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ISSUE #44 - 29th June 2003 [95]
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There is a religion with a strict moral code, and an excessive interest in sex. No sex before marriage, no sex outside marriage. If you are not happy with your spouse, you can leave him/her but cannot set up house with someone else, much less marry someone else. If you do, the religious authorities will ostracise you and deny you full participation in religious activities, and you will be disgraced in the eyes of many worshippers. And if you are a homosexual, the religious authorities will consider you have a curable disease, such as leprosy, and will demand that you remain celibate until cured and married to someone of the opposite sex. Sound like Islam ? Actually, it's Roman Catholicism. On recent talk-shows in (formerly theocratically Catholic, now aggressively secular) Ireland, people have been phoning in, in outrage, at being denied the sacraments - Communion in particular - just because they are living “in sin”. They generally get a very sympathetic response at the Church's uncompassionate behaviour, conveniently forgetting that marriage vows are entered into freely and are for life. But such people have three simple choices.
If you go for number 3, the worst thing that will happen to you (in this life) is that some of your co-religionists will look down on you and if the priest knows you he may embarrass you. But you will not be arrested, tortured or stoned to death, by either Church functionaries or the State. And here, in what happens when you don't conform, lies the crucial difference between Islam on the one hand and Christianity and Judaism on the other. The contrasts between these three mighty religions (and their various offshoots) are not great in the demands they make of the individual. In any of them, you must
But if you are a citizen of an Islamic state you are obliged to be a Muslim and to practice as a Muslim. If you are caught flouting the rules, or trying to change your religion, terrible punishment will follow, administered by the State on behalf of the religious authorities. This is the essence of Sharia Law, which inextricably binds the secular into the religious. The result is things like women forced to wear the chador in Iran, forbidden to drive in Saudi Arabia, stoning for an adulterous woman in Northern Nigeria, the excesses and limb-chopping of the Taliban in Afghanistan. You simply do not have the option of not toeing the religious line. For a Christian or Jew, this is almost incomprehensible. Yet I believe it is largely an evolution thing. Judaism is thousands of years older than Christianity, and when the Jew Jesus Christ appeared on the scene, it was a pretty brutal faith that didn't hesitate to get the Romans to** torture him to death for disobeying its rules. Modern Jews would not recognize such a form of Judaism.
Christianity - specifically Catholicism - was, in turn, founded 600 years earlier than the Prophet Mohammed founded Islam If you look back at Christianity, you see a trail of blood, as Catholics killed and tortured in the name God, all the time believing (mistakenly, I hope) that this would speed their passage to eternal paradise.
The similarities of the extremes of Mediaeval Catholicism and today's Islam are indeed uncanny. But it is important to remember that during all the mayhem, the vast majority of religionists were and are humble, honest, God-fearing folk just trying to feed their families and raise their children to be good adults. Christianity and Judaism, in all their forms, are today religions whose sole purpose is to do good in the world and to provide guidance on lifestyle choices that will lead believers to heaven. Of course there are plenty of bad Christians and bad Jews, lay and clerics alike, but their behaviour is no longer endorsed by the religious authorities. It took thousands of years for the religions to reach this sublime condition; Catholicism was still manifestly barbarous just 500 years ago. The point of this comparison is, therefore, to conclude that Islam will, in time, also calm down and become a rational movement that claims adherence, voluntarily, only by the demonstration of faith and the good example of existing practitioners. The only force will be force of argument, not of arms. But let Islam not follow the Catholic example and take another 500 years to come of age. I believe that most of today's Muslims are a lot smarter than that.
Tony Blair and His Dossiers, continued Before the war I wrote a couple of times about the dossiers that were being produced by Tony Blair (and Saddam Hussein). In particular I recommended reading two British ones, which I personally found made a very compelling case to go to war. But the one that's been in the news this week is a third one which I didn't know existed. Called “Iraq, Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation”, this is the one containing stuff plagiarised from “a PhD student's out-of-date thesis”, as the newspapers would have it. It's fascinating reading, by the way, almost like a spy novel. But it puzzled me that the student was hardly ever mentioned and never interviewed, so I investigated.
In September of last year, he published an article entitled, “Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network : A Guide and Analysis” in the journal of the Middle East Review of International Affairs. (MERIA is a think tank owned by a Barry Rubin which publishes a monthly journal free on the internet. From its web address, “.il ”, it is located in Israel). Dr al-Marashi's article is lucid, pertinent, well-written, with over a hundred references, but at only ten pages is far too short to be a student thesis. What he has clearly done is take his thesis, bring it up to date, compress it and make it more readable. In short, his article has all the makings of having been well researched by an expert in the field. It is a serious and authoritative piece of work. The British Government was probably right, therefore, to copy great chunks of it into its dossier. Its mistake was solely that it kept the source secret (and it wasn't too smart to copy the typos). MERIA indicate they would have been quite happy for the paper to have been used - all they would have asked for was an attribution. The same goes for the good doctor himself. And you will notice that there has been no material criticism of the dossier itself. Only the manner in which it was put together and made public. It is extraordinary how people will practice deceit, when telling the truth is so much easier, less stressful, and in fact enhances your cause. But tell that to Tony Blair's spin doctor, Alistair Campbell, who put the dossier together and tried to make it look like the British intelligence services had done so.
Ireland Flatfooted in Palestine Ireland is very excited at the prospect of taking over the Presidency of the EU from January to June 2004. For possibly the last time, if the proposed 2½-year presidency replaces the current six-monthly musical chairs system. So Brian Cowen, the foreign minister, made a tour of the Middle East last week to acquaint himself better with the situation. An admirable and appropriate project. But it was very disappointing that his first stop was a sycophantic meeting with the Palestinian Authority's President Yasser Arafat, rather than restricting himself to Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), whom he also visited. Israel recently made it clear that its officials will not sit
down with any foreign leader who talks to Mr Arafat; this also accords
with declared EU policy. Therefore Mr
Cowan heard only one side of the argument, while the (subscription-only)
Irish Times described
Israel's decision as “petulant
if not intransigent”.
The reason is plain - Mr Arafat demonstrated his inability
and/or
For some people, there is a more cynical interpretation of Mr Cowen's behaviour. If you drive around parts of Northern Ireland,
Was Mr Cowen trying to send a covert message of support to Irish Republicans, and two fingers to the Loyalists ?
You know when someone ends up in hospital with, say, a broken leg, and people always say, “you're very lucky, it could have been worse”. It doesn't sound very lucky to me to have a broken leg. So how lucky would you have to be to suffer and survive, over a period of 40-odd years, all this ...
Well, that's the exciting life of 74-year-old Croatian musician, Professor Frane Selak - nicknamed “Lucky”. But that's not all. With his first ever lottery ticket, this good-looking guy has just won Croatia's jackpot of €875,000. So Lucky's going off to buy a house, a car and a speedboat and marry his new young girlfriend. Expect more fireworks !
Britain would not be so vehemently opposed to adopting the €uro if they knew why their European brothers and sisters were so keen on it. For within just seven months of being launched in January 2002, some 90% of all €uro bank notes were found each to contain an average of 0.4 microgrammes of cocaine particles, according to Prof Fritz Sögel and his team of German scientists from the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg. It seems rolled- up banknotes are often used to sniff cocaine. And because €uro notes are made from environment-friendly pure cotton, cocaine crystals stick especially easily. The concentration of cocaine apparently correlates with the national the usage of cocaine. The Finns, Greeks and French are a backward lot who don't know much about the joys of cocaine, so notes originating in these countries show the least contamination. The Belgians, Dutch, Italians and Luxembourgois are doing their best but are nowhere in the placings. However the bronze medal for dreamland €uro notes goes to Germany, while Ireland takes the silver. But to collect gold, step forward you fun-loving
Spaniards, for your notes register no less than one hundred times more
cocaine than even the bronze medallist. The
researchers said they were “knocked
flat” (?) by this finding, if not by the Spanish €uro
notes.
The German government and the European Central Bank, who print the currency, were asked for their comments, but “no comment” was all they would shyly comment. Meanwhile, you Britons, stick to your beloved sterling and eat your heart out (instead of your septum).
Though he does look a bit bemused. I don't think he realises what a popular icon he has become in the West. He needs to click on www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com !
Quote 1 : “The information I received from the governorates was more precise and comprehensive than the information I got from the Baghdad area. I was sincere in everything I said, even just before the fall of Baghdad International Airport. The information was correct, but the interpretations were not. I did my duty up to the last minute.”
Former Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, * * * * * Quote 2 : “My father told me as a boy, ‘Whales don't get killed unless they spout’ ”. Sir Denis Thatcher, Bt, who died on 26th
June aged 88,
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ISSUE #43 - 22nd June 2003 [128]
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Aaron Barschak - Comedian, Linguist, Footballer, Paint-Sprayer We've all enjoyed the spectacle of Aaron Barschak, dressed up as a camp Osama bin Laden, gatecrashing Prince William's 21st birthday party at Windsor Castle on Solstice night.
No-one knows much about him, other than he calls himself a “comedy terrorist”, and from his name that presumably he's a Jew. So here are a few titbits :
With all the hullaboo he has caused, you can be sure his Edinburgh gig will be a sell-out. Also expect to see him on every talk show lucky enough to get its hands on him. His career is made ! Good luck Aaron !
The Unratifiable EU Constitutional Treaty Valéry Giscard d'Estaing last week presented his draft EU Constitutional Treaty to the EU summit at Thessalonika. He and it are to be commended for the open manner in which, over the past sixteen months, it has been produced with the help of 105 delegates from the current and future EU member states. It is also wise to rush it through before the phalanx of new members join, as it will be exponentially more difficult to get 25 members to agree it compared to the current fifteen. So, top marks for process. What a pity it's such a dog's breakfast that it hasn't a hope of being ratified. The original, admirable idea was simply to tidy up all the existing Treaties since the Treaty of Rome in 1957 to produce a single document containing everything that's already been agreed. In business, such a cleaning-up mechanism is common practice when you have a long-running contract with countless amendments and side letters, because it gets increasingly difficult to understand what the overall agreement actually is. Of course, sweeping all existing clauses into a single document would give anyone pause for thought. As the (subscription-only) Economist so engagingly expressed it, “It is rather as if, having happily consumed factory-made sausages for 30 years, consumers are now being asked to read the ingredients on the side of the packet and consider carefully if they want to keep eating reconstituted udders.” No matter; there would be no reason for rejecting such a document and it would certainly help all EU citizens understand their Union. But tidying up contributes only 75% of the new Constitutional Treaty (which is both and neither a constitution and/or a treaty). For Valéry and his merry men just couldn't resist inventing new stuff, which will be the rock on which the document fails. The new stuff includes these five jewels :
A new foreign minister to run the EU's common foreign and security policy.
A charter of human rights, including social things like the right to work, to strike, to be consulted about big company decisions.
The EU raising its own budget. This is just code for the EU collecting taxes from EU citizens, instead of (or more likely as well as) being funded by contributions from national governments.
Redistribution of EU parliamentary votes and EU commissioners away from the small countries in favour of the big ones. Currently it takes 832,000 voters to elect a German MEP but just 74,000 for a Luxemburg one.
So, in the months that follow,
Then, perhaps after a further year to lick wounds, a more modest Constitutional Treaty whose sole purpose is to tidy up, will emerge and be quickly ratified. Proposed changes to the arrangements between EU States need to be negotiated on their own merits and not smuggled in via the current draft (or should we say daft ?) Constitutional Treaty.
French Leadership Still Protecting Tyrants It can't be true. French leaders seem unable to shake their reputation as friends of tyrannical dictators everywhere.
The love also seems to extend to the mullahs of Iran. At their behest, he has had members of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, located in Paris (because they would not be safe in Teheran), rounded up. This has provoked demonstrations by dissident Iranians in Paris and outside French embassies in Berne and London. And not just protests but appalling self-immolations as well. The last time I remember this tactic being used was when saffron-clad Buddhist monks used to douse themselves with petrol and set themselves on fire in Vietnam in the 1960s to protest the suppression of Buddhist rights (which provoked a sick joke - “what's yellow and goes well on Shell”) . France also seems to be helping Hamas, the suicide-favouring Palestinian faction most virulently opposed to President Bush's Roadmap and the ceasefire it entails. Its charter states that “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad,” yet France is opposing moves to designate it a terrorist organization. You have to wonder whether there might be something dysfunctional in the DNA of French presidents when you look both at these examples and at the support that former incumbents gave to the despots of their day. To name but a few :
So the question I end up asking myself is, will Kim Jong Il, North Korea's enigmatic and brutal suppressor of his own people, be the next dictator that the French president will try to defend ? Are France and North Korea involved in secretive trade deals in arms and other nasty things that have yet to be revealed ? I hope I am proved wrong. In the meantime, I imagine most French people must cringe with mortification at the behaviour of their leaders. Yves Roucaute, a
philosopher, writer, and professor of political sciences at the University
of Paris evidently feels this way. At a recent symposium entitled
But why do they keep electing such people as presidents ? And we haven't even started talking about their difficulties over matters of personal honesty.
Two pathetic stories have been doing the rounds in Ireland for the past week or so, under the rubric “conflict of interest”.
Sanctimonious individuals with too much time on their hands and who are too keen to tell others how to behave are getting too much prominence. They should get a life.
Leopold Bloom and Artistic Incomprehensibility Last Monday, 16th June, was the 99th Bloomsday, which celebrates the fictional day in 1904 that Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, walks pretty pointlessly around Dublin, in James Joyce's seminal novel, Ulysses, a book which, incidentally, does not mention the word Ulysses even once. In Dublin on every 16th June,
On street corners, people make speeches about Joyce, sing songs of the period, quote lengthy and incomprehensible chunks of Ulysses from memory. In the realms of literary incomprehensibility, nothing in the English language matches chapter 18. Just one paragraph long, it rambles on for fifty pages without a single punctuation mark, recounting random unconnected thoughts going through the flighty head of Leopold's wife Molly, something psychiatrists today call stream of consciousness. But impossible to read more than a couple of pages of. There are other portions of the book that appear to be no more than a jumble of real and invented words arranged in random order on the page. Why would an author deliberately choose to discourage 99% of his readers from persevering with his book ? At a time when industrial innovation was booming and becoming ever more coherent (such as Henry Ford's invention of the automated assembly line), perhaps the artists felt it was time to explore beyond the limits of convention. Consider.
Perhaps the artistic world, after thousands of years of trying to perfect a form of ever-purer communication with its audience, felt threatened by the democratic embrace of technology. Perhaps the artists' answer was to try to create a new artistic universe by breaking all the rules of the old, and irritating the majority of their customers, appealing only to a narrow and superior group of cognoscenti. Perhaps it was - and remains - a giant con job, like the emperor's clothes. “If you don't understand my art, that's your own fault because it shows you're an ignorant boor, or worse still an engineer”. Anyway, that's the view of your blogger, who is a boor and an engineer.
If you have any interest at all in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, you should visit the extraordinary Theban Mapping Project website. With maps, drawings, photographs, video-clips and commentary, it allows you to use your mouse to explore the tombs of Pharoes such as Rameses, Sety, Merenptah, Ametahep more easily and more clearly (and more comfortably) than if you were actually there. Dating from the half-millennium 1500-1000 BC, 62 such tombs have been discovered, of which the most recent, nbr 62, is Tutankhamen's found in 1922. The site describes them all. There are more than two thousand exquisite images, and models of each tomb where you can measure, pan and zoom over 250 detailed maps, elevations, and sections. Also included are 65 narrated video tours and a 3-D re-creation of Pharoah Setnakht's tomb KV 14. And it's all completely free, and free of advertising. I cannot imagine who is paying for it. So switch on your speakers and click here.
Honda Fails to Work - 605 Times I don't know who else has been watching a curious but rather elegant two-minute advertisment for Honda that's been on our TV screens (in Britain and Ireland, anyway) for the past couple of weeks. Named “Cog”, It shows a a lot of car parts effortlessly bumping into each other no fewer than 43 times in a pre-choreographed ballet which ends with a Honda Accord rolling off a ramp, while a voiceover says, “Isn't it nice when things just work ?”. I'm grateful to Andrew Sullivan for providing this link so you can replay it at will, though it takes about ten minutes to download in full. Apparently, the ad was filmed in one continuous take without any trick-photography (ha !). The Daily Telegraph has provided a detailed commentary, which most memorably reveals that it required an incredible 606 takes before they got all the bits to work right, and this drove the film-production crew almost crazy. But on the successful, 606th take they cracked open the champagne. It's a truly remarkable sequence, but if I wasn't already an enthusiastic Honda owner, I would say choose another car. Do you really want to have 605 false starts before the thing finally works properly ?
Quote : “I walked into the kitchen crying and ... said, ‘I've just killed the person ... you need to be a ruthless killer’.” JK Rowling, creator of Harry Potter,
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ISSUE #42 - 15th June 2003 [134]
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Chicanes in the Middle East Road Map Attempted implementation of President Bush's Middle East Roadmap for Peace began on 4th June with his peace conference in Aqaba, Jordan, where Prime Ministers Abu Mahzen of Palestine and Ariel Sharon of Israel pledged to do their best to move forward along it. Their respective first obligations are to curb Palestinian attacks on Israelis and to dismantle recent settlements. Delight reigned for two days as both sides contemplated what peaceful coexistence might feel like. Then all hell broke loose in both Palestine and Israel, with civil war threatened in both entities. Good. For if both leaders had encountered only sweetness and light when they went back to their respective peoples with what they had agreed at Aqaba, you would have to conclude
The internal conflicts however are testament to the fact that the Roadmap has real teeth, for only by hurting factions on both sides, has it a chance of bringing closer that elusive peace. Abu Mahzen agreed to try and stop Palestinian attacks on Israel. Over the past several years, he has repeatedly preached the futility and counter-productivity of Palestinian violence. He has reasoned that Palestine cannot possibly compete militarily with Israel, which could defeat every Arab country simultaneously if it chose to. But it most certainly can and should compete diplomatically, politically and in the arena of world opinion. Hardliners in Hamas, the Al Aqsa Brigade and so forth hate this message of reality, as does Yasser Arafat sniping from the background, for it shows up their own impotence. Abu Mahzen´s task is therefore to convince the wider Palestinian community that their best long-term interests are not in dead-end attacks, but in peaceful negotiation that embarrasses and out-manoeuvres the hated Israelis. Meanwhile, Ariel Sharon has outraged many Jews by removing a few caravans, many of them empty, the first of the so-called illegal outposts set up in Palestinian territory since he became Prime Minister. He will infuriate them more as he continues with this Roadmap obligation, and has had to beef up his personal security in light of assassination threats by fellow-Israelis. This is all typical of a normal negotiation process, albeit with higher and bloodier stakes than when, for example, two corporations negotiate a major contract, or union and company representatives hammer out a pay deal. For in negotiations, there is a curious dynamic. The two negotiators sit down together and argue for hour on hour trying to reach an agreement that is in the best interests of their respective organizations. They may hate one another, and rant and curse at each other. They may still feel very cross over the agreement they eventually initial, each feeling that he has been shortchanged, yet each believing he has secured the best deal that was available. What then happens is what is curious. Because each then goes back to his own organization to try to sell the agreement. To do this, he has to assume the side and arguments of his opponent to explain why this is a good deal. Sometimes, he will find himself ranting, raving and cursing to persuade his own organization to accept the very clauses that caused him to rant and rave and curse at his opponent. He will find himself defending the position of his opponent, trying to make the case that his opponent's demands are sensible and acceptable. And his own organization will often not accept his arguments. This is exactly the position that Messrs Mahzen and Sharon both find themselves in, but Mr Sharon has made a major tactical blunder. Hamas's chief spokesman, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, quickly declared that “all Palestinians reject the Aqaba summit”, and in particular that Hamas would not accept the Roadmap obligation to halt attacks on Israelis. He also cut off further ceasefire talks with the Mr Mahzen's Palestinian Authority. This was a challenge not to Israel but to Abu Mahzen as part of the Palestinians' internal negotiations. But
Mr Sharon interfered. He tried (and failed) to assassinate Mr Rantisi, which led, predictably, to the current appalling cycle of Israeli/Palestinian attack and counter attack which has left over 50 people dead. A worse and even more cynical interpretation, however, is that Mr Sharon is playing a double game. By provoking the latest bloodshed, perhaps he hopes to generate an excuse to backslide on his own Roadmap promises. In either event, one thing is sure. Mr Sharon's actions are steadily elevating the status and respect of Abu Mahzen as a serious statesman in the eyes of President Bush and the other sponsors of the Roadmap, even as his own standing is dropping. And this will really annoy Mr Sharon. If Mr Mahzen can hold his nerve, and stick to his demands that his own side desist from further pointless attacks on Israelis, the Roadmap still has a chance.
Fatness - A Matter of Education Not Poverty
On the other hand, thinness (think Ethiopia) has meant poor - dirt poor. In today's developed economies, however, the positions have switched. It is the poor in society who are fat and the well-off thin. Moreover, struggling health services - and governments - have begun to note that fat people use their services more than the thin. Therefore some have suggested :
Wails of protest have greeted such proposals, which indeed would put the added costs onto those - the poor - least able to bear them. But why do the poor get fat and not the rich ?
I'm exaggerating of course, but you get the drift. But the explanation in any case lacks logic. The poor man's diet is not cheap, he just thinks it is. In fact a healthier diet will save him money. I did a little check at the local Tesco.
With exception of the bread, not only are foods on the right noticeably cheaper, but they're generally healthier as well, though preparation requires a bit more work. So the explanation is not, in fact, poverty. It is education. For no-one seems to have taught the poor
And that's not to talk about the craziness of smoking and overdrinking. Want of education is at the base of poverty. It means you lack not just the skills to get a well-paid job, but how
The result : poor, fat and an earlier death. Education produces the converse. At this school-examination time, it would be as well for youngsters to remember this. In the meantime, I am all for a fat-tax, as indeed Sri Lanka has introduced. This would either
For instance, tobacco taxes far exceed smokers' extra medical costs. The story is similar for alcohol. Late Note (30th June
2010)
76% of Spain's 11,800 km of railway lines are single-track, with tracks occasionally doubled up, such as at stations, to allow opposing trains to pass each other, with the help of traffic lights. It seems that on that fateful day, green lights were showing simultaneously at two stations just 2½ km apart. As a consequence two trains, travelling in opposite directions at 100 km/hr, suffered a head-on collision somewhere between the two stations. It was Spain's worst rail wreck for 30 years. At a press conference shortly afterwards, Miguel Corsini, president of Renfe (Spanish Rail), no less, blamed human error. One of the trains had made an unscheduled stop at Chinchilla Station and the chief of rail traffic failed to change the lights to red to allow the opposing train to pass. “Human Error” always gets my attention, because it is always a sham, a refuge for the lazy and uncommitted. Its beauty is that it brings a nice clean conclusion to an investigation and a decisive remedial action - get rid of the person(s) who committed the human error. End of story. But it actually does nothing to solve the underlying problem that caused the accident - and usually makes recurrence more, not less, likely. In this case, though it might be true that the chief of rail traffic was derelict, other more fundamental, more uncomfortable questions should be answered. Here are a few.
It is only these types of questions that will reveal root causes and hence lead to an effective action plan to reduce future risk. You will recall that to this day, blame for the Exxon Valdez, which ran aground in 1989 in Prince William Sound off Alaska spilling 232,000 barrels of oil, is placed squarely on the drunk captain. Yet he was such a known drunkard that the local police had confiscated his car driving licence. Even so, Exxon put him in charge of a supertanker.
That's why “human error” is always a sham.
National Geographic last month published the first-ever photograph of Planet Earth and of the moon, taken from another planet, namely Mars. Here it is on the right, top and middle, and you are among the first in the entire history of mankind to view it. The lower image is a digitally created reference to show the Earth's position. More details here. If the stars interest you, you may also like to view these magnificent photographs of the night sky recently taken in Oman by my friend Samir Kharusi using his computer-controlled astronomical telescope. They are fully explained in easy language and annotated as appropriate. You will also get a quick history of anthropocentric thinking from pre-Galileo to the present. How one star became billions times billions.
That fun-loving body, the Danish Crematorium Owners' Association, have worked themselves into a lather because their ovens occasionally blow up when a body is cremated with pacemaker installed, which takes 13,000 €uro plus three days of lost cremating to repair. And even when it doesn't explode, it leaves a residue of gold, silver, platinum and copper at the bottom which has to be scraped off. They therefore want doctors to remove your pacemaker before your body is delivered to them. The main cause of the problem, however, is that the doctor who signs your death certificate often isn't aware there's a pacemaker installed and can hardly ask you as you lie on the slab. According to Private Eye's print edition, the Medical Officers Association want legislation that ensures “pacemaker” is tattooed on your chest. That way your doctor will know to rip it out before handing you over to the crematers. However, tattoo expert Albert Jeffers points out that a tattoo machine contains an electromagnet whose magnetic field can affect your pacemaker, and you already, of course, have a heart problem. So you could well die of a heart attack half way through the procedure leaving you, appropriately, with “pace” emblazoned across your chest. If getting your tattoo ends up killing you, I suppose it does solve problems all round.
Quote : “Do you think I give a f... what Carrickfergus Council thinks. In Peterborough we do not wish to get involved. “The troubles in Northern Ireland have been of your own making, there have been enough English soldiers killed in Northern Ireland to fill a doomsday book; the Irish should learn to live in peace and bloody well get on with it. “We are quite happy for Northern Ireland to f... off and run its own affairs. If you have a dispute do not involve us. I want an apology from Carrickfergus Council for trying to involve us in this. “What has it got to do with me if someone wants to commit suicide ? We have no jurisdiction over that. If these people are unionists they should have more bloody sense. “When you join the armed forces it is tough and you have to be prepared to deal with a bullet. Anyone who commits suicide must have a lot of f...... courage and I would not question that. “Tell Carrickfergus, wherever it is, that their whole bloody scenario over there has killed a lot of Englishmen. If you do not want to be part of the UK then f... off. I am fed up paying my taxes to cover for lazy b....... in Ireland. “I don't want to get involved in your mess. Who the bloody hell do they think they are trying to blacken my name in this way ? “If someone commits suicide then that is their right, it is nothing to do with me. “If you want to fight each other in Ireland then do not include me in it. “I was in the Navy before and it was tough. He was not forced to join the Army. “This whole thing is preposterous, I do not even know where poxy Carrickfergus is; tell them to stop wasting my time. This is an infringement of my civil rights, tell Carrickfergus Council that I am demanding an apology. “I wish they would just p... off.” Neville Sanders, Conservative leader of Peterborough City
Council,
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A
US-born son of Iraqi immigrants, t
The
army fatigues are gone, he's lost weight, his hair has mysteriously turned
from black to white and he's now being called Baghdad Bob. But,
appearing last week on Abu Dhabi TV in Dubai, there's no mistaking our old friend
What gall, what courage to parade
audaciously in front of the TV cameras, in his trademark peach
dress, women's shoes, false beard and - ugh - false pubic hair,
before sneaking round to some school at the back to climb and
wheedle his way into the castle. 
Now, for a little [Light Relief]
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Gift Idea |
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Good to report that as at
FREED AT LAST, |
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BLOGROLL
Atlantic Blog (defunct) Blog-Irish (defunct)
Jihad
Religion
Iona Institute
Leisure
Blog Directory
My Columns in the
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What I've recently
But it's not
entirely honest in its subtle pro-Palestinian bias, and therefore needs
to be read in conjunction with an antidote, such as See detailed review +++++
BP's ambitious CEO John Browne expanded it through adventurous acquisitions, aggressive offshore exploration, and relentless cost-reduction that trumped everything else, even safety and long-term technical sustainability. Thus mistakes accumulated, leading to terrifying and deadly accidents in refineries, pipelines and offshore operations, and business disaster in Russia. The Macondo blowout was but an inevitable outcome of a BP culture that had become poisonous and incompetent. However the book is gravely compromised by a litany of over 40 technical and stupid errors that display the author's ignorance and carelessness. It would be better to wait for the second (properly edited) edition before buying. As for BP, only a wholesale rebuilding of a new, professional, ethical culture will prevent further such tragedies and the eventual destruction of a once mighty corporation with a long and generally honourable history. Note: I wrote
my own reports on Macondo +++++
A horrific account of:
More details on my blog here. +++++
After recounting a childhood of convention and simple pleasures in working-class Aberdeen, Mr Urquhart is conscripted within days of Chamberlain declaring war on Germany in 1939. From then until the Japanese are deservedly nuked into surrendering six years later, Mr Urquhart’s tale is one of first discomfort but then following the fall of Singapore of ever-increasing, unmitigated horror. After a wretched journey Eastward, he finds himself part of Singapore’s big but useless garrison. Taken prisoner when Singapore falls in 1941, he is, successively,
Chronically ill, distraught and traumatised on return to Aberdeen yet disdained by the British Army, he slowly reconstructs a life. Only in his late 80s is he able finally to recount his dreadful experiences in this unputdownable book. There are very few first-person eye-witness accounts of the the horrors of Japanese brutality during WW2. As such this book is an invaluable historical document. +++++
This is a rattling good tale of the web of corruption within which the American president and his cronies operate. It's written by blogger Michele Malkin who, because she's both a woman and half-Asian, is curiously immune to the charges of racism and sexism this book would provoke if written by a typical Republican WASP. With 75 page of notes to back up - in best blogger tradition - every shocking and in most cases money-grubbing allegation, she excoriates one Obama crony after another, starting with the incumbent himself and his equally tricky wife. Joe Biden, Rahm Emmanuel, Valerie Jarett, Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Steven Rattner, both Clintons, Chris Dodd: they all star as crooks in this venomous but credible book. ACORN, Mr Obama's favourite community organising outfit, is also exposed for the crooked vote-rigging machine it is. +++++
It is really just a collation of amusing little tales about surprising human (and occasionally animal) behaviour and situations. For example:
The book has no real message other than don't be surprised how humans sometimes behave and try to look for simple rather than complex solutions. And with a final anecdote (monkeys, cash and sex), the book suddenly just stops dead in its tracks. Weird. ++++++
It's chapters are organised around provocative questions such as
It's central thesis is that economic development continues to be impeded in different countries for different historical reasons, even when the original rationale for those impediments no longer obtains. For instance:
The author writes in a very chatty, light-hearted matter which makes the book easy to digest. However it would benefit from a few charts to illustrate some of the many quantitative points put forward, as well as sub-chaptering every few pages to provide natural break-points for the reader. +++++
The author was a member of Britain's V Force, a forerunner of the SAS. Its remit was to harass Japanese lines of command, patrol their occupied territory, carryout sabotage and provide intelligence, with the overall objective of keeping the enemy out of India. Irwin is admirably yet brutally frank, in his descriptions of deathly battles with the Japs, his execution of a prisoner, dodging falling bags of rice dropped by the RAF, or collapsing in floods of tears through accumulated stress, fear and loneliness. He also provides some fascinating insights into the mentality of Japanese soldiery and why it failed against the flexibility and devolved authority of the British. The book amounts to a very human and exhilarating tale. Oh, and Irwin describes the death in 1943 of his colleague my uncle, Major PF Brennan. +++++ Other books here |
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After
48
crackling, compelling, captivating games, the new World Champions are,
deservedly,
England get the Silver,
No-one can argue with
Over the competition, |
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