Author: Mick Hartley

You can just imagine what the original advert was like, in Baltimore back in the Eighties. Now, after a makeover, it’s, um, very rude, and very funny. Language NSFW. Via Metafilter.

Gerard Baker gets a little hot under the collar at the liberal consensus on Blair:

Next week, you’ll be able to watch the latest — I’m sure carefully researched — television drama about the Blair years from Channel 4. Called The Trial of Tony Blair it imagines the last days in No 10. Robert Lindsay stars as Mr Blair and gives a hint of the challenges he must have faced assuming the character role: “I was angry with the decision to go to war,” he said at a press screening this week. “It was a big, big mistake. I think it was illegal and the situation can only get worse.”

Meanwhile, over at the Tricycle Theatre in radical Kilburn, they’re preparing a similar project — Called to Account: The indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair for the crime of aggression against Iraq — a Hearing. The Prime Minister, it seems, is to be indicted in absentia for war crimes before an audience (a wholly objective one, I’ve no doubt) and prosecuted by Philippe Sands, the barrister.

And on it goes. These are not minority views, of course, but the near-universal consensus of the educated opinion-formers of our times. It’s hardly even controversial these days to talk of the Prime Minister in this way. People used to shout “fascist” at Margaret Thatcher but I don’t really ever think their heart was in it. With Mr Blair it’s deadly serious. Imagine the raucous, triumphant, mocking Shia at Saddam Hussein’s execution — minus the beards — and you have a sense of what most of these people feel about the Prime Minister.

So at the risk of finding myself in the dock with him when the modern elites have their Nuremberg, let me take issue. His critics excoriate Mr Blair for a decision made in the most excruciating of circumstances. And this from people whose idea of a difficult decision is whether to go The Ivy or Soho House for dinner.

In 2003 the British Government was faced with a selection of unpalatable choices. Leave Saddam Hussein in place despite his record; watch as sanctions and limited military action against him killed his people but left him politically strengthened; or move to enforce the repeated reasonable demands of the international community at the risk of a bloody war. Most difficult of all for a British prime minister, he was faced with a US administration that was determined on military action to remove Saddam. No British leader wants to find himself aligned with a French and Russian president against an American one.

This is the defensive, passive case for Mr Blair. But, yes, there is still another one. His decision helped to remove one of the most murderous figures of the 20th century. It helped to allow benighted Iraqis to choose their own path. Thus far they have chosen sectarian warfare — that’s regrettable. Above all Mr Blair helped to offer all the people of the Middle East the glimpse of a revolutionary future, a route out of the medievalist tyranny. That’s an objective that is still worth fighting for.

Another mass-murdering tyrant is found guilty:

Former Ethiopian ruler Mengistu Haile Mariam has been sentenced to life in prison on genocide charges.

The former leader was found guilty last month after a 12-year trial, although he is living in exile in Zimbabwe.

After his conviction, Zimbabwe said it would not extradite him and many fear he will never face justice.

In a notorious campaign – known as the Red Terror – thousands of suspected opponents were rounded up and executed and their bodies tossed on the streets.

From an earlier BBC profile:

The president’s dream was to turn Ethiopia into a Soviet-style workers’ state.

Thousands of intellectuals, professionals and other perceived opponents of socialism and the regime were killed during the “Red Terror” years.

At the time, the country was embroiled in a war with Somalia, which was armed and backed by the Soviet Union. Mengistu encouraged Moscow to switch sides.

An alliance was formed, which saw the Soviet Union pour more than $10bn of military aid into the country during the 1980s.

For years, Mengistu relied on the Soviet Union for his economic thinking.

He saw himself as a Third World champion of communism. Alongside portraits of Lenin, Engels and Marx, he hung huge portraits of himself leading the masses to victory.

He spent much of his leisure time reading Marxist-Leninist tracts and wore Soviet-cut military jackets and caps.

Bob Geldof never told us about that.

, I was struck by the Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell song, “Papa’s on the Housetop”. It’s a fabulous song, which I’d never heard before. Dylan even quotes the lyrics of the chorus:

Baby’s in the cradle, brother’s on the town,
Sister’s in the parlour, tryin’ on a gown,
Mama’s in the kitchen, messin’ all around,
Papa’s on the housetop, won’t come down.

Right there you’ve got the inspiration for a whole load of Dylan lyrics. Tombstone Blues, obviously:

Mama’s in the factory
She ain’t got no shoes
Daddy’s in the alley
He’s lookin’ for food
I’m in the kitchen
With the tombstone blues

[bobdylan.com has the lyrics:

Mama’s in the fact’ry
She ain’t got no shoes
Daddy’s in the alley
He’s lookin’ for the fuse
I’m in the streets
With the tombstone blues

but that’s plain wrong.]

Or Maggie’s Farm, where Dylan runs through Maggie’s brother, pa and ma, who he ain’t gonna work for no more. Or On the Road Again, where Mama, Daddy, Grandpa and Grandma all get walk-on parts. A run through the family is a Dylan staple, and you’ve got to think that Leroy Carr song is a major influence.

Michael Gray’s “Song and Dance Man 3: The Art of Bob Dylan” (at 900 odd pages I should say magisterial, but really, indigestible’s more like it) has plenty of references to Leroy Carr, but not to this particular song. But, referring back to It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, he quotes Carr’s “Alabama Woman Blues”, with the lyric:

Don’t the clouds look lonesome across the deep blue sea
Don’t my gal look good when she’s coming after me.

which I suppose just goes to show that influences are multiple and complex.

After Dylan’s played the song, he quotes the line again: “Papa’s on the housetop, won’t come down”. “Well”, he says, “I guess we’ve all had days like that.”

rong>Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: Yes, but we have to work on these things. We must declare this, and we must convene a large conference with them, and tell them that time must be calculated according to Mecca.

Interviewer: What other benefits are there to calculating time according to Mecca?

Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: If you calculate time according to Mecca, those 8.5 minutes… The magnetic field of Earth, for example… What I say is that there are people at the North Pole and the South Pole who cannot come here in multitudes.

Interviewer: Really?

Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: This is because the magnetic force is concentrated there, which affects people’s blood and the biological movement of life. It has been proven that if magnetism, anywhere, exceeds 1,000 gauss, which equals one tenth of a tesla, it affects the ability of the hemoglobin in the blood to carry oxygen to the body’s tissues, the ability of the blood to carry oxygen to the tissues.

Interviewer: In other words, the ability to live…

Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: Yes, to live… This means is that when you are in Mecca, the ability of the blood to carry oxygen to the tissues is greater than anywhere else in the world.

Michael J Totten continues his excellent series of reports from Lebanon, this time visiting the Hezbollah-controlled south of the country:

The majority of the people in the South are Shia, but there are some Christian, Sunni, and Druze villages, too.

“The Christians down here are cornered,” Henry [one of Totten’s guides] said. He could have mentioned that the Sunni and Druze are, as well. “They have no freedom of movement. They only have freedom of speech inside their own villages. Outside their villages they can’t speak or talk to the press unless they leave the South.”

“They have been a long time under Hezbollah control,” Said said. “It’s the same scenario as 1975, only with different players.”

The situation is eerily much like it was in 1975 when Lebanon descended into 15 years of hell and chaos and war. Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization used South Lebanon as a launching pad for terrorist raids into Israel. The Shia who lived there were fiercely opposed to having their land used in this way for a foreigner’s war. Lebanon’s Christians also stridently opposed the use of their country as a battleground by Palestinians. But Lebanon’s Sunni community allowed and even encouraged Yasser Arafat to build himself a state-within-a-state in West Beirut. Street clashes between Christians and Palestinians sparked what eventually became a war of all-against-all that shattered the government and drew in the Syrians, the Iranians, the Americans, and the Israelis….

Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew the Israeli occupation forces from the “security belt” in South Lebanon in 2000, and wrongly assumed the Lebanese army would take control of the area. Hezbollah moved in instead and immediately dug in for more war. […]

“So this is our victory,” Said said. “This is how Hezbollah wins. Israel destroys our country while they sleep safely and soundly in theirs.”

The evidence is stacking up – God hates smart women:

A Pakistani fruit vendor shot dead his sister because she had a job and was studying for a university degree, a police official in conservative North West Frontier Province said.

Naheeda Bibi, 22, was shot three times by her brother on Sunday near her village outside Mansehra city, as she went to catch a bus to return to Rawalpindi where she studied and worked.

“The brother, Gul Shahzad, has no remorse and says she defied him and her father,” local police officer Mohammad Afzal told Reuters by telephone.

“He kept on screaming after he surrendered to the police that she met the destiny willed for her by God,” he said.

He hates gays as well, of course.

during a furs robbery, because he thought it was rabbit. He also said he successfully convinced a German au pair girl that he was a Post Office telephone engineer, and robbed the wall safe. He had also been visited by an income tax inspector, and produced a doctor’s certificate that he had a weak heart and could not be “caused stress”. Ten minutes later, he drove, in a Rolls-Royce, past the inspector waiting in the rain at a bus stop, and gave him a little wave.

Building bridges in the Middle East (via):

Authorities have revoked the Bahraini citizenship of a Kenyan-born athlete who ran in an Israeli marathon, the nation’s athletic union said Saturday.

Bahraini runner Mushir Salem Jawher competed and won the Tiberias Marathon in Israel on Thursday, ending the race in just over 2 hours and 13 minutes.

Most Arab states do not recognize Israel, and the Jerusalem Post newspaper said Jawher was the first athlete from an Arab country to compete in an Israeli marathon. Jawher was born in Kenya in 1978 and moved to Bahrain in 2003, according to the International Association of Athletics Federation.
The Jerusalem Post cited Jawher as saying he was “very proud” to have run in Israel. Even though Bahrain has no official ties with the Jewish state, “It is a free country,” the athlete was quoted as saying.

Bahrain’s Athletic Union said in a statement Saturday that it had received the news that a Bahraini national competed in Israel with “shock and regret.”

“The union deeply regrets what the athlete has done,” the statement said. A comity of sport and government authorities decided to strike Jawher’s name off the sport union records and strip off his Bahraini nationality, the statement said.

Industrial photography goodies (via Metafilter).

Lots of wonderful pictures of steel works, plus the odd coal mine.

The Germans seem to have cornered this area. As I’ve mentioned before, the masters here are Bernd and Hilla Becher .

Here’s another related post.