World Trade Center

We just saw Oliver Stone's film World Trade Center. He was surprisingly restrained - no conspiracy theories in it at all. We both felt it was as honest a portrait as can be told by someone other than the people who actually went through it. Granted, they did work with him on the story and the families were involved - but it is a lot to ask that such a major film (with major actors) would remain true, and I think it did. It also struck me, as we were sitting in the theater filled with a British audience, that the film was so very American and I wondered if they were responding like we were. We Americans expect that everyone, especially our firemen and policemen, will always do the right thing and not be hesitant to risk their own lives for someone else's. That's our culture - or at least one of our cultural myths - and such a common storyline that I take it for granted that the Brits would get it. But do they? Or are they rolling their eyes and sighing in the dark at the blatant heroism? It's funny. Living in England, I feel safe and know that most everyone I encounter will be polite and most likely, kind. And that if our car broke down at least 5 people would stop and ask if we needed help. That's not an assumption I make at home. Yet I don't feel that same belief from the Brits about themselves and I definitely don't feel their belief that they always do the right thing. But maybe they do. Maybe it is too British of a thing for me to get. Maybe they are more humble than us. Perhaps they are just as heroic but they just don't celebrate it. Maybe they should! It may be more honorable to not 'toot one's horn' but the behavior of the policemen and firemen in New York immediately after 9/11 seems to be one thing that we should be proud of. And there aren't many things to be proud of at the moment, so I'm grateful for this!

This is a good film. Very good. A heck of a lot better than United 93.
Go see it! Here's a link to the official site... WTC.

)K

Thirty...

...one!

Dripping wet with a mouse in my hand

Well, I passed the Theory test this morning. 35 out of 35 on the multiple choice questions and 60 points out of a possible 75 on the hazard perception. I believe I would have gotten a higher score on the hazards if I hadn't held back like I did. If you click too many times, you could lose points for the whole clip you're watching (there were a total of 14 clips), so I was trying to think the way the DSA test designers would think. I guess I was too careful.

The test experience didn't go as smoothly as I would have liked. You're supposed to arrive 10-15 minutes early, which I tried to do. It was raining this morning. I drove (illegally) to the test centre at 8am, but I didn't get to the front desk until about 8:45. Yeah, tell me about it. I was a bit mislead by the AA Routefinder directions I had printed out yesterday. It's my own fault, I should have done a bit more research before leaving. Then I wouldn't have walked the wrong way on Old Christchurch Road for about a mile in the rain before deciding that it was indeed the wrong direction. By the time I got to where I needed to go, I was quite drenched and sweaty (if I had gone the right way from the parking lot the first time, I would have gotten there in about 5 minutes and been reasonably dry). I pressed the buzzer for the test centre and the conversation went something like this:

Buzzer Lady: "Good morning..."

Me: "Morning, I have an appointment for the theory test."

Buzzer Lady: "Name?"

Me: "Peder Richardsen" (name changed on the blog to hide identity)

Buzzer Lady: "What time did you think your appointment was, exactly?"

Me: "I know. I'm really sorry. I thought I left with plenty of time, but then I got really lost and I've been running around out here in the rain for the last half hour. Very sorry."

Buzzer Lady: "Well, you better come on up. I don't know if you can sit the test, but come up and we'll see what we can do."

Me: "Ok. Thank you!"

I go inside and the building porter tells me it'll be fine, just sweet-talk her. He wishes me luck and I dart up the stairs, probably splattering rain-water and sweat everywhere. I apologize a few more times when I get to the test centre and she says the only way I can take the test is if I don't do the marketing and customer satisfaction surveys at the end. Uhm, OK. Perfectly fine with that. She tells me she could have given me a lift because she lives just near me. "Wish I'd known!" She asks about my American accent because it says my nationality is Danish. I explain why. She tells me to go hand my documents to her colleague around the corner. He takes me into another room where several people are well into their tests and shows me what I need to do.

The multiple choice section is a breeze and I whizz through it as I'm trying to stop sweating. I have to mop my brow with my wet shirt every few minutes. I click away at the answers. Then I move on to the hazard perception bit. This requires headphones. Impressively, they provide a moist towelette to clean the headphone ear-cups with. Being somewhat "hygiene conscious", I make use of this before and after the test. The hazard perception takes a little longer because you have to watch the 14 clips (about a minute, minute and a half each). Finally, the test is over. I skip the marketing and customer satisfaction surveys (damn, I really wanted to do those) and go back out to reception. Buzzer Lady's colleague hands me an embossed certificate stating that I passed, "Well done!". I thank him, go back downstairs, tell the porter I talked her into it and that I passed the test, head back to the car I'm not supposed to be driving, and drive to work without L-plates or a fully licensed driver accompanying me.

Anyway, I passed and it only took me about 30 minutes for the whole thing (not counting the journey there). Yahoo! On to the next test... the practical. I'm going to call them tomorrow to schedule it. Apparently there's usually a five-week waiting list, but hopefully I can get a cancelled appointment or something. I want to get this over with! I'll probably do a one or two hour session with a driving instructor before the test, though. Just to make sure I've got the correct driving habits to pass the test.

Testing, testing

Well, I've been studying every day and I just took two sample tests on the Driving Standards Agency website. Scored 35 out of 35 on both of them, so I'm fairly confident I'll pass at least that part of the test tomorrow. The hazard perception test should be OK, too. I should be able to at least get 44 out of 75 points (the minimum to pass), though I would hope that I could score a little higher than that. Time to go to bed soon. The test is first thing in the morning.

"Your engine catches fire. What should you do first?
a) Lift the bonnet and disconnect the battery
b) Lift the bonnet and warn other traffic
c) Call a breakdown service
d) Call the fire brigade"



Answer: d

The Constitution... remember that?

Great little piece in The Observer today about how the fundaments of the US Constitution are being eroded by the current Administration. A shame really. After all, the Constitution is one of the things that defines America. Anyway, here it is:


Even a bag-lady can teach Bush about human rights

The President is destroying the constitution and few Americans seem to care or even notice

Henry Porter
Sunday September 10, 2006
The Observer

An elaborately turned-out bag-lady of the sort you occasionally see in Manhattan - a former fashion editor, perhaps, or designer who has lost her mind but not her style - stopped in front of all the people sunning themselves in Bryant Park and shouted at me: 'I obey the constitution.' I wish I had had the wit to shout back: 'Which is more than your President.'

What Bush is doing in the run-up to the midterm elections is a disgrace equal to any other scandal of his nasty, incipiently despotic, regime. Using the hallowed anniversary of 9/11, he has demanded Congress pass a law that enables the major terrorist suspects, until now held in CIA secret prisons all over the world, to be transferred and tried at Guantanamo.

The proposed courts would allow evidence obtained by what is politely called in America 'coercive interrogation' as well as hearsay and would deny the suspects' rights to see evidence against them because it is deemed by the government to be classified. Because these courts plainly fly in the face of the rights enshrined by the American constitution and the Geneva Convention, the Supreme Court ruled against them last June.

This was hardly going to deter Bush and Dick Cheney. Last week, the President made a speech to an audience of sympathisers in the White House, many of whom had lost people in the attacks five years ago, to promote this legislation. If enacted, it will set Congress and the executive against the Supreme Court and the United States against international standards of decency and the rule of law.

Whatever Congress decides, nothing can change the court's original opinion that the United States would be in violation of article three of the Geneva Convention, which only allows for trials in regular courts that afford 'the guarantees which are recognised as indispensable by civilised people'.

The day after his speech, Bush went to Atlanta to address another audience, this time of 'conservative intellectuals' (truly an oxymoron in Bush's America), and told it that he required a law from Congress that would legalise the NSA's eavesdropping programme, which has also been held by the courts to be illegal and against the rights established in the constitution. The strategy of demanding these laws now is actually rather clever. Every member of Congress and some senators are about to go back to their constituencies to fight the November midterm elections and few are willing to stand up for the constitutional rights when security is still the top priority of the vast majority of American voters.

Bush is likely to get what he wants from Congress, at the same time as refocusing attention on the terrorist threat rather than the inferno in Iraq.

Not many Americans appear to understand what is going on. But a few do - the odd bag-lady, dissident, late-night talk shows such as Bill Maher's and the New York Times which, considering it is the leading voice of liberal, law-abiding America, has been a mite too genteel for my tastes these past five years. However its editorial on Thursday did say this: 'Mr Bush wants to re-write American law to create a glaring exception to the Geneva Convention, to give ex post facto approval to abusive interrogation methods and to bar legal challenges to the system.'

Precisely. The point that will surely feature in the forthcoming obituary of American rights and values is that the law that Bush proposes includes a measure which makes it retroactive to 11 September 2001. So, officials and CIA interrogators will be protected from prosecution under the War Crimes Act for anything they may have done from the inception of the 'war on terror', i.e. 9/11.

Why would this be necessary unless Americans had been torturing the 14 senior suspects who have been transferred to Guantanamo? It certainly gives the lie to Bush's statement on Thursday: 'The United States does not torture. It is against our laws and our values.'

Rupert Murdoch's dreadful Fox News and his papers promote these utterances, offering a subliminal wink in the direction of the White House because they understand that torture is part of the 'war on terror' and, more crucially, that bamboozling Congress before the recess will concentrate more power in the 'decider's' hands.

It is all part of a process of fashioning what Dick Cheney called 'strong, robust executive authority' with 'constitutional powers unimpaired'; that is to say, executive power which is untrammelled by the courts or the people's representatives in Congress. As in Britain, power is remorselessly flowing to the centre and threatens to disrupt, if not permanently cripple, the democratic system.

At the last count, Bush has discreetly claimed the authority to disobey 740 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the constitution.

This state of affairs has gradually developed since the days of the Depression, when Roosevelt used the economic crisis to gain more power for the executive branch. Before the Thirties, legislation had been precisely drafted so as to minimise interpretations by the executive branch. Now the executive branch can ignore anything it wants and only consults Congress when it needs a law to bypass the remaining obstacle to total and unfettered power - the Supreme Court.

You may think I exaggerate, but the facts speak for themselves. The majority of Americans cares not one jot for the constitution and lawyers and politicians are content to set aside any of the revered articles whenever it suits them. Nobody complains. There are no demonstrations on Massachusetts Avenue, no mass rallies in Central Park in defence of the constitution.

'It is paradoxical,' says American author Paul Craig Roberts, 'that American democracy is the likely casualty of the "war on terror" that is being justified in the name of expansion of democracy.' Quite.

[source: Guardian Unlimited, published September 10, 2006]

---

But here are some Americans that are noticing what the Bush administration is up to:

-The American Civil Liberties Union: "Even while the president's abuses of power diminish the light of American values, key victories since 2001 show that together we can carry the torch for freedom."

-Sourcewatch: Bush administration vs. the US Constitution

In case you'd like to read it, here's where you can find the US Constitution online.

---

In slightly-related other news, you've probably heard/seen the furore over the "documentary" that ABC is planning to air. If not, here's an article from the BBC: Clinton aides attack 9/11 drama; and from Air America Radio: ABC to alter miniseries. Interestingly, this 3-hour docudrama will be airing tonight and tomorrow night on BBC1 here in the UK, presumably unexpurgated. We're not very happy about this very distorted view of events will be presented over here as fact.

"What Really Makes Our Nation Strong" by Garrison Keillor

Here's another great little piece from Mr. Keillor. He mentions the fall of America. This is something I've been thinking a lot about recently. It's fair to say that America is an Empire. It is the World Empire, the biggest kid (bully?) in the playground. But history has shown us that all empires fall... without fail. Of course, I don't wish that on the US and I hope it's not anytime soon, but you can't deny the possibility because it is not just a possibility, it is a certainty. Anyway... these certainly are interesting times...

---

Published on Thursday, September 7, 2006 by the Baltimore Sun (Maryland)

What Really Makes our Nation Strong

by Garrison Keillor

Growing up in the '50s, we imagined our country defended by guided missiles poised in bunkers, jet fighters on the tarmac and pilots in the ready room prepared to scramble, a colonel with a black briefcase sitting in the hall outside the president's bedroom, but Sept. 11 gave us a clearer picture. We have a vast array of hardware, a multitude of colonels, a lot of bureaucratic confusion, and a nation vulnerable to attack.

The Federal Aviation Administration has now acknowledged that the third of the four planes seized by the 19 men with box cutters had already hit the Pentagon before the FAA finally called there to say there was a problem. The FAA lied to the 9/11 commission about this, then took two years to ascertain the facts - a 51-minute gap in defense - and released the finding on the Friday before Labor Day, an excellent burial site for bad news.

So America is not the secure fortress we grew up imagining. Perhaps it never was. What protects us is what has protected us for 230 years: our magnificent isolation. After the disasters of the 20th century, Europe put nationalism aside and adopted civilization, but we have oceans on either side, so if the president turns out to be a shallow, jingoistic fool with a small, rigid agenda and little knowledge of the world, we expect to survive it somehow. Life goes on.

It's hard for Americans to visualize the collapse of our country. It's as unthinkable as one's own demise. Europeans are different: They've seen disaster, even the British. They know it was a near thing back in 1940. My old Danish mother-in-law remembered the occupation clearly 40 years later and was teary-eyed when she talked about it. Francis Scott Key certainly could envision the demise of the United States in 1814 when he watched the bombardment of Fort McHenry. Abraham Lincoln was haunted by the thought. We are not, apparently, though five years ago we saw a shadow.

We really are one people at heart. We all believe that when thousands of people are trapped in the Superdome without food or water, it is the duty of government, the federal government if necessary, to come to their rescue and to restore them to the civil mean and not abandon them to fate. Right there is the basis of liberalism. Conservatives tried to introduce a new idea - it's your fault if you get caught in a storm - and this idea was rejected by nine out of 10 people once they saw the pictures. The issue is whether we care about people who don't get on television.

Last week, I sat and listened to a roomful of parents talk about their battles with public schools in behalf of their children who suffer from dyslexia, or apraxia, or ADD, or some other disability - sagas of ferocious parental love vs. stonewall bureaucracy in the quest for basic, needful things - and how some of them had uprooted their families and moved to Minnesota so their children could attend better schools. You couldn't tell if those parents were Republicans or Democrats. They simply were prepared to move mountains so their kids could have a chance. So are we all.

And that's the mission of politics: to give our kids as good a chance as we had. They say that liberals have run out of new ideas - it's like saying that Christians have run out of new ideas. Maybe the old doctrine of grace is good enough.

I don't get much hope from Democrats these days, a timid and skittish bunch, slow to learn, unable to sing the hymns and express the steady optimism that is at the heart of the heart of the country. I get no hope at all from Republicans, whose policies seem predicated on the Second Coming occurring in the very near future.

If Jesus does not descend through the clouds to take them directly to paradise, and do it now, they are going to have to answer to the rest of us.

Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.

Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun

[source: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0907-26.htm ]

Going Legit

You are only allowed to drive for one year in the UK with a non-EU driver's license. After that, you're supposed to either stop driving or get a UK license. We've been here for longer than a year, so we're obviously living beyond the bounds of the law. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as just trading my American driver's license for a UK license. I have to go through the same procedure that a new driver has to go through. That is, apply for a provisional license (learner's permit), take a theory test, and then a practical driving test. When you have a provisional license you have to have a Learner sticker on the front and back of your car and any time you drive you have to have someone with you who has had a full license for at least 3 years. You're not allowed to drive at night or on the motorway. Let's just say, we've been flaunting these "provisions" quite brazenly. An L sticker just doesn't look good on a BMW! We don't drive very often and in the event of being pulled over, I will show my US license and play dumb. [In a Texan accent, "Sorry officer? I can't drive over here with this license? I'm terribly sorry. I'll drive right home and park it, officer. Nope, won't happen again. Have a nice day!"

Anyway, I'm in the process of making things right, of going legit with a UK license. I have my provisional license (with the customary horrible photo) and I have booked my theory test for next Thursday at 8:30am. For the past few weeks, I've been reading the Highway Code book and a couple of "Pass Your Theory Test" books. Not doing too bad on the sample questions, though I'm not completely without a worry. You have to get 30 out of 35 questions correct. I should be fine, but historically, I don't test well. Even in subjects that I am fairly knowledgeable about. Aside from the theory questions, there's a section in which you have to watch a bunch of clips to test your hazard perception. I'm fairly confident I can pass that without too much trouble because I've been driving for about 12 years and I'm actually a pretty good driver, if I do say so myself (and I do).

Well, a week from now, I'll either be moving on to my practical test or having to book a re-take of the theory test. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

A Winner

A bit of good news. A few weeks ago The Guardian did a prize draw for The Mavericks DVD Collection box sets. There was a little ad in the Sunday paper. I usually enter contests like this because it's always nice to win something and you can't do that if you don't enter. Anyway, I had forgotten about it. Last week somebody from The Guardian called our house. K was working from home that day. The lady said she just wanted to confirm our address because I had won the prize draw. The DVDs arrived yesterday. Twelve of them! The prize draw wasn't just for ONE of the box sets, but for all four! They're all great films, too:

European Mavericks - "Love Gone Wrong" with:
Together
Vodka Lemon
Dear Wendy

European Mavericks - "Heart of Darkness" with:
Das Experiment
Evil
Pusher

Mavericks - "Driven by a Vision" with:
Overnight
Donnie Darko
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

Mavericks - "Fight the Power" with:
The Assassination of Richard Nixon
Manic
The Corporation

Woo hoo!!! It pays to enter competitions! This is the second DVD(s) I've won this summer. A couple of months ago, I won The Green Butchers DVD from Fortean Times [look at the bottom of this page]. There was no telephone call about that one. It just arrived one day in a padded envelope with no explanation. Took me a while to figure out how I had ended up getting that one.

What!?!

Steve Irwin was killed...













...by a stingray!

I'm a bit bummed by this. I always liked that guy. Watched his show a lot when it first came out. I felt like he was a bit protected against getting killed by an animal because he had built up so much good karma from helping animals in so many ways, but I guess it wasn't foolproof. Still, a stingray barb to the heart... shit.

Mr. Crocodile Hunter, you will be missed.

"A Plan to Save the Country" by Garrison Keillor

---Copied and pasted from Common Dreams Newscenter. ---

It's the best part of summer, the long, lovely passage into fall. A procession of lazy, golden days that my sandy-haired, gap-toothed little girl has been painting, small abstract masterpieces in tempera and crayon and glitter, reminiscent of Franz Kline or Willem de Kooning (his early glitter period). She put a sign out front, "Art for Sale," and charged 25 cents per painting. Cheap at the price.

A teacher gave her this freedom to sit un-self-consciously and put paint on paper. A gentle, 6-foot-8 guy named Matt who taught art at her preschool. Her swimming teachers gave her freedom from fear of water. So much that has made this summer a pleasure for her I trace to specific teachers, and so it's painful to hear about public education sinking all around us.

A high school math class of 42! Everybody knows you can't teach math to 42 kids at once. The classroom smells bad because the custodial staff has been cut back. The teacher must whip his pupils into shape to pass the federal No Child Left Untested program. This is insanity, the legacy of Republicans and their tax-cutting and their hostility to secular institutions.

Last spring, I taught a college writing course and had the privilege of hanging out with people in their early 20s, an inspirational experience in return for which I tried to harass them about spelling and grammar and structure. My interest in being 21 again is less than my interest in having a frontal lobotomy, but the wit and passion and good-heartedness of these kids, which they try to conceal under their exquisite cool, are the hope of this country. You have to advocate for young people, or else what are we here for?

I keep running into retirees in their mid-50s, free to collect seashells and write bad poetry and shoot video of the Grand Canyon, and goody for them, but they're not the future. My college kids are graduating with a 20-pound ball of debt chained to their ankles. That's not right, and you know it.

This country is squashing its young. We're sending them to die in a war we don't believe in anymore. We're cheating them so we can offer tax relief to the rich. And we're stealing from them so that old gaffers like me, who want to live forever, can go in for an MRI if we have a headache.

A society that pays for MRIs for headaches and can't pay teachers a decent wage has made a dreadful choice. But health care costs are ballooning, eating away at the economy. The boomers are getting to an age where their knees need replacing and their hearts need a quadruple bypass - which they feel entitled to - but our children aren't entitled to a damn thing. Any goombah with a Ph.D. in education can strip away French and German, music and art, dumb down the social sciences, offer Britney Spears instead of Shakespeare, and there is nothing the kid can do except hang out in the library, which is being cut back too.

This week, we mark the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the Current Occupant's line, "You're doing a heckuva job," which already is in common usage, a joke, a euphemism for utter ineptitude. It's sure to wind up in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, a summation of his occupancy.

Annual interest on the national debt now exceeds all government welfare programs combined. We'll be in Iraq for years to come. Hard choices need to be made, and given the situation we're in, I think we must bite the bullet and say no more health care for card-carrying Republicans. It just doesn't make sense to invest in longevity for people who don't believe in the future. Let them try faith-based medicine, let them pray for their arteries to be reamed and their hips to be restored, and leave science to the rest of us.

Cutting out health care to one-third of the population - the folks with Bush-Cheney bumper stickers, who still believe the man is doing a heckuva job - will save enough money to pay off the national debt, not a bad legacy for Republicans. As Scrooge said, let them die and reduce the surplus population. In return, we can offer them a reduction in the estate tax. All in favor, blow your nose.

Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.

Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun

Published on Thursday, August 31, 2006 by the Baltimore Sun (Maryland)