01 July 2005
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13 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
the big thing really is how little things have changed. Anyone who had been put in suspended animation for four or five years wouldn't notice the difference unless he looked really closely. Although I'm less familiar with La-la land, I'd say the same applies, certainly as you head out along 101 towards Agoura and Calabasas things look almost unchanged from my first visit to the area over a decade ago. One thing that most certainly hasn't changed is the Californian love of cars big enough to house a family of four in Hong Kong as the picture above notes.
14 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
French counter-attack
The fine imposed on France by the European Court of Justice was the biggest yet - 20m euros ($24.2m) plus an additional 58m euros for every six months it continues to allow fishermen to catch small fish.
But the men in charge of French fishing have hardly sounded contrite.
"Tonnes upon tonnes of small fish are unloaded in Spain, Portugal," Pierre-Georges Dachicourt of France's National Fisheries Committee (CNPMEM) told France Info radio.
"There is fishing over and above the quotas in Scotland, Britain and elsewhere, and you never hear anything about it. People always point the finger at France."
The idea that France is being unfairly singled out does not really hold water.
It's true that there are infringements in every country - Spanish and Italian fishermen had the worse records in 2003 - but the reason France was penalised was that it had failed to enforce EU fishing law effectively over many years.
The European Court of Justice first ruled that the French authorities had failed to prevent the catching of undersize fish back in 1991.
The European Commission then tried to persuade France to resolve the problem for nine years, before taking the case back to the court.
It seems to me that a British government who feels that its position on, say, the budget was being attacked unjustifiably could quite simply say "not paying" and nothing would happen. Even after many millions had been spent in all sorts of stupid courts at the end of the day no one in the EU could actually enforce whatever judgement was found to be against Britain. There is a standard piece of advice given to military officers about never giving orders that you know will be disobeyed. Despite the fact that most of continental Europe has had compulsory military service for decades this piece of wisdom does not seem to have percolated into the consciousness of our leaders.
15 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
15 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
16 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
Cocaine traces have been found at the European Parliament in an inquiry by one of Germany's main broadcasters.
The Sat-1 channel sent reporters to take 46 swabs from toilets and other public areas of the Brussels buildings. Nearly all tested positive for cocaine.
... A total of 41 of the reporters' swabs tested positive for cocaine.
However this doesn't seem to be cause for widespread alarm because
"It seems the findings are in line with findings in other public buildings," Ms Van den Broeke told the BBC News website.
The parliament may look into whether the testing was legal as it was performed without its consent or knowledge.
I admit the spokeswomen does have a point - I wonder how many toilets in the BBC, to pick a broadcaster totally not at random, would also produce positive test results, and for that matter what the results would be in other legislatures. However it is interesting that rather than try and follow up and see whether the story is true, the prefered response appears to be to try and discredit the testing method and then claim that everyone else does it too. No doubt if the story gets more legs than it currently has an EU regulation will be passed banning such tests, because the usual EU reaction to bad news is to atteck the messnger rather than fix the problem.The claims of drug abuse at the European Parliament complex was greeted with derision by Nigel Farage, an MEP for the United Kingdom Independence Party.
He said: "Given the stultifying boredom of committee work in Brussels, it is hardly surprising. But it could explain the decisions they come up with."
16 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
20 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
There are those of us who do not want to be pregnant, period. So adoption is not an option.
We are not public property, so lay off. When you get the urge to proclaim approval or disapproval for a woman's choice, do the opposite and shut it. Just shut it.
Because while abortion isn't horrible, enforced pregnancy is. As is pillorying women who refuse to be guilty for choosing differently than you.
although the problem IMHO is not so much that women are public property but that many husbands and families consider women to be their property and the rest of us prefer to not look too closely at what goes on inside the family.
20 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
20 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
Mohammed Rashid would like to employ a British-born imam in his Luton mosque, but limited resources and a shortage of candidates mean he has to recruit from abroad....
"We can't afford to pay our imam more than 300 pounds a week," Rashid explained as he stood in front of the mosque's well-kept, red brick facade, decorated with colourful flower baskets and topped by a minaret.
"If our young Muslims know they can earn 500 pounds in the private sector, then why are they going to work as imams?"...
There is a chronic lack of well-qualified, homegrown English-speaking imams in Britain and, even when they are available, many mosques -- funded solely by donations from local, often deprived communities -- cannot afford them.
They therefore recruit imams from abroad who accept low wages but speak poor English, preach a conservative strain of Islam and are out of touch with their worshippers.
I suspect that similar problems apply to other religions in the capitalistic west too and it is certainly an interesting hint that maybe all this talk of Islamic ghettoes is perhaps slightly overdone, after all £500/week is more than the dole and indicates that many muslims can in fact get a job. The other capitalist religion problem - the Televangelist - doesn't appear to have occured to Imams yet but I'm sure one will be along shortly.
21 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
... According to page 417 of The K, as we shall snappily now call it, “as for the righteous, they shall surely triumph. Theirs shall be gardens and vineyards, and high-bosomed maidens for companions: a truly overflowing cup”.
A few observations here.
One, I presume that calling a maiden “high-bosomed” is a diplomatic way of avoiding use of the “sag” word. So what does that tell us – that Paradise is full of plastic surgeons?
Or are all of the 38EE ladies herded off to some isolation wing of the Aftergarden where nobody will see them traipsing about tripping over their nipples?
Two, what is all of this “vineyard” lark? Who are the vineyards for? I thought the Believers didn’t drink. Or don’t the rules apply up there? I only ask because if everybody’s pissed off their face playing with high bosoms in the vineyards, then I can’t see the difference between Paradise and a lock-in at The Kings Arms when that bird who’s now gone to Exeter used to run it.
Three, as you may know The Koran is the infallible word of God as revealed to Mohammed by the Angel Gabriel (who was obviously quite the gossip). So which one of those three was having a laugh by punning “a truly overflowing cup” on the high-bosomed business? Was the Angel Gabriel in fact Max Miller wearing a sheet?
Four, and this is the page (70) that The Imploders would probably prefer us to skip over, or at least to pretend that the pages got stuck together after somebody got excited reading it with maidens in the vineyard – this matter of “the righteous” needs examination.
Because page 70 makes it perfectly plain that there is absolutely fuck-all “righteousness” to be found in blasting anybody with an unpleasant flying cocktail of Semtex and your bits. And I quote:
“It is unlawful for a believer to kill another believer except by accident….He that kills a believer by design shall burn in Hell for ever”.
Excuse me for being dense but weren’t there a few believers on (a) The Bus and (b) The Tube trains?
Sorry, I think you’ll find that there were. Don’t you boys come moaning to me with excuses about how you’d left your spectacles in Leeds. I don’t care if you didn’t notice them, those were believers. No bosoms for you; it’s straight to bed in Hell for you, my lad. Consider yourself smoted.
Oh and this is merely an extract - you should read the rest. Mind you I have one minor quibble. It occurs to me that the virgins thing (which is anyway well known to be a possible misinterpretation of a word that could mean raisin) isn't something that the average suicide bomber knows much about. It is no doubt true that a mature and experienced man would prefer to dally with an experienced lady rather than a frightened virgin who has to be shown what to do but that doesn't apply here. The majority of suicide bombers have probably only had one or two sexual experiences which didn't involve their right hand and therefore probably are effectively virgins themselves. If you are a young man with limited persoal experience of the opposite sex then the experienced woman of the world - the kind that tries to explain that sex can involve foreplay, that women like orgasms too and that sex can take longer than 10 seconds - is going to be rather scary, much better to dream of rogering some poor young thing that doesn't know any better and hence won't complain.
21 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
21 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
The National Review has an article which mentions Enoch Powell and follows that up with a piece in the corner blog. Given the recent bombs in London this is perhaps unsurprising since Enoch Powell is best known for his "Rivers of blood" speech, which is indeed what the article is about. Unlike the Baron, I was unable to hear the original due to being in my mother's womb at the time, and likewise I am unable to comment on Britian at the time, however as someone who subsequently grew up in multi-culti England thereafter I think I can comment on the accuracy of his predictions.
Firstly, Enoch Powell most certainly got a raw deal from the establishment and the press at the time, and his rhetorical style was not that of a popularist which meant that he was easily pigeonholed into the "eccentric old fool" category. Indeed as I grew up my general knowledge of his comment was along the lines of "racist, wrong, country not wracked with civil war", which is simplistic when looking at the speech itself. He was not 100% correct of course, but then few people are, and was I think overly pessimistic in terms of his expectation of a lack of integration, but he was certainly right enough in his identification of the drawbacks of what we now call political correctness and the like. Needless to say this part of the speech was not a part that was mentioned by the media, no doubt because they were precisely guilty of what he spoke:
There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it “against discrimination”, whether they be leader writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same news papers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong. The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming. This is why to enact legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.
Indeed I would say that his speech was remarkably influential despite the near universal opprobium it received amongst the chattering classes. It is undoubtedly true that he was somewhat naive in terms of the sourcing of some of the material he based his speech on, and on the date when he chose to make it (the 79th aniversary of Hitler's birth), but it is also clear that he did indeed speak to the fears of many of the "non chattering classes" and that he spoke both out of conviction and out of the not unreasonable suggestion that uncontrolled immigration was going to cause trouble unless everything went perfectly.
I met Enoch Powell once a little over 20 years ago, when I was probably a bit young to appreciate him, and my father insisted that we discuss my stumbling comprehension of Herodotus and the Illiad in their original language (both Powell and my father read classics at Cambridge) rather than politics, whether concerning UK immigration or Northern Ireland (Powell was Ulster Unionist MP for South Down at the time). However I do recall he was able to use Herodotus to make a brief digression on how historically every race or nation sees itself surrounded by "βαρβαροι" - that is to say less civilized/capable foreigners and that hence the word for foreigner frequently becomes insulting. Although my father and Powell prefered to discuss theology and classics rather than politics, it was very clear to me that Enoch Powell was a gentleman and a scholar, and clearly someone so talented he would have made an impact no matter what he did. Had he turned to industry or commerce I have no doubt he could have made squillions, had he devoted his life to academia he would no doubt have been a huge influence in whatever university he taught. Compared to today's politicians (of any country or political party) he was an intellectual giant and I think that may have been part of his problem because I got the feeling that he expected his audience to be intelligent too and as a result he frequently omitted words of explanation that would have made his positions more justifiable.
Politically Powell was similar to Margaret Thatcher, and she claimed to have based her economic policy on his (to which he responded that it was "A pity she did not understand them!"). However he was considerably more of a UK isolationist being skeptical of both the US and Europe as his wikiquote page indicates. It is in fact interesting to note that he was against the first Iraq war and, for that matter, much of the cold war; something that I suspect that many of the people who call him to mind today as a result of the predictions in his rivers of blood speech would be rather uncomfortable with.
It is clear that a lot of his positions would cause trouble today just as they did during his life, however I think he would both have been a godsend to the blogosphere, as he was able to argue logically and consistently on controversial subjects, and a beneficiary of it, since bloggers are typically able to gather the required background to defend people such as Powell from the misinterpretations of a lazy, biased press. Moreover since Powell held positions that were mostly liberal (in a Manchesater sense) if not libertarian, he would have provided a certain amount of intellectual rigour to a part of the political spectrum that sometimes seems to suffer from being closely identified as idiotarian.
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22 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
English pride took a real beating yesterday, not because of some firecrackers being let off in the tube, but because of the first Ashes test against Australia. Norm of that that blog was there and makes the point nicely. First there was the triumph noted in the Evening standard:
England made a start beyond their wildest dreams today as they bowled Australia out for 190 in a sensational opening to the Ashes series at Lord's
Then after all that hope came the depression as Australia not only fought back but in the shape of McGrath produced even more destructive bowling, leaving England at the end of the day looking like they would be lucky to get much more than 100 in their first innings. After the one day matches England was looking like it had a chance to do well in the Ashes. At lunchtime yesterday that promise looked to being fulfilled in the first test yet by yesterday eveing those chances looked about as likely as Zarqawi renouncing violence. This is a cruel mental torture far more acute than any at invented by those devious baseballer at Guantanamo bay.
I am not, by any means, a cricket fan - I have been heard to claim that it ties with baseball and paint drying for most boring spectator sport in the world - yet I would have loved to have seen yesterday's cricket. Test matches usually last 5 days, with it being common for one innings to last two days. Yesterday we nearly had two innings in one day and from the accounts they were sensational.
22 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
An article in the FT a couple of weeks ago (link is to a pay article) about the woes of Hollywood and the music publishers gathers together many of the points that should be accepted by all sides but yet it fails to draw the obvious conclusion. There is no doubt that file shareing programs such as Grokster do indeed facilitate the piracy of music and films, and there is no doubt that they do indeed threaten the comfotable livelihooods of those at the top of these industries. However the article fails to understand that the domination of content publishers is a comparitively recent phenomenon and one which exists purely because of the support of governments for a monopoly. It is entirely reasonable to argue that the monopoly of copyright is justified but that doesn't stop the beneficiaries of the monopoly from falling into all the traditional errors of monopolies though the centuries. Part of the problem for a monopoly is that it tends to lead to a lack of customer service or the ignoring of customer demands or overall trends.
This is precisely what has happened to the entertainment industry which has completely failed to grasp the impact of the internet and modern technology in general on the underpinning assumptions of its business model. Despite what should have been the wakeup call of the videocassette, the entertainment industry has, to date, utterly failed to adapt its business model to the new distribution and paradigms that modern electronics have provided. If they continue to do so then we will see some interesting times before some alternative publishing and entertainment producing entities show up.
For the most of the 20th century production and dsitribution of content has been a capital and labour intensive process that meant that it was possible only a few, well capitalized organizations could manage to distribute recorded audiovisual entertainment or even printed material such as books and magazines. The movement to digital recording permitted a drastic reduction in the cost of distribution but the providers, while they may have benefited from the resulting increase in profits they utterly failed to realize that their customers are both demanding other formats for their entertainment and a reduction in price to correspond with the reduction in cost. Moreover the bundling options used in the past, whether for one decent track on an album or a group of cable channels or whatever, are now being perceived as a way to sell second rate products on the back of the good stuff. Combine this with the way that there has been significant price inelasticity with regards to quality - CDs, movie tickets, books are the all same; good/popular ones cost the same as bad ones. In general no one denies that artists or writers should not be rewarded for the work they produce, however as an article at theregister.co.uk makes clear the problem with copyright law and publishing as it stands today is that we have a crisis over appropriate levels and methods of compensation and over the right of others to control the use of material we have bought.
The pigopolists, to use a register expression, still want to force apparently arbitrary controls on what we can do depending (for example) on where we happen to be - Star Wars III took months to arrive legally in Japan despite being available illegally on various filesharing networks since the day it was released elsewhere. Likewse author JK Rowling and her publisher(s)/agent(s) have refused to meet demand for an ebook version of Harry Potter. The result is that the latest HP was available for download on the web for free a few hours after its UK release - according to barflies at Baen's Bar this meant:
It was actually on the net before it was released here in the states. Since it was released at midnight that gives a big chunk of the world time to scan it in before it reaches midnight here.
Just out of curiosity I checked IRC the night it was set to be released. At 8pm CST when I looked chapters one through five had already been posted in a proofed format for people wanting to get the jump. Chapters six and seven also but not proofed. By 2am the entire book was posted in an unproofed edition.
There is a problem here that, as another barfly in the same thread put it:
I wanted an ebook version so I can read it again before September. And
its SEARCHABLE!.
I would have paid a reasonable price for an ebook. I invested time
instead, which gives no financial reward to the author. Silly author.
The evidence of iTunes, not to mention the statement above, indicates that consumers are looking for electronically storable versions of content for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with theft. Many of them are willing to either spend money to obtain such content from a legal source or if not spend the time to find it elsewhere. This is precisely the same issue that causes the smuggling of almost everything that has been smuggled from French Brandy to tea. There is a demand and entrepreneurs are willing to meet that demand with supply. Historically the prohibition of legal supply for something that is in widespread demand means that everyone winks at the breaking of the law in question and even begins to treat as heroes those lawbreakers who make the product available.As Jeff Jarvis notes, judging by an AP report, the pigpopolists still haven't got the message, prefering to make us all potential criminals rather than customers with a demand they won't meet.
I don't know why they do this because the evidence is that they would probably make more money by meeting the demand. It should surely be possible (trivially so I imagine) for someone to take something like the bittorrent code and create a version that allows you to mark certain streams as accessible only after the recipt of some payment and use of resulting access code. Of course the hackers will enjoy reverse engineering it but the point is that such people would never pay anyway. The vast majority of people will (witness starbucks vs generic coffee) pay money for a trusted reliable branded supplier. Disney etc. already have the brand, they could build on that to make a reliable, cheap download service (say $5-$10 per movie, $1 per music track) instead of forcing us to either look for the illegal versions of wait months for the legal but much more expensive DVD. In this hypothetical model they would almost certainly make money even if the download option ate into DVD sales. For example Amazon sells DVDs for between $15 and $30 (and sometimes less) and it is hard to imagine that the publisher and creators actually pocket more than $3 or so from that sales price when you take into account all the production and distribution costs, not to mention the cut that the retailer takes. With such an online model there is no reason why the price should not vary item by item, hour by hour depending on demand, age of product etc. so Harry Potter 6 could have started being priced at $10 then in 6-9 months depending on demand the price could have been cut to $8 then $6 etc. Since there is almost no distribution cost practically all the $x charged is available as royalty or publisher profit and if the barebones electronic format is popular then it may drive sales of the book/DVD/CD format that has the pretty cover etc etc.
This model is not completely hypothetical. Baen has just started to release "eARCs" - electronic Advance Reader Copies - of some of its more popular forthcoming works with a pricing model (for the eARC of David Weber's At All Costs) as follows:
Here's how it will work. You can get the complete =At All Costs= (when I get
it up) for $15.
That price will be good until July 31 when the price will drop to $12
That price will be good until August 31 when the price will drop to $10
That price will be good until September 30 when the price will drop to $8
That price will be good until October 15 when the usual WebScription single
version becomes available.
Note that this is entirely separate from WebScriptions. If you want the
final corrected version you still have to buy the WebScription bundle or the
final individual book.
The signs are that both the works currently available have had a good number of downloads and it is highly likely that the readers (including yours truly) will in fact buy the books again either in paper format or as part of our monthly eBook fix (or both). [For the curious Baen's webmaster reported 400 downloads on the first day at $15 each - when there was essentially NO publicity what so ever and many more since. My rough estimate is that the first day's eARC take basically paid for all the electronic proofing/typesetting for the book which means that al subsequent sales of both the eARC and the final eBook are at a gross margin of 100% less the trivial cost of the website and internet link] I can see absolutely no reason why similar schemes would not work for others but I am sure that the majority of publishers and authors would reject it out of hand and then, having spent gazillions on some awkward, proprietary eBook format, complain that there was no demand for eBooks, because their potential readership is unwilling to jump through the hoops that they want.
FWIW Baen seems to be (as I have noted before) one of the few publishing firms that makes a serious amount of money from eBooks - my recollection is that Baen sells over 2000 webscription bundles (of 6 books) per month at $15 per bundle. By my calculations that is a minimum of $30,000/month, or $360,000 per year - and it is probably considerably more, and once you deduct the cost of one salaried employee, a webserver and internet link, the remaining money is all profit to be split between publisher and authors. In terms of JK Rowling style blockbuster revenue this is peanuts. In terms of the average SF author's royalty take (maybe $10,000 at best) it is significant.
22 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
22 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
Some person called Jonathan Chait seems to think - for reasons that seem to indicate where the fat is in his body - that Bush has a fixation on exercise and thus the suitability of exercise fanatics for high office. Bryan the Junkyardblogger points out that at least some of the Bush cabinet are lardasses, which seems to swiftly dispose of the "must be fit to be part of my government" claim. Normally I wouldn't spend much more on this except for the fact that Chait demonstrates two classic idiocies.
The first is that he seems to think Bush should not encourage Americans to exercise:
Bush not only thinks so, he thinks it goes for the rest of us as well. In 2002, he initiated a national fitness campaign. The four-day kickoff festivities included the president leading 400 White House staffers on a three-mile run. As then-Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said: "When it comes to exercise, there are many people who just need that extra little nudge to go out there and do a little bit more exercise."
Perhaps Jonathan Chait hasn't noticed it, but the rest of us have most certainly observed that, epidemic or not, the US seems ot have more fat people than anywhere else and they seem to be more and more of them piling on more and more blubber. It is of course a little hard to tell how much this lard costs the nation in healthcare costs for chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, heart attacks, type II diabetes etc. but I'm going to guess that it is in the billions of dollars. If everyone did in fact do half an hour's exercise a day just maye the US would have solved its healthcare funding crisis.
The second idiocy is that he fails to comprehend the difference between "some" and "all".
The notion of a connection between physical and mental potency is, of course, silly. (Consider all the perfectly toned airheads in Hollywood — or, perhaps, the president himself.)
Some people who spend a lot of time exercising are stupid, therefore, according to Chait, all exercise fanatics are stupid. The fact that exercise does seem to help mental health by stimulating neurogenesis and endorphin release, seems to indicate that actually contrary to Mr Chait's hypothesis, "mens sana in corpore sano" is in fact more than just an old wives tale. Of course the required understanding of statistics and the like that would be required to understand why exercise is a positive indicator towards mental alertness but yet that positive inidcator does not mean that all fitness fanatics are mental giants is, I fear, somewhat beyond Mr Chait's limited intellectual grasp.
Update: Michelle Malkin and others are on his case too
23 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
Muslim leaders have called on the police to explain why an Asian man was shot dead at Stockwell station.
The Muslim Council of Britain said Muslims were concerned there was a "shoot to kill" policy in operation.
A spokesman said Muslims he had spoken to this morning were "jumpy and nervous".
Inayat Bunglawala said: "I have just had one phone call saying 'What if I was carrying a rucksack?'.
"It's vital the police give a statement about what occurred and explain why the man was shot dead.
"There may well be reasons why the police felt it necessary to unload five shots into the man and shoot him dead, but they need to make those reasons clear.
"We are getting phone calls from quite a lot of Muslims who are distressed about what may be a shoot to kill policy."
He said in the current atmosphere Muslims were very afraid and other people were looking at them in a very suspicious manner.
From this I think I see some people seem either to be a little weak on the deductive logic front or are pretending such weakness. Do we really have to explain why (dark skinned) Muslim males are going to be treated as if they are potential bombers by the police and the general public? I prescribe application of a cluebat.
23 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
23 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
Scott Burgess, a blogger from New Orleans who recently moved to London, spends his time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian for its stance on the environment, its columnists such as Polly Toynbee, and its recent intervention in the US presidential election campaign.
He pitched into Mr Aslam, who as it happened, beat him to the traineeship on the Guardian. Googling the 27-year-old Muslim's name, Mr Burgess picked up some articles the journalist had openly written in the past for Hizb ut-Tahrir websites and denounced him on his blogspot, The Daily Ablution, saying: "He is on record supporting a world-dominant Islamic state." [...]
Mr Burgess fished out a website article written by Mr Aslam before September 11 for Hizb ut-Tahrir. He quoted one line: "Establishment of Khilafah [the worldwide Islamic caliphate] is our only solution, to fight fire with fire, the state of Israel versus the Khilafah state."
I could be wrong but my recollection is that Scott has been in London for some years so the snark about recently moved seems somewhat misplaced. As does the "spends his time indoors", a regular reader of the Ablution would note that Scott has done a lo of travelling for someone indoors.
24 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
24 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
It is wrong to put the onus on British Muslims to defeat terror
Let us start with the sub head. I don't believe anyone, and certainly not Cherie "jiljab" Booth's husband, has said that only Muslims can defeat terror. What he said is that British Muslims need to stop shrugging their shoulders when they hear so-called co-religionists making statements that sound like they could be incitements to terrorist activityFaced with the events of the past two weeks, it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to say the Muslim community must do more to combat terrorism. Many community figures have done just that.
Shahid Malik MP told the Commons: "The challenge is straightforward - that those voices that we have tolerated will no longer be tolerated." This raises the question: did we really hear people planning violence in this country but do nothing about it?
The problem, Mr Saeed, is that hitherto there has not apparently been much assistence given the the police. Actions,as they say, speak louder than words, especially when the words are generally followed by a weaselly "but..."
This is why I've found it strange that many Muslim leaders have offered to look deep within our community now. It's a tacit admission of negligence that I simply do not accept. The prime minister has of course welcomed this attitude. Indeed he has led from the front, ratcheting up the rhetoric against Muslims, laying the responsibility solely on us. "In the end, this can only be taken on and defeated by the community itself," he said last week.
Blair is of course completely correct, terrorists need the tacit support of their neighbours to operate successfully. The classic examples of this being across the water in N Ireland. The fact that it seems that very few Muslims have to date dared to complain publically about the inflamatory speeches etc. of their co-religionists indicates that he could be correct. One wonders whether Mr Saeed is worried lest he be shopped for something he might have said or written sonewhere - Google shows up, for example, this article but it is more risible than anything else IMO
Mr Blair has attacked the idea of the caliphate - the equivalent of criticising the Pope. He has also remained silent in the face of a rightwing smear campaign against such eminent scholars as Sheikh al-Qaradawi - a man who has worked hard to reconcile Islam with modern democracy. Such actions and omissions fuel the suspicion that we are witnessing a war on Islam itself. If there is any thought that Muslims are fine but their religion can take a hike then Mr Blair should know that we will never be in the corner, in the spotlight, losing our religion.
Firstly - why not criticise the pope? you only have to look in the Grauniad a few months back to see all sorts of papal critcism. Secondly I don't think any pope since the 17th century (if then) has ever claimed that the entire world should become Roman Catholic and if they don't they should at the least be governed exclusively by Roman Catholic governors, law courts etc. Thirdly if al-Qaradawi is working hard to reconcile Islam with modern democracy he hasn't been terribly good at it, at least when it comes to the part of democracy open to those who are not male heterosexuals. While we are not at war with Islam, some parts of Islam, such as those run by that other Osama, do declare that they are at war with us. It seems not unreasonable that those threatened with war to establish a religious state should ask the co-religionists of said warriors whether they agree with the goals or not and explain that such a goal is counter to our way of life.
By putting the onus on Muslims to defeat terror, the prime minister absolves himself of responsibility. Muslims are not in denial of our duties, but who are we meant to be combating? The security services had no idea about all that has gone on in London, so how are we as ordinary citizens to do better?
So here we are - outright slopey shoulders. The police should be omniscient and it is not the responsibility of any Muslim to help the police. As for "who are we meant to be combatting?" what kind of a dumb rhetorical question is that? Just in case Mr Saeed is genuinely confused on the question the answer is people who prefer to blow up others rather than engaging in negotiation or political lobbying.
It is not Muslims but Mr Blair who is in denial. He was advised that the war in Iraq would put us in more danger, not less. Silvio Berlusconi has admitted Italy is in danger because of his alliance with Bush; Mr Blair should do the same.
And more slopey shoulders and "root cause" apologia for terrorism. Apparently it is entirely acceptable for cowards to blow innocent users of public transport because of their government's policies. The only reason why Iraq made Britian more of a target is because of appeasing statements by papers such as the Grauniad who seem to think that western nations must remove the speck from their own eye before removing the plank from that of another.
Jack Straw has just apologised for Britain's role in the Srebrenica massacre. This is a welcome development, but these apologies need to be extended to Britain's explicit roles in creating the injustices in the Muslim world - from the mess that colonial masters left in Kashmir to the promising of one people's land to another in Palestine. We need to recognise our past mistakes and make a commitment not to repeat them. Western leaders are outraged about London but show no similar anger for other atrocities across the world. What happens abroad matters to British Muslims as much as what happens here.
The difference between Srebenica and either Kashmir or Palestine is the way that in Srebenica unarmed Muslims relied on the global community to protect them whereas Muslims in both of those places where armed but still managed to be defeated in battle. Somewhat less culpability methinks. Of course it is interesting to note that Mr Saeed seems to deny the right of the state of Israel to exist.
As EU Rota noted a few days ago, most of the deaths in Iraq have been caused by Islamic terrorists not occupying forces. Combine that with the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed by Saddam Hussein it is hard to say that either the US or British governments are making Iraqis less safe.
Why 12 or 1400? how about 60? or 30? or some other number? And why should I judge these acts as being either a part of Islam or a protest? Given the bloody history of Islam over the past 1400 years I think you could make a plausible argument that Islam has always behaved this way. Actually I think that is generally wrong but I do think that the instigators of the terrorism believe that they are fighting for the same goals as Muslims did when the conquered Spain a thousand years ago - namely the establishment of a global muslim state, the Caliphate. I think that because the terrorists say that in their propaganda. Are we not supposed to take their statements at face value? The ball is most certainly not in Mr Blair's court, it is in yours because if you continue to tacitly support terrorism in favour of the establishment of a Caliphate you will be unwelcome in Britain where the vast majority of the inhabitants don't want to live under such a regime.
· Osama Saeed is a spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain
Osama Saeed is a embarassment to the Muslim Community in Britain
25 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
Don't kill fat people, they're hard to carry.
In other words you may be less likely to be murdered if fat. What is not pointed out, but which is undoubtedly true, is that beinjg fat may also make it harder for vital organs to be penetrated in a timely manner. On the other hand one disadvantage of being fat is that you may find it harder to run away....
25 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Already battered by an insurgency, Iraq's government faced a barrage of questions in parliament on Monday on everything from the fate of billions of dollars in donor pledges to garbage collection.
Reading long lists of complaints, National Assembly members were often cut short by the deputy speaker because they were taking too long to air grievances in the session televised live.
Yet I can't think of another country in the region (except Israel or Turkey) where MPs (or equivalent) would be willing to make such complaints of the government on behalf of their constituents, nor where, if they did so it would be broadcast on live TV.
26 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
With all the recent terrorist events it is interesting to look at terrorism as portrayed in Science Fiction and thus, right on cue as it were, comes a book on precisely that topic from Michael Z Willimason. The book is The Weapon ( ISBN:1-4165-0894-5, $25.00 Hardcover (August 2005) and as an ebook).
The Weapon is set in the same universe as Freehold, a book that I have raved about before and is a sort of complementary story to that one, in that some minor characters in Freehold are the major ones in The Weapon and vice versa. I expect the book stands up well as a stand alone, but I can't exactly give an opinion on that since I have practically memorized Freehold. Although the Freehold/Weapon universe is set some five centuries into the future, the government forms of the majority of the worlds are entirely recognizable today. Indeed many of them are only too recognizable being precisely the sort of failed state anarchies that we see today in Africa or the statist bureaucratic nightmare that we Eurosceptics predict that the EU is on its way to becoming. The one standout from this is the libertarian world of Grainne - a.k.a. the Freehold - and both books look at how such a world will likely appear as a threat to the statist rulers elsewhere and thus must be assimilated.
In The Weapon we get to see how a libertarian culture might react against terrorism and how that differs from a society where people are trained to expect others to look after them. The first part of the book is about how the hero becomes an "operative", basically some sort of special operations combat superman. This part of the book is similar to bits of (say) Heinlein's Starship Troopers or any other book where the hero trains to become a soldier before going out to battle - in some ways it is interesting to compare and contrast this book with CJ Cherryh's "The Paladin", which Baen put un the previous month's webscription bundle, because, while one is set in ancient China and the other set in an interstellar future the basic plot of hero plus small band fighting massive tyranny is the same.
The interesting part is when the training ends and the hero and his colleagues go out into the real world, where terrorism and the like are no less common than they are today. One of the things that happens is that a Grainne Citizen - one of the rulers (to the extent that there are any) - is killed by some terrorists and the hero is required to teach the terrorists not to do this again. Without giving away too much of the plot, the method chosen is to visit a level of frightfulness to the terrorists so that they decide to go after easier targets. One might consider this to be an American response that didn't happen when the Achille Lauro was hijacked and Leon Klinghoffer was killed by the PLO.
We also get two different examples of how easy it could be for terrorists with good preparation to use standard conman tricks to penetrate almost anywhere and then cause havoc. The book, as a fictional parable, makes it clear why security specialists such as Bruce Schneier or Joe Huffman are sceptical about profiling, ID cards and the like. Nothing that we see in Iraq, Egypt, Israel or London seems to disprove this and indeed the way that the Iraqi terrorists have evolved their tactics indicates that the surviving Islamist terrorists are quite capable of learning.
Finally we get to see the hero and his group commit the ultimate terrorism against the planet earth. There are two things to note here. The first is that although sucessful in megadeath terms, on its own even such enormous shocking terrorism would have failed to work without some other external acts. The second is that it repeats the observation above that it is extremely hard to stop determined terrorists at the point of terror and relatedly that this gets progressively worse in societies where civilians are conditioned to let the government do things rather than take responsibility themselves. This latter point is key when we look at how we in the west should react to terror. The root cause arguers have a sort of point - we need to remove the conditions that foster terrorism - but the way to do that is not, as the book also makes entirely clear, by giving in to the terrorists demands but by resolving the underlying environment that permits terrorists to gain support.
Back to more mundane matters, the Weapon is a great read, with good characters, flashes of humour and so on to make the story interesting. It isn't perfect, but I think most of my reservations are related to my discomfort with the subject matter rather than the story. In fact I believe this tale has something in it to annoy everyone, be they left wing, right wing, libertarian, communist or what ever and that is probably the best reason why everyone should read it, because those annoyances are the barbs that make you (re)think your positions.
26 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
26 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
"If it is concern for Iraq, why are they driving a car bomb into the middle of a group of children and killing them?" he asked.
"What is happening in Iraq is that ordinary decent Iraqis are being butchered by these people with the same terrorist ideology that is killing people in different parts of the world."
...
"It is time we stopped saying 'ok, we abhor their methods but we kind of see something in their ideas or maybe they have got a sliver of excuse or justification'.
"They have got no justification for it.
"And one other thing I want to say while I'm on this subject, neither have they got any justification for killing people in Israel either.
"There is no justification for suicide bombing whether in Palestine, Iraq, London, Egypt, Turkey, in the United States of America. There is no justification for it, period.
"And we will start to beat this when we stand up and confront the ideology of this evil. No just the methods but the ideas."
(Hat tip: Harry)
28 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
The General Medical Council has won its appeal against a ruling allowing a terminally ill man to stop doctors withdrawing his feeding tube.Lesley Burke did not want doctors to stop giving him food and water in the final stages of his illness.The ruling has wide implications for terminally ill people who want the right to die.
And it means that decisions over people's right to live or die are back in the hands of doctors, rather than the patients.
[... T]he GMC told the Court of Appeal it believes the ruling could put doctors in "an impossibly difficult position".
The organisation believes it obliges a doctor to provide treatment which the patient demands - even if the doctor believes the treatment will not provide any benefit or would be futile.
The GMC said the patient did not have the right to demand any particular form of treatment.
Is it just me who finds that last line particularly chilling?
28 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
29 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
29 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
ADDICTS TAKE NOTE | |
| A Baen WebScriptions Special Advance Reader Copy available NOW online The Dance of Time by Eric Flint and David Drake | |
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29 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
Albert Scardino, the Guardian's executive editor for news, has resigned as a direct result of Sassygate. My impression from that source's report is that his position had become untenable because of the split between Mr. Aslam's supporters and those who wanted him fired (the latter including, to his credit, Ian "Clark County" Katz).
According to that source, Alan Rusbridger has conceded that the Aslam affair and its internal repercussions constitute a significant crisis for the paper.
Despite the Grauniad being, generally speaking, an Internet aware newspaper with its own blog, they apparently seem unable to do basic things like google and show precisely the same arrogance that their transatlantic cousins - CBS/Rather and CNN/Eason Jordon - showed. There was a time earlier this year when various people were opining that the British were not going to see the same sort of blog effect that we saw last year in the US. I think the coverage of 7/7 and subsequent events has in general disproven that thesis and if there were any doubt, this event clearly shows that British blogs can be just as influential as their transatlantic cousins (even when their detractors do their best to paint the blogs as crazy-eyed Bush-loving yankees).
