BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

August 02, 2003

Moblog meets culture
: The Scotsman is hosting a moblog and contest for the Edinburgh Festival.
: And more mobile smarts in Scotland: Police will now receive mobile phone text messages when they are needed to testify in trials, thus allowing them to stay on the street and beat longer.

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God and country
: Tony Blair is looking at involving religion in government:

Blair is to allow Christian organisations and other 'faith groups' a central role in policy-making in a decisive break with British traditions that religion and government should not mix....
The Prime Minister, who this weekend becomes the longest continually serving Labour Prime Minister in history, has set up a ministerial working group in the Home Office charged with injecting religious ideas 'across Whitehall'....
The new high-powered ministerial grouping will have an input across government. Although based in the Home Office, it will advise the Departments for Education, Culture, Media and Sport and Trade and Industry....
Membership of the committee will also include representatives of the Jewish, Sikh, Muslim and Hindu faiths.

So you could see this coming a mile away:

Some No 10 officials are concerned that the Government will fall victim to unfavourable comparisons with the Republican administration in America, where President Bush makes no secret of his religious faith and right-wing religious organisations have a powerful input into policy-making, particularly on sensitive issues such as abortion.

Opportunities for Bush/Blair snarks aside, I would be nervous, too.

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Lucky Lindy
: Charles Lindbergh had a secret German family, reports The Sueddeutsche Zeitung (auf Englisch here).

In an article yesterday, they told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that, on a visit to Germany in 1957, Lindbergh, then 55, fell in love with Brigitte Hesshaimer, a 31-year-old hat maker.
For the next 17 years, Hesshaimer was his intimate companion and gave birth to three children, who now range in age from 36 to 45. They only discovered their father's identity after his death in 1974 and it was not until their mother's death that the three felt able to tell the world.

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Women and men
: At View from Iran, the American and female half of the Iranian/American couple who blog there, writes today about the role of women in Iran:

I am beginning to feel that women themselves are responsible for much of the way that society in Iran works. I see this pattern time and time again: women, mothers, aunts, everyone, raise their daughters to deny their true self. From the time they are very young, the daughters are looking after other people. They are serving guests, serving their fathers, serving their brothers, serving their mothers. They are encouraged to be cute and do cute things. They are told not to complain or say that they are hungry or ask for anything. They are told to obey. Later, when they are adults, Iranians, both men and women, complain that Iranian women are manipulative. How could they be anything else but? Because they cannot honestly ask for things, they learn to manipulate situations to get what they need or want. ...
Just for a little comparison, I want to write about one of the last conversations I had with my great-Aunt Rose. She said that what amazed her most in her lifetime was how much men had changed (which means that women had changed at least as much). “When I was young, my husband did not do a thing in the house. He did not touch the babies or help with the children or cook or clean. Now I see my grandsons changing diapers and cooking dinner, and I know that the world is getting better.”

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Imagine what they'd do with Richard Simmons
: The mullahs even fear aerobic dancing:

Khordadian, 46, became a symbol of cultural unrest when he returned to Iran last year for the first time since 1980 to visit his ailing father. In the nation where student aspirations for democratic reforms are clashing with the ideals of political hard-liners, he was arrested and convicted for "promoting moral corruption" by holding dance classes in the United States.
Instead of death, the judge eventually banned Khordadian from teaching dance for the rest of his life.

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Afraid of the truth
: The mullahs of Iran have gone on a spree of arresting journalists. Says Reporters Without Borders:

Amid continuing clamour about the death of photojournalist Zahra Kazemi while in custody at the start of July, Reporters Without Borders today voiced concern about the imprisonment of a total of 21 journalists in very harsh conditions in Iran, many of them in a wave of arrests in the past few weeks.
Secretary-general Robert Ménard said at least 14 journalists have been arrested in the space of a month, and in most cases the families have received no word about those detained. "Those lucky enough to have been freed have talked of very harsh conditions of detention, psychological pressure and mistreatment," Ménard said.
He stressed that the organisation is very worried about the fact that half of the detained journalists are being held by aides of Tehran state prosecutor Said Mortazavi and by revolutionary guards in the same centre where Kazemi, a photographer with Canadian and Iranian citizenship, received the blows to the head that caused her death.

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Trouble
: Al Bawaba reports:

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah movement, announced Saturday it was ending its truce on anti-Israeli attacks after the arrest of 20 of its activists by Palestinian security forces.
"We have ordered the resumption everywhere of our attacks and in particular suicide operations," the group said in a statement.

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The real reason for war
: To repeat: The real reason for war was never WMD but was the moral imperative to rid Iraq of a murderous tyrant and the mistake Bush and Blair made was playing to the U.N. and the left by pushing WMD when they should have pushed their moral hand and justified the war based on morality and humanism.
Tom Friedman tomorrow says the best speech made about the war was made to a hallway by Tony Blair, as recounted in Peter Stothard's book, "30 Days":

`What amazes me,' [Mr. Blair says,] `is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why we don't get rid of [the Zimbabwean leader Robert] Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let's get rid of them all. I don't because I can't, but when you can you should.' "
Alas, Mr. Blair never really made this case to his public. Why not? Because the British public never would have gone to war for the good reasons alone. Why not? Because the British public had not gone through 9/11 and did not really feel threatened, because it demanded a U.N. legal cover for any war and because it didn't like or trust George Bush.

Yes, it's amazing that we had to make Saddam a threat to us. How self-centered of us. How selfish of us. He was clearly a threat to his own people. But to Europe and the antiwar left, Saddam's people did not matter.

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Numbers
: Douglas Rushkoff says the just-passed law trying to discourage (to say the least) Israel/Palestinian marriages is really a matter of numbers:

The most ancient, but relevant fact in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is the numbers game. Whoever is the most fruitful and multiplying, wins. Israel realizes that within a few years - 4 to 8 by most counts - the Israelis in Israel will be outnumbered by Palestinians and Arabs.
This is why Sharon and even the most radically conservative members of his government support the formation of a Palestinian state. It's also why their parliament passed today what can only be understood as a racist law under which Palestinians who marry Israelis will be denied citizenship (while others who marry Israelis will face no such restriction). ...
This is also an major reason why Palestinian militants seek to slow down the peace process. The longer it takes, the less it will matter whether Israel accepts a Palestinian state. It will simply become one....

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The blogger candidate
: Phil Wolff urges Dave Winer to run for governor in California as the bloggers' candidate (and then he puts forth a platform of the, well, Bloggers Party). The idea is that people would then be motivated to ask, What the heck is a blogger? Not a bad idea. No offense to Dave, but if he runs would Howard Dean still be known as the grumpiest politician? Any other nominees?

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Post-industrial
: hAiko hebig points us to some magnificent photos of the aftermath of industry.

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