I do my best thinking in the shower.
Today, for example, I had another great idea in the shower.
I can even remember thinking:
“But I don’t suppose I’ll remember this when I get out. As usual.”
And you know what?
I don’t remember.
As usual.
This happens to me most days.
On looking up information on the No2ID campaign to see how they started up, I came across the web site www.no2id.co.uk which is entitled “History of NO2ID campaigning organisation. This is a informational website about No2ID campaigning organisation.”
“Oh, wow,” I thought. “Everything I need to know.”
Nope. It is not what it says. It has been set up to advertise web sites selling id cards, digital access control, search engine optimisation services, web hosting, army recruitment, and biometric services. That’s right, selling exactly what the No2ID campaign is opposed to. But they have done it by taking text from the No2ID campaign and knocking up a fake site to do it.
What cynical buggers. (A WHOIS lookup will tell you who the cynical bugger is. The same cynical bugger it links to as a SEO Consultant. As he says: “He is a member of Nominet, a TAG holder and well known and respected in the UK domain industry.” Not well-respected by me!)
Conclusion: always register the alternative domain names – if you don’t some toe-rag parasite will and may even use them to actively campaign against you and make money as they do it, using your marketing effort in the process.
Amazing.
Lord Gilbert spoke a few months ago in the House of Lords on how the nuclear deterrent is effective in preventing wars. At some point I’ll put his argument up here. Meanwhile, a subset of his words were used in a number of articles online to say he was claiming we should “nuke the Taliban”. It is ironic he was advocating a solution for maintaining peace to prevent the deaths of huge numbers of civilians and got attacked for it.
Anyway, you’ve gotta love the outraged headlines it produced. Examples are:
As for what he said, this is taken from Hansard’s proceedings for 22nd November, 2012:
Lord Gilbert: … I draw your Lordships’ attention to what used to be called the neutron bomb. The main thing was that it was not a standard nuclear warhead. Its full title was the ERRB: Enhanced Radiation Reduced Blast weapon. I can think of many uses for it in this day and age. … you could use an ERRB warhead to create cordons sanitaire along various borders where people are causing trouble.
I will give an example. … nobody lives up in the mountains on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan except for a few goats and a handful of people herding them. If you told them that some ERRB warheads were going to be dropped there and that it would be a very unpleasant place to go, they would not go there. You would greatly reduce your problem of protecting those borders from infiltration from one side or another. These things are not talked about, but they should be, because there are great possibilities for deterrence in using the weapons that we already have.
© Parliamentary Copyright
He did not say we should nuke the Taliban. He was saying there are options for deterrence that are not being considered because the subject is taboo. The media reaction proved him right. If you want to read it in context, which is about how deterrence is preferable to war, he started speaking at 3.42 pm.
One has to be very careful what one says when advocating peace methods other than going to outright war. Many people don’t like it. Weird, innit?
As H used to say:
If things don’t change, they’ll stay the same.
How thoroughly marvellous! Have a blog for 5 minutes and the issues start.
I re-began this just as a massive global botnet attack started on WordPress sites, using brute-force to try to break into admin accounts.
The last 5 days have been lost as I worked out why I couldn’t log in at all (the hosting company’s temporary security measure), then deleted the admin account (and created a new one with a different name) and downgraded myself from an administrator to have less powerful user rights. But now I’m back online and can post again. With login attempt tracking installed, captchas needed to do most anything and everything up-to-date software-wise.
What a tedious waste of time and energy, and an unnecessary distraction. Not just for me, but probably for millions of other WordPress site owners and users worldwide.
(Originally written 05/11/2012.)
During the Cold War, because of fear of escalation between NATO and the Soviet Union, proxy wars were undertaken in third party locations.
Massive economies; substantial training and arming of civilians to produce armed militia from otherwise unarmed civilians; a legacy of weapons and gun-culture; little or no risk to the sponsors of damage; vast amounts of matériel could be deployed upon the citizens of the target country.
End-of-life or redundant weapons and date-expired ammunition and explosives can be disposed of en masse quickly and cheaply without the cost of safe disposal nor any fear of the consequences of their failure.
Consequently, huge amounts of damage are done to the victim country where the proxy war is played out.
Used as a way of striking at an opponent through a third party, at great cost in life and suffering to the third party. The damage to the third party is far greater than to the opponent.
They also function as weapons testing grounds, thereby ensuring the newest, most unpleasant and yet-to-be-banned weapons can be tested on the people of the proxy country, without risk to the user or even the opponent. Hence the effects can be far worse.
This is what providing arms and air support in the Arab Spring is all about.
(Originally written 19/10/2012.)
There was a common acceptance when I was at school that
“There’s not much point getting O Levels or A Levels. We’ll be dead before we start work anyway”.
This was because we were growing up in the Cold War, after the Cuban Missile Crisis / October Crisis / Caribbean Crisis / Kарибский кризис had occurred, when it was clear the USA really would consider use of a first-strike with nuclear weapons, and knowing there were Mutually Assured Destruction policies in place on both sides. That is, one small error or political crisis would result in the destruction of missile sites in the UK, and the death of most everyone in Europe and certainly us children before we’d had a chance to grow up.
This made it hard to find the motivation to plan for the future, as there was little point. There were many of us who had poor grades as a consequence of this, including some who gave up althogether.
And we all knew how we were going to spend our last 7 minutes when the sirens went off. We certainly talked about it often enough.
Growing up in such a climate cannot be healthy. Off the top of my head, our cultural exposure included:
1979 – the Protect and Survive films like Casualties
1983 – 99 Red Balloons – Lena
1983 – WarGames
1984 – Two Tribes – Frankie Goes to Hollywood (“War! What is it good for?” *)
1984 – Threads
1985 – The War Game
1986 – When the Wind Blows
All manner of cheerfulness: www.atomica.co.uk/culture.
Perhaps it is no surprise that my generation, born in the 1960s, have such a strong “think of the children” and “children must be allowed freedom” and “children must be protected from fear” mindset.
My mother, who lived through the second World War, said the Cold War was a huge improvement over the hot sort.
* Record sales, apparently.
Isn’t there a global recession?
I don’t want my tax money spent on killing civilians.
In Northern Ireland, communities and individuals have created community projects that bring together people from both sides of the sectarian divide. And we never hear about the wives and mothers that won’t let their family members take part in marches to help stop the problem at grass-roots level.
As for peace and reconciliation, a Google search will tell you just how much research and work is being done.
Restorative Justice and truth commissions, such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, allows those that have suffered to find a way to move on without revenge or escalation of violence.
The foundation of the European Union was forged from France and Germany and others ensuring they could not go to war again through close integration. Western Europe has been at peace with itself for 3 generations – when did it last – if ever – do that?
The presence of so many peace organisations shows there is plenty of desire for peace worldwide. There are more of them than there are those campaigning for war!
Countless research institutes explore possibilities for creating and maintaining peace. (This must be far more rewarding than researching hand grenade fragment blast radius and kill co-efficient.)
Some random links:
No New Wars 11 11 2018. Meaning, “let’s ensure No New Wars start as from 11th November 2018“.
How? By making it clear we expect our leaders to use other means to achieve change. It will have been a hundred years since the Armistice, a hundred years in which we have learned an awful lot not just people’s ability to harm other, innocent, people, but also about communication, reconciliation, change management, energy creation, environmental management, understanding, and sharing.
In our name, and with our financial support through taxes, people are dropping air-bombs, firing guided missiles, shooting long-range heavy-calibre machine-gun fire, remotely-controlling armed drones … to kill people including civilians. And is a person who picks up a gun to defend their home a soldier or an armed civilian? Much of the 20th century involved the deaths of tens of millions of civilians; the 21st century so far has comprised the deaths of 100,000s of civilians, and if you include civilians carrying guns, it is already in the millions. And the media is glorying in the “Arab Spring” ignoring that it is the worst kind of war: a civil war. A civil war that is being armed, funded, supported and maintained by external forces who benefit financially or politically from the suffering and deaths of those involved.
Wars are the principle cause of this suffering, and it is time they stopped. They are not necessary for peace. There are other means, and not just financial sanctions which are only a feeble exercise in trying to show the futility of peaceful solutions. Governments and politicians are just not trying to end war; it neither adds to their power nor is it financially attractive for their sponsors.
Wars are started by politicians being manipulated and promoted by the media. If politicians can be made to see that war-mongering is no longer going to create votes, they will become peace-makers. And if the media are hit financially by not getting readers and web page hits, they will lose advertising revenue and so will cease that behaviour.
The trite cliché “War is the continuation of politics by other means” is not only facile, but also two hundred years out of date and inappropriate in a nuclear-energy, internet connected, post-empire world.
I am not so naïve as to think existing wars can be just stopped. But we can do out bit to create a world where it is not necessary or politically wise to start any new wars.
I am not saying we should not support our troops nor have a defence facility. I am not saying the campaign to stop population growth is wrong. But I am saying we must actively prevent our leaders from starting down paths that lead to the deaths of thousands of civilians just because that is easier and more attractive to them than any alternatives.
We must make peace more attractive.