"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect". Mark Twain 1904
// March 30th, 2008 // 5 Comments » // Bertie Ahern, Fianna Fail, irish politics
After the little problem earlier, P.ie has returned by means of a trip to the home of President G.W. Bush (oh God what have we done!)
In other news, legal action is to be take against people pubs discussing the Late Late.
// March 30th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Bertie Ahern, Fianna Fail, Ireland, irish politics, politics
Pi.e has gone off-line this afternoon and one wonders if the legal notice regarding a matter tangential to the Tribunals is being used by members or representatives of Fianna Fail as a means to prevent any and all discussion for matters concerning Bertie’s problems.
After all, we’re repeatedly told An Taoiseach has nothing to hide. What have they to fear? What do they not want people to hear?
// March 30th, 2008 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
I apologise for the quality. I’m throwing this up in case people missed the Late Late on Friday with Dunphy and Harris and they want to see it before Rte upload in later in the week. I really need to get a proper card and pipe stuff into the PC from the Sky Plus box and there is some over lap in content as my old camera has a 3 minute limit despite the 2 Gig card. Also I’m discussing nothing here and I will lock the thread so no one can discussion. You can feel free comment on my blog provided you play wish to nice.
This is the key moment for me
The whole thing
Part 2
Part 3
Waiting on Part 3 to process, but I can confirm there are no ewoks! Update, Part 3 is below.
I might think about doing some work on a few prequels and really cash in!
// March 27th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // damien mulley, irish blogs
29…30! Most people in the Irish blogosphere will be aware of Damien’s cry for help/tirade against Fine Gael last month. Well, here is what they don’t know, it wasn’t true. I chose not to engage directly at the time in order not to leave myself open to accusations of seeking to deflect attention from the Irish Blog Awards which are primarily Damien’s creation and for which he deserves considerable credit and which I can well imagine generates a good degree of stress in the organising.
Put as simply as possible his bald assertion that he was being harassed and stalked on and off line is completely erroneous. Some few people may be aware that I had what could be charitably described as a set-do with Damien back at the turn of the year over his use of a particular piece of terminology and his less than elegant reaction to my making my opinion about it known to him. The back and forth on the whole thing lasted a few days, and since then I’ve had no direct contact with him. Well after I got to make one comment which he proceeded to modify I reckoned there wasn’t much point in bothering.
As regards his even more peculiar reference to being harassed and stalked off line all I can say is that to the best of my knowledge the last time I was even in the same city as Damien Mulley was for the blog awards last year. In fact in the week prior to his post about all this Damien travelled to Limerick twice and on one of those occasions was or so I heard inquiring as to my whereabouts. As it happens I was in Dublin on both occasions. Frankly, if that is stalking it sounds much more like Damien is the one doing it. Or if I really am supposed to be doing it I should think about buying a manual. I would very interested in seeing Damien produce the merest sliver of evidence to back up this ludicrous claim.
As regard his involvement of Fine Gael in all this, I’m further perplexed. In his communications with a number of people and organisations regarding his claims he has mentioned my name and that of Fine Gael. Why? The truth is that it would appear Damien is prone to the odd bout of histrionics going from cheerleading for Eamon Ryan to being his self appointment nemesis in the blink of a political eye. Since this was a disagreement between two individuals over the use of language one would wonder why Damien took issue with my membership of Fine Gael at all, rather than say my being an engineer or a Kerryman. Honestly, I would suggest that his repeated harping on about Fine Gael says more about his own indulgence of his biases when approaching any topic than anything else.
I comment on lots of blogs and I suppose one might say we end up playing in the same sand pits from time to time. Let’s face it the Irish blogging township isn’t quite that large and I wasn’t aware that I was supposed to be banished from interacting with people simply because I had fallen foul of Damien Mulley. So I’m sure there have been a couple of occasions when I’ve commented on the same post as Damien but what reasonable person could characterise that as harassment or even stalking?
Further to this we had his quite excitable jumping up and down about people making threats of legal action. People who were paying close attention from his first post would have noticed that it was Damien Mulley who first spoke of contacting An Garda Síochána and of seeking recourse to legal advice. To date I’ve heard nothing, nada, faic from anyone to do with his claims and frankly I strongly expect to never hear anything. Any more than I expect to be contacted about the whereabouts of Shergar or the Irish Crown Jewels. Since there was no harassment or stalking there aren’t going to be any legal actions forthcoming from Damien. Simply saying something again and again doesn’t make it true.
The one quite serious implication from his remarks in his post was that I, acting with others, was in some way seeking to deliberately impact on his health. This is, just like the rest of his post, completely rubbish. As the state of his health wasn’t known to me, how was I supposed to be doing this? Voodoo? Incantations? If he is suffering from some form of paranoia and it is somehow impacting his health then I would really suggest that he seek help for it. Strange to think that a simple thing like a relative nobody in blogging not being cowed by Damien’s vitriol three months ago would be an scab he would chose to return to on the eve of the blog awards. Retaining a positive mental outlook is vitally important when a person is dealing with a disease like MS.
As for making threats to radio shows and contacting blog nominees about their eligibility for nomination that did not happen either. Who was contacted and exactly what kind of threats would I be in a position to make to radio shows? Withhold my license? Write to Arthur Murphy on Mailbag?
If people like Damien want to say something about people they should be prepared to be upfront about it. Damien made big play of taking his twitter account private though I suspect the real reason behind that was so he could continue to make snide, sly, underhand comments which are his real modus operandi. It’s the web 2.0 version of whispering in class with your hand over your mouth. I’m sure those who do have access to his twitter will know if this is the case. Did he name names? Drop hints? Is he still going on about it?
The really disappointing aspect for me was that so few people looked for any justification for the accusation. Most were simply prepared to take him at his word and instead of calling for habeas corpus, the call went out for a head, any head in fact. I acknowledge that Damien has done tremendous work promoting blogging in Ireland but to suggest that such efforts somehow gives him carte blanche to make accusations about people and then never front up is totally unjustified. I will continue to blog, but as for the Irish Blogging Community I have to wonder who would wish to be a member of a community that reaches so readily for pitch forks at the whim of its leader.
It is worth remembering that a benevolent dictator isn’t benevolent to everyone all the time and at the end of the day they really are a just dictator, one more petty tyrant.
// March 21st, 2008 // 9 Comments » // credit crunch, economy, finance, financial crisis
Last week the word was put out about the state of a major bank with the intention of impacting its share price. Yet one week on there has been no announcement of any investigation into improper conduct by those spreading the rumours.
The bank I’m referring to isn’t HBOS or Anglo-Irish Bank, it is Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns was telling everyone who would listen that it was fine, just dandy, nothing at all to see here and there was no reason for anyone to worry their silly little heads about when it came to its ability to continue to do business in the future. Yet in the matter of a few days, it has been subsumed in JP Morgan Chase. So I guess the lesson is when the institution itself tells fibs that’s ok, if someone else does it that is wrong.
// March 19th, 2008 // No Comments » // arthur, arthur c clarke, clarke, satellites, space elevator
One of the giants of science fiction has passed on. His writing was always somewhat dry in my view and to be honest he didn’t really do characters but God some of the ideas. Harks back to when the bulk of science fiction came from the pens of actually science grounded people, like scientists and engineers, like Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke . I think his short stories are today somewhat under appreciated though that is where 2001 came from.
While his idea or promote of geo stationary satellites will doubtless get lots of attention over the coming days I think the his use of the idea of the space elevator may end up being the more significant in terms of the exploration of space by humans.
// March 18th, 2008 // No Comments » // credit crunch, economy, finance, US politics
The two Johns have tackled the issue of the sub prime market already (see the clip below) but I believe the real problem isn’t the unemployed black man in a vest sitting outside a house he can no longer afford, it’s the college educated white 20 and 30 somethings who is up to their eyes in credit card and college loan debt.
At the heart of the credit problem is a significant percentage of people mostly white college educated folks who had large sums of money made available to them which they gladly borrowed and spent it on pure frippery, and of course spring break! Average credit debt in the US for those graduates in the 20s is nearly $6,000. And that is just credit card debt, most US graduates have college loans into the 10s of thousands. Now the solution being offered by the Fed is yet more cheap credit which will lead to more spending on frippery (most of it coming from Asian economies rather than the US).
Is there some hope that those being lent to would act to re-finance their credit card debt into loans and take the time to pay down their debts? The problem is that the servicing of the credit card debt is much more profitable to the banks and they are disinclined to alter the terms to medium term loans. This is the time to turn into the tidal wave of financial mismanagement but I suspect most will take the short term option and just spend again.
// March 18th, 2008 // No Comments » // economy, irish politics
So the topic of worrying sheep came up recently and the theory was put forward that Jack Russell’s being a more intelligent breed of beast have their own style of worrying the wooliers. Apparently, they sidle up to the fuzzy ones under cover of dark and start telling them that inflation is up again, that the stock market is screwed and that the building industry is laying folks off left right and centre. That has them worried in no time at all.
// March 12th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // alcohol, driving, Ireland, irish politics
I believe the new blood alcohol limitations are a waste of time and a fig leaf to really dealing with the abuse of alcohol and driving.
The report below (which is from 2003, I’ve been unable to find more recent figures) shows those with blood alcohol between 50 and 80 to be just 5% of fatal accidents. And those with no alcohol at all in their systems were 30%, another 20% were not tested.
http://www.healthintelligence.ie/publications/updated%20report%20fatal%20crashes%202003.pdf
while those over 160 mg/ml are involved in nearly 30% of fatal accidents.
The numbers involved in accidents who are between 50mg and 80mg would not indicate that this is the area that needs most attention. A more sensible approach would be punish more severely based on the degree to which you are over the limit. We should do the same with speeding and link fines to a % of income.
What are we doing about the bigger problem of those who are completely ignoring the existing limits and effectively driving while hammered? The answer is – nothing.
// March 8th, 2008 // No Comments » // US politics
And we have another great instance of a time sucker. Back in 1996 when the net had stopped yelping and it was being to attract attention for other reasons, a number of media outlets tried a number of things out to get people interested in the Presidential contest between Clinton, Dole and Perot (yes cranky old Ross ran again, well it was either that or buy a state for himself).
One sub site put up was called Dark Horse, in which you played as a virtual candidate, picked your platform, spent some money on ads and campaigned like crazy. Dear God, it killed some amount of time while waiting for my machine to churn through stuff. I’m sure we’ll get even more of these as time goes on, I’ve got my own on the drawing board but…well can’t really say too much. One thing that strikes me is that each of these ‘games’ says as much about how people understand or would like politics to be as it is about how politics might be made more interesting.
And naturally I have this old stager in the electoral politics stakes too! With the dollar the way it is, it is excellent value.
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