STAND PROUD!

11:15am

I'm a ginger and proud! Long live the Ginger Liberation Organisation!

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Wrong job

9:30am

Oliver Kamm has another example of someone being in the wrong job (like, as he puts it,  an arts administrator who doesn't see the point of art or an editor of an anti-censorship magazine who doesn't see the point of free speech).

 

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Motty

9:09pm

This just in, from John Motson's commentary on England v Brazil at Wembley. Pondering the drop in crowd noise at the start of the second half:

It's quite noticeable how the noise level has dropped as the crowd have yet to take their seats for the second half.

Er, yes. The crowd aren't there. Difficult to see how they could make a noise...not being there.

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Putting the Yazzmonster in her place

5:07pm

Nick Cohen's performance on Crosstalk, a strand on 18 Doughty Street, has more to commend it than just this, but...to watch him destroy the Yazzmonster is a truly wonderful sight. You can watch it, and relish it, here.

Really, is there a more irritatingly wrong person on the entire planet than Ms Alibhai-Brown?

(I should say that I have been unfairly given the accolade of having coined the phrase 'Yazzmonster'. I would love to have done, but I have merely appropriated it from the peerless Peter Briffa.)

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Boycotts

10:03am

Once you start down the boycott route, all sorts of unforeseen consequences emerge:

An American research foundation announced on Thursday that following the decision of the British University and College Union (UCU) to consider launching an academic boycott of Israel it has cancelled its plans to open a grant application process for UK researchers. 

The $150 million Goldhirsh foundation supports scientists around the world in the quest for a cure for brain cancer funds research.  

In a letter to British academic institutions, foundation leader Elizabeth Goldhirsh writes: " As a director of a $150 million foundation that supports scientists around the world in the quest for a cure for brain cancer, I am profoundly disappointed in your union's decision to boycott Israel today. This action represents a severe setback for academic freedom and open discourse. Moreover, the decision to single out and demonize Israel above and beyond all other countries - remaining silent over Russia's brutal occupation in Chechnya, for example, or China's ongoing oppression of Tibet - is, at best, troubling. At worst, it points to a far more sinister and tragic motivation. Equally disturbing is to do so at a time when Israel's civilians are facing near-daily missile attacks from Gaza and her partner for negotiations is an organization that dispatches suicide bombers and refuses to recognize the Jewish State's right to exist. Given this decision, I am deeply saddened to say that while my foundation had been considering opening up our scientific grant process to British researchers we will no longer be able to do so. I urge you to work against this boycott and restore learning's highest ideal of fairness free of prejudice to British academia."

Meanwhile, the response from our higher education minister, Bill Rammell, has been, well...pathetic:

I profoundly believe this does nothing to promote the Middle East peace process.

It maybe that I am doing him a disservice and he has come out with a stronger statement against the boycott. But I can't find one anywhere. In which case, his response is simply shameful. Is the most powerful thing he can think of to say against the vote that it won't promote peace? How about calling the vote what it is: a despicable act of racism and a repudiation of all that the word 'university' should mean.

One Middle Eastern academic understands this. Here's Dr Sari Nusseibeh, President of al- Quds University:

The free flow of science and information, far more than traditional military methods to preempt conflicts, constitutes in my view a powerful force against war. It is also, far more than the free flow of trade between nations, a powerful tool for equal- opportunity human- development.

...[A]n international academic boycott of Israel, on pro Palestinian grounds, is self- defeating: it would only succeed in weakening that strategically important bridge through which the state of war between Israelis and Palestinians could be ended, and Palestinian rights could therefore be restored. Instead of burning that bridge the international academy should do everything within its power to strengthen it, including, foremost, through its own collaborative intervention. 

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How civilisations fall

8:45am

Tim Worstall has a superb fisking of a piece of health nonsense in the Independent: 

I am well-doctored, to put it mildly. I probably consult more doctors than Woody Allen, who has separate screenings of his movies for his doctors. Everyone is entitled to a hobby; mine just happens to be my health, and what a fascinating hobby it is.

Start with a hypochondriac then.

When at a loss to explain my new malaise, I visited my naturopath.

Correction, a deluded hypochondriac, one who consults charlatans.

Believe me folks, it's not going to get any better from here on in.

She insisted that my exhaustion was caused by electromagnetic "smog" in my flat.

Yup,  been going on since we started using light bulbs and that wireless radio, hasn't it?

This made sense, as my symptoms had begun soon after installing wireless technology in my sitting room.

Riggghhht....

For example, although I've turned off my wireless access I can still tap in to my neighbour's Wi-Fi downstairs.

Mmmmm...so you were exposed to these electromagnetic waves from your neighbour before you installed your own and they didn't affect you. Showing that the causality of your own system is what?

"Any imbalance in our electromagnetic field creates a disturbance in cell structure and function, which can lead to illness in sensitive individuals," says London-based complementary health practitioner Dr Nicole de Canha.

Right, well, obviously, umm, is this "our electromagnetic field" anything to do with our aura? Or, perhaps, something that is affected by the earth's own magnetism? You know, that reason that when we ever move south or north we fall ill?

...As yet, no one knows what price we will pay for our dependence on modern technology.

As compared to not having modern technology actually we do. We're surviving, something which a good 99% of the 6 billion on the planet wouldn't do without it.

Naturopath, homeopath, holographic fields, look, we might as well start sacrificing virgins by throwing them down the wells to cure society's ills.

Read the whole thing. If  you believe in reason - and thus the primacy of science over witchcraft - you'll relish Tim's destruction of this drivel. But there's a serious consequence to the rise of such quackery. As Tim puts it:

I am left wondering if this is how civilizations fall. When the obviously well educated in that society, let alone the proles for whom the State provides as little as it can, believe in fantastical alarums, how can it survive?

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When the left loved Zionists

8:08am

I have a piece in this week's Jewish Chronicle on the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War. Here's an extract:

How ironic that the fortieth anniversary of Israel’s victory in the Six Day War should fall between the publication of the Winograd Commission’s interim and final reports into last year’s war on Hezbollah. Forty years ago, Israel fought an existential war and won. Last year, it took action against Hezbollah as part of a wider and no less existential war. Israel may not have lost that war, but she certainly did not win it. The threat not only remains; it grows.  

But that is not the only difference between 1967 and 2007. In 1967, it was not merely Jews who rallied to Israel’s defence; others also saw that the tiny, young country was in mortal danger from its surrounding enemies. In 2007, however, the likes of Independent Jewish Voices betray Israel from within the Jewish Community; and non-Jewish chattering class opinion is suffused with hatred for . 

It truly was another world back in June 1967. A Jewish Chronicle report of 16^th June described how “showmen” had rallied round at an emergency aid meeting: “Peter Sellers pledged £1000 while Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor cabled from Hollywood to pledge $1000 apiece”. Nothing too surprising there, until the very last sentence of the report: “Other donors included…Harold Pinter.” The same Harold Pinter who last year joined with 300 others in signing a full page ad in The Times to denounce Israel for “terrorizing an entire people” - with no mention of any responsibility borne by Palestinian terror. Not that one should be surprised at such behaviour from a man who eulogized Slobodan Milosevic 

In 1967, Gerald Kaufman was Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s press spokesman. A few weeks after the war, the JC reported (August 4^th) that he had written to the general secretary of Poale Zion stressing how important the territorial gains made in the war were to Israel’s security and that they could only be given up as part of a guaranteed peace settlement. He would not, he stressed, wish to “put back the clock” over Jerusalem . 

O tempora. O mores. Now Sir Gerald, this is the man who has declared he will never visit Israel again and who, last July, ranted in the House of Commons against “Jewish terrorists”. 

How different it all was. The Times of 8^th June 1967 reported that the Socialist International was arranging for a member of the Israeli Labour Party to come to London to address a meeting of the organization, which was discussing “the possible lines of a political settlement when the fighting ends, which would have sufficient stability to avoid a repetition of the present struggle”. The Socialist International! An organization whose sole contribution to Middle East debates now is to blame Israel, as in its statement of principle from 1996 holding that “Israel has a special responsibility to bring the peace process back on track”. 

In 1967, the leaders of liberal-left opinion led Israel’s defence in the arena of public opinion. Forty years later, it is so-called liberals who are the useful idiots of Israel’s enemies, taking every opportunity to attack the country. As state-sponsored terror threatens Israel, today it is Israel they blame. Go figure.

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Sorry

8:04am

Apologies for the lack of posts yesterday - I was at a wedding. I didn't think it would be that polite to sit there bashing out posts on my Blackberry!

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