Ephemeral Isle
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Monday
2 January 2006
One Move and the Jihadi Gets It
Susan Osthoff. You have to take our word for it
Notice anything in common about these recent spate of kidnappings in the Middle East?
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Iraq 26 November 2005: Norman Kember (British), James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden (Canadian), and Tom Fox (American).
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Members of the Christian Peacemakers, a Canadian group opposed to the Coalition and tasked to "expose abusive acts by U.S. Armed Forces," though not those of the terrorists.
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Gaza 28 December (released): Kate Burton (British).
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Works for Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, a group whose activities, according to NGO Monitor, reflect centrality of (a) radical anti-Israel agenda, including promoting claims of "Israeli war crimes".
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Iraq 25 November 2005 (released): Susanne Osthoff (German)
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Archaeologist and photo gal for this column. After being let go at the same time a Hezbollah killer was released from a German prison in a move that Berlin called a pure coincidence (cough, cough), Ms. Osthoff appeared on Al Jazeera in a yashmak to claim she'd been kidnapped by "poor Sunnis" because they couldn't find any Americans. Has since further embarrassed the German government by refusing to return to the Fatherland.
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Iraq 5 December 2005. Bernard Planche (French).
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Winner of the Poor Bastard Award. Planche is an engineer with AACCESS NGO working on water projects in Iraq. He's included here because one of the demands of his captors is that France withdraws from Iraq. Tricky, because France isn't in Iraq.
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Give up? Five out of the seven are members of anti-Coalition, anti-Israel groups, one is a convert to Islam whose story changes by the day, and the seventh has the bad luck of being a citizen of a country that still hasn't learned that appeasement doesn't work worth a damn.
What's
interesting about this weird little clutch is that it shows just how
desperate the terrorists are becoming. Having learned that going up
against Coalition forces is a guarantee of mass job openings in Al Qaeda,
that blowing up weddings in Amman is not exactly the way to conduct a hearts
and minds campaign, and that beheading people on television just pisses off
the infidels, the Islamofascists have sunk to the bottom of the barrel and
have resorted to kidnapping people who support them.
Nothing spells pure gonzo despair like using your own allies as abduction fodder. When this goes bust, as it will, don't be surprised if the next bold Al Qaeda strategy doesn't look more like a Cleavon Little impression.
Tuesday
3 January 2006
Mixed Messages
Palestinian Child Abuse
Tip o' the hat to Little Green Footballs.
I have no doubt that most Muslims want nothing but a quiet life, but there are those who make no bones about wanting to subject the West to sharia law, as this list of quotes from Dhimmiwatch shows.
Sometimes I feel like this isn't so much a war we're in as a revival of the 1930s when the Fascists and Communists were transparent about their plans and no one except a few perceptive souls like Churchill took them seriously. Frankly, when someone like Omar Ahmad of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) says things like,
Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faiths, but to become dominant. The Koran…should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.
I do not think he is kidding.
Boar Wars
The
village of
West Anstey, Dorset is being besieged by one hundred wild boars that
were released from the Woodland Wild Boar farm by animal rights "activists",
who once again have caused incredible harm to the local wildlife and
livestock by their fat-headed actions. The
boars, which weigh in at up to 440 lbs, have been destroying fields and
terrorising residents. So far, some forty of
the brutes have been rounded up, but as it takes twenty men a go to catch
each one, most are still at large and unlikely to be caught any time soon.
What I find particularly vexing about this story is accounts of residents seeing the boars rooting about in the fields and being powerless to do a thing about it. In a more enlightened age, the people of West Anstey would have simply hired a local to go out with a rifle and keep the village stocked with bacon for a year. However, this being Blair's kinder, more compassionate Britain that frowns on people protecting their property all the villagers can do is sit by and watch as their livelihoods are destroyed before their eyes.
21st Century Sergeant York
Perhaps
what the people of West Anstey need is someone like
Staff Sgt Jim Gilliland, leader of the American Army's Shadow sniper team in
Iraq, who is profiled in the sort of story that editors of the New York
Times would chew their own legs off rather than run.
21st Century Mess
The
Times
Online, however, has a less optimistic account by former Royal Navy
officer Michael Smith, who has a new book
Q: Do the UK’s special forces (SF) use the SA80 weapon system?
A: I am sure you will understand that the MoD cannot divulge details of the weapons used by the SF as this would assist potential adversaries in countering or neutralising UKSF capacities.
A more forthright version, in a dream MoD briefing, might have gone like this:
Q: Do the UK’s special forces use the SA80 weapon system?
A: Of course they don’t (mordant, incredulous laugh). They’re the premier experts on small arms in the world, for goodness sake, and have their choice of equipment. The only people anywhere who carry the SA80 are those who don’t have any alternative — regular British troops. Oh, and the Mozambique army use it, apparently, but they didn’t have a choice either. They got the SA80 as part of a British aid package.
Q: What do the special forces use, then?
A: When they want a 5.56mm rifle they normally use the American M16; when they want a 5.56mm light machinegun they use the Belgian-designed Minimi, again like the Americans. All the Americans, that is, not just special ops people. Both of those guns were available cheaply when we bought the SA80. Proven designs. We could have thrown the unions a bone by making them under licence here.
Q: Well, why didn’t you?
A: God knows. No, seriously, the fact is we were in the process of privatising Royal Ordnance just then — that is, selling off the government rifle plant, among other things. They were the ones who came up with the SA80. The Royal Small Arms Factory wouldn’t have been worth tuppence if it hadn’t had the order for the new rifle. And a foreign make under licence wouldn’t have been any good; there were all the design bods to think of. Why would the private sector buy a design bureau that couldn’t sell its designs? . . . Come to think of it, that plant hadn’t actually brought out a new rifle of its own since the Lee-Enfield, and that was in the 1890s. No wonder the SA80 turned out to be a mess. The buyers shut the Enfield plant straight away and shifted production elsewhere.
Q: Who bought Royal Ordnance?
A: British Aerospace. We had to guarantee it the second tranche of SA80 production, naturally. Even then BAE gave us only £190m for the whole shooting match . . . and it stiffed us on the pension fund. You’ll be hearing its name again.
Q: When?
A: Well, later on after we had a whole bunch of duff SA80s, some made by us and some by BAE, we decided to get the guns fixed once and for all. We paid £92m for that, to Heckler & Koch, which is a good reputable firm that seems to have done a decent job.
Q: Phew. At least we had the sense to go to someone else, eh?
A: Not really. Can you guess who owned Heckler & Koch just then?
Q: Not British Aerospace?
A: Now you’re getting the idea. We order dud guns from ourselves, in order to sell our gun factories to BAE for a knock-down price. We then order even more dud guns from BAE . . . so years later we have to give BAE a lot of the money back to fix the bloody things once and for all. And another thing . . .
(Suddenly a group of ministry PR staff burst in. After a struggle, A is subdued and stuffed into a sack. The ministry guys wrestle him from the room.)
As they say on the blogosphere, read the whole thing.
Cultural Suicide
The ever-perceptive Mark Steyn takes on the idea that "our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable," and how multiculturalism combined with low birth rates is the slow poison of the West.
Can these trends continue for another thirty years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.
Wednesday
4 January 2006
Klaatu Barada Nikto
Take me to Kofi!
It seems that I've been wrong about the United Nations. Apparently it is not a talking shop of tin-pot dictators, international poseurs, grafting bureaucrats, and self-righteous busybodies, but more like an exceptionally brilliant child that underachieves in school because it isn't challenged. Since Earth seems too small a stage for Kofi Annan et al to strut upon, the General Assembly, if this story is to be believed, has decided to spread its benevolent, competent rule out to the furthest reaches of the Cosmos with a resolution intended to pave the way toward opening diplomatic relations with any extraterrestrial civilisation that wishes to present its credentials at Turtle Bay.
In order to show that Earth means the rest of the Galaxy no harm, the resolution calls for the complete disarmament of space by all nations. (*cough* USA *cough*). This should please the former Canadian defence minister, Paul Hellyer, who recently went clear off the deep end and declared,
The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. The time has come to lift the veil of secrecy, and let the truth emerge, so there can be a real and informed debate, about one of the most important problems facing our planet today.
Nice pacifist sentiments, albeit those of a raving paranoid who's seen too much Star Trek, but what if instead of ET we end up meeting the Mekon?
Remember to Dress Up Warm
In related intergalactic news,
it turns out that
Pluto is
colder than expected with daytime temperatures at -382°
Fahrenheit.
Environmentalists blame global warming.
Audvid Moment
While we're out in space, take a look at this link sent in by a reader to a neat little 1961 educational film about the future of space travel. Stick in a couple of apes and a monolith and you pretty much have the plot of 2001: a Space Odyssey.
Boar Update
A modest proposal
The
good people of West Anstey, Devon, are having a go at solving their
wild boar problem by enlisting the help of the
local hunt.
Mr. Allan Dedames, the farmer who engaged them, says that the hunt will not
kill the boars, but rather help to round them up.
"Animal loving" activists let loose a load of wild boars that end up ravaging the countryside (note the BBC doesn't mention that little aspect of the story), and the hateful, animal-loathing hunt herds the porcine fugitives home without turning them into several thousand rounds of mixed grill. Irony doesn't begin to describe it.
Speaking of Cooling Off
The new leader of the
Conservative party,
David Cameron, says that in order to be returned to power at the next
general election the Conservatives must modernise, scrap Thatcherism, embrace the welfare state, and be more "flexible" rather
than be bound by an ideology
Mr. Cameron has been rising in the polls of late and may even be our next prime minister, but as a hoary old Tory who thinks that the country has been going downhill ever since Charles II started giving titles to that Nouveau Riche lot, I can't really see the point. If the choice is between Tony Blair and Tony Blair with a less toothy smile, then I'd prefer to keep the original and save on new stationary.
George Orwell, Call Your Service
In
a reassuring development that shows what the government really thinks of us,
the Works and Pensions Secretary John Hutton has proposed that "non-paying
parents", i.e. fathers who don't pay child support, should be fitted with
electronic tags.
Given that Britain now leads the world with the most security cameras per capita, that the government plans to introduce ID cards, and that it wants to track every single car in the country, it seems to me that Blair should just order everyone to wear ankle tags and be done with it.
And Finally,
If you're like me and think that Political Correctness is not a joke, but Newspeak with a smiley face tacked on, this pdf pamphlet by Anthony Browne of the Institute for the Study of Civil Liberties is a must read. The only place I seriously disagree with Mr. Browne is that I don't think that the intent of PC, like all totalitarian ideologies, was ever benign.
Thursday
5 January 2005
Badgers? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Badgers!*
The
National Farmers Union has stated that in order to control bovine
tuberculosis a cull of the badger population, which acts as a host for
the disease, is inevitable.
I know, I know this is a dull story, but I couldn't resist the headline, okay?
*If you don't get the reference, click here.
Standing Up For Our Rights, If It's Okay With You Guys
The Danes have once again
shown that the old Viking blood is running pretty thin these days as Prime
Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen in his New Year's address "defended" free
speech in the row over Danish newspaper cartoons that mocked the prophet
Mohammed by saying that free speech should be exercised.
in such a manner that we do not incite hatred and cause fragmentation of the community that is one of Denmark's strengths.
In other words, you can go on offending Christians and Jews as you've always done, but remember to act the dhimmi around Muslims.
Unremarkably, the Egyptian ambassador welcomed Mr. Rasmussen's remarks. Voltaire may be spinning in his grave, but at least Denmark has the approval of an Arab dictatorship, and that's all that counts.
Kitsch Cowardice
I
love Archie
McPhee's, the Seattle based novelty shop that celebrates the bizarre and
transgressive at competitive prices. In fact, it's where I went for my
Christmas stocking stuffers last year. Admit it, nothing says "I care"
like an Internet urinal.
McPhee's poke-in-the-eye, mildly disgusting humour is like a trip to a strange little kitsch world where nothing is sacred.
Or is it?
Take a look at this page from their online catalogue. Notice anything missing? Items offensive to Christians? Check. Items offensive to Jews? Check. Hindus? Check. Buddhists? Check. Hmmm... Ah, yes! No Muslims! Nothing whatsoever to raise their hackles. I guess being transgressive has its limits after all.
Maybe they're taking their cue from the Dutch director Ter Heerdt, who cancelled making a sequel to his acclaimed multicultural comedy Shouf Shouf Habibi! after the brutal Islamofascist murder of Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam. Giving his reasons, Mr. Heerdt said,
I don't want a knife in my chest.
Understandable, but it just goes to show that shocking the straights is fine, so long as you carefully avoid those who'll cut your head off in retaliation.
Theear shi blows!
Scientists
at Oregon State University have discovered that whales
speak in dialects.
In compliance with its policy of forsaking clarity in preference of presenters with incomprehensible accents, The BBC reacted to the news by issuing a statement that in future all nature documentaries dealing with whales will favour those cetaceans with regional accents over those speaking RP. " We dooant want enny toff whale voices ont' air even if fowk can understan' wha' thee seh," added the Director General.
There'll Always Be a Banger
Tony
Blair might be willing to sell the country down the river in exchange for
being called a "good European," but at least the
New Market sausage still stands tall against the EU Juggernaut.
Pass the mustard, please.
Fish Eggs Are Off
The
current ban on the trade of caviar from the Caspian Sea has sent
shock waves from the Harrods's food court to Fortnum and Mason's as
retailers scramble to secure supplies of the delicacy that retails for as
much as £112 an ounce.
Here at Chez Szondy we are restricted to lumpfish caviar ($2.73 (£1.55) an ounce), but still our hearts go out to our suffering plutocratic brethren in these hard times when they face the prospect of being reduced to falling back on North American or French farmed stocks. So, we raise a glass of cheap, domestic, American Champagne ($3.99 (£2.77) a bottle) and say, "Hold hard, lads. It's always darkest before the dawn."
Make Up Your Mind
It must be terribly
confusing being an Islamofascist these days. According to
this piece via Little Green Footballs, the parents of the late "peace
activist" Rachel Corrie were almost kidnapped in Gaza by five gunmen who let
them go when they found out who the couple were.
I guess the terrorists didn't get the memo.
Just Do It
There is a fascinating
little brouhaha down under concerning the local council of Waverly, New
South Wales, Australia, which in a bald-faced act of Political Correctness
refused to fly the national flag from the historic Bondi pavilion on the
grounds that it would incite "racist" sentiments. When pressed to
reverse their decision, mayor Mora Main cited "heritage and financial"
reasons for not raising the flag. This prompted the Premier of New
South Wales,
Morris Iemma to declare,
There's no need for a meeting and there's no need for consultation.
If they are short a flag we'll give them a flag, if they're short a flag pole I'll have the Department of Commerce send them a flag pole with the bolts so that the flag and the flag pole can go up at the pavilion immediately.
If you're short the work people to do it we'll send you the people from commerce to do it and just get the flag up.
They don't need to have a heritage study, or consultation, or any meetings.
Now that is cutting the Gordian knot!
Tip o' the hat to Tim Blair.
Couldn't They Have Had a Civil Partnership?
In
a
story that confirms that the world has gone stark, raving mad, a British
woman has "married" a dolphin at the Israeli resort of Eilat. After
the ceremony the former Sharon Tendler (husband's name unknown) said,
"I made a dream come true. And I am not a pervert."
That will depend on what happened on the wedding night, darling.
Lost in Space
It
appears that yesterday's item about the UN putting forward
a resolution regarding diplomatic relations with extraterrestrial
civilisations was based on a hoax press release put out by a group of
saucer-minded NGOs who are running a
petition drive to have to UN implement their "contact resolution," which
is really a thinly disguised demand that the Americans be forbidden from
defending their satellite systems on the grounds that it might upset the
Klingons.
A case of the insane pursuing the incompetent, I suppose.
Boars 1, Dulverton Farmers' Hunt nil
The
boars are ahead as the people of West Anstey, Devon continue to try to find
some way of getting rid of the porkers. The local hunt was called in
yesterday and after three and a half hours only one of the sixty fugitive
animals was captured.
Now can we fire up the barbeque?
Friday
6 January 2005
Boar Update
The situation in
Devon is deteriorating as the porcine insurgency has
begun to
spread. Reports are coming in that wild boars have been sighted as
far south as the Burrator Reservoir. That's 40 miles as the crow flies
and 92 miles as the cranky old Morris Minor leaks oil on the road as you
wonder whether or not you should have taken that last right, but oh, well,
it's a nice day.
You'll notice that the porkers (who are from the Continent, I might add!) are making straight for the Royal Navy submarine base at Plymouth. Coincidence? You decide.
Curfew Lifted
The
French government have
lifted the curfew a month early after a "quiet"
New Years, thus demonstrating the superiority of the French strategy of abject appeasement regarding Islamist
rioters. At a news conference President
Chirac said,
Given the situation of the past few weeks, I have decided to end it.
No further violence is expected.
Train of Terror
A
gang of twenty Muslim "youths'
terrorised the passengers for five hours
aboard the Nice to Lyon train on New Years Day. The "youths" tore up
seats, robbed passengers of wallets and cell phones, and sexually assaulted
women.
President Chirac as unavailable for comment.
Tip o' the hat to Little Green Footballs.
Now Pay Attention, 007
Image from mi6.co.uk
I
mentioned in passing the other day the British government's plan to
track every single car in the country in a move that
would have warmed the cockles of Stalin's black little heart. It seems
now that some of the criminal classes and the sheer bloody-minded have
already found a way around the nasty little snoopers:
stealing number plates.
If this works out, can the revolving number plate on Bond's Aston Martin be far from becoming an optional extra?
Tip o' the hat to Samizdata.
Wrong Footing
An
interesting take by
Stephen Pollard in the Times that David Cameron's attempt to make
himself into a Blair clone may not only be a betrayal of the principles of
conservatism, but may be political suicide.
Mr. Pollard was talking about the NHS, but perhaps a better example is that of Mr. Cameron embracing the nanny state with this cogent observation;
Try to buy a newspaper at the train station and, as you queue to pay, you’re surrounded by cut-price offers for giant chocolate bars... As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does WH Smith promote half-price chocolate oranges at its checkouts instead of real oranges?
With Conservatives like Mr. Cameron, who needs Blairites?
Tip o' the hat to Best of the Web.
Monday
9 January 2005
Barren Arguments
According
to the BBC, society
seems to have something against those who choose not to procreate. In fact, it goes out of its way to shower those who breed
and their spawn with all sorts of benefits. Newborns
are given a £250 savings bonus by the generous Mr. Brown,
couples with children get all sorts of tax breaks,
paternity leave is written into the law, and politicians are forever
waffling on about the importance of the "family."
Worse, if you're childless you still have to pay for all the things that benefit parents and children, but not the non-breeders. If you're childless you still have to pay for some brat's education, for their vaccinations, child-welfare agencies, day-care centres, nursery schools, free milk, scholarships, leisure centres geared more toward families than singletons, all those children's books that libraries stock, and the salaries of Blue Peter presenters.
Even the private
sector is no refuge from this wholesale discrimination. Companies are
always giving slack to parents to have to rush off to tend a sick child, but
not someone taking a study course, so the childless must take up the slack
for the breeders. Advertising is slanted in such a way as to appeal to
families rather than those who refuse to multiply. Indeed, there seems
to be an implicit bias where, in the words of Nicki Defago, author of Childfree and Loving it!
(T)he message is that having a family is the most valid way of life.
This sort of blatant childism has prompted some concerned childless to take action. Jerry Steinberg founded Kidding Aside, a social club of the childless. According to Mr. Steinberg, government policy must face up to the fact that as many as 25 percent of adults refuse to bear children. In his view,
It would be less upsetting if the childfree were subsidized as much as those who chose to have children,
People shouldn't be bribed to create more consuming polluters, and compensation should be based on qualifications and job performance, not on the number of children one has produced.
All of the above turn parents into a privileged class of employee and citizen.
Mr. Steinberg's group has an interesting take on people who have children. According to his organisation's British branch's web site they acknowledge that parents may have a hard time of it, but,
We all have demands upon our time which interfere with our careers, be it raising a family, dealing with a plumbing problem, pursuing academic qualifications, or looking after an ageing family member. If helping Britons to balance home life and work is a boon to British productivity then the government must help us all be maximally productive and not just those of us with children.
It isn't often that one comes up against a group that is able to so completely ignore the elephant in the living room. Indeed, the BBC itself is pretty good at it. In fairness, the do give proper space to Mr. Norman Wells of the Family Education Trust, but even there the most blindingly obvious point for the opposition is left until the very last paragraph.
What's the elephant? Very simple. Society at every level tends to favour those who have children. They are preferred to get tax breaks, subsidies, leniencies, and general slack. And yes, those who do not have children are expected to help pay for the children of others being raised properly. But why? Why should the childless be required to defer to families and why should they pay for the decision of others to breed?
Why? Because, as should be blindingly obvious, in order to have a society you need people. If people stop having babies, then you will very quickly run out of adults and your society becomes an historical footnote. Indeed, Mark Steyn made this point very forcefully and I shan't try to build on the arguments that he made much better than I except to repeat his point that if a society ceases to breed it faces one of two very unpleasant futures. In the first one ends up like Japan with an increasingly elderly population being supported by a dwindling workforce in a stagnant economy, or in the second like Europe where the fading native population is being replaced by Muslim immigrants who are rapidly tipping over into becoming hostile invaders who have no desire to pay the pensions of a load of retired infidels. Either way, both choices eventually end up like Carthage.
It's interesting that Kidding Aside equates the support of families with the government's desire to promote productivity, which is rather a red herring, as such support has a more basic purpose: human survival. It's also interesting that Kidding Aside tries to couch its arguments in altruistic terms by claiming that its members are doing their bit to combat overpopulation. This is straight out of the '70s of Paul Ehrlich (indeed Kidding Aside cites the long-discredited Club of Rome) that even the self-loathing left gave up years ago when it became evident that Europe was facing demographic suicide and that the 21st century may be remembered as the time when Italians, Dutchmen, and Russians became extinct.
Kidding Aside might be of passing interest if they were just a more mild version of the Voluntary Extinction crowd, but they don't even have that level of fanaticism going for them. The forum on Kidding Aside site that discusses reasons for being childless tend to revolve around this typical example:
I don't want the responsibility
I don't want the massive financial burden
I don't want my entire life to be dictated by children
I travel abroad 12+ times a year and want to be able to disappear on holiday at a day or two's notice without having to worry about schools, nurseries, carry-cots, bottles, nappies, kids clubs, colouring books, toys & having to put up with Bob the Bl**dy Builder all the way to Stansted
I can't see myself on the floor playing with Lego
I like having walls that don't have Marmite and crayon all over them
I don't want the smell of sick or wee in my car
Not much in the way of world-saving altruism here, I'm afraid. There is, however, a notable tendency to use the word "I" in every sentence. Not even "we" as in a childless couple, but "I" as in me, myself. It's also very negative. There aren't any positives listed, just a string of drawbacks to be avoided. It's less a list of reasons for an alternative life style than a justification of what Steyn calls "slyer death culture of post-Christian radical narcissism."
I'm not one of those who believe that the only path to true happiness is having children. There are a great many saints, monks, and nuns who would give the lie to that argument. Nor would I say that children are an unalloyed joy. I certainly wouldn't say that today when my three-year old daughter had a distinctly unpleasant and unsuccessful potty-training lesson. I would, however, say that those of us who do have children are not only carrying out the most basic function for a society's continuance, but that the next generation belongs to us and not the likes of Kidding Aside, because we have literally created it.
Ms. Defago may despair that society's message is that "having a family is the most valid way of life," but at the end of the day having children is a necessity of survival. Not having children is a tragedy, the price of a higher calling, or a dead-end luxury.
Tuesday
10 January 2005
No Plot, No Power Suits
The other night my three-year
old daughter refused to sleep until 11:30, so I found myself around midnight
totally exhausted from trying to outwait my offspring and I decided to catch
a few minutes of mindless television before hitting the proverbial sack.
So, I pulled up On Demand from the cable menu and more or less grabbed
something at random from the sci-fi category. Unfortunately, what I ended
up with was Starship Troopers
I remember disliking this
film when it came out in 1997. What I didn’t realise was just how much I
disliked it and how since 9/11, when real soldiers are fighting real
battles, it leaves an even worse taste after revisiting it. I don’t have a
very high standard for films based on Robert Heinlein’s works. For all
their straightforward narrative form, his stories are extremely difficult to
adapt to the screen and the only really successful Heinlein film was Destination Moon
One girl told him bluntly: “My mother says that violence never solves anything.”
“So?” Mr. Dubois looked at her bleakly. “I’m sure the city fathers of Carthage would be glad to know that. Why doesn’t your mother tell them so? Or why don’t you?”
They had tangled before—since you couldn’t flunk the course, it wasn’t necessary to keep Mr. Dubois buttered up. She said shrilly, “You’re making fun of me! Everybody knows that Carthage was destroyed!”
“You seem unaware of it,” he said grimly. "Since you do know it, wouldn’t you say that violence settled their destinies rather thoroughly? However, I was not making fun of you personally; I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea—a practice I always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue—and thoroughly immoral—doctrine that ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.”
When Heinlein gets into cracker-barrel philosopher mode it’s hard to stop him. Never mind that a student who had “tangled before” with such a sophist would never throw him such a soft ball. Heinlein has an opinion to pontificate on and story logic be damned. It’s this sort of writing that prompted Alexi Panshin to refer to Heinlein as,
(A) man standing in a pulpit delivering sermons against an enemy that no one but he can see clearly.
Now don’t get the idea that I object to Heinlein’s vision of a militaristic society because I’m some sort of a crypto-pacifist. I’m quite the opposite. Being a Royal Navy brat, I am very pro-military (Want to see me turn purple? Mention John Reid’s budget cuts within my hearing.). Nonetheless, I have no truck with the militarism of the sort I see many conservatives, particularly in America, indulge in and which Heinlein championed in Troopers. I believe that the profession of arms is an honourable one and that those who serve in Her Majesty’s or the United States armed forces do so with dignity, valour, and, often, heroism. I also believe that soldiers strive toward a peculiar set of moral standards, just as doctors, lawyers, and clergymen do in their professions. I do not, however, believe that soldiers are morally superior to civilians. They are many things, but they are not plaster saints. Over the years I’ve known many an officer and enlisted man and I can state categorically that you find as many fat-heads, cowards, drunkards, lechers, time-servers, bigots, toadies, and creeps in uniform as out-- especially in the rear echelons. The only difference is that soldiers take this unavoidable fact with an ordinate sense of humility and aggressively prosecute those who transgress the code of military justice. I also don’t hold with exalting the military as opposed to giving them due appreciation and thanks. War is never glorious. It is a dangerous, dirty business that has to be done, but never to be exulted in. Nor is the power that we entrust in soldiers to be taken lightly. That is one of the reasons why we have a Royal Navy but a British Army. We recall too vividly what happens when those who bear arms get out of control. It’s been my experience that societies that become too mesmerised by gold braid, parades, and bellicose speeches are neither well ruled, nor do they fight well. Juntas tend to make lousy warriors when the time comes. They also lead to another quote from Troopers, this time from Rico the narrator,
Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics -- you name it -- is nonsense. Correct morals arise from knowing what Man is --not what do-gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be.
The universe will let us know -- later -- whether or not Man has any "right" to expand through it.
And if you don’t agree, Heinlein will remind you that the world of Troopers is run by a "a scientifically verifiable theory of morals.” Unfortunately, Heinlein never grasped that “Might makes Right” is every bit as silly as “Violence never settled anything.”
With that sort of a starting
point, small wonder that most cinematic takes on Heinlein are as wincingly
painful as The Puppet Masters
Hollywood was not going to make a straight pro-war film in the 1990s (or today), so Verhoeven tried to lighten things with some fairly heavy-handed satire and by pointlessly conflating Heinlein’s militarism with Fascism. He also followed his first instincts as a director and made it an incredibly violent piece. There are times in watching Troopers that you say to yourself “I’ve seen every way a giant bug can kill a man… Oh, there’s another.”
This is one of those sci-fi films that don’t pass the reverse engineering test. That is, if you take out the sci-fi elements, does it still work as a story? The answer is a resounding “no,” as the mixture of what passes for a plot feels like a very poor quality ‘50s B-grade war movie with every cliché thrown in, the military tactics make Paschendale look like a stroke of genius, and there is a romantic subplot too painful that follows as a cast of too-pretty actors from the depths of the 90210 era go through their paces. You have the feeling that recruits in this army of the future had to submit their headshots along with their medical records and that the first qualification of being a pilot was to look good in riding pants. Worse, for such a stunningly beautiful woman, Denise Richards comes off looking like she’s made out of plasticine every time she smiles. Whenever she flashes that wall of ivory it’s as if her brain has suddenly disengaged.
"I like potatoes!"
I can’t
decide what irritates me most about the film. Sometimes I opted for the
satire in the “propaganda” breaks, which are supposed to be funny, but since
it’s a retread of a gimmick already used by Verhoeven in Robocop
But
I’ve determined that what leaves the worst taste in my mouth is Verhoeven’s
attitude toward women in this film, which I find nothing short of
sickening. Bowing to modern prejudices, Verhoeven takes women in combat for
granted, but given the complications they cause in the story he makes a
good, albeit unintentional, case against the practice. In Verhoeven’s
world, future women will be men with breasts who still take time off to be
hot-sex machines. Yup, that’s a really likely combination. And watch the
eyes roll heavenward as Verhoeven explains with a straight face that the
co-ed shower scene wasn’t exploitative. Worse the violence—the casual
violence, mind— meted out to women in this film is nothing short of
sadistic. When raw recruit Dina Meyers decides that the way to impress her
drill sergeant (a man twice her size!) is to challenge him to single combat,
the scene is both butt-clenchingly embarrassing and more than a little
disgusting. What sort of Neanderthal would even accept such a
challenge; much less jam his knee into the girl’s throat until she passes
out?
Perhaps this is excusable on the grounds that women of the future are made of sterner stuff. Ms. Richards certainly demonstrates this, as in the last ten minutes of the film she has a bug drive a claw the size of a kitchen chair through her shoulder yet she not only can stay conscious, she can also stand, walk, run, fire an assault rifle, and saunter to a waiting transport while having a casual conversation with her friends. Things like shock and blood loss are apparently a male prerogative.
And to think that Verhoeven left out the Power Suits, the only really cool thing in the book, for all that.
Wednesday
11 January 2005
Respect Party
Symbols of Britain today and yesterday
Tony
Blair has now decided that the way to cure Britain's woes is to
legislate "respect" with a new programme aimed at a "radical new
approach to restore the liberty of the law-abiding citizen."
This restoration of liberty will not be obtained by lowering taxes or getting the government out of our lives, but rather will involve mandatory "parenting" courses, curfews, a "national parenting academy" intended to train a new army of social workers, the forced eviction of annoying people from the homes-- even if they own them, and (all together now!) more public spending.
This one of those schemes that is going to end up one of two ways, and neither of them what Mr. Blair intends. Either this will turn out to be just another expensive gimmick that will merely waste taxpayer's money on an empty gesture, or it will destroy more of our ancient liberties in pursuit of a vague and ill-conceived goal.
Perhaps someone should have a word in Tony's shell-like and explain to him that engendering respect is neither in the government's responsibility or power.
Keep Your Hands Off My Spittle
Meanwhile
it has also come to light that the British government has been
saving DNA samples not only from convicted criminals, but from anyone
who was arrested or even cautioned. That means that some 750,000
people are now in the government's DNA database, making it the largest
proportionally in the world. Given that there are now no non-arrestable
offences in Britain (another chilling thought) this will only continue to
grow in the future.
I am all for fighting crime (and would that the police were as well!), but I am vehemently opposed to the government gathering information on citizens as a matter of course. This sort of "just in case" thinking has a foul taint to it because it can just as easily be extended to newborns, schoolchildren, hospital patients, and anyone else for the best of intentions and the most sinister of results.
You Will Volunteer!
And
just to show that those who oppose identity cards for Britain are not
paranoid, it now turns out that the "voluntary" identity cards are about as
voluntary as income tax. According to proposals put forward by Lord
Falconer's jumped-up "Constitutional Affairs Office," the cards will be
"voluntary," but local councils will be empowered to slap a
£2,500 fine on anyone who doesn't have one.
As the Telegraph so aptly puts it, this is a tax on being alive.
No Go Glasgow
We
can, of course, trust the police with all this sort of power because they
are handling what they have now so well. According to
Mohammad Sarwar, Labour MP for Glasgow Central, police in Scotland are
so terrified of being tarred as racists that they are taking a page out of
the French law enforcement book and letting gangs of "Asian youths"
(*cough* Muslim *cough*) run rampant.
Clearly the Auld Alliance is still in force.
Quick, Watson! The Juicer!
At
least Scottish authorities have their priorities right. Muslim gangs
might be doing as they please up North, but at least Scots schoolchildren
are being protected by the grave threat to life and limb posed by...
orange pips.
Maybe they've just been reading too much Sherlock Holmes without understanding it.
Animal Bill "Won't Kill Circuses"
Just
like the identity cards were supposed to be "voluntary."
It's interesting how Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary defends the Animal Welfare Bill,
Very few circuses still have animal acts. Our understanding is there are only about seven, and only three of those have what you might consider wild animals.
Translation: Circuses are like fox hunters; a minority unpopular with the chattering classes and if the bill does destroy them, what's the harm?
And That Changes Things How?
For
the
bottom-feeding story of the day, the BBC has announced that Thought for
the Day will henceforth be including secularist commentators.
Given the fact that TFTD has been religion-free for years, how will we tell the difference?
Umm... Hurrah?
In
a recent letter to the Groaniad,
Phillip Gould, AKA Lord Gould of Brookwood, has been crowing about how
New Labour has triumphed utterly now that David Cameron has gone over to the
Dark Side and joined hands with the Nanny State in
condemning chocolate oranges. What Mr. Cameron will do when he
finds out about the pips, I don't know.
Given the above posts here on Ephemeral Isle, I wouldn't crow too loudly, Phil.
Tip o' the hat to Samizdata, who have some fairly caustic remarks about Mr. Gould (I refuse to call a life-peer by title!)
Blind Eye
The
BBC's
Andrew Little has an article about what a jolly place France is, what
with their efforts to promote political harmony and how they enjoy so many
benefits that strikes against the government are paid for by the government.
Indeed, according
to Mr. Little everything is glorious except for the odd right-winger who
won't stop grumbling and smell the croissants.
Of course, things like a month of Muslim riots, a population in demographic freefall, and an economy that's built like a ponzi scheme don't come within range of Mr. Little's eagle eye anymore than they do that of M. Chirac.
Perhaps "harmony" is another word for papering over the cracks.
Well Done, Monsieur
Meanwhile
French engineer Bernard Planche, 52, who was kidnapped by Iraqi
terrorists, showed that some of the spirit of ancient Gaul still
survives when he escaped after his captors fled in the face of a US/Iraqi
search patrol. M. Planche then insisted on staying with the soldiers
and helped them in hunting down the terrorists.
Manifique!
Fly the Dhimmi Skies
British
Midlands struck a new low when the
Sunday Mirror revealed that airline staff on flights to Saudi Arabia are
banned from possessing crucifixes, St. Christopher medals, Bibles, or even
teddy bears. Furthermore, Stewardesses are required to walk two paces
behind male colleagues while wearing an
abaya, Not
surprisingly, homosexual stewards have been calling in sick in record
numbers rather than fly to a country where their proclivities carry a rather
nasty death sentence.
In 1914 Captain William Henry Shakspear of the Bengal Lancers became the first man in history to cross the Arabian peninsula. He did so wearing his Lancers uniform and he carried along a crate of Scotch and a large box of cigars, both of which he consumed openly in front of his Arab guides, who had nothing but respect for the thoroughly UnPC Englishman.
To this day, Captain Shakespear is held in high regard by the Saudis. The dhimmi British Midlands directors are probably held in little more than amused contempt.
Quagmire
I
wasn't aware that the UN was in Haiti (I don't get down that way very often
since the bottom fell out of the voodoo market), but apparently they've been
there since
1994 and last Sunday the head of the UN peacekeeping mission,
General
Urano Teixeira Da Matta Bacellar, was found shot dead.
Quagmire! Kofi lied, peacekeepers died! Mounting casualties! Futile! Illegal! No blood for... um, dirt! Support the troops! Bring them home!
Justice Abuse
Staying
with the UN for a bit, reporter Julian Davis Mortenson at
Slate braved
the UN detention centre for accused war criminals at Scheveningen, the
Netherlands. Inside its grim walls, Mr. Mortenson found these horrors:
If you could tune out the cells' ponderous steel doors, the accommodations looked like nothing so much as a string of dorm rooms in a college residence hall: poster-covered walls, well-stocked bookshelves, big wardrobes, homey quilts spread over the bed, comfortable chairs, and spacious desks usually crowned by a laptop. Actually, with radios, coffee machines, and full private bathrooms, the cells looked at least as comfortable as your average Super 8. Each floor had a rec room with good-size windows, a tatty little cooking area, a pile of board games, a communal television (usually turned to one of the Serbo-Croat channels that gets piped in from back home in the Balkans), and sometimes even a ping-pong table or a dartboard. Detainees roam freely around their assigned floor during most of the daytime hours, so as we walked through the corridors, there they were, folding laundry, playing chess, watching television, reading in the rec room, or chatting in small groups in the hallway, invariably offering us neighborly hellos and greeting the warden by name.
Watching over this hellhole was the warden, Irishman Tim McFadden who snarls things like,
(Y)our biggest enemy is time. So, the function of the occupational therapy program is to fill that time in order to maintain their emotional welfare so that they're not going into crisis.
Of course, the poor dears do need all the consideration they can get. After all, their trials for committing genocide won't even come up for years, so we really must make them as comfy as possible.
Still, they sit and serve as the best argument yet against the International Court.
Another Day in Paradise
Over
at Vodkapundit
Stephen Green is having fun Fisking
this indignant report out of Germany about how old age pensioners are
dining on inexpensive smoked salmon in the discount restaurant at the local
Ikea (try the meatballs!) instead of queuing at the soup kitchen like
they're supposed to.
Some people just don't know their place.
Go Apathy!
Hopping
back to Blighty, we have
this opinion piece in the Telegraph that rises to the defence of
terrorist supporter and part-time hostage Kate Burton. Bryony Gordon
says that it is wrong to call Miss Gordon a "brainless ass" because she
managed to get herself and her parents kidnapped by murderous Islamists, nor
should she be faulted for being part of an organisation that never met a
terrorist it didn't like. Instead, we should be praising Miss Burton
for not only "caring," but "doing something."
Quite frankly, given the sort of things Miss Burton's "doing something" involves, I'm all for a bit of apathy.
Mouse Fire
And finally,
we have this
story out of the States about a mouse who managed to burn down a man's
house in a remarkable episode of poetic justice.
Thursday
12 January 2006
One Day at the Plant
"Okay, guys. It's not funny anymore. Guys? Guys?"
Mouse Hoax
"I am shocked, shocked that the news media got it wrong."
You can't even trust a humourous human interest piece these days. It turns out that the flaming mouse story we reported yesterday was false.
My faith in the reliability of the news media is shattered.
Peta, Pick Up the Phone
The
annual animal sacrifice in Muslim Turkey went less than according to
plan the other day when a number of the animals turned on their sacrificers,
injuring over 1600 people and two dying of heart attacks.
Tip o' the hat to Little Green Footballs.
Friday
13 January 2006
Friday the 13th
Greetings, Tridecaphobes! Here's hoping that all your luck today is good. If not, then keep your head down, for God's sake!
Boar Wars
In a move to combat
the growing menace of the porcine insurgency that erupted recently in West
Anstey and seems poised to engulf the entire West Country, Devon District
Council has convened
a council of war.
No details are forthcoming, but the nuclear option has not been ruled out at this time.
Boar Wars Update
Taiwanese
scientists claim to have used gene splicing to make a cross between a
pig and a jellyfish. The result is a fluorescent pig that glows in the
dark (I'm not making this up.)
Unnamed sources close to Devon District Council hint that the research is part of a secret programme to combat the wild boar problem. "If we can't catch them in the daytime, then we'll be able to go after them at night when they aren't so stroppy."
Boar Wars Update II
Are Britain's
children ready to face the boar menace? Knowledge is the best weapon
and forewarned is forearmed, so in doing its bit for the cause, CBBC has put
forward this
pig quiz to make sure that young people are aware and prepared.
Carnival of Tomorrow
If you've never come across the travelling feast that is the Carnival of Tomorrow, you should check this out. Among the fascinating fare on offer there's a link to this video on yet another proposal for a flying car.
Infighting
Over in Iraq civil war has
finally broken out. No, not between the Sunnis and the Shiites, but
between the
native terrorist groups and Al Qaeda. In fact, it's got so bad
that the New York Times has been forced to notice and Der Spiegel is
carrying the story as well.
Tip o' the hat to the Captain's Quarters.
Hearts and Minds
At the trial of
Muslim rabble-rouser
Abu Hamza we learn that an Al Qaeda manual laying out targets in Britain
including Big Ben, football stadiums, skyscrapers, and airports was found in
his possession.
Meanwhile, outside the court Mr. Hamza's supporters demonstrated that Islamofascism is a myth by carrying signs saying "Democracy go to Hell."
Tip o' the hat to Little Green Footballs.
Police State Britain?
I never thought that
I would come to see Britain as being a police state. I am not
exaggerating either. I said police state. Ten years ago I would
have thought anyone mad if they said that soon the British would have to
look over their shoulders before they spoke for fear of the Thought Police.
That was the sort of view that only existed in the minds of people who lined
their hats with tin foil. Yet is it hard to give the benefit of the
doubt when you see stories like these.
- In 2002, Harry Hammond, an elderly evangelical, displayed a placard saying, "Stop immorality. Stop homosexuality. Stop lesbianism." Mr. Hammond was assaulted by hecklers and knocked to the ground. His assailants went free, but Mr. Hammond was arrested by the police on the grounds of "homophobia."
- Last December, Lynette Burrows, an author and mother of six children, made remarks on a Radio 5 programme in which she disagreed with the policy of allowing homosexual couples to jointly adopt children. She was subsequently contacted by the police who said that a "homophobic incident" had been registered against her.
- Later that month, Joe Roberts 73, and his wife Helen, 68, of Fleetwood, Lancashire were questioned by the police on a charge of "homophobia" when they asked the local council if they could display Christian leaflets alongside gay lifestyle magazines.
- Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, made comments in an interview about his religious beliefs on BBC 4's PM programme in which he said that homosexual practices were "harmful" and that civil partnerships were "unacceptable." He is now being investigated by the police.
This sort of thing is abhorrent no matter where you stand on the political spectrum-- unless you're an out and out Stalinist. It's not about gay rights and quite frankly I am amused when Sir Iqbal gets some of his own back, but that's beside the point. It could just as easily be about any subject that the government decides is beyond debate or even dissent. It could be about race, it could be sex, it could soon be about religion (read Islam), or anything else. In Tony Blair's Britain you can preach hatred and scream for murder on an apocalyptic scale and the law won't dare lay a glove on you, but if you express an opinion that the chattering classes don't want to hear you can expect the police to knock on your door.
That is a police state, and it doesn't matter how much Mr. Blair smiles or how good his intentions are. It's still a police state.
More on this at Samizdata and from Melanie Phillips.
Who Trumps Whom?
Actually,
I'm a little surprised that Sir Iqbal ended up being collared for thought
crime. When
this item came out about a gay magazine being condemned by gay rights
groups for being "Islamophobic" I concluded that the Religion of Peace was
superior on the PC pecking order.
Guess that's what happens when you don't get the updates.
Save the Planet; Kill a Tree
German scientists have discovered that trees are actually one of the largest sources of so-called greenhouse gases in the world and a Stanford University study claims that forested areas trap heat and raise temperatures by as much as three degrees Celsius.
Maybe they're right, maybe more study is needed, but the time to act is now. Destroy the forests before the planet dies!
Monday
16 January 2006
Phone Home
Thinking
of phoning your MP?
Think
twice
about it, because you never know who might be listening. For forty
years Great Britain has operated under what is known as the Wilson Doctrine,
which states that an MP's phone cannot be wiretapped without his knowledge
and consent. That may soon be a thing of the past along with the right
to silence and trial by jury as Tony Blair puts forward his proposal to make
members of Parliament subject to MI5 surveillance.
This has produced a near riot in the Cabinet as even such close Blair allies like the Minister of Defence, John Reid spoke out against the move,
"Reid demanded to know why on earth we were going down this route," said one government colleague. "It was all the more surprising since you would have thought the MoD is one of the departments most in favour of increased surveillance powers."
It's hard to decide if this is an example of the sinister or the insane. Britain was once a land of clear thinking and solid conviction. Now it is a country where a man who refuses to swear loyalty to the Queen can hold office, yet where MPs can now be spied upon.
Gay Horses for Courses
Perhaps
what Mr. Blair is afraid of is a rogue MP who might start asking questions
about matters like this
thought crime that escaped our listing
last week.
Mr. Sam Brown, a student at Oxford University, was up before the beak for allegedly asking a mounted policeman, "Excuse me, do you realise your horse is gay?" For this enquiry he was charged by the police with "homophobia" and was taken to court when he refused to pay the £81 fine. The case was thrown out, but we regret to report that Mr. Brown was not set free because the judge saw what a load of codswallop this was, but due to there being insufficient evidence to prosecute.
The horse was unavailable for comment.
Justice: A Victorian Anachronism
Mr.
Brown should be grateful that he asked about gay police horses when he
did, as it may
soon be the case that, in an effort of "modernise"
the justice system,
millions of petty criminals will be dealt with
by police and prosecutors who will hand down verdicts and sentences
without ever going to court.
Rachel Sylvester in the Telegraph says that Tony Blair's real legacy
may be that he abolished the idea that an Englishman is innocent until
proven guilty. It is certainly the case that he has guaranteed that
the only judge many people will see will be one named Dredd
"I am the law!"
Under False Colours
Gordon Brown's British National Day got a bit sidetracked.
Gordon
Brown seems to
have finally noticed
that since 1997 he's been Chancellor of the Exchequer for a country known
as "Britain" and in a burst of belated enthusiasm he's come out and
said that it might be a jolly good thing if people actually took pride in
being, pardon my French, "British." He's gone so far as to say that
there should "a (Union) flag in every garden" and he even says that
Britain should have some sort of National Day like the Americans and the
French have.
Funny, I thought that Empire Day, Trafalgar Day, or any of the patron saint days were supposed to do that, but Mr. Brown's political ancestors were so successful at trashing them that perhaps he's forgotten that tiny little slice of the world before New Labour.
Over at the Telegraph the view is that there is less of the patriotic than the cynical about Mr. Brown's sudden love of country. As the man tipped to be the next prime minister he's faced with the rather awkward fact that he's a Scottish MP and as such, under Tony Blair's attempt to fracture the country via devolution, he will be able to pass laws over England even though England can no longer pass laws over Scotland.
My objection to Mr. Brown's faux patriotism is more fundamental. The way New Labour is going on the issue of our ancient liberties we should forget about a new holiday and go in for something a bit more relevant to New Labour. Might I suggest a Two-Minute Hate?
Living in His Own Little World
Over
at the BBC
John Simpson is running true to form with
this article in the Telegraph in which he carps on about the
government's anti-terrorism bill and how it will make it impossible for
him to visit a terrorist training camp without risking getting thrown in
gaol by Her Majesty's government. Given the fact that he talks about
Al Qaeda "volunteers" and refers to terrorists in Britain as "resistance
cells" I would say that his biggest problem is not the
anti-terrorism bill, but that he has trouble telling the difference
between friend and foe.
Much of Mr. Simpson's argument revolves around journalists being neutral observers dedicated solely to the public's "right to know."
<pause></pause>
Sorry, I had to stop for a good laugh. I would have thought that the Butler Enquiry put paid to any notion of the BBC being neutral except in the sense that a neutral is a dacoit who is for nobody but himself. Besides, Simpson must be well behind the curve if he hasn't noticed that the evolution of the blogosphere has thrown up the question of whether journalists are really a true profession or a load of political activists with aspirations of guildhood. This is especially the case when many so-called layman are not only doing the "professionals'" fact checking for them, but are picking up the slack on stories that the "professionals" choose to ignore.
For more on this, Clive Davis as his two cents.
Living in His Own Little World II
Proving that John Simpson is not an isolated case, John Muir looks at the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran and based on the existence of an old 1950s Atoms for Peace research reactor Mr. Muir concludes that Iran doesn't mean any harm, that it's being unfairly persecuted by a load of rabid neocons, and even if it does get the Bomb from "somewhere" it's just a symbol of national pride. I mean, the Shah had a research reactor, for goodness sake, so what's the big deal if the Mullahs can drop a few kilotons on Rome?
Never mind that for all his faults the Shah was a civilised man who was trying to pull his people out of the dark ages while his successors are a load of crazed Islamofascists waiting for the word from a man hiding at the bottom of a well for seven hundred years so they can vaporise Israel.. and maybe Berlin. Tehran is innocent, I tell you and the Americans are out for blood; straining to let slip the dogs of war, though Mr. Rumsfeld has something to say on the subject,
SPIEGEL: The US is trying to make the case in the United Nations Security Council.
Rumsfeld: I would not say that. I thought France, Germany and the UK were working on that problem.
SPIEGEL: What kind of sanctions are we talking about?
Rumsfeld: I'm not talking about sanctions. I thought you, and the U.K. and France were.
SPIEGEL: You aren't?
Rumsfeld: I'm not talking about sanctions. You've got the lead. Well, lead!
SPIEGEL: You mean the Europeans.
Rumsfeld: Sure. My Goodness, Iran is your neighbour. We don't have to do everything!
SPIEGEL: We are in the middle of regime change in Germany...
Rumsfeld: ... that's hardly the phrase I would have selected.
It's amazing that an Iran that is building reactors despite having one of the world's largest oil reserves, insists on having a nuclear enrichment cycle; scatters its nuclear facilities in hardened bunkers; possesses ballistic missiles of greater and greater range; routinely chants "Death to America;" calls for Israel to be "wiped off the map;" sponsors terrorism worldwide; is reported that it could have the Bomb within three years; and breathlessly awaits the return of the Mahdi who will herald the end of time is regarded by many on the left as being a unfairly persecuted government engaged in perfectly innocent activities.
And Hitler just wanted a little Lebensraum.
Compleat Tragedy
It's
with great sadness that I report the fire that destroyed the
Compleat Angler and killed its owner on Bimini Island in the Bahamas.
It's a real tragedy. When I went sailing and scuba diving in the
Bahamas, Bimini was a
regular stop and I lightened many a glass of planters punch and many a
bowl of conch chowder there.
The Angler was a
hotel and bar that wasn't notable for the finest of amenities, but it was
perfect as a place to stay for those who liked to fish and drink and
didn't like to walk too far between the two. But the Angler is most
famous for it's collection of Hemingway memorabilia commemorating the
great American writer who wrote To Have and Have Not
But my Hemingway memories are not of literature, but of fishing. In Hemingway's day the Bahamas were more "pristine" (i.e. swarming with dangerous sharks) and the photos of his piscatorial triumphs in the Angler were notable in that despite Mr. Hemingway's catches being impressive, the fish invariably had huge chunks bitten out of them by marauding sharks before Hemingway and his crew could haul them aboard.
Dirty big rats with fins, I tell you!
Tuesday
17 January 2006
Selective Memory
The
BBC must have the memory of a may fly or they just think the rest of us do,
otherwise I can't see how they hoped to fob off
this
interview with a childhood friend of the late, unlamented Communist
revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Mr. Carlos Ferrer has written a
book about his travels around South America with Guevara fifty years ago and
has nothing but praise for his erstwhile companion. That's all well and good and it would be pointless
to upbraid Mr. Ferrer for his loyalty. Even Hitler had friends who
turned a blind eye to his evil. But the BBC is not Guevara's friend
(at least, they are aren't supposed to be) and the article contains not one
word about what a monster Guevara turned out to be.
Maybe they prefer to leave that job to another man who knew Guevara, Armando Valladares:
I knew Che Guevara. He was an assassin, unscrupulous to the core. Many died at his hands, and many more died on his orders. His legend is pure fiction, masterfully crafted by his fellow Communists and the nostalgic Left. Add to their numbers every misguided liberal, a gullible multitude resembling the deluded masses who believed the cowardly lies of the Communists about the Katyn massacre.
Che adulators and fans miss the logical conclusion. Had the object of their adoration and his ideology triumphed, their victory would have unleashed the Communist system worldwide, resulting in the bitterest fruits: total loss of personal freedom, execution by firing squad for dissent, concentration camps, an end to religious expression, and to a free press. Stalin's Russia replicated across a global stage.
That is the legacy Che Guevara intended for us — including for those who adulate him.
And now he's a fashion statement.
Delayed, But Not Dead
The
House of
Lords defeated the government's identification card scheme yesterday,
but don't start opening the champagne just yet. On closer reading it
turns out that what the Lords objected to was not the appalling
redefinition of the relationship between the governed and governing that
identity cards implies, but merely that the government hasn't declared
exactly how much the scheme will cost.
Marvellous! Our liberty now rests on the knife edge of a bookkeeping question.
Biggles, Where Art Thou?
Britain
unveiled
its prototype unmanned stealth plane yesterday and it not only marks a
technological advance, but will do for manned combat aircraft what digital
cameras did for film. The Corax is a high-altitude jet-propelled spy
plane with wings that can be swapped to suit its mission. But that
isn't the interesting bit. To pay for Corax the Ministry of Defence
scrapped plans for a future manned combat aircraft and are collaborating
with the Americans on
Project
Churchill, which is aimed at developing unmanned combat aircraft by
2015. Indeed, some believe that the
Joint Strike
Fighter will be the last manned combat aircraft to ever be built by a
major power.
Perhaps the next Battle of Britain will be fought not by the Few, but by the micro(chip).
"A Man I Can Do Business With"
Some
people
on the Left believe that George Bush is using the current nuclear
brinksmanship with Iran to stage a replay of the run up to the Iraqi
invasion, but as
Anne
Bayefsky says in National Review that this is more true of Koffi
Annan, who is running around Turtle Bay talking about how reasonable the
Iranians are and how the real problem is the Americans insisting that the
UN actually do something about a threat to world security.
In other words, as far as Annan is concerned, the problem is not that Iran has escalated the stakes. The problem is that involvement of the Security Council, which is supposed to be the "organ bearing the main responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security," is escalation. The U.N. chief aims to shift the dynamic from taking strong action against an Iranian madman, bent on nuclear proliferation and the obliteration of a U.N. member state, to placing roadblocks in the way of an American-driven effort to stop it.
Will someone explain to me again why the UN headquarters site has not been scheduled for redevelopment?
Trust Me, I'm a Journalist
Meanwhile
CNN
is showing that they're still just as skilful at crawling before the
Mullahs as they were licking Saddam's boots. On Monday Iran banned
CNN from the country after a CNN story wrongly translated President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying "the use of nuclear weapons is Iran's right"
instead of "Iran has the right to nuclear energy." At least, that is
what Iran says he really said and I don't know if any reliable third party
has done a translation.
Regardless, CNN stood up for the highest ideals of freedom of the press and Speaking Truth to Power by instantly reacting with an abject display of public grovelling that it reserves for the world's nastiest dictators.
Please Surrender
In an act of unalloyed gall an Islamic group has made the most open demand yet for the dhimmis to surrender,
An Islamic campaign group has called for a Catholic primary school to be based on the Muslim faith.
The Campaign for Muslim Schools said 90 per cent of pupils at St Albert's Primary, in the Pollokshields area of Glasgow, are Muslim, yet children are having to take part in Catholic rituals like saying the Lord's Prayer and attending mass.
Osama Saeed, co-ordinator of the alliance of Glasgow's main mosques and Muslim organisations, said he could see no reason why the main faith of the school should not change.
He said: "Clearly the parents of that area find a faith school, even if it is of another denomination, preferable to a secular one. But surely it should be possible for them to have one that is relevant to their own faith.
"To move towards this would be a fantastic example of good faith - in more ways than one - on the part of the Church."
A fantastic example of good faith is to fork over the school? It's almost a parody of the Islamification of Europe in miniature.
Tip o' the hat to Dhimmi Watch.
Sit Back And Enjoy The Ride
In Slate,
Christopher Hitchens looks
at the current in-fighting among the Iraqi terrorists and comes to this
conclusion:
The significance of this, and of numerous other similar accounts, is three-fold. First, it means that the regular media caricature of Iraqi society is not even a parody. It is very common indeed to find mixed and intermarried families, and these loyalties and allegiances outweigh anything that can be mustered by a Jordanian jailbird who has bet everything on trying to ignite a sectarian war. Second, it means in the not very long run that the so-called insurgency can be politically isolated and militarily defeated. It already operates within a minority of a minority and is largely directed by unpopular outsiders. Politically, it is the Khmer Rouge plus the Mafia—not the Viet Cong. And unlike the Khmer Rouge, it has no chance at all of taking the major cities. Nor, apart from the relatively weak Syrian regime, does it have a hinterland or a friendly neutral territory to use for resupply. And its zealots are now being killed by nationalist and secular, as well as clerical, guerrillas. (In Kurdistan, the Zarqawi riffraff don't even try; there is a real people's army there, and it has a short way with fascists. It also fights on the coalition side.) In counterinsurgency terms, this is curtains for al-Qaida.
Which is my third point. If all goes even reasonably well, and if a combination of elections and prosperity is enough to draw more mainstream Sunnis into politics and away from Baathist nostalgia, it will have been proved that Bin-Ladenism can be taken on—and openly defeated—in a major Middle Eastern country. And not just defeated but discredited. Humiliated. Is there anyone who does not think that this is a historic prize worth having? Worth fighting for, in fact?
Defeated and discredited. Not a bad twofer, I'd say.
Wednesday
18 January 2006
But It's Cozy
As housing prices skyrocketed some compromises were inevitable.
Doctor Who in the USA
The BBC and the SciFi Channel have reached an agreement that will allow the American cable network to broadcast the first series of the new Doctor Who starting in March. Quoth scifi.com:
SCI FI Channel announced Jan. 12 that it will air the first season of the BBC's hit SF series Doctor Who, starting in March. The 13 episodes, starring Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor and Billie Piper as Rose Tyler, will air as part of SCI FI Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Damn, now I can't lord it over people in California that I can see Doctor Who on Canada's CBC while they must rely on web clips and PAL DVDs.
Rodent Mail
Two
Cambridge students have been
fined for posting a hamster.
How the men managed to get the stamps to stick remains a mystery.
Thursday
19 January 2006
Tea and Crystals
I should never talk to people before I've had my tea. The modern world is hard enough to understand and since I never know what I'm going to encounter first thing I always feel it wisest to be fortified with a cuppa as soon as possible.
So it was my own fault when I walked in on the wife before the kettle had boiled and saw what it was that had come in that package addressed to her the day before. The thick, padded manila envelope was now open and empty on my wife's desk and under the study lamp was a clump of purplish crystals welded to an irregular base of cruder stone. I picked up the object and turned it so the light could play within the complex facets in shades ranging from nearly white to dark indigo.
"Pretty," I said. "You planning on doing tequila shooters with the girls?"
"What?" asked my bride.
"Amethyst. Albertus Magnus claimed that if you carry one around in your pocket you'll never get drunk."
"That's silly," said my wife, ignoring my tendency to recall obscure trvia. "This is for the ritual."
Now I wished I'd had my tea.
She continued. "You're supposed to take the amethyst and these two little quartz crystals, wash them in water boiled with sea salt, then let them dry in the sun."
"Okay," I said, not sure where this was going.
"But only if it's Saturday."
I knew better than to ask why. The world suddenly seemed to be sliding eastward.
"Then you hide one of the quartz crystals in the south end of the room and put the other one in a bag in your pocket."
"That's it?"
"No, you have to light candles and say these chants."
She handed me a typewritten sheet of paper filled with instructions involving wearing dark clothes, throwing salt over the shoulder, and saying things like,
With this salt I banish negativity
With this salt I toss out bad luck
with this salt I get rid of sorrow
But apparently it won't do a damn thing for bad punctuation or avoiding rituals that use words like "negativity."
"So, what's all this in aid of?" I asked.
"It's the 'out with the old in with the new' ritual."
I refrained from asking if she'd considered saving time and money by making a list of New Year's resolutions instead. It was enough for me that I'd suddenly been cast as Norman Taylor in a remake of Night of the Eagle.
Now my wife is an intelligent, sane, educated woman who has as level a head on her shoulders as I've ever known and yet her she was going in for a New Age "ritual" that didn't even pretend to a veneer of plausibility. There was no explanation in the instructions of why any of the crystals and candles lot should do anything or where the ritual was derived from. Why the candles? Why these particular words? Is it Greek? Egyptian? Chinese? Was it even Atlantean or Lemurian? More likely its derivative was whole cloth, but nobody cared. The current crop of New Agers can't even be bothered to drop random references to "energy" and "dimensions" any longer.
I've never had much time for
superstition in general (aside from my practice or hurling cucumbers at a
picture of W. G. Grace and shouting "Maldon!" when signing insurance forms) and none at all with the New Age
lot. Say what you like about Gerald Gardner, the founder of the
"ancient" cult of Wicca, he may have looked ridiculous running about in his
long underwear, but at least he had the energy to crib from Margaret
Murray's faux archaeology study, The Witch Cult in Western Europe.
And when it came to old-time necromancers like the Golden Dawn you could
admire the effort they put into scribbling their "ancient" grimoires and
drawing their complicated "ancient" amulets.
Even that old
fraud Aleister Crowley knew enough to rip off Egyptian rituals and old
demonology texts to provide verisimilitude.
It may have all been a load of twaddle that served as a pretence for bohemian
types to indulge in cheap thrills, but at least there was enough "there"
there to form the basis for
Night of the Demon
and gave Dennis Wheatley
Perhaps this is just as well. If people took New Agers seriously and thought that those who cast spells really could alter events or control human emotions, then we'd have a wand ban before you could say "Doctor Faustus." Still, even though I don't think anything will come of my wife's amethyst conjuring and I doubt if she will accidentally open a portal to another dimension that will allow the Great Old Ones to invade our world and lay waste to all life on Earth, I'm going to move the furniture just in case.
Friday
20 January 2006
Baristas Blues
Over at the
Scotsman
Brian Hennigen is burning with a hard, gem-like flame as he takes on the
coffee house culture and baristas in particular.
You could make a far better coffee yourself. You are not paying for the coffee. You are paying to be part of the coffee lifestyle, which means forking over a couple of quid for the privilege of sitting in a brown armchair you don't own. This is all very new. If sitting in an armchair you hadn't paid for had been a cultural event several years ago then my dad would have gone to his grave as the Muhammad Ali of leisure.
Brave words and I sympathise, though I do so in only the quietest of tones least I be overheard and denounced. Living in Seattle, I am in the epicentre of the coffee lifestyle.
I am utterly astonished at how caffeinated people are around here. This place has coffee houses the way some people have mice. It's the sort of town that has an espresso bar in a hospital and where a Starbucks (I'm not kidding) opens up across the road from a Starbucks. I see so many coffee vending places that I suspect that every business permit has a check box for "selling coffee" and why you have to go to New York to hear stories about coffee houses going belly up. There are drive up coffee stalls, coffee carts outside of car dealerships, coffee bars in supermarkets, furniture shops, and cinemas Not to leave out the automatic espresso machines in petrol stations. And I don't mean scattered here and there; I mean as closely backed as Las Vegas fruit machines. When I lived in Fremont, a post-boho neighbourhood down by the canal, there were eleven coffee houses within a five minute walk of my front door. Of course, that was in a more built up area. Now I live in a quiet residential neighbourhood, which means that the nearest coffee house is a good two streets away. And just in case you should stray out into the wilderness, the local shops sell self-heating cans of latte.
The irony of all of this is that while I am surrounded by aircraft engineers, code writers, and off-duty baristas rushing about in a perpetual buzz I'm unable to appreciate this frothy, mocha-enhanced stimulation. In my university days I drank a staggering amount of java from waking to sleeping with scarcely any effect at all. I once even drank two steaming carafes of black coffee at lunchtime because a restaurant overcharged me for a corned beef sandwich and I was determined to get the balance back in refills. These days, however, whenever I drink coffee I end up suffering for it within the hour. If I hit the local Jack in the Box drive-thru for breakfast there had better be a toilet free at my destination. So, my caffeine delivery system of choice is now a nice cup of tea.
The irony is that while Seattle produces some of the best exotic coffees in the world, their tea is the most ghastly ever conceived by the mind of man. These are a people who go to shops with espresso machines that look like something out of the space programme, rattle off the most intricate and precise specifications when they order their coffee, think nothing of spending two hundred dollars on a home machine that will make a cappuccino just right, but they can't prepare a tea that isn't tepid brown pool formed by a teabag dangling in a paper cup. And no milk.
Would it kill them to boil the water? How long, oh, Lord! How long!
Monday
23 January 2006
Brinksmanship and the Madman
"We'll meet again, don't know how, don't know when..."
There's
an interesting discussion going on in the blogosphere about what Iran is
going to do if, hopefully "if," it acquires nuclear weapons in the light of
the newly coined "Chirac
Doctrine."
Frankly, M. Chirac's promise to respond to terrorist attacks with nuclear weapons strikes me as having the Maginot Line written all over it. Looks tough, but won't stop the Wehrmacht when the balloon goes up. Still, it has provoked some healthy debate, which should clear the air about what we're up against.
Belmont Club has a post by Wretchard looking at the practicality of Iran waging a nuclear attack. His argument is that for Iran to wage a winning attack against another country it would have to kill at least 25 percent of the enemy's population. That means that to take out the United States Iran would have to successfully deliver 124 warheads. Wretchard points out that this is an absurdity whether Iran uses conventional missiles or terrorists armed with so-called "suitcase nukes,", which is a moot point, as the suitcase nuke is really a myth.
Wretchard has a table of various countries as how many bombs it would take to destroy each one. It's impressive, but I notice that Israel is left off. By my calculations, based on Wretchard's model, it would take only four nukes to do the job. In the genocide trade this is known as "doable."
Over at Dinocrat the argument is taken a step further, stating that Iran couldn't use its bombs because it has no conventional forces to back up its threats and that it couldn't attack another country because it would invite massive retaliation with little gain.
Meanwhile VDH wades in with an article that points out that Iran doesn't have to go for all-out war, but could play the "victim" card to keep the West frozen with guilt up to the point of allowing Tehran t commit genocide against Israel.
These all make for fascinating reading, but even VDH, who is a must-read on military matters, fails to notice an important factor in the case of Iran: The country is run by a load of raving nutcases.
With Iran we should not be talking about a new Cold War in miniature or a matter best handled with sanctions and containment. This is a classic Jack D. Ripper scenario. The Soviet Union may have been ruled by evil men bent on world domination, but they were at least sane. Our policy of deterrence was based on the premise that the Kremlin wouldn't dare attack, because that would be national suicide. But what if the enemy is by nature a suicide bomber who doesn't give a toss if his country is turned into a glass car park? I rather suspect that Ahmadinejad is the sort who would regard 90% Muslim dead in return for "victory" as being acceptable casualties.
Look at Mr. Ahmadinejad's record. This is a man who,
- Talks about glowing at the UN
- Has expressed a desire to see Israel wiped off the map
- Is in a deep state of Holocaust denial
- Demands that Israel relocate to Europe or Alaska
- has declared that there is now a "Final War" going on between Islam and the West
- Has expressed solidarity with fellow dictator Assad
- Openly supports terrorists
- Hell, he started out as a terrorist!
- And is anxiously awaiting the return of the Mahdi, who went missing several centuries ago.
This is neither a man to be reasoned with nor to imagine that he will make rational decisions. True, he may not be able to bring the United States to its knees, but that doesn't mean that he wouldn't mind seeing it take a severe blooding. An army of terrorists armed with suitcase nukes might be a fantasy, but that doesn't prevent a conventional bomb being delivered in a cargo container or a freight plane. It doesn't have to go through customs. It just has to get close to the target. A container ship detonating in Puget Sound will still take out most of Seattle as neatly as if it were tied to the pier.
But why would Ahmadinejad do that? Doesn't he know that Iran would be vapourised? Maybe, but would he care? The Nazis carried out their extermination programme even when losing the war was inevitable-- and most of them were frighteningly sane.
Look at the recent example of Saddam, who stared down the world so fiercely that even the anti-war left was certain that he had WMDs to spare and that taking Baghdad would be a replay of Stalingrad, but on the night it turned out that he'd made every military misjudgement possible and his "elite" Republican Guard folded like soggy gingerbread men. And he did this twice in twelve years! Remember, in the scales between Iraq and Iran Saddam was always regarded as the sane, calculating one who'd always act in his own self-interest.
Now imagine an Islamofascist fixed on wiping out the Jews and bringing about the End Times who has five or six fission bombs and ask yourself if he might not get a bit impatient with that nice, tempting red button sitting there just waiting to be pushed.
Ah, I hear you say, but Ahmadinejad isn't the real power in Iran. It's the Mullah's who run the place. Right, Ahmadinejad may not be the true power in Iran, but this is cold comfort, as the Mullahs are as crazy as he is, if not more so. I'm not going to sleep any easier knowing that a homicidal maniac with a messiah complex is being watched over by a clinic-load of paranoid schizophrenics.
No, this is most definitely not the time to use Cold War tactics. This is a case of absolutely keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of Iran or, better yet, getting rid of the madmen who keep their people in bondage.
Tuesday
24 January 2006
The Strange Ride of Susanne Osthoff
Susanne Osthoff: Victim or Accessory?
There are some stories that
start out odd and quickly descend into the utterly bizarre. Such is
the case with stories about strange kidnappings in which the victim may have
been in on her own abduction.
On 25 December 2005, 43 year-old German archaeologist and Muslim convert Susanne Osthoff and her driver were supposedly kidnapped in Baghdad. Ms. Osthoff quickly became something of a media darling as pleas were made by her estranged parents for her release and candlelight vigils were staged from Berling to London. Finally, on 18 December Ms. Osthoff was released by her kidnappers.
Happy ending? Not quite. Even at the outset this story had a fishy smell to it. As we pointed out earlier this month, it seemed odd that a terrorist group would nab someone who is on record as being sympathetic to their cause. It became even odder when after her release no one seemed at all curious as to what happened to her driver who got her in the mess in the first place. Was he released, or did he, in fact, not need to be released?
Then things started to get interesting. It turned out that in the Summer of 2005 Ms. Osthoff reported to the American authorities in Iraq that she'd allegedly received "threats" of abduction, which contradicted her claims that she was kidnapped because her captors "couldn't find any Americans." Then we learn that the German embassy told Ms. Osthoff to leave the country for her own safety. She refused. Add the coincidence when Islamofascist terrorist Mohammed Ali Hamadi, who killed a US Navy diver, was released from a German prison, causing many to suspect that some sort of deal had been struck for Ms. Osthoff's release, and something starts to tickle the back of the brain.
All of this could have been discounted as the sort of chaff that surrounds many terrorists kidnappings, but then Ms. Osthoff began to give her account of her adventures in a series of contradictory stories. She appeared on Al Jazeera in full burqa kit and said that her kidnappers who were ordinary Sunnis who were trying to secure humanitarian aid, that she was well-treated, and was assured that because she was a Muslim she was safe. Quote Osthoff, "I was so happy to know that I had not fallen into the hands of criminals." Later asked why she dressed that way on Al Jazeera, Osthoff said she "didn't have time to change."
But then on German television she claimed that her kidnappers were Al Qaeda, that she was bound part of the time, and that she was terrified for her life. Her contradictory, rambling, and often evasive accounts of her kidnapping have made her very unpopular in Germany-- a point not lost on Ms. Osthoff, who said,
I think the Germans hate me. No one stands at my side; everyone attempts to portray me as a poor mad person.
Ms. Osthoff's image wasn't helped when the public learned that she has not been in direct contact with her family in Germany despite their public pleas for her safety, that she did not contact her twelve-year old daughter until weeks afterward, and then only at the arrangement of a German television programme, and that Ms. Osthoff refused to return to Germany despite pleas by Gerhard Schroeder, which deeply embarrassed the government. Rumours that she is in Jordan intending to return to Iraq, which she denies, began to circulate. The Syrians responded by saying that Ms. Osthoff was welcome any time (an endorsement I'd rather not have), and the German government took these rumours seriously enough to tell the Iraqi government not to allow Ms. Osthoff back into the country.
Then the lid really started to blow. Allegations came forth that Ms. Osthoff had worked for German intelligence. At first this gave her the confusing impression of being a German spy until some columnists bluntly claimed that she was an informant with knowledge of impending terrorist attacks, indicating that she was not moving in the most innocent of circles. According to John Rosenthal's take on the matter,
This raises an obvious question: how was Osthoff privy to such information? In the series of often mind-bending interviews that she has given to the German media since her release -- starting with her now famous burqa-clad appearance on Germany’s ZDF public television -- Osthoff has made no secret where her political sympathies lie. Among other things, she has referred nonchalantly to the forces responsible for the violence in Iraq as “the resistance,” waxed philosophical about wishing to see Iraq return to “how it was,” and even spoken of Osama Bin Laden by just his first name as “Osama” (that’s “Sheik Osama”, her captors are supposed to have corrected her).
There were media claims that the German government paid five million US dollars for her release. To this Osthoff replied,
The kidnappers got an offer from the Germans. I'm not allowed to say how much but they thought it wasn't enough.
Not the wisest choice of words to deflect the allegation.
But is as nothing compared to this Reuters report that some of the ransom money, amounting to several thousand dollars, was found in Ms. Osthoff's clothes after her "rescue." If this turns out to be true, then both Ms. Osthoff and the German government have fallen straight into the mulligatawny. It is going to be a profound embarrassment in Berlin if after opposing the invasion of Iraq and carping about the fight against the terrorists every step of the way it turns out that the German government is forking over millions of dollars in ransom to the terrorists. It is, after all, one thing to criticise the war effort. It is another thing to pay for the enemy's IEDs. Worse, if the Reuter's story is true, then the Germans have been taken for a ride by a woman who was not a kidnap victim (albeit one sympathetic to her captors), but a knowing accomplice in a hoax to shake down the German government for a whacking great hunk of change.
What is the world coming to? If you can't trust Western converts to Islam who consort with terrorists and pine for the good old days under Saddam, then who can you trust?
Wednesday
25 January 2006
The Rock That Came In From The Cold
Russia's
Federal
Security Service (the more cuddly version of the KGB) has claimed that
three British diplomats have been carrying out spy operations against the
Russian government using a fake rock packed with electronics as a sort of
wireless drop box where British agents and informers from Russian NGOs could
exchange information using PDAs.
There's been a lot of talk about how this device might work and how it is in the "great tradition" of spy gadgetry, but for my money I think the whole thing is a concoction by the FSA-- not because it's implausible, but because it isn't implausible enough. The British have had a tradition of clandestine gadgeteering going back to the Q ships of the First World War and something as clumsy looking as this spy rock with its obvious battery problems does not seem like the work of Major Boothroyd. It seems more likely that this analysis by Jeremy Page is closer to the mark and that Mr. Putin is using this Cold War double-bluff as a way of trying to pick a fight with Britain as part of a campaign against the NGOs in his own country. According to Mr. Page,
All Western governments have openly funded a number of NGOs to try to help the development of a democratic society in Russia. However, some of the organisations which the West regards as being entirely legitimate are highly subversive to Russian eyes.
Russia's idea of democracy and an independent media is very different from the West's, and the Kremlin regards Western funding of some organisations as an attempt to undermine Russia. It has become particularly sensitive to this following the events in Ukraine last year when the Western-backed NGOs instinctively sided with Viktor Yuschenko, as the pro-democracy candidate, against the Russian-backed Viktor Yanukovych.
Can't let all that democracy run loose. It's unhealthy
Last One Out, Please Turn Off The Lights
The West Lothian
question is starting to have a mighty sting for some people in the light of
Gordon Brown having suddenly wrapped himself in the Union Jack.
Vicki Woods at the Telegraph gets a bit testy with the way that Labour
has been so keen to bestow devolution on everyone except the English; a
people whom Labourites scarcely acknowledge to exist. Meanwhile, north
of the border the
Scotsman
worries over Scots MPs being able to pass laws over a people they do not
represent and is demanding home rule for England.
Mark Steyn, however, brings news that this may be just a temporary problem. Given that Scotland now has a birth rate like that of Russia, the whole matter may be moot by the end of the century. Perhaps the best course of action is for England to sit back and wait for the Scots to die out and then quietly move in.
The MOD Giveth...
The
British Army is developing a new form of electric armour that protects
tanks with a sort of "force field." The idea is that if a tank is hit
with an armour-piercing
round the enemy projectile comes into contact with an
electrified layer inside the tank's plating that vaporises the round before
it can penetrate.
You'll be able to tell these tanks from the conventional types. The electric ones have "Do Not Immerse" stickers on them
And The MOD Taketh Away
The relentless beat
of anti-war,
anti-military sentiments in the press combined with misguided "human rights" legislation
courtesy of the EU have begun to take their toll. Not only have they made the British Armed Forces almost
impossible to
manage, they are precipitating
a recruiting crisis.
This calibre of "supporting the troops" would be risible if it weren't so scary.
As Fake as Caesar
An
Italian atheist
is suing
a priest for fraud on the grounds that Jesus is a fiction. As an
historian I am astonished at the double standards that some people have when
it comes to Christianity. It is one thing to dismiss the Bible as a
load of doo doo, but it's another thing entirely to claim that Jesus Christ
never lived. His life isn't as well documented as, say, Winston
Churchill's, but it's better recorded than thousands of historical
individuals whose existence is never questioned.
This affair reminds me of Woody Allen describing his first wife,
She used to prove that I didn't exist.
Clearly, there is something else going on here.
Tip o' the hat to the Captain's Quarters.
Coming and Going
A man
has been gaoled for
driving under the influence of
Red Bull.
I'm no fan of fizzy caffeinated drinks and my opinion of Red Bull was best summed up by John Cleese,
This is extremely nasty, but we can't prosecute you for that.
But there is something perverse about a government that prosecutes people for not only driving drunk, but also driving while really, really sober.
Best Computer Ever!
Will the real Orac please stand up, or whatever
We present for your enjoyment the coolest computer ever built. Named Orac³ after the famous Orac computer on Blakes 7, it was actually made a couple of years ago, but I still say it is as gorgeous a hunk of electronics as you're likely to see for a while.
Ambergris
An
Australian couple
found a greasy, smelly stone on the beach and are now doing very well for
themselves. It turned out that the stone was pure
ambergris and is worth
$US20 a gram, which means that the couple's bit of flotsam comes in at
$US295,000.
Not bad for a bit of whale vomit.
Haggis and Chips! Mmmmmm!
As if Scotland
doesn't have enough problems, the busybodies in government have declared
that haggis is
a health hazard and have decreed that children should not be allowed to eat
the dish beyond once a week.
Something tells me that the Scottish Executive have way too much free time on their hands
Another Nail in the Coffin
In order to confirm
that civilisation is indeed coming to an end,
BBC 4 is abandoning
the theme music it's used to start its broadcasting day for
thirty-three years in favour of a "pacy news briefing."
Those sufficiently outraged can go here to sign the petition.
Superman Returns... Again
A
new animated Superman feature to be released later this year has been
announced by Warner. According to the
Superman
Through the Ages forum,
In Superman: Brainiac Attacks, the Man of Steel faces a combined threat from his two biggest foes, Lex Luthor and Brainiac. But perhaps even more daunting will be getting in touch with his feelings for Lois.
If nothing else the current fad for live-action superhero films keeps the studios pumping money into the animated versions, so I'm happy.
If You Can't Beat 'Em, Buy 'Em
Disney
seems to have found
a solution to Pixar Studios walking away and becoming a rival: They're buying Pixar for $7.4 billion.
Of course, since the deal also makes Pixar head Steve Jobs Disney's largest shareholder, it's hard to say who's eating whom.
From the Echo Chamber
This just in:
BBC surprised that Iraqis and Afghans are the among most optimistic people
in the world. And Katy K
over at
At the Zoo has something to say about it.
Never cheese off a tennis pro.
Thursday
26 January 2006
Racist Soup
Proving
once again that it is a master at putting out imaginary matches while a real
inferno blazes on its doorstep, the French Government is cracking down on
charities that are doling out
"racist" soup
to the poor. Claiming that pork soup "discriminates against
Muslims and Jews," (though we suspect that Jews were an afterthought
on the part of the Elysee Palace), the Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has
called for a nationwide ban on soup kitchens that dispense the doubleplus
ungood porcine broth.
Perhaps the government should call on the services of a group that has had considerable success with this sort of thing,
In parts of France, a de facto millet system is already in place, with women obliged to wear the hijab and men to grow beards; alcohol and pork products forbidden; “places of sin” such as cinemas closed down; and local administration seized.
Come on in, the Vichy water is fine!
Democracy? Maybe.
The
Palestinians are going to the polls for the first time in ten years and
we'll soon be finding out which party will be leading them. Given the
fact that it's a toss up between Fatah and Hamas, I'm not too optimistic.
Hamas as been trying to project a more warm and cuddly image in the run up to the elections, but it seems that some of the guys just can't stick to the script.
Dhimmimonde
Meanwhile,
Michael Jackson is in Bahrain, where he is combining dhimmitude with
profound gender confusion by running about in an abaya and veil.
I definitely think that it's time for Mr. Jackson to return to Homeworld.
War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, Conformity is Diversity
On the thoughtcrime
front, The
Birmingham Christian Union, a group which has been operating at
Birmingham University for 76 years, has been suspended because it refuses to
take non-Christians as members. If that does not plumb the depths of
perfidy, the Union's documents refer to "Men" and "Women," which is clearly
meant as a slur to all transgendered and transsexual... uh, entities.
A Christian group that expects its members to be Christians and whose documents deal in reality rather than PC fantasies? How can we have diversity on our campuses if some people refuse to conform!
The Wonders of Coyote Pee
Wile Coyote is not amused
A
burning question* these days is whether or not
coyote pee is
effective in keeping deer out of people's gardens. Some say yes,
others say no, and some ask how the heck do you get a coyote to use a
specimen jar.
All I know is that I finally got my chance to use "coyote pee" in a column.
*We need a urethritis joke here.
Flushed With Pride
The
American television networks
UPN
and the WB have announced that they are merging to form a new network to
be called CW.
Having caught some of the programming on both networks, I would suggest that reversing the letters might be more apt.
They're Coming to Take Me Away! Ha Ha!
The new dress code at the New York Times
Somebody
get the chlorpromazine quick. Both the
New York Times and the subject of this article seem to have hit the
slippery slope of paranoia and slid smack into cloud cuckoo land,
Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a "rent boy."
It was the first time Ms. Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google. As Ms. Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18. She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy--a young male prostitute?
Ms. Hanson, 45, immediately told her boyfriend what she had done. "I told him I'd Googled 'rent boy,' just in case I got whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night," she said.
Ms. Hanson's reaction arose from last week's reports that as part of its effort to uphold an online pornography law, the Justice Department had asked a federal judge to compel Google to turn over records on millions of its users' search queries.
"Whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night?" Dick Cheney must be clicking his cloven hooves in delight at the prospect.
And if you haven't been following the whole Google in a teapot controversy, Jonah Goldberg has a very good piece on the subject.
Tip o' the hat to Best of the Web.
Friday
27 January 2006
The Passing of Peter Simple
Michael Wharton (AKA Peter Simple) 1913 - 2006
It is with great regret that we mark the death of Michael Wharton, better known to his readers as Peter Simple, the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph's Way of the World column. According to his Times (no, not The Reactionary Times and Feudal Chronicle) obituary,
A mainstay of his column was the fantasy world of Stretchford, a town populated by such grotesques as the excruciatingly trendy Bishop Spacely-Trellis, who eternally exhorted his flock to jettison “outdated concepts such as God, the Saints and the Incarnation”; Jack Moron, the boorish Fleet Street drunk whose bellicose refrain was “Wake up Britain!”; an appalling tribe of Hampstead liberals, the Dutt-Paukers; and not least the ridiculous social scientist, Dr Heinz Kiosk, who would conclude his monologues by protesting: “We are all guilty!” In Wharton’s universe, everyone remembers the famous Swedo-Albanian war; the famous fifth Brontë sister, Doreen Brontë; Stretchford’s beleaguered Aztec community; and the huntin’ an’ shootin’ Ernest Hemingway’s decision to move to Britain’s most virile town, Bournemouth.
The multi-cultural rainbow banner of the University of Soup Hales will fly at half mast as Feudal landlords, clerical reactionaries, cranks, conspiracy theorists and Luddite peasants everywhere are in mourning.
Time Tunnel
Being a parent is often an
exercise in maintaining one's morale, so after sitting through two
viewings of Cinderella with my three-year old daughter I rewarded
myself with the guilty pleasure of The Time Tunnel
Irwin Allen was no David Lean (in fact, he was one step ahead of being another Bert I. Gordon), but he did have a real flare for producing series with fantastic pilot episodes filled with great visuals. Trouble was, the run of his shows never lived up to the promise of the pilots and were inevitably marked by a rapid decrease in budgets and originality.
The Time Tunnel was no exception to this rule. The pilot looks fantastic. The giant underground complex of Project Tic Toc is a marvellous echo of the Krell machine from Forbidden Planet and the DVD's resolution shows just how impressive the sets and miniatures were, as well as how crappy some of the props turned out to be. The problem with the series, as with many of Allen's other sci-fi outings, is that while his premise was great the execution was disappointing. The Time Tunnel itself is probably one of the best sets ever built for television with its black and white tunnel that stretches literally to infinity and the deep, ponderous hum that it makes it seem as if it were alive, but once our two scientist heroes step into the tunnel and become lost in time everything starts to sag. Granted, the early episodes were actually not badly written. There's lots of action and the pace kicks along well enough, but the situations, such as being stuck on the Titanic, or trying to find a saboteur on the Moon just aren't as compelling as that amazing time machine.
The other problem is that the heroes are probably the worst that Allen ever put on screen. Allen was notorious for all his heroes being dark-haired cardboard cut-outs and Doug Phillips and Tony Newman as the time travellers are right out of that stable. Robert Colbert and James Darren as the leads have nothing to work with. Their characters have literally no personalities and their lines could easily be swapped around without anyone being the wiser. As a retired actor, I can honestly say that my vision of Hell is being cast as the hero in an Irwin Allen series.
Oddly enough, The Time Tunnel was a rip-off of the sci-fi B picture The Time Travelers by Ib Melchior, maker of such classics as Reptilicus and Angry Red Planet. In fact, it was ripped off twice; once by Melchior's producer Ray Dorn, who remade it as Journey to the Center of Time and then by Allen, but Melchior refused to do anything about it for fear of being refused work.
And who says show business isn't fun?
Hamas Wins, Sanity Loses
Topping
the happy news, Hamas has won the Palestinian elections and the civilised
world's reaction can be summed up by an unnamed
EU
figure who said, "Oh dear, fasten your seatbelts."
In the uncivilised world, there was this sort of reaction,
Jihad-Daneshgai, a semi-governmental cultural body active in Iranian universities, congratulated Hamas in a statement, saying the victory "angers the arrogant leaders of the US and the occupiers of Jerusalem".
And Hamas itself has made it quite clear that it will have nothing to do with the "peace process,"
Negotiation with Israel is not on our agenda,” said Mushir al-Masri, who won election in his home district in the northern Gaza Strip. “Recognising Israel is not on the agenda either.
But some people actually see having a load of murdering Islamofascists coming to power as good news-- and not for the Islamofascists. Emanuele Ottolenghi in National Review says that this is an unintended win for Hamas that forces them to work in the open and removes any hope of deniability. According to Ottolenghi, it's one thing to lob missiles at Israel when you're an out of power group that the Palestinian Authority can deny any connection with, but try that when you're the government and Tel Aviv can regard your actions as an act of war.
Whether Ottolenghi is right or not, Hamas winning says something scary about the Palestinians. I have travelled and lived among them and twenty years ago I thought they were a decent bunch whatever the likes of Arafat were up to, but when I saw them dancing and cheering as the twin towers fell on 9/11 their currency with me hit rock bottom. Electing Hamas as their government has done nothing to improve my opinion.
Britain Prepares to Give Iran a Good Talking To.
Hamas's chief sponsor Iran
is rattling sabres of its own with the
accusation
that Britain is behind the recent bombings in the Iranian city of Ahvaz.
This story is only of interest if Tony Blair finally does something about it besides huffing, which seems unlikely. After Iran seizing three Royal Navy boats last year, supplying arms and training to terrorists in general and to Iraqi terrorists in particular, and, of course, that little nuclear weapons thing-- all of which ended in Downing Street doing nothing except issuing a sternly worded memo, I'm not holding out much hope.
And Now For Something Incredibly Scary
In
a move that
is sure to have the Pentagon saying, "They've got to be kidding." Iran is
petitioning the United States to allow direct civilian flights between the
two countries.
It seems reasonable to me. Iran is trying its darnedest to get its nasty little hands on a nuclear weapon, but once hey have it they still need a delivery system. Now be a good little infidel and put your neck on this nice chopping block.
Tip o' the hat to Little Green Footballs.
Iran and St. Thomas
The
Officer's Club has an interesting take on a pre-emptive strike against
Iran's nuclear facilities and how the Just War Theory applies to it.
As an aside, he has this tidbit on the Just War Theory as the Islamofascists apply it,
There are of course offshoots of the JWT. Marxists only believe that war is just if it is means to progressive ends, pacifism is the antithesis of just war (i.e. war is never just), and Islamic fundamentalists use an almost bizzarro version of the just-war theory in their fatwas. In fact, Islamic jihad is by definition a complete perversion of the jus ad bellum, e.g. killing innocents is authorized, no legitimate authority is necessary, war is fought with little chance of success, war is not used as a last resort, and war is used to establish fundamentalist dictatorships instead of peace.
Oh, Those WMDs!
George
Sada, who was number two in Saddam's air force has told the New York Sun
that the missing WMDs are in Syria.
Mr. Sada, 65, told the Sun that the pilots of the two airliners that transported the weapons of mass destruction to Syria from Iraq approached him in the middle of 2004, after Saddam was captured by American troops.
"I know them very well. They are very good friends of mine. We trust each other. We are friends as pilots," Mr. Sada said of the two pilots. He declined to disclose their names, saying they are concerned for their safety. But he said they are now employed by other airlines outside Iraq.
The pilots told Mr. Sada that two Iraqi Airways Boeings were converted to cargo planes by removing the seats, Mr. Sada said. Then Special Republican Guard brigades loaded materials onto the planes, he said, including "yellow barrels with skull and crossbones on each barrel." The pilots said there was also a ground convoy of trucks.
The flights - 56 in total, Mr. Sada said - attracted little notice because they were thought to be civilian flights providing relief from Iraq to Syria, which had suffered a flood after a dam collapse in June of 2002.
Given the troubles that Boy Assad is having at the moment this is something that he'd probably rather not have come to light.
Dutch Treat
It
looks as if the Dutch
are starting to take Islamofascism serious. This week the Dutch
parliament passed a bill requiring all immigrants to take an "integration
test" before they enter the country. For this they also must pay €350
and then take a second tougher test after they get to the Netherlands.
On top of this, the government is also seriously considering sending recalcitrant "youths" to military camps,
Fearing the occurrence of “French situations” such as the widespread rioting by immigrant youths in France in November last year, politicians from the Right and the Left have embraced the proposal to send young people to a military drill camp. The proposal was made this week by the former entrepreneur Hans de Boer, who was recently appointed by the government to head the Taskforce for Youth Unemployment. De Boer said in Thursday’s papers that young dropouts, who have no jobs or qualifications, have to be sent to “prep camps” in order to be drilled and prepared to go back to school. He called upon the army to encourage decent and responsible behaviour in the youths. One of the sites for such training is a former army barracks in Budel, near the Belgian border.
I'm not getting out the confetti just yet. Passing a test doesn't make one a good citizen and as for the training camps, they're a nice idea, but I've seen the Dutch Army. Any fighting force that is unionised and only fights from nine to five is going to have a tough go trying to civilise a load of Jihad fodder.
But it's a first step.
James Bond Car Secrets Revealed
James
Bond will be back behind the wheel of an
Aston Martin in the upcoming
Casino
Royale. Both the car maker and Eon productions are trying to keep
the details of the Aston Martin DBS a secret, but toy maker Corgi has
accidentally let slip the For Your Eyes Only info and
pocket-lint.co.uk
has the photos.
Haggis on High
And finally, in a
haggis update we proudly announce that the high-altitude Burns Supper record
has been broken. Chris Dunlop of Glasgow scaled the 23,000ft Mount
Aconcagua in Argentina, where he enjoyed a traditional Burns Supper of
tinned haggis, neeps, and tatties.
Congratulations, Mr. Dunlop and Och Aye!
Monday
30 January 2006
Presenting: Pulp Parade!
We
are pleased to announce a major new section to Tales of Future Past:
Pulp Parade. If you're an Ephemeral
Isle fan you've seen our photo features. Well, here is an easy place
to relive those moments without having to scroll through the archives.
If you're new to EI, here's your chance to bathe in pulp goodness-- though
you're invited to browse through the archives as
well.
Future of British Transport
The BBC has a column on the future of transportation in Great Britain.
Given it's current state, I'm not holding my breath.
Health MOT
The government has announced that it will be issuing "Health MOTs" to whip the population into shape. People will be given periodic exams followed by "advice" and oversight by personal trainers. These MOTs will supposedly be voluntary, but we know from the ID card scheme how "voluntary" this will ultimately become.
Wouldn't it be more efficient, and honest, to just have us muster in front of the telescreen for callisthenics every morning and be done with it?
We Know Where You Are
Speaking of those
dreaded ID cards,
we now learn that they will have RFID tags embedded in them. The
government says that they will only be used with short-range scanners of
only a few inches, but they also said the cards were "for services" and
"voluntary."
Stand by for chip implants.
Any Questions?
And just to show how
welcome enquiries are in Brave New Britain pupils at the
Jo Richardson comprehensive in Dagenham have been banned from raising
their hands on the grounds that it "leads to feelings of victimisation."
That's the spirit. Teach them young to just sit down, shut up, and take it.
You Can't Even Rest in Peace
Even when you're dead
you're expected to be a productive member of society.
Prof. Des Thompson the principal uplands adviser to Scottish Natural
Heritage, says that scattering ashes of the dear departed on mountain tops
does wonders for the local flora.
How long before some bureaucrat has the idea of making cremation and ash scattering on mountains compulsory is only a matter of time.
EU Panic over Hamas
"I am shocked, shocked that Hamas refuses to renounce terrorism"
The
EU responds to Hamas's intentions to continue it's terrorism with it's
standard operating procedure: Running about like headless chickens.
Jack Straw Delivers
I thought I was being
a bit harsh the other day when I said that Britain was ready to respond to
the latest outrages by Iran with a stern memo. Now along comes
Jack Straw to reassure me by standing up to Iran's latest threat to
launch missile attacks against the West by issuing an earth-shaking
statement that if Iran continues on its path to acquire nuclear weapons
Britain will not use military force.
"Straw" is the perfect name for him.
Peter Simple Speaks
It appears that Mr.
Straw is a follower of Dr. Spacely-Trellis, whose wisdom the late Peter
Simple made a career of following from a safe distance. In this
extract from 2002, the Bishop of Stretchford gives his solution to
Islamofascism.
Dr E W T Spacely-Trellis, the go-ahead Bishop of Stretchford, this week presided over a moderate trans-faith conference in the People's Narthex of his cathedral. He had originally intended it for moderate Muslims only, but "in view of the overall world crisis", he decided to enlarge it to include moderate adherents of all religions, including the Nerdley Aztec community.
He wore symbolic trans-faith vestments designed to express the "essential oneness" of all religions. His bishop's mitre was surmounted by an Islamic turban; a phylactery gleamed in the folds of a garment, part chasuble, part Buddhist's saffron robe; he carried a crozier and a lama's double-ended thunderbolt and his face was painted with the sacred patterns of Australian aborigines.
In his opening address, he emphasised the importance of apologising for all the wrongs Christianity had been guilty of: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the persecution of the Jews, the slave trade and all the actions of colonists and missionaries throughout the world.
"The key to world peace," he said, "lies in the hands of moderate believers, particularly moderate Muslims. We moderate Christians have got rid of most of the immoderate superstitions that disfigured our religion in unenlightened times: God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Saints, the miracles, the Bible - all the accumulated rubbish of centuries.
"I feel sure that our moderate Muslim friends will likewise get rid of Allah, the Prophet, the pilgrimage to Mecca and all the other obstacles to a moderate, rational religion suited to the needs of the average Muslim man and woman in our day and age.
"I feel sure that the average moderate Aztec will come to realise that it is not necessary to carry out human sacrifice on a large scale to ensure that the sun continues to rise daily." Descending from the pulpit, he prostrated himself on a moderate prayer-rug specially woven by Mantissa Shout, his live-in partner and Countryside Dean of Stretchford, tipped as the first woman bishop.
At this point Dr F Z Ifikarullah, Grand Mufti of Stretchford, rose to his feet and strode immoderately from the cathedral amid a crowd of his children and adherents. Will he proclaim jihad? Or will he be content with issuing a fatwa? "I am convinced," says Dr Trellis, "that if he does, it will be a moderate fatwa in a very real sense."
The Islamofascist Fight Song
They may never win, but, damn, they can crank out a catchy tune.
Update: Google has gone dhimmi and censored the link, but Little Green Footballs has taken up the slack.
Breed or Die
Germany's
Chancellor Angela Merkel has had the courage to point out that unless
Germans start having more babies the country faces extinction.
That strikes us as pure common sense. What is amazing is that some claim that the problem can be solved not by having more babies, but by more day-care centres and employment regulations.
Excellent! Expand the very welfare state that caused the death spiral in order to stop it!
Spacesuit Satellite
In a fascinating development, Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are going to throw an empty space suit into orbit.
Perhaps the Goodwill drop off was a bit far to drive.
It's billed as a first, though there was actually an earlier spacesuit satellite back in 2001, but nobody likes to talk about that one.
I Like Chinese
Zimbabwe is under the
heel of an insane dictator, the once bread-basket of Africa faces
starvation, the white population is fleeing for their lives,
the black population is losing theirs, and political
dissent is outlawed. What to do? Force the population to
learn Chinese!
Calling Captain Nemo!
An
octopus has been caught on videotape in mortal combat with a submarine!
Okay, it's only a little submarine, but what the heck.
Quisling
Not
only is Norway continuing to fund the
Palestinian Authority even though it is now an officially terrorist
government, but it
has taken the position that it's safer to opt for
dhimmitude than to
take a stand for freedom of speech by issuing this apology to those of the
Faithful who are offended by cartoons mocking Mohammed,
I am sorry that the publication of a few cartoons in the Norwegian paper Magazinet has caused unrest among Muslims. I fully understand that these drawings are seen to give offence by Muslims worldwide. Islam is a spiritual reference point for a large part of the world. Your faith has the right to be respected by us.
The cartoons in the Christian paper Magazinet are not constructive in building the bridges which are necessary between people with different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Instead they contribute to suspicion and unnecessary conflict.
Let it be clear that the Norwegian government condemns every expression or act which expresses contempt for people on the basis of their religion or ethnic origin. Norway has always supported the fight of the UN against religious intolerance and racism, and believes that this fight is important in order to avoid suspicion and conflict. Tolerance, mutual respect and dialogue are the basis values of Norwegian society and of our foreign policy.
Freedom of expression is one of the pillars of Norwegian society. This includes tolerance for opinions that not everyone shares. At the same time our laws and our international obligations enforce restrictions for incitement to hatred or hateful expressions.
Translated into English, "Don't blow us up! It was those accursed Christians' fault, not ours! We're good dhimmi secularists who know our place!" The double standard operating here is staggering. If the religion in question had been Christianity or Judaism there would have been no apology forthcoming and probably a smugly self-righteous sermon about fighting the dark hand of censorship instead. Of course, Christians and Jews don't back up their complaints with bombs and dull hunting knives.
Tip o' the hat to DhimmiWatch.
Progress
Japanese
beer maker Asashi
has made a major contribution toward the advancement of civilisation with
the invention of a robot that can open beer cans and pour out a cold one.
Perhaps they were inspired by this.
Tip o' the hat to Tim Blair.
Tuesday
31 January 2006
Iran to Infiltrate Nuclear Inspectors
The
Daily Telegraph
reports that Iran is preparing for UN nuclear inspection teams by
infiltrating them.
If anyone still believes that all Iran wants is a peaceful civilian power programme, then collect your rose-coloured glasses at the door.
The Price of Terrorism
Hamas
is discovering that refusing to renounce terrorism has a price and it's in
cold, hard cash. So far
Israel
has has refused to hand over its regular monthly £24.4 million tax
revenue payment if Hamas enters parliament and the United States has said
that it will withhold aid unless Hamas gives up violence and recognises
Israel's right to exist.
But Steve Schippert over at Threatswatch has suspicions that the EU, the Palestinian Authorities largest donor, is going to quietly talk itself into keeping the Euros rolling.
Britain’s Minister to the European Parliament Edward McMillan-Scott puts forth the prevailing logic, which hinges on three essential points.
1. Hamas is now the duly elected governing body of the Palestinian Territories.
2. Hamas has largely adhered to a cease fire with Israel for months and should be rewarded.
3. Hezbollah is not on the list, neither should Hamas be.
This approach, if it is warmly received, is troubling as well as problematic in its logic. The logic necessary should be self-evident.
I suppose it's just easier for Old Europe to pay the jizya.
Cartoon Crisis
Meanwhile
the Muslim world demonstrates it's tolerance for other views with
violent demonstrations against Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet
Mohammed,
Angered by the drawings, masked Palestinian gunmen briefly took over a European Union office in Gaza on Monday. Islamists in Bahrain urged street demonstrations, while Syria called for the offenders to be punished. A Saudi company paid thousands of dollars for an ad thanking a business that snubbed Danish products
Things have become so bad that Danish citizens are being advised to avoid Muslim countries and former President Clinton has come down firmly... on the side of the Jihadists.
In case you're interested in what the fuss is about, the cartoons in question can be found here.
The Death of Free Speech
The
Danish cartoonists should think themselves lucky that they are in Denmark
and not Great Britain, which is soon to turn its back on centuries of being
the cradle of liberty by passing the Religious Hatred Bill, which would mean
that cartoons mocking Mohammed would put the artist in question in chokey
for seven years.
Massive protests are planned against the bill and even some Muslim groups have spoken out against it, though the Church of England has shown that it has no survival instinct by joining the Muslim Council of Britain in supporting it.
Comedian Rowan Atkinson has an opinion piece in the Groaniad in which he explains just how nebulous and therefore dangerous the language of this legislation is as in this quote,
"A person is not guilty of this offence by reason of anything done ... so far as it consists of criticising, expressing antipathy towards, abusing insulting or ridiculing any religion, religious belief or religious practice ..."
"Excellent" I thought. "Fantastic". "Job done".
Sadly, the next word is "Unless". "UNLESS he intends thereby to stir up religious hatred or was reckless as to whether religious hatred would be stirred up".
In order words, you haven't committed an offence unless of course you've committed the offence, in which case I'm afraid you've committed an offence.
Laying aside the fact that lack of intent is never going to be a defence for a comedian, as the very nature of a joke is that it is a construct, a deliberate act with a victim in mind, it is the recklessness provision that is most pernicious. "You should have known you were going to cause trouble and yet you went ahead and staged your play all the same".
I can't decide whether this is Orwellian, dhimmitude, or both.
The Horror of the '70s
The
1970s may be the decade that taste forgot with some of the worst fashions,
music, dancing, sexual mores, politics, foreign policy, and economic
decisions the world has ever seen, but most people forget that it also had
some of the best
made for television horror movies in history. This was a
time before the slasher films and the cheap cable knockoffs when the
American networks, lead by ABC, produced such classics of subtle,
atmospheric horror as the Night Stalker, the Norliss Tapes, A Cold Night's
Death, and Ritual of Evil.
Judge for yourself its believability, and then try to tell yourself, wherever you may be, it couldn't happen here.
Carl Kolchak