Twitter Under Attack

A DoS (denial-of-service) attack more precisely:

Twitter’s site crashed on Thursday at about 3pm BST due to a “denial of service” attack – thousands of remote-controlled virus-infected PCs trying to contact the site.

Though the site came back up after an hour, the company said it was “continuing to defend against and recover from this attack”.

Facebook isn’t operating correctly either. Conspiracy theories time? Stupid kids? North Korea? Putin not liking being mocked by tweet?

Either way as I write (1735 BST) the site isn’t back up, even though Twitter says otherwise…How will we twitterati cope?

Alistair Meditation Mindblog – 2e

A definite case of preference today. Very difficult indeed to rest in the breath – sounds I didn’t like were bringing up strong feelings, generating a thought factory, and I noticed a very strong impulse to give in to the thoughts and feelings. But I did keep returning to the breath and was aware of how peaceful it felt, whilst not trusting it somehow.

It’s not surprising I suppose – it’s how I’ve coped with things I don’t like (or otherwise respond to strongly) my whole life. This period of meditation feels more real than others – I’m actually looking right at what I’m really like, trusting far more than before and idealising less. I allowed these thoughts and feelings not to be changed – this morning at least I wasn’t as hateful of myself as I know I can be!

Alistair Meditation Mindblog – 1e

I put all my weight onto my right foot, I overuse my calves to stand up, and I have a constant urge to rush or not do my morning meditation. I know this by continuing the practice of looking at the four fields of mindfulness whilst standing. I can now see thoughts too which take this very seriously indeed, and when I’m aware of them I find myself nearly laughing compassionately at myself – taking myself seriously is so ‘me’ and that’s fine. I didn’t meditate the last two days, once I regret – the other not (sex is pretty important in a relationship and the time was right), and I didn’t write up 1b, but the themes I’ve seen have been similar. The thoughts for example aren’t the same, but there are semi-invisible, subtle thoughts which are. They put huge pressure on my chest still, tied as they are to this self image I have still that this isn’t serious enough a thing to do. If I just think about my morning hard enough, if I just achieve, achieve, achieve, and do all the things listed in my head then I’ll be happy.

I also notice how much I control my breathing and how difficult it is to let my breath take care of itself. My breath responds to my emotions which are tied to my thoughts. Not thoughts of Michael Jackson’s death for example, those are the things which just pop into your head and go away – my breath responds to causal thoughts – thinking. It’s quite humbling watching the organism which is me from a distance, as an observer. There’s so much going on, so many conditions to accepting myself throughout my ‘big’mind, yet it’s clearly so simple when I see me for what I am.

I hadn’t noticed how thorough that self image was before Tuesday’s meditation.

He Can’t Hold On

At least I don’t think he can. Last night’s resignation by James Purnell seems to be the final nail in the coffin for Gordon Brown’s premiership. It appears to be a Blairite coup, which begs the question – if they try to move New Labour ever rightward and the failing of Brown’s time as PM has been not to move leftward enough, would doing so now decapitate them? Martin Kettle asks:

Dire though the current hysterical atmosphere is for Labour – and the local and European election results will surely make things worse – there must now be a leadership election. Experts say it can take place quickly. The new leader can be in place by the start of July, even under the cumbersome procedures which Labour has inflicted on itself. Everything points to Alan Johnson being the man of the hour, but there can still be a real debate of the sort that the massively shortsighted coronation of Brown two years ago precluded. My god, they were wrong to give Brown the leadership.

So Brown will be gone in hours, maybe days. He’s right to say that regardless of however much the rules of succession get truncated they must debate the future of the party and the future of the government, and do so publicly. Last time such issues were never discussed at the leadership level, only during the deputy’s race. And remember Harriet Harman, who talked the talk of an independent mind, but who as deputy has never truly changed New Labour for the better. Labour must realise that the reason why this is happening is only partly because of the expenses scandal, for which it is being blamed. Polly Toynbee notes:

The left of centre Compass group agonises over the dilemma: they think Brown a disaster, but a privatising, modernising, rightwing alternative could be worse still. Disappointed that he failed to turn the party progressive, this time they will demand an open debate if a new leader is to emerge. But these bleak calculations of least-worst options are devoid of the support a leader needs, too thin fuel to keep Gordon Brown flying long.

Is neoliberalism working? No, Brown’s been busy trying to patch it back together. Has a limp, half-engagement with the EU been any help there? No. Was Jacqui Smith’s strategy in the Home Office anything other than a disaster? No. Should the party apologise for going to war in Iraq? Hell yes. If Alan Johnson is now to become Prime Minister he needs to realise that the argument has transcended Blair/Brown, left/right divides. The party has become a warmongering, corporate bully, owned entirely by transnational capital, which uses its army and police militia to do its bidding. This is not what New Labour was elected to do. Eradicating child poverty, closing the gap between rich and poor – not endless talk of marketising areas of public life where markets don’t belong and trying everything in its power to stifle the freedom the public should have over the information of government. ID cards must be sacrificed, trident, city academies, superdatabases, RIPA, SOCPA, you name it. Of course if Brown announced all this or Johnson (surely the party can’t be mad enough to appoint Purnell or Miliband, ahead of the now inevitable November General Election) they’d then just become the Greens. And that’s part of the tragedy playing itself out.

Govt Refuses to Abandon Precriminalisation

In December the government was told by the European Court of Human Rights that retaining innocent people’s DNA records on the national DNA database was illegal.  Today Jacqui Smith decided she didn’t care:

The genetic profiles of hundreds of ­thousands of innocent people are to be kept on the national DNA database for up to 12 years in a decision critics claim is designed to sidestep a European human rights ruling that the “blanket” retention of suspects’ data is unlawful.

The proposed new rules for the national DNA database to be put forward tomorrow by the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, include plans to keep the DNA profiles of innocent people who are arrested but not convicted of minor offences for six years.

The proposal would also apply to children from age 10 who are arrested but never successfully prosecuted.

Splendid. So rather than comply with the court, she’s decided to defy the law, conventional wisdom and statistics. She says:

“It is crucial that we do everything we can to protect the public by preventing crime and bringing offenders to justice. The DNA database plays a vital role in helping us do that and will help ensure that a great many criminals are behind bars where they belong,” said Smith.

Yes it does Jacqui, but it’s also been proven that keeping everyone on the database has done nothing more to prevent crime or bring offenders to justice. Does she not understand the distinction, is she just stupid, or doesn’t she care? DNA profiling pioneer Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys says:

“I do not see this as balanced and proportionate. It still places England, Wales and Northern Ireland as the only jurisdictions in the world, to my knowledge, to retain such large amounts of innocent DNA information.”

Jeffreys dismissed a Home Office prediction that 4,500 fewer crimes will be detected if the proposals go ahead.

“There is an unspoken assumption in here that these thousands of crimes that will not be detected by not having the DNA will remain undetected and that simply isn’t the case. A significant number of these will be detectable through conventional police work, including the obtaining of fresh police DNA samples.”

He demanded that the government release further details of its concerns about poorer detection rates.

“We have been told some very cursory figures. One would like to know a great deal more. Are these serious crimes? Are they a relatively small number of individuals, for example serial burglars? We don’t have that information at all. And we need that information to be able to balance the improved ability to detect these crimes against the right to a private life.”

He makes entirely the right case. Not only is it entirely right that many of these thousands of crimes would indeed be detectable by conventional police work, but it’s entirely unclear where the Home Office feels its current advantage lies in keeping innocent people on the database. From the looks of it it’s represents a continuation of the government’s now near total adherence to precriminalisation in their obsession with ‘protection’. Mark Thomas points out:

Smith’s new regime leaves the innocent who have been cleared of charges of minor, non-violent crime on the database for six years, which erodes the principle of innocent until proven guilty and in classic New Labour fashion creates a third way, neither innocent or guilty but innocentish.

Then there is the very simple issue of privacy, something consecutive Labour home secretaries simply don’t understand. Why should the police have DNA information that could relate to a person’ s paternity or genetic prevalence to certain illness when the individuals concerned may well not hold that information themselves?

Most galling of all, though, is that Smith’s proposal still clings to the notion of creating a compulsory national DNA database by stealth. Instead of openly arguing and campaigning for this, Smith seeks to build one incrementally, slyly and on the quiet.

May this disgusting woman be taken to court again and lose again.

Richard Littlejohn: Gay Men Steal Children

Hard on the heels of his Daily HateMail columnist colleagues Amanda Platell and Melanie Phillips, now Richard Littlejohn wades in with his take on the gay adoption case in Edinburgh:

As for anonymity, does anyone really think that two gay men, living together in an Edinburgh suburb, who suddenly start playing Happy Families with a five-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl, are going to go unnoticed?

Coincidentally, this story emerged in the week in which details were revealed of the millions spent in the search for little Maddie McCann, who was abducted almost two years ago and is still missing.

On the face of it, the cases have nothing in common.

But stolen children are at the heart of both.

Does it matter whether your child or grandchild has been taken by a complete stranger or by social workers?

What’s worse: not knowing, or knowing — and being utterly unable to do anything to get them back, after being told that if you try, you will never, ever see them again?

In each case, the key question is the same: what kind of monsters could do something like this?

Is Littlejohn really suggesting that the placing by social services of the vulnerable children of a heroin addict with gay adoptive parents is the same as a child criminally stolen from her parents by a child trafficker/paedophile? I’d ask the question: what kind of monster would say something like that? Disgusting.

Bye Bye Sarah Palin

All the relevant statistical data is saying Barack Obama won the debate, whatever else the ‘experts’ and blogosphere say.

TPM has the internals of the CNN poll of debate-watchers, which had Obama winning overall by a margin of 51-38. The poll suggests that Obama is opening up a gap on connectedness, while closing a gap on readiness.

Specifically, by a 62-32 margin, voters thought that Obama was “more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you”. This is a gap that has no doubt grown because of the financial crisis of recent days. But it also grew because Obama was actually speaking to middle class voters. Per the transcript, McCain never once mentioned the phrase “middle class” (Obama did so three times). And Obama’s eye contact was directly with the camera, i.e. the voters at home. McCain seemed to be speaking literally to the people in the room in Mississippi, but figuratively to the punditry. It is no surprise that a small majority of pundits seemed to have thought that McCain won, even when the polls indicated otherwise; the pundits were his target audience.

Even a Fox News focus group of undecided voters plumped for Obama, citing the exact same reasons:

This suggests McCain’s in deep trouble. His decision to ‘suspend’ his campaign was a disaster, the growing financial crisis isn’t playing to his advantage in any way, his temper is flaring and Sarah Palin’s interviews with Katie Couric have been lambasted by friend and foe alike as worse than risible. Even conservative commentator Kathleen Parker said:

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

So the question has been that if McCain dumped the only selling point his campaign has ever had (or somehow pulled her back from the front line), how on earth could he win? What new stunt could his train wreck of a campaign try in order to regain media prominence? Today the hints began:

In an election campaign notable for its surprises, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice- presidential candidate, may be about to spring a new one — the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter to her ice-hockey-playing fiancé before the November 4 election.

Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”

It’s about the last possible, underhanded, pointless charade of a stunt they can pull to try to take the country’s attention off the disaster that is the McCain/Palin ticket. Given that all their recent stunts have backfired, it makes you wonder how successful it really would be though. One of these videos is real, the other one is a fake. Can you tell which is which, and then tell me either way whether you think Sarah Palin is a remotely acceptable candidate for Vice President or potential President?

Vodpod videos no longer available.

My feeling is that short of a national or world disaster between now and November 4th, Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States.

Matthew Mitcham: Gay Gold!

The BBC and British media had the diving at these Olympics all wrong. The man to watch was the eventual gold medal winner, 20 year old Aussie Matthew Mitcham.

For the two or so of you who don’t know, Matthew came out a few months before the summer games in Beijing, and let me just show you a quick (and shallow) reason why that’s a good thing before I continue:

It made him the only out, gay male competitor at the Beijing Olympics. Except he’s not just a good Olympian, he’s a great Olympian. In fact going into his last dive in the 10m platform final, he was running second, but pulled out an astonishing, near perfect dive to eke out a dramatic gold medal win.

“It’s absolutely surreal. I never thought that this would be possible,” Mitcham said.

“I wasn’t even sure of my medal chances at all. After I did my last dive and I saw I was in first, I thought, “That’s it, it’s a silver medal, I am so happy with this’ and then I won. I can’t believe it, I’m so happy.

“I had some very wise words and some very good advice before coming into the 10m competition, to just enjoy it, have fun and that’s what I thought right from the very first dive in the prelims to the very last dive in the final.

“I was definitely stressing it to myself, just enjoy the moment, there is nothing you can do to change what’s about to happen, so just enjoy it and it worked.”

The result was a major turn-around for Mitcham from his performance in the 3m springboard, in which he failed to make the final after struggling to keep his nerves under control.

It’s all the more amazing since:

The gold medal hopeful’s journey has not been easy. Those close to him have seen Mitcham, 20, battle depression, retire in his teenage years after physical and emotional burn-out, then nine months later resume his sport and build himself into the champion he is today.

Without question in my eyes he’s an example to younger gay men everywhere and deserves not just to be an idol to some but a hero to many. Here’s his post-event interview with the media, flanked by his mother and his boyfriend Lachlan. Cute doesn’t quite cover it.

Bob Ballard says:

The fact that he unburdened himself and was proud to represent his country as a gay Olympian, should make it easier for those who want to follow that path.

Matthew Mitcham you are a true ground-breaker.

Milibandmania?

Give me a break.

Suddenly everything changed. The burst of optimism was so startling it dazzled those too long trapped deep in a dungeon. In that one moment it was all over for the old leader who had plunged them into these depths. Suddenly here was the chance of escape everyone was waiting for.

David Miliband will rescue New Labour? I really don’t think so. End the adventure in Iraq? Brown’s already talking about it (for a second populist time I suppose), riding on Obama’s coattails. Ending ID cards and the ever encroaching authoritarianism of the surveillance state of Blair/Brown? I don’t think so. Ending the party’s obsession with corporate business and rich businessmen, which has seen the country’s rich/poor divide increase to its worst ratio since before even Victorian times? I don’t think so. Does young David have a solution to the credit crunch, which is seeing house prices plummet, energy and food bills surge upwards with huge profits for abusing energy companies, whilst economic and job confidence is in freefall? Gordo is already thinking about a new windfall tax (which is where his original popularity in 1997 came from anyway). And if he can’t get the Chinese, Americans and French to agree with one another at the Doha Round to come up with a deal to knock world food prices down, what could Miliband do differently?

So Brown’s greatest problem has consistently been presentation. He has terrible advice at Number 10, no grip on the party machine, Cabinet or the media, and the slightest mistakes (which, like the election which never was, was outright incompetence) become howlers. Having said that his decision to tax the poor to feed the middle class showed a man who, despite protestations to the contrary, clearly was after power for its own sake, more than his stated wish to combat poverty. And his shenanigans in both suggesting and then (for now) winning 42 days detention without charge for ‘terror’ suspects showed an authoritarianism which he thought the polls showed the country would admire, but instead showed a distaste for a move which even Margaret Thatcher at her worst would never have made. Would David Miliband really make a better Prime Minister because he’d make these abuses less transparent and haphazard? No.

He would step in and regulate the risk-taking City. He chooses equality over the old Blair “choice” agenda. His espousal of personal carbon trading is the most radical policy any Labour minister ever proposed in a decade, cutting energy use while redistributing wealth – but it was blocked by Brown at the Treasury.

He’d regulate the City? What, and guarantee an end to Labour Party funding? No, I don’t think so. One of the first smart moves which Blair and Brown made in 1997 was to toady up to the City, at least to gain support for the windfall tax on excess profits of the privatised utilities. To make improvements now he (or any Prime Minister) would have to announce a renewed windfall tax on energy companies like Centrica, would have to find some mechanism for cutting boardroom greed for such companies, when people at the lowest end of the job market are struggling to make ends meet – and take the poorest out of income tax altogether. I don’t hear him offering that, nor Brown, nor Cameron.

Miliband’s against the ‘choice’ agenda? Really? He’s taking collective responsibility in a government which lives and breathes it – how on earth has he shown a dislike for internal markets in the NHS and the marketisation of education? Granted Alan Johnson is trying to be nice about it with the NHS, but remember ‘choice’ isn’t just about creating a market which doesn’t naturally arise with these services, it’s also about fostering a market ethos – where’s the pressure against that from Miliband, Johnson, Harman? They too live and breathe it – there is no pressure against neo-liberal economics anywhere in Western society, apart from perhaps from the French Socialists, and look how they crashed and burned in the last election!

Oh and Miliband’s carbon trading scheme isn’t regressive?

Under the scheme, everybody would be given an annual allowance of the carbon they could expend on a range of products, probably food, energy and travel. If they wanted to use more carbon, they would be able to buy it from somebody else. And they could sell any surplus.

Is it just me or does that sound pretty regressive? That sounds like the rich being able to buy carbon allowances from the poor, which just might have been the reason why Brown blocked it.

The real reason why Miliband is in the ascendant right now is because he looks and acts like a celebrity – he brings back the Blair factor, which Labour are starting to think might have been the best thing all along. But he doesn’t offer anything different, at a time when the electorate is screaming merely for politicians to do what they promise, to offer genuine radicalism and change in a period of wasted opportunity and economic and social stagnation. Ruth Kelly isn’t offering high speed rail, she’s offering a third runway at Heathrow, without explaining what the socio-economic benefits of what would essentially be unlimited expansion of air travel for business, at time when cheap air travel is withering and dying. Jack Straw is also not clamouring for disestablishment, and his proposal for a fully elected House of Lords (still not to be a true Senate), voting at 16, as well as other progressive ideas like proportional representation for Westminster aren’t going to be enabled by any Labour leader until after the next election. And Miliband’s a neocon too – he just doesn’t like people to realise it:

“In fact, the goal of spreading democracy should be a great progressive project; the means need to combine both soft and hard power. We should not let the debate about the how of foreign policy obscure the clarity about the what.”

They’re finished. And given that the main alternative is a true Conservative neocon – David Cameron – so are we. Granted David Miliband realises that relentless New Labour tinkering with policy instead of actively making change will lose them the next election, but it’s not just about that. The actual policies they’ve implemented in the last few years have been so lamentably arrogant, regressive and socially divisive, and they’ve (this includes Miliband himself) shown themselves to be so completely out of touch that policy vacuums like Cameron gain popularity, when just 12 months ago he was so unpopular he was about to be replaced. Neo-liberal economics are what are fueling the current economic and social nightmare going on in the world right now. Gordon Brown’s successor, whoever she or he may be, needs to get to grips with that, because our ‘broken’ society is unlikely to repair itself in the way most people want without it.

Gay Marriage in California

An exciting state of affairs unfold in California, as its State Supreme Court slaps down Proposition 22, determining gay Californians have a constitutional right to marry.

Vodpod videos no longer available.from www.sfgate.com posted with vodpod

“History alone is not invariably an appropriate guide for determining the meaning and scope of this fundamental constitutional guarantee,” the court wrote.

“Our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation,” the court wrote.
The state’s attorney general argued that California’s domestic-partnership law afforded the same substantive rights as marriage, but the court found the separate nomenclature risks denying same-sex couples “equal dignity and respect”.

So now a ballot measure banning recognition of same-sex marriages, passed in 2000, has been struck down as unconstitutional – is that the end of the matter? Last year the California State legislature actually passed marriage equality legislation, which was only vetoed by the Governator himself. Yet as this vote approached, so did a campaign to change the Californian State constitution again, this time banning same-sex marriage itself by constitutionally defining marriage as a heterosexual institution. Bizarre I know, but this is what the least popular president in American history tried (and failed) with the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004. Schwarzenegger unexpectedly detached himself completely from this, which now makes his current position, in an election year, very interesting indeed.

“I think we need a constitutional amendment so that a foreign-born (person) can run for president, but not against gay marriage. That would be a total waste of time.”

And California now becomes an honest-to-goodness battleground. As Chris Crain points out California is the 8th biggest economy in the world, has 12% of the population of the US, and with its history at the forefront of civil rights politics in the US, legalisation of same-sex marriage carries enormous weight. Now that Proposition 22 has been repealed, the opponents of same-sex marriage have to fight to the finish in November; if they lose they essentially lose the argument in the United States full stop. At the same time Schwarzenegger is no longer on their side, making November a real chance at retaining full equality, as in the case of Massachusetts.