Saturday, July 23, 2005
FREEDOM ABOLISHED
Dear God, no! Not the dreaded library clause!
ISRAEL EXCEPTED
Jim Brown points out the following in Iraq’s draft bill of rights:
Any individual with another nationality (except for Israel) may obtain Iraqi nationality after a period of residency inside the borders of Iraq of not less than ten years for an Arab or twenty years for any other nationality, as long as he has good character and behavior, and has no criminal judgment against him ...
Not exactly Jeffersonian, is it?
Update: Israel included!
KRATOS!
Several days prior to the shooting in London of a suspected recent visitor to Pakistan, the Sunday Times reported:
Under secret guidelines codenamed Operation Kratos, armed officers were instructed that they should shoot to kill suspected suicide bombers. “The most effective way of dealing with someone with explosives is to shoot them in the head,” said the officer.
Theory proved. That’s via Alan R.M. Jones, whose sister is presently in London. She sends this email:
Yesterday, we took the children up to London to see the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy and to the Tate Gallery. We travelled from here to Euston and then got on the Victoria Line to take us to Pimlico to the Tate. We were literally ON the train that went through Warren St. (where a device failed) about half an hour before the incident. That’s about as close as I would wish to get! The rest of the day involved endless walking, policemen with machine guns passing by, sirens, areas being cordoned off. But in the end we saw some art and took the kids to China Town for supper. So there!
Meanwhile, Londoners are showing some Mark Bingham spirit:
Upstairs in the station, a passenger, Paul Martin, saw “a guy being chased. It was completely crazy. People were trying to drop him, to rugby tackle him,” he told The Guardian.
Fantastic.
DR ELLIS
Poor Cornelia Rau. She’s lately acting on advice from Bob Ellis, as her sister Christine explains:
Christine also criticised the “wisdom” of the treating psychiatrist who gave Ms Rau permission to leave the state and called for her to return to resume treatment.
“It was unwise for the doctors to let her go without taking a blood test to check if she was taking her medication,” Christine Rau said.
Her sister travelled to Melbourne after meeting author Bob Ellis at Adelaide’s Festival of Ideas a week earlier.
Ellis did not return phone calls yesterday, but Christine Rau said he “felt bad about planting the idea in her head to go to the festival”.
Good work, Bob.
AUSTRALIA FRIGHTENS MODO
Julia Baird in the Sydney Morning Herald:
The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd described Australia to me as an “apocalyptic Bushworld”.
She may have meant that as an insult.
SASS QUASHED
Dilpazier Aslam, the sassy junior Guardianista exposed by Scott Burgess, has been fired:
On Monday July 18 Aslam was advised that the Guardian considered that Hizb ut-Tahrir had promoted violence and anti-semitic material on its website and that membership of the organisation was not compatible with being a Guardian trainee.
The following day Aslam told the editor, Alan Rusbridger, that he was not willing to leave Hizb ut-Tahrir and that, while he personally repudiated anti-semitism, he did not consider the website material to be promoting violence or to be anti-semitic.
The matter was subsequently treated under the paper’s grievance and disciplinary procedure. Aslam was invited to a meeting with GNL’s chief executive, Carolyn McCall, at which he repeated his refusal to leave the organisation or repudiate its material.
Having considered all the circumstances Ms McCall took the view that Aslam could not remain a member of the Guardian’s trainee scheme.
The paper will carry a clarification making it clear that Aslam’s membership of Hizb ut-Tahrir should have been mentioned in the context of his July 13 article.
So he wasn’t promoted after all. We await a similar clarification on Aslam’s Hizb ut-Tahrir membership from The Age.
UPDATE. The Guardian is now so fearful of blogger reprisals that it’s omitted a byline from this bitchy anti-blogger piece.
(Via LGF)
Thursday, July 21, 2005
REPORTER SCHOOLED
Kathy from Austin reviews the news:
God, I just love John Howard. His news conference with Tony Blair has been playing on all the cable news channels here in the states. As is typical with these gatherings, a reporter asked the Australian Prime Minister a dumb ass question that indicated blame should be placed as usual, on the victims due to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Howard hit it out of the park in blunt, no nonsense language. He pointed out that 9/11, Bali and other atrocities had been committed PRIOR to Iraq and that in fact, OBL had tied his hatred of Australia to the East Timor operation. He then went on to school this stupid reporter about his tendency to blame victims instead of the terrorists. Tony Blair was left to respond that he agreed “100%” and could not have said it better. John Howard: ya gotta love a guy who calls a spade a spade.
Glenn Reynolds saw the same press conference, and wonders if Howard and Blair haven’t read Jim Bennett’s book.
MULTICULTURALISM ATTACKED
Tattooed hairdressers, Guardian staffers, council workers, Italian business analysts, couples, Turkish students, photo researchers, Vietnamese IT experts, healthcare specialists, Israeli charity workers, Bangladeshi bank cashiers, Glasgow mission volunteers, Afghans, French, fathers, mothers ... all among the dead following July 7’s terrorist attacks. Also murdered was Giles Hart:
A ‘Champion of liberty and human rights’ who helped Lech Walesa deliver Poland from totalitarian rule has been confirmed among the victims of the London bus bombing.
Giles Hart, 55, a prominent British supporter of Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland throughout the 1980s, was also chairman of the HG Wells Society and a member of the Humanist Society and Anti-Slavery Society.
Mr Hart was on his way to work as a BT engineer in Islington when he was killed by the explosion on the No 30 bus. He leaves behind his Polish wife Danuta, daughter Maryla, 21, son Martin, 17, mother Elsie, 85, and sister Erica. As the official death toll rose to 55 yesterday, Mr Hart’s family said in a statement: ‘Giles was always a champion of liberty and human rights and a campaigner against political injustice and bigotry. It is tragic that he fell victim to the very evil against which he had struggled.’
Hart supported Solidarity because he “was pleased to find a campaign that recognised the totalitarian nature of communist Eastern Europe, instead of referring to the Soviet Union as a ‘socialist state where workers have real trade union rights’.” I wonder what he would have made of the BBC’s failure to recognise terrorists.
Three London Underground stations have been evacuated following “incidents”. Emergency services personnel have also responded to reports of an incident on a bus in Hackney Road, junction near Colombia Road, east London.
London Ambulance Service said there were are no reported casualties at Warren Street, Shepherds Bush and Oval tube stations. Stations were evacuated.
Further details on the bus incident are currently unknown.
Passengers at Warren Street reported seeing smoke and there were unconfirmed reports of some kind of explosion at Warren Street station. Other reports indicate that gunshots were fired, or that a nail bomb went off.
Here’s another link. Via J.F. Beck.
UPDATE. I should have linked to this earlier; Norm Geras on terror apologists.
SMALL WORLD, ETC
The idea to run archival Bulletin pictures at our website came after fascinated staffers were observed one afternoon poring over ancient file photographs. Everybody loves old-timey pictures. Several posted shots have turned up readers or reader relatives; in a recent batch, blogger Tim Lambert discovered an image of his dad as a teenager.
KWITTING KYOTO
The Kyoto Protocol is a disaster in New Zealand, and now even those close to it in Canada are running away:
A team of officials responsible for a key part of the Kyoto implementation plan has been decimated by resignations, raising questions about whether insiders believe the plan can work ...
“The key people that we dealt with are almost all gone,” said John Bennett of the Sierra Club. “They had the expertise and the calculations and had negotiated with industry for a couple of years. They have to all be replaced.”
Natural Resources officials won’t speak on the record, but some privately mock Environment Canada’s Kyoto plan as little more than a fiction filled with soft numbers and wishful thinking.
You don’t say.
(Via Bill Schumm in historic Falmouth, Virginia)
ASHES
First wicket of the Ashes: Matthew Hayden, bowled by Matthew Hoggard for a scratchy 12. Australia 1/35.
UPDATE. Two Australians were struck on the head in the first hour: Hayden, harmlessly, and Ricky Ponting, who has a substantial cut below his right eye. Justin Langer was hit hard above the elbow by Steve Harmison’s second ball.
In related news, Brett Lee is in the Australian team for the first time since January 2004.
UPDATE II. Australia now 4/66.
UPDATE III. Australia were 2/10 and facing a bouncer barrage in the first session of the 1974/5 series. Anyone remember what happened after that? When England batted?
UPDATE IV. Live Ashes blogging from Scott Wickstein.
UPDATE V. Australia all out for 190.
UPDATE VI. England 3/18; Glenn McGrath has all three wickets for just seven runs, which means 502 career wickets.
UPDATE VII. England 4/19. McGrath again; Bell out for 6. Big-hitters Flintoff and Pieterson now at the crease. McGrath’s figures: eight overs, four maidens, four wickets, seven runs.
UPDATE VIII. England 5/21. McGrath again; Flintoff out for 0, bowled by a ball that cut and kept strangely low. This pitch is playing like a fourth-day MCG wicket in 1981.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
HAZCHEM
No comment required:
Eight Greenpeace activists staged a protest in the office of Bayer CropScience in Melbourne “to show what it’s like to have an unwanted presence of contamination”.
JAMES DOOHAN
James Doohan, who played Scotty in Star Trek, has been beamed up:
Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Washington, home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease, he said.
Doohan’s most impressive role came some years prior to Star Trek:
At 19, James escaped the turmoil at home by joining the Canadian army, becoming a lieutenant in artillery. He was among the Canadian forces that landed on Juno Beach on D-Day. “The sea was rough,” he recalled. “We were more afraid of drowning than the Germans.”
The Canadians crossed a minefield laid for tanks; the soldiers weren’t heavy enough to detonate the bombs. At 11:30 that night, he was machine-gunned, taking six hits: one that took off his middle right finger (he managed to hide the missing finger on screen), four in his leg and one in the chest. The chest bullet was stopped by his silver cigarette case.
(Via Alan R.M. Jones)
GREEN LEFT IN RED
This tragic news will have everyone crying like a Kennedy at closing time:
Green Left Weekly is facing a serious financial crisis. Last year we finished with a $35,000 deficit and so far this year are almost $65,000 down — that’s a combined shortfall of $100,000! We have borrowed to keep going, but if this trend continues we can’t go on. It’s as simple as that.
Here’s to simplicity. “The last two years have been hard for the progressive movements,” continues Green Left Weekly’s Peter ”Lance” Boyle. “The retreat of the huge global anti-war movement after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the re-election of PM John Howard’s Coalition government have left their mark.” Boyle then pleads for cash. No money for retreaters!
(Via Tim Train, now posting from sunny Melbourne)
ENVIRONMENTALIST CALLS FOR ACTION ON NAZIS
The ABC’s Australian Story profiles millionaire-turned-animal activist Brian Sherman, provoking this line from enviro-hysteric Tim Flannery:
I think that Brian sees something akin to what went on in the Holocaust. You know, that this is a terrible tragedy unfolding before our eyes, and unless we act to do something about it, we’re complicit in this cruelty and this degradation.
(Sherman himself says: “The Holocaust and animal rights aren’t on par. They’re different things totally.”) A couple of years ago PETA based a whole campaign on the idea that battery chickens suffer similarly to Auschwitz inmates. But we’re six decades on from Nazi death camps; it’s time to update, chickenists. I’m sure all the residents at Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib would be honoured to be used in a campaign equating them with domestic fowl. Hey, why not compare these chickens to Nelson Mandela, or David Hicks?