I have been parodied.

Eek!

I should have seen this coming.

(Exits, stage left, in search of a cold shower.)

An urban legend sweeping the Arab (and western neo-Nazi) press alleges that the Israeli security apparatus warned jews to stay away from the World Trade Center on September 11th.

Note: not Israeli citizens -- jews. Turns out that anti-semitism (of a level that would have been familiar to Germans in the 1930's and 1940's) is sweeping the Middle East: Mein Kampf is at #6 in the bestseller list in the Palestinian Authority area, and a big-budget dramatization of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is due on Middle Eastern TV screens next year. Islamist fundamentalist movements have lapped up the old 1930's propaganda and recycled it for their own consumption. And they're exporting this ideology: when the Zimbabwean government starts blaming the Jews for their economic ills, it looks like the traditional scapegoat is back in fashion.

Whee! On top of all the other problems the west faces in dealing with the Middle East, we now have a de-facto resurgence of Nazism to get to grips with. I am so looking forward to this bright new century ...

You've probably seen the news about a group of twelve British and two Dutch plane spotters who were arrested while on a plane spotting trip to Greece, and charged with espionage (carrying a 20-year maximum sentence). They've now been released on bail and the main charges dropped, replaced with minor ones.

The following message was posted to the (public) scoopgen mailing list on Sunday by Chris Fudge, one of the released members of the plane spotting party, and I think it bears reproduction here because of what it suggests about the way the media has handled the whole affair, especially in the current climate of paranoia about terrorism.

Dear all

Just starting to plough through 5000+ Emails and realised the amount of attention that I have been attracting.

[ snip ]

Just a few points about our arrest (if you can keep a straight face !)

• I was arrested for taking pictures at an airshow. I don't have a camera!
• We had an invitation to the Greek airshows from a Brigadier-General in the Air Force
• The faxed invitation from the Air Force magically disappeared for four weeks.
• The eight original charges against us have all been dropped as they were based on lies.
• The court charged us 300 pounds each for every visit we made. The EEC (e.g. the British tax payer) paid $40 each per day for our accommodation ($40 x 14 people x 36 nights). It's a money making scam especially as we were sleeping on the floor.
• A retired Greek Air Force General, a senior Greek Intelligence Officer, plus others have offered to appear in court in our defence.
• The Greek Government is still saying that we took photos four weeks after the charges were dropped!

You will pleased to know that there is no evidence against me but It is claimed that I offered 'psyological support' to the group! They are unlikely to drop the charges as we will then be able to prosecute them for wrongful arrest etc. The British MEP's are also looking at the legal aspect with a view of a prosecution through the European courts.

Back to Charlie:

What we have here is an innocent (feh!) money-making scam by some bureaucrats that backfired and has turned into a full-blown international incident between the UK and Greece -- one that promises to occupy most of the agenda of an EU Foreign Minister's summit later this month.

But just try to imagine for a moment what the news coverage would have been like if the plane spotters had included any arab or middle-eastern faces. Or if Greece was operating under the proposed legal regime US Attorney General Ashcroft wants to introduce, or with the detention provisions that UK Home Secretary Blunkett has just pushed through.

Here's a new acid-test for anti-terrorism laws: "imagine that a corrupt cop decides to turn you into their pet revenue-generating scheme. Under the new proposed law, are you (a) better off, (b) much the same, or (b) less able to defend yourself?"

The Taliban get a lot of stick in the west for their disgusting attitude towards women.

But they're not the only ones who believe in the patriarchal control of women, as the case of Shamsa al-Maktoum's bid for freedom and subsequent alleged kidnapping suggests.

There's a charitable way to view this situation (concerned father taking security precautions to protect fractious adolescent), and an uncharitable way. The fact that the police are treating it as kidnapping leads me to believe that the uncharitable view is more plausible -- that for cultural or religious reasons, the crown prince of Dubai thinks his daughter is his property rather than an independent adult.

(I'd like to be proven wrong on this point, but I'm not holding my breath. "You are now entering the Middle East: please set your watches back four centuries ...")

Lots of intriguing pearls of wisdom got buried in the midden of media triumphalism when the Taliban got their asses kicked.

Phil Agre, who runs the Red Rock Eater News Service, a sort of blog-by-email, has been culling interesting links to some of these pearls. (If you haven't seen RRE, maybe you ought to check it out.)

Here are some explorations of how some of GWB's friends are in bed with dubious Saudi charities fingered as terrorist fund-raising fronts, why the Northern Alliance are nearly indistinguishable from the Taliban, the uncomfortable reasons why the Bush administration refuses to go after the real culprits (in Saudi Arabia), and how US oil companies are subsidizing Al-Quaida.

I can see Osama bin Laden sitting in his cave and quoting Lenin to his followers: "the great thing about capitalism is that the capitalists will sell us enough rope to hang them".

(Note for the irony-impaired: I am not a fan of Osama bin Laden. Or Lenin, come to think of it.)

One moderately good piece of news: the UK's House of Lords, formerly a broken parody of a constitutional instrument, has actually begun doing some good for democracy in overly-managed Blairtown. Home Secretary David Blunkett's anti-terrorism bill has been gutted, with the most dangerous provisions for civil liberties stripped out in order to get the rest of it past a fractious, rebellious, House of Lords. Like US Attorney General Ashcroft, Blunkett had tried to ram through a number of repressive provisions under the guise of a clampdown on terrorism; these included a new offense of incitement to religious hatred (which I imagine had the Church of $cientology drooling down the phone to their lawyers) and astoundingly wide-reaching wiretap and data retention provisions for telecommunications carriers. The HoL is in transition from being an unelected chamber of hereditary inbred chinless wonders to -- I hope -- being a directly elected upper chamber; currently it's occupied by political apparatchiks and bishops, but at least the apparatchiks and bishops seem to be taking their revising responsibility seriously. And -- possibly because they don't have to worry about defending their seats at the next election -- they're willing to do the Right [but unpopular] thing ...

(Second note for the irony-impaired: the UK's statute books are already crammed with thirty years' worth of the most draconian anti- terrorism laws in the developed world. Somehow I don't think Passing Another Law will reduce the chances of a suicidal fanatic crashing a 747 into Canary Wharf one iota -- but making it an imprisonable offense to criticise any religious beliefs would tear up and throw away the "freedom of speech" clause in the Bill of Rights we finally got last year.)

Not a lot, really. However, I discovered a couple of coolish things.

• Dixons (large chain electronics store) has branches in the duty-free sections of most UK airports. They're selling Palm M505's for 254 including tax, way below the street price.
• There's a Japanese shopping mall in Hendon, North London , and they're having a half-price sale of very nice crockery -- bowls, tableware, ornamental stuff, all imported, all Japanese, at about a third what you'd pay for it elsewhere.
• The stall at Camden Market that sells Theremins -- including a DIY desktop model for 30 -- was impossible to locate on a crowded Saturday. (Anyone know of a good source of compact theremins?) However Cyberdog was well worth a visit.
• M & L Engraving of Derby engrave pewter and glassware, and make leather goods. Send them 40 and they'll build you a custom-made Palm Pilot belt pouch -- with room for a folding keyboard -- to order. And what a pouch! We're talking about quarter-inch thick hide with a fabric-lined brass plate inside it so that if you sit on your PDA it will survive. As this is a tenner cheaper than the official Palm product (and infinitely more durable), I had to order one.

I've been busting a gut this week to get my workload nailed down before I head off to London (tomorrow) for a long weekend that will involve shopping for presents, the Pig's Ear Beer Festival, and the 'tun (London SF group meeting).

Expect postings next week, discussing what's Hot and what's Grot on the pre-Newtonmass retail scene. Maybe.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden had some interesting comments in his weblog, Electrolite about my earlier article explaining why I'm unlikely to want to visit the US until the business of applying military tribunals to non-citizens is settled. In it, he pointed out how there's a slight case of motes, beams and eyes at work here.

To be fair, he's quite right. I'm going to start by denying personal responsibility: I didn't vote the New Labour control freaks into office, and I don't like what they're doing. It seems to be basically Thatcherism with better PR, and I disliked it enough the first time round. Having said that, however, basically I agree with him. And I'm beginning to think there's a more insidious, and threatening, tendency at work. One we should all be screaming about.

In the past couple of decades, democracy has made great strides -- in fact, more than half the countries represented at the UN have democratic forms of government. We're told that this is a good thing, but every time I open a newspaper or look at a website I see evidence of democratically elected representatives in one country or another passing insanely repressive laws. The US gets a lot of stick over this partly because the American media are widely syndicated worldwide, but it happens elsewhere. Australia's net-nannying law (that will ban all internet content that isn't suitable for children). The English police force's registers of delinquent children. Moves to maintain public registers of sex offenders that don't distinguish between serial rapists and young couples who were caught having sex at 15. (According to recent figures, about 30% of British children -- of both sexes -- start having sex before the age of consent, which is 16.)

It looks to me as if democracy isn't what's under attack -- it's civil rights, and a surfeit of democracy, applied in inappropriate ways, is the means of attack. Once a law is passed it is hard to get it struck down or reviewed. Improved communications have made it easier to get a lobbying group rolling, or start a grass roots campaign, and panic legislators (who need to be seen to be doing something, anything) into acting thoughtlessly.

Legislators today can't do much about the economy; in this thoroughly globalised era they can't impose tarriff barriers, mess with interest rates, or impose policy through taxation or fiscal means. So in an attempt to justify their posts, they're hunting for new causes. And the control freak tendency -- people who basically believe that other people can't be trusted to do the right thing -- is everywhere, and appealing for action.

What I fear is a future in which 100% of the seats at the UN are occupied by representatives of elected democracies -- and everywhere citizens are oppressed by insane violations of their civil rights, passed into law by elected legislatures held to ransom by special interest lobbies.

Someone, please tell me I'm barking at shadows?

The whole Afghanistan situation bugs me. News coverage on this side of the Atlantic (the UK) is mixed, and it's hard to separate ideologically biased editorializing from factual reporting.

Here's a particularly scary article from The Guardian, in which Tariq Ali gives an explanation of the real motivations of Zahir Shah (former King of Afghanistan), the Northern Alliance, and the political reasons why Pakistan funded and backed the Madrassas (religious schools) That produced the Taliban. It goes back to rivalries between the Afghan and former British Indian governments over control of the Pashtun territories of what is now Pakistan's North West Frontier. If true, it paints a frightening picture of a subcontinent that could be about to go up in mushroom clouds, as an Afghan territorial claim dating to the second world war destabilizes a region where two nuclear powers are facing off against each other.

So why do I only put conditional credence on this?

It's hard to say. There's something in the author's tone that suggests he has axes to grind -- but I can't tell what his agenda is, from here. I just don't know; I lack sufficient knowledge of the political realities of the region to know whether this is a carefully spun propaganda ploy that urges sympathy for the Taliban, or a clarion-call warning that the west is backing the wicked in a war with the evil, and that good intentions will be the ultimate casualty.

(If there's one thing that would be worse than September 11th, it would be jumping in with both feet to try and ensure it never happens again -- and triggering a regional nuclear war.)

No, not that war.

World AIDS Day is the first of December. To date, "only" a couple of million people have died of this disease, but because of its slow incubation and 100% fatal consequences HIV is an even more devastating threat to our future than tuberculosis or terrorism. Every day more people die of this plague than died in the World Trade Center attack.

I'm not doing a lot about it. However, there are a couple of thousand condoms and information packs in my living room: that's because my partner Feorag is a novice brother in the Scottish branch of the Order of Perpetual Indulgence, and they take it rather seriously.

Every day this week they'll be out in Edinburgh and elsewhere in Scotland, pushing the message about safer sex, and raising funds for medical charities.

Meanwhile, we see news like this from South Africa.

Is there no limit to human stupidity?

Michael Ratner had this to say in Counterpunch about the current anti-terrorism laws being pushed through in the US.

If these measures go through, I probably won't be visiting the USA again any time soon. As a non-citizen, every single one of these measures could be applied to me, for any reason or no reason at all. Would you visit some Ruritanian backwater where the government had explicitly said that foreigners could be arrested, held indefinitely, tortured, tried by military tribunal, and executed without a judicial appeal, at the whisper of an anonymous denunciation? I have no terrorist connections or sympathies, and I don't think anyone hates me enough to lie about me to the FBI ... but I wouldn't want to risk being behind the wrong door when they come knocking.

(Hint: this isn't going to do the US tourism industry any good. Never mind what else it harms!)

I hate Christmas.

So does this guy (warning: Angelfire site -- disable window.open() in javascript before visiting to avoid annoying ads).

Isn't it great not to be the only one?

I've suspected it for a long time, but it took those fun-free folks at the Childcare Action Project to realise The Truth:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: An amazing excursion through dazzling computer animation and computer-aided graphics. A colorful display of goth art. A bunch of delightful and bright kids displaying great talent and skills. Ingenious planning and outstanding attention to detail .... Several points of wisdom, integrity and honor skillfully placed. And all to present evil as good ... what better time to embrace evil in entertainment than now when we have kicked God out of schools, government and many, many homes and what used to be the family?

(This is pretty much a reposting of something I wrote earlier today on rec.arts.sf.written. A thread had developed, discussing Gardner Dozois' Years' Best SF collection (#18, for stories published in 2000), in which I have a story called "A Colder War". It's an H. P. Lovecraft pastiche. I figured the following needed to be said, on the record, to explain why I wrote that story.)

"At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft is science fiction -- if you read it it's basically a tale of an Antarctic expedition who, cut off by bad weather, discovered the long-abandoned colony city of the Old Ones, a prehistoric race of aliens who found the Earth through some kind of gateway, colonised it, and died long ago (by way of various wars with their servitor-creatures called Shoggoths, and successor species, and the like).

The reason it's often categorized as horror is that, as Andrew Wilson (SF critic in "The Scotsman") pointed out somewhere or other (probably at the pub), "horror is a tone, not a genre" -- you can write an SF story that's horror, mainstream/horror, detective/horror, fantasy/horror, probably even a romance novel that's also a horror story. What you need to do is just layer the tone over the genre substructure to get horror out at the end of the process. ATMoM is a horror story because Lovecraft inverts the sense of wonder that was so beloved of his Cambellian contemporaries (in the 1930's) and replaces awe at the works of ancient races with horror of the depths of time and inevitability of species extinction.

Now, fast-forward to the present and we have to wonder why Lovecraft isn't horrifying any more: right? I mean, plush Cthulhu dolls are all very well, but they aren't exactly terrifying, are they?

My take on this is that we've become so used to Lovecraft's mythos trappings that we've de-mystified them: they're like familiar fright-house spooks on springs that leap out at you predictably every time you go in the haunted parlour. And the depths of time have been pushed back by our own exploration of the universe (it's hard to remember that until the second decade of the 20th century people thought that the sun glowed due to gravitational contraction, and the solar system consequently had to be several orders of magnitude younger than it actually is).

Anyway, I thought that the way to put the fear of Cthulhu back into the mythos was to link it to something genuinely terrifying to modern folks -- not nanotechnology and gray goop, which don't exist yet, but the imminent and very real fear of being nuked to cinders by a coke-sniffing moron in the White House or a paranoid psychotic in the Kremlin. Two whole generations grew up in terror of The Bomb; most of my friends, when asked, confess to having had occasional (or frequent) nightmares about nuclear war. It's like being buried alive to the contemporaries of Edgar Allen Poe, a very real terror that may not be shared by other generations.

The final trigger for "A Colder War" was a usenet thread on soc.history.what-if (and I'd like to salute everybody -- especially Douglas Muir -- who took part in it).

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, and the whole nine yards are now old news.

However, here's a UK take on the case. (Achtung: contains discussion of the SSSCA, campaign funding for US senators, international relations, attempts to ram bad laws down the throats of other countries by nobbling WIPO, and a big dose of indignation.)

Originally published in Computer Shopper in August 2001.

Warning: do not photocopy this article, visit the United States, and show the photocopy to a customs officer. If a criminal case working its way through the Californian court system results in a guilty verdict and sets a precedent, doing so will get you into seriously hot water, to the tune of a $50,000 fine and five years in a federal prison. No, there's nothing in this article which is illegal.

Posession of a photocopy of this article is not illegal in the UK -- yet. But a draconian new piece of legislation passed on the nod by US Congress in 1999 is threatening to overturn a centuries-old common law doctrine called "fair use", and in the process, turn us all into criminals. Worse: the large companies who lobbied for this law have nobbled the international trade organisations and are trying to export this law by international treaties: a draft directive based on it has already been rubber-stamped by the European Commission. And under new interpretations of US law, you aren't safe from extradition and prosecution even if you engaged in activities which are perfectly legal at home -- as Dmitri Sklyarov, a Russian programmer who has never knowingly broken a law in his life, is discovering the hard way.

This mess is new; it's emerging from the inevitable collision of the internet and copyright law. What's new is the pervasive lobbying of big companies (film, music, and software businesses in particular) who want to clamp down on reverse engineering of file formats, even when it's hitherto been perfectly legal. It has implications for everyone who uses a computer -- and some of them are unexpected.

Read on ...