'Nother Solent

Cold Turkey.

Not only is that what I get to eat for the next month, it is also my Blogging Recovery Program for the next few days. I'm off on a family visit to my in-laws, which is lovely in all respects but one... no computer! See you all in 2002, and a happy new year to all.

The Guardian calls for profiling?

Not exactly, but this story reports on calls for profiling without endorsing the usual comment that it is racist. One day, maybe, the Guardian et al will bring themselves to admit two things. The first is that, yes, in the strict meaning of the word, profiling is racist - but that it might have saved thousand of lives in the US and might yet save hundreds more, including many of the same Arab and Arab-looking people who would have been inconvenienced and annoyed by it. Secondly the day may finally come when the Chattering Classes will bring themselves to observe that what actually brought down the unsavoury "Mr Reid" was not any sort of screening system but the fists and belts of crew and passengers.

Alas, I've lost the reference, but I noticed one of Mr Reid's subduers had the first-name "Kwame". Now it's a reasonable bet that Kwame is a black man, and has suffered racism in his life. Still, if asked, I rather think he might say that life is still worth having - that's why he successfully fought for his own life and that of others.

In this BBC News 24 article on the same subject, Oliver Letwin loses his reputation as the Great IBISIOK* Hope of British politics by copping out. He thinks we must all put up with the queues and the intrusion in order to spare the feelings of the "profiled" group. To some extent we must indeed submit on pragmatic grounds; no doubt from now on terrorists will select non-Arabs where possible. (It seems that Reid was no sort of Arab; he had a part-Jamaican background and was a convert to Islam. Whether he was working alone is not clear.) But do I really have to spell it out? When Mr Letwin says

"I wouldn't like to see groups of people segregated as one goes through the departure lounge because they happen to come from whatever is that month's risk category - being deeply frisked in the way that everyone else isn't."

he is kidding himself. (Or attempting to kid the voters.) Most of the terrorists in the world are Moslem Arabs. That is not a fad of this month or last month; it has been the case for thirty years. Looking harder at them makes it much harder for Al Qaeda to carry out mass killings. It is my day for lost links, but soon after Sep 11 an Arab American from one of the universities wrote a superb article saying he would have traded profiling for those thousands of lives any day.

Enough of race. Back to fists and belts - and the penknives and nail clippers that weren't available. Most people on the plane want to live, right? Compared to a gun, a blade isn't much of a force multiplier. Fifty men and women with box cutters beat five men with a box cutters, and live to tell the tale afterwards. So issue them.

*I'm Being Ironic So It's OK.

Of all the pathetic excuses.

Christopher Pellerito of Libertyblog wants to shut up shop for no better reason than he has to earn a living. I ask you! Does the man not know his duty? Dulce et decorum per blogia fame confici. This excuse is scarcely better than that given by Tim Blair when I told him to swap bodies with the Prime Minister; all he could come up with to excuse his sloth and inactivity in the matter was some mutterings about not wanting to put up with Cherie. I am slightly mollified to note that Mr Pellerito will write for Samizdata in future, although that, since the hacker struck, is no longer the exclusive privilege it once was.

Bet I got a bigger slice of paranoid Christmas-present guilt than you did, na na ne-na naa.

This message to Random Jottings in particular. Bet you didn't lose a present in the loft and have to give it unwrapped at 8pm. And even that's better than the time I lost a present and had to give it eighteen months later as an emergency birthday present to another person entirely. Or the time I...

Oh no. No, please no. What have I done....

Remove your hats. Dust off your black suits, your armbands and your mourning weeds. Compose your eulogies. In a minute I must go downstairs and admit that we totally forgot to use the Harry Potter Crackers.

When the attack came, the watchmen were awake at their posts.

The watchmen in this case being whoever designed big stairwells at the World Trade Centre and whoever put in place and practised evacuation drills. I got this grimly fascinating "USA Today" account of who lived and who died, and how that was related to where they were when the planes hit from er....this is embarrassing. I've forgotten. Drat. I read the story in someone's blog, then, when called away to wash up Christmas dinner, I posted but did not publish the link to store it in Blogger until I could come back. Thank you, whoever you are. I'll credit you eventually.

Yes.

I am a sad, obsessive geekette who posts to her blog even on Christmas Day. But I'm a happy sad obsessive geekette because it's Christmas. I hope you are too.

Twenty one years ago, a searing expose was written. Only now can the story be told.

I would have liked to have posted this on the exact anniversary of the day I wrote it, namely 30th December 1980. However I can't because I will be off on a family visit on 27th Dec, and won't be back until the New Year. Would like to have posted what? you ask. Well, hiding in a cupboard, having accompanied me on several moves, I found this little notebook with a picture of a kitten on the front. Inside is a diary kept by me and my sister recording all the British villains we kept seeing on American TV shows. This is it, spelling and punctuation as in the original:

Tue 30th Dec 1980
'Paris' ITV
British mother* connections in Scotland
"weak, wimpery, influenced by son, lying

Towering inferno.
British dishonest architect causes entire collapse (not entirely his fault).

Dukes of Hazard
-con man betrayed daisy duke. Ended up in humiliating car crash with tree

Pelham 1.2.3.
"OK he was cool but also v.evil

Fantasy Island 31 Dec...... [This entry written upside down for reasons lost in the mists of time.]
Nasty Br Cookery judge calls everyone 'peasants'

There follow no less than seven entries for "Hart to Hart", including:

2 British dog food manufactures ended up in cauldron of dog food - one in wheelchair, woman looked 'exceedingly evil'

And this mysterious and surreal entry:

Pseado beatles in chips stole

A damning indictment, you will agree. Although some would say that if my sister and I of our own free will chose to watch "Fantasy Island" and at least seven episodes of "Hart to Hart", then any mental anguish caused should be regarded as self-inflicted. Also anyone using quote marks for emphasis deserves to suffer.

But this is still a relevant social document, my dear American friends. You know why? Because I've just been watching "Rush Hour", and you're still at it. Have you people ever heard of "profiling?" Huh? Huh?

Heinlein.

The Puppet Masters. Serialised in Galaxy in 1951. Made into a not-great film starring Donald Sutherland. Here's an interesting question: all of Google and Lycos and Altavista to choose from, so why did I, without even thinking about it, ask you guys instead of searching myself? And why were so many of you happy to answer? Human beings just like dialogue.

Let's crucify Tinkerbell.

Bad taste? Not half so bad as what prompted it. Beat the new year rush, get your puking done now. The best order to read what I'm talking about is, first, Tim Blair's intro, then Stephanie Salter's mind-bogglingly presumptuous original column (where are lightning strikes when you need them?), then James Lileks' beautiful rebuttal.

Armed Liberal on the prowl.

Brian Linse at Ain't No Bad Dude has exploited an evolutionary niche in blogland by turning round the obsessions of the more common right-wing subspecies and presenting them back to us. Here he is on Enron:

...the more troubling comparison is between how little is being done to investigate possible unethical behavior on the part of government officials in the Enron case as opposed to the massive investigation triggered by Whitewater. A shitty little land deal in Arkansas versus a 60 billion dollar fiasco with the aroma of influence peddling at the federal level.

On a similar 'let's tease the warbloggers' theme he has a very funny link to a site new to me called The Illuminated Donkey. Is author Kenneth Goldstein related to, or a rebel alter ego of, my favourite antiwar blogger Emmaneul Goldstein (who has a great snippet about the Euro and lessons its supporters could learn from Argentina)?

Let's fly naked!

So says Ken Layne. This is his strategy to defeat people who get on to planes with explosive buried in their shoes. (For anyone who hasn't heard, I am not making this up. See this BBC story.) I'm happy to say that the unorganised militia saw to the problem and kept their trousers on.

Somebody help me out. Was it Eric Frank Russell or Heinlein who wrote the cold war SF story where the mind-controlling aliens attached themselves to your back, and the only defence was for the entire Free World to strip off before entering a public building?

Year Zero, Afghanistan.

I was joking about Year Zero, but of course in Cambodia it was no joke. Iconolausts have arisen in many times and places. In many English and Scottish churches you will find that the the statues in alcoves are headless. This is no accident; they were smashed during the Reformation. It is said that one particularly zealous breaker of idols used a rope to link the heads of a line of ancient statues representing the Apostles and thus was able to decapitate the lot with one big pull. His spiritual cousins were at work in Afghanistan until recently, according to this story in yesterday's Telegraph. 50,000 years of history destroyed by the Taliban.

What a difference a day makes.

Yesterday I glowered upon the world with a Quindlenesque and dyspeptic eye. Fairy lights - Bah! Shoppers - Humbug! Guy in red suit - Have we no poorhouses? But this happy morn, all but one of the tickboxes on the Great Christmas List of Guilt and Stress are checked off, snow has fallen, and the street rings with the merry cries of infants falling off tea-trays and commiting aggravated assault with compacted water. As a result I have decided to shelve yesterday's plan to post to Samizdata that I have seen the light, dropped all this libertarian flim-flam and started work on instituting a Year Zero of exiling the entire population to live on pillars.