The Okie turns

Does Merle Haggard Speak for America?

Merle Haggard has always had his guitar hardwired to the gutbucket pulse of Middle America. Back in the Vietnam era, he seemed the essence of a historic political migration: white males fleeing the feminized, antiwar, politically correct Democratic Party. He was your basic Reagan Democrat, fully loaded with a resonant, iron-edged voice and the ability to write razor lyrics that stuck in the mind and the craw.

His brilliant anthem—Okie from Muskogee—became a rallying cry for those who were disgusted by the "hippies out in San Francisco" smoking marijuana and burning draft cards...And so when I heard that Haggard had written a song endorsing Hillary Clinton for President I was more than curious about the motivation for his apparent left turn...

Thanks, but I think we'd already worked that one out.

Consortiumnews

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq for the first year of the occupation, blamed “incompetence” by President George W. Bush’s national security team for creating a “nightmare” that could last far into the future.

Sanchez, who led coalition forces from June 2003 to June 2004, used an Oct. 12 speech to a conference of Military Reporters and Editors in Arlington, Virginia, to castigate nearly everyone connected to the Iraq War, including the U.S. news media, Congress, the State Department, the White House and the Pentagon. “There has been a glaring, unfortunate display of incompetence in strategic leadership among our national leaders,” Sanchez said. “They have unquestionably been derelict in the performance of their duty.

In my profession, these types of leaders would be immediately relieved or court-martialed.”

Oh yeah?

Telegraph Blogs - Daniel Hannan: Tories naturally get the internet

“The facts of life are conservative”, Chris Patten used to say. Technological change is making that statement truer than ever, empowering the customer and bypassing the regulator. David Cameron evidently understands this: his speech to the Google Zeitgeist Conference was a penetrating analysis of how state services have simply been left stranded by the communications revolution. Compare the experience of booking a holiday or ordering a TV with that of booking a GP appointment or getting your child into a state school. I had to replace a lost driving licence the other day: a procedure involving more form-filling and queuing  than would be imaginable in the private sector.

Or he could have gone HERE.

Friday Tunes

Two great performances. Just for the sake of it. Enjoy!

Johnnie Ray - With These Hands



Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart

At last!

Spectator - The Magazine

After messing around with the design for the last few years the Spectator have finally dumped all the silly, tricksy rubbish and got someone in who knows what their doing.

At one point it looked like they'd set a 17 year old web-design student loose on the project. I don't suppose my emails detailing all the faults had any influence but I'm glad to see that most of my criticisms have been addressed in the revamp.

The home page is still a bit of a mess with too much going on and isn't rendering properly in Firefox (or even in IE at the moment). But still, they are getting there.

Now if they can just dump D'Ancona and Con Coughlin and those bloody rollovers we might start getting back to a site worth visiting.

Add your comment

David Miliband : LOCALLY ENGAGED STAFF IN IRAQ

David Milliband has posted a piece on the Iraqi Employees proposals on his blog and he is taking comments. That is a commendable thing to do so please make the most of this opportunity and add a (polite and non-abusive) comment in support of  providing comprehensive safeguards to the Iraqi employees  in danger of torture and murder for working with British forces.

Via Justin

 

Piss prize

Gore and UN panel win Nobel prize

 
Why not? The prize ceased to mean anything a long time ago. If you can award it to that old monster Henry A. Kissinger you can award it to anyone, and they have: Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Yasser Arafat, Menachem Begin, Betty Williams, Mairead Corrigan and, of course that awful old fraud, Mother Teresa - to name a few. It could have been worse, they could have awarded it to some dreadful old neocon for ‘efforts to bring democracy to Iraq’. Ha!

More Granita than granite

‘Bottler Brown’ — the PM British politics deserves

…behind the ‘Brown bottles it’ headlines, the widespread expressions of surprise and outrage at his decision not to go for an autumn election seem a bit naive. Nobody should be shocked to discover that Brown and New Labour are not up for a fight (or be fooled by the Conservatives’ displays of empty bravado, either). The election-that-never-was fiasco fits into the pattern of unprincipled manoeuvring, indecisive leadership and mistrust of the public that characterises contemporary British politics…

A dog by any other name

Mercenaries in Iraq: Dogs of Indecision

This debate about private military contractors – or what we might call the ‘Blackwater-bashing’ that now passes for an anti-war position – is based on a profound misunderstanding of what lies behind the rise of the mercenary in Western warfare. The use of Blackwater and other money-hungry former soldiers in Iraq is not a product of any clear-cut political agenda on the part of the Bush administration, but rather of its opposite: a severe crisis of authority amongst America’s rulers which means they are even willing to outsource the means of coercion – traditionally the highest form of authority in capitalist society – to non-state actors.

It is a powerful sense of political stasis in Washington, and the US government’s inability to convince its own military men that Iraq is a cause worth taking a risk for, that means it is ready to hire others to use force on its behalf. From this viewpoint, Blackwater and the rest do not represent Washington’s authority, but rather its crisis of authority; they are an army of private contractors conjured up to do what Washington feels it does not have the political or moral legitimacy, or the military nerve, to do for itself. Mercenaries were once referred to as the Dogs of War – the private military contractors in Iraq look more like the Dogs of Indecision.

This is the future (and the past) of war. There are now more private security contractors in Iraq than US military personnel. When wars are driven by the interests of the wealthy and powerful it is hardly surprising that, when they run out of poor schmucks to fight their battles, they are happy to cough up hard cash for others to do it.

Where there's muck...

Solicitors make millions from sick miners' claims

Beresfords, a tiny firm of solicitors in Doncaster, has received £123m from the taxpayer by winning compensation claims on behalf of coal miners for work-related diseases, new government figures show.

The head of the firm, Jim Beresford, had a personal salary of £16.7m in 2006 and two partners - one of whom was his daughter Esta - shared a further £3.7m between them last year.

The largesse ultimately came out of a high court victory by miners nearly 10 years ago when British Coal and the National Coal Board were found to be negligent with the health of their staff.

Getting the horn

It has always been perfectly clear to me that Diana and Dodi died as a result of reckless and drunken driving (and not wearing seal belts) and recent statements by witnesses only confirm that view. I've been driving for over forty years (often too fast) and I've had the odd near miss (a car pulled straight out of a side turning in front of me last week and I had to brake, avoid a collision and keep control of my rear wheel drive, non ABS sports car on a greasy road. But I know one thing for certain. In a situation like that I don't have time to frantically sound the horn for a 'fairly long' time.

The latest witness statements make it clearer than ever what happened that night.  David Laurent had to swerve to avoid hitting a 'slow moving' car in the Alma tunnel seconds before the fatal crash. Mr Laurent claims he was driving no faster than 50mph but, as we all know, drivers are notorious for underestimating their speed. The fact that he was 'taken by surprise' by the car in front indicates to me that he was travelling pretty fast. The car he had to swerve to avoid was, according to Mr Laurent,  travelling 'extremely slowly' but later he claimed the car was driving at up to 25mph. Once again the predictable underestimation of speed this time which is what you get when drivers accuse other drivers of going too slowly (especially when they themselves are travelling at speed). The limit in the Alma tunnel is 31mph so, even at 25mph, the offending vehicle can hardly be said to be travelling 'extremely slowly'. In all probability the car was doing closer to the 31mph speed limit (and in the nearside lane) and Mr Laurent approached it from behind at closer to 55 - 60mph, hence his surprise and the need to swerve.

By the time Diana's car entered the tunnel the slow moving vehicle would have travelled even further along allowing even more time for a following driver to see and avoid it. And indeed witnesses said they heard the sound of a horn being frantically hooted followed by the screech of brakes and then the sound of a collision. Clearly Henri Paul didn't slam on the brakes as soon as he saw the car. Indeed you have to ask why he sounded the horn at all and didn't just brake, move into the outside lane and overtake.



Was Henri Paul trying to intimidate the Uno driver into getting out of his way rather than overtake it? Did the driver of the car panic and start to move to the left at the same time as Paul attempted, belatedly to pass it? We will never know for sure but one thing is certain. The hapless driver of the Fiat Uno was driving in the correct lane at the correct speed when not one but two cars entered the Alma tunnel at speed. One probably doing 25 mph over the limit and the other, driven by Paul, doing in excess of twice the speed limit.

The stopping distance for the Mercedes travelling at 60mph is about 200ft. At 31mph it would stop in less than 70ft. But add on the effects of tiredness, drink and medication and you are looking at a thinking distance at 60mph in excess of the total stopping distance at 31mph. It's not rocket science. Henri Paul had been drinking and was driving too fast (as was Mr Laurent) and the only driver in the tunnel at that time who was doing absolutely nothing wrong was the poor guy driving the Fiat Uno, French/Vietnamese security guard Le Van Thanh, who has refused requests from the coroner Lord Justice Scott-Baker to attend the inquest (who can blame him?) and who Lord Stevens referred to in his Paget report as 'a strong suspect'. 

What is he strongly suspected of, driving with due care and attention? Driving while sober?

Every cloud etc...

One of the advantages of dumping Newsfire (check out the story here) is that I now have to load a new set of RSS feeds into my desk-top reader (NNW) and that means thinking carefully about whether I still want all those links or whether I can just forget about some of them. I've got far too many (about 700) and it's utterly impossible to check them regularly (although Scoble reckons he checks about 600 a day) and, frankly, many of them are just not worth reading anyway. 

I've also got a second chance to start from scratch with meaningful folders and tags rather that the unorganized lists I have had up until now. But I'm a bookmarking nut and I hate to lose a potentially interesting site, so I fully expect to be back in the high hundreds before too long.

I must also check out some of the more efficient ways of focusing on relevant content. I know there are tools out there (I've seen them - Jeez I've probably got them bookmarked somewhere) it's just setting aside the time to set them up.  Good intentions and all that...