, or caused the slaughter of civilians.

The Man, like an angry parent caught in His double standards wants to shut down the open door into His secret room. Our job is to make sure that the door is kept firmly open and that we defend those trying to keep it open. I quote;

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

We are all WikiLeaks.



PS If in London, there is a Demo on 11th Dec.

The Climate Change Data Scandal You Won't Read Much About in the Telegraph, Mail or the Express

This is a very techey story and much of it is above my knowledge but from what I can understand, but it is very, very interesting. It also shows the inner workings of a denial home-goal. Here's the background. There is this statistics professor Wegman who gets commissioned to write a report examining the famous Hockey Stick (that's the graph that shows global temperatures with a sharp and scary rise at the end of the 20th Century.) Now, climate deniers hate the Hockey Stick and they hate it's most prominent author, Michael Mann. I guess because it's an easy to understand graphic that communicates the serious situation we find ourselves in and also became Mann speaks his mind.

So they went after it. They commission Wegman who produces a big report and it's conclusions tear into the Hockey Stick and all the denialists cheer! Woo! Woo! The meat of the report is an allegation that the computer code that Mann and others used to error-correct the data for the Hockey Stick was doctored to produce a hockey-stick shaped graph, whatever the data that was input. In short they are saying that Mann faked it and the Wegman report proves it.

Except that there a murmurings of problems with this report. Murmurings that wont die. First there is an accusation of plagiarism; the unattributed copying of somebody else's work. This is a serious charge in academic circles. Second the data analysis that 'proves' the fake Hockey Stick result itself looks, well, fake...

[George Mason University] spokesman Daniel Walsch confirms that the university, located in Fairfax, Va., is now investigating allegations that the Wegman report was partly plagiarized and contains fabrications. Last month, a 250-page report on the Deep Climate website written by computer scientist John Mashey of Portola Valley, Calif., raised some of these concerns. Mashey says his analysis shows that 35 of the 91 pages in the 2006 Wegman report contain plagiarized text (with some of the wording taken from a book, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, by Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts) and contain erroneous citations of data, as well.

Some denialists have argued that this is just about a missing attribution and it means nothing. Now remember that a couple (out of thousands of studies) of incorrectly attributed references to a study in an IPCC report was blown out of all proportion by the denialosphere. But now they argue we should not worry about a couple of attribution errors.. (Can't have it both ways!)

Here's the interesting bit; about the Hockey Stick. In essence the data analysis used by Wegamn, which was copied uncritically from the work of a couple of other denialists, generated some noisy data (but meaningless) data then feed it into a version of Mann analysis and out pops a Hockey Stick-like result.

Except that the generation of the input data was far from random - oh no! It generated 10,000 sample sets of data - then selected the 100 from that huge pool that were the most hockey-stick like! These 100 cherry picked results are then fed into the replication of Mann's analysis. Wegman's analysis is far from an objective analysis. It would appear that far from being a random test, Wegman was using loaded dice. It seems the Wegman report may be a huge fudge. (You can read a very detailed breakdown of the full fudgey nature of the fudge here.)

Forget the so-called 'climategate' - this is the Climate Change Data Scandal You Won't Read Much About in the Telegraph, Mail or the Express

Student Plan to 'Decapitate' LibDems - Stephen Williams is on the 'chopping block'

After the big demo and as the dust still settles (somewhat) on all that, the NUS has decided to leave moaning about some smashed windows and instead concentrate on a 'decapitation' strategy of ousting some LibDem MPs.

Its great news that they are opening up new fronts in the war on the LibCon cuts, however my local MP Stephen Williams is one of those targeted to removal. Now I voted for him a few years back as a protest against Labour (yes I vote, I agree with Ian Bone on this issue). Now he's unhappy about all this attention:

Stephen Williams, MP for Bristol West, accused Aaron Porter, the NUS president, of playing partisan politics rather than engaging in the debate, as it emerged that students planned to try to oust him from his seat.

“It is not going to change my mind on any issue,” said Mr Williams, who has yet to say which way he will vote on the issue of increasing tuition fees.

“I don’t think students are im­pressed with it either. Rather than the NUS engaging with the issues and talking about what we are doing, they are playing partisan politics, and Aaron is playing to the Labour party gallery rather than standing up for students.”

He added: “I don’t recall them having a decapitation policy against Labour MPs who introduced tuition fees in the first place.”

His comments came as the NUS said it would make use of a coalition idea for holding MPs to account, dubbed the “right to recall” initiative, to try to force by-elections in targeted sets.

Get a grip Stephen, any campaign group must be expected to campaign for their constituents and you so publicly opposed tuition fees that a U-turn on that is just pure hypocrisy, and if you can't be trusted to vote on the basis of what you stood for in the election, then it's bye-bye time as far as I'm concerned.

Government harassing and intimidating Wikileaks Supporters

Typical. Back to the dark Bu$h days and so much for free speech...

In July of this year, U.S. citizen Jacob Appelbaum, a researcher and spokesman for WikiLeaks, was detained for several hours at the Newark airport after returning from a trip to Holland, and had his laptop, cellphones and other electronic products seized -- all without a search warrant, without being charged with a crime, and without even being under investigation, at least to his knowledge. He was interrogated at length about WikiLeaks, and was told by the detaining agents that he could expect to be subjected to the same treatment every time he left the country and attempted to return to the U.S. Days later, two FBI agents approached him at a computer conference he was attending in New York and asked to speak with him again. To date, he has never been charged with any crime or even told he's under investigation for anything; this was clearly a thuggish attempt by federal officials to intimidate any American citizen involved with or supporting WikiLeaks.

That campaign of intimidation is now clearly spreading to supporters of Bradley Manning. Last Wednesday, November 3, David House, a 23-year-old researcher who works at MIT, was returning to the U.S. from a short vacation with his girlfriend in Mexico, and was subjected to similar and even worse treatment. House's crime: he did work in helping set up the Bradley Manning Support Network, an organization created to raise money for Manning's legal defense fund, and he has now visited Manning three times in Quantico, Virginia, where the accused WikiLeaks leaker is currently being detained (all those visits are fully monitored by government agents). Like Appelbaum, House has never been accused of any crime, never been advised that he's under investigation, and was never told by any federal agents that he's suspected of any wrongdoing at all.

Students Get Angry, Media Does Same-old, same-old

So at the demo against the cuts to education and the ramping up in fees - making education something only for the rich, people got angry and stormed the Tory Party HQ.

The predictalbe media coverage follows focusing of the 'violence' (in the main some broken windows) and not the issue (the cuts). Lots and hand wringing follows and complaints about the 'violence' and how it 'spoil it' for the majority.

Look Mainstream media; you can't have it both ways. If the march had passed off peacefully it would have got little to no coverage. If trouble happens, it gets coverage - though mainly of the trouble itself. Protesters can't win.

If the media vowed never to cover an event where trouble kicked off, and always covered peaceful demos, that might send a message that is consistent with their claimed views. But that is not what happens; all sensationalism.

Where is the handwrining of the coverage over the Wikileaks revealed violence in Iraq? Now that is real violence. Ten of thousands of dead and tortured people, not a few windows. Yet pundits bang on about the realease of the info instead. Assemble these words into an order: point, You, missing, the fucking, are.

I'm with the message from UCU Goldsmiths: The real violence relates not to a smashed window but to the destructive impact of the cuts and privatisation.

The Rightward Drift of Politics

It has been claimed that there is a right-ward drift in US politics. I don't know enough about it to say either way, but the Republican gains in the recent US election are depressing. Not that the White House under democratic rule was doing much to be happy about. As ever the US elections have implications for us globally and again I'm depressed that political parties there to represent the working people are either so hamstrung or so two-faced due to the corporate funding they get, that there seems little hope for mainstream politics. Here's a couple of examples of what I mean:

In the US:

The Democrats aren't preparing to stand up for anything, either. They're already talking about backing down on the repeal of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy in the military. I didn't vote for the Democrats so that they could turn tail at every Republican whim: they're supposed to work for the policies Democrats claim to stand for.

In the UK:

Thirteen years ago, I had my defence epiphany on the lay committee for Labour's first and only strategic defence review in 1997. This was under George Robertson. I vividly remember our first meeting when we were given our terms of reference. Such was the radical mood of those euphoric early Blair days that were told to think the unthinkable and discuss everything, no holds barred.

This lasted about five minutes. It turned out we could not discuss the nuclear deterrent; we could not question the Trident programme and its submarines; we could not discuss the Eurofighter contract; nor could we discuss the need for two or perhaps three new aircraft carriers. I remember the smug look on the faces of service chiefs in the room. Our excluded items had nothing really to do with Britain's defence. They were political. Robertson and his colleagues were under instructions not to give an inch to the Tories on defence procurement, lest they be seen as soft on defence. We could think the unthinkable – but not the thinkable.

Thanks Labour, 'cos it's worth spending billions of crappy weapons systems of little use to us to keep the Daily Mail and crew of your back... Thanks Democrats, your inability to fight for things you believe in and push to compromise with people only willing to compromise to the right has now given us a man running for House Energy and Commerce Committee, John Shimkus, who thinks we don't need to worry about climate change because God says it's all ok.

And behind all this pumping out piles and piles of shit is the rightward media...
.

Secret Meetings to Control the World...

Sort of. This is a great post about a couple of secret(ish) meetings that are claimed to impact us. One is called by a couple of billionaire oil magnates who gather right-wing politicians and executives to plot election strategy and the other is a group of climate scientists who talk science...

It must be wonderfully liberating to be a hard-core conspiracy theorist, casting off the limiting constraints of reality - common sense and facts be damned! [climate scientist] Mike Mann is plotting the socialist takeover of the globe using tree-rings and obscure statistical techniques to control the UN while naive, mind-their-own-business, successful capitalists are in danger of being tossed out of their hard-earned mansions just because they want all of us to be as wealthy as they are. Or something.

Yet those spending millions to derail climate legislation and roll back welfare, they all about freedom and shit.

Wikileaks: Iraq is a deeper blood bath than we knew

Thanks god for Wikileaks. They are exposing the massive, massive, criminal, violent and messy bloodbath that is Iraq. One we paid for in taxes and the Iraqi people paid for in blood. It's is gobsmacking how low, how deep the void of horror this conflict has opened, is:

...one case in which he claimed a British rifleman had shot dead an eight-year-old girl who was playing in the street in Basra.

"For some reason the tank stopped at the end of the street, she's there in her yellow dress, a rifleman pops up and blows her away."

It's not just that: It turns out they did do body counts; and the majority of those dying in the coalitions own figures, are civilians. Given that I'm sure soldiers sometimes lie about who they had killed to cover-up mistakes - this is still a staggering figure..

Leaked Pentagon files obtained by the Guardian contain details of more than 100,000 people killed in Iraq following the US-led invasion, including more than 15,000 deaths that were previously unrecorded.

British ministers have repeatedly refused to concede the existence of any official statistics on Iraqi deaths. US General Tommy Franks claimed in 2002: "We don't do body counts."

The mass of leaked documents provides the first detailed tally by the US military of Iraqi fatalities. Troops on the ground filed secret field reports over six years of the occupation, purporting to tot up every casualty, military and civilian.

The ignoring of torture - and remember that Bliar and Bush took us into Iraq to stop the torture of Saddam - and they turn out to be almost as bad. With us paying the tax bill... and the Iraqi's paying the butchers bill:

This is the impact of Frago 242. A frago is a "fragmentary order" which summarises a complex requirement. This one, issued in June 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, orders coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, "only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ".

Frago 242 appears to have been issued as part of the wider political effort to pass the management of security from the coalition to Iraqi hands. In effect, it means that the regime has been forced to change its political constitution but allowed to retain its use of torture.

I've run out of outrage words to describe all this....

Climate Change, Extinction: It's not just for Polar Bears anymore

It's for us. Yes I'm alarmist, 'cos I'm alarmed. Calling people alarmist does not make the alarm go away, it just points to the alarm.



That's one of the many things about denialists, they claim that things won't be so bad yet none of them are doing any original research to establish if this is true... They just cherry-pick holes (or try) in other peoples' hard work...

It’s the same tiny bunch of skeptics being quoted by right-wing blogs. None are doing new research that casts the slightest doubt on the scientific consensus that’s been forming for two decades, a set of conclusions that grows more robust with every issue of Science and Nature and each new temperature record.

Getting the CO2 Cuts to work...not easy...

Getting the cuts in CO2 is going to be hard... This is from an email FWed to me by a friend (I'm hot claiming the credit for it).

This is an interesting carbon calculator, which lets you see the consequences of possible actions to hit the 'scientific minimum' target for reduction of UK emissions of 80% by 2050.

http://2050-calculator-tool.decc.gov.uk

I tried the following scenario:
Reduce domestic power consumption by 50%;
Major shift from road transport to low carbon;
Halving of all road freight;
50 new nuclear power stations;
New desert solar project;
20,000 new onshore wind turbines;
24,000 new offshore wind turbines;
Sequestration of 30 million tonnes of carbon underground.

With all of that, plus a lot of other measures, I could only get a reduction of 57%!

The Cuts and the Financial Crisis - What the fuck happened?

So the Tories (sort of) have got into power the the mantra of the coalition government is cuts, cuts, cuts. What is hard about all this is that there are so many factors at play and so many issues that are woven into the issue that it is hard to unpick what is what.

Its also why we're all looking for easy stories that explain it and easy fixes that will solve the our woes. Problem is, that I suspect there are none. The whole thing is a monstrous fuckup that is getting more fucketyuped day by day.

I'm been trying to make sense of it all myself - and in trying to make it touches on other political beliefs that I hold - which also need to be re-examined, that the whole thing becomes a mess in my head. In short, I'm getting nowhere trying to understand the whole and what we should do about it. So this article is an attempt to make sense of it.

So I'm going to start with some of the basics...

What the fuck happened?

Here is my understanding of it: Back in 2006 everything seemed business as usual with the leviathan global economy. However what most of us did not know then was that a series of complex financial products that were being brought and sold for many years, where in fact highly unstable investments. Investments that many mainstream banks had put lots of cash into. Once conditions in the global economy ceased to favour these risky investments (mainly due to a loss of liquidity) then they started to explode in the faces of whoever held them at that point. This in turn triggered a series of other conditions that in turn triggered other mini-crises and so on and so forth until it became a huge financial crisis. Faced with a meltdown of the underlying baking system, most governments responded with bailouts . Pouring billions into the mainstream banks fearful that if they did not the wave of triggering crisis would go on and on.

However this is where the complexities start to mount. Many cited the lack of regulation of the financial markets as the problem. Other claimed too much regulation was the problem. Some claim that without the bailouts, it would be much worse. Others claim that the bailout are perpetuating a rotten system and we should have let the banks fail. I have no idea as to the correct answer. Try to get your head around all the variables that you would need to understand to get a clear answer and the scale of the problem of understanding becomes apparent; regulation, speculation, the shadow banking systems, trade deficits, exchange rates, commodity prices, GDP, interest rates and more - and for each country that was a player in the drama - the US, China, UK, Germany, Greece, Japan and so on... That's just the stuff we know about - what was the impact of the costs of all the wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Colombia, Palestine etc...) ongoing in this? Where is the role of peaking oil supplies in all this? Climate change? Shifts in global power? Technological change? Ecological damage? Human population growth?

Its a quantum mechanics of an equation to try and understand it. Put simply, us humans tend to only be able to follow a few threads of a story. We seek to find a simplified way to understand it all then relegate those bits we can't have the space brain-space for as minor variables in the whole. This is not because the evidence suggests that this is what we should do but because we don't like to think that we are wilfully ignoring something important, so we just find a way to rationalise ignoring it. "The real issue in all this is..." "What most people don't get is..." "The important factors in this crisis are..."

Just because something has not featured in our analysis of events, does not mean it was not significant. Indeed, each of us (me included) carries a set of cognitive filters in our own head (called Selection Bias) that means we tend to pick things as important not based on the evidence set before us, but because of pre-existing prejudices, political views and emotions.

So the bankers are unlikely to fully consider a Marxist view of what happened and why. But an anarchist is unlikely to consider the evidence that if the state had not bailed the banks out, it would be much, much worse now than it is. Capitalists are going to wave the free market around as a solution to all the problems and anarchists will point to mutual aid as the only way out. Given the number of variables and variable-variables, how could any of us know? Who'd be willing to risk finding out?

Here's how I understand it... The UK government debt is about £1000 billion and the state borrows about £160 billion per year. Officially we spent about £850 billion bailing banks and the like out. Unofficially this figure may be higher; possibly over £1000 billion. It is more complex than this - we now own big chunks of banks and we have had some of the money paid back...

Either way, the figures seem to suggest that if we had not have to bail the banks out, we'd not be in the mess we are. So why don't we hear much (if anything) about the financial sector doing anything to help us out of the mess they so clearly contributed towards?

Why Climate Denialists Never Seem to Use Coherent Arguments

When you debate with climate change deniers, they have these annoying habitats of:

1. Never stating their position in any concrete terms.
2. Adopting contradictory positions and never acknowledging this.

This make is hard to have a real debate with them because point 1 means you're never told what position you are debating against is, and point 2 means they are always a moving target jumping from nonsense point to point as you shoot each argument away.

You'll be hard pressed to find them making a factual assessment they can be held to, as does the IPCC. So the IPCC may say they think there will be a 2 degree rise over a set time and give the statistical probability that this forecast is accurate. Then they'll revise and amend that forecast as new evidence emerges. That's why it's a science.

By contrast the denialist talks of 'alarmism' and 'concern' other woolly terms that don;t really means anything tangible. They are deliberately vague emotional terms that allow them to escape making solid predictions over which they could be held to account. Denialism never seems to propose research methods that would show what is going on in the climate system - it always relies on cherry picking other peoples data and producing critiques of others hard work. There is nothing itself wrong with criticism - its an essential part of science. But after a while you want the people saying "that's wrong" over and over to show you how it's done right. After all, millions of dollars have been (and are) being pumped into denial by vested interests. Should be simple to fund a few bit of original research that says 'the temperate change will be X degrees over Y years...?

So why is this?

They have to have points 1 and 2 in operation else the carefully woven tissue of conspiracy and obfuscation would collapse under the weight of it's own contradictions. How do they do this? By making an emotional and not a scientific argument...

“…I’ve come to view “denial” as reflective of an individual values, rather than an emotional state they pass through. It is a culture war issue, in the same way abortion, stem cells, Sharia law and creationism have become litmus tests for conservative Christians, Muslims etc.

…Creationist reject evolution because it contradicts their literal reading of the bible. Ergo, thus *must* reject the science in order to affirm their tribalism and confirm their membership to the creationist “tribe”. It’s about outward signs of orthodoxy and inwardly managing ones identity.

Free market libertarians, culture warriors and ultra-conservatives see climate change mitigation as deeply threatening to their “choices” within the market and individual “liberty”.

If your committed to small government and limited intervention in the market, then things such as a carbon tax, ETS or regulation are anathema. After all, the “market” will fix this.

Why is also why you find conspiracy theories, crazy analogies in thier postings - indeed anything but rational thought. To understand them you also need to understand the conspiracy mindset and how it works.

The Black Hole of Stupid: US Right Goes (Even More) Mental

This is a staggering political position to end up with as a major political party in a democracy:

The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones. ... Just for the record, when the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences last reviewed the data this spring, it concluded: "A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems." Not only William Hague but such other prominent European conservatives as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have embraced that widespread scientific conviction and supported vigorous action.

Indeed, it is difficult to identify another major political party in any democracy as thoroughly dismissive of climate science as is the GOP here. Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, says that although other parties may contain pockets of climate skepticism, there is "no party-wide view like this anywhere in the world that I am aware of."

Wow - serious nuttyness. What is also staggering is the position that so many denialists seem to have which is if they don't know about and/or understand the science of climate change, then it can't be true. As if the laws of nature only operate if we humans can get on consensus on understanding...

It's a black-hole of stupid that is also sucking vast sections of the media (Fox, Telegraph, Dail Fail etc) in with it.