Wouldn’t you know it I ended up in Bloomsbury where two of the blasts occurred and suddenly it seemed like everywhere I looked were police cordons and other things that reminded me of the bombs. I have put up a few pictures on Flickr that I took using my mobile phone’s lousy camera and added them to the London Bomb Blasts pool there.

A friend I hadn’t heard from for a while popped up on my blog and posted about her concern at “the way these ‘murders’ are somehow seen as worse than the many other ‘murders’ we know of, from rapes and muggings through hit-and-run driving deaths to deaths from starvation.” Well, I certainly wouldn’t go as far as she does on that point – after all there is, I believe, a moral difference between deliberately killing people and neglecting to save their lives when this is possible. But it’s certainly worth thinking about.

Above is a UN map of the proportion of the world’s population that is malnourished (more details statistics are available from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization). While the global media’s attention focuses on an attack which likely killed 50 people, it swivels away from the G8’s inadequate response to the ongoing disastrous situation much of the world where 24,000 people die of starvation every day – a situation that global climate change may only make worse.

As for the attack itself, it seems to indicate to me that the so-called ‘war on terror’ continues to be fought in the wrong ways. No amount of surveillance (and London may be the surveillance capital of the world) can keep determined terrorists from striking. The only way to deal with terrorism is at its source – in other words a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign.

Obviously, the West can’t (and shouldn’t) attempt to meet the terrorists’ ‘demands’ (insofar as they are articulated). But we should, where possible, attempt to deal with some of the Arab world’s legitimate grievances over our behaviour. We should, for example, be leaning on Sharon that if he is going to impose a peace settlement it should at least be a just one which leaves Palestine in a form capable of taking care of itself. We should also be talking a little more about how to reduce civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s outrageous that the coalition doesn’t even publish figures on this issue leaving the counting to volunteers like Iraq Body Count – giving the erroneous impression that the coalition authorities there aren’t concerned with the problem and handing terrorists potent propaganda.

At the back of my mind there has always been the knowledge that London is a prime terrorist target – I had hoped that we would be spared given the time that has passed since 9/11 and Madrid – evidently not.

Thankfully, we are safe and so far nobody we know has been directly affected though of course some people we know have been inconvenienced and a close friend’s wife who could have been near one of the blasts was not heard from for five and a half nerve wracking hours before turning up unharmed at home.

It’s striking that for at least five hours after the blasts there was no UK helpline for people worried about those who are missing (though the State department set one up earlier “For information about American citizens who may have been affected by the July 7 bombings in London, please call 1-888-407-4747”) and it has taken several hours even to get a consistent count of the number of explosions (three on the tube, one on a bus). Some news outlets were still quoting seven for hours afterwards – presumably because where trains were blown up between stations survivors were evacuated in both directions, seemingly doubling the number of tube explosions. The casualty hotline here in London is 0870 1566 344.

Ironically when my parents lived here with me in the 1970s they also had to put up with bombs and scares – at that time from the IRA (and I was here when the IRA bombed Canary Wharf and the City of London).

I’m hopeful that Al Quaeda has now ‘done their worst’ for the moment and since they missed us our lives can return to normal. We’ve been here before and (sad to say) we’ll probably face this again…

It’s a rather polemical TV series which makes the bold (but – to me – fairly plausible) claim that effectively ‘Al Queda’ does not exist.

The programme suggests it is largely a phantom dreamed up by politicians – particularly American neo-conservatives – (with the tacit collusion of the media and the security services) to give western politicians a new role in a cynical world.

It gives copious examples of how the alleged ‘terror cells’ in the UK and US that have been found have been painted as such on the basis of flimsy – even ludicrous – evidence. A summary of the programme with links to transcripts and audio is available at the “Disinfopedia”:http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=The_Power_of_Nightmares/.

Of course that is not to say that Islamic terrorists do not exist or have the ability to carry out atrocities – 9/11 and the Madrid bombings clearly show otherwise – but it suggests these are disparate groups of loosely allied people not some kind of sinister octopus. It is clearly not balanced either – it is making a case and I would be interested to hear the other side of the story. But it does raise the important question – how will we know when the war on terror is won?

Over in the Live Journal of “blog sociology”:http://www.livejournal.com/community/blog_sociology/ here’s a reference to a pair of matching sites – the sorry’s and the not-sorry’s. Both feature pictures sent in by Americans who are (or aren’t) sorry that Bush was re-elected.

This is interesting to me from an academic point of view as an example of how ‘ordinary people’ can use Internet technology to make political statements that have the power of authenticity precisely because of their ordinariness but which have a very low ‘barrier to entry’. You don’t need to be clever or articulate to express your views on the site – you just need a camera.

update Along similar lines “Geodog”:http://www.thebishop.net/geodog/archives/2004/10/08/late_night_thoughts_on_browsing_the_iraq_tag_on_flickr.html points out that services like Flickr make it easy to find photos about what’s going on in Iraq – many of them taken in Iraq. Also see “my earlier blog posting”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_world.html#001222 about this…

In an hour-long segment on Chicago Public Radio’s Odyssey. Both guest speakers had interesting things to say about the changing media and its impact on politics – I can’t do better than to quote the description given here:

Most Americans used to get their political information primarily from the evening news. But with the rise of cable TV and the Internet, there are countless venues for political news and opinion. How are new media shaping what we learn about politics? Political scientist Arthur Lupia and communication scholar Bruce Williams join Chicago Public Radio’s Gretchen Helfrich for the discussion. Lupia is coauthor of The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Know? Williams is director of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He’s working on a book project entitled, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Eroding Boundaries between News and Entertainment and What They Mean for Politics in the 21st Century.

“Listen to the realaudio”:http://www.wbez.org/DWP_XML/od/2004_10/od_20041008_1200_3415/episode_3415.ram

An illuminating account of the truth behind the movie revealed that the real-life head of Strategic Air Command was prepared to attack the Soviet Union whether or not the president gave him an order if he thought the Russians were going to attack and the Dr Strangelove character himself was likely based on “Herman Kahn”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn who was at the Rand thinktank and who wrote books about the aftermath of nuclear war containing references to the need to preserve humanity in mineshafts. Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon papers and worked at RAND joked when he first saw the film that it was a documentary.

If that doesn’t scare you enough, it turns out that for about a decade “the ‘top secret launch code’ for US nuclear weapons was 00000”:http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm because Strategic Air Command didn’t agree the security systems were necessary.

And I haven’t heard anything about the security systems and the thinking in the defense departments of the Soviet Union at the time – I imagine what we may learn if and when when that leaks out would be just as scary. It’s a wonder we made it through that period in one piece…

The BBC World Service has taken a look at the issue in a four part programme (on the web and in archived streaming audio) – Profit and Loss: The Story of African Oil. It looks at two countries where oil wealth has spectacularly failed to bring prosperity to most of the populations of the countries (Gabon and Nigeria) and two countries hoping to do better with their newfound income – Chad and Sao Tome.

Also see “earlier stuff”:https://blog.org/archives/000864.html on a similar topic (which is not too encouraging).

It seems – contrary to suggestions made earlier by Cass Sunstein in Republic.com and “essays”:http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR26.3/sunstein.html (and by many others) – people using the Internet don’t tend to just get more political information that agrees with their previously-held beliefs – they are better informed about both sides than their offline counterparts – at least according to the latest report based on a large scale survey from the excellent “Pew Internet & American Life Project”:http://www.pewinternet.org/.

Before you say ‘well that is just because Internet users are on average better educated or of higher social status’ (as I admit I was tempted to do) they found:

Simply being an internet user, controlling for demographic factors such as gender and education, as well as the other factors already discussed, increases the likelihood that a person has heard more arguments about a candidate.

This seems quite persuasive to me but I doubt this argument will go away in a hurry!

The most popular weblog, “boingboing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/10/26/boingboing_endorses_.html and (more tellingly) the second most popular conservative weblogger, “Andrew Sullivan”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=qFFINfAm4eR7PMnY1tkQ2m%3D%3D have endorsed Kerry (though “Instapundit”:http://instapundit.com/archives/018671.php – the most popular right wing blog – does not look likely to do so). Keep an eye on “the official Kerry endorsements page”:http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/press_endorsements.html to see who in the US mass media endorses Kerry and see “here”:https://blog.org/archives/001247.html for more on what the rest of the world thinks of the election.

Update: Even the Economist has “endorsed Kerry”:http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?Story_ID=3329802 (albeit reluctantly).

After three necessarily tumultuous and transformative years, this is a time for consolidation, for discipline and for repairing America’s moral and practical authority. Furthermore, as Mr Bush has often said, there is a need in life for accountability. He has refused to impose it himself, and so voters should, in our view, impose it on him.

On a lighter note here is a mildly entertaining, well-executed Chomsky-ite propaganda cartoon video clip that just came to my attention – Pirates & Emperors. And I just learned if you haven’t yet seen Fahrenheit 9/11 it is being made available unofficially in several formats to download “by this guy”:http://marc.perkel.com/archives/000468.html among others (apparently Michael Moore would “like people to pirate the film”:http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/56254.html though of course since he almost certainly doesn’t own the rights this doesn’t make it legal). There’s a BitTorrent of it “here”:http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2848/Fahrenheit.911-avi.torrent (this is the most efficient way of downloading it though it needs “special software”:http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/).

Don’t forget if you are overseas there is (probably) still time to cast your overseas ballot (see “here”:http://www.aokerry.com/aok/2004/10/4_important_ann.html for more information about how from Americans Overseas for Kerry though of course the same instructions work whichever way you want to vote).