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The Times – good for them – have a full page obituary of Johnny Ramone, who’s just died in New York from prostate cancer. In Isaiah Berlin’s fox or hedgehog terms (and how often do you get Isaiah Berlin and Johnny Ramone in the same sentence?) Johnny was one of life’s hedgehogs. He had one great idea, and he stuck with it: very fast buzz-like chords, catchy tunes, moronic pop-culture lyrics. That was Ramones-style punk, which was punk at its purest. If Lou Reed was the godfather of punk, Johnny was the real father. The rest of the New York crowd like Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell or Patti Smith had some sort of intellectual or artistic pretensions, could quote Rimbaud, and imagined themselves as poets maudits transferred to Manhattan, but for the Ramones it was American culture all the way; notably horror flicks like Todd Browning’s “The Freaks” which supplied the signature “Gabba Gabba Hey”. And it was after seeing the Ramones that the Sex Pistols and the Clash saw the way to go.

Here’s Johnny expounding at length on his philosophy, the state of the world, and the inner demons which he could only exorcise through the transformative power of his art:

“I basically tried to play normal stuff. We didn’t sing about surfing or cars or girls because we didn’t surf, didn’t have cars and didn’t have girlfriends. So we wrote about sniffing glue and the boredom of suburbia.”

And here’s life on the road for the Ramones, in between fighting off the groupies:

On an early tour, their manager remembered, he was accosted by a filling-station clerk as the band (in full Ramones regalia) milled around in the forecourt. “Mister,” he was told, “it sure is nice of you to take care of those retarded people.”

Yep, a true American original.

Jamie Lyons reports on his trip to North Korea in the Scotsman (via NKZone):

The air stewardesses on Air Koryo hand out propaganda on all flights in and out of North Korea. One passenger on our plane gratefully accepted the brochures, carefully folded them and placed them in his bag.

The stewardess immediately removed them from his bag, unfolded them and handed them back to him. “You must not fold the face of my leader,” she rebuked him.

It is not compulsory to wear the Kim Il Sung badge. But in three days in Pyongyang I did not see a single Korean without one. Why? I asked our guide/minder.

The answer was obvious. “It is because of the very high esteem in which we hold our Eternal President.”

A similar explanation pervades the country’s voting system. The people here can vote for a deputy to represent them in the Supreme People’s Assembly. Each constituency has a choice of precisely one candidate. The turn-out is 100% and the vote in favour of the candidate, also 100%.

Why?

“Because our leaders have chosen a wise deputy who will represent us.”

Dogma is everywhere. The underground trains stop at stations with names such as “Great and Powerful Nation”, “Liberation” and “Glory”. The train speakers pump out martial anthems.

Similar anthems were played endlessly on our tour bus, songs with titles like “My loved one is away in the trenches fighting the evil imperialist dogs.”

Here‘s another group of Iraqi freedom fighters struggling to liberate their country from Western imperialist aggression (via <a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="Dhimmi Watch):

A militant group threatened today to attack Iraqi universities if authorities continued to permit women to study alongside men, according to a videotape broadcast on the Arab language Al-Arabiya television station.

The group calling itself the Islamic Jihad Brigade in Iraq demanded that the minister of higher education separate men and women at all schools and universities. The video showed one man, his face hidden by a kefiyah, reading a statement.

On one side stood a masked man with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. On the other side stood a masked man with a machine gun.

“You must isolate the men from women because of the immoral attitudes existing in the private and public universities,” the man reading the statement said. “If this is going to be continue, we will hit the colleges and universities.”

The group read a statement in front of a banner that read “There is no God but Allah. Mohammed is the messenger of Allah.”

short, extremist Islam is a threat and a danger; Arab reform offers opportunity and hope.

tive judgment and bias. So we sought terms that carried no such judgment.

It’s an extraordinary admission: the requirements of objectivity apparently mean that news reports should be compiled in a moral vacuum.

Is the latest spate of hurricanes churning through the Caribbean evidence that global warming is beginning to bite? Not according to George Taylor writing at TCS:

[T]here is no reason to expect increases in hurricanes due to greenhouse warming. Climate models, for all their problems, are unanimous in at least one respect: they predict that most of the future warming will be in high latitudes, in the polar regions. This will reduce the north-south temperature gradient and make poleward transfer of heat less vigorous — a task in which tropical storms play a major role. All other things being equal, a warmer world should have fewer, not more, hurricanes.

More on the Egyptian journalists whose pronouncements MEMRI has been dutifully reporting. I posted about this here and here. Now the main protagonists have been featured in a discussion on Egyptian TV:

Rif’at Sayyed Ahmad: “…[T]oday a true Holocaust is occurring from Rafah to Jenin, Nablus, Baghdad, and Nafaj. This is the Holocaust that our nation and our region is experiencing today, and the West does not pay attention to it and doesn’t feel the same level of pain that it feels concerning the old Holocaust. When this article was published, the Zionist MEMRI organization in America and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is also Zionist, translated the article and then disseminated it and sent letters to the American Congress, to the American Embassy in Cairo and to the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, and other places.”

On the Phone – Muhammad Al-Zurqani, former editor-in-chief of Al-Liwaa Al-Islami: “I agree with what Dr. Rif’at Sayyed Ahmad wrote and I accept full responsibility. I think, Dr. Sayyed, that you and I are of the same generation, colleagues who worked together. We were educated from childhood that the Holocaust is a big lie.”

Sayyd Ali:”Of course.” […]

Rif’at Sayyed Ahmad:”The Palestinian prisoners today, who are leading the Palestinian Intifada in the start of its fifth year, and on an empty stomach, are suffering in the Palestinian jails [sic] a greater suffering than what the Jews or others suffered in Nazi prisons. This suffering has reached such a level that it has been said that all of the experiments conducted in the Abu Ghraib prison on Iraqi prisoners or in Guantanamo were first conducted on the Palestinian prisoners, whose numbers reach 8,000, and among them 300 women and 300 children. Some of them suffered from experiments that turned their bodies into germ laboratories and turned them into human guinea pigs.”

Sayyd Ali, Host: “Into laboratory mice…”

Rif’at Sayyed Ahmad: “They have made them laboratory mice out of these heroic prisoners. This is an example of the modern Holocaust that we are now experiencing. A fresh Holocaust. Where is the West’s conscience? I ask where is Anne Marie, the media advisor in the U.S. Embassy, on this issue? Where is Bush himself?

“The annihilation of olive trees… In the last two years half a million olive trees have been annihilated in Palestine. The olive tree is the oldest and deepest-rooted tree in Palestine. Why are they being annihilated? Is this not Nazism? Is this not a modern Holocaust?”

The Evening Standard report on a pupil raping a teacher:

A 15-year-old boy has been charged with raping a teacher, it emerged today.
The youngster allegedly attacked the 28-year-old at the central London school last Tuesday.

The premises were closed for two days while police carried out forensic examinations.

A Westminster Council spokesman said: “The local education authority is offering support and guidance to the headteacher and staff.

“The school regards this as an unacceptable, but isolated incident.”

I imagine Westminster Council have a list of what they regard as unacceptable for the kids in their schools: swearing, running in the corridors, chewing gum, raping teachers…..

Reports of a nuclear explosion in North Korea are, according to the Beeb, being played down by the US and South Korea:

The blast in Yanggang Province, close to the Chinese border, is said to have happened on Thursday as the Stalinist state celebrated its National Day.

The blast created what officials in Seoul say was a peculiar-shaped cloud.

As the secretive North stays silent on the blast, a visiting UK minister has asked for an urgent explanation.

This (via lgf) provides some more detail:

The explosion happened at 11 a.m. Thursday in Yanggang province near the border with China, Yonhap said.

“We understand that a mushroom-shaped cloud about 3.5 to 4 kilometers (2.1 to 2.5 miles) in diameter was monitored during the explosion,” the news agency quoted an unidentified diplomatic source in Seoul, the South Korean capital, as saying.

Yonhap quoted an unidentified South Korean official as saying seismic activity related to two blasts in North Korea occurred at 11 p.m. Wednesday and 1 a.m. Thursday.

The damage and crater left by the explosion in Kim Hyong Jik county was big enough to be noticed by a satellite, Yonhap quoted an unidentified source in Beijing as saying.

The agency said the diplomatic source raised the possibility of a nuclear text blast or an accidental explosion. It quoted a source in Washington as saying the incident could be related to a natural disaster such as a forest fire.

Update: The Marmot’s Hole has good coverage.

t there has been no comparable public outpouring of sympathy for the Chechen children or expression of horror at the ‘evil’ Putin.

The universal horror experienced at the atrocities in Beslan and, in particular, the hatred felt for the Islamic fanatics who perpetrated this act of terrorism against innocent children is all very well, but such a response is crude and simplistic. This is because double standards and self-deception are involved.

Were not incomparably more innocent children blown to bits at Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Did the men responsible for those gratuitous acts of violence delude themselves that the children killed were ‘accidental’ casualties in a ‘legitimate’ war? So how is it we can admire one set of killers and abominate another?

It is not so much the uncritical revulsion against the events in Beslan that I find disturbing. It is the lack of revulsion against greater atrocities committed elsewhere – by us and our leaders.

Children are being maimed and killed in an illegal war in Iraq at this very moment. The men responsible for these deaths, instead of being hauled before the international courts and tried as war criminals, are likely to be re-elected soon as leaders of their countries.

The outrage at the school in Beslan, though terrible, pales into insignificance when compared to the destruction wreaked on Chechnya by Russia. But state terrorism is irrelevant, according to David Aaronovitch, as is US backing for the Nazi policies of the state of Israel to the events of 11 September. He has admitted to being fooled over the Iraq war. How long before he admits to being misled over the so-called ‘war on terror’?

For a brief uncomfortable moment there, it looked like there might be some atrocities so despicable that there would be universal condemnation, which could only detract from the true story of what’s happening in the world: the crimes of the West. Thank God for those Observer readers who’ve brought us back to our senses, reminding us of the horrors of the Second World War in Dresden Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and, really, what was the difference between our side and theirs? Didn’t both sides kill lots of people?), the slaughter of the innocents by our troops in Iraq, and the policies of Israel, the new Nazis.