Sunday, October 01, 2006
FOOD 101
Excuse me, but aren’t Blue Staters meant to be the clever people? Farm Aid is currently performing in New Jersey, where special education is apparently required:
The emphasis at this year’s event — the farthest Farm Aid has gone into the heavily populated Northeast — was on teaching urbanites about where food comes from.
Part of that teaching involves consuming $9 organic hamburgers. Via J.F. Beck, who has further organic news.
AL SQUIRA
It’s a squirrel insurgency in California:
“The squirrels will be back,” South Bay wildlife rehabilitator Norma Campbell said. “For every one you take out, two more will come in. It could be a never-ending project that isn’t going to accomplish anything.”
James Taranto blames Donald Rumsfeld.
DNA ANALYSED
Rosa Prince, political correspondent for the Daily Mirror, enjoyed Bill Clinton’s recent Labour Conference appearance:
In a speech as powerful as it was persuasive, preacher-man Bill Clinton declared not just Britain needed the Labour Party in government - but the world ...
In words that would not have been out of place in the Arkansas churches where he first learned the power of oratory, he thundered: “The great promise of progressive politics in the end is that we really do believe our common humanity is more important than our differences.”
At that moment he became warrior and missionary, his faith helping the poor, his battle-plan to end global injustice.
Since quitting the White House six years ago, Bill Clinton has dedicated himself to making the world a better place.
Er, OK. Clinton didn’t “quit” the White House (interesting, by the way, that he decided to become a force for good only after his presidency). Rock on, Rosa:
Almost chuckling with glee, he told how, when DNA was analysed, it showed 99.9 per cent of what makes us human turned out to be identical. How he gloried in this confirmation of his faith in the commonality of humanity.
He became an Arkansas preacher again [ed: again?] as he urged the crowd to concentrate not on the 0.1 per cent which was different but on what was the same.
No surprise, given certain skirt-based evidence, that Clinton is a DNA expert. His next point was to contradict his own idea of glorying in the commonality of humanity:
Clinton explained to the delegates that he needed a Labour Prime Minister in No 10 because only Labour shared his vision.
Never mind all the 99.9%-shared DNA. Concentrate on what is the same, Bill, not on differences!
And the world could not afford another mistake such as that by US Democrats which allowed a dangerous Republican president into the White House.
Republican DNA must be scary stuff.
(Via Ushbeti)
SUICIDERS ON THE SLIDE
Good news from Iraq, via Jules Crittenden:
Al-Qaeda in Iraq has recruiting problems. Allah be praised!
Read the whole column.
MOTOON ANNIVERSARY
The Guardian’s Luke Harding is chilled:
Denmark has now drifted to the right - as has neighbouring Sweden, which last week booted out its Social Democrat government. The chill hand of pragmatism has even arrived in Christiania, the Danish capital’s hippy commune, as the government announced last week it intended to charge the hairy denizens rent.
Why, Denmark is practically a police state. Speaking of hairy denizens, Harding also meets Ahmad Abu-Laban, the dumb cleric who took the Danish Motoons (plus a few extra-inflammatory freelance images) on a death-provoking Middle Eastern tour:
According to Mr Abu-Laban, the cartoons a year ago were the “final straw” - and followed a long list of “provocations” aimed at Denmark’s small Muslim community. “When I saw the cartoons I said to myself: ‘Oh, not again’,” he said. “I had a vague feeling that something bad would happen.”
Ahmad is a regular Nostradamus. Although I’m not sure if predictions count if you’re actually responsible for them coming true:
He put together a dossier of the 12 drawings originally published by Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper at the centre of the row. But he also included three pieces of unpublished hate mail - showing a dog sodomising a praying Muslim, Mohammad as a paedophile, and a French pig-squealing contestant.
The cleric insists that the ensuing crisis was not his fault.
(Via LGF)
UPDATE. Ushie: “No one ever expects the Chill Hand of Pragmatism!”
VALUELESS AUSTRALIA
“There are no peculiarly Australian values that are worth enforcing,” writes the Age’s Terry Lane. Well, presumably aside from the peculiar values that allow gullible columnists to keep their jobs despite publishing old lies. Lane continues:
What makes Australia a desirable destination for migrants is the extent to which we believe in and enforce universal human values. Our values worth enumerating and preserving were set down in eloquent prose in 1948 by the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are the rules for living that transcend national prejudices and should be aspired to by decent, enlightened, civilised people everywhere. If only ...
Article three sums up a fair go as: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” Except David Hicks, of course ...
Articles five to nine say: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. (Except David Hicks.) Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law. (Except David Hicks.) All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. (Except David Hicks.)
And so on, and on. I’m in broad agreement with Lane; these rules should be aspired to by decent, enlightened, civilised people everywhere. If only David Hicks aspired to them.
THIN-SKINNED BOB
Fisking Central notes the following item in Private Eye:
Interviewing John Malkovich in the Observer two months ago, Lynn Barber asked about his alleged hatred of Robert Fisk, the Indie’s Middle East correspondent.
“No one has thinner skins than journalists, in my experience, and I come from a family of them,” he replied. “They can dish it out, but they can’t take it. But the reason I don’t like the topic, why I don’t really say anything about a whiner like Fisk, is it gives them more oxygen.”
Prescient words: Fisk’s lawyers fired off a letter threatening to sue. The Observer has now been forced to apologise and to remove all Malkovich’s comments about the Indie hack from its online archive - thus giving him even less oxygen.
Fisk, naturally, is yet to apologise for his recent claim that “Israeli missiles had pierced the very centre of the red cross painted on the roof” of two Red Cross ambulances. Speaking of which, wouldn’t that ambulance story make an excellent MythBusters episode? Fisk could play the role of the driver, protected from missile blast by the sturdy driver’s canopy.
UPDATE. Dan Lewis:
Regular viewers of Mythbusters know that where they attempt to recreate a scenario according to the urban myth and can’t (busting the myth) they then try to recreate it using various additional props and technology.
In this case, it would be a crappy episode. They couldn’t recreate the ambulance missile strike as reported, for it’s absolutely impossible to recreate what Fisk, Chulov and others reported.