September 2006 Archives
Friday, 01 September 2006
Privacy
There’s a new browser for Windows, Browzar which promises:
With Browzar you can search and surf the web without leaving any visible trace on the computer you are using.
NB this doesn’t mean that AOL won’t collect your search data and dump it online. It just means that auto-complete won’t complete things. Which would be a bummer for me, because it’s how I do most things: type in a few letters and then cast around for whatever I’m looking for. History isn’t much good, because I can never remember when I last looked at things. But Browzar doesn’t have history either.
So really, it just offers what the others (like Firefox, which I’m starting to prefer over Safari) do with a little effort.
But at least you can avoid worrying discoveries like this:
I just tried auto-complete on my wife’s computer and got: Hitler, Nazi marching, air raid, blitzkrieg, infantry German, Nazi rally, Wehmacht infantry, Wehrmach rally... If she wasn’t a history teacher I’d be quite worried.
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Sunday, 03 September 2006
Sock (Puppet) It To ’Em
Various Lee Siegel goodness around teh interwebs. Hilzoy is, as per her character, pretty reasonable. As is Lindsay Beyerstein. Ezra Klein, whom Seigel was particularly nasty about, should have the last word.
But hell, Scott Lemieux has teh funny about Lee Siegel as is Robert Farley, Lee Siegel. Robert Farley announced Siegel’s end in Count one for the blogofascists.
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The Ordeal Of Excretion
Craig Brown was good yesterday on the Betjeman hoax. His column contained one gem I hadn’t heard before.
It’s hard to imagine that Hugh Trevor-Roper managed to greet the news that he had been hoaxed over the Hitler Diaries with a good belly-laugh, but it would surely have been the most appropriate response. Hitler’s old mess-mate Herman Goering certainly let himself down when confronted, in his cell at Nuremberg, with the news that the forger Han van Meegeren had succeeded in selling him a fake Vermeer. "He looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world," recalled one observer.
The paragraph before merely repeated a well-known truth:
In fact, one might almost say that authors are their own worst forgers: most people are agreed that Martin Amis has been producing some pretty unconvincing Martin Amises over the course of the past decade.
Yesterday, Martin Amis (or a bad forger) turned up in the Times to write The real conspiracy behind 9/11 a review of The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda’s Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. I did consider blogging this separately, because I consider it a bad review - qua reviewing, not with regard to the book - which we learn nothing about at all. The review could be a sustained effort of compression: in which Martin Amis dehyrated the book and printed the fine powder that remained. In academic reviewing, it’s common for the reviewer if she is a known expert in the book’s field to spent most of the review sharing the basics, before moving on to assess the quality of the work. When I read the Times piece, I didn’t consider Martin Amis an expert on military affairs. Even if he were, he might have been kind enough to add a sentence or two which the publisher could reproduce on the cover of the second edition. He doesn’t even name the author.
(UPDATE. As Matthew Turner has kindly pointed out, Martin Amis doesn’t mention the author apart from the paragraph which starts "The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright’s tough-minded and cussedly persistent narrative ..." Oops.)
And today, we have The last days of Martin Amis by Muhammad Atta.
(Oh crap, I started this this morning then had to go out without finishing it. Jamie has posted on this, apparently this is an extract from a book which is a ’fictionalisation’ and not super-heated documentary. (Pity, because I think Amis has been more interesting as a journalist and autobiographer than as a novelist for nearly 20 years now.) tehgrauniad fails to make this clear. Also, the book came out in the States a couple of months ago where it failed to impress.)
He slid from the bed and called Abdulaziz, who was already stirring, and perhaps already praying, next door. Then to the bathroom: the chore of ablution, the ordeal of excretion, the torment of depilation. He activated the shower nozzle and removed his undershorts.
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Before You Ask
Yes, I am Finland too. See Alex and Jamie. I didn’t keep my scores, as I regard these things as stupid.
Useless fact, as you’re here. One of the early 80s editions of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to ... [pause] Europe says that the defence budget of Andorra is spent entirely on the annual police target practice. I don’t know if this is true or not. Sadly, Andorra was not an option here. Still, Finland, eh? Go, Finns.
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Monday, 04 September 2006
Enlarging Men’S Sympathies
Sam Leith today:
There’s a point of view about novels that is regarded in academic circles with a certain amount of suspicion, but that endures outside them, and all the better that it does. It was best expressed by George Eliot: "If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally." The death last week of the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz brought that old quotation to mind.
One of the nice things about Sam Leith (apart from his humour) is his freedom from snobbery. He can write two pieces in one column: one about a Nobel laureate (whom I hadn’t heard of; perhaps you hadn’t either), in the second, he remembers Adrian Mole. You don’t get that from James Wood.
Should art enlarge one’s sympathies? I don’t know the answer to that, but I’ve always suspected that ’liberals’ were in general better read than reactionaries. (I don’t regard the existence of Philip Larkin a disproof. Larkin for all his anger, racism, and what have you, had bags of sympathy and feeling.)
Might this be the distintion between artist and critic? I can think of a theatre and film reviewer whose sympathy reserves are almost dry: Mark Steyn. Via Glenn Greenwald. (At least Steyn is consistent.)
Steyn reads books - or he did once. This is his response to the ordeal of the Fox journalists kidnapped in Lebanon who (said they) converted to Islam:
In 1895 Sir Arthur had taken his sick wife to Egypt for her health, and, not wishing to waste the local color, produced a slim novel called The Tragedy of the Korosko, about a party of Anglo-American-French tourists taken hostage by the Mahdists, the jihadi of the day. Much of the story finds the characters in the same predicament as Centanni and Wiig: The kidnappers are offering them a choice between Islam or death. Conan Doyle’s Britons and Americans and Europeans were men and women of the modern world even then:
"None of them, except perhaps Miss Adams and Mrs. Belmont, had any deep religious convictions. All of them were children of this world, and some of them disagreed with everything which that symbol upon the earth represented."
"That symbol" is the cross. Yet in the end, even as men with no religious convictions, they cannot bring themselves to submit to Islam, for they understand it to be not just a denial of Christ but in some sense a denial of themselves, too. So they stall and delay and bog down the imam in a lot of technical questions until eventually he wises up and they’re condemned to death.
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A Moral Story
I remembered something since my last post. Here’s a Western story (probably needs images and javascript enabled to work) which even Mark Steyn should know.
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Value Of Handing In My Resignation Letter - Priceless
Beautifully done political interview, notable because every question carries an implicit citation* (perhaps in the future we can have ticker tape type scrolls on tv with links - which would function on internet connected TVs or computers - for citations). Also notable for the former speechwriter who informed her friends via an email (which just happened to find its way to the press) "Value of handing in my resignation letter - priceless". (The chief qualifications for being a speechwriter are being a dedicated party member and being reasonably - good university degree - intelligent.) At 4:25ish Nora O’Donnell’s face is as expressive as any face under industrial strength make-up can be.
Via First Draft.
*Before I post, I realise that this may not be clear. I mean that the way questions are asked: "X says Y about you" means "and we can show you where they said it". The links would go to reliable sources which said they did. I think this is borne out in that none of the quotations here is gainsaid.
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Tuesday, 05 September 2006
Vandalism And Nonsense
Via tehgrauniad’s technology blog, Who Writes Wikipedia?. Of interest to me because I’ve just joined (on the grounds that if Peter Hitchens can do it, so can I). It’s very nicely argued (a lot of the page is comments; it’s not nearly as long as it seems), but if you just want the conclusion:
Unfortunately, precisely because such people are only occasional contributors, their opinions aren’t heard by the current Wikipedia process. They don’t get involved in policy debates, they don’t go to meetups, and they don’t hang out with Jimbo Wales. And so things that might help them get pushed on the backburner, assuming they’re even proposed.
Out of sight is out of mind, so it’s a short hop to thinking these invisible people aren’t particularly important. Thus Wales’s belief that 500 people wrote half an encyclopedia. Thus his assumption that outsiders contribute mostly vandalism and nonsense. And thus the comments you sometimes hear that making it hard to edit the site might be a good thing.
I like to shoehorn barely relevant information into each post, and here’s a goodie. This morning I received an email from Mark York thanking me for adding him to the blogroll. I couldn’t remember which his blog was so I checked it out. And co-incidentally, he posted about Wikipedia, specifically the entry on his dad. And indeed, Mark’s editing history is in line with Aaron Swartz’s prediction. Two interesting things:
He was among the first to enter the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald with the CBS News correspondent Edward R. Murrow.
And this makes me think of Glenn Greenwald on David Warren for some reason:
York turned down a Purple Heart so as to not worry his mother.
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Wednesday, 06 September 2006
Here We Go
Who says blogs aren’t important? Yesterday, Iain Dale If They Were Men of Honour They Would Resign. (I originally read that the wrong way: not as ’men’ who have ’honour’ but as ’men of honour’ - ie mafiosi.) Today: Minister resigns in attempt to force Blair exit.
Watson, the chase is afoot!
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We Were Going To Sack You Anyway
Blair hits out over ’disloyalty’.
Tony Blair has branded ex-junior minister Tom Watson "disloyal, discourteous and wrong" for signing a round robin letter urging the PM to go. ...
Just minutes after Mr Watson announced his decision to quit, Mr Blair said he was going to sack him anyway.
Shorter Blair: "Nyah, nyah". Hilarious.
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Hush
There’s a rumour going round (which has been in my inbox twice now) that a much more senior figure may be the next to act like a "man* of honour". Senior, I’ve heard, means holding a seat before 1997, and even being in the Shadow Cabinet. Blair’s sacked his way through a lot of the old guard by now, so at least we can discount Charles Clarke and David Blunkett, not that anyone expected honour from them. So whoever it is must be a survivor, and something of a loyalist to be in government rather than on the backbenches. Margaret Beckett has just been promoted to Defence, despite showing no interest in the subject before, so it’s not likely to be her. Gordon won’t step down. Does Jack Straw smart from being moved from Foreign Secretary and effectively demoted? I know I wouldn’t care to be Leader of the House of Commons right now. Hints from knowledgeable readers would be appreciated.
*Or of course, a woman.
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1971
Chris Applegate and Doctor Vee have been remembering the news from the years when they were nine.
Here are some the things I might have noticed between 9 April 1971 and 9 April 1972.
1971:
April 9 - Charles Manson is sentenced to death but the sentence is commuted to life imprisonment.
April 19 - Followers of Charles Manson, the Manson Family, are sentenced to the gas chamber.
April 20 - Supreme Court of the United States rules unanimously that busing of students may be ordered to achieve racial desegregation.
April 24 - Soyuz 10 docks with Salyut 1.
April 24 ’ Five hundred thousand people in Washington, DC and 125,000 in San Francisco march against the Vietnam War.
May 19 - Mars probe program: Mars 2 is launched by the Soviet Union.
May 30 - Mariner program: Mariner 9 is launched toward Mars.
May 31 - The birth of Bangladesh is declared by the government in exile, in territory formerly part of Pakistan.
July 3 - Doors musician Jim Morrison is found dead in his Paris apartment.
July 6 - Louis Armstrong dies of a heart attack.
September 24 - Britain expels 90 KGB and GRU officials; 15 are not allowed to return.
October 31 - A bomb explodes at the top of the Post Office Tower in London.
November 3 - The UNIX Programmer’s Manual is published.
November 13 - Mariner program: Mariner 9 becomes the first spacecraft to enter Mars orbit successfully.
1972:
November 15 - Intel releases the world’s first microprocessor, the Intel 4004.
January 30 - Bloody Sunday - the British Army kills 13 unarmed Roman Catholic civil rights marchers in Derry, Northern Ireland.
February 1 - First scientific hand-held calculator (HP-35) is introduced (price $395).
March 2 - The Pioneer 10 spacecraft is launched. It will be the first man-made satellite to leave the solar system.
I don’t remember any of those. Not even the space ones. If I remember ’Bloody Sunday’ for instance, the original impression has been buried under what came later. (Though I think the name wasn’t taken up immediately in the British press, even the Guardian or the Observer, and I think initial reaction was cooler than subsequent revisions would have us believe.)
I certainly watched Tomorrow’s World and only a few years later, we owned several more-reasonably priced calculators, but if I heard of either of the next two, they meant nothing to me.
unknown date 1971 - Ray Tomlinson sends the first e-mail.
1972 April 3 - The first cellular phone call is made in New York.
My parents took the heavies, I read the Sunday Post. I had no interest in current affairs (apart from the moon landings) until my mid-teens.
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David Horowitz Strikes!
If it’s in the BBC, it must be true: liberal lecturers targeted.
...has called for liberal and secular university lecturers to be removed.
He told a group of students that they should organise campaigns to demand that the liberal teachers be sacked.
..."A student must yell against liberal thoughts and the liberal economy," ...
"A student must ask why a secular teacher gives low marks to a student that does not have the same ideas as him."
Oh all right, it’s some other former radical, now a conservative with a beard.
Ripston expected students to agree with her position on the day’s topic and they almost always obliged. Abortion? Great! Proposition 209 (Ward Connerly’s anti-racial preferences initiative): Bad! Dissent was rare.
A student must yell against liberal thoughts and the liberal economy:
Campus conservatives know who to watch out for: deans, provosts, professors who happen to be Democrat congressmen. The only job more fulfilling than teaching liberalism is legislating it, right Dr. Price? (U.S. Rep. David Price (D-N.C.) is a member of the Political Science department at Duke University.)
However, too few are aware of the growing support network available to abused, conservative students.
Thankfully, there is a happy land where there will be none of these atheist, lefties with their post-modernism and science. Just good old’ military training and religion.
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Broken Promises
I know you’re all sick of resignations and rumours of resignations. I know Blogger4Labour is. I imagine that he hates this Amateur Kremlinology and whispering by insiders.
So let’s discuss old-fashioned politics. What’s the one thing everyone knows about politicians? They lie. And the second thing? That they break promises. tehgrauniad, at least keeps up with the old kind of story as well as the new. Kelly reneges on social housing promise.
Ruth Kelly has reneged on a promise of widespread consultation on the politically sensitive issue of how the government should spend billions of pounds on new social housing for the poorest people in the country.
In June, the communities secretary promised a chance for everybody from council tenants to landlords to give their views on plans to make social housing a priority in Gordon Brown’s spending review next year.
That’s the government for you, always having consultations.
With just under a fortnight to go before consultation finishes, Peter Wycherley, a senior civil servant at the department for communities and local government, admitted that only three discussion meetings were being held - in Newcastle, Cambridge and Bolton. The Bolton meeting will be held a week after the consultation period is over. He told Alan Walters, chair of Defend Council Housing, in an e-mail: "I am not aware that other Government Offices intend to hold events specifically on the discussion paper."
Suspicion that the government is biased against council tenants has been fuelled by a decision by Go East, the regional office organising the Cambridge meeting, to prevent an elected tenant representative on Cambridge’s housing management board from attending the consultation.
John Marais, an opponent of selling off council housing estates was told: "As the discussion document is targeted towards local authority (LA) and Registered Social Landlord (RSL) practitioners, we have taken the decision to limit attendance to LA and RSL officers and LA members. We anticipate that the audience will consist of a number of Tenant Participation Officers, who will be in a position to offer their expertise in developing and strengthening the role of tenants".
Hold on, who’s affected here? Tenants. So, naturally, they’re not invited to a consultation.
In fact the department’s website does not list the proposals under their current consultation exercises seeking the views of the general public. It lists the proposals as a discussion document aimed at a more specialist audience.
This is the page that they mean, I think. It does say:
Specifically we are looking for views on:
*getting the most out of existing public sector investment and assets;
*ways to improve planning for affordable housing at the local level,including a stronger role for local authorities;
*ways to lever in additional resources and assets to support social and affordable housing in particular from the private sector; and
*ways to strengthen tenants role in decisions on social housing.
Which doesn’t sound like it’s aimed at the man on the Clapham omnibus. Though it goes on:
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Thursday, 07 September 2006
Advice For Martin Amis
Via Tim F of Balloon Juice, Decision ’08 About That Docudrama:
Again, the partisan aspect interests me not at all; this is 9/11, and ’reasonably accurate’ isn’t good enough. Either go completely fiction or stick to the facts.
He’s writing about Disney’s "The Path to 9/11", not about Amis’s novel "Mohammed Atta Goes To The Bathroom" but it still applies.
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Falling Academic Standards
That rat Bérubé is stealing my jokes.*
*Hmm, the timestamp suggests he got there first. Curses!
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Advertising Your Blog
Via Jack Schofield, Lore SjΓΆberg on The Ultimate Blog Post.
Another approach for advertising your blog is to mention it as much as possible in conversation; you’d be surprised how many people are fascinated to hear you have a blog and want to know more, especially if you were expecting the number to be greater than zero.
The ultimate blog posts are teh funny:
Daily Kos: Bush caught in three-way with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.
Little Green Footballs: Bush enjoys triumphant three-way with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.
Cute Overload took it very well, with a post titled A kitten licks a puppy while the puppy licks a bunny. (And this surely is class.)
Jason Kottke appears to be on vacation. I wouldn’t stake the mortgage on his reaction being as understanding.
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Friday, 08 September 2006
Children Are Our Future
And thank god for that:
Within 15 minutes the volume had risen, the placards were multplying, Blairite aides were starting to gulp and we had a very satisfactory near-riot in progress. Schoolchildren were chanting ’Tony, Tony, Tony, out! out! out!’...
Police reinforcements marched in from the south. A grown-up was trying to bribe the children, offering them a trip to McDonalds if they would leave the scene. They declined, egged on by a woman from International Socialist Resistance who had a megaphone.
(Via Nosemonkey.) Tony, children know not to accept offers of goodies in return for later doing what someone wants. How about those trips to Cliff Richard’s Barbados home, and then your co-incidental interest in his royalties?
Why oh why couldn’t he have gone to Glasgow? They still throw tomatoes there.
And none of your five-a-day crap either. Still in the tin.
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Various Updates
Following my last post, Simon Hoggart is also (as expected) good on Blair’s brief appearance yesterday.
Via Ellis Sharp, Kate is not doing well with David Lodge.
First, there is the obligatory peeing scene. What is it about male characters of a certain age that we must, within pages of meeting them, accompany them to the toilet for a pee? ...
Shortly after the peeing ceases, Vic shaves, and he is described to us as he appears to himself in the mirror. Is this not unforgivably cliché? The sort of thing that creative writing students are told to avoid at all costs?
Martin Amis published a collection of essays, originally (and not at all clichéd) titled The War Against Cliché.
Amis doesn’t give us a peeing scene: he is still a young turk, after all, an enfant terrible. With a daring leap of originality, he gives us a shitting scene.
Now, emitting a sigh of unqualified grimness, he crouched on the bowl. He didn’t even bother with his usual scowling and straining and shuddering, partly because his head felt dangerously engorged.
Now Amis wouldn’t tell us how his protagonist appears to himself in a mirror, would he? This is the man who decalred that "all writing is a campaign against cliché".
The worst was yet to come: shaving. Shaving was the worst because it necessarily involved him in the contemplation of his own face. He looked downwards while he lathered his cheeks, but then the chin came up and there it was, revealed in vertical strips: the face of Muhammad Atta.
Oh dear.
I meant to do more research before linking to Were Martin Amis and John Updike taken in by blowback from an anti-Muslim disinformation campaign? but it seems plausible.
Ellis is also good on the late Paul Foot’s use of ’literally’ and his ’stunning’ editor. (See also Jeffrey Archer.)
This is old, but essentially right: One look at Blair’s A-team tells you he is in deep trouble. Where are the retired elder statesmen, or some of the more intelligent lords? Or even the ambitious new entrants like David Miliband?
If Tony Blair had read David Copperfield, he wouldn’t tell the world that he’s ever so ’umble. If he knew King Lear, he wouldn’t
have allowed his succession to degenerate into loyalty declaration auction. And now I can add, if he’d read Silver Blaze, he’d know something was wrong.
On Blair, I voted against devolution (I live in Cardiff), which I thought would be disastrous. Michael White makes some interesting predictions.
More than selfish calculations are at stake. If Labour loses control of the devolved governments it set up after 1997 it will create constitutional tensions with London which a resurgent Tory party will exploit as it demands "English votes for English legislation" (ie no Scots) at Westminster.
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Is Anybody There?
BBC: Earth-like planets may be common. More details from PZ Myers. Like Gary Farber I remember an Isaac Asimov essay about the role of (Lunar) tides on the development of life. Now, it seems to me, that however common earth sized planets are in the galaxy or universe, earth-moon systems with significant tides (I think Pluto is the only planet to have a moon large enough to ... and Pluto isn’t a planet any more!) must be very rare. However, if Jovian planets exist closer to their primaries and they can have arbitrarily large moons, then the odds for earth-sized bodies (large enough to retain a significant atmosphere) with tidal systems seem much better.
Now, I’m no expert here. The last time I read this sort of stuff seriously was before I even started calculus. I remember all the Asimov books (er, some, there were a lot), and Carl Sagan’s wonderful prosyletising before and after the Pioneer programme left earth. However, I’m a bit sceptical about this habitable zone thing. The kid’s book I remember first described this showed a zone comprising Mars, Earth, and Venus labelled "Life can exist". (I was sceptical enough to note that we were the centre, the outliers on either side.) Mars’ problem seems to be partly size: it can’t hold on to an atmosphere. Venus: runaway greenhouse warming (where the idea came from). But a big Mars (and how much gravity could life stand? We know life is very adaptable) might hold an atmosphere and runaway global warming from a very cold start might result in liquid water temperatures - depending on atmospheric pressure at surface. I’m merely suggesting that the ’Habitable Zone’ may be wider than we expect. (These are, doubtless, cautious scientific guesses.)
So, life may be everywhere. Why don’t we see it? Many of the likely planets in these systems are, compared to the water-covered earth, waterlogged: possibly miles deep under oceans everywhere. Back to the Beeb Climate change caused civilisation, scientist says:
An increase in harsh, arid conditions across the globe around 5,000 years ago forced people to start living in stable communities around remaining water sources.
It wasn’t an obelisk?
I suspect that vertebrate life may be very rare (almost all sci-fi aliens are humanoid, and most of the rest are vertebrate). Cephalopods seem intelligent, and perhaps skeletons encounter difficulties under higher gravities. (Since lower gravities have the atmosphere problem, higher gravities seem likely to be the norm.) Non-vertebrates wouldn’t have bone decay due to long zero-gravity exposure. I’d like someone to be out there, but even stretching "someone" to include the very very alien, I doubt it.
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Torture
Tim F finds good stuff. First up Gregory Djerejian. (Seriously, I’d like to see both Djerejian and Chris Dillow in our papers. If I went back to buying a newspaper on a daily basis, they’re the sort of writers who would swing it for me. I was going to say that if they went to rival titles I couldn’t choose between them, but that’s not quite true. I’m more interested in international affairs than I am in economics, so I’d go with Gregory. Sorry Chris.)
Good quote from Kevin Drum too:
Is this torture? There’s an easy question that provides some moral clarity here: If someone else did this to American prisoners, would you consider it torture? If you would, then it’s torture when we do it too.
Gregory has been in great form lately. I hate the imperative voice and the whole RTWT thing: it implies I have some sort of right to tell you what to do - and I deny that. However, should you be interested in a recommendation of mine, then I recommend the The Belgravia Dispatch.*
One problem with torture is that it has two obvious deficiencies: a) it doesn’t work, and b) it’s immoral. If it had only one of these we’d be on surer ground. But its proponents want to suggest that if it did work (and hey we’re the good guys, we’re also way more sophisticated than the Nazis or those Caliphate clownz), the other objection would collapse, because we’d quickly know if someone was innocent and stop torturing them. And what sort of person objects to the suffering of a potential mass murderer if it saves some arbitrarily large number of lives? I’d counsel that we just go for the "it doesn’t work" approach, but there are always people who don’t crack, unlike the apocryphal (and probably real) Soviet party members who all confessed in Stalin’s joke. (Apologies: I’m too tired to find links.)
I don’t know the right answer to this, but I think we all lose some sort of seriousness every time someone gets tortured in the interest of the west. My view is simple: if they wish us harm, we need evidence for this, and they can’t blow up planes if they’re inside prison; if they’re not, the idea of hurting them or holding them a moment longer than is necessary to convince us that their innocence is no less than ours is, is disgusting.
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Saturday, 09 September 2006
A Ferocious Temper And A Jealous Streak
Via Ellis Sharp, Ted Hughes revealed as a domestic tyrant who laid down law to mistress. (Speaking of Control Freaks...)
The most interesting thing in the article is a link at the bottom of the page: My father was not a monster, says daughter of Ted Hughes.
After Plath’s death, she adds, he "kept the memory alive of the mother who had left me", making everything to do with her appear "miraculous". He even played a record of Plath reading her poetry.
Though she pays tribute to Plath’s poetry and to the courage with which she fought depression, Frieda Hughes says that she has revised her once-perfect image of her mother: she "had a ferocious temper and a jealous streak". And Plath, she reminds us, twice destroyed her husband’s work - once by ripping it up and once by burning it.
The story in today’s Telegraph is sourced from "the first biography of Assia Wevill, Hughes’s mistress for six years" which the paper prints a 13-page extract starting here. I didn’t know that Wevill, like Plath, gassed herself. If there’s any substance to the extracts, Frieda Hughes’ portrait, while understandable, belongs in the bin.
The first day-and-a-half of the visit passed smoothly enough. "On Sunday morning, we got up late and hung about until lunch," says David Wevill. "Assia was in the kitchen making a salad, and Ted was with her. Sylvia and I were sitting outside chatting.
"We could hear Assia and Ted’s muffled voices, and suddenly Sylvia went very still. She touched me on the knee and said, ’I’ll be back.’ She jumped from her chair and ran into the kitchen as if she remembered that she had left some fire burning."
Clearly, this fits with Freida’s description of her mother’s possession of "a ferocious temper and a jealous streak".
A sexual predator by nature, Ted found his first opportunity to stalk his prey five weeks later, when he had a couple of hours to kill in London after making a recording at the BBC. He hurried to the agency where Assia was working, only to discover that she wasn’t available.
Undaunted, he scribbled a note and left it with the receptionist. And intimate though it was, Assia showed it to her friends. It read: "I have come to see you, despite all marriages."
Jealousy is not an attractive trait, but you can understand her being hurt. Sylvia did indeed destroy her husband’s work.
On July 9, Sylvia had a phone call in Devon that changed everything: the voice on the other end appeared to be a woman pretending to be a man ’ and she was asking for Ted. In a fury, Sylvia ripped the cord of the phone out of the wall and then raced to the bedroom.
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Monday, 11 September 2006
Don’T Read Kaye Grogan!
I said don’t. You don’t listen to me, do you? And now look what you’ve done.
Unlike The Editors the first sentence almost makes sense - to me!
The Democrats always want you to believe that they are straight-shooters - unless of course the pistol is aimed at them, then they want those who couldn’t hit the side of a barn door if their life depended on it, pulling the trigger.
I don’t claim to be a straight-shooter, but, hell, I agree with the rest of that. Who doesn’t?
The very idea that the movie producers would use public records as the deciding factor to make sure they were being as close to the actual facts as possible when composing the movie. Don’t they know that the facts have to be spun by public relation news hounds for Democrats - before they get the green light for "lights - camera - and action?"
Finite verbs are bad, see, because they’re limited, unlike god, who is infinite. That’s why Kaye kept one out of the first sentence there. There are only two counter-claims to an otherwise very strong argument: Government pressure on networks is a tactic pioneered by the GOP, and as the USA Today TV critic put it, "he movie is defeated by its subject and by its willingness to twist that subject to score political points."
When the shoe is on the other foot, the Democrats start getting bunions - raising cane and demanding that their good name and image be restored. What good name? - and forget the image altogether.
If I understand Kaye (and who does?) she claims to be a Christian. Spelling may not be Christian virtue, but knowing the names of characters in the Bible ought to be.
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Deception And Reality
C’mon, life in blogland would be less fun without Peter Hain. Digging back through my archives, I found I’d blogged the police merger fiasco here. Let us not forget that Hain [was] optimistic on police merger, though Charles Clarke wasn’t optimistic and was set to force police merger.
But Mr Clarke has said a single force is the best way to police Wales.
No one else agreed. Now we have: Axed police mergers cost millions. Stupid idea which consultation said was unpopular, expensive, and unlikely to achieve anything. But does that matter to the Minister for Cuprinol? Or the ex-minister for smearing Gordon Brown?
You know, I can see the attraction of John Reid. While his colleagues are definitely stupid bastards, he doesn’t seem to be stupid.
And what if Charles Clarke hadn’t squandered millions? I know someone in need of a few million quid.
Do they learn?
Prime Minister Tony Blair has since said the mergers are "not off the agenda" and that greater strategic co-operation between forces is needed.
That’s a ’no’.
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Dave Gorman, Photographer, Terror Suspect, And Genius
I’ve already linked to Dave Gorman’s photo of Battersea Power Station and Grosvenor Bridge in the sidebar (and, therefore, the Newsroll), but his Photos on Flickr are splendid. (He’s clearly improving, so the most recent are generally the best.) Well worth a few minutes of your time.
Also, I don’t see how genius can get any better than it was last week with Johnny Vegas. Though ’not quite as good’ would still leave it one of the funniest things on the radio.
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Tuesday, 12 September 2006
Vintage Stuff
Via Fontana Labs and Robert Farley, these outtakes are hilarious.
See the thing on the YouTube site, because you can find his successful commercials. He didn’t flip any fingers at the cameras, though, and say what you like about those ads, the man was a genius, and America has not produced his like since.
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Of T-Shirts And Tyrannies
Chris has unusual post on a T-shirt. Unusual because below par, and, I think, wrong. He quotes Bryan Caplan.
A caricature of hypocrisy: Overweight, middle-aged man in a Che Guevara t-shirt, talking on a cell-phone in his illegally-parked BMW.
Like commenters on both sites, I don’t think I see this. I mean Che would always have parked legally, wouldn’t he? And don’t the ’Motorcycle Diaries’ testify that he was not just a green before the movement, but the sort of guy who’d give his car to the first beggar he saw? Talking on cell phones is reactionary how? Being alive after 30, that pisses of the young, so that’s in his favour. And, finally overweight? Ah, I get it, he should have worn a Michael Moore T-shirt.
Seriously, why do people wear T-shirts? I mean ones with messages or pictures? If you saw someone (of any size) wearing a T-shirt with the Twin Towers would you think they were: a) an architecture student, b) a tourist who doesn’t watch the news, c) demonstrating patriotism, or d) saying "Fuck you, Osama"? Most of the fun of T-shirts is giving socially acceptable offence. Blair or Thatcher T-shirts are - almost exlusively - worn by their detractors. Bush is slightly different. Going by the ads on political blogs across the pond, Bush swings both ways. But wearing him is meant to offend the other lot, so earning points with your own side.
Where is this taking us? Sadly, to Martin Amis. To be fair, Martin starts as he means to go on. Pretty closely to unreadably from the first paragraph.
It was mid-October 2001, and night was closing in on the border city of Peshawar, in Pakistan, as my friend - a reporter and political man of letters - approached a market stall and began to haggle over a batch of T-shirts bearing the likeness of Osama bin Laden. It is forbidden, in Sunni Islam, to depict the human form, lest it lead to idolatry; but here was Osama’s lordly visage, on display and on sale right outside the mosque. The mosque now emptied, after evening prayers, and my friend was very suddenly and very thoroughly surrounded by a shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood: the young men of Peshawar.
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Wednesday, 13 September 2006
Now It’S Getting Fun
Two stories from the Torygraph (increasingly unsympathetic to the government, although not quite behind Cameron).
Lord Chancellor condemns ’shocking’ Guantanamo.
The minister in charge of Britain’s legal system has condemned the US detention camp Guantanamo Bay as a "shocking affront to democracy".
Ie: US policy offends, rather than spreads, democracy.
The Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, voiced the most outspoken criticism of US terror policy yet made by a senior British minister.
Mmm. Why now, I wonder?
In a keynote speech delivered today in Sydney, Australia, Lord Falconer said: "It is a part of the acceptance of the rule of law that the courts will be able to exercise jurisdiction over the executive.
And in Australia too. One of the other countries fully on-side in the TWAT/GWOT.
In June this year the Lord Chancellor denounced the camp in Cuba as a "recruiting agent" for terrorism, and described the existence of the base as "intolerable and wrong".
This puts him into the "the way TWAT has been executed by President Bush encourages more attacks" camp.
And Beckett admits ’regrets’ over Iraq.
The problem for me is: is this spin? Is she admitting ’regrets’ because it seems more humble, having seen the reactions that Bush’s arrogant approach has provoked?
"But I also regret that the tenor of debate about Iraq is now of a kind that almost no longer recognises there was anything wrong with the regime of Saddam Hussein."
I consider this unfair. Most people I know recognise that Saddam was a foul dictator - and we think the same of the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and so on and so forth. It’s not that I wanted him in power, I just thought that the costs and benefits to us (and I only care about this country, really) made the venture an utter waste of life. I’m really going to have to find Christopher Hitchens’ arguments against Gulf War I (see here). He wasn’t a fan of Saddam (or of Saddam’s Republican backers) then, either. Though I’ve never seen him use the ’objectively pro-Saddam’ line against himself.
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Thursday, 14 September 2006
When Did You Stop Throwing Jews Down Wells?
Via John Cole, this is unbelievable. Yes, it’s in the reliable Daily Mail. I checked Google News: I can’t find any quotes - reputable - quotes agency carrying it. Wonkette does, but I don’t count her as reliable. Ditto both for the Mirror. The Mail says:
Cohen’s representatives refused to allow him or his alter ego to respond to the controversy because it’s not close enough to the film’s release date.
A commenter on John’s thread gainsays this, fortuneately the magic of the interwebs gives you Gary Farber who both gets the quote right, and shows that it was pre-emptive.
Are you propagating bigotry in the film? "Yeah." How will the movie affect Kazakhstan’s international reputation? "I hope it will help the people know about Kazakhstan and know that we are now a civilized country like everyone else.... Homosexuals do not have to wear blue hats and the age of consent has been raised to 11 years old."
More objective assessments via the CIA Factbook: Kazakhstan. I couldn’t find anything on the Amnesty site. Wikipedia notes:
In 1999, Kazakhstan applied for observer status at the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly. The official response of the Assembly was that Kazakhstan could apply for full membership, because it is partially located in Europe, but that they would not be granted any status whatsoever at the Council until their democracy and human rights records improved.
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What Orson Welles Missed In School
Woman in play: Good bye, I hope you had a good time.
Soldier in play: Yes, I had a good time.
Soldier in play: Oh, my god, what is this sore on my lip?
Doctor in play: You have a social disease, my friend. If you do not treat it, you will go blind, or insane!
Applause
Sergeant: Well men, that is the end of the play. Have a good time on your furlough, but look after yourselves.
Private 1: What did you think of the play?
Private 2: It was weak. I was never interested, although the part of the doctor was played with gusto and verve and the girl had a delightful cameo role. A puckish satire of contemporary mores, a drool spoof aimed more at the heart than at the head.
Private 1: As for me, I’m planning to spend the next three days in a brothel. Care to go with me?
BBC: Alcohol education ’not working’.
Tougher methods of teaching children about alcohol and tobacco are needed to combat the rise in consumption, a government advisory panel says. ...
The government has spent ’£70m on drugs education since 1997.
Having reviewed research from across the world, a committee of doctors and scientists on the ACMD concluded that the success of school-based schemes was "slight or non-existent" and could even be "counter-productive".
So the solution? Have twice as much education! Charles Clarke couldn’t see the point of silly subject like history: this is Year Zero. So cut that, cut maths and chemistry and stuff as well. More citizenry classes. Let’s make the people good. Young face tougher drink, smoking laws.
They [the "government’s experts"] also say it is time to raise the legal age for buying tobacco from 16 to 18 ....
The Beeb again:
Between a fifth and a quarter of 15-year-olds are regular smokers, half drink alcohol at least once a week and nearly a quarter have used illegal drugs in the past month.
If Ruth Kelly or anyone else with a reigious education is reading: 15 < 16 < 18. Expert: one who persists in a particularly asinine opinion when all evidence is against it. Still, it’s a gold mine for someone. What would I do with 70M? What wouldn’t I?
If you don’t get the title, see the YouTube video.
The next scene of the DVD starts:
We started the battle with 12,000 men. When it was over we had 14 survivors. We got a message from the Czar saying "Keep up the good work."
Under New Labour, the Czar would have a team of experts on whether ’good’ is better than ’excellent’ or whether ’splendid’ conveyed the right tone.
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Friday, 15 September 2006
Let Me Be Somebody I Admire
Let me be somebody I admire
Let me be that muscle down the street
Stick another turtle on the fire
Guys like me are mad for turtle meat.
Thanks to Chris Brooke (who has a nice new site for the Virtual Stoa), I’ve had an answer to a (rhetorical, actually) question I posed when I started this Martin Amis thing. (BTW, while I’m here I was wrong in the Conrad reference in that post: it’s not Marlow who relates the story of another in "Heart of Darkness", it’s an unnamed narrator who repeats Marlow’s account. I remembered because the same device is in "The Time Machine" which allows the Time Traveller both the narrate the action and vanish at the end.) Anyway, I wrote:
But who is this friend? One suspects Christopher Hitchens, but it could equally be James Fenton.
It was, of course, Christopher Hitchens and while Amis’s account may bypass the Turnitin software, it’s clearly a lift - apart from the bits that don’t work, such as "when the crowd scowled out its question." "Scowled out a question" may work if you’re retelling your wife’s response to your arrival home at 3am after texting you were going for a "swift half" post work, but it doesn’t work for a crowd, especially when said crowd is also "shoving, jabbing, jeering" and "fizzing."
The Hitchens piece is good, BTW. It inspired someone, possibly in France, going by the URL, to type it out entire, and it has one lovely rhythm-breaking short sentence: "I had a rude question for him too." (Notice how strong an adjective ’rude’ is in context.) I’d like to think the typist was in awe of Hitch’s deathless, but the bottom of page bears two "Terrorism Links" the second of which is Pakistan Facts. There are two naming conventions you should distrust: "Democratic" in any nation-state, and "facts" when applied to teh interwebs. Let me say that the "axis of evil" poll (top right hand corner) is a classic of its genre.
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Monday, 18 September 2006
Magnum Opus
Why did no one tell me that Berke Breathed is cartooning online in the Washington Post? To my eternal shame, I didn’t get Bloom County when it first ran the Grauniad in the 80s. But, in some many ways, he really is the best.
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Bonfire Of The Vanity Publisher
Iain Dale’s choice of Top 100 UK Blogs caused unexpected controversy. Up and down the country, bloggers looked at the A-lists and said, as one, Who are these people?
An unnamed blogger commented: Buy it to read, buy it to burn, it’s all royalties.
Via Jarndyce.
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Tuesday, 19 September 2006
Arthur Silber Returns
First the good news: he’s not dead. Then more good news: he’s still pissed (off) with everything. He still doesn’t like (ex) Trots. Sadly, he deleted his old archives, and all I’ve got is an extract in a post of mine.
It is undeniably true that many of today’s neoconservatives are former liberals and leftists, and some of them are Trotskyites like Hitchens himself. I have analyzed the neofascist program set forth by Irving Kristol in some detail, and Kristol’s intellectual journey is typical of this group.
As I have said on a number of occasions, in their transition from left to right, their worship of the State and of authoritarianism generally is the one constant that has remained unchanged for these leftists-turned-neoconservatives. In addition, as I explained here, these newly-minted rightists were leftists of a particular kind: they were vicious nihilists - and nihilists they remain. David Horowitz is the perfect representative of this kind of intellectually backward thug. In fact, in that earlier essay I noted with a bit of astonishment that Horowitz himself has chosen to advertise his former associations.
Arthur likes Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America. Arthur extracts more than I’m prepared to, but this is good.
To be sure, Bush’s liberal supporters have been disappointed by his efforts. Every newspaper I have listed and many others besides have carried editorials criticising Bush’s policy on imprisonment, his use of torture and above all the sheer ineptitude of the president’s war. But here, too, the Cold War offers a revealing analogy. Like Stalin’s Western admirers who, in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, resented the Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for discrediting their Marxism, so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War ’ among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment ’ have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ’preventive war’ a bad name.
As I remember, there were two reasons for being in the anti-war camp in 2003. One was that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and co did not have records of supporting democracy (at home or abroad) and there was no good reason to believe they were about to start. Tony Blair interest’s in Saddam is documented in John Kampfner’s Blair’s Wars, p7:
Many of his [Blair’s] colleagues , however, had taken up these causes. The gassing of the Kurds at Halabja in March 1988 by Saddam Hussein’s forces exercised a large number of Labour MPs. Eight parliamentary motions were tabled condemning it. ... Other motions condemned the British and American governments[*] for supplying Saddam with chemical weapons. One called for the immediate termination of all financial aid to the Iraqi government, including a ’£340 million export credit guarantee signed a month after Halabja.
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The Hivites, And The Jebusites
I thought about writing something on the Pope, but this is more fun. It’s also serendipidous, which you can take as divine guidance or whatever moves your world.
First up, the French. Er, I mean, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Adopted by Resolution 260 (III) A of the U.N. General Assembly on 9 December 1948)*. Via Normblog, home of the how would you rid the world of the UN?
question.
Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
And here is Scary Bible Quotes (King James Version) (via Brian Leiter). NB this only looks good in Firefox for me; in Safari all the text is in a narrow column on the right. Deuteronomy 20:10-17.
When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee. And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee. Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations. But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee.
Via Lindsay, Giles Fraser says:
For in claiming that Islam may be beyond reason, and then to claim that to act without reason is to act contrary to the will of God, is pretty close to the assertion that this religion is godless. And that’s not how different faiths ought to speak to each other ...
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Wednesday, 20 September 2006
Tell Tale Signs Of Extremism
But, Comrade Stalin,
stammered Beria, five suspects have already confessed to stealing it.
Torygraph: Reid: parents must heed ’tell-tale signs’ of extremism.
John Reid, the Home Secretary, will challenge British Muslims today to do more to identify potential terrorists.
Mr Reid will meet an audience of specially-invited Muslims in London’s East End to urge parents to "look for the tell-tale signs" of radicalisation in their children.
My emphasis. That almost makes sense - up to ’specially invited.’ Since the parents are expected to agree (presumably) to look for signs of extremism in their offspring, they’re clearly not ’radicals’ (or, more colloquially, ’nutters’) themselves. (Ooh Radio 4 just now: he has been barracked
by a well-known activist
, who is a allegedly a member of a banned organisation. Why did they invite him?)
He is expected to tell parents to search for signs that their children are being recruited by "fanatics" who will "brainwash" them and convince them to serve as suicide bombers.
Strike is expected to tell
for told
, according to the BBC. This still seems barking. Parents do look out for their kids - whether they join Islamic loonies, the Moonies, Scientologists, or just have the wrong partner (not that it ever makes much difference). I can’t see the point of John Reid offering a sermon on parenting. Surely as Defence Secretary he learned that sensible parents object to their children joining the military. If he’s talking to parents who look out for their children’s well-being, he’s preaching to the choir as they say. Also, some Islamic extremists who support or carry out violence are converts. Tell everyone, John, or don’t bother.
Speaking of tell tale signs
and because I can never resist a pun, even on matters as serious as this They told him yes, he could invent a story
: Katherine of Obsidian Wings continues the Maher Arar story.
He also seems to have been sent to be tortured in Palestine Branch partly because of false confessions that two other Canadian citizens made under torture in the same prison.
Their names are Ahmad Abou El-Maati and Abdullah Almalki. Unlike Arar, they both traveled to Syria voluntarily. El-Maati flew to Damascus for an arranged marriage in November 2001. Almalki went there to visit relatives in May 2002. Both were arrested by Syrian intelligence forces when they arrived at the Damascus airport, and taken to a prison called the Palestine Branch. Both have since been released, returned to Canada, and given detailed chronologies of their experiences in Syria to their lawyers. (Here is a PDF of El-Maati’s chronology; here is a PDF of Almalki’s).
False confession under torture, betraying your family to the authorities (naturally John Reid’s solution is not talk to your son, and sort it out yourselves
, but leave it to use, we’re from the government, and here to help
), now is a good time to remember John Reid’s former political hero was Josef Stalin.
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Local Man Slightly Hurt As World Ends
Gotta love the local press. Via John Cole, the Sacramento News and Review: The end of time approaches.
Last month, high-profile evangelical Christian minister Jerry Falwell announced that the beginning of the end of the world as we know it likely has begun and that Christians should
proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ and prepare for his imminent return.If the televangelist’s prediction is accurate, thousands of Sacramentans soon may experience what evangelical Christians call the Rapture: Believers will spontaneously disappear from their homes and workplaces and be carried to heaven, while the remaining population will be left behind to endure trauma and hardships never before experienced by mankind.
I think this means the reporter, Stephen James, doesn’t take the Rapture
thing seriously. I hope it isn’t some quirk of the Sacramento press that they otherwise run stories like Sacramentan killed as terrorists fly planes into World Trade Center, Pentagon
.
The online Rapture Index - a kind of Dow Jones Industrial Average of end-time activity that tracks pre-Rapture conditions that portend the end of days, such as drought, famine and war - is hovering within 20 points of its all-time high.
Actually, it’s not. It says, Record High 182... 2006 High 160
so even though the article is a little old (end of August), it hasn’t been within 22 points of its all-time high
so far this year.
Falwell’s ominous prophecy is based primarily on the current conflicts in the Middle East - mainly the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah - which parallel Evangelical beliefs about the final battle between good and evil.
You know, that war is over; Israel lost, but surely it’s a bit racist to call Israel actually evil isn’t it? And if all the evil in the world is in the Middle East how come bad things happen elsewhere? Where do I fit in to this? I know I’m on the side of evil, but can’t I fight right here? Where I live, it looks like we’re winning.
Keith Watenpaugh, an associate professor of religious studies at UC Davis, believes the near-term timeframe for the showdown between good and evil may be exaggerated, especially since the end of days has been wrongly predicted before. Early Muslims, he said, believed they were living in the end times centuries ago, and more than one Christian denomination has predicted the world would end at a specific time.
... Watenpaugh does, however, see some unsettling similarities between Bush and Ahmadinejad.
They’re both lesser intellectual lights in many ways, and they want to appeal to very popular versions of their respective religions,he said.I think sometimes both of them have sort of an incomplete understanding of larger theological issues.
My emphasis.
Bill Maher said the same thing, and atheist Christopher Hitchens wigged out. Strange days indeed, my friends.
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Life Sucks
Here. That’s the problem with being an atheist. People of Religion (I think that’s the tolerant phrase, now) can say they pray
for someone, but that’s just talking to yourself. Saying I care
isn’t enough.
And here (via Gary Farber).
And here. That is, where I live. People suck.
I went out to get some goats’ milk from the local Tesco and coming out and crossing Penarth Road, I could see the blue lights of fire engines and an ambulance. So I went to look, as you do. I thought it was a fire in the cafe on the junction (and diagonally opposite this shop which has since changed its name) and more or less here. But they were there for a head on collision at the junction. How, I don’t know, because there are lights and there is always some traffic, and the roads are wide.
That’s bad because car crashes are obviously nasty. But the fire brigade were there because there was a person trapped in one car. They’d taken off the passenger door and a child’s foot was visible where the passenger seat should have been, awfully low down though, as if she were on the floor, and not seat belted in the back. You’d think they’d open a car up like a sardine can easy enough, but getting the driver out took ages. The car was something like a small Vauxhall and not obviously greatly damaged, but they didn’t make much impression with various power tools.
But the crowd were much, much worse. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a fight start behind a police line between rubberneckers. An Asian teenager, presumably Muslim because his mum was with him, but not the sort John Reid has to worry about, because his dress and his mobile said that he was in love with the material West. That mobile phone got him into trouble. He wasn’t the first to take pictures, I think. I’m sure I saw someone else do it first. But he upset someone else, who asked him to show some "respect", and when we, that is, all of us, turned to look, he was exactly what you would have expected. Short of hair, because what age hadn’t taken away was only reluctantly coming back from its last encounter with a razor, and with a head that had obvious enjoyed a few encounters with moving objects. If it wasn’t for the pallid skin tone, he’d have resembled Homer Simpson in a rage, except Homer has a wide range of emotions, and you immediately suspected this guy had only one. Respect
clearly wasn’t the issue.
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Racial Tension At The Black And White Cafe
I wrote the last post in a hurry and a degree of emotional turmoil. Re-reading it, it makes less sense than I’d intended. Beating oneself up is never easy, and I probably didn’t do it enough, but even trying takes the edge off one’s critical reading facilities. Trust me on this.
Because I still haven’t got the revision template cooking (hello Gary Farber: I will, I will), this is a sort of update. Where I wrote An Asian teenager, presumably Muslim because his mum was with him ...
I ahem! meant to add because she obviously was, with a solemn head cover thing which I can’t remember the name of
. But because I thought, Oh the name will come back to me
I left out that subordinate clause. I do that a lot, BTW.
I also didn’t mention - because it didn’t occur to me, that we were standing outside the Black and White Cafe
(which was how I looked for the post code for the Google Map; I ended up using the post code of a furniture store (owned by the ex-boyfriend of a friend of a friend, and where I have bought stuff, but I digress) further up) which just seems so apposite now I’m calmer. I’ve never been in; as a veggie, I’m not keen on greasy spoons really.
I don’t have much to add to that, really. Perhaps that I wished I’d stepped in earlier with something cleverer than Calm down, calm down
* like You know what you said about respect, how about doing just that by not fighting?
But of course, I didn’t.
There was a faint crackle of racial tension when this started. A passive looking black with narcoleptic eyelids and faint wisps of beard advised the teen with the phone to show respect - in the best he’s a nutter, but do as he says
tradition. This should have satisfied honour all round. In a different time it would. But racists feel justified, they feel a momentum behind them, and that it’s OK to start a fight now, because the cavalry are only over the hill. And Muslims feel harried, as well they might, because we keep talking about them. Maybe it was ever thus. IIRC, there were race riots in Cardiff in the 1950s.
John Reid’s speech today was racist. I can’t find a transcript (and, considering that the outline was released to the media beforehand, that’s shameful), so the Scotsman will have to do.
He is expected to say:
There is no nice way of saying this. These fanatics are looking to groom and brainwash children, including your children, for suicide bombing, to kill themselves in order to murder others.
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I Have Sympathy
for ’Brilliant’ scientist jailed over ’animal testing’ attacks. Like the titular bank robber of the song he never hurt nobody
. Three years seems steep for vandalism.
Joseph Harris, a doctor of molecular biology, could not cope with the pressure of working in an industry which tested on animals while holding strict beliefs that laboratory experiments caused unjustified suffering.
There but for - essentially luck - go I.
Jailing him, Judge Ian Alexander said:
You are a highly intelligent and motivated young man but you have developed a warped moral justification as an explanation for your serious criminal acts.
There are non-warped moral justifications? If you saw one, how would you know? Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.
All three companies have since stopped trading with HLS.
At least he achieved something. There’s an old poem:
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But lets the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
If a homeless person beats her dog like whatsisname in L’Etranger, they get an ASBO. If a company listed on the stock market opens monkeys’ brains the way Anthony Hopkins did to Ray Liotta in Hannibal, anyone who protests gets locked up. So good on you, my friend. The world needs more like you.
I wanted to be a psychologist when I was a kid. I had to get permission to get an adult ticket (which started at 12 IIRC) to borrow text books at one point (this was an isolated moment of precocity; I’m really pretty dense). But when I was 14 or so I read something by James Tiptree/Alice Bradley Sheldon about animal experiments which put me off. Even when I eventually studied psychology as a mature student (having tried physics, and, partly through laziness, drink and writing, and partly through disgust that most of the jobs involved the nuclear or defence industries, dropped out), I made sure that I’d never be asked to work on animals before I accepted a place.I have no sympathy. Greasy political bastard.
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So That Nobody Could Doubt It Was A Work Of Philosophy
I’ve had James Tiptree Jr and R.A. Lafferty mixed up in my head for years now. I used to like Tiptree once - I can’t see why so much now - but Lafferty was a god. And this is good: Slow Tuesday Night.
A thoughtful man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox feed-in, and the striking analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions.
"I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting," said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.
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Friday, 22 September 2006
I’M Pushing An Elephant Up The Stairs
Or obligatory blog post #119. Everything you read these days seems to contain the phrase I’m pushing an elephant up the stairs
, but what the hell is this supposed to mean? John Reid on addressing Muslims in Leytonstone: I’m pushing an elephant up the stairs ... over my shoulder a piano falls, crashing to the ground
. Alan Not the Prime Minister (Yet)
Johnson: I’m pushing an elephant up the stairs... I’m breaking through, I’m bending spoons
. Where did this come from? What does this mean?
Other too-common phrases which pollute our journalism:
I can swing my megaphone
. I’m sure you can. What am I supposed to do about it?
Don’t go back to Rockville
. Honey, I’ve never been there.
It’s the end of the world as we know it
and I feel fine.
But that was just a dream, just a dream
Still with the New Labour fallout?
What’s the frequency, Kenneth?
How the hell am I supposed to know?
I sit at my table and wage war on myself
. Don’t we all? Have you tried prozac?
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Save The Tripoli Six
Lawyers call for science to clear AIDS nurses in Libya.
Nature editorial: Libya’s travesty.
Via Cosmic Variance.
Good reporting. No sign of any interest in the English-language press.
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Brain Damage
I don’t think this Telegraph headline will make the print edition.
tehgrauniad, earlier, was more upbeat: BBC presenter out of intensive care.
Last night’s 10 O’Clock News on BBC1 pointedly quoted his Top Gear co-presenter Jeremy Clarkson’s antipathy to health and safety regulations.
Business correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones quoted from an article Clarkson wrote for the Sunday Times in which he described health and safety as
the cancer of a civilised society.Clarkson also referred to the Health & Safety Executive as
the programme prevention department. The HSE will investigate Mr Hammond’s accident.The BBC said in a statement that it would cooperate
fullywith the investigation.
The circumstances of this accident will be fully investigated by the BBC, and this process began last night. We will, of course, be fully cooperating with any investigation by the police and the Health & Safety Executive,the corporation said.Until the BBC’s investigation is complete, it would be inappropriate to comment on the details of what happened.
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Saturday, 23 September 2006
At Home With The Dysfunctionals
Independent: NEC member attacks Blair as father over Euan arrest. Via Peter Black. (Deep Quote link because of the Independent’s silly policy.) This is Blair’s Social Exclusion speech. It’s not, IMO, particularly controversial. Although I suspect it reflects the views of Blair’s researchers more than those of the PM.
A quick run through:
The political and philosophical vision behind this is classic New Labour. ...
Shurely shome mishtake?
And it is not as if there is no evidence base on which to draw. The truth is that around the world, in societies similar to our own, such social exclusion is common. There is now a wealth of empirical data to analyse. The purport of it is clear. You can detect and predict the children and families likely to go wrong. The vast majority offered help, take it. And early intervention is far more effective than the colossal expenditure of effort and resource once they have gone wrong. This is the lesson from Europe, the USA, New Zealand and many other countries.
I don’t think I need to point out that I agree with this: both the actual fact gathering and the conclusions drawn. This is what politicians should do.
It was to define the necessities of life that Seerbohm Rowntree undertook his famous survey here in York in 1899. ... Applying this severe criterion, Rowntree found that 9.9 per cent of the population of York were in primary poverty and that a further 3.2 per cent were near the line. ... The poor were working, usually very hard, and it was inadequate wages that caused the poverty. This fact was emphasised again in the 1960s by Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith’s revelation that about two million people were in fact living below the National Assistance scale.
He goes on to cite Beveridge and the Nobel economist James Heckman. This is one of his most historically literate speeches. I don’t think he does ’stigmatise’ single mothers. I don’t think all his ideas are practical and I think phrases like the excluded of the excluded, the deeply excluded
are closer to self-parody than I would recommend. Change that comma to an and
and you have the perfect Jean Genet title.
I can’t find the interview where Blair is alleged to have suggested that that unmarried mothers went into prostitution
.
But this from the Indy is great fun, and regardless of whether Ms Yeo was right to blame Blair in the way she did, she contributed to the sum of human happinesss.
A grim-faced Mr Blair had been taking questions on his leader’s report to the NEC. "Blair was reduced to a gibbering wreck," said one eye witness. "Harriet said she was an unmarried mother and how dare he lecture anyone on how to bring up their own family. Gordon [Brown] just sat there. There was a stunned silence." One member of the committee said: "It is the most devastating thing we have ever seen at an NEC meeting."
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Radley Balko Has Saved Cory Maye’S Life
Though he just calls it A Small But Lovely Victory. Applauding him are Gary, Katherine, and, of course, Jim, who has much good to say.
In fact, it has taken dogged, pro bono legal work by Covington and Burling, the local efforts of the public defender and considerable generosity on the part of Radley’s employer regarding how he’s been spending his time the last few months. We should salute every one of those people. And to make Radley’s employers especially happy, we should buy his book or at least download the PDF.
But all of those other people got involved because Radley Balko dragged this case into the public eye and kept it there. If there was ever a triumph of the fucking blogosphere moment, this is it. So much of what The BlogosphereTM crows about amounts to collecting scalps - hit pieces, gang stomps, ambushes. Getting people fired. Disgracing someone.
Here, instead, a guy who did not deserve to be killed but was going to be, will probably not be killed after all. His daughter will not be orphaned.
I’m very proud that Radley Balko is my friend.
Your cynical voice may be saying, ’It’s great that one black guy in the country interested enough rich white lawyers to get some eventual justice, but that’s not a justice system worthy of the name.’ You’d be right. Based on his writing, I’m sure Radley would agree with you. The Maye case is a start. It needs to become the teachable moment about how far off track the criminal justice system in this country has gotten, and how much farther wrong it could go. Cory Maye got swamped by a perfect storm of liberty-destroying practices American law enforcement has adopted in the name of our wasteful, cruel and impossible ’War on Drugs.’ Confidential informants, no-knock raids, police militarization. They all feature.
Radley doesn’t have cateogories, so you have to look up previous posts one by one. Here’s an extract from Meet Randy Gentry, Confidential Informant.
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Monday, 25 September 2006
Well, That’S A Lie!
Bloomberg: Cherie Blair Walks Out of Brown Speech Praising Her Husband (unconfirmed, via Radio 4).
As Brown told the Labour Party conference in Manchester that it had been a
privilege for me to work forthe premier, Mrs. Blair left the auditorium sayingwell that’s a lie.
Me, I think that’s ambiguous: but surely Cherie is more loyal than that?
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Fisking
Via Stephen Pollard, A global crisis of understanding by William Dalrymple.
Pollard excels himself here. He has his prejudices, I have mine. His first:
There’s a wonderful example of this in today’s Sunday Times. When I see the name William Dalrymple above a piece, I know I am about to read a collection of pernicious, dangerous drivel and, sure enough, his review in today’s Sunday Times of Michael Gove’s terrific Celsius 7/7 - a book which should be read by anyone who cares about the future of freedom and our civilisation - is full of the usual Dalrymple stuff.
(The reader may care to note that much of the ballast of the Times papers is now skeptical of the Iraq War, Blairism, etc, etc. The tilt started when insiders like Jeremy Clarkson and Matthew Parris saw through the neo-con project. Now, it seems even freelancers can join the party.) Oh yes, my prejudices. Well one reason I gave up tehgrauniad was its near addiction to dangerous
as the catch-all sexy adjective. Stephen, we’re talking about a book, not driving a rocket-propelled car or clearing land mines in Somalia. Drivel
, I’ll let you keep, dangerous
and pernicious
are fantasies to make you seem important. The only way a book hurt anyone was when it was thrown with some accuracy.
Now I am also a pedant, and happy to help pedants elsewhere. So when Stephen spots a verifiable error (as he does), I am there for him. Details matter. Facts matter. As Stephen says, William Dalrymple is wrong to suggest that Michael Gove sits in the Conservative shadow cabinet
because as Stephen correctly reminds us, Mr Gove is only
shadow Housing Spokesman
. I get this who is in
and who is just outside
the Cabinet mixed up all the time. I’ll repeat: William Dalrymple was wrong to say that. He should have called Mr Gove a shadow ... er thing
as I’m not sure what the right term is. Shadow Minister
can that be right? it sounds like an oxymoron.
But ... and while I’m willing to give you the whole one wrong fact on my part undermines everything I claim by making me unreliable
thing, this seems to be the whole case Mr Pollard has against Mr Dalrymple.
Pot to kettle: "You are BLACK!"
Let’s ignore the mistakes Dalrymple makes in his supposed destruction of the supposed errors in Gove’s argument. Dalrymple also shows that he doesn’t even get the very basis of his attack on Gove right:
Stephen, let’s not. Let’s go through them, like good borderline-autistic bloggers. Because I want to know what they are. Dalrymple makes lots of assertions. They’re clear (much clearer than the fuzzy hand waving of the some-of-us-is-some-of-us-isn’t hand-waving of an internet petition which you won’t have heard of).
Here is a nice example.
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Tuesday, 26 September 2006
That Would Be The Textbook Definition... Sir, Of Cowardice
The Editors wonder how to put this. Shrill? Crooks and Liars has the latest transcript of Keith Olberman shrillity.
You see the thing in any size you want on the Google Video site, but if the Eds can embed it, so can I.
Thus was it left for the previous President to say what so many of us have felt; what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack:
You did not try.
You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.
You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.
Then, you blamed your predecessor.
That would be the textbook definition... Sir, of cowardice.
To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past.
That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair - writing as George Orwell - gave us in the novel "1984."
The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar to you, as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.
"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power’¦
"Power is not a means; it is an end.
"One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
"The object of persecution, is persecution. The object of torture, is torture. The object of power’¦ is power."
You do know who he’s talking to, right?
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Louder Than Commas
Holy cow, this is weird. Serenely, Bush sails on, across a sea of commas.
In a report here at E&P, we observed that in this exchange, Blitzer asked about the latest setbacks in Iraq and indications that civil war may be at hand. Bush, with a slight smile, replied,
Yes, you see - you see it on TV, and that’s the power of an enemy that is willing to kill innocent people. But there’s also an unbelievable will and resiliency by the Iraqi people.... I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is - my point is, there’s a strong will for democracy.
Apparently this is a reference to saying among the Christian Right Never put a period where God has put a comma.
This is explained at greater length in Just A Comma: Dog Whistle Politics.
The other name for this is dog whistle politics. When you blow a dog whistle humans can’t hear it, but the dogs sure can. It’s a pitch higher than humans can hear. When you speak in code like this, most of the time the only people who hear and understand what you just said are the intended group, who have an understanding of the world and a use of words that is not shared by the majority of the population. So it allows you to send out two messages at once - one pitched for the majority of Americans, the other pitched for a subgroup. This goes on all the time, and usually it isn’t caught - most people don’t hear it, and the media is made up of people who can’t make the connections because they don’t belong to these subgroups. So they can’t point out the subtext either.
It’s very effective, and it’s one reason why Bush still has his hard core of support - he’s constantly reassuring them, at a pitch the rest of us can’t hear.
This explains quite a bit about why Bush supporters like Hindrocket describe Bush as a genius
.
On similar things see Dred Scott = Roe v. Wade, Dred Scott, abortion, and originalism, and Why Bush Opposes Dred Scott. Honestly, I think anyone who can interpret Bush has demonstrated genius.
That’s a personal opinion. That’s not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we’re all - you know, it doesn’t say that. It doesn’t speak to the equality of America.
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Wednesday, 27 September 2006
Stopped Clocks
tehgrauniad has a roundup of the other papers on Tony Blair’s (putatively) final conference speech. Most of them could have been written 10, 20, or 30 years ago and then just stored in archives until the need arose and few names were changed. Daily Mail:
The sooner he matches the action to those words, the sooner Britain can start to rid itself of the politics of mendacity and poison.
No paragraph in the Daily Mail is really complete until you find the word ’Britain’ but ’mendacity’ is a favourite. The ’action’ referred to, is of course, Blair’s resignation, but it’s clear even from the short extract that the writer doesn’t want Blair to go for the benefit of the Labour party; he wants Labour to leave government too.
Both the Daily Mail and the Daily Express take Blair to be a liar. The Daily Express descends to a cliche which never fails.
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Mr [XXXXX] was the living personification of that truth yesterday."
I think the Americans would say, ’cookie cutter’.
The Independent gushes:
The speech was a reminder of why Mr Blair has been such a formidable leader. He is able to deliver meticulously prepared speeches in a way that is conversational, good humoured and rich in policy content.
This looks like a bespoke description, but consider: a non-conversational speech would be what? Hilter-like probably. Our system means that politicians pretty much have to address meetings as if they believed that speaker and spoken-to were interchangeable, whether they do or not. Bush and Rumsfeld give ’good humoured’ platform: they like to think they’re telling jokes too. And who doesn’t deliver speeches ’rich in policy content’? David Cameron presumably - a trick he learned from the Leader of the Labour Party.
It just happens that the assessments I consider to be the correct ones are those of the Mail and the Express. Go on, call him a liar and a fantasist who’s been around too long - it fits everyone in time.
The only exceptions are the Murdoch papers, which are, to use the Mail’s favourite $10 word, mendacious, in all but one particular. Both the Sun and the Times overly threaten to change political allegiance. We knew it would happen. Now they have an excuse to turn their coats with sham honour.
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Thursday, 28 September 2006
I Support Stephen Green
Love your neighbour till
His wife gets home
I remain greatly ibdebted to Stephen Green. If it weren’t for him, I probably would not have bothered to watch Jerry Springer: the Opera - in which case I would have missed a wonderful work of art.
Now he plans to sue police and not any old bobbies, but my local force, Cardiff’s finest.
Stephen Green, the national director of Christian Voice, was arrested at the Mardi Gras festival in Cardiff earlier this month after distributing hundreds of leaflets entitled
Same-sex love - Same-sex sex: What does the Bible say?Green, 54, pleaded not guilty on Sept 6 to using threatening words or behaviour likely to cause harassment or distress.
Mr Green asked a fair question - the answer to which is quite a lot.
Judge not, that ye be judged. 2 For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measures ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. 3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Matthew, 7 1-3. Mr Green is a Christian, so one might expect that he give extra weight to those bits of the Bible which record Jesus’ actual words (allegedly).
However, while he would not extend the same charity to me, he was handing out leaflets. I support people handing out leaflets. He’s entitled to his opinion, and he’s entitled to express it.
Outside court, Mr Green, of Carmarthen, West Wales, said he planned to take civil action against South Wales Police for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution and breach of his human rights. He said he had been locked in a police cell for four hours after his arrest.
It was disgraceful the way I was treated that day,he said.
The police should concentrate on nicking villains instead of people like me going about my lawful business.
It is important that Christians should be able to stand up for the Gospel and resist any attempt by the police to trample our civil rights.Mr Green, who last year led protests against the BBC’s broadcast of Jerry Springer: the Opera, was charged by South Wales police’s minority support unit after refusing to accept a formal caution.
Good for him. I’m on his side. We should all resist any attempt to limit our civil rights. And he was right to refuse to accept a caution: he did nothing wrong.
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Perhaps We Could All Just Swap
Chris Brooke earlier this month:
Of course, if John Reid emerges as Prime Minister, then it’ll be time to leave the country. But I still think that’s quite unlikely.
It’s not unlikely enough for comfort. And now Gary Farber:
It may be time to leave this country.
Where can they go? Where can we go? Is Canada big enough?
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The Baghdad Police Academy Is A Disaster
It couldn’t be worse than the Steve Gutenberg movie, could it? Before you answer, here’s Wikipedia.
The series opened with Police Academy (1984) which started with the premise that a new mayor had announced a policy requiring the police department to accept all willing recruits. The movie followed a group of misfit recruits in their attempts to prove themselves capable of being police officers. The main character, Mahoney (Steve Guttenberg), was a repeat offender who was forced to join the police academy as punishment.
Reminds me of this Intel Dump post.
Nearly 40 percent of recruits now score in the bottom half of the Army’s ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery), according to David Chu, undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness. More high school dropouts are now recruited than five years ago. There are fewer "washouts," meaning the Army is holding on to more borderline soldiers, critics say. ...
The Army reports that many combat and combat support units scheduled to deploy to Iraq in 2007 will have less than the required one year period for rest and re-training. This is one of the key indicators that lead many Army officials to conclude that current deployment rates cannot be sustained without breaking the force.
You know, I never could understand why the US, once they occupied Baghdad, they didn’t pull down Abu Ghraib as a symbolic gesture if nothing else. Instead, in an action whose symbolism their commanders missed, they occupied it.
But now I get it. At least the toilets worked. WaPo: Heralded Iraq Police Academy a ’Disaster’.
A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found.
The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed "the rain forest."
$75 million? They spent $75 million in a Third World country - and the plumbing is so bad that the building is dangerous? After 3 years? This is like Yes Minister written by Tim Worstall where central government is axiomatically stupid and spendthrift and cannot do the simplest thing right.
Anyone sensible would prefer anything to Haliburton. Enron, Uri Geller, and L Ron Hubbard are saints by comparison.
CNN: Poll: Most Iraqis favor U.S. pullout in a year.
The poll’s summary also suggests that most Iraqis think the American presence is doing more harm than good.
An overwhelming majority believes that the U.S. military presence in Iraq is provoking more conflict than it is preventing and there is growing confidence in the Iraqi army,the summary said. "If the U.S. made a commitment to withdraw, a majority believes that this would strengthen the Iraqi government.
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Friday, 29 September 2006
I Always Thought Those Books Were Over-Rated, Too
Look, I just said that they’re not that well-written, and they’re not really original. You do wonder how Gandalf the Grey would get on in the Old Testament. And lions, is it OK for Christians to make heroes of lions?
Second thought, gorsh, that lady is fat! I mean, what would Jesus eat? Probably not them bagels Jews have. They’re like, kinda a health food anyways, I bet he went for donuts! Like lotsa donuts! And being pure, as we all know He was, he could have donuts for desert as well.
That’s the difference between Osama and us. He’s starving in a cave, while we have donuts! And the Lord of course. And ammunition.
See more. Via Harry’s Place.
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Tortured Logic
Governor Tarkin: The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.
General Tagge: But that’s impossible. How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?
Governor Tarkin: The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.
Why oh why can’t we be more like the Americans? Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald quoted Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson, in his letter to Thomas Paine, 1789. ME 7:408, Papers 15:269, said: "I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
Torygraph: Instant fines plan for violent crimes. They. Cannot. Be. Serious.
Oh. God. They. Are.
(I’m quite convinced, by the way, that giving police the power to fine will corrupt some of them.)
But Glenn suggests that this is no longer the American Way. As someone once said, The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.
Just about every American blog I read regularly is upset. Jon Swift, Lindsay Beyerstein, Gary, John Cole (so many times), Jim Henley, Hilzoy, and, as the old K-Tel ads used to say, and many, many more...
I have nothing to add.
In other news, Nick Cohen worries about anti-Americanism. He doesn’t need to name Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Wolfowitz - and now I think of it, he doesn’t. All the fault of A-rabs, I’m sure. It must be one of those co-incidences you hear about that his opening paragraph and the ’history’ section of the first hit in Google for anti-American are so similar.
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Saturday, 30 September 2006
A Military Blog
Gary Trudeau is going to host a military blog on his site Doonesbury.com.
Army Spc. David Lease, another wounded servicemember Trudeau met with today, said the books are important because they bring to light the experiences of wounded troops and letting them know people care.
This is letting us know that they support us,Lease said.They might not support the fact that we’re over there, but they support us.As part of his attempt to inform Americans about the sacrifices servicemembers are making, Trudeau is launching a military blog on his Web site: www.doonesbury.com, he said. The blog, which launches Oct. 8, will be called
The sandboxand will feature entries from servicemembers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s important that people understand,he said.I think the wars are just too remote for people’s minds. They see two, three minutes on the evening news, maybe, if they don’t look away. And people just get on with their lives. I understand that; there’s just so much stress that you want in your life. But at the same time, there’s a lot of people over there fighting in our name, so I think we need to pay attention to what they’re doing.
Good for him
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