Marathon Training
Ive just finished a 17 mile training run around the roads near home. It's a beautiful day - sunny but cool - but after about 10 miles of running the charm of the countryside began to recede as my legs grew steadily wearier. However, I managed to maintain an 8 minute mile average so I am tired but happy. If I can stretch this average over the full 26.2 miles of the Dublin marathon then I will finish just within my target of 3 hours and 30 minutes. That goal looks a bit ambitious at the moment.
- posted by Pat O'Sullivan @ 10:34 AM 0 comments

 
The Lakes of Killarney
These are a few photos I took while on a 3 day break in Killarney recently with my wife.



Muckross Lake.



Boathouse on Muckross Lake.



I don't know the name of this lake.


The gap of Dunloe.
- posted by Pat O'Sullivan @ 8:59 AM 0 comments

 
Conflation
Extract from Eoghan Harris of the Independent:

THE new Sinn Fein anthem is Conflation Once Again. In the Dail last week, party TD Caoimhghin O Caolain brazenly tried to put the Taoiseach on the spot by conflating Ray Burke's tax dodging with the crimes of the Provisional IRA.The Taoiseach rightly treated O Caolain like the Sean Russell statue and took his head off. Pity he didn't also take advantage of Dail privilege to flush out the covert Sinn Fein supporters in the media who do theirbit for the party, peddling similar conflations. Conflation is a crime against truth. Conflation is claiming that taking a brown envelope from a builder is equal to gunning down a garda. No it's not. Financial corruption is endemic to any open society, and indeed is evidence of a functioning democracy.Conflating minor corruption with major criminality was one of the Nazi party's crucial propaganda weapons in subverting the Weimar Republic. Goebbels and his gang spread the sick delusion that the Nazi party's criminal use of political violence was no worse than the financial and sexual corruption of the Weimar Republic. Let's get real.
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This black propaganda of conflation is taking us down a dark road. Back in the Thirties, the German people failed to distinguish between the normal corruption of the Weimar Republic and the abnormal corruptions of the Nazi party. And that conflation ended in a camp called Auschwitz.


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President McAleese's references to Northern Protestants were a regrettable reflex from her roots, rather than a reflection of her current pluralist politics, but she openly acknowledged Irish anti-Semitism in the Thirties.The media might have probed two points.First, they might have acknowledge that anti-Semitism in Ireland is still alive and sick, and sublimated in socialist attitudes to Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. How come we were the last state in the Western world to permit an Israeli embassy? How come RTE and the Irish Times single out the Palestinian cause for special support? Well?Second, they should have looked at Irish nationalism's long strain of anti-Semitism, which runs from Arthur Griffith to various republican fringe groups, and pondered one similarity between Sinn Fein and the Nazi party - combined political and paramilitary agitation.The Holocaust did not come out of a hole in the ground - although it ended there. It was the conscious product of a political party with a paramilitary wing which set out to subvert the Weimar Republic with a pistol in one hand and a ballot box in the other.

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CONFLATION is not confined to Irish domestic politics. Legions of leftists continually try to conflate George Bush with Osama Bin Laden, compare the abuses of Abu Ghraib with the mass killings in Saddam Hussein's prisons, and imply that heroic Iraqi voters are no better than Iraqi "insurgents" - who are actually evil terrorists trying to start a civil war.

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Meanwhile, let me explain something to the superannuated socialists in the media who get so worked up about white-collar crime because they're trapped in a Sixties time warp with Pete Seeger singing about how "some men kill with a gun and some with a fountain pen".Maybe these media hippies conflate fountain pens with guns. Let me give them a reality check. If you are shot with a fountain pen you feel fine, if you are shot with a gun you die.

- posted by Pat O'Sullivan @ 12:08 AM 0 comments

 
Presidential Gaffe
President Mary McAleese has caused some upset among Northern Protestants by drawing a parallel between the anti-Semitism that spawned the Holocaust and hatred for Catholics in Northern Ireland. She made the remarks during a radio interview on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The remarks are unfortunately a double-edged sword, insulting Northern Protestants and gravely understating the horrors of the Holocaust.

Mrs. McAleese is herself a Northern Catholic. Moreover, the nationalist – mostly Catholic - areas of Ulster seem to harbour unusually strong anti-Israel sentiment.

I have been an admirer of President McAleese but unfortunately one is now left with an uncomfortable feeling that this is something of a Freudian slip.

- posted by Pat O'Sullivan @ 11:56 PM 0 comments

 
Holocaust Memorial Day
The Holocaust defies the imagination. To give the simplest sense of scale: the 21st century was transformed by a multiple act of terror on September 11, 2001, when 3,000 people died. During the Shoah, on average, 3,000 Jews were killed every day for five and a half years.


- posted by Pat O'Sullivan @ 11:16 PM 0 comments

 
International aid effort is media driven.
Addressing a press conference last week, Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the U.N. Millennium Project, was .. critical of the double standards of the donor community.
He told reporters that while the international community remained focused on the Indian Ocean disaster, "the world continues to overlook the silent tsunami of death from malaria, which takes every month the number of people that died in the Asian tragedy."
As of Wednesday, the estimated number of deaths resulting from the tsunami tragedy has exceeded 250,000.
Every month, Sachs said, 150,000 children in Africa, if not more, were dying from malaria, "a largely preventable and utterly treatable disease".

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It took but days for the Paris Club of western creditors to espouse a debt moratorium for all the tsunami-affected countries, "but time and time again -- most recently just last fall" -- the rich industrial nations refuse to cancel African debts.
"Even when they agree that it must be done, they can't agree on a formula which would make it possible." (U.N. Special Envoy ) Lewis said.
There's something indefensible at work, he said, because it's not just south and south-east Asia. "Iraq gets debt reduction, Africa festers in frustration."

Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)

- posted by Pat O'Sullivan @ 4:37 PM 0 comments