Fortress Singapore Welcomes IMF and World Bank delegates

Quite a big hoo-hah is going on in the old S'pore at the moment, with a large part of the city in full lock-down mode while the IMF and World Bank does its thang. What's kind of amusing in a firghtening way, is the manner in which the government here has assured security for the delegates and procedings.

A section of the city containing an entire exhibition centre and a few hotels has been completely locked down -- razor-wire-topped barricades surround the enclave, anti-ram devices are in place at the few entrances, and everywhere there are armed soldiers and ghurkas. Nearby, ranks of firetrucks, armoured personnel carriers and ambulances are on standby.

Is the government worried about terrorist attacks? Hell yes they are, especially since they consider any form of protest seditious.

A protest with more than four people is illegal here, and the government has no qualms about confusing a demonstration with a full blown riot -- the implication being that if any protester is let loose on the streets the average Singaporean will totally lose his shit and start destroying the place.

So they've banned protesters at the IMF/World Bank summit, aside from those pre-approved by the government. Even then they have to submit to stringent searches, background checks and more. And where can they protest? In a special 8m x 8m area within the cavernous exhibition site, far away from the populace and international media.

Brilliant.

Furthermore, they've also detained, questioned and deported other protesters who were pre-approved by the World Bank and IMF. Oddly, this has raised the ire of the IMF/WB delegates as it contravenes a clear agreement between them and Singapore.

Singapore has inflicted enormous damage to its reputation because of its reluctance to admit 27 activists accredited for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings, bank president Paul Wolfowitz has said.

"Enormous damage has been done... A lot of that damage has been to Singapore and it's self-inflicted," Wolfowitz said at a meeting with non-governmental organizations.

Singapore said it had security concerns about 27 of the hundreds of activists whom the World Bank and International Monetary Fund had already accredited to attend the institutions' meetings in Singapore as part of a formal dialogue.

"I would certainly argue that at the stage of success they've reached they'd be much better for themselves if they (took) a more visionary approach to the process," Wolfowitz said.

Interestingly, once this went global and Wolfowitz slammed Singapore, the government suddenly decided to allow 22 of the 27 activists in. Awesome. Gayle Goh has a local opinion of the whole affair, and you need to remember as you read it that she's only 17.

Everyone knows Singapore is authoritarian, so it's nothing new, but the levels to which they will not compromise is quite an eye-opener. Especially for the delegates.

I think the last word should go to the Minister Mentor (yes, they actually have that position) Lee Kwan Yew speaking from this Yahoo story about free speech and an alternate government. It really puts the polish on how the government sees the populace here and the xenophobic nature of the Singaporean Chinese about our Muslim neighbours. (My bold for emphasis.)

Lee acknowledged that there was growing support for opposition parties among Singapore's voters, but said the office of the elected presidency had been put in place to prevent a profligate opposition government from touching the island's vast monetary reserves.

"Without the elected president and if there is a freak result, within two or three years, the army would have to come in and stop it," Lee said.

This is democracy, Singapore-style.

You may not know it, but I harbour warm feelings for simians

This time I'm posting a story that I've been forwarding about for roughly ten years now. I have no idea where I came across it, who wrote it or even how old it is. All I know is that it has monkeys and it brings the funny.

I LIKE MONKEYS

I like monkeys.

The pet store was selling them for five cents a piece. I thought that odd since they were normally a couple thousand each. I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I bought 200. I like monkeys.

I took my 200 monkeys home. I have a big car. I let one drive. His name was Sigmund. He was retarded. In fact, none of them were really bright. They kept punching themselves in their genitals. I laughed. Then they punched my genitals. I stopped laughing.

I herded them into my room. They didn't adapt very well to their new environment. They would screech, hurl themselves off of the couch at high speeds and slam into the wall. Although humorous at first, the spectacle lost its novelty halfway into its third hour.

Two hours later I found out why all the monkeys were so inexpensive: they all died. No apparent reason. They all just sorta' dropped dead. Kinda' like when you buy a goldfish and it dies five hours later. Damn cheap monkeys.

I didn't know what to do. There were 200 dead monkeys lying all over my room, on the bed, in the dresser, hanging from my bookcase. It looked like I had 200 throw rugs. I tried to flush one down the toilet. It didn't work. It got stuck. Then I had one dead, wet monkey and 199 dead, dry monkeys.

I tried pretending that they were just stuffed animals. That worked for a while, that is until they began to decompose. It started to smell real bad.

I had to pee but there was a dead monkey in the toilet and I didn't want to call the plumber. I was embarrassed.

I tried to slow down the decomposition by freezing them. Unfortunately there was only enough room for two monkeys at a time so I had to change them every 30 seconds. I also had to eat all the food in the freezer so it didn't all go bad.

I tried burning them. Little did I know my bed was flammable. I had to extinguish the fire.

Then I had one dead, wet monkey in my toilet, two dead, frozen monkeys in my freezer, and 197 dead, charred monkeys in a pile on my bed. The odor wasn't improving.

I became agitated at my inability to dispose of my monkeys and to use the bathroom. I severely beat one of my monkeys. I felt better.

I tried throwing them way but the garbage man said that the city wasn't allowed to dispose of charred primates. I told him that I had a wet one. He couldn't take that one either. I didn't bother asking about the frozen ones.

I finally arrived at a solution. I gave them out as Christmas gifts. My friends didn't know quite what to say. They pretended that they like them but I could tell they were lying. Ingrates. So I punched them in the genitals.

I like monkeys.

I saw a tit! And there was a snake on it!

'You want to see it. You have two people goin' to screw in a bathroom on a plane and you know that there are some snakes on there... you know that when that tit comes out, you want to see a snake on that tit! At some point you gonna go, "Man, I know a snake's going to show up somewhere... and hopefully that snake's going to be on that tit."'

True words, Samuel L. Jackson, true words.

Lest we forget...

Today marks both the five year anniversary of the September 11 attacks in America and the start of at least a week-long bout of masturbatory frenzy in the mass media.

No doubt we'll see those planes smash into those buildings again and again, because you know, we just haven't seen that enough and it was five years ago after all. Happened in New York, I think.

But, I am not here to mock nor denigrate the losses sustained on that day, nor the losses in the Madrid train bombings, the multiple bombings in Bali, the London underground bombings (in which I lost a friend), the bombing of the Australian Embassy in Indonesia, the bombings in Cairo, nor the other equally as heinous terrorists attacks since that day in New York. What I do want to discuss is the fear. The perfectly manufactured patina of fear that covers us all. To continue momentarily with that awful metaphor -- Osama laid the undercoat, Bush. Blair and Howard have been layering on top coat over top coat until now no one remembers what the original colour was.

I found myself watching an anchor on CNN the other day, presenting statistics from polls conducted both in the months after the 9/11 attacks and followed up last month. When asked if they felt more unsafe now, in the months following 9/11 44% or respondents said they did. The follow-up almost five years on had seen that number rise to around 68%. (Note: I was not entirely paying attention but there had been a remarkable increase.)

In this time we've seen public freedoms repressed and suppressed more rapidly and markedly than the terrorists could ever hope for. While the nebulously defined War on Terrorism continues, we've seen new Wars -- the War of Shoes and the new War on Moisture. I'm all for finding and quashing the bastards responsible, and I'm particularly for pressing them hard and deep into the Earth's crust, but what I cannot abide is this terrible and insensate fear that's permeating society.

Fear is a powerful force. It's a primal, survival force in fact. The best horror movies never show the creature or ghost who kills. When it's left to the imagination the effects are starker and more horrific, but they are also personal to each person. Compared to the delicious terror of the imagination, the blood-spattered animatronic that shuffles into scene is laughable. Poe knew this, as did Lovecraft, and their stories are timeless.

Bush must watch a lot of these classic movies (I doubt he reads the books) as he's telling us everything, but showing us nothing. The War on Terror purports to say a lot, but means nothing. It's nebulous, ill-defined. I'm not the first to comment on this, and won't be the last, but other things that similarly sound good but mean nothing are Bush's assertions that the terrorists 'hate our freedom'. Bush says a lot of dumb things, but that's a whopper to swallow.

And here I pass the baton to David Cross, a very funny comedian, who said while discussing Bush's 'they hate our freedom' rhetoric:

"I don't think Osama bin Laden sent those planes in to attack us because he hated our freedom.

I think he did it because of our support for Israel, and our ties with the Saudi family and all our military bases in Saudi Arabia.

You know why I think that?

Because that's what he fucking said!

It's sad that that has to come from a comedian, but there you have it. That's why Osama had the planes hijacked. It's the same reason why he had them blow a huge fucking hole in the U.S.S Cole years earlier, and why they even tried to bomb the WTC earlier than that.

Saying it's about a hatred of freedom just muddies the waters...and that's probably Bush's point.

So here we are, five years on from one of the most horrific acts of war on America, and we're all feeling worse off. The boogeyman could be anywhere, anytime, and he wants to kill us because we are free.

To be honest, I fly a lot, and I never really dwell on terrorists. I'm more worried about the idiot driving the taxi to the airport, or just how much job-satisfaction the low-paid maintenance ground crew who are responsible for checking my plane have. Statistically you are vastly more likely to slip and die in the shower, get kicked to death by a donkey or be killed by a falling coconut than you are to be killed by an act of terrorism.

Anyway, security expert Bruce Schneier has an excellent Scorecard from the War on Terror with some interesting findings. As he says 'This is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in how the U.S. is prosecuting terrorism. Put aside the rhetoric and the posturing; this is what is actually happening.'

In the twelve months immediately after 9/11, the prosecution of individuals the government classified as international terrorists surged sharply higher than in the previous year. But timely data show that five years later, in the latest available period, the total number of these prosecutions has returned to roughly what they were just before the attacks. Given the widely accepted belief that the threat of terrorism in all parts of the world is much larger today than it was six or seven years ago, the extent of the recent decline in prosecutions is unexpected. See Figure 1 and supporting table.

Federal prosecutors by law and custom are authorized to decline cases that are brought to them for prosecution by the investigative agencies. And over the years the prosecutors have used this power to weed out matters that for one reason or another they felt should be dropped. For international terrorism the declination rate has been high, especially in recent years. In fact, timely data show that in the first eight months of FY 2006 the assistant U.S. Attorneys rejected slightly more than nine out of ten of the referrals. Given the assumption that the investigation of international terrorism must be the single most important target area for the FBI and other agencies, the turn-down rate is hard to understand. See Figure 2 and supporting table.

The typical sentences recently imposed on individuals considered to be international terrorists are not impressive. For all those convicted as a result of cases initiated in the two years after 9//11, for example, the median sentence -- half got more and half got less-- was 28 days. For those referrals that came in more recently -- through May 31, 2006 -- the median sentence was 20 days. For cases started in the two year period before the 9/11 attack, the typical sentence was much longer, 41 months. See Figure 3.

Yowch. Maybe we are right to feel more frightened.

Who doesn't like Japanese girls?...oh.



How about some tea then?

The Doctor is in...

(test shoot at abandoned mansion, part of the Haunted Spaces project)

I used to be a carpenter...

Energy for nuthin’ and your chicks for free.

It’s bit of a dream really, free energy. No more power bills, no more raping wilderness areas for oil, no more raping other countries for oil, no more changing freaking batteries all the time. Could it be time to take your house off the energy grid?

The guys at Steorn think so.

They’ve developed what they say is the world’s first energy generating device that outputs more than is put in. There is a technical scientific term for this kind of contraption, and it is ‘bullshit’.

Perpetual motion machines and energy-for-nothing generators are considered not just wrong, but completely impossible. It’s right up there with ancient alchemists trying to transmute lead into gold (even Newton did his damnedest to get that one to work), to the more modern fallacy of Fleischmann and Pon’s claims to room temperature desk-top fusion in 1989 and the less modern attempt I made to fly in the late seventies by stuffing my arms into white plastic trash bags and leaping off a chair (failed).

Looking for a way to create self-powered mini security cameras, Steorn’s team stumbled on what they are calling an invention that will change the world. The device features four minutely calibrated magnets, spinning about a fifth magnet. Somehow, this apparently produces more energy than is fed in -- they say around 285% efficiency.

The Laws of Thermodynamics (note the capitalisation) are very clear, and have withstood the test of time. The First Law states that the amount of energy in a closed system remains the same. While a thrown ball has more kinetic energy than a stationary one, this energy is converted from kinetic into heat as friction works on the surface, heating the ball and air. Energy converts, it never disappears or appears. In this example kinetic energy becomes heat,. Measured as a whole the amount of energy never, ever changes.

So Steorn’s claim to have a system that is 285% efficient totally and completely flies in the face of one of the most fundamental building blocks of science. They say that their closed system has even delivered just under 400% efficiency in tests. What they don’t say is how exactly they’re ‘detecting’ this energy.

Now, this may be true. It could actually be pumping out more energy than is being put in, but the First Law states that this energy must be coming from somewhere so it could be that it’s coming from somewhere unexpected.

Arenas that pop into my head could be that the interlocking magnetic field could be creating a Casimir effect somewhere nearing the Planck scale, but the problem with this is that although quantum mechanics fully allows for enormous energies to be released via this effect, it also dictates that it must also disappear just as quickly. Maybe what they’ve developed is a detector of this unleashed energy. Harnessing it is a different matter.

The second way I can see this happening is that the conjunction of magnetic fields is allowing for the energy of the quantum foam to be detected. Again, and incredibly similarly to the Casimir effect, this is happening at the Planck scale so how they’re detecting this I do not know. Also like the Casimir effect this energy is transient.

Now, while you may dismiss all of this as a complete load of bulshit, Steorn are putting their money where their mouth is by purchasing a full-page advert in The Economist, challenging scientists to come and investigate the device in-depth, and then present their findings. This panel of leading physicists, chemist and presumable quantum physiscists must publish their claims as other scientific bodies who have studied the device refuse to out of being named and shamed by the rest of the community.

As of time of writing, 4,581 scientists have applied for position on the panel.

It’s interesting too, as they don’t seem to be asking for funding until the panel’s results are out, and then it’s either rolling-in-cash time, or shunned-by-Science time.

Validation Process

The process of testing Steorn's technology shall consist of three test phases. The process shall commence with the scientific jury appointing its own chairman. Steorn shall then provide an in-depth explanation of the operation of its technology and shall present the tests and test data conducted on the technology to date.

Steorn will cover all direct costs relating to the validation process.

Phase I

Confirm that the Steorn technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.

Phase II

Confirm that the operation of the Steorn technology does not affect the component parts of the technology.

Phase III

Carry out a full thermodynamic analysis of the technology.

What Happens After Validation?

The jury’s analysis will be published on the company's website where everyone can register to receive the results.

The Company will then be seeking to license its technology into a variety of markets including the consumer electronics and automotive sectors. The company will also be releasing several products that it is developing itself.

So it’s very interesting. Steorn is canny enough to know that they’re in a position to be completely ridiculed by the scientific community if they just come out and say ‘our product does this’, but by inviting the community to openly investigate it they’re potentially cutting off that route. And after all, it could turn out that it’s a completely known effect and that the device may appear to be over 100% coefficient but is really 90% and that the detected energy cannot be harnessed.

Who knows? Regardless of what happens, I’ve signed up for the results. As have 57,682 others.

Rust my Nuts!

A place to sit

Part of my haunted places project