Matt Keefe's Blog

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If I stole a load of money, that could potentially help terrorists – if I chose to give it to them. In the absence of any evidence that I was likely to do this, or that that was why I had stolen the money, the offences for which I could be arrested, detained and questioned would surely be those pertaining to theft, not terrorism.

If what I had stolen was instead information, those possible offences might conceivably extend to those to do with spying. But still not terrorism. In fact, if David...

“Anytime a person goes into a delicatessen and orders a pastrami on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies.”

Milton Berle

“A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou.”

Omar Khayyam

I often wonder what people mean by integration. It’s easy enough to define as an outcome – a society in which links are only marginally stronger or more numerous between individuals presumed to be part of the same ethnic, religious or cultural grouping than they are between members of the population at large – but that’s an o...

3 Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,

7 for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,

9 for Mortal Men doomed to die,

1 for the Dark Lord on his dark throne

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

1 Ring to rule them all, 1 Ring to find them,

1 Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Big Brother is watching. Maybe. If he was, he’d be seeing Orwell’s name a lot.

Geoff Pullum rightly takes issue with this piece from The Spectator’s Lexington about the supposedly differing use of language by Republics and Democrats in American politics. Lexington invokes George Orwell’s famous notorious essay, Politics and the English Language – the same essay which, coincidentally, Paul Krugman today tells us “anyone who cares at all about either politics or writing should know by heart.” (I...

“At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance.”

George Orwell | The Freedom of the Press

“Nothing...

…Obama has a Nobel Peace Prize.

To trust in ourselves, we need only examples of courage like this.

‘Hollow’. You’ve heard it. (Big, heavy; lyrically bland but musically characteristic. What’s going on with the video? The lyric video far superior.)

‘Pretty Done’. Dark, gritty, complex. Riff is immediate and attention-grabbing, even (or especially?) following the already familiar strains of ‘Hollow’.

‘Stone’. You’ve heard it. (Similarly to hollow, musically characteristic, lyrically bland, sits well enough here.)

‘Voices’. First change of pace. Distant, spacey intro followed by acoustic opening...

Is this the most inconsistently styled sentence ever? (Probably not, but it’s certainly the most intriguingly inconsistent I’ve come across in, oh, a day or two):

From Salon on a potential filibuster of Chuck Hagel’s nomination as US Secretary of Defense:

“Other Republicans also seemed wary of using the filibuster against Hagel, including Richard Burr, N.C., Susan Collins, Maine, Sen. Roy Blunt, Mo., Pat Roberts, R-Kan. and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.”

Bizarrely, the five states mentioned are named...

Unexpectedly, striding bemulleted back into my consciousness, I find, is Richard Marx. The reason is his latter day mission of what would seem to be sworn vengeance upon anyone who, well, said pretty much anything about him, really. The result is my return to a guilty pleasure.

Reading the article, what I couldn’t understand was how Edward McClelland could fail to mention what I’d always presumed to be Marx’s greatest (if not only) hit, ‘Hazard’. Was I simply wrong to think of it as one of Mar...