March | 29 |
2004 |
Hutton - the gift that keeps on giving:
Top BBC staff threaten to walk out over WMD probe
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March | 27 |
2004 |
There have, of course, been problems with Iraq. The Americans plainly did not plan as well for the victory as they did for the fight. But, as Mark Steyn shows, to argue that it has not been a success requires so willful a warping of the facts as to be simply ridiculous:
1) Saddam Hussein is in jail, his sons are in ‘paradise’, and of the 52 faces on the Pentagon’s deck of cards all but nine are now in one or the other of those locations.2) The coalition casualties in February were the lowest since the war began.
3) Attacks on the Iraqi oil pipelines have fallen by 75 per cent since last autumn, and crude oil production in British-controlled southern Iraq is at 127 per cent of the target set immediately after the war.
4) The prewar potable water supply — 12.9 million litres — has been doubled.
5) The historic marshlands of southern Iraq, environmentally devastated by Saddam, are being restored, and tens of thousands of marsh Arabs have returned to their ancient homeland.
6) Public healthcare funding in Iraq is more than 25 times higher than it was a year ago and child immunisation rates have improved by 25 per cent.
7) Iraq’s only international port has been modernised and desilted so that it is now able to take large ships without waiting for the tide, and daily commercial aircraft departures are 100 times higher than prewar.
8) School attendance in Iraq is 10 per cent higher than a year ago.
9) Despite Saddam emptying his prisons of cutpurses and other ne’er-do-wells just before the war, coalition authorities report that crime in Basra has fallen by 70 per cent.
10) The interim Iraqi constitution is the most liberal in the Arab world.
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March | 26 |
2004 |
Apologies for the absence. My line went down thanks to wonderful Belgacom (yes, folks, I live a double life in Brussels) and I was too manic with paid scribbling to wander out and find a connection.
But now I'm back...
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March | 22 |
2004 |
Brilliant piece on tax returns by the incomparable Dave Barry. Do read it - it's hilarious.
April 15 is lurking around the corner, so if you haven't yet filed your federal tax return, it's time to set aside a few hours, gather together your financial records, and flee the country....For openers, we have a new Internal Revenue Service commissioner, replacing former Commissioner Charles Rossotti, who, in what the IRS described as a ''freak auditing mishap,'' was eaten by hyenas. The new commissioner is Mark W. Everson, whose name can be rearranged to spell ''Rev. Snakeworm.'' According to his official biography, Commissioner Everson used to be a vice president at a major company in the field of -- I am not making this up -- airline catering. That is exciting news for taxpayers, because when it comes to customer service and satisfaction, the term ''airline food'' is virtually synonymous with the term ``Thanks, but I'll just chew on my seat cushion.''
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Same old same old. Spring Dawn finished 3rd. He led most of the way, and jumped well, but faded at the business end of the race. I couldn't see any excuses - it was the right trip, and a truly awful race (the others were all pretty crap).
So it looks like we've got to face the fact that, beautiful as he is, he's just not very good.
Meanwhile, here's Spring Dawn's Japanese soul mate, uncannily called Gentle Spring.
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I pay my licence fee so the BBC can publish this sort of vile terrorist propaganda:
Sheikh Yassin: Spiritual figurehead Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, was a frail quadriplegic who could barely see. His voice was thin and quavering. Sheikh Yassin believed in "holy war". Yet he wielded growing power among Palestinians, long frustrated with a peace process that has failed to improve their lives....After a childhood accident left him a quadriplegic, he devoted his early life to Islamic scholarship and studied at al-Azhar university in Cairo, the birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood.
It was there that he formed the belief that Palestine was an Islamic land "consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day", and that no Arab leader had the right to give up any part of this territory.
You'd think he was a saintly, frail scholar rather than a mass murderer.
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As ever, Oliver Kamm cuts through some of the naueating hypocrisy, moral blindness and wilful ignorance about the state of terror in Israel with this coruscating post today on the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas murderer:
It’s a defensible position (though not one I hold) to argue that Israel’s security needs would best be advanced by eschewing retaliation against terrorist organisations. What is not permissible – what in fact is downright indecent when Israel’s civilians require reserves of courage merely to travel on a bus or eat in a restaurant for fear that that journey or that meal will be their last – is to dispute the urgency of those security needs. Yet here are two of the most facile remarks it’s possible to imagine concerning Israel’s assassination this morning of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin:British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw described the assassination as "unacceptable" and "unjustified''. Mr Straw said he did not think Israel would benefit from an attack on an old man in a wheelchair.
And the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said the killing was "very, very bad news" for the Middle East peace process.
What moral relevance the Foreign Secretary imagines inheres in being old and infirm is beyond my training in casuistry to identify. Does he suppose that, because Sheikh Yassin was not himself physically capable of killing Jews, Israel got the wrong man? I imagine he does not, for a couple of years ago – after some peculiarly inept remarks and a feeble non-apology on the same subject by Cherie Blair – he made a sharp distinction between those who carry out and those who order suicide-murders:
When young people go to their deaths, we can all feel a degree of compassion for those youngsters. They must be so misguided and depressed to do this…
But behind those people are some very evil terrorist leaders who do not put their own lives on the line when they are making sure that others' lives are ended.The first sentence is of course dangerous nonsense. The distinctive characteristic of the suicide bomber’s actions is not that he voluntarily ‘goes to his death’ but that he takes a large number of other people – killed not quite indiscriminately, for the targets are carefully selected to comprise defenceless and often juvenile Jewish civilians – unwillingly to theirs. To call the suicide-murderer misguided doesn’t quite do justice to his act of unmitigated barbarism, while to attribute to him ‘depression’ – as opposed to, say, fanaticism and zealotry – is a speculative hypothesis proffered without the remotest empirical support.
But the second sentence is entirely accurate, as the Foreign Secretary later expanded upon while trying to extricate himself from his absurd initial pronouncement:
Suicide bombing is not remotely a spontaneous act by individuals. It is an action organised by some very evil terrorist leaders who have hatred for the state of Israel.
Read the whole thing.
I'd love to see a poll on what ordinary people think. I'd bet a fortune that if you discount Grauniad readers, BBC journalists and politicians for whom the phrase 'double standards' might have been invented, an overwhelming majority would support what Israel has done.
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Andreas Whittam Smith tells us that
Iraq will determine how I vote at the general election.
Me too, old chap. Can't think of many other reasons to vote for Blair.
Or does he mean he'll vote for the dictators' friend?
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Who'da thunk it, eh?
BNP boss accused of stirring up racial tensions
(from The Independent)
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The Edge has a suggestion for a GOP button:
I voted for John Kerry, before I voted against him.
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Today's Media Guardian asks various media figures what question they would put to the various candidates for the chairmanship of the BBC.
I'm with Kelvin:
Kelvin MacKenzie Chairman and chief executive of The Wireless Group
Question: In a multi-channel world why on earth should viewers be forced, under the threat of jail, to pay £10 a month licence fee for two dreary light entertainment channels?Reason: The answer I expect I would receive would be to keep 26,000 rather untalented left of centre turds in a job.
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Until Friday night I had no idea that, for the 135 years since its first performance, all renditions of Wagner’s Das Rheingold have been missing a central character. One might reasonably have assumed, as has every previous producer of the opera, that the only characters in it are those such as Alberich, Wotan and Loge, whom Wagner included in the score.
The English National Opera has, however, discovered otherwise. How else to explain the presence on the left-hand side of the stage of a man dressed wholly in black, making all sorts of facial expressions in reaction to the events being portrayed, flinging his arms around with abandon and spot-lit throughout the evening, just in case one’s eyes happened to wander from him.
Dramatically, I have no idea what his addition to the production was meant to indicate, since I found no reference to the character “man in black gesticulating enthusiastically” in either the synopsis or the cast list. But he took a bow at the end with the rest of the cast and no attempt was made to remove him, so he was clearly part of the conception rather than a madman who had wandered in off the street.
I am, of course, being disingenuous. I know full well what he was doing. He was signing the performance for the deaf. But that explanation of his presence is, surely, no more far-fetched than my alternative.
Has no one pointed out to the new director of ENO, Sean Doran, that he is running an opera house, and that opera is based on the fusing of music and drama? I am unaware of any successful attempts to sign Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for one simple reason: it is a piece of music and, as such, has to be heard to be understood. Opera is, certainly, a theatrical experience but the visual aspect is merely one component. Without the aural side, it is not opera but a wholly unsatisfactory piece of drama.
I have no idea how many deaf people were in the audience on Friday (more to the point, nor does the Coliseum — such figures are not kept). But I would venture a guess: none. The truth of it is that the presence of a sign- language interpreter has nothing to do with making life better for the deaf, and everything to do with complying with bizarre extensions of the notion of “accessibility” which, thanks to the subsidy culture and the political posturing which underlies it, has infected the arts beyond all reason.
Take the Coliseum’s London neighbour, the Royal Opera House. Because it performs operas in their original language, it uses surtitles to translate the libretti into English. Nothing, one might think, could make opera more “accessible” than such surtitles — and not just to the deaf. Yet that is not enough. Preposterously, and utterly pointlessly, the Royal Opera also employs signers to stand at the side of the stage. Does the Royal Opera House think deaf people cannot read as well as the rest of us?
Such signing ruins the experience for the overwhelming majority of those present. Since it is impossible to avoid looking at the signer, it is akin to having a man standing by every painting in the National Gallery continually shouting a description of how it looks, for the benefit of the few blind people who choose to go, and to the detriment of everyone else.
It may be, of course, that having operas signed does transform the artistic life of some deaf people. In which case, a way should be found to make it as discreet as possible — perhaps a small video screen to be held by those who want one in the same way that the blind are given earpieces to listen to descriptions of the stage. Anything, in fact, that avoids adding extraneous characters to, and ruining, the entire operatic repertoire.
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March | 20 |
2004 |
Words of wisdom from Bernie Ecclestone:
"Countries like France and Britain really believe we have a place in the world by right. But you cannot live on history. People should worry about our economy and the fact that in 10 years' time Europe will be a third world region, taken over by Asia and Latin America. We can't produce anything like the prices they can. We want a 35-hour week. Time off to go to the dentist and God knows what else. And we're supposed to be competing."
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Passing swiftly by the miserable failure of my last speculative tip, here's my latest real tip (and bear in mind that my record so far with them is a 7/1 winner and a 33/1 third - a pretty huge profit).
A strong source close to Barry Hills tells me that the great betting trainer refuses to countenance his Lincoln winner from last year, Pablo, not winning again this year. Since Mr Hills is not one to exaggerate his horses' chances, this is a must bet each way. Best priced 16/1. (Even better, he's trading at 22/1 on Betfair at the moment.)
Go make money.
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March | 18 |
2004 |
Melanie Phillips poses the right question in response to the facts which are emerging about four of the five suspects freed from Guantanamo Bay, and the murderous incitements by Mohamed al Masri:
Why are the British authorities passive in the face of all this?
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One of the posters at Samizdata has a wonderfully cheeky riposte to the hilariously bad 'If...' series now airing on BBC2, which takes a series of 'problems' - power generation, rising inequality, obesity (not that the topics are in any way a tired retread of familiar statist crap) - and then posits a fictional scenario (always involving some kind of disaster because the state hasn't acted 'properly') mixed with talking heads:
As part of this conversation, the BBC asks for views of the world in 2020 and I thought that it would be rude not to oblige.By 2020, we will no longer have to pay the licence fee to watch substandard populist rot that masquerades as quality TV, notably, the series of poor documentaries called If.
If Iran or Al Qaeda obtain weapons of mass destruction, then we can expect them to unleash a second Holocaust, in order to remove Israel from the Middle East. Half of Europe will revile this, half will be relieved. One or more countries will withdraw from the European Union due to its institutional inflexibility and inability to compete with the United States or the Far East.
There will be further wars in the Middle East involving the West (without a UN mandate) due to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in oil producing areas.
And this comment says it all:
I saw the first one, concerning the possible breakdown in the power supply system. In one sequence that will stay with me for some time, one of the talking heads commissioned, one presumes, to lend some sense of authority to the programme, said: "Well, you can't make power out of thin air". This was followed not five minutes later by a picture of an air turbine on a wind farm. Priceless.
Do watch the rest of the series (Wednesdays at 9pm, BBC2). They say the Beeb can't make comedies any more. Oh yes it can.
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March | 17 |
2004 |
Please, read this fabulous piece by Andrew Sullivan, which destroys the Guardian's foul response to the Spanish bombings.
I can no longer stand reading that nauseating rag. Its response to terror is now beneath contempt. I can no longer stomach having it infect my flat, or contemplate the fact that my money helped fund its existence. Until last week I had all the broadsheets delivered every day; this week I cancelled The Guardian. May it rot.
(And Melanie Phillips has a withering response to Jonathan Freedland's bizarre and illogical piece in today's Guardian.)
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Marvelous example of football rubbish from Jamie Redknapp, one of the more thoughtful players:
"Hopefully Europe is within our reach and we have got to keep pushing on," said Redknapp.
"Sunday was a big result for us because we are five points behind Newcastle now, but we have got a tough run because we play Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal - but I think we have proved we can beat the big teams."
Since Spurs have lost to Man U, Chelsea and Arsenal, I'm wondering how exactly it is that we have "proved we can beat the big teams".
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Here's a speculative bet.
In the past, I've only tipped horses I've been totally confident about. But in today's Coral Cup (4pm), it seems to me that Rosaker is way over priced at 10/1. The only horse to have beaten him all season is the fine stayer Solerina. And far from being laid out for this race, he was due to run in tomorrow's stayers' shampionship until Rhinestone Cowboy changed plans and ran here instead, thus keeping the weights right down for Rosaker.
With only 10 stone 9 pounds, and Paul Carberry on board, he simply has to be backed each way.
UPDATE: I did say it was a speculative bet. Sorry. And I suppose I should have said that I'd backed the winner, Monkerhostin, at 16/1 ante post. Sorry again!
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