Draw Breath

The Indian courts shouldn't stop here. They should ban mobile phones and boats too.

A minor furore today over whether or not Coldplay has copied Joe Satriani's If I Could Fly with their song Viva La Vida. I have to say that close aural scrutiny does reveal a similar chord progression and melody line in parts. However, If I Could Fly is not the most memorable tune ever. Pleasant and all as it is, Viva la Vida is not one of Coldplay's strongest numbers either. In fact, I would be inclined to believe Coldplay when they say any similarity is coincidental. No danger of similarities between tunes during Coldplay's concert in Dublin on 14 September with Girls Aloud and Jay-Z as support. An eclectic mix which could make or break the evening!

What an interesting, nuanced corrective this piece by Mahmood Mamdani makes to the bizarre claptrap being spoken on this Slugger thread about African tribalism (never mind incredible shite about 'the people of Africa' and 'African pastoral culture').

On intervention in Zimbabwe, am I mad in thinking that there's a difference between sitting in Belfast (or York) demanding military intervention and actually figuring out a way that you could intervene in a country somewhat larger than Germany and be positive that you won't make matters even worse than they are?  After all, the lessons of the last decade are not uniformly positive.

If you can't really take the leap from saying that something must be done to actually figuring out what it is that can be done, then - sadly - inaction as events play out might be the wisest course.

My mood about Ireland is not good today. I more or less have the same feeling about the place as I did, just before I high-tailed it to England, when Dublin Bus added 20% to the length of my route home and then charged me 20% more for the privilege of being cooped up for longer in their sodding fume wagons.

So, here's my gripe:

1. We market tourism on 'Ireland of the welcomes' and then gouge tourists for every penny/cent they have in return for warm chips and cafetieres filled with instant coffee.
2. We take money from the EU but, once we become net contributors, we tell them to piss right off.
3. We re-elect a venal government that talked down to us about supply and demand when their mates were gouging us but has switched to lecturing us about our patriotic duties now that we've been high-tailing it to shop in foreign parts (you know, Newry).
4. And now, oh now, having marketed Irish farm produce as somehow more natural than that from your average swamp, we reveal that we've been adding industrial oil to the livestock's swill. Which really undermines the brochure.

The Irish. Sometimes we lack a touch of class.

Another day, another template. I decided that I didn't like Plurlalism as much as I had originally thought (it seemed oddly crowded) so I've opted for the Barlow theme. I think I might try to widen the main window a bit, but apart from that it seems nice and sedate. Like me!

I'm not sure I agree with all that he has to say, but Michael Taft's outline of an alternative to the government's lunacy is certainly worth a read, if only to highlight that there are alternatives to the government's lunacy.

I don't have time to go through it at all today, but I suppose the one criticism I would have is that I'm not sure whether this would provide Ireland with the dig-out it needs. Specifically, while it may help alleviate the repercussions of the countries property orgy, Ireland alone can never attend to the major problem: the death of the wholesale banking market (and death it seems to be) will require either banks entirely reshaping their business models along the much more restricted Captain Mannering model, which will take a massive adjustment in the global economy or it will require states coming together to underpin the wholesale markets themselves.

Of course, the Irish government prefers free-riding to international cooperation so they will most likely not even be involved in any international action. And meanwhile, Irish banks are still likely to go to their predictable hell in an only partly self-made handbasket.

The Big Picture has some incredible photos from the decade-old International Space Station.

h/t Gavin.

By the way, this has to be the strangest US election correlation I've seen so far.

I think the think or swim blog has got Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney down just right. So how depressing to see Harry McGee (who, or whose editor, ought to know better) giving them a puff piece in today's Irish Times. Now, I'm not going to weigh in on ‘inaccuracies in An Inconvenient Truth’ = ‘climate change is a sham’ claims or on the idea that there’s a scientific debate over anthropogenic climate change. The climate change debate is over: there is no reasonable disagreement remaining even if we have to listen to bullshit generated by special interests and their ideological shills.
But what really makes my blood boil is that McGee lets them get away with the old canard about DDT. It seems McElhinney and McAleer’s film begins by covering “the widespread ban on the use of the anti-malaria pesticide DDT.” McGee tells us that “the ban was highly controversial because there was evidence that its absence actually increased the incidence of malaria in poor countries.”
But there is no ban on DDT use against malaria. McGee would have known this if he had even searched Wikipedia.

I'm not sure which has me more depressed about America. First we have the manufactured furore over Acorn's campaign throwing up something like 25 pieces of registration fraud out of 1.3 million new registered voters. Why do I have the feeling that this is stoked by people who would really prefer if poor people didn't vote? Second, we get the information that confirms the end of civilisation: someone would actually christen their child Duran Duran.

(h/t The Jed Report.)