rssEarlier, Mr Howard received overwhelming support for the Government's position on Iraq from Coalition MPs after a meeting of the Liberal and National parties in Canberra.
[...]
About 20 members and senators spoke and were all supportive of the Government's position.Not a single person raised any concerns about Australia going to war.
Not a single concern. No-one had the courage to ask a single question of Glorious Leader. Like, ooo, what are the constraints of this war? When do we bring the troops home? What conditions are there for sending more people? What are we getting from the US for this? What do the US expect of us? I'm sure pretty much everyone can think of any number of concerns about this - even the most bloodythirsty 'letsgetSaddam'ite can think of things that might go wrong. But none of that for our brave government MPs. They're quite content to sit there and peck at their little pellets of food and do what they're told.
I think that this magnificent display shows one reason why, aside from the Federal government, the Liberals aren't trusted to run a fucking chook raffle anywhere else in Australia - they're a party of time-serving sycophants and number-crunching hacks. Gods know that the ALP is full of plenty of wastes-of-skin and factional time-servers, but the Liberals make them look like a pack of Enlightenment thinkers by comparision.
From Art Daily, via RuminateThis.
Guernica Reproduction Covered at UN
NEW YORK.- The "Guernica" work by Pablo Picasso at the entrance of the Security Council of the United Nations has been covered with a curtain. The reason for covering this work is that this is the place where diplomats make statements to the press and have this work as the background. The Picasso work features the horrors of war. On January 27 a large blue curtain was placed to cover the work.
[...]
A diplomat stated that it would not be an appropriate background if the ambassador of the United States at the U.N. John Negroponte, or Powell, talk about war surrounded with women, children and animals shouting with horror and showing the suffering of the bombings.
Perhaps something like this is more suitable? Or this, this, this, or maybe just this.
After all, no-one wants to announce the bombing of
civilians liberation of an oppressed people while standing
in front of a great work of art.
The key summary paragraph from the new piece:
Unfortunately, the core problem that lay at the heart of the Challenger tragedy applies to the Columbia tragedy as well. That core problem is the space shuttle itself. For 20 years, the American space program has been wedded to a space-shuttle system that is too expensive, too risky, too big for most of the ways it is used, with budgets that suck up funds that could be invested in a modern system that would make space flight cheaper and safer. The space shuttle is impressive in technical terms, but in financial terms and safety terms no project has done more harm to space exploration. With hundreds of launches to date, the American and Russian manned space programs have suffered just three fatal losses in flightand two were space-shuttle calamities. This simply must be the end of the program.
My fear is that rather than replacing the shuttle with something better, we'll instead see the shuttle canned, and a replacement scheduled "at some point in the future". With the Boy-Emperor and his retainers doing their damnedest to bankrupt the US treasury, this could be simply "never".
The other horrifying quote from the Time piece:
I've been playing around with stylesheets, trying to build a fixed table of contents that sits in the right hand gutter (based on the oh-so-nifty looking CSS homepage at the W3C. Hopefully it should "just work" for most people - I expect netscape 4 will probably just whack it at the very bottom of the page, which is a graceful enough degrading for me.
Oh bloody brilliant. Just tried with IE6, and shockhorror, it didn't work. The table of contents gets scrolled off, and the positioning is dreadful. Anyone with CSS clues is welcome to suggest why. ("Because IE6 is stuffed", yes, I know, thanks Richard :) It works fine in Phoenix (and therefore Mozilla) and in Konqueror. Bleah. Stupid browsers.
Via PR Watch's Spin of the Day, the Federal government has tasked Hill and Knowlton to help sell a radioactive waste dump in South Australia.
The rationale for spending $300,000 dollars on this?
Interesting that in an attempt to counter "misinformation and distortions", they turn to H&K. For those unaware, this fine firm was responsible for the staged "Iraqis pulled babies out of incubators" story during the first Gulf War. This story was, of course, complete bollocks (scroll down to "Suffer the Little Children") (or see this story, or this google search for many many more), and the "tearful Kuwaiti teenager" was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States.
Pardon me if I decline to drink the H&K Kool-aid on this one...
Tony Parkinson, who's been constantly boosting in the Age for war on Saddam, has a wonderful "So when did you stop beating your wife" opinion piece in the age today.
In this piece, we find out that while Howard, who favours war, is acting from deeply held convictions, Crean is wishy-washying around, driven partly by polls, and hasn't had to make the tough decisions yet. No evidence is presented for this, aside from blanket assertions.
The kicker is the second last para:
I could rewrite that as "Is Howard prepared to countenance a war on a civilian population to allow the US to secure their own oil supplies?" It's an equally useless question. As far as Parkison's question, well, we still have no proof that the Iraqi regime actually has any weapons programs intact. The US has asserted strongly that they do, but won't show anyone the evidence. Mind you, people in the US leadership have strongly asserted that there's a Saddam-Al Qaeda link, despite their own intelligence people saying otherwise, so forgive me if I'm a little skeptical.
Michael Hudson emailed responding to the earlier posting on "shock and awe" - a spokesdroid commented "The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before." Michael commented: "Uh... Dresden?"
A small amount of web research shows:
The "Christmas bombings" of North Vietnam dropped 36,000 tons in 12 days.
According to US military websites, a tomahawk can carry a 1000 pound payload. That gives a payload of, what, 350 tons or so? (estimating, as we speak grownup units downunder). That's rather a long way short of 3900 tons.
So as well as quite happily targetting civilians, they're showing no sense of history. Mind you, if Gulf War I is anything to go by, as well as the hundreds of "precision" munitions, the US will probably also be dropping a whole crapload of non-precision munitions.
It's probably also worth noting that after the fire-bombings of WW2, even Churchill tried to disown responsibility for the raids, writing in a memo:
Following on from the whole "terror bombing" theme, here's a piece from the 1991 Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists (the folks with the doomsday clock), questioning the morality of the US bombing in the first war.
On the other hand, this piece from the NYT claims:
The Pentagon's war plan for Iraq calls for unleashing 3,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles in the first 48 hours of the opening air campaign, an effort intended to stagger and isolate the Iraqi military and quickly pave the way for a ground attack to topple a government in shock.
The initial bombardment would use 10 times the number of precision-guided weapons fired in the first two days of the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and the targets would be air defenses, political and military headquarters, communications facilities and suspected chemical and biological delivery systems, military and other Pentagon officials say.
...
Only 9 percent of the weapons dropped in the 1991 gulf war were precision-guided; this time, the figure would be well in excess of 75 percent, allowing more effective bombing with fewer total aircraft, officials say.
So maybe there's hope, after all...
[Edited: missed a paragraph on the payload of tomahawks]
Update: Dan Kennedy notes the timing of the NYT story, and suggests that it was put out deliberately to calm things down after the original piece. His comparision of the stories is ... interesting.
I can still remember the morning that Challenger exploded. I was doing a summer paper round, and my little brother came running into my room at about 5.30am to tell me "the space shuttle exploded". I remember doing the paper round in a state of disbelief - pausing throughout the round to read the papers and try and make sense of it all.
Partly because she was the first one, I always had a bit of a soft spot for Columbia. I'd read all the pieces about how the shuttle fleet was just an aging bunch of hideously-expensive courier vans, but it didn't really change how I felt, inside. They were the peak of our travels into space, and, in the absence of anything better, I felt like they were carrying all of our hopes for a future that involved more than this single dirtball in space.
My great fear now is that the US government will use this as an excuse to cut off manned travel, or indeed space research in general. Yes, I know that, in general, unmanned vehicles are cheaper and more reliable ways to explore space. But they don't carry the same impact, the same striving and reaching and questing spirit that people travelling through space do.
Oh, and to people like Instapundit and others who'll attempt to spin this for their own ends: Fuck You. When Columbia blew up, I think everyone felt it. The American space program, for good or evil, carries a lot of the hopes and dreams of all of us. Don't even fucking try to spin this.
Rest in peace, Columbia, and all who travelled on her.
TBogg's favourite punching bag, Little Ben is has obviously been hopping into Crazy Andy's steroids and is feeling all... butch.
Here's him frothing over the bunch of crazy/brave loons who are off to Baghdad to act as human shields.
Ah yes, that would be those strategic water and power supplies for a civilian population.
As Sean-Paul Kelly recently put it:
People like Andrew Sullivan and countless others are sickening. Your asses will never be in the firing line. You'll never have bullets whizzing around your head. You'll never see bloated, distended and putrefying flesh. You will never smell death on the battle field. So how fucking dare you sorry ass chicken hawks root for war. You are the worst of the worst. You are worse than those stupid fucking A.N.S.W.E.R. people. Why?
Because all you will do is sit at home and watch the bombs drop on Fox News and think it is all like a video game. You people make me sick.
I disagree with Sean-Paul's take on the "necessity" of this war, but he's dead right on these keyboard warmongers.
And I don't think that going to Baghdad to act as a human shield is a particularly smart or useful move, but hey, at least they've the courage to act on their convictions.
From a CNN piece on Nelson Mandela.
Mandela said U.S. President George W. Bush covets the oil in Iraq "because Iraq produces 64 percent of the oil in the world. What Bush wants is to get hold of that oil." In fact Iraq contributes to only 5 percent of world oil exports.
Now, Mandela obviously misspoke here - either deliberately, or misinterpreted. That's not the point. What is interesting is that CNN felt the need to point out that he wasn't telling the truth. When was the last time that they did this to, say, Ari Fleischer? Or Bush, after his state of the union speech? In fact, I can't remember the last time I saw a US news article that directly disagreed with something reported.
I'd like to think we'll see articles that point out when, say, Bush states again that Saddam and Al Qaida are "in league", that "In fact, no evidence of any linkage has been shown". Or next time they spin the "aluminium tubes for nuclear weapons" story, "In fact, the tubes in question are not useful for nuclear weapons, but were instead for missile engines".
But I'm not holding my breath.
CHANCES of war with Iraq are "very high", Prime Minister John Howard said yesterday.
In his gravest assessment of the Iraqi crisis, Mr Howard said only a slim hope remained of Saddam Hussein owning up to his lethal weapons arsenal and allowing it to be destroyed.
"I think the possibility of military conflict is very high," the PM said.
Mr Howard was speaking during an election-style media blitz to bolster support for his argument Iraq must be stopped from developing weapons of mass destruction.
"It scares me that we might go on living in a world where countries like Iraq with a terrible record of aggression and use of those weapons should be able to retain them," he said.
From the SMH, less than a week ago (also noted by Tom Tomorrow and Dan Kennedy):
The US intends to shatter Iraq "physically, emotionally and psychologically" by raining down on its people as many as 800 cruise missiles in two days.
The Pentagon battle plan aims not only to crush Iraqi troops, but also wipe out power and water supplies in the capital, Baghdad.
It is based on a strategy known as "Shock and Awe", conceived at the National Defense University in Washington, in which between 300 and 400 cruise missiles would fall on Iraq each day for two consecutive days. It would be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 GulfWar.
"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," a Pentagon official told America's CBS News after a briefing on the plan. "The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."
So the US admits that they plan to kill a whole pile of Iraqi civilians, in a completely hands-off and clinical manner (with the added advantage of not having any pesky journalists and cameras nearby).
More:
"We want them to quit, not to fight," Ullman said, "so that you have this simultaneous effect - rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima - not taking days or weeks but minutes."
The main objective was not just to disable Iraq's fighting capacity but to leave the population dispirited and unwilling to support Saddam's regime.
This is utterly utterly disgusting. In order to save the people of Iraq, we have to bomb them and kill them. Uh huh. Feel like expressing your opinions to the author of this magnificent piece of strategy? Here's his contact details.
I seem to recall that one of the international treaties on the rules of war prohibits directly targetting civilians for bombardment. I'm working my way through this collection of documents on the Law of Armed Conflict, but if anyone knows better, feel free to let me know.
From The Times:
GERMAN youths have taken up a dangerous new pastime: firing potatoes as fast as a rocket from bazookas made from drainage pipes.
...
Horst Przbyla, a munitions expert for police in Brandenburg near Berlin, said: "What started out as an extreme form of paintball has become deadly dangerous."
Maybe it's just my lack of imagination, but I can't see the path that went from paintball to potato bazookas. There's a couple of intermediate steps there that seem to be ... missing... somehow.
The first website in google http://www.kartoffelkanone.de seems to be gone - the pages all give not found. You can still get older cached copies of the pages, of course, but it seems like the page has been offline for quite a long time.
Tests have shown that such a bazooka firing an empty film canister filled with sand and the cardboard centres of toilet rolls filled with cement could penetrate brickwork.
...
Some youths have made multi-barrelled potato cannons, resembling the Soviet Katyusha rocket launchers of the Second World War and capable of firing at a phenomenal rate.
And they say kids of today don't get outside and do activities any more...
(thanks to Cam for the pointer)
You'd think someone who's a "media columnist" would actually comment in a helpful way, rather than helping drag the general body politic further into darkness and despair. Ah, but that's because you haven't met Howie Kurtz, the Washington Post's "Media" writer. From their website: The Post's Howard Kurtz keeps a watchful eye on the national media, and a tongue wedged firmly up the buttcrack of the powers that be, it inexplicably fails to add.
From his recent slagging of Paul Krugman (a fabulous example, for students everywhere, of playing the man rather than the ball, and as a result losing 5-0), his joining in the pack smearing of the anti-war protests to his review of National Geographic's swimsuit edition, little Howie can be relied on to ask the tough questions that all the other kool kids ask, while occasionally drifting off into pointless and irrelevant idiocies.
He even, apparently, has a television show. From the occasional transcript, it appears that the format is something along the lines of:
Tonight: is The Media (always, it seems, capitalised, as a monolithic beast)
handling Topic X in the appropriate manner?
Much blather from various dull talking heads, finishing with a conclusion of
"Yes, they're doing a great job. Now some messages from our sponsors".
There are better "media" writers out there. And occasionally, you get to see just how much better in a head-to-head comparision. The recent issue of Scott Ritter's arrest and subsequent dropping of charges on a sex charge back in June 2001 is the case study here.
Howie, asks are the media covering this enough, while in the other corner, the Boston Phoenix's Dan Kennedy asks who leaked these (sealed) court documents to the media at such a suspiciously convenient time.
Now, I know the Washington media are obsessed with the sex life of others as a way of knocking down a tall poppy (unkinder minds might think that the washington press corp has trouble scoring a root, and is bitter at anyone who seems to actually get some sex), but for chrissakes! This looks pretty unpleasantly like a deliberate smearing of an inconvenient opponent by a government agency or branch, and the Post's media watchdog's line is "have we drunk of the Kool-aid deeply enough?"
Howie: Fuck off, and give the job to someone who actually makes an effort, you hack.
Via Blah3, the Pentagon is considering bulldozing bodies of their own damn soldiers into mass graves (presumably to save money, in case the bodies are infected, or contaminated.
Jesus. Bit of a step from the old "we don't leave anyone behind" rhetoric.
Also from blah3, the suggestion to start calling the war against Iraq as what it is - an invasion. A fine idea.
overheard at Arcanacon today:
Weather bureau forecast for tonight: "an oppressive night" - no, really? You think? But it's a balmy 30-some degrees outside....
So much for little "never met a foreigner he didn't mistrust" johnnie and his "oh, I'll consult the people before committing troops".
So, exactly how many civilians is an "acceptable" number, fuckstick? 10,000? 20,000? Or is it ok, so long as we don't have to see it on the TV?
(quotes from Friday's Age)
A spokesman for US President George Bush said: "The President is very grateful and today publicly thanks the people of Australia and the Government of Australia for their actions; it will help keep the peace."
a) How does invading another country "help keep the peace"? b) the people of Australia have pretty thoroughly rejected sending troops in a US war over oil. That the gutless little toad in the prime minister's skin decided to send them is no doing of ours, fuckhead.
Duh. Fuckwit, you do the same thing that Israel does when the US vetoes resolutions that are otherwise 14-1. You ignore them, as they are not fucking valid.
Or is he proposing that the Security Council should now run on a majority vote system? Someone better tell the US that.
Excuse me while I lie on the floor kicking my legs laughing. Johnny "Deputy Sheriff" Howard doesn't just do what the US wants? Oh, please. But, on the other hand, we get rewarded as good little vassals by the US for our help. Oh. No. Hang on. We don't. In return for our mindless acquiescence in their stupid plans, we get fucking shafted by them every time trade negotiations come up. How is this going to be the slightest bit different?
Howard, you disgust me. On this Australia Day weekend, I hope you feel utterly proud to stand for almost nothing that is good about Australia. I hope your fear-mongering (don't forget the whole "holding 14 year olds is necessary for national security"), nods to the racists and pathetic lack of leadership is remembered as the crowning glory of your sickening time as our Prime Minister.
The forest industry has called for the right to clear trees in national parks, blaming poor maintenance and fuel build-up for the Victorian and Canberra fires.
The chief executive of the National Association of Forest Industries, former ACT chief minister Kate Carnell, said state governments were being held hostage by the environmental movement and were increasing fire dangers by prohibiting the removal of trees and fuel from national parks.
"This is about maintaining them properly," Mrs Carnell said. "It's about maybe even - shock, horror - allowing people to come into national parks and take out the fuel.
Now, putting aside that logging has not been shown to reduce fire risk, but in fact makes it worse, how utterly utterly disgusting is it that the former leader of the ACT government is using the disaster that befell her former constituents to push a pro-logging wishlist.
I seem to recall that, earlier this year, there was some talk of her returning to politics. I hope that if she ever does, this piece of crass, vile, and completely abhorrent opportunism is flung in her face at every opportunity.
I consider myself pretty cynical about politicians, but this is just... amazing.