THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
As any journalist knows, the
use of irony is as dangerous in a broadsheet or weekly
paper as in a mass-circulation tabloid. Most readers will
take it quite literally.
—Richard West, Chaucer,
1340-1400: The Life and Times of the First English Poet
Kevin
Michael Grace, 6.50 p.m., 15 May 2005►
PENSÉE
Where would Bono be today if he'd never hooked up with
clever Brian Eno? Jim Kerr. The truth hurts, but there it
is.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.07 p.m., 14 May 2005►
WEIRD SITE METER/GOOGLE
SEARCH STRING OF THE DAY
"kelly torrance +michael"
Kevin
Michael Grace, 12.12 p.m., 12 May 2005►
HISTORICAL
CONSCIOUSNESS
I really shouldn't comment on the following—as it is
beneath contempt—but I retain the naïve
belief that truth is important, so here goes. Bob from
canadiancomment writes:
If
Neville Chamberlain were alive today and ran for the
Labour party in the election that just took place in
Britain, he would have won it going away. It would have
been a landslide victory, how does that grab you?
The
British economy is good, social programs were expanded,
you'd think that would be enough to keep most Europeans
happy. But the one big problem the people over there have
with Tony Blair is that he took the country to war in
Iraq, and with Neville Chamberlain in power, that would
have never happened. Neville would have been a lock to win
the election easy.
What
the hell is wrong with you, Bob? is how that grabs me. It
was Neville Chamberlain who extended the territorial
guarantee to Poland on March 30, 1939—notwithstanding
that he was in no position to prevent that country's
martyrdom—
and Neville Chamberlain who acted upon that guarantee
regardless on September 3, 1939, thereby taking Britain to
war two days after the German invasion, you daft ninny.
Postscript:
I have this question for Blair's soi-disant
conservative admirers. Is Tony's gradual reduction
of Britain to a police state—"It
is time to move beyond the social indifference of Right
and Left, libertarian nonsense masquerading as
freedom"—incidental to you, or is it
instead the greater part of his appeal? Don't answer all
at once now.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 12.10 p.m., 12 May 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
The transferable
vote is well designed to give
principle-free politicians maximum power, since it makes
it very difficult ever to get a majority, while at the
same time it shoves everybody towards the centre where
deals can be done.
—Martin
Hutchinson
Kevin
Michael Grace, 8.52 a.m., 12 May 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
In the 1932
platform of the Democratic Party we may
read the following:
Believing that a party
platform is a covenant with the people to be faithfully
kept by the party when entrusted with power, and that the
people are entitled to know in plain words the terms of
the contract to which they are asked to subscribe, we
hereby declare this to be the platform of the Democratic
Party.
The Democratic Party solemnly
promises by appropriate action to put into effect the
principles, policies, and reforms herein advocated and to
eradicate the policies, methods, and practices herein
condemned.
We advocate:
1) An immediate and drastic
reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing
useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments
and bureaus and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a
saving of not less than 25% in the cost of the Federal
Government…
2) Maintenance of the
national credit by a Federal budget annually balanced on
the basis of accurate executive estimates within
revenues…
3) A sound currency to be
preserved at all hazards…
We condemn:
4) The open and covert
resistance of administrative officials to every effort
made by Congressional committees to curtail the
extravagant expenditures of the government…
5) The extravagance of the
Farm Board, its disastrous action which made the
government a speculator in farm products…
To accomplish these purposes
and to recover economic liberty, we pledge the nominees of
this convention…
That the nominees upheld this
pledge was made clear by the candidate
for the Presidency on July 2, 1932, when he
spoke
in public acceptance of the nomination:
As an immediate program of
action we must abolish useless offices. We must eliminate
actual functions of government—functions, in fact, that
are not definitely essential to the continuance of
government. We must merge; we must consolidate
subdivisions of government and like the private citizen,
give up luxuries which we can no longer afford.
I propose to you, my friends,
and through you, that government of all kinds, big and
little, be made solvent and that the example be set by the
President of the United States and his cabinet.
He returned to these themes
frequently throughout the campaign. In a radio
address delivered July 30, 1932, for
example, he summed up:
Any government, like any
family, can for a year spend a little more than it earns.
But you and I know that a continuation of that habit means
the poorhouse.
What are we to make of the
words in these several quotations? They would be easy
enough to explain if we could assume that the men who
wrote them were just liars, deliberately trying to deceive
the people. There is, however, no convincing evidence that
would permit us to draw so cynical a conclusion. Are we to
believe, then, that they were utterly stupid, with no
understanding of economics or politics or what was going
on in the world? Taking the words as they stand, this
would seem to be the only alternative conclusion. But this
also does not seem very plausible. These men and their
associates, though they doubtless knew less than
everything and less than they thought they knew, were
surely not so ignorant as to have believed literally what
the words seem to indicate. There is some further puzzle
here. Perhaps the words do not have anything to with
cheap government and sound currency and balanced budgets
and the rest of what appears to be their subject matter.
—James Burnham, The
Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom
(emphasis added)
Kevin
Michael Grace, 3.43 p.m., 11 May 2005►
PENSÉE
Neoconservatism is best understood as a form of
post-modernism—it is conservatism deconstructed.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 9.01 a.m., 10 May 2005►
MASTERS OF PROSE
As for me, Christina [McCall]
taught me the essence of womanhood. She was the
quintessential WASP shiksa who never misplaced her
aura. She had an innate sense of fashion, looking as
though she had been born with pearls and a cashmere twin
set. She was a singular woman—smart, beautiful, with the
eyes of a nightingale and a zaftig figure, burdened
by a hyperactive Presbyterian conscience, but decent to
the core.
—Peter
C. Newman, National Post, 4 May 05
Kevin
Michael Grace, 8.25 a.m., 10 May 2005►
WHY, HELLO THERE,
208.58.7!
As an aside, I can tell you
that if there's nothing wrong with you except fat it is
easy to get thin. You eat and drink the same as always,
only half. If you are handed a plate of food, leave half;
if you have to help yourself, take half. After a while, if
you are a perfectionist, you can consume half of that
again. On the question of will-power, if that is a factor,
you should think of will-power as something that never
exists in the present tense, only in the future and in the
past. At one moment you have decide to do or refrain from
an action, and the next moment you have already done or
refrained; it is the only way to deal with will-power.
(Only under sub-human stress does will-power live in time
present, but that is a different discourse.) I offer this
advice without fee; it is included in the price of this
book.
—A
Far Cry From Kensington, Muriel Spark
Kevin
Michael Grace, 2.26 a.m., 9 May 2005►
MASTERS OF PROSE
Planned
hypocrisy and double-dealing
may still be comfortable tools
in the grip of the Russian
leadership—whether Czarist, Communist, or
"Other"—but the Muscovite ship
of state has sailed into
uncharted waters, and Putin knows the rules
of the game have changed. On the western
flank, Russia has watched its historically most
important border erode into a
European sea—with the Baltics already in
the soup and Ukraine, whose very name means
"at the border," too far
from shore to reel
back in. Along the eastern frontier,
the news is even worse: Russia's western border mania
was always a function of its desire to have access to
Europe (which now it has in spades),
but the China Question has no easy
answers. Underpopulated, underpoliced, riven
with AIDS and hard to rule, Siberia makes a pale
sister to the extravagant
assertiveness of cross-border
China.
—James
G. Poulos, The American Spectator, 9
May 2005
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.59 a.m., 9 May 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
He was also unhappy with his
first [Harvard] concentration, literature: “All we did
was read Roland
Barthes for all of sophomore year. I then
found out how Roland Barthes diied. He was run over by a
laundry truck because he didn’t look both ways while
crossing the street. I decided I’m not going to have to
study his stuff anymore.”
—Greg
Daniels
Kevin
Michael Grace, 12.22 a.m., 9 May 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Guardian: How do you feel
about the move towards downloadable music?
Ron: Aside from the issues of
music being stolen, one thing that worries me is this idea
of people being able to select whatever they want from
what you present...like in iTunes. Even if listeners skip
over tracks, I want them to have to accept the entire work
I'm presenting as an album.
Guardian: Any other
concerns?
Russell: It's also completely
eliminating the tangible aspect of what's cool about pop
music, such as the album artwork. If your whole life is
centred around iTunes or its equivalent, then you see a 1
inch by 1 inch digital representation of some artwork, and
that's it. There's no back cover or liner notes. I've
heard authors say the same of ebooks and downloads, that
there's just something about a tangible book...the feel of
it, the smell...and you can't replace that no matter how
convenient it is to have in your Palm Pilot or music in
your iPod. Technologically, that is all quite cool, but
you can't replace that experience of opening a new CD. I
was on iTunes for a look around and was disappointed
because it's just an interface, and there's no real
background to the artists, and nobody's really got a
visual statement to help you figure out the sensibility of
the group. That's a shame.
Guardian: How about the
ringtone phenomenon?
Ron: That's bizarre...they're
not even downloading the whole song, just the main hook.
It sounds almost Japanese—like slicing things up into
razor-thin segments so that nothing is ever really
complete, and everything is taken out of context. It's not
enough that there isn't time to go through a whole
album—there isn't even time to go through a whole song!
—Ron
and Russell Mael, Sparks
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.58 p.m., 8 May 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Lapsed Catholics are sorely
disappointed that the 265th Pope of Rome, Benedict XVI,
is—shock, horror—a strict Roman Catholic. The 20
million lapsed Catholics in America had hoped, according
to an Ohio-based newspaper, that the Church would become a
‘friendlier place’ after the demise of John Paul II,
and coax ‘hurt, angry and lapsed Catholics’ like
themselves back into the pews. Lapsed Catholics in Britain
also prayed for a new happy-clappy era under a less
dogmatic Pope, who might, a friend of mine hoped,
"bend some of the old rules"...
But I have a question for
Benedict XVI, should he be reading this: do you really
want this lapsed lot—an irritating bunch who have all
but set up their own breakaway religion anyway—back in
your gang?
Lapsed Catholics get on my
wick. In my experience, they bang on about
Catholicism—how it moulded them or damaged them or made
them into sexual inadequates or guilt-ridden
masturbators—far more than practising Catholics do. Many
of the observant seem sensibly to have abandoned hope that
we heathens might be converted to the One True Path, and
thus tend to keep their religion to themselves. But if you
have the misfortune to be plonked next to one of the
lapsed at a dinner party, there’s a very good chance he
will bore you comatose with tales of his time in the bosom
of the wicked Mother Church.
—Brendan
O'Neill
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.55 a.m., 5 May 2005►
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
A Muslim sheik told followers
at a public meeting in Bankstown that women who were raped
had incited men's lust by dressing immodestly and only had
themselves to blame.
Sydney-born Sheik Faiz
Mohamad, 34, a former boxer who teaches at the Global
Islamic Youth Centre in Liverpool, made the comments
during a lecture for more than 1000 people at Bankstown
Town Hall.
The Sun-Herald has a
recording of the March 18 speech in which Sheik Faiz said:
"A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the
world. Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her
beauty to the entire world . . ."
—Miranda
Devine, Sydney Sun-Herald, 24 April
2005
Kevin
Michael Grace, 8.03 a.m., 3 May 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
It is a remarkable, scarcely
noticed fact that this is the first election ever in which
immigration, despite the strong feeling in the country
over generations, has been a proper issue. Of course, it
has been talked about by both sides eager to say they
agree to watch it carefully but, above all, to maintain a
cross-party consensus.
Ah, yes, the deadly
consensus. Those of us who have watched politicians for a
living know that ominous sign. Joining the ERM, appeasing
Sinn Fein, the need for prices and income policies, the
Maastricht Treaty, invading Iraq—these and other grim
errors saw the two front benches in cosy agreement.
You might argue that the 1970
election of Heath vs Wilson did see immigration as a
proper party issue. But it was so only to the extent that
Heath promised—not that it came to anything—that
immigrants wishing to return to their countries of origin
could have financial assistance.
The reality is that both
parties have been scared stiff of this issue and agreed on
obscuring it, with the eager support of middle-class
opinion formers who look down on ordinary electors. The
view they take of the average voter runs something like
this: "They are dreary little people, living in
dreary little houses, taking dreary little cheap holidays
in Spain." Important matters, you see, should be left
to well-informed, middleclass people like them. After all,
tough immigration laws could produce serious problems. How
would one find a cheap Albanian nanny?
You say that we live in areas
unaffected by immigration? Nonsense. There's that Asian
professor who lives opposite, a black banker down the
road, near that South African surgeon. Also, there's an
ambassador from some Third World country nearby. We are
very happy with cultural diversity.
The BBC approach on
immigration is well illustrated by Jonathan Dimbleby,
normally an admirable interrogator. When interviewing a
Tory, one half expects that he will produce a stick and
thrash him, shouting: "Confess, confess—you are a
racist."
The cosy attitude towards
immigration is dressed up as high minded. How else, they
demand, could we get the doctors and nurses we need? What
does not seem to have crossed their minds or consciences
is how this robs poorer nations. Make no mistake, people
die in other countries because their doctors and nurses
are looking after us.
How immigration really pans
out in votes cast is hard to say. Maybe all this dressing
it up as a test of decency and tolerance really will
discourage electors from their true feelings. On the other
hand, the dreary little people might give their mentors a
two-fingered salute.
—Andrew Alexander, London Daily Mail, 29 April
2005
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.30 a.m., 2 May 2005►
