The Musings of Chris Samuel

I was listening to the BBC From Our Own Correspondent Podcast which had a great piece by John Sweeney about murky going ons in Liechtenstein. Part of it made me think that they’ve been going to the same school as Microsoft:

The next morning we heard that there was a banking seminar at the university on openness. This being Liechtenstein, the openness meeting was closed, at least to us.

John also has a wicked sense of humour..

Imagine my disappointment on discovering that Liechtenstein was, in fact, the most boring place on earth. I’m used to boredom – I work for the BBC, for heaven’s sake – but Liechtenstein was as dull as ditchwater, no duller. They bank behind closed doors. They create fuzzy trusts behind close doors. They make false teeth. And then they go to bed. The person who most looked like a ruthless killer was Howard, and he was the BBC producer.

Well worth a listen..

There’s an interesting article by a BBC correspondent on the BBC website talking about “Propaganda war: trusting what we see?” that raises doubts about the veracity of a YouTube video put out by the Israeli government claiming to show a rocket attack on a lorry being loaded with Grad missiles.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem though disputes this story, itself claiming that it was a mistaken attack on a lorry being loaded with oxygen cylinders by Ahmed Sanur, his family and workers – at which point the Israeli’s changed their tune:

The Israeli response was that the “materiel” was being taken from a site that had stored weapons.

Sadly the Israelis are deliberately making it hard for people to confirm or refute their claims:

Israel has bolstered its approach by banning foreign correspondents from Gaza, despite a ruling from the Israeli Supreme Court.

which immediately makes you wonder what they’re trying to hide.

Unfortunately as the reporter is being critical of Israels policy of denying foreign correspondents access he gets accused by readers on that article of trying to side with Hamas (same strategy as accusing those being against the stupid useless mandatory content filtering proposal here in Australia as being pro child porn), which obviously gets his goat, his response to that is:

I do not believe anyone’s “propaganda.” We seek to verify all claims, from whatever source. One of the main claims in Gaza at the moment is the serious situation for the population. Having reported from Gaza many times over the years, I know how crowded parts of it are and how dependent the people are on food aid from the UN. This means they have no other source of supply but equally, if the system is working, they should be getting enough to get by on. The problem is that foreign correspondents cannot get in to establish the exact situation for themselves.

Before I get accused of similar pro-Hamas leanings I’d just say that I consider all violence by both sides to be wrong, unjustified and completely counter-productive. As Ghandi said “An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind”. I have my doubts that there will ever be a lasting peace in that area.

Via Bruce Schneier, a redacted version of the NSA’s “American Cryptology during the Cold War, (1945-1989)“ has been released thank to a request from the George Washington Universities National Security Archive project.

It includes a rather interesting section (book 1, pages 18 and 19) on how, in 1947, the UK foreign intelligence agency, SIS, decrypted some KGB messages from Canberra that turned out to include classified UK intelligence military estimates. This caused the US to break off crypto intelligence sharing with Australia putting the British in an awkward situation; as Clement Attlee put it:

The intermingling of American and British knowledge in all these fields is so great that to be certain of of denying American classified information to the Australians, we should have to deny them the greater part of our own reports. We should thus be placed in a disagreeable dilemma of having to choose between cutting of relations with the United States in defence questions or cutting off relations with Australia.

It took 5 years, the establishment of ASIO and a change in government from Chifley to Menzies before the US would reestablish full resumption of cryptologic exchanges with Australia and the author of the history concludes that this has a very bad effect on early American intelligence efforts against China.

The cause of the original leak to the KGB ? Two “leftists” in the Australian diplomatic service…

Via Bruce Schneier, an image from the Washington Post comparing the rules for slot machines against voting machines. The image is dated 2006, but I doubt much has changed since then (if at all).

Obviously money is far more important than democracy.

This is pretty neat, Breathing Earth is a flash based simulation of the real time statistics of births, deaths and CO2 emissions across the planet. You can mouse over countries to see how many people have died and been born whilst you’ve been watching, how much CO2 has been emitted and the rates.

It also has the per-capita emission numbers which are quite illuminating (especially if you listen to all this noise about getting India and China on board). So, for example, here are a few examples of the annual per capita CO2 emissions (in tonnes) of some countries:

USA : 19.66
Australia : 18.17
Japan : 10.1
UK : 9.23
France : 6.72
China : 3.7
India : 1.17

“We have ’survival’ emissions, you have lifestyle emissions.” – Shyam Saran, India’s envoy to the UN climate conference in Poznan, Poland

So the Labor Party has decided to set a measly 5% reduction in emissions by 2020. How pathetic. They say that they will consider going to 15% if everyone else cuts their emissions but given that we are one of the worst emitters per head of population that’s just not good enough.

What with this on top of their crazy Great Firewall of Australia internet censorship scheme I don’t think I’ll be able to vote for these people at the next election (and no, I’m not going to vote for the even worse opposition coalition).

Bah humbug..

For those who feel strongly about the brain dead government plan to break Australian Internet access through censorship and security theatre rather than following existing effective law enforcement methods GetUp is running a campaign against the proposed mandatory filtering of Internet access.

Today is the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War, a horrific slaughter of youth from across the world in the name of politics, alliances and patriotism.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
– Wilfred Owens writing from the front.

Lest we forget..

John Simpson, the BBC’s World Affairs editor has a nice piece on what the world might make of President Obama. He’s right on the money when he talks about the squandering of respect for America by the actions and attitudes of GWB and his neocons, and this is reflected in the fact that:

Last summer a poll for the BBC World Service, conducted in 22 countries, indicated that people preferred Barack Obama to John McCain by four to one. Almost half said that if Senator Obama were elected, it would change their view of the United States completely.

I don’t think Obama is in for an easy ride at all, but I think the world has breathed a collective sigh of relief at an unexpected outbreak of sanity in America.

For real this time..

Good news I have to say, at least now the planet has a fighting chance with getting something done on climate change (though I don’t know if it’s more than 50/50). Hopefully we’ll also see an end to the War on Science of the previous administration.