What happens when you give a geek acess to a credit card, cheap consumer electronics and a box of Jean-Michel Jarre videos?
Oh dear.
Best Christmas lights ever courtesy of the Guardian’s Online Advent Calendar.
Read more: War On Christmas, Christmas lights, YouTube, Video
I’ve been a bit slack for a couple of days and will be till Monday on account of getting some necessary Sinterklaas-type stuff done: I think it’s safe to wander off for a bit as there hasn’t been much of note on the interwebs lately so I shan’t be feeling too guilty at taking a couple of days off . Well, there probably has been, but I just haven’t seen it.
I have some big issues with Sinterklaas, not least that it buggers up Christmas, which feels like such a let-down in NL when the present-giving’s already been done in early December. It makes Christmas day just like any other. And you only get one present! What kind of a measly Christmas is that? And you have to sit through a load of Dutch bollocks first- you can’t just be quietly pleased and thank the giver nicely, it all has to made a major public production out of.
I’m not madly keen on this whole make a big joke out of the present and writing a poem thing , you may’ve guessed. Does anyone actually enjoy it? Seems to me it just makes giving someone a gift into a massive and embarassing chore.
But of course the big issue is Sint Piet, the very most disconcerting thing about the Netherlands and its customs.
For those who are unaware Sint Piet, aka Zwarte Piet, is Saint Nicholas’ little pickaninny slavey (sorry about the language, but that’s the portrayal even though the story goes that he’s ‘Moorish’).
Everywhere you look in Amsterdam now there are blackface caricature-bedecked stickers, sweets, shop decorations, costumed shop assistants, street decorations, parades of blacked-up minstrel types – that ugly golliwog image is everywhere. I’ve even seen blacked-up, black Sint Piets. Uh?
What the fuck is wrong with these people? No Dutch person I’ve asked can see the racism in it at all, and it’s particularly bizarre that there’re few public complaints at all from non-white Dutch people. I’ll never get used to it, ever, and it makes me take a very jaundiced view of the festival. For that reason I really can’t throw myself into it at all – celebrating Sinterklaas to my mind is just continuing to perpetuate offensive stereotypes like this one, used to advertise bakery products:
Ack, that’s just … ack.
However, deep breath, bite tongue. Family obligations prevail.
So in the meantime while we’re away, to try and cleanse your brain of that last please feel free to avail yourself of our exemplary blogroll. Here’s a cat pic to act as a placeholder for a while.
Worried about what the cats will do while we’re away? Who, us?
Now I’m off to go and get some clingfilm so I can leave strategically placed, loosely-wrapped bowls of catfood in various places to keep Hector, Sophie and Monty from wrecking the joint for the next couple of days. Then I’m going to stick assorted Sinterklaas presents together and make them look like a giant gold glittery top hat. You know, like the Black & White Minstrels used to wear in their show-stopping music & dance numbers.
What larks.
Read more: Europe, Netherlands, Holidays, Customs, Sinterklaas, Sint Piet, Racism, Friday cat blogging
Hot off the press comes this latest research report from the Department of Stating The Utterly Bleedin’ Obvious:
Bush Nuts
Are George W. Bush lovers certifiable?November 23, 2006 By Andy Bromage
A collective ?I told you so? will ripple through the world of Bush-bashers once news of Christopher Lohse?s study gets out.Lohse, a social work master?s student at Southern Connecticut State University, says he has proven what many progressives have probably suspected for years: a direct link between mental illness and support for President Bush.
Lohse says his study is no joke. The thesis draws on a survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. Lohse?s study, backed by SCSU Psychology professor Jaak Rakfeldt and statistician Misty Ginacola, found a correlation between the severity of a person?s psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.
[?]
?Our study shows that psychotic patients prefer an authoritative leader,? Lohse says. ?If your world is very mixed up, there?s something very comforting about someone telling you, ?This is how it?s going to be.??
Well fancy that.
[H/T The Poorman. ]
Read more: US politics, Bush, Psychology
No, that’s not an Onion headline. From the Morning Star, via Lenin:
THERE are times when the phrase mind-boggling simply isn’t adequate to describe the reaction to one or other item of news.
This is just such a time. The news that shattered and partially dismantled Iraq has paid out over $40 billion in so-called “reparations” is bad enough.
But to find out to whom that vast sum has been or is about to be paid to is so shattering as to be almost incredible.
That a country which has been illegally invaded, which has lost over 650,000 of its population, which has been carved up between the oil transnationals and the states that host them and which has had a puppet government foisted on it which has no more relation to democracy than fly in the air should have to pay reparations is, in itself, ludicrous.
That the companies which are claiming large slices of that $40 billion should include Kentucky Fried Chicken is appalling.
Also claiming Gulf war reparations are Halliburton and Bechtel, two war-profiteering corporations who’ve done more to ruin Iraq and its infrastructure and suck the country dry than anyone, while simultaneously raiding the US treasury and swindling American armed forces. In this they were aided and abetted by Bush, Cheney and their willing minions.
But what are these massive corporations actually claiming reparations for? What have the war-torn and exhausted Iraqis done to these international corporate bullyboys that could possibly warrant their shareholders being compensated with such vast sums? Not a lot actually, the Iraqis themselves did nothing: it’s just that KFC, and Toys R Us et al lost profits.
Naomi Klein has the numbers:
Since Saddam was toppled in April, Iraq has paid out $1.8bn in reparations to the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), the Geneva-based quasi tribunal that assesses claims and disburses awards. Of those payments, $37m have gone to Britain and $32.8m have gone to the United States. That’s right: in the past 18 months, Iraq’s occupiers have collected $69.8m in reparation payments from the desperate people they have been occupying. But it gets worse: the vast majority of those payments, 78%, have gone to multinational corporations, according to statistics on the UNCC website.
Away from media scrutiny, this has been going on for years. Of course there are many legitimate claims for losses that have come before the UNCC: payments have gone to Kuwaitis who have lost loved ones, limbs, and property to Saddam’s forces. But much larger awards have gone to corporations: of the total amount the UNCC has awarded in Gulf war reparations, $21.5bn has gone to the oil industry alone. Jean-Claude Aim?, the UN diplomat who headed the UNCC until December 2000, publicly questioned the practice. “This is the first time as far as I know that the UN is engaged in retrieving lost corporate assets and profits,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 1997, and then mused: “I often wonder at the correctness of that.”
But the UNCC’s corporate handouts only accelerated. Here is a small sample of who has been getting “reparation” awards from Iraq: Halliburton ($18m), Bechtel ($7m), Mobil ($2.3m), Shell ($1.6m), Nestl? ($2.6m), Pepsi ($3.8m), Philip Morris ($1.3m), Sheraton ($11m), Kentucky Fried Chicken ($321,000) and Toys R Us ($189,449). In the vast majority of cases, these corporations did not claim that Saddam’s forces damaged their property in Kuwait – only that they “lost profits” or, in the case of American Express, experienced a “decline in business” because of the invasion and occupation of Kuwait. One of the biggest winners has been Texaco, which was awarded $505m in 1999. According to a UNCC spokesperson, only 12% of that reparation award has been paid, which means hundreds of millions more will have to come out of the coffers of post-Saddam Iraq.
[My emphasis]
The fact that Iraqis have been paying reparations to their occupiers is all the more shocking in the context of how little these countries have actually spent on aid in Iraq. Despite the $18.4bn of US tax dollars allocated for Iraq’s reconstruction, the Washington Post estimates that only $29m has been spent on water, sanitation, health, roads, bridges, and public safety combined. And in July (the latest figure available), the Department of Defence estimated that only $4m had been spent compensating Iraqis who had been injured, or who lost family members or property as a direct result of the occupation – a fraction of what the US has collected from Iraq in reparations since its occupation began.
4 million dollars. If we take the civilian fatalities at the Lancet numbers that’s just over six dollars each corpse.
For the price of two dead Iraqis you can get a 10 piece mixed meal with all the fixin’s and chump change. Mmm, mm, mmm. I’m licking my fingers already.
Read more: Iraq, Civil war, War profiteering, Reparations
The genius that is… Mulligan and O’Hare.
Read more: UK Comedy, Reeves & Mortimer, Video , YouTube
