Iranian in the Membrane

Some thoughts on Iran:

Sanctions

Blair's mention of needless Iraqi deaths is a reference to the mass death of children under sanctions reported by the UN, human rights groups and aid agencies. In a recent Newsnight interview Blair argued that "because of the way he [Saddam] implements those sanctions" they are "actually a pretty brutal policy against the Iraqi people". (BBC2, Newsnight Special, February 6, 2003)
Media Lens

[Concerning sanctions against Iran] Obviously we don't rule out any measures at all.
The Grauniad (January 11th, 2006)

ERANU

The words that came to mind when looking at the
above picture in Thursday's The Independent.
As seen on my bedroom wall.

Memories of Green

04:47 July 2nd 2005

I went to bed at 7AM this morning. Going to sleep in the pre-dawn blue light is like passing another boat going down the Nung river as you travel upstream.

What brought a smile to my face? The Seagulls are back. I have memories of being up at 4AM during my first exam season and listening to all the birds waking. I especially find the seagulls calling down at the waterfront quite relaxing. It's like a rarity, not many people are up to hear them before the day star rises and floods the sky with blinding light. Their return marks the beginning of the sunny season...

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Optimism Fading?

I'm trying to drag myself out of depression, but this morning my sociology class foresaw the collapse of society within the next century, and the newspapers (the broadsheets, naturally) detail nothing but how governments are either faffing about talking bollocks or being downright hypocritical.

Male Caucasian. Lieutenant 030.

We were consciously making new music for the cities. But rather than looking to America, I wanted to make a kind of music which might have happened if America never existed. A sort of minimalist European urban electronic folk music. I had a picture of a future jukebox in some lost European motorway service station. I just listened to it play what became Metamatic.
John Foxx, June 2001

I received Metamatic (along with Organisation) from Amazon on January 20th. The first week consisted of listening to Organisation which, though melancholy, offers some hope in warm synth. Metamatic, of the following two weeks, is cold synth. Very cold.

Low 1/4: Parenthood

I've often thought of myself as having a strong paternal instinct. I'd rather not view myself as subject to biological drives, nor do I wish to believe it's a big egotrip to have a mini version of yourself. Regardless, there's something that makes me want to have a child... I think the video for Will Smith's Just the Two of Us brough it on. That's in an ideal and lovely world. We don't live in that world. I know I hate being born into this world, and I deeply resent being on a planet in which I have to prostitute myself to capitalists to stay alive. How can I possibly introduce a child to a planet which has received hardly any praise from my own blog?

Are The Results Half Censored or Half Free?

Are they still there?

"While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission," a [Google] statement said.
BBC News

Google tried to claim the amount of information censored would be was less than two percent of Chinese news sources and, "On balance we believe that having a service with links that work and omits a fractional number is better than having a service that is not available at all."
P2PNet

Google.com is censored (and now blocked) in the PRC by the PRC, Google.cn is censored by Google. What's the difference? Google is providing Chinese users with a degraded experience better than nothing? Google.com from Mainland China used to give you the same thing as Google.cn gives you now. Crap information better than no information? Depends what you're looking for.

"It's Funny Because It's True"

Totally unrepresentative...

Evil Empire

From today's El Reg letters:

Possibly the most frightening thing I have ever seen on this web of ours:

Search Tiananmen from Google Images:
http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

Search Tiananmen from Google China:
http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen

Colin Jackson

What I find most frightening appears in the top left-hand corner on the Chinese site (primitively translated with Babelfish as always):

您是不是要找： 天安门
You are not must look: Tiananmen

Be careful what you look at. Be careful what you write.

Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper — the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

The First Time As A Tragedy...

The BBC informs me there's been a tanker accident in Alaska, while Wikinews informs me one also happened on Tuesday in the Baltic Sea.

Funnily enough, the second episode of Futurama on Tuesday was this.

Fry: What's happening?
[Zoidberg turns on another screen that displays the extent of the damage to the tanker. There is a huge gash most of the way along the hull. A gauge at one side of the screen drops as the dark matter levels go down.]
Zoidberg: All 6,000 hulls have been breached!
[Fry falls to his knees.]
Fry: Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it with 6,001 hulls! When will they learn?

According to the BBC, the double hull was...

a design brought in during the 1990s to protect cargoes.

Yes, it would truly be a tragedy if the cargo was damaged (how exactly do you damage oil?). Of course, the environment doesn't need protecting from the oil industry...

Yes, we have the right to caricature G*d

Hmm, things don't travel as fast as they used to.

I can see the sales of Danish bacon are going to be dented in the Middle East...

Low 3/4: Animal Farm, Calling

I have an irrational wish to shoot all those who defend this cattle-market economy in all its degrading splendour - namely, the Neo-liberal asinine pricks that are my parents and their generation.

It was their generation that saw 2001 in the cinemas, yet this generation was condemned to a year and resulting decade that never achieved anything near its cinematic namesake. I can't say I didn't enjoy watching the live deaths of 10,000 Americans on TV (as was the figure on the day), but now I think it was awful - not that, the bit where American Imperialism rose again.

Low 2/4: Planet

The people you can see walking down the street are not looking up into the sky and wondering who is out there - instead, they mindlessly watch people with the intelligence of cockroaches on empty-content TV. You can travel 13,700,000,000 Light Years in all directions*, yet we (and by we, I mean Americans) haven't been to the Moon since December 1972. It's only 3 Light Seconds away (384,400 km on average). What was done in the meantime? We built Concorde. Then we scrapped Concorde. Humanity moves forwards. Humanity moves backwards. Politicians build more bridges.

Like a can of sugar-water Coke®, humans arrived and unscrewed the cap on the equilibrium. At this moment , I would truly welcome this species' extinction - the only tragedy would be if the means resulted in the wipeout of the less destructive species.

*The distance to the edge of observable space. Anything beyond that is irrelevant to us
Based on barely-legible depressed rants written in the middle of the night on 19/01/06

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