From The Morgue

c/o Billy:
London blasts had no direct al Qaeda support-report
“The London bombings last July were planned on a shoestring budget from information on the Internet and with no direct support from al Qaeda, a British newspaper on Sunday quoted a government report as saying.”
This has been a theme I’ve returned to over and over again when I’ve got going on this subject – the US and UK govts are desperately trying to sell us this image of Al Qaeda as a highly-structured international network of co-ordinated terror. It’s not.
This sales job is being done to justify the war on terror and to provide legitimacy to their bullshit explanation for the terror: “they hate our freedom!
Ah, I ranted about this before when I attacked big stupid-head David Capitanchik. “If we have a massively decentralised movement, then we need to accept that people are not joining that movement because they are brainwashed by malicious James Bond villains.” Go read that again and imagine I’m ranting it word-for-word here. Enough.

My ankle is doing wonderfully, thank you. A few twinges now and then when I catch my foot on an odd angle, but otherwise back to full mobility and strength.
Now it’s my shoulder that’s playing up. It just starting hurting after the party on Saturday night. No obvious explanation (although being pulled back and forth through a window can’t be ruled out). It’s frustrating, especially as it’s just painful enough to completely ruin my ability to sleep properly. Or, when the painkillers run out in the wee hours of the morning, at all.
I think this is my body’s way of telling me I’m thirty. Bugger.
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In any case, I’m a bit disheartened to be off the sport so soon after getting back on it, so I’ve scheduled some self-pity for this evening. At 7pm, when I was meant to be playing indoor netball, I’ll instead close the door to my room and curl up on my bed listening to Portishead’s Numb on my headphones. And weep bitter salty tears. Should be fun. (Sorry – you’re not invited.)

I am fine here. How are you? It is sunny outside. I have been drinking a mug of rooibos tea, which I like very much!
Many people have commented on my birthday post, which makes me very happy. Plenty of fun stuff to read in the comments there! You could do much worse than reading through these insightful and amusing quotes. And, of course, adding a quote of your own if you haven’t already!
Here are some other interesting things for you to read:
The Other Moose has a fascinating series of posts on why we can change the world, and why we haven’t done it yet, among other things.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Stronger Light has a great post about the existence or otherwise of ‘covert’ racism here in NZ. Among other things.
No Right Turn‘s Idiot Savant went to the Climate change conference here in Welly, and threw some reports on his blog: One, Two, Three, Four, Five
He’s also conducting some interesting work on encouraging participation in our democracy, trying out pledgebank as a way to motivate action and brainstorming things to suggest to MPs for private members bills.
Also, for my money, the team over at This Modern World continue to provide the best window through which to stare in disbelief at the ludicrous theatre of the absurd that is the US political world. (And David reports that the Daily Show is coming to C4!)

When my classy older bro turned 30, he had a Logan’s Run theme party.
I, on the other hand, am marking the occasion the same way I did the last couple of years. I’d appreciate it very much if you would please throw a quote of some description into the comments section. It can be anything, from any source. Yes, you can make it up, or quote yourself. It can be a Bible verse or something someone said in a film or a knock knock joke. Anything. You don’t need to justify yourself. Give me some quotey goodness in the comments, please – I’m only gonna turn 30 once after all.
Mostly I just like to hear from people. The existence of good people in this world is something to be endlessly celebrated. Yay.
(And do it now. If you decide to come back later you might forget, and if you forget I’ll be a Sad Panda.)
(Lurkers who never comment are particularly invited to comment this time. You can do it anonymoosely.)
(Last year Chuck’s quote made him internet famous! Which is nice because he’s saying nice things about me on his blog. Read the last comment of last year’s post to see.)
Previous birthday quotefests: 2005 2004

Laptop still in shop being checked out. This is the checking-out stage only, they haven’t started work on repairing yet. Gah. So I’m stuck on Slowy McSnailpace here, which can take upwards of 20 seconds to do a screen redraw sometimes. Patience, of course, is a virtue.
Have been busy. Went to De La Soul gig. Went to a wedding (#3 of the year). Hung out with temporarily-returned Leon (still a God). Have successfully recuperated ankle such that I have played three games of netball, one of basketball and one of ultimate over the last three days. Now I am achey from the exercise, but it’s lovely to be fully mobile again.
There now exist printed copies of Ron the Body. This pleases me no end. Thanks, sekret printing source! (Time elapsed from opening printed copy until finding a typo: approx ten seconds.)
The blogging will continue to be irregular while I’m stuck in Slowville. Please, just carry on without me. I’m fine.

I took my laptop into the laptop repairing place today. Online on the parental computer, which is slow. I’ve managed to quadruple its speed but it’s still slow. Only solution: pause the internet for me. I will catch up when laptop returned.
Played netball today, first outing on the ankle post-injury. I did not make it worse. This is good.
Instead of this, go read the other moose’s post about how our psychology influences our political tendencies. Is good, and includes micro-summary of Lakoff, who I’ve been mentioning here of late.

Late Afternoon Sun In A Toronto Park
01torontosunlight.jpg, 226K
(It’s a Canadian sweep of the top three! Go Canucks!)
One of our afternoons in Toronto we made it out to the cool neighbourhood where Andrew H and Janice live. We went for a wander through a big park that was right nearby, and as the sun got lower in the sky the whole place became really pretty.
I just really like this photo. I like the way the lines fall, the treetrunk and the path making a cross shape, Janice and Andrew and the tree all backlit, the more sculpted garden away down the hill… Janice has her hands up because she’s just noticed that the light is great to take a photo of someone standing against the tree, a photo that was taken a minute later on someone else’s camera.
Mostly I like this photo because it brings back the feeling of that day so vividly. It’s one of the few photos I have that combines the pretty scenery with a candid photo of people, and those are two things I like, so, yeah.
Andrew H, by the way, I met on the same trip to Portugal that led to me meeting Aaron (who was in photo 8 with the Guru Josh record) and Ella (who took me to the prairies for last week’s sunflower photo). That was a good trip.
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So those are my favourites. Except it’s a stupid exercise, choosing favourites. There are other photos I also like a whole bunch which didn’t make it in this list. Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed lookin’ at them. I’ve enjoyed revisiting them, that’s for sure.
🙂

From the Dom Post today:
Joe Bennett’s column title: “Do-gooders do no good”
Key paragraph: “Doing good makes people feel gooey inside, but it springs from exactly the same desire as warmongering. It springs from the desire to feel superior.”
(Joe Bennett is pretty moderate as far as columnists go in NZ newspapers, btw.)

All The Shah’s Men: An American Coup And The Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer, Wiley, 2003
I’ve been reading about Iran, and one of the books I read was this account of the 1953 coup that toppled Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mossadegh. New York Times veteran Kinzer dug into the archives to provide a detailed account of the secret actions driving the coup, as well as putting the oil standoff that had led up to it in clear context. (The title is at least slightly misleading – the British had much more responsibility for the coup than the US, even though the work on the ground was done by the CIA. Kinzer’s pitching the book towards those Americans who want to know why America is viewed with hatred and suspicion in the Middle East, hence the downplaying of Britain in some of the copy.)
I knew going in I’d be angry at what I read, and appalled at the level of interference by the US and Britain. I was surprised by just how angry I’d get.
The story goes like this – it’s worth reading, I promise:
* Early 20th century! Great Britain is a colonial power in Iran, extracting its oil via the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, still later British Petroleum a.k.a. BP). The Brit govt owned a majority share of the company – it saw Iran’s oil as essential for its national wellbeing. For all intents and purposes, the British government was extracting the oil directly.
* The company was massively exploiting Iran – its workers were forced to live in appalling conditions for pitiful pay, no Iranians were trained up to work above the menial level, and Iran was given only a minuscule proportion of the oil revenue.
* Negotiations with Britain to strike a better deal over the oil met a complete stone wall. The US, among others, repeatedly advised Britain to make concessions and improve the terms of the deal with Iran. They did not budge. Their stonewalling led to popular Prime Minister Mossadegh’s decision to nationalise the Oil industry.
* Britain tried to wait Iran out. They removed all their personnel from the oilfields and prevented Iran from recruiting trained workers from other countries; they stopped ships from entering and leaving to transport the oil; they generally tried every trick in the book to break Iran’s spirit and force it to allow them back in. Mossadegh did not back down, and refused to negotiate.
* Britain had the Shah, ruler of Iran, on side the whole time but Mossadegh had proved impossible to control. They wanted to organise a coup, but their Embassy staff had been removed from the country. They approached the US to perform the coup, and as soon as Eisenhower gained power this went ahead. The fledgling CIA sent Kermit Roosevelt into Iran to depose Mossadegh.
* The British had established a small army of paid contacts within Iran. Roosevelt accessed this network and threw a hell of a lot of money around. As a result, newspapers condemned Mossadegh, mullahs condemned Mossadegh, gangsters who ran neighbourhoods in south Tehran condemned Mossadegh. Massive demonstrations were held in which enormous numbers of attendees had been paid off.
* There was more to it than this – Kermit was a sophisticated operator, and he knew how to stage events to drive public opinion. He carefully constructed a plan for the final coup, in which his hand-picked military man would succeed Mossadegh. The coup didn’t exactly go off without a hitch, but it ended as Roosevelt wanted, and Mossadegh was arrested. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was recolonised by the British, under more liberal (but still exploitative) terms.
* The Shah gained renewed power after Mossadegh’s fall. His regime became more and more totalitarian until 1979, when popular revolution removed him from office and installed the Ayatollah Khomeini. Mossadegh’s name was invoked frequently during the revolution, but afterwards, to the horror of the democratising forces within Iran, Khomeini removed him from public discourse and put in place the Theocracy that remains in power today.
* Kinzer’s position is also that the US’ role in the 1953 coup was the direct inspiration for the hostage-taking in the US Embassy in Tehran – a situation that set the tone for fractious Iranian-US relations ever after. It’s a reasonable suggestion, I think.
The book was an incredible read. Most eye-opening was the extent to which the British government and CIA could and did undermine democracy in Iran – as soon as your newspapers and Mullahs have their opinions co-opted by foreign interests, you’ve lost the ability to engage in free decision-making.
Most anger-making was reading about Kermit Roosevelt, true believer in the Greater Good, sitting with his friends sipping drinks and waiting for news while hundreds of people die during the coup-struggle he had initiated.
It makes me wonder what the CIA and other such agencies are up to today. Meeting a newspaper editor in an alley with a pre-written story and $1000 cash is a bit too clumsy for todays wired and paranoid Western world, but I don’t doubt the same covert control over news is pursued today. (Of course, overt control of the news agenda continues to be a battleground, but that’s one we at least have some kind of handle on.)
Of course, this was the first major operation by the CIA, and its success led directly to a series of interventions in other foreign countries. In Iran, it all came back to oil; the British government, and then the US government, had ample opportunity to support a strong democracy in the difficuly Middle East, but they chose to destroy that democracy in order to maintain their oil access.
It would be sickening if I didn’t already expect the worst.

One of the cell networks here in NZ is running a long-term promotion: texting is free on weekends to other phones on that network. It’s a genius bit of marketing, but I don’t know how the heck they afford it.
Anyway, it’s given birth to an entirely new phenomenon – new to me at least.
Four times this weekend I received texts from unknown numbers. The content was text-speak for ‘hi, who is this?’. They were all from different numbers at different times of day.
(One of them’s in the title; another read ‘Hae!Wad u up 2 hu dizb??…’, I deleted the other two before I realised this was a phenomenon worthy of note)
So, I figure there are only a few possible explanations:
* my number is written on a wall somewhere with an encouragement to text me
* the cellphone virus we’ve all been dreading is here, and it communicates like a fourteen-year-old girl
* there are people out there who take advantage of free text weekends to randomly text any number they can think of, and see what response they get
It is a bit odd to me that out of nowhere I get four texts from different numbers in the same weekend. That’s a pretty incredible hit rate if it’s people entering numbers pseudo-randomly, which leads me to suspect that the third explanation isn’t the true one.
I didn’t text back to any of them in case they were some weird spider trying to harvest active cellphone numbers or something. I dunno. Also I didn’t care enough.
So, anyone else experience this? Anyone know what it means?
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This, over on the new-look Xenodochion and Matt M’s LJ, is extremely worth a look and a ponder, combining amusing cute kid story with epistemological exercise: Part 1 and Part 2