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I still believe it’s a good thing that the people of Iraq have been liberated from a brutal dictatorship. But I also believe it should have been possible to do this without losing the entire contents of the National Museum of Iraq.

It’s been compared with the loss of the Library of Alexandria

While I don’t know all the facts, there’s some evidence that Donald Rumsfeld is personally responsible for this; it was his idea to have only just enough troops to defeat the small proportion of the Iraqi military that might fight back, and not nearly enough to maintain order once Saddam’s regime collapsed.

Rumsfeld blames the messenger, and idiotically accuses TV of showing the same woman taking the same vase over and over. Truth is, like a depressing proportion of militarists throughout history, he’s a total bloody philistine; he couldn’t care less about the irreplaceble archeological treasures lost. Nothing, but nothing matters more than short term military gains.

“Who cares about a few rocks?”, said one right-wing ‘usual suspect’ on Pyramid Online, typifying the neo-conservative attitude. I suspect a few on the right-wing lunatic fringe even dislike museums on principle, seeing them as statist, socialist institutions, and believe the place for irreplacable archeological artefacts is the hands of wealthy individual collectors.

I wonder how these fools would feel if a mob destroyed the last surviving copies of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”?

Scott is also very angry about this.

From BBC News:

British Airways and Air France made simultaneous announcements that they would be permanently grounding the famous supersonic airliners this year.

Passenger numbers have never recovered since the crash near Paris in 2000 and the aircraft no longer makes a profit.

In a statement, BA said Concorde would cease flying in the autumn because of “commercial reasons, with passenger revenue falling steadily against a backdrop of rising maintenance costs for the aircraft”.

Living and working under the Heathrow flightpath from many years meant Concorde was an everyday sight for me. I remember the first commercial flight, when I was still at school, and the teachers marched us all out into the school playing field to watch it pass over. The first flights were not to New York, but to Bahrain; At the time the American authorities refused to allow Concorde to fly to America on envionmental grounds (Or was it that it wasn’t built in America?)

While small size of the fleet meant the planes never recovered the massive development costs, they were still a great source of national pride. It will be sad to see them go.

I expect most if not all the Concordes to be be preserved in aircraft museums in Britain and France, and I hope at least one in kept in working order.

Ruling Backs Anti-Spam Activist (TechNews.com)

This spammer will continue to get his just desserts. Spammer George A. Moore Jr. went to court to force Francis Uy, a tech specialist at Johns Hopkins University to take down his site exposing the spammer’s activities.

He lost.

Uy’s site encourages people to sue spammers under Maryland’s anti-spam law, and it includes Moore’s address and telephone number, which Moore claimed led to harassment by anti-spam vigilantes. Threatening phone calls were left on his answering machine, and he received dozens of products in the mail that he never ordered, including about 200 unwanted magazines and catalogues, he charged.

Can you say “Poetic Justice”?

Moore, who denies he is a spammer because he contracts with third parties to market his products…

Oh yes, I’ve heard that one. Anything that is not spam does not need to say “This is not spam” on it. Spammers lie.

(link from Boing Boing)

Scott‘s friend Bill has the solution. It’s not very politically correct, though!

I blame Scott for this.

From Fanatical Apathy, the Movie in Bush’s Head. Excerpt:

ANNAN: I’m taking you off the case.

BUSH (leaping up): You can’t do that!

ANNAN: Yes, I can. Sort of. Officially, at least. Dammit, Bush, you can’t just storm in and kill an important man like Hussein. There are laws. We need proof.

BUSH: You need proof, Chief. I just need my investigatative partners.

ANNAN: Partners? Your partners have already requested reassignment.

BUSH (with a flourish): I’m talking about the only partners I ever needed – Smith and Crisco.

ANNAN: “Crisco?”

BUSH: Uh, “Wesson.” Smith and Wesson.

ANNAN: Don’t make me ask for your badge, Bush.

Go read the whole thing. (Link from Making Light)

Looks like war is inevitable now. All we can do is pray that it’s swift and relatively bloodless; and the aftermath isn’t as messy as many people fear it might be.

Scott is not impressed with Bush’s speech at all. Meanwhile The sometimes creepy Libertarians at Samizdata.net are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of the collapse of the United Nations and the European Union, and take great pleasure at the great defeat the believe they’ve inflicted the ‘Transnational Progressives’. Yes, for these people, the real enemy is not the terrorists that are trying to kill us, nor the tyrant the murders his own people. It’s the internationalist liberals. Where are the Black Helicopters when we need them?

Meanwhile, the tone of a lot of redneck conservatives trolling around in the comments sections on Blogcritics makes me think that some parts of the American right have descended into clinical paranoia. I wonder if the way they shout down anyone that questions the war is because of their own subconscious doubts about the justification for the war.

My fear isn’t so much the war itself; the overwhelming firepower arrayed against Saddam Hussein means the eventual outcome is in no doubt. I’m more worried about what happens next; far from reducing the threat of terrorism, there’s a danger that the attack on Iraq could be a recruiting sergeant for Al-Queda. If we manage to cause significant civilian casualties, we’ll pay for that in civilian casualties of our own through terrorist attacks. I’m also worried some of the crazier people in the Bush administration hold the same views as warblogger Steven Den Beste. This article of his is truly scary, and suggests the war on Iraq is the first part of a total ‘Clash of Civilisations’ between the west and a large part of the Islamic world. Please God don’t let this be Bush’s real stategery!

A large segment of the Blogosphere, including Ginger, are alarmed at the idea that Al Queda suspects might be tortured to reveal information, and that some warbloggers are actually in favour of the idea.

I’m concerned that the are almost certainly people in the Bush administration that condoned the torture carried out in countries like Argentina and Chile in the 1970s and 80s, and have no moral qualms about using such methods themselves.

I wonder how some pro-torture neo-conservatives would feel if it was their loved ones having electrodes attached to their genitals in order to reveal the whereabouts of fugitives from Hilary Clinton’s revolutionary regime that took power with the popular uprising following Jeb Bush’s “victory” in the blatantly rigged 2008 elections.

OK, so the above is an apocalyptic fantasy scenario I don’t expect anyone to sake seriously, but once you start believing “The End Justifies the Means”, you’re on a slippery slope. If we (and I say ‘we’ despite the fact I’m British, since Blair has coupled his wagon to Bush’s locomotive) allow ourselves to sink morally to the terrorists’ level would mean the terrorists will have won in at least one respect.

There’s also the fact that if ‘we’ use torture, it’s a green light to every two bit dictator (Mugabe, anyone?) to do the same. And we’ll have lost the moral right to condemn him.

We are supposed to be the Good Guys. Once we lose the moral high ground, we might even be on the way to losing the War against Terror, in part, because we’ll longer deserve to win.

Tom Coates of plasticbag.org ponders the parallels between the fundamentalism of Osama Bin Laden, and the closed proprietry standards of AOL and Microsoft. An interesting analogy,

Scott linked to this Yahoo News about someone being arrested in an American shopping mall for wearing a T shirt with the words “give peace a chance”.

The fact that the mall owner is within his legal rights doesn’t mean that he’s not acting like a jerk.

It’s cases like this that make me realise how much the ‘utopian’ society advocated by the more extreme libertarians would suck for everyone other than the very rich. When everything outside your own front door is owned by someone else, probably some faceless and unaccountable corporation, you’ll be forced to obey someone else’s stupid and arbitary rules the moment you step outside your front door. America’s sacred 1st Amendment? Forget it!