Back Seat Drivers

Telling Choices

2008-12-09T12:50:00.002Z

Last weekend, Spanish newspaper El Pais ran a long feature in its Sunday magazine, listing the 100 personalities of the year. Each profile was itself written by a public figure. Spanish prime minister José Luis Zapatero wrote about Colombian politician and freed hostage Ingrid Betancourt. Opposition leader Mariano Rajoy chose footballer David Villa.

Spreading the wealth around

2008-11-03T20:31:00.001Z

"The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor... The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess... It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion." - Adam Smith

Crisis in quotes

2008-09-30T12:50:00.001+01:00

"If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down." - President Bush

"As a friend said last night, we’ve become a banana republic with nukes" - Paul Krugman

"Gonna be an interesting afternoon for Western civilization" - Daniel Drezner

The ingenuity of the market

2008-09-30T08:20:00.003+01:00

It's more than a year old, but it's just as funny today.

"I'd buy anything if it said 'enhanced'".

How do you spell xenophobia?

2008-09-08T19:17:00.003+01:00

I've noticed anti-immigration graffiti cropping up in my area recently. The spelling says it all.
Categories: Dublin, Graffiti, Immigration

Why revive one blog...

2008-08-26T10:32:00.000+01:00

...when you can revive two. More blogging going on here.

Myers and Nigerians

2008-08-21T12:39:00.004+01:00

Has anyone ever noticed that when someone says that it's time for an honest and open debate about immigration, that is invariably the last thing you get? The latest commentator to make such a call is the Irish Independent’s Kevin Myers, who last week got a bit exercised about the number of Nigerians who are claiming rent allowance.

According to Myers, 3,024 Nigerians, or 18.6 per cent of the total Irish population of 16,300 are now claiming rent allowance. This figure is far higher than the number of British (2.7 per cent), Poles (1.5 per cent) and Lithuanians (3 per cent). Myers asks:

Why are so many people, from a country to which we have no moral or legal or historical obligations, living off this state? Why are they being allowed through immigration, if they have no jobs to go to? Why are they choosing to come to Ireland, when 20 countries or more lie between their homeland and ourselves? And finally, and perhaps most important of all, why is no one else asking why?

His piece has prompted a good deal of comment online, much of it along predictable lines. There’s a thread of 15 pages and counting on Politics.ie and it’s up to 12 pages at Boards.ie. Myers also garnered some supportive letters to the editor, such as this missive from one Frank Magee in Dublin. Although it was probably not Magee’s intention, it also sheds some light on facts that Myers is either unaware of or chose to ignore:

Stated Government policy and Irish immigration law prohibits the payment of welfare benefits to non-EU nationals, other than those granted refugee status. That, in effect, means the maximum number of Nigerians eligible to claim welfare benefits here is 150.

A massive number of Nigerians have immigrated illegally to Ireland. The previous Minister for Justice stated that no amnesty was to be granted to these people, yet a scheme was designed to allow them remain in Ireland called the IBC/05 scheme.

IBC/05 was not an amnesty, at least not as Magee wants us to believe. IBC stands for Irish Born Child. The people given leave to remain under the scheme had children born here. This leave is subject to renewal every three years. Until the citizenship referendum in 2004, the government couldn't deport Irish citizens. Nor could they realistically deport their parents.

According to this parliamentary question answered by former justice minister Michael McDowell, a total of 16,984 applicants were granted permission to remain in the State. No breakdown of nationalities appears to be available but, given the numbers of Nigerians entering Ireland in recent years, it is probably fair to assume that a decent proportion of these applications came from that country.

With a few exceptions, those with leave to remain have the same rights as someone granted refugee status, including the right to claim welfare. To sum up, there are a few thousand Nigerians in Ireland who haven’t been granted asylum but are legally entitled to live here and receive welfare benefits.

Are these people exploiting a loophole in immigration law then to live off the Irish state, as Myers and his supporters might presume? The origin of the figures used by Myers lies in a press release issued by Labour Party TD Joan Burton recently. The figures were originally reported in the Independent by Michael Brennan, ten days before the Myers piece appeared. According to Brennan, immigrants "account for 39 per cent of the 63,000 people on the means-tested scheme, which costs a total of €390m annually and is generally open only to those who are unemployed".

Breaking down the figures reveals that the average person on rent allowance receives €6,190 annually, or €515 a month, which is well short of the average rent on most properties. In other words, most people are only receiving part of their rent and not the "full state-subsidy for rental accommodation" as Myers would have it.

Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that every Nigerian receiving rent allowance is necessarily unemployed. When issuing the figures, Burton expressed concern that "the scheme ran the risk of becoming a 'poverty trap' because most of those on it would lose their benefit if they went back to work". However, as Brennan reported:

However, the Department of Social Affairs defended its operation of the scheme. A spokeswoman pointed out that significant changes were made last year to allow people to receive more wages without losing out on the allowance.

Specifically, from June 5 2007, those coming from unemployment may still qualify for rent allowance if they are accepted as being in need of accommodation under the Rental Accommodation Scheme by their local housing authority and have been unemployed or not in full-time employment for at least twelve months before they start to work. If they still qualify for rent allowance, the amount they receive may be reduced depending on the level of their wages.

To try and further reinforce his point, Myers points out 2006 census figures that indicate that of the total 16,300 Nigerian population, only 38 per cent participate in the labour force:

Maybe this is because so many are too old for work? Not so. There are almost no Nigerians over 50. Their average age is 26.6, with some 10,000 between the ages of 25 and 44. Yes, there are a large number of Nigerian children (3,845 under fifteen), but that figure of 38pc at work is a percentage of the over-15s only. The equivalent working proportions are: Poles, 84pc; Lithuanians, 82pc; and Latvians 82pc. On the other hand, the figures for rental-subsidy (remember: Nigerians 18.6pc) are Poles, 1.5pc; Lithuanians, 3pc; and Latvians, 4.3pc.

To extrapolate from the figures, there are 7,700 Nigerians in Ireland who aren’t working. Of course, by comparing labour force participation with Poles, Lithuanians and Latvians, Myers isn’t comparing like with like. The latter three are EU member states, whose citizens can work from the minute they got off the plane. The figures are absolutely meaningless until you factor in the number of Nigerians who legally cannot work here because they are tied up in the asylum application and appeals system. Given that the number of asylum applications numbered in the thousands for the past few years and that a goodly proportion are reportedly from Nigerian, it is probably fair to assume that a lot of these 7,700 simply can’t participate in the labour force.

In short, if Myers had bothered to look a little further he would have found out that there are large number of Nigerians who haven’t been granted asylum, but are legally entitled to remain in the state and claim rent allowance. Furthermore, the mere receipt of rent allowance does not mean that they are not working and simply ”living off this state”. He concludes by saying:

For the real issue is not the number of Nigerians living here, nor even the absurd and unacceptable dependency of so many of them on this State. No, it is the abject refusal of the Irish people, both through the media and the Dail, to have an open debate about the biggest issue facing this country.

Perhaps old age is affecting his memory, but there was a debate on this issue in 2004 with the Citizenship Referendum and people opted to close off one of the chief routes to allow Nigerians to remain in the state. This begs the question of why Myers wants to restage this issue and drum up hostility to those who remain here from a time before the law was changed?
Categories: Ireland, Immigration

Funny money

2008-08-12T11:10:00.004+01:00

This is kind of funny. A Spanish shopkeeper has discovered a euro coin in his till on which mischevous engraver had transformed the image of the King of Spain into Homer Simpson:

Jose Martinez was counting the cash in his till in the city of Aviles, northern Spain, when he came across the coin where Homer's bald head, big eyes and big nose had replaced the serious features of King.

King Juan Carlos was back in the news recently when he kissed and made up with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. The king, who usually does nothing more controversial than photoshop family pictures on his Christmas cards, famously lost his temper last year with the irascible Venezuelan leader, who had kept interupting Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Zapatero at a summit with South American leaders. ¿Por qué no te callas? (why don't you shut up) instantly became a catchphrase in Spain and t-shirts bearing the slogan started appearing in shops.

Credit: Zugaldia (CC License)

The pair reconciled at another summit meeting last month and the King went as far as to give Chavez one of the offending t-shirts.
Categories: Spain, Porquenotecallas

Stick a pin in a compass

2008-08-11T10:54:00.005+01:00

There were some interesting quotes in today's Irish Times piece about the flooding seen this weekend in Dublin and Kildare.

For example, Dublin City Council's spokesman got a bit mixed up when describing the extent of the flooding:

"You could nearly get a compass and stick it on the map of the city and you would find a localised flood there," he said.

Meanwhile, Inspector Gerry Wall of the Garda Regional Traffic Division at Dublin Castle thought we were lucky the rain didn't come on a week day.

"It is fortunate that it happened on a Saturday when many people are still on holiday and not on a week day when there are schools open," he added.

He forgot that the schools aren't back until September.
Categories: Dublin, Floods

End of isolation

2008-08-11T10:13:00.011+01:00

Spotted at the works on Dublin's Luas line, on Abbey Street.
Categories: Dublin, Photos

Mystery of Murtagh’s millions

2007-06-12T13:48:00.001+01:00

Both the Irish Times and Irish Independent report this morning on Brendan Murtagh's sale of a significant chunk of his Kingspan stake. However the papers differ significantly on just how much cash the company co-founder generated from the sale. According to the Times (sub. req.):

Brendan Murtagh, co-founder and director of building materials group Kingspan, has sold one third of his holding in the group for close to €50 million.

The Independent meanwhile has this to say:

Kingspan co-founder and director Brendan Murtagh fetched almost €90m by selling 2.4m shares, or a 1.4pc stake, in the group.

So why the €40 million difference? As both papers note, a formal announcement is expected to be given to the stock exchange within days, which should confirm the details. However, the basic facts of the deal are reported by both, namely that Murtagh sold 2.4 million shares at €20.05. That yields €48.12, which means it looks like it was the Indo in this case that got its sums wrong.
Tags: Ireland, Business

Footballing quote of the week

2007-04-25T13:17:00.000+01:00

"Ronaldo, Ronaldo, wherefore art thou Ronaldo?"
George Hamilton, as Cristiano Ronaldo steps up to take a free kick against AC Milan on Tuesday night. "Missing in action" was probably the most accurate response.
It's a pity that George wasn't commentating on Barcelona's recent game against Getafe when Messi scored a goal incredibly similiar to Maradona's 1986 goal against England. He'd have been reaching for the sonnets.

Long live death!

2007-01-28T12:51:00.000Z

Credit: US National Archives

Even though he's long dead, Francisco Franco is still the mayor of Salamanca. As Spanish daily El Pais reports, the dictator was declared honorary mayor in perpetuity by the town in 1964. A recent motion to strip the Caudillo of the title was defeated, when Partido Popular councillors voted it down. Not surprisingly, PP declined to debate the matter or give any reason for voting against it. Socialist councillor Fernando Pablos said all PP had to do was abstain from the vote, as had happened recently in the towns of Girona and Granollers, but clearly Salamanca PP members thought there was something worth holding on to.

This is the second time Pablos & Co have failed in removing some unsavoury items from the town's books. Back in December, PP also voted against the removal of a 1936 'motion of destitution' against philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno, who at the time was rector of the University of Salamanca. Unamuno's damnation dates from a famous incident during the Civil War, when he clashed with Francoist general Millán Astray at a dinner celebrating the discovery of America.

Astray was the founder of the Spanish Legion, which was modelled after its French equivalent. A borderline psychotic, Astray's was responsible for the legion's nickname of Novios de la Muerte (bridegrooms of death) and its battle cry, Viva la muerte (long live death).

Taking umbrage at Astray's repeated chanting of the aforementioned battle cry during speeches, Unamuno dared to point out its nonsensical nature, prompting Astray to begin shouting 'death to intelligence'. By some accounts, it took the intervention of Franco's wife Carmen, who was also at the dinner, to prevent Unamuno from being lynched. Afterwards, Unamuno was removed from his position at the university and died under house arrest later that year.
Categories: Spain, Politics, Franco

Sac of woe

2007-01-11T20:32:00.000Z

Credit: Team Cofidis
You really have to feel sorry for Cofidis rider Tristan Valentin. The Frenchman was slapped with a six month ban after failing a drugs test. However, in making its ruling, the disciplinary committee acknowledged that the cyclist failed the test because his doctor had accidentally prescribed him with a medication containing a substance on the banned list. Now either people are going to think of him as a drug cheat or, if they are aware of the circumstances, they'll know all about his, err, scrotal problems.
Categories: Sport, Cycling

Sex: the breakfast of champions

2007-01-10T19:17:00.000Z

Why not start the day with a nice cup of Hornimans tea?

Then butter up some toast made from Bimbo bread.

Or if that doesn't suit your tastes, how about a freshly brewed pot of Bonka coffee? Ooh err Missus.

All available at a Spanish supermarket near you.
Categories: Spain, Food, Photos

The last refuge of scoundrels

2007-01-09T23:12:00.000Z

1.“ETA expresses its solidarity with the collateral damage caused by the Government’s repressive politics and with the humiliation suffered by the nationalist left” in their first statement since the attack at Barajas airport 10 days ago, according to El País.

2."Of course, no lover of democracy can fail to rejoice in the serious blow received by the “war process” to the Constitution and the democratic state, as he will be saddened by the sad fate of the victims, caused by those who had been so favoured by the government, who consequently shares their responsibility.” Pío Moa, Franco’s hagiographist and expert in democracy, celebrates ETA’s attack his way, like Frank Sinatra.
Via Escolar.

3. “Remember, Ecuadorian ladies and gentlemen, that the Autonomous Communities where you reside [Valencia, Murcia and Madrid] are governed by PP. So think it over before you get involved in a certain mess.” Federico Jiménez Losantos warns the Ecuadorian community in Spain –Joe Pesci style– not to attend a demonstration protesting the attack in Madrid’s airport [where two Ecuadorian citizens lost their lives], organised by the Spanish Association of Ecuadorians and the two majority trade unions, that PP is considering boycotting. For a full whack of Federico's apoplexy, click here (in Spanish).
Via NetoRatón 2.0.

Quote of the day

2007-01-09T13:22:00.000Z

"I mean, it was 11 to 1! You'd think he'd be violating every virgin within 100 miles. How does he even get on his bicycle?" - World Anti-Doping Agency chairman Dick Pound on Floyd Landis's Tour de France testosterone ratio.
Categories: Sport, Cycling, Tour de France

Fist of irony

2006-12-11T11:54:00.000Z

Poetic justice of this calibre is hard to come by: Augusto Pinochet died on the 10th of December, a date marked by the UN as International Human Rights Day.

Attack of the killer tomatoes

2006-12-05T12:20:00.000Z

Fill in your tub with tepid water adding a small dash of shampoo (nothing fancy). Submerge your head in the tub and open your mouth taking in a mouthful of water. Spit and savour the aftertaste. That's what the average tomato sold in Ireland tastes like.

It's time for independence

2006-12-05T10:51:00.000Z

Anyone familiar with Spanish politics will be used to the frictions generated by the national question; that is, Is Spain a nation? A nation-state? A plurinational state? A bogstandard mess or a plurinational mess? Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG), the main nationalist party in Galicia currently in power in the Xunta government in coalition with the Socialists, has introduced a further complication to the national question by proposing that Galicia adopts the same time zone as Portugal, requesting that the Autonomous Government "work towards assimilating Gallego time to its natural time zone".

I presume that by "natural time zone" they refer to the time zone that results from aligning a geographical area with other areas on the same vertical/meridian axis. However, if you take a look at a map of the world's time zones, you will see that there is nothing particularly "natural" about that distribution, seeing as the lines zig zag in an out of geographical areas resulting in some very obvious stretches and weird compressions of the "natural" time zone. Britain, for example, is roughly on the same vertical axis as most of Spain (and certainly on the same zone as the central part of Spain, which is the most undesirable part of Spain for a nationalist). "Naturally", this should result in the two countries sharing the same time, whereas Spain is currently one hour ahead of the UK.

Maybe BNG is aware of this and they just don't give two figs about (the rest of) Spain, their obligations being "naturally" restricted to the time welfare of Gallegos. On the other hand, perhaps they mean that it is more likely (and hence, more "natural") for a Gallego to cross the border to Portugal than it is for them to visit León or Asturias. Or maybe the "natural" order of things is for Gallegos to separate themselves as much as possible from the rest of Spain, which strikes me as a "political" rather than a "natural" proposition. Yet again, nationalism is predicated on the idea that there are irreducible "natural" differences between peoples, and proposes that "culture" does ultimately have a "natural" genesis, something that might account for the ultimate immovability of its tenets.

Curiously though, Gallego nationalism (or at least BNG nationalism) tends to resolve its "natural" desire for separation from Spanish culture/nature by positing a "natural" approximation to Portugal, which results in an interesting fusion of Hispanophobia and Lusophilia. This is not restricted to the quaint "natural time hypothesis" but overlaps with other "separation policies" including the orthographic reform of the Gallego language, so as to approximate it to Portuguese spelling.

One of the most entertaining strands of Gallego nationalist Lusophilia is their adoption of the Portuguese football team as a surrogate national team, something I witnessed during my stay in Galicia this summer. Considering the paltry results obtained by the Spanish soccer team throughout the history of the World Cup, this seems to me to be the most "natural" manifestation of Gallego Hispanophobia/Lusophilia so far. Unfortunately, the Portuguese don't seem to give two figos about it, driven as they are by their “natural” suspicion towards anybody from the other side of the border.

007: the number of the beast

2006-11-24T21:10:00.000Z

Last weekend, in a rare break from a work schedule that worryingly resembles Sisyphus’ day at the office, I went to see Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (a beautiful-looking folly with more plot holes than a slice of gruyere) in the Savoy with two of my fellow backseat drivers. When we came out of the cinema we encountered a queue of cinemagoers that went down as far as the taxi rank on Sackville Street. I hadn’t seen a queue like it outside a cinema in Dublin since Gangs of New York (a heavy-handed disappointment) was released. You get no prize for guessing that they were queuing to see the new Bond flick starring Daniel Craig in his first turn as her Satanic Majesty’s spy.

I had of course been prepared for this “major” cinematic event by the onslaught of speculation preceding the announcement that Brosnan had been replaced by Craig, and the subsequent calibrations regarding Craig’s suitability to play the part, and have been sufficiently warned by the billboards displaying Craig’s steely mug from around the corner to Timbuctu. By the way, if there are any Bondites out there that still harbour doubts as to whether Craig is a deserving successor to Brosnan, they will be put at rest by the said billboards. Boy, is Daniel trying hard, I haven’t seen the like of his pout outside a Playboy centrefold, only this time the pouting packs more testosterone than a monkey gland.

I have since heard good reports about the movie from fans and sceptics alike, and may even break my Scarlet O’Hara-like oath not to see a Bond movie again (uttered outside the Ambassador after Tomorrow Never Dies, if memory serves). Although I have the niggling feeling that I will hate this one as much as all the others, which is why I am dusting off this old piece summarising the reasons behind my disdain for all things Bond. The piece was actually my first online publication, and was published on an e-zine run by the Monkey Princess about 700 years ago…

007: the number of the beast

The enduring popularity of James Bond films: one of pop culture’s esoteric mysteries. Time has come to exorcise that demon shrouded in the glossy colours of the pop-savant, masked with the specs of the connoisseurs of everything post-modern. I have to admit that it has not been an easy exercise: is Bond really overrated? I asked myself. Yes and no, was the answer. It is not overrated in a Peter Greenaway sort of way. It is more that it is overrated in its underratedness. What I mean is that no Bond fan is under the illusion that the series constitutes a profound reflection on the nature of life and death, neither do they expect enlightenment after the chase in the snow. They know that the emperor is naked and they like it that way.

In an attempt at tempering the urgency of my task, I decided to listen to what the devil’s advocate had to say. With that purpose in mind I asked my Bond fetishist housemate to explain the appeal of the satanic spy. The most substantial argument he offered me to justify his devotion was to stress the wide-spread appeal of the series and its impact on pop culture: I retorted that the same could be said of margarine and Celine Dion and I also failed to see the point there. To no avail, I had underestimated the strength of the spell that Beelzebond casts on his victims. All things considered, I have to admit that I have more respect for this kind of argument than for the one that tries to give Bond kitsch credibility; those who think that Bond is the essence of kitsch are probably the same people who think that seventies-themed office parties constitute the pinnacle of wacky decadence. No, I don’t criticise Bond’s lack of depth, more the fact that its surface has less substance than a Bond girl’s bikini.

To the point: what does your average Bondite enjoy in a 007 flick? There’s the chase, there’s the explosion, there’s the chase with explosion, the gimmicks, the Bond girl, the Bond villain, and of course, the beast himself, Bond, James Bond.

The chase. The explosion. The chase with explosion.

So you’re in a car and it explodes and you manage to miraculously (and predictably) jump out of the car in the last minute, landing on a passing helicopter piloted by a gang of clueless but villainous minions who try to push you off the (yes) helicopter, whilst you try to disentangle your handy parachute when you notice out of the corner of your eye that the Transiberian train loaded with nuclear weapons is cruising at high speed right under the helicopter with the evil minions. Do you…a) jump and fight a nebulous and pantomime evil organization, b) gasp with delight as you munch your popcorn, he will take off his snowboarding shoe and safely land on the snow-covered roof of the Transiberian, c) recoil with horror in your seat, break in a sweat and then proceed to fall asleep throughout the next two hours. If you chose a) you will probably have vigorous but meaningless intercourse with a “hilariously”-monikered amazon within the next ten minutes of reel; if you chose b) I am afraid that you are a Bondite and there is nothing I can do for you, if you chose c) please read on…

The pen loaded with poisonous gas

So, James Bond is a suave and cunning individual with a brain of gold and nerves of steel. So, how come he needs the snowboarding shoe and the pen loaded with poisonous gas? I mean, if I had the pen loaded with poisonous gas in my pocket I would also have nerves of steel. Imagine being told ‘no way you are getting in’ by a bouncer and having the pen loaded with poisonous gas in your pocket: I would certainly need no Q to tell me that you open the pen to release the gas. How many variations of a crime-fighting car can anyone muster throughout his/her life without being seriously brain damaged anyway?

The Bond Villain

Bond villains are exactly like Bond himself: vain and stupid. The only difference between Bond and his villains is that the latter are uglier/fatter/balder/older/have a funny accent and lack the poisonous pen at a crucial moment in the plot. Proof #1: they both love gimmicks, proof #2: Bond will invariably fondle the same women the villain has fondled, proof # 3: Bond brandishes a huge gun in the opening credits, the villain always has a handy missile in his rocket-launcher (someone please call Dr. Freud).

The Bond Girl

I will spare you the obvious: the day it makes sense to call Ursula Andress in the famous bikini scene a girl, is the day John Paul II will be rightly referred to as Pope boy. By the way, there is nothing to the Bond girl but a famous bikini scene; only some are less famous than others, a sad thought if ever there was one. But I digress. If anything epitomises the subservience and dependence of working women in Western Capitalist societies it must be the unfortunate fate of the Bond girl: aspiring actresses sell their scantly clad talents to Satan, and in return, they are told that their best and only line (they tend to be the same thing) in the movie is going to be: “You certainly are a cunning linguist, Mr. Bond”; thespian dreams and erotic potential are thus dropped with the gold knickers. Ex-Bond girls cannot even complain about being pigeon holed, the character does not have enough substance for that. Of course there is no other one to blame but Bond (the beast) and his all devouring egocentrism: there is no place for an intelligent and resourceful female character in the series. They could make obvious that the poisonous pen doth not a cunning spy make.

The beast

There are only two possible perspectives from which to admire the beast. Number one: the man’s perspective. The man has a beer belly and therefore cannot pinch an unsuspecting woman’s arse without tearing the lining of his white dinner jacket. He cannot tell the difference between a cocktail stick and a pint of lager either. He, however, fantasises about these things: voila, here is a wanker who is slim enough to wear the white dinner jacket and pinch the arse, and who also knows something about cocktails; rumour has it that he has a pen loaded with poisonous gas…His name is Bond, James Bond.

Number two: the woman’s perspective. In this case the woman probably is thinking of Sean Connery, and if there is anything that puzzles me more than Bondites, it has to be women who find Sean Connery sexy. I still break into a cold sweat when I recall the unspeakable horror of the first time a woman told me that she thought Sean Connery got sexier as he got older. This kind of woman gets erotic thrills out of a man who looks over your shoulder while he unfastens your bra, shields his hairy chest from treacherous weaponry with your vulnerable naked body, and is at his most energetic in bed when he rolls under it to shelter himself from the bullets of his assailants (which I am sorry to say have landed on your naked butt). By rights the next Bond should be gay, since Bond, despite (or perhaps because of) his sexist bravado lacks any serious interest in women. He picks them, fucks them, drops them, and moves on. Incidentally the only big O here is in Bond. No surprises, though, considering that our obscure object of desire, Sean/Bond, once declared in an interview that there are times when women "want a smack" . Sorry, I forgot, the accent: shometimes women want a "shmack". Now that is shexy.

Nose candid

2006-11-24T19:35:00.000Z

Spanish writer and IMPAC winner Javier Marías chastises Spaniards for their foolishness from his pulpit in El País Semanal once again (we “progres” [1] don’t need to go to mass, we have Marías instead). Our weekly sin: “pharisaic” and “grotesque” hysteria in the face of celebrity drug consumption. I am used to Marías whipping his readers to a contrite pulp every Sunday [2], but I wasn’t expecting this revelation about his own drug consumption:

With regards myself, the few occasions in which I have taken “something” have been those in which I had to make a great effort or work longer than I could without a rest (give ten interviews without a break in one day after a sleepless night, for example). Unfortunately, I haven’t had the opportunity, then, of feeling “euphoric” or of “hallucinating”… (Yes, I confess that I have been interviewed whilst “on drugs”; or “on dope”; or perhaps “out of my head”; but nobody, I’m afraid, noticed anything at all, a pity.) (My translation)

To my knowledge, the only other Spanish writer to confess publicly to snorting “something” was Camilo José Cela, although, in his case, the “something” was water, and the orifice used was not a nostril. I let you work out the rest for yourselves. Let’s just say that his rare talent for water absorption did not make it into his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. [3]

Somehow I cannot imagine John Banville opening up (ahem) to the same extent.

[1] “Progre”: pejorative term for “liberal”, projecting more scorn than the word “liberal” pronounced through clenched tobacco-and-gunpowder-stained teeth by a Texan redneck after being offered a spliff and a blow job by Hilary Clinton’s homosexual twin brother.

[2] Marías has found a pitch all of his own in his weekly op-eds for El País: a rare combination of fury and common sense that I find more terrifying than the Sermon in Joyce’s Portrait.

[3] Sadly, Cela's "watergate" is the best thing I can say about him outside of his literary talent. Let me just summarise his personal record in three words: Franco. Callous. Asshole. (Hold on, I am repeating myself with this last one.)

Bring back Ciaran Duff

2006-11-24T19:03:00.000Z

It's been a bad week for some of my sporting heroes. John O'Leary diving into the greasy arms of FF and Roy being nice.

Vote for us or die violently

2006-11-20T22:07:00.000Z

You only have to look as far as Enda "I'll Make Criminals Pay For Their Crimes" Kenny to know that Irish politicians aren't immune to playing the law and order card. However, they pale in comparison to Spanish opposition party PP, whose latest party political video is a minor classic. (Click here to launch WMP video).

You don't need to speak Spanish to appreciate the "let's frighten the bejesus out of people with these violent scenes" editing and sound track straight ought of The Omen. As Spanish blogger Ignacio Escloar puts it, it's like something out of Mad Max. If I didn't know any better, I'd be packing the knuckle duster and baseball bat for my Christmas trip to Madrid.

Just when you think it couldn't get any better, it now transpires that some of the footage used isn't even from Spain, but from Colombia. Other images are indeed from Spain, but date from the time PP itself was in government and party leader Mariano Rajoy was the man responsible for law and order as Minister for the Interior.
Categories: Spain, Politics, Crime

Headline of the day

2006-11-10T13:46:00.000Z

"Eunuchs shame local tax defaulters into paying" - from the Irish Times.
Categories: Media, Eunuchs

Learn English with José María Aznar

2006-11-10T13:36:00.000Z

After me: "Never listen any muslim apologise me".
Categories: Spain, Aznar, Mad Language Skillz

Mr. Republican

2006-11-09T17:13:00.000Z

Now that Donald Rumsfeld has some spare time before corporate friends in Bechtel, Asea Brown Boveri, etc. come a-looking for some of his insights, he could do worse than to examine some excellent analysis of the demographics of the party that chucked him.

Checks and balances

2006-11-09T12:41:00.000Z

Following the Democratic victory in the US midterm election, there's been a lot of half-informed talk in the Irish media about how the American people have registered their preference for "checks and balances" (this is usually delivered in knowing tones with the implication that Republican control of Congrees and the White House is somehow anti-democratic). The concept of checks and balances, however, has nothing to do with having different parties controlling the legislative and executive branches of government; rather, checks and balances is a doctrine of separating powers between the executive, legislature and judiciary, regardless of which party happens to control them. It's about structuring the governing apparatus, not balance governing ideologies. I find the mistake especially ironic coming as it does from practitioners of a system in which a mere parliamentary majority can install a prime minister who only has to win an election in his local constituency.

North by Northwest

2006-11-06T20:24:00.000Z

I stumbled upon this today whilst trying to access the Trinity Library Catalogue. Although the writer of this piece was obviously in no hurry to break the news that Mary Robinson was awarded the Príncipe de Asturias Prize back in October, she still managed to speed read her knickers (or indeed "he" "his kaks") into a twist:

In her acceptance speech, Mrs Robinson referred to the similarities between the northern Spanish region of Asturias and Ireland. She said: "We both have and continue to address the ongoing challenges of historic conflicts through negotiated peace processes."

In the original speech (here, in its Spanish translation), Mary Robinson does draw parallels between the green coastal landscape of Asturias and Ireland, but applies the political parallel ("the historic conflict and negotiated peace process") to the whole of Spain. Could it be that the news writer was thinking of another province in the North of Spain also green and coastal, indeed the only green and coastal province in the North of Spain with which most of the Irish public is familiar? Or is the author a covert Aznarite, nostalgic for the warring days of Don Pelayo and the Reconquista?

Lance is going to suffer

2006-11-04T14:14:00.000Z

He may be a seven-time Tour de France winner, but Lance Armstrong doesn't sound ready for his debut marathon in New York tomorrow:

After a 16-mile run two weeks ago, his longest run in his preparation for this race, Armstrong said he developed shin splints. The pain has been so bad that he has lugged his bike on road trips, so he can ride to prepare for the marathon instead of run.

Armstrong did, however, go for a run in Central Park yesterday. He said he felt good, although he iced his shins afterward.

Two bad signs for Armstrong: 1) 16 miles isn't a long enough longest run and 2) shin splints are usually a sign of a rapid increase in either training volume or intensity, which means Lance has been backloading his training. If you're not ready with two weeks to go, you're not going to be ready.

Abortion ban in Nicaragua

2006-11-03T18:06:00.000Z

And now for another example of the odious collusion of Church and State, this time in Nicaragua:

FSLN and rightwing parties ALN (Alianza Liberal Nicaragüense) and PLC (Partido Liberal Constitucionalista) have joined forces to revoke a 100-year-old law in the Nicaraguan penal code that permitted abortion on therapeutic grounds, allowing for abortion if the life of the mother was at risk.

Just days before the presidential election, due to be celebrated on the 5th of November, 28 deputies from FSLN, along with 6 from ALN and 18 from PLC, have voted to revoke the law, in what looks like an electoral effort by the FSLN to court the Catholic vote. According to El País:

The FSLN had never come out against abortion before. But the agreement reached between the party's leader, Daniel Ortega, and Cardinal Miguel Obando in order to win over church voters has been decisive. (My translation)

Women's rights organisations have protested against the ban, and some, like Dr. Ana María Pizarro, have spoken out against FSLN women deputies voting in favour of the ban:

"It's shameful that female deputies have voted to revoke this law, since many of them had given their word not to eliminate therapeutic abortion. They didn't have the courage to face up to their "boss". Everybody knows that rich women go to Miami when they need an abortion, and Sandinista women, to Cuba". (My translation).

Given the U-turn taken by previously staunch atheist Daniel Ortega, whose political broadcasts are getting more pious by the day, some leftwing supporters are splitting hairs, and decrying "danielismo" -as opposed to "sandinismo"- as responsible for this church-friendly approach. Such semantic squabbles, however, will be of little interest to the 400 women who, according to the BBC, suffer ectopic pregnancies in Nicaragua each year, now effectively facing a death sentence.

A History of Violence

2006-11-03T17:16:00.000Z

Zapatero's government has caved in to pressure from the powerful Spanish Catholic lobby (yep, I too can do the "powerful lobby" thing) and announced plans to introduce an alternative subject for those students who do not want to take "Catholic Religion". The new subject, which will count towards a student's overall grade, will be called "History of Religion". This constitutes a radical departure from the possibility that "Religion" might be eliminated from the curriculum altogether, or that those not wishing to study "Religion" would be exempted from class whilst that subject is imparted.

Just how alternative is the alternative? It occurs to me that the "History of Religion" is covered by an already existing subject, namely "History"; but, hey, the way agnostic teenagers are, who's to say that they do not switch off during the boring parts to daydream about vandalising convents or downloading pornography? In any case, if this goes ahead, I hope we will not hear a peep of dissent or protest from the powerful Catholic lobby (starting to sink in by now?) when contientious teachers decide to impart lessons on, say, "the history of the Inquisition", "the history of Jihad", or "the history of the Salem Trials", or examine the complex and stimulating relationship between mysoginy and religion.

Although I somehow suspect that if CONCAPA [1] rejoices at the news it is because they have bargained for a cosy piece of fluff that will banish critical thought to the sixth circle of hell.

[1] CONCAPA= "Confederación Católica de Padres de Alumnos", or "Catholic Federation of Students' Parents".

Pinochet: King of bling?

2006-10-25T23:54:00.000+01:00

Reuters reports that the Chilian government is investigating claims that former dictator Augusto Pinochet has stashed nine tonnes of gold in a bank in Hong Kong. Both Pinochet and the bank deny the existence of a retirement fund worthy of Mr T. He should have fled to Marbella long ago. Even if he'd built himself a gold house, no one would have noticed a thing.
Categories: Chile, Pinochet, Gangsta Rap

Blogs banned at Leinster House

2006-10-21T18:57:00.000+01:00

A well informed individual tells me that all Oireachtas staff were recently asked to sign a new web use policy document which specifically bans the perusal of any and all so-called "weblog" sites.

It looks like blogging politicians like Ciaran Cuffe will have to look beyond the walls of Leinster House for a wider readership.

Of course there's several ways to look at moves like this. One is that employers own the IT infrastructure in a workplace and are perfectly entitled to decide what people can and can't read. The other is that they should recognise that people spend half their waking hours on the premises and as long as the work gets done, shouldn't be so strict about what people read during their breaks. Personally, I've always preferred working for the latter type.

On a related note, a teacher tells me that they recently tried accessing the Department of Education website at work. The school's web filter informed them that the site had been blocked because of "pornographic content".
Categories: Web, Work

David Stewart

2006-10-13T13:02:00.000+01:00

Journalist and blogger David Stewart passed away late on Wednesday night. I had the pleasure of working with David on a number of publications over the years. A lovely guy and a great writer, his enthusiasm for his subject matter always shone from his copy and made him stand out among his peers. He'll be sorely missed.

Iraq death toll

2006-10-11T09:50:00.000+01:00

An update of the October 2004 Lancet study of excess death in Iraq claims that 655,000 people have died as a result of the US invasion and subsequent fighting. Considering the first study proffered what seemed to be an inflated figure of 100,000, it's hard to see how another half-a-million Iraqis have died in the last two years, notwithstanding the appalling and shameful scale of the ongoing violence there. Just to put that number in perspective: it exceeds US military deaths for the whole of World War II, which featured such meat-grinding battles as Iwo Jima, Okinawa and the Battle of the Bulge. It's also about six times the number of deaths in the Bosnian War, which featured organised genocide.

Help us, Lee Carsley, you're our only hope

2006-10-11T09:28:00.000+01:00

Now that I qualify for official Irishness (but have delayed the paperwork on my end for obscure psychological reasons), I've got a pretty big emotional stake in tonight's result. But looking back to the many conversations I had with Paul at the end of the Roy Keane era, it really demoralises me to see such a connoisseur of the midfield art crossing his fingers for Lee Carsley. Forget the SSIAs and the housing bubble - the fate of the Irish economy rests on a poor man's Thomas Gravesen. Time to start buying gold.

Of course, Carsley would nutmeg his way right into the US holding role last occupied by Paolo "Two-footed Tackle" Mastroeni against Italy in the World Cup. His red-card forced the brittle Claudio Reyna into a deeper position against Ghana, whereupon the venerable captain 1) crocked his knee and 2) gave away a goal, leaving the team at the mercy of a game but ineffective Ben Olsen. Well, at least he wore a beard for the occasion. Anyway, it looks like Juergen Klinsmann is on the shortlist to manage the Yanks. If we pull that off, you can have your soccer economy and Lee Carsley. And if the Mexicans get Klinsi instead? We've gone to war for less.

Stagger Lee

2006-10-10T12:24:00.000+01:00

Steve Staunton seems to have made an intelligent decision asking Lee Carsley to join up with the Irish squad.
This U-turn will hopefully lead to the introduction of some backbone to the team after Saturday's hopelessly vapid display against Cyprus.
There is an element of heart break involved in getting excited about Carsley returning to the fray, but it is a reminder of the state of the footballing nation.
Last week, when asked whether not recalling the combative player was a mistake, Staunton replied: 'No, because we are looking forward.' Let's look backward then and hope that tomorrow night does not lead to fresh humiliation.

Brewing up another storm

2006-10-05T10:52:00.000+01:00

Could it finally be that Bertie is on his way?
Questions are right now being put in the Dail about transactions relating to his house, whether it was bought at market value, etc. The PDs are absent.
Caoimhin O Caolain is suggesting that Mery Harney took her own walk on the basis of having had access to all this information courtesy of Geraldine Kennedy.
It's getting very hot in that Armani anorak.

Cameron and on

2006-10-04T16:42:00.000+01:00

I’ve got a question for you. How much can you stand to be patronised by politicians? Maybe you should start checking your limits. Because it turns out, Blair was only scratching the surface. Blair, with his brow-knotting, and his lip-crimping, Blair with his strategic tears, his halting, thing-is delivery, and his whither-Britain eyes, Blair was nothing but a journeyman. Blair made the amateur’s mistake of aiming low, of trying to be the voter’s friend. There’s another politician out there who realises that condescension works best when it’s most extreme, that if you piss on people from a great enough height they’ll call it gentle rain. That man is David Cameron, and his speech to the Conservative conference on Sunday must rank as one of the most vapid, simple-minded and condescending addresses ever given by a British party leader to his own supporters.

Of course, some of the blocking is strategic. Cameron is treating the renewal of the conservatives as an ongoing project, and at this stage the goal is to get through a conference without a row on Europe or tax-cuts derailing the whole enterprise. Maybe he’s right to keep all of his actual policies under wraps, too; over the past decade, Labour have treated conservative conferences as vast open buffets of useful ideas and fixes. Yet his attitude- chiding conservatives for even demanding clarity on policy this early on, as if they were bored children on a long car trip looking for chocolate- was both defensive and insultingly simplistic. If he acts like a berk from new management towards his own troops, you have to ask what he would be like with the rest of the country. I was originally quite positively disposed towards Cameron, but reading his speech made me want to put the worst possible construction on everything about him: the furtive eyes, the oddly sexual blushing, that eminently sockable chin. You start to think: if I work hard at it, if I put the hours in, I could really, really get to hate this guy.

The problem is the writing. The structure of the speech sucks too- it’s the kind of address where one by one, policy issues waft in from offstage, are joylessly despatched, and sent reeling back out into the wings – but that’s par for the course in British politics today. No, it’s the writing- lazy, imprecise and unbearably condescending- which is the real shocker. Could this really be the man whose sparklingly articulate speech to the 2005 Conference turned him from a nobody into a potential Party Leader? In a misguided attempt to reach out to the common man, Cameron has trimmed his vocabulary down to about 500 words, and trusted in single clause sentences throughout. In the process he seems to have forgotten that a smaller vocabulary doesn’t make a speech more accessible; it makes it more awkward. For a start, it blunts any attempt at humour. How else do you explain the man who would be Prime Minister casting into the rich waters of New Labour scandal and pulling out a rancid old boot like this:

First Gordon said he could never trust Tony again, then Tony called Gordon a blackmailer.
Charles said Gordon was stupid, then John popped up and said no, Tony was stupid.
Charles called Gordon a deluded control freak.
And a member of the Cabinet said "it would be an absolute effing disaster" if Gordon got to No.10.
That was just the husbands.

It is as if, stung by criticism that he is more style than substance, Cameron wants desperately to show the world that he possesses neither of these qualities. Or as he puts it himself in this earlier ‘gag’:

Tony Blair says it's all style and no substance.
In fact he wrote me a letter about it.
Dear Kettle…
You're black.
Signed, Pot.

I confess: I had to get up and go for a brisk walk after this one. Who would you fear and loathe enough to try and placate them with that crock of a joke? A roadhouse full of rednecks? The North Korean border police? Or the party who elected you its leader?

As well as erasing all traces of personality, the clumsy writing also gives rise to massive lapses in tone. At least I presume that’s what’s happened with Cameron’s tribute to conservative party Chairman Francis Maude, turning what should have been an affectionate ribbing of an old colleague into a veiled threat from a mobster kingpin:

Then there's Francis.
I know Francis likes to pretend that everything is doom and gloom.
He's always talking about the mountain we have to climb.
He's so gloomy, he makes Gordon Brown look like a ray of sunshine.
But Francis, you're doing a great job.”

As it happens, Maude’s speech had been perfectly sensible- a dollop of hearty self-congratulation tempered with anxiety about the road still to travel– the sort of speech Cameron should have made, in other words. Is there genuine tension between the Party Leader and Chairman about the way forward? Or had Cameron asked Maude to emphasise the downside, then slammed him for it? Either way, Cameron comes across dreadfully- at best as a school bully, at worst as a political lightweight, pathologically averse to any mention of difficulty. Conservatives like difficulty; they think they’re good at it. Cameron’s audience grew up on Churchill’s wartime oratory, remember, and he made Gordon Brown look like a champagne supernova in the sky.

But what of the speech’s substance? Well, it started with the usual staples- a lame swipe at New Labour’s troubles, a much more meaty attack on New Labour process, and a retread of Cameron’s earlier Conservatives for fixating on what they were interested in- Europe and tax-cuts- and not what the country was interested in. So far, so good. Unfortunately, all this momentum is wasted by the introduction of the most redundant extended metaphor in politics. Rebuilding a party is like building a house, Cameron says; you have to do it in stages. Straightforward enough? Not for the Conservative Party, whose leader has to riff on it at length:

My argument is based on a simple analogy.
Getting ready for the responsibility of government is like building a house together.
Think of it in three stages.
First you prepare the ground.
Then you lay the foundations.
And then, finally, brick by brick, you build your house.

Thankfully, the house metaphor exhausts itself before Cameron starts to hang the curtains, and he turns finally to the real meat of his speech- the need to re-focus on the issues of most interest to the centre ground, which he defines as: safer streets, schools that teach, a better quality of life, and better treatment for carers. In each case he excoriates current Labour policies in these areas (sometimes fairly, sometimes less so), and puts forward his own detailed plans for action. Only he does nothing of the kind. Instead, he claims that the Conservatives have mystery solutions to all these problems based around the value of “responsibility” (which is of course nothing but good old fashioned liberalism in flash clothes).

True, there are some pointers to the Conservatives’ new direction. There are hints, for example, that a Conservative Government would rely on social enterprise to tackle many quality of life issues. Cameron also promises that workers’ problems could be better dealt with by cultivating a culture of ‘corporate responsibility’, and dangles the carrot of self-regulation to businesses. But mainly his prescriptions are almost zen in their vagueness. What for instance does “giving doctors and nurses responsibility for the health service” actually mean? Isn’t that what every NHS reform in the past thirty years has promised?

Cameron’s policies may exist, or they may not. At the end, it doesn’t really matter. The real purpose of the speech was to carry out a land-grab- Cameron is moving onto Labour territory, seizing its priorities and appropriating them as his own. If I were a Conservative, this is the only heartening thing I would take out of the whole speech. Cameron’s media friendliness has been compared to Blair’s; it’s interesting to see that he also possesses at least some of Blair’s talent for political positioning as well.

The speech ends in a bizarre finale, which in its terminal cheeriness and outright mistrust of basic political terminology, effectively reprises all of Cameron’s earlier sins:

If you want to know what I'm all about, I can explain it one word.
That word is optimism.
I am optimistic about human nature.
That's why I will trust people to do the right thing.
Labour are pessimists.
They think that without their guidance, people will do the wrong thing.
That's why they want to regulate and control.
So let us show clearly which side we are on.
Let optimism beat pessimism.
Let sunshine win the day.

I was going to let that last line speak for itself, but I just wanted to append one question: what the fuck happened to that house? If you’re going to start building a house on page 7 of your speech, you’d better have it completed and occupied by a hard working family by the close. Or is the sunshine coming in through the bare timbers of the half-constructed roof? Whatever else he does in his future career, Cameron should at least learn to be consistent in his metaphors. After all, the only ray of sunshine mentioned in his entire speech was Gordon Brown.

Kids go wild for coke

2006-10-03T13:34:00.000+01:00

Spanish daily El Pais reports that police in the southern town of Algeciras were stumped when they noticed an upsurge in the number of rear-view mirrors being ripped off cars. At first they attributed it to wanton vandalism, until the discovered that local teenagers were using the purloined mirrors to take cocaine. Looking back, stealing Volkswagen badges doesn't seem quite so badass.
Categories: Spain, Drugs, Teenage Crime Sprees

Brownism

2006-09-29T17:52:00.000+01:00

On 22 March 2006 Gordon Brown should have delivered the speech of his career. Blessed with a burgeoning economy and faced by a jejeune and uncertain opposition, he mounted the hustings to present what many assumed would be his final Budget as Chancellor with the scope and political space to say whatever he liked. This, we were promised, would be the moment when Brown emerged from the carapace of the Iron Chancellor, and revealed his true potential as future Party Leader and Prime Minister. Of course, none of this happened. Instead, Brown gripped the podium and launched intoa bizarre fifty-minute flurry of statistical exuberance. His supporters in the press tried to interpret the farrago as a triumphant round up of his decade as Chancellor, but really, there was nothing there to interpret. This wasn’t a speech. It wasn’t even talking. It was static, it was noise, it was verbal ticker tape.

This week, Brown was granted that rare commodity in politics, a second chance. True, considerably less favourable political circumstances meant that in his address to the Labour party conference this Monday, he had to do everything at once: head off doubts about his ambition and his Scottishness, map out a cogent plan for his leadership, demonstrate what motivates him as a person, showcase a lighter, more human side to his character, and bury the hatchet with Tony Blair (while at the same time marking out a cautious distance from Blairism). Yet Brown has always been happiest when dealing with the big picture, and faced with such a broad remit, he almost managed to fulfill it. He certainly gave a convincing enough outline of how Britain would look under a Brown administration.

At the heart of Brown’s speech was a renegotiation of the contract between the Government and the public. Blairism famously viewed the citizen as a consumer who was always free go elsewhere if public services weren’t up to scratch. Brown sees the public more as members of the Government’s club, or congregation, with rights and responsibilities on both sides. The Government’s duty would be to maximise the opportunities to develop and utilise each individual’s talents; the individual would in turn be obliged to take advantage of all of these opportunities, and to use their talents to maximise productivity.

Brown went into some detail about how this system of responsibilities would work for public services. So, for example, promising students would be given very generous subsidies, but only if they achieved consistently high grades. There would be a major investment in training and upskilling the unemployed, but a corresponding reduction in simple welfare payments. Health provision would be free at source, but individuals could be made pay for minor abuses of the system, such as missing appointments.

This all sounds forbiddingly contractual, and Brown did in fact give a tantalising hint that the relationship could be formally encoded in a written constitution (all he said was that Britain had no written constitution “as yet”, but the suggestion was strong enough to be picked up by the papers and television news). It also sounds like a staunchly Presbyterian ethic. It comes as no surprise that Brown explicitly credits his preacher father with inspiring his political career.

The Brown doctrine has two major strategic payoffs. Firstly, it’s the only political speech I’ve seen that makes a coherent link between traditional British values and the challenges of globalisation. Brown starts by endorsing his father’s belief that everyone, no matter what their circumstances, has a talent to contribute, then goes on to argue that only by maximising everyone’s talents can Britain hope to compete in a globalised world against larger countries with greater economies of scale. In so doing, he seems to cast the whole country as a cottage industry, with everyone pitching in to outsmart and outmanoeuvre the giants. It’s a genius linkage, which fastens on two enduring characteristics of British life- the fear of being overwhelmed by foreigners, and the love of “Spirit of Dunkirk”-style collective activity-, takes away their connotations of whimsical inwardness, and recasts them as motors of future growth. A good speechwriter could turn this into a very attractive manifesto for the next general election.

Brown’s second stroke is directed at his own party. The discourse of rights and responsibilities Brown sets out in this speech will be familiar to anyone who’s ever joined a union or a political movement. By applying such a comfortable framework to his public services agenda, Brown is giving the entire package an Old Labour coating, without actually having to change any of the policy content. True, it won’t be camouflage enough to survive the first nurses strike, but it does at the least suggest an ability to win over different factions by speaking their language which may serve Brown well if he becomes party leader.

The manifesto hangs together remarkably well- maybe too well. Brown has a huge weakness for grand unified theories. These may have worked in the Treasury, not least because simplicity and predictability in Government are much prized by financial markets, but this attitude seems less useful when dealing with all the complexities of a modern society. The system of rights and responsibilities Brown has in mind seems broadly sensible, but you have to ask how flexible it would be in dealing with fringe cases. What do you do with the brilliant, but underprivileged student who goes briefly off the rails? Or the patient who is too sick or confused to keep on top of her schedule? It also seems a shade prescriptive for someone who is trying to shake off the label of a control freak. You have to ask: how does Brown intend to square his commitment to devolve responsibility throughout Government with such an overarching, centralised vision?

Musharraf to do Daily Show

2006-09-26T22:27:00.000+01:00

I learned from Jeff Jarvis this morning that Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf is to appear on the Daily Show tonight. It's pretty bizarre and you'd almost wonder if Musharraf knows what the Daily Show is. Either way, I can't wait to see the outcome. Apparently he's touting a book. No word yet if he'll be doing signings at book shops around the States.
Categories: Daily Show, Musharraf

Migration to new blog

2006-09-26T10:59:00.000+01:00

I've started a solo blog where I plan to write about certain interests of mine - primarily Jewish issues, but also immigration, cultural identity and related topics - that to date have made up a lot of my posting on Backseat Drivers. I'll keep contributing here, but will probably limit my comments more specifically to media criticism, which is where it all started. For a while I may also post alerts here directing readers to my new blog.

Ex Ihle is a work in progress and I expect it to change as I develop it. At the moment it doesn't look particularly interesting, the blogroll is small and I won't be having comments. Criticisms and suggestions can be sent directly to my email address.

Riots in Budapest

2006-09-19T13:43:00.000+01:00

Credit: Veszig (Creative Commons License)

There were riots in the Hungarian capital Budapest last night. According to Germany's Der Spiegel, remarks made by prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany sparked the disturbances. Apparently he admitted that he'd lied "morning, noon and night" to get re-elected. Gyurcsany wasn't foolish enough to make the admission publicly. They were revealed on a leaked tape of a private meeting of the ruling Socialist Party.

Der Spiegel has more photos of the riot, including one of this young man, who for reasons best known to himself, is rioting in his underpants.
Categories: Hungary, Politics, Riot

Albarracín

2006-09-11T21:27:00.000+01:00

Perched on a ridge in the mountains near Tereul in Aragon, Albarracín is certainly one of the most dramatic looking towns in Spain.

A natural fortress in itself, the town is dominated by a castle and walls built by the Moors, who also gave the town its name¹.

The walls on the hillside above the town look like a steep trek in baking heat, but you actually get up there in no time.

Once up there, the views are pretty spectacular, both of the town and the surrounding countryside.

Down in the town itself, the streets are cobbled and so narrow that sometimes it seems the buildings on either side of the street are practically touching each other.

Full set of photos here.

1. It's a pretty safe bet that most place names in Spain beginning with "Al" have Moorish origins. For example, Almería derives from Al Meraya.
Categories: Spain, Albarracín, Photos

Dangerous Bens

2006-09-11T21:04:00.000+01:00

I read this and then remembered who's learning to drive.
Categories: Dangerous Drivers

On yer bike

2006-09-08T16:45:00.000+01:00

One of the things I'm really enjoying about my holiday is the opportunity to go out on the bike nearly every day. This is a great place for cycling. Starting from the northern suburb of Tres Cantos you can motor along the steady climb north to Colmenar Viejo, from where you can go on to the villages in the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains.

Alongside the motorway to Colmenar is a great cycle path, which bears no resemblance to the kind of cycle lanes you'd see at home. As you can see from the picture, it's more like a cycling road. Even on weekday mornings it's pretty busy with everyone from huffing and puffing fat dudes on mountain bikes, to rail thin bespandexed groups powering up to the mountains.

On from Colmenar Viejo, you've got your pick of routes. The most common one I've done so far is up to the village of Cerceda and from there on to Manazanares, a pretty town wedged between the mountains and the Santillana resevoir.

Just outside the village is a medieval castle, but the town itself is a nice spot to stop for a bite to eat where you can sit the shade outside one of its bars. Back on the bike and its on to Soto del Real and probably the most scenic part of the ride with the mountains looming up on your left. From Soto you can head back to Colmenar and cruise downhill all the way home. All told, it's a 65 kilometre trip.

Yesterday we took a different route, heading from Colmenar Viejo towards Guadalix, which involves a good climb over a mountain before a rapid and snaking decent into the town. They're building a new bridge across the valley, which looks pretty dramatic from above, but I hardly had time to check it out given the speed I was going at and paranoia about misjudging a curve and/or getting hit by a lorry. The route was about the same distance, but involved a lot more climbing.

Afterwards I heard about a 23km Category One climb beyond the village of Navacerrada. I'm a total amateur of course, but one day I hope to try it. I'm hooked.

POSTSCRIPT: Given the weather, you need to leave very early or you'll end up doing most of your ride in temperatures north of 30 degrees. One of the consequences of this is you end up with cyclist's tan. It looks alright on your arms, but a tan that starts just above you knees looks a bit silly. That's not half as ridiculous though as having the straps of your helmet tanned into the side of your head.
Categories: Spain, Madrid, Cycling

Pepi, Luci, Bom

2006-09-07T08:48:00.000+01:00

Probably only funny if you know the Almodóvar film. Seen in Malasaña, Madrid.
Categories: Madrid, Photos

From Ma(r)x to minus

2006-09-06T08:17:00.000+01:00

Seen in Malasaña.
Categories: Madrid, Photos, Graffiti

Hotel High Tech

2006-09-06T08:10:00.000+01:00

I'd never noticed this wonderfully named hotel on Gran Via before.
Categories: Madrid, Photos

Reasons for not blogging

2006-09-06T08:06:00.000+01:00

At Marx Madera, the Izquierda Unida bar in Malasaña, they sell mojitos by the litre.
Categories: Madrid, Photos, Booze

World's biggest food fight

2006-09-04T08:39:00.000+01:00

Credit: 20 Minutos (Creative Commons License)

Forget running with bulls, throwing tomatoes at strangers is where it's at. This year's La Tomatina was held on Wednesday, with 40,000 people descending on the town of Buñol in Valencia to frolic in 120 tonnes of tomatoes.
Categories: Spain, Tomatina

Dogs in suits!

2006-09-04T07:54:00.000+01:00

The Spanish are in a league of their own when it comes to tack, whether it's glow-in-the-dark Jesus statues, neon lit virgins or Queen Sophia ashtrays. It's hard to top a dog in full dress uniform though.
Categories: Madrid, Photos, Dogs

Down with rain

2006-08-31T19:15:00.000+01:00

It's not really worthy of a post, but I'm off to Electric Picnic tomorrow and I'm very excited.
I have stoked and fanned my excitement over the last few days with hordes of other Stradbally-bound thirty somethings, bonding through debates in Army Bargains/ Argos/ The Great Outdoors over raincoats, tents and torches.
If my 10pound tent can withstand the weekend's rain (and if Ireland can scrape a point or better in Stuttgart on Saturday) I will be very happy to see out the summer in epic style.
I'll be lucky if the torch lasts half an hour.

Daylight robbery

2006-08-27T21:04:00.000+01:00

I flew to Madrid yesterday, but before indulging in two weeks of sun, cycling and cured pork, there was one more opportunity to enjoy the wallet sapping experience that is shopping in Dublin. The food hall in departures at the airport is charging €8.75 for a pannini type sandwich.¹ They won't even heat it up for you.

Which brings me to Damien Mulley, who uncovered this wonderfully scripted and shambolically performed Jarvis Cocker number, C**ts Are Still Running The World.²

1. The immediate assumption is that the concession holders have a captive audience and can charge whatever the hell they want. But there may be more to it than that. Aer Rianta may very well take this into account and charge top dollar for rent, which means the retailer has to recoup this from consumers. Aer Rianta in turn could plough this revenue into reducing fees for airlines, which means cheaper flights for consumers. But the sandwich buyers are subsidising the non-sandwich buyers. The moral of the story: make your own fecking sandwiches.

2. I'm loath to put the stars in and never did before. But a regular reader emailed me a while back to tell me they were hauled up by their boss over their web browsing habits after colourful language on a blog was flagged by the system.
Categories: Ireland, Dublin Airport, Thievery

Feeding the dog

2006-08-27T10:25:00.000+01:00

Spotted outside my local Super Valu on Talbot Street. I was going to say I liked the spelling, but maybe this irate individual was interupted before they could finish? Perhaps they were going for something like "I wouldn't feed my dog out of their poxy shop"?
Categories: Ireland, Dublin, Photos

Commie Times

2006-08-23T13:41:00.000+01:00

What do right leaning readers see when they read the New York Times? Will Murphy at the Huffington Post tries to find out. Slide your mouse over the headlines and see what happens. My favourite is the Arts Section. (Via the magnificent Ignacio Escolar)
Categories: US, Media

Goose-stepping in heaven

2006-08-16T18:50:00.000+01:00

Former Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner has died at the age of 93 in exile in Brazil, which was a bit of a surprise to me since I'd assumed he died years ago. What is it with these tinpot dictators and longevity? Pinochet will be 91 this year and is still going strong.
Categories: Paraguy, Stroessner

How big is your list?

2006-08-14T18:10:00.000+01:00

I suspect the weekend disappeared for a few people after Copernicus discovered the Library Thing and a fair sized chunk of Ireland's bloggers rushed off get their own account.

The Library Thing allows you to catalogue your book collection online and, depending on how you look at it, it's either one big member measuring contest or a great community of book lovers. Like a cross between del.icio.us and MySpace for bibliophiles, it's got lots of neat features like tagging, the ability to add books from other people's collections or retail sites like Amazon.

Anyway, here's my stab at starting a catalogue, and here's the Irish bloggers' group.
Categories: Books, Library Thing

Blogger beers

2006-08-14T18:09:00.000+01:00

The next bloggers' meet up will be in the Market Bar, Dublin on Saturday from around 6.
Categories: Ireland, Blogging

"Rescue worker" is rescue worker

2006-08-12T13:45:00.000+01:00

His name is Salam Daher and he's head of operations for the Lebanese Civil Defence in Tyre. He's been with the Civil Defence for 20 years and is making no apologies for making sure people saw the outcome of the bombing at Qana.
Categories: Lebanon, Qana, Media

Terror in the skies

2006-08-11T13:37:00.000+01:00

It's extraordinary how people react when they learn that they risked being blown out of the sky:

"Eight hours without an iPod, that's the most inconvenient thing" - Hannah Pillinger
"They won’t even allow me to take my lipstick on" - Firoaus Amur

I suppose now is not the right time to mention I'm going on holidays in two weeks and will be pretty upset if I can't take anything on board? Didn't think so.
Categories: Airlines, Terrorism

Lebanon propaganda

2006-08-11T11:27:00.000+01:00

Here are two informative compendia of various types of fakery coming from agency stringers in Lebanon: Zombietime and NewsBusters. Lots of links within each.

Eat it, suckers

2006-08-11T09:09:00.000+01:00

Watch as the "rescue worker" in the green helmet directs the filming of the Qana recovery: Meryl Yourish has the goods.

Social Dumping

2006-08-10T14:59:00.000+01:00

It's pretty well known that Bertie's annual week's holiday in Parknasilla is family time, one week out of the year away from his political or moneyed cronies (especially after the intense wheeling and dealing with all his boyos at the Galway Races the week before).
So isn't he a game lad to have dropped in on a consitutent's new venture not far from Parknasilla in Sneem. Louis Moriarty has invested 20 million in this development, a 69-room hotel and conference centre.
Liam Reid in today's Irish Times gives us the dirt on Louis:

"It emerged that Mr Moriarty, who used to own a Dublin waste disposal company, has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing in relation to charges arising out of an investigation into the largest illegal dump ever uncovered in the State at Whitestown, Co Wicklow. He has also been the subject of a High Court order to clean up 8,000 tonnes of waste, including hazardous hospital waste such as blood-contaminated tubes, at another Co Wicklow site in Coolnamadra."

FF seems to have become so far removed from any sense of ethics in political life that they don't even notice the smell coming from their friends.

Second Wired writer found out

2006-08-10T00:55:00.000+01:00

Wired has just annouced that it's pulled two stories by Philip Chien after he "failed to confirm the authenticity of a source". It was only last year that it had to acknowledge it couldn't locate sources for 24 stories by Michelle Delio.
Categories: US, Media

Nail Technicians

2006-08-10T00:33:00.000+01:00

Given the builders are in, you have to wonder just what kind of nail technicians they're looking for.
Categories: Ireland, Dublin, Photos

How does your Beirut home get blown up?

2006-08-09T19:00:00.000+01:00

Writing in today's Independent, Robert Fisk attempts to answer that question. He reports on how two Israeli missiles hit a block of apartments on Asaad al-Assad Street in the Shiyah district of Beirut:

And why was the building struck? The Israelis have slaughtered hundreds of civilians, attacking convoys of refugees they themselves ordered to leave. But Saadieh, Ali Rmeiti's sister-in-law, has a story which matches those of two other survivors. Before the missiles exploded, she said, an Israeli drone flew over the Shiyah district, a pilotless reconnaissance aircraft which sends live pictures back to Tel Aviv. "Um Kamel", as the Lebanese call them, whined around for a time and then, without warning, someone drove down Assaad al-Assad street on a motorcycle and fired into the sky with a rifle opposite the Rmeiti home.

Then he left, some youth who wanted to prove his foolish manhood. You can't destroy drones with a rifle, as any Hizbollah member knows. But not long afterwards, the two missiles came streaking down on the homes of the innocent.

According to Fisk, at least 17 civilians died as a result.
Categories: Lebanon, Israel, Beirut

Who or what is the ICDISS?

2006-08-08T20:19:00.000+01:00

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber points to two pieces (here and here) in this week's Economist which take a close look at the International Council for Democratic Institutions and State Sovereignty. The ICDISS describes itself as an international NGO, specialising in "nation-building issues" and producing professional and academic looking "reports".

However, the Economist noticed something odd, namely the group seemed solely focused on the breakaway Moldovan region of Transdniestria. When questioned, it proved very cagey about revealing anything about itself, leading the magazine to wonder if it wasn't a Kremlin front to promote possible Transdniestrian independence. It's a good example of how, in the internet age, it's so easy to present yourself as a quasi-authoritative source with little more than a website and the time to churn out some plausible looking research.

There's a few interesting elements to the story. For example, times are changing when you see the Economist central and eastern European correspondent Edward Lucas blogging about his work and thrashing it out on the Talk pages at Wikipedia.

And then there's Farrell, who wryly refers to him as "the Economist journalist who wrote the expose (or, if you want to be careful, someone who appears to be the Economist journalist who wrote the expose)" which really does go to show that on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. Categories: Moldova, Russia, Media

Seedy soft porn king

2006-08-08T13:23:00.000+01:00

Boing Boing links to this LA Times profile of Girls Gone Wild supremo Joe Francis. The piece opens with an account of Francis pinning the Times writer against a car bonnet and things just get worse from there. It's a great bit of journalism by Claire Hoffman, but scary stuff indeed.
Categories: US, Media, Girls Gone Wild

Photo fraudster fired

2006-08-08T13:13:00.000+01:00

Reuters has ditched a Lebanese stringer after concluding he had photoshopped at least two shots from the current conflict in Lebanon. You really have to wonder what he was thinking. One of the photos captures the Beirut skyline after air raids. The altered picture makes the smoke look thicker and darker, but the original is only marginally less dramatic. Selling your work to Reuters is a pretty sweet gig for any photographer. Throwing it all away for a poor piece of embellishment is a pretty dumb move.

There's been a fair bit of speculation about Adnan Hajj's motives, with many suggesting it was a piece of anti-Israel propaganda. I'm wondering though if monetary reasons weren't a contributing factor. Hajj wasn't staff and, while I'm not party to Reuters arrangements with stringers, I'm assuming payment is made on the basis of whether their work is accepted by the agency and possibly on how many media outlets buy the photo. The more dramatic the photo, the more likely it is to be sold.
Categories: Lebanon, Media, Photography

Friedman throws in the towel

2006-08-04T18:18:00.000+01:00

Remember how Tom Friedman spent two and a half years telling us that the next six months will be crucial for the future of Iraq? Now it looks like he's finally tired of waiting and argues for disengagement.
Categories: US, Iraq, Media

Revenge of the Euroweenies

2006-08-04T18:03:00.000+01:00

It's nice to see Commission vice president Margot Wallström using her blog to puncture some of the daft stories that circulate about the EU. She links to the Telegraph's David Rennie, who dug into a Sun story claiming the EU was going to change the name of Bombay Mix to Mumbai Mix^*. Not suprisingly, it turned out to be rubbish.

Wallström also links to an EU page which fact checks media stories about the organisation. The EU's UK office also has its own page devoted to stories that circulate in the British press.

^*And yes, it's also nice to see a Telegraph journalist doing something like this.
Categories: Europe, EU, Wallstrom

Arrr Matey!

2006-08-03T17:01:00.000+01:00

It's embarrassing enough to have to be rescued after drifting out to sea in an inflatable dinghy, but to have it happen while you're dressed as a pirate is pretty mortifying.
Categories: Pirates

Oh dear

2006-08-03T07:39:00.000+01:00

When you rightly condemn people for comparing Jews to Nazis, it doesn't look great when it emerges your next book is entitled Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton.
Categories: US, Media

How many lawyers do you have?

2006-08-02T18:01:00.000+01:00

As any Irish blogger will know, having your own legal representation is a must in this day and age. Indeed, the mounting level of complex legal issues arising from blogging now means that for many bloggers, a team of at least two lawyers is now essential. In the interests of perhaps gaining a greater understanding of how Irish bloggers handle legal issues, I'm posing a question. How many lawyers do you have?

To get the ball rolling I can reveal that here at Back Seat Drivers, we currently have seventeen on retainer. While smart alecs may laugh and say we've more lawyers than Philip Morris, I'd respond by saying that each performs a crucial role in defending our collective interests. If you think blogging is merely a hobby that occupies the time between work and family commitments, think again. Given our staggering levels of web traffic and high profile in the media, our reputation and livelihoods require the utmost protection. For example, we have two teams of four lawyers devoted to the issue of libel, one to pursue actions against individuals we feel may have defamed us, another to defend us in the numerous cases brought against us. Another team of three lawyers is devoted to copyright, protecting our valuable work from unauthorised reproduction. In addition to this, we each have our own personal lawyer, to represent our individual interests in contractual negotiations regarding our contributions to this weblog.

We've always believed that it's better to be safe than sorry. Our rule of thumb is that you can never have enough lawyers.
Categories: Ireland, Blogging, Law

Deadly

2006-08-02T07:40:00.000+01:00

Ben Good is back in business.
Categories: Blogging

Qana conspiracy theories

2006-08-02T00:34:00.000+01:00

Like a lot of people I suspect, I've noticed a number of websites claiming, amongst other things, that photos of the rescue operation at Qana were staged. The allegations mainly centre around different time stamps appearing on photos published online. Since they obviously confused the time the photo was published with the time the photo was taken, I didn't pay too much heed to them. Now the agencies themselves have rejected the charges, as reported in this AP story.

I'd question the wisdom of even responding, given the nature of the "evidence" being touted. It's hardly as if they have a case to answer. Then again, as the AP notes, this one made it onto Rush Limbaugh, so maybe they thought they ought to do something. Meanwhile, Megan McCardle is one of many to note the similarities between this and 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Categories: Lebanon, Qana, Photos, Media

Questions on Qana

2006-08-01T13:26:00.000+01:00

The narrative from the Israeli government regarding civilian casualties since the beginning of the current campaign in Lebanon has been pretty consistent. Hezbollah are operating in civilian areas and thus endangering lives. To prevent this, civilians should leave south Lebanon. While the message is simple, there are some problems with it.

For example, in the aftermath of the bombing at Qana, in which near 60 people died, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert announced:

All the residents were warned and told to leave. No one was ordered to fire on civilians and we have no policy of killing innocent people.

The IDF meanwhile released a statement saying Qana had been a base for attacks on Israel:

IDF acted tonight against terror targets in the village of Qana. Qana has been used since the beginning of these events as a hideout and the place from which approximately 150 rockets have been fired at the territory of the State of Israel, in 30 salvos, some of which struck Haifa and points north.

We've heard a lot about "precision bombing" during the current campaign, so it may be reasonable to ask if the building concerned was the actual target.

As Tom Clonan pointed out in yesterday's Irish Times (sub. req.), Hizbullah rockets cannot be fired from buildings:

The type of missiles being fired by Hizbullah at Israeli cities cannot be fired from within houses, mosques, hospitals or even UN facilities as has been suggested by the IDF. Due to the massive "back-blast" caused by the rocket launchers of these missiles, they can only be fired from open ground.

If the building wasn't the target, then is Israeli bombing far less precise than we have been led to believe? Perhaps it's already been revealed elswhere and I've missed it, but I'd be interested to hear what exactly the Israelis were trying to hit.

So why haven't all civilians left south Lebanon? The answer, it appears, is that they don't fancy their chances on the roads. Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch gives an example:

When the Israelis dropped leaflets instructing all villages south of the Litani River to evacuate immediately "for your own safety," Manal and dozens of her neighbours set off in three cars, waving white flags. As they left, an Israeli warplane dropped bombs 10 meters in front of and behind the convoy, which raced on. As far too many Lebanese civilians have found, Manal's experience is not exceptional, on the contrary.

Writing in the Independent (sub. req.) last week, Robert Fisk demonstrated how dangerous it is on the roads of south Lebanon. Fisk was travelling with a Red Cross team to Jezzine. While the Israelis had been informed of and had given the green light to the route, bombing on the road forced them to turn back:

That's when five vast, brown, dead fingers of smoke shot into the sky in front of us, an Israeli air-dropped bomb that exploded on the road scarcely 80 metres away with the kind of "c-crack" that comic books express so accurately, followed by the scream of a jet. If we had driven just 25 seconds faster down that road, we would all be dead.

In the light of these accounts, what are we to make of Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon, who last week announced: "All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah".
Categories: Israel, Lebanon, Qana, Hezbollah

Landis may have some explaining to do

2006-08-01T08:07:00.000+01:00

When Tour de France winner Floyd Landis first tested positive for excess testosterone there was a lot of reasonable doubt floating around, with plenty of discussion of just how high a level of the hormone could be naturally found in the body, not to mention the fact that a lot of cyclists who've failed this test appealed the decision and won.

However, it's now emerged that tests on Landis's sample indicate that some of the testosterone had come from an external source and was not produced naturally. This flies in the face of his earlier assertion that the hormone was "natural and produced by my own organism". If the B Sample, due to be tested this week, confirms the findings, he could be in serious trouble.
Categories: Cycling, Tour de France, Floyd Landis

Shiny happy people

2006-08-01T08:02:00.000+01:00

OK, what's Denmark got that we don't have? "In a new study aimed at charting each country's levels of happiness, Denmark has scored top marks, followed closely by Switzerland, Austria and Iceland".
Categories: Denmark, Happiness

Handy number

2006-08-01T00:47:00.000+01:00

Oh to be a mere twenty five years of age and have enough cash at hand to buy your own newspaper.
Categories: US, Media

Spoiling the view

2006-08-01T00:43:00.000+01:00

The New York Times informs us that the city of Las Vegas has made it illegal to feed homeless people in public parks. If you do, you face a fine of up to $1,000 or could land yourself in jail for up to six months. Meanwhile, Mayor Oscar Goodman is suggesting that homeless people with signs asking for food be sued for false advertising, since they can be fed by soup kitchens.
Categories: Las Vegas, Homelessness

The destruction of the Temple and why Israel fights

2006-07-31T10:43:00.000+01:00

Thursday is the fast day of Tisha B'Av, when Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and other calamities of exile such as the Inquisition and the Holocaust. Naturally, this period in the Jewish calendar takes on special significance this year in light of the fighting in Lebanon and Gaza and the ongoing rocket attacks on Israeli cities - I'm told religious Jews are "praying with great devotion". That Jews should go on mourning a traumatic history when today there is a Jewish state with a strong army and Jerusalem as its capital may seem melodramatic, yet if you see exile as not merely dispersion among the nations but as exile from redemption - from peace and justice - lamentation looks a bit less extravagant:

Sure, it would have been wonderful if David Ben Gurion's announcement in 1948 spelled out not only a declaration of independence but also real, practical and total independence. The truth, however, is that we are far from independent. We can proclaim our sovereign rights from today till tomorrow but we are still very dependent on America, on Europe, on public opinion, on the media and even, to a degree, on the United Nations.

We are certainly not yet independent of Hamas and Hizbollah with whom we are waging a real war as I write these lines.

When Jewish lives are being lost daily to terrorist armies, when our neighbors still dream of driving us into the sea, when they still deny us our basic legitimacy, when the international media challenges our right to defend our citizens, can we claim that we are really and truly independent?

I would add that as long Israel has to kill innocent civilians to defend itself from murderous torment, redemption will remain a long way off. This is the tragic dimension of Israel's existence - and I want to emphasise that this is not exclusively a Jewish tragedy. However, where I see a tragic dilemma there is a more widespread perception that Israel fetishises security and because of this fights with "disproportionate" aggressiveness and reckless disregard for civilian casualties. Missing from this analysis is the crisis of sovereignty Israel faces with every attack - however small - on its borders, on its legitimacy, on its right to defend its citizens, and with every call to meet genocidally motivated violence with diplomacy. There simply is no redemption in negotiating the status of your own existence and thus inviting terminal exile.

Savagery

2006-07-31T07:57:00.000+01:00

On Sunday morning, an Israeli air raid killed over 60 people in Qana, including 34 children.

On Friday, a man walked into a Jewish centre in Seattle and shot six women in cold blood, killing one. The man said he had selected the centre as a random target "for his anger toward Jews".

Barbarity is alive and well, and thriving in the twenty-first century.

For some people though, killing even more civilians could provide the route to victory:

Could Israel - even hardy, strong, universally conscripted Israel - possibly stomach the bloodshed that would accompany the total destruction of Hezbollah? If Lebanon's 300-plus civilian casualties are already rocking the world, what if it would take 10,000 civilian casualties to finish off Hezbollah? Could Israel inflict that kind of damage on Lebanon - not because of world opinion, but because of its own modern sensibilities and its understanding of the value of every human life?

And in today's Irish Times, another old friend criticises the world for its outrage over civilian deaths:

Hearing the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hizbullah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world - governments, the media, UN bureaucrats - has completely lost its moral bearings.

No doubt in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Arab world, the equivalents of Krauthammer and Podhoretz are writing their own screeds from the opposite side of the bloody coin.
Categories: Israel, Lebanon, Qana, Seattle

Lebanese support for Hezbollah increases

2006-07-29T14:46:00.000+01:00

Any grounds for believing that the current Israeli offensive in Lebanon would weaken public support for Hezbollah now appear to be disappearing. Writing in the Irish Times on Monday, resident conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer was earning his undoubtedly hefty pay cheque by again demonstrating his own cluelessness (sub. req.):

Then there are the Arabs, beginning with the Lebanese, who want Hizbullah out. The majority of Lebanese - Christian, Druze, Sunni Muslim and secular - bitterly resent their country being hijacked by Hizbullah and turned into a war zone. And in the name of what Lebanese interest? Israel evacuated every square inch of Lebanon six years ago.

Krauthammer's analysis is about a year out of date. In March of last year nearly a million Lebanese marched in defiance of Hezbollah to demand that Syria withdraw from the country. Things have changed a lot since then. While Krauthammer opines from the comfort of his office in the States, Time correspondent Nicholas Blanford is on the streets of Tyre:

If Israel really believed its fiery campaign against Hizballah in South Lebanon would help turn the local population against the militant Shi'ite group, all indications are that the death and destruction being rained down is having quite the opposite effect. That much was painfully clear Wednesday after an Israeli jet returned to bomb the center of this — until now — relatively safe coastal town for the first time in 10 days, and a new generation of Hizballah supporters was born.

Poll numbers from Lebanon are backing up Blanford's discovery. Writing in the Irish Times today, Michael Jansen reports that Lebanese from all communities are beginning to row in behind Hezbollah (sub. req.):

87% - Support Hezbollah in its confrontation with Israel
70% - Approve of the operation to seize Israeli soldiers
55% - Christians who favour Hezbollah's action
63% - Do not believe Israel can defeat Hezbollah
90% - Do not believe the US is an honest broker
35% - Think the US and Israel will impose their conditions in exchange for a ceasefire
57% - Say the US and Israel will not succeed in such an endeavour

When the majority of Christians, traditionally the community most hostile to Hezbollah, start backing them, you know you're in trouble.
Categories: Lebanon, Hezbollah

Chad Vader

2006-07-29T14:40:00.000+01:00

It's Chad Vadar, Darth's less successful brother and day manager at a supermarket.
Categories: Video, Chad Vader, Star Wars

Did you know?

2006-07-29T14:00:00.000+01:00

The number of active French blogs has been put just over three million. That's more per head of population than even the United States.
Categories: France, Blogging

Graf Zeppelin found

2006-07-29T09:51:00.000+01:00

The BBC reports that the wreck of Nazi Germany's only aircraft carrier, Graf Zeppelin, has been discovered by the Polish navy. The History Channel must be rubbing its hands in glee. They'll probably be able to get around two years worth of documentaries out of it.
Categories: Graff Zeppelin, Germany, Nazis

Week's most disappointing headline

2006-07-29T09:48:00.000+01:00

When I read "Russian rocket destroys 18 satellites" at the Register, I was thinking not only had the Russians developed a missile to knock out satellites, but one that could take out several in one go. The truth was far less sensational: "A Russian rocket carrying 18 satellites crashed on launch in Kazakhstan late Wednesday".
Categories: Russian, Satellites, Media

He eats babies too...

2006-07-28T00:49:00.000+01:00

Zapatero outlines his plans to
invade Poland. Credit: PSOE

Ever since its election in 2004 and the subsequent withdrawal from Iraq, the Spanish government has been the subject of some pretty wild allegations in certain circles, whether it's supplying chemical weapons to Venezuela or giving human rights to monkeys.

The latest is that prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is in fact a closet Nazi sympathiser. It all started with this story on Israeli news site Ynetnews, which got some serious exposure on the web last week, courtesy of the Drudge Report and a number of high profile right wing blogs. It alleges:

The first signal came on Monday, 5 December, when during a dinner with the Benarroch family, Zapatero and wife began claiming what Vidal Quadras, member of the European Parliament, described on the radio as "a tirade of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism". By the moment the Benarroch couple had left the table to express their regrets, Zapatero was explaining his lack of surprise about the Holocaust: according to the people present, Zapatero claimed to understand the Nazis.

You can listen to the radio segment here. Although it's implied in the Ynetnews piece, if you listen to the piece, it becomes clear that Vidal Quadras wasn't actually at the dinner. Instead he simply "heard" that this happened. None of the people present have come forward and confirmed his allegations.

The Benarrochs are a prominent Spanish Jewish family and those familiar with Spanish politics will know that they are close to the ruling PSOE party and friendly with Zapatero. If the prime minister really had decided to start telling his Jewish friends that Hitler had the right idea, you would assume that they would distance themselves from him, but that hasn't happened. It's also probably worth noting that nobody in Spain has touched the story with so much as a barge pole. Even media outlets like El Mundo or La Razon, who need little excuse to bash the government haven't gone near it. In other words, the whole thing is completely unsubstantiated.

After starting out on such a high note, the piece then goes on to allege that since the recent conflict between Hizbollah and Israel erupted, Zapatero has gone public with his "hate towards Israel, Jews and Zionism":

In the third day of such rants, before a gathering of the Socialist Youth Movement and a day before a demonstration against Israel, Zapatero showed at last his true colours: At the closing of the meeting he let the teenagers take pictures of him wearing a Palestinian kaffiyah.

Leaving aside the fact that the kaffiyah isn't exactly a Nazi armband, but a piece of traditional dress, the author fails to put the incident in context. First of all, as Spanish daily El Pais reports, the teenagers in question were actually Palestinian teenagers. Zapatero was addressing a meeting of youth socialist groups from all over the world, including Israel and Palestine. Secondly, he was hardly parading around in the thing:

At the end of the presentation, tens of young people raced to the front to have their photographs taken with Zapatero. One of them, to the surprise of the president, placed a Palestinian scarf on him for a few seconds to be pictured with him. Zapatero immediately removed the same. [My translation]

Unlike the Vidal Quadras allegation, the opposition in Spain has been only too happy to jump all over Zapatero on this one. However, if wearing a Palestinian scarf makes you an anti-semite, some have pointed out this means that senior opposition figures also fall into this category.

Ynetnews then alleges that Zapatero offered no words of condemnation for Hizbollah. This is despite the fact that at that very same meeting he said "we must condemn any type of violence and reject the kidnappings". It claims that much of Zapatero's thinking comes from foreign minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos, who it alleges has links to Hamas. This is of course is the same Moratinos who last week was again condemning attacks on Israel by Hizbollah and Hamas and demanding the disarmament of Hizbollah as called for by the UN.

Armed with all of this "evidence" and just for good measure, it finishes up by advising Jews to think twice about visiting the country and remarks that unless action is taken against Spain, the American embassy in Madrid will be full of Jews fleeing Spain.

What's amazing about all of this is that there are so many people who seem eager to lap it up. Then again, it appears that people often believe what they want to be true.
Categories: Spain, Anti-Semitism, Israel

A step too far?

2006-07-27T20:09:00.000+01:00

Staying on the subject of doping in sport, the New York Times this week reports that WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, is considering banning altitude tents. What the hell are they you ask? They're tents, or rooms in some cases, in which the level of oxygen is lowered in order to stimulate the production of red blood cells. A lot of athletes sleep in them, including several of this year's Tour de France contenders.

The proposal strikes me as a bit daft. They're called altitude tents of course because they simulate the oxygen levels found at high altitudes. So once they're banned, athletes will probably go back to what they were doing before these things were dreamed up, namely sleeping at high altitudes. Maybe they'll try and ban that next?
Categories: Sport, Doping, Cycling

More doping on the Tour?

2006-07-27T06:19:00.000+01:00

Uh oh. Looks like the doping scandal surrounding this year's Tour de France isn't finished yet. (via Tour de France Blog)

UPDATE: Cycling News confirms what everyone was thinking: that the rider in question was Tour winner Floyd Landis. His team said he will be contesting the result and asking for an analysis of the B Sample.
Categories: Sport, Cycling, Tour de France

Irish officer warned Israelis

2006-07-26T18:01:00.000+01:00

The Irish Times has a story this afternoon claiming the Israelis were repeatedly warned about bombs falling close to UN outposts:

Lieutenant Colonel John Molloy, who is with the Unifil force in the south of the country, phoned the Israeli Defence Forces six times to alert them to the bombs landing near UN bases, according to a spokeswoman for [defence minister] Mr O'Dea.

Not surprisingly, the government sounds hopping mad, with foreign minister Dermot Ahern announcing:

"All the evidence we have at the moment would suggest that this was either an incredible accident, despite all of the repeated warnings from our people, or else the observation post was in some way directly targeted."

Six warnings and they still get hit. It hardly inspires confidence.
Categories: Ireland, Israel, Lebanon, UN

Pizza economics

2006-07-26T17:23:00.000+01:00

Either my maths just got very rusty or there are some funny figures in this Irish Times piece today (sub. req.) It reveals that an Irish branch of Dominos Pizza has recorded the highest sales of any Dominos outlet worldwide. That says something about our appetite for pizza or maybe more about the cost of living in this country. The weird part of the story comes at the end:

The spokeswoman did concede that it would take more than one million pizzas to reach sales of €2.4 million. On the basis that branches open for around 90 hours a week, it would have to sell around 200 pizzas an hour to reach one million in a year.

It looks like the Dominos spokeswoman was a bit confused. In order to sell more than a million pizzas for €2.4 million, they'd have to cost less than €2.40. Now I don't order a lot of pizzas, but €2.40 is a very cheap pizza. A glance at the Dominos website reveals that their cheapest pizza is €5 and most options are in excess of €10. That's to say nothing of extras like garlic bread, chips and drinks. In other words, they're selling a lot less than 200 pizzas an hour. Assuming an average bill of €15, that translates into a more realistic 34 orders an hour, which is still pretty good going in my book.
Categories: Ireland, Business, Pizza

Who needs enemies when you've friends like this?

2006-07-26T13:37:00.000+01:00

Alan Dershowitz is beginning to sound a bit extreme, even by his own standards. A column in the LA Times on Saturday responds to news of high civilian casualties in Lebanon by arguing that women and children sometimes can't be classed as civilians:

Hezbollah and Hamas militants, on the other hand, are difficult to distinguish from those "civilians" who recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important roles in their attacks.

The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit. Some — those who cannot leave on their own — should be counted among the innocent victims.

Dershowitz of course offers up no evidence that any of the civilian dead have actually been "financing, harbouring and facilitating terrorism". Indeed I'm curious to know how he thinks you can identify such individuals when you're unleashing ordnance from the air. He also makes it sound ridiculously easy for civilians to get out of the way of the Israeli attack, especially considering several of the more publicised incidents involve people actually fleeing their homes.

It must be lost on him though that he's treading dangerously close to the logic of Hamas: that civilians are legitimate targets since they are somehow complicit with the enemy.
Via Crooked Timber.
Categories: Israel, Lebanon, Dershowitz

Oops

2006-07-26T13:29:00.000+01:00

Editor & Publisher reports a major foul up by the Washington Post:

The Washington Post ran an article Thursday that included a phone number for evacuees in Lebanon to call -- but it turned out to be a number for a sex line.

Someone's going to get their ass chewed.
Categories: US, Media, Lebanon

Calling all bloggers

2006-07-26T13:26:00.000+01:00

Annette is trying to organise a bloggers' get together next month, possibily on the 19th. Those who fancy going along should drop over and add their two cents.
Categories: Ireland, Blogging

Jew-jitsu

2006-07-25T09:26:00.001+01:00

Even though I snarked at Paul in the comments to his post below, he's right to pour cold water on the fevered dreams of some neoconservatives that Israel's fight with Hizballah is just what America needs to get started with Iran. While I would agree with, say, Tony Blair that a ceasefire isn't particularly desirable just now (as I said to my mother the other day, I wish Israel could kill every Hizballah terrorist twice), I'm having trouble distinguishing an American interest in all this beyond passively supporting a staunch ally (Israel) against genocidally determined enemies (Hizballah, Hamas, Syria, Iran).

So I just thought I'd check in to let Paul know his thoughts are chiming somewhat with the Forward's editorial take, which is arguably the most representative gauge of American Jewish opinion you'll find (and, yes, there are arguments!):

Something raw and elemental has been laid bare in the current Middle East crisis, exposing certain primal truths about our new world order that many of us might have preferred not to know.

As awkward as it might be for liberals to acknowledge, there is no comforting balance of competing rights in this battle, no "Yes, but" behind which to hide from engagement. Israel has been forced into a fight that pits simple right against wrong.

And yet, as frustrating as it will be to conservatives, this battle will not end in a clear triumph of right. There will inevitably be compromise. The balance of existing powers will not permit anything else. It is foolish to pretend otherwise.

That sounds about right. Israel may be clearing space on its northern border in expectation of an eventual confrontation with Iran and/or Syria, but the current fighting - ferocious as it is - is more about shifting the terms of engagement and debate than hastening the apocalypse.

The Forward has a surprising take on the question of proportion, too - fighting Jew-jitsu style by essentially admitting the charge of disproportion, but then arguing the need to exceed limits:

From the first, the Israeli response was disproportionate to the stated goal of freeing the soldiers — not for lack of judgment, but because a broader response was necessary. In a systematic campaign of targeted bombings of military and civilian infrastructure, Israel sought to lay down markers of deterrence, to signal to its neighbors that assaults on its territory are intolerable.

As the fighting escalated, however, Jerusalem expanded its objectives. The larger goal, implicit in the south but clearly spelled out in the north, is to eliminate the illegal presence of armed militias on Israel's borders.

The effort is a worthy one and should be welcomed by the world community. The weakening of state authority and the usurpation of power by lawless gangs is one of the most worrisome developments on the global scene in recent years, sowing chaos from Somalia to Colombia to the slums of Brazil and the jungles of Laos. The problem is particularly acute on Israel's borders

This was never really about the kidnapped soldiers, but about the (perfectly legitimate and limited) goal of deterrence. A lot of the people shouting "disproportionate" are as wilfully blind to this fact as the neocons who think Israel has embarked on the war to end all wars.