Pages

Sunday, October 31, 2004

Saturday, October 30, 2004

The louse's view: Collateral


It’s very good rather than great but certainly not quite Heat. TC and JF are excellent, which is true for the rest of the cast (although JPS doesn't have much to do). There’s superb dialogue throughout but especially in the taxi, in the Jazz Club and, above all, when Felix tells the story about Santa and Pedro. It loses credibility when they return to the office at the end. I couldn't quite keep my disbelief suspended I'm afraid. I loved the bit with the wolf. Well worth the ticket price.

Friday, October 29, 2004

A bit of perspective on the polls

Ruy Teixeira notes the following:

Today the TIPP tracking poll was a tie; at this time before the 2000 election, it was +5 Bush.

Today the Zogby tracking poll was a tie; at this time before the 2000 election, it was +3 Bush.

Today, the WP/ABC tracking poll (LV) was +3 Bush; at this time before the 2000 election, it was also +3 Bush...where it stayed, with a brief detour to +4, until its final poll, thereby missing the actual popular vote margin by 3.5 percentage points.

Today, the Rasmussen poll was +2 Bush; no information available on where it was at this point before the 2000 election (and it wouldn't be strictly comparable anyway, since Rasmussen has substantially changed their methodology since then), but it seems safe to say that Bush's margin was far larger--their final poll, after all, had Bush winning by 9 points.
. 

Thursday, October 28, 2004

Dr Thompson says ...

Back in June, when John Kerry was beginning to feel like a winner, we had a quick rendezvous on a rain-soaked runway in Aspen, Colorado, where he was scheduled to meet a harem of wealthy campaign contributors. I told him that Bush's vicious goons in the White House are perfectly capable of assassinating Nader and blaming it on him. His staff laughed, but the Secret Service men didn't. Kerry suggested I might make a good running mate, and we reminisced about trying to end the Vietnam War in 1972.

That was the year I first met him, at a riot on that elegant little street in front of the White House. He was yelling into a bullhorn and I was trying to throw a dead rat over a black-spike fence and on to the President's lawn. We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us. We kicked two chief executives out because they were stupid warmongers. We conquered Lyndon Johnson and we stomped on Richard Nixon - which wise people said was impossible, but so what? It was fun. We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river. That river is still running. All we have to do is get out and vote, while it's still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.

. 

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Dusk, River Clyde


Cloch lighthouse (photo by my brother Joe)

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Straight to video

Under Suspicion: Liam Neeson, 1992. Watched it tonight on DVD. Wow, it's humpty!
. 

Monday, October 25, 2004

A safer world, George?

From the New York Times: 

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations. 

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year. 
. 

Sunday, October 24, 2004

They may be mad, you know

As written by Ron Suskind in Without a Doubt:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
. 

Saturday, October 23, 2004

The Yellow Dog Drag

One day, this louse might wallow in the blues. But not this day, I fear: not this day.
. 

Friday, October 22, 2004

What have the Romans ever done for us?

Hubris is not, I hope, a fault I’m guilty of (too often). So it’s with some trepidation that I set down here a hostage to fortune by recalling the words that William Shakespeare put in the mouth of Mark Anthony in Act 3, Scene 2 of the tragedy, Julius Caesar.

We all know the words that start the speech: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. / I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. Then he goes on to do a hatchet job on Brutus.

We all die sooner or later and most of us think too soon; too soon. So it’s natural, perhaps, for each of us to reflect on those who die before us. Maybe it’s even necessary that we pause to remember: as Link has done for its founding editor, Jeff Heath; as an article in Link's current issue does for the sorely missed Kevin Byrne; as I have done in this column for my mate Neil.

It’s another man’s death, however, that brought to mind the words attributed to Mark Anthony. And if I pause to reflect for a moment on what has struck me, it is not so much upon the death that I wish to linger but more upon a complex and, at times, contradictory life. To be frank, and unpopular with some readers, I also want to reflect on the sometimes-disappointing responses that I’ve read to the death I have in mind.

What can I say? In places, some responses lacked charity. (This louse is not moved by Faith but see Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, for what I mean by charity).

But first, a disclaimer: I’m an ageing Leftie. I favour certain ideological positions over others. I have a bias of which you should be aware and, therefore, wary of.

That said: how should we assess a man’s life, an activist for thirty years, who dies too young? Shouldn’t we mourn, with charity, the death of one who:
· has been a public advocate since 1976 on what are now known as ‘green issues’ (long before our mainstream political parties);
· joined Amnesty International in the mid-1970s;
· demonstrated on the streets of Pinochet’s Chile in 1987 against death sentences passed on 77 actors;
· received an award for bravery from a human rights organisation working with and for the victims of torture;
· voted Democrat in America and didn’t run from the label “liberal” (seen as a term of abuse by many in that weird political culture);
· helped to bring about the US 1999 Work Incentives Improvement Act, which allows people with disability to return to work and still receive disability benefits.
· is the only quad in history to win an Emmy;
· and more?

Ah, the penny drops: you mean Christopher Reeve; the stem cell research man; the cure not care man; the quad who said he’d walk before he’s fifty man (but didn’t); the man who some would have us think of as disability’s Uncle Tom. He who is not ‘one of us’. I even heard it said: a traitor.

It’s no secret that this louse and ‘superman’ did not agree on where the stress should fall in the debate about the search for ‘cures’ and the struggles for inclusion. We talked briefly about our different emphases on the one occasion that we met. I told one thousand people I disagreed with him when I was next to speak, after his speech in Sydney last year. I sat next to his wife, his research specialist and other supporters of his view and said as much again the very next day.

But traitor? Uncle Tom? Please!

I watched the world’s media go overboard when Christopher Reeve, 52, father of three, husband, son, actor, movie-maker, Democrat, human rights, disability rights, sustainable ecology and medical research campaigner died. Most of what he believed-in, represented and campaigned for, a movie-loving, un-reconstructed Leftie like me admired, supported and respected. Some of what he did I disagreed with and said so to his face.

But surely charity requires that we, people in a disability ‘movement’ that lays claim to a vision of common humanity and decency, must pause to reflect on the whole man, the complete picture, the life no more or less complex and contradictory than ours.

Not for nothing is it said that charity begins at home. Too many good and decent people have died in recent days. Christopher Reeve is one of them.

. 

Thursday, October 21, 2004

Kerry: 311 Electoral Votes

How?
- increased turnout (up to 80% of voters registered in some swing states). New voters break nearly 70/30 in favour of Kerry

- polls don't include people whose primary phone is a mobile phone. That's 6% of the population, predominantly young people who also break almost 70/30 in favour of Kerry
- Bush polls less than 50% satisfied he's doing a good job and no President with less than 50 has ever been re-elected
- Kerry's using Clinton, which Gore should have done
- Cheney and Ashcroft got their flu injections while Bush is asking citizens to forego their shots.
- Incumbents don't have close results. They win big time or lose big time.

Unless, of course, there's an attack on the US or Bush conjures up bin Laden, either of which would make W a shoe-in.
.

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

almost midnight

troubled by the silent
pause

fall into empty space
hopeful

accepting nothing more
or less

and so remain
forever

. 

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Comings and goings

Susi returned from New Zealand this evening, so that’s brought the day to a happier close than its beginning. She's been asleep for hours, largely because their day started three hours before ours.

After dinner I added 1,400 hundred words to my great unpublished novel. That means there are 43,000 down with about the same number to go and all before Christmas, so that’ll be no great challenge. Still, I succeed in killing my main character. I’m glad that’s out of the way because I feared it might be quite difficult to do. The truth is he’s a much more engaging person dead than alive. That’s why I like him so much. I’m not entirely sure what that says about me.
.

Monday, October 18, 2004

Is the tide turning on George Bush?

From http://www.salon.com

Five more papers that endorsed Bush in 2000 came out this weekend in favor of Kerry instead. No one did it more eloquently than the Bradenton Herald, a daily in Florida's Manatee County. Manatee went big for Bush in 2000, but the Herald says its readers shouldn't let themselves be fooled again.

"When the Herald recommended the election of George W. Bush as president of the United States four years ago, we lauded his record in Texas as a consensus builder and expressed confidence in his ability to unite the country after four years of bitter partisanship. We liked his slogan, 'A uniter, not a divider,' and criticized opponent Al Gore's role as point man for Democrats' mean-spiritedness.

"How poorly we understood George W. Bush in 2000. We could not imagine the possibility that, just four years later, Bush would have done just what we feared of Gore -- that the United States would barely be on speaking terms with some of its staunchest allies, and that America would be reviled around the world as a bullying, imperialist superpower. How far we have fallen from the bright fiscal forecast in 2000, with surpluses that offered the promise of debt paydown now replaced with a staggering $500 billion annual deficit and the national debt projected to exceed $9 trillion by 2010.

"As for Bush being a uniter, sadly, the nation is more polarized than it has been since the 1960s. Bush's administration is notable for its lack of transparency, its intolerance of dissent, its refusal to admit mistakes. Under Bush's leadership and Republican control, Congress has become a mean-spirited, partisan body where the vice president is praised for cursing an opposition senator on the Senate floor. The 'compassionate conservative' president has people at outdoor rallies arrested for hoisting an opposition sign.

"But all of this is overshadowed by the two most significant issues in this campaign: the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism. In both, Bush has failed as well -- to our country's great peril."

There's much more where that came from, and it's all at http://www.salon.com

.

Sunday, October 17, 2004

Spreading freedom

from http://www.truthout.org 

American soldiers carry away the remains of someone killed by a bomb attack inside their 'Green Zone'. And President Bush still asks us to believe that the Mission Accomplished will result in elections within three months. (photograph: Washington Post)

Saturday, October 16, 2004

Bush says ... things are getting better in Iraq

From http://www.salon.com

According to family members, the convoy was being asked to go much farther than usual from its southern base -- on a more than 200-mile trip through and around the extremely hostile Baghdad area. The tankers lacked bullet-resistant armor and, lumbering along at 40 miles an hour, would have made an easy target for insurgents lobbing bombs or grenades. The supply trucks are in disrepair and prone to breakdown. Many of the soldiers hadn't had enough sleep. And – astonishingly -- no armed escort or air protection was to be provided, the family members said.

Most absurdly, though, the jet fuel that these members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company were risking life and limb to transport wasn't even usable. It was contaminated with diesel and had already sensibly been rejected by one base and would undoubtedly be rejected again in Taji -- if the convoy managed to make it to its destination at all.

. 

Friday, October 15, 2004

Dr Who?

I blink, therefore I am
turned on, attuned

you think, to laws of man
burned on, galvanized

with zinc; hot wired
off and on, binary code

to link the three great laws
built on the works of Asimov.

Or do I wink, because I can
lead on, beguiling readers

who still think the laws of man
seized on a truth, not fiction?

Lyp sinc on this robotic rule:
count on the carbon life-form fool.

This Dalek says: I cannot wait.
This Dalek says: EXTERMINATE!!!!

.

Thursday, October 14, 2004

Moldova?

It is bad enough that the louse faces a second day in bed while his paralysed arse recovers from its small scrape. For Scotland to draw with Moldova in the World Cup qualifying competition just piles on the misery. I'm afraid that Mr Vogts has to go.
. 

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Life is a pain in the ass

There's a small piece of scraped skin on my bum apparently. So that'll be the next few days decided. When you've been paralysed for twenty years you take note of such small damage or it becomes big damage. And if you want to understand just how serious the damage can become, ask Christopher Reeve.
. 

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Wimbledon

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. There is a law of diminishing returns operating here, isn't there? Not even the best efforts of thoroughly watchable Paul Bettany could prevent this from trudging with too few laughs to its inevitable conclusion. The poverty of imagination on display is breathtaking. I imagine the film-makers will be laughing all the way to the bank. But how many times can they re-shoot 4W&AF before we get totally bored by that original conceit?
. 

Monday, October 11, 2004

Christopher Reeve

We spoke at the same conference, in Sydney, last year. We placed the emphasis in different places on the spectrum between what has become known as 'cure or care'. The common ground that we shared, however, made our differences pale into insignificance. A decent human being died yesterday, much too young as always.

Sunday, October 10, 2004

Australians vote

We're still not happy, John! If you're a louse, like me, it was ghastly to watch the results come in last night. I feared the bastards would win but watching them triumph beyond everyone's expectations is not easy.

What can we make of the result, I wonder? They have an increased majority in the House of Representatives and look likely to take control of the Senate too.

It's too easy and comforting (if falsely so) to fall back on the Labor Party line that a big lie won the victory for the Right. It's true that people in the marginal electorates are anxious about their huge mortgages and big debt. But the ALP needs to start winning hearts and minds, not just fighting too little and too late over voters' bank balances. Unless they do some paradigm shifting the Left here is always going to lose out until the economic cycle of boom and bust starts to do some busting. And who would want to inherit an economy going to hell in a handcart?
.

Saturday, October 09, 2004

Three hundred years later ...

Scotland's Parliament Chamber, which was formally opened today.

Friday, October 08, 2004

Chemin de Jerusalem

To walk, as pilgrims walked,
the labyrinthine way
of virtual penitence
before their understanding God,
our Lord and Maker,
an architect’s precision
marked the hallowed ground
with immaculate asymmetry:
one route in and out,
beginning with the end;
a single path traversing
quadrants north and south,
east and west; eleven circuits
leading inward to the six-leafed core
of contemplation.

In Chartres,
eight hundred years ago,
repentance on its knees
and hope upon its quest
commenced modernity:
worship in the Gothic age.
The road of Jerusalem
became a metaphor

in stone for pious men,
too poor, too rich
or too pre-occupied
with daily bread
to walk the holy walk.

Today that path is trod
- infrequently. Perhaps
we take a photograph
or wonder at those masons,
crafting work that stood
the tests of times long gone,


or it may be we lay down
good intentions on a road
now much less travelled.

. 

Thursday, October 07, 2004

There were no weapons of mass destruction

As written in the UK's The Independent;

Now we finally know what we had long suspected. When US and British forces invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein had no chemical weapons; he had no biological weapons; he had no nuclear weapons. In fact, he had no banned weapons at all. That is the considered judgement of the Iraq Survey Group, set up by President Bush to prove his case for removing the Iraqi dictator, and released in Washington last night.

The ISG report proves precisely the opposite. The much-maligned international regime of weapons containment had functioned exactly as it was supposed to. After his failed effort to annex Kuwait, Saddam Hussein was progressively disarmed.

Establishing this truth has required half a dozen top-level inquiries on either side of the Atlantic, the spending of millions of dollars and pounds, the dispatch of hundreds of UN weapons inspectors over the years, and - since the removal of Saddam Hussein - the work of 1,200 inspectors who scoured the country under the auspices of the US-directed Iraq Survey Group.

Oh yes, and it took a war, a war in which thousands of Iraqis, more than 1,000 Americans and more than 100 British and soldiers of other nationalities have died. Iraq is a devastated country that risks sliding into anarchy. And what has it all been for?
. 

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Rumsfeld lifts the lid again

The BBC's web site reports:

Donald Rumsfeld has cast doubt on whether there was ever a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. The alleged link was one of the justifications used by President Bush for the invasion of Iraq.

Mr Rumsfeld was asked by a New York audience about connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two," he said. 
. 

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

... resigned

19. ............ dxe5
20. Nxe5+, Kb5
21. c4+, Ka5
22. Rd-a1+, Na2
23. Rxa2+, Kb4
24. Nd3+, Kb3
25. Nc1+, Kc2



First win
. 

Monday, October 04, 2004

Restless

I have been this way before
(too many times before)
when everything I sought to say
seemed immature and juvenile,
wasteful of energies, which,
when used by other hands,
electrify the soul
sent searching for a meaning,
for a purpose or an explanation,
at least an answer to the question
that we all must ask, one day,

when truth descends
upon our consciousness
like dusk falling at the end
of long and lazy summer days,
when cicadas irritate the sun
until it sets into the silent night’s
still air,
apparently immovable,
fixed and weighing heavily
on the minds of restless sleepers
asking why?

. 

Sunday, October 03, 2004

Grasping at straws

Partick Thistle 2
Raith Rovers 0

something short of inspirational.
. 

Saturday, October 02, 2004

The life and death of Peter Sellers

It felt like a bit of a con job. The cast are excellent: Geoffrey Rush especially but also Emily Watson and Miriam Margolyse(?). Very dodgy script, I have to say. It defines characters in part by showing us how they act when they're alone. And that's often when they're shown at their most dislikeable. The problem is: if they were alone at the time, how can we know? (Pete’s mum watching TV news of her son’s heart attacks is the clearest example of characterisation maybe written to fit the plot rather than truth). None of us are better off for this film. It's a waste of superb talent. Who has a right to care (except his family and friends who actually new him) if Peter Sellers was a shit from time to time or all the time? That’s their business, not mine. I’m a movie watcher and I love (most of) his movies. They'll last long after this dubious piece has vanished from the screen.
. 

Friday, October 01, 2004