unbelievable

heckler ejected

So farewell then, free speech. If an 82-year-old man who is clearly not a security threat cannot heckle a speech at a party political conference without being manhandled out of the hall by huge bouncers, then it is clearly a death-knell for free speech, especially when he is subsequently held by the police under the new anti-terrorism legislation.

...the prominent anti-war campaigner Alice Mahon also witnessed the incident.

She said: "We were listening to Jack talking about Iraq. This gentleman shouted 'That's rubbish, that's a lie'.

"Two or three of the security people dived on him. This other chap a couple of rows in front turned round and said 'You must be joking', because this was simple political heckling. He wasn't threatening anybody.

"He got manhandled out as well. I think they were really over the top." [BBC article]

See also: Guardian article

Just did a quick search on Walter Wolfgang (the heckler) - he is a veteran campaigner for Labour CND and a member of the Stop the War Coalition Steering Committee, and widely respected for it. So it's hardly surprising that he should have strong feelings about what Jack Straw was saying about Iraq.

sham 24/7

Can it be right that politicians can hijack music for their own ends? It is a rather dubious honour for any musician to have their cherished composition used to bolster the fast-fading image of Tony Blair. His latest attempt to harness the power of popular culture, in using Sham 69's If The Kids Are United seems especially cheesy given the divisive and repressive tactics he is using to promote his neo-conservative agenda. As a left-wing stalwart quipped, "More like sham 24/7."

Big Brother

philwilson.org: ID cards for what reason?

Good comments by Phil on the security of the national ID cards database issue. Why would it provide more security for us to have ID cards? If all our records are gathered into one place, they will be more easily hacked into by criminals, and it will be easier for terrorists to steal others' identities. (The biometric data is not very reliable.) OK, so at the moment the Government can find out what people are involved in by looking at the various data they hold on them, and probably by searching on the internet to see what forums etc they are involved in. But with this new system, all the data will be in one place - and it will probably be massively inaccurate.

del.icio.us

I've just been introduced to del.icio.us, a great tool for bookmarking things and accessing them from anywhere. No longer are your bookmarks exclusive to one browser on one PC - they are saved on the web, and also you can share them with others. Cool. My account is yewtree.

Trade Justice Campaign

The Co-operative Bank : Trade Justice Campaign: there's nothing free about free trade. Vote now for Trade Justice instead.

weekend in Cornwall

Nick and I went for a romantic weekend to Cornwall, which was lovely except I felt really ill on the first evening, and then the car broke down on the way back, so we did the last 70 miles in a recovery truck! But lots of lovely people tried to help us restart the car; Joe at the Arthurian Centre gave us a jump-start, and the kind ladies at Knightshayes came out and pushed the car, as did some of the visitors in the car park. Knightshayes is a very interesting house; I love the Burges décor, especially the reconstructed room with the bird paintings, and the ornate cupboard in the Great Hall.

On the way down we also visited Killerton, which was great except for the costume exhibition which was difficult to follow because the exhibits were numbered instead of labelled, so each time you wanted to find out what something was, you had to refer to a separate list and by that time you had forgotten what number it was. This is especially bad for people who are both long- and short-sighted (another lady who was looking at the exhibition had this problem) and people with dyslexia. I find it tiring even though I don't have either of these issues.

But we went to Boscastle - the Witchcraft Museum was as splendid as before the flood and we saw Gerald Gardner's hat and sword. Also bought two books about the Cochrane tradition, very interesting. Ended up reading half of the first one while waiting for the recovery truck.

We did lots of walking by the sea and admiring the waves crashing, and ate very nice food in the Manor House in Boscastle and the Old Malthouse Inn in Tintagel. We stayed in the Riverside Hotel, which has a very high standard of rooms, and delicious and massive breakfasts. They also do carveries, but unfortunately I was still feeling a bit delicate when this was on offer.

On Saturday we did a big walk round Boscastle, up to the headland and Forrabury Stitches (a common with medieval strip-fields), then into Boscastle Church, across to Minster Wood, and back down to the car-park. In Minster Wood there was an island where people had built little stacks of stone. The devastation wreaked by the flood of 16th August 2004 was still apparent though, lots of debris up against the trees, and the banks ripped up. We also saw a lovely green man sculpture in the woods there. The village itself is pretty much back to normal and open for business - only the Youth Hostel, the Harbour Light shop, and Things have not yet re-opened (not that I was planning on going into Harbour Light anyway!)

fiction forum

send gumboots: a collaborative fiction forum

After a discussion with Balador & Meadicus, we decided to create a collaborative fiction forum. It also has a slot for people to post scifaiku (science fiction haiku).

condensed milk and honey

100-minute Bible launched

I'm not sure what to think about this. The Bible (especially the King James version with its sonorous poetry) is - or used to be - part of our culture. OK, so I haven't read Leviticus or some of the obscurer prophets, and I skipped all the lists of who begat whom, but I have read most of the rest of it, and even though I am a Pagan, I still think it is part of our culture. It inspired loads of art and music, the legal system is based on it, and so on. Apparently a huge percentage of young people have no idea what happened at Easter. Actually I remember when I was at school, there was a Jewish girl in my class, and neither she nor the rest of the class had any idea what was the main doctrinal difference between Judaism and Christianity. (I did.)

I think people should be aware of the beliefs of the world's religions, at least in outline. Hmm, must get around to reading the Koran and the Guru Granth Sahib etc. I have read the Tao Te Ching (highly recommended). I suppose the 100-minute Bible will give people an idea of what Christianity is about, but it removes the poetry and the diversity of styles found in the original - which, whatever you think of the content, is a great work of English literature. And more credit should be given to William Tyndale's version, as much of the text of the King James Version is based on it. And look at all the everyday phrases people use which come from the Bible - "land of milk and honey", "the meek shall inherit the earth" and so on. AS Byatt wrote a short story about this, bemoaning the loss of these phrases from our speech. The one I particularly remember her quoting was "Here is the butter in a lordly dish" - apparently from the story of Jael, who killed her husband with a tent-spike (after bringing him the butter in a lordly dish). There's also a painting of Jael in the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth.

I also wish people were more aware of what Paganisms are about, especially the philosophical aspects. It makes my brain hurt sometimes having conversations about theology with people who just don't get my worldview. I encountered a refreshing change recently on a train, in the person of a Muslim chap, who was very well-informed. However, we ended up talking about Islam and how it is widely misinterpreted - but then that is always a hot topic.

that's cheating

So that's how she stays so thin!

topical

Guardian Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson

Worth a read, though bizarrely the interviewer claims that Robinson's books are all set in America - so they haven't read Years of Rice and Salt, then?

Robinson's latest book is about a flood overwhelming a large American city - that was particularly prescient of him.

scary things

Things I really should get my head around...

• Inner and outer joins in databases
• Programming (working on this one)
• PhotoShop

I once went to an interview where I was asked the difference between inner and outer joins in SQL. Er.... dunno. The scariest thing was that the person who asked me this bore an uncanny resemblance to Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen. Don't try to explain it to me (the inner and outer joins, not the uncanny resemblance).

ethnic cleansing

More evidence of the mass extermination of eastern Germans:

The Open Wound by Samuel D Sinner
The Expulsion by Erik Edelstamm

There should be a memorial for these people. OK, so some of them had settled in Eastern Europe on the basis of Hitler's Lebensraum policy; but many of them had been there since the Austro-Hungarian Empire and even the Middle Ages. East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia had been German areas since the 13th century. There is official denial that this even happened, but there are eyewitness accounts and documents.

Apparently it's not politically correct to mention this particular genocide, as it's often used as an argument by neo-Nazi revisionists and deniers of the Holocaust. However, the way I see it is, genocide is genocide is genocide. Just because these people happened to be Germans, doesn't mean they were worth less than other people. Most of them were civilians - farmers and artisans.

There needs to be a process like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which dealt with both black and white people who had committed murder during the apartheid era, even though the apartheid system was set up by whites. The Czechs have apologised and put up a memorial in 1990, but the rest of Eastern Europe has yet to follow suit. Haven't they heard of the saying "Two wrongs don't make a right"?

bums on pews

By their adverts shall ye know them... (BBC)

I quite liked the Che Guevara version of Jesus, it was a lot cooler than most of the adverts (usually involving really bad puns) that you see outside churches.

However, the problem with a lot of church services is that they simply do not provide genuine spiritual experiences, which is why so many people are looking for alternatives.