Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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The plane
Forty miles from where I write, a man sits. His eyes and ears are covered, his wrists and ankles manacled. He has been drugged. He may not know he is aboard a Lockheed Gulfstream jet, refuelling on the tarmac at Glasgow International Airport. He may not know where he's going.
He is going to be tortured. With beatings. With a scalpel. With a broken bottle. He will sign a confession. He will say he knows people whose names have been given to him. Some of the people he names may, some day, be on that plane. He may be on that plane himself because somebody else has, in the same position, named him.
At some moment, in the past year or two, this has been the case. It may be the case at this moment.
The confession he gives may be true. The confession that named him may be true. But that is how it was obtained. We know what such confessions are worth. The British government wants to make them admissible evidence in British courts.
This man's story may be a tissue of lies. It may be exaggerated. I rather hope it is. The man's laywer, Clive Stafford Smith, OBE, doesn't think so. He's suing the British government over it. There is no dispute, really, that all of this goes on. Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, describes the process:
"In Uzbekistan, it works like this," he says. "Person X is tortured and signs a statement saying he’s going to crash planes into buildings, or that he’s linked to Osama bin Laden. He’s also asked if he knows persons X, Y and Z in the UK who are involved in terrorism. He’ll be tortured until he agrees, though he’s never met them."The jet has finished refuelling. The hoses are disconnected. Through the seat, a man feels the vibration as the engines start. Through silent headphones the rising sound comes through, like a scream. He's on his way.
The confession is sent to the CIA where, according to Murray, it is "sanitised". Before sanitisation the report "will have the guy’s name on it, the date of the interrogation, where it took place - and might still be bloodstained.
"The CIA then issues a debriefing document, which does not name the individual. It does not say he was tortured. It only says that it is a detainee debriefing from a friendly overseas security service.
"This will set out the brief facts, such as "we now know person X in London is in Islamic Jihad and plans to blow up Canary Wharf". This goes to MI6 - the British and Americans share everything - and then it goes to MI6’s customers: the Prime Minister, the defence secretary, the home secretary, the foreign secretary, and other key ministers and officials. I was one of these customers too because I was the ambassador to Tashkent.
A bucket of Sunshine for Sunni Iran
Britain's most popular newspaper says Britain's to all intents and purposes at war with 'Sunni' Iran.
'It may still be a war of words - and worried Western leaders will do their best to keep it like that.Oil-hungry Teheran, fuelling the insurgency all along? There's more:
But if oil-hungry Teheran has its way, this is doomed to turn to bloody conflict.
It has been clear almost from the start that Iran is not just fanning the flames of the insurgency in Iraq, but providing the fuel and the ammunition.'
'It also strikes fear into the hearts of Iran's Arab neighbours who are convinced they are pawns in a power grab which will establish Sunni Iran as the dominant Islamic force in the Gulf.'Who knew? I'll say this for The Sun, it gives you information won't find anywhere else.
A view from the Middle Kingdom
Via a commentator at Lenin's Tomb, we find Hong Kong commentator and politician Lau Nai-keung casting a cold eye on the prospect of a US-led global recession in the next year or two. His economic analysis will be familiar (here's a similar one, via TPM, from James J. Kramer, NYT stock tipster) - deficits, debts, trade imbalance, you've heard it before - and he gets at least one big number wrong (the cost of the Iraq war so far has been $200 billion dollars, not $700 billion) but in the context that's a nitpick. What I find interesting is his staunchly Sinocentric take on it all:
The US is now clearly in huge trouble, economically, socially, politically, and internationally. The Bush Administration bungled big in cyclone Katrina's aftermath in New Orleans, and then a minor rerun from Rita in Houston, and this will trigger the general outburst of people's dissatisfaction with the government, leading to great internal turmoil lasting for many years.Do it to Julia! But as US-China tensions rise, looking on complacently while Iran is picked on may not be an option even for China. Our only hope really is that great internal turmoil lasting for many years.
[...]
To us, the good news is that when the country is in deep trouble, the US will not have the energy to pick on China. Even when it is necessary to start another war to divert people's attention, it would pick one much smaller in size and weaker in strength, like Iran. This will provide a much more amicable environment for China to make good use of its "period of strategic opportunity" till 2020 for the country to pass through a turbulent zone between per capita income of US$1,000-3,000.
The Big Bag Never Opened
Some time in the 1980s The Guardian, then so notorious for misprints that it was nicknamed The Grauniad, published an article that referred to 'the big bag theory' of the origin of the universe. A letter pointing out this mistake was sportingly illustrated with a cartoon of the Greek goddess Cornucopia, shaking the stars and galaxies out of a big bag.
There is in fact a connection between the Big Bang theory and cornucopia, but it's an entirely negative one. Such at any rate is the claim made by Eric J. Lerner, in his book The Big Bang Never Happened, which I recently rediscovered while tidying the workroom.
I first read Lerner's book several years ago. It didn't convince me, but it stimulated me to pay more attention to New Scientist's cosmology articles, which I had hitherto skimmed. Re-reading it after a few years of thus paying (more) attention, it made a lot more sense than it did the first time. Some of it is dated - Lerner was sceptical of galactic black holes, which have now been observed. It's been criticised, defended by its author and others, and I have no competence to comment. However, the technical back-and-forth is becoming increasingly beside the point. Problems with the Big Bang are now so mainstream that Lerner is cited, as a minority viewpoint but by no means a crackpot, in New Scientist itself, which recently devoted an issue to the subject. Even the plasma cosmology, developed by the Swedish physicist and Nobel Laureate Hannes Alfvén, seems to make more sense these days, with observations of obvious plasma flows and vast electromagnetic phenomena.
While there's little doubt that the observable universe is expanding, and that that expansion had a beginning in some kind of big bang, this does not necessarily imply the full eldritch pantheon of the Big Bang theory. That the entire universe emerged literally from nothing for completely unknown reasons, was inflated in an instant to a much larger size by a completely unknown force, is still accelerating outward under the influence of another completely unknown force, and that nine-tenths of it consists of a completely unknown form of matter, might seem at first glance an odd conclusion for a scientific deduction. If the name hadn't already been taken, the Big Bang theory would be known as scientific creationism.
And, like an earlier creationism, it has increasing difficulty in dealing with the evidence from the past. A cursory search turns up reports of: bafflingly early large-scale structures, old-looking early galaxies and even speculation that the most sacred relic of the Big Bang, the cosmic background radiation, is local in origin:
The most contentious possibility is that the background radiation itself isn't a remnant of the big bang but was created by a different process, a "local" process so close to Earth that the radiation wouldn't go near any gravitational lenses before reaching our telescopes.The article continues with a brisk summary of the Big Bang's problems:
Although widely accepted by astrophysicists and cosmologists as the best theory for the creation of the universe, the big bang model has come under increasingly vocal criticism from scientists concerned about inconsistencies between the theory and astronomical observations, or by concepts that have been used to "fix" the theory so it agrees with those observations.No doubt a suitable fix for these will be in shortly, if it isn't already. To the making of epicycles there is no end.
These fixes include theories which say the nascent universe expanded at speeds faster than the speed of light for an unknown period of time after the big bang; dark matter, which was used to explain how galaxies and clusters of galaxies keep from flying apart even though there seems to be too little matter to provide the gravity needed to hold them together; and dark energy, an unseen, unmeasured and unexplained force that is apparently causing the universe not only to expand, but to accelerate as it goes.
In research published April 10 in the "Astrophysical Journal, Letters," Lieu and Mittaz found that evidence provided by WMAP point to a slightly "super critical" universe, where there is more matter (and gravity) than what the standard interpretation of the WMAP data says. This posed serious problems to the inflationary paradigm.
Recent observations by NASA's new Spitzer space telescope found "old" stars and galaxies so far away that the light we are seeing now left those stars when (according to big bang theory) the universe was between 600 million and one billion years old -- much too young to have galaxies with red giant stars that have burned off all of their hydrogen.
Other observations found clusters and super clusters of galaxies at those great distances, when the universe was supposed to have been so young that there had not been enough time for those monstrous intergalactic structures to form.
What's really intriguing, though, is that Lerner has not been content with theory. In fact, contentment with theory is for him the root of the problem. Like Alfvén, he affirms that the best way to understand cosmic processes is through hands-on experimental work with similar processes in the laboratory. As director of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, he has conducted extensive research into plasma physics, particularly the plasma focus device, with the ultimate aim of developing cheap fusion power. He has some US government support and private investment, and a step-by-step business plan.
And Cornucopia? Well, Lerner's thesis is that there's a tight connection between technological devlopment, our understanding of the universe, and the general condition of society. The Big Bang cosmology has an immense ideological appeal in a society without any hopeful vision of the future. The shift from experiment and observation to increasingly arcane theory and the multiplication of epicycles is a further malign twist, digging us deeper into the hole. Fundamental technological developments are slowed down. Apart from biotech, in which great advances in both theory and practice have gone together, the rest of our technology - even the Internet - is an elaboration, refinement and diffusion of developments made half a century or more ago.
And that's why the big bag never opened.