Being able to travel to the USA: Priceless
For non USA citizens, visiting the USA has gotten more difficult since 9/11. And for some non-citizens, it can be impossible. But in the coverage of these unfortunate cases, there is a particular class of barred individuals whose plight has been shamefully ignored by the liberal media -- that of the rich tycoon who can't enter the USA because he'd be arrested or served with messy writs the moment he set foot in the place. And we're not talking about the exiled US citizens such as Marc Rich, forced to summer (and winter) in Zug, Switzerland, until his pardon by Bill Clinton.
Rather, we have in mind someone like Nicky Oppenheimer, chairman of De Beers. Nicky can jet between Cape Town, London, and all points in between no problem, but his huge wealth is not enough to get him or any of the Oppenheimers or De Beers executives into the USA, because the government has two diamond price fixing cases pending against the family company. Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday (subs. req'd) that De Beers is looking to settle the cases, not least because the taint attached to diamonds from the legal concerns and their often dubious sourcing is hurting their ability to compete with other luxury goods. So one of these days, Nicky might get to visit his company's biggest market.
We bring this up because even as Nicky gets off the barred list, he could be replaced by none other than Conrad "Lord" Black. We haven't posted about Black in a while, but he suffered a major legal reversal this week when a Delaware court blocked one of his typically brazen stunts. Black was looking to do a back-door sale of his media empire at a knock-down price to a mysterious Channel Islands company, but the judge ruled that Black was trying to screw the other shareholders in his empire by doing so, and furthermore that he had almost certainly lied to the court in his explanation of how the deal was put together.
Thus poor Conrad has handed a gift to the blizzard of lawsuits against him and may even have perjured himself. Sounds like a good reason to hang out in London for a long time, safe from the reach of the American courts. While in London, he can host his pal Richard Perle, key promoter of the Iraq war, who should be flying in any day to sue the New Yorker for libel [this Slate story explains]. He can always send a shopping list for his favourite American goodies with Lady Black, who will doubtless want to take advantage of the cheap dollar to add to her shoe collection.
Saturday, February 28, 2004
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Soldier of Naivete
During his now extremely long tenure as leader of the Irish Republic's natural party of government, Fianna Fail, and as Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern has specialised in a studied naivete about the party's corrupt past and the ongoing tendency of its senior figures to get embroiled in extended investigations. But Bertie wants us to know that he's not completely naive, because he's gone on record today as saying that he always understood Gerry Adams to be a Provo:
The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has said he has always assumed that the Sinn Fein President, Gerry Adams, had been a member of the IRA.
Mr Ahern said he was not concerned as to how close Mr Adams was to the IRA now.
Mr Ahern also said he did not know the present membership of the IRA army council, but that it was a question that was worth finding the answer to.
That's vintage Bertie in the last sentence -- it would be worth finding out who's on the Army Council now, but then again it would also be worth knowing the meaning of life and the latest sales figures for daughter Cecelia's chick-lit novel. Don't expect Bertie to put too much effort into that Army Council question with such other pressing issues on the table.
And Bertie's savviness about there being an Armalite on the Adams bedside table is in stark contrast to his oft-claimed ignorance about just why it was that senior Fianna Fail figures always seemed to be rolling in cash even with the economy, let alone the party's own treasury, in perpetually lean circumstances. Just this month, the Irish Times reported (subs. req'd) on a radio interview that Bertie had given the previous day:
Asked why he thought there had been such an extent of wrongdoing in the late 1980s, [Bertie] said: "The difficulty was that there were no rules. People just assumed that the highest of standards of probity and controls were in place and it got shoddy and people did wrong things."
He said he didn't suspect such activities were going on at the time. "In the ordinary run of things you get on with your work and you get on with things and you don't suspect that anyone is doing anything particularly wrong and you don't dwell on it...
Asked if he had ever suspected any of his colleagues of wrongdoing, he said: "Back in the 1980s the answer is No...I did not suspect there was anyone going around giving huge donations or involved in any kind of corruption. It's a pity any of these things happened.
So something about Gerry Adams (the Northern accent?) tipped off Bertie that there might be two sides to him, but Haughey's Dublin mansion, the private island, the trips to Paris; Liam Lawlor's delightfully Irish-named home (Somerton); the impeccably tailored Padraig Flynn, Ray Burke's trips to the Shelbourne with blank passports to meet visiting Saudis -- Bertie just had his head down, hard at work, serving the people of north Dublin and saw or heard nothing.
No wonder Dubya is visiting the Republic in June for a chat with Bertie, from whose ability to shut out the background noise and focus on what really matters he can truly learn something.
During his now extremely long tenure as leader of the Irish Republic's natural party of government, Fianna Fail, and as Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern has specialised in a studied naivete about the party's corrupt past and the ongoing tendency of its senior figures to get embroiled in extended investigations. But Bertie wants us to know that he's not completely naive, because he's gone on record today as saying that he always understood Gerry Adams to be a Provo:
The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has said he has always assumed that the Sinn Fein President, Gerry Adams, had been a member of the IRA.
Mr Ahern said he was not concerned as to how close Mr Adams was to the IRA now.
Mr Ahern also said he did not know the present membership of the IRA army council, but that it was a question that was worth finding the answer to.
That's vintage Bertie in the last sentence -- it would be worth finding out who's on the Army Council now, but then again it would also be worth knowing the meaning of life and the latest sales figures for daughter Cecelia's chick-lit novel. Don't expect Bertie to put too much effort into that Army Council question with such other pressing issues on the table.
And Bertie's savviness about there being an Armalite on the Adams bedside table is in stark contrast to his oft-claimed ignorance about just why it was that senior Fianna Fail figures always seemed to be rolling in cash even with the economy, let alone the party's own treasury, in perpetually lean circumstances. Just this month, the Irish Times reported (subs. req'd) on a radio interview that Bertie had given the previous day:
Asked why he thought there had been such an extent of wrongdoing in the late 1980s, [Bertie] said: "The difficulty was that there were no rules. People just assumed that the highest of standards of probity and controls were in place and it got shoddy and people did wrong things."
He said he didn't suspect such activities were going on at the time. "In the ordinary run of things you get on with your work and you get on with things and you don't suspect that anyone is doing anything particularly wrong and you don't dwell on it...
Asked if he had ever suspected any of his colleagues of wrongdoing, he said: "Back in the 1980s the answer is No...I did not suspect there was anyone going around giving huge donations or involved in any kind of corruption. It's a pity any of these things happened.
So something about Gerry Adams (the Northern accent?) tipped off Bertie that there might be two sides to him, but Haughey's Dublin mansion, the private island, the trips to Paris; Liam Lawlor's delightfully Irish-named home (Somerton); the impeccably tailored Padraig Flynn, Ray Burke's trips to the Shelbourne with blank passports to meet visiting Saudis -- Bertie just had his head down, hard at work, serving the people of north Dublin and saw or heard nothing.
No wonder Dubya is visiting the Republic in June for a chat with Bertie, from whose ability to shut out the background noise and focus on what really matters he can truly learn something.
What if it was only Meath that wanted gay marriage?
Wednesday was a bad day for Dubya. Alan Greenspan spoke the truth about the tax-cuts (they'll be deducted from Americans' future social security cheques), and his proposal for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage has gone down like a lead balloon even within the home team. And it has contributed to one of the more pathetic spectacles in Blogistan -- prominent gay conservative, Andrew Sullivan, finally realising that he's as expendable as yesterday's fishwrap when it comes to his once beloved Dubya's electoral calculations. Sullywatch gets in a particularly cruel cut:
It would, come to think of it, be really, really hilarious if Sullivan went down as the Neville Chamberlain of gay history.
And Sullivan's blog has become basically an open thread of mostly negative ruminations on the perceived stab in the back. One of the reader e-mails is of Irish interest, noting accurately the counterproductive history of the attempt to play moral politics with the constitution in the Republic; the country had perfectly good (if you're anti-abortion) legislation left over from the days in the UK completely outlawing abortion, but pro-life groups wanted it "copper-fastened" with a constitutional amendment. As the reader explains, the final outcome is a legal grey area that may actually have created a limited right to get an abortion in the Republic (there is a de facto option to get one in Britain anyway).
Of course we Irish are always flattered when it seems that we have useful lessons for the rest of the world, so if Sullivan wants to use this lesson, fine. Now, there are differences between the cases. Most notably, the US always has its federal structure as a fallback option -- let the states decide how they want to handle such issues. As a unitary state, the Republic can't do that. There's not much of a "county rights" agenda in the Republic, although with the abysmal way the central government is being run these days, maybe there needs to be one. We'll spend a little while thinking about which county in such a world would the first to allow gay marriage.
Wednesday was a bad day for Dubya. Alan Greenspan spoke the truth about the tax-cuts (they'll be deducted from Americans' future social security cheques), and his proposal for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage has gone down like a lead balloon even within the home team. And it has contributed to one of the more pathetic spectacles in Blogistan -- prominent gay conservative, Andrew Sullivan, finally realising that he's as expendable as yesterday's fishwrap when it comes to his once beloved Dubya's electoral calculations. Sullywatch gets in a particularly cruel cut:
It would, come to think of it, be really, really hilarious if Sullivan went down as the Neville Chamberlain of gay history.
And Sullivan's blog has become basically an open thread of mostly negative ruminations on the perceived stab in the back. One of the reader e-mails is of Irish interest, noting accurately the counterproductive history of the attempt to play moral politics with the constitution in the Republic; the country had perfectly good (if you're anti-abortion) legislation left over from the days in the UK completely outlawing abortion, but pro-life groups wanted it "copper-fastened" with a constitutional amendment. As the reader explains, the final outcome is a legal grey area that may actually have created a limited right to get an abortion in the Republic (there is a de facto option to get one in Britain anyway).
Of course we Irish are always flattered when it seems that we have useful lessons for the rest of the world, so if Sullivan wants to use this lesson, fine. Now, there are differences between the cases. Most notably, the US always has its federal structure as a fallback option -- let the states decide how they want to handle such issues. As a unitary state, the Republic can't do that. There's not much of a "county rights" agenda in the Republic, although with the abysmal way the central government is being run these days, maybe there needs to be one. We'll spend a little while thinking about which county in such a world would the first to allow gay marriage.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
The Passion of the Dubya
A few months ago, President Bush was widely and justly ridiculed for a claim that each attack by insurgents in Iraq was proof that the occupation was making progress. It is likely that most people who don't think much of Dubya to begin with filed that incident under D, for delusional. But maybe it should have been under A, for apocalyptic. In a seemingly unrelated discussion reported by the New York Times by a group of clergy from different faiths of the Mel Gibson Jesus film, there is the following revealing and insightful opinion:
He [Greek Orthodox] and the other Christian clergy members agreed that the movie was based on a "theology of atonement" familiar to evangelicals, one that emphasizes Jesus' suffering and sacrifice over his resurrection.
They noted that the movie had opened with a passage from Isaiah: "With his stripes we are healed."
Mr. Blackwell, the Methodist pastor said: "If your theology is blood, and you're washed clean in the blood, then the more blood and suffering the better because the more salvation there is in it. If that's your theology, the more stripes, the more you are healed.
Not hard to see how that becomes a justification for war; the messier, the better.
A few months ago, President Bush was widely and justly ridiculed for a claim that each attack by insurgents in Iraq was proof that the occupation was making progress. It is likely that most people who don't think much of Dubya to begin with filed that incident under D, for delusional. But maybe it should have been under A, for apocalyptic. In a seemingly unrelated discussion reported by the New York Times by a group of clergy from different faiths of the Mel Gibson Jesus film, there is the following revealing and insightful opinion:
He [Greek Orthodox] and the other Christian clergy members agreed that the movie was based on a "theology of atonement" familiar to evangelicals, one that emphasizes Jesus' suffering and sacrifice over his resurrection.
They noted that the movie had opened with a passage from Isaiah: "With his stripes we are healed."
Mr. Blackwell, the Methodist pastor said: "If your theology is blood, and you're washed clean in the blood, then the more blood and suffering the better because the more salvation there is in it. If that's your theology, the more stripes, the more you are healed.
Not hard to see how that becomes a justification for war; the messier, the better.
Justice delayed is justice denied
A little while ago, in a post since eaten by our inability to get blogger to properly archive old posts, we had noted the extremely sloppy investigative techniques of the Irish Republic's police force in the 1970s, which had hindered a thorough investigation of bombings in Dublin and Monaghan that may have involved elements of the British security forces. We'll refer you to the Shamrockshire Eagle for more details on the latest twists in that investigation, but one lingering question for us was whether the investigation of a similar event today would be just as sloppy. We fear that it would.
Now this is not a directly comparable incident, but the way that the police are approaching the investigation of a tragic bus accident in Dublin gives us cause for concern. The accident details have filled the pages of the Irish papers since it happened on Saturday and the outline of what happened is simple and depressing: one city bus with no passengers ploughed into a line of people boarding the 66 bus to Maynooth, killing 5 and injuring 3 times as many. But from this Irish Times report, we learn that 3 days later, the police had yet to interview the driver of either bus.
Maybe we've watched too many Law and Order episodes, in which such a gap would be viewed as a disastrous error, giving the interviewees time to cook up a story. And this is presumably not a criminal investigation. But...
But 5 people are dead. Some severe individual or corporate negligence might be involved. The delay in the interviews is rationalised by the emotional state of the drivers --
Crash investigators attached to both the garda and Dublin Bus investigations are anxious to speak to the drivers. The bus company said yesterday the "level of distress and coherency are issues which are still being addressed by specialist counsellors".
But how about the emotional state of the victims? And given the inevitable feelings of guilt and responsibility, even with the best will in the world the mind can play tricks with memories of what happened as each day passes. The public have been assured that the best international experts will be brought in to figure out what happened. We suspect it will take those experts about two seconds -- someone had their foot on the accelerator when they thought they had it on the brake.
The experts would then move to secondary responsibility issues: are the pedals on the bus too close? was the bus-stop poorly designed in exposing boarding passengers to this risk (many preliminary indications say that it was). However, with the investigative delay, there is time for other explanations to emerge. Freak explanations of course, but ones that could still find a constituency. The people promulgating them might genuinely believe them (the bus just lurched forward, I never touched anything).
And the Republic being what it is, a good story is just one step removed from a media appearance, a pressure group, and a multi-year tribunal of inquiry. A contemporaneous interview with the principals would provide a baseline to judge any subsequent interpretations of the events. But now we don't have it. In this day and age, the job description of the Irish police should involve more than saying "what's going on, lads" to the local bowsies. The classic Law and Order interview strategy involves Mr Nasty and Mr Nice. There seems to be times when the Garda's Mr Nasty goes AWOL.
A little while ago, in a post since eaten by our inability to get blogger to properly archive old posts, we had noted the extremely sloppy investigative techniques of the Irish Republic's police force in the 1970s, which had hindered a thorough investigation of bombings in Dublin and Monaghan that may have involved elements of the British security forces. We'll refer you to the Shamrockshire Eagle for more details on the latest twists in that investigation, but one lingering question for us was whether the investigation of a similar event today would be just as sloppy. We fear that it would.
Now this is not a directly comparable incident, but the way that the police are approaching the investigation of a tragic bus accident in Dublin gives us cause for concern. The accident details have filled the pages of the Irish papers since it happened on Saturday and the outline of what happened is simple and depressing: one city bus with no passengers ploughed into a line of people boarding the 66 bus to Maynooth, killing 5 and injuring 3 times as many. But from this Irish Times report, we learn that 3 days later, the police had yet to interview the driver of either bus.
Maybe we've watched too many Law and Order episodes, in which such a gap would be viewed as a disastrous error, giving the interviewees time to cook up a story. And this is presumably not a criminal investigation. But...
But 5 people are dead. Some severe individual or corporate negligence might be involved. The delay in the interviews is rationalised by the emotional state of the drivers --
Crash investigators attached to both the garda and Dublin Bus investigations are anxious to speak to the drivers. The bus company said yesterday the "level of distress and coherency are issues which are still being addressed by specialist counsellors".
But how about the emotional state of the victims? And given the inevitable feelings of guilt and responsibility, even with the best will in the world the mind can play tricks with memories of what happened as each day passes. The public have been assured that the best international experts will be brought in to figure out what happened. We suspect it will take those experts about two seconds -- someone had their foot on the accelerator when they thought they had it on the brake.
The experts would then move to secondary responsibility issues: are the pedals on the bus too close? was the bus-stop poorly designed in exposing boarding passengers to this risk (many preliminary indications say that it was). However, with the investigative delay, there is time for other explanations to emerge. Freak explanations of course, but ones that could still find a constituency. The people promulgating them might genuinely believe them (the bus just lurched forward, I never touched anything).
And the Republic being what it is, a good story is just one step removed from a media appearance, a pressure group, and a multi-year tribunal of inquiry. A contemporaneous interview with the principals would provide a baseline to judge any subsequent interpretations of the events. But now we don't have it. In this day and age, the job description of the Irish police should involve more than saying "what's going on, lads" to the local bowsies. The classic Law and Order interview strategy involves Mr Nasty and Mr Nice. There seems to be times when the Garda's Mr Nasty goes AWOL.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
His Day is Here
Yesterday we noted that, by the standards of the New Ireland, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern can be proud of his family -- one daughter married into a boyband, and the other with a high profile novel. But as Bertie looks around at his fellow prime ministers at the next summit, he might still feel like he's in the ha'penny place. Real PMs own football clubs. The prime example is Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, owner of reigning European club champions AC Milan. Now it seems like Asian PMs want in on the act. This BBC story claims that Thai PM Thaksin Shinawatra wants to buy Liverpool football club and he certainly has the cash to do it.
Thaksin's entry into politics and his generally shameless self-promotion makes him very different from those reclusive Oirish businessmen who may or may not be buying Manchester United. Being Liverpool fans ourselves, our main hope would be that, if he does buy the club, he gets around to sacking manager Gerard Houllier as soon as possible, and (in the dream scenario we share with Tory leader Michael Howard) bring in Derryman Martin O'Neill from Celtic as the new manager.
But back to Bertie. What if he now views his Italian or Thai counterparts as a new role model? For one thing, the party name would have to change. Both have a preference for apolitical but populist names: for Berlusconi it's the football chant Forza Italia (Go Italy) and for Thaksin it's Thais Love Thais, a fine sentiment indeed. But Bertie is saddled with the name Fianna Fail, Soldiers of Destiny, which is a tad strident. There is however, a ready-made alternative. Look for the Republic's natural party of government to be renamed You'll Never Beat the Irish.
Yesterday we noted that, by the standards of the New Ireland, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern can be proud of his family -- one daughter married into a boyband, and the other with a high profile novel. But as Bertie looks around at his fellow prime ministers at the next summit, he might still feel like he's in the ha'penny place. Real PMs own football clubs. The prime example is Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, owner of reigning European club champions AC Milan. Now it seems like Asian PMs want in on the act. This BBC story claims that Thai PM Thaksin Shinawatra wants to buy Liverpool football club and he certainly has the cash to do it.
Thaksin's entry into politics and his generally shameless self-promotion makes him very different from those reclusive Oirish businessmen who may or may not be buying Manchester United. Being Liverpool fans ourselves, our main hope would be that, if he does buy the club, he gets around to sacking manager Gerard Houllier as soon as possible, and (in the dream scenario we share with Tory leader Michael Howard) bring in Derryman Martin O'Neill from Celtic as the new manager.
But back to Bertie. What if he now views his Italian or Thai counterparts as a new role model? For one thing, the party name would have to change. Both have a preference for apolitical but populist names: for Berlusconi it's the football chant Forza Italia (Go Italy) and for Thaksin it's Thais Love Thais, a fine sentiment indeed. But Bertie is saddled with the name Fianna Fail, Soldiers of Destiny, which is a tad strident. There is however, a ready-made alternative. Look for the Republic's natural party of government to be renamed You'll Never Beat the Irish.
Monday, February 23, 2004
Anorak man spawns Blahnik Woman
The Republic of Ireland's VIP culture arrived with a thud in the USA over the weekend -- specifically the thud of the Sunday New York Times on its readers' doorsteps. Contained within the paper's Sunday Styles section was a full page ad for Cecelia Ahern's novel, P.S. I Love You. And while the NYT's readers were sold on Ms. Ahern's novel via a blurb from fellow novelist Marian Keyes, us Irish readers are more inclined to think of her as...Bertie's other daughter, not the one married to the dude from Westlife.
If all of these references are producing a series of "Who?s" from our vast American readership, we can't blame them for not being sufficiently immersed in the goings-on of the Republic's quasi-royalty. So just to get everyone caught up, Bertie is our Taoiseach (i.e. Prime Minister), Westlife is a home-grown boyband one of whom married a daughter of Bertie's last year, and now Cecelia has arrived with what is being pitched as a major Irish entry in the chick-lit sweepstakes, a genre of literature which we are poorly qualified to evaluate. But since a visit to just about any bookstore will feature a wall of chick-lit books, we are frankly sceptical that there's really a new angle or style in this one lifting it above all the others, and this Guardian article summarises the negativity.
Which quickly leads to the unsurprising implication that being the Taoiseach's daughter has opened a few doors for Cecelia. Then again, if Cecelia is thus taking advantage, it's not like she's out of step with the USA experience -- governed by George, son of George, a Federal Communications Commission headed by Michael Powell, son of Colin, and all sorts of eye-catching surnames scattered throughout the government.
So let us just conclude in the manner of the above Guardian article, and indulge in some begrudgery -- it'a far from all this she was reared. Bertie has prided himself on the image of being just the regular man in the anorak on his way to a football match on Sunday, and being down in the local in Drumcondra for a few pints with the lads. From this to Cecelia's full page NYT ad, in various shades of pink, and doubtless placed in the section most likely to have Sex and the City fans as readers, and therefore judged to be the most likely market for the book. And no need for her to flee to Paris or Zurich to achieve this level of success. Truly a tribute to the success of the Irish Republic.
The Republic of Ireland's VIP culture arrived with a thud in the USA over the weekend -- specifically the thud of the Sunday New York Times on its readers' doorsteps. Contained within the paper's Sunday Styles section was a full page ad for Cecelia Ahern's novel, P.S. I Love You. And while the NYT's readers were sold on Ms. Ahern's novel via a blurb from fellow novelist Marian Keyes, us Irish readers are more inclined to think of her as...Bertie's other daughter, not the one married to the dude from Westlife.
If all of these references are producing a series of "Who?s" from our vast American readership, we can't blame them for not being sufficiently immersed in the goings-on of the Republic's quasi-royalty. So just to get everyone caught up, Bertie is our Taoiseach (i.e. Prime Minister), Westlife is a home-grown boyband one of whom married a daughter of Bertie's last year, and now Cecelia has arrived with what is being pitched as a major Irish entry in the chick-lit sweepstakes, a genre of literature which we are poorly qualified to evaluate. But since a visit to just about any bookstore will feature a wall of chick-lit books, we are frankly sceptical that there's really a new angle or style in this one lifting it above all the others, and this Guardian article summarises the negativity.
Which quickly leads to the unsurprising implication that being the Taoiseach's daughter has opened a few doors for Cecelia. Then again, if Cecelia is thus taking advantage, it's not like she's out of step with the USA experience -- governed by George, son of George, a Federal Communications Commission headed by Michael Powell, son of Colin, and all sorts of eye-catching surnames scattered throughout the government.
So let us just conclude in the manner of the above Guardian article, and indulge in some begrudgery -- it'a far from all this she was reared. Bertie has prided himself on the image of being just the regular man in the anorak on his way to a football match on Sunday, and being down in the local in Drumcondra for a few pints with the lads. From this to Cecelia's full page NYT ad, in various shades of pink, and doubtless placed in the section most likely to have Sex and the City fans as readers, and therefore judged to be the most likely market for the book. And no need for her to flee to Paris or Zurich to achieve this level of success. Truly a tribute to the success of the Irish Republic.
Friday, February 20, 2004
A pint of Joyce and a packet of Doyle, please
Friday's New York Times returns for a 2nd bite at the cherry on the Joyce-Doyle imbroglio. As we posted about last week, the NYT had rather gullibly picked up a story from the British media in which some lighthearted and out-of-context remarks by Roddy Doyle were taken as a slam of James Joyce, creating the literary frisson equivalent of going to Kilburn to watch Irish construction workers throw each other out the windows of the local pubs. Today's article by John Rockwell (not to be confused with Felicity Shagwell) sets the record straight, noting Colum McCann's Irish Times account of what Doyle really said. The article then expands into a more general rumination about the literary theme park industry, in which Ireland clearly has a huge comparative advantage. We're not sure what the final message of the article is, although Mr Rockwell is clearly a big fan of Roddy Doyle. With whom he seems to share some legitimate scepticism about how Dublin is planning to mark the Bloomsday centenary:
For the anniversary, 10,000 people are expected on O'Connell Street for a meal of fried offal and mutton kidneys, all washed down with Guinness. "They'll be serving Joyce Happy Meals next," Mr. Doyle joked at N.Y.U. "ReJoyce 2004," as the centenary festival calls itself, also promises a music-and-light spectacular along the River Liffey.
Now that Dublin has its own Left Bank, the Temple Bar, the Bloomsday throng can continue the drinking there amidst the English stag parties and contemplate that if Dublin had been this sophisticated and cosmopolitan 100 years ago, the likes of Joyce and Beckett wouldn't have had to leave at all. And of course, that Guinness that everyone will be downing is now brewed by the fine multinational corporation Diageo. If this festival gets much more Oirish, they'll be changing the name of O'Connell street back to Sackville Street any day now.
Friday's New York Times returns for a 2nd bite at the cherry on the Joyce-Doyle imbroglio. As we posted about last week, the NYT had rather gullibly picked up a story from the British media in which some lighthearted and out-of-context remarks by Roddy Doyle were taken as a slam of James Joyce, creating the literary frisson equivalent of going to Kilburn to watch Irish construction workers throw each other out the windows of the local pubs. Today's article by John Rockwell (not to be confused with Felicity Shagwell) sets the record straight, noting Colum McCann's Irish Times account of what Doyle really said. The article then expands into a more general rumination about the literary theme park industry, in which Ireland clearly has a huge comparative advantage. We're not sure what the final message of the article is, although Mr Rockwell is clearly a big fan of Roddy Doyle. With whom he seems to share some legitimate scepticism about how Dublin is planning to mark the Bloomsday centenary:
For the anniversary, 10,000 people are expected on O'Connell Street for a meal of fried offal and mutton kidneys, all washed down with Guinness. "They'll be serving Joyce Happy Meals next," Mr. Doyle joked at N.Y.U. "ReJoyce 2004," as the centenary festival calls itself, also promises a music-and-light spectacular along the River Liffey.
Now that Dublin has its own Left Bank, the Temple Bar, the Bloomsday throng can continue the drinking there amidst the English stag parties and contemplate that if Dublin had been this sophisticated and cosmopolitan 100 years ago, the likes of Joyce and Beckett wouldn't have had to leave at all. And of course, that Guinness that everyone will be downing is now brewed by the fine multinational corporation Diageo. If this festival gets much more Oirish, they'll be changing the name of O'Connell street back to Sackville Street any day now.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Get your Brits out for the lads
Here's a truly pathetic reach by the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. The Kerry intern affair rumours have completely flamed out due to not being true. But of course the time honoured principle of scandal-mongering is to look for the cover-up, and so Andrew Sullivan does his best today: with some research by Matt Drudge, he reports devastating inconsistencies in Kerry's story, that surely call for someone like, say, Ken Starr, to be appointed as an independent prosecutor to investigate:
the father [of the Kerry Monica] said: "I know my wife will not be voting for Mr Kerry, let's put it that way...Whatever audience he is talking to, he will tell them what they want to hear." The father also referred to Kerry as a "sleazeball." Now it's all sweetness and light: "We appreciate the way Senator Kerry has handled the situation and intend on voting for him for President of the United States." The father says he was previously misquoted. If he was, that is in itself a story. That's a hell of a quote to have fabricated...But the extreme reversal of opinion still strikes me as strange - and possibly dangerous for Kerry.
So this new Lewinsky affair rests on what the father of the woman who didn't have an affair with Kerry is alleged to have said about his voting intentions over the course of a weekend? But it gets worse. As Sullywatch always advises when reading Sullivan, follow the link. And his link to the source of these quotes: that would be The Sun, Britain's tabloid trash paper par excellence. Now we're not saying that you shouldn't read the Sun -- in its trashy way, it's pretty funny. For instance, today, the paper that will bring down President Kerry also invites you to check out the assets of Krystle from Manchester on Page 3, has some good pictures and quotes from The Darkness at last night's Brit awards, and in a weird echo of the Clarence Thomas affair, explains why an Arsenal player has the nickname "Le Long." Woodward and Bernstein, eat your hearts out!
UPDATE: The Sun's reputation as a source might be undermined by Page 3 and the laddish reporting, but it's not like the "upmarket" Daily Telegraph is any better. Day after day, the VRWC uses it as a source, gets the story into circulation, with the occasional pointless admission once that purpose has been served that, yes, the original story was not in fact correct. Here's Wednesday's Wall Street Journal online page:
It seems Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is not planning to tear a roof off California's state capitol to make way for a "smoking plaza," as the Daily Telegraph had reported (and we repeated yesterday).
the father [of the Kerry Monica] said: "I know my wife will not be voting for Mr Kerry, let's put it that way...Whatever audience he is talking to, he will tell them what they want to hear." The father also referred to Kerry as a "sleazeball." Now it's all sweetness and light: "We appreciate the way Senator Kerry has handled the situation and intend on voting for him for President of the United States." The father says he was previously misquoted. If he was, that is in itself a story. That's a hell of a quote to have fabricated...But the extreme reversal of opinion still strikes me as strange - and possibly dangerous for Kerry.
So this new Lewinsky affair rests on what the father of the woman who didn't have an affair with Kerry is alleged to have said about his voting intentions over the course of a weekend? But it gets worse. As Sullywatch always advises when reading Sullivan, follow the link. And his link to the source of these quotes: that would be The Sun, Britain's tabloid trash paper par excellence. Now we're not saying that you shouldn't read the Sun -- in its trashy way, it's pretty funny. For instance, today, the paper that will bring down President Kerry also invites you to check out the assets of Krystle from Manchester on Page 3, has some good pictures and quotes from The Darkness at last night's Brit awards, and in a weird echo of the Clarence Thomas affair, explains why an Arsenal player has the nickname "Le Long." Woodward and Bernstein, eat your hearts out!
UPDATE: The Sun's reputation as a source might be undermined by Page 3 and the laddish reporting, but it's not like the "upmarket" Daily Telegraph is any better. Day after day, the VRWC uses it as a source, gets the story into circulation, with the occasional pointless admission once that purpose has been served that, yes, the original story was not in fact correct. Here's Wednesday's Wall Street Journal online page:
It seems Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is not planning to tear a roof off California's state capitol to make way for a "smoking plaza," as the Daily Telegraph had reported (and we repeated yesterday).
Coming soon: the Jameson Whiskey Driver of the Year award
Today's Irish Times:
The princess [Anne] was scheduled to present the Cork Dry Gin Sailor of the Year Awards at the Old Jameson Distillery, Smithfield at 12.30 p.m.
Today's Irish Times:
The princess [Anne] was scheduled to present the Cork Dry Gin Sailor of the Year Awards at the Old Jameson Distillery, Smithfield at 12.30 p.m.
Homage to Catalonia
Looking at the news today made us realise that we haven't been paying enough attention to Spanish politics. Spain is apparently convulsed by a statement from the violent Basque separatist group ETA that it is ceasing all terrorist activities in Catalonia. And if you're thinking...wait a minute, I didn't think the Basque country and Catalonia were the same thing...you'd be right. It's perhaps misleading but nonetheless tempting for us to try and map this situation into the familiar Irish context, and thus the hypothetical analogy would be if the IRA issued a statement announcing that they are ceasing terrorist activities in Scotland. This would arguably be read as (a) an admission that it was behind some previously unacknowledged attacks in Scotland, and (b) as an implicit threat to continue attacks in other parts of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Just to complicate things further in this hypothetical scenario, the IRA statement would conclude with greetings and salutations to the Scottish National Party.
And so it is in Spain. ETA's statement made common cause with Catalonian separatists, characterised the region as under the oppression of Spain and France, and seems to have landed one of the Catalonian governing coalition parties in the soup by bringing into the open secret meetings ETA had with them. The more excitable Madrid centrists read the ETA announcement as a stunt designed to promote a new Northern Alliance in which masked gunmen would drop their books about Miro and Picasso and jump on the next Talgo to Madrid and be done with the war of independence by dinner time. Consequently, the chief immediate beneficiary of the stunt seems to be PM Jose Maria Aznar's party, headed into a general election (albeit one that they were likely to win anyway). In short, other than getting themselves in the news, it's not clear what ETA has achieved. More research required.
Looking at the news today made us realise that we haven't been paying enough attention to Spanish politics. Spain is apparently convulsed by a statement from the violent Basque separatist group ETA that it is ceasing all terrorist activities in Catalonia. And if you're thinking...wait a minute, I didn't think the Basque country and Catalonia were the same thing...you'd be right. It's perhaps misleading but nonetheless tempting for us to try and map this situation into the familiar Irish context, and thus the hypothetical analogy would be if the IRA issued a statement announcing that they are ceasing terrorist activities in Scotland. This would arguably be read as (a) an admission that it was behind some previously unacknowledged attacks in Scotland, and (b) as an implicit threat to continue attacks in other parts of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Just to complicate things further in this hypothetical scenario, the IRA statement would conclude with greetings and salutations to the Scottish National Party.
And so it is in Spain. ETA's statement made common cause with Catalonian separatists, characterised the region as under the oppression of Spain and France, and seems to have landed one of the Catalonian governing coalition parties in the soup by bringing into the open secret meetings ETA had with them. The more excitable Madrid centrists read the ETA announcement as a stunt designed to promote a new Northern Alliance in which masked gunmen would drop their books about Miro and Picasso and jump on the next Talgo to Madrid and be done with the war of independence by dinner time. Consequently, the chief immediate beneficiary of the stunt seems to be PM Jose Maria Aznar's party, headed into a general election (albeit one that they were likely to win anyway). In short, other than getting themselves in the news, it's not clear what ETA has achieved. More research required.
Monday, February 16, 2004
Three green fields and one dump
If the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are to be successfully unified at some point in the future, it might be in the interests of the Republic to ensure that Northern Ireland is not a toxic dump by the time that happens. And it appears that one trend in the Republic is pushing towards that scenario, namely the country's schizophrenia about its rapid growth. With the economic boom has come by-the-book consumerist problems and specifically what to do with all the waste and by-products of the boom, and all the stuff that is not wanted anymore (e.g. whatever consumer durables were purchased this time last year). Pick up any provincial newspaper in the Republic and you won't have to search far for the story of the pressure group blocking any expansion of the local dump. The consequence has been that the Republic is now an exporter of waste.
Now, "exporter" was understood to imply that the waste was heading across a body of water, but now it emerges that quite a bit of it was going, illegally, to Northern Ireland. It's tempting to make the hypocrisy accusation at this point -- the strength of identification that might otherwise be claimed with those Irish across the border suddenly disappears under a mountain of rubbish. To be fair, the average Irish householder whose rubbish winds up in, say, in Dungannon, has little or no idea where the trash is going -- but he does know that he doesn't want to think about it once he puts it outside the door. But in any event, the time-honoured skills of smuggling are now being applied to trash, as this BBC story explains:
It is believed there are dozens of illegal dump sites containing tens of thousands of tons of rotting rubbish from household bins and industry across Ireland.
The waste is bring brought into Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland and has made some of the criminals behind the practice into millionaires. ..
Steve Aston, head of Waste Management at the DoE said: "We are talking about the discovery of one to two new illegal landfills on a weekly basis."
But the DoE say the problem is set to get worse.
There is a crisis in the waste industry in the Republic.
Major councils have closed their landfill sites because they are full. They have no alternatives and admit to "exporting" their waste.
Look for the Republic's waste disposal millionaires to legitimise their wealth with investments in British soccer teams.
If the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are to be successfully unified at some point in the future, it might be in the interests of the Republic to ensure that Northern Ireland is not a toxic dump by the time that happens. And it appears that one trend in the Republic is pushing towards that scenario, namely the country's schizophrenia about its rapid growth. With the economic boom has come by-the-book consumerist problems and specifically what to do with all the waste and by-products of the boom, and all the stuff that is not wanted anymore (e.g. whatever consumer durables were purchased this time last year). Pick up any provincial newspaper in the Republic and you won't have to search far for the story of the pressure group blocking any expansion of the local dump. The consequence has been that the Republic is now an exporter of waste.
Now, "exporter" was understood to imply that the waste was heading across a body of water, but now it emerges that quite a bit of it was going, illegally, to Northern Ireland. It's tempting to make the hypocrisy accusation at this point -- the strength of identification that might otherwise be claimed with those Irish across the border suddenly disappears under a mountain of rubbish. To be fair, the average Irish householder whose rubbish winds up in, say, in Dungannon, has little or no idea where the trash is going -- but he does know that he doesn't want to think about it once he puts it outside the door. But in any event, the time-honoured skills of smuggling are now being applied to trash, as this BBC story explains:
It is believed there are dozens of illegal dump sites containing tens of thousands of tons of rotting rubbish from household bins and industry across Ireland.
The waste is bring brought into Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland and has made some of the criminals behind the practice into millionaires. ..
Steve Aston, head of Waste Management at the DoE said: "We are talking about the discovery of one to two new illegal landfills on a weekly basis."
But the DoE say the problem is set to get worse.
There is a crisis in the waste industry in the Republic.
Major councils have closed their landfill sites because they are full. They have no alternatives and admit to "exporting" their waste.
Look for the Republic's waste disposal millionaires to legitimise their wealth with investments in British soccer teams.
Saturday, February 14, 2004
Of Irish Interest
1. New York Times editorial page tribute to John Hume, upon his imminent retirement. Warning: article describes David Trimble as "enlightened."
2. BBC website article about Dublin's Temple Bar, the city's answer to the Left Bank (in which case, we don't know what the question was). Summarised by the headline "Ibiza with coats." Somewhere there's a message in the need to describe Temple Bar in Continental terms.
1. New York Times editorial page tribute to John Hume, upon his imminent retirement. Warning: article describes David Trimble as "enlightened."
2. BBC website article about Dublin's Temple Bar, the city's answer to the Left Bank (in which case, we don't know what the question was). Summarised by the headline "Ibiza with coats." Somewhere there's a message in the need to describe Temple Bar in Continental terms.
Friday, February 13, 2004
Banishing the snakes from Ireland
We haven't wanted to test the patience of our non football-fan readers with excessive Man Utd postings but it's getting hard to resist. Incidentally, there must be some kind of message in having both the club and its sponsor be the centre of huge takeover speculation at the same time -- though in the latter case, Vodaphone would be the predator whereas the club itself looks like prey. In any event, let's indulge in amateur Marxism for a second and speculate that the most interesting thing about the battle for control of Man Utd is how it made visible the dialectic between the Republic of Ireland's crony capitalists and their carefully cultivated populist image. JP McManus and John Magnier have always enjoyed a certain esteem amongst hoi polloi, or at least amongst hoi polloi who follow horse racing (which granted, does restrict things a bit).
McManus was the average punter who just applied the same skills to...well, actually we're not sure what he applied his skills to, but he has a house in Geneva to show for it. And Magnier participates in the sport of kings from his lair in County Tipperary. Sure shouldn't we all be proud of them, and of their pal Dermot Desmond too, the biggest shareholder in Glasgow Celtic FC?
This logic was always rather dubious, but something about the country's small size and indifferent economic fortunes perhaps made us prone to a VIP culture. So full credit to manager Alex Ferguson for being instrumental in helping the man on the Drumcondra omnibus see that in at least one instance, he has divergent interests from the home-grown tycoons. As we posted about earlier, Magnier and Fergie are feuding over the breeding rights to a horse, and McManus and Magnier are using their now 30% stake in the club to force through financial management reforms, seemingly aimed at Fergie's traditional modus operandi. Pro-Fergie fans have already mounted peaceful protests at one meeting where the Oirish pair had horses running, and they want to do a similar protest at next month's Cheltenham race meeting on the St Patrick's Day holiday weekend.
Amongst the embarrassed onlookers will be the bulk of the Republic's Cabinet who in the past would never have passed up a chance to schmooze with the equine plutocrats. Schmooze, and discuss any pressing tax affairs the two might have, such as the continuing tax exemption of breeding income and the technicalities of maintaining tax exile status. It was always such a nice synergy for Fianna Fail at these race meetings -- get in the social pages and do the lobbying at the same time. With one eye on the Republic's enraged Man Utd fans, it won't be quite so easy any more. Doubtless the Fianna Fail solution will be to have the meetings behind closed doors. It's pretty difficult to find out much about McManus's Geneva operations, so look for a sudden surge in pressing Irish government business in Switzerland over the next few months.
We haven't wanted to test the patience of our non football-fan readers with excessive Man Utd postings but it's getting hard to resist. Incidentally, there must be some kind of message in having both the club and its sponsor be the centre of huge takeover speculation at the same time -- though in the latter case, Vodaphone would be the predator whereas the club itself looks like prey. In any event, let's indulge in amateur Marxism for a second and speculate that the most interesting thing about the battle for control of Man Utd is how it made visible the dialectic between the Republic of Ireland's crony capitalists and their carefully cultivated populist image. JP McManus and John Magnier have always enjoyed a certain esteem amongst hoi polloi, or at least amongst hoi polloi who follow horse racing (which granted, does restrict things a bit).
McManus was the average punter who just applied the same skills to...well, actually we're not sure what he applied his skills to, but he has a house in Geneva to show for it. And Magnier participates in the sport of kings from his lair in County Tipperary. Sure shouldn't we all be proud of them, and of their pal Dermot Desmond too, the biggest shareholder in Glasgow Celtic FC?
This logic was always rather dubious, but something about the country's small size and indifferent economic fortunes perhaps made us prone to a VIP culture. So full credit to manager Alex Ferguson for being instrumental in helping the man on the Drumcondra omnibus see that in at least one instance, he has divergent interests from the home-grown tycoons. As we posted about earlier, Magnier and Fergie are feuding over the breeding rights to a horse, and McManus and Magnier are using their now 30% stake in the club to force through financial management reforms, seemingly aimed at Fergie's traditional modus operandi. Pro-Fergie fans have already mounted peaceful protests at one meeting where the Oirish pair had horses running, and they want to do a similar protest at next month's Cheltenham race meeting on the St Patrick's Day holiday weekend.
Amongst the embarrassed onlookers will be the bulk of the Republic's Cabinet who in the past would never have passed up a chance to schmooze with the equine plutocrats. Schmooze, and discuss any pressing tax affairs the two might have, such as the continuing tax exemption of breeding income and the technicalities of maintaining tax exile status. It was always such a nice synergy for Fianna Fail at these race meetings -- get in the social pages and do the lobbying at the same time. With one eye on the Republic's enraged Man Utd fans, it won't be quite so easy any more. Doubtless the Fianna Fail solution will be to have the meetings behind closed doors. It's pretty difficult to find out much about McManus's Geneva operations, so look for a sudden surge in pressing Irish government business in Switzerland over the next few months.
Thursday, February 12, 2004
The Literary Fighting Irish
On more than one occasion, we've noted the risk involved when American news outlets pick up a story from British outlets, forgetting the very slack accuracy standards that often prevail at the latter. Of course, for the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, this is precisely the advantage, a way of getting dubious stories into domestic circulation [look for rumours of a John Kerry affair to be attrbuted to "London's Daily Something" over the next couple of days].
But here's an example where the New York Times is among the outlets that should have been more careful. The NYT's Arts Briefing on Tuesday carried this item, which had been on the BBC website the previous day:
James Joyce's birthday present from the Irish writer Roddy Doyle was a figurative slap in the face. " `Ulysses' could have done with a good editor," Mr. Doyle told a gathering in New York to commemorate the birthday of Joyce (1882-1941), the BBC reported. "People are always putting `Ulysses' in the Top 10 books, but I doubt any of those people were really moved by it." As for "Finnegans Wake," Joyce's successor to "Ulysses," Mr. Doyle called it "a complete waste of time," though he said he had read only three pages.
We had thought the story seemed a bit odd, and surely would have generated more publicity in Ireland had it been true. In today's Irish Times, writer Colum McCann, who was at the gathering, explains what really went on:
Doyle had an enormous amount of praise and respect for Joyce and his work, and he mentioned this several times. He talked about Ulysses being one of the finest books of the century. He said he had read it twice and he cited Leopold Bloom as one of the most fascinating characters in world literature...It doesn't make much news that Doyle had all sorts of praise for Joyce, that much of what he said was in banter, that often his comments were presented with a wry grin, that he was operating with a small audience in mind, and that other topics he confronted were presented with sparkling intelligence...
I find it shameful that Doyle is left to the behest of tabloid journalism, the seekers of soundbites. That the comments were further filtered down by the British media which latched on to them with a sow-eating-her-own-farrow mentality is really no surprise. Their reports were a lens filtered through a lens filtered through yet another lens - and the only intention was to cause flame.
You could almost hear the rattle at the news desk: Let's go watch the sport. It's an Irishman - a famous one - stabbing another - a really famous one - in the back.
Perhaps the original story will be defended as a Joyce criticism-related program activity.
On more than one occasion, we've noted the risk involved when American news outlets pick up a story from British outlets, forgetting the very slack accuracy standards that often prevail at the latter. Of course, for the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, this is precisely the advantage, a way of getting dubious stories into domestic circulation [look for rumours of a John Kerry affair to be attrbuted to "London's Daily Something" over the next couple of days].
But here's an example where the New York Times is among the outlets that should have been more careful. The NYT's Arts Briefing on Tuesday carried this item, which had been on the BBC website the previous day:
James Joyce's birthday present from the Irish writer Roddy Doyle was a figurative slap in the face. " `Ulysses' could have done with a good editor," Mr. Doyle told a gathering in New York to commemorate the birthday of Joyce (1882-1941), the BBC reported. "People are always putting `Ulysses' in the Top 10 books, but I doubt any of those people were really moved by it." As for "Finnegans Wake," Joyce's successor to "Ulysses," Mr. Doyle called it "a complete waste of time," though he said he had read only three pages.
We had thought the story seemed a bit odd, and surely would have generated more publicity in Ireland had it been true. In today's Irish Times, writer Colum McCann, who was at the gathering, explains what really went on:
Doyle had an enormous amount of praise and respect for Joyce and his work, and he mentioned this several times. He talked about Ulysses being one of the finest books of the century. He said he had read it twice and he cited Leopold Bloom as one of the most fascinating characters in world literature...It doesn't make much news that Doyle had all sorts of praise for Joyce, that much of what he said was in banter, that often his comments were presented with a wry grin, that he was operating with a small audience in mind, and that other topics he confronted were presented with sparkling intelligence...
I find it shameful that Doyle is left to the behest of tabloid journalism, the seekers of soundbites. That the comments were further filtered down by the British media which latched on to them with a sow-eating-her-own-farrow mentality is really no surprise. Their reports were a lens filtered through a lens filtered through yet another lens - and the only intention was to cause flame.
You could almost hear the rattle at the news desk: Let's go watch the sport. It's an Irishman - a famous one - stabbing another - a really famous one - in the back.
Perhaps the original story will be defended as a Joyce criticism-related program activity.
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
So THAT's what should have been sexed-up
Here's a story that illustrates how much the US arm of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy misinterpreted the reaction in the UK to the Hutton Report. While the US neocons gloated at the BBC's expense, British conservatives were far more reserved, for reasons of both oppositional tactics and true reflection of public opinion. Today's London Times picks up a Guardian story on the new career of the supposedly disgraced BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan:
Gilligan, the BBC journalist at the centre of the Kelly affair, has reportedly been hired to write for the Spectator magazine.
That would be the Spectator magazine, owned (for now) by Conrad Black and edited by Tory MP Boris Johnson. By the way, the invaluable Sullywatch had already noted the apparent divergence between Boris's view of the Kelly affair and that of his alleged chum, the US-based gloater-in-chief Andrew Sullivan. In fact, a follow-up remark of Boris's about Gilligan makes us wonder what Sullivan might have privately told him really underlies his tirades about the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation:
Mr Johnson added: "I think the reason there is all this beastliness towards Gilligan is because he is not particularly good looking."
Here's a story that illustrates how much the US arm of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy misinterpreted the reaction in the UK to the Hutton Report. While the US neocons gloated at the BBC's expense, British conservatives were far more reserved, for reasons of both oppositional tactics and true reflection of public opinion. Today's London Times picks up a Guardian story on the new career of the supposedly disgraced BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan:
Gilligan, the BBC journalist at the centre of the Kelly affair, has reportedly been hired to write for the Spectator magazine.
That would be the Spectator magazine, owned (for now) by Conrad Black and edited by Tory MP Boris Johnson. By the way, the invaluable Sullywatch had already noted the apparent divergence between Boris's view of the Kelly affair and that of his alleged chum, the US-based gloater-in-chief Andrew Sullivan. In fact, a follow-up remark of Boris's about Gilligan makes us wonder what Sullivan might have privately told him really underlies his tirades about the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation:
Mr Johnson added: "I think the reason there is all this beastliness towards Gilligan is because he is not particularly good looking."
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
The West defeated Communism by invading some rocks
With the sun setting on the reign of the current or former Canadian neocons at the Daily Telegraph, there is a lot of revisionist history to squeeze in. Mark Steyn keeps busy today, blaming John Kerry for everything bad about the 1970s and then telling us:
It took Mrs Thatcher's Falklands war and Reagan's liberation of Grenada to reverse the demoralisation of the West that Kerry did so much to advance.
With Dubya and Tony under such pressure from pesky demoralising critics, look for them to follow Maggie and Ron with an invasion of Rockall.
With the sun setting on the reign of the current or former Canadian neocons at the Daily Telegraph, there is a lot of revisionist history to squeeze in. Mark Steyn keeps busy today, blaming John Kerry for everything bad about the 1970s and then telling us:
It took Mrs Thatcher's Falklands war and Reagan's liberation of Grenada to reverse the demoralisation of the West that Kerry did so much to advance.
With Dubya and Tony under such pressure from pesky demoralising critics, look for them to follow Maggie and Ron with an invasion of Rockall.
Monday, February 09, 2004
What everyone in Ireland is doing tonight
The land of saints of scholars is as transfixed as its larger neighbour by the British reality TV show I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Thankfully, the tendency to feel a national obligation to cheer for even the most tenuous connection to Ireland seems not to be present in this case -- people know trash when they see it. In any event, the Irish connection would have been a choice between son of Irish immigrants John Lydon and wife of boyband star Kerry McFadden. There is already quite enough prattle about the sociological significance of the appeal of this show, so let's just move to the more troubling question for Ireland: if all the Irish media do is talk about the latest goings-on on the show, why do we need a specifically Irish media at all?
UPDATE: the wife of the Irish boyband member wins. Thus, a great victory for Ireland.
The land of saints of scholars is as transfixed as its larger neighbour by the British reality TV show I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Thankfully, the tendency to feel a national obligation to cheer for even the most tenuous connection to Ireland seems not to be present in this case -- people know trash when they see it. In any event, the Irish connection would have been a choice between son of Irish immigrants John Lydon and wife of boyband star Kerry McFadden. There is already quite enough prattle about the sociological significance of the appeal of this show, so let's just move to the more troubling question for Ireland: if all the Irish media do is talk about the latest goings-on on the show, why do we need a specifically Irish media at all?
UPDATE: the wife of the Irish boyband member wins. Thus, a great victory for Ireland.
Friday, January 30, 2004
Blogging-Related Program Activities
We will be doing lots of blogging over the next week. If, that is, we apply the Dubya definition to such a positive statement by which we actually mean the exact opposite. As a result of a top-secret meeting (at the Bread Line restaurant for lunch yesterday) with an unnamed White House official (Condi Rice), P O'Neill has been tasked to investigate a report that Saddam dumped his WMDs at the bottom of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. So that will take us out of action for about a week, until our top-secret report is posted on this blog when we get back.
Let us just briefly note some intriguing news stories today:
1. It was noticable from the start that most of the gloating about Hutton and BBC seemed to be happening amongst reactionary hacks in the USA, whereas public opinion in Britain seemed to be adopting a much more nuanced position; check out for instance the skeptical tone even in fomer Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy member, the Daily Telegraph.
2. Not a good week for Ireland's and Europe's biggest low-cost airline, Ryanair. It's been known for sometime they achieve their advertised low fares by charging for just about everything else connected with getting passengers from A to B (often via C with bags via D), and one of those charges would certainly horrify our vast American readership: charging passengers for the wheelchairs at airports. The result was that for a handicapped passenger, the total wheelchair charges on a return trip could exceed the cost of the ticket. Not surprisingly, someone has now sued and won. And in a demonstration that spite can be a corporate strategy, the airline is now claiming that it will add a "wheelchair levy" to all its tickets for travel from Irish and UK airports.
We will be doing lots of blogging over the next week. If, that is, we apply the Dubya definition to such a positive statement by which we actually mean the exact opposite. As a result of a top-secret meeting (at the Bread Line restaurant for lunch yesterday) with an unnamed White House official (Condi Rice), P O'Neill has been tasked to investigate a report that Saddam dumped his WMDs at the bottom of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. So that will take us out of action for about a week, until our top-secret report is posted on this blog when we get back.
Let us just briefly note some intriguing news stories today:
1. It was noticable from the start that most of the gloating about Hutton and BBC seemed to be happening amongst reactionary hacks in the USA, whereas public opinion in Britain seemed to be adopting a much more nuanced position; check out for instance the skeptical tone even in fomer Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy member, the Daily Telegraph.
2. Not a good week for Ireland's and Europe's biggest low-cost airline, Ryanair. It's been known for sometime they achieve their advertised low fares by charging for just about everything else connected with getting passengers from A to B (often via C with bags via D), and one of those charges would certainly horrify our vast American readership: charging passengers for the wheelchairs at airports. The result was that for a handicapped passenger, the total wheelchair charges on a return trip could exceed the cost of the ticket. Not surprisingly, someone has now sued and won. And in a demonstration that spite can be a corporate strategy, the airline is now claiming that it will add a "wheelchair levy" to all its tickets for travel from Irish and UK airports.
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Can I deduct myself as a liability?
This is quite a tax dodge. The Wall Street Journal describes a brewing crisis between phone company MCI-Worldcom, American state tax authorities, and MCI's auditor KPMG. The states are annoyed at a tax strategy designed by KPMG for MCI, and if they collect back taxes from MCI by disqualifying the strategy, the company will turn will look to blame KPMG (although, strangely enough, not actually sue them, but that's another story). And what a strategy:
Under it, MCI treated the "foresight of top management" as an asset valued at billions of dollars. It licensed this foresight to its subsidiaries in exchange for royalties that the units deducted as business expenses on state tax forms.
By the same logic, look for Dubya to balance the budget by declaring himself a huge asset of the Federal Government -- with resulting huge losses to the nation if he's not reelected in November.
This is quite a tax dodge. The Wall Street Journal describes a brewing crisis between phone company MCI-Worldcom, American state tax authorities, and MCI's auditor KPMG. The states are annoyed at a tax strategy designed by KPMG for MCI, and if they collect back taxes from MCI by disqualifying the strategy, the company will turn will look to blame KPMG (although, strangely enough, not actually sue them, but that's another story). And what a strategy:
Under it, MCI treated the "foresight of top management" as an asset valued at billions of dollars. It licensed this foresight to its subsidiaries in exchange for royalties that the units deducted as business expenses on state tax forms.
By the same logic, look for Dubya to balance the budget by declaring himself a huge asset of the Federal Government -- with resulting huge losses to the nation if he's not reelected in November.
Five ring circus
There are days when one sees the wisdom of historian Norman Davies' decision to call his brilliant history of Britain and Ireland The Isles, given his belief that the more standard designations for those two large land masses on Europe's continental shelf are so loaded. We already had an inadvertent theme for the week of those uppity (O)Irish meddling in England's affairs, and Wednesday's Irish Times brings word of a new dispute.
When Ireland was partitioned in 1922, sporting and cultural organisations took different approaches to how to realign with the split jurisdictions; the Irish Rugby Football Union continues as the representative body for rugby throughout the 32 counties, while the soccer bodies correspond to the countries: the Football Association of Ireland for the Republic, and the Irish Football Association for Northern Ireland. It's not well-known that the situation with the Olympic bodies is even more complicated, and has come to wider attention because of a dispute between the British Olympic Association and the Olympic Council of Ireland. Athletes from Northern Ireland have had the option of declaring for either association, for example:
Wayne McCullough from Belfast historically boxed to a silver medal for Ireland in the 1992 games, while Belfast's Mary Peters won gold for Britain in the 1972 Olympic pentathlon.
But a document prepared by the BOA for Athens is seen as encroaching on this agreement:
The final draft of the BOA's Team Members Agreement refers to the Athens Olympic team as Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In the OCI's eyes, this is an annexation of Northern Ireland
While the BOA claims that the inclusion of Northern Ireland in its Athens team name is merely a technicality, the OCI fears that sometime down the road, the BOA would try to lay exclusive claim to athletic talent from Northern Ireland. The main weapon being threatened by the OCI in response is to lobby against London's 2012 bid. Britain's tabloids have generally kept the anti-Irish jingoism at a low level in recent years, but with "Sir" Alex Ferguson, the hand-painted periwinkles, dirt-cheap universities, and an Olympic bid all under threat in one week due in part to the Other Island, can they restrain themselves for much longer?
There are days when one sees the wisdom of historian Norman Davies' decision to call his brilliant history of Britain and Ireland The Isles, given his belief that the more standard designations for those two large land masses on Europe's continental shelf are so loaded. We already had an inadvertent theme for the week of those uppity (O)Irish meddling in England's affairs, and Wednesday's Irish Times brings word of a new dispute.
When Ireland was partitioned in 1922, sporting and cultural organisations took different approaches to how to realign with the split jurisdictions; the Irish Rugby Football Union continues as the representative body for rugby throughout the 32 counties, while the soccer bodies correspond to the countries: the Football Association of Ireland for the Republic, and the Irish Football Association for Northern Ireland. It's not well-known that the situation with the Olympic bodies is even more complicated, and has come to wider attention because of a dispute between the British Olympic Association and the Olympic Council of Ireland. Athletes from Northern Ireland have had the option of declaring for either association, for example:
Wayne McCullough from Belfast historically boxed to a silver medal for Ireland in the 1992 games, while Belfast's Mary Peters won gold for Britain in the 1972 Olympic pentathlon.
But a document prepared by the BOA for Athens is seen as encroaching on this agreement:
The final draft of the BOA's Team Members Agreement refers to the Athens Olympic team as Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In the OCI's eyes, this is an annexation of Northern Ireland
While the BOA claims that the inclusion of Northern Ireland in its Athens team name is merely a technicality, the OCI fears that sometime down the road, the BOA would try to lay exclusive claim to athletic talent from Northern Ireland. The main weapon being threatened by the OCI in response is to lobby against London's 2012 bid. Britain's tabloids have generally kept the anti-Irish jingoism at a low level in recent years, but with "Sir" Alex Ferguson, the hand-painted periwinkles, dirt-cheap universities, and an Olympic bid all under threat in one week due in part to the Other Island, can they restrain themselves for much longer?
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
A chequebook in one hand and an aye in the other
It's already an eventful week for Irish (or Oirish) meddling in Britain's affairs. As we posted the other day, reclusive Oirish businessmen seem intent on showing the door to Man Utd manager Alex Ferguson. Today brings news (subs. req'd) that another pair of Oirish businessmen, although less reclusive than Magnier and McManus, are bidding for another piece of English heritage:
Waterford Wedgwood directors "Sir" Anthony O'Reilly and his brother-in-law, Mr Peter Goulandris, have sparked takeover speculation on the London market by, between them, taking a 3.3 per cent holding in Royal Doulton.
The 200 year old china firm has been in financial difficulties recently despite its exalted reputation (not least through the hugely influential Hyacinth Bucket), but they own a lot of property, so one view is that "Sir" Tony would buy the firm in order to shut down the core operation and speculate with the property assets. Which would be a weirdly accurate reflection of how Ireland's crony capitalists accumulated their wealth even when the productive side of the economy was in the tank in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, with reference to Man Utd, it didn't take long for someone to comment explicitly on the spectacle of two Irish businessmen tinkering with the winning recipe at a famous English football club:
[BBC online] And fans in Northern Ireland have give [MU manager Alex] Ferguson their full backing, saying they are disappointed by the actions of Magnier and McManus.
"We are embarrassed about the problems these Irishmen are causing Manchester United."
To this we can only say: Dudes! They're not Irish, they're Oirish!
And there was one other Irish intervention in English affairs today. As widely reported, PM Tony Blair's government only survived the Commons vote on university fees by five votes. And amongst the little details on who voted in which direction:
[RTE website] The fee system will not apply in Northern Ireland, and all the Northern Ireland parties had been expected to either abstain or vote against the bill.
However, it is thought that at least two SDLP [moderate nationalist] MPs supported Mr Blair.
So for a brief moment it was back to the glory days of Parnell when Irish MPs held the balance of power in the House of Commons. Immediately following the vote, the Tories made a lame point of order, questioning why Scottish MPs were allowed to vote on a measure that did not affect Scotland (they could of course have said the same thing about Northern Ireland). It's your Union, lads, play by the rules.
It's already an eventful week for Irish (or Oirish) meddling in Britain's affairs. As we posted the other day, reclusive Oirish businessmen seem intent on showing the door to Man Utd manager Alex Ferguson. Today brings news (subs. req'd) that another pair of Oirish businessmen, although less reclusive than Magnier and McManus, are bidding for another piece of English heritage:
Waterford Wedgwood directors "Sir" Anthony O'Reilly and his brother-in-law, Mr Peter Goulandris, have sparked takeover speculation on the London market by, between them, taking a 3.3 per cent holding in Royal Doulton.
The 200 year old china firm has been in financial difficulties recently despite its exalted reputation (not least through the hugely influential Hyacinth Bucket), but they own a lot of property, so one view is that "Sir" Tony would buy the firm in order to shut down the core operation and speculate with the property assets. Which would be a weirdly accurate reflection of how Ireland's crony capitalists accumulated their wealth even when the productive side of the economy was in the tank in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, with reference to Man Utd, it didn't take long for someone to comment explicitly on the spectacle of two Irish businessmen tinkering with the winning recipe at a famous English football club:
[BBC online] And fans in Northern Ireland have give [MU manager Alex] Ferguson their full backing, saying they are disappointed by the actions of Magnier and McManus.
"We are embarrassed about the problems these Irishmen are causing Manchester United."
To this we can only say: Dudes! They're not Irish, they're Oirish!
And there was one other Irish intervention in English affairs today. As widely reported, PM Tony Blair's government only survived the Commons vote on university fees by five votes. And amongst the little details on who voted in which direction:
[RTE website] The fee system will not apply in Northern Ireland, and all the Northern Ireland parties had been expected to either abstain or vote against the bill.
However, it is thought that at least two SDLP [moderate nationalist] MPs supported Mr Blair.
So for a brief moment it was back to the glory days of Parnell when Irish MPs held the balance of power in the House of Commons. Immediately following the vote, the Tories made a lame point of order, questioning why Scottish MPs were allowed to vote on a measure that did not affect Scotland (they could of course have said the same thing about Northern Ireland). It's your Union, lads, play by the rules.
Monday, January 26, 2004
The Fighting Oirish
One of the unexpectedly frequent phrases of 2004 so far is "reclusive businessmen." Two weeks ago, it was the Barclay brothers emerging from their Channel Islands redoubt to make a bid for the crumbling Conrad Black empire. Now apparently it's two reclusive Oirish businessmen, John Magnier and JP McManus, showing their fangs at Manchester United Football Club.
The two skillful tax avoiders had always two sides to their role as the largest single shareholder in Man Utd: the public side of hobnobbing in the corporate boxes with the prawn sandwich crowd, including Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, but also a slow but steady build-up of their stake in the club to its current 25 percent. The latter signalled the duo weren't simply content with the ego-trip of sports team ownership and were either intending to flex the muscles that come with being big investors, or get a big payoff if another like-minded businessman wanted to buy the club (the most likely candidate in that regard being Tampa Bay Bucs owner, Malcolm Glazer).
Right now it looks like a muscle-flexing operation, with the first recipient of the robust shoulder being "Sir" Alex Ferguson, the team's long-time and hugely popular manager. As we posted about a little while ago, Ferguson had fallen foul of the horse breeder Magnier, in a dispute about the interpretation of his ownership rights in one of Magnier's horses. But now things are getting more serious. There has been a mysterious delay in finalising another contract extension for Fergie, accompanied by two weeks of revelations in the London Sunday Times about how Man Utd have played the transfer market.
In particular, the team's frequent purchases of high-priced talent seem to involve unusually large payments to self-appointed middle-men, one of whom happened to be Fergie's son. This BBC story reports that Magnier wants the club to fully investigate the dealings before Fergie gets a long-term contract.
There is already something strange about the sudden focus on Man Utd's player transactions -- they have been, to say the least, aggressive in their methods for a long time, and dealing with the little technicality of a player they desire being under contract to another club has been the central bone of contention. Man Utd engages in what US professional sports leagues would consider tampering -- interfering with a contractual relationship between a player and the other club. This happens via an approach to the player about their interest in acquiring him, when strictly speaking the approach should go the club holding the contract. The player then knows that Man Utd want him and demands that the club transfer him. Since he always has the option to sulk if he's not sold, the only real negotiations with Man Utd concern the price.
To avoid breaking the flimsy rules about getting permission to negotiate with the player, the initial approach will be indirect -- via an intermediary or a well-placed leak to a newspaper. Hence the mysterious side payments that accompany the final transaction. To the Sunday Times' credit, it seems to have its hands on some detailed paperwork, and Magnier sees his chance to get another big ego out of the way.
And it's risky to run a legend like Fergie out of town without having lined up a splashy replacement. Here's our guess, based on the fact that an important part of being Oirish is to show an occasional semblance of being Irish, most easily achieved by some populist gesture that will be lapped up by the Irish meeja. So -- out with Fergie, in with current Glasgow Celtic manager and Derryman Martin O'Neill.
O'Neill has been an excellent manager at Celtic and was recently himself a victim of MU's transfer market tactics, as his young Irish star Liam Miller signed a very odd "pre-contract" agreement with MU to go there when his current Celtic contract expires a few months from now. So Magnier keeps his Irish credentials alive by putting an Irishman in one of Britain's highest profile jobs, O'Neill gets to play on a bigger stage than Scottish football allows, and Man Utd attribute any unsavoury past dealings to the now departed Fergie. As they say in the Guinness ads, Brilliant!
And the Oirish icing on the cake: it's now official Conservative party policy, as communicated by their leader Michael Howard, that O'Neill is to be the next manager of Liverpool. How better to prove one's republican credentials than by screwing the Tories?
UPDATE: Here's the story from Monday's Sun. Note that the story is clearly setting up one pro-Fergie weapon for future use -- blame the Irish. Several references to the "Coolmore mafia," Coolmore being Magnier's stud farm in County Tipperary.
One of the unexpectedly frequent phrases of 2004 so far is "reclusive businessmen." Two weeks ago, it was the Barclay brothers emerging from their Channel Islands redoubt to make a bid for the crumbling Conrad Black empire. Now apparently it's two reclusive Oirish businessmen, John Magnier and JP McManus, showing their fangs at Manchester United Football Club.
The two skillful tax avoiders had always two sides to their role as the largest single shareholder in Man Utd: the public side of hobnobbing in the corporate boxes with the prawn sandwich crowd, including Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, but also a slow but steady build-up of their stake in the club to its current 25 percent. The latter signalled the duo weren't simply content with the ego-trip of sports team ownership and were either intending to flex the muscles that come with being big investors, or get a big payoff if another like-minded businessman wanted to buy the club (the most likely candidate in that regard being Tampa Bay Bucs owner, Malcolm Glazer).
Right now it looks like a muscle-flexing operation, with the first recipient of the robust shoulder being "Sir" Alex Ferguson, the team's long-time and hugely popular manager. As we posted about a little while ago, Ferguson had fallen foul of the horse breeder Magnier, in a dispute about the interpretation of his ownership rights in one of Magnier's horses. But now things are getting more serious. There has been a mysterious delay in finalising another contract extension for Fergie, accompanied by two weeks of revelations in the London Sunday Times about how Man Utd have played the transfer market.
In particular, the team's frequent purchases of high-priced talent seem to involve unusually large payments to self-appointed middle-men, one of whom happened to be Fergie's son. This BBC story reports that Magnier wants the club to fully investigate the dealings before Fergie gets a long-term contract.
There is already something strange about the sudden focus on Man Utd's player transactions -- they have been, to say the least, aggressive in their methods for a long time, and dealing with the little technicality of a player they desire being under contract to another club has been the central bone of contention. Man Utd engages in what US professional sports leagues would consider tampering -- interfering with a contractual relationship between a player and the other club. This happens via an approach to the player about their interest in acquiring him, when strictly speaking the approach should go the club holding the contract. The player then knows that Man Utd want him and demands that the club transfer him. Since he always has the option to sulk if he's not sold, the only real negotiations with Man Utd concern the price.
To avoid breaking the flimsy rules about getting permission to negotiate with the player, the initial approach will be indirect -- via an intermediary or a well-placed leak to a newspaper. Hence the mysterious side payments that accompany the final transaction. To the Sunday Times' credit, it seems to have its hands on some detailed paperwork, and Magnier sees his chance to get another big ego out of the way.
And it's risky to run a legend like Fergie out of town without having lined up a splashy replacement. Here's our guess, based on the fact that an important part of being Oirish is to show an occasional semblance of being Irish, most easily achieved by some populist gesture that will be lapped up by the Irish meeja. So -- out with Fergie, in with current Glasgow Celtic manager and Derryman Martin O'Neill.
O'Neill has been an excellent manager at Celtic and was recently himself a victim of MU's transfer market tactics, as his young Irish star Liam Miller signed a very odd "pre-contract" agreement with MU to go there when his current Celtic contract expires a few months from now. So Magnier keeps his Irish credentials alive by putting an Irishman in one of Britain's highest profile jobs, O'Neill gets to play on a bigger stage than Scottish football allows, and Man Utd attribute any unsavoury past dealings to the now departed Fergie. As they say in the Guinness ads, Brilliant!
And the Oirish icing on the cake: it's now official Conservative party policy, as communicated by their leader Michael Howard, that O'Neill is to be the next manager of Liverpool. How better to prove one's republican credentials than by screwing the Tories?
UPDATE: Here's the story from Monday's Sun. Note that the story is clearly setting up one pro-Fergie weapon for future use -- blame the Irish. Several references to the "Coolmore mafia," Coolmore being Magnier's stud farm in County Tipperary.
Friday, January 23, 2004
Two odd meetings next week
1. Dick Cheney is going to Rome to meet, amongst others, the Pope. The word of Hobbes meets the word of the Lord. Maybe Dick is there as an emissary of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, as it seeks to get its story straight about what the Pope did or did not say about the Mel Gibson movie.
2. Friday's Irish Times reports that:
The Taoiseach, along with the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, will meet the [Democratic Unionist Party] leader, the Rev Ian Paisley, and other leading party figures in the Irish Embassy next Thursday.
What's odd about this meeting is not so much that's likely be a screamfest, which would meet everyone's expectations, but the location: since all relevant parties to the meeting live in Ireland, it's not clear why they have to go to London to meet each other, let alone to the Irish Embassy. In fact the location is suggestive of a Paisleyite stunt, to which Bertie Ahern inexplicably agreed -- Paisley will meet at a location that clearly acknowledges the Republic as a foreign country. On its website, Bertie's party, Fianna Fail, continues to describe itself as "the Republican Party." They might want to change it to Simply Oirish.
UPDATE: Even the former Loyalist terrorists, unlike Paisley, are willing to come to Dublin for meetings. Monday's Irish Times:
The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, will tonight meet a delegation of loyalists linked to the Ulster Defence Association at a secret location in Dublin.
1. Dick Cheney is going to Rome to meet, amongst others, the Pope. The word of Hobbes meets the word of the Lord. Maybe Dick is there as an emissary of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, as it seeks to get its story straight about what the Pope did or did not say about the Mel Gibson movie.
2. Friday's Irish Times reports that:
The Taoiseach, along with the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, will meet the [Democratic Unionist Party] leader, the Rev Ian Paisley, and other leading party figures in the Irish Embassy next Thursday.
What's odd about this meeting is not so much that's likely be a screamfest, which would meet everyone's expectations, but the location: since all relevant parties to the meeting live in Ireland, it's not clear why they have to go to London to meet each other, let alone to the Irish Embassy. In fact the location is suggestive of a Paisleyite stunt, to which Bertie Ahern inexplicably agreed -- Paisley will meet at a location that clearly acknowledges the Republic as a foreign country. On its website, Bertie's party, Fianna Fail, continues to describe itself as "the Republican Party." They might want to change it to Simply Oirish.
UPDATE: Even the former Loyalist terrorists, unlike Paisley, are willing to come to Dublin for meetings. Monday's Irish Times:
The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, will tonight meet a delegation of loyalists linked to the Ulster Defence Association at a secret location in Dublin.
A day of Simpsons references in the Irish legal system
From Friday's Irish Times:
1. A taxi-driver who removed part of a clamp and drove off with the rest of it still on his car has paid compensation for the damage, a court heard yesterday.
2. According to the witness [in the property zoning corruption tribunal], "Jim Kennedy [dubious property developer] would put legs on lies and would have them running out before you like leprechauns". He compared Mr Kennedy to the cartoon character, Bart Simpson, who says: "I didn't do it. Nobody saw me do it and you can't prove I did it."
From Friday's Irish Times:
1. A taxi-driver who removed part of a clamp and drove off with the rest of it still on his car has paid compensation for the damage, a court heard yesterday.
2. According to the witness [in the property zoning corruption tribunal], "Jim Kennedy [dubious property developer] would put legs on lies and would have them running out before you like leprechauns". He compared Mr Kennedy to the cartoon character, Bart Simpson, who says: "I didn't do it. Nobody saw me do it and you can't prove I did it."
The Irish cultural exception
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is annoyed with Bono. As discussed in Friday's Wall Street Journal -- in an article that begins by slyly noting Bono's friendship with the now out-of-favour Paul O'Neill -- Bono's widely heard exclamation that greeted U2's Golden Globe award last year, f**king brilliant, led to an obscenity complaint, which was rejected by the FCC on the grounds that:
The word "f**king" may be crude and offensive, but, in the context presented here, did not describe sexual or excretory organs or activities. Rather, the performer used the word "f**king" as an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation.
This exception has enraged FCC bosses and a predictable range of politicians, who are now talking about a steep increase in fines for obscenity. The article bills this as an achievement of Bono's, which seems odd because an increase in fines itself does nothing to change to the legal reasoning that got Bono off the hook in the first place. But what about that other word that Bono used, brilliant? At the rate corporations are seeking to trademark generic words, how long before Diageo is after him for infringing on the centrepiece of their new Guinness ads i.e. the repeated use of that word? Play the ad in full here [busted link; try here]. And cringe.
The word "f**king" may be crude and offensive, but, in the context presented here, did not describe sexual or excretory organs or activities. Rather, the performer used the word "f**king" as an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation.
This exception has enraged FCC bosses and a predictable range of politicians, who are now talking about a steep increase in fines for obscenity. The article bills this as an achievement of Bono's, which seems odd because an increase in fines itself does nothing to change to the legal reasoning that got Bono off the hook in the first place. But what about that other word that Bono used, brilliant? At the rate corporations are seeking to trademark generic words, how long before Diageo is after him for infringing on the centrepiece of their new Guinness ads i.e. the repeated use of that word? Play the ad in full here [busted link; try here]. And cringe.
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Cast your votes for President at KatherineHarris.com!
Here's a story from the Wall Street Journal that we are surprised is not getting more attention. The Pentagon is seeking to improve voting procedures for overseas military personnel in Federal elections. All this in the context of a the Florida count from 2000 which was decided by either a few hundred votes, or just three (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas). And we even recall some specific yelling and screaming about the overseas votes from the military in that election, something about how Al Gore was personally making sure that none of them would ever be counted. So one would think that proper handling of these overseas votes is a sensitive issue. Well, here are the essential aspects of the WSJ story (subs. req'd).
1. The contract for handling the votes went to Accenture. Which used to be known as Andersen Consulting. Which used to be the sister firm of Arthur Andersen, the noted accounting and auditing firm. But leave aside the rotting carcass of its former sister firm; Accenture is also one of those firms that moved its HQ to Bermuda to lower its US taxes. There were attempts in Congress to deny Federal contracts to firms pulling this trick, but the attempts were blocked, pretty much along straight partisan lines. If the referee in the coming Superbowl took the field in a New England Patriots uniform, would we have much expectation of a fair contest? Well, Accenture has taken the field and they're not wearing black and white.
2. Accenture's brilliant idea for improving voting is to use...the Internet. Yes, the Paris Hilton videos, the phishing scams, the Nigerian bank accounts, even the blogs, will now be sharing bandwidth with soldiers casting their votes next November. The idea of electronic voting is already controversial, because of the scope for high-tech meddling and the associated lack of traceability and verifiability of votes -- and these criticisms arise in the context of dedicated voting machines not hooked up to the information superhighway.
[Of Irish interest: this controversy is very active in the Republic because of the country's aggressive move to electronic voting; see the blog GUBU for a recent tirade and while you're at it, check out the blogatrix's discovery about who exactly in high authority has been reading her blog; look for the posts about Moriarty]
So now take all the concerns about electronic voting, blend with all the concerns about Internet security, and you have a fiasco -- at least in the opinion of the experts, but not of course the Pentagon or the fine Bermudans at Accenture:
The experts' report on Serve* said hackers could attack the system, resulting in "large-scale, selective voter disenfranchisement, or privacy violation, or vote buying and selling ... ." Also, Serve is vulnerable to vote switching, even to the extent that it could affect the outcome of an election, the report said.
What's more, the vulnerabilities can't be fixed by changes to Serve, the report asserted. Instead, the vulnerabilities are linked to the design of the Internet as well as computer hardware and software, the authors said.
Accenture said Serve is secure and reliable
[*the Acronym: Secure Electronic Registration & Voting Experiment]
Note: they don't say for what purpose it is secure and reliable.
UPDATE: some signs late on Wednesday that the story is being picked up; here's the New York Times story. But so far it's only that commie rag, the Wall Street Journal, noting Accenture's Bermuda domicile.
Here's a story from the Wall Street Journal that we are surprised is not getting more attention. The Pentagon is seeking to improve voting procedures for overseas military personnel in Federal elections. All this in the context of a the Florida count from 2000 which was decided by either a few hundred votes, or just three (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas). And we even recall some specific yelling and screaming about the overseas votes from the military in that election, something about how Al Gore was personally making sure that none of them would ever be counted. So one would think that proper handling of these overseas votes is a sensitive issue. Well, here are the essential aspects of the WSJ story (subs. req'd).
1. The contract for handling the votes went to Accenture. Which used to be known as Andersen Consulting. Which used to be the sister firm of Arthur Andersen, the noted accounting and auditing firm. But leave aside the rotting carcass of its former sister firm; Accenture is also one of those firms that moved its HQ to Bermuda to lower its US taxes. There were attempts in Congress to deny Federal contracts to firms pulling this trick, but the attempts were blocked, pretty much along straight partisan lines. If the referee in the coming Superbowl took the field in a New England Patriots uniform, would we have much expectation of a fair contest? Well, Accenture has taken the field and they're not wearing black and white.
2. Accenture's brilliant idea for improving voting is to use...the Internet. Yes, the Paris Hilton videos, the phishing scams, the Nigerian bank accounts, even the blogs, will now be sharing bandwidth with soldiers casting their votes next November. The idea of electronic voting is already controversial, because of the scope for high-tech meddling and the associated lack of traceability and verifiability of votes -- and these criticisms arise in the context of dedicated voting machines not hooked up to the information superhighway.
[Of Irish interest: this controversy is very active in the Republic because of the country's aggressive move to electronic voting; see the blog GUBU for a recent tirade and while you're at it, check out the blogatrix's discovery about who exactly in high authority has been reading her blog; look for the posts about Moriarty]
So now take all the concerns about electronic voting, blend with all the concerns about Internet security, and you have a fiasco -- at least in the opinion of the experts, but not of course the Pentagon or the fine Bermudans at Accenture:
The experts' report on Serve* said hackers could attack the system, resulting in "large-scale, selective voter disenfranchisement, or privacy violation, or vote buying and selling ... ." Also, Serve is vulnerable to vote switching, even to the extent that it could affect the outcome of an election, the report said.
What's more, the vulnerabilities can't be fixed by changes to Serve, the report asserted. Instead, the vulnerabilities are linked to the design of the Internet as well as computer hardware and software, the authors said.
Accenture said Serve is secure and reliable
[*the Acronym: Secure Electronic Registration & Voting Experiment]
Note: they don't say for what purpose it is secure and reliable.
UPDATE: some signs late on Wednesday that the story is being picked up; here's the New York Times story. But so far it's only that commie rag, the Wall Street Journal, noting Accenture's Bermuda domicile.
Now Losing Its Identity
It was inevitable as sports teams seek to market themselves globally that this would happen: a dispute between the UK Meteorological Office and the New York Mets baseball team about the European trademarking of the word "Met." The UK repository of all things weather-related has been marketing itself as the Met Office for years, but the baseball team wants to trademark Met as well as the more obvious Mets for their use. So far the UK Patent Office is not sympathetic to the Met Office, ruling that while there is an obvious overlap in the words, there is little potential for confusion -- not withstanding the ever present cloudy gloom experienced by New York Mets fans in recent years. This story does remind us: whatever happened to that much hyped New York Yankees-Man United partnership of a couple of years ago? Perhaps the US trademarking of the very worthy dream of Man United proved too problematic.
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
There's a thin line between stupid and clever
We're pretty sure that we're horrified by the following development but maybe Mr Lydon has planned some grand manipulation of his er...public image:
Former punk singer John Lydon is joint favourite to win the third series of ITV1's I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here, which starts on 26 January.
We're pretty sure that we're horrified by the following development but maybe Mr Lydon has planned some grand manipulation of his er...public image:
Former punk singer John Lydon is joint favourite to win the third series of ITV1's I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here, which starts on 26 January.
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