Freedom is when your government illegally eavesdrops on your phone calls and keeps records of who you called, when and for how long.

Freedom is when your government illegally tracks your international financial dealings and those of foreigners.

Freedom is when your government fingerprints and iris-scans all visitors to your country.

Freedom is when your government illegally demands personal information on people flying through your country’s air space.

Freedom is when your government scans the internet and your emails for personal information to add to its databases so it can keep tabs on everything you do.

Democracy is when your government steals your election.

Is this the sort of freedom & democracy the U.S. wants to spread to the world?

Ali Khamenie, the Supreme Jurisprudence of Iran, gave a speech yesterday in Iran. The U.S. Governement’s Open Source Centre has provided an english translation of the Persian, and Juan Cole has placed a section on his site, in which Khamenei addressed the issue of Iran trying to acquire nuclear weapons:

"Their other issue is [their assertion] that Iran seeks [a] nuclear bomb. It is an irrelevant and wrong statement, it is a sheer lie. We do not need a nuclear bomb. We do not have any objectives or aspirations for which we will need to use a nuclear bomb. We consider using nuclear weapons against Islamic rules. We have announced this openly. We think imposing the costs of building and maintaining nuclear weapons on our nation is unnecessary. Building such weapons and their maintenance are costly. By no means we deem it right to impose these costs on the people. We do not need those weapons. Unlike the Americans who want to rule the world with force, we do not claim to control the world and therefore do not need a nuclear bomb. Our nuclear bomb and our explosive powers are our faith, our youth and our people who have been present on the most difficult scenes with utmost power and faith and will continue to do so. (Chants of slogan, God is great).

Rolling Stone presents an article titled Was The 2004 Election Stolen? which looks at the discrepancies in the US Presidential election. There are a number of discrepancies in any process as large as an election in a nation of almost 300 million people, but when almost all of those discrepancies favour one candidate over the other, there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark. In one instance “Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent.”,1),
(

What’s more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent — a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)

‘’When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,’’ concludes Freeman. ‘’The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud — and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.’‘

Sure, the article is written by Robert F. Kennedy, so there’ll be accusations of partisan bias, but all his sources are listed at the bottom of the article and there’s just too much evidence for it all to be easily explained away.

Knowing what we now know about the insecurity of the Diebold election machines and the fact that the company refuses to allow independent analysis of the machines’s software, it’s easy to see how the result could be suspect. When the owner of the company, who’s a major Republican donor, comes out with a quote like the following it’s even more suspect. [link]

David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold Election Systems, said the potential risk existed because the company’s technicians had intentionally built the machines in such a way that election officials would be able to update their systems in years ahead.

“For there to be a problem here, you’re basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software,” he said. “I don’t believe these evil elections people exist.”

This idiot doesn’t believe corrupt election officials exist?? What planet is he living on?

It’s a long article, but definitely worth a read.

How fucked up is this? Brad and Angelina had their sprog in Namibia and were able to get the Namibian government to refuse certain journalists entry to the country, provide armed security around where they were staying and enforce a no-fly zone over the area! Tossers!

[ link ]

The Boston Review has a long article by Helena Cobban titled Hamas’s Next Steps in which she interviews the new Palestinian Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister on what their plans are now that they are in power.

Coggan touches on the reluctance of Fateh to accept Hamas’s victory, the difficulties in ruling the West Bank given Israeli travel restrictions, and the refusal to recognise Israel:

Dr. Mahmoud Ramahi, Hamas’s chief whip in the PLC, made a similar statement when I interviewed him a few days earlier in the PLC’s main seat in Ramallah:

“We have said clearly that Israel is a state that exists and is recognized by many countries in the world. But the side that needs recognition is Palestine! And the Israelis should recognize our right to have our state in all the land occupied in 1967. After that it should be easy to reach agreement. They ask us to recognize Israel without telling us what borders they’re talking about! First let us discuss borders, and then we will discuss recognition.”,1),
(

Haniyeh made clear in our short interview that his government would be putting domestic rather than international affairs at the top of its agenda. “We are confident we can succeed in this new challenge of organizing the Palestinian house,” he said. “Our people want internal security now.”

She also touches on Hamas’s relationship with the Arab League, and how the League will be encouraging Hamas to adopt their line on conditional recognition of Israel, their plans to buildup economic ties independent of Israel and their views on the rights of women.

What are the prospects for Palestinian women, Christians, and secular Muslims if Hamas extends its power? Hamas is different from al Qaeda and the Taliban in many important ways—just as Palestinian society is very different from those of the rugged, underdeveloped areas of Afghanistan and Waziristan that spawned and incubated the two other movements. To understand this, it helps to meet a woman like Jamila Shanty, a longtime professor at the Gaza Islamic University and one of six Hamas women elected to the PLC in January.

Shanty clearly relishes her new role in the parliament, where, she told me, she hoped to sit on the political and legal-affairs committees. She said she was inspired mainly by the Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. “Sheikh Yassin always paid such a lot of attention to women’s affairs.” she said. “He made sure the mosques all provided enough space for the women to pray in, and that they offered lectures and other activities for women. He told us that the work we do in our homes is important because it has real political value. But he also strongly encouraged women to become engaged in causes outside the home. Whenever he visited a mosque he would make sure to have a meeting with the women there, and he would urge all the women to finish their education and contribute what they could to society. He was an example not just to Palestinians but all Muslims.”

It’s a very interesting read, especially since the usual crap you read in other newspapers just parrots the “Hamas are terrorists” line without providing any background or making any effort to educate readers about the ins and outs of Palestinian politics. While there’s no doubt that Hamas does have a military wing known for attacks on Israel, it’s also a fact that the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, no slouches themselves on the suicide-bombings front, was an integral part of Fateh, the party which held power in Palestine for twelve years prior to Hamas’s victory. Foreign aid still flowed in to Palestine while they were in charge, so why is there suddenly all this talk of cutting off the flow now that Hamas are in their place, especially since Hamas decided to unilaterally enforce a ceasefire in 2005, which they have stuck to? It would seem that now is the good time to engage with the official representatives of the Palestinian people, who, let’s not forget, were democratically elected, not to shun them.

It seems that back in 2003, Iran sent a document to the U.S. in which they proposed to recognise Israel and stop funding anti-Israel organisations such as Hamas, and even Hezbollah.

The March 2002 Beirut declaration represented the Arab League’s first official acceptance of the land-for-peace principle as well as a comprehensive peace with Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal to the territory it had controlled before the 1967 war. Iran’s proposed concession on the issue would have aligned its policy with that of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, among others with whom the United States enjoyed intimate relations.

Another concession in the document was a “stop of any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad, etc.) from Iranian territory” along with “pressure on these organizations to stop violent actions against civilians within borders of 1967.”,1),
(

Even more surprising, given the extremely close relationship between Iran and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah Shi’ite organization, the proposal offered to take “action on Hezbollah to become a mere political organization within Lebanon.”

The Americans rejected it out of hand, and even went so far as to complain to the Swiss ambassador that he would even consider forwarding the proposal to them. Something to bear in mind while listening to all the sabre-rattling about Iran now.

[ link ]

Juan Cole over at Informed Comment has a post up today detailing just how badly the US has fucked up in Iraq.

Although it’s very rarely mentioned in the media, it’s pretty clear that Iraq has descended into civil war for a while now and with the US now firing up the bullshit machine aimed at Iran, it’s hard to see how the world is going to get any safer in the next decade or so.

Iran’s only hope is that Iraq stays screwed up enough to keep US troops booged down there long enough for Bush & the Fuckwits to get voted out of office. Hopefully the fact that his approval rating is among the lowest in history, and still trending down, means that the Republicans will get a hiding the next time out. We can only hope…

Israeli troops have a habit of shooting innocent Palestinian civilians, including children as young as three, then claiming that they were a threat, or that they were misidentified as justification for their actions. This is usually horseshit, as most people are killed by sniper fire, which implies that they were shot from a distance, and also that they were being watched through a high-powered scope. How you can’t recognise a three-year-old child through a rifle scope is beyond me.

Anyway, thanks to the dogged pursuit of the truth by the family of a murdered British peace activist, an Israeli soldier has received an eight year jail term for the crime.

Mr Hurndall said the Israelis had initially admitted someone had been shot, but claimed it had been a gunman who had opened fire first.

After photographs of Tom having been shot in the head emerged, the Israeli military later admitted that Hayb – a sentry who had won prizes for marksmanship – had shot him using telescopic sights.

“They just lied continuously,” Mr Hurndall’s father said. “It was a case of them shooting civilians and then making up a story. And they were not used to being challenged.”,1),
(

There had been a “general policy” for soldiers to be able to shoot civilians in that area without fear of reprisals, he added.

Make sure you keep this in the back of your head the next time you fly…

It seems like every time someone tests airport security, airport security fails. In tests between November 2001 and February 2002, screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. And recently, testers were able to smuggle bomb-making parts through airport security in 21 of 21 attempts. It makes you wonder why we’re all putting our laptops in a separate bin and taking off our shoes.

From: Bruce Schneier

Here’s a list of the Top Ten Catastrophes of the Third Year of American Iraq. No.4 is particularly instructive:

4. The US military used Kurdish and Shiite troops to attack the northern Turkmen city of Talafar in August. Kurdish troops, drawn from the Peshmerga militia, were allowed to paint lasers on targets in the city, which were then destroyed by the US air force. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed, and much of the population was displaced for some time. Shiite troops and local Shiite Turkmen informants were used to identify and interrogate alleged Sunni insurgents. Turkey was furious at the attack on ethnically related Turkmen and threatened to halt its cooperation with the US. Although the attack was allegedly undertaken to capture foreign forces allegedly based in the city, only 50 were announced apprehended. The entire operation ended up looking like a joint Kurdish-Shiite attack on Sunni Turkmen, backed by the US military. Turkmen and Kurds do not generally get along, and Turkmen accuse Kurds of wanting to ethnically clense them from Kirkuk. The entire operation was politically the worst possible public relations for the US in northern Iraq, and seems unlikely to have put a signficant dent in the guerrillas’ capabilities.

Now, the U.S. military would have to be either incredibly malicious, or have a pretty retarded set of experts on the region to allow that to happen, wouldn’t they?

Oh yeah, the ex-Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, has said that the country is in the middle of a civil war. Freedom, democracy, etc.

While U.S. troops are busy spreading Freedom & Democracyâ„¢ throughout Iraq, it turns out the very government espousing that Freedom & Democracyâ„¢ is happily censoring the web sites its soldiers are allowed to visit. Turns out that well known left-leaning sites are excluded, while right-wing commentators are de riguer.

Scientists develop bird flu vaccine

University of Pittsburgh scientists say they’ve genetically engineered an avian flu vaccine that has proven 100 percent effective in mice and chickens.

It’s like Y2K all over again. Massive panic, lots of work then gets done to ensure it doesn’t happen. Sweet!

from PhysOrg.com

Looks like the Brits are no better than the Yanks when it comes to believing daft religious stuff. A poll conducted by the BBC, for their Horizon science show, revealed the following:

Over 2000 participants took part in the survey, and were asked what best described their view of the origin and development of life:

• 22% chose creationism

• 17% opted for intelligent design

• 48% selected evolution theory

• and the rest did not know.

[…]

When given a choice of three descriptions for the development of life on Earth, people were asked which one or ones they would like to see taught in science lessons in British schools:

• 44% said creationism should be included

• 41% intelligent design

• 69% wanted evolution as part of the science curriculum.

Participants over 55 were less likely to choose evolution over other groups.

What’s wrong with 40% of the population that they feel that creationism provides a scientific account of the creation of the world. “God said, let there be light, and there was light, and God saw that the light was good” – yeah, that’s fucking scientific!

The ‘over 55s’ line has me wondering: I’d like to see a breakdown of the results by age. Given that British society (and Australian and Irish for that matter) has become less religious over the last 50 years, does that mean that the proportion choosing evolution is somewhat inversely proportional to age? Maybe increasing secularity just means that the same number of people believe in creationism/ID they just don’t see the need to worship whatever flavour of god they see as the creator.

Al Gore gives a Martin Luther King Day address outlining his view on what is wrong with American democracy and advocating that something be done about it. It’s a long speech, but well worth a read.

This particular part rings especially true given all the warnings about how our very way of life is under threat from terrorism:

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of nuclear missiles ready to be launched on a moment’s notice to completely annihilate the country? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when the last generation had to fight and win two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they did. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it’s up to us to do the very same thing!

An interesting New York Times article (free rego. required) on the fight to raise the minimum wage in the US, a battle being fought at the municipal level. The federal US government is opposed to any sort of raise. The Australian government has just enacted the ‘WorkChoices’ legislation, a misnomer if ever there was one, which will result in lower wages in the long run, and trumpeted the “higher wages = less jobs” canard in the run up to the vote.

This last position was long underpinned by the academic consensus that a rise in the minimum wage hurts employment by interfering with the flow of supply and demand. In simplest terms, most economists accepted that when government forces businesses to pay higher wages, businesses, in turn, hire fewer employees. It is a powerful argument against the minimum wage, since it suggests that private businesses as a group, along with teenagers and low-wage employees, will be penalized by a mandatory raise.

The tenor of this debate began to change in the mid-1990’s following some work done by two Princeton economists, David Card (now at the University of California at Berkeley) and Alan B. Krueger… But in 1995, and again in 2000, the two academics effectively shredded the conventional wisdom. Their data demonstrated that a modest increase in wages did not appear to cause any significant harm to employment; in some cases, a rise in the minimum wage even resulted in a slight increase in employment.

Sadly, the mentality parodied by Chris Rock when he said that minimum wage means “We’d pay you less if we could” still holds sway.

Today is Martin Luther King Day and while I’m familiar with the ‘I have a dream’ bit, I have never read, nor listened to, the full speech. Here’s the text, and here’s the audio, so have a listen, and, while doing so, compare his delivery to Bush’s incompetent “Freedom, Democracy, Terror” babbling – poles apart. Somehow I think the world would be a better place had their fates been swapped.

I never thought I’d see the day when a Murdoch-owned paper hailed the installation of a pro-Iran government in Iraq as “a good thing”!

The resulting coalition government will be good news since it will put the strongest group, the cleric-backed pro-Iranian Sciri, or Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, in effective power.

Even more worrying, you know things are really bad when a paper like the Times, which can’t really be described as a bastion of pinko, commie-loving lefties, describes the situation in Iraq as follows:

On December 22 Tony Blair paid his Christmas call on British troops in Basra to tell them how much things were improving. This time he said security was “completely changed” from last year. What he meant was unclear. It was as if Gladstone had visited Gordon during the siege of Khartoum. Did it not seem strange to Blair that he could not move outside his walled fortress, could not drive anywhere or talk to any Iraqis? Did he wonder why British troops have withdrawn from two anarchic provinces? Was he really told that security is transformed for the better? If so he is horribly deceived.

Reliable reporting from Iraq is now so dangerous that the level of insecurity can be gleaned only from circumstantial evidence. Baghdad outside the American green zone is now all “red zone”, off limits to any but the most reckless foreigner. The death rate and the number of explosions are rising. While some rural areas are relatively safe there is no such thing as national security. Iraq’s borders are porous. Crime is uncontrolled. The concept of an “occupying power” is near meaningless.

The Americans cannot even protect the lawyers at Saddam’s trial, two of whom have been killed. Iraqis are meeting violent death in greater numbers probably than at any time since the Shi’ite massacres of 1991. Professionals are being driven into exile, children are kidnapped, women are forced indoors or shot for being improperly dressed. Those Britons who preen themselves for “bringing democracy to Iraq” would not dare visit the place. They have brought three elections, but elections without security do not equal democracy.

It used to be just the US that was turning Orwellian with its Patriot Act, but now Europe is to follow suit. The European Parliament has just passed the Data Retention Directive which requires phone and internet usage records to be kept for a specified period of time. The bill was originally aimed at providing data to help track/crack terrorism, and access to the data was supposed to be severly restricted. However, the final version has all those safeguards removed and even the fucking recording industry can get access to it to try and find illegal downloaders!

The average European citizen will be subject to constant tracking of everything he does electronically, including web browsing habits, travel patterns, phone calls placed and received, and emails and SMS messages sent and received. The logs won’t be required to keep the contents of messages and calls, but the invasion of privacy is blatant nonetheless, especially since log access can be requested for investigation of pretty much any crime with little prior evidence required. Combined with upcoming legislation that could newly make certain instances of copyright infringement a prosecutable criminal offense, it looks like civil rights should be put on the endangered species list back east.

Is it just me or does anyone else think things are getting a bit out of hand? Sure, 9/11 was a tragedy but Malaria kills 1.3 million people a year and 42,636 people died in US car accidents in 2004! We’re running around spending billions of dollars, spying on ourselves and curtailing long-held freedoms to fight a threat which kills less than 1,000 people per year! It’s about time we got our fucking priorities straight.

Southern Sydney is going to the dogs at the moment. After two lifeguards were bashed by a gang of young Lebanese in Cronulla two weeks ago community tension was high. Last weekend almost 5,000 showed up to protest, but it quickly got out of hand and turned into a race riot. Most of those taking part were under 25 and there was a smattering of neo-nazis there to stir things up further, so it’s not exactly representative of the local community. Alcohol, not surprisingly, had a massive role to play, and the protest devolved into running battles with the police & any poor unfortunate who happened to look remotely Middle Eastern.

I’m supposed to be staying in a hotel there this weekend in preparation for my first triathlon around the corner on the Sunday morning, but there’s rumours going around of revenge attacks this weekend so Jacqui doesn’t want to go anywhere near the place. We’ll have to wait and see how things pan out later in the week.

Billmon covers an L.A. Times story on U.S. propaganda in Iraq:

As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

The articles, written by U.S. military “information operations” troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a . . . small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group . . . The Lincoln Group’s Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.

Now the thrust of the story — and of the outrage expressed by the anonymous Pentagon sources who passed out the paperwork on Lincoln’s little payola scheme — is the utter hypocrisy of preaching democracy and transparency while secretly bribing journalists to print government propaganda.