backword

Wednesday, 1 February 2006

I Liked Oil, I Guess »

Your lights are on,
but you’re not home
Your mind is not your own

Robert Palmer, Addicted to Love

tehgrauniad: Bush sets goal for US of 75% cut in Middle East oil imports:

President George Bush has admitted the US is “addicted to oil” but pledged to reduce its dependence on Middle East imports by three quarters by 2025, largely through the development of ethanol fuel for cars derived from wood chips, vegetable matter and grass.

The US is “addicted”. In His Own Words.

I didn’t, but I’m one of those that — I don’t think I was clinically an alcoholic; I didn’t have the genuine addiction. I don’t know why I drank. I liked to drink, I guess.

English irregular verbs, part whatever. “I like to …/You may have a problem with …/He’s addicted.”

These 38 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:07am GMT Permanent link.

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Thursday, 2 February 2006

Politics Of Envy Watch »

Good god, Cristina Odone is a cretin.

I’ve no idea why tehgrauniad decided to let the former Deputy Editor of New Statesman loose on the much-more successful Spectator when she could be telling us how brave the Pope is (and how bad sex is except when dog-collar wearers try it on with kids, then oh forgive, we must forgive, have pity, etc etc etc).

But a weekly political magazine ought to have more than circulation in its sights: it should have an impact on the life of the nation. The Spectator, hijacked for nearly six years by an editor who saw life as a big joke, instead sidestepped the serious issues of the day and missed out on shaping the most important transformation of the Tory party since Margaret Thatcher.

Oh indeed, Cristina, indeed. But life is a big joke, isn’t it? Unless it’s ruined by a priestly pederast, of course. Sextator under Comrade Johnson: sales 60,000. Staggers: 25,000. And influence? What influence? It’s a conservative periodical. There’s a hint in that word; they’d run a mile from “political philosophy.” Has the Staggers had an “impact on the life of the nation"? If it has, I missed it. It’s backed the wrong horse in every Labour contest in the past 25 years. I was in short trousers when the Tory party had its last transformation, led by Enoch Powell and Keith Joseph, but I don’t think they broadcast their conversion to monetarism in the Speccie.

Oh dear. It couldn’t be something to do with Boris’s success in running a readable magazine against Ms Odone’s pious hectoring bore of a rag, could it? And, how plebian, he actually made money. Disgraceful business.

These 216 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:40pm GMT Permanent link.

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Racist Cartoons »

Is this the MPLA
Or is this the UDA
Or is this the IRA
I thought it was the UK
Or just
Another country
Another council tenancy

Anarchy In The UK

This is particularly shocking. I don’t care that it’s part of a series which featuers a character who

… has taught Spaniards bull fighting, the Swiss mountain climbing, taken part in the Olympic Games in Greece, caused civil war in Germany …

Claiming the invention of tea is a serious cultural slight. And what do they mean warm beer?

This gets things precisely the wrong way around. “He’s my first cousin once removed from Britain. And they don’t talk quite the same as us.” It’s not us who talk funny. It’s the Cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

The phrase was first used by the dour Scottish character Groundskeeper Willie in the television cartoon series The Simpsons to describe the French.

You can tell the writers didn’t mean the phrase to be taken seriously. They put it in the mouth of “the dour Scottish character.” Oh that Septic (tank == Yank) sense of humour. My sides!

In short I can’t understand the reactions to some cartoons in the Middle East. Gunmen surround EU offices over Mohammed cartoons. They seem surprised that foreigners hate them. Look up “foreigners” in any decent dictionary and you’ll find “Unwashed barbarian hordes who envy our freedom, the beauty of our women, the affection of our sheep …” But enough about the Welsh.

The sensible reaction (tehgrauniad via Tim Worstall):

The centre-right Die Welt also ran the caricature on the front page, reporting that Muslim groups had forced the Danish newspaper to issue an apology. It described the protests as hypocritical, pointing out Syrian TV had depicted Jewish rabbis as cannibals. Yesterday Roger Köppel, editor-in-chief of Die Welt, said he had no regrets. He told the Guardian: “It’s at the very core of our culture that the most sacred things can be subjected to criticism, laughter and satire. If we stop using our journalistic right of freedom of expression within legal boundaries then we start to have a kind of appeasement mentality. This is a remarkable issue. It’s very important we did it. Without this there would be no Life of Brian.”

Good for Herr Köppel. Slinging Ink translates France Soir:

“It is necessary to crush once again the infamous thing, as Voltaire liked to say. This religious intolerance that accepts no mockery, no satire, no ridicule. We citizens of secular and democratic societies are summoned to condemn a dozen caricatures judged offensive to Islam. Summoned by who? By the Muslim Brotherhood, by Syria, the Islamic Jihad, the interior ministers of Arab countries, the Islamic Conferences — all paragons of tolerance, humanism and democracy.

So, we must apologise to them because the freedom of expression they refuse, day after day, to each of their citizens, faithful or militant, is exercised in a society that is not subject to their iron rule. It’s the world upside down. No, we will never apologise for being free to speak, to think and to believe.

Because these self-proclaimed doctors of law have made this a point of principle, we have to be firm. They can claim whatever they like but we have the right to caricature Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, Yahve and all forms of theism. It’s called freedom of expression in a secular country …

For centuries the Catholic church was little better than this fanaticism. But the French Revolution solved that, rendering to God that which came from him and to Caesar what was due to him.”

To which I can only add, “Vive la France! Vive La Revolution!” Good blokes the French, for smelly, lazy cheese eaters.

There’s an interesting essay on Sullywatch (Via Mike Power who quotes one of the weaker passages, IMO):

First, to some of the outraged Muslims for not helping their cause any with profoundly anti-democratic statements and sentiments (As an aside, we have always been somewhat amused by the tendency of some Muslims to sneer at the Christian belief in Jesus’s partially divine parentage, while deifying their own prophet (about whom no claims of divinity have ever been asserted) to a far greater extent than Christians ever have. There is an extent to which Muslims have failed to delineate Islam the religion from Islam the personality cult). To act as if the Danish government is supposed to do something about this is almost as culturally insensitive as the cartoons themselves.

And let’s not forget, either, the grotesque antisemitic imagery that circulates in some of the Middle Eastern media.

Second, to the Danish newspaper that published the story originally. They cannot pretend to be totally shocked that this sort of thing would happen. The drawings were not incidental to the story; they were the story. To feign surprise over such a reaction is disingenuous to say the least.

Third, the conservatives exulting over this in the blogosphere. Some of these people are the last ones who should be tut-tutting over such a public temper tantrum to the insult to someone else’s faith. We seem to recall a television show they recently ran off the American airwaves.

We also seem to recall how some of them reacted, many years ago, to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwaa calling for the author’s head. Consider that none other than then-Religious Right Golden Boy Dan Quayle opined: ” [The book] is obviously not only offensive but, I would think most of us would say, in bad taste” (And he was so perceptive, he knew this without even having to read it). In fact, we seem to remember, a lot of conservatives expressed regret that the Christian world didn’t take such insults to its faith as seriously as the Islamic one did. Pat Buchanan wrote a column saying as much, we think (back when he was still safely on the plantation).

But I’m less impressed with the case for the defence.

Remember that in most of Europe, the majority of Muslims are in a sort of political limbo they would never be in over here. Their children, even if born there and being native speakers of the local language, often cannot gain full citizenship rights. Even when they do, they remain ghettoized, with few of them attaining positions of prestige and importance within their adopted societies.

Well, I wouldn’t expect an American to understand the marginalised in Europe. (NB and once sponsored by LEGO; that’ll confuse the imams.)

Even though the butt of the jokes is not always Muhammad (one, in fact, skewers the original instigator of this controversy, childrens’ book author Kåre Bluitgen as a publicity hound), it’s the offhanded way it’s used that strikes one as understandably rubbing the wrong way. Hah hah, it seems to say, everything’s material. Coming up next, a sitcom about the zany workplace antics of the two guys whose job it was to drop the Zyklon B crystals into the gas chamber.

If I remember correctly, there were prudes who objected to Aristophenes for casualness and lack of seriousness. Let them stew. Is the proposed sitcom any worse than a musical celebrating the Führer?

Throw that out in a society where very few Muslim immigrants have a way of making their voices heard …

Very few people have a way of making their voices heard — anywhere. Assuming, of course, that that means anything at all. But everyone has more chance in a society which allows freedom of speech than in once which puts gunmen out. “Cross us and we’ll shoot you.” Young Palestines must rejoice at getting their voices heard.

So to my favourite of the cartoons.

Do they mean us?

These 357 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:42pm GMT Permanent link.

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Boycott! »

I wonder if anyone’s told the Palestinians who’re proposing to boycott Danish goods that they mostly export bacon and lager?

First Roger Simon boycotts Google and China; then Muslims stop buying alcohol and pig meat. Capitalism collapses overnight!

These 38 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:25pm GMT Permanent link.

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Friday, 3 February 2006

The 24 Hour Hate »

Muslims to march in London to protest cartoon and Day of anger threatened over cartoons of Prophet. In the first:

This morning protesters in Jakarta, Indonesia, attacked the lobby of a building housing the Danish embassy.

Between 200 to 300 demonstrators from the Islamic Defender’s Front [sic] smashed lamps and threw rotten eggs and tomatoes at the Danish embassy symbol and tore up a Danish national flag.

My emphasis. Yesterday, the Torygraph reported Gunmen surround[ed] EU offices over Mohammed cartoons. It seems a simple rule of thumb: if any activity requires hiding your face, it’s not something you should be proud of. And any organisation with “Front” in the name is pretty much guaranteed to be fascist. “Defenders’” is a bad sign too.

Via Tim Worstall: even worst than possibly expected bollocks in tehgrauniad.

Now the great shape-shifter of fascism seems to have taken on the clothes of “freedom of speech”. If these cartoons were designed to provoke Muslim fundamentalists, maybe they have done more to reveal the prejudices of Europe. Europe has a history of turning on its minorities. Will that be its future too?

That Salman Rushdie, what a fascist. Voltaire too, bastard. “Europe has a history of turning on its minorities.” Of course, the Middle East hasn’t. Anti-Semitic cartoons in Saudi Arabia are our fault too. Not that Saudi Arabia is noted for freedom of speech. Well, you can say what you like provided it’s “What a great country we live in”, “Aren’t Jews evil?” or “Death to the West!” And who really wants to say anything else?

I should say that I agree with Chris Bertram that:

… [I]t is obvious that racists in the West (such as the BNP in Britain) are using “Muslim” as a code under which to attack minorities in ways that don’t fall foul of laws against the promotion of racial hatred.

I don’t believe that these cartoons were designed to provoke Muslim fundamentalists any more than I believe Jerry Springer: the Opera was designed to provoke Christian fundamentalists. Or whatever got Mary Whitehouse’s knickers in a twist was done specifically for that purpose. And I really loathed Mary Whitehouse and detest Stephen Green.

tehgrauniad article notes that “Sarah Joseph [the author] is editor of emel magazine”. That’s Emel magazine whose website features the currect cover — bearing a photograph of Muhammed. (OK the boxer.) Now it says here: “[T]he Koran forbids pictorial depiction of people, animals, or god.” Oh dear. There’s never a rotten egg thrower or masked gunman around when you need one.

These 286 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:47am GMT Permanent link.

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Draft Of A Letter To Sarah Joseph »

Dear Ms Joseph,

does not the most holy Qur’an say “a woman who can edit a lifestyle magazine is like a dog who speaks *Norwegian*"? And does not the book also say that “pictorial depiction of people, animals, or god is like fitting wheels to a tomato, time consuming and completely unnecessary"? Your magazine is an affront to Allah (PBUH)!

Death to reactionaries!*

Death! Death! Death!

yours

Disgusted of the Gaza Strip

PS Death! Death! Death!

PPS Death! Death! Death!

PPPS If Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, wills it.

*Except our reactionaries, of course**.

**Except to suicide bombers. Death to them. Most glorious death!

These 104 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:23am GMT Permanent link.

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Battle Hardened »

I love: “I’m prescribing that you be stretched thin. We don’t define that as torture.”

Another cartoon they didn’t want you to see. See letter to WaPo from one Major Major Major Major and a report on same in The Age.

Being a fascist for free-speech is hard work, folks. Now to offend the Jews.

[Exits, whistling the Siegfried Idyll.]

These 61 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:48pm GMT Permanent link.

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Where One Burns Books »

“Where one burns books, one eventually burns people”

Brecht

I could post this over at Aaro Watch but I think I’m in a minority of one on this matter, so what I have to say belongs under my name, on my site.

I caught part of David Aaronovitch’s contribution to Radio 3’s Night Waves (as trailed on his blog). While he was careful to be, ahem, “decent”, and to use his own word “civil” he let two claims by the other contributors pass without comment. And it’s his silences rather than his words I take issue with.

One of the other guests said that he thought that a Muslim boycott of Lurpak was entirely fair. Well that’s his opinion, but it’s clearly wrong. Boycotting French wine over the French government’s acts (such as the Rainbow Warrior) or boycotting South African goods over apartheid make sense because it’s the government which made the offensive policies and it’s the government boycotts are aimed at hurting. Unless Jyllands Posten is also known as “Pravda” what it publishes is entirely separate from government, and in a free society is free only so long as governments do not interfere with editorial policy. Our fanatical friends may have a beef with the Jyllands Posten, and they should boycott the paper. That’s a good tactic and it taught the Sun a thing or two after Hillsborough. What’s that you say? They didn’t buy the Jyllands Posten in the first place? Then why the fuck are they bothered what’s in it?

The second thing is somewhat more slippery. I agree that “Muslim” and “Islam” are used, both by the BNP and many commenters blog sites, as proxies for nastier terms of racial abuse. But I disagree with whichever guest (not DA) who suggested that the situation now for Muslims is in any way like the German Jews in 1934. The Jews didn’t burn books or exhibit prohibited art or declaim the decadence of Germany. If newspaper editors got sacked it was because they were Jews and their owners were not. It’s a very bad analogy — no less hysterical and overstated than the claim of a tsunami of anti-Semitism. Jesus H Christ, guys, get a fucking grip.

These 360 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:38pm GMT Permanent link.

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Saturday, 4 February 2006

Cartoons Again »

The Religious Policeman is particularly fine.

I’ve just noticed this: Syrian protesters set fire to embassies. At the bottom of tehgrauniad article is:

See the cartoons
The cartoons can be seen at www.brusselsjournal.com/node/698

I can’t see Jack Straw being pleased. (I’m sure that wasn’t on earlier stories.)

This is a brilliant headline in the Belfast Telegraph: UK papers not to be drawn in cartoon row. Well I liked it.

The Sun, in “what’s all the fuss about ” comment, says it “sees no justification for causing deliberate offence” to their “much-valued Muslim readers.”

I have a very simple solution whereby the Sun can publish the pictures and not offend any Muslims. Come on, Dave, you say. It can’t be done, can it? Simple: publish them on page 3. Good Muslims would refuse to look at images of people, animals, or God, and especially young women with no clothes. One of the horrors of the decadent West, and I’m sure they’d pluck their eyes out than suffer such sacrilege. They’d therefore skip page 3 altogether, and what they don’t see can’t offend them. And if any of them don’t … well they’ll understand why some of us want the cartoons published so we can make our own minds up.

I mean, I’m really convinced that devout Muslims buy the Sun …

These 186 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:00pm GMT Permanent link.

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You Could Have Told Us Already »

Number of planets in solar system in doubt.

’Tenth planet’ is bigger than Pluto.

And Then There Were 10…Or Should It Be Eight?

Pull out your old grade-school models and dioramas of the solar system. They may need to be fixed. …

“Now we have a consistency problem,” he added. “Either we take Pluto out, or put these things in.”

So Pluto may not be a “planet” after all.

Oops.

These 33 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:47pm GMT Permanent link.

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All In The Best Possible Taste »

Maybe my last word on cartoons — but almost certainly not.

It doesn’t surprise me that I seem to have flipped to the dark side. Though it does please me that I’m still on the opposite side to Harry’s Place.

First: Good for Asghar Bukhari. He’s stood up. I doubt I’d have had the cojones, and I respect that. Respect is earned, you see. Basic politeness you get gratis as it were. But you have to do something for respect. I can’t think of anything Jack Straw’s ever done which would get mine.

But I also admire Sunny of Pickled Politics who quotes the Muslim group blog Aqoul:

The whole “boycotting Danish companies” thing has, in my opinion, a lot to do with inability to differentiate between a newspaper in Denmark, and/or a company that is headquartered in Denmark, and the Danish government. In a country where the government either owns all media or, at least, heavily controls and censors all media, it is hard for the population to imagine a newspaper, or a radio/television station, that is independent from government influence and control.

Similar, in a place where national identity and pride is pushed to the forefront of public life, and where the differences between political establishment and private enterprise are blurred, at best, it is hard to see a company that is headquartered in Denmark NOT as a “Danish company”.

If we were all sensible, we’d refuse to see Muslims as a homogenous group — but their community leaders here and Imams in the Middle East insist they are. I’ll come back to this. But, for now, the activist Muslisms refuse to see Danes and possibly Scandanavians and even possibly Europeans as anything other than homogenous. Kulvider in Sunny’s comment #32 has one of the best put-downs of the debate so far. (The standard is very low.)

Just been to Tesco. Filed my trolley with nearly ALL Danish products.There seems to be a Buzz about, everyone is doing the same. Made sure i purchased NOTHING from Islamic countries. Well done you Danish Vikings ! [— comment #27]

I assume you drove there.

I’m also impressed by Sean in comment #52:

My point was more that the moral high ground really is a very difficult place for modern Islam to ever reach, given the terrible human rights situations in so many Islamic countries, the oppression of women, execution of gays, stonings, beheadings, torture, cultural repression, etc.

But I also see that you were referring strictly to the cartoons. You think the original offence was made by the Danes. Well, I think the original offence occurred when a bunch of Danish publishers couldn’t find any illustrators to help with a book about Mohammad, because they were all too scared of being beheaded by Muslims, so a brave Danish editor decided to see if it was still possible for anyone to satirise religion, as it has been possible in the West since the Enlightenment.

And is it possible? Only if you want to kick up a worldwide culture war, it seems.

Indeed, it seems that British Muslims could gain the moral high ground fairly easily — provided they insisted that they were a discrete group with discrete values. As long as they insist that Islam is a world religion and their brothers were in the Taliban and are in Taliban-like organisations, the moral high ground will escape them for most British citizens. (There will always be nutcases like Stephen Green who think that we should forbid women from working, have a morality police, and that the shelling of the statues of Buddha was a good thing — in short that the only fault of the Taliban was choosing the wrong prophet. I hate these people.)

And so I come back to Mr Bukhari.

Mr Bukhari told the BBC News website: “The placards and chants were disgraceful and disgusting, Muslims do not feel that way.

“I condemn them without reservation, these people are less representative of Muslims than the BNP are of the British people.”

He said that Muslims were angry over satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published in European papers but it was “outrageous” for anyone to advocate extreme action or violence.

I can get behind that. Here we have a counting problem. If I hadn’t found this article I’d have written that my best guess of radical Muslims in the UK amounted to the number of guys who actually help placards at these protests. Naturally the organisers count the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims behind them. Like the police count at any rally, I fear my estimate may be conservative, and the truth must lie somewhere in between our two estimates, but a lot closer to mine. (Though I would say that, wouldn’t I?)

And here’s the bit which may expain why I’ve gone over to the baddies.

Flanked by a forest of messages such as, “’Freedom’ to insult”, a speaker at Saturday’s rally told the crowd they were demanding an end to “vilification”.

“If you want to debate and criticise then we are ready and we have been waiting, but we are not going to accept these images,” he said.

He called on “the governments of the Muslim world to completely sever all contact with European governments” until they had “controlled the media”.

I never, ever want government to control the media. We’ve spent centuries shrugging that off. If the governments of the Muslim world did sever contact — well good. We’d lose Uzbekistan for one thing. And we’d find a replacement for oil within five years and probably stop global warming. Governments should have nothing to do with the media. This is non-negotiable.

If they had, would they have sent back a certain novel and said that it was well-written in parts, but did the narrator have to have a silly name and be infatuated with a girl of 13? Couldn’t she be more respectable — if it was a movie able to be played by someone nicely grown up, like Reese Witherspoon, or Sandra Bullock, or Meryl Streep? And that book in Dublin. Does the guy have to … well you know … couldn’t he have a cup of coffee and think how glorious Allah is and how Mohammed is his prophet (PHUH)? And the book where the guy goes to war. Doesn’t get to snuff it (rewrite?) but does get hit in the you know … and his wife goes off him (the hussy) and takes a liking to the groundsman … I mean it’s not inspiring is it? Downright insulting suggesting that what women want are lusty working class blokes.

This is my favourite headline: Alienated Danish Muslims Sought Help from Arabs. I looked up “alienation” in the annotated Koran. There are 678 references, along with 451 for “workers struggle”. “Michel Foucault” gets a comparitavely miniscule 111 and “postmodernism” only has 68. (Close.) Who’d have thought the Germans would have such a great use of irony? Alienation, eh? Marx really informs Islam. That’s why they still have slaves in Saudi Arabia.

And now you’re wondering why Kenny Everett is at the top of this post. Here’s why:

Islam forbids the depiction of the religion’s founder Muhammad, and Muslims in Denmark grew outraged after the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, a major Danish daily, published a series of 12 political cartoons in September that depicted the prophet in various disparaging contexts. When they responded — through letters to the editor and complaints within the community — they felt ignored.

Awwww. They wrote to the papers and they felt ignored. Kenny Everett used to do a brilliant weekly sketch as “Colonel Clean” or “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” in a pinstripe suit and waving a brolly and calling for “nice things on the television”. Then he’d walk away; the suit cut away at the back to reveal women’s underwear.

And guys, go to a few Pinter plays. Or better still, open your ears. No one ever listens to anyone else. Everybody’s talking, nobody’s listening. It’s been that way since long before Muhammed, and the world’s not stopped turning yet. Now shut up, wash your face, and shave what’s left on there, and either get a job or fuck off to Syria where nutters are always welcome.

These 857 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:23pm GMT Permanent link.

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Sunday, 5 February 2006

Dozy Sycophant »

There’s a splendid profile of Hilary Armstrong in the Sunday Times this morning. (I know, I know. I was looking for David Aaronovitch. Honest.)

The chief whip’s disastrous mathematical calculations last week not only saw backbench Labour rebellions take Tony Blair to his second Commons defeat but also — unbelievably — to his third, just a few hours later, by a single vote: his own. He had gone home early because Armstrong (dubbed Squawker, with a voice like a howler monkey that has just hit its thumb with a hammer) had assured him his presence was not necessary.

…

Miscalculating how many of her own party would vote for amendments to the government’s draconian “religious hatred” bill was a slip-up richly relished by the rank-and-file, who loathe the government’s bully-girl-in-chief as much as the Tories.

Those who resent her are hoping that Blair might finally realise that he has over-promoted a dozy sycophant who sees the chief whip’s job as less about jollying along — or threatening — the troops, than issuing orders down the chain of command and “telling Tony what he wants to hear”.

…

Prior to that, the closest she had come to a setback was a run-in with the late Robin Cook in the summer of 2001. The whips’ main methods in enforcing their writ and getting unpopular government measures past their own party without revolt are a carrot-and-stick mix of dangled blandishments and threatened punishments.

But Armstrong has form on bodging the job. In July that year, Downing Street tried to take out two troublemakers. Gwyneth Dunwoody, the rumbustious left-wing member for Crewe and Nantwich and longest serving female MP, was rung up by Armstrong at 11.20am and told that an announcement that she was being sacked as chairwoman of the select committee on transport was being made 10 minutes later. Simultaneously it was revealed that Donald Anderson, another thorn in the sides of the whips, would be removed as chair of the foreign affairs committee. The pair were saved only when Cook, leader of the House, forced a vote in which 100 MPs rebelled; a disastrous situation for a whip to have brought upon herself.

Cook considered Armstrong “a bit thick” while she complained that he “patronised” her. Despite an avowed pride in her northern roots, Armstrong has shown evidence of a mighty chip on her shoulder.

Take the time, for instance, that she hauled in Paul Marsden, MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham, over his refusal to support military action in Afghanistan. She first accused him of absenteeism, which he defended by saying that his wife had been seriously ill and that he had been campaigning in the general election. Then she demanded that he consult her before making any statements to the press. When he refused, Armstrong complained that “the trouble with people like you is you are so clever with words that us up north can’t answer back”. Marsden retorted that he came from Cheshire.

Ouch. I hoped when I voted for New Labour in 1997, that the “clever party” were finally getting in. Little Hilary going against Robin Cook reminds me of Bevan complaining of being sent “naked into the conference chamber.” Not that us in Wales can understand clever talk like that.

Armstrong continued her studies with a degree in sociology at West Ham college of technology and then Birmingham University, later becoming a county councillor in Durham.

She would prefer to see it as a vicissitude of fate (rather than nepotism) that gifted her (from a shortlist of five) the old man’s seat when he stood down in 1987. Her maiden speech was on the need to transfer resources to the northeast to make up for the collapse of mining and heavy industry, and put local people in control of them. In her early days in the Commons she showed her later winning streak as a big supporter of the now defunct plans for devolved regional government in the northeast.

Er. “vicissitude of fate"? She’s got a sociology degree! Such things are above her head. It’s all good stuff.

Jamie wondered what’s wrong with this government when it can’t win easy votes. Indeed. The question I want answered is: why can’t Blair sack some people — Peter Mandelson, Keith Vaz, Hilary Armstrong? They’re among the foulest turds ever to disgrace the Houses of Parliament, besides being utterly hopeless. Apparently they’re friends of his. But what’s that got to do with it? A degree of ruthlessness is essential for the job. (See Wilson, Harold and Thatcher, Margaret.) The next question is, why does he pick such friends?

These 181 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:01am GMT Permanent link.

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Monday, 6 February 2006

Censored! »

In a break from cartoon coverage, we give you the American Taleban!

BBC: [Rolling] Stones’ Super Bowl songs censored.

The Rolling Stones were censored during their halftime performance at the Super Bowl XL in Detroit on Sunday.

TV censors deemed two lyrics too sexually explicit to be broadcast and they were cut from the three-song show.

Start Me Up and Rough Justice were subject to censorship, while (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction was left intact.

I’m not sure that the first sentence there is correct: the lyrics were censored — and on and only on the TV broadcast: they were allowed to sing what they liked. There’s a sort of special use of censored here: it’s like saying that the Sun censored the Mohammed cartoons by not printing them. But “I/we won’t publish X” is different from “X must not be published.”

Part of me thinks this is fun. The point of the Stones originally was that they were (or Mick was) very sexual for a white band. And there were always people they rubbed up the wrong way. It’s sort of good that a 62-year-old Tory-voting grandfather still scares. “Hope I die before I get old” — offer applies to certain definitions of “old.”

These 149 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:11pm GMT Permanent link.

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Vive Denis Diderot! »

This isn’t for you: it’s for me. It is a) a way for me to attempt to articulate what I think about the cartoon thing so far, so I at least have a rough idea where I stand and b) a means for me clearing out several tabs of pages I like.

John Simpson is unsurprisingly very good: Cartoon anger is a misrepresentation.

Yet despite how it looks on television news, the response to the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad has mostly been non-violent so far.

There were no demonstrations at all in a sizeable number of Muslim countries. In Iran, Egypt, Pakistan and Iraq, the demonstrations passed off quietly.

There has been serious trouble in Gaza, Damascus and Beirut, but in each case, local tensions clearly boiled up and found their expression in this particular issue.

Indeed, oh indeed. I’ve a degree in psychology, but I don’t understand anger (least of all my own). It can boil up … “overnight” is too plodding. It’s much quicker than that that ploughshares get sharpened and turned into swords. “Neurotic” to me means something like “cannot function [well] in society” and much anger isn’t neurotic at all. Anger functions very well.

Of course, even John Simpson gets it wrong.

How did a series of not particularly well-drawn or funny cartoons, published on 30 September in a Danish newspaper, produce such anger in Europe and the Middle East four months later?

But they weren’t meant to be funny cartoons. (Editorial cartoons rarely are.) At least one was supposed to be an illustration for a children’s book.

If anyone fanned the flames, it was not Osama Bin Laden.

I don’t remember anyone accusing him.

Instead, it was the mild, distinctly moderate figure of Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the Foreign Minister of Egypt.

As early as November, he was protesting about the cartoons, and calling them an insult.

“Egypt,” he said, “has confronted this disgraceful act and will continue to confront such insults.”

That awful noise is your bullshit alarm. Turn it off. I SAID, TURN IT OFF! “Egypt … has confronted …” Well we all saw the effect that had. Egypt’s confrontation consisted of: one superannuated old fart saying “Egypt has confronted …” Way to go, Egypt! Egypt, everybody!

At one point, Rushdie recanted and asked for forgiveness. At least one of [The Satanic Verses]’s translators seems to have been murdered.

Two, John, have.

But The Satanic Verses continued to make good money, and the British government asked Rushdie to pay part of the high cost of his own protection.

It’s a book! I’ve a low enough opinion of the British government, but WTF? You really think authors make money? I mean enough money to pay someone else’s wages? Or enough money to pay round-the-clock bodyguards (given European employment directives)? Free speech goes with being British.

Why, one of the elders asked again and again, did we allow the Prophet Muhammad to be insulted when we knew how much distress it would cause individual Muslims?

I’ve said it in a Crooked Timber thread. Who knew how much distress seeing a girl in Man U shirt would cause Ian Huntley? Who will apologise for this awful thing?

He had a point; after all, a number of European countries would not allow a deeply anti-Semitic book to be published, and have made it a criminal offence to deny the Holocaust.

Why should it not also be illegal to insult the Prophet?

Because the Holocaust happened. Insult is an opinion. Facts are sacred, opinion is free.

I only saw the Sun (I think it was the Sun) headline tonight: “Nick this Twat” or something. Before I read Man apologises for bomber protest.

He likened his own “insensitive” behaviour to the “provocative and controversial” cartoon publication.

Which he didn’t feel motivated to protest against until now, of course.

Oh those nasty cartoonists: Muslim cartoon fury claims lives. Next, we release … the mimes!

At least five people have been killed in Afghanistan as protests against European cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad swept across the country.

How cunning is that? Danish cartoonists from their underground hideaway in Denmark assassinated we repeat assassinated five quietly rioting Muslim extremists.

There’s a better locus for all this fuss: Saudi Arabia. I hate Saudi Arabia, especially when I learned that apart from having all the chinless wonders in palaces they also wouldn’t admit Jews, but accepted US protection.

Try Daily Kos:

While it was a minor side story in the western press, the most important of Muslim religious festivals recently took place in Saudi Arabia - called the Hajj. Every able-bodied Muslim is obligated to make a pilgrimage once in their lifetime to Mecca, which is in modern-day Saudi Arabia. This pilgrimage can be done at any time of the year but most pilgrims arrive during the Muslim month known as Dhu al-Hijjah, which follows a lunar calendar that does not exactly match the western Gregorian calendar.

The most recent Hajj occurred during the first half of January 2006, precisely when the “outrage” over the Danish cartoons began in earnest. There were a number of stampedes, called “tragedies” in the press, during the Hajj which killed several hundred pilgrims. I say “tragedies” in quotation marks because there have been similar “tragedies” during the Hajj and each time, the Saudi government promises to improve security and facilitation of movement to avoid these. Over 251 pilgrims were killed during the 2004 Hajj alone in the same area as the one that killed 350 pilgrims in 2006. These were not unavoidable accidents, they were the results of poor planning by the Saudi government.

And while the deaths of these pilgrims was a mere blip on the traditional western media’s radar, it was a huge story in the Muslim world. Most of the pilgrims who were killed came from poorer countries such as Pakistan, where the Hajj is a very big story. Even the most objective news stories were suddenly casting Saudi Arabia in a very bad light and they decided to do something about it.

Their plan was to go on a major offensive against the Danish cartoons. The 350 pilgrims were killed on January 12 and soon after, Saudi newspapers (which are all controlled by the state) began running up to 4 articles per day condemning the Danish cartoons. The Saudi government asked for a formal apology from Denmark. When that was not forthcoming, they began calling for world-wide protests. After two weeks of this, the Libyans decided to close their embassy in Denmark. Then there was an attack on the Danish embassy in Indonesia. And that was followed by attacks on the embassies in Syria and then Lebanon.

Or try The Religious Policeman.

As Your Majesty requested recently, in order to divert public attention from the regrettable demise of a small number of pilgrims in Makkah during the last Hajj, Saudi newspapers were instructed to revive the four-month-old story of cartoons about the Prophet (PBUH) in a Danish newspaper, and turn it into an attack on Denmark, together with a “spontaneous demand by the people” for a boycott of Danish goods.

So far this has worked reasonably well, although major Danish exports are bacon and lager beer, which we do not import, except as “special consignments” for some members of your family.

Other good stuff: Matthew Parris:

A little candour is called for here. Those protesting against publication are not really doing so because they themselves do not wish to see these pictures. They do not want you or me to see them either. They do not want anyone to see them. They do not want them to exist.

Of course, Mr Parris is alluding to his own unspeakable sexual orientation. It is quite reasonable is it not to be offended by the thought of two buff toned young men rolling around together? I mean you’re disgusted that some good looking guy might be sticking his tongue into some other young man’s mouth? What a horrible thought! And not only should you not have to bear it, we have the solution for even the possibility! Stephan! The next slide! Where are you, you degenerate schweinhund? The next slide, when we find it, demonstrates the remarkable power of Zyklon B. …

Now it’s very easy to murmur “I am not a Muslim/Christian/Jew/Hindu” as though not being something was terribly inoffensive — a sin, at worst, of omission; a way of avoiding an argument — the suggestion, perhaps, that “your” religion may be “true for you” but, as for me, I’ll sit this one out. But let us not duck what that “I do not believe” really means. It means I do not believe that there is one God, Allah, or that Muhammad is His Prophet. It means I do not believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, or that no man cometh to the Father except by Him. I do not believe that the Jews are God’s Chosen People, or subject to any duties different from the rest of us. It means I do not believe any living creature will be reincarnated in another life.

In my opinion these views are profoundly mistaken, and those who subscribe to them are under a serious misapprehension on a most important matter. Not only are their views not true for me: they are not true for them. They are not true for anyone. They are wrong.

This is of course my opinion too. I’m pretty much a “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted” kind of guy, but some nothings are even less true than others.

The FT: The reality of cartoon violence:

But a week ago, when a Saudi imam broadcast a sermon about the affair, much of the Muslim world flew into an anti-Danish rage.

This isn’t genuine rage. It’s not as if Abdul and Omar and Mohammed all opened their papers, and after perusing the disgraceful Western decadence of Babs on page 3 (they say “know your enemy” so our heroes devoted half an hour of study to the houri flaunting herself in a manner so hurtful to the Prophet (PBUH)), they came across these cartoons. No, they were told they were outraged, and at one snap of the hypnotist’s fingers, they were. Without even seeing the offending material. But the Europeans have form. That’s why their parents came here.

The Sunday Times:

IT began innocently with a Danish children’s book on the Koran and the prophet’s life. Its author, Kare Bluitgen, was having difficulty finding an illustrator, complaining that all the artists he approached feared the wrath of Muslims if they drew images of Muhammad. Many cited the murder of the Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh by an Islamist as reason for refusal.

Learning of this, Flemming Rose, cultural editor of the daily Jyllands-Posten, invited anyone “bold enough” from the Danish Cartoonists’ Society to submit their entries. On September 30 Carsten Juste, the newspaper’s editor, published 12 drawings, declaring he wanted to challenge the trend for “self-censorship”.

One showed a bearded Muhammad with a bomb fizzing out of his turban. Another depicted him telling dead suicide bombers that he had run out of virgins with which to reward them. In another he is portrayed as a schoolboy with a blackboard.

To many non-Muslims the drawings might seem banal and poorly executed. But in the Islamic world the offence was palpable. Muslims across the globe observe the injunction not to display pictures of animals or humans, notably Allah’s messenger Muhammad, to prevent idolatry.

Except they don’t, of course. Islamic law applies to Muslims — not non-Muslims. Otherwise, why aren’t they suicide bombing Carlsberg breweries? If Muslims did “observe the injunction not to display pictures of animals or humans” what of Sarah Joseph, tehgrauniad conributor and editrix of Emel which is a “lifestyle magazine” and as free of pictures as these things are?

Chris Dillow is also good. I’d go further. We don’t know that an idea is irrational until it has stood up to mockery. Dark matter comes out of the cold. (I still think that ‘Dark Matter’ and ‘Dark Energy’ are absolute toss, but as I may have said before, I know more than anyone should about neutrinos, because I used to think that they were crap too. I was persuaded otherwise.)

While I’m closing windows and tabs: there’s this glorious image (via Mike Power).

Now, how do we convince the Saudis to “rise like lions from the slumber” and strangle their bastard priests?

You, dear reader, may believe that I am wrong to think, like Matthew Parris, that religion is total shit, I mean utter crap, er, complete lies, deception and so forth for the empowerment of a priviledged few, etc. If you do, kindly fuck off.

And what are you doing reading this far down?

Oh, yes. For fans (before this site dies): this is the return of drunk posting. I was led astray by Omar Kayam. Not the combat trousers one. The “Awake! For morning in the bowl of night” one. He liked his wine. Th’ bastard.

These 925 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:57pm GMT Permanent link.

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Friday, 10 February 2006

Perhaps He Should Ask For Political Asylum »

Alex Salmond, in sparkling form, suggesting that Gordon Brown may happen to like living in a country with a leadship cult, a “free market” in the hands of the local mafia, which practices torture, etc etc. The Torygraph has happy news indeed, Stunning Lib Dem victory in Brown’s backyard. It strikes just one odd note.

Mr [Charles] Kennedy will almost certainly claim a part in their victory — having paid a very high-profile visit to the constituency last week.

One visit by the former leader, a man who can properly be described as “beleaguered,” produced a ” swing of 16.24 per cent"? What of, oh surely you remember this story?

In the first vote, 26 Labour backbenchers rebelled and more than 40 others did not vote. At least 15 of these were Scottish MPs believed to have been campaigning for next week’s Dunfermline and Fife West by-election.

And all for nothing, eh? Glorious.

Via Google News, Matahaba News has a splendid (if a little starry-eyed) report. BBC: Lib Dems deliver blow to Labour. tehgrauniad: Lib Dems hail victory in Brown’s backyard. C4 News: Liberal Democrats stun Labour with by-election win.

Following his victory, Mr Rennie said the voters had “sent a powerful message to the Labour government that will rock the foundations of Downing Street”.

“This is truly a historic victory. Thanks to the people of Dunfermline and West Fife - I will not let you down.”

“This by-election will send shockwaves through Westminster. Labour has taken the people up and down the country for granted for far too long. Too much spin and not enough delivery.

“It’s time that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown both got that message. This is a sensational victory.”

Contrast tehgrauniad:

The Labour party today moved to distance Gordon Brown from the shock byelection defeat in Dunfermline, with the Scottish secretary, Alastair Darling, saying he alone took “full responsibility”.

…

He added: “We got a warm response but not enough. We’ve got to learn from that. We’ve got to galvanise your own vote. Some people will have thought ‘it’s in the bag — it’s a safe Labour seat’.”

C4 again:

Defeated Labour candidate Catherine Stihler paid tribute to Rachel Squire as a remarkable woman and a tremendous public servant.

She said: “This is not a result which Rachel would have wanted but I think I know what she would have said.

“We have to listen to the people and we have to learn.”

See, the people really want Labour. And management speak. They were just complacent. We’re not. We didn’t lose, we just did not get “a result which Rachel would have wanted” and achieved a deficiency in votes.

New Labour Dictionary

Listen: shout more loudly, put one’s point across forcefully, get the lazy buggers out to the polling station or I’ll want to know why not.

These 197 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:06am GMT Permanent link.

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Darling, I Think You've Dunfermline »

If I were Nick Cohen, I’d start with “Ever since 11 September 2001, reasonable people in Dunfermline and West Fife have objected to being patronised.” But that’s such a godawful platitude dressed up in a flimsy veil of contemporary relevance that I won’t.

Reuters: Scottish poll rout piles pressure on Blair ("rout” yet!):

The drubbing comes at a very difficult time for Blair who is fighting a rebellion from party members opposed to his planned public sector reforms, especially for schools.

The result was also a blow for Finance Minister Gordon Brown, credited with deft management of the country’s economy since 1997 when Labour took power and widely expected to take over from Blair before the next election, due by 2010. Brown lives in the constituency and fought hard in the campaign.

“It was a very bad result for us, let’s make no bones about it,” cabinet minister Alistair Darling told BBC radio.

“This was a safe seat, we should not have lost it.”

“Drubbing” by god! But, Darling, you sent all those MPs canvassing …

Blair, who has said he will not fight another election, has been weakened by three parliamentary defeats since November.

And it was only one parliamentary defeat before you did. Now, they drub him here, they drub him there, they will they will rout Blair anywhere!

Although Darling tried to blame local issues for the vote, …

An anonymous press briefing suggested that Forth Road Bridge toll rises were due to the unique combination of an Iranian mullah’s sermon and a planned attack on Los Angeles in 2002. Events in Scotland, like events elsewhere in mainland Britain, are beyond the control of Westminster, and Tony Blair is not responsible for gas prices, toll prices, inflation, the crime rate, prisons, education, and so on. He is willing to go on record as saying that he has the greatest respect for the prophet Mohammed, and can’t remember polling badly in Basra.

“You’d think we ran the country the way these so-called voters carry on!” The unnamed source said. “We gave that up in 1997. We moved the whips out of their office and let Alastair Campbell in for a reason. We run the media. Al used to have a picture of some guy in a leather coat on his wall, Gobby-something, said he was his inspiration. We hold the levers of truth, and what we say goes. Controlling the media is easy. Take a hack, any hack. Buy him a quadruple Jack Daniels. One minute he’s telling you that he’s so independent, the next you’re his best friend. Though I always tell them ‘Don’t call me “darling”, please. I had enough of that at school.’ They always laugh at that. Small things for small minds, you could say.”

Activists’ gloom over by-election.

Veteran left-winger Dennis Skinner described the loss of Dunfermline and West Fife to the Liberal Democrats by 1,800 votes — overturning an 11,500 Labour majority — as the biggest by-election upset he had ever witnessed.

The Labour party had simply not seen it coming.

Memo to Blair: Dennis has the best voting record in the House. You want democracy? Talk to Dennis.

In Alan Clark’s Diaries, he mentions an interview with a whip (when they still had a decent office) during which he was asked for his favourite parliamentarian. “Dennis Skinner.” It’s an obvious two-fingers, but since Michael Foot and Enoch Powell, who else has understood House procedures so well? I caught a discussion on Radio 4 earlier of some recently deceased football manager (I missed his name). How he was gentleman, not like the modern generation. How he loved the game and motivated players, rather than blaming the referee. Stuff you could write in your sleep, of course. But not entirely untrue of modern politics in this country.

(With thanks to Blackadder and tehgrauniad’s Michael White.)

These 320 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:17pm GMT Permanent link.

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Irony Of The Day, And Other Matters »

tehgrauniad: Londoners opt for off-road cars.

Even motorists in Scotland, who faced harsher weather and rougher roads than are found in the capital, were less likely to invest in a four-wheel drive vehicle, with only one in 10 planning to buy one.

We, er, they — as I’ve lived down South one way or another for two decades — cannae afford them! Thatcher ignored us, because she thought she couldn’t win our votes (more or less correctly; I’ll write about this in detail eventually — but her heuristic made sense: it saved effort better expended elsewhere) and so does Blair, because he takes us, I mean them, for granted.

“When you consider the volume of traffic in London it is almost counter-intuitive that drivers in the capital opt for large vehicles traditionally associated with rougher terrain, said Lloyd East, general manager of AA Financial Services.

…

“We would urge people to think carefully about their needs before they buy a car.”

Yes, Londoners are arrogant idiots. I’d buy a tank.

I’ve meant to post a link to this Slacktivist post for some time, because this is so good:

That’s right: a movie that respectfully portrays the story of heroic evangelical Christian missionary martyrs and of their families’ astonishingly brave and loving response to their deaths is being boycotted by evangelical Christians.

Why the boycott? Because the actor playing the dual role of missionaries Nate and Steve Saint, is gay. And this matters because … well, despite all their agitating, I’m not really sure why these people think this matters. On the one hand, they seem to claim that the actor, Chad Allen deceived them by not announcing, at the start of his audition, that he was gay (apparently since he was once on Dr. Quinn — which airs in reruns on PAX, they figured he was “safe"). On the other hand, they claim that their problem isn’t simply that he’s gay, but that he’s openly and outspokenly an advocate for “gay causes.” These don’t seem to be two things you can be upset about at the same time.

There’s a poll on The New Statesman site: “Are there reasonable limits to freedom of speech?” My answer:

[No.] Some things are self-evident. Truths. All men being created equal. Those things. Oh the question means saying things against The Party. Of course there are limits. I love Big Brother. I love the Dear Leader. Anyone who does not is an infidel and should be killed. (Local laws apply. Murder may be carried out by agents of foreign powers. Allah be praised.)

“[R]easonable limits to freedom of speech” means “limits to say what one believes to be true”. There are laws against lying, possibly starting with the Ninth Commandment, and certainly enshrined as “perjury” in contemporary law. I don’t wish to suggest that being impolite is a good thing, only to suggest that I can’t choose to do X if I am prohibited from the alternative. Such laws make knaves of us all.

On a similar note, I’m trying to work out how this and this co-exist. (Via everyone who got there before me.)

These 210 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:49pm GMT Permanent link.

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Saturday, 11 February 2006

Embarrassing »

Unity of Talk Politics is intrigued by Brownie of H’sP.

Here’s the thing. The hosts are called “Levonline”. So let’s Google. Levonline is the first result. So let’s go there. There’s a little union jack on the home page, and I don’t read Swedish so let’s click it. Then we go to Web Hosting. On the menu is a link to a PDF of terms and conditions.

10. Termination of Subscription

Levonline shall be entitled to terminate the subscription and the agreement, with immediate effect and without any obligation to repay any fees paid by the customer, if it should become evident that the customer has used the subscription in an inappropriate manner. It shall be considered inappropriate:

• to disseminate information that may be deemed unlawful, to commit unlawful acts and to incite or assist a third party to commit unlawful acts via the Internet or networks linked thereto;
• to disseminate information of a pornographic or otherwise offensive nature via the customer’s web page;
• to market to e-mail addresses (so called SPAM or mail bombing) if the recipient has not given prior consent thereto. This shall also apply to spam/marketing/cross-posting;
• to use server software that has not been approved in advance by Levonline, including but not limited to the customer’s own servers, irc bots, e.g. eggdrop; and,
• to take any other action that causes considerable inconvenience to Levonline, Levonline’s system, other subscribers or to the Internet and networks linked thereto.

Not being a lawyer, my reading of this is limited, but I’d guess that the company used “to incite … a third party to commit unlawful acts via the Internet” and “to disseminate information of [an] … otherwise offensive nature via the customer’s web page…”.

And yes, they can do that. No, it’s not fascist.

Here’s a Chinese news site on the affair.

These 130 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:48pm GMT Permanent link.

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Sunday, 12 February 2006

This Is Getting Old »

“Do as we say, or bad things will happen.”

Labour MPs should vote for the education reforms or risk division, chairman Ian McCartney has warned.

He said the Labour by-election loss last week showed that party disunity would not be tolerated by voters.

I don’t see how. I thought that Bob Marshall-Andrews scraping back in last year showed the reverse.

“Our manifesto can’t be a pick and mix,” he warned, adding that MPs should not “collaborate with the opposition parties’ whips to defeat Labour”.

I don’t see why the manifesto “can’t be a pick and mix” since that’s what I think manisfestoes, er, manifestly are. They’re promises of good things written by amateurs who’ve usually got little or experience in the areas they’re hoping to have control over.

And Mr McCartney doesn’t understand the House, it seems. It’s not a game, and whoever concedes the most goals loses. Parties do not get defeated. Bills or amendments to bills do. The only time Labour can be defeated is in an election. Tony Benn used to say politics was about issues. Ian McCartney seems to think it’s about sides.

These 145 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:55pm GMT Permanent link.

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Monday, 13 February 2006

The Real Face Of New Labour »

Although this is a blog, *only* a blog, in fact, I take a certain, shall-I-say, *amateur* pride in getting facts right. I've therefore decided to alter my post of 16 February 2006.

I dislike doing this. I'd like records to be kept, and kept reliably. It also puts me - and bloggers generally - at a disadvantage to the printed press: assuming at least one library achives every issue of a paper, subsequent corrections and apologies do not destroy the orinigal story, no matter how much of it was invention.

If I delete something on here: that's it. It is gone forever. There may be a copy for a time in the Waybackmachine or Google's cache, but these get revised every so often; so long as there is something on a given page, the latest version of a page will be the one in the store.

However, when I've said something wrong - factually incorrect, it's up to me to put it right. That seems to be the case here. Therefore I've decided to remove the whole post (the link to the Daily Mail site fetches a page with no content).

I also apologise to Phil Dilks for any distress, upset, etc caused by my reprinting the Mail's story (for which he received damages). I acknowledged at the time that the story was both unlikely and defamatory, and I should have been sensible enough therefore, not to reproduce it.

These 176 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:41pm GMT Permanent link.

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I Am Not A Number »

According to tehgrauniad, Blair thinks the argument is already won.

Speaking in South Africa after his delayed return to the UK, Mr Blair told reporters: “I think we’ve won the argument on it [ID cards].

“The whole point is we are going to have to in Britain move to biometric passports in any event, so it’s not really much of an addition to have an identity card which will then help people to access services much more quickly, as well as obviously protect our borders and protect against some of the threats we face.”

Did he always speak like a malfunctioning robot? I like the use of “obviously.” That’s chutzpah, that is.

These 29 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:04pm GMT Permanent link.

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Tuesday, 14 February 2006

Divers Prejudices »

I’m sure I’ve linked to Matthew D’Ancona pieces before. He seems like quite a smart bloke. Now he’s editor of the Spectator. By Christ, this mugshot redolent as it is of the Duke of Wellington and countless other toffs who never dropped an ‘H’ or even acknowledged an ‘R’ — this wall-eyed, cold-blooded son of all that was rotten in Britain the last time we took a king to the gallows frightens me. I dunno about you chaps. I wrote on Aaro Watch about comparisons between George Orwell and Nick Cohen. I meant to note that Nick was never as posh as St George. He never strangled innocent vowels with such malice.

As I’m sure I’ve said before, there’s a bit in Michel Tournier’s The Erl King where there’s some Nazi banquet and some inbred no-chin leaps to his feet with a joke about the near-blind-inbred-etc-etc-king who was out hunting elk. Servants had been told that as His Highness was somewhat slow on the uptake even for a toff to shout “I’m not the elk” in ringing tones, should he approach and raise his gun. His Highness shot one such employee, and as he was carted away on a stretcher, he asked “Why did you shoot me?” The monarch replied, “I’m terribly sorry, my dear chap, I thought you said ‘I am the Elk.’”

Goebbels, who was present in the book, was not amused. Taking the piss of one’s “betters”. Unthinkable! Oh did I mention Goebbels? and someone who didn’t see the funny side?

Oh yeah. Labour Listens: try voting. Will ID cards make us safer?

Donkeys elected by lions, indeed. Clearly no one not entirely self obsessed would put themself for election. But are we this ennervated? It’s time to think about leaving. Or finding those IRA arms caches which Peter Hain insists don’t exist. So he won’t mind if I leave them in his office with a long fuse then?

Update: edited.

These 352 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:31am GMT Permanent link.

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Oh! We Are All Guilty »

As I hope is my practice with these things* after reading this ridiculous crap I’m going to quote only American opinion. Do you find such objectivity on Normblog? Sure he calls people comrade, but he means it. Dear God. It’s like Wodehouse never lived.

Let’s see, Cheney and friends go shooting-for-no-wits as I believe it’s called. Cheney fails to miss another bird murderer. Of course, it’s not his fault. Who told him to look where he was shooting?

*I have no idea if it is, of course. Consistency is the *something bad* of small minds. Small minds in this case including those who can be bothered to find the thesaurus. I can’t.

Update: edited.

These 220 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:32am GMT Permanent link.

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The Good News »

Ain’t it great! Our wise representatives supported ID cards. I love this country! Come hither little Ian McCartney. If you think at all, which seems very unlikely, do you wonder if elected representatives in Germany (you may have heard of it) ever voted to gas people?

Well, little Ian, it seems you’ve repeated history.

Update: edited.

These 248 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:15am GMT Permanent link.

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Wednesday, 15 February 2006

Without Fire »

God, it’s depressing, isn’t it? I agree with Unity that life has a 100% mortality rate and not at all with the Patricia Hewitt:

Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt said the change, expected to take effect in summer 2007, would “save thousands of people’s lives”.

Delays thousands of people’s deaths, perhaps.

Simon Jenkins isn’t pleased — though he thinks local government should decide. And I have some difficult believing in this bit:

I hold John Stuart Mill as sacred in this matter: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”

(or shorter Simon Jenkins and JS Mill, “The Government should keep its nose out") with this bit:

Laws to curb what citizens find merely unpleasant should be exceptional in an otherwise free society. Above all, restraint should be consensual, accountable to those directly affected. The concept of local licensing in Britain arose to permit councils and magistrates to reflect local opinion on how social behaviour should be regulated. Bylaws existed to permit local option in such matters as pub opening, Sunday trading, market regulation and even film censorship. Had local option applied to smoking today, I have no doubt that half of Britain would be smoke-free.

(shorter Simon Jenkins, sans JSM, except sometimes, like).

At least tehgrauniad seems to realise that Working Men’s Clubs will not like this nor will Bingo Halls.

Not only pubs will be affected by the ban. Other licensed premises will have to change — including bingo halls, which have an unusually high concentration of smokers.

A majority of the three million people who regularly play are smokers, says the Bingo Association.

These enthusiasts, mostly women, will have to be persuaded to play without a smoke — and there are fears that a downturn could cause the closures of bingo halls, taking away the chance of a night out for many people.

Neil Harding thinks David Cameron, who opposed the bill is a “Typical Tory!” Neil adds in the comments:

I never thought this would become law. I am actually amazed. This could lose Labour more votes than the Iraq War. It is probably the most important piece of legislation this government has done.

That’s why I can’t bring myself to comment on Neil’s post. Losing votes is, apparently, very clever and principled. It’s probably democratic too.

And that reminds me — who’s going to tell the army? Surely being in Iraq raises more pressing concerns for one’s well-being that a merely statistical chance of (operable) lung-cancer in thirty years or so? I suppose Patricia Hewitt could tell “our boys” that smoking is dangerous.

Well, it is.

Closer to my home, the management of my regular pub The Conway changed over the New Year, and the incomers banned smoking. There’s still a smell in the lounge. Turns out it’s over a broken drain, but no one noticed until the air cleared.

There’s nothing like the smell of effluent passing the sinuses to remind you that you’re still alive.

These 246 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:32pm GMT Permanent link.

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Thursday, 16 February 2006

Home Office Does Not Take Terror Seriously »

The BBC puts it mildly: Row over murdered officer’s award.

As a service to readers, the photo on the right illustrates the Home Office’s idea of “police gallantry.”

Greater Manchester Police had nominated him for the George Cross, the highest civilian award for gallantry.

But the Home Office said standards for awarding the gallantry awards were “extremely high”.

A spokesman said: “All recommendations are considered on their merit on the advice of others.”

The George Cross is the civilian equivalent to the Victoria Cross and has not been awarded to a police officer for 30 years.

It is given for “acts of the greatest heroism or the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger”.

PC Stephen Oake died for his country and his colleagues. That probably wasn’t his intention, and he may not have been thinking of those he saved in that order, but that’s what he did.

In a desperate bid to flee the scene, Bourgass attacked Mr Oake with a kitchen knife, plunging the blade into his chest eight times, piercing his heart and lungs.

Sgt Paul Kelly, chairman of Greater Manchester Police Federation, said: … “Stephen chose to intervene even though he was unarmed and wearing no protective equipment.”

…

Mr Oake’s father, Robin, who is a retired Chief Constable of the Isle of Man Police and previous Assistant Chief Constable in Greater Manchester, told the BBC his son “would not have acted as he did to seek any recognition.”

Well of course he didn’t. That’s what made him a hero.

These 74 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:45pm GMT Permanent link.

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Saturday, 18 February 2006

Rumour Mills »

Hooray for the Italian police and magistrates! Torygraph (the print edition is accompanied by a horrifying still from Night of the Living Dead or some similar movie, and may be disturbing to sensitive readers): British lawyer to Berlusconi faces trial after raid.

Italian magistrates have produced their final evidence in the case against David Mills, the lawyer husband of the culture secretary Tessa Jowell, in which they allege he was paid £400,000 to lie on behalf of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister.

Mr Mills and Mr Berlusconi both now seem certain to face trial — Mr Berlusconi for corruption and Mr Mills for diverting the course of justice.

The British lawyer, who first started working for Mr Berlusconi nearly 20 years ago, faces between three and eight years in prison if he is found guilty.

Investigators claimed to have uncovered a sum of money in an offshore bank account and last Friday British detectives raided Mr Mills’s London offices and the home that he shares with Miss Jowell, seizing computer equipment and files.

This was on page 4! Both The Torygraph and tehgrauniad led with the photo of David Cameron and his third child. (Look, his boys can swim! It’s not news.) Culture Secretary’s home raided by police, er hello?

In 1988 he was also convicted of paying Benito Craxi, a former prime minister, through another of his companies, All Iberian.

In 2001, however, Mr Berlusconi was acquitted in the Fininvest case and cleared in the All Iberian case because the statute of limitations had run out and false bookkeeping was no longer a criminal offence.

Wheedlewheedlewheedle “… the statute of limitations had run out and false bookkeeping was no longer a criminal offence.” Oh really? Now why would that be? Wikipedia entry on Silvio Berlusconi.

On some occasions, which raised a strong upheaval in the Italian political opposition, laws passed by the Berlusconi administration have effectively delayed ongoing trials on him, allowing the statute of limitations to expire, or stopped them entirely. Relevant examples are the law reducing punishment for all cases of false accounting; the new law on international rogatories, which made his Swiss bank records unusable in court against him; the law on legitimate suspicion, which allowed defendants to request their cases to be moved to another court if they believe that the local judges are biased against them; and most importantly the lodo Maccanico law, passed in June 2003, which granted the highest five state officers, including the Prime Minister, immunity from prosecution while in office.

And why is this important? Because everyone seems to think that Tony Blair is redesigning government in an American Presidential model.

Talk Politics has been on really fine form this week, and reprinting this letter to the Times is essential reading. “[S]ix law professors from Cambridge University, three of who are QCs and two knights of the realm” conclude:

It [the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill] would, in short, create a major shift of power within the state, which in other countries would require an amendment to the constitution; and one in which the winner would be the executive, and the loser Parliament.

David Howarth, MP for Cambridge, made this point at the Second Reading of the Bill last week. We hope that other MPs, on all sides of the House, will recognise the dangers of what is being proposed before it is too late.

We know Tony Blair is matey with Slippery Silvio. If he doesn’t want to be accused of following the mafioso’s political example, he could stop meddling with the constitution. Then again, he may yet be remembered like an American President. Phoney Tony, meet Tricky Dicky.

These 213 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:42am GMT Permanent link.

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Sunday, 19 February 2006

Tilting At Mills Again »

God, this is fun. tehobserver: Jowell’s husband in gift row.

An extraordinary letter written by the husband of the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, reveals that he avoided telling the full truth about the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, to keep the media tycoon out of a ‘great deal of trouble’.

Jowell’s husband, David Mills, was a witness in an Italian trial that alleged Berlusconi had paid bribes and made secret political donations. Mills later received a £350,000 ‘gift’ allegedly linked to a senior executive working for Berlusconi’s media organisation.

The letter, obtained by The Observer, was written by Mills on 2 February, 2004, and sent to his London accountant. Mills, who was Berlusconi’s legal adviser, wrote: ‘I kept in close touch with the B [Berlusconi] people… they also knew quite how much the way in which I had been able to give my evidence (I told no lies, but I turned some very tricky corners, to put it mildly) had kept Mr B out of a great deal of trouble I would have landed him in if I had said all I knew.’

He’s a lawyer, of course. Why wasn’t he cross-examined harder?

The letter was uncovered by Italian prosecutors who are set to charge Mills with corruption in connection with the alleged £350,000 payment. They allege the payment to Mills was made by Berlusconi as a bribe to give false evidence at the earlier trials — a claim that both Mills and Berlusconi have always strenuously refuted.

Mills has always denied receiving the money from Berlusconi or anybody connected with the Italian leader, claiming that it came from another client. Yet the letter has been described as the ‘smoking gun’ in Italy because Mills appears to be admitting receiving the money from Berlusconi for his help.

Mills’s letter to his accountant, Bob Drennan at Rawlinson & Hunter, states: ‘At around the end of 1999, I was told I would receive money, which I could treat as a long-term loan or a gift. $600,000 was put in a hedge fund and I was told it would be there if I needed it.

(It was put in the fund because the person connected to the [Berlusconi] organisation was someone I had discussed this fund with on many occasions, and it was a roundabout way of making the money available.)

Now being a lawyer, and therefore guilty of thinking straight (on occasions), I can’t see how this letter squares with Mills’ denial to tehobserver.

He said: ‘My own private papers have been intercepted and grossly and maliciously misinterpreted by people with a motive to do it. I come back to the simple fact: these magistrates are accusing Berlusconi of corrupting me. They have to prove he paid me money and I received it… they know for a certain fact that that money did not come from anyone who had anything to do with Berlusconi.

’I am largely the author of my own misfortune in all of this, in writing the letter… At the end of the day I am innocent of being corrupted.’

I hope he penned the letter in Italy. If false bookkeeping is no longer a crime there, writing letters of fantasy involvement in conspiracies is probably acceptable too. “[A]uthor of my own misfortune” may be an understatement. From now on, I think I’ll refer to him as “Meathook Mills.” I’m sure all B’s associates are honourable (is that the phrase?) men.

Update 10:52. Via Guido, the Sunday Times adds Jowell’s husband ’kept Berlusconi out of trouble’.

When shown the letter by prosecutors in Milan, Mills said re-reading it upset him greatly. According to the transcript of the 10-hour hearing, which began on July 18, 2004, Mills said the letter was “extremely eloquent” and needed little explanation.

Mills told investigators he had written the letter to answer demands from UK tax authorities. He said Carlo Bernasconi, an executive in Berlusconi’s Fininvest media group, told him: “Berlusconi, as a mark of gratitude … had decided to allocate a sum of money to me.”

Mills amended his explanation in a memorandum sent to prosecutors on November 7, 2004. According to the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera yesterday, Mills said he had been asked to look after the sum on behalf of a client, Diego Attanasio.

Defence lawyers in the Milan probe have 20 days to submit new evidence, failing which the prosecution is expected to recommend Berlusconi and Mills go on trial.

This weekend Mills said: “That letter was written to get advice on a tax point. It created an imaginary scenario. I never expected it to fall into the hands of prosecutors. It is embarrassing it has done so but that does not make it factual. I provided to the Italians information which identifies the source of the payment. The allegation of corruption is nonsense.”

One never does expect incriminating evidence to fall into the hands of prosecutors, does one?

These 105 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:10am GMT Permanent link.

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Beware Of Falling Anvils »

Small things for small minds dept. Torygraph: Cartoon violence erupts around the world. Giant ACME catapaults, dynamite, and if you get hit in the face with a frying pan, it turns your face round and flat.

Also: if you walk off a cliff, the moment after you look down you fall for five seconds into a crevasse, your landing marked only by a puff of dust.

These 66 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:17pm GMT Permanent link.

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Home Office Does Not Take Terror Seriously, Part 2 »

I’m still disgusted, as I posted earlier about the denial of a medal to PC Stephen Oake. Apparently dying, which rather leaves you with nothing further to give, didn’t qualify him for the highest civilian award for gallantry. We’re supposed to be at war — according to government propaganda. And here’s someone who actually dies after tackling the enemy, unarmed, and it’s not enough.

I’m sure PC Oake didn’t suspect when he got up that morning that he’d never have to pay a bill again. But that’s what happened. And I’m sure the officers who shot Jean Charles de Menezes didn’t plan to murder anyone. But, again, that’s what happened. And neither get justice. At least there may be Charges for police in Tube shooting.

Police officers are facing criminal charges over allegations that they tampered with evidence after shooting dead an innocent Brazilian at a London Underground station, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

Happily, this goes all the way to the top:

Mr de Menezes’ family has called for a public inquiry into the killing. They have already brought a separate case against Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. They allege that he misled the public over comments he made in the aftermath of the Stockwell shooting.

Now I understand all the “throw away the key” Daily Mail rants. Hanging’s too good for him.

Rachel North at least got an apology from the Palace. Brings a lump even to anti-Monarchist like myself’s throat. She quotes David Leppard of the Times, the only journalist who seems at all keen to keep on at this story.

The Queen failed to send letters of condolence because of bungles by officials working for Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary, whose department has special responsibility for victims of disasters.

In unusually frank language, the palace wrote that it had been told by Jowell’s office that she “took the omission very seriously” and was determined that other tragedies would be “managed better in future”.

To be fair to Ms Jowell, I think she’s got enough problems with Meathook’s health prospects.

Yasmin Waljee, a solicitor at Lovells, who is representing some of the victims of the London and Sharm el-Sheikh bombings, said ministers had been “completely inert” in dealing with their grievances.

She said the Home Office had suggested the families take legal action against the perpetrators of the attacks. “It’s a little crass to suggest the families try to sue Al-Qaeda. Are we supposed to hunt down Osama Bin Laden in his cave in Afghanistan and serve a writ on him?” Rachel North, who was injured in the London bombs, yesterday joined the criticism of the DCMS. “They need to improve victim’s aftercare,” she said.

What Ministers of the Crown being neither ert nor ept? I’m shocked, shocked. There’s a war on terror when they want to scare us. If anyone actually gets hurt, they’re on their own. Mind you after watching Peter Hain’s miserable Question Time performance where you could see razor sharp analysis whizzing between his ears like a glacier creeping toward a moraine, we’d be better off without the whole sorry shower.

The sad thing about John Reid performance on Breakfast with Marr when interviewed by Huw Edwards is that he got away with:

Let me tell you what’s in it Huw, it is saying we ought to recognise the difficult situation our troops now fight in, far more difficult than any time in history, because they face an enemy that is completely unconstrained. The international terrorist is not constrained by legality, by morality, by any conventions, Geneva or otherwise.

Come on Huw, perfect moment to say, “So he’d blend in on Sauchiehall St when the pubs shut then?”

Come to think of it, when were the IRA, the UDA, or whoever we fought in Afghanistan last time round ever constrained by those things? Course, we lost to all of them.

These 350 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:54pm GMT Permanent link.

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Cheney Reaction »

I almost feel sorry for the Tories. In the post Howard era, they’re naturally trying to renew contacts with the White House. If only they’d waited.

Niall Ferguson usually annoys me, but Trigger-happy Dick Cheney is a dangerous man to have on your side shows just how much the smart right-wing have abandoned the Bush regime. And it contains excellent Jon Stewart jokes:

“Thank you, Jesus,” whispered Jon Stewart, host of the hilarious Daily Show. You could see why. When it comes to humour this was less a quail shoot than a turkey shoot. “Dick Cheney Shot a Guy in the Face” is a pretty funny headline in its own right. Cheney’s remarks in the interview he gave to Fox News on Wednesday did the rest (Jon Stewart’s Daily Show interjections follow in brackets).

Cheney: “… It was, I’d have to say, one of the worst days of my life.”

(Stewart: “Yeah, it was like Vietnam… if you’d gone there.")

Cheney: “… Katherine [Armstrong, the ranch proprietor] suggested, and I agreed, that she would go make the announcement [about the accident]. And I thought that made sense […] She was the immediate past head of the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department.”

(Stewart: “So she out-ranked you? That’s how the hierarchy works - President, past head of the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department, Vice-President?")

Cheney: “She wanted to go to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times… And I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knew and understood hunting. … I still think that the accuracy was enormously important.”

(Stewart: “Yeah, accuracy is enormously important. Next time you’ll kill Harry Whittington.")

And one stupidity.

The official line — conveyed in Bob Woodward’s books Bush at War and Plan of Attack — is that Cheney is no more than the President’s self-effacing, loyal and trusty servant. Even in private, he deferentially calls him “Mr President” — as in “Yes, Mr President. No, Mr President”. To third parties, he likes to refer to Bush reverentially as “The Man”. Yet you have to wonder if this is not the Veep’s idea of irony.

Bad mouthing your boss (or any powerful colleague) tends to rebound. Has Professor Ferguson ever seen Yes, Prime Minister? Deference comes in many forms; one of which is leading the idiots on.

It was also Cheney who asserted that there were links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, insisting: “We’ve got to do it because it’s the convergence of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction”. It was Cheney who flew to the Middle East to square the other Arab states on the eve of the war; Cheney who made sure the Saudis were on the inside track; Cheney who invited the Iraqi opposition leaders to the White House.

“Cheney was beyond hell-bent for action against Saddam,” writes Woodward, almost certainly paraphrasing Colin Powell. “It was as if nothing else existed.” If anyone had war “fever” in 2003, according to Powell, it was Cheney.

Yet it was also Cheney who argued that “we need to have a light hand [in Iraq] in the post-war phase”. It was Cheney who reassured Senators: “I think we’ll be greeted as liberators.”

And no prizes for guessing which member of the administration has been most intransigent in the face of Congressional demands that the United States renounce torture as a means of eliciting intelligence.

Burial, not praise.

These 101 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:25pm GMT Permanent link.

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Monday, 20 February 2006

More On Meathook Mills »

Via Tim who takes Meathook’s statement that he was “exhausted and frankly frightened” as a title. If I were Meathook, I’d be frightened too.

Independent: I invented story about Berlusconi bribe, claims Jowell’s husband.

David Mills, the husband of the Secretary of State for Culture, Tessa Jowell, was last night facing a deepening crisis over allegations that he received a bribe from Silvio Berlusconi.

Addressing a rally in Verona, the Italian Prime Minister said: “Someone has taken advantage of my name.” His comments were an apparent reference to a letter from Mr Mills, published on Saturday, in which the British lawyer said he he had received $600,000 (£346,000) from ” the B organisation”, which he was told to treat as a long-term gift or loan in return for giving favourable evidence in a police investigation of Mr Berlusconi.

…

Mr Mills claimed that he wrote the letter when he was working for an Italian client, whom he named yesterday, for the first time, as Diego Attanasio. Mr Mills said he wrote it because he wanted to invest $600,000 for Mr Attanasio without identifying him. He was horrified to learn subsequently that the letter to his accountants was in the hands of the Italian police, who accuse Mr Mills of being paid to give false evidence in court for Mr Berlusconi.

The letter resulted in him undergoing a 10-hour interrogation, at the end of which he signed a confession which he said yesterday was false, insisting that he had signed it when he was “exhausted and frankly frightened”. The signed statement said that he “protected Berlusconi in various trials and investigations”.

And the kicker:

Mr Berlusconi, who faces a looming election, has denied all the accusations levelled at him, claiming they are politically motivated. He went a step further yesterday and denied he had ever met Mr Mills. Without referring directly to the lawyer, he said the claims related to “someone I have not even had the means of meeting”.

Mr Mills said that he spent an hour with Mr Berlusconi and his daughter in 1995.

Let’s not forget that Mr Berlusconi has supplied hospitality to our own dear Mr Blair. I wonder if Blair knows he may be asked for a reciprocal favour? The Prime Minister has his moral code, code of course, but could he be a “man of honour"?

Pictured: Mr Berlusconi, who denies meeting Mr Mills.

These 92 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:40pm GMT Permanent link.

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Gratuitous Linkage »

Harry, he say Mad Ruler Bans More Stuff. Brian Micklethwait of Samizdata thinks Blair has always meant well. Or does he think that? Does he really? He ends:

But feel free to disagree.

While you are still allowed to.

Harry flashes his knowledge of arcane history, recalling “a controversial Austrian politician": Who Was Worse, Blair Or Hitler?

Hitler had his faults, of course, as he himself would be the first to admit. Many of his “Nazi theories” have now been debunked. With the benefit of hindsight his invasion of Russia was ill-conceived, and his scheme to exterminate the “lesser races” has been widely discredited.

Unity of Talk Politics has a splendid idea. Pleasingly Neil Harding calls it (perhaps that should be “laughably calls it” as he’s so fond of the word) A coalition of the mistaken:

Because that is the crux of my criticism, it is only what they ‘think’ are civil liberties that are being eroded, not actual civil liberties.

I’m very keen to defend what I “think” are civil liberties, whether or not Neil Harding agrees with me. While I’m still allowed to, of course.

These 104 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:36pm GMT Permanent link.

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Divided Loyalties »

So I watched some of Scotland’s Great Britain and Northern Ireland’s last game (end? leg? I don’t know the slang) of the Winter Olympics. I was going to post before the match that I’d be, true-to-streotype, booing the USA. And then I saw them. Quoth the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Curling even has its groupies, at least for blond [sic] U.S. sisters Cassie and Jamie Johnson. Two fans held up a sign: “2 Johnson sisters, 2 of us, Coincidence?” Too bad. Jamie is getting married, and Cassie has a boyfriend.

My patriotism always was rather negotiable.

These 54 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:29pm GMT Permanent link.

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Free The Vienna One »

Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can’t possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.

Terry Pratchett, Jingo, p 404

I read the news on Mike Power first: Where is free speech now?

Then on David Duff: You could hear a pin drop! (David, you’ve got a point, but some of us were watching the Olympics.)

Via David D, I find that Oliver Kamm is surprisingly good.

The issue for public policymaking is not that Holocaust denial is offensive (though it certainly is that) but that it is false: malevolently, systematically so.

Indeed. The point of Irving’s writings is not merely to promote one view of events over another, but is also to promote a pretty unpleasant political doctrine.

Even Stephen Pollard gets it right.

It would ill behove anyone who defends the right of the Danish newspapers to publish cartoons mocking Mohammed then to defend the idea of Holocaust denial being a crime. Free speech is not absolute — I cannot call a certain politician a thieving liar, for instance, without the evidence to back up the statement — but it ought to be a guiding principle of our societies.

(It is important to separate out the expression of a view which might be — and, in Irving’s case, is — used by violent thugs to justufy their behaviour, from those times when the expression of the view is itself an incitement to violence or other criminal behaviour. In the former case, allowing such an expression is the concomitant of liberty; in the latter it is properly dealt with through the courts.)

Irving is not a martyr. He is not a prisoner of conscience. His cause is not in any way noble. But he is wrongly imprisoned.

Defending David Irving makes me somewhat less jocose than a hypochondriac in shit. But thank god he was tried in Austria. Via Harry, I’ve learned that they’ve got form with controversial politicians. This Hitler bloke didn’t much like free speech did he?

And they do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Pictured: Sid Vicious. Offensive? Well, my mother thought so at the time.

As I’ve blown a decent post by quoting Pterry above, here’s another from the same book (p278).

’So many ships,’ he said. ‘In such a short time, too. how very well organized. Very well organized. One might almost say … astonishingly well organized. As they say, “If you would seek war, prepare for war”. ’

’I believe, my lord, the saying is “If you would seek peace, prepare for war”. ’ Leonard ventured.

Vetinari put his head on one side and his lips moved as he repeated the phrase to himself. Finally he said, ‘No, no. I just can’t see that one at all.’

Well, this agreeing with Oliver Kamm had to stop somewhere.

These 174 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:32pm GMT Permanent link.

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Tuesday, 21 February 2006

Good For Norm »

11 And the angel of the LORD said unto her, Behold thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ish-ma-el; because the LORD hath heard thy affliction.
12 And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethern.

The Good Book, Genesis, Chapter 16

This can’t have been easy for Professor Geras to type. But it’s things that aren’t easy that show character.

Not that I’ll be wasting any sympathy on him, but for Holocaust denial he should not be going to jail. Poisonous and untrue as it is, Holocaust denial is a form of opinion.

How do we oppose the Nazis? By not being like them.

Sometimes, I’m a smug atheist liberal twat and I think the thing that divides me and my kind from, say, Daily Mail readers is that we can think all that “hanging’s too good” rubbish — and then we think again, and it’s the examined thought, not the first pulse of the hippocampus, which wins. Sometimes I think, “Nah, it’s all even more complex than that.” But mostly I’m the first of those. (I thought I had a really witty end to this paragraph, but when I read it, it was pretty pathetic.)

Just over a week ago, I accused Ian McCartney of thinking politics was “about sides.” One reason I could never be an MP (after the 187 other good reasons) is that I try to find ("work out” may be a little generous) my position, and then calculate who’s on my side. So I’m not at all ashamed to find Stephen Pollard, Oliver Kamm, and Norman Geras on my side. (Or, to be relativist about it, find myself on theirs. Though that is self-evidently wrong.) There have been MPs who thought like this. There was one instance, at least, of Enoch Powell and Michael Foot conspiring together. But that’s my problem. Who in their respective parties admires either parliamentarian?

There are lots of people who think it’s all about sides. Dear Neil Harding revolves like an ancient woman gathering fuel in vacant lots as he defends New Labour’s latest edict. How he hails TINA! ("There Is No Alternative” — one of Mrs Thatch’s coinages; and one New Lab sticks to like superglue.)

I defended Kingsley Amis’ move to the right in a comments thread over at Aaro Watch. As far as I’m concerned, when he was poor, he supported Labour. When he wasn’t, he supported the Tories. In short, he always voted with economic self-interest in mind, sans thin-blooded do-gooding. Paul Johnson, by contrast, was a bombastic shit whatever side he was on. The English language is remarkably flexible. It has a word for those who think they know what’s best for people they’ve never met, how they should answer for their crimes, though whose history they know nothing, zip, zilch, etc about. It has a word for those who want to improve the diets of skeletal Africans. It has a word for those who think there are immiscible classes with some common interest diffused among them like a paint pot upturned in the Pacific. Happily this word is “Idiot”.

These 441 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:15am GMT Permanent link.

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Send Them To Gitmo! (Only Kidding!) »

Torygraph: Enron three lose extradition battle.

Three British bankers are to be extradited to the United States over charges related to the Enron scandal, following a High Court decision which could have far-reaching consequences for UK extradition law.

…

Lawyers for the three men tried to block the request by arguing that the Serious Fraud Office should investigate the case.

They also insisted that the alleged crimes were not extradition offences and that forcing the bankers to stand trial in the US would be incompatible with European and UK human rights law.

But Lord Justice Laws ruled the case “has very substantial connections with the United States and is perfectly properly triable there”, saying it would be “unduly simplistic to treat the case as a domestic English affair”.

I don’t know anything at all about finance law. And I’m probably more fond on David Irving than I am of your average bean-counter. But my very very limited opinion is: I don’t like this at all.

These 43 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:38pm GMT Permanent link.

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A Load Of Pretentious Bollocks »

Or, Hey I thought that too! tehgrauniad: Sir Ben to you: knight stirs film realm.

Veteran film producer Lord Puttnam has labelled Ben Kingsley “barmy” for insisting on being billed as “Sir Ben Kingsley” on the poster of his new film.

For the first time in his career, the Oscar-winning actor is to be billed as “Sir Ben Kingsley” for the thriller Lucky Number Slevin, which is released in the UK this week. In the film, Sir Ben plays a New York crime boss opposite Josh Hartnett and Morgan Freeman.

I saw the poster yesterday, and apart from muttering “Oh God” after seeing Bruce Willis (who was very good in The Sixth Sense) doing yet another hackneyed macho role, thought, “Jeepers, what’s with the ‘Sir’ thing?”

Knighted actors such as Anthony Hopkins, Sean Connery or Michael Caine are never billed with their titles. Michael Gambon reportedly threatened to hit anyone who called him “Sir Michael” during the filming of the US TV series Angels in America.

But Sir Ben is known for being touchy about his honorific. At a 2003 press conference, the Oliver Twist actor criticised a German reporter who called him Mr Kingsley, saying: “It’s Sir Ben. I’ve not been a Mr for two years.”

After he became a knight in 2001, the Gandhi actor said, “There is no Mr Ben Kingsley any more. Being a Sir brings with it responsibility”.

Puttnam was not the only one annoyed by Sir Ben. Another knight of the realm, Roger Moore, said: “It’s a load of pretentious bollocks.”

I’ll raise one eyebrow to that.

These 57 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:05pm GMT Permanent link.

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Darfur »

It’s only genocide. Gary Farber has lots to say about Darfur.

Bloggers aren’t the least bit better than the dread “MSM” in their pack-journalism. If anything they’re worse, save that there are more bloggers and thus more outliers. But if the leading blogs of Your Side aren’t saying “this is important, here’s the news, here’s the outrage,” few bloggers notice.

It’s only genoicide.

So, in my despair, I offer this.

Pro-Bush bloggers: your President just called for doing something to fight a genocide. Support him. Encourage him. Tell your readers to do the same. Mobilize outrage in support of defeating genocide, and expressing the values of the American people. And if you want to take a slap at those nasty, wimpy, do-nothing Europeans, here’s a free shot.

Anti-Bush bloggers: Bush has fallen down and done little but talk on a genocide. Speak up for your liberal values. Talk about the racism involved in ignoring yet another genocide against dark-skinned people. Speak bitterly of John Bolton’s obstructionist tactics. Say that the UN needs to be supported by America in saving lives and fighting genocide. Spread the outrage at how little is being done.

Libertarians: well, you can at least donate money to charity, and that’s good, although how that would be sufficient to help the people of Darfur, I don’t know.

Everyone else: at least spread the word. Pay attention. Don’t look away. Whatever you can do, it’s better than nothing.

People are dying. Every day.

He also quotes the ‘dread “MSM"’ at length. (If there were not a “Mainstream Media” how would we know this?)

I’ve yet to see any UK reaction to this. I suppose that if the Americans volunteer NATO, that means us, of course. John Reid seems to have come over all media shy.

I agree with Gary that what’s going on is terrible. And I agree, reluctantly, that “something must be done.” I have to say though that any success will be actuarial — that is, we can tot up the number who might have died had we not intervened and subtract from that the number who actually do die and count the difference as “lives saved.” This is war though, and we should expect cock-ups, retaliations, and wanton destruction. And even though we know that something will go horribly wrong, we shouldn’t take that as an excuse not to investigate it; and we should hold criminal trials if appropriate.

These 170 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:22pm GMT Permanent link.

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Now It's A Row »

tehgrauniad: Government ‘currying favour’ with US in extradition row.

An extradition case over three British bankers in connection with the Enron scandal in the US today erupted into a full-scale political row.

I’m not sure that this adds anything of substance to the Torygraph article which I quoted earlier. Still there is:

Referring to Mr Bermingham, he [Boris Johnson] said: “Insofar as he has done anything, he did it in Britain against British interests — against the NatWest bank — and he is a UK citizen, so why are sending him over to America?”

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said the decision was “nothing short of a disgrace” and the trio were being traded like “sacks of parrots”.

…

Their case is being seen as the first major test on whether those accused of white collar crime in the UK can lawfully be extradited to the US to face trial under new provisions of the Act, which the government largely justified on grounds of anti-terrorism. Several other high-profile cases are awaiting the outcome. The government denied there was a “serious imbalance” in its extradition arrangements with the US.

Denied it how?

Home Office minister Andy Burnham … said the 2003 act brought the relationship with the US into line with existing agreements with European countries.

“The relationship we have now with the United States is now far more balanced. Before it took much longer for us to extradite to the US than the other way,” he told the BBC.

Note the careful use of facts. “Before it took much longer …” and now it doesn’t take much longer to extradite to the US. This could of course mean that there is an imbalance where it takes much longer to extradite from the US, and Mr Burnham would not have lied. Not as a politician understands the word.

Under the 2003 law, the US does not need to put a prima facie case before a judge in a British court, and is instead able to extradite suspects to America and keep them on remand while marshalling a case. By contrast, US citizens cannot yet be extradited to Britain in a similar way.

The Home Office, however, pointed out that noone could be extradited unless sufficient information to justify arrest pending extradition was presented to a judge.

The US government argued that, even though a company incorporated in the UK was the target of the alleged illegal conduct, part of the fraud occurred in the US.

As Boris Johnson has pointed out, part of the (alleged) fraud took place here. We’re holding British citizens having charged them with a crime on British soil. That “part of the fraud occurred in the US” seems bafflingly weak to me.

These 131 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:01pm GMT Permanent link.

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New Blogs »

Via Nosemonkey, Notes from a Small Bedroom. Good stuff 1: Missing the point (again):

Neil Harding, I’m afraid, is almost the blogosphere’s very definition of cluelessness (as in ‘could not get a clue if he smeared himself in clue pheromones and stood in a middle of a field of horny clues in the clue mating season’).

Good stuff 2:

Well I do remember, and I am over forty, and if anyone wants to talk about history — the assault on our freedom by this Labour Government are unprecedented in the last 350 years (I am not however 350 years old…). You may have disapproved of Thatcher’s economic policies — I did myself; you may have disapproved of the hectoring moral tone — I did too; but for all her personal and political faults neither her government nor John Major’s contrived to undermine the basis of our entire legal system or to tear up the fabric of our constitution, and all in the name of a narrow, short-term, media-driven political advantage.

That in the end is what is most despicable about this Labour government — that it does these things, not out of a sense of ideology or moral purpose, but for the sake a few good headlines and to outflank their party political opponents. That it should do such damage to our democracy so casually and so thoughtlessly, with such patent lack of understanding is what both astonishes and appals.

Old Peculier, near-ubiqitous commenter on too many British blogs to mention, turns out to have her own blog. Abrasive stuff, and very little I agree with, but better written than almost all of the competition.

These 52 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:47pm GMT Permanent link.

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Wednesday, 22 February 2006

Final Frontier »

BBC: Top stars picked in alien search. One of the advantages of teh interwebs is that you don’t have to take stories which interest you from only one source.

Margaret Turnbull at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC looked at criteria such as the star’s age and the amount of iron in its atmosphere.

Her top candidate was beta CVn, a Sun-like star 26 light-years away.

Dr Turnbull had previously identified about 17,000 stellar systems that she thought could be inhabited.

From these, she has selected five stars that look most likely to support intelligent extraterrestrial life forms — if they exist.

“I’ve chosen five to advertise the very best places to move to if we had to, or to point the telescope at,” she told the BBC.

Reuters Astronomers get shortlist of possible ET addresses however says:

Turnbull’s top 10 list includes 51 Pegasus, where in 1995 Swiss astronomers spotted the first planet outside our solar system, a Jupiter-like giant.

Others include 18 Sco in the Scorpio constellation, which is very similar to our own sun; epsilon Indi A, a star one-tenth as bright as the sun; and alpha Centauri B, part of the closest solar system to our own.

But, but the Beeb said “five”.

SPACE.com — Top 10 List of Habitable Stars to Guide Search lists all ten, and explains that five have suns which could have a planetary system with the right elements and five more which may have earth-like planets.

Of course, NASA may suffer further cuts. (Bush sometimes does seem to understand that you can’t cut taxes and carry on spending.)

What NASA won’t do, other countries will. BBC: Japan launches space telescope.

Glenn White, professor of astronomy at the Open University and the CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, said the mission would provide a powerful new tool to learn about the birth and formation of stars and planets.

“It is going to completely revolutionise the study of galaxies in the process of formation at the edge of the Universe,” he told the BBC News website.

Astro-F was the third Japanese launch this year, as the nation’s space programme races to catch up with its regional rival China.

How long before India lauches a Terrestrial Planet Finder of its own as the US slips back into the Dark Ages?

Finally, via Gary Farber, MIT Researchers Take Space Suit to Next Level, so all in not yet lost for the West. Except we won’t have a space programme the way things are going.

These 171 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:14am GMT Permanent link.

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My Life So Far »

Superb.

This word was hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:33am GMT Permanent link.

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Another Boring Free Speech Post »

I disagree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it.

Somebody who wasn't Voltaire

What is so difficult to understand about free speech? It’s not always easy to distinguish what is opinion and what is a threat. Sometimes it depends on context. Think of a statement like “It would be dreadful if you were to fall under a bus.” Threat? Expression of concern? Depends a lot on context, and tone, and other subtleties.

Derek Bentley was “hanged on 28 January 1953 for a murder he did not commit.”

Bentley, completely unarmed and while being held by a policeman after an abortive break-in, is alleged to have called out to his accomplice “Let him have it, Chris”. After a while, Chris Craig shot and killed a policeman. 16-year-old Craig was jailed - 19-year-old Bentley was hanged. The story has generated several books, a film and even some songs. It took 16619 days from Derek’s death, but he has, at long last, been pardoned … .

As Elvis Costello sang, Bentley said to Craig “Let him have it Chris"/They still don’t know today just what he meant by this.

So, OK, some things you may say may be judged as criminal, even in a relatively free society.

I found in my referer files a link from In Defense of Ann Coulter? (If nothing else, it’s worth following the link just to imagine what Christopher Hitchens would make of the images below the title.) I’m cited in this comment. You can probably divine the subject of the post from the title (though I think the question mark is gratuitous).

I thought Ann Coulter was also speaking about “radical Islamists” who are “evildoers”, “bloody murderers” and “bastards” as well. And what about beloved free speech? Supporting Denmark’s free speech to criticize Mohammad and Islam, but not Ann Coulter’s to criticize, using sarcasm, radical Islam?

There are several mistakes in these two fairly simple sentences. Ms Coulter’s critics aren’t denying her free speech. Governments can deny free speech. Free speech can be curtailed by violence (eg lobbing a brick at a speaker you don’t like). But “censure” and “censor” are quite different. And who is accused of not supporting Ann Coulter’s speech? Er, Michelle Malkin:

Ann used the term “raghead” when describing what our homeland security policies should be: “I think our motto should be post-9-11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.’”

Ann says many deliberately provocative things. This one was spectacularly ill-chosen and ill-timed. I want the young conservatives who attended CPAC—particularly young conservative Muslims—to know that not everyone uses that kind of epithet.

Free speech stopped? I can’t see it myself.

Were I a newspaper editor I wouldn’t publish an article with that kind of language, used in that way. I can’t see many papers publishing historical essays by David Irving, and not because they either “suppress free speech” or because they’re “frightened of retaliation by Jews” — but because some things are just too intellectually feeble to bother with.

This isn’t a better defence:

Nevertheless, only the most abstruse*, self-righteous person (which includes the two young men who challenged Ms. Coulter during the question and answer period) would believe that Ms. Coulter was referring to “all” Muslims in her remarks. She quite clearly was addressing the radical Islamists who have declared war on the United States and its allies — and who are aggressively fighting that war, while we in the west debate the finer points of free speech.

*I’ve no idea what “abstruse” means here: it’s an adjective I’ve only ever seen applied to concepts. It seems to me that if you choose as an insult the mode of dress of several nations, you’re not talking about a small subsection thereof.

At the risk of being labeled a “racist” myself, I confess I find it very troubling that conservative commentators like Mr. Hogberg are so offended by a few harsh words for our sworn enemies. Let us not forget that these enemies, who are committed to a way of life that is antithetical to our own, have killed thousands of our fellow citizens and would gladly kill millions more.

(Emphasis from Amy Proctor; not in original.) But not all Muslims are committed to yada yada yada. That’s why it’s offensive. If the term “Islamofacism” (© C Hitchens) had any merit, it was an attempt to find a collective noun for the ideology behind what we otherwise clumsily call “Muslim extremism.” But looking at every comments thread the word appears on, one man’s “Islamofascist” is another’s “Islamist” (silly term, because it already existed, and means “a scholar of Islam”, or a “Muslim") and is another’s “Muslim.” At which point we’re in straightforward race hate, and meaningful discussion has stopped.

(There’s one thing I find grossly offensive on Ms Proctor’s site. Some way down the page in the navigation bar is an image of Pope John Paul II with the text “In Loving Memory Pope John Paul II 1920-2005”. I think it’s a somewhat bizarre image, but what do I know? I’m not only an atheist, I’m a protestant atheist. My gripe is with the one below, which has “In Loving Memory of Terri Schiavo” in a font presumably intended to suggest either a very small child or someone with some sort of palsy. Think what you like about the ethics of the Terri Schiavo, but having had her initial cardiac arrest, she was never fit enough to hold a pen. See Terri Schiavo medical background:

On the morning of February 25, 1990, at approximately 5:30 a.m. EST, Terri Schiavo experienced cardiac arrest and collapsed at her home. Firefighters and paramedics arriving in response to Michael, her husband’s 9-1-1 call found her face-down and unconscious in the hallway outside her bathroom. She was not breathing and had no pulse. Attempts were made to resuscitate Schiavo, and she was defibrillated several times while she was transported to the Humana Northside Hospital. There, in order to keep her alive, she was intubated, ventilated, and eventually given a tracheotomy. She remained comatose for two and a half months. When she emerged from the coma, she never exhibited any evidence of higher cortical function. The long period of anoxia she sustained had led to profound brain injury (termed “anoxic-ischemic encephalopathy"), severely damaging those parts of the brain concerned with cognition, perception, and awareness. While initially fed by means of a nasogastric feeding tube, she eventually received a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) feeding tube—inserted through the abdominal wall.

This is just blatant sentimentalism. And using someone who can’t answer back as a support for one’s views is disgusting.)

But back to free speech. There’s a good piece in the Torygraph on David Irving by Michael Burleigh.

Irving is not without responsibility for his own fate, however much his website claims that conspiratorial “enemies of free speech” (most of them Jews) have done for him. He brought the 2000 libel action against Penguin that resulted in his financial ruin, and he decided to speak in Austria despite an outstanding arrest warrant, over-confident that Austria’s leisurely way with prosecuting Nazi war criminals would somehow exonerate him.

(I don’t think Mr Burleigh means “exonerate"; not being arrested is different from being acquitted or absolved.) So he was an arrogant fool. Still not a reason to lock him up.

And a couple I can’t be bothered commenting on.

Red State, Meet Police State.

Guantanamo actors held at airport.

These 664 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:22pm GMT Permanent link.

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Thursday, 23 February 2006

Hooray! The Apprentice Is Back »

Here’s the Apprentice website (with Episode 1 available for download, so I’ll keep spoilers to the end of this post and mark them).

I love the Apprentice. It took me a while to convert last year, but it really has everything. First, it’s reality TV, and the people on it should know better. They’re not showbiz washups out of rehab or attention junkies: they’re people with jobs and supposedly lives. Laughing at people like Big Brother’s Jade is a bit nasty and a bit naff. Like politicians, these people are bastards who’d bite you if don’t bite first. And there’s always the comfort blanket that you don’t have to work with them.

Why are so many of the men of … foreign extraction? (Samuel is a lot darker on TV that his mugshot appears; but I think he’s Jewish: whether that counts as “white” or “of colour” is your call. Four: Ansell, Mani, Syed, and Tuan are all differently tannined or whatever we say these days.) Does this mean something? Is it overdrive in the PC engines of the Beeb? Only one woman (Nargis) is non-white. Does this say something about sexism? NB: I’m all for colour-blindness in job-filling. But surely this is a very unlikely mix statistically (especially with the bias toward white females) of people currently in white collar jobs in the private sector. That deserves to be examined, not ignored. Have the males’ white contemporaries all done so well that they don’t need to go on tv for “mere” six-figure salaries? I doubt this, but I’d like to discount it.

The men also seem big. I haven’t checked their ages yet, but assuming they’re between 24 and 35, I think only Tuan may weigh less than the average man in that cohort. And exactly the opposite applies to the women: only Ruth may be larger than average. These people believe they are successful (it can be a humiliating show). I don’t think these facts are accidents.

So … seven pricks and … seven female pricks. They’re not an easy shower to like. I think Ansell looks a complete cock in his serious glasses and a lot more human in ‘street’ clothes and a baseball cap. Mani also looks better out of a suit.

Now, who’s watched before? OK *** Spoilers follow ***

Task 0.1: choose a name. God, the boys flunked this. Only Ben seemed to realise that being a team leader was a poisoned chalice (as the cliche has it; and as everyone talks like that, so will I), so he (in a very bad move, IMO) insisted on lots — and lost. Ha Ha. Syed is mentally a lost cause. What’s wrong with “The A-Team” as a name? Just about everything. I think he’ll do well. Coming to Sir Alan’s attention isn’t actually a bad thing. Being overlooked is worse. I think he’ll lose Samuel, even though I like him (Sam), because he moves into the background. Samuel’s not unemployable; he’s just not worth 100K+. (This may be a very good quality of course; look at the people who are: Peter Stringfellow, for example.)

I prefer the girls, except, now I think about them, I can’t remember so much. (It’s a well-edited show: by that I mean tightly edited; a lot is left out.) I’m glad that (***Another spoiler; if you haven’t watched, and are thinking about it, please stop here) the girls won the first task; it was pure butchery in the first season. On the other hand, the more I saw, the less I liked. The flirtatiousness was fun, but it wasn’t business. Sir Alan is looking for someone to earn 100K — and that means generate a lot more. There are lots of women flashing their bits with no overheads in Kings Cross who don’t earn that*. There’s a ceiling somewhere, and I wouldn’t blame it on sexism.

So, Dave, who’s going to win? Karen is smart, but she’s been a lawyer for 12 years, and should have stayed as one. Nice, middle class girl, not a crook (like some), but not going to, as they say, set the world on fire by the power of her mind alone. Maybe she’s not been in quite the job to realise all her potential, but who is?

I’ve taken a firm dislike to Jo (who I thought of as the “Sort-of-Anita-Roddick-lookalike-except-blonder"). Partly, it’s that bloody “I’m from Yorkshire so I speak plain” bullshit. Mostly, it’s because she’s a bossy, teflon-skinned cow.

Tuan is smart. I say after his one contribution of the group name — “Invicta”.

Mani is sound: he’ll make the last five. He won’t drop a ball.

I think Sir Alan will like Paul. He had a very good report to start, and that counts for a lot. Good manner is important. Not so numerate though, which matters to Alan Sugar.

Then there’s Syed. Prejudice, Dave, prejudice. His page says:

Syed Ahmed was born in Bangladesh and lives in London. He has spent the last two years working as a director of his own IT recruitment company with a turnover of £1.6m.

He says: “I’m street-wise, I’ve been a sort of hell-raiser over the past 10 years and I think all that combined together has made me a business bad boy.”

He cites an ability to think on his feet and strong powers of persuasion as two of his primary assets. Syed is an uncompromising character and is convinced he will be one of the highlights of the series: “Without doubt I think I will be the focal part of the show because I am passionate.”

I’m sure he said that he had been a “hell-raiser over the past 10 years” (no “sort of") in the video introduction. I think he would be a focal point as well — if this were TV scripted by the producers. But it’s not; it’s Alan Michael Sugar looking for someone he can use and train and make money from. And I think he thinks that Syed is full of bull. “Uncompromising character” == “egotistical bully” I suspect.

I do think that “Ruth Badger” and “Paul Tulip” are names I’d never have dared to invent.

So the winner? Thinking again, I have to go for Mani.

*I’m assuming this. I don’t actually know from any experience.

Update. I realised just after posting that my choice was also the tallest of the men. So he’s about my height then. Just to declare another prejudice. I see also that Ben (who got fired; you didn’t listen did you?) thinks he “doesn’t suffer fools gladly.” They say that about me too, but at least I know that in my case it means “rude.”

These 934 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:39am GMT Permanent link.

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The Sceptical Terrorist »

Fafnir goodness:

Q. There are more terrorists now than before the war. Is the occupation causing more terror?

A. Well, nobody can say for sure if that’s a man-made terror increase. It may just be a periodic shift in the natural terror cycle.

Q. Tell me more about this “not our fault” theory — I find it oddly compelling.

A. Like weather, terror is affected by seasonal fluctuations. The jet stream carries hijackers from continent to continent; El Niño causes suicide bombers to condense in the upper atmosphere. Is this affected by human activity or just part of a natural warming trend for terror? We just don’t know!

Q. Your ideas are boldly nonconformist, yet conveniently reaffirm my desire to do nothing. I like it!

Alex is seeing fake policemen everywhere:

Fake policemen are something like the symbol of the Iraq war. When the Americans went back into Ramadi the first time in 2004, they ordered the remaining real police to stay off the streets so the only people in police uniform would be the insurgents posing as police. Pretty much every report of sectarian brutality involves either policemen or people pretending to be policemen, or conceivably policemen pretending to be people pretending to be policemen.

Via Gary Farber, Struggling for recruits, Army relaxes its rules. In Napoleon’s day, an army marched on its stomach. Fortunately for the US, the marching part is now optional. Heh, I’ve got an image of the infantry going into battle in golf carts.

These 50 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:21pm GMT Permanent link.

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DEFLAMORTY »

Via Bobbie Johnson, a new word swims into our ken:

As Queens Council in Canada I would be more that willing to represent anyone in Canada who is named on your site in a deflamorty way. please respond with any further enquiries to dondeveny@gmail.com please keep in mind that any further responses will be archived for future litigation.

And there’s more illiterate goodness from “lawer” Don Deveny Queens council.

And yes the word for this is “theft".

“Well,” she said, “we have a bit of a situation. You see, my nine year old son found your camera, and we wanted to show him to do the right thing, so we called, but now he’s been using it for a week and he really loves it and we can’t bear to take it from him.”

I listened, not sure where she was going with this.

“And he was recently diagnosed with diabetes, and he’s now convinced he has bad luck, and finding the camera was good luck, and so we can’t tell him that he has to give it up. Also we had to spend a lot of money to get a charger and a memory card.”

Read the comments. No, on second thoughts, don’t.

Very, very tenuously related (by involving both photographs and the differently grammatical): this page.

For an individual photograph mounted and lamented. Just send us a cheque for $13.00 to … We will give you a full refund if you’re not happy with your photo.

Actually, they got “you’re” and “your” right, and most people don’t.

These 62 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:56pm GMT Permanent link.

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We Didn't 'ave These Bleeding Litres When I Was A Young Man »

From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee — real coffee, not Victory Coffee — came floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.
He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing. … There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. …

’I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?’ said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. ‘You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug in the ‘ole bleeding boozer?’
’And what in hell’s name is a pint?’ said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.
’Ark at ‘im! Calls ‘isself a barman and don’t know what a pint is! Why, a pint’s the ‘alf of a quart, and there’s four quarts to the gallon. ‘Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.’
’Never heard of ‘em,’ said the barman shortly. ‘Litre and half litre — that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf in front of you.
’I likes a pint,’ persisted the old man. ‘You could ‘a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn’t ‘ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.’
’When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,’ said the barman, with a glance at the other customers.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, Chapter 8

Via Mark Holland, Neil Kinnock making a ridiculous ass of himself (yet agane).

Lord Kinnock says: “Our imperial road signs are perhaps the most obvious example of the muddle of measurement units in the United Kingdom.

“They contradict the image — and the reality — of our country as a modern, multicultural, dynamic place where the past is valued and respected and the future is approached with creativity and confidence.”

The BBC piece links to the UK metric association (who are so metric, they don’t use capital letters! v v modren).

In the mid-20th century, British industry recognised that there were substantial benefits to industry, trade and education by implementing the metric system. In response, in 1965, the Government announced plans to adopt the metric system in Britain within 10 years and led the entire Commonwealth to do the same. More than 40 years later we are the only Commonwealth country that has not completed the transition, and British people now have to cope with two incompatible systems without adequate help or support. As a result, the British public is poorly informed and has an insecure grasp of measurement units. A Department of Education study in 2002 showed that one in three adults could not calculate the floor area of a room in either metric or imperial!

I checked that link. As expected, it does indeed claim that one in three adults can’t multiply two numbers. This has nothing to do with units.

We must have been taught imperial measures at primary school, as I’m convinced that I first heard the word “kilometre” on Doctor Who, when the program briefly went metric and aliens, in a respite from invading the London Underground, invaded a quarry.

If I’m hostile to SI units (outside their proper place, which is science), I blame Orwell.

These 118 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:43pm GMT Permanent link.

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Bloody Stupid Johnson »

Via Chris Dillow, yet more proof that there really are no limits to the imbecility of New Labour.

In a Mansion House speech tonight, trade and industry secretary Alan Johnson will seek to recast his department as a champion of science, technology and productivity.

He will urge British business and universities to think more creatively about globalisation, and encourage what he calls “Sgt Pepper economics”.

“If the Beatles had carried on producing albums like Please Please Me, they’d have ended up with a dwindling catalogue, dwindling sales and a dwindling audience,” he will say.

Not the least of my objections is that if the Beatles had “carried on producing albums” of any sort, their catalogue would have grown. From now on, “Sgt Pepper economics” is my new buzzword for “clueless.”

For reasons I don’t understand, Chris believes that Ruth Kelly [is smarter than] than John Prescott. I can’t see it myself. Ruth Kelly had the benefit of an expensive school; Prescott dragged himself up.

Here’s Ruth Kelly being bloody stupid:

Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, said that the best faith schools promoted inclusion and appreciation of other faiths. She said: “This is part of the vital role that faith schools have played in education. By promoting core values, they have also strengthened communities and our society.”

Oh, to be in Northern Ireland, that haven of religious tolerance, etc.

ID scheme to bolster child safety is more weird than stupid.

Every pupil at a Scottish state school is to be given an identity number as part of a child protection drive.

The Scottish Candidate Number (SCN) system will be shared between schools and councils and help bolster a child-tracking system.

Child protection is good, but there’s a perfectly fine child identification system. They’ve got names, you know. Note: this is limited to Scotland. And it was introduced because:

The killing of five-year-old Danielle Reid in Inverness in 2003 highlighted the risk of public services losing track of vulnerable young children when families move around the country.

No-one realised Danielle was missing for two months because her mother Tracy told Crown Primary School, which Danielle attended, that the five-year-old had been taken to live in Manchester.

Would this ID system have saved her? Not that I can see.

Finally, via Mike Power, Brendan O’Neil in The Spectator:

Under the Blair terror, you can’t even take a piss in peace. The other day, standing at a urinal in a plush cinema in north London, I found myself staring at a notice on the wall in front of me. ‘Relax, go ahead and read’, it said. ‘No one knows you’re a wife-beater. You don’t look like someone who would hit a woman.’ The ad further advised that I should not flee the setting in which I had apparently been battering my partner, because ‘we will track you down’ and ‘punish you’. I was so angry I almost spilled. The old geezer standing next to me was reading the same threatening words above his urinal: he was 80 if he was a day and, bless him, was wearing a suit and tie (and probably a pocket watch) to the flicks. Why were we both being accused, in a public loo of all places, of being fist-swinging misogynists?

If I were a wife-beater (I’m not, BTW), I think I’d be reassured by this. I could take a piss, knowing that wife-beating was so common that everyone else relieving themselves beside me did it too.

These 202 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:52pm GMT Permanent link.

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Friday, 24 February 2006

Bloggers Can Make A Difference »

Vote Bérubé! Via Brad Delong. Michael Bérubé seems to be above all this.

These 13 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:37am GMT Permanent link.

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Shameless Plagiarism »

Yep, that’s me. Peter Black (the Welsh Liberal Democrats Assembly Member for South Wales West) three most recent posts are excellent.

Party without a name: Plaid Cymru ("Vote Wales") are to relaunch themselves as “Plaid” (c’mon, you knew “Cymru” means “Wales” didn’t you? Now try to pronounce it correctly) — or “Vote”. Loses something in translation, doesn’t it? Peter asks if this is the first time a nationalist party has dropped the name of the nation.

Deadlines. Good news: well not good exactly. Comical certainly. BBC: Clarke set to force police merger.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke looks set to drive through a merger of the police forces in Wales.

Mr Clarke had given the four Welsh police authorities until Friday to agree to a voluntary merger — but all of them have now rejected the plans.

That’s a great use of “voluntary” isn’t it? Everything I read about Charles Clarke just makes me hate him more.

But Malcolm King, a member and former chairman of North Wales Police Authority, said his authority’s concerns were more than just financial ones.

He said the HMIC report which recommended the merger had been “very heavily criticised”.

Mr King added: “I think most people think it’s a pretty half-baked report that has been sold to the home secretary and he’s rushed in and reached much too early conclusions from it and now he’s stuck with it”.

Mr Clarke has said that a single force was the only way to police Wales adequately, by creating a force that would be large enough to best deal with the threats such as terrorism, drugs and organised crime.

Charles Clarke — half-baked? Of course, we all remember that [Peter] Hain optimistic [was] on police merger.

The Welsh Secretary Peter Hain has said he still hopes that Wales’ four police authorities will agree to voluntarily form one Welsh force this week.

Might as well just call the idea a “disaster” and be done with it. Peter Hain — tough on terrorism, except those terrorists he likes. (I believe the term is “freedom fighters.")

Speaking of half-baked: Betting on failure.

When it was announced on the radio this morning that builders working on Wembley Stadium are thought to have won thousands of pounds by betting against the venue being ready in time for the FA Cup I thought I had misheard. However, apparently it is true.

Peter thinks it was unethical of the builders to bet. I think that builders know a half-cocked government plan and an unrealistic deadline when they see one.

These 195 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:22pm GMT Permanent link.

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Saturday, 25 February 2006

Take Me To The South Park Embassy »

Splendid, splendid, splendid: Boycott backfires: South Park gets record audience. (Via Mike Power.)

An appeal from the Catholic Church for New Zealanders to boycott an episode of South Park has resulted in a record audience there for the controversial cartoon.

Wikipedia entry for Matt Stone:

Stone was born in Houston, Texas to Gerald Whitney Stone (of Irish Catholic descent) and Sheila Lois Belasco (who was Jewish).

That’s like a license to offend everyone. The bastards! (Not that it matters, but I think the caption to the photo of Parker and Stone mixes them up: Trey Parker is the blond one; in this case he’s also the one in the All Blacks shirt, so he knows his audience.)

If there’s a South Park embassy, I want to stand outside it in solidarity.

In other news.

15,000 atheists in London rioted after a blank sheet of paper was found on a cartoonist’s desk.

From the comments:

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.

These 89 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:07pm GMT Permanent link.

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Bird Flu »

New guidelines for bird flu prevention:

(Not my PhotoShopping. It’s doing the rounds.)

These 14 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:16pm GMT Permanent link.

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Williams On Betjeman »

I should start buying TV Quick or one of those. I’ve nearly given up papers on weekdays, and the weekend efforts are dire. I bought tehgrauniad in what can only be called a fit of madness. Most columnists I’ve learned to avoid, the way a child learns that touching a hot stove isn’t an experience worth repeating. So I’ve no idea what froth issued from Martin Kettle though the pullquote “The headlines about civil war do not reflect the complex reality that few of us can truly know” should scare away anyone with any sense. Boo to headlines, Martin! You’re only Assistant editor of tehgrauniad. But how do you know that they “don’t reflect the complex reality …"? You used your special “I am a former communist” powers I expect.

Some mong called James Harkin writes about free speech. To fully appreciate how truly godawful he is, compare Sam Leith in the Torygraph. (No one can seriously believe that “Europe has been flexing its muscles as a guarantor of freedom of expression” make any more sense than “The present King of France is a cartoonist” — the “muscles of Europe” have just as much existence as the Gallic monarch. Europe may have military strength — like NATO. There is no European entity, or if there is, it includes Turkey.) And Sam has a glorious contribution to things I learned today:

When I was comment editor of this newspaper, one of the things that astonished me was the regularity with which I’d hear of Conservative Central Office going into meltdown when a leading article disagreed with the Tory line on such and such.

Mike Power did the spadework and found the interweb link for what he calls Another Crap Theory. From what I can understand, Ian Buruma argues that Alexander Portnoy assassinated Kennedy. Or perhaps it was Martin Luther King. Who Portnoy killed, silly! Bad prose rots teh mind.

There is a more plausible explanation for the attraction felt by a certain kind of homosexual for violent elitism and extreme political causes, and that is the loathing of bourgeois life.

Charles Bukowski, Jean-Paul Sartre, Toulouse Lautrec, Paul Gaugin, yes, these and many many others are the boot boy pins-ups of disaffected gay men. What is especially gay about missing the discrete charm of the bourgeoisie?

Everything associated with the word “prudence” was hateful to him.

Everything she wants costs money. So, a Morrissey fan then?

In 2004, Johann Hari wrote about the “overlap” of homosexuality and fascism. “Gay men,” he wrote, “have been at the heart of every major fascist movement that ever was …” This was especially disturbing to Hari, who identifies himself as a “progressive gay” man. Examples supporting his thesis are readily at hand: Pim Fortuyn (though not really a “fascist”, as Hari seems to think) was gay. Jörg Haider is said to be gay. And then there were the Nazi Stormtroopers, the brown-shirted SA led by a thug named Ernst Röhm. Röhm, and many of his comrades, were homosexual.

My emphases. I’m not sure why Ernst Röhm was “homosexual” when the others were gay. Perhaps Mr Buruma believes there’s a KT boundary in gay history; prior to 1960 there were homosexuals and after it there were gays. A more likely explanation is he feared a call from the British Board of Gay Deputies threatening to suspend him for a month for comparing them to a Nazi. (So that doesn’t make sense? You think Ken’s undemocratic suspension did?)

While I fear that Mr Buruma is taking the Poor Man’s Weekly Wanker far too seriously, he may have a point. Deranged sexual inadequates do seek out phallicly suggestive nicknames.

Jamie was impressed with an article I skipped.

It is a depressing experience to go away for just eight days, and to return to a country substantially more illiberal than when you left. The Commons vote to support a bill outlawing the glorification of terrorism and the sanctioning of the ID cards bill are part of the slide towards a more authoritarian society, and yet few of us seem to care.

At the end of last week I flew into Heathrow from Cape Town, on a full British Airways 747. We came into a distant parking slot, and it was a lengthy walk to the arrivals hall. One of the walkways was out of order. The arrivals hall was seething with people, and at our end of it there was not a single spare luggage trolley.

Er, you go away for eight days, and you need a trolley to carry your bags. WTF? The thing with airports is you only ever take so much as you get away with carrying on. And anyone not crippled with arthritis walks faster than those bloody sliding things. So no sympathy from me, you lazy cow.

Everyone noticed the case of Walter Wolfgang, but 425 other people were also stopped under the terrorism act.

Make that 425: Wolfgang wasn’t. Austin Mitchell may have been. Get past the breathless, emtional language (perhaps that flies under Martin Kettle’s radar — “a woman who can write clinical prose is like a dog who speaks Norwegian” or whatever the Great Helmsman said) and you find a very off-message article for tehgrauniad:

ID cards are one danger, but there are other measures which are already a reality. Since the start of this year, a little noticed change in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act has transformed the police’s powers of arrest. Until 2006 only serious offences were arrestable. Now all offences, from speeding to picking wild flowers, allow a police officer to arrest us if they choose. Once we are held, they can fingerprint, photograph and take DNA evidence from us, and hold it in a national database for ever, whether or not we are charged.

Blair must go. Blair must go now.

There was one article worth buying the bloody paper for, but that was worth the £1:30. Hugo Williams on John Betjeman. Great stuff. I must reread Williams.

His taste for suburban railway stations, provincial art galleries, small-print pocket books, insects, jellyfish, Australia, Mary Wilson, impoverished Irish peers and minor public schools were affectations in solidarity with the (then) unpopular public buildings he fought so hard to save and which he identified with, having been bullied himself at school. (The Eurostar wouldn’t be coming grandly into St Pancras if it weren’t for Sir John.) All this he worked at; what he was born with was a natural excitability and a diamond-stylus ear for a particular English music:

Has it held, the warm June weather?
Draining shallow sea-pools dry,
When we bicyled together
Down the bohreens fuchsia-high.

These 580 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:08pm GMT Permanent link.

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Sunday, 26 February 2006

I Wish I Were A Londoner »

Is there anyone who really thinks that the suspension of Ken Livingstone is anything other than undemocratic, anti-democratic, unrepresentative misuse of power by an unelected body? I want to vote for Ken Livingstone!

Some people seem to think that what he said was offensive. He was talking to a journalist, whom he didn’t want to talk to. Most variants of “Piss off, you tosser” are offensive. If Oliver Finegold finds being told to piss off offensive, he should try not harassing people. I was tempted to write to tehgrauniad as a former concentration camp guard and say how much I resented the comparison to a journalist, but I think even they might spot it. Cuddly Ken was clearly referencing Hannah Arendt. Vot part of “I voss only followink orders” is Mr Finegold not understandink?

David T thinks “Ken Livingstone’s remarks constituted an easy-to-recognise form of left-racist discourse.” Well there’s an aspect of in-group/out-group about it. The Daily Mail and the Standard supported the Fascists and the Nazis. And Ken isn’t keen to let them forget it. (Despite writing for the Standard himself. I’ve never said that the newt-lover was a clear thinker.) It’s mean. It’s nasty. It’s cruel. And it’s hilarious and fun. If you work for the Hate Mail you just have to get used to the fingers over the top lips and the goosestepping.

Via the comments on Nosemonkey, I’ve learned about the unelected bastards.

Town hall corruption will be targeted by a powerful independent body looking after community interests, the government has pledged.

You just know it stinks from that don’t you? There’s weasel word #1: “community.” And “interests” is almost as bad.

The Local Government Minister, Hilary Armstrong, says the plans will create a new “ethical framework” for local authorities.

She says the new body will investigate malpractice and allegations of corruption.

Hilary Armstrong, my own favourite Dozy Sycophant! Ken, note, didn’t break any laws. He violated an “ethical framework”. Oh dear. No, I don’t know what that is. Some twaddle they teach in Sociology at Humpback Polyfilla I expect. And you gotta love this for overkill:

Sir Norman Fowler, Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, said: “Some of the worst problems have arisen in Labour councils which have been under one-party control for year after year.

“In effect they have become one-party states. …”

I well remember the daily dash across no-man’s land, the crawl under the barded wire, and the constant rattle of machine gun fire as I left Camden on the way to work in Westminster. Coming home was easier, greeted with flowers and virgins, and a free council flat for joining the Communist Republic. Er, no, it wasn’t like that. BTW, I’d hope that as councils were elected for five-year periods that one-party (or coalition) control did last “year after year.” Tosser.

Now for an offensive post I thought about writing, but eventually didn’t. Well, I clearly am, but I was going to start with this.

Jealous father gets life for torture and murder of son.

A father who tortured and battered his three-month-old son to death because he was jealous of the attention the baby’s mother showed him was jailed for life yesterday.

On C4 News, Livingstone’s Deputy, Linda Gavron, said that Ken “didn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in his body.” And Ken himself said (from Harry’s Place link earlier):

I have been deeply affected by the concern of Jewish people in particular that my comments downplayed the horror and magnitude of the holocaust. I wish to say to those Londoners that my words were not intended to cause such offence and that my view remains that the holocaust against the Jews is the greatest racial crime of the 20th century.

But not liking Jews was never Ken’s crime. He also liked Arabs as well. “How can you say you love us when you hang out with the Schwartzes and the Homos?” Fuck the Board of Jewish Deputies. Anti-democratic whiney motherfuckers. May birds nest in their beards.

These 490 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:13am GMT Permanent link.

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Monday, 27 February 2006

I Came Here For An Argument »

If you’re looking for an argument, you may be disappointed with the Houses of Parliament. The ever-excellent Sam Leith:

The Prime Minister yesterday wrote an article seeking to defend his record on civil liberties. “On ID cards,” he wrote, “there is a host of arguments, irrespective of security, why their time has come”.

Wouldn’t you be a bit more reassured if he made those arguments, rather than simply alluding to them?

(Tim Worstall agrees.)

With any luck I’m a deranged monomaniacal out-of-touch bullshitter will become the most-linked to, and laughed at, newspaper article in the short history of teh interwebs. I particularly like:

At one level, the charge is easy to debunk. But on another level, there is a serious debate about the nature of liberty in the modern world.

Can I resist seeing that as

Freedom is Slavery

couched in marshmallow soft New Labour Speak?

But first, the true record. This government has introduced the Human Rights Act, so that, for the first time, a citizen can challenge the power of the state solely on the basis of an infringement of human rights, and the Freedom of Information Act, the most open thing any British government has done since the Reform Acts of the 1830s. We have devolved more power than any government since the 1707 Act of Union introduced transparency into political funding and restricted the Prime Minister’s right to nominate to the House of Lords. In other words, I have given away more prime ministerial power than any predecessor for more than 100 years.

I count only one instance of “prime ministerial power” in that list. I still can’t figure out the relevance of the Human Rights Act. According to the Human Rights Act: Frequently Asked Questions, the Act stems from our signing and ratifying the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

The Convention enshrines fundamental civil and political rights, but for many years it was not part of our own law. Using the Convention usually meant taking a case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. This was often time-consuming and expensive.

I understand from this that prior to the introduction of the act “a citizen [could] challenge the power of the state solely on the basis of an infringement of human rights.” Freedom of Information Act: Cough, splutter.

Devolved power? I was always against that, even though I voted Labour in 1997. Tony Blair is, as I understand it, the head of the British government. All British government in effect. In the US, power is partially devolved to the States, but the President can overrule any State Governor. What he’s done is create more government, and then there’s Ken… Devolved power? When a quango can remove an elected representative? Who has the power there?

But the ‘rules’ are becoming harder to enforce. Antisocial behaviour isn’t susceptible to normal court process.

And this is new? How?

Modern organised crime is really ugly, with groups, often from overseas, frequently prepared to use horrific violence.

Tell that to Elliot Ness.

And, though I get into constant trouble for saying it, while I completely condemn IRA terrorism, I believe it was different in nature and scale from the new global Islamic terrorism we face. For me, this is not an issue of liberty but of modernity.

And “the new global Islamic terrorism” is supposed to be a global war, isn’t it? Oh, it’s the worst thing we’ve ever faced all right.

If we fail to tackle ASB because the court system is inadequate, other people’s liberties suffer. If we don’t take head-on organised criminals or terrorists, others are harmed. The question is not one of individual liberty vs the state but of which approach best guarantees most liberty for the largest number of people.

Say it George:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

From Chris (congrats on the entirely unwarranted anachronism of a degree, BTW), more Geoff “Buff” Hoon goodness. David Howarth (Lib Dem) asked:

I hope that the Leader of the House has had a chance to read a letter in The Times today from six professors of law at Cambridge university, expressing their concern about the extraordinary powers granted to the Government by the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which is now widely known as the “Abolition of Parliament Bill”. Will he take steps to rescind the decision of the House last Thursday not to consider the Bill in a Committee of the whole House but to take it upstairs? Surely, given the Bill’s massive constitutional importance and the seriousness of what part 1 does to the House’s powers, all Members should have the opportunity to discuss it in detail on the Floor of the House.

Buff replied:

I know that the hon. Gentleman is on temporary, sabbatical leave from the university of Cambridge. We are delighted to have him here for a relatively short time while he represents the people of Cambridge. I hope that he did not stimulate that letter in The Times from his former colleagues in the law faculty at Cambridge university. I know that he is a distinguished lawyer and anxious to get back to academic life as soon as possible, but before he does so he will of course have the opportunity to debate the Bill in Committee in detail, and we look forward to his observations.

Slap him with a fish and call him Roger Irrelevant I say.

These 299 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:14pm GMT Permanent link.

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Me Too »

Via Mike Power, who says “Go on, Ken, tell us what you really think,” Jackie Ashley in tehgrauniad: Livingstone’s suspension is an affront to democracy.

No one could say that Ken Livingstone is naturally discreet or prone to grey understatement. I have a vivid memory of interviewing him on a London bus for this paper. As we were careering round a corner, he announced loudly to the crowded interior: “I just long for the day I wake up and find that the Saudi royal family are swinging from lamp posts and they’ve got a proper government that represents the people of Saudi Arabia.”

Me too, Ken, me too.

His loyal press officer blanched and made vague “Please don’t say this, boss” gestures but the London mayor was completely unabashed. His cheery enthusiasm for publicly hanging a key British ally in the Middle East produced predictable demands for his expulsion yet again from the Labour party, and his Tory opponent in the mayoral race, Steve Norris, accused him of incitement. Ken did not much care.

And why should he? Why did we station troops in Saudi Arabia (and why did no one insist that they relax their inflammatory anti-Semitism as a starting condition?) to protect them from incursions by Saddam Hussein? Watching them fight would have been like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia at war in the 1940s.

“We have more show trials than you.”

“Our uniforms are smarter.”

“Our people would eat rats if we told them to.”

“We’ve killed more homosexuals and Jews than you.”

Let them destroy each other. It’s more than the bastards deserve after all. Still the British government claims to champion “democracy” while propping up one of the most racist, backward, oppressive regimes on the planet. No hypocrisy involved of course. Ken’s statement is as much incitement as saying ‘good for von Stauffenberg’ would have been in 1944.

I still can’t see Ken’s offence. William Rees-Mogg says:

He attacked Oliver Finegold, a journalist from the Evening Standard, in terms that were particularly offensive to a Jew, and would have been highly offensive to anyone.

I can’t see why Ken is supposed to have said, “If I’d known you were Jewish, I’d never have called you a Nazi.” He was trying to be offensive. The Nazi comparison was supposed to be offensive. Someone owes this chap an apology. And don’t even mention Larry David’s wife.

The affair is not, however, just darkly funny. It raises tougher questions still. You may or may not agree with Ken’s views on the Middle East, but to move from his hostility to the actions of the state of Israel to suggest that he behaved in an anti-semitic way is gross. He has made clear, on these pages and elsewhere, the distinction between his loathing of the Holocaust and his admiration for the Jewish people, on the one hand, and his anger about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, on the other. He has worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews against the National Front. His hatred of the Mail group is connected to its pre-war admiration for the Nazis. He has to be allowed his strong views.

And Ms Ashley concludes:

The new Power report opens with a heartfelt cry from Helena Kennedy who speaks of “thousands of people around the country who feel quietly angry or depressed. When it comes to politics they feel they are eating stones … The politicos have no idea of the extent of the alienation that is out there.”

Helena Kennedy was always in the sensible part of the Labour Party. One might even say “brainy” — so nothing like Maximum Tone, Ruth Kelly, Buff Hoon, Charlie Clarke, and company.

I forgot that there was a splendid letter on the front page of Saturday’s edition of tehgrauniad from David Hockney.

I don’t think the press know their readers anymore. I am spending time in provincial England. There is an anger you don’t seem to know.

What a great bloke:

In the Labour party — let’s get a lot more human in our observations — the 80-year-old Mr Benn is a happy pipe smoker; Mr Robin Cook took up “healthy” fell walking, it killed him; same with Mr Smith; Tony Banks another non-smoking vegetarian health fiend falls over with a stroke at the age of 61.

…

Gorrdon Brrrown is a prig P.R.I.G., a dreary atheistic Calvinistic prig, who I’m sure will never be elected in England. He goes along with a “health lobby” whose view of life itself I detest.

Surrrely that’s “prrrig"? I’d vote for David.

These 265 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:50pm GMT Permanent link.

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An Old Favourite »

Any excuse, I know.

Tim Worstall is attacked in his comments:

Tim Worstall is unnecessarily offensive. Blair is not a fascist in any meaningful sense of the word. He is not the leader of an authoritarian party in a one-party state. There is a free press - most of it anti-Government. There are free trade unions, an independent judiciary, no silly wearing of uniforms by the party leadership.

My emphasis. Oh, indeed not. No, not at all.

These 21 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:46pm GMT Permanent link.

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Hold That Front Page! »

There’s a gentleman that’s going round
Turning the joint upside down
Stool Pigeon - ha-cha-cha-cha
He’s an old ex-con that’s been away
Now he’s back, no one’s safe
Stool Pigeon - ha-cha-cha-cha

If you wanna squeal, said the FBI
We can make a deal, make it worth your while
So he told it all and in return
He got a credit card and a Thunderbird
And the maximum security
Even after plastic surgery
So go on and squeal, said the FBI
We can make a deal, make it worth your while

Kid Creole And The Coconuts

Phil of Actually Existing has a splendid post on David Mills, which I’ve meant to link to since he wrote it. Yesterday he’s updated it — leaving me no excuse.

Tessa Jowell made the front page of the Hate Mail this morning, which may make me take back all that stuff I said earlier about it being a Nazi rag.

Meanwhile, Italian prosecutor Fabio de Pasquale says he has sufficient evidence to go before a judge within 10 days to secure an indictment of Mr Mills on bribery charges which carry a maximum eight-year jail sentence.

The Torygraph profiled Signor Fabio de Pasquale on Saturday.

Fabio de Pasquale is no stranger to corruption trials. He has been investigating sleaze in Italian public life for more than 15 years.

He also turns his hand to criminal cases. When the Sunday Telegraph arrived at his Milan office, he was handling a rape case and a gang of illegal immigrant pickpockets. Behind his desk was a poster of Albert Einstein with the caption: “Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you that mine are still greater.”

He was dressed casually, and did not look “horrible” — as the British lawyer David Mills described him during an interview with this newspaper last weekend.

…

Mr Mills told the Sunday Telegraph last weekend that he signed a confession after a gruelling 10-hour interrogation in which Mr De Pasquale and his colleague, Alfredo Robledo, played “good cop, bad cop”.

But Mr De Pasquale dismissed the claims. He said: “I can assure you that it was nothing like how he described it. The interview was carried out in a polite and civilised manner.

“We even arranged for him to be seen on a Sunday so his appearance would not cause a stir. We went out of our way to accommodate him.” He added: “He had his solicitor with him, and there were no objections to the questioning.

Well, thank god that David Mackenzie Mills had a solicitor with him. How else would he have understood the baroque complexities of the law? As the Independent says:

David Mackenzie Mills has a favourite saying: “Nothing exceeds like success!” He has known a lot of success, as a lawyer, linguist, occasional politician, polymath, socialite, amateur musician, father, grandfather and husband. There has also been a whiff of excess in a lot of what he has done, not least in his long involvement in the dangerous world of Italian politics and offshore bank accounts.

So — that’s two lawyers against two policemen. I’m too lazy right now to check on Italian police interview procedures, but I’ll assume that given EU wide human rights legislation and the complexity of the case that the interview was recorded throughout, as interviews are under PACE. (I’ll be happy to correct this if any reader knows otherwise — with evidence, of course.) Given what I think of David Mills, I wouldn’t worry if they’d gone for the Sean Connery line of questioning in The Untouchables (script by the “overrated” — according to Nick Cohen — David Mamet). If you remember, Connery’s Malone picks up a corpse and pretends to question it. When it doesn’t answer, he shoots it. Their other suspect talks. That’s bad cop. And here I agree with Maximum Tone: when dealing with international organised crime, go at the bastards hard.

However, Mr Mills said last night: “It was not friendly, it was hostile and relentless.” He is adamant that substantial defence evidence has been lodged with the magistrate proving that the money came from another client and that any attempt to indict him will not succeed.

He’s still walking about, so it wasn’t hard enough in my book.

This story is everwhere. Isn’t it great! The splendidly named James Blitz in the FT, Blair ally to be quizzed by top official:

Mr Mills has admitted that, in 2000, £350,000 was paid by an Italian into Torrey Global Offshore, a hedge fund.

The couple then raised a loan on their house in north London for a similar amount and put this money into a second hedge fund.

The loan on the house was paid off within a month, using the cash from the first hedge fund, which Italian police are alleging was a bribe.

Mr Blair, in an article I linked to earlier as I’m a deranged monomaniacal out-of-touch bullshitter:

Modern organised crime is really ugly, with groups, often from overseas, frequently prepared to use horrific violence.

Just so you know the official line, of course. And in a break from the usual blogging where I cut an paste links, here’s a bit I have to type. John Dickie’s Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia really is a great read. Here’s a taster.

Antonio Giuffrè, known as ‘Manuzza’ (’Little Hand’) acting head of the Caccamo mandamento of Cosa Nostra [I’m sure you know this — ‘Our Thing’ — what massive, cool intellects those boys have!], was captured on 16 April 2002. …

In June, feeling that he had been betrayed by his leader, Giuffrè started to talk to investigating magistrates: ‘I was Provenzano’s principal collaborator and my job was to try to restructure Cosa Nostra on a huge scale.’ But his most startling claim was that in 1993 Cosa Nostra had ‘direct contacts’ with representatives of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s famous perma-tanned media magnate with a crooner’s smile.

The same year, 1993, it will be recalled, was the year of Cosa Nostra’s bombing campaign on the Italian mainland. It was also the year when Berlusconi was in the process of forming a hew political party to respond to the crisis brought about by the ‘Clean Hands’ corruption investigations The subject of the meeting between Berlusconi’s people and Cosa Nostra, Giuffrè claims was an alliance between the mafia* and Berlusconi’s planned political party, soon to be baptized Forza Italia (’Come on, Italy!’).

*"There is no mafia.” Tony Soprano

Page 434. I realise that I don’t attract the highbrow readers of, say, Harry’s Place. So I feel the need to reiterate, in case any of you are at all slow.

The same year, 1993, it will be recalled, was the year of Cosa Nostra’s bombing campaign on the Italian mainland.

Maximum Tone:

Modern organised crime is really ugly, with groups, often from overseas, frequently prepared to use horrific violence.

…

You can say it is a breach of the right to free speech but in the real world, people get hurt when organisations encourage hatred.

When he’s right, he’s right, you know. As I said before. Anyway, let us continue.

The following year Berlusconi led an alliance to victory in the general election. But the alliance proved fragile and collapsed before 1994 was out. Then in May 2001, the year before Giuffrè’s capture, Forza Italia met with electoral triumph and Berlusconi became Prime Minister with a solid parliamentary majority behind him. The man who likes to be known as il cavaliere — ‘the Knight’ — is also the richest man in Italy with an estimated fortune of $10.3 billion at the time of the 2001 election; among many other things he own the country’s three major private television networks and a publishing empire. No one since Mussolini has had so much power over Italy or, indeed, over Sicily; the alliance led by Forza Italia holds all sixty-one of the island’s parliamentary seats.

There are numerous indications that since 1994 men of honour [ie Mafioso — DW] have been directing their people to vote for Forza Italia candidates. Bearing in mind how the mafia has tended to operate over the past century and a half, there is nothing surprising or scandalous in this: politicians with power are inevitably the most vulnerable to pressure from organised crime.

Pages 434̵–5. I should note that Mr Dickie goes on to say:

Nobody in Italy would seriously claim either that Berlusconi is a mafioso or that his electoral victories are a direct result of mafia influence.

Page 435. My emphasis. Why? Well, why not? BBC (not in Italy, BTW): Berlusconi accused of Mafia links. Let’s continue with our tale (which links to the BBC story, don’t worry.) Page 436:

In 1974, Berlusconi was looking for a groom and major-domo for his Ancore estate near Milan. He turned for advice to Marcello Dell’Utri who, after a prodigiously rapid rise through the Sicilian banking world, had recently moved to Milan to become Berlusconi’s business factotum. (Dell’Utri later became the head of Publitalia, the highly profitable advertising arm of the Berlusconi business empire; it was he who came up with the idea of Forza Italia in 1993.) Dell’Utri’s recommendation for the post of major-domo was a fellow Palermitan, Vittorio Magano, who filled it for two years. Mangano died of cancer recently, a few days after being sentenced to life for two murders. This ‘major-domo’, it transpires, was a man of honour from the Porta Nuova Family of Cosa Nostra.

Two murders? What would Maximum Tone say? Oh yes:

Modern organised crime is really ugly, with groups, often from overseas, frequently prepared to use horrific violence.

…

You can say it is a breach of the right to free speech but in the real world, people get hurt when organisations encourage hatred.

And who does Tony Blair go on holiday with?

I’ll post more from Cosa Nostra soon.

Other jollity: Times: Jowell says mortgage on home was perfectly innocent.

BBC: Jowell: No conflict of interest.

Some conflicts of opinion:

Matthew D’Ancona (new editor of the Speccie) in the Torygraph: Blair ditch Jowell? Don’t make me laugh.

Scotsman: Blair distances himself from Jowell.

tehgrauniad: Blair backs Jowell over Berlusconi claims.

The last is the one I want.

Melissa Kite of the Torygraph: Blair faces embarrassment at Jowell’s connection with intrigue.

Periodically, intrigue over Mr Mills’s professional life has bubbled over as opposition MPs strain every sinew to find a damning connection. The fact that the millionaire lawyer moves in elevated Government circles, courtesy of his wife, sounds too tempting for some world-weary souls at Westminster.

The closest Ms Jowell came to being implicated was when it emerged in 2003 that Mr Mills, as the representative of an Iranian trading company, used a dinner party to ask the then foreign trade minister for advice on a £125 million deal to sell British Aerospace passenger jets to Iran. Baroness Symons duly wrote warning him to “tread very carefully”.

Iran? It’s almost too good to be true! Apparatchik with connections to Eurasia, weeps at trial and pleads that we were once allied to them!

Ms Jowell skirted close again last year when her then civil servant press secretary e-mailed a statement from Mr Mills to a newspaper denying wrongdoing in the Silvio Berlusconi affair — a “staggering breach” of ethics, said the Tories.

My emphasis. Remember that Indy profile of David Mackenzie Mills?

The Labour Government was not many months old before Mr Mills received a warning about the publicity a minister’s husband can attract. One of Labour’s election promises was to end tobacco sponsorship of sport, but in November 1997, it emerged that the British Government was actually trying to protect Formula 1 racing from an EU-wide ban. Mr Mills was both legal adviser to and a former director of Benetton Formula 1. His wife, as Minister for Public Health, was responsible for government policy on smoking.

The resulting uproar put the couple’s loyalty through a stern test. It was not then publicly known that it was not her idea to ask for an exemption for Formula 1. She had privately argued against it. After a few days in which the couple shut up and took the flak, they were saved by the much bigger furore that erupted when it emerged that the Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone had secretly donated £1m to Labour funds.

Then, as Italian prosecutors searched for the money trails leading to and from Silvio Berlusconi, Mr Mills was given another insight into how unpleasant life can be, even for a polymath who has known nothing but success all his life. He now has 14 filing cabinets full of documents forwarded by the Italian authorities, in which he has read statements made by people he has known for years, as business associates and — he imagined — as friends who, according to one of his children, “have sold him down the Swannee to save their own skins”.

These 620 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:37pm GMT Permanent link.

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Tuesday, 28 February 2006

And An Update »

I swamped myself with links for the last post. And I have to confess that I didn’t read all of them after the early paragraphs. I did read the Independent profile of David Mills:

David Mackenzie Mills has a favourite saying: “Nothing exceeds like success!” He has known a lot of success, as a lawyer, linguist, occasional politician, polymath, socialite, amateur musician, father, grandfather and husband. There has also been a whiff of excess in a lot of what he has done, not least in his long involvement in the dangerous world of Italian politics and offshore bank accounts.

…

He had been speaking freely to journalists, until his Italian lawyer told him to stop. He described himself to the Sunday Telegraph as “a complete idiot”. Talking to The Independent he described one of his actions as “completely insane”.

I’ve quoted some of this before.

I omitted to read Matthew D’Ancona (editor of the Speccie, etc) in the Torygraph: Blair ditch Jowell? Don’t make me laugh.

A health warning: I know and like Ms Jowell and her husband, and served on the Millennium Commission with the Culture Secretary for a time. And, for what it is worth, I find it impossible to imagine Mr Mills so recklessly lighting the fuse of his own destruction, and imperilling his wife’s entire career, by taking a bung from Mr Berlusconi. That is my opinion.

Noted and recorded, Mr D’Ancona. If you’re right, you’ve found a subsciber.

Case closed? No. As the Sunday Telegraph revealed last week, Mr Mills now says that this statement — since retracted — was wrung out of him after 10 hours’ gruelling interrogation. While he does not now claim that the confession was “forced” in the strict sense, he insists that, by the time he signed, he would have “done anything” to end his mental ordeal and the fear of being detained in the cells.

Did they play Country and Western? Did they shine lights in his eyes? Were these interviews taped (on those tricky modern double cassette things where one copy goes into the archives to make tampering harder)? Poor, poor Mr Mills. Pound of flesh closest to his heart? Ahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Find the organ first suckers! Ahahahaha!

Mr D’Ancona considers this a defence:

All this is explicable only in the murky context of Italian politics and law enforcement. Mr Mills’s travails have invited inevitable comparison with The Godfather. But a more useful guide would be the wonderful novels of Leonardo Sciascia, which explore the inextricable and often surreal entanglements of crime, the judiciary and politics in Italian society. It is no coincidence that there are elections coming up in Italy on April 9. And whatever you think of Mr Berlusconi, he is right that “when elections approach, the judiciary strikes, regular as a clock”. Mr Mills is but a small player in an epic Roman drama.

Translation: he’s a mafioso, but a) he’s my mate; and b) he’s only a small mafioso. People, as Signor Blair pointed out, get hurt by organised crime. And the law has to start somewhere.

That is not, of course, how it seems in Westminster. On that stage, Mr Mills’s plight is seen — inevitably — as the latest chapter in the collapse of New Labour morality: a convenient book-end to the Ecclestone Affair nine years ago, in which Ms Jowell and Mr Mills were also embroiled. The new furore revives memories of Mr Blair standing alongside Mr Berlusconi in Sardinia in 2004, the Italian looking seriously dotty in a bandana. The Labour movement hates the Prime Minister’s association with “Silvio”, and their close alliance during the Iraq War. Italian billionaires, freebies, mobsters, Blairites living high on the hog: the images swirl around, merging into one in the minds of the political class. There is a longing for the trail that starts with Mr Mills to lead to the door of Number 10: if the consigliere can be busted, then why not the capo di tutti capi in Downing Street?

Translation: you don’t get invited to the dinner parties I do! (Three per night, judging by that chin, Matt.) You think my mates are corrupt! They are; but they feed me.

The stakes are vertiginously high for the Blairites. Ms Jowell is managing Labour’s London campaign in the local elections. She is minister for the Olympics and, as such, needs to remain a pillar of integrity.

Why? I’m pro-Olympics, but I acknowledge that corruption goes with these multi-national efforts. If you told me that she paid to be buggered by captive hippopotami, I’d consider that almost too vanilla for the IOC. (I expect 7 $ figure bribes as well.)

So what every MP returning this week wants to know is: will the Prime Minister assess the damage and then dump her? This, at least, is easy to answer. No Cabinet Minister was more important than Ms Jowell in persuading Mr Blair not to resign during his famous “wobble” two years ago: were it not for her and Cherie, Mr Brown would be Prime Minister already. She convinced him to take the Olympic bid seriously, and the gamble paid off.

So? That was in the past. I think I’m talking to New Labourites here, so I urge you to consider the final, marvelous, episode of Rome.

In that, Ceasar’s last words were, more or less, “Urggh!” In some upstart pleb’s version he said “Et tu, Brute!” I’ve always understood this as a polite translation of the man’s supposed “Kai sou, technon” (And you, son!), but others favour “Even you, Brutus?” Oh even Brutus, who owed Ceasar his life. For it is written: no good deed goes unpunished. Or “You owe me"/"I won’t ever forgive you, you bastard.”

By the magic of the interwebs, I bring you tomorrow’s (as I write) Times editorial:

The financial affairs of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, are labyrinthine. They have consumed Italian prosecutors for the best part of a decade. Those of Tessa Jowell are less complex. But they are threatening to make life extremely uncomfortable for the Culture Secretary. Ms Jowell may have reason to gripe at the way that her household accounts are being tied suggestively to the murky Berlusconi business empire. But she provided the link with her own hand. By signing a joint mortgage application with her husband David Mills, a former legal adviser to Signor Berlusconi’s Fininvest empire, she brought a central issue in the Italian general election — the tycoon’s business methods — into the kitchen of her North London home.

The question for Ms Jowell, no less comfortable for being familiar, has thus become: what did she know, and when did she know it?

Her signature, it is alleged, prompted Mr Mills to activate a large sum of money held offshore. According to Italian prosecutors, it was placed there by associates of Signor Berlusconi for Mr Mills in return for his helpful testimony in previous corruption trials. Mr Mills told his accountant that it was a “long-term loan or a gift”. Prosecutors view it as a bribe. Specifically, Ms Jowell’s signature appears to have triggered the import of £350,000 from the fund to the UK. Mr Mills denies any wrongdoing. The issue is one for the Italian courts, should the case proceed.

Thankfully, British ministers are not yet disqualified from holding office according to their choice of spouse. Ms Jowell, therefore, does not have to answer for her husband’s actions. But the disclosure of her own signature — despite earlier denials from Mr Mills that she had played any part in his business transactions — does raise questions about her role. Did she know why her husband wanted to take the highly unusual step of raising a substantial six-figure mortgage, only to repay it within a month? Did she agree with his financial reckoning? Did she know where the money was coming from? She said yesterday that the money had “categorically” not come from Signor Berlusconi. Witness statements from her husband suggest otherwise, though he has since retracted them.

For the time being, Ms Jowell appears to be on firm ground when insisting that nothing she has done, including the two-second flourish of her pen, conflicts with her public duties as Culture, Media and Sport Secretary. It should also be noted that the timing of the current allegations, weeks before the Italian general election, is no coincidence.

Whether she has breached the code of ministerial conduct, which calls for ministers “to behave according to the highest standards of constitutional and personal conduct in the performance of their duties”, is a separate matter. More specifically, it requires ministers to provide their permanent secretaries with a list of not only their own personal interests, “but those of a spouse or partner”, including those involving real estate. Did she do so? When? Sir Gus O ‘Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, is, initially at least, well placed to clarify such issues. But the toughest question is for Ms Jowell to reflect on in private. In retrospect, knowing what she knew, if she failed to ask appropriate questions of her husband, should she be claiming the confidence of the Prime Minister? It is a matter for her conscience.

Keep this on the front page! And if Alastair Campbell phones, quote him verbatim. Ruth Kelly, pray, pray, pray. Tony Blair, remember what a wise Jew once said about religion: “It is the opium of the masses …” Marx was right about some things and creeping jesuses are near the top of the list.

You can say it is a breach of the right to free speech but in the real world, people get hurt when organisations encourage hatred.

I agree.

These 563 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:20am GMT Permanent link.

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A Self-serving, Cosmopolitan Elite »

Craig Murray on David Mills:

Now for something else you won’t find in the mainstream media. Mills was under long term surveillance by the Serious Fraud Office for numerous dubious financial transactions. Approximately nine years ago, his office was actually raided by the SFO. As the investigation drew to a close, New Labour came to power. An inside source tells me that SFO staff believed they had a good case, and wondered whether his friendship with the new Prime Minister Blair had any bearing on it not coming to court. A Sunday Times Insight investigation into Mills was spiked by the editors.

And his take on the Prime Minister may be considered, er, undiplomatic:

What will it take for the eyes of the very many decent people still left in the Labour Party to be opened to the appalling people who now lead their party? How many of the current cabinet are not, themselves or their partners, personally millionaires? Blair has a £3 million house. Straw has a Cotswold mansion as one of his homes. We recall Blunkett’s dodgy directorships, and Mandelson’s loan from Robinson. Who do these people represent, except a self-serving, cosmopolitan elite? Is it any wonder they are so keen on privatising health and education, when they and all their friends can afford the best? And what does any of this have to do with the aims and origins of the Labour Party, or the hopes of those who elected them?

These 17 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:35pm GMT Permanent link.

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Livingstone Suspension Frozen »

tehgrauniad: Livingstone suspension frozen by judge.

The mayor said he had not broken the law and that he reserved the right to treat journalists with the same robustness as they treated him. “As far as I am aware there is no law against ‘unnecessary insensitivity’ or even ‘offensiveness’ to journalists harassing you as you try to go home,” he said. Mr Livingstone was leaving an event at City Hall last February when Oliver Finegold tried to interview him.

He denied that his comments were influenced by alcohol: if he had been drinking, he said, it would have been much stronger.

BBC: Judge freezes mayor’s suspension.

The Mayor of London’s four-week suspension has been frozen by a High Court judge, pending an appeal.

Ken Livingstone was due to be suspended from Wednesday, after being found to have brought his office into disrepute with his comments to a reporter.

Earlier he said he would fight the “attack on the democratic rights of Londoners” through the courts.

He said his remark, comparing a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard, had been “blown out of all proportion”.

And does Jon Benjamin of the Board of Deputies of British Jews is quoted as saying:

“With freedom of expression comes responsibility to be sensitive to other people’s feelings.”

That’s a new one to me. Aw, we must all be sensitive. Diddums. If you don’t like him, vote for someone else.

These 49 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:12pm GMT Permanent link.

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