Pligget

Interesting to hear this this morning. There are moves afoot in the US to set up an independent inquiry into suspicious circumstances surrounding the attempt to discredit someone critical of the government's reasoning for going to war with Iraq.

Sound familiar?

The person in question is Joseph Wilson, the subject of this excellent post by Iain last week, who points to a recent interview with Ambassador Wilson. This morning's BBC report doesn't go into much background detail of Wilson's qualifications to speak out on the subject, so it's well worth reading the full transcript to appreciate the weight of his opinion and why the Whitehouse might be ill-disposed towards him.

If nothing else, the interview boasts one of the best opening remarks of all time from an establishment interviewee, especially one who was until recently a career diplomat:

"Well, I think we're fucked."

Important stuff.

You know how you sometimes forget you have a passion for something? Well I just remembered this evening how much I love taking photos, and realised I hadn't yet downloaded some I took a month ago. This is the pick of the crop:

For reasons too obscure to go into here, I just Googled up "outside a chip shop in" and was greeted with a list of local news reports. It seems that if you're bored and want a savoury snack and some unsavoury action, pop out to your local chippy in:

Dundalk
Cork
Sligo
Luton
Markey Drayton
Nantwich
Blackheath
Glodwick
Dublin
Kirkby Stephen
Newcastle
Altrincham
Tottenham
Exeter
Hackney
Ballyfermot
Gateshead

I say! That's bloody well not fair!

This is great. I heard some people on the radio this morning complaining about it, saying that it was unfair for students from under-resourced state schools, with equal or lower A-level grades, to be preferred to other students with grades achieved at independent and private schools with masses of advantages. They argued it should be based on grades only, otherwise it was unfair.

They want it both ways - they want the privileges associated with an unequal society, but they don't want any of the inequalities used against them.

As far as I can see, it's entirely logical for universities to prefer students who achieved their grades despite the adversity of their surroundings, because it indicates that they are more able/committed than others who made it helped by all the advantages in life.

Imagine the implications. Private education would lose its attraction. Why spend a fortune sending kids to private schools if it disadvantages them compared with the hoi polloi?

What's more, if a school's league table position started to count against its students (because their school was thought to provide a privileged education), maybe that school would stop thinking about churning out the highest possible exam scores, and actually be able to devote time to educating their pupils in the important things in life.

Mind you, if you were to extrapolate this idea too far, schools would start to degrade their standards deliberately in order to improve their deprivation index, so there would either be huge waiting lists at Tower Hamlets Comprehensives from nice families in Islington, or the nicer schools would start introducing headlice and glue-sniffing courses to improve their Oxbridge credentials.

Do you come here often?

It feels a bit confessional to admit it, but I've been thinking about the soon-to-be-enacted L.A. law I mentioned yesterday - the one imposing a 2-metre "total exclusion zone" around strippers in clubs (i.e. banning lap-dancing). The reason given was that it's a response to local complaints of prostitution and other illegal activity in and around the clubs.

I can't see exactly how this measure addresses the problem. Presumably the dancers weren't being coerced into having sex with their clients just because they danced close to them, so it must have been one of two things:

Maybe the dancers were offering sex to their punters - using the lapdance as targetted advertising. Preventing them from using that sales pitch will just force them to find another.

On the other hand, maybe the clubs were attracting prostitutes from outside - in the same way that lions hang around watering holes in the Serengheti. I can't see it being a solution to that either. Lions don't decide to go on a diet when the watering hole dries up - they find other opportunities.

I've always thought of lap-dancing as an alternative to prostitution, in that it fuels the client's ability to take matters into their own hands, so to speak, or it inspires them to return to their partner for a bit of how's-your-parent. It gives them the (illusion of) contact with a sexual fantasy-figure that plays a big part in the attraction of prostitutes, without the risks of actual sexual contact.

I can only think that the new law reflects a prudish discomfort at the idea of the arousal going on under the punters' clothes, and a misguided belief that imposing a bizarre restriction on one tiny aspect of the sex industry will make that arousal go away.

P.S. Spare a thought for the people at City Hall wading through all the licence applications for the security guards who will have to be stationed in the clubs at all times to enforce this gem. Sounds like a good job opportunity for local pimps.

Prepare to be dazzled

Some more amazing optical illusions, via memepool - who I linked to via Bob, who commented to Meg that he'd fasted (i.e. water only) for 30 days once while getting on with his life, hence corroborating my theory about Blaine.

Another proud day for the law-makers.

You know what was the main thing that struck me about lap-dancing being banned in L.A.?

"So - the US is finally going metric."

Nothing that happens there surprises me any more.....

P.S. If I were a smart L.A.-based entrepreneur, I'd develop a sequinned kiddie-style fishing net with a 2 metre long handle - for collecting tips.

You Lraen Smontheig Ervey Day

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Initsereg.

Meg saw David Blaine in his box recently, and had good things to say about the fact that he's supposedly going to earn millions for choosing to do something that the poorest in the world can't avoid. The fact that he's volunteered for it doesn't make it impressive. There are masses of people out there who would do the same willingly if they thought they'd be paid the same amount.

's a funny thing. In many ways I'm loath to write anything about the tosser, because the mere act of writing about his stunt means it succeeds, which is something I don't want to be part of. Fortunately, anything I write here is of too little consequence to affect matters, so I will.

A friend said last week "I don't get it. The man's an illusionist. He makes a living out of trying to trick people into thinking that there's something superhuman going on, when in fact there isn't. He clearly wants us to think he's only drinking water, but he has to be getting other nutrients through that tube."

I don't agree. Yes he's an illusionist, but I think the illusion he's perpetrating is not that he appears to be going without nutrition when he isn't. I think the illusion he's created is that going without food for 44 days is a death-defying feat of some kind, when it isn't. Not when you can pile on the pounds beforehand, can have a full medical check-up, can be kept safe and warm, can avoid expending energy and can have access to clean fresh water. OK, so I'll admit it's a feat of endurance - but it's not particularly dangerous compared with the life of, say, displaced African refugees.

People who enjoy things like Big Brother get drawn in by the sheer duration of it. If you observe or are exposed to a wholly unremarkable set of people for long enough, you develop a relationship with them (the perverse thing with BB is that the relationship is one-way. They don't know you). In normal life, everyone feels their circle of friends is something special, and in many ways it is. But when it comes down to it, they're just a bunch of ordinary, unremarkable people. If you didn't know them, you wouldn't feel particularly compelled to get know them - it's just that you do know them, so you care. Your family is an even more extreme example of how a group of ordinary people can take on such huge significance that you'd lay down your life for them.

Blaine's stunt is a cynical attempt to elicit the Big Brother effect. Exhibit yourself in an extremely public place, with continuous TV and online coverage, for an inordinately long period of time, and people will feel associated with you in the way they do with those twats on Big Brother. In order to command all that air time, there needs to be a purpose for it - what can someone be doing continuously for weeks on end? No-one can actually perform a continuous activity for that long, and Blaine's brainwave was to choose the complete absence of activity. Hence the starvation thing. The really perverse thing is that he's deliberately doing even less than anyone else normally does. At least the BB household had conversations, ate meals, got pissed, completed tasks, flirted with each other. The most we see him do, as Meg says, is sip water and poo (although presumably his anus will have healed over pretty soon through neglect).

Although I don't suppose this will happen, my dream is that the egg-throwing and breast-baring will peter out, people will drift away, and by the end of the 44 days everyone will have lost interest with the sheer boringness of his inactivity. Then all we need is for some momentous event to occur in mid October which will divert everyone's attention away from his truimphant emergence from his goldfish bowl, and he'll go back to palming cards on street corners.

Just completed a voluntary questionnaire for the French website ViaMichelin, which incidentally is a great site for European roadmaps and town plans, as well as route planning, hotels etc.

I was interested in the different cultural slant on hobbies and interests (from what I'm used to with a UK-based organisation), which gives an insight into our similarities and differences:

Quels sont vos centres d'intérêts? [What are your interests?]

Animaux de compagnie [pets]
Associatif, caritatif [community or charity work]
Auto, moto [cars, motorbikes]
Beauté, santé [beauty, health]
Bourse, placements, assurances [the stock market, investments]
Bricolage, jardinage, décoration [DIY, gardening, decorating]
Cinéma, vidéos, télévision
Informatique [information technology]
Jeux de hasard, loteries [gambling, lotteries]
Jeux vidéo [video games]
Lecture (livres, journaux, presse magazine) [reading = books, newspapers, news weeklies]
Mode, vêtements [fashion, clothes]
Musique
Nouvelles technologies [new technologies]
Sorties (concerts, théâtre, spectacles) [going to shows]
Sport
Vins, gastronomie [wines, good food]
Voyages, vacances, tourisme [travelling, holidays, tourism]

I don't remember any UK questionnaires asking whether I was interested in beauty and health, or gambling. Significant by their absence are things like pubbing/clubbing, galleries/museums and arts/crafts.
I guess it may just be that they've only listed those activities that might make me prey to internet marketing, but I'd be interested to collect similar lists from other countries - just to get an idea of the different cultural emphases.

Being a woolly-headed liberal I have problems being forthright, one way or the other, about this article, which reports on the fact that cluster bombs are being exhibited at an arms fair in London.

Obviously I'm appalled at the prospect of children playing with unexploded bomblets and being killed or injured. On one level, any lethal weapon - something expressly designed, built and delivered with the intention of wounding or killing people - is abhorrent. And I accept that any weapon that carries a risk of causing death and injury, even after the end of conflict, is especially difficult to contemplate.

My doubts come when I consider the alternatives. There is of course the extreme view that there should be no armed forces, and that we should all live together in peace and harmony. All very well and good as an ideal, but just not currently applicable as a policy on this particular planet. So, given that our messy human natures require that there be at least the threat of armed force to protect civil liberty (in preference to spending our entire lives behind parapets), we have to ask what form this armed force should take.

There are no cuddly weapons. They are all terrible - from bare fists, knuckle-dusters and bayonnets, all the way up to nuclear weapons - all meant to do terrible things to people. All of them have the capacity to kill outright, both civilian and military, and they all have the capacity to maim and cripple. And they all have the capacity to do this on a huge scale, if deployed widely enough and for long enough. I don't separate nuclear weapons out from the others - they just achieve in a very short time what most other weapons could do eventually, and I don't regard timescale as being the crucial factor.

Also, while I agree that for a child to lose their life, or just a limb, to a bomblet or a mine is simply horrific, I think it's equally horrific for that child to lose a father or brother (who happened to be in uniform) to a "smart weapon", a well-aimed bullet or a machete. There will always be civilian casualties, whether they are physically injured or not.

The simple truth is that, if cluster bombs are banned, they will be replaced by something else that kills a lot of people over a wide area - because that's what fighting comes down to.

There is a tendency for the right-on amongst us to profess extreme opposition (if not outright hatred) for the companies that produce weapons, as if war is all their doing. I have to confess here that I work for a spacecraft company that is a subsidiary of a group that also produces military aircraft and missiles, a lot of which are sold overseas, so I have to admit to a vested interest. Although I work only on satellites used for civil communications and crap TV, my salary comes from an organisation that sells weapons.

However, when confronted by people who abhorr my complicity in the war machine (many of them teachers, health workers, welfare workers and other civil servants) I point out that, although I may work for an organisation that makes and sells weapons, they work for one that buys and uses them.

Campaigning for kinder weapons is aiming at the wrong target.

Courtesy of What You Can Get Away With:

You Have to Admire his Gall

Bush's speech last night (full text here) makes me fulminate - again.

Apparently:

"Iraq is now the central front [in the war on terrorism]."

So whose bloody fault is that then?

Let's ignore for one moment the definition of terrorism. After all, parallels could easily be drawn between the killings in occupied Iraq and the actions of, say, the Free French in occupied France during WWII. Were they terrorists, or were they loosely organised armed nationals resisting the imposition of a new regime by an occupying foreign military force? But let's ignore this, and call the Iraqi fighters "terrorists".

Why is Iraq now the central front? Because Bush started fighting there. It may be true that there is now more terrorist-type activity in Iraq than anywhere else in the world. If so it's because there has been a huge upsurge of such activity in Iraq - not because the terrorists have all dropped their activities in other countries and moved their theatre of operations to Iraq. If Bush wants to call it terrorism, he has to admit that his actions in Iraq have had a negative effect on the war against terrorism - i.e. created a net increase worldwide.

Instead he wants to have his cake and eat it too. He thinks: "The war on terrorism is stagnating, with no sign of Bin Laden still, and the situation in Iraq is a mess. I know - we can reclassify the Iraq situation, calling it a terrorist problem, and, hey presto, we're back to the 9/11 effect, whose anniversary is.... well waddaya know?"

From today's Grauniad coverage:

"Our strategy in Iraq has three objectives: destroying the terrorists ... enlisting the support of other nations for a free Iraq ... and helping Iraqis assume responsibility for their own defence and their own future."

Americans should brace themselves for further sacrifice, he said, but added that other countries should also get involved.

So, he fully expects that other countries will volunteer to provide cannon-fodder for the current messy, open-ended, inglorious struggle against an invisible enemy, even though they were reluctant to help out before (especially when their reluctance arose because they believed a unilateral invasion without an explicit UN mandate would result in a prolonged armed struggle from factions within the country opposed to the foreign occupation....).

Whatever happened to Bush's "If the UN won't back us, we'll have to go it alone" rhetoric from before the invasion? Does this mean Bush is now admitting he isn't up to the job and can't manage without them?

It seems the UN is no longer "irrelevant". It now "represent[s] the compassion and generosity of the world".

We're about to see if that generosity and compassion extends as far as the US.

The Great Communicator links to this article about a recent Doonesbury cartoon. It referred to the recent evidence that regular masturbation reduces prostate cancer risk in certain age groups. I mentioned the news at the time, albeit light-heartedly. In the article it seems that 19 out of 34 newspapers polled said that they would not publish the strip, because it included the M word.

It's just staggering to me that they even considered it. They decided to publish an innocuous alternate strip, on grounds typified by one editor:

"You know what they say about pornography: 'You know it when you see it.' There is a line between what's acceptable and what's offensive dialogue in a community like ours. For me, this crossed the line. I knew it when I saw it."

Pornography? PORNOGRAPHY??

I'm too shocked to find adequate words for this. I thought we'd managed to jettison all that superstitious bunkum about wanking being a source of shame. I also thought that the main missions of our great free press were to inform, educate and demystify.

After all, we're talking about saving lives here. About a risk-free, costless, universally available and (let's not beat about the bush) thoroughly enjoyable way of reducing the risk of a terrible disease that kills too many young husbands, partners and fathers in every corner of the world.

Not only that, the news may even be the catalyst for a revival in the sexual relationships of troubled couples everywhere. Imagine: something thrilling that a couple can share at the most intimate level, in the knowledge that they're making a positive contribution to life expectancy - and feeding their relationship at the same time.

But no. Instead of encouraging anything that might help to spread the good news, we get blinkered and backward censorship, with the usual get-out clause:

"Other newspapers may feel differently, and that's what makes this such a great country."

"Great" isn't the word I was looking for.

P.S. Wouldn't it be wonderful if someone were to announce a finding that regular masturbation reduced the risk of cervical cancer too? I can't imagine the Women's Pages of many newspapers, even the more backward mid-western ones, being shy about that - but maybe that's just wishful thinking.

I'm not a fan of the program myself. I only clicked on this op-ed link because I thought it referred to the Sissy Spacek version of Carrie, rather than the Sarah Jessica Parker one. However, my disappointment deepened when I read it.

The show may deserve a nod for spotlighting women's conversation, for treating sexuality frankly and for rendering the traditionally stigmatized state of being a single woman more acceptable - indeed, chic. But under the guise of being salaciously liberating and radically feminist, the vision of modern femininity in "Sex and the City" is in fact surprisingly retrograde. The heroines spend most of their time on shopping, cocktails and one-night stands. Charlotte dreams of bridesmaids' dresses. Miranda frigidly "dates" her TiVo, while nymphomaniac Samantha - a blond bimbo who combines old-fashioned objectification with postmodern "do me" feminism - plows through the Kama Sutra. And in one episode Carrie discovers that she has only $957 in savings - but $40,000 in designer shoes in her closet.

More dated still, especially for a show that supposedly celebrates the joys of single life and female friendship, is its preoccupation with snagging a man. The characters are a walking compendium of modern female angst - the quest for a relationship, the ticking of the biological clock, the fear of aging out of the marriage market.

Now, I can't call myself a feminist for the simple reason that I'm not qualified to know what being a woman is like, but I do what I can to support the general cause. Which is why I'm going to criticise this tosh. Can you imagine someone doing a deep analysis of Men Behaving Badly and criticising its depiction of men? That's the equivalent of what Catherine Orenstein has written.

Orenstein sets up her article by saying that SatC operates "under the guise of being salaciously liberating and radically feminist", so that she can then debunk it. What??! SatC's just a bit of fluff, for goodness sake - it's harmless entertainment. When you look at it that way, it delivers just what it intends - a bit of saucy sass to keep you watching until the next commercial break.

She goes on to cite examples of far better female role models, like Mary Tyler Moore, Murphy Brown and Helen Gurley Brown, saying:

It's no coincidence that these icons of single femininity are all journalists. In the early 20th century, journalism was one of the few careers open to women, and the expanding ranks of "girl reporters" inspired stereotype-defying single heroines: Rosalind Russell as an ace reporter in 1940's "His Girl Friday," Katharine Hepburn as a foreign correspondent in 1942's "Woman of the Year," not to mention that famed comic-strip journalist Brenda Starr.

It may be no coincidence, but that doesn't mean the Parker character has some sort of duty to uphold a tradition. I would have guessed that the reason these characters were all journalists has less to do with the fact that "journalism was one of the few careers open to women", and more to do with the fact that they are all created by writers. Writers are closely related to their journalist cousins, cutting down on the need for background research. No doubt, being writers, they may also have started from the viewpoint that journalists have more interesting things to say than nurses, teachers or other female-dominated professions.

So it's a pretty empty point to make that journalist characters should be radically feminist, any more than other professions should.

the heroines of "Sex and the City" are vapid, materialistic and hysterical. The show makes short shrift of their intellect, they have no causes, no families ... and their jobs (what little we see of them) seem to exist to enable office trysts

Perhaps this is because they're not real people, and the escapist nature of the program isn't meant to address the mundanities of life. You certainly don't read much criticism of other programs that depict men in the same way.

If you want to do the cause of feminism more good, stop criticising every fictional female character that isn't a cross between Marie Curie, Jeanne d'Arc and Virginia Woolf, and just make sure that the real women around you are accorded the respect they deserve.

Does anyone remember that series on the Beeb many years ago, fronted by smarmy erstwhile Tomorrow's World presenter James Burke, where he explained the mechanism for technological progress in terms of a contrived series of links between contemporaneous but completely independent discoveries? You don't? Well, whatever - I've just made one of those connections myself.

Consecutive items on Today this morning got me thinking (yes, I know I said I'd stop listening, but I haven't yet). The first item was their usual fractal analysis of the Hutton inquiry - no surprises there. But it was followed by a piece which plumbed new depths in terms of vital current affairs coverage, investigating the lack of Government funding for research into complementary medicine. They broadcast a piece from some new-age trade fair in Warwick dedicated to such medical wonders as Tibetan Bell-ringing ([paraphrasing] "there - did you notice that the second ring sounded louder and clearer than the first? It sounded like some form of resonance. That's because the first one cleared the space in the room...."), and our old friend Homeopathy. A homeopathic practitioner said that, when considering how homeopathic medicines work, it was wrong to think of the extreme dilutions in terms of chemical engineering - it was more to do with physics. I'm glad they cleared that one up for me.

Aaanyway, at lunchtime today I made a connection between the two. I realised that Tony Blair, in his constant attempts to woo the populace, is striving to combine his pledge of Honesty and Openness in Government with trendy, new-age homeopathic principles. He's taken the truth, and by a process of diluting and diluting and diluting it, flooding it with inert data from all the different arms of the secret services, the MoD, and the communications directorate re-shuffle, he's hoping that we'll really begin to feel the truth working through our entire beings, suffusing us with a sense of wonder and spiritual health and convincing us that we are all of one energy, one light.

Or something like that.

Pro-Life and Pro-Death

This morning's execution of a pro-life murderer (how's that for an oxymoron?) leaves me all over the place:

he had carried out the killings "to prevent innocent babies being killed". In what way does killing a doctor and his driver stop abortions from being carried out? Wouldn't the abortions just be carried out by someone else?
How many women with unwanted pregnancies are going to change their minds and decide to bring their babies into the world because there's terrorism on their local streets?
How many pro-lifers want women with unwanted pregnancies to decide to have their child for the sole reason that there was someone out there murdering doctors (i.e. through fear rather than love)?

OK, so he was clearly a deranged twat. Locking him up to protect us from his warped actions is good - both for him and for us. But then the authorities go and ruin it all by demonstrating that it's wrong to kill people in cold blood - by killing him in cold blood.

What's worse is that he welcomed his own death sentence. He "was looking forward to dying for his cause". So, rather than subject him to a life of incarceration, during which time he might learn to rue his actions or be cured of his sickness, they let him off the hook and make him a martyr.

Far be it from me to suggest that Jeb Bush decided to further the extreme pro-life cause in this way to please his fundamentalist sponsors.

This is a propos of nothing, other than the fact that I haven't posted much for ages, and this thought came back into my head this morning.

Like many others, I really enjoyed reading Nick Hornby's High Fidelity a few years back - mainly for its exposition of how the "bloke" mind works.

(If you haven't read the book or seen the movie, but intend to, then read no further - the plot details will spoil your enjoyment.)

When I heard about the movie, and that it was going to be set in Chicago rather than London (presumably because John Cusack would find it easier that way), I had my reservations but went to see it anyway. Good movie - would recommend it to anyone. Happily, it didn't fall down where I expected it to. Being a Brit, I wrongly assumed that the interplay between Rob, Dick and Barry in the record shop (with their music snobbery and nerdy preoccupations) wouldn't travel well, but it turned out to be every bit as good as in the book.

However, the film chickened out of two things that I thought were major plusses in the book.

My first (and minor) gripe with the film was the addition of "discover talented young musicians and produce their first CD" to the plotline. It seemed that, to provide an upbeat ending for the cinema audience, there had to be at least the possibility that our hero would become rich and successful as a record producer, and thereby escape the dingey dead-end of the record shop. I preferred the book's message that you can be fulfilled simply by being happy in your skin and doing something you really love doing.
My second (and major) gripe was with the scene between Rob and Laura in the car, just after the funeral. Laura is distraught and incredibly vulnerable, and asks Rob to have sex with her to give her respite from the grief. In the film he gladly complies and their relationship bursts into life, the jealousy over her previous fling forgotten. This was lovely in its way, but it missed what was, for me, the most powerful scene in the book. All along, we (at least the "bloke" readership) have been empathising with Rob. This is easy to do. He may be naive in the ways of love but he's much cooler than Dick and Barry. He knows lots of stuff about proper music. He's funny and charming enough to get off with the attractive Texan singer. He has a string of amusingly failed relationships that we can all relate to in one way or another. We like him. But in the car, confronted with the woman he loves asking him to make love to her, he responds with an unsettlingly powerful ring of truth: he doesn't do it. Instead he asks her if she has a condom, knowing that she doesn't. When she's at her most vulnerable, and despite the fact that she's clearly still fond of him, and grief-stricken at the loss of her father, he seizes the first opportunity he's had in weeks to hurt her. He can't have unprotected sex with her because she fucked another man. She can't even hit back, because his argument is solid. For me, holding up the mirror like that - showing that underneath our lovable exteriors we are all capable of such vindictiveness - was the main lesson I took from the book.

Being human is not always as comfortable as Hollywood would have us think, and I wish more movies would have the balls to show our true selves.

The Special Relationship

New Moon Setting

Salt and Battery

I say! That's bloody well not fair!

Do you come here often?

Prepare to be dazzled

Another proud day for the law-makers.

You Lraen Smontheig Ervey Day

Nil By Mouth

Cultural Identity

Cluster Bombs

This is a Cracker

You Have to Admire his Gall

A Bunch of Tossers

Sex and the City

Connections

Pro-Life and Pro-Death

High Fidelity