Thursday, July 28, 2005

Brood en Spelen voor het Plebs

.
Uit : The Independent

Arts projects to lose out as Lotto money goes to Games

By Matthew Beard

Published: 28 July 2005

Arts and heritage projects, which have in recent years benefitted hugely from lottery largesse, are set to lose out on tens of millions of pounds which will be diverted to help fund London's 2012 Olympic dream.
Camelot, the lottery organisation, said ventures such as today's Olympic scratchcard would raise £750m, half of Lotto's £1.5bn contribution to the event. The remainder will come from lottery profits that would otherwise have gone to good causes such as funding museums and exhibitions.
The way the scheme works at present, £340m - about 45 per cent - of that would have been earmarked for sports and the remainder, £410m was to go to the Big Lottery Fund, and major arts and heritage projects.
The arts community is now determined to lobby hard to prevent savage funding cuts in the run up to 2012. Mark Wood, chairman of the Museums, Galleries and Archives Council said the issue would now "dominate the agenda" in his talks with Government departments.
"This is a serious amount of money but I suspect you have not heard the end of the story," he said. "Museums and galleries are among the most popular tourist attractions in the UK and they are a part of the bigger role of the 2012 Games. With that in mind we will want to make sure that we don't lose out on the Olympic dividend."
He said that in exchange for co-operation on Olympic lottery plans, his members would be hoping foSir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, has already warned that it is important that the Games does not "cannibalise" all the money required for culture between now and 2012: "The Olympics has to be additional and a catalyst and not instead of what we are doing at present.".
Holding the Government line on the Games, the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, insisted that diverting lottery funding to fund London 2012 was a fair price to pay, considering the dividend the games would bring to the whole country. Games organisers point to the planned cultural festival in Hyde Park and Victoria Park, which will showcase London's music, theatre and cinema.
"You will always find people who will complain but what I would say is just think of everything you can do to maximise the benefit of the Olympics. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity" Mrs Jowell, the Cabinet minister in charge of the Olympics, said.
Now is not necessarily a good time to launch new gaming schemes: disappointing sale of the Euromillions games has fuelled fears that the Olympic scheme may struggle to hit its targets. But Camelot's chief executive, Diane Thompson, said she was confident of reaching revenue milestones: one-third raised by 2009 and the balance thereafter. If these targets were exceeded, Ms Jowell said, London's taxpayers could expect to pay less towards the Games.
Camelot is expected to introduce other schemes in the run-up to London 2012, including a game tied to the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
r direct government funding, especially in the regions.

Saturday, July 02, 2005

Waarom de Amerikanen nooit zullen winnen, en het hadden kunnen weten ....

.
Uit : NYT dd. 2-6-'05 by John Tierny

(...) In those early days, when the memory of Saddam was still fresh, you could walk down a street in Baghdad and be greeted by an Iraqi stranger thanking you for bringing freedom. But even back then there were plenty of Iraqis like Saleh Youssef Sayel, who proudly told me of the reaction of his 5-year-old son, Mustafa, to an American soldier.
"The soldier tried to shake his hand, but my son refused," he said. "He knew enough English to say, 'No. You go.' Later he told me he wanted a gun to kill Americans. This is a natural feeling. Nobody wants a stranger in your house or your country."


The natural impulse to dislike outsiders is so strong that it barely matters who the outsiders are.
When experimental psychologists divide subjects into purely arbitrary groups - by the color of their eyes, their taste in art, the flip of a coin - the members of a group quickly become so hostile to the other group that they'll try to deny rewards to the outsiders even at a cost to themselves.
And when the members of a group really have something in common, like family ties, they're willing to fight outsiders even if it means their own deaths. Xenophobia produced genetic rewards for hunter-gatherer clans. When the evolutionary psychologist J. B. S. Haldane was asked whether he would lay down his life for his brother, he replied, "No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins."


Iraqis have their own version of that line: "My brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the world."
Because marriage between cousins is so common in the Middle East - half of Iraqis are married to their first or second cousins - Arabs live in tightly knit clans long resistant to outsiders, including would-be liberators. T. E. Lawrence learned that lesson when trying to unify Arabs early in the last century.
"The Semites' idea of nationality," he wrote, "was the independence of clans and villages, and their ideal of national union was episodic combined resistance to an intruder. Constructive policies, an organized state, an extended empire, were not so much beyond their sight as hateful in it. They were fighting to get rid of Empire, not to win it."


Today's liberators in Iraq like to attribute the resistance to Islamic fascists' fear of democracy and hatred of the West.

But those fascists know that an abstract critique of Western ideology isn't enough to attract followers. In their appeals they constantly invoke the need to expel foreigners from their soil, a battle cry that is the great common denominator of suicide bombers around the world.

QED

http://steinmeijer.net