Blogkeeping

Deborama's Kitchen has a post about the arrival of Bisquick in the local hypermarket. The Book Review blog has a post about the BBC production of Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters (highly recommended).

For Easter - A redemption story

Like Jeanne, I too meant to blog about the story of Ashley Smith, a suburban single mom who subdued a "dangerous" murderer with home-cooked food and acceptance and talk. And like Jeanne, I am glad someone else did a good job of explaining the importance of this compelling story. Instructions for Care: What Ashley Smith Reminded Us is an article by peace activist Susan Van Haitsma in Common Dreams.

Hardly Lake Wobegone

Red Lake to White Media - stay out! Non-Americans may not have noticed - there has been another mass killing at a high school, and this one is a predominantly Native American (Ojibwe tribe) school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation near Bemidji Minnesota. "Normally" (and how sick is it to use that word in reference to such a thing?) when a community experiences a murderous teenage rampage, the whole town and its environs and inhabitants are transformed (not for the better) by the intense media attention. Red Lake, however, is what is known as a "closed" reservation, where the Tribal Council has broad powers to limit access by anyone not an approved resident of the rez. And they are exercising their power fully in this case. Which has got to be a good thing, in my opinion.

Blogkeeping and some journalling

I just recently added Creative Loafing (Atlanta) to Deborama's Fund of Knowledge under the Local News Sources category. I was browsing the web trying to find places to shop in Atlanta. That's because I am going there for a week, from April the 9th, primarily to visit my son, Carey. But hey, I may as well shop a bit too.
I recently attended a meetup in Nuneaton of American Ex-pats. I met two, Jay and Carla, and also Jay's English husband. We were all three American women with English husbands and we live within 5 miles of each other. We are trying to grow the network of Midlands Americans.
Deborama's friends, colleagues and family have been plagued by illness and stress lately, so even though I am theoretically fine, with my thin psychic skin, I am feeling the effects. My mother-in-law had a heart attack (she's much better now), my husband is in an emotional trough, the guy next to me at work on the verge of a total emotional meltdown, and a woman I ride to work with on the train most days has a 21 year old grand-daughter who just had her second major brain surgery and has apparently had some brain trauma because she is in a sort of fantasy state and has severe short-term memory loss.
All this is partly why I have not been blogging very much. I am just wiped out when I get home and then the weekends pass in a daze of TV and messed-up sleep patterns. I am off work until next Tuesday so maybe I can get something done, at least my backlog of book reviews. I am thinking of introducing some TV reviews. I am in awe of the wonderful site Television Without Pity, but I would do much more selective, and much shorter, reviews. Feedback?

Rosie O'Donnell

Yes, that Rosie O'Donnell, has a blog and it is written in blank verse and this post is about depression, mostly. It's very good, read it.

Blogkeeping

A little while ago I got an invitation from a person who had started up a website to feature posts by various bloggers in a news digest format. It sounded like a good idea, but I did not want to submit any posts until I had checked it out. I am glad I did; after monitoring it for about a month, I was moved to write the following reply to the founder of the site:

Dear ******:
I have been reading your blog *** for a few weeks now, having added it
to my Bloglines feed as soon as you had the feed up and ready (and
just watching it before that.) On reflection, I have removed it from
my Bloglines feed, and I want to take the opportunity to notify you
that I am not interested at this time in participating as a writer,
forum-member or supporter. Quite frankly, I am very turned off by the
quality of most of the writers. And I do think you have a real
problem with bias. You are basically sounding a single note, and it
is the note of a rather shallow, male-dominated, US-boosting, blindly
and reactively conservative viewpoint, one which I do not even care
enough about to bother arguing with.
I wish you well for the future, and I will probably check in about
once a month to see if things improve, but at the age of 52, my life
is too short to spend any of it reading the drivel of pimply-faced
frat boys who think they are libertarians, or the middle-aged men who
write like them.
Kind regards,
Deborama

In a way, this is rather tragic, because I am not sure that the founder of this blog shares the bias of his writers (whom he is paying, by the way, as soon as the blog generates enough revenue. But even so, good idea, poor execution. Would it be possible to start a similar enterprise that featured a balanced number of liberal and conservative but high-quality bloggers, a few interesting nutters of various fringes, and a real international viewpoint, rather than just a few token stories by American "friends" abroad? I seriously doubt it. And that is very sad.
On another note - I have a nice post about bananas at Deborama's Kitchen.

England, abolition and the current immigration debate

The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free. Everyone who comes to this island is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin.

In preparation for the mammoth task of reviewing the mammoth literary work known as "the Barock Cycle" (Neal Stephenson) I have been browsing the Quicksilver Metaweb, where I found the sublime quote above. Slavery and the history of abolition movements is one of about a dozen major themes that run through the three weighty tomes that make up the Barock Cycle. As you may know, abolition movements, the study of, is one of my areas of passionate interest, and the Stephenson novels seem to uncannily hit upon a lot of them (cryptanalysis, metaphysical debates, religious wars and slightly unusual sexual practices also feature prominently.)
I am struck by the vast philosophical gulf between the sentiments in the quote above, from an English judge in an historic case which may have sparked the British abolitionist movement, and the beliefs (or perhaps total lack of beliefs) of the current guardians of British liberty, ironically known as the Labour Party.
Several cases in point will illustrate this:

• The new anti-terror legislation


• The terrible decline in military ethics in recent decades


• Blatantly racist policies towards "asylum seekers" and other immigrants


• And all I can say about this one is: "All intolerant people shall be shot!"


• "Unless, of course, they are intolerant of 'travellers', because that sort of prejudice is just normal middle-class values."

Things are not looking good for Sinn Fein

Parliament has decided to fine the Sinn Fein party for the crimes of the IRA. And things are looking very bad indeed for the IRA, which has (predictably) been called upon to disband by many parties, including the American envoy to Northern Ireland and six out of ten nationalists and almost half of Sinn Fein supporters.

You want a rabbit?

Riverbend's latest post at Baghdad Burning starts out with some opinions about the killing of Nicola Calipari and then segues into an anecdotal account of a horrendous confrontation between doctors and Iraqi National Guardsmen in a hospital, and thence into discussing the inadequacy of Iraqi officials under the occupation. It ends up with a piece of Iraqi folk wisdom, hence the rabbit thing:
“Tireed erneb- ukhuth erneb. Tireed ghazal- ukhuth erneb.” The translation for this is, “You want a rabbit? Take a rabbit. You want a deer? Take a rabbit.” Except we didn’t get any rabbits- we just got an assortment of snakes, weasels and hyenas.

Trudeau's tribute to the inspiration behind Uncle Duke

Doonesbury is running a little series featuring Duke (now an American warlord in Iraq) in an existential yet surrealist tribute to the good doctor, aka Mr. Fear and Loathing, aka Hunter S. Thompson.

US troops kill rescuer as Italian hostage is plucked to safety in Iraq

Story from the Guardian. I could hardly believe I was hearing this correctly when I caught just the tail end of the story on the news yesterday. And yet, in a way, it was a disaster just waiting to happen. It has long been noted that the demoralised American troops in Iraq (and to some extent this is true of all coalition forces), having been given an essentially impossible mission (shades of Vietnam again) have been responding by becoming increasingly "trigger-happy" and careless of suffering and the loss of human life, which is all around them daily whether they precipitate it or not. And now it has happened, and the victim is a coalition agent in a high-profile rescue operation.

Buy some stuff

My daughter, Aimee Danger has an online store with some very cool things for sale. Wouldn't you like a wall calendar with a picture of my first grandchild on it? I know I would.

Blair is election liability, warn Labour aides

The Observer reports on trouble within the Labour election camp. Tony Blair is too "presidential". He must now appear with cabinet members at his side, and Gordon Brown will be put more to the forefront. Oh, the irony of it.

A law to end all lawfulness

George Monbiot, in Protest as Harassment raises an important but overlooked (in the media) issue about the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill. While attention has focused almost exclusively on the admittedly problematic religious incitement provisions, most people have not noticed that, by clever redefinitions of offences, the Bill pretty much outlaws all forms of peaceful protest and makes free speech a crime. The most basic activities of peaceful protest are now defined as criminal harrassment; it is only necessary, for example, to hand a handbill making a valid point to two people to be guilty of "harrassing" the public 'in order “to persuade any person … not to do something that he is entitled or required to do, or to do something that he is not under any obligation to do.” ' And the public itself does not have to complain of being harrassed; under this law, the McDonald's libel action against Dave Morris and Helen Steel that was recently overturned on human rights grounds would not even have been needed. McDonald's could have just had the two activists locked up for criminal activity.

Blogkeeping

Yes, almost all of my pictures are broken. This is not the fault of Blogger or Blogspot. I think the server of my ISP (ntlworld) is completely kaput. I cannot even access their main site to see what's wrong, and my mail service with them is sputtering around, timing out, only an occasional little dribble of mail coming through very late. I don't know about the fate of my outgoing mail.
Sorry for the inconvenience this will cause, as they say on the trains.
***Update, same afternoon *** Seems to be all better now. As you were.

City Pages - The Pizza Man Always Rings Twice

City Pages. quality weekly tabloid of the Twin Cities, investigates the myths and legends surrounding pizza delivery persons. Noirish, ironic and with more than a nod to cyber-punk. Highly recommended reading.

The Doctor is Dead

Hunter S. Thompson, one of my great heroes is dead from an apparent suicide. With a gun, which is appropriate, because he loved his guns a lot, and he famously said that he would feel really trapped in life if he didn't know that he could commit suicide at any time he chose. So I guess this was the time. He also said he never expected to live past 30, and he was a respectable 67, and in far better health than he had any right to be, the old devil.
The following are some excerpts from the obituary for HST in The Independent:

Hunter S. Thompson in 2003 summed up his life thus: "I was a notorious best-selling author of weird and brutal books and also a widely feared newspaper columnist . . . I was also drunk, crazy and heavily armed at all times."
His heyday was the Seventies when every magazine around wanted to use him. He set up home in Woody Creek, near Aspen, Colorado, in a "writer's compound". In 1970 he was almost elected sheriff in Aspen under the Freak Power Party banner but in subsequent decades became increasingly reclusive, surrounded by peacocks and guns. His books were mostly collections of his journalism. They included: The Great Shark Hunt: strange tales from a strange time (1979); The Curse of Lono (illustrated by Ralph Steadman, 1983); Generation of Swine: tales of shame and degradation in the '80s (1988); Songs of the Doomed: more notes on the death of the American Dream (1990); Silk Road: thirty-three years in the passing lane (1990); Better than Sex: confessions of a political junkie (1993); and The Proud Highway: the saga of a desperate southern gentleman, 1955-1967 (1997).
Thompson was the model for Garry Trudeau's balding "Uncle Duke" in the comic strip "Doonesbury". In 1980 the film Where the Buffalo Roam, based on Thompson's coverage of the Super Bowl and the 1972 presidential elections, had Bill Murray playing the good doctor of gonzo journalism. Later, in 1998, Johnny Depp played him in Terry Gilliam's film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
As the years went on, Thompson's provocative insights into American society and politics sometimes veered into hectoring and invective. However, on occasion, he still kept his bite. In a 1994 Rolling Stone obituary of Richard Nixon he famously described the former President as "a liar, a quitter and a bastard. A cheap crook and a merciless war criminal."

Another kindred spirit gone.

Blogkeeping

Something for your amusement at Deborama's Kitchen.

The Fighting Moderates

My non-blogging friend Joani sent me this New York Times op-ed by Paul Krugman. It's a good analysis of what Howard Dean is and isn't (the clue is in the title) and also outlines what the current Democratic strategy should be for preserving the last great creation of Democratic liberalism under the guns of the Bush administration - the middle class.

Baghdad Burning

Another infrequent post from Baghdad Burning's Riverbend. This one contains a Baghdad-eye view of the elections and a story about a visit to the Ministry of Education, where Riverbend was admonished by a strict Shi'a official for not dressing appropriately.

Stop press! Deborama finally comes down against political correctness!

You all know I am a liberal, except in those areas where I am left of liberal. You may not all know it, but my gay-friendly, practicing bisexual, friend of friends of Judy credentials are pretty well established. Nevertheless, when I readthis, my reaction was "Fer christsake, don't you people have better things to do with your time and energy?" I mean, really!

OK, look . . .

I am not going to blog about the Chuck and 'Milla Show. Not now, not ever, well, not unless they do something newsworthy. But I can still blog about the things that spring up because of them and their little drama, such as this wonderfully bitchy depiction, by Polly Toynbee, of what monarchy does to a nation, which I have had the misfortune to witness firsthand.

Ludicrous and grotesque for the wretched royal performers and their subjects alike, this is the least dignified of all state institutions. It always was, even in those relatively few reigns when the monarch did behave with due decorum.
The glittering emblem of the sovereign infantilises the nation into an unhealthy fascination with the doings of the royal household, children, servants, foibles and every banal saying and doing. It demeans the idea of citizenship and the meaning of the state. Why should these meaningless people be embedded in our national imagination? . . .
The tyranny of the monarchy is not in its puny temporal power but in its hold over the national imagination. Its spirit permeates politics, poisoning the appetite for reform and imbuing the nation with grandiose fantasies. It imparts an unsubtle taste for the thwack of "strong government" under the firm dictatorship of one party: Her Majesty's government. Proportional representation comes from another part of the brain, less hierarchical, less certain, more consensual - but somehow "not the British way". We have hierarchy hard-wired into us - tyrannical little kings and queens atop every pyramid of management.

That last paragraph particular struck a nerve. While all the "royal wedding" fuss was going on, my workplace in Nottingham was actually graced with a visit from a minor royal: Sophie, the Countess of Wessex. To my staunchly republican American gaze, this was an appalling show. First, they closed off to all of us peons the spanking new and happy-shiny atrium of our building, with its vital deli, shop and cafeteria, between 10:30 and 12:15. Then we were informed we were "welcome" (ha!) to stand respectfully around the balconies on the upper two floors and gawk at the lovely Countess and the beribboned mayor and those lucky few who actually got to press the royal(-ish) flesh. (No flash photos please.) Then the intranet the next day was adorned with pictures of the poor old wait staff in their crisp uniforms standing at attention behind the crystal coffee urn, the ultra-serious PR types and management types looking only a touch less ludicrous as they stood at ease in their poshest suits awaiting her arrival, and in some ways the unluckiest of all, the Countess herself, dwarfed by a huge bouquet that she was apparently obliged to carry around with her the entire two hours she took part in the Presenting of the Enormous 7-foot Cheque, the Song-singing of the Local Schoolchildren Who Would Benefit from the Aforesaid Cheque, the Making of the Speech, and the Listening to the Welcomes and Thank Yous of a Grateful Nottingham.
Meanwhile back at home (our castle!) DH thinks he (but not I, of course) and other British men and women, ought to have a referendum on the role that poor old Camilla will play in the nation. He just doesn't get it. Referenda are not guaranteed in any government, and certainly not a monarchy. I think he wants to have his cake and eat it too, because he is not in favour of abolition of the anachronistic institutions in Britain, but only of their reform, or to be more precise, picking and choosing the bits he likes. I say "You live in a monarchy, which means you are a 'subject' rather than a 'citizen'. If you're not prepared to change it, just deal with it."

Iraq to US: Where is our money?

George Monbiot, in Fraud and Corruption, delivers a scathing indictment of the Bush administration's fast-and-loose policy with money, in this case other people's money. (I would add, in this case, the money of a people they cynically subjugated under the flimsy guise of saving them from a worse dictator.) Most of this I pretty much either knew or suspected, but to see it all gathered together, carefully documented and laid out in one place is a sickening experience.

On my book reviews blog and my kitchen blog

Another great post idea stolen from the Whole Wide World of Fat Buddha : a wonderful article on Dashiell Hammett, which I linked to in Deborama's Book Reviews.
Speaking of books, I am very close to finishing The Confusion, book 2 of 3 massive books making up the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. I just can't say enough good things about these books. They are a stupendous achievement on so many levels.
Meanwhile, Deborama's Kitchen features a heartwarming story about tuna-noodle casserole.

The paradox of urban ecology

A posting by Dr. Menlo in American Samizdat links to this article by David Owen, reprinted from the New Yorker magazine, called Green Manhattan. The article points up the paradox that the most environmentally-responsible living takes place in the very environments that are considered ecologically catastrophic - densely populated cities like New York. Where over 80% of workers commute either by public transit, on foot or by bicycle, a rate that is 10 times the US national average. Where those great destroyers of the environment, the lawn, the highway and the second car, are virtually non-existent. And where energy usage per household is a fraction of that in the suburbs and the idyllic countryside.

Blogkeeping

See Holy Chocolate at Deborama's Kitchen.
And I still haven't done those darned book reviews! I am now plugging away at the Baroque cycle or trilogy or whatever it is by Neal Stephenson, even though books two and three are only available in hardback and I hate reading hardbacks with an irrational passion. Well, I guess it isn't that irrational - it hurts my neck and shoulders to hold up a heavy book, that's the problem. But the books are excellent. A hard slog to read, but eminently worth it.
On another topic, I have just discovered a photoblogger here in Leicestershire who has been linking to me, all unbeknownst to me. Thanks to Brodick Photo World and hey, some excellent photos there. I have added you to my Bloglines feed.

Latest Criminal Scourge: Wal-Mart Openings

City Pages (of Minneapolis/St. Paul) reports on the way that Wal-Mart is using the police force to do its private security work. In this particular case, threatening and "warning" union members who might be thinking of protesting Wal-Mart's viciously anti-union tactics at one of their store openings. I don't know whether it's the union members (who ought to know better) or the reporter who is so naive as to think that this is something new, but it really isn't. It wasn't just the Pinkertons in the labour wars of the past who were providing the muscle for the corporate side; just as often, it was the local police or the national guard.

Better news from Portland

Grand-daughter Savannah seems to be on the mend. She was hospitalised two days to have a staph infection lanced (she had to be heavily sedated for this, which is mainly why they had to keep her in overnight). The staph is partly resistant to antibiotics, but she is taking some kind of antibiotic that hopefully will clear up the immediate infection. The family is on a strict hygiene regimen to try to "flush" this bug out of their systems, because they have all had infections at one time. (Staph will "colonise" your body asymptomatically and then flare up when your resistance is low.) But the danger is past, and I am calmed down a bit.
Thanks for all the friends here and on my mailing lists who offered prayers and vibes and kind wishes. And I'm sorry I haven't been blogging much. I do mean to do better.

Pray for us

I just heard via a brief and desperate-sounding e-mail that my baby grand-daughter is in the hospital with an MRSA infection. Can't blog anymore right now, but please, please, send prayers for health and recovery to 17-month old Savannah in Portland.

PressThink: Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over

Here is a nice thought-y piece about the shifting relationship between journalism and the internet, specifically that microcosm of the internet we know as "blogging". This was written as an address to a conference held last week in Cambridge MA called Blogging, Journalism and Credibility, and is by media critic Jay Rosen of NYU, who also runs a blog called PressThink.

My feminist hero has become a rancid bore

Julie Burchill on her (and my) former feminist hero, GG, on the occasion of GG leaving the CBB (Celebrity Big Brother) house in a huff. Wonderfully bitchy, as expected from the fabulous Julie. (I know this is way out of date, but I couldn't let it slip away.)

A young gay woman discovers her history

Sarah, blogger of 'not you, the other one,' was initially unimpressed to learn that February is GLBT history month. Born in 1981, she is younger than my son Carey (my youngest). Here's what she says:

I dunno, I thought, probably some old queen on Radio 4 is going on about how Shakespear was gay. Then, during my near-daily read of naked blog, I picked up the following from Mike of Troubled Diva in the comments:

She then goes on to quote a basic and yet gripping summing up of the state of homophobic policy and public behaviour in the early 1980s. "I had no idea that any of that happened," says Sarah. And she's a politically-savvy young woman and even a bit of red-diaper baby as we used to say in the states. But unless you have either a gay mentor, a gay(gay-aware or gay-friendly) parent or a really radical school system that is going to teach you this stuff, how would you know? So apparently lots of young gay people get "their" history from blogs. Another plus for us, then.

Seymour Hersh: "We have been taken over by a cult"

I got this from Pete (WWW of Fat Buddha). Seymour Hersh's article in Counterpunch, We've Been Taken Over By a Cult, is a transcript of a rambling, jittery and yet totally sincere speech he gave at a synagogue in New York. It is pretty chilling reading, as he harkens back to My Lai, fast-forwards to Abu Ghraib, and speculates on the amount of damage the President's cult can do to the US in the next four years.

Four British Guantanamo detainees released today

The story as covered in the Guardian. The four men have been taken into police custody, despite protests from their many supporters and the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which believes they need treatment before interrogation. However, experts says thay can expect to be released within days.

Guilty pleasures

I have a confession to make. I started watching Desperate Housewives at its UK debut, and I am an open and practicing viewer of the show. In short, I am hooked. In Red Sluts, Blue Sluts, The Nation's Richard Goldstein deconstructs the show in an attempt to answer the question of why it appeals equally to bi-coastal gay and metrosexual men, married Christian conservative heartlanders and American feminists from states of every colour. (And, I would add, the Brits who love them.)

While the creators of this show understand the golden conservative rule of sinful pleasure--it must beget ruination--on TV this could take many seasons, and meanwhile everyone can focus on the hot means to that hellish end. For different reasons, secular humanists and fundamentalists alike can revel in the foibles of idle, affluent housewives. The right can view the show's sexual politics--women competing for men, men struggling for dominance over their wives--as fidelity to the patriarchal code, while lefties can see the same thing as camp. What's more, a babe is a babe, a hunk is a hunk, and the joys of watching their unseemly meeting cross party lines.

Post-'Roe' Postcard : Is Mississippi America's future?

Sharon Lerner's article in The Nation, Post-'Roe' Postcard, is about the current state of abortion services in Mississippi, a state that has all but outlawed abortion. And don't you know, it has the country's highest levels of child-poverty and an infant mortality rate that is double the national average.

Bluesblog: Hazy Shade Of Winter

Bluesblog is the work-related blog of the guy who does The Whole Wide World of Fat Buddha. In this post, he addresses homelessness in his part of Great Britain, and describes his visit to a dire and grim hostel.

It is a shame, it is a shame upon us as a nation that we will let people live like this. We take the most desperate, inadequate people we have and put them in grotty hovels, with no facilities, in the grottiest part of town and say, go on then, improve yourselves. You look at the dead, expressionless eyes of the young girls holding their babies and wonder what kind of life has led them to this, and you look at the babies, the faultless, innocent babies, and you envisage their future and it is enough to make you weep.

Compare and contrast

Baghdad Burning's Riverbend in "Bleak Eid" tells us how it really is in Iraq in the ugly, squalid run-up to the so-called election. Contrast this with the lavish celebrations in Washington and Bush's cynical depiction of "freedom" coming to Iraq. In Biblical language, water is always symbolic of freedom, justice, things going as they should. "As the waters cover the earth" is God's promise. So why does Baghdad have no water, along with no freedom of travel? And why are people being threatened with punishment if they don't vote? Something is very very rotten here.

Baghdad Burning - Girl Blog from Iraq

Left I on the News reports that Riverbend's blog, which I link to constantly because it is so good, is to be compiled into an eponymous book.

Dirty Old Town makes national news

Just as I was about to switch off the tv and go to bed, I heard the name of the little town where I live being mentioned, and it was not even the semi-local "East Midlands Today" programme, but the Nightly News itself on BBC2. It turns out that Robert Kilroy-Silk MEP (Ind) had chosen a rather posh-looking venue here in Hinckley to announce his official break with UKIP, the party under whose colours he was sailing when elected to the European Parliament. As I was wondering where in Hinckley this elegant assembly room was located, in which Mr. K-S was addressing about 60 former or disaffected UKIP members, they happened to mention it was the private golf club, which is only a few hundred yards from my front door! Across town at the Red Lion, the embittered husk of the UKIP local Bosworth branch was holding its official meeting, and holding forth to a national TV audience about what a sneaky old traitor Kilroy-Silk is. The whole story is far too tedious, convoluted and jejune to go into. It's always amused me that the more fringe and irrelevant a political organisation or movement is to begin with, the more likely it is to splinter into even tinier and more ridiculous factions, and this is just a banally unremarkable example of the phenomenon, featuring a main "personality" who is just embarrassing to watch.

Guantanamo Bay Britons

No, I did not miss the story that the remaining Britons held at Camp Delta were to be freed, announced rather quietly a little over a week ago. I just neglected to blog about it. To be fair, they aren't here yet, are they? And the whole deal is being done in a very opaque manner, the better to frighten the populace, I suppose. It's also not as if just releasing these men, after a long and brutal detention with no obvious crime having been committed, is going to make the wrong go away, or the political embarrassment to the UK government.
And it's not as if they are closing Camp Delta down; that would be the only just outcome, to end all of the illegal horrors that may or may not go on there.

Minnesota Eats Itself

Oh, dear. The excellent City Pages has an article on the continuing descent of once "decent" Minnesota into the appalling depths of laissez-faire, slash-and-burn state government.
Minnesota used to be a leading state in all kinds of indicators - infants' and children's health, education, the arts, employment rates and the rating of state bonds (AAA before the current administration got its hands on the budget.) Now the state has been through a severe recession and is still far behind where it was a few years ago. And the new biennial budget season is coming up, but instead of learning from its mistakes, the Pawlenty administration looks set to dish out more of the same.

Fry Chosen For Hitchhiker's Film

Stephen Fry is absolutely chuffed to have been chosen to do the voice of the guide in the new film of the cult classic, Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He described the experience of learning that he had got the role thusly: "It's like having your birthday on Christmas Day, discovering a winning lottery ticket in your stocking and having chocolate poured all over you."

Martin Luther King's warning to America

Tonight I watched a BBC special on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As is usual for me, I was in or near tears through much of the show, not simply because of the emotional power of the message of Dr. King, but also, I am ashamed to say, through a sort of self-indulgent nostalgia. The civil rights struggle dominated my childhood to such an extent that merely watching a documentary on it is like a visit back home. I was stunned by a segment that was shown of a speech given in 1967 against the Vietnam War. The documentary led one to believe that it was part of the historic Riverside Baptist Church "Beyond Vietnam" speech of April 1967. But when I googled that speech, the segment was not in it. So then I googled just King's name and a short segment of the excerpt, and found it listed as "attributed" on Wikipedia. Well, I think they can correct that "attributed" because I just saw and heard him saying it. To read the words here will not have one tenth the power of hearing him say it, so I urge you to see if either BBC Four in the UK or The American Experience in the US have a clip of it on a website somewhere. But here are the words:

Don't let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be - a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with justice and it seems I can hear God saying to America "you are too arrogant, and if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I am God."

George W. Bush, you can have that one for free.

Alas, Babylon!

U.S.-led forces, using Iraq's ancient city of Babylon as a military base, have caused "substantial damage" to one of the world's most renowned archaeological treasures, a British Museum report says. A soldier from 101 Airborne Division is pictured overlooking the ruins of Babylon in this file photo. (Reuters, Peter Andrews)

In other news from Iraq:
Riverbend reacts to the "news" that the US has given up its search for WMD:

A question poses it self at this point- why don't they let the scientists go if the weapons don't exist? Why do they have Iraqi scientists like Huda Ammash, Rihab Taha and Amir Al Saadi still in prison? Perhaps they are waiting for those scientists to conveniently die in prison? That way- they won't be able to talk about the various torture techniques and interrogation tactics...

The author of "Iraq's Nuclear Mirage", Imad Khadduri, has started a blog called Free Iraq. It is in a mixture of English and Arabic. He has a recent post about the destruction of Babylon, too.
And finally, as Abu Ghraib fall-guy Spc. Charles Graner awaits sentencing, two firms whose employees faced abuse charges at the prison have been awarded valuable defence contracts to continue providing prison "services" in Iraq.

Three employees of CACI International and Titan - working at Abu Ghraib as civilian contractors - were separately accused of abusive behaviour. The report on the Abu Ghraib scandal implicated three civilian contractors in the abuses: Steven Stefanowicz from CACI International and John Israel and Adel Nakhla from Titan. Stefanowicz was charged with giving orders that 'equated to physical abuse', Israel of lying under oath and Naklha of raping an Iraqi boy. It was also alleged that CACI interrogators used dogs to scare prisoners, placed detainees in unauthorised 'stress positions' and encouraged soldiers to abuse prisoners. Titan employees, it has been alleged, hit detainees and stood by while soldiers physically abused prisoners. Investigators also discovered systemic problems of management and training - including the fact that a third of CACI International's staff at Abu Ghraib had never received formal military interrogation training.

In the face of demands by US human rights groups that the two companies be barred from further contracts in Iraq, CACI International has been awarded a $16 million renewal of its contract and Titan has been awarded a new contract worth $164m.

Quotes from tribe.net

This may replace my blogging about subject lines of spam e-mails. I have been collecting quotes from conversation threads in the various tribe message boards that I follow. Here are two particularly lustrous gems:

• Yes you could, we need someone to wear out the cat so that she sleeps through the weekend.


• I can weld, but I can't teleport.

'Girl Culture' photos reveal social pressures

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune announces in the art section a powerful photography show by California photographer Lauren Greenfield. The Minneapolis Center for Photography in NE Mpls hosts the show, which was two years in the making and covers 20 venues around the world.
Greenfield's accompanying book, "Girl Culture" (Chronicle Books, $40), matches the photos with candid ruminations by fat girls, showgirls, anorexics, bulimics, self-mutilators, party girls, shopgirls, pre-teen vamps, a Chattanooga Christian, a Stanford swimmer, a New York model and 13-year-olds from Edina. They talk of "in groups" and "out groups," mockery and humiliation, peer pressure, food and exercise obsessions, having babies, getting "boob jobs" and -- in a rare instance -- the independence and self-esteem that come with athletic skill.

Getting personal - Tribe

I have been hanging out on Tribe a lot. Ideally, I would like it if all my online friends, and all my real-life friends who go online, would join Tribe. I have tried wikis, Friendster, LiveJournal, yahoo groups, Google groups and group blogs, and I have to say this is the first online "thing" I have encountered in the 21st century that really works more or less as it says on the label. It actually can be a form of online community.
Here is how it goes : you sign up, no need for an invite, although you can be invited, nor to pay, although you can pay and get merely the satisfaction of supporting it. You define a profile, as forthcoming or not as you like. You can upload a lot of photos, and you can choose one as your "main" which will appear in a little avatar by all your posts, listings, messages, etc. You can send a message to anyone. You join tribes (I have joined about a hundred so far.) The tribes work a lot like newsgroups or forums in that you post to create or reply to threads. You ask people to be friends, and unlike friendster you don't have to know them first. (They can always say no!) I currently have 20-something friends, only one person said no to a friend invite, and two or three just ignored it. Three of the people who are my friends I knew already - my two kids, and my daughter's good friend Ursula. One is someone I "know" from his blog, and he knows me the same way. I visit Tribe every day, sometimes several times. I love getting messages on tribe.
One of the really good things about Tribe, and like all its other qualities it is something it borrowed from another "product" and slightly improved upon, is that it is localised - you tell it where you live and it sets your location. (Of course you can set a location other than where you really live if you want to.) This is good mainly because of listings - you can list job openings or searches, places to rent or for sale, items for sale, services, upcoming events, both public and private, recommendations of things like restaurants, coffeeshops, bookstores. So Tribe can connect you in the real world, too, and not just in cyberspace.
If you want to enrich the quality of your online interactions and grow a bigger network of like-minded people, I strongly recommend Tribe.
I have posted here before about how I don't have many (well, any) friends (well, close friends) in the UK, and what a wrench that was after the vibrant, encompassing but not restricting, community I had in Minneapolis. I am trying to use Tribe in tandem with another great web-based idea, Meetup.com, to meet more people, and not just random people, but people I have something in common with, and can maybe have some social activities with. Last week, I went to my first meet-up, but it was not a blogger's meet-up, where I have been putting most of my attention, it was a Book Crosser's meet-up. There were only two people there, but they were Good Quality People, so it was worth the trip. (Well, it would have been, if not for damned Central Trains stranding me on a halted train 5 miles from home from 9:15 to 10:45 pm. But that's another story.)

Neoliberal vs. re-distributionist theories - a case study

George Monbiot's blog has an excellent article titled "Punitive - and it works" which attacks the received wisdom that neo-liberal economic policies work better than those old outmoded social democratic ideas with their "punitive taxes" and "grandiose projects of public spending". He does this in the simple, straightforward way of comparing various economic and social welfare indices for two fully developed "post-industrial" countries, one of which (the UK) follows neo-liberalism in an exemplary fashion and one of which (Sweden) is "one of the last outposts of distributionism". The results are telling: GDP is slightly higher in Sweden, and has been for all but seven of the years between 1960 and 2000. Sweden's national balance sheet shows a $10bn surplus, while the UK's shows a $26bn deficit.

Even by the neoliberals’ favourite measures, Sweden wins: it has a lower inflation rate than ours, higher “global competitiveness” and a higher ranking for “business creativity and research”.
In terms of human welfare, there is no competition. According to the quality of life measure published by the Economist (the “human development index”) Sweden ranks third in the world, the UK 11th. Sweden has the world’s third highest life expectancy, the UK the 29th. In Sweden, there are 74 telephone lines and 62 computers per hundred people; in the UK just 59 and 41.
The contrast between the averaged figures is stark enough, but it’s far greater for the people at the bottom of the social heap. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Economist does not publish this data, but the United Nations does. Its Human Development Report for 2004 shows that in Sweden 6.3% of the population lives below the absolute poverty line for developed nations ($11 a day). In the United Kingdom the figure is 15.7%. Seven and a half per cent of Swedish adults are functionally illiterate – just over one third of the UK’s figure of 21.8%. In the United Kingdom, according to a separate study, you are over three times as likely to stay in the economic class into which you were born than you are in Sweden. So much for the deregulated market creating opportunity.

It's interesting that I read this today; this morning, on the radio, I heard a story about Sure Start, the eminently neo-liberal programme for lifting families and children out of poverty. A think tank had evaluated the results and found them almost too small to measure and had predicted that far better results could be attained by simply giving the parents the money. Sort of a no-brainer when you hear that the programme, with all its overheads and bureaucracy, costs £100K per year per child.

Too black for America

A City Pages article, The Baddest Man on the Planet tells the story of the immortal Jack Johnson, the most in-your-face black man in American history. The renewed interest in Jack Johnson is sparked by a new 4-hour documentary by Ken Burns which is being released this month in the US. (I have to see it!)
Johnson was many things in his life--a dandy, a braggart, a womanizer, a gambler, a drinker, a fugitive, a convict, a vaudevillian, even an inventor (he held the patent on a special wrench designed for working on racing cars, another of his passions). But he was never yellow. In the language of the day, Johnson was a "bad nigger," and he swaggered through Jim Crow America as if prejudice did not exist. In the ring, he reveled in humiliating white boxers, delaying or altogether forgoing the knockout to extend their suffering. Conversely, he often took it easy on fellow blacks.
At a time when other black men were lynched for looking at a white woman the wrong way, the Galveston-born Johnson flaunted his relationships with white women, often traveling from city to city with two or three of them in tow. Ultimately, his relationship with one "sporting woman"--as prostitutes were called--became the pretext for Johnson's arrest and conviction on a trumped-up Mann Act violation, which prohibited the transport of women across state lines for "immoral purposes."