Witticisms required for the header

If you have a witty and - more importantly - pithy quote, email it to me so I can, if I agree it’s worthy, add it to the header above.

The most recent is a Woody Allen quote, although a very good J.M. Keynes witticism was considered and eventually dropped. Quotes are changed every week or so.

Byers stokes the flames

Stephen Byers, the former transport minister, has written a call to arms in The Times (link), demanding that the Labour Party does not turn its back on Blairism in favour of Brown’s brand of head-down authoritarianism. Many in The Labour Party are beginning to worry about the almost-inevitable Brown premiership. Brown is considered to be an isolated and arrogant micro-manager.

Personally I believe a Brown government will be a disaster. He procrastinated too long; Brown will inherit a cancerous administration, and will not have available the talent to turn it around. Some of the best in the Labour ranks are avowed Blairites, so will no doubt, be cast aside by the dour Scot.

Byers is right to stoke the flames of debate. The last thing The Labour Party needs, or could accept, is a coronation. The Party, after a decade of Blair, needs a bloody leadership fight, if only to hand the winner the mandate to force through necessary reforms.

Bank Holiday reading | Bush is no Lincoln

Been quiet today on the blog. Went swimming this morning and pulled my back. Nothing major, it’s just a strain, but I have been sulking all afternoon so no writing. I will answer any emails tomorrow.

There is quite an interesting article over on Slate from earlier in the week, here. Garrett Epps asks, ‘Is Bush the new Andrew Johnson?’ Johnson is of course Abe Lincoln’s ineffectual successor.

George W. Bush is Lincoln the way Dan Quayle is Jack Kennedy.

Robert Bateman

One of the unsung hero’s of tygerland.net is Robert Bateman. Robert painted the Siberian Tiger that prowls the header of this blog. Robert’s work is astounding, and readers should check it out.

More on the image, Click here.

Robert Bateman

Robert Bateman.ca
Essays
Buy art

Don’t worry, this is not a case of corporate blogging, Robert has never asked for payment and has never requested any advertisement. In fact I wonder if Robert has ever heard of a blog. A bit of a technophobe I’m told.

Nuremberg chief prosecutor: Bush and Saddam should hang

A chief prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials has said that Bush should also be tried for war-crimes, from Yahoo: -

Benjamin Ferenccz, who secured convictions for 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating the death squads that killed more than 1 million people, told OneWorld both Bush and Saddam should be tried for starting “aggressive” wars — Saddam for his 1990 attack on Kuwait and Bush for his 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“Nuremberg declared that aggressive war is the supreme international crime,” the 87-year-old Ferenccz told OneWorld from his home in New York. He said the United Nations charter, which was written after the carnage of World War II, contains a provision that no nation can use armed force without the permission of the UN Security Council.

Passenger Jet downed in US

A Comair passenger jet, flying from Lexington to Atlanta, crashed in the early hours of the morning (6am Eastern Time, US). One survivor has been found, who is being treated at hospital, and is said to in a critical condition.

From The Washington Post: -

Comair is a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines, based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Mr. Bornhorst [the Comiar President - tyger] said in a news conference that commuter flight 5191 crashed at about 6:10 in the morning about half a mile from the end of the runway in a wooded area.

“We can not speculate on the cause of this accident,” he said.

He said that it was “rumor and speculation” to discuss causes of the crash, such as whether the aircraft had been on the wrong runway.

Mr. Bornhorst said that the aircraft was purchased in January 2001 and had been up to date in routine maintenance, with its last scheduled maintenance on Saturday.

The 50-seat Bombardier CRJ200 regional jet was flying from Lexington Blue Grass Airport to Atlanta when it crashed at about 6 a.m. eastern time, Delta Airlines said in a statement.

Asked about work schedules of the crew members, Mr. Bornhorst said that they had been adhering to a schedule that incorporated a legal rest period “well beyond what is required.”

Ann Coulter: Afghanistan is going swimmingly

Ann Coulter, who I once cruelly referred to as a ‘vacuous, self-promoting, she-bitch’, lost her cool on Hannity & Colmes. When challenged about the non-catching of bin Laden, and the mess in Afghanistan, she said, “As for catching Osama [bin Laden], it’s irrelevant, things are going swimmingly in Afghanistan, he’s like a fading movie star.” [link] I can’t imagine that even the most rabid rightwingnuts could defend her now. Well, we’ll wait and see.

Poor Kirsten Powers, the stand in for the utterly feckless Alan Colmes, she’s clearly too coherent and informed to represent the liberal argument on Fox. One assumes she will not be replacing the newt-like Colmes in the long term.

Streamofconsciousness

I lay there watching Match of the Day. It must have been after the Liverpool-West Ham game (2-1). Both sides played well. West Ham put up a real fight although Liverpool’s two goals were superb. The studio guests are delivering their inane ‘analysis.’ It always amazed me: footballers, those who have spent every Saturday running about for 90-minutes, never actually watching or assessing a game, are somehow ‘experts.’ Yet those who watch/read/debate every morsel of football available are ‘fans.’ Beggar’s belief! It’s like making cows experts on milk-production. Anyway, I’m lay there on the sofa, with Mark Lawrenson giving his ‘expert’ opinion, and I’m tired, but I want to watch the other games. I’ll let my eyes close. Just for a minute mind. I can’t close my eyes, I’ll fall asleep. Just a couple of minutes will be ok. I’ll stop myself before I fall asleep. But you fall asleep every Saturday. You’ll wake up with a stiff neck. Your t-shirt all creased. Go to bed. No. I’ll be fine; I don’t want to have to catch the repeat in the morning, I’ll open my eyes when the action starts again.

…

Wesley Snipes doesn’t play in the Premiership. Shit. Check the clock moron, you fell asleep again. Five-past-one, great. Every week. My shirts all creased, and my neck… stiff. I better go to bed.

Unions attack New Labour over reforms

Never bite the hand that feeds you. [link]

Jumping Ship

37 members of Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett’s Labour Derby South constituency defect over her handling of the Israel-Lebanon crisis, link:

“When Margaret Beckett refused to back a ceasefire and instead sided with George Bush it was the breaking point for us.”

“New Labour have abandoned the beliefs that led me and thousands of others to join Labour in the first place.”

~ Mohammed Rawail Peeno, resigning chairman of the Arboretum branch of Derby’s Labour Party.

Refusing to fight George’s war

The Guardian’s Garry Younge meets those who refuse to go back, here:

Joshua Casteel, an interrogator at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. His turning point came when a 22-year-old Saudi who came to Iraq for jihad was brought before him for questioning. “He admitted it,” says Casteel, 26, a deeply religious Catholic convert from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “I asked him why he had come to Iraq to kill. Then he asked me why I had come to Iraq to kill. He said I wasn’t following the teachings of Jesus, which was pretty ironic. But I thought he sounded just like me. He was not a maniacal kind of killer. He had never fired a weapon in his life … I know what it’s like to proselytise. At one time I had been a pretty nationalistic kid. I understood where he was coming from but in order to do my job I couldn’t look at him as a human being. I had to look at him as an object of exploitation.”

[...]

Whether you call them deserters, conscientious objectors or resisters, every story of American soldiers who left the army prematurely because of the Iraq war shares the same emotional trajectory. They begin with doubt and end with determination. And somewhere along the way comes that ill-defined but crucial moment when the psychological struggle and moral angst overwhelm their military commitment.

I’m not terribly sure, but in my understanding of contract law, you cannot enforce a contract if the contract requires a party to break the law. Now if the Iraq War can be proven to be illegal in an American Court or Army Tribunal, surely no soldier can be tried for refusing to serve? Of course my training is in British Contract law not American, and certainly I know nothing of the technicalities of military law, but I wonder if the same fundamentals apply?

You gotta see this

A pregnant man?

[link]

Why a decrepit Dylan is still important

I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan. Even before I went to university I was a fan. I used to write a lot of - mostly sardonic - poetry when I was young, so an attraction to Dylan was unavoidable. Obviously the guy can’t sing, his gravel voice, honed with a mixture of tobacco and bitterness, is an acquired taste, but that was never the point. Dylan stood outside the establishment and peered in, and like the rest of us, he didn’t like what he saw.

I’m only 28. I can’t remember Dylan in his heyday because I wasn’t around. I don’t remember Vietnam or the riots in Paris, because I wasn’t there. But the establishment doesn’t change; we’re still being governed like mushrooms - kept in the dark and fed on bullshit. We’re still fighting wars that nobody can quite understand, and still, when things go wrong, the French youth will still trash Paris. Things don’t change, not really. When we got rid of Nixon, they picked up the pieces and hashed together Bush. They didn’t shoot Clinton, but they still managed to kill him. Even today’s Labour Government is a quasi-Thatcherite experiment in economic neoliberalism, with a dash of authoritarianism thrown in gratis. It’s getting like Stalinism without the free housing. Ok. I’m exaggerating, but take a look at John Reid’s criticisms of civil liberties, and tell me you don’t know what I’m getting at.

Dylan still speaks for us, mostly because he’s never quite been surpassed. There have been sporadic instances of musicians reflecting the modern world. Green Day’s American Idiot, is certainly a product of Bush’s America: disillusioned, bitter, and incensed. During the eighties and early nineties Tracey Chapman would sing about the urban black poor, and today we can hear The Streets define modern urban Britain. But mostly, angst in modern music doesn’t really exist. Politics is not cool. Those who do proselytise about the ills of the world, and I speak of Chris Martin, Bono, and the like, do so with as very much part of the establishment. And they concentrate on a non-offensive agenda; they don’t challenge leaders about the democratic shortcomings in their own backyards, or a misguided and counterproductive foreign policy. They don’t speak for us.

Where is the music (or poetry) that rages against the system? Where is The Clash of the noughties? Or are we too comfortable and decadent to worry about civil liberties and democracy? Even democracy is a dirty word among the left now; the Bush doctrine has even sullied that. So that’s why Dylan is so important, because he, now ravaged by age, is all we have.

It may not be throwing mud in the eye of Bush, but in a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine (an excerpt of which can be read here) it seems Dylan can still boil up some characteristic venom, as he takes on the chronic overproduction in the music industry.

“Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today. We all like records that are played on record players, but let’s face it, those days are gon-n-n-e. You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don’t know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really.

I’m not quite sure I wholly agree. Certainly, modern digitally recorded music isn’t as warm or as fluid as vinyl. And the alchemy of the CD is not as aesthetically pleasing or as tactile as a 12” record. And, you certainly can’t roll a joint on a gatefold CD case. But there is some good music being made, some of which even sounds good. But bands such as The Killers, Queens of the Stone Age, and Muse are few and far between. I genuinely struggle to muster the interest to buy a CD in a record shop now; mostly I just shuffle off home and play some Smiths or early REM. And maybe because of this, music doesn’t really mater anymore. It doesn’t help that so much of it is garbage or so diluted you may as well not bother, but no one, even those making it, seems to give a shit anymore. And that is the real problem with modern music.

It’s nice to see that Dylan is still prepared to be the polemicist, and rally against the established orthodoxy. We certainly need him. And his new album does reflect on a post-9/11 world, which is more that can be said for some of the ‘politically aware’ bands around. But Dylan is not a product of our world; we shouldn’t be relying on a sixty-five-year-old musician to define it. We need the vacuous singer-songwriters who litter the charts to stop looking inwards, reflecting yet again about a lost lover, and look outwards at the shit that’s building up at the door.

Billy Bragg is still raging, but he’s knocking on fifty and very much a product of the seventies and early eighties. We need someone to define us who wasn’t part of the scene that gave us The Young Ones; we need someone to rally against the sheer gormlessness of our over-commercialised, politically vacant reality.

The problem is not Bush and Blair, the problem is we don’t fight back.

Did you hide or spend?

There is strong undercurrent of mainstream anti-globalisation appearing in the comment pages of the major newspapers recently. Not so long ago it was pretty much a given that this economic juggernaut was unstoppable. Critics lambasted countries such as France for closing the curtains and hiding behind the sofa, hoping beyond all hope, that globalisation would just go away. “You can’t ignore it,” they said, “you can’t pretend the new reality doesn’t exit.” When the French dismissed the EU constitution as Economic-Anglicisation by the back door, we scoffed, “look at those silly frogs and their hulking welfare state!” But should we have been so confident?

We had got cocky of course. The world has been going through a long period of economic growth, fuelled by the emerging Asian economies; chief among these was China, that enormous manufacturing powerhouse. These emerging Tigers didn’t have a sophisticated banking system, so huge amounts of capital was used to buy US treasury bonds and pumped into Western Anglo-Saxon economies. This massive capital flow ensured low-interest rates in the US and UK, allowing low-cost lending, which fuelled an insatiable demand for shiny new products, most of which were made in China. Circle closed, economic growth guaranteed. Hmmm.

Last year UK consumer lending (inc. secured lending) smashed through the one trillion pound mark, within 6-months it had risen another 10%. People began to question the enormous levels of consumer debt. In the US too, the balance sheet of household assets and debts became neutral at 0%. Alarm bells began to ring. In both countries the ongoing house price boom has begun to cool, and homes, many of which are underwriting huge loans, suddenly don’t look so secure.

It’s not just a problem on the demand side either. On the supply side of this capital merry-go-round, namely China, things don’t quite appear so rosy, as reports suggest billions are being wasted on silly investments. Massive over-capacity is leaving China exposed as the global economy cools. Rising commodity costs, and shrinking supply (mainly energy), is leading to a reduction in demand. The dollar, the worlds default currency, in which China has invested billions, has rarely looked so insecure.

The communist bigwigs in Beijing are panicking. Local government officials are being jailed for their poor investments. The Chinese economy needs to be cooled effectively, or it threatens to overheat. Would a recession in China lead to a global recession? And would this expose millions in the West, who have borrowed so much at those low, now unsustainable, interest rates? Probably.

Those French and Germans, who didn’t borrow half as much, look pretty comfortable behind that sofa.

Finally, Westminster is getting it

I wrote about the failure of political multiculturalism last year, in this essay, where I argued, “The Multicultural Experiment is failing; failing not only society but also the very minorities it is has been employed to aid.” Now it seems the government has woken up to the reality that, while a multi-ethnic society is possible and desirable, the use of multiculturalism as a means to integrate minority groups within society is highly counterproductive.

Maybe now, with Ruth Kelly’s statements on record, we can have a reasoned and progressive discussion about how to reduce inter-ethnic/religious tensions without the constant cloud of political correctness stifling debate?