Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: News and politics

  • The Great Wen

    Craig Murray comments on recent events in London, and opens with a marvellous evocation of the Great Wen that is worthy of Michael Moorcock’s Mother London:
    LONDON
    An Italian banker, custodian of Vatican money and secrets, is found swinging under Blackfriars Bridge. Businessmen purchase seats in the national legislature simply for payments of cash. A Bulgarian dissident is killed with a tiny ricin pellet injected from an umbrella. A Brazilian electrician is executed by police on the London underground. The dismembered torso of a small African child floats down the Thames. The country’s most flamboyant businessman, a lawmaker, steals his workers’ pensions and leaves for a yacht cruise. Muslim lads from Yorkshire kill themselves and 67 people on public transport. Etonian mercenaries plan coups in Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea before finding respectability and the jackpot in Iraq. A Russian defector is poisoned with polonium and dies a slow horrible death. Politicians and civil servants concoct a dossier of lies to provoke a war. A girl is arrested for reading out the names of the dead at the Cenotaph, and a man for carrying Vanity Fair outside Downing St. A small black child bleeds to death in a tenement stairwell. Gays die as a nail bomb rips through a pub. The IRA run a long, slow war of death and attrition. Every year, scores of people simply disappear. Homeless people curl up like bundles in neon-lit doorways.  
    Go and read the rest.
  • Dominoes

    I had some respect for Wim Kok. But when I read this sort of thing, then I think I was mistaken.
    RNW: So the mistakes he made in relation to Iraq resulted from a strong belief that he was choosing the right way?
     
    "Absolutely. If you still remember his speech, his brilliant speech, in the British parliament on the eve before the British took action in Iraq, then you’ll remember that this was really a man who believed in every word he spoke with so much passion and conviction. I was very impressed by that. Although I had a somewhat different view, I was still impressed by what he did."
    Oh bloody hell. Why don’t people realise that passion and conviction does not make things true? Evidence makes things true. Kok, you’ve gone down in my estimation.   
  • Open The Can…

    … and what you might find inside are worms.
     
    There’s recently been a story in the UK press about a 16 year-old who has gone to the High Court to accuse her school of discriminating against Christians by banning the wearing of "purity rings". Now it starts to appear as though the backstory to this is even more interesting. See here and here. Whether this gets picked up in the mainstream media, of course, is another matter.
     
    Oh, and be sure to check out the greatest animated cartoon ever made. See the second link.
  • Goodbye, Tony

    The farewell can’t come soon enough for some people. Can’t say I blame them. Beware of Godwin’s law, though.
       
  • Sloppy Journalism

    Oh dear, I’m sure there was a time when the BBC was considered a gold standard in journalism. But as Ophelia points out, they seem increasingly to be employing Unspeak in their reporting, whether consciously or not. Compare this opening from the Beeb’s news site yesterday:
    Iran has criticised the British government for its decision to give a knighthood to author Salman Rushdie. His book The Satanic Verses offended Muslims worldwide and led to Iran issuing a fatwa in 1989, ordering Sir Salman’s execution. 
    with this one from The Guardian:
    Iran accused Britain yesterday of insulting Islam by awarding a knighthood to Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses prompted the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his assassination. 
    If you can’t see the difference, refer to Ophelia’s excellent analysis. She nails the bastards.
  • A Masterstroke

    The Guardian reports on a stunning idea by the US Military. What can possibly go wrong?
  • How Not To Answer Your Critics

    Well, of course, looking at American politics is like shooting fish in a barrel. But when you have presidential candidate Senator Sam Brownback coming out with this guff, then I’m sorry, but I fear for the state of that particular nation.
    While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.
    So that would be, "I’m sorry; I’ve made my mind up, and no amount of evidence is going to dissuade me from my crazed view of reality".
     
    Welcome to Kansas. 
  • Bye Bye…

    Hilzoy, over at Obsidian Wings, writes what is probably the perfect summing-up of the Paul Wolfowitz debacle at the World Bank.
  • You Cannot Be Serious II…

    Belatedly, I discover it’s not just the UN that appears to be taking leave of its senses. The Council of Europe is just as guilty. Jobs for the boys, and to hell with the people, eh?
  • You Cannot Be Serious…

    …is this really going to be the candidate country to head the UN’s Commission for Sustainable Development? Has the UN been taken over by Monty Python? Bizarre in the extreme.
  • Plus Ça Change

    You didn’t really think that Nicolas Sarkozy and friends would change their spots, did you?
  • The Seven Year Itch

    It would appear that the US Republicans are assembling a less-than-star-studded cast of contenders all hoping to be the next President of the United States. Last week, for example, we had the revelation that three out of the ten candidates do not accept the theory of evolution. Now we have the fact that one of them, Mitt Romney, apparently believes that in France people frequently get married under contracts that expire after seven years. Where do they get these idiots from?
  • Skeletons In The Closet

    I see that The Times today carries a story on the late Ted Heath, and the suggestion that he "propositioned men for sex". Whether that’s true or not, I have no way of knowing, but what I find faintly risible is that, even now, some of his friends will still publicly deny that he was gay, claiming that he "had close relationships with unmarried women". Well, I have "close relationships with (unmarried) women" as well, but it doesn’t alter the fact that I’m queer.
     
    I think a truer view of the matter is the portrait offered of Ted by Matthew Parris.
  • A Trifle OTT?

    A trifle over the top, was my reaction to the news that a Swiss man living in Thailand has been jailed for 10 years for insulting the country’s king. But it could have been worse – the judge wanted to impose a sentence of 20 years, but had a flash of leniency, because the accused pleaded guilty…
  • Sauce For The Goose…

    …Is not always sauce for the gander. I think Ronan Bennett makes a very good point in his article in The Guardian today.
  • Beyond Parody

    There are some things that are clearly beyond parody. Such as the news that Dr. Ian Paisley has comissioned a bio-pic of his life. The end result will be clearly something that will have to be experienced in a cinema equipped with full Dolby sound in order to appreciate the decibel levels of his stentorian oratory at full blast.
     
    My favourite (I think apochryphal – but you never know) story about the old rogue and bigot is when he is addressing a rally of the faithful…
     
    "When the day of Judgment comes, there will be a weeping, a wailing and a gnashing of teeth!"
     
    A little old man mumbles with his gums and interjects at the front: "Dr Paisley, what will happen to us who have no teeth?" "Teeth," says the great man, "will be provided." Or, as he would say: "Tayth wull be provayded!!"
  • Safe Haven

    And yet another story from today’s Observer – this time about a row that appears to have erupted over the Isle of Man and its status as a tax haven. As a native of the island, I can’t say that I’m totally surprised that perchance in some instances tax avoidance has shaded into tax evasion. Nonetheless, what really caught my eye were a couple of elementary mistakes in the article in the opening two paragraphs.
     
    The story refers to the population of the island as being 26,000. Erm, what happened to the other 54,000 people then? Have they all just disappeared? And then in the second paragraph, the Common Purse Agreement is referred to as the Common Pure Agreement. Sloppy.
  • The Blair Farewell Tour

    And while we’re on the subject of satire coming uncomfortably close to reality, here’s news of a proposed reality that has already crossed over into satire: retail jails. The ever-dependable Marina Hyde is on hand to give it, and the progenitor of this idea, the blasting that they both richly deserve
  • What’s Sauce For The Goose…

    Justin, over at Chicken Yoghurt, points out that New Labour only gets steamed up about dawn raids in certain cases… But somehow, unlike Justin, I don’t think that it will teach the people concerned to have a little humility – not when Tony clearly doesn’t understand it himself