Dividing the Clans

by | Mar 29, 2007 | UK

Not sure why the decision has been taken to split the Home Office into two. Perhaps it’s about disaggregating incompatible personality types – dividing the Accountants of Justice from the Warriors for National Survival…

The Power of Nightmares redux

by | Mar 28, 2007 | Conflict and security

Jimmy Carter’s NSA Zbigniew Brzezinski makes a strong critique in the Washington Post of the way the ‘war on terror’ has been framed. He writes:

The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own — and can become demoralizing… We are now divided, uncertain and potentially very susceptible to panic in the event of another terrorist act in the United States itself.

All of which points neatly back to Adam Curtis’s outstanding The Power of Nightmares on BBC2 in 2004: a superb three part documentary discussing the parallels between the neoconservatives and salafi Islamists. Curtis says at the end of the last episode:

This story began over thirty years ago, as the dream that politics could create a better world began to fall apart. Out of that collapse came two groups: the Islamists and the neoconservatives. Looking back, we can now see that these groups were the last political idealists, who in an age of growing disillusion tried to reassert the inspirational power of political vision, and give meaning to people’s lives. But both have failed in their attempts to transform the world and instead, together, they have created today’s strange fantasy of fear, which politicians have seized on: because in an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, the fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.

All three episodes are – finally – available on Google Video. Required viewing if you missed it first time around.

Wired neighbourhoods

by | Mar 28, 2007 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks

Wired has a story about a new technology being rolled out with the Police in Oakland, California: microphones have been dotted around a rough neighbourhood, and when they pick up the sound of a gunshot, they immediately triangulate its exact location and route the information through to laptops in police cars, where the information is overlaid on a Google Earth style map. Now that’s a mash-up.

Indonesian mud volcano: the showdown

by | Mar 28, 2007 | East Asia and Pacific

Since June last year, a Javanese village has been subjected to a belching mud volcano producing 130,000 cubic metres of toxic mud a day. Thought to have been caused by gas exploration rupturing a pressurised aquifer underground, the mud flow has so far submerged 12 villages and displaced 15,000 people, and shows no sign of being ready to abate.

Now, the New York Times reveals, a showdown is looming. Local geologists are attempting to stem the flow by dropping large concrete balls – 400 of them, so far – into the gloop. But, explains a soldier guarding the site,

“The mud explosion happened because the spirits in the crater are angry. The insertion of the balls will only spark more anger. The soothsayers have already said there will be a new and much bigger burst. I believe this.”

A UK-based geologist who has visited the site is also sceptical of the concrete balls, albeit for different reasons: “The underground plumbing of a mud volcano, I don’t think, is going to be that simple”. The NYT reports rather sadly that he also “dismissed the notion that some of them could be ejected like cannonballs.”