The piece is all about documenting vaccinations worldwide, and the assumption that people should be encouraged to travel is a given.
We're barraged with articles about climate change, full of demands that we cut back on all sorts of things, but here we are, already traveling much less. Why don't we assume that's a good thing — a wonderful accomplishment — and speak only of restraining ourselves from getting back to the pre-pandemic practice of blithely jetting about the planet?
I'm glad to see that the comments at the NYT are full of this opinion:
"With climate change increasingly being shown to be an existential threat, we should NOT be trying to "jump start" any additional travel whatsoever. It's time to set priorities, and then act like they are a priorities. I know the argument for more travel is related to the economy, as always. The earth cannot support economic growth forever," "Unleashing worldwide travel is exactly the wrong idea in the era of Climate Crisis. The argument that travel is essential to healthy economies is similarly wrong headed. The cost of forever climate emergencies is incalculable by today’s standards," "My immediate reaction to the headline - confirmed in the essay - is that this is completely wrong-headed. Less travel is a good thing, not a bad thing - good for the planet, good for individuals. Yes it is hard on places that depend on tourism ... but eliminating coal-fired plants is hard on places that depend on coal mining. Some necessary travel will resume and some pleasure travel will resume, but if there is less, it will be good for the world as a whole," etc. etc.
ADDED: I'm looking at the Wikipedia entry for "Poodle." It begins: "For the political insult, see Poodle (insult). For the security vulnerability, see POODLE. For the archaeological site in Peru, see Kanichi, Peru."
In politics, "poodle" is an insult used to describe a politician who obediently or passively follows the lead of others....
In June 2001, Colette Avital unsuccessfully tried to have the term's use banned from the Knesset.
During the 2000s, it was used against Tony Blair with regard to his close relationship with George W. Bush, and the UK's involvement in the Iraq War. In July 2002, singer George Michael infamously used it in his song "Shoot the Dog", the video of which showed Blair as a "poodle" on the lawn of the White House....
Check it out:
That's really something. I don't know if you can make it through the whole thing. (I couldn't.) But it's interesting to go back to the day — this video is less than a year after 9/11 — when George W. Bush was vilified as a dangerous war monger and a complete idiot.
Let's go to the blog archives. It's nice to have a "plagiarism" tag that lets me pull out so many old conversations about plagiarism that were prompted by various things over the years. (The links are on the numbers.)
1. "The internet is changing the way students think about plagiarism... or — I would add — they way they lie about it."
2. "Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength; if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information."
3. "The real fault is not making it a point always to write sharp, distinctive prose. Prose like the stuff [Maureen] Dowd lifted called out for rewriting. She might not have known to think I can't use that because I didn't write it. But she should at least have thought I can't use that because it's dull."
4. "'[T]here is a big difference between being a plagiarist — at bottom, lazy or sloppy — and being a fabulist.' It's tougher to make things up than to copy, and yet it's Lehrer who's screwed himself more deeply."
5. "'To coin a phrase, in the spirit of the vice president-elect, you can't always get what you want, but you get what you need,' Alito said, an imperfect rendering of a Rolling Stones lyric. Then, he added, 'Did someone say that before?'"
6."My dear, it's called an allusion. The error isn't stealing, it's assuming people get it."
7. "Jerry Seinfeld's late-night rant about his wife's cookbook rival was no joke to the author's family."
8. "When you are discovered, I want you to claim — really sincerely — that you actually mistakenly believed that you remembered the incident as if it had happened to you. You can be all: 'I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me.'"
9. "How is it possible for someone in [Fareed Zakaria's] position to make a mistake of that kind? The risk far outweighs any convenience in copying material like this. It can't be deliberate."
10. "Once you’ve been busted for making stuff up, you need to be sure that what you publish is reasonably accurate... though I suppose that passing on other people’s fabrications is arguably a modest improvement over creating his own."
11. "Should Coldplay be able to force Hoepfner to take down his accusatory video and apologize, or do we think it's a nice resolution of the controversy for Coldplay to escape unsued and for Hoepfner to have his viral video to leverage his band to whatever degree of fame it can get out of this amusing little artistic squabble?"
12. "'I think that’s the way Bob Dylan has always written songs.... It’s part of the folk process, even if you look from his first album until now.' Well, theft itself is a traditional 'process,' but it would still piss me off if someone robbed me, either with a six gun or a fountain pen. At least Dylan called an album 'Love and Theft,' and he's repeatedly presented himself as a thief in various lyrics. To have Bob Dylan steal some of your phrases and the Dylan fanatics ferret out the connection he declined to tell us about is to get publicity you never would have gotten otherwise."
13. "When you accuse a 6-year-old of plagiarism in an art contest, you'd better be ready to make a decision to disqualify her and stick to it. You've besmirched her, and you can't unbesmirch her. Oh, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service! You idiots!"
14. Rush Limbaugh appropriates my question, without attribution.
15. "And if our good opinion of him is based mainly on his speeches, then we have reason to examine why we're supporting him. But politics is full of stock phrases, contagious memes, and brainstormed messages."
16. "Obama defends his use of a couple lines given him by his associate Duval Patrick. 'This is where we start getting into the silly season in politics.'"
Here are the things that jumped out as I watched "Meet the Press." this morning.
1. At the end of a discussion of the Boston bombing, David Gregory asks "[W]hat are you really focused on that you’d like the intelligence community and the FBI to answer?"
REP. PETER KING: I think it’s important to know are there other people involved in this threat? Are there others that are still out there?... Are there family members or people in-- in the community? That’s very important to find out. Also, what did cause them to radicalize? Was it done here? Was it done overseas? Was it done over the internet? What caused that to happen? How can we stop it in the future? Also ask why the FBI is not cooperating more with the law enforcement? Why they did not give vital evidence to the NYPD about another possible attack.
GREGORY: This is that you think a failure that needs to be learned from?
REP. KING: Absolutely. Absolute failure.
2. Chuck Todd, talking about Obama's routine at the Washington Correspondents Dinner:
"... and you may disagree with those decisions but they were made because I genuinely believed them to be right."
Said Tony Blair, as if a religious person can think about what what he believes is right without religion being part of the idea of what is right. That Blair blur happened in a debate with Christopher Hitchens, who asked:
"Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs, to appeal to our fear and to our guilt — is it good for the world?...
"To terrify children with the image of hell ... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?...
In the end, the audience got to vote on who won the debate, and Hitchens got 68% — 68% of those who would go to a debate — in Toronto — about whether or not religion is a force for the good.
A hilarious use of YouTube (found via Drudge). I'm jumping over the first minute or so to make it funnier, but feel free to drag the slider back to the beginning if you're the leisurely sort:
Declaiming from atop her white horse, her legs now conspicuously parted as she straddles the jittery, stamping animal, she invokes God and country, blood and honor, life and death, bringing to mind at once Joan of Arc, Henry V, Winston Churchill and Tony Blair in one gaspingly unbelievable, cinematically climactic moment. The queenly body quakes as history and fantasy explode.
A lurid sort of Christopher Hitchens vision of history pervades Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Shekhar Kapur’s sequel to his 1998 art-house hit Elizabeth.
Christopher Hitchens? He's everywhere. (Omnipresent.)
The earlier film, which made a star of Cate Blanchett as the eponymous Virgin Queen, celebrated the triumph of bright, happy Elizabethan Protestantism over the dark, unwholesome Catholic world of Bloody Mary. Even so, that film’s church-bashing was tame compared that of this sequel, in which everything bad, evil and corrupt in the world ultimately is ultimately the bitter fruit of Religion. And by Religion, I mean Catholicism....
In attacking England, Philip [II of Spain] is convinced that he’s on a mission from God: “England is enslaved to the devil,” he declares. “We must set her free.” Certain that God is on his side as he leads his nation into a holy war that becomes a debacle, Philip couldn’t be a blacker, nuttier Hollywood villain if his middle initial were W.
Wait. Isn't Spain al Qaeda?
Other flirtations with topicality in this pre-election year include assassins and conspirators praying secretly in a foreign language while plotting their murderous attacks, and the Machiavellian Sir Francis Walsingham (returning Geoffrey Rush) torturing a captured conspirator during an interrogation. (Tom Hollander, who costarred with Rush in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, is running around somewhere in this picture, an odd juxtaposition in another film that ends with a sea battle with cannons.)
The film does go on to concede that the Spanish have other grievances against the English besides religion, such as the Queen’s tolerant stance on English pirates like Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) raiding Spanish ships.
Sex, religion, politics, pirates... Let's go to the movies!
'The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don't have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you've got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,' Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton... 'The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."'...
Blair added: 'How are [we] oppressing them? You're oppressing them when you support the people who are trying to blow them up.'
Blair, who normally chooses his language carefully when he talks about Islamists, also takes a swipe at critics who accused him of undermining civil liberties. 'When I'm trying to change the law in order to make it easier to deport people who engage in terrorism - the idea that that's an assault on hundreds of years of British civil liberties is completely absurd. Some of what is written on this is loopy-loo in its extremism.'
Normally chooses his language carefully. Maybe he still is. "Absurd" is sometimes the right word.
"In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no one dares miss out," said Tony Blair.
"I’ve made this speech after much hesitation,” he said. “I know it will be rubbished in certain quarters. But I also know this has needed to be said.”
.. Mr. Blair’s criticism today seemed unusually blunt, as he assailed sensationalism, “the confusion of news and commentary,” an alleged lack of balance in British reporting and over-simplification. “Things, people, issues, stories, are all black and white,” he said. “Life’s usual gray is almost entirely absent....
He continued: “I do believe this relationship between public life and media is now damaged in a manner that requires repair. The damage saps the country’s confidence and self-belief; it undermines its assessment of itself, its institutions; and, above all, it reduces our capacity to take the right decisions, in the right spirit for our future.”
My first instinct -- feral, I suppose -- is to rubbish this. Public figures will always complain about the press, and competition among media is the marketplace of ideas. What's new is that the media itself is subjected to instant and vigorous scrutiny.
The decision, by a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, was a sharp rebuke for the F.C.C. and for the Bush administration. For the four television networks that filed the lawsuit — Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC — it was a major victory in a legal and cultural battle that they are waging with the commission and its supporters.
Under President Bush, the F.C.C. has expanded its indecency rules, taking a much harder line on obscenities uttered on broadcast television and radio. While the judges sent the case back to the commission to rewrite its indecency policy, it said that it was “doubtful” that the agency would be able to “adequately respond to the constitutional and statutory challenges raised by the networks.”
It all started with Bono:
Beginning with the F.C.C.’s indecency finding in a case against NBC for a vulgarity uttered by the U2 singer Bono during the Golden Globes awards ceremony in 2003, President Bush’s Republican and Democratic appointees to the commission have imposed a tougher policy by punishing any station that broadcast a fleeting expletive....
Reversing decades of a more lenient policy, the commission had found that the mere utterance of certain words implied that sexual or excretory acts were carried out and therefore violated the indecency rules.
But the judges said vulgar words are just as often used out of frustration or excitement, and not to convey any broader obscene meaning. “In recent times even the top leaders of our government have used variants of these expletives in a manner that no reasonable person would believe referenced sexual or excretory organs or activities.”
Adopting an argument made by lawyers for NBC, the judges then cited examples in which Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had used the same language that would be penalized under the policy. Mr. Bush was caught on videotape last July using a common vulgarity that the commission finds objectionable in a conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. Three years ago, Mr. Cheney was widely reported to have muttered an angry obscene version of “get lost” to Senator Patrick Leahy on the floor of the United States Senate.
Yeah, stick it to Bush and Cheney.
I love the way the NYT seems enthused about this new liberation in media but still can't print "Go f*ck yourself." (Me neither, but I'm only using the asterisk out of fear of what filters might do to me.)
“We find that the F.C.C.’s new policy regarding ‘fleeting expletives’ fails to provide a reasoned analysis justifying its departure from the agency’s established practice,” said the panel.
So this is not a First Amendment decision, though the majority does say “We question whether the F.C.C.’s indecency test can survive First Amendment scrutiny.” The court is finding fault with the process of developing the new policy. In dissent, Judge Pierre Leval stressed the "the deference courts must give to the reasoning of a duly authorized administrative agency": "The commission’s position is not irrational; it is not arbitrary and capricious.”
The case involved findings that the networks had violated the indecency rules for comments by Cher and Nicole Richie on the Billboard Music Awards, the use of expletives by the character Andy Sipowicz on “NYPD Blue” and a comment on “The Early Show” by a contestant from CBS’s reality show “Survivor.”
So Bono opened the door and now every nitwit celebrity and reality show half-celebrity will be saying "f*ck" on the slightest provocation. The networks say it's up to you to decide what shows to watch, so... good luck figuring out what to let your kids watch.
Bush and Blair in the Rose Garden. Poignant, almost tragic. I don't have a transcript yet, but I was listening to part of this on C-Span radio as I was driving in my car.
Bush said that he's read three biographies of George Washington in the last year and isn't it interesting that they are still analyzing what the first President did? If they're still trying to understand that now, it means that the final interpretation of what he has done will be written long after he is gone. So, he says, he feels confident in what he is doing, despite all the criticism. It's based on sound philosophical ideas, he said, and eventually people will see that he was right.
At some distance there were protesters, and Tony Blair said he couldn't quite hear what they were saying but he imagined it wasn't complimentary. Blair brought a light, humorous touch that contrasted with Bush's profession of deep commitment to philosophy and history. Blair expressed more concern for the people who think he was wrong about Iraq, though he still says the war was right, and of course he articulates the reasons why it was right so much better than Bush can. Everywhere in the world, Blair says, when people have been given the choice of what kind of government they want, they choose freedom and democracy, not a secular dictatorship or religious fundamentalism. I'm not so sure that's true, but it's always so beautiful when someone says it is.
Indeed, Mr. Blair has likened his successor to “a great clunking fist” of a politician who will lead Labor into battle against the polished Conservative leader, David Cameron.
From his body language, slumped on the benches of Parliament, Mr. Brown sometimes seems dour and troubled, at times conspiratorial. His speeches evoke the Protestant ethnic of hard work and decency bred by his Scottish upbringing.
Sir Andrew Turnbull, a former senior colleague at the Exchequer, Britain’s treasury department, once described Mr. Brown’s management style as Stalinist. Mr. Brown’s adversaries depict him as brusque and reclusive. To some, he resembles a dark prince who has waited a decade for his throne only to see his inheritance devalued by an unpopular war in Iraq, hints of economic troubles and a loss of trust in his party.
That's the idea of UK Children's Minister Beverley Hughes -- who looks remarkably like Ross Perot in a wig:
Those who fail to read stories or sing to their youngsters threaten their children's future and the state must put them right, Children's Minister Beverley Hughes said.
Their children's well-being is at risk 'unless we act', she declared.
And Mrs Hughes said the state would train a new 'parenting workforce' to ensure parents who fail to do their duty with nursery rhymes are found and 'supported'.
Amusing quotes on "supported."
The call for state intervention in the minute details of family life followed a series of Labour efforts to reduce anti-social behaviour and improve educational standards by imposing rigorous controls on the lives of the youngest children.
Mrs Hughes has established a national curriculum to set down how babies are taught to speak in childcare from the age of three months.
Her efforts have gone alongside a push by other ministers to determine exactly how parents treat their children down to how they should brush their teeth.
Tony Blair has backed the idea of 'fasbos' - efforts to identify and correct the lives of children who are likely to fail even before they are born - and new laws to compel parents to attend parenting classes are on the way.
This autumn is likely to see an extension of parenting orders that can force parents to attend parenting classes so that they can be used on the say so of local councils against parents.
For the first time, parenting orders are likely to be directed against parents whose children have committed no criminal offence.
The threat of action against parents who fail to sing nursery rhymes was unveiled by Mrs Hughes as she gave the first details of Mr Blair's 'national parenting academy', a body that will train teachers, psychologists and social workers to intervene in the lives of families and become the 'parenting workforce'.
How utterly alien! That could never happen here, right?
I refrained from singing to my kids because I believed that I sang off key and that I would cause them to have a poor sense of pitch. Was I right or wrong? I don't know. But I used my judgment. I also refrained from playing children's songs after I got the idea that rock and roll songs from the 50s and 60s were kind of like children's songs but were much more appealing. I can just imagine how I would have flipped out if some government functionary had tried to instruct me that I was wrong.
Of course, the government agent would have no intellectual depth about what was good and bad and no ability to discuss it. She -- it would be a she, don't you think? -- would only insist that I follow the instructions. And if the day comes when the experts decide that children need to learn how to think for themselves, will there be anyone around who even knows how to do it?
Tony Blair says God and history will judge whether he was right to go to war in Iraq, according to the transcript of a television interview to be broadcast Saturday.
In a rare reference to his Christian religious faith, Blair told broadcaster Michael Parkinson he had struggled with his conscience over the decision.
When asked about sending troops to Iraq, he said: "That decision has to be taken and has to be lived with, and in the end there is a judgment that -- well, I think if you have faith about these things then you realize that judgment is made by other people," he said.
Asked to explain what he meant, Blair replied: "If you believe in God, it's made by God as well."
Parkinson asked Blair if he prayed to God when he decided to go to war in Iraq.
Blair replied: "Well, I don't want to get into something like that."
Pressed on the subject he answered: "Of course you struggle with your own conscience about it because people's lives are affected and it's one of these situations that I suppose very few people ever find themselves in.
"In the end you do what you think is the right thing."
That is a very minor reference to God, dragged out of him by the reporter.
His submission to the judgement of God goes against years of warnings from advisers, says the Independent - not to mix politics and religion.
The Daily Mirror sees his TV interview with Michael Parkinson as "remarkable".
"The Judgement Day is some way off," it says, "but the judgement of the British people is critical of a bloody invasion as the death toll mounts."
The real issue here is whether we were right to go to war and, more importantly, how best to deal with the current state of things. Worrying about Blair's slight reference to religious belief shows either an aversion to religion or the usual pointless grasping for political arguments.
Tony Blair spoke out yesterday about stamping out the virulent version of Islam that (apparently) led to the 7/7 bombings:
Talks are to begin on bringing in new laws covering preparations for attacks and to make it easier to deport people trying to "incite hatred", he told MPs.
The "moderate and true voice of Islam" had to be mobilised, he said....
"This is not an isolated criminal act we are dealing with," he said.
"It is an extreme and evil ideology whose roots lie in a perverted and poisonous misinterpretation of the religion of Islam."...
Those behind the bombings were perverting the teachings of Islam, he argued....
Of course, I understand his motivation for saying this, and I agree with his opposition to a dangerous, violent ideology, but how can he say what the true intepretation of a religion is? I realize Britain does not have as robust an approach to the separation of church and state as we have, and I can see the role of government promoting the more socially beneficial versions of religion -- quite apart from the truth -- but who is Tony Blair to say what is the "true" version and what is the perversion?
If the bombers' version was in fact the more accurate interpretation of the Islamic tradition and moderating fundamentalism was the perversion, he'd be for the perversion, wouldn't he?
I had the satellite radio tuned to BBC all day today, and I heard a lot of interviews with persons on the street in London. They were being asked: do you think you'll be able to get home? how do today's attacks make you feel? and will you come in to work tomorrow? Person after person displayed exactly the same attitude: an almost cheerful faith in the ability to get home somehow, crisp but not emotive anger about the attacks, and an uncomplicated intention to come back to work tomorrow just as they would any other day. No sobbing or even mild whining. No despair whatsoever. Inspiring!
"It is a very sad day for the British people but we will hold true to the British way of life.
"It is through terrorism that the people who have committed this terrible act express their values and it is right at this moment that we demonstrate ours."
Well said.
STILL MORE: Slate gathers some London attitude, blogger-style. From the freely expressive, feisty Nosemonkey:
"I tell you what, if this is an 'Islamic' terrorist attack, they're doing a piss-poor job. The pubs are all packed out, people sipping their pints happily, all a tad pissed off, but basically fine with it," he noted at 2:05 p.m. "Nice one, Al Quaeda - you profess to be from a teetotal religion, and you've given the pub trade a massive mid-week boost. … Other than causing the grief of too many innocent people, these cunts will have achieved precisely fuck all. We shall not be moved."
And scroll down to the pictures at 23:20:
Nearly time for bed. All I ask is that we don't forget the others who have died today, from whom those bastard terrorists managed to distract our attention.
The White House briefing room is a mess, plus, it's rather silly, per Elisabeth Bumiller:
The last major renovation of the press room was in the Reagan administration, when the television-ready oval backdrop with the words "The White House - Washington" was first hung behind the press secretary's head. (Somehow, the gimmick never caught on with other world leaders. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia does not conduct news conferences with a backdrop that says "The Kremlin - Moscow," and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain has never appeared with a "10 Downing Street" logo behind his head.)
I was just listening to C-Span's re-airing of the press conference that took place yesterday in Baghdad with Tony Blair and Iyad Allawi. Blair's brilliance as a speaker always amazes me. My intense admiration for his speaking is tinged with the pain of the comparison to President Bush, whose gift for communication is modest. If only Bush could speak like Blair, it seems, things would go much better. I know Blair has his troubles back home, but I marvel at his capacity to inspire. This part of the press conference particularly impressed me, as a reporter tries to pin him with a hard question:
Q: Nick Robinson, ITV News: Can you just give us a sense of your feelings today? You flew here in secrecy under armed protection into what is still a safe zone more than a year and a half after Saddam fell. Can you honestly say to yourself, this is what I meant to bring about when I said that we ought to invade Iraq?
Tony Blair: That's a good question. I'll tell you exactly what I felt coming in. Security is really heavy - you can feel the sense of danger that people live in here.
He takes a very long pause here -- long enough to make you worry that he's going to crack and reveal his despair.
But what I felt more than anything else was this - the danger that people feel here is coming from terrorists and insurgents who are trying to destroy the possibility of this country becoming a democracy.
Now where do we stand in that fight? We stand on the side of the democrats against the terrorists. And so when people say to me, well look at the difficulties, look at the challenges - I say well what's the source of that challenge - the source of that challenge is a wicked, destructive attempt to stop this man, this lady, all these people from Iraq, who want to decide their own future in a democratic way, having that opportunity.
And where should the rest of the world stand? To say, well that's your problem, go and look after it, or you're better off with Saddam Hussein running the country - as if the only choice they should have in the world is a choice between a brutal dictator killing hundreds of thousands of people or terrorists and insurgents.
There is another choice for Iraq - the choice is democracy, the choice is freedom - and our job is to help them get there because that's what they want. Sometimes when I see some of the reporting of what's happening in Iraq in the rest of the world, I just feel that people should understand how precious what has been created here is. And those people from that electoral commission that I described as the heroes of the new Iraq - every day... a lot of them aren't living in the Green Zone, they've got to travel in from outside - they do not know at any point in time, whether they're going to be subject to brutality or intimation even death and yet they carry on doing it. Now what a magnificent example of the human spirit - that's the side we should be on.
UPDATE: An emailer suggests that Tony Blair comes across as too slick when you have to hear him all the time. Conceivably, Bush's imperfect, but strong and heartfelt speech is more effective.
ANOTHER UPDATE: The link above is to the text of the press conference, but you can watch the streaming video here. The delivery is a big part of the effect.
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