Jock 'No, that really is his name' Stirrup, who is the UK's official chief militarist, has carefully explained why it's all our fault that our brave lads and lasses are dying in Afghanistan without actually having toppled the Taliban, offed the opium barons, and abolished Al-Qaeda.

Apparently, they get disenheartened and upset when the GBP starts thinking they might not actually be doing any good over there, they might not be able to provide a pony in every Afghan back yard, and they might actually be encouraging foreigners to dislike our country (and potentially try to blow bits of it up) rather than spreading goodwill.

Nothing to do with the military establishment's reluctance to give them adequate housing, helicopters, injury compensation, or even body armour, then. Nothing to do with the political leadership's insistence on the ludicrous idea that we have to fight a land war in Asia to avoid fighting a land war in Aldgate. Nothing to do with the way they and their allies keep blowing up wedding parties, killing innocent people, and encouraging the locals to use the Coalition forces as pawns in inter-tribal warfare.

Seriously, though - I appreciate the importance of morale when fighting a war. I just don't think that we ought to be fighting wars as a general principle; I don't think we are doing anyone any good fighting this specific war; and I haven't seen anything to convince me that they even know what winning would look like, let alone how to get there.

And I am damned if I am going to be told to shut up and cheer.

ACM Stirrup added: "Support for our service men and women is indivisible from support for this mission.

"Our people know that they can succeed, that we'll only fail if we choose to fail. We owe it to them, and to those we've lost, not to make that choice."

Indivisible, eh? Would you care to substantiate that allegation, because it's about to be arrested for vagrancy...

As for his second para, this is the classic loser's streak philosophy. It doesn't matter how much you've lost; it only matters that you win in the end. And the only way to do that is to keep doubling down.

If he were only spending his own money - or his own blood - then I wouldn't care. But he's throwing away taxpayers' money, the tattered vestiges of the UK's good international name, and a lot of other peoples' lives. Even if only Coalition soldiers had died, that would be completely unacceptable.

And now he's asking us to help him do it. No, actually, he isn't asking... he's telling us off for not helping, and explaining that it's our duty. From the same BBC article, one David Wakefield says: "The Taliban is not going to defeat us militarily, but we want the same patience, courage and discipline that soldiers show here from the public at home."

Sorry, mate. Ain't signed nothing, ain't getting paid, ain't going to surrender my judgement to anyone - especially not anyone with the kind of track record the UK military establishment has racked up by now. So you can fuck right off.

Tags: pacifism, politics

I strongly recommend this Guardian/CiF article by Arundhati Roy to all of you.

Tags: politics, signal amp

So there's been a huge mess on; you probably all know about it by now. Bunch of unethical corporate cowboys, gang of lawyers, Byzantine (not to say Kafkaesque) legal proceedings obsessed with letter rather than spirit, left-wing newspaper fighting back by sticking to the letter of Parliamentary procedure and making the spirit do triple reverse somersaults.

Not my field, so I'm not going to comment further on that, but I have just read the Minton Report (PDF link) and have some comments to make about the chemistry involved.

Most of them are unrepeatable, but can be summarized as "they did WHAT? WHY? What the BLOODY HELL did they think they were doing?"

In short, they found a nice-looking process to refine their partially treated crude, decided that using an actual chemical plant and some sensible procedures was too much like work, churned all the stuff together in the hold of a ship, and then slung in some more caustic soda for good measure, presumably on the age-old pharmaceutical principle of "well, if a little bit is good for you, a lot must be much better, right?"^[1]. After that, they separated out the bit they wanted^[2] and threw away the rest.

"The rest" in this case consisted of a total of about 285 metric tons of foul water, naphtha, caustic soda, and mercaptans. Mercaptans, also known as thiols, are the foulest-smelling substances known to humanity. One afternoon at Cranfield, I accidentally let about 10 cc of a harmless mercaptan loose from the fume cupboard (I'd been working with them too long, and couldn't smell them any more) and the entire School of Engineering spontaneously evacuated itself. It took me half an hour and a lot of waving the MSDS around to convince the builders working on the outside of the building that it was safe to go back to work.

When I say "harmless", I mean that it wasn't toxic, and that in those concentrations all it did was smell bad - we didn't get anyone choking and coughing, vomiting, or crying uncontrollably. That was mostly because it was a nice clear summer's day, with a good strong breeze, and it dispersed quickly. Most mercaptans will do all that, and are poisonous too; the ones released at Abidjan were. Oh, and there's another problem, too; when exposed to acid, mercaptans turn into hydrogen sulphide. H₂S isn't just the smell of rotten eggs; it's corrosive and highly toxic. UK Occupational Health guidelines allow exposure to 10 parts per million H₂S for 15 minutes. If the concentration goes over above about 20 ppm, it stops being possible to smell it, which means you breathe a lot more of it. The Minton report goes into a lot of detail on the dangers of these compounds, and the only other thing I'll highlight from there is that the waste dump is extremely environmentally damaging as well as toxic. Burning and salting the fields does not even make the list in comparison.

And they dumped this crap right there. If you're keen on the letter of regulations, it's possible to make an argument that what they did was not illegal yet; on the other hand, that's missing the point rather. It's also possible (and wearisomely inevitable) to make the eternal "That was the blokes we hired - nuffink to do with us, guv" argument, but I do hope none of my readers will insult our collective intelligence by doing that.

Trafigura have stated in several places since then that standard handling and disposal practices were followed. This is what we technically call "an outright lie". It may be standard if you happen to be a cowboy with neither common sense nor empathy; it may be possible to argue that that sort of slapdash unconcern comes as standard in the business; it does nobody any credit to do so.

---

[1] It isn't. It made the reaction less efficient and more wasteful, and made it produce a much higher proportion of more toxic volatiles in the waste.
[2] Which still contained plenty of mercaptans. This procedure doesn't even get more than half of them out.

Tags: politics, science

Or, Why filling in the forms really is hard work, and why the process sent my mental health spiralling downwards.

A lot of you, O my readership, have been on government benefits or had a partner or close friend who has, and for you there is no need to explain that it really is unpleasant, counterproductive, interminable, and soul-destroying. On the other hand, there's a pervasive sense amongst some sections of the British public (and the media) that benefits are money for old rope; all you have to do is fill in a couple of forms, turn up to a couple of interviews, and then you're living the life of Riley.

( So here's how it works. )

Tags: dwp, esa, personal, politics

Not complete; assistance appreciated. Source: Show of Hands, "Roots". Inspired by this LibCon article, quoting from the News of the World:

…local council candidates John Coombes, of Maidenhead, Berks, and Dick Hamilton of Marlow, Bucks, were sitting with others around a brazier.
Hamilton’s ghettoblaster blared out songs supporting Hitler and attacking “ni**ers”.

And a fascist thug said his hope and dream
Is events where everybody's white as cream.
Call it a festival? What d'you call
Events where no-one sings at all

And everyone stares at the same small dream
Losing at cricket and letting off steam
With piss-weak lager and combat boots
Whingers and thugs in cheap-ass suits

And we oughta be ashamed of all these trends
Of the way we treat our cousins and friends
Without their cooking or their sounds

How will we know where we're all bound?
I've lost St. George and the Union Jack
That's my flag too and I want it back

Laugh away boys, let them go
On and on in their lonely show
We've gained more than we'll ever know
From the open shores of England.

Tags: filk, politics, racism

For a country that's simultaneously in the middle of two wars, a pandemic, and a serious recession, most of the population are really quite relaxed. Or obsessing over something completely different, of course.

Poll #1430133
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31

These issues have affected me or someone close to me:

The national catastrophe you've forgotten is:

The completely different thing I'm obsessing over is:

Tags: politics, poll

Latest Labour MP to resign over the expenses scandal is Harry Cohen, who's been my MP for three years. He wasn't completely awful (some good positions, some really bad ones), but his responses to my letters have been almost entirely useless or nonexistent. I wonder whether we'll get a shiny new Tory MP next time...

Tags: politics

So they're being officially published online, with some key details blacked out.

Heather Brooke says: "I can see that avoiding embarrassment has been the key motivating factor of what's been deleted."

Clearly, not letting everyone in the world know MPs' addresses, their regular travel patterns, their bank details, their NI numbers, their signatures, and the names of people who deliver to their houses is entirely due to a desire to spare the government any more embarrassment.

Tags: politics

While I was looking around for some folk lyrics, I found this interesting FT article on folk music and constructions of Englishness, focusing on Show of Hands and their song Roots.

Attempts to write English national songs tend to founder on the question of conservatism: does English identity mean no more than an insistence that nothing should ever change?

Well, obviously the answer to that is "no", but I think there are some interesting questions about moving forwards involved. They're basically not in favour of SoH's approach, but I think that ignores one of the most important strands of folk history & practice, which is the protest song.

Tags: folk, music, politics

So, Labour have been beaten into third place by people who can't work out how to unfold their ballot paper, and who would have preferred us not to have been voting in that election at all.

I'm not holding any brief for Labour, but this is dismal.

The European Union is a fundamentally good thing. We're all Europeans together, and always have been. The UK's never been separate in any real sense - even after the sea levels rose and we weren't joined on any more, there's been constant economic & social traffic between island and continent. The whole island-race, silvery-sea thing is a propagandist delusion.
( longish )

Tags: politics, the matter of britain
Current Location: Europe

Lib Dem, for the record - was considering Green, but their science is about as rigorous as a rubber banana. If you can and you haven't, go do it. Polls close at 10 pm.

Tags: politics

This BBC article talks about content restriction based on user profiling, in order to make an archive more accessible.

The Warumungu community were interested in repatriating a lot of historical data about their people, but they have restrictions on who can view what - "[F]or example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Meanwhile images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families."

So this kind of soft restriction, based on user-reported profiling, is actually quite harmless... it's almost like, oh, what's the word, a thing that will let some data past but not others, based on a predefined pattern. If only we had those everywhere. Not sure why they're reporting it as a new kind of DRM, really.

Tags: history, politics

...is when using a Tory party election leaflet to save you having to handle it seems like a good idea.

However, it did stir a slothful attempt at minor political activism... which was foiled by Hope Not Hate being useless.

It's a nice idea, but they seem like a bunch of flailing incompetents. I wanted to download an A4 poster image, that I could print out and stick in the front window. You'd think that would be a no-brainer for them, hm? "I want to give you free advertising with no effort whatsoever on your part." After the six-pointless-steps-to-send-a-form-letter episode I had from them the other day, this is irritating me unreasonably.

What they do want to do is mail me ten posters if I pay them £3.00 (including P&P, at least) or 100 for £20.00. And they don't specify the size of their posters anywhere, either. Really very helpful, isn't it...

I mean, I can see the win for them in getting people to hit the streets and convince others to display posters. However, that's not me - the cost-benefit analysis comes down firmly on the wrong side of that for me. And it's not as though they're making any noticeable profit on those posters - it'd cost me as much as the highest per-unit price there to print out my own onto half-decent paper.

Anyone in a sensibly contiguous London location got some? Or, alternatively, are there enough sensibly contiguous people interested to make it worthwhile ordering a batch? (I'm not going to faff around mailing them to people I can't meet up with.) They do have badges too, but if the total goes above £5 then I'm going to want micropayments in return.

Poll #1405871
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 8

Mmm, tasty anti-fascist posters.

Tags: politics, poll

After the Late Unpleasantness at Bishopsgate, I've thankfully seen a very sensible attitude towards the police from all my friends-list. A couple of times, though, I've seen commenters talking about "pigs" or "filth", as though the police were some monumental dehumanized bloc. Please, if someone does this on your journal, point them to this.

Tags: irritation, politics, signal amp

As you've probably seen by now, the policing tactics used against protesters in London on April 1st were appalling. libellum has an impressively detailed roundup here.

I've written to my London Assembly Members -
( letter under cut )
Here are the responses I got, from the Lib Dem Members -
( LibDem response )
- and from the Labour group.
( Labour response )

Tags: politics

If you haven't seen this appallingly racist cartoon in the Times, I recommend it for sheer did-they-actually-publish-that value.

Edit: please read the comments before leaving "helpful" corrections. If someone else has already said it, I don't need a "me too". Thank you.

I can't find an address specifically for complaints; comment@thetimes.co.uk gets autorejected. I've sent the following to online.editor@timesonline.co.uk as the apparent next most appropriate thing.

( Read more... )

Tags: fail, politics, racism

Boris Johnson's right about one thing; taxes that "clobber the rich" could well deter high earners from continuing to work in the financial sector in this country.

So that's one very good reason why it should happen.

They broke it, they bought it.

Tags: politics

Remember those emails we were supposed to send, so the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights would see Craig Murray? They got deleted unread.

Tags: politics

I'm interested in what you think poverty means. Because of who I am (and, frankly, who you are) this is mostly about poverty in the context of rich countries. Warning: may be triggering for some.

( poll below cut )

Tags: politics, poll

Since I just got a reply to my complaint to the BBC, herewith some commentary on portions of Mark Thompson's response.

We usually - though not always - accede to the DEC's request and as a result have broadcast many DEC appeals over the years.

So which others were turned down, and why? Claiming that you're Independent, Dammit isn't going to do you any good if you weasel about it.

One reason was a concern about whether aid raised by the appeal could actually be delivered on the ground.

Not your responsibility. The DEC knows better than you do, mate.

But there is a second more fundamental reason why we decided that we should not broadcast the appeal at present. This is because Gaza remains a major ongoing news story, in which humanitarian issues - the suffering and distress of civilians and combatants on both sides of the conflict, the debate about who is responsible for causing it and what should be done about it - are both at the heart of the story and contentious.

This is quite sneaky. They're attempting to place both sides of a conflict on an equal footing, and to assert that "the suffering and distress of civilians and combatants on both sides of the conflict" are equivalent, which of course they aren't. A hundred-to-one death rate is fairly one-sided, really - and that's just the raw numbers, not the civilian/combatant breakdown.

And how are the humanitarian issues contentious? People are suffering and dying. That's not really contentious, unless you really do believe that the context is more important than the suffering.

...our news services where we can place all of the issues in context in an objective and balanced way. After looking at all of the circumstances, and in particular after seeking advice from senior leaders in BBC Journalism...

Because it makes such a difference that people are suffering and dying, depending on the context in which they're doing it, of course. And it's OK because we asked ourselves whether or not it was.

The question is whether you can disentangle the War issue from the Crisis issue, and the BBC don't appear to be even attempting to do this - or they believe that the GBP won't be able to do this. The broader issue here is that not all War issues are identical, or even alike.

Politically, Israel has deliberately caused a humanitarian crisis. There are already a lot of people sticking their metaphorical fingers in their metaphorical ears and humming loudly over this, but it's what has happened; in fact, it's a large part of many state (or pseudo-state) warmaking doctrines these days. (Cf. sanctions in Iraq, bombing power stations, &c.)

But I haven't seen anyone seriously arguing that in attempting to remedy said humanitarian crisis, we would be engaging in an act of war against Israel, because arguing that would be Bloody Stupid. Aid & comfort to the enemy, possibly - but again, that's a typical black-and-white warmonger's view. No matter who caused the crisis, it's Not About Them. I want to help the people who are suffering and dying, and I don't care who it gives aid & comfort to.

I think basically the BBC have fallen into the trap of thinking, They're At War. We must take their aims Incredibly Seriously, because they are all grown-ups and not naughty children who need to be spanked and sent to the naughty step. Just because they're a state, and a nuclear power at that, it doesn't mean they deserve respect. Caution, yes, but in the final analysis what they've been doing is Getting In The Way while we try to clear up the mess they made.

Tags: politics