 |
| Blog |
 |
| Archive |
|
|
|
|
| Blog |
| To find an archived article, simply click on Index and scroll the subject titles, or do a Ctrl-F search |
TALLRITE BLOG You can write to blog@tallrite.com |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| June 2003 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ISSUE #44 - 29th June 2003 [95]
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
There is a religion with a strict moral code, and an excessive interest in sex. No sex before marriage, no sex outside marriage. If you are not happy with your spouse, you can leave him/her but cannot set up house with someone else, much less marry someone else. If you do, the religious authorities will ostracise you and deny you full participation in religious activities, and you will be disgraced in the eyes of many worshippers. And if you are a homosexual, the religious authorities will consider you have a curable disease, such as leprosy, and will demand that you remain celibate until cured and married to someone of the opposite sex. Sound like Islam ? Actually, it's Roman Catholicism. On recent talk-shows in (formerly theocratically Catholic, now aggressively secular) Ireland, people have been phoning in, in outrage, at being denied the sacraments - Communion in particular - just because they are living “in sin”. They generally get a very sympathetic response at the Church's uncompassionate behaviour, conveniently forgetting that marriage vows are entered into freely and are for life. But such people have three simple choices.
If you go for number 3, the worst thing that will happen to you (in this life) is that some of your co-religionists will look down on you and if the priest knows you he may embarrass you. But you will not be arrested, tortured or stoned to death, by either Church functionaries or the State. And here, in what happens when you don't conform, lies the crucial difference between Islam on the one hand and Christianity and Judaism on the other. The contrasts between these three mighty religions (and their various offshoots) are not great in the demands they make of the individual. In any of them, you must
But if you are a citizen of an Islamic state you are obliged to be a Muslim and to practice as a Muslim. If you are caught flouting the rules, or trying to change your religion, terrible punishment will follow, administered by the State on behalf of the religious authorities. This is the essence of Sharia Law, which inextricably binds the secular into the religious. The result is things like women forced to wear the chador in Iran, forbidden to drive in Saudi Arabia, stoning for an adulterous woman in Northern Nigeria, the excesses and limb-chopping of the Taliban in Afghanistan. You simply do not have the option of not toeing the religious line. For a Christian or Jew, this is almost incomprehensible. Yet I believe it is largely an evolution thing. Judaism is thousands of years older than Christianity, and when the Jew Jesus Christ appeared on the scene, it was a pretty brutal faith that didn't hesitate to get the Romans to** torture him to death for disobeying its rules. Modern Jews would not recognize such a form of Judaism.
Christianity - specifically Catholicism - was, in turn, founded 600 years earlier than the Prophet Mohammed founded Islam If you look back at Christianity, you see a trail of blood, as Catholics killed and tortured in the name God, all the time believing (mistakenly, I hope) that this would speed their passage to eternal paradise.
The similarities of the extremes of Mediaeval Catholicism and today's Islam are indeed uncanny. But it is important to remember that during all the mayhem, the vast majority of religionists were and are humble, honest, God-fearing folk just trying to feed their families and raise their children to be good adults. Christianity and Judaism, in all their forms, are today religions whose sole purpose is to do good in the world and to provide guidance on lifestyle choices that will lead believers to heaven. Of course there are plenty of bad Christians and bad Jews, lay and clerics alike, but their behaviour is no longer endorsed by the religious authorities. It took thousands of years for the religions to reach this sublime condition; Catholicism was still manifestly barbarous just 500 years ago. The point of this comparison is, therefore, to conclude that Islam will, in time, also calm down and become a rational movement that claims adherence, voluntarily, only by the demonstration of faith and the good example of existing practitioners. The only force will be force of argument, not of arms. But let Islam not follow the Catholic example and take another 500 years to come of age. I believe that most of today's Muslims are a lot smarter than that.
Tony Blair and His Dossiers, continued Before the war I wrote a couple of times about the dossiers that were being produced by Tony Blair (and Saddam Hussein). In particular I recommended reading two British ones, which I personally found made a very compelling case to go to war. But the one that's been in the news this week is a third one which I didn't know existed. Called “Iraq, Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation”, this is the one containing stuff plagiarised from “a PhD student's out-of-date thesis”, as the newspapers would have it. It's fascinating reading, by the way, almost like a spy novel. But it puzzled me that the student was hardly ever mentioned and never interviewed, so I investigated.
In September of last year, he published an article entitled, “Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network : A Guide and Analysis” in the journal of the Middle East Review of International Affairs. (MERIA is a think tank owned by a Barry Rubin which publishes a monthly journal free on the internet. From its web address, “.il ”, it is located in Israel). Dr al-Marashi's article is lucid, pertinent, well-written, with over a hundred references, but at only ten pages is far too short to be a student thesis. What he has clearly done is take his thesis, bring it up to date, compress it and make it more readable. In short, his article has all the makings of having been well researched by an expert in the field. It is a serious and authoritative piece of work. The British Government was probably right, therefore, to copy great chunks of it into its dossier. Its mistake was solely that it kept the source secret (and it wasn't too smart to copy the typos). MERIA indicate they would have been quite happy for the paper to have been used - all they would have asked for was an attribution. The same goes for the good doctor himself. And you will notice that there has been no material criticism of the dossier itself. Only the manner in which it was put together and made public. It is extraordinary how people will practice deceit, when telling the truth is so much easier, less stressful, and in fact enhances your cause. But tell that to Tony Blair's spin doctor, Alistair Campbell, who put the dossier together and tried to make it look like the British intelligence services had done so.
Ireland Flatfooted in Palestine Ireland is very excited at the prospect of taking over the Presidency of the EU from January to June 2004. For possibly the last time, if the proposed 2½-year presidency replaces the current six-monthly musical chairs system. So Brian Cowen, the foreign minister, made a tour of the Middle East last week to acquaint himself better with the situation. An admirable and appropriate project. But it was very disappointing that his first stop was a sycophantic meeting with the Palestinian Authority's President Yasser Arafat, rather than restricting himself to Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), whom he also visited. Israel recently made it clear that its officials will not sit
down with any foreign leader who talks to Mr Arafat; this also accords
with declared EU policy. Therefore Mr
Cowan heard only one side of the argument, while the (subscription-only)
Irish Times described
Israel's decision as “petulant
if not intransigent”.
The reason is plain - Mr Arafat demonstrated his inability
and/or
For some people, there is a more cynical interpretation of Mr Cowen's behaviour. If you drive around parts of Northern Ireland,
Was Mr Cowen trying to send a covert message of support to Irish Republicans, and two fingers to the Loyalists ?
You know when someone ends up in hospital with, say, a broken leg, and people always say, “you're very lucky, it could have been worse”. It doesn't sound very lucky to me to have a broken leg. So how lucky would you have to be to suffer and survive, over a period of 40-odd years, all this ...
Well, that's the exciting life of 74-year-old Croatian musician, Professor Frane Selak - nicknamed “Lucky”. But that's not all. With his first ever lottery ticket, this good-looking guy has just won Croatia's jackpot of €875,000. So Lucky's going off to buy a house, a car and a speedboat and marry his new young girlfriend. Expect more fireworks !
Britain would not be so vehemently opposed to adopting the €uro if they knew why their European brothers and sisters were so keen on it. For within just seven months of being launched in January 2002, some 90% of all €uro bank notes were found each to contain an average of 0.4 microgrammes of cocaine particles, according to Prof Fritz Sögel and his team of German scientists from the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg. It seems rolled- up banknotes are often used to sniff cocaine. And because €uro notes are made from environment-friendly pure cotton, cocaine crystals stick especially easily. The concentration of cocaine apparently correlates with the national the usage of cocaine. The Finns, Greeks and French are a backward lot who don't know much about the joys of cocaine, so notes originating in these countries show the least contamination. The Belgians, Dutch, Italians and Luxembourgois are doing their best but are nowhere in the placings. However the bronze medal for dreamland €uro notes goes to Germany, while Ireland takes the silver. But to collect gold, step forward you fun-loving
Spaniards, for your notes register no less than one hundred times more
cocaine than even the bronze medallist. The
researchers said they were “knocked
flat” (?) by this finding, if not by the Spanish €uro
notes.
The German government and the European Central Bank, who print the currency, were asked for their comments, but “no comment” was all they would shyly comment. Meanwhile, you Britons, stick to your beloved sterling and eat your heart out (instead of your septum).
Though he does look a bit bemused. I don't think he realises what a popular icon he has become in the West. He needs to click on www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com !
Quote 1 : “The information I received from the governorates was more precise and comprehensive than the information I got from the Baghdad area. I was sincere in everything I said, even just before the fall of Baghdad International Airport. The information was correct, but the interpretations were not. I did my duty up to the last minute.”
Former Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, * * * * * Quote 2 : “My father told me as a boy, ‘Whales don't get killed unless they spout’ ”. Sir Denis Thatcher, Bt, who died on 26th
June aged 88,
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SEE THE ARCHIVE BAR AT THE TOP LEFT, FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ISSUE #43 - 22nd June 2003 [128]
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Aaron Barschak - Comedian, Linguist, Footballer, Paint-Sprayer We've all enjoyed the spectacle of Aaron Barschak, dressed up as a camp Osama bin Laden, gatecrashing Prince William's 21st birthday party at Windsor Castle on Solstice night.
No-one knows much about him, other than he calls himself a “comedy terrorist”, and from his name that presumably he's a Jew. So here are a few titbits :
With all the hullaboo he has caused, you can be sure his Edinburgh gig will be a sell-out. Also expect to see him on every talk show lucky enough to get its hands on him. His career is made ! Good luck Aaron !
The Unratifiable EU Constitutional Treaty Valéry Giscard d'Estaing last week presented his draft EU Constitutional Treaty to the EU summit at Thessalonika. He and it are to be commended for the open manner in which, over the past sixteen months, it has been produced with the help of 105 delegates from the current and future EU member states. It is also wise to rush it through before the phalanx of new members join, as it will be exponentially more difficult to get 25 members to agree it compared to the current fifteen. So, top marks for process. What a pity it's such a dog's breakfast that it hasn't a hope of being ratified. The original, admirable idea was simply to tidy up all the existing Treaties since the Treaty of Rome in 1957 to produce a single document containing everything that's already been agreed. In business, such a cleaning-up mechanism is common practice when you have a long-running contract with countless amendments and side letters, because it gets increasingly difficult to understand what the overall agreement actually is. Of course, sweeping all existing clauses into a single document would give anyone pause for thought. As the (subscription-only) Economist so engagingly expressed it, “It is rather as if, having happily consumed factory-made sausages for 30 years, consumers are now being asked to read the ingredients on the side of the packet and consider carefully if they want to keep eating reconstituted udders.” No matter; there would be no reason for rejecting such a document and it would certainly help all EU citizens understand their Union. But tidying up contributes only 75% of the new Constitutional Treaty (which is both and neither a constitution and/or a treaty). For Valéry and his merry men just couldn't resist inventing new stuff, which will be the rock on which the document fails. The new stuff includes these five jewels :
A new foreign minister to run the EU's common foreign and security policy.
A charter of human rights, including social things like the right to work, to strike, to be consulted about big company decisions.
The EU raising its own budget. This is just code for the EU collecting taxes from EU citizens, instead of (or more likely as well as) being funded by contributions from national governments.
Redistribution of EU parliamentary votes and EU commissioners away from the small countries in favour of the big ones. Currently it takes 832,000 voters to elect a German MEP but just 74,000 for a Luxemburg one.
So, in the months that follow,
Then, perhaps after a further year to lick wounds, a more modest Constitutional Treaty whose sole purpose is to tidy up, will emerge and be quickly ratified. Proposed changes to the arrangements between EU States need to be negotiated on their own merits and not smuggled in via the current draft (or should we say daft ?) Constitutional Treaty.
French Leadership Still Protecting Tyrants It can't be true. French leaders seem unable to shake their reputation as friends of tyrannical dictators everywhere.
The love also seems to extend to the mullahs of Iran. At their behest, he has had members of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, located in Paris (because they would not be safe in Teheran), rounded up. This has provoked demonstrations by dissident Iranians in Paris and outside French embassies in Berne and London. And not just protests but appalling self-immolations as well. The last time I remember this tactic being used was when saffron-clad Buddhist monks used to douse themselves with petrol and set themselves on fire in Vietnam in the 1960s to protest the suppression of Buddhist rights (which provoked a sick joke - “what's yellow and goes well on Shell”) . France also seems to be helping Hamas, the suicide-favouring Palestinian faction most virulently opposed to President Bush's Roadmap and the ceasefire it entails. Its charter states that “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad,” yet France is opposing moves to designate it a terrorist organization. You have to wonder whether there might be something dysfunctional in the DNA of French presidents when you look both at these examples and at the support that former incumbents gave to the despots of their day. To name but a few :
So the question I end up asking myself is, will Kim Jong Il, North Korea's enigmatic and brutal suppressor of his own people, be the next dictator that the French president will try to defend ? Are France and North Korea involved in secretive trade deals in arms and other nasty things that have yet to be revealed ? I hope I am proved wrong. In the meantime, I imagine most French people must cringe with mortification at the behaviour of their leaders. Yves Roucaute, a
philosopher, writer, and professor of political sciences at the University
of Paris evidently feels this way. At a recent symposium entitled
But why do they keep electing such people as presidents ? And we haven't even started talking about their difficulties over matters of personal honesty.
Two pathetic stories have been doing the rounds in Ireland for the past week or so, under the rubric “conflict of interest”.
Sanctimonious individuals with too much time on their hands and who are too keen to tell others how to behave are getting too much prominence. They should get a life.
Leopold Bloom and Artistic Incomprehensibility Last Monday, 16th June, was the 99th Bloomsday, which celebrates the fictional day in 1904 that Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, walks pretty pointlessly around Dublin, in James Joyce's seminal novel, Ulysses, a book which, incidentally, does not mention the word Ulysses even once. In Dublin on every 16th June,
On street corners, people make speeches about Joyce, sing songs of the period, quote lengthy and incomprehensible chunks of Ulysses from memory. In the realms of literary incomprehensibility, nothing in the English language matches chapter 18. Just one paragraph long, it rambles on for fifty pages without a single punctuation mark, recounting random unconnected thoughts going through the flighty head of Leopold's wife Molly, something psychiatrists today call stream of consciousness. But impossible to read more than a couple of pages of. There are other portions of the book that appear to be no more than a jumble of real and invented words arranged in random order on the page. Why would an author deliberately choose to discourage 99% of his readers from persevering with his book ? At a time when industrial innovation was booming and becoming ever more coherent (such as Henry Ford's invention of the automated assembly line), perhaps the artists felt it was time to explore beyond the limits of convention. Consider.
Perhaps the artistic world, after thousands of years of trying to perfect a form of ever-purer communication with its audience, felt threatened by the democratic embrace of technology. Perhaps the artists' answer was to try to create a new artistic universe by breaking all the rules of the old, and irritating the majority of their customers, appealing only to a narrow and superior group of cognoscenti. Perhaps it was - and remains - a giant con job, like the emperor's clothes. “If you don't understand my art, that's your own fault because it shows you're an ignorant boor, or worse still an engineer”. Anyway, that's the view of your blogger, who is a boor and an engineer.
If you have any interest at all in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, you should visit the extraordinary Theban Mapping Project website. With maps, drawings, photographs, video-clips and commentary, it allows you to use your mouse to explore the tombs of Pharoes such as Rameses, Sety, Merenptah, Ametahep more easily and more clearly (and more comfortably) than if you were actually there. Dating from the half-millennium 1500-1000 BC, 62 such tombs have been discovered, of which the most recent, nbr 62, is Tutankhamen's found in 1922. The site describes them all. There are more than two thousand exquisite images, and models of each tomb where you can measure, pan and zoom over 250 detailed maps, elevations, and sections. Also included are 65 narrated video tours and a 3-D re-creation of Pharoah Setnakht's tomb KV 14. And it's all completely free, and free of advertising. I cannot imagine who is paying for it. So switch on your speakers and click here.
Honda Fails to Work - 605 Times I don't know who else has been watching a curious but rather elegant two-minute advertisment for Honda that's been on our TV screens (in Britain and Ireland, anyway) for the past couple of weeks. Named “Cog”, It shows a a lot of car parts effortlessly bumping into each other no fewer than 43 times in a pre-choreographed ballet which ends with a Honda Accord rolling off a ramp, while a voiceover says, “Isn't it nice when things just work ?”. I'm grateful to Andrew Sullivan for providing this link so you can replay it at will, though it takes about ten minutes to download in full. Apparently, the ad was filmed in one continuous take without any trick-photography (ha !). The Daily Telegraph has provided a detailed commentary, which most memorably reveals that it required an incredible 606 takes before they got all the bits to work right, and this drove the film-production crew almost crazy. But on the successful, 606th take they cracked open the champagne. It's a truly remarkable sequence, but if I wasn't already an enthusiastic Honda owner, I would say choose another car. Do you really want to have 605 false starts before the thing finally works properly ?
Quote : “I walked into the kitchen crying and ... said, ‘I've just killed the person ... you need to be a ruthless killer’.” JK Rowling, creator of Harry Potter,
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SEE THE ARCHIVE BAR AT THE TOP LEFT, FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ISSUE #42 - 15th June 2003 [134]
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Chicanes in the Middle East Road Map Attempted implementation of President Bush's Middle East Roadmap for Peace began on 4th June with his peace conference in Aqaba, Jordan, where Prime Ministers Abu Mahzen of Palestine and Ariel Sharon of Israel pledged to do their best to move forward along it. Their respective first obligations are to curb Palestinian attacks on Israelis and to dismantle recent settlements. Delight reigned for two days as both sides contemplated what peaceful coexistence might feel like. Then all hell broke loose in both Palestine and Israel, with civil war threatened in both entities. Good. </ |
A
US-born son of Iraqi immigrants, t
The
army fatigues are gone, he's lost weight, his hair has mysteriously turned
from black to white and he's now being called Baghdad Bob. But,
appearing last week on Abu Dhabi TV in Dubai, there's no mistaking our old friend
What gall, what courage to parade
audaciously in front of the TV cameras, in his trademark peach
dress, women's shoes, false beard and - ugh - false pubic hair,
before sneaking round to some school at the back to climb and
wheedle his way into the castle. 