6 May, 2003

I like what Heather has to say here. I know I get easily worked up and pissed off and express my opinions rather strongly, and honestly, taking the last five days to chill out and distance myself from politics has really brought home to me just how distressed I let myself get about stuff. On the one hand, with a few days off from it, I almost dread getting back into paying a lot of attention to what's going on in the world. On the other hand, I kind of feel like everyone has a responsibility to pay a lot of attention to what's going on in the word. But that said, I can sure see why so many people opt not to do so.
09:06 p.m.

I'm home, yay. I had a really nice break, the weather was lovely and I've even got a sunburnt nose. And gosh, life is so relaxing when you only pay attention to the news for about 30 minutes each day -- who knew?

More blogging later, but in the meantime, I really hope that this is a pack of lies.
03:20 p.m.

1 May, 2003

The ability of politicians to damage wildly successful industries never ceases to amaze me.
11:27 a.m.

Terrorist attacks at lowest level in more than thirty years:

"It is harder for terrorists to hide and find safe-haven," [Colin Powell] said. "It is harder for them to organize and sustain operations. Terrorist cells have been broken up, networks disrupted and plots foiled. The financial bloodlines of terrorist organizations have been severed. Since 9-11 more than $134 million of terrorist assets have been frozen. All around the world, countries have been tightening their border security and better safeguarding their critical infrastructures."

If that's not good news, I don't know what is.
11:24 a.m.

Bloody hell. A couple of days ago, I made comments in this blog along the lines that there is no item of legislation or government policy that could ever eliminate the conflict felt by women when facing the "Career and/or motherhood?" question. What I didn't say at that time (partly because I think it's obvious, forgetting that I'm not necessarily preaching to the choir here) is that I don't approve of big government expanding its imagined responsibilities to try and eliminate this conflict and make life cosy for people with money taken from the pockets of others.

Maybe someone should tell the French, and certain Guardian columnists, this. To paraphrase Peter Briffa:

[I]t's got damn all to do with the government...I think this is why I despise the likes of [columnists Hugo Young and Jackie Ashley]. They spout liberal platitudes, but when it comes to the crunch they just don't trust us, the public to sort things out on our own. Leave it all up to the government, that's their motto. Maybe this bogus liberalism, which is merely state control writ large over an entire continent, is why some of us are Eurosceptics...

What he said.
09:44 a.m.

A country designed to self-destruct:

First and foremost, it is apparent that the country was engineered to go to hell in a handbasket should the Ba'ath party lose control...As a result, one has to wonder how much larger the Coalition ground force would have had to have been to maintain order from the very earliest moment; the likely answer is that no number of American troops would have been sufficient.

Moreover, it would be a mistake to ascribe solely noble motivations to those Iraqis currently protesting the Coalition presence; it is far from unthinkable that, if anything, the protestors, having been victimised, feel entitled to now become the victimisers, and want the Coalition troops out of the way so they can get on with victimising someone...

I'm tempted to quote more liberally, but it's really worth reading the whole thing (which isn't long anyway).
09:37 a.m.

Do something to help save Amina Lawal from being stoned to death.
09:30 a.m.

Hee. Me, a Labour MP, a young Conservative activist, a former Trotskyist, and a renowned columnist and political commentator; needless to say, I'm extremely flattered. I don't know if the smart money is on me, but the day is young!

(NB I'm waiting for a courier to collect an LCD projector, and then I'm out of here. They're meant to come between 9 and 3; my bet's on 2.59.)
09:20 a.m.

It's a bank holiday weekend here, and I'm taking off today for a four day mini-break. Sun, sea and Britain's irritatingly rocky beaches will play a part, weather willing. Blogging will not, unless we get really lazy and I suffer withdrawal from news and annoying people with shit for brains.

Have a great, safe weekend.
03:07 a.m.

There's an interesting interview that Christopher Hitchens did with Salon last October (the full version requires a subscription to Salon, but for some reason it's reproduced in full here), a snippet of which was emailed to me by the delightful Lindsey Corcoran, who every so often sends me intriguing articles and quotes and things of that nature. In any case, the Hitchens interview followed on the heels of his leaving The Nation, and as part of his promotional activities for his book Why Orwell Matters. The whole thing is worth a read, but the excerpt that Lindsey emailed me is, funnily enough, the part that really strikes a chord with me.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar. For some people that's definitive. They can't get over it. So the idea that the United States could use force with moral justification is to them totally alien. They can't — they can't go there. They won't. But that is more a proof of their inflexibility than their attachment to principle. It's an empty position. It's a nihilistic position. If they said, "Yes, if bin Laden's the only revolutionary, he may not be perfect, but we're on his side," well, I could sympathize. No — I won't say sympathize, but I could see it, I could respect it. But they don't do that. They look for bogus equivalencies that actually lead to a cop-out. "Well, he did this bad thing, but we've done this bad thing." That leaves you exactly nowhere. And surely it should at least condemn both. In fact it appears to excuse both.

And Orwell was clever about this. I mean, there were a lot of people, a very large number in fact, in 1940, for example, not just in England but in Europe and America, who would say, "Well, this Nazi business in Poland is pretty rough, obviously, but look at how the British behave in India. Why should we pick a side?" He sort of knew by the same instinct that I hope your readers have why that stinks as a means of arguing. I could explain why it stinks, but if I had to explain why to someone who didn't get it right away, I probably would never succeed.

Because it's obvious on its face?

I would distrust at once someone who didn't see there was a fallacy there. And those who didn't I think would not be open to persuasion.

What is the fallacy?

The fallacy is one of moral equivalence. The motive for it, or the ruse of it, is — I prefer to call it masochistic. It's a self-hatred. It's a refusal to believe that you would ever be justified yourself in having the arrogance to define and defend yourself against or to destroy an enemy. That would surely make you no better than them. But this is disabling.

Well, if that doesn't sum up about 90% of what I've been hearing from the left over the past six months or so, nothing does. And I agree with Hitchens: such people cannot be persuaded, because they don't want to be persuaded. While they congratulate themselves for their supposed openmindedness, their minds are as closed as any racist's or homophobe's. Their closemindedness leaves them totally unable to see the fundamental failure of their thought process. You'd have more success trying to teach quantum physics to a goldfish.

It seems to me that the left has a reflexive pacificism —

Well, I wish it was pacifism.

— an unwillingness to fight wars.

If you're a Quaker, you say: "It's not that I'm afraid to die — I'm afraid to kill. I don't think anything would justify it." That's fine. But in practice, it isn't that. The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved. Ramsey Clark didn't organize a protest against Saddam Hussein's attack on Iran, or Kuwait. He's not antiwar to that extent. And nobody complained about the failure of the West — nobody complained in an organized street-protest way — about the failure of the West to rescue Rwanda. And nobody complained about Milosevic's invasion of Bosnia — well, that's not true, a lot of people did — but their juices only kicked in when there was intervention to remove him. Voilè! You see the bad faith of this all the way through...

With the Clinton years, I realized that the left had moved literally to the right, because it was willing to excuse things that the United States did that it shouldn't do if it was done by someone claiming to be a liberal Democrat. Horrifying things, like the bombing of Sudan on the international front, and horrifying things on the home front like the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act [of 1996], which, if either of these things were done by either Bush or Ashcroft, everyone would know what to say. When they were really being done and they were both worse things.

Clinton didn't consult the U.N. about bombing Sudan. He didn't consult Congress. He didn't consult his Cabinet. He didn't consult the CIA or the National Security Council. He overruled the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He got a free pass. And every lawyer who wants to throw someone in jail quickly with a minimum of trial knows to charge them under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Against which there's no defense. And then there was Bosnia. If you are ever going to be confronted with a moral issue in your lifetime, one where there isn't much wiggle room, it would be: Here's an attempt to destroy, physically to destroy, a European minority, the third attempt of the 20th century. The first being the Armenian Christians, the second being the Jews, the third being the Muslims of the former Yugoslavia, or Bosnia Herzegovina. If you can't be against that, when it's taking place in front of your own eyes, what the hell can you say you are against?

02:43 a.m.

Ye Newe York Times reports on postwar difficulties following victory at Yorktown. Love it.

Link via Dean Esmay
02:23 a.m.

It's also local election day here in Britain, and David Carr has a pretty good summary of what we'll likely be looking at after the votes are counted. I'm quite jealous of those who can vote here, and infuriatingly, rather a lot of people I know aren't even going to bother. Curiously, many of the people who can't be arsed to vote are the same people who were so determined to "show the government how [they] feel" that they marched with the Stalinists who organised the anti-war protests in this country. If it wasn't so sad, it would make me laugh. It's probably for the best that those Einsteins don't vote, actually.
02:14 a.m.

Happy May Day! Shopkeepers all over London were boarding up their windows and doors yesterday in anticipation of soapdodgers throwing a temper tantrum against The Man today (and you'll never guess what bunch of Stalinist nutjobs is calling on their minions to take part in the demonstrations), so we'll see how things go in Londinium and in other major cities. I'm sure the great unwashed are going to be feeling mighty pissed off this year (for a change), but for some reason I'm thinking their annual bout of destruction and mayhem may not be as bad as anticipated. You never can tell with those types, though.
01:58 a.m.

Was Rumsfeld referring to Robert Fisk, or the Iraqi information minister? The fact that it's hard to tell speaks volumes about the Independent's prize reporter. (Serious question: is anyone still buying that rag?)
01:33 a.m.

30 April, 2003

She didn't have far to travel, but Janeane Garofalo has finally gone off the deep end. I don't really dislike Janeane, though I think she's got some very warped ideas about America ("We are living in neo-McCarthy, post-democratic times. Democracy is being criminalised." Huh?) and about history ("Boycotts are Nazi stuff." Yeah, that's what the Jews and the gays were so scared of: boycotts.), and she just generally strikes me as a deeply negative person. So I'm not really shocked to learn that she suffers from depression and general malaise. It's a shame, but I wonder if she's getting any help for it. Are her increasingly deranged ramblings a cry for help? Does she have any friends who are willing to reach out to her and help her through her depression? All in all, it's a very sad state of things for someone who used to be funny and get regular work. I hope she gets well soon.
09:33 p.m.

I read an article in the Times (London) the other day that some of you might find interesting. It has to do with the museum in Baghdad, and it gives me the opportunity to round up some links and give my thoughts on the irrational and hugely ignorant stance that many are taking on the events that unfolded there a couple of weeks ago:

Mr George is clearly angry, claiming that the Americans left the museum unguarded for days. He is not the only one. Repeating an Iraqi conspiracy theory so universal that it is now received wisdom, Mohammed Sabri, a prehistoric specialist, said bitterly: “They were late. They should have been here from the first day. The Ministry of Oil was protected the first day, why not the museum. Why? Ask the Americans.”

The Americans have a ready answer. “We were fighting the whole time,” Captain Jason Conroy said, wiping his brow as he guarded the museum gate. “For four days we were taking machinegun-fire and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) from these buildings around here. They had a bunker around the back of the museum with a cache of RPGs. Guys were running out of that alley, firing Kalashnikovs at us.

When we shot them, they threw out hooks, dragged the bodies and guns back and came at us again.”

After four days of intense street battles with Saddam’s Fedayin and Special Republican Guards, Captain Conroy said, his company of Abrams tanks and armoured vehicles was ordered north on April 15 to destroy an anti-aircraft gun.

“When we got back the next day, everything was already on fire here and the press were here asking us: ‘How come you weren’t in the museum three days ago?’ I said: ‘If you guys had been here three days ago, you would know why.’”

Who masterminded the museum thefts isn't clear, but the fact that some of them had keys to the vaults would point to those with close ties with the museum.

There are also reports out of Iraq that newly deposed Baathist officials were behind much of the theft:

Some of the museum's collection was carried off in the 1990s by members of Hussein's government, according to Iraqi antiquities officials. Archaeologists who work for the Culture Ministry said today that Baath Party officials periodically confiscated gold and other valuables from the museum, possibly to be sold on international underground markets. The officials said they don't expect to see those valuables again.

Some museum employees say other museum employees were involved, and art experts agree:

"Everything about it sounds like an inside job, at least in the beginning. They knew which objects to go for, they had the combinations, and they destroyed the documentation. It was done by people who obviously had some knowledge of antiquities," said dealer Torkom Demirjian, who sells expensive Greek, Roman and Near Eastern artifacts at his Ariadne Gallery in New York. "Clearly they did have [buyers] in mind."

The director general of Iraq's state board of antiquities says:

"The people who came in here knew what they wanted. These were not random looters," Donny George, the director general of Iraq's state board of antiquities, said Wednesday . . . He pointed out that replica items - museum pieces that would have looked every bit as real to an angry mob as authentic items - were left untouched. The museum's extensive Egyptian collection, which is valuable, but not unique to the world, also was left alone...

Some of the stuff's already turned up in Paris, and elsewhere in Europe and Asia:

Witnesses have spoken of seeing well-dressed men with walkie-talkies at the scene, and of artefacts being transported away in orderly convoys of vans rather than over the heads of the crowd. "We already have reports of exhibits being offered for sale in Switzerland and Japan," says Karl-Heinz Kind, Interpol's specialist officer for art and antiquity trafficking. "Even in a war zone, even with the country practically sealed off, these things can move with incredible speed"...

Long before the latest war began, millions of pounds worth of Iraq's ancient treasures were quietly flooding each year into the hands of Western and Far Eastern collectors. . .

In recent years Saddam's own officials appear to have given the stamp of approval to the lucrative business of selling antiquities abroad. Last year a large sculptural frieze, originating from a 3,000-year-old Assyrian palace in north eastern Iraq, weighing more than a tonne and measuring more than six feet square turned up for sale on the British market. Art experts believe it unlikely that such a major piece could have been exported without the acquiescence of someone in authority.

Julian Radcliffe, the chairman of the Art Loss Register, the organisation which identified the frieze, says: "There may have been theft from Iraqi museums by their own government working with the staff or by criminal elements working with the staff. Curators have often been worried about keeping the roof on the building of the museums they work in and desperately need the money to pay for it". . .

Oh, and the LA Times reports that the looting actually began in the 1990s:

"The gang started in the early 1990s, with the support of Saddam Hussein himself," said Junayd Fakhri, an archeologist who claims the 1990 discovery of a royal Assyrian treasure buried in a palace well, perhaps in the 8th century BC. . .

. . . Fakhri and several other Iraqi experts say Hussein's culture and information minister during the 1980s and early '90s, Latif Nusayyif Jasim, ordered about 160 pounds of Nimrud's golden treasures, including a queen's crown and jewelry, shipped to Baghdad. The treasure was stored in a vault at the national bank, which was looted along with the national museum in the early hours after Hussein's fall. "They can say the museum was looted and nobody knows the truth," Fakhri said. "The truth is they sold all the pieces."

It's not an original line of thinking, but the fact is, the museum had been closed to the public for years, war had been threatened for months, and the tyrant running the country is widely rumoured to have been stashing treasure in foreign countries in case they had to flee. And yet, the place is looted while the US forces are still taking fire from the buildings around the museum (the Republican Guard HQ is across the street), with a plethora of evidence that much of the work was an inside job, and the finger gets pointed at the US military anyway? (The Pentagon did urge US ground forces commanders to protect the museums, saying, "Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures.")

I think people are overlooking some fairly important evidence here, and in a way that's pretty self-serving to their eagerness to condemn, if not the US forces, then the US military planners and higher-ups. I'm pretty sure I know why they're doing so, and I can appreciate the comedy of their failure to join the dots, but I can't help but wonder: do they?
07:49 p.m.

Jane Galt explains why mere words are not as important as hard facts -- something you think would be fairly obvious, but eludes many:

A while back, I was interviewed along with some grad students in a Middle Eastern studies program. They presented me at one point with a most extraordinary thesis. The war in Iraq, they said, was about oil. But not in any way that anyone had been arguing (presumably, earlier theories had been refuted.) Rather, the object of the war was to get Iraqi oil so that we could keep it away from Europe and, by impoverishing them, improve our own lot.

There were a number of very strange economic ideas in there, but one is demonstrably incorrect: that you can force oil prices up in one area through embargo. It simply doesn't work in commodity markets. If we took all Iraq's oil ourselves, the oil we otherwise would have consumed would simply be purchased by Europe. If we cut production and diverted all the oil here to keep our prices stable, prices would spike in Europe, and people would resell our oil to Europe until the prices balanced. We know commodity boycotts don't work, because they've been tried in various times and places, including by OPEC on us, and they don't work unless you've got a totalitarian police state to enforce them (even then, there's a lot of leakage).

I tried to explain this to them. All three of them reacted as if the very idea of referring to the economics of oil markets to test the validity of their argument were some sort of wacky notion, like trying to disprove it using the tea leaves at the bottom of my cup. It had clearly never occurred to them to think about ways in which they could test their theory -- and in my days as a Lit major, it wouldn't have occurred to me to test my semantically interesting, but economically demonstrably false, theories either. They didn't attempt to refute anything I said, but sat there with a pitying, contemptuous look on their face, about the way I used to look at my parents when I was fourteen and they told me drinking was bad for me. They seemed to believe they had some sort of hidden knowlege that validated their beliefs in such a way as to render any empirical evidence moot.

Sound familiar?

It was strange. But not that strange. I've been an English major. And the unfortunate tendency for those who are verbally fluent and spend four years arguing their opinion through footnotes and elegant phrasing rather than data, is to believe that a nice turn of phrase is as important as hard data. It informs the glib politics of many in the academy who often seem to think that the amusing bon mots of a Doonesbury cartoon constitute serious policy thought.

I'd love to make copies of this piece and go door-to-door, slipping them into mailslots. (No, that's not at all normal.) Go read the whole thing.
04:07 p.m.

The New Zealand government paid $900,000NZ for a domain name.

“The million dollar purchase comes hard on the heels of the Clark Government taking Seattle-based Virtual Countries to the World Intellectual Property Organisation arguing that a private company couldn’t own NewZealand.com. This from a government that trumpets the importance of intellectual property rights!

“WIPO dismissed the Clark government’s case and found the New Zealand government guilty of an attempt to reverse hijack the domain name."

Doh.
03:45 a.m.

According to the BBC, Osama bin Laden isn't a terrorist -- he's a "dissident". I wish I could use the cheque that pays my TV licence to wipe my ass before personally handing it to Greg Dyke.
03:35 a.m.

Tina Brown threatens to start blogging.
02:22 a.m.

George Galloway returns to London...and a hero's welcome. Some people really have no shame.
01:52 a.m.

Robbie Williams: living proof that you don't have to be clever to make a lot of money:

ROBBIE WILLIAMS has finally admitted what we have known all along — he won’t crack America with Escapology. He says he can’t be bothered trying too hard — despite being given £80million by his record company, EMI.

He told a US magazine this week: “I don’t think the album will break here. I don’t know where I sit on this issue — to tell the truth I don’t want it badly enough. I could break the States if I toured. It would solve everything because the live show is great but I’m not prepared to work that hard.”

Dude, people aren't even shelling out for your album -- despite the fact that it's selling for a mere $5 in some outlets. What makes you think they'd shell out for concert tickets to hear some guy they're not interested in sing songs they've never heard?

I'm going to see Robbie at Knebworth this summer, thanks to the most generous and wonderful friend in the WORLD (yes, he reads this page), and I really hope he doesn't show up with some chip on his shoulder because he's spent two years in the US, trying to make a name for himself and failing miserably. America being indifferent to your existence is no big deal, Rob, especially when the likes of Avril Lavigne and Kelly Clarkson are the kind of shit people are buying.
01:35 a.m.

I posted a couple of weeks ago about a rumour that RIAA chief Hilary Rosen would be helping draft copyright legislation for Iraq. Now, the rumour is gaining momentum. Greg Palast is a journalist of questionable merit, but he might be correct on this one (stopped clock, twice a day, etc). That said, he is full of shit when he says:

"Who's really going to win this war? It looks like Madonna," Palast told Democracy Now radio. "Where before, they feared Saddam Hussein, now they have to fear Sony Records will chop off their hands if they bootleg a Madonna album..."

Fuck you, Palast. You have no idea what real oppression is. Hint: it's a little more harsh than any corporation, no matter how evil you think capitalism is.

This reminds me of something Bill Whittle wrote the other day:

I believe that many of those who opposed the war did so because they simply could not -- or in many cases would not – imagine what life under real oppression is like. Remember, these are the people who say, and seem to believe, that we in the US live in a police state, under a murdering dictator, where propaganda is spoon-fed to us like willing idiots and political opposition is crushed mercilessly.

If you say such things long enough, and you spend all your time in the company of similarly tinfoil-hatted comrades, then you actually begin to believe that life in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein wasn’t that much worse than life in Berkeley under the racist, election-stealing, Wellstone-murdering, Earth-destroying Republikkkan administration.

This nation has been for many decades under direct and coordinated attack by fanatics whose failure to gain respect and attention through the force of their arguments have turned their level of rhetoric to such a shrill and hysterical pitch that years of it have seemingly driven some of them quite insane -- insane to the degree that they cannot see that acid baths, state rapists, children’s prisons and daily torture and execution are not mere rhetorical flourishes -- roughly equivalent to hanging chads and bulldozed Dixie Chicks CD’s -- but a desperate and ever-present reality. They did everything in their power to deny this reality, these Champions of Compassion, and Not In Their Name did these daily horrors come to an end. That is what six decades of freedom, security, tolerance and prosperity will do to some people: isolate them from the brutal reality of horror and torture to the degree that “evil” must be accompanied by sneer quotes and the motives of 300 million free and decent people are suspect while those of a small cabal of psychopathic mass murderers are not.

Fortunately, the names of the Not In My Name brigade were not required for the war in Iraq. And fortunately, they live in countries where speech is free and where the idiots amongst them, like Palast, can continue to expose themselves as idiots by speaking their minds. Unfortunately, Saddam Hussein isn't around to give the likes of Greg Palast an unforgettable lesson in the difference between him and Sony Records. (And, by the way, Madonna is signed to Warner Brothers. Do your homework, asshole.)
12:54 a.m.

29 April, 2003

There's an interesting interview with George Galloway in Al Bawaba, where he claims the Arab National Congress in Beirut is setting up a "defence campaign" to help him finance his libel lawsuits.

[T]hese defence campaigns can be a means by which we all stay together and face this difficult future together. I would like to say that if anyone would like to contribute to my legal fund, they can send cheques or payments to [SNIP]...So I suppose I am asking my friends to advance to my lawyers the money that I will need to fight this case.

What's that about a fool and his money? Oh yes...
03:41 p.m.

I don't put much stock in this kind of thing, but I saw the link on Robyn's site and thought I'd see what it said about me. If you know me in real life, please try and hold your laughter until the very end:

Your first name of Jackie has given you a responsible, expressive, inspirational, and friendly personality. Expression comes naturally to you and you are rarely at a loss for words; in fact, you have to put forth effort at times to curb an over-active tongue. Self-confidence has made it easy for you to meet people and you are well-liked for your spontaneous, happy ways. You sincerely like people and do not often experience loneliness; your work and home-life are likely filled with association. You enjoy music and could have a fine singing voice; however, the study could be somewhat difficult because you do not find it easy to apply yourself to concentrated study for long periods. In this respect, this name is not altogether constructive; it creates a somewhat scattering influence which makes it difficult for you to finish what you start. This name brings disappointments and emotional involvements through being too sympathetic and easily influenced. As a result of your active nature, you have an appetite for quick-energy foods, which you could consume to excess. Health weakness appear as skin conditions, or as ailments relative to the liver.

It's up to you, if you don't know me, to guess how much of that is untrue. All I'm going to say is, I don't have a fine singing voice, and I don't have any skin conditions (time will tell as far as my liver goes, but in my old life of a year or so ago, I probably rolled out the red carpet for cirrhosis).
02:04 p.m.

Any anti-war types still want to defend International ANSWER? It's getting more difficult, what with them now defending Castro's arrest and imprisonment of human rights activists, journalists and other political dissidents. Stunning stuff, even for militant Stalinists.

Courtesy of Matthew Hoy, here's a list of the democracy advocates who've been imprisoned -- deservedly so, according to International ANSWER -- by Castro since everyone's been distracted by the war, SARS and the Dixie Chicks:

Name Occupation Sentence Marta Beatriz Roque Cabello Human Rights Activist 20 years Raúl Rivero Castañeda Independent Journalist 20 years Héctor Palacios Ruiz Human Rights Activist 25 years Oscar Espinosa Chepe Independent Journalist 20 years Víctor Arroyo Carmona Independent Journalist 26 years Eduardo Díaz Fleitas Human Rights Activist 21 years Horacio Julio Piña Borrego Human Rights Activist 20 years Fidel Suárez Cruz Human Rights Activist 20 years Osvaldo Alfonso Valdés Human Rights Activist 18 years Ricardo González Alfonso Independent Journalist 20 years Pedro Pablo Álvarez Ramos Human Rights Activist 25 years Roberto de Miranda H. Human Rights Activist 20 years Efrén Fernández Human Rights Activist 12 years Omar Rodríguez Saludes Independent Journalist 27 years Marcelo Cano Rodríguez Human Rights Activist 18 years Héctor Maseda Gutiérrez Independent Journalist 20 years Carmelo Díaz Fernández Human Rights Activist 15 years Antonio Díaz Sánchez Human Rights Activist 20 years Regis Iglesias Ramírez Human Rights Activist 18 years Marcelo López Bañobre Human Rights Activist 15 years Arturo Pérez Alejo Human Rights Activist 20 years Antonio Villareal Acosta Human Rights Activist 15 years Pedro Argüelles Morán Independent Journalist 20 years Pablo Pacheco Ávila Independent Journalist 20 years Alejandro González Raga Independent Journalist 14 years Alfredo Pulido López Human Rights Activist 14 years Mario Mayo Hernández Independent Journalist 20 years Normando Hernández G. Independent Journalist 25 years Claro Sánchez Altarriba Human Rights Activist 15 years Luis Milán Fernández Human Rights Activist 15 years Alexis Rodríguez Fernández Human Rights Activist 15 years Ricardo Silva Gual Human Rights Activist 10 years Leonel Grave de Peralta Human Rights Activist 20 years Jorge Olivera Castillo Independent Journalist 18 years Julio César Gálvez Rodríguez Independent Journalist 15 years Edel García Díaz Independent Journalist 15 years Manuel Vázquez Portal Independent Journalist 18 years Adolfo Fernández Sainz Independent Journalist 15 years Mijail Bárzaga Independent Journalist 15 years Nelson Aguilar Ramírez Human Rights Activist 13 years Nelson Molinet Espino Human Rights Activist 20 years Arnaldo Ramos Lauzurique Human Rights Activist 18 years Fabio Prieto Llorente Independent Journalist 20 years Miguel Galván Gutiérrez Independent Journalist 26 years Jorge Luis García Paneque Independent Journalist 24 years Juan Carlos Herrera Acosta Independent Journalist 20 years José Ubaldo Izquierdo Independent Journalist 16 years José Gabriel Ramón Castillo Independent Journalist 20 years Omar Ruiz Hernández Independent Journalist 18 years Margarito Broche Espinosa Human Rights Activist 25 years Alfredo Domínguez Batista Human Rights Activist 14 years José Daniel Ferrer Castillo Human Rights Activist 25 years Luis Enrique Ferrer García Human Rights Activist 28 years Orlando Fundora Human Rights Activist 18 years Alfredo Felipe Fuentes Human Rights Activist 26 years Próspero Gaínza Human Rights Activist 25 years Diosdado González Marrero Human Rights Activist 20 years Léster González Pentón Human Rights Activist 20 years Jorge L. González Tanquero Human Rights Activist 20 years Iván Hernández Carrillo Human Rights Activist 25 years Reynaldo Labrada Peña Human Rights Activist 6 years Librado Linares Human Rights Activist 20 years José M. Martínez Hernández Human Rights Activist 13 years Rafael Mollet Leyva Human Rights Activist Pending Angel Moya Acosta Human Rights Activist 20 years Oscar Elías Biscet Human Rights Activist 25 years Jesús Mustafá Felipe Human Rights Activist 25 years Félix Navarro Human Rights Activist 25 years Omar Pernet Hernández Human Rights Activist 25 years Blas G. Rodríguez Reyes Human Rights Activist 25 years Ariel Sigler Amaya Human Rights Activist 25 years Guido Sigler Amaya Human Rights Activist 20 years Miguel Sigler Amaya Human Rights Activist Pending Manuel Ubals González Human Rights Activist 20 years Julio A. Valdés Guevara Human Rights Activist 20 years Miguel Valdés Tamayo Human Rights Activist 15 years Héctor R. Valle Hernández Human Rights Activist 12 years Orlando Zapata Tamayo Human Rights Activist 18 years

Other cases of concern Status Berta Antúnez Pernet Human Rights Activist House Arrest Luis González Pentón Independent Journalist Unknown Roberto García Cabrejas Independent Journalist House Arrest Javier García Pérez Human Rights Activist Unknown Rolando Jiménez Posada Human Rights Activist Unknown Rafael Ernesto Ávila Human Rights Activist Unknown Adela Soto Álvarez Independent Journalist House Arrest

ANSWER link via Josh Chafetz at Oxblog
01:48 p.m.

Cambridge students reject freedom of speech by overwhelming vote:

Last Thursday evening the Cambridge University Union held a debate on the motion:

"This House would gag the bad".

By 'House' they (of course) did not mean someone's home, they meant the Union (acting like a legislature) would, if it could, use the threat of violence to prevent people it regarded as bad expressing opinions by voice or in print.

As a publicity stunt the Union invited the French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen to be one of the speakers against the motion. Various young people then expressed their 'antifascism' by smashing up Mr Le Pen's car. In the debate itself over 200 students voted in favour of the motion and 12 voted against the motion.

In short in the whole of the University of Cambridge only 12 students exist who have the decency and courage to come and vote against even such an obscene violation of liberty. The rest of "the House" did not even have the wit to understand that the power they wished to have to gag those with whom they [do] not agree could also be used against themselves...

I don't know why this shocks me, but it does. So much for progressive education, and so much for freedom of speech. Cambridge must be very ashamed, though -- based on the 200/12 vote against freedom of speech -- they probably don't have the awareness to even realise how bad this makes them look.

Link via Peter Cuthbertson, who notes that this whole shameful situation reminds him of Hitler's boast of the effectiveness of Nazism:

The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.

And so it goes at Cambridge University...
11:12 a.m.

Naomi Wolf is an embarrassment to feminists:

"The fact that in Australia, as well as the United States, women . . . still don't have decent work, family policies to . . . let us take care of our babies and pursue other passions we might have without feeling terribly torn."

I'm not a mother, but I know a lot of them. Some have chosen to go back to full-time outside work immediately after giving birth, some have chosen to go back to part-time outside work immediately after giving birth, some have chosen to jack in their outside work, and some have chosen to jack in their outside work but have consequently had no choice but to go back to work due to financial concerns. And I guarantee you that there is no law or government policy that exists now, or that ever could exist, that would eliminate all feelings of conflict over the "Career and/or motherhood?" dilemma. Not one. Even if you paid mothers £1 million for every child they gave birth to, they'd still feel conflicted over any division of their attention between their child(ren) and the rest of their life. It's a consequence of the wonderful society that actually lets women choose whether or not we want to have children, and with all choices come conflict -- welcome to life as an adult.

Link via Tim Blair
11:00 a.m.

Ohio school district closes due to SARS fears:

The possibility that a group of students who visited Toronto last week may have been exposed to the SARS virus prompted officials to shut down an 1,100-student school district Monday.

None of the students showed any signs of severe acute respiratory syndrome, but two school board members received five or six calls each from worried parents requesting that schools be closed, said Rocco Adduci, superintendent of Weathersfield School District in suburban Youngstown.

"I think the community and some parents are overreacting," Adduci said. "To be safe, maybe it was the best thing."

As I understand it, the incubation period for SARS is ten days. Why not just keep the 39 kids and staff home from school for ten days upon their return from Toronto? Also, does it really only take five or six parents to complain before an entire school district is shut down? Not in my part of Ohio, it doesn't. Aducci is either a pushover or full of shit.
10:32 a.m.

This was written in 1975, by Eric Hoffer:

"What rankles Frenchmen is the decline of France relative to other European countries. France wants to be not a world power but the foremost European nation. If the present fuel debacle brings about a decline of Western Europe, France wants to make sure that it ends up sitting on top of the heap. To solve the fuel problem by force would result in a situation in which France could not play a paramount role. Hence France will urge submission to Arab dictates. It will also be for the abandonment of Israel and the cold-shouldering of the United States."

Hmm. I may have to find a copy of Before the Sabbath and find out what other predictions Hoffer made.

Quote stolen from Andrew Sullivan
10:29 a.m.

Belgium, the ICC and the neo-conservative worldview: Jurjen's got a few things to say about all of them, and they're well worth a read.
10:19 a.m.

28 April, 2003

Galloway admits appeal paid wife £18,000:

The appeal set up by George Galloway to treat a sick Iraqi child spent more than £800,000 on political campaigns and expenses, including a direct salary payment to his wife, the MP admitted yesterday.

By the way, his wife is PLO leader Yasser Arafat's niece.

He said the fund's accounts, when fully revealed, would show that, after spending £100,000 on Mariam's treatment, it spent £860,000 on anti-sanctions campaigns, expenses and administration. Four times as much money was spent on renting offices in central London and in paying staff salaries as went on treating Mariam.

Mr Galloway estimated the salary bill was £300,000, including payments to 18 people on temporary contracts. One of those was Dr Abu-Zayyad who, Mr Galloway said, received £18,000 for nine months' work in 1999.

All this despite claiming, at the time the appeal was started:

"The balance after Mariam's hospital bills have been paid will be sent as medicine and medical supplies to the children she had to leave behind."

Instead, just £100,000 was spent on Mariam's medical treatment, and over £800,000 was spent on a pro-Iraqi propaganda operation.

I've always thought it fishy that Galloway claims not to recall whether or not he was in Iraq over Christmas in 1999. Call me crazy, but I tend to remember where I am from one Christmas to another, and I'd definitely remember if I spent it in Baghdad with Iraqi officials. Well, it's now come to light that, despite protesting that he didn't remember if he'd been there in December 1999, Galloway most definitely was in Baghdad:

Iraqi TV broadcast a report of a meeting between Mr Galloway and Izzat Ibrahim, vice-chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, on Dec 27 1999 - the day after the documents say he met with the intelligence agent.

The Iraqi broadcast was picked up, recorded and translated by the BBC's Monitoring Unit. Its record of the meeting between Mr Galloway and Ibrahim says the Iraqi official "conveyed the Iraqi people's warm feelings and greetings" to the Glasgow Kelvin MP.

And as for Galloway's claim that he's never even laid eyes on an Iraqi intelligence agent, you can write that one off as another lie:

Canon Andrew White, the director of international ministry at Coventry Cathedral, said that, based on his own experience of dealing with Saddam Hussein's regime, it was impossible to avoid the Iraqi intelligence operatives.

"To say that he [Mr Galloway] had never met with any intelligence agents sounds like balderdash to me - we were shadowed by intelligence agents all the time."

All told, it's no big mystery why Galloway is still only threatening to sue the Telegraph, and hasn't actually taken any legal action against them. I think the shit has only started to hit the fan with this one, and it couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy than George Galloway. Long may he rot in hell with his buddy Saddam.
10:50 a.m.

Freedom of speech, as defined by to those who do not get it, explained:

Freedom of Speech is: The right to say whatever your fool mouth wants to say without fear of any consequence.

Freedom of Speech is not: The right to criticize what anyone has said or to point out that their words prove they are a moron. In fact, this means you hate free speech.

Freedom of Speech, however, includes: The right, nay, the responsibility to criticize or call a moron anyone who criticized or called someone else a moron as long as that criticized criticism is criticizing an initial enactment of speech.

For example: Tim Robbins says something stupid. Under this understanding of free speech, those rights do not extend to allow me to say he said something stupid. But if I do say he said something stupid, then free speech rights are immediately re-invoked for someone else to call me stupid and a free speech hater for saying he is stupid.

Heh. Funny stuff, but once again, all too true in the eyes of far too many.
09:59 a.m.

Thank you, Jurjen, for linking to David Wong's Fraud. Wong should be writing for Private Eye, so sharp are his satirical writing chops:

We wandered the streets and open markets of Kabul, speaking to the townspeople milling about. "Indeed," said Abdulla Matif, a cafe owner in downtown Kabul. "The destruction of the Taliban has been the most horrific crime ever perpetrated against the Afghani people."

Several customers nodded their heads, and grunted agreement.

So you wish the Taliban was back in control?

"Oh, no," said Matif. "We hated them. For the Americans to have allowed us to continue living under the iron fist of the Taliban would have been the most horrific crime ever perpetrated against the Afghani people."

As Jurjen notes, this sums up the no-win situation, damned if you do, damned if you don't attitude of many towards US foreign policy. It made me smile, but I suspect that more than a few people I know could read that and not spot the irony.
09:20 a.m.

Following on the heels of excellent visual revamps at No Cameras and The Illiterate, I've changed things a bit to suit the current spring mood and climate. (Well, not exactly current: it's been lovely and sunny here, but right now it's windy, grey and rainy. Mother Nature giveth, and Mother Nature taketh away...) The drawing at left is something I scanned in with the fantastic new scanner that some nice person bought me last week, and it's actually the cover of a cute-but-overpriced notebook I bought at Paperchase last year. The font on the logo above is CooperBlack, which I have admired for a long time -- most recently on the cover of the Sugababes album Angels with Dirty Faces.

By the way, for those of you who are on my case about permalinks and stuff like that, I've spent my weekend indoors and ill, playing around with MySQL and CGI stuff. (Sadly, I enjoyed the hell out of that.) I'm exploring all the bells and whistles of PMachine, and hope to convert to that in the not too distant future. In the meantime, suck it up and scroll, bitches.
08:15 a.m.

Camilla Parker Bowles is moving into the Queen Mum's old house, according to the Sun. Readers of this blog will already know that, though, since I wrote about it on April 14 after receiving inside information about it from a perfectly placed (and very good looking, and good smelling, and pure of heart) source. It's not like I'm another Popbitch or anything, but it amuses me that I scooped the Sun two weeks ago.
04:40 a.m.

George Galloway is even more disgusting than I thought: when nurse Debbie Parry was finally set free after 17 months in a Saudi jail, after being sentenced to be beheaded for a murder she didn't commit, Galloway relentlessly tried to ruin her life, claiming she was a maniac and attempting to get the Health Ministry to stike her from the nursing register.

It is difficult to understand why Galloway pursued poor Debbie Parry in so vicious a way. It surely can't have had anything to do with the fact that the Saudi Crown Prince he interviewed on his "fact-finding mission" later contributed £100,000 to his Mariam Appeal - can it?

What a nasty piece of work. The delight I feel as he gets his comeuppance is rivalled only by the revulsion I feel as more and more of his dirty deeds are revealed.

UPDATE: Will Self is a fucking liar:

The curiousness of Galloway's behaviour is a field day for those who want to smear all of us who opposed the war with tar, but I, for one, won't allow it to stick. We were never fellow travellers with Galloway.

Bullshit. Who was it the crowds at the anti-war marches cheered and applauded as he took the stage to shout "Vive la France!"? Why, it was George Galloway. Even Self admits:

Anyone who had paid attention to Galloway's pro-Saddam statements should have realised his motives for meddling in Iraqi politics were far from humanitarian. No humanitarian could ever have sang hymns to the Butcher of Baghdad the way he did.

And yet Self would have us believe that Galloway's status as the darling of the British anti-war movement was wholly unsupported by those who opposed the war. Again I say: bullshit. Cheers and applause and whoops and hollers of admiration were all that greeted Galloway on the anti-war march circuit. He didn't just wander onto the stage after breaking through security: he was an invited guest of honour and keynote speaker, and everyone who cheered him on should feel the deepest shame for their foolishness, and ask themselves exactly what else they've got ridiculously wrong about the war and its opposition.
01:29 a.m.

On the subject of the revelations of the last two days about the French government providing intelligence and other assistance to Iraq in recent years, Lt Smash has a letter to Jacques Chirac that's quite powerful. I don't know exactly why, but I found it rather moving.

The revelations about France make me angry, but they also make me feel a great deal of sadness, because I know -- as Lt Smash does, as demonstrated in his letter -- the rich history of friendship and strength that the US and France have shared. I am deeply disappointed in the actions of the French government, and I suspect that what they've done to assist Iraq is not limited to what we've learned over the weekend and this Monday morning. I hope I'm wrong, but I think the most shocking revelations are yet to come.
01:13 a.m.

More collusion between France and Iraq uncovered in Monday's Daily Telegraph:

France colluded with the Iraqi secret service to undermine a Paris conference held by the prominent human rights group Indict, according to documents found in the foreign ministry in Baghdad...

The files, retrieved from the looted and burned foreign ministry by The Telegraph last week, detail the warmth and strength of Iraqi-French ties...

A month after the meeting, a letter headed "Role of Southern France" (sic) from Saddam's office authorised the finance ministry to pay $383,439 to undisclosed beneficiaries.

Even more damning is a document from the Iraqi intelligence service, whose role outside Iraq was "to collect intelligence, murder opponents and maintain relations with friendly groups":

It states that "one of our sources" met the "deputy spokesman" of the French foreign ministry, "with whom he has good relations". It claims that the spokesman from the justice and interior ministries had sought to find a legal way of preventing the Indict meeting.

The paper said it had been agreed that no Iraqi opposition leaders would be granted visas for France to attend the conference. It is not clear if Iraqis living outside the country were granted visas.

Although the conference went ahead, the Iraqis regarded moves to undermine it as a striking success.

Comical Ali, Mohammad Said al-Sahaf, is part of this article, too. Maybe that'll get the attention of those who'd otherwise ignore such a big story.
12:57 a.m.

27 April, 2003

There are a few new Laci Peterson developments in the several links Gael's just provided at Pop Culture Junk Mail, including an Oakland Tribune story that says police knew where Laci's body was weeks ago, but couldn't get to it and didn't want to let Scott know what they knew. Also, Scott Peterson bought a Mercedes with cash just before he was arrested. And the DA announced on Friday that he'll seek the death penalty for Scott.

Thanks to Gael for putting up all these links -- go check out the rest of the stories.
10:08 p.m.

Guilt will not defeat terror. So says John Lloyd, with whom I do believe I'd like to make babies:

Many on the left and most on the right have dismissed these shifts towards an ethical dimension in international policy as cosmetic, propagandist, hypocritical, over-idealist or useless. This is tragic, especially on the left, for this current of opinion has in the past – together with the United Nations, Christian churches and many international NGOs – been in the forefront of pressing for humanitarian intervention, and for an end to the possibility of using national sovereignty as a shield behind which tyrants can commit atrocities with impunity.

As a result the intellectual/creative opposition to this war has, in Europe, been quite close to a monopoly. Only a few have broken this monopoly, notably the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who wrote in La Repubblica on 16 April that “one of the few profound joys which history reserves for us is the end of a tyranny.” But few of his fellow writers and artists have shared this joy. Most have felt something quite different: a profound disgust – at the US.

And on to Zimbabwe...

According to a report last week in the Independent, poor Zimbabwean youths are asking when Bush will come and liberate them from Mugabe. Do we smile at their naiveté and the falseness of their consciousness? Or, on the other hand, do those of us who are British – with some historical responsibility – allow an indifferent American administration to convince us that we have no dog in this fight because Mugabe is not part of any axis of evil? Or do we try to think through, as the times invite us to do, how we can better square our ideals, our humanitarian impulses and our internationalism with life as it is lived and deaths as they are meted out?

We should recognise that politics, and human rights, are becoming global. None of the answers to the often-hideous questions thrown up are easy. And those that spring from finely crafted denunciations of American wickedness are the least convincing of all.

Go read the whole, brilliant thing.

Link via Chris Bertram
08:24 a.m.

Everyone's a victim, even convicted gameshow cheats. At least according to this article in the Sunday Times, about Charles and Diana Ingram, the husband and wife who conspired with another Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestant to win £1,000,000 on the programme:

Who wants to be a millionaire? “I don’t” the Ingrams would now groan. And so to the £1m question: are they villains? That’s the verdict. But victims, too. A major fraud? What exactly does the company think it’s doing tempting thousands of poor folk to spend hundreds of pounds on telephone calls to get on a show that they mistakenly believe will make them as rich as Tarrant?

Gee, maybe the production company thinks they're, you know, making a gameshow? Forgive me if I don't shed too many tears for the "victims" -- who were convicted of fraud -- because some evil TV show made them, as if there were loaded guns pressed against their temples, flood the phone lines for a chance to win a million pounds.

Diana Ingram had already been on the show once on her own, winning £32,000, and she and Charles appeared together on a special couples' edition of the show. Diana's brother also won £32,000 on WWTBAM?. In fact, Diana collaborated with her husband and brother on a book about how to win on the show, but it was pulped in light of their fraud conviction. Sounds like these poor "victims" sure knew what a good gig they were onto. Yet Diana Ingram now says:

"It (the show) has ruined our lives and I wish it had never been invented."

Translation:

"But it's not fair! None of this is my fault! I wouldn't have had to cheat if that stupid show had never been invented! And I never asked to be born!"

Could she sound any more like a pissy, blame-gaming four-year-old if she tried? Not much, apparently.

This whole argument about people who try out for gameshows being "victims" reminds me of the old line about the lottery being a tax on the stupid. Perhaps, but it's a 100 per cent voluntary tax, and the only way the tax gets paid is if someone chooses to pay it. Same goes for those who regularly try out for gameshows.

Obviously the idea of accepting personal responsibility for one's choices and actions is a concept still foreign to a lot of people, but I really would have expected better from the Times. That'll teach me.

(By the way, the Ingrams had their prison sentences suspended by the judge, who didn't want to take them away from their children. They also stand to make millions by marketing their story in the US and all the other countries where Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? has been a success. And yet, strangely, my heart still refuses to bleed for their suffering...)
05:21 a.m.

I was waiting for her to announce it on her site so that I could link to her and say how happy I am, and now I can: Gwen got a book deal!

Gwen is super bad-ass talented, and I only wish I still had a copy of my old website from about three years ago, where I said she was going to go far and be famous someday. It really could not happen for a more lovely and deserving person, and the fact is that it didn't happen to her -- she worked her ass off and made it happen.

Congratulations, Gwen! I'm very proud of you.
04:57 a.m.

George Galloway, mates with Fidel Castro? After the revelations of the last week, that's hardly a shock. Hell, it wouldn't have been a shock anyway.

He refused to make any detailed comment on our dossier of his lavish spending, but said: "I have never been given a painting or any other present from Fidel Castro."

That's all he could muster for a denial? Hmm.

UPDATE: Things are getting worse for Gorgeous George:

The embattled Labour MP George Galloway acted as the secret 'emissary' for a British-based Islamic dissident who purchased a satellite phone supplied to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

The phone was used by Osama bin Laden and his associates to plan the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

And this is from the left-wing Observer, so God knows how Galloway is going to spin this one as his political enemies being out to silence him. If he really is going to sue all of the media outlets coming out with revelations about his dodgy dealings, Galloway's lawyers are going to be running around like blue-arsed flies for the next several months.
03:09 a.m.

Oh, this is probably nothing:

Papers found yesterday in the bombed headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, reveal that an al-Qa'eda envoy was invited clandestinely to Baghdad in March 1998.

The documents show that the purpose of the meeting was to establish a relationship between Baghdad and al-Qa'eda based on their mutual hatred of America and Saudi Arabia. The meeting apparently went so well that it was extended by a week and ended with arrangements being discussed for bin Laden to visit Baghdad.

This probably is irrelevant, too:

FRANCE gave Saddam Hussein's regime regular reports on its dealings with American officials, documents unearthed in the wreckage of the Iraqi foreign ministry have revealed.

The first Iraqi files to emerge documenting French help for the regime show that Paris shared with Baghdad the contents of private transatlantic meetings and diplomatic traffic from Washington.

02:20 a.m.

26 April, 2003

I know I come over all starry-eyed when I refer to Harry Hatchet, but he's saying so much good stuff that I just can't help it. Today he tells us, on the issue of the Stalinists and Leninists who led the anti-war movement in the UK, that it's time for the "soft left" to get tough on the anti-democracy hard left and send them packing:

We saw it with the Militant mafia in the 1980’s. If you questioned their motives (which we all knew had nothing to do with building a viable Labour Party) you were in for a rough time whenever you came across them again. Many elements of the soft left, as it was known then, tut-tutted as Neil Kinnock finally moved to drive a self-described Leninist revolutionary party out of an organisation they had no right to belong to and who sought only to feed off it.

The reasoning given, and I used this argument at the time myself, was that an attack on Militant was an attack on the left as a whole. And indeed the exit from the Labour Party of the Trotskyists has left the radical wing of Labour numerically weaker. But so what?

Surely by now we have realised that you simply cannot build a viable radical, egalitarian and democratic socialist movement in alliance with people who desire dictatorship. It is not good enough any more to say these ‘comrades’ may be a bit wacky on the theory but they are good organisers who get things done. The whole issue of Iraq shows that if you support dictatorship in theory you will do so in practice...

There needs to be a change of approach from the democratic left. It is no longer just good enough to criticise New Labour for failing to engage with a radical agenda, important though that is. We must also challenge those who offer a false alternative. We must not be afraid to expose the undemocratic nature of the ultra-left, to attack them with the same force we would attack other enemies of a democratic socialism. Ask them the tough questions, hold them to account.

Hear, hear. I fear, though, that as with the anti-war movement -- and not just in this country; the pro-North Korea, pro-Soviet, anti-Israeli International ANSWER organised many large "peace" marches in North America -- leftists will shrink from the mission of taking back leftism from the extremists who openly oppose democracy and call for the violent overthrow of the government. Maybe it looks to them like you need all the help you can get when you don't think your government's doing a good job, but elevating these hateful and anti-democratic sorts into the leadership ranks of your cause only undermines your position. I'm downright ashamed of the way otherwise decent liberals have not only made excuses for, but linked arms with and applauded those who are the self-proclaimed enemies of democracy. As Andrew Sullivan said:

A few readers have complained that by fixating on the extremes, I'm misrepresenting the marchers. The trouble is: the extremes organized the march. Can you imagine if a massive gay rights rally had been organized by NAMBLA, the pedophile group? But NAMBLA is to gay rights what ANSWER is to legitimate anti-war sentiment. And no-one in the liberal establishment seems to care.

It's time for people to start caring. It's time for people to stop thinking that bitching and moaning alone are going to get them anywhere, and start coming up with viable alternatives and solid policies and -- more importantly -- credible figureheads for their movement. That can only happen when they oust the pro-Stalin, anti-democratic nutjobs. Otherwise, they're handing President Bush another four year term on a silver platter, whether they want to believe that or not.
06:49 p.m.

Obviously, we didn't get to see President Bush's interview with Tom Brokaw over here in the UK. (MSNBC Europe may have shown it in full, but I don't have satellite so have no idea.) It sure is being analysed to death, but since I don't really trust any media organisation to present things as is, without twisting and distorting things, I read the transcript. Even if you've seen bits and pieces of the interview, I'd urge you to read it all. Unless, of course, you're a whole lot less cynical about media outlets than I am.
06:16 p.m.

25 April, 2003

If you want analysis and discussion of the Santorum controversy from a bunch of law professors (Temple, UCLA, George Washington University, et al) and scholars who just happen to be damn fine writers, check out the Volokh Conspiracy's posts of the last few days. Good stuff and, as Glenn Reynolds notes, it's spurred interesting debates about sodomy, bestiality, incest and that kind of thing. (Just thought I'd point that out for Google's sake.)
07:22 p.m.

I can't believe it's already time for the Friday Five:

1. What was the last TV show you watched? Emmerdale, last night at 7. Oh, shut up -- it's actually quite juicy at the moment, much better than Eastenders right now. The storyline about video game cheats is amusing, too.

2. What was the last thing you complained about and what was the problem? That I've been sick for the last couple of days and don't know why -- mostly (look away now, delicate flowers) throwing up a few times an hour. Must be the Spanish fly curse.

3. Who was the last person you complimented and what did you say? I told my Dad how funny he is (ME: "I think I'm going to play basketball this weekend"; DAD: "Oh yeah? Still got that 40 inch vertical leap?") and how much I love talking to him. He just got a super-cheap international rate for calling me from Ohio, which means I get to talk to him all the time now. Funny thing: it only seems to make me more homesick.

4. What was the last thing you threw away? I put all seven menus (four for Indian restaurants, two for Chinese restaurants and one for a pizza place) that came through our mailslot today into the recycling bin. Some of the houses in our road have notices on their doors reading "No hawkers, circulars or other unsolicited leaflets," and I can see why -- we get an average of about thirty or so each week.

5. What was the last website (besides this one) that you visited? I checked out Ananova's TV listings to see if the snooker is over yet. It's not. Damn.

07:05 p.m.

I love Tim Blair, even though his permalinks are busted:

TED TURNER, the vice chairman of AOL Time Warner CNN Sports Illustrated People Entertainment Weekly Fortune Money In Style Real Simple Time For Kids Sports Illustrated For Kids Teen People People en Español Fortune Small Business Business 2.0 Southern Living Progressive Farmer Southern Accents Sunset Cooking Light Coastal Living For the Love of Cross Stitch For the Love of Quilting Parenting Baby Talk Health In Style U.K. In Style Australia In Style Germany Time Asia Time Canada Time Atlantic Time Latin America Time South Pacific Wallpaper* Who Weekly Popular Science Outdoor Life Field & Stream Golf Magazine Yachting Motor Boating Salt Water Sportsman Ski Skiing Freeze This Old House TransWorld Stance TransWorld Surf TransWorld Skateboarding TransWorld Snowboarding TransWorld Motocross TransWorld Surf BMX Ride BMX Skiing Trade News TransWorld Skateboarding Business TransWorld Snowboarding Business TransWorld Surf Business BMX Business News Amateur Gardening Amateur Photographer Angler's Mail Cage & Aviary Birds Chat Country Life Cycling Weekly Horse & Hound NME Now Shooting Times & Country Magazine Woman Woman's Own Woman's Weekly Woman's Feelgood Series Woman's Own Lifestyle Series Woman's Weekly Home Series TV & Satellite Week TVTimes What's On TV Mizz Mizz Specials Webuser Caravan Magazine The Guitar Magazine VolksWorld World Soccer Beautiful Homes Bird Keeper Cars & Car Conversions Chat Passion Series Classic Boat Country Homes & Interiors Creating Beautiful Homes Cycle Sport Decanter Essentials Eventing Family Circle Golf Monthly Hi-Fi News Homes & Gardens Horse Ideal Home Land Rover World Livingetc Loaded Marie Claire MBR-Mountain Bike Rider MiniWorld Model Collector Motor Caravan Motor Boat & Yachting Motor Boats Monthly Muzik 19 Now Style Series 4x4 Park Home & Holiday Caravan Practical Boat Owner Practical Parenting Prediction Racecar Engineering The Railway Magazine Rugby World Ships Monthly Soaplife Sporting Gun Stamp Magazine The Field The Golf Uncut What Digital Camera Woman & Home Yachting Monthly Yachting World Aeroplane Monthly Superbike Women & Golf Shoot Monthly Hair Wedding & Home Women's Weekly Fiction Special International Boat Industry Farm Holiday Guides Jets Time Life Inc. Oxmoor House Lesiure Arts Sunset Books Media Networks, Inc. First Moments Targeted Media Inc. Time Inc, Custom Publishing Synapse Time Distribution Services Time Inc. Home Entertainment Time Customer Service Warner Publishing Services This Old House Ventures, Inc. TimePix Essence Communications Partners European Magazines Limited Avantages S.A. CompuServe ICQ MapQuest Moviefone Netscape AOL Music Little, Brown and Company Adult Trade Books Warner Books Little, Brown and Company Children's Publishing Bulfinch Press Warner Faith Time Warner AudioBooks Time Warner Books UK HBO Cinemax Comedy Central HBO Asia HBO Brasil HBO Czech HBO Hungary HBO India HBO Korea HBO Ole HBO Poland HBO Romania A&E Mundo E! Latin America SET Latin America WBTV Latin America Latin America History Channel New Line Cinema Fine Line Features Bay News 9, Tampa, FL Central Florida News 13, Orlando, FL News 8 Austin, TX NY1 News, New York, NY R/News, New York, NY News 14, Carolina Time Warner Telecom, Inc. inDemand Kansas City Cable Partners Texas Cable Partners TBS Superstation Turner Network Television Cartoon Network Turner Classic Movies Turner South Boomerang TCM Europe Cartoon Network Europe TNT Latin America Cartoon Network Latin America TCM & Cartoon Newtwork Asia Pacific CNN International CNNfn CNN en Español CNNRadio CNN Newsource CNNMoney.com CNN Student News CNNSI.com Cartoon Network Japan Court TV CETV Castle Rock Entertainment Telepictures Productions Warner Home Video Warner Bros. Consumer Products Warner Bros. International Theatre Looney Tunes Hanna-Barbera DC Comics MAD Magazine The Atlantic Recording Corporation Elektra Entertainment Group Inc. Warner Bros. Records Inc. Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. Alternative Distribution Alliance Giant Merchandising Rhino Entertainment WMG Soundtracks Ivy Hill Corporation, claims that too few people own too many media organisations.

Turner's always been universally acknowledged as an asshole of epic proportions, but it's nice to know that comes with a total lack of ironic sense.

And someone might like to point out to Turner (and Tim Robbins) that the "warmonger" Murdoch is the guy who publishes Michael Moore's Stupid White Men. So much for that vast right-wing conspiracy...
05:42 p.m.

Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter are considering publishing a Spy retrospective. This would be the answer to one of my many prayers if it happened; I used to get so excited when I opened the mailbox and found my monthy issue of Spy there.
04:50 p.m.

This beggars belief. As the Gweilo says:

Let me see if I've got this straight, Hong Kong can afford to spend US$77 billion on an infrastructure plan which includes a cruise ship hub, US$2 billion on the misguided Cyberport officepark boondoggle, God only knows how much in direct and indirect subsidies to Disney for a theme park, and yet must ask residents for a hand-out to buy protective suits, costing HK$25 (US$3.20) each, for frontline medical workers treating SARS patients. They must be joking.

But no.

I haven't posted anything about SARS up till now, because I thought it was all a little bit overblown. I'm not so sure, now. Tell you what, if it's not as serious as the bureaucrats at the WHO are making it sound, I feel sorry for Toronto -- their economy could take a big-ass hit as a consequence of the WHO warning people not to travel there. I was annoyed yesterday to see the headline on the cover of Metro (free daily newspaper) declaring that Toronto is "shut to tourists". No, actually, it's not, but why let the truth get in the way of a fearmongering headline?
03:20 p.m.

Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean tells Wolf Blitzer "we don't know" if the Iraqi people are better off without Saddam than they were with him:

"We don't know that yet. We don't know that yet, Wolf. We still have a country whose city is mostly without electricity. We have tumultuous occasions in the south where there is no clear governance. We have a major city without clear governance."

Conrad quotes Mohammed in Baghdad, who agrees with Dean:

"Sure, I wasn't happy when Saddam had my wife and daughter raped before my eyes, sent my eldest son to die in the war with Iran and fed my youngest, feet first, into a shredding machine. And when Saddam had battery cables connected to my testicles -- that really smarts, let me tell you -- before imprisoning me for 10 years because my neighbor's, brother's cousin laughed at an Uday joke, I could have done without that. But hey, at least the lights were always on. Not like now, with these infidel Americans and their constant power outages (my cousin Achmet says they are giving the electricity to the Zionist descendants of pigs and monkeys). And what's up with this al-Zubaidi guy? I mean, is he really the mayor or what?"

03:10 p.m.

You all know me too well -- quite a few of you emailed me about Greg Dyke claiming the US media is biased. I saw the story before I went to bed last night, sighed and once again cursed the fact that Dyke's ridiculous salary is paid for by the British public (read: poor suckers like me who have no choice but to stump up the cash if they want to own a TV or radio and don't want to be fined and/or jailed). Eastenders is going to have to get a whole lot better before I feel like I'm getting anything worth paying for from those dickwads.

Anyway, David Carr over at Samizdata is on the case.

UPDATE: Frank Sensenbrenner has a spectacular commentary on this as well:

Mr Dyke continues to state that US networks are not impartial (implicitly comparing them to the platonic ideal of the BBC), and defines impartiality as "giving a range of views, including those critical of the government's position". First, where do we draw the line between acceptable, yet rather extreme views, and hatemongering? I have not seen many BNP apologists on the BBC recently, even though they have views critical of immigration policy, and are certainly as mainstream as Tariq Ali or anti-globalist activists...

He claims fragmented media makes the White House and Pentagon 'all-powerful'. First of all, Mr Dyke, competition works. Secondly, remember the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the plethora of stories covered by fragmented organizations? Why were they so eager to publish this news? To beat their competitors. I can't seem to recall a BBC scoop of that magnitude...

[Dyke] stretches credibility by stating how he was continuously approached by people in the US praising him for his work in keeping the BBC impartial. I'm sure the average American, or even the well-educated "public intellectuals" don't tend to know what Greg Dyke looks like. These weren't people on the street, but probably sycophants at a symposium. This guy's almost criminally foolish. Hence his column appears in the Independent.

Labour MP George Galloway better pray that these are fakes -- but I'm guessing they're not, and Galloway knows that too:

BAGHDAD - A fresh set of documents uncovered in a Baghdad house used by Saddam Hussein's son Qusay to hide top-secret files detail multimillion dollar payments to an outspoken British member of parliament, George Galloway.

Evidence of Mr. Galloway's dealings with the regime were first revealed earlier this week by David Blair, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph in London, who discovered documents in Iraq's Foreign Ministry...

The three most recent payment authorizations, beginning on April 4, 2000, and ending on January 14, 2003 are for $3 million each. All three authorizations include statements that show the Iraqi leadership's strong political motivation in paying Galloway for his vociferous opposition to US and British plans to invade Iraq.

The Jan. 14, 2003, document, written on Republican Guard stationary with its Iraqi eagle and "Trust in Allah," calls for the "Manager of the security department, in the name of President Saddam Hussein, to order a gratuity to be issued to Mr. George Galloway of British nationality in the amount of three million dollars only."

The document states that the money is in return for "his courageous and daring stands against the enemies of Iraq, like Blair, the British Prime Minister, and for his opposition in the House of Commons and Lords against all outrageous lies against our patient people...."

Son of a bitch.
12:40 a.m.

24 April, 2003

Michael Douglas is pissed off on his wife's behalf over the negative coverage of their privacy lawsuit against Hello! magazine, but I don't think that, as this item puts it, he's annoyed with the British public: I think he's angry with the British press.

"I felt angry on behalf of my wife. This is her home country and there was an element of disrespect in the coverage, which really disturbed me. She is such a tremendous spokesperson for Britain in general, and Wales in particular, that it hurt to see how she was treated in this whole process.

"Since I've been with Catherine, to see potshots taken at her - for whatever reason - by her own country kind of amazes me. I don't think it's particularly focused on her, but it's this whole issue of cutting down people who succeed. I have spoken to different ex-pats and tried to understand it, and I think a lot of it does have to do with class structure."

A few things:

1. She (and her husband) filed a lawsuit against a magazine for violating their privacy...at an event where they'd invited the highest bidder for photos of the event to capture it all on film. A High Court judge eventually ruled against them on that.

2. The press -- and especially not the out-for-blood British press, bless their cotton socks -- isn't going to be nice when a pampered Hollywood star says that £1 million "is not that much money to [her and her husband]," tells how she felt "devastated" and "violated" because some photos made it "look like all [she] did was eat" on her wedding day, and claims that she was so upset by those photos that she hasn't felt able to send out any wedding photos to anyone but her mother. As one columnist put it, for CZJ to portray some unflattering photos being published as a "devastating" event shows just how much she's lost touch with the real world.

3. So maybe that does have something to do with class, but I think it's less about class structure than it is about forgetting where it is you come from. CZJ was the local girl done good and could do no wrong as far as the British press was concerned -- until she opened her mouth and said things which seemed to suggest she hasn't retained any of the "civilian" good sense she had when she was just the girl from the Mumbles who'd made it in Hollywood. (As Daily Mirror editor Piers "Morgan" Moron says: "I knew La Zeta when she was a rather nice Darling Bud of May. She has morphed into a hideous caricature of a self-obsessed, nauseatingly self-congratulatory, whining Hollywood crone.") So it's not about "cutting down people who succeed" -- it's about people who succeed and come to believe that the world revolves around them getting knocked down a peg or two. (See also Edward, Prince; though he's failed miserably at everything and anything he's ever turned his hand to, he went to America and gave a speech about how it was such a breath of fresh air to be in a country where people don't just rip to shreds "those who succeed" -- as if he'd know. I think what he meant to say was, "I'm so pleased you colonials are so impressed with bluebloods -- no one in Britain seems to kiss my arse merely by virtue of my royal birthright anymore.")

4. The British tabloids are brutal; to take that personally is to assume you're rather special. See points two and three.
09:30 p.m.

Grrrrr:

"Respect our words, Blue Angels. Respect kids' words. Don't kill people."

"If you blow up our city, we won't be happy about it. And our whole city will be destroyed. And if you blow up my favorite library, I won't be happy because there are some good books there that I haven't read yet."

Those are the words of some pre-schoolers whose teachers thought it would be a fine idea to scare three-year-olds into becoming anti-war activists. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, this pisses me off. Natalie Solent has more on this sick bit of peacenik proselytising.

What the hell is wrong with these people?
05:32 p.m.

In London and into shitty pop music? I've got a bunch of free tickets to an "unmissable pop music extravaganza" this Sunday at Ocean in Hackney. On the bill:

Kelly Rowland (from Destiny's Child), S Club, S Club Juniors, Emma Bunton (Baby Spice), Dannii Minogue, Sinead Quinn, Girls Aloud, Busted, Abs (from Five), Ashley Hamilton (the one who was married to Shannen Doherty -- his dad is George Hamilton and he's got a single out next month), Big Brovaz, David Sneddon, Kym Marsh, Lisa Scott Lee (from Steps), Pippa Fulton, Sarah Whatmore, Triple 8 and live via satellite from Rotterdam: Sugababes, Blue, Atomic Kitten and Gareth Gates

This is for the filming of a TV show on Channel Five called Spring Break Live (yeah, because everyone wants to spend spring break in East London), and it films on Sunday afternoon (doors open at 1, filming scheduled to end at 6.30 PM). Mail me if you want free tickets.
05:03 p.m.

I'm just reading the current issue of Now magazine (hush), and came across this quote from Kate Hudson, about how she deals with worrying about her husband, Chris Robinson, having pretty girls throw themselves at him while he's on tour:

[L]uckily, I married a guy who was more interested in drugs than women!

Yes, you lucky thing! (She goes on to say that his cocaine addiction is under control now, but still, what an odd thing to say.)

Kate also reveals that she moved in with her husband on the night of their first date. Well, you know, whatever works for you -- my parents only knew each other for two weeks before they got married (that didn't quite pan out) -- but damn.

UPDATE: A couple of more gems from this issue of Now:

If you threw a twig in a salt mine, it would come out covered in crystals. It would be the same twig, but it would look totally different. That's what falling in love's like.

--Olivier Martinez, actor and boyfriend of Kylie Minogue

I could never stop loving [husband Bryan McFadden, of boyband Westlife]. He's the love of my life and always will be. He likes me for me, not just because I have big boobs.

--Kerry Katona, formerly of girlband Atomic Kitten

04:04 p.m.

This is dumb. We had champagne flutes as prom souvenirs for our senior prom, but we had to refer to them as "orange juice glasses" or else the senior class adviser wouldn't let us have them. Yes, really. And guess what? We'd all been drinking for a few years by that point. I guess some people haven't learned that the more forbidden they make alcohol consumption, the more eager kids are going to be to (binge, most likely) drink.

Our prom and homecoming themes for our junior and senior years were Can You Feel the Love Tonight? (Elton John), All for One (Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart and Sting), Wonderful Tonight (Eric Clapton) and some other lame song that my brain has mercifully erased. I find that more worrying than the possibility of people who are either old enough to vote and serve in the armed forces (or almost old enough to vote and serve in the armed forces) having a glass of champagne, a mug of beer or a shot of tequila. Exposure to shitty music is serious business.

Link via Kim, who notes that kids are going to drink after the prom anyway, and that most of them will drink out of plastic cups in order to keep their souvenir flutes/mugs/glasses clean. Well, we drank out of plastic tubes connected to funnels, but yeah -- what Kim said.
02:47 p.m.

Mark Steyn on looting in Iraq:

Am I sorry it happened? Yes, because it has given the naysayers, who were wrong about the millions of dead civilians, humanitarian catastrophe, environmental devastation, regional conflagration, etc., one solitary surviving itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny twig from their petrified forest with which to whack Rumsfeld and Co. The retrospective armchair generals are now complaining the generals didn't devote enough thought to saving armchairs from the early Calcholithic age. It isn't enough for America to kill hardly any civilians or even terribly many enemy combatants or bomb any buildings or unduly disrupt the water or electric supply, it also has to protect Iraq's heritage from Iraqis.

Link via Tim Blair, whose hate mail is almost as funny as mine.
02:10 p.m.

The Galloway story gets rather more amusing:

George Galloway conceded last night that intermediaries in his fund-raising activities could have siphoned off money from Saddam Hussein - but insisted he had never done so...

Speaking to the Guardian from his holiday home in Portugal, Mr Galloway said there was a "possibility" that third parties had taken money from the former Iraqi dictator.

He also conceded he was open to criticism for collecting money from what he called "unlikely quarters". But he insisted he personally had received "no money from anybody".

Hmm. He's qualifying his statements an awful lot, isn't he? As far as the Mariam Appeal, a fund Galloway started ostensibly to pay for the medical treatment of an Iraqi girl with leukaemia but never registered as an actual charity:

As MPs urged him to throw open the appeal's accounts, Mr Galloway revealed that the Mariam Appeal had received about £800,000 over the past four years. More than £500,000 was provided by the United Arab Emirates and about £100,00 by Saudi Arabia.

The bulk of the remainder had been provided by the Jordanian businessman, Fawaz Zureikat, a long-time opponent of sanctions against Iraq and the campaign's chairman. The rest came from a number of small donors, said Mr Galloway. As for expenditure, £150,000 was spent on the "Big Ben to Baghdad" bus - which travelled from London to Baghdad in 1999 - and about £60,000 on a sanctions-busting flight to Baghdad the following year.

A total of £80,000 was spent on the campaign's offices overlooking Trafalgar Square in central London, £35,000 was spent on three conferences, and £50,000 on sanctions-monitoring publications, publicity and advertisements.

Note: none of the above have anything to do with Mariam Hamza's medical treatment. Also, how silly to shell out £80k on offices overlooking Trafalgar Square. Surely if you wanted to spend the fund's money efficiently -- either for the purpose of giving medical treatment to Iraqi cancer patients or conducting anti-sanctions activities -- you wouldn't blow it all on such prime real estate.

Even the Independent is forced to point out the flaws in Galloway's defence:

He claims he has "never seen a barrel of oil, let alone owned, bought or sold one". Anyone receiving commission would not necessarily have to have done so. He later tells the Telegraph: "I have never solicited nor received money from Iraq for our campaign against war and sanctions." That, in itself, does not address any personal benefit.

Galloway's already cracking. I honestly don't think, at this point, that he and the Telegraph will ever end up battling this out in court. I may be wrong, and God knows I'd love to observe such a circus, but it looks like things aren't going too well for Galloway.

And isn't that a crying shame? Heh.
01:39 p.m.

So George Galloway's not just a scumbag -- he's a stupid scumbag. When, as Labour Party secretary in Dundee, Scotland, Galloway arranged for Dundee to be twinned with the Palestinian city of Nablus on the West Bank:

as part of the twinning ceremony, the Mayor of Nablus was presented with a crate of whisky and a kilt by the Scottish delegation. What use a strictly teetotal Muslim, both of whose legs had been blown away in a terrorist explosion, would have had for whisky and kilts was never made clear.

If Galloway and the far left keep it up, they're going to put the Onion out of business.

Link via Conrad
11:57 a.m.

I assure you, this is not a parody, spoof, goof or joke of any kind:

"Iraqi information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf’s briefings of the international media have attracted attention for their informative and often cogent content, in contrast to the contradictions of the coalition spokespersons, who have had to field numerous questions regarding the misinformation they were spinning the day before."

So said the Weekly Worker on 3 April. The Weekly Worker is a publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which has been one of the most outspoken organisations against the war in Iraq. In fact, the CPGB is still holding anti-war events, including a forum entitled -- wait for it -- "The new US imperialism". C'mon guys, try to be a little unpredictable, will ya?

Link courtesy of Harry Hatchet, whose blog is essential daily reading.
11:22 a.m.

This pretty much encapsulates what I hate about British tabloids: they elevate an average person (in this case, an 18 year old who happens to be pregnant with quadruplets) to celebrity status to sell some papers, and then they go through the person's dirty laundry to sell some more papers. They'll even exploit some dead babies for profit if they can.

This probably wouldn't annoy me quite as much if it weren't for the fact that this teenager's already got her hands full with a pretty risky pregnancy -- she's been advised (but refused) to terminate a couple of the foetuses' lives in order to give a better chance of survival to the others. I'd be surprised if she carried all four babies to term, but I hope she does. I don't think the chances of that are helped by the Sun digging into her private life to find out that her boyfriend has been cheating on her, and then splashing it across the front page.

This is irresponsible journalism at its most extreme. The case of Mandy Allwood, a woman who lost all of her unborn octuplets and had to go into hiding for months after becoming a PR and tabloid tool, springs to mind:

'The funeral itself was awful,' she says...'We came out of the church and there was this mob of photographers. And we had a fairly long walk to the grave. There were cameras in my face all the way, everyone shouting, "Here, Mandy", "Over here, Mandy", as if they knew me or something. There were mobile phones going off all over. They were trampling across fresh graves.

'The worst thing was that when we got there I'd put these little posies of flowers on each of the eight small coffins, and to each one I'd attached a little note. They were my little private messages. And I had to watch these people, these journalists, reaching into the graves and taking these notes out, and reading what I'd written. I could not believe it was happening. I just stood there. And all I could think was I wished I had a camera I could turn on them so I could show the public what was happening to me.'

I hope Stacey Theobald's life at the hands of the tabloids doesn't go the same way, but I'm not holding my breath.
10:58 a.m.

Conman admitts to duping Lucie Blackman's family out of £15,000. What a scumbag.

Lucie Blackman was a young woman from Sevenoaks (where I lived for a couple of years, until last September) who disappeared a few years ago while she was in Japan, working as a bar hostess. Her family went through a very traumatic time, and her body was eventually found -- in several pieces -- in early 2001. (A Japanese businessman, Joji Abara, is currently awaiting trial for her rape and murder.) Quite a few people I know in Sevenoaks were close friends of Lucie, so maybe that's why this guy swindling her family out of so much money with the promise of finding their daughter makes me so sick.

I hope that once this guy and Lucie's killer are brought to justice, the Blackmans will find some peace.
10:21 a.m.

23 April, 2003

Dear Janeane Garofalo: Rachel Lucas sets her straight on the difference between Nazism and boycotts.

You know, I think celebrities have as much right to voice their opinions as any of us do. I also think that anyone who looks to celebrities to inform their own opinions is, to be charitable, deeply misguided.

That said, I do find it pretty distasteful when visible public figures minimise something like the Holocaust, and I don't think they should get a pass for it just because they're celebrities and we're not supposed to care about their political opinions anyway. I mean, I don't look to the guy sitting behind me on the bus for political wisdom, but when he makes a racist remark about the Pakistani woman sitting across the aisle, you're damn skippy I'm going to call him out on it. Ignoring stupidity isn't always an option.
11:16 p.m.

More on the idiot Santorum -- go here to read the full transcript of his comments.

Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

Heh. I'm guessing Santorum isn't on the receiving end of many blowjobs, then. Poor sod. Same probably goes for "Randy," who emailed me to defend Santorum's comments. I guess if you're not getting any hot sodomy action yourself, you probably don't want anyone else to have any either. Must suck to be you, but really, keep your misery to yourself.
11:08 p.m.

Oil for food -- who's in charge? Jurjen explains it all, and shatters some common misconceptions about UN bias in awarding contracts.
10:54 p.m.

Some excellent commentary on the George Galloway "scandal" (like no one knew he was dodgy) and what it says about the anti-war Left in the UK comes courtesy of the Independent (fo' sheezy!):

It is a sign of how deranged the far left has become that one of their most prominent spokesmen can be seriously accused of being a paid agent of an appalling totalitarian regime, and it doesn't surprise anyone. Whether or not Galloway is actually Saddam's client (he says he'll sue the Telegraph), it should shake all decent people who followed Galloway's call to realise that he has only spoken in ways that would comfort Saddam and his gang of torturers. For this, he was applauded time and again at anti-war rallies by the very people who should be most repulsed by tyranny.

If you are one of the mostly decent people who cheered Galloway at the anti-war rally, now is the time to pause and ask yourself: "What did I do?" I am drawn to the left; it is my political home; but something has gone horribly wrong for us when Saddam-saluting Galloway can be seen as one of our leaders. The day when the left might not even have to be paid by a tyrant – when it might be offering him comfort for free – is a day from hell. We are living in that long, sulphur-scented day.

I love those two paragraphs so much that they really have brought tears to my eyes. I hope some of those who have dismissed me when I told them -- far less eloquently and succinctly than Johann Hari has -- exactly what was wrong with linking arms with the likes of Galloway now sit up and take notice. You've blown it, guys -- big-style.

And British Spin hits us with what Harry Hatchet calls "a superb Kinnockesque rallying call for a war on the anti-American left":

I know that there are those who will see any defence of America as a defence of imperialism, of Bush, of big oil. I willingly concede that America, as a political force is flawed, is imperfect, even alien to social democracy in total.

Yet alongside these grave errors, there is a brighter story to be told. There is the America of Woody Guthrie, the America of the Marshall programme, the America of the great society, the peace corps, the civil rights movement. There is the America of democracy, of the freedom of the individual, the freedom of speech, the America of ich bin ein Berliner. Yes, this is only a part of America, and there are darker threads alongside the bright (Cambodia, Chile, Central America) but in total, compared to all the other alternatives, it is the US that has fought the most often on the side of the angels with dirty faces.

For the left to fail to see what can be made of this America, what can be done in supporting the basic American desire to do the right thing, is foolish, is short-sighted and self destructive. It starts from opposing American foolishness and bad policy, and ends up with the spectacle of a Labour MP, a Labour MP, scuttling from dictator to torturer, handing out compliments and support to corrupt regimes and oppresive neo-fascists.

I want to see a day when no Left-winger is tempted to support a dictator as a counterweight to US hegemony, when we see that the bigger chance for us is to join that better America, restrain the worse, but never flinch from choosing to be on the side of imperfect democracy against brutal dictatorship.

Hear, hear.
04:51 p.m.

Mohammad Uda, the man whose bravery led to Pfc Jessica Lynch being rescued, is now in the United States. (He was en route on Sunday, from Kuwait, so I imagine he's arrived.) There's a photo of him with GySgt Michael R. Harris here (scroll down).

This may be old news to those of you in the States, but I haven't heard a word about it here in Britain.
04:28 p.m.

Lileks on that idiot Rick Santorum, and why his idiocy is bad news for centrists:

It reinforces the idea that people who hold a certain set of ideas about taxation, government involvement in the economy, and the necessity of a strong defense are also consumed by the idea that somehow, somewhere, Tab A may not be going into Slot B. This is not the same thing as having a religious belief that frowns on homosexuality; if that's what your doctrine believes, and you choose to believe it, that's your right and your choice. But it's no more a matter of public policy than the Catholic prohibitions against divorce are a basis for civil law. The public sphere accomodates these views, inasmuch as it does not ban them - preaching against homosexuality or divorce is not prohibited speech. But the public sphere is not obligated to burn these precepts into the tables of civil law. We're not talking about granting a new right here - this is about removing something that shouldn't have been there in the first place. It does not encourage behavior that isn't going on now - for heaven's sake, if they repealed a law against riding dogs while naked and slathered with Crisco, would you strip down, grease up and find a pliant Schnauzer?

[...]

[I]f anyone insists Santorum should suffer consequences for his speech, they are denying his First Amendment right to dissent! A chilling wind is blowing across America! If anyone disinvites him to an event, the black cloak of Ashcroftian Throat-Chokery has been draped across another dissenter! If you don’t buy his book, Joe McCarthy cackles from his personal pit in hell!

Hee. Long live Lileks.
02:52 p.m.

Over at Freedom and Whisky, David Farrer posts this sobering bit of information:

Scotland now spends more of its national income on health than any other country in the developed world. While this has led to higher hospital staffing levels, Scotland’s life expectancy remains the lowest in Europe.

Neat. Chancellor Gordon Brown has a lot to answer for. Oh, and:

Mr Brown’s spending bonanza is aimed at lifting England to public spending levels enjoyed both by Scotland and the rest of Europe - specifically health spending.

Yes, because spending more is the answer to all our woes, right? Looking to Scotland as an example, it's obviously not.
02:41 p.m.

Common as muck: Atomic Kitten's Natasha Hamilton wins Rear of the Year competition...and shows off her arse in a pair of jeans from pikey shop Matalan. Oh dear.

Anyone confused, upon looking at Natasha's bum, at how she won the award should be aware that it's all just an annual PR stunt. Charlotte Church won last year.
02:41 p.m.

The George Galloway story gets more interesting: Saddam Hussein rejected the Labour MP's request for more money from the oil-for-food programme, according to today's Daily Telegraph.

Galloway "debated" Charles Moore, the Telegraph's editor, on last evening's Channel Four news. Krishnan Guru-Murthy, the presenter, shot down Galloway's claims about how any money trail between him and Iraq would have had to go through the UN, and it only got worse for Galloway from there.

Galloway says he's suing the Telegraph. I'm excited at the prospect of any libel trial, because I think the Telegraph has got this one right. Galloway is blaming it all on "intelligence hocus pocus," but as the reporter who discovered the documents says:

"Nobody steered me in that direction at all. We just went and purely by chance we stumbled across this room which had these files in it, and again purely by chance we came across these files which carried the label Britain. And it was two days before we had actually gone through the contents and found this document. I find it very hard to believe that this document is not authentic. I think it would require an enormous amount of imagination to believe that someone went to the trouble of composing a forged document in Arabic and then planting it in a file of patently authentic documents and burying it in a darkened room on the off-chance that a British journalist might happen upon it and might bother to translate it. That strikes me as so wildly improbable as to be virtually inconceivable."

Speaking to a friend of mine who was (and is) stridently anti-war last night, he said to me, "You know, I'm really glad I made clear to you my feelings about Galloway long before all this came to light." (Note: this person still cheered Galloway on at a London "peace" rally.) Thing is, this story about him being in Saddam's pay could be totally false, and Galloway would still be a disgusting human being and a corrupt politician. He's got a history of openly admiring Saddam Hussein (the video they played on the news of him telling Saddam, "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem," really turned my stomach), he urged British soldiers to put down their weapons and defy "illegal orders" in this war, he called on Arabs around the world to raise up against the "wolves" Blair and Bush, and he used money meant for an Iraqi child with cancer to finance his trips to visit Saddam.

Peter Cuthbertson made a fine point yesterday about what this whole situation says about our ideas about who gets a pass for engaging in dodgy dealings, in a society where "compassion and tolerance [have] stopped being about the way you [treat] people in your everyday life and [have] turned into a demonstration of the leftist causes you [promote]":

Gorgeous George has proved that you can be a vigorous supporter of all the left's great causes, and still be a monster, willing to starve thousands to enrich oneself. He has shown that your politics are no testament to your moral virtues.

02:41 p.m.

Another big BBC blunder -- or, rather, a series of them. And the journalist's response is so pissy and unprofessional it's unbelievable; I hate management speak, but upon reading Dr David Whitehouse's email, the image that came immediately to mind was a baby throwing toys out of his pram.

What a disgrace. My kingdom for a privatised BBC...
02:41 p.m.

22 April, 2003

Puce isn't our dirty little secret anymore: Mark Glaser's written about him in this week's Online Journalism Review.
02:41 p.m.

Further embarrassing herself, Melanie Goux now trumpets a John Pilger quote on her peace poster contest page:

The threat posed by US terrorism to the security of nations and individuals was outlined in prophetic detail in a document written more than two years ago and disclosed only recently. What was needed for America to dominate much of humanity and the world's resources, it said, was "some catastrophic and catalysing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor".

What the document Pilger and Goux refer to actually says is:

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions. The decision to suspend or terminate aircraft carrier production, as recommended by this report and as justified by the clear direction of military technology, will cause great upheaval.

Bill Herbert has more on the self-serving and frankly shocking distortion of this document. As he notes:

The truth is that the document proposed no real shift in foreign policy, taking the status quo -- the Clinton administration's status quo, to be [precise] -- for granted. The recommendations merely addressed the deficit between Clinton's own "US Terrorism" and the force structure that implemented them...

Again, Melanie Goux seems like a nice person, but she consistently betrays her own ignorance and willingness to take as gospel the disingenuous and blatantly dishonest words of deceptive extremists like Pilger. No wonder she favours Saddam Hussein's brand of "peace" over an Iraq free of his dictatorship. The sad fact is, she's not alone.
02:40 p.m.

On the peace poster contest: Jim has the goods, and no, I didn't win any of the Amazon gift certificates. Dammit. Here are my entries (thumbnails removed to conserve bandwidth -- click links for full size posters):

poster one | poster two | poster three

You may think that my entries were badly designed, overly simplistic, way over the top and of questionable merit (yep, they were), but how do you explain that this and these were accepted? Nevermind this one (depicting French oil companies which stood to make billions on development contracts had Saddam retained power), this one depicting Robert Mugabe as morally superior to President Bush, and this one, which won an honourable mention from the jurors. You really couldn't make it up.

Melanie Goux, the woman who ran the competition, seems a very polite and nice enough person. But being nice and polite is no defence against not knowing enough about this war to recognise entries like, say, the pro-Mugabe and pro-French oil companies ones for what they are: either deluded moral equivalency or out and out satirical comment on her competition. I hope she learns something from this little contest, because I sure have: ignorance knows no political stripe.

UPDATE: the French oil company entry was, in fact, a prank. Its creator, Jerry Joplin, mailed Jim Treacher and told him so. Once Melanie Goux realises what she fell for out of ignorance, I'm sure it'll be pulled from the contest's site -- in which case, you can view the brilliant spoof of her competition here.
02:40 p.m.

"Do you realise self-righteous ignorance has a half-life of over 4.5 billion years?" If you're buying into the hysteria over depleted uranium, you might want to give this a gander.
02:40 p.m.

Hey, at least he admits it: Gary Kamiya, Salon's executive editor confesses that he wished for the worst in this war:

"I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong," Mr. Kamiya wrote last week. "Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings."

[...]

"Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least-bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people," he wrote. "But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative — four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere?

"Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world."

It's funny; when I wrote, more than once, at the beginning of the war that I knew people who were wishing for the worst, I got a lot of mail from people saying that they found it hard to believe. Give you a clue: most of them just aren't openly talking about it. Kamiya, disgusting though I find him, is at least honest about his radical and nonsensical beliefs. Remember that next time you're reading Salon, okay?

(It's a good thing I had almost a whole bottle of wine -- Californian Zinfandel, 1999 -- with lunch, or else my reaction to this would be a lot less mellow than it is.)

Link via Gweilo Diaries, where it's Bash China Day at our man in Hong Kong's website.
02:40 p.m.