Month: June 2005

Yet More Proof Of False Pretenses For The War

Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’ – Sunday Times – Times Online: (via Mefi)

MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.
The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

NI_MPU(‘middle’);The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.

“US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia,” the briefing paper warned. This meant that issues of legality “would arise virtually whatever option ministers choose with regard to UK participation”.

The paper was circulated to those present at the meeting, among whom were Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The full minutes of the meeting were published last month in The Sunday Times.

The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.

“It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject,” the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be “most unlikely” to obtain the legal justification they needed.

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

So why did they want the war? I’m not clear on that. It wasn’t terrorism; it wasn’t WMDs. The oil? Couldn’t they get that anyway? American companies were dealing under the table with Hussein on a scale that would put Kofi’s kids to shame… And surely this war costs more than the increased cheapness of oil that might come from 0wning Iraq (but they didn’t expect it to go this way did they?) Was it really in reaction to the terrible economic threat of a switch from petrodollars to petroeuros? Was it just wanting to have a place in the Middle East that was stable and docile and on our side? (Boy, did we blow it if that was the goal…)

We know lies were told, and the stated motivations were pretenses, but what were the real motivations? Did the memos say that? They seem to have said the objective was a “stable and law-abiding Iraq.” Why that was worth a war, I’m not sure, but according to the Washington Post’s story on it, a big focus of the papers was that the Brits seemed to be aware that America was rushing in with no particular plan for the aftermath of the invasion, and they were worried they were going to be left holding the bag.

Temple Builders of Eastern Europe

From the newspaper which brought you a completely misleading and overhyped article on the Oxyrhynchus fragments, an article on a newly discovered ancient civilization of stone-age temple builders. I would normally find this exciting but after being taken in by the previous article I wonder if this is even news. One of the authors (David Keys) is even the same as the previous article.

What’s that acronym again? ATIUBS?

ATIUBS, this sounds pretty cool.

Via mefi.

Archaeologists have discovered Europe’s oldest civilisation, a network of dozens of temples, 2,000 years older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids.

More than 150 gigantic monuments have been located beneath the fields and cities of modern-day Germany, Austria and Slovakia. They were built 7,000 years ago, between 4800BC and 4600BC. Their discovery, revealed today by The Independent, will revolutionise the study of prehistoric Europe, where an appetite for monumental architecture was thought to have developed later than in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

In all, more than 150 temples have been identified. Constructed of earth and wood, they had ramparts and palisades that stretched for up to half a mile. They were built by a religious people who lived in communal longhouses up to 50 metres long, grouped around substantial villages. Evidence suggests their economy was based on cattle, sheep, goat and pig farming.

Their civilisation seems to have died out after about 200 years and the recent archaeological discoveries are so new that the temple building culture does not even have a name yet.

Excavations have been taking place over the past few years – and have triggered a re-evaluation of similar, though hitherto mostly undated, complexes identified from aerial photographs throughout central Europe.

Archaeologists are now beginning to suspect that hundreds of these very early monumental religious centres, each up to 150 metres across, were constructed across a 400-mile swath of land in what is now Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and eastern Germany.

The most complex excavated so far – located inside the city of Dresden – consisted of an apparently sacred internal space surrounded by two palisades, three earthen banks and four ditches.

The monuments seem to be a phenomenon associated exclusively with a period of consolidation and growth that followed the initial establishment of farming cultures in the centre of the continent.

It is possible that the newly revealed early Neolithic monument phenomenon was the consequence of an increase in the size of – and competition between – emerging Neolithic tribal or pan-tribal groups, arguably Europe’s earliest mini-states.

After a relatively brief period – perhaps just one or two hundred years – either the need or the socio-political ability to build them disappeared, and monuments of this scale were not built again until the Middle Bronze Age, 3,000 years later. Why this monumental culture collapsed is a mystery.

The archaeological investigation into these vast Stone Age temples over the past three years has also revealed several other mysteries. First, each complex was only used for a few generations – perhaps 100 years maximum. Second, the central sacred area was nearly always the same size, about a third of a hectare. Third, each circular enclosure ditch – irrespective of diameter – involved the removal of the same volume of earth. In other words, the builders reduced the depth and/or width of each ditch in inverse proportion to its diameter, so as to always keep volume (and thus time spent) constant .

Archaeologists are speculating that this may have been in order to allow each earthwork to be dug by a set number of special status workers in a set number of days – perhaps to satisfy the ritual requirements of some sort of religious calendar.

The multiple bank, ditch and palisade systems “protecting” the inner space seem not to have been built for defensive purposes – and were instead probably designed to prevent ordinary tribespeople from seeing the sacred and presumably secret rituals which were performed in the “inner sanctum” .

The investigation so far suggests that each religious complex was ritually decommissioned at the end of its life, with the ditches, each of which had been dug successively, being deliberately filled in.

“Our excavations have revealed the degree of monumental vision and sophistication used by these early farming communities to create Europe’s first truly large scale earthwork complexes,” said the senior archaeologist, Harald Staeuble of the Saxony state government’s heritage department, who has been directing the archaeological investigations. Scientific investigations into the recently excavated material are taking place in Dresden.

The people who built the huge circular temples were the descendants of migrants who arrived many centuries earlier from the Danube plain in what is now northern Serbia and Hungary. The temple-builders were pastoralists, controlling large herds of cattle, sheep and goats as well as pigs. They made tools of stone, bone and wood, and small ceramic statues of humans and animals. They manufactured substantial amounts of geometrically decorated pottery, and they lived in large longhouses in substantial villages.

One village complex and temple at Aythra, near Leipzig, covers an area of 25 hectares. Two hundred longhouses have been found there. The population would have been up to 300 people living in a highly organised settlement of 15 to 20 very large communal buildings.

Just Checkin’ Ubuntu

It runs pretty well from the LiveCD on an iBook. I’ve got GAIM running, I’m connected to ISCA, it detected my airport flawlessly, I’m listening to Virgin Radio’s OGG stream, a little tweak in the prefs made the mousing all good… I just realized I have no idea how to right click or center click, but so far that hasn’t mattered… Fonts fairly ugly. GIMP and XSane work together out of the box — wow, working scanner out the box is more than I can say for OS X. Good gravy, it detected the Griffin iMic out of the box too, though I couldn’t figure out how to tell it to play music through it (the music player’s interface is rather spartan). But it appears as an option in the volume controller.

I’d love to see if my USB keyboard works with it out of the box, but I don’t think there’s any music playing software installed on the livecd, so I don’t know how I’d test it.

Sound recording doesn’t work out of the box.

OK, it looks like sound is still a bit of an iffy proposition, even on a very good distribution like Ubuntu.

Overall conclusion — It’s nice, I could deal with it if I decided I had to be there, but I think a short trip to Linux on the LiveCD did the job I intended it to do — convinced me that I like OS X just fine right now and want to go back to it. (While reassuring me that if I felt the need to bail for some reason, life wouldn’t be completely horrible using Linux on this thing.)

After I post this, I’ll see how sleeping and waking up works.

Imagine vs Imagine

Both rx (aka The Party Party) and wax audio have nice mp3s of George W. Bush singing John Lennon’s “Imagine.” I think Wax’s “Imagine” wins, but rx still holds pride of place for “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “My Name Is Rx,” which I can’t get out of my head sometimes.

(via MeFi)