04.16.04
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:08 am by
Fathers
Marion Finucane on Radio 1 did another one of those pieces on how dreadful it is that fathers are not being included in their children’s lives. The sorry sight of the ‘McDonald’s fathers’ who have no where else to bring their children was cited. It was claimed, for example, that even at primary school level, men are being ‘phased out’ of teaching in primary schools and this is dreadful. As usual the automatic presentation is of men being victims and someone else is doing the excluding. Isn’t it true that in most cases, men have every option to include themselves. They could bring their fat kids to sports events instead of McDonalds and the reason they are not in primary schools is because they simply don’t apply for the job! No one is ‘phasing’ them out of schools. In fact, the few that do apply go into management very quickly because they’ve no interest in hanging out with kids in the first place. It’s just a career. Women can cope by themselves because they had to, not because they chose to. Who would choose to raise a family alone? (well, apart from the rich). Boys/men are in crisis, and don’t have positive role models; but that’s because they’re poor, not fatherless.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 11:01 am by
E-voting fiasco
So Joe McCarthy, my favourite citizen, has made a breakthrough. After persistently seeking, under FOI, information about e-voting he discovers that there were discrepancies in the trial run in the last election. They showed that 1,294 votes had gone missing in the 2002 general election in Dublin North, while 716 too many had been counted in Dublin West. Local polling officers were blamed for ‘administrative’ errors i.e. they filled out the forms wrong and that its all due to human error. But here’s the point: If the polling officers had made those mistakes under the manual system it would have been discovered as soon as the ballot boxes were opened. The mistake would have been investigated on the spot and a resolution or sign off done under the actual , live eyes of the public. Instead, one guy has to pursue an entire department and pay for the information under the now doubled fees for Freedom of Information. So much for transparency. That’s why we always think those lying bastards are lying to us. They are!!!
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04.15.04
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:48 pm by
Guns for hire
Just for the record, a quick word from Salon on those 4 men killed last week:
“The four men killed in Fallujah were not U.S. troops but rather employees of a little known company, Blackwater USA, that resides within an industry that until last week, few people even knew existed. Breaking out of the “guns for hire” mold of traditional mercenaries, corporations like Blackwater sell the sorts of services that soldiers used to provide. Known as “private military firms” (PMFs), they range from small companies that provide teams of commandos for hire to large corporations that run military supply chains. This new military industry encompasses hundreds of companies, thousands of employees, and billions of revenue dollars.
In Iraq, they’re also accounting for a growing share of the force and the casualties. There are 15,000 private personnel carrying out mission-critical military roles, and they have suffered at least 30 to 50 killed in action, including the four dead contract workers whose bodies were discovered on Tuesday. Scores more have been taken captive in just the last week. “
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Posted in Uncategorized at 10:58 am by
The World Today
As Iraq worsens, Bush endorses a ‘plan’ which flies in the face of hundreds of UN resolutions regarding Israel’s settlements on the West Bank and the Palestinian right of return. Amazing how he manages to take decisions which will result in thousands of deaths and people still consider voting for this lunatic. Meanwhile I consulted Delia on how to poach an egg. It was lovely. On other fronts Hugh and his OED has an update on meet with and I am confused about how much food to give my now weaned child. Outrage-fatigue has set in and I am tempted to immerse myself in the daily minutae of domestic life where I am God. I must resist.
Here’s Hugh’s take on meet with:
The usage “meet up with” is clearly American in origin, and was originally seen by Americans as being a “provincialism”, as it’s first recorded use in print was in 1837, in Sherwood’s ‘Gazetteer Georgia’. In English usage this side of the Atlantic, “meet with” has been around for a very long time, since at least 1275, but only in the sense of coming across someone or something, crossing paths, etc., rather than in the sense of meeting somebody by design. Incidentally,
it has also been used occasionally as a euphemism for sexual intercourse!
The simple use of “meet” is the primary usage (first recorded in 1205). The use of “meet with” you dislike WAS also used to indicate meeting a person by design in the early modern period, but is now noted as obsolete by the OED. I suppose that it may well have transferred to American with the original colonists, and survived (possibly in conjunction with the
“meet up with” noted above) as so many other artefacts of language have done.
Whatever happened, it has clearly filtered across the Atlantic through the usual means, and so the Americans have managed to shorten their speech patterns through lengthening ours!
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04.08.04
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:57 pm by
Iraq, US Elections and all that
Yet again, the left has been proved correct, as Iraq descends into a possible civil war. This will provide opportunities for Bush/Bliar to make heroic speeches about standing firm and accusing the left of being weakling pacifists. The simple fact is that the ‘left’ analysis of international affairs has been vindicated time and time again. Their position has nothing to do with a reluctance to get involved in combat or make hard decisions: it’s about making intelligent decisions.
A correspondent has made a link between the left’s amorality /moral relativism on individual matters and their apparent moral relativism in relation to international matters. He suspects that they are too idealistic and try to explain away everything bad in the world rather than making a stand. This may be true on personal issues but I think with regard to military interventions this is not fair. I could sum up the left’s position as follows:
- The world view which sees the rise of Islam as a global threat is medieval and over simplistic. Fundamentalist Islam is a huge problem but its a problem for Islam as well as the West.
- The refusal of the US to enforce a settlement in Palestine which forces Israel to return to pre-67 borders is inflaming the whole situation
- You will not fight terrorism successful by breaking the law (Guantanamo etc)
- You will not fight terrorism successfully by bombing a country and killing innocent civilians
- Doing the above makes matters worse not better.
Surveillance, intelligence, good security, helping moderates, conflict resolution: these are the tactics that are useful.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 10:04 am by
Tribunal costs
While the threat of paying my legal costs for the Tribunal still hangs over my head, I see that the costs which the government are all already paying for the Tribunal team included the following:
More than €11,000 has already been spent at Gruel, the trendy restaurant on Dame Street not far from Dublin Castle. This is for sandwiches, coffee, pizzas etc. If the barristers are being 2.5k a day why can’t they buy their own lunch? Who else has a job where your salary is paid and the company buys all your lunch as well? My legal bill will probably be around this amount. Our single income household will suffer sorely if I’ve to fork this out, yet these guys won’t pay for their own sandwiches.
A training session from Carr Communications for a member of staff. The training session cost €190 in August 2003. Who? Why?
A new coffee machine was bought in December 2002, for €729, and a “save a cup, Beca bin, for coffee cups”, was purchased for €162 a month earlier. The latter item was delivered by King Ireland, who charged €342 for “catering supplies and one food item”, that same month.
This is a weird one: The delivery and collection of the legal team from Dublin Airport led to a €127 bill from Michael Divine Chauffeur Services on September 3rd, 2002. A bill from the same service, apparently relating to September 5th, 2003, cost €420. Why are they being picked up from the airport? Why can’t they get a taxi? Where were they?
RKD Floral Displays Ltd was paid €135 in January 2003 for the supply of “Christmas trees and festive trimmings”. Six planter units six months later cost €112. A bill from the same company in January 2004, was for only €89, presumably on the basis that the festive trimmings from the previous year were used. How economical of them.
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04.07.04
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:41 pm by
Ahern at the Tribunal
So our esteemed Taoiseach makes his long awaited Tribunal appearance and within hours cracks on all the main issues:
- He may well have met Gilmartin
- He did take phone calls from Gilmartin
There was nothing wrong with either of these things so why deny it in the first place? Will there be a resignation? Of course not. In the meantime Gilmartin also says that he told Ahern in 1989 that Redmond and Lawlor were looking for money. Did Ahern do anything? Of course not. This is on top of the nice letter he’d had FF write Padraig Flynn in 1998 enquiring about the missing 50k. Flynn simply never replied. Did Ahern EVER ask him once on all the occasions when he personally met him since? God no.
In the meantime I can’t help noticing that Mary O’Rourke’s statement, and all last week’s statements from Moriarty were all printed in detail in the press prior to the witnesses’ appearance. Wholescale leaking. Is there a whisper? Will the Tribunal teams aggressively pursue the origin of these statements? Methinks not.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:48 pm by
Citizenship
Thanks to Kevin for sending this “check out the concept of citizenship in one of our glorious imminent EU fellow member countries”.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 9:41 am by
Citizenship referendum
Herr McDowell is determined to bring his citizenship referendum to the people on June 11th, local and european election day, thus muddying the waters nicely. Apart from the obvious strategy of deflecting everyone’s interest from economic issues, the referendum is nasty in concept. “The Government maintains the referendum is needed because the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which stated that every child born on the island of Ireland is an Irish citizen, is being abused. This right was enshrined in Article 2 of the Constitution after the Agreement was accepted in a referendum, leaving the Republic with Europe’s most liberal citizenship rights.
In 2001, 3,153 people were granted residency because they were the parents of Irish-born children, while this figure rose to 4,027 in 2002. Nearly a quarter of all births in the three Dublin maternity hospitals were to non-nationals. In January 2003, the Supreme Court ruled by a five-two majority that non-national parents of Irish-born children did not have an automatic right to remain here. However, the court judgment has not led to a fall in the number of applications for asylum from over-16 females, who still make up 60 per cent of the numbers lodged with the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform.” (IT)
What this report, as all others, fails to mention when they quote the 25% non-national births in the maternity hospitals is that most of these are to perfectly legitimate foreign nationals in this country. In Holles St, there were about 9,000 births last year. About 2,500 were to non-nationals BUT only 239 were to women who showed up in labour having just flown in from Nigeria or wherever. To hear the government talk, one would think that all 2500 were maternity tourists. Our current citizenship laws are problematical but why go the sledgehammer route which will just whip up racism? Blame our poor health service on the blacks. That’ll do instead of a proper health policy.
The Government plans, it is understood, to change the Constitution so that citizenship will only be granted to a child if one of his/her parents has lived on the island of Ireland for three years.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 9:32 am by
Sinners at mass
This article from today’s IT worth quoting:
“The Bishop of Kerry last night said it did not make any sense “if a couple who are not believers ask for a church wedding. And one wonders if it makes any sense if a couple who do not go to Mass expect a Mass on the occasion of their wedding……People who do not share this faith will consider the sacraments meaningless rituals and empty rites and should not receive them. To do so would be a lie, a charade, an abuse,” he said. “Disregard for the dignity and sacredness of the sacraments is also shown when people attach more importance to the clothes, presents and meals than to the spiritual and religious significance of Baptism, First Holy Communion, Confirmation, Marriage and, indeed, Ordination,” the bishop said”.
I think he’s right. I’ve know one couple who were outraged when their local priest refused to marry them. They never went to mass or at least contributed to parish funds. They had been shacked up for years and had two children already, who they never brought to mass either. Then they were furious when the priest asked them why they wanted a wedding mass at all! The bride’s mother, who did attend mass regularly, pleaded their case and in the end he gave them a blessing. But he also refused to allow them play “The wind beneath my wings”. Common sense prevails.
Another unmarried non-believing couple I know brought their child for christening. The priest gently questioned them on their motives for bringing the child. They confessed that they were really doing it for the granny. The priest advised them to come back later when they felt they could actually give the child a ‘proper’ catholic upbringing.
I think the church has to be commended for these actions. All too often they are accused of oppressing people and forcing religion down everyone’s throat. Usually there are hysterical parents wanting to take their children out of religion classes in school. Paradoxically my friends in the catering industry assure me that first communion is bigger than christmas for parties. I’d start with banning the communion dress and make them do it in their school uniforms.
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