August 2006 Archives
Thursday, 03 August 2006
The Return
I meant to get everything working before I returned. But after I screwed up the newsroll thing a week or so ago, it looks like my best option is to plug away and debug as I write. That means comments soon rather than now. I don’t know how I did it, I knew I’d tinkered a little, but I came home from the pub in some considerable disrepair and couldn’t figure it out. If I’d been in a better state, I’d probably have cried, "Objects, objects, damn all objects" and legged it for the South France, and such ideas passed across my fevered brow. The next time I read of some disaffected high school kids who take their frustrations out on their tormentors with guns, knives, and assorted bombs or a postal worker who took to sniping from a tower sympathy will stir in the Weeden breast. ’There but for the grace of ... go I’ I will sigh. For I have suffered mightily too.
Oh Christ, this isn’t going to work, is it?
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Aarghh!
Times are in GMT (or UTC if you prefer), comments start from zero (Jebus, but that’s smart), I can’t remember where the clever email address mangling script is, now it eats comments (but at least it stops giving error messages), and previews the post text twice, but doesn’t do the form and doesn’t write permalinks (I swear it did)... and I can’t remember what else is wrong.
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Friday, 04 August 2006
This Is Another Test
This is me, ponderously debugging. Mike Power reads Melanie Phillips, so you don’t have to.
Britain at this moment isn’t really sane. It is gripped by a kind of collective derangement in which, blinded by hatred of Israel, it thinks that the current war against Israel by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, and its ally Syria, is a war by Israel against ’innocent’ Lebanon. As a result, it is quite unable to grasp that Hezbollah’s war against Israel, which is desperately trying to bring Israel to an end once and for all, is a key salient in Iran’s escalating war against the free world.
I’d like to think that Boris would never have published such a unilateral attack on the English language. As Nietzsche (not an anti-Semite, that was why he fell out with Wagner, who was) said "Insanity in individuals is something rare -- but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." But Mad Mel isn’t referring to this; she seems to think that Britain is normally sane, as if 60 million people (some of them non-white, some of them even A-rabs, eek!) somehow think together. Even ’[not] really sane’ is typical Mel tangled fluff: what would ’really sane’ be like? Is America really sane? You know, with Michael Moore and those pesky Democrats threatening to bring down the country at any moment!
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Simon Carr
Via Justin we learn that Simon Carr has a new site. I don’t think keyword tags have any effect these days, but this is rather cheeky, what?
<META NAME="Keywords" content="sketch, simon carr, news, politics, political humor, funny gossip, westminster, stories, analysis, MPs, members, parliament, diary, political blog, Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes">
Can’t spell ’humour’ either.
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Saturday, 05 August 2006
The American Ladder Had Gone Awol
I’ve now seen the Israeli Defence Force referred to as "not up to the (task|job)". First on the Wall Street Journal via Jamie.
Mr. Olmert’s decision to respond with massive force enjoyed left-to-right political support. He also had a green light from the Bush administration, which has reasons of its own to want Hezbollah defanged and which assumed the Israelis were up to the job.
But it seems they are not up to the job. The war began with a string of intelligence failures: Israel had lowered its alert level on the northern border prior to the raid; it did not know that Hezbollah possessed Chinese-made antiship missiles, one of which nearly sank an Israeli missile boat off the coast of Beirut; it was caught off guard by the fierce resistance it encountered in the two Lebanese villages it has so far attempted to capture. Such failures are surprising and discouraging, given that Israel has been tracking and fighting Hezbollah for nearly a quarter-century.
And now in, of all places, Haaretz.
In 1996 a group of then opposition U.S. policy agitators, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, presented a paper entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" to incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The "clean break" was from the prevailing peace process, advocating that Israel pursue a combination of roll-back, destabilization and containment in the region, including striking at Syria and removing Saddam Hussein from power in favor of "Hashemite control in Iraq." The Israeli horse they backed then was not up to the task.
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Back To Bellyaching Again
Via Matthew Turner, we have ’Mad’ Melanie Phillips on ’the supposedly pro-Israel Times’ and ’the New York Times is on this vile bandwagon’ (the NYT is anti-Semitic, who knew?) and best of all ’The Daily Telegraph -- whose once principled support of Israel is now a distant memory as the paper signs up to the psychological pogrom against Israel....’
The situation, friends, is far worse than that. Slate publishes Christopher Hitchens so one would assume it had some sympathy with gallant little Israel and the war to defend the West though it also publishes the anti-American Doonesbury so perhaps this this is to be expected: The Israelites are back to bellyaching again ....
In other news, Roger L Simon has a post called The one-handed war, which ... no the jokes just write themselves. He has another called Shame of Edinburgh. They say that Yanks don’t follow football, but there he is in Southern California, writing about Hibs. It’s a magnificently twisty post, not least for the way he avoids the words "Easter" and "Road". I don’t think the organisers of the Edinburgh Film Festival have been particularly intelligent. (Every instance of that story on the web, BTW, from The Scotsman to Haaretz derives from one Reuters source; it’s not worth looking for contrary versions: I’ve tried.)
Israeli director Yoav Shamir said Thursday he has been advised by organizers of the Edinburgh film festival in Scotland not to attend the screening of his new work due to Israel’s offensive in Lebanon.
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Enough Is Enough
I got the Atom feed working! It’s valid though I had to throw in a meaningless (to me) hack to make it so. Apparently:
The "atom:id" element conveys a permanent, universally unique identifier for an entry or feed. ...
Its content MUST be an IRI, as defined by [RFC3987]. Note that the definition of "IRI" excludes relative references. Though the IRI might use a dereferencable scheme, Atom Processors MUST NOT assume it can be dereferenced.
All of which seems to boil down to: each entry in an atom feed needs to be identified by a unique string. This string does not have to mean anything. In Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom, Ben Hammersley gives <id>http://example.org./2004/23456789<id> as a suggestion, but I can’t tell what this is supposed to point to; it seems to be a copy of the entry, which seems utterly pointless. But then, to be valid, an Atom feed has to point at itself, which also looks useless to me.
So I looked at what I assumed were working Atom feeds in Typepad. I found this: <id>tag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-33166</id> on Tim Worstall’s blog feed, so I came up with: <id>tag:backword.me.uk,2006:post-6</id>. It looks right and it validates (the 6 refers to the 6th post), but god knows what it means. Still, I can say I tried.
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Sunday, 06 August 2006
Concentrating On Quality, Not Quantity
According to tehgrauniad, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has made an appeal to the site’s users to start concentrating on quality, not quantity.
"It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone. "At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world’s oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition," Wales said. "According to our database, that’s 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven."
Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence Founding Fathers, Patriots, Mr. T. Honored. (Not tehgrauniad, if you couldn’t guess.)
While other news and information websites chose to mark the anniversary in a muted fashion, if at all, Wikipedia gave it prominent emphasis over other important historical events from the same day, including the independence of the nation of Africa in 1847, the 1984 ascension of Constantine to Emperor of the Holy Roman Emperor, and the 1998 birth of Smokey, a calico cat belonging to Mark and Becky Rousch of Erie, PA.
Founder Wales, a closeted homosexual and hot-dog freak, according to his user-edited bio on the site, also hosted a symposium of amateur historians at the New School in New York on Saturday.
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Why Vote For A Lesser Evil?
Imagine, if you will, the press conferences. The Great Old One is not known to speak English, but then neither is the incumbent. Cthulhu is said to be amoral, but he is not on record as shooting a friend while picking off some tame fowl at point blank range. Above all, he is not Donald Rumsfeld. I urge you to vote Cthulhu.
Via PZ Myers.
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Tuesday, 08 August 2006
Ballsing-Up What Look Like Easy Targets
I’m not much of an admirer of Bloggers4Labour (the plural in the name is a bad start, since it’s just, to paraphrase Harlan Ellison, a boy and his blog), but I liked Hove today, gone tomorrow:
Nick [Boles] may have his talents, and is a Henry Jacksonite, but with a track record of ballsing-up what look like easy targets, is he really the chap to put up against a Labour majority of 161,202 (5.4% swing required), against (we assume?) an experienced a campaigner as Livingstone?
I think "may have his talents" is not intended sarcastically, and "is a Henry Jacksonite" is not meant to be read as "LOSER!!!!" See Matthew for more Henry ’Scoop’ Jackson hubristic hilarity. All the same, I like "ballsing-up what look like easy targets" (Iraq, Afghistan, Lebanon) and I intend to use it often.
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Mixing Memory And Desire
An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
BBC: Drug ’treats depression in hours’.
Many antidepressants target levels of brain chemicals, such as serotonin and dopamine, and, over time, the accumulation of these chemicals can affect a patient’s mood. But this can take several weeks.
But the team believes ketamine is having a faster affect because it is targeting a different brain-protein, called the NMDA receptor, which is thought to play a critical role in learning and memory.
It’s surprising that someone hasn’t thought of a chemical link earlier, since it’s been known for over 40 years that depression has a lot to do with learning and memory.
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You’Re So Hain
I bet you think this blog is about you, don’t you, don’t you ...
Peter Black considers his first-namesake and constituent Peter Hain. I like this bit (you can find tehgrauniad link yourself):
The Guardian says that he "has often caused controversy by frank speaking, including an admission that the government had lost support among traditional supporters. Three years ago while Commons leader, he was slapped down by Tony Blair after suggesting that high earners should pay more tax." What it does not say is that there is a view that these incursions were part of a calculated attempt to create an image within the Labour Party.
I can’t imagine Tony Blair "slapping" anyone down. It’s not his style. There have been plenty of ministerial cock-ups more deserving of a "slapping down" than suggesting that the rich pay a bit more tax (poor dears). Blair hasn’t done so; he’s not confrontational like, say, Thatcher.
Via Peter (Black, not Hain, obviously), Iain Dale on Peter Hain’s freebies as reported in the Belfast Telegraph (behind a pay wall).
But woah, stop there a moment. Surely Peter Hain should fly to Ulster, he is Secretary of State for Northern Ireland after all. And via Justin, what a cracking job Peter Hain makes of it.
Secretary of State Peter Hain dozed off during a meeting last week with the father of a loyalist murder victim and a local MP!
Exclamation mark in original, I’m afraid.
Angry Raymond McCord - whose son Raymond Jnr was battered to death by UVF informers - said Mr Hain started to nod off three times during the Stormont meeting last Tuesday.
Embarrassed Ulster Unionist MP Lady Hermon confirmed Mr Hain had begun to doze off and said Mr McCord had "every right to feel furious" at the way he was treated.
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Wednesday, 09 August 2006
The People’S Prime Minister
tehgrauniad: ’No plans’ for Thatcher state funeral. I still hate Thatcher. I think ’Victorian Values’ was empty cant. I think she was inflexible, snobbish, elitist, bonkers in her chumminess with Ronald Reagan, and all too inclined to destroy what she didn’t like or didn’t understand. (I’ll always suspect that her distrust of the Soviet Union had more to do with it not having Harrods than the Politburo’s penchant for sending people to the salt mines.)
But still. If they have a state funeral, it’ll be on tv, and I can boo throughout. tehgrauniad does point out the strong argument against:
One of the few former prime ministers to receive a state funeral was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and a hero of the Battle of Waterloo. He died in 1852, after many years in the cabinet and a brief stint as PM. In 1965, Winston Churchill was also afforded a state funeral to honour his leadership during the second world war.
I think Thatcher was a great Prime Minister. Not a good Prime Minister, but one who left her mark on this country like an apatosaurus stepping into drying concrete. Not of the same kidney as Wellington or Churchill, though. I don’t know much about Wellington, and sometimes I think Churchill was just a guy with an impressive vocabulary and a drink problem, but they won crucial wars. Thatcher, on the other hand, didn’t. She did change the country, and just being the first woman PM was significant.
I don’t know. It’s a mistake to assume that because something is recent, it’s also the pinnacle of human achievement to date. Yet it also seems rather mean not to.
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Spreading Equality
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others
Former Communist Party member John Reid has expressed concern at the inequality in Britain today.
As Home Secretary, my every move is watched by the security services. My mail is opened, my calls are monitored; I am accompanied everywhere by armed policemen. As a socialist, I ask myself, "Is this fair? Is this right?" I enjoy these privileges, but do you, the voters? Of course you don’t. Years of Tory misrule, which only came to an end when I was appointed Home Secretary, let me remind you, have seen the state’s basic concern for its citizens whittled away to almost nothing. Why, when people go out for night on the town, or on the ’toon’ as I like to say, they may be monitored by a few hundred CCTV cameras, but is that good enough? Is it? These images are often blurry and difficult to make out. How can we be sure the gang of lads falling about at 02:13 on camera THX1138 is the same gang of lads who may look very similar on camera R2D2 at 02:15? In those two minutes, in one of those dead zones between cameras, dead zones, let me tell you, which are well known to terrorists and terrorist sympathisers, they may have been mugged their clothes stolen, their faces and their hairstyles mimicked with uncanny accuracy and replaced by terrorists is clever disguise. These harmless boys, mewling and puking in the gutter, will never be see again by their families, their probation officer or their JobSeekers allowance clerk. Their empty shells will be inhabited by terrorists and we will have no way of knowing.
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Thursday, 10 August 2006
He Starts To Shake And Cough Just Like The Old Man In That Book By Nabakov
Loose talk in the classroom
To hurt they try and try
Strong words in the staff room
The accusations fly
Its no use, he sees her
He starts to shake and cough
Just like the old man in
That book by Nabakov
Craig Brown: Lips that move smally? Surely not. Smally sounds self-consciously poetic. Could be Milton, and I seem to remember Thomas Hardy used ’smalled’ of someone moving away (not confirmed by my Shorter OED, which thinks ’smally’ is Late Middle English, and obsolete except when meaning slenderly or refering to a sound of low volume).
Ernest Hemingway is one of the authors currently under threat. On a recent holiday in Spain, I read his "classic" Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls ("The best book Hemingway has written" - New York Times; "One of the greatest novels which our troubled age will produce" -- The Observer). It must surely be the worst "classic" ever written, barely above the level of Jeffrey Archer on an off-day.
Take the hero’s first meeting with the dusky Maria, for instance: "Her teeth were white in her brown face and her skin and her eyes were the same golden tawny brown. She had high cheek-bones, merry eyes and a straight mouth with full lips. Her hair was the golden brown of a grain field that has been burned dark in the sun, but it was cut short all over her head so that it was but little longer than the fur on a beaver pelt."
Perhaps this off-putting description explains why it takes 150 pages before our hero thinks of holding Maria’s hand.
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Saturday, 12 August 2006
You Don’T Give A Damn
Sky Anchorette: Well as usual you have prompted a huge email response, both for and against you, Mr Galloway, so we’ll leave it there. I have to say that some people might find it offensive when [there | er ] more families are mourning their dead, you to hear you say that it was a ...
This is at 8:32 (the whole thing is 9:18; she does manage to wrap up). Sadly for her, one of Gorgeous George’s points that she didn’t even try to contest (correctly, as he’s right) was that Israel is killing 30x more Lebanese than Hezbollah is killing Israelis, so, even apart from the weaselly ’some people might’ (some people abuse their children, some people are Morris dancers, so ...?), the glaring assumption that ’families mourning their dead’ can only mean Israeli families and not those of the hundreds of Palestinians killed is -- well take it away George.
You don’t give a damn, you don’t give a damn, you don’t even know about the Palestinian families. You don’t even know they exist. Tell me the name of one member of seven members of the same family, slaughtered on the beach in Gaza by an Israeli warship; you don’t even know their name, but you know the name of every Israeli soldier who has been taken prisoner in this conflict because you believe whether you know it or not, that Israeli blood is more valuable than the blood of Lebanese or Palestinians, that’s the truth and the discerning of your viewers already know it.
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Sunday, 13 August 2006
Invisible Sun
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life/Looking down the barrel of an armalite
On News Of The World: Archived Tabloid Stories (a v good acronym): IF YOU’RE A MUSLIM - IT’S YOUR PROBLEM, by Lord Stevens whom Wikipedia kindly remembers:
John Arthur Stevens, Baron Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, QPM, DL, FRSA (born 21 October 1942) was Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis (head of the Metropolitan Police Service) from 2000 until 2005. During which time, rape increased 21%, assault by 18%, robbery by 12%, theft by 5% and murder by 2% while burglary fell by 9% and motor vehicle theft by 19%, comparing the year 2005 to the year 2000, according to Metropolitan Police figures.
And:
He is currently heading a Metropolitan Police inquiry, operation Paget, into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed which has yet to report its findings.
It’s only been nine year since their drug addled chaffeur crashed. But I understand the delay, doubtless they’ve been on junkets to observe the grassy knoll in Dallas and Area 51 in Nevada. The involvement of Opus Dei, the Knights Templar, the Illuminati, Soviet moles so secret they missed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a watery bint with a sword should not be discounted lightly either. My own suspicion, based on reports in the Daily Express and extensive research in airport bookshops, is that their deaths were the culmination of plots by former Nazis to clone Adolf Hitler in South America while simultaneously destroying the US economy by irradiating the gold in Fort Knox with a nuclear device.
Let me say that I agree with parts of Lord Stevens’ editorial.
Blasting a passenger airliner out of the sky, killing hundreds of innocent men, women and children, is NEVER acceptable. Under any circumstances. There is NEVER an excuse.
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What Is The Point Of Martin Kettle?
This could be interesting. The dazzling journalism of the New York Review of Books is enough to shame the vanities of its British imitators. (I always thought ’to shame’ meant ’to cause to feel ashamed’, but the OED demurs and suggests that it can mean ’bring disgrace on’. It also notes that this usage is "ME". Hmmm.)
Hold on there. Who is Martin Kettle?
Kettle is best known as a columnist for his newspaper [tehgrauniad], where he is Assistant Editor, ...
So, Martin Kettle argues that British newspapers are rubbish. Martin Kettle is an editor of a British newspaper. So if he’s right, he’s a rubbish editor. It’s like one of those Greek logic problems where the solution is you can ask either one what the other would say and do the opposite.
About a year ago someone pointed out to me that I had developed a columnar tic.
He has. He sees something on the floor that he doesn’t like the look of. So he aims his blunderbuss and Pop! he feels a curious pain in his foot.
But my devotion to this wonderful fortnightly review of politics and the arts remains undiminished ...
Just not to the point of imitating it, by encouraging tehgrauniad to hire decent conscientious editors.
To do so, one need look no further than the current August 10 issue, in which friends and colleagues remember Epstein and the care of her editing. In one of these, Gore Vidal recalls how Epstein challenged him over the casual use of the word "ruthless" as applied to Bobby Kennedy (imagine attempting to maintain such tact and scruple in today’s insult-driven British press).
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Monday, 14 August 2006
The Fire Last Time
I’m still reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Pepys. Here’s a good -- and relevant -- bit.
The political aftermath of the fire* was almost as alarming as the fire itself. There were so many rumours of arson that Parliament could not ignore them, and in late September Catholics were told to leave the City unless they had special permission to remain. Pepys, no bigot, was perfectly happy to stand godfather to the son of his Catholic picture varnisher, Lovett, in October. He had just acquired a fine picture of the crucifixion, or possibly, a crucifix, from him. A Capuchin, one of the queen mother’s priests. conducted the ceremony; he was wearing lay clothes. Pepys observed, considerably smarter than his own outfit.
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I Used To Think We Evolved
Via Ex-Christian.net via PZ.
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Am I Liberal Bien-Pensant Fool?
It seems to me Bill Gates is entirely right on Women [are the] key to Aids policy, because they are. Not just because men are all irresponsible bastards who’ll shag anything and leave a fake phone number.
The American philanthropist Bill Gates has said the key to stopping the Aids pandemic lies in giving women the power to protect themselves.
...
The epidemic continues to have its worst effect in the poorest countries.
Male circumcision is emerging as a promising potential method for preventing new infection and teams of researchers are trying to develop microbicides.
...
And he [Gates] said progress in the development of microbicides offered real hope to millions of people: "A woman should never need her partner’s permission to save her own life. There’s progress on these, but the pace has been too slow."
His call was echoed by Stephen Lewis, UN special envoy on Aids in Africa: "To change the sexual behaviour of men is a question of generations. Women are dying now."
...
The conference also heard from a Rwandan woman Laurance Mukamurangwa, who cares for five grandchildren aged three months to five years, despite being infected herself by HIV after she was raped.
She said: "It’s really a problem for us because we don’t have anything and must get food, clothes and school supplies and you must remember that I am sick too and I will die."
In line with this blog’s usual policy of doing next to no research, I can’t remember who it was who last wound me up with the whole "Myth of heterosexual AIDS" thing, but whoever they are, they’re a bastard.
Bill Gates is a good bloke. Windows still sux, of course.
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Don’T You Walk Through My Wards
Don’t you walk thru my words
You got to show some respect
Via Peter Black Walking in a discourteous manner:
Plaid Cymru leader Ieuan Wyn Jones has been ticked off by National Assembly Presiding Officer Lord Dafydd Elis-Thomas after failing to inform local AMs that he was walking through their constituencies in his recent ’Wales-wide walk’.
The original complaint came from Leighton Andrews who asked whether there is some kind of protocol regarding visits to constituencies by AMs who have no representational role there. It turns out that there isn’t but that the Presiding Officer believes that one should exist.
Yes, yes ’constituencies’ != ’wards’. I can’t resist a pun.
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All Holocaust Survivors Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others
Property is theft. Therefore, theft is property. I stole it, therefore it’s mine.
I usually avoid moral philosophy, partly because I think it’s all bogus wittering, and largely because I prefer the safer shallows of outrage.
Now, I don’t often read Normblog, but this post just confuses me. The Times has the story Battle over a suitcase from Auschwitz.
An old brown suitcase made of cardboard is at the centre of an unprecedented legal battle between the son of its former owner and the museum commemorating him and fellow inmates at Auschwitz.
I think there’s a mistake there already -- in "former owner". He was the former owner, in the sense that he’s now dead. However, he lost possession of the suitcase through theft. Now if something is stolen of yours, your own suitcase, say, it doesn’t stop being yours just because someone else has it. If you see the thief (or someone he sold it too) walking down the street with it, you can still say "That’s my suitcase." Ownership is not transferred by taking without consent.
This is where I depart from Professor Geras.
Levi-Leleu obviously has a moral claim on the suitcase. But so, I would think, does the Auschwitz museum, though its claim is not well-stated by the museum itself:...
Well, he’s right that the museum makes a perfectly rotten case for holding on to the suitcase, but I can’t see where the museum’s moral claim comes from.
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Tuesday, 15 August 2006
Hooray, A Politician With A Blog
And not just any politician. Not one, like David Miliband, whose style is anondyne and his politics bland. Via Channel 4 News blog.*
You may know him as the President of Iran or even the world’s most notorious Holocaust denier, but from today it’s Ahmadinejad the Blogger.
It’s translated into English, French, and Arabic although it takes a bit of getting used to. Under the banner, there are four very small button, the second of which may be the stars bit of the stars and stripes and two bars of the cross of St George, and something else which is really too tiny to make out at all. Whatever, this translates the page into glorious English. Glorious if you like that sort of thing.
It is perhaps the weirdest blog I’ve ever seen. If you mouse over the author photo, a bigger version floats out. (It’s also worth noting here that he’s wearing a suit, which I’ll come back to.) And there’s a poll.
Do you think that the US and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another word war.
I voted ’Yes’, though I fear their intention and goal is probably worse than just a ’word war’ but I don’t mind those, they’re my favourite kind of war.
And you can ask the President a question, if you supply your Nick Name, Email, Address, Contact Info which seems a little like overkill on the personal details front for a simple question.
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Wednesday, 16 August 2006
The First Casualty Of War Is ... Academic Freedom
UPDATE: Christopher Wood replies.
Via Peter Black (who finds all the good Welsh stories), this is outrageous.
SIR - I was astonished to read Swansea University Professor Sheehan’s diatribe in the Western Mail ("Britain and US seen by Muslims to have failed the Islamic world", August 14).
By these statements Swansea University is actually justifying future terrorist acts on Welsh and British soil, an astonishing and disgusting position for Swansea University to adopt.
In the absence of immediate clarification, this position taken by Swansea University will have devastating repercussions and will reverberate around the world.
As a Welshman and as a US citizen, I am disgusted by Swansea’s University’s stance in justifying past and future terrorist acts.
In the absence of immediate clarification I intend to take this matter up with Senators and Members of Congress to demand Swansea University’s position as a participating institution in the US government federal loan program is anything but.
Swansea University has, In the absence of immediate clarification, rendered itself a pariah in the fight against international terrorism.
CHRISTOPHER WOOD
Attorney at Law, (US Federal Law), DC metro area,
Arlington, VA 22204, USA
Naturally, I looked Christopher Wood up; and he was born in Cardiff.
So what does Professor [Michael] Sheehan say?
A WELSH academic has said the phenomenon of British Muslims prepared to carry out attacks on their own soil is the result of British foreign policy which has alienated the Arab world.
Speaking about why British citizens would plan attacks on their own country, Michael Sheehan, a professor in international relations at Swansea University, blamed the situation on Britain’s actions abroad, rather than a breakdown within society back home.
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Thursday, 17 August 2006
Under Construction
This blog is under construction. I wanted one of those annoying animated images that used to be everywhere, but bloody post modernism and irony got there before me.
I thought I’d be done by now, but I’ve spent most of this evening figuring how to do Digg, Del.icio.us and so forth links. I had them working (they kept showing up on the wrong pages for reasons which will no doubt be self-evident in the morning, but for now look like indisputable proof of gremlins and Murphy’s Law. I’m supposed to be a humanist and everything and not believe in these superstitions, but it’s late and I’m tired and pissed off and my guard is slipping.
So if things don’t work, I’m working on them.
This is interesting too.
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Whatever Happened To The Good Old British Sense Of Humour
You may not realise this, dear reader, but we live a perfect (or nigh-on perfect) world. Earlier today (or, in fact yesterday, for those of you who worry about the details), I posted on an US based lawyer’s apparently hatred of free speech. Orange is my mobile network. I don’t use the phone much, so the the level of the coffers down at Orange Mansions wouldn’t change either way if I went elsewhere. But for the moment, I’m rather pleased that they are. On the second of this month Conservative Home published the words of Inigo Wilson who "manages community affairs for a large telecoms company. He lives with his wife and young daughter in Fulham. His favourite blogs are ‘the Belmont club’ and ConservativeHome. He is a regular reader of Commentary, National Review and The Spectator." Not really my sort of person then. I didn’t mind the Speccie when it was edited by Boris, because both Boris and Rod Liddle like to wind people up, but I suspect that Matthew D’Ancona is a humourless prig who’s "right on" with a couple of side-orders of "right", but, ’nihil humanum a me alienum puto’ and all that apart, I can’t believe anyone reads the National Review for pleasure.
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Zip Your Gob Or Lose Your Job
Lots of links for the Inigo Jones thing. Guido suggest that
Those of you offended by Orange suspending someone for writing a jokey article should convey your views directly to stuart.jackson@orange.co.uk
which I cannot but endorse. And indeed I have,
Dear Mr Jackson,
I am an Orange customer (mobile no 07969 XXX XXX*, if you need proof of this), and I would like to express my unhappiness at your decision to suspend Mr Inigo Wilson over views he expressed on the Conservative Home website. He didn’t name your company or any individuals. Only someone determined to cause trouble would have tried to find out where he worked and then get him sacked. As Orange is a private company, your contracts with employees are a private matter, however if you do not reinstate him I would advise you against ever adopting an advertising campaign which used both the words ’free’ and ’speech’,
yours sincerely,
David Weeden
PS I’ve always enjoyed your cinema ads and I hope you keep them going. Don’t listen to the voices of dissent.
Besides Guido (and again), there’s Iain Dale, who concludes:
UPDATE: The Muslim Public Affairs Committee describes itself on its website as "the UK’s Leading Muslim civil liberties group, empowering Muslims to focus on non-violent Jihad..." Now call me old fashioned, but am I alone in finding the use of the word ’jihad’ a little alarming? Perhaps Orange do too...
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Friday, 18 August 2006
God, I Love This Country
I think it was Lenin (who sojourned in London for a bit, fermenting unrest among the masses, as one does when the state police frown on one’s presence in the motherland) who said, "the great thing about England, which we will celebrate when the revolution comes, is that there is no shortage of walls."*
Another really great facet of this rain-drenched island is the hospitality of its denizens. Granted, this may be lost on you if you reside in Glasgow, say, or you chose a domicile in one of the thriving communities south of the Thames, a mistake you will live to regret the first time you try to persuade a taxi driver to take you thence from a location north of said river. By really, did you know that PR guys have websites, and they put their pictures on them? (This may or may not be congruent with the fact noted above that this country displays largesse on the matter of vertical assemblies of bricks and my continuing faith in the imminence of the people’s revolution.) You didn’t? Here’s Stuart Bruce who has chosen to title his blog with not one but two obscenities which I cannot repeat on this site and must settle for the euphemistic approximation, "A Smug Tosser’s Wankings".
He is also an elected member of Leeds City Council and was previously the Lead Member for Corporate Communications and Customer Services.
Stuart started blogging in early 2003 which makes him one of the first to recognise the potential of blogs for professional purposes such as business and government.
Note, Mr Bruce chooses not to divulge his political affiliation. This is wise of him, as when considering the Inigo Wilson thing he observes:
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Pluto Roundup
I’m in, and I’m sure I’ve been in for some years now, the group of people who think that Pluto is not a planet. The "escaped moon of Neptune" theory seems to be dead.
Pluto’s orbit is highly eccentric. At times it is closer to the Sun than Neptune (as it was from January 1979 thru February 11 1999). Pluto rotates in the opposite direction from most of the other planets.
Pluto is locked in a 3:2 resonance with Neptune; i.e. Pluto’s orbital period is exactly 1.5 times longer than Neptune’s. Its orbital inclination is also much higher than the other planets’. Thus though it appears that Pluto’s orbit crosses Neptune’s, it really doesn’t and they will never collide.
Whatever else Pluto is, it’s pretty weird.
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Sunday, 20 August 2006
’Islamism’ And ’Islamophobia’ Both Stupid Words Horror
I’m probably going to get back on the Inigo Wilson definition of "Islamophobia" thing soon (shorter me, it’s a cant word and a bullshit neologism), so let’s put that aside.
Nick Cohen is back on ’Islamism’ again, specifically:
Instead of looking Islamism in the eye, [Craig] Murray declares that Bush and Blair longed to distract attention from their troubles and ’dodgy’ intelligence about the alleged airport bombers ’gave them a chance’.
This isn’t what Craig Murray is saying at all, in my reading. Since Mr Murray lived in an Islamic country, I suspect he’s met rather more Islamists (which I use in its dictionary definition, meaning a scholar of Islam, or Muslim; while Nick Cohen likes to imply ’extremist’) than certain Observer columnists I can name. Now Nick Cohen wants to claim that all extremist Muslims are of one party which threatens us. I mean, god know what these guys (Rooftop snipers cause carnage in Baghdad; Baghdad killings mar pilgrimage) are trying to prove, but early reports suggest that they’re part of the ever-ongoing conflict between Muslim sects. (I suppose the alternative theory is they’re US troops who longed for a bit of the old Dick Cheney sports shooting, and needed targets that didn’t move much and were too numerous to miss. But they have X-Boxes for that.)
From the Skeptic’s Annotated Quran:
Kill disbelievers wherever you find them. If they attack you, then kill them. Such is the reward of disbelievers. (But if they desist in their unbelief, then don’t kill them.) 2:191-2
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Homeland Security
A friend bought this t-shirt in Canada. I want one.
Here’s someone who wore one to the non-hilarity of HM Customs.
I suppose terms like ’genocide’ and ’Holocaust’ are out of the question. (Or we could ask ’If that was a Holocaust ... how come there were ... left?’)
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Monday, 21 August 2006
Did You Shoot Me ... When My Back Was Turned?
Police laugh about shooting protester in the face, also available through Radley Balko, and PZ. And the story: Fla. Police Tape Is No Laughing Matter to Protester.
Extra fun: watch the video then compare the journalist’s take:
Still dressed for work in a red blazer, Ritter took to the streets with a homemade sign that read "Fear Totalitarianism."
With the police immediately afterwards.
The Broward Sheriff’s Office identified police Sgt. Michael Kallman as the officer who had discussed Ritter with the group of assembled deputies.
The tape shows no reprimand for the use of force as Ritter had hoped. Kallman and the deputies laugh about the incident.
"The lady in the red dress," Kallman says on the tape, to cheers and laughter. "I don’t know who got her, but it went right through the sign and hit her smack dab in the middle of the head."
Don’t policemen have to be observant in Florida?
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When The Numbers Don’T Add Up
It seems that the Police [have] charge[d the] terror suspects.
Peter Clarke, Deputy Assistant Commissioner, revealed that the police investigation had uncovered bomb making equipment including chemicals and electrical components and so-called martyrdom videos.
Mr Clarke said: "Since August 10 we have found bomb-making equipment. There are chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, electrical components, documents and other items.
Does he mean by documents something like "Bomb Making for Dummies"?
He said: "There have been 69 searches. These have been in houses, flats and business premises, vehicles and open spaces."
Searches had found more than 400 computers, 200 mobile telephones and 8,000 computer media items such as memory sticks, CDs and DVDs, he said.
That’s roughly (calling 400 420 and 69 70) 6 computers per searched permises, 3 mobile phones, and 120 media items. Now the last I can understand, though it sounds more like someone’s music and DVD collection. That’s a lot of memory, it’s much much more than you’d need for all the material in an undergraduate course plus a doctoral dissertation. And where are 20 odd young guys supposed to keep 20 computers each?
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Where I’M At Right Now
This thing is sort of working. I’m pretty pleased that archived posts now link to previous and following posts, and I’ve finally cured all archived posts of linking to imaginary directories. I’m fairly sure the digg, technorati, and other links all do whatever they’re supposed to. (As I’m exactly sure what that is, bets are off.) There are categories too, but I’m still messing with those.
I’ve got it to the point where it previews posts pretty much as they’ll appear (before I was more concerned with catching anything which might go wobbly when put into the database). I’m close to being able to update posts easily, though I still haven’t decided whether I should be able to rewrite posts entire should I want to and just have a datestamp at the bottom showing when I did, or whether updates have to be a clear (and dated) addition. And when that works, yay! comments.
I’ve thought a lot about comments. More than is healthy. At the moment I’m thinking of going the route typad took (as I learned looking at Jamie’s code) which is to publish email addresses, but encode them with character entities. (As I’ll keep them raw in the database, I can always upgrade the encoding later.) And I’ll probably publish them anyway, the way Haloscan comments can show both email address and site url. (Thanks to Project Honey Pot, I think I can catch and block most email harvesters anyway.) And I’ll probably show IP address too. You’ve probably seen on Harry’s Place, for instance, how the same people can show up under a variety of aliases, well this may just make it a little more obvious for anyone reading.
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Aarghh! My Eyes!
Here is a 426KB PDF file (the "Euston fyer" [sic] according to its ’Document Properties’). It may look like an innocuous fringe theatre flyer from the 1970s, printed in some marijuana fragrant basement with a wheezing press and rotting potatoes before being pasted on innocent walls in the rain after the pubs shut. The typeface is some trendier (ie obscurer version) of Futura, used by Adidas if you don’t have it on your computer, distinguished with the plain childlike lower A as a circle and a bar. The first page isn’t so bad, there is something about red (or reddish-pink as this is) which attracts the eye across the room.
The second page is nearly unreadable. There’s a reason paper is white and ink usually black. Think about it.
There are a lot of words (467). Here are some highlights:
We are united against terror in all its forms. We took differing views of the war in Iraq.
(I’m part of the sneering left: we have nothing to fear except fear itself. We sneer at terror. I am, however, against terrorists and terrorism. I know other people are frightened. Picking on them for being so is not constructive, in my view.)
We are a diverse group of people who have disagreed about much. Around half of us opposed the Iraq war.
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Tuesday, 22 August 2006
Disproportionate
I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.
This isn’t another Lebanon post, you get more than enough of that on the news. This is my final post on the Inigo Wilson mash-up. (Earlier posts here and here.
First a comment I posted on Doctor Vee’s blog:
Oh hell, you’re all wrong here. ’Islamophobia’ is not a ’fear of Islam’, it’s a bullshit neologism. It’s just used to mean ’nasty people’ but [sic -- by DW] idiots who never heard of Godwin’s Law. Wilson does not explictly equate Islam with blowing things up; rather the opposite, he says people who object to blowing things up may be called Islamophobic. (Which is probably a hysterical reaction, but he works in community relations, a field stuffed with buzzword zombies, so who knows what crap they come out with.)
Second, I fail to see how he brought Orange into disrepute. He didn’t name them. He said he worked for a telecoms company and gave his name. If you thought John Band was treated poorly by stalkers who complained to his (also unnamed) employers, you’ve got to come out for Wilson. Many people didn’t find John Band funny either. I did, and I always liked his style. It’s almost too tempting to do the Harry’s Place thing here -- JB slagged off the Jews, and Inigo Wilson said nasty things about Muslims.
There’s a good post Islamophobia, the new Racism? by Longrider who also comments. I think he’s right (and I didn’t read his earlier comments properly when I wrote my comment above) and he’s even better on his own.
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More Free Speech
Rachel posts about a mass lone demonstration evening in London.
Many people see this legislation as an assault on our civil liberties and human rights. It’s not always practical to plan a week in advance what government activities you may or may not disagree with. Sometimes a spontaneous response is called for. And surely the most appropriate place to demonstrate against the government’s actions is within the newly ’Designated Area’, at the very core of this country’s democratic foundation.
And why is New Labour so concerned about peaceful protestors anyway? If you apply for permission 6 days in advance for a lone protest (ie 1 person) they cannot refuse permission, so in order to highlight the ridiculousness of having to ask for police permission to hold a peaceful demonstration, Mark Thomas is organising a mass lone demonstration evening.
Anyone who wants to demonstrate about any issue can come along, or even if you just want to demonstrate your disgust at having to ask for permission to protest in a supposedly free country. Remember. This will NOT be breaking the law in any way!
Why is New Labour scared of peaceful protestors? Er, they pinched ’the Third Way’ from Mussolini; Blair’s greatest ally outside his brain dead puppet-master is a criminal leader of a vanity party with a fascist name. Work it out. Speaking of the Italians, this scheme reminds me of similar wheeze in Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality where a telecoms company was ground down by a campaign of trivial overpayments. (Is there no end to hell? Now Amazon’s tempting me with Feyerabend books, just because I searched for the link, and I’m broke.)
Shame I live in Cardiff so going to London twice is a big ask.
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Wednesday, 23 August 2006
Snakes On A Product Placement
I thought about calling this ’Snake Eyes’ after the superior Brian De Palma movie, because I could really have done without the "snake’s eye view" cuts. According to movie precedent, serial killers and other species generally cannot see very much, and the best way to describe this is first imagine yourself very very drunk, got that, now add Magoo-strength myopia confounded by wearing someone else’s glasses which just happened to be smeared with Vaseline. You are of course in a very dark place and everybody else is holding failing torches under their chins. This, according to Snakes on a Plane, is what snakes see (it ain’t true, folks).
I could also have done with a lot less violence, specifically a lot of the snake-on-person violence, snake-on-cat violence, and person on snake violence. My upper limit is somewhere around ’Psycho’ where you saw almost nothing. I know that the ’fans’ apparently requested much of this ("Ohh how about a snake bites someone in the eye!" "No man, what if they bit his dick!" "Could you imagine a snaking biting a woman’s breast?") and these things went in. Now Samuel L Jackson does indeed say "Motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane" and people do indeed get bitten in all sorts of places one generally takes great protection of (though you don’t see a penis, because that would have taken its US classification even higher; because as we all know, violence is commonplace, but dicks are really shocking), and this gets tedious pretty quickly. Perhaps I’m overly squeamish, but I think going for the higher certificate was a dim choice.
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Wednesday Video Special!
Germany was having trouble
What a sad, sad story
Needed a new leader to restore its former glory
Where O where was he?
Where could that man be?
We looked around and then we found
The man for you and me
And now it’s
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Deutschland is happy and gay
We’re marching to a faster pace
Look out
Here comes the master race
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Rheinland’s a fine land once more
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Watch out Europe, we’re going on tour
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Winter for Poland and France
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Come on Germans, go into your dance
I really like more/tour for some reason, though faster pace/master race is splendid.
Via Harry.
"Well I certainly didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition." ... "Even the initials, JC, are exactly the same."
Via PZ.
Bonus video: Fenno the kitten. Via Cute Overload.
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Soap Followup
Pretty much random thoughts really. As ticket sales have so far been disappointing, I’m going to predict that the studio backtracks and releases the original cut. I said the following originally in an email to Gary Farber:
I don’t know how you react to violence, but my feeling this morning is that the producers did a really really stupid thing in shooting the extra violent scenes and adding ’motherfucker’ (and releasing it at the end of the school holidays); now the film’s natural audience -- not just the sliver who’d turn a loss into a profit, but the big fat core of everyone who’d really enjoy it -- that is, boys of 13 -- won’t be able to. That was really dumb. Stupid censors too, BTW. It’s not like the film shows anything really corrupting, like genitals.
I’ve probably mentioned before (because it’s one of my favourites) the Simpsons’ episode where Bart shoplifts and gets caught, and he’s worried that he’ll lose the love of his parents (hey, heavy concerns for a 10-year-old) so he asks Milhouse what he worries about. Milhouse doesn’t have such cares. "I worry about pirhanas! Did you see the movie where they sent to submarine after the pirhanas and the pirhana swam down the periscope and bit the guy the in the eye?" Milhouse, SoaP is that movie.
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Standing Up For Gunter Grass
...he became his admirers.
...You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:...
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
There have been some good defences of Gunter Gräss by John Berger and John Irving and some rather poorer attacks by Christopher Hitchens and Oliver Kamm. Oliver’s suffers from bizarre reification:
Anchored in the liberal West and the transatlantic alliance, Germany has faced and confounded totalitarianism rather than, as it once did, exemplifying it.
There’s a case, surely, that the ’liberal West’ is anchored in Germany if one wants to make the tired old case of tracing its ontogeny back to the Enlightenment in general and Kant in particular. "Exemplifying" seems very much the wrong word. My dictionary suggests "illustrate by example" - perhaps Oliver believes in a ghost-like Platonic ideal of totalitarianism which countries occasionally reflect, the way a mirror in a hallway reflects guests entering a party. I prefer the suggestion that the political system came first: Germany was not an illustration of totalitarianism (which Oliver may be suggesting just adopts different guises for different zeitgeists). It was a state which we happen to call totalitarian. By ’faced and confounded’ Oliver seems to believe there was a spectre which was kept from the door, perhaps by garlic and crosses or some other means.
German conservatism abandoned authoritarianism and nationalism.
Perhaps ’German conservatism’ pre-1945 and ’German conservatism’ post-1945 were, because they differed in significant aspects, actually two different things. This is really like going to the house of a friend who used to have a cat and, the animal having died, replaced it with a dog, and saying "I see your pet has abandoned purring."
But he has never shrunk from drawing tendentious analogies between Germany’s Nazi past and its postwar policies.
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Thursday, 24 August 2006
Author Defends Book Shock
Dawson: Unit, Corps, God, country.
Michael Gove: far from being tedious rubbish as my more objectionable critics have claimed, my recent work is actually rather good. He doesn’t quite say that.
Building a secure and tolerant multi-ethnic society is one of the biggest challenges Britain faces.
You’re a Conservative, Michael, have you considered conserving? I don’t think Britain needs to build either a secure or tolerant multi-ethnic society. I was born in one which is both. Violations of the former by the IRA, the Sons of Glydwr, Muslim nutters have not altered that. Dissent from the latter by the BNP, various Muslim puritans, Stephen Green, and Tory sponors of Section 28 haven’t stopped most of us rubbing along more or less agreeably the while. tehgrauniad may have generously offered Mr Gove some space, but it has been as stingy as ever in subediting.
Which is why I was pleased to ...
Which is why I was surprised to [following paragraph, and the opening sentence, too] read that [Madelaine] Bunting thinks I am a "venomous media voice who thinks no Muslim is worth talking to". As someone who has spoken to hundreds of Muslims at meetings organised by a variety of groups the allegation is nonsensical.
Would it be unkind to point out that ’talk to’ implies dialogue and ’spoken to’ implies lecturing?
There is a strain within Islam at once puritan and militant which is closely associated with the thinking of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But the Muslim Brotherhood is surely ’a strain within Islam’ so this is a mere pleonasm.
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I Heard An Old Religious Man
Never shall a young man,
Thown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.
But I shall get a hair dye,
And set such colour there,
Brown or black or carrot
That young men in despair
Shall love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.
I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That god alone my dear
Can love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.
Oh, this is good.
Cliff Richard lent his house in Barbados to Tony Blair and his family after he saw the prime minister looking "dwindled and haggard" during the war in Iraq, the singer reveals in the Guardian today.
Good lord, now the hacks are writing stories about stories that appear elsewhere in the paper. Nothing like research, what?
"How dare people suggest I asked him to help me, or spoke to anyone else," said Sir Cliff. "My very raison d’etre is not to do anything like that. I’ve always been careful not to talk to Tony about politics, because that would spoil things. He must have great difficulty, in the same way people like myself do, in finding friends who want you for yourself. So I wanted Cherie and Tony to think, ’they’re friends of ours, they never ask us for anything’."
Tony is such a close friend, that Sir Clifford realised that Tony was off-colour when he saw him on the box. That’s what I call a close friend. Being a Christian, Sir Clifford invites beggars into his house to sample his wines and bask by the pool. He never asks anything of these people. He is too modest to admit it, which is why there is no record of him lending out his mansions charitably. And did you see any of the Godfather movies? No one ever asks a favour that bluntly.
He doesn’t like Gordon Ramsay. The man has risen even higher in my eyes. So here is the Interview with Victoria Moore.
The wounded tone disappears for a moment and is replaced with a harder edge: "I think [Ramsay’s] very ambitious. If he asked me to go on his show again, I would say no."
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Victory For Pluto-Haters!
Pluto loses status as a planet. This was the original scenario. Heh, take that Cthulhu.
Go orbital plane!
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Friday, 25 August 2006
Right Of Reply
Ten days or so ago, I posted The First Casualty Of War Is ... Academic Freedom. Yesterday, I received an email from Christopher Wood, which may make his position clearer.
Hi,
I just read your blog. I very much welcome your interest. I emailed Peter Black on August 18, 2006; Peter of his own accord copied my email to his blog, see below (http://peterblack.blogspot.com/2006/08/land-of-free.html#links).
With regard to the issue of academic freedom of expression, I concur absolutely that academics enjoy freedom of speech within the law. I have never indicated otherwise.
Professor Sheehan took care to point out that he was a Swansea University Professor and headed up Swansea University’s Centre for Conflict Studies. Putting on such clothes he should have qualified his statement to the effect that he was not speaking on behalf of Swansea University or even on behalf of Swansea University’s Centre for Conflict Studies that he heads up.
It turns out that Professor Sheehan was not representing the views of Swansea University. Thus, the matter is cleared up. I now know this because I received a communication from a representative of Swansea University who stated clearly that Swansea University has not expressed a corporate view on the matter. Specifically, Professor Peter Townsend (Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Administration, University of Wales Swansea) communicated to me (on 16th August, 2006): "Secondly, and probably what you are seeking, is that the views of Professor Sheehan in this article are his own personal views. The University has not expressed a corporate view on these matters. It is unfortunate that the newspaper did not make this clear."
The matter is, for me, closed.
Christopher Wood
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The War On Terra
Mel Very Thoughtlessly Made A Jewish Slur, Undeniably Nasty. ("Egregiously threatens to be a tautology, and I’m not having my kids learn poor logic.) It’s a shame ’ebriated’ isn’t a word, and one which means much the same as ’inebriated’ (as in ’flammable’/’inflammable’). Ebriated may be a word, but if so, it means the opposite of what I want. D’oh, my automobile’s a hatchback. (Mnemonic for: ’Damn Menmonics Are Hard’ with a bonus indefinite article.)
The best of Unfogged and Boing Boing
My! Very educated morons just screwed up numerous planetariums
Many Very Earnest Men Just Snubbed Unfortunate Ninth Planet
My vision, erased. Mercy! Just some underachiever now (as spoken by Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh)
Most vexing experience, mother just served us nothing!
Many Very Enterprising Madmen Just Suppressed Underdog Ninth Planet. (Those fuckers.)
One to expand your vocab:
Munis, Veriloquents, Enclear Misosophists Judging Sciolists Ultracrepidarian Nebulochaotics
I wouldn’t advise dropping any of those into conversation mind. That goes for ’judging’ too.
My Very Enormous Meat Just Swelled Up Nicely
Simple words which all children know, but of little use unless you’re cooking a carnivorous Sunday dinner for a large family, and possibly insulting to those who have to go without.
I may as well squeeze a seperate post on a similar subject here.
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Saturday, 26 August 2006
His Terrible Swift Pen
I’ve just discovered a new (to me) blog so good it deserves a post of its own. I don’t know if Jon Swift really is, like his namesake, a conservative, still less whether his a "reasonable" one. I found him via John Cole, which makes the ’conservative’ claim more credible. I appear to agree with him on most things. Going by the second comment on Science Is Dead, dang, some liberals are stupid. While it’s true Mark "My Mommy Says Dolphins R Angels" Noonan says something similar, the satirical intent here is unmistakeable.
Now that two of my least favorite subjects in school, science and history, are dead, I’m hoping that the Bush Administration will redouble its efforts to kill off two other subjects I didn’t much care for, Math and Geography. While important strides have been made, I still think more can be done to send Math and Geography to the dustbin of History, which, course, has itself been sent to the dustbin of ... something else, I guess. I’m not ready to declare victory until our schools are teaching only two subjects: Religion and Gym.
Posts with titles such as A Conservative Message to Blacks: Sink or Swim, Message to Illegal Immigrants: Protesting Is Un-American, God Needed a Former Energy CEO with a Knack for Creative Accounting in Heaven: Kenneth Lay 1942-2006, and Let’s Not Nuke Iran-Yet suggest a writer unencumbered with Noonan-like loyalty to the GOP. From the last of those:
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Ruth Kelly
The good news: Chris Dillow seems to have got over his April 1 post last year (I only just noticed the date; I’m sure it’s not relevant) where he said ’I like Ruth Kelly’ and the one from January this year which started ’Ruth Kelly is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met.’ Now he thinks she’s Politicizing crime:
I’ve been trying to work out what it is that I dislike most about Ruth Kelly’s speech on "multicultualism." I’ve narrowed it down to seven things.
I suppose it’s proof that Ms Kelly really is intelligent, that she manages to squeeze seven things offensive to the tolerant Chris into one hemi-demi-semi-grammatical speech. I’m not going to summarize. I’ll break with my usual avoidance of the imperative: read him.
Vicki Woods isn’t pleased either: I cohere, you cohere, let’s all cohese.
Patronising guff, all this. To be ignored by everyone, barring those "community leaders" who desire an OBE.
Kelly brought up David Blunkett’s old chestnut about English lessons again. With the bright hope (presumably) that if everyone’s Kashmiri granny spoke English, there would be an end of terror. I don’t think so.
The community I live in (there is no NuLab name for it, but you know who you are) doesn’t do integration and cohesion that well. My neighbour, who lived in Tuscany for 20 years, spoke Italian only one word at a time: "Bella"; "Brutta"; "Basta". His wife spoke late-learnt Italian with speed, accuracy and hilariously English inflections. His young children picked it up like breathing and their accent was praised as "molto toscano".
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On The Internet, No One Knows You’Re A Dog
Not my most original title, and the relevance will only become apparent later.
There’s a terrible article on blogging in the New Statesman. I just checked the site to see if Nick Cohen had posted anything (he hasn’t) and Stephen Armstrong’s ’Bloggers for hire’ was the top story, so I read it.
I don’t recommend you do.
[Blog Republic - advertising through bloggers] caused quite a flurry in the online world. After all, if blog culture has been about anything, it has been about sticking it to large corporations rather than taking their advertising dollars.
I can’t say offhand what percentage of blogs I read run ads, 40% seems like a not-bad guess. Most of those are on affiliate programs so they take the ads they get. ’Large corporations’ aren’t treated differently, it’s just that they usually aim their budgets elsewhere.
Last year, for instance, Dell would not replace a faulty computer owned by the influential blogger Jeff Jarvis. He started chronicling the company’s poor service on his blog buzz machine.com under the heading "Dell Hell". His postings hit such a nerve that Jarvis was soon receiving 10,000 visits a day.
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Sunday, 27 August 2006
Manliness
Via Explananda, Majikthise and Scott Lemieux, Martha Nussbaum’s splendid review of Manliness by Harvey Mansfield. This is how to write a review.
And that was Stephen Colbert introducing Mansfield’s book (suggested by a comment on Explananda above, though I can’t find the actual interview).
Mansfield seems like a sad character, in this interview he says he "would include him [Arnold Schwarzenegger] as a manly man" though the interviewer neglected to ask his thoughts on Mansfield lookalike Dr Niles Crane. Not only is he lacking in self-knowledge, he’s not up to date either. "I was told by someone who visited her [Margaret Thatcher] that she is very feminine with her husband." Date of interview, March 12 2006: Oops. Still, at least Dick Cheney is a man. "He hunts. And he curses openly." (This was before the shooting thing, when we learned that Cheney ’hunted’ domesticated birds, and missed even then.) Madonna hunts and curses too.
But that review is glorious.
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A Walking Symbol Of Inefficient Civic Refuse Collection
From the prologue to The Day of the Scorpion:
The writer encountered a Muslim woman once in a narrow street of a predominantly Hindu town, in the quarter inhabited by moneylenders. The feeling he had was that she was coming in search of a loan. She wore the burkha, that unhygienic head-to-toe covering that turns a woman into a walking symbol of inefficient civic refuse collection and leaves you without even an impression of the eyes she watches the gay world through, tempted but not tempting; a garment in all probability inflaming to her passions but chilling to her expectations of having them satisfied. Pity her for the titillation she must suffer.
After she had passed there was a smell of Chanel No. 5, which suggested that she needed the money because she liked expensive things. Perhaps she had a rebellious spirit, or laboured under a confusion of ideas and intentions. On the other hand she may merely have been submissive to her husband, drenching herself for his private delight with a scent she did not realise was also one of public invitation - and passed that day through the street of the moneylenders only because it was a short cut to the mosque.
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Kelly Condemns Religious Isolationism
BBC Close extremist schools - Kelly. Backword has a scoop not reported elsewhere.
Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly condemned ’secretive’ organisations which indoctrinate the young, the unprotected, and the gullible today. "Religious brainwashing" she said "is all around us." Even Hollywood stars on 8 figure salaries are not immune to substituting thinking for themselves with slavishly quoting the mad prejudices of the founder of their cult."
Ms Kelly expressed her pleasure that Scientology was a very small cult on this island, as is the Unification Church, or ’Moonies’, who offer latria to the (self-appointed) Sun Myung Moon, the controversial Bush supporter and owner of the Washington Times. "However, thanks to the fearless detective work of author Dan Brown, I must warn you of a sinister indoctrination cult called ’Opus Dei’ she continued. "These people will stop at nothing in their quest for power and influence, and have even placed ’sleepers’ (much like those in the film The Manchurian Candidate) in positions of influence. These deadly agents pretend to be loyal to Britain and representative democracy but really answer only to a sinister foreign puppet-master known only as ’The Pope’ (whom some contend is a former disciple of Adolf Hitler no less)."
She said the government had to "stamp out" XXXXXX schools which were trying to change British society to fit XXXXXX values.
"They should be shut down," she said. "Different institutions are open to abuse and where we find abuse we have got to stamp it out and prevent that happening. And XXXXXX schools are notorious for abuse. Fortunately the abusers are easy to spot: they are creepy looking men who wear dresses."
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O Horrid Hoaxes Fall On Wilson
The Sunday Times Betjeman love letter is horrid hoax starts too demurely:
So the late poet laureate’s biographer [AN Wilson] could be forgiven the thrill of discovery he felt when someone sent him a passionate love letter supposedly written by Betjeman to a mistress. ...
The giveaway - and a clue that a bitter rival of Wilson’s may be behind the trick - is that the capital letters at the beginning of the sentences in the letter spell out a vivid personal insult to the biographer.
C4News Snowmail reports this rather vaguely:
A note supposed to be a rare love letter from the man who complained about not getting enough lovin’ during his life turns out to be made up. How do they know? Because when you string together the first letters of each sentence they apparently spell out something along the lines of ’AN Wilson is a shit’. So who did the duping and why? Wilson has ruffled a few feathers in his time - could be practically anybody. A mystery probably more gripping than the book.
But ’something along the lines of’ is merely ass-covering. The ST:
The letter begins: “Darling Honor, I loved yesterday. All day I’ve thought of nothing else. No other love I’ve had means so much.”
Later on in the letter the poet waxed that “love has given me a miss for so long and now this miracle has happened. Sex is a part of it, of course.”
Betjeman then ended the letter: “Tinkerty-tonk, my Darling. I pray I’ll hear from you tomorrow. If I don’t I’ll visit your office in a fake beard. All love, JB.”
Close study of the letter, however, shows that the capital letters at the beginning of each sentence spell out a message: “AN Wilson is a shit”.
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Tuesday, 29 August 2006
Ill
I’m not well today. I’ve only got some kind of cold, but my concentration is pretty much shot. Apologies that I broke the site for a couple of hours (between 9:17 and 11:55 am to be accurate). I somehow left a comment without an opening hash (#) in the .htaccess file. Like I said, my concentration is shot.
Good stuff elsewhere: Mr Eugenides on Football and sectarianism. (NB for these purposes, I’m a Protestant, as is Mr Eugenides.) Since he’s linked in the second comment of Marcus of Harry’s Place post on the same topic, and subsequent commenters appear not to have read him here’s a relevant extract.
Artur Boruc, the Celtic goalkeeper, trotted towards his goal in front of the massed ranks of Rangers fans, who gave him hearty abuse as fans do. Boruc smiled, walked into his goal facing the fans, looked up at the crowd and slowly and deliberately crossed himself while still grinning at them. He then followed this up with a "wanker" gesture to the supporters. Only then did he turn and concern himself with the imminent business at hand of winning a football match. (Update: I should state for the sake of balance that I am informed by my Celtic-supporting friends that he performs ’a similar’ ritual before each game at Celtic Park too, though I rather doubt that the obscene hand gesture forms part of the routine on those occasions.)
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Sub Judice
As many of you will know, the New York Times published an article on the London terror case. That article is not available to internet users with British IP addresses.
Bruce Schneier has the important bits (which you probably knew already):
* There was some serious cash flow from someone, presumably someone abroad.
* There was no imminent threat.
* However, the threat was real. And it seems pretty clear that it would have bypassed all existing airport security systems.
* The conspirators were radicalized by the war in Iraq, although it is impossible to say whether they would have been otherwise radicalized without it.
* They were caught through police work, not through any broad surveillance, and were under surveillance for more than a year.
And from his comments, the whole thing appears in the comments on TechDirt. Via Gary Farber, it’s also available (for now) on Blogger: Details Emerge in British Terror Case.
I’m a bit uncomfortable about publicising this: as far as the NYT is concerned, the matter is sub judice, which means that publication may prejudice the trial. Now, I’m not a lawyer, and I may have made a wrong call here, but I think there is a lot less in the article than will be presented in court. There are few personal details. The allegations are that several young men were radicalised and may have filmed martyrdom videos; some of them may have made trips to Pakistan (some don’t have passports, so they can’t all have).
What this article does tell us, and what I think we need to know are in Bruce Schneier’s points. There was a threat; it was not imminent; the police had it under control.
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Wednesday, 30 August 2006
Still Ill
And hitting the LemSip. I’ve spent part of the day in semi-delerious sleep.
I did manage to take the Aspie-quiz (via Gary Farber).
Your Aspie score: 106 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 102 of 200
You are more Aspie than neurotypical
I don’t know what these mean, but it’s probably not good.
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This is the complete text of unsolicited email I received the other day. Hooray for the Trades Descriptions Act. Also: WTF?
Hi my diar friend!
This is the spam message for you.
Vasya.
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Thursday, 31 August 2006
Breaking News
Since the plot to detonate ad hoc compounds aboard passenger flights from Britain to the US was revealed the day after Home Secretary Dr John Reid’s inspirational speech, reaction to these dastardly plans have been mixed. Some observers, see Best of Both Worlds for extracts from the Powertools who think the capture (despite the flight being a ’dry-run’) was ’a near-run thing’. Others have doubts about the plausibility of the explosives plot, citing things like ’chemistry’ which John Hindrocket rightly scoffs at.
Backword can now reveal what the terrorists had, and why Hindrocket was right. This never before seen clip of the terrorists’ lair reveals the horrible truth behind "faith based chemistry" as we are sure it will be known. You won’t be laughing then, PZ "so-called" Myers. We am aware that this surveillance shot may prejudice the trial in ways that John "We’re a’ going to die" Reid’s "These terrorists will murder us a’ in oor beds" speech didn’t. The image quality is poor, and we are certain the individuals concerned could not be identified beyond reasonable doubt. The sound track has been interpreted, and may not be 100% accurate.
This footage may be prohibited within the UK. If you have doubts, please do not click here.
(All sources used besides this one video are freely available and based on information distributed by the US and UK governments.)
And now, a poem:
Poor Abdul, he has left us now,
To jail he had to go,
His ’lethal’ H2SO4
Was mostly H20.
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Why I Can Never Be A Scientologist
One (of the many) commonly-used phrases I avoid is the "five senses". Smell and taste are very closely related; too much so, IMO, to really count as separate things. Vision, on the other hand, breaks down into light-and-dark (detected by rods in the retina) and colour (dependent on the three types of cones also in the retina). Balance should be called a sense, as it concerns the relationship between the self and the world as the other senses do. (Internal senses, like hunger, pain, a full colon etc, do not really count for my purposes, as they refer to the state of the body rather than sense-data about external objects.) L. Ron Hubbard’s followers naturally disagree. Scientology nearly ready to unveil Super Power. Inspired no doubt, by an all-American success story, Hubbard discovered (in his cupboard) "57 perceptics" (because normal words just won’t do). These include:
Timen Sight
Tasten Colorn Depth
This is what you get when you type drunk without a spell checker.
Touch (pressure, friction, heat or cold and oiliness)
Hey, I got that one!
Solidity (barriers)
A man walks into a bar. "Ouch," he said. It was an iron bar. (Ken Dodd, I think.)
I got that one too.
Awareness of awareness
Dude, that’s far to metaphysical for me.
Personal emotion
If we had emotions and were not aware of them, what use would they be?
Saline content of self (body)
I believe that’s called ’thirst’.
Awareness of not knowing
Donald Rumsfeld demolished that one.
Physical energy (personal weariness, etc.)
Chris Brooke has photos demonstrating personal weariness.
Even if I wanted to have these superpowers, so according to the story, I could see cars no one else could, I’m doomed.
Rhythm
Lost cause right there. Is it because I is white?
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Fugue States
Glenn Gould for tehgrauniad’s Lindesay Irvine who called YouTube "the idle browser’s fount of inane distraction".
Via Mark Kaplan.
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I Was Ambivalent About This
via PDF who got it from here until I read the latter’s comments. No one mentions that what the campaign advocates is the cutting off of cats’ balls. (I’ve only had neutered cats, but then I adopt strays. Gordo was neutered just before I got him, I doubt I’d be able to inflict that myself.)
Raping a human being is a lot more serious than abandoning a cat.
Not to the cat.
Neutering is, of course, the right thing to do. ’Desex’ is still a horrible word. ’Unsex’ at least has, ah, pedigree.
Bonus poem mehitabel and her kittens.
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The Roof Is On Fire
From the same site that I got the kitty-fiddling image from:
Teh funny, yeah? Policeman, cowboy, contruction worker, or even an Indian.
That’s why I agree with Mr Eugenides.
The BBC almost get an inuendo into Gay snub firefighters disciplined.
Some of the firefighters involved had argued it would be embarrassing for them to turn up in uniform to the Pride Scotia event, while others claimed it would contradict their moral beliefs.
Part of being in a free society is having the discretion to exercise one’s moral beliefs unimpeded by righteous twats (and that includes the right to be a righteous twat, or as Mr E puts it, a bigot). But surely anyone can see that coercing someone to go to a Gay Pride event in uniform is not reasonable. OK the police have to do it, but you don’t mess with Glasgow bobbies. I bet the management bastards who thought this up wouldn’t put on a uniform for a day to do this, and asking firemen to dole out leaflets, WTF? I’m sure my local firemen are all decent brave blokes. If I meet one or two socially all well and good. But I have no desire to meet firemen qua firemen, and I can’t imagine why anyone else would. What next? the poor bastards having to give out leaflets at hen nights? Or would that be too hetero for the bosses?
And one of the firemen was a watch manager and his job isn’t putting out fires, training others to put out fires, and so on but handing out propaganda? Damn right he refused.
’Diversity training’ is just more do-gooder, quasi-Stalinist ’everyone must think like us’ crap.
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