For Lefties too Stubborn to Quit
As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.
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does any body know where i can get information on erna bennett’s early life in ireland – the national library of australia have a tape of her but it’s not available as a freely given typescript or audio file.
The English writer NIna Bawden just died at the age of 87. A terrific writer who wrote two stone classic children’s books, Carries War and The Peppermint Pig based on her childhood experiences in the second world war.
The TV dramatisation of Carries War is the first programme I can remember being absolutely enraptured by as a child. Reading the book recently with my eldest daugher I was struck by what a terrific book it is, so much memorable characterisation and so many plot twists effortlessly contained in a small book.
From a political point of view she was a Labour Party member for many years. In the biography of Kaye Webb, who was publisher at Puffin Books when that was the finest childrens imprint in the world, it’s said that the company’s greater responsiveness to books more closely mirroring social realities owed a great deal to Nina Bawden’s experiences as a magistrate in North London in the late sixties and seventies where she witnessed the consequences of poverty and inequality.
In later years she was a tireless spokesperson for the victims of the Potters Bar train crash in which her husband was killed and she was badly injured. That crash came to be seen as an indictment of railway privatisation under John Major. David Hare described her fight to obtain justice for the victims as, ‘a model of eloquence, principle and human decency.’
But mainly she deserves to be remembered as one of the greatest writers in what’s often seen as a golden age for children’s books. She spoke about being at Oxford and being surprised to see her contemporary Margaret Roberts join the university Conservative Club when Bawden was joining its Labour equivalent. I know which woman did the most to increase the store of human happiness.
Here’s a clip from that original TV adaptation of Carries War.
An amazing Google Translation of a Kazakh news piece about Paul Murphy MEP. I’m not entirely sure what the original said, but I know I like this version. I’m particularly enamoured of the idea of Paul “flashing in the media”.
“Today, my opponent will MEP Paul Murphy. Mr.Murphy Who is? Paul Murphy can be called one of the most active foreign political figures, lighted during Zhanaozen confrontation. If we talk about it briefly, we know that he was born April 13, 1983, a representative of the Socialist Party MEP. His party is part of the so called united left alliance, actively opposes capitalism and stick to the ideology of Marxism and Trotskyism. And the Socialist Party is not the first year is one of the most ardent supporters of equal rights for sexual minorities and calls for promotion of gay pride parades around the world. They say that the slogan goes even emblazoned on the banner of the party. Here is another interesting fact. In the mid-2000s, the same Paul Murphy visited the Gaza Strip with a cargo of cement and reinforcement designed to whom do you think? … Hamas militants. So, around the end of 2010, this young gentleman began to flash in the media, anyway raising the question as to the violation of workers’ rights Kazakh authorities in Zhanaozen, arbitrary police admitting to the torture of detainees, and so on detailed understanding of Paul Murphy essentially the problem of the labor dispute, its economic, legal and other preparedness can speak eloquently letter sent to them by the Majilis deputies Vladimir Bobrov.”
No great shakes in the great scheme of things but this caught my eye in the Irish Times discussion of crime at the weekend:
‘Dr Paul O’Mahony, a leading criminologist who has recently retired as associate professor of psychology in the School of Medicine at Trinity College, on ‘the changed nature of street crime. “People didn’t kick other people in the head 20 or 30 years ago. There was an acceptance it was a dangerous and cowardly thing to do; that you’d have to be madcap to do it. But now, middle-class young people on booze and out of their heads routinely do it.”
is it just me or is that mental? I seem to remember people getting their heads kicked in being fairly common 30 years ago. Or maybe my brain is addled from getting kicked in the head…
I wasn’t around 30 years ago, but the notion that kicking people in the head is a new phenomenon is total rubbish.
Reminds me of old Londoners who always claim ‘this sort of thing wouldn’t've happened if the Crays was still about.’ [sic]
Interesting piece from Slugger O’Toole here:
http://sluggerotoole.com/2012/08/22/does-the-south-really-want-the-north-as-part-of-ireland/
I’d argue the north was consciously pitched into outer darkness 90 years ago, just before the Civil War started down here. Afterwards, there was a bit of feeble shadow-boxing around the Boundary Commission, then in 1937, irredentist aspirations were neatly preserved in aspic with the rhetorical constitutional guff of Articles 2 and 3, and in 1969, Jack Lynch simply upheld previous governments’ policy of standing idly by. After Bloody Sunday, the south really really REALLY didn’t want to know.
Has anybody here used bitcoin? Been playing around with the software but this article, if a bit techno-utopian, is really interesting politically
http://www.scribd.com/doc/73323889/Why-Bitcoin-is-a-Foundational-Change-That-Won%E2%80%99t-Go-Away-and-Could-Change-Everything
This has some comedy value:
http://www.upworthy.com/a-tea-partier-decided-to-pick-a-fight-with-a-foreign-president-it-didnt-go-so-we
Some of you may enjoy this:
http://politicsandletters.wordpress.com/2012/08/21/niall-ferguson-is-a-charlatan/
I have not come across this blog before, but the writer has another post entitled ‘Niall Ferguson is a moron’, so he obviously has good judgment.
Incidentally, I found this via Brian Leiter’s blog: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/
“The Deputy is like the Rolls Royce — well oiled, inaudible and he keeps going for ever.”
- from the Dáil record, 1969
August marks the end of the death of the last hunger striker in 1981. Thought I’d share this on Tom McElwee. Red Mickey Devine was the last to go. RIP boys.