Country Reflex - A Poem for America

Tuesday 1 June 2010

mobile phones, pensions and McFuckery

I'm almost half ashamed of this post, especially having not even logged on here and written anything for a while. I suppose I've been too busy.
Anyway - this started as up update to facebook status but its too long, so here it is:

after a long a valiant fight for life, and in the face of much adversity, my phone has eventually spluttered to a more or less dignified end. No doubt it will now be sent along with all other "recycled" phones to the African Continent upon where small children will deconstruct it with their nimble fingers in order to extract minerals originally mined in the so-called 'Democratic Republic of Congo'. And because I - like most others - couldn't possibly live without a mobile fucking phone, I shall knowingly perpetuate this cycle of mineral extraction, war, poverty and general McFuckery safe in the knowledge that i will have a new shiny phone tomorrow with the same number as before. However, I can offset this hypocrisy by having canceled my public sector pension. I can now bask in the fact that my future financial security is more or less uncertain while being safe in the knowledge that I am no longer investing in mineral and oil extraction, and that this - my small contribution to not having a financial interest in planetary destruction - may mean a more secure future for the same nimble fingered children soon to be setting about removing the Coltan (Google it) from my dead mobile phone. Phew. This of course depends on whether or not you think the income these children receive for extracting metals from our dead consumer durables could outweigh the possibility that the industry itself is part of the machinery destroying our planet?
Do let me know what you think.
Answers on a postcard please.
Fuck, that's a tree - if only all postcards were made from hemp!

Wednesday 3 February 2010

Iraq Inquiry II

I have to say I felt quite sorry for Claire Short. Her appearance before the Iraq Inquiry was always going to be emotional if nothing else. But she did get a round of applause for being stupid enough to be conned and bullied into one of the worst votes in her political career. As I said, I feel a certain amount of pity - which, in many respects is perhaps wrong but there we go, eh?
We already know what the FCO lawyers thought about it.

Friday 29 January 2010

The Iraq Inquiry


Nice one Tony.
Same old shit and still we're no closer to having any adequate answers to why you felt it necessary to destroy a nation and allow thousands of people to die on the fucking off-chance that Saddam Hussein might have still had the chemical weapons we sold to him, and might have had the capacity to 'reactivate' the weapons programs destroyed by over a decade of draconian sanctions that crippled a country and arguably killed even more people than our war of aggression.
There can be no doubt that this was a war of aggression. We didn't like Saddam anymore. Our former ally had become a liability and threatened to upset the applecart through the shrewd leverage of his national oil wealth and trading capacity.
Regime change was the only way to reverse this policy. And reverse it we most certainly have. Sadly this issue was not given as much weight as it should have been by our free and independent press.
Now, I'm not for one minute saying that Tony Blair had knowledge of the above situation and that his motives were impure in so far as Saddam Hussein was a "monster" with somewhat murderous tendencies when challenged, for example, by the Kurds.
However, this was NOT the reason we went to war - even ostensibly. We stood by and let him massacre the Kurds!
The 'inquiry' has proven itself to be a toothless affair dealing more on a media circus basis and focusing on the word of those directly involved in sanctioning the carnage.
Why, for example, are we not hearing the legal opinion of those who advised the rest of the UN Security Council, all those who opposed the war. This inquiry has avoided any line of questioning that might start getting to the point.
We were led to war on a false prospectus, by a divided cabinet - only two of which had the moral fortitude to resign over their spineless colleagues and megalomaniac self publicist of a Prime Minister's blind belief in "the right thing".
Christ! Launching a war of aggression on the basis of a tenuous point of law that did not have unanimous agreement within the respective governments concerned, let alone the UN Security Council, means that we committed the ultimate crime, an unprovoked war of aggression.
Lord Goldsmith is a mealy mouthed twat with as much blood on his hands as our former Prime Minister and every member of the cabinet and Opposition who supported our invasion of Iraq.
They didn't ask the right questions at the time and are therefore equally culpable, at least in moral, if not legal, terms.
They allowed themselves to be taken in by a convenient lie, a convenient pretext and the most convoluted, legal semantics/bollocks i have ever heard.
I want to hear what the French, Chinese and Russians have to say.
Surely the UN Security Council members and their legal representatives are crucial to our understanding this situation adequately?
We're getting the most flimsy side of the argument delivered by those with most to gain by having it 'accepted' and lodged in the history books as yet another example of well meaning but ultimately disastrous unilateral military action of highly dubious legal - and zero moral - integrity.
At best we were grossly misled into war and at worst we have all been party to the supreme war crime, which has been paid for with much blood and a vast chunk of our taxes. But thats okay because almost every global oil company has posted record profits consistently in every quarter since the invasion took place.
Afghanistan, anyone?
The Russians must be furious.
All they get is a tidal wave of cheap heroin and all the related social problems that accompany it.

Time for a Global Agri-Industrial Agreement?


Perhaps one of the biggest issues of the day is our obsession with food.
Love it or hate it, cook it or cairy oot it ;)
We need food. It's a big deal.
Personally I love it. Food is good. But I do get a bit fucked off with the various 'camps' and their 'superior' diets and great insights into what we can, could, should and don't eat.
We have problems with obesity in our society because we eat too much of the wrong shit and do fuck all exercise.
Of course, the reasons why this should be the case is a whole other topic. And one that deserves considerable attention on its own merit.
The point here is that our obsessions and hang-ups about food follow from the situation we see literally unfolding before us. It clearly bothers us individually, and as a society.
It is so very obviously a western luxury, our journey to the frontier of ill health - because you're worth it!
We get fat on junk food, shitting away the planets resources while millions of people have a low nutrition diet simply because they are too poor, too displaced geographically or too damn ill or hungry to care.
People eat what they can, and many have to eat what they are 'given' through the ever benevolent transfer of aid, or debt, to our developing cousins.
And one issue, one matter keeps coming back time after time: the fact that one of the single most nutritious sources of food on our planet is still subject to a control system that was ostensibly designed to prevent production of narcotics!
Now, if we consider the massive increase in drug production and consumption globally, vast areas of lawless and/or disputed territory under poppy or coca fields, packs of criminal gangs roaming the streets with broadswords and MAC10s then we ask a simple but pertinent question:
Why the massive waste of resources that only serves to enforce even greater wasting of resources - from the destruction of Colombian water supplies through unregulated cocaine production, to the crappy amounts of money Afghan farmers receive for their opium gum, to the incredible situation that sees a genuine 'super food' more or less banned from global scale agricultural production.
Industrial hemp, or cannabis sativa, is perhaps the most impressive renewable resource on earth. Especially as a food source.
How can we possibly justify controls that prevent such a nutritious food source from being grown in all the worlds great agricultural regions? These places need not be the poorest, but they undoubtedly are.
I like to think of a world where people are free to produce the food, fibre and fuel they need locally, with a market - probably a global market - for the surpluses.
In many respects, this would be something approaching 'fair'.
At the centre of what I have called a 'Global Agri-Industrial Agreement' would be the production and distribution of hemp, its byproducts, derivatives, food stuffs etc.
My only difficulty with this 'vision' is what type of world will make it happen?
What will the conditions be like for the people living in agricultural regions who we are likely to rely on even more than we currently do?
Will it be 'business as usual' i.e. the extraction of every ounce of value through low wages and deeper, more entrenched poverty and social division - as currently dictated to developing countries by the IMF and World Bank?
Or, will it be fair, and on equal terms, quid pro quo?
Will technology transfer and environmental enhancements also be attached to an equitable pricing system under such an agreement that adequately reflects the social cost of production and biodiversity protection (i.e. an end to deforestation) with wages commensurate with the social goods produced.
The main 'social' good emanating from the Global Agri-Industrial Agreement would be the long term mitigation of climate change.
But like everything, it depends on how it is done.
Let me give you an example. As I am writing this, news has come through that Bill Gates is to spend $10billion on a child immunization program for the 'developing' world, that will 'save' the lives of 7 million children.
Mr Gates, with all due respect, $10billion could provide the clean water and sanitation for those without, thus eliminating much of the disease your program hopes to treat.
£10billion could help provide a sustainable and renewable source of nutritious food for the same 7 million children, and then some.
Apparently we are only capable of fixing problems through a process of replacement with bigger problems, or 'solutions' that benefit 'business as usual'.
Is there no end to our ignorance?
Apparently not.

Saturday 16 January 2010

Blowing (hot air) in the Wind

Since our elected leaders failed to come up with anything meaningful in Copenhagen to avert the 2 degree shift in average global temperatures required to avert the worst climate change scenario, there's been much convenient muttering about the recent weather from the usual suspects. Apparently, our freakish weather (snow) is evidence that global warming is all bollocks. Way too convenient!
The interaction of climate, geology and pollution is really fucking complicated. So much so that even with a gargantuan amount of processing power, sophisticated computer modeling of future climate scenarios cannot provide anything absolute.
As I said - it's really fucking complicated!
For example, our freakishly cold weather could be the result of fresh arctic melt water messing with the Atlantic ocean conveyor, or Gulf Stream. We forget about our high latitude. Russia is on a similar latitude and frequently gets -30 degree temperatures or less. The Gulf Stream helps keep UK average temperatures relatively high considering our location. Worth keeping in mind when faced with simplistic arguments by climate change skeptics ;)
Here's an interesting bit of reading for you and quite topical given this weeks disaster in Haiti.
Everyday we understand a little more about just how connected everything is - GAIA, living breathing, changing - never fails to amaze me.
The sooner we can start working with her, the sooner we can do something meaningful to ensure our own survival. And let's face it - that's what it's about. I feel a certain level of nausea when I hear people talking about 'saving the planet'. GAIA does not need us to save her, in fact - it's fairly fucking obvious that she would be a damn sight better off without us.
No, we need to concentrate on saving ourselves in such a way as to remedy the gross inequality in the world that will make adaptation to a changing climate a total impossibility for the vast majority of humanity.
At the same time it is also fairly fucking obvious that there is nothing we can do to save everyone from the problems we have inadvertently created over the last 3-400 years. But we can certainly improve things.
Central to our ability to do this is agriculture and how we produce the goods and services we need. There are no technological quick fixes or sensible options for so-called 'bio or geo-engineering'. More fucking boys with their fucking toys trying to 'save the world' is not going to help.
At the same time a back-to-basics approach is never going to win the hearts and minds of a civilisation transfixed by the myth of perpetual economic growth and what new shit we can buy.
We need a Global Agri-Industrial Agreement (GAIA) to fix our current problems. We need a total moratorium on global deforestation, combined with a massive shift in agriculture away from intensive meat production and to be able to combine this with dual use crops that can help fulfill local needs for both food and energy.
I tried to come up with an idea for how this could be achieved 10 years ago when I was a post-graduate student.
Ok, so it's not very sexy and is not based on any cutting edge technology that needs to be invented or proven. The arithmetic is also quite crude. But we already have the technical capacity to implement this or something similar - and who knows, it might just work.
Ironically enough, the main barrier to implementing a Global Agri-industrial Agreement based on this work is largely ignorance and the ridiculous waste of money that is the 'war on drugs' - that and the other, more 'conventional' wars we are currently fighting, sorry, losing.
All war is a massive waste of resources and the impact on the environment of our ever sophisticated war machinery is absolutely staggering.
As the recently departed Henry Allingham (Worlds' oldest man and war veteran) said to the BBC, "War's stupid. Nobody wins. You might as well talk first, you have to talk last anyway."
Rest in peace Henry.

Friday 8 January 2010

Hello

The song 'Country Reflex' (in the video above) was written a few years ago, shortly after 9/11 and our knee jerk response to this tragedy with yet another - the invasion of Afghanistan.
While the legality of this military action was and still is highly questionable, the tragedy is that we bombed one of the poorest and most war-ravaged countries on earth back into the dark ages, while at the same time creating the impetus for a backlash of violence from those most deeply affected. I should make absolutely clear that I am not an 'apologist' for violence of any kind but if the 'west' cannot understand the problem with invading foreign soil, displacing thousands of people and killing many more in what amounts to nothing more than revenge, then we are truly stuffed.
However, this grossly simplifies the situation and politics that surround our invasion of Afghanistan and the true reasons behind it.
Just ask yourself this: if, following an IRA bombing on the UK mainland during the 1980's, would the UN and NATO have sanctioned a full scale invasion of the Republic of Ireland by NATO forces? The answer is of course 'no' - enough said.
I am not even going to start describing these reasons because that is not the point of this blog. I'll leave the conspiracy theories (and facts) for others to cover - and there's certainly no shortage of them!
No, the point of this blog is to look forwards, not back.
We've made a total fucking mess of Afghanistan and our action has helped finish off the 30+ year rape of an already fragile environment while cementing Afghanistan's role as the worlds primary producer of opium. There will be much more to come on that topic in this blog.
The 'war on drugs' is a literal concept - we fight for control and ownership of resources all over the planet, and drug production is central to the global economy, black/white or, as is more often the case, gray.
I'm not for one minute suggesting that the allied invasion of Afghanistan meant to create this situation, or even to make the existing situation worse.
But the fact is that it has.
Prior to 2000, Afghanistan was producing opium in only a handful of provinces but by 2004, 28 out of 32 provinces were under opium poppy cultivation. Illegal drugs are best produced in war zones - lawlessness and conflict are a prerequisite for illicit drug production from Colombia to Laos.
In 2004 - while working for small Glasgow-based NGO - I did a considerable amount of research on the subject. This work was partly motivated by an increasingly grim heroin problem in Scotland, but mostly it was driven by a situation in Afghanistan that is enough to make even the most cold hearted bastard cry like a baby. But don't take my word for it - go and read the proposal for yourself.
It is located here: http://www.hempreport.com/downloads/RPCD_Afghanistan_SA_2004.pdf

A related article written for the BBC can be read here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3704878.stm

Anyway, this'll do for the time being . . .
Peace Y'awl ;)