DUFF & NONSENSE!

'Texicana'

Thomas Carlyle called economics "the dismal science" but these days I think demography has taken over.  Without wishing to echo Pte. Frazer and his chorus of "we're all doomed", it seems that every demographic story in the media condemns Anglo-Saxons to a certain end.  The latest is from Houston and it appears that we really do have a problem!

Looking at population projections for Texas, demographer Steve Murdock concludes: "It's basically over for Anglos."

Two of every three Texas children are now non-Anglo and the trend line will become even more pronounced in the future, said Murdock, former U.S. Census Bureau director and now director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University.

There is no escape, apparently:

Most of the state's population growth is natural, Murdock told the House Mexican American Legislative Caucus today. About 22 percent of the growth comes from people moving to Texas from other states.

About 6 percent of the state's population is not documented, he said.

B y 2040, only 20 percent of the state's public school enrollment will be Anglo, he said. Last year, non-Hispanic white children made up 33.3 percent of the state's 4.8 million public school enrollment.

Is there any hope for the Lone Star State?

"It's a terrible situation that you are in. I am worried," Murdock said.

Take that as a 'no', shall I?

 

What on earth has got into the 'Yerdie-durbles'?

As usual my heading is obscure enough to qualify as a clue in The Times crossword so allow me to explain.  Years ago I used to be a fan of The Muppets - well, it wasn't that long ago, actually, so I can't plead extreme youth as an excuse - but anyway, they used to a feature an incomprehensible Swedish chef who come on speaking 'Muppet-Swedish' which sounded like "Yerdy-durble, derdy-burble, ferdle . . ." and so on, which, when you say it to yourself, is more or less, what real Swedish sounds like.

Of course, these days we all think of the Swedes as a very amiable, easy-going people, the sort who make ideal UN peace-keepers.  It wasn't always so, of course, as I have to remind my audiences during one of my military history talks; there was a time when the Swedes were ambitious and aggressive, and a constant source of trouble 'up there'.  But all that was centuries ago and the Swedish reputation for pacifism, or at least, neutrality, has spread to cover all of Scandinavia, so that we look upon them all as very placid, law-abiding folk.

So where has all this literary murder and mayhem suddenly come from, I would like to know?  I am just halfway through Three Seconds by Rosslund & Hellstrom, a terrifying but excellent thriller part of which is set inside a Swedish prison and if, like me, you thought they were a cut above a Butlins holiday camp, think again.  Then there were those amazing Steig Larsson books with that incredibly vicious, autistic Goth he had a 'heroine'.  I have already told you of the excellent Jo Nesbo, a Norwegian, whose drunken, thuggish hero is a police officer and around whom the bodies accumulate.  And so it goes on.  What is happening up there in the land of the midnight sun?  Have all those Northern Lights sent them potty?  I don't know, but if I were you and thinking of a trip to Scandinavia, I'd suggest you try the Congo for some peace and tranquility.

By the way, if you take my advice and try the Nesbo books, buy them in date order.  He has a habit of taking one story line over two or three books.

 

I never knew the Rubicon flowed through Madison, Wisconsin

The Krauthammer has spoken!  Which is a rather silly way of saying that the distinguished columnist, Charles Krauthammer, has written an article in The National Review pointing up the critical importance of the current imbroglio in Wisconsin.  To be honest, I couldn't actually point to Wisconsin, let alone its capital, Madison, on a map.  However, Krauthammer tells us that the outcome of the ongoing, thumb-in-the-eye, knee-in-the-groin fight between the public sector unions and the Republican governor will have considerable implications for both the main political parties. 

The dispute began when the newly elected Governor Walker took one look at the books and knew that his State was broke.  As a result he insisted that public workers must henceforth pay more towards their generous entitlements.  As Krauthammer explains:

They were contributing a fifth of a penny on a dollar of wages to their pensions and one-fourth what private-sector workers pay for health insurance.

Needless to say, the unions charged in where angels fear to tread and the resulting mass demonstrations along with all the nastiness that usually accompanies them hit the national headlines.  The result of all that publicity was that the people of Wisconsin, the vast majority of whom are not public employees, found out the true and eye-wateringly expensive details of the sweetheart deals that previous, and mostly Democrat, politicians had struck with the unions.  This caused the unions to capitulate on Governor Walker's demand that public employees contribute more towards their honeypots, but they dug in their heels when Walker also insisted that in future the unions could only bargain on wages, not entitlements and extras.  This, of course, would break the cosy little set-up in which politicians would nod and wink through some golden eggs in return for union support at the elections.  Needless to say, the cost of these golden eggs would not become apparent until they hatched, usually long after the politicians concerned had departed:

To redress these perverse incentives that benefit both negotiating parties at the expense of the taxpayer, Walker’s bill would restrict future government-union negotiations to wages only. Excluded from negotiations would be benefits, the more easily hidden sweeteners that come due long after the politicians who negotiated them have left. The bill would also require that unions be recertified every year and that dues be voluntary.

The Democrat party instantly saw this was a sword thrust aimed directly at them and they have rushed to the barricades to defend the staus quo:

Recognizing this threat to union power, the Democratic party is pouring money and fury into the fight. Private unions have shrunk to less than 7 percent of the working population. The Democrats’ strength lies in government workers, who now constitute a majority of union members and provide massive support to the party. For them, Wisconsin represents a dangerous contagion.

The fact that Democrat politicians elected to the State House have 'done a runner' so that the lack of a quorum will jam Governor Walker's proposals, plus the daily demo shenanigans in the capital, have kept this in the headlines across the country, and there-in, according to Krauthammer, lies its crucial, national importance:

Hence the import of the current moment — its blinding clarity. Here stand the Democrats, avatars of reactionary liberalism, desperately trying to hang onto the gains of their glory years — from unsustainable federal entitlements for the elderly enacted when life expectancy was 62 to the massive promissory notes issued to government unions when state coffers were full and no one was looking.

Obama’s Democrats have become the party of no. Real cuts to the federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell no.

It's not often that political issues are clarified for the public but on this occasion the choice is writ large with no chance of anyone misunderstanding it:

Led by famously progressive Wisconsin — Scott Walker at the state level and Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan at the congressional level — a new generation of Republicans has looked at the debt and is crossing the Rubicon. Recklessly principled, they are putting the question to the nation: Are we a serious people?

We should get the answer in 2012.

 

Sometimes all you can do is bow your head in humble admiration

I confess that up until a few days ago I had never heard of Irena Sendler.  Now that I have, I feel better about the human race.  She provides me with a tiny hope that there is, there might be, there's a chance, that we humans might make out alright in the end.  This remarkable lady was born Irene Krzyżanowska in Poland in 1910 and perhaps under the influence of her father who died when she was only seven she grew up without the anti-Semitism which was as in-bred and pernicious in Eastern Europe then as it is today.

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Irena worked in the German-controlled Children's Department of the Social Welfare Service.  She and others forged some 2,500 false documents for Jewish children in the ghetto and thus helped them to safety by placing them with sympathisers round the country.  She was granted a permit to visit the Warsaw ghetto and under that cover she smuggled these children out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys.  She was aided in much of this clandestine and highly dangerous work by various members of the Catholic Church.  Eventually she was caught by the Gestapo, tortured and sentenced to death, but this remarkable woman bribed the guards on the way to her execution and they dumped her in some woods with broken arms and legs.  She spent the rest of the war in hiding.  Throughout, she kept every detail of the children and their families so that, she hoped, when the war was over they could be re-united.  The details were hidden in several jars which she buried in different locations.  Alas, after the war when the jars were disinterred the contents were of little help because the families had long since perished in the camps.  Needless to say, the Communist regime which followed the Nazis continued to harass her but eventually when they, too, departed her activities were made public and she received the honours due to her.  In 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize but, true to form, the noodles who run that particular set-up decided to award it to, of all things, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  I suppose it takes one set of noodles to recognise another!  She died a year later in 2008 at the age of 98.

I feel guilty of my ignorance of her life and her courage.  In small recompense, I salute the memory of a truly good and brave woman:

Somerset Maugham: miserable misanthrope?

Please note the question mark at the end of my heading because I may be severely biased having seen a performance of The Constant Wife yesterday at The Salisbury Playhouse.  The characters in this 'comedy' are a mixture of deceit, stupidity, greed, artifice and hypocrisy; you would not wish to share a long journey alone with any of them.  Their 'smart' dialogue rattles out like a machine-gun and whilst a considerable majority of the audience laughed, I sank further into gloom.  Pondering on on my response, I came to the conclusion that this play, written in 1924/5, stands at a sort of halfway house in English theatre.  Earlier in time, there are the comedies of Sheridan, and his ilk, in which the characters' cartoon-like quality is emphasised by their descriptive names; thus, from The School for Scandal we have Lady Sneerwell, Sir Oliver Surface, Sir Benjamin Backbite, and so forth.  They are, for all intents and purposes, walking, talking icons for their various vices.  However, Sheridan's cynicism is softened by the young lovers who are presented as fairly real human beings with real feelings.  At the other end of the time-scale, we have the contemporary social comedies of Alan Ayckbourn whose masterpiece, Season's Greetings, I saw and posted upon, a few weeks back.  Like Sheridan, and Maugham, he provides a portrait (or a mirror) of his society but whilst the comic situations are stretched to their full comic potential they are rooted in reality, in fact, self-recognition sometimes makes for a painful night in the theatre.  But in my view, Maugham, in this play, falls between the two.  His characters are not 'real', in any sense of the word, and the overwhelming impression one gains from this play is that the author was a crabbed and bitter misanthrope.

I know very little of Maugham's life so before writing this I checked his Wiki entry and from it one might almost weep for a life, particularly in his early years, of almost continual unhappiness.  Combine that with an adult life in which, like many in his day, he disguised his homosexuality in a fraught marriage, and you can understand the bitterness that seeps through in this particular play.  I stress the word 'particular' because I only have two memories of his other works.  First, the film version of The Painted Veil which is up there in my Top Ten Films of All Time.  In this we see a rather silly young woman who falls into temptation, brings pain to those around her, suffers herself, but in the end finds a sort of adult redemption; but I don't know how closely they followed Maugham's book. My second memory of Maugham's work comes from childhood when I came across, and God knows how I did so, his short stories featuring Ashendon, the fictional hero who works for the Secret Intelligence Service.  I cannot for the life of me remember anything about them except that they were definitely not of the 'crash-bang-wallop' type but instead far more slow-moving and thoughtful.  (Note to self: must find a copy from Abebooks!)  Of course, Maugham knew at first hand how the SIS of his day worked being an agent in the field for some years.  If ever you needed a portrait of a spy, this photo of Maugham would do nicely:

So, a complex and fascinating character, as even a brief skim of his Wiki entry will demonstrate.  I must set aside my prejudices gained from The Constant Wife and investigate further.  Oh God, that means more books - and I promised the 'Memsahib' not to buy anymore.

 

Yet more "Words, words, words"

Three fascinating articles on words, or to be precise, the use of words.  For ease of reference, and because what these writers have to say is much more interesting, as well as more expert, than anything I can produce, I will give you the links here:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8c60799c-24e2-11e0-895d-00144feab49a.html#axzz1BvPeSMTA

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Use-value-6943

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/11/lost-art-editing-books-publishing

Regular readers will know of my inner suffering when it comes to matters of English useage, both in the grammatical and the stylistic sense. Because I only possess a veneer of education I am frequently caught in the same situation as the parvenu who finds himself sitting next to a Duchess at dinner and inadvertantly uses her skirt instead of his napkin to wipe his lips, he is aware of a faux pas (or 'dropping a bollock', as I think of it) but is not quite sure why or how!  Thus, re-reading some of my posts is at best an exercise in unease and at worst a cause of intense embarrassment.  These three essays only compound my feelings.

The first, by Adam Haslett in the FT is a review of a book How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One by Stanley Fish.  He begins by referring to a work by Strunk & White, The Elements of Style, which, back in 1919 laid down the ground rules for proper American writing.  These two worthies, one an eminent professor, the other his pupil, insisted that a sentence in literature should be short and to the point.  Haslett provides two examples: from Henry James, the following sentence, “He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved them still less when they made a pretence of a figure;” and from Hemingway the exact antithesis: “These were the new dead and no one had bothered with anything but their pockets".

Apparently Fish, being a modernist, decries the strictly prescriptive attitudes of his earlier 20th century precursers, and Haslett agrees with him by insisting that rhythm and form are as informative of meaning as plain words.  He offers an example from Lincoln who, on hearing of the capture of Vicksburg, a key transport link for Union forces, wrote: "The father of waters again goes unvexed to the sea."  Note the rhythmic quality and power in the syllables: de-dah/ de-de-dah/ de-de-dah/ de-de-dah which would have been ruined if he had written 'goes again'.  Haslett, sensibly,  says in effect that it's horses for courses and that the style you choose as a writer for any particular subject must be chosen on the grounds of what expresses your thoughts most efficaciously and passes them onto your reader with clarity.

The second essay is by Barton Swaim in The New Criterion and is a review of a new edition of that old classic A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by the sometimes witty, sometimes waspish, H. W. Fowler.  I have a copy of an original edition to hand but I rarely have the nerve to read it.  Apart from anything else, I don't know, or cannot now remember, the meanings of the technical words and phrases which that (* see comments below) describe English grammar (oh dear, should that have been 'which' or 'that'?)  Like Swaim, I am sometimes perplexed by Fowler's strictures over one particular issue, and his almost lackadaisical, 'you choose' attitude to another.  For example:

If you wanted to know whether “their” may refer to singular antecedents, for example (If someone isn’t doing their job, they should be fired), Burchfield [the editor of a later edition of Fowler's book] told you that “the issue is unresolved, but it begins to look as if the use . . . is now passing unnoticed.” Maybe the issue is “unresolved,” one thought, but could you please resolve it and tell me whether I should write “they” or “he” or “he or she” and so avoid sounding like an ignoramus to an educated audience? For his part, Fowler—the original Fowler—had called this use of the plural pronoun a “mistake.” He acknowledged rare instances of the use in Fielding and Thackeray, but suggested that “few good writers” could get away with it.

You see, there-in lies the difference between the 'ams' and the 'pros'; I would write "their" and not even realise there was a problem!  Anyway, Swaim points up the differences between the (mainly old) prescriptivist teachers of the English language who insist that there are rules, and the contemporary descriptivist linguists and grammarians who, in effect say, anything goes, let it hang out, baby!  Apparently, the introduction to this new edition of Fowler's original is written by David Crystal, a man whom I admire and to whom I will forever be indebted because of his superb Shakespearean glossary which no actor/director should be without.  Alas, Swaim takes him to task because Crystal is an unapologetic modernist who gives the old 'master' a tough time over his edicts handed down from on high.  The debate is summarised rather neatly by Swaim, thus: 

To insist on rule-following in the absence of any practical justification for the rule, they argue further, is to engage in class prejudice. And here, I think, is the real reason for the intense dislike descriptivists feel for the older attitudes. The idea of “correctness” is linked in their minds with snobbery. It’s clear from Crystal’s work that he regards “prescriptivism” as an absurd bourgeois bigotry: the half-educated passing sentence on the uneducated for failing to obey rules understood by neither. That suspicion isn’t unreasonable. We’ve all known people who feel they’re superior because they don’t split infinitives.

But you may as well condemn table manners for the same reason. Conventions of politeness aren’t based purely or even primarily on functional considerations—putting one’s elbow on the table doesn’t affect the taste of the food—and they are apt to become tools in the hands of pretentious fools. Yet the proposition that they should therefore be done away with is manifestly preposterous. Certain conventions will govern the ingesting of food in a civilized society. Humans abide by customs when they wish to please their companions or ingratiate themselves, and there’s no point in trying to convince them to stop.

The final piece is a sort of lament for The Lost Art of Editing by Alex Clark in The Guardian.  He is concerned with the proper editing of proper books by publishing houses but, if I may insert a personal plea for mercy, I would like to beg forgiveness of my reader for the numerous lapses in the editing of my posts.  I am constantly amazed at the errors of spelling,  syntax and grammar which I fail to spot despite reading and re-reading them several times.  Back to Mr. Clark and his gloomy description of falling standards in the publishing world where old-fashioned editors are no longer considered indispensable.  When you think about it, it is a very strange and rare skill to be a good editor, requiring excellent taste and judgment combined with tact and intelligence.  Not virtues which are absolutely necessary in the modern publishing world, as one life-long member made clear:

"It's the kind of business," he told me, "where as soon as an author has a tipping point and becomes a big brand, then other forces come into play. Sales and marketing and publicity departments want that author's next book as soon as possible, and it takes its place in budgets and forecasts."

I'm not sure if proof-reading is part of an editor's brief but I have noticed spelling mistakes in books more and more often in recent times, something you rarely saw in the past.  Anyway, it's a fascinating glimpse into the world of publishing and well-worth a read.

Now, if anyone spots a spelling or grammatical mistake in this lot, feel free to tell me - because I'll never see it!

 ADDITIONAL:  I have just checked Fowler's entry for exclamation marks, of which, you may have noticed, I am overfond.  Oh God, and I'm still no wiser! (Ooops!)

 

Chickens come home to roost - amongst chickens!

An excellent political column in this week's Spectator (no link yet but it should appear next week) by James Forsyth.  In effect, he points out that the chickens in the Tory party (Chief Chick - Cameron D.) who allowed themselves to be led by Labour's party machine into soft-pedaling on Europe, the Equalities Act and the Human Rights Act, and thus failed to win outright despite an open goal, have now found themselves surrounded by even more clucking, scratching, vociferous chickens which have hatched from those three mother hens.  According to Forsyth, after nine months in office, ministers are complaining loud and hard that many of their plans are constantly stymied by any or all of these 'embuggerence factors'.  They are not helped by their coalition partners who hold these acts to be almost sacred.

Now, I am a strong supporter of real-politik because on the whole wishful-thinking-politik is usually a disaster.  So, I do recognise that at times it is necessary for politicians to duck and dive, one thinks of 'that woman' and the time when she gave way to Scargill's miners - only to return the following year having built up stocks of coal!  However, when 'Dave' and his cronies gave way to Labour bullying and the threat of (what they thought) would be bad headlines they sold the pass and now they are stuck with fetching the ball from the back of the net of their own goal over and over again.  And, of course, they have the 'il-Lib-non-Dems' hanging round their necks like a millstone.  That is their deserved punishment for not fighting hard on true Tory policies.

Even so there is some good news, or so Forsyth tells us, in that more and more ministers are becoming hardened, not to say, vociferous in their anti-European feelings because now they are finding out the hard way exactly how much interference we suffer at the hands of Brussels.  The full effect of 'Harry Harperson's delayed action IED, the Equalities Act, will soon begin to tell as more and more ministerial policies are nobbled by constant 'equality impact assessments' which are bound to go against ministers if only because it will keep the assessors in jobs forever.  Apparently even 'Dave' is tiring of it all and is exasperated by the drag anchor laid down by his so-called partners.

However, nothing much can be done because 'Clegg and Co.' will refuse to tamper with any of this legislation so 'Dave will have to soldier on with gritted teeth and then fight the next election on proper Tory ideas.  Forsyth does not mention this but I will; it raises the delicate subject of exactly how and when the Tories break away from the coalition.  The 'when' is critical because the government is going to face increasingly hard times as the economy falters under the impact of the cuts (to say nothing of the oil price shock), so he will need to hang on long enough for (dare I say?) the 'green shoots' to appear.  I have mentioned before reports from those who examine the small print of Treasury documents that Osborne is quietly building up a war chest of 'surplus' cash in order to splurge it before the next election.  'Dave' will need every penny!  Then there is the 'how' to make the break.  A 'palsy-walsy' arrangement in which both sides agree not to attack each other will not do and, judging from Foryth's article, both 'Dave' and his ministers (and MPs) would not stomach it.  So a suitable 'matter of principle' will have to be engineered, something that even power-hungry Clegg could not force his party to accept, and thus the coalition will fall at a moment of 'Dave's choosing.

Sorry to repeat myself, a failing amongst the elderly and the boring, but as in sex and drumming, timing is everything!

 

The totalitarian Democrats

It is a given that any political party which includes in its title words like "Democratic", "Free", "United", "Workers", "Peace", and so forth, will almost always be the very opposite of what the name implies.  For proof of this one need look no further than 'over there' where the Democrat party is now openly practicing its final assaults on democracy.  In Wisconsin, the minority Democrats in the State senate have 'upped sticks' and left the State thus technically depriving their chamber of a quorum and thereby bringing Republican legislation to a grinding halt.  This is an overt act of political sabotage taken against the democratic wishes of the people of Wisconsin who voted only three months ago.

My second example is higher up in the Democrat polit-bureau, in fact, all the way to the top.  President Obama has let it be known that he disapproves of The Defense of Marriage Act, a bill proposed and voted through during the presidency of Bill Clinton - a scrummy piece of irony, I know - and which is now the law of the land.  However, 'His Highness, King' Obama, with a languid wave of his hand, has summarilly dismissed it and instructed his Department of Justice (DoJ) - the department charged by the Constitution to uphold the Federal laws of America - to ignore it and to refuse to take any action to uphold it.  This is the same DoJ which refused to take action against two black agitators standing outside a poll booth swinging baseball bats.  Were I an American I would wonder what other laws of the land 'His Highness' has under review?

I really am beginning to fear for America.

Duel in the sky

Allow me to introduce Donald Pittenger.  I have mentioned him before but you lot frequently fail to pay attention which is why I have to keep dishing out lines as punishment!  Mr. Pittenger has an excellent blog called Art Contrarian which I recommend you bookmark.  He describes his blog in better words than I can find:

 A blog about about painting, design and other aspects of aesthetics along with a dash of non-art topics. The point-of-view is that modernism in art is an idea that has, after a century or more, been thoroughly tested and found wanting. Not to say that it should be abolished -- just put in its proper, diminished place.

Suffice to add that his knowledge is deep, his judgment excellent and the scope of his blog is wide.  A couple of weeks ago he wrote an interesting post on a subject close to my heart, that is, the decades long rivalry between the aircraft makers Hawker and Supermarine, designers and builders of, respectively, the Hurricane and the Hunter, and the Spitfire and the Swift.  I was a child during the war and you can imagine that the Spitfire and the Hurricane loomed large in my early perceptions.

Early Supermarine Spitfire Mk. I

Is there a man alive who would not sell his wife into slavery for a chance to fly a Spitfire for half an hour?

Hawker Hurricanes Mk. I

Controversy still erupts over which was the best plane but Mr. Pettinger gives the honours to the Spitfire, although I'm sure I read a review fairly recently of a book which maintains that it was the Hurricane which won us the Battle of Britain.  I will remain neutral but give a prize to the Spitfire for its beauty.  It is elegant and deadly, an iconic design which never dates.  Even today, some 70-odd years later the Spitfire looks lethal.  I put it up there with the old pre-war Bugattis as a fine example of design with purpose raised to the level of art:

A Bugatti 57SC Atlantic. The record-breaking car was in a private collection and rarely seen for the last four decades. Photograph: Martyn Goddard/Corbis

But I digress so let me return to the Hawker - Supermarine rivalry which continued after the war and into the jet age.  This time Supermarine produced the Swift:

Supermarine Swift F.1, (or possibly an F.2), 56 Squadron - 1954

Hawker, in turn, produced the Hunter and this is the plane which captured my boyish imagination.  The chief test pilot at the time of its development was Neville Duke DSO, OBE, DFC & Two Bars, AFC, Czech War Cross, an absolute hero of mine.  I have written before of witnessing John Derry's fatal accident in the DH110 at the Farnborough air show but had forgotten that Duke went up later in the Hawker Hunter, despite the death of his close friend, and repeated the demonstration of breaking the sound barrier.  What I did not know is that he received the following note from the Prime Minister: "My Dear Duke, it was characteristic of you to go up yesterday after the shocking accident. Accept my salute. Yours, in grief, Winston Churchill."

The Hawker P1067 was designed by Sydney Camm and his design team at Hawkers

In this post-war competition the tables were turned and the Hunter outshone the Swift.  Again, perhaps co-incidentally, the most beautiful and elegant aircraft proved to be the best at the killing game.

Anyway, do visit Mr. Pittenger's blog, it is both a pleasure and an education.

 

Myers tells it much better than me - dammit!

As you will have gathered by the frequent mentions he receives here at D&N, I am an admirer of Kevin Myers, the columnist at The Irish Independent.  Yesterday he poured a bucket of cold water, and commonsense, over the vainglorious hopes of both western liberals and neo-cons that the result of the revolutions in the middle east will lead to a new era of bright, sunlit and democratic uplands.

Short-term good seldom results from revolutions. It certainly does not result from revolutions in Muslim societies in which the local imam is usually the font of both civic and criminal law, and where tolerance of others is merely conditional.

He evokes Donald Rumsfeld's famous phrase concerning "unknown unknowns" and asks:

What unknown unknowns await us today, as the neo-con dream of collapsing despotisms comes true? What nightmares lie ahead? What dark forces may yet emerge from soukh, bazaar or mosque as the old SAD [Secular Arab Despotisms] order perishes?

He admits his own past error, a practice which only serves to  increase my admiration of him:

The great neo-con theory was that with such SAD dictatorships abolished, democracy, the rule of law and the market economy would flourish in the great landmass from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. And I confess, I too subscribed to this insane hallucination, not because of any evidence, but because I wished it, despite all the evidence of history.

He also points to the deafening silence especially from the usually screech-worthy, liberal and feminist MSM:

Had the butchery of Tripoli or Cairo or Yemen taken place in Israel, hundreds of thousands of protesters in European capitals would have been denouncing the cruel Jews.

Had the US journalist Lara Logan been grabbed and sexually violated by a mob of Israeli men, feminists across the world would rightly have been protesting. But she was instead the victim of a frenzied sex attack in Cairo by a score of Arabs, and there is accordingly silence.

And this, in one bitter but accurate sentence, sums up one aspect of the situation:

In an ever-changing world, some things never change: and to the western liberal mind, the only real villains in the Middle East can only ever be Jewish.

Quite so!

 

Portrait of a day in this our septic Isle!

I read several newspapers via the net and without any doubt the most comprehensive coverage is offered by The Mail.  You might disagree with its political stance but if you're after a wide survey of what is going on in our beloved kingdom you can do no better than The Mail.  Here are just the headlines from today at 15.15 hours, a snap shot of Britain, God bless her and all who sail in her:

'Highly dangerous' child sex killer who strangled seven-year-old boy found 'murdered' in prison

Teenager battered for refusing arranged marriage after father sold her as £10,000 bride

Rude, arrogant, lazy... that's what patients think of NHS staff

Obese patient is first to take NHS trust to court for refusing to fund gastric bypass

Caught on CCTV: The moment a drunk driver gave a traffic police officer 'respect beating' for daring to pull him over

Worried workers took less sickies during recession - but they're back to their old ways now

SAS troops 'to be deployed on the streets' to prevent terrorist attacks

Thirteen A-level students missed out on university places after exam board blunders left them with wrong grades

'British justice has lost the plot': Now businessman forced to pay damages to thieving employee he frogmarched to police faces COURT COSTS

Lib Dem MP accused of being a paedophile admits he 'kissed and cuddled' teenage girl

Binge Britain: Astonishing video of man so drunk he cannot walk up a gentle hill

But it's not all bad news, so to cheer you up here is a story that is bound to bring a smile to your lips and a tear to your eye:

The lost Enid Blyton: After decades gathering dust, one of her earliest magical tales is discovered in archive

It's all about Mr. Tumpey's magical caravan and I for one can hardly wait!

 

Don't mention . . . oh dear, too late!

In my blogging experience I have learned, the hard way, to avoid two thorny subjects - abortion and natural selection.  They frequently create spontaneous heat but rarely much light.  However, alas and alack, today I am prompted to return to Darwin's contentious theory but the blame lies entirely with Kevin Myers in The Irish Independent.  He drew my attention to an item in David Attenborough's recent TV series on animal life which was shot on location in a particularly ferocious desert in Madagascar:

This desert is a brutally unforgiving place, in which an ordinary spider would simply be desiccated, even in shelter. So one variety of spider has developed a technique by which it lassoes an empty snail-shell, and by a careful geometric arrangement of its web, is able to hoist the shell off the ground and suspend it from a branch in shade, safe from the heat and from ground predators, with the hole pointing vertically downwards, away from both the sun and intrusion by birds.

[...]

what magical circuitry did the spider possess that enabled it to create an entirely new home, involving complex suspensory trapezoids and a careful positioning of a crustacean shell, millions of years after it had emerged in entirely different ecological circumstances?

Now let me confess immediately - I was a believer!  Years ago I read some of Richard Dawkins's books and I swallowed them whole with barely a gulp.  Although, and I mention this in mitigation, reading him I did realise for the first time that the Darwinists were a divided camp, some believing that natural selection operates at the level of species, whilst others say it is at the level of individual organisms, whilst yet others, including Dawkins, insist that natural selection operates at the level of genes within organisms.  When faced with anyone doubtful of the whole Darwinian concept, of course, these 'little' differences are quickly swept away and a united front is presented.

So there I was, warm and comfy, chanting along with all the others, "I believe, I believe!" when suddenly I was confronted by a big, bullying Aussie who, so to speak, picked up a 10lb sledge hammer and hit Dawkins smack over the head with it!  I was shocked, shocked, I tell you!  This subversive Aussie was the late, and in my opinion very great, David Stove and his 'sledge hammer' was his book Darwinian Fairytales.  Whilst Stove had some sympathy with Darwin he had none whatsoever for Dawkins and his silly notion that we're all controlled and programmed by little itty-bits of protein called genes.  (I blush to remember how I believed all that crap!)  But once the worm of doubt enters your consciousness there is no escape from its insidious burrowing and so the next book I read was Darwin's Black Box by Michael J. Behe.  Unfortunately, Behe rather spoiled his case by proposing the existence of an 'Intelligent Designer' to replace the notion of God and this was free ammo for the devout atheists like Dawkins.  But both Behe and Dawkins, and Darwin for that matter, believed that life was purposeful, not with any particular end result in view but driven above and beyond all other imperatives by the need to reproduce - and the most succesful reproducers win the game!  It's an enticing theory but as Stove points out, it is a fallacy because it does not extend to all living things, and indeed, the biggest exception to this so-called 'Law' are human beings, themselves.  As we can see from our own experience, the richer and more bountiful our societies become the less we breed!  Falling birth rates in the west are becoming a real problem.  So much for those pesky little genes that the absurd 'Archbishop' Dawkins would have us believe control and drive us helpless humans along in the direction they insist upon.

But Behe had another argument to support his doubts concerning Darwinian natural selection, and Meyers's mention of that cunning little spider reminded me of it.  It is necessary to understand that most neo-Darwinists insist that natural selection works infinitesimally slowly through almost literally uncountable zillions of tiny 'improvements' passed on from generation to generation.  However, Behe, a micro biologist by 'trade' took a long hard look at the means by which these 'improvements' occurred.  Down at the micro-chemical level, a view not open to Darwin, a whole universe of complexity arises, and even the smallest of changes requires the simultaneous action by several components which must exist before the 'improvement' occurs.  His famous metaphor was the 'simple' mouse trap:

Having a mouse trap confers an advantage because you can rid your environment of a pest.  But in order to use it, it is necessary to have the component parts, a flat wooden base, a metal hammer, a spring (which is fairly complicated in its own right), a pressure-sensitive catch to hold the hammer in place, and finally, a metal bar that connects to the catch and holds the hammer back when it is charged.  Also, of course, you need several staples to hold all these components together.  Now, to have the advantage of this device it is absolutely necessary to have all the components and, moreover, they must be arranged in the 'correct' order.  A failure of any of these strict requirements means the trap will fail and, like Meyers's spider mentioned above, failure means death.  And there is one other critical factor to be taken into consideration.  If our mouse trap was produced by Darwinian evolution, then first, each of those components would have to be slowly evolved seperately over time despite the fact that none of them, on their own, provides the organism with the slightest advantage!  This tricky objection to natural selection Behe called "irreducible complexity".  Reading the occasional efforts by Darwinists to refute, or at least, to wriggle around, Behe's irreducible complexity argument has provided me with some sardonic sniggers over the years.

However, if Darwin's theory of evolution falls how are we to account for the changes over time that we see in living things? For that, somewhat hesitantly, we must turn to mathematics.  I, of course, failed my maths 'O'-level and my ignorance of the subject galls me to this day because, in some obscure way, I think the mysteries of life are probably to be found in mathematics.  I stress the word 'probably' because I suspect that probability plays a large part in the equation.  For a reasonably easy to understood explanation I would urge you to read Chaos and Life by Richard J. Bird.  He treats the multiple exchanges of genes which take place at every act of reproduction as a Turing machine operation working on the same basis as the iterated equations which form the basis of Chaos Theory.  If he is right then it will explain, in a sense, how a 'mouse trap', or at least, a major change of organism can come about almost instantaneously because the iteration of equations over 'zillions' of times does result in sudden and startling changes of outcome which cannot be forseen.  Also, of course, there is no purpose or aim, they just happen, and if they are 'successful' they will remain, and if not - not!  It is perhaps best summed by a phrase much used by 'the cousins' - shit happens, or to be more accurate, sometimes it's shit and sometimes it's peaches and cream, it all depends where and when it happens.  Or, to put yet another way, God, or the Intelligent Designer, does indeed play with dice.

Sorry to bore on at such length but as I wrote up above, it's all the fault of that Kevin Meyers!

 

There will be blood!

Further to the amusing writings of the delicious Ann Coulter (see below), there is some sardonic humour to be derived from the situation in Libya and the awkward dilemma that arises for some Leftie-liberals.  According to the 'experts', the nature of Libyan society is highly tribal and if the cruel but firm grip of the Gaddafi family (that's 'family' in the Sicilian sense) is broken then civil war is more than likely.  Thus, those of a liberal disposition must ask themselves whether the butcher's bill which will arise from a civil war is worth paying, particularly in the almost certain knowledge that the type of society which will follow will probably be every bit as severe as that practiced by the Gaddafis. 

Of course, I know as well as you that in fact there will be no dilemma for Leftie-liberals who will pay no heed whatsoever to the slaughter provided the maimed children, the raped women and the dead men are all rendered so in pursuance of what they perceive to be 'the glorious cause'.  Mind you, if it's American bombs doing the rendering by way of removing a murderous dictator, well, that's another story - as Ms. Coulter lays out for us so wittily in the post below.

This is why I am in love with Ann Coulter

Why do I keep falling for strong, powerful women?  Is it, as disciples of Dr. Freud and his phantasy religion would have it, due to my potty training?  Or is it, in the case of Ms. Coulter, that her writing hits the ace of spades right in the middle at a hundred paces?  For example, her column on 17th February:

The Middle East is on fire again, and crazy Muslims with funny names aren't helping things -- Mahmoud, ElBaradei, al-Banna, Barack ...

The major new development is that NOW liberals want to get rid of a dictator in the Middle East! Where were they when we were taking out the guy with the rape rooms?

Remember? The one who had gassed his own people, invaded his neighbors and was desperately seeking weapons of mass destruction? The guy who emerged from a spider hole looking like Charlie Sheen after a three-day bender?

Liberals couldn't have been less interested in removing Saddam Hussein and building a democracy in Iraq. So it's really adorable seeing them get all choked up about democracy now. Say, as long as liberals are all gung-ho about getting rid of out-of-touch, overbearing dictators, how about we start with Janet Napolitano?

Ouch!  But she's not finished:

You know another country where Obama wasn't interested in democracy? (I mean, besides the U.S. when it comes to health care reform?) That's right -- Iran.

Iran is ideal for democracy: It has a young, highly educated, pro-Western population, and happens to be led by a messianic, Holocaust-denying lunatic.

Liberals say: Why upset that apple cart? Much better to support tumult and riots against our allies than our sworn enemies.

When peaceful Iranian students were protesting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's stolen election in 2009, we didn't hear a peep out of Obama. The students had good reason to believe the election had been rigged. In some pro-Ahmadinejad districts, turnout was more than 100 percent.

Wait, no, I'm sorry -- that was Al Franken's election to the U.S. Senate from Minnesota. But there was also plenty of vote-stealing in Ahmadinejad's election.

Ooof!  That was below the belt. But look out, here comes another:

The fact that liberals support democracy in Egypt, but not in Iraq or Iran, can mean only one thing: Democracy in Egypt will be bad for the United States and its allies. (As long as we're on the subject, liberals also opposed democracy in Russia, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and all the Soviet satellite states, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, Grenada, Nicaragua and Minnesota.)
Democrats are all for meddling in other countries –- but only provided a change of regime will harm U.S. national security interests.

And then comes the haymaker:

For 50 years, Democrats have harbored traitors, lost wars, lost continents to communism, hobnobbed with the nation's enemies, attacked America's allies, and counseled retreat and surrender. Or as they call it, "foreign policy."

As Joe McCarthy once said, if liberals were merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that at least some of their decisions would serve America's interests.

Opinionated? Yes!

Hyperbolic? Yes!

Dogmatic?  Yes, yes, yes - and I love it - and her!

(Sorry, this is a lazy Sunday post using long quotations but I did an extra half hour in the pool this morning and I'm a bit knacked - er, have I told you I go swimming every morning? . . . oh, take that as a 'yes', shall I?)

 

The Lesbian-Straightener is about to get a bowl of moussaka tipped over his head

'Beware the Greeks advancing with a bowl of moussaka' goes the old saying, or something like that, anyway.  So that proud, upstanding icon of British manhood, Chris Huhne the Lesbian-Straightener, needs to beware his Greek ex-wife who is advancing on him not with moussaka but with the draft copy of her forthcoming book.  No wonder he looks deeply pissed off!

According to The Mail on Sunday, the former Mrs. Huhne, aka Vicky Price (doesn't sound very Greek but I am assured she is), is planning a book in which a major segment will be taken up with the details of her former husband's affair with his lesbian girlfriend.  From this photo the Greek lady looks exceedingly determined and Mr. Huhne might now be wishing that he had kept his lesbian rescue activities confined to mere good advice and less, er, hands on!

 

Apparently, she is particularly 'ticked off' because Huhne dumped her, after 26 years and three children, a month after campaigning on 'family values' in his Eastleigh constitutuency last year.  According to The Mail, he dropped the bombshell of his affair and then left the house saying, "I'm off to the gym!"  Well, poor chap, he has to keep his strength up, I mean to say, the ladies are always damned difficult to please in the 'biology department' even when they're normal, keeping a lesbian happy must require a super-human effort.  Still, he's a credit to all of us British chaps - er, he is British , isn't he?  Don't tell me with a name like that he's some sort Hun who sneaked in through our efficient border controls.

So far there has been no comments from Carina Trimingham, the lady who was saved from herself by the gallant attentions of Mr. Huhne.  Nor, it must be said, have I seen anything from her ex-girl friend who, I suspect, might be planning all sorts of devilish revenges on poor Mr. Huhne using the, er, implements so beloved of ladies who love ladies.

  

Ms. Trimingham, too, looks rather formidable.  I'm not sure what the rest of her looks like but her neck is thicker that Arnold Schwartzenegger's!  Still, I'm sure that she, like the rest of us, is very grateful that Mr. Huhne has put her in touch with her feminine side.  (That doesn't sound quite right but you know what I mean.)

Anyway, in these revolutionary times we must all be grateful to Mr. Huhne for bringing a titter of humour into our lives.

 

 

The 'Arab street' finally erupts and the virgins are helpless!

For years the 'old middle east hands' and sundry Left-wing 'experts' have been warning us gravely that the 'Arab street' will erupt against this or that disgracefully wicked American or Israeli action taken in support of Big Oil/Israeli ambition/American colonialism (delete to taste) but now, without any warnings at all from the so-called experts, the 'Arab street' really has erupted, but not against the usual suspects, instead it is against their own Arab governments.  I think the irony is too, too, delicious and sufficient to warrant several good, hearty whinnies - nya-nya-nya!

It all confirms my own opinion based on nil expertise that the rise of fundamental Islam has been brought about by their own intuitive insight that in this modern communicating world their religion and their way of life is doomed, and like most people faced with this prospect, one thinks of the American Indians, the Australian aborigines, the 16th century Roman Catholic church and others, they are determined to fight to the end to preserve what they cling to.  Unfortunately, this democracy lark is such a simple and highly subversive idea, easy for even the illiterate and stupid to understand, that is, that on  the whole it is better to be ruled by a set of rascals under a system in which at least you have the chance to turn the rascals out every few years.  They remain rascals, of course, and the lot you bring in will be equally rascally, but at least they must pay a due regard for your wishes.  Now it may well be that the wishes of you and your fellow voters might be incredibly stupid but at least you voted for it so there is no one else to blame, and there is a chance that having changed your mind you can also change the government eventually.

So I wish the 'Arab street' well even if I doubt whether they will quite achieve what they think they want.  Only one question of real interest remains and that is exactly how much protection the ludicrous 'Col.' Gaddafi will receive from his security guard unit made up of virgin females?

Photo courtesy of The Mail

Will it, one wonders, depend on exactly how virginal they are?  Anyway, old chap, don't fancy yours much but I quite like the one in the middle - back in the day I could have made her tassles swing, eh? what? those were the days - another chota peg, boy!!

 

California dreamin' - or is it a nightmare?

Odd coincidence but no sooner had I finished my fist-shaking at 'Greenie-eco-warmers' below when I came across an article by the estimable George Gilder, a copy of whose excellent book, Wealth & Poverty, sits on my book-shelf as I write.  In The American Spectator he writes of what I would categorise as the biggest suicide note in history, that is, the decision by the people of California not to repeal the Assembly Bill 32, the so-called Global Warming Solutions Act.  As Gilder emphasises:

Passed in 2006, AB 32 ordained that the state economy be ratcheted back to 1990 levels of so-called greenhouse gases by 2020, a 30 percent drop, and mandated an 80 percent drop by 2050.

You may need to read that several times for the full horror to sink in.  And if that fails to leave you imitating a character from a Bateman cartoon, then a description of the current condition of the Californian economy will:

California's Treasurer Bill Lockyer has a bridge he wants to sell you. No, he is not putting the Golden Gate on the market. That would actually find buyers. He is trying to foist a "bridge loan" on the country that in effect would require us to buy the entire state.

Shuffling off the streets of Sacramento into the bond market a few weeks ago seeking to raise some $14 billion in so-called "revenue anticipation notes," Lockyer is offering notes that can be repaid only by future revenue anticipation notes, in a delusional statewide recycling binge of bonds on bonds.

Since the state at the same time officially projected $20 billion annual deficits for the next six years (Governor elect Jerry Brown says $28 billion in 2011), the end of this road is another of those bridges to nowhere that politicians believe stimulate an economy but ordinary people prefer not to drive on or off. So now Lockyer is following up with a drive to get the federal government to guarantee California's debt against default, which means the taxpayers will have to be the ulti-mate buyers.

I am tempted to wonder if Boris has considered flogging off London Bridge!  To put Gilder's words in plain English, the Golden State is leaden, it's broke, skint and lacks even the proverbial pot to piss in!  How could that happen to the most incredibly successful State in America, a centre of high-tech excellence which produced a seemingly never-ending supply of innovative, scientific gadgetry in the fields of computers, medicine and defence which kept the USA hugely prosperous and safe?  What happened is simple to explain - the 'Greenie-eco-warmers' took over the place!  According to Gilder, even the previously hard-nosed venture capitalists who had made fortunes backing revolutionary scientific advances which led to companies like Google, Apple, Sun, Applied Materials, Amazon and a host of others, went soft and soppy having made their billions:

 Most of the donors seem to have suffered a midlife muddle of plethoric wealth and quixotically set out to save the planet at the expense of the U.S. economy.

No doubt they retained a residual greed which made them light up when the likes of Al Gore hinted at the prospect of all those Government subsidies which would come their way:

The Green gaggle of venture geniuses in California are simply out of their depth in a field they do not understand. All these venturers made their fortunes in digital information technologies. As MIT professor Eugene Fitzgerald, a microchip and solar innovator, writes in his new tract, Inside Real Innovation, "Early stage investors hoped that energy would be the same as the semiconductor-PC-information technology sector but alas… there will be no new form of energy analogous to the birth of the transistor or integrated circuit… that offers very dramatic performance gains… without breaking the laws of thermodynamics."

The stench of burnt fingers is beginning to arise:

From the sublime to the bathetic, Kleiner [one of the biggest of the venture capitalists who formerly created such enormous wealth and innovation] is now moving on to such politically dependent firms as MiaSole, Bloom Energy, Amyris Biofuels, UpWind Solutions, and Segway. Many have formidable technology and employ thousands of ingenious engineers, but they are mostly wasted on the pursuit of ambient pork and pelf. Other venturers plunged into solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, which received some $500 million in federal subsidies and a campaign visit from Barack Obama before slipping toward bankruptcy last fall, laying off some 17 percent of its work-ers, closing a major new plant, and giving up on half of its 2,000 projected green jobs. Many of these green companies, behaving like the public service unions they resemble, diverted some of their government subsidies into the AB 32 campaign for more subsidies.

Sometimes the folly of Man passeth all understanding!  However, if you read Gilder's piece in full you might at least grasp one whopping big example of it.  My emphasis in the quotes above.

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'

All the leaves are brown
And the sky is gray
I've been for a walk
On a winter's day

I'd be safe and warm
If I was in L.A.
California dreamin'
On such a winter's day

Stopped into a church
I passed along the way
Oh, I got down on my knees
And I pretend to pray

You know the preacher likes the cold
He knows I'm gonna stay
California dreamin'
On such a winter's day

All the leaves are brown
And the sky is gray
I've been for a walk
On a winter's day

If I didnt tell her
I could leave today
California dreamin'
On such a winter's day

(California dreamin')
On such a winter's day
(California dreamin')
On such a winter's day

You can listen to the Mommas and Poppas singing their song here:

 http://www.links2love.com/love_lyrics_206.htm

 

'Greenie-eco-warmer' mass murderers show the SS how it should be done!

I'm obliged to the leader in this week's Spectator (no link yet) which reminds us that the global freezing we and the rest of the northern hemisphere have suffered this winter is likely to end in tears, well, it will do if you are upset by the sight of countless numbers of African children with large heads, bulging eyes, swollen bellies and stick-like arms and legs slowly starving to death!  The 'Speccie' reminds us that China, the world's largest wheat producer, is suffering a catastrophic harvest due to an ultra severe winter drought and we in Britain are already feeling the effects as the price of food stuffs begins to climb even higher.  The Chinese, apparently, have set aside a fund of a billion dollars in order to snap up whatever wheat is available anywhere in the world in order to keep the lid on their own people and their possible anxieties. 

However, the amount of wheat available elsewhere is severely diminished because of the efforts of the 'Greenie-eco-warmers' who have badgered various governments into switching agricultural production into biofuels, for example, a quarter of all grain production in the States now goes to ethanol distilleries.  So remember, when you next hear some 'Greenie-eco-warmer' telling you that biofuels are economically neutral and the price of bread and similar foodstuffs goes rocketing up, it is partly a direct re-action to the loss of wheat resources.  'Over here', despite 'Dave' telling us that he's going to resist all those Brussels' diktats, we must obey the edict of Brussels that biofuels constitute 10% of British transport fuel by the end of this decade - or else!

Of course, in the relatively prosperous west we will moan and groan as the price of food goes up but we'll manage, but in places like Africa they will moan and groan - and die, slowly, painfully, first the babies, then the old people and then the mature adults.  Still it's not all bad, eh?  At least our lorries will be carbon-reduced, so that's alright, then.  And the 'Greenie-eco-warmers' will be happy because they reckon there are far too many people on earth anyway so if the odd billion starve to death, well, it's an ill wind and all that sort of thing.  You see, that's where the SS went wrong, they took direct action, like gassing and burning 6 million Jews, and thus suffered the direct re-action when people noticed.  'Greenie-eco-warmers' have learned the lesson.  Their method is to keep their actions at several removes from the results and hope that no-one notices.

 ADDITIONAL:  I just came across this in an article by George Gilder in The American Spectator (see post above):

Matt Ridley makes the argument cogently in his superb book The Rational Optimist: "Roughly 5 percent of the world's crop land has been taken out of growing food and put into growing fuel (20 percent in the United States).… Not even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that… it would somehow be good for the planet… to give up food-crop land to grow biofuels...thus driving up the price of food for the poor [who] spend 70 percent of their in-comes on food. In effect, American car drivers were taking carbohydrates out of the mouths of the poor to fill their tanks."

 

The proof of the monetary transfer pudding is in the German indigestion!

A fascinating article in the WSJ today by Geoffrey T. Smith in which he points out that 'Kaiserin' Merkel's grand plan, heavily supported by her Grand Chamberlain (or, Court Jester, perhaps?), the Hungarian dwarf, is being stoutly resisted not only by the untermenschen, or, ordinary tax-payers as I prefer to think of them, but also by expert opinion.  Apparently some cove called Patrick Artus who is chief economist of a bank - a French bank, needless to say! - went to Frankfurt to urge the Germans to dig deep and shell out to the rest of Europe not only because it is their duty to do so but also because it is in their self interest:

Thus it was last week, when Patrick Artus, chief economist at French bank Natixis, published a note entitled, with disarming honesty, "Germany should accept federalism in the euro zone for its own self-interest."

One has to give Mr. Artus high marks for having the courage to come over to the lions' den in Frankfurt and market his ideas in person.

The note quite correctly argues that Germany has an interest in sustaining euro-zone demand for its exports (although the relentlessly increasing share of German exports going to emerging markets makes this argument a wasting asset). It also correctly identifies the risk to German welfare of a default elsewhere in the euro zone, and the near-impossibility of advanced economies "re-industrializing" once they have lost their industrial base. Neither point is sufficiently appreciated in Germany.

So far, so good, and indeed, I, myself, have made much the same point by referring to the 'New Frankish Empire' as "a German racket".  However, not possessing even a D- grade at GCSE Economics I failed to raise the fundamental point, which Mr. Smith does in his article, that money transfers between regions are almost always a complete and expensive failure and the proof of it - delicious irony - lies in Germany, itself: 

Germany has a perfectly good, home-grown reason for resisting an expanded system of fiscal transfers between euro-zone states; its own one patently isn't working.

The federal states have since 1950 been required to pay into the "Laenderfinanzausgleich," a scheme that aims to iron out the differences in incomes between rich and poor states, ensuring that the state can provide a roughly equivalent level of public services to all Germans.

The trouble for Mr. Artus is that the system is ridden with false incentives. States that receive money from the mechanism have no reason to improve their financial management, or their economic strength by structural reforms. Only one, Bavaria from the mid-1980s onward, has ever transformed itself durably from a net recipient of transfers to a net donor.

The great experiment was tried at the time of the incorporation of East Germany into the West:

When the eastern states were first incorporated into the system in 1995, it was assumed that public and private investment would gradually strengthen their economic base and reduce the need for transfers. In fact, with the exception of Saxony-Anhalt, all of the eastern states have taken more out of the system in the past five years than between 1995 and 1999. (My emphasis).

And even on the smaller scale of the original West German states, inter-regional fiscal transfers have proved a failure:

Despite being home to one of Germany's best natural ports in an age when global and German trade have exploded, Bremen has remained a resolute net recipient. The concentration of sunset industries such as coal and steel in states like North Rhine-Westphalia may explain why it has slipped from being a net donor to a net recipient, but it does nothing to explain the persistently dismal performances of Rhineland-Palatinate, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein.

So the recent international financial crisis might have been an ill-wind but it has blown a bit of good by exposing many of the fictions and cover-ups that have disguised various festering pools of squalor and waste - and not only in Germany:

It isn't just Germany that is being forced to re-examine the way it redistributes income between rich and poor regions. In Italy, Spain and, most dramatically, in Belgium, the trend is unmistakable: the unbearable pressures put on state budgets by the financial crisis and the ensuing recession are flushing out all the hidden subsidies and transfers that governments have built into their economies in the name of national cohesion and social peace over the past six decades.

Time for 'Dave' to take a long, hard look at the sackfuls of cash we send to 'Jockland', perhaps, but don't hold your breath!

 

I fear for Richard North

I once described him as "dyspeptic" but that does not do justice to the monumental grumpiness of which he is capable.  I imagine him beginning each day in a bad temper, reading the press he loaths so cordially, and then moving up the scale to Lear-like levels of fury.  His opening remarks to this post will give you a clue:

In a decision which would struggle to crawl out of a primeval swamp with sufficient vigour to qualify it as moronic, the formless creatures that pass for our leaders have decided to continue the £1bn aid programme to India, paying it £280m a year until 2015.

Oh, come on, Richard, tell us what you really think!

The sad creature Andrew Mitchell, the International Development Secretary, says Britain will channel its aid to the three poorest states in India ... which is why, of course, we are giving £10 million to Rajendra Pachauri for his thieving outfit ... in New Delhi, while he continues to live in millionaires' row.

He might not think it but Mitchell escaped fairly lightly there, especially when you read the next paragraph:

Our masters are beyond stupid ... beyond venal, regressed to below the level of the slime from which they have so recently emerged. They bring new meaning to the word crass and new hope to imbeciles, who can now aspire to the highest office. Bring on the tumbrels. Putting them out of our misery would be a blessing.

Well, you can understand his, er, grumpiness irritation anger fury rage when he tells us that:

This is the country which has, as the Daily Mail observes, three times more billionaires than the UK. It has its nuclear power, its own £1.2 billion space programme and spends £20 billion in defence each year, maintaining a standing army of over a million. It is rich enough to donate money to African nations each year – to say nothing being a major donor to Afghanistan.

Of course, those frightfully well-educated chaps in the FO probably think that handing over all that dosh to India will somehow give us some influence over this growing power.  Maybe not their fault entirely because probably none of those military dimwits in the MoD has told them that we no longer have a navy or much of an airforce and the army is already laying off soldiers so our influence is nil verging on none!  Once this Afghanistan imbroglio is over we will revert to being a small to middling European power subject to the diktat of the new Frankish empire.  But for God's sake don't tell Richard North he'll have apoplexy.

Good man, North, but I do worry about his blood pressure!

Does Mervyn King have enough hands?

I ask because the poor fellow has to weigh an enormous number of options.  On the one hand inflation is way over his prescribed target, but on the other hand most of the inflation is coming from global commodities like food and energy and raising our interest rates is unlikely to alter that state of affairs.  However, on this hand ("If I might just borrow your hands for a moment, Chancellor), according to that clever, young Fraser Nelson at The Coffee House, the UK growth rate, despite the snowy blip, is back on track at around 2.0% pa so perhaps it's time to raise the cost of money before domestic businesses and trade unions start to adjust to what they will see as permanent inflation rather than the temporary inflation he has been telling us about for the last, er, five years!  (The question arises as to when does 'temporary' become 'permanent'?)

But there again, on the other hand, if he does raise interest rates it is likely to cause a shudder in the slight growth we do have and might well induce a second dip into recession which will be doubly unpleasant because on top of the economic misery, it will induce that dreadful little squirt, Ed Balls, to smile - quelle horreur!  Then again, poor old Mervyn has to bear in mind - can anyone spare another hand or two - that on this hand everyone says that the cost of borrowing is far too low and is likely to bring about a repeat of the bubbles of yesteryear, but on that hand other people report that whilst money is cheap as chips for banks to borrow when anyone wants to borrow from them there are fees for this and charges for that and their interest rate to their customers bears no relation to the rate they are paying.  In other words, they are building up their profit margins - and any suggestion that this is linked to personal bonuses is a vile calumny!  However, Mervyn will be saying to himself as he contemplates his two feet (having run out of hands); on this foot, my job specification is not to worry about overall economic policy, that is the responsibility of those elected to take it on, my job is simply to control inflation; but on the other foot, (as Fraser Nelson tells us using an OECD graph) British households are hugely in debt and if I ramp up rates they might burn me in effigy - or even worse, they might just burn me!

We must spare a thought for poor, old Mervyn as he shuffles uneasily back and forth in his huge Bank of England office between the whisky decanter and the loaded revolver because, as Alice Cook has warned him on her excellent blog, Clouded Outlook (which is actually pellucid, intelligent and worth bookmarking), those scurvy ratbags from the media are beginning to bare their teeth as they move in closer.

Only the historians will be able to provide a (fairly) definitive description of who did what, and why, and how, and for what reason.  In my utterly ignorant opinion, Mervyn King's first mistake was to widen his perceived brief.  As I understood his independent role (and that of his monetary committee), it was simply to control inflation - nothing else.  The politicians would have hated him for raising rates earlier because it would have made life very difficult for them - as it will now, if he raises interest rates - but surely it is their job to lay down economic policy taking into account (if they are ever capable of so doing) the realities of life, one of which is the interest rate policy laid down by their central bank chief.

King's decision is a judgment call in which he must weigh short, medium and long term outcomes.  This blog is rarely short of an opinion on anything, detailed knowledge or expertise being, in our view, an optional extra, but on this occasion I confess to a total inability to make up my mind.  In either direction lies misery of one sort or another.  Hold a gun to my head and insist I pronounce, and I will tell you that I think interest rates should go up - and sooner rather than later.

 

Never mind the circus, give me some bread!

I just heard a snippet of news.  That grossly over-hyped, over-budget and over here circus otherwise known as the Olympic Games is going to open with - wait for it - women's football!  That just about sums up the utter futility of the whole ridiculous exercise in which our druggies will attempt to beat their druggies whilst we will pay, and keep on paying for years, for the pleasure of it, that is, if anyone can find a single grain of pleasure anywhere.  Well, I suppose, grudgingly, there might be a snigger or two to be had from watching synchronized swimming, arguably the daftest 'sport' ever invented.  And to be fair, there might be Brazilian-style ladies' volley-ball in the programme somewhere and that will keep me up - if you'll excuse the expression!  Come on, Boris, do us all a favour and cancel the bloody thing!

Jutland - you couldn't make it up!

I have just finished rehearsing my lines prior to giving my talk ("Roll up! Roll up!") on the Battle of Jutland later this evening and yet again I am left open-mouthed with wonderment bordering on incredulity at what took place.  Beatty, in happy ignorance, hurtling south in pursuit of Hipper who was merely leading him into the powerful jaws of Scheer; then the screeching handbrake turn, or the nautical equivalent thereof, as Beatty then raced to the north leading both Hipper and Scheer into the even more powerful mincing-machine that was, or was supposed to be, Jellicoe's fleet.  Then the sea mist descends, now you see 'em, now you don't, hit or miss, until the ships, well, bar those that sank or blew up, return to home base, their crews scratching their heads and muttering something along the lines of 'WTF'?  Based on this extraordinary battle 'our Albert'(*) was wrong not to believe that God plays with dice!

Even more fascinating are the 15 or so years prior to the battle when the best brains in Britain and Germany wrestled with the tactical and strategic implications of technology changes that kept occurring faster and faster and over a wider and wider area - from ship-building techniques to massive 15" guns, from coal-fired reciprocating engines to diesel-powered turbines, from signal flags to radios, and so on and on.  Thank God He put away his dice and ensured that we had the services of two of the most remarkable men of the era - Adm. Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill.  In a post down below I referred to Peter Hitchens's remarks concerning the number of errors made by Margaret Thatcher.  No doubt they were legion, as were the mistakes made by these two great men, but when set against the things they got right - who cares? Without them Jutland would almost certainly have been lost and Britain starved into submission.

(*) Einstein, who famously declaimed against the bookmaker's odds implied by quantum mechanics.

Yet another pulp fiction corker!

With the exception of espionage thrillers I normally eschew British pulp fiction.  After all, the essence of this genre is for the writer to invent a somewhat far-fetched tale of cops and robbers but when you are British and therefore know the British police at first hand it is hard, if not impossible, to suspend belief.  But every so often a writer tells a story which though it is a fiction it nevertheless tells a truth.  I think of G. F. Newman's classic 1970s book Law and Order - which is about as far as you can get from that silly American franchise of the same name which has recently spread like measles across every channel on my TV!  Now Newman has a rival from the other end of the country.  Where Newman lifted the lid on the commonplace corruption in the Met police of the '70s, Stuart MacBride tells it the way it is in the Grampian police up on the north east coast of 'Jockland'.  Yes, yes, alright, I can hear you groaning 'no, no', but trust me!  I have just read Shatter the Bones which I think is his latest book but happily he has already written at least half a dozen more so I have many hours of catching up.  Of course it isn't true but it tells a truth!  I believe in these coppers, including the tough, foul-mouthed, lesbian Detective Inspector whose partner has just produced a baby and no longer wants sex; and definitely I believe absolutely in the copper known to one and all as 'Bio-hazard' on account of his unfortunate wind problem - we've all met people like that!  I can hardly believe that MacBride did not actually serve in the police force because he has the the patter and the banter exactly right.  I was never in the police force but I was in the army so I know where-of I speak.  This book is by turns hilariously funny and grimly cruel.  It is not to be missed and it hereby earns the highest possible accolade from Duff & Nonsense it's - a corker!

The Chinese hare and the European tortoise

One of my commenters to the post below points out, quite correctly, that when it comes to the possibility of falling civilisations, Europe stands uneasily on some ancient but crumbling foundations.  Today, so the 'experts' tell us, we live in a Chinese world and to confirm it we are told that China's economy has just overtaken Japan's and now stands second only to the USA.  Well, there is no doubt that when China finally abandoned Marxist economics and turned to capitalism it was only a matter of time before their economy was galvanised.  One almost feels sorry for that lonely Band of Brethren who, despite an entire herd of Chinese elephants sitting in their living rooms, continue to insist that Karl Marx is 'the light and the way'.  Really?  In what, three decades? China has been transformed.  That's what a nice dose of capitalism does for you.  However, despite all the evidence of increasing wealth inside China and my delight that so many previously poor people are now emerging into a land of plenty and enjoying moderate wealth, I still hesitate; I still "hae ma doots", I keep reminding myself that if something is too good to be true then it's probably untrue!

For a start, the Chinese have not adopted true capitalism in the Adam Smith meaning of the word.  Only the Hong Kong Chinese under the paternal but liberal hand of a faraway British government were left to practice capitalism red in tooth and claw.  Government House refused to soil its hands in grubby money-making and left the Hong Kong entrepreneurs to get on with it provided they obeyed the law.  Consequently, that tiny piece of rock with a decent harbour but absolutely no natural resources became one of the richest spots on the earth.  The mainland Chinese, however, have opted for the worst of all possible choices - state-controlled capitalism.  A sort of 'mafia-syndicalism' in which every get-rich-quick merchant can raise huge amounts of money provided a goodly proportion of it ends up in the back pockets of the government party hacks and appatchiks - to say nothing of the numerous gangsters who infest every level of Chinese life.

The end result of this gigantic Ponzi-scheme, of which Bernie Madoff, himself, would have been proud, is inevitable and likely to prove catastrophic.  Here are but two examples which, like the disappearing sea which heralds an incoming tsunami, should ring warning bells everywhere.  In the WSJ today they report - yet another - bribery and corruption case:  

Chinese authorities are investigating the railways minister for "serious infractions," state media said, heralding the downfall of a powerful official who presided over the building of the world's largest high-speed rail network.

Liu Zhijun has been stripped of his position as top Communist Party official at the Ministry of Railways, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday. Among Chinese officials, the party position is more important than the government position.

Mind you, the trains run on time - now who was it who used to boast of that?  An even more crazy clue to the real state of affairs in China are the mysterious 'Ghost Cities'.  I have only just begun to hear about them and a few weeks ago I caught a TV news report which showed an enormous shopping mall - and I do mean enormous - in the middle of the day with just one person standing at the top of a grand stairway surrounded by empty shops - I mean, not one single shop was occupied,and absolutely nobody lived in this city built for a million people.  If you go to http://followthemoney.forumotion.net/t176-china-and-it-s-empty-cities there is a YouTube of film of just such an empty ghost town.  As the narrator explains, all this uselss activity is simply undertaken to bump up China's GDP statistics.  Thank God, the mad, one-eyed Jock and his henchman, Balls, didn't think of that one! Oh, wait a minute, weren't they going to build a ring of so-called green cities?

The other worrying thing about China are the hundreds of millions of the 'great unwashed', the dis-possessed peasantry, or their wide-eyed brethren, who set off each year to find work and what they hope will be riches in the cities.  If, for any reason, the Chinese economy stumbles or pauses and these people are let down the question will be whether or not the Party can hold down the unrest.  We are not talking of a couple of hundred thousand demonstrators like those in Egypt, we're talking of millions and millions on the rampage.  I would have had confidence in the old party whose personal wealth was minimal but who enjoyed the perks and power of office, but this current bunch of crooked fat cats are unlikely to have the idealistic certainty and ferocity of their predecessors.

In the long run, a place like China is bound to succeed.  They are a highly intelligent and disciplined people ready to work hard.  All they need is to rid themselves of the crooked hands that hold them down.  However, if central discipline is lifted then my question changes to this: will China as we know it today survive, or, will it fall prey to the centrifugal forces which have ripped it apart so many times in the past.  After all, people often talk of China as 'an empire', and we all know what happens to those!  So, perhaps, the plodding European tortoise might just keep going whilst the Chinese hare has a heart attack by the side of the road!

 

'That woman!' Time for a re-appraisal?

I was taken with Peter Hitchens's article in today's Mail.  He, like many other Maggie admirers, is gloomily despondent on the likely worth of the film being made of her days as Prime Minister in which she is played by Meryl Streep, not an actress I have always admired, like her British equivalent, Helen Mirren, she tends to 'do' acting, if you can follow my meaning.  However, the likeness is remarkable:

I call Hitchens an 'admirer' but it is only fair to say that his admiration is strictly limited and possibly it is only expressed in terms of her being better than anything else on offer at the time!  However, he does make a salient point when he yearns for a proper historical survey of her 'reign' unfettered by by either too much love or too much loathing.  Like him, I lived through it all and in a sense I find it difficult to be detached and analytical.  Like all 'great' prime ministers, and I do think she has earned that adjective, her faults were legion but her virtues outnumbered them - in my opinion.  If, as Hitchens intimates, she failed to do all that she could have done, then let us thank the 'Intelligent Designer' for the things she did do.  Hitchens, being something of an all-or-nothing man, is ruthlessly dismissive of human frailty standing before a monumental and never-ending deluge of "events, dear boy, events".  But he's right, it is time to answer some of these questions:

I would like a conservative answer to these questions. Did the economic strategy work, as is now claimed, or was she rescued by circumstances? Did she actually defeat trade union militancy, or merely destroy all the industries where such militancy was possible? Did she simply forget the great issues of state schools, marriage, drugs, crime and justice? Or was she in fact in favour of much of the social revolution we went through during her allegedly conservative government? Remember, Alderman Roberts, her revered father, was a Liberal alderman, not a Tory one. And she married a divorced man.

Was she vital to 'victory' in the Cold War, or is that Anglocentric hyperbole? In any case, was it such a great thing that we won it at all? Did it take her too long to see the threat from the European Union? Was the Falklands War in fact largely her fault, because of the unwise naval cuts she approved - and which, if they had taken effect by 1982, would have rendered us incapable of retaking the Islands (as we are now, thanks to a new round of Muscular Liberal cuts).

Was she really brought down by the Poll Tax, the myth generally propagated by the BBC and much of the Tory establishment? Or was it her late but fiery realisation of the dangers of Brussels that led to her fall? How on earth was she so utterly fooled by John Major?

Good questions, and you are very unlikely to find any answers in Ms. Streep's forthcoming film, but what a cracking good book it would be if somebody sensible wrote it and tried to answer them!

 

The decline and fall of Arab civilisation?

That proposition is discussed in a fascinating essay at The American Thinker by Michael Frayly who takes as his cue a thought-provoking paper written 5 years ago by Lt. Col. James G. Lacey called "The Impending Collapse of Arab Civilization" in The Naval Institute: Proceedings.  Like them, I have been struck by the intellectual stasis into which the whole of Araby seems to have fallen since the early spread of Islam although Col. Lacey is at pains to point out that it is Arab civilisation, not Islam, which is in danger of collapse, re-enforcing his point by reminding us that the Asian Muslim nations are thriving.  He predicted the Arab collapse some years ago and today would no doubt point at the current Egyption crisis as merely a step on the way.  He points to the Arab League's own website which proudly lists all the achievements of Arab civilisation which though long and impressive ends abruptly in 1406!  There-after Arabia has contributed nothing to the world's stock of ideas:

That makes next year the 600th anniversary of the beginning of a prolonged stagnation, which began a dive into the abyss with the end of the Ottoman Empire. Final collapse has been staved off only by the cash coming in from a sea of oil and because of a few bright spots of modernity that have resisted the general failure.

Frayley would date the beginning of the terminal inertia which has frozen the Arab intellectual mind a couple of centuries earlier when Ibn Rushd, an original thinker much influenced by the Greek philosophers, was banished by the traditional Caliphate.  Frayley suggests that a later and more malignant intellectual has been far more influential in Arab thinking:

Arab scholarship, in contrast, went on to hold up Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), born in what is modern Tunisia, as one of their greatest political thinkers. His definition of government as "an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself" still dominates Arab political thought. (My emphasis)

The current state of Arabian society is best summed up by the UN's own statistics on the region quoted by Col. Lacey 5 years ago:

There are 18 computers per 1000 citizens compared to a global average of 78.3.

Only 1.6% of the population has Internet access.

Less than one book a year is translated into Arabic per million people, compared to over 1000 per million for developed countries.

Arabs publish only 1.1% of books globally, despite making up over 5% of global population, with religious books dominating the market.

Average R&D expenditures on a per capita basis is one-sixth of Cuba's and less than one-fifteenth of Japan's.

All of this potential for disaster is further aggravated by a demographic explosion in the numbers of young people.  Several commentators remarked on the recent Tunisian 'revolution' that much of the impetus came from young people given good educations but with no jobs in which to put their knowledge to use.  Of course, in Saudi Arabia the reverse is the case and with even more dire results likely; there, the entire educational system has been passed over to the religious authorities:

In Saudi Arabia over a quarter of all university degrees are in Islamic studies. In many other nations primary education is accomplished through Saudi-financed madrassas, which have filled the void left by government's abdication of its duty to educate the young.

Col. Lacey spells out the appalling statistics:

While predictions of the future are usually fraught with peril, those based on demographics are, barring some unforeseen plague or truly catastrophic war, uncannily accurate. Using even the most optimistic assumption—that fertility rates drop by fifty percent in a generation—the respected Population Resource Center, based in Princeton, New Jersey, expects Arab populations to grow from 280 million to almost 460 million by 2020 and to over 600 million a generation later. On the face of it the Arab world is staring political and economic disaster in the face. Arab governments and institutions are already failing to meet basic human needs in many Arab countries. It is hard to imagine how they will cope with the stress of such a massive population increase.

The percentage of the population under age 15 is double that of Western Europe and those under age 24 make up 50% to 65% of Middle East countries—an astonishingly young population. This youth bulge is already beginning to rock the foundations of Islamic society. Upheaval and revolution are the likely results of a massive number of youth confronted by stagnating or collapsing economies as they enter adulthood.

For a young Arab man living under a strict security apparat run by his dictatorial government the only outlet for his naturally idealistic and aggressive energies is within the religious community which is, in many countries, left to its own devices by its secular leaders.  A recipe for trouble of which even Macbeth's three witches would approve!

All of this makes the outcome of the current 'experiment' in Egypt absolutely crucial.  If, and it's a huge if, they can produce some sort of semi-coherent democracy in which the political factions can live safely and patiently and take their turn at government as and when the people decide, then just possibly an important part of Arabia will have taken a giant step forward.  More important, if the west (ie, America) can bolster this democratic and secular infant whilst simultaneously keeping Turkey from falling into the clutches of the Islamists, then we will have gone a considerable way to sealing off the western edges of Arabia and keeping the coming chaos well away from us.  But I wouldn't bet the deeds of the house on it!

 

"My signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt": Exodus vii. 3

Well, that was the easy part but now that 'Sticky' Mubarak has gone the hard part begins.  The score, for the moment, is Army 1: Rest of Egypt 0, but this, to paraphrase the well known 'Colemanballs' is likely to be a game of several halves! Still, I was amused when so many Lefties came hurtling out of the woodwork to decry the annual American bribe aid given to the Egyptian army.  The fact that it has kept them more or less inside barracks for the last 25 years makes it worth every penny - or cent, if you prefer.  Now that the generals are running the country they will be loath to lose any of it and they must suspect that any civilian government is unlikely to add to their defence budget so the name of the game will be to keep the Yanks happy - and paying.  Nor, having built up, I suspect, a hefty arsenal of sophisticated weaponry will they be too eager to see it all turned into scrap metal by the Israelis which is what occurred the last time they tried their chances.  Of course, the Muslim Brotherhood will need watching because the Egyptian army will know that if they ever form the government they will follow the lead of the Iranian government and set up their own military wing as a seperate force from the army.  For what it's worth - 'nottalot' - I would like to add my congratulations to the Egyptian people for their remarkable revolution.  I gather that the crowd leaders are agreeing to leave the main demonstration centres but have promised to reconvene every Friday after prayers.  That is shrewd and indicates an intelligent political brain at work behind the mob.

It would be excellent if a working democracy evolved in Egypt but I am not holding my breath.  I do not pretend to expertise on Islam but my feeling is that as a religion which governs every detail of its adherents' lives, there is something deeply antithetical between it and the notion of a popular democracy.  Also, much depends on how Mubarak is treated.  Undoubtedly by our standards he deserves to be shot but if revolutions always end in the usual way by victors slaughtering losers then it only serves to stiffen the resolve, and thus the brutality, of whichever ruling claque is in government.  The idea of "a loyal opposition" which will stand a chance every few years of forming the government and who, in the interim, need not fear for their lives is a very sophisticated concept and not one that is easily adopted - after all, think how many centuries it took us!

Anyway, three cheers for plucky little Egypt - and fingers crossed!

 

OK, OK, so I'm 10 years late - again!

Alas, the new Atlantic Channel has been slightly more 'miss' than 'hit'.  Boardwalk Empire seems to me to be an example of over-emphasis on costumes and sets to the detriment of character - and there is a complete lack of humour.  My new Sky+ Box-thingie is recording every episode but if the series fails to improve then the 'obliterate button' will have to be pressed - if I can find it!  Also, Blue Bloods is hopeless.  The premise that the NYPD has a Commissioner, Tom Selleck, whose entire family seems to be employed by it in one respect or another is hard to swallow but when one of his sons seems to get every juicy case that crops up, and when his girlfriend is the reporter, one of hundreds in 'Noo Yawk', to whom a suspect confesses, then my credulity is well and truly stretched.  Selleck appears to possess only two expressions; he pulls down the corners of his mouth under his massive moustache, frowns, and attempts to look either stern or magisterial - and that's it!

Both of these shows sink without trace in comparison to BBC4's superb Danish murder story, The Killing.  This is a police procedural combined with complex personal story lines made to the very highest standards.  It has already entered my Top Ten TV programmes ever seen - and I'm only on episode 6, I think it is!  If you have missed the beginning then do yourself a favour and buy the DVD because, although BBC4 seems to be producing a steady stream of excellent television films, one cannot be absolutely sure they will be reshown on BBC1 or BBC2 - and this particular film must be seen.  It's up there with Tinker, Tailor - than which one can praise no higher.

Now to explain my 10 year tardiness.  Has anyone heard of The Sopranos?  Alright, alright, no need to shout, take that as a YES, shall I?  Well, of course, even I had heard of them but as I missed the opening series, mostly because they were broadcast long past my cocoa time and, as I told you in an earlier post, I could not master the intricacies of getting my old multi-zillion pound recorder-thingie to actually record.  It may have had something to do with me stamping on it in a rage, I cannot be sure!  Anyway, they are repeating the entire series on Atlantic and my all-new, all-singing, all-dancing Sky+ box-thingie which is idiot-proof (thanks, 'Rupe'!) is recording them all.  I almost applauded James Gandolfini in his very first entrance before he had even spoken a word.  It's the scene when he enters the psychiatrist's office for the first time.  Just the slightest of swaggers as he crosses the room, the equally slight but uneasy smile, the way he sits in the chair as though he owns it, and immediately rests the ankle of one leg on the knee of the other as though, again, to state his proprietorial rights - not that he owns any of it but he knows that he can steal all of it anytime he cares to snap his fingers.  But he is a man, a gangster-man, aware of inner weaknesses and Gandolfini, in just those brief few seconds of movement only, sums up the situation and his character by just using body language with great subtlety.  They should show that sequence to every student of acting.  Also, and unlike the heavy-handed Boardwalk Empire, the show has a streak of bleak humour.  Tremendous!

Ooops, somebody just dropped the bratwurst!

No, I don't know what my title means either, it just popped into my mind and is meant to indicate that all is not well within 'Kaiserin' Merkel's empire.  Her choice of a German banker to take over the European Central Bank (ECB) has just said, in effect, 'danke very much but I'm outta here'!  It was essential for the 'Kaiserin' to have a German in charge of the ECB in order to sell the idea of Germany buying up the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) lock, stock and leaky barrel using, of course, the taxes of ordinary Germans to do it.  The ordinary taxpayers, or, untermenschen as politicians tend to think of us privately, are exceedingly doubtful at the prospect and only a German banker, particularly a hard-line monetarist, like Herr Weber, would have stilled their fears.  But he has walked away indicating that he doubts whether his other Board members would support him.  According to The WSJ, there is no other German candidate with anything like the expertise of Herr Weber and now the Hungarian dwarf who had hitherto supported the idea of a German in the role is backtracking if anyone other than Weber is put forward.  The 'Kaiserin' is furious and is stomping around Berlin practicing her Rosa Klebb kicks with the spring-loaded daggers in her clumpy little shoes.  And just to add a can full of petrol to the smouldering dispute, there was, apparently, a major sell-off of Portuguese bonds in the last couple of days requiring the ECB to step in rather smartly.  It's been quiet recently 'just over there' but, remember, "You ain't seen nothin' yet!"

Verily I have sinned

Sorry, sorry, sorry, but we had an unexpected visitor, one of my oldest friends, who stayed two nights rather than the one we expected and time had to be served driving hither and thither to view various properties he's thinking of buying.  Anyway, what passes for normal service will be resumed here at D&N later today when various outstanding jobs have been completed to the Memsahib's satisfaction.

A man with a past - and not much future!

I have just watched Round #2 of the Osborne/Balls heavyweight contest.  Prior to these two exchanging blows, all the wiseacres in the media forecast that Balls would make mincemeat of Osborne.  They based their opinions on the 'fact'(?) that Balls understands finance and economics and Osborne doesn't.  Even as they said or wrote it, I kept thinking to myself, well, if Balls really does have such a grasp of all the details how come he was the one playing the pipe that led us all on a merry jig straight into Carey Street?

The short questions and answers they went through two days ago hinted at Osborne's strategy, but today, in a more lengthy and detailed exchange, it now stands out clearly - and it is going to prove devastating to Balls's reputation.  Quite simply, the more Balls lists what he sees as Osborne's failures to act on certain measures, the more Osborne will ask, with deadly venom, how it is that over the last nearly 12 years Balls, as a Treasury man and former City minister, failed to enact any of them himself?  Answer was there none, because there is no answer.  People and politicians may, and already are, arguing as to what are the best methods to adopt in order to get us out of the financial 'Deep Trench Latrine (DTL) in which we currently reside, but the fact that we are in it up to our necks cannot be wished away.  More important, so long as Osborne keeps reminding us all over and over and over again that Balls was the man who helped design and dig the DTL in the first place, it will act like acid on his reputation and career.  Most Labourites were pleased when he replaced the genial but dim Mr. Johnson as shadow Chancellor but I think over time they will deeply regret it.  Well, most of them will, but I suspect 'Cain' Miliband will not be too unhappy, anything that chops his bumptious, bullying colleague off at the knees will suit him excellently.  After a few months of seeing their shadow Chancellor having his nose repeatedly rubbed in his own mess perhaps the Labour party will be desperate for someone new.  In any event, Balls's chances of eventually becoming party leader are slowly sinking beneath the slurry at the bottom of his DTL. 

 

Instead of burning Guido on 5th November, let's erect a statue

'Guido Fawkes' is a trouble-maker, I am delighted to report.  And he's been at it again, this time 'Belgrano-ing' today's 'Shlock-Horror' story which has hit all the headlines and which originated in that chip-wrapping factory called The Guardian, or to be precise, its brand, spanking, new Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ).  With all its skill and attention to detail, and with its usual standards of accuracy, the BIJ/Guardian has revealed that:

the City accounted for £11.4m of Tory funding – 50.79% of its total haul – in 2010, a general election year.

The media, being entirely lazy and mostly useless, swallowed this whole and then, as is their wont, regurgitated it all onto their own front pages and TV screens.  'Guido', however, actually did some checking:

According to the BIJ “The biggest individual City backer of the Tories is David Rowland, who has contributed £4.013m in just two years.” Anyone who has read even only the business pages of the Guardian will tell you that David Rowland is a property developer, not a City financier. His firm is not even listed on the London Stock Exchange. (Original emphasis)

'Guido' then does some arithmetic, an activity beyond the skills of your average hack, especially Guardian hacks, and demonstrates that if you:

Subtract Rowland from the BIJ’s own dubious numbers and all of a sudden the reality behind the headline “City Bankrolled Tory Election Campaign“ becomes less exciting, with their own self-selected top ten of remaining City donors giving the Tories a mere 9% of their funds. (My emphasis)

Suddenly a 'Shlock-Horror' story becomes a 'yawn-and-so-what' story.  'Guido', in what I can only describe as a piece of gratuitous (and delicious) torture skewers the BIJ/Guardian with this:

The BIJ received a £2 million grant from the Potter Foundation last year to explore new ways of conducting and funding investigative journalism. David Potter made his fortune when he floated his firm on the London Stock Exchange… (Original emphasis)

The second-, or even third-, rate nature of our media is becoming ever more serious.  I leave it to the acerbic, not to say, downright dyspeptic, Richard North to sum up the problem:

But there is also a sense of the surreal, as I look at the newspapers and other sources of news. I wonder whether much of what I am reading is real, or one vast practical joke, as if 1 April has been extended indefinitely. In this topsy-turvy world, one supposes that there will be one day a year – or half-day – when the stories are true, and we are not being taken for fools. Will they call it "April non-fool's day" or will someone come up with a better title?

Don't hold your breath!

Pistols at dawn - or any time, really!

I have just watched the gunfight at the Westminster Corral between 'Blinky' Balls and 'Cool Dude' Osborne.  How very wise they were in the past to ensure that the space between each side of the House is the length of two swords, or there would have been blood.  I don't think I have ever seen such venom on a man's face as that displayed by 'Blinky' when facing Osborne.  His obviously well-prepared insults didn't quite come out as planned sounding instead rather like a well-used record that had slightly jumped a groove.  (Oh come on, you remember what records were, don't you?)  In response, the Harrow(*) privately-educated 'Cool Dude' simply curled a lip - but not too far - just exactly and precisely to the millimeter to indicate his distaste that this man had been allowed into the club.  Their respective arguments are easily summarised: You are going to throw widows and orphans into the street; you and your psychotic, one-eyed master are responsible for us being up Carey Street without a canoe - or words to that effect.  Like one of those monster series now starting on 'my mate Rupe's new Atlantic Channel, this script will run and run.  What a pity they are not within arms reach of each other - such fun!

'Hawk-eye DM' spotted my, er, deliberate mistake?  No, alright then, my error.

I wonder where my money went: #1

I have enumerated this title because now I think about it I suspect, dolefully, that there will be more, many, many, more on this subject!  Anyway, I am grateful (I suppose) to the irreverent rascals at IHTM who pointed me towards this story in The Daily Telegraph which tells me, and all of you, where at least £35k of my your our money went.  The grateful (er, they were grateful, weren't they?) recipients were the Schools Out organisation and they have devised some fascinating lessons which will be, I'm sure, invaluable to your little kiddie-winkies:

The initiative will be officially launched next month at the start of "LGBT History Month" – an initiative to encourage teaching about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual issues.

The lesson plans, spread across the curriculum, will be offered to all schools, which can choose whether or not to make use of them.

They aim to, er, broaden your little mites' minds by attaching their LGBT(*) propaganda to various lessons including maths, geography and design and technology.  Thus:

Maths – teaching statistics through census findings about the number of homosexuals in the population, and using gay characters in scenarios for maths problems;

Design and technology – encouraging pupils to make symbols linked to the gay rights movement;

Science – studying animal species where the male takes a leading role in raising young, such as emperor penguins and sea horses, and staging class discussions on different family structures, including same-sex parents;

Geography – examining the transformation of San Francisco's Castro district in the 1960s from a working-class Irish area to the world's first "gay neighbourhood", and considering why homosexuals move from the countryside to cities;

Languages – using gay characters in role play scenarios, and teaching "LGBT vocabulary".

Do you know what?  Even a non-stop keyboard bore like me has finally run out of things to say.  I have read, and re-read, the story and, put simply, there are no words, except possibly to croke, "Give me my money back!"

(*) Whilst travelling anywhere in 'this septic Isle', I always indulge my weakness for a really good sandwich and somehow I know, don't ask me how, that one day I shall march into Pret-a-Manger, or somewhere similar and, slavering for a BLT, I shall instead demand an LGBT.  If the spotty 'youf' behind the counter gives me a kiss you'll read all about in the papers!

 

 

Well, Irwin Steltzer agrees with me!

And Irwin Steltzer is one of the biggest wigged, bigwigs you could ever come across given that he's a proper economist with degrees and things, and he writes for all sorts of outfits including The Sunday Times and The Wall Street Journal - oh, and he's a big mate of Rupe, need I say more?  However, it's perfectly obvious from his last essay in the WSJ that he has taken to sneaking into my place in an effort to keep up with the very latest trends 'just over there'.  Thus, he writes the following:

When "the European Project" was conceived a goal was to contain Germany—create a European Germany as an alternative to the other possibility, a German Europe.

For a while it looked as if the founders had succeeded, especially when they created the euro as the most important step toward the replacement of nation states with a European Union, or at least a euro zone. Then came the financial crisis in the periphery countries, and the emergence of Germany as the principal source of funds to prevent (postpone, or conceal, would be more accurate descriptions) the restructuring of the debts of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and perhaps Spain and Italy, not to mention Belgium, home of the burgeoning eurocracy, and a nation seemingly incapable of forming a government of its own.

Now, the member states of the euro zone, and indeed the entire EU, are confronting the possibility that their effort to subsume Germany in a united Europe is about to fail, and a Europe dancing to the German tune—a German Europe—is about to emerge.

Or, "a German racket", as the prescient, but alas, late, Mr. Nick Ridley once put it between drags on his ever-present fag, and which I have been banging on about for absolute yonks.  Needless to say, because I've already told you, the French poodle is more than happy to yap along at 'Kaiserin' Merkel's rather clumpy heels:

After considerable dithering, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy protecting her flank, laid down the surrender terms at a summit just before the weekend. Germany will support the financially stricken nations, if they, well, become more German. In return for the cash, they are to adopt Germany's retirement age, abolish the indexation of wages to inflation, copy the policies Germany employed to make its goods competitive in world markets, harmonize taxes across the euro zone if not the entire EU, and set firm limits on the ability of countries to run up debt.

'You zee, vee haf vays of making you German, and for you zee var is over!'  However, Mr. Steltzer offers a ray of hope:

Here's the odd part. Most countries profess broad agreement of the need for reforms along the lines Germany is demanding. Yet when confronted with the German-French package—the French have always favored some form of centralized economic management of the EU, including strict regulation and heavy taxation of the financial services sector that is centered in Britain—they balked.

Don't they realise - Balking is Verboten! - or you vill be shot!  Even so, Mr. Steltzer believes there is very real opposition but for myself, 'I hae ma doots'.  (Regular commenter, DM, will no doubt correct my Scottish!)  Anway, as the New, Improved Frankish Empire grows apace, the great question for this off-shore island is what do we do about it.  Anyone got any ideas . . .  ?

 

Season's Greetings: Alan Ayckbourn, at the RNT

I'm sure someone has already said this but I don't care if I do repeat it, Alan Ayckbourn is the English Chekhov.  I know it's difficult to think of Chekhov's plays as being comic but the man himself insisted that they really were comedies and should be played and appreciated as such.  Well, I rarely find much to laugh out loud about in Chekhov but it is true that from time to time I do smile inwardly at the gentle mockery he aims at his more than somewhat ridiculous, Russian bourgeoisie.  I put my inability to find anything really funny in his plays down to the difference between the Russian and English senses of humour.  The English are less subtle, a man going heels up after stepping on a banana skin is guaranteed to have the English leaning against a wall helpless with laughter.

Thus, Ayckbourn tends to avoid too much subtlety and instead provides plenty of visual humour, particularly in this play which describes the Christmas family gathering from your worst nightmare!  Written - can you believe it? - 31 years ago it remains a comic masterpiece, and in my view, long after Pinter and his ilk are forgotten footnotes in the history of theatre, Ayckbourn 's plays will still be playing and still reducing audiences to helpless laughter.  Perhaps a better comparison is to describe him as the Sheridan of our times.  Whilst his plays are, indeed, funny, they are also, like Chekhov's,  painfully funny.  I have lost count of the number of his characters who make complete prats of themselves in various ways and who remind me - of myself!  Years ago it was the younger men in his plays who, with their puffed up pretensions, made me cringe with embarrassment; but now it is the older men and in this play, the hugely comic creation of Harvey, a grumpy old man of epic proportions, murderous intent and an endless supply of bile is far too close to home.  In Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, pistols are fired but off-stage and everyone misses!  Ayckbourn has a similar shooting incident but on-stage and a man is hit - this provides a comic climax which has the audience crying with laughter.  There-in , I suppose, lies the difference between Russian subtlety and British hearty humour.

 The production at the RNT is excellent - except in one crucial area - one had to strain to hear some of the delivery.  It wasn't just me with my increasingly deteriorating hearing, even those with younger ears complained.  Needless to say a stern letter of rebuke will be despatched to Ms. Jeannette Nelson, allegedly, the lady in charge of "Company Voice Work".  In this context I make an honourable exception of David Troughton, a superb classical actor whose every word was audible.

Even so, I still recommend the production to you although I think tickets are not easy to aquire now.

 

Searching for Mrs Bercow?

To the nearly 3,000 people who have logged in here over the last 12 hours to see Mrs Bercow in a sheet, you will, God help you, find her 3 posts down.

Of course, you are all very welcome but I do rather fear for the state of your social life!

I grant you all a weekend off!

I'm off to London today with the 'Memsahib', collecting 'SoD' and his bouncing Czech en route, to see an old favourite of mine, Seasons Greetings, at the RNT.  Alan Ayckbourn is painfully funny to watch, not least when it dawns on you that this or that ridiculous character actually resembles yourself.  Cruel man, that Ayckbourn!

Then it's back to 'SoD's house and out to dinner in the evening with 10 of his oldest friends whom we have seen grow up over the years - I wonder when 'SoD' will grow up?  All of this is by way of celebrating the 'Memsahib's birthday so I may be walking wounded on Sunday!  After a late brunch we return home but only to change and go out again to a very old friend for supper.

That means you have no need to check in here to catch my latest words of wisdom; you have the entire weekend to yourselves - "You lucky people", as the late Tommy Trinder used to say.  And, yes, thank you, I know how old that makes me sound!

 

King Lear: Derek Jacobi

Once again, last night I went to my local cinema to see a simultaneous performance and broadcast under the auspices of The Royal National Theatre (ntlive.com) but this time the action was taking place at the Donmar Warehouse, a 'studio' theatre in Covent Garden which only seats 250 people.  It is a superb space for Shakespearean productions with a large rectangular stage thrust out into the audience which makes for both intimacy and immediacy.  I really must try and visit sometime.  The smaller space, I guess, made life somewhat more difficult for the film-makers but they chose their camera angles with care and, despite a short break when the satellite signal went down and the cast stopped and then began again at the beginning of the scene, it was an excellent piece of cinematic skill.

To quote a famous 'Colemanballs', the role of Lear is a game of three halves!  Lear, himself, passes through three phases.  First, the angry, obtuse and vindictive stage; then the madness, or perhaps the 16th/17th century word 'fondness' better expresses his benign idiocy; and then, finally, the last stage when, having been stripped not just literally of all pomp and circumstance, but metaphorically of everything that makes him human including his wits, he regains his mind and at last sees Truth - and then he dies!  This is a colossal work of art.  I think, reluctantly because I dread the thought, but if I had to choose just one of Shakespeare's plays to survive it would be King Lear.

But, continuing the 'Colemanballs' sporting thread, how did our lad in the No. 9 shirt do on the night?  Well, the 'lad' is 72 years of age and he was simply terrific.  I trust the West End theatre critics about as far as I would Bernie Madoff with the deeds of my house but in this case their 'rave reviews' were entirely right.  Personally, I would have preferred to see more fury than just mere anger in the opening scene when Cordelia is cruelly cast aside.  I think an audience really does need to despise and dislike Lear at that stage, but Jacobi, in my humble opinion, didn't quite provoke that re-action; perhaps his "old white head" and his still boyish, angelic-looking face didn't help him.  However the 'mad scenes' were superb and it was obvious that actor and director had gone to great lengths to tease out the meaning of these now-archaic phrases and words, and Jacobi's actions suited the words so that meaning, even mad meaning, was clear.  And the final scenes, in which he was dressed in a very pale, Christ-like robe, were enormously emotional.

Jacobi was very well supported by his fellow actors.  In particular, that absolute pillar of English theatre, the unassuming man of all parts, Ron Cook, was excellent in that trickiest of tricky roles, the Fool.  Again, the meaning behind archaic nonsense had been teased out and he was both funny and shrewd and moving.  Paul Jesson was an excellent Gloucester although I would like to have seen more of his selfishness and amorality shown in the very opening scene - perhaps it was more explicit from the stalls.  Edmund's (Alec Newman) villainy does not make sense unless his father's thoughtless cruelty is made clear.  If Lear's tragedy is the 'symphony's' major theme, then Gloucester's is in the minor key.  He, too, suffers and only in his blindnes does he finally 'see' - Shakespeare's irony at its very best. 

There is one small point on which I disagree with the director/actor and that was the treatment of the soliloquies, mostly Edmund's.  I am not saying that I am right and they are wrong because there are no rules in this matter. A soliloquy is tricky to handle in that the actor is alone on stage and speaks his inward thoughts aloud.  The question then arises as to whether he should address the audience directly, as it were, taking them into his confidence, or whether it is better to deliver the lines 'out there' into space leaving the audience, in effect, to eavesdrop.  I prefer the latter but I suspect that the very immediacy of this tiny theatre where the front rows are only 24" from the actors tempted them to include the audience in, so to speak.

One excellent feature of this production was its energy.  Actors entering almost literally stepped on the heels of those exiting and this gave the whole thing great speed.  Similarly, lines were delivered with pace and attack, unlike so many Shakespearean productions where actors, almost in religious observance of their golden lines, deliver them too slowly and sermon-like.  There were moments in this show where the pace slowed but they were chosen with great care to illuminate a dramatic point. 

On the subject of delivery, of course, I must mention Jacobi's remarkable decision to whisper the famous "Blow winds and crack your cheeks" speech as he stands alone in a storm of thunder and lightning, rain and wind.  In that one, single decision lies the reason why I am, and always will be, an amateur.  For a start, I would never have thought of it; and secondly, I wouldn't have known how to pull it off.  I cannot describe how it is done now but if a DVD of the film is ever issued buy it and you will see how and why it works so brilliantly.  Better still, the show is now going on tour round Britain and then on to New York.  If you have to, sell your wife and children into the sex trade and buy a ticket, it's worth it!

ADDITIONAL:  Slightly off topic but since writing the above I have come across a very good review of The King's Speech by James Bowman in The American Spectator.  Worth reading!

 

 

The unloveliest couple in Britain

I give you . . . Mr and Mrs Bercow:

PA photo via The Telegraph

When I'm really depressed I wonder whether, in their second-rate, tawdry and stupid awfulness they really do represent my country as it slowly but surely sinks into oblivion.  He, as Speaker of the House of Commons holds the second most important office in the nation.  The Queen is at the pinnacle and holds in her frail, elderly hands the remains of whatever dignity this country once possessed. He, as Speaker, holds an ancient and mostly honourable, and sometimes courageous, office which comes to its fortunate occupier replete with its own dignity and respect.  After his ghastly, gruntish predecessor, 'Gorbals Mick' Martin, another choice from antediluvian, so-called 'nu-Labour', one hoped for something better, never dreaming, or nightmaring, that it would be infinitely worse.  Again, the Labour party deserves the blame because Bercow, formerly a Conservative, spent the last 6 years or more lick-spittling and toadying to every Labour MP in the hope of gaining their votes for his bid to be Speaker.  They, as the majority party at the time, were happy to oblige, mostly because it was a poke in the eye to Cameron and his party none of whom can stand Bercow.  To watch this man at Prime Minister's question time is hideously embarrassing, in fact, the very worst sort of embarrassment that arises when you know that the person making a complete ass of himself is totally unaware of it. 

He is not just encouraged in his ghastliness by his wife, she positively out does him! Tomorrow in the Evening Standard magazine she offers this less than enticing photograph of herself.  One is only deeply, deeply, grateful that she is not in the nude displaying, I feel sure, her tattoos and sundry pieces of junk metal embedded in her flesh.

To cheer myself up, and you, too, by now, I suspect, I will repeat the famous Cameron dwarf joke, as told by The Telegraph:

Mr Cameron went on to regale guests with an anecdote in which junior health minister Simon Burns’s driver reversed into the Speaker’s car in a Parliament courtyard.

The Prime Minister described how the diminutive Mr Bercow appeared and told Mr Burns: “I’m not happy!” To which Mr Burns replied: “Well, which one [of the seven dwarves] are you?”

He should make that man Burns a minister, with jokes like that he would send Dave's 'Happiness Index' sky high!

ADDITIONAL:  Good grief!  I took the 'Memsahib' out to dinner tonight to celebrate her birthday and having just returned and checked my blog, I nearly fell off my chair to see over a thousand hits inside four hours.  That is approximately 999 more than I would have expected.  Was it my wise and witty review of King Lear that brought them all flocking in?  No, it was the picture of Mrs. Bercow in her sheet!  Oh God  . . .

Stoppard on typos and quillos!

For some reason the other day I dug out Stoppard's script for The Invention of Love, a play centred on the life of A. E. Housman. This play has limited appeal because, as usual, Stoppard takes no prisoners and works on the basis that everyone is as well-read and intelligent as he is, himself.  I remember the production well because you could almost feel the audience concentrating on every word so as to pick up all the allusions.  The play, which takes a gentle poke at 'High Table Oxford' (Stoppard, of course, never went to university), makes several mentions of Catullus, the rather naughty Roman poet.  Alas, my classical education ended after my first year in Grammar School when it was mutually agreed that I was not destined to be a Latin scholar!  Even so, Stoppard on any subject is never less than interesting and in the script there is this passage which touches upon the vagaries of what the experts assume to be historical documents passed down through the ages.  The speaker is Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, on the subject of what trust should be placed in the current copies of the work of Catullus:

"This morning I had cause to have typewritten an autograph letter I wrote to the father of a certain undergraduate.  The copy as I received it had a missing apostrophe that turned a singular into a plural, and asserted that the Master of Balliol had a solemn duty to stamp out unnatural mice.  In other words, anyone with a secretary knows what Catullus really wrote was already corrupt by the time it was copied twice, which was about the time of the first Roman invasion of Britain: and the earliest copy that came down to us was written about 1,500 years after that.  Think of all those secretaries! - corruption breeding corruption from papyrus to papyrus, and from the last disintegrating scrolls to the first new-fangled parchment books, with a thousand years of copying out still to come, running the gauntlet of changing forms of script and spelling, and absence of punctuation - not to mention mildew and rats and fire and flood and Christian disapproval to the brink of extinction as what Catullus really wrote passed from scribe to scribe, this one drunk, that one sleepy, another without scruple, and of those sober, wide-awake and scrupulous, some ignorant of Latin and some, even worse, fancying themselves as better Latinists than Catullus - until! - finally and at long last - mangled and tattered like a dog that has fought its way home, there falls across the threshhold of the Italian Renaissance the sole surviving witness to thirty generations of carelessness and stupidity: The Verona Codex of Catullus; which was almost immediately lost again, but not before being copied with one last opportunity for error.  And there you have the foundation of the poems of Catullus as they went to the printer for the first time, in Venice 400 years ago."

These somewhat gloomy thoughts of Stoppard on the fragility of the written word are mitigated in another of his passages, this time in his masterpiece Arcadia.  In it, an early 19th century tutor, Septimus Hodge, attempts to placate his brilliant young pupil, Thomasina, who is furious that so many works of genius have been lost forever when the Romans burned down the great library of Alexandria.  She asks, almost in tears, "How can we sleep for grief?"  He replies:

"By counting our stock.  Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripedes, my lady!  You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old.[*]  We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.  The procession is very long and life is very short.  We die on the march.  But there is nothing outside of the march so nothing can be lost to it.  The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language.  Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more.  Mathematical discoveries [*] glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.  You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?  I have no doubt that the improved steam-driven heat-engine which puts Mr. Noakes into an ecstasy  that he and it and the modern age should all coincide, was described on papyrus.  Steam and brass were not invented in Glasgow."

I placed the markers [*] in the quotation because Thomasina's school book does indeed go missing but is found again by the 20th century characters in the play who are investigating what went on nearly 200 years previously.  To their considerable shock they find that Thomasina, a 12-year old girl, had already begun to uncover the mysteries of chaos theory mathematics.

Perhaps because I am an old man I love these reflective passages by Stoppard.  There is some consolation, despite the bleak knowledge that as individuals we are merely but one microscopic molecule of H2O floating along in the myriad streams and tributaries that eventually flow into the enormous river of life, that just to be a part of it, and to have a sense of the past and the future of it, is enormously exciting.  Connectedness, I think, is everything.

PS:  Undoubtedly I have confirmed Stoppard's witty prognostications by inserting several errors into his text, for which I apologise.

Atlantic Channel

I don't know if you heard the crash; if it woke you, I apologise!  The fact is, no, the totally  incredible, unbelievable fact is that I have just leapt into the 21st century.  You may remember me moaning from time to time about the absolutely crap instructions, originally written in Korean, translated into Hindi and then further translated by a Serbo-Croat into English, which accompanied my video-DVD-player-recorder-thingie attached to my TV.  Needless to say, that machine's do-flicker-thingie joined the other do-flicker-thingies in the corner of the room where I tend to hurl them in my exasperated rage.  A friend has been nagging me for some time to treat myself (treat myself - heh!) to the mother of all new TV-techie-thingies (Oh, do keep up!) and buy a 'Sky + HD Box'.  He assured me that it was idiot proof well-suited to elderly English gentlemen of uncertain temper.  Thus assured, I rang Sky to enquire the price and was told that the box plus the dish plus fitting would be in excess of £300.  I demurred.  Well, actually I told him that if he thought I was on this earth to keep Rupert Murdoch in the style to which the upstart Aussie-Yank thinks he is entitled he could think again - and so on and on.  But the young man was excellently well-trained and after pretending to speak to his manager (corny, or what?) he told me that they could finagle the paper work and I could have the whole lot for nothing - provided I paid an extra £10 a month for the HD channels which I could cancel after a year!  Go ahead, young man, I instructed him loftily.  Well, needless to say, a chapter, no, an entire volume, of errors then occurred amongst which was the discovery that my existing TV was unable to accept HD broadcasts.  The Memsahib, who could earn a living on stage as 'The Amazing Memory Woman', reminded me that when we bought it a couple of years ago the man had asked if we wanted the HD extra and I had airily dismissed it out of hand because of the cost.  Now - buggering buggeration! - I had to buy an entirely new TV!

Anyway, I am now up and running, well, jogging, with my new Sky Box and my new TV.  I must admit my friend was right and that the do-flicker-thingies seem easy to operate.  Best of all, this has happened just in time to catch the opening of the new Atlantic Channel.  Regular readers will know of my weakness for pulp fiction and their TV/film equivalent.  Thus, I was very excited last night to sit down and watch the first episode of Empire Boardwalk starring the always watchable Steve Buscemi in the first episode directed by Martin Scorsese at an eye-watering cost of $20 million!  Alas, I must admit that I was slightly underwhelmed, but still, it's a series and I shall watch the next few episodes and see how it develops.  Of course, if I miss an episode then my new ''Sky+ Box' automatically records every single episode - oh, have I told you I've just bought a Sky Box? yes, of course I did, silly me!  Where was I?  Oh, yes, well, I also recorded on my cunning little Sky Box, the first episode of Blue Bloods.  This is another of those somewhat improbable films concerning an entire family of New York policemen, with Grandad a retired cop, Dad the current Commissioner of the entire NYPD, eldest son a brutal but efficient detective, youngest son a Harvard law graduate but now enrolled as a rookie policeman, and the daughter a somewhat liberal prosecuting lawyer.  We are told that another son has been killed in the line of duty.  All a bit predictable and too slick and quick to be believable, for example, a pervert snatches a child and is found alive within a day or so - when did that ever happen in real life?  However, there is one little wrinkle that might make it worth following, the young rookie cop is approached on the quiet by some Feds who want him to act as a snitch in unmasking some corrupt cops.  He, the son of the current Commissioner, naturally refuses but is then told that his late brother had been acting in that capacity and his killing was no accidental street shooting but a carefully managed murder by these corrupt coppers.  So that might develop into an enticing tale.  We shall see, but I'm afraid they all stand, and fall, in comparison to the incomparable The Wire.  However, they are also intending to show the entire series of The Sopranos which, for reasons unknown, or proabably due to my disagreement with a do-flicker-thingie, I have never seen.  Everyone said it's brilliant, so I will give it a try using my new Sky Box - by the by, did I tell you I'd just bought one - ooops, what was that?  - time for my meds - yes dear, just coming . . .

 

If the Atlanta police carry out a probe - better watch out!

Thinking of visiting Georgia this year?  Well, if you land at the airport in Atlanta and hire a car do pay very special attention to the speed limits and any other traffice regulations in the city.  No chance there of a bobby strolling up to your car and saying, "Evenin' all, in a bit of a hurry, were we, sir?"  Oh dear me, no, in Atlanta they have a somewhat different approach, according to The Atlanta Journal:

Two men pulled over by Atlanta police last June say they were fondled and humiliated by three officers with APD's Red Dog unit, Channel 2 Action News reports.  Brian Kidd told the station one of the unnamed officers reached down his pants while subjecting his friend to a body cavity search.

This particular, er, probe took place in broad daylight in the street and WSBTV shines its 'torch of truth' into the dark cavity:

In an exclusive interview with Philips, the passenger in the car said members of the Red Dog unit pulled over his friend's vehicle and forced the driver, Shawn Venegas, to pull down his pants on the side of the road in broad daylight. He says officers conducted a body cavity search for drugs on Venegas. No drugs were ever found, passenger Brian Kidd said.   

“They went to his bottom part. That’s as low as you can go. I don’t think anybody should be subjected to that kind of search,” Kidd said. “I had to look away because I couldn’t watch my friend be done like that.”  

Kidd told Philips that an officer also reached down his pants searching his private parts for drugs.  

Anyway, I am glad to see that old-fashioned, Southern politesse has not changed because the delicacy of the phrase "They went to his bottom part" is quite remarkable.  I can imagine how a resident of, say, Stoke Newington, or the Moss Side, might have described the incident!

Anyway, rumours to the effect that the motto of the Atlanta Police Department is "No Hiding Place" should not be believed!

 

Green = black = red

Here's a nice picture:

Doesn't that look lovely and, well, green, in every sense of the word.  It's the sort of image that gets Chris Huhne, our, er, distinguished Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, really excited.  And now that he has succeeded, I assume, in 'straightening' out his lesbian mistress, a very exciting task in its own right, he is in need of fresh invigoration and apparently, so I am informed, these tall, phallic-looking windmills get him going like nothing else.  Well, in these private matters one must strive to be tolerant.  However, there is a public side to these bright, shiny, 'green' windmills which few know about, and people like Huhne definitely do not wish to know about.  It is what one might call the black side:

The Mail, which people like Huhne tend to despise, tells the story of this black lake which is to be found in Baotou in inner Mongolian China.  In this particular part of China there is deposited something like 90% of the world's rare elements many of which are required by the manufacturers of those squeaky-clean-green machines above.  As The Mail tells it:

The reality is that, as Britain flaunts its environmental credentials by speckling its coastlines and unspoiled moors and mountains with thousands of wind turbines, it is contributing to a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China. This is the deadly and sinister side of the massively profitable rare-earths industry that the ‘green’ companies profiting from the demand for wind turbines would prefer you knew nothing about.

Hidden out of sight behind smoke-shrouded factory complexes in the city of Baotou, and patrolled by platoons of security guards, lies a five-mile wide ‘tailing’ lake. It has killed farmland for miles around, made thousands of people ill and put one of China’s key waterways in jeopardy.

This vast, hissing cauldron of chemicals is the dumping ground for seven million tons a year of mined rare earth after it has been doused in acid and chemicals and processed through red-hot furnaces to extract its components.

"What's it all about, Alfie?"  Well, neodymium, actually!

Neodymium is commonly used as part of a Neodymium-Iron-Boron alloy (Nd2Fe14B) which, thanks to its tetragonal crystal structure, is used to make the most powerful magnets in the world. Electric motors and generators rely on the basic principles of electromagnetism, and the stronger the magnets they use, the more efficient they can be. It’s been used in small quantities in common technologies for quite a long time – hi-fi speakers, hard drives and lasers, for example. But only with the rise of alternative energy solutions has neodymium really come to prominence, for use in hybrid cars and wind turbines. A direct-drive permanent-magnet generator for a top capacity wind turbine would use 4,400lb of neodymium-based permanent magnet material. (My emphasis)

And, of course, 'there will be blood', red blood, much of it coughed up from the rotting lungs of local people who have seen their once fertile farmland turned into a stinking brew of deadly chemicals:

People too began to suffer. Dalahai villagers say their teeth began to fall out, their hair turned white at unusually young ages, and they suffered from severe skin and respiratory diseases. Children were born with soft bones and cancer rates rocketed.

Official studies carried out five years ago in Dalahai village confirmed there were unusually high rates of cancer along with high rates of osteoporosis and skin and respiratory diseases. The lake’s radiation levels are ten times higher than in the surrounding countryside, the studies found. 

Since then, maybe because of pressure from the companies operating around the lake, which pump out waste 24 hours a day, the results of ongoing radiation and toxicity tests carried out on the lake have been kept secret and officials have refused to publicly acknowledge health risks to nearby villages.

Regular readers will know that I rarely allow any chance to escape me of reminding you all of Auberon Waugh's advice when faced with a politican on a soap-box, that is, to shout out loudly "Show us your willy!"  But in the Right dis-Honourable Chris Huhne's case I suggest a variation, come on now, altogether, as loud as you can:

"Show us your lesbian straightener!"