Things I’ve Seen

Southpaw has MP3s of the key speeches from the second day of the convention, including Barack Obama.

I watched the video of Obama last night, courtesy of CSPAN. Man, he’s good. He looks good, he speaks well, he’s got amazing presence. I hear yesterday was the first time he’d ever used a teleprompter - but he looked a natural, looked as if he was speaking unscripted.

And the brilliance of the speech was to take values that Conservatives think are theirs - faith, self reliance, opportunity, patriotism, and wrap them in an unashamedly liberal message - “If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child.”

Just one line that irritated slightly - “in no other country on earth, is my story even possible”. OK, I get the context, I get that he is playing to the best sort of American Patriotism (the sort that, instead of saying “we are the greatest nation” says “we have a duty to be”): but there are other countries where the son of a mixed race couple, one an immigrant from the developing world, can make a great life for themselves. I’m glad to live on one of them, since my son meets the same description…

I’ve heard a lot of people raving about Barack Obama in the last few months; he’s come from nowhere to dominate the Illinois Senate race, and praise - and comparisons with Clinton’s oratory - has been heaped on him from all directions (well, all leftward directions). But until reading Read the rest of this entry »

Dulce Et Decorum Est

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Al Gore has a sense of humour… as proved by the opening remarks in his Democratic National Convention speech:

I’m going to be candid with you. I had hoped to be back here this week under different circumstances, running for re-election. But you know the old saying: you win some, you lose some. And then there’s that little-known third category.

But I didn’t come here tonight to talk about the past. After all, I don’t want you to think that I lie awake at night counting and recounting sheep.

It’s a great speech, by the way - although Carter was even better… (and not just for his throwaway “He showed up when assigned to duty”)
Read the rest of this entry »

The Guardian Leader has an excellent summary

This is not a volatile campaign and Mr Kerry is steadily building a strong position in the polls, especially in crucial swing states - places like Florida, Ohio, Missouri and New Hampshire - that will again decide the outcome, while also harbouring his big campaign war chest for when the going gets tougher. The longer the campaign has gone on - this contest effectively lasts for nine months - the better shape Mr Kerry seems to be in, and the shrewder his decision to play the long game.

Nevertheless, the hard pounding of the 2004 campaign is about to begin, and it will get much harder and much dirtier once the summer is done. Mr Kerry still has heavy lifting to do before he takes his support across the gap between the 47% or so of the electorate who seem determined to vote for him anyway and the around 53% of voters who say it is time for a change - and who are thus making themselves available to support him if he can complete the sale.

On the (satirical!) site Black People Love Us! I found the following email. You might want to look at the site to get some context, but the email stands alone….

What I will say is that the thing that tickled me most on your site was the letter from David Whiffen. “Americans don’t do irony, right?”, he says. But your site is satirical not ironic. Mr Whiffen obviously does not “do irony”. He probably had the same English teacher as Alanis Morisette (what the hell is ironic about it raining on your wedding day. Unfortunate yes - ironic no). But he writes in because he thinks he does. Now, this is irony. Big time. The irony of this is so thick you’d need an axe to cut it. If there was an instrument for measuring irony this would be off the scale. If they were to teach irony in schools this would be example 1, lesson 1.

He has created his own irony. He has provided your site with the irony that he has labelled it with and the irony of it all is that he does not realise this. It is self-fulfilling irony. Oof, take that.

I’d like to think you included his letter because of this. If you did, thank you, I appreciated it.

My hangover stinks, your web site doesn’t.
Cheers,
Dan from London, England

This URL is the home of the WORLD POLL MONITOR: BUSH VS. KERRY, which has just included the poll of polls in its very impressive selection of metapolls and analysis pages.

Stephen Hawking declares that black holes do not destroy information after all.

Prof Hawking said he now believed that black holes, the mysterious massive vortexes formed from collapsed stars, do not destroy everything that is sucked into them. Instead, an abstract quantity called “information”, which describes the core characteristics of every type of particle in the universe, leaks from the black hole over time.

…His new calculations suggest the surface of the black hole, the event horizon, has fluctuations that allow the information to escape.

Sadly, my days of prolific blogging have now come to an end. As of last week, I returned to work, and this week I also start a course of study; so suddenly instead of being an at home dad with a baby who naps beautifully, I’m part time working, evening studying, part time baby caring. I fear that those parts add up to more than one full person.

I’m not going to drop TIS, but I’ll be posting a lot less frequently than I did.

From a thread at Kos:

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Hersh spoke at the ACLU conference; an unofficial transcript says

Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it’s going to come out.

From the comments on the thread:

Let me get this straight. The people running the video cameras saw people raping children, and taped it instead of stopping it?

…pictures and video were taken to be shown to other prisoners, to coerce & threaten them and their families.

If any of this is true then as Maryscott O’Connor says:

This is so wrong I have lost the capacity to put words together.