Words in performance

It's the final day of National Poetry Month. Throughout the month, I've been featuring performance poetry videos from HBO's "Def Jam" poetry series, and in case you hadn't noticed, I've now collected all those posts together on one page which you can access in the sidebar features under "Words in performance".

Seeing as it's the last day of NPM and I wanted to bracket the collection with performances by Saul Williams, the next post belongs to him. His versatility, presence, verbal dexterity, dramatic skill and the audacious inventiveness of his work mark him out as one of the very best of the slam poets.

Incidentally, if you're interested in learning more about the origins of slam poetry then "An Incomplete History of Slam" by Kurt Heintz is a good place to start.

Coded Language

Saul Williams on Def Poetry

Wednesday roundabout

Michael Weiss at Snarksmith: "No Flies on Syria, According to Scott Ritter".

Cobb on the American lifestyle - neither generalizable nor sustainable.

Airshipworld reports on Festo AirJelly with video of the thing in flight.

Clive Davis has a short note on Humphrey Littleton's atheism.

Language Log: "split infinitives are grammatical, unobjectionable, and often highly recommended".

And finally,

Science Punk has a cool many-handed clock - I want one.

Death and science

Via Instapundit: John Derbyshire quotes Ben Stein from a recent interview with Paul Crouch of Trinity Broadcasting Network:-

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

Crouch: That’s right.

Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Has Stein completely lost it?

Zoe Brain had some musings on the Philosophy of Science yesterday, including a clip from Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man" where he talks about the mindset behind the Holocaust - it wasn't science.

Sign Language

Rives on Def Poetry

Defrauding democracy

The Times comments on the recent report from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust which says the British electoral process is vulnerable to large-scale fraud:-

Rowntree is not the first organisation to point out the shortcomings of the British democratic process. The Council of Europe, the Electoral Commission and the Electoral Reform Society have all highlighted serious defects. So has Richard Mawrey, QC, presiding over an election court established in 2005 to examine a scandal in Birmingham. He said the system would “disgrace a banana republic”.

Also in the Times, Libby Purves calls for the abolition of postal voting on demand because of widespread fraud.

Dire warning

This would really put a cap on things:-

Opec, the oil producing cartel, has warned that the price of crude could keep rising to reach $200 a barrel.

If that happens then, in line with Stephen Leeb's predictions, we're in for "hyperinflation, double-digit interest rates and a cascading collapse of the world economy".

Thinking about kin

There's an interesting sounding new paper featured at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology: "The Architecture of Human Kin Detection" by Debra Lieberman, John Tooby, & Leda Cosmides:-

Humans in all known cultures feel differently about family members than they do about non-family members. To greater or lesser degrees, they are willing to sacrifice some of their own welfare to help family members, and they feel usually disgusted at the prospect of having sexual contact with nuclear family members (those who are genetic relatives). They also often feel incest to be morally wrong, and generally oppose brother-sister and parent-offspring incest in others.

What causes these phenomena, and what previously unknown facts about the human mind/brain can be discovered by using them as the basis of a research program?

A further detour

Writing the phrase "further distanced" in the previous post gave me pause for thought. I had no hesitation spelling it "further" rather than "farther" but I wondered about the distinction, so I looked up common usage.

Merriam-Webster has this to say:-

Farther and further have been used more or less interchangeably throughout most of their history, but currently they are showing signs of diverging. As adverbs they continue to be used interchangeably whenever spatial, temporal, or metaphorical distance is involved. But where there is no notion of distance, further is used . Further is also used as a sentence modifier , but farther is not. A polarizing process appears to be taking place in their adjective use. Farther is taking over the meaning of distance (the farther shore) and further the meaning of addition (needed no further invitation).

Hmmm. I thought I'd check out what Language Log had to say on the matter but it seems the subject is too dull even for them.

Half-baked pastor

I have no idea what Pastor Wright thought he was up to with his performance at the National Press Club: it's clear he loves the attention he's getting (not unusual for a pastor, I guess) but it's hardly an edifying sight.



Press reaction to Wright's appearance has been largely negative and Barack Obama has further distanced himself from his former pastor:-

In a dramatic press conference this afternoon in North Carolina, Obama said he found Jeremiah Wright's comments yesterday at the National Press Club "appaling" and "ridiculous" and gave a "performance" with a "complete disregard for what the American people were going through." It was "antithetical" to his campaign and to everything he has stood for as an adult, trying to unite people around common values and aspirations.

Last time around, in his earlier speech in Philadelphia, Obama couldn't quite bring himself to renounce Wright. Today, Obama said that he was shocked that Wright would use yesterday's forum to accuse him of political posturing, and said very clearly that his friendship with Wright is over. "Obviously, whatever relationship I had with Rev Wright has changed as a consequence of this," he said.

Maybe Obama should have said that some time ago.

American myths

The BBC's Justin Webb (in an article on gun ownership) talking about the British misperception of America as a violent society:-

Brits arriving in New York, hoping to avoid being slaughtered on day one of their shopping mission to Manhattan are, by day two, beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about. By day three they have had had the scales lifted from their eyes.

I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place, the lack of the violent undercurrent so ubiquitous in British cities, even British market towns.

"It seems so nice here," they quaver.

Well, it is!

That's Entertainment

mbox
Paul Weller reprises The Jam classic with Noel Gallagher.

Public censors

According to today's Times:-

The BBC is facing a High Court challenge over its decision to censor a party political broadcast in the run-up to Thursday’s local elections.

A Christian party has begun legal action after the corporation insisted on changes to a short film in which the party voiced opposition to the building of Europe’s biggest mosque next to the site of the 2012 Olympics.

The Christian Choice election broadcast would have described Tablighi Jamaat [the organization behind the £75 million development] as "a separatist Islamic group” before welcoming that some “moderate Muslims” were opposed to the mosque complex.

Reportedly, the court action comes after lawyers at the BBC and ITV forced Christian Choice to change the broadcast's words and meaning:-

The BBC refused to accept “separatist” — the corporation asked for “controversial” instead — and barred the use of “moderate Muslims” because the phrase implied that Tablighi Jamaat was less than moderate.

ITV went a step farther, demanding that the adjective “controversial” be used merely to describe the planned mosque and not the group itself.

What's going on? This is not what normally happens with party political broadcasts, is it?

A day off

No blogging from me, today; I've just spent the day popping pain-killers.

I get to see the surgeon next month and then I should get a date for the op - no promises as to when. In the meantime, if the pain-killers stop working (pretty close to that right now) Mac will start pleading with me to let her take me to the local hospital as an emergency case.

Of course I'm not that keen to go (last time was Christmas and it really put a dent in the festive cheer). And, hey, just cause I'm doubled over in pain, rocking back and forth and groaning doesn't mean I need to go to hospital. Right?

Unfortunately, it might mean exactly that. So, if I end up not posting for a couple of days, you'll know where I'll be.

Weekend reading

Mother Jones: The Seven Myths of Energy Independence.

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? Glenn Loury on race and justice in Boston Review, last year.

Cartoons Go to War at Slate: "Bill Mauldin's unflinching vision has yet to be beat."

"Green giants: Our love affair with trees" in the Independent.

Criminal system

Bill Stuntz at Less than the Least looks at the dramatic rise in the American prison population:-

Adjusted for population, imprisonment has quintupled in the last thirty-five years. As of 2001 (America’s prison population has grown since then), the average incarceration rate in EU countries was 87 per 100,000 population. In the U.S., the comparable figure was nearly 700. The black incarceration rate is several times higher than that.

[Via Instapundit]

Imagine

Black Ice

The Humph

"Perfect gent, pioneer of jazz and purveyor of the rudest jokes on air"

Melvyn Bragg pays tribute to Humphrey Lyttelton who died Friday at the age of 86:-

He was a very amiable, good-mannered and well-bred man and that is why he got away with all of the stuff he said on Radio 4 as chairman of the panel game I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. His lines must surely be among the rudest jokes that have ever been broadcast anywhere on the radio, but I would be interested to know if he ever got a single complaint. His kind of self-deprecating humour is a very British thing and probably also came from being with musicians. It is a class thing too, of course, that kind of dry wit.

It is very attractive to be so self-deprecating and the style, I think, comes from the importance of always being a gentleman.

The world just won't be the same without him.

Saturday roundabout

The latest edition of The Momma 'n' Daddy Collection is available at Normblog.

One Camera. One Take. Video of David Ford performing "Go To Hell" at AE Brain.

Andrew R has a review of "In Bruges" staring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.

Fate of the Artist: Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" turned into a comic book.

At Savage Minds: Global Buzz Helsinki style.

And finally,

Restraining Order at xkcd.com.

Sustainaballyhoo

Is it just me, or are key elements of the Green agenda falling apart?

The worldwide effort by supermarkets and industry to replace conventional oil-based plastic with eco-friendly "bioplastics" made from plants is causing environmental problems and consumer confusion, according to a Guardian study.

The substitutes can increase emissions of greenhouse gases on landfill sites, some need high temperatures to decompose and others cannot be recycled in Britain.

Many of the bioplastics are also contributing to the global food crisis by taking over large areas of land previously used to grow crops for human consumption.

See also: biofuels, food miles, global warming and nuclear power.

PhD in Him

Vanessa Hidary on Def Poetry

Some kind of dumb

From Punning Pundit yesterday at Dean's World - gleefuly riding the thin end of a wedge down a slippery slope towards the justification of political violence:-

[I]f you’re going to ask other people to die for things you believe are right, good, and just– shouldn’t you personally be able to take a cream pie to the face to explain the same? Politics ain’t bean bag, and war isn’t fluffy.

It's a diluted and deranged version of the chickenhawk argument: unless you are willing to subject yourself to physical assault, you shouldn't voice your political opinion. Ain't that just dandy!

But what about upping the ante? I mean, cream pies only slap at the problem; bullets solve it. Right, Pundit?

I'm glad to see some of the other Dean's World contributors taking issue with such nonsense: Naftali's (somewhat hurried) post about it, on DW's frontpage today, is receiving plenty of comment.

Defining deviance

From a post by Armed Liberal at Winds of Change:-

[W]e are increasingly funneling our responses to bad behavior through the criminal justice system in ways that seem - well, just bad to me.

I street-raced cars as a kid - a misdemeanor today. I made guncotton in AP chemistry in high school - God knows what I'd have been charged with today. I think that we have created a complex of laws that makes all of us criminals to some extent, and one aspect of this is that there are probably a bunch of decent kids out there with felony records - arrests or convictions.

And to the extent that those records block them from having any decent opportunities in life... we've just created a cohort that has no choice but to live on the margins of society.

Good morning

My computer crashed yesterday, and although it's working again now and I'm back online, I still have no idea what the problem was/is.

So, there was no roundabout yesterday and I only managed a few posts. I'd like to think today will be different, but seeing as I've just bought the MacQuarrie/Robinson translation of Heidegger's "Being and Time", I might be otherwise engaged.

State execution

Stubborn Facts on the death penalty:-

Americans support the death penalty nearly two to one, and although support has been ebbing away since reaching a peak in the early 1990s, at time of writing Pew finds that 62% of respondents support the death penalty. If present trends continue, support will fall below opposition in 2019, by my projection - but abolitionists are impatient, and the future is an undiscovered country of uncertain terrain.

Magazine lifestyle

From The Onion's creative collection of lifestyle magazine covers. [Via Clive Davis]

Overcoming metaphysics

Following on from this post, a short passage from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Heidegger's view of metaphysics:-

According to Heidegger, today's metaphysics, in the form of technology and calculative thinking related to it, becomes so pervasive that there is no realm of life that is not subjected to its dominance. It imposes on man its technological-scientific-industrial character and makes it the sole criterion of his sojourn on the earth. Grounded in the Cartesian philosophy of the subject and the Nietzschean idea of the unconditioned will, metaphysics provides an answer to the question of the being of beings for contemporary men and women, but skillfully removes from their field of view the problem of existence. Moreover, because of its powerful sway over contemporary human beings, metaphysics cannot be simply cast aside or rejected. Any straightforward attempt to do so can only fortify its power over human life. Metaphysics can neither be rejected, canceled or denied, but it can be overcome by the way of demonstration that it is nihilism.

Persepolis

"Here is an adaptation so inspired, so simple and so frictionless in its transformation of the source material that it's almost a miracle. When I tell people it's a lo-fi animation, largely in black-and-white, about Iran, they put their heads in their hands and make a low groaning sound. But I've seen those same people bounce happily out of the cinema after seeing it as if they had had some sort of caffeine injection."

Peter Bradshaw reviewing Persepolis in today's Guardian.

Thursday roundabout

Vodkapundit points to some background on last year's Israeli airstrike in northern Syria.

Tim Blair commemorates Anzac Day.

Oliver Kamm: "Labour is no longer even a credible prospect, let alone a dominant political force".

Tim Worstall has a video showing how the European Union works.

There's a dialogue on games at Normblog.

And finally,

Language Log unearths the early history of txt spk.

Happy Birthday Hubble

One of a collection of images of merging galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope - released by NASA today to mark Hubble's 18th anniversary.

NGC 520 is the product of a collision between two disk galaxies that started 300 million years ago. It exemplifies the middle stages of the merging process: the disks of the parent galaxies have merged together, but the nuclei have not yet coalesced. It features an odd-looking tail of stars and a prominent dust lane that runs diagonally across the center of the image and obscures the galaxy. NGC 520 is one of the brightest galaxy pairs on the sky, and can be observed with a small telescope toward the constellation of Pisces, the Fish, having the appearance of a comet. It is about 100 million light-years away and about 100,000 light-years across.

Thinking about...

Hmmm. Ever since I found myself contending that findings from modern empiricism supported the ontological argument against nothingness, I've been reading Heidegger. Or rather, commentaries on bits of Heidegger - most notably from Brad Elliot Stone at LMU.

I hadn't looked at Heidegger before and it's now clear I had the wrong impression of him. I'd always lumped him in with the Existentialists but it turns out he had a completely different idea of what philosophy should be about. In essence, Heidegger thinks that Western philosophy has taken a wrong turn as regards understanding the nature of being.

I have a lot of sympathy with Heidegger's way of thinking about things, and many of his ideas seem somehow familiar. So I wasn't that surprised to learn he had studied the Tao Te Ching - even working on a German translation.

I was also interested to find, while trawling the internet, that Heidegger's work is influencing developments in AI:-

[I]n order for an AI to get past this crucial problem of contextual relevance, they would need to be imbued with particular “bodily needs” in order so that the AI could “cope” with the world. In other words, these AI need to be embodied and embedded in the world so that there is a particular significance for the program, or else it will never be able to act intelligently in the world. You can’t develop a truly artificial intelligence based on pure symbol shunting because the significance of the world stems not from our brain “processing” symbolically, but rather from the entire referential totality of culture. We can’t escape from the fact that our intelligence results from persons coping with an environment.

Some people even blog about it.

Logging opinion

Victor Mair at Language Log asked a former student, now working in China: "What’s the atmosphere like in China these days?" The answer he got may come as a surprise:-

I have not talked to a single person among my friends and colleagues in China who has any sympathy for Tibet, Xinjiang, or the protests. Their reactions are as offended and irrational as those of the Chinese government.

Also, Drew Kumpf at Foreign Policy reports on protests by overseas Chinese who regard the disruption of the Olympics and the media coverage of Tibet as affronts to the Chinese nation.

Whatever happened to PJ?

Via Clive Davis: Alex Massie at The Debatable Land says PJ O'Rourke's latest offering at The Weekly Standard is "simultaneously over-written and under-observed":-

It suggests the spark has gone, leaving only the kind of flat insult-by-numbers favoured by the most tediously bellicose type of saloon-bar bore who, in increasingly rare moments of self-awareness, wonders why there seem to be fewer people listening than once there were in younger, happier days.

Ouch.

Wednesday roundabout

At Normblog, Eve Garrard on "How to be a union boycotter, in 10 easy steps".

The Fall and Rise of Chris Langham: a guest post from Niki Shisler at Harry's Place.

Michael Totten on the case of AP photographer (and alleged insurgent collaborator) Bilal Hussein.

Armed Liberal at Winds of Change: A Path Toward Democracy and Information Warfighting.

Melanie Phillips on what is perhaps "yet another ‘defining moment’ for the implosion of the Brown premiership."

And finally,

There's robot dancing at Neo-neocon.

George and Dragon

From Black Forge Weathervanes for St George's Day.

Safety first

Internet Ronin unveils a new California state flag.

[Erm..., if there's still a comment there from me that says something like "這是垃圾郵件" just ignore it, I was referring to an earlier (now deleted) comment.]

Encyclopediology

The Uncyclopedia entry on Wikipedia:-

Massively Multiplayer Online Editing Game played by experts in redundancy, skepticism, pseudoscience, hyperlinking, reverting articles, demanding reliable sources, redundancy, verification, redundancy, identifying original research and initiating subtle flamewars over what is encyclopedic.

See also the Wikipedia entry on Uncyclopedia.

Missing children

From the Yorkshire Evening Post:-

Thousands of children have gone missing from school rolls, it has been claimed.

At least 2,089 under-16s disappeared from the register, with fears that some may have been forced into arranged marriages. The youngsters are from 14 areas of the country identified as "high risk" by the Government's Forced Marriage Unit.

And this from the Guardian:-

More than 400 foreign children, many suspected of being trafficked into the sex or drug trade in Britain, have gone missing from local authority care.

Children from Africa, Asia and eastern Europe have disappeared from safe houses and foster homes around the country's biggest ports and airports, figures released to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed.

The missing children include at least 87 Chinese who disappeared from care around Heathrow and Gatwick and 68 from countries including Afghanistan, Albania and India who went missing from the care of Kent county council, which is responsible for protecting children trafficked through Dover and Folkestone.

Common People

William Shatner and Joe Jackson cover a Pulp classic.

Staple prices

Rice in the Times:-

The global trade in rice lurched to the brink of a 1970s-style “oil shock” today as prices surged 2.3 per cent to a new high and speculation mounted that Thailand, Asia’s predominant “rice superpower”, may join other regional producers in curbing exports.

Wheat in the Guardian:-

Wheat prices have been rising rapidly because of increased demand from developing economies and because of pressure on farmers to switch to biofuel crops. There is a global shortage of hard red spring wheat, a variety used in bread that has doubled in price since last September.

Leading ambitions

Neo-neocon looks at the will to power that drives both Clinton and Obama. This on Obama:-

“Ambitious” and “power-mad” aren’t words ordinarily used to describe him. But it’s hard to escape the idea that they would be highly appropriate. Obama’s charm—a quality Hillary singularly lacks—plus a purposefully ironic and slightly self-deprecating detachment whereby he mocks his own hype while simultaneously and slyly encouraging it, act as effective smokescreens to hide the ambition that must be a good part of what drives him,

Mistranslations

xkcd.com

On Twittering

Lore Sjöberg at Wired takes a look at Twitter:-

The internet is to human interaction as Pringles are to potatoes. Companionship and closeness are processed into an unrecognizable slurry, then reconstituted as an unnatural recreation of their original incarnation.
[...]
Twitter takes the Pringles analogy to its logical conclusion. It's something like a collection of personal blogs, only each entry is limited to 140 characters, so you end up with a vertical stack of bite-size, artificially flavored communication snacks. They're oddly compelling while remaining staunchly unsatisfying, and it always feels like maybe the next one will quell the roiling ennui inside.

Tuesday roundabout

Mr Eugenides presents this week's Britblog Roundup.

Boingboing: British Police tell photographer it's unlawful to take photos in public (again).

Norman Geras has a post about the term 'post-left'.

Another example of how not to measure temperature at Watts Up With That.

There's a postcard from David Adesnik at Oxblog.

And finally,

Science Punk: Building a Jet Powered Beer Cooler.

Red barn

Barn, Berne, Indiana - beccafromportland

Chronic incredulity

It's been happening for a few years now - but lately more and more - I keep finding myself thinking I can't believe how old I am. I'm forty-eight, I have to keep reminding myself. I just can't believe I'm two years off fifty.

I don't remember having any trouble believing I was twenty-four.

Tales of the West

I'm a big fan of Westerns, partly because I get to play "spot the surrogate ancestor". I'm not talking about outlaws, gunslingers and assorted maverick heroes. Nope, in my family, it's homesteaders and townsfolk; law-abiding citizens of the sort that, in Westerns, usually end up having their crops trampled and their church burned down before up to seven heroes arrive to save the day.

Great grandfather Jacob and his brother Martin were Union veterans who moved West after the war. They weren't cowboys or renegades, gamblers or gunslingers but settlers - solid, family men with wives and children. They didn't cross the Missouri to seek their fortune or make a name for themselves; they were farmers seeking land. When they got to where they were going, they unhitched the wagons, planted a crop and built a town from the mud up.


So, watching Westerns with my three boys, I get to point out little bits of family history to them - give them a little reverence for the ancestors. Though, of course, none of our forebears were saints. Great uncle Martin, for example, had a habit of rallying concerned citizens outside the local courthouse with the strongly professed intention of lynching some felon or other. Thankfully, he was thwarted the two times he tried it - on one occasion, only by the stout intervention of the local judge who said he'd lay out the first man through the door.

Still, I can't judge Martin too harshly. I am bound to criticize his ideas on summary justice but, in his own estimate, he was a man of principle and fine judgement - he only targeted horse thieves and Democrats.

Blogging USA

The Cornhusker State

One of the Great Plains states. "Where the West Begins": The Omaha, Chimney Rock and the Oregon Trail. Beef, corn and Union Pacific. Arbor Day and the runza sandwich.

Kool-Aid is the official state beverage.

Random quote

"Ruling the country is like cooking a small fish."

Lao Tzu

Random picture

What's up Indiana

Yesterday, the state tour arrived in Indiana. Today, I've been wandering around some of the local blogs:-

Feed Me/Drink Me: Indianapolis food, wine and commentary.

Today's Image: Images of America from a retired photography teacher.

The Bilerico Project: "the web's largest LGBTQ group blog" - lively and diverse.

Chris Hardie's Weblog: "community building, cultural change and personal adventure".

The Feminist Review: recently launched blog dedicated to challenging patriarchy.

writewrite: notes from the life of a writer and teacher in Richmond, Indiana.

Indiana cornfields

Monday roundabout

Scott Kirwin responds to fellow Dean's World poster Kevin D's linking of Darwin and the Holocaust.

Tim Oren at Winds of Change surveys the idea that there's a Cold Civil War going on in America.

Clive Davis links to the Bloggerheads conversation between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury on the Democratic presidential candidates.

Neo-neocon on Brigette Bardot, currently on trial in France for inciting racial hatred against Muslims.

Patrick Porter at Oxblog on Gordon Brown's recent US visit and the peculiar dynamics of the "special relationship".

And finally,

Paul Kuliniewicz: How to be a homeopathic bioterrorist. [Via Orac]

Bad science

Ben Goldacre looks at the the Advertising Standards Agency's investigation of Zara, the “UK’s premier psychic adviser”:-

[The ASA] was concerned that statements like “I will cast a spell to grant your wish”, “might be interpreted to mean that her spells would be successful”. Thank God the ASA is there to save us from this underhand marketing practice. I don’t understand why anyone would pay for a spell if they didn’t think it would be successful.

Then the regulator tried to assess Zara’s powers. “We considered that the claim ‘premier psychic adviser’ implied that Zara offered an objectively superior service to all other psychic advisers … because we had seen no comparative evidence to show that Zara offered an objectively superior service to all other psychic advisers, the claim was misleading.”

It’s unclear what kind of evidence might have sufficed for the ASA. If it was a provable phenomenon then perhaps that would genuinely have been mis-selling.

The medieval mind

Three documentaries from the BBC's Medieval Season exploring the medieval mind are currently available via the BBC's iPlayer:-



Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press: Fry investigates the story of the first printing press and attempts to recreate "the machine that made us".

The Saint and the Hanged Man: Reason and the supernatural collide in this documentary about a trial case based on several purported miracles.

Inside the Medieval Mind: A four-part series investigating the intellectual landscape of the medieval world.

Vic Wooten

Via Cobb: Some stunning virtuoso bass playing from Victa.

Decent responses

There are responses to the recent opinion piece by David Edgar on defectors from the left at Harry's Place and Normblog, while Andrew Anthony lays into Edgar at Comment is Free:-

Conveniently early in his essay on "defection literature", David Edgar gives the game away:

"Just as past generations sought to reposition the fault-lines of 20th-century politics (notably, by bracketing communism with fascism as totalitarianism) so, now, influential writers seek to redraw the political map of our time."

Do we get the idea that describing the Soviet model, with its vast network of gulags and millions of state murders and total party control, as "totalitarian" was a historical error? Certainly, that's the suggestion left hanging like a two-pig-owning kulak.

It's worth reading it all.

Update
Oliver Kamm also responds to Edgar.

Local news

Serious goings-on two streets away from where Mac's mother lives. The BBC reports:-

Bomb disposal experts in Bristol have carried out a third controlled explosion at the home of a man arrested under the Terrorism Act. It comes a day after police were granted a further seven days to question Andrew Ibrahim, a 19-year-old British Muslim convert.

A first controlled blast was carried out at the property, in a cul-de-sac in Westbury-on-Trym, on Friday. A second explosion was carried out earlier on Saturday.

The second and third detonations had originally been intended for Friday evening, but were postponed as officers awaited the delivery of sandbags to minimise the impact of the blast.

I know the security services make mistakes - sometimes they carry out controlled explosions on items that later turn out to have been harmless. But after three controlled explosions, I'm guessing they found something that was potentially very dangerous.

Scotland goes dry

If you live in Scotland you might want to think about filling your car up before Friday because, after the weekend, it sounds like there'll be no petrol in Scotland for a month or so.

The BBC reports:-

Bosses at Scotland's only crude oil refinery have started a shutdown after claiming an impending strike will compromise safety. Ineos said the Grangemouth refinery could shut for "at least a month", and warned of major fuel shortages.

The statement from Ineos says:-

Fuel shortages are likely to begin in Scotland as early as Friday 25 April and the whole of Scotland could be without fuel for at least a month.

Is the company scaremongering or just giving fair warning? I guess we'll find out next week.

Slur of the day

"Not all Darwinists are Nazis"

Kevin D at Dean's World mires himself in reductio ad Hitlerum.

Pick a bale of cotton

Rare film of Lead Belly from 1945

Weekend reading

"This Is How We Lost to the White Man": The audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic.

After Mamet: David Edgar, "the stopped clock of English theatre", denouncing the Left's defectors in the Guardian.

Anthony Campbell on the evolution of consciousness in Julian Jaynes Revisited.

Erasmus: The Praise of Folly - an extract - still a rollicking good read after five hundred years.

Observer error

Gaby Hinsliff's article in today's Observer "Ethnic middle classes join the 'white flight'" contains a factfile on migration. Here's the first fact:-

The last census in 2001 put the UK's minority ethnic population at 4.6 million, or 7.9 per cent of the total population. In 1991, it was almost 6 per cent.

Which suggests the UK's ethnic minority population grew by less than a third in the ten years to 2001. But that doesn't appear to be the case. Figures from the National Statistics Office show that, over the same period, the ethnic minority population increased by more than 50%:-

[I]n Great Britain the minority ethnic population grew by 53 per cent between 1991 and 2001, from 3.0 million in 1991 to 4.6 million in 2001.

Am I'm missing something here or has the Observer got its facts wrong?

Blogging USA

The Hoosier State

Midwestern state at the crossroads of America. Land of the Indians: Miami, Delaware, Shawnee. Angel Mounds and the Indy 500; cornfields and college sports. Limestone, steel and tenderloin sandwiches.

Water is the official state beverage.

Saturday roundabout

Michael Totten in Iraq reports on working with the tribal authorities.

Cartoonist in trouble: Baroque in Hackney on Egypt's Magdy El Shafee.

Jay Tea at Wizbang has some thoughts about the push to reinstate the draft.

Vodkapundit: crushing Of dissent at Thesaurus.com.

The Simpsons: back on Venezuelan TV after the ban.

And finally,

Donald Sensing has news of the weird.

Heaven indeed

Ophelia Benson can't help noticing that clerics sometimes say the oddest things. This from the Bishop of Oxford, for example:-

I am sure the Roman Catholic bishops are intelligent, rational people, but their starting point on embryo research is mistaken. They believe that the newly fertilised egg, the tiny bundle of multiplying cells smaller than a pin head, has the same right to life as an adult. But more than two-thirds of fertilised eggs are lost in nature anyway. If each of these really is a person, that is, an eternal soul, it would lead to the absurd conclusion that heaven is mainly populated by people who have never been born.

Ophelia has something to say about that:-

Ah yes, how absurd - but is it any more absurd than the conclusion that heaven exists and that it is mainly populated by people who have been born? Not a lot. The whole idea of a heaven populated by dead people is absurd, yet here is this grown man treating it as a matter of fact.

Indeed. And not only a matter of fact, but a fact which the good bishop knows more about than anyone else.

How did he come by such knowledge?

Hands

Sarah Kay on Def Poetry

Prejudice and persecution

This, from Zoe Brain, following the suicide of a young woman in Nova Scotia:-

In a week's time, many schools will have a Day of Silence, to commemorate the silence GLBT people must bear in order to protect themselves from persecution. This year, we especially commemorate the execution-style slaying of Lawrence King, a 15 year old shot twice in the back of the head at his schooldesk for not remaining silent.

And this "short short story" Zoe wrote a couple of years ago:-

DiEthylStilbestrol (by Zoe Brain)

One in five genetic males whose mothers took that drug have Gender Dysphoria.
Simon: pushed under a bus by bullies at age 7. She didn't 'vibe right' as a boy.
James: slit her wrists at 16, after being raped after school. Again.
John, Freddy and George: all kicked out of home for being 'sissy boys', shaming their families.
John: took the wrong one home, and her mutilated body was found in a back alley. She was 19.
Freddy: OD'd on her 20th birthday, just another tranny whore.
George: turned tricks, saved, paid for her treatment at 24, with enough for legal studies too. Georgina, now a successful lawyer, and her partner Sue live two doors from Samantha. Georgina hides her past carefully.
Sam: supported by her parents, transitioned at 21. Samantha's married, with two adopted children. Only her husband and her gynecologist know her medical history.
Neither Georgina nor Samantha know about the other.
William: earned a posthumous decoration at 24, charging a machine gun nest. Ending her pain.
Charles: ate her gun at 25. Her platoon never knew why.
Andy: resigned her commission after being surprised in drag. Drugs, Aversion Therapy and repeated ECT didn't work, so they tried lobotomy. The body died of pneumonia years later, but she was gone at 28.
Harry: A chief design engineer, lost her job, her savings, her family, her home too, when she started transitioning. She's 42, now on the game as she's unemployable. Saving for treatment. There's still hope.

Like Zoe says, this isn't fiction, this isn't some hypothetical, this is real. Go read the whole thing.

Help wanted

At the start of the month I signed up to the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day service.

Today, they sent me a link to "Ferrum" by M. NourbeSe Philip. They didn't send me the poem itself "in order to remain faithful to the adventurous formatting".

If anyone has the faintest idea what "Ferrum" is about please let me know. Not because I'm trying to appreciate the poem - I've already given up on that - but just because I'm curious as to the poet's intention. I really don't have the faintest idea what Philip is up to.

In general, I'm fairly open minded about what constitutes a poem (see this performance here or even this) but "Ferrum" - really, I don't know what it is.

What's up Rhode Island

Rhode Island is “the nation’s yardstick” and a “key unit of metaphoric measurement” according to the WSJ's Numbers Guy.

Yesterday, the state tour arrived in Rhode Island. Today, I've been wandering around some local blogs:-

Bil's Cry for Help is a "maddeningly reasonable" take on day to day life in East Greenwich.

Caroline's Earth Friendly Gardening is a green gardening blog with lots of photos.

There's progressive blogging at Rhode Island's Future.

Rhode Island's conservatives can cluster around Anchor Rising.

And Q Finder has been in Providence taking pictures of the Capitol Building.

Rhode Island sunrise

Philosophical games

From the first of a couple of fine posts on games at Normblog:-

A man and a girl, respectively father and daughter, are playing at being two characters called Tree and Girl. Tree stands in the forest and Girl, who is wandering there, comes upon him and invites him to her house for tea. Tree explains that she'll have to uproot him first, which she does; she then shows him the way and helps him through the front door (he has to bend, being taller than the doorway). Girl gives Tree a cup of tea.

Reminds me of playing "Horsey" with No 1 Son when he was little. He'd climb on my back and I'd carry him round the sitting room on all fours. When we were finished, he'd give me a pat on the back, an imaginary apple to chomp and tell me I was a brave horse.

But Norm is not pointlessly reminiscing, he goes on to discuss the central contention of a recent book on games by Bernard Suits:-

The Grasshopper's central thesis challenges Wittgenstein's view of games. To quote from Hurka's introduction to a new edition of the book:

[I]n giving necessary and sufficient conditions for playing a game [Suits is] doing exactly what Wittgenstein says can't be done... His book is therefore a precisely placed boot in Wittgenstein's balls.

It beats me why some intellectuals feel the need to use such starkly aggressive metaphors. In any case, it seems Wittgenstein is in no danger, as Norm goes on to say in his second post:-

[Suit's] book, so far from being a boot placed where Thomas Hurka says it was, is more like a mislaid sock at the back of a shelf of philosophy books.

I'm tempted to say game over, but Norm says he'll be posting more on the subject over the weekend. I'm looking forward to it.

Friday roundabout

Cobb has The Cosby Crusade: video of Ta-Nehisi Coates talking about Bill Cosby's social activism.

Common cause: David T from Harry's Place features in a story in today's Daily Mail about "Muslim only" swimming sessions.

Dean Esmay has a case about Wikipedia's reliability.

Wishful thinking at Samizdata: Jonathan Pearce imagines a libertarian utopia.

Oliver Kamm: "I am an immoderate liberal. 'Blairite ultra' is a synonym."

And finally,

The illustrator's gallery (via EC) at Barnaby Richards.

Blogging USA

The Ocean State

Smallest state in the union. First of the colonies to declare independence; last to ratify the constitution. Stone-enders, quahogs and Hot Weiners; gilded mansions, clam cakes and clear chowder.

Coffee milk is the official state beverage.

Unrighteous indignation

I used to do a lot of work in the inner city - community development, capacity building, that sort of thing. It was worthwhile, though not at all well paid, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people.

Yesterday, one of the guys I used to know back then got out of a taxi across the street from me. I wasn't going to acknowledge him but he saw me first.

Yes G! Long time.
Yeah, it has been. How you doing, Kay?
Good, man. Things are running good for me right now.
You been away?
Well, me had a little trouble but everything smooth now.
Yeah? You don't look too happy.
I'm mad, man.
Yeah? Why?
Having to deal with all this ignorance. You see that taxi man there? I get into the back of his car and the first thing he says to me is "You look like a drug dealer." Tsch! Just 'cause I dress good. People like him see a black man with money and all they can think is he got it dealing drugs.
But Kay, you do deal drugs.
True, true. But he didn't know that, now did he?

Poetry corner

Modern Britain

From BBC Magazine:-

Phil Smith thought ex-EastEnder Letitia Dean turning on the Christmas lights in Ipswich would make a good snap for his collection.

The 49-year-old started by firing off a few shots of the warm-up act on stage. But before the main attraction showed up, Mr Smith was challenged by a police officer who asked if he had a licence for the camera.

After explaining he didn't need one, he was taken down a side-street for a formal "stop and search", then asked to delete the photos and ordered not take any more.

Close to home

This happened early this morning about a couple of miles from here:-

A controlled explosion has taken place in Bristol after a man was arrested under the Terrorism Act.

Avon and Somerset police said homes in a cul-de-sac in the Westbury-on-Trym area were evacuated and some people have not been able to return yet.

The 19-year-old, said to be from the local area, is being questioned by detectives at an undisclosed location.

I'll be following the story with interest.

Family life

No 1 Son has decided he'll be going to Exeter University in September. He's had offers from a few places but, talking to him yesterday, it's clear he's chosen Exeter for all the right reasons.

I had been trying to encourage him to do Psychology at Bristol (more neuroscience) but he wouldn't hear of it. Of course, like Mac's dad used to say, that's the problem with raising your children to be free thinking individuals - they grow up to be free thinking individuals.

Dang!

Face paints

Put a smile on your face.

No peace from Hamas

Mahmoud al-Zahar, one of the founders of Hamas and Gaza's foreign minister, has a article in the Washington Post entitled: "No peace without Hamas".

Al-Zahar makes it clear that, for Hamas, peace will only be possible when Israel no longer exists:-

A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.

When the only basis for peace with Hamas is the destruction of Israel it's little wonder the Israelis see no point in negotiating with them.

I've said it before but it's worth saying again because some people still don't seem to get it. Hamas's dedication to the destruction of Israel is not some bargaining position that can be negotiated away by wily diplomacy, it's a central commitment and Hamas are hell bent on violence to achieve it.

Free will and neuroscience

Chris at Mixing Memory takes issue with media reaction to a paper published in Nature Neuroscience which suggests that it's possible to makes predictions about people's behavior from viewing their fMRI scan. The Boston Globe (and others) have got hung up on the idea that the study indicates people don't have as much free will as they think.

Chris puts them right:-

[F]or this study to have any relevance to free will, there would have to be this conscious system (physical or not, it doesn't matter), separate from the unconscious one, that is sitting around getting input from the unconscious system and making its own decisions freely (whatever freely means in this context). You'd have to have a conscious mind that's watching the unconscious mind, and acting separately. If this is your model of how things work in the head, then you've got more problems than this data -- you've got a hundred years worth of data to contend with, along with some difficult logical and engineering problems.

If, however, you treat the conscious and unconscious minds as part of the same system, then any decision made by the latter are as free as decisions made by the former. That is, there's no reason to treat decisions made unconsciously as less free than decisions made consciously. Unless there's some property of conscious awareness that gives freedom to choices, but I have no idea what that property would be, and I don't think anyone else does either.

You might decide to read the whole thing. Or you might not - you may just find yourself reading it and only subsequently feel the need to justify the activity by reference to some sort of conscious decision making process.

Thursday roundabout

Glenn Reynolds on the Yale art project story. Is it a hoax?

Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine: Journalism as a control point.

Ophelia Benson catches up with 'Brain Gym' at Notes and Comment.

Respectful Insolence: Why woo is thriving in academic medical centers.

Edward Lorenz has died. The Reference Frame takes a look at the Lorenz attractor.

And finally,

Flying penguins! I missed this when the BBC broadcast it at the start of the month.

The Shorter Milne

Seamus Milne's op-ed at Comment is Free (edited and abridged so you get it straight):-

Reviewing the media, you might get the impression that Robert Mugabe is a murderous dictator at the head of a uniquely wicked regime and that Zimbabwe is the "most important and urgent issue" in Africa. In reality, Mugabe is being picked on in order to divert attention away from the real reason for Zimbabwe's decline - British interference.

The British (and Americans) are also interfering in China's internal affairs by making a fuss over Tibet. As with Zimbabwe, the reason is simple - to deflect the public's gaze from Western crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey.

The days of colonial diktat are over. Resistance will overcome.

Is Milne a caricature? I think we should be told.

Etude No.6 - Moszkowski

Valerie Kim (9)

Packin' a poem

Today at Baroque in Hackney:

Today’s the day when we’re all supposed to put a poem in our pocket and share it with the people we see throughout the day. It sounds silly and saccharine; it certainly does! But there have been times enough when I’ve carried poems in my pocket. Sometimes you just need a sort of talisman. Or you want to have a poem on you so you can refresh your essential nature with it, as at a spring. Sometimes it’s even been one of mine.

I'm going with Naming of Parts by Henry Reed. How about you?

Insensible religion

Nietzsche had a lot to say about Christianity in the "The Antichrist" - he wasn't very complimentary. Of course, Nietzsche had a lot to say about a lot of things and, reading him, it's sometimes difficult to pick out cogent thought from madness and malignity.

Nevertheless, something that Nietzsche wrote illustrates what I was talking about yesterday when I said it's not possible to talk sensibly with a believer about what they mean by God. It also goes some way towards explaining what I meant about religious faith being "a peculiarly rigorous form of wishful thinking".

So, without further ado, Nietzsche on Christianity*:-

Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality.

It offers purely imaginary causes ("God" "soul," "ego," "spirit," "free will"--or even "unfree"), and purely imaginary effects ("sin" "salvation" "grace," "punishment," "forgiveness of sins"). Intercourse between imaginary beings ("God," "spirits," "souls"); an imaginary natural history (anthropocentric; a total denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or disagreeable general feelings--for example, of the states of the nervus sympathicus with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdash--, "repentance," "pangs of conscience," "temptation by the devil," "the presence of God"); an imaginary teleology (the "kingdom of God," "the last judgment," "eternal life").

This purely fictitious world, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the world of dreams; the later at least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it.

[*From HL Mencken's translation of Nietzsche's "The Antichrist"]

What's up Maine

Yesterday, the state tour made landfall in Maine. Today, I've been wandering around some local blogs:-

All Things Maine: More than you will ever need to know about Maine.

Real food and real cooking from Portland's Stephen Smith at What's for Dinner? (Best Food Blog finalist 2006)

Freaks, weirdos and unmapped roads. Strange Maine explores strange scenes.

Maine Crime Writer "lives on a dirt road in a one-stoplight town". Blogs about reading and writing crime.

Maine in the 50s and 60s: Growing Up in Maine tells us how it was.

Maine-ly Megan in her own words: "Maybe it's a step towards an autobiography of sorts. Maybe its a series of writing exercises."

Cadillac Mountain, Maine

From Robert Love's blog on economics, technology, and wolves.

Village people

Village Voice "outs" James Lileks - he's numero uno on their list of fully paid up members of "the Right-Wing Blogosphere".

The Voice gives Lileks a Stupid/Evil Ratio of 60/40.

OMG, I have that guy on my blogroll! What kind of stupid/evil person am I? And what does Lileks have to say for himself?

Blogging USA

The Pine Tree State

Biggest state in New England and most northerly state on the Atlantic Seaboard. Lighthouses, lobsters and clams. Home of the Penobscot, the Popham Colony and wild blueberries.

Moxie is the official state beverage.

Wednesday roundabout

Freemania on the Saudi-BAE arms deal: National security and the rule of law.

Rumbold at Pickled Politics: Should there be an amnesty for illegal immigrants?

Faith in Honest Doubt: Turkish barber sentenced to death for blasphemy in Saudi Arabia.

Adloyada: How to do the Pretzel manoeuvre for Ken Livingstone.

Science Punk has memories of urban exploration.

And finally,

Via Dean's World: Why Superman Will Always Suck at Bam!Kapow!

Commence to dancing

Chill Wills and the Avalon Boys with "At the Ball" in Way out West.

Bryson's Britain

From Bill Bryson's "Notes from a Small Island":-

I took a train to Liverpool. They were having a festival of litter when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier bags to the otherwise bland and neglected landscape. They fluttered gaily in the bushes and brought colour and texture to pavements and gutters. And to think that elsewhere we stick these objects in rubbish bags.

Instacook

Nice to see I'm not the only blogger posting about family recipes.

Revolutionary question

Tricky question at Poligazette, this morning:-

What did all the officers in America’s Revolutionary Army have in common (according to some at least)?

Hint: think George Washington, Benjamin Franklin.

My guess was they were all Presbyterians. Of course, that doesn't fit with Washington and Franklin (the former was likely a deist, the latter certainly was) but most of the Army's officers were Presbyterians and it was the only thing I could come up with that stood a chance of being even half right.

Turns out, the answer they were looking for was masons. That's right, according to some people, all the officers in the Revolutionary Army were masons.

I don't know about that. But I do know most of them were Presbyterians:-

“When Cornwallis was driven back to ultimate retreat and surrender at Yorktown, all of the colonels of the Colonial Army but one were Presbyterian elders. More than one-half of all the soldiers and officers of the American Army during the Revolution were Presbyterians.”

It's like James I said:

“Presbytery agreeth with monarchy like God with the Devil."

Zen garden

Fueling hunger

From yesterday's Telegraph:-

We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.

"The reality is that people are dying already," said Jacques Diouf, of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "Naturally people won't be sitting dying of starvation, they will react," he said.

The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted "massacres" unless the biofuel policy is halted.

We are all part of this drama whether we fill up with petrol or ethanol. The substitution effect across global markets makes the two morally identical.

George Monbiot, that tireless promoter of the green agenda, has (to his credit) been warning about the consequences of biofuels for some time.

But biofuels are only part of the problem: increasing demand, depleted stock piles and the high price of oil (together with biofuels and other factors) have combined to rapidly push up world food prices over the last nine months. And, as I've said before, things are not going to get any easier.

Food is a global commodity: let biofuels compete with food crops and the international markets will trade hunger for fuel. As long as we can afford to spend more money running our cars than they can on feeding themselves - we can drive while they go hungry.

If that thought gives you qualms you may be assured, by those who know, it's all for the good of the planet.

The God question II

Dale at Faith in Honest Doubt has recently had a number of interesting posts on religious belief and the nature of God. I've talked about the God question before but Dale's posts gave me an urge to revisit the issue.

When people say they believe in "God" they are not really saying anything sensible. That is, they are not postulating that some entity called God exists as part of objective reality. If they were saying such a thing then the question of God's existence could easily be put to the test: define the term "God" by reference to its physical properties, check you have a sensible definition that's consistent with the laws of physics and then undertake a universe-wide search for such an entity.

If you come across such a thing in the universe - congratulations, you've found God. If you don't, well the question is still open - at least you got a definition of God that makes sense.

As things stand, religious people can't even come up with a definition of God that's acceptable to other believers, never mind one that might make sense to anyone else. Sure, there are plenty of descriptions of God - the concept appears in a lot of picturesque fables, and believers are wont to attach all kinds of adjectives to it - but a hazy description (often comprising little more than a host of "good" qualities) is not the same thing as a working definition.

Of course, those who say they believe in God won't accept such practical methodology - that's why they're called believers; they have faith. And in the sense in which they use the word, faith has nothing whatsoever to due with objective reality. In fact, their faith involves a rejection of the world as revealed by the senses - such "faith" is, in effect, a peculiarly rigorous form of wishful thinking.

All of which means it's kind of difficult to have a discussion about God with people who take the idea seriously. Like Dale says:-

A telltale sign of a discussion that has landed precisely nowhere is the insistence that words no longer mean what they did when the conversation began, and yet won't be redefined.

He's talking about words like "goodness", "love" and "benevolence" but the thing that really needs to be defined at the outset is what people mean when they talk about God.

Unfortunately, there's nothing sensible to be said on the subject.

Movie rumours

I've just learnt (via Eddie Campbell) that Paramount is planning a feature length movie based on last year's Iron Man trailer.

Comment and analysis follow:-

Dirty secret

Most visitors to England are too polite to point out the obvious. I guess they don't want their hosts to feel insulted.

Last year, we had a Canadian couple over for Christmas dinner. Nice folks. It was they're first visit to England - they were impressed by some things, unimpressed with others. They were divided about the merits of old Victorian houses: she thought they were charming and full of character, he thought they were drafty and hard to maintain.

Mostly, they said nice things about the country and the people. They rarely ventured any kind of criticism, and even when they did they were fairly non-committal about it: "I guess that's just the way they do things over here.".

So I had to bring it up: "What do you think about the litter?"

It was like I'd opened the floodgates - all reticence disappeared. I'm paraphrasing but here's what it boiled down to: "The streets are filthy, people here don't seem to care, it shows a complete lack of civic pride. Don't people get fed up with it?"

It might be distressing for the English to learn this (though, in truth, I doubt they'd care very much) but, in my experience, most North American visitors to these shores are truly shocked at how dirty the place is.

Which makes it unsurprising to find that Bill Bryson (currently England's favorite American and head of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England) has launched an anti-litter campaign:-

Bryson is obsessed by litter. He can't walk past a piece of chewing gum without getting out his penknife to scrape it off of the pavement. "It gives me a sense of achievement," he says.

He is kept awake at night by the thought of drivers throwing apple cores out of their cars. So, last summer, he devised a cunning plan: he became the new President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, just so he could "get my hands on the headed notepaper and start writing to politicians".

Today, he moves into the next phase, launching a three-year campaign to "Stop The Drop", aimed at eliminating stray rubbish and casual fly-tipping.

Good luck to him, but I doubt it will have much effect - it's not so much that the English are set in their ways, they just can't really see the problem.

Tuesday roundabout

Mediashift reports on blogging in Kenya and the evolution of the African blogosphere.

The latest Britblog roundup is available at The Wardman Wire.

David T at Harry's Place has an update on segregated swimming in Hackney.

Via Vodkapundit: Lesbians, Christians, discrimination and the law in New Mexico.

There's a horde of philosophical zombies at Siris.

And finally,

Of Two Minds explains how to ship your brain.

Olympic death toll

Amnesty's UK director Kate Allen quoted in today's Guardian:-

As the world's biggest executioner, China gets the 'gold medal' for global executions. According to reliable estimates, on average China secretly executes around 22 prisoners every day - that's 374 people during the Olympic games.

Everyone involved in this year's Olympics, especially the IOC, should be pressing China to reveal the extent of its use of the death penalty, to reduce the 60-plus crimes for which it can be imposed and to move toward abolition.

As a comparison, there were 42 executions in the US in 2007.

Little Red Books

Kelly Tsai with "Mao" on Def Poetry

Idiom and ignorance

Via an e-mail from Mac:

Being able to speak the Queen's English can take you a long way in the world. Conversely, as this story in the Register demonstrates, not being able to speak properly can severely limit your horizons:-

A 19-year-old Saaarf London girl has been advised to use the Queen's English on the phone after her hunt for a cab to whisk her to Bristol airport ended less than satisfactorily.

Read on.