The Big City

The attitudes that people in the US have towards ‘terrorism’ at the moment wouldn’t seem out of place in an episode of Star Trek. Ask most Americans about their enemy in the ‘war on terror’ and they will have at best a very vague idea and in most cases no idea at all about who that enemy is, where they come from and what they want. They will bluster and talk about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ although their freedom is being sacrificed to their fear and their democracy is based on such a lack of information that it is meaningless. The fact that none of the US networks is prepared to show Adam Curtis’ film “The Power of Nightmares” illustrates just how hard the media in the US is prepared to work to avoid carrying real information to the American people. It’s a reminder to those of us enjoying a free(ish) media that any American influence in that media can only be a malign one.
Guardian Unlimited Film | Features | The film US TV networks dare not show

This stupid story claims that Bogus blogs snare fresh victims without having a single example of any victim being snared by a bogus blog. It’s a terrific example of the sort of extremely bad tech journalism that the BBC excels in. They have just fallen for a load of hype published by some no-mark parasitic consultancy company.

Anyone visiting the baited blog and falling victim to the keylogger could find that they have bank accounts rifled by the phishing gang behind the bogus website.

What nonsense. The truth is that anyone who downloads and installs a program that installs a keylogger without their anti-virus software noticing and who then uses an online banking service with terrible security might risk losing money. All four online banks that I use either ask for individual letters from my password in a different order each time or ask for different information on every visit. Even if I was foolish enough to accidentally install a keylogger it would take a very long time for someone to gather enough information to get access to my money.

I am a boycott kind of a person, I have to admit. In the olden days it was Barclays Bank and South African wine. These days it’s a bit complicated. For example, Palestinian farmers have to label their produce as Israeli or they are in danger of their crates being left ‘accidentally’ to rot on the tarmac, so I still sometimes buy Israeli avocados. I try not to buy toys made in China, but it’s as much on aesthetic as political grounds because I know that, despite my objections to the torturing, murdering government, success in the Chinese economy has the potential to lift millions of people in China out of miserable poverty. And of course there’s America. I have the uncomfortable feeling that any of my money that goes into the US economy is funding repression, injustice and global warming. On the other hand, I love my Mac, I couldn’t buy any other make of computer or operating system.

So when I was looking recently at buying two LCD computer monitors, reading lots of reviews and comparing specifications, I was quite relieved that I was able to rule out the highly rated and cheap Dell monitor almost entirely on political grounds. Michael Dell, the boss of the company, gave lots of money to Bush and worked on his campaign. I really never would buy anything from Dell, even if it was a real bargain. Mind you, they are very ugly as well.

The Lancet report that the ‘liberation’ of Iraq has led to the deaths of 100,000 people was denied by Tony Blair. He said that “The Iraqi ministry of health have put out figures for the six months up to October of just over 3,000 deaths, but that includes people who are either terrorists or insurgents themselves killed or alternatively people who are the victims of terrorist attack.” The Prime Minister is wriggling out of the fact that those people would still be alive now if there had been no invasion. He is also suggesting that some human lives are worth more than others and that some deaths are not undesirable.

According to an article in the Economist he is also just plain wrong. The Economist says that it is reasonable to say that 60,000 have been killed violently since the invasion, it also says that the total of confirmed deaths in press reports is 15,000. Blair must know that the current regime in Iraq has a real interest in under-reporting the casualty figures. He doesn’t seem to have lost his habit of believing even the most suspect evidence when it suits him.

I have been angry about this story ever since I first learned the details of what happened. If you don’t know you really should have a look at the site, but a very potted history is that a US chemical company built a pesticide factory in Bhopal, a city in central India with a population of 850,000, roughly the same size as Birmingham. The factory was negligently managed and safety measures were removed in order to reduce the running costs. As a consequence, in 1984 there was an enormous chemical leak which released a huge cloud of poisonous gas. A large number of people died in agony, Union Carbide say 3,800 but many experts have estimated the total who died in the first week alone at between eight and fifteen thousand. The company withheld information about the poisons the gas contained, information which could have helped save lives, they fought tooth and nail to avoid having to pay compensation to the victims of their negligence and they continue to refuse to clean up the contaminated factory which is still poisoning people. The government of Bhopal charged Union Carbide’s boss, Warren Anderson, with manslaughter and an international arrest warrant was issued. He wasn’t arrested by the US authorities, instead he “disappeared”. Greenpeace tracked him down in 2002 living a life of luxury in the New York State. If anything epitomises what I hate about US capitalism this is it. Bastards.