News sources
The Guardian
BBC
Aljazeera in English

Weblogs
Baghdad Burning
Baghdad Burning author Riverbend has recently re-settled in Syria because of the continuing violence.

Contact Psipook

Bush permitted 9/ll
We link here to an article by Michael Meacher, a British politician and former member of the Blair cabinet who has joined some of the dots regarding Bush's deed.

Flight 77
The Pentagon was not hit by an airliner on 11/9.
Click here to read more.

Splenetically yours
Spleen started out as a deposit for occasional essays about political things. It was a strong name for an old fart's reading room.

However, Spleen has since turned into a weblog for things in the big world that offend the Pookian sensibilities. Iraq, Bush's US, terrorism, Bush's US, globalisation, Bush's US, Liverpool FC, Bush's US, taxes on alcohol, Bush's US, and so on.

A medical study last year told us that people who write about their frustrations live longer. Writing is a way of relieving stress. In this case, the boffins are not wrong.

Casting an eye over Spleen tonight, I could be around for a bloody long time.

So come in and have a butcher's. Here's my elixir of youth: Spleen.

By the way, I would just like to say to Blair, Bush, Koizumi, Aznar and Bin Laden, Al Sadr and all your friends: fuck you all, you're ruining a beautiful planet.

Get Involved: Peace and Social Initiatives in the Kansai

mango smiles children's page
www.geocities.com/mango_smiles

mustard seeds intro.
www.geocities.com/cal_mustard

join adbuster's boycott of brand america: http://www.adbusters.org

Links to war protest sites
http://www.worldpeacenow.jp/
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/lpl/musubu/
http://homepage3.nifty.com/peacenow/
http://www.zenko-peace.com/
http://www.truthout.org
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/

Sadman Hussein
Old news. Bogeyman captured by Superpowerman

Arashi: environmental terrorists
While popsters around the world are lining up to urge us to environmental action with the Live Earth concerts, cuter-than-kittens J-Pop boy band Arashi are doing their best to destroy the world.

Arashi, of course, means 'storm' — which reminds us of the tornado that killed nine people in Japan in November 2006, and the like of which is going to be more common because of the effects of global warming encouraged by people like, er, Arashi.

To promote their new album, whatever the hell it's called, they have employed a large lorry emlazoned with billboard-sized ads to drive around central Osaka, thus dumping yet more carbon into the atmosphere for no good purpose.

At the close of business each day, you can see this lorry parked out the back of OCAT. It looks imported, probably American and is all gleaming chrome and classic retro bodywork.

Arashi are not listed among the acts appearing at either the Tokyo or Kyoto Live Earth shows.

On the subject of Live Earth, some sceptics have dared to suggest that popsters flying around the world (British acts appearing in the US, US acts appearing in Britain, a 50 per cent foreign bill in Tokyo, and so on) to perform with lots of power hungry sound systems and lights might be sending a confusing message. One cause of consternation is the inclusion of The Police on the US bill — Sting contributes tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere every time he opens his gob.

July 7, 2007

Homeland Insecurity
On the theme of airport security, and in the words of Nagaijin who forwarded the link to me, "Another one of those pathetic true American stories which threaten to make The Onion redundant" Read here.

June 15, 2007

Psipook thwarts British security
Toothpaste threat goes unnoticed
Yes, I was a bit pissed when I packed my bags for my flight from Heathrow to Japan and slipped my toothpaste and brush in my hand luggage. It'll be nice to freshen up during the flight, I thought, completely forgetting that Iraq had been invaded for possessing such weapons of mass destruction.

And being pissed, I also promptly forgot that I had packed these things.

At Heathrow the next morning, I passed through two security checks. In the first I took my laptop from my bag, put it in a tray and emptied my pockets into another tray. The other side of the scanner, the security lady stopped me from reclaiming my laptop. She kept it in its tray beside the scanner while she fussed over some other bits and bobs from other people.

Meanwhile, I had been permitted to sling my dangerous toothpaste-laden rucksack on my shoulder.

Eventually, the very serious securi-lady, who wore what appeared to be a permanent securi-scowl, brought my laptop over and brusquely demanded I remove it from its case, whereupon she brusquely waved an electronic stick at it and took it away again to be subjected to another hard stare.

Finally satisfied that despite its shiny white casing it contained no toothpaste, she returned it to me. I took my shoes off and stood in line for another security check that confirmed an absence of toothpaste in my footwear and I continued with my journey.

It was at Hong Kong security that a slightly surprised securi-operative pulled my toothpaste — a new, bulgingly full tube — from my rucksack. I think I said something terribly sharp and political like, 'Ah, that's where it got to,' just in time for the toothpaste to be confiscated.

No Guantanamo and no instant waterboarding I was happy to note and then I went on to have sausages and toast for breakfast while waiting for my connecting flight.

I note also, that a couple of days prior to this I was boarding a flight in the Canaries bound for Madrid when, despite being immaculately sober, I failed to remove my laptop from my bag before security.

Again, in another one of those encounters with officialdom that leaves you scratching your head, the Spanish staff had been paranoid enough to turn me back before the scanner to remove my belt, but then failed to notice an entire computer in my hand luggage.
But perhaps they would have spotted toothpaste.

June 9, 2007

PS I have just been reminded that for the last 15 years or so, I have been routinely carrying a knife through security and onto airplanes. The knife is admittedly small and insignificant, a mini Swiss Army blade attached to my key ring. It is nevertheless a banned object as far as airport security is concerned. Since 2001 I have probably made near on 20 international trips by plane and security has not once challenged me over it, even when troubling over my toothpaste at Hong Kong or my laptop and shoes at Heathrow. I wonder if they would notice if I carried my RPG with me.

The politics of noise
Entirely gratuitous post about Japan's noisy lawmakers and the aural horror of local elections. Read here.

May 1, 2007

That Labour victory: ten years on
On another note, it is ten years to the day that 18 years of Tory rule ended in the UK and Labour won their landslide victory. Get all neuralic here.

I raise a glass to the Conseratives' defeat but not necessarily to Blair's victory.

May 1, 2007

Seal cull on ice
Canadian sealers have been stranded by unusual pack ice conditions.

About 100 boats carrying fishermen conducting the cull of 270,000 seals off Newfoundland's coast have been trapped by ice.Some are running out of food and fuel and the bad conditions are set to continue.

The annual seal cull, the fishermen say, is necessary to preserve fish stocks ensuring a supply of McDonald's Filet-o-Fish and Kit-e-Kat (or was that KitKat?). The seal pelts are used to insulate frozen Norse totty and the oil from the seal blubber is used to, er ... power incubators in hospitals or something terribly crucial like that.

Well, the stranded sealers can always club each other to keep their spirits up.

April 19, 2007

Does Big Brother watch NHK?
Does Japan's state TV station suffer state censorship?

This is the question that has set Japan's blogosphere buzzing since the Ishikawa earthquake on March 25.

Nagaijin has alerted me to a video extract of a NHK news broadcast that has been posted on the net.

In the clip an anchorman is quizzing a journalist in the earthquake zone via an audio link. When the anchorman asks whether the two nuclear reactors in the area have suffered any damage the link abruptly goes dead. Seconds later the link is apparently re-established, but the voice from Ishikawa is clearly a different person, who first assures us that the link was not broken and then brusquely assures the audience and anchorman that there was absolutely no damage to the reactors whatsoever, not even a little bit.

Nagaijin has rendered that part of the conversation like this:

The anchorman calls for the reporter "moshimoshi? Naeyama san?" Then after a pause, an obviously different voice comes on: (my paraphrase) "Yes, this is Naeyama."
"I think we were cut off just then," says the anchor.
"No, there was no break," says the voice.
"You were talking about other damage."
"Oh no. Nothing at all." The end.

You can see the video here, and get a Japanese language transcript here.

There has apparently been no mention of this oddity in the mainstream media, nor have there been any reports of damage to the nuclear reactors which, again according to NHK, were not functioning at the time of the earthquake.

Japan's journalists are notoriously obedient and through the press clubs basically say what politicians want them to say. This is the first such odd incident during a broadcast that I have heard of.

Of course, the voice may have been that of an embarrassed technician trying to cover his mistake in letting the audio connection drop but this would also be unprecedented and in jobsworth Japan, pretty unlikely.

Do you have any interesting information on this story? Drop us an email here.

Many thanks to Nagaijin for telling me of the story.

April 1, 2007

Brazil is now
There was an interesting piece in the online Guardian recently which explained how in Britain victims of wrongful imprisonment are charged for B&B for the amount of time they spent in prison.

Some of these people convicted of crimes they did not commit can spend years or decades inside and if they are successful in getting their sentences overturned are required to pay some of the state's expenses for keeping them locked up ... though very often it was the state's mistakes (or malice) that put them there in the first place.

This is not an entirely new idea. In Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, felons and political prisoners are billed for their arrest and interrogation. There is a wonderful scene, shot from the hero Sam's perspective from the inside of a prisoner's hood in which going from one bureacratic office to another his invoices and payment options including state loans to be paid back with interest are explained to him.

Gilliam's film, which is the best film in the history of the universe (discuss) anticipated many other modern practices, such as the permanent war on terrorism.

I do believe Britain's current government have studied it carefully and are nicking ideas.

"Happiness — we're all in it together!"

March 22, 2007

A cure for cancer? Not if there's no profit in it.
A chemical called dichloroacetate (DCA) has proved effective in lab tests of killing most kinds of cancer dead. DCA is cheap, easy to produce and has no serious side effects.If lab tests are a real indication of the potential of this drug, it could save millions of lives and make cancer a lot less of a threat than it is now.

However, none of the pharmaceutical companies are moving toward developing the drug for production. Why not? There is no patent on it and therefore no significant profit to be made from it. No dosh, no cure for cancer.

The story was reported in New Scientist issue no. 2587 (Jan 20, '07) and apparently inspired a number of cancer sufferers to approach their doctors to ask for DCA, only to be told that it simply was not available.

The fact that DCA has no patent is utterly baffling as just about any corporation can patent anything these days. How many times have we read of people in Africa or India being deprived of some herbal cure extracted from roadside weeds that they have been using for centuries because a lawyer in the US has just patented it?

A typo in the New Scientist article renders 'pharmaceutical companies' as 'harmaceutical companies'. Or perhaps it wasn't a typo.

I wonder how the champions of unfettered capitalism who say that market forces will inevitably cure all ills will rationalise this situation?

The same companies insisted on flogging their anti-AIDS drugs to impoverished African nations at unaffordable prices oblivious to the millions who were dying of the disease.

You read more about DCA here and here in New Scientist.

February 13, 2007

Drug crisis hits UK
British politics was thrown into turmoil today when it emerged that absolutely no one in the country has never taken drugs.

The revelation rules out the entire population from leading a political party or becoming prime minister.

Constitutional experts are examing the possibility of installing a goldfish as prime minister as it seems to be the only creature in the country that has not smoked pot at one time another.

"The Js don't burn under water, dig?" said a Whitehall spokesperson. "Want a hit on this bong?"

February 11, 2007

GUS THE MYNAH BIRD
A military regime in democratic disguise
That lies in all impunity
That takes apart what it took people years to build
Public institutions that promised a decent life
Self determination should be fact,
Not essentially a right
There are the lobbies, insurance companies
Who want to change the whole country
Into a vast commercial counter for the pure consumer
The promise to give the generals a better place
Self determination should be fact in the face of corruption

Stereolab, from the album Sound Dust

December 23, 2006

Spamalot
I am now receiving an average of 400 bits of spam mail per day.

I log on, and I sit here for whole minutes as the little wheels on my Macmail software spin and my rubbish bin goes obese. Even though the spam filters are diverting most of it straight into the trash, about 10 percent deposits into my inbox.

This quantity of mail is relatively recent and a massive rise on the usual levels. Just a week ago I was getting 40 or 50 globs of spam a day. Seemingly overnight it jumped.

The spamsters have come up with a new technique to get us to open their little packages. Most of my recent rubbish has come in the form of legitimate-looking daemon delivery failure notice messages. I even opened one. This format is insidious as this kind of message is very difficult to ignore. What if it's a real notification? But, well, I don't send 400 messages a day to get 400 failure notices.

In the first half of this year, spam monitors were reporting that 60 percent of all email was spam. This summer that number jumped to 90 percent. The spammers are hijacking ordinary PCs running Windows — yours, your neighbour's, the machines at your office ... The spam they send out sometimes contains software that installs itself on the recipient's PC and works as a proxy relaying and generating more spam. The owner of the PC has no idea this is going on because it leaves no obvious trace and is only identifiable with additional security software. This malware does not affect Mac, Unix or Linux, just Windows. If you have a Windows machine and you leave it online for any period of time, if you have ever, even accidentally, opened a spam message or a message from the FBI or CIA or UN or signed an email petition in support of conserving the Amazon rain forest, you are probably an unwitting proxy or target for the spammers.

This technique of hijacking machines enables the spammers to send out 100 million messages per mail shot (I stress, PER SHOT) and makes them very difficult to track down. It also means that the quantity of spam on the world's networks is increasing exponentially.

Will the system stand the strain? Will governments or ISPs decide to counter spam by imposing charges on individual messages? Will they go for a two-tier web, one commercial, fast and spam free, the other open but clogged with junk? None of those options are appealing and all represent a massive step back from what the web is supposed to be.

Spammers, in short, are probably the same people that shit in the bushes at public camp sites.

And to the spammers I say, I do not have a problem maintaining an erection — quite the opposite in fact — so don't bother me with more Viagra ads. The women I have known have found in me plenty to complain about, but none has ever moaned about the proportions of my willy, so I will not be signing up for any enlargement services. I am amenable to the idea of investing money, but I guarantee that I will not be taking up any anonymous and unverifiable offers that drop into my inbox at the rate of twenty-odd an hour. I do not need to borrow money because I have a lovely wife who is good at telling me what to do with my salary. So you see, Mr. Spammerman, you can save a lot of effort by leaving me off your lists.

Having spoken my mind, I will expect to see no unwanted mail tomorrow morning when I log on.

The following links to BBC articles about spam and hacking make alarming but instructive reading.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6038236.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/askbruce/articles/email/spam_1.shtml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5407516.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5414502.stm

December 16, 2006

McDonald's: no cheese
Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Hard times indeed at the world's favourite burger emporium: McDonald's.

My wife today bringing the kids home from baseball practice stopped at the Heguri, Nara, McD's to get them some dins.

I know, I hear you cry, how can you countenance such a thing? I don't. So there.

She ordered cheeseburger for my son, but on getting home found that it was sans cheese. It was cheeseless. Not a blob of orange, reconstituted fermented curd in sight.

In terms of corporate irresponsibility, it probably isn't up there with Minatomata or Bhopal or the hanging of Ken Saro Wiwa, or the appropriation of Iraq's infrastructure by Halliburton, KRB, Bechtel and co., but there it was: a cheeseburger with no cheese.

What next? A Big Mac with no big?

Heguri being a 20-minute drive from here, and my wife being exhausted, there was no point in returning the non-cheeseburger. So, tonight, this almost cold and somewhat breezy night, a 14 year-old boy goes to bed with no cheese.

Wallace of Gromit must be tossing in his bed.

Can it be that the poor beleaguered staff had cheese driven from their minds by the whip cracks of their supervisors? Or has McDonald's simply run out of cheese?

Or is it merely that the end of the world is nigh?

December 9, 2006

Once more unto the commode of I-can't-be-bothered.
There have been no updates on Psipook of late, and are unlikely to be too many in the near future, due to the demands of writing.

Service will be resumed eventually, especially when the next folly of humanity sparks my righteous indignation and I am overcome with a need to fulminate incoherently.

See thee then.

December 8, 2006

Suffer yet more little children ...
The first casualties of war are the innocents

Flight 77
The Pentagon was not hit by an airliner on 11/9

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