Mental Meanderings

Here's one for you. In a speech made yesterday, Jacques Chirac announced that France will, for now onwards, commemorate the abolishment of slavery every 10th May. In the speech he declared that "slavery fed racism." I'll quickly ask if perhaps it was the other way round; that racism fed slavery. I'm really just throwing it into the air without much thought; so discuss.

A former US Marine, Jim Massey, has claimed that US cargo flights through Shannon Airport are carrying depleted uranium, Live 95FM reports.

In an interview to be broadcast on the "Limerick Today" programme, Mr. Massey states that weapons which contain depleated uranium were used in both Iraq and Afghanistan. he described both countries as "glowing green" because of the presence of the radioactive material.

According to Massey, depleted Uranium has a half-life of two million years.

Hamas itself has been forced into moderation, and will become more moderate in power. They were responsible for the cease-fire and were in better control of their people than Fatah, and face it, Fatah has its own militant terrorist group who isn't any better. Leaving Hamas out of the political process can only make them more radical. After all, terrorism is a product of exclusion. When the Muslim Brotherhood was persecuted in Egypt, they resorted to violence. When Israel was created, those who resisted occupation turned to violence. Exclusion is what causes the violence - it's that simple.

If any bad comes out of this, it will be at the hands of Israel, who is characteristically reactionary and paranoid. I'm not saying it doesn't have the right to be, but if it refuses to talk to Hamas, it is going to make happen what it says will happen, and peace will be dead. Only Israel can kill the peace process.

The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.

Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real? The fact that the "Information Operations Roadmap" is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.

And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military's ambitions for it.

[U]ntil the government of the day starts to justify the present distinction on the grounds that same-sex relationships are less meaningful, legitimate, or worthy, it is not true that the separate arrangements for relationships between one man and one woman constitute anything more than an instrumental view that this is in the best interest children and social stability.

Fiona makes no attempt to argue why someone would be right in feeling better or worse about themselves on the basis of what the state thinks or doesn't of them, so I'll take the point as conceded.

I think there's a decent case for civil unions, but also think that the family understood as a marraige between a man and a woman deserves protection.

Robert Holohan's mother, Majella, addressed the court. She claimed that semen was found on Robert's body when it was discovered dumped in a ditch at Inch strand in east Cork. Mrs Holohan said that her family's suffering following Robert's death was heartbreaking and indescribable.

She asked why would he have been killed for throwing stones; why were images deleted from his mobile phone; and what was Robert doing in Wayne O'Donoghue's bedroom at 7.20am on one occasion when he was supposed to have been on a sleepover with a friend.

First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

and there was no one left

to speak out for me.

- Pastor Martin Niemöller

In a mystifying self-contradiction, Bush trumpeted that "the Palestinians had an election yesterday, the results of which remind me about the power of democracy." If elections were really the same as democracy, and if Bush was so happy about the process, then we might expect him to pledge to work with the results, which by his lights would be intrinsically good. But then he suddenly swerved away from this line of thought, reverting to boilerplate and saying, "On the other hand, I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform. And I know you can't be a partner in peace if you have a -- if your party has got an armed wing."

So Bush is saying that even though elections are democracy and democracy is good and powerful, it has produced unacceptable results in this case, and so the resulting Hamas government will lack the legitimacy necessary to allow the United States to deal with it or go forward in any peace process. Bush's double standard is clear in his diction, since he was perfectly happy to deal with Israel's Likud Party, which is dedicated to the destruction of the budding Palestinian state, and which used the Israeli military and security services for its party platform in destroying the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority throughout the early years of this century. As Orwell reminded us in "Animal Farm," some are more equal than others.

When an Irish guy tries something romantic, the reaction tends to be one of two:

1. Eyebrows raised and a look of "what are you trying on"

2. Ridicule. Real and continuous ridicule.

We hear endless surveys about how Irish men aren't romantic. Yet try and do something (small or large) and most Irish guys will expect to receive the verbal equivalent of a slap in the face. It's all very well saying you want your men to be more romantic, but when you tell all your Irish male friends that Don Juan is the only romantic man you've ever met you're not exactly helping their confidence. It's all very well saying that foreigners "are more confident at romance" which is something else I hear - that's all very well if Irish girl will be eating out of their hands when they try something because confidence plays a big part in this. We're not immune to being hurt when we try something and have it thrown back in our faces.

Yeah you can say "he's bitter over something" and I probably am - as are most of my friends. There's a double standard at play that puts Irish men in a box that they can't, and given enough experience won't try and break out of.

President Bush accepted the stunning election results in the Palestinian territories yesterday with a conciliatory tone, saying the landslide victory of the militant Islamic group Hamas was rejection of the "status quo" and a repudiation of the "old guard" that had failed to provide honest government and services.

"There's something healthy about a system that does that," Bush said at a news conference. He reiterated that he will not work with Hamas, formally known at the Islamic Resistance Movement, as a "partner of peace" until it renounces its goal of destroying Israel and disarms its militias. But he left unsaid what a Hamas-led government will mean for the distribution of U.S. financial assistance and for American involvement in trying to reach a peace deal.

[T]he great hallmark of Bush' second term may well be the global march of democracy. Trouble is, that march is taking some surprising turns, as is evident in Hamas' stunning victory yesterday. Who would have expected a seedling of democracy would grow from the stump of Islamic fundamentalism and terror? We are witnessing the emergence of democratic Islamic fundamentalism. It is now a fragile flower. It may soon grow to be a sturdy, but most unhealthy tree. The new cedar of Lebanon.

The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response.

The White House this week also formally notified Representative Richard H. Baker, Republican of Louisiana, that it would not support his legislation creating a federally financed reconstruction program for the state that would bail out homeowners and mortgage lenders. Many Louisiana officials consider the bill crucial to recovery, but administration officials said the state would have to use community development money appropriated by Congress.

The White House's stance on storm-related documents, along with slow or incomplete responses by other agencies, threatens to undermine efforts to identify what went wrong, Democrats on the committees said Tuesday.

In the 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, the White House received detailed warnings about the storm's likely impact, including eerily prescient predictions of breached levees, massive flooding, and major losses of life and property, documents show. A 41-page assessment by the Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), was delivered by e-mail to the White House's "situation room," the nerve center where crises are handled, at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, the day the storm hit, according to an e-mail cover sheet accompanying the document.

The NISAC paper warned that a storm of Katrina's size would "likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching" and specifically noted the potential for levee failures along Lake Pontchartrain. It predicted economic losses in the tens of billions of dollars, including damage to public utilities and industry that would take years to fully repair. Initial response and rescue operations would be hampered by disruption of telecommunications networks and the loss of power to fire, police and emergency workers, it said.

In a second document, also obtained by The Washington Post, a computer slide presentation by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, prepared for a 9 a.m. meeting on Aug. 27, two days before Katrina made landfall, compared Katrina's likely impact to that of "Hurricane Pam," a fictional Category 3 storm used in a series of FEMA disaster-preparedness exercises simulating the effects of a major hurricane striking New Orleans. But Katrina, the report warned, could be worse.

Selecting Mr. Bashir, a general who seized power in a 1989 coup, would put the organization in the difficult position of attempting to mediate peace talks and quell the violence in the home of its chairman. Worse still, Mr. Bashir's own government has been accused of carrying out attacks on civilians in the western Darfur region and arming militia fighters who continue to terrorize the population there. An international criminal court is investigating an array of officials in Mr. Bashir's government for human rights violations related to the Darfur crisis, but has not indicated how high up the ladder the inquiry goes.

Human rights groups across the continent and beyond warned that choosing Mr. Bashir would damage Africa's credibility in the eyes of the world and hamper the African Union's efforts to negotiate an end to the Darfur crisis and to other conflicts around the continent. "Making Bashir the chairman would be an insult to the victims of Darfur," said Salih Osman, a Sudanese human rights lawyer and opposition member of Parliament. "The highest level officials in this government are involved in the atrocities in Darfur."

I can understand bringing the Vanguard and Princeton issues up, but to repeatedly harp on these accusations shows how desperate the Democrats have become. They can't win on the facts, they can't win on integrity and they can't win on the law, so they have to resort to innuendo.

The odd thing is that we expect a wife to sit behind her husband, unable to participate, just a backdrop of support. It's strange the way wives are used in politics to create an image for the man. In the business world, a man bringing his wife along to sit with him for a job interview would be out of his mind.

Of course, husbands sit with female nominees too. But we have yet to see a nasty hearing for a female Supreme Court nominee. Imagine if the Senators were saying awful things about a woman while her husband sat behind her. Would he glower just enough that the Senators wouldn't dare go too far? Would there come a point when this man would lose emotional control? Would he cry and run off? Would he step forward and say How dare you talk to my wife that way? That would be some new political theater.

A 70-year-old Italian law professor has discovered a new career writing erotic memoirs after losing his university job following accusations that he offered students high marks for sex.

Ezio Capizzano, a former law teacher at Camerino University in central Italy, gives detailed accounts of his amorous "tutorials" in the book, The Last Baron In A Campus of Tulips, published this week. When it emerged in 2002 that he had video-taped his "one-to-one" tutorials he became a household name in Italy and a role model for ageing Casanovas. Far from condemning him, the media lauded Prof Capizzano.

The respected Corriere della Sera newspaper described him as "Italy's answer to Sean Connery". In 2004 he was acquitted of any wrongdoing after the court accepted his claim that the students had all given their full consent."

…the issue of human rights…is not about recognizing the interests of the powerful. It is about protecting the interests of the powerless. It would be nice if all of the big five could be trusted to do this. But not all of them can, either at home or internationally. Some of the people most in need of a strong U.N. voice on human rights live under tyrannies that have carefully cultivated Chinese or Russian favor: Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe, to name a few.

Although Ambassador Bolton has repeatedly made it clear that he has little use or respect for the United Nations and would be happy to see the United States walk away from it, we have never questioned his commitment to reform its most dysfunctional institutions. But his behavior on this issue leaves us questioning his judgment, and that of his bosses in the State Department and the White House.

Fox News and CNN's Lou Dobbs worry about terrorists stealing across the United States' border with Mexico concealed among illegal immigrants. The Pentagon wages war in the Middle East to stop terrorist attacks on the United States. But the growing nightmare of officials at the Department of Homeland Security is passport-carrying, visa-exempt mujahideen coming from the United States' western European allies.

Jihadist networks span Europe from Poland to Portugal, thanks to the spread of radical Islam among the descendants of guest workers once recruited to shore up Europe's postwar economic miracle. In smoky coffeehouses in Rotterdam and Copenhagen, makeshift prayer halls in Hamburg and Brussels, Islamic bookstalls in Birmingham and "Londonistan," and the prisons of Madrid, Milan, and Marseilles, immigrants or their descendants are volunteering for jihad against the West. It was a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, born and socialized in Europe, who murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last November.

A Nixon Center study of 373 mujahideen in western Europe and North America between 1993 and 2004 found more than twice as many Frenchmen as Saudis and more Britons than Sudanese, Yemenites, Emiratis, Lebanese, or Libyans. Fully a quarter of the jihadists it listed were western European nationals -- eligible to travel visa-free to the United States.

The emergence of homegrown mujahideen in Europe threatens the United States as well as Europe. Yet it was the dog that never barked at last winter's Euro-American rapprochement meeting. Neither President George W. Bush nor Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice drew attention to this mutual peril, even though it should focus minds and could buttress solidarity in the West.

Update London Denizen has read the article in more detail (and with more time) than me and has this to say about it. I still haven't had a chance to go back over it with sufficient time to form a critque but it's on my list of 'things to do'.

The fundamentalists would like to portray sexual/queer men as predators of the young and defenceless, ie lock 'em up and throw away the key. But the defence against that is not "we're not predatory at all, how dare you, we are nice and fluffy and all we want is to live in monogamous unthreatening domestic bliss just like you, really". The response, as far as I'm concerned, is to acknowledge the unsettling, powerful, and often predatory urges that are present in sexual desire, and then to point out that there's nothing wrong with sex, of whatever flavour, as long as it's consensual.

1. Two-and-three-quarters cheers for Orla Barry. I heard Newstalk 106 come into its own this morning. Advertisers take note: they are attitudinally and culturally in tune with at least 50-plus-one percent of under-35 Ireland on issues like this. The first instinct of RTE (Morning Ireland, to a lesser extent Pat Kenny - Gerry Ryan is a special case, because I believe he was teasing out the callers to expose their attitudes, and he later added his own anecdote about Dubs working in England and learning that you can't yell out the word "nigger"; he explained that this was Irish "tolerance of ignorance") and the Irish Times was to circle the wagons, downplay and let her off the hook. The first instinct of Newstalk (and, let it be said, Gerry O'Regan and Frank Coughlan's Indo) was to confront the racist remark for what it was rather than explain it away. This is an interesting thing to observe.

2. Mary O'Rourke IS a racist. One could argue about the provenance, etymology and appropriateness of Mary O'Rourke's phrase, "worked like blacks". One can also argue whether or not she, as an elected official with skin thicker than a T-Rex, should be expected to apologise. But if the word racism has any meaning, it includes prejudice based on race. Mary O'Rourke's first instinct when confronted by a black texter to Newstalk was to congratulate her on getting her asylum, that is, to assume she was an asylum seeker.It is for that remark, even more than her earlier "off the cuff" remark, that she should apologise. That remark was far more revealing, far more ugly, and far more damaging to race relations in Ireland generally.

As someone whose mother used to call snots "black men", (and perhaps ill-advisedly still does) I can confirm that this was an example of at worst, unthinking insult. Let's require an element of mens rea (and no, recklessness doesn't count) before bandying the racism tag around with wild abandon, particularly where the accusation, as in Mary O'Rourke's case, is wildly at odds with the evidence of her strong commitment to multiculturalism.

Also, on Newstalk 106, she didn't just congratulate the woman on getting asylum, she said something along the lines of "well done for getting asylum or whatever you had to do to get your papers". She did leave open the migrant worker alternative. Let's be fair.

Cowboys Are My Weakness

By LARRY DAVID

SOMEBODY had to write this, and it might as well be me. I haven't seen "Brokeback Mountain," nor do I have any intention of seeing it. In fact, cowboys would have to lasso me, drag me into the theater and tie me to the seat, and even then I would make every effort to close my eyes and cover my ears. And I love gay people. Hey, I've got gay acquaintances. Good acquaintances, who know they can call me anytime if they had my phone number. I'm for gay marriage, gay divorce, gay this and gay that. I just don't want to watch two straight men, alone on the prairie, fall in love and kiss and hug and hold hands and whatnot. That's all.

Is that so terrible? Does that mean I'm homophobic? And if I am, well, then that's too bad. Because you can call me any name you want, but I'm still not going to that movie. To my surprise, I have some straight friends who've not only seen the movie but liked it. "One of the best love stories ever," one gushed. Another went on, "Oh, my God, you completely forget that it's two men. You in particular will love it.""Why me?""You just will, trust me."

But I don't trust him. If two cowboys, male icons who are 100 percent all-man, can succumb, what chance to do I have, half- to a quarter of a man, depending on whom I'm with at the time? I'm a very susceptible person, easily influenced, a natural-born follower with no sales-resistance. When I walk into a store, clerks wrestle one another trying to get to me first. My wife won't let me watch infomercials because of all the junk I've ordered that's now piled up in the garage. My medicine cabinet is filled with vitamins and bald cures.

So who's to say I won't become enamored with the whole gay business? Let's face it, there is some appeal there. I know I've always gotten along great with men. I never once paced in my room rehearsing what to say before asking a guy if he wanted to go to the movies. And I generally don't pay for men, which of course is their most appealing attribute.

And gay guys always seem like they're having a great time. At the Christmas party I went to, they were the only ones who sang. Boy that looked like fun. I would love to sing, but this weighty, self-conscious heterosexuality I'm saddled with won't permit it.I just know if I saw that movie, the voice inside my head that delights in torturing me would have a field day. "You like those cowboys, don't you? They're kind of cute. Go ahead, admit it, they're cute. You can't fool me, gay man. Go ahead, stop fighting it. You're gay! You're gay!"

Not that there's anything wrong with it.

It is striking how the craven extremism of Bush & his bestiary of madmen is prompting even the mainstream media to acknowledge Chomsky's analysis of U.S. conduct: it fits the evidence so well that even journalists can no longer ignore it.

Chomsky is often accused of supporting unsavoury regimes because he demands that the same standards (moral standards and standards of proof) be applied to the west as are applied to unfriendly regimes...there is a difference between the crimes of official enemies and the crimes of official friends.

Chomsky's mistake - if you can call it that - is to assume that his readers and critics will be as intellectually honest as he is. In fact his critics refer derisively to his "forests of footnotes".

Last August, Hamdan joined a prisonwide hunger strike to protest the conditions on Guantánamo. The detainees' numerous demands included the return of religious books that had been taken from them. When Swift next visited Hamdan in late August, he found him unusually intransigent. For two days, Hamdan refused to meet with him altogether. Not long after Swift returned home to Northern Virginia, he got a call from another lawyer at Guantánamo informing him that Hamdan, a slight man to begin with, had passed out from dehydration in his cell and was taken to the medical clinic at Delta and put on an IV drip. Swift flew back down to Guantánamo Bay almost immediately and managed to persuade Hamdan to start eating again by appealing to the same sense of solidarity that he says prompted him to join the strike in the first place. The best way to help his fellow detainees, Swift told him, was not to martyr himself but to follow through on their challenge to the system.

Like the government, Hamdan's lawyers also see him as much more than a detainee; to them, he represents the pretext for a historic and unconstitutional presidential power grab. As Hamdan's lawyers and other critics see it, the administration, by unilaterally creating the tribunals, defining the offenses and handpicking the panels, is not only denying detainees fair trials, it is also violating bedrock principles of the American government. To put an even finer point on it, they say the Bush administration is undermining the very values it purports to be defending in its war against Islamic extremism. They would like to see Hamdan and other enemy combatants tried before a traditional military court, a pre-existing legal system approved by Congress with built-in provisions for the complications that arise during wartime.

FRESHLY returned from the Middle East, where his new film, "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" had its world premiere as part of the second annual Dubai International Film Festival, Albert Brooks sounded exhausted, elated and relieved.

In "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," Mr. Brooks plays a comic on a somewhat dubious government mission. "I had the head of a studio telling me that this would cause a fatwa," Albert Brooks says. "This had never happened before," said Mr. Brooks from Los Angeles. "There's been no other American comedy that's made light of anything after 9/11. Nobody knows what will happen. The audience could stand up and walk out, they could boo, who knows? I don't have any road map here. I was told that, 'We think it will be O.K.,' but I was also told that people don't mince words here. If you hit the nail wrongly, it's like your thumb: you know it right away."

New details have emerged of how the growing number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay are being tied down and force-fed through tubes pushed down their nasal passages into their stomachs to keep them alive. They routinely experience bleeding and nausea, according to a sworn statement by the camp's chief doctor, seen by The Observer.

...

The London solicitors Allen and Overy, who represent some of the hunger strikers, have lodged a court action to be heard next week in California, where Edmondson [the doctor] is registered to practise. They are asking for an order that the state medical ethics board investigate him for 'unprofessional conduct' for agreeing to the force-feeding.

Edmonson's affidavit, in response to a lawsuit on behalf of detainees on hunger strike since last August, was obtained last week by The Observer, as a Guantánamo spokesman confirmed that the number of hunger strikers has almost doubled since Christmas, to 81 of the 550 detainees. Many have been held since the camp opened four years ago this month, although they not been charged with any crime, nor been allowed to see any evidence justifying their detention.

This and other Guantánamo lawsuits now face extinction. Last week, President Bush signed into law a measure removing detainees' right to file habeas corpus petitions in the US federal courts. On Friday, the administration asked the Supreme Court to take this retroactive, so nullifying about 220 cases in which prisoners have contested the basis of their detention and the legality of pending trials by military commission.

CHRISTIAN television evangelist Pat Robertson and the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have a well-established affinity for the outrageous. This time their mutual embrace of indecency places them in a category all to themselves. As Ariel Sharon lies hospitalized and critically incapacitated by a massive stroke, Mr. Robertson, one of America's best-known religious extremists, and his Iranian counterpart -- no slouch when it comes to religious demagoguery -- suggested that Israel's prime minister had it coming. Speaking on his TV show, "The 700 Club," on the Christian Broadcasting Network, Mr. Robertson said the Bible "makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who 'divide my land.' " Mr. Sharon, Mr. Robertson asserted, "was dividing God's land, and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course." As Mr. Robertson was offering up his thoughts about a man fighting for his life, Iran's president was expressing unrestrained hope that Mr. Sharon would simply die.

Pat Robertson and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are probably beyond the point where they can be reached by embarrassment or shame. But they are not beyond the kind of strong condemnation that they have richly earned. We need not recite the records of contemptible remarks made by both men in the past. There is little reason to believe that either will cease his disgraceful behavior. Mr. Ahmadinejad, the president of a country with a lamentable human rights record and a nuclear program, is dangerous, where Mr. Robertson is only pathetic. But they share a self-righteousness that blinds them to the distance that they have placed between themselves and the majority of people who find their remarks repulsive. It's sufficient to know, we suppose, that at a time when messages of hope are flowing from around the world to the bedside of Ariel Sharon, Pat Robertson and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad still have each other.

In our class Sam was respected for his intellectual ability. He was quiet, but when he did speak his remarks were thoughtful and to the point. He wasn't showy or pretentious. He listened to others. I can't recall Sam prejudging an issue or reaching arbitrary conclusions. He worked hard and was never ashamed of that, even at a school that favored the appearance of effortless brilliance.

Since announcing the nomination of Judge Alito, the Bush administration has conducted a high-powered marketing campaign to sell him to the public. Such efforts anticipate and seek to thwart hostile confirmation hearings like those that sank Robert Bork. But neither a witch hunt at the Senate nor a hard sell from the White House will afford Sam Alito the confirmation process he, or the country, deserves: one as thoughtful and measured as the legal mind it considers.

A spokesman for the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, said that the Government was cooperating fully with the Council of Europe's investigations into allegations of so called extraordinary renditions. He said that it remained the case that the US had given repeated assurances to the Government that no prisoners had been transferred through Shannon and there was no independent evidence that this had taken place.

A leader of the Southern Baptist Convention has been arrested in Oklahoma City on a lewdness complaint for allegedly propositioning a plainclothes policeman.

Police say the Reverend Lonnie Latham was arrested Tuesday night in a motel parking lot after soliciting an officer who was posing as a male prostitute. Latham is pastor of South Tulsa Baptist Church and is on the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention. He has spoken out in the past against homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

After posting bond, Latham told K-F-O-R T-V in Oklahoma City that he was set up, and was in the area ministering to people.