backword

Friday, August 1, 2003

Strike «

Thought for the day. Major: (taking the paper) Strike, strike, strike. Why do we bother, Fawlty? Basil: (to himself) I didn’t know you did, Major.

Let page-rank stand as the carrot and the stick of good web behaviour.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 7:16 pm GMT

Saturday, August 2, 2003

Austin Powered «

Dull conformity time. Today we welcome a new asylum seeker to the republic of Blogistan: Austin Mitchell (found via Airstrip One). True, he won’t fit right or feel at home, as he’s sadly not a slavering right-winger, though he’s a member of the Labour Party and appears on Sky (or used to; I assume he still does), qualifications which should fool most bloggers into assuming he is one of their own. Kellyland is our Westland.

Alistair then did the boss’s bidding brilliantly. The launch in 45 minutes claim (which we should have said was a misprint for "years") was there when the "Dossier" reached him on 10 September 2002. But Alistair had chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee meeting on 9 September.

Austin like Rod Liddle uses the word "mincing" to describe Mandleson. Not particularly nice, but then neither is Mandy…

Christopher Hitchens jokes Did Bob Hope ever say anything funny?

Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:17 pm GMT

Sunday, August 3, 2003

What Sharks «

Sharks have a rather high brain to body mass ratio and there is some evidence of social behaviour among certain sub-species, according to a BBC wildlife program filmed with the aid of a robotic shark called Roboshark, which reminds me of this shark submarine. Good to know that conservation is at last being taken seriously for non-cuddly creatures.

That word, "creatures," suggests a creator, so it’s so it was good to find Three Hundred Proofs of God’s Existence (rather more I can digest at once; still good fun), which prompted a thoughtful article On the existence of God by Tom Coates.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:17 pm GMT

Monday, August 4, 2003

My Sister Has Orders to Shoot Me «

Wray Norton writes to Broadcasting House:

Your programme is brilliant, but as I am fairly new to radio 4, I am still getting to grips with the concept that people who don’t like it keep listening rather than just turn it off! I’m learning that Radio 4 listeners would rather write to Feedback raving about ’wasting an hour and a half of my life listening to that drivel’ rather than reach for the off switch.
If I ever get this way, my sister has orders to shoot me.

What and miss the pleasure of apoplexy at my licence fee being used to fund Humphries? For shame!

Speaking of John Humphries, we have a letter (at last!) from a reader.

This morning I heard that rude man Humphreys interviewing Thomas Friedman. Why, oh why, does he have to be so rude? Why can’t he play nice music like Noel Edmonds or Terry Wogan? It drives me crazy. At my age (I’m eighty-six, you know), you don’t go fiddling with knobs any more I can tell you!
And he is on BBC2 in the evenings now, asking his aggressive questions at mild-mannered members of the public. The other week he was grilling some poor soul about the Smiths. Now there are an awful lot of Smiths around, how is the fellow supposed to know about all of them? Take him off the air at once!
Yours sincerely,
P. Thisbee (Mrs.)

George W. Bush is not a liar, in case any of you ever thought he was. ;)

Hurriedly scribbled @ 10:59 pm GMT

Tuesday, August 5, 2003

A Sound of Thurber «

Can they ever stop lying?

No 10 denies Mitty slur over Kelly:

Downing Street sought to distance itself from reports that a senior Whitehall source had compared Dr Kelly to the fictional Mitty, an undistinguished man with delusions about his own importance.
No such comment would be approved by Tony Blair or anyone within Downing Street, a spokesman insisted.

No 10 ’sorry’ for Kelly slur:

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman has apologised "unreservedly" for using the term Walter Mitty in connection with Dr David Kelly.

Sack No 10 spokesman, urges Jackson.

No 10’s capacity to disgust us would seem positively boundless.

The Grauniad, refers to Dr Kelly’s "apparent suicide." Quite right, pending the inquiry.

Hell, I wanted to be funny, but how can you be?

Hurriedly scribbled @ 8:24 pm GMT

Friday, August 8, 2003

Confuse-a-Cat «

With the papers reporting the temperature like it was news or something, what can a humble blogger do but follow?

The main effect on the weather chez backword is cat-confusing. Both my cats are black (not that they view this as any reason for solidarity, or even mutual tolerance). Both have the unerring feline instinct for gravitating to the warmest place. Both can lie happily in the sun for as much as a quarter of an hour before they start to suffer. Then they move to the shade. There they continue to suffer, if not so much. Then they move indoors, where they recover, and inevitably, grow bored. Then they go outside again to find that nice warm spot…

(NB I thought that Confuse-a-Cat was a Goodies sketch, but a quick check on the ‘net shows it to be Python. And here’s a Confuse-a-Cat website.)

Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:26 pm GMT

Friday, August 15, 2003

Pale and Interesting «

So, August is the quietest month. My handwriting was practically remedial at school, and degenerated once I started using computers regularly. (Before that I used a manual typewriter for stories and poems.) Which is a roundabout way of saying that while I’ve been thinking beautiful thoughts in the sunshine, I haven’t been writing them down.

The most interesting events this week, outside the Hutton enquiry, have been on television.

I should have been warned by Mark Kermode puffing it, that Straw Dogs would stink. It wasn’t the plethora of British TV actors (’he was in Porridge’ and ‘he was in Z Cars’ and so on), so much as its utter pointlessness. Peckinpah’s realism extended to the ‘baddies’ — if there was any ambiguity, I missed it — entering Hoffman’s house one by one, and riding up and down outside on mysterious tricycles (why were there tricycles when there were no children about?) to show that the uneducated locals not only spoke funny, and had a penchant for violence, but were demented too.

I was left thinking so fucking what? The only claim to sophistication seemed to be its refusal to have a point.

The other great disappointment on the box was the final episode of Spooks. I hardly watch BBC1 outside the news, Only Fools and Horses, and wildlife programmes, but Spooks was a return to decent drama. I only began to watch it with this series, as there were complaints before screening that the second episode was racist, and I watched in the dim hope of provoking either my anti-racist or anti-censorship sensibilities. The programme strained to be fair — and managed some intelligence and sonorous dialogue. There’s always been a grain of the ridiculous in the plots; most fall apart under any kind of scrutiny, but they rattled along in a satisfyingly tense way.

The closing episode (and there may be a third series over a year hence) just lost everything the rest had built up. There has been an arc stretching through the series of Tom Quinn, the central character’s growing disillusionment. He felt betrayed by his boss during a training exercise which he thought was real (perhaps the least convincing thing ever screened once you ask a couple of questions, but while it was on, about as gripping as the War Game was); he thought they went to far using a fourteen-year-old burglar to spy on the French; he liked an army officer with a grudge he went undercover to investigate, and who was shot by a sniper; he was told to quit his American girlfriend because she ‘worked for the enemy’ (ie the CIA), and so on. Something was going to give.

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. Howard (The Romans in Britain) Brenton’s best episodes have always been constrained to very little actual action, but a lot of implication and talk, and have had the largest cracks in credibility. Why they asked him to write the finale, and why they accepted his story, which had zero internal logic and no sense of continuity, I’ll never know.

Some people on the series website seem to think that it was all a plot to con his co-workers, so he could come back and unearth a mole. But that assumes that he’ll do anything for MI5, when the series has been probing his limits. On the other hand, his turning bad was orchestrated by a supposedly dead CIA man with infinite resources. He could have turned bad for far more interesting reasons that a deus ex machina pulling his strings. There’s always been a element of propaganda in Spooks, as the series shows how deadly the enemies of the UK are, and what decent, integrated coves the security services are.

I now don’t care if Tom gets transported to Florida in the belly of a whale of picked up by a Korean submarine, or just drowns. I don’t think I’ll watch the next series. Some of that feeling may be petulance at such a downer of an ending, but I expected a downbeat, disappointed conclusion. I just thought that I had the right to expect a contingent one that made some sense.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 7:57 pm GMT

Sunday, August 17, 2003

Light Shining Out of Darkness «

7 hours after blackout and 20 hours before blackout. (Note that these times are therefore 27 hours apart or one day and three hours, so they are not of course equivalent — some offices and shops would have closed for the night in that time, etc.)

From Thursday, 21 August the Hutton Enquiry website will carry documentary evidence.

Peter Mandelson was right when he said, on the Today programme July 21st 2003:

the BBC continued for so long describing the source for this story as a reputable senior intelligence source when Dr Kelly was no such thing

As Kelly was not an intelligence source, he could not be senior or otherwise, reputable or not. In his own words, Dr Kelly said he was not a

member of the intelligence community,

but

a user of intelligence

A complex character caught in a storm (The Guardian). Though the Guardian also says of David Kelly

Any idea that he was a Walter Mitty character has crumbled. He had an office in defence intelligence, reviewed the September dossier and in internal appraisals is praised as a world-renowned expert on chemical and biological weapons. Not telling the truth to his bosses and MPs after identification as Gilligan’s source is the only black mark so far.

And the Scotsman:

[David Kelly] was a "superb scientist", according to a former colleague, and his work in uncovering Iraq’s biological weapons programme had been rewarded by the government with the award of the Cross of St Michael and St George. Patrick Lamb, deputy head of the counter-proliferation department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, admitted Dr Kelly was shown drafts of the September dossier because of his expertise on the subject. He often ran things past Dr Kelly, said Mr Lamb.

Few hairs can sleep safely when Mr Mandelson is around. Less attentive listeners may have made the easy mistake that Mr Mandelson was impugning Dr Kelly’s reputableness or his seniority.

Max Hastings in the Telegraph sees anonymity for sources as a question of journalistic ethics:

It seems fair to guess that Kelly was appalled to find himself in desperate trouble, after a conversation with a journalist which he had probably regarded as routine. All reporters talk privately to Whitehall officials. If we, as journalists, were solely dependent upon the pronouncements of ministers, the public would learn precious little about anything. Our sources depend on us not to "drop them in it".

I’ve yet to understand why such consideration should extend to Michael Kelly who was after all doing his job. Secrecy for press officers seems to be a cover for journalists who want to be able to say "sources" (plural) when they mean "a civil servant, who gave the government line."

Just to show that there is no certainty, Matthew d’Ancona discovers The strangest twist of all: Dr Kelly was a hawk. As of course, was Andrew Gilligan.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:26 pm GMT

Monday, August 18, 2003

Saud and Proud «

It’s not often that I agree with Stephen Pollard, but he’s bang on about Idi Amin and the Saudis. I’ve yet to gets to grips with why we’ve invaded Afghanistan and Iraq when 15 out of the 19 terrorists on 9/11 were Saudis and there is evidence linking them to Al-Queda, surely a clear and present danger to the "West," indeed the world. The greatest indictment of the Bush administration has been its refusal to accept that international terrorism is a new kind of threat, and to blunder on with the last century’s wars between nations.

Somehow, we need to encourage proper education and opportunity in the Middle East. If the US is prepared to offer bounties in the tens of millions of dollars for the immediate family of Saddam, they should be prepared to spend similar sums on other programmes. Everyone seems to think that the current police force in Iraq is tainted. Why not select some recruits and train them elsewhere? Some in the US, some in the UK, some in Australia, some in India, or Germany. (Yes they’ll have to learn languages, but if Iraq is to open up to the world, and tourism, is that a bad thing?) I’m not suggesting all police recruits, just a few from each intake, the point being that some are exposed to other ways of doing things. We should set up bursaries for Iraq students to study abroad. At present we’re allowing the closed-minded and the fanatical to set the agendas. Until we break that, there will always be recuits for martydom.

That we need the Hutton Enquiry is vouchsafed by Michael Gove, who rather unwisely adapts Oscar Wilde’s quip about foxhunting (The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable, which had the merit of assonance), to a scattergun attack on everyone not in his camp.

The inquiry provides a chance for those in the shallow end of journalism and politics, who prefer cynicism to argument,…

This wouldn’t include the Times’s stablemate The Sun of course, but seems to include the solidly Tory and pro-war Daily Mail. Mr Gove should slip in a reminder to his readers that they will burn in hell if they buy another proprieters’ papers next time. He verges on the too subtle.

And all the time the real issues will be ignored.… Instead of asking how we can better prevent fanatics killing innocents in the future,…

Well who is stopping asking this sort of question? Mr Gove doesn’t ask it, and he doesn’t address what the Iraw war had to do with the question, if anything. I could ask the question "what has the Hutton Enquiry to do with the price of cheese?" No law that I know of prevents me. And the price of cheese is important.

In any case, the whole Hutton hoo-hah is not really about Dr Kelly. Well before he took his own life politicians with a grudge and journalists with an agenda were demanding that a judge be sent for to try the Government for daring to win the war in Iraq.

Politicians [pl] with a grudge [sing]? Do they all share the one? "It’s my turn for the chip, old boy." "Well that’s a weight off my shoulder." And journalists with an agenda (again the odd singular/plural juxtaposition). What is wrong with an agenda? It sounds like Craig Brown. "I have principles. You have an agenda. He is Osama Bin Laden/Robin Cook." I would believe that Mr Gove is an agenda-free zone if his opinion even slightly opposed the line of all the Murdoch papers. Perhaps it is just coincidence.

[The Hutton Enquiry] by its very existence implies that the Government and its behaviour over the Iraq war are deeply questionable, if not positively criminal.

Questionable means "that may be questioned, doubtful, uncertain" which seems only reasonable. "Deeply" here is just a sonorous adjective. Something is questionable or it is not. But it sounds good, and they don’t call the paper the Thunderbox for nothing.

None of these groups [agenda-bearing hacks from the Mail, embittered politicians, etc] has been driven by a disinterested desire to arrive at the truth.

So asking questions is not the way to arrive at the truth. I suggest Mr Gove look into the works of the late Karl Popper if he thinks that disinterested enquiry (here used to mean "without preconceptions") is possible or desirable.

Under question, indeed under implicit attack, is the right of the Government to make the best possible case for its actions in a hostile media climate

This does seem to be the core of the Enquiry. The Government did not make the best possible case, but made a case which suited it. As for the hostile media climate, the BBC was neutral, at least one reporter in Iraq, Andrew Gilligan, was pro-war, the Mirror was anti-war, the Grauniad and the Independent largely, but not exclusively anti, and the rest largely pro.

Saddam Hussein was not accountable. Tony Blair, like any democrat, should be. Being criticised goes with the territory, and they should be grateful: it saves them from the absolute corruption that comes from absolute power.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:38 pm GMT

Tuesday, August 19, 2003

20 Greats «

If Peter Cuthbertson can post his 20 Greatest Figures of the Twentieth Century (based on the Right Wing News polls of right-wing and left-wing bloggers), then so can I.

It doesn’t surprise me that my choice is closer to the "left-wingers," and I make no apologies for the absence of generals. The absence of women is more embarrassing. I feel bad for omitting, among others, John von Neumann, Richard Feynman, and Jonas Salk. And really this sample covers only a few degrees of longitude (and, apart from Mandela, all are from the northern hemisphere). i thought about Ghandi, but too many people I admire, like Orwell and Koestler, had little time for him. I even considered Gene Roddenberry, but this list will be embarrassing enough without him.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:54 pm GMT

Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Not Another Pretty Face «

According to the BBC, young people want to be Bill Gates not Gareth Gates. And I was just thinking that Bill showed up in quite a few lists of greatest persons of the 20th century. Clearly not many Slashdot readers among them.

The Independent has an almost perfect silly season non-story with Texting blamed for summer movie flops:

…the technology of hand-held text-message devices has drastically cut down the time it takes for movie-goers to tell their friends that a heavily promoted summer action movie is a waste of time and money.

Sudden Giant Nostril Gallery: my favourites are Mandatory Pussy Reference Cat and Moses (cat) (via Metafilter).

Hurriedly scribbled @ 9:38 pm GMT

Thursday, August 21, 2003

Ouch! «

Earache Brazilian loses more than hearing: being a little deaf, Valdemar Lopes de Moraes thought he heard his name when a nurse called for Aldemar Aparecido Rodrigues, who was scheduled for a vasectomy. He apparently asked no questions when being prepared for the operation. Mr de Moraes, a local farmer, later told staff he thought his ear inflammation had reached as far as his testicles. And I thought farmers knew basic anatomy.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Alastair John Campbell, the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications and Strategy, gave evidence to the morning and afternoon sessions of the Hutton Enquiry.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:09 pm GMT

Friday, August 22, 2003

Free At Last «

Keiko the "Free Willy" whale still doesn’t want to be free. In some ways a really sad story.

And Keiko is still a novice at life in the wild. In February, he swam under ice for the first time, panicked and broke through, injuring his head.

I am aware that this has a slightly insensitive title given the previous post.

The dance is dead. And I bet you never even knew it existed.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:08 pm GMT

The BBC celebrates the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s Let freedom ring speech (also famous for the I have a dream refrain) with Marching for freedom, accounts from participants in Dr King’s movement. Not everyone thinks that the apotheosis of Dr King has been in good faith: there are the accusations of plagiarism which came to light in Theodore Pappas’s Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Other Prominent Americans. I haven’t been able to find extracts online, so Gavan Tredoux’s review will have to do. Without having read the book, it seems to me that the review goes too far: Martin Luther King’s thesis occupies one chapter; he isn’t by any means the only American accused of plagiarism, and Tredoux seeks to tarnish all of Dr King’s reputation by examining his academic failings. These are deep waters, but I don’t think that Dr King’s repuatation unravels so easily.

There may well have been shortcomings in the doctoral thesis Dr King submitted. As Tredoux says:

Pappas has no trouble establishing the principal case against Luther King Jr., since a few lengthy excerpts from his doctoral thesis and an uncannily similar work at the same college, by the deliciously-named Jack Boozer, more than suffices. Luther King Jr. copied vast tracts of text from Boozer, even repeating citation errors in the original. It is especially poignant that this was work conducted in divinity.

It isn’t especially poignant that he was a student of divinity: divinity courses are supposed to produce preachers, not great thinkers, like another Luther or Kierkegaard. Boston University certainly seem to be at fault for not spotting the errors in either thesis. King may not have been the originator of all the phrases associated with him, but one can accuse even Shakespeare of that, but he could think on his feet and extemporise on a theme:

Indeed, he had actually started to wind [his speech] up without its signature passage when the singer Mahalia Jackson, who stood nearby, encouraged him to go on. When he began to tell the crowd: "Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama," she urged him: "Tell them about your dream Martin. Tell them about the dream."

according to Gary Younge in the Guardian. Younge is himself taken to task by Peter Cutherbertson. Younge and Cuthbertson collide like Boeing 747s coming in to land — in different airports. I don’t think Younge has anything of substance to say; his piece is just an "it was 40 years ago today yadda yadda yadda" chewing-gum article too typical of the Guardian. He has a political point at the end which Cuthbertson misreads, and which seems — to me — fatuous anyway. In stating

Only equality could ensure that they would be able to pay the bill.

Younge misunderstands the meaning of equality to Americans. He seems to think that equality is only possible in a near-perfect socialist state. Cuthbertson, and I suspect most US citizens, take it to mean something like "equality of opportunity." Although it puts me in the camp of people I usually can’t stand, my intuition is that university admission and employment contracts should be unaware of colour, and not quota-filling. While I accept that race relations in the US are far from ideal, I can’t see which of King’s demands has not been met. (Except perhaps "We can not be satisfied as long as… a negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote…" but that seems true of too many voters.)

I included Dr King in my list of 20 Greatest figures of the 20th Century, so I own up to a degree of bias. But King’s greatness lies outside his speeches, even if that is what got him noticed. It was his tactical nous, and his leadership that made him great, ask Conservative historian Andrew Roberts. George Bush doesn’t write his own speeches either.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:54 pm GMT

Saturday, August 23, 2003

Shoplifters of the World Unite «

When I posted yesterday about Martin Luther King, I had meant to go on at greater length about the issue of plagiarism in universities. Gavan Tredoux’s article seeks to imply that plagiarism is a fault unique to Dr King. In fact, there seem to be two problems with this.

First King’s plagiarism would not have been so obvious had he not copied erroneous references from an earlier thesis, which shows to me that the examination process was pretty slack at best. Perhaps if they had raised expectations higher, he might have worked harder. King may have been guilty of plagiarism, but he also guilty of doing only what he had to earn his doctorate.

When I was at university, plagiarism kept the photocopying machines occupied all the hours the libraries were open. I doubt that there are many students in the arts not guilty of lazily lifting others’ texts at some point, and passing off an argument as original.

Ian Betteridge shows that a PhD is no guarantee of recognising a decent argument in A silver lining to unjust executions.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:57 pm GMT

Monday, August 25, 2003

I Write Like a Girl «

according to The Gender Genie, based on this algorithm, which is supposed to deduce an author’s gender 80% of the time. The results when I checked were close to chance: it was actually wrong a little more often than it was right.

However, that may be because I mostly gave it blog entries, and that may explain Nick Barlow’s results too. The best explanation is in this Nature article: Computer program detects author gender.

These differing styles have previously been called "informational" and "involved", respectively.

Blogs tend to be personal in some sense (even this one), so it wouldn’t be surprising if the style were indeed "involved".

Hurriedly scribbled @ 10:54 pm GMT

Conservative-Liberal-Socialism Revisited (found via Sitting on a Fence).

[I]t seems to me possible, indeed sensible, to value the conservative temper and traditions, to feel some respect for complex social institutions, to participate in liberal discussion and applaud liberal values, to abhor socialism without adjectives but support public social responsibility.

I’m reluctant to consider myself a conservative of any sort, although my natural pessimism (and I suppose my age) makes me leery of what I’d now call change for change’s sake. I’m almost an inverse Blairite: I’m sceptical of all this ‘New’ stuff — I was perfectly happy with warm beer and old maids bicycling through the mists. What galls me about libertarians and neo-conservatives most is their instinct for making things worse. I’m not a natural believer in ‘regime changes’ either. As William Yeats says in The Great day:

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

I’m unashamedly liberal, which puts me at odds with most conservatives, and I would defend the common ownership of as much as possible. Still, I don’t see Conservative-Liberal-Socialist as a label I’ll be adopting soon.

Remarkable applications from stem cell reseach: Cell transplant restores vision.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:27 pm GMT

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Run, Rabbit «

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to catch a rabbit. I believe that the preferred method of hunting them is to use a gun. I helped dissect a rabbit when on holiday when I was fourteen. It had been pregnant and stank mightily. I forget why it was dissected something to do with the diet on Fair Isle, I think, but I’m not making any promises.

If you don’t know, catching a rabbit is a tricky business. They don’t run as far as you expect, but they move like fleas. One moment they’re there; the next they’re a few feet away, and sneaking up is impossible.

I learned all this while feeding a friend’s cat and his daughter’s rabbit over the bank holiday weekend. The hutch seemed too cramped and I let the rabbit out for a little exercise. I thought the garden was walled all round, but there is a breach in the wall at the back which a healthy animal could have hurdled. Fortuneately the rabbit consistently turned back at the brink of freedom, and preferred to hide and dig up the borders. You also can’t use cats like sheepdogs. They don’t really work with you in any way, so I gave up on pincher movements early on. Despite that the rabbit ought to have been hungry, I couldn’t tempt it back with food.

I gave up chasing it for a bit, and went to watch TV, but none of the remotes seemed to change the channel from FilmFour, which was locked in an unending loop of trailers. Then the TV wouldn’t turn off either. Eventually I turned off all the plugs, as the only foolproof solution, and hoped the video hadn’t been set. (I doubt it as Dave’s digital watch is always on GMT, as he doesn’t reset it for summer time.) As boredom had now set in, I went from encouraging the rabbit to move back to the safety of its hutch to attempts at grabbing it. The thought of leaving it out occured, but that wall at the back bothered me, and though the rabbit was bigger than the cat, there would be other cats later, and I have seen foxes in the area anyway.

So then I learned how quickly rabbits can move. Don’t try to catch one alone.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:00 pm GMT

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

BBC Joke «

In the 1980s there was an advert for Rover with two Germans driving along talking in German with subtitles and they stop next to this Richard Rogers building (it may have been Norman Foster), and the driver (the car is, as you knew, a Rover) says “Britische Architekt.”

See, for intance Yoz’s comment to Tom Coates’s blog entry I mentioned earlier. Google, one of the few survivors, boasts their Calculator, which has the charmingly geeky answer to life the universe and everything.

All I can say is “BBC Joke.”

Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:42 pm GMT

Two pieces I agree with from Samizdata. The first is an excellent take (though I disagree with the final paragraph, which blames his mother) on this Guardian article Death of a schoolboy. It’s one of those stories which there is nothing to add to.

The second is Madsen Pirie’s line at the end of another Guardian piece — Antidote to the stiff upper lip (which would otherwise have mouldered away forgotten): .“Thinking has been given a bad press. Feeling did not devise a law of gravity: thinking did.”

Martin Krygier, in Conservative-Liberal-Socialism Revisited states that

Many liberals have no time for the conservative disposition. Such non-conservative liberals are enemies of the unexamined life. In principle, they believe everything should be weighed on the scales of liberal reason.

I’m rather a fan of thinking, and I always thought that John Stuart Mill had it right about the “stupid party” — but then, New Labour are Tories, aren’t they?

The Campaign for Emotional Literacy still exists, though perhaps you have to be a Guardian reader to be aware of it. I suppose it’s one way of keeping trick cyclists and counsellors off the streets. I mean if I wanted to put the world to rights and tell everyone and his dog they were wrong all the time, I’d keep a blog…

Tom Coates gathers too many wonderful replies to Tories would close BBC website to select any to repeat here. My homepage is the BBC News site, and my only objection to the licence fee is that it is essentially a form of poll tax. Most of the objectors to the licence fee would seem to prefer to pay more, or they live abroad and don’t pay for it anyway. Still the Tories come up with daft ideas, and then New Labour pinch them. Good to see from Tom’s comments that any such policy would be stiffly resisted.

I can’t understand the Google Calculator, even if it knows the answer to life the universe and everything. Even mobile phones have working calculators, you’re reading this on a big poweful calculator now. But it seems to impress a lot of people.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:52 pm GMT

Thursday, August 28, 2003

The Opium of the People «

Christopher Hitchens’s attack on The immorality of the Ten Commandments (the page never stopped loading in my Internet Explorer, but that’s MS for you)

the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it

provoked certain degree of heat, but little actual light. There is a reply of sorts at the bottom of the article, though sadly the person who supplied it has problems with their shift key. (“rape, he says, was left out. well no, it wasn’t. rape is a form of theft, after all” gives as much a flavour as I can handle.) It’s my loss, but I don’t get the “uncaused cause” argument. God, didn’t make people bad, but they still rebelled… um yes. The church could have been quicker to condemn the Nazis. It could have even bothered to condemn the Nazis. If the atrocities of the last century were larger than earlier ones, it was only because technology made it possible. The Inquisition, the auto-da-fés, the Crusades, were also the product of “the criminal in us” (to quote Auden). Dante seemed confident that he would meet most former Popes in Hell. Machievelli learned “Machievellianism” from the Borgias. How moral were they?

I’ve yet to see anyone tackle him head on here. And I suspect that’s because he’s not wrong.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 10:42 pm GMT

The Hubble site is showcasing the newest Mars images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Anthony Burgess, when asked what he would do differently if he could live his life again, once said that he wouldn’t read The Magus by John Fowles. (He may have named a different book to another interviewer, but it’s The Magus, which I remember liking, even if I couldn’t recap any details now, which sticks in my mind.) One book I wouldn’t bother attempting again is Appearance and Reality by F.H. Bradley, which I read out of a misguided attempt to better understand:

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

which is helpfully explained in the notes:

411. Cf. Inferno, XXXIII, 46:
  ’ed io senti chiavar l’uscio di sotto
  all’ orribile torre’
Also F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 306

I know you want more, so you’d better read the whole poem.

As Janet Daley points out, Bradley, Eliot, and their critics, Russell, Ayer, and the gang

of course, had not lived through the Blair Government.

The Hutton Enquiry is turning out not to be Watergate: there will be no impeachments, just a few lost jobs, but what lingers is Ms Daley’s impression

What will probably remain after all this will be a sense of the Government having been cleared on the specific charge that the BBC pursued with such badly judged zeal, but having been exposed as little more than a team of political conjurors: illusionists who fail to distinguish between content and packaging, who believe that all problems are solved by finding the right form of words.

Shantih shantih shantih.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:43 pm GMT

Friday, August 29, 2003

Political Candour «

I was impressed by this 1977 interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger (link from Kottke). Arnold comes over as particularly relaxed, articulate, intelligent, and thoughtful. There may well be worse candidates than him out of the 136 or whatever it is candidates. The only wrong note was his statement that he “should probably play the victim” — if that’s what he calls indestructible robots from the future, maybe he’s not so savvy after all.

The cartoon on the fifth page (it’s a long article), finally explains all that spam I’ve been getting.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 9:33 pm GMT

Rod Liddle has gone from strength to strength since leaving the Today programme; he has a higher profile at least. Now the man the Torygraph objected to as editor of the middle-classes favourite breakfast news programme is an associate editor of The Spectator.

To show that he is not merely sitting on his laurels, he wrote this week’s cover story The hand of history is pointing to the door:

Andrew Gilligan and David Kelly were not the first members of the public to suffer systematic hounding and character assassination after having crossed swords with No. 10 Downing Street. Rose Addis, the pensioner who wished only for an operation, got it with both barrels, if you recall. It was put about that she was a “racist“, to the incandescent fury of her family. The people who ran the support group for victims of the Paddington train crash were also defamed (to an even worse degree than Ms Addis—they were labelled “Tories“). The former drugs tsar, Keith Hellawell, and the former parliamentary ombudsman, Elizabeth Filkin, found themselves attacked and, in the end, forced out of office. Even outgoing ministers haven’t been spared — ask Mo Mowlam and David Clark, for example. And, indeed, existing ministers, or at least existing ministers who pose a possible political threat to the Prime Minister, such as the Chancellor. Gordon Brown, you will remember, is psychologically disturbed, according to Alastair Campbell.

Talk about prescient. Alastair Campbell quits and finds the obituaries have already been written: The life and times of Alastair Campbell. The BBC takes some reactions.

One of the ironies of New Labour has been the success of Campbell. Peter Mandleson borrowed considerable sums of money on the strength of a future book deal, when he was but a poor MP, rubbing along on a measly 42 grand a year. Tough for a single man, when there are people out there with children to feed and so on. I can’t imagine in much interest in the book now, though you can see it

Bernie Eccleston brought over another flute of champagne and some avocado for me. “I just wanted to say,” he began, “that you are the smartest, most daring man I have ever met.” How perceptive he is!… That man Prescott passed me on the stair of No 10 today. He is a pleb. I ignored him of course, but politely. I pretended that I was talking to my excellent friend Geri Halliwell on my smart new Nokia…

But Campbell has a wonderfully clear mind. He dissects his enemies like some lecturing surgeon. If the changes in tone, and the nuances in timbre he manages between the documents released by the Hutton Enquiry and his own testimonies and interviews shine through, just a transcription on his diaries will be a world bestseller. That’s the book I want to buy, anyway.

That Campbell has been replaced so quickly by Dave Hill shows that no lessons have been learnt. Campbell and Hill are party operatives, and act in the interests of the party. They should not be paid like civil servants. I actually admire Campbell, I just think that he had the wrong employer. (And I secretly hope that the falling out between Fiona Millar and Cherie over Carole Caplin, as well as the falling-on-sword act will have embittered him to pitiless honesty. Otherwise, I won’t buy the book, just to warn all the publishers out there.) So they appoint party loyalists to public office in the States. I admire the West Wing as much as the next liberal. I used to like Starsky and Hutch too. I didn’t think it was true.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:59 pm GMT

Saturday, August 30, 2003

The Moral Bankruptcy of the War-Mongers «

Stephen Pollard finds this parody Ikea ad naueating. War is hell, yadda, yadda, yadda. I actually agree: it is nauseating. Therefore I can’t see why he didn’t call his blog entry “The moral bankruptcy of the war-mongers”

We’re going to miss Ali: Those Other Off The Record Briefings.

The future, in a word, is Californian according to the New York Times — the article is not exactly wrong, but supposes a direction for evolution. But then I’m in the green-ink brigade on this one. I still believe in punctuated equilibrium, long after even the late Stephen Jay Gould abandoned it.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:03 pm GMT

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