06 May 2008

Ploughshares Aotearoa Deflate US Military in NZ

Not sure if it's cool to download photos and then publish them on my blog, even with a credit, but i'd people to see this picture and there doesn't seem to be any other way to embed it. The photographer is Derek Flynn and you can see his 5-photo series here at stuff.no.za.
Yesterday at the Waihopai Spy Base in Aotearoa/New Zealand, three men caused an estimated $1 million in damages by deflating "one of the two 30 metre radomes covering satellite interception dishes. The members then built a shrine and prayed for the victims of the war with no end - the so-called 'War on Terror' led by the U. S. Empire which also controls the New Zealand taxpayer funded Waihopai spy base." The consequences of their action, in the NZ legal system, can be followed at the Ploughshares Aotearoa website. At this time, they've been released on bail but can't associate with each other or get anywhere near a military base.

According to the national Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC), Waihopai is one of three Escelon bases run by the US in NZ under the "super-secret" UKUSA Agreement. If you live or travel in the Pacific, this is probably the place where your emails, faxes and text messages are intercepted, then analyzed to detect any terrorist polyps. The US can't put this equipment anywhere they can't also insure its security, which means that whether the people on Aotearoa like it or not, they live under the shadowed fist of the Pentagon, policing the world for no other reason than to protect its own infrastructure. This is vicious circle territory, significant if one lives in New Zealand but hardly a point of concern in the US during an election year. For more info on how Waihopai fits into the over-arching militarization of outer space, check out Global Network and the Federation of American Scientists' Space Policy Project.

05 May 2008

Not prone to read sensationalist news, i've pretty much avoided the whole Austrian cellar story after it first broke and the headlines were enough to indicate what had happened, which was definitely more than enough information for my brain. However, had to check out the BBC story today, Austrian cellar man 'mentally ill'. The notion that someone who repeatedly raped his imprisoned daughter is NOT mentally ill is hard to fathom. Do sane people do such things to their own children? Please don't say 'yes.'

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In the interests of redeeming myself (at least in my own eyes) for writing about this yesterday and thereby participating in the onslaught of short-term memory news hype, here's a somewhat interesting article in Spiked about the extent to which the whole of Austrian is being stereotyped as part latent Nazi, part head-in-the-sand ostrich. Do people/media do this in because they really believe there is something in the Austrian national subconscious that needs attention, or because they cannot come up with a better way to sell their papers?