Teleportation!

The website of the Federation of American Scientists is a site with all manner of information on it. Finding myself on the site having Googled for a Madeleine Albright speech, I was soon distracted by a study of quantum teleportation conducted for the US Air Force by a private research lab in Las Vegas. All so very sci-fi that I had to share... check it out.

The other fantastic exciting fascinating news I have for you, my loyal readers, is that I was fortunate enough to visit an "Eerie pub," one of 5 (or now, 4) in London, which are decked out a bit like the set of Brazil and feature such fantastic events as meetings of the London Vampire society, Tarot readnigs, theme nights, magicians, a selection of cocktails named after the 7 deadly sins, and weird concoctions you drink out of test tubes.
Tragically, the Bell, Book and Candle near St. Pauls is ceased to be an Eerie pub as of closing time last night. But there are 4 others around London, including one by Oxford Circus. I strongly encourage anyone who has the chance to check them out.

The right to form a union...

Workers at Wal-Mart in Colorado Reject Union
By REUTERS

Filed at 1:41 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Tire shop workers at a Colorado supercenter operated by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT.N) on Friday voted ``No'' to union representation, dealing another blow to efforts to unionize employees at the world's largest retailer.

Wal-Mart -- which recently shut down a Canadian store that voted in favor of a union -- said tire and lube express associates at its Loveland supercenter voted 17-1 to reject representation by the United Food & Commercial Workers Union.

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Mandy

Mandy
Originally uploaded by ukplc.

It's a dull existence when you're EU Trade Commissioner. Mandy is surely tired of telling the Chinese that lifting export quotas doesn't mean they can suddenly flog all the textiles they want to the EU... when will we see him back to turning those wheels of power in his own inimitable, if rather shadowy way? Give the man something to do!

The legal case for war - a UCL professor's view

The Guardian has today published an extract from a forthcoming book from UCL law professor, Phillipe Sands which claims to shed more light on the advice given (or not) to the government by Lord Goldsmith about the legality of a war against Iraq, and also revealing that "in her letter of resignation in protest against the war, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, deputy legal adviser at the Foreign Office, described the planned invasion of Iraq as a "crime of aggression"."
Let us recall that launching a war of aggression has been defined at the Nuremburg trials as the "supreme crime" in the international arena, and that the trial sentenced German leaders to death for perpetrating it. No wonder that "The government was so concerned that it might be prosecuted it set up a team of lawyers to prepare for legal action in an international court."
It would appear that concern for the rule of law is not something this government takes very seriously. Hence, the fiasco over detention of "terrorist suspects" and so on. Democracy isn't something people can be given. They have to exercise it for themselves. In the case of Iraq, few would disagree with this statement. Looking in the mirror is often harder, but far more important too. But how reliable is Sands' advice? It seems to me the government will be able to dismiss this story, continuing to avoid publishing the advice it was given for reasons of "national security" - it's all for your own good, you understand.

What are we becoming?

Is it just me, or is there something about all this house-arrest stuff that reminds you of Israeli "anti-terror" tactics? We'll be bulldozing them down next...

roving

Yes indeed in my travels around the world wide interweb I do see some strange things from time to time. Having just wasted minutes investigating the core convictions of the Flat Earth Society (my favourite is the idea that Idaho is nothing more than an international cartographical conspiracy) I was really blown away by the realisation that Benny Hill has returned as the most powerful man on the planet. Scary stuff indeed.
And finally, a lesson in eco-terrorist tactics: if you're going to storm a trading floor, do it in the morning, not the afternoon.

Porter Goss gets real... kind of

"Iraq, while not a cause of extremism has become a cause for extremists" Porter Goss told a Senate Intelligence committee today. What an odd thing to say. A bit late for stating the blindingly obvious and join experts the world over (the second part). In a campaign in which this is not an issue, I suppose Tony is unlikely to comment.

Face Pots!

A joke or not, I cannot say. But apparently these are "taking America by storm." Check it out.

Ceasefire

Whether or not the current displays of goodwill between Israel and the Palestinians lead to progress in the long term could depend on international opinion. It is significant that Israel is able continually to point to acts of terrorism by Palestinians as evidence that the PA cannot or will not keep terrorists under control, and therefore Israelis can only be safe if Palestinians remain under occupation. The reason Israel is able to make such pronouncements on the international stage and keep a straight face whilst doing so is because acts of violence by settlers basically go unreported outside Israel. Thus a prominently placed article on the website of Israel's best-selling daily, Ha'aretz reports today that "Gunfire from the Atzmona settlement in the Gaza Strip critically wounded a Palestinian man Wednesday, Palestinian security officials said....The 22-year-old man was shot in the abdomen while walking near the Atzmona settlement on the border with Egypt, the officials said."
"The body of a Hamas militant, Hassan Alami, was also found Wednesday near the Khan Yunis refugee camp...Hamas officials said Alami was killed in a "work accident," meaning he was either building a bomb or trying to plant one. They did not provide any further details."

The facts are that acts of violence continue to be carried out by terrorists on both sides. There are always going to be fanatics in this conflict. But how often do you hear about suicide bombers? And how often do you hear about settlers shooting people? If the facts were accurately reported, the conflict could be very different.

If all this good will develops in to a "peace accord" of some kind, the most likely outcome, I think, is that Abbas will trade the Palestinians continued existence as a political entity for vague assurances of peace, in the same way that Arafat traded Palestinian statehood for vague assurances of peace at Oslo. The reaction by the Palestinians could be a violent one. Again, the international dimension here is crucial. And some appreciation of the real meaning of the Gaza pull-out is necessary if we want to understand the conflict. In my view, it only confirms Baruch Kimmerling's thesis (see his 2003 book "Politicide".) It seems that too few realise what Sharon is doing. The question is whether or not he can delay final status negotiations long enough to do it. Graham Usher's article in Al-Ahram Weekly last Friday was very revealing on this point I feel. Usher quotes Hassan Abu Asli, head of the Land Defence Committee in the village. of Sur Bahar in south Jerusalem on how Abbas will tackle the question of Israel's ongoing construction of settlements and the seperation fence: "He will ask the Americans how Israel's wall and settlement policies in Jerusalem square with George Bush's vision of a viable, contiguous and independent Palestinian state. He will demand to go directly to the final status negotiations, since this is the only way to stop them."

My guess is Sharon will evade final status negotiations for as long as he can, to create as many solid West Bank settlements as possible. What the end result will be is anyone's guess, but I have a feeling that the longer the "peace" lasts, the more violent the eventual backlash will be.

Of course, nothing is set in stone, and the power of "the international community" (that is powerful contries, like ours) to change all of this is immense.

Guess who's back?

Well it wouldn't be New Labour without Ali. The Sindie reckons he's back on the payroll heading a "dirty tricks" unit.
The main problem with this story is that Ali didn't invent the allegations about Major. It all came out of an FT investigation that attempted to use the FoI to get info about what really happened on Black Monday. Don't these people read the papers?!

Saturday Night

Public school boys who only want to talk about rugby. Girls who cannot pass a mirror without checking themselves. Why am I at this party?

Did somebody say "Totalitarianism"?

I trust that none of my readers (I have readers?) are familiar enough with Slovenian radical philosopher Slavoj Zizek to denounce my invocation of a piece of his work before familiarising myself with it. Well whether Mr. Zizek would agree with me or not, I have detected this morning what I believe to be an extreme "misuse" of the concept of totlitarianism. Actually, the concept of Fascism. Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman have written an article praising Robert F. Kennedy Junior, hopefully predicting that Kennedy may announce his candidacy for Attorney General of New York State, and gushing over his "great book" about the Bush administration's environmental policies and its connections with big business.
If Mokhiber and Weissman are right (and they generally are), Kennedy is very keen on comparing the Bush administration with German Nazism, on the basis that his "American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as 'a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism.' Sound familiar?"
The problem I have with this is that it misses the point. By comparing the Bush adminstration to the Nazi party, Kennedy suggests that the relationship between the state and corporations that he has identified is exceptional. It isn't, it's standard in every "market democracy" and that is what a "market democracy" is. What is exceptional about the Bush Administration is their disregard for the opinion of Americans and the rest of the world and their audacity in the quest for global hegemony.
One interesting element is the messianic rhetoric identified by David Domke in a recent book called "God Willing?" (Pluto Press, 2004). Compare Domke with Kershaw's "Ideology, Propaganda and the Rise of the Nazis" in Peter Stachura's collection "The Nazi Machtergreifung" (Allen & Unwin, 1983) and the rhetorical parallels are interesting. I guess the New Age of Terror or whatever this is gives as much scope for chiliastic rhetoric as the 30s... But things like this are marginal.
The main things that make the Bush administration so dangerous to the USA and to the world are structural and have little to do with who is in power. Some useful discussion can be found in Noam Chomsky's article on the November elections.
Having said all of that, I would probably vote for RFK Jr. given the likely alternatives, but getting people like him in to power gives a less bad expression of a terribly oppressive system, rather than a different kind of system that empowers people. Caricaturing Bush and his cohorts as Nazis only disguises this elementary truth, making the struggle for democracy even harder to win.