For those in the UK, the clocks go back today. An extra hour sleeping. Goody.
But will this last. Some council leaders want to shift the whole time system forward an hour, to save the lives of schoolchildren and cyclists.
However, this is rejected by (mainly) Scottish MPs, because they say if this would endanger the lives of schoolchildren.
Oh, I don't know who to believe. Sort it out between yourselves!
Cory
Lots of banks aren't doing their job properly:
Several leading banks may be facing unlimited fines over allegations that they dumped confidential customer account details in bin bags on streets...
Mr Thomas said among the findings in bin bags were bank statements, loan applications which had been turned down and paying-in slips.
It comes after BBC investigators found customer names, addresses and account details when rifling through discarded rubbish.
Just rifling through discarded rubbish, they were. As you do.
This is pretty dreadful. Made even worse by that fact that one of the banks in question is my bank!
In response to all this, Yahoo has given us some guidelines on how to protect identity fraud. Now we ought to do that stuff, but there seems precious little point if your bank is just going to take your details and just dump them on the street.
Cory
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Expect blogging from me to be a little slow for the next week or so - an essay on 10th century monastic reform to do. If you're good, I may post it here, so you can read it. You wish!
Cory
At Oldham Athletic, we have had our share of unpopular owners over the years. We used to have Ken Bates as chairman, back in the 60s. Then before the current owners came in, Chris Moore was our big cheese. He brought in lots of players, then felt he was losing too much money and withdrew his 95% stake of the club. That shafted us; we were 24 hours from bankruptcy for virtually six months.
However, none of that even gets near the madness of Hearts FC's current owner, Vladimir Romanov:
Romanov says he will move players on to "Kilmarnock or whatever club will take them" unless [Hearts] defeat Dunfermline.
And he has warned that he would then play a team of youngsters against Celtic the following weekend.
Roddy Forsyth on 5Live was also saying that Romanov may even play himself!
The man's clearly lost it, though the situation is kindof funny, if you share my warped sense of humour.
It is, though, sad that football clubs have become a haven for petty rich men for flex their egos, cash, and petty little quarrels.
Cory
Their campaign to stop the closing of small post offices. It's not the campaign as such, just their logo for it, which is as tabloidy as it comes:
Elvis Costello is releasing new DVDs!
See here.
I remember seeing the live "A Case For Song" on VHS when my mum bought it Dad for his birthday. I was about nine or ten. An important bit of my musical education. I'm really pleased it's now on DVD, as I think the video's worn out now!
Also talk of a concert DVD for this year being released in the UK. Fingers crossed!
Cory
This short piece from the Guardian:
Hospital workers face comedy sock ban
East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust wants to ban doctors and nurses from wearing novelty socks because they are "unprofessional". Uniformed staff could face disciplinary action if they sport such characters as Homer Simpson, Mr Blobby and Wallace and Gromit on their ankles. The proposal forms part of a new dress code being discussed by the trust's board. The trust wants a "corporate image which presents a professional and business-like approach". The new code would also ban opaque clothing, clothing that is too tight or too loose, and plunging necklines.
Press Association
Does this mean doctors will be forced to wear transparent clothing? We should be told.
Cory
George Orwell, something of a literary hero of mine, wrote in his 1946 essay 'Why I Write':
I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.This 'power of facing' was arguably his greatest asset as a writer. It must have come in handy whilst he fought his battles against his three great foes. Imperialism; which his rejection of cut any ties he might have had to his family's old cash cow. Communism; against which he fought his longest and most bitter struggle, remember, nothing is as hate-filled as a Comrade scorned; and Fascism - a disgusting ideology against which he saw fit to grab a rifle and hurl himself against.Central to this 'power of facing' is to admit when you have got things wrong. It is difficult, it is humiliating, and it is harder to do the longer you ignore it; But like an elephant in the room, it bears down on you, demanding attention and acting as a dam to your intellect, preventing you from addressing any other issue until the omnipresent pachyderm is dealt with.
We got it wrong. We all got it terribly wrong. All the columnists, pseudo-intellectuals and 'experts' who backed the war in Iraq (I almost said Bushes war, but it was Our war as well) should feel cowed and intimidated by the magnitude of their mistake. It was never going to work, and the true experts said so. All the hubris and self-righteous squawking about the 'flowering of democracy' ignored history, ignored evidence and ignored reason.
I am talking here not of the upper echelons of the Bush administration. Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. are old school nationalist Conservatives who never gave a damn about the Iraqi people and had no interest in seeing Iraq become a country for and of its people rather than a state lording it over them. Rumsfeld just wanted to go in and bomb the crap out of a few Arabs. Blow some shit up. Show 'em who is boss. American Iron, American Steel, American hegemony. Might makes right. Never having been a fan of Bush and Rumsfeld and the rest of the junta and not believing for a minute their bullshit about Weapons of Mass Destruction, I looked elsewhere for justification. My search led me to the writings of Christopher Hitchens, the famous journalist and polemicist. Well spoken, incredibly intelligent and possessed with an acid wit and sharp turn of phrase, Hitchens seemed the ideal advocate for this noble enterprise I was supporting. It helped that the most vocal opponents of the war were the repulsive neo-fascists of RESPECT and their demagogue-in-chief, the slobbering and spitting and drooling George 'Slug' Galloway. I had no wish to associate myself with such people. No, instead I would read the work of this gentleman man-of-letters and take my position alongside him accordingly. (Incidentally, for those who think Hitchens is as boorish and rude as Galloway, remember this phrase: 'a gentleman is never rude except on purpose'.) Hitchens' polemics in favour of regime change were convincing and his essays about the plight of the Kurds and the brutality of Saddam had me enthusiastically signing up for his removal. So on it went for several years afterwards. As things rapidly deteriorated in Iraq I read more and more pro-war literature in a desperate effort to shore up my rapidly declining confidence in the whole adventure. Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Nick Cohen. Even Tony Blair, a man who I respect and admire as Prime Minister, had a lot of stirring rhetoric to deliver about Freedom and democracy and all the rest of it. The blogsphere also made its contribution - Harry’s Place, Normblog and Oliver Kamm were all articulate and effective proponents of the war. Andrew Sullivan in America also had much to say about Iraq that I found inspiring and persuasive.But they were all wrong. As was I. It was never going to work. The thinkers who supported the war should have realized several things.1. Saying 'You go to war with the President you have' represents a gross refusal to face reality. The fact was, Bush was President and Rumsfeld was Defence Secretary and the war was designed and carried out by them. Wanting to see the end of Saddam was the only moral position to take, but to then ignore all other factors when someone proposes to remove him represents a sacrifice of reason and a profound lapse in judgment. Bush was not the President to do it. The time was not right. What was the right time? Not then, not now, not with the Junta in charge.
2. For a while I thought that sending more troops was the answer. Supporters of the war (once again, I include myself amongst them) dodged their own culpability by throwing out the charge of incompetence at the Administration. Of course, this charge is completely true, but it came too late. We should have been saying it before the war started. We should have realised that the Junta had no interest in doing the right thing. We should have doubted. Many of us did, but we thought we would give it a shot anyway. We dealt in possibilities, in what might happen and wishful thinking overtook us. We looked at the successful society that surrounds us and expected others to rush to build it straight away. They would understand that we were there to help them. Ours was the language of hopes, dreams and vagueness. Orwell spoke of the danger of such thinking in his Politics and the English Language:
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia
Undoubtedly many were sincere in their wish to see the Iraqis succeed, but as things spiraled into the abyss we started muttering increasingly meaningless phrases such as 'staying the course' and 'no cutting and running' with no thought as to what they meant. Our euphemisms were resulting in people being killed. Our idealism had already cost the lives of thousands upon thousands.
There is seldom something as dangerous as a zealous idealist infected with a sense of 'destiny'. History is littered with examples of tragedies being wrought by those who had ostensibly noble aims. The French and Russian Revolutions are perhaps the two best examples of this. Hitchens is perhaps the worst offender here. So convinced is he that his cause is right and his fight just, that he sweeps under the carpet the death and destruction the war in Iraq has sparked. His ideological fervour is something that I do not share, having never been a revolutionary Marxist. His belief that America under Bush has become a Jeffersonian-Thomas Paine-esque 'Empire for democracy' which spreads freedom with power is flawed. I admire America very much, but it is still a nation-state; and nation states have interests and, no matter how much Hitchens wishes it were so, those interests are not based on any good sense of morality. Kissinger may be an odious man, but he is closer to reality than Hitchens. Being able to change your mind is a very precious thing. I was wrong. I turned into an idealist, perhaps even an ideologue. A better appreciation of the limits of my own judgement and of the ability of government to effect change in such a drastic way in a part of the world we little understood would have resulted in a more reality-based position.-posted by Adam
Ming Campbell wants troops out of Iraq:
"There is a moral obligation - even those of us who were opposed to the war accepted a moral obligation to the people of Iraq - but it can't be open-ended.
"It's got to be somehow reflected in Iraqi government and in the Iraqi people taking responsibility for themselves."
He said the government needed to explain to Parliament and the UK public what was happening, as there had not been a debate on Iraq for two years.
I prefer, however, the view of the deputy Iraqi Prime Minister:
Iraq deputy PM Barham Salih said his country still needed the international community to help fight extremists.
"We need to work together to ensure that that day will come when Iraqis are fully in charge of security," he said.
The fact is, we've made such a massive pig's ear of the whole thing, that we cannot just abandon Iraq now. We must keep troops in Iraq until the country is stable enough to look after itself. For better or worse.
Cory
...now that's what I call business.
Cory
