Panglossian Notes

A little something to clear the nasal passages

"He's a good, brave and honourable soldier."
Norman Lamont on ex-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, January 1999

"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes."
Winston Churchill, war office departmental minutes, 1919

"Hang Mandela."
campaign slogan of the Federation of Conservative Students during the 1980s, during which time its chairman was John Bercow, now Speaker of the House of Commons

From: The "greatest" [UK?] Conservative quotes of all time
Daniel Trilling
Newstatesman
July 31, 2009

Can a blog be sycophantic?

Or would a synonym for printing something that's obsequious be more appropriate as a descriptor?

Some choices to maybe add at the end of It is:

servile, subservient, deferential, groveling, toadying, fawning, flattering, ingratiating, cringing, unctuous, slavish, ...

Updated: The curious case of Henry Louis Gates jr

I wonder how those involved with the Gates incident feel after a weekend of rest and now since it's in the national and international media - it happened last Thursday night but started to be reported on Monday.

Oh, here are some descriptions of the incident:

The daily voice -précis

Travis Smiley - wondering what's up?

Bloomberg.com - more details

Gawker.com - Its Crash vs The Age of Innocents

The Police Reports I had linked to early this morning on the Boston Globe site seem to have gone missing.

Police Report as jpegs - indifferent description of events but a little harder to read as it isn't in pdf format (a video would be better but curious quotes). Part of Update: PDF format is available at Peter Moskos'.

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Professor Gates' Report of incident through his lawyer - via Gawker

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Update

The charges against the professor have been dropped both Cooked Timber and A Tiny Revolution have notes up on the incident. Cooked Timber points to Peter Moskos’ book, "Cop in the Hood" and Peter also has a couple of posts up on the arrest at his, always interesting to read, blog Cop in the Hood.

I'm not sure what to think of this little peccadillo and maybe I should not even describe it as a small unimportant sin/offense.

Technorati Tags: Curious

A marvelous litany of Afghanistan wonderings

"No one seems to be able to articulate why we are in Afghanistan. Is it to hunt down bin Laden and al-Qaida? Is it to consolidate progress? Have we declared war on the Taliban? Are we building democracy? Are we fighting terrorists there so we do not have to fight them here? Are we “liberating” the women of Afghanistan? The absurdity of the questions, used as thought-terminating clichés, exposes the absurdity of the war. The confusion of purpose mirrors the confusion on the ground. We don’t know what we are doing.

War Without Purpose
Chris Hedges
Truthdig
July 20, 2009

Technorati Tags: The Mission, The Plan, The Program

The USA, a democratic police state?

Bernard Chazelle at ATR asks you to be the judge.

Technorati Tags: Confused, USA

Brown's fumbling government backs at large "war criminal" as future POTEU

Jim Bell has drawn a fitting replacement for the 5 Euro note if the Irish approve the Lisbon Treaty, Blair avoids being arrested and Gordo's wacky government gets its wish.

Technorati Tags: Scum, warfare

Obama a very confusing guy?

Is Obama confusing or is there something else going on, like you know, a general disconnect from reality for some?

Let's take the matter of Health Care Reform. Here, for example, is a headline from a story today in the Huffington Post:

"If Congress Fails to Pass the Obama Health Care Plan

I saw the story this afternoon and wondered, without reading it: What Obama Health Care Plan?

I thought the US House of Reps had already cobbled something together and the US Senate was getting their contribution ready but, the POTUS?

Had he sent anything concrete over to either chamber, other than maybe a few lofty words, I'd missed reading about?

Well, it seems I've not been the only one wondering about Obama and Health Care. Trudy Lieberman, over at the Columbia Journalism Review, thinks he

"... has staked out a position as health care chief in absentia."

Lots of words but little else, and at least Trudy thinks:

"we still don’t know what the president stands for.

And not only that, his:

"Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius said that health care overhaul “needs to be owned by the House and the Senate,” and won’t be dictated by the president.

So Mz Lieberman has a suggestion, which would satisfy my afternoon wondering on seeing the Huffington Post headline:

"If that’s the case [Health Care reform is owned by Congress and not the POTUS], then we urge the media—especially headline writers—to stop referring to “Obama’s health care plan” or to “Obama’s health care overhaul.” Better to call it Congress’s health plan.

Source for quotes, outside square brackets :

All the President’s Words
Trudy Lieberman
Columbia Journalism Review
July 15, 2009

Technorati Tags: A PLAN, Confused

A faux Whitehouse, I wonder where it could be, eh?

Narcotecture
P.J. Tobia

(via)

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, NATO, The sacred sacrifice, chuckle, chuckle, The Mission, The Plan

A glimpse of Hell?

No, it's just last year's intervention project.

"On the road to Pristina, we passed slum dwellers hawking smuggled cigarettes and phone cards, trash heaps crawling with feral dogs, shotgun shacks crammed together like bad teeth, and, intermittently, sites of glimmering new construction. Here and there, protected by sandbags and concertina wire, were the offices and barracks of the United Nations and Nato, some structures little better than shipping containers built to house the international bodies that came to save the land. The hot June air was heavy with petrol fumes, the stereo blared rap music in Albanian over pounding bass lines, and in the distance the red sun was sinking behind snow-draped mountains. My driver, Scratch, jockeyed through traffic down one and two-lane roads pocked by potholes wide enough to swallow our blue BMW sedan. Scratch said that he was armed and told me not to worry. “You never know,” he said.

Scratch swerved the car around a cow, then a military vehicle equipped with a swivel gun. The speedometer clicked upward, and a man came into our sight, staggering down the edge of the road, carrying in his arms what appeared to be the limp body of a woman. The man shook his head at the passing traffic. Soon I could see that the woman’s head was bleeding, her eyes and mouth wide open, and her left hand dangling twisted and limp as if her sun-burnt skin were the only thing keeping it attached to her arm. Shouldn’t we stop? I wondered. We didn’t; no one did. Cars and trucks cut around the man and woman, kicking up tiny clouds of dust, and then past two crashed-up hatchbacks in a weedy ditch, where three men stood gesturing at the darkening sky.

“Welcome to Kosovo,” Scratch said.

The wreckage of intervention
Christopher Stewart
The National
July 10, 2009

Technorati Tags: Confusing?, Foreign Policy

Being cynical about Obama's little African sojourn

It must be the humid, no sun, morning that's putting me in a skeptical mood about the Obama gig, aka sermon junket, to Africa.

It could also be how the CBCs hourly news is reporting the visit with their specific noting that the Ghana's president was "democratically" elected. I guess that's opposed to chief executives or heads-of-state, etc., etc. not "democratically" elected, like, say right now in Honduras (he's self-appointed) or Iran (maybe who really knows) or some recent hits from the past, say LBJ (in his 1948 Senate win), JFK (electoral college votes in Illinois maybe), George W Bush (in 2000 and 2004).

Small, unrelated, things piss me off when it's humid, particularly using crappy adverbs meant to convey some subliminal message to us the unwashed listeners of radio. Drop the modifiers CBC. Simply saying "Obama was greeted by the president of Ghana" would be perfectly fine and avoid implying that your listening audience maybe uninformed boobs or worse that you might have just figured out something about the "dark continent".

This brings me to a piece from the Winter 2005 edition Granta, written by Binyavanga Wainaina and titled "How to write about Africa":

"Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

How to write about Africa
Binyavanga Wainaina
Granta Winter 2005

(h/t Pulse)

Technorati Tags: CBC, Celebrity, Preaching