Cows and Stuff

Well, I thought I might check in and wax interminable about CIF and Harry and Euston (again)and that sort of stuff, but Matt had a post about cows which took me back a few years.

I spent a few months in Banaras, which is the best place in the world to be if you're a cow, but even so they get knocked about a bit by the rickshaws and taxis and whatnot. Indian veneration for the bovine is a passive thing. They won't hurt the critters, but they don't go out of their way to help them either.

The dogs do, though.

Mad but true. Under our balcony an old white, humpy heiffer thing used to kip down and most nights before I turned in I would look down on her to see how she was getting on. She'd sit in the same place on the dusty street, chewing the cud gleaned from the rotten vegetables, banana leaves and bidi ends that made up her diet, staring placidly at the shadows.

One night I went out on the balcony to see her assailed by a pack of pi dogs. Five of the buggers were crowded eagerly around her and although she didn't seem unduly bothered I was worried for her. I shouted down and chucked shoes and whatever I could find to drive the filthy canines away.

Eventually they slunk off and I went down to retrieve my footwear. Close to, I could see she had a nasty gash on her haunch where some vehicle had rammed into her. The wound was red and fresh and shiny. I slapped her haunch and bade her goodnight, convinced I'd done the old girl a good turn in driving her tormentors away.

Next night they were there again and again our girl was just sitting there,happy as Larry. So, before launching another shoe frenzy, I observed proceedings. The dogs were jostling to LICK the wound on the cow's haunch. I left them them to it.

It was much later that I read that dogs' saliva is a sort of natural antiseptic, which is why they are always licking them selves, I suppose, and I suppose there was some sort of symbiotic, mutually beneficial thing going on in that dusty Indian night.

Hm...Interesting

The unveiling of the Guardian Blog Comment is Free and the opening up of their opinion and leader pieces to comments has led to an interesting, if predictable phenomenon.

If your RSS reader features, as mine does, a fair smattering (all right, an exclusivity) of political blogs, you might be forgiven for thinking there is a veritable army out there of highly articulate, well informed commenters and bloggers who can demolish in a pithy sentence the whole Guardian world view. All of them lament the sad decline of said organ and terrabytes of bandwidth are swallowed up every day in deconstructing and exposing for the drivel it is the latest Maddy of the Sorrows, Polly, Naomi, Moonbat or whoever.

So, you would have thought, wouldn't you, you would have thought that this vast intellectual juggernaut would have bulldozed the pages of the Guardian's venture within days of its inauguration?

Funnily enough, it hasn't quite happened that way. Faced with the opportunity of taking the fight to the enemy, the Keyboard Commandos prefer to stay in their own havens to do their fighting. They drop their virtual Shock and Awe in the same way as they have always done, in safety, among friends.

Sorry, But it's The Euston Manifesto

We're going to look back on this momentous week in awe, I tell you. Twenty brave souls in a London pub working to change history. Ignoring such distractions as nascent civil war in Iraq, the war of words and sabre rattling over Iran's nuclear ambitions, the American Generals lining up to denounce the Bush administration's handling of Iraq and allegations that American and UK allies in the form of Shia militias are causing as much death and destruction as the Sunni insurgents; ignoring all this, the Euston Twenty have their attention on far weightier matters.

We are talking, naturally, of the soon to be legendary Manifesto, which will, without a shadow of doubt come to replace in terms of historical significence the seminal 1989 document The Paddington Manifesto For Change(Marxist-Leninist-but-definitely-not-Trotskyist-ho-no) which even now informs almost all contemporary comment on the Left despite being the work of three drunk students working on the London School of Economics Rag Mag.

This is not to undermine the critical importance of the Euston document, however. In its admittedly less than exciting style, it manages to reach the crux of the critical
global political and humanitarian issue of today. I refer, of course, specifically to section 14 of the Statment of Principles:

14) Open source. As part of the free exchange of ideas and in the interests of encouraging joint intellectual endeavour, we support the open development of software and other creative works and oppose the patenting of genes, algorithms and facts of nature. We oppose the retrospective extension of intellectual property laws in the financial interests of corporate copyright holders. The open source model is collective and competitive, collaborative and meritocratic. It is not a theoretical ideal, but a tested reality that has created common goods whose power and robustness have been proved over decades. Indeed, the best collegiate ideals of the scientific research community that gave rise to open source collaboration have served human progress for centuries.

Amen to that, eh, my geeky friends? And don't worry your nerdy little heads over all the other complicated stuff. Just sign on the dotted screen.

You Couldn't Make it Up

I can't say I've done an exhaustive round-up by any means, but I haven't so far seen any comment about the suicide bomber bloke.

Don't get me wrong - I'm as confused and agnostic on this one as I am on most things these days. What with the fucking nob ends setting fire to embassies on the one hand and the fucking nob ends demanding that the BBC show the cartoons on the other, the only place to be is in the wimpy liberal middle ground pleading in vain for calm.

Having said that, it's got to be time for a wry smile when a potent symbol of outraged Muslim sensiblities, a devout young man so outraged by the slur on his religion that he felt compelled to take to the streets of London dressed as a suicide bomber all the better to express his devotion to the Prophet, peace be upon him, turned out to be a convicted crack cocaine dealer on parole.

That About Wraps it up for ... Everyone Else

How do people - and I'm talking bloggers, of course, not real people - have such a sense of stone wall certainty? You can't browse a blog or scan the comments these days without an image of the poster springing unbidden into your mind. He (it's usually a he) is leaning back in his chair surveying the words on the screen before hitting the publish buttton. His chest is visibly widening in pride as he reads through his purple prose, and you know, you just fucking know, that no matter what anybody else might say on the subject, no matter how many compelling countervailing arguments are out there, pinging back and forth through the phone lines and over the wireless networks, eating up bandwidth like it's going out of fashion; no matter how asinine his opinion, or how ill thought out his argument, at that moment in time the guy is thinking, that's nailed it.

And he believes it. He really thinks that his half arsed bit of bile, his insult of someone he doesn't know, his purblind prejudice, his cack handed attempt at a joke, his nauseous bigotry, is about to be lapped up by a grateful audience. They are going to nod admiringly at his stinging insight, instantly converted to his way - the right way - of thinking.

I'm with the toilet wall guy, really. In theory, I'm not. I buy into all the yada yada yada about how good it is that the traditional forms of media are being challenged by the new kid on the block that is t'internet. It's just a pity the new kid is such a wanker.

Not Dead Yet

I've only ever managed to get a few decent links and four months of inactivity has lost me two of the best, Harry and the Prof. Best, in link quality terms, I hasten to add, 'cos I think in terms of content, they have run out of steam in the same way that I have, it's just that no one has told their typing fingers. Harry's comment boxes have turned into LGF Lite and the main posts have their backs turned firmly on anything that might effectively challenge their view of the world, so all that's left for the faithful is Galloway and Benji baiting. What larks.

As for the Prof, well, what can you say? He sometimes has something worth reading, but has the man got an actual life? I think I last looked at his blog just before Christmas, and today my RSS reader tells me he has 200 posts I haven't read. Two hundred. There comes a point where you have to wonder who is the sadder, the person who churns it out out or the person who takes it in. Just think, if you've got twenty or so blogs with that amount of posts on your reader, how much time in the day is left to work, talk to real people and walk the dog? Factor in the time to participate in a couple of futile arguments in the comment boxes a day, follow ten more that you're not involved in, plus the time to follow a few random links - if it were a spotty teenager defragging his hard drive you'd pull the plug out the wall and kick him blinking and nervous out the front door, and if it were a celeb snorting something noxious you'd check 'em into rehab for life.

I'm off to do something worthwhile with my time. Freddie Flintoff Cricket on PS2. See you in four months.

Shameless Excuse to Recycle Old Joke - Number Twelvety Thrumpty Seven

I know this is late to the party, but I don't think my favourite one made it anywhere else.

I call my dog Pinter.
Why's that, then?
Because he's got long paws..........es.

I thang you.

The Blog Stats That Matter

Let's see what we have on the font pages and comments this week.

Little Green Footballs - 30 odd dhimmis and a couple of moonbats.

Harry's Place - 14 Galloways and a dozen stoppers.

Samizdata A disappointing 3 taxes, 3 states and just the one gratuitous picture of a fit woman.

Norm - 5 crickets, 3 Guardians, 1 jihad.

Andrew Sullivan - 1 feeble excuse to beg for money.

The Non Blue Eyed Son

Watching four hours of Dylan on the telly recently sparked vivid memories for me from thirty years ago and more.

In those days, as a seventeen year old living with his parents, listening to music was not like it is now. Turn it off, for God's sake was a parental reflex action, unlike today where teenagers are often disgusted to find their acts of high decibel rebellion can be trumped by pretty much anything from the parental back catalogue.

"Guns and Roses? You should listen to Led Zep. Greenday? Where would they be without the Clash? Dance Music? I remember when New Order invented it"

Thirty years ago there was no such overlap, it was a rare parent prepared to walk the line from Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Black Sabbath, the Stones, Fairport Convention, The Grateful Dead and the Mahavishnu Orchestra to blues, jazz, R and B (in the old sense) traditional folk, country, older popular song etc and find some common ground. And it was an even rarer teenager prepared to walk it with them.

My old man was a curmudgeonly old bastard, funnily enough, and I was a not untypical arrogant, selfish up his own arse teenager, so in our house tensions ran high at the best of times. Added to that, my father held a bizarre conviction that evil entered Britain with Bill Haley and the Comets, so the various drug addled long hairs adorning the covers of my records or strutting their stuff on the Old Grey Whistle Test were guaranteed to send him into apopletic rages.

But once he walked in on me listening to A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall and he did a sort of double take. The insistent guitar played and those mesmeric words tumbled forth:

Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

My old man didn't say anything, but he picked up the blue cover of More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits and perused it until the end of the track. Then he put it carefully back on the table and left. We never spoke of the moment again and it didn't herald the beginning of a new understanding or anything like that, but my copy of Song and Dance Man, the Art of Bob Dylan went missing for a few days and I like to think that he read it.

That About Wraps it up for Anarcho Capitalism

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I do love all things Libertarian, especially those whacky anarcho capitalists. I particular adore the Austrian School with their insistence that economics is just another branch of maths and that everything can be subject to their rigorous logic.

It has been noted by others that Libertarians love to squirm, shifting the burden of proof to their opponents, or, in extreme cases, rejecting evidence and real world argument altogether. Over at the Kid's comments boxes, Paul Coulam is a particularly fine example of this.

As much as I love 'em, though, they've got to go. In a sane universe, Libertarian thought would be the indulged child - we would look on affectionately at its antics, smile and laugh in the right places, tell it to blow its nose and take no notice of what it says whatsoever. We certainly wouldn't have it influencing proper politics.

But this is not a sane universe. Even Labour governments these days have Libertarian foibles. In his latestGuardian Column the Chief Moonbat reveals that the government is resisting regulation over global warming in the name of the free market - or rather, The Free Market -
despite the fact that many players in the market are arguing for regulation.

It is no accident that the climate change denier movement is fuelled by Libertarians of various hues. You might think this is simply because they are a bunch of greedy fuckers who don't want governments interfering in the serious business of making money. Or you may think that their ideology sees its purest expression in this issue. You might believe that they are so hoplessly blinkered by that ideology that they can't entertain a notion that puts the primacy of their beloved Free Market in any sort of doubt.

All of these things play their part, but it goes way beyond that. Being excessively logical people, they fear for their very existence. They fear that what Oolon Colluphid tried to do to God will actually happen to them. A paradox will be created and they will simply vanish.

It is beginning already with those corporate chaps the chief Moonbat mentions demanding regulation and the government refusing it. Imagine if governments gave in to the demands and regulated effectively. The market for green technology would open up and as the evidence for climate change stacks up, the momentum would grow, more and more corporate types would realise regulation does not signal the end of the world as we know it and that long term benefits actually outweigh short term losses. Like Winston Smith, but without the rats, they would come to love the enemy. Why not? The market benefits.

This is a logical impossibility to your anarcho capitalists and they would dissolve into the ether.

Of course, if climate change is denied for long enough and regulation avoided, this unhappy state of affairs will never come to pass. The world will turn to shit and maybe some anarcho capitalists will be around to cash in at the end of it all.