What is this blog?

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The purpose of this blog is to allow me to record my journey, the formation of the No New Wars organisation (whatever form that may take), the Eleven Eleven Twenty-Eighteen campaign and the supporting resources and networks of people and organisations.

This idea crystallised for me in 2012 when I decided it was not enough to be angry about wars being started in my name (that is, by my government) that I could not prevent.  Instead I would do something.  Not march with a banner, or send a letter to my MP, or write to the embassy of the enemy state, but instead stop the war in the first place.

I realised that I could not stop foreign countries starting wars.  But I can do something to influence my own government.  I could start a movement that makes it clear to our politicians that we do not want war, and that we will make them pay if they start one.

In a democracy we have only one tool available: our vote.  If enough of us pledge to remove our vote from any politician promoting an unjust, illegal or unnecessary war and to instead give that vote to an opponent, then we can make the politicians and major political parties too frightened to want to start a war.

It does not even need many of us to sign up to this.  In many constituencies it would only take about half of the MP’s majority to take the pledge to make the MP realise their next election might be their last.  And if people who do not vote – which is most of us – sign this pledge saying we will turn up and make a protest vote, it will make the political parties sit up and think about the consequences of the actions of a few war mongers.

I haven’t done the sums in detail, but if this campaign had been in place by 2003 when the 2nd Gulf War started, and if just 1% of the electorate had signed this pledge, then 170,00 non-voters voting against Labour plus 1% of Labour voters voting for either of the other major parties, would have resulted in Labour losing the 2005 General Election.

Between 750,000 (Police figures) and 2,000,000 (organisers’ figures) people marched in London alone to protest against the 2nd Gulf War.  Just 400,000 registered voters making a pledge would have more effect.

We actually can stop wars from starting by targeting the real cause: politicians who want to start a war.  By telling them we as voters will end their political career and wreck their party’s future prospects of power at the same time.

Would you consider war prevention a big enough cause to change your vote, or to make you go out and vote?

Why Greenlanders won’t want to be USA citizens

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I was going to write a post as to why Greenlanders might not want to be forced to be US citizens, but it is as obvious as why you shouldn’t stab yourself in the face with a fork.  So I’ll restrict myself to some highlights.

The residents are mostly Inuit.  The USA does not have a good history for dealing with indigenous people; this is still the case with ICE picking up native Americans for deportation.  I think they can expect to be ‘resettled’ somewhere ‘for their own good’.

As a socially progressive nation, having US values imposed will come as an unpleasant shock.  Greenland has free healthcare, whereas in the US, 1.3 million people are rationing their insulin because of the cost and nearly 100,000 people a year in the USA because they cannot afford the insulin they need.

Greenland has a progressive education system.  While the US citizen (or their parents) pays between $10,000 and $60,000 per year, the Greenland citizen pays nothing for their education and gets a grant for accommodation expenses.

Greenland will either become a state, or, more likely because of its low population, be absorbed under some other structure.  Instead of having its own government and laws, these will be swept away as US federal laws take their place.  For example, as a part of Europe the death penalty is forbidden; under US law it is not.  Oh, and Scandinavian countries have the most reformed prison systems in the world, the USA amongst the worst.

There has been one mass shooting in Greenland; it was 36 years ago.  The USA has one every few hours.  School shootings are unheard of in Greenland.  Actually, they are very rare almost everywhere except the USA.

Greenland permits abortion and it is far from unusual.  The anti-abortionists in USA will likely put a stop to that.  The Washington Examiner gives that as a good reason for the USA to ‘acquire’ Greenland.

Should I continue?  This list is so easy to compile.

 

Greenland and the principle of ‘Self-Determination’

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Just over a hundred years ago, at the Paris Peace Talks that produced the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the Great War, American President Woodrow Wilson raised a very important principle regarding national boundaries: ‘self-determination‘.  It was something that had already been discussed for decades and he had raised in an address to Congress on 11th February 1918.

Wilson said:

“National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Self determination’ is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of actions which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.”

It essentially means the people in a territory should be entitled to determine how they are governed.  After the Second World War, this principle was strengthened by its inclusion in the charter of the United Nations and its recognition as an international legal right.

So, for example, if the people of Bermuda, Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands say they want to be British, then British they should be.  And if those of India, Canada and Australia (and some 60 or so other nations) say they want independence, then independence they should get.

So somebody saying in 2026 that they think they should be allowed to buy or simply take another country by force, despite the opinion of the people living there, they are at risk of committing an international crime against the human rights of those people.

Currently, about 85% of Greenlanders oppose being taken over by the USA.  They do not want to be governed by the USA.  So they should not be.

Meanwhile, only 8% of Americans support using military force to take Greenland.  So it is either an individual’s personal desire, government policy or commercial interests that are pushing for the colonisation of Greenland.  It is not even a democratic desire of the US citizens.

It is also becoming clear why Donald Trump is opposed to the United Nations and the International Court of Justice (the World Court) – they hinder his ambitions.  One can but hope President Wilson was right, and he ignores them “at his peril”.

Blogging and protecting URLs

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When I started this blog, I also registered NoNewWars.org, NoNewWars.info, NoNewWars.net and NoNewWars.org.uk.  I got talked into releasing the ones that I was not actively developing to save money and so I let them expire.

As at today, domain squatters (who took them over when they expired and have been trying to sell them since) are charging nearly £15,000 for these domains.  That is down to a certain Donald Trump and his vow of “No new wars” making the expression rather popular.  I wish I had kept those domains now.

But recent events have prompted me to register another one for myself: No New Wars with a Greenland TLD.

Boycotting supporters of war

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I had been wondering for some days why StatusCake has been saying some of the web sites I look after (as a volunteer) are down, when I know they are not.  I tried all sorts to work out what the problem was.  Their systems could not tell me:

A downtime reason saying "Don't know"I eventually realised what they have in common:

A list of servers in Tel AvivTheir location: Israel.

I was then able to work out what had happened.  Someone, somewhere, between my hosting companies and Tel Aviv, had decided to block internet traffic from Israel.

That prompted me to contact StatusCake:

Somewhere between my hosting companies and your servers, someone has decided to block traffic from Israel.

 

That got me wondering… why I am dealing with a company with servers in Israel given what is going on right now? I have stopped buying any Israeli products or services this past couple of years and will continue to do so as long as the current massacre continues. Sadly, that appears to include yourselves.

 

I am going to delete my account now.

 

Goodbye.

There’s plenty of other companies that provide uptime monitoring that don’t do business in or with countries at war with their own population.  I’ll stick with them.

The spammers finally work out how to use AI

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Now here’s an interesting twist on blog comment spam: the use of AI (at last). This spammer has analysed the overall content and concept of this blog to come up with the comment:

What innovative methods could be employed to teach the art of conflict resolution in schools, fostering a generation of peacemakers?

posted in English. It looks like a genuine and relevant comment.

But…

  1. they posted it in the blog about fake Chinese domain name sellers;
  2. it comes from an IP address of a Russian company who are utterly riddled with botnet-driven computers;
  3. they put a one line advert at the bottom in Russian and
  4. included the web site they were advertising three times, which is always a giveaway.

It is a Moscow-based internet hosting provider and the computers they own include over 3,300 IP addresses that are currently sending out spam or looking for additional computers to attack. It is reckoned to be one of the world’s worst offenders for sending out spam, illegal emails and email selling material those is best not seen. They also conduct denial of service attacks on media organisations that complain about them.

It appears the AI that composed the comment is smarter than the people using it.

Scarcity of food, overpopulation and CO₂ production

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The artificial fertiliser market is worth about $400 billion dollars. Those involved do not want to see that reduced!

Over 50% of that market is production of 200 million tonnes of nitrogenous fertiliser each year.  That fertilizer is required to feed our over-populated planet. Half the world’s population relies on artificial fertiliser.

8 billion people on the planet, half needing that fertiliser. That is about 50 kilos each or 1 kilogramme of fertiliser per person per week.

Each additional person increases the demand. When we have gone from 8 billion to 12 billion people, the fertiliser need will have doubled. The market will have doubled too. Ker-ching!

(Oh, heck. We’re at 8.1 billion people already. I thought we only just heard it was 8.0 billion.)

Production of nitrogenous fertiliser is energy intensive. It is responsible for 2.1% of greenhouse gas emissions. A 50% increase in the population will double those emissions.

To feed our over-sized population, we are using artificial nitrogenous fertiliser, which is a carbon-industry product.

For our population to keep growing we must increase our CO₂ production.

This is why some people keep saying “WE NEED MORE PEOPLE TO, umm, thinks, there must be something, oh yeah, LOOK AFTER YOU WHEN YOU ARE OLD!!!!”

The carbon industry would love there to be more people on the planet, because without the carbon-based fuels, they would starve to death. Ker-ching!

Eat up your petroleum (and coal and gas) products people! Om, nom, nom!

This is going to get very ugly within a couple of decades.  Seriously, we are so doomed unless we do something about climate change and our increasing overpopulation.

Statistics, Propaganda and Social Media

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The first casualty of war is the truth.

Not just the first, but throughout and after.

I saw yet another comment on social media about the death toll in Gaza at the hands of the IDF being unreliable.  I explained how they are checked and considered reliable.  The person replied saying

Despite the statistical anomalies.

How many people reading or posting on social media are good at research, media analysis and statistical analysis? I was trained in the latter a long time ago and qualified in social science research more recently. I like to think I have a fair idea how to check this stuff and the academic marks I got tended to agree.

So, let’s look for sources for statistical anomalies in the Gaza death tolls reporting. They are almost all Jewish media or Israeli media. So there is bias in the reporting if only those sources are doing so.

Checking those articles, they are referring either to one source, or to another media article also using that one source or other media sites using the Jewish or Israeli sites as their source. So this is not widespread conclusion of differing groups, but of one individual.

The source is Abraham Wyner who produced a paper which was published as “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers”. It is unusual for an academic title to be editorialised like that. It implies he was starting with a conclusion and looking for the evidence to support it, which is a red flag. So, who agrees with him?

The Gazan death figures, the underlying data on names and ID numbers and the method used to count them, have been analysed by media organisations, academic research departments, mathematicians and social scientists all of whom have been satisfied they are accurate.

He is one lone exception. Could he be right and everyone else wrong?

In his blog a Bit of DNA, mathematician Lior Pachter wrote ‘A note on “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers”’. In this he explains how Wyner carefully chose a specific 15 day sample, used graphs arranged as cumulative rather than an x-y plot to mislead, and took advantage of how the statistics come in batches from verification of ID numbers to provide the false answer he sought. If you go through the comments on that post by other specialists, you’ll get explanations of how Wyner was able to produce his misleading article.  It is more to do with how the data is passed from hospitals to be checked and then on for reporting and it being done in batches, and then utilising that fact to identify a cherry-picked sample to suggest all the data is wrong.

(During the Covid-19 pandemic it was noted how few people died at the weekend but lots on Mondays, suggesting the numbers were false.  That was because admin people like me, in the hospitals providing the statistics to National health England, don’t tend to work at weekends.  So the stats for Monday included Saturday and Sunday.  A similar thing happens with how the identification records of the Gazan victims are validated in batches.)

So, the one person challenging the figures has been debunked.

tl:dr: The source of the statistical anomaly suggestion has been debunked. That one poor source It is used, however, by biased sources as counter-propaganda to claim the death toll figures are false, when they are, actually, very reliable.  This poor journalism is then picked up and repeated across the Internet as if it were truth.  And so people propagate the view that killing in war is acceptable because they don’t have to think about the victims because the numbers might be dodgy.

It is amazing the harm can be caused by one bad academic + rubbish journalism + biased media + poorly educated people + social media.

The Study of International Relations

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This is a summary of my notes from 12th October 2018 in Major Approaches to the Study of International Relations at Lancaster University.

International Relations – IR – is the name of both the practice and the academic discipline.  It started after The Great War an an attempt to use reasoned debate to develop common interests.  The original IR scholars were liberal internationalists.

Sometimes it is about relations between actors, sometimes the processes.  It is transdisciplinary.  It is eclectic.

The theories help, but can always be criticised in their coverage or assumptions.  The theories let you see better, but also distort part of reality.  All the theories have merits, all have weaknesses.  One needs to be able to criticise them all.  It is a contested discipline. The theories are commensurable: they allow one to see the same world differently and explain different aspects.

Questions posed by IR:

  • Are humans egoist (devoted to their own interests and advancement) or perfectible (capable of being made perfect, improvable)?
  • Is the international system anarchical or an international society?

There are no political opinions in IR.

 

Goodbye tinyurl.com and goodbye to your spam

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One of the most useful resources for spammers is the link shortening tool at tinyurl.com .  Because they provide a free service, it is great for mass spamming of comments onto blogs like this.  It also has no way of reporting abuse and that is because there is nothing in their terms of use saying you can’t use it for spamming purposes.

They actually have posts on their blog saying how to avoid spam filters.

tinyurl.com has gone from being a handy idea to become a spamming tool.

I am so fed up with spam that uses tinyurl links that I am going to configure this site to automatically flag any comments referring to it as spam and block the poster.

In contrast, bitly provides the same link shortening service but they actually respond to complaints of spam.  I know, I report them and they react.

Bye bye, tinyurl spam.  Consider yourself spam-flagged, blocked and deleted.

Do cartoons cause bullying?

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Looks Good On Paper is a slightly spicy cartoon strip on GoComics.  This one is typical:

A cartoon dog blowing up a cartoon cat

It prompted some discussion about cartoon violence ‘back in the day’ and whether it really caused any harm.  And whether the newer sanitised cartoons have made things better.

“The new cartoons haven’t taught kids not to be bullies”

It’s not the cartoons. Superheroes use violence to do what they want, the TV cops use violence to deliver justice, many movies based on righteous anger-driven violence, the news is full of governments using violence to achieve their aims.

We now know the police going in to schools to show kids knives and other weapons does not deter them, it makes them frightened that everyone else is tooled up and results in them being more likely to carry knives.

We know gun sales go up after every mass-shooting is publicised and guns are glamourised in the media.

Despite almost all of us living peaceful lives from day to day – that is most people’s reality – the media is packed with images and stories about violence, often suggesting it is how people are getting what they want, need or deserve.

I don’t think Jerry making Tom trip on a rake or Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff have much influence on a young mind compared to that lot.