Dear Kitty. Some blog

This video is called Iraq WMD Lies: the words of mass deception.

When is a quote by Thomas Jefferson not really by Jefferson? See here.

From British weekly Socialist Worker:

Dan Hind on Kant, the “war on terror” and Enlightenment values

Enlightenment values of truth and rationality have been hijacked and wrongly used to justify the “war on terror”, argues Dan Hind

In 1784 a German magazine asked its readers to answer the question, “What is Enlightenment?” Among those who replied was the philosopher Immanuel Kant.

He wrote, “Have the courage to use your own reason! That is the motto of Enlightenment.”

Generations of columnists have reduced Kant’s remarks to a series of clichés and impressive sounding phrases that do little more than corroborate liberal conventional wisdom.

This use of the Enlightenment crops up in a very particular context – when commentators decide that it is time to defend “rational” (usually Western) modernity from its “irrational” enemies.

Thinkers associated with the 18th century Enlightenment movement such as Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson and David Hume are enlisted to give a kind of grandeur to this theme.

It is in the politics of Western military aggression that this model of Enlightenment has had the most pernicious influence.

The idea that the values of the Enlightenment such as secularism and modernity were under attack gained ground in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

By October 2001 conservative commentators in the US were calling for “enlightened” intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Meanwhile many liberals accepted that only the US army could be relied on to bring the values of tolerance and personal freedom – the West’s enlightened inheritance – to the poor benighted countries of the Middle East.

The propaganda campaign for the invasion of Iraq included many, sometimes contradictory, themes. The appeal to the ideas of the conventional model of Enlightenment played an important part in reconciling some opinion to the need for war.

The kidnapping of South Koreans in Afghanistan: here.

This video is called The Death of Alan Turing.

By Anindya Bhattacharyya:

Science You Can’t See: Dangerous Knowledge

Decent science documentaries are few and far between these days. They have been a prominent casualty of the commercialisation and cost-cutting that has hit the television industry.

So it’s a pleasure to see Science You Can’t See, a season of intelligent but accessible programmes looking at the breakthroughs in our understanding of the world.

Dangerous Knowledge looks at the work of mathematicians such as George Cantor, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, who transformed our understanding of what mathematics is.

The presenter David Malone does a good job of explaining the ideas of Cantor and Gödel without losing sight of the social and historical context of their work.

It’s a shame, however, that the documentary puts so much stress on the cliché of the “mad genius”. Cantor and Gödel both suffered from mental illness throughout their life, and Turing was persecuted for being gay, eventually committing suicide.

Malone implies that these tragic facts are in some way linked to the work of these men – as if exploring the foundations of mathematics and logic somehow sent them “over the edge”.

This is a profoundly conservative vision of science, reminiscent of ancient mythology and its stories of humanity being punished by the gods for its intellectual curiosity. It marrs an otherwise excellent documentary.

Science You Can’t See: Dangerous Knowledge
BBC4 Wednesday 8 August, 9pm

Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan here.

By Tom Behan:

The legacy of Giuseppe Garibaldi - the 19th century’s Che Guevara

The Italian national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, the ‘Che Guevara of the 19th century’, was born 200 years ago. …

If you visit Italy, you will notice that, wherever you’re staying, the main street or square will almost invariably be named after Giuseppe Garibaldi. Garibaldi is the national hero who led the movement to unite Italy in the mid-19th century.

Italy only became a unified state between 1859 and 1871. Before that it was a patchwork of different states.

“We Italians adore Garibaldi – from the cradle we are taught to admire him,” Antonio Gramsci [see also here; and here and here], the great Italian Marxist, wrote.

“If one were to ask Italian youngsters who they would most like to be, the overwhelming majority would certainly opt for the blond hero.”

But it is not just the left that would like to claim Garibaldi as one of their own. The Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and other leaders of the Italian right have been fascinated by Garibaldi’s military exploits and admired him for his patriotism.

Garibaldi’s exploits made him an international hero during his lifetime. An account from April 1864 describes one of his visits to London:

“The working men of London had organised a procession for the purpose of meeting and welcoming the liberator of Italy.

“But this procession, though numbering 50,000 intelligent artisans, was completely swallowed up in the mighty ovation by the whole metropolitan people, and served merely as a foretaste to Garibaldi of the extraordinary testimony which was about to be given of the estimation in which his principles and services in the cause of liberty were held by the English people.”

Garibaldi was in London primarily to raise funds to finance an expedition to free Venice, which was still under Austrian rule. He mixed in government circles, and spent many evenings chattering with the middle classes.

But in a contradiction that sums up his life, Garibaldi had also been invited to London by the city’s trades council.

The reaction he provoked among workers and trade unions began to worry the government. It eventually ordered him out of the country – and Queen Victoria made clear she regarded this as good riddance.

But why did people make such a fuss about Garibaldi, and why is his memory so contested? He was born 200 years ago in the city of Nice, then an Italian-French area, the son of a fisherman.

Like many people in continental Europe at the time, Garibaldi experienced brutal domination by a foreign power. However the local opponents of this rule were often not much better.

They were typically aristocrats and business leaders, totally uninterested in democracy or in improving the lives of working people.

Insurrection

As a young man Garibaldi gravitated towards a secret movement known as La Giovine Italia, “Young Italy”. It was led by Giuseppe Mazzini. He believed in revolutionary action to unite Italy as a republic, rather than as a monarchy.

However it is always difficult to build a mass movement under a dictatorship, and Garibaldi’s first experience of armed insurrection, in Genoa in 1834, was a dismal failure.

The following year Garibaldi moved to South America where he spent the next 13 years taking part in a variety of national liberation movements.

Word of his exploits started to feed back to Italy and he acquired a reputation as the “hero of two worlds”.

This video shows an interview with Martin Rowson on John Major.

From British daily The Morning Star:

The truth told in jest

(Tuesday 31 July 2007)

INTERVIEW: Martin Rowson
by MICHAL BONCZA and JOHN GREEN

INTERVIEW: Left-wing political cartoonist MARTIN ROWSON explains his position as a barb in the side of the thick-skinned political establishment.

During the 1990 Labour Party conference, Martin Rowson found himself standing alone with fellow cartoonist Steve Bell at the top of the Blackpool Tower.

He turned to Bell and said: “If this wire mesh wasn’t here, Steve, I could push you off and take your job.”

Mighty Bell, towering over Rowson, paled for a moment, not knowing if he was serious or just joking. That small incident encapsulates the essence of cartooning. Is it humorous, serious or both?

Over a bowl of spaghetti pescatore at an unassuming Italian cafe squashed between a few dubious-looking massage parlours in Euston, Rowson tells the Morning Star how he sees cartooning as akin to black magic, shamanism or voodoo.

It is a process of exorcising demons or sticking pins in dolls that represent your victims. But he also sees himself as being firmly on the side of the underdogs in society and his role as “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”

Although every cartoonist hopes that their pins will penetrate thick skins and hurt their target, they also know that this rarely happens.

The boundless vanity of most politicians makes them largely immune to criticism and they are often avid purchasers of cartoons aimed at them, even if they only get hung in corridors or the toilet.

He says that cartoons serve to remind our leaders that they are human, but they also underline the disconnections in society and tear them open. They are a healthy part of the democratic process.

Rowson believes that, on the Continent, cartoonists are taken more earnestly. Here, we view them more as entertainers than serious critics.

It was to his eternal regret that Alastair Campbell dissuaded Tony Blair from conveying his outrage to the Guardian after one particular venomous satire stung as intended.

Such a response would have exposed a chink in Blair’s armour, as previous ones did with John Major. Political death by cartooning would have been a real possibility as the cartoonist troops could have easily zeroed in with bayonets fixed on such frailty.

Rowson began drawing as a small boy and became interested in cartooning after discovering his sister’s history book as a 10-year-old. It was llustrated with cartoons from many of the great figures of the past, from Gillray, Tenniel to Low. He used to copy Trog’s cartoons of Edward Heath.

´This video is about the Nanking Massacre, Comfort Women and other tragic events of WW2.´

By Jamie Allinson:

Japan’s upper house elections disastrous for ruling party

Last Sunday’s elections to the upper house of the Japanese parliament were a huge defeat for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the right wing prime minister Shinzo Abe. Elections were held for 121 seats – half of the upper house. The LDP only won 37 seats, while the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) gained a majority with 60 seats.

Shinzo Abe has said he will continue despite the result. However, the Asahi newspaper – Japan’s equivalent of the Guardian – wrote on Sunday: “Voices saying ‘no to Abe’s LDP’ swirled around the whole country.”

The election was a vote of no-confidence in Abe’s pro-war, neoliberal policies.

Japanese troops have joined the occupation of Iraq, in violation of the country’s “peace constitution”. Abe has continued to support the Iraq war and wants to change the constitution to allow troop deployment. He has also changed Japan’s education system to foster nationalism and deny Japan’s wartime atrocities.

At home Abe has continued the neoliberal programme of his predecessor Junichiro Koizumi. This programme includes the privatisation of the Japanese post office, the world’s largest financial institution. In campaigning for Sunday’s election, Abe tried to present himself as a new force despite being the incumbent candidate of a party that has ruled almost continuously for 50 years.

The attempt failed. A series of LDP corruption scandals and blunders – one minister committed suicide and another described women as ‘breeding machines’ – reminded voters just how far the LDP is from ordinary people.

The biggest scandal for the LDP was the “loss” of 64 million people’s pension records. That scandal is part of a bigger crisis in the Japanese pension system. As in Britain, bosses in Japan want workers to retire later on smaller pensions. The pensions scandal has been a focus for anger at this situation.

There is also Abe´s denial of forced prostitution for ´comfort women´ during World War II. His ´Defence´ Minister´s apology for the US nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Etc.

Japan’s agriculture minister resigns in scandal: here.

This video from the USA is called Bill Moyers’ ‘True Cost of the Iraq War’.

By Eric Margolis in the USA:

THE SECOND MOST EXPENSIVE WAR IN AMERICAN HISTORY

`A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money,’ famously quipped US Senator Everett Dirksen back in the 1960’s.

The US government has just estimated that President George Bush’s occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and his so-called `war on terror,’ will cost at least $690 billion by the end of next year. That’s more than the total cost to America of World War I, the Korean War, or Vietnam, and second only to the $2 trillion cost of World War II (in current dollars).

This means that by 2008, Bush’s wars in the Muslim World will have cost each American man, woman and child $2,300.

The $690 billion poured into the bottomless hole of the faux war on terrorism does not include the estimated $100 billion direct cost of the 9/11 attacks, the urgent need to replace $66 billion of US military equipment worn out or destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan, billions in lifetime care for seriously injured soldiers, $125 billion in backlogged veteran’s claims, and untold billions spent in secret CIA programs in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ironically, half of the money spent on these wars is being borrowed from former American enemies, Communist China and Japan. Half the current American deficit is being tied directly to the war on terrorism. After six years, the Bush/Cheney Administration cannot even define what it means by victory in its wars in the Muslim World.

Defeat looms large in Iraq; Afghanistan is headed that way; and the US National intelligence Estimate just reported that al-Qaida is actually stronger than ever.

Poem on the costs of the Iraq war: here.

According to the British Conservative Daily Telegraph, the Iraq war costs British taxpayers more than World War II.

This is a video about the artificially built white stork nest in Warmond, the Netherlands.

This blog has already written before about the white stork nest on top of Oud Wassenaar castle in Wassenaar village.

While many stork nests in the Netherlands are human made, with old wheels on poles etc., this nest was built spontaneously by the birds themselves.

Originally, they had two chicks. However, rainy summer weather like this year is bad for stork chicks. So, only one of the two Wassenaar chicks apparently survived.

Now, it can fly and is almost as big as its parents, though still recognizable as a juvenile from its blackish, not yet red beak.

With its parents, it was looking today for food on a meadow where there were Canada and Egyptian geese as well. After some time, the three storks flew across the road, to land high on the nest on top of the castle.

A bit further, a hobby flying.

Other birds around here today were buzzard, robin, moorhen, great cormorant, wood pigeon, magpie.

Also, speckled wood butterflies. And dragonflies.

UPDATE 2 August 2007. Today, two adult and two juvenile storks flying there. So, also the second chick may have survived the rainy weather.

This video is called Rare Glass sponges.

Part 2 of the video is here.

From Animal Science Blog:

Where Glass Sponge Reefs Are Found

The same species of glass sponge in this 2005 photo from British Columbia waters is one of a trio of reef-building sponges that have been discovered on the seafloor 30 miles west of Grays Harbor.

Thirty miles west of Grays Harbor, University of Washington researchers have discovered large colonies of glass sponges thriving on the seafloor. The species of glass sponges capable of building reefs were thought extinct for 100 million years until they were found in recent years in the protected waters of Canada’s Georgia and Hecata straits, the only place in the world they’ve been observed until now.

The discovery in Washington waters extends the range of reef-building glass sponges into open ocean.

The sponge reefs could be important to the ecosystems on the Washington coast because they create a thriving oasis dense with sea life on seafloor that is otherwise sparely populated for miles, says Paul Johnson, UW professor of oceanography and chief scientist on the UW’s ship Thomas G. Thompson, June 10-16, when the Washington glass sponge reefs were discovered. The glass sponge reefs were alive with zooplankton, sardines, crabs, prawns and rockfish.

“It’s like looking at an overcrowded aquarium in an expensive Japanese restaurant,” he says.

The Washington sponge reefs are each hundreds of feet in length and width. It’s possible that the state has reefs comparable to the Canadian reefs that are miles in length, Johnson says.

The glass sponge reefs on the continental shelf west of Grays Harbor appear to be thriving on specialized bacteria that consume methane gas that the UW researchers were surprised to discover flowing out of the seafloor in copious amounts. Methane has not been detected by Canadian researchers near their glass sponge reefs, thus the Washington margin reefs could represent a new type of ecosystem on the shelf, one where the abundant biology is fueled by methane gas derived from ancient carbon in the sediments, Johnson says.

The glass sponges so-called because their skeletons are made of silica (the same material as beach sand) come in un-sponge-like shapes similar to cups and funnels. They range in color from creamy white to brilliant hues of yellow. The reefs build upward as new generations of sponges grow atop the still-hard silica skeletons of prior generations. The reefs just discovered are in 650 feet of water and rise between 6 and 15 feet above the seafloor. The sponges on the mounds grow as tall as 1 feet.

The mounds off Grays Harbor have the same trio of glass sponge species as the reefs discovered in Canadian waters. The reefs in the Georgia and Hecata straits are in relatively protected marine waters, causing researchers to previously speculate that those reef-building glass sponges mandatory a special ecological niche that allowed them to grow in those waters.

The field discovered on the open Washington shelf is very exposed to winter storms, which makes it much more likely that other reef-building glass sponges are still to be found around the globe, for example, on the Alaskan and Russian continental shelves, Johnson says.

Solitary glass sponges are found living in a number of parts of the world’s oceans but are composed of different species than the ones capable of colonizing themselves into reefs. Individual glass sponges generally live 100 to 200 years and the Canadian sponge reefs have been dated as being 8,000 years old, making them comparable to coral reefs and redwood forests, Johnson says.

The reef-building sponge species had their heyday 150 million years ago when ocean conditions allowed them to grown near the surface of the ocean. Their fossilized remains, for example, are found in outcrops that are hundreds of miles long on land throughout Europe, all sites that were underwater in the late Jurassic period. It was thought the reef-building glass sponges were all driven to extinction 100 million years ago when diatoms, single-celled algae that also require silica dissolved in seawater, evolved in the global oceans and began using up the silica needed by the reef-building glass sponges.

The Washington and British Columbia reef-building glass sponges have learned to live at water depths that are below the sunlit zone where diatoms live but where the essential dissolved silica they need is available.

See also here.

This is a video of a penduline tit.

‘Scarce breeding bird in the Netherlands with only few records a year’.

From Animal Science Blog:

Abandoned Eggs Of The Penduline Tit Remiz Pendulinus

The eggs of the penduline tit Remiz pendulinus are frequently abandoned as both parents go in search of new sexual conquests, a study reported in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology has found.

Around one in three clutches of eggs are abandoned in this way, making it a puzzling example of childrearing where both parents improve their reproductive success by abandoning the nest.

Males and females can mate with up to seven different partners in any one breeding season and frequently vary their attitude to childcare between different clutches.

Over the course of a breeding season more than half of all clutches are cared for by the female, with up to a fifth cared for by the male. The rest, roughly a third, are abandoned by both.

In an intensive battle of the sexes, male penduline tits often flee the nest before egg-laying is complete, whilst females sometimes hide their eggs from the males so she can leave before he notices how a number of eggs have been laid.

When this happens, males left caring for the eggs frequently flee the nest. Penduline tits can be found throughout most of central and southern Europe. …

Responsibilities for childcare vary enormously throughout the bird kingdom. Commonly both parents care for the young even though the female takes the bulk of care. In a score of species, such as in phalaropes and lily-trotters, males do all of the childrearing.

See also here.

This video is about the film Taking Liberties, about governmental threats to civil liberties in Britain.

By Chris Talbot:

British students jailed for possessing “extremist” literature

31 July 2007

Four 20-year-old Bradford University students and a 19-year-old school student were jailed after a trial at the Old Bailey for being found with material said to be “glorifying Islamic terrorism” on their computers. Aitzaz Zafar, Usman Malik and Awaab Iqbaal were jailed for three years each, Akbar Butt was jailed for 27 months and the school student, Mohammed Irfan Raja was given two years’ youth detention.

Such is the atmosphere created by politicians and the media after the attempted terror bombings in London and Glasgow earlier this month that there was very little opposition in the media to what are police state measures—the jailing of these youths merely for downloading material readily available on the Internet

The case is the first successful prosecution under the Terrorism Act 2000 for possessing material useful for terrorism.

Raja, at the age of 17, had run away from his home in London leaving a note to his parents saying, “if not in this [world] we will meet in [the Garden of Paradise]”. According to the prosecution, he was planning to go and fight in Afghanistan after training in Pakistan, and for that purpose he had joined the four students in Bradford. No serious evidence that this was anything more than an adolescent fantasy is reported.

His parents talked to him over the phone and persuaded him to return home after three days.

If the hateful propaganda of the nazi British National Party, members of which have been convicted for violent crimes, is freely available on the Internet, and some people say something against that, there is a deafening chorus in the big media: “Hands off! That’s free speech! That’s free speech!” No one has ever gone to jail for just one day for downloading hateful BNP stuff from the Internet.

The Turner Diaries, the US white supremacist racist fantasy of violence which has inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, is freely available on the Internet. No one has ever gone to jail for just one day for downloading it.

Adolf Hitler’s infamous Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, US capitalist Henry Ford’s The International Jew, and lots of other anti-Semitic and/or otherwise racist material, inciting to violence, is freely available on the Internet. No one has ever gone to jail for just one day for downloading it.

I have to make a confession. I myself have sometimes downloaded from the Internet freely available material by neo-conservatives and similar supporters of George W. Bush’s wars. Does that make me an accomplice in the killing of over 655,000 and counting in Iraq? in the sexual torture of children by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib jail? No, I oppose these atrocities and I wanted to have a look at how twisted the minds of Bush’s apologists are exactly. Some of the people downloading Bushist material from the Internet probably agree with it. Has any of them ever gone to jail for that for just one day?