Clinton’s oratorical

We’re in the midst of party conference season. Not just during election years, but every year – the major parties (and the minor ones for all I know) gather for their annual party conference. Usually held in some dreary seaside town, it’s an opportunity to agree policy, grandstand, network and glad hand. They are broadcast on tv, but only on the parliament channel – highlights appearing on the BBC and other news programmes.

The Liberal Democrats
I couldn’t even be bothered to comment on the Liberal Democrat Party conference last week. They are the “third” party – haven’t really ever been in power (the Liberals were in Government in the teens or twenties). We did watch a bit of their conference (snooze). The best thing I can say about the LibDems is that they’ve had a colorful leadership contest in the past year. The once (and future?) leader, Charles Kennedy, has had his problems with the demon rum – and got booted out for being a drunk. Charley Kennedy has dried out now (he says), and so have the LibDems with an impossibly dusty-dull Ming Campbell. Campbell was selected leader because he didn’t have such a colorful past – as say one rival who smeared a gay rival in a political contest – and then turned out to be gay himself. Or the not-gay candidate for LibDem leadership, the one with the wife and family, who turned out to be having “focus group” sessions with male prostitutes – and then blamed his lapse on the pressures of losing his hair.

The Labour Party
The Labour Party Conference has just finished up. It was all very interesting because of the leadership tussle between Tony Blair and the eternal contender and current Chancellor (like Secretary of the Treasury, but with budget setting and tax raising powers),Gordon Brown. Sometime in the distant mythical past, Blair made a deal with Brown who agreed to let Tony be leader for a while if he Tony stepped aside after one or two elections – or whatever the details were. Anyway, Tony Blair has won three elections as Labour leader…and Gordon thinks it’s his turn now. Tony Blair has been under increasing pressure from his own party to step down. They think he’s too right wing, too close to George Bush, too “presidential” in style.

What’s funny, is that the Labour party seem to love Gordon Brown, and seem to want to practically annoint him as new leader when Tony goes at some yet indisclosed time before the next annual Labour conference. But Gordon Brown, though admittedly lacking in charisma or human warmth, is even more dictatorial than Tony and there are many rumours of how he brooked no dissent at his Treasury stronghold. Labour members seem to have fooled themselves that Gordon is somehow more left wing than Tony. Sure, Gordon makes noises about child poverty and third world debt, blah, blah, blah – but this is the guy who just will not let go of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) which binds the public sector to a lot of really bad deals and lines the pockets of clever finance types.

Bill Clinton spoke at this year’s conference. It isn’t the first time he’s spoken at the venue and he’s always been well-received. Clinton, whatever his faults may have been, is a killer speaker. Everyone says so. The big boss of my work had been at the conference and seen Clinton speak. She’s seen a lot of speeches in her day, but she said she’d never seen anything like that and was blown away. She tried to use Clinton’s “challenging” style to rouse us all to do better, but sadly it just got people’s backs up. Not everyone can have Clinton’s oratorical.

The Conservatives
The Tories kick off their conference this weekend. We’ll be watching this one a little more closely, not least because we know people and will be looking out for them on tv.

old places and old faces

I made a sort of drunken pledge with a friend on the “quit smoking” thing. We said we’d quit in September. She picked the date of the 23d as the quit date. I quit. She didn’t.

We met up last night for dinner for the first time since I quit. She was smoking like a chimney. It was hard, but I didn’t smoke. As we sat in the restaurant, I had the heretical, hypocritical notion that no one should smoke around me. Just like the urge to smoke, I took a sip of water and shook off that notion, too.

nekkid pictures, sacked teachers

Via Atomictumor

A popular, award-winning art teacher is given the boot after taking kids to the Dallas Art Museum, where they saw some nekkid statues. The trip was all above board, but Sidney McGee’s contract will not be renewed after 28 years of service to public education.

Eee-gads. But sadly, this does not surprise me. VolMom bought a children’s book about the Romans in Britain for her step-grandchildren. It had the word ass in it. (And no it wasn’t a donkey, but a small denomination Roman coin – see you learned something). It also had a line drawing of a Roman statue of a nude goddess – appearing in the background of another scene. Anyway, her step-son found it all bit racy and decided that it was inappropriate for his youngsters.

I find this whole issue a little bit disturbing. I’m for a decent amount of modesty and all, but for goodness sake a little flesh in stone isn’t going to make your eyes burn out. And if you won’t look at nekkid statues, you are seriously missing out on some great experiences. Like The David*, which I have judiciously cropped…

…because frankly, it’s more salacious this way.

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*This is merely a plaster cast housed at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. It’s fantastic. The original in Florence is pretty cool, too. But I saw the V&A one first – and the amazing thing about it is the scale and perfect proportions. You just don’t realise how enormous it is because of Michelangelo’s genius in sculpting.

Does Iraq make us less safe?

You’ve seen the stories about the leaked intelligence report which says:

“The Iraq Jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives,”

Other key points of the report include:

• Militants, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion
• If this trend continues, threats to US interests globally will become more diverse leading to increased attacks worldwide
• Militants consider Europe an important venue for attacking Western interests
• The loss of key leaders in rapid succession would probably fracture al-Qaeda into smaller groups that would pose, at least for a time, a less serious threat to US interests.

I’m certainly not the kind of person who thinks that we in the West have brought this all on ourselves. And I know that there’s a death-cult ideology in fanatical, radical Islam that began long before Iraq and is driven as much by internal conflicts with Islam and Arab culture as it is a reaction to the West.

BUT, can you blame people for getting mad when it appears to most of the world that the Iraq invasion was done under flimsy pretext. Can you blame them for assuming the worst motivation on our part when our leaders give us different reasons for going in after the fact and I’m still not clear what the real reasons are.

Muslims, in some respects are like that squabbling family that live down the block, constantly fighting each other, but turning on anyone, anyone who dares to attack or criticise their own. Invading someone’s country counts as a pretty straightforward attack in my book, and in one sense it doesn’t matter that most of the civilians killed in Iraq are killed by other Muslims. We kicked it off and we are responsible.

I don’t for one second thinks this gives anyone an excuse to join up with their local terror brigade, but if the Muslims are burning with a sense of injustice already and we give them a real reason to feel a sense of injustice who are they going to turn to? If not by the sword, than by the hand (donations to terror groups, running terror websites) or the tongue (the fomenting anger of the Arab street).

It’s true that there may have been the occasional agent of terror hanging around in Iraq before. And it’s true that Saddam Hussein certainly wasn’t going to be cooperative and help us root them out. But now Iraq is a swarming hive, a live-fire exercise in terror. We stirred the hornet’s nest. Sometimes you have to do that, but I don’t think we needed to invade Iraq. And now we have to deal with the consequences.

soothing wallabies

So, when I feel all anxious about quitting smoking, I look at the picture of the wallaby on my desktop. It’s soothing. But it makes me think too much about wallabies.

Soothing wallaby

I’ve been sharing wallaby facts with my colleagues.

1. Wallabies can make excellent pets, but they must be bottle fed from babies (joeys) to establish a really close bond.
2. Wallabies can be house trained – i.e. trained to poo outside, but you can never quite train them not to knock things over with their fat marsupial tail.
3. Wallabies like water. If you have a house wallaby, and you’re in the bath, sometimes they’ll jump in with you.
4. Wallabies, particularly male wallabies, like to box. It’s cute when they’re young, but not so cute when they get big. (Particularly for Bennett’s wallabies that seem to be hardiest as kept pets).
5. Wallabies are nervous creatures – you must protect them from getting scared.

I don’t think all my colleagues appreciate learning about wallabies. One said “You certainly have done your research. Did you happen to find any recipes for wallabies?”

I can see her strategy here. To freak me out. But it won’t work. I lived too long in rural Tennessee. I’ve eaten Bambi.

“I bet wallabies would make good eating,” I say. “They’re herbivores, kind of like deer. Plus they breed pretty quick, and it only takes 1 male to service 10 females. You could eat the surplus wallabies.”

But the truth is, I couldn’t butcher my own pet wallaby. Even one that wasn’t being a very good pet. Plus, you can sell a live male wallaby in the US for around $800, which would make eating him a pretty expensive bbq.

ViL: Great Post from The War Nerd

This made me laugh.

“That left the whole mess to those poor bastards, our Brit friends. You know, we should get down on our knees and apologize to the Brits for making them trust us, making them believe we Americans actually had a clue and were leading them somewhere. You can see they’ve finally figured it out, that Bush and Cheney never did know what they were doing, but now the poor trusting Limeys are as deep in the shit as we are. I guess it’s some kind of poetic justice, because we’ve done to them what they did to hundreds of other tribes: luring them into doing our dirty work for us. But it’s no way to treat an ally.”

It’s so true…

semantics

So, you’re trying to quit smoking, and your quit date is Sept 23d. Does that mean that you quit on that day (perhaps a full day of smoking, setting them aside sometime before midnight)? Or does that mean no smoking at all on the 23d.

I feel that it’s the former. My husband felt it was the latter. Anyway, I suppose we both agree that there’s not to be any smoking on the 24th. And there hasn’t been.

I haven’t killed anyone in my withdrawal pangs and short, short temper, yet. My nerves are going jingle, jangle, jingle – then screaming for nicotine. My lungs are missing that smoky, smoke – I feel a tightness in my chest – wanting that expanding power of a nice full drag on a Marlboro Red.

Football haiku

If you haven’t seen the weekly haiku contest at Rocky Top Talk – go and have a look at this week’s competition.

Tennessee Vols make
trash talk, in the haiku form
Our football foes quake

I’ve been reading and enjoying them, but since I was away in France, it was difficult to participate. I’ve made my first entry this week (and it’s lamer than the above example). Great idea, Joel.

Go Vols

My personal jihad

According to some Islamic scholars, Ramadan – the month long ritual of diurnal fasting – begins tomorrow. Yesterday, I went to lunch with some colleagues, one a Muslim, to enjoy the last time she can eat with us during the day for month.

It was a good lunch. I also announced that I would be giving up something at the start of Ramadan. My Muslim colleague seemed pleased, although I explained it’s complete coincidence. I had agreed a quit date for smoking some time ago, the 23d of September.

Ramadan has elements of purification (keeping clean of not just food, but also bad thoughts and actions and daytime sex) and also of struggle – overcoming normal bodily urges to become closer to God. In some senses this is part of a personal, inner jihad – striving to become a better person.

Goodness knows that giving up smoking is a struggle. And I will be striving to overcome my addictive bodily urges in my effort to stop smoking. Having a philosophical approach to it, has helped me in the past (yes, I’ve given up before and stayed quit once for 2 and a half years). So perhaps I will use the month of Ramadan and the concept of struggle and personal jihad to my advantage.

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The other philosophical concept I will use during my month of struggle (and after) is the Finnish idea of sisu. I think sisu can be best thought of as will, grit, fortitude, guts and stick-to-it-iveness all rolled into one.

The lie of organic

There’s been an E coli epidemic in the US. Packaged “organic”, natural spinach has caused an E. coli outbreak.

You know what E. coli travels in? Shit. You know what organic veggies are fertilised with? Shit. Now, for a lot of things, using a slurry of potentially e coli laden shit as fertiliser doesn’t really matter. E. coli is killed when food is cooked properly and you can get rid of a lot nasties on potato skins or similar by a good scrub down and proper cooking. But salad? Not the same thing. (I’m no food hygiene expert, but I’d bet that properly cooked spinach wouldn’t have caused these problems).

A colleague of mine is big into the organic thing. I told her once: You want organic fruit* – like apples, fine by me. Generally, they don’t taste any better and they’re not any more nutritious, but they’re not dangerous. If you want to pay more for nothing more than a status symbol and some kind of mental trickery that you’re being healthy, that’s fine by me. But organic leafy vegetables – I personally wouldn’t touch them (unless I’d grown them myself fertilised with my own compost which contains no shit).

People, don’t be taken in by the organic lie.

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*I can be as much of a foody as the next person. I don’t think we should use more chemicals than we need to, am I’m very much into the idea of locally grown, picked-when-ready produce which is often more flavorful and more nutritious. Sometimes these are organic, sometimes not. Organic farmers sometimes also use older and more flavorsome varieties of fruit and veg which can mean that the end product is tastier, but it’s to do with the variety rather than the organic status.