There seems to be something truly ugly, something truly terrifying brewing in Washington. The beating of drums, the call to arms for bubba, has begun again. And the ramping up of the masses has started. And once again the usual suspects seem to leading the charge to war….Micheal Gordon the writer of said piece has a very dubious past, as you’ll see if you read on. And once again they are doing so with a litany of half quotes…unsubstantiated, and from those historically reliable anonymous sources in the Bush administration…and wild claims delivered as fact,

I’ll leave it to Glenn Greenwald to make the very obvious points here: that not only is there absolutely no presented evidence to back up the claims being made by these people (and if it’s there, show us please, and show us credible hard evidence), but how complicit mainstream outlets, such as the NYT, have yet to properly atone for the blood on their hands from the last rush to arms. Then follow the link to the Editor and Publisher piece on Michael Gordon’s earlier story from 2002, which contained the now infamous recruiting slogan:

“The first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”, and groan at the gruesome inevitably of it all.

Selling the reasoning for an attack on Iran to an American public (and to the Bush cabal that’s all it takes….the rest of us don’t matter) is not, lets be real, going to be a hard sell. A quick whiz through middle America’s online press indicates a fairly unquestioning repetition of the claims being made by Gates. On ludicrously thin evidence last time it was, to quote the now forgotten George Tenet, a slam drunk. Is it going to be any different this time?

I’d wager that a quick poll across middle America today would indicate that most now think that those Iranians (supported by Russia I bet) are behind all those attacks on the good ol’boys batting the haters of freedom in Iraq. Nothing to do, of course, with illegal invasions or a vague resentment over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their compatriots. An ABC / WaPo poll in late January indicated that 61% of Americans believed that their government was either not being confrontational enough with Iran, or its current push to demonise and force a confrontation was “just right”. I find that terrifying too.

Once the ALCMs start flying the stars and stripes will be unfurled across the nation….George and Dick are banking on it and they’re right. It’s their last stand. I can’t but feeling that the electorate in the USA, despite last November’s result, has learned nothing in the past four years. Lets face it, they only voted against the GOP because they were losing. It wasn’t a moral judgment on the war from middle America.

Niall Fergusson, in the notoriously conservative bastion of the establishment and voracious 2003 invasion plugger, The Daily Telegraph, says it all really….

For the strange thing about this Colossus is that the part of its anatomy that appears to be made of clay is not its feet, but its head.

Update: there seems to be plenty of speculation out there about the “evidence” supposedly presented by the anonymous US official, much of which calls into question the credibility of said evidence..For example there is this obvious, and glaring flaw in the photographic proof….and once again the mainstream media seem to have little problem with these holes. Can anyone say “niger uranium” or “mobile bio-labs”………

update 2: I liked this quote, from a comment on the Newshog site I linked above, I felt some urge to repost it:

What kills americans in Iraq are the political and strategic blunders of the US government.

As a kiddie, I grew up with the themes of road safety relentlessly drummed into me. We learned to repeat by rote, things like “look right, look left, look right again”. As I grew I was subject to countless public campaigns on television, billboards, and via every other conceivable media, to drive slowly; look left; always stop at signs; belt up; slow down; don’t drink and drive; keep my distance; and countless other themes designed to keep not only me, but everyone on the roads safe. These were driven home by marauding traffic police zealously, and it’s only right to say, fairly enforcing the rules. Of course the huge chink in this is, that in western terms, New Zealand’s drivers are appalling; and the roads are seemingly designed to ensure maximum traffic bloodshed.

Those last two factors used to make me very angry…that is until I came to Bali, and Indonesia as a whole. Before I go any further its only fair to point out that if Indonesians paid petrol and road tax at the same level as we do in New Zealand then the Jalans may well be in a better state than they are here on Bali.

But probably not….the tax on cars is very high and the annual registration fee is about three times that charged in New Zealand, where people earn perhaps twenty times as much on average. You can’t help but concluding that no matter how much was directed to road funding and maintenance, the traffic lights would not work on this island (and when they do they are behind a tree or pointed into the air); there would still be huge holes in the centre of roads for weeks (there has been a dislodged curb stone jutting right out into a lane in Sunset Road….a major thoroughfare…beside a Police booth, for over a year); and any new roads built would be uneven and disintegrating within weeks of opening.

Cynical, me?

So with that in mind I thought about the various road safety campaigns I’ve been privileged enough to witness being implemented here over the past eighteen months or so.

1. The first one I remembered seeing was the attempt, at quite a number of intersections to educate the driving public (the walking public, unless they are stupidly naïve would be wise to ignore this) in the proper reaction to a pedestrian crossing. Signs were clearly and strategically placed telling drivers to give way to the crossing public. Bear in mind that Bali has more pedestrian crossings than I have ever seen in my life anywhere. They are everywhere, including every two hundred metres or so on the new, take your life in your hands even driving on it, let alone crossing it, freeway thingy up the East Coast. To date, I have never seen a car or a motorbike stop, or even contemplate stopping on a Zebra crossing anywhere in Bali, including the one by the arrivals at the airport where unaware, jet lagged tourists are forced to jump quickly to avoid the Kiljangs bearing down on them at some speed.
2. Then there was the helmets on motorbikes thingy. This is currently being revisited. It is, I believe, now illegal to ride, or be a passenger on a Sepeda Motor without a helmet. Suffice to say, that on most roads here 90% of all riders and passengers remain bareheaded. And more often than not, child safety on a bike consists of a beanie and a pair of cheap sunglasses whilst junior stands between Mum & Dad as the bike roars down the bypass at quite some speed. What does bemuse me too, are the number of tourists who think that it’s either clever or attractive to go bare-chested, or wearing very, very little, on a bike in the traffic mayhem. Chances are that body will not so beautiful for long, as the casualty clinics will attest to.
3. A few weeks back came the campaign to get bike riders to stop and look at intersections before they speed without a glance into traffic…..ha….sure….I’m impressed by the absolute blind faith this shows…or something.
4. One of my favourites was the campaign, of recent, telling folks that motor bikes should be ridden in the inside lane only, leaving the outside lane for 1) cars, 2) monstrous belching buses full of the Jakarta Hari Raya massive, and 3) the obscenely overloaded and unstable giant trucks that scream through built up areas at 100kpm blasting their fog horns at all who get in their way.
5. But the best has to be the current push, via the media, to get all motor bikes to keep their lights on at all times, day or night. This of course, is not only standard practice, but indeed the law, in much of the world (as are road fitness checks on all vehicles), and to me makes quite some sense. Now, one needs to bear in mind that a large percentage of bikes on the road see fit to do quite the opposite, leaving their lights off, not only during the day but at night as they pull, without looking, with no helmets, and anak-anak standing, into the traffic. I’m not sure if the populace bought into this one. Despite substantial advertising, I’ve yet to see a bike lit in the daytime.
   

Of course, all of this is being attentively enforced and encouraged on a day to day basis. Yeah, sure…the only checks you see, and its actively and aggressively pursued, are the monotonously regular driver’s Licence checks. All of which are issued only on the basis of having paid a fee. Thus, of course, the ownership of which contributes absolutely nothing to road safety. But II bet there’s lunch money in those checks….

This all sounds a bit self righteous, from the keyboard of a snarky expat, so it’s only fair to mention the very odd case of McDonald’s (as in the purveyor of those slabs of gourmet warm coagulated fat between two bits of sugary cardboard, not the family down the road from us in Auckland) and their long term sponsorship in New Zealand of school road safety campaigns. For some twenty years, youth TV was full of images of our Ronald and a bunch of smiling policemen pushing seatbelts and the like to the kiddies. The assumption was that, in order to have such massive tag onto the campaign over so many years, they were paying a big chunk of the $8 million spent each year. Last year it turned out they’d been paying only $40k a year to the Police for the tie in, which included not only the TV campaign, which in the commercial world would’ve cost hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions each year, but massive in-school branding which tied McDs to the concept of safety and the Police.

Corruption in Indonesia? We are all quick to condemn but I bet there were a few complimentary rounds of Big Macs supporting this little deal over the years.

Ten songs for today, old, new, and not quite so new…this is the way it flowed on the iPod at the gym today…hard to fault really and nothing to do with me….blame providence or something like that…

1. Claude Vonstroke – Who’s Afraid of Detroit (Paul Woolford mix)…I have to admit I’ve had this for a month or three but not really listened to it as it really got lost in a rush of new things around that time….which is surprising because the original is such a big record for me. Dirty, punky, wobbly, layered techno that drags you around for over twelve minutes taking you on quite a journey, especially when the treadmill is seemingly dragging you forward ever faster…which goes absolutely perfectly with…
2. Siouxsie & The Banshees – The Staircase (mystery) (Polydor 1979)….an almost prototypical techno record in my ever so humble opinion…the way the almost unreal electric guitar slithers violently from speaker to speaker, with the double handclaps accentuating the collision is pure rave. It just needed a siren….
3. The Ronettes – Paradise (recorded 1965, released 1975)…one of a bunch of lost Spector / Ronettes tunes that have turned up over the decades on various collections, this was originally an unreleased acetate, and fits squarely into the River Deep era PS sound (it was recorded shortly before that epic). Ronnie’s plaintiff, entrancing I’ll wait for a day when he takes me to Paradise is unfortunately ironic considering the pain she was experiencing in her marriage to Spector, but nevertheless absolutely devastating (isn’t she always). What is less ironic is the later repeated phrase I’ll Die for Him…by all accounts she was lucky not to do so; luckier it seems than that poor girl forty odd years later. A genius Spector might well be, and I absolutely crave his productions, but if it wasn’t for the liberal in me, I’d say fry the bastard….
4. Metro Area – Soft Hoop (Environ 2002)…a record that evokes, more than anything else, the ghost of the late, very, very great Nu Groove label…a simple groove; a very tight but tough snare; a subtle blue, understated percussive lead; a live bass player and the vague aura of NYC circa 1990…
5. Iggy & The Stooges – Gimme Danger (CBS 1973)…and that is nothing like this…I think Raw Power is Iggy’s least dangerous sounding record, at least until the bad Arista, and A&M ones a few years later. The snarls are all cartoonish, the threat so obviously contrived…but, hell I love it, and my signed copy is a treasure. The cowbells that open it are funky as phuck and I love the way it explodes half a minute later, although, unlike, say anything on Funhouse, it’s a perfectly controlled explosion. This was Mainman after all…
6. The Jam – Ghosts (Polydor 1980)….perhaps the prettiest song ever recorded by Weller with The Jam, and from the wonderful, and underrated The Gift, when it was screamingly obvious that Weller had outgrown the band. Sadly, to my mind, despite an extended series of killer Style Council singles, and a few tracks as a solo act, he never fulfilled the promise he showed on those last four Jam albums, and on tracks like this.
7. Eddie Kendricks – Body Talk (Motown 1975)…not the Imagination song of the same name, although I love that, but the even better track from the ex-Temptation’s album The Hit Man. I used to have this song going around in my head, not knowing who it was, until my friend, Murray Cammick put me right. Absolutely perfect in both arrangement and performance…..I weaken at the part where Eddie’s voice rises to a falsetto on the third chorus, and falls into a loose scat…vocal genius…and then…
8. Bobby Womack – An American Dream (Beverley Glen 1984)….the first song to sample MLK’s Dream speech..slow, sultry and utterly gorgeous, with that towering Womack voice expressing what is both a disarming love song, and a work of pure optimism that never comes close to cloying patriotism. The Poets, both Volume I & II were, and still are, huge records for me.
   
9. Roxy Music -Three and Nine (Island 1974)…what perplexes me about Roxy Music is how quickly and badly it all went wrong. The first four albums (this comes from the 4^th) have varying degrees of brilliance about them. The crucial input they had in what was to dominate the rock’n’roll planet for the next two decades is indisputable. From album six (the fifth had its moments, albeit few) it all turned increasingly to MOR mush. Three and Nine, on the other hand, is disarmingly charming without the slightness of their latter catalogue…it still carries the hint of decadence that their best records still evoke…..damn that sounds pretentious, but I don’t know another way to put it…
10. Magik Johnson – Scanning For Viruses (Claude Vonstroke mix) (Made to Play 2006)…and so we go full circle….I really like the low down grunty bits on this..pure, simple but effective dancefloor, but works well on a treadmill, as I discovered (now that sounds sad). Oh, and I really like Dick Johnson’s radio show on George FM, on the rare occasions I get to hear it…