DUFF & NONSENSE!

More war - sorry!

I am finding it difficult to choose exactly the right words to express the shock ... the dismay ... the anger ... even the anguish ... I am feeling as I delve into the history of the forgotten war - Korea 1950-1953.  Also, to be honest, the guilt because I really should have studied this long ago and learned the lessons.  However, I will leave all that for later but in the meantime, for those ignoramuses like me, I will continue to tell you the highlights.

In my last post on the subject I told you of MacArthur's stroke of military genius (and enormous luck!) in undertaking the highly risky Inchon landings far to the north, and due west of Seoul, whilst the remainder of his army was bottled up in the far south east corner of the country and in danger of being swept into the sea.  Inchon was a stunning success and vindicated the psychotic old brute in his far-away HQ in Japan.  The unutterable pity of it is that at this, the very pinnacle of his success, MacArthur threw it all away!  Virtually the entire North Korean army was in the south and by landing so far north, there was nothing to oppose him except rear echelon troops.  MacArthur with his army in Seoul could have raced eastwards and cut off the entire North Korean army.  Their leadership, true to style, failed to tell their front-line units that an enemy army had appeared behind them for four days!  Not that there was much they could do anyway because now it was their turn to be pressed backwards and being a 'peasant army' they had no trucks to aid their withdrawal, and anyway, American airpower made movement during daylight almost impossible.

Map courtesy of: http://www.johndclare.net/cold_war10.htm

So there was MacArthur's golden opportunity but instead, obsessed as he was with conquering the whole of Korea, and also with placing a powerful American army on the Chinese border, he ordered an advance to the north, in fact, an advance all the way to the Yalu River.  Even a lowly ex-corporal like me could have told him that the Chinese communist regime which had just won a long and bloody civil war in which the Americans had aided their enemies, were never going to allow that to happen.  The further north the Americans went the more convinced were the junior army intelligence officers and their battalion and regimental commanders in the field that something was not right.  The geography of northern Korea is mountainous and the American army rarely if ever left what roads they could find but up in 'them thar hills' literally tens of thousands of Chinese troops were hiding.  Camouflaged or crammed into caves which they dug during the night, they were invisible during the day to ground troops or even over-flying 'planes.  The junior commanders on the ground were aware of an eerie  feeling of being watched but they could not find hard evidence, and anyway, their intelligence assessments were firmly squashed by MacArthur's ghastly Chief of Intelligence, Charles Willoughby, who sounds as though he was from 'frightfully British' stock but was actually from Prussian lineage and even affected a monocle from time to time.  Willoughby, along with every officer in MacArthur's HQ simply worked on the premise that whatever 'the General' said was right and any information that contradicted it must be ignored or altered.  Truly, reading about MacArthur and his HQ, and bearing in mind the death and destruction that would emanate from his pronouncements, is enough to almost reduce me to tears.

MacArthur absolutely dismissed any notion that the Chinese would intervene and so colossal was his reputation and his political influence, via the Republican party and the MSM of the day, that no-one in Washington, not Truman, not the Chiefs of Staff, not Acheson, the Secretary of State, no-one, despite their doubts and their uncertainties, stood up to the stupid, old brute.  It was dereliction of duty on a mammoth scale and hundreds of thousands died for it.

In the first few days of November as the American army crossed the last big river before the Yalu there took place one of the strangest operations in modern military history.  Suddenly, from the (apparently empty) mountains surrounding the triumphant American (and SouthKorean) armies as they advanced up the roads leading north, tens of thousands of hitherto completely hidden Chinese troops descended on them.  Entire South Korea formations simply disappeared as did many American forces cut off, as they were, from any support because the Chinese had infiltrated round and behind them.  It was bloody carnage but - just as it had suddenly started - so, equally suddenly, after about six days, it ended.  The Chinese simply melted back into the mountains!  The battered, bashed and bewildered Americans were left to try and sort themselves out from the dangerous shambles in which they had been left.

In effect, the Chinese, realising that their diplomatic warnings had been ignored by the Americans, had decided to administer a bloody nose on their army in order to re-inforce the fact that under no circumstances would they allow an American army to be based next to their frontier.  And yet, despite this terrific and terrifying example of Chinese fighting power, still the American establishment ignored it!  Honestly, reading the two books I have on this subject, I cannot tell you how many times I have had to put the book down because I was so shocked and upset at what I was reading.  People rail at the WWI generals because of what they see as the useless slaughter but those men were caught in a technological time-trap between the invention of the machine-gun and the very late invention of the tank.  No-one at that time could work out how to get a man made of soft tissue across 250 yards of open ground against machine-guns firing 600 rounds a minute.  But here, we have some of the best political brains in America, a General Staff made up of officers experienced from WWII and a General who had helped defeat the Japanese, and all of them, absolutely all of them, could not recognise what the Chinese were signalling when they sent the American army reeling backwards  in early November 1950!

Instead, and it almost makes me weep, that evil, old fool, MacArthur, insisted that the enemy troops involved were not regular Chinese army but only volunteers(!) and whilst it had momentarily taken them by surpise, the advance to the Yalu could now begin again.  And Washington caved in - again!  They even allowed him to bomb the bridges over the Yalu river.  Thus, a massive and this time not a temporary intervention by the Chinese was certain.

Sorry to have bored on about this subject - and there will be more - but I cannot think of any history books which have produced such an emotional response in me.  I am all too aware of the folly of political leaders, our own British history is replete with examples, but I don't think I have ever read of an entire political and military establishment, with virtually no exceptions, taking leave of all commonsense and judgment even when provided in the bloodiest way possible with hundreds of body-bags as a warning.  Suddenly, Vietnam is beginning to make a sort of horrible sense.  I'm not sure I can bring myself to read the history of that war, at least, not until I have recovered from this one.  Anyway, thank you for letting me get it off my chest.  This blog is my therapy!

 

But will Dave give George a bonus for this cock-up?

It's all t0o, too delicious!  I'm hugging my schadenfreude to me for warmth in this chilly weather.  Dave pontificates on how bankers' bonuses must be strictly controlled and more power given to shareholders.  Then George toddles along and gives the nod to a £1 million pat on the back to the chairman of RBS in which he and Dave are majority - by a long chalk - shareholders.  I reached snigger-factor ten!  As increasing amounts of smelly stuff hit sundry fans around Westminster, No. 10 came out with an utterly pathetic equivalent of 'it wasn't nuffink to do wiv me, honest, guv'.  Little Georgie was then winkled out later and tried to hide the fact that the board of RBS had sandbagged him.  Meanwhile all the goodie points earned by Dave over his gesture at the EU and his determination not to pay welfare recipients more than an average wage has vanished to be replaced by truculent bad feeling amongst the electorate.

Yes, I know that this particluar banker is not receiving a million in cash but only in shares at today's price which has dropped like a stone under his stewardship.  On the other hand, they are now so low that they can only go up, so he could be on an even bigger earner!  George demonstrates that, just like Dave and Clegg and Miliband, he has never run a business in his life.  Never had to meet a payroll, never had to sweat through a VAT return, never had to negotiate as a buyer or a seller, in fact, never had to anything really difficult in the real world.  Thus, the board of RBS had him over just by indicating that they might resign en bloc.  If he had even the tiniest of balls he would instantly have called their bluff.  He and his government have to convince the City fat cats that they mean business but now the only pussies on show are George and Dave.  They could have replaced the board inside a month and that, irrespective of whether it is right or wrong, would have played to fanfares with the electorate and made not an iota of difference to the bank.

For God's sake, if they can't even get the politics right what is the point of them?

 

Why I'm a blogger and he's a top journalist

Sometimes you just have to put your hand up and confess your limitations.  It's not just my bad spelling and my unnecessarily convoluted grammar, which usually arises from the tangle which represents my thought processes, that marks me down as just a mere blogger.  Usually, a good, old-fashioned comparison will do the dirty deed.  Take this comment from Simon Carr in The Independent on Clegg and Cameron:

Of course they have their differences, Clegg said – and he might have gone on: "His father was a stockbroker, mine was a banker. He went to Oxford, I went to Cambridge. He has a blue tie, I have a yellow. He looks like Pinky and I look like Perky." You could try and explain the difference between Cameron and Clegg to a Japanese tourist but he'd surely say: "They look the same to me, mate."

I would give my right left arm to write such a neat and deadly summary as that!

 

David Davis MP rats on the bankers and their bonuses!

Ever since I learned about Pavlov and his slavering dogs I have always been fascinated by experiments with animals designed to show human behaviour.  Mind you, I'm never very sure quite how useful or even accurate they are and David Davis MP adds to my doubts with an intriguing post at The Coffee House.

He quotes from a book which I have never read by Dan Ariely called The Upside of Irrationality.  Apparently, Mr. Ariely has studied some animal experiments, rats, to be precise, carried out a century ago which indicate that, paradoxically, the bigger the bonus, or 'incentive', the worse the outcome!

He cites a century-old experiment in which rats were placed in a cage with two pathways. One led to a reward, the other to a device which gave the rats an electric shock. The aim of the experiment was to see how quickly the rats learned which path to take.

As an added twist, the scientists varied the size of the electric shock. Some rats who took the wrong pathway received a low level shock, which produced a tickling sensation. Others received a medium shock, while a third group received a high level shock, which was almost fatal.

The results seem eminently predictable.  The higher the electric shock received, the greater the motivation there is for the rat to learn the rules of the cage, and therefore those rats who receive the strongest shock are the quickest to learn which pathway to take out of the cage.  It is obvious.
But wrong.

The rats which received the biggest shock — in effect the most severe punishment for making a poor decision — were slower to figure out which pathway was right than all the other rats. In other words, the group with the biggest incentive to succeed were the least successful. 

Heh!  But that's rats, you might mutter, what about us intelligent humans?  Oh dear:

In a different experiment, this time conducted in India, Ariely offered volunteers bonuses for winning games which tested their reasoning skills and cognitive ability. The volunteers were divided into three groups. For the first group, the bonus on offer was equivalent to a day’s pay for the average local worker. Winners in the second group received a bonus worth two weeks’ pay, and in the third group, 5 months’ pay.

The results would make bankers quiver.

You would expect those with the most to gain to be the most motivated and perform best. In fact, those in line for the biggest bonus performed more slowly and less successfully than those chasing more modest windfalls.

Instinctively we think large monetary incentives must encourage individuals to go the extra mile. But Ariely draws our attention to the psychology of bonuses and the dangers huge rewards can create. The frantic pursuit of riches can heighten feelings of workplace stress and encourage recklessness and poor decision making.

Unsurprisingly the banks don’t want to hear this.

Well, I can't say I blame them, I mean who wants to be compared to a bunch of rats? Oh, you mean they already are!  Well that may be because the rest of us have at last cottened on to the fact that 'banker rats' collect their rewards irrespective of any outcome at the business they are supposed to serve.

 

"They failed because they did not start with a dream": Shakespeare?

Did Shakespeare write that line?  Well, yes and no.  According to The Telegraph, the French socialist candidate for the presidency, François Hollande, thinks so because he quoted it in a major speech a few days ago and attributed it to William Shakespeare.  Unfortunately, but perhaps typically of politicians everywhere, it was the wrong Shakespeare.  The words were actually coined by the Telegraph's book reviewer, Nicholas Shakespeare, in a novel he once wrote.  Sorry, François, only 'E' pour un effort!

However, buffoon though he might be, M. Hollande deserves to be watched.  The savants reckon he is a dead cert to be the next president and according to a BBC radio news item I heard last night, he is promising not just to make waves inside the EU but to blow up a full scale tsunami.  Yes, yes, of course these pols always blow hot and hard when they are electioneering but if he only tries to impose half of what he is promising there will be European tears before bedtime.  His prime target, naturally given that he is a socialist, is the financial industry and that means, in French terms, the City of London.  Where Sarkozy merely muttered, this man intends to push hard and ruthlessly to achieve his aim.  Internally, apparently, he means to go for full red-blooded socialism with the retirement age cut and increased government spending across the board on all the items to be found on a socialist 'wish-list'.

Personally, I wish him well and hope he romps home with a massive majority, so massive, in fact, that he feels absolutely confident of pushing through all his 'Mad Marx' ideas, because then, with a bit of luck and a following wind, 'Dim Dave' will wake up to the fact that the whole European edifice is rotten to the core and bad for Britain.  Then he might, although I wouldn't hold my breath, actually do something about it.

 

I almost feel sorry for 'Merkozy'

I have just caught a glimpse on TV of 'Dave the King of the Clichés' marching across a platform at Davos with a manful stride and then turning and pelting his audience with, er, clichés.  They, meaning 'Merkozy' although he didn't say it, must 'be firm', they 'must take tough decisions', they 'must stop tinkering', and so on and on.  Well, we all know, as does he, that there are only two cures for the ills of the euro - either it breaks up and reduces to a north Europe German hegemony, or, the whole lot of them unite under a central government and central bank.  Which one does Dave want?  He seems to be in favour of the second.  In other words, he actually wants a colossal national entity created just across the Channel and the North Sea, an outcome which is in direct opposition to British foreign policy for 500 years and against which countless generations of Englishmen have fought and died to foil.  And if such a monstrosity is brought into being, what part does Dave see us playing?  Will we join it?  Or will we be an appendix, a sort of dangling spare part of no real use or importance, let alone influence, to the powerful United States of Europe?  And if he is actually being rather crafty (which I don't believe because he's not intelligent enough) and hoping to prod 'Merkozy' into either failure or into this giant marriage so that, in either event, it will provide us with an excuse to leave, has he told Nick Clegg? 

 

Nothing changes

A little pressed for time this morning but I could not resist another quote from the very first edition of The Spectator, July 5th, 1828.  Here they are quoting from Blackwood's Magazine:

"The disposition of a genuine Briton is to make up his mind upon what he ought to do, and having once determined that, to adhere to his resolution with a fixedness of purpose, which more frequently proceeds to the lengths of obstinacy, than deviates into vacillation and uncertainty.  Now this is a character quite opposite to that of the Liberals, and much to be preferred before it; for while the Briton of the old school may possibly carry his principle to an extent which is not right, he of the new or Liberal school will most probably tumble through sheer weakness into  what is wrong.  In the Liberal there is a total absence of the sound healthy firmness, which is absolutely essential to eminent usefulness; he yields this; he concedes that; he compromises the other thing; he winds, and twists, and hesitates; and when he wants to accomplish a thing, chooses rather to do it by a trick or a stratagem, than by candour and plain speaking.  You are never sure of him; you are doubtful as to his object, and quite uncertain as to the means he will adopt."

Well, I think that more or less sums up Clegg & Co., even if the description is nearly 200 years old.

 

All the news that's fit to print!

The principal object of [this blog] is to convey intelligence.  [Look, I do the jokes round here!]  It is proposed that in [Duff & Nonsense] to give this, the first and most prominent place, to a report of all the leading occurrences of the week.  In this department, the reader may always expect a summary account of every public proceeding, or a transaction of interest, whether the scene may lie at home or abroad, that has taken place within the seven days preceding the termination of our labours; which, we wish it to be remarked, close on Saturday on midnight.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

The Russians are advancing slowly in their invasion of Bulgaria: the army has crossed the Danube at several points, and thrown a bridge over the river.  The fort of Isakza has yielded and the town is burnt; but the more important fortress of Brailow, or Ibrail still resists; at least, there is no certainty that it has fallen.  The Emperor Nicholas has pitched his camp at Babadagh, a town of Bulgaria, lying between twenty and thirty miles from the south bank of the Danube.  Count Wittgenstein has issued a proclamation to the Bulgarians . . . "I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves" . . .  hang on, hang on, that's not right - stop the presses - that's another Wittgenstein, for God's sake!

Oh dear, I knew this would end in disaster so I had better explain.  In the course of the afore-mentioned (see below) 'tidy-up-your-garret-or-else' exercise insisted upon by the 'Memsahib' in which I have been engaged for what seems like days already, I came across a facsimile of the very first edition of The Spectator dated Saturday July 5th 1828, and all the above, er, with a few slight alterations, was their opening column which I thought might add a touch of much-needed class to this blog.  But then Wittgenstein, or his great grandad, had to stick his nose in and confuse me.  Typical!  Bloody philosophers!

 

Some more Ogden Nash to make you even more cheerful!

I'm taking a break from the tidying up (see previous post) on the grounds of extreme physical exhaustion.  However, in moving one pile of rubbish from here to there the course of my careful tidying up, I came across my collected verse of Ogden Nash and, well, I just had to dip into it, well, I just had to, I mean, you understand, I'm sure even if that old . . . ooops, I hear footsteps on the stairs so quickly, here are a couple of his silly short ones:

        THE PORPOISE

I kind of like the playful porpoise,

A healthy mind in a healthy corpus.

He and his cousin, the playful dolphin,

Why they like swimmin' like I like golphin.

 

THE SHARK

How many scientists have written

The shark is gentle as a kitten!

Yet this I know about the shark:

His bite is worser than his bark.

 

And here our learned poet uncovers a great universl truth:

 

ASSORTED CHOCOLATES

If some confectioner were willing

To let the shape announce the filling,

We'd encounter fewer assorted chocs,

Bitten into and returned to the box.

 

There, feeling better already, aren't you?

 

Good grief! Good news!

This is going to make all the doomsters even more miserable!  David Middleton over at WUWT brings "glad tidings of great joy".  I will not attempt to paraphrase his wonderful essay because, apart from anything else, I have been told by 'she who must be obeyed' in terms which brook no argument that this garret I occupy along with my computer and my books has got to be tidied and cleaned - or else!  However, I will leave you with a couple of quotes by way of a taster and then you can pop over and be made cheerful:

The world has plenty of food, water, space, mineral resources and the Earth’s environment is generally cleaner now than it was 35 years ago. Crop yields have continued to maintain an increasing upward trend for 40 years… And there is every reason to believe that crop yields will continue to improve (unless we really are on the verge of returning to Little Ice Age climate conditions).  [...]

The only thing the world has a genuine shortage of is honest and competent people in gov’t. Almost all of our problems are due to political interference with market forces.

Can't argue with that last one!

 

Croation corruption

I can claim some considerable expertise on the subject of Croatia because I once spent a week there!  Well, it's better than nothing!  Actually it was in the ancient and charming sea town of Poreč which is at the northern end of the Croation seashore in the district of Istria.  Not the least of its attractions is that you can hop on a fast boat across the sea for a day visit to Venice - and the best way to see Venice is the approach by sea.  Anyway, enough of this tourism puff for which I will not receive a single Kuna.

In fact, I will definitelynot receive any Kunas fairly shortly because the Croatians have just been tricked into the USE.  I am grateful to England Expects for offering a piece by Marjan Bošnjak of the Only CroatiaParty who explains how his country has been sandbagged, tricked, swindled, cheated and lied to in the campaign mounted jointly by most of their own corrupted politicians, plus the crooks, rogues and vagabonds in Brussels-Berlin - my emphasis throughout these quotes:

The Government spent huge amounts of public funds to pay for a massive YES campaign, whilst denying any funding to the NO case. In addition, the European Commision ran its own very expensive YES campaign. State enterprises and corporations were also enlisted. State Television aired pro-EU adverts for free or at discounted rates, Croatia Post home delivered more than 2 million government leaflets for free, and the City of Zagreb provided free EU advertising on its trams. [...]

 

The 'Vecernji List' daily reported on 10.8.2011 that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and EU Integrations had in the two preceeding months (June and July 2011) paid the broadcasting of  more than 13 thousand radio adverts and more than 2300 TV adverts on 80 radio stations, 6 national and 15 local TV stations. This massive propaganda campaign continued and even increased in scope and intensity over the next six months leading up to the referendum.

 

And so on and on and on . . . and yet, the result was that only 43% of the electorate actually voted!  And of those who did vote whilst 66% were in favour 33% were against.  The government actually had to rescind part of the Croatian constitution which made any referendum failing to reach 50% approval null and void.

 

For me this sums up the entire 'European Project' for the rotten, stinking mess of corruption that it is and the quicker we get out the better.

 

Pret a Brit!

It was Fraser Nelson at The Coffee House who pointed me in the direction of an intriguing article in The Evening Standard by Joshi Herrmann.  Nelson, like just about everyone else, including Boris [mayor of London] who made a fuss about it, had noticed that it is virtually impossible to be served in a London cafe or pub by anyone who is English.  In particular, he pointed at Pret a Manger who appear to employ only foreigners in their London shops.  (For the benefit of my foreign readers, Pret a Manger is a highly successful chain of take-away sandwich/snack outlets.)  Joshi Herrmann is a young journalist with The Standard and he went along to work a shift at a Pret a Manger branch.  It is a fascinating article and you can see instantly why Brit 'youfs' and 'youfettes' are unlikely to suit their corporate needs and requirements.  I must admit to being very surprised at their management approach to their staff and to their new recruits.  This includes a 'test day' in which the recruit is judged by his or her fellow workers!  You can see instantly why so many of our very own, dearly beloved, grunt-shuffling mouth-breathers fail to make the grade given that punctuality, courtesy, mental agility, team work and communication skills are essential.  In this 'septic' Isle there are several monstrous crimes committed against us by those who should know better but few reach the abysmal cruelty of what passes for our 'edukashun servis'.  Time, I think, for one teacher in three to be shot pour encourager les autres!

 

Ne dites pas, "Non, ce n'est jamais arrivé".

Not bad my French considering that I had to take two goes to pass my 'O'-level.  Oh, alright, yes, I did have just a little help from mon ami, 'M. Google Translate'.  Anyway, the point of this (fairly useless) post is to ponder on the decision by the French Senate to ban the denial of genocide in general, and in particular, the genocide allegedly inflicted on the Armenians by the Turks in 1915.  I use the word "allegedly" for the simple reason that I have no idea whether or not the Turks are (or were) guilty of what is a crime under international law.  Commonsense (never a totally reliable indicator, particularly mine) indicates that a great number of Armenians perished at the hands of the Turks but whether it amounts to 'genocide' is quite beyond my pay grade, and indeed, my knowledge, to decide.  It sounds to me like the sort of squabble likely to keep lawyers busy for years, and international lawyers for decades, if not lifetimes!

So, setting aside guilt or innocence (and thus risking a hefty fine and/or imprisonment were I to say this in France), I would like to dwell on the sort of people and their mind-set that allows them to insist that other people say or unsay things.  It is a peculiarity mostly confined to those of a political persuasion and not necessarily full-time politicans only, but also the myrid bottom-feeders who swim round the arsehole of parliamentarians and nibble away at them until they take on board the message of the day.  Nor, of course, is it confined to our French neighbours.  I am still waiting in trembling fear for a knock on my door at 3.00 am because I have twice referred to Ms. Diane Abbot MP as a "fat, black clown" - and when it comes, I don't think it will be at the behest of the United Union of Clowns who are so useless that they can never carry a pail of water ten feet!

What these 'denialist deniers' fail to understand is that simply banning people from saying what they think or believe does not somehow make the beliefs go away.  In fact, I suspect that it has just the opposite effect of making the gagged believe all the more strongly that they are onto 'The Truth'.  It must be true, they say to themselves, quietly, under their breath, because otherwise why would the authorities make such an effort to silence them?  And because they have been silenced there is now no opportunity to bring to their attention certain established facts which might change their minds.  I mean, personally, I am more than willing to listen to arguments attempting to convince me that Ms. Abbot is, in fact, not fat, not black and not a clown!

 

Megalomaniac? Yes! Swine? Yes! But . . .

I was very rude about the late Gen. MacArthur recently which was quite easy given the wealth of material on his manifold weaknesses and failings but of course, as Shakespeare always demonstrates, men are complex creatures, never entirely one thing or another.  So, to counter-balance the ton of iniquity I spilled on his head the other day it is only right that I should add 'military genius' into the other scale.  Perhaps 'flawed' military genius would be a more accurate description.

For those unfamiliar with the Korean war let me explain that the North Koreans attacked over the border, the 38th parallel, on the 25th June 1950 and within a couple of months they had hurled the South Korean army and the hastily assembled American forces back into the south east corner around the port of Pusan.  A quick glance at the map shows you what a dire state the allies were in by September.

Map courtesy of: http://www.johndclare.net/cold_war10.htm

In fairness, I should make clear that where-as the North Korean communist state was highly militarised throughout its society, the South was not and, despite its president being very hawkish, the army was not in particularly good condition and was totally unable to cope with a massive onslaught from the North.  Equally, the first American army units rushed to Korea did not, on the whole, perform very well.  In fact some of them were dire and in several instances the men simply broke and ran.  However, this was not the battle-hardened army of 1945.  Most of them had long-since been demobed.  These were green troops whose only service had been in the luxoury of occupied Japan where many of them lived better than they did at home.  In the way of all democracies in peacetime, and in an American climate which thought that their sole possession of 'The Bomb' had banished war, basic military equipment and training had fallen away.  Difficult to believe for an American army but they were actually short of ammo!

In addition, the American army was trained to fight in straight lines, so to speak, that is, on a continuous front with supporting units either side.  However, so pitifully small were the numbers in these early days that there was no possibility of a continuous front and this gave the advantage to the North Koreans who were trained to avoid frontal attacks (except for the purposes of pinning an enemy in place) but always to seek an open flank and manouvre through the gap and come up behind the enemy.  Time and again this operational method wrought havoc in the hastily drawn-up plans of the Amrican commanders as they were forced back and back and finally pushed into the Pusan pocket.

But even as they were beaten, smashed and bashed backwards with local commanders fearing for a Korean 'Dunkirk', back in Tokyo that grandest Grand Panjandrum of them all, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, was already working out how he was going to utterly destroy the North Korean army and conquer their half of the country.  And he would do it with a stroke which Hannibal, victor at Cannae in 216BC, and von Schlieffen, designer of the plan that would have destroyed a French army in 6 weeks in 1914, would have applauded.  Instead of pouring yet more troops into the Pusan pocket and using the gradually accumulating American power to start pushing the North Koreans back, he would use his total command of the sea to mount an amphibious landing, not just on the flank of his enemy, but way back behind him where there would be virtually no combat troops only those working to supply their frontline troops.  He chose Inchon, the harbour that is immediately west of Seoul.

He could not have chosen a more difficult site if he had tried!  When the Navy and the Marines looked at the difficulties they were appalled.  It had a small island smack in the middle of the harbour which an attacker would have to assume would be defended vigorously.  There were no beaches to land troops on, only high beach walls like a citadel.  The currents were powerful and fast, and the tides enormous, rising or falling 30 feet.  Time was pressing because the vicious Korean winter was approaching and there was only a tiny window of opportunity of four days maximum in September in which a landing could take place.  All these genuine and enormous difficulties MacArthur simply brushed aside and told his staffs to get on with it.  He understood that precisely because of all these difficulties, his enemy would think it absurd for the Americans to try anything on the harbour at Inchon.

Well, he did it, or at least, his exceedingly brave and skilful servicemen did it and, at a stroke, suddenly the Allies had a knife at the throat of the North Korean army, or at least, a knife across their supply lines.  Thus, the North Korean army which was all in the south thinking that victory was theirs was forced to recoil backwards as fast as it could go.  It was at this triumphal point, his genius vindicated, that 'The Great Architect of Victory', Gen. Douglas MacArthur, beset with pride and hubris made a colossal error.  More of which later.

ADDITIONAL:  Further to the comments added by 'JK' and Hank I would like to pay tribute to this man leading an assault at Inchon; a superb marine, a brave soldier and an excellent leader of men.  Let his memory stand as an example of the best of America - via Wiki:

Lieutenant Baldomero Lopez of the Marine Corps is shown scaling a seawall after landing on Red Beach (September 15). Minutes after this photo was taken, Lopez was killed after covering a live grenade with his body.^[67] He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

 

'KILL A KID - OR - 2 FOR THE PRICE OF 1!'

Not a very nice title, is it?  Not exactly tasteful or discreet.  Not something you would want to flash in front of your vicar or your grandmother.  But I'm just trying to get you all used to the idea now 'They' - yes, those mysterious 'They' who decide things without asking us - have allowed abortion factories to advertise their killing skills on our TVs.  So warn Granny, or your young teen-age daughter, as she watches her favourite chat show that when these ads come on, in between the double-glazing offers and the cut-price sofas, she will be able to compare and contrast the various offers, and decide on exactly how skilfull the 'providers' are at gripping, twisting, pulling and tugging the various bits of a baby out of a woman's womb.

Of course, they won't put it like that, oh dear me, no.  There will probably be some soft music, a long view over the English countryside and one of those actresses speaking very slowly with a truly rich, melodious voice assuring you of absolute privacy, comfort and tender loving care as 'you kill your baby adjust your life-style priorities', or something like that.

In fact, having thought about it, there is another reason not to let Granny see any of those ads because it might occur to her that now that killing babies is no longer frowned upon, it can only be a matter of time before there will be companies advertising their skills at 'offing the elderly'!

 

A 2nd tour of duty in Korea!

Oh yes, my sense of duty to my devoted - er, you are devoted, aren't you? - readership knows no bounds and having finished one massive tome on the subject of the Korean War I felt sure that somewhere in the wreackage that constitutes my bookshelves I had another book on the subject which I had never actually read.  Sure enough, after about three days searching, lo and behold, I found it lurking somewhere beteen the Punic Wars and Austerlitz - slight error of navigation, I feel!  It is by a man called Bevin Alexander and it is called Korea: The Lost War.  It was first published in 1986 and as I am only on p.38 of nearly 500 pages it is, perhaps, a tad early to judge but so far, so good.  What I am enjoying are some of his asides, such as this fascinating passage:

Truman was following an obligatory course laid down long before.  Alexis de Toqueville in his classic study of the United States in the 1830s focussed on an American reality when he wrote: "The men who are entrusted with the direction of public affairs  in the United States . . . may frequently be faithless and frequently mistaken, but they will never systematically adopt a line of conduct hostile to the majority." [Not least, I suppose, because unlike so many other leaders they have to face their public every four years!]

De Toqueville also observed there is a propensity in the United States "to obey impulse rather than prudence, and to abondon a mature design for the gratification of a momentary passion."  De Toqueville noted that only George Washington's inflexible stand and his immense popularity kept Americans from allying themselves with France and going to war against Britain at the time of the French Revolution.

Sound fella', that Washington, I will not have a word said against him, er, despite him being a scoundrel and a rebel!

ADDITIONAL:  I only read on a few more lines and came across this:

More specifically to the point, de Toqueville also spotted another American propensity - to cloak whatever we do, however harsh or unfair or inconsistent, with a mantle of legality.

Shrewd observer, that Toqueville chap, must buy his book one of these days!

 

56–58 Am Großen Wannsee, Berlin

Last Friday, as Der Spiegel reminds me, was the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference and if there is a God one would have prayed that he might have arranged a Lancaster-load of bombs to fall on that elegant villa on the 20th January 1942.  On that day, 70 years ago a collection of fanatics, intellectuals, security policemen and bureaucrats met to take the Final Decision.  There was nothing special about the meeting, it only lasted around 2 hours, and for most of the participants it was but one more meeting in a constant schedule of meetings.  The result, of course, was horrific almost beyond description.  However, it is worth emphasizing because it seems to have been forgotten, or perhaps 'buried' is a better word, that it was not the first such decision of that sort and the results, compared to other efforts in mass extermination both before and after, were paltry by comparison.  It is appropriate, and admirable, that the Germans represented by their President, remembered the anniversary.  However, if you are waiting for Russia or China to commemorate their monstrous acts of human extinction, please do not hold your breath, it could endanger your health!

Incidentally, anyone wishing to see a depiction of the conference should treat themselves to a DVD of Conspiracy, a film of the event starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci amongst many other very fine actors.  It is a great example of art and artifice telling truth.

 

J. Edgar Hoover: man or monster?

Clint Eastwood's film, J. Edgar, provides an opportunity, or at least a nudge, that it is perhaps time to try and judge the man fairly.  His reputation has taken some 30-odd years of calumny either by direct (and usually false) accusation or by sly hints and nudges until today he is considered to be a monster.  I have no particular view simply because I know little or nothing of the man but I do recognise a witch hunt when it is in full cry!  John Preston in yesterday's Telegraph puts up, if not a stout defence of the man, at least a plea for a fair and factual weighing of the pros and cons of his life.  Like all men, Hoover had his faults, and the 'Big Men' of any age tend to have virtues and vices to match - think Churchill, Roosevelt, and so on.  However, as Preston points out, one thing cannot be gainsayed, Hoover turned the original FBI from a gang of incompetent, corrupt rascals into a superb police force and in doing so insisted on a scientific approach to crime-fighting.  The FBI were the first to have a national fingerprint database and Hoover encouraged his newly formed forensic department to investigate the possible uses of blood type and handwriting analysis as well as wire-tapping techniques.  Undoubtedly he stayed in office for too long and thus his individual enemies became over time battalions.  Still, to be attacked by both Richard Nixon and Harry Reid is, I feel, no mean achievement!

 

The Lesbian-straightener might get a lesson in going straight!

One of the 'il-Lib-non-Dem' cabinet ministers who, er, stands straight and true and is a hero to us heterosexuals is, of course, Chris Huhne.  As I have told you before, his good works amongst the lesbian community has resulted in at least one poor confused woman being led back to the manifold delights offered by chaps.  Of course, it is a pity that his missus, hitherto the grateful recipient of 'Hot Dog' Huhne's undoubted libido, was rather muffed miffed when she found out and instead of agreeing to join the party - no, no, not the 'il-Lib-non-Dems', do pay attention! - instead she ratted him out to the 'Plods' by claiming that she took the penalty points he should have incurred whilst speeding dangerously in his car.  There is a totally unconfirmed rumour going about that the speed of the car gradually increased as he was explaining in some detail to her exactly where-in lay the pleasures of Sappho.

Vicky Pryce and her ex-husband the Energy Secretary Chris Huhne Photo: PA via The Telegraph

Anyway I remind you of all this rather stale tittle-tattle because the latest news is that The Times has withdrawn its objection to providing the 'Plod' with the e-mails in which, apparently, the ungrateful ex-Mrs. Huhne blew her master's cover story to smithereens!  Surely the so-called Director of Public Prosecutions-Provided-You-Are-Not-A-Cabinet-Minister can no longer continue the soft-shoe shuffle he has executed so brilliantly for so long and any minute now poor old Chris will have his collar felt and even - oh, say it ain't so! - face the rigours of 'D' Wing where-in, I am assured by commenters at Guido's place, 'Big Bubba' is waiting impatiently!

I am in London for most of the day tomorrow so whilst I'm away you can amuse yourselves, provided you are not easily shocked, by reading the suggestions to Guido's caption competition which this week features our hero.

 

As my jaw dropped, my eyes opened

First, some personal background to explain this particular post.  I have a fairly good but only a general layman's knowledge of WWII, although that tends to be concentrated on the European side of the conflict.  In any event, my specialist reading more or less stopped from the summer of 1945.  I know virtually nothing of the next 20 to 30 years other than what I read in the papers at the time - yes, quite!  I must have been dimly aware of the gap in my knowledge because I can think of no other reason to explain why I purchased David Halberstam's book The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.  Anyway, I did and I read it and, as my title above suggests, I was both shocked and educated.  This is a first class history book but it is also part-horror story and an almost un-put-downable thriller.  I stress "almost" because there were places where I was so moved by pity or anger that I simply could not read any more for a while.  What Halberstam describes is the best of America and the worst of America!

Let me sketch in the background for those, like me, who are woefully ignorant of the situation between 1945 to 1950.  At the end of WWII in the Far East, the Russians and the Americans agreed to divide Korea, hitherto a Japanese colony, with the northern half given to Stalin's tender mercies, and the southern under the stewardship of Washington.  Frankly, the USA was not particularly enamoured with the country and in their first policy mistake they failed even to include it in their defence strategy plans because they did not consider it important enough.  The north was run by the first of the Kim family, a megalomaniac, the first of a dynasty as we are now finding out.  From the very beginning Kim was agitating to be allowed to attack the south which he was convinced would rise up in support of his communist faith.  However, he was restrained by Stalin, the most cautious of careful dictators.  The south was run by Syngman Rhee whose latent dictatorial tendencies were only just held in check by the Americans.  He, too, needless to say, was eager to march his (mostly useless) army north in order to re-unite his country.

During those five years most attention in the Far East was directed towards China and the mammoth struggle going on in the civil war between Mao and Chiang, the nationalist leader.  The USA, under the generally wise leadership of Harry Truman refused (thank God!) to commit American troops to the war but under pressure from the vociferous (and Republican) China lobby he did spend huge amounts of treasure in the form of money and military equipment.  This was despite growing proof on the ground, and the confirmed suspicions of some smart young men in the State Department, that Chiang’s nationalists were so corrupt, so cowardly and so ineffective that it was all a colossal waste of time and effort.  During this period, as we all know, Mao finally won and Chiang was forced to flee to Taiwan (Formosa, as it was called then).  However, Chiang’s clever, smooth, corrupt and corrupting operators in Washington continued to provide political ammunition to the Republicans which they in turn fired at Truman’s Democrat administration.  They were aided in this by the despicable Henry Luce who owned most of the influential papers and magazines.

Meanwhile, sitting in Tokyo like a latter-day Roman consul, was General Douglas MacArthur.  There are almost no words to describe this man but here are few to give you the flavour of the man - boastful, preening, lying, cheating, insubordinate, delusional psychopath.  It is understandable, but not necessarily forgivable, that Truman took so very long to sack this monster who, primus inter pares, was most responsible for the dreadful casualties amongst American (and allied) lives during the first part of the war.  His two principal ‘cohorts-in-crime’, Ned Almond (Chief of Staff)and Charles Willoughby (Intelligence Chief), should, in my opinion, have been put up against a wall with MacArthur between them and all three shot dead!

Again and again in this tragic tale we see the Janus-like aspects of this war, which was to be repeated ad nauseum in Vietnam, in which all reasonable and intelligent observers on the ground could see what was the truth of the matter but none of it filtered to the top with sufficient strength to correct the picture in the minds of their leaders.

Halberstam’s book moves effortlessly between the freezing fox-holes of the Chosin Reservoir to the air-conditioned offices in the White House and the Congress.  He makes clear that all the leaders involved made major miscalculations.  Stalin let Kim mount his attack confident that America would not intervene.  MacArthur advanced to the Yalu River equally convinced that China would not intervene.  Mao ordered his armies across absolutely confident that with their communist faith to inspire them they would overcome advanced technology and sweep the soft Americans into the sea.  MacArthur was insistent that the Chinese would never attack an American army and when they did exactly that, he and his cohorts, steeped as they were in their racist estimation of the “laundrymen” they were fighting, boasted that they would not only defeat them in Korea but given the chance, they and Chiang’s forces in Taiwan would invade and conquer China itself.

It is a fascinating if appalling story, well told, and, above all, invaluable as a guide to how the American system works, or, as in this case, failed to work.

 

More techie-thingies!

I voiced, so to speak (oh, very witty Wilde!), your complaints concerning difficulties with commenting to Jen (who is a gorgeous blonde lady from California - I insist on it!) and she has replied, thus:

Hi David- 

The most likely cause of a comment not displaying right away - especially for long comments - is the comment is held in moderation. Is the missing comment included with your spam comments? 

On the comments page, select "spam comments" to view any comments flagged as potential spam. Then you can change the comment status of any comments mistakenly held as suspected spam. More information: [No, I have checked the 'suspected spam' list and there is nothing there except commercial spam]

http://help.typepad.com/comments-not-displaying.html#comment-disappeared

If the comment submitted was not held in moderation, there could be another reason related to the individual's browser settings preventing the comment from being submitted. A corrupt cookie in your browser can cause a session time out error or prevent the comment script from working. We would recommend any commenters reporting a problem make sure they are using the latest version of their preferred browser and clear the typepad.com cookies in their browser as described here: [Needless to say, all this incomprehensible talk of 'cookies' and 'browsers' is obviously a plot got up by the 'Memsahib' to convince me that I'm mad and should be put in a rest-home!]

http://help.typepad.com/clear-browser-cookies-cache.html 

We're also happy to troubleshoot commenting problems with your individual readers who are reporting continued problems. They can contact us directly at support@typepad.com, and then we can find out their browser information to further troubleshoot.

 If you receive any other information from people reporting comment problems, please let us know.

 Thanks,

Jen

Andra, I will send your e-mail description of the problem directly to Jen (the gorgeous etc, etc) and see what she says.  Over the weekend I will try and induce 'SoD' to come in by remote and sort out these mysterious 'cookies' and 'browsers', whatever they are.

If anyone else who has had difficulties wants to describe what went wrong I would be grateful.

 

Because I'm feeling idle - right?!

Yes, it's one of those somnolent days where energy is waning fast and I feel the inexorable draw of my armchair acting like gravity but tinged with the anticipation, although not entirely unalloyed anticipation,  of reading further chapters in one of the most jaw-dropping history books I have ever read - more of which later!  In the meantime, and without even a blush of shame, I hereby present you with a stolen extract from Adam Smith's The Theory Of Moral Sentiments which Russ Roberts of the excellent Cafe Hayek re-published today.  I will even nick his title which, as you would expect from Cafe Hayek, is entirely appropriate:

Adam Smith on the the self-deception of politicians

Amidst the turbulence and disorder of faction, a certain spirit of system is apt to mix itself with that public spirit which is founded upon the love of humanity, upon a real fellow-feeling with the inconveniencies and distresses to which some of our fellow-citizens may be exposed. This spirit of system commonly takes the direction of that more gentle public spirit; always animates it, and often inflames it even to the madness of fanaticism. The leaders of the discontented party seldom fail to hold out some plausible plan of reformation which, they pretend, will not only remove the inconveniencies and relieve the distresses immediately complained of, but will prevent, in all time coming, any return of the like inconveniencies and distresses. They often propose, upon this account, to new-model the constitution, and to alter, in some of its most essential parts, that system of government under which the subjects of a great empire have enjoyed, perhaps, peace, security, and even glory, during the course of several centuries together. The great body of the party are commonly intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of this ideal system, of which they have no experience, but which has been represented to them in all the most dazzling colours in which the eloquence of their leaders could paint it. Those leaders themselves, though they originally may have meant nothing but their own aggrandisement, become many of them in time the dupes of their own sophistry, and are as eager for this great reformation as the weakest and foolishest of their followers. Even though the leaders should have preserved their own heads, as indeed they commonly do, free from this fanaticism, yet they dare not always disappoint the expectation of their followers; but are often obliged, though contrary to their principle and their conscience, to act as if they were under the common delusion. The violence of the party, refusing all palliatives, all temperaments, all reasonable accommodations, by requiring too much frequently obtains nothing; and those inconveniencies and distresses which, with a little moderation, might in a great measure have been removed and relieved, are left altogether without the hope of a remedy.

Mr. Roberts wanted one passage emphasised which I have done and hope, thereby, to escape a charge of literary larceny.  It is an irony of considerable bitterness that Scotland could produce such a superb philosopher of economic theory and then, over the centuries, sink into such a socialist slough of despond as exists there today.

 

Tinker, Tailor, Physicist, Chemist, Student . . .

I am obliged to Michael Ledeen of PJ Media and even more obliged to Potkin Azarmehr, a British-Iranian blogger, who is the source for this story even though it shows me up for the sort of idiot who jumps to conclusions without evidence. (Surely not, I hear you murmur – er, you did murmur, didn’t you?)  Alas, my guilt is all too clear because on the news of the murder of yet another Iranian physicist I assumed, along with the rest of the MSM, that those peerless, ruthless, super-efficient MOSSAD agents had been at work.  Well, to be fair, they might, but then again, they might not.

As Mr. Ledeen stresses:

Tehran is an armed camp.  There are security forces, check points, men with weapons and cell phones, and countless informers, all over the place.  If a citizen makes a phone call that is the least bit suspect to the regime, that citizen is located, on average, in less than half an hour, and sometimes in a few minutes.  Several Iranian officials and scientists involved in the nuclear project have been blown up in the last two years, and the killers have always gotten clean away.  Indeed, the latest assassins killed their man just a few feet from the headquarters buildings of the Intelligence Ministry.  That’s quite an accomplishment.  If agents of a foreign intelligence service are doing it, they’re better than Tom Cruise’s fictional operatives in the Mission: Impossible movies.

‘Titchy Tom’ better than the dreaded MOSSAD?  Oh no, tell me it ain’t so!

To be serious, when you think about it, and the fact that so far there have been no arrests in a city that is crawling with security police and their hundreds of informants, it is rather odd and stretches one’s credulity to think that MOSSAD can seemingly come and go and murder as they see fit.  But there are other oddities to this story, as Potkin Azarmehr points out in some detail.  The first victim:

Ali-Mohammadi was in fact a Quantum field theorist and elementary particle physicist. His academic achievements included some 53 research articles and numerous translations of text books like the Modern Quantum  Mechanics. He was NOT in any way related to the nuclear weapon or the nuclear power industry, nor was his name on any sanctions list. More importantly, he was an active supporter of the Green Movement. Ali Mohammadi actually actively encouraged and organised his students to take part in the post-‘election’ protests. He was one of the 240 university professors who publicly and openly expressed their support for Mir Hussein Moussavi, one of the main leaders of the Green Movement, now under house arrest with his wife.

He was also part of an international scientific group concerned with some obscure piece of physics which included scientists from Israel and whose meetings he attended regularly.  He seems, in retrospect, hardly likely to have been a member of Iran’s top secret nuclear bomb programme.

The second assassination victim was:

Majid Shahriari, again was a theoretical quantum physicist and not on any sanctions lists, although unlike Ali Mohammadi, he had no interest in politics and supported neither side during the post-election protests, but he too worked alongside other regional scientists on the SESAME project [the same international programme to which Ali-Mohammadi was a member.

He was killed in his car broad daylight in a crowded street by two men on a motor bike who attached a ‘sticky bomb’ to his driver’s door and then drove off, never to be seen again!  Interestingly, the authorities made no public appeal for witnesses.  On the very same day, another ‘assassination’ attempt was made but failed.  The ‘victim’ in this case was definitely attached to the Iranian nuclear programme but he survived unscathed.  The authorities said it was a bomb attack but his car only showed some bullet-holes.  A report on a quasi-government site giving somewhat contradictory reports was quickly removed.  According to Potkin Azarmehr:

It seems [this ‘victim’s] assassination was a fake and staged attempt to justify the Western/Mossad hit squad story to give it more credence.

The next victim might (or there again, might not) be a case of mistaken identity.  His name was Dariush Rezaee Nejad who was shot dead in front of his family and not only was he nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear efforts, he was actually a student studying for his MSc in electrical engineering.  A man with a very similar name is a nuclear physicist but he lived in an entirely different area of the city and anyway was out of the country when the shooting occurred.

The latest victim, according to Mr. Ledeen’s story was:

a chemist, not a physicist, and his main connection to the nuclear program was administrative, not technical:  he worked in the purchasing office for the Natanz operation.  He was important enough to have been interviewed by IAEA inspectors, and after his death, Iranian leaders alleged that the IAEA people had passed on classified information to the assassins.  But this isn’t very convincing; administrative officers are a dime a dozen, after all.  Blow up one, you get a dozen applicants for the position. More mysteries.

However, the cry through the ages reverberates once more – ‘It was the Jews wot dunnit!’  And yet . . . and yet . . . Iran produces not one jot, one tittle or even a tiny scintilla, of hard evidence to prove that the devilish cunning MOSSAD did the dirty deeds.  Of course, they might have done.  Because the fact is that no-one, as Mr. Ledeen is keen to stress, no-one has the slightest idea of who did it - and that includes me!

 

It's so very difficult to choose between the unspeakable and the uneatable!

I wonder if Hungary will be the undoing of the USE, not the PIIGS?  I ponder the question because, whilst I have picked up the odd bit of tittle-tattle concerning Hungarian affairs, I have failed to get round to studying it.  To this end I am grateful to Der Spiegel who have covered recent events in some detail in three recent articles.  I will be quoting from them indiscriminately but will provide their links at the end of this post.

In 2006 Hungary was ruled by a socialist administration that did what all socialist governments do when they get their hands on an exchequer – spend money like a drunken sailor!  The prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, was a millionaire socialist who began by giving civil servants a 50% pay rise and led the country to believe this sort of thing was possible for everyone.  Needless to say it wasn’t too long before reality crunched and smashed its way into some ministers’ minds, at least.  A private conference was ordered and Gyurcsány spelled out the fact that everything they were doing was simply unsustainable.  Many of his ministers refused to believe him and unfortunately a surreptitious recording was made of the PM’s words in which he admitted that in the election:

he and the party had lied to the people. "We lied in the morning, in the evening and at night."

With this made public, of course, the ruling coalition of socialists and liberals was crushed and a new nationalist party under the leadership of Viktor Orbán was formed.  So disastrous was the socialist defeat that Orbán was given a two thirds majority in parliament which has allowed him to pass some controversial laws including rewriting the Constitution.  He is intent on lowering the retirement age of judges so that he can replace them with appointees more sympathetic to his views:

A new media law intimidates critical journalists, and some have already been fired. Orbán has also enacted new laws that have forced the courts to bend to his will. He has reduced the powers of the country's Constitutional Court, and judges are now appointed by an agency headed by the wife of a fellow party member. Orbán now wants to force older judges -- in other words, those who were not appointed by his party -- into early retirement.

Well, the Hungarians voted for him, so in my opinion it is Hungarian business not ours, but such a laissez-faire attitude does not suit the pecksniffs and pox-doctors’ clerks in Brussels who are planning all sorts of legal attacks on the grounds that Orbán’s regime is undemocratic – ooops, sorry, did you just spew out coffee all over your keyboard?  And, yes, you are right, I, too, am thinking that the words ‘pot’, ‘kettle’ and ‘black’ come to mind.

Unfortunately for Orbán, and even more so for his people, it is rapidly becoming clear that he understands economics no better than his predecessor.  The country is broke and the Brussels bureaucrats are threatening to withhold a desperately needed loan.  However, they have yet to learn that you should never kid a kidder.  Orbán knows that if Hungary goes broke then so does Austria!  Or at least, its banks will implode because they have loaned fortunes to Hungary in recent years.

It will be fascinating to see how this story – tragedy? – unfolds.  However, what should concern us here is the sight of the USE wielding its truncheon over a nation which has a democratically-elected government.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,809669,00.html

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,809799,00.html

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,809434,00.html

ADDITIONAL:  And by one of those creepy coincidences, I click over to Cafe Hayek and read this as its 'Quote of the Day' 

… is from page 89 of the 1963 Van Nostrand edition, translated by Arthur Goddard, of Faustino Ballve’s 1956 book Essentials of Economics:

[N]ationalism inevitably leads to socialism, and socialism to nationalism.

 

And here's another reason to go for it now, Dave

Peter Hoskin at The Coffee House offers yet another reason why 'Dim Dave' would be wise to cut his losses - and the il-Lib-non-Dems are a total dead loss - and after picking a fight with them over, say, Europe, go to the country.  This diagram, he reckons, sums up the Lib-Dems' game plan for the remainder of this parliament:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This graph is based on the words of one of Clegg's advisors and as Hoskins points out, it is interesting that they think this year is the time for them to start kicking up to show their (spurious) independence.  Just a couple of weeks into the year and even I have noticed Clegg mouthing off more than usual.  Prime ministers are usually accused of weakness if they are unable to control their own backbenchers but the same accusation will be made if 'Dave' fails to command and control his coalition (non)partners.  As of now, Labour is in even more disarray than last year with an adolescent leader and a lying liar for a shadow chancellor.  There will never be a better time to go to the country because matters will only get worse not better.  Labour might actually show some gumption and do to Ed what Ed did to David; the 'Bruvvers' are winding up for another big ding-dong; the 'red-braces brigade' are only temporarily distracted from our dire condition by the non-stop crapulata in Europe but sooner or later they will take a hard look at us; and worst of all, the people have been fooled into thinking that they have suffered a period of austerity with hard, swingeing cuts but over the next two years they will finally feel the real thing!

So go for it now, 'Dave'.  Remember my boring wise old words concerning sex and drumming, timing is all!

 

Techie question for the regulars

My regular commenter, Andra, keeps complaining that she is finding it difficult to register comments.  Are any of you suffering similar difficulties?  If so, please let me know because I will raise it with TypePad.

However, please note the following:

If you leave the 'Comments' box open for any time (say, more than 5 mins or so) it will automatically switch itself off, so to speak, and you will have to start again.

So, if you have written, or partially written, a comment and then you are interrupted, when you return to it the best thing to do is swipe and copy what you have written, hit the 'refresh' button, and then when the page re-appears with an empty 'Comments' box simply copy your comment back in.  You will then need to click the space bar (or any other key) to activate the 'Comment' box.

Another possibility, because I am guilty of it myself, is that you write a comment, then copy the CAPTCHA code,  but then, in your eagerness to read even more of Duff & Nonsense you click onto another page and forget to press 'Send'.

Incidentally, I do realise that the sight of me giving anyone lessons in the finer points of computer-techie-thingies is quite ludicrous!  However, if you have problems let me know.

"The Iron Lady"

Much against my will I went to see this film.  From what I had read in various reviews I thought the idea of filming a bio-pic of a lady, still alive today, suffering with dementia and seeing her past life through flashes of remembrance was likely to be very distasteful.  However, 'SoD' talked me into going because he thought it was brilliant.  Well, not for the first time, he was right and I was wrong!

First let me say that I understand those who knew Lady Thatcher personally and who have been affronted by what they think is bad taste on the part of the film-makers.  However, I saw and heard nothing that could be taken in the smallest way as a sneer or a gloat at her current condition.  Quite the contrary, because of her suffering she shone through as an even greater heroine than her reputation indicates.  In fact the film was positively tender in its portrayal of her and her marriage to and love for Dennis Thatcher.  It was acutely accurate but painful, I think, in the way it showed the disintegrating relationship between her and her children, the unfortunate collateral damage of a successful career in politics.  Above all it showed the sheer guts and determination of a woman who fought her way up through the massed ranks of Tory men and seized the leadership from under their silly noses.  Sorry to trot out the usual old Dickensian cliché but really, "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" and the film shows it fairly, by which I mean neutrally, if not absolutely accurately to the last tiny detail.

Putting it as simply as I can, Meryl Streep, an actress I have not hitherto admired overmuch, gave a master-class in acting.  Drama students from now on should be forced to watch her performance as part of their training.  Every single detail was thought out, worked on, practiced and then given over to a performance of stunning and seemingly effortless quality.  I have tried to think of another performance by an actress of equal worth and the only one that springs to mind is Lisa Minnelli in Cabaret - maybe I will think of others tomorrow.  Suffice to say that Meryl Streep is truly excellent in every respect.  At this point I would like to add my hope that if they give an Oscar to make-up artists then those who worked their magic on Ms. Streep's face in her aged scenes definitely deserve to take the prize.

I will confess now that at certain moments in this film I was blinking rather furiously to keep back the tears.  The film is an astonishing achievement and far from being in any way an insult to the Lady in question - it is her monument.

 

Jack Reacher didn't quite get there!

Oh dear, here's me, telling everyone what great books Lee Childs writes featuring his unbeatable hero, Jack Reacher, but then I read his very latest, The Affair, and "oh, what a falling off was there"!  The point about Childs's books are that they are simple yarns for simple minds.  They require no effort on the part of the reader, you just sit back whilst Jack Reacher does all those naughty things you wish you could do, if you are a man, or, that you admire in a man, if you are a lady.  The very last thing you want to do is grapple with a complicated plot.  If you want that, and I do sometimes, then go to John le Carré.  Unfortunately with this latest book, Lee Childs overloads it with a plot of such complexity that credibility disappears - always assuming you can follow the plot in the first place.  To add to my irritation, he has repeated a habit from previous books in attempting to describe the local layout in some detail.  We are forever driving north before turning west and then taking a side-road to an interstate highway which goes south and so on and on.  Please, Mr. Childs, next time, just ask your publisher to print a map at the front of the book, it will make it all much easier for the reader.  To be fair, he has written 16 of these tales so on the law of averages he's bound to produce the occasional clunker.  Even so, 'could do better, Mr. Childs' is my admonition, er, but don't tell Jack Reacher I said so!

 

When will the red-braces brigade turn on us?

Yes, I admit it, I did have a not-so-quiet snigger at the expense of the French when their credit rating was pegged back.  I know it's small-minded but there you go, one hugs one's prejudices to one's breast because it saves one from thinking which is always a complicated business, don't you think?  However, this whole international begging and borrowing lark really does have to be thought about.

Dave and George are effortlessly living up to the roles for which they are best suited (by Saville Row, naturally), that is, a couple of public school chaps with a veneer of Oxbridge who have mastered that amazing trick of being able to remove a suited chap's braces without him realising it until his trousers fall round his ankles.  This trick seems to have worked even with those spivs in the City who actually wear red braces - I know, I know, shockin'!  This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, at least, to people like me who worked for many years in a trade which rested almost entirely on 'porkies'*, as we used to call them, and who realise that politics and international finance are all 'sisters of the game', as it were!  Thus, so far, our smoothie duo weave their fabrication and the spivs, with the scent of a blood from a very fine French cassoulet, or a Greek moussaka, or even an Italian bolognaise, are too pre-occupied to notice the stitching is a bit threadbare.

However, Liam Halligan at The Telegraph (amongst others) has noticed.  He gives credit to the coalition for being able to 'talk the talk' but it cannot long be delayed before the red-braces brigade start to look at the facts:

While the Tories' hair-shirted rhetoric has helped calm the markets for now, "austerity" itself has so far barely been implemented. Even if the Government achieves its much-vaunted aim of eliminating the "structural deficit" (that is, the annual fiscal shortfall, excluding interest payments) over the coming five years, the national debt (the stock of liabilities we must continually service and ultimately repay) will still double. In other words, borrowing keeps expanding like topsy. [My empahsis]

Lest you failed to get the message, Halligan spells it out in even more brutal details:

Buried in the fine-print of the recent Autumn Statement, for instance, was an additional £111bn of borrowing between now and 2016. That's equivalent to 7pc of national income and – repeat – is on top of the massive borrowing increase already planned. Gilt sales during 2012 alone will hit almost £180bn. That's 18 times more than in 2000. So the UK isn't a "safe haven". Our fiscal position remains perilous. There is no room for complacency in any form, none whatsoever. [My emphasis]

So why is the yield (interest) on our debt so low?  According to Halligan there are two reasons, printing money and crafty regulations:

During 2009 and 2010, the Government issued a massive £475bn in gilts. That's equivalent to more than a third of the UK's annual GDP. No less than £241bn of those IOUs - more than half – have been sucked up by the Bank of England. In other words, the demand for UK gilts has been strong, pushing yields down, because the majority of them have ultimately been bought by our central bank, using "electronically-created" credits.

Our money supply has multiplied by three as a percentage of GDP in three years.  But Dave and George would point, proudly, to the incredibly low level of yields required by buyers of British debt and claim that justifies everything they are doing.  But time and tide wait for no man and it is worth noting what Halligan points out, that in the last ten months the cost of insuring British debt has nearly doubled!

So looking at mes amis over the channel, I am reminded of that old saying to the effect that 'he who laughs last didn't get the joke'!

 

*For the benefit of my foreign readers: 'a porky' (plural, 'porkies') is abbreviated London rhyming slang for a lie, as in, 'a porky pie'.  (You're confused, what about me? And I'm supposed to speak the bloody language!)

 

The 'Kraut' takes a sideways look at Ron Paul

I once went down with a bad dose of libertarianism but happily I recovered.  I put it down to my youth, I think I was in my 40s then!  It is an enticing philosophy, even more so when all around you are the results of meddling, muddling governments.  However, it is, I suggest, a bit like Christianity, the main tenets and thrust of the idea are good but one simply couldn't live with the devils in the detail.  But even so, virtually all governments everywhere are long overdue a hefty dose of libertarianism, not least in the USA where the Federal Government is growing like Topsy.

Hence, the 'Kraut', or Charles Krauthammer as he is known in The WaPo, casts a benign smile on Ron Paul's balding, 76-year-old pate and applauds him (one-handed, I sense) for gaining, via the current GOP nomination process, an ever-increasing audience of stunned Americans who had never heard anyone in their entire lives on prime-time TV:

calling for the abolition of the Fed, FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] and the CIA; American withdrawal from everywhere; acquiescence to the Iranian bomb — and perhaps even Paul’s opposition to a border fence lest it be used to keep Americans in.

Millions of Americans are hearing such subversive thoughts for the first time.  It will not do Ron Paul any good in his bid for the presidential nomination, let alone for the presidency, itself, but it may, according to the 'Kraut', achieve two things.  First, it may put Ron Paul in a key and influential position come the Republican convention:

Paul won’t quit before the Republican convention in Tampa. He probably will not do well in South Carolina or Florida, but with volunteers even in the more neglected caucus states, he will be relentlessly collecting delegates until Tampa. His goal is to have the second-most delegates, a position of leverage from which to influence the platform and demand a prime-time speaking slot — before deigning to support the nominee at the end. The early days of the convention, otherwise devoid of drama, could very well be all about Paul.

The second aim will be to blaze a trail for his son, Rand Paul, aged only 49 and already a Senator, who shares many of his father's ideals but (apparently) without following Pop to the outer fringes of loonyville!  The 'Kraut' summs it up, thus:

Put aside your own view of libertarianism or of Paul himself. I see libertarianism as an important critique of the Leviathan state, not a governing philosophy [my emphasis]. As for Paul himself, I find him a principled, somewhat wacky, highly engaging eccentric. But regardless of my feelings or yours, the plain fact is that Paul is nurturing his movement toward visibility and legitimacy.

Paul is 76. He knows he’ll never enter the promised land. But he’s clearing the path for son Rand, his better placed (Senate vs. House), more moderate, more articulate successor.

And it matters not whether you find amusement in libertarians practicing dynastic succession. What Paul has already wrought is a signal achievement, the biggest story yet of this presidential campaign.

Hmmmn!  I wonder.  A wily, cunning political operator told us many years ago that 'a week is a long time in politics'.  Young Paul will have to wait at least five years, assuming Obama wins, before he can reap the harvest sown by his dad.

 

Eleven states of uncertainty

Jonathon Jones seems to have been appointed by The Coffee House as the resident expert on the forthcoming Obama-Romney contest.  Last week he cut to the chase and assumes that provided Romney isn't caught in flagrente with a boy scout the Republican nomination is his.  There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth in Republican circles, not least in the GOP heartland occupied by the once powerful Tea Party movement, because Romney gives every appearance of being a RINO (a Republican In Name Only).  I would suggest that appearances can be deceptive, particularly in politics where disguise and deception is all, and furthermore, I do not ignore the possibility that politicians can learn from mistakes  - a certain W. S. Churchill comes to mind!  Romney does have 'previous' because in his time as Governor of Massachusetts he introduced a State health bill which is indistinguishable from Obama's national effort. 

According to MDA (My Darling Ann [Coulter]), destroying Obama's health plan is critical and salting the ground in which it flourished even more so.  She seems to think Romney can and will do that and I, for one, am not prepared to argue with her - well, it's a budding relationship, early days, you know  . . .  However, MDA is no mean strategist and she understands that first of all it is essential for the GOP to pick an electable candidate.  For that to happen, the Republican vote is not so important because where else is it going to go?  (Actually, some of it could go to the eccentric Ron Paul if he decides to run as a third party candidate.)  The crucial votes are those of the independents most of whom are not doctrinaire.  It is from the mass of independents that a candidate can get what they call 'over there' - the Big Mo!  MDA thinks that it is precisely Romney's un-doctrinaire history which will attract the independents.

I think Mr. Jones at The Coffee House would agree with her.  He reminds us 'over here' of the tricky and often not appreciated fact that the US presidential election is not won simply by getting more votes than your opponent.  They have this pesky Electoral College, to which the various States send their delegates, as voted for by their State populations and each State is entitled to a differing number of delegates depending on their population. 

He provides this useful map which demonstrates, as an example, that the small-ish State of New York has a hefty 29 delegates against the very large State of Arizona which only has 11: 

The map above — which I produced at 270towin.com based on recent polls and previous results — shows the states likely to be carried by Obama (blue) and Romney (red) if the national vote is as close as it looks now.  Of course it's just a rough guide: it's not unfeasible, for instance, that Obama could win the red-shaded state of Indiana (which he carried in '08). And, of course, not all of the unshaded states are equal: Obama is much more likely to win Michigan (which has voted Democrat since 1992) than South Carolina (which hasn't since 1976). But if the election is close, the outcome will probably be decided by some combination of those 11 unshaded states. These are the 2012 swing states.

Various conservative analysts 'over there' are doubting Romney's ability to avoid the damage already hitting him from the other Republican candidates - and that's before the Democrats and their puppies in the MSM magnify it tenfold when the campaighn begins.  However, I would remind the doubters that Romney is not the only one with a dodgy history.  Compared to the utter uselessness of Obama's regime which continues to wallow helplessly in an economic swamp, Romney's sins of omission and commission seem rather paltry.  In my humble opinion the whole campaign hinges on one four-letter word - jobs!  If, by next November, the number of people in work has shown a steady increase over several months then Obama might squeak in.  If not, he's dead man walking.

 

Make these men government advisers now!

Their expertise will be vital for the new HS2 (High Speed train) from London to somewhere called Birmingham which was announced with great pride by 'Dave' earlier this week.  However, I do feel that given your average government minister's inability to know which end of a spade is required to dig a hole they would profit from the expertise of these chaps who seem to know exactly how government projects work, er, or fail to work, perhaps!  As The Daily Mail reports it:

A persistent group of thieves went to extreme lengths to get their hands on extra cash - after digging a 100ft tunnel under a building to reach a cash machine.

The labour-intensive robbery saw the gang spend six months digging a passageway under a Blockbuster Video in Fallowfield, Manchester to get up underneath the cash machine.

Actually, they began their tunnel four years ago but it was discovered by some cable repairers and so the project was delayed - how often do we hear that from government ministers?  But, showing admirable perseverence, they came back to it later and kept on digging for six months.  Their profit for this work intensive exercise was - £6,000!  Assuming there were only four of them that works out about £62 a week!  Duh!  They would have earned four times that stacking shelves in Tesco's.

As of this moment I remain strictly neutral on this HS2 project.  All I know for certain is that you will not get me on it for gold sovereigns.  Hurtling along at 225 mph! on rails maintained by whatever semi-governmental organisation it is that gets sued so regularly following the many crashes that occur, and driven by some dozey train-driver with a hang-over from the previous night's union meeting, is not my idea of a fun away-day.  And anyway, who the hell wants to go to Birmingham? 

 

This blog apologises for its petty larceny

But I will make good for stealing Guido's photo, which is the basis of his weekly 'Caption Competition', by urging you all to go over and take a look at some of the captions offered by his readers.  They are weepingly funny and utterly filthy!

For the benefit of my foreign readers I should explain that the gentleman in the photo taking such an interest in the top shelf is Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, and a man whose sense of duty, to say nothing of his libido, has impelled him to undertake a vigorous campaign to prove that not all British politicians are secret woofters!

Well done, Guido, and thank you for the merriment you and your readers provide.

 

Now's the time, Dave!

'Blinky' Balls, the shadow Minister for Mischief,  has shocked the world, well, what passes for 'the world' in Westminster circles, by a blatant disregard for convention and tradition and his own previous political example by actually, um, telling the truth!  I know, I know, it's shockin', I mean, how can you place your trust in a man who lies through his teeth for years and then does something like that?  Late last night he announced that, despite what he had said over and over again for the last two years, actually he wouldn't change a thing that the Chancellor had done and certainly would not allow public sector wages to rise.  He could get a job on the next Bond film as a stunt driver because I can't remember seeing a better, faster, hand-brake u-turn than that for some years.  The end result is that no-one, certainly no-one who is minded to support the Labour party, will ever take him seriously again.  (How the quiet, careful and canny Alistair Darling, the last Labour Chancellor, must be smiling to himself.)

Anyway, now is the time for a ruthlessly intelligent Tory prime minister to strike by calling an election for the early Spring.  At a stroke (to quote a phrase),  he will rid himself of the il-Lib-non-Dems who will be reduced to a tiny insignificant piece of political detritus - which is what they deserve.  Labour, already saddled with a leader who looks and sounds like the dopiest teenager in Britain, and a shadow Chancellor who eats his own words for breakfast, will be well and truly thumped.  Dave has all the excuses anyone could need - the looming implosion of the euro-zone, the increasingly stroppy attitude of the ratings agencies, the need for a unified approach to Brussels, and so on.

It's a nice thought but, alas, there is one crucial thing missing - a ruthlessly intelligent Tory  prime minister.  Ah well, a man can dream, can't he?

ADDITIONAL:  I have just read Guido and he tells us that 'Blinky' is going to make his about-turn speech this morning to the Fabian Society.  Unfortunately, he gave an interview just a few weeks back to the Fabians for their magazine which, because of printing schedules, is going to be published today.  Thus we will be able to relish the 'before' and 'after' Blinky Balls:

Then:  “Nobody in the Labour Party should get into the idea that it has to be this way”.

Now:  “My starting point is, I am afraid, we are going to have keep all these cuts.”

"Oh what a tangled web we weave" . . .  and all that jazz!

 

Holding the coats whilst others fight - such fun!

When it comes to fighting I am definitely on the side of the spectator.  I still remember my one and only venture in a boxing-ring when my opponent kept punching me in the face and making my eyes water and thus through which I could then see nothing.  I back-pedaled, blinking furiously to clear my vision when - SMACK - another punch landed and once again blindness followed.  This went on for what seemed a lifetime.  I retired from the ring after that experience!  There-after I joined the spectator-tendency where at least you see the action and, best of all, feel none of the pain.

I was reminded of this after reading an article in Der Spiegel describing a growing argument between Germany and her neighbours - I know, I know, hard to believe but there it is!  You may remember that the 'Kaiserin' took fright after the Fukushima nuclear plant went, er, nuclear having been hit by an earthquake and a tsunami, neither of which are likely to occur in Germany, and which killed exactly - two people!  In her panic  - well, actually, I think an election was hovering and if she could nick a few Green votes it would help still her beating heart! - she ordered the closure of all nuclear power stations inside Germany.

Needless to say, her neighbours saw an opportunity and both Poland and the Netherlands have announced that they intend to build and operate new nuclear power plants, some of them quite close to the German border.  According to Spiegel, there is absolutely nothing that Germany can do about it - yet!  And anyway, her decision to switch off her 'nukes' has already resulted in Germany facing power shortages which were only solved by buying electricity from France and others and most of which was produced by nuclear means.  If 'Dim Dave' is really intent on Britain expanding the number of its nuclear power plants then he had better get on with it because by the time they are up and running the Germans will have twisted enough arms in Brussels to ensure that they will all be banned under European edict just about when he opens the first one!

 

'Look, darling, I didn't know they were pros, they were all naked!'

Well, as excuses go I'm afraid I can only give M. Strauss-Kahn 'E' for Effort!  But that, according to The Daily Mail, was his excuse for finding himself, against his will and much to his surprise, I'm sure, in the middle of an orgy at a well-known Parisian knocking shop.  M. Strauus-Kahn thought he was attending a rather smart 'School for Young Gals' in order to deliver a lecture on monetary theory and the fact that the young 'gals' kept tapping him up for around £1,200 for the night merely confirmed his misapprehension.  As his lawyer (natch!) put it:

'At these parties, people were not dressed, and I defy you to tell the difference between a naked prostitute and any other naked woman.'

Well, you wouldn't, would you?  And anyway, who would think that nice young 'gals' would need to be paid to have sex with the suave, good-looking, youthful M. Strauus-Kahn?

It has all been a terrible misunderstanding and sundry accusations of rape, of attending sex orgies, of possessing the telephone numbers of ten prostitutes, can easily be explained away once M. Strauss-Kahn and his lawyer have worked their way through the (growing) list.

Anyway, I'm thinking of trying out his excuse on the 'Memsahib' but first I need to find a suitable knocking shop with several young 'gals'.  Mind you, there is then the problem of remembering what to do next?  It's a terrible thing this memory loss when you get older!

 

Now you know why I call them the 'il-Lib-non-Dems'

M' Lord Bishop Hill reports on an all too typical example of the way in which our establishment works against us, quietly, discreetly and with maximum obfuscation and utilising to the full the sort of glove-puppets they themselves appoint to positions of influence.  Needless to say, two of the three plotters are members of the 'il-Lib-non-Dem' party in the House of Lords and the third is a Labour peer.  They are all 'wimmin'!  Nobody has ever voted any of them into political office.   They are all typical smarmy, creepy bottom-feeders who have spent their mostly useless lives in the murky world of quangos, university hierarchies and the BBC via which, provided you sing from the correct hymnal and do not lose the tune, you are certain to rise to the surface like scum in a stagnant pond.  I give  you . . .

The Baroness Brinton, and her wiki CV tells you all you need to know:

Beginning her career in the mid 1970s at the BBC as a television floor manager, working on programmes including Playschool, Grandstand and Doctor Who, she became a Cambridgeshire County Councillor in 1993 and contested the parliamentary seat of South East Cambridgeshire in 1997 and 2001.  Formerly Bursar of Selwyn College, Cambridge from 1997 to 2002, and a founder member of the Board of the East of England Development Agency from Dec 1998 to Dec 2004 (Deputy Chair from 2001 to 2004) she was a member of the Lib Dem’s national working group on education, skills and learning.  In 1997 she won the East Anglian entrepreneurial businesswoman of the year award. In 2003 Brinton was awarded an honorary PhD for her contribution to education, skills and learning by Anglia Ruskin University. She is presently a non-executive director of the University for Industry (Learndirect).  In November 2010 she was nominated to the House of Lords,^[3] taking her place on 10 Feb 2011^[4] as Baroness Brinton, of Kenardington in the County of Kent.

Next up is Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe, a Labour peer who crept up the trade union ladder and was finally rewarded with a pat on the head from Gordon Brown and a peerage, according to Wiki:

She was General secretary of the Association of University Teachers from 1983 to 1992 and Chief Executive of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy from 1992 to 1995. On 10 July 1999 she was created a life peer as Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe, in the County of West Yorkshire.^[1]  She is currently Chief Executive of Universities UK.^[2]  She is also Chair of International Students House, London.

Finally, we have the exotic Floella Karen Yunies Benjamin, Baroness Benjamin OBE DL, another 'graduate' of the BBC Playschool programme, well, it provides such a good grounding for our future leaders and legislators, don't you think?

[She] is a British actress, author,^[3] television presenter, businesswoman and politician. She is known as presenter of children's programmes such as Play School, Play Away and "Fast Forward". On 28 June 2010, Lady Benjamin was introduced to the House of Lords as a Life Peer nominated by the Liberal Democrats with title Baroness Benjamin, of Beckenham in the County of Kent.

I dwell at some length on the bios of these third-raters simply to rub home the reality of the sort of dross and bum-fluff that ends up in our so-called House of Lords and who thereby enjoy all the trappings of unearned office to say nothing of the perks, pay and pensions that go with it at our expense.

Anyway, Bishop Hill (who damned well deserves to be in the Lords) has spotted these three apparatchiks doing their masters' bidding (step forward Sir Muir Russell) by introducing some obscure changes to the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) as it pertains to universities and their professors undertaking research.  There is an existing exemption from FOI requests if it pertains to work which is about to be published.  But these three 'belles dames sans merci' have introduced an amendment which, according to Bishop Hill, in effect:

appears to say that if information requested is part of a programme that is going to lead to a publication it is exempt. This vastly expands the scope of the exemption. [My emphasis]

See how it will work - let's say someone wants some correspondence about tree rings. Under a revised FOI Act the university can say "no, this correspondence was created as part of a programme of research and there will be a report of that research in due course". In other words, not only the data, but the peripheral stuff - emails plotting to keep critics of the research programme out of the scientific literature and so on - are brought within the scope of the exemption. (It is worth pointing out that tree rings would still be disclosable under the Environmental Information Regulations - I'm merely illustrating the principles with a familiar example).

Yes, indeed, a very "familiar example" in which that heroic warrior for truth and openess, Steve McIntyre, was held at bay for years by obfuscating so-called scientists at East Anglia University attempting to cover up the codswallop they had been excreting over the years.  Also bear in mind that this codswallop was produced on the back of our taxes!  But the ever acute Bishop Hill sees how this ammendment would work in practice:

But more than this, the term "research programme" is deliciously vague, isn't it? Does this mean that when the paper is published, the university can turn round and say "we are still involved on a research programme on tree rings. The emails are still exempt". I think so. I don't know so, of course, and the obvious question is to ask how the exemption has worked in Scotland, but unfortunately according to this blog, the question has never been asked of the COmmissioner so there is no legal precedent as yet.

You will have noticed, as the sharp-eyed Bishop Hill has done, that these three 'wimmin' are all part and parcel of the university establishment  and you may wonder, as he has done: 

So, Universities UK are in essence able to propose their own amendments via their sympathisers in the House of Lords. It's certainly something of an indictment of British democracy to see special interest groups propose their own legislation in this way.

Well, so far, so typically British establishment! But I have one further question not raised by Bishop Hill.  Why is a so-called 'Liberal Democrat' party pushing a proposal that is both illiberal and undemocratic?  And can we sue them under the Trade Descriptions Act?

 

What a shame this man can't run for the Presidency

Right, here's a little test for you.  Who pointed out these, and other, truths which have been paraphrased thus:

Gun-control laws began to be passed during times when crime was declining, rather than climbing.

Crime began climbing after gun-control laws were passed.

Places with very strict gun-control laws typically have more crime than do places without them—a fact that holds true between countries and between regions of the United States.

There is little or no relationship between the rigorousness of gun-control laws and criminals’ access to guns.

Many countries have lots of guns but relatively few murders, while others have few guns but relatively many murders.

Swimming pools kill many more people in accidents than guns do.

Well, you can almost feel the liberal nannies wincing, but he went further and into much more dangerous territory when he asked, again paraphrased:

Why is it that these programs that we are told will help blacks in fact hurt them? And what should be done about that?

Even worse he pointed to actual examples:

He points to the case of Dr. Patrick Chavis, a celebrated case study of affirmative action, and notes: “[Chavis was] publicly praised by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights—just two weeks before his license was suspended, after his patients died under conditions that brought the matter to the attention of the Medical Board of California. An administrative law judge referred to Chavis’s ‘inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician.’ A year later, after a fuller investigation, his license was revoked.”

Not that his enquiring mind is limited to investigating American domestic idiocies.  He has given considerable thought to the travails of Africa:

Consider his fascinating disquisition on the geography and natural environment of Africa, in which he argues that such factors as the lack of navigable interior waterways, the steepness of its rivers, the lack of pack animals due to insect-born disease, the lack of natural ports and harbors on the continent’s smooth coastline, other interior barriers to travel, the resulting isolation of group from group, and linguistic fragmentation (Africa, he points out, has 10 percent of the world’s people and a third of its languages) explain much of the continent’s socioeconomic backwardness. Such brilliant observational analysis does not fit neatly into orthodox conservative or orthodox liberal explanations of development. It is fact-intensive and based upon observable, empirical realities ...

Now, were any of the Republican hopefuls, currently bashing each other to pieces so that the survivor will be easy meat for the Dem-controlled media to finish off, to say these things we would hear the howls of outrage 'over here'.  But it is a little tricky for the massed regiments of the politically-correct brigades to attack this man.  For a start, he is black which helps but does not make you fireproof as Herbert Cain has recently discovered.  Also, he has just about the most 'authentic' black background a noodle-headed liberal would swoon over - he was born poor in the south and remained poor in Harlem where he was eventually raised.  He was forced to drop out of school at 17 and was quickly called up to the Marines during the Korean war.  During his twenties he was a Marxist until his inner compulsion to follow facts and reason where-ever they led turned him into a conservative, free-market libertarian.

This man is Thomas Sowell whom I first came across and admired back in the '80s when I used to subscribe to The American Spectator.  Intermittantly, I have followed his career as he has steadily decimated what he calls "the vision of the anointed", that is, all the pontifical streams of un-consciousness poured forth by the liberal 'Great and the Good'.  He would be the first to admit that he is not necessarily always one hundred percent right about everything, but you would need to get up very early in the morning to prove him wrong.  What a pity his talents are denied in the field of politics.

I am grateful to an article in Commentary by Kevin D. Williamson from which I have quoted above.

 

Talking of tits . . .

No, no, not the Ken Clarke variety (see below), I mean the real thing, or perhaps in this case, the real false thing!  I had better explain.

Richard North reminds us all that the Harley Medical Group, the biggest provider of the biggest tits in the business, has refused point blank to carry out remedial operations on their customers free of charge and intends to leave it all to the NHS.  So, if the operation for your agonisng hip is put off (again) for several weeks it is probably due to Waynetta and her mates all trooping in to have their tits deflated.  If it is of any consolation (take that as a 'no', shall I?), the biggest tit of them all appears to be the Health Minister, Mr. Andrew Lansley, who reckons that he will seek redress for the cost of these operations via the 'Cocklecarrots' and their courts.  He is obviously unaware, and why wouldn't he be, he's only the Minister of Health, after all, that the chairman of the Harley Medical Group, whilst struggling to keep a straight face, has already well and truly 'Belgranoed' that idea:

He says the government must accept "moral responsibility" for replacing the PIP implants. "We're only sitting here today because the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), their own regulatory authority, has approved these implants and obviously hasn't done their proper checking". [My emphasis]

He adds: "We're an innocent victim like everyone else, we're attempting to do our best for our patients", then asserting: "We can't take on this whole thing on our own, especially when it wasn't our fault".

But according to Richard North, it gets 'worserer and worserer'!  The MRHA is governed, as are so many things in this our 'septic Isle', by European directives against which we have no appeal:

The central part of the legislation - part of the Single Market corpus - is a system of prohibition from marketing unless the product (or "device") conforms with detailed technical standards, with assured manufacturing and quality control measures in place, subject to ongoing inspections and approval by the regulatory authorities. If all conditions are met, the device is awarded a CE mark, which acts as a marketing authorisation.

These CE marks can and are issued by any European nation and must be accepted by all others!  Thus, the 'falsies' packed full of old cassoulet, horse hair from the dead animals the French use to provide their 'steaks', bits of mattress stuffing and the like, were all authorised by the French government and its agency.  My guess is that Andrew Lansley will be dead and stuffed himself before we ever see a euro from them, always assuming, of course, that the euro is still around in about 50 years!

In the meantime, perhaps some use can be made of these remedial procedures by simultaneously attempting a brain transplant into the heads of Waynetta and her sisterhood who volunteered to have foreign (in all senses of the word) substances placed inside their bodies.  There should, I feel certain, be plenty of room inside their craniums for a new brain!

 

Why Ken Clarke is a tit!

I hesitate to call Ken Clarke a tit because, as you all know, I am rather fond of tits, but in his case I use the word as a derogatory term.  Quite apart from anything else, the time is long overdue for him to do the decent thing and join the 'il-Lib-non-Dems' since his Tory days have disappeared as his incipient senility has increased.  He is our so-called Justice Minister and as far as I can tell he wants to release as many prisoners as possible and instruct the 'Cocklecarrots' not to lock up any more than they absolutely have to.  The idiocy of this policy, or 'dereliction of duty' as I prefer to think of it, is obvious but it is useful to have some facts and figures backed by some keen intelligence on the subject.  Thus, I was pleased to read this piece by Charles Murray on The American Enterprise site:

He concentrates on violent crime as opposed to soft crime aimed at property.  The figures for property crime have dropped and almost certainly this has something to do with the hardening of security measures:

It’s impossible to steal most new cars this day because there is no way to get the engine started without the key. Hot-wiring is futile. Try to burgle a home in a neighborhood where homes have much worth stealing, and you’d better be prepared to get in and out before the high-tech security system brings the cops. If you’re in a commercial area, you’ve got omnipresent surveillance cameras to worry about along with the security systems.  The effect of these innovations on violent crime has been much spottier. Yes, it can be harder to rob a convenience store (robbery is classified as a violent crime), but for the most part, robbery, homicide, aggravated assault, and rape are not technically more difficult to commit than they used to be.

However, as Murray shows, the incidence of violent crime in the States has dropped like a stone as the number of prisoners has gone up:     

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, FBI Uniform Crime Reports. “Prisoners” refers to inmates of state and federal prisons and does not include persons in jail

When crime gets safer, crime goes up very quickly as a response. In the late 1950s, the “prison only makes people into smarter criminals”  school became dominant in criminal justice circles. By the early 1960s, imprisonment rates were plummeting. For that matter, even the raw number of prisoners fell.

From 1960 to the mid '90s, violent crime nearly quadrupled.  However, beginning around 1980 the imprisonment rate began to go up.  As always there was a time lag before more and more of the criminal fraternity began to realise that crime doesn't always pay but, as the message was received and experienced by more and more of them, the crime rate began to drop.  Murray refers to the “dirty 7 percent” of offenders who commit about 50 percent of all crime" and points out that a high percentage of them would have fallen foul of the 'new improved' sentencing policy and that their incarceration would have had a large effect on crime rates.  Murray finishes with this summary:

So how much of the reduction in violent crime was produced by increased incarceration? This kind of analysis doesn’t tell us. But neither am I sure that the armory of social science quantitative techniques adequately models what has gone on. Here is my simple-minded thought: Suppose we had maintained imprisonment for violent crime at the rate that applied in 1974. In that case, we would have had 276,769 state and federal prisoners in 2010 instead of the 1,518,104 we actually had. Suppose tomorrow we freed 1.2 million inmates from state and federal prisons. Do we really think violent crime would continue to drop at a somewhat slower pace?

In one sense, it is a silly question, as all counter-factuals must be. And I’m not saying that our current incarceration rates are appropriate. We may very well have been in a state of diminishing returns to incarceration for the last decade, as the experts DiIulio [an academic crimonologist] cites have argued. But I continue to harbor the belief that without the massive increases in incarceration after the mid 1970s, crime rates wouldn’t have turned around at all. Higher imprisonment was the necessary condition for 100 percent of the reduction in violent crime.

If anyone knows Ken Clarke, feel free to pass this on to him!

 

They're not all 'Cocklecarrots', thank God!

Some of my posts might lead you to suppose that this blog is 'Judge-ist'!  I admit that is true to a certain extent but I am always delighted to report on any exceptionally good examples of practice by our judiciary.  Thus, I would ask you all to pop over and read a report from 'Gildas the Monk' on the case of Stephen Neary and Hillingdon Council.  It is a long-ish tale but 'Brother Gildas' tells it well and I will not attempt to paraphrase it.  Also, it shines a searchlight into an area of the law which could entangle any of us all too easily!

http://www.annaraccoon.com/court-of-protection/hillingdon-dol-house/#comment-52195

 

Blog-post production fell yesterday!

Yes, apologies for my lack of output yesterday but the night before I had a 2-hour journey up to my Theatre Club in Twickenham and a 2-hour journey back, arriving home at 1.00 am, so I was a bit 'nacked'.  However, the reason for my late-night odyssey could not have been better.  We were celebrating the life and times of Mike Green, the humourist, who is a member of the club and, well into his '80s, is still in good health and still in possession of the wickedest chuckle I have ever heard.

So on Monday night, several of the members had got together and arranged an evening of readings from various of Mike's books and such is the affection in which he is held that I am delighted to say the place was packed even on a cold, wet, January night.  I am even more delighted to tell you that his most famous book, The Art of Coarse Acting, is still in print and available at Amazon.  Mike, himself, describes a 'coarse actor' thus:

One who can remember his lines, but not the order in which they come. An amateur. One who performs in Church Halls. Often the scenery will fall down. Sometimes the Church Hall may fall down. Invariably his tights will fall down. He will usually be playing three parts – Messenger, 2nd Clown, an Attendant Lord. His aim is to upstage the rest of the cast. His hope is to be dead by Act II so that he can spend the rest of his time in the bar. His problems? Everyone else connected with the production.

Some of his 'coarse acting' play scripts are hilarious.  These are plays in which everything that could go wrong in an amateur production - does, with a vengeance!  I remember one, 'The Escape from Stalag 17 1/2', or some-such, in which the gallant British airman is in a cell with a barred window high up which means he has to go up on tiptoe in order to pass a message out.  Unfortunately, in their haste, the set builders put the 'flat' containing the window in upside down.  The bewildered actor, after searching vain for the window finally spots it at ground level and is forced to go down on hands and knees to pass his message.

For all you 'hearties', his other very popular book is The Art of Coarse Rugby which, again, is still in publication.  Mike was a very keen rugby player and in fact ended up as the rugby correspondent for The Daily Telegraph.  This book was written, not for the expert 'hearties' who played for their club's first team but for those 'wannabes' in the 'B' Team Extras!  He defined a 'coarse rugby player' thus:

he does not enjoy playing, but instead plays for any one of a number of other reasons, such as to get away from his wife, or because he dare not admit he is too old.  The sort of players who stub out their cigarettes on the goal posts!

I have published this photo before when I wrote on the subject of my playing Falstaff but I do it again now because the other character is Mike Green playing Bardolph.  He really is super bloke and, of course, is in reality a very good actor, himself.

He has written several 'Coarse' books on different subjects and they are all weepingly funny.  If you are ever stuck for an idea for an unusal gift for someone, try one of his books - but don't read it yourself, you might end up keeping it!

 

Are the Jocks as canny as they would have us believe?

I ask because there are indications, I put it no higher, that slippery Salmond is going to lead them on a merry Highland caper eagerly followed by the 'MacStoopids', there always being a surplus of 'stoopids' in any population, who will dance along after him waving their nationalist saltires which, as sure as night follows day, will be banned by the Eurocrats just as soon as less-than-bonny Scotland is ensnared inside the USE.  Thus, the few union jacks still flying in Scotland will simply be replaced by the Euro flag.  Needless to say, Salmond, who I doubt gives that much of a toss one way or the other for 'Jockland', will be laden with Euro-honours and invited to sit at the top table in Berlin - where he will be given his orders - 'vich vill be obeyed because ve haf vays of making you obey'!  He and the rest of the 'MacStoopids' have their eyes fixed firmly towards the east and resolutely refuse to glance over their shoulders to the west to see how Ireland is faring under Berlin's rule.

In a comments thread somewhere below we had a discussion on logicality and how far it should be taken in human affairs.  I mention the subject because on the basis of logic (and under certain specific crieria) I would be happy to kiss Scotland goodbye not least because it costs us a fortune and all we ever get for our money is more and more moaning in that nasal Scotch dialect that drives you mad.  However, putting my heart above my head, so to speak, I would miss the 'MacBastards'!  They are part of the warp and woof of what makes Britain.  Their contributions over the centuries in science, the arts, the military and in sports, has been immense.  They are, I suppose, a bit like a Mother-in-Law, forever nagging, but when push comes to shove they are there for you. 

Actually, I suspect that most Jocks are shrewd enough to see that perhaps the English are the lesser of two evils but 'Dim Dave' needs to handle the situation with great care.  Salmond is a devious operator and his intelligence and cunning should not be under-rated.

  

Kelvin kicks a Cocklecarrot!

I wish it to be known that this blog makes every effort to ascertain the facts and to establish the truth of every statement we make.  I make this declaration to assuage the Lordly irritation likely to erupt from Cocklecarrot Leveson as he sits conducting his worse than useless, because it is highly dangerous, investigation into our (so far) free press.

This morning I watched perhaps the best bit of TV I have seen for yonks.  Up in the dock at the witness table was Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of The Sun - We Love It! in front of His Lordship Leveson. It was like watching two majestic ships of the line passing each other at dead of night, both sending signals which the other was unable to decipher.  Rather surprisingly, 'Mac the knife' MacKenzie remained fairly quiet and reasonable which must have irritated Cocklecarrot Leveson no end because you just knew that he was itching to send MacKenzie down to the cells to cool his heels at the first sign of insubordination.

Needless to say, for possibly the first time in this long, tedious waste of oxygen in which the only winners will be the lawyers (so no change there, then) some realism was introduced.  This caused many intakes of breath and several pursed lips, to say nothing of someone erupting in the public gallery because, of course, lawyers do not operate in the real world.  Theirs is a 'construction' in which incidents, I will not add to their dim lustre by calling them facts, are carefully arranged and presented to give a version of events.  Not the truth, you understand, you silly little naïf,  just a hopefully coherent story-line (bit like a paper, really) to fit the needs of their client who is, after all, paying for young Roddy and Emily to go to Public School!

Not that this was a trial, thank goodness, because it was obvious that 'izz 'Onour has already made up his mind and had probably done so before even the less than lovelyAnne Diamond and the insufferably smug and stupid Hugh Grant, to say nothing of the deeply unpleasant Max Mosley (a man who achieved the impossible by making his father seem not too bad)  had appeared before him to weep all over the witness table.  But today, in breezed our 'ero, Kelvin, the composer of "Up Yours, Delors", "Gotcha!" and sundry other jewels of the headline writing fraternity.  He tried, with remarkable patience (for him), to explain what real life was like but it was all quite beyond His Lordship who attempted to patronise our Kelvin and received a few neat jabs for his troubles.

There will be two winners and two losers when this farce runs to a close.  The winners will be Cocklecarrot Leveson who from being an obscure and fairly dim judge will now achieve fame, and the political class who will now feel much freer to rip us all off.  The losers will be the newspapers who will be unable to print the gossip that so titillates us all and will thus lose even more money until they disappear altogether, and the final and biggest loser of the lot will be  - YOU and ME!

 

Alan Turing: crushed by conformity

I have mentioned before the fact that that very nice old man, 'Rupe', sent me a devilish clever 'magi-recording-playback-thingie' which has only taken me several months to master.  Needless to say, having mastered it and recorded numerous items on it I hardly ever watch any of them!  It must drive poor rich old 'Rupe' potty.  However, today, having been robbed of watching an exciting 'footie' match between the two Manchester teams (and hoping thereby to see a full scale inter-Manchester riot to follow) because the ref sent off one of the players in the first ten minutes - pillock! - I decided to try and watch one of the programmes I had recorded.  I chose a 'dramatised documentary' by Channel4 on the life and early death of Alan Turing.  It is an irony of the gloomiest sort that the technology behind 'Rupe's 'magi-thingie' could be traced back, in whole or part, to the genius of Alan Turing, himself.

With countries as with people there are 'different strokes for different folks'.  Thus, in most countries of the world, if you step out of line they shoot you.  Here, in this "scepter'd Isle", we 'conform' you out of existence, and at no time did we do it better than the 1950s.  Honesty impels me to confess that, personally, looking back to the '50s and my teenage years, I think of it as almost a lost golden age of safety and security.  But then, I wasn't an outsider.  I was a conformist.  Turing's tale, which is too well known for me to retell here, shows what happened if you failed to conform.  No need for the lead-filled cosh, water-boarding, Gulags or any of that, just steady, constant, unrelenting pressure by the authorities - who never failed to call you 'Sir' - until you fell back into line.  This is what Turing suffered.  They crushed the spirit and then the genius and finally the life out of arguably the greatest British genius of the 20th century.

The film kept repeating that Turing was the man who did more than any other to win the war.  Nonsense, of course, there were others equally deserving of that sort of praise, but he was certainly up there with them.  Nor, to be accurate, can the surreptitious pressures of the security services be entirely blamed.  By any standards, unless you knew the man intimately, Turing was a walking, talking security risk, not just because of his homosexuality but more because of his other-worldly innocence.  Alas, government bureaucracies, especiallyif they have the word 'Intelligence' in their title are often short of that very ingredient.

However, none of that excuses the lack of proper action by contemporary governments.  As far as I know there are only two 'memorials' to this English genius.  The first is the 'Alan Turing Way', a ghastly dual-carriageway on the outskirts of Manchester where he worked at the University.  The second, set up by private funds, is a statue in a Manchester park set, appropriately, between the Univerity and a 'Gay Village'.   In my view it really is time that the nation, through the government, set up a suitable memorial in central London to his lasting memory.

 

High-minded but low-bodied art criticsm

Now, I want you to take a long, hard look at this painting.  No, no, not a quick glance, really study it, put your sun-glasses on if you have to.  It is by a man called Clyfford Still (1904-1980) and it is worth $30m - not, of course, that such a fact would alter your high-minded appraisal of this creation.  If you are somewhat unclear as to what it represents the artist has helpfully entitled it "1957-J no.2".  Right, off you go and in due course let me have your analyses but, please, n0 more than ten paragraphs!

 

 

 

Well, there you are then, what do you think?  Of course, you may not feel up to writing too much of a critique this being the Sunday morning after the Saturday night, as it were.  In which case you might care to emulate that well-known art critic, Ms. Carmen Tisch, 36, who, according to NBC Southern California, when she saw it in the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, she:

dropped her pants at a museum and rubbed her rear end all over it

Lest the finer, more sophisticated point of her critique be misunderstood, she:

tried to urinate on it but apparently missed.

Well, I suppose a butt wipe and a pee saved us all from ploughing through a 1,000 words of turgid art criticism but somehow I can't see this new, direct-action style of reviewing works of art catching on at the Royal Acadamy!

As so often I am obliged to those reprehensible subversives at I Hate The Media.

 

Oh no, Shorty reaches for Reacher!

Tell me it ain't so!  Or (he wrote desperately as he searched for Americanisms), you cannot be serious!  Hollywood - what a bunch of shmucks!

Yes, alright, I know, it's an even more confusing opening than usual for one of my posts but I am shocked, shocked I tell you!  Finally, Hollywood has got round to making a film of my hero and the hero of every other middle-aged - OK, old-aged - man in the Anglosphere - Jack Reacher.  These books featuring a 6'-5", ex-military cop, who bums round America carrying nothing but a folding toothbrush and wielding two fists and a pair of size 12 boots with which he slaughters countless dozens, nay, scores of baddies are to be filmed and will star - wait for it - titchy Tom Cruise!  Switching from American to Estuary English - you're 'avin' a laugh, ain'tcha?

Quite apart from his size, Cruise is in danger, when I die, of inheriting my title as the world's worst actor.  I have only seen him act well in one film when he played a villain.  Lee Child, an Englishman, is the author of these boks which sell by the gazillion, and seems pleased enough with the casting but given the money he's going to earn (and good luck to him) he is wise not to demur.  Steve Oney in The WSJ wonders if Hollywood is simply not producing men of John Wayne proportions any more:

Casting, however, was the main stumbling block. Reacher's size is central both to his ability to prevail in violent encounters—he has a propensity for taking on gangs of thick-necked thugs—and to his self-concept. "To be born tall was to win life's lottery," Mr. Child writes in "61 Hours," a 2010 Reacher novel.

"Subliminally," Mr. Child observes, "everybody was saying, 'Find the biggest guy we can find,' which in Hollywood is not very big. Actors just aren't big guys."

It's perfectly obvious, and therefore quite beyond Hollywood, that with such a well-known and beloved character whose huge physical proportions are integral to his character that they should have found an unknown actor.  But of course, with 'schmillions' riding on the outcome nobody dared take the risk.  All a great pity but I shall still go and see it and if Mr. Cruise defies the auguries and makes a good fist of it, then I shall eat my words - and as they are floating in the Blogosphere it won't be too difficult!

 

Is there anybody there? asks 'the Kraut'

But first, a terrific poem which came back to me through the ages from my long-lost school days provoked by the recent words of 'the Kraut':

'IS there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor.
And a bird flew up out of the turret,	5
Above the Traveller's head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill	10
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight	15
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.	20
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even	25
Louder, and lifted his head:—
'Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,' he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake	30
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,	35
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

I love that poem - how could I have forgotten it for so long? Anyway, on to 'the Kraut' who had some fascinating ruminations in The WaPo last week.  He asks one of those simple but deadly questions, "Are we alone in the universe?"  He was prompted to this by the, probably undue, excitement in cosmological circles (or should that be 'ellipses?) at the discovery of some planet-like objects circling suns in much the same way as our tired, battered, old planet does.  Instantly this raises the question of whether or not we are alone in the universe.  "Is there anybody there?" we mutter, and answer comes there none!

As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?

The silence, as they say, is deafening!  And perplexing.

It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”

'The Kraut' quotes something called The Drake Equation (1961) which seeks to enumerate how many advanced civilisations there must be in just our galaxy alone.  Apparently if you add in the information gained from modern satellite sources the number should be very great indeed.  And yet ... and yet ... despite all our signals sent out at the speed of light and our monitoring devices which could pick up the sound of an alien's fart from a zillion miles away - there is nothing, just the vast, endless emptiness of nothing.

Personally, I am not too unhappy because I always reckon that people - or beings, if you like - are nearly always trouble in the end and are therefore best avoided!  But 'the Kraut', being 'the Kraut', has an even gloomier explanation:

Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.

In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.

He lists the many man-made possibilities available to those madmen who, seeking a salvation in an after-world, would be happy to pull the trigger and bring about 'apocalypse now'.  But then, in a startling and original piece of thinking, he points to the only thing likely to save us - politics!

Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.

There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.

Good man, 'the Kraut', he makes you think.

 

Should Clegg be nicked for receiving?

I ask the question because if some East End gang leader was in receipt of stolen money he would surely have his collar felt.  Of course, he might plead ignorance of the fact that the money was stolen when he received it but if, having been appraised of the fact, he then hung on to it, it would surely risk a visit from the Plod.  I see no difference between my scenario and that of the all too real 'il-Lib-non-Dems'.  True, I don't think Clegg was capo di tutti capi at the time the dosh was handed over but he is now and the responsibility is his.  But even if he refuses at least he could tell that wizened old prune, Vince Cable, to shut up with his non-stop cranky, waspish attacks on so-called 'City slickers and greedy bankers'.  According to The Telegraph, this is the statement issued by this gang of corrupt money-launderers:

"The Electoral Commission inquiry in 2009 found that the party accepted the donation in good faith, and were in no way at fault.

"It cleared the party of all wrongdoing and accepted that at the time of the donation, Michael Brown was a permitted donor.

"There is no indication that the Electoral Commission will revise its opinion in this matter but any arrest abroad should lead to his extradition to the UK."

Notice, not a word about the people, the victims of crime, from whom the money was stolen.  In the stinking septic tank of politics some turds float effortlessly to the top.

 

America, oh, America!

Sometimes my ignorance appalls me.  I don't expect to know everything about everything, nor even a little about everything, but occasionally (well, quite often, actually) I stumble into the wide open space of total ignorance on a subject about which I really ought to know something.  This confessional has been prompted by an excellent book to which I referred in an earlier post, David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.  For an amateur, general interest 'student' I have a fairly good knowledge of WWII but it all ends at 1945.  There-after, up until, say, the last 25 years, I know nothing.  Not that I 'know' that much of these recent years either because until the history books are written none of us do but I actually lived through the late '40s to the early '60s and it is all a blank.  However, Mr. Halberstam's book is putting that right but only at teh cost to me of a series of constant shocks.  I am only halfway through and already I am sitting in my armchair, shaking my head, unsure whether to laugh or cry, and instead plaintively wailing "America, oh, America!"

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times".  America had won a world war defeating, with a little help from her friends, two powerful enemies on opposite sides of the globe.  The decidely dodgy Roosevelt was dead and to everyone's surprise a farmer turned (failed) haberdasher with no college degree became president.  Harry Truman belied his background because he was both shrewd and tough.  He was also, by Washingtonian standards, dead straight.  He ordered that the priority for the nation was to ensure the future prosperity and safety of war-shattered Europe.  This displeased many parts of the Republican party and the American public who were under two baleful influences.  First, the Anglophobia of middle-America which was determined to return to the isolationism they preferred before those wily Brits tricked them, for a second time, into a war they didn't want.  Secondly, and even more malignantly, the China lobby, led by the smooth, corrupt and corrupting Chinese ambassador, Wellington Koo, and a bevy of Chiang Kai-shek's American-based relatives, plus the almost mad, fanatical campaigns of Henry Luce, the publisher of the then influential Time and Life magazines.  Truman and Acheson, his Secretary of State, plus a coterie of smart young men in the State Department known as the 'China Gang', knew that all was lost in China and that it was only a matter of time before the communists took over ... and yet ... and yet ... under the pressure of constant and virulent attacks led by Luce the administration was forced to keep supporting the insupportable Chiang and his rotten-to-the-core regime.

That America did this once is, I suppose, forgivable but to do it twice, as they did later in Vietnam, is not!  As I write those words, believe me, I am all too aware of the fact that we Brits are now fighting the Third Afghan War which is proving as unwinnable as the previous two - is that stupid or what?   Anyway, in the late '40s, with Chiang (and his gold) now esconced in Formosa (Taiwan) the stage was set in 1950 for the two madmen in North and South Korea to wage war with each other.  Here, entering stage right with his villainous demeanor, comes General Douglas MacArthur, a man verging on clinical insanity.  I intend to write more on him later.  In the meantime, again, I can only mutter with genuine emotion, "America, oh, America!"