Faulkner and the Great Fox Hunt

William Faulkner once said (note - I may be misquoting) "The past is never forgotten - it is not even past". Who could disagree with that after this week? I could vaguely recall, back at the start of the week, caring about fox hunting (or in fact *not* fox hunting) in about 1998. But, what with war and security theatre and real problems, I'd rather lost interest. Could anyone really justify putting through a hunt ban when there is officially no parliamentary time for new corporate manslaughter legislation, to say nothing of the Euro, serious action on renewable power, regionality etc? I was in the mood to write it off as one of those things (like the €) that should have been dealt with in 1997, when the momentum was with us and Blair hadn't yet stripped open his mask to show the hideous rubbery chops and green fangs now familiar to millions. But, yes, I feel induced to care again.

I've said before that every nation has at least one issue that it considers capital, that divides it utterly, and that no-one else in the world can understand, still less care about. Foxes are exhibit A. It is astonishing how much old blood has boiled up over this, even in the last week. Some of the divides:

Every great political question begins and ends in the tenure of land - Gladstone You may disagree - I usually do - but the conflict between what survives of the old landed interest and the (essentially bourgeois) political system of modern Britain was well to the front. Add to this, the tradition of Labour/Left campaigning over access to the land. Walking used to be an ideology in the UK, with ferocious campaigns by people from the industrial cities of the North for access to the moors owned by the rich. In all the fuss you might have forgotten that the Right to Roam legislation comes into force this week - you can bet the protestors didn't. Yet another old classic is evoked by the odd social milieu of the Commons raiders - 5 out of 8 or thereabouts can claim to know Prince Charles. Ye gods, a King's Party? Is this 1776? And, right down in the deep play, there is one of the eternal questions of political philosophy - majority decision vs minority rights. Not to mention the Commons and the Lords. Is this 1911? And police vs protestors. It's quite astonishing how this has reactivated so many of the founding conflicts of British political history.

Some of the cliches and habits that came up have been interesting, too. The Tories' Alan Duncan - a former oil trader, most rural of all occupations, despite his description as a "pro-hunting shires Tory" - thought the police had been "lippy, surly, provocative and menacing". Don't be sulky to Memsahib now. And what was Sir Max Hastings thinking about this:

"Soon, the only survivals of a batty yet wonderfully colourful heritage will be pubs named the Fox And Hounds. Perhaps Mr Tony Banks and his friends will feel more comfortable when these, too, are suppressed, replaced by some ideal New Labour niterie christened The Halal Butcher."

Why the Halal butcher specifically, may I ask? Why not the Spin Doctor or the Foreign Fighter? Or the Unattributable Briefing? The Doctor Kelly? Enough already. By the way, when I did in fact live in The Countryside, I knew where my nearest halal butcher was. I can't say that here in The Suburbs. Funny, eh, rather like the fact I've still never met a hunt in the flesh. Probably never will now, unless "they" decide to stage one as a protest on the M25.

A Small Protest Wave

Looking at the news lately, you might think there was a degree of discontent in the air - first of all, the chap with the sledgehammer outside Downing Street, then Fathers4Justice climbing Buckingham Palace, now foxhunters invading the House of Commons chamber while their comrades fought it out with the cops outside. Not that I agree with them, but this quote from one of the chamber invaders has a certain resonance:

"The government - they've mucked up pensions, they've mucked everything! There is no democracy!"

Well, you can see his point of view, what with the revelation that British officers were present at Abu Ghraibh -and isn't the degree of Anglo-American respect shown here great! Link

"Col Jordan was questioned in February by Major General Antonio Taguba, the US officer in charge of the investigation. Asked who was then his supervisor, he replied: "Colonel Campbell James, British colonel, just came on board".

Asked whether he worked directly for him, Col Jordan responded: "I work directly, sir, I'm gonna tell you, on paper I work directly for him. But between you, me and the fencepost, I work directly for Gen Fast and keep Col James informed because [of the] British versus American pecking order"

What bothers me is the degree of fury and spectacle devoted to fox hunting and the failure of all the constitutional defence systems to deal with this.

BTW, I said that the glass barrier across the House wouldn't work, didn't I?

Secretary claims documents faked - but true

Link
"I think it is plain and simple. Bush didn't think that he had to go by the rules that others did,” says Knox.

Why Bush wouldn't have joined the National Guard today

Phil Carter has an excellent post on the radical changes to the US National Guard that have seen it go from an organisation you might join to avoid going to war - to one that certainly will send you to war. The US now has 168,915 reservists on operations overseas, largely due to reforms that transferred a large section of the army's rearward organisation into reserve units. This is similar to the British Army's hugely increased use of Territorials since the two Conservative defence reviews of the 1990s radically cut the support services, but there is an important difference. In the UK, reserve-isation went further while at the same time the Territorial Army was drastically altered - losing its larger formations and HQs, cutting down its combat arms, and reducing in size.

One of the ideas behind this has been that the TA's infantry units are less likely to be needed as whole battalions, and more likely to be used either as replacements or to backfill Regular units up to their war establishment strength. This has brought predictable problems - breaking up units (especially ones with traditional identity) has been bad for morale and recruitment. The USNG, for its part, has much more material (Harriers!) and even forms full divisions. Most TA members now deploy only in companies if they are lucky. But, at the same time, the Army has been depending on TA manpower more. Each relief of the British force in Basra requires a callout of around 1,100 [Edit: an error of fact crept in here. Sorry.] reservists, and the legal requirement that they cannot be mobilised again for a set period after completing a tour means that this source of soldiers is being used up. Just another great idea, especially as the prospect of even more frequent callouts is reportedly causing friction with employers...

It had to happen - Viktor Bout spam

"ATTN: PRESIDENT /CEO,
> TRANPARENT ENTERPRISE.
> LIBERIA.
> I am ENG.VIKTOR BOUT, former special adviser on Diamond matters to the
> former head of state of government of liberia President Charles Taylor.
> Because of my strategic position in the former government and also being
> a close confidant of the former head of state, I was able to acquire
> personally
> the sum of $51,000,000,00 USD (fifty one million united state dollars
only)
> presently lodged in a security deposit in Europe..."

Classic spam! From 419legal.org

Not again.

An esteemed colleague, My Way of Thinking, has blogged reasons why, in his view, the Left should not support John Kerry. Oh God, are we on to this again? It's a trope that some people on the left always argue that we should stand aside and let the latest bunch of bastards do as they like because the alternative isn't left wing enough, or worse, that letting things get worse will lead us to a "revolutionary situation". This is at best silly and at worse an attempt to deliberately force the people we claim to represent to suffer for our own ambitions.

Personal note: I recall meeting the Austrian writer Robert Menasse during a demonstration outside the Austrian Federal Chancellery in 2002. He announced that the FPO should be tolerated because this would force the Socialists to be better. I told him this was like cutting off your fingers to have stronger hands. Only kater did I learn that the German anarchist poet, Erich Mühsam, had written much the same about Hitler - before he was thrown in Dachau.

Guy Fawkes - Hoist with own petard....

All righty then, get a dose of this!

"Bouffard, the Ohio document specialist, said that he had dismissed the Bush documents in an interview with The New York Times because the letters and formatting of the Bush memos did not match any of the 4,000 samples in his database. But Bouffard yesterday said that he had not considered one of the machines whose type is not logged in his database: the IBM Selectric Composer. Once he compared the Bush memos to Selectric Composer samples obtained from Interpol, the international police agency, Bouffard said his view shifted.

In the Times interview, Bouffard had also questioned whether the military would have used the Composer, a large machine. But Bouffard yesterday provided a document indicating that as early as April 1969 -- three years before the dates of the CBS memos -- the Air Force had completed service testing for the Composer, possibly in preparation for purchasing the typewriters.

As for the raised ''th" that appears in the Bush memos -- to refer, for example, to units such as the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron -- Bouffard said that custom characters on the Composer's metal typehead ball were available in the 1970s, and that the military could have ordered such custom balls from IBM."

So, the original source for the whole story has coughed to being WRONG. And further, perhaps you ought to have read this before spamming away? Or perhaps even this? Or yet, this? BTW, the Washington Post story linked to by Insta is not sound. If the fact that CBS's chap only saw copies of the documents is meant to prove anything, we ought to give a tad of consideration to the fact that the experts who claimed they were forged had also only seen copies. I see no mention of this. Oh, but the Post has managed to ask "prominent conservatives" and Laura Bush for their view, giving this as if it were information of any value whatsoever. And our old friend the logical flaw has still not left the building: see the continuing and fallacious use of "we can do it now on computers and therefore it can only have been done in this manner"-type arguments.

If you have better information, why is there none of it on your blog?

Eh?

The New York Times is reporting that the US Govt is increasingly concerned by the apparently increased possibility of a North Korean nuclear test. However, they are also very keen to play down the gigantic explosion reported in NK on Thursday. Of course, there is no possible way a bang that created a mushroom cloud of 2.5 miles' diameter and a crater visible from space could be a nuclear weapon! What else it might be seems unclear - one commenter suggested a large steam locomotive boiler, but I have a little difficulty accepting that in the light of reports of a 3.7 Richter earthquake being associated with it. (German speaking link, referring to Chinese sources) That would be quite a big train, no?

(edit)It is reported that it took place near a missile base - a slightly less scary explanation might be an accident with liquid fuel, as occurred on a couple of occasions in the cold war.

Really, this is not good enough

Now, I've just spent a good hour composing a long post about the Bush documents, but Blogger had one of its increasingly frequent crappy fits and the lot vanished. So, I'll keep this short.

The fact you can recreate the documents in MS Word is no kind of argument that they were created that way. Why should it be at all remarkable or even interesting that a higher level of technology can replicate a lower level of technology? This is like arguing that, because you can heat your house with central heating as well as with a fire, anyone who says they lit a fire is a liar. (Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo should be especially ashamed of this logic fart) The rightwingnuts who all sprinted off to try it themselves even admit the problem - try this link (tongs recommended).

"I opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Microsoft’s Times New Roman, tabbed over to the default tab stop to enter the date “18 August 1973,” then typed the rest of the document purportedly from the personal records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian."

Well, what a surprise that it turned out to look much the same. After all, what does MSWord do as a default? It produces an A4 page very similar/identical to a letter produced on a typewriter. Where do you think those standard settings originate from? Any Word document produced on a printer capable of producing fonts, on A4 paper, from whichever version of Word, with the same text in, will look much the same and much like the same document typed on a fonted typewriter. There's a reason your keyboard starts QWERTYUIOP. Times New Roman type was introduced in 1931. IBM introduced proportional spacing in 1941, and superscript/subscript type in the 60s. That word processing - a technology whose standard operating assumptions are taken from typewriting - will produce something similar is no proof of anything. (And if you doubt this stuff, then why am I touchtyping, and why do I start hitting the keys like a crazy drummer once the speed picks up?)

BBC NEWS Downing Street hammer man arrest

BBC NEWS | Politics | Downing Street hammer man arrest

"A man has launched a sledgehammer attack on the security gates at the entrance of Downing Street forcing Whitehall to be closed off on Friday."

I think I can relate to that...

Thesis

I have completed and submitted my dissertation!

Update: a reader has requested a copy, which can be found here.

Boom! Bush's personnel files out

Records Say Bush Balked at Order (washingtonpost.com)

Key papers concerning Bush's (lack of)military service have been published. His CO, Lt.Col. Jerry Killian, is quoted as suspending young George from flying due to "failure to perform" and "failure to take his annual physical as ordered". Killian also seems to have been concerned about the lad's skiving and pressure apparently placed on him to let Bush off.

"In another "memo to file," dated Aug. 18, 1973, Killian complained that he was under pressure from his superior, Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, to "sugar coat" Bush's officer evaluations. "I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job," he wrote in a memo titled "CYA.[CYA=Cover your ass. ed]" "I will not rate."

Heh heh heh heh heh.....in fact, here's a killer quote from the text.

"1. Staudt [the big boss] has obviously pressured Hodges more about Bush. I’m having trouble running interference and doing my job. Harris gave me a message today from Grp regarding Bush’s OETR and Staudt is pushing to sugar coat it. Bush wasn’t here during rating period and I don’t have any feedback from 187th in Alabama."

Odd: mystery cinema discovered under Paris

This is very cool indeed

More mobile masts may be better

Interesting link to an article by Jan Engvald of Lund University in Sweden, who recently visited this blog. He basically makes the point that, if you are worried about radiation from mobile phones, you should welcome more base stations - the technology is designed to save battery life, so the closer a phone is to a base station, the lower the power used. More stations - less radiation.

German supermarket attempts to ban word

Linky (German)

Metro AG, a German supermarket operator, is suing the publishers of the Duden Dictionary of Foreign Words for defining "metro" as "the underground railway, especialy in Paris and Moscow". Not only that, but they have also had a pop at the public transport services of Hamburg, Munich and Berlin for using the M-word. God help us if they get their hands on Fritz Lang's copyright.

Who will get Richard Perle first?

Will it be the Canadian police over his involvement with Hollinger (including a $3.1 million performance bonus for running a venture fund that lost 24% of its value every year) or the FBI on the AIPAC/Pentagon spy scandal? My view on the spy story is that it's not so much about the information that got out than about the information that got in. According to reports, one of the men accused of passing classified papers to Israel (as well as to Ahmed Chalabi, who passed them to Iran) also took part in a meeting with the Italian military intelligence service where the now-infamous fake documents concerning uranium and Niger were first brought up. The real story may be that they planted the story with the Italians and Chalabi in order to feed it back into the government as "confidential information from our allies". There is a well known tendency to give information more credence if it appears to come from secret sources - what you might call the "stolen kisses are sweetest" theory of intelligence failure.

Edit: Juan Cole seems to feel something similar:

"That is, the information circuit may have been ingrown among the Neoconservatives, the Israelis and Chalabi's people."

Torture - not just evil, stupid too

"American interrogators working in Iraq have obtained as much as 50 percent more high-value intelligence since a series of coercive practices like hooding, stripping and sleep deprivation were banned, a senior American official said Monday.

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the American commander in charge of detentions and interrogations, said that the number of "high-value" intelligence reports drawn from interrogations of Iraqi prisoners had increased by more than half on a monthly basis since January. That was when American officials first disclosed that they were investigating abuses of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American military police and intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib.."

Well, it's about time too, seeing as last month had the highest rate of attacks on coalition forces since the war began (no less than 87 contacts daily on average). What with Chalabi's brother on a murder rap, Chalabi himself and half the Pentagon suspected of passing classified information to the Israeli secret services, you can see why they'd need some "dignity and respect", the official term for the new interrogation policy.

Bloodbath and a propaganda point

I'm not going to try to say anything profound about the Beslan school massacre. All anything I say will do is to repeat that this is a horror so depraved it's blank, like trying to talk to a fish. What answer can there be to this? Discussing the grim politics that took Russia to this point is superfluous, and anyway the killers can hardly have believed they had any chance of seeing their demands granted. In fact, one of the most sinister facts was the degree to which they didn't seem to care if the Russians made concessions - they gave a phone number out as a contact but switched it off, sent out a video tape that reportedly turned out to be blank. All that was left was the blood. Very likely, they sought out North Ossetia with a view to stimulating an anti-Muslim pogrom; it has been a long standing aim of the Chechen rebels to broaden the war by revolutionising the Muslim republics to each flank, and a new civil war there would serve well. But I'm not sure this is really worth discussing.

The discussion will happen though. Vladimir Putin's "official aide on Chechnya" was translated on the BBC last night as speaking of "contracted gunmen" from abroad being among the killers. A curious statement, this. That English formulation can surely only translate the Russian "kontraktniki", a term for mercenaries hired by the Russian military to do their dirty work in Chechnya. Can they really mean that they were hired to carry out a mission which would involved the near certainty of killing several hundred children and then being hunted down by the Alpha Group? Clearly they are people who will do this, but I'm damn sure they aren't in it for the money. More like the Russians are trying - as if it was necessary - to demonise the Chechens still more. Kathryn Cramer covers this angle with reference to possible mercenary involvement. However the report she links to comes from a Russian "security source" too, perhaps the same one. How they can know that they were mercenaries so quickly, before they can even give accurate casualty figures for the victims, is a mystery.

Congratulations

Congratulations to Laura Rozen on breaking out the story on Douglas Feith's staff, the AIPAC and the fake "uranium from Niger" documents. Good work!

Sorry

No blogging for the past week. I've been away.