ninme

Posted by ninme at 8:48 am 7 Comments

Everyone (but especially Australians) click here.

Bonus: click here. But only after clicking on the above.

Posted by ninme at 8:09 am No Comments

The Times - It’s a riot in the Japanese police… if only
Notebook: The closest you get to a mob in Tokyo is sale time at Prada, by Richard Lloyd Parry

There are few more forlorn and pointless occupations in the world than that of the Japanese riot police. Consider their situation - plucked from the ranks for their intelligence and fitness, trained over several years in marksmanship, crowd control and the most lethal of the martial arts, then set loose in a country with the same level of civil unrest as Legoland.

Forty years ago Tokyo was a place of crunchy anti-American protests; these days the closest you get to a rampaging mob in Tokyo is sale time at Prada. “Japanese riot policeman” is close to being a contradiction in terms, like Welsh humorist or Scottish gourmet. So it seems only fair that, every now and then, Japan’s finest are allowed out of their box.

So they were last week, at the G8 summit on the northern island of Hokkaido. On the face of it, this was an opportunity for the world’s most powerful leaders to come together to discuss weighty issues of global import. In fact, it was a poorly disguised excuse for rozzers from all over Japan to unite for the riot policing equivalent of a three-day bender.

The leaders of the US, Britain, Germany and Russia all in one room are certainly a succulent terrorist target. The Japanese strategy was to locate the room on top of a mountain and seal it off for 30 miles in every direction. Filling the void, in patrol cars, buses and on foot, equipped with body armour, riot shields, perspex shields, guns and smiles, were 20,000 police.

The scene on the road to the media centre was like one of those post-holocaust scenarios when the human beings have died out, bequeathing the Earth to the cockroaches - except that these cockroaches were blue, life-size and carrying truncheons. Every hundred yards, for an hour-long drive, was a Plod standing on an almost empty road, with literally nothing to do.

<– me

Posted by ninme at 8:04 am No Comments

The Times - Bringing up Baby
The law on maternity leave is trying to be modern, and failing

Yet the real world intrudes. As we reported on Monday and as Nicola Brewer, then chief executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), noted yesterday, it is an inconvenient truth that women are being turned down for jobs and promotions because of the cost and hassle of their maternity rights. Worse, as those rights are extended to include 12 months’ paid maternity leave, up from nine, the risk grows that laws framed to erode gender stereotypes will end up entrenching them instead.

Important social reform is colliding with prejudice and what some employers take to be their short-term financial imperatives. Ms Brewer deserves praise for pointing this out. She did so in a speech launching a consultation aimed at modernising a workplace “stuck somewhere in the 1950s”, even though, as she acknowledged, her remarks could be taken as an attack on hard-won maternity rights.

They are not. On the contrary, she has indicated that the EHRC’s preferred remedy is not to cut mothers’ rights but to increase fathers’; to “level up” in favour of the British men whose two week’s statutory paid paternity leave is the shortest in Europe. There are powerful arguments for maximising both parents’ time with their young children. There are counterarguments, too, including one based on a study of American university professors who, if male, chose overwhelmingly to use any extra paternity leave to write books, leaving childcare to their partners. But not all men are as single-minded, or as selfish. …

For all the same reasons, the best employment policies will also help men to be good fathers. There is a simple way of doing this: rename the second six months of mothers’ maternity leave “parental leave”, to be shared as partners’ wish. Experience elsewhere in Europe suggests uptake by fathers would be significant. Not all women can be superwomen, or want to be. Not all men want to bring home the bacon all the time. The law should reflect this.

So one of Peter’s coworkers is off on paternity leave right now. A few days before the man’s wife desperately moved up her delivery date, I was chatting with a few other coworkers at a picnic. Since this is a relatively new company with very casually assigned rules, and since the gentleman in question is the first one to procreate while working at the company, I said, “Well what I’m interested to see is how much paternity leave he gets.” So one of the other employees said, “Well there’s the yuh-dut-dut-dut (some acronym).” And I said, “The what?” And he said, in a rather pugnacious, know-your-rights sort of way, “The yuh-dut-dut-dut. You’re guaranteed twelve weeks unpaid leave in the state of Washington and you’re guaranteed to have your job back at the end of it.”

And I thought, how is that helpful? I was talking about what sort of paid leave would be generously allowed to a new father (2nd time round), so it misses the mark in that respect, but who can afford 12 weeks unpaid leave? Either you can, in which case you’re well-off enough that you don’t need the State of Washington guaranteeing it for you, and if you’re that well off you probably have the sort of job where you can’t afford to disappear for 3 months anyway for other reasons, or if you can, you’d just quit your job and take a sabbatical, or else you can’t afford 12 weeks of not getting paid.

Posted by ninme at 10:30 pm 4 Comments

Curtsy: Wheat and Weeds, from the post, “This Is For You, ninme“

Posted by ninme at 10:25 pm 2 Comments

So, the Daily Telegraph has one heck of a section devoted to World Youth Day. It’s, ah, All Pope, All the Time.

I was promised a story about a cat. Ah here, “You can’t spell Catholic without Cat”:

Daily Telegraph - Bella the cat keeps Pope Benedict company

Bella, huh?

A special cat has been brought in to make the devout animal lover feel completely at home during his stay at the Kenthurst retreat.

It is hoped the 11-month-old kitten, named Bella, will ease any bout of homesickness the Pontiff would have felt being away from his most beloved of all pets.

Man, it’s good to be the pope.

Local Catholic Catherine Lennon said the Opus Dei followers at the Kenthurst Study Centre brought the cat into the retreat to keep the Pope company while he played the piano.

A talented musician who enjoys playing Mozart, the Pope will have access to a baby grand piano in a room decorated with paintings of Australian landscapes.

With no television, the Pope will have time to get to know Bella.

Sniffle.

Posted by ninme at 10:13 pm 1 Comment

The Times - The UN decision on Zimbabwe is based on neither morality nor decency The Security Council has shown itself to be the enemy of human rights, by Stephen Pollard

There is an old, perhaps apocryphal story of a small girl who, watching the ranting, gesticulating Randolph Churchill, tugged at her mother’s skirt and asked: “Mummy, what is that man for?”

The same must now be asked of the United Nations. The failure of the Security Council to agree a set of modest sanctions against Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe’s henchmen - such as a freeze on financial assets and a travel ban - speaks volumes about the reality of the UN and the fatuity of those who place any moral store by its decisions.

There could be no clearer case for action. No civilised nation can regard Mr Mugabe’s behaviour as anything other than obscene. But decisions of the Security Council have never been based on decency or morality. They are based on realpolitik. The UN’s very constitution as a body including some of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet necessitates that.

Indeed, the UN is structurally incapable of acting in accordance with the dictates of civilised behaviour. Whether it is its failure to stand up to the Burmese regime or to deal with the threat to Israel posed by a nuclear Iran, or its support for Hezbollah, the UN has shown itself to be not the promoter but the enemy of human rights.

Well. Not exactly lingering on the niceties, is he.

The most bizarre reaction to the Security Council’s rejection of sanctions is disappointment. Could anyone seriously expect the Chinese Government, which locks up and tortures dissidents and props up the Mugabe regime to further its own economic interests, to overturn decades of foreign policy and act in support of democracy and human rights? In 2005 the Chinese signed an aid agreement with Zimbabwe and made an explicit promise not to interfere in its “internal affairs”, saying that it “trusts Zimbabwe’s Government and people have the ability to deal properly with their own matters”.

The idea that the UN holds some special legitimacy and moral worth is not merely naive - it can make a bad situation worse. Mugabe now claims that he has been exonerated by the UN. Had the UN not existed, no attention would be paid to the failure of Russia and China to criticise him, because that is entirely to be expected. And if, as they should, the EU’s member states were to impose stronger sanctions, that would not be seen as somehow in opposition to the UN.

Hmmm.

Posted by ninme at 10:18 am 3 Comments

A golden ray migration off the coast of Mexico:

More pictures at the link.

Posted by ninme at 10:14 am 9 Comments

Telegraph Pictures - Beauty Sheep

Border Leicester? Not so much.

Posted by ninme at 9:51 am 1 Comment

An excerpt from Hardeep Singh Kohli’s forthcoming book, Indian Takeaway:

The perception of India was that all Indians were smelly, smelling, presumably, of curry. The fact that Britain later adopted Indian food as its own was an irony lost on Charlie McTeer, the celebrated school thug, as he spent the entire day with a clothes peg on his nose, complaining of the aroma that apparently emanated from my body. I have to confess to having been unaware of any smell, other than my mum’s spittle from where she had invariably cleaned some breakfast off my face.

Yet, this idea of India was radically different from the place I watched on TV or saw splashed across the newspapers. The Indians I saw on TV were either starving or poor or both; cyclone-hit Bangladeshis, emaciated and barely alive. Surely this was not where I fitted in?

As I grew older, perceptions of India changed. I became aware of the more spiritual side of India through the Beatles and their beads and cheesecloth, and their discovery of their guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I remember being faintly embarrassed by the idea of this bearded Svengali owning a legion of Rolls Royces in a country which was in the throes of famine and pestilence. The India of the early 1980s was a world away from the economic superpower it is today. I didn’t understand how, to the young, free-minded, drug-addled youth, India was a place worth visiting. India was the home of mysticism, the epicentre of spirituality, the birthplace of religious civilisation. But I found it impossible to access any of the cool associated with that world. Lank-haired hippies would trail their way across three continents to fi nd themselves in the warm waters of the Arabian Sea in Goa. I never quite grasped how this worked, or what they did once they found themselves. What did anyone hope to find in India that wasn’t already present in their Scottish life? I had spent most of my childhood being ridiculed for being Indian and yet here were these white folk off to the selfsame country to find enlightenment.

You see? I got made fun of all through (Catholic) elementary school (nobody at my public school ever said anything about it) for having red hair, and by the time we were all legally allowed to buy it, the hair colour of choice was red. (Sure, the red thing has died down since then, but I think it was because so many people were asking me, “Is that your real colour?” that they were embarrassed to keep it up. Yep.)

Posted by ninme at 9:30 am 1 Comment

India Knight:

Speaking of children . . .

A vicar in Staffordshire last week ordered a toddler out of his church for being too noisy. He was marrying the toddler’s parents at the time.

Should children be banned from weddings? Couples have certainly got braver about putting “no children” on their invitations, which really outrages some people (not me: any excuse for an adults-only day out, plus I don’t see how weddings are fun for children, unless there is child-specific entertainment laid on).

But of course I don’t think children should be banned from weddings as though they were leprous. The problem, I have observed over the years, is never with the child and always with the parents.

Only recently I sat through a wedding that was ruined by a baby howling throughout the exchange of the vows. This wasn’t the baby’s fault, obviously, but God knows what the mother thought she was doing not removing him. This scenario has played itself out dozens of times: child cries or misbehaves, parents look on fondly and do nothing about it, even if half the congregation has turned around and fixed them with basilisk stares.

Take your children to weddings, by all means, but learn some manners first.

Heh.

Posted by ninme at 9:23 am 1 Comment

The Times - The undeserving poor exist - just don’t say so
It is a common Tory urge to moralise about the lazy, the greedy and the dishonest. They should resist it at all costs, by Matthew Parris

Anyone would think, from the sudden interest on both Left and Right in the writings of the modern American thinker Gertrude Himmelfarb, that the argument about the deserving versus the undeserving poor has only recently been discovered. But it was a dominating sociological debate in the 18th century, and right through the 19th century too.

Anyone would think it was socialism that sold the pass on the moral society and began (as Himmelfarb has it) “de-moralising” society by alleviating distress regardless of how caused. But it was really the Victorians (preachy as they now sound) who developed the idea of undiscriminating provision. Re-read Dickens, Trollope, the parable of the Prodigal Son. Look at the social outreach work inspired by the Wesleys and the nonconformist churches. The inherent conflicts between rewarding virtue and trying to alleviate all distress are ancient, profound and logically insoluble.

I’ve been trying to figure out why, only in Britain, did the invention of the teenager mean vandalizing churchyards. I mean, there are a lot of bored teenagers in the world, and probably the highest concentration of bored teenagers in the world are in the US, and all they do here is hang around at gas stations with irritatingly vapid looks on their faces. At any rate, I’ve decided it’s to do with an unhappy coincidence of the end of Transportation and the beginning of Victorian charity. Karl Marx was a Victorian, after all. They were obsessed with the poor. That and galapagos turtles. So, it was an era of peculiar hobbies. Unfortunately, the galapagos turtles were in the Galapagos and the poor weren’t in Australia.

(It’s times like these I’m glad I’m not a famous blogger.)

Posted by ninme at 8:58 am 1 Comment

I love word stories.

The Times - Definitions coming to a dictionary near you
As the English language nears its millionth coinage, here are some newcomers that might make it into the lexicon, by Giles Coren

According to the Global Language Monitor (whatever in the world that is) the English language is on the cusp of a glorious landmark. For there are at present 995,844 official words in this lush and Lucullan language of ours, with the millionth expected to be coined on April 29, 2009.

French, meanwhile, is stuck on 43. But that’s not our problem (and we’ve never been ones to boast of our size in front of the French).

Our problem is the sheer profligacy of our coinage. It is all very well hanging on to words such as “egg”, “bottom” and “Smurf” [and Kermodian!], which are used all the time (although “Smurf” not as often as it used to be), but what of “olation”, “rattinet” and “splore”?

Oh well. Obsolete splore-sounding words are what make the world go round. (I looked up “splore” in my trusty Apple dictionary but it wasn’t there, so I’m assuming it to be an onomatopoeia describing the sound one makes when one pronounces the word “splore”.)

The aforementioned “present rate” is one that I have just worked out. It seems to predict 4,156 new coinages in ten months, which is about 416 a month, or roughly 100 a week. I have been wondering what the 100 new words coined this week are likely to have been. Unfortunately space allows for only 22 of them. Many, you will notice, are merely new meanings for old words, which I am assuming will count. I haven’t actually phoned the Global Language Monitor to ask (I’m a bit scared of him, to be honest).

He supplies some new definitions. Skips Kermodian, tho.

Posted by ninme at 11:29 pm 1 Comment

More Iranian Fauxtography Discovered:

Posted by ninme at 8:27 am 2 Comments

Fox News - Tony Snow, Former White House Press Secretary and FOX News Anchor, Dies at 53

So, what? Huh? What?

All the stories about his health end in 2007. So, uh, what?

Posted by ninme at 5:26 pm No Comments

The Times - West suffers historic defeat as China and Russia veto Zimbabwe sanctions

Britain’s diplomatic strategy in Zimbabwe collapsed last night in an historic defeat for the West in the UN Security Council that will have repercussions across Africa and beyond. …

Britain and the United States forced the draft resolution to a vote because they counted on the support of the nine members needed to secure adoption. In a dramatic show of hands, the draft did indeed earn the requisite nine votes to pass, with five against, but was not adopted because of Russia’s and China’s block. South Africa, Vietnam and Libya also voted against, while Indonesia abstained.

Wow, great. Mark Steyn has a favourite line, that if such-and-such “is the right thing to do, it doesn’t become the wrong thing to do because the Chinese guy refuses to raise his hand.” So …bah. So it’s too late to do anything practical, because the election came and went without anyone trying to help, and now the UN option is gone, so it’s basically too late to do anything. I suppose the Zimbabwean cricket team might be excluded from a few matches, but I also suppose people will decide not even to do that, really.