02 July 2007
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The number of civilians killed in Iraq fell in June to the lowest level since the Baghdad security drive began in February, the Iraqi government says.
It says 1,227 civilians were killed in June - a 36% drop compared 1,949 violent deaths to May.
However, the figures cannot be verified independently, and many deaths are believed to go unreported.
There we have it - many deaths are unreported. But has that, one wonders, changed suddenly in the last three months or is it just as likely that the Iraqis who tend not to report deaths are failing to report about the same proportion of deaths recently as they did in the past? The BBC is silent on this point. All it says is:There are suspicions about the way the Iraqi government handles such information, our correspondent says.
It has refused to reconsider its decision to withhold statistics from the United Nations mission Iraq.
Details please. Oh and pray explain why reporting statistics to the UN automatically gives them a seal of approval?Unofficial figures compiled by McClatchy Newspapers' show 189 Iraqis, including police and government security forces, were killed in the capital through Friday, a drop of almost two thirds since this year's high in February, when 520 were killed. The average monthly death toll of Iraqis in Baghdad was 410 from December through May.
In other words not only are overall deaths decreasing but in Baghdad, where the surge started, the figures are even more impressive with a reduction of over 50% from the average for the previous six months.
02 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
I thought that it might be fun to see whether there were any other flaws with the process and discovered shedloads of them. The first and most bizarre is that it turns out that Harper Collins have outsourced the eBook part of the business to a company called overdrive and have, for some unknown reason, decided that there will be UK, US, Canadian and Australian sites. And if you read the small print it seems like there may be trouble if you don't have an address in one of these countries. Although maybe not because I registered at the US site with a French address, but I'm not going to actually hit "buy" to find out if this is OK or not. What I did find "interesting" was that the list of Bujold books in the UK site was limited to Paladin of Souls. So if I'm a UK resident who prefers to pay for things in £ rather than some form of $ I'm going to be missing 5 out of 6 of the Bujold oeuvre published by Harper Collins. And umm seeing as Paladin of Souls is the sequel to Curse of Chalion the lack of the latter is particularly odd. But I digress.
03 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
03 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
03 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
It would appear that the EU runs on the guiding principle of if it moves ban it.
The author of that blog clearly had no idea how true he was. The Register reports today that:The EU Parliament's environment committee is considering a proposal to ban all cars capable of exceeding 100 mph (162 km/hour) from 2013. The proposal, put forward by LibDem MEP Chris Davies, is based on the arguments that cars that go faster than 100 mph are "over-engineered to a ridiculous degree", and that for safety reasons, they need to be heavier, and hence to burn more fuel.
On his webshite Mr Davies explains:"Cars designed to go at stupid speeds have to be built to withstand the effects of a crash at those speeds. They are heavier than necessary, less fuel efficient and produce too many emissions.
"At a time when Europe is worried about its energy security it is sheer lunacy to approve the sale of gas guzzling cars designed to travel at dangerous speeds that the law does not permit."
The Register article gives this moronic proposal a good "John Smeaton" but fails to note one obvious weakness in the proposal. That weakness is that practically any car will go faster that 100Mph. You can (if you really try hard) get a Twingo to do a ton as the photo on the left illustrates and given that they've overtaken me on the A8 I believe the same goes for a Smart (the Roadster anyway although I'm sure I've seen the classic Fortwo also go that speed on the A8). Both the Twingo and the Smart, for those who may not be aware, are the sorts of wimpy cars that people like Mr Davies seem to think are what we should all drive with fuel economies up in the 40-60Mpg (imperial) range and neither is exactly heavy. In fact I'd say that driving a Twingo at 100Mph is the sort of thing you should only do on an empty road where you are sure there will be no need to make sudden changes of velocity. In fact unless cars are electronically limited (i.e. we stop them going any faster even if they have the potential to) I sincerely doubt any car on the market today cannot do a ton.
03 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
04 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
Okay, here's the deal: I'll pledge 1000 hours of my time to lead the drive to endow a new super-duper $50M chair at Texas Law School. The sole condition is that the Law School faculty en masse, and the chair's holder in particular, must pre-commit that if the chair's holder ever accuses an American president — any American president — of being an "out-and-out dictatorial [authority] totally indepedent from any scrutiny or accountability,' then he (the professor) must go live and teach for a year in any country whose name ends in the syllable "-stan."
I think this is an idea that could usefully be extended to other seats of learning and indeed other disciplines. Of course faculty meetings might get a little sparse for the first couple of years when half the faculty is spread over "ashcanistan" but the after that one suspects that hyperbole WRT the US government would diminish quickly.
04 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
Internet service providers (ISPs) would face charges if they failed to block websites containing bomb-making instructions generated anywhere in the world, EU officials said.
...
EU officials denied that it would be impossible to track down websites based in remote places, insisting that the local provider based in the EU could be held to account. One said: “You always need a provider here that gives you access to websites. They can decide technically which websites to allow. Otherwise how would China block internet sites? There are no technological obstacles, only legal ones.”
But the Internet Services Providers’ Association (Ispa) said that it would fight any attempt to make ISPs criminally liable for content.
Tim W and the EU Referendum blog, not the mention the Reg, poor scorn on the idea, and for good reason. The comparison with the "Great Firewall of China" is a total joke fo rthe simple reason that, unlike the PRC, Europe's Internet connections to the rest of the world are extraordinarily diverse so having a few block points isn't going to work. If ISPs are supposed to block content then they will either over react and ban (say) all of typepad because Mr Worstall has just mentioned ammonium nitrate and fuel oil on his typepad blog or under react because it is impossible to create a list of bomb-making instructions that need to be banned. Consider how spammers consistently update techniques to get their V!AGR@ and pump'n'dump stock scams through our filters and see how easy it would be for terrorists and the like to create instruction manuals that are missed by the ISPs.
05 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
06 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
06 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
A preliminary report by U.N. auditors, issued last month, confirms massive violations of U.N. rules regarding hiring practices, the use of foreign currency, and inspections of U.N.-funded projects. In a series of interviews in New York, Mr. Shkurtaj says the auditors (who were barred by North Korea from going there) barely scratched the surface of the misconduct.
We get quickly to the bottom line: Did the U.N. money go to the humanitarian projects it was supposed to fund? "How the hell do I know?" responds Mr. Shkurtaj -- oversight was so poor, the involvement of North Korean workers assigned by the government so extensive and the use of cash so prevalent, that it was impossible to follow the money trail.
Mr. Shkurtaj arrived in North Korea on Nov. 4, 2004. He says one of his first indications that something was amiss was when checks denominated in euros and made out to "cash" arrived on his desk for signature. "Rule No. 1 in every UNDP country in the world is that you have to operate in local currency," he says, "not in hard currency. It's the rule number one of development. . . in order to support the local economy and not devalue or destroy the local currency."
"I didn't sign the checks for about a week," he says, and then "it became a real mess. Headquarters contacted me, and said, 'don't become a problem. You're going to wind up a PNG, a persona non grata, and ending up a PNG means the end of your career with the U.N. . . . We are authorizing you to go ahead and sign the checks . . . So I started signing."
"Every morning from 8 to 10, we would issue checks" in euros for staff and projects, Mr. Shkurtaj says. "Then the checks, instead of going directly to the people or institutions by mail, as they should go [as specified by U.N. rules], the checks were given to the driver of our office." The driver would take them to the Foreign Trade Bank, where he would "exchange them into cash and come back to the office." North Korea did not permit Mr. Shkurtaj to have access to the UNDP's accounts at the Foreign Trade Bank, which refused even to keep his signature on file.
Then, every day at noontime, "North Koreans saying they represented U.N.-funded projects would come to receive cash at the UNDP offices." Mr. Shkurtaj says he was not allowed to require the North Koreans to sign receipts for the money or even to present IDs. "I had to trust them," he says. "But, hey, if headquarters tells me to give the money away, I'll give the money away."
On Aug. 16, 2006, a few weeks before Mr. Shkurtaj left North Korea, the UNDP resident representative, Timo Pakkala, issued a memo to the staff noting "an increased use of cash payments, in some cases to payees that are not authorized to receive payments." Citing "UNDP policy," Mr. Pakkala ordered future payments be made by bank transfer or "non-cash cheque." He also ordered staff to obtain receipts and not give money to unidentified people.
However to go back to the scandal. Mr Melkert is not the only prominent UN official who might find answering probing questions a little embarassing. Britain's Minister for Kleptocrats was running the UNDP while all this N Korean laundering was going on and it would be interesting to know why he apparently failed to notice anything amiss?
06 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
07 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
was one of the books that really stuck in my mind after I read it (aged approx 11). The books that most people cite, Stranger in a Strange Land
, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
and Starship Troopers
are indeed some of my favourites too. They are some of the select few books that I can almost recite passages from because I have read them so often. However the Heinlein book that I like the best is the second or third one I read - Friday
. Friday is a book that hasn't received quite the same approval and is frequently lumped amongst the "late season dross" rather than the brilliant books of his middle years yet I believe this is wrong. A couple of years ago I defended Friday after a I read an NY Times review of Heinlein which was rather negative about Friday and I stand by what I wrote there.Until recently, large amounts of electricity could not be efficiently stored. Thus, when you turn on the living-room light, power is instantly drawn from a generator.
A new type of a room-size battery, however, may be poised to store energy for the nation's vast electric grid almost as easily as a reservoir stockpiles water, transforming the way power is delivered to homes and businesses. Compared with other utility-scale batteries plagued by limited life spans or unwieldy bulk, the sodium-sulfur battery is compact, long-lasting and efficient.
It would be nice if the developers of this battery or some other better one called their product a shipstone.
11 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
13 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
13 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
Judge Bernard Borrel, 39, was officially in the former French colony on the Red Sea - site of France's largest military base in Africa - to help to reform the penal code. It has since emerged that he was also investigating alleged drugs and arms smuggling by the man who was to become Djibouti's president, Ismael Omar Guelleh.
Borrel's partially burned body was found at the foot of a ravine in October 1995. The local authorities, supported by Paris, declared that he had committed suicide.
The suicide was clearly similar to some of those russian ones where the accused manages to shoot himself three times and then jump from a window. It has taken 12 years for anyone to officially quibble with the verdict, and one sort of wonders why it had to wait until Sarko became President for anything to happen. There is clearly a lot of undercover behind the scenes shadiness here, something that this paragraph makes clear because it is so bizarre :The affair has many other ramifications. Djibouti brought a case in the International Court of Justice in The Hague in January 2006 to try to force France to hand over its legal dossier on Borrel's death. According to a document recently discovered by investigators at the foreign ministry in Paris, M. Chirac urged Djibouti to bring the case against France.
Mind you the two concluding paragraphs are rather more obvious:On Monday and Tuesday of this week, two other investigating judges raided the home of Michel de Bonnecorse, a former senior African adviser to M. Chirac. The former president has let it be known that he will refuse to answer any questions about the "Affaire Borrel". He claims permanent legal immunity for all his actions while in the Elysée palace.
In an interview with Le Monde last weekend, the Djibouti President denied all knowledge of the affair. "The Republic of Djibouti was not involved, either closely or from afar, in the death of Bernard Borrel," he said.
How do you say "It wasn't me guv and anyway I was out of the country at the time" in French?
13 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
BRUSSELS, Belgium -- EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner denied on Thursday (June 21st) that a deal on freeing five Bulgarian nurses on death row in Libya was imminent. She acknowledged, however, that EU negotiators are busy trying to reach a settlement. The nurses -- and a Palestinian doctor who was recently granted Bulgarian citizenship -- were sentenced to death on charges that they deliberately infected nearly 500 children with HIV. Bulgaria, its European allies, and the United States have rejected the verdict, citing experts who testified that the epidemic began before the medics were hired. The families are demanding compensation for every infected child.
Mrs Sarkozy's visit came one day after the death sentences were handed down on the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor, who recently acquired Bulgarian citizenship.
She said her visit was "not official" - she had been sent by the French president "as a mother" to affirm the support of France for the children.
It looks like the Libyans are negotiating more to avoid a serious loss of face by admitting that they framed the foreigners. Atg least that is what I infer from this:"The nurses are also ready to meet a condition stipulated by Libya - not to engage in any additional appeal against Libya through international judicial proceedings."
Official or not, one can only hope it has an effect. I doubt I am alone in hoping that the poor Bulgarians are released.
15 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
Here is my challenge. Let Gerson name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader of this column think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first -- I have been asking it for some time -- awaits a convincing reply. By what right, then, do the faithful assume this irritating mantle of righteousness? They have as much to apologize for as to explain.
This is where I disagree. Religion, depsite the efforts of rationalists of all flavours pops up all over the place. Strong arguments can be made that the militasnt atheism of Dawkins, and Hitchesn, amounts to a religion in some cases. Certainly many atheists seem to substitute belief in some set of unproven ideology, or "science", instead. Witness the idiots who cling to Communism, the outbreaks of Bush Derangement Syndrome and those who slavishly follow the creeds of Evironmentalism and Climate Change and insst, with a self-righteousness that would rivals those of any religious fundamentalist that we must all don environmentally friendly hairshirts and that anyone who fails to subscribe to their "scientific consensus" is a heretic who must be forced to recant and whose writings must be ignored by all.I found the person I had been talking to in the tiny office of a youth centre, next door to a mosque. He showed me a video reconstruction of how easy it is to convert some men in this country to terrorism. The grainy low-budget movie has been made by people who have had brushes with extremism, and it is horribly plausible. Gruelling images of torture and Iraqi casualties from BBC News form the backdrop to a conversation that begins in a gym and which ends up convincing a pretty average young man that “it’ll be us next; Iraq can happen here; the kufs are killing us; we must unite against them”.
The video was made by the Active Change Foundation. What is striking about its leader, Hanif Qadir, is that he talks about street crime, gang crime, drugs, as much as religion. These are the materials from which much of the extremism in Britain is fashioned. It seems that the recruiters are using what is an age-old recipe for many successful cults and gangs. They target kids who are doing drugs, or carjacking. They offer them a safe house when they come out of prison. They provide friendship on drug rehab. It echoes the kind of pyramid-selling perfected by drug dealers: get someone hooked, and use him to hook the next ones.
The journalist says this echoes the techniques of successful cults but I can't help but think of the Jesuit saying "Give me a child before he is 7 and he is mine for life". Also springing to mind is that saying about the devil providing work for idle hands and, for that matter, the one about religion being the opium of the masses.For a time it puzzled me that after 50 years of tumultuous change the media liberal attitudes could remain almost identical to those I shared in the 1950s. Then it gradually dawned on me: my BBC media liberalism was not a political philosophy, even less a political programme. It was an ideology based not on observation and deduction but on faith and doctrine. We were rather weak on facts and figures, on causes and consequences, and shied away from arguments about practicalities. If defeated on one point we just retreated to another; we did not change our beliefs. We were, of course, believers in democracy. The trouble was that our understanding of it was structurally simplistic and politically naïve. It did not go much further than one-adult-one-vote.
We ignored the whole truth, namely that modern Western civilisation stands on four pillars, and elected governments is only one of them. Equally important is the rule of law. The other two are economic: the right to own private property and the right to buy and sell your property, goods, services and labour. (Freedom of speech, worship, and association derive from them; with an elected government and the rule of law a nation can choose how much it wants of each). We never got this far with our analysis. The two economic freedoms led straight to the heresy of free enterprise capitalism - and yet without them any meaningful freedom is impossible.
But analysis was irrelevant to us. Ultimately, it was not a question of whether a policy worked but whether it was right or wrong when judged by our media liberal moral standards. There was no argument about whether, say, capital punishment worked. If retentionists came up with statistics showing that abolition increased the number of murders we simply rejected them.
It is interesting to note that Jay calls "media liberalism" an ideology. It seems to me that "media liberalism" with its dogmatic rejection of certain things and dogmatic acceptance of others is more of a religion than an ideology. Although perhaps one can define the difference between the two as religions admit they have a supernatural origin for beliefs whereas ideologies claim a natural, scientific one. However this is quibbling.
17 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
Mr Livingstone said Mr Johnson would be "seriously damaging for London".
He said: "He (Mr Johnson) has the 567th lowest record in Parliament in terms of the number of votes he bothers to attend - which puts him in the lowest 20 per cent of MPs.
"To put someone in charge of London with such a right-wing record, who has no experience of managing anything practical at all, and who has shown no serious interest in even the most important issues confronting the capital, would not be a joke but seriously damaging for London."
Looking at Mr Johnson's voting record, Mr Livingstone said: "He did not bother to vote in the House of Commons to defend the Freedom Pass for free travel for older people. He did not even bother to vote on the Parliamentary Bill in favour of Crossrail - the most important transport project for London.
"He strongly supported the war in Iraq until this turned into a disaster. He voted against amendments that would have allowed unmarried couples, both heterosexual and homosexual, to adopt children. He voted in favour of hunting.
"On nuclear issues, Johnson voted in favour of replacing Trident and did not bother to attend the votes on nuclear power in 2002 and 2006."
Mr Livingstone also questioned the Tories' stand on affordable housing, free bus and tram travel for under-18s, and the congestion charge.
If the Grauniad fails to properly quote Red Ken, it does manages to redeem itself by bringing up the most gratuitous toff reference:If elected, he could one day be mayor at the same time as Mr Cameron, his friend from Eton and Oxford, is prime minister.
And then in the battle to attack Boris the Grauniad wins hands down because they also go after him in the comment section. Their leading columnist, Polly "Pot" Toynbee has a wonderful piece entitled: Boris the jester, toff, serial liar and sociopath for mayor. Just in case it wasn't obvious Ms Toynbee makes it clear she is somewhat anti-Boris and Tim W explains why this appears to be the case. The Polly hit piece is a true gem. Ms Toynbee's goves come off and she explains in detail why Mr Johnson is unfit to run a whelk stall let alone London. This is classic "read the whole thing" stuff but I suspect that Ms T may end up regretting her tirade. For example this section:Jokes make outrageous views acceptable, but the general tenor of Borisisms reveals his political cast of mind - the endless mock cockney attacks on "elf'n'safety", on children's car seats or, notoriously, Liverpudlians wallowing in their victim status. He hints at utter contempt for the NHS, with USSR comparisons. Though liberal on matters of sex (what else could he be?) and drugs ("I'm instinctively inclined to liberalise"), his politics are right off the Cameron scale. Here he is on education: "I am in favour of selection ... So is every member of the British ruling classes"; and on universities: "I believe passionately in academic inequality."
Just before the grammar school row he complained: "We have taken away the old ladder of social mobility, the academic selection that used to form a way out for the bright children of poor families." How will London parents react to the tone of this? "Masters of the Universe" should "endow new schools for improving the education of our feral children to reduce the risk of being despoiled of their squillions by a hoodie". As a rabid Europhobe, how would that play with the Olympics or the Tour de France?
I'm sure that the media liberal voters of Islington and Notting Hill will indeed reject anyone who says such things, but what about the cockneys of Stratford or the city lawyers, accountants etc of Peckham or Wandsworth? One suspects that many people like the Suspect Paki would agree with his NHS diatribes, even if they disagree with him on Iraq etc. and I reckon a lot of people will agree with him when he talks about grammar schools. [Aside: it is possible Ms Toynbees hatred for the Grammars is because she failed her 11plus ]. It is far from impossible that the victims of the "feral children" agree with Mr Johnson that a better education might lead them away from a life of crime. Who knows, if they master joined up hand-writing perhaps they can read "media studies" at some second rate polytechnic and then become Grauniad columnists?
17 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
19 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
[I]n Britain, the rich give a lower proportion of their wealth than others, with more donors in the north east than the south east, and more women than men. The total value stays pretty steady at 0.9% of GDP.
0.9% of GDP by region, over time? or what? GDP seems an odd measure for charitable giving by individuals. But I'm allowing myself to get trapped in irrelevant ratholes.So long as they fulfil the very basic requirements of probity, registered charities may cover a multitude of crankiness and inefficiency: cut-throat wasteful competition between near-identical tin-rattlers, advertising campaigns that distort important social issues; or empire building charity managers with little genuine assessment of their outcomes. Of course many are excellent, but, good or bad, the taxpayer has to pony up that 28% extra for every pound put in a tin.
Donors with their hefty cheques can cause serious trouble for good charities doing difficult, skilled work. Masters of the Universe are used to running the show themselves in their own companies, and they think they know best how to run any organisation. Sometimes they do, but sometimes the cash comes at a high price. Once they've got all the "toys", the danger is that using their money to run poor folk, their schools, their estates or their children is just the most fun toy of all.
I'll hand over to Boris for a second to point out that governments are not exactly paragons of efficiency:Take the case of poor Olive Rack, 56, who has 20 years experience as a nursery teacher, and who last year saw one of her charges - a two-year-old - whacking a baby over the head with a large wooden brick. The toddler was about to have a second crack when Olive intervened and took her by the hand to the naughty chair.
Alas, her actions were spotted, through a window, by the emanations of the state. Two early learning advisers from Northampton County Council happened to be doing an inspection, and grimly noted the event.
Five weeks later, to Olive's utter amazement, the police turned up on her doorstep and charged her with common assault. The case went to court, and only collapsed when the toddler's mum said the whole thing was bonkers, and that Olive was a good nursery teacher.
Anyone want to guess how many thousands of pounds were wasted by that attempted prosecution? But there is more. Boris points out that HMG is planning to require nursery / pre-school teachers to become accredited with something called "Early Years Professional Status". Boris notes that if you take a look at the pre-requisites for obtaining one of these piece of paper you need some other pieces of paper:Before you start the training you must have:
[...]Before undertaking the validation process you must:
The main provisions of the national and local statutory and non-statutory frameworks within which children’s services work and their implications for early years settings
andThe current legal requirements, national policies and guidance on health and safety, safeguarding and promoting the well being of children and their implications for early years settings
as well as all sorts of other box ticking. None of which appears to require a university degree or mathematical ability. Indeed I can't help but note that I would apparently meet the requirements (A grades in GCE O Level English and O, AO and A level Maths, BA (Hons) ) but it would seem unlikely that the sort of person that ZANU Labour would like to get into the labour market and who would be suited for this (viz. a teenage single mother) would. Said person would need to atend 3 years of university in order to run a child-care facility.
20 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
20 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
Meanwhile, on July 9th, fifteen Iranian students and the mother of another were beaten and jailed after demonstrating in commemoration of an assault on student activists in 1999.
On July 10th, the leader of an independent trade union, who spent most of last year in prison, was abducted from a Tehran bus.
On July 11th, the Iranian judiciary banned a moderate news agency, just a few days after shutting down a newspaper that had resumed publication only two months earlier, following a seven-year ban.
In the spring, a hundred and fifty thousand Iranians were briefly detained for wearing clothes or hairstyles deemed un-Islamic. According to the Christian Science Monitor, “Iranian news organizations have been instructed not to report negative news regarding social unrest, gas rationing in the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter, the nuclear program, or the impact of U.N. sanctions on Iran.” Recently, Iran has lifted a moratorium on stoning, and has ramped up the number of executions of adulterers, homosexuals, and minors.
He also has this plausible explanation of why Hirsh might have been happy to gloss over the nasty bits:Why did a journalist as experienced as Michael Hirsh not notice? Because, justifiably arguing for dialogue and against fantasies of easy regime change, he wants to be able to say that things are not as bad as you think in Iran. The truth is, things are worse than you think for any Iranian who tries to exercise minimal political rights. Just as the neoconservatives concocted a simple case on Iraq and, now, Iran—claiming that the locals would welcome regime change from outside—people like Hirsh want to make a simple case, too. It’s a great temptation to say that, because X is true, Y, which seems to point in a different direction from X, must be false.
Yet after all this he then writes this:We all want total vindication. But in politics there is no total vindication, on Iran or anything else. The regime there is brutal, and we should talk to it.
Huh? I'm not saying that there is no argument that we should talk to Iran. But a bald statement like "The regime there is brutal, and we should talk to it" isn't an argument.
20 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
Update: This appears to be because it occured "tomorrow" British time
21 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
A black dustman has been banned from wearing a St George's Cross bandana because council officials say it could be regarded as racist.
Matthew Carter, 35, who was born in Barbados, used the headgear to keep his dreadlocks out of the way while he was on his rounds in Burnley, Lancs. He had done so for seven months before his photograph appeared in a local newspaper. A number of local people complained, and his superiors called him.
"I received a verbal warning," Mr Carter said yesterday. "They told me the St George's Cross was not allowed to be seen on any clothing we wear because it could be considered offensive and racist."
One wonders how many "a number" were. One also wonders why these people are living in Burnley (a town in the NW of England) if they are so upset with the idea of England? I try not to repeat mindless racist slogans but "Fuck off back to wogland"* does spring to mind as I read this. Unless of course it was a couple of Mr Carter's mates complaining for a joke (in which case I hope they were as pasty white as it is possible to be). However no matter whether it is a joke or not the local jobsworths sprang into action with their usual complete and utter lack of either sense or proportion:Ian McInery, the operational services manager for Pendle council, defended the decision to discipline Mr Carter. He said: "We have made it clear to staff that they are not allowed to put stickers or flags on bin wagons or wear clothing which shows support for a particular team, group or country.
"We can't make one rule for one person and one for another. It's just a common-sense approach that we are sticking to."
This is a defninition of common sense that is umm about 180° away from the usual one. I can see that wandering around England with (say) a Hamas baseball cap on, or sticking American flags on bins might be considered divisive (I would find the former offensive rather than the latter, regretfully I suspect many English folks would find the opposite to be true), however the English flag, that is to say the flag of the country where one resides, is not generally considered offensive to anyone. Indeed, if white supremacist groups have hijacked the national flag for their racist idiocy, surely the solution is to encourage others who are not of their ethnic background to display the flag and thus reclaim it for the entire nation. Mr Carter, as the photo from the local newspaper's article clearly shows, would seem to be a perfect candidate.
21 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
If I were eager to maintain a semblance of military independence from the agenda of extremist, Republican partisans, I wouldn't go on the Hugh Hewitt show, would you? And yet Petraeus has done just that. I think such a decision to cater to one party's propaganda outlet renders Petraeus' military independence moot. I'll wait for the transcript. But Petraeus is either willing to be used by the Republican propaganda machine or he is part of the Republican propaganda machine. I'm beginning to suspect the latter. The only thing worse than a deeply politicized and partisan war is a deeply politicized and partisan commander. But we now know whose side Petraeus seems to be on: Cheney's. Expect spin, not truth, in September.
and this:And speaking of Petraeus, what should we expect from him come September? It’s probably best to lower expectations now. Petraeus’ credibility suffered a serious blow this week when he appeared on far-right activist Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, and stuck closely to the White House script.
Do you notice a difference between the ant-war nutters and the pro-war folks? As in, how come the anti-war guys are attacking the person and the delivery but the pro-war folks are attacking the content? I am, on the whole, on the pro-war side and the reason is clearly illustrated here. Us "right wingnuts" look for the weaknesses in what people say or write and expose their lies, inconsistencies or shadings of the truth. The "nutroots" on the other hand seem to prefer to attack ad hominem, and it seems to me that you don't do that when you have a better argument.
21 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
23 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
23 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
23 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
There was a day when an Englishman's word meant something: not all that long ago as well. I've been a beneficiary of this idea that we are an honourable people who do as we say we will, will do the right thing, as recently as the 1990s in Russia. I've no doubt that my brother, currently working in Kabul, benefits from it today.
There are those who think this unimportant: unfortunately they are also the scum who rule us.
Write to your MP. Email them, phone them. Spread the word. Comment on the newspaper blogs. Write letters to editors.
The French already think of us as Perfidious Albion: let's not go and prove it to the whole world, eh?
He's right in every particular. I'll go further and suggest that denying these people asylum while putting up with someone like this as a "political refugee" is a sign of a government that has its priorities so fucked up that any reputable writer of fiction would be ridiculed for writing something like it in a book.
23 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
24 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
The findings are significant. Simply by considering this ratio at a level of statistical significance (and in most cases the stats are extremely clear) a new list of OFCs is produced. The following which were considered OFCs by the IMF are confirmed as such: [...]
The following which the IMF thought to be tax havens fall off this list:
But most tellingly three new OFCs are identified. they are:
This data is objective. I’ll admit, the UK is clearly not as dependent on financial services as, for example, the Channel Islands, Cayman or Luxembourg are, but equally, compared to places like the US we’re massive players. It’s time to recognise reality. With its cohort of supporting states in the above list the UK is at the centre of the threat to world stability caused by the financial services sector and tax abuse.
The financial services sector is a "threat to world stability"? Umm yes I guess this is true if you think that in times and places where the financial services sector hasnot been available the world has been remarkably stable. The populace of these times and places have also been poor and as a result of their poorness, disease ridden, prone to starvation and, by any objective measure you like to make, miserable compared to those of us who live in places and times where the financial services sector is present and active. Compare Zimbabwe (say) with its neighbours South Africa and Botswana. Guess which nation lacks the financial services sector? Oh and "tax abuse" From the context tax abuse means people doing their best to avoid paying taxes by moving their financial affairs to places where they can legally pay less tax. Mr Murphy appears to share Polly Pot's belief that everyone should be taxed at about 90% of their income and then cheerfully sign up for government assistance to survive. Well actually that is what I'd call tax abuse, if I didn't reserve the term for the sorts of people of create a new tax and then retroactively apply it.The Guardian has traced more than 650 directors of British companies who give their current address as Monaco, and the top 10 residents there with UK interests alone control family assets worth more than £13.5bn.
Now either these 650 directors are all financial idiots because they prefer to live in Monaco not London - or the IMF report is bunk. What do you think is the answer?
24 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
When you publish a book called Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression, the whole point would seem to be that you're speaking up for unfettered satire. Apparently not. The publishers of Killed Cartoons ... killed one of the cartoons!
Readers are invited to guess what that cartoon's subject was before clicking here. Hint it begins with M ends in D has 8 letters and was the subject of a certain amount of ire against Denmark.
24 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
Wong is not a greatly loved reporter. A third-generation Canadian, she moved to China during Mao's "cultural revolution" and, in her own words, "snitched on class enemies and did my best to be a good little Maoist."
She later wrote a "Lunch With" series for the Globe in which she acted all sympathetic to interviewee guests to catch them out. "When they relax, that's when their guard is down," she told a college newspaper. "It's a trick, but it's legit." Yuk!
However that is beside the point. In both cases the newspaper finds ways to avoid taking the blame for journalists whoThe Independent's subscribers promise to make no changes to our reports. But when our syndication folk contacted the Globe, they discovered that the Canadian paper had simply stolen the article. They were made to pay a penalty fee. But as for the censorship of the word "genocide", a female executive explained to The Independent that nothing could be done because the editor responsible had "since left the Globe and Mail".
It's the same old story, isn't it? Censor then whinge, then cut and run. No wonder the bloggers are winning.
I find it fascinating that newspapers which complain about the shoddy standards of bloggers and the ethical lapses of politicians, celebtrities and business leaders are willing to be so cavalier their own standards and ethics.Although the new research is purely statistical and does not examine possible explanations for the rise, two of the authors believe that the MMR jab, which babies receive at 12 to 15 months, might be partly to blame. Dr Fiona Scott and Dr Carol Stott both say it could be a factor in small numbers of children.
Later on there are a few lines about a certain Dr Wakefield:Controversy over the MMR jab erupted in 1998 after Dr Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in north London, said he no longer believed it was safe and might cause autism and inflammatory bowel disease in children. Many parents panicked and MMR take-up fell dramatically. More families opted to have their child immunised privately through three separate injections to avoid the possibility of their immune system being overloaded by the MMR jab, thus leaving them at greater risk of infections.
The medical and scientific establishment denied Wakefield's claim, described research he had co-authored as 'bad science', and sought to reassure the public, with limited success. Wakefield and two former Royal Free colleagues are due to appear before the General Medical Council next week to answer charges relating to the 1998 research. The trio could be struck off.
The doctors' disciplinary body claims that Wakefield acted 'dishonestly and 'irresponsibly' in dealings with the Lancet, was 'misleading' in the way he sought research funding from the Legal Aid Board, and 'acted unethically and abused his position of trust as a medical practitioner' by taking blood from children after offering them money.
You might think that in such a case the fact the one of the two researchers "quoted" above works with Dr Wakefield might be relevant, and indeed in their clarification they state that:Dr Stott, one of the authors of the Final Report and described by The Observer as believing that there maybe a link in a small number of cases between MMR and autism, does some work for Thoughtful House, the autism centre in Texas that treats children from all over the world. Dr Wakefield works at Thoughtful House. Dr Stott’s links to Dr Wakefield should have been made clear in The Observer news report.
As Mr Goldacre points out Dr Wakefield is rather more than a fellow minion working at Thoughtful House that Dr Stott might run into occasionally:Dr Wakefield founded Thoughtful House!
www.thoughtfulhouse.org/founders.htm
He doesn’t “work at” Thoughtful House. He is the Executive Director.
www.thoughtfulhouse.org/board.htm
[...]
In the Observer’s world, Wakefield “works at” a place in America where Stott also does “some work”: in the real world, Stott and Wakefield have even issued joint press releases answering critics of Thoughtful House.
Oh and the other researcher? Dr Fiona Scott. They never called or emailed her until the night before the "clarification" despite the fact that email and work phone contact methods are clearly listed. This sort of jornalism is almost as good as that practiced by the New Republic!
24 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
From: Micheal Roland <[email protected]>
Dear Friend,
My name is Mr. Micheal Roland, 45 years old from Bromley Kent , London. Head Financial Control & Planning department, Harrogate Bank Plc.I am divorced, have 3 kids living with me at home. I'm 5'11 tall. black. I love animals. I have 2 dogs and 3 cats. I love to travel. I love the outdoors, swimming, riding, skeet shooting, etc..I have a healthy and active social life.
[...]
Thank you.
Yours sincerely,
Kenneth Joel.
Let me pick out the errors.
24 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
So at the UN, a 90 day audit cannot be carried out in substance in over six months. And a 45-day review to determine if a complainant is a whistleblower, a determination that must be made before any protection can be offered, cannot for some unexplained reason be reached even in 45 days.
Close observers of the UNDP North Korea saga, the first scandal to erupt on Ban Ki-moon's watch, just 19 days into his term, offer a range of interpretations of the slow-down or gridlock. UNDP is dead-set against Mr. Shkurtaj being acknowledged as a whistleblower, because it would make a number of UNDP actions since January constitute retaliation, which itself is misconduct under UNDP rules.
Given Mr Melkert's apparent dislike of Bush appointees it seems ironic that the person calling for him not to be fired (yet) is the US representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen who appears to have been appinted by Bush. Mind you it isn't exactly strong backing, indeed it reminds meof the backing Melkert gave a certain Wolfowitz in some other international institution recentlyOn Monday afternoon, Inner City Press asked U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen what she thought of recent calls for UNDP Associate Administrator Ad Melkert to resign or be fired. Rep. Ros-Lehtinen replied that
"I want to make sure that the problems in the system are addressed rather than just boot one individual and then there'll be a feeling that, 'oh we've gotten rid of X, and so then the problem has been solved.' It's such a systemic problem, it has to be done in a more comprehensive way. That doesn't mean that that guy should keep his job, but sometimes when you start to roll heads, it gives you the feeling that you've dealt with the problem and let's move on, and it's far deeper than that."
Its fun stuff. But there's more...Algemeen Dagblad -
DEN HAAG - Nederland moet aandringen op het ontslag van Ad Melkert als tweede man bij het ontwikkelingsprogramma van de Verenigde Naties UNDP. ...
‘Stalinistische Melkert moet worden ontslagen’
'Ad Melkert is een stalinist'
Ad Melkert zwaar onder Amerikaans vuur
THE HAGUE, 21/07/07 - John Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, thinks Ad Melkert should resign from his post at the UN Development Programme (UNDP). The Dutchman is incompetent, in his view.
Bolton, who is seen as a confidante of President George Bush, told TV programme Nova that Melkert, as the second-in-command at the UNDP, has failed to investigate and take action against alleged abuse of UN donor money. The US suspects that "hard currency went to the government of North Korea" directly that was intended for humanitarian aid, according to Bolton.
Towards American requests for appropriate action, Melkert has "adopted a very defensive attitude". "We find his behaviour puzzling. Why deny the existence of the problem," said Bolton. It "remains to be seen" how the affair works out for the US contribution to the UNDP and UN as a whole, he warned.
Apart from having a "bunker mentality", Melkert "insulted our ambassador Mark Wallace and threatened him with retaliation," added Bolton. Elaborating on the Dutchman's "undiplomatic behaviour", the American stated that "perhaps attitudes in your country are different" but internationally "the civil servants work for the member governments, not the other way around."
As if that were not enough the Dutch also had a chat with Mr Shkurtaj, a man who seems to be following in the Bolton school of tact and diplomacy:THE HAGUE, 25/07/07 - Tony Shkurtaj, who previously headed the UN's development organisation (UNDP) in North Korea, considers that Ad Melkert cannot stay on as associate administrator of UNDP. "He must be sacked," says Shkurtaj in Vrij Nederland weekly.
Shkurtaj was the operating head of the UNDP office in North Korea. He saw how millions of euros in aid flowed to the North Korean regime without UNDP having any idea about the spending of the funds. When he warned his superiors, including Melkert, that UNDP was systematically breaking its own rules in North Korea, his contract was not renewed, according to Vrij Nederland.
Shkurtaj told the Dutch weekly that UNDP took its revenge because he told his story to the Americans. He says Melkert is personally responsible. "He runs a Stalinist reign of terror. (...) Anyone not following the party line is kicked out. (...) All at once, I was a dangerous person who was refused access to the UN building (...) The staff in New York are dead scared now they have seen what happened to me."
I love the "stalinist reaign of terror" quote. I also rather like this bit:In the interview with Vrij Nederland due to appear today, Shkurtaj says the American criticism of Melkert is unrelated to the role Melkert played in the Wolfowitz affair. "In the Netherlands, Melkert cries out that he was attacked by this nasty conservative Bush regime. Personally, I hate Bush. (...) I have nothing in common with conservative Republicans. But still, I say they are right to push for an open and transparent United Nations."
There's a saying about "what goes around comes around" it looks like Mr Melkert may be learning the truth of this. Personally I'm waiting for the dots to show up connecting all this to the Minsister for Kleptocrats who was, let us not forget, in charge of the UNDP while the N Korean money laundering was going on.
26 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
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26 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
The figure is down from £2.7bn over the Department for Work and Pensions' (DWP) previous financial year.
Either way that is about £40 for every UK resident or about £100 for every tax payer (from memory only about 25 million people in the UK pay tax). Ok you may be thinking so £100 isn't that much but let me point out that this is merely one department. Add in the cockups on Transport and PPP, the NHS and IT and a supporting cast of thousands and I trust it is clear why I vehemently oppose people like Polly Pot who seem to think we should give all our money to the government to spend for us. As someone once said "a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money".
31 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
31 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
Sadly Johann Hari is threatening me with defamation proceedings. He takes the view that this piece, and the comments which follow it, contain defamatory material.
Given that most of the disputed post is simply a quote from Nick Cohen's defense of his book from Hari's review it seems odd that Mr Hari finds the post defamatory. The obvious conclusion is that Mr Hari takes offense at being called a tabloid jounralist because I'm sure that it would be unreasonable to feel that he was insulted by a statement that "a serious academic commentator or non-tabloid journalist" with "a reputation for making things up" might face the end of his career.
31 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
31 July 2007 Blog Home : All July 2007 Posts : Permalink
Oliver also refers to the fact that I had to get the Indie lawyers to contact the blog Harry's Place to take down an allegation against me. I have never threatened legal action against anyone before - indeed, as regular readers know, I link all the time to people who criticise me, often very severely - but the site made a really outrageous accusation against me, on a par with suggesting I indulge in credit card fraud, or mug grannies, and just as preposterous, so I felt I had no choice really. I've always defended the libel laws if they are used properly - to prevent people saying outrageously, howlingly untrue things about you. Normally I let weird things that are said about me go - life's too short, the truth will out etc - but it's a website I've written for in the past, so I thought I ought to make a rare legal interjection to put the record straight. I'm glad the site accepts that what they said has abolutely no evidence for it at all, and had to be withdrawn immediately.
Even if we ignoring the initial post (archived here for prosterity) and what it may have said and simply concentrate on the replacement text this seems to be a rather odd interpretation of the words written. The replacement post says (in full):Sadly Johann Hari is threatening me with defamation proceedings. He takes the view that this piece, and the comments which follow it, contain defamatory material.
Practically speaking, I am neither able, nor prepared, to hand edit articles and comments in order to meet threats of legal action. Therefore I have chosen to take the article down and have removed all comments.
I have occasionally closed quotes or removed articles when asked to correct an inaccurate statement about a person on this blog. I think that is the proper and responsible thing for a person who has a blog to do.
I am particularly sad that the first threat of legal action should have come from a journalist, and from a person who I regard as a friend.
I am not proposing to discuss this issue further.
It is odd to see how this response is equated in Hari's mind to "I'm glad the site accepts that what they said has abolutely no evidence for it at all, and had to be withdrawn immediately." To any neutral obsever (e.g. me) there is no line anywhere that says that the original auther accepts he wrote something with no evidence and it is clear that the post was only withdrawn because the author figures he has better things to spend hsi time and money on than deal with trying to defend against a defamation suit.Let us say that I wanted to argue that I did not, in fact make "a really outrageous accusation against me, on a par with suggesting I indulge in credit card fraud, or mug grannies".
In order to do this, I would have to repeat the two lines to which Johann (in my view, unreasonably) objects, and therefore risk the waste of time and money associated with litigation.
So, as you can see, I am handicapped.
Well I'm happy to assist here, and Johann can sic his legal eagles on me if he wishes. I'll note that what will happen here is a lot more adverse publicity that he most likely wouldn't have got if he'd decided to eschew the legal approach....When presented with an uncomfortable argument, serious editors usually invite a critic to present a clear account of what is said, correct mistakes, and argue with interpretations and extrapolations. The trouble with looking for a critic in the British media is that normal intellectual standards are collapsing over here. At this writing, even the once-respected BBC has admitted to fixing competitions and deceiving its viewers as a matter of routine. The behavior of much of the press is worse, and if you trawl what used to be called Fleet Street for a reviewer you run the risk of picking up Johann Hari, who from almost the first paragraph of his piece in your last issue, misleads your readers.
I was, I am told, brought up by left-wing parents who raised me “to see Orwell in Catalonia as his moral archetype.” Their indoctrination, apparently, makes me confront all great issues with the question, “what would Orwell do?”
As if.
I make clear in the introduction that my parents were ex-communists who remained conventional members of the late-twentieth-century left. They didn’t “raise me” to see Orwell as “a moral archetype.” Indeed, I’m not sure that they ever read Orwell themselves. If they had, they would have hated his argument about totalitarianism because, as I say again in the introduction, they did not see a moral equivalence between communism and Nazism. For my part, it’s true that I did start Homage to Catalonia a few years ago, but to my shame I never finished it. I would no more ask “What would Orwell do?” than I would “What would Jesus do?”
Hari makes up these stories about my mother and father solely so he can declare that I am an “ostentatious claimant of George Orwell’s mantle.” This would indeed be a preposterously self-aggrandizing claim to make if I had ever made it. But I haven’t, in print or in private.
Having misrepresented my parents, he goes on to misrepresent my book.
So let me do a little summarising here.
