cadmus

"a short war, with the lads home by christmas"

2005-12-23T16:16:00.000Z

Just saw that Rumsfeld announced troop reductions in Iraq. What a timing. Peace on earth and merry christmas, dude.

I feel a strange mix of condradictory thought and emotions whenever the Bush adminitration makes one of those totally surreal things that would makes your eyes roll back and sigh "duuuuuh" in even the most over the top, totally turkey Hollywood blockbuster.

Lame and tacky one-liners like 'mission accomplished', 'let freedom reign', 'slam dunk', 'mushroom cloud smoking gun', 'dead or alive', please don't kill me'*, 'bring'em on', flightsuits, surprise turkey to the troops. So cramp, so kitsch, so corny.

You feel disbelief that they bet so many of the US citizenry are such idiots they can get away with it, awe at the outlandish brazenness, comtempt for the bottomless bad taste, amusement at the ridicule cartoonishness, the creeping fear that at least some of them really believe it.

In an essay (don't remember if it was one in Testaments Betrayed or The Art of the Novel), Milan Kundera described how the kitsch of social realism was not an arbitrary style, but a central tool of the totalitarian propaganda of the Eastern Bloc, and this is exactly what I see whenever there's such a moment in the news.

When trying to find that essay online (which I failed, sorry), I found that Matthew Ygglesias and Timothy Burke share my thoughts about the tawdriness of the Bush admin., so go read them, especially the latter's first-hand comparaison of the respective lack of class of the Zimbabwe's and the US government.

Does this mean the US is no longer a democracy? No. It has is a quite a bit to go until you reach the Putin's Russia's level, much less that of a fully-fledged dictatorship.
And although the risk has never been higher since George Washington was offered dictatorial powers, I think all the scandals (torture, extraodinary renditions, the Fitzgerald investigation, the massive warrantless eavesdropping of communications, and probabably more) are building up to an extent that the judiciary system and Republicans (not the Bushist fundamentalist/neo-con movement that has hijacked the party) can no longer tolerate. But it'll be a slow process, and there'll be a lot more of those shoddy shennanigans. Have some pop-corn & enjoy the show!

* although non-scripted, a bad guy line worthy of a Bond villain.

Crossed-posted at Tacitus; for comments please follow this link

Green

2005-11-24T00:06:00.000Z

Your Blog Should Be Green

Your blog is smart and thoughtful - not a lot of fluff.
You enjoy a good discussion, especially if it involves picking apart ideas.
However, you tend to get easily annoyed by any thoughtless comments in your blog.

What Color Should Your Blog or Journal Be?

A door to the future?

2005-09-04T06:53:00.000Z

Again, an incredibly nifty Japanese gadget. Watch the video!

categories: fun, sci

Major Scientific Breakthrough Proves "Theory" of Gravitation Wrong

2005-08-21T23:52:00.000Z

The Onion reports: Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

It is now just a matter a time before narrow-minded 'scientists' proponing such 'theories' realise that the truth is that the world was intelligently designed by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Hat tip to Davinci.

Martial Day Blogging Inauguration

2005-08-16T22:02:00.000Z

Cadmus is on hiatus no more!

From now on, every Tuesday will be about subjects under the influence of Mars and Tyr.

Now introducing our première installment, hosted at Tacitus:

Bases in Kurdistan: an Alternative to Withdrawal?

Cadmus on Hiatus

2005-04-20T15:58:00.000Z

I think that writing is just not a habit of mine. Yet. I had never written anything (well, at least not on my own volition; stuff you gotta write cuz somebody sez so don't count.) before I began with Cadmus six months ago.

A major problem of Cadmus is that it is a bit of all things to all men, besides a test-bench to develop my writing, ranging the whole gamut from retro/intro/extro-spections to fun links, interesting factoids, to essayish comments on war, science, or whatnot.
Also, a blog implies a certain regularity, be it daily, bi-fortnightly, or whenever. So, since I can't achieve neither focus nor regularity on Cadmus, it'll be on hiatus until further notice.
This, however, not in the least means I've quit blogging; I'll probably continue to post here sporadically when I feel I just have to, and I'm considering starting another blog(s) with a narrower focus and/or only for my friends.

Ce n'est qu'un au revoir...

Apocamon Now!!

2005-02-17T11:27:00.000Z

The APOCAMON is nigh; are you unaware it's coming soon and that you must prepare for the rapture? It will come even sooner than in the ungodly, but yet cool & funky '70s. So learn how to be a good christian, so that you won't been Left Behind (now sold in over 10 million copies! get it for for your kids NOW, and the future shall belong to us!); but beware of false prophets!

Second Face of Janus

2005-01-12T22:13:00.000Z

If you're one of the people that can be counted on one hand that have read Cadmus sporadically since its birth, you may have noticed a certain evolution, like for instance, the links on your right.
Also, that productivity has increased, though I haven't yet reached my target of posting daily, hence the gap between the faces of Janus. Guess I'll just have to improve the structure of my procrastination.
Typing* faster might help a bit, but it's really marginal. Having much more impact on my efficiency is the fact that I am prone to meandering (like that dvorak footnote), and I often end up with at worst three or four browsers windows with a couple of dozen tabs open in each. Well, it might be bad for my efficiency, but it's good for my effectivity, as it as I get inspiration not only to mere footnotes but also while new posts through surfing around.
As you may have noticed, Cadmus needs a new tagline. "All your message are belong to us message is an interesting memetic hybrid, but like most mutants, it feels a bit sterile.
"This** is dragons' teeth beeing sowed", which I had until last week, was a way of pointing out that blogs are a medium in their own right, just like cinema or radio or newspapers or novels. I find the Cadmus myth very compelling, but it feels redundant to refer to McLuhan in both the title and the tagline.
So, if you got something, by all means write in the comments; even if it's half-assed write it anyway, it might not be as bad as you think. And think! If two people post a comment, they could have a discussion!! Like on a real blog!!!***

*Anyway, if I am to learn typing seriously, I'd much rather learn dvorak; qwerty is standard purely and solely because of the panda's thumb effect; I'll change my keyboard to dvorak as soon as I'll start to write enough to make a difference.

** the word "this" was supposed to be a link opened to be a link that opened Cadmus in new window, like this, but that kind of tag doesn't work in Blogger's tagline window. I also wanted each new window opened through this link to get progressively smaller in a Fibonacci series, and each new window placed in a nifty golden spiral.

*** In the blogosphere, to have comments is de rigueur is you want to be 'a real blogger', unlike those famous people that just happen to have a blog. Some are congenial communities, such as Obsidian Wings or Tacitus, where debate between commentators is just, or even more, enjoyable as the blogs themselves.

First Face of Janus

2005-01-07T15:15:00.000Z

It's been a short year for Cadmus, only four months, so there ain't that much to retrospect. Still, I'll hang on the fine tradition of re-runs, so here are my favourite posts of 2004:

September: Hard to kill in the Dead Sea

October: War & Blogging

November: Thirteen Minus Nine

December: Subconscious Check

I won't wish peace on earth, I think I'll wait till '08 or '09 for that, but I hope that everybody will retain the integrity of their bodily fluids and achieve purity of essence in 2005.

Hearts & Minds of Injun Country

2004-12-31T03:14:00.000Z

The Economist has an article from an 'embedded' reporter of the American army's anti-insurgcency tactics and behaviour towards the Iraqi civilian population. Well, it's not really news; they're have been many other stories about this, and they all tell the same tale: a behaviour can be summarized in one word as jackbooted. In fact, even senior British army officers in Iraq have accused their colleagues of viewing Iraqis as 'untermenschen' (of course, when they don't even listen to their own officers back in Washington...)

Arbitrarily rounding up people and sending them en masse to prisons where many are tortured is more characteristic of a South American Junta than of an open and free society, the goal supposed to be achieved in Iraq. Such flouting of basic human rights are supposed to be the price yo be paid to enforce 'law and order'. Yet, Iraq is now one the most crime-blighted countries on the planet: Baghdad is the capital with the highest murder rate in the world, twice that of second-runner Bogota (76/100,000 vs 39/100,000); and if kidnappings were a cottage industry in Colombia, they are on a Fordist scale in Iraq.

Against that, US PR efforts such as painting schools or handing out frisbees, laudable as they are, seem pathetically inadequate when such demands about basic state functions and due process are unfulfilled; case examples for the State Failure 101 course.

Furthermore, those tactics are directly counter-productive in military terms: total lack of human intelligence for the Americans, rampant infiltrations of collaborators by insurgents, resulting in events such as the Mosul suicide bombing.
Considering how casually American soldiers talk about most of Iraq as 'bandit' or 'Indian' country, the 'fort in the Far West' mentality seems to have get so entrenched that talking about them digging themselves deeper into trouble is not a metaphore but literally true...

Turkey and Europe

2004-12-30T13:59:00.000Z

Mrs Tilton of A fistful of Euros writes an excellent post about Turkish EU membership, one of very best thing I've read about the subject. Go read the whole thing.
In other news, the Turkish Lira is to loose six zeroes.

Tsunamis, Asteroids, and Not Behaving Like an Ostrich

2004-12-28T13:22:00.000Z

One of the most tragic aspects of the Indian Ocean tsunami is that many lives could have been saved if there had been a warning system. The cost of such a system, a few million dollars, would be negligeable in regard of the devastation of such events, rare as they are, with some estimates putting the death toll above 50,000.
One irrational part of human nature seems to take precautionary measures only after disaster has struck. Though it was another cry-wolf event, the reports about 2004 MN4 a couple of days ago are a darkly ominous coincidence.
Given that even a rock the size of your bed has the explosive energy of tactical nuke (and indeed more than thirty such stones strike the Earth each year; try different sizes for yourself), I hope we will have an efficient warning system before the cataclysm happens.

Is Orange the Colour of Dawn or Dusk?

2004-12-28T02:39:00.000Z

Viktor Yushchenko's victory is greeted as good news, and indeed it is. "We have been independent for 14 years but we were not free ... now we can say this is a thing of the past. Now we are facing an independent and free Ukraine." Thus Yushchenko to his supporters. Many Ukrainians also hope that now their country will leave Moscow's orbit, and join the EU sooner rather than later.
It's been a humiliating setback to Putin's ambitions to maintain a Russian sphere of influence in the "near-abroad", as obviously demonstrated by the sour tone in some Russian media.
Putin's a despot, but more of the enlightened kind like Peter the Great or Katherine II than Stalin or Ivan the Terrible, and like for them, the expansion of Russia's borders, which now are more or the less same than in the early XVIIIth century, is a major long-term goal. And like them, his view of the long-term is at least several decades; so, to quote another historical character, "this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning".
My opinion is that serious negotiations about Ukrainian membership in the EU should start as soon as possible; ideally, its adhesion should be simultaneous with Turkey's. And if Russia wants influence beyond its borders, it can join the EU too like everybody else.

Europanto!

2004-12-25T19:34:00.000Z

Jag haben una kurwa rigolo tunga discovero, Europanto; palabre l'europantese ist också kurwa facile. Jag know es ist inappropriate och ein settimana trop tôt por wünsch paz sur het terra, ma noël ist också about paz och amor, so peut-être det would be meno krieg om tutti sprachte det, since nieman would capisce if ils were dissade.
Jag hope vous alles got somechose nice, that vous hade ein bueno moment con ihre kin, och no haben übermangiare lutfisk, plum pudding och dinde aux marrons.

Glücklich noël och merry nieuw año!

Subconscious Check

2004-12-23T13:26:00.000Z

Me and some of my friends consider ourselves to be players, gamers and gamblers; we'll play anything from parlour games to no-limit texas hold'em through backgammon, boardgames, and every kind of computer game.
Yet to me, chess is still the game of kings and king of games. So I was pleasantly surprised when I visited Daniel in San Francisco to discover that he's become as an enthusiastic café chess player as a backgammon one. And while I had improved my own backgammon skills to beeing a match to him and beating him for the first time ever, he'd done the same with his chess skills.
I've lost three times in a row to him, now as White as well; what bothers me is that my subconscious still seems to regard him as some rookie sucker. Like in this last game, he has an open column with a rook on it and his dame and a bishop on a diagonal aimed at my king's castle on the right flank.
Now that's an extremely delicate position, which requires some very serious defensive thinking. Against someone with skills matching yours, you're definitely the underdog.
That happens quite early in the opening play, a real mongrel bastard between a Black French and a White half-Indian Dame Gambit.
So what do i do about that? Not very much. I happily go on with building up my offensive on the left flank. Now i'm a rather aggressive player, and ideally I want every move's primary objective to be storming the enemy king; if I've got to defend, I prefer moves that have a strong secondary attack potential.
Counter-offensives that take the pressure off me and back on the other side are my bread and butter at chess, but I was deluding myself when thinking Black's underdevelopment compensated that powerful threat to my king.
However, what I find most admirable in how Dan played this game was that he won not by materializing his advantage, but by psyching me out.
My king's predicament was like a cocked and loaded pistol to your head, and so far my attacks just hindered the trigger from beeing pulled. Eventually I manoeuvered my dame into checking his king and forcing an exchange, thus putting the safety catch on the gun; removing the rook would then be akin to taking the bullet from the chamber. At the very least it would make it easier to jam the barrel by draging something on that column.
It was then he pointed out I could take the rear pawn of his pawn chain. Now taking a pawn for its own sake is worthless in itself, and one of the most common cause for defeat for many a rookie. Nevertheless, I was conned; because it made me saw the opportunity of unravelling his whole right flank in a series of forced moves, with at least a bishop, a knight and a couple of pawns as booty, as his rook was boxed in by his knight still on its starting square.
So I was distracted enough not to see that this second rook would then be free to mate me in three moves...
There's a poker saying, "poker's a people game played with cards, not a card game played by people". I was bluffed, and bluffed real good; a much more personal defeat than merely beeing outmanoeuvred on the board.
This what makes gaming more than a fun way to spend some good time with your friends; it's a way to following the socratic "know thyself" adage, as you just have to assess objectively the personal strengths and weaknesses in your play, and ultimately in yourself. Homo animal est quod ludit.

What I Saw

2004-12-10T13:09:00.000Z

Since the end of the festival I 've been taking a course that's rather demanding timewise, so therefore the dearth of posts. The exam is on wednesday, so hopefully I'll be able to write more after that. Or rather, finishing all the drafts I've started.
Writing is great fun, but I feel very much a beginner. I suppose it'll be better when I will have begun for a longer while. That's all for today, except for this list of films I saw during the festival.

Other Worlds

Appleseed

Primer

Innocence

Izo

The Machinist

Uncovered: The War on Iraq

Donnie Darko - Director's Cut

Dogora

Alexander

L'Esquive

Comme Une Image

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Three Extremes

Innocence

2004-11-24T19:19:00.000Z

When the film was over, the director, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, stayed for a few questions; she told about how she had asked the daughter of her friends if the movie felt strange, who answered: "non, c'est comme ça d'être une fille..." *

The Stockholm Film Festival: Blogged by Cadmus

2004-11-22T11:30:00.000Z

As both a cinephile and a chionophile, I'm finding this year's November unusually cheerful.
Originally, I thought of blogging about every film I saw, but I realise now it's overly ambitious as well as not so giving neither for me nor for my readers; better quality than quantity.

The only film I've seen so far I'll post a review about for sure is Appleseed. I still have to check to the programme thoroughlly and make a schedule for the rest of the week. As soon as I've done that, I'll post it. My blogging will be sporadic this week, but that's better than the last forth week, ain't it?

Film I'd possibly like to see today are War, Innocence, 20 Fingers, Tokyo Godfathers, The Story of the Ramones, Chrystal, and Breaking News.

The Friday Four

2004-11-09T21:57:00.000Z

Via Stefan Geens, I just discovered Fredags Fyran. Since I feel sleepy tonight, I'll jump on this opportunity to do some light blogging.

This friday's questions are:

1) Won the right person the election?

hmmm... feels like my blog as been mostly about this question in one way or another this far, much as I want to write about other stuff. You can try to guess the answer after reading, for example this post, or this one. This one too should help.

2) Do we meddle too much in US politics?

Absolutely not. Americans are very insular, and they need more outside influence. Furthermore, given the US weight in world affairs, it's only natural that people should be interested.

3) Who should the president of Sweden?

Svt showed an interesting pseudo-documentary about a fictious presidential election in Sweden. Carl Gustaf Bernadotte was one of the candidates, pitched against a fictious character named Per Vian.
I think Carl Bildt would be a favourite, if he presented himself.
Personnally, I don't care.

4) What would happen if George W. Bush and Carl Gustaf Bernadotte switched jobs?

People would joke about the king's mispronunciations instead of his dyslexia. Americans would probably think that Sylvia fitted her role as First Lady much better that her husband's one as president.

Gay Marriage Gratuitous Helpful Election Issue for Bush

2004-11-05T14:24:00.000Z

On tuesday, 11 states held ballots on banning same-sex marriage (and in eight of them critics asserted the wording could led to the banning of same-sex civil unions as well). All were approved. (link*)

There's a lot of talk about wether this is the wedge issue that mobilized Bush supporters and pushed the vote his way. Already this spring when the issue came up I felt this would advantage the Bushites. It is all the sadder as it is totally unnecessary. As Juan Cole writes:

[The Democrats] also need to start defusing deadly cultural and "moral" issues that have been so effective for the Republicans. And they need to be sly about it.

For instance, a lot of Democrats would like to see gay marriage or at least civil gay unions passed into law. This is a matter of equity, since gay partners can't even get into a hospital to see an ill partner because hospitals limit visits to close family.

This issue scares the bejesus out of the red states.

But if Democrats were sly, there is a way out. The Baptist southern presidential candidate should start a campaign to get the goddamn Federal government out of the marriage business. It has to be framed that way. Marriage should be a faith-based institution and we should turn it over to the churches. If someone doesn't want to be married in a church, then the Federal government can offer them a legal civil contract (this is a better name for it than civil union). That's not a marriage and the candidate could solemnly observe that they are taking their salvation in their own hands if they go that route, but that is their business. But marriage is sacred and the churches should be in charge of it.

If you succeeded in getting the Federal government out of the marriage business, then the whole issue would collapse on the Republicans. You appeal to populist sentiments against the Feds and to the long Baptist tradition of support for the US first amendment enshrining separation of religion and state.

But the final result would be to depoliticize gay marriage, because the Federal government wouldn't be the arena for arguing about it. The Federal government could offer gays the same civil contract status as it offers straight people who want to shack up legally but without the sanction of a church. As for gays who wanted a church marriage, that would be between them and their church (remember, the Federal government is not in the business, but would go on recognizing church-performed marriages as equivalent legally to the Federal civil contract). The Unitarian Universalists could arrange it for them. The red states' populations can be hostile to the UUists all they like, it wouldn't translate into a victory at the polls for a Republican president.

The final outcome would be both more progressive (the Federal government should not in fact be solemnizing a religioius ceremony like marriage) and also advantageous to the Democrats, and it would leave gays actually better off. [...]

*for fun's sake, I thought it would be nice to link to Faux News; when I searched for 'same-sex marriage bans', I was "alerted" that I had "entered a seach term that is likely to return adult content". I didn't knew there were so many 8 years-old checking Fox... the poor little things could become gay by reading news about such horrible things... or does it tell something about the maturity of the Fox audience? I know, I know, cheap shot.
But they deserve all shots that can hit them, cheap or not: another article, with that so characteristic and insidious orwellian doublespeak, speaks of them as"pro-marriage ballot initiatives" (emphasis added)...

Four more years. Of what?

2004-11-04T08:34:00.000Z

From the september issue of the Wahington Monthly: "What If Bush Wins?"

Minarchy rules OK!

2004-11-03T15:11:00.000Z

Today's post is a comment I wrote at Tacitus' while checking people's reactions to the election (light bulb joke included!!).
Now that the election's over (??), I hope it will again become the good discussion place it was before the campaign made it all about Bush-Kerry.
Bush! - Kerry!.
Bush! - Kerry!.
BUSH!!!! - KERRY!!!.

Cyberisolationism

2004-11-02T22:01:00.000Z

The Bush campaign site has become unavailble outside the US, which has prompted many comments (here, here, here, here, and here), and could have the funny side effect of a lot of people going to www.georgewbush.org*... However, until a couple of days ago of days ago you still access it through alternate URLs: https://georgewbush.com and http://65.172.163.222.

This suggests that whoever blocked the access was not very technically savvy... more like the kind of guy who is pointy-haired or talks about 'the internets'...

Officially (to the extent that campaign officials have bothered to reply), the reason was "security". In that case it was a pre-emptive (what did you expext from Bush-Cheney?) measure; according to the BBC, 'Data gathered by Netcraft on the pattern of traffic to the site shows that the blocking is not the result of another denial of service attack.'.

So, "security" seems to be a lame excuse; a friend of mine who's taking a degree in computer systems security at Stockholm University calls it "total ottershit".

Wether american citizens or not, people outside the US are massively anti-bush; giving the 403 is a server's way of showing this.

*You can still view the real site from outside the US via this site.

Endorsement

2004-11-01T22:51:00.000Z

I say like Morrisey, Jon Stewart for president!

The Whiskey Bar is open again!

2004-10-31T23:32:00.000Z

Cheers to your beein back, barkeep'! A double Balvenie cask strength for me!

Thirteen Minus Nine

2004-10-30T13:16:00.000Z

Svt showed 'Thirteen Days' on friday night, the Kevin Costner movie about the Cuba Crisis. Excellent timing, as it ended exactly 42 years ago, and with the presidential election four days away.
I'm not alone in beeing struck by the contrast in how the Kennedy admin. managed the Cuba crisis compared to the Bush admin's handling of Iraq. Of course, it's a very hollywoodian movie with "good guys" that can do no wrong (Kennedy & his team,) and "bad guys" (the military top brass) that are just bastards*. Still, I can't help thinking how the tables have turned; now the civilian leadership recklessly drives for war while it's the military's turn to try getting out of their clusterfucks.

The detail that struck most though, was Kennedy mentioning 'the Guns of August'. He was afraid, that just like European leaders in the early days of august '14 got caught by the cogs of a mobilization machine through sheer bellicose foolishness, he and Chrushtshev were on the inescapable path of mutual assured destruction; black rain would have fallen down if Kaiserish types on any side had prevailed.

Reading history books is not a sure-fire way of avoiding mistakes however; I read somewhere that Dick Cheney sought solace in Victor Hanson's books** during the run-up of the Iraq war in late '02, how people were thrashing antique leaders for taking them to war and then build triumph arches for them when they came back with a 'veni, vidi, vici' on their lips***.

Another book by Barbara Tuchman I've read that is even more relevant is 'the March to Folly: From Troy to Vietnam'; folly she defines as 'the pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest'. Was she alive, she would probably add it as the fifth folly; her four examples are the Trojan horse, how Renaissance popes split Christiandom, how King George (not dubya) lost America, and the Vietnam war.

A few years from now, the debacle in the middle east will be held up as another example of such a pursuit. A high price in gold, blood and tears to pay for something we already knew.

*although it had more than its fair share of people like Curtis LeMay.

**scroll down past the reviews of the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey', to 'Carnage and Culture'. It was written partly in response to Jared Diamond's excellent 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'. I think that Hanson, as far as his points about Western cultural superiority are valid, misses the question of where those cultural factors come from. Fascinated as I am by all things evolutionary (which Hanson cannot tell apart from geographical determinism), I can only note it as another example of how little influence evolution theory has on people's thinking compared to, say, newtonian mechanics. Everybody's familiar with the concept of 'action' and 'reaction', but even doctors and psychologists have a rather dim grasp of it. Like engineers beeing taught math as a nice to have, but not really essential subject...

***if at least 'our' leaders had the honour of living by what Gorgo said to her husband the king of Sparta, when he went fighting at Thermopylae: 'come back victorious or on your shield', which would correspond to a flag-draped coffin in our times... their style is like, more kind of WWI château generalship.

Ground Control to Major Tomcat

2004-10-28T19:40:00.000Z

You know how a cat always* lands on its feet when it falls down? But have you ever wondered what if there's no down?
Watch a kitty in zero gravity and still your curiosity, without killing the cat (quicktime, via boing-boing). It gives a good idea of how a toast/cat anti-gravity engine would work.

*well, not stricly scientifically speaking

Antisaturnine

2004-10-09T20:14:00.000Z

the heaven's wholly blue
the clouds are pink
the day just flew
now in my bath i'll sink

Colourful alert

2004-10-05T17:28:00.000Z

Non-Americans may not be familiar with Attorney General Ashcroft and his terror alerts. Watch this clip.

It has now been scientifically proved that they raise Bush's approval rating (via cleek's diary at Tacitus).
Of course, to the Bush administration all scientists are anti-republican partisan hacks, unless employed by Halliburton or a conservative think-tank.

I'm a flip floper, yes I am!

2004-10-04T09:30:00.000Z

In a comment in the Stockholm Spectator's blog, I kind of say that Iran was semi-democratic, with respect that they have "free" elections, sort of. That was confusing. Guess I'm not much of a straight-talker... So I'm feeling obliged to nuance myself... err, 'make a flip-flop':

Thank you for the link to that article (though I didn't say anything about southerners, much less equate all of them with fanatics, or even fundamentalists). I see now that I forgot to link "1/3 republicans" (not americans, sorry) to another guardian article:
American pollsters believe that 15-18% of US voters belong to churches or movements which subscribe to these teachings. A survey in 1999 suggested that this figure included 33% of Republicans

-I don't believe for a second that more than a tiny minority of those church members are rapture ready lunatics (I'll admit that I expressed myself with a tabloid sensationalism on par with an Expressen billnews...) Don't you believe the proportion of Iranian fundamentalist shi'as that are jihadist fanatics is about the same?
Whatever the figure for the proportion of fundamentalists in the US, it's one or two order of magnitude more than in Europe (to apply physics thinking to another field). More to the point, they nowadays have a disproportional influence in the Republican party.
But a tiny minority of extremists can effectively take power as the self-appointed elite of a larger ideological movement. Not that I believe that the risk of Christian fundamentalist coup d'état is anything but negligeable. As I said, what scares me is the level of influence they have on the agenda of the Republican party.

-I call Iran a theocracy, not 'a functioning democracy of any sort'. Euphemisms are not entirely abhorrent to me, so you may be justified in counting 'may not be a model democracy' as one. I totally agree that 'free' elections do not a democracy make; human rights & free speech are much more important (viz. Hong Kong under British rule), and the Iranian record on that is appalling. It is an authoritarian regime, but it is not a totalitarian one like North Korea, Saddam's Iraq, Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany (I know, degrees of hell...) The problem is that people say "democracy" when they mean "open society", in the popperian sense.
I can't tell if Thors Hans Hansson really believes Iran is democratic like Israel or the USA, or if he just expressed his view in a confusing manner. I think it is the latter: a litterary critic, though as much or as little of an Islam expert, would probably haven't made such a gaffe; and nobody would come to think of questionning a critic reviewing a book for not beeing an expert on it's subject, would they?
But I wholly agree with him when he says "One should never forget that for religious fanatics the word of God stands above the will of the people".

-'The elections will be freer than under Saddam' sounds almost as bad as 'the torture was worse under Saddam'... you'll find more of my take on them here.

The Stockholm Spectator is something I think has been missing in the Swedish media, an English-language paper. When I've been in Asia, there's always a paper like the The Mainichi Daily News, The Bangkok Post and even The Vientiane Times* in tiny Laos, and I thought, why not in Sweden? So, it's a welcome fill in the gap.
Already it has shown it's usefulness by broking a story about a Swedish Jayson Blair, a story that has been ignored by the Swedish mainstream media.

*with wonderful Eastern Marxistic prose

Oct. 15th

2004-10-03T10:25:00.000Z

Première for "Team America: World Police"

War & Blogging

2004-10-02T15:12:00.000Z

When I first heard of the plans for war on Iraq, sometime during the summer of 2002, my first thought was "Iraq will be invaded next spring". You don't threaten war if you don't mean it, and it was hard to imagine Saddam backing down. Spring is the natural season for campaigning, and the timeframe was just right for the inevitable pre-war diplomatic activity. And coincidentally, just right with the election calendar too: what better than the winds of war blowing the ballots your way in the mid-terms, and then having achieved victory in good time for the presidentials? It seemed that O. Bin Laden had slipped away, and counter-terrorism doesn't yield the same spectacular results than a good short ol'fashioned war, with the boys home by Thanksgivin an all.

During the autumn, I began to dimly realise that there was something more sinister at work than mere electioneering. At the time, I viewed the Bush administration as "same as daddy's, with Junior a figurehead". I hadn't been interested in politics for several years, and wasn't until this spring. Unlike Senior's, this administration was totally uninterested in upholding good relations with the USA's allies, and nobody could seriously believe Saddam's embryonic WMD program was an imminent threat. All the brouhaha with the inspections was just for show, and they would go to war come hell or high water.

There was also a marked difference in the public debate compared with Afghanistan: after 9/11, the same opinion that has routinely opposed any international intervention as "imperialism" said the same about Afghanistan, while traditional pro-europeans (Swedish eurosceptisim is largely left-wing) and pro-americans were in favour of the war. For me personally, it was a very simple choice (why, myself I had been in favour of invading the Talibans ever since they blew up those Buddha statues).

It was a whole different story as the Iraq War loomed. Massive anti-war demonstrations with people from the whole political spectrum, while most non-opponents were either silent or wrangling arguments over whether war or Saddam was the lesser evil, and only a few isolated voices mouthpiecing the NRO and Weekly Standard talking points.
I myself was sitting on the fence, thinking that war shouldn't be waged without a broad consensus in the international community, the WMD threat grossly exaggerated propaganda (exaggerated beyond my most cynical expectations as it would turn out), that it was rash to start a new war before Afghanistan was stabilized and Al-Qaeda crushed, but that the UN sanctions had led nowhere and were just hurting the Iraqi people, the removal of Saddam an inarguably good thing, and the prospect of a democratic iraq, while a highly uncertain proposition, might still make the whole thing worthwhile.

Still, I wasn't really interested, and if I talked about the war, it was mainly about whether Saddam could put up any kind of serious defense. The only way seemed large-scale house-to-house urban combat, and hope that the outcry from the international community would force the US to a settlement. With a couple of friends I thought about making a 'Battle of Baghdad' boardgame, loosely based on Turningpoint: Stalingrad, with media warfare special rules.

It turned out Saddam didn't demand such a stalinesque sacrifice of his people, so the invasion looked even more like dangerous live-fire manoeuvres for the US Army than the Kuwait War.

Any hope i had for this thing turning out for the best started crumbling with the reports of the museum lootings. How can you establish democracy if you can't maintain order? But then again, I was going on a trip to South-East Asia that summer, so yet again I didn't follow what was happening.

The next time I started to care was this spring. I was to visit a friend in San Francisco, and I wondered how the mood was in an "America at war". When I came back, I started to learn about the neo-cons and their monumental incompetence. The belief in "cheering-crowds-and-rose-petals", the consequent insufficient number of occupation troops to maintain security, how the staffing of the Coalition Provisional Authority had nothing to do with competence and everything with party loyalty, the dismal mismanagement of the reconstruction, the cluelessness to the political reality of Iraq, the jackbooted behaviour of the GI's towards the civilian population... and then, Abu Ghraib made to all the miserable failure plain to see*. All this I discovered by drifting around in the blogosphere.

So, this a kind of introduction to my blog. I'll write about the Iraq War, since it may be the most important thing that has happened since WWII. At the same time, I feel I want to write about a lot of other stuff, and that it diverts focus from that. We'll see if I can find some kind of right balance.

*Warning. Graphic pictures.

Hey, yes you, keep those gloves on!

2004-09-30T17:43:00.000Z

Katherine of Obsidian Wings, who has thoroughly documented the Maher Arar scandal, alerts us that "the Republican leadership of Congress is attempting to legalize extraordinary rendition".

If you believe in the "iron hand" approach, read this, this, and this.

This is a problem not only in the USA. This practice is forbidden by the CAT, but many western governments that do not want their prisoners in "kid-gloved" hands have breached it. The best way to enforce the convention is the public noticing the foul play at hand and sharply telling politicians to lay it off. You know what to do.

Sun Day

2004-09-26T06:51:00.000Z

I was walking home this morning by sunrise. Perfect dawn.

Elections won't stop resistance to occupation

2004-09-24T17:11:00.000Z

Earlier this spring, there was hope in some quarters that the end of Iraq's administration on June 30th (well, 28th actually) would dampen the insurection.

This could have been, if only the description "new sovereign interim government" was not so much doublespeak.

The Allawi government tried to distance itself from the US, but has been forced to retract every initiative that didn't please the American ambassador ( those pleasant to the occupation authorities but of a dubious democratic nature didn't elicit any commentary, much less opposition).
This week, as Allawi was visiting the US, he didn't do much to change this impression of beeing a poodle on a tight leash by sounding like an echo of Bush's delusional statements about how safe Iraq is and only troubled by a handful of terrorists.

More importantly, his visit has put some focus on the up-coming elections in January next year:

- how elections maybe would have to be suspended in parts or the whole of Iraq

- how Iraqis won't have much choice besides a 'national unity list' of exile parties

- how the Pentagon is planning a December offensive to pacify the most rebellious areas enough to hold elections.

Personnaly, I doubt the result of the latter will be much different than the fighting in Fallujah and Najaf earlier this year. As for the elections, what is satire in America, as in Rob Corddry's "Delayed Election", will be reality in Iraq. So strangely enough, most Iraqis will continue both the insurection against Allawi and to view him as a Quisling.

Periwinkles, ticket-Tinas, hostages, and the hijab

2004-09-20T22:26:00.000Z

Recently, Le Monde reported that Nora B., a 'periwinkle' (French for 'meter maid') was suspended because "she showed up at work, on August 25, with a thin hairnet holding her hair and hiding her ears, beneath her cap. [...] She explained that she followed a religious obligation".

I had a talk on the phone with Karin Hebel, of the Stockholm City Real Estate & Traffic Administration, and asked her if a lapplisa ('ticket-Tina') would be allowed such a garment. She answered that they hadn't an official policy as the case hadn't arised, but that they had had theoretical discussions and as long as the cap was clearly visible, with the veil beneath, it would be ok to wear one.

Very pragmatic, as expected, though showing up at school in a chador is beyond the pale.

Why no such pragmatism in France? Because 'the Veil' threatens 'la laïcité', considered one of most important heritages of the 1789 Revolution. There has also been concern on how peer pressure in Muslim areas forces girls to wear the hijab to avoid been regarded as 'dishonourable' (or more crudely 'whores'), and is seen by many primarily as a women's issue. Others argue that the real feminist thing is to let every woman decide for herself; and last but not least, there is the question of whether this discriminates France's largest minority. Such a mix of issues, each in and by itself very sensitive, led to anxiety about a 'hot September' when school was due to resume.

The kidnapping of two French journalists in Iraq changed all that. Muslim organisations, both in France and abroad, compactly denounced the kidnappers' demand that the ban be abolished, instead bringing unity to the country. The terrorists, seeing how this was badly backfiring on them, handed over the hostages to another group, raising hopes that their release will be imminent.

So, all's well that ends well? For the moment, at least. That doesn't make the ban against 'conspicuous religious symbols' a good idea. It's very controversiality made it a highly dubious proposition, and it's only by a fortuitous turn of events that France has avoided a tearing national debate, and that may have been only postponed. Its practical application can also lead to delicate predicaments: what if one of Nora B's non-Muslim colleagues wore the same hairnet as a fashion accessory? Whatever the rights or wrongs of the ban in principle, in the real world it's likelier to create more problems than it solves.

Hard to kill in the Dead Sea

2004-09-19T14:41:00.000Z

Everyone with a passing interest in biology knows that bacteriae can be tough critters; they have been found thriving in the core of nuclear reactors, inside antarctican rocks, and down in the Earth's crust several kms beneath the seafloor, among other places. Basically, you find them everywhere on Earth that is not molten rock.

Now Nasa reports of insights in DNA repair gained from Dead Sea archean Halobacterium (via the Agonist). Add this to the Mars rovers' clues of martian water with the Allan Hills meteorite, which is less than 0.5 billion yrs old (when Mars most certainly had the same climate as today), and next in the news will be actual living martian bugs.

Not so fast, says I. First, there are certain doubts if there ever was water on a global scale on Mars. Personnally, I find the "long-winded Mars Model" (word doc with pictures) much more elegant in explaining the floodvalley-like and other martian geological features. Second, the magnetite in the ALH 840001 meteorite could well be abiogenic; it then becomes a question of which process, biogenic or abiogenic, is more probable.

But whatever the propitiousness of Mars for the genesis of life in the early solar system, or its eventual survival to this day, one thing is clear. Life can spread through space. In fact, life appears so early in Earth's history that it is hard to see how it could had it made through the then common impacts huge enough to melt the entire planet's surface every few million years, unless bacteriae could survive on splinters that fell back after a while, when conditions were again liveable.

One could set up a function, similar to the Drake equation, P=N*fB*fL*fS*fT*fA where:
P: Probability of finding life on a solar system body.
N: Number of meteorites leaving earth's orbit
fB: fraction captured by body's gravity field
fL: fraction of them having life on them
fS: fraction of bacteriae that survive journey
fT: fraction of bacteriae that survive landing
fA: fraction able to adapt to local conditions
If someone more mathematically inclined and more astronomically knowledgeable is interested in putting some figures in this formula... let me know! Some of the most interesting bodies are Europa, Callisto and Titan (where Huygens is scheduled to crash on Jan. 14, 2005)

This would mean the panspermia theory is correct, if nothing else in the sense that Earth is the origo of life's dissemination through the galaxy.

The chain of command is out of the loop

2004-09-17T13:57:00.000Z

One sure sign that a military campaign is not going well is when the officer corps openly criticizes the conduct of a war. And there has been a lot of criticism, from field commanders to the highest generals*.

The American military has a very strong tradition of unquestionably obeying civilian authorities. The number and seriousness of officers (as well as intelligence people) speaking up should really make those authorities pause and reconsider, especially since the military is supposed to be one of their most supportive constituencies. Sadly the Bush administration seems to have developed its own kind of bunker mentality.

*as well as grunts, but everybody knows that 'theirs is but to do and die'.