« November 2004 »
S M T W T F S
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30
You are not logged in. Log in
Entries by Topic
All topics  «
Blog Tools
Edit your Blog
Build a Blog
View Profile
Group One
Tripod Home
Tripod Build
Tripod Member Spotlight
Webmonkey Tools
Register Your Domain
Group Two
Lycos Home
Find a Date
Check Stock Quotes
Lycos Search
Wired News
Derek McMillan's blog
Wednesday, 3 November 2004
Good news Kerry lost
The race between tweedledum and tweedledumber is over. Admittedly Bush will now be looking very smug - but how will we be able to tell? In reality, one millionaire backed by the corporations was thrashed by another millionaire also backed by the corporations. If Kerry had won it would have been a repeat of the situation in the UK when Blair won and people thought "things can only get better." In fact they got a lot worse.

If Kerry had won we would have been out on the streets protesting his Iraq policy within weeks, as soon as people realised no he wasn't withdrawing from Iraq - he never said he was!

As American socialists traditionally said:

"Dump the elephant
Dump the ass
build a party of the working class :)"

http://socialistparty.org.uk

Posted by derekmcmillan at 5:35 PM GMT
Saturday, 30 October 2004
Halloween
The shops in Forest Row are full of Halloween displays. I can just imagine Mr and Mrs Satanist shaking their heads and complaining about the commercialisation of their festival.

Posted by derekmcmillan at 7:07 AM BST
Friday, 29 October 2004
100000 dead nothing said!
If the entire population of Cambridge were wiped out, I imagine even the Tabloids would find space on the front page to mention it. Clearly if the same number of people die as a result of the war in Iraq that is "not news".
The Americans and the Quisling government in Iraq have not bothered to count the civilian casualties in the war. However Dr Gil Burnham and his team from John Hopkins University in the US compared mortality rates in Iraq before and after the March 2003 invasion. The results published in the Lancet in the UK revealed the figure of 100000 casualties.

GIL BURNHAM(quoted on ABC): "And what we found was that mortality rates or death rates had increased substantially, and the thing that accounted for the increase in the death rates was violence."

"Much of this violence was - in fact most of it - related to the coalition forces being present, and the increased deaths were almost exclusively related to - not exclusively - but very heavily related to aerial bombardments of urban populations."

The headline in the pro-war Sun newspaper on this day? "Chelsea Sack Mutu"

Posted by derekmcmillan at 4:04 PM BST
Saturday, 23 October 2004
Computers and Flutes
I sorted out a problem with a friend's computer today and she used the now time-honoured phrase "This stupid computer."
Reflexively I repeated the mantra "Computers are stupid so we have to be clever." which is one of those "things teachers say."

My daughter plays the flute. Imagine a recalcitrant pupil picking up a flute and finding he or she can't get a beautiful tune out of it immediately. "'ere this flute don't work" "this flute is crap!"

Another "thing teachers say" (or at least this teacher) is "imagine you are playing a computer game. You would not sit waiting for a teacher to come and show you what to do, you would experiment. Treat Mozilla the same way, try things out, experiment, see what happens. There is an "undo" button if it goes wrong. You cannot damage the program or the computer unless you are a total pilchard."

Yesterday was a good day at work. Two unpromising classes responded very well and got stuck in with Mozilla. The "learned helplessness" was in abayance. It will be interesting to see if the same thing happens with spreadsheets after half term :)

Posted by derekmcmillan at 6:15 AM BST
Saturday, 9 October 2004
A question of language
Reading through my father's wartime diaries I find him opposing the ban on coloured soldiers being in the cinema at the same time as white soldiers ("they are good enough to die with or for the British but not good enough to share a cinema") and supporting the Egyptian workers fight against exploitation and colonialism. He also talks about chatting with Italian prisoners "with all racial prejudice put aside, as it should be."

Yet he uses the same racist terminology as the other soldiers, except that he puts it in inverted commas.

Posted by derekmcmillan at 9:07 AM BST
Wednesday, 29 September 2004
FR McMillan's wartime diaries
I didn't know my father. He died when I was seven so I only ever saw him through the eyes of an adoring child. My brother and sisters knew him much better. So it was a delight to me to get the transliteration of his wartime diaries from my sister. It shows the war from the point of view of a common soldier and it gives me an insight into how he thought and felt.

He was 27 when he began the diary and it is such a strange experience to read his words and try to imagine what it must have been like to go off to war. The diaries were written for us with the knowledge that he might not survive. What a casually brave man he was.

Posted by derekmcmillan at 5:46 PM BST
Saturday, 25 September 2004
New York Times on "ghost detainees"
The BBC continues to states confidently that the Americans have "only two women prisoners", yet the New York Times reveals that the military authorities conceal prisoners at the behest of the CIA. If they don't even acknowledge the existence of these prisoners one wonders how they confidently determine their gender!


"The Central Intelligence Agency kept dozens of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and other detention facilities in Iraq off official rosters to hide them from Red Cross inspections, far more than has been previously reported, two senior Army generals said today.


"An inquiry by three generals issued last month found eight documented cases of so-called "ghost detainees," but two of the officers said in congressional testimony and interviews later that depositions with military personnel at the prison suggested the number was far higher.


"The number is in the dozens , and perhaps up to 100," Gen. Paul J. Kern, the senior officer who oversaw the inquiry into the role of military intelligence personnel in the prisoner-abuse scandal, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. He added that a precise number would never be known because there were no records kept on most of the C.I.A. detainees. "


Posted by derekmcmillan at 4:34 PM BST
Friday, 24 September 2004
Mother's plea for the life of her child.
Nobody could have listened unmoved to the plea from Lil Begley broadcast by the BBC. She was so distressed by her brave broadcast that she was admitted to hospital the same night. Anyone watching would wish that the women in Iraq could be released and Ken Bigley restored to his family.

But just a minute. The BBC could have filled the airways with pleas from mothers, Iraqi mothers, pleading "save the life of my child", "don't bomb my family" in the run up to war. They chose not to.

They could have broadcast the feelings of the relatives of the prisoners being tortured by the Americans in Guantanamo bay. They chose not to.

Instead the BBC repeat the story that the Americans "only have two" female prisoners. They have dumbed down their news coverage from Iraq to the point that Nicholas Witchell can just read scripts which might as well have been written by the military and get away with it. They really have become Blair's Broadcasting Corporation now.

Posted by derekmcmillan at 5:18 PM BST
Tuesday, 21 September 2004
Diplomat lets the cat out of the bag
If you see Osama Bin Laden putting up election posters, don't be surprised if they are for family friend, George W Bush. It is unsurprising that Osama Bin Laden prefers to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.

British ambassador to Rome, Sir Ivor Roberts, described President George Bush as "the best recruiting sergeant ever for al-Qaida". Sir Ivor obviously has a different definition of the word "diplomatic" than the one the rest of us use!

This revelation, although overstated, is not that far from the truth. The worldwide upsurge in anti-American resistance has led - in the absence of mass socialist movements - to a growth of fundamentalist militancy.

Thousands of American troops have been brought within striking distance of groups who are always identified by the media as "linked with Al Qaida". This is intended to discredit any and every opponent of American imperialism but a by-product is an enormous boost to the importance and prestige of Al Qaida.

John Simpson (BBC foreign correspondent) has made no bones of the fact that Al Qaida received arms, training and finance from the CIA.

Bush and Bin Laden are two terrorists who clearly need each other.

Posted by derekmcmillan at 4:37 PM BST
MNUA
I must not use abbreviations
I must not use abbreviations
I must not use abbreves.
I mst nt u abbreves.
MNUA
MNUA

Posted by derekmcmillan at 6:32 AM BST

Newer | Latest | Older