Tag: Ireland

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Politics

State Media Silent On Dana Allegations

Picture of RTÉ Studios in Donnybrook
Not Quite Perpendicular?

RTÉ, the Irish state broadcaster, seems to be refusing to report the substance of the allegations against Presidential candidate Dana Rosemary Scallon‘s brother.

This scared me half to death when I heard the news this morning. You see in Ireland we have some quite stunningly repressive libel legislation. How else could so many politicians have gotten away with so much? It did appear that this blog was the first here to relay what was being reported in the US, and when even the state-owned broadcaster didn’t dare repeat the answer to the question the whole country was asking, I had a horrible feeling that I must have overstepped the mark. Just how much would I be liable for? So it was with enormous relief that I saw the Irish Times today.

They at least followed suit after the IrishCentral scoop – so quickly and thoroughly in fact (Colm Keena’s background report is excellent) that I suspect they had the story prepared but didn’t want to be the ones to break it. The Irish Independent meanwhile, supposedly the leading quality broadsheet, coyly states only that there have been accusations of a sexual nature against a member of Dana’s family – nothing she hasn’t said herself. It all adds up to a picture of some pretty craven behaviour on the part of the Irish media.

RTÉ may at least have the excuse that as a national broadcaster they are bound by charter to be scrupulously fair to candidates. But when that reaches the point where they cannot report allegations which are now known publicly – as I write they are still saying only that she is upset by “media coverage about a family member” – it becomes pantomime. What’s more it now favours her unfairly, because their flagrant censorship lends weight to her apparent conviction that she is the victim of media persecution.

Which is ironic, to say the least.

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Humour

Diary Of A Frightened Man 3

I passed! I passed my driving test! Well OK, it was just another practice run, but I practise-passed! After two abysmal practice-fails, that’s the best news I’ve had all week. I can’t describe how I feel.

Well actually I can. Tired. I feel very… tired.

I guess it’s relief. Fear of failure has been driving me for the last few days. Now it’s been alleviated a little, I’m as limp as a grounded weather balloon. Some coffee needed here I think. Also breakfast.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

I took a long walk around the town of Tuam, shaking the nuts and bolts out of my skeletomuscular system. Had a coffee and a water and a croissant with bacon and cream cheese, and finally felt… still wrecked. But taut, springy. Like after a good workout. Then more driving practice for another two or three hours. Good, but not quite attaining the relentlessness of the day before.

The danger now is that, even on this exceedingly flimsy evidence, I’ll become overconfident again. My skills are still… marginal, to put it nicely. Passing the test is going to be hard. The more I do this, the more it becomes clear that driving well is a juggling act, an exhausting task that requires absolute full-on concentration for a protracted period. And though in time juggling can become second nature, that time is not generally “By next Monday”.

And I’ve got to produce that concentration while trying to make it look like it’s already easy. The proverbial swan – serene on the surface, kicking like a bastard below. So the next few days are going to be… like this I suppose. Exhausting. I want to be able to drive right, I am determined, I believe I can do it. But I wonder if determination and belief can really galvanise me in the same way that staring failure in the face did.

There is something to be said for fear.

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Humour Politics

The Truth About The Truth About Dana

Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument, New...
Didn't really feel like putting up a picture of Dana. Here are some pretty rocks instead

Dana Rosemary Scallon, religious recording artist, Irish Presidential candidate and, er, American citizen, showed signs of distress in Wednesday’s TV debate and has said that “a vile and false allegation” about her family is “about to surface”.

W, as they say, TF?

Maybe it’s a fantastically complicated ruse to make herself look like a victim. It seems like the only chance she has now. A victim of what? Government, perhaps. The forces of secularism. But I’m guessing the media. She seems like the sort of person to blame the media for things. Which is fair enough I guess. It was the media after all that told everyone she has taken a vow of allegiance to the United States of America, something she seemed perfectly content not to tell us before becoming our President.

And as – in my own little way – the media, I’d like to point out to the US authorities that by running for the Presidency of another country, she is presumably breaking that oath. Last public figure to do that got assassinated with a drone, I mention in passing.

Speculation is rife of course. But I’m puzzled not so much about what the dark secret is, as by how there can be a false allegation known only to her and the… alleger? alligator? I mean, someone surely can’t be sending her anonymous mail to say “Do what I tell you, or I’m going to make up some shit about your mother.” A false allegation would be hurtful, yes, but a secret false allegation just doesn’t make any sense. Furthermore, it makes no sense to tell us about the existence of it.

The only conclusion I can draw is that, whatever it is, it’s probably true.

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Humour Politics

Quantitative Easing

Bank of England – Images George Rex

Ireland’s government is considering making a deeper fiscal adjustment than planned next year in a bid to further distinguish itself from Greece and build on its recent bond market rally. – Reuters

Ah yes. I think they call that “masochism by proxy”. Our government stands ready and willing to show how much we can suffer.

The UK has taken a rather different approach, one not open to us as Euro members. “Quantitative easing” they call it. Sounds like a euphemism for a good solid dump, but it actually disguises something even more unmentionable – what they used to call “printing money”. Of course, they don’t actually print the stuff these days. Who uses cash, darling? Somewhere in some secret turret of the Bank of England, they push a button and simply magic £75 billion into existence.

Doesn’t seem right, does it? If you like, you could think of it as the B of E simply raising its own credit rating and lending itself that £75 billion. But if it’s a loan, who does it have to be paid back to? The future? An alternative universe maybe? I think it’s best to just grit your teeth and accept the reality. Money is fictional. What the B of E has done here is simply made some more up.

Yes, fictional. Money is nothing except what we pretend it is – not even power. Power after all is the ability to make other people do what you want, and money only has that effect if we all play the game, doing what someone else wants in return for mere tokens in the knowledge that other people in their turn will do what we want to get them. If you think about it too much it seems like an utter house of cards. Why do we go along with it – especially we who don’t have so many tokens to begin with?

Well, the only non-fictional way to make people do what they don’t want to do is the threat of direct physical violence. So playing along is preferable to that. Plus it’s hard to see how anyone could be scary enough to organize a whole society through intimidation, certainly not one of any real size.

The other thing that bothers people here is, who owns this £75 billion? Actual wealth like a resource is still there even when it goes unclaimed and unexploited, but money only exists by virtue of someone having it (and someone else wanting it). So when a government just wishes billions into existence, whose exactly are they?

Well the Bank of England gets to spend it, so I guess it’s theirs. What they do though, mostly at least, is immediately use it to buy government bonds. Not from the government, I hasten to add. Modern economics is insane, yes, but it hasn’t quite reached the point where a government invents money to buy the bonds it invented from itself. No, they buy them from people who have invested in them, thereby making those investors’ assets liquid again so that they can spend, spend, spend. Which is good for the economy.

Or so Tories always say when they need to justify the transfer of public funds to private friends.

Will it work? I’m not so sure. When a government makes money up they are unilaterally modifying the rules of the game. Or cheating, as we once called it. This may encourage other people to get creative too. Will markets play fair with the UK government, or will they say that this new stuff just isn’t as good as the old, and they need some more please?

I know where my fictional money is.

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Technology

Yeah Yeah, New iPhone

Photograph showing Apple Newton hand held comp...
Here it is, the iPhone 5... Wait.

Who would have thought this day would come? The day when they release a boring iPhone.

The 4S is by no means a minor update. It is significantly better than the 4. Dual core. iOS 5. The 8 Mpx camera alone will be enough to change the minds of many waverers. But it is a consolidation, a strategic market repositioning, not a shock. It perhaps takes back the lead, after the Galaxy S II being seen by many as the new messiah. But it’s still neck and neck, and that is not what we have come to expect from an iPhone release. On its day of launch, the latest iPhone is supposed to be the most desirable piece of consumer electronics on Earth. Unequivocally.

It’s Tim Cook I feel sorry for, Apple’s new CEO. In place of the showman, they’ve got the man credited with the sound strategic business decisions. Decisions like closing down Apple’s manufacturing in the US (and indeed, Ireland) and moving it to such questionable locations as Foxconn‘s giant plants in China. It is just his misfortune that his first product launch happens to be of a rather strategic and businesslike update to the iPhone.

But people are bound to say that if Steve were still in charge, there would have been surprises. Steve would have taken some feature of the new iPhone – probably Siri, the voice recognition ‘valet’ – and make it sound like God’s personal gift to you. Actually no, Steve wouldn’t even have presented us with something as lacklustre as mere voice recognition. It would have read your mind, and granted desires you had not yet even consciously formed. Steve could do it, why can’t this phone?

Yeah. Basically people are mostly just missing Steve.

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Politics

Westlife Promote Cigarettes – Or Is That Bollocks?

Westlife‘s tour of the Philippines is being sponsored by a Philip Morris cigarette brand – or so someone on the Joe Duffy radio show assured us yesterday. Overflowing with outrage, I drew out my trusty keyboard.

Then I paused, and actually checked the story.

Basically, I can find damn all to damn them with. There’s that picture there, of the band and the brand on one billboard, and then there’s… Ehm… There was a comment posted on the Irish Cancer Society‘s Facebook page – quoted here by Broadsheet.ie – but it no longer appears to be there. Maybe they too noticed there was very little to go on.

The tour promoter’s blog has a positively effusive list of sponsors. Some – Fox for example – perhaps not paradigms of ethical behaviour. One, rather bizarrely, a brand of herbal sleeping aid. (Westlife fans need that?) But none of them the brand in question, or any other known cigarette. See footnote for full list.¹

It all hangs on whether that really is a single poster on the Manila billboard, or two posters next to each other. The continuous strip across the bottom seems to unify the two halves, but we can’t be completely sure it’s not a message about how to advertise in this space or something. Futzing in Photoshop doesn’t make it much clearer, and I can’t find any version of the image that’s larger, brighter or less badly compressed. Indeed I can’t find where it came from originally – no one seems to be crediting it. I’d call that suspicious, except I don’t know what to suspect. A campaign of vilification against a boy band just seems too petty.

One thing – The brand in question, Clas Mild, is not made by Philip Morris. It’s a Philippine state-owned brand (rumoured to explode, interestingly). For all I know its appearance on concert posters is mandatory. Not likely, but we really have no idea what’s going on. Some clarification from the band or their management would be nice. I realise I’m effectively asking them to prove their own innocence there, but I expect they’ll be only too eager to distance themselves from an industry so absolutely evil it makes arms manufacture look like a charity for homeless kittens.

 

  1. “Westlife Live in Manila is brought to you by DAYLY Entertainment in cooperation with the following major sponsors: SMART, FOX, Star World, Sleepasil, Accessorize, Calliope, Mossimo Music, Skin Food and Terranova, and Official Residence-Edsa Shangri-La Hotel. This is also supported by the following media partners, Official TV Network-ABS-CBN, Official Music Channel-MYX, Asap Rocks, Philippine Star, The Manila Bulletin, The Manila Times, Business World, Business Mirror, People’s Journal, Bands, Official Radio Partner-Love Radio 90.7, Magic 89.9, Baranggay LS FM 97.1, Yes FM 101.1, Tambayan 101.9, Energy FM 106.7, Manila Conert Scene, Philippineconcerts.com, Atthewomb.com, OrangeTVMagazine.com, and Digipost. Special thanks to Le Ching Tea House, Astro Plus, Odyssey”
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Cosmography

The Golden Age of Gold

Entrance stone with megalithic art.
Newgrange

At the National Museum today, where I haven’t been since I was twelve. But then, I was pretty much twelve again when I walked through the door. Caveman stuff!

Our whole visit went on simply taking in the main hall on the ground floor, which brings you from the Palaeolithic (beginning 3-400,000 years ago), to the end of the bronze age (about 500 BC). Quite a span – but actually the palaeolithic is a bit of a cheat. It’s not thought that people actually lived in Ireland then. This is the era when tools were no more than rocks broken to have sharp edges. At that level of technology people probably didn’t have clothes, so it seems highly unlikely that they could have survived here during an ice age… Nevertheless we have a couple of what appear to be palaeolithic stone tools. It’s just that we’re not sure how they got there. Theories range from them being carried here by receding glaciers, to being carried here by mischievous archaeologists. Well the display card didn’t actually say that, but I couldn’t help feeling it was the subtext.

From this perhaps weak beginning we skip straight to the action – nearly half a million years later. Things begin to get going around 7,000 years ago with the Mesolithic, when they finally had the idea of tying rocks to sticks. If you don’t think that’s a big difference, compare the idea of trying to chop down a tree with an axe to the idea of trying to chop down a tree with an axehead. I shouldn’t talk as if they just suddenly thought of it though. It takes tools to make tools; the technology evolved in tiny gradations until a breakthrough was possible.

But these people were still nomads. It was the Neolithic that brought farming to Ireland, five or six thousand years ago, and with that the first lasting buildings, the great megalithic monuments like Newgrange, apparently part of an extraordinary culture that seems to have blossomed throughout north-western Europe for, well, for a few thousand years, and about which we now know almost nothing.

Now the stone tools were different. They were… beautiful. Some smooth, some ornately carved. These people had brought the art of banging rocks together to its apotheosis. One shocking example of their technological confidence was the Lurgan boat, the mother of dugout canoes. It’s basically a fifty-foot oak cut down, split, and hollowed out. Looked to have room for thirty people or more, a whole community.

But then bronze. The technological transition never seemed as dramatic to me as when I saw the new bronze swords and spearheads next to the old stone knives and axes. It must have been on a par with the invention of gunpowder. But it meant huge social change too. An isolated community can fashion stone tools. Bronze is made from raw materials you have to trade for.

And with this new metallurgy, gold. What ancient Irish smiths did with gold is nobody’s business. Work that could have been buried with Pharaohs has been dug out of bogs. Virtually all of it jewellery – after all, what else useful can you make from the stuff? The weird thing perhaps is that there were so few designs, speaking of a pretty unified culture. Just torcs, collars, clothing fasteners, bracelets, boss-headed “sunflower” pins and what are still known as “boxes”, though by current theory these were actually inserted in pierced ears much like the plates worn by some peoples in Africa. Except, you know, made out of gold. They were hollow and contained beads so that they’d rattle, which must have provided a constant pleasant reminder of just how rich you were. An illustration of an ancient leader decked out in all this stuff gave the distinct impression that he must have clanked like a Transformer.

And all this before history even started. Will definitely have to go back.

Categories
Politics

Is The Norris Campaign Unfinished?

Senator Norris, Here Seen Fondling Some Of My Cartoon Characters
Senator Norris, Here Seen Fondling Some Of My Cartoon Characters

Last night Senator David Norris made a play to revive his bid for the Presidency. Did he do enough?

His interview on Ireland’s Late Late Show was a robust one. Excessively so some thought, but really it could hardly have suited him better. Certainly he was asked tough questions; about the way he acted when his ex was convicted of statutory rape, about quotes attributed to him concerning underage sex. But these were exactly the questions he needed to face publicly if he was to have any hope of competing again.

He even volunteered answers to questions presenter Ryan Tubridy fought shy of asking. In order to contextualise his remark about wanting to be “molested” when he was a child, he brought up the fact that it is quite normal for younger people to fantasize about older. His new, hard-won political experience showed through here though. He didn’t actually say younger people, or adolescents, or teenagers. He said people “of 17 or 18”. People of legal age.

We all know that it is in fact perfectly normal for people years younger than the age of consent to fantasize about adults. We also know that it would have been political suicide for a middle-aged Gay politician to say what we all know to be true. It’s the sort of hypocrisy politics demands. And it will be good for his campaign, because it demonstrates he now has a level of political awareness that he demonstrably did not have when he wrote to the Israeli Appeals Court. This judicious use of half-truth shows he can play the game.

Which seems a little sad, but it is not completely unreasonable. We want a President who is circumspect, diplomatic, who can tell when he’s on the verge of saying something that will scandalize and hold back, who isn’t going to spring any surprises when he’s representing the country abroad.

Well OK, most people want that. Personally I want a President who comes out with stunningly undiplomatic but heartfelt opinions and makes gleefully off-colour sexual remarks – preferably about other people’s Presidents. But we shouldn’t always get what we want.

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Cosmography Technology

Life In The Fast, Narrow, Dark Lane

Athenry North Gate 2009 09 13
You Are Now Leaving Athenry

Uhh. Just drove back from Athenry. The GPS did a great job, but it brought me by ways I knew not. A transaction based purely on trust. Our modernised country roads; beautifully paved and marked but still crazily meandering. Blind bends you round to find that they conceal other blind bends. In the dark. In the rain. A red dot following a purple line.

A microcosm of my life in the last few days, even weeks.

Probably months.

I didn’t know where I was and I only thought I knew where I was going. But somehow, I got home.

A transaction based purely on trust.

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Humour

Merry-Go-Roundup 2

no spam!
I do not like it

The last week was of course dominated by 9/11, its conspiracy theories especially, but my attention was also arrested by a court in England which created some rather unusual and onerous conditions of bail. I ranted somewhat about the extraordinary birthday arrangements for Ireland’s disgraced former leader Bertie Ahern, and got good and mad with what seems like an ever-rising tide of ever-more-tedious spam.

But I’d swear, writing about spam attracts more spam. And writing about conspiracy theories attracts weirder spam. Look at this one:

We have learned a great deal about recovering from narcotic addiction and have found several methods that work well. This is information drug treatment programs would not want out since it would cause them to lose a large number of patients.

The what now? Are they offering me drug rehabilitation, or drug rehabilitation as a business opportunity? I don’t want to know.

The surprise hit of last week though was the one about the cyberstalking of Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google. It was picked up by a couple of other sites, including the formidable Reddit and the forums of the veteran Ctrl+Alt+Del webcomic. This made it the single most-read post of the blog so far. Lovely stuff. I encourage you all to follow this example and spam other sites about I.Doubt.It.

Er, I didn’t say spam.

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