A nice little diversion for a slow Friday afternoon: Make and subtitle your own Bollywood movie ( h/t commenter Jillian at Sadly No]
Culture
“Leaving Coe and Jowell in charge of this project was like sending Constable Dogberry to sort out Enron.”
Simon Jenkins in The Grauniad this morning proves once again why they were so right to hire him, as he puts the boot elegant brogue into Britain’s Olympic organisers, demolishing their spiralling demands for more and more public money with cold, angry logic. But he reserves his particular ire for the unelected and unaccountable members of the IOC:
[…]
These people are like pre-Reformation cardinals. Since the Olympic pope graciously allowed Britain to sponsor his latest crusade, he has heard nothing but complaints from the peasantry over the cost. It is giving his “brand” a bad name. Why cannot the British behave like the Chinese, who are coughing up $30bn for his ritual in decent silence? How dare they question gilded taps in the Olympic village or teakwood lining to executive boxes, or swansdown seats on the loos? Where is the Olympic ship, promised to carry pilgrim children (I kid you not) from Peking to London? And what of legacy? The IOC likes a legacy or two to gladden its press releases.
These are not sportsmen but Vegas-style businessmen for whom Blairite ministers have an extraordinary weakness. They move in a world of stadium designers, equipment suppliers, architects, promoters and agents. They are unaccountable to any electorate. The one thing they sell each four years is chauvinist glory, the “right” to hold the Olympic franchise for 16 days. They have already spawned an office block of 700 staff in Canary Wharf, consultants, architects, engineers and project managers. They have even brought in an outside company, CLM, to defend their costs at a reputed fee of £400m, money not for sport but to go straight into someone’s back pocket. If anyone accuses me of being a killjoy, I say too right. Somehow or other we are paying for this.
The truth is that Jowell and Coe are not up to dealing with this bunch – with Coe actually thinking the games will “make money as an investment”. Neither has passed the whelk-stall test, yet they find themselves negotiating with people who travel first class, stay at five-star hotels and expect chauffeurs to pick up bills for less than a million. Leaving Coe and Jowell in charge of this project was like sending Constable Dogberry to sort out Enron.
[…]
I sense Mr Jenkins is a little annoyed.
Has there ever been a government so in thrall to slick salesmen? At least the Tories, being sleazy salesmen themelves, knew when they were being snowed. The luminaries of New Labour not only fall for every hustle going they seem infatuated with the hustlers too (and quite often they marry them, as in the case of Ms. Jowell). You could paint this as the idealistic working class having been corrupted by contact with big money, but let’s face it, a preponderance of Labour MP’s and cabinet members are lower-middle-class, not working-class, and came up through net-curtain-land and secure jobs in local government. They are those people who that sourpuss Belloc derided as ‘the people in between’:
Back To The Future
“There’s a revolution going on in rec rooms, living rooms and classrooms around the world…”
How the intertubes were built – this 1993 CBS News clip explaining the internet comes via Neatorama:
Apparently there’s this thing called the “Internet”, which runs on computers… Think it’ll catch on?
The Sins Of The Father
I meant to mention this post of Martin’s from Wisse Words in the week but it slipped my mind, sorry.
But he points out one of the big unspokens about wingnuts, and wingnut pundits in particular, though it’s not a phenomenon that’s exclusive to the US right:that it’s all about Daddy.
Wed 21 Feb 2007
More ReynoldsScruggs over at UFO Breakfast Recipients has read my post on Glenn Reynolds and points out something I missed: that Reynolds’ dad was a moderately famous antiwar protestor himself and much of his behaviour may just be because of unresolved daddy issues:
Now let’s be clear that many young, rebellious kids say awful things. I made my parents wince more times than I care to contemplate when I was in the throes of puberty. And some parents really are pretty dreadful. Growing up and individuating is not always easy, especially in an authoritarian state. So one can understand why some apsects of the angry, frustrated, spiteful child persist into physical adulthood.
They certainly do: witness the angry frustrated, spitefuilly childish rightwing bloggers and commenters in full flow this week post- Reynolds’ call for the assassination of nuclear scientists and clerics who have had the misfortune not to be born white and American. The uber-angry, frustrated, spitefuilly childish Instapundit is right in the vanguard of the Daddy-issues wingers.
There’s certainly past evidence for Scruggs’ thesis that Reynolds (and by extension, his fellow wingnut pundits) has unresolved paternal issues and it comes from a unexpected, hawkish source:
Listen to Yourself, Instaman
by Gene Healy | Jan 9, 2003 | 4 commentsSo here’s Glenn Reynolds on the US (the Daddy Country) and its relationship with other countries (sniveling, spoiled teenage brats with no respect for authority):
LAST NIGHT there was a Cosby show rerun on Nickelodeon. Theo defies his parents, and they leave him with nowhere to live in order to teach him that actions have consequences, and forgiveness isn’t to be taken for granted.
This morning Howard Kurtz is writing about the surprising degree of support, even among conservatives, for the idea of hanging South Korea out to dry. I wonder if there’s a parallel to be drawn here?
… long-term, there’s a lot to be gained by reminding our triangulating allies that American love, and American forgiveness, are not to be taken for granted either. That’s a lesson we keep ramming home to the Germans. And the Koreans need to learn it too.
We live in a world where most of our allies are Theo Huxtables: self-centered, unrealistic, and overconfident in their assorted schemes because they know Heathcliff will always bail them out in the end. But this isn’t a situation comedy.
[…]
Reynolds is like one of those spoiled, crying, snot-nosed children you see shrieking and grabbing their parents’ sleeve in the supermarket. “Daddy! Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!, DADDY!! Notice meeeeee!”
Sense or Sensibilities
Today is the centenary of WH Auden and in rereading some of his poems this morning, I came across this, which it seems to me bears directly on the Democrats’ dilemma – whether in a time of increasing religious fanaticism they should attempt to reach out to the religious or whether here and now is where they should draw a bright line, on this side reason and the enlightenment ideals that the writers of the US constitution stood for, on the other theocracy, oppression and regression.
Digby is hopeful reason will out – but I’m with Auden on this, and not so sure about that at all.
Law, Say The Gardeners, Is The Sun
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers shrilly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I’ve told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.Like love we don’t know where or why,
Like love we can’t compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.W.H. Auden