The government of Israel has a policy of assassinating political leaders in Gaza. That means that the people who have ended up in charge of Hamas are the violent nutters rather that anyone who might be interested in a political solution. If the British government had shown this kind of clumsy disrespect for the rule of law in the 1980’s (and let’s face it they came close) then Gerry Adams and his colleagues wouldn’t have been around for any kind of peace process and we’d still be waging a war in Northern Ireland against the throwbacks who eventually became the Real IRA.
Even so, despite being idiots Hamas can fairly reasonably claim to be a legitimate party of government in Gaza because they were kind of voted in. They are committed to armed conflict against Israel, that is the ticket they ran on and that is what people voted for. Which is fair enough. I don’t think they should be described as terrorists, they are entitled to go to war if they want to. It does mean, though, that the awful casualties that the Israelis caused in their retaliation are not a ‘disaster’. They are casualties of war. Describing it as a disaster, as though it couldn’t be avoided, is dishonest.
So I agree with the BBC’s recent decision not to show a fundraising film on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee. While I hate to have to agree with the annoying Mark Thompson I think that he’s right when he says:
…Gaza remains a major ongoing news story, in which humanitarian issues – the suffering and distress of civilians and combatants on both sides of the conflict, the debate about who is responsible for causing it and what should be done about it – are both at the heart of the story and contentious.
People say that the BBC should trust the judgement of the charities who make up the DEC. Why? The people who work for charities are only human, they can be corrupt, incompetent or wrong just like anyone else. And because their credibility depends on maintaining a pristine image they don’t publicise their failings. They also have their own biases. Just because the DEC thinks that aid can be delivered safely and without being diverted by Hamas that doesn’t mean it can be. It is reasonable for the BBC to be sceptical about their claims.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t think people should give money to the DEC, of course they should if they want to. But BBC news isn’t there to tell people how to react to what’s going on, it’s just there to report the story. Reporting the suffering of the people of Gaza is the right thing to do in a news programme. Showing a film afterwards which is specifically designed to tug on the heart strings and raise money isn’t. We all know that when there stop being developments in the story it will stop dominating the headlines and yet the suffering will go on. That is the right time to show a fund-raising film, not now.
If you’ve ever seen the Stan’s Cafe show Of All the People In All The World, where every grain of rice stands for one person, you may have been surprised by the size of the pile representing all the people who died between 1998 and 2004 as a result of the civil war in the Congo. The pile is about the size of an up-turned wheelbarrow and is roughly as big as the mound representing all the slaves who were ever carried from Africa in British ships during the slave trade.
Ironically the largest proportion of slaves who were taken from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade were from West Central Africa, a region that includes modern Congo and Angola. They were almost all captured during wars between native kingdoms. In fact the desire to capture slaves was often the main cause of wars in Africa at that time.
I always imagined that the civil war in Congo, which is still going on, was an ethnic conflict. That is how it is usually portrayed and it’s quite a comforting view for people like me because it means I don’t have to feel any sense of responsibility for what’s going on there. Today I heard a dispatch by the BBC’s Mark Doyle, a man who has spent an awful lot of time working in Africa. His explanation is more complicated and convincing. Have a listen.
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Some researchers at Edinburgh University have just published a report about how easy it is to buy prescription-only medicines online. They visited sites which they found via Google and Yahoo but they did not take the final step of actually buying the drugs because they felt that would not be ethical. So they were just counting sites which offered drugs.
At the start of this year researchers at Berkeley and San Diego were doing a study into how profitable spamming could be. They set up a fake online pharmacy which was just like the real thing, offering prescription-only drugs. They counted how many people visited the site and added drugs to their basket. The only point at which the customers discovered that it was not actually working was when they submitted their credit-card details, at which point they got an error page.
So, the Edinburgh researchers probably included the Berkeley researchers in their study, and vice versa, unless they warned each other, which seems unlikely. It’s like a collaborative version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – Whenever you try to measure something by doing anything on the web you are probably affecting someone else’s measurements at the same time.
Basing the growth of your economy on people borrowing money, as opposed to relying on increased productivity, doesn’t seem like a very sensible idea. An Austrian ecomomist called Ludwig von Mises described the problem very nicely:
It may sometimes be expedient for a man to heat the stove with his furniture. But he should not delude himself by believing that he has discovered a wonderful new method of heating his premises.
Nevertheless this is exactly the economic model that pretty much everyone apparently believes in at the moment. It seems to be the unanimous view of both journalists and politicians that we need the banks to start lending again in order to get the economy moving. But some of the banks are in trouble because of their imprudent and greedy business practices and so now all the banks are being extra-cautious and won’t lend. So the favoured solution is for governments to give the banks yet more money in the hope that they will lend it out to people. To go back to Ludwig von Mises, this is still not a wonderful method of heating; it’s just the government buying more furniture. Nobody is prepared to say the truth, which is that lots of people are going to have to accept a prolonged lowering of their standard of living.
It’s funny seeing the terrible fuss some Scottish people are making after Jeremy Paxman described (accurately in my view) Robert Burns’ poetry as sentimental doggerel. It often feels like a good result if one can make it through any conversation with a Scot without having to accept with good humour some sort of complaint about England or the English. Make even the slightest suggestion though that Scotland is not the mistreated heaven on earth that its natives believe it to be and you’ll be in for a lecture, and as for Scottish culture and cuisine, why it’s only the English that eat oats nowadays isn’t it?
Anyway, someone said that Mr Paxman should read more Burns so that he could understand the poet’s great insight better and it got me thinking. Isn’t it about time someone produced a decent Burns anthology in translation? All the translations I’ve ever seen make him seem prosaic and shallow when the picturesque language is stripped away. Come on Seamus Heaney, let’s settle this once and for all!
I know I’m only posting videos on here these days. I’m too busy writing music to do anything else. Sorry. Who am I kidding? I know nobody cares. Anyway, look at MRirian (and she’ll look at you), or you could look at her strange, compelling ears.
I don’t love her like I want to marry her, although I suspect it would be great being married to her, well at least really interesting and stimulating, but I do love Miranda July more than anyone else in the world who I don’t really know. Not only is this film about how buttons are made really perfect, but also she’s got a great thing on her site about good reasons to vote which applies just as much here as it does in the US. (If you’re intimidated by the way her site asks for a password use mine – “nobody”.)
So, today the BBC launched BBC World News, the new name for their global channel BBC World. They’ve changed the on-screen branding and everything. There’s one thing that won’t be changing though – the website remains www.bbcworld.comfor now as they put it. Why would that be. Surely they snapped up the bbcworldnews.com domain as soon as they thought of the title. Didn’t they? Oh dear.
Recently I’ve been getting a bit disillusioned with spending loads of time trying to compose complicated tracks that I’m often tired of before they’re even finished. A couple of days ago I remembered something I once read about a writing course where the participants were encouraged to keep a journal and write in it every day. I thought I’d do the same thing with music.
I had a look and the tuneaday domains were mostly free or not being used, so I went ahead, snapped them up and made a site. It’s at tuneaday.org and the tracks are also available as a podcast at the iTunes store.
I’m hoping that having to come up with something new every day will push me towards being less concerned with fiddling and tweaking and will make me more spontaneous. The tunes might be recorded in my studio or just with my phone or on whatever I have to hand when I think of something.
I’m not going to use any old ideas, everything will be posted on the day that it’s recorded. If anyone is interested in collaborating with me on something, that would be interesting, but it’s all got to be new material, not a reworking of something you came up with ages ago.
I have no idea how long I’m going to be able to keep it up, it’s an intimidating prospect, but I’m aiming for some significant period like a hundred tracks, or a year, or something like that. If it gets too painful I’ll just make up a new target. We’ll see how it goes.
Here’s a cool little script that estimates your gender based on the sites you’ve visited. How does it know where you’ve been? Now there’s the question.
If the main division in modern politics is between liberal and authoritarian then I am a liberal and if David Davis was standing against Labour in my constituency on the issue of 42-days I don’t see how I could vote Labour. That makes me very sad.
The BBC Model B was the first computer I wrote music on. In fact I wrote my own sequencer and made my own midi interface. Now the Science Museum have made an exhibition about it. I don’t know why this makes me feel so sad.
The government of Israel has a policy of assassinating political leaders in Gaza. That means that the people who have ended up in charge of Hamas are the violent nutters rather that anyone who might be interested in a political solution. If the British government had shown this kind of clumsy disrespect for the rule of law in the 1980’s (and let’s face it they came close) then Gerry Adams and his colleagues wouldn’t have been around for any kind of peace process and we’d still be waging a war in Northern Ireland against the throwbacks who eventually became the Real IRA.
Even so, despite being idiots Hamas can fairly reasonably claim to be a legitimate party of government in Gaza because they were kind of voted in. They are committed to armed conflict against Israel, that is the ticket they ran on and that is what people voted for. Which is fair enough. I don’t think they should be described as terrorists, they are entitled to go to war if they want to. It does mean, though, that the awful casualties that the Israelis caused in their retaliation are not a ‘disaster’. They are casualties of war. Describing it as a disaster, as though it couldn’t be avoided, is dishonest.
People say that the BBC should trust the judgement of the charities who make up the DEC. Why? The people who work for charities are only human, they can be corrupt, incompetent or wrong just like anyone else. And because their credibility depends on maintaining a pristine image they don’t publicise their failings. They also have their own biases. Just because the DEC thinks that aid can be delivered safely and without being diverted by Hamas that doesn’t mean it can be. It is reasonable for the BBC to be sceptical about their claims.
Recently I’ve been getting a bit disillusioned with spending loads of time trying to compose complicated tracks that I’m often tired of before they’re even finished. A couple of days ago I remembered something I once read about a writing course where the participants were encouraged to keep a journal and write in it every day. I thought I’d do the same thing with music.
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