Thursday, 1 September 2005
Frank, My Dear, I Don't Give A Damn »
Or Frank Field is nuts. (I look forward to reading his admirers outside the Party, like Mark Holland, on this.)
We have entered a new political age; the threat to the safety of large numbers of citizens is now an everyday reality. The Islamist bombers differ from those of the IRA, who generally so loved their own lives that they gave warnings of intended outrages. Such “gentlemanly” behaviour is now a thing of the past.
Threats “to the safety of large numbers of citizens,” as Mr Field concedes, have been common before. I can’t see any necessary connection between suicide bombings and warnings. Nothing seems to stop potential suicide bombers (or their accomplices or controllers) telephoning warnings; nor did the IRA always give notice. (And when they did, it was so they could demonstrate their power, without causing an “outrage,” surely.) Love of life has nothing to do with it. IRA bombers weren’t interested in dying: sometimes they warned, sometimes not. The IRA as such is not a thing of the past because we have moved on, in the Labourite sense of progression; the new bombers are from a different culture.
But planning for the very long haul puts a new responsibility on politicians. The government’s pre-election anti-terrorist measures were inept on two counts. First, a serious change in the boundaries between safety and liberty was being redrawn, and yet the government tried to ram through its proposals in a single day.
But this had everything to do with the parliamentary timetable before the election.
What was alarming was the parliamentary opposition to control orders, which are little more than posh-sounding antisocial behaviour orders. Such orders have a 50% chance of failing to curb unruly yobs, so heaven knows why parliament thought they would be more effective against suspects who might be planning to blow up large numbers of innocent people.
I’ve read this several times, and I think “parliamentary opposition” refers to one group of MPs and “parliament thought” refers to the activity of the little grey cells of the government and its civil servants who drafted the bill. After all, Mr Field then goes on:
And yet all too many of my parliamentary colleagues billed the measures as a grotesque attack on civil liberties. I voted against them because they were so inadequate.
So did anyone vote against the bill because it might do what it proposed to do? It seems not. Still, this interpretation of Mr Field’s logic seems amiss. He must be saying that his colleagues opposed the bill because they thought it would work.
Mr Field then goes on to discuss opinion polls (magically reliable now, as they aren’t before elections).
These results are an appalling indictment of governments that have modelled British citizenship on a supermarket, where individuals can roam about taking and rejecting what parts of it they wish.
This is the grouch of the moment, apparently the Pope has said much the same thing.
The government must invite parliament to begin a national debate on what being a British citizen means today. My guess is that quite a large number of respondents would say how appalled they were at the growing decadence and yobbishness of British culture. Probably many Muslim parents would express disdain at this trend, and would be joined by white parents. Building a new sense of a joint endeavour on the basic tenets of citizenship must now occupy an important part of parliament’s time.
Blame the kids with their hair creeping over their ears, their “skiffle music” and so on. Does your son call you “Daddy-O"? Does your daughter think you’re square? Well the times, they are a-changin’:
Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse.
Oops, that was George Orwell in May 1945. I will not oppose Mr Field’s wish to encourage a debate on “what being a British citizen means today” provided he grants me one wish, that first we hold a debate on what “meaning” means today. For if we do not know what we mean by “mean” how can we be sure we know what we mean by “what being a British citizen means today"? Surely Mr Field knows enough to to realise that philosophical debates have no place in Parliament. And a member of the Labour Party, no less, should know that when the Party was being formed, being British meant quite different things to miners than it did to their representatives in Parliament.
Still, he makes sense at the end.
The Blair government must seize the initiative and begin revamping the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. It allows only the five signatories to possess nuclear weapons, but allows all other countries to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium for peaceful purposes. The major countries’ reaction to Iran and North Korea has to become part of the strategy that prevents terrorists getting their sticky fingers on the materials to make dirty bombs.
And, cough, Israel.
Via John Band, who also found time to read a Times editorial: Tough on disrespect.
A backlog of policy pronouncements … awaits him. It will shape this parliamentary term and also Mr Blair’s personal legacy. Timidity will not enhance his place in history.
Straight from the stock cupboard of leader comment on a new term since editorials were invented. Well of course what he does will shape his legacy. “Timidity will not enhance his place in history.” Well blow me, you really bent the brain on that one.
Violent gangs have for decades played a grisly walk-on role in Britain’s seaside towns and inner cities. Knifewielding individuals have been around for even longer.
Really? Have you got a source for that last sentence? Like first there were guys with knives and later they formed gangs? Because it seems to me that the gangs came first, and youths fighting is common everywhere, in the suburbs, in villages. And boys have been in gangs since before we were human.
But hopefully David Miliband, the Minister for Communities, has been taking notice.
Education would a good investment for Times writers.
But there is a sense among many, heightened by recent headlines, that the speed and regularity with which inane and drunken loutishness turns violent is sufficiently alarming to become a national priority.
Yeah, bloody Mods and Rockers. That “skiffle” music causes trouble.
The memory of a time when British youth knew to behave with respect, decorum and decency seems as wistful as a long-ago summer holiday.
This might be before Teddy boys, which would make the writer at least 60.
Two trends are at work, one short term, one medium term, and they are linked. Violent assaults, much of them alcohol-fuelled, have quadrupled since Mr Blair came to power in 1997. And the country has yet to fill the void where “God” used to preside before organised religion fell away to a point where only 4 per cent go to church regularly.
Blame the French, if Francois Marie Arouet hadn’t said “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” and if Pierre Simon Laplace hadn’t said to Napoleon, “"Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis [God]” and that Pole, Nietzsche hadn’t declared God to be dead, we wouldn’t be in this. Burn the philosophers! They don’t have this nonsense in Iran.
Mere materialism is an invitation to valueless vacuity and is an environment in which boorishness breeds.
Personally, I call it “physicalism” and why have you moved to a description of public schoolboys studying geography at Oxbridge?
The intention of anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs), introduced in 1999, is correct.
Can an “intention” be correct? No wonder leader writers are anonymous. I want to know which school this illiterate prig went to, in order to avoid it.
These 698 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:43pm GMT Permanent link.
Raising Some Potential Privacy Concerns »
Via Nick, Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can’t Index. The Onion is written to much higher journalistic standards than the Times (see last post).
The company’s new directive may explain its recent acquisition of Celera Genomics, the company that mapped the human genome, and its buildup of a vast army of laser-equipped robots.
Incredibly the second page trumps that with:
“This announcement is a red flag,” said Daniel Brandt, founder of Google-Watch.org. “I certainly don’t want to accuse of them having bad intentions. But this campaign of destruction and genocide raises some potential privacy concerns.”
Wonderful.
These 35 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:04pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 2 September 2005
Its Inherent Fakeitude Is Fairly Obvious »
The New Yorker on the recently published second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary [which] contains a made-up word that starts with the letter “e". An “independent investigator” (ie journalist) “set himself the task of sifting through [the] thirty-one hundred and twenty-eight ‘e’ entries in search of the phony.” Surprisingly, it came down to six:
earth loop—n. Electrical British term for GROUND LOOP.
EGD—n. a technology or system that integrates a computer display with a pair of eyeglasses . . . abbreviation of eyeglass display.
electrofish—v. [trans.] fish (a stretch of water) using electrocution or a weak electric field.
ELSS—abbr. extravehicular life support system.
esquivalience—n. the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities . . . late 19th cent.: perhaps from French esquiver, “dodge, slink away.”
eurocreep—n. informal the gradual acceptance of the euro in European Union countries that have not yet officially adopted it as their national currency.
“Earth loop,” “electrofish,” and “eurocreep” are not all that recondite, surely? ELSS sounds right. The use of “eyeglasses” sounds quaint, but apparently it’s the correct Americanism. The ringer is “esquivalience.”
The most personal of the rationales belonged to Eli Horowitz, an editor of the literary anthology “The Future Dictionary of America,” who complained, “I had to read it a few times, and I resent that.”
That was my problem, too.
As for “esquivalience” ’s excesses, McKean made no apologies. “Its inherent fakeitude is fairly obvious,” she said. “We wanted something highly improbable. We were trying to make a word that could not arise in nature.” Indeed, “esquivalience,” like Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, is something of a maverick. “There shouldn’t be an ‘l’ in there. It should be esquivarience,” McKean conceded. “But that sounds like it would mean ‘slight differences between racehorses.’ ”
Via Doctorvee.
These 93 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:58am GMT Permanent link.
When The Levee Breaks »
First of all, I want to thump Christopher Howse. (This may not be a rational response, but I’ll get to that.)
Distressed as Americans are by the cruelty of Hurricane Katrina, one witness of the disaster that I talked to was sure it was all the more compelling because the people of New Orleans only had themselves to blame. He is not a heartless man, but he insisted that folk who lived hugger-mugger 12 feet below sea level and refused to budge, even when the mayor ordered them out, should not be surprised to drown. Some stayed because they feared looters. Some survivors later fled when roaming looters looted firearms.
The “people of New Orleans only had themselves to blame.” Oh sure. They “lived hugger-mugger” whatever that means. The mayor did not order them out: this is the United States, which despite what many see as the parallels between George W Bush and Adolf Hitler remains a democracy. Mayors cannot give orders to their citizens.
A city I’ve visited and liked is no more. There would still be a humanitarian disaster even if everyone had left; where are the 1.3 million supposed to live? It’s a little tough if all your family also lived in the same city. Perhaps the TV channels and newspapers over-rely on “experts” so a certain scepticism is understandable. Perhaps, as a reporter on Newsnight last night said (from memory): “Weather stories are tightly choreographed. They start with reporters standing in high winds, … and when it’s all over, DIY shares go up.” How bad did you think Katrina would be last week? Don’t you think your house is safe?
John Cole has several good posts like this.
Sure, a lot of the people interviewed on cable may say they just stayed because they have seen all sorts of hurricanes. They may say that. But I am willing to bet a lot of them are just saying that to save face. Ever been broke? And I mean, chronically, long-term, without ANY money, broke? It sucks, and it can be embarassing, and it isn’t likely most people are going to admit it. I know most of you are affluent, but was there never a time in college when all your friends were going somewhere, going to a concert, going out, going on Spring Break, and you wanted to go, but couldn’t? Instead of saying “I’m broke,” how many of you said something like “I’ve got better things to do,” or “I hate Florida,” or made some other excuse?
The situation in New Orleans (what was New Orleans?) is mind-ripping.
He’s only hearing bits and pieces. The people in the city are shooting at the police. They’re upset that they’re not getting help quickly enough. The fireman keep calling because they’re under fire. He doesn’t understand why the people are shooting at the rescuers. Here it is 5 days ago the Mayor said get out of town and nobody went and now they’re pissed.
John Cole says (of a different incident):
I simply can not fathom the type of person that does this sort of thing. I just can’t.
And John served in Gulf War I. He’s seen some things. People aren’t rational, especially when their certainties are destroyed in a stroke.
Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings is also on the side of the compassionate. PC Copperfield says Looters beware.
I would be less cautious and would personally mobilise the local Territorial Army unit in support of the civil power. In the Church Road Estate, my word would be law.
Well, good luck to him, via hilzoy (above) the Associated Press.
At least seven bodies were scattered outside, and hungry, desperate people who were tired of waiting broke through the steel doors to a food service entrance and began pushing out pallets of water and juice and whatever else they could find. An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet. “I don’t treat my dog like that,” 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. “I buried my dog.” He added: “You can do everything for other countries but you can’t do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can’t get them down here.”
It’s really too much to bear.
These 272 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:31pm GMT Permanent link.
Quite Right Too »
Guardian: Labour peer expelled over donation to Lib Dem MP. Disgraceful moral turpitude, I call it. When the story broke, Lord Hoskins said he made the donation to Lib Dem Danny Alexander as he was a friend who he worked with previously. We don’t want his sort in the Labour Party.
We need upstanding, principled Lords. Mike Watson has apologised, so that’s all right. Best forgotten. No need for an ASBO, or Charlie Clarke to crack down on twisted fire-starters. What a man does with his own money is the Party’s business; setting fire to hotels is an unhappy personal quirk.
BWA-HAHA-HAHA-HAHA.
These 102 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:47pm GMT Permanent link.
Tony Has An Excellent Idea »
BBC: Blair calls for better parenting.
Respect for other people must be learnt within families first, said Tony Blair as he launched a new drive against bad parenting and anti-social behaviour.
In his first speech since his summer holiday, Mr Blair called for change in the UK’s culture as well as new laws.
Mr Blair announced plans to extend the use of orders telling parents how to deal with their unruly children.
…
Speaking in Watford, Mr Blair said the orders were currently only used once a child had committed a crime or been expelled from school.
“Far too often we get heavy when the problem has got too serious,” he said.
Under the new plans, law enforcement agencies could intervene earlier once children showed signs of beginning to “go off the rails”, he said.
How would we know if a child was ‘beginning to “go off the rails"’? How about being drunk?
The teenager, who was celebrating the end of his GCSE exams, was found by police officers in Leicester Square, in London’s West End, at about 2300 BST on Wednesday. …
An ambulance had to be called after Euan was discovered vomiting on the pavement, but paramedics decided there was no need for the teenager to go to hospital.
And then lying to the police:
Instead, he was taken to Charing Cross police station where he initially gave his name as Euan John, gave an old address and told officers he was 18.
He was then searched and his true identity discovered.
I blame the parents. You may say, “Awww, poor kid.” It’s a good job Charles Clarke is “neither woolly or liberal or a woolly liberal.” Perhaps by the time Leo takes his exams, we’ll have real, Laban Tall style, law enforcement. Shoot-to-kill for a first offence, perhaps. Special wild dog patrols to tear to shreds teenagers out after 8pm who haven’t washed behind their ears.
These 96 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:05pm GMT Permanent link.
James Lileks »
James Lileks is a cock. (Via Jim Henley.) See also Sadly, No!
Jonah Goldberg is a cock, too.
Jim Henley says:
My thinking is that there’s been a lot of recognition that the water in New Orleans itself is foul, full of human waste and sewage and other disease vectors.
If he’s right, the survivors in New Orleans who haven’t either hoarded or looted water (especially those stranded on rooftops) don’t have very long left. And if they are rescued (once they stop firing on helicopters) they’ll need urgent medical attention, and possibly isolation, though the numbers make that all but impossible.
These 73 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:24pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 3 September 2005
Promises »
Once upon a time there was a political party whose name was “New Labour” though most people, being ignorant, just called it “The Labour Party.” New Labour did not like to be called “The Labour Party,” “The Labour Party was nasty and smelly,” it sniffed, “and it lived on beer and sandwiches.
“I drink only the finest bottled water, and eat only in Granita.
“Old Labour people wore donkey jackets; I wear smart designer suits and a red rose!”
But to be really famous and successful, New Labour had to win an election. When an election was called in 1997, all the Parties wanted to win, and they all wrote manifestoes. A manifesto is a sort of book where political parties make promises. And when you make a promise, you must keep it forever and ever. New Labour sat down and worked very hard on the manifesto. When it was finished the voters in Great Britain said it was the best manifesto of all, and New Labour won the election. Hurrah!
Here is an extract from that manifesto. New Labour promised to “clean up politics” including:
Freedom of information and guaranteed human rights
Then they removed to right to trial-by-jury. Because this went back to William the Conqueror, it was not modern. Then New Labour turned on its former supporters because they kept diaries, and if people read these diaries, they might lose some faith in their wise and just rulers. But didn’t they promise freedom of information. “Oh no,” said the New Labour’s fairy godmother, “that bit was written with crossed fingers, so it doesn’t really count. And besides, who wants to read tittle-tattle about the government? If governments told the people what they were up to everything would be so confusing! Why don’t you read your horoscope instead?”
One of Tony Blair’s former policy chiefs has condemned Alastair Campbell and other No 10 insiders for keeping diaries of their time at the prime minister’s side.
In a programme to be broadcast on Radio 4 on Monday, Geoff Mulgan argues that plans by senior staffers to publish books about their experiences undermine trust and honesty in government.
And now an exclusive extract from Alastair Campbell’s diary:
That poxy cunt Mulgan was creeping to TB again. “Sir, sir, he’s taking notes, sir …”
God, Mulgan really is a cock-sucking little arsehole.
If I have to share a meeting with that demented fuckwit Mulgan again …
I don’t know if I have the tenor right. I think it needs more swearing.
These 317 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:55pm GMT Permanent link.
Is Peter Mandelson A Hyprocrite? »
This is (partly) a genuine question. Last Sunday, the Sunday Telegraph ran this story: Far, far away from the trade crisis he created, Mandelson relaxes at a concert in Pompeii. The newspaper edition was illustrated with a photograph to complement the descriptive opening paragraph.
Ushered straight to the best seats in the house, Peter Mandelson cut a relaxed figure in the front row of the spectacular Teatro Grande in Pompeii on a balmy August evening. Dressed casually in a white linen shirt for the two-hour concert, his Brazilian partner Reinaldo da Silva at his side, resplendent in shocking pink, the European Union trade commissioner had the air of a man without a care in the world.
I can’t find the picture online which is sad, because what the text doesn’t say is that his casual shirt reveals a white plastic bracelet on his right wrist. This is almost certainly a Make Poverty History white band.
Here is Mr Mandelson writing on poverty and free trade in Africa in the Independent.
If we care about ending poverty in Africa for good, we have to match debt relief and humanitarian aid to the continent with a new commitment to building Africa’s capacity to benefit from free and fair trade.
I have no pretensions of being an economist, which is why the question in the title is genuine. Perhaps there are reasons why free trade would benefit the poor in Africa, but not in the Far East. (This is also why I’m blogging this almost a week late. I sent the following article to free trade fiend Tim Worstall but he passed.)
In today’s Guardian, Peter Simon, the “founder of the Monsoon retail empire,” called the EU Trade Commissioner ’naive and ignorant’.
If the embargo is not lifted, Mr Simon warns, the entrepreneurial Chinese suppliers will simply find ways around the protectionist measures — such as exporting partially finished goods to be completed in other countries.
He asks whether Mr Mandelson is aware that he has put in jeopardy ethical trading initiatives that many retailers have developed with their Chinese suppliers to improve workers’ pay and conditions.
So much for free enterprise and ethical trading. But nice wristband, Peter, you must be so caring.
These 197 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:15pm GMT Permanent link.
Oh, When The Troops ... »
Things look bad for Bush: worse than ever expected. Gene of Harry’s Place calls the administration Criminally negligent. Via Gene’s update to that post, CNN’s report on the relief convoys. Even this looks bad.
At a New Orleans street corner, Lt. Gen. Russel Honore directed the deployment of National Guard troops — expected to number 1,000. …
Honore said getting food and water to the people at the convention center was difficult. “If you ever have 20,000 people come to supper, you know what I’m talking about,” the three-star general said. “If it was easy, it would have been done already.”
CNN’s Barbara Starr, who is traveling with the general, said Honore is “very determined to keep this looking like a humanitarian relief operation.”
“A few moments ago, he stopped a truck full of National Guard troops … and said, ‘Point your weapons down, this is not Iraq,’” Starr reported.
First, good for General Honore. Second, WTF? Why do troops need to be told where they are (or where they’re not)? Why weren’t they given that order before they left base?
Things must be bad. Fox News looks good. Geraldo Rivera and Shepard Smith on Hannity and Colmes (slow download). Via Ogged. Geraldo is somewhat melodramatic, hurling his arms about like an Italian explaining there’s a bomb in the windmill. But both reporters want the masses huddled in the Superdome to be sent somewhere out of New Orleans. The incredible part is they can’t be. Smith says there’s a checkpoint on the freeway which is the only way out of the city, and anyone approaching it is sent back. Even with two reporters from a Republican-leaning station saying the same thing, I found this hard to credit.
But the American Red Cross say the same thing.
(Via Gary Farber.)
Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.
Things must be bad for the National Guard via Gary, again.
The troops, members of an elite Special Response Team from the Louisiana Army National Guard, were the first convoy out of what was rapidly becoming a massive military staging ground.
Their mission, simply, is to turn New Orleans into a police state — to “regain the city,” 1st Sgt. John Jewell said.
The truck lurched through the streets, past buildings burning unabated and MPs in gun turrets. When they stopped to gear up for their arrival at the New Orleans Convention Center, where more than 15,000 people had been living in squalor since Katrina, these words echoed — for the first time, one would imagine — through the intersection of Poydras Avenue and Carondelet Street: “Lock and load!”
“Sixteen in the clip!” one Guardsman shouted, a common refrain used to indicate that rifles are fully loaded.
Someone should tell those guys they’re not in Iraq.
Things must be bad, via Gene above, not only is Andrew Sullivan sensible, Jonah Goldberg is too.
So the question is, would the money have been better spent if the Republicans hadn’t gotten their way? And, though it sickens me to say so, that is at best an open question. I have the utmost faith in the kleptocratic and dysfunctional governments of New Orleans and Louisiana to waste and steal money. But, we were supposed to be preparing —at the national level — for a major terrorist attack for the last four years. I just don’t see much evidence of that preparation…
I tried making a similar point in Mick Hartley’s comments. This is what I can neither understand nor quite believe. Suppose Jonah Goldberg is right about “the kleptocratic and dysfunctional governments of New Orleans and Louisiana” (and I’ve no good reason to doubt him), Florida should be prepared for the worst a hurricane can do. The President’s own brother is governor, surely he has an interest in the federal government getting this right. Don’t they have contingency plans? Evacuation procedures? Is there no one in Florida if not in Louisiana who can take charge? It seems not. Well then California is a Republican state, and someone must have plans there for the inevitable earthquakes. Again no. And where is the planning for a tactical nuclear strike we’re supposed to expect from al-Qaeda? What has the administration been doing for the past four years?
Things must be bad… No they’re now unbelievable. Mike Brown, the “Federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue” was pushed from last job “overseeing horse shows.”
And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.
The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.
The agency, run by Brown since 2003, is now at the center of a growing fury over the handling of the New Orleans disaster.
How bad is FEMA? Here are the charities it recommends. You will have heard of the Red Cross. At number three, is “Operation Blessing.” You may not know that that is the charity of Pat Robertson. Give ‘em your money and maybe they’ll assassinate a democratically elected Latin American.
Lindsay Beyerstein dissects the sophistry of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
China Mieville finds Innovative Emergency Management also to be less than honest.
I’ve yet to see much evidence of British support being sent. Canada has been particularly generous. Canadian navy ships, coast guard vessel sail for New Orleans. (Er, via Gary again.)
Back to Gene.
When conservative Republican Senator David Vitter of Louisiana gives the federal government a grade “F" for its response to the disaster so far (an interesting contrast to the Democrat Landrieu), you know that even Bush loyalists in Congress are not going to fall on their swords for him.
On the positive side (unfortunately too late for those who have suffered and died needlessly), there are self-correcting mechanisms in this country, and I expect them to be operating at full strength in the weeks, months and years ahead.
I know this is shrill, but there is one “self-correcting mechanism” that cannot wait. Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Him Now.
These 519 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:28pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 4 September 2005
We're Not In Kansas »
Jamie writes about drawing the line (also posted on The Sharpener) and defining the responsibilities of good government. His point of view is in contrast to Lew Rockwell’s (which I don’t have the patience to criticize now; somehow he manages to ignore all democratic processes entirely).
The BBC asks Katrina response: Has enough been done? and prints responses: mostly from the USA. Hasn’t this web thing filtered through to the colonies yet? Don’t their media allow for commentary this way? Arthur in Kansas gives a response so heartless and counter-factual that I’m not even going to consider decorative adjectives.
I happen to know something about American disaster preparedness and emergency response. In New Orleans, the federal government has done exactly what it is supposed to do as have the other American States. This is the procedure we follow several times every year in hurricane-prone areas like Florida, earthquake prone areas like California, and tornado-prone areas across the Central Plains and South. The first responsibility for emergency response lays with the State, in this case Louisiana, and especially its political subdivision, the City of New Orleans.
Arthur, old son, you’re an idiot. This is a national emergency.
Charles Bird of Obsidian Wings has a very good post titled Rebuild, which quotes extensively from New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize by George Friedman.
During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn’t come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn’t flow out. Alternative routes really weren’t available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.
Charles summarises a lengthy piece so:
In effect, a city is needed at the mouth of the Mississippi, and New Orleans is “it” by default. New Orleans is in our national interest, every bit in our interest as the War Against Militant Islamists.
…
New Orleans must be rebuilt and no small amount of the monies should come from the federal government, all the more so because our national government fell short in protecting the city in the first place.
In the comments, the blogger called Tacitus objects:
I disagree for many reasons — not least because the site of New Orleans per se is simply untenable, as we’ve seen — but I’ll save it for a post later.
More untenable than Las Vegas, more untenable than Los Angeles, San Francisco? (The first two are in desert, the third on a fault line.)
The next commenter also thinks that New Orleans is tenable if the will is there:
I would be fascinated to hear what some experienced Dutch civil engineers would say is necessary to properly rebuild New Orleans and keep it safe from future disasters of this kind.
Never mind the “first responsibility” Arthur, this is bigger than that. The US may have lost a major city, and that may seriously hurt the national economy. You’re going to regret the federal government’s miserly approach to catastrophe. You may not have a heart, but your bank balance can bleed too.
These 238 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:11am GMT Permanent link.
It Saves Time »
John Humphreys via Guido.
Humphrys allegedly told diners Brown was the most boring politician he had ever interviewed and that the problem with Prescott was that “you can’t understand a bloody word he says”. On Peter Mandelson, he reportedly told his audience: “I said to somebody once, ‘Why do you all take an instant dislike to Mandelson?’ and he said, ‘It saves time’.”
Are any of those remotely controversial? The Observer adds that “Last night Mandelson hit back publicly at the presenter.”
Does anyone really need reminded that Mandelson had to leave the Cabinet twice, despite being Tony Blair’s bum-sucker in chief? That he’s dishonest enough to lie to his building society? That his pals include the Hinduja brothers still under investigation in India (but happily for them have succeeded in gaining British citizenship)? That his inspired “Nuremberg rally” in Sheffield cost Neil Kinnock the 1992 election? Now all of Europe reviles him too and Blair refuses to support Mandelson in bra wars. Peter Mandelson, there is a way you can be headline news and give pleasure to millions, fuck off and get eaten by bears.
These 127 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:29pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 5 September 2005
The Earth Opens And Swallows Up All Alike »
The Sunday Telegraph gave over two thirds of its main comment page to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I think an editor made a serious error of taste in illustrating those pieces with a line drawing, supposedly representing the human wreckage, when there are hundreds of photographs more eloquent, and, importantly, also true, rather than imaginative. But first a laugh at the paper’s expense. What is a subeditor to do when regular columnist Niall Ferguson says in his penultimate paragraph:
Natural disasters — please, let’s not call them “Acts of God” — killed many more people than international terrorism that year (according to the State Department, total global casualties due to terrorism in 2003 were 4,271, of whom precisely none were in North America).
And the following article, a written-up interview with Southern belle-lettrist Donna Tartt begins:
What happened in Mississippi and Alabama is an act of God. But what is happening in New Orleans is a human tragedy.
Ms Tartt blames Bush.
But should America have been better prepared for the tragedy that’s taking place now in New Orleans? Definitely. This was a completely preventable disaster. For years, scientists have warned of the immense tragedy and loss of human life that would take place if a Category Four or Five hurricane hit New Orleans. Last year, National Geographic wrote about how unprepared New Orleans was for a hurricane of this magnitude.
They’ve known for years that the levees would be endangered during a Category Four hurricane. They could have — and should have — reinforced the levees; but the Bush administration cut funds from the Corps of Engineers, despite the fact that many scientists thought that the chances of a hurricane like this hitting New Orleans were one in six over the next 50 years. They were only given 20 per cent of the money they needed to maintain the levees. This was a disaster waiting to happen.
The great, great fear was the levee breaking. This is the perennial terror of anybody who has ever lived in or around the Mississippi Delta. When we first heard that a Category Four was heading towards New Orleans, the news struck terror in the hearts of all people who grew up in Louisiana, Mississippi or Alabama. But then we had days of watching it barrel towards us, days when preparations could have been made, lives could have been saved.
Professor Ferguson starts well, gets a little lost, and recovers magnificently. The Good Beginning.
Disasters happen. Two hundred and fifty years ago, on November 1, 1755, the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, was flattened by an earthquake that killed thousands of its inhabitants. Like the hurricane that inundated New Orleans last week, the calamity inspired not only awe at the power of nature and sympathy for the helpless victims, but also all kinds of moral commentary. None was more profound than that of the French philosopher Voltaire.
A dodgy bit in the middle.
According to Leibniz, evil and suffering were integral parts of the order God had ordained. Though they might seem inexplicable to us, they were a vital part of the divine plan; the world would, paradoxically, be less perfect without them.
I wonder how many Southern preachers will venture that argument today, at a time when untold numbers of bodies are lying unburied in the streets of what used to be “the Big Easy”, or floating in the toxic flood unleashed by Hurricane Katrina?
Sadly, quite a few.
The magnificent finish:
Voltaire’s answer was a classic statement of the atheist position. Disasters happen because there is no God. As he wrote to a friend, the Lisbon earthquake was “a cruel piece of natural philosophy! We shall find it difficult to discover how the laws of movement operate in such fearful disasters in the best of all possible worlds — where a hundred thousand ants, our neighbours, are crushed in a second on our ant-heaps-, half dying, undoubtedly in inexpressible agonies, beneath debris from which it was impossible to extricate them… What a game of chance human life is!
“What will the preachers say?” asked Voltaire and he went on to express the hope that mankind might learn a lesson from the indiscriminate cruelty of the earthquake. It ought, he wrote, “to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike”.
…
Having recently shown one of my classes a map projecting the effects of rising sea levels on the eastern seaboard of the United States (guess which city disappears first?), I must confess that this [blaming the US for not signing up to the Kyoto protocol] was also my initial reaction. Only last week, after all, I was fulminating in this column about the way we pollute the world’s oceans. It was only with difficulty that I banished the thought of Katrina as Neptune’s vengeance.
The reality is, of course, that natural disasters have no moral significance. They just happen, and we can never exactly predict when or where. In 2003 — to take just a single year — 41,000 people died in Iran when an earthquake struck the city of Bam, more than 2,000 died in a smaller earthquake in Algeria, and just under 1,500 died in India in a freak heatwave. Altogether, at least 100 Americans were killed that year as a result of storms or forest fires.
Doubtless a few sanctimonious humbugs are preparing essays on evil even now.
The Sunday Torygraph manages two professors writing columns this week. The other was Simon Schama (who makes a point which Mark Lawson in the Guardian received some flak for):
Oh we all knew about the force of evangelicalism, especially in the South; had heard when we travelled there the relentless Bible-punching performances of salvation radio. Apparently there was an America out there that remained in thrall to revelation and miracle; which believed in the sovereign truth of the Gospels, every last word of them. What a hoot. How tremendously quaint.
We wrote them all off as remnants of Picturesque America, destined to fade away as the frontiers of LBJ’s Great Society rolled across the prairie and the Rockies. The notion that the Scopes Trial of 1922 — when the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan appeared for the prosecution in Tennessee in the case of a schoolteacher convicted of teaching evolution — might be revisited, and that the scientific truth of Darwin’s Descent of Man would be challenged 80 years on would have struck us as fabulous, the comeback of flat-earthers.
But that is precisely where America is now, a place where belief counts for more than demonstrated science, a place where the sitting President can give his endorsement to the teaching of “intelligent design” — a fig-leaf for creationism — alongside evolution, as two “theories” of equal persuasiveness. At stake, in what is shaping up to be a momentous kulturkampf, possibly the most momentous in modern American history, is not whether Americans should not be entitled to their own religious beliefs, but rather whether they should be licensed by official fiat to impose them in the schoolroom under the fraudulent guise of an alternative “science”.
And despite the occasional blast from the predictable places in the liberal press, the shock is how feeble the public response has been to the advancing front of dogmatic theism in America; as if to question the pastors, and to insist that the fossil record makes it not a “theory” but a fact that humans are descended from primates and they from species before them, and the world is not 10,000 but some billions of years old is to say we are all “monkeys” and to spit on the flag.
Mark Lawson wrote about “a sort of galloping spiritual inflation"; Professor Schama, “the advancing front of dogmatic theism.” Perhaps it’s how they tell ‘em.
These 189 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:50pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 6 September 2005
Stories Which, Even If They Aren't True, Should Be ... »
Sam Leith in yesterday’s Telegraph:
Extremely pleased, I was, talking to a friend who works for the Metropolitan Police, to hear about one of the measures being taken against road haulage crime. Millions of pounds worth of goods “fall off the back of lorries” every year — but the shoe manufacturers, a couple of years ago, cracked it.
The solution was simple, but brilliant. They now transport left shoes and right shoes in different lorries. I find myself beaming at the thought of the first criminal to be caught out by the ploy. “Rodders, you plonker! How am I supposed to shift 150,000 left shoes?”
I doubt this: I don’t ever remember trying on a pair of shoes which came in two separate boxes, and shoes, being far less one-size-fits-all than other clothes, don’t lend themselves to be sold from the back of a van or from a suitcase, much less carried round a pub. But it’s too good an idea to let pass.
Sam’s description of a former BBC Director General as a “thuggish, washed-up hipster” is also wonderful.
These 80 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:18pm GMT Permanent link.
John Humphreys »
The Telegraph follows the BBC in running online comments from readers: Your view: political football? on John Humphreys.
They also achieve a sort of balance: there are negative comments, the best being right at the end (for now) from Nic Harrison of Muswell Hill.
After many, many years of listening to the Today programme I now have to switch it off if Humphrys is presenting, I have become absolutely sick and tired of hearing his views on events of the day. He now sounds like the elderly relative who tut tuts about the “youth of today”, he is completely out of touch and irritating.
This is why I like him; he’s an entertaining grouch. (Plus, he’s a working-class lad from Cardiff, so I’d always prefer him to Christopher Hitchens and his brother spitting cant from their mouths stuffed with plums and silver spoons.)
Some favourable comments:
Thank God for John Humphrys. He asks the right questions and states the facts as they are. How typical that Labour’s spin machine should try and discredit — silence him.
Tony
Mr Humphrys remains the only part of the BBC that is not an apparatchik of the Labour Party. He can also perhaps be said to be the only effective opposition that the present government have had to deal with since the collapse of the Conservative party.
D Turner
I think it is time the BBC stopped reacting to Government/New Labour “sensitivities”. The BBC should not be accountable to PR merchants like Campbell. If it cannot have journalistic freedom like the independent media it should be privatised. We do not want or need an Izvestia. Gilligan was right. Humphrys is right. Campbell should be exposed as a Stalinesque propagandist. So what does that say about Blair?
Neil Curtin
If Mr Humphrys did not state as a fact that senior politicians are as a rule dishonest, then he ought to have done. ‘Presentation’, ‘spin’ and ‘news management’ are simply neutered terms which amount to dishonesty. Blair plainly lied through his teeth over Iraq — even those in support of the war would agree with that — unless they were a government minister. It goes further; many politicians are now so inured to perpetual deceit that they are unable any longer to differentiate the expedient from the truthful. Ministers, and especially the Prime Minister, frequently express outrage that anyone should question their integrity; I am invariably reminded of an expression employed by my late grandmother with reference to such cries: “And the louder he sang of his integrity, the faster we counted the spoons.”
Simon Jenkinson, University of Exeter
And on and on and on. Hooray for Telegraph.
The editorial makes an interesting point.
The answer to that question goes to the very heart of the BBC’s constitution. If the corporation were truly independent, as it claims to be, then Mr Grade would not have hesitated to support Mr Humphrys. Everybody who has ever listened to the Today programme knows that John Humphrys is one of the least biased interviewers on the BBC. He is every bit as tough on his Conservative and Liberal Democrat interviewees as he is on New Labour and its supporters.
…
He should consider that a BBC that forbids its employees to tell a few home truths about New Labour politicians, for fear of offending the Government, is hardly worth preserving.
I’m not normally with the BBC bashers, precisely because “Everybody who has ever listened to the Today programme knows that John Humphrys is one of the least biased interviewers on the BBC” (or IMO, anywhere). Michael Grade just needs a firm grip.
These 153 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:42pm GMT Permanent link.
We Love Him Whatever His Colour Is »
Ahhhh. The cat that turned pink.
Philip and Joan Worth have been told by vets that Brumas, named after the first polar bear born at London Zoo, is not toxic. But no explanation can be found for the Barbie-pink rinse he acquired after walking near his home in Bratton Clovelly, Devon.
So he’s OK.
Mrs Worth, a retired shop assistant, added: “We’re quite happy to live with him as a pink cat. We love him whatever his colour is.”
A lesson for us all.
These 14 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:53pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 7 September 2005
The Yorkshire Ranter On Christopher Hitchens »
Alex has a really great post on Christopher Hitchens. I missed Newsnight but I watched the web version after reading Ellis Sharp. Alex’s take has grown on me. Hitchens’ statement seems increasingly bizarre as more and more reports come out.
They’re not mostly Americans — really from the isthmus and the Caribbean. It’s a sign the American dream still exists that they are willing to live below sea level for it …
Commenters of every political stripe has said something about the situation before the troops moved in. There are refugees (because that if what they are now — homeless and displaced) everywhere. No one — apart from Saint Christopher — has claimed that they are mostly immigrants. And there’s no evidence that they are. Is “really from the isthmus and the Caribbean” some Republican secret signal for black?
Holland has a large immigrant population. It’s a sign of the Dutch dream that they’re prepared to live below sea level (-7 m at the lowest point). Or something.
David Aaronovitch notes:
After the great Galveston, Texas, hurricane of 1900 the seawalls were built 17ft high and the whole town was raised by something like 8ft. It would have been impossible to do that in New Orleans.
The Dutch seem to manage. It’s that famous European “can do” attitude, against dull American defeatism. The swaps were drained and the levees were built with nineteenth century technology, Can a superpower which is thinking of putting men on Mars really not go better? (I don’t deny that some things are impossible — but I’d like to hear it from an engineer rather than a credulous hack who believes everything politicians tell him.)
See also Aaronovitch Watch for David Aaronovitch’s tantric approach to natural disasters.
These 224 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:27am GMT Permanent link.
You Spin Me Right Round Baby »
I’ve never had a great deal of time for Quentin Letts — until today. He is splendid on John Humphreys.
The new row about Today’s John Humphrys suggests that senior Blairites remain bitter about Radio 4’s flagship and that the political elite remains greatly agitated about the free media. The rumpus has had its comical moments, but it should also have given voters a greater understanding of just how vengeful this Prime Minister’s groupies can be, and just how wary BBC presenters must be to retain their positions.
Astringent Mr Humphrys did a commercial turn in front of an audience of public relations wallahs, regurgitating some mouldy jokes and making Dave Spartish cracks about politicians. If quoted selectively, if stripped of the joshing humour with which they were expressed, these could, with heavy topspin, be made to sound biased against Labour.
This is exactly what happened. The Times, which these days can seem laughably pro-Blair, seized on what should have been little more than a diary column lead. Pages were cleared. Siege engines were loaded. The paper turned the three-month-old yarn into an all-bells-clanging, chorus-kicking, klaxon-hooting major news event.
Mr Letts goes on to name the chief suspects: “a fellow called Baldwin, a notorious Downing Street favourite whom Alastair Campbell and friends have used rather in the way Ancient Romans employed the Cloaca Maxima” who Mr Letts sees as “as a Hogarthian figure, warted and cankered by cunning” and “Ill-washed and prone to speaking Mockney"; Tim Allan, and “the familiar figure of Sir Gerald Kaufman, a veteran Labour MP and BBC hater.”
And the happy ending:
The anti-Humphrys plot has backfired like a circus cannon and soot now blackens the faces of the clowns at the loading end. Mr Allan has been made to look unrelenting, swivel-eyed, driven by ancient hatreds. Why can these people not realise that the British public has had enough of such low manoeuvres? Why can Mr Allan not drop it?
As for our friend Baldwin, he found his very own newspaper all at once tiring of its Blairite reputation and suddenly running a partly pro-Humphrys leader article. To see The Times dumping on its reporter in this way was like seeing a coyote chew off its own leg to escape a trap.
…
Public reaction on the BBC website message boards has been running heavily in the Today man’s favour. It has been almost one-way traffic against Labour and its skulking propagandists. The only anti-Humphrys postings I have been able to find have had have a distinctly Campbellonian flavour. Is it possible that mad Alastair, whinnying and twitching with a desire for revenge, has been sitting at some computer terminal in north London, tapping out furious e-mails about his old foe? Oh, I do hope so. Call the men in white coats!
Read the rest scale: it’s all good. The Telegraph front page always carries a graph of sales against the sad wreck of the Times. Really, the Thunderbox is no longer the paper it was in the days of Bernard Levin. Now it’s dreck for the stupider public school types and the jetsam of the aristocracy.
These 152 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:36am GMT Permanent link.
Raw Sewage, Bacteria, Heavy Metals, Pesticides And Toxic Chemicals »
John Cole calls the The Looming Environmental Disaster “[j]ust another angle to this never-ending mess.”
While the human and economic toll of Hurricane Katrina continued to mount, New Orleans was beginning to pump back into Lake Pontchartrain the floodwaters that had inundated the city.
But this is not the same water that flooded the city. What started flowing back into the lake on Monday and continued spilling into it Tuesday is laced with raw sewage, bacteria, heavy metals, pesticides and toxic chemicals, Louisiana officials said on Tuesday.
Whether or not the accelerating pumping of this brew from city streets into coastal waters poses a threat to the ecosystems and fisheries in the brackish bay remains to be seen, the officials said.
From the New York Times: Water Returned to Lake Contains Toxic Material. You don’t have be a green to be concerned that the water in the local lake had human corpses decomposing in it until recently. The water needs pumped out now and these concerns, which, at any other time, would be a major political issue, have to be passed over.
There is some hope:
Some scientists outside government tended to agree that the risk of long-term damage to the coastal waters was not high. …
[Frank T. Manheim, a former geochemist for the United States Geological Survey who teaches at George Mason University and was a co-author of a 2002 report on pollution issues in the lake] said that most of the long-lived industrial pollutants that can accumulate in organisms and work their way up the food chain have largely been phased out.
Note however that the “risk … was not high” sounds good, but “long-term damage” is something you want at very, very low risk. Also “long-term damage” is not a high risk, so what of medium-term damage, and so on?
These 119 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:00pm GMT Permanent link.
More John Cole »
There’s a cliché about news being instant these days, so we’re more in contact with “the world” than we used to be. John Cole has a very good post Calm Down And Let’s Get This Right on errors in the press on all sides. The only conclusion is that you can’t trust anything you read. Maybe FEMA aren’t entirely incompetent; maybe there have been no rapes. I’m certain now that the violence was overstated (and much of what was reported seems to have been rumour), so much of the rest seems very doubtful. What seems certain is that the city is full of polluted water; there are people who are seriously ill for lack of medicine; and that much of this was predicted — and not by lone crackpots with doomsday theories, but credibly by scientists. And they do these things better in Cuba.
These 144 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:27pm GMT Permanent link.
See How They Spin »
Ah vacillation. Jim Henley put it well in Katrina Really IS Like September 11:
… Katrina has chiefly served to confirm people in their previously held views.
Maybe it is unfair — unethical even — to blame the federal administration for the death toll following Hurricane Katrina. Some things clearly are not Bush’s fault, and maybe no conceivable administration would have strengthened the levees or drilled the denizens in Cuba-like evacuation procedures. Maybe chaos is a part of freedom.
Still, it’s possible to have fun with John “I’m not gay” Hindrocket and the Powertools boys.
The mainstream media’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and the disasters in New Orleans is a disgrace, possibly the worst instance yet of media bias.
Ah yes, the old “mainstream media.” It’s a lot like my “all lawyers are slavering monsters of greed” theory. Every time I see a story in the press which features lawyers, there they go taking money from anyone, just like whores or taxi drivers, the difference being that taxi drivers and whores don’t defend the oppression of Muslim women, or let murderers roam the streets. And if a lawyer does something good, like saves a drowning child, it can show that lawyers are finally coming to their senses.
There should be advert that says, “Feeling persecuted? Whole world out to get you? Conspiracies everywhere? Are the papers printing lies just to discredit you? Call a psychiatrist. They’re in the phonebook under ‘P.’ We know it’s confusing, but it means only educated patients reach us.”
I’m parting company here with two people whose judgment I respect. Michelle Malkin has recommended that President Bush fire FEMA head Michael Brown. Brown is, apparently, a political appointee with few qualifications for the job beyond general competence and management skill. This is hardly unusual in Washington; the conventional assumption is that staff who report to the head of an agency furnish the necessary expertise. As seems to have happened; FEMA’s response to hurricanes last year was widely praised.
There’s a scary thought: Michelle Malkin may have been kidnapped and a less-cracked dopple-ganger has been put in her place. Note the word “apparently” and the justification.
FEMA Director Singled Out by Response Critics (via Farber):
Michael D. Brown has been called the accidental director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, caricatured as the failed head of an Arabian horse sporting group who was plucked from obscurity to become President Bush’s point man for the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.
Few qualifications? Check. “[G]eneral competence and management skill"? WTF? What does that even mean? As to what I think of managers as species see Dilbert. “This is hardly unusual in Washington; the conventional assumption is that staff who report to the head of an agency furnish the necessary expertise.” See Dilbert. I accept that when politicians run departments, they’re there as generalists whom specialists report to, but in all other circumstances why should the head guy be the most clueless? What does he add? How does he earn his salary? It may be common in Washington: that may be a good reason to be cynical about the federal government.
“As seems to have happened; FEMA’s response to hurricanes last year was widely praised.” Ho for Google! FEMA hurricane 2004. The first two results are from FEMA’s own site. The next two are from the White House site. I skipped these. The fifth result is FEMA paid for at least 203 funerals not related to 2004 hurricanes in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
The federal government used hurricane aid money to pay funeral expenses for at least 203 Floridians whose deaths were not caused by last year’s storms, the state’s coroners have concluded.
The deaths include a Palm Beach Gardens millionaire recovering from heart surgery who died two days before Hurricane Frances; a Miami baby not yet born when the storm arrived; and a Port Charlotte man who died of cirrhosis and heart failure five months after Hurricane Charley.
…
FEMA funeral assistance also covered six suicides, including that of Delbert M. Copeland, 42, of Lady Lake in central Florida. He died Sept.7 in the Withlacoochee State Forest after shooting himself in the head. “Distraught over business indebtedness,” coroner records say.
Ten people were not in Florida at the time of their deaths, including Brant Moskowicz, 40, of Boca Raton. He died in a head-on collision Sept. 7 in Ashburn, Ga., when the driver of a Ford Ranger crossed a median and hit his Nissan Altima, according to traffic reports.
I can’t find a credible reason why FEMA would give money away like this. The obvious effect is that it would raise the count of hurricane-related deaths, and I can’t think why an agency would want to do that.
The next article is Disaster in the making which on the Google results page looks like supporting Hindrocket’s thesis.
FEMA’s relatively quick response to the hurricanes has thus far won mostly high marks from Florida officials, who remember well a time when the disaster agency seemed the last party to show up after catastrophes. In addition, President Bush has paid multiple visits to assure storm victims they will get whatever help is needed, and he promptly secured more than $2 billion from Congress to fund Florida’s recovery.
As storms continue to batter the Panhandle, no one would call Florida lucky. But with national elections just around the corner, the hurricanes could scarcely have hit at a better time or place for obtaining federal disaster assistance. “They’re doing a good job,” one former FEMA executive says of the Bush administration’s response efforts. “And the reason why they’re doing that job is because it’s so close to the election, and they can’t fuck it up, otherwise they lose Florida—and if they lose Florida, they might lose the election.”
Oh. And some background to the changes from early 2001:
The [Bush] administration also made a failed attempt to cut the federal percentage of large-scale natural disaster preparedness expenditures. Since the 1990s, the federal government has paid 75 percent of such costs, with states and municipalities funding the other 25 percent. The White House’s attempt to reduce the federal contribution to 50 percent was defeated in Congress.
At the same time, Allbaugh gave off contradictory signals on the value of mitigation, on one occasion chastising a community for doing too little to prepare in advance for disaster. In April 2001, he caused a stir when he asked Iowans, then in the midst of massive flood recovery efforts, “How many times will the American taxpayer have to step in and take care of this flooding, which could be easily prevented by building levees and dikes?”
A month later, the Washington Post reported that the Bush administration’s moves against mitigation programs were causing worries in disaster-prone states. “Statehouse critics of the proposed cuts contend that in the long run they would cost the government more because many communities will be unable to afford preventative measures and as a result will require more relief money when disasters strike,” the newspaper noted.
By ignoring the logic of fully-funded mitigation and other preparedness programs, Bush’s first FEMA director earned some scorn among emergency specialists. “Allbaugh? He was inept,” says Claire Rubin, a senior researcher at George Washington University’s Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management. “He was chief of staff for Bush in Texas—that was his credential. He didn’t have an emergency management background, other than the disasters he ran into in Texas, and he wasn’t a very open guy. He didn’t want to learn anything.”
There’s Hindrocket’s management style again. Put a pig in charge, give him a nice office and fat salary, but don’t expect leadership. How about the new guy?
Michael Brown, a college friend of Allbaugh’s who had served as FEMA’s general counsel, was recruited to head the agency, which would now be part of the DHS’s Emergency and Response Directorate. When the reorganization took effect on March 1, 2003, Brown assured skeptics that under the new arrangement, the country would be served by “FEMA on steroids"—a faster, more effective disaster agency.
But the merger into DHS has compounded the agency’s problems, says FEMA employee and union president Pleasant Mann. “Before, we reported straight to the White House, and now we’ve got this elaborate bureaucracy on top of us, and a lot of this bureaucracy doesn’t think what we’re doing is that important, because terrorism isn’t our number one,” he said. “The biggest frustration here is that we at FEMA have responded to disasters like Oklahoma City and 9/11, and here are people who haven’t responded to a kitchen fire telling us how to deal with terrorism. You know, there were a lot of people who fell down on the job on 9/11, but it wasn’t us.”
But “people who haven’t responded to a kitchen fire telling [you] how to deal with terrorism” is “hardly unusual in Washington.” Get with the program! Oh Hindrocket, only you could make Michelle Malkin seem reasonable.
These 554 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:41pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 8 September 2005
I Get Something Right »
Yesterday, without giving it any thought, I used the word “refugees” for the displaced in (from?) Louisina. I added a parenthetical very ad hoc justification, “because that if what they are now — homeless and displaced” because I was a little uneasy about it, but nothing better came to mind.
Now Gary Farber has a detailed consideration of the word in the context of Hurricane Katrina. The New York Sun: Storm’s Wake Includes Spat on ‘Refugee’ starts with those against the word.
Those who object to using “refugees” include President Bush, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Al Sharpton, major relief agencies, and some major news outlets, such as the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, CNN, and NPR.
Mr. Bush, who has been heavily criticized for the federal government’s handling of emergency relief efforts, spoke out yesterday against the word’s widespread usage in the press.
“The people we’re talking about are not refugees,” the president said, according to the Associated Press. “They are Americans, and they need the help and love and compassion of our fellow citizens.”
Mr. Bush’s statement came after African-American civil rights leaders and politicians, particularly Rev. Jackson and Rev. Sharpton, voiced objections to what they see as a racially offensive term. Rev. Jackson, speaking Monday on CNN, told his interviewer, Lou Dobbs, it was “utterly distasteful” for the press to call the victims refugees. “In fact, they are citizens,” Rev. Jackson said.
Unusually President Bush is being (IMO overly-) PC here. My estimation of Rev. Jackson is not high. Why are “citizens” and “refugees” exclusive? Surely “refugee” does not carry overtones of “black” — what about European Jews fleeing the Nazis? or the Pilgrim Fathers? Rev. Jackson seems to go out of his way to take offence. You can imagine him in a cinema, standing up and turning to the person in the seat behind, “Are you looking at me?”
So the NY Sun asks a lexicographer:
While it may offend some, the word refugee accurately describes the condition of Americans who fled the hurricane and sought refuge in other cities and states, the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, Jesse Sheidlower, told The New York Sun.
“These people are Americans, of course they are. But they are in an extremely difficult situation,” Mr. Sheidlower said. “And calling them guests doesn’t change that. Calling them Americans doesn’t change that, either. They really do need a lot of help.”
Guests? Bleah! Gary finds other sources, and points out that some refugees themselves are offended by the term. It’s their right, but having lost your home, your livelihood (in all probability), and been forced to live in Houston, a word isn’t much more to bear. As the NY Sun and Tom Scudder in Gary’s comments point out the UNHCR uses the definition “a refugee is essentially any person who is outside his home country owing to well-founded fear of persecution for reasons, of race, religion, nationality or political opinion” but that is a specific legal use of the word for a organisation; it’s not binding on the rest of us. And a headline like “Soup Kitchen for Americans” is more confusing than enlightening.
These 290 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:33am GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 9 September 2005
Some People Should Be Just Shot »
Norm calls the views of “Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a former chief rabbi and the spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas movement” Depraved belief and quotes:
“He (Bush) perpetrated the expulsion (of Jews from Gaza). Now everyone is mad at him. This is his punishment for what he did to Gush Katif, and everyone else who did as he told them, their time will come, too,” Yosef said.
There is a special religious understanding of the word “perpetrated” which apparently means “did nothing to stop.” In the world view of all the monotheistic religions, “their time will come, too” is a trivial truth; using it in this way — ‘their time will come’ but ‘my time (and thy time, if thou art lucky) will not’ is practically blasphemous.
Whether because he didn’t read any further, or because he regards justifications of that kind statement as specious, Norm didn’t quote the rabbi’s defender.
A Shas official, Tzvika Yaacobson, did not deny Yosef made the comments but said they were taken out of context and that people were misinterpreting the rabbi.
“He has a special style he uses when he speaks to the people,” said Yaacobson. “He tells jokes that you may like, and may not like. When you just tell the joke, you are ignoring the connotation.”
This “special style” defence is used whenever a cleric of any persuasion uses “hate speech” as current slang has it. It’s poetry, not inflammatory.
Yosef singled out black victims, saying “they don’t study Torah.” He used the word “Kushim,” which in the Bible refers to an ancient African people but in vernacular Hebrew is considered derogatory.
George Bush doesn’t study Torah. In Saudi Arabia (chosen because I can’t remember any recent wars or natural disasters there) they don’t study Torah — or even admit Jews. It must be the way he tells them.
He has called on the Israel Defense FOrces to “joyfully” annihilate Arabs with rockets, and he caused a huge uproar when he stated that the six million Jews who perished in the Nazi Holocaust died because they were reincarnations of sinners in previous generations.
I’m sure the rabbi and his followers would say that my religious education is bastardized (OK, they wouldn’t use that word); but I’m certain that reincarnation is an Eastern concept which has no place in the Torah. This is the sort of embarrassing mash of spiritual concepts you get from Glenn Hoddle, who at least has the excuse of not being particularly educated.
Rabbi Yosef isn’t the only one. (I did say that Niall Ferguson was over-optimistic to suggest that few “Southern preachers” — I’m getting to them — wouldn’t venture the argument that Hurricane Katrina was party of God’s plan.) Sadly, No (I’ve decided that I don’t want to link to the article they discuss) reports on “Rabbi Joseph Garlitzky, head of the international Chabad Lubavitch movement’s Tel Aviv synagogue.”
“We don’t have prophets who can tell us exactly what are God’s ways, but when we see something so enormous as Katrina, I would say [President] Bush and [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice need to make an accounting of their actions, because something was done wrong by America in a big way.”
Again, really what has America done here? Sadly, No!:
So while God didn’t see fit to attack America with natural disasters back when we were enslaving Africans or killing Native Americans, but He did send a hurricane to kill people when we supported the evacuation of settlers who were illegally living on occupied land. Makes sense to me.
Next things get weird, if you think blaming America demonstrated the abandonment of logic try:
Now, Garlitzky and many others here and on the Internet are pointing to what they call eerie similarities between Katrina and the evacuation of Gush Katif, including parallels in events, names and numbers:
-Close to 10,000 Jews were expelled from their homes in the Gaza Strip and parts of northern Samaria. Katrina’s death toll is now expected to reach at least 10,000.
-America’s population ratio to Israel is about 50:1. Ten thousand Jews who lost their Gaza homes is the equivalent of about 500,000 Americans who are now reported to be displaced as result of Katrina.
So it’s 10,000 deaths for 10,000 expulsions AND 50,000 deaths for … 10,000 expulsions. You have to admire the big guy’s smarts.
The connections have caused a firestorm of speculation on Internet blogs and in chat rooms.
In a Jerusalem Newswire op-ed discussing the similarities just before Katrina made landfall, writer Stan Goodenough commented, “Is this some sort of bizarre coincidence? Not for those who believe in the God of the Bible and the immutability of His Word. What America is about to experience is the lifting of God’s hand of protection, the implementation of His judgment on the nation most responsible for endangering the land and people of Israel.
I like “What America is about to experience is the lifting of God’s hand of protection.” I’ll come back to that.
Perhaps the first to publicly connect Katrina to the Gaza evacuation was famed Israeli conspiracy theorist Barry Chamish, who sent a mass e-mail noting, “GUsh is like GUlf, and KATif is like KATrina. If you take ‘KAT’ from KATif and KATrina, you are left with ‘IF’ and ‘RAIN.’ If you support Gush Katif evacuation, it will rain.”
Perhaps you’re left with “IF” and “RINA.” Conspiracy theorists are famed? Gee Agent Mulder, who knew?
At last a voice of sense!
But Rabbi Mordechai Greenwald, leader of a Jerusalem synagogue, said connections between the Gaza evacuation and Katrina should not be made.
Hooray for Rabbi Greenwald!
“No rabbi can tell you why such a disaster struck,” Greenwald told WND. “Doing so, making these statements, is dangerous and counterproductive. There have been debates the past 50 years for the reason of the Holocaust, and we still don’t know what it was about. Some things we are not meant to know.”
Greenwald said the religious leaders who publicly blame Katrina on U.S. support of the withdrawal “do not speak for the majority of rabbis. We cannot say who is being punished for what.”
Oh, back to the Holocaust — and the reason. A couple of entries on from the post I opened with Norm considers a better methodology for getting to grips with the ‘reason’ of the Holocaust: Following the absurd.
Gary Farber on the Souther preachers I promised earlier.
A confrontation this morning between an East Texas church and an evacuee from New Orleans. It centers around a sign out front of Woodland Hills Baptist Church on Old Jacksonville Road in Tyler, about a mile inside the loop. Some say the message ["The Big Easy Is The Modern Day Sodom And Gomorroh"] is offensive.
Did I mention the Holocaust being some sort of judgement? I believe I did. And did I mention “the lifting of God’s hand of protection” as well? Uh-huh.
Pastor Bennett says, “Anybody that’s ever visited New Orleans, the very name its self — Big Easy — denotes that it’s easy to find sin there.”
Pastor Bennett says the sign, is a sign of the times. “The purpose of the sign is to wake American up to the fact that America is going away from God. New York City’s 9/11 was a call of judgment and New Orlean’s horrible incident was judgment on a wicked city.”
So al-Qaeda are God’s judgement as well? What about Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake, the Chicago fire? the Civil War? I despair, I really do.
NB The title of this post is intentionally hyperbolic. I’m not advocating the shooting of anyone.
Coda: also through Gary, yet more tangled religious crap. Churches React to Controversial Sign:
Dr. Mike Dent at Marvin United Methodist Church says, “I would want them to know what they have experienced here is God’s gracious compassion through his people, that God’s love is for us in the midst of the storm. God doesn’t create the storm, but brings us through the storm to comfort us and to care for us and lead us forward in a very difficult time for these people.”
God creates storms; God doesn’t create storms. Can’t they get their stories straight?
These 538 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:07am GMT Permanent link.
So, So, So True »
Via Explananda.
Does Sky count as the MSM?
These 10 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:51pm GMT Permanent link.
Brownie, You're Doing A Heck Of A Job »
Telegraph: Brown removed from Katrina relief role. Also, CNN.
These 9 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:56pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 10 September 2005
Hindrocket Changes His Mind »
On September 4, in A New Low for the MSM?, Hindrocket wrote:
[Michael] Brown is, apparently, a political appointee with few qualifications for the job beyond general competence and management skill. This is hardly unusual in Washington; the conventional assumption is that staff who report to the head of an agency furnish the necessary expertise.
My emphasis. Yesterday, when his colleague Paul Mirengoff (aka “the one without a phallic pseudonym") noted:
FEMA director Michael Brown has been recalled to Washington, D.C. Coast Guard Vice Adm. … The recall follows a Time Magazine report that Brown padded his resume.
Hindrocket chose to add:
Good Lord. That resume was padded? It’s hard to imagine how it could have been much weaker.
Now, it’s no surprise that Brown was a “political appointee” because that’s how the system works — so the “apparently” must have referred to the “few qualifications.”
Oh yes, last Sunday, Hindrocket continued:
In any event, whatever the wisdom of Brown’s appointment in hindsight, firing him now would be an admission that FEMA performed poorly in the current crisis—an assertion that is constantly repeated, but for which I have seen, at this point, little hard evidence. There will be time enough for sorting out, in a rational environment, the pros and cons of FEMA’s efforts; firing Brown now would accomplish nothing but to uselessly fan the flames of hysteria.
Good job his padded resume gave the government an excuse to recall him, isn’t it?
These 80 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:55pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 11 September 2005
Best Thing I've Read All Week »
That’s Simon Winchester’s account of the responses to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
The San Andreas last ruptured in 1906, and in doing so all but destroyed the city of San Francisco — the last time that a great American city was wrecked by a caprice of nature.
The tectonic stresses that have built up below the Bay in the century since are unimaginably huge - and while it may well be technically possible that the San Andreas is the next fault to rupture, science is convinced that will in fact be the Hayward - it is much more likely than not that a quake of Magnitude 7 or more will occur on it between now and 2020. And that truly will be the big one: it will cause vast damage, it will kill thousands, will cost billions. Of all of this there is now no doubt.
Just so you know, this is a read-the-whole-thing-er, I’m just going to quote the bits I’d like to be able to find again in the future.
A century ago, things went pretty well. After it struck at 5.12am on April 18, 1906, tough men rose quickly to the occasion, took stock and took charge. A general, Frederick Funston, acting on his own authority (the quake brought down all of San Francisco’s communications, such as they then were) had troops deployed within two and a half hours.
The city mayor, at whose disposal he placed them, Eugene Schmitz, was merely a violinist and a hack in the local political machine - yet responded brilliantly to the challenge, warned looters they would be shot, ordered up army dynamite to create firebreaks (the city was ruined by endless fires, much as New Orleans has been wrecked by ceaseless floods), commandeered boats to take telegrams to cable offices that were working and sent out urgent cries for help.
America read those wires, and dropped everything. The entire nation was galvanised into a frenzy of thrilled assistance. The first relief train, from Los Angeles, steamed into the Berkeley marshalling yards by eleven that night. The navy and the Revenue Cutter service, like the army, not waiting for orders from back East (though they came, with exemplary promptitude), ran fireboats and rescue ferries. The powder companies worked overtime to make explosives.
Once Washington learned of the calamity, so the US Congress met in emergency session to pass sufficient legislation to pay all imaginable bills, and at 4am next day.
… It was all done intelligently and compassionately, and remains a relief operation of which the nation deserved to feel proud.
The recent operation is not one to be proud of.
The notion of America as the most glowing example of a can-do country has been completely dismantled. On every level, the response to Katrina has been a devastating failure — slow, incompetent, racist, unimaginative, mired in bureaucratic quagmires and sheer stupidity.
Simon Winchester then quotes a “Scots friend” who has just come back from Vietnam, where literacy is 98% — in Louisiana and Mississipi it is only 70% — who says that the authorities do not have the intellectual energy or the imagination to cope when things get bad. I enjoy “Americans are stoopid” stories as much as the next European.
There are some who suppose it will not in fact be California that poses the next major crisis — that there will be a huge earthquake in Missouri (for which there is ample evidence — and yet no preparation at all), or the eruption of the very dangerous super-volcano lurking under Yellowstone Park in Wyoming. Both are interesting possibilities, and there are arguments for and against these two locations vying with the Hayward fault to be the next tectonic danger zone.
But it was a remark once made to me in all seriousness when I was recently discussing these possibilities before an audience, that brought home the intellectual vacuum which, increasingly, seems to dominate so many arguments over serious issues.
I had remarked that geological evidence now suggested that an eruption of a new supervolcano under Yellowstone was unlikely to take place for the next 250,000 years - a hiccup in geological time, maybe, but long enough, I said, to ensure that mankind would be well and truly extinct.
The hall fell silent, as if this hadn’t been taken on board. Yes, I repeated. There’s no need to worry about being destroyed. For, by then, we humans will have gone. We will all be extinct. And then a woman put up her hand and protested, in utter seriousness. “What? Even Americans?” she said. “Oh, no. There is no way that Americans will ever be extinct. Ever.”
Ah yes. If God himself had not been on our side, If God himself had not been on our side.
The Sunday Telegraph is now officially (nb this word means nothing whatever; it just sounds good) the only intelligent Sunday paper. Unlike its rivals, it doesn’t carry a horoscope — only Psychic Psmith (doubtless because of editor Dominic Lawson’s Augustinian distaste for the bogus) — and now it’s devoted a whole page to Pastafarianism.
Stupidest remark of the week is from Liam Fox and quoted by Matthew d’Ancona.
When Liam Fox met his old friend George W Bush last month, he challenged him to devote more energy to the promotion of meaningful democracy in Muslim states. “Islam gave us astronomy, Mr President,” the shadow foreign secretary said, “but it took the West to put a man on the moon.” This snappy slogan got Mr Bush’s full attention. “That’s a good line!” he exclaimed.
Er, Islam gave us algebra, but it took a unitarian Christian apostate to give us calculus? Or Islam gave us algebra, but it took an agnostic Jew to give us relativity? But astronomy, tell that to the pre-Socratics who knew the earth went round the sun, as well as Ptolemy and Galileo. Good job Dr Fox said “the West” rather than “Nazi Werner von Braun” though.
These 264 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:47pm GMT Permanent link.
Tim Allan »
I can’t improve on Guido’s term for PR Guru Tim Allan. Mr Fawkes doesn’t give a link to Simon Hoggart’s splendid Tim Allan story:
As I have said, if you want to see Humphrys really getting critical about New Labour ministers, you should watch his body language when he’s interviewing a minister who is somewhere else. The eyeball rolling, the cranking of an imaginary gramophone, the incredulous slaps on the forehead (his own, not Jim Naughtie’s or Caroline Quinn’s); the message is a constant: “Why is this person telling me lies?”
There seems to be absolutely nothing New Labour won’t do to protect their people from any criticism. (What do they think they might achieve? If Humphrys were to say: “Ministers are doing a good job in trying circumstances,” would anyone believe him?)
My colleague Michael White knew how to cope with Tim Allan, once Alastair Campbell’s deputy, and the man who leaked the tape of the Humphrys speech to the Times. Mr Allan had come into our office at Westminster to moan about the Guardian’s insufficiently reverential attitude to Tony Blair once too often.
“You can fuck off,” said Mike, thoughtfully. Mr Allen looked hurt. “I didn’t realise you were going to take it so seriously,” he said.
“I am not taking it seriously,” said Mike. “If I were taking it seriously you would have been through that window 10 minutes ago. Now fuck off!”
It worked, too, in that he did.
Good for Humphrys! Working-class Cardiff boy and pretty much one-man opposition to the current shower. (Will Mr Hoggart’s sister paper get the subhead “You have to be stupid to work here” with the redesign? It deserves it. Try Fatso-for-war If nothing is eventually found, I — as a supporter of the war — will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again or today’s idiot Mary Riddell.)
The Telegraph has several defenders of John Humphreys. Former editor William Deedes:
Seen in the right light, Michael Grade, chairman of the BBC, is in deeper trouble than John Humphrys. All Humphrys did was to make a comic speech to a private gathering which, when leaked, upset politicians. Grade, instead of upholding the independence of the corporation, which is his first duty, by standing up for a distinguished member of his staff, showed himself susceptible to government feelings.
That’s more culpable than Humphrys’s speech.
Columnist, Sextator editor, Tory MP Boris Johnson says Humphrys spoke the truth: that’s why Labour got itself in a spin.
What was so “misguided and inappropriate” in the remarks of John Humphrys? There is nothing controversial in saying that Gordon Brown is on the dull side in debate. The Chancellor prides himself on his dullness. If anything, Humphrys was too mild. Most of us who have endured Gord’s Budget speeches would happily pay Humphrys’s exorbitant after-dinner rate not to hear another word from the man, and as for the suggestion that John Prescott is difficult to understand, it is as blindingly uncontroversial as saying that Tony Blair has a simpering grin.
What enraged the Labour Party was nothing to do with Brown or Prescott. The reason they are persecuting Humphrys is that they still cannot face the reality that the BBC was right about Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair, and the sexed-up dossier about Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
And we’re not going to forget — or forgive — those lies, are we readers?
The bright side of the Humphreys story is this: “Mr [Tim] Allan told The Sunday Telegraph last night that he regretted his role in the affair.” I bet he does.
It was a good week for unlikely pairings: Sir Mick Jagger and Sir John Major shot the breeze about cricket on Radio 4; Nicholas Soames and John Humphrys were both admonished by the humour police, those Left-wing guardians of the nation’s finer feelings.
Soames has been sledging female Labour MPs in the Commons, apparently, making disparaging jokes about them under his breath. The boot-faced former Lib Dem MP Jackie Ballard has complained, saying that Soames ought to be sacked for being sexist. Humphrys, meanwhile, got it in the neck for making “light-hearted” comments after dinner about how boring Gordon Brown is, and how Labour politicians “couldn’t give a bugger” whether they lied or not. The BBC’s Director-General bowed to Labour pressure and publicly rebuked Humphrys, telling him his comments were “inappropriate”.
…
The fact that Mosley insisted on calling himself “the Leader” was enough to have the general population sniggering - and calling him “the Bleeder”. Labour might consider this: if you want another Mosley, go around gagging jokers like Soames and Humphrys.
If memory serves, back in the Major years, the government started giving off-the-record press briefings. Only the Independent refused to go along with this practice and boycotted the meetings. It soon fell into line: it had to. Now Tim Allan briefs against a well-liked broadcaster, and he’s immediately outed. Remember when Alastair Campbell tried to get heavy with Newsnight and they let everyone know that his email included “fuck off and cover something important, you twats!” What can be next? Whenever Tim Allan or one of his legion of pockmarked sycophantic lily-livered bandicoots (I used some help) pays a visit to a paper “to moan about its insufficiently reverential attitude to Tony Blair” perhaps he’ll be videoed. Broadcast live on Channel 4! You won’t believe the things that nice Tony Blair’s goons say when they think they’re off the record.
Update (13/9/05): the first two sentences of the above paragraph are total rubbish. See this correction. Thanks to Anthony Wells.
Humphrys demands compensation for leak. With any luck, Tim Allan will regret ever leaving the happy slime of his pond.
These 340 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:55pm GMT Permanent link.
Simply Terrible »
Worse things happen at sea, or on land in the case of New Orleans. But the loss to the interwebnet thing world of Arthur Silber is pretty bad. If someone asked, “Would you rather a) be eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex or b) Arthur Silber stop blogging"? I’d have to think, I can tell you. Arthur is, that is was, and will be again, one of the most powerful, thoughtful, funny, and original bloggers ever. OF COURSE those traits aren’t appreciated. As Arthur says
Some of the bloggers who make decent amounts of money through ads write what I will politely call swill. Sometimes it’s even vicious racist filth. And they make a living at it. I’ve offered something different.
I think he means the Little Green Fedayeen.
Condolences and appeals can be left on Lindsay Beyerstein’s blog.
These 102 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:27pm GMT Permanent link.
Headbangers »
Tim Worstall linked to Sam Leith’s excellent piece yesterday, but that’s no reason I shouldn’t as well.
My more learned colleagues read Hansard as others read Harry Potter; refer to the committee of backbench Tory headbangers by its pet name, “the Twenty-Two"; hail Black Rod, for all I know, as “Rodders"; can tell the difference between a White Paper and a Green Paper; and perk up at phrases like “Tariff Reform” and “Imperial Preference”.
And this is the Torygraph! You can imagine how that arse-licker Tim Allan would react if it were the government Sam was talking about. Is this the language of deference NuLab™ ‘Respeck’®?
I look at these characters. David Cameron? I loved Aliens, and the second half of Titanic was OK — but is he really prime minister material?
Nah. Ridley Scott’s Alien was class, but the sequels are unspeakable. It’s a miracle that any film could be worse than Aliens; but David Fincher and that Frog guy somehow managed it. I don’t even want to know his name. I abandoned Alien 4 Mulaic (or whatever it was called) faster than I give up on an Oliver Kamm piece.
There is a myth that members of the Conservative Party are a minority of bigots in a tolerant society. Quite the opposite is the case. It was the Conservatives who gave Iain Duncan Smith a chance to be in charge, when nobody else in the country would let him run so much as a whelk-stall.
Bring us your bald, they seem to say, your huddled masses; your Europe-obsessed Ancient Mariners; your men with hairy ears and no experience of shopping at Asda; your plutocrats and aristocrats and your muddled asses yearning to be free-market. We will give them a home. This is altogether commendable. But it butters no parsnips.
The problem isn’t that the Tories are bigots: the problem is that they have to persuade the bigots to vote for them.
And Sam knows which Tory is the only one I could vote for.
Ken Clarke eats pork pies, smokes cigars, and strikes me as the sort of man who would break wind loudly in a crowded lift and shout: “Look out! Who stepped on a duck?” He’s not Demosthenes, exactly, but he’s a start.
Come on, Ken. I’d vote for that.
These 129 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:51pm GMT Permanent link.
Some Good News »
Telegraph: Blair plans reshuffle to put Blunkett back at the Home Office. Sure Charlie is a clown, but hooray! Davy’s coming back.
Now every press conference he gives can start with serious questions. “Whose wife are you shagging now, Dave?” “Which is the best Metallica album to play down the phone late at night?” “Are you as sure about this as you were that Mrs Quinn’s second baby was yours?” “Don’t you think this [whatever his current fuck up is] is an even less subtle hint than Kimberley Fortier’s changing her name to her husband’s?” “David, do you agree that since you were Education Secretary, schooling has become a joke in this country?” “David, which do you think is more likely: George Bush personally capturing Osama bin Laden or you successfully suing for being called a vindictive authoritarian bully?” “Was making Sheffield a nuclear-free zone a good idea?”
What larks we can look forward to.
Further Blunkett related fun. Scotsman: Blunkett was ‘anti-police’ says Stevens; Guardian: Bully Blunkett leaked stories about me, claims ex-Met boss.
Bring back, oh, bring back my Blunkett to me. I need a good laugh.
These 189 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:22pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 12 September 2005
Please, Please, Please Bring Back David Blunkett »
I forgot in my post on David Blunkett yesterday to mention his wonderful success as education secretary: David Blunkett’s Online university ‘squandered £50m’. Has Mr Blunkett never heard of the Open University, created by a cough real Labour government, and what do you know, online as well? But then David Blunkett just likes creating trendy half-assed ideas which cost the earth and he hopes to have shifted round the cabinet table when the shit hits the fan.
Yesterday we learned that David Blunkett was ‘anti-police’ says Stevens. Today brings the glad tidings that not a picogram of the once and future Home Secretary’s bad judgement has gone missing while he was on the back benches. Now his biographer One of us is a liar, Mr Blunkett…and I can prove it’s not me. Tapes that expose the former Home Secretary’s deceit. Take it away Stephen:
Lord Stevens’s memoirs are a clinical demolition job on the former Home Secretary, not least because they expose Mr Blunkett’s willingness to tell an outright lie — about me — to defend his position.
Stephen Pollard recounts events he described in his biography of Mr Blunkett.
From all the interviews I conducted for the book, the most oft-cited of his characteristics was his phenomenal memory. But sometimes Mr Blunkett does appear to have a truly terrible memory. By an amazing coincidence, however, his memory failures seem to happen only at especially convenient times. When the news broke of the speeded-up visa for his own son’s nanny, he claimed to have no recollection of having raised the matter with his private office. And now we learn that he has no memory of having spoken to me for my biography.
But:
There is only one person who has lied, and it is not me. Lord Stevens writes that he had been advised “never go to see him alone, but always take a witness”. I had a witness with me throughout my interviews: my tape recorder. I listened to the relevant interview again yesterday. His words are crystal clear. Mr Blunkett said everything I quoted — and a lot more which has yet to emerge. Indeed, as I interviewed him I would go out of my way to point out to him that the tape recorder was running, lest he forget and, being blind, be unable to see the red recording light. So not only is it plain wrong for Mr Blunkett to assert that I made the quotes up, it is also stupid. He knows that the interviews were recorded.
It seems we have bad judgement (but we knew that already; see Blunkett’s record on education or in Sheffield or his resignation last December); dishonesty; and now stupidity. Go on Tony, bring him back. They made bear-baiting illegal for the pleasure it gave to the spectators. I’m beginning to understand that pleasure.
These 209 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:04am GMT Permanent link.
Is Tony Blair Brain-Damaged Or What? »
Here’s a first: Gary Farber and Mick Hartley on the same topic and giving a sort of stereoscopic perspective. Mick says, “The government certainly knows how to pick its Muslim advisers” and quotes the Telegraph: Jews and Freemasons controlled war on Iraq, says No 10 adviser.
Mr Thomson wrote a book in 1994 in which he said Freemasons and Jews controlled the governments of Europe and America and described the claim that six million Jews died in the Holocaust as a “big lie”. In The Next World Order, Mr Thomson, a Muslim convert who was born Martin Thomson in Rhodesia, wrote: “When the majority of people in a predominantly Christian society cease to worship God, the result is fascism.
“When the people in a predominantly Jewish society cease to worship God, the result is either communism or capitalism. A predominantly Christian society is concerned primarily with establishing a political ideology, whilst a predominantly Jewish society is concerned primarily with establishing an economic system.”
This, he suggested, led to the rise of Adolf Hitler. Mr Thomson, who was called to the bar in 1979, wrote: “The fascism of Hitler was the Christian element in the increasingly “Jewish” environment in which he and his followers found themselves.”
This man advises the government? Why isn’t he in a straightjacket? (If I thought he was correct, BTW, count me as a Jew in that I believe an economic system beats a “political ideology” every time.) Gary Farber says:
A separate Genocide day, if you like, is okay by me, if, for some reason, being folded in with the Jews offends one. On the other hand, while there has been gross and terrible injustice in Israeli treatment of Palestinians, there’s been a notable lack of furnaces and lampshades, so the implied equivalency is a bit of a stretch there, Ibrahim Hewitt.
I believe — as strongly as I believe anything — that the popular press’s demonising of (largely Muslim) asylum seekers is grotesquely offensive; that there have been “gross and terrible injustice in Israeli treatment of Palestinians"; and that the presentation of Islam — and all Muslims — as extremist, intolerant, reactionary, and sexist is nothing more than barbaric. But that doesn’t excuse the government hiring delusional bigots. The problem with “community leaders” is that they’re the sort of nutters who write to newspapers and give up their weekends to protest some featherweight injustice. They may be ideal political material, as that’s how real politicians behave too, but they don’t have the reality check of democracy. Ahmad Thomson doesn’t speak for Muslims, he’s a semi-educated opportunist baboon.
These 211 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:27am GMT Permanent link.
News Of The Screws On Screwy Screwing Home Secretary »
Via Guido the News of the World (dodgy link; will be on something else next week) on David Blunkett. As ever with the British tabloids it’s constructed out of doubtful and emotive adjectives. See how many you can spot.
Lord Stevens reveals how the disgraced ex-Home Secretary was nice to his face but secretly BITCHED about him to try to get him sacked.
In exclusive extracts from his explosive new autobiography, Not For The Faint-Hearted, News of the World columnist Lord Stevens also tells how Blunkett:
EXPLOITED the 9/11 terror attacks to score cheap political points against senior policemen.
ACCUSED cops of “over reacting” on terror warnings less than two years before the London bombings.
DESTROYED all the good work done by his predecessor Jack Straw on police reform, causing mass protest by 14,000 officers.
LEAKED lies on what was said at a meeting—even though only Stevens, Blunkett and his dog were present.
This is the Murdoch press; bred like a genetically-engineered gun dog for loyalty. Er, they don’t like David Blunkett, it seems.
The two fell out again after a crisis meeting of COBRA—the government national emergencies committee. Stevens sensed even then Blunkett was still playing power games. “Tony Blair ran the meeting superbly,” writes Stevens.
“But when Mr Blunkett raised doubts as to whether the Association of Chief Police Officers could deal with terrorism, I became quite vigorous in saying it could.
“The anti-terrorist branch was one part of the organisation that really did work. I immediately wondered whether I should have given such a forthright reply but two members of the Cabinet came up afterwards and said, ‘Well done’.”
Rattled Blunkett, however, didn’t agree.
“Rattled"?
On October 21 a tabloid headline claimed: “Blunkett gives top copper a roasting”. It was news to Lord Stevens. “The report claimed the Home Secretary had called me in and rebuked me for warning the public that Britain could be the next target for a terrorist attack,” he says. “But I had not been called in.
“Then in February 2002 he told the Evening Standard I had six months to get the level of street crime down or else I would be replaced. In recent months, street crime had been falling following my decision to put 1,000 officers, mainly from the traffic division, into the fight against robbery and mugging.
“When I telephoned him to remonstrate about his remarks he denied having said what had been reported,” says Stevens. “I subsequently confirmed the story was true from the newspaper.”
There he goes — lying again. That’s a policeman and a newspaper (the latter probably keeping a record of Blunkett’s remarks) against his word. It’s easy to have total recall when you just make things up to suit you.
The two were also at loggerheads over police reforms. After what Stevens thought had been a promising first meeting with Blunkett on the issue, a senior member of the Commissioner’s staff told him she thought Blunkett couldn’t be trusted to carry on good work the previous Home Secretary Jack Straw had started.
“All that (Straw’s work) seemed to be ignored in a new, aggressive approach which I warned Blunkett would ‘end in tears’,” says Stevens.
“My forecast proved correct when 14,000 police officers marched on Parliament. I called my aide into my office and told her, ‘You’re absolutely right. You saw through him straight away’.
David Blunkett said: “Sir John was an excellent Commissioner. I wish him well in seeking to sell his book. We have a shared legacy on which we can reflect with pride.”
I so want David Blunkett to handle the introduction of ID cards.
These 136 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:48am GMT Permanent link.
Guardian Let Down »
I bought the Guardian today; just to see what it looked like. I was one of those who hated the last redesign, and I’m not fond of this one. (The font is ok, apart from the lowercase ‘a’ which I hate.) The site still uses the old typography: that is the word “Guardian” in Helvetica Bold. Norman Geras and Matt seem to like it, but it seems like a vanity project by Alan Rusbridger to me: Peter Preston got a redesign and so will I.
The front page has three stories and a photograph of Shane Warne plus the first paragraphs of four further stories. (The paper discontinued the “more on page 2” in the broadsheet in the 80s because it angered commuters who couldn’t turn pages easily. I don’t know where someone sardined on the 8:30 tube is supposed to put the three papers they’re not reading.) But one of those stories is about the new paper and the main top left story is a trail for an Estelle Morris article in Tuesday’s paper. News as in events (and as opposed to articles written by politicians) overnight were: the riots in Belfast, the clean up in New Orleans, and of course Iraq. Belfast is covered on page 3. Page 2 is contents. Pages 4 and 5 are news, and national news seems to peter out by page 6 in a discussion piece by Mark Lawson on the new passport photos story. You could have written it yourself; it is not news. Actually, national news limps on over a few more pages after a car advert with a stories on the Tate (not news), Mike Leigh (not news), Andrew Marr taking over the BBC1 Sunday morning political interview show (not news). “I watched television” or “I went to an art gallery” is not news. There is one interesting investigative story (proper journalism) Destination Cairo: human rights fears over CIA flights which isn’t even on the front page of the web site — to find it I had to search for “Destination Cairo.” As someone with serious doubts about the government’s handling of TWAT, I ought to be keen on this sort of stuff. But it’s very disappointing.
Human rights campaigners insist that these operations violate international law. Washington insists they do not.
See, there’s no names, no direct quotations. Which human rights campaigners, what did Washington insist? It seem to come down to the final two paragraphs.
President George Bush has defended the renditions programme, saying: “We operate within the law and we send people to countries where they say they’re not going to torture the people.” Critics doubt whether such pledges are credible. The US State Department describes torture as being systemic in most of the countries. Even the CIA has described the “curtailment of human rights” in Uzbekistan as a concern.
The CIA declined to comment.
George Bush can be gainsaid by producing evidence of someone extradited (or otherwise moved) to a country where torture is agreed by the US to take place. He made a falsifiable statement. If you’re going to say he’s wrong, that’s the way to do it; not with innuendo.
Martin Scheinin, a UN commission on human rights special rapporteur, has submitted a number of queries to the British government. His view about complicity in renditions is clear: “When several states can, through cooperating, breach their obligations under international law simultaneously, if they are all involved in torture, they all bear their own responsibility. It is my intention to look at acts where more than one state is involved. It is too early to say what will happen with the UK.”
Prof Scheinin’s view is far from clear to me. I have no idea what he means. It’s just ungrammatical rubbish, an amateur attempt at the Chewbacca defence. (The final clause, if it is a clause, is not conditional on the “if” clause: it’s a given. States “bear their own responsibility.” So? That’s trivial.) It’s a real story, but one that needs more facts, and fewer soundbites.
But the real problem for me is in G2. There’s an “ideas” section which going by the first interview (of one, with any luck) should be renamed “Middle Ages Ho!” I was going to go into their pitiful sycophantic Michael Behe interview (which in the paper is illustrated with a picture of its author smiling the sort of smile which made Britsh dentists feared the world over), but PZ Myers did it so much better.
I won’t buy it again.
Update: I’ve added one joke, and just learned that they haven’t just moved Doonesbury, they’ve bloody axed it. There is room for Mark Lawson’s inanities about smiling and Michael Behe, but none for Gary Trudeau? See previous paragraph. And read How I found a new home at the Telegraph.
These 562 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:02pm GMT Permanent link.
Bad New For Harry's Place »
*A different Brownie, that is. The HP Brownie is still doing a great job.
I invented *. *
*Sadly, no, I didn’t.
These 24 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:15pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 13 September 2005
The Guardian Public Wants What The Guardian Public Gets »
Other reactions to theguardian. Tom Coates likes the advert (pretty big Quick Time movie). Er … good grief! Tom wrote:
… which really pushes the whole dynamic change idea as well as the size shift and the increase in the use of colour. It’s a great little advert and might push the publication out to a whole range of new potential readers.
I checked: it’s the ad I saw. Hang on, I’ll get a stick to prop my jaw on; gravity or something has got to it. That advert is IMO — to use a carefully chosen technical phrase — about as appealing as drinking sheep dip with turds floating in it. The music is ghastly noodling. The imagery is pure Have I Got News For You — especially the bit where a photo of Bush and Blair melts into a Steve Bell cartoon. (Oh, that will win new audiences. Look, we take journalism, and turn it into piss-poor caricature.) It doesn’t yell “designer” so much as scream “we’re twendy and so much better than everyone else that we only have sex with ourselves.”
Tom also links to Assessing the new Guardian, with brief nod to the avant-garde (aka Grazia, Heat and The Sun), which is very thorough on the design of the redesign, and largely in favour. Don’t miss the annotated flickr post on the cover. (Mouse over the squares for comments.) The column on the right of the front page is comment; signalled by being ragged right rather than justified. (Far too subtle.) I liked the observations on the barcode: “Interesting place to put the barcode - wonder if that’s a result of testing?” See DoctorVee: “First things first then — the front page (actually, the first thing is the barcode — the checkout guy spent ages looking for it!).” Take that as a “yes” then. DoctorVee seems ambivalent rather than excited, which is reassuring because Jamie managed to parody me before I even wrote yesterday’s post:
Also, I don’t like the feel of the new paper. And my arthritis is playing up. And the kids today…it’s just shocking, I tell you.
Nosemonkey is splendid on the weaknesses. I wish I’d written this.
Page 6 shows little has changed as Mark Lawson romps ahead with one of those typically under-researched articles which he does so well, the first sentence of which unnecessarily evokes Orwell in a typically cliched piece on passport facial recognition technology which somehow gets him onto discussing Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman. Unlike the Torygraph, however, the Guardian has managed to avoid big pouting pictures of the two Hollywood hotties (although there is a big close-up on Marilyn Monroe’s mouth - does that count?)
I’m at odds with Nosemonkey’s next sentence though:
So far, so predictable — appeals to a wider, younger, hipper, more lecherous audience in a bid to boost circulation.
The old paper was always trying to be ‘younger’ and ‘hipper’ (though the last and ‘wider’ are exclusive, surely?) — but “more lecherous"? Surely not. In the Sunday Torygraph a very tedious piece on book groups was illustrated with a huge still (half the available page) from the remake of The Stepford Wives which told you nothing other that Nicole Kidman has really magnificent legs. But somehow I read that. I didn’t read Lawson. I can’t think why. Oooh, let’s take an interesting picture, and fuck it up in PhotoShop. Can’t have good looking women, that’s a bit heterosexist. The Lawson piece gives a clue why Graun sales are falling; you can only lose the will to live so many times.
A lot of rest is spot on. What I thought, but better-expressed. He thinks the news section is messed up (as do I); much of it being arts coverage. There’s a distinction which may be worth articulating. News should be written by journalists who go places the commuters reading the papers can’t. A preview of a film, an interview with Nicholas Serota, what Simon Hoggart watched on TV; these don’t count. They may be part of our shared culture, but they’re not news.
The most confusing, though, is the extended Comment & Analysis pages. Does anyone really care about newspaper comment sections any more? I’m doubtless preaching to the converted here as you’re reading a blog, but the interweb generally provides far better comment via innumerable blogs than any of the national newspapers do these days. Roy Hattersley’s pointless nonsense about atheism is irrelvant and ill-argued, Madeline Bunting slagging off the “liberal” idea of civilisations clashes and the current level of debate on the situation without once mentioning Edward Said shows little more than a 6th form level of understanding, Jackie Ashley crops up with one of those perennial “where for Labour after Blair?” pieces which could have been written at any point in the last five years and so on. The only one moderately worth reading is Chris Patten on why Ken Clarke is the Tories’ best hope for the future. Yet, including the page full of Leader articles, there are now four whole pages of opinion - five if you include Lawson’s piece earlier on. These writers get paid more than any others, yet generally have far less of interest to say — do we really need this much space devoted to them?
It seems odd that the Guardian, despite generally being the most web-savvy British newspaper (and having a claim to having the best web presence of any paper full stop), has failed to notice the gradual death of in-depth print comment. Why read the likes of Bunting and Ashley when there are so many far more interesting, far more readable writers online?
Somewhere I’ve picked up a very strong dislike of Alan Rusbridger. I think the campaign against Tory sleaze in the final years of John Major was bitter, partisan, lazy, and unprincipled — especially since Keith Vaz, Peter Mandelson and co have been far more venal than the Tories managed. Rusbridger has simply shat on C.P. Scott’s apothegm: “Opinion is free, but facts are sacred.” The Guardian has become nothing more than opinion: facts are things found in libraries (see Nosemonkey’s comments on Madelaine Bunting and Mark Lawson). Do these people go out and, well, to be honest, get shot at? Did they ever? Bill Deedes, a comment writer worth reading, did.
David of Kitty Killer seems to like it. Instant Punditry detects a Lurch To The Right (written last Thursday):
Typical lefties that they are, they’re opting for the third way. Neither a tabloid nor a broadsheet, the Guardian is opting for a size known as berliner. Which is not a donut, it’s a size in between tabloid and broadsheet. Or the same size as Le Monde. If you know what that is. We were going to try and calculate it in terms of Wales, the Guardian’s normal unit of measurement, but couldn’t be arsed doing the math.
There’s a lot of mail on Should Doonesbury be saved? (Including a typical Guardian idiot who writes in — after half a million Doonesbury fans have — to say “I don’t like it, but other people seem upset.” You can depend on a leftie to talk for other people who can speak perfectly well for themselves.) Compare those to theguardian sets a new benchmark, the print edition’s backslapping. The first letter is enough.
At last, a really serious national newspaper, with true depth in its content, where the new format enhances the product and does not dumb it down. …
“At last, a really serious national newspaper” …? what was the old Graun last week then? Or is it a “serious national newspaper” whose “new format” “does not dumb it down"? Well, if the latter they could have skipped the new format. (I doubt it enhances the content.)
Cliff of Cosmic Variance discovered another fault I’ll lay on Rusbridger. First he finds the staff’s comments on the new paper.
“It’s not only about reinterpreting the paper for a particular age, but making the case for what we do and saying it has validity.” Alan Rusbridger, editor
“Every single way you look at it, we are changing everything we do and how we do it.” Carolyn McCall, GNL chief executive
“If everyone else is shouting louder and louder, the only way you can be heard is by talking in a normal tone of voice — or even whispering.” Mark Porter, creative editor
Clifford says:
Guys: I have no idea what those sentences mean! Is it just me? Could someone explain please? I often have this problem with media-speak.
It’s not you. It’s bullshit.
They are bringing Doonesbury back, but I thought today’s cartoon was so apposite. The first frame could be rewritten “You ‘interviewed’ Michael Behe because you don’t believe in science …”
And the only possibly good thing in the paper at all is Ben Goldacre. (Why couldn’t they have let him loose on the fraud Behe?) I worry that the new audience chasing paper will hire “Dr” McTeeth and Ben will be looking at a P45.
These 869 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:59pm GMT Permanent link.
Peter's Friends »
This BBC profile of Peter Mandelson includes:
After the 1997 election, he was swiftly rewarded with the job as minister without portfolio, a trouble-shooting role with responsibility for the Millennium Dome, whose contents, he promised would “blow your socks off”.
Despite having to resign (over lying to his building society) he retained contacts with the Dome.
And he was forced to quit a second time in January 2001 over allegations of misconduct over a passport application for Dome supporters, the Hinduja brothers.
The Dome’s contents didn’t blow anyone’s socks off; just fleeced their pockets. And still the scandals come. Telegraph: Dome chief set to be sentenced over £4m fraud.
Simon Brophy funded a life of luxury after ensuring the contract to light up the River Thames development was awarded to a company he secretly owned.
Didn’t New Labour promise something about ending sleaze?
These 58 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:11pm GMT Permanent link.
Did I Really Vote For That Liar? »
Nosemonkey wrote
… the interweb generally provides far better comment via innumerable blogs than any of the national newspapers do these days.
Yesterday I wrote
If memory serves, back in the Major years, the government started giving off-the-record press briefings. Only the Independent refused to go along with this practice and boycotted the meetings. It soon fell into line: it had to. Now Tim Allan briefs against a well-liked broadcaster, and he’s immediately outed. Remember when Alastair Campbell tried to get heavy with Newsnight and they let everyone know that his email included “fuck off and cover something important, you twats!” What can be next? Whenever Tim Allan or one of his legion of pockmarked sycophantic lily-livered bandicoots (I used some help) pays a visit to a paper “to moan about its insufficiently reverential attitude to Tony Blair” perhaps he’ll be videoed. Broadcast live on Channel 4! You won’t believe the things that nice Tony Blair’s goons say when they think they’re off the record.
Now Alice Thomson (Alice? Alice? Who ..) says The end is in sight for Labour’s bullies and spin-masters.
This week, Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police commissioner, laid bare a similarly difficult relationship with David Blunkett. He complained that there were three of them in meetings: himself, David and the dog, and it wasn’t the dog who was briefing against him. Once, just a few loners used to cry foul. They were considered crackpots. Now everyone is queueing up to tell their stories, and it’s the government propagandists who are beginning to look like mad, swivel-eyed losers.
It’s not just that these victims have had enough. They know that the Prime Minister’s power is waning and he is on the way out. He is no longer such a dangerous enemy. So they can spill the beans and the coming Brownite regime won’t mind.
…
But the main winners could be the public. This fighting takes up a huge amount of time and energy. If victims are finally prepared to stand up to this playground bullying, the Government might at last get on with some real work. Or maybe it will never learn and will spend the next few weeks trying to dig up dirt on Mr Ashcroft.
I hope she’s right. It’s nearly over. That bastard has ruined the Labour Party, and he’s nearly ruined the country. While his chum celebrates his response to the September 11 terrorist attacks by reading “My Pet Goat” to the drowned and the saved in New Orleans (it worked last time), and reveals himself to be as useless and stupid as we suspected in the 2000 election, the swamp around Blair is slowly being drained. The rats are leaving. Britain can be proud again.
These 107 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:28pm GMT Permanent link.
Correction »
This is a correction to my earlier post on Tim Allan. Anthony Wells (of Polling Report) has emailed to correct just about every detail of this passage:
If memory serves, back in the Major years, the government started giving off-the-record press briefings. Only the Independent refused to go along with this practice and boycotted the meetings.
Anthony:
it was entirely the other way round! Under Major the briefings became attributable, not vice-versa.
What used to happen was the twice daily lobby briefings were off-the-record and unattributable, and had been since year dot (actually I think Attlee had the first Press Secretary, but there goes). During a rebellious phrase the Independent— and the Guardian— refused to go along with it and boycotted the meetings. The actual trigger wasn’t them becoming secret, they had always been thus, it was Bernard Ingham using them to brief against Cabinet Ministers (specifically, IIRC, John Biffen).
So, two sentences and I’m wrong in almost every detail! (Bernard Ingham was of course Mrs Thatcher’s press secretary.) Maybe the Guardian will hire me.
These 53 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:08pm GMT Permanent link.
The Dunces Were All In Confederacy »
Hated by fools, and fools to hate,
Be that my motto and my fate
Swift
Sad news: Shot By Both Sides is no more.
Perhaps there’s no higher acclaim that being blackmailed by envious anonymous cunts.
These 21 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:21pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 14 September 2005
Oh Dear, I Am Getting Cynical »
I found this survey through The Sharpener. I suppose it’s well intentioned. But here are some questions and my answers.
Q3 Some people claim the media breeds cynicism about politics and politicians which discourages political interest and involvement. Is this true? If so, how can the media play a positive role in encouraging political involvement?
Me: No. No, silly question. The more you know about politicians the more you want to string them up. It doesn’t matter if you know them through the media or directly. Opinion columns in the US have been soft of Bush, but everyone who knows him that he blew what few brains cells he had with cocaine and booze 20 years ago, and he’s just a strutting arrogant shell. [See These critical observations and insights have been doled out by elite journaists at dinner parties for years.] Acquaintance breeds contempt.
How can the media play a positive role? Raise funds to arm the unemployed.
Q4 The number of people voting in General Elections has declined considerably in the last ten years. Turnout is also very low in elections for local councils, devolved institutions and the European Parliament. What changes would encourage a larger number of people to feel it is worth voting?
Me: Public execution of the losers.
Q5 Some people argue that voting in elections is not enough. They believe today’s citizens need an opportunity to discuss and have a direct say over individual policies through other means such as referenda, internet forums and public meetings designed to have significant power to influence political decisions. Would more opportunities to do this attract participants and would they encourage greater trust in the policies pursued by politicians?
Me: Too right. I’d abolish parliaments and bring government down to city states where all debates took place in the marketplace and everyone had a say. That’s democracy. (NB by everyone I of course exclude children, slaves, the lower classes, and women.)
Q6 Some groups in society are very unlikely to be involved in politics. Young people are far less likely to vote or join parties than older people. The poorest sections of our society and black and minority ethnic communities are less likely to vote, join parties or take part in any sort of political activity. What action would encourage greater political involvement by the groups that are least involved with politics?
Me: Young people are stupid. They should be gassed. I was stupid when I was young. I’m cynical now.
Apathy should be encouraged. If no one cares, maybe parties will die out like the dodo or the moa. (Both were ineffably stupid, and neither is missed; well the Maoris thought moas were tasty, but they think the haka is cool. I’m not disputing their taste, merely saying that I wouldn’t rely on it.)
Q7 Is there anything further about participation and engagement in democracy you would like to add?
Me: No. I bet you’re glad.
The final page asks you give your name and email address if you wish to hear from Citizen Space. It was hard, but I didn’t put Anthony Charles Lynton Blair and the email bliar@number-10.gov.uk.
I’m sure I believed in something, once.
These 292 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:13am GMT Permanent link.
John Band Support Links »
Kurtz: We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won’t allow them to write “fuck” on their airplanes because it’s obscene!
John Milius, Apocalypse Now
The closing of Shot by both sides has occasioned quite a few posts in support of the boy Band.
Tim Worstall calls it Very bad news. (Tim’s following post is called Should Blogs Be Regulated? If you’ve read anything at all by Tim, you can guess the answer is ‘No.’ Still worth reading.)
David T of Harry’s Place writes (uncharacteristically) of Fucking Fucking Wankers (usual HP warning — early comments are reasonably sound and on topic; later ones are just inter-commenter abuse and entirely OT). David’s main source is Chris Bertram’s Crooked Timber post Shot by Both Sides has died of its wounds, especially Michael [Brooke]’s comment:
It turned out my hunch was spot-on – not only did someone (or some people) complain to John’s employers, but they also threatened to contact the firm’s clients and the national press. Clearly, this wouldn’t have done wonders for his career prospects – hence the site closure (which John said was the “least worst option”).
So let’s just put this in perspective: while some may have been offended by what John wrote, others actually took it upon themselves to try to destroy his career.
To say that these people are scum is something of an understatement – and I for one hope they’re outed before they pull off another stunt like this.
Ally of Ducking for apples simply calling John’s blackmailers (I can think of no other word) “people who get their ya-yas by intimidation, bullying, power-games and trying to control other people.”
Even Bloggers4Labour is shocked.
Matthew Turner worries it is:
bad news for British blogging, and probably a sign of the rut it is currently in. Of concern is that he advised his readers, who presumably include the loons and bigots who ruined his blogging too often, to come here.
Jim Bliss is pissed off.
The style of SBBS was deliberately provocative and controversial. Calling for the assassination of anyone who complained about bad language on TV, or for holding particular objectionable views, was bound to annoy those poor sods whose brains are incapable of processing irony or humour. Certainly it’s a particular type of humour (dark, dry and deceptively intelligent) but it takes a particular type of person (small-minded, tedious and very ugly) to take genuine offence at it. SBBS was never guilty of racism or sexism, but refused to bow to contrived notions of political correctness. If John was guilty of anything, it was of overestimating the ability of his readership to discern the real target of a particular barb.
Jim won’t repeat “the remark that (I believe) was the straw that broke the blackmailers back” but David T does (and I know he’s not anti-semitic) and so will I:
Send the Board [of Deputies] to the gas chambers, that’s what I say (no, not for their ethnicity; for their fatuous whining. And obviously, the people who complain about Bob Geldof saying ‘fuck’ on the telly should be ahead of them in the queue….)
Jim thinks that John’s blogging under his real name was a mistake.
Up until the beginning of this year I used to blog under my real name. But I found myself applying all manner of self-censorship because I was aware that anything I wrote could be called up just by typing my name into google.
That’s become part of the point for me. I have lost friends (specifically, I was asked to leave my running coach) for this post — for my description of Peter Hain (though, note, I didn’t call him anything, someone else did, and the term was a joke running through a few posts that week which referred to John Lydon on I’m a celebrity …, but no matter.) I often say things I later regret (and if they’re factually incorrect, I do what I can to point that out), but I’ve never wanted to be right all the time. As David T says
The whole raison d’etre of a blog is that it provides an immediate — sometimes intellectual, sometimes visceral — response to events. Blog articles are not commissioned. Blogs are not sub edited. Bloggers are not line managed. Indeed, blogging only works if bloggers can freely write things which are accidentally or deliberately offensive. The hope is that gems of wisdom will shine through the muck.
I’ve always taken the view that if you’re open, they can’t blackmail you. In John’s case, I was clearly wrong. His employers knew about his blog, but getting complaints about it is a different matter. Still, these are my opinions; I disagree with many of them within an hour; but I’m not at all ashamed of them. On the subject of shame and who should feel it, the last word should go to Old Peculier who has as much reason to dislike John as anyone (comment on Harry’s Place):
To be honest I thought that particular post of John’s was out of order. I think I commented on it here, perhaps, because of my mood at the time taking, it more seriously than it deserved.
But blackmail and writing to his employers is just plain evil. Disgusting.
Update: among those I forgot are Chris Lightfoot, Nosemonkey, Chicken Yoghurt, and Devil’s Kitchen. And the anonymous weasel who calls himself “kenzdawg” in David T’s comments is just another cunt.
These 386 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:19pm GMT Permanent link.
Spooks »
I’m really glad Spooks is back. Of course, it’s often very silly with irritating dialogue ("He’s the best there is” nonsense) but it has its moments of proper debate: Harry’s catalougue of all the things the state had done for Martine McCutcheon’s character, and her list of all the things it hadn’t (is it me, or was her list entirely New Labour?) for instance. Jeff (Drop the Dead Donkey) Rawl’s very Jack Straw-ish Home Secretary turn was particularly good.
It’s very brave (or progressive or stupid or something) of the BBC to allow instant online reviews. Not all the criticisms are fair: the part two trail didn’t give away the mole — that was intentional misdirection. However, anyone who’d watched Dalek could have guessed that. Some people have criticised the subject matter, but what are MI6 for? If you’re going to have a series about the secret service, it’s going to deal with terrorism. The Beeb could have repeated series 2, episode 2 (where the nice doctor from Deep Space Nine got killed).
These 173 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:25pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 15 September 2005
Calling Telegraph Subs »
One of the reasons I read the Torygraph is that it’s usually better sub-edited than the Graun or the Independent, and its journalists are more alive to the distinction between facts and everything else. So even if we ignore the first paragraph of Charlotte Church ‘more of a hell-raiser’ than Oasis:
Charlotte Church is a bigger rock’n’roll hell-raiser than Liam Gallagher, according to a new poll.
“Is” should read “is considered to be” which is quite different.
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, famed for his cocaine, heroin, LSD and whiskey intake over more than 40 years of debauchery, topped the poll by music channel VH1.
Richards, 61, was rumoured to have had a complete blood transfusion before embarking on a Stones tour.
I always hoped that Richards preferred what some call “scotch.” The “blood transfusion” story is indeed just a rumour — but that doesn’t excuse a serious newspaper simply reprinting it. Even Snopes says that Richards “probably did undergo some type of treatment involving blood filtering, however” having admitted “no real evidence supports it” and that the blood change “procedure is medically questionable in terms of both safety and effectiveness.”
Good old Charlotte though, she makes me proud of Cardiff.
These 141 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:56pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 17 September 2005
Good Posts Elsewhere »
Lazy roundup of things I like elsewhere; having apparently nothing to say myself.
I rarely agree with Labab Tall, but he’s got a couple of posts where I do.
He’s unimpressed inHistoric First As Statue Of Disabled Person Unveiled. (NB, in what follows I’m writing about the commentary in the press, not the statue itself; and so is Laban. Feel free to be offended, but please limit it to what each of us says.) Laban emphasises the Times:
Never before has someone with a disability — let alone someone with a disability who is naked and eight months pregnant — been put in such a public place and portrayed in such a positive way.
Of course, Laban merely has to look up (mentally, anyway) to see an “180-foot column” with an “18-foot statue on the top.”
The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins was even worse. Someone (does the Grauniad even employ subs?) has the sub-heading “Public hails 3.5m tall work in Trafalgar Square.” There is no way that statement can be meaningful. The public, BTW, turn out to be a Dutch couple and Ken Livingstone quoted as:
“Alison [Lapper]’s life,” he added, “is a struggle over much greater difficulties than the men who are celebrated here” — referring to the military heroes whose grand statues stand in the other three corners of Trafalgar Square, as well as Nelson high up atop his column.
Which entirely misses the point of Nelson. It’s not whether he suffered and whether he struggled but “what acts Made him the greatest figure of his day.” And, as an addition to Laban’s short list look here and here (and those are straight off the top of my head). Apart from that, I think it’s a rather good statue. I still like the lions best, though.
Utterly uncontroversially, Laban also calls psychology The Bleeding Obvious and gets to quote Thomas Hardy. There are other flaws in the survey — the Reuters write-up doesn’t suggest that depression may be a cause of “downward social shift[s].” Not does it deal with successful men — like Woody Allen or Spike Milligan — who report depressive symptoms, but have undoubtedly moved upwards socially.
Tim Worstall is concerned about The Definition of Extremists and a Guardian story that Extremist groups active inside UK universities, report claims. I knock New Labour all the time, and why should today be different?
Yesterday the education secretary, Ruth Kelly, ordered vice-chancellors to clamp down on student extremists in the wake of the July terror attacks in London.
But a report due to be published next week by Anthony Glees, the director of Brunel University’s centre for intelligence and security studies, lists more than 30 institutions — including some of the most high-profile universities in the country — where “extremist and/or terror groups” have been detected.
“This is a serious threat,” Professor Glees told the Guardian. “We have discovered a number of universities where subversive activities are taking place, often without the knowledge of the university authorities.”
“Ordered"? And it would be Ruth Kelly, wouldn’t it? At least Jack Straw or Times columnist David Aaronovitch might have the decency not to be taken aback that “subversive activities” take place in universities “often without the knowledge of the university authorities.” Bloody hell, they’re students. Of course they’re daft. If members BNP go about mugging people, then that’s a crime; otherwise they should be allowed the right of association, just like everybody else.
Via Mike Power even the former-dodgy-Marxists-turned-dessicated-free-marketeers at Spiked have the sense to ask Why should the authorities have the right to shut up both Make Poverty History and the BNP?
Sadly, but entirely predictably, Make Poverty History protested against the ban, not by insisting upon its right to promote and elicit support for its views, but by denying that its aims or its ads were in any way political …
I’m sure I’ve said before that conservatives tend not to think of themselves as “political” — merely common sensical, realistic or some such. What greater proof that the government is conservative? Against “political” positions and increasingly believing in “natural law.” I’m just an old reactionary: anthropos politikon zoo-on, I say, (Yes I know “politikon” usually translates as “social” — but the social is political. All of it.)
Chris Bertram is concerned about the government’s definition of Glorifying terrorism. Matt McGrattan (who could blog more often) says in the comments:
I think they [the Blair government] believe the country ought to be run in the country’s best interest, and if the country is too stupid to know its own interest, well, then more competent individuals will just have to get on and do it.
Couldn’t put it better. A cough democrat would recognise that
As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.
Madison on Faction (via Chris Brooke, for which, thanks). Someone should impress upon Tony Blair that he is as fallible as the rest of us, and the maker does not whisper to George Bush in the Oval Office. (If he does, he gives damn bad advice.)
For reasons best known to himself, Mark Holland has invented a new subcategory of blogging and taken to promoting rather ham-handed liberal movies. I watched Victim as a result and it was good, if a little didactic. The Blue Lamp post (heh!) is good too.
These 608 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:42pm GMT Permanent link.
Splendid Parris »
Via Mark Holland, the only sensible writer in the otherwise gelded Murdoch stable: Matthew Parris: We should expect the policeman’s knock for what we do, not think.
No, there is only one possible source of this folly. The notion that you can make the world a better place by making it illegal to say nasty and dangerous things has the intellectual sloppiness, the headline-seeking shallowness, the philosophical carelessness and the creepy mix of the sinister with the sanctimonious, that marks it out as absolutely characteristic of our Prime Minister’s mind.
No one else gets Barmy Blair quite like Matthew Parris. Except perhaps:
From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now… 16 years old!
These 39 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:57pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 18 September 2005
David Blunkett, The Politician Who Keeps On Giving »
Stardate 5730.2. Among the artefacts found on the wreck of the USS Ahmad Chalabi on Phobos is a collection of books, evidently the library the exiled Earth dissidents, called Neocons, hoped would lay the cultural foundations of their attempted colony on a planet suitably named after the Roman god of war. We have found no adequate reason for their attempt to land on Phobos, which is a characterless, potato-shaped, captured asteroid far too small to sustain an atmosphere. Some say the neocons were deranged, or believed in a logic all their own; others think its nature exactly matched their character, and that some of them never breathed air anyway. Their books are strange, relics of a time before the last politicians were strangled with the entrails of the last superstitious leaders. We have found an account of one such politician, one whose career illustrates why the people rose to take such drastic action, a biography written by a court sycophant called David Aaronovitch, a writer for some strange ephemeral publications (called, historians believe, “tomorrow’s chip wrapper” because rather than describe actual events, they consisted of airy speculations and make-believe), who boasted that he always trusted politicians. The behaviour of this politician is no less irrational than that of “priests” “ayatollahs” and the other oppressors of mankind before the enlightenment. It begins like this:
The year 2005 was something of a fulcrum in the career of the future Maximum Minister and Citizen #1 of the 51st State. It began badly, when David Blunkett resigned to devote himself to establishing the father of Mrs Quinn’s unborn baby. Beneath the rough exterior, Blunkett was, after all, a sensitive man. Like other great leaders before him, those who knew him in private were always surprised by the candid and gentle soul they met, and wondered if this really could be the man who man the rousing speeches on television. Blunkett’s sensitivity, his soft and caring side which was hidden under a patina of Sheffield steel, had undone him before, when in the grip of understandable human weakness he had “fast tracked” a visa application for Mrs Quinn’s nanny. In September of that year, his “weakness” (if you must, but this devotion to real people is what sets him above all other politicians in the present writer’s humble opinion) attacked again. News leaked that seven years previously, Blunkett had used his position as Educashun Secretary to exert his influence through official channels where other parents would not have had the option. Now, in the bright dawn of the 21st Century, we see that this was the correct response, but in those days, civil servants worshipped an antic god called “impartiality.” Dear reader, the world is not fair. Citizen #1 had influence and he used it. The public failed to understand this, clinging to the reactionary notions of justice and equality, until a government survey revealed that the average IQ in the then United Kingdom was too low to entrust responsibility in the people, and voting was abolished.
These 483 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:35pm GMT Permanent link.
Scotland Comes Top In UN Survey »
The UN recognises the achievements of my home country, beating the US, Columbia, even Ireland.
Whit you lookin at?
Is that a deep-fried Mars bar in yer pocket?
Aye, square goes then? Aye? Aye? C’moan then.
These 36 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:07pm GMT Permanent link.
Andrew Sullivan Is A What? »
Jeepers. Andrew Sullivan is a journalist. I think being innumerate is a job requirement for political commentators (as is any knowledge of economics: if you’ve ever read any actual economists or run a whelk stall, you might embarrass the ruling party). Sadly, No! say Oh, This is Just Too Funny of a “feud” between the Powertools and Andrew Sullivan.
But according to this blog traffic list, Hugh’s site gets around 44,000 visits a day and this blog — despite my attempt to piss off every conservative reader I’ve ever had — still gets 54,000. Add in my Time column — the biggest news magazine in the U.S. — and my Sunday Times column — the biggest Sunday circulation in the UK — and I’m not sure how Powerline believes that I have fewer readers than Hewitt has readers and listeners. But, hey, Powerline believes that the Iraq war has been conducted flawlessly and that the feds did a perfect job with Katrina.
The Powertools object to that last sentence: what Andrew means is that none of them has seen fit to blog a single criticism. And in the passage I’ve emphasised, Andrew has a touch of the Jeffrey Archers (Archer claimed he was the youngest MP ever when he wasn’t even the youngest MP in the House; it was only a difference of months). Andrew has forgotten the News of the World (circ. 3,759,343) and the Mail on Sunday (circ. 2,190,962); the Sunday Times is 3rd with 1,342,574. Figures from the Guardian.
These 150 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:58pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 19 September 2005
In Which I Manage To Insult Pigs »
I’ve realised that two of my favourite films from the 1990s — Babe and Schindler’s List — should be dismissed as unresearched crap. Piers Morgan (got some dirty pics, mate?) explains why:
This movie made me sick. And that’s before I got round to taking in any of the absurd plot, breathtakingly laughable dialogue, and generally patronising view of a tabloid world that none of its actors, writers or producers has clearly ever inhabited.
I realise now that no one involved with Steven Spielberg has ever worked in a concentration camp; naturally their depiction of the Ralph Fiennes would be some way off. Did Dick King-Smith or George Miller inhabit the world of pigs before writing Babe? I very much doubt it.
One of the best reasons to withhold criticism of the conduct of the peace in Iraq (contra Powertools, it’s not a war; the war ended some time ago, at the very latest with the capture of Saddam Hussein; the Coalition casualties may be low for war — they’re unacceptably high for peace) is that such criticism may be used for propaganda and hence recruitment and hence endanger our troops. Normally, I don’t have a great deal of time for this. I regret the danger our soldiers are in, but if the US can’t control its personnel, that should be reported. Should be reported if true. If David Aaronovitch is an gullible fool for accepting what Blair says without checking, how much worse was Piers Morgan who put fabricated pictures on the front page?
Here’s the voice of the British working classes, Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan (to use his full name):
Tabloid reporters are thus all foul-mouthed, amoral, drug-abusing alcoholics whose only joy comes from inflicting misery and pain on others. Blackmail, criminality, infidelity, drug abuse and gross stupidity ranking as the very best of our qualities.
“Who are we going to get this week?’’ is the mantra of Eddy Taylor. That’s such a lovely little myth propagated with particular gusto by those great souls who tread our nation’s theatrical boards: namely, that tabloids start each week with a hatchet board targeting poor celebrities for no reason other than because we are horrid little people with nothing better to do with our thankless lives.
All lies of course. Sam Leith in this morning’s Telegraph on tabloid ethics:
The very notion of the “role model” seems to have been invented to license the worst sort of wilful moral imbecility. Take Kate Moss, the more sympathetic of our protagonists. Because she is a “role model”, runs the argument, teenage girls will copy her in a “monkey see, monkey do” fashion. Perhaps so.
This might lead teenage girls into various things that are bad for them: smoking cigarettes, drinking champagne out of tiny bottles, hating their own bodies, and competing with each other to waste their money on cynical fashion-industry tat.
Oh. Sorry. That part of it is OK. In fact, it’s her job. It’s the reason we made her a role model in the first place. But when she’s caught, by subterfuge, doing cocaine in secret, moral panic reigns.
If it gets out that she snorts cocaine, teenage girls will think it’s cool to snort cocaine. (Let us say, for the sake of argument, that teenage girls could afford £50 grams of charlie, and that ruthless pushers were queuing up outside school gates across the country, hoping to corner that lucrative market.) This must never be allowed to happen.
The only way to protect the precious, precious youth of the nation from the pernicious influence of their role model is, then, to announce on the front page of the newspaper that the coolest woman on earth takes cocaine. Brilliant.
(Writing in the same paper as Mr Pughe-Morgan, Paul Morley was also good on Kate Moss and the Mirror.)
And I saw a headline yesterday in the paper shop (I think on Wales on Sunday) that claimed that Charlotte Church’s ex was on his way to his first million after bagging £250,000 for selling his story — now he only has to go out with, and rat on, three more celebrity girlfriends who the nation will be shocked, shocked to learn they took drugs and had sex.
I know, I’ve been unfair to pigs. And concentration camp guards.
These 340 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:23am GMT Permanent link.
With Photographs »
Having had the sensible Paul Morley in the Sunday yesterday, today’s Torygraph balances him with the ludicrous Hilary Alexander (bylined as “Fashion Director” what’s that all about then? has the DT gone all PC in job appellations?).
She [Linda Evangelista] was the epitome of the style that will transmit London’s image across the globe. Yet however powerful she may be, how much more successful — and inspirational — yesterday’s photo call would have been had the model been our own Kate Moss.
Instead, we have the unedifying video snatches of an alleged cocaine binge, the tabloid headlines of three-in-a-bed, lesbian sex, the dreary roll-call of a life on the edge, with a going-nowhere rock ‘n’ roll junkie.
Where has Kate gone wrong?
But “style”, whatever it does, does not transmit images, surely. Models are not powerful, in any real sense. Has Ms Moss “gone wrong"?
Her taste in clothing cannot be faulted. Whatever she wears, whether it be haute couture, vintage or Topshop, is faultless.
Perhaps because it looks good — on her. This seems to be a truth an aging bag like Ms Alexander cannot face. It’s not clothes that makes people attractive; it’s that some people look good in anything. Curiously, fashion designers and chains hire these people to advertise their clothes. The accompanying “report” is just as bad, referring to the companies Ms Moss models for as her “employers.” Come off it, she’s a self-employed. If she parted company with any of them, they know she’d go to their rivals, make their rags look good, and make their shareholders happy.
Like Keith Richards, Ms Moss can apparently weather any amount of, er, self-abuse. Michael Parkinson in the sports pages says:
Even now we are working on Mr Flintoff being a guest upon his return from Down Under. Cricket reasons apart, Freddie is gaining a reputation for being eminently quotable. When asked after a night’s carousing what he had managed to eat, he said: “A cigar.” I look forward to his company. If only for the chance to say thank you.
A cigar! Is this any diet for a sportsman? His employers should do the decent thing, or there’ll be fourteen-year-olds chomping on Hamlets before they can tell Deep Fine Legs from Kate Moss’s pins.
But this is Ms Alexander’s really stupid paragraph.
But, surely she must see that, shorn of the industry’s well-lit sets, retinue of hair and make-up artists and digital-remastering aces, and captured, instead, on a series of grimy, grainy grabs, she looks just like the very thing she would perhaps have wanted to escape from — an inner-city victim of drug, alcohol and sexual excess.
If Kate Moss looked like everybody else, or vice versa, she wouldn’t be in the papers. As Paul Morley said yesterday:
It was more “cocaine non-shocker”, as various gossip bloggers commented, marvelling how Kate retained a photogenic composure even while being snapped by a mobile in terrible light. She did indeed seem very at home with the process of lining the powder up and rolling bank notes into tubes while keeping her knees together with ladylike poise.
And “she would perhaps have wanted to escape from"? You’re guessing now, dear Ms Alexander, you haven’t a clue what Ms Moss wants. I’ve long wanted to escape from sexual excess, but “Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in.” Too much sex is simply terrifying. I’m sure young people are recoiling in horror from the thought! The silly accompanying article reveals:
Yesterday the News of the World reported that the face of Chanel, Christian Dior and Burberry had instigated sex with her girlfriends after taking cocaine. It claimed that while sober she would never be attracted to women, but the use of the drug removed all her inhibitions.
Kids should be warned off cocaine. The papers must carry these shocking stories.
With photographs.
Lots of photographs.
These 327 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:24pm GMT Permanent link.
Religious Pluralism »
I shouldn’t, but I do. Read Torygraph leaders that is. The third leader today ended with this.
Today, with our linguistic and cultural hegemony assured, it is only right that we should help the French to rediscover the tradition of religious pluralism that helped us to victory in the first place.
I’ll try to remember that tomorrow when the print the usual “decadence! decadence! multiculturalism will be the end of England!” screed from Mark Steyn.
The previous leader on BBK (Blair, the BBC, and Katrina; I made that up, not the Torygraph; don’t worry) sides with the PM. Sort of.
Well said, then, Prime Minister. But why unload your frustration on Mr Murdoch? It is, after all, up to you to decide whether to renew the BBC’s charter. If you really wanted to do something about its ingrained partiality, you could tell them first. Moaning behind the BBC’s back to a rival news organisation is both pointless and unmanly.
Those three little words — that is, “rival news organisation” — have never been so ambiguous. And this in a paper which publishes a graph of its sales against Mr Murdoch’s title.
These 98 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:45pm GMT Permanent link.
They Don't Do Anything For You, It Seems »
Well, I can resist no longer. I must follow Justin’s example and write about Blair’s Fucking Welsh comment (it’s only F****** Welsh in the DT). But first, the joke Justin and the Sharpener comments missed.
The diaries claim that Mr Blair asked Mr Price, a homosexual: “When you see a beautiful woman, doesn’t it do anything for you?”
You can tell he’s gay. A straight man would have said, “They can’t do anything for you, judging by Cherie.”
The diaries talk of foul language and petty rivalries. Mr Price claims that Mr Campbell called Mr Blair “a dickhead” to his face. Mr Blair allegedly used even worse language, repeatedly shouting “F****** Welsh” when it looked as if Labour might lose the first Welsh Assembly elections.
The Sunday Telegraph magazine carried a full page advert for the DVD of Downfall. The box bears this quotation.
If the war is lost, then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it. I still would not shed a single tear for them because they did not deserve any better.
Such is the logic of the sweeping statement (and the sweeping statesmen). If the war had been won, however narrowly, then people collectively would deserve better. Blair would love the Welsh, if only 51% voted New Labour. From the Graun:
Under civil service rules, Price was obliged to submit his manuscript to the government for clearance. He was then asked to make cuts. The newspaper claimed that one of those cuts was an account of Mr Blair’s mood when he sent British bombers on joint raids with the US over Iraq in 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. “I couldn’t help but feeling that TB was relishing his first blooding as PM, sending the boys into action. Despite all the necessary stuff about taking action ‘with a heavy heart’, I think he feels it is part of his coming of age as a leader,” read Price’s original version.
Bet you did not shed a single tear either, oh dear leader.
These 126 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:26pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 20 September 2005
BBC In Agreement With LGF Shock »
The BBC’s weblog watch (quick register biased-weblog-watch-watch.com: watching them watching us watching them watching us) on the photo of Bush’s memo to Condoleezza Rice.
The immediate response of Pat at Judicious Asininity was: “The note is a forgery designed to embarrass the President” and many among the community at Little Green Footballs agreed. Lest this seem unbelievably sceptical, it’s worth remembering how much misinformation is bandied around, both in politics and during wars, and especially in politics during wars.
Fake or not (I lean toward not, Reuters is a much better news agency that the British tabloids, or anything owned by Rupert Murdoch), it’s excited many otherwise dull lives over the pond.
It can sometimes seem strange in the UK, where die-hard party members will reserve the right to deride the PM, but the office of the American chief executive is able to command automatic respect …
Well, not exactly. Bill Clinton didn’t command much automatic respect from self-described “patriots.” The corollary has to be that the President doesn’t take “bathroom breaks” which seems unlikely. The angle I haven’t seen covered yet is typical Bush. If Reuters did set up a camera to look over his shoulder, then they presumably expected sexier notes than that. He might at least have written things like “Bullshit!” or “We can deny this” or “Selective use of statistics.” The point of meeting is to listen to the other person’s points; good debaters don’t stick to a script. If Bush wrote no other notes, that’s a story in itself.
These 164 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:13am GMT Permanent link.
Guardian New Format Causing Trouble, I See »
I think Norman Johnson in the Saturday Grauniad was funny, but it was hard to be objective after Gene of Harry’s Place called him The Guardian’s ‘new voice of sanity’. It’s impossible now, knowing through Harry that hard-core Guardianistas were taken in too. I remember Keith Flett with affection, but I’ve never heard the name Dorothy Macedo before, which must say something about how often I read Guardian letters. (For further hilarity, in the comments, resting blogger Peter Cuthbertson takes apart Ms Macedo’s rather silly point; and is himself misunderstood.)
The spoof nature of Norman Johnson is surely not all that subtle. Gene presumably read him on the web, and may have been thrown by the lack of presentational clues; but the UK readers should have no excuse. Is it the new format that’s confused people?
There’s no question that The Lance Boyle diaries are not real. It may be the place they occupy in the print Telegraph or more likely the “Craig Brown” byline.
Monday, July 6, 1998: at Blair’s political strategy meeting, he said he was concerned to put an end to Blair-Brown split stories. He suggested the two of them appear on a platform together. We discussed the exact nature of the platform. Alastair insisted it should be divided in two, with the Brown section 18in shorter than the Blair section. Blair thought that might look too obvious: might it not be better if he stood, and Brown knelt? Peter objected, saying we didn’t want people thinking Brown is better at saying his prayers than Blair. Alastair suggested that the stage could be on the same level, but that Tony could sit on a chair while Brown sat on the floor. We agreed to set up a Strategic Awareness Executive to report back on the whole question.
Cringe-making for anyone who knows anything about New Labour. Silly, and yet utterly brilliant.
These 180 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:52pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 21 September 2005
Stone Walls Do Not A Prison Make ... »
… if you’re in the SAS, it seems. Telegraph ’Five Iraqi civilians killed’ in SAS rescue operation.
Confusion still surrounds whether British forces knocked down a prison wall, resulting in the escape of prisoners, in their attempt to rescue the two SAS men.
The British troops believed the two Special Forces men were being held there but later freed them from a house in Basra where they were being held by Shia militia.
…
British officers say they received intelligence that the men’s lives were at risk and bulldozed their way into the jail, in the face of a mob throwing petrol bombs, to rescue them.
The action, condemned by many in Iraq, was defended as “absolutely right” by Defence Secretary John Reid.
Whether they “knocked down a prison wall” or not (if their own officers say they did, that’s good enough for me), five Iraqi civilians died in the following clashes. But as Ellis Sharp says of yesterday’s Daily Mirror headline ("It Was a Miracle No One Was Killed"):
What the Mirror meant, of course, was that wasn’t it wonderful no British troops died. As for Iraqis — well, who really gives a toss.
We don’t know how many died in the airstrikes, so what’s five more?
I must lack “moral fiber”, because I can’t say that “the authors of the chaos and misery are not the coalition but the jihadist and Baathist saboteurs who gleefully make war on civilians….”
Jamie thinks the Iraqi Civil War is here. I can’t find any convincing arguments against.
These 125 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:46pm GMT Permanent link.
Bracing For Intensified Criticism »
Via John Cole (whose post reads Things that will make the WH cringe), The Onion: Bush Braces As Cindy Sheehan’s Other Son Drowns In New Orleans. John only quotes the first two paragraphs —
WASHINGTON, DC—According to White House sources, President Bush is bracing for intensified criticism following Monday’s report that the body of Tyler Sheehan, son of outspoken anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, was recovered from the receding floodwaters in New Orleans.
Although the White House has not released a statement, a firestorm of controversy is expected to follow the death of the dynamic, well-liked young man, who was working on a levee-upkeep crew while completing the EMT-certification training he needed to become a firefighter.
It made me laugh, in a I-don’t-know-why-that’s-funny way, but the whole thing is far far more political.
Sheehan moved to New Orleans in 2004 to take a year off from the University of California at Berkeley, where administrators had temporarily suspended the stem-cell research program in which he was enrolled in hopes of helping to combat his younger sister Ruth’s spinal meningitis. Friends report that his public spirit continued in the Big Easy, as he delivered meals to elderly New Orleans residents affected by recent Medicare cuts, and doggedly petitioned the Justice Department for the release of his life partner, Amin Sagheer, who has been detained without charge at Guantanamo Bay for nearly three years.
“He made service to his fellow citizens his number-one priority,” Ghivarello said. “He made that vow back in 1998, when his best friend, a developmentally disabled black juvenile, was put to death in Texas for a crime he didn’t commit.”
Cindy Sheehan was unavailable for comment, as she was busy trying to contact her lone surviving son Teddy, a meteorologist studying global warming with the International Geophysical Foundation in Antarctica, who is believed to be marooned on a 45-square-mile chunk of the shrinking Ross Ice Shelf that broke off Tuesday morning.
Superb. Something there to offend just about everyone.
These 59 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:28pm GMT Permanent link.
Why We Have Experts »
P O’Neill of Best of Both Worlds catches the Powertools (aka Time Magazine’s Blog of the Year) out in self-contradiction. In brief the reason Hindrocket gave in defence of the unqualified Michael Brown is the reason he now thinks Julie Myers is unsuitable. Note that he cites Michelle Malkin in both posts — without mentioning that she has been consistent, while he has changed his mind.
In his next post, P finds Hindrocket talking about Global warming on Mars, something he knows even less about. This is the key paragraph.
le it is theoretically possible for human and animal activities to affect the climate on Earth, the main factor causing fluctuations in temperatures on this planet, as on Mars, is variability in energy output from the Sun. The Mars Global Surveyor data suggest what I think would be a relatively simple experiment: Why not place thermometers in a few locations on Mars, equipped with radio transmitters that would send temperature data to Earth or to a spacecraft? You’d have to take into account the two planets’ different atmospheres, of course; the atmosphere on Mars is thin, but consists almost entirely of carbon dioxide. In time—it would take more than a few years’ observations, obviously—such an experiment would settle once and for all the question whether human activities are making a significant contribution to climate variations on Earth. And I don’t think the experiment would be very hard to conduct. The main catch I can see is that figuring out how to account for the planets’ different atmospheres might recreate the debates that are now going on about how to properly model the Earth’s weather system.
Oh dear. As P O’Neill says, if it’s fluctuations in the energy output of the sun, you don’t have to go to Mars. In fact, as he doesn’t say, it’s better if you take your measurements outside an atmosphere. For a conservative and therefore someone concerned with profligate federal spending, and for a successful lawyer, who presumably pays more to the government than the average, John Hinderaker doesn’t seem to know much about where his tax dollars go. Of course, scientists are just nerdy guys who failed to get into law school, and would never think of consulting this data until some blogger suggested it.
Sadly for Hindrocket, having had a good idea (pinning global warming solely on the sun) he then completely blows it with the admission that planetary atmosphere is a determining factor in itself. (NB the moon is the same distance from the sun as the earth and its Mean surface temperature (day) is 107°C; Mean surface temperature (night) is -153°C.) And what the atmosphere is composed of is also conceded to be a factor. This has taken us precisely nowhere apart from the proposal of a “relatively simple experiment” which would only involve several Martian landings.
He’s actually wrong on whether the debate would be settled by his experiment. We’ve known for a long time that the sun has cycles of activity.
Having asked his readers, he still doesn’t get it:
Still, it seems to me that even a rough estimate of the extent to which increasing solar output is raising temperatures on Mars would be a useful reality check on the “global warming” claims being made here on Earth.
You don’t need to go to Mars! And we have figures for solar output. The problem is interpreting them.
These 344 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:36pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 22 September 2005
Gloating About Our Troubles »
Do you detect a whiff of bias and “gloating about our troubles” in this BBC story? There’s nothing factually inaccurate but it seems designed to criticize a Labour peer’s much regretted error of judgement.
To paraphrase the Dear Leader, “Fucking Scots!” Only they would let some eejit with a tin star and a six-gun pronounce sentence. This should have gone to the home secretary, as judges and courts are inherently reactionary and attempt to judge the plebs and their betters alike.
Mr Watson was merely taking Louise Casey’s tips on improving performance.
Damn them! Damn them all to hell!
These 99 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:32pm GMT Permanent link.
Theology And Waste Disposal »
Via Mike Power, Melanie Phillips despairs of the university system. Contra Mike, I think the Telegraph leader and Ms Phillips agree — both seem to say that only a small section of people are university material. The difference is not one of politics or perception (both are small ‘c’ conservative, as I’ll come to) but only of degree of sanity.
This whole policy is propelled not by a concern to improve education but by the dictates of class war. The universities have been turned into the tools of social engineering, placed under a financial cosh to discriminate against well-qualified students just because they come from fee-paying schools. Merit and aspiration are being penalised out of pure ideological spite.
This is the education of the madhouse. And it has come about because instead of promoting equality of opportunity — the essence of a fair society — the government is determined to impose equality of outcomes.
This ‘all must have prizes’ mentality is why the government believes that half the population should have a degree. Anyone who points out the obvious, that this is progressively destroying the value of all degrees, is immediately denounced as an ‘elitist’ who wants to deny the disadvantaged the opportunity to better themselves.
I’d hope that a university education — at a decent university — would teach better rhetoric than “This is the education of the madhouse.” (I’m not even certain that that sentence makes sense.) Do they suggest over the sherry that if you write a book, you have to get its title into every newspaper piece you write? The Telegraph is not much better, shooting itself in the foot with an argument it would deride on any other subject.
These days, tremendous pressure is put upon low achievers to go into higher education. It comes not only from a government that is forever telling the young that graduates earn more money than school leavers (not necessarily so, of course — and the more graduates there are, the less difference a degree will make).
But is this true? The gap between the best and worst off seems to be increasing. And the assumption that “the more graduates there are, the less difference a degree will make” is only true if graduates simply saturate the white collar job market. But markets aren’t zero-sum games, there’s always room for more value-added products.
The argument that both make is that the extra (if you will) university degrees are not providing useful skills, however abstract.
Others give up [and drop out] when they find that the course for which they have enrolled is boring, fatuous or just not for them ("theology and waste disposal” is one of the combinations on offer at Oxford Brookes University).
Waste disposal is a useful subject, and that course should at least teach students what to do with the other half of their degree.
The Telegraph leader and Ms Phillips share a conservative outlook as defined by John McGowan.
In any political conflict, the liberal assumes that all the advantages lie with those at the top of the prevailing social hierarchy. For that reason, the liberal believes that every benefit of the doubt—and every concrete material benefit—should flow to those on the bottom. The liberal, in other words, recognizes that power and advantage accumulates in any society—and is committed to undoing that power and accumulation wherever possible. By way of contrast, the conservative is always a member of the “party of order,” convinced that only by maintaining authority can society be preserved and chaos averted. The liberal thinks that authority hardly needs any extra help; the centripetal forces of society are so strong that our efforts should be thrown on the side of the centrifugal. The multiplication and dispersion of power is the best remedy to the tendency of power to coagulate—and dominate. We’ll worry about anarchy when it rears its ugly head, but not let that boogie man frighten us into placing too much power into too few hands.
(I’m sure the Simon Wiesenthal quote is entirely deliberate.) AFAIK, earnings, health, and even happiness are correlated with level of education, and there’s nothing wrong with a progressively inclined party wanting to spread that around a little more. What we have is too many theology degrees and too few in science and engineering. Pervious governments allowed apprenticeships to atrophy. If employers want suitably qualified recruits, they could do a lot worse than going back to training them themselves.
These 332 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:05pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 23 September 2005
They All Look The Same To Me »
Google News this morning. I recognise the face, but I can’t remember his name. Oh these cunning terrorists, slipping from one alias to another, one day they want to be called “Your Royal Highness” and the next simply “Prince.” How will ID cards cope with their lack of surnames?
These 50 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:44am GMT Permanent link.
Read The Bible For Its Prose »
Thou shalt not be on friendly terms
With guys in advertising firms,
Nor speak with such
As read the Bible for its prose,
Nor, above all, make love to those
Who wash too much.
Auden
You know what they say about trying to pass a camel through the eye of a needle: it ruins the needle, and it annoys the camel. Is there no platitude sacred to the English middle-classes which Oliver Kamm will not defend in the Thunderbox? Good god, now he doesn’t like the 100 minute bible. Politics and the English Language is one of Orwell’s angriest essays, but for some reason Mr Kamm takes it in jest — as if history flows from farce to tragedy. That seems to be the import of
Suddenly it is no longer funny.
Funny then, serious now. The world going to hell in a handcart.
The English Bible, in the Authorised Version, is among the noblest expressions of the language. Its power lies in its directness. So far from being couched in archaic and impenetrable language, the King James Bible uses short and unambiguous words. Its poetic quality lies not in ornamentation but in rhythm.
If the King James bible uses “short and unambiguous words” why are there so many interpretations of scripture? Why is this even funny?
Spectator I: I think it was “Blessed are the cheesemakers”.
Mrs. Gregory: Aha, what’s so special about the cheesemakers?
Gregory: Well, obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
Something can’t be taken metaphorically and unambiguous.
Few of these qualities are left in modern English translations of the Bible, but at least the possibility remains of comparing those versions, verse by verse, with the cadences of the Authorised Version.
This makes not only no sense, but a sort of negative sense. It takes meaning into a black hole and crushes and inverts in stupendous gravitational tides of bizarro logic. The point of the The 100-Minute Bible is defined on its website.
It is published with the hope that it will enable people who are not familiar with the Bible to understand something of the book that is the basis of the Christian faith.
At a guess, that means it’s aimed a Muslims, Hindus and people of other faiths. But I doubt that anyone reads the New English Bible side-by-side the KJV as if they were trying to grasp Dante in medieval Italian.
Mr Kamm takes careful aim at one of his feet and releases this volley.
It is not a translation but an attempt to render Christian doctrine and biblical narrative simply and succinctly. Its failure was almost certain, and is already obvious.
Can it really only be two paragraphs since he wrote:
So far from being couched in archaic and impenetrable language, the King James Bible uses short and unambiguous words.
So, the translators and editors of the KJV could “render Christian doctrine and biblical narrative simply and succinctly” but the “failure was almost certain” was anyone else who tried it. WTF? Seriously, WTF?
The 100-Minute Bible takes a sacramental language and renders it banal.
Again, only two paragraphs earlier we find:
Few of these [literary] qualities are left in modern English translations of the Bible …
Which is followed by:
Christians may squander their scriptural or liturgical inheritance as they wish. But when they demean a work of beauty and dignity that has shaped English history and literature as no other book, they invite retribution.
I’ve no idea how the 100-minute bible demeans the KVJ. It hasn’t destroyed it. No one claims that it’s rendered more windy translations obsolete. Next week, Mr Kamm lays into the lack of bonnets in an updated Emma.
The sample page of the 100-minute bible gives the The Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus emphasised that he had not come to destroy the moral demands of the Jewish Law but to fulfil them. He taught that it is not enough not to commit murder; the anger which can lead to murder must be set aside too. It is not enough not to commit adultery; lustful thoughts must be set aside too. It is not enough to keep only our solemn promises; we should always mean what we say.
You’d be pushed to glean the first sentence from the KJV if you didn’t have a background in either Christianity or Jewish traditions. Many people without the benefits of Mr Kamm’s education don’t get that part, never mind possible converts from other religions (evangelism is part of the Christian teaching after all). Notice also that the first sentence is a subtle reminder that Jesus was Jewish; a point too obvious to be spelled out in the KJV, and hence often forgotten.
As the poet said:
I lose my patience, and I own it too,
When works are censured, not as bad, but new.
The writer of Telegraph leader, A Bible for beginners misses the point as well.
This edition is a sad sign of the times, when adults must be presented with the sorts of books children used to read.
I’m not surprised that the sort of bright sparks who grow up to write for national newspapers could read better at 10 than many adults. There were illiterates in Dickens and George Eliot. If everyone read the bible just because they could buy a copy, there’d be little need for sermons.
There is a good point to the new version.
It is good in parts. Mercifully Mr Hinton skips Leviticus, with its lengthy instructions on keeping clean in the desert. We can also, surely, do without all the begats.
Quite. It would spare us this sort of embarrassing scene.
But the beard bloke’s aim now seemed to be to rush the ceremonies a bit. He hustled R.V. Smethurst off stage rather like a chucker-out in a pub regretfully ejecting an old and respected customer, and starting paging G.G. Simmons. A moment later the latter was up and coming, and conceive my emotion when it was announced that the subject on which he had clicked was Scripture knowledge. One of us, I mean to say.
G.G. Simmons was an unpleasant, perky-looking stripling, mostly front teeth and spectacles, but I gave him a big hand. We Scripture-knowledge sharks stick together.
Gussie, I was sorry to see, didn’t like him. There was in his manner, as he regarded G.G. Simmons, none of the chumminess which had marked it during his interview with P.K. Purvis or, in a somewhat lesser degree, with R.V. Smethurst. He was cold and distant.
“Well, G.G. Simmons.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“What do you mean—sir, yes, sir? Dashed silly thing to say. So you’ve won the Scripture-knowledge prize, have you?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“Yes,” said Gussie, “you look just the sort of little tick who would. And yet,” he said, pausing and eyeing the child keenly, “how are we to know that this has all been open and above board? Let me test you, G.G. Simmons. What was What’s-His-Name—the chap who begat Thingummy? Can you answer me that, Simmons?”
“Sir, no, sir.”
Gussie turned to the bearded bloke.
“Fishy,” he said. “Very fishy. This boy appears to be totally lacking in Scripture knowledge.”
These 503 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:59pm GMT Permanent link.
Does The Party Have The Guts »
Splendid letter in yesterday’s Telegraph from Douglas L. Cooke:
Sir - There can be little doubt that the vast majority of our citizens want to see our forces withdrawn from the disastrous venture in Iraq. At the moment, Tony Blair seems less occupied with plans for a strategic withdrawal than in contemplating the possibility of military action against Iran.
As the Labour Party faithful, of which I was hitherto a proud member, meet in conference, they have an opportunity to earn the nation’s commendation. They must appreciate that their current leader, who will undoubtedly go down in history as the most disastrous prime minister of the post-war era, is incapable of any action that might upset the American President. An exit strategy will never feature on his agenda.
Time is not on our side. The country cannot afford to wait until retirement fits in with Tony’s plans. Does the party have the guts to tell him to go?
Only “the most disastrous prime minister of the post-war era"? Tony is far more ambitious than that. Unravelling habeas corpus, double indemnity, making every citizen the slave of the state to be watched over all the time and under constant suspicion, backing superstition over science in state-funded schools, getting us into more wars than any previous PM, and managing most of them disastrously, selling his soul to an Australian media magnate, hanging out with a mafioso, lying to Parliament, forgiving of outright criminality in Peter Mandelson, but sacking Ann Clwyd for principled rebellion, Tony Blair will leave a scar on British life far worse than the Luftwaffe. And he still hasn’t told us whether he prays with a man known to execute developmentally disabled juveniles.
And a splendid story in yesterday’s Independent, Debate on Robin Cook’s memory designed to embarrass Blair.
Labour party leaders are seeking to stop grassroots activists who are hoping to use the memory of Robin Cook at next week’s annual party conference to embarrass Tony Blair about the upsurge in violence in Iraq.
…
Conference organisers are trying to head off pressure for a debate on the Cook motion and Iraq by telling his former allies that the party wants to honour the memory of Mr Cook along with Mo Mowlam and Lord Callaghan, the former Labour Prime Minister who also died this year, with a video at the start of the conference on Sunday.
Isn’t that sweet? They want to show a video.
Blair lied to get us into Iraq. To borrow from Brad DeLong: Impeach Tony Blair. Impeach him now.
These 177 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:31pm GMT Permanent link.
Dreams Sometimes Come True »
Please please please
Let me let me let me
Let me get what I want
This time
The Smiths
PoliticalBetting.com: Could Blair make an announcement in a matter of days?
Pictured: never one to miss a photo opportunity, the Prime Minister, clad in a tasteful coke sniffer Burberry T-shirt, offers comfort to a survivor of Saddam’s inhuman lobotomy programme. “Now I guess you’ll have to tell ‘em That you got no cerebellum,” he joked.
These 56 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:14pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 24 September 2005
Rights »
Only takes one itchy trigger
One more widow, one less white nigger
Elvis Costello, Oliver's Army
I’m sorry, but my fellow bloggers have gravely misread the situation. Take this. Your anger is misplaced, my friend. The police were doing their sworn duty. Protecting Eve Garrard.
Backword sez: Policemen, shoot-to-kill-to-protect! Remember, dead men tell no tales.
These 40 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:10am GMT Permanent link.
Top Public Intellectuals »
Vote Jamie or the dog gets it!
However, he’s missing from the Prospect list, not that I’ve even heard of all those who are. Who the hell is Robert Putnam? I thought they meant Hilary, whom I’d be glad to include. And I’ve never heard of Henry Louis Gates Jr, apparently a “theorist of race.” It’s not always to the swift, Harry. I thought they meant William Henry Gates, III—the guy who made Ctrl-Alt-Del famous.
Of those included, I’d go for Steven Weinberg, Daniel Kahneman, Richard Rorty, and Richard Dawkins. There are a few others I like, but I’d rate them lower than the following list, which reflects, rather too much, my parochialism.
- Philip Roth. Novelist. USA. I can’t think of any reason why Roth should be left off the list. He’s maintained quality for the past 40 years. He’s written on every important theme there is: sex, Israel, sex, America, sex, what it means to be American, sex, what it means to be Jewish, sex, Fascism, sex, Communism, sex, and so and so forth …
- Steven Hawking. Mathematician. UK. I know that unlike Steven Weinberg, he has yet to receive the Nobel, but this may be because his discipline is Mathematics, which is not recognised by the committee. He is however, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a post once held by Isaac Newton. He doesn’t write for the Guardian or the Mirror but we’ve known for the last century (since 1905, to be exact) that God doesn’t bother with the lay audience — or human comprehension, for that matter.
- Ingmar Bergman. Film director. Sweden.
- Francis [Ford] Coppola. Film director. USA. He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
- David Lynch. Film director. USA. The best TV series ever made, or at least the opening episodes, but Eraserhead, and Blue Velvet are the perhaps the greatest movies made in the USA since the war.
- Woody Allen. Film Director, jazz musician, writer, comedian, actor. USA.
- Bob Dylan. Songwriter. USA. We are talking public intellectuals, are we not? Name one with more influence.
- Brian Eno. Musician. UK.
- Philip Glass. Composer. USA.
- Harold Pinter. Playwright, actor, director, poet. UK.
- Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV aka Black Francis. Screamer. USA.
- William Shatner. Actor, singer. Canada. Split infinitives no man has split before. “Man became civilised when he said, ‘I will not kill today.’"
Intellectual who should be alive:
- James Marshall Hendrix. Genius.
Unaccountably missed: Miguel Alcubierre, which I’ll put down to snobbery as his doctorate is from Cardiff University. (Once upon a time, a humble patent office clerk could submit scientific papers which those who understood them took seriously,) Yes, I know it’s discredited. And I know enough special relativity (the general stuff is way over my head, I’m afraid) to know just how forbidden the supposed effect is.
These 470 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:51am GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 25 September 2005
Alun Michael Namechecked By Nick Cohen »
Alun Michael is my MP, and Nick Cohen is really rather splendid.
Among the most gruesome spectacles at this week’s conference will be the daily prayer breakfasts of the Christian Socialist Movement. Meg Munn, Alun Michael, Stephen Timms and many another mediocrity will give thanks to the Lord for allowing them to impose their selfish dogmas on a secular country which may, one day, regard faith schools as this government’s most poisonous legacy.
My emphasis. Also:
[Delegates at the Labour conference] could suggest their leaders do what they promised in 1997 and replace the Lords with an elected chamber whose members don’t include criminals.
New Labour keep a promise? Oh ho ho ho.
These 24 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:02am GMT Permanent link.
You Have To Be Still Alive For This To Work »
Have a look a the photo above. The caption in the Seattle Times reads “Firefighters work to cover the bodies of those who died early yesterday when the bus they were traveling in caught fire on Interstate 45 south of Dallas. The bus was carrying elderly residents of a Houston-area nursing home who were fleeing Hurricane Rita.” Now read the “cartoon” on the right. “Neither were they thankful” indeed.
Cartoon from Answers in Genesis, found through Sadly, No! Not exactly related, why bad things happen to good people. The cartoon which came before that one is brain-hurtingly stupid; perhaps the god-bothers will take on the a new high-resolution map of microwave light emitted only 380,000 years after the Big Bang from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe next.
Bus Photo: JIM MAHONEY/THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
These 136 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:43am GMT Permanent link.
Instructions Inside »
The Editors on the art of falling down.
On the other hand, the guy falls down a lot. I don’t know what a normal amount of falling down is, an I imagine that some people have lifestyles that involve a higher risk of falling down than mine, and so that needs to be taken into account. That said, he fell off a Segway. That’s like … I don’t know what that’s like, like water flowing uphill or something. I’m not sure how you would go about doing that, falling off a state-of-the-art self-balancing transport, but I think there are instructions inside bottles of cheap Scotch.
Great stuff.
These 10 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:24pm GMT Permanent link.
Bollocks To Blair »
I’ve nothing against the Badminton Horse Trials; I just hope the horses have access to good lawyers, and the police evidence is above board. I don’t link to Horse and Hound enough: this is a first. Via Guido, Girl arrested over Bollocks to Blair shirt. Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to do what other people don’t want you to when it’s none of their business — to paraphrase Orwell. No-talent little God Botherer Alun Michael would be the chief persecutor of the Countryside Alliance. Stop people doing what they like and make them do want the government thinks is good for them. It’s Stalinism with a human face like a horse’s arse.
My friends, we live under a government which thinks a demotic word for “testes” is obscene, but the execution of a Brazilian electrician, and the stream of lies from the Met which followed is defensible; that the murder of 98,000 Iraqis, the replacement of Saddam with a fundamentalist oppressive regime, torture and deportation, and now raids on state prisons is a “success.” For more on New (Labour) Speak, see Chris Dillow.
Fuck Blair.
These 189 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:41pm GMT Permanent link.
Liberal Bias »
Julian Sanchez totally uncovers bias in the AP. I’m waiting for an update from this erstwhile Republican.
These 17 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:05pm GMT Permanent link.
Headline Of The Day »
Erotic film sparks shipping alert. Sadly, that’s only on the BBC Front Page News RSS feed. Like a hurricane petering out as it moves inland, the headline on the page itself is “Sea alert as crew watch sexy film.” Sexy film? Like Confessions of a Driving Instructor? Nope, it was Crash, broadcast on UK Channel 4. Worse things happen at sea, indeed.
These 63 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:15pm GMT Permanent link.
Honour Marching »
Via David T, Sunny Hundal of Pickled Politics is being ‘honoured’ with a BNP March, and misquoted on their site, but both Sunny and David link there, so I won’t. David T says two very worthwhile things:
Sunny cannot be blamed for the use that racist groups make of his research. Neither should he — or anybody — refuse to report a story for fear that it will be spun by racists and woven into their paranoid millenial vision of a society fractured by racial warfare.
And
Sunny Hundal shouldn’t be embarrassed that the BNP have quoted him as an authority. It is a good thing that the political climate forces the BNP to pretend — even to its own members — that it isn’t a racist organisation.
The BNP don’t believe in freedom in the sense that liberals like David, Sunny, and myself use it. They’re picking up on Sunny’s The case of Pakistani men grooming young white girls for the wrong reasons, as David explains — to give themselves a patina of respectability and to strength their supporters biases.
The second time, Blink and Eastern Eye launched a campaign to stop it, although I supported it being shown.
Censorship is a very bad idea anyway, and in cases like this, not broadcasting gives the BNP (and similar organisations and people like Richard Littlejohn) carte blanche to imply that the truth was even worse than it was.
In his Asians in Media piece, C4 should not be pressured into pulling its controversial film, Sunny wrote:
Why are we afraid to air our dirty laundry? I have argued before that this is an issue more about segregation, poverty and drugs than race. Paedophilia is not just an Asian issue. That however doesn’t make this any more right. There have been other documentaries on paedophilia, one specifically focused on the Catholic Church, so we can’t complain of being unfairly picked on.
Could it be, leaving political correctness aside, that some Muslim leaders don’t want to give a negative impression of what many of their own youth are doing in Bradford? …
Last week’s Asian Voice newspaper points out the harassment of Hindus by Muslim youths, during religious celebrations in Bradford, has gone unreported and unresolved.
If no one raises these questions it is likely that problems will get brushed under the carpet, as all religious leaders are adept at doing.
It’s time the government understood that “community leaders” do a poor job of looking after their own, are not democratic or accountable, and are not the way to communicate with minorities.
Pickled Politics is now on the blogroll. I hope David T doesn’t make a habit of sensible posts like this.
These 198 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:44pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 26 September 2005
What Is It With David Blunkett And Tape Recorders? »
Via Guido (as I don’t read the Guardian any more), Roy Hattersley on Blunkett’s biggest lie.
Resentful hostility was replaced by almost universal rejoicing when David Blunkett gave an assurance which seemed too categoric to leave room for doubt. “Read my lips. No selection by examination or interview.” Even I — despite having known Blunkett for years — believed him.
I admit to feeling some concern when, the next day, he insisted that he had only promised “no more selection …” — an obvious invention that was quickly exposed by reference to recordings of his speech. And my doubts were increased towards the end of the week by the bizarre claim that the promise had been a joke based on George Bush Sr’s “read my lips” guarantee against tax increases. The comparison was more apposite than it seemed at the time. Bush increased taxes.
My emphasis. Blunkett’s biographer Stephen Pollard:
I had a witness with me throughout my interviews: my tape recorder. I listened to the relevant interview again yesterday. His words are crystal clear. Mr Blunkett said everything I quoted and a lot more which has yet to emerge. Indeed, as I interviewed him I would go out of my way to point out to him that the tape recorder was running, lest he forget and, being blind, be unable to see the red recording light. So not only is it plain wrong for Mr Blunkett to assert that I made the quotes up, it is also stupid. He knows that the interviews were recorded.
Do I hate politicians? Not entirely. Not the ones who keep their promises.
These 35 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:37pm GMT Permanent link.
Artists Are The Antennae Of The Race »
Ezra Pound
The dad of four has enjoyed a string of dates with Sally since they met at West End club Annabel’s in June. They both love poetry and the arts and City high-flyer Sally is training to be an opera singer.
I really don’t care about David Blunkett’s relationships with anyone or anything apart from the truth. But I find a 29-year-old trainee opera singer unlikely. A proper journalist would have used quotes:
Thompson: Everybody knows that story, Mr. Leland. But why did he do it? How could a man write a notice like that?
Leland: You just don’t know Charlie. He thought that by finishing that notice he could show me he was an honest man. He was always trying to prove something. The whole thing about Susie being an opera singer, that was trying to prove something. You know what the headline was the day before the election, “Candidate Kane found in love nest with quote, singer, unquote.” He was gonna take the quotes off the singer.
These 36 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:57pm GMT Permanent link.
One Hand Washes The Other, Or Something »
Did someone say, “It’s a funny old world"?
BBC: Labour ‘should learn from Bush’:
Labour should turn to George Bush’s Republican party for inspiration about how to boost party membership, Europe Minister Douglas Alexander has argued.
Via Brad DeLong, Conservative Republican and Reagan tax honcho Bruce Bartlett testifies before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee and says, “we must travel the same route taken by the Europeans”
Therefore, like it or not, we must travel the same route taken by the Europeans, who long before us made peace with the welfare state and tried to figure out how to pay for it with the least negative impact on economic growth and incentives. They all imposed a broad-based consumption tax called the value-added tax as an add-on tax to all the others. I think it is only a matter of time before we are forced to do the same thing and the longer we wait the more painful it will be when it is finally done.
I tried “symbiosis” and “complementarity” as titles, but neither worked, unless I did the “when I use a word” thing as too many hacks do. So it’s back to the tired old moive mafia references. Sorry.
These 80 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:31pm GMT Permanent link.
Do The French Have A Word For »
An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you.
Dylan Thomas
I dislike Bush (who’d a thunk that) for his policies likely to affect me; beyond that I care little. Well, I care a bit; I’ve visited the States, and the people I’ve liked have been pretty much all Democrats. So some internal US politics does interest me. I don’t really care what happens in the Supreme Court (beyond that it’s a central part of the American democratic process, and if the US insists on exporting its democracy, I’d far rather it was religiously tolerant, secular, anti-racist in intent (I don’t care whether it believes that positive discrimination is the problem or the solution, so long as it acknowledges that racial/theological/ethnic barriers are wrong), pro-choice (at least on the grounds of non-interference with adults and their bodies), and so on and so forth. Whatever, I don’t quite get the Sunday Telegraph profile of John Roberts. I look to the Torygraph to give me the positive right-wing spin.
Senators learnt that the youthful, clean-cut appeals court judge had been disparaging about Elizabeth Brinton, a Girl Scout of 14 who had wanted to sell cookies to Mr Reagan in 1985. The “little huckster”, Mr Roberts wrote, had already sold 10,000 boxes and wanted to palm one off on the president. But he did give the request the legal green light. He also suggested that Bob Jones, a fundamentalist Christian supporter of Mr Reagan, should be told to “go soak his head” for demanding a favour.
(That makes Elizabeth Brinton 34 this year, by the way.) “Huckster” seems a pejorative word, but what is the difference between what she was doing and Reaganomics in general? She seems to me, from that account, to be a sort of capitalist Stakhanovite, a little lucky, a little phoney, but what the 80s were all about — larger than life greed. True, Roberts ruled in her favour (why did he even need to?), but what’s with the snide?
These 234 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:03pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 27 September 2005
So, The Guardian »
I’ll never buy theguardian again, for, well, quite a few weeks actually. I’m still upset over their Michael Behe interview. I wrote to complain, as I’m sure others did. I don’t mind not getting a letter somewhere downpage from Keith Flett, that’s neither here nor there — that they didn’t publish any criticism lost one regular Saturday buyer. (I already boycotted the Torygraph for carrying a horoscope.) But is it really “the best newspaper in Britain” as Theodore Dalrymple claimed? Or is he still (rightly, IMO, for what that’s worth) boiling with plans of revenge for being sacked (or “let go") from the Sunday Telegraph for being ‘old’?
Hell, I don’t know. That’s a stupid question! Ask me another. OK, “Is The Guardian institutionally racist?” (Via Mick and Laban.)
I respect Theodore Dalrymple. He writes from experience, which is more important that anything else. As a doctor, he met what we presently call the “underclass” or “chavs” (we’ve given them other names and horror stories, and will again). As a doctor, he gave them the same expertise that he gave to his social peers. Medicine allowed him to cast the cold eye, as the poet chappie had it, over the mores of the lumpens.
Did I also mention that I buy the Sunday Torygraph? And I respect its editor. And maybe he had a reason for letting Dr Dalrymple go. Maybe he has lost it. Others, as I’ve said, like his piece. I know what he wants to say — and I have some time for it. But he doesn’t say it, he writes a confused, frustrating farrago instead.
If you want to win a argument with statistics, first get as much data as you possibly can. It’s true that if you only sample your cat, you can get 100% in favour or against, but most numerate people know this, and they know about sampling errors. Theodore (if that is your name; I’ve forgotten which one is the alias), if you really think the Grauniad is the best paper around, why don’t you buy it every day, and if you do, why don’t you go through your rubbish/recycling? Because this won’t do:
I tested the accuracy of my impression by counting the photographs in the edition of 19th September 2005.
Note: I am not disputing Dr Dalrymple’s “counting the photographs in the edition of 19th September 2005.” I’m disputing why he chose that particular edition. It may have been innocent. (I’d like to believe it was.) But a month of photographs seems more arbitrary on his part, and more indicative of long-standing bias on the Gruan’s side.
There was only one photograph of an Indian, and that was in a commercial advertisement, over the content of which The Guardian, presumably, had little or no control. By contrast, there were 26 photographs of blacks. Surely this was a discrepancy that could not have arisen by chance, and is proof positive of a systematic bias amounting to racism. After all, there are more people of South Asian descent in Britain than of African and West Indian descent, and yet Indians were the subjects of fewer than 4 per cent of all the photographs of ethnic minorities to appear in the newspaper.
Philosophically trained readers may spot what they call a “category error.” India is a country, and “Indian” is a nationality. “Black” is a skin colour. (I should point out that I don’t believe in “race” which is a 19th Century concept and good for nothing, IMO.) Dr Dalrymple continues:
The people who run and write The Guardian have deep, suppressed and subliminal doubts about the equality of human races. To prove to themselves that they do not have such doubts, they overcompensate by publishing as many photographs of blacks as possible in their pages.
This may be so. I’ve suspected that the Guardian er, “positively discriminates”, or less nicely, practices tokenism, for some time. But the “people who run and write The Guardian” are white surely? All they have to do is publish as “many photographs of [non-whites] as possible in their pages” to be inverse racists.
Dr Dalrymple tries to anticipate and defuse such criticism with:
They don’t have any such doubts with regard to the Indians and the Chinese.
But this returns to the category error. Is Thierry Henri black? Is Zinedine Zidane black? The country, India, covers many ethnicities, religions, and so on. How do you tell an Indian? How does one qualify as an Indian? Does one have to wear one of those feather things on one’s head? Does one have to look a little dark? And yet not be George Galloway? Or Peter Hain?
Spot the Indian. (Lest I be accused of racism, because I don’t publish representative photos of non-whites, this is one from last year.) Yes, he’s number 254, aka Lord Coe, and he’s only got one grandparent from the subcontinent — but how Indian do you have to be? This, it seems to me, is the problem with every account of “race” or “colour” — sooner or later you have to choose who is what. I had a girlfriend who was one quarter Indian. You wouldn’t have know it — the three-quarter part, a few randon genes overran that idea! She had a sister who even the little inbred dribbling racists at LGF would accept. Are you sure you can spot a “black” in a newspaper photograph? If your life depended on it? If someone else’s life did?
In fact, Dr Dalrymple anticipates this:
In fact, he [Gary Younge] is a perfectly adequate journalist. I rarely agree with what he writes, and he seems to me to have a very narrow viewpoint, but he is certainly no worse than many other journalists. His championship of the coalition of intellectuals, moral entrepreneurs and bureaucrats is no better and no worse than anyone else’s.
That hasn’t much to do with my thesis, I just thought it was worth recording.
The idea that all differentials in achievement between groups of human beings are attributable only to bias, illicit discrimination and prejudice is a primitive one, a little like the Azande idea that everyone dies of malevolent witchcraft, but it serves the ends of those who want to politicise the whole of life and control all social developments. Such people do not believe that societies can reach satisfactory accommodations and equilibria spontaneously and piecemeal, without central direction and an overall plan, usually their own of course.
This is interesting. “[I]llicit discrimination” is a primitive explanation of bias? OK.
This is nonsense, of course. It isn’t long ago that football clubs in this country were deeply prejudiced against black players, but it soon enough became clear to them, thanks to the obvious talents of black players, that they would be ill-advised to reject black players on account of the colour of their skin. There was no central plan to this effect, any more than there was a central plan to make the owners of newsagents and corner stores predominantly Indian.
Now, “talent” and “achievement” are not the same thing. That maudlin poet chap:
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.
Black players may have talent, but if they were barred from the top clubs, they wouldn’t achieve.
These humble businesses, incidentally, have been the motor of a great deal of social mobility, something which their owners understood a great deal better than the intellectuals, moral entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. The quiet heroism of parents who have kept a little store for twenty or thirty years, often in the face of very difficult conditions (despicable racist abuse among them), that their children might be educated, ascend the social scale and enjoy richer, fuller lives than their own, moves me far more than the rage of those who see only racism and discrimination.
I quite agree about the “despicable racist abuse” but sadly, feeling that you’re at least one layer from the bottom is what passes for human pride. My happiest memories are of smart alec Jews abusing Irish immigrants. The humble police (the date is wonderful is it not?) moved up the social ladder. (You try making a pun out of “Kennedy” no less an Irish name than “Dribble” I mean …)
Dr Dalrymple’s final paragraph is his best:
Primo Levi most movingly wrote that each person should be judged as an individual and that no person should be judged according to his membership of a race or nation. But that is not the same as demanding that group outcomes should be absolutely equal, for then anti-racists will become mere mirror-image racists.
In sum: I still think the Graun is lowbrow rubbish; but any thesis which involves “race” — especially as defined by skin colour — is total rubbish. If you wish to argue that there are races or nations (the latter being more than passport), you need to go down to DNA to convince me. Until then, I believe that we’re all one race. (So why are Indians good at cricket? Could it be because they’ve practiced? And Africans at football? Perhaps sports are reducible to co-ordination and spacial perception. It’s a thesis: look at Ian Botham, or J.P.R. Williams. Prove me wrong.)
These 980 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:01am GMT Permanent link.
I Suppose They Did Carry It »
The Grauniad (or possibly, tehgrauniad), boldly taking misprints into cyberspace.
These 11 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:43am GMT Permanent link.
The Most Dysfunctional Of The Developing Democracies »
But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we’re forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God’s on your side.
Bob Dylan With God on our side
You know the scene in The Fly when Jeff Goldblum tries to teleport a baboon and it ends up sort of inside out? I’ve suspected that someone gave the poor creature a suit, and it’s been writing as “Mark Steyn” ever since. Today, in the Times (yes, the Times), Ruth Gledhill ("Religion Correspondent” yes, “Religion Correspondent") has written a truly splendid piece, Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’ which reads a lot like you took Mark Steyn and teleported him back to the reality-based community. (Via PZ.)
RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.
That’s a punchy opening. I like Ruth already.
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.
“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”
You see this anti-Steyn beginning to emerge. The polarity gets reversed and life and real blood begin to flow. Religion — all religion (though actually we’re only discussing monotheism) is “harmful” and the US is “dysfunctional.”
The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional.
See?
Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”
He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.
Mr Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. “I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states,” he added.
Hee hee, I love “increasingly repelled.” But then I like Fontana Labs’s Listen to yourself (original NYT article won’t open: Safari thinks the page redirects to another page which redirects back to the first page — WTF?)
Alexia, who wore a cross pendant, prayed all through the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Delta State University in Mississippi. At 23, she was having her third abortion. “My religion is against it,” she said, adding that she is a Baptist. “In a way I feel I’m doing wrong, but you can be forgiven. I blame myself. I feel I shouldn’t have sex at all.”
Third Avenue says the articles in The New Criterion “are almost all unadulterated screeds on what makes Britain dreadful.” There are many things wrong with this country, but there’s a certain sort of right-winger (Mark Steyn is merely the most vocal) who takes pleasure in running this country down, preferably from third-hand stories, and unchecked anecdotes — and in Steyn’s case from the far side of the Atlantic as well. One of the great things about this country is that we have rehabilitated almost all gerin oil junkies.
Medium doses of Gerin oil, though not in themselves dangerous, can distort perceptions of reality. Beliefs that have no basis in fact are immunised, by the drug’s own direct effects on the nervous system, against evidence from the real world. Oil-heads can be heard talking to thin air or muttering to themselves, apparently in the belief that private wishes so expressed will come true, even at the cost of mild violation of the laws of physics. This autolocutory disorder is often accompanied by weird tics, hand gestures or other stereotypies, for example rhythmic head-nodding towards a wall.
With typical British civility and slowness, our programme is working. Occasionally, there’s a sort of deranged self-flagellation when we overreach our tolerance of these nutters, but sufferers are destroying their caches of weapons, and fanatics, far from being recruited by the self-destruction of their fellow users, have turned their avidity to more practical obsessions, like cricket. There is still the odd deluded fool left, but even he has promised to leave public life before 2010.
These 334 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:06pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 28 September 2005
New Speech »
Words in papers, words in books
Words on TV, words for crooks
Words of comfort, words of peace
Words to make the fighting cease
Words to tell you what to do
Words are working hard for you
Tom Tom Club, Wordy Rappinghood
First, principles.
The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities. The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as verb, noun, adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and the noun form, when they were of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms.
Then, praxis.
I say to you. To all of you. For you. Like me. Use words. Everyday.
Words. Don’t. Come easy to me. Or to us. To any of us.
And I asked myself. Wouldn’t it be simpler. If we just got rid of. Some of them?
When you think. Of the time spent in the classroom. Learning verbs. For what?
For we. Us. The Labour Party. Are a progressive party. Not a liberal party. But a tough party.
And we will be tough. On verbs. And on the causes of verbs.
Not forgetting adjectives.
(He didn’t really say that.) Justin has more on Blair’s speech impediment. The Beeb too.
These 19 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:05am GMT Permanent link.
21st Century Crime »
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be lead to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken
The Telegraph noted something in the Dear Leader’s speech others have missed (I. Couldn’t Read. The whole. Thing). Blair promises 21st century justice system to fight 21st century crime.
Tony Blair has promised to modernise the ‘Dickensian’ way the police and courts deal with criminals, drug dealers and binge drinkers as he laid out a packed policy agenda for Labour’s third term.
Er, hold on there, did he say that? Yes, he did.
For eight years I have battered the criminal justice system to get it to change.
And it was only when we started to introduce special ASB laws, we really made a difference.
And I now understand why. The system itself is the problem. We are trying to fight 21st century crime — ASB, drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime —with 19th century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens.
I’ve a radical idea — like all radical ideas, I’ve stolen it from history. The reader may have heard of the famous Chicago gangs in the 30s. Much of their income came from bootlegging alcohol, which the government in its wisdom, had outlawed. The US government in its later wisdom found a way to deal with these criminals. It made alcohol legal again. Now, think of drug-dealing. A simple, painless solution which frees up police time, and empties the cells, might damage the profits from organised crime too. In a sensible 21st century, drug-dealing would not be a crime. ASB? The one that got Cleopatra was a bit of a bastard, but that was 20 centuries ago. Binge-drinking is a crime? Since when? Will there be police waiting outside pubs to arrest anyone who has had more than four drinks in a single session? (This PDF paper on binge drinking defines it as “as men consuming at least eight, and women at least six standard units of alcohol in a single day.” Most strong lagers now have more than 2 standard units of alcohol.) More sensibly, Bernard Manning:
I’ve been a licensee for 50 years at the Embassy Club in Manchester and binge-drinking is no worse than it was back when I started.
And while I’m here, Blair also says a few paras down:
Second, we need a uniformed presence on the street in every community.
This “community” nonsense is one of the fault-lines of Blair thought. I don’t think it means anything; but he seems to imply that there are ghettoes where the police don’t go. Some “communities” — in fact most, as New Labour use the term — are virtual: the “gay community"; the “Muslim community” — they don’t have streets. Now there seems to be an SW1 community (where the police wait outside your front door) and an SW2 community (where they only show up with firearms), and so on.
Update: this passage has struck a nerve. Johnathan Pearce of Samizdata says, “it can and should be possible to crack down hard on crime while protecting our ancient liberties.” Roger that. Tim Worstall: “People living in safety is best achieved by prevention of crime...which means bobbies on streets dissuading the commission of them [crimes], not locking up in greater numbers those who may be innocent.”
These 328 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:21am GMT Permanent link.
Bossy »
Pub Philosopher caught the Today programme’s discussion between Julie Morgan (MP for Cardiff North) and David Hockney on the government’s ban on smoking. He wasn’t impressed by David Hockney. I’ll agree that he didn’t argue as well as he might have, and I don’t know who suggested him to oppose the motion, but I thought before and still think that Hockney is a great bloke, a bloody-minded Yorkshireman of the old sort. (And a marvellous artist too.) This government is supposed to trust the market; why not let the market decide? I’d prefer smoke-free pubs — but only the one I’m in at a given time, the rest can do what the hell they like. As as Hockney said, it’s bossy. “Death awaits you whether you smoke or not. Pubs are not health clubs. … This is ridiculous. It’s bossy.” “Why has every place to be suitable for you?” I thought Julie Morgan (whose husband Rhodders I usually admire as a cuddly old Labour lefty or useless old duffer, as friends who know him say) was strident and, for want of a better word, bossy. She said we have to protect those who don’t smoke. As Hockney said, they can go elsewhere. She said that Hockney can smoke where he likes, just not in public places (which I think restricts “where one likes” so much as to make it nonsense). What about the workers? For one thing, it means they can’t smoke at work. There is something about people who work in pubs — almost all of them smoke. The government isn’t protecting them at all.
These 266 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:21pm GMT Permanent link.
The Creationists Have Their Wedge Document »
Rational people need The Wedgie Document. Quite splendid, and a guide to arguing on the internets which can be applied to any subject. Note that the first comment is hostile and, a propos absolutely nothing, raises Hitler and Stalin.
Sort of related: I almost fell for the Footprints in the Sand. Neat.
These 52 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:34pm GMT Permanent link.
Proof Of Intelligent Design »
Here:
“At temps that cold, he probably doesn’t have to worry about his organs freezing up but things can definitely get a bit sluggish,” says Dr. Henry. “That’s probably why his designer gave him ethylene glycol. It was a very intelligent thing to do when you think about it.”
Ethylene glycol?
The lab experts finally identified the fluid through a taste test; one brave technician detected the presence of a bittering agent known as denatonium benzoate (trade name Bitrex). After that, it wasn’t long before the scientists knew what they had on their hands: ethylene glycol, more commonly known as antifreeze, the water-based liquid coolant used in gasoline and diesel engines to keep them from freezing.
So, whose organs are cold?
Doctors who performed surgery on Vice President Dick Cheney over the weekend to remove aneurysms from behind both of his knees say that they made a bewildering discovery: Mr. Cheney has no blood flowing through his veins. Doctors present in the operating theater also determined that the Vice President’s body temperature is approximately 45 degrees, less than half the average human temperature.
Would you believe that someone in the comments objected that 45 degrees is not half the “average human temperature"?
The whole site is just brilliant.
More Parents Naming Children After GOP Stars:
Parents need not be white to want to name their kids right. A growing number of Hispanic families are also tagging their tots with anti-liberal labels. One favorite: Gonzo, the nickname of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
These 40 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:43pm GMT Permanent link.
Part Of A Progressive Cause »
Ellis Sharp: Terrorist Detained!. Though I think Mike Power got there first with Shame! Chicken Yoghurt: New Labour: A Home Fit For Heroes. Guardian: Straw heckled over Iraq.
A delegate, who was 82 years old and has been a Labour party member for 60 years, was bundled out by security guards after he shouted, “That’s a lie,” during the foreign secretary’s keynote conference address.
That was it? One heckle? You can’t say that in the House, but you can shout things like “Stand up!” when Mr Straw is on his feet at the dispatch box.
Even when my father had lost most of his brain to the steady deterioration following oxygen starvation caused be a stroke, there were the occasional flashes of the old personality. There are still reasons to love the Labour Party:
A second delegate was expelled for complaining at the treatment of the first heckler.
That’s the old party; standing up to bullies. And this is the New Labour Party backing bullies and giving them authority:
The Labour party later apologised to the first delegate - veteran activist Walter Wolfgang, the vice-president of CND and organiser of one of the first Alderston marches.
After being ejected from the conference hall, Mr Wolfgang had his pass seized by police acting under the prevention of terrorism act.
Terrorism? BBC: Complaint over heckler treatment.
Delegate Carol Hayton protested during a later debate that Mr Wolfgang had been “manhandled”.
…
Ms Hayton told Sir Jeremy Beecham, who was chairing the session: “We are very concerned about the way in which a gentleman of over 80 was manhandled from the balcony.
“Perhaps more appropriate action could have been taken, but this was an 80-year-old gentleman and I am sure that Jack Straw, a politician of great experience, is able to deal with events of this kind without that kind of response from our stewards.”
You know, one of the reasons I never became a journalist is my talent for being the wrong (ie less interesting) place. But when I was a student, and supposedly covering the NUS conference in 1981, Owen Carron, then recently elected Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone came to speak. I was off getting drunk when he did, but he gave a press conference the following day, and I went to that. He talked really quietly, and I don’t think anyone made out a word. But no one asked him to speak up, and the atmosphere was tense and subdued. “That was a little weird” I said to someone else as we left. “Didn’t you see him last night? When the heckler was dragged outside by ‘security’"? she asked.
Owen Carron had progressive ideas, just like the dear leader, and wasn’t afraid of a little force when appropriate. An Phoblacht 24.6.82:
We therefore, once again urge the young men and women of this generation to come forward and join the Republican movement, to expand and strengthen it so that we can escalate the struggle at every level and particularly to sustain and increase the momentum of the armed struggle ….Victory to the freedom fighters.
These 279 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:14pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 29 September 2005
Pollard On Blunkett »
Stephen Pollard has a sympathetic (emotionally rather than intellectually) piece What has happened to David Blunkett? in the Daily Mail and on his blog.
It’s touchingly written on the points where Blunkett deserves, at the least, privacy and understanding. There’s point however, when objectivity becomes a distraction.
Today, there are those who regard him as a laughing stock; a figure to be pitied; a man whose career has spiralled downhill since the unravelling of his affair with a married woman. Worse still, he has been described as a liar and a bully.
Further down, you realise that Stephen Pollard himself is determined not to be one of “those who regard him as a laughing stock” but his sympathy tips into pity for Blunkett, and the former Home Secretary’s being “a man whose career has spiralled downhill since the unravelling of his affair with a married woman” is a matter of fact, not an opinion. David Blunkett has been described as a liar — by Stephen Pollard.
Mr Blunkett long ago developed a liking for good food and wine. But it is one thing enjoying a glass or two of Burgundy, quite another for a Cabinet minister to spend the night in the louche surroundings of Annabel’s.
I suspect that liking opera and wine are approved by the biographer, because these are his tastes too. They’re also more or less mine, but this doesn’t really tell us much. What a “trainee opera singer” is doing in a nightclub — smoky, and where shouting is the only option for conversation — is a more challenging question.
At a stroke, he lost his most invaluable reputation - for straight talking and probity. That can never be recovered. Nor can we ever now forget the bizarre image of him whiling away the night at Annabel’s in search of human contact to fill the void in his life.
David Blunkett was a towering figure in politics, whose extremely courageous personal story and public achievements stood as an inspirational example to us all. Today, he is just another politician, who is in danger of frittering away a gleaming reputation.
The real tragedy of his career is that there is a risk that where once he was revered, in future, he will be pitied.
An outcome Mr Pollard’s article seems designed to produce.
What has still not been explained to my satisfaction is whether the Mirror is going to contest Mr Blunkett’s denial of the interview they printed. It seems only professional to have kept the recording — given that Mr Blunkett has gainsaid statements he’s made in the past (to his biographer, and to Lord Stevens, to give two examples). They haven’t retracted, but inventing quotes is a serious breach of journalistic ethics, and a lawsuit ought to be inevitable. Where is it?
These 269 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:15am GMT Permanent link.
Hooray For Democracy »
Give the people choice: The Mighty General Zod for President 2008. Via Henley, who is clearly so awed, he doesn’t even complain about the General’s Limey accent. Clearly, I’m still a Walken man (unless Zod promises me, say, France for puffing him in blog posts), but Zog has almost sane policies.
The Iraq War has shifted $187 billion to the defense industry. How is this “defense industry” to kneel before me? Are my praises to be sung as footnotes in their paperwork? You will stop giving these corporations your wealth. I suggest you put the money into your own schools and health care, so that I may have intelligent, healthy servants. I will indulge your wishes if you all want a Westernized, unpopular regime in Iraq, and I too shall gloat in its troubles, but it will not be done at my expense.
Even a criminal like myself is shocked that millions are not able to get health insurance and cannot pay for basic surgery. Who are these power brokers that allow the pigpen to become wormy and filthy? I demand your very lives, but I am not such an imbecile as to institutionalize suffering and poverty. You have my assurance that this shall change swiftly.
Why do you buy Chinese-made items when you know that it sells out the jobs of your family and friends? How will you buy those cheap things when you have no job? You are sending my wealth and tribute to foreign lands. I will not tolerate this.
He talks like the leader Tony Blair can only wish he was!
Child, let me explain something quite important to you. Under my new order, I allow you to live. In return for your obedience, you enjoy my generous protection. I expect tribute. Your tricycle, your dolls, everything you own. All these you will gladly give to me. All swear allegience to Zod!
Sadly, his cross-dressing past may excite interest from the tabloids.
These 73 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:46pm GMT Permanent link.
Hear! Hear! »
Norm says Nonsense. Splendid stuff. The stewards are rubbish.
He was ejected for heckling — in a political meeting! For shouting ‘Nonsense’. Any speaker at a Labour gathering who is unable to handle that hasn’t been around much.
Indeed. I prefer the Labour party because their conferences used to be boisterous and rowdy with debate. Broad church and all that. Views got aired. Takes a bit of a thick skin, but that’s what “The Red Flag” and “Jerusalem” are about.
Seriously, isn’t it the role of the chair (or “Speaker” in a parliament) to silence hecklers and say who should be thrown out and when? I don’t disagree that some hecklers can deny others their right to be heard — and not everyone who addresses the conference is as experienced as Jack Straw. But conference is chaired. Someone is responsible for order and speakers sticking to their agreed time limits. I suspect the stewards were given more autonomy this year because acknowledgement of heckling from the stage would have been televised, and that could make the party look disorganised. This is where stifling dissent gets you.
One year, the conference was chaired by Dennis Skinner. Hecklers were quickly dealt with.
The BBC article Heckler returns to hero’s welcome shows how to deal with interruptions.
The leader of Ealing Council, Leonara Thompson, who was speaking onstage when Mr Wolfgang returned, attempted to ignore the interruption, before ironically thanking delegates for clapping her comments.
I owe the title of this post to Steve Forrest:
Steve Forrest, the chairman of Erith and Thamesmead Labour Party, was also thrown out after complaining about Mr Wolfgang’s treatment.
He said that five security guards moved close to him in an intimidating manner after he shouted “Hear, hear” during an anti-war speech in debate.
A few minutes later, as Mr Wolfgang was being escorted away, he protested: “Leave him alone, he’s an old man.” At that point he was hauled out himself.
He said: “Where is the democracy in this party? It seems that the leadership is full of paranoia.”
Is that an over-reaction? BBC: MP’s anger after camera is seized:
[Great Grimsby MP Austin Mitchell], a keen amateur photographer, was taking photographs of the queues when stewards demanded to know what he was doing.
He said: “The police were called over and asked if they could look at my pictures. I said of course they could but I did not want the pictures deleted.
“I kept repeating that I did not want the shots deleted and the police officer said it was alright because he didn’t know how to use the camera.
“After he handed it back to me I found he had deleted every picture. This is security gone mad. And what’s the point.”
“The party has given the security staff absolute carte blanche and they have gone mad. It’s completely over the top.”
This was predictable: see Chris.
Austin Mitchell (wasn’t he “Haddock” for a time?) may be a maverick, and a bit of an attention seeker. Simon Hoggart:
The Labour conference was to hold its big debate on Iraq yesterday. So did they discuss it? Of course not! Instead, a furious woman from Unison stormed the podium. “I want to know why I have been stopped from bringing a bag of sweeties into the conference. It is bureaucracy gone mad!” she said.
…
At the time we all looked rather puzzled, until the steward standing near my seat explained: “I’ll tell you why they’re banned, they could be used as missiles.”
Unbelievable.
These 233 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:28pm GMT Permanent link.
All I Know Is What I See On The TV News »
Flashback: March 14, 2005. Michelle Malkin is impressed with “the many TV interviews to come with Atlanta hostage Ashley Smith, the extraordinary woman who survived a night with now-captured courthouse gunman Brian Nichols.” She cooked him pancakes and told him about the Lord. Ms Malkin quotes from an MSNBC broadcast:
Nichols at one point called her “an angel sent from God,” Smith said.
Ms Malkin concurred:
I have no doubt she is.
I just love it when a plan comes together. Even when I didn’t have a plan. Especially when I didn’t have a plan.
Rogier van Bakel finds a more detailed account of that ordeal.
Ashley Smith, the woman who says she persuaded suspected courthouse gunman Brian Nichols to release her by talking about her faith, discloses in a new book that she gave him methamphetamine during the hostage ordeal. … She says he asked for marijuana, but she did not have any, and she dug into her illegal stash of crystal meth instead.
He asked for marijuana, and I gave him crystal meth… It could almost be a song. Sweet Jesusy goodness. In a syringe near you.
These 111 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:00pm GMT Permanent link.
Hello, I'm Your New Stepfather »
Incredible. The new film for all the family. “But, sometimes, what we need the most. Is just around the corner.” Shining. Via Ogged.
These 23 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:30pm GMT Permanent link.
Suddenly I Feel Incredibly Badly Read »
Via Lindsay, the Most Harmful Books. Whee! Should be good. Lindsay says, “Excerpts don’t count.” Boo.
1. The Communist Manifesto
Easy. Everyone’s read this right? Can’t remember the plot. Some bloke gets chained up. Or something.
2. Mein Kampf
I looked at it in a bookshop once, and read half a page. Not enough? He was on about the Jews. I flicked about 100 pages forward, but it was still about the Jews. No development. Where’s the arc? I think he was obsessed. I heard it got remade as My Struggle, but that may be news for you.
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao
I used to have this. When I was wee. Didn’t read it through. Couldn’t make any sense of it. I assumed it got lost in translation (not in those words). Now, knowing more, perhaps not.
4. The Kinsey Report
Eek. I’ve read about it. I used to know a lot about Kinsey and his research and methodology, but didn’t actually read him. Not beginning to end anyway. Or at all, now I think about it.
5. Democracy and Education
Actually, I’ve never even heard of this. Heard of him, so I’m not totally ignorant.
6. Das Kapital
Tried when I was 17 or 18. No one told me how bloody dull it was. I mean really dull. Like Richard and Judy only infinitely worse. And then some. Linen. The price of linen. Like, who the hell cares?
7. The Feminine Mystique
I think I’ve got this. Not read it though.
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy
Nope. Read other positivists, but only know Auguste second hand. Helium, that’s what I think of, when I hear the name Auguste Comte.
9. Beyond Good and Evil
Hot diggity dang yes. Straight after reading about Whatsisname, the Russian chap who kills the old women with an axe, and goes crazy while the cops read his undergraduate essays. (The ending goes on forever, and when you get there, it stinks. But it starts well. Nabokov gave it a B+ and he may have been generous.) I read the Penguin Classics version published in the 70s or early 80s, not the one pictured. On eBay it’s described as “UNCOMMON NAKED LADY COVER.” It’s the Sphinx you mong! Some guy falls into an abyss, so it’s a bit like the Roadrunner cartoons. I thought it was going to be about the planet Krypton, but that’s one of the others.
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Read about half, and quite enjoyed it. I’m not good on economics though.
Of the “Honorable Mentions” I’m not much better.
Authoritarian Personality
Skimmed enough to eviscerate in an essay. Total toss.
The Origin of Species
Or as some call it, Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. A most excellent read, and the greatest book ever.
Madness and Civilization
Also splendid. Not as good as Discipline and Punish especially where the guy gets torn apart by galloping horses, but holy weirdness!
Introduction to Psychoanalysis
I’ve read a lot of Freud, but not this one. Totally bogus. You are haffing problems with your mother, I think? Bastard sat behind his patients so he could fall asleep. Was that in Jeffrey Masson or just There’s Something About Mary?
These 553 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:44pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 30 September 2005
Strong Stomach Required »
Via just about everywhere — BBC: Abu Ghraib images ‘must appear’.
But in his 50-page ruling, the judge said: “My task is not to defer to our worst fears, but to interpret and apply the law, in this case, the Freedom of Information Act, which advances values important to our society, transparency and accountability in government.
“Our struggle to prevail must be without sacrificing the transparency and accountability of government and military officials,” he added.
Judge Hellerstein said America “does not surrender to blackmail, and fear of blackmail is not a legally sufficient argument to prevent us from performing a statutory command.
“Indeed, the freedoms that we champion are as important to our success in Iraq and Afghanistan as the guns and missiles with which our troops are armed.”
The Little Green Fedayeen call it another propaganda windfall. One comment:
How does this idiot Judge have the right to tell the Pentagon what to do?
How does this idiot Judge not see that this is going to YET AGAIN piss off the Mooslims. (I see burning effigy’s of George Bush and Sharon in our future islamic pics).
Give that man a lesson in American civics. Comment #27:
Aren’t the people who are to blame for this the people who are doing what’s shown in the pictures? Not the judge, not the ACLU, not even the people who took and distributed the pictures, the people IN the pictures.
Receives this reply in comment #35:
Um, they kind’ve already have been blamed? And kind’ve punished? Now you rightly blame and punish left-wing Judges and anti-American organizations who try to ride the story a little further to embarrass the President and America.
Wtf is wrong with your head?
“[K]ind’ve already have been blamed"? “And kind’ve punished?” Don’t these idiots even know the foundations of their own civil society?
Sadly No! has a picture of Charles Johnson and friends.
Sensible right-wing comment will be found on John Cole tomorrow. (I hope.)
These 80 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:34am GMT Permanent link.
It's Not Just The Blogosphere »
DoctorVee asks Has anybody else noticed how foul-mouthed the British blogosphere is becoming? It’s not just the blogosphere, it’s all British civil society — and it’s going back in time. Kevin Drum is apparently a fan of Sir Richard Mottram, but he’ll only say that the reason is in the seventh paragraph of the Guardian account. As he won’t print it, I will.
It was subsequently announced that both Ms Moore and Mr Sixsmith had resigned. Mr Sixsmith denied this, and Mr Byers, who did later resign, gave a confusing account in the Commons about what had gone on. Sir Richard put it more succinctly. He is said to have told a colleague: “We’re all fucked. I’m fucked. You’re fucked. The whole department’s fucked. It’s been the biggest cock-up ever and we’re all completely fucked.”
He is “to take on the key job of the prime minister’s top security and intelligence adviser.” Good for him.
These 83 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:59am GMT Permanent link.
Raising Heckles »
The comments on Harry’s farewell post have wandered off-topic again, and may be set for another cull. (Tsk, if you think that’s because there’s no thread for discussing the Labour Conference — just as conference itself did not discuss Iraq.) Mike in the comments:
Of course, there wouldn’t be this sort of attitude toward hecklers in the first place if the media didn’t always guarantee any moron who decides to shout out an ignorant statement a spot on the evening news, and then adds insult into injury by having them as honoured guests on GMTV the next day, not forgetting all the endless drivel about how “uncomfortable” and “embarrassed” the said politician apparently looked during the incident. The whole thing ends up completely taking away from everything the politician was trying to say — extraordinarily frustrating for a democratic political party.
Heckling is a attempt to stop other people from being heard by disrupting a speech — it is a very undemocratic practice and it is long time the heckling cancer was cut out once and for all.
And here’s an undemocratic practice. Shouldn’t be allowed, of course. Whatever were they thinking of?
She got a standing ovation before she began, another when she finished.
The Tories rose cheering and waving their order papers, many of them the same men and women who had pulled the lever to send her through the trap door of history.
“Hypocrites!” yelled Labour MPs, who are genuinely distressed to see her go.
…
And then Dennis Skinner engaged her in a double-act. Asked whether, in retirement, she would still oppose a European central bank, Mr Skinner fed her a line, shouting: “No, she’s goin’ to be the Guv’nor.”
Hear that, Dennis? Cut it out.
These 65 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:11pm GMT Permanent link.
Good Stuff »
Brain Leiter posted on Religious Societies More Dysfunctional than Secular Ones, According to New Study and noted “correlation is not causation…” (which should please Chris), and followed with a brilliant passage from David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion:
How happens it then…if vulgar superstition be so salutary to society, that all history abounds so much with accounts of its pernicious consequences on public affairs?
Factions, civil wars, persecutions, subversions of government, oppression, slavery; these are the dismal consequences which always attend its prevalency over the minds of men.
If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it. And no period of time can be happier or more prosperous, than those in which it is never regarded or heard of.
My emphasis. Great stuff.
On a not greatly similar note (other than it won’t go down well with the superstitious) Julian Sanchez on What Marriage Means: Gay unions and the benign dictatorship of the status quo.
What emerges above all from Coontz’s account is the realization that marriage has no “essence.” There is no one function or purpose it serves in every time and place—and indeed, for each function marriage does serve, there is a time and place where some other institution primarily did that work.
It’s almost sad watching defenders of “traditional” marriage try to inject an “essence” into their definition. Procreation? What is one partner is infertile? Love? Fades sooner or later in most cases. Companionship? Never mind love, there are a lot of uncompanionable people around.
Tradition is apt to be a thin bulwark when tradition itself is a chronicle of flux. The meaning of “marriage,” as of life, will be the one we give it.
These 117 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:09pm GMT Permanent link.
Dr Heckle »
Julian Glover, political correspondent for theguardian seems to prefer Walter Wolfgang to John Reid.
“Hi Walter, shout out if you are here — or maybe you shouldn’t,” said John Reid from the conference platform, his menacing Glasgow humour capturing the tone of a day that was half jocular, half threatening.
…
By now John Reid was up to close the conference. “I am sorry about yesterday, we didn’t want it, it shouldn’t have happened,” he said with a cheery good grace that almost made the words sound as if he meant them.
“Next year I am going to sit up there and shout MY SPEECH and it will be in every paper in the country,” Mr Reid joked, and as one of the party’s toughest heavies he should know about heckling.
But yesterday it was Mr Wolfgang who was in the papers not Mr Reid and it was Labour that was left struggling to explain why an elderly survivor of Nazism who had been in the party since 1948 should have been detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for shouting the word “nonsense”.
Third Avenue watches as Labour’s PR disaster spreads across the pond.
Just listened to the 2pm news bulletin on the radio here. One of the main stories: the treatment of the elderly heckler at the Labour party conference. What a sorry shower the UK leadership has become.
See how the leadership, and the devoted followers all whine that they’ve been set up, that it’s the media’s fault.
On the Telegraph Bob Marshall-Andrews says Our PM is nothing but a bully.
Behind these violent and ugly displays of rank bullying lies a profound irony which exposes the true pusillanimous nature of New Labour and its prime architect. In their analysis of the party’s electoral failure the high priests of New Labour identified party indiscipline as a root cause.
As part of the cure, therefore, intellectual challenge and dissent were to be ruthlessly expunged. Rule books have been amended to emasculate conference, and sanitise debate. The parliamentary power of patronage has been ruthlessly employed to advance quiescent minds, placemen and transparent cronies to protect orthodoxy and order. As a result, party membership has plummeted by 50 per cent. The price of Blairite “success” has been the near disintegration of the most valuable and influential democratic party of the 20th century.
Modern politicians are less likely to face an angry interruption than their predecessors, who frequently confronted live audiences, before the TV age.
Harold Wilson famously silenced a man who demanded why he supported “savages” in Rhodesia.
“My friend, we don’t support savages, we just allow them to come to our meetings,” Wilson replied, to great applause.
But even Wilson came unstuck during a speech in Chatham when, having sung the praises of the nation’s Navy, he asked, rhetorically: “And why am I saying all this?” A voice from the back of the hall replied: “Because you are in Chatham.”
May it never die out.
These 68 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:54pm GMT Permanent link.