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TALLRITE BLOG 
ARCHIVE
This archive, organized into months, and indexed by time and alphabet,
contains all issues since inception, including the current week.

ISSUE #169 - 27^th January 2008 [500+105=505]

Click here for PDF Version of Issue #169 (175kb)

I've become a newspaper columnist with the (subscription-only) Irish Times.  My first column appears on 27th February, titled “Don't sign an EU contract you can't even understand”.  The Lisbon Treaty is unintelligible and for that reason alone should be rejected.  For PDF version click on the image below.

Execrable Lisbon “Reform” Treaty

Has any one actually read this 272-page tome from cover to cover, I wonder?  Or even tried to?

I've calculated, using Adobe's Read-Out-Loud function (timed at three minutes per page), that it would take you nearly thirteen hours to plough your way through it just the once.  And because the prose is so impenetrable, you will not understand it properly until you've carefully gone through it three or four times.  I would challenge anyone to deny, therefore, that not a single one of the 54 esteemed signatories has read it even a single time.  What prime minister or foreign minister can set aside thirteen hours for study?  If he/she did, it would probably be half-an-hour at a time snatched before going to sleep at the end of the day, which means not finishing the wretched document for a month. 

Former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing is the progenitor of this oeuvre.  He chaired the committee that drafted its forerunner, the would-be “Treaty Establishing A Constitution For Europe”, or TEACoFEe as I once described it - a “tea-coffee-or-whatever-you're-having-yourself” mishmash designed to please and annoy everyone in equal measure. The TEACoFEe was then thankfully rejected in the French and Dutch referendums.  He had earlier (June 2005) advised president Jacque Chirac against a referendum because the TEACoFEe was too long and complicated for ignorant French plebs to understand, but he was ignored.  

Perhaps the mighty Jean-Claude Juncker, long the prime Minster of the Colossus that is Luxembourg, was right after all when he famously said, in relation to those pesky referendums,

“If it's a Yes, we will say ‘on we go’, and
if it's a No we will say ‘we continue’”.  

The Lisbon Reform Treaty is a slightly modified version of the TEACoFEe - still 90% the same according to Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Bertie Ahern, or very, very near to it.  A few provisions have been changed, largely cosmetic things like removing the EU anthem, but the phraseology and architecture have also deliberately been made much more difficult to comprehend.  Astute as ever, Mr d'Estaing now proclaims that

“Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly ... All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way ... What was [already] difficult to understand will become utterly incomprehensible, but the substance has been retained … Why not have a single text? The only reason is that this would look too much like the constitutional treaty. Making cosmetic changes would make the text more easy to swallow.” 

Karel de Gucht, Belgian Foreign Minister helpfully adds,

“The aim of this treaty is to be unreadable … The Constitution aimed to be clear, whereas this treaty had to be unclear. It is a success.”

It's certainly that.  To achieve unreadability a very simple technique has been used. At the beginning of the treaty after seven sheets of pompous signatures it states

“AMENDMENTS TO THE TREATY ON EUROPEAN UNION
AND TO THE TREATY ESTABLISHING THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY”

Thereafter, it goes on, page after page, beginning each clause with phrases such as

“Article x shall be amended as follows”,

after which you are instructed to delete, insert, modify and/or renumber Article x, which apparently appears in one or both of the previous two treaties mentioned.  Consequently, you can't possibly understand the import of the particular amendment unless you have the other two treaties open in front of you at the specific article in question.  This couple of treaties, by the way, usually go by the more familiar names of the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and the Treaty of Rome (1957) respectively, though to put you off the scent the Lisbon Treaty doesn't tell you this or even mention the names of those proud cities. 

Even the proposed new 2½-year “President of the EU Council” doesn't get his own clause in the treaty: he (or she) is introduced via the “insertion” of a new Article 9B into those previous treaties.  Same with the new qualified majority rules designed to reduce national vetoes: Article 17 tells us to stick in a new Article 9C.  How does this mesh with the rest of the mysterious Article 9?  Who knows. 

Lisbon is thus an abomination that no serious business would ever contemplate writing or signing.  If it really was a “reform” treaty, it would have replaced the two prior treaties in their entirety and incorporated all the amendments into a single, unambiguous easy to comprehend document. 

But then it wouldn't have met Mr de Gucht's demanding standard of unreadability. 

And, frankly, that's the single biggest reason for any compos mentis person to vote NO.  Would you sign a contract for, say, employment or to buy a house, if you didn't understand a word it said?  Yet the threat of a NO is of course precisely why no-one (but the Irish) is being permitted a referendum this time around. 

As a result, the constitutionally unavoidable Irish referendum is going to become a huge battleground, where NO and YES camps across the length and breadth of Europe are going to be slugging it out via proxies within Ireland.  For only Ireland can stop, or at least further slow, Mr Juncker's relentless march. 

Apart from the unreadability aspect, the principal YES arguments you hear don't seem to really stack up.  Apparently the main raison d'être for the treaty is to make the running of the EU smoother and more stable with the advent of the recently joined members.  But, as various studies and publications, notably the (subscription-only) Economist, have pointed out, decision-making has actually become more not less slick since the last dozen members joined, with new rules and regulations being adopted 25% faster than before enlargement. 

People sometimes come up with little details for voting YES, such as that Lisbon mentions “climate change”.  Well, yes it does, but only parenthetically and only to add via Clause 143 the magic words “in particular combating climate change” to an existing article, 174, about “deal[ing] with regional or worldwide environmental problems”.  This hardly embraces Al Gore's absurd climate changeology cult. 

But the main argument advanced by the YES camp is not really that the Treaty serves any specific purpose.  Rather, that it is part of the mighty locomotive that is the EU, which is always advancing towards some mythical nirvana in a never-attainable future, and you either get on board or get left behind at the station.  Therefore, to vote NO is

Some have even suggested it is almost treasonous.  A common theme in the UK, shared by many EUrocrats and specifically by Mr d'Estaing, is that if the British were to vote against the Lisbon Treaty, in the promised referendum which prime minister Gordon Brown is now denying them, this should be interpreted as a vote to leave the EU altogether.  Actually, many British think it should be rejected with precisely this ulterior objective.

The same arguments were trotted out after the Irish voted down the Nice Treaty in 2001 and had to cajoled, bribed and frightened to vote again with a YES a year later, so as not to be ejected from or villified by or left behind by the EU. 

Yet such a notion is nonsense. 

The EU is not the plaything of EUrocrats, MEPs, Commissioners and other Brussels bigwigs, even though they number in the tens of thousands and often behave as if it is.  It is above all a club of the citizens of the 27 constituent countries, and they add up to 490 million (an astonishing 60% more than America's population).  So if some of them decide they want something different from the Brussels bunch, and are able under Club rules to achieve this, the EU remains just as much the EU as it ever was.  Your golf club doesn't stop being your golf club just because, for example, members vote to admit women even though the Committee happens to oppose it. 

So no thinking citizen could possibly vote to support the Lisbon Treaty:

Of course the 26 countries who will (or have) put the treaty to their parliaments for ratification are guaranteed to pass it, because the respective ruling parliamentary coalitions are the very ones who have signed it. 

I look forward, therefore, to a vigorous debate within the only country that will give its citizens the chance to vote, as well as the proxy war as wealthy foreign antagonists from both sides try (covertly) to influence Irish voters. 

For Ireland represents the EU's last chance for sanity over this execrable treaty, whose only “reform” is a negative one. 

Late Notes (7th March 2008):

In February, the distinguished Irish journalist Vincent Browne explained how he was unsuccessful when he tried to procure the unexpurgated Lisbon Treaty texts from EU offices in Dublin.  He concludes, as I do, that “the only responsible, sensible, reasonable, intelligent course of action to adopt is to vote No to this treaty on the grounds that we don’t know - and can’t know - what it means.”

Watch this amusing video clip,
put out by a body called the European Referendum Campaign

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That Illegal Apartheid Wall Round Gaza

This remarkable picture appeared on the front page of the Irish Times last week which wonderfully illustrates the contorted view many journalists and others hold of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.  According to the caption, It shows “thousands of Palestinians pour[ing] through dozens of holes in the wall, rushing to buy items that are in short supply due to an Israeli blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza”. 

It seems the perfidious, vengeful Israelis, with their “illegal” “apartheid wall” and military-controlled “checkpoints” have turned innocent Gazans into prisoners.  And when they closed off the entryways last week, merely because the Hamas government was firing deadly Qassam rockets and mortars into southern Israel at a rate of 50 per day, this became a blockade resulting in loss of electric power, children starving, babies dying in hospital, blah, blah, blah. 

But look again at that photo.  That's a wall between Gaza and Egypt which, notwithstanding the well-known secret tunnels under it that bring in bombs and other matériel, is there to keep Palestinians out of Egypt, especially those of an Hamas-Islamicist hue.  Apart from the fact that Egypt is not under attack from Gaza, why is this not described as an “illegal” “apartheid wall” with (a single) military-controlled “checkpoint” at Rafah, to be condemned by the world's bien-pensants?  Why is this wall not blamed for the blockade, since without it there could be no blockade? 

There is of course only one answer.  Egyptians are not Jews.  Therefore you don't have to automatically hate and condemn everything they do, whether it is imprisoning Gazans, or wounding 90 would-be escapees, or oppressing fellow Egyptians under a decades-long dictatorship.  For they, or course, are not part of any vast and sinister conspiracy that malignantly controls the Western world's governments everywhere.  Not like certain other hook-nosed pigs and apes. 

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Soapy, Slippery Morality

I am always embarrassed to admit I watch one of the world's longest running TV soap operas, Coronation Street, but I do.  I despise the characters but it is compelling none the less, and I wouldn't miss it. 

An interesting observation is how what might be termed morality is dealt with, so I constructed this little table of what's OK and what's not.   

The Red-Green colour-coding is meant to indicate -

See how the left hand column is mostly red, the right column green.  From this, it is interesting to note that the soap opera's moral universe seems to be, roughly speaking, a slippery inverse of what you would expect in real life. 

I have been particularly affronted by the casual treatment of paedophilia - adult men having sex with underage schoolgirls is just good fun, it seems.  In the past few years, there have been at least two storylines with this theme, featuring 16-year-olds - Katie with a grandfather (2003), Rosie with her schoolteacher (2007). 

But does any of this matter?  Since it's only entertainment, perhaps not much.  On the other hand, you would have to wonder whether the on-screen

also foster similar behaviour in real life among younger, more impressionable viewers, from small children upwards. 

The series clearly places an extra burden on conscientious parents, if only to remind their kids that it's only “only a show”. 

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Belcanto, Budapest - A Restaurant Review

“Belcanto” is the Italian for “beautiful singing” and refers to a particular vocal technique which originated in Italy during the late seventeenth century, reaching its pinnacle in opera of the early 1800s.  The Sicilian composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801-35) was a major exponent, and one of his best-known Belcanto works is “Norma”, about love betrayed.  Its title role is regarded as the most taxing ever written for a soprano, which is why Maria Callas made it her own in the 1950s and 60s.  “Casta Diva” is undoubtedly the opera’s most gorgeous aria and and to get a more modernised flavour, listen to this utterly delightful interpretation by the elfin Filippa Giordano - why not play it as you read on. 

One of the world's most beautiful opera houses may be found in Budapest, on the Andrássy Boulevard, named after Count Gyula Andrássy de Csíkszentkirály et Krasznahorka, a Hungarian hero of the nineteenth century.   Nearby is a smaller opera house (the Operettszinhaz) and a number of other theatres. 

And right around the corner is the Belcanto restaurant, whose purpose in life is to continue the opera sensation well after the respective theatres have kicked you out.  Exquisitely appointed, as you can see from the photo, there is an interesting menu. 

But its prime attraction are wonderful singers - two beautiful young sopranos and a barrel-chested baritone, and the small orchestra of four that accompanies them, as indeed so do all the waiters and waitresses from time to time.  While you eat and drink, they will regale you with wonderfully delivered renditions of renowned and lesser known hits from opera and other classics masterpieces, and will play requests.  I was entranced at how they played my own request, Albinoni's haunting Adagio in G-minor for strings and organ, which you can hear here. 

No doubt each of Belcanto's vocalists and instrumentalists is performing his/her heart out each evening, in the hope of being discovered by a hungry roving scout from the adjacent opera houses - and if it were up to me they would be. 

Savour the music, it's fabulous, because you won't enjoy the food, even if it is irrelevant to the evening's experience. 

The menu looks enticing - who could resist, for example, “Crispy goose leg with cabbage and champagne, onion potato soufflé”?  Actually I could.  I don't like my poultry desiccated from long hours in an oven, distinctly uncrisp and skin removed, cabbage riddled in vinegar, champagne undetectable, potatoes converted to rubber.  And this was one of the more delectable dishes.  The food is, frankly, ghastly, without exception.  I imagine the “chef” is no more than a couple of teenagers with a microwave. 

Yet believe me, you pay handsomely for the privilege - my group forked out €80 per person for a main course each and a shared desert, plus mediocre wine and some bottles of beer (no draft!). 

So don't go there for the food and drink.  The music is the thing, but you really would need to start off with a performance at one of the theatres to put you in the mood.  Otherwise you might concentrate too much on what the singing waiters put in front of you. 

My overall score as a percentage?

Belcanto is located at number 8 Dalszínház Street, Budapest 1061.  If you have a GPS or want to have a look via Google Earth, it's at Latitude  47°30'8.69"N by Longitude 19° 3'28.84"E.  You can phone for a reservation on +36-1-269.2786, and they speak good English. 

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Issue 169's Letter to the Press

Just the one letter, and it went unpublished.  No other letter in similar vein appeared which might have displaced mine.  I find this disappointing because it's about time the media abandoned the canard of the “Israeli blockade”.  How can Israel alone be held accountable for such a thing if one wall is maintained by Egypt?

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Quotes for Issue 169

Quote: “I absolutely publicly apologise to the families in Omagh. I am desperately sorry that we have not at this point brought people to justice for that dreadful attack ... I publicly apologise to all those families and all those victims, to all those who were injured, without reservation ... Of course, as chief constable, I have to take responsibility for the shortcomings that the judge [who presided over the acquittal of the only suspect] highlighted.” 

Sir Ronnie Flanagan, Northern Ireland's former Chief Constable
apologises for deficiencies, under his watch, in the police investigation
into the 1998 Omagh bombing.

This is an extraordinary turnaround.

Back in 2001, the new police ombudsman Nuala O'Loan
issued a report highly critical of Sir Ronnie's Omagh investigation
(“seriously flawed ... defective leadership,
poor judgement and a lack of urgency”).
But he considered her investigation to be
neither “fair, thorough or rigorous ... [with] an erroneous conclusion.”

Moreover, he then declared,
“I would not only resign, I would publicly commit suicide
if I felt this report to be fair.”

It's to his credit that he has now at last accepted his responsibility,
though he doesn't need to carry out his bizarre threat.

Quote: “You're a corrupt little crook.”

John O'Shea, boss of the (reputable) Irish charity GOAL,
whispers, undiplomatically, in the ear of
President Fredrick Chiluba of Zambia
at a formal reception during a recent visit to Dublin. 

Mr Chiluba was subsequently charged with
stealing $46 million from his own people,
75% of whom survive on less than one dollar a day.

Mr O'Shea is champion of giving aid directly to the people who need it,
rather than channelling it through despotic governments
who routinely cream off more than three-quarters.

Quote: “I know you think it's crazy, but I kind of like to see Barack and Hillary fight.”

Former US president Bill Clinton, as tensions grow between his wife
and rival Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

Of course he loves it,
because Mr Clinton is the main subject of their acrimony.

Quote:
“Bill has a dream.”

Headline in the New York Post
accompanying a photo
of Bill Clinton asleep during
a service to honour
the late Dr Martin Luther King Jr

Quote: “The Ottawa Citizen and Southam News wish to apologize for our apology to Mark Steyn, published Oct. 22. In correcting the incorrect statements about Mr. Steyn published Oct. 15, we incorrectly published the incorrect correction. We accept and regret that our original regrets were unacceptable and we apologize to Mr. Steyn for any distress caused by our previous apology.”

The Ottawa Citizen and Southam News apologise for something. 
No, I don't understand either.

ISSUE #168 - 22^nd January 2008 [535-153=382]

Click here for PDF Version of Issue #168 (286kb)

The (subscription-only) Irish Times published a column by me on 12th March 2003, entitled ‘Time for war on  drugs to target users’, which is based on this post.

Declare Drug-War on Users and Kids

Last week, following some exemplary police work involving intelligence, informers and surveillance, the Irish Gardaí seized a massive 32-kg haul of heroin worth €6½ million on the street, and in the process captured, virtually red-handed, one of Dublin's most notorious drug traffickers, believed to be a 35-year-old called Michael Byrne. 

Congratulations all round are therefore in order.  That is 32 kg that will not be injected into anyone's veins, and a drug dealer taken off the streets who will therefore not be pushing deadly chemicals for the next several years. 

Surely, a major fillip for society. 

Except it's not.  Not by any measure whatsoever. 

The whole drug-busting success is a total waste of taxpayers' money. 

This is the utter fallacy of the much-touted war on drugs, vigorously pursued by well-meaning jurisdictions and police forces all over the world, and with equal lack of beneficial impact whatsoever.  The only spin-off might be a slight rise in the price of drugs to compensate for the inconvenience of being harassed by the boys in blue, which might marginally deter a few marginal users. 

Surely some of the more sophisticated and richer states are having some success?  Nope.  Not one.  Not even the much-vaunted United States. 

The reason is a simple one: they are aiming at the wrong target, all of them. 

It is drug-peddlers who are the common object of attack, and they have been duly - and rightly - vilified and placed beneath contempt in societies everywhere, from Capitalist America to Authoritarian Russia to Socialist Venezuela to Communist Cuba to Islamist Iran.  Thoroughly antipathetic to each other, such countries make strange bedfellows when it comes to drugs, and do little to co-operate with each other in their fights against the common enemy, the drug dealing industry. 

The secondary mis-targeted target, not pursued so eagerly as the pushers, are the drug growers, those wondrously industrious and inventive developing-world farmers of such places as Afghanistan, Columbia, Laos.  In the quest of feeding their families, these hardy men find ever better ways of growing poppies, coca, cannabis and other nefarious plants.  This is despite the attentions of international drug-busters who want to ruin their harvests while vainly tempting them to take up less lucrative crops. 

You have to marvel at how stone-age Afghan tillers of the soil, in a desperately poor, war-torn, gun-happy, terrorist-ridden country, are nevertheless by far the world's foremost producers of heroin-grade opium-poppies. 

Indeed, according to the UN and the CIA, those rugged Afghanis currently meet over 90% of the world's demand for heroin and other opiates. 

I can think of no other single country that produces - and, don't forget, also exports - 90% of the world's anything, let alone a land-locked nation almost devoid of infrastructure and beset with every kind of problem known to mankind, whose people sport an average annual GDP of barely $2 a day. 

The growers and the the pushers are the wrong targets for enforcement because they are not the source of the world's drug problem. 

That dubious honour belongs of course to the customers.  For it is they, and they alone, who create the demand and provide the money, without which there would be no drugs industry, criminal or otherwise. 

There is only one way to stop or suppress the drugs industry, and that is to mount relentless, merciless pressure on drug users themselves.  So long as they are prepared to continue buying, no amount of napalming of crops or putting traffickers under lock and key is going to halt the production and trade.  New farmers and new traffickers will spring up to meet the demand while welcoming the (temporary) reduction in competition. 

If drugs are to remain illegal, any drive against users needs to make two distinctly different attacks. 

Moreover, it would soon become supremely unpopular, because vast numbers of users are not so easily vilified as handfuls of dealers.  Drug-takers are regularly portrayed as “victims”, “addicts”, “prostitutes”.  Or else they are pillars of society, or celebrities (of movies, TV, music, modelling, even sport), or just ordinary, regular, tax-paying, law-abiding guys and gals - not to say, voters - enjoying a night out or a private dinner party. 

A concerted crackdown will quickly look like bullying and overkill and will particularly upset influential people who are caught or whose offspring are.  And without robust leadership from politicians who don't mind losing their seats as a result, it could quickly become as desultory as random breath-testing often is, where ambushes of pubs, clubs and restaurants at closing time are assiduously side-stepped, as are blackspots where the drink-drive accidents actually happen. 

Nevertheless, such a crackdown would at once start cutting demand and thus, in turn, production and trafficking, a feat which no other “war on drugs” has come close to achieving.  It would immediately criminalise thousands and cause uproar among the people (ie voters), as they see their friends and relations carted off by the law. 

Brainwashing kids with anti-drug ideas will thus certainly succeed in reducing the number of adults with a yen to snort or inject.  But though not especially expensive, it is unglamorous, difficult to implement in a widespread manner, pretty boring and will take twenty years to yield results.  Compared to the fun of routing out dealers and poisoning poppy fields, it provides few kudos for politicians and law-enforcers charged with tackling society's drug problems. 

Yet no battle against drugs can ever be ultimately successful until it confronts the true culprits, ie those who imbue the stuff, both

For both groups of citizens, the solution is the same: to conquer and bend that most powerful of mankind's attributes - the attitude of the human mind. 

This means declaring drug-war on both users and kids. 

Nevertheless, society everywhere should recognizes that efforts over the past several decades have been no more than a money-wasting sham, and should simply refuse to countenance their continuance. 

There is of course another alternative, even more radical yet by comparison cheap and easy.  Drugs could simply be legalised, decriminalised, regulated and taxed.  They could be treated no differently than those two other dangerous drugs tobacco and alcohol. 

But that's an argument for another day. 

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Should the State Sanction Gay Marriage?

Every Monday, the (subscription-only) Irish Times hosts what it calls a Head2Head debate, where two antagonists set out their respective cases over a selected, topical