Blog Storm

Holy shit! Liberia really exists! At least, it does now that “America has bowed to international pressure” (as the BBC News 24 anchorman put it earlier this morning). In fact it now exists so well the BBC are headlining it for the first time (though not on their website). Liberia, we were told, was “founded by American slaves,” and Liberians are “fed up with vague promises from America” about intervening.

Of course, if the US had been a little more vague in its threats over Iraq like most of the world wanted, those silly Liberians wouldn’t ever have gotten their hopes up so high, would they? So I blame Polly Toynbee. Naturally.

HMG have dreamed up another gravity-defying solution to the problem of immigrants to Britain not being assimilated into the native populace:

A new consultation document suggests that would-be Britons would take a new pledge of loyalty to the UK and observe the national anthem.

Local dignitaries - the mayor or MP, perhaps - would be invited to attend to make a speech and hand over citizenship certificates.

Small commemorative gifts could be presented to new British citizens under the plans.

Schoolchildren might be asked to perform a traditional song or dance to give a local flavour to the events.

And afterwards: “There may be an informal celebration….with light refreshments provided. This would be in keeping with the welcoming nature of the ceremony.”

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” So wrote Sun Tzu two and a half thousand years ago, and in spite of the fame of the book in which this line appears - The Art of War - it seems to be a book more talked about than actually read. The media commentary on the recent war in Iraq, for example, has appeared even to me, a non-general, to be so spectacularly ill-informed and lacking in even a basic understanding of how wars are fought as to be virtually useless as a guide to what was really going on. Instead, we were treated to a dismal parade of second-hand ‘knowledge’ and third-guessing dressed up as thoughtful insight - and, if not that, rather faux-clever attempts by the various authors to ‘interpret’ the events unfolding before them by the lights of their own preoccupations and a priori notions, relevant or not.

The WWW comes in for some serious flack around these parts, but I suspect I speak for quite a few WWW-phobes when I say that, whatever flaws it may have as a disseminator of ideas, it is still, on occasion, capable of producing some seriously first-class websites. One of these, currently near the end of its latest series of brilliant insights into modern warfare is the web drama Spooked-online (catchphrase: “Thingy tells us more about wotsit than it does about widget”).

Spooked-online is a slick piece of work, sharply written and argued, and sits well with the errorism preoccupations of the 9/11 world. Contrarian extremists, post-Marxist nutballs, anti-imperialism militants, pro-nothingers - I expect the site will only be canned when they run out of things to say no to.

Saddam gave Uday authority to control all press and media outlets in Iraq. Uday was the publisher of the Babylon Daily Political Newspaper.

On the front page of the paper’s four-page edition for Nov. 14, 2002, there was a picture of Osama bin Laden speaking, next to which was a picture of Saddam and his ”Revolutionary Council,” together with stories about Israeli tanks attacking a group of Palestinians.

On the back page was a story headlined ”List of Honor.” In a box below the headline was ”A list of men we publish for the public.” The lead sentence refers to a list of ”regime persons” with their names and positions.

I really should read the Times (of London) more often. That way I’d find out more aout things like this:

[A] local council is employing staff to take fathers on dry-slope skiing trips to help them bond with their children and make them less “sexist.”

The post, based in Knowsley, Merseyside, is one of a welter of dubious jobs being created by the vast sums of taxpayers’ money that the government is pumping into the public sector.

Details of the job emerged during a four-month undercover investigation by The Sunday Times in which applications were made for 60 jobs involving “facilitation”, “evaluation”, “co-ordination” and “monitoring”. They included:

NZ has voted (narrowly) to decriminalise prostitution. I’m all for it, though I baulk at the term “sex worker.”

Isn’t it interesting how liberal instincts are scattered about across the political spectrum, from left to right, from economic liberalism to social liberalism? It just goes to show that you don’t need any Third Way nonsense to adopt a politics that cuts right across the right-left divide; such a politics already exists. It’s called libertarianism.