Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent. 
Links ( 'Nother Solent is this blog's good twin. Same words, searchable archives, RSS feed. Provided by a benefactor, to whom thanks. I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.) The Old Comrades:
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Saturday, June 15, 2002
Moves, News, Corrections. Midwest Conservative Journal is now at http://mcj.blogspot.com so adjust your links. I hope Our Editor does keep the archives available somewhere. Ain't No Bad Dude says that the Gun Show Loophole really exists and needs closing, others disagree. One for you Yanks, I think. And, keeping up the non-idiotarian liberal theme, Gary Farber's Amygdala is back and strategizing after a hiatus. Layman's logic has looked a little closer at The American Kaiser's post cited by me earlier. He corrects some maths and mathematical terms and gets a less dramatic result. The corrected figures are still striking: "...And therefore a Jewish child is two and a half times as likely to die as his Arab neighbour, and it's mother twice as likely." Someone else - in fact several someones - should check up on this. Not because I don't think Ben Sheriff hasn't done a capable job, but because if confirmed these figures are extremely important and should be spread widely.
But the checking won't be done by me any time today. I have birthday party games to arrange, loot bags to fill, panics to have, a temper to lose. I love it all really.
Friday, June 14, 2002
Wallabies from Hell hit Henley. Why do I have to turn to the Sydney Morning Herald to find out all the important news? I never heard about the chimpanzee, either. Cook, A Snoop, At the World Cup. Sorry. Couldn't resist that. A regular correspondent (Let's call him A.R.C. for short) writes:
Rage against a cupcake. The story that made my blood boil last night was not a murder, a rape, or a terrorist attack. I don't know why I should be so bothered by a school dispute in a foreign country, unless it's because I have been a teacher, but I was absolutely incensed by this story about some idle brat in Peoria, Arizona who who was about to fail for cutting classes, plaiglarism, ignoring the offered second chance and all-round complacent inefficiency. But not, I think, stupidity. Oooh, no, this chick knew how to ensure she passed without the trouble of actually working. She just gave Mommy and Daddy a call, and Mommy and Daddy hired this nice lawyerman called Stan F. Massad and he told the mean old teacher lady that he'd be make her very sorry if she didn't let Daddy's girl have fun with a cap and gown. But the school authorities knew that would be unfair to the honest students. They acted firmly to back up their teacher, Elizabeth Joice, and defend the reputation of their school, right?
Seems I wasn't the only one incensed. The Arizona Republic described the original report as "knuckle-whitening" and speaks of a wave of angry comment from readers. And several blogs have covered the story, such as Desert Pundit who includes an e-mail address for complaining about the lawyer's intimidatory tactics,
And here's the cool cartoon by Benson that gave me the "cupcake" line.
I've had a little play on Google myself. I didn't find Cupcake's name, alas, but I did find the website for Sunrise Mountain High School. (Motto: We Won't Fail You)
I bet Cupcake sang the school song with a big smile on her face as she graduated: "Go mighty Mustangs! gallop to glory / fighting all the way / Mustangs will conquer / in purple and white / standing up tall / with their heads held high / So let’s go, fight / we’re Sunrise Mountain High School / onward to victory! "
I've wimped out of ringing up Arizona. But if anyone nearer or braver wants to courteously ask the school why they allowed the hard work of their honest students to be debased, the phone number and address can be found here. Or perhaps the Peoria Unified School District Administrative Center at 6330 West Thunderbird Road, Tel. 623 486-6000 would be the guys to talk to; I am unsure of American practice in these matters. And if you're feeling very, very brave indeed, Pirhana-lawyer (I refer only to his undoubted tenacity and initiative on behalf of his clients) Stan F. Massad can be contacted here. I live far away and have a pure past, Stan. And no money.
Thursday, June 13, 2002
A good sport. I'd just like to mention that Nick Butterworth, author of the Percy the Park Keeper books, very good-humouredly signed a copy of his justly famous work, "Just Like Jasper" for my son. Nothing unusual about that you say? Well, the copy concerned still had its "Withdrawn from Hertfordshire Libraries" stamp clearly visible. I think we paid 20p for it. But we got Percy new, honest. And in hardback. Ain't no way to pretend that I'm posting this story about an actor alleged to have taken out a contract on his wife for any other reason than a ghoulish interest in its sheer filmability. An interest shared by the LAPD, according to the defence. Wednesday, June 12, 2002
I'd have caught this Lileks blast on the profiling issue eventually as I complete my sweep through the blogs I've missed over the last week or so. But Joanne Jacobs caught it first. Mr Lileks is talking about fingerprinting and photographing visitors to the US from high-risk countries. I don’t care. I am way past caring. I have not a jot of the care-sauce left in my bones. The care tank is empty. There’s no one home in Careville. The dog ate my care. The Care Crop didn’t come up this year. Self.com/care comes up as a 404.There's the germ of an idea in that last paragraph. Or rather, there's one point that has been widely made and another idea that needs to be teased out further. The widely made point is that he suppression, or attempted suppression, of obvious and moderate precautionary steps against Arab/Muslim suspected terrorists is one of the factors promoting hatred against innocent Muslims. Man, it does not please folk who have just had three thousand slaughtered in front of their eyes to be told that they are racists for wanting to check out the next Saudi buying a copy of "Teach Yourself To Fly." The point I haven't seen widely made is that intelligent profiling might have good effects on Muslims of goodwill. And I can see why. The way I've written it, it looks completely freaking loopy. Getting Hassled, Stopped, Frisked and Full Body Searched Is Good For You. Yeah, right. But there's something there. Something more than the obvious point that their lives might also be the one saved: many Muslims were murdered in the WTC, the Pentagon, and on those planes.
Perhaps the proposition looks a little saner if we consider what's happening now. There is a vicious circle. Moves that would clearly make us all safer are not openly taken. Result: resentment among non-Muslims at being endangered for the sake of political correctness. But, of course, Arabs and Muslims are being profiled, only stealthily, and you can bet the stealth adds poison to the way that baggage checkers and cops carry out this task. Next result: resentment among Muslims at the snide insults they suffer. So we get hysterical denunciations of measures that are not objectionable when the real cause of their anger was the objectionable way in which those measures were carried out. But the denunciations annoy non-Muslims even more, and motivate the frisker to be a little more rough, the policeman to put a little more sneer in his voice, the press and public to build on any existing tendency to lump all Muslims together as terrorists and enemies. And characterizations of that sort have a way of coming true.
Open and avowedly temporary precautions would be a lot better. The inconvenience to travellers is never going to be fun, and the powers granted to snoopers are always going to be worrying. But the bad effects would be much softened. Among those fingerprinted there would be occasion for dignity and fortitude, two qualities that Islam does seem to promote. There would be occasion for sympathy and imaginative identification among the bystanders, and that the West does well.
God knows, we're in need of some more positive thoughts about Arabs and Muslims. MEMRI's latest shocker, ably described by David Tell, featured on Instapundit today, and is going to be all over the world tomorrow. As it should be. Truth will out and should out. This soft-spoken corrupter of children, Doaa 'Amer, and her supporters should be denounced before the world. I think there are Muslims who would like to speak out against this behaviour. They are (mainly) silent for two reasons. The first is obvious: physical danger from either their rulers or the mob. Those more fortunately situated could make them safer by highlighting their cases in the way that Amnesty International still does well, when it can tear itself away from callow anti-Americanism. The second reason for silence is isolation. Like Winston Smith watching the film of the lifeboat being bombed, individual Muslims who are disturbed by the fanaticism look round and see everyone else baying for more blood. Why, even most of the Franks who you might think would object seeing as they are so loudly against racism, seem vaguely approving. Unless these individual Muslims are very exceptional individuals they do as Smith did and shrink into themselves. Here, again, Muslims and non-Muslims living in free countries help by speaking out. If the general population of Egypt, say, learn that the rest of the world are horrified by their anti-semitism some of them are going to wonder if the rest of the world might be right. The first person to say so looks a weirdo, quite possibly an apostate, and lives in fear of his life. The ten thousandth person doesn't. Fans of 'Robot wars' will like this picture from Random Jottings. Me, I feel sorry for the poor little aeroplane. Did laugh a bit, though. A certain profile. Dr Frank asks some questions about the exact histories of dirty bomb man Padilla and his British equivalent, Reid the shoe-bomber. Both are members of disaffected ethnic minorities who converted to Islam in prison. It is very clear to me that members of this category should be looked at hard. "Looked at" does not mean insulted, harassed, or arrested. Forensic profiling does have a fair record of success in catching serial killers, along with some notable failures. The term refers to a procedure more complex and more tentative than what people usually mean by profiling, although one-word profiling also has its uses. In other words, yes, I do think that the baggage checker should snap to attention when either an Arab or a Muslim reaches the head of the line. That is hard on the non-terrorist majority of Arabs and Muslims, so let it be done with decent discretion. The checkers should never be dozing, of course, but the ideal of constant total alertness when checking all passengers is forever unattainable. Some selectivity is necessary. The selection will be a mixture of simple broad-category-prejudice, more complex narrow-category prejudice and the copper's standby of watching to see if they twitch. And, I hope, specific intelligence briefings based on the answers to Dr Frank's questions. My point is that the broad category prejudice is not irrational. Al-Qaeda have turned to non-Arab agents such as Padilla and Reid precisely because the operations of their Arab agents are hindered by it. It is good that they are forced to work from a much smaller pool of agents, as their chances of finding people with the correct temperament are smaller. (Both Reid and Padilla seem to have lacked it: both prone to hysterical display.) But if you say, "no point in looking extra hard at Arabs because neither Reid nor Padilla was Arab" then you relax that pressure and restore access to the larger pool of terrorists. I made some similar comments to a post entitled "Profiling folly" at The Edge of England's Sword before seeing Dr Frank's post, which expressed what I wanted to say better than I did. Iain Murray correctly points out that most Arabs in the US are Christian, but I don't see that that negates my argument any more than the undoubted fact that most Arab Muslims are not terrorists negates it. All investigation has some element of slander, since even to look over a suspect violates the pure presumption of innocence. We just have to manage the balance as best we can. One-word profiling and detailed forensic profiling don't stop being useful merely because they are not security panaceas.
And it stayed 0-0. A table-full of football pundits seem to regard this as a quite good result for England. I begin to see why people like talking about football. It's nicer than real life. In real life people bomb school buses and the Guardian reports on it without comment. The American Kaiser has done some counting of the dead in the current conflict. (Link found by Damianation.) Everyone knows that many more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed. But did you know that "... nine Israeli women were murdered for every Palestinian woman, and five Israeli children for every Palestinian child." ? That, in a nutshell, is why I am so hostile to the Palestinian side in this war. They go for soft targets. The fact that these bombers also kill themselves is irrelevant in ethical terms. Certainly the fact that they are in the grip of that rare but ineradicable fever of the human species, a death cult, is important. The psychology of the cult demands that its adherents kill in in a spectacular way, outside the bounds of normal wartime behaviour. Put crudely, it would be a waste of all that mana generated by an act so unusual as premeditated suicide to use it all up while doing something so boring and passé as waging war according to the custom of civilized nations. It's important but not crucial. Suicide per se does not outrage me. It is not their self-killing that makes them evil but who else they kill. (Fattening up your own five year old children to kill themselves later does outrage me, but that's another story.)
The garage opens at eight. So why don't I ring up the nice mechanic right now and order the part I need. Of course I shall have to give him detailed information about the chassis number, the engine number, the make and model of the car and suchlike - he may have to look some of these details up, but I'm sure he won't mind taking a little extra time for a customer. And I always think it's polite to engage people in a little social conversation, don't you? Everyone likes to talk about their kids! Just kidding. I wouldn't really do a thing like that. It's still 0-0. Tuesday, June 11, 2002
Great Lines from the Movie of Life. It must have looked rather sinister, me saying, "I'm going away for a day out... at least the roads will be empty." Famous Last Words or what. (Count no man happy until he is dead. The last words of General John Sedgwick at the Battle of Spotsylvania were: "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist--") I do hope there is an innocent explanation for the silence of Muslimpundit, who has now had the longest two minute break in history. Chewing the cud. Or other bodily products. Hi, Ray. Ray has written to me saying, "And you thought seed-rich poo didn't work as a metaphor. I like it better than this one...."Then he links to a Bill Quick link to a sparky blog called Silflay Hraka. And if you don't know what that means you need to either read Watership Down or check out this bunnytalk dictionary. Exercise caution if you are of a sensitive disposition and/or have a taste for raisins or chocolate drops. (Having only one rabbit I had no idea that they did it to each others'... I trust I need not continue.) Sensitive people won't like the insect adolescents post either. Pure Far Side. If I were not nissed as a pewt on chink pampagne I would say more on why I think Watership Down has one of the best portrayals of an alien mindset that I have ever read in a science fiction novel. Oops, just spotted an unintentional ethnic spur in the Sloonerism back there. Doubly unfortunate given that we have just been so royally feasted by the staff of the Lucky Star and an aromatic duck (whadda they do, wear aftershave to pull the drakes?) who died gloriously so that we could celebrate my husband getting the job he wanted.
And with that I shall gid you bood night.
http://dawsonspeek.com. D'y'hear that? Dawson is the latest to get his own domain name. Us Blogger bloggers are getting thin on the ground. Or flushed out to sea. Whatever. And another one gone, and another one gone, and another one bites the dust... And, like Random Jottings, another one who acts like I just disappeared into the Lost World for an untraceable four months hunting dinosaurs and lost civilizations when all I was really doing was shopping, eating, drinking and plinking. I have an ominous feeling that my post of 4 June that was meant to explain things either didn't explain or didn't appear.
UPDATE: It didn't appear, according to reports from my trusty spies. You know for a guy who gave, free, a phenomenally useful and innovative service to the world, poor old Ev of Blogger (sounds like a minor thegn of Ming the Merciless) must walk around with a lot of curses on his innocent head. Over the last month or so I have occasionally found that despite pressing "post and publish" and getting back the message, "your transfer was completed successfully" when I check the web page nothing new has appeared. There doesn't seem to be any cure other than try, try again. Or go off to Belgium. Works for me. No man or woman of spirit lets a little thing like the limits of statistical validity get in the way of judging the entire spirit of a nation from one chance encounter. So, amid all the reports of murky French equivocation about terrorism, allow me to inform you definitively that the true France has not spoken yet. While waiting for the ferry home from Dunkirk we popped in to the little museum that commemorates the evacuation of 1940. The custodian there, or at least the one on duty when we visited, is a very pleasant ex-army chap. We got talking when my husband went over to point out that the Martini action shotgun-type thing was actually nineteenth century, and used for hunting not war. (Whenever you let my spouse into a war museum he always does something like this. I've learnt to put up with it. Pretending that I've never met him before only leads to embarrassment later. There always comes a point when he cheerily says"...and you must meet my wife", and then I have to either drop all pretence or respond "unhand me, sir!") So the nice custodian comes over and he and my husband have a happy talk about the rifling, the diameter of the barrel, what sort of rifles colonial troops had in 1940, and the way people just give things to museums who, being the mathom-houses that they are, haven't the heart to refuse them. I learnt the French word for "rifling". I've forgotten it since, but it's cool to have known it even for a little while. Anyway, the conversation moved on to his experiences in Algeria (he wasn't hostile to Algerians) and thence to terrorism in our own day, and he said some pretty uncomplimentary things about intellectuals and their spouting off, and added for good measure that we knew how much King Solomon paid for the pillars of his temple, so it sure seemed to him like the Jews weren't complete interlopers. Or, at least, I'm fairly sure he said that. I found I'd reached an interesting plateau in my French comprehension. I could understand 90% of his words and 75% of his sentences, but was missing at least half of what he said. What I desperately needed was more processing time. Misled by the pretty way I can reel off a pre-prepared sentence of French he assumed that I was a good deal more fluent than I really was. Next time I must remember to dumb down my sentence structure to a level commensurate with my understanding. Get your priorities right. Skimming through Samizdata, I see that Brian Micklethwait imagines me as denouncing discussion of football when there are so many more important issues that demand to be addressed. And so there are! Did you know, for instance, that I got some beautifully nuzzly suede mules from a little place in Lippenslaan for the absurdly low price of thirty Kalganids? "Lippenslaan". Don't disabuse me; if this doesn't mean "Lips lane" I don't want to know. In the previous post I really ought to have said that Flemish sounds like English happily drunk. No doubt it is all just a linguistic coincidence but there are dozens of jolly Flenglish constructions to delight the Anglophone visitor. For instance "toegang" means either "entrance" or "forbidden". (I really ought to sort out which before next visiting a Flemish nuclear reactor. Or, indeed, the Flemish shooting range that I just did visit. "Geen toegang" definitely does mean "entrance forbidden," I have at least established that much.
But what a likeable word "toegang" is. I look down at my toes (neatly dressed in suede) and wriggle them. The way they hang around in a gang all the time is something shocking. She's back! She's unpacked! She's - oooh, about five-eighths of the way through the enormous pile of washing. My husband and I just spent a long weekend in the Belgian resort of Knokke-heist. Long ago it would have been two separate cutely-named resorts, Knokke and Heist. Flemish sounds like English, drunk. |