ninme

Posted by ninme at 8:50 am No Comments

Stupid = the kerfuffle which is (alarmingly) being taken much too seriously. The bearskin hats are beautiful.

The Times - The right to bear arms and the right to bearskins
Could it be that Britain has its priorities a little wrong? By Hugo Rifkind

In Russia this week they had the Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, boasting about shooting a tiger. In the US they found themselves a prospective vice-president who has most of a grizzly bear strewn across her sofa, including the head. In Britain we were wringing our hands because some members of our Armed Forces, the most iconic in the world, will occasionally get bits of an already dead Canadian bear and balance it on their heads.

He shot a tiger? We were watching Planet Earth before we, ah, left (that is, before the wedding, which seems strange), and all that was left was the last disk with The Future episodes on it. After two episodes of listening to them catalog the world’s ecological crises (pop quiz: what do all the governments of the locations listed have in common? they’re none of them western, democratic, or — this one might be important — not corrupt) and then dwell at length on the criminality of drilling in Anwar, we thought we’d probably heard all we’re going to hear. I thought maybe a catalog of Russia’s efforts to preserve the critically endangered Siberian Tiger might be more interesting, but obviously they couldn’t get the footage because the camera crew was in serious danger of being shot by Vladimir Bloody Putin.

…War in Iraq, 3,000 troops shuffling a monstrous dynamo across the Taleban heartlands, and still Baroness Taylor of Bolton, the Minister for Defence Equipment and Support, finds time to sit down with a group that chased the Prince of Wales around the country in a bear costume (them, not him) and pretend that they aren’t utter, screaming cranks.

This would be People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta), which is desperate for the Guards regiments to ditch the bearskin, worn for the past 200 years. …

In the US and Canada, I’m told, Peta actually does some sensible stuff. Recently, it has had battery hens in its sights. (Not literally.) In this country, it’s bears, bears, bears.

For the love of God, why? The Army doesn’t kill bears. The MoD has bought a total of 51 bearskins since 2005. The Canadian Government culls 10,000 a year, on ecological grounds. These are spare bears. They’re effectively roadkill. Why is this a priority? Why has Ricky Gervais, of all people, written to Gordon Brown about it? Did I miss the point when we all became vegetarians and stopped wearing leather?

For now, the MoD seems to be stalling. Synthetic alternatives, a press officer says, “have all flopped, literally”. Bearskin is good at keeping the rain off. That’s probably why bears wear it. But don’t think that the rest of the world doesn’t notice this stuff. In opinion pages across the globe, we are at present getting the sort of look that you might give your grandmother if you spotted her on the bus with 15 cats. The Germans in particular, the MoD says, “are distraught”. According to a writer in the Canadian National Post, “Britain’s record on the defence of cultural integrity is not a strong one these days.” Too right.

sigh

Posted by ninme at 8:31 am No Comments

Seattle, peculiarly, isn’t mentioned.

The Times - After New Orleans - would you move here?
Whether by earthquake, flood, drought or volcanic eruption, some of the world’s cities are in serious danger of disaster, by Paul Simons

It was a close shave, but New Orleans just managed to escape Hurricane Gustav’s onslaught on Monday. But the stark truth is that the city’s days are numbered. Its fate was sealed in 1717, when French explorer Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville chose a sharp bend in the Mississippi River to found “Nouvelle-Orleans”, in the teeth of opposition from his chief engineer, who warned him of flooding ahead.

And it didn’t take long before the first flood struck. Today New Orleans is a hopeless case. It can play around with levees, floodgates and sluices, but the seas are rising higher and the natural flood defences of surrounding marshlands are disappearing,

I’m all about restoring wetlands. I’m also all about people not moving to New Orleans. A quaint, tightly-packed, high-density population of essentials is great. Surrounded by lots of nature and wetlands is better.

Istanbul:

In fact, Istanbul is so dangerous that some earthquake experts of my acquaintance refused to go to a conference there several years ago.

Huh.

Phoenix:

The Arizona city could become the first in the United States to run out of water. It is built in a desert, with a yearly rainfall of only around 20cm (8in), and much of its water supply is taken from the Colorado River, which is running out of water as seven states also tap its water.

I’m also not a fan of people moving to Arizona. I don’t mind a couple golf courses that people can fly into (as in Hawaii), and then fly out of. Make like the desert is the ocean, and don’t build on it.

Bombay:

Rain is killing India’s most populous city. On July 26, 2005, record-breaking monsoon rains devastated Bombay and killed more than 400 people. The city’s decrepit drainage system, built in the 19th century, could not cope with the deluge, and Bombay has little open space to soak up heavy rains.

As the surrounding mangroves have been stripped away to reclaim more land, the city also faces floods and cyclone surges from the sea, which is rising higher. Eventually, Bombay could disappear under the waves.

Well, not much to tell them to do there. Build better infrastructure? Duh?

Shanghai:

The first major world city to sink under its own weight could be Shanghai. Each year it sinks around 1 centimetre (half an inch) from subsidence after too much water extraction from the ground, and from the sheer weight of skycrapers on the soft ground it is built on.

Well that’s stupid. They don’t build on bedrock?

Naples, ah, Naples:

Vesuvius also sets off earthquakes, and in 1456 a quake killed 35,000 people and left Naples in ruins. The city’s buildings are largely poorly built, and a big earthquake or eruption coud leave it in ruins.

Oh well. The food’s good. Maybe the impending doom will keep property prices low for me!

Posted by ninme at 8:05 am No Comments

The Times - Press a key, raise a billion for charity
Colombia’s cash machines help us to count our blessings, by Matthew Parris

Just occasionally you encounter abroad an idea so smart that you cannot think why it hasn’t been adopted here. Colombia, whence I’ve just returned, has cash machines like ours. They work fine with British cards, paying out in Colombian pesos. The procedure’s the same, except that before pressing the final proceed key you are asked on-screen whether you wish to donate the equivalent of about (a) 30p; (b) 60p; or (c) 90p, to a listed charity; a sum that would not be deducted from your cash payout, but charged on your monthly statement. To indicate your decision you press a key.

All my group found ourselves opting for the middle-sized donation, which was to a children’s charity. Why? Because, first, it’s a tiny sum, it’s easy, and it doesn’t reduce your payout; secondly, because this is when you’re keeping your fingers crossed that the machine will cough up and you sort of half-think in a superstitious way that you’re more likely to get mercy if you show mercy to others; and, thirdly, because the moment of pulling loads of dosh from a hole in the wall is (for me, anyway) a moment of counting my blessings and remembering that not everybody can.

Huh. It makes more sense than Safeway’s checkout people asking you at the end if you’d like to donate a dollar to pancreatic cancer research (or whatever their charity of the month is). It’s a noble thing to do, but I just can’t be groovy enough about it to actually do so. Probably because the person’s standing right there, and maybe I’m being ornery about the pressure, but maybe also because in this case I’m spending a bunch of money, whereas if I was (sort of) getting it I’d feel more generous? And in the privacy of my own ATM, more at leisure to do so?

(incidentally, I’m pretty sure this is Matthew Parris’ second year in a row of jetting off to interesting South American locations… haven’t I enough places I want to see?)

Posted by ninme at 7:16 pm No Comments

I meant for this to be yesterday’s but forgot to get to it, and then I had this all open to get to this morning and then suddenly I was missing a bus and now it’s almost 7.30.

More hilarity:

The Times - Sarah Palin: it’s go west, towards the future of conservatism
Her thrilling convention speech showed that the Governor of Alaska is a force to reckoned with. But she might be more than that, by Gerard Baker

The best line I heard about Sarah Palin during the frenzied orgy of chauvinist condescension and gutter-crawling journalistic intrusion that greeted her nomination for vice-president a week ago came from a correspondent who knows a thing or two about Alaska.

“What’s the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”

“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let’s be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.

“The other kills her own food.”

Heheheh.

It never ceases to amaze me how the Left falls again and again into the old trap of underestimating politicians whom they don’t understand. From Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to George Bush and Mrs Palin, they do it every time. Because these characters talk a bit funny and have ridiculously antiquated views about faith, family and nation, because they haven’t spent time bending the knee to the intellectual metropolitan elites, they can’t be taken seriously.

So the general expectation was that Mrs Palin would stumble on to the stage in high heels, clutching her sprawling, slightly odd family (five children! how weird), mispronounce the name of the Russian Prime Minister, mutter a few platitudes about God, and disappear for ever to a deafening chorus of sniggers.

No one paid much attention to the fact that she had been elected governor of a state. Or that she got to that office not because, unlike some politicians I could mention, her husband had been there before her, or because she bleated continuously about glass ceilings, but by challenging the entrenched interests in her own party and beating them. In almost two years as Governor she has cleaned out the Augean stables of Alaskan Government. You don’t win a statewide election and enjoy approval ratings of more than 80 per cent without real political talent.

Posted by ninme at 8:11 am No Comments

This morning’s Times Online:

Overheard comments [in one of many sports bars the British media have gleefully sent correspondents for colourful "background"] included: “I was on the fence and now I’m blazing the McCain trail” (a middle-aged woman) and “I wasn’t excited until this, now I’m all fired up” (a grey-haired man). Meanwhile, at a table directly underneath one of the TVs, Lu Sackett, 70, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of a grizzly bear and a floppy hat decorated with flag pins waved his burger in appreciation when Palin laid into the Democrats’ tax plans.

“She’s like a moose going after a cabbage,” he marvelled.

Heheh.

And this just amuses me:

And Mark Steyn:

I would like to thank the US media for doing such a grand job this last week of lowering expectations by portraying Governor Palin - whoops, I mean Hick-Burg Mayor Palin - as a hillbilly know-nothing permapregnant ditz, half of whose 27 kids are the spawn of a stump-toothed uncle who hasn’t worked since he was an extra in Deliverance.

Well, maybe for the rest of the world, but were they even watching? I would have said the expectations were, like, super, super high after all the what’d-you-say-about-my-girl?! raptures about her. I was afraid she’d come out and be all, “Uh, here I am,” and an entire convention full of people would have to grit their teeth, grin, and tell some interviewer “wasn’t she wonderful?”

Posted by ninme at 8:03 pm 2 Comments

Judging from the look on the faces of a lot of the women watching Sarah Palin speak, I think McCain might want to get someone to taste his Wheaties for him tomorrow.

Posted by ninme at 11:16 am 3 Comments

I wonder if it’s worth remarking upon that both members of the Republican ticket have kids in Iraq?

Posted by ninme at 10:01 am 2 Comments

First of all, oh. my. goodness:

Power Line - THE MEDIA VOTE

I thought that “Why He Loves Her” cover was ridiculous at the time, but I also thought “Meh, it’s Us Magazine”. I mean good lord.

LGF: Palin Has Not Pushed Creationism As Governor. Ah good.

And, finally, Instapundit:

HOW THEY COULD HAVE KEPT THE PALIN PREGNANCY STORY OUT OF THE PRESS: Leaked it that John Edwards was the father . . . ..

Hah!

Update:

I dunno about you all, but I’m thinking the conventioneers are getting a little weary about all this.

Posted by ninme at 9:30 am No Comments

I wonder if the timing of this was entirely coincidental:

The Times - Tears before bedtime - and that’s just grandad
What happened when an ageing editor was left alone with two children - and what was learnt, by Magnus Linklater

[A]fter a fortnight’s immersion course in full-on grandparenting, I can confidently proclaim that the reverse is true. The only way to survive is to impose Victorian standards of behaviour, play the tyrant and insist on the kind of manners that even Mrs Beeton might have found excessive. Oddly, children will accept a regime required by grandparents that would elicit tears and tantrums if attempted by their parents.

It is possible, of course, that, at the age of 3 and 7, our grandsons were simply indulging two ancient and clearly demented characters who were nevertheless the source of sweet and unhealthy treats banned at home. The three-year-old cottoned on with alarming speed to the idea that if, instead of saying “I need chocolate”, he said: “Please may I have some chocolate?” he got it that much quicker. The routine of sitting down to meals, finishing food and observing rudimentary standards of tidiness was easier because it was clearly temporary, an enjoyable interlude, before real life kicked in again.

It is possible, too, that both sides get something out of showing up the parents. As someone said once: “Grandchildren and grandparents get along so well because they have a common enemy.” Grandparents, consciously or otherwise, show their offspring that they can handle their children better; grandchildren are telling their parents: “You see, I can behave perfectly well, it’s just with you I choose not to.”…

In the end, the one commodity that grandparents have, and modern parents do not, is time - time to indulge, entertain and focus on the children to an extent that is simply unavailable in most busy households. Just how full-time this can be was brought home to me when I was left in charge alone, fielding telephone calls, sending e-mails and arranging meetings while attempting to fulfil the equally demanding schedule of football on the lawn, building and knocking over towers of wooden bricks, playing an obscure card game in which the rules changed periodically, but in which there was only going to be one winner, and attending to non-stop calls of nature.

Once I found myself forcibly holding the door shut as I tried to hold a telephone conversation with an important contact who asked at one stage if I was in any trouble. The quick answer was yes, but nothing life-threatening at this stage.

At that moment I had a glimpse of the average mother’s daily life, and quailed.

Posted by ninme at 9:10 am 1 Comment

Can women have it all? Ah, the age-old question.

The Times - Sarah Palin: a loveable woman, but an appalling candidate Her zest for life gives her an appeal even to those who oppose her views. But is she really White House material? By Alice Miles

Mrs Palin may be a feminist (you can hear, by their silence, old leftie feminists grappling with the concept of a “Feminist for Life” anti-abortionist, the group that Mrs Palin belongs to) but there is little feminine about her. She may be the supermum who can “just put down the BlackBerry and pick up the breast pump”, as she put it - but there’s nothing maternal in flinging a vulnerable teenage daughter at the flashlights of the world. It’s the sort of self-interested decision a softer “mom” would not make.

Evidently a woman can have it all and stay a woman, but doing so nullifies her womanhood. Further on:

She is such a mass of contradictions, that alone may qualify Mrs Palin as all woman after all.

Oh that’s good. Since evidently her, ah, sex doesn’t.

Nothing like Mrs Palin has, could ever, be seen in the British political system. She turns liberals into conservatives and conservatives into feminists. Stand back, Mr Obama, a new character is storming the ratings.

How Hillary Clinton, all safe lines and patronising empathy, must be hating it. How fast Michelle Obama must be recalibrating her soft little tales about baking cookies and enjoying The Brady Bunch. Mrs Palin would eat Carol Brady for breakfast, and still have space for some moose stew. Hell, yes.

Okay that made me laugh.

So, yeah. This is going to be entertaining. And we thought the prospects of the Mormon Mitt Romney was going to send them out with the vapours.

Posted by ninme at 8:52 am No Comments

Five Guys In a Limo

I have a strange relationship with the late Mr LaFontaine. On the one hand I thought he was probably hilarious and funny given those brilliant glimpses into his real life via that sort of thing and this, but on the other I wished every kind of curse on him for what he did to my favourite British movies (”In a world, before elastic, there was a man, on a horse, and a woman, who loved him” and the entire continent of North America goes “click”).

Posted by ninme at 3:53 pm No Comments

The Times - Triumph for British forces in Boy’s Own-style Kajaki mission

It was a task of epic proportions, inspiring comparisons with Commando magazine, Mad Max, the battle of Arnhem in 1944 and the relief of the siege of Mafeking in 1900.

The mission was to take 220 tonnes of turbine and other equipment, worth millions of pounds, across 100 miles of some of the most hostile and heavily mined territory in Afghanistan.

At the climax of the Taleban’s fighting season.

Without anyone noticing.

Nato commanders, facing an escalating Taleban insurgency in eastern and southeastern Afghanistan, initially argued that it could not be done until the spring poppy harvest, a traditional low point in the Taleban’s capabilities. But they came under pressure from Washington, which was anxious to secure visible progress before the presidential election to protect funding, according to sources in Kabul.

So it was that they devised Operation Tsuka (Eagle’s Summit) – their biggest military venture since US-led forces invaded Afghanistan in late 2001 to topple the Taleban Government as punishment for shielding Osama bin Laden.

Fun!

Posted by ninme at 3:40 pm No Comments

Telegraph - What’s worse: fake Austen or real Big Brother? By Michael Deacon

If today’s audiences are as obsessed with costume dramas as television commissioners are, it’s with good reason. As a subject for television, the past is often a lot more palatable than the present.

In their sentimentality and staginess, costume dramas may sometimes paint an absurdly false picture of history, and indeed of the novels they’re adapted from; but better a false picture of the past than the true picture of the present offered by reality television.

Big Brother and the innumerable talent shows that clog the schedules drag us into a nightmare peopled by wannabes and bullies. Costume dramas invite us into a heaven peopled by immaculate gentry and lovable yokels.

If it’s an adaptation of Austen, everyone’s manners are as beautiful as the country houses; if it’s an adaptation of Dickens, even the most feral villain looks as harmless as Billy Bunter next to the species of screeching delinquent found year upon year in the Big Brother household.

Heh.

Posted by ninme at 3:29 pm 3 Comments

The Times - A return to 1815 is the way forward for Europe
The Congress of Vienna divided the continent into spheres of influence. Similar rules are needed for the 21st century, by Christopher Meyer

Last year a French diplomat warned me that once Kosovo got its independence (itself the unnatural product of Balkan hatreds), Russia would feel free to make its move in Georgia. And so it has come to pass. As a Times leader put it recently, history has resumed, leaving Francis Fukuyama, the apostle of its end, trailing in its wake. But Professor Fukuyama was adrift from the very start. Once the iron fists of the former Soviet Union and Tito’s Yugoslavia had been removed, nationalist and ethnic tensions broke surface with the murderous velocity of the long suppressed. Contrary to what David Miliband has been telling us, the glacial years of the Cold War were “the period of calm”. The years since have been marked by the constant turmoil of history’s march.

Globalisation and interdependence were supposed to have swept aside these ancient feuds and rivalries. Theories of the postmodern state now abound. Tony Blair preached how national interest would be trumped by the spread of “global values”. This is self-evident rubbish. For here is the paradox of the modern world. Money, people, culture, business and electronic information cross porous frontiers in ever-increasing volume. But as national boundaries dissolve in cyberspace, so everywhere the sense of nationhood and national interest strengthens. Five minutes in Beijing, Washington, Tehran or Moscow will tell you that. What is the European Union if not the 21st-century arena for the intense and competitive prosecution of the national interest by its 27 member states?…

What is to be done, as Lenin once put it? The first thing is to sweep away any rose-tinted illusions left from the Blair-Bush era. For the democracies of North America and Europe, relations with Russia are always going to be awkward and bumpy, at best co-operative and adversarial in equal measure.

The fall of the Soviet Union did not wipe the slate clean. The Russia that we are dealing with today, with its fear of encirclement, its suspicion of foreigners and natural appetite for autocracy, is as old as the hills, long pre-dating communism. It is a Russia that will never be reassured by the West’s protestations of pacific intent as it pushes Nato and the EU ever eastwards.

Most important of all, Russia and the West need to draw up rules of the road for the 21st century. Mr Miliband and others have condemned the notion of returning to the geopolitics of the Congress of Vienna which, in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, divided Europe into spheres of influence between empires and nations. They perhaps forget that what was agreed at Vienna held at bay for almost a century a general European war.

Oh that’s cheery.

Posted by ninme at 3:06 pm No Comments

The Times - Mexican Crimewave
America’s southern neighbour is succumbing to bloody anarchy

President Calderón will deliver his annual address on the state of Mexico today - a state that millions of Mexicans now see as terrifying. Murders, shootings, kidnappings and gang violence have turned the country’s main cities into battlegrounds. Almost every day policemen are killed in ever more brazen attacks. Hundreds of people have been kidnapped, and dozens have been murdered, sometimes even after a ransom was paid. In one case last week 12 decapitated bodies were found in Yucatán. In hopes of avoiding a similar fate, some who can afford it are even paying for implanted microchips to enable rescuers to track them if kidnapped.

Drugs are the cancer that is destroying lives, the law and the nation’s political fabric. Mexico has now surpassed Colombia as the main drug production and distribution centre for the western hemisphere. Methamphetamines, cocaine, marijuana, heroin and crystal meth are smuggled into American in huge quantities, with an estimated 550-700 tonnes crossing into the US each year. Heroin production last year went up by 56 per cent. In November soldiers seized 23.5 tonnes of cocaine, the largest haul yet reported and enough for about 200 million lines. The cartels controlling this trade earn an estimated $30billion a year, and drugs now account for about 4 per cent of Mexico’s turnover.

The corrosive effects cannot be overstated. Gang wars have become so vicious that people are inured to the violence. When victims’ heads are dumped in coolboxes and torture videos posted on YouTube, when a drug gang casually rolls five severed heads across a nightclub floor and journalists reporting the atrocities are shot, suffocated or burnt to death, the result is a deep sense of helplessness. The police seem powerless - or unwilling - to act, since many themselves are instigating the violence or carrying out kidnappings on behalf of gangs that have suborned them. And those that resist meet spectacular deaths: in May Mexico’s acting chief of police was shot nine times as he arrived home - his killers sent by another federal officer. In all, 2,700 people have been killed this year in drug-related violence, a rise of 50 per cent in a year. Barely 5 per cent of crimes are solved. …

Mexico’s crisis has spread north with the violence and drugs. The Bush Administration has responded by offering an emergency $500 million package of equipment and training, but the programmed is stalled in Congress. No one doubts President Calderón’s commitment. But he is handicapped by a political culture that has too long tolerated corruption, too often planned only for the short term and still reacts with kneejerk hostility to US initiatives.

Nice.