You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November, 2007.
The BBC reports:
A British teacher has been found guilty in Sudan of insulting religion after she allowed her primary school class to name a teddy bear Muhammad.
Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, has been sentenced to 15 days in prison and will then be deported…
…Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said he could not “see any justification” for the sentence, calling it an “absurdly disproportionate response” to a “minor cultural faux pas”…
Thankfully, the Archbishop’s being a Muslim convert well-regarded observer on matters Islamic — …He commends the Muslim practice of praying five times a day, which he says allows the remembrance of God to be “built in deeply in their daily rhythm”. — one would think that his views should carry some weight. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to . . .
…But Sudan’s top clerics had called for the full measure of the law to be used against Mrs Gibbons and labelled her actions part of a Western plot against Islam…
. . . for this “faux pas” doesn’t seem particularly “minor” as far as Sudan’s “top clerics” are concerned.
[Posted November 29, 8:50 PM NY time]
A British teacher detained in Sudan after her class called a teddy bear Mohammad was charged on Wednesday with insulting Islam in a move that sparked a diplomatic row between London and Khartoum.
Gillian Gibbons, 54, was also charged with inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs, Sudanese official media said. If convicted, she could face 40 lashes, a fine, or one year in jail…
According to Reuters writer Opheera McDoom – yes, that is actually her reported name – the details of Ms Gibbons’s purported ”crime” were specifically that:
…Teachers at the school said Gibbons had asked her class of 7-year-olds to choose their favourite name for the bear, and 20 of the 23 had voted for Mohammad.
A 7-year-old student called Mohammad told Reuters this week he had suggested his own name be used for the bear.
In a writing exercise students were allowed to take the bear home and asked to keep a diary of what they did with the toy. These accounts were put together in a book entitled “My Name is Mohammad”.
Leaflets were distributed in Khartoum calling for protests after Friday prayers, but many ordinary Sudanese said they were ready to forgive Gibbons if she apologised…
If she apologized? Before even getting to that point, the issue at hand defies ready comprehension. And given what we have endured previously, that’s saying a lot.
For it was apparently not she herself, but evidently her 7 year old Muslim pupils who chose overwhelmingly to name their bears after another student . . . who was named Mohammad and who was, naturally, himself, therefore named after the Muslim prophet. Yet was she supposed to veto her Muslim students’ choice of the Mohammad name? And if she had done that, in doing so would she also have not ”insulted” Islam?
[Posted November 28, 9:47 PM NY time]
The development of Bristol as a lively port, with its complex network of waterways spans 1,000 years. While Bristol’s role as a port has declined, development of Bristol’s harbourside is ongoing with the current redevelopment of residential, commercial and leisure spaces due to be completed in 2012…
Cape Town’s Victoria and Alfred Waterfront development has grabbed the imagination of Capetonian and visitor alike. With majestic Table Mountain as a backdrop and the unique interest of the ‘working harbour’, it is not surprising that the ‘Waterfront’ has become Cape Town’s most popular attraction. Its success has largely been built upon local support and attracts over a million visitors a month, of which 70% are Capetonians.
…The city is filled with amazing views, but few can top the ones from this scenic third-of-a-mile stretch along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Postcard-like views of lower Manhattan, South Street Seaport, the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge draw photographers, couples on romantic walks, and New Yorkers who want an inspiring place to sit and think. The sound of cars whizzing by directly below on the BQE provides an oddly soothing soundtrack. Sandwiched between pricey Brooklyn Heights properties, pretty tree-lined streets, and rows of conveniently placed benches, the Promenade is also a convenient place to start sightseeing in Brooklyn…
Great Neck, like some other municipalities across Long Island, has long considered plans to reclaim portions of its decaying waterfront.
But some say politics got in the way, and now, instead of the low-rise housing and boardwalk that residents had hoped for, a 24-hour U.S. Postal Service sorting facility will soon occupy prime real estate overlooking Manhasset Bay.
Construction of the 15,000- square-foot Great Neck Carrier Annex is scheduled to be completed by early 2009, postal officials said…
If you already know something about the high quality of Long Island local governance, I know what you may be thinking. However, in this case the above actually does appear to constitute a major improvement in such government’s deft ability to ascertain quality land use, given that allowing that facility’s construction may at least lead to quicker mail deliveries. And, after all, there was a time other Long Islanders’ futures were sold down the, uhh, river not even for Aston Martins or Maseratis, but . . . for Buicks.
Indeed, maybe what we see here is not yet another instance of a fumbling inability to deal with the patently obvious? Perhaps rather than here bemoaning Long Island local government’s perpetual, intractable, institutionalized stupidity, lethargy and ineptitude – on a level that, by comparison, makes the New York Jets organization look reassuringly well-run – it is possible north Nassau local officialdom is actually deeply impressing us in this instance with a well-thought out, longer-term vision?
As we know, most seaside localities worldwide strive in cookie-cutter fashion to build and/or regenerate public-space friendly waterfront centers. Likely, government in Nassau intuitively perceives a vital need to do something utterly against that “ho-him, everyone does waterfront regeneration” grain in order truly to set Great Neck apart. So instead of actively seeking what some may ignorantly consider to be a more appropriate site, in fact a postal sorting facility on a prime waterfront location is probably exactly what is called for.
Still, numerous questions remain. For instance, will the benches, flower-beds and promenade viewpoints take in the full grandeur of the building from just next to the truck entrance, in front of the spiked iron rail fencing? Or will they be better positioned just next to the roadside loading bay?
[Posted November 27, 9:48 PM NY time]
The Sunday Times (via my wife):
THE Archbishop of Canterbury has said that the United States wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain during its imperial heyday.
Rowan Williams claimed that America’s attempt to intervene overseas by “clearing the decks” with a “quick burst of violent action” had led to “the worst of all worlds”.
In a wide-ranging interview with a British Muslim magazine, the Anglican leader linked criticism of the United States to one of his most pessimistic declarations about the state of western civilisation…
…He contrasted it unfavourably with how the British Empire governed India. “It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what the British Empire did — in India, for example…
That Britain “in its imperial heyday” was, true, perhaps the least oppressive empire ever, but that the hundreds of millions of Indians who were taxed (often excessively) to support much that was “poured in” might have a rather different interpretation obviously escapes the Archbishop’s insightful foray into comparative imperialisms. In any event, one would have thought the Archbishop would be a tad too busy of late with trying to facilitate the appreciation of certain imperialist universal values among Anglican African congregations, to worry publicly in a Muslim publication about the danger posed by the U.S. to fading western civilization? However, regardless, he need fear not.
For modern, corrupt “Byzantium” is, we are told, finally about to give way. And given the Archbishop’s chosen platform in this instance, he evidently already senses how western liberation courtesy of the march of progressive civilizations emanating from the near east — …”In the interview … Williams makes only mild criticisms of the Islamic world…” — and, then, ultimately, as we know, from the far east, is but a matter of time. Indeed, if he doesn’t know this as of yet, the Archbishop will likely be truly thankful when he discovers that Australia’s new head of government fluently speaks the new soon to be global lingua franca.
[Posted 8:30 AM NY time]
Australia’s Labour leader Kevin Rudd, a Mandarin speaking former diplomat, swept into power at national elections on Saturday on a wave of support for generational change, ending 11 years of conservative rule…
Mr Howard’s party’s defeat is not a real surprise, but unsurprisingly it is being attributed — at least in some measure — to Iraq.
…Rudd, 50, presented himself as a new generation leader by promising to pull Australian combat troops out of Iraq and sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change,…
Conveniently forgotten however by that same insightful media is that Mr Howard’s victory in 2004 was somehow NOT attributed to Iraq. And as to pledging “to battle ‘climate change’ “: that stance is hardly even worth a mention any longer, given that “battling” that slippery, doomsday scenario is now currently deemed the required default position for “rising” western “leaders”. So why shouldn’t they embrace it? After all, being deemed “the default”, it is a “battle” that carries little political risk to “fight”. (Worrying about thorny human rights, economic and security issues today? Going out on a limb to offer projections on the state of government run social welfare programs ten or twenty years hence? It is far easier, of course, to be passionately committed and totally clear about the utter accuracy of certain computer models’ projected flood forecasts for 2087.)
Such media myopia is to be expected. Yet why Mr Howard chose to stand again at all is unclear to anyone even remotely familiar with how, particularly in current Anglo-Saxon politics, voters seem unwilling to grant more than a decade in electoral power to any one leader. People get bored — “…Many people also seemed to be simply tired of Mr Howard after 11 years of his rule…” — and desire “change”.
…”We’ve all got goose bumps that finally we might have a leader who is passionate about fairness in this country,” Celeste Giese, 39, told Reuters at Rudd’s victory party. “Finally, after 11 years, it’s happening,” she said…
“Goose bumps“? And as an Anne from Brisbane told the BBC, “After too many years I can finally hold my head up and be proud to call myself Australian again“. Thus, secondly, after a near decade of “wartime” leadership (such as was able to be exercised, anyway), through the increasing projection of personal “self-esteem” issues onto a political leader, we see yet another expression of what we had noticed rearing its head in the U.S. — …The new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi … heads a caucus that will demand caution on some of the baby-boomer liberal generation’s pet subjects… — in 2006. And so we seem likely to see it manifest itself still further in 2008. Get ready: “goverance by hug” is returning:
…Winfrey, who has never endorsed a presidential candidate in the past, said she chose to support Obama this time because she knows “what he stands for.”…
…When asked if she would ever run for an office herself, the popular talk-show host said she is able to make more of an impact in her current job than she could in any political post.
“You know that is not going to ever happen,” she said of a potential political bid. “I feel that the platform that I hold, the chair in which I get to sit in every day and speak to the world, is of far more value to me than any political office could be.”
“Value in that I get to speak to people’s hearts and get to connect with people all over the world,” she added…
Indeed, and while we are speaking “to people’s hearts” and connecting “with people all over the world“, hopefully the Dark Angel, undetected, will not be hovering over some major western metropolis as a consequence of some people globally having inexplicably chosen not to have allowed themselves to “be reached”.
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“Generational change” is important, but is also always a curious issue. The inevitable passage of time, naturally, always makes for generational changes. However, given that we live increasingly in a world dominated by the “thirty-teens” and even “forty-teens”, our seemingly perpetual childhood does cause one to wonder if, nowadays, 65 or even 75 should perhaps be the minimum age for Western leaders?
That’s not to say we want geriatic Brezhnevs stiffling us. Certainly we require leaders open to new ideas. But we always also need leaders who have truly experienced life, and who possess wisdom.
So with the increasing immaturity of Western society, rather than “youth” it seems what we need more than ever are leaders who have left ever-aging “youth” in their rear view mirrors . . . and can barely recall the name of their college dining hall. When a U.S. president gives a speech, perhaps we should prefer to see not someone in his 40s, but a lined, experienced, Dwight D. Eisenhower looking at us?:
[Posted November 24, 7:21 PM NY time]
Newsday, November 19:
…One place where the traffic might be lighter this weekend is at local shopping malls — at least according to a survey of 1,000 consumers published Monday by the Consumer Federation of America and the Credit Union National Association. It found that 35 percent of adults are planning to spend less this year than last on holiday shopping because of high gasoline and heating fuels costs. The portion expressing that sentiment is up from 32 percent in last year’s survey and the highest in the eight years the survey has been conducted.
“It is noteworthy how frequently consumers cited rising energy costs as a reason they plan to cut back their holiday spending, far more frequently than they cited general family finances,” said the federation’s chief economist Bill Hampel…
Cablevision News 12, November 23:
It was midnight madness out in Riverhead early Friday morning.
The Tanger Outlet mall opened at midnight for shoppers looking to get a head start for the holiday season. The crowds were so large, shoppers were turned away at some stores. Some stores only allowed a few people in at a time to get a change to purchase discounted items. The crowds also forced the LIE to come to a complete standstill at some points…
Gee, one wonders how bad it might have been . . . had those high gasoline prices not been keeping traffic so “light”?
[posted November 23, 8:50 PM NY time]
The NY Daily News:
…Retailers eager to get the most of this year’s predicted $456 billion holiday spending bonanza have scrapped their traditional Thanksgiving break and are opening their doors Thursday.
“People want to start early,” said Kirsten Whipple of Kmart, which became the first major retailer to open its doors on the holiday 15 years ago.
Among the stores joining the trend are CompUSA, FAO Schwarz, City Sounds of NY, Kiss Home Entertainment & Appliance Superstore and some Sports Authority outlets.
…Ellen Davis of the National Retail Federation spun it this way: “Shopping is a way for families to spend time together.”…
Don’t let them fool you. Today is a federal and state holiday; it is not a normal workday. Neither is shopping together about “family togetherness”; those compelled to work today apparently have no “family togetherness” worth the name, right?
It’s about making money, of course. The mere notion of a “day of rest” — in our “24/7″ world — has come under blistering assault in the last few decades. About the only days that remain distinctive as holidays are Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day; and as we can see, both of those are now also under increasing threat.
…Some retailers say opening today ruins the spirit of the holiday.
“It’s a sad thing,” said Gregg Richard, president of PC Richard & Son.
“I bet the executives won’t be coming in, just the paid-by-the-hour employees, and we think we should be saying thanks to them by giving them the day to spend with their families.”…
If you’ve ever worked in retail you know the drill. The schedule goes up, and you have to turn up. I remember my experience, 20 years ago. Sundays were a short day, but one some were happy to work because you got paid time and a half. Then, suddenly, “main office” informed everyone that henceforth Sundays were to be a straight time day like any other — because competitors were paying straight time.
I don’t know whether retail employees are nowadays being enticed to work Thanksgiving Day owing to similar “special considerations”. In the end, though, it’s always self-defeating; for the greater the number of stores open each year, the more likelihood that those “special considerations” will eventually vanish, leaving Thanksgiving Day to become “just another day” like Sundays.
Once it’s gone, we’ll never get it back.
So PC Richard’s Gregg Richard has absolutely the correct attitude. There is nothing wrong with making money, of course. But in our rollercoaster world a day or two of commerce quiet is not a bad thing.
Thanksgiving in particular — unlike Christmas — is a day that transcends religious observance. Everyone can participate, each in his own way. So today should be a day when every mall lot is empty, and every large retail establishment is closed. We — each and every one of us — can help see to that being the case.
The only shop you should venture into today is one that is owner-operated — where the owner is physically present; he (and his family) are entitled to make a personal choice as to whether to work or not. But do NOT step into any corporate retail establishment. Resist the temptation with all your might: stay home, go for a walk, rake leaves, watch football, sleep, whatever. Let’s give those who work in such places a break for today. Society can use it too. The shopping can wait ’till tomorrow . . .
However, if none of that makes an impression, how about this?: if all large retail establishments were shut a scant two days out of 365, think of how that can only but assist in “the struggle against climate change”?
Regardless, wherever you might be reading this, Happy Thanksgiving.
[Posted 9:31 AM NY time]
Hello from NY. We flew over on Monday afternoon to visit my parents for Thanksgiving, and to spend some time here for the next couple of weeks.
Before we left, at Heathrow we joined the “Iris” scheme. At a small office in Terminal 4, a pleasant woman took our ID and a guy at a PC recorded our “Iris” details — “Look at the green dots on the screen…” — into a database. We are now enabled to enter the UK through the “Iris” recognition booth if we want to, rather than have to go through normal passport control.
The safety of our personal data? Should we be concerned? Well, as Reuters tells us:
…[Alistair] Darling told parliament two discs containing information on 25 million Britons had disappeared after being sent through HMRC’s courier, Dutch mail and parcel company TNT NV, and a police investigation was underway. There was no sign of fraud at present, he said…
But that was HMRC, remember. “Iris” is handled by the Home Office . . .
[Uhh]
. . . Okay, okay, there is always something to be a tad aware of. Still, holiday time is approaching. On the NY end, our immigration officer was, the wife said, “The friendliest and most pleasant one” we had ever encountered. He even suggested she eventually take out U.S. citizenship, rather than have to be limited in her comings and goings.
Telling my parents of that on the way to their house, they noted that NY’s “terribly sensible” — in the words of CNN commentator Ruben Navarrette Jr. — driving license plan recently had been abandoned, owing mostly to the inability of those in favor of it to respond to the obviously ”extreme“ assertion that allowing people who should not be physically present in New York to be considered state residents entitled to be granted a legal right to drive by NYS might just happen to be . . . a fundamentally strange idea. British driving licensing, for example, also functions under the insane notion that one must actually be a legal resident in order to obtain a license; if one is not one cannot, and that — shockingly! — is that.
However, the particulars of this debate didn’t apply to the wife anyway, but not just because she herself is not an illegal alien . . . but because when here she is a legal alien and not a NY state resident. In fact, there’s another loophole that also must be closed in any future noble effort to address what that same Mr Navarrette trenchantly identifies as New Yorkers’ “state of denial“. Indeed, not even offering the likes of legally admitted tourists NYS driving licenses immediately upon arrival at JFK? Yet another absurd failure of NYS to act “sensibly”.
[posted November 20, 9:40 PM, NY time]
The BBC reports:
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has criticised the Anglican Church and its leadership for its attitudes towards homosexuality.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4, he said the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, had failed to demonstrate that God is “welcoming”.
He also repeated accusations that the Church was “obsessed” with the issue of gay priests…
…”It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual.
“You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred.
“It’s like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.”
That latter is a particularly curious observation from the Archbishop, given that from what non-Anglicans can see from the outside looking in, the “obsession” over gay clergy is NOT pivotally the Archbishop of Canterbury’s. Opposition appears to emanate most strongly primarily from African congregations, who now make up about half of the world Anglican Communion. Interestingly, Archbishop Tutu evidently had nothing to say about how if it weren’t for the ongoing “revolt” of those “black” congregations, gay clergy would probably have years ago become the norm within the Anglican Communion?
But, then again, mischaracterization is nothing new to the South African.
This post by Hanlon’s Razor has been getting wide play on WordPress:
Let’s get this straight: America is not a Christian Nation.
And it offers a reasonable overall argument, as long as it means to “get straight” that the U.S. Constitution never endorsed an established church. For let’s also be careful. The U.S. is clearly a “Christian nation” in the same sense that, for instance, Turkey is today a “Muslim nation” . . . but is not an “Islamic state”. Neither is the U.S. a “Christian state,” and few feel that it should be.
Of course Americans, being overwhelmingly Christians, have been melding and blurring — often without consciously realizing it — Christianity and the State since pre-United States colonial times. For example, as Maryland The Seventh State tells us:
…On March 27, 1634, Governor Calvert bought the land from the Yaocamicoes. Once the land was purchased, they sent word back to the crews of the Ark and Dove for them to move to this new town. As the settlers moved into the new town, a celebration began. Dressed in their finest clothes, the new settlers fired cannons and flags were flown. The new village name changed from Yaocamico to St. Mary’s City. This name was given in honor of the Virgin Mary…
And according to St Mary’s City.org:
…a group of disgruntled Protestants led a revolution against Lord Baltimore in 1689. The crown appointed royal governors and they moved the capital from St. Mary’s City to Annapolis in 1695. The colonial statehouse was turned into a Protestant (Anglican) church in the same year; and in 1704 the principle of liberty of conscience was dramatically overturned when Catholic churches and schools were closed in accordance with “An Act to Prevent the Growth of Popery within this Province.” Abandoned for the most part, St. Mary’s City sank back into the soil from which it had arisen and by the time of the American Revolution, little of Lord Baltimore’s capital was left but memories of its former importance…
To avoid sectarian conflict like the above, the First Amendment’s “Establishment Clause” is as clear — no establishment — as it can be. However even it still has its fuzzy areas when coupled with the “Free Exercise Clause”. It’s not hard to understand the underlying reason: the quest to draw strict constitutionalist boundaries around what are often essentially amorphous religio-cultural practices which appeal in innumerable ways for a bewildering variety of reasons to the mass of the population, is always bound to lead to, well, all too numerous inconsistencies.
So pitching any discussion of “Christianity” v. “the State” in terms of semi-polemic “Myth” v. [non-Christian] “Fact” (as the post does) positions matters far too rigidly. It has rarely been, if ever, so clear cut. Above all, in the end, it is worth remembering that there was never a time that ”the Founders”, or their predecessors, or those who followed, were in blissful agreement on the issue. Just as neither are we, today.
Scott appears to have suddenly deleted his – dormant since May – Daily Ablution entirely.
I won’t email him to ask why. Whatever his reason for doing so, it is his right to vanish. If you see this, Scott, we all wish you well.
(On a purely selfish note, I do admit that I will probably badly miss the many visitors I used to get via his sidebar link!)
Experts warn of ‘abrupt’ warming
Some good news to open a weekend. What a relief! Those elderly may not have to engage in art forgery in order to make it to March after all.
The southeast’s U.S.’s current “water crunch” certainly couldn’t have anything to do with the area’s decades-long population explosion having finally caught up with it? Nor could it have something to do with large scale industrial growth and related mass immigration both finally having made a major impression on that region of the U.S. where until recently neither had ever made much of one? No, neither has mattered a wit.
Cutting to the chase, the newspaper of “British liberalism” — The Independent — has already handed down its unalterable verdict. It has identified the culprit, and insists that — well, at least in this instance — no further review is necessary. Or arguably acceptable, according to the paper’s Leonard Doyle:
…These days, the plight of the village of Orme makes the national television news. And as the mayor drives up the hill for half a mile he is followed by a crocodile of gleaming 4×4s and rental cars, carrying among them a crew from the Weather Channel, Fox News, ABC News and The Independent. Under the glare of the television arc lamps, Mayor Reames solemnly opens the spigot.
It is a daily task that has turned him into a symbol of global warming. The sight of a small village trying to cope without water for 21 hours a day has touched something in the national psyche.
A few years ago, Orme, like the rest of the normally lush southeast, had plenty of water. But a powerful waterfall which supplied the village has been bone dry for more than two years. Water in the wells is now sulphurous and undrinkable, thanks to the drought…
Orme is in Tennessee, but its very smalltown water issue is similar to that of next door Georgia, especially the now large city of Atlanta and its suburbs, only insofar as water is always an issue wherever humans dwell. It is obviously of little note that even in “the normally lush southeast” there have always been regular, and often very severe, droughts. However, the paper’s failing to realize that is entirely possible — and especially so if its southeast U.S. climate background research focused mostly on information gleaned from certain DVDs (”A hunter (Andrews) happens upon a fugitive (Brennan) and his daughter (Baxter) living in a Georgia swamp…”).
Regardless of the reason, an unfortunate result is that The Independent has overlooked here how, for example, as a Georgia state climatologist and University of Georgia professor expressed in a 2003 study:
…Drought is a normal component of the Southeastern US climate system…
…Georgia has experienced a major prolonged drought of three years or more eight times since 1680. This means that on average, Georgia experiences a drought lasting three or more years about once every 40 years…
Therefore it would seem that “climate change” as revealed (if that is the best word?) to us in the last decade, could not have been a major factor for droughts pre-1914 (C.E. — it’s the Independent, remember); but The Independent makes no mention of that trivial side issue. Moreover, that other droughts, which might have been worse, would not have seemed quite as bad when there were far fewer inhabitants, is apparently also not a line of inquiry the paper considers worthwhile. The Independent is, unsurprisingly, much too busy being appropriately scandalized and “liberally” incensed at the local rubes (which probably also includes University of Georgia climatologists):
…despite the looming catastrophe, and the publicity surrounding Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental campaigning, the issue of global warming gets little consideration in these parts. Georgia’s state assembly recently organised a climate change summit in which three of the four experts invited were global-warming sceptics…
…One reason environmentalists give for the state’s poor record is Southern Company, a huge electrical utility that wields huge influence all the way to the White House. More than any other company, Southern has been responsible for steering President George Bush away from action to halt global warming. It has done so by spreading largesse – $8m (£4m) on contributions to politicians in the past nine years, an amount far outweighing the political contributions of any other utility…
One wonders what took so long: of course it is partly about the outgoing U.S. president’s “close financial links to…” But as he is also someone we know already to be devoid of any non-monetary conscience whatsoever, far worse undoubtedly is the revelation (again, if that is the right word?) here that some small-fry politicians jump ever eagerly into bed with carbonating, seductive, money-gobbling ”big business”. What would you expect but that such people would happily sell their souls (if one quaintly still believes, that is – remember, it is The Independent), as well as risk “the future of the planet”, for some few bits of gold debased currency?:
I don’t think Americans get it. I don’t think they realise quite how serious the collapse of the dollar is for the global economy, nor the long-term consequences of this decline for the position of the US in the world…
Thus today also explains the Indy’s Hamish Mcrae. Remarkably, though, on that currency issue, Mr Mcrae somehow doesn’t mention how (in some suitably multi-religious afterlife) one William Jennings Bryan – who felt an economically “imperial” U.S. to be at moral odds with what the country stood for — is somewhere probably cracking a faint smile. Although, then again, The Indy probably knows that rube that Secretary of State best through a fictionalized film portrayal. (The same Secretary who resigned because he thought President Wilson — yes, that Wilson — was too hawkish over the German sinking of the Lusitania. Incidentally, that was also the same president who would eventually do what Mr Bryan had then feared: take the U.S. into WWI, thus helping stave off total defeat for France . . . and Britain.)
…This year, for the first time ever, China is adding more demand to the world economy than the US. It is still a smaller economy and will be for another 20 years at least…
So hope is on the eastern horizon. In fact, rather than fretting over U.S. water shortages caused by U.S.-created “climate change”, and U.S. dollar fluctuations (one suspects also caused by U.S.-created “climate change”), ever fearful of the “Gulag Archipelago” that is the U.S., one would think the Independent would be pleased. For a relatively less powerful and activist U.S. is not just close to the editorializing heart of The Independent, but is also a dream of millions of Americans (and is also at the center of a current presidential candidacy). An American re-embrace of Mr Bryan’s “isolationism” could only be globally beneficial, for the U.S. is, after all, a vicious place . . . compared to the liberally governed People’s Republic of China.
It’s all too much, really. Succumbing to the temptations of the “cross of gold”? Pushing the horrific products of wasteful, crass ”polluters”? No such moral weakness is ever to be seen in the pages of the smallish circulation Independent:
. . . It would never itself even dream of sinking to that level.
Owing to a recent comment by Chris (which helped along my own sense that the text was a bit small), I thought I’d try what may appear to be a slightly larger — and therefore easier to read – template font.
What’s happened to autumn?
Has winter arrived early this year? That could be an important issue. As GMTV tells us:
A poll, commissioned by the British Gas Help The Aged partnership, found that up to 2.5 million older people could be inhabiting just part of their house because they cannot afford to heat their entire home.
The survey, which questioned 1,171 adults aged over 60, found that more than 2.2 million people switched off their heating last year in a bid to save money…
…In 2007, £4.5 billion in winter fuel benefits remained unclaimed due to a complicated applications system, causing thousands of unnecessary deaths, according to the partnership…
“Unnecessary” depends upon one’s point of view, of course. GMTV and that British Gas/Help The Aged partnership are seemingly unaware that this Government’s top priority is NOT about providing heating. Rather, the bigger concern by far is just the opposite: to look to prevent an increase in warming, because ”This is World War Three…“.
Therefore, elderly accustomed in their youth to wartime rationing and lack of heat during, say, WWII, should at least be experienced in such discomforts as well as, umm, warmed by the knowledge that, in expiring in a frigid house – rather than heating an all too carbon-leaking, decades’ old semi – they are in fact once more making a necessary sacrifice in the long-term “struggle” to help “save the planet”.
Feeling sick since late Tuesday, and with the wife just flown off Wednesday afternoon for a long planned short visit with her best friend, who lives in Dublin (”You should see what they are doing to Dublin airport. It looks like Heathrow now! Carousels upon carousels,” the wife phoned me upon landing), last night the hound and I had a quiet evening in.
While enjoying a lemsip, I thought I’d watch a calm DVD. Off the shelf I pulled one we’d bought, but had never watched. Now to my gripe (still feeling not too great this morning, I feel like offering a personal gripe): what’s with the not-pausible, not-advancable, assaulting of the senses, pre-menu opening montage of pulsating, high-volume, driving electro beat background music helpfully aided by screeching police sirens, underscoring the flashings across the screen of (given all that, therefore hardly “subliminal”) “You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a mobile phone… Buying pirated films is a crime!… Piracy It’s a crime!“?
I couldn’t get to the volume remote quickly enough. Thank you very much Universal, for the headache (on top of my other aches) you brought on through unexpectedly thumpingly lecturing me NOT to buy a pirated copy . . . on the — dammit! — legally purchased, copy we own. Irritating legal purchasers seems sure to make substantial, anti-pirating inroads.
Security will be boosted at stations, airports and other potential targets to protect against car bombings and counter a growing threat from Islamist militants, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Wednesday…
Brown also announced that the government would spend 400 million pounds abroad on fighting radicalisation. For the first time, Britain will sponsor events in Pakistan to counter extremist propaganda, he said…
. . . but just in case the security services in Britain somehow fail to apprehend anyone who missed those tables offering the British government’s “anti-extremist” brochures at those events in Pakistan, rumor has it that the military has also been studying the very latest in last minute, anti-jihadist distraction tactics.
The BBC’s Stephen Evans, December 2004:
…This country is devoted to the free market but with a strong nannyish tendency, especially where matters of drink (and sex) are concerned…
And which country do you think that is? Mr Evans wasn’t then talking about Britain. However, yesterday, the BBC also reported:
Doctors are seeing patients in their late teens and early twenties with severe alcohol-related disease.
More than a hundred specialists from around the UK have told the BBC of their concerns in response to a questionnaire…
…The specialists who responded to the BBC believe the social acceptability of heavy drinking is the most important influence on young people…
It being Britain, there is, of course, nothing “nannyish” about this debate. It is, we are told, merely about improving “health”, yet the “P” word — “prohibition” — would likely make a much greater societal “health” impact than just some additional pence in tax increases — …”Dawn Primarolo, the public health minister … said tax on alcohol in the UK was already the second highest in Europe“… — while importantly also bettering “community cohesion” through perhaps creating a degree of sharia in fact, if not precisely in name. (Who really needs alcohol-fuelled Western civilization?) But despite those obvious benefits, that approach would, alas, naturally put a rather serious dent in the state’s hefty liquor tax revenue stream.
Thus the Labour “middle way” is clear. “Prohibition” could hardly work given that, for example, the powerful government entity that is responsible for overseeing foreigners’ basic right to work legally in Britain can’t apparently itself even manage a pre-hire immigration status check of the legality of people . . . who are to be employed to work in often sensitive posts at the very heart of government. So the plan (if that is the right word?) to “tackle the problem” of “youth drinking“, “middle class drinking“, “wealthy drinking“, and eventually likely even priests “drinking“, is probably to continue to babble on sanctimoniously about “health” alongside enjoying increases in booze-based tax revenue, the latter of which is then to be spent on still more sanctimonious babbling, as well as that new frontline issue: alcohol’s impact on “climate change”. Welcome to 21st century governance.
Meanwhile, tiring evidently of just covering advocacy group infomericals opinion as “news”, we see in that “report” how the BBC is now investigating branching out into serving as its very own advocacy group . . . and then reporting its own created “news”. That may not be a bad thing, however. Perhaps it’s one way for the corporation to save money?
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has seemingly confused The Independent . . . which is not, however, evidently too difficult:
…The Prime Minister’s praise for the closer relations between Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and George Bush is interesting, too. Despite his trumpeting of Britain’s US ties as “our most important bilateral relationship”, Mr Brown seems to want to get away from the “Anglo-sphere” theme of the Blair years. Again, if that indicates a refreshed commitment to multilateralism from the Prime Minister, it is entirely welcome…
…It is all very well for Mr Brown to put some subtle distance between Britain and the United States, but unless this is accompanied by a new willingness to work with EU governments and institutions, he risks isolating Britain on the international scene…
…what would Mr Brown do if Mr Bush decided to order the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office? Despite the disaster of Iraq, this is by no means an inconceivable prospect…
Although the Independent hasn’t yet noticed, even Reuters has pointed out that “the disaster” is seeming, slowly, and interestingly, to appear to be less so daily.
More relevant here, note the Independent’s clarity of prescriptive foreign policy thought. In effect 1) while exceedingly worried about an attack on Iran, The Independent then inadvertently notes such an attack is actually hardly likely — “by no means an inconceivable project“. It 2) has for some time hoped to see the current Labour government adopt a stance more distant from that of the U.S. But then it 3) desires that the very same British government, after it has “put some subtle distance between Britain and the United States“, substantively somehow to exercise a steadying influence on Washington.
How Britain might do that in concert is decidedly unclear, and 4) one would think that if that attack on Iran were as “conceivable” as the paper believes it might be, the last thing the Independent would desire is a Britain more distant from Bushington Washington? Oh well, enough with the Independent’s confusing geopolitics. Did you know that there are at least “20 reasons to love Leeds“?
A man was jailed for life on Monday for murdering schoolgirl Lesley Molseed over 30 years ago after detectives used ground-breaking DNA techniques to identify him…
Separately, Reuters also:
David Cameron called on Monday for rape laws to be tightened to reverse a decline in the number of convictions.
The Conservative leader said too many men think they can “get away with it”, pointing to figures showing that less than 6 percent of reported rapes result in a conviction, down from nearly 33 percent in 1977…
…Figures which suggest that as many as half of young men think there are some circumstances when it may be acceptable to force a woman to have sex were an example of “moral collapse”, he added…
…Cameron said sentences given to convicted rapists have fallen over the past three years to an average of just under seven years…
Obviously, there may be reasons to tighten up, but there seems no exploration of another issue: Does Mr Cameron have any thoughts on how, rather than the courts joining in a conspiracy to allow depraved young men to get away with rape — because that’s what courts are all about, as we know — a recent conviction drop-off may also have something to do with the slight possibility that advances in investigatory technology may also now make it tougher to imprison those who actually didn’t commit that crime? Just as it allows us now properly to identify murderers, three decades after they committed their murders?
Thanks to the World’s Greatest Newspaper’s Daily Express’s November 10 paper TV Guide for this week, on the “Last Word” celebrity Q & A page . . . let’s here have a big round of applause now for (although, unfortunately, no net link is available):
Best known for playing Captain Jack in Doctor Who and Torchwood, actor and singer John Barrowman, 40, has also starred in West End shows including Grease, Phantom of the Opera and Sunset Boulevard and has been a judge on BBC1’s Any Dream Will Do and How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? He has also recorded an album, Another Side, and will be performing on Children In Need on Friday. Born in Glasgow and raised in the U.S., he now lives in London with his partner, Scott Gill.
Two of the dozen or so scintilliating issues raised with Mr Barrowman included these — one following right after the other:
What’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for you?
That’s hard, because I don’t do grand gestures. I find simple things romantic, like when Scott cooks me dinner.
Who would you like to swap places with for 24 hours?
The President of the United States. I would change the country’s backwards human rights laws, legalise civil partnerships for gay couples and pull the troops out of Iraq.
A curious set of presidential priorities there from Mr Barrowman. For having been raised in the U.S., one might think he therefore understood that government there does not legislate what constitutes “human rights”. Rather, one is assumed to have intrinsic rights under the U.S. Constitution, and various laws are then promulgated through the legislative branch as and when deemed necessary. (In contrast to the European Union, laws in the U.S. are not meant as “grand gestures”; they are supposed to be enforced.)
So Mr Barrowman’s having not noticed that fundamental, it is therefore unsurprising that he might have also missed out on how gay partnerships are as a result NOT deemed by definition to be illegal in the backwards U.S. Some states have chosen to create them, and the current president (an American president is, by the way, an executive, not a legislator) has not ruled them out.
That said, such partnerships appear to form a higher core priority for Mr Barrowman’s imagined U.S. presidency than even withdrawing from Iraq. (As to Afghanistan, he is inexplicably policy silent.) But given that the existence of Iraq’s democratically elected government makes it at least theoretically plausible that same sex relationships there might someday enjoy halfway civilized treatment of the sort he takes for granted in London, it is also perhaps worth asking what might happen to gays and lesbians in Iraq were the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops to lead to that fragile government’s collapsing and being replaced by, say, an Islamist dictatorship? Evidently, worries about that perhaps serious policy intersection is to be of no “human rights” importance for a – sadly, all too terribly brief — Barrowman presidency.
For our British friends WWI was an utter disaster. The country suffered a nearly now inconprehensible almost 1 million killed between 1914-1918. So while today has been “modified” to include remembrance of all those who’ve died in Britain’s conflicts, its roots in the WWI armistice have never been totally forgotten. (We spent today with my brother-in-law’s family. A 14 year old niece of my sister-in-law told us that a school assignment required her to watch “My Boy Jack” tonight on ITV.)
In the context of the fact that most U.S. servicemen killed in WWI died between March and November 11, 1918, America’s 126,000 dead were not exactly a “small” loss; but WWI has long since been overtaken by WWII in American recollections. Thus today being the 11 day of the 11th month, let’s remember WWI specifically for a moment. Here’s some information courtesy of The American Battle Monuments Commission:
Within the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and Memorial in France, which covers 130.5 acres, rest the largest number of our military dead in Europe, a total of 14,246. Most of those buried here lost their lives during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive of World War I. The immense array of headstones rises in long regular rows upward beyond a wide central pool to the chapel that crowns the ridge. A beautiful bronze screen separates the chapel foyer from the interior, which is decorated with stained-glass windows portraying American unit insignia; behind the altar are flags of the principal Allied nations…
The ABMC have provided a short video tour also, which opens in Media Player.
…Lions For Lambs is extremely worthy and heartfelt, and Robert Redford’s film will certainly appeal to voters in the end-of-year awards ceremonies, not least for another tour de force performance from Streep as the journalist who wisely observes, “What have we been doing for the past six years, Senator? World War Two only took five.”…
Actually, the American role in WWII took about three and a half years; Britain’s almost exactly six. Nevermind. Next, The Daily Express:
…There’s nothing like a bit of extra-judicial torture to set you up for the weekend. The picture is Hollywood’s first major salvo of the awards season but I doubt audiences will be queuing up, despite a terrific cast including Reese Witherspoon, Mery Streep, Peter Sarsgaard and Jake Gyllenhaal.
You could say that Rendition is the Ronseal of movies - it does what it says on the tin, telling the story of an innocent man ‘abducted’ by the CIA and removed to a North African country where he is tortured under suspcion of being a terrorist…
It is perpetually reassuring to be treated to a myriad of films examining the horrific and utterly baseless American hyperreaction to 9/11. Pity, though, that we haven’t gotten a similarly thoughtful set of analyses of the enemy. (”What’s he been doing? And what might he still do?“) Why might that be?
It is also regularly pointed out that U.S. government motives are primarily “profit” and “greed”. Yet one wonders, too, if filmmakers have bided their time to see how wide swaths of non-American, global opinion would head before risking the bankrolling of major theatrical War on Terror films? As The Scotsman suggests also (and reasonably enough), unlike during WWII, when films were often in the opinion vanguard, nowadays . . .
…with the advent of the internet and streaming 24 hour news, cinema has become reactive…
Reactive, it might also seem, in more ways than we may even have previously realized. For instance, the sudden uptick in War on Terror releases currently wouldn’t have anything to do with filmmakers believing now that there might be money to be made in such films globally (while many, like Mr Redford, also never cease to voice serious misgivings about “globalization”)? “Profits” in amounts that their filmmaking predecessors did not even dream their films could have earned during WWII?
It seems an issue worth addressing. After all, films attacking jihadists appear unlikely to attract