Saturday 6 February 2010
The Red Riding Trilogy
Based on David Peace’s cult novels about the far-reaching tentacles of the corrupt West Yorkshire police force in the ’70s and ’80s, Red Riding hits theaters as an anomic, must-see trilogy.
“Dickens on bad acid” is the phrase used by screenwriter Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) to pithily describe the sprawling, paranoiac nature of the telefilms he wrote for Channel 4 in the UK. This inky triptych nears Bacon-esque nightmarishness and ravishment, with each part helmed by a different talent shooting in a different format. Together, Julian Jarrold (gritty 16mm), James Marsh (elegant 35mm), and Anand Tucker (immersive widescreen) magnificently exhume a past in which the cutthroat police have a members-only toast: “To the North, where we do what we want.”
See more clips from the trilogy, learn more about author David Peace, and read an interview with a few of the cast members, including young 1974 star Andrew Garfield.
The story of Neda Soltani - A story of what media can do to an innocent person
She who was presumed dead sat opposite me. She talked, she laughed, but sometimes I could feel her fear. Neda Soltani had to flee, she had to leave her homeland. Everything seems so different here at this obscure address near Frankfurt am Main - the snow, the frost, the rain, the inclement streets. It is a foreign country for this young woman.
Almost everyone in the world knows Neda Soltani’s picture. It appeared on TV and the Internet and in the newspapers in almost every house as the picture of someone who had died. This well-known portrait shows a young brown-eyed woman carefully made-up. The veil, obligatory in Iran, is pushed back slightly. One can see the beginnings of luxuriant hair. She smiles, gently, a bit innocent but friendly.
But right now, here in a café somewhere near Frankfurt Neda Soltani has become harder. She’s not wearing a veil anymore. One can see grey strands that are growing on her forehead. “It was a misunderstanding,” she says, “a mistake, an error with terrible consequences.” Neda Soltani got caught up in the tumult between the fronts after the fraudulent election in Iran. She was hounded, hunted and had to flee. Her old life fell apart like a shattered mirror. Her photo, that picture with the gentle smile, was torn from her.
Neda Soltani lived in Teheran up to half a year ago. She taught English Literature there. She speaks this language fluently, precisely and intelligently. In summer she completed a work on feminine symbolism in the works of Joseph Conrad. For that reason she had no time to take part in the protest in Iran. She had to do proof reading in June. “My aim was to become a professor one day, should I prove good enough for it.”
Her parents belong to the Iranian middle class. She does not want to say exactly where she grew up or what her family do. She is afraid. She is aware of the problems. She knows that things are not going well. But she was diligent when it came to learning. I was an academic, she says, “I worked hard for ten years to get a position as a lecturer in the university. I earned money, I went out with friends and I had fun.” She has none of that today. No work, no money and no friends to go out with. Nada Soltani is now 32 years old.
The story of her photo began on June 20th 2009. That day a young woman was shot down near Kargar Avenue in Teheran at 7 p.m. local time. She fell on her back and blood ran out of her mouth. On doing so she stared into a mobile camara, wounded, terrified and helpless. She died shortly afterwards on the way to hospital. The pictures of the dying woman appeared on Youtube.
The big TV stations soon got wind of the dying woman from Bloggers and Twitter. Editors tried to identify the woman. Pressed for time, they looked for pictures. Neda, her first name could be heard on Video. The internet quickly turned up a surname: Soltan, student at the Azad University in Teheran. Sombody used these data to search in Facebook.
Nada Soltani also had a profile there. There is not much accessible to the public in it. Only Nada’s friends had free access to the contents. But her photo was accessible at that time to every body.
It is not possible, anymore, to reconstruct who it was exactly who first gained access to the international portal for students, managers and housewives. It is also impossible to identify who it was who mistook the photo of Nada Soltani (below on the right) for that of the murdered Neda Soltan(below on the left).
But the fact is that on the night of June 21st 2009 someone copied the photo of the living Nada Soltani from her Facebook profile. It was sent to all the social networks, blogs and portals. Soon it was being used by CNN, BBC, CBS, ZDF, ARD and every other conceivable station. It was printed in the newspapers and magazines of dozens of countries. It all happened simultaneously world wide.
The photo of this young woman became the symbol of the freedom fight in the Persian Gulf. Furious people carried the picture of this alleged martyr before them in demonstrations. They carried it on their T-shirts and built alters to her. “The Angel of Iran” they called her.
How could it come to this photo swap? Soltani is a common name in Iran. Something like Miller probably. Neda is also not unusual. Somewhat similar to Sonja. The murdered Neda studied at the private Islamic Azad University, the living Neda Soltani was a lecturer there. Shouldn’t the media have done better research on the photo they were using instead of coping it directly from a Facebook profile and sending it around the world? Time was pressing, true, but one thing should have made them pause. The full name of the dead women was Neda Agha-Soltan. The name of the living Neda was simply Neda Soltani.
On the morning of 21st June 2009, the day after the shooting Neda Soltani was surprised by the number of people who wanted to register on her Facebook profile, allegedly as friends. There were hundreds from all over the world. They kept coming. There were telephone calls. A professor, a close friend, broke down in tears when he heard her voice.
At first Neda Soltani thought it was all a bad joke. Something that could be cleared up with two or three phone calls. A mistake that shouldn’t happen but then did. She began to write. She wrote that she was still alive. She wrote to the ‘Voice of America’, a popular broadcasting station in Iran. She told them that there had been a mistake, they had the wrong photo. She sent them her real photo as proof and asked the editors to make a comparison. Her photo was her. Neda Soltani never expected what then happened.
“Voice of America” broadcasted this new picture as a new picture of the dead Neda and CBS took it up. Neda Soltani got frightened. Everything she did to get back her true picture seemed useless.
She took her photo out of her Facebook profile so that nobody could make more copies of it. The next stone began to roll. Suspecting a censure her photo was copied in dozens and hundreds of Facebook pages all over the world. Blogs fixed it and Twitter sent it.
It was as if her own identity was subtracted from the photo and replaced by the longings of thousands of people. The smiling face of one presumed dead became the icon for an innocent victim in the freedom fight.
It was no help that on 23rd June 2009 genuine photos of the dead Neda Agha-Soltan were made available to all and sundry by her parents. Neda Soltani’s picture was still used.
Friends of Neda Soltani in Foren tried to correct the mistake. They were reviled with the words, “you bastards, you are not going to take the ‘Angel of Iran’ away from us.” It is as if a once believed-in mistake cannot be corrected.
This story is not just about a fiasco by the media in the artificial hectic they create when news gathering. This story also describes a cock-up created by the social media. The masses have the power in internet not only to expose lies, the masses can also create their own “truth” and defend it no matter how wrong. Few blogs bother to report the mistake. None of them had profile enough to be taken seriously.
The point came when it became clear to Neda Soltani that something had gone terribly wrong. Only a few journalists wrote to her about her Facebook profile and asked about her identity. None of them could or wanted to stop the deception.
Pressure was put on Neda Soltani in Iran. She was threatened. She feared for her family, for that reason she is not willing to say what exactly happened. Only one thing was clear: the mistake made with her photo should be used by every means possible against the opposition, the people on the streets should be revealed as instruments of western agents. Odious reproaches were made that could have meant death. Neda became ill, panic attacks and helpless fear became part of her life.
She couldn’t stay any longer. She had to disappear out of Iran. She fled to the west on July 2nd 2009 without saying farewell to her parents. She had to use her savings to pay her helpers. She fled with nothing in her hands except a rucksack, a small rucksack. She fled via Greece to Germany. She had a cousin here in Bochum. That is now her family.
Eventually the BBC Online reported the false identity on 3rd July 2009 in a weekly column about social networks. It was published directly after a report on the conspiracy theories about Michael Jackson’s death. The BBC commented, that this case was an excellent example of the danger involved when the mass media use pictures taken from the social networks.
One would have thought that that was the end of it. “My friends said, wait a day and all will be well. But days passed and nothing was good,” said Neda Soltani.
Her application for political asylum in Germany is in process for months. Neda says she never wanted to go abroad. She had never been in the west. She has homesickness. She gets about Euro 180 a month from the German state. That is barely enough to buy salads, fruit and bread which is what she was used to. She lives somewhere in a home for refugees. Her room, number eleven, is small, has two beds and a shelf. She lets nobody in. She wants to forget these months ‘in camp’ as quickly as possible. As soon as she is out she wants to completely forget it. The metal fittings on her door have been patched with plaster. There is no window in the kitchen for the two dozen people on the whole floor. The water tap clings to a shelving construction. There is a satellite dish attached to a broken metal bar on the balcony above the yard. The bar is stuck into a shabby sauerkraut bucket full of sand and stones, an improvised contraption for the connection to the homeland.
Although the photo of the dead Neda has been known for months the wrong picture still appears in Spiegel-Online, in the New York Times and in the Online edition of the Süddeutschen Zeitung. Even the AFP news agency used a version of the picture.
Almost all of these pictures have one thing in common: often they are photos taken by photographers. They show people inserting an icon into a camera. They are photos of a wrong picture.
Neda Soltani remained silent about this for a long time. She wanted to get her feet on the ground again, to collect herself.
In November CNN made a report on Iran; they used Neda Soltani’s picture again. She wrote to CNN and asked them to erase her picture.
The answer she got was an automatic Email asking for her understanding that not all enquiries could be personally answered. The Email was signed “CNN, The Most Trusted Name In News.”
Her picture doesn’t belong to her anymore. It belongs to CNN and all the others.
Almost everyone in the world knows Neda Soltani’s picture. It appeared on TV and the Internet and in the newspapers in almost every house as the picture of someone who had died. This well-known portrait shows a young brown-eyed woman carefully made-up. The veil, obligatory in Iran, is pushed back slightly. One can see the beginnings of luxuriant hair. She smiles, gently, a bit innocent but friendly.
But right now, here in a café somewhere near Frankfurt Neda Soltani has become harder. She’s not wearing a veil anymore. One can see grey strands that are growing on her forehead. “It was a misunderstanding,” she says, “a mistake, an error with terrible consequences.” Neda Soltani got caught up in the tumult between the fronts after the fraudulent election in Iran. She was hounded, hunted and had to flee. Her old life fell apart like a shattered mirror. Her photo, that picture with the gentle smile, was torn from her.
Neda Soltani lived in Teheran up to half a year ago. She taught English Literature there. She speaks this language fluently, precisely and intelligently. In summer she completed a work on feminine symbolism in the works of Joseph Conrad. For that reason she had no time to take part in the protest in Iran. She had to do proof reading in June. “My aim was to become a professor one day, should I prove good enough for it.”
Her parents belong to the Iranian middle class. She does not want to say exactly where she grew up or what her family do. She is afraid. She is aware of the problems. She knows that things are not going well. But she was diligent when it came to learning. I was an academic, she says, “I worked hard for ten years to get a position as a lecturer in the university. I earned money, I went out with friends and I had fun.” She has none of that today. No work, no money and no friends to go out with. Nada Soltani is now 32 years old.
The story of her photo began on June 20th 2009. That day a young woman was shot down near Kargar Avenue in Teheran at 7 p.m. local time. She fell on her back and blood ran out of her mouth. On doing so she stared into a mobile camara, wounded, terrified and helpless. She died shortly afterwards on the way to hospital. The pictures of the dying woman appeared on Youtube.The big TV stations soon got wind of the dying woman from Bloggers and Twitter. Editors tried to identify the woman. Pressed for time, they looked for pictures. Neda, her first name could be heard on Video. The internet quickly turned up a surname: Soltan, student at the Azad University in Teheran. Sombody used these data to search in Facebook.
Nada Soltani also had a profile there. There is not much accessible to the public in it. Only Nada’s friends had free access to the contents. But her photo was accessible at that time to every body.
It is not possible, anymore, to reconstruct who it was exactly who first gained access to the international portal for students, managers and housewives. It is also impossible to identify who it was who mistook the photo of Nada Soltani (below on the right) for that of the murdered Neda Soltan(below on the left).
But the fact is that on the night of June 21st 2009 someone copied the photo of the living Nada Soltani from her Facebook profile. It was sent to all the social networks, blogs and portals. Soon it was being used by CNN, BBC, CBS, ZDF, ARD and every other conceivable station. It was printed in the newspapers and magazines of dozens of countries. It all happened simultaneously world wide.The photo of this young woman became the symbol of the freedom fight in the Persian Gulf. Furious people carried the picture of this alleged martyr before them in demonstrations. They carried it on their T-shirts and built alters to her. “The Angel of Iran” they called her.
How could it come to this photo swap? Soltani is a common name in Iran. Something like Miller probably. Neda is also not unusual. Somewhat similar to Sonja. The murdered Neda studied at the private Islamic Azad University, the living Neda Soltani was a lecturer there. Shouldn’t the media have done better research on the photo they were using instead of coping it directly from a Facebook profile and sending it around the world? Time was pressing, true, but one thing should have made them pause. The full name of the dead women was Neda Agha-Soltan. The name of the living Neda was simply Neda Soltani.
On the morning of 21st June 2009, the day after the shooting Neda Soltani was surprised by the number of people who wanted to register on her Facebook profile, allegedly as friends. There were hundreds from all over the world. They kept coming. There were telephone calls. A professor, a close friend, broke down in tears when he heard her voice.
At first Neda Soltani thought it was all a bad joke. Something that could be cleared up with two or three phone calls. A mistake that shouldn’t happen but then did. She began to write. She wrote that she was still alive. She wrote to the ‘Voice of America’, a popular broadcasting station in Iran. She told them that there had been a mistake, they had the wrong photo. She sent them her real photo as proof and asked the editors to make a comparison. Her photo was her. Neda Soltani never expected what then happened.
“Voice of America” broadcasted this new picture as a new picture of the dead Neda and CBS took it up. Neda Soltani got frightened. Everything she did to get back her true picture seemed useless.
She took her photo out of her Facebook profile so that nobody could make more copies of it. The next stone began to roll. Suspecting a censure her photo was copied in dozens and hundreds of Facebook pages all over the world. Blogs fixed it and Twitter sent it.It was as if her own identity was subtracted from the photo and replaced by the longings of thousands of people. The smiling face of one presumed dead became the icon for an innocent victim in the freedom fight.
It was no help that on 23rd June 2009 genuine photos of the dead Neda Agha-Soltan were made available to all and sundry by her parents. Neda Soltani’s picture was still used.
Friends of Neda Soltani in Foren tried to correct the mistake. They were reviled with the words, “you bastards, you are not going to take the ‘Angel of Iran’ away from us.” It is as if a once believed-in mistake cannot be corrected.
This story is not just about a fiasco by the media in the artificial hectic they create when news gathering. This story also describes a cock-up created by the social media. The masses have the power in internet not only to expose lies, the masses can also create their own “truth” and defend it no matter how wrong. Few blogs bother to report the mistake. None of them had profile enough to be taken seriously.
The point came when it became clear to Neda Soltani that something had gone terribly wrong. Only a few journalists wrote to her about her Facebook profile and asked about her identity. None of them could or wanted to stop the deception.
Pressure was put on Neda Soltani in Iran. She was threatened. She feared for her family, for that reason she is not willing to say what exactly happened. Only one thing was clear: the mistake made with her photo should be used by every means possible against the opposition, the people on the streets should be revealed as instruments of western agents. Odious reproaches were made that could have meant death. Neda became ill, panic attacks and helpless fear became part of her life.
She couldn’t stay any longer. She had to disappear out of Iran. She fled to the west on July 2nd 2009 without saying farewell to her parents. She had to use her savings to pay her helpers. She fled with nothing in her hands except a rucksack, a small rucksack. She fled via Greece to Germany. She had a cousin here in Bochum. That is now her family.
Eventually the BBC Online reported the false identity on 3rd July 2009 in a weekly column about social networks. It was published directly after a report on the conspiracy theories about Michael Jackson’s death. The BBC commented, that this case was an excellent example of the danger involved when the mass media use pictures taken from the social networks.
One would have thought that that was the end of it. “My friends said, wait a day and all will be well. But days passed and nothing was good,” said Neda Soltani.
Her application for political asylum in Germany is in process for months. Neda says she never wanted to go abroad. She had never been in the west. She has homesickness. She gets about Euro 180 a month from the German state. That is barely enough to buy salads, fruit and bread which is what she was used to. She lives somewhere in a home for refugees. Her room, number eleven, is small, has two beds and a shelf. She lets nobody in. She wants to forget these months ‘in camp’ as quickly as possible. As soon as she is out she wants to completely forget it. The metal fittings on her door have been patched with plaster. There is no window in the kitchen for the two dozen people on the whole floor. The water tap clings to a shelving construction. There is a satellite dish attached to a broken metal bar on the balcony above the yard. The bar is stuck into a shabby sauerkraut bucket full of sand and stones, an improvised contraption for the connection to the homeland.
Although the photo of the dead Neda has been known for months the wrong picture still appears in Spiegel-Online, in the New York Times and in the Online edition of the Süddeutschen Zeitung. Even the AFP news agency used a version of the picture.Almost all of these pictures have one thing in common: often they are photos taken by photographers. They show people inserting an icon into a camera. They are photos of a wrong picture.
Neda Soltani remained silent about this for a long time. She wanted to get her feet on the ground again, to collect herself.
In November CNN made a report on Iran; they used Neda Soltani’s picture again. She wrote to CNN and asked them to erase her picture.
The answer she got was an automatic Email asking for her understanding that not all enquiries could be personally answered. The Email was signed “CNN, The Most Trusted Name In News.”
Her picture doesn’t belong to her anymore. It belongs to CNN and all the others.
(Indebted to HerrB for this!)
Regular readers may recall that this blog was one of (if not the first) to publish a real picture of Neda (22 June) (Full photo here) I do know now who sent me the photo and the circumstances of how they got it but at the time I didn't.
I had provided numerous exclusive stories to The Huffington Post last June previous to this but they decided not to run with the story that the wrong photo had been used by us all.
Of course when the BBC finally did use this photo later it was accepted that it was genuine!
Regular readers may recall that this blog was one of (if not the first) to publish a real picture of Neda (22 June) (Full photo here) I do know now who sent me the photo and the circumstances of how they got it but at the time I didn't.
I had provided numerous exclusive stories to The Huffington Post last June previous to this but they decided not to run with the story that the wrong photo had been used by us all.
Of course when the BBC finally did use this photo later it was accepted that it was genuine!
Friday 5 February 2010
Die Antwoord
There’s a new sound blowing up in the Kaapse Afrikaanse hip hop community. Imagine some dirty electro 80s style beats and some simple-yet-catchy synth. Then throw in some of the filthiest and funniest lyrics you’ve ever heard, at the same time poignant and dripping with irony and you’re getting close to what Die Antwoord is producing, under the billing of a zef rap-rave crew. So rof are some of the lyrics that, frankly, you need to take a bath after listening to it...
Mahala: What is Die Antwoord?
NINJA: Die Antwoord is the name of my zef Zuid Afrikaanse rap-rave crew.
Mahala: How did Die Antwoord come about?
NINJA: Die Antwoord was always there hiding in the dark waiting for me to find it.
Mahala: A song like Dagga Puff has a strong and direct social message and comes across as a kind of nursery rhyme - and it’s obvious you’re trying to make a point and change the habits of your audience, or at least make them think more. Then other songs like Doos Dronk with Francois - take more subtle, tongue in cheek digs at our alcoholic culture. Same with Scopie - taking on sex. Are you trying to make a point. Or do you just want people to dance to your music, get fucked and then go home and pomp?
NINJA: Yes.
Mahala: How do you feel when your audience does not connect with the meaning of your music - and thinks that some of these ‘ironic’ songs are intentional. As if Die Antwoord is to get fucked up and have sex and live to buy expensive kak.
NINJA: Different people find Die Antwoord in different things.
Mahala: You said in the interview with Griffin on the Watkykjy website that you like coloured people. From your music it sounds like you are coloured, but from that statement, I take it you’re not. Are you pretending to be coloured?...
Full interview @ Mahala
http://www.dieantwoord.com/
Listen to the album HERE
Zip @128 HERE
More @ 'Boing Boing'
History
Yes it is a parody but a damn good one!
Search Youtoob for 'Max Normal TV'
Monday 1 February 2010
Death toll in anthrax outbreak among heroin users hits 9 in Scotland
Deaths linked to heroin contaminated by anthrax have risen to nine, tests revealed.
The laboratory tests confirmed anthrax infection in a heroin user who died in the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde area in December.
This takes the number of confirmed cases of anthrax in the current outbreak in Scotland to 18, with nine people dead.The latest confirmed case was a drug user who died on 12 December – the earliest death linked to the outbreak, although the connection has only just been proven.
Experts said evidence suggested that contaminated heroin may still be in circulation and urged all drug users across Scotland to remain vigilant.
The outbreak began with the identification of cases in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde in December, with cases now having been identified in six NHS boards across the country.
It is the first known outbreak of anthrax linked with drug use.
Dr Colin Ramsay, consultant epidemiologist at Health Protection Scotland and head of the national Outbreak Control Team, said: "While public health investigations are continuing to attempt to identify the source of the contamination, no drug samples tested to date have shown anthrax contamination, although a number of other types of potentially harmful bacteria have been found.
"It must therefore be assumed that all heroin in Scotland carries the risk of anthrax contamination and users are advised to cease taking heroin by any route if at all possible.
"While we appreciate that this may be extremely difficult advice for users to follow, it remains the only public health protection advice possible."
Detective Superintendent Derek Robertson, who is leading the police investigation, said: "We are working hard to attempt to identify the source of the contamination."
Blair's bounty
Writer and Guardian columnist George Monbiot is so incensed by Tony Blair’s efforts to wage war on Iraq that he has launched a new fund - www.arrestblair.org – to reward those who attempt to arrest the former British prime minister.
The only question that counts is the one that the Chilcot inquiry won’t address: was the war with Iraq illegal? If the answer is yes, everything changes. The war is no longer a political matter, but a criminal one, and those who commissioned it should be committed for trial for what the Nuremberg Tribunal called “the supreme international crime”(1): the crime of aggression.
But there’s a problem with official inquiries in the United Kingdom: the government appoints their members and sets their terms of reference. It’s the equivalent of a criminal suspect being allowed to choose what the charges should be, who should judge his case and who should sit on the jury.
As a senior judge told the Guardian in November, “Looking into the legality of the war is the last thing the government wants. And actually, it’s the last thing the opposition wants either because they voted for the war. There simply is not the political pressure to explore the question of legality – they have not asked because they don’t want the answer.”(2)
Others have explored it, however. Two weeks ago a Dutch inquiry, led by a former supreme court judge, found that the invasion had “no sound mandate in international law”(3). Last month the former law lord, Lord Steyn, said that “in the absence of a second UN resolution authorising invasion, it was illegal.”(4) In November Lord Bingham, the former lord chief justice, stated that, without the blessing of the UN, the Iraq war was “a serious violation of international law and the rule of law.”(5)
Under the UN Charter, two conditions must be met before a war can legally be waged(6). The parties to a dispute must first “seek a solution by negotiation” (Article 33). They can take up arms without an explicit mandate from the UN Security Council only “if an armed attack occurs against [them]” (Article 51). Neither of these conditions applied.
The US and UK governments rejected Iraq’s attempts to negotiate(7). At one point the US State Department even announced that it would “go into thwart mode” to prevent the Iraqis from resuming talks on weapons inspection(8). Iraq had launched no armed attack against either nation.
We also know that the UK government was aware that the war it intended to launch was illegal. In March 2002, the Cabinet Office explained that “a legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to Law Officers’ advice, none currently exists.”(9) In July 2002, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, told the prime minister that there were only “three possible legal bases” for launching a war: “self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC [Security Council] authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.”(10) Bush and Blair later failed to obtain Security Council authorisation.
As the resignation letter on the eve of the war from Elizabeth Wilmshurst, then deputy legal advisor to the Foreign Office, revealed, her office had “consistently” advised that an invasion would be unlawful without a new UN resolution. She explained that “an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression”(11). Both Wilmshurst and her former boss, Sir Michael Wood, will testify before the Chilcot Inquiry today (January 26, 2010). Expect fireworks.
We must show that we have not, as Blair requested, “moved on” from Iraq, that we are not prepared to allow his crime to remain unpunished, or to allow future leaders to believe that they can safely repeat it.
Without legal justification, the war with Iraq was an act of mass murder: those who died were unlawfully killed by the people who commissioned it. Crimes of aggression (also known as crimes against peace) are defined by the Nuremberg Principles as “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties”(12).
They have been recognised in international law since 1945. The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and which was ratified by Blair’s government in 2001(13), provides for the Court to “exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression”, once it has decided how the crime should be defined and prosecuted(14).
There are two problems. The first is that neither the government nor the opposition has any interest in pursuing these crimes, for the obvious reason that in doing so they would expose themselves to prosecution. The second is that the required legal mechanisms don’t yet exist. The governments which ratified the Rome Statute have been filibustering furiously to delay the point at which the crime can be prosecuted by the ICC: after eight years of discussions, the necessary provision still hasn’t been adopted.
Some countries, mostly in eastern Europe and central Asia, have incorporated the crime of aggression into their own laws(15), though it is not yet clear which of them would be willing to try a foreign national for acts committed abroad. In the UK, where it remains illegal to wear an offensive T-shirt, you cannot yet be prosecuted for mass murder commissioned overseas.
All those who believe in justice should campaign for their governments to stop messing about and allow the International Criminal Court to start prosecuting the crime of aggression. We should also press for its adoption into national law. But I believe that the people of this nation, who re-elected a government which had launched an illegal war, have a duty to do more than that.
We must show that we have not, as Blair requested, “moved on” from Iraq, that we are not prepared to allow his crime to remain unpunished, or to allow future leaders to believe that they can safely repeat it.
But how? As I found when I tried to apprehend John Bolton, one of the architects of the war in George Bush’s government, at the Hay festival in 2008(16), and as Peter Tatchell found when he tried to detain Robert Mugabe(17), nothing focuses attention on these issues more than an attempted citizen’s arrest. In October I mooted the idea of a bounty to which the public could contribute, payable to anyone who tried to arrest Tony Blair if he became president of the EU(18). He didn’t of course, but I asked those who had pledged money whether we should go ahead anyway. The response was overwhelmingly positive.
So today I am launching a website, www.arrestblair.org, whose purpose is to raise money as a reward for people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former prime minister. I have put up the first £100, and I encourage you to match it. Anyone meeting the rules I’ve laid down will be entitled to one quarter of the total pot: the bounties will remain available for as long as Blair lives. The higher the reward, the greater the number of people who are likely to try.
At this stage the arrests will be largely symbolic, though they are likely to have great political resonance. But I hope that as pressure builds up and the crime of aggression is adopted by the courts, these attempts will help to press governments to prosecute. There must be no hiding place for those who have committed crimes against peace. No civilised country can allow mass murderers to move on.
Note: George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books Heat: how to stop the planet burning; The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain; as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man’s Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper. The above article was posted at his website, www.monbiot.com.
A broken society, yes. But broken by Thatcher (Cameron is right: society is broken. Labour have failed to fix it, but acute inequality is a Tory legacy)
David Cameron is right to point to Britain's "broken society" as an election issue. In his Hugo Young lecture at the end of last year, the Conservative leader cited in support of his thesis our research that found, in his words, that "among the richest countries, it's the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator".
Among 21 developed market democracies, we found that Britain does worst on child wellbeing and badly on teenage births, imprisonment, drug abuse, trust, obesity, social mobility and mental illness. This week brought fresh confirmation of the pervasive and profound inequality in Britain in the form of a 460-page government-commissioned study – An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK – which described a nation in which the richest 10% are more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10%.
But where does the blame lie? The evidence shows that almost all the problems that occur most often in the poorest neighbourhoods – including those that make us a broken society – are systematically more common in more unequal societies. Rates are not just a little higher, but between two and eight times higher. Wider income gaps make societies socially dysfunctional across the board.
Last October Cameron rounded on Labour, saying: "Who made inequality greater? No, not the wicked Tories. You, Labour. You're the ones that did this to our society. So don't you dare lecture us about poverty. You have failed and it falls to us, the modern Conservative party, to fight for the poorest who you have let down."
But the truth is that we are suffering the impact of the massive increases in income inequality under Thatcher, which Blair and Brown have since failed to reverse. In the 1980s the gulf between the top and bottom 20% widened by a full 60% – much the most dramatic widening of income differences on record. Since then there have been only minor fluctuations under Major, Blair and Brown. The result is that the gap between the top and bottom 20% in Britain is twice as big as among our more equal European partners.
Almost all of Gordon Brown's budgets did at least something to redistribute from rich to poor. But because the benefit was entirely offset by the unconstrained rise in top earnings, he can claim no more than having prevented a greater rise in inequality.
What happened in the later 1980s may now seem merely water under the bridge. But broken Britain is Thatcher's bitter legacy. Rather than having instantaneous effects, inequality gradually corrodes the social fabric. It takes a while for greater material differences to make the social hierarchy steeper, for status competition and consumerism to increase, for people to feel a greater sense of superiority or inferiority, for prejudices towards those lower on the social ladder to harden, for prisons to fill to overflowing under the impact of more punitive sentencing, and for people to seek solace in drugs.
Rather than dealing with inequality, some politicians find it tempting to blame "broken families", "bad parenting" and "damaged" children. Science has made huge leaps in understanding how our biology and psychology are affected by early life experiences, both in the womb and after. Children are deeply sensitive to family relationships and the quality of care. However, this sensitivity, and the way it shapes emotional and cognitive development, is not an evolutionary mistake.
It exists because early life serves as a taster of the kind of society that we may have to deal with in adulthood. It prepares children for the kind of society they are growing up in. Are they in a world of rivals, in which they will have to fight for what they can get, fend for themselves and learn not to trust others? Or will they need to gain one another's trust, dependent on co-operation and reciprocity, in a world where empathy and social skills are at a premium?
Whether through maternal stress in pregnancy, depression, domestic conflict or poor attachment, parents' experience of adversity in a more unequal dog-eat-dog society is passed on, with inevitable consequences for their children's cognitive and emotional development. Early intervention programmes may help but will be needed for ever unless we reduce inequality.
Because the children of single parents fare less well than children raised by two parents, it is sometimes suggested that our broken society results from broken families. In the revised paperback edition of our book The Spirit Level, we include an analysis of the effects of higher rates of single parenthood on levels of child wellbeing in rich countries. The proportion of single parents varies from under 4% in Greece to nearly 30% in Britain and the US, but this bears no relation to average levels of child wellbeing.
National standards of child wellbeing seem unaffected by high rates of single parenthood. The explanation is that the disadvantages of single parenthood are largely the result of higher rates of poverty and maternal depression. More equal countries seem to avoid ill effects by providing good services and keeping most of their single parents out of poverty.
The remedy for broken Britain is to reduce income inequality. Prime ministers who proclaim, as John Major did, that they want to create a classless society, will inevitably fail unless they reduce material differences. Similarly for those who want to give all children an equal chance in life: if the social ladder is steeper it becomes harder to climb and social mobility slows.
Greater equality improves the quality of life for everyone – not just the poor. Whatever your income or education, living in a more equal society means you will be likely to live longer while being less likely to suffer violence or have a problem with obesity. In turn, your children have a better chance of doing well at school and are less likely to use drugs or to become teenage parents. This is about the quality of life for all of us.
RePost: Nothing polite to say...
The Tories were today forced to deny that a video clip purporting to show a long-haired party-goer at a 1988 outdoor rave was the party leader David Cameron.The purple-tinted video, set to a hypnotic acid house rave track, shows a man bearing a striking similarity to Cameron with shoulder-length hair and wearing dungarees. The video, called 'Acid House Sunrise 1988 Part 4', has surfaced on YouTube and has been picked up by political blogger Guido Fawkes.
Held during the so-called second Summer of Love in 1988, the long-haired man appears to be joining in the fun at the outdoor event. Tory blogger Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, was Head of PR for the 1988-89 rave party planners, Sunrise. It was Fawkes who received the emails sent by Brown's special advisor Damian McBride about slurs on top Tories which led to McBride's sacking. Posting on his blog, Guido asks his readers to decide for themselves whether the man in the clip really is the Tory leader and Old Etonian. Alongside stills from the video, he says: 'This has been building up for a few weeks and now Guido is getting calls from Dead Tree Press diarists, it is probably time to bring it out into the open. 'Is this a picture of a long-haired 22 year-old David Cameron? 'The pictures are taken from a video of a Sunrise Party held in the summer of 1988. You decide… ' However a Tory press spokesperson 'categorically' denied that the man in the clip was Cameron. Raves, fuelled by dance music, boomed during the late 1980s and were infamous for the widespread use Ecstasy. The all-night parties, frequently illegal, were held at secret locations in warehouses or in fields. In 2007, it was revealed that Cameron narrowly avoided being expelled from Eton after being named by a fellow pupil as a cannabis user. Cameron repeatedly refused to answer questions during his successful Tory leadership campaign on whether or not he had taken drugs. And he has stuck by his insistence that all politicians are entitled to a 'private past' and should not be required to reveal everything of their lives before they enter politics.
Sunday 31 January 2010
Slime mould attacks simulates Tokyo rail network
In a Japanese laboratory, a group of scientists is encouraging a rapidly expanding amoeba-like blob to consume Tokyo. Thankfully, the blob in question is a "slime mould" just around 20cm wide, and "Tokyo" is represented by a series of oat flakes dotted about a large plastic dish. It's all part of a study on better network design through biological principles. Despite growing of its own accord with no plan in mind, the mould has rapidly produced a web of slimy tubes that look a lot like Tokyo's actual railway network.
The point of this simulation isn't to reconstruct the monster attacks of popular culture, but to find ways of improving transport networks, by recruiting nature as a town planner. Human societies depend on good transport networks for ferrying people, resources and information from place to place, but setting up such networks isn't easy. They have to be efficient, cost-effective and resistant to interruptions or failure. The last criterion is particularly challenging as the British public transport system attests to, every time a leaf or snowflake lands on a road or railway.
Living thing also rely on transport networks, from the protein tracks that run through all of our cells to the gangways patrolled by ant colonies. Like man-made networks, these biological ones face the same balancing act of efficiency and resilience, but unlike man-made networks, they have been optimised through millions of years of evolution. Their strategies have to work - if our networks crash, the penalties are power outages or traffic jams; if theirs crash, the penalty is death.
To draw inspiration from these biological networks, Atsushi Tero from Hokkaido University worked with the slime mould Physarum polycephalum. This amoeba-like creature forages for food by sending out branches (plasmodia) from a central location. Even though it forms vast, sprawling networks, it still remains as a single cell. It's incredibly dynamic. Its various veins change thickness and shape, new ones form while old ones vanish, and the entire network can crawl a few centimetres every hour.
For a mindless organism, the slime mould's skill at creating efficient networks is extraordinary. It can find the most effective way of linking together scattered sources of food, and it can even find the shortest path through a maze. But can it do the same for Tokyo's sprawling cityscape?
Tero grew Physarum in a wet dish at a place corresponding to Tokyo, with oat flakes marking the locations of other major cities in the Greater Tokyo Area. Physarum avoids bright light, so Tero used light to simulate mountains, lakes and other prohibitive terrain on his miniature map. The mould soon filled the space with a densely packed web of plasmodia. Eventually, it thinned out its networks to focus on branches that connected the food sources. Even by eye, these final networks bore a striking similarity to the real Tokyo rail system.
The mould's abilities are a wonder of self-optimisation. It has no sense of forward-planning, no overhead maps or intelligence to guide its moves. It creates an efficient network by laying down plasmodia indiscriminately, strengthening whatever works and cutting back on whatever doesn't. The approach seems as haphazard as a human planner putting railway tracks everywhere, and then removing the ones that aren't performing well. Nonetheless, the slime mould's methods (or lack thereof) produced a network with comparable cost, efficiency and tolerance for faults to the planned human attempt.
Tero tried to emulate this slime mould's abilities using a deceptively simple computer model, consisting of an randomly meshed lattice of tubes. Each tube has virtual protoplasm flowing through it, just as the branches of the slime mould do. The faster the flow rate, the wider the tube becomes. If the flow slows, the tubes thin and eventually disappear.
Tweaking the specific conditions of the model produced networks that were very similar to those of both live Physarum and Tokyo's actual rail system. Tweaking it further allowed Tero to boost the system's efficiency or resilience, while keeping its costs as low as possible. This, perhaps, is the engineering of the future - a virtual system inspired by a biological one that looks a lot like a man-made one.
Reference: Tero et al. 2010. Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design. Science 10.1126/science.1177894
Lykke Li & Bon Iver - Dance, Dance, Dance
BrandDNA Bon Iver and Lykke Li get together in a park and singlehandedly kickstart the skiffle revival. http://bit.ly/buNVma Kudos to @exilestreet
New Fluxion album due in March
Dub techno artist Fluxion will release his next album, Perfused, this March on Echocord.
The Greek producer has been making tracks since 1998, with over a dozen releases on Chain Reaction, Resopal Schallware and his own label, Vibrant Music. He fell silent for a while in the middle of the last decade, then bounced back in 2009 with two EPs and a full-length album, Constant Limber, which will have preceded his new one by only six months.
We caught up with Fluxion via email to to ask him a few questions about the new album.
How did you choose Perfused as a title? I am always trying to express at least with an album title, how I perceive my way of making music and producing and what it reflects. My music had always the "melting," "flowing" aesthetic. I tend to create sounds that in the course of a track, never exactly repeat themselves. So the title Perfused describes this liquid state, in which I create streams of sounds, moving in time and space, and capturing this live feed. You released three records in 2009, including a full-length album, Constant Limber. What has made you so productive lately? Well to be honest, I haven't stopped making music. There is a big volume of recordings I've made between 2002-2007, which I am considering and selecting for a Vibrant Forms 3 release. I just needed some time off, from discography. I am trying not to release for the sake of releasing. I am trying to release because I have something new to offer. Something I really want to share... The other reason is that I felt in 2009, a strong impulse to release, due to this downfall of the music industry. I want to be a part of the optimism in the music/artist community. If it's a good release, it will prevail, will stand out. Not only because there is a name behind the release. I felt more, in a way, that whoever produces good music today, offering a new perspective, is doing it primarily for the love in what they do. It's more pure, and it shows What's next for Fluxion? After Perfused, it's two vinyl releases (the first with a Deadbeat remix and the second with Rod Modell remix), there is a remix I did on "Soul Is Back" from Soul Designer (Fabrice Lig). It will be out in May on vinyl/digital from Third Ear. It will include remixes by Luke Slater, Marco Passarani, Fluxion, UR Timeline (Mike Banks and Jon Dixon). So I am looking forward to this as well. After those releases, I'm also selecting material possibly for a new Vibrant Forms album.
Tracklist
01.Horizons
02.Waves
03.Tantalizer
04.Inflection
05.Wabbler
06.Elation
07.Fluctuations
08.Inductance
09.Perfuse
Echocord will release Perfused this March.
01.Horizons
02.Waves
03.Tantalizer
04.Inflection
05.Wabbler
06.Elation
07.Fluctuations
08.Inductance
09.Perfuse
Echocord will release Perfused this March.
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