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Thursday 31 July
In a similar way for which the famous "Two sheds Arthur Jackson" owed his fame to his second shed I am now in posession of a second blog
Tuesday 29 July
When wandering in the woods with a camera on a summer's day it's quite hard selecting shots because there's so much of interest - all these patches of sunlight filtering through branches, luminating through flowers and leaves - patterns of movement as the wind riffles through leaf sprays, insects buzzing and settling, wildlife doing its thing etc
I was walking through the "Arndale" type shopping mall in Dalston trying to figure if what was before me was of less photographic interest than the forest - possibly not bearing in mind the various hues, shapes and sizes of humans accompanied by carrier bags and shopping trolleys. I think it probably comes down to inhibitions on my part which make it seem to have less interesting subject matter. I'm just not loose enough these days to be want to throw myself full length on the floor just to get a good angle on the nearest person - who might well object to my behaviour anyway.
(Pointless speculation since they don't usually allow unlicensed photography in malls anyway).
Anyway I will post up a few pictures taken on Sunday in Epping Forest.
Sunday 27 july
At last I have found a subject that doesn't leap out of the way...
Saturday 26 July
Nice pictures of squirrels at Mutated Monkeys where Beth points to some other great pictures of wildlife from Sensitive Light. In fact I am now inspired to put some of my own recent squirrel pics up on the site.
This morning Talking Politics on Radio 4 featured an interesting and occasionally insightful round up of the political realities surrounding the liberation of Iraq.
I've been involved in discussions in various fora which have been debating the Kelly/WMD scenario during the last week. I'm sure there are some arguments to be made against the process which took us into the war but in many cases it's hard to get past the slogans, the cheap jibes, the weird historical conflations, and the virulent anti-Americanism to see what the nubs of the anti war arguments are.
Friday 25 July
Schedule a test match and the rain inevitably arrives...
Monday 21 July
In the interests of fair play I have to say that I have now heard a BBC news bulletin use the same form of words that only yesterday I said you'd never hear used. I'm delighted at being proved wrong so quickly. Today's "World at One" broadcast was the most even handed I have heard for a long time and it made a refreshing change to be suddenly made aware of all the different aspects of this argument. It may be too late for those top BBC execs who seem to have blindly stuck to their macho posturing since Alistair Campbell questioned the truth of Gilligan's report, to change their stance but I am convinced that thoughtful BBC reporters will come to realise that the Corporation has almost unwittingly stumbled into an indefensible position and that the eating of some humble pie has to be more than the usual cosmetic exercise to adverse viewer comment.
Sunday 20 July
A week is a long time in politics? So it seems for in the time interval since my posting of last Saturday, David Kelly, the unfortunate weapons research scientist has given evidence before a commons select committee and then apparently committed suicide. Blair has been feted before the House of Representatives in the US before being brought down to earth with this news.
And, the BBC has released the news, (delayed so as not to reach the Sunday papers?), that David Kelly was, in fact, Gilligan's main source. Meanwhile the tone of BBC radio news broadcasts has reached an almost hysterical pitch in trying to convey the impression that it is solely the British Government that has all the questions to answer. It seems to me that the BBC did not inform Kelly that he was Gilligan's main source otherwise he surely would not have testified before the committee that he believed he was not.
The trouble from my point of view is that many of us have a long standing faith in the impartiality of the BBC. So that even if we hear slanted news we somehow fail to acknowledge it, fail to read between the lines, fail to see the lie we're being fed because it has become the norm, the staple everyday diet of current affairs.
Do we hear any news presenters saying We tried to get a representative from the BBC to talk to us but none was available"? Er no, we don't. That phrase is reserved for reps of political parties only. And yet the BBC has been sitting on its hands failing to tell either the public or, it appears, the unfortunate man himself that he was Gilligan's main source.
And for days the Beeb has been hypocritically pushing the line that Kelly had been set up by the Ministry of Defence and "probably" only played a minor role in Gilligan's report.
I can only hope that some honest reporters working the BBC begin to see how we are all being duped. Richard Sambrook, the head of news at the BBC is the person who seems to have the most questions to answer and also the least accountability.
In a further report on the web site the BBC acknowledges that it has had criticism. Perhaps the most elling comes from Tom Mangold, a former BBC employee and personal friend of Dr kelly who said
"If the BBC cannot find supporting evidence, it really must come out and say whether it has been unable to support these wider allegations.
"The BBC has got a lot of work to do on this. I don't understand why some of the Uncle Toms of the Board of Governors gave the whole thing their support."
Stephen Pollard also comments tellingly:
"It also seems clear that Dr Kelly did not realise that he was the source, since what Gilligan reported appears not to have been quite the same things that he was told by Dr Kelly. There seems indeed to have been 'sexing up', but by Gilligan rather than Alastair Campbell.
The BBC managers know full well now what happened, and are thus even more determined to tough it out, to cover their own backs in allowing Gilligan to go on air with his false story.
And although Downing Street did, with the hindsight of Dr Kelly's death, make a terrible mistake in putting his name out as the source, the real culprits are Andrew Gilligan and Richard Sambrook for, first, running a false story and then compounding the error by obfuscating and refusing to admit error.
That, as I say, is the view of every single person I have met in recent days in Westminster, including three BBC employees (but excluding two others"
So perhaps the BBCs attempt to keep a low profile on these questions will at last fail in the coming week, and we will be able at least to see some the news managers have to defend their actions and attitude in public instead of the terse, self-righteous statements which have become the norm.
I'll leave the last words to Tom Baldwin of the Times Online
On this issue the BBC does not stand for principle but Blundering Bombastic Cynicism. Is the corporation becoming the Blair Baiting Campaign or is it a case of Blinkered Bosses Cornered? Maybe both. Bye Bye Credibility
Tuesday 15 July
Good BBC4 documentary on Jeff Buckley tonight. A more tragically dramatic story would be hard to write.
Broadband flaky. The world uninterested. Why do I bother with this blog thing anyway? Sod it. See you later - maybe.
Sunday 13 July
Telewest seem to have a problem in my local area. My broadband line is going down unpredictably for several hours at a time - it's amazing how quickly one gets to take a fast always-on connection for granted. Floundering around for modem leads and connecting to flaky dial up servers seems a whole lot more unattractive now than it ever used to. I've taken the opportunity to archive May posts.
Hot hot heatwave....
Saturday 12 July
The War, the BBC, WMD and all that jazz
It's time for an overview. I haven't posted about this stuff for a while but now is the time for me to assemble my thoughts on the current pre-occupations.
So that it's clear where I stand, I approved of the war. To me the international community could not morally stand behind the UN convention that one should not interfere with the internal affairs of another state. Saddam Hussein is a known mass killer who has been largely responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths if not millions. When in power he was an unpredictable de-stabilising force in the whole area of the middle east. He waged a fruitless, pointless war against Iran for ten years which killed millions, he brutalised and tyrannised his own people and used poison gas to kill those not under his direct control, He provoked a world crisis by invading Kuwait, he set fire to the oil wells and caused an ecological crisis in the area, and he baited the UN for ten more 10 years by a deliberate policy of hampering the UN Weapons' teams.
There was a lot of protest from people who didn't believe in war at all, whatever the circumstances, and from people who thought that the UN should decide the issue. The UN could have backed the US/UK approach but was hamstrung by France and Germany who, from self interested internal political reasons decided to throw their weight behind the popular majority in those countries and insisted on a strict and legalistic approach to the problem involving the continuing presence of weapon's teams searching for WMD, the finding of which would give the only ground for military intervention.
It's a pity but we may not know for some time where, if ever, Bush and Blair either together or separately, decided that war was the only realistic option if the status quo was ever to be ended with certainty. I would say probably somewhere around the time that large quantities of troops began to be shipped out to the area.
However, whilst Tony Blair mentioned Saddam's brutality it seemed that the de facto reason for going to war was because of danger from Saddam's WMD. The intelligence reports assembled into a couple of dossiers were supposed to provide evidence of Saddam's weapons posing a threat, both immediate and long term.
The second dossier was tumbled pretty quickly of being a rehash of a PhD student's doctoral thesis spiced up by the addition of a few tart phrases. The Government apologised for it but stuck to the case that the first dossier did contain unvarnished reports from Intelligence.
Now, three months after the fall of Baghdad rumblings are being felt both here and in the US regarding the fact that WMD have not been discovered. The BBC, much to my disappointment, are running a scarcely disguised anti-Blair campaign focussed upon the removal of Alistair Campbell. Talk about easy news items, if nothing earth shattering has happened in the world then like as not BBC news will lead on "WMD not discovered today again" which will serve as a launch pad for great bouts of speculation and a quote from a back bencher or a disgruntled ex-minister (Clare Short on permanent studio duty) saying that TB should go if they don't discover the WMD etc etc The other day 7 people were killed in a crash on a motorway but it was relegated to a fairly minor news item with no spin off reports. Another recent motorway crash in which four were killed received slightly higher billing because...the victims were soldiers returning from Iraq.
It is the war that has galvanised this anti-Blair stance from sections of the BBC. Reporting from Iraq has been relentlessly negative. The apparent looting of the Baghdad museum received hours of airtime. When most of the pieces were discovered to have been stored away for safety by a closed-mouthed museum warder it was given scarcely any attention. In Iraq the instruction seems to be "Find something bad - then report it". How much reporting has their been of the unconfined joy in the Kurdish regions for instance. One American soldier gets shot by a sniper - headline news! Excuse me - how many people get shot every day in US cities? The BBC seem to have lost their cool altogether. They have never been an organisation able to admit that they get things wrong. From old Anne Robinson slyly winking away watchers' gripes on Points of View, to the News Director at the present time it's always been the same old unbelievably patronising story. "We're right - you must be mistaken.".
The running story is that a senior person in the Intelligence services leaked to a BBC reporter that Alistair Campbell had "sexed up" the language of the "good" dossier. The reporter will not name this source for confidentiality reasons. The trouble is that the BBC now sees itself as having a duty to play the official opposition party role. The discredited Tories are quite willing to follow the BBC's lead for it is years since they had a new idea for themselves.
None of this would matter much if WMD had in fact been discovered. But they haven't and as long as this situation pertains it seems certain that the BBC will lead on it. Funny how they don't lead on "Saddam and sons not found today again!" In fact little airtime has been devoted to this subject - maybe it would point up rather too sharply that things or people may not be easy to find in a country the size of France, especially when they have been designed not to be found.
But the BBC in its wisdom has decided that's time the bloody things were found. Do they miss the contradictions inherent in their other reports which tell how the coalition have failed to get enough electricity or water into such and such a place (never a mention of the places where it has been done.) Are they really suggesting that teams of people should be scouring the place looking for WMD and bugger the electricity after all? Apparently they want it both ways - any way which will enable them to do a bit of scourging on the current Nulab leadership at any rate.
So - we come back to the running story. I have to ask myself why the mysterious gentleman who leaked the story to Andrew Gilligan doesn't step forward. Could it be that a disgruntled agent with Tory leanings is using the BBC as a mouthpiece for his own dissatisafaction? Well that's one idea they won't report because it would make them look silly and wrong and as every fule know the BBC can't be wrong.
They've had an enquiry of course. Much to everyone's surprise Alistair Campbell appeared before it and defended his case. The gall of the man! The BBC decided it would only accept the committee's findings if they were unanimous. Anything less than complete unity would justify the BBC's position! Quelle surprise!
Do I sound perturbed? Well, yes I am a bit. I usually think the BBC does the impartiality bit rather well and, as the reader (let's not get too optimistic) of this blog will know I'm usually rather fulsome in praise of a great many of the Beeb's various programmes. In fact I'll mention now The Talk Show in which the recently deceased philosopher Bernard Williams opined that all of the broadsheet newspapers were now following a tabloid agenda - fear and suspicion of government creates a self fulfilling prophecy where the government gets increasingly defensive as every inconsistency is minutely dissected. He might well have included the BBC news department as well. "Balance" has been thrown out of the window with near hysteria breaking out in the studios whenever anyone is caught mentioning that the BBC might be at fault. Jon Humphrys even uncharacteristically let one of the "defenders" speak right into the pips the other day instead of using his well-practised "I'm afraid I'm going to have to stop you now..."
Of course everyone who was against the war in the first place can now get off on the Beeb's negative publicity about the thing. Collectively they can play the game "Now look what you made us do! (when we were right all the time)" And I can whinge on about the broken backed government we'll have if the Beeb manages to dislodge just about the only PM in my lifetime to have a modicum of humane vision and intelligence.
Meanwhile millions of Iraqis wake every morning to a world of new possibilities which inaction would have denied them for the foreseeable future. That's the good bit.
Thursday 10 July
Did I mention Artie Shaw - The Quest for Perfection ? Clearly I meant to last night but was diverted at the last minute by a half bottle of Malt whisky. Artie Shaw is a fabulous man. If my brain is in the condition his is in when I'm 94 I'll be doing alright. My dad turned me on to him and he was as excited as me about it. I must check out the New Gramercy Five recordings - "some of the best small group playing ever".
Informally I am playing "psychologist" on CIX. I'm starting to see conferencing in psychodynamic terms using the metaphors of Transactional analysis. It's fun sorting out the games though a lot of them seem to run into each other as if fusing in some strange hybrid. I must watch out for myself falling into "I'm only trying to help you" - one of my favourites.
Sunday 6 July
Lately something seems to be happening with me that I don't totally understand. I seem to have become more volatile - less easy going and as a result I've had exchanges online and on the phone where arguments seem to have flared up out of nothing. I've upset people without meaning to by being, perhaps, more direct than usual. Things that I would ordinarily let go by I've pursued and then had to accept the consequences.
In many ways I feel alienated. My thoughts unacceptable even to those I considered friends. And yet I've been honest and I haven't concealed my thoughts in order to curry favour or to pretend that I'm something I'm not. Life's difficult to get a grip on sometimes....
Then as I write these words there is a bit of a commotion outside my room. The girl from downstairs has been mugged five minutes away from the house by people in a car who have snatched her handbag. She's upset but hasn't been physically harmed. A horrible reminder that there are some very nasty people around and the streets round here are far from safe. Grrr.
Friday 4 July
What's happening tonight? A controlled frenzy of replying to a minor torrent of emails from someone who's getting their head around the potential for immediate communication after years of sloppiness (you know who you are Trevor and thanks for the link to the remarkable Gingko). Concurrently I'm keeping an eye on the discussion board (unaffected by the shenanigans at the hoster) whilst trying to keep my end in up in some fairly abstruse discussions about the possibility of evolutionary purposeon CIX. And then there's Alison Kraus playing a concert on BBC4 which I'm trying to record whilst searching teletext for BIg Brother which seems to have unexpectedly gone missing this evening.
Ah - just heard that there's been a security alert at Elstree and the programme has been cancelled tonight. Even the link from the channel 4 site is down.
I'm going to munch some sardines and contemplate things for a while.
Tuesday 1 July
I've just been notified by email that the hosting provider that I use for the discussion board has been hacked and that parts of it are temporarily out of service. So if the discussion board disappears temporarily that is probably the reason.
John Mclaughlin - great guitarist but hey John, please get your man not to be so clever with the web site.
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