Take It As Red

“Sickness comes on horseback and departs on foot.”

2005-11-02T11:12:00.000+01:00

I woke up coughing, achy and full of snot and I don't feel at all well. Bird flu, what bird flu?

And the first blog post I read this morning was re Lewis Libby's writing about the sexual torture of a small child by a bear. What a vivid imagination that man has! And what a way to start the day...

This is a year old, but 'tis apparently the season for bestiality and respiratory illnesses, and it seems appropriate.

I suppose that means the flu alert level is high...

(The post title is an old Dutch proverb, and thanks to Risng Hegemon commenter Max Power for the pic))

Ceph Blogging No.19

2005-11-01T16:07:00.000+01:00

There seems to have been an explosion in ceph-related needlecraft:

This is the Surly Squid hat from Deviant Goods. I'd be surly too, knitted in that vile colour.

How many knitted squid hats is that now? I may have to start a separate squidknitting blog.

Random Tuesday Lifeform Blogging

2005-11-01T16:01:00.000+01:00

This is the trouble with blogging, you start and you can't stop. This is posted despite the fact I loathe spiders and arachnids of all stripes, just because it's beautiful. I'm not sure I like the look on that big spider's face though. Dammit, it's staring at me.

Run!

Picture Credit, The Robot Vegetable at Middle-fork

Occasional Ceph Blogging (sorta) No. 18

2005-11-01T14:33:00.000+01:00

It's been brought to my attention that I haven't yet blogged the FSM, so for the truly devout and pious amongst you, here's a devotional image of His Pastaness in his true noodly incarnation.

"For a growing band of devoted followers, the FSM – as His Noodliness is informally known – is the Supreme Being, Creator of the Universe and of all living things. Rather than a fatherly figure seated on a golden throne, the Monster looks like a heap of pasta and meatballs topped with eyeballs on stalks. The tenets of the Church include the usual standard notions of Heaven and Hell, of course, the reward system that has worked so well in other religions to keep the faithful appropriately in line. Immortality, as well as sin and redemption, fanaticism and self-sacrifice, are also in place so that the new church will be acceptable to those raised on Islamic or Christian agendas.

There may now be millions of converts to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the discovery of 25-year-old Bobby Henderson, a currently unemployed physics graduate from the state of Oregon. According to Bobby, the FSM revealed himself in a dream, though not in a burning bush or out in a desert, as we might have expected. It is suspected that indigestion might have played a role in this epiphany, but that possibility is still only under investigation."

For those without eyes to see the Holy Truth, here is the more usual representation of Him passing his ineffable knowledge to the tentacly-challenged ones:

Worship our alien overlords, may their wonders never cease: and to aid you in your devotions, there's this:

Want!!!

Occasional Ceph Blogging Nos 15, 16 & 17

2005-11-01T14:09:00.000+01:00

Awwww, a cat in a squid hat!

An origami squid, created by Peter Engel.

And I so need this on DVD. Why are we stuck with Nickelodeon and the like in NL, and no Adult Swim?

Squidbillies, the Georgia hillbilly squid....

Aqua Teen Hunger Force looks like fun too.

Blogstipated

2005-11-01T13:50:00.000+01:00

I haven't blogged since June, for a number of reasons - a] that we were offline for 6 weeks during the house move, b] that my son spent the summer at home, c] That I was just too damned depressed . (Oh, and we have new kittens, which is enough to distract anyone. Awwww).

In the meantime I have been guest-blogging at Martin Wisse's blog, Progressive Gold.

I am feeling a little better now, the house is gradually settling into some semblance of order, and no 2 son is back at uni, so I fully intend to get this show back on the metaphorical road. It will be kidney blogging, as there are new developments on dialysyis/surgery front.

So home to the UK for the boy's graduation on the 10th, back on the 14th, normal service will then resume.

I have lots of ceph posts saved up.

Occasional Ceph Blogging No. 14

2005-06-24T16:53:00.000+02:00

Some fellow ceph enthusiast probably spotted this already, but I'm blogging it anyway. It's so lovely I want one.

A crocheted yellow squid made only of household materials, courtesy of artist Mary Carlson and reported in Gay City News

Personal Statements in Just One Color

Elizabeth Harris allows nine artists the freedom to have their own say

By STEPHEN MUELLER

With the season coming to a close and the European art fairs under way, most of the galleries have already mounted summer group shows, which provide an opportunity for curators to, well… curate and galleries to put together collections of work by their artists.
[...]
Most startling here is Mary Carlson’s “Yellow Squid.” It is a giant squid crocheted in Naples yellow yarn and nearly twelve feet long. I had seen this piece before and seeing again was like seeing an old friend. It brings to mind early feminist art in that it uses the most household of materials. Even at that, it is a formidable task to have made it. The idea is just wacky enough to go beyond the obvious and is an exemplar of the way Carlson works. She is liable to do almost anything.
[...]

All of the work in the show is self contained and provocative in a personal, contemplative way, expressive of an individual vision. It is a welcome break from the style of the moment exhibitions in most of the galleries.

You Haven't Done Nuthin'

2005-06-24T15:39:00.000+02:00

I haven't done nuthin either, it's too damn hot to do anything at all today. I'm also feeling weirdly hormonal, so I'm listening to music, something I don't normally I do as I'm addicted to the joys and wonders of the mighty and splendiferous Radio 4. So I'm sitting here cleaning the computer screen and listening to Fulfillingness' First Finale, and crying my eyes out because every single song has a place and time and person attached, and those times'll never come again.

Before I become too maudlin - I was listening to Blair's speech at the EU meeting yesterday. He really is desperate to leave something positive behind him, to take away the sour taste of the Iraq war. isn't he? SaveAafrica, save Europe, save the poor, save the environement, save the world. Blair the Saviour. Won't happen, sorry. Blair was, is now and will always go down in history at Bush's poodle. Talk, talk, talk and no action at the G8 will do nothing. Bush will give nothing either - he'd rather let the world die than give up one iota of piotential profit. Blair gave his all for for Bush and for what? Nothing.

Anyhow, that's what prompted me to listen to the album again: times are coming full circle, another century and America is as split politically as it has ever been. Wonder recorded it at the time when the disaster of Vietnam had bitterly divided America. The outstanding track of a whole album-full is a song that seems just as prescient today as when it referred to Nixon and LBJ.

This one's for you, Bush & Blair.

You Haven't Done Nuthin
We are amazed but not amused
By all the things you say that you'll do
Though much concerned but not involved
With decisions that are made by you
But we are sick and tired of hearing your song
Telling how you are gonna change right from wrong
'Cause if you really want to hear our views
You haven't done nuthin

It's not too cool to be ridiculed
But you brought this upon yourself
The world is tired of pacifiers
We want the truth and nothing else
And we are sick and tired of hearing your song
Telling how you are gonna change right from wrong
'Cause if you really want to hear our views
You haven't done nuthin

We would not care to wake up to the nightmare
That's becoming real life
But when misled who knows a person's mind
Can turn as cold as ice
Why do you keep on making us hear your song
Telling us how you are changing right from wrong
'Cause if you really want to hear our views
You haven't done nuthin
Yeah

A Life Wasted

2005-06-22T11:58:00.000+02:00

How could I not blog this?

My son Stephen is currently in the very prison mentioned in this article - he is in exactly the same situation as Andrew O'Connor. On holiday from his independent school, the school that I had bargained, sold and mortgaged my sould to get him into (because education is the most important thing for young Black men) Steve was arrested, aged 12, when the 'friends' he was with from his previous primary school 'taxed' 2 other boys during the school holidays. Stephen was there, but was not involved. However it was my son who was arrested and jailed in Exeter prison, an adult jail. The white boys walked away. Our solicitor had advised that if Steve owned up to being with the boys, and apologised to them, their parents and the court, that he would be acquitted., so he did. He was convicted of robbery. No-one else was even charged.

Steve is now 23. He was introduced to drugs in Portland Young Offenders Institution, the place, along with Exeter Prison, that he's spent most of his adolescence. Of the past ten years I'd estimate he's spent 8 in custody of one kind or another, though he has actually committed only 3 petty offences. The sentences have been for breach of licence, breach of probation or of community service, all sentences imposed for previous breaches. It;s like Kafka. His whole time in custody he was becoming more and more involved with drugs: first cannabis, then speed, then heroin, then whetever he could get his hands on, and mostly all at once. We had to move house twice because drug dealers would come round and try to brace me for money they said he owed.

And it wasn't for lack of family support. I tried and tried to get help for us and for him, but neither our doctor, nor social services, nor probation were in the slightest bit interested. He was in the system now, just another young Black man to be categorised and warehoused. Because, as any fule kno, all young Black men are innate criminals, or if not then they must be mentally ill.

Stephen is in custody again now, I'm not sure why. He was released in May from yet another spell in Exeter, again for something he had not done. As one does, he went to the pub, but unfortunately it was with someone he had known at Portland. At closing time, the boy (I hesitate to call him a man) mugged another customer and stole his mobile phone. Steve, having been known to Plymouth police, being Black, and in the vicinity, was of course arrested as well, though there were witnesses to say he had nothing to do with it. The Plymouth court remanded him in custody until May when it went to a full hearing; of course he was acquitted. At this, Exeter prison just released him into the street: he had nowhere to go (the sheltered housing we and his social workerhad previously arranged had evicted him, due to his arrest, and there is no duty to house released remand prisoners) no money (his benefits were stopped, and because he was only on remand, there was no discharge grant) and no medication.

Medication because Steve is now classified as paranoid schizophrenic. The drugs he was introduced to and the treatment he recived from other inmates and screws when in custody have fried his brain and he is now very disturbed. How could a talented young man, described at school as academically gifted, a scholarship boy, South West under-13 100 metres champion, picked for Bristol schools under-13 rugby team - someone with a committed, educated and very vocal parent - how could this happen?

I don't know where we go from here. Stephen is 23, he's an adult now. No-one is authorised to speak to me or give any information regarding his welfare, because he's over 18. I donb't know what to do to help him: my hands are tied. All I'm able to do is grieve, as the son I love more than life uitself spirals down into - what? What will happen? It's like a death but not a death. A death of hope, perhaps. They stole my son, they ruined his life and I don't know if we can ever get it back. Steve'll be released again in July. Back to square one. And he's not alone, there are thousands like him.

Read this. I guarantee by the end you'll want to scream in rage and frustration at the way a whole generation of young men has just been written off as so much inconvenient rubbish, because they didn't fit New Labour political and fiscal priorities, and how they are now being blamed themselves for the government's own failures. They're not rubbish, or scum, or feral children or any other of the pejorative tabloid descriptions - they're real people, they have mothers and brothers and are loved and wanted, and we want them to have a future. The way we are treating our young men, and especially our young Black men, is the real criminality here.

I look at pictures of my son at 11, his face so full of promise, his eyes bright, his future ahead of him. I read about Andrew O'Connor, who didn't even have the advantages my son had. If there is no hope for my son Steve, what is there for the Andrew O'Connors of this world?

Think of Andrew O'Connor. When Michael Howard tells you that prison works, when the prime minister celebrates his tough line on crime, when you hear once again that this country jails more of its men and women than Burma or China, think of Andrew O'Connor - petty thief, pain in the neck, prolific offender, habitual prisoner, dead.

There is nothing so unusual about his being dead. People who work with offenders will tell you that, as things stand, there really are only three ways that most repeat offenders finally stop breaking the law: they grow out of it; they kill somebody and get locked up for life; or they die. Some of those who die commit suicide, some of them accidentally overdose, most of them just die from general neglect.

As offenders go, there never was anything very unusual about Andrew O'Connor. Any social worker or police officer or prison officer reading this story could stop now and, with their eyes shut, they could predict just about all of his background: his family were poor, he grew up on crap estates, he never knew his father, he was knocked about by his stepfather, he was a nightmare at school and a pest on the streets, he was put into care, he was sexually abused. By the time he was 10, he was being arrested. By the time he was 15, he was doing custody. By the time he was 30, he was dead. Nothing unusual. There are thousands of Andrew O'Connors shuffling through the dark tunnels of our criminal justice system.

Now, watch how the judges and the politicians play their hand. And look back, in particular, at what happened after the prime minister, in the autumn of 2001, decided to make good on his pledge to be tough on the causes of crime by personally commissioning the Social Exclusion Unit in the Cabinet Office to find out what he had to do to stop the endless reoffending of people like Andrew O'Connor.

The SEU set off on a mighty investigation, using five civil servants to work full time for nine months, trawling through statistics and research, visiting prisons, interviewing experts, talking to officials in government departments, all in search of an answer.

And they found it. In July 2002, they published their report, Reducing reoffending by ex-prisoners - 218 pages of analysis, packed with facts and figures, supported by more than 400 footnotes. Its conclusions were clear.

Essentially, they boiled down to three big themes. First: "Prison sentences are not succeeding in turning the majority of offenders away from crime."

Second: "A prison sentence can - and frequently does - make things worse."

Finally: the real key to reducing offending was to attack its causes (just as the prime minister had been saying). Homelessness, unemployment, drug and alcohol problems, mental health problems, physical health problems, educational problems - these were the seeds from which crime grew, seeds which were fertilised by the impact of imprisonment.

In many ways, there was nothing new about these conclusions. Any frontline worker in the criminal justice system would have recognised them. The importance of the SEU report was that these conclusions were backed by irresistible evidence, supported by seven different government departments which had been consulted, and delivered direct to the most powerful figure in government, who duly welcomed them as "a significant contribution to our understanding of what works in combating crime". This was a chance finally for the criminal justice system to start to make a difference.

It could make a difference to the communities who suffered from the crimes of prolific offenders: the SEU found that released prisoners were streaming unchanged out of custody and committing something like 1m offences a year and that these offenders alone were costing at least £11bn a year. (That did not count the value of what they were stealing or damaging; £11bn was simply the cost to taxpayers of pushing them through this ineffective process of punishment.)

And it could make a difference to the offenders themselves. By the time the SEU report was published in July 2002, Andrew O'Connor, then 29, had been convicted in the courts of Devon, where he lived, on 24 different occasions. Never once had any of those court hearings done anything conceivably likely to stop him offending because none of them did anything to tackle the causes of his crime. They treated him as though he really were the Daily Mail's caricature of an offender, breaking the law because he was "a bad person", simply in need of stiff punishment to deter him.

Andrew O'Connor was not this caricature: he was a young man whose life had collapsed under him like rotten floorboards.

He grew up without his father. His stepfather thrashed him with a belt, so the boy used to run away and sleep in the woods for days at a time. His mother reluctantly agreed to put him into care for a while, never knowing that her much-loved nine-year-old boy would be slippered, caned, bullied and used as a sex object by an older boy and one or two members of staff.

Then he started going out with other kids, nicking stuff from shops, setting fire to an empty building, stealing cars, taking pills, screwing houses, smoking dope.

By the time he was 12 he was the walking, talking, non-stop offending embodiment of what the SEU report was describing. Prisoners are 13 times as likely as anybody else to have been in care. They are also 13 times as likely to be jobless, 10 times as likely to have played truant at school, six times as likely to be very young parents. Eighty per cent of them cannot write with the skills of an 11-year-old. More than 60% of them have drug problems. More than 70% of them suffer at least two mental disorders.

Andrew O'Connor had all this. The courts, however, carried on hurting him, as though they had some moral right to pile torment on a 10-year-old, as though they really thought that by doing this, they were protecting the community from his offences.

He was convicted of stealing cars in Plymouth. So they endorsed his licence. That made no difference at all. He didn't have a licence: he was only 12 at the time. He carried on stealing cars. So the courts endorsed his non-existent licence again when he was 13 and once again when he was 14 and yet again when he was 15. On the last two occasions they also disqualified him from driving, never minding the fact that he was still too young to qualify to drive in the first place, never wondering why this small boy was earning a living by stealing expensive cars for adults in Plymouth and taking his pay in cannabis and amphetamine.

From the age of 10, he came up in court for burgling. The bench imposed a care order on him. But he was already in care. That was part of the problem. They fined him too, even though they knew very well that his only source of income to pay the fines was more burgling.

When he was 14, they started locking him up. That year they sentenced him to three bouts of custody, amounting to 10 out of the ensuing 13 months, even though it was plain that he was coming straight out of custody each time to carry on with his offending. When he was 18 they gave him three years' probation, never minding the fact that they had already given him two years' probation, not once but twice in the previous 10 months. He went ahead and carried on offending.

After the courts failed, the prisons failed too. By the time the SEU report was published, Andrew O'Connor had been released from custody 11 times and he had never received any effective help for any of the problems that made him an offender. Over and over again he would come out homeless and jobless, bingeing on drugs and alcohol, haunted by personality disorders created by his abusive childhood, unregistered with a GP, still unskilled, still unable to read or write like an adult.

Each time he stumbled straight back into crime: thefts, burglaries, assaults. On one release he was given £10,000 in compensation for the sex abuse he had suffered in care. He blew the lot in weeks, on drugs and generosity to strangers. Sometimes it took him only a day to get back into trouble; never more than a few months. Blair's government already knew quite a lot about this and had started to talk more about rehabilitation. Andrew O'Connor had heard the talk and he had believed it.

On his last big release before the SEU report, in March 2000, he wrote to his legal adviser, Nicki Rensten of the Prisoners' Advice Service: "I've got a good personal officer. He's set up meetings for my release and is in touch with my probation officer. He's guaranteed me I won't just be dumped on the streets like last time.

"They're working to set up a package for me with the best support I can have ... Between him and another officer, they have phoned the council housing and DSS on my behalf. He says he'll get probation to pull some strings to get me in my own council flat on release with help with clothing, furniture etc, and help to set myself up working ... I want to live in this lovely place in Devon called Teignmouth ... I think I'll give prison a rest in future. I think this is going to be a good year."

It never happened. Andrew O'Connor was pushed out of the gate of Long Lartin prison one morning with no address to go to, no job to go to, no GP to look after him and only £46.75 of discharge grant to last him the several weeks it would take him to sign on.

None of the help he had been promised materialised. The housing office in Teignmouth said it did not have to house him, because he was not vulnerable enough to qualify. Without an address, he had even less chance of finding a job. The DSS gave him no help with clothing or any of the other basics which he lacked after a four-year prison sentence; his discharge grant soon ran out and, when he eventually received his benefit, he found the minimal weekly payment had been cut even further to make him repay a crisis loan he had taken out six years earlier. His former GP refused to take him back even when he broke his foot.

He ended up sleeping in a friend's car where he was arrested and sent back to jail for failing to tell probation where he was living, even though they themselves had allowed him to be released without an address to go to.
[...]
By now, of course, Andrew O'Connor was dead. While the government had been sitting on the evidence of the failure of prisons, the numbers being jailed had carried on climbing and Andrew O'Connor had been behind bars again.

During the two years when government departments were busy blocking most of the SEU's findings, he had managed three months at liberty, ended up with a crack habit and a bed in the Salvation Army hostel in Devonport, Plymouth.

One night he walked into a snooker club and asked for a drink. They told him he would have to pay £10 for membership. He told them he would pay £5 this week and £5 next. The bar staff told him to get lost. He told them to give him a drink or he would take everybody in the bar hostage. He was unarmed, but the club called the police and he ended up doing 16 months for affray. When he came out of that sentence, he lasted one day before being sent back for breaching his licence: they said he had stumbled drunk into a probation hostel; he said he was having an epileptic fit.

He spent four more months in prison in Exeter. He did a course in enhanced thinking. When they asked him for his objectives, he wrote "No objectives - you won't get anywhere." He told them: "I never had a proper childhood so am unsure a lot of the time how I should respond or even if what I am thinking or feeling is appropriate for the situation." He passed the course.

He filled in a form at the prison: "Paramount, I need structured care plan to make sure of good recovery. I would like to achieve outside counselling for the root causes of my problems, so the right support and right environment, ie around my family, with intense counselling, this would be the best plan for me."

He had a big reconciliation with his mother, who said he could come home to live with her. He wrote to a friend: "My mum is taking three months off work to love and support me, take me to meetings and appointments, help me fill out forms, take me places and reintegrate me into society generally."

As usual, it never happened. There was a meeting in the prison to discuss his release. His probation officer failed to turn up. The prison workers agreed that he should go to his mother's with help from a local agency to deal with his drug habit. But the probation officer then over-ruled this and said he had to go to a hostel miles away from her, in Cornwall. The hostel housed sex offenders and, recalling his past abuse, O'Connor refused to go there and, in protest, then refused to work with the local drug agency.

His mother spent the three weeks before his release phoning the police and probation and the prison, warning them that Andrew would not go to the hostel and had to come to her. Most of her calls went unreturned.

On Thursday October 23 2003, he walked out of prison. On Wednesday October 29 at 7.30 in the morning, at the Peppermint Park caravan site in Dawlish, south Devon, he was found dead. The pathologist said he had had an epileptic fit in the night.

If he had been at home, if he had had a GP, if he had had a life, maybe it would have been different. As it was, he was living a half-life.

He was fully clothed. His mother said he must have slept that way so he could run away if the police came to get him. She wrote afterwards: "Andrew was a victim before he was born and continued to be a victim. He wanted to come home. In the last 20 years, he never had his own bed. It breaks my heart and fills me with so much pain to know one of my children that I loved, suffered so much for the biggest part of his life, because of my mistakes, to let him go into care, and the mistakes of a system that was supposed to care for him. Why was it so hard to get any real help? Is it easier to just lock someone up to keep them off the streets?"

READ THE WHOLE THING

Occasional Ceph Blogging No. 13

2005-06-17T18:27:00.000+02:00

The Silurian reef diorama at the Milwaukee Public Museum

Idling around the internet this afternoon as one does, I found the Virtual Silurian Reef. You can use the cursor to 'swim' round the reef, with explanations of the animals available at hotspots. It's the artwork I particularly like, just look at these gorgeous pictures of squid precursors.

The site is a project of the Milwaukee public museum and is just the sort of multimedia educational project a museum should be doing, in my opinion. I'd've been thrilled to have found this as a child. It's nice to know not all American museum boards are infected with the Intelligent Design loonies.

Today We Joined The Petty Bourgeoisie

2005-06-17T14:51:00.000+02:00

Today I feel an odd mixture of guilt and happiness: happiness because yay, we exchanged contracts and got the keys to our new Amsterdam flat this morning, but guilty, because now this means we're property owners, and as any good socialist knows, all property is theft - particularly so when what you've bought is formerly social housing (it should still be social housing, but the Dutch housing corporations have been privatised and are now divesting themselves of huge numbers of properties to raise capital; not to mention putting up rents). The part of Amsterdam we are moving to is just north of the Ij river, a couple of minutes from the 5 minute ferry to Centraal Station, in a neighborhood called the Vogelbuurt (the bird neighbourhood) as the streets are, guess what? Named after birds.

The Vogelbuurt in 1983

I've decided just to enjoy the happy, the liberal guilt can wait till 3am one morning when I can't sleep. Also i need to take my mind off medical matters for a while; the hospital just rang, and the current kidney infection isn't responding to the antibiotic that turned me into a walking chemical factory this past 10 days. Now they want to try another, which in practical terms means yet another flavour of horribly upset stomach. The new one is amoxycillin - when the clever stuff doesn't work, they revert to the old faithfuls. Amoxycillin is what you get as a child with a throat infection. To me, that says this kidney infection is streptoccal. Lovely. So you can see why I want to concentrate on the happy...

Lookit the pretty amoxycillin

We now have an awful lot to do. Although the new flat has been renovated it's all very bog standard; walls papered with chip and painted white, wood work done in that disgusting Dutch institutional cream colour. The floor is concrete and we plan to install a hardwood floor if we can ever make our bloody minds up about what wood and what colour. The kitchen while new, is exceedingly basic and also has a weird tiny worktop, made of pressed aluminium, that I've noticed in several flats here. Because they're textured metal they're impractical for food preparation and difficult to clean. What a dumb idea.

It's all going to be a fair amount of work, but we should have sufficient time and person power. The good thing about the flat is that in the tiny garden there is a huge, brick-built shed with light and power outlets. So we're converting it into a study/spare bedroom as it's ideally sized, is just a step across the garden to the kitchen, and means we get some privacy as well when we have visitors.

Hmm, I note I've used the word tiny twice in describing the flat. Amsterdam flats are tiny on the whole. What you pay for here is space and location: a 1 bedroom flat in the south of the city, depending on location, can be listed from 200,000 euro and house prices genrally are very high. Not as silly as SE England, but still way beyond the reach of anyone not having two well-paid white collar family incomes. This is not a place to live spaciously, unless you're an expat on a generous housing allowance.

Still, we managed it, and I can't wait to survey my new domain now. I've loaded the bike panniers with all the necesssaries to camp out while we redecorate and rebuild: (loo-paper, tea milk, sugar, mugs, cleaning stuff and so on), let me at it. And how often do you get to go shopping for oooh-shiny things without any guilt over being extravagant? Tomorrow we're going to spend a lot of money on flooring, and no-one is going to moan about it.

On second thoughts I think I'll wait till Martin comes home before I go over. It seems only right that we should make our visit as the owners together. Besides, I'm tired and I need tea.

But first those bloody antibiotics.

Occasional Ceph Blogging No. 12-ish

2005-06-16T19:23:00.000+02:00

I'm not sure whether to cheer in appreciation of a nice little claymation creature or march on the studio for misrepresenting the poor maligned squid...

Dancing Diablo Animates 'Monsters of the Deep' Campaign For The Franklin Institute
June 10

For The Franklin Institute’s (Philadelphia, PA) new Monsters of the Deep exhibition, ad agency Red Tettemer (Philadelphia, PA) commissioned the devilishly talented folks at the DUMBO-based Dancing Diablo Studio (DDS), which designed and produced a pair of vibrantly colored claymation :15s. The spots, Squid and Whale, began airing in the Philadelphia area on June 3, 2005.

[...]

These spots aim to show kids that monsters do not live in their closets or under their beds but reside under the sea and can be enjoyed and explored at the Franklin Institute’s Monsters of the Deep exhibition.

Squid opens in a claymation bedroom with one long purple tentacle, then another and another, emerging from under a mattress, undulating around a sleeping child, and resolving to a super which reads “Real monsters live under water. Not your bed.”

One could accuse the filmamkers of being anti-natural sciences, in describing squid as 'monsters' whn they're patently nothing of the sort. They're marine invertebrates who are mercilessly hunted and which pose little if any threat to humanity. We are destroying their habitat as surely as we are the rain forests, but with much less fuss being made. It's ok to kill 'ugly' things, they're just freaks and monsters. Cutesy cartoons like this are hardly going to encourage children to take a rational, observational attitude towards the natural world.

But on the other hand, if something gets a child interested in squid, no matter how scientifically reprehensibly presented it is, surely that's a good thing?

The Joy of Kidneys

2005-06-16T15:57:00.000+02:00

As people who know me will already know, I have been ill for some time with chronic and now end-stage kidney failure, resulting from complications after a bout with cancer some years ago.

We ( Martin and I) knew this was likely before and when I came here to Amsterdam, so this is not shock news - commiserations are not necesssary. In light of the fact that I'll be starting renal dialysis soon, ( at the Vrij Universiteit Academic Medical Centre , which I'm glad to say is one of the best teaching hospitals in Europe, so I'm in good hands so far) and that we have just just bought a new flat in Amsterdam and will be moving house very shortly, posting is likely to be sporadic for a while. My younger son is here for the summer too from uni, so I'll be spending as much time with him as I can.

I 'm debating whether or not to blog the whole kidney-failure /hospital dialysis experience, particularly as I'm in a foreign country and not at home in the UK, but I'm concerned it may bore people. My illness may be an endless fascination to me but not others. There's also the hardware issue: if I decide to blog it I'm hoping to get a laptop, either second-hand or borrowed, so I can blog whilst at the hospital. All donations welcome - moving house costs lots :)

I'm hardly the first person to go through this... but, on the other hand, if mine is a new perspective and gives info about the experience that someone else who's facing it can't get anywhere else, then maybe it's a good idea? What would help me deal with it all and make a decision to blog it publicly is some feedback from anyone reading : tell me what you think.

Kidney blogging or not?

Still Laughing Hollowly

2005-06-11T18:31:00.000+02:00

Twenty-seven countries are eligible for debt relief under the HIPC
(highly-indebted poor countries initiative). The 18 that have reached completion
point, and will therefore qualify for immediate debt relief, are shown in bold:
Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo,
Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Guyana, Honduras, Madagascar,
Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Niger, Rwanda, Sao Tome,
Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia

I've just been listening to the detail of the deal the G8 has made to 'write off third world debt' - in effect a mere drop in the ocean, though I have no doubt Blair will spin it as an amazing triumph that will put him in the history books. He will be, but not for that. But did we really expect anything better from a voluntary arrangement with a country like the US? A country that observes none of its international obligations, moral, legal or financial? And the hypocrites of the EU, knowing the amount of subsidy they vote themselves, for agriculture particularly, could feed the third world by itself.

It's all very well Geldof acclaiming it as 'a great victory'. He's almost as deluded as Blair himself. We have also yet to see what strings are attached, and there will certainly be strings. The small amount of money that has been allocated to debt relief is also being deducted from the total development funds available from the IMF and World Bank. This pl;an falls so far short in so many ways they needn't have bothered. Nice of Sir Bob to pat them on the back though.

The BBC has an excellent fact-packed overview of the 'plan' and the response by aid agencies and other NGO's, here.

I also found this story, which illustrates the effects of laissez-faire economics and an entrenched class system better than anything I could say. This so-called plan is unlikely to have any effect on these people at all, in a country where the lack of a social support system and adequate work means that child slavery is necessary to retain a government sinecure:

India's five-year-old policeman
By Alok Prakash Putul
BBC News, Chhattisgarh

Police officer Saurabh - 'hides behind his mother'

At a time when most children prepare to go to school, Saurabh Nagvanshi is off to the office.

Saurabh works at a police station in Raipur, the capital of India's central state of Chhattisgarh. He is five years old. He is part of an Indian system that allows a family member to take the post of a government employee who dies while in service.

There is no age limit and many families have no alternative but to send young children to work to make ends meet. Saurabh has to feed a family of five and so his mother, Ishwari Devi Nagvanshi, holds his hand and takes him the 110km (68 miles) from Bilaspur, where they live, to Raipur. In this surrogate police job, a child must work one day and go to school the next.
[...]
At work, the children are asked to do filing and bring tea and water for senior officials. The children are paid 2,500 rupees ($57) a month. At an age when children are learning how to write, Saurabh now knows how to sign his name when he receives his monthly salary. He is quiet. If you try to talk to him he will either run away or hide behind his mother.
[...]
Railway Police superintendent in Raipur, Pawan Dev, says the employment of the children in the police must be seen from a social perspective. The money is a great relief to the families, he says. In addition, the workload is light. But Subhash Mishra, a member of the state's Human Rights Commission, says it is wrong to make children work like this. He says, instead, the families should be given an equal amount of money to pay for the child's upbringing and education.

Saint Bob - Knave, Or Fool?

2005-06-11T16:57:00.000+02:00

Corporate circus to take front row for best Live 8 views
By Adam Sherwin, The Times

WHEN the Wembley turnstiles swung open for Live Aid, 72,000 fans dashed for the plum stage-front positions. But at Live 8, a band of gold ticket holders will have the best view as corporate hospitality invades the world’s biggest charity event.

VIP tickets for the Hyde Park Africa awareness concert are already being sold for up to £400 through official corporate hospitality packages.

The Gold Circle tickets guarantee access to food, drink and entry to an exclusive reserved area in front of the stage, offering a close-up view.

More than two million people have entered the text message lottery to win tickets for the July 2 event starring Sir Paul McCartney, Robbie Williams, U2 and Madonna.

But barriers will divide the 133,000 ticket winners chosen by computer next Monday from the Gold Circle reserved for 15,000 special guests standing directly in front of the stage.The Gold Circle tickets were yesterday advertised as part of an accommodation package including two nights at the Royal Lancaster or Marriot Maida Vale London hotels.

Guests of the concert sponsors, such as O2, operators of the text lottery and AOL, in charge of the internet concert relay, will also be among the Gold Circle guests. Money raised from corporate packages will fund the staging of the London concert and the simultaneous shows for Africa held across the world.

Clear Channel, the company staging the Hyde Park concert, has offered the packages to block hospitality companies profiting from the event through corporate deals involving touted tickets. It is taking no profit from the deals.

On last night's Radio 4 News Quiz (listen here) someone made the joke that the only Black faces to be seen at Live 8 will be the setup and takedown crews. Later on that evening Saint Bob, dressed in holy white, in what was one of the most hagiographic interviews I've ever seen ( funny as Jonafon Woss is, he's no Paxo) hurried to add that Jay Z, Alicia Keys and IIRC, Snoop Dogg were also appearing in his hideously pallid concert lineup. Woohoo, a few more multimillionaires on stage! Yeah,really inclusive, Bob.

What's enraging me about this whole Geldof publicity stunt for out-of-the-public-eye-currently white musicians is that there were already huge protests planned for the G8 by Globalise Resistance and other anticapitalist and left groups. It was to have been the Genoa of the North - remember Galloway calling for a mass mobilisation to Edinburgh on Question Time?

No wonder Blair is so in favour of Live 8. It deflects public attention away from the politics and onto the pretty singers and poor ikkle photogenic starving brown babies - a classic Roveian bait & switch operation. Mad conspiracy theorists might think that with Geldof's recent knighthood and his closeness to members of the current British government, that the timing is, shall we say, a little convenient for Mr Blair. I, of course, would be utterly horrified should someone suggest such a thing might have happened.

Everyone will dance a bit and have a little self-indulgent weep whilst watching the videos of war and carnage, and give a little money (and we know it's the poorest that give most, not rich people like rock stars or politicians), and then go home with nice phone-camera pics and forget all about pushing for real political change. And the corporate rich fuckers, those cunts responsible for the current condition of Africa and many other nations, the ones who don't actually give to charity much, they can sit smug in their VIP areas thinking what wonderful people they are.

Either Saint Bob is Saint Stupid Fuckwit, for not having noticed he's played right into the hands of Blair and the G8, or he's Saint Devious Bastard for colluding with big money.

But then Bob is big money isn't he? From 2001:

With last week's sale of deckchair.com, Bob Geldof earned himself half a million and a 3-year contract at 100,000 pounds a year to stay involved. Two years ago, when he sold his production company, Planet 24, to Carlton, he bagged a cool five million. He has been transmogrified from Bob of Boomtown Rats, to Sir Bob of Bandaid, to Bob the Businessman.

Draw your own conclusions.

Deckchair.com is just one of Saint Bob's businesses and it would not be exaggerating to call him a plutocrat. Recently he suggested that we all give all our excess personal wealth to charity.

Haha. Ahaha. Listen to the hollow laughing.

A Terrible Beauty

2005-06-07T16:47:00.000+02:00

Reuters - Thu Jun 2, 2:35 PM ET

The Colima volcano, in Mexico, is seen here in a timed exposure as lava and hot rocks flow down its sides and lightning flashes over its crater.

Mexico's fiercest volcano this week fired its angriest blast in at least 15 years. Local villagers shrug off the danger of lava and falling rocks with stoic fatalism. The 12,540-foot volcano, also known as the Volcano of Fire, shot volcanic debris almost three miles into the sky since Monday, forcing emergency services to consider an evacuation of nearby villages.

Picture taken June 1, 2005. REUTERS/Eduardo Quiros

It's been pretty active in California and Mexico recently, at least seismologically speaking. This map, from the US Geological Survey, shows worldwide seismic activity over the past 30 days; you can see at first glancethere's a big cluster of dots denoting quakes and aftershocks in the California/Mexico region. The biggest and most recent quakes are the red dots and as you can see by the map, all the plate margins are pretty active right now. The Aceh quake and tsunami set off a shock wave that is still reverberating around the world. Who knows what will blow next?

Why It Took Deep Throat 25 years to Come Clean

2005-06-07T13:02:00.000+02:00

As any fule now know, Deep Throat was Mark Felt., but he managed to keep it quiet for more than 25 years, and after reading this report, that seems like a sensible decision - apart from his position in the FBI, this sort of state sanctioned thuggery is a good reason NOT to have come forward. Just look what happens to whistleblowers when they do whistleblow:

This photo provided by the law firm of Rothstein, Donatelli, Hughes, Dahlstrom, Schoenburg & Bienvenu, Copyright AP

"Los Alamos Lab Whistleblower Beaten Up "

By DEBORAH BAKER, Associated Press Writer 6 minutes ago

"SANTA FE, N.M. - A Los Alamos lab whistleblower scheduled to testify before Congress was lured to a bar and then badly beaten in an attack his wife and lawyer believe was designed to keep him quiet.

Tommy Hook was treated for a fractured jaw and other injuries, according to his wife, Susan Hook. She said the assailants told him during the attack early Sunday that "if you know what's good for you, you'll keep your mouth shut."

Tommy Hook has a pending lawsuit against the University of California alleging whistleblower retaliation. He had been scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee later this month about alleged financial irregularities at the nuclear weapons lab. Police and the FBI said they were investigating.

According to Hook's wife, the 52-year-old lab employee got a telephone call from someone late Saturday night — after he was already in bed — wanting to meet with him at a Santa Fe bar about 45 minutes from their home.

She said her husband told her the man never showed up, but as he was leaving the topless bar's parking lot, a group of men pulled him from his car and beat him.

"They left him in the parking lot for dead," Hook's lawyer, Robert Rothstein, said Monday at a news conference where pictures of Hook's bruised, bloodied and swollen face were passed around. Rothstein said the assailants didn't take Hook's wallet, other personal belongings or his car. In the absence of any other motive, it appears the beating was related to his whistleblowing, Rothstein contended.

"It is clear to us that this was a message," Susan Hook said.

She said her husband had been told last week by a friend about someone who had information about the lab. A planned meeting with that informant on Friday never materialized, and Hook believed that's who he was going to meet on Saturday, she said.

Susan Hook, who was in Albuquerque visiting their grown sons when the incident occurred, said her husband did not frequent bars and she believed his account of the attack. The assailants did not specifically mention the lab, she also said.

Lab spokesman Kevin Roark said the beating of Hook — who works in the Prime Contract Office, an internal oversight group — was "a senseless and brutal act and should not be tolerated." The university and the lab are "outraged" about the assault, according to a statement released by the lab.

Hook and another whistleblower, Chuck Montano, sued the university in March, alleging that after they uncovered management failures, university and lab managers tried to make their jobs miserable so they would quit."

On The Insufferable Smugness of EU Liberals

2005-05-31T12:40:00.000+02:00

From Apostate Windbag:
"There is an insufferable smugness with which the liberal (in the Anglophone sense of the word) encouragers of a Oui vote in France's referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty tomorrow present their argument."

[...]

"However, I wonder whether these liberal Ouistes have actually themselves read the very document they champion. Today's leader on the referendum in the same paper calling for a Yes, contains this howler:
'[T]he constitution does not warrant the opposition it has generated. For all the anger about liberal Anglo-Saxon economics, the text does not include economic prescriptions that are any different from those in the Treaty of Rome in 1957'

Just quickly, here are a handful of the key examples (which I already discussed in an earlier post) of how the ECT remains not merely neo-liberal through and through, but is additionally aggressively militarist, (incidentally undermining the traditions of neutrality of Ireland and Austria):
1. Articles 111-69, 70, 77, 144 and 180 all identically repeat that the Union will act 'in conformity with the respect for the principles of an open economic market where competition is free.'
2. There are numerous clauses that specifically correspond to demands made by certain employer organisations.
3. The ECT demands unanimous voting for any measures that might go against corporate interests. This is the certainly case for measures against tax fraud, or taxation of companies. Such legislative movement in this regard requires a unanimous vote as, above all, "[it is] necessary for the functioning of the internal market and to avoid distortion of competition." (111-63). Thus, any future proposed duty imposed on corporations would be subject to unanimous voting - something the Ouistes regularly trot out as being reduced under the ECT.
4. Shockingly, the ECT demands all states' subservience to NATO: '[M]ember states shall undertake progressively to improve their military capacities.' (1-40-3). Article 1-40-2 says that European defence policy shall be compatible with members' NATO obligations, a direct recognition of the superior judicial status of that military organisation. Furthermore, the article continues with even greater precision that "participating member states shall work in close collaboration with NATO". Even in situations of "internal serious disturbances affecting public order, in cases of war or of [...] the threat of war", member states are obliged to work together in order to avoid "affecting" the functioning of the "internal market"! (III-16)'
5. Perhaps most disturbing in the ECT is clause 17 of the third section, regarding the question of the break-up of public services: It is permitted that a member state can be in favour of maintaining a public service. But public services have: "the effect of distorting the conditions of competition in the internal market, [and] the Commission shall, together with the state concerned, examine how these steps can be adjusted to the rules laid dawn in the Constitution. By derogation of common law procedure, the Commission or any member state can apply directly to the Court of Justice which will sit in secret..." (III-17)' Thus the constitution from the start commits member states to the ultimate elimination of public services.
I find it remarkable that the Guardian leader writers are not aware that the ECT explicitly codifies the dismantling of social services and expansion of European military capablilities. "

I too find it remarkable: it's not as though the SWP and others haven't been banging on about this for years. It's simple: ratify the proposed constitution and public services are gone - dissappeared, nullified, privatised, gone. This has been the planned outcome since the start: to put it crudely, the funnelling of the taxes we pay directly into the pockets of corporations. Cut out the middleman, and if democratic accountability goes in the process, well, what the hell, what do the voters know anyhow?

This alleged constitution legitimises the corporate robbery of countries under the guise of spreading a spurious democracy. Remind you of anyone?

(crossposted to Progressive Gold)

Why Do Bush Nominees Hate America?

2005-05-15T11:16:00.000+02:00

Jeanne at Body & Soul picks up the story that exposes, better than any rant of mine, the morally bankrupt, activist 'judges' Bush is trying to impose on America. The truth speaks for itself.

In brief, a case was taken against Ford for supplying a defective pickup in which a child was injured, leading to his becoming a paraplegic, dependent on a ventilator. The child was awarded $30 million. Ford appealed on a point of law and the case came before Bush nominee Priscilla Owen:

Two years after the lawyers representing Willie Searcy and the lawyers representing Ford had requested an expedited hearing, Owen wrote the majority opinion. A process that could have been completed within months of the oral argument in November 1996 dragged on until Owen completed her opinion in March 1998.

Her opinion was stunning. Not because it ruled against Willie Searcy and his mother, Susan Miles, but because of how it ruled against them. Owens ruled the case would have to be retried in Dallas because it was initially filed in the wrong venue. Yet venue was not among the issues, or "points of error," the court said it would consider two years earlier when it took up the case. "We felt like we got ambushed," said Ayres. A lawyer who had worked at the court at the time agreed: "If venue wasn't in the points of error, it is unusual that the court addressed it. If the justices decide they want the court to address something not in the points of error, they would ask for additional briefing. They send letters to the parties and ask for briefing." There had been no letters and no requests.

It would be another three years before the Dallas Court of Appeals handed down a ruling giving Willie Searcy's family money to care for him. But it was too late. Four days after the ruling, his ventilator stopped working during the night. When his mother went into his room at 5 a.m., he was dead.

He was 21 years old.

Res ipsa loquitor.

That New Scopes Monkey Trial In Full

2005-05-10T15:55:00.000+02:00

All credit and copyright belong to the hilarious Bigger Than Cheeses

Hurra-a-a-a-a oooohh! It's Orgasm Day!

2005-05-10T13:50:00.000+02:00

Brazilian Town celebrates Orgasm Day

A Brazilian town has just celebrated its first Orgasm Day.

The small town of Esperantina marked the day with lectures about sex, impotence and the importance of orgasm.A free production of The Vagina Monologues was also put on at the local theatre for residents. Town mayor Felipe Santolia told Terra Noticias Populares: "I think that the orgasm issue is a very important and modern one."

Indeed it is.

Back Again.

2005-05-09T17:13:00.000+02:00

Life intervened, as it has this horrible tendency to; I had a couple of stays in hospital and had to confine my online activity to commenting bad-temperedly on other blogs.

I have been prodded back ito activity by an invitation to guestblog at Progressive Gold. With luck this will satisfy my politics jones and I can confine this blog to interesting pictures of squid, ephemera of various types, plus the perennial topics of food and the way the Dutch have local noses, for local people, and weird taste in clothes.I don't rule out the occasional anti-Blair or Bush fuckup rant though.

So to get the show back on the round, I give you this:

Awwwww...

Friday Lifeform Blogging

2005-03-11T16:09:00.000+01:00

A baby Xiphias gladius, (Swordfish)

RIP Dave Allen

2005-03-11T13:28:00.000+01:00

Dave Allen, the Irish comedian famous for his relaxed joke-telling style with cigarette in hand and whiskey tumbler at his side, has died in his sleep. He was 68.

His agent Vivienne Clore confirmed that he had died at home unexpectedly. He had been unwell over Christmas but had recovered, and was not suffering from any life-threatening illnesses.

"Now it seems there was this English soldier that went to Ireland for a vacation because he knew he could get the best whiskey there. (Dave takes a sip from his glass and smiles at the audience from over its rim ... ) Well ... after having had "quite" a night of pubbing he found himself wandering along the side of an Irish road at a very early hour of the morning.

Coming up the road was an Irish farmer on his way to market. In his wagon was his prize pig and pulling the load was his best horse. When the Irishman saw the soldier he thought, "Poor soldier. Out this early in the morning walkin' alone. I should offer him a ride." So, he pulled up next to the soldier and asked if he wanted a ride into town.

Now the English soldier wasn't too sure about accepting a ride from an Irishman, especially when he saw, sitting on the floorboards, the farmer's rifle. But the farmer insisted and the soldier was quite drunk (Dave takes another sip from his glass and smiles, sweetly, from over its rim ... )

When the soldier was in the wagon the farmer realized he was running late and coaxed his horse to go faster. Just at that moment a wild rabbit ran across the road and scared the horse. He broke into a mad gallop and no matter how hard the farmer tired to stop him, he would not slow down!

Then, suddendly, the horse made a sharp turn and the wagon tipped over and everyone fell out. The soldier landed in a ditch, face down, and couldn't move. He knew he'd broken at least one arm and a leg. He was feeling dizzy and thought he might even have sustained a concussion. He had trouble seeing from one eye and knew it was bleeding.

From behind him he could hear the farmer moaning over what had happened. "Oh, my poor pig! You've got a nasty cut in your side. I'd best be puttin' you out of your misery." And the soldier heard the farmer fire his rifle into the pig. Then, the farmer saw his horse. "Oh, my poor, poor horse! You've broken a leg. I best be puttin' you out of your misery." And the soldier heard the farmer fire his rifle, again, into his horse. Then he heard the farmer coming closer to him. The farmer turned the soldier over and said, "oh, you poor soldier ... how are you?" The soldier said, quickly, "I never felt better in my life!"

One of the funniest, most acerbic comics ever, amd my Dad's favourite. He'll be sadly missed.

Get 'em While They're Young, and They'll Be In Bondage Forever

2005-03-10T12:46:00.000+01:00

I've been reading the summary of the new US Bankrupcy legislation ( thanks to Rude Pundit for pointing to it) and, aside from the general everyday evil clauses* that allow credit card companies to own you and your labour forever, there is this:

(Sec. 1308) Instructs the Board to study and report to Congress on the impact that credit extensions to dependent students enrolled in postsecondary educational institutions have upon the rate of Federal bankruptcy cases.

What are the Rethugs (and tame Dems, like Leiberman and Biden) planning? You know it's nothing good. Now that Pell grants have been substantially reduced and look to be about to be removed entirely, students will have to rely either on minimum wage jobs or credit to pay tuition and living costs at university.

" A new formula for calculating eligibility for college financial aid will eliminate federal Pell Grants for up to 80,000 to 90,000 low-income students and will affect funding levels for up to 1 million others.

The change, announced by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) Dec. 23, will also force other types of state and federal assistance to scale back their financial aid programs.

Besides those who will lose their Pell Grants completely, "we estimate about 1.3 million students will see reductions of $100 to $300 per year," said Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, a trade association representing 2,000 public and private colleges and universities.

The Bush administration supports the new formula and estimates the federal government's savings at $300 million in the 2005-2006 academic year alone."

Only after graduation do students find that they are unable to pay back the debt, because even a college degree doesn't guarantee a living wage these days.

Comparison of selected US starting salaries (in US$):

Petroleum/Coal: $51,685, Computer Science: $51,429, Mechanical
Engineering: $48,654Accounting: $40,293, Civil Engineering: $40,280,
Economics/Finance: $40,047, Business Administration: $35,209, Rental/Lease
Services: $29,737, Liberal Arts: $28,667
= $ average 40,666, or approx 30,000 euro ,or in real money, 21,000 pounds.

Not exactly generous, and I note that the sciences are not included, or teaching, nursing and medicine or many other professions.

In the U.S., student loan debt is exempt from bankruptcy discharge for five years after a student leaves school. And according to commentators there has been an explosion in student debt in recent years:
"Student loan debt is 85 percent higher among recent college graduates who took on debt while attending public four-year colleges than among graduates from a decade ago. Recent graduates owed an average of $15,100 in 1999/2000, up from $8,200 in 1989/1990. Student loan debt increased by 55 percent among recent graduates of private four-year colleges with student loan debt. These graduates owed an average of $16,500 in 1999/2000, compared to $10,600 in 1989/1990 (all figures in 2002 dollars).

Lower income students tend to owe the most money, but the biggest increase in indebtedness over the decade has been among higher income students. In 1999/2000 recent graduates of public colleges from families in the poorest two quartiles owed an average of $13,300 and $13,400, respectively. This compares with an average debt burden for indebted students from the richest quartile of $12,000. However, this debt burden represented an increase of 85 percent for the students from the richest quartile, compared to increases of 67 and 62 percent for poorest and second poorest quartiles, respectively.

The percentage of recent graduates with student loan debt also rose substantially over this period. For example, the percentage of recent graduates from private colleges with student loans from families in the poorest quintiles rose from 63.7 percent in 1989/1990 to 75.4 percent in 1999/2000. Among private school graduates in the richest quartile the increase was from 26.8 percent to 50.1 percent.

The rise in indebtedness over this period was the result of federal government policies that favored loan aid rather than grants, and focused increasingly on students from relatively affluent families. Data from the late nineties indicates that the strong labor market at the time allowed most graduates to cope with higher debt burden. However, the recent weakness of the labor market could pose problems for heavily indebted students. In addition, sharp tuition increases of recent years (driven by state financial problems) are likely to lead to higher debt burdens for future graduates. Such burdens may seriously constrain students’ career choices, and could lead them to delay starting a family or buying a home.

This clause smells to high heaven of a future plan not to allow students to claim protection from overwhelming debt, ever. That will mean even less people will be able to afford college.

The Future of American Education?

Bush and his cronies really want an ill-educated sharecropper population, don't they? "Oh no, we can't have educated people, they might figure out what we're up to, and heaven forbid they may have the time or money to fight us politically. Let's keep them in debt bondage forever." Either that or it's a way to drive poor kids into the military. Or both.

And Democrats voted for this. So much for their being the party of the little person.

Time for a revolution, Bring guns and money. ( What's that you say, Mr. Tony Blair and Mr. Charles Clarke? I'm advocating armed revolt and should be banged up indefinitely without charge or trial?)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Those General Everyday Evil Clauses:

*During the recent debate on tightening the bankruptcy code, the
lawmakers rejected a proposal to prohibit corrupt companies from issuing huge
payouts to senior executives shortly before entering bankruptcy. They blocked
consideration of a measure that would have curtailed the ability of companies
like Enron and WorldCom to shop for the most favorable bankruptcy courts; such
actions have had the effect of disenfranchising employees and retired workers
from the process.

*They defeated a proposal to protect those employees and retired
workers when their companies go bankrupt. They refused to close the
"millionaire's loophole" that permits wealthy individuals to shelter their
assets from lenders by creating special asset-protection trusts.

*And on Wednesday, they rejected a proposal to put a nationwide
limit on the homestead exemption, a provision that has enabled corporate
executives to buy expensive homes in states like Florida and Texas to shelter
their assets from creditors.

'Fo All You Beotches Who Wanna Find Shiznit'

2005-03-10T12:17:00.000+01:00

A short sample:

"Donald Rumsfeld News Brief "

As we know,
there is knizzay knowns.
there is th'n we know we kizzy . Fo'-fo' desert eagle to your motherfuckin'
dome.
we also knizzow
there is kniznown unknowns . Keep'n it gangsta dogg.
that be ta say
we knizzow there is some th'n
we do not know but real niggaz don't give a fuck.
but there is also unknown unknowns,
the ones we dont kizzle
we dont kizzy but real niggaz don't give a fuck."

Occasional Ceph Blogging No.9

2005-03-10T10:54:00.000+01:00

Cartoon copyright David Farley,(d-farley@metalab.unc.edu)

...Then they Came For the Trade Unionists....

2005-03-10T10:42:00.000+01:00

Unions, U.S. Fight Over Union Audits
Tue Mar 8, 2005
By Erwin Seba

HOUSTON (Reuters) - U.S. labor union locals are being audited by teams of federal government inspectors in what officials say is part of a labor law enforcement campaign and union leaders charge is payback for opposing President Bush's reelection.

"We kind of looked at it as something of a shot across the bow of labor," said Bob Frase, executive assistant to the secretary-treasurer of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union (PACE).

The union, based in Nashville, Tennessee, has advised all of its local units to expect audits this year. PACE represents 275,000 workers in the paper, chemical and energy industries.
"We haven't seen anything like this before," Frase said.

The inspectors are being sent by the U.S. Department of Labor to audit the locals' annual reports of income and expenditures required by U.S. law.

"This administration is strongly dedicated to enforcing the law," said Labor Department spokeswoman Pamela Groover. "Employers and unions who abuse workers are going to feel the impact."

The Department has increased enforcement of safety and pension laws in addition to tightening rules on labor unions, Groover said. The AFL-CIO said the audits are meant to burden all labor unions.

"It means diverting time from critical work to a massive amount of paperwork," said AFL-CIO spokeswoman Suzanne Ffolkes. "It's not surprising given their record on working people. They've been anti-labor since Bush's first term."

At a PACE local representing workers at two Houston-area refineries, the Labor Department auditors arrived in early January and stayed for two weeks, said David Taylor, secretary-treasurer of PACE local No. 4-227.

"They came in every day and stayed all day," Taylor said. "They said it was our first audit since 1983. My secretary's been here 25 years and she said she had never seen this before." The auditors asked the local to reclassify some expenditures and refile the reports but found nothing improper, Taylor said.

"I've got a very good bookkeeper," he said.

More Like Cracker White Than Prussian Blue

2005-03-09T14:58:00.000+01:00

Prussian Blue

Cute little buggers aren't they? Little, blonde, identical twin twelve-year-old tykes in kilts, singing and playing away. Awww, so kyooot.

NOT.

This is what they said when interviewed:

"What do you think is the most important social issue facing the white race right now? Do you have any songs that address this issue?"

"Not having enough white babies born to replace ourselves and generally not having good-quality white people being born. It seems like smart white girls who have good eugenics are more interested in making money in a career or partying than getting married and having a family. And yes, we are working on some new songs about this issue."

"Please tell me the significance of the name Prussian Blue."

"Part of our heritage is Prussian German. Also our eyes are blue, and Prussian Blue is just a really pretty color. There is also the discussion of the lack of "Prussian Blue" coloring (Zyklon B residue) in the so-called gas chambers in the concentration camps. We think it might make people question some of the inaccuracies of the "Holocaust" myth."

These are some of their lyrics:

Aryan Man Awake

When the man who plows the fields is driven from his lands,
When the carpenter must give away what he’s built with his own hands,
When a mother’s only children belong to her no more,
And black masked men with guns come bashing down the doors.
Where freedom exists for only those with darker skin,
Where lies and propaganda will never let you win.
Where symbols of your heritage are held with such contempt,
And benefits of country ’cept tax are you exempt.
Chorus:Aryan man awake,
How much more will you take,
Turn that fear to hate,
Aryan man awake."
(by Lamb and April)

Seems to me that dear little April and dear little Lamb have been very carefully taught.

"You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught "

Rodgers and Hammerstein, South Pacific
"You've got to be carefully taught"

May their parents rot in hell for what they've done.

Paddlefish Blogging

2005-02-27T13:34:00.000+01:00

A while ago I found a picture of a very unusual fish on a Japanese website, which I posted with a query in the vain hope some browsing ichthyologist might come across it and identify it for me. Fat chance. This is it, somewhat overcolorized but this is the picture as it appears on the website (if the colour is auto-adjusted the fish appears to be a light grey-green):

Thanks to the wonderfully informative and eponymously-named
Australian Museum Fishes Website, I thought for a while it might be a paddlefish. Here's one:

The trouble is it's not the right colour, and it has scales. Paddlefishes are primitive; unlike most modern fishes, they have skins with reduced scales, almost wholly cartilaginous skeletons, and upturned tail fins. They are a uniform leaden gray in color. However, there are plenty of different subspecies, including the Chinese paddlefish. Here's one of those:

It's the one at the bottom left, psephurus gladius.

Paddlefish are amazingly interesting. They are an ancient freshwater fish with a cartilagenous skeleton, that have similar morphology to sharks but are more related to the sturgeon. Paddlefish are one of the oldest fishes, with fossil records dating their first appearance at 300 to 400 million years ago (about 50 million years before the first dinosaurs. Paddlefish roe, like sturgeon roe or caviar is considered a great delicacy. The Chinese paddlefish is now very rare, found only in the Yangtze River and is called in China 'the panda of the river'.

"The American paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) and the
Chinese paddlefish (Psephurus gladius) are the only
living members of the family Polyodontidae. American
paddlefish are native to the United States where they
inhabit the Mississippi River and large rivers and
associated oxbows connected to the Mississippi River.
The paddlefish faintly resembles a shark based on its tail
structure, skin color, and lack of bones, but is more
closely related to sturgeons than sharks. Other features
of the paddlefish include a paddle-like snout and a gill
cover that extends greatly toward the rear of the fish.
The paddle was first believed to serve as a tool to disturb
the bottom substrate or aquatic vegetation and allow the
fish to capture organisms as they were dislodged.
However, it was later discovered that the paddle was
used as a sensory organ, enabling the fish to seek out
zooplankton, tiny crustaceans found in the water column
that are a preferred food source especially when they are
young. As the fish swims through concentrations of
zooplankton with their open mouth, zooplankton are
funneled along the gill arches of the fish where the gill
rakers filter out the plankton and move them toward the
throat"

So I'm actually no further forward on identifying that little fish, but I now have an abiding interest in paddlefish, so, swings and roundabouts. The request to any visiting icthyologist still stands.
This is what the internet is for.

UPDATE: I was watching a report about China's economic boom on BBC2's 'NewsNight' a couple of days ago (it's China week on the BBC) and the presenter was interviewing restaurant patrons at a 1000-seater seafood restaurant in Shanghai. What should he be standing in front of but the tanks from which live fish are taken to cook, which was full of, you guessed it, paddlefish.

So much for their protected status.

Anime-niac

2005-02-27T13:21:00.001+01:00

"An Alaskan man is building an 18ft hydraulic humanoid which can fire 20ft flames from its arms. Carlos Owens Jr says his creation will also be able to shoot 9ins nails from its shoulders.

He has been building the £10,000 machine, which he calls a 'mecha', at his parents' house in Wasilla since October 2003."
Some people have waay too much free time.

The Ultimate Teabag

2005-02-25T16:39:00.000+01:00

Ok, so now I'm in a complete quandary. I really want the squid t-shirt, but hot damn, a diamond encrusted teabag. For the PG tips fanatic, that really is the Holy Grail.

75,000 pounds? Mere chump change to the blogger.

Not that PG tips is much cheaper here in NL, they're 5 euro for a box of 80. That's around a 400% markup from the UK price of approximately one pound twenty or so , and to someone like me who can drink around 10 cups of tea a day, that's fair old expense. I have tried Dutch teabags, but if you open them up and look inside they're filled with teadust; literally, the sweepings left over when the leaves are used for the good tea brands. They taste stale and dusty and make a lousy cup of tea. the only Dutch tea I have any time for is Max Havelaar's organic Engelse melange, but they're so expensive I may as well make the effort to go and get PG tips, however extortionate the cost.
"The diamond teabag worth £7,500 has been made by Boodles jewellers to celebrate PG Tips 75th birthday. The tea bag took three months to make has been hand-crafted using 280 diamonds. Pete Harbour, spokesman for PG Tips said: "As it's our 75th birthday, we wanted to do something special to remind people just how much they love the great British cup of tea. The tea bag will eventually be used as part of a prize draw to raise money for Manchester Children's Hospitals, a charity chosen by workers at the PG Tips factory in Trafford Park, Manchester."
Sign me up, how much are the tickets?

Condi Shows Her Inner Eichmann

2005-02-25T15:36:00.000+01:00

"Rice's coat and boots speak of sex and power -- such a volatile combination, and one that in political circles rarely leads to anything but scandal. When looking at the image of Rice in Wiesbaden, the mind searches for ways to put it all into context. It turns to fiction, to caricature. To shadowy daydreams. Dominatrix! It is as though sex and power can only co-exist in a fantasy. When a woman combines them in the real world, stubborn stereotypes have her power devolving into a form that is purely sexual."
[...]
"Rice challenges expectations and assumptions. There is undeniable authority in her long black jacket with its severe details and menacing silhouette. The darkness lends an air of mystery and foreboding. Black is the color of intellectualism, of abstinence, of penitence. If there is any symbolism to be gleaned from Rice's stark garments, it is that she is tough and focused enough for whatever task is at hand."

For heaven's sake won't someone, somewhere, please put the Washington Post out of its misery? Either that or retire this writer, Robin Givhan, to the Sunshine Home For Has-been Hacks, where she can suck up her Condi-koolaid in peace and quiet?

Robin Givhan

Call yourself a fashion editor, Ms Givhan? Your slip is showing... and have you never read about decent foundation garments?

No wonder all those Washington women look like spray-glossed ragbags if they take your advice. Oh, and shell-pink, howver fashionable, is so not your colour.

'Bring me Your Poor Your Huddled Masses, Yearning To Be...Tortured?"

2005-02-25T13:52:00.000+01:00

I can remember, back in 2001, being outraged by the rounding up of Middle-Eastern people by law enforcement in the US, apparently on the grounds that they were a] brown-skinned and b] not American. I've always wondered what happened to those poor people: well now we know. Many were imprisoned and tortured, many deported; hardly any were charged with any offence, and none were convicted, as a result of Operation Liberty Shield.

2001

"...police stopped an Amtrak train bound for Penn Station and took ten passengers in for questioning. All but one were eventually released; the one was held on charges unrelated to the hijackings. Meera Kumar, who works for the Ford Motor Company, was among the passengers held. "We're in a terrible emergency," Kumar told a reporter later. "But I'm a full-fledged tax-paying United States citizen. I shouldn't have been subjected to this, nor should anybody else."

A new Middle Eastern restaurant just blocks from St. Vincent's Hospital,the closest trauma center to the site of the World Trade Center, began putting American flags in its window and displaying a blackboard calling its cuisine Israeli, after several ominous incidents; in one, a customer told a waitress that he had a gun."

Not long after this the US mmigration service got all antsy about Middle Eastern immigrants and started calling them in for interview. What happened next?

2003

Operation Liberty Shield:A New Series of Interviews of Iraqi-Born Individuals in the U.S. Is The Latest Example of Dragnet Justice

By ANITA RAMASASTRY ---- Tuesday, Mar. 25, 2003

Recently, the FBI commenced a round of interviews of "a number of
Iraqi-born individuals" residing throughout the United States - both citizens
and non-citizens alike. 50,000 Iraqi nationals are on the list; 11,000 have so
far been targeted for interviews. No one seems to know what the criteria are, by
which the 11,000 were chosen.

The "voluntary" interviews are
part of a program initiated by the Department of Homeland Security known as
Operation Liberty Shield. Their purpose is "to elicit information that may be
useful to the U.S. government in the event of hostilities in Iraq."
Interestingly, the interview program is listed under the heading "Monitoring
Terrorist Suspects."

This new wave of interviews is the latest round of dragnet justice. Once again, federal law enforcement has cast an overly broad net in the hope of uncovering leads in its fight against terrorism and its war in Iraq.

Last year, the government did not claim concrete benefits from a similar type of time-consuming dragnet initiatives aimed at Middle Eastern men in the U.S. on visitor visas. And it's not surprising: What terrorist would show up for "voluntary" interview? And even if one did, wouldn't he be carefully prepared to lie adeptly?

Over the past year-and-a-half, the federal government has engaged in various rounds of interviews of immigrants present in the U.S., and has compiled extensive information as a result of its interviews.

For example, in the fall of 2001, the government conducted "voluntary" interviews of 5,000 men of Middle Eastern background between the ages of 18 and 33 who were present in the U.S. on visitor visas. Could the men bring attorneys? The "invitation" to appear did not say. As I noted an earlier column, these interviews asked individuals to divulge highly personal information- where they worshipped, who their friends were, the names, addresses and phone numbers of their friends and colleagues. By creating robust profiles of interviewees and their associates, the federal government was likely able to build a profile of entire communities and their daily lives.

Those Americans who feel this effort is reasonable should consider this scenario: How would you feel if - in a foreign country facing national security threats, where you were studying or working - you were rounded up by a foreign intelligence entity, and questioned in this highly personal fashion, simply because of your national origin?

I believe most Americans would see this treatment as both terrifying and unfair. That then raises the question of why we don't see our own treatment of Middle Eastern visitors the same way.

[...]

More recently, the federal government instituted a special registration process for
foreign men from Middle Eastern countries, or countries with large Muslim populations. These men must register with immigration authorities either at a port of entry or a designated immigration office in accordance with the special registration procedures. Again, as in the Fall 2001 round of interviews, an intrusive battery of questions is asked. In addition, visitors are fingerprinted and photographed. At last count, approximately 102,000 men have registered.

Can the persons interviewed have counsel present if they choose? The Department of Justice, and federal regulations, say yes. But the reality is often different. According to the ACLU, Georgia and Washington, DC immigration officials have stated that lawyers may be excluded from portions of the registration process. Further reports indicate that regional offices in Florida, New York, Texas and Illinois have also blocked attorneys from accompanying their clients.

In addition, even where attorneys are technically allowed, visitors may not be able to afford them, or may simply be too intimidated to use them.

To add to all these problems, the guidelines for these interview processes have not always been well publicized. Understandably, they have therefore caused fear and confusion in immigrant communities in the United States.

The Special Registration process had also had surprising consequences. Individuals who were in the process of having their permanent resident paperwork processed or their visa status lawfully changed found themselves being rounded up and detained when they arrived to register in California and other states. "

Hmm, I wonder whatever happened to those people who were detained? This:

2005

'Brooklyn's Abu Ghraib'
"Terror suspects allege abuse

By LARRY COHLER-ESSESDAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Some prisoners held at Brooklyn's federal Metropolitan Detention Center say they were abused by guards. Defense attorneys call it Brooklyn's Abu Ghraib. On the ninth floor of the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, terrorism suspects swept off the streets after the Sept. 11 attacks were repeatedly stripped naked and frequently were physically abused, the Justice Department's inspector general has found.

The detainees - none of whom were ultimately charged with anything related to terrorism - alleged in sworn affidavits and in interviews with Justice Department officials that correction officers:

Humiliated them by making fun of - and sometimes painfully squeezing - their genitals. Deprived them of regular sleep for weeks or months.

Shackled their hands and feet before smashing them repeatedly face-first into concrete walls - within sight of the Statue of Liberty.

Forced them in winter to stand outdoors at dawn while dressed in light cotton prison garb and no shoes, sometimes for hours.

"In December, they left me outside for more than four hours [wearing] only a jumpsuit and a light prison coat," Ahmed Khalifa, an Egyptian, told the Daily News. "I asked them to let me inside. They were laughing and pointing to me. When I finally got back inside, I felt like I had frostbite."

The Justice Department's inspector general has substantiated some of the prisoners' allegations - and some incidents were captured on videotape. But the Justice Department has declined to prosecute any federal correction officer at MDC.

"I was informed the videos amounted to nothing more than shoving, but no serious injuries," said one Justice Department official, who would speak only on condition he not be identified.
But Inspector General Glenn Fine, whose staff reviewed 380 MDC videotapes, reported in 2003 that "These tapes substantiated many of the detainees' allegations." Furthermore, the officers were not just a few bad apples but "a significant percentage of those who had regular contact with the detainees," Fine wrote last March.

The Justice Department currently is reconsidering its rejection of a News Freedom of Information request for the tapes, after the paper filed an appeal.

Meanwhile, interviews by The News with 12 ex-detainees - all but one now deported for visa violations - and a review of sworn complaints filed against the Bureau of Prisons adds shocking detail to the earlier findings of what occurred at MDC.

The picture that emerges mirrors some of the abuses the International Committee of the Red Cross denounced recently as "tantamount to torture" when inflicted by U.S. military authorities on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Wael Kishk, an Egyptian student who was unable to walk, alleges he was beaten by guards on Feb. 15, 2002 - the same day he complained to a judge in open court about earlier mistreatment at MDC. When guards were returning him to the jail that day, he says they threw him into the back of a transport bus with his hands cuffed behind his back and his ankles shackled close together. Kishk, now in Cairo, recalled landing painfully on the floor, face down, unable to break his fall.

Back at MDC, said Kishk, the guards piled him into a wheelchair and took him to a room where they stripped him and "started stomping on me."

"There were three of them - with their leader, four," Kishk said. "They took all my clothes off and turned me on my stomach. Then, the leader put his foot on the back of my neck and told me, 'All of this is so you will stop playing games,'" an apparent reference to his statements in court.

Rami Dahmany, another Egyptian inmate, alleged he was injured by two guards - Michael McCabe and Christopher Witschel - when he complained about a strip search. They grabbed an already injured finger on his right hand and bent it painfully far back, then twisted it hard.
"They saw the finger was damaged," said Dahmany, speaking by phone from Egypt. "I still have an injury from that. I can't fold my hand. The finger stands up all the time."

McCabe and Witschel are accused of similar conduct in a lawsuit filed by other former inmates.
Witschel declined comment. McCabe could not be reached.

All the detainees complained of frequent strip searches - sometimes six a day - even though they remained continuously isolated in solitary confinement or were shackled when taken to court hearings.

Ehab ElMaghraby, a restaurant worker from Egypt, alleges in a lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Prisons that MDC guard Steven Barrere inserted a flashlight into his rectum during a strip search while other guards looked on. ElMaghraby said he saw blood on the withdrawn flashlight. Two other MDC officials - Michael DeFrancisco and Raymond Cotton - inserted a pencil into his rectum during other searches, ElMaghraby alleged.

Barrere's attorney, James Ryan, denounced ElMaghraby's allegations as "factually baseless." Cotton's attorney, Nicholas Kaizer, labeled ElMaghraby's charges "preposterous," adding, "ElMaghraby is trying to get rich through these fanciful claims."

Kishk, who has not filed any lawsuit, described strip searches in which a guard would grab his genitals "so hard, it hurt badly" - a charge echoed by Egyptian detainee Ashraf Ibrahim in a suit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

"There's a lot more I can't describe," said Kishk. "It was very degrading." Oded Ellner - one of five Israeli Jewish terrorist suspects - said he sought medical help after MDC's allegedly meager, often spoiled meals left him with severe dysentery symptoms. The doctor came with five guards and a camera, he said. She then ordered him to strip and shift his backside into a small space in the cell door so she could conduct a rectal exam from outside the cell.

"I'm a human being, not an animal!" Ellner said he shouted. "I have a right to an exam." The guards, he said, "just laughed," and all walked away.

The prisoners interviewed by The News were part of a group of 84 detainees jailed at MDC between Sept. 11, 2001, and September 2002. Some 1,200 such immigrants were jailed nationwide, including 400 in nearby Passaic County, N.J., where abuses were also reported.
Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Prisons, said that her agency began an investigation of abuse allegations last April - it is still ongoing - after the Justice Department decided not to prosecute anyone.

"Any substantiated incident will be addressed with appropriate disciplinary action and, where appropriate, criminal prosecution," she said.

Robert Nardoza, spokesman for the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, which participated in the criminal investigation, said government efforts to prosecute alleged abusers at MDC were frustrated when six inmates who had complained of abuse chose deportation to their home countries rather than continued imprisonment until a possible trial at some point where they might testify as witnesses.

Nardoza referred further questions to the department's Civil Rights Division. He would not say whether prosecutors pursued options such as video depositions from abroad, closed-circuit TV testimony or even temporarily returning ex-inmates here to testify.

Civil Rights Division spokesman Eric Holland has refused to talk with The News. None of the inmates who spoke to The News said they were ever asked to testify. All said they were ready to do so.

"It's a whitewash," said Steven Leegan, an attorney for Indian Muslim inmate Mohammed Jaweed Azmat. "This was a mini-Abu Ghraib in Brooklyn."

In fact, "It was worse," he said, "because these were not guardsmen thrown together but supposedly highly trained federal corrections officers doing the same thing long before we sent troops into Iraq."

"I was very trusting of the system," said Kishk. "I was infatuated and overtaken by your ideals of tolerance."

"I got the flip side of all the ideals I believed America held." "

Occasional Ceph Blogging No.8

2005-02-25T12:25:00.000+01:00

Via Squidblog, your source for all things ceph-related. I so want one of these, I can't sit still for yearning. How long is it till my birthday? Too long. Ooh, it's easter soon, I feel the need for a chocolate substitute, and this is it.

"I Hate The Dutch"

2005-02-25T11:15:00.000+01:00

If anyone has the .mp3 of this please, pretty please, send it to me. I want it played at my funeral ( after I've been fatally mauled by hordes of foaming- at- the- mouth autochtoons that is).

"I Hate the Dutch"
John Dowie
[1977, EP "Another Close Shave"].

[Lalalala - Dick van Dyke]

I'm a British Tourist and I'm very, very rude.
I hate the stinking foreigners
hate their stinking food
I don't like French or Germans
I don't care for Belgians much
But worst of all worst of all
I hate the Dutch
The Dutch, the Dutch
I hate them worse than dogs.
They live in windmills
and mince around in clogs.
They don't have any manners
They don't say 'thanks' or 'please'
all they eat is tulips
and stinking gouda cheese...
I'm a British tourist with a countenance severe
I love to strike the foreign type
And box their poxied ears
But there's one woggy dago
I cannot bear to touch
The slimy crawling
stench appalling
snotty grotty Dutch
The Dutch are mad
Their fingers stuck in dikes
They use the wrong side of the road
And ride around on bikes
They don't have any manners,
don't have any brains.
There's only one race worse than them
and that's... THE BLOODY DANES!

2005-02-24T21:21:00.000+01:00

Canada Opts Out of U.S. Defense Shield

"TORONTO - Prime Minister Paul Martin said Thursday that Canada would opt out of the contentious U.S. missile defense program, a move that will further strain brittle relations between the neighbors but please Canadians who fear it could lead to an international arms race.
[...]
When Bush visited Canada in December, he surprised Ottawa by making several unsolicited pitches for support of the defense shield, which is in the midst of testing interceptors capable of destroying incoming missiles targeted at North America.

Martin, who leads a tenuous minority government, has said Ottawa would not support what he called the "weaponization of space." Though he initially supported joining the program when he was a candidate for the Liberal leadership, Martin has retreated, since polls indicate that a majority of Canadians oppose it. Many believe that the umbrella, when fully implemented, could lead to an international arms race."

Canada's parliament has also voted for extra money to secure its border with the US. Seems a sensible move to me. Good fences make good neighbours, especially when the neighbour is a behemoth with an uncertain temper and a fondness for war, pollution and reckless spending.

The US is constantly pushing Canada to allow their security apparatus operate over the border.

The cult of fundamentalism has also spread north, and fundies have taken control of the Canadian Alliance, Canada’s second-largest political party and the official parliamentary opposition to the ruling Liberals. Unfortunately there is a movement in Canadian conservative evangelical business types which identifies with the US Republican party. They seem determined to remove the border entirely; not just to trade but also monetarily and militarily, a Greater North America. Call it leibensraum. Conspiring with a foreign nation to subvert your own country's government sounds treasonous to me. If I were Canadian I would not feel very secure with such quislings around. Those still-optimistic Americans who look to Canada as a safe haven should worry too. While it's cheering to see the Canadian PM sticking out against Bush, he is electorally on shaky ground, and we've all see what fundies can do to a once reality-based ( for certain values of reality) nation.

Correction: Commenter Green Knight has pointed out that I'm behind the times: the Alliance swallowed the old Progressive Conservative Party in a hostile takeover last year, and reconstituted itself as the Conservative Party of Canada. mea maxima culpa.

The Chocolate Soldiers

2005-02-24T18:17:00.000+01:00

Hmmm, wonder if the Preznit will be bringing one of these uniforms home...?

(Photo copyright NYT)

Hypocritical Boot -Faced Bitch

2005-02-24T17:55:00.000+01:00

Laura Bush was inteviewed by Rosie O 'Donnell ( ah - so it's OK to be gay now, just as long as you're in the media and can be useful, but it's not Ok for a divorced woman to stay at the WH) on MSNBC during the tour of Germany. This is what she said when asked about potential changes at the WH:

" I think we'll do more entertaining. We already have at the White House.What happened on Sept. 11, and of course the war, really made us mindful of not having a lot of lavish entertaining at the White House. What you didn't see is that my husband hosted more working dinners with heads of state than ever before. Well over a hundred heads of state."
[My emphasis]

She also said she was looking forward to appointing a new chef.

Remember the inauguration? Didn't look much like they were mindful of not having a lot of lavish entertaining then did it?
"The biggest ticket was on Wednesday at the Texas State Society's Black Tie & Boots Ball.Preparations started the day before the event to prepare 21,000 enchiladas, 20,000 quesadillas, 25,000 pastries, and 3,000 lbs (1,360kg) of beef barbeque. "

Looks damned pretty lavish to me. Hypocritical bitch.

Oh, and the chef? Laura Bush sacked Walter Scheib III, the White House's French-trained chef. He had worked at the White House for 11 years. Scheib said he got fired because he failed to meet "the first lady's stylistic requirements." There are reports that Scheib balked at White House orders to create an inaugural menu that used brand names representing food companies of top Bush campaign donors. He had to whip up entrees using ingredients such as Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Coca-Cola and Pilgrims Pride butter-basted turkeys. That other boot-faced bitch, Camilla, should be glad she won't be asked to stay.

That Bush German Visit In Full

2005-02-24T17:28:00.000+01:00

I particularly like the '70's German porn-star flag. Are they related? I think we should be told...

(Pictures courtesy of the BBC and Creative Parties UK)

$10k Reward for Gannon Smoking Gun

2005-02-24T15:50:00.000+01:00

A Washington DC gossip website is offering ten thousand dollars as a reward to anyone who can definitively link GFannon/Guckert to a senior member of the Bush adminsitration.

"Have you seen this man?

A wealthy Washington socialite is offering a $10,000 reward for proof that Jeff Gannon (pictured), an allegedly gay kinky-sex prostitute / escort / white house reporter / GOP operative, has had sexual relations with top-ranking government officials."

[...]

"But one thing is for sure: Jeff Gannon is on the lips of every insider in Washington D.C., and many say he's been kissing some of them, too -- for $200/ hour and $1,200 / weekend. His profiles on escort websites say he leaves no marks, only lasting impressions.

So, I ask again -- have you seen this man? Have you slept with this man? Do you know this man?

A local socialite, who wishes to remain anonymous, has teamed up with this site to offer a $10,000 reward to anyone that can provide hard proof (photos, phone pictures, locks of hair, DNA on a suit) that Jeff Gannon had ANY sexual -- or romantic -- relationship with any top-ranking officials here in Washington."

Email tips to: gannoninvestigation@kellyanncollins.com

Kinder, Kirche und Kuchen". The US Military Gets Desperate

2005-02-24T14:32:00.000+01:00

One of the most interesting things about blogs is the comments function. I was reading a post about military recruiting at US schools at Koufax award winner Body & Soul this morning and I came across this set of photos.

Apparently the Worcester, Mass. school board arranged to take local schoolchildren on a field trip to see a show called "Spirit of America". Seems perfectly appropriate for a school trip, doesn't it? A free day out, patriotically themed, with a stage show thrown in? The trouble is, Spirit of America is

"a free, patriotic, live-action show presented by the U.S. Army Military District of Washington. Performed by more than 400 soldiers of the U.S. Army's elite ceremonial units, the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) and The U.S. Army Band "Pershing's Own," this free show features traditional and modern music, disciplined drill and historical narrative as Soldiers recap the heritage of our country in an inspiring and entertaining performance."

What it actually is, as shown in the pictures, is a barely concealed military recruiting fair. No Child Left Behind also compels US schools to provide details of all their pupils to military recruiters and children are being put under enormous pressure. The pressure to recruit on the recruiters themselves is getting more intense as fewer volunteers see joining up as an option:

"Very frankly, in a couple of places our recruiting pool is getting soft," said Lt. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, the Army's personnel chief. "We're hearing things like, 'Well, let's wait and see how this thing settles out in Iraq,' " he said in an interview. "For the active duty for '05 it's going to be tough to meet our goal, but I think we can. I think the telling year for us is going to be '06."

The US, along with the UK, still uses child soldiers. I personally have never been against the need for any nation to have some sort of defence force, indeed I've served myself, briefly; just so long as any such force is staffed by volunteers, adults who have made the decision to enlist of their own volition and in full awareness of the potential risks they face. Children under 18, pressured to enlist by recruiters like this, cannot possibly be said to have made such a informed decision, as by definition they are not of legal age. They can't even be trusted to have a beer.

Some students, like commenter the yeti, realise what's happening:

"I just got called by a USMC (not USMCPT, alas... ;-) recruiter tonight. I'm a senior in HS and I could fill a medium-sized room with all the mailings I've got, and I get one of these calls at least once a week. This guy in particular was persistent to the extreme. I consider myself pretty strong-minded, so I can't imagine how most of my classmates would react to him. It's very, deeply saddening to me.

And it's not like you can say, well, three of my state's national guard died yesterday, today W. refused to rule out military action against Iran, and kids across the country are saying you promise they won't have to go to war and they do anyway. Most kids my age aren't even equipped with these facts - that's why the recruiters are free to lead with, "how would you feel if you could get a free ride through college?" Subhuman, that's how I'd feel. Or else propagantastic."

Posted by: theyeti February 23, 2005 07:21 PM

So what have those children who are seduced by recruiters' promises, of free college, international travel and a lifetime career, got to look forward to? Ask Spc. Alexis Soto-Ramirez . Oh no, sorry you can't, he's dead by suicide after returning from Iraq.

Feb. 18, 2005 WASHINGTON -- Before he hanged himself with his bathrobe sash in the psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Spc.Alexis Soto-Ramirez complained to friends about his medical treatment.Soto-Ramirez, 43, had been flown out of Iraq five months before then because of chronic back pain that became excruciating during the war. But doctors were really worried about his mind. They thought he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving with the 544th Military Police Company, a unit of the Puerto Rico National Guard, the kind of unit that saw dirty, face-to-face combat in Iraq. A copy of Soto-Ramirez's medical records, reviewed by Salon, show that a doctor who treated him in Puerto Rico upon his return from Iraq believed his mental problems were probably caused by the war and that his future was in the Army's hands. "Clearly, the psychiatric symptoms are combat related," a clinical psychologist at Roosevelt Roads Naval Hospital wrote on Nov. 24, 2003. The entry says, "Outcome will depend on adequacy and appropriateness of treatment." Doctors in Puerto Rico sent Soto-Ramirez to Walter Reed in Washington, D.C., to get the best care the Army had to offer. There, he was put in Ward 54, Walter Reed's "lockdown," or inpatient psychiatric ward, where the most troubled patients are supposed to have constant supervision.

But less than a month after leaving Puerto Rico, on Jan. 12, 2004, Soto-Ramirez was found dead, hanging in Ward 54. Army buddies who visited him in the days before his death said Soto-Ramirez was increasingly angry and despondent. "He was real upset with the treatment he was getting," said René Negron, a former Walter Reed psychiatric patient and a friend of Soto-Ramirez's. "He said: 'These people are giving me the runaround ... These people think I'm crazy, and I'm not crazy, Negron. I'm getting more crazy being up here."

It's not just schools either. The military is now using christian churches as a recruiting tool, as reported at shlonkom bakazay

"Even as I had already taken these photographs of something that I clearly know is wrong, hell we ended with “I‘m proud to be an American”, after a sermon and a combined rendition of all the services anthems. I was conflicted. I knew, and know that almost all of the people I’m depending on to bring this to light disagree with me on virtually every issue. I wasn’t going to release this unless they were recruiting. They were.

Jesus himself only got mad once. It was because merchants were using the church to sell their wares, he flipped their tables, seized a whip, and attacked them. This day the answer to “what would Jesus do?” is grab one of the m-16s laying around and start kneecapping. "
[...]
"As I leave you with the final images I plan to of two of the ancient flags that surrounded the stage, and The banner at the front door I have to express regret that even a very small portion of my country is as religiously militaristic as the whole world already believes it to be. I myself think of this as a huge fuster cluck of the balances that are already there being missed.

If you have any questions feel free to IM or PM me. I have huge 5 mega pixel raws to prove it was me. And if you still try to tell me this administration will not attack Iran, there is no way I would remotely believe you. And I even question how they will manage to do such an insane thing. Instead of a draft (at least for the mean time), we have such sick invasion of places of worship? I am not sure which is worse. Wow...wow...wow.

I'm truly speechless. This is very significant. This has to be illegal. How can this be?"

So, so far we have Kinder and Kirche. What about Kuche? The military is not yet as blatantly targeting women. But, according to the Rand corporations reccomendations they soon will be.

"RECOMMENDATIONS
We recommended a number of actions to solve growing recruiting problems. Given our prediction of a shortfall in meeting the increased accession requirement, one was to increase recruiting resources, specifically by increasing budgets for advertising and educational benefits and by boosting the number of recruiters. Research shows these to be the most cost-effective resources for increasing the supply of high-quality enlistees. Another recommendation was to reduce the requirement for high-quality male accessions without prior service. This can be done by recruiting more women, accepting more prior-service accessions, or by lowering quality goals. Each of these options, however, has limits and costs that must be weighed against the costs of increasing recruiting resources"

More than 5,000 troops had deserted since the war began, CBS’s 60 Minutes reported last month. Many experts say that America’s 1.4 million active-duty troops and 865,000 part-timers are stretched to breaking point : the drain from the US military is heaviest among parttimers, who have been dragged en masse out of civilian life to serve their country with unprecedented sacrifice. For the first time in a decade, the Army National Guard missed its recruitment target by 5,000 this year. A further sign of strain can be seen in the Army’s decision this year to mobilise 5,600 former soldiers that can be mobilised theoretically only in a national emergency.

More than 183,000 National Guard and reserve troops are on active duty, compared with 79,000 before the invasion of Iraq. Forty per cent of the 138,000 troops in Iraq are part-timers who never expected to be sent to the front line. Instead, as a woman soldier pointedly reminded Donald Rumsfeld on his visit to Iraq they face “stop loss” orders that delay their return to civilian life. "Women in Uniform: Can They Save the Military?" (U.S. News & World Report, June 5, 1978) described how women are filling the post-draft manpower shortfall as sailors, parachute riggers, pilots, Minuteman missile crewmembers.

"Another soldier lost his court battle this week to stop the Army extending his one-year contract by at least two years. At least eight soldiers have turned to the courts, accusing the military of tricking them into enlisting for a fixed term without warning them that they could be forced to stay longer. Once they get out, soldiers are increasingly resisting hefty bonuses to re-enlist, an incentive that had helped to meet recruitment targets in the past. The crisis may be even deeper than the statistics suggest. Active-duty Army recruiters exceeded their target of 77,000 by 587 this year only by dipping into a pool of recruits who had not planned to report until next year, and by dropping educational standards, Mr Korb said.

At 10 per cent, the death rate among war casualties is the lowest in history. But maimed men and women are flocking home with horror stories about the war, which is claiming more and more casualties. Between June, when the Iraqi interim Government took over, and September, the average monthly casualty rate among US forces was 747 a month, compared with 482 during the invasion and 415 before the coalition government was disbanded. With elections looming next month, the toll is expected to mount.

Most soldiers keep their anger under wraps, partly out of patriotism but also out of loyalty to their units. “There’s a thin green line that you don’t cross,” said a veteran with the 4th Infantry, who deployed to Iraq last year to help to plan counterinsurgency operations and train Iraqi forces.

But at his home base in Fort Carson, Colorado, he has resisted a $10,000 re-enlistment incentive and plans to get out as soon as he can. He illustrates the long-term problem the Army faces. He served for five years, first in Korea, then in Iraq, where he was a combat soldier for almost a year. The Americans received little training for the counterinsurgency they face. “Every day you wake up alive, is a gift from above,” the soldier said. Few experts are surprised to hear that a recent army survey discovered that half the soldiers were not planning to re-enlist. Experts are divided over how stretched America’s military really is. But they agree that another conflict would put the military in overdrive. Another war would require a shift to a “no-kidding wartime posture in which everybody who could shoot was given a rifle and sent to the front,” according to John Pike, of GlobalSecurity.org."

Bush, in his European visit this week, said the idea of a strike on Iran was "Ridiculous" but seconds later reversed himself and said that "All options are still on the table". Condoleeza rice, regarded as her master's voice, has made similarly bellicose noises; there have also been reports of Special Forces squads having already being sent into Iran to reconnoitre. They are gearing up for war, but they don't have the troops.

From what has been reported so far it doesn't look as though many are being taken in by the military's increased recruiting efforts. rumour has it the Iran invasion is scheduled for June this year. How long before a draft?

Martian Lake Found

2005-02-23T11:54:00.000+01:00

Sounds like SF doesn't it? But according to this report in Nature, an area up to 500 miles in width and length and 50m deep at the equator of Mars has been found to consist of ice floes.

Mars ice on the left, terrestrial ice floes on the right for comparison

(Copyright Nature magazine)

"The pictures, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on board the European Space Agency's craft, show a flat plain close to Mars's equator that is covered with irregular blocky shapes. They look just like the rafts of fragmented sea ice that lie off the coast of Antarctica. The camera team presented its findings at ESA's Mars Express Science Conference in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, on 21 February. The results will be published by Nature in March.

"I was expecting glaciologists to be sceptical of our interpretation," says team member John Murray of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. "But when I showed the pictures to an expert on sea ice, he was utterly convinced."

The researchers think that the camera has snapped a sea that froze about 5 million years ago, and was then covered by volcanic dust.

"Five million years might sound like a long time," Murray says, "but in geological terms it is virtually yesterday. This suggests that pockets of liquid water have existed throughout Mars's geological history."
Approximately 7% of Earth's surface is covered by sea ice, which is colonized principally by psychrophilic microorganisms. This extensive community of microorganisms contains algae (mostly diatoms), protozoa, and bacteria. Recent investigations indicate that the sea ice bacteria fall into four major groups: the proteobacteria, the Cytophaga-Flavobacterium-Bacteroides group, and the high and low mol percent gram-positive bacteria. Archaea associated with sea ice communities have also been reported. Several novel bacterial genera and species have been discovered, including Polaromonas, Polaribacter, Psychroflexus, Gelidibacter, and Octadecabacter; many others await study. Some of the gram-negative sea ice bacteria have among the lowest maximum temperatures for growth known, <10°c>

Psychroflexus bacteria from the Antarctic

(courtesy University of Bath Centre for Extremophile research)

There's obviously much speculation as to whether something similar may be living in the Martian ice: extremophile bacteria have been found living in similar environments like the McMurdo dry valleys in Antarctica, and buried deep in ice millions of years old in Lake Vostok. It may be just a matter of time before life is found on Mars.

'Cause SUV's Are Just Soooo Last Week...

2005-02-22T16:18:00.000+01:00

This is the Bad Boy Truck. The name says it all:

It's made by a company called Homeland Defense Vehicles; this is their sales pitch:

"The Bad Boy Truck is ready for the streets, and it’s so cool that we’ve created a new vehicle category for it, the HMT, which stands for Heavy Muscle Truck.

SUVs are yesterday, and the Bad Boy is the biggest, longest, meanest, heaviest, street-legal military conversion vehicle on the road today.

If you want ride that is tough enough to take what you dish out, the Bad Boy is ready. If you want to impress your clients and friends, take along a Bad Boy.
Be warned though, we don’t make these for just anyone.

The Bad Boy is a luxury conversion of a tactical vehicle built for the U.S. Army by Stewart & Stevenson. The diesel-powered Bad Boy is 21 feet long, 10 feet tall and 8 feet wide, and has room for three adult passengers in the front seat. The all-wheel drive vehicle can run 72 mph, and it can carry a 5,000-pound payload. It offers 22-inch ground clearance, and it can ford water 30 to 60 inches deep. It can also climb grades as steep as 60 percent. The truck comes equipped with a Central Tire Inflation System that has settings for off road, mud and snow. The tire system can also keep the tire inflated even if it has a hole the size of a quarter in the sidewall. The truck comes with a 58-gallon tank and can carry passengers 400+ miles, depending upon the payload.

For adventure seekers who want the ultimate in security and protection as they travel abroad, the Bad Boy HMT can be equipped with a cabin filtration system to protect occupants against nuclear radiation, biological contaminants and chemical agents. "
Are You Bad Enough?"

Good lord. Why?

I note that not one of the info pages gives figures for miles per gallon; but then why would it? Anyone who's in the market for one of these obviously doesn't give damn about the environment, except their own immediate environment. I can just see the chimperor and his wormtongue Karl Rove, up in their trucks riding over all the poor people as they choke to death on nuclear radiation, biological contaminants and chemical agents unleashed upon the US when they attack Iran in June... probably going 'HA HA!" a la Nelson Muntz.

Perfect for within the Beltway - I wonder which of 'em, George or Karl, will have Jeff Gannon riding shotgun. It is a 'Bad Boy' truck after all, and should appeal to all those chickenhawk military fetishists in the Republican party.

Guess where it's made? Right first time. Texas.

Hey Gannon, Over Here! Sue Me!

2005-02-22T15:39:00.000+01:00

"Jeff Gannon, the White House correspondent forced from his job by left wing blogs is considering suing left wing bloggers for a “political assassination” that drove him from his job, according to a Newsweek Article to go to print on Feb 28.
Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, singled out Media Matters, a quasi blog that focuses on the political affiliations of the US media. "

Jeff Gannon/Guckert is a male prostitute, posing as a journalist, who posts naked pictures of himself online to get business, who lied to get a White house press pass, who has lied more than once to publications and pundits who have interviewed him, bragged about his acccess to the White House, bragged about access to secret CIA memos and who has been bankrolled in these endeavours by prominent Republican party supporters. Here he is, large as life and twice as tacky:

Truth is the absolute defence to libel. So sue me too, motherfucker.

War? What War? Quick, Look, Celebrities!

2005-02-22T13:01:00.000+01:00

I loathe Ebony magazine. And Jet. And BET.

Why? because they are just so fake, and so Republican, and all about consumption. They teach young Black people, and not just Americans, that what it means to be Black is to be rich and live a bling lifestyle and try to look and act as white as possible. Just look at the people they feature as people to watch in the front pages of Ebony: on the face of it these are role models for today's youth, but look closer and they are all people who have swallowed the corporate pill in some way. Fratboys, fratgirls, pols and middle managers to a man and woman, and not a single inspirational leader amongst them. It's all about the benjamins. This month's features? 6 Women Who Struck It Rich ,'Sistah Celebrities' & Their 'Best Girlfriend' ,ZANE: Up Close And Personal, EBONY Legends, How To Tell If He's Cheating and the one useful item, Special Section on Diabetes. Nothing about the war, nothing about education, social security, taxes: just wall-to-wall celebrity fluff and advertising. Jet is marginally better, at least it mentions Malcolm X and Spike Lee, but again the majority of content is commercial fluff.

Bob Johnson, founder and CEO of Black Entertainment Television, is not someone I will teach my sons to look up to as an African-American inspiration: he has filled the brains of today's youth with crap via his network and has to take a huge share of the blame for young people's obsession with consumption and disposability. Bob Johnson is only the latest in a line of Black entrepreneurs who are feted for making money while doing down their own community: here's a bio of publisher John H. Johnson, who founded Ebony and Jet magazines and has been called the most influential black publisher in American history-

"...has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was honored for breaking negative stereotypes and building self-respect in the black community. Johnson is the founder, publisher, chairman and CEO of the Johnson Publishing Company Inc., Chicago, Ill., the largest black-owned publishing company in the world. Johnson is one of American's most successful entrepreneurs. A self-made man, his company is the publisher of Ebony. Through faith, self-confidence and a positive mental attitude, Johnson turned Ebony into the nation's number one African American oriented magazine with a circulation of 1.7 million and a monthly readership of 11 million. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor the nation can bestow on a citizen, from President Bill Clinton in 1996. Johnson was born a descendant of slaves in Arkansas City, Ark., in 1918. His mother, Gertrude Johnson Williams, worked as a domestic and a levee cook to raise the money to move to the family to Chicago. At the time, no high schools for blacks existed in Arkansas City. Johnson repeated the eighth grade in Arkansas rather than end his education. In Chicago, Johnson graduated from DuSable High School where he was on the honor roll, served as senior class president, editor of the newspaper, and yearbook editor. Among his classmates were Nat King Cole, Redd Foxx and future entrepreneur William Abernathy. When Chicago youths made fun of Johnson's speech, he would stand in front of his mirror at home and practice speaking correctly. Because of his accomplishments, Johnson was invited to speak at a Chicago Urban League event. There African American businessman Harry Pace noticed Johnson, offering him a scholarship and a job at Pace's company, Supreme Life Insurance Company.He started Johnson Publishing in 1942 with a $500 loan against his mother's furniture. He got the idea for Negro Digest, the forerunner of Ebony, while selecting articles for Pace to keep abreast of current events of interest to blacks. The company has a book division and also publishes Jet magazine, the number one black news weekly with a readership of over eight million. It employs more than 2,600 people with sales of over $388 million. Johnson Publishing owns Fashion Fair Cosmetics, the number one makeup and skin care company for women of color around the world and Supreme Beauty products, hair care for men and women. The company is involved in television production and produces the Ebony Fashion Fair, the world's largest traveling fashion show, which has donated over $47 million to charity. The show visits more than 200 cities in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean. The Johnson family is active in many charities, including the United Negro College Fund and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. In 1971, Johnson Publishing moved to its new 11-story headquarters on Chicago's fashionable Michigan Avenue, becoming the first black-owned business to be located in the Loop. Johnson presently serves on the boards of directors of Dillard's Inc., and he has served on the boards of First Commercial Bank, Little Rock; Dial Corporation; Zenith Radio Corporation; and Chrysler Corporation.Among the many awards he had received is the NAACP's coveted Spingarn Medal for the highest and most achievements by an African American in 1965. That same year, he was one of 12 Americans who received the Horatio Alger Award. Johnson also has received the USC Journalism Alumni Association's Distinguished Achievement Award in 1969, Black Journalists' Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987 and The Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones entrepreneurial Excellence Award in 1993. In 1982, he was the first black named to the Forbes' list of the 400 wealthiest Americans. Most recently he was honored with the 2001 Arkansas Business Hall of Fame Award sponsored through the Sam M. Walton College of Business of the University of Arkansas. In 2002, he received the Vanguard Award and The Trumpet Award. Also among Johnson's many accomplishments is service to the United States. In 1957 he accompanied Vice President Richard M. Nixon on a special goodwill tour to nine African countries and again in 1959 he accompanied Vice President Nixon to Russia and Poland. In1961 Johnson was appointed by President John F. Kennedy as Special U.S. Ambassador to the Independence Ceremonies of the Ivory Coast; and in 1963 he was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson as Special United States Ambassador to the Independence Ceremonies of Kenya. In 1966 he was appointed by President Johnson to the National Selective Service Commission. In 1970 he was appointed by President Nixon as a member of the President's Commission for the Observance of the 25th Anniversary of the United Nations."

A country at 'war', democracy under threat, and what does Ebony give us? Woohoo, celebrities!

So far so very impressive: but actually look at that record. When he wasn't sucking money out of the Black community for those socially progressive causes of entertainment, vanity and profit, he was sucking right up to the government, regardless of ideological stripe. Look at the boards he's been on: banks and car companies and life insurance and the draft. In 1970, when African-Americans were being sent to war in disproportionate numbers. Where was he? On the draft board. But what has he actually done for African-Americans? Sure he's given money to charity, but that's tax-deductible. The man is a shill for the Man, all the while making his own personal fortune. Yes, he has done some good things, 47 million dollars to charity is not peanuts - but where are the Johnson family millions when the Black communiuty is under attack like never before, with no Child Left Behind, the abolition of Pell grants, SS reform, and the elephant in the room, disenfranchisement in Ohio and Florida?

Bob Johnson, founder and CEO of the Black Entertainment Network is not related to Ebony & Jet magazine's Johnson. Nevertheless the same principle holds for both. The BET company has been successful despite three separate scandals involving executives who served as BET's top financial officers. One of them went to prison, and another has accused Johnson of improperly avoiding taxes. After a small group of founding executives became millionaires as a result of BET's growth, Johnson forced most of them to resign. Johnson fired his own wife, Sheila Johnson, from BET. Johnson engaged "in personal relationships with top female executives at his company. His now ex-wife, Sheila Johnson, learned of one affair when she was subpoenaed to testify in a lawsuit against the company. Another executive who he had an affair with, Debra Lee, is now the president and chief executive officer of BET. Johnson's own sister, who was one of the company's first employees, sued him and settled for more than $1 million.

According to author Brett Pulley in "The Billion Dollar BET : Robert Johnson and the Inside Story of Black Entertainment Television ", Johnson originally envisioned high-minded programming, but succumbed to the lucre made available by devoting more and more time to music videos supplied for free by the record companies.

This is the weekly news in in the BET universe:

"WEEKLY NEWS QUIZ :Ray Charles won eight Grammy Awards. Michael Jackson was hospitalized. Video game makers were sued. Were you paying attention this week? Take our quiz. "

"It is consistent with Johnson's philosophy of money first and social responsibility . . . whenever. For journalists who have followed BET over the years, some of the disclosures should come as no surprise, even though we might not have known the specifics. For example, a chapter on Ed Gordon's 1996 post-criminal trial interview with O.J. Simpson tells us that BET trumped NBC for the "get" once Johnson promised Simpson and his lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, that BET would run paid advertisements during the show for a $30 video that Simpson had produced giving his version of what happened at the Brentwood murder scene. Only after Gordon repeatedly argued that such a compromise of the line between news and advertising would "impugn my integrity" were the ads placed instead at the beginning and end of the program. Although Johnson did not cooperate with the author, who developed this, his first book, after a 2001 cover story on the entrepreneur, some passages seem to place Johnson in the best possible light. The book's biggest hurdle could be, as Pulley said, that "people have strong passions about BET and about Bob." Thus, anything at variance with those opinions will be greeted skeptically. For example, a favorable passage about BET's support of the 1995 Million Man March says that BET covered the event. That's true if cutting in from time to time among the day's routine showing of music videos is considered coverage. If viewers wanted to see the event without interruption, they had to -- and did -- tune elsewhere. And on Gordon, Pulley states, "Before the O.J. interview, Gordon's fundamental competency as a journalist had been questioned. Afterward, the only question that the major networks were asking was, 'Why didn't we hire this guy a long time ago?'" Yet once Gordon left BET for NBC, he didn't last long, a situation the book doesn't explore. For whatever reason, he has found success only at BET. By Forbes magazine's calculations, Johnson was America's first black billionaire, and for some, that is cause for celebration. Yet it is telling that of the four blurbs on the back of the book jacket, three are from journalists praising the book. It is only the blurb from the non-journalist -- NBA Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas -- that praises Johnson himself. To Thomas, Johnson is "one of the most inspiring men of our time."

It's the same old story - I've got mine, fuck you. The Johnsons, Condi, Colin Powell, Star Jones and hundreds of others, they think that if they make enough money, suck up to power, throw some opiate to the masses, that that will protect them from the racism endemic in US society. I mind most of all that they are teaching this trash to our children through the privileged positions that they hold, either in the media or as media-owners and regulators. I find them loathsome and the very last role models for our children.

Occasional ceph Blogging No.7: A Boy and his Squid

2005-02-22T12:55:00.000+01:00

How cute is this?

This is what I like to see, introducing our young to their future cephalopod overlords at an early age. Adorable child, adorable cephknuffel.

All together now, say "awwwwwwwwwwwww."

Fixed, fingers crossed.

2005-02-22T12:47:00.000+01:00

Ok, so I changed the template, because for some weird reason the previous one simply refused to layout properly in IE. I guess it's not called Internet Exploder for nuthin'. So for all those IE users who've clicked the 'homepage' button in Haloscan, at least now there's something to see. You may not like it, but at least you can see it. Or at least I can. If you still can't, what can I say - except, get a real browser, you loser.

Not that I'm crazy about about this template, as it is somewhat lacking in pizazz - still, until I have sufficient clue to code it myself,( or as is more likely, use my fabled powers of persuasion, aka cooking, to get Martin to do it for me) it'll just have to be dull.

Getchore WH Press Pass Here!

2005-02-22T12:09:00.000+01:00

Tired of mandates? Wanna be a top-notch Rove-ing reporter? Wanna get close to the Preznit?

Well, now you can, thanks to those great patriots at whitehouse.org. The WH Press Pool pass gets you close to some of the most powerful closet queens in the Administration.

Think what it could do for your journalistic career, not to mention the fees you could charge for those strictly military wrestling in peanut oil lessons! (Even more when barebacked)

WH.org Press pass holders have gone to write for such shining beacons of journalistic integrity as Talon News, National Review Online, Free Republic, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and Eberle Weekly.

Get yours today. It's free, and you can use any name you like.

(Copyright Fleischer-McLennan Enterprises Inc, Offer not valid in Blue states)

I Think I May Hurl.

2005-02-18T15:28:00.000+01:00

Jesus'General is at it again. I swear someone should take his photoshop away before an innocent bystander dies from laughing so hard. Dammit, I just got out of hospital!

"Mr. Jim JD Jeff Gannon Guckert isn't the only friend of Our Leader's who took advantage of capitalism's many benefits by creating an internets business. Deputy Leader tried his hand at providing personal services via the web as well. I found the site shown above this morning while googling the phrase "Dr. Dobson's mighty rod."

I think this is the final proof that Jim JD Jeff Gannon Guckert did nothing wrong. If Deputy Leader can run an escort service out of the Executive Office Building than anyone can--that is as long as they've been washed in the blood of Jesus, of course. posted by Gen. JC Christian, Patriot 3:02 AM"

A Belated Valentine's Day Story

2005-02-17T17:00:00.000+01:00

Monday February 7, 05:27 AM

Gay rebels marry in Philippines

MANILA (Reuters) - Two communist rebels in the Philippines truly became brothers in arms when the men were married in a jungle camp, a newspaper has reported.

Draped in a red flag with hammer and sickle in gold sequins, they exchanged vows, walked under an archway of assault rifles and were serenaded with revolutionary love songs by a choir of New People's Army comrades.

Ka Andres and Ka Jose, who both use the word for "brother" before their names, each held a bullet during the ceremony on the southern island of Mindanao to show their "commitment to the armed struggle", the Philippine Daily Inquirer said."What we have to do now -- with the help of the party -- is to work on our marriage and to be strong while serving the people," said Jose, who at 21 is 33 years younger than
Andres.

Homosexuality is a largely taboo topic in the Philippines, with stereotypes of flamboyantly effeminate men reinforced in the media. The communist movement -- waging a violent insurgency in poor, rural areas since the late 1960s -- has been more progressive, adding same-sex relationships and marriage to its guiding policy in 1998.

Still, Jose and Andres said they ran into the "patriarchal" culture of the Philippines when they decided to marry."We conducted painstaking discussions to make comrades understand gay relations and gay rights," Andres said.

Do you think it may be catching? Thanks to Rising Hegemon and this wonderful image, I think it just might be...

Today's White House Terror Alert

2005-02-17T16:43:00.000+01:00

Is ... pink.

"WASHINGTON -- Senior U.S. intelligence leaders told Congress yesterday that "it may only be a matter of time" before terrorists try to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States.

In his first public appearance since becoming CIA director in September, Porter J. Goss used the annual worldwide threat hearing to issue the prediction, while another federal official said the FBI knows little about al Qaeda sleeper cells such as the September 11 terrorists.

"It may be only a matter of time before al Qaeda or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons," Mr. Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence."

Can you say Gannon, children?

The Torturers Take Over

2005-02-17T16:12:00.000+01:00

I can't believe it.

Negroponte is to be the National Intelligence Director. If I were American I'd be packing my bags and running now, the man's a death squadding nun-raping torturing psychopath.

"As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte played a key role in coordinating US covert aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras. During his term as ambassador there, diplomats alleged that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. In a 1995 series, the Baltimore Sun detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 3-16, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.

A former official who served under Negroponte says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras skyrocketed from $3.9 million to over $77 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America. "

George Bush Sr was CIA chief until 1977 before running as Vice-President to Reagan and he was deeply involved in US covert operations in Central America. Negroponte has done well in reward for his loyalty. Never say the Bushes don't look after their own.

Rotterdam Film Festival

2005-02-17T15:51:00.000+01:00

Nice review by Dennis Lim in the Village Voice of the Rotterdam film festival. It's so annoying to be a short train-ride away and theoretically able to go, but to not be well enough to. Pah.

"There was also an unavoidable sense of nervous reflection to Rotterdam '05—the first large international arts event in a country still reeling from the assassination last November of filmmaker and political gadfly Theo van Gogh. For proof of how decisively the Dutch liberal dream has shattered, you needed to look no further than the metal detectors at the screening of van Gogh's final movie, 06/05, a speculative thriller about the murder (on May 6, 2002) of right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn. The festival had planned to show Submission, the Islam critique that cost van Gogh his life, but citing security concerns, pulled it at the last minute. (Part of the short, reviewed in these pages last November, is still available at ifilm.com.) A wheezy conspiracy clogged with broad and suspect characterizations, 06/05 connects Fortuyn's murder to a backroom effort involving the Dutch military and the U.S. Joint Strike Fighter program. 06/05 is now as much about its director's death as its subject's, and just as his hagiography offers a heroicized view of Fortuyn, van Gogh, who had a knack for provoking anger and not argument, is being eulogized as a free-speech hero. "

But for once a non-Dutch commentator is judging Van Gogh on what he did, rather then as some sort of icon for free speech. Now that's verfrissend.

Occasional Ceph Blogging No's 4,5 & 6

2005-02-17T13:05:00.000+01:00

PZ Myers at pharyngula pounts out this nifty squid ipod case. I'd love one, but first I'd have to get an ipod. Fuck that, they're 369 euro here in NL, which is utterly ridiculous. I'll stick with my cuttlefish hat if it's all the same to you.

" Is Our Children Learning, Mr McCarthy?"

2005-02-17T10:13:00.000+01:00

Via Atrios, now apparently famous after a mention on the Daily Show regarding l'affaire Gannon. This seems somewhat unfair to those who actually did and are still doing the digging on AmericaBlog and Kos, but there you go, fame is fickle and fleeting and it's the exposure of the truth that's important, so feh. At least it momentarily gets that bloody awful, spoilt, fratgirl Wonkette off the airwaves, the silly little madam. I must say if she is a fair example of just what kind of education many young people are getting in the US then we should be worried. Many seem beyond redemption from developing a capacity for independent thought at a scarily early age, as is evidenced by the number of complaints made to a wingnut front website.

Students for Academic Freedom was set up to gather ammunition for the Republicans to allege liberal bias in colleges and schools. So far, so unexceptional for the genre. There's lots of these things, laid out like lures by Republican party operatives and their characteristics are quite similar. But when you start to read the complaints here en masse it takes on a much more sinister aspect.

St. Louis University Sunday, February 13, 2005
Required Readings, Introduced Controversial Material, Mocked
Political/Religious Figures, Conducted Political Activities, Other, Conducts
one-sided lectures in class
SociologyProfessor : Dr. C.M. Terry and Dr. Shockey
Class : Introduction to Sociology

University of Wisconsin-MadisonFriday, February 11, 2005
Required Readings, Singled Out, Introduced Controversial Material,
Forced Students, Biased Grading,
Political Science
Professor : Scott Straus
Class : Politics of Human Rights

University of Georgia Friday, February 11, 2005
Required Readings, Mocked Political/Religious Figures, Conducted
Political Activities, University Funds,
Political Science
Professor : Charles Bullock
What's chilling is that these students obviously seem to think that this is some sort of official complaint site and that something actually will happen to the academics they complain about, in terms of discipline. The mindset that that exposes is quite terrifying, and that these young people have been trained by adults to think this way, that people who don't agree with them have no rights and should be punished. This belief system isn't just fertile ground for fascism, it is the very prerequisite for it.
There is also the aspect of the list in itself. What a handy little compendium of accused subversives, all neatly laid out with times and dates and details, how very efficient. How very official. The Patriot Act is still in force, and Bush is trying to bull through sweeping extensions to its current scope right now.
"As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I've got a little list--I've got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed--who never would be missed!"

Not Optimistic At All

2005-02-17T09:08:00.000+01:00

Margie Burns, commenting on Atrios yesterday, notes that military nurses are quietly having their tours extended and being sent to Iraq.

"The more sinister possibility is that this is one early warning sign of some new deviltry planned for Iraq by the White House. The quietness and abruptness of the move do not inspire confidence, though admittedly the quietness and abruptness could be a political response to a worsening combat situation that the White House will not acknowledge."

In the light of the aggressive noises being made against Syria for allegedly blowing up Lebanon's former prime minister (why would they destabilise their own client state? That little escapade has Rumsfeld's private army's sticky fingerprints all over it), and the openly aggressive posture Condisleeza has been taking towards Iran, who can doubt there is more combat on the horizon?

Christ, these neocons are dumb. Every single time they get caught out at home ( like rentboys in the WH, say, or being caught out lying, again) they think they can pull the old bait and switch by starting wars abroad. "Look! Over there! Terrorists! Axes of Evil!" Unfortunately it's real people that die, and real civilisations that are decimated.

Last night on BBC2 Adam Hart-Davies hosted a programme called 'What the Ancients Taught Us'. This episode showed how the Arab and Islamic world virtually invented modern scientific method, not to mention maths, astronomy and chemistry. The breadth and sophistication of the Arabian empire spread from Western Europe to China, before the Greeks, before the Romans, before the Enlightenment. We in the west like to think we are the civilised nations. We have nothing on the Arabs. If it had not been for a few lucky breaks ( there you go, Jared Diamond's whole thesis in one handy phrase) the industrial revolution might well have happened in Baghdad or Constantinople, not Manchester.

Aside from the individual deaths this is a civilisational war, just like the crusades, and we westerners were the barbarians in that too. The crusades led to the dark ages, and a general retreat from knowledge and the collapse of western civilsation for a long time. The crusaders at least had the excuse of religious fervour and general ignorance, but by destroying ancient civilisations like those of Iraq and Iran now the neocons are doubly culpable, in that they know what they are doing but they just don't care. A few military nurses, or dead children, or thousand year old seats of learning, they're just minor inconveniences in the quest for christian dominion. What do thousands of years of learning matter when you know, for certain sure in your heart of hearts because God says so, that the earth was made in 6 days and white men are the pinnacle of creation?

I think it's inevitable, barring miracles or some sudden plague that only affects wingnuts, that we will see the whole of the Middle East in flames soon. What happens then is anyone's guess. Let's just say I'm not optimistic.

It's The Corruption, Stupid.

2005-02-16T12:39:00.000+01:00

Like a lot of people I've been absolutely riveted by the whole Gannon/Guckert -shock-horror- male -whore/pretend journo -in -the -White House thing. It's been a bit of light relief after a horrendous weekend; in which not only did I narrowly escape agonising death once again, hurrah! I also was told that my insurance wouldn't cover it. I'm still too angry to really blog about that whole it experience; suffice it to say that it was very very scary and painful and for the moment it's nice change to focus away from the purely personal.

It's hard to know quite how to describe the whole Guckert saga. Entertaining isn't quite the word. There's the prurient angle, obviously : high jinks in high places are always interesting and even we're lucky they're titillating too, and this is certainly that, with Guckert plastered all over the internet, erect and coy and well, just so manly, and military and ooooh so perfectly designed to give a nice rightwing mama's-boy-blogger what he so desperately needs and has yearned for. I mean, what was the whole Iraq shebang but the sublimated desires of Bush and his coterie of closet queens for someone, somewhere, to get a good, hard and most of all military ass-fucking? From the large scale right down to the small, the administration is obsessed with anal sex. And baldness.

His mother must so be proud.

The irony of it all is that most people couldn't give a shit whether they're gay or not. The carapace that the Republican elite built for themselves to hide their true natures, this whole rightwing noise machine; it's their own self-made prison.

We the general public just don't care who's gay or whatever, just don't do it in the street and scare the horses, as it were. The fact that somebody is gay generally merits an "Oh? Is he? Well, I never knew that." And that's it. Nobody cares that much. Big deal. Next?

Scandal and gossip drive politics. It's the common change of every day discourse, another form of quid pro quo in a favours based system, which we, however high-minded we are about the constitution, know that that's how the system really works. Because the system is corrupt and we all know but won't admit it, there is this strange culture of impunity going on. It's like some sort of massive in-joke between mainstream media and the executive. Given the ubiquity of modern independent media and information channels (gossip, basically) the Bush administration must surely know that the blatancy of the corruption of US government is a generally known thing worldwide. But knowing that seems to give them license to take bigger and bigger risks, as if to say, "See! I dare you to report this. Look, see what I can do and there's nothing you can do about it, nyernyernyer, yah-booh-sucks. We win! USA! GOP!"

The alternative would be for the mainstream US media to admit to itself that the ship of state is full of obvious holes, that they know and have known it, that the executive arm is corrupt, morally, sexually, financially and utterly, and that the mainstream media knew that too and are complicit in the corruption. Who, if anyone, in the WH press corps challenged Gannon's credentials? More to the point, how many in the Washington press corps used Gannon's services? Who took him to that correspondent's dinner? What about Diplomats? Foreign diplomats, maybe? Maybe Iraqis, or Saudis or Afghans? Oh yeah, and drugs? What bout performance enhancers and cocaine and viagra and all those useful little things that middle-aged office jockeys need to keep their peckers up when they've finally scored a real ass-reaming by the bronzed buff marine of their sweaty adolescent dreams? What about HIV? How many good little dewy-eyed republican security moms should now go get tested? And how many more little chums has the administration got stashed away in convenient positions? This could go on and on.

It's been suggested that Gannon/Guckert will turn up 'suicided' in short order. I dunno. If nothing else has distinguished this administration, aside from the corruption, it's incompetence. They may well fuck that up too. Think of all the many many scandals so far, we found those out, easy-peasy. We find out everything eventually. The internet is heaven for the would-be investigative reporter, and some natural reporters have really shown their mettle in this thing, particularly on AmericaBlog and Kos. However I hope those intrepid reporters remember that in a quid pro quo system the question always to ask is cui bono? Who benefits? Follow the money and the favours. The rest is just entertaining fluff about bumboys, and while it's fun to read, Little Britain is much more entertaining on the subject. American rightwing closet gays have to be so bloody butch and military macho all the time, where's the 'Will & Grace in the West Wing' we all truly want?

Sigh. At least the Democrat sex scandals were entertaining, this everyday blatant corruption is just banal. But then, as Hannah Arendt said, evil is. In the meantime while all this goes on, the Bush administration is fighting American pilots who were tortured by Saddam during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, trying to prevent them from collecting nearly $1 billion from Iraq that a federal judge awarded them as compensation . Never mind, I'm sure they can become military escorts- I hear there's great opportunities in Washington DC. I'm even willing to bet there's an amputee sub-division. All your VA benefits problems, solved, the neocon way!

Welcome to the Fourth Reich

2005-02-11T15:03:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the non-blogging this week, but I have been rather ill again. (I really could do with a laptop and a wireless base station so I can blog in bed ... but fat chance.) Anyway, on with the posting.

This one comes courtesy of Jesus' General, and is an account by a prowar Republican who is shocked, Shocked! I tell you (why?) that his local church has become a military-religious recruiting station. It seems to be the banners that bother him most. Take a look and you'll see why.

Are they by any chance related? I think we should be told...

And just to pound the point home, here's this wonderful post from Billmon at the Whiskey Bar

Credit Where Credit is Due

"I think it's my duty to listen to Rush. I think Rush has actually yet to get the credit he is due because his audience for so many years felt they were in the wilderness of this country. No one was talking to them. I think Rush helped to give birth to a movement. I think he played his part in the contract with America. So I hope he gets his due as a broadcaster."

NBC News Anchor Brian Williams
C-SPAN Interview
December 26, 2004

"I think it's my duty to listen to Adolph. I think Adolph has actually yet to get the credit he is due because his audience for so many years felt they were in the wilderness of this country. No one was talking to them. I think Adolph helped to give birth to a movement. I think he played his part in the contract with Germany. So I hope he gets his due as a broadcaster."

Deutsche Radio News Anchor Bruno Villams
Völkischer Beobachter Interview
December 26, 1934

Posted by billmon at 06:11 PM

Heh. And indeed.

Say It Loud, Allochtoon & Proud!

2005-02-04T15:17:00.000+01:00

Meanwhile, in Dutch news, the parochial bigotry of that small minded, petty-bourgeois huisvrouw Rita Verdonk reaches new and dizzying lows:

Dutch government unveils new integration exam

4 February 2005

AMSTERDAM — Does a car have two or four wheels? Is it OK to sunbathe topless on the North Sea beaches along the Dutch coast?

These are just two of the questions would-be immigrants may be asked as part of the new inburgeringsexamen, or integration exam, included in draft legislation that was unveiled by Immigration and Integration Minister Rita Verdonk on Thursday.
The exam is intended for immigrants, who will have to take it in their home country prior to coming to the Netherlands, to test their ability to speak Dutch and to gauge their understanding of Dutch culture. A video accompanies the exam material to give candidates insight into life in the Netherlands. It includes images of women sunbathing topless on the beach and of gay marriage — two examples of accepted behaviour in the Netherlands.

The draft legislation provides for exemptions for certain groups of newcomers. These include citizens from other EU countries; the European Economic Area (EU states and Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein) and Switzerland, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. These groups of newcomers are not required to sit the integration exam in their land of origin, according to the draft legislation. However, some may be required to undertake an integration course and exam when in the Netherlands. The draft legislation has to be approved by parliament before it is introduced.

The integration pack — exam material and video — will cost EUR 45 and students will need 250 to 350 hours preparation before sitting the exam, Verdonk said. People sitting the exam will communicate with the examiner in the Netherlands by phone. The immigrant will have to pay for the price of the phone call. Verdonk says the exam will ensure that people who choose to settle in the Netherlands for an extended period of time will have prepared for life here before arrival.

"As integration into Dutch society is a longterm process it is important that newcomers before arrival to the Netherlands have a command of the Dutch language at a basic level and developed an understanding of the society into which they are coming," Verdonk says.

The obligation to undertake an integration course will mainly apply, Verdonk says, to people who come here to form a family by marrying a Dutch person, for example, or who want to be re-united with family members already in the Netherlands.

The ministry estimates 14,000 people a year will apply to take the exam. And given that most family-reunification migrants come from Turkey, Morocco and Suriname, Verdonk says, the majority of applications will be dealt with in the capital cities Ankara, Rabat and Paramaribo."
As far as I am concerned the damned Dutch can take their "normen en waarden" and shove it. The sheer arrogance of Verdonk and other Dutch people, assuming that anyone not Dutch is an uneducated, uncivilised moron who must carefully be taught those wonderful Dutch ways before being allowed to set foot on Netherlands' sacred soil - well, I think I've made it pretty clear what i think of the Netherands' national qualities. But just for those who haven't caught it, here's a quick summation. The Netherlands is not tolerant, it is racist, intolerant and religiously bigoted: the citizens themselves may be some of the world's worst mannered: it's overcrowded, badly built, expensive, noisy, flat and greyly grim.
I am proud of my nationality and its characteristics, as are most people from whatever country, and while I'm perfectly willing to try and fit in to whichever city or country I reside, the whole inburgering system is not about helping anyone to settle. It's about forcing people to give up their national characteristics for the convenience of those indigenous Dutch living here , because the Dutch don't like it. Well, fuck them. I am an EC citizen, I have the right to be here, and I also have the right under the ECHR to a private and family life: this includes my cultural norms too. The Council of States declared that "Europe, characterised by solidarity and a rich cultural mix, is founded on respect for diversity and on tolerance. All member-states ... are continuously striving to build and maintain a Europe based on [...] the diversity of its cultures and languages, a Europe where [the] rights of Minorities are protected." Or, in the words of Commission President Romano Prodi: "We must never forget that Europe is all about diversity. Therefore it needs us to respect and reap the rewards of diversity. European integration has always been about diverse peoples with varied cultures [...] Diversity is one of Europe's greatest treasures."
But no diversity in the Netherlands: no no, too scary, too untidy, too... un-Dutch. Verdonk and her followers will not rest till all us allochtonen are turned into cheese-eating, elbow jabbing, Sjonny & Anita clones, who shop at Hema, eat ham kaas broodjes with their workmates at lunch every single day of their working life, and look down on anyone who doesn't do the same. Let us not forget that this is the same country that collaborated with the Nazis to send 104,000 of its Jewish citizens to the death camps, a fact that Verdonk and her kind would prefer to sweep under carpet while making these racist and oppressive laws.
"Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud,
adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority."
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Of course, the most typically Dutch thing about this plan is buried in the middle paragraph:
"The integration pack — exam material and video — will cost EUR 45 and students will need 250 to 350 hours preparation before sitting the exam, Verdonk said. People sitting the exam will communicate with the examiner in the Netherlands by phone. The immigrant will have to pay for the price of the phone call."
Ah yes, now we know it really is a Dutch plan. Not only do they impose their racist culture on you, they make you pay for the privilege.

Friday Lifeform Blogging

2005-02-04T13:34:00.000+01:00

Is this not stunningly beautiful?

The world's largest bacterium,Thiomargarita namibiensis (“Sulfur pearl of Namibia”).

Torturer Appointed US Top Legal Officer.

2005-02-04T13:27:00.000+01:00

Well, we knew that it would happen; how could it not, while the Republican's hold Congress' gonads in a vise - but it doesn't make it any easier to accept or bear. That that corrupt, second-rate, sycophantic bought and paid-for shyster lawyer and torturer manque, Alberto Gonzales, is now Attorney General of the USA, and charged with protecting the legal rights and freedoms of all US citizens, absolutely beggars belief.

( Copyright: The Illustrated Daily Scribble)

Many Americans, including the editors of the New York Times ( not noted for standing up to the Rethugs) are wondering what this will do to the US's standing in the rest of the world:

"The confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general yesterday was depressing. The president deserves a great deal of leeway in choosing his own cabinet. But beyond his other failings, Mr. Gonzales has come to represent the administration's role in paving the way for the abuse and torture of prisoners by American soldiers and intelligence agents. Giving him the nation's top legal post is a terrible signal to send the rest of the world, and to American citizens concerned with human rights.

The 60-to-36 vote for confirmation was also preceded by a depressing debate. There was the usual comic opera of these Senate votes, with the president's party piously denouncing all opposition as outrageous politicking and the opposition piously denying it. But this debate had a sinister overtone as well: in a ham-handed way, the Republicans tried to portray a vote against Mr. Gonzales as an act of bigotry."

[...]

" Mr. Gonzales testified that he agreed with the substance of the original torture memo, and he still takes the view that the president can declare himself to be above the law. In written responses to senators' questions, Mr. Gonzales argued that intelligence agents could "abuse" prisoners as long as they did it to foreigners outside the United States. Republican senators argued that it was unfair to say Mr. Gonzales was personally responsible for the specific acts of torture and degradation at Abu Ghraib. That would be a fair defense if anyone were doing that. The Democrats simply said, rightly, that Mr. Gonzales was one of the central architects of the administration's policy of evading legal restrictions on the treatment of prisoners. He should not have been rewarded with one of the most important jobs in the cabinet."

(My emphasis)

Speaking as a fully paid up member of the reality based-community that passes for the rest of the world, I can tell you my immediate reaction and it's not nice. "Fucking dumb-assed Americans" pretty much sums it up. Because if not stupid, then you must agree with Gonzales and his approval of torture of anyone who disagrees with his Chimperors plans, and even some who don't but just got in the way. Your Republican senators apparently do agree, and you voted for them, didn't you? For fuck's sake, you have all the information to know that the new head of the whole of the US justice department approves torture, HE SAID IT UNDER OATH. Take a look - it's right there in the transcript.

To pontificate, as Bush did in his State of The Union address (and as Condosleeza is doing now on her visit to Tony Blair) on freedom, liberty, democracy and the American way, just makes the rest of the world go "WTF? Surely the US public can't be taken in by this rubbish when its so demonstrably untrue?" But the American public is taken in, every single time. Either that or they do know and they just don't give a damn. Personally I think the latter is more likely.

In say, 25 years, when the climate is totally fucked, hordes of refugees roam the world looking for a safe place to live, when tsunamis, hurricanes and crop failures are regular occurrences, when the insurance companies go bankrupt, when the oil runs out, when there's no safety net of welfare for anyone; when a repressive, torturing, theocratic government has run the nation trillions and trillions of dollars into debt - remember then the scum who voted for Gonzales:

Alexander (R-TN)Allard (R-CO)Allen (R-VA)Bennett (R-UT)Bond (R-MO)Brownback (R-KS)Bunning (R-KY)Burr (R-NC)Chafee (R-RI)Chambliss (R-GA)Coburn (R-OK)Cochran (R-MS)Coleman (R-MN)Collins (R-ME)Cornyn (R-TX)Craig (R-ID)Crapo (R-ID)DeMint (R-SC)DeWine (R-OH)Dole (R-NC) Domenici (R-NM)Ensign (R-NV)Enzi (R-WY)Frist (R-TN)Graham (R-SC)Grassley (R-IA)Gregg (R-NH)Hagel (R-NE)Hatch (R-UT)Hutchison (R-TX)Inhofe (R-OK)Isakson (R-GA)Kyl (R-AZ)Landrieu (D-LA)Lieberman (D-CT)Lott (R-MS)Lugar (R-IN)Martinez (R-FL)McCain (R-AZ)McConnell (R-KY) Murkowski (R-AK)Nelson (D-FL)Nelson (D-NE)Pryor (D-AR)Roberts (R-KS)Salazar (D-CO)Santorum (R-PA)Sessions (R-AL)Shelby (R-AL)Smith (R-OR)Snowe (R-ME)Specter (R-PA)Stevens (R-AK)Sununu (R-NH)Talent (R-MO)Thomas (R-WY)Thune (R-SD)Vitter (R-LA)Voinovich (R-OH)Warner (R-VA)

(Thanks to PZ Myers at pharyngula for the list)

Remember them especially when you try to complain about the government fucking up the country and get thrown in jail, or worse, for your presumption. Remember also that you voted for those who voted for him. Yes, it is your own damned fault.

The rest of the world will also have to pay for the laziness, brutality, venality and sheer stupidity of the majority of US voter's mistakes, (and if history is any guide, it will be a payment disproportionately higher than any an American voter will suffer). We lesser beings, we non-americans, don't get a choice for good or ill; the USA does what it does and well, we just mostly have to take it. But we will remember who it was put us in that position.

Towards A Lesser Anglo-Dutch Understanding, II

2005-02-02T13:16:00.000+01:00

I couldn't possibly have put it better myself. On browsing expatica's discussion boards (something I do when feeling particularly hostile) I came across this reply to a post on 'What do you least like about Holland and/or The Dutch?', which sums up pretty neatly my views on the Dutch as a nation. Let's face it, the Dutch are chavs.

"Raimund, it's not that the Dutch are ugly and impolite mutants. It's just that they're:

Unpleasant, Unfriendly,
Unwashed, Arrogant,
Overly aggressive, Self-important,
Narrow-minded, Sophomoric,
Anti-American, Anti-German,
Anti-Morrocan, Anti-Semitic,
Champagne liberal, NIMBY-oriented,
Bovine, Porcine,
Ovine, Over-accessorised,
Over-tanned, Over-gelled,
Overly sleazy, Exploitative,
Opportunistic, Finger-wagging,
Begrudging, Vindictive,
Defensive, Neurotic,
Provincial, Bureaucractic,
Over-regulated, Profit-minded,
Ferengi-like, Money-oriented,
Lazy, Lying,
Hypocritical, Cheese-slurping,
FEBO-addicted, Nose-picking,
Sneezy germ-spreading, Canine-excrement-smearing,
mutants."

To which I might add, inter alia,

Tasteless, Badly dressed ,
Not half as cultured as they'd like to think
Small-minded, Self-obsessed,
Fat-assed, Loud,
Screechy, Bad-mannered ,
Deceitful, The worst hair in the world,

Truly weird noses ( this is a local country, for local people...)

And what do they do when they find the sum of all those sterling Dutch qualities in human form?

Naturlijk, they make him Prime Minister.

The Dutch Nose, in All Its Mutant Glory

Are they perhaps related? I think we should be told...

Als ik naar de TV kijk

dan staat daar weer Jan-Peteren vliegt

spontaan het kwikuit

mijn bloeddrukmeter

(the King of the Nerds is a Nerd among Kings)

Een wereld vol ellende

En wie moet ons besturen?

Jan-Peter Balkenende

En dat moeten wij verduren

(het is niet makkelijk, tis helemaal niet makkelijk)

When I watch TV
I see Jan Peter again
And the mercury splashes spontaneously
from my blood pressure meter
(The King of the Nerds is a Nerd among Kings)
A world full of misery
And who is there to rule us?
Jan Peter Balkenende
And we have to endure this ...
(It's not easy, it's definitely not easy)

Chorus:Uh-oh ... hope all goes well ...Uh-oh ...
hope he doesn't make a fool of himself again

Copyright © 2004 Doc Jazz

Result!

2005-02-02T13:13:00.000+01:00

Oh, this has cheered me up no end-

Homeless grab EUR 100,000 from ATM
1 February 2005
"AMSTERDAM — Twenty homeless social security recipients were suddenly made a lot richer recently when they were able to withdraw a total of EUR 100,000 from a faulty Fortis Bank cash machine in Rotterdam.

Two homeless people withdrew EUR 33,000 and have disappeared without trace. An official with the Pauluskerk homeless shelter said they might now be sunning themselves on holiday, newspaper De Volkskrant reported.

A computer glitch last Thursday night allowed social security recipients to withdraw an unrestricted amount of money. The recipients used their special bankcard from the Dutch social security office that usually only allows them to withdraw EUR 140 per day if the have sufficient funds in their account. But the computer problem meant the limits of their bank accounts were not checked, literally opening up the bank's vaults. The amounts withdrawn from the cash machine ranged between EUR 400 and EUR 18,000."

Why The Iraqi Elections Passed Me By.

2005-01-31T13:47:00.000+01:00

It's been pretty vile weekend here in the world of end-stage renal failure. I've had yet another nasty kidney infection and have spent the weekend alternately shivering and throwing up - Lord, I so don't need this. The worst of it is is that there is no end in sight - or rather there is but the question is when and where. There are times when an end to it seems very attractive, particularly when in excruciating renal colic that no painkiller can touch.

I'm now on the the last type of antibiotic that will actually work, so I have to avoid taking them for as long as possible for fear of lurking bacteria developing resistance. Once that happens there's nothing that will kill the infection, unless someone comes up with a new miracle drug, and my kidneys will fail for good. I've been told by my UK specialist that I am unlikely to be considered a good risk either for perineal or regular kidney dialysis, or a transplant, even should there be a kidney available. Because of a previous bout with cancer and lots of major abdominal surgery my insides are a mass of scar tissue and adhesions, and any transplant surgery would be unlikely to succeed; ditto dialysis.

So that's that then.

Knowing one is going to die and how, but not exactly when, is a bit of a burden. My mother and father both died fairly young, of cancer (my father in his early '50's, my mother at 62) and I am beginning to see their faces in mine when I look in the mirror. The same drawn, gaunt expression, the same inexorable weight loss, the same look of ineffable fatigue.

But still, nil desperandum eh? as my Dad would 've said.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

2005-01-31T13:19:00.000+01:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Towards A Lesser Anglo-Dutch Understanding

2005-01-27T14:54:00.000+01:00

No wonder Martin Wisse and I bicker like a pair of Tasmanian devils in a sack: here, shamelessly purloined and reformatted from expatica.com is the

ANGLO-DUTCH TRANSLATION GUIDE

What the British say: I hear what you say.
What the British mean: I disagree and do not want to discuss it
What the Dutch understand: He accepts my point of view.

What the British say: With the greatest respect...
What the British mean: I think you are wrong (or a fool).
What the Dutch understand: He is listening to me.

What the British say That's not bad.
What the British mean That's good or very good.
What the Dutch understand That's poor or mediocre.

What the British say: Quite good.
What the British mean: A bit disappointing.
What the Dutch understand: Quite good.

What the British say: Perhaps you would like to think about it
What the British mean: This is an order. Do it.
What the Dutch understand: Think about the idea, but do what you like.

What the British say: When appropriate locally...
What the British mean: Do what you like
What the Dutch understand: Do it if you can.

What the British say: Oh, by the way…Incidentally….
What the British mean: The primary purpose of our discussion is .....
What the Dutch understand: This is not very important.

What the British say: I was a bit disappointed that…It is a pity you
What the British mean: I am most upset and cross
What the Dutch understand: It doesn't really matter.

What the British say: Very interesting.
What the British mean: I don't agree / don't believe you.
What the Dutch understand: They are impressed.

What the British say: Could we consider some other options.
What the British mean: I don't like your idea.
What the Dutch understand: They have not yet decided.

What the British say: I'll bear it in mind.
IWhat the British mean: I will do nothing about it.
What the Dutch understand: They will probably do it.

What the British say: Please think about that some more.
What the British mean: It's a bad idea: don't do it.
What the Dutch understand: It's a good idea: keep developing it.

What the British say: I'm sure it's my fault.
What the British mean: It is your fault !
What the Dutch understand: It was their fault.

What the British say: That is an original point of view.
What the British mean: You must be crazy.
What the Dutch understand: They like my ideas!

What the British say: You must come for dinner sometime.
What the British mean: Not an invitation, just being polite.
What the Dutch understand: I will get an invitation soon.

What the British say: You'll get there eventually.
What the British mean: You don't stand a chance in hell.
What the Dutch understand: Keep on trying for they agree I'm heading in the right direction.

What the British say: I almost agree.
What the British mean: I don't agree at all.
What the Dutch understand: He's not far from agreement.

I can add another:

What I say Oh, so sorry, do excuse me.
What I mean: Get your great Dutch hooves off my foot, you freakish dairy-fed giant.
What they hear: I'm a tiny wimp. Jab me with your elbows too.

I could go on for days like with these- anyone would think I wasn't keen on the Dutch... make your own mind up whether I say what I mean.

Oppose Alberto Gonzales

2005-01-27T13:34:00.000+01:00

Kos asks all bloggers of conscience to oppose the nomination of Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General of the USA.

Consider it done.

Gonzales has consistently acted as Bush's consigliere, covering up his messes and providing spurious legal opinion to justify whatever the Chimperor has wanted to do, be that drunk-driving, executions in texas or torture at home and abroad.

Bush has been Gonzales' biggest booster since 1995, when Bush, then governor of Texas, hired Gonzales away from a Houston law firm to serve as his general counsel. Two years later, Bush made him Texas' secretary of state, the state's chief election official, with added responsibilities to serve as liaison to Mexico. In 1999, Bush appointed Gonzales to the Texas Supreme Court, a position he gave up to serve as White House counsel.

Rather than provide the necessary judicial oversight of executive action and protection of individual liberties that the office of AG requires of its nominees he will act as a mere rubber stamp, continuing his role as enabler-in-chief for the subversion of the US constitution, legal system and government apparatus by the Bush family. Just as he did in Texas, but on a national scale.

At Griffin Bell's swearing-in, Jimmy Carter noted:

"To the maximum degree possible, the Attorney General should personify what the President of the United States is--attitudes, philosophies, commitments--because here is an extension of the President's attempt to provide equality of opportunity and a sense of trust in the core of our American governmental institutions."

Well, Gonzales certainly does that. That's why any thinking human being would oppose his nomination. He is and always will be a Bush creature, they bought and paid for him to keep an eye on the boy emperor. Attorney General, and then the Supreme Court, is his reward for getting Georgie safely into the White House.

"I (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."

Gonzales took that oath in Texas and betrayed it.

(Apologies to Jeanne at Body& Soul from whom I've borrowed this)

From today's Boston Globe

WASHINGTON -- When White House counsel Alberto Gonzales was a Texas Supreme Court justice running to stay in office in 2000, he took thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from companies that had business before him and he did not recuse himself from voting on their cases.The practice is legal in Texas, and Gonzales was not the only judge to benefit from it. But his record in 2000 -- when he raised $539,000 for the Republican primary, outraising his opponent by a 1,047-to-1 ratio -- drew special criticism from an Austin-based group that tracks the influence of money on government.

In Texas he was corrupt, unqualified, and a callous placeseeking apologist for theocratic neofascism. He'll be the same in Washington. The world is already laughing at your country, don't make it even more of a joke.

US Army Recruiter Rebuffed By Kids

2005-01-27T09:42:00.001+01:00

This is from last week's news but still cheering to the spirit:

Thu Jan 20, 5:24 PM ET

Sgt. 1st Class Jeff Due, right, a U.S. Army recruiter, is surrounded by protesters at Seattle Central Community College, Thursday, Jan. 20, 2005, in Seattle. After about a 10-minute standoff during which protesters tore up U.S Army literature, the protesters were successful in getting Due and another recruiter to leave their table under escort by campus security officers. Several hundred students walked out of classes at several Seattle colleges and universities to protest the inauguration of President Bush (news - web sites). (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
However, judging from the responses to this picture on a certain rethug discussion I don't care to dignify with a mention, maybe it's best not to get too hopeful:
To: RepublicanMensan; Chieftain
That is disgusting! So much for their phony liberal "We love and support the troops, its the war we hate." I want my federal taxes refunded that went to this university! Those "students" should be arrested for threatening behavior and a HATE crime.
Free speech? Just for commies.
3 posted on 01/20/2005 7:34:48 PM PST by Recovering Ex-hippie (Let's begin the Barbara Boxer trial for treason!) [ Post Reply Private Reply To 1 View Replies ]
To: RepublicanMensan
He should come back with a platoon of troops, armed, locked, and loaded!
4 posted on 01/20/2005 7:34:51 PM PST by DTogo (U.S. out of the U.N. & U.N out of the U.S.) [ Post Reply Private Reply To 1 View Replies ]
I am sick and tired of the police walking on eggs with the hatefilled fascist protesters. They should all be maced and loaded into the paddy wagon to cool their heels for a good long time. The police's tolerance of this kind of action only goes to show their approval to the anarchists. Thus these episodes happen more often and get uglier. The police forget they are to serve the innocent - not the guilty!
33 posted on 01/20/2005 7:57:23 PM PST by Paperdoll [ Post Reply Private Reply To 1 View Replies ]

The Road To the Gulag Starts With A Single Step

2005-01-27T09:42:00.000+01:00

"The power of the court of Star Chamber grew considerably under the Stuarts, and by the time of Charles I it had become a byword for misuse and abuse of power by the king and his circle. James I and his son Charles used the court to examine cases of sedition, which, in practice, meant that the court could be used to suppress opposition to royal policies. It became used to try nobles too powerful to be brought to trial in the lower courts. Court sessions were held in secret, with no right of appeal, and punishment was swift and severe to any enemy of the crown.Charles I used the Court of Star Chamber as a sort of Parliamentary substitute during the years 1628-40, when he refused to call Parliament. Finally, in 1641 the Long Parliament abolished the hated Star Chamber, though its name survives still to designate arbitrary, secretive proceedings in opposition to personal rights and liberty."

I haven't blogged for a couple of days, mostly as a a result of another bike accident, really accidental this time. We had snow, it melted and froze, and the bike path was covered with black ice, with the inevitable result that I went over. Such a a horrible feeling when your wheels start to slip, the sick inevitability of it... a set of ice tyres would be handy. I thought I was fine, if shaken, just a few bumps and bruises; until much later and the blinding headache, neckache and nausea. I didn't quite make it to the loo and cleaning vomit from the bathroom floor at 3am is no fun at all. Seems I may have had a minor concussion. D'oh.

By yesterday afternoon, having spent the morning doing soothingly domestic things and fixing my back tyre, I thought I had regained my equilibrium, more or less. Then I heard the UK radio news; I had been waiting to hear if the Guantanomo detainees, being held at Paddington Green following their return were to be released. What I actually heard was Charles Clarke, beefy and menacing David Blunkett replacement, in the Commons announcing he was to essentially re-institute the Star Chamber, or as he put it in his own special way, (the one that tells you that it's all decided anyway and there's no need to argue) 'a heirarchical range of options that will be proportionate and non-discriminatory.'

What he actually meant was this: I propose to give myself the power to imprison or restrict the liberty of any person for any period whom I deem to be a menace to the state. I do not need to show any evidence to anyone, and there is no appeal.

I am having trouble actually believing that is is happening. I can see it, I can hear it, I am actually not at all surprised; but there is something in me still idealistic enough to believe that something like this couldn't happen, could it? Not in England, surely? Under a Labour government? It's pathetic of me, knowing at least some British history, to even hope that it couldn't happen, but I must've absorbed some of the jingo about fair play and the rule of law to still be having this instinctive gut reaction.

The reasons why this is is so wrong legally are obvious; it's a civil order with criminal penalties ( like an ASBO), it has no judicial oversight, there is no evidence, no review; the list goes on and on. It's also wrong constitutionally, in ceding the the biggest power of all, that of depriving an individual of his liberty, to one party political placeman. Because Charles Clarke, despite the imposing and statesman-like persona his media advisors have taught him to project, is nothing but in essence a political apparatchik. He owes his position to political patronage, and any decision he makes is tainted by his political views and adherence to government policy. The same would apply to any Home Secretary, of whatever party. By abrogating such naked power to the executive he also by extension makes that power available for political ends, now or in the future.

It's not as if he doesn't know he's wrong. I listened to John Humphries interview him on Radio 4 this morning and he all but admitted it. But he's going to do it anyway; he knows things he couldn't possibly tell us, we're all it great danger, there are enemies all about us. He has access to secret information, so secret he can't tell us, but of course he would never, ever, heaven forbid! use the powers against anyone if he didn't really think they were dangerous. "Trust in me, just in meee...."

Well, Parliament; you trusted the government when they and the Prime Minister lied to you about WMD - thousands upon thousands have died since then. Why should you trust them on this, when they're proven liars? But Parliament will trust them, it always does. Labour has a majority in both Houses, Blair's best mate is Lord Chancellor in charge of the judiciary, the Commons backbenches are full of Blairite hacks - all the dice are loaded in their favour. Blair and Alistair Campbell learned well from Rove's operation.

I don't mind admitting that this proposal scares me horribly. Coming as it does in the week we commemorate the industrial human disposal machine that was Auschwitz, and the millions that died, it seems like bathos to make this comparison but we appear to be living in a time where such a thing could easily happen again; our efficiency and productivity in illegality and killing has improved immeasurably since, just as inversely our consciences seem to have shrunk, most particularly those consciences in the Labour Party, that were socialists once. For Labour, that can trace its history all the way back to the Levellers, to revert to the kind of abuse of state power that caused revolution and a bloody Civil War in England seems a somewhat retrograde step.

Tony Blair is defending these policies. 'Most people have nothing to fear', he says.

First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

and there was no one left

to speak out for me.

Pastor Martin Niemöller

Opus Dei in Government - Update

2005-01-24T15:39:00.000+01:00

Following on my occasional series about secretive religious organisations and their apparent ease of entry into political and public life, it was reported this weekend that Ruth Kelly, youngest ever British government minister (didn't they hear of Pitt the Younger?) and mother of 4, count 'em 4! children of school age ( Woohoo! Mother does important job- news at 11!) is a member of Opus Dei.

"The education secretary, [...], said of her involvement in the organisation: "I don't see why it should be an issue at all. I came here to do a job which is about raising standards in schools "I am in politics because I have a strong belief in the equal worth of every child," Ms Kelly said. "I have a private spiritual life and I have a faith. It is a private spiritual life and I don't think it is relevant to my job. I am here as a Catholic."

Ms Kelly has attended meetings of Opus Dei but has not revealed whether she was a member. She rejected a suggestion that her religious beliefs could affect the way she carries out her role in government in relation to sex education. "We have an established government policy on that. I came here to do a job which is about raising standards in schools," she insisted.

The Opus Dei organisation is relatively small with membership estimated by some at around 80,000 in 80 countries worldwide. It is founded on the principle that ordinary Catholics can achieve holiness in their everyday lives. Some members of the movement practise "self mortification" including fasting and flagellation as a way of reminding themselves of how Christ suffered."

Labour Party Membership rules:

1. (a) The member is the basic unit of the party. Irrespective of nationality, citizenship or of place of residence, but subject to paragraph (b) of this section, any person who -

(i) subscribes to the Party's Principles and Objects and accepts this
Constitution,

(ii) is not a member of another political party, and

(iii) is not a member of, or associated with, any organisation, publication or institution the objects or activities of which are declared by the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Party to be injurious to the interests of the Party or inconsistent with its Principles and Objects,

is eligible for membership.

So, what does Parliament think of Opus Dei members as MP's? According to their
own Code of Conduct MP's are obliged to show:

Integrity
Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might influence them in the performance of their official duties.

Objectivity
In carrying out public business, including make public appointments, awarding contracts, or recommending individuals for rewards and benefits, holders of public office should make choices on merit.

Accountability

Holders of public office are accountable for their decisions andactions
to the public and must submit themselves to whatever scrutiny is appropriate to their office.

Openness

Holders of public office should be as open as possible about all the decisions and actions that they take. They should give reasons for their decisions and restrict information only when the wider public interest clearly demands.

Honesty

Holders of public office have a duty to declare any private interests relating to their public duties and to take steps to resolve any conflicts arising in a way that protects the public interesy.

From Guy Fawkes' blog of parliamentary plots, rumours and conspiracy

"According to Rangers-supporting Scotsmen, Ruth Kelly has been confirmed as a member of Opus Dei by sources in the organisation. The Blessed One has "supernumerary" status within the Roman Catholic organisation. This means she is a lay member who contributes a significant proportion of her earnings to Opus Dei. This arguably makes her the most devout of the Roman Catholics in Blair's government - although Paul Murphy, the Northern Ireland Secretary, who is a Papal Knight of St Gregory might lay claim to that honour. The Divine Leader himself has slipped back into taking communion again from his (Catholic) family priest, despite in 1996 receiving an official written request from Cardinal Hume to desist and His Holiness the Pope in 2003 re-stating in an encyclical that only those in "full communion" with Rome should take communion. Cardinal Hume told Blair he was allowed to take communion in Tuscany where there was no Anglican church, but not in Westminster. Blair was however again spotted going into Westminster Cathedral alone in 1998 and used to take communion with his family regularly at the St Joan of Arc church in Islington. Guido understands that Father Timothy Russ, of the Immaculate Heart of Mary church in Great Missenden near Chequers, has continued to offer Blair communion. Guido is betting that after the premiership Blair will formally convert to the true faith.

Since her promotion to Education Secretary last month, The Blessed One has refused to confirm or deny that she is the first Cabinet minister to belong to Opus Dei. John Allen, Vatican correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter, says: "The fact that Opus Dei has been given a parish in Westminster and Ruth Kelly has been appointed Education Secretary are both signs of Opus Dei coming in from the cold." Opus Dei members are conservative on the major cultural issues - such as divorce, abortion and homosexuality. Guido has pointed out previously that she has somehow always managed to miss votes on these sensitive issues. All of this warms the heart of an old Catholic freedom fighter like Guido himself.

As a supernumerary and mother of four Mrs Kelly is not required to flagellate herself - unlike some celibate Opus Dei members - but is instead asked to observe a rigorous daily regime of prayer and is known to attend mass daily whenever possible. She also dresses in the house style of Opus Dei, black tailored modest feminine outfits. Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam!"

The current New Labour government is pushing faith schools as the answer to all our educational issues, and Ruth Kelly is the pointwoman for this policy. Doesn't the fact that she is such a rabid religionist, even cultist, depending on your view, who admits herself that her Catholicism informs all her daily actions, bother anyone?

An example of this go-ahead modern policy is Emanuel College, which stands apart from the education authorities ( yet receives public funding) and which is run by the evangelical businessman, Chairman of Directors/Governors Sir Peter Vardy. Emanuel College became notorious recently for telling its pupils that the Harry Potter books are satanic. This is the kind of religious crap this 'school' teaches:

"Moreover, it can now readily be shown that there exists both physical laws and a substantial body of empirical data, especially the intrinsic irreducible complexity possessed by all living organisms which are incompatible with, or else fundamentally defy, a doctrinaire naturalistic explanation. Johnson and others have fought hard academically and politically. Presently, his 'Intelligent Design (ID)' group are urging the US Government & Legislature to wake up and realise the social and moral implications of adopting unquestioningly naturalistic scientism in the classroom. It remains to be seen how successful they will be. The recent machinations of the Kansas Board of Education show clearly that there exists a powerful body of ideological proponents who are keen to retain the falsehoods inherent in the present status quo. Here in the UK the situation is regrettably worse."

I'm trying to find out what New Labour now thinks of its members
belonging to secret organisations, but the Labour Party Constitution and Rules appear no longer to be online, if they ever were... Time was, back when I was a member, that you had to declare any such membership - for example, to belong to the freemasons was anathema to the comrades, and rightly so. How can you be a party loyalist, let alone an adequate political representative of a religiously, ethnically and culturally diverse population when your primary allegiance is to a secret organisation?

There are 41,834 non-Christians in Bolton (according to Bolton's census
page) and 58,789,194 non-Christians nationally. I fail to see how someone so beholden to religious dogma could possibly think that they represent those people with honesty, integrity or accountability. Imagine the outcry had she been Muslim and wore hijab- the tabloids would go crazy.

This is different. For a start, the hijab is worn openly and publicly states your religious views. You can't miss it: it's as clear as the day. Kelly's real error is not her religion but the secrecy that surrounds it, and its lack of a clear and open agenda. Freedom of religion for all: and that includes those with none. Don't try pushing evangelical catholic right-wing views in secret, do it openly and we'll have an open debate. That's what democracy is about (not that Opus Dei has a good track record in that respect, particularly in Franco's Spain).
Opus Dei itself is aware of this issue - from its own website:
"Do members tend to have a common view on political or social matters? "

"No. Opus Dei's role and aims are confined strictly to the spiritual and apostolic spheres. On any issue on which the Church has not defined a position (for example, on the vast majority of political, social and economic issues) members of Opus Dei, just like other Catholic citizens, make up their own minds with complete freedom and independence, adopting whatever views seem best to them. Opus Dei cannot, and does not, get involved, ever. "
Note the nice little get-out clause: 'On any issue on which the Church has not defined a position'. I can't think of many issues on which it hasn't. Education, for instance. A simple google brings up hundreds and hundreds of pages of catholic doctrine on just about every aspect of education, for example, 'The Presence of the Church in the University and in University Culture'-Congregation for Catholic Education (June 7, 1994), · 'Catholic Institutions Exist for One Reason Only: 'To Proclaim the Gospel'-John Paul II (L'Osservatore Romano, June 30, 2004) 'Spectata Fides' (On Christian Education) - Leo XIII (The Papal Encyclicals 1740-1881, November 27, 1885) 'Our Public Schools and Religion' - Curtiss, Elden Francis (The Catholic Voice, Unknown). Those are just a few represenative samples. ( More here.)

If Opus Dei and Kelly ( by extension) really believed and could prove that the outdated superstition they push is the truth, they'd be prepared to debate it openly. Kelly isn't prepared to do this: she prefers to do her deeds in the dark and to the time of writing has neither confirmed nor denied her membership. Lets shine a light; we've seen what untrammeled religiosity can do to a liberal democracy, and it's not pretty.

Spoiling the Ship For A Ha'porth of Tar

2005-01-24T15:05:00.000+01:00

From today's Independent:

"According to reports in the United States this weekend, the White House and Nasa have agreed to stop all plans for a space mission to prolong the life of the (Hubble) telescope, which is in orbit, 380 miles above Earth.

The White House blames the escalating costs of maintenance - a mission to service the telescope would cost more than $1bn (£530m). Instead, Nasa is expected to focus its activities on George Bush's space priorities - the further exploration of the Moon and Mars. Hubble, meanwhile, will be allowed to gradually run down."

One lousy billion. That's all. Look over to the left and you'll see the current cost of the war on Iraq, currently standing at well over 150 billion dollars and accelerating rapidly.

Which of these federal outlays does more good for the world's long-term knowledge and progress?

This?

Or maybe This?

I can hardly bear to look at that first picture. That poor boy, covered in blood in his Man U hat, looks eerily like my son. Maybe that's a good thing: that day that we can look at these horrific images and say 'that's my son' or 'that's my daughter' maybe that feeling of utter horror and grief will impel us to stop this illegal and inhuman war.

But looking at this, somehow, I doubt it.

To Mars, Bitches! ( and don't forget the munitions)

Occasional Ceph Blogging No 3

2005-01-23T18:53:00.000+01:00

Because it's a dull Dutch Sunday;
because I've been painting the bedroom white all afternoon and am going snowblind;
because there is no chocolate in the house;
because I'm bored rigid;
because I deserve a treat; and ah, fuck it, just
because, OK?

Now STFU, and marvel at the

Vampyroteuthis Infernalis. Almost as Cool As
A Cuttlefish, But Not Quite As Cute As The Bobtail Squid.

2005-01-23T18:21:00.000+01:00

Thanks go (yet again) to Rising Hegemon for this link to the Buffalo Beast and the 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2004:. Scroll down for many of the usual suspects, plus some yu'll go 'Who?' to - until you get to No. 3 -

"3. You

Crimes: You gaze idly at the carnage around you, sigh, and go calmly back to your coffee and your People magazine. You can’t stop buying useless crap, though you’re drowning in a deepening pool of debt. You think you’re an activist because you bitch all day on the internet, but you reelect the same gangsters at a 99% rate. You consider yourself informed because you waste a significant portion of your life watching the same three news stories cycle over and over again on your gargantuan, aerodynamic television set while you eat processed food. You really thought everything would be okay if Kerry won. Not only do you believe in an invisible man who magically farted out the universe, you also excoriate and marginalize those who disagree. You have a poorer understanding of your country’s foreign policy history than a third world peasant, but you can’t wait to see what Julia Roberts will be wearing at the Oscars. You cheer as Ukrainians challenge an election based on exit poll data, but keep waiting around for someone else to fix your problems. You can’t think, you can’t organize and you won’t act. This is all your fault.

Smoking Gun: You’re fat.

Punishment: You’re soaking in it. "

Meanwhile, From Our Dictatorship Correspondent...

2005-01-22T13:13:00.000+01:00

I took the past few days off blogging and watching or listening to radio & tv news: I just couldn't stand to listen to that hypocritical lying, corrupt, venal bunch of thieves showing just how much better they can do dictatorship than any of those damned Ceausescus or Mobutus...the photos say all that need to be said about the new American fascism and the demolishment of the First Amendment and the US Constitution.

I did, however, (inadvertently, because it was so short; it was almost over before I realised) hear the inaugural address, which was basically a big "Fuck You World! I rule! Yes, me, Chimperor of the World! USA No.1!" to the rest of us.

Bush supporters appear to agree, according to the Washington Post.

"They need a new law for these protesters: 'You cross the line, you do the time,' " said Kenneth E. Boring, 80, still apparently irritated by the experience as he waited to leave Reagan National Airport.

He and his wife Dottie, 59, of Dalton, Ga., are members of Republican Eagles, the elite GOP fundraising group, but they watched the president's speech from the Willard InterContinental Hotel. The security line was too long, they said, and made longer, in their opinion, by the protesters.

"It's time to put a stop to all this nonsense, protesting and causing confusion," Boring said.'

Well, fuck you too Mr. President, and all your supporters, in as many undignified and painful ways as possible. 3 cops to arrest 1 teenage girl? And just look at the sheeple, just sitting there docile while they assault her. Pepper-spraying children who dare to protest? Since you seem to think freedom & democracy are such amazingly good things, try starting them at home first.

I'll let Jeremy Hardy on this week's BBC Radio 4 News Quiz have the last word on the armed camp that Washington DC has become: " All those snipers placed on the rooftops, and not one of them could get off a clear shot..."

(Pics courtesy of the NY Times and Banana Bush)

Well, That Didn't Take Long.

2005-01-19T13:12:00.000+01:00

From Expatica:

"Mum, baby arrested for lack of ID

A 33-year-old Amsterdam woman and her five-month-old daughter have been
jailed after failing to prove their identification. Since 1 January, everyone in
the Netherlands above the age of 14 has been obliged to be able to prove their
identity or risk a fine or jail. Marba van Dullemen and her baby Dominique, of
Amsterdam North, were arrested on Sunday night because she could not produce a driver's licence. They were detained in a cell for an hour until Van Dullemen's
partner arrived with her driver's licence. A police spokesman confirmed both
mother and baby were detained in a "day cell" made of glass and 3m by 3m in
size. Van Dullemen will be fined for driving without a licence and for not
wearing a seatbelt. "
A number of Dutch-based and Dutch bloggers wrote recently about this pernicious new law before it came in; the consensus seemed to be that they would commit civil disobedience and deliberately not carry ID. Now that the police have shown themselves to be small minded and petty enough to detain mothers and babies, would they care to reconsider? Speaking as an allochtoon, I always carry my passport. My Dutch isn't good enough to argue and you can betcha that as soon as they hear my non-Dutch accent, any police requesting ID will suddenly and conveneiently forget they ever knew any other language but Dutch. English? What's that? Ik kan niet.
What I would be very interested to know is the ethnicity and/or religion of the woman arrested. I live in Noord-Amsterdam: all the police I see are white, and most of the mothers and children I see are Moslem. Funny how this didn't happen in De Pijp.

Miscellaneous Lifeform Blogging

2005-01-18T15:49:00.000+01:00

Apologies to Rising Hegemon, from whom I stole the post-title, but I really can't think of another one for this picture I came across while googling for weird fish. As one does.

It's on a Japanese site and is unidentified. Any willing ichthyologists out there know what this is?

News in Briefs

2005-01-18T15:13:00.000+01:00

Not really, though news in briefs could be interesting, depending on whose briefs and the contents.

First, an interesting piece in todays Independent by Peter Stanford, former Catholic Herald editor( who should know) on Opus Dei, the secretive Roman Catholic society, and

Armando at Daily Kos reports that Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) told him "it is her intention to hold Condoleeza Rice to account for her performance as National Security Advisor -- from the failed performance in the fight against terrorist threats by the Bush Administration prior to 9/11 to the Bush Administration's failing Iraq policy and the harm done by that Debacle to the fight against al Qaida and the terrorist threat to the Nation", and

this fantastic headline from the Boston Herald: "Democrats prepare to pepper Rice at grilling" and...

Here comes World War III, right on time.

No Country Can Attack Us, Iran Says
Jan 18, 2005 — TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran has the military might to deter attacks against it, its defense minister said in remarks published on Tuesday, one day after President Bush said he would not rule out military action against Iran. Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani said the Islamic Republic, which has seen U.S. forces topple regimes in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq in the last three years, did not fear attack.

"We are able to say that we have strength such that no country can attack us because they do not have precise information about our military capabilities due to our ability to implement flexible strategies," the semi-official Mehr news agency quoted Shamkhani as saying.
"We can claim that we have rapidly produced equipment that has resulted in the greatest deterrent," he said, without elaborating.

Share the Guilt

2005-01-18T14:52:00.000+01:00

Briton admits beating Iraq captive
Tuesday, January 18, 2005 Posted: 1333 GMT (2133 HKT)

OSNABRUECK, Germany (AP) -- A British soldier has pleaded guilty to one count of beating an Iraqi captive, while he and two others pleaded not guilty to all other charges as their court-martial opened on allegations they mistreated Iraqis.

Photos of alleged mistreatment published in a British newspaper in the spring of 2003 led to investigations against the three men, and it is the first case of alleged abuse of Iraqis by British soldiers to go to trial. The defendants, all from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, showed little emotion Tuesday as they entered their pleas at a British base in Germany, answering Judge Michael Hunter only with "guilty" or "not guilty."Lance Cpl. Darren Larkin, 30, pleaded guilty to battery for assaulting and beating an Iraqi in his custody as the trial opened. But he pleaded not guilty to indecent conduct for allegedly forcing two Iraqi detainees to undress in front of others. Cpl. Daniel Kenyon, 33, and Lance Cpl. Mark Cooley, 25, pleaded not guilty to all charges.

It was the first time the charges were officially announced, and it was not immediately clear what possible punishments they face.Cooley is accused of placing an Iraqi captive with bound hands on the front of a forklift and driving it around, and also simulating punching and kicking a detainee while someone else took photographs. Kenyon, who outranks the other defendants, is accused of being present while abuse was taking place -- including naked captives being forced into simulated sex acts -- and not reporting it. He also faces a charge of being an accessory in the battery to which Larkin pleaded guilty. The abuse allegedly happened in May 2003 while the three soldiers were stationed at a food warehouse compound outside Basra in southern Iraq, according to British media reports.The photographs showed an Iraqi detainee gagged and bound, suspended in the air in a cargo net hoisted by a forklift. Other pictures showed simulated sexual acts involving stripped Iraqi detainees. A fourth soldier, 20-year-old Fusilier Gary Bartlam, went on trial last week in the same case at a different British base in Germany but Hunter imposed a gag order on journalists, banning any reporting about the process.
My own country, the UK, is as complicit in the utter clusterfuck that is Iraq as is the US. When I criticise America harshly, you may assume that I include Britain as well; I feel Tony Blair is in many ways worse than Bush. You can see just by looking that Bush is as dumb as a bag of hammers (other then his low cunning and seemingly infinite capacity for self-delusion), but Blair is clever enough to know exactly what he is doing. He has dragged us into a pit of despair, destruction and violence beyond anything we could have imagined, he has lied openly, he has connived at torture and the dismantling of the rule of law both at home and abroad, and he has done so with his eyes wide open, in full knowledge of the likely consequences. I'd like to see Blair impeached, then tried at Den Haag, then jailed. Just a pity we don't still do the hanging, drawing and quartering thing.

No-one has resigned or been fired over Iraq, except the Director-General of the BBC and the editor of the Daily Mirror. So when is Piers Morgan getting his job back?

"Dutch Revolt in Iraq?"

2005-01-18T13:49:00.000+01:00

From Eurosavant -if only this story showed the Dutch acting on principle, but typically, it's about money:

"Dutch Revolt in Iraq?

As if there weren't enough troubles already in Iraq, another tribe there is now in revolt. And this is among folks who would ordinarily be among the last you would look to for such trouble, the "good guys," so to speak. I'm talking here about the 1,350-strong contingent of Dutch soldiers stationed there, and that's a direct quote from the head of their union, the AFMP, W. van den Burg: they're in opstand, or "in revolt." What that means in practical terms? Increasing talk about some sort of "strike action," whatever that is supposed to look like in the middle of Iraq.

At least the Dutch still have military forces helping out there, as one-by-one other national contingents slip away (the Hungarians being the latest such). After I first came aware of this story and commenced my usual Dutch press-scanning for it, it turned out that most Netherlands dailies have declined to cover it, at least on-line. The exception is Allard Besse, of the Algemeen Dagblad and his article Soldiers in Iraq Grumble Over Money, but quite a good exception it is."

My Dutch is in no way good enough to deal with that Algemeen Dagblad article, which in any case is hidden behind a subscription wall: would some kind cloggie with an abonnement and a bit of time do the needed and translate for me?

That 'Blog Payola Scandal' In Full

2005-01-18T13:48:00.000+01:00

"A year ago I took a nickel from the "give a penny take a penny" jar at Dunkin Donuts an even though I put a disclaimer on Fafblog tellin people I was gettin money from Dunkin Donuts I did not tell them HOW much money I got from them. I am very sorry. Now there is no way to tell if everythin we wrote over the last year was part of an organized campaign to convince you of the deliciousness of Dunkin Donut donuts.

The smooth creamy chocolatey deliciousness of Dunkin Donut donuts. Mmm, mmm, good."

The War On Terror Is A Scam

2005-01-18T13:27:00.000+01:00

Vaara points to this excellent op-ed piece in the LA Times: US mainstream journalism appears to have finally noticed last year's excellent BBC documentary 'The Power Of Nightmares' which points out just how the existence of scatttered Islamic terrorist groups has been conflated and inflated by the neocons on both sides of the Atlantic into a fake threat to our very existence, in order to prop up their power.

If you haven't yet seen it do so: BBC 2 is repeating The Power of Nightmares next week on

Tuesday 18th January
23:20-00:20

Wednesday 19th January
23:20-00:20

Thursday 20th January
23:20-00:20

For those who can't get BBC2 for whatever reason a bittorrent of the programme is available here. Download it now before it's illegal under the Patriot Act.

Cute Cats, Death Squads and the Iran Invasion

2005-01-18T11:07:00.000+01:00

Well,what with Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker giving us the inside skinny on the USA's latest madcap plans - oh, those jolly japesters and their hazing pranks - to invade Iran (hang on, haven't they done that already? Isn't that what sending special forces teams into a country you're not at war with is, an invasion? Oh, silly me, of course, that's just semantics. Those are US Freedom Squadstm!) I have been feeling the need for some fluffiness. So here it is:

Right on time, via The Poorman , here comes Christy Marx with the Silly Sleeping Pose Olympics. I'm not sure I want to know exactly how this cat got where it is, but suffice it to say it probably took some serious spatial geometry calculation, which, as we all know, comes naturally to cats. Dogs, on the other hand, can barely make it through long division.

There has been a lot of left blog commentary on Hersh's report, but what commentary I have read so far seems to miss the main thrust of the article. Instead they've concentrated on the whole Iran thing. I think this is a mistake. What comes over most clearly from the article is the way in which the normal checks and balances, such as they were, that kept the Pentagon from operating secretly have now been dismantled, that the CIA has become a busted flush and is now nothing more than an echo chamber for the administration, and that Rumsfeld has the power to send Special Forces anywhere at all, to do anything at all, with apparently no executive, judicial or legislative oversight. Humint is no longer within the purview of the CIA but that of Defence Intelligence ( that was what the whole Porter Goss purge was about, and aren't secret Executive Orders handy?) ; thus Defence Intelligence, directly overseen by Rumsfeld, is now in control, is free from reporting and not subject to the Freedom of Information Act or subject only when it suits.

SEC. 1045. PROTECTION OF OPERATIONAL FILES OF THE DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY.
"(a) Authority.--Subchapter I of chapter 21 of title 10, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
Sec. 426.
Protection of sensitive information: operational files of the Defense Intelligence Agency"(a) Authority To Withhold Operational Files.--The Secretary of Defense may withhold from public disclosure operational files described in subsection (b) to the same extent that operational files may be withheld under section 701 of the National Security Act of 1947 (50 U.S.C. 431), subject to judicial review under the same circumstances and to the same extent as is provided in subsection (f) of such section.

Apparently this is subject to judicial review, at least according to the above. So what happens when a request for a file is made, on the grounds that there might have been some wrongdoing? Here's a case,Paul Wolf v Central Intelligence agency (Civ. No. 01-00729) brought to be judicially reviewed under the very same subsection (f) that supposedly applies now to the Defence Intelligence agency:

"The CIA Information Act provides that exempted operational files are subject to search and review for information concerning "the specific subject matter of any investigation by the intelligence committees of the Congress . . . for any impropriety or violation of law, Executive order, or Presidential directive in the conduct of an intelligence activity." 50 U.S.C. § 431(c). "A congressional investigation that touches on CIA conduct in a particular incident or region, standing alone, is not sufficient to warrant the release of all CIA documents anent that incident or region." Sullivan v. CIA, 992 F.2d 1249, 1255 (1st Cir. 1993) Further, the information requested must relate specifically to the subject matter of the investigation."

Put very, very simply , even if you apply under FOIA and are turned down, and then take it to court, you still can't look at the files unless you exactly what incident they refer to. Which you won't know until you se the file. This is how it appears to me at least: IANA US constitutional scholar, but subverting the constitution, yet again, to allow mini-invasions, snatch and death squads and political assassinations seems to me to be not quite what the founding fathers had in mind. Or maybe I misunderstand what "strict constructionism" means?

Miscellaneous Ceph Blogging No.2

2005-01-17T13:55:00.000+01:00

From the New Yorker:

All Change Please!

2005-01-16T14:00:00.000+01:00

The Sunday Telegraph reports this morning that another MP has defected: this time it's Robert Jackson, Tory MP for Wantage , to Labour. This follows the defection in December ofantiwar Labour MP Paul Marsden to the LibDems.

I remember Marsden well from numerous antiwar marches, rallies, and meetings. He struck me as a principled if soft socialist who was suffering greatly from his party's actions over the war, and who was deeply conflicted about his party membership.

"On October 13, the backbench Labour MP spoke out against the war at a march and rally organised by CND in London that attracted up to 50,000 protestors. Prior to this on October 8, in the third debate on the “international coalition against terrorism”, Marsden had raised a point of order calling for a Commons’ vote on the conduct of the war. Marsden also asked, “When will British citizens be given a written constitution so that Parliament, not a prime minister, authorises a declaration of war?” Both questions were brushed aside"
.

I remember that: I was there. I felt rather sorry for him while as the same time despising him for staying with the party when he so obviously had deep disagreements with policy. I am glad he has finally had the courage of his convictions.

I was once a very active Labour Party member, and when I left to join the SWP after the defeat of Clause IV it was as though 75% of my life and social circle had just evaporated. I imagine what Paul Marsden must be feeling is much much worse: he has lost all his support systems, his former friends and colleagues have been and are briefing against him, (at one stage, he was being compared by Labour Chief Whip, Hilary Armstrong, to the appeasers of the Nazis: this is the woman who said 'war is not a matter of conscience', so so much for anything she thinks or says) and he may not keep his seat. I admire his decision; it wasn't easy but he did the right thing. I don't agree with his choice of new party ideologically, but if he wants to stay in big politics he has to join one of the big 3, and he has.

Jackson is on the BBC 1pm news now saying that he feels what Labour has to offer the country is much better than anything the Conservatives could. He is quoted in the Telegraph today as saying that he had decided to quit because the Tories had "dangerous" views on Europe, "incoherent" policies on public services, and had "wobbled" on Iraq. Most damaging for Mr Howard, he said that the party "deserved better leadership". No change there then.

It says all you need to know about the current state of New Labour that it is now the natural home of the Tory. I for one still haven't forgotten the parachuting in of Shaun Woodward, the millionaire former Tory MP who defected to New Labour, against the local candidate, who was supported by the constituency party and many St. Helens residents..

I wonder which safe seat Jackson will get? One thing is for sure, Marsden is moving because of ideological conflict, but from everything I've read and heard Jackson's move is more about his political career or lack of it should he stay with the Conservatives. In this he follows Woodward's example, while proving Marsden's point that the Labour Party is now beyond ideological redemption.

US Gov Promotes Bum Fun!

2005-01-16T13:43:00.000+01:00

Pentagon Reveals Rejected Chemical Weapons
15 January 2005
(From New Scientist Print Edition. )

"THE Pentagon considered developing a host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would disrupt discipline and morale among enemy troops, newly declassified documents reveal.

Most bizarre among the plans was one for the development of an "aphrodisiac" chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Provoking widespread homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale, the proposal says."

"Distasteful but completely non-lethal"? strange assumption there, that homosexuality is distasteful. To whom, in this context?

"Other ideas included chemical weapons that attract swarms of enraged wasps or angry rats to troop positions, making them uninhabitable. Another was to develop a chemical that caused "severe and lasting halitosis", making it easy to identify guerrillas trying to blend in with civilians. There was also the idea of making troops' skin unbearably sensitive to sunlight.

The proposals, from the US Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, date from 1994. The lab sought Pentagon funding for research into what it called "harassing, annoying and 'bad guy'-identifying chemicals". The plans have been posted online by the Sunshine Project, an organisation that exposes research into chemical and biological weapons. Spokesman Edward Hammond says it was not known if the proposed $7.5 million, six-year research plan was ever pursued."
(Emphasis mine)
I don't know what's worse, the plans themselves or the fact that the US gov don't know whether or not they spent $7.5 million. But then again that's irrelevant; it's SOP for the Bush government to say they don't know whether they did something when they actually did, so look out for lots of of gay Iranian civil partnerships popping up, and then all the happy couples being tragically killed in frenzied wasp attacks while shopping for factor 150 sunblock.

Cheney Still Not Dead.

2005-01-16T13:31:00.000+01:00

Damn.

Quick Sunday Morning Blogging

2005-01-16T13:09:00.000+01:00

I've been quite busy this week one way and another, what with work and taking a dewy eyed American physicist on the red-light/coffeeshop/museum tour of Amsterdam, so have not blogged much. Nevertheless the world has still turned, so here's a quick roundup of the week's events and my reactions to them:

Prince Harry and the Swastika: (And doesn't that sound like the new JK Rowling title?) So, an overprivileged, sloppily educated, motherless and badly brought up semi-adolescent dresses up as Rommel. Same old same old, a thick as a brick aristocracy who have no idea of history or how ordinary people think. Media go wild, big fucking deal. What's the real story? Since the Murdoch press has been deprived of its rightful prey, ie the story behind Harry's real parentage, they'll take anything they can get. The media has been gunning for him for a long time. I wonder whatever came of that 'People' attempt to get a DNA sample?

Kos, MyDD and that whole payola thing:

Sigh, the American left shoots itself in the foot again. Yes, the WSJ lied, and continues to lie that you took money from Dean for favourable blogging. It's a lie got up by the Republican noise machine, as always, to divert attention from the whole Armstrong Williams, ace black commentator, taking taxpayers money to push Bush policy thing - any idiot can see that. But again, the lefty blogopshere sucumbs to the bait and switch operation they have fallen for so many times before. The alleged story, that Kos and Jerome of MyDD were paid consultants for Howard Dean's campaign, has been common knowledge since the campaign and was declared prominently on both blogs. Dean staffers are also on record as saying the consultancy fees were for form, not content. This 'story' only continues to run because the left bloggers are letting it.

Note to lefty bloggers: shit or get off the pot. Kos is a lawyer. So sue the fuckers for libel, and name O'Reilly, and Fox as co-defendant with the WSJ. Every time they republish the lie it's defamation. It's not as though the evidence isn't there. Keeping on blogging about how badly done-by you've been merely keeps the story alive. If it's money that's the issue, I'm sure we can all help. And it's not as though there's no precedent: a Boston judge is sueing a reporter for libel for reporting that he told a 14yr old rape victim to 'get over it', a libel repeated, surprise surprise, by O'Reilly and Fox.

"Murphy, who claims he never said ''tell her to get over it," has sued the Herald and four of its writers for libel. The case is scheduled to go to trial on Wednesday.

Citing more than a dozen articles, Murphy accuses the newspaper of waging a ''malicious and relentless campaign" that has destroyed his personal and professional reputation. He also plans to use statements a Herald reporter made on television to prove his ''malicious state of mind" in writing the articles.

David Wedge, the main reporter on the story, said on Fox's ''The O'Reilly Factor" three weeks after the story ran in the Herald that Murphy had made disparaging remarks about other crime victims, not just the 14-year-old rape victim.

When host Bill O'Reilly asked Wedge if he was sure Murphy said the rape victim should ''get over it," Wedge replied, ''Yes. He made this comment to three lawyers. He knows he said it, and everybody else that knows this judge knows that he said it."

Wedge later said in a deposition that only one of the lawyers heard the comment firsthand and the other two just repeated it to Wedge. The prosecutor who claims to have heard the comment, David Crowley, said in his deposition that he recalled Murphy saying the words ''get over it," but couldn't remember the judge's exact quote."
They have form for this sort of thing. For once, can someone on the left stand up and fight for themselves properly instead of just bleating about it ineffectually on their blog?

Titan and Huygens:

This is where I get all "Oh wow!" while feeling incredible liberal guilt about the cost and what that money could have done for the poor. But on the other hand, Oh wow! Pictures of Titan's surface! Look!

They Don't Like It Up 'Em...

2005-01-13T10:28:00.000+01:00

Remember the US Presidential campaign, when all those citizens were turned away from Bush rallies?. Or when the mother of the dead soldier who was arrested for daring to speak out?

Or the woman attacked and kicked by a rethug operative at the Republican Convention, while being restrained by 3 SS guards? On camera? The video is here if you want to see it.

Or even the illegal arrest and restraint of 277 legitimate protestors, again during the Republican Convention?

Remember also what the Right said then?

Freepers on the soldier's mother's arrest:

"Since this is coming from a network news source, I have to ask:

How do we know this woman ever had a son?
And if she did, how do we know he was in the military?
And if he was, how do we know that he was killed?
And if he was, how do we know that he was killed in Iraq?

Sounds like an activist stunt to me."

Oh, the humanity of Freepi, it does your heart good doesn't it? Now the boot is on the other foot, and they don't like it at all. From Newsmax:

"Christians Charged with 'Ethnic Intimidation' at Gay 'Outfest'

A group of gospel-preaching protesters faces up to 47-years in jail after being charged with criminal conspiracy, ethnic intimidation, and riot for demonstrating at Philadelphia's gay "Outfest" celebration in October - even though they had obtained the proper permits and reportedly did nothing against the law.

"I have not seen an abuse of power like this in this country ever," complained American Family Association attorney Brian Fahling on Monday. "We had a district attorney who received disorderly conduct charges -- and there was no basis for that -- who then escalated the matter by adding three felonies," he told the Fox News Channel's "O'Reilly Factor."

Oh the poor loves. what a bunch of lightweights. You don't know protest until you've been teargassed, videoed from all directions, and ridden down by mounted riot police armed with batons and shields (all of which I have at various times. And we had permits.) Friends of mine have been at Genoa, Nice and other protests and it's been much worse: one still suffers hearing loss from being batoned with great force by Italian riot police - and before anyone accuses him of being a leftwing loony, here was there in his capacity as a union officer, with the union's blessing, and paid for by his union, the biggest public service union in Britain (1.3 million members)as were many others of many nationalities from many other unions.

And what about what happened at the Genoa convergence centre, when sleeping journalists and activists were attacked by squads of armed carabinieri in the middle of the night for no reason, other than that they were dissenters. It's well documented.

Shut the fuck up, jeebus-freaks, you have no idea what abuse of power means. This is abuse of power.

It's not your livelihood being confiscated and ruined under the Patriot Act, not your children being excluded from school for exercising free speech, or you losing your job for daring to voice a contrary opinion to your boss. And you're not dead yet, your head deliberately broken like a smashed pumpkin by masked police in a Land Rover, like Carlo Giuliani was.

I should be beyond being surprised by the hypocrisy of the Right by now, but just when you think you've reached bottom, the lower they go.

Say What?

2005-01-11T15:40:00.000+01:00

The trial of Charles Graner for torture at Abu Ghraib, as reported in todays Guardian:

The lawyer defending him at the court martial in Texas, Guy Womack said: "Don't cheerleaders all over America make pyramids every day?" He added: "It's not torture."

Look! Cheerleaders!

Hang on, isn't this illegal under the Geneva Convention?

ABOUT FUCKING TIME

2005-01-10T17:49:00.000+01:00

The four remaining Britons held at Guantánamo Bay are to be released within the "next few weeks", foreign secretary Jack Straw announced today.
The imminent release of Moazzam Begg, Feroz Abbasi, Martin Mubanga and Richard Belmar comes after months of what Mr Straw told the House of Commons had been "intense and complex" discussions with the American government over US security concerns.

Those discussions included a direct plea from Tony Blair to George Bush, as well as repeated assertions by a British delegation, which included the attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, that a proposed military tribunal which Mr Begg and Mr Abbasi were listed to face did not meet international standards of justice.

Mr Straw said that once the four had returned from the US naval base in Cuba, UK police would decide whether to arrest and question them under the Terrorism Act 2000. "Any subsequent action will be a matter for the police and the Crown Prosecution Service," he said.

Oh right. Blair can beg Bush on his hands and knees for this ( how many blowjobs did it take?), but the Belmarsh prisoners are still there, despite a House of Lords decision saying their detention is unlawful. Every day the Blair government sinks to new levels of hypocrisy.

What kind of state are these men going to be in when they are released? Moazzam Begg particularly, whose father, Azmat Begg, has campaigned tirelessly for his son as only a parent can, is thought to be severely mentally and physically traumatised, not that the others aren't.

Moazzam Begg with his children before Guantanamo

Those poor men: arrested for nothing, imprisoned and tortured for nothing and now released to... nothing. They will have shattered lives, shattered health, will have lost their jobs - they will never ever really recovwer from what those US bastards did and are still doing to other innocents. I know that what goes around comes around, I just wish it would come around NOW, and that I could watch while it does.

Calling Trinny and Susannah to the White Courtesy Phone..

2005-01-10T13:12:00.000+01:00

A post at Rising Hegemon on the Chimperor's measly $10,000 dollar contribution to the tsunami fund, contrasted with the cost of the inauguration, nudged me into checking into the price of the inaugural wardrobes of Laura Bush and the 'first" twins.

Here's a description of Laura's inaugural dresses, from the Washington Post:

"Carolina Herrera has designed a formal gown expected to be worn during the week's festivities, although not to the inaugural balls. Herrera created the graceful burgundy velvet and organza gown " ( see below) "that Bush wore to Buckingham Palace in 2003. Oscar de la Renta, whose clothes Bush wears regularly, has been tapped as well. Although the White House would not confirm it Thursday, he almost certainly has created the official inaugural gown as well as the swearing-in suit. De la Renta, one might recall, designed Hillary Clinton's second inaugural ball gown, which was a cascade of gold lace.And then there is designer Peggy Jennings, who has created a formal evening gown for Bush to wear to the candlelight dinners planned for Jan. 19, the evening before the inauguration. She has also designed a day dress and matching coat that will be worn during the week. (Notably absent from the list of designers is the Dallas-based Michael Faircloth, who created Bush's 2001 inaugural gown, a red sheath encrusted with Austrian crystals.)"

If you're paying Carolina Herrera 5000 bucks it could
at least fit... It matches her eyes though. What was Laura on?

So I looked up the prices. Off the peg Carolina Herrera evening gowns cost $1500, and couture 4-5 times that. Oscar De La Renta couture evening gowns start at $6400. None of this includes accessories or internal scaffolding either: all in all I can't see Laura Bush's inaugural wardrobe totalling much less than 25,000 dollars. Gods, I hate that hypocritical, tranquillised bitch.

So, what will the twins be wearing?

"Barbara is set to wear a light pink leather jacket over a black-and-white wool houndstooth sheath dress with matching coat. Jenna will opt for something a tad trendier, stepping out in matching skirt andcoat of camel and ivory checks, with a mossy-green cashmere sweater featuring yellow and orange polka dots.Footwear for both is sexy, chic and like the designer clothing out of the price range of most teens.Mrs. Rose chose chic, all-the-rage Jimmy Choo pumps and slingbacksin snakeskin. One pair is a light camel-cashmere shade; the other is black."We kind of thought Jimmy Choo would be not so what-you-would-think," she says. "They are very classic with a twist."

Oh and btw, the suits for Not- and Jenna will cost around 1500 dollars each. Jimmy Choos cost around 500 dollars. Expect their evening dresses to be couture also, at around 5000 dollars each. So, just for the twins, (assuming they only have one evening dress each, which I doubt) that's roughly $14,000 total, $4,000 more than Daddy gave to those poor naked heathens. If they have a dress for each ball at $5000 a pop, that's $34,000 in total. Excluding additional evening shoes, bags, hairdressers and makeup artists (who can cost $4,500 a day plus $500 a day for an assistant) plus whatever they spend on booze and cocaine beforehand.

All that money spent and they still look like trailer trash. Couldn't Not-jenna afford a Wonderbra?

I do like that picture though, in a weird and sick sort of way. It shows just how the zygotes split on fertilisation: one half got all Laura genes, the other got all George. Jenna looks just like like her father in drag: she'd make a great pantomime dame. It's behind you.......

Where in The World Is Dick Cheney?

2005-01-09T14:00:00.000+01:00

Apropos of an aside at the Swami Uptown, it occurred to me we hadn't heard much of Cheney (hawk, spit)lately. Google gives the most recent article mentioning him or his actions, other than tangentially, as December 21 2004. There has been no statement on the tsunami, on Gonzales, on Iraq... nothing. So where is he? And will he turn up for the inauguration or will Bush look even stupider than he would with him there?

Bob Bob The Angry Flower thinks the Chenoid can't be killed.

Maybe he's had a heart attack. Maybe he's even dead. So I enquired of Is Dick Cheney Dead Yet? whether, in fact, he is dead. Not as of January 4 apparently. Damn, damn, damn. On the bright side, that's 5 days in which anything could've happened, anything at all. He could have been decapitated by in a horrible lear jet accident, eaten by a python, or mangled beyond recognition in one of the occasional thallium poisoning accidents. There are so many ways a tired, evil, corrupt old man could die. So sad that no matter how much money and power you steal, you cannot make yourself totally invulnerable.

Any recent sightings of Cheney will be very ungratefully and ungraciously recieved.

Haiku Of The Year 2004

2005-01-04T13:59:00.000+01:00

Thanks go, yet again, to Rude Pundit for this masterpiece of brevity:

All rotting corpses
Smell the same, in Fallujah,
Darfur, or Aceh.

This Should Be Interesting...

2005-01-04T11:48:00.000+01:00

US Election rules demand that the electoral college votes be counted in front of Congress. Democratic Representative John Conyers, ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, plans to object to the counting of Ohio electoral votes and has sent the following to every Senator:

"As you know," writes Rep. Conyers in his letter, "on January 6, 2005, at 1:00 P.M, the electoral votes for the election of the president are to be opened and counted in a joint session of Congress. I and a number of House Members are planning to object to the counting of the Ohio votes, due to numerous unexplained irregularities in the Ohio presidential vote, many of which appear to violate both federal and state law."
The letter goes on to ask the Senators who receive this letter to join Conyers in objecting to the Ohio Electors.
"I am hoping that you will consider joining us in this important effort," writes Conyers, "to debate and highlight the problems in Ohio which disenfranchised innumerable voters. I will shortly forward you a draft report itemizing and analyzing the many irregularities we have come across as part of our hearings and investigation into the Ohio presidential election."
I look forward to it: if only we could get C-SPAN in NL.

Support The Refuseniks.

2005-01-04T11:25:00.000+01:00

The Guardian reports that Israeli soldiers are starting to mutiny:

The Israeli army says a soldier has been arrested for calling on his comrades to refuse to evacuate a West Bank settlement outpost. It is the first case of its kind.
It happened the day after settler leaders said hundreds of soldiers might refuse to carry out orders to evacuate Gaza Strip settlers if the government went ahead with its plan to withdraw this year. The prime minister, Ariel Sharon, said yesterday that refusal to obey orders would be punished.

"This would be a serious mistake if a movement arises that supports refusal to carry out an order. The decision regarding the disengagement plan was made democratically by the government and approved by a large knesset majority. I see no justification for refusal, neither by soldiers, nor by political leaders, nor by rabbis. There might be attempts at refusal but... the law will be upheld."

Unfortunately they're not mutinying because of the treatment of Palestinians, oh no. The reason for the refusal is that they don't want to evacuate settlers, despite the fact they are occupying internationally agreed Palestinian territory, an issue that was decided under the Oslo agreement. However there are Israelis who refuse:

add this to your site

Declaration of Israeli Reservists

A Refusal to Serve in the West Bank and Gaza

We, reserve combat officers and soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, who were raised upon the principles of Zionism, sacrifice and giving to the people of Israel and to the State of Israel, who have always served in the front lines, and who were the first to carry out any mission, light or heavy, in order to protect the State of Israel and strengthen it.

We, combat officers and soldiers who have served the State of Israel for long weeks every year, in spite of the dear cost to our personal lives, have been on reserve duty all over the Occupied Territories, and were issued commands and directives that had nothing to do with the security of our country, and that had the sole purpose of perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people. We, whose eyes have seen the bloody toll this Occupation exacts from both sides.

We, who sensed how the commands issued to us in the Territories, destroy all the values we had absorbed while growing up in this country.

We, who understand now that the price of Occupation is the loss of IDFs human character and the corruption of the entire Israeli society.

We, who know that the Territories are not Israel, and that all settlements are bound to be evacuated in the end.

We hereby declare that we shall not continue to fight this War of the Settlements.

We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.

We hereby declare that we shall continue serving in the Israel Defense Forces in any mission that serves Israels defense.

The missions of occupation and oppression do not serve this purpose-- and we shall take no part in them.

Whether you agree with Zionism or not, you cannot but admire the refuseniks for their humanity and refusal to become mere tools of an oppressive state. The refuseniks remain true to the original socialist and humanistic ideals of the nascent Israel. They deserve our support; if only we could see the US occupation forces in Iraq remain true to the ideals of the US constitution, and just refuse to serve. If only.

Indeed, and heh.

2005-01-04T10:55:00.000+01:00

It didn't take them long did it? The fundies are already using the tsunami as a rationale for their insane theories about god and intelligent design, and Panda's Thumb elegantly rips them a new one (if such a thing can be done elegantly).

Tuesday Ceph Blogging.

2005-01-04T10:39:00.000+01:00

Via cephnews and the fascinating Pharyngula, these lovely pictures of the Indo-Malaysian mimic octopus, well, mimicking things.

Here it is mimicking a sea snake:

Look Mum, I'm a lionfish!

Did I say how much I adore cephalopods?

Governor Of Baghdad Assassinated

2005-01-04T09:02:00.000+01:00

Well, this about wraps it up for the ''elections'' then. And so much for the safety of the Green Zone, such as it was.

They're At it Again.

2005-01-04T08:53:00.000+01:00

FFS, where's the humane killer when you need it? If this is christianity, thank providence I'm an atheist. I wonder how many devout baptists were on paedophile sex tours in Thailand when the tsunami hit?

Note: Readers, such as they are, may have noticed the lack of capitalisation in this blog of any word to do with religion, eg christianity, baptist, jesus and the like. I've taken a decision not to dignify any of this superstitious claptrap with a proper noun. A superstition is a superstition , not a real thing with a real name.