Or so suggests best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich in her blog. Naturally, being a writer who would rather chew off my own fingers one by one than resist the impulse to write when it comes upon me, and being a big Barbara Ehrenreich fan, I was perplexed; and when so perplexed, it’s best to go to the text…

Everyone has a book in them, at least everyone who writes to me seems to have a story waiting to be packaged between hard covers and peddled on Amazon: The mother trying to support an autistic child on $6.50 an hour, the army medic who’s seen how military health care goes wrong way before Walter Reed, the inner-city school teacher who digs into his own pocket to pay for pencils and glue. These are all potentially great stories, but I have one piece of advice: Don’t write a book. At least not yet.

I’m not saying this because I want to keep the wildly lucrative business of book-writing to myself. First, it isn’t wildly lucrative; most of the royalty statements I’ve received over the course of my career have been in the negative numbers. I consider a book — or an article — a success if it earns just enough to allow me to go on to the next one.

More to the point, most books don’t start as books. They evolve from humbler efforts such as magazine articles, doctoral dissertations, even op-eds or blogs. If you find yourself saying “I could write about a book about it,” start by writing something far shorter. If you can’t get that published — as an op-ed, for example — you’re not ready for a book. Correction: you may be ready, but an agent or editor isn’t going to pay much attention to an entirely unpublished writer.

Read the rest on her blog, which I’m adding to the blogroll now.

For all those writers, publishers, editors, bloggers, and journalists out there. Forget the office party and come drink with The Shebeen Club tomorrow night at the Irish Heather!

We’ll be upstairs in the Reading Room this time, at the Irish Heather in Gastown, 217 Carrall Street in Gastown, from 7-9pm. No cover, order off the menu and enjoy the best damn gastropub in the West!

Twas the day before Tuesday, when all through downtown
The email went out inviting Shebeeners down
To the Heather on Tuesday the 19th: tomoz!
For a drink and a nosh and tales of Santa Claus.

We’ll have a fun evening, no lectures to hear,
From seven ’til nine, just a-drinking our beer!
With Lorraine with Grinch earrings and a Santa hat,
You can come as you are, or all dressed up in spats.

And down in the kitchen arises a bashing
The chef is meat grilling and potato mashing.
Order straight off the menu and pay what you nosh
Tear into the butter, and the whiskies quite posh.

“Now Writers! Now Students!
Now, Publishers many!
Come, Poets! Come, Bloggers!
Come, Booksellers, merry!
To the Reading Room of the Heather
At the top of the stairs!
Now party on! Party on!
Don’t put on airs!

We’ll read Chrismas stories, and tell our tall tales
So drop in for a bevvy; I’ll tell about the old jail.
The Heather was lockup in decades gone by
So come down, serve your time drinking Guinness and rye.

 Undermining Freedom of Expression in China:
the Role of Yahoo! Microsoft, and Google

By Amnesty International and available as a pdf download here.

‘and of course, the information society’s very life blood is freedom. it is freedom that enables citizens everywhere to benefit from knowledge, journalists to do their essential work, and citizens to hold government accountable. Without openness, without the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers, the information revolution will stall, and the information society we hope to build will be stillborn.’

Kofi Annan, Un Secretary General

recommendations for action

Amnesty International calls on Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google and other Internet companies operating in China to:
1. Publicly commit to honouring the freedom of expression provision in the Chinese constitution and lobby for the release of all cyber-dissidents and journalists imprisoned solely for the peaceful and legitimate exercise of their freedom of expression.

2. Be transparent about the filtering process used by the company in China and around the world and make public what words and phrases are filtered and how these words are selected.

3. Make publicly available all agreements between the company and the Chinese government with implications for censorship of information and suppression of dissent.

4. Exhaust all judicial remedies and appeals in China and internationally before complying with state directives where these have human rights implications. Make known to the government the company’s principled opposition to implementing any requests or directives which breach international human rights norms whenever such pressures are applied.

5. Develop an explicit human rights policy that states the company’s support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and complies with the UN Norms for Business and the UN Global Compact’s principle on avoiding complicity in human rights violations.

6. Clarify to what extent human rights considerations are taken into account in the processes and procedures that the company undertakes in deciding whether and how the company’s values and reputation will be compromised if it assists governments to censor access to the Internet.

7. Exercise leadership in promoting human rights in China through lobbying the government for legislative and social reform in line with international human rights standards, through seeking clarification of the existing legal framework and through adopting business practices that encourage China to comply with its human rights obligations.

8. Participate in and support the outcomes of a multi-stakeholder process to develop a set of guidelines relating to the Internet and human rights issues, as well as mechanisms for their implementation and verification, as part of broader efforts to promote recognition of the body of human rights principles applicable to companies.

Read the whole report online or download it here.

Referred to in our July 18 meeting

Crashing Bodily Into a Target is Not Easy

[The following appeared in the Guardian newspaper, reprinted from Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods by Albert Axell and Hideaki Kase, published August 2002. I have corrected it to American usage. -- Dan Ford]

Transcend life and death. When you eliminate all thoughts about life and death, you will be able to totally disregard your earthly life. This will also enable you to concentrate your attention on eradicating the enemy with unwavering determination, meanwhile reinforcing your excellence in flight skills.

Exert the best in yourself. Strike an enemy vessel that is either moored or at sea. Sink the enemy and thus pave the road for our people’s victory.

Take a walk around the airfield. When you take this walk, be aware of your surroundings. This airstrip is the key to the success or failure of your mission. Devote all your attention to it. Look at the terrain. What are the characteristics of the ground? What are the length and width of the airstrip? In case you will take off at dusk, or early morning, or after sundown, what are the obstacles to be remembered: an electric pole, a tree, a house, a hill?

How to pilot a fully dressed-up aircraft that you dearly love. Before taking off: You can envision your target firmly in your mind as you bring your plane to a standstill. Breathe deeply three times. Say in your mind: “Yah” [field], “Kyu” [ball], “Joh” [all right] as you breathe deeply. Proceed straight ahead on the airstrip. Otherwise you may damage the landing gears. [Updated: Click here for more about this translation.]

Circle above the airstrip right after take-off. Do so at the minimum height of 200m. Circle at an angle within five degrees and keep your nose pointed downwards.

Principles You Should Know

Aborting Your Mission and Returning to Base 

In the event of poor weather conditions when you cannot locate the target, or under other adverse circumstances, you may decide to return to base. Don’t be discouraged. Do not waste your life lightly. You should not be possessed by petty emotions. Think how you can best defend the motherland. Remember what the wing commander has told you. You should return to the base jovially and without remorse.

When turning back and landing at the base. Discard the bomb at the area designated by the commanding officer. Fly in circles over the airfield. Observe conditions of the airstrip carefully. If you feel nervous, piss. Next, ascertain the direction of the wind and wind speed. Do you see any holes in the runway? Take three deep breaths.

The Attack

Single-plane attack. Upon sighting a target, remove the safety pin. Go full speed ahead towards the target. Dive! Surprise the enemy. Don’t let the enemy take time to counter your attack. Charge! Remember: the enemy may change course but be prepared for the enemy’s evasive action. Be alert and avoid enemy fighters and flak fire.

Dive attack. This varies depending on the type of the aircraft. If you are approaching the enemy from a height of 6,000m, adjust your speed twice; or from a lower height of 4,000m, adjust speed once.

When you begin your dive, you must harmonise the height at which you commence the final attack with your speed. Beware of over-speeding and a too-steep angle of dive that will make the controls harder to respond to your touch. But an angle of dive that is too small will result in reduced speed and not enough impact on crashing.

Where to crash. Where should you aim? When diving and crashing on to a ship, aim for a point between the bridge tower and the smoke stacks. Entering the stack is also effective.

Avoid hitting the bridge tower or a gun turret. In the case of an aircraft carrier, aim at the elevators. Or if that is difficult, hit the flight deck at the ship’s stern.

For a low-altitude horizontal attack, aim at the middle of the vessel, slightly higher than the waterline. If that is difficult, in the case of an aircraft carrier, aim at the entrance to the aircraft hangar, or the bottom of the stack. For other vessels, aim close to the aft engine room.

Just Before the Crash

Your speed is at maximum. The plane tends to lift. But you can prevent this by pushing the elevator control forward sufficiently to allow for the increase in speed. Do your best. Push forward with all your might.You have lived for 20 years or more. You must exert your full might for the last time in your life. Exert supernatural strength.

At the very moment of impact: do your best. Every deity and the spirits of your dead comrades are watching you intently. Just before the collision it is essential that you do not shut your eyes for a moment so as not to miss the target. Many have crashed into the targets with wide-open eyes. They will tell you what fun they had.

You are now 30m from the target. You will sense that your speed has suddenly and abruptly increased. You feel that the speed has increased by a few thousand-fold. It is like a long shot in a movie suddenly turning into a close-up, and the scene expands in your face.

The Moment of the Crash

You are two or three meters from the target. You can see clearly the muzzles of the enemy’s guns. You feel that you are suddenly floating in the air. At that moment, you see your mother’s face. She is not smiling or crying. It is her usual face.

All the happy memories. You won’t precisely remember them but they are like a dream or a fantasy. You are relaxed and a smile creases your face. The sweet atmosphere of your boyhood days returns.

You view all that you experienced in your 20-odd years of life in rapid succession. But these things are not very clear.

In any event, only delightful memories come back to you. You cannot see your own face at that moment. But because of a succession of pleasant memories flashing through your mind, you feel that you smiled at the last moment. You may nod then, or wonder what happened. You may even hear a final sound like the breaking of crystal. Then you are no more.

Points to Remember When Making Your Last Dive

Crashing bodily into a target is not easy. It causes the enemy great damage. Therefore the enemy will exert every means to avoid a hit.

Suddenly, you may become confused. You are liable to make an error. But hold on to the unshakeable conviction to the last moment that you will sink the enemy ship.

Remember when diving into the enemy to shout at the top of your lungs: “Hissatsu!” ["Sink without fail!"] At that moment, all the cherry blossoms at Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo will smile brightly at you.

[Copyright 2002 by Albert Axell, the Guardian newspaper, and Daniel Ford]

Shebeen Club note: I believe the copyright for the majority of this material actually belongs to the Japanese government, but am fearless about incurring their wrath. Cuz that’s how I roll.

via Kitsilano, James’s Up in Ontario blog, to be specific.

Seems that old church/state separation idea doesn’t go over big with the bigwigs at the Times Colonist.

Visit the site to read James’s take on it, along with the original article, plus the breaking news from Sean Holman.

A snippet from Up in Ontario:

Smith wrote a column raising questions about the value of visiting some well-established Victoria tourist destinations and suggested some alternate, free attractions. Tourism industry representatives sought and got a meeting with the Times Columnist publisher, Bob McKenzie, and a day later Smith was sacked.

Now, a commenter on Up in Ontario has objected, saying the story had no place being published at all, as it was an opinion piece. It may or may not have been slanted, but the Times Colonist is no stranger to slants and, as I pointed out, if the tourist attractions are overpriced, that in itself is news. If free attractions that are interesting are available, that, too, is news. And the decision about whether or not a story belongs in the paper rests with the editors, not the local business capos.

As was put very well by a journalism prof on Public Eye Online:

In an interview with Public Eye, associate professor Klaus Pohle, a specialist in media ethics and newspaper management at Carleton University’s school of journalism, said it wasn’t surprising publisher Bob McKenzie declined to comment on the situation, explaining “I would be totally embarassed to admit” to cancelling such a contract just after meeting with “the vested interests in Victoria…It’s a terrible conflict. A terrible conflict. And it sends a terrible message - not only to the journalists at the paper but to the other media and the readers and the advertisers. It sends a message (to the advertisers) that I can interfere anytime. And that’s a very, very dangerous situation to be in.”

Sure Victoria is a small town, but it’s got at least two horses, and so is too big to be indulging in these Pottersville-type shenanigans, particularly in a CanWest Global publication. Or are they planning to take this strategy national?

[first posted on raincoaster]

This is the email exchange between Henry Porter and Tony Blair.

Only the first email is reproduced here; the rest are available here, on the Observer site.

Britain’s liberties: The great debate

Over the past few months Henry Porter has written a series of articles in The Observer criticising what he sees as a sustained government assault on fundamental freedoms. He attacked a range of measures, including legislation on identity cards, new police powers and anti-terror laws. Porter’s critique has generated a huge response from the public - and now from the Prime Minister. Here, in this extraordinary email exchange, Tony Blair rejects the criticism - and announces plans to go furtherHave your say and post your questions for the government on our blog.
Henry Porter and Tony Blair
Sunday April 23, 2006
The Observer  

�
From: Henry Porter To: Tony Blair Re: Liberty
Dear Prime Minister,  �
Nine years ago, as I watched you arrive at the South Bank on the night when you became Prime Minister, I would never have imagined that I’d come to view you as a serious threat to British democracy. But regrettably I have. Either by accident or design, your ‘modernising’ Labour government has steadily attacked our rights and freedoms, eroding the Rule of Law and profoundly altering the relationship between authority and the people.

Successive laws passed by New Labour have pared down our liberty at an astonishing rate. The right to trial by jury, the right to silence, the right not to be punished until a court has decided that the law has been broken, the right to demonstrate and protest, the presumption of innocence, the right to private communication, the right to travel without surveillance and the details of that journey being retained - all have been curtailed by your legislation.

While hearsay has become admissible in court, free speech is being patrolled by officious use of public order laws. In Parliament Square we now see people parading with blank placards to make the point that they are not allowed to demonstrate within one kilometre of the Square under the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA). And this in the land once called the Mother of Parliaments.

For a democrat, this is all profoundly troubling. I hope that you believe you are acting in good faith; that you are simply motivated by the need to respond to the threats of terrorism and organised crime and the nuisance of anti-social behaviour, but I wonder if you have any idea of the cumulative effect of the 15 or so bills which have incrementally removed or compromised our liberties.

Forgive me, Prime Minister, if I say that the country has faced far greater threats under many of your predecessors and they did not go in for this wholesale assault on the Rule of Law. One of the results of your modernising zeal is that while the state has become invisibly more authoritarian, we all to some extent have become suspects. Under the SOCPA, a person can be arrested for any offence - even dropping litter. Before charges are laid he is fingerprinted, photographed and required to provide a sample of his DNA for indefinite retention by the police database.

That says a lot about the state’s attitude to the individual’s innocence before he has been tried, but even more about the state’s odd sense of entitlement to the essence of each person. Defenders of this practice say it is justified if a single murderer is prosecuted. With the same reasoning you would ban the use of cars if it saved a single life claimed in road accidents.

Reasoning is so often the problem with laws hurried through to show that the government is doing something in response to yesterday’s headlines. The reasons for the ID card scheme are serially given as a means to combat terrorism, benefit fraud, illegal immigration and identity theft. You will agree the ID card could not have stopped the British bombers of 7 July last year.

Government figures estimate benefit fraud due to identity theft at between £20-£50m per annum, a fraction of the LSE’s low cost estimate for the scheme of £10bn. There is no ID system in the world that cannot be breached by determined gangs. And illegal immigrants? Well, a card might make their lives more difficult but it won’t stop people-smuggling.

Set against these ‘benefits’ are the cost to the tax payer (how many schools or hospitals would £10bn buy?) and the implications of the total surveillance of people’s lives, the details of which will be retained in the National Identity Register database for the inspection of joined-up authority. I have nothing to hide, but I fear this scheme beyond any of your measures, for it is the dream of every authoritarian government to be able to monitor its citizens around the clock.

Just as harassment, anti-social behaviour and terrorism laws have been used to limit free speech and protest, so the ID card scheme will come to control the life of this country in ways that we can barely imagine. I conclude that this is its primary purpose and that your government has shamelessly used the fear of terrorism and the loathing of scroungers and illegal immigrants to attain this goal of total supervision.

I could be persuaded to put a more benevolent interpretation on so much of what you have done, if it weren’t for the fact that parallel to the assault on liberty has been your move against Parliament in favour of giving the Executive more arbitrary powers. You say that you respect Parliament, that you answered more questions than your predecessors and that you are the first Prime Minister to appear before a select committee, but in other ways you seem thoroughly hostile to the idea of scrutiny by elected representatives.

The Civil Contingency Act, presented as modernising emergency powers for the age of terrorism, allows ministers in an emergency, which they only have to believe is about to occur, to make practically any provision without reference to parliament. The Inquiries Act, in effect, allows ministers to scrutinise their own behaviour, while the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill proposed an extension of law by ministerial decree. There has been a government retreat - or ‘clarification’ - on this. I pray it is real.

It is possible that many of your measures have been subject to a law of unintended consequences. That is also my deepest concern. Whatever your motives today, it is clear that by ignoring the ancient traditions of the unwritten British constitution you have provided all the laws that a hard-line leader would need to drive this country into dictatorship. You have offered us a trade-off between freedom and security: I fear we will lose both.

Yours sincerely,

Henry Porter

read the response here.

As read by me at the July 18th meeting, Forbidden Words: Banned Books, Freedom of Speech, and Mein Kampf. This is the article that got a man arrested for handing out photocopies near Parliament. He was arrested for “inciting terrorism”. 

Full article here. This is just the introduction. And you can find the complete exchange between Henry Porter and Tony Blair here, as originally published in the Observer. 

Blair’s Big Brother Legacy 

In the guise of fighting terrorism and maintaining public order, Tony Blair’s government has quietly and systematically taken power from Parliament and from the British people. The author charts a nine-year assault on civil liberties that reveals the danger of trading freedom for security—and must have Churchill spinning in his grave 

By HENRY PORTER 

I.M.-ING THE P.M.: BLAIR-PORTER E-MAIL EXCHANGE 

In the shadow of Winston Churchill’s statue opposite the House of Commons, a rather odd ritual has developed on Sunday afternoons. A small group of people—mostly young and dressed outlandishly—hold a tea party on the grass of Parliament Square. A woman looking very much like Mary Poppins passes plates of frosted cakes and cookies, while other members of the party flourish blank placards or, as they did on the afternoon I was there, attempt a game of cricket. 

Sometimes the police move in and arrest the picnickers, but on this occasion the officers stood at a distance, presumably consulting on the question of whether this was a demonstration or a non-demonstration. It is all rather silly and yet in Blair’s Britain there is a kind of nobility in the amateurishness and persistence of the gesture. This collection of oddballs, looking for all the world as if they had stepped out of the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, are challenging a new law which says that no one may demonstrate within a kilometer, or a little more than half a mile, of Parliament Square if they have not first acquired written permission from the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This effectively places the entire center of British government, Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, off-limits to the protesters and marchers who have traditionally brought their grievances to those in power without ever having to ask a policeman’s permission. 

The non-demo demo, or tea party, is a legalistic response to the law. If anything is written on the placards, or if someone makes a speech, then he or she is immediately deemed to be in breach of the law and is arrested. The device doesn’t always work. After drinking tea in the square, a man named Mark Barrett was recently convicted of demonstrating. Two other protesters, Milan Rai and Maya Evans, were charged after reading out the names of dead Iraqi civilians at the Cenotaph, Britain’s national war memorial, in Whitehall, a few hundred yards away. 

On that dank spring afternoon I looked up at Churchill and reflected that he almost certainly would have approved of these people insisting on their right to demonstrate in front of his beloved Parliament. “If you will not fight for the right,” he once growled, “when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” 

Churchill lived in far more testing times than ours, but he always revered the ancient tradition of Britain’s “unwritten constitution.” I imagined him becoming flesh again and walking purposefully toward Downing Street—without security, of course—there to address Tony Blair and his aides on their sacred duty as the guardians of Britain’s Parliament and the people’s rights. 

For Blair, that youthful baby-boomer who came to power nine years ago as the embodiment of democratic liberalism as well as the new spirit of optimism in Britain, turns out to have an authoritarian streak that respects neither those rights nor, it seems, the independence of the elected representatives in Parliament. And what is remarkable—in fact almost a historic phenomenon—is the harm his government has done to the unwritten British constitution in those nine years, without anyone really noticing, without the press objecting or the public mounting mass protests. At the inception of Cool Britannia, British democracy became subject to a silent takeover. 

Last year—rather late in the day, I must admit—I started to notice trends in Blair’s legislation which seemed to attack individual rights and freedoms, to favor ministers (politicians appointed by the prime minister to run departments of government) over the scrutiny of Parliament, and to put in place all the necessary laws for total surveillance of society. 

There was nothing else to do but to go back and read the acts—at least 15 of them—and to write about them in my weekly column in The Observer. After about eight weeks, the prime minister privately let it be known that he was displeased at being called authoritarian by me. Very soon I found myself in the odd position of conducting a formal e-mail exchange with him on the rule of law, I sitting in my London home with nothing but Google and a stack of legislation, the prime minister in No. 10 with all the resources of government at his disposal. Incidentally, I was assured that he had taken time out of his schedule so that he himself could compose the thunderous responses calling for action against terrorism, crime, and antisocial behavior. 

The day after the exchange was published, the grudging truce between the government and me was broken. Blair gave a press conference, in which he attacked media exaggeration, and the then home secretary, Charles Clarke, weighed in with a speech at the London School of Economics naming me and two other journalists and complaining about “the pernicious and even dangerous poison” in the media. 

So, I guess this column comes with a health warning from the British government, but please don’t pay it any mind. When governments attack the media, it is often a sign that the media have for once gotten something right. I might add that this column also comes with the more serious warning that, if rights have been eroded in the land once called “the Mother of Parliaments,” it can happen in any country where a government actively promotes the fear of terrorism and crime and uses it to persuade people that they must exchange their freedom for security. 

continued on the Vanity Fair website.

The Blair law that could send his wife to prison
By Boris Johnson
(Filed: 27/10/2005)