Categories
Politics

Libyan Rebels ‘Undemocratic’

History of Fine Gael

Mayo Fine Gael TD Michelle Mulherin thinks that the rebels in Libya should not be supported because, as quoted in the Times, they “did not follow democratic means. They took up arms against their leader.”

I will allow you a moment to take that in.

The rebels against Gaddafi should not be supported because they… are rebels.

Fine Gael, the party of obedience.

I wonder what democratic means she supposes are open to the inhabitants of a dictatorship – other than the one of mass protest, which I think we can safely say was exhausted when he started shooting them.

There are many clear reasons to be against intervention in the Libyan uprising, and they must be weighed against the good it might possibly do. I outlined what I think is the most important one days ago. There are even reasons why it might be wrong to rise up against Gaddafi. But his being the legally constituted dictator for life according to the constitution which he wrote personally, that is not one of them.

You idiot.

Categories
Politics

Save The Senate

This is a photograph of the Seanad chamber, Le...
What our Senate might look like with the useless scum removed

There could be no better image of all that’s wrong with the Senate than Ivor Calelly contemptuously abusing the house to save his own political career. No wonder the public has no respect for it when so many of its denizens were dumped there, in what the parties seem to think of as long-stay parking.

This is a great shame. Though as presently constituted the Seanad is, let’s face it, a pustule, what we need in this country is more oversight of the executive, not less. It may be little better at this than the rubber-stamping Dáil, but it is a little.

The Senate has some great strengths. You can get into it without really being a career politician, without being slave to the party whips. We could use more of that, you know. The Senate has – or had – people like Shane Ross and David Norris.

Want a simple way to reform the Seanad? End the Taoiseach‘s right to stuff it with useless lackeys. Skim off the political pond scum.

Categories
Politics

Save The Senate

This is a photograph of the Seanad chamber, Le...
What our Senate might look like with the useless scum removed

There could be no better image of all that’s wrong with the Senate than Ivor Calelly contemptuously abusing the house to save his own political career. No wonder the public has no respect for it when so many of its denizens were dumped there, in what the parties seem to think of as long-stay parking.

This is a great shame. Though as presently constituted the Seanad is, let’s face it, a pustule, what we need in this country is more oversight of the executive, not less. It may be little better at this than the rubber-stamping Dáil, but it is a little.

The Senate has some great strengths. You can get into it without really being a career politician, without being slave to the party whips. We could use more of that, you know. The Senate has – or had – people like Shane Ross and David Norris.

Want a simple way to reform the Seanad? End the Taoiseach‘s right to stuff it with useless lackeys. Skim off the political pond scum.

Categories
Politics

The Right To Employ People

Differences in national income equality around...
Inequality - Apparently There's Not Enough Of It

I just heard someone called Jackie Lavin on the Pat Kenny radio show say that unemployment benefits interfere with “the employer’s right to employ people”. That’s an interesting concept, isn’t it? I remember when right-wing lunatics used to just call social welfare an interference in the sacred free market. Now it’s an abrogation of their rights. They are actually being oppressed by social welfare.

I hadn’t known that the wealthy had any special rights – at least not officially – but according to her, one of them is to have other people be poorer so that they’re more affordable. That’s kind of mind-blowing, isn’t it? The rich have a right to poor people. It makes a strange Zen-like sense.

This Jackie Lavin is on the radio because she’s a “Business Personality”, best known for appearing in the Irish version of The Apprentice as mentor to her real-world business and life partner Bill Cullen. Also, for appearing in and writing for glossy Hello!-style magazines, like the one owned by Bill Cullen. He’s an entrepreneur, Fianna Fáil donor and I suppose our nearest equivalent to Donald Trump. These are important people then.

Why not apply this entertainment paradigm to the country as a whole? If the unemployed don’t shape up, we can fire them from their homes – from the whole country indeed. ‘Firing’ is much sexier than that dated emigration idea.

I mean. Fuck this.

Categories
Humour Politics

Michael Lowry Is A Corrupt Politician

Esat Digifone logo
"Jesus But Didn't We Make Some Money"

There, it felt good to say that. Of course he is far from alone, it almost seems unfair to single him out, but because of our wealth-favouring libel laws it’s not often you can actually come out and name one of the bastards.

Today I can, because a judicial body, the Moriarty Tribunal, says it is beyond doubt that Michael Lowry, when Fine Gael minister for transport, energy and communications, gave “substantive information to Denis O’Brien, of significant value and assistance to him in securing the licence”.

The licence they speak of was for the country’s second GSM mobile phone network in 1996, the biggest contract ever awarded by the State to a private company. Denis O’Brien’s Esat consortium won, even though by proper procedures their bid would have come third. In a transaction which the Tribunal concludes was not unrelated, Minister Lowry was given a huge wad of cash. And when that licence was later sold to British multinational BT, Denis O’Brien made more money than you will ever even be shown a picture of.

Lowry CartoonInterestingly, while the Tribunal’s report calls this “a cynical and venal abuse of office”, it doesn’t actually call the act corrupt. I refuse to be so mealy-mouthed. If he cynically and venally abused office, if he received money in consideration for bending the rules to favour the giver, then Michael Lowry is as crooked as a snake with stomach cramps.

Moriarty does use the word corrupt with reference to an unrelated deal between Lowry and another tycoon, Ben Dunne (most famous for giving an unexplained million or two to former Taoiseach C. J. Haughey). Dunne reacted with outrage, saying that if they wanted to call him corrupt then they should put him in jail.

Denis O’Brien likes to emphasise how much money the State has wasted on trying to catch him. The Irish Times puts the final costs of the Moriarty Tribunal at over €100,000,000, though O’Brien has set up his own site to lie about and exaggerate the figure. It’s even got a picture of the gates of Dublin Castle on it, so it gives the impression of being official. That’s how crap the man is.

He is right though. As is Ben Dunne. The money spent on the Tribunal has been wasted. It will remain wasted until he and his fellow corrupt and corrupting businessmen are safely behind bars, along with the politicians they paid for.

Categories
Cosmography Humour

Paddywackery – or, How Comics Changed My Life

The local shop I mentioned is a goldmine. Today I found that they sell a thing called paddywack. As a dog food. What the…?

It turns out the original meaning of “paddywack” is the large ligament that runs down the back of a grazing animal’s neck. The word is from the Old English paxwax, meaning something like “hair grow”. Because longer hair grows along the neck ridge of some animals, perhaps? By being highly elastic, this ligament makes it easier for the beast to raise its head. When dried, it makes a chewy treat for dogs.

So a whole other meaning for a word I thought of merely as a mild ethnic slur – that at least was my impression since childhood, when a strip of the same name in the British Comic Cheeky Weekly used to encourage readers to send in their Irish jokes. The whole comic indeed was packed with race and gender stereotype gags – and what’s worse, pointlessly awful puns. Such were the 1970s; vertiginous now to see that stuff again.

I didn’t find most of this funny even as a child. And yet, I liked the comic. It had a vivacity you didn’t see before, it messed with conventions and introduced elements of metafiction. Each issue had a single framing story, with characters commenting on the other strips, even moving in and out of them. And I guess it helped that it featured a sexy crossing guard called Lily Pop; I was getting to that sort of age. If Barry Cryer had written a kids’ comic – albeit on a bad day – it might have come out something like this.

Now that I look this stuff up I’m reminded that Cheeky Weekly had an even weirder progenitor, Krazy comic. I don’t think most of the strips in Krazy worked really. As the name suggests it was self-consciously way-out and wacky, and kids are quite sensitive to straining for effect. What compensated were the interstitial gags packed into it – comments between panels or as background graffiti, flick-book animations in corners. It was aiming I think to be something like a junior Mad magazine.

And I think this in turn may have been partly inspired by the comic that influenced me the most – Sparky. It was not an outstanding example perhaps, but it had one thing that really got me: the flat-out metafiction of a strip about the people who supposedly created the comic. They were in it… But making it… In it… The contradictions beguiled my mind. My own first comic strip, started I think while I was still 11, was pretty much a straight rip-off of this idea, and it must be at least partly responsible for a lifelong fascination with philosophical concepts like self-referentiality, recursion and nested realities. My mature (?) comic strip work rarely resisted opportunities to tell stories within stories – or indeed, stories within each other. My first long strip, which was also my degree dissertation, took place within a reality that only existed in the mind of God – but within which, God existed.

Come on, I was in college.

Well that turned into an unexpected ramble; from doggy treats to comic theology. It seems though that in the process I’ve accidentally written a response to this lovely blog post by Lisa “SwearyLady” McInerney. Yeah, comics were an important early influence in my life. For me it’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, and The Sparky People.

Categories
Humour

German Cake

Cake Cartoon

Flicking through the channels, I came across Judge Judy saying “Just take out what you can identify as your own hair, Madam.”

I kept going.

So I’m sitting here eating a lovely herren cake, actually German-made. How our little local shop came to stock this I am not at all sure. But it’s one of those great country stores where you can buy anything from bicycle pumps and glue to inner tubes and sulphuric acid. You can tell I’m designing some sort of weapon already, can’t you? I shouldn’t be surprised by anything turning up there.

But it’s the name that bugs me. Herren cake. Correct me if I’m wrong, but herren means “men”. As in Damen und Herren, which is how you formally address toilets. So this is… Men’s cake?

That’s great, I’d like to see that on a shop sign. Men’s Cake. Nothing pink and fancy about this cake, ladies. It’s a man’s cake. From Germany.

Categories
Cosmography Humour

Yes It’s Only A Supermoon

So last night many of you will have seen the biggest moon you ever did see. The “Supermoon” – or perigee-syzygy, to give it its even sillier proper name. Hope you enjoyed it. Despite being sandwiched between lovely days, last night was clouded and rainy here. Sadly I realize that I may not live to see a moon so imperceptibly larger than average as that one. “Almost visibly bigger!” as a FOAF said.

It might have gone largely unremarked, if someone hadn’t speculated that it caused the earthquake and tsunami. This was probably inevitable considering that tsunamis used to be called tidal waves, back when we didn’t know what really caused them. But this is actually quite an interesting idea.

It would be easy to dismiss it with ridicule, what with there being one or two salient differences between liquid water and solid rock. Though it’s enough to leave a very noticeable gap between high and low tide, all the moon’s gravity is really doing is changing the shape of the layer of water that lies on the Earth by the teeniest, tiniest fraction of an iota of a scintilla of a percentage. It’s really a very weak influence.

The Brain, An Owner's Manual - The Moon

But then again – we know the Earth’s crust is a highly complex, unstable system, and we have heard of  the “butterfly effect“, which suggests that small inputs to such systems can lead to vast, unpredictable and – yes – even catastrophic outcomes. So there might be something in it?

Might be. Isn’t though. There’s the small detail that the tsunami happened over a week ago, while the moon was still at a perfectly ordinary distance. Sort of kills the theory, that detail.

The trickier question to answer though is why there isn’t anything in the theory. It doesn’t sound unreasonable. In fact it’s a fine example of an excellent theory that just doesn’t happen to be right. Excellent, because it makes a clear, easily-tested prediction: If the moon’s orbit had any appreciable effect on plate tectonics, there would be a rhythmic pattern to earthquakes. And there isn’t.

If there were, they wouldn’t be so bloody hard to predict.

But why isn’t there…? Well I don’t know. What are asking me for, I’m not a plate tec… nician. But my guess would be that with all that roiling molten rock beneath our feet, with the huge energies of continents weighing billions of tonnes grinding against one another, with the titanic rattling and farting of volcanoes, the moon’s influence is just lost in the mix, drowned by countless stronger forces pushing unpredictably in other directions. Real, yes. But insignificant.

So dwell on that, the next time you stare up into the beautiful night sky. Space may be vast and cold and silent, but hey, you’re standing on a fucking bomb.

Categories
Politics

When Not Enough Is Too Much (#Libya)

Location of Benghazi within Libya.
Image via Wikipedia

Weird to sit here watching the Allies bombarding from the air and sea in the film The Longest Day, when something very similar is happening in Libya. Except of course that they will be stopping short of actually invading this time. We hope.

The mandate is vague – sufficiently vague to get an agreement – but we’re led to believe that NATO and friends will only do the minimum necessary to thwart Gaddafi’s counter-offensive on rebel strongholds such as Benghazi. After that we must hope that the Libyans can and will handle it themselves. Anything more, and it begins to look like another Western oil-grab. (Remember, Libya has the largest proven oil reserves in Africa.) Already the Arab League has accused the NATO allies of going beyond what was agreed, though one might fairly assume the Arab League would have said that if they’d bombed with flowers and guided kittens.

And they have a point really. NATO may pragmatically accept that they will have to inflict civilian casualties if they are going to prevent Gaddafi inflicting civilian casualties. But on the ground, death inflicted by the domestic enemy will be seen very differently from death dealt by foreign powers. It could all so easily go horribly wrong, turn popular support across the Arab world against the Libyan rebels – perhaps even against all pro-democracy uprisings. Nothing could damage their cause more than being seen as Western proxies, fifth columns preparing their countries for ‘Crusader’ invasion. The hard thing for the allies, with their vastly superior fire-power, will be to stop firing – to know when they’ve done enough but not too much.

Unless of course they actually want to undermine Middle East democracy movements. That’s one Machiavellian possibility we may need to consider.

Categories
Humour

Random Cartoon

I haven’t done a cartoon in a few days. I guess it’s mainly because it’s hard to get a lot of gags out of a tsunami and incipient nuclear meltdown. That crushing of the Libyan uprising wasn’t too inspiring either.

So I’ve decided that when the prevalent events are bitter and sad, or when I’m just in the mood, I might do a gag cartoon instead. Something about nothing.

This one came to me this evening, while I was watching a documentary about Ancient Egyptian engineering.

It has nothing to do with Ancient Egyptian engineering.

But it is very tall.

Which gives me the problem of filling in all this blank space.

 

 

I give up.