Ester is blijkbaar enkel met haar nominatie bezig “als ze ’s avonds haar oogjes toedoet”. En ze wil Kelly zeker niet zien vertrekken, al heeft ze hem genomineerd. En Heidi ook niet, maar al de rest wel. En zeker Hanz.

Ester de goele. Ze probeert te slijmen bij Filip, en nu wil ze zogezegd leren pompen. Dat Bert daar geduld mee heeft!

Bah, op een recupdag pas net op tijd thuis zijn voor Big Brother.

To shove another Churchill quote into the fray: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

And also: “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”

Not that it’s germane to anything, but there ya go. Beggars can’t go looking for periodontitis in gift horses’ mouths. Or words to that effect.

Ugh ack! I left myself open for a flamewar! Perhaps I even unwittingly started one!!

Quick Robin! To the Batcave!! Get the asbestos underwear and the flame retardant ointment!

America rules! Long live Big Oil! Long live the Republican party! No socialist can be a democrat! Pinko commie Fidel-loving Chavez out! I’m starting a local John Birch Society chapter tomorrow!

🙂

Ho boy, I seem to have trod in a hornet’s nest over at The Devil’s Excrement. Miguel apparently objects to a bill that sets out to ensure unbiased media:

If anyone still believes that Hugo Chavez and his MVR have any concern for democracy, free speech or civil rights. I quote directly from the proposed bill, written, proposed and supported only by Chavez’s Deputies in teh National Assembly (Translated by me as acurately as possible);

“Article 6. paragraph 2. Participation requires of a State policy in all its instances and levels, to guarantee true and plural information to all citizens and to facilitate access to the same media for the free exercise of freedom speech”

Imagine this, the State is the guarantor of truth and plural information. Sounds like censorship to me

Doesn’t sound like censorship to me at all. Sounds to me as if Chavez want to guarantee access correct and unbiased information to all of Venezuela’s citizens. It even says so: facilitate access to the same media for the free exercise of freedom speech.

Right. Next:

Article 52 Paragraph 3. Any call for a referendum…..Equally, the next day following publication, it will be broadcast for free through the communications media, both private and public, if it is a natioanl refrendum and by those of teh areas affected by it in the other cases. This publication will bee done for free up to three times during teh campaign”

Paragraph 4. All communicatiosn media, both private and public, will have to disseminate for free an isntitutional campaign to promote citizen participation, without the possibility of giving an opinion as to the content of the vote.

Again I ask why? If private media have to do this for free, why should the state have radio or TV stations or even newspapers. I thought that these were in charge of doing this. Once again this is like a new tax.

Uh huh. I still don’t see the problem here. I may have completely misunderstood, but am I correct in paraphrasing art. 52 § 3-4 as “if there’s a referendum all media will brodcast this information for free and call on potential voters to exercise their democratical right”?

And whatever is wring with state broadcasting? I can imagine it may sound bad if you think of the North Korean of Lybian or Iraqi State Broadcasting Companies (don’t know if they exist, but I should guess so), but think of PBS, or of the BBC, or even of our very own VRT. A state broadcast can, again, be an excellent provider of unbiased, non-commercial information to the general public. Yes it can be used as a propaganda instrument, but the proposed bill deals with this too (see later).

Right, next problem:

Now it gets even better

“Article 59, pargraph 4. The National Electoral Council will have to watch so that all communications media, both public and private, provide an equilibrated treatment in news broadcasts, opinion programs and debates of the positions for or against the question taht is the object of a referendum. Not fullfilling this by any media will be sanctioned according to this law and others that regulate the matter”

Read: CENSORSHIP. This is simply outright censorship. As an example, imagine a referendum to impeach President Chavez, the media will have to provide balanced views of for and against, even in the case that 90% of tehe popalation is in favor of impeaching him. Moreover, if you don’t do so, your concession may be closed. Hello!! Freedom of Speech???. Imagine the minimun group of people possible get together to ask for a referendum and they have to have 50% propaganda. Sounds like limiting freedom of speech  to me.

Again, I’m not sure if I understand this right: giving unbiased information and fostering debate will be enforced, and this is bad thing? If this means forcing the media to let both sides present their arguments to the public, where’s the censorship in that?

“Article 131: For the control of the fullfillemnt of the acces to all media, truth and impartiality by all citizens……the National Council of Supervision of the media is created”

The actual word in Spanish for supervision used in the bill is “vigilancia”. I guess the name of the Council says it all. Censorship, censorship, censorship.

Of course there should a national council for the supervision of the media: I wouldn’t trust privately owned companies, by definition only in existence to make more money and certainly not “for the good of the people”, to supervise themselves.

Go down that route and you end up with the so-called liberal media as you have them in the States: pandering to big business, ergo in the main completely rightist.

I’m pretty confident I can find about the same rules Miguel seem to object to in Belgian law and regulations. And I’d hardly call Belgium a dicatatorial regime.

Posted by Miguel Octavio recently as a comment to this entry:

Well, I do not praise Mr. Carter for his work, in the case of Venezuela he has played into Chavez’ hand and I am pretty confident that the reason is that my Government made a substantial donation to the Carter Center. In fact, the information I have is that it was US$ 2 million.

Here is my story: http://blogs.salon.com/0001330/2002/10/12.html#a99

In the end they are both corrupt.

Well, I don’t know of course, but it seems to me as if Miguel is reading a bit too much into the over-careful wording of the Carter Centre’s denial.

As far as I know, Carter did not get the different parties in Venezuela to reach an agreement and at least part is the blame for this failure rests in the opposition’s rejection of the Carter Centre as a mediator. Apparently they would have preferred the Organization of American States to handle the talks, but Chavez’s people balked at that beacause, let’s face it, the OAS was not exactly chomping at the bit to condemn the coup aginst Chavez 🙂

I don’t know. I guess I’ll follow Churchill in seeing democracy as “the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. The fact remains that Mr. Chavez was elected to power in 1998. With a landslide majority. And it’s not because he has ties to Lybia or Cuba, that the opposition should seek his removal from power with any other means than democratic ones.

I mean, it’s not as if democracy doesn’t give them options: I don’t know about the Venezuela constitution, but aren’t there any provisions for some sort of referendum? Or perhaps the opposition could do a Clinton on him and try to get him indicted, perhaps for fraud or embezzlement?

Of course the role of the US administration in all this (Chavez overthrown? Yay! Who cares if the coup was illegal!) is less than honourable in all this, but what else is new?

Kom het tegen: meer gegevens dan ooit tevoren over het zwart gat in het midden van de melkweg, wegens dat ze een ster gevonden hebben die in een baan rond SgrA* (Sagittarius A, de naam van het beestje) draait.

When we included the latest NACO data in our analysis in May 2002, we could not believe our eyes. The star S2, which is the one currently closest to SgrA*, had just performed a rapid swing-by near the radio source. We suddenly realised that we were actually witnessing the motion of a star in orbit around the central black hole, taking it incredibly close to that mysterious object. [ESO via Eurekalert]

Sweet jesus. Vergaderingen heel de dag lang, en dan moet ik nog aan werken komen. ’t Zal voor morgen zijn vrees ik. Wat dus inderdaad wil zeggen dat ik het morgen ook aan mijn been heb, bah.

Tot zover een paar dagen recup pakken.

Wel grappig: mijn bestelling bij ThinkGeek volgen via de tracker van UPS:

PACKAGE PROGRESS
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Oct 16, 2002		10:02 P.M.		LINTHICUM, MD, US		DEPARTURE SCAN
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		9:41 P.M.		BALTIMORE, MD, US		DEPARTURE SCAN
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		4:22 P.M.		US		BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED

Ik vraag mij af of het nog voor vrijdag in België zal zijn. Waarschijnlijk niet zeker?

Zucht. Nog maar eens een ronde voorbij in de uitputtingsslag. Goed op sommige punten, zeer goed op veel andere, minder goed op één.

Ik ga nog eens emacs installeren denk ik. En dan in afschuw opgeven een halve dag later.

Of misschien doe ik beter iets met die hele pc van mij die nog op het werk staat.

Naaaaahhh.

I do not believe this. Am I actually watching Sex in the City? En dan nog zonder dat Sandra hier naast mij zit?

Brrr. Ik zit te kijken naar Kyle MacLachlan met erectiestoornissen. Kyle, niet ik, uiteraard.

Interessant over taxonomieën. Ha, heady days in de tijd, met vijftien verschillende systemen voor soka.

Go Geert! Geert Van Istendael vermeld in de New York Times, haha.

Van Istendael surprised me when we spoke together at a Parisian-European literary festival by asserting that Europe, in order to work, has to become like Belgium. What he means by this, he explained in an e-mail message, is that Belgium has peacefully and successfully resolved what seemed an intractable conflict between Dutch-speaking and French-speaking communities. This has been done ”by democratic (i.e. legislative, parliamentary) means and by pacific means (i.e. marches, speeches, public discussions etc.). . . . Two people were killed, one French-speaking, one Flemish, in 172 years of argument and adjustment. . . .

”I never pretended that our solutions for the language problem were/are very elegant or highly intellectual or shining monuments of political thought. No, they are certainly not, but obviously, they are workable. That’s why South Africans and Palestinians visit Brussels: to study the rather Byzantine labyrinth of our language equilibria. Because the Belgian way of dealing with this type of cultural difference seems to be an antidote against civil war and the wholesale destruction of societal fibers.”

En gelijk heeft hij. Op het artikel gewezen via Rene zijn blog.