Monthly Archive for March, 2005

FBI targets flag.blackened.net

Published
by
Christiaan
on 30 March, 2005
in Imperialism
. 0 Comments

Pomegranate, an admin at flag.blackened.net, has been ordered by the FBI to submit IP info on two separate incidents having to do with subdomains hosted on flag.blackened.net, both in regard to claimed or threatened responsibility for acts of propaganda by the deed. Essentially they’re ordering him to dob in someone who has been mouthing off. Of course that someone could be anyone, including a spook.

Pomegranate saw his choices and took them as follows:

1. Do not comply with the wishes of the FBI. This will most likely lead to the seizure of flag and a compromise of all the sites and information online. It will probably also lead to me being imprisoned, I would guess. I personally do not fear this, but I am the sole support for my wife and infant daughter. There can be no doubt we would probably lose our home as a result.

2. Comply with the wishes of the FBI, provide the IP addresses, and count on the fact that I will catch a lot of heat and hatred from my comrades in the anarchist movement worldwide.

Though it pains me to comply with the State in any manner, I have to choose option #2. The people who have foolishly compromised us all will shoulder the burden for their selfish actions. Frankly folks, they know better - we all know better.

I have to admit to being disappointed. Maybe what’s even worse is the number of those clammering over themselves to comfort Pomegranate in his decision. Comfort, as it ever is for those of us in the West, appears to be the objective. What use is all this talking about a better world if we are not prepared to stand up for it with our lives? That we get to continue to bare perpetual “moral witness” to the world around us?

In any case, putting such criticism aside, and bearing in mind the stupidity (or spooks) that Pomegranate is now having to deal with, it seems to me the biggest lesson to come out of this mess is that IP logs shouldn’t have been kept in the first place.

Update: Pomegranate writes:

none of the information provided is from an http log. when you post to phpbb, mediawiki, geeklog etc. etc., your ip is recorded with your post. it’s not a log, it’s built into the software. admins can see it.

if you post here anonymously, i can still see the IP you used every time i read the message. it’s permanent and it’s not something i can change without changing to different software.

Up shit creek with no paddle

Published
by
Christiaan
on 29 March, 2005
in Environment
. 1 Comment

You’ve probably heard more and more lately about global climate disruption (or “global warming“)—and probably a little too late—but there’s one thing politicians really really don’t want to talk about (apart from the Greens that is) and that’s our pending little energy problem.

This piece in the Rolling Stone, adapted from The Long Emergency, a soon to be published book by James Howard Kunstler about “Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century”, has this to say:

“The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don’t have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.”

and goes onto to say

“The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.”

To understand the enormity of this issue you only need to have a little understanding of the way we currently use fossil fuels (i.e. for everything) and that replacing this source of energy any time soon is most likely impossible, meaning that we are likely approaching a, uh, slight adjustment phase in our lives. Check out the rest of the piece which you can also read here.

Baghdad or Bust

Published
by
Christiaan
on 28 March, 2005
in Human shield action to Iraq and Iraq
. 1 Comment

I watched Baghdad or Bust the other night, a BBC 4 documentary on the human shield action to Iraq, put together with a heap of footage provided by the numerous film crews we had with us. I thought it was a pretty good effort overall. It really nailed home for me what we might of achieved had we not had a certain group of people on board. There’re a bunch of re-runs for those of you in the UK if you missed it, the next one is on Friday at 12:10am.

One major point they missed with regard to the road trip was that Joe Letts, the owner of the red buses, didn’t “volunteer” his buses (as he asserts at the start of the documentary) but charged us thousands of pounds for them.