Man, I really want to see Mike Gravel as U.S. President

This video is absolutely insane but is quite entertaining - love the ‘military-industrial complex’ speech bit at the end too.. It seems to be quite legit given that Gravel has it on his webpage:

Fitna (English Language version)

Ideologically rather corrupt and shallow, this film doesn’t really make much of a point beyond ‘extremists are bad’ which one would imagine is rather self-apparent. While it has some impact, mainly through using footage from some real-life executions, any person with a brain should be able to see through the blatant racism and short-sightedness of Geert Wilder’s film. There’s an intersting article about it on the BBC here and it certainly shows what the BBC is talking about in terms of his ability to generate interest - as I write this, the film has been seen 410,211 times on the host website alone. And that doesn’t take into account other language variations.

Just to be clear, I’m posting this out of interest in the topic and the controversy it has generated. Not out of any belief in Mr.Wilder’s ideas. I’m also doing this because I think that silencing talk becuase religious extremists don’t like the content of a video is a bad thing and should be opposed on principle if nothing else.

George Bush don’t like black people

Man, I hadn’t heard this before but it’s great… A remix of the Kanye West’s ‘Gold Digger’ …

‘The Word’ on Obama’s ‘Race Speech’

Cian’s already talked about this, but Obama does it funnier (sorry Cian) (Also, I apologise for the fact that ‘funnier’ isn’t correct English)

The UCCSU elections

It’s been an interesting few days in UCC which owing to illness (including an eye infection) I haven’t been around for. However, voting for the new Students Union which took place over the Tuesday and Wednesday has resulted in a man, who to put it mildly, is a fuckwit, getting the Presidency. A friend of mine described him thus:

”For Christ’s sake it’s like some nightmarish state where Mike Huckabee won the Republican primaries and has Ron Paul as his running mate”

Now, one of the interesting things about this particular candidate was that they ran on a very explicitly ‘anti-SU’ platform. Whether it was down to their mobilising of individuals or just that the amount of the candidates actually got people interested in the elections, for once the turnout was surprisingly high. Some 4000 up from 1400 last year. The person who won did so with only 135 votes so you can’t give them all the credit for the turnout.

To some extent, the candidate has proven their point which is that you can get people interested in the SU. However, their method of doing so was by saying ”it’ll be funny to fuck with the only body that actually represents students”. Also, they generally preyed on general student stupidity. Talking to a class of first years he said he would get 2€ vodka’s in the college bars. Given that these bars leak money as it is, how such a thing is possible is beyond me. Another promise of his was a 24/7 library. Talking to a guy in my class who seemed quite taken by this idea, I pointed out that it wasn’t like the previous SU’s had been not interested in such a policy and that such thing required massive problems with financing, contracts and unions. But hey, I’m just glad I won’t be in UCC next year…

Granted, he may have a point that the body could do more but how exactly you can do that while doing your job properly remains beyond me. For those people who follow student politics, UCC will be an interesting test case for the immediate future.

Myth of the Liberal Nanny State

I’ll really have to stop posting links from Alternet soon but before I get there…

Among the most fanciful is the notion that conservatives are self-reliant actors who embrace a private sector free from government meddling. Supposedly, the right is content to take on the free-market with strength and skill, and let the chips fall where they may, while liberals look to the state to be their protective nanny, there to iron out the wrinkles of a dynamic, entrepreneurial society

A quick example of how the deck is stacked in certain ways:

Now what they could have done — and this would have been a true free trade policy — they could have said, “Look, there are a lot of very smart people in Mexico and China and India. And they can be doctors, lawyers, accountants and economists, and they would drive down costs in those areas enormously.” We’d get our health care for much, much less — we’d save hundreds of billions of dollars per year — our college tuition would fall, because we’d pay college professors much less. We could make the whole thing transparent — set up standards to make sure that we get the same quality of doctors.

Enormous savings for the United States — a great free trade story — but instead of putting downward pressure on the wages of our auto workers, we’d be putting downward pressure on the wages of our highest earners. If we brought our wage structure for doctors just down to European levels, you’d be talking about saving $80 billion per year. That’s a big chunk of our health care bill right there. But no one talks about that, and that’s a classic example of framing the debate about what “free” trade is.

You can read the article here and download the PDF book here

Does Snuff Exist?

Surprisingly good documentary on horror movies and supposed ’snuff’ movies. Granted, at the start it’s more of a history of certain types of ‘video nasties’ than about snuff itself but as it goes along it shows how there have been ‘possible examples’ of snuff. Interesting also is the ‘chicken or egg’ question. Does demand creaty supply or supply demand? The moors murders example was one I hadn’t heard before.

Just some quick thoughts on the BBC interview with George W. Bush

It’s a pretty good interview and you can see the whole thing here.
Just a few things that I found interesting -Bush has a very utilitarian ‘end’s justify the means’ view of a lot of his policies. It just comes across in a lot of the things he says and the language he uses, especially relating to Iraq but also to Africa. There’s also the oddest echoes of Jimmy Carter in terms of how he talks about the ‘higher realism of helping Africa’ in the sense that securing African well-being safeguards America’s national interest. What’s also interesting to see is how surprisingly affable Bush is. Nearly too much at times such as when he off-handedly refers to the ‘Dali Lama crowd’ & uses the word ’suicider’ which is just .. awkward. Anyway, I still think he’s a horrible excuse for a President but it’s worth a look.

Reasons to be cheerful?

Very interesting article from the Economist as to why the world is getting better:

In China 25 years ago, over 600m people—two-thirds of the population—were living in extreme poverty (on $1 a day or less). Now, the number on $1 a day is below 180m. In the world as a whole, a stunning 135m people escaped dire poverty between 1999 and 2004. This is more than the population of Japan or Russia—and more people, more quickly than at any other time in history.

Poverty alleviation has gone hand in hand with improvements in basic services. Digging canals and building water-treatment plants has increased the number of people with access to safe water: in South Asia, for instance, the number of those without clean water has been nearly halved since 1990. Thanks to this, and to better public-health provision, the rate at which people die from infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis is falling in most poor countries, Africa excepted.

That in turn has cut child mortality. In 2007 Unicef, the United Nations child-welfare body, said that for the first time in modern history fewer than 10m children were dying each year before the age of five. That is still an awful lot but it represents a fall of a quarter since 1990. Life expectancy has increased a bit in low- and middle-income countries. The long march to literacy is nearing an end: three-quarters of people aged 15-25 were literate in 1975; now the rate is nearly nine-tenths.

Lou Dobbs and ‘Esteban Colberto’

Sorry for two of these posts after each other but this is just too funny: