In the past week or so we have witnessed two extraordinary interruptions.

First, some background information:

The first interruption occurred when Barack Obama delivered his healthcare reform speech to a joint session of Congress. As he once again confirmed that his proposed health plan would not cover illegal immigrants, Obama was childishly and loudly interrupted by GOP congressman Joe Wilson, from South Carolina. You could see the shock and anger on Nancy Pelosi’s face as she heard ‘You lie!’ from the opposite chamber. Presumably after being smashed about by his party whip, the congressman came out afterwards and apologized.

The second interruption, while in rather different circumstances, was equally inappropriate and laughable. As Taylor Swift stood up to accept her first Video Music Award, the gold-plated imbecile who is Kanye West burst in to declare that ‘Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time’, then stormed off the stage. Again, he calmed down, and issued an apology to minimize the media carnage.

What unites these two events? While it’s true that Obama commented on Kanye’s temper tantrum, calling him a ‘jackass’, I think this video sums it up more eloquently:

And that’s all I have to say.

I noticed this anti-lisbon poster sitting high on a lamp-post the other night (or more accurately, the other morning) as I walked home through Rathmines.

Is this a joke?

No really. Is this a joke?

In the spirit of objectivity, I follow on from yesterday’s Jesus Camp entry with a different but equally questionable children’s summer retreat: Camp Quest, which I found (as usual) on one of my many daily visits to BBC News. It is, according to the US equivalent’s website, supposed to

[…] provide children of freethinking parents a residential summer camp dedicated to improving the human condition through rational inquiry, critical and creative thinking, scientific method, self-respect, ethics, competency, democracy, free speech, and the separation of religion and government […].

The camp has naturally drawn controversy, instantly labelled an ‘Atheist Camp’ or a ‘Dawkins Camp’ (While I’m sure Richard Dawkins is pleased to see the camp setting up in the UK, he does not, in fact, have any personal involvement with it). In response to the media frenzy, the organizers offer this page of refutation.

While arguably less sinister than the Kids on Fire School of Ministry, is it any less fundamentalist?

EDIT: Viddler seems to have taken down its mirror of Jesus Camp. I guess you’ll have to find it elsewhere!

‘MR. PRESIDENT! ONE NATION UNDER GOD!’ cry the children in front of the cardboard cut-out of George W. Bush. Disturbed yet?

Directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing and released in 2006, Jesus Camp is a documentary film about a Charismatic Pentecostal summer camp, which aims to teach children how to ‘take back America for Christ’. A classic example of thought reform at its most deadly, it is a worrying snapshot of the hardline conservative bible-thumpers of 21st century America.

As it dips in and out of the lives of a handful of evangelical christian families, we see that both inside and outside the home, what can only be described as brainwashing is taking place. We meet a sickeningly content boy watching ‘Creation Adventures’, a cartoon which happily tells him that God made the earth 6000 years ago. We meet a jubliant young girl who loves to dance, and would be having a ball if not for her sin of dancing ‘for the flesh’ (everything has to be done for the Lord).

While this certainly infuriated me, I soon found out that it barely tips the iceberg. Keen to save their souls, pastor Becky Fischer scorns children as young as seven and eight who are on their knees, hysterically upset about their supposed ’sins’. She yells that they are ‘phonies’ and ‘hypocrites’, before stepping in with ‘the water of your [God's] word’ to ‘cleanse’ them (it’s really just a bottle of the finest Nestlé spring water. I wonder who settled that sponsorship deal?).

Later on, a ‘pro-life’ activist comes to speak to the campers. Armed with a roll of red duct tape, a box of anatomically-incorrect plastic foetuses (you can buy your very own set here if you’re interested), and the most condescending tone of voice in existence, he explains that ‘God formed you in your mother’s womb. You’re not just a piece of protoplasm’. He then delivers his punch-line: ‘whatever that is!’ His joke certainly is funny, if only because it illustrates perfectly that he clearly has no business discussing matters of biology. ‘You’re not just a piece of tissue in your mother’s womb. You were created intently by God. Isn’t that incredible!’. Yes, it certainly is incredible. Incredible that a grown man has convinced himself that this unsubstantiated religious rhetoric is fact.
The most disturbing part of this episode is the pastor’s bizarre ’symbolic gesture’ of taping the children’s mouths shut with his big strips of red tape. It sums up the aim of the camp: to silence the individual voices of the most impressionable people in society, whilst (quite effectively) convincing them that they’re better for it.

I challenge you to watch this without wanting to cry out in anger. Perhaps the only good to come of this profoundly sad tale is that after the film’s release, the camp’s organizers were so innundated with complaints that they had to shut it down.

As I found out on my way home with a friend, it would seem that the recent defamation bill didn’t go down as well as expected. I think this picture rather elegantly sums up the state of Ireland in 2009.

So says this blog post by Bob Byrne. I will be the first to recognize that Irish really is in dire straits. But I couldn’t contain my anger at the sheer hypocrisy of this post.

It would have been a perfectly reasonable argument, were it not for two sentences:

I would love to be able to speak my native language.

I wish everyone spoke it. But nobody speaks it.

Byrne then goes on and on about how much the language costs the taxpayer, and how ineffective school classes are. This is the typical weapon in the armoury of the anti-Irish punter, nattering on about póg mo thóin and ár nAthair atá ar neamh down in the pub over his Guinness, and it just doesn’t make sense. My question is, if you really would love to speak your native language, and if you really do wish everyone spoke it, then why are you advocating its obliteration from the face of the earth?

It is disgraceful that some couldn’t ask for directions in the street after 15 years of study. It is disgraceful that the education system is under-funded and fails those in disadvantaged areas. But it simply doesn’t follow that we should cut Irish out of our lives altogether.

Bryne makes the point that it’s pointless to translate road-signs, public documents and announcements into Irish. How can we even hope to learn a language for 15 years without being exposed to it? If we’re surrounded by a language, learning it ceases to be a hobby; It becomes a necessity. It is only by taking pains to surround the public in Irish that we can ever hope for its revival.

I do agree however that our Irish courses are pathetic. Irish literature could be some of the most fascinating and enthralling material in existence, but we somehow manage to suck all the fun out of it.

Despite this, according to Byrne:

[He has] friends who pursued learning Irish after leaving school, really embraced it and they will pay the cash to send their kid’s [sic] to an Irish school. Fair play to them. They’re footing the bill. So let’s remove Irish from normal national schools. If you want to learn it you can choose to.

What a sweeping statement. Why should we remove Irish from national schools? We haven’t a hope of saving it if we remove it all together. But we do need to crawl before we walk. Stop attempting to force-feed hundred-year-old poetry and complicated prose to uninterested students, and get busy on communication. Look at the contrast: In other language classes (French, German, Spanish, Italian) you learn about grammatical gender right from the off. You learn and get tested on every-day vocabulary. I never knew that Irish had masculine and feminine nouns until 4th year in secondary school. And how is it that everybody fears an modh coinníollach and an tuiseal ginideach, yet they master le conditionnel in French and Deklination in German? Let’s start with the basics, and work up, just like we all did when we learned English.

He is apparently capable of language-learning (‘I have taught myself two languages since 2003′), so why not learn it? If he truly wishes he could speak it, and learned, at the time of writing, two languages in six years, he shouldn’t have much trouble. Regardless of the stories about it being hard, Irish grammar is quite unremarkable for that of a European language. If you shut out the literature, the history and the Catholic rituals, and take a step back, you’re left with a perfectly normal modern language.

And there are so many resources out there for you to learn it. Go to Club Chonradh na Gaeilge on Harcourt Street and a room of Irish-speakers will help you out. Buy an Irish book. Read Foinse (Sorry, Fianna Fáil can’t afford to bail Foinse out anymore). search ‘Gaeilge’ on YouTube. Watch TG4 and work out the subtitles. Do something. That’s the only way we can ever hope to save it.

I am actually speechless. You MUST watch this video.

Perusing the BBC’s excellent news site this afternoon as I while away on 5th Avenue, I came across this video of a Cold-War-era missile base in rural Russia. With North Korea’s recent sabre-rattling in mind, I found it quite disturbing.

It is widely known that the Government of the People’s Republic of China conducts large-scale censorship of Internet access in that country. But what would it be like to actually experience, first-hand, this despicable, flawed attempt at curbing free speech?

The China Channel add-on let's you waft in and out of the great firewall of China like a cartoon ghost.

That’s exactly what China Channel attempts to do. From a software point of view it’s a bit dodgy, overriding your proxy settings and reducing Firefox to a crawl, but it’s interesting nonetheless. You download the add-on from here, install it in Firefox (which takes a bit of fiddling around, as I found out), restart the browser, then you get a tasteful little icon like this above the tab bar:

Clicking it points Firefox at a proxy server located somewhere inside China, behind the filters and DNS poisoning. Browsing is painfully slow, but quite surreal.

Attempting to access blocked sites gets you disconnected entirely.

For example, googling ‘Tiananmen’ and visiting this BBC page about the 1989 massacre was deemed too dissenting by the powers that be, so I was blocked. One thing I hadn’t realized before is that as well as being prevented from accessing the site in question, you are also completely disconnected from the Internet for fifteen minutes. Thankfully, living in relatively liberal Ireland, I was able to just call up another proxy server and start over.