I’m adding these two new blogs to my blogroll: The Uninformer and Just another false alarm. A warm welcome, and the very best of luck, to both of them. I do have one or two questions, though.

> One wouldn’t want to be an informer. But an ‘un’-one? What is it?

> Is there something intrinsic to blogging that leads to wild mood swings? I know from extensive and probing research that the phenomenon is more general.

Here are some excerpts from a speech by Ilka Schroder, a Green MEP. I had better make it clear, in the (probably vain) hope of forestalling misunderstanding, that I do not endorse everything in what Schroder says. There’s no evident sense in what she says of Israel’s great share of responsibility for the conflict. Nonetheless, if what follows is accurate, then it needs to be publicized:

Officially, the institutions of the European Union always declare that they are – well balanced – calling upon both sides to hold peace again. But in reading the resolutions, in following the policy of the EU, you know that this is not the case. You have only to see the exhibitions on Israel and Palestine in the European parliament’s foyer – where Israel is accused of sociocide and branded as an apartheid state – to know which side the EU is on. While the Israeli side is confronted over and over again with concrete demands and every step of Israel is being commented on and criticised in detail, the PA is only abstractly called upon doing everything possible against an abstract kind of terror. And you can have considerable doubts whether the repeated public demands on the PA are still raised in any informal setting.
…..
It is an open secret within the European Parliament and the Commission that European Union aid to the PA has not been spent correctly. Everyone knows that the PA created a black budget. After entering and searching the Headquarter of Arafat, the IDF presented a vast amount of material found there. It shows how the PA as an Institution and Arafat as a person are involved in ideological preparation, financial and political support and planning of terrorist acts against Israeli citizens. The government of Israel officially informed the European Commission that the PA misused EU money.

The reaction of the Commission to the material that the Israelis presented was – to put it diplomatically – not very convincing…

When the first accusations were raised that European funds might have been used to create a black budget for the PA to finance its war against Israel, I started an initiative to establish an inquiry committee in the European Parliament. There was a lot of resistance against the establishment of such a committee. No matter that over 170 of my colleagues joined the initiative: it has pretty much failed. The European Parliament does not intend to verify whether European taxpayers’ money could have been used to finance anti-Semitic murderous attacks.

This is also to the point:

For its war against Israel, the PA has received not protest but rather enthusiastic approval from Palestinian society. This is the result of a true flood of anti-Semitic literature that is published in the Palestinian territories and in all other Arab countries and that sells like hot cakes, among them books like “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, Ford’s book about “the international Jews” or Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”. Much of this is a contemporary form of Holocaust-Denial-literature from Europe and the US, some of it comprises works from Syrian, Saudi-Arabian, Lebanese or Palestinian writers, among them high representatives of the respective regimes. Anti-Semitic hate talk can be found in newspapers that are close to the government. Anti-Semitic statements are made on national, pan-Arab and international conferences by official student bodies and otherwise respected professors. The distribution of this literature would not have been possible without the benevolent support or at least tacit consent of state authorities as well as of the PA. Similarly, new schoolbooks published by the PA and financed by different European countries are not free of anti-Semitic clichés.

And there is a long section towards the end of Schroder’s speech on the spread of anti-Semitism in Europe. This should be read and taken seriously. There can be legitimate differences of estimate as to just how far this poison has now spread, but that it is spreading I think there are more than enough reasons to fear. (Hat tip: Anthony Cox.)

Go read – here and here. About the BBC he writes:

I’m sufficiently conservative to believe in the concept and the ethos of public-service broadcasting financed by a consumer levy; it so happens that the BBC as it is currently constituted has betrayed that ethos and gives scant indication that it even recognises the problem.

I’ll second that; as well as Oliver’s suggestion for ‘the ideal Chairman of the Governors to replace Gavyn Davies’.

Under the headline ‘UK retailers blamed for rise in slave labour’, Felicity Lawrence reported yesterday:

Big-brand fashion and food retailers are accused of contributing to appalling employment conditions around the world in a new study by Oxfam published today.

Using their power at the top of global supply chains, companies with ruthless buying practices are squeezing their suppliers to deliver faster and more cheaply, the aid agency says. The effect is to drive down wages and compromise the welfare of the workers.

“There is a widening gap between the rhetoric of global corporate social responsibility and the reality of corporate practice,” Oxfam’s policy director, Justin Forsyth, said.
…..
At one US-owned factory in Kenya… price pressure has led to hourly production targets that are almost impossible to reach. The factory rules allow unions, but in April 2003, when workers went on strike to demand decent pay, most union members were fired.

Why is this happening? I would suggest it’s in the same line of country as the deaths of those Chinese workers at Morecambe. When Chris Bertram wrote two days ago that ‘such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism’, there was an immediate raising of eyebrows in the Crooked Timber comments box. I must say I find that perplexing. It’s not as if it’s hard to think of what motivating concerns central to capitalist enterprise might lead to disasters of the sort Chris was talking about, or why companies run for profit might adopt the practices criticized in the Oxfam study. Nor is it as if it’s a new idea that capitalism either unrestrained or too little restrained has this kind of regular downside. Is the scepticism towards the ‘predictable consequence’ claim based on a view that there is just no alternative world to one in which workers are obliged by their impoverished circumstances to take terrible risks, and in which the production and distribution of economic goods must necessarily ‘compromise the welfare of workers’? One has to hope, and try, for a better possible world than that.

Another horror – brought about by ‘militants’. However:

We cannot afford to be choosy.

(Updated at 11.45 PM: The word ‘militants’ has now disappeared from the BBC report.)

The Financial Times is running a poll to find out who we think is the most influential European of the last quarter of a century. There’s a short-list of 25 people to choose from. This is the person I voted for – though to be honest, not on the basis of thinking he has in fact ‘made the most impact’. Rather, I’d like him to have done.

In an unrelated development, Mary Seacole ‘has been voted the greatest black Briton’:

The internet vote was organised by Patrick Vernon in response to the absence of black people in the top 100 of the BBC’s Greatest Briton poll.

“Mary Seacole is one of black history’s unsung heroines,” he said. “She made her way independently to nurse soldiers in the Crimean war, despite being refused passage by the government.

“Her contribution to nursing is as important [as], if not more so… than[,] Florence Nightingale’s, but very few people have ever heard of her.”

David Aaronovitch on the former director-general of the Bleeb:

In Shanghai I was spared the full and inevitable force of many of my journalistic colleagues’ determination to tell the world that Hutton (and not them) had got it all wrong. What I did see on CNN, however, was the weird sight of an outgoing director-general of the BBC glad-handing an insurrectionary crowd of his own ex-employees…

The other odd thing that Greg has done has been to sign up to Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins publishers for a big advance to tell his story…

Now as it happens I was at a dinner with Greg and Tessa Jowell and a number of others back in September… and the one thing that stood out was the vehemence of the then DG’s attack on Murdoch and all his works, and on the government for tolerating the Antipodean-American tycoon. It was a magnificent and heartfelt performance and – doubtless – sincere at the time.

Brad DeLong gets severely taken to task here. Why? Because of this:

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > No.

There’s a thread over there with more than 80 comments on the question, focused round Democrats and Republicans mainly (is my quick impression), rather than, say, anarcho-syndicalists and Maoists, animal libbers and carnivores, or admirers of John Pilger and humanitarian interventionists. Anyhow, it’s one more outing for that normblog profile question.

John Kerry, that’s who. What do I know? I’m not sure whether it’s this:

Larry Sabato, director of the centre for politics at the University of Virginia, described the race as amazing. “Electability has become the alpha and omega of our politics. Democrats are voting for the frontrunner because he is winning. Winning begets winning. Forget about the social myths that Americans root for the underdog.”

Or this:

So far the quite sensible maxim has been that voters are opting for the person most likely to beat George Bush and that this man is John Kerry.

But there’s a problem ahead. Kerry is a northerner and – conventional wisdom has it – a northerner cannot win the presidency because southerners will not vote for them. That’s why all the Democrats who have gained the White House since 1964 have come from southern states, and all those who have come from northern ones have lost.

I just took this test; and I got this result:

Your Brain Usage Profile

Auditory : 73%
Visual : 26%
Left : 52%
Right : 47%

The following is my summary:

Norman, your hemispheric dominance is equally divided between left and right brain, while you show a moderate preference for auditory versus visual learning, signs of a balanced and flexible person.

Your balance gives you the enviable capacity to be verbal and literate while retaining a certain “flair” and individuality. You are logical and compliant but only to a degree. You are organized without being compulsive, goal-directed without being driven, and a “thinking” individual without being excessively so.

The one problem you might have is that your learning might not be as efficient as you would like. At times you will work from the specific to the general, while at other times you’ll work from the general to the specific. Sometimes you will be logical in your approach while at other times random. Since you cannot always control the choice, you may experience frustrations not normally felt by persons with a more defined and directed learning style.

You may also minimally experience conflicts associated with auditory processing. You will be systematic and sequential in your processing of information, you will most often focus on a single dimension of the problem or material, and you will be more reflective, i.e., “taking the data in” as opposed to “devouring” it.

Overall, you should feel content with your life and yourself. You are, perhaps, a little too critical of yourself – and of others – while maintaining an “openness” which is redeeming. Indecisiveness is a problem and your creativity is not in keeping with your potential. Being a pragmatist, you downplay this aspect of yourself and focus on the more immediate, the more obvious and the more functional.

Indecisive, moi? Never. But, then again, maybe deep down…

(Via The Corpus Callosum.)