I'm not an animal lover (that's probably the French in me) but I do know that some people who like pets suffer from the disgusting bugs they carry around with them unless they're cooked to rare at gas mark 6. Fear not, oh hypersensitive Brits, for soon you will be able to acquire a hypo-allergenic cat to soothe your ills.
This is surely the only comment required on Sunday's soupendous Pizzagate fiasco.
Fox (prop. R. Murdoch) is well known for its extremely biased coverage of all things political and its anti-Democrat stance. (In fact, we're likely to see more of this kind of thing in the U.K. with the increasing reach of Sky News on free to air digital broadcasts and the Mail group of newspapers stake in ITN.) But it's interesting how the media attempts to damn those who it opposes while trying to look like it's not engaging in character assassination. Check out this Fox story, for example, which suggests Kerry isn't the all-American baseball fan he claims to be. No need to tackle the issues, no need to question his war record: if he's a point out on the score, he's not Presidential material. Of course, he does actually know where Vietnam is...
Having found that Iraq didn't have nuclear weapons but did show incontravertible proof of possessing the intention to make them, it appears that we should excuse some intelligence dossiers having a word or two out of place. Or even just a letter: didn't they mean Iran?
The U.S. wants to impose sanctions on Tehran for pursuing a nuclear energy policy that could allow arms research. There is no claim that Iran has instigated a weapons programme, but they do seem to possess that sanctionable intent.
European efforts to migrate Iran to more advanced nuclear energy techniques that wouldn't be suitable for weapons have been met with dismay by the U.S. State Department, who fear that this will give Iran time to develop a bomb.
Of course there are few qualms expressed about Pakistan or Israel, who have implemented this technology already and tested it. The message seems to be, if you want a nuclear weapon, you'd better not show it until you've actually developed it (and the means to fire it into a neighbouring country).
While MPs are only now having to divulge all their expense claims, you are able to check up on their activity (or lack of) through this useful site.
Ahead of the match in Athens, I thought I'd set out my stall on how Arsenal and others are likely to perform. And I can't see Arsenal winning the tournament.
The defence lacks strength in depth, both in personnel where if Campbell or Touré were injurerd the team would really suffer and on the pitch, where the bulk of the defensive onus is placed on the centre backs and Vieira. There isn't enough defensive capacity in the rest of the team to sustain a successful European campaign. The teams that best meet those values are Chelsea and Juventus, with Milan and Manchester United being other contenders.
In the league it's different however. I can't see anyone beating Arsenal, even when they suffer injuries; they score goals from every part of the pitch. I realize this was the case two years ago, but this time Arsenal's rivals aren't strong enough to capitalize on any slips.
But the managers who have made the biggest impact in the Premiership remain Moyes and Santini. Moyes has demonstrated what you can achieve with little skill -- he's ideally qualified for the Scotland job -- while Santini has turned Spurs around by doing the blindingly obvious effectively. Why Pleat and Hoddle failed to realise that the Spurs midfield couldn't run and that the defence was a shambles is beyond me, but Santini has addressed both from the outset. He's such a miserable git though.
I'm often struck by the force of conviction that people with religious faith have that they are right. But why shouldn't they be self-righteous when they have a book that justifies all they say, be it the Torah, Coran, Bible, Guru Granth or whatever? Because there's no suspension of judgement, no further investigation, no intellectual exercise; just a displacement of confidence away from the self to text that has been interpreted for them.
It's little coincidence that the times of the greatest religious fervour have produced the least progress in human knowledge. The industrial revolution saw the greatest decline in church attendance in Britain, while the Cultural Revolution in China (little red books this time) hardly compared favourably with increasing levels of education in neighbouring Japan.
Marx may have looked on religion as an opiate, assuaging those in poverty that they would be rewarded after they died. But its hallucinogenic qualities are no less evident as it blinds us to resolving issues (west bank, stem cell research, capitalism) that should be considered in a little more detail.
The web is a worldwide community, a source for people of diverse languages to communicate with each other. As such, this on-line dictionary of abuse has to number among my favourite sites.
Do you think there's a trade fair for trade fairs? Where stands compete to see who provides the most lurid jelly beans and salesmen in suits recount patronizing blandishments about things you never asked about in the hope you'll forget a pertinent question. Then lumber you with a carrier bag full of glossy documents you'll never read and non-biodegradable plastic. Such is the fare of corporate ennui.
So farewell Jacques Derrida, France's most famous philosopher of recent times, whose work by its nature compounded its own miscomprehension. To understand Derrida, I think you have to see him in the light of structural linguistics and scepticism.
In the 1960s, the over-riding notion of how language worked was based on minimal phonetic pairs, called phonemes. At its most basic level language could be broken down into these pairs s/z, t/d, p/b etc. so that we understood language by these sounds: bat is different to pat is different to pad is different to bad... you get the idea. (This can be seen through tonal distinctions made by the Chinese tones: mă or mā, incomprehensible to many English-speaking ears, or in Castillian Spanish making no distinction between b and v.) Since all language was made up of these minimal pairs, by extension any text could be broken down into linguistic pairs: subject / object, active / passive etc.
Derrida did not wholly subscribe to this view, however, but drawing on sceptical philosophy of suspension of judgement deemed that we understood language not because of these minimal pairs, but because one piece of language was different to another. So cat was different not just to cad but to dog as well. All language is made up of this vast array of differences, so that we understand language with reference to other elements of language; meaning is deferred until it can be conceptualized with reference to other meaning. Derrida coined the term différance to describe this semi-deliberate delay in understanding something until it is distinguished from other things. It was a play on words (it means both difference and deferral) that practically every other academic has since tried to imitate. (There is linguistic evidence of this too, in the way that language evolves: a word used 300 years ago is unlikely to mean the same as it does now: what's the first thing you think of when you see the word web?)
The corollary of such deferral of meaning was that everything you did and everything that influenced you also had an impact on how you understood language. To get to the root meaning of a text therefore, you had to deconstruct it of all these layers of meaning that were sitting atop it: political, cultural, emotional.
Derrida was extensively mis-read, glossed over (as here) and misunderstood, possibly not least by himself, to the extent that some took deconstruction to be a denial of objective fact; though I'm not sure that Derrida ever said this. I think his thought was an asset to the way in which we might choose to view the world, where our preconscious emotions are layered with meaning as we try to express them and the moment we release text for others to read or listen to, they are no longer our own but a construct of the culture in which they are consumed.
A bit like a content management system.
In Not On The Label, Felicity Lawrence describes food deserts, areas where out-of-town supermarkets have left behind urban wastelands where it is impossible to walk to shops and buy fresh fruit and vegetables. The inhabitants of these areas are mostly the poor and car-less who take taxis they can't afford to buy poor quality processed food from supermarket giants.
Yet oppression of the poor is not just through denial of access to everyday healthy requirements, but can be seen in the way government runs filthy segregationist trunk roads through deprived areas of east London like Bow where people are too poorly educated and disaffected to complain.
The legacy of Thatcherite Britain is this new proletariat: semi-literate subscribers to a benefit hegemony where second-class health and education are a brand of poverty. These people have been abandoned to fast food and Blockbusters by all political parties in favour of an aspirational and self-deluding middle England who turn a blind eye to the fact that they are the next in line.
I don't normally like to reference self-righteous Guardian articles (preferring to preserve the pontification for myself) but this is well worth the read.
Let's see how long this stays online. A web renegade has restyled BBC news to demonstrate what it would be like if its content actually linked to information relevant to the body of the content it was discussing. More links to more sites giving news a much more interactive nature, rather than the prescriptive sourcing BBC uses at the moment. All those who herald BBC as the self-styled best practice merchant on the web, take note.
To see it in action, click on a story and follow some inline links.
A Canadian submarine has broken down in the Atlantic stranding its crew, only four days after they acquired it from the Royal Navy. The Canadian navy used to manfacture its own submarines until the industry went under. No compensation will be due as the British warranty doesn't hold water, but the Canadians aren't the only disaffected party; the president of Real Madrid has also complained about a disappointing English sub he bought.
Regular readers of this blog will know of my interest in endocrinology; but this article from the archives may be of more general interest. Apparently 8% of rams are gay. This is due to impact of a cell group within a ram's brain that means it prefers the company of other rams. The Church of England declined to comment.
