September 27, 2002
The Today programme had nothing to say
about the biggest political demonstration in British history, the Countryside March, despite claiming to be a flagship programme covering political affairs. Its editor pured scorn on the marchers in a Guardian column, saying that they were a reminder of why he had voted Labour, despite having signed up to a duty of political impartiality when he took up the post. I give a potted history of what happened in Biased BBC.
Those countries that have in effect turned a blind eye to the rules - Italy, Germany, France and Portugal - have been allowed to do so without much in the way of a rebuke from the Commission and nothing more than anxious tut-tutting by the finance ministers of the eurozone.Excusing its lethargy, at least in the cases of France and Germany, the Commission will point to this year's elections as demanding a discreet silence.
This is no way to run a stability pact. Indeed, we can question whether this pact or any pact can have real credibility when the temptation for governments to try to buy re-election via fiscal generosity will always outweigh eurozone "good governance" requirements.
These pressures will never go away. There's always an election on somewhere.
By the way, I had never before realised how different the paper Indy is from the electronic one. The paper version only has half the story, leaving out all the stuff about the leaked memo. And a different headline.
Wan-Wan.
Japan Today reports on a device that can translate dogs' barks into Japanese.The comments from "Fangpi" and -it appears - "Douglas MacArthur" are hilarious:
Joking apart, this device seems perfectly feasible. I can distinguish several different words in my cats' vocabulary. There's "happy","bird", "feed me", "enemy cat", "horny" (heard in their younger days) and "get me down from the garage roof" for a start.See Spot speak!
Fangpi (Sep 27 2002 - 17:45)Once man's best friend is given a voice, I don't know how much longer the friendship can be expected to last.
Before
Fido: Wan-wan
Owner: "Stop humping my leg, damn you!"After:
Fido: Wan-wan
Device: "I'm horny"
Owner: "Tough s**t. And stop humping my leg, damn you!"This is one time when technology should leave well enough alone.
Takara launches gadget to convert dogs' emotions into words
Douglas MacArthur (Sep 27 2002 - 18:01)Rumor has it they're making one for salarymen next called 'Oyajilingual'. It will convert the semi-audible grunts that form the basis of salaryman's conversation into actual words. Designers, though, have only found 4 words and one phrase that sumarize a salaryman's entire existence: bath, beer, shower, bed and girlies' panties.
The device also has a special setting which lets users know when their salaryman has had enough in life and will announce: 'take me to the train platform and push me in'.
September 26, 2002
Looky here.
Amygdala says that the Arab News has an article saying it would be kind of nice to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Can he be right? Yes he can.What is it with Arab News lately? Don't they like being savaged by bloggers? They used to be a reliable source of sicko stuff to rant about, and they still do have plenty of it, but one or two articles and cartoons recently suggest that there are other, more benign, voices struggling to be heard..
One of my all time favourite
TV moments starred the late Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania. He's up on his balcony, addressing the masses assembled below. From his exalted position he can hear a low rumble coming up from the crowd. Graciously he makes a regal gesture, extending an arm and patting down the air, to indicate his desire that the applause should now cease. Then he realises... that noise is not applause.Yeah, so it's a bit of an anti-climax to move on to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. But isn't it fine that MGM are standing up to the shakedown-meisters? About time someone did. While it would be uncharitable to wish that either gentleman should suffer the fate of Ceausescu, how I would have loved to have seen their faces when it dawned on them that their rule was being challenged.
September 25, 2002
Germans have a sense of humour, sense of humour, sense of humour.
Some inner demon drove me. I put Tim Blair's effort through Babelfish.
Poland-harvesting bunker monkeysAnd it came out as:
Welfare-scarfing nature babies
Slap-dancing Fahrvernugen goblins
Order-following command munchkins
EU-lusting sausage honkies
Scrabble-busting maxosyllabic Gemeinschaltzentrum spellers
Luther-boosting Riesling huffers
Polen-Ernten der Bunkeraffen Wohlfahrt-Flämmen Naturbabys, welche die Fahrvernugen goblins Auftrag-folgen den Befehl munchkins Eu-lusting Wurst honkies Scrabble-sprengen die maxosyllabic Gemeinschaltzentrum Spellers Luther-aufladen Riesling huffers Slap-tanzen
It took me a moment or two to notice. Look where "slap-tanzen" came out. That poor, hardworking computer did its Teutonic best. It put the verb at the end.
Mick Fealty
of "A letter to Slugger O'Toole" kindly directed me to this post, commending an article by a Anthony McIntyre, a leading light of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity campaign who quotes Chomsky.I agreed with the article. I even agreed with the Chomsky quote. I must have fallen into an alternative universe.
Evil tidings
from the Indian subcontinent: seven Pakistani Christians murdered in attack on charity and Indian forces on high alert in face of terror strikes in Gujarat.There is something particularly scary about the Indian temple massacre, even besides the horror of killing worshippers of any religion at prayer. It seems to be a deliberate re-ignition of the firestorm that followed February's massacre of Hindu pilgrims on a train returning from Ayodhya. Hindu mobs took brutal revenge for that, killing hundreds or thousands of innocent Gujurati Muslims in the weeks that followed. Did the Islamic fanatics who attacked the temple want the same thing to happen again in Gujarat? I rather think they did.
It is a relief to turn from these dark thoughts to the safe, familiar procedure of slagging off Reuters. The second report I linked to was from IRNA, the Islamic Republic News Agency. Can anyone tell me how come the news agency of one of the "Axis of Evil" states, the Islamic Republic of Iran, sees no difficulty in calling terror - terror carried out by their own Muslim co-religionists - by its true name, but Reuters can't manage it?
September 24, 2002
This story about the Japanese citizens
(and, no doubt, even greater numbers of South Koreans) abducted by North Korea twenty years ago continues to obsess me. Ever wondered what the North Koreans themselves said about it all? It was "we take this serious." Oh, good. I learned how serious they took it from this Korean Central News Agency website. (They don't make it easy for you. First choose September 17 from the calendar and then scroll down to the second item. The people who were abducted, enslaved and in many cases murdered are described as "missing.") Here's what Corsair the Rational Pirate had to say about that. Between me and Mr Pirate there is not a complete meeting of minds on all subjects - religion for instance - but, by G-er-whatever, he hits the spot there. (Link found via Damian Penny who has posted on the subject here and elsewhere.)But for sheer, unadulterated weirdness take a look at this. The poor drudges who churn out the KCNA's mind-rottingly boring output about how the Prime Minister of St Kitts & Nevis sends greetings to the Dear Leader have to do what they are told or end up starving to death in a work camp. In contrast, this website, the bulletin board of the Korean Friendship Association, is full of bright young things called Dermot and Alejandro who voluntarily swap "Juche greetings" and discuss the best means of refining their understanding of the Dear Leader's wisdom. No one obliges them to at bayonet point. They just like doing it.
Dear Friends,In the KCNA article on the 17th of September, the DPRK announced the DPRK-Japan declaration and announced the return of missing Japanese. The DPRK government is regretful of what has happened, and promised not to let such things happen again.
If only the United States of America could be equally honest and admit their mistakes, which are far, far, worse.
regards,
Bjornar SimonsenBjonar Simonsen
Oslo Norway - 09/17/02 23:54:43 CST
Dermot wasn't fooled by this apparent admission:
re the KCNA bulletin for 17/9/2002 I intrepet[sic] the Foreign Ministry statement as just saying that the missing Japanese have been located........this has been distorted by the imperialist media into meaning all kinds of things.I hope you all realise that I am devotedly typing this all out. As the "KFA BBS" is a bulletin board, I assume that as new posts are added in the next few days these posts will slide off the bottom and lost to posterity. Sooner if they realise that the imperialist bloggers are looking in on them. And for some reason I cannot copy the text. The typing is tedious work, though, so I'll skip a few posts. Here's Alejandro Cao:Dermot Hudson
Dermot Hudson
LONDON UK. -09/18/02 15:54:18 CST
I just now talked with the DPRK diplomatic corp.The statement since the beginning until today is that the Japanese people were missing, and the DPRK helped the Japanese part to find the people they're looking for, but at the moment there's not a single word referring to the 'recognition of kidnapping'.
What I was reading in CNN, BBC or other media is that a 'person near to Koizumi' said that.......
and as always the capitalist media take the words like something real when they can be used to say
Didn't I tell you they're evil? -quoting Mr. Bush.Is incredible that a local newspaper will know always more than the own DPRK Ministries!!
I can also say that I know the Prime Minister Junichiro since I'm 5 years old. This kind of words are just wind, and at the moment the only official point is that the Japanese were missing and the authorities took the proper investigations to locate them.
Why they were missing... or the reasons why they went to Pyongyang? We'll have more details soon and I'll keep you informed.
Best regards,
Alejandro Cao
-09/19/02 01:10:00 CST
I shall look forward to being kept informed by Mr Cao when the individuals listed here finally see their homes again and tell their stories.
UPDATE: The Japan Times says that a diplomat has actually met the abductees.
The Guardian asked "politicians, historians, activists and commentators"
what they thought of the Countryside March. They did not ask postmen, software engineers, soft porn stars or me. I will correct at least part of this deficiency. If you want to see the original article without my malicious edits click on the link. If you want to see what soft porn stars think of it all, do your own research. Allons!Ian Jack - Editor of Granta: "Is it possible that the march was neither a seminal moment in the history of popular protest nor a media confection? That it was both things? That - very boringly - might be my guess. "
Me: Too right mate. Next!
Tommy Sheridan - Scottish Socialist MSP, organiser of the anti-poll-tax movement:
...seemed rather a sweetie, but wrote far too reasonably on the subject of protest for me to quote him at all entertainingly. He did make a late effort with
"Poverty in rural areas is very real and needs to be addressed, but the way to do so is through national policy, such as a higher minimum wage and investment in rural services."
Yes, lets. Then we can have more enormous agricultural machines and the remainder of those unsightly labourers will become unemployed. In the spirit of Lord Peter Wimsey investigating where the drains go, someone I knew who had once seen a labourer tried to find out what happened to them afterwards. She reported that they were put in something called a "drop-in centre for the unemployed." Best thing, really. I'm sure they are much happier being dropped in there to be recycled into doormats and children's play equipment than they were when they had a low wage. Anyway, if that's what the man means by "investment into rural services," I'm all for it.
Francis Wheen, Roger Scruton and Amanda Platell all said sensible things. Talk about peverse incentives: none of 'em get any attention from me at all.
Tristram Hunt - historian: "The numbers were impressive, but the march was inspired by a culture of hostility to New Labour and a visceral anti-Blairism that would have put off a lot of people. They would have had even more numbers if they hadn't been so aggressively and personally hostile to the prime minister."
To me, Hugin! To me, Munin! Find me, O Thought, Find me, O Memory, one - just one - human soul in all this wide realm who sayeth in his secret heart, they speaketh cruel words against the Queen's Annointed and so I will not go.
Richard Benson - writer and journalist, who is working on a book about the modern British countryside: "But it's difficult talking about class in this context, because the march did involve a lot of working-class Tories. Liberal thinkers have trouble with them because they are happy to march behind their bosses and vote for those who their employers think best represent their interests."
Yes, when I hand out soup to my tenants I always give the poor dears strict instructions as to how they should vote. Mr Benson's book about the "modern British countryside" has just about reached The Great Reform Bill. He continues:
"...I was struck by the parallel with the miners; both protests were about the end of a certain way of life. It's hard to formulate any realistic demands around something like that."
"Don't ban hunting." Not hard to formulate at all.
Bruce Kent - vice-president of CND: "I've never known a CND march to be flagged up until it's over..."
I somehow managed to find my way to several in the 1980s.
"...and then there will normally be some critical remark made about how somebody did something stupid or wore something silly. We have a march next Saturday organised by the coalition against war on Iraq, about which I should think nobody outside the peace movement knows anything."
I know about it. Then again I have an obsessive interest in political no-hopers.
"It did make me feel nostalgic seeing it on Sunday. I remember being on the platform and seeing a sea of faces from Speakers' Corner right down to Hyde Park Corner. I remember saying to these people, "Lift up your banners," and it was like watching an enormous field of flowers coming up. Whether we were ever bigger than what happened yesterday, I don't know. We were very big in our day."
I too waxed nostalgic about those same marches. Ah me, well do I recall being outraged that the Telegraph said that some of CND's top brass were tools of the Soviets. I didn't think that even those fascist Torygraph warmongers could really believe such slander. Cor, didn't I laugh when it turned out a bunch of them were not merely unwitting tools of the Russkies but fully paid-up spies.
We have a very, very peculiar system of democracy in this country. Once every five years we have an election, and that's it. Apparently we could go to war without parliament voting on it. Anything that gives a chance for local people to demonstrate and have an input, I think is great.
Actually this last line, illogical as it is (does he think local input into BNP demonstrations is great?) won me over. I always did have a soft spot for the monsignor.
Douglas Hurd - former foreign secretary: "Every prime minister has an in-tray marked "too difficult" and that's where Blair has put foxhunting. The march highlighted that. There wasn't a person there who supported the ban. If the march had any political significance, this was it. The government's attitude towards the marchers has been called relaxed, but is actually evasive."
Never thought I'd have a good word to say about the man who started the modern round of gun-grabbing, but that hit the nail on the head.
Michael Foot - former leader of the Labour party: "It has no political significance whatsoever. If these people want to demonstrate, why don't they demonstrate against Britain going to war with Iraq? What's going on in the Middle East is far more important."
Consider that this man, who says the largest demonstration in modern times, and probably in British history, "has no political significance whatsoever" was once seriously submitted to the electorate as a candidate for the office of Prime Minister of Britain.
On your second point, Michael. I'd never really thought of considering political demostrations solely as a leisure activity, but if you say so, I will. I guess what we're looking for here is a good demographic in the client base, networking opportunities, lavish provision of Portaloos, and really classy supporting merchandise. Can you honestly say that shouting "Hands off Socialist Iraq" in the company of a SWP activist who moonlights as a local govenment officer really makes the grade?
Stella Tillyard - historian:"People are comparing this march to the Chartists and the Jarrow marchers, and talking about the huge numbers, but these people could afford to march. It's a false claim to put it in such a historical context. Most people who have demonstrated in the past with a grievance have not been able to afford to march. There were vast Chartists' meetings in the north of England, but of course people could not afford to march to the capital because they didn't have any money. They couldn't afford to charter trains and coaches and book London hotels. It's a completely different constituency."
Protests only count if you can't afford to be on them! Or sumfin.
"I absolutely don't think it's a significant event. The really important decisions about the countryside will be be taken in Brussels. The common agricultural policy [CAP] - this is really what these people are protesting against. Hunting is a way of making it colourful and appealing to British snobbery. When they say their way of life is threatened, it's a way of life that's become dependent on subsidies. The CAP will be reformed with EU enlargement."
Such faith.
"The other thing you could say about the march is that the Tory party is not a credible party of opposition. What other way do these people have to say whatever disparate things they have to say? It's the Tory party on its feet. Nobody takes the Tory party in parliament seriously. It's a way of getting attention in terms of issues."
Actually this last para should read:
The other thing you could say about the march is that
(8) the Tory party is not a credible party of opposition.
(5) What other way do these people have to say
(1) whatever disparate things they have to say?
(6) It's the Tory party on its feet.
(0) Nobody takes the Tory party in parliament seriously.
(2) It's a way of getting attention in terms of issues.
The whole thing came from typing 851602 into the random anti-Tory spiel generator.
September 23, 2002
On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair.
Jim Bennett has a column on the ludicrous proposal from Andrew Duff MEP that the EU rules should be changed to force countries to stay inside even when they want to leave. He - Bennett, not Duff - compares the EU to a Roach Motel. I can let you know in confidence that Mr Duff is our side's most devoted and cunning deep cover agent. Can you imagine any proposal more certain to arouse the fighting spirit of even the most supine British Prime Minister?Dodgeblog came up with a similar metaphor. Incidentally, Andrew needs the love of a good woman. That's Dodge not Duff.
Can anyone track down this story?
I'm told that the Tasmanian government is thinking of banning snowmen because of the "danger" when they melt. They also, I am told, plan to ban snowball fights.
September 22, 2002
Quote of the day
:"The IDF is "isolating" Arafat. Haven't we been in this movie before?"
- Tal G in Jerusalem.
Wisdom comes in time.
Surprisingly, this Guardian article about the ending of the French ban on British beef is cynical about the workings of the EU and coldly hostile to the French agricultural lobby.
Certain poor benighted heathens
have asked, who is this Dan Dare chap* anyway? This site introduces him. I've just discovered that neither of the further info links at the bottom of the page work. Never mind. This gets you there.As James Rummel and I agreed, it is distinctly depressing that the interplanetary adventures of Dan Dare are set in 1997. We seem to have fallen into the wrong future somehow.
In a similar vein James laments that we have the UN we have (with Colonel Gadaffi in charge of human rights, ye gods!) instead of the proper UN as depicted in "The Man from "U.N.C.L.E."
But I must disagree with the post two up, past the one which calls me a blog goddess but honestly that is not the reason why I'm talking about this you can skip the one about me if you like, which talks like it's a bad thing for space exploration that some rich kids from a boy band are going to pay $22M for a ride. It's great for space exploration. Which is a more fertile and reliable source of funds: appropriations voted for by a committee of politicians who know there ain't no votes in space, or the unsleeping desire of rich human beings to buy a new experience - in this case an experience literally like no other on this earth?
*Dan Dare is definitely a chap and not a guy or dude.