DUFF & NONSENSE!

For goodness sake, stop giggling, it's the United Nations!

Alright, I admit it, to begin with I thought it was a spoof but, no, it's all too real.  That splendid body of fools, charlatans, murderers and thieves (aka, the United Nations) has succeeded in sinking even lower in public esteem than the profound depths which they have already plumbed.  I am grateful (I think!) to The Weekly Standard, via Drudge, for this headline which says it all and which reduced me to helpless giggles:

North Korea to Head U.N. Conference on Disarmament

There is one further item of interest to those of you who enjoy a good belly laugh, although I fear it may not even raise a smile with my American readers.  Of the prodigious cost involved in keeping this international 'bonfire of the vanities' blazing away it is:

American taxpayers who continue to foot 22 percent of the bill

(Heh, heh, heh!)  Needless to say the most constantly villified country in the UN is the United States of America.  Still, it's a noxious, smelly, ill wind that blows no one any good so I am pleased to report that:

Iran’s Mohammad Hassan Daryaei told the Conference meeting: “I would like to congratulate the distinguished ambassador of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for the assumption of the presidency and assuring him of my delegation’s full support and cooperation.”

So that's alright then!

 

Where are Wiki-leaks when you need them?

I came across an intriguing little oddity over at Pajamas Media by Roger L. Simon.  In his article he raises what might be called 'The Mystery of the Missing Tape'.  Or, to paraphrase Conan Doyle's master detective, Sherlock Holmes:

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the tape in the night-time."

Gregory: "The tape did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

Oh dear, I'm stretching the connection to breaking point so I had better explain. 

According to Simon, in 2003 Barack Obama was a guest at a celebratory dinner party with some cove called Rashid Khalidi, a big mover and shaker in American academe, currently the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia and director of that university’s Middle East Institute.  You will not fall over in shock to learn that this 'great scholar' is fervently pro-Palestinian and therefore equally anti-Israel.  Fair enough, he is entitled to his opinions.  Apparently, these opinions and the matching opinions of those present, which included Obama and the convicted terrorist couple, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, were expressed very forcibly and you can take an educated guess that any understanding of Israel's position was understated, or more likely, never stated!  However, as is the way of things in this modern world, someone recorded the conversations.   The tape went into the possession of the LA Times and there it has remained, silent and unreported  upon, and guarded more closely than Her Maj's jewels in the Tower of London.

It seems to me that the stinking pit of putrescence into which the MSM in America has now fallen is so deep as to be beyond measure or rescue.  The LA Times has consistently refused to release this tape, particularly during the run-up to the last presidential election.  However, by stark contrast this month they eagerly published 24,000 e-mails issued by Sarah Palin.  And earlier this year they were quick to leap to the defence of the man responsibe for siphoning off state secrets to Wiki-leaks, and equally quick in publishing them.  But their own tape, which contains information the American people have a right to know, remains under lock and key.  Some of the snottier types of European are in the habit of sneering at Americans for their supposed ignorance of world affairs.  Perhaps they should point their well-manicured fingers at the American MSM who for the last few years have not just failed in their duty to inform but have, with malice afore-thought, deliberately surpressed the news.

A true 'gutter press', indeed!

Two political IEDs threatening MDS

Sorry about the alphabet soup title.  What I am trying to say is that when My Darling Sarah finally declares herself ready to run for the presidency (notice the 'when', not 'if'!) she faces two very tricky and explosive issues along her path which have already caused some collateral damage to 'My gal Michele' Bachman.  The first is craftily hidden in that perennial problem peculiar, amongst western nations, to America, that is, Darwin's theory of evolution.  This particular 'IED' has a triple fuse.  Those who swallow believe it, the majority, do so with religious fervour and will brook no doubts.  Those 'heretics' who do have doubts come in two guises, the religious and the scientific.  And always and forever in American politics you have the overhanging question of States rights versus Federal authority.  'My Gal' Michele has already fallen foul of this trap when, in answering reporters' questions, she seemed (that was the MSM spin on her words) to be advocating that Intelligent Design (ID) be taught alongside Darwinian theory.  According to Jay Richards & David Klinghoffer in The American Spectator, most members of the ID movement do not insist that it be taught in schools, only that scientific criticism of evolution theory be voiced.  They go on to list several other Republican candidates who have been caught in the blast of this particular controversy.  So My Darling Sarah had best beware!

The other political IED almost certain to explode in her face is the same sex marriage movement.  Opponents are eager to move a constitutional amendment which would over-ride State's rights and undo recent acts passed by State legislatures, including the most recent, New York, by proclaiming that marriage is only possible between members of the opposite sex.  Again, 'My gal, Michele' appeared to want to try and have the best of all possible worlds (well, she is a politician and also a woman!) by supporting the amendment but claiming that it would not interfere with States' rights.  Aaron Goldstein in The American Spectator spells out the incoherence of her position.  Again, MDS needs to prepare for these IEDs by donning full body-protective armour!

 

Grumpy and out of sorts

Troubles shared are troubles halved, they say, so if I tell you lot about my troubles that should reduce my share to a miniscule fraction.  Actually, I don't really have any troubles, what I have are irritations, but when irritations go on and on, and then on, they do become exceedingly irksome.  I think I mentioned before that my water-tank sprang a leak and flooded the house.  Naturally in the circs, furniture had to shoved around whilst the drying out process went on.  We have had the sitting-room redecorated and whilst waiting for the new carpet to arrive I took advantage by getting a painter to repaint all the skirting boards because it didn't matter if the old carpet had the odd drop of paint on it.  All that has been done but still we wait for the new carpets to arrive and be fitted.  That job, of course, entails moving all the furniture in and out of rooms and thus we sit here day after day looking like the day we moved in with furniture out of place and boxes of small items packed and stacked so as to ease the job of the carpet-fitters for whom we are waiting . . . and waiting.  As I said, this is not real trouble, let alone a disaster (ask the Japanese about real disaster), but after so many weeks it is becoming exceedingly wearing.  There are things I want to do but somehow, mentally, I can't get myself going to do them until my house is back in order and life can recommence its normal placid flow.

Or let me put it another way, I'm pissed off!

 

See, even that Tacitus bloke agrees with me!

A friend sent me a cutting from the International Herald Tribune.  It was a book review by Cullen Murphy who is, so I gather, something of a classicist which is probably why he was asked to review a book with the somewhat unwieldy title of Tacitus's "Germania": From the Roman Empire to the Third Reich.  According to the author, Christopher B. Krebs, that great chronicler of Roman times, Tacitus, had the Germans well profiled as early as the 1st century AD.  My friend knew that in one of my talks, How the Germans Lost WWI in the First Six Weeks, I begin, much to the despondency of my audience, in the year 9AD, and describe the little-known - well, little-known outside Germany - Battle of the Teutoberg Forest.  In this debacle, three Roman legions were despatched by Augustus to cross the Rhine and finish off once and for all the ferocious and constantly troublesome German tribes who inhabited the north German plains and forests.  So, off they went - never to be seen again!  I mean, literally, they simply disappeared; like Python's parrot, they ceased to be!  The shock to Rome in general and to Augustus in particular was enormous.  Thereafter, no efforts were made by any of his successors to force a crossing of the Rhine/Danube barriers.  This has had profound geo-political consequences for Europe.  In my talk I emphasise that it was typical of the north German way of war which had developed under the influence of its geography.

Not being a classicist myself - you guessed as much? -  I was surprised to learn that Tacitus had devoted some time and effort in writing a book seeking to explain the unique qualities of the Germans.  From Murphy's review of Krebs's book:

In his [Tacitus's]telling, the Germans possessed "fierce blue eyes, tawny hair, huge bodies".  They prized freedom, scorned luxury and esteemed military courage above all else.  They were a people of sturdy values for whom "good laws" were no substitute for "good habits".  In the land of the Germans, Tacitus writes, "nobody laughs off vice; and to corrupt and to be corrupted in not called 'modern times'".  Pointedly, he observed that the Germans were "not tainted by intermarriage with any other nations" but rather existed "as a distinct unadulterated people that resembles only itself."

Well, interesting but somwhat arcane, you are probably thinking, so let me accelerate you forward in time by some 14 centuries. Germany is a myriad of large, medium and mostly tiny statelets and principalities sharing Christianity and the German language but not much else.  The 'intellectuals' of the time were not satisfied and needed something else to help bind these disparate parts together.  They knew there was once a book by Tacitus entitled Germania but assumed that it had disappeared over the centuries - but then, suddenly, a very old copy was found in some remote monastry.  Any resemblance to a Dan Brown story must be ignored; Mr. Krebs is a serious Harvard historian!  Anyway, Germania was seized upon by the German intellectuals of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly amongst the Prussians, and thereafter it has become the guidebook to a whole series of German leaders up to and including Adolph Hitler.

But don't blame Tacitus!  As Mr. Krebs points out, "Tacitus did not write a most dangerous book.  His readers made it so."

 

She can, she should, she will - er, I hope!

Sorry, sorry, I know, it's always an embarrassment when an old fool who should know better falls for a younger woman, particularly when everyone around him keeps telling him she's no better than pig-ignorant  'trailor trash', but I can't help myself.  My Darling Sarah (MDS) simply must be the next President of the United States.  I confess that being something of an old roué (in your dreams, I can hear the 'Memsahib' muttering!) that my eye did wander towards the delicious Michele Bachman and the words of the old Beatles song recurred:

Michelle, my belle.
These are words that go together well,
My Michelle.

There is much to admire in this lady, not the least being the fact that unlike so many of her liberal opponents she actually does good deeds rather than forever taxing the rest of us so that they can spend the money and claim they are virtuous.  Bachman has fostered 23 children during her married life - and that I consider to be a very good deed, er, indeed!  But even so, my heart remains with Sarah and so I was delighted to read a very supportive article by Robert Eugene Simmons Jr. in the American Thinker.  In it, Mr. Simmons puts forward some compelling reasons why the Republican party must choose MDS as their candidate.  Any 'new' Republican candidate is going to face a lynch-mob got up by the MSM:

Assuming that Sarah Palin doesn't run the campaign will go sort of like this: the media will talk up the largest RINO they can find in an attempt to split the Republican Party from within.  However, the real dirt will be kept securely under wraps.  As the Republican primary nears its close, the research effort will go into full force.  They will send squads of lawyers to go into every tiny detail of the candidate's personal and professional life.  They will examine every detail of the life of the nominee from the day of their birth.  The researchers will talk to every ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, every business partner, and any employees they can find.

After the primary is over, they will start to dump the juiciest tidbits in carefully edited and scripted special stories.  National interviews will be granted to jilted lovers and business acquaintances that felt wronged by the candidate, or perhaps could be persuaded to feel wronged with a little interview stipend.  The candidate will be mocked for their lack of intelligence and any microscopic mispronunciation or slip of the tongue will result in a weeklong national news cycle about why that candidate is too stupid to be president.  The candidate will not have time to counter the perception and, combined with the media adoration of Obama, likely Obama would get another four years.

Bearing all that in mind, of course, the advantage of MDS as a candidate is obvious (my emphasis):

[I]f Sarah Palin runs, the media has already shot all of their ammo.  They have done everything they can possibly do to destroy her but she has learned how to counter them via Facebook, Twitter, and streaming video.  The accusations against Palin and her children have been flying in for two years and have failed to destroy her.  All they have left is to repeat the old tired line of "Palin is an idiot."  Of course it wouldn't take more than a debate or two, nationally televised with live video, to dispel that myth with everyone that can possibly be persuaded.  The problem with the media is that all they have left to shoot are lies which can't stand in the light of day, and even all the plausible lies have been spent by Palin's opponents.  If Palin wins the primary, the leftist media will be left to incoherent rage watched by fewer and fewer Americans.

The reason everyone except the village dog-catcher is offering to run against Obama is the perecption that he is another Jimmy Carter-style, one term president.  It just needs a battle-hardened veteran armed with an authentic voice in favour of old-fashioned American virtues, with no nasty surprises likely to jump out of the cupboard at the last minute, to lead the way:

On the issues, Palin's conservatism combined with her small-government libertarianism will make a stark contrast to Obama who will now be forced to defend his policies rather than run on emotion ad-hominem attacks and catchy phrases.

When the political calculus is done, it is clear that Palin is the only real conservative with libertarian leanings that can possibly be elected in the country.  Although there are other conservatives with promise such as Bachmann, Cain, and West, they have not been subjected to the vetting that Sarah Palin has and there should be no doubt that the media will do everything they possibly can to destroy them should they win the nomination.

Absolutely super, and all I can add is, er, "Go, Sarah, go!" 

I say, old chap, was my accent alright? 

 

The third Battle of Britain, perhaps?

If you allow me licence to suggest that the first Battle of Britain took place at Jutland in 1916, and the second followed in 1940 in the skies above southern England, then I will take advantage of your generosity and insist that the third Battle of Britain was the protracted, bloody and utterly crucial campaign which is normally called the Battle of the Atlantic.  If I really wanted to push my luck I would call it the first Battle for Anglo-America because whilst its loss would have resulted in the complete defeat of Britain, it would also have had disasterous strategic implications for America.

I am provoked to these ramblings by a review in The American Spectator of a book entitled: Turning the Tide: How a Small Band of Allied Sailors Defeated the U-Boats and Won the Battle of the Atlantic by Ed Offley.  The reviewer, Larry Thornberry, begins thus:

It's not that the story of the Battle of the Atlantic hasn't been told often and well. But Ed Offley's Turning the Tide is a dramatic contribution to understanding of a long-running and geographically huge confrontation that may have mattered more to the outcome of World War II than more commented-on campaigns.

Well, I'm sure he's right. and that the battle has been described 'many a time and oft' but I have never seen one let alone read one - and I'm ashamed of my ignorance and daftness because it was obviously a huge, complex campaign which drew not only on the resources of courage available to the fighting men but also to the scientific brainpower of all the nations involved.  The courage required is summed up in Thornberry's review:

With the somber totaling up after the war, we learned that almost 10,000 U.S. Merchant Marine crewmen had died during the battles in the Atlantic. British and Commonwealth merchant sailors fared even worse, with more than 37,000 crewmen lost. The British and Commonwealth fatality rate for merchant seaman was 17 percent, almost three times the fatality rate of the British Army.

Perhaps a tiny vignette I read about somewhere, and which has stuck in my memory ever since, was the story told by a destroyer crewman whose ship was about to engage in picking up survivors from a U-boat attack when they were suddenly ordered to 'full steam ahead' because the sub had been spotted elsewhere.  As it accelerated through the middle of a pack of struggling sailors in the water one of them was seen waving his arms and shouting, "Taxi! Taxi!"  I cannot rid my mind of the memory of that man - whoever he was.

However, the part of the story which fascinates me is at the level of the various High Commands as they were forced to change tactics under the stress of a changing circumstances and, even more so, what might be called 'the battle of the boffins':

There was also the critical electronic battle, fought by scientists, technicians, and code-breakers ashore. A major break for the Allies came with the fortuitous capture of a German naval Enigma code machine from an abandoned U-boat and the breaking of the enormously complex code that went with that system.

Changes in weaponry -- new types of torpedoes and the development of the hedge-hog, forward-firing mortar system -- as well as developments in radar and other detection and tracking technology, gave first one side then the other an edge for a bit until the next development or refinement came along. The Allies finally captured the technology edge and held it to the end of the war. 

If any readers can recommend a good, comprehensive history of this campaign I would be delighted to hear of it.

 

Dick Three Done to Death!

The other day, SoD (Son of Duff) asked me if I would like to go and see Kevin Spacey in Richard III.  To be honest, it is not my favourite Shakespearean history play.  The eponymous 'hero' is such a brilliant, glittering creation he quite overpowers everyone else.  Even so, there are some terrific and unforgettable scenes in it, not least the opening soliloquy delivered by the hunch-backed villain and beginning:

Now is the winter of our discontent 

Made glorious summer by this sun of York  

and during the remainder of the speech Shakespeare, with great theatrical daring, in effect spells out the story to come.  For the acting fraternity that opening speech is right up there with "To be or not to be"  and "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more" as a chance to deliver one of the most well-known speeches Shakespeare ever wrote.

I confess that the thought of Kevin Spacey as Richard 'Crookback' did not fire my imagination.  I have never seen him on stage but his movie roles tend to show him as a somewhat diffident, quiet, introverted, or at least, internal, sort of actor.  Even so, I told 'SoD' to go ahead and book the tickets.  Then, on Friday I read this in The Daily Mail (I can't find a link):

His performance grips you the moment he appears on stage and he gives his winter-of-discontent speech with a half-eaten takeaway curry and cans of lager and a paper crown atop his head.

I quickly rang 'SoD' and told him not to bother!

'A slight alteration to our schedule'!

I know regular readers frequently click in and out of here in case there is something worth reading - not very often, I know! - but yesterday we suffered a minor domestic accident which has interrupted production, so to speak.  Perhaps later on today I will get round to my usual equivalent of scribbling on the playground wall!

 

Alan Bennett on irony

Regular readers will know that I am the Founder and therefore the President-for-Life of the Irony Appreciation Society.  So it was with considerable glee that I came across this passage in Alan Bennett's 1978 play The Old Country.  His elderly 'hero' (and that was ironical) is a man named Hilary (that, I think, was not ironical, many English toffs of the early to mid 20th century had what now sound like girls' names) and in the play we find him living with his wife and expecting a visit from his sister and brother-in-law.  It is only gradually that we realise that what we had taken to be a countryhouse somewhere in the English countryside is in fact a dacha outside Moscow.  Hilary is a traitor who 15 years previously had skipped just before he was nabbed.  What appears to be merely a family visit is in fact an attempt by his brother-in-law, an established figure in the establishment, to talk him into returning to England.  I am delighted to tell you that the brother-in-law is called Duff, er, no relation!  The following dialogue ensues:

DUFF:  Our car is coming at five, and we're bidden to the ballet this evening so we have a fairly tight shcedule.  I must ask you again.  As a friend.  Will you come back?  It isn't an idle question.

HILARY:  Oh.  I thought it was.  'Slot it in at the back of your mind,' you said.  However.  I have to decide.  Come down on one side or the other.  And without recourse to irony.  Which is not to decide at all but have it both ways.  The English speciality.  I wonder with the new European vogue that we don't have a referendum on it.  Irony, is it a good thing?  And on the voting paper two boxes, one to read Yes or No.  The other Yes and No.  The whole thing would have to be held under the auspices of an institution impervious to irony . . . the Egg Marketing Board suggests itself, or the Royal School of Needlework.  Except there is a problem: no institution you can name but the choice is tinged with irony.  Utterly absent, it is never more present.  Irony is inescapable.  We're conceived in irony.  We float in it from the womb.  It's the amniotic fluid.  It's the silver sea.  It's the waters at their priestlike task of washing away guilt and purpose and responsibility.  Joking but not joking.  Caring but not caring.  Serious but not serious.

The Old Country is a good play but, I think, in the end it fails to move.  I felt no sympathy towards any of the characters, and indeed, Hilary's constant and long-winded, literary excursions became in the end somewhat tiresome.  Still, I did like the passage on irony and Alan Bennett's laundry list would read better than many another 'great' playwright's work.  This, I think, was one of three plays he wrote in which he worried away at the nature of betrayal and traitors.  The other two, An Englishman Abroad, based on Guy Burgess which I once had great pleasure in directing, and A Question of Attribution based on Anthony Blunt who, after his treacherous days in MI5, became Master of the Queen's paintings, were both much better plays.  I think the latter must be the only play which features Her Maj as a character.  The passage in it in which she and Blunt discuss exactly how you can tell a fake from a genine picture has irony dripping from every word.

 

Bejasus, oi've got that 'deja vu' feelin' all over again!

It's like a time warp.  Riots and gunmen all over the streets of Belfast.  Old names, long forgotten, but now brought back to sharp focus - Newtonards, the Short Strand, the Shankill Road, all the stuff of headlines years ago but thought to have been buried long since under the platitudes and wishful thinking of people who should have known better.  Needless to say, it was the Fenians who kicked things off with a spate of recent murders but now it is the turn of the 'Proddies' in the unlovely shape of the UVF who have organised mayhem on the streets aimed at Catholic families.  Shots were fired last night so it's only a matter of time before the bodies pile up.

No one seems to have a particular reason to explain the sudden upsurge in 'Proddie' violence.  Perhaps it was a reaction to the vicious campaign mounted by the PIRA, the Psychotic Irish Republican Army, which has gone on growing in viciousness for the last two years or so.  Or perhaps the final straw that broke the back of 'Proddie' resentment was this deeply un-lovely woman:

Photo courtesy of The Belfast Telegraph

Mary McArdle is her name and murder is, or was, her business.  In 1984 she assisted in the killing of Mary Travers who, at 23, was only four years older than her murderer.  Miss Travers, with her parents, was leaving a Roman Catholic church after mass when a gunman approached and shot at the family.  Mr. Travers was hit six times, young Mary just once - but fatally.  McArdle was arrested close by and when searched two guns used in the killing were found hidden in the surgical stockings she was wearing.  It has since been learned that one of the guns had been used in eight different IRA murders. 

Well, you might say with a yawn, all very sad and that sort of thing but surely it's 'all blood under the bridge' now.  Not quite!  For the very same Mary McCardle - look at her picture, isn't she sweet? - only served 14 years of her sentence because she was released under - and please have a sickbag to hand - the Blair/Clinton Peace Agreement.  And just to rub your noses in the blood and the vomit, she has recently been recruited as a special adviser by new Stormont Minister, Carol Cullin, or 'Caral ni Chuilin', as she ostentatiously prefers to call herself these days.  This prize specimen of malignant womanhood did four years for explosives charges so no doubt the pair of them enjoy a good crack over the thrills and spills back in 'the good old days'!  Lest we forget, here is Mary Travers who, let us remind ourselves, would have been 50 years old this year probably, being a good catholic, with a brood of children and looking forward to an even bigger brood of grandchildren:

Photo courtesy of the BBC

Were I an Ulster man, 'which thank the Lord I'm not, sir', I think I would be tempted to throw a few stones given that this pair of murderous harridans are paid handsomely with taxpayers' money plus, no doubt, with generous pensions to look forward to. 

Cuts? What cuts?

That canny, wee Scot, Fraser Nelson, spells it out at The Coffe House.  Whilst 'Blinky' Balls would have you believe that the coalition cabinet are raging through Whitehall armed with bloody axes and determined on a campaign of slash and burn, the actual fact of the matter, or, if you like, the truth - and someone will have to explain that concept to 'Blinky' - is that:

The UK government’s current spending was £51.7 billion in May, up from £50.6 billion in May last year (the last month of Gordon Brown). George Osborne has so far outspent Gordon Brown every month that he’s been in the Treasury. Even adjusted for the runaway inflation, the Chancellor has on average outspent Brown during his first 12 months:

Nelson explains what he calls 'Blinky's optical illusion, and what I call a lie, with my emphasis:

Behold, a Balls optical illusion. And, as ever, one worth exploring in some detail. He wants us to believe that the low growth (and the contraction last winter) is the result of the harsh cuts. In cash terms, there have been no cuts. Adjust it for inflation, and the real-terms cuts have only just started. In the 2011-12 financial year, spending across government departments will fall by 4.1 per cent. Add debt and dole, and total state spending will be shaved by a gossamer 0.6 per cent. Is this “cutting too far and too fast?”

If, like me, you prefer a pretty picture to explain the figures, Nelson provides this one.  You can see at a glance that the cuts imposed by Healey back in 'the bad old days', and the cuts forced on Obama in the run up to the election next year, were 3.9% and 3.8% respectively and were undertaken inside 2 years.  Osborne's 'cut' of 3.7% is going to take 4 years.  Hardly Dracula-like, is it?  And then again, one must factor in 'Jelly Baby' Cameron taking fright at the unions and changing what passes for his mind.

He sneered on the wrong side of his face

To use the current jargon, or probably to misuse it because I don't always understand it, Mr. 'Bill' Keller is an 'Alpha Male' member of the MSM.  He is, no less, the 'Executive Editor of the New York Times'.  In Brit terms that is the equivalent of being Alan Rusbridger with laurels and a halo.  In fact, they share much in common, given that both their newspapers are shrinking at the same rapid rate they are losing money.  No doubt they would blame it on the internet, or the weather, or George Bush/Maggie Thatcher (depending on nationality) and neither of them would consider for a moment that it is the thoughtless, pre-programmed, robotic, Left-wing grunt and snuffle they produce daily in their respective rags.

For example, take the effortlessly superior Mr. Keller, who could sneer for America at the Olympics, automatically failing to engage his brain before writing because apart from him suffering with almost terminal stupidity, Sarah Palin has that affect on Left-wing 'pundits'.  He took her to task for daring to slap down some 'wannabe-executive-editor-of-the-NYT', a junior hack from National Public Radio (the equivalent of the BBC 'over there'), who asked Mrs. Palin what she was doing at the Rolling Thunder rally, a sort of Bikers' gathering in support of American troops.  She replied thus:

“It is our vets who we owe our freedom — not the politician, not the reporter — it is our vets, so that’s why we’re here.”

Mr. Keller then went into sneer-overload:

There is, I suppose, a gracious way to translate her comments. She might have meant to convey something along the lines of: “I’m sincerely humbled by the sacrifice our veterans have made to defend the freedoms I enjoy in my capacity as a politician and Fox News media pundit.” But I think we all know she meant nothing of the kind.

I’ll let the politicians stick up for themselves; I do hope they’ll ask if her contempt applies to the politicians who wrote that Constitution our worthy veterans swore to defend.

The last sentence contains a sneering twist to what Mrs. Palin said off-the-cuff which Keller probably learned from Pravda in his days as a correspondent in Russia.  Not satisfied with that, however, he goes on:

But I do not think Palin intended her remark simply as a cheap applause line; after all, at that moment she was not pandering from a Tea Party stage but speaking to an audience of NPR listeners, who I’m pretty sure have a less malign view of the press. No, her remark was automatic, like acid reflux.

Palin’s disdain goes beyond the bitterness of a public figure who has been burned by the press. Plenty of others have endured the pain of mainstream-media excoriation but have remained civil and responsive.

I read this story yesterday and whilst I did not know the background there was something about the words Mrs. Palin used which struck me as being above mere political rhetoric, or, as Mr. Keller would have it "a cheap applause line".  Thus, I was not totally surprised to read today an article in Commentary by Rick Richman explaining that what Mrs. Palin was doing under questioning was trying to recall a poem:

IT IS THE SOLDIER

It is the Soldier, not the minister
Who has given us freedom of religion.

It is the Soldier, not the reporter
Who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the Soldier, not the poet
Who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer
Who has given us freedom to protest.

It is the Soldier, not the lawyer
Who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the Soldier, not the politician
Who has given us the right to vote.

It is the Soldier who salutes the flag,
Who serves beneath the flag,
And whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who allows the protester to burn the flag.

©Copyright 1970, 2005 by Charles M. Province

Not, in my opinion, a particularly profound poem, so Mrs. Palin can be forgiven for not remembering it exactly, nor is it entirely accurate, and if the emotions expressed in it are somewhat simplistic and naive, nevertheless, they are heartfelt and entirely appropriate to be recalled at the Rolling Thunder rally in honour of soldiers.  The poem was given prominence in a speech at the Republican rally in 2004 by Sen. Zell Miller, a Southern Democrat (= usually more Republican than the Republicans!)  Mrs. Palin, the new vice-presidential candidate, would have heard it and noted it.  The Executive Editor of the New York Times didn't, and wouldn't, even if he had!  He, in his effortlessly condescending manner, described her response as "automatic, like acid reflux".

I would suggest that if there is any 'automatic acid reflux' it emanates from Mr. Keller who, like the rest of the MSM, have had their snotty noses put out of joint by her 'non-campaign' campaign in which she studiously ignores the press pack and communicates via the new media which is inexorably destroying the likes of the NYT:

Palin can’t ignore us. Sure, she can bypass the press pack and directly commune with her vast Twitter and Facebook following. But if she does have ambitions for higher office, she needs to convince more than the faithful that she’s worthy of the job, and making her case through the lamestream media — print, broadcast and digital — is still the most effective way to do that.

That is part plea, part threat and totally a bluff!  Perhaps Richman sums it up best:

The Times covered the keynote speech in 2004 but did not mention the poem, so Keller had no way of knowing about it. He may  suffer from a disability common among journalists of the Times– what medical experts refer to as paper-of-record imposter syndrome; it is a malady particularly striking editors who replaced religion with the Times – an opiate causing automatic reactions, like acid reflux.

Ouch!

 

So the Beatles weren't rubbish after all

Many years ago whilst living in barracks at Aldershot I became increasingly irritated by the 'Scousers' going on and on about some new pop group called The Beatles.  Eventually someone caught one of their songs on a radio, we all listened and at the end of it I pronounced my verdict - they're rubbish!  Well, they weren't as good as the great song writers and singers of the earlier era but they were better than 'rubbish' and I have reprimanded myself many a time and oft' for that hasty judgment.  Now, Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek celebrates Paul McCartney's 69th birthday by recalling one of George Harrison's songs and whilst I have never heard the tune, the lyric is spot on:

Let me tell you how it will be;
There’s one for you, nineteen for me.
‘Cause I’m the taxman,
Yeah, I’m the taxman.

Should five per cent appear too small,
Be thankful I don’t take it all.
‘Cause I’m the taxman,
Yeah, I’m the taxman.

(if you drive a car, car;) – I’ll tax the street;
(if you try to sit, sit;) – I’ll tax your seat;
(if you get too cold, cold;) – I’ll tax the heat;
(if you take a walk, walk;) – I’ll tax your feet.

Brilliant!  And how wrong can I be?  Er, well, you can tell exactly if you read this blog!

It's the Germans who must leave the euro not the Greeks!

A startling piece of lateral thinking by Edmund Conway in The Telegraph which is obvious once you think about it.  He suggests that if any country should leave the euro system it should be Germany!  After all, they are the biggest distorter of the system and have waxed fat and powerful by means of it:

The eurozone has been pulling itself apart for years; removing Greece will not change that.

However there is another eurozone member that sticks out like a sore thumb. It has run its economy just as, if not even more, recklessly than the Mediterranean brothers, has single-handedly destabilised the euro area for the best part of a decade and is one of the biggest road-blocks to its ultimate recovery. That country is Germany.

This might sound counter-intuitive. Germany, after all, has an enormous current account surplus; it honed its productivity and competitiveness over the past decade; where Greece borrowed it saved, where Spain splurged it cut, where Ireland inflated it deflated. But that is precisely the problem. Were Keynes around today he would have identified the issue instantly: in any monetary system, nursing a mammoth current account surplus can be just as destabilising as a deficit.

Germany's wealth stems from its export record which is phenomenal but it has been aided over the years by the weak value of the euro.  In effect, the impoverished mediterranean countries have been subsidising Germany!

It’s easy to blame Greece and its incontinent cousins for their over-spending – and certainly Athens is guilty of fiddling its fiscal figures and failing to collect taxes. But its twin deficits are also a consequence of the low interest rates which were largely determined by the way Germany ran its economy.

Now, of course, the German eagles are coming home to roost!  According to Google translator it's now amortisationszeit, or 'payback time', as we call it. 

Without Germany, the euro would obviously be a significantly weaker currency (particularly if Germany was joined by the Netherlands). But it would no longer be torn apart by the unhealthy dynamics that have haunted it in its first decade.

So, will Germany do the decent thing?  Don't hold your breath!

I'm entitled to trial by my peers not by half-wits

I'm obliged to Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday for reminding me of something I meant to write about earlier in the week.  He raises the case of Joanne Fraill, a juror of such abysmal ignorance and stupidity that she appeared not to realise that contacting a defendant by FaceBook was a criminal offence.  She now has several months in jail to ponder on that great legal Truth - ignorance is no defence!

But, as Hitchens says, there is a deeper problem exposed by this case.  Any of us at any time and, it appears, almost for any cause, may suddenly face arrest and trial by jury.  Take the case of Mr.Owais Dar, a shopkeeper, who caught a juvenile stealing from his shop and rather than call the police, and having obtained the lad's address, he took him back home and handed him over to his father for punishment.  The next day, at 4.30 in the morning the police hammered on his door, arrested him, put him in the cells and took finger prints and DNA swabs.  He appeared in court last week and, fortunately, the judge threw the case out and, in effect, called the police a bunch of pillocks!  However, Mr. Dar might well have found himself in front of a jury of his peers.  It is obvious to me that he is a man of some intelligence but would he have been able to say that of his jury had a trial ensued?

Hitchens proposes that there should be a higher minimum age and also a higher set of educational standards before people are selected for jury service.  I agree with him and suggest that anyone under the age of 30 should be excluded.  When it comes to educational qualifications I'm not too sure how that would work.  Given the sort of daft things they teach in schools these days, to say nothing of the evident laxity in marking exams, a 'C+' in plasticine modelling, or some such, would not give me confidence in a juror.  Still, I'm sure something could be worked out and it would be better than placing one's future in the hands of dim-wits like Ms. Fraill. 

The latest EU game: Pass the Poo!

The way it works is this.  All the EU leaders sit in a circle passing a large bucket of poo from one to the other whilst some music plays - the Danse Macabre, perhaps, or Chopin's Funeral March -  and when it stops whoever is holding the bucket has to roll up their well-tailored sleeve and thrust an arm into the smelly stuff and bring out a little box.  Inside the box is a note which says, "YOU are to blame!"  This game has already started and, of course, the music stopped some time ago because Greece has, to all intents and purposes, defaulted on its obligations months ago but the EU being the EU this has not happened, indeed, cannot happen unless and until they say it has happened! 

So why, you may reasonably ask, is our government continuing to take our money and lend it to the Europeans when they know that it is money down a Greek/Irish/Portugese drain - to say nothing of the forthcoming drains which are about to open wide?  The answer, according to Paul Goodman at Conservative Home is twofold.  First, there is what he calls the 'Euro Blob', so-called after Sir Chris Woodhead's appellation which he attached to the inertia-ridden education bureaucracy.  The 'Euro Blob' is that mass of civil servants, diplomats and politicians who simply cannot bring themselves to even imagine a world without the euro and without the European Union.  His second suggested reason is the fear amongst Cameron's administration that they will be blamed for the resulting crash if they decide, alone in Europe, to tell it the way it is and refuse to put any more of our money up to support a charade.  In such circumstances the Kaiserin and the Hungarian dwarf would be delighted because, at a stroke, they would be able to point their fingers at "perfidious Albion" (again!) and heap all the responsibility and acrimony on to us.

In my humble and, when it comes to international finance pretty ignorant, opinion, the default and the end of the euro (as we know it today) has already happened.  The 'Blob' are merely rushing around papering over cracks in the walls when the roof has already blown down the street.  Hence, it is necessary to consider what follows.  Pain, is the only honest answer.  That our pain will be somewhat less than others because of the almost unbelievably fortuitious circumstances that ejected us from the euro system will aid us little because pain is pain and to know that others are hurting more is little comfort.  As far as I can see the immediate results will be an enormous strain on the world-wide banking system because there is no way in which the effects can be confined to Europe.  Credit will become increasingly difficult to obtain and businesses, as well as individuals, will suffer accordingly.  It will not last, these sorts of things never do, sooner or later capitalism re-invents itself to cope with prevailing conditions.

My main concern is political rather than financial and can be summed up in the simple question - whither Europe?  Easily posed but the answer is hideously difficult.  I suspect that many of the Mediterranean fringe nations will, in their distress, fall to dictatorships of the Right or Left.  That would be distressing but not necessarily a threat to our national interests.  Spain under Franco, and Greece under the generals, operated fairly normally on the world stage and it was more than possible to do business with them.  However, mitteleurop would probably graft themselves, more or less tightly according to taste and history, to the Franco/German axis. 

So what will we do?  Stumble-bum our way along, as usual, I suppose, trying not to upset anyone and ignoring the patent hostility of those to whom we are sucking up.  Perhaps a better question is what should we do?  In the words of Sellers & Yeatman, a Franco-German mitteleurop could be 'A Good Thing', but there again, it could be 'A Bad Thing'.  Instinctively, as a Brit, I am exceedingly wary of any large power dominating Europe however, there is a danger that if the EU disintegrates the smaller and more volatile east European nations might prove a tempting target for expansionary Russia to pick up on the cheap.  Russia has degenerated into a gangster state and gangsters, whilst brutal and greedy, are not always too intelligent.  The existence of a fairly strong Franco-German edifice containing a ring of satellite east European nations might give Russia pause.  The problem underlying that scenario, of course, is that such a Franco-German edifice, in military terms, would not be at all strong, indeed, feeble is more the word.  Even worse, the Germans having just decided to forego all nuclear options for civil energy are now hanging from the Russian energy teat.  Of course, as reality sinks in they might be able to switch to France's already thriving nuclear power industry but that will not cater for all their needs in oil and natural gas.

Given that, there is also another possible development, and that is another Russo-German pact.  Germany (and France) need to export their industrial products, and Russia needs to export its oil and gas.  Why fall out over the likes of Poland?  They didn't in 1939, they carved it up between them!  They need not do it again literally because they could achieve much the same result by simply leaning on Poland from east and west to ensure compliance on important matters.  The possibility of a Russo-German-Franco sphere of influence across Europe is alarming, to say the least.  So, again the question is what should we do?

First, above and beyond all other things, we need to take a long, hard look at what we are, what we are worth, what, precisely and exactly, are our strengths and our weaknesses.  At the moment I would suggest that we are enfeebled.  If the euro currency system crashes we will be reduced to 'walking wounded'.  It is essential, therefore, that very harsh measures are taken to strip away the froth and silliness which have bedevilled and enfeebled our country.  I almost wrote that we should get 'back to basics' but that phrase has suffered bad publicity in the past.  Even so, something like it is required.  Schools and education must be forced to stick to the fundamentals required to produce a working class educated to work!  Immigration must be reduced to a tiny hand-picked minority.  Unlike the 'lady with the lamp' who stands at the approach to New York, we do not want "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", we just want your surgeons, your scientists, your IT specialists and your billionaires!   Every help must be given in the form of lifting restrictions and regulations to businesses to thrive, particularly industrial business.  By all means hive off the High Street banking operations from the speculative end of the business and ring-fence them, but then allow the investment banks almost free reign to get on and make London a world centre for high finance.  We must do our best to remain good neighbours with Europe but at the same time we should, once again, become a global operator, not in military terms, those days are over for quite a while, but in terms of doing business with anyone anywhere in the world.

None of this will happen, of course, because our political class are timid and useless and look no further ahead than the next election.  As it is us that vote for them every five years, the responsibility is ours. 

Pssst! Dave! Need some dosh? I got an idea . . .

For goodness sake, 'Dave, stop playing with those model airplanes, I'm fed up with you racing round No. 10 all day with a Spitfire in your hand shouting, "Ratatatatat, take that you Libyan swine!"  Young George next door is becoming very agitated about the overdraft which is even bigger than it need be because you authorised lending zillions to the EU who in turn are lending it to the Greeks - the Greeks!!! - and anyone else with a nice line in blarney - oh God, that reminds me, the 'Oirish', too.  Anyway, George is snivelling because that bully Ed Balls keeps beating him up, and the overdraft is growing and growing and the Shylocks international bond dealers are getting restless.  Now, if you'll just put the'phone down for a minute and stop repeating, "Oui, oui, monsieur le President" I can tell you a sure fire way to rake in some dosh.

I can't take all the credit for this brilliant idea, it was that Don Boudreaux at The Cafe Hayek who put it in my mind.  According to him, that huge, university-educated brain-box who rules America has been paying Brazil $12 million monthly - yes, $12 million monthly! - as a bribe means to stop the Brazilians from raising import tariffs on American goods.  Need I say more, Dave?  Just drop a few hints, nudge and wink, know what I mean?  The Yank's will cough up, no problemo!

Tweet not lest ye be tweeted!

Not much originality here today because of the decorators so forgive my apparent idleness.  My grateful thanks to Peter Hoskin at The Coffee House who collected some of the tweeted questions aimed at 'Cain' Miliband when he was daft enough to open himself up to questioning on the internet.  Had I known of it I would have asked the following: Hi, Cain, how's Abel?  However, I am easily outdone in wit by several people and here are a few examples:

@MTPT: If a train leaves Paddington at 1136, carrying 200 commuters, what time will the RMT bring it to a standstill?
@FelicityParkes: Where did Ed Balls touch you? Show us on the doll.
@MShapland: hows your brother
@Charlesm186: how many knives did you put in Tony Blair's back?
@alexmassie: Was Brutus an honourable man? Discuss.
@Toy_Tory: you were the one who was foreign secretary, right?
@Tory_Torch: Do you believe it is right for Bob Crow to live in a council house?
@jamesburdett: If you fell through a crack in the universe would anyone notice?
@journodave: Lenin or Trotsky?

And last, but most to the point:

@obotheclown: Have you sacked the c**t who had this idea yet?

All very cruel but very funny.

 

Sexy and gorgeous

See, I knew that headline would get you clicking over here in a hurry!  My thanks go to Donald Pettinger at Art Contrarian who in this post offers a delectable collection of paintings of beautiful women.  If, like me, you are having a grotty day (I'm surrounded by decorators who have piled all my furniture in the centre of the room and covered them with dust sheets and I can't find a damn thing) then whizz over and take a look.  Terrific paintings and gorgeous girls!

 

For God's sake,who gave the sun a cure for acne?

Now look here, be serious, this is no joke!  According to some terrifically swottish solar experts sun spots, or to be precise, the lack of them, are likely/probably/maybe/possibly (you choose) to lead to another Maunder Minimum.  What's that?  Never heard of it? Well, let me tell you, it lasted 70-odd years and despite my peurile attempts at humour it was no laughing matter but a catastrophe of huge proportions.  Temperatures fell across Europe, the Thames froze frequently, as did the Baltic, in places the earth was frozen to a depth of 1 metre and, needless to say, wheat crops failed and people starved.  The winter of 1708/9 was known as The Great Frost (Le Grand Hiver). 

As regular readers will know, I never believed in the theory of global warming, not because I am a terrific science swot - I failed maths, physics and chemistry at 'O' level - but because of the sort of people who were pushing it, and the way in which they pushed it.  I have more or less stopped writing about it now because after the 'climate-gate' e-mails were published it was obvious to anyone with half an eye that the whole thing was a scam.  The fact that so many people still appear to be 'half eyed', or half witted,  is of no interest to me, not least because none of them are ever likely to visit this blog.  However, I have been keeping half of one of my eyes on the reported lack of sun spot activity which the estimable Michael Watts and his contributors have been reporting on regularly for the last 2 or 3 years.  What began as a slight worry has gradually became somewhat alarming. 

Yesterday, the American Astronomical Society (AAS) reported the results of three seperate lines of scientific enquiry into the sun's activity, or lack of it, and they all agreed:

“All three of these lines of research point to the familiar sunspot cycle shutting down for a while.”

Immediately, I must enter a caveat.  From what I have read here and there no-one is absolutely certain what the effects will be of the disappearance of sun spots but the correlation between lack of sun spot activity and extremely cold weather is very strong.

 

I would add my own scientifically ignorant, prejudical/commonsensical (you choose) opinion that of all the influences effecting our world's climate the sun outweighs them all by an enormous factor.  To paraphrase, if the sun sneezes, we all catch a cold - and some of us freeze or starve to death!

Watch out, as a great president once said, "You ain't seen nothin' yet!"

Will Germany lose WWIII?

As usual, a wildly inaccurate and misleading title, but hey, you don't come here for engineering exactitude!  Even so, there is a grain of truth in it.  During the late 20th c. Germany has pursued policy aims first set down at the beginning of the 20th c. and then repeated in the middle of the 20th c., that is, the formation of a mitteleurop under German control.  These aims were originally enforced by bayonets but having failed, twice, they have now seen the way to success by means of money-lending.  Thus, one by one the nations of Europe fall into the hands of their bankers, the Germans.  But, as the old saying goes, if you owe your bank £1 they have you by the short and curlies, but if you owe them, say, £100 billion, then you enter a scorpion and frog scenario.

The mounting pressures within the EU are well-described by Nouriel Roubini in the FT; they stem from the inbuilt fault line by which the EU tries to have a common currency without a common fiscal authority.  Needless to say, those who pointed to the elephant in the Brussels/Berlin livingroom years ago were derided and ignored.  The other element which has accelerated the crisis is the fact that the Greek, Portugese, Irish and, well, more or less most Euro politicians, are born-again liars when it comes to money. Roubini reminds us that the debt problems facing these countries is short-term, in other words, the money-lenders want their dosh and they want it now, or at least, very shortly.  Thus, the German solution:

reforms to increase productivity growth and keep a lid on wage growth — will not work either. In the short run such reforms actually tend to reduce growth and it took more than a decade for Germany to restore its competitiveness, a horizon that is way too long for periphery economies that need growth soon.

IRONY ALERT!  There is some ghoulish humour to be derived from the fact that the euro, itself, cannot devalue to help these impoverished nations export their way out of trouble because its value is held up by the successful German power-house economy!  The words 'hoist' and 'petard' come to mind.  Roubini dismisses other escape routes proposed by the fairytale believers in Brussels/Berlin and insists there is only one way out of the predicament:

there is really only one other way to restore competitiveness and growth on the periphery: leave the euro, go back to national currencies and achieve a massive nominal and real depreciation. After all, in all those emerging market financial crises that restored growth a move to flexible exchange rates was necessary and unavoidable on top of official liquidity, austerity and reform and, in some cases, debt restructuring and reduction.

You can almost hear the sibilant hiss of intaken breath at even the hint of such a thing.  But Roubini is insistent:

Of course today the idea of leaving the euro is treated as inconceivable, even in Athens and Lisbon. Exit would impose big trade losses on the rest of the eurozone, via major real depreciation and capital losses on the creditor core, in much the same way as Argentina’s “pesification” of its dollar debt did during its last crisis.

Yet scenarios that are treated as inconceivable today may not be so far-fetched five years from now, especially if some of the periphery economies stagnate. The eurozone was glued together by the convergence of low real interest rates sustaining growth, the hope that reforms could maintain convergence; and the prospect of eventual fiscal and political union. But now convergence is gone, reform is stalled, while fiscal and political union is a distant dream. [My emphasis]

Is anyone at our 'Ministry for Foreigners', or even at No. 10, itself, preparing for this eventuality?  I doubt it.  However, I hope the Treasury and the boardrooms of our big banks are paying attention because we will be hit very hard by such a major default.  The Germans, however,will be absolutely crippled by it.  Oh dear, what a pity never mind.  Anyway, after three tries they have the whole of the 21st c. to try and get it right!

 

"To be or not to be"

No, don't worry, this is not going to be another yawn about Shakespeare.  I didn't see the TV show in which some poor chap suffering with an incurable disease was 'offed' by one of his relatives at that death factory in Switzerland.  Hitherto I have avoided the subject of assisted suicide mainly on the grounds that it is, usually, an intensely private affair in which the clod-hopping Law should tread with great delicacy.  On the other hand, killing someone concerns us all and so, with a sigh, I turn to the subject today.

I must confess that I am provoked to it by Anna Raccoon who writes an excellent and acerbic post on the subject in which she approaches this barbed-wire controversy from the point of view of the killer (I use plain English on a subject which is frequently lost in the soppy mush of euphemism):

If you think you are going to find yourself in a situation where you may not be able to drive up Snowdonia with a length of hosepipe one day; if you really can’t face the pain, or whatever it is that ails you – then you have the perfect right to take your own life, quietly, in the manner of your choosing, when you can, how you can.

Don’t force your family to behave as though killing you is a perfectly normal thing to do. It isn’t. You owe them better than that – especially if they are your children, or partner.

That about sums it up for me, to paraphrase, it's called having the courage of your own catastrophe.  But, of course, this being an intensely human affair, no drawn lines are ever entirely straight.  I can visualise a scenario in which a loving couple having shared their lives might, at the end of day, reach an almost unspoken agreement for one partner to guide the other through the exit.  Needless to say, this will entail the entry of P.C. Plod and quite rightly so because killing is a serious matter and concerns society as much as the individual.  In such cases, the killer must face the consequences - and the questions - and one can only hope that wise judges will rule according to the circs.

'The Secret in Their Eyes': dir. Juan José Campanella

Had you asked me yesterday what I thought of the Argentinian film industry I would have replied by asking what film industry?  But last night I watched on the Sky Indie channel a film called The Secret in Their Eyes directed by Juan José Campanella.  It will surely play again on Sky but if you do not have satellite then treat yourself to a DVD and you will watch one of the very best films to come available for some time.  Nicely complex plot which unfolds slowly to end with a disturbing moral conundrum.  Perhaps the only very slight difficulty  for an Englishman was in trying to work out the exact heirarchy of the Argentinian police-judicial bureaucracy in which our hero operates.  (Normally, I put single inverted commas round the word 'hero' but in this case he really is a hero, not in terms of physical courage but much more interestingly, in moral courage.)  All the performances were simply first-rate, and the screenplay and the direction were absolutely surefooted even as the story skipped backwards and forwards over 25 years.  I particularly liked the way the director shot the scenes in which there were two 'talking heads', so to speak, nothing flash but he chose good angles to film them.  This is one of those films you will not forget in a hurry, the plot and the characters who people it will linger long.

Order, counter-order, dis-order

CHQ (Coalition Head Quarters), and I mean that ragbag shambles in Westminster not the European shambles trying to turn Libya into an even bigger desert than it is already, is rapidly resembling a Monty Python sketch.  'Field Marshal' Cameron is dithering about ordering advances one minute and retreats the next and it's becoming obvious that the man is totally useless.  It's only goofy young 'Cain' Miliband who provides him, by comparison, with a spurious veneer of competence.

He's obviously lost command and control over his admirals, one of whom piped up this morning to point out the 'bleedin' obvious' that the Libya operation would have been much easier if we still had an aircraft carrier and some Harriers.  To which I can only reply that if this admiral had as much guts as he has gold braid he would have resigned either when the Ark Royal was decommissioned or when this desert wet dream began.

I sit here shaking my head and wondering if there is anyone - anyone at all - in Westminster with even a shred of competence?  Perhaps if she doesn't make it in the primaries My Darling Sarah will come over and run us for a while.  Well, a man can dream, can't he?

Gotta love this one!

I am always a sucker for nay-sayers and the more fervently any particular opinion or scientific theory is held, the more I cheer on the gadflys who buzz in and shout, "Bollocks!"  Well, except, of course, when it is an opinion or theory dear to my heart!  Anyway, some time ago I stumbled across this site which offers "counter examples to the theory of relativity".  Because I can never quite get my head around Einstein's theory then, like every other ignoramus in history, I join in with the sneers and jeers.   I remember years ago reading the emminent British journalist, Tom Bethell, in The American Spectator, who maintained a constant barrage of criticism against relativity, and admiring his nerve and, to be fair, his persuasiveness.  Anyway, this particular site offers not one refutation but 35 "counter examples", although I'm not sure precisely what they mean by that, however, one in particular took my fancy:

The barn and ladder paradox: Person A has a ladder too long to store in his barn. Person B takes the ladder and runs very fast into the barn. For A the ladder will contract, and if the velocity is fast enough, it will fit in the barn. But to B, who is moving with the ladder, it is the barn that will contract, making the problem even worse. So, who is correct? Does the ladder fit in the barn? This problem was considered in the book Introduction to Electrodynamics by David Griffiths, and the author, who supports Relativity, claim that both are correct. The ladder both fits and doesn’t fit in the barn. This is obviously against elementary rules of logic.

If you are a maths and physics swot, please don't bother to try and explain it, I'm too thick!

 

I see the future - bugger! who put that step in the way?

Human beings are prone to wasting their time.  If they are sensible they confine themselves to wasting their own time but on occasions, if they are determined to be tiresome, they insist on wasting other people's time, as well.  I am something of an expert on this time-wasting lark because, you see, I am wasting your time now even as you read this daft blog post!  However, rather like my theatrical efforts, at this I remain a stumbling amateur but there are others who are so brilliant at wasting everybody's time that they become a positive menace.  Take futurologists - no, please, please, do take them and do something to them they never imagined would happen, just to please me and also for the rare pleasure of seeing the surprise on their faces.

I am back to The Boston Globe again, this time in the amiable company of Graeme Wood who reports on the activities of some ultra-futurologists beginning with our very own, home-grown one, Prof. Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, no less, and the winner of the $1.7 million 2011 Templeton prize - crikey, I bet he didn't see that coming!  This terrific maths and physics swot told the Royal Institute of Terrific Maths and Physics Swots the other day:

Our sun formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more before the fuel runs out [...] It won’t be humans who witness the sun’s demise: It will be entities as different from us as we are from a bug.

Well, he might be right, but there again, he might be wrong, after all, going by past experience the predictions of Futurologists are not something you would bet the deeds of the house on.  Anyway, apparently Oxford University has opened a new department - The Future of Humanity Institute.  I assume they have seen the future and despite current restraints remain confident of endless expenditure on dotty university projects well into, er, the future.

There are, it must be said, some interesting conjectures to be enjoyed, for example, according to one contributor, Sean Carroll, a major swot from (where else?) - California:

[T]o a cosmologist steeped in the vastness of time, 6 billion years may not even seem so long. Carroll puts the sun’s remaining years in stark perspective, noting that one can go further and set one’s cosmological egg timer for the burnout of all the stars in the universe (about one thousand million million years from now) and for the evaporation of the last black holes (about a googol, or one followed by a hundred zeroes, years from now). “After that, the universe will simply continue to expand and dilute, and that will go on forever,” he says.

Well, it's all fascinating stuff and I suppose if it keeps a few old, tweedy profs off our street corners and out of the parks where they would otherwise hang around drinking dry sherry in front of our precious, little kiddie-winkies, then why not?  But, as I read Mr. Wood's interesting article a nagging suspicion started to jump up and down in the back of my mind - yeah, yeah, I know, plenty of room there - and it wasn't too far down his report when I read these ominous words from some cove called Nick Bostrom who I already think of as a sort of latter-day Ernst Stavro Blofeld:

Thinkers about the future deal constantly with those who dismiss their speculation as science fiction. But Bostrom, who trained in neuroscience and cosmology as well as philosophy, says he’s mining the study of the future for guidance on how we should prioritize our actions today. “I’m ultimately interested in finding out what we have most reason to do now, to make the world better in some way,” he says. [My emphases]

At this point I left the article at a run, screaming, "Oh no, not another one!"  Still, finishing as I began, if you want to waste your time go and read it, it's a good article and it does make you think.

 

My Darling Sarah - she's such a tease!

James Lewis at The American Thinker writes an amusing piece highlighting the one characteristic shared around equally according to the socialist tenets held so dearly by the American MSM - their utter stupidity.  MDS (My Darling Sarah) has announced a non-campaign, hired herself a non-campaign bus in which, by shere coincidence, she is travelling through all the swing States on her non-campaign, and because it is a non-campaign she has no PR mouthpieces with her and also she never provides prior notice of destinations or timings to the MSM hacks because, as she keeps telling them, she is engaged in a non-campaign.  It's driving them all mad!  However, their insanity is of such intensity that she is reaping colossal amounts of free publicity for her, er, non-campaign as the out-of-breath hacks desperately try to keep up whilst shouting the story up.  It's quite brilliant, really, and the ideological pin-brains in the MSM still don't get it!

Last week, of course, the MSM thought they had won a great victory by finally laying their grubbly hands on over 24,000 e-mails from the Alaskan government during MDS's time as Governor.  So vast was the quantity that the WaPo and the NYT (and The 'Grauniad') had to appeal to their readers to sift the material for any howlers because they simply did not have the manpower.  So we waited . . . and we waited  . . . and, well, nothing happened!  They are now so infuriated that Politico, for example, placed quotation marks around a harmful sentence and follow it with the words "she said" and told their readers that it was a Palin quote.    Within 24 hours they were forced to retract and hastily admitted that it was all just a silly, unfortunate mistake by a nameless copy editor - yeah, yeah, and my cock's a kipper, as they say round these parts!  In the meantime, MDS steams on and on, unfazed and no doubt chuckling gleefully at all the headlines she's garnering for nothing whilst her rival candidates probably have to shell out for them.

However, to put things in a wider perspective, the alarmingly-named but generally very astute Charles Krauthammer is the man to read.  In the WaPo he defines the two grounds upon which, when chosen, the Republican presidential candidate must fight Obama - stewardship or ideology.  According to him, in 2010 the Republicans wiped the floor with the Democrats on grounds of ideology, repeating endlessly (and accurately) that the Democrats were a socialist party intent on inflicting European-style structures on the American people.  However, alarm bells rang after a recent by-election in the 26th Congressional District of New York, hitherto a Republican seat for four decades, which suddenly turned Democrat because they seized upon Congressman Paul Ryan's recently released and highly ideologically-based budget proposition for the Republican party.  The implied threat to Medicare contained within it frightened the voters and the Dems won the ballot.  Krauthammer acknowledges that the Republican candidate was weak and that Ryan, himself, would have countered Democrat agit-prop but even so, the result was a warning. 'Obamacare' is highly unpopular but if attacks on it become embroiled with Medicare which is dearly beloved by the American public then the Republicans will suffer.

Happily (well, sort of!), the economic news has taken a dive into the basement and this raises the possibility of attacking Obama on the grounds of his abysmal stewardship.  Virtually everything he has touched has crumbled in his clumsy, socialist fist.  He simply does not get it, but the American people do as they see and experience the wreckage of lost jobs and lost homes with no sight of the cavalry coming over the horizon.  Krauthammer suggests that it need not be entirely an either/or attack on Obama's regime and that a shrewd candidate will be able to attack on both fronts.  Alas, he does not think MDS is the candidate to do it.  I can only assume she turned him down for a date!

 

Bloody Shakespeare, but I do miss him!

When I moved down here to the south west I was still able, with a bit of jiggery-pokery, to direct plays for my theatre group in Twickenham.  Indeed, my last production was an attempt, only partially successful, to climb the Mount Everest of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet.  Since then, of course, the price of fuel has risen like a rocket and making that sort of journey to and fro three times a week is simply unaffordable.  My attempt to recruit actors for a production of King Lear down here failed for a lack of young actors willing to take part.  But, dammit, I do miss him! 

Now, I am reduced to simply reading about him but here, at least, I seem to have struck lucky with a book I bought on the spur of the moment mainly because of the title - Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets by Don Paterson.  I only read the first paragraph of the Introduction and I knew instantly that I had picked a winner:

Since their first publication in 1609, Shakespeare's Sonnets have appeared in countless editions, and have been translated into every major living language, as well as many minor, dead and intergalactic ones, too.  Basque, Latin, Esperanto and Klingon have all played host to these verses, written 400 years ago by a bald Englishman who didn't even consider poetry his main literary medium.  The Sonnets have been awarded the ultimate accolade human culture can bestow: proverbialism.  'A Shakespeare sonnet' is almost as much a synonym for 'love poem' as 'Mona Lisa' is 'beautiful woman'.  As soon as something becomes proverbial, however, everyone feels like they already know it.  In recent times, this has relieved us of the trouble of reading the Sonnets properly.

Ouch!  That last sentence struck home.  However, I just know that I am going to enjoy Mr. Paterson's 'read-a-thon' and it reminds me that reading Shakespeare is a minor skill which has to be worked at.  Like a really good, ice-cold Dry Martini, it is better sipped than gulped.  That is why I enjoy working on his plays because it is then an absolute requirement for you to take it slowly and dig below the surface of his text as you go along.  Let me give you but one example, not just for the textual analysis (if I may bestow such a pompous description on my effort) but also as an example of, perhaps, reading more into his words than he, himself, intended.  Here is the beginning of the opening speech to Troilus & Cressida:

In Troy, there lies the scene. From isles of Greece
The princes orgulous, their high blood chafed,
Have to the port of Athens sent their ships,
Fraught with the ministers and instruments
Of cruel war: sixty and nine, that wore
Their crownets regal, from the Athenian bay
Put forth toward Phrygia; and their vow is made
To ransack Troy, within whose strong immures
The ravish'd Helen, Menelaus' queen,
With wanton Paris sleeps; and that's the quarrel.

This prologue, containing as it does some rather high-blown, poetic language is probably spoken by a junior officer, the equivalent of a platoon commander.  In virtually one long sentence he describes the background but, right at the end, he finishes with a flat, simple commonplace, a brief phrase which might easily be missed by a casual reader.  Of course, Shakespeare does provides a hint to the careful reader/director/actor not to dash past too quickly by making the next line short, only six syllables instead of the usual ten:

To Tenedos they come;
And the deep-drawing barks do there disgorge . . .  etc, etc

Why the sudden short line? we ask, and whilst pausing and looking at the preceding line with its sudden change from rich description to four flat, ordinary words, again we wonder why?  I think it's because there is within them, when you cut away the preceding bullshit, a whole world of confusion, anguish, loss, regret and sorrow in that phrase which is delibarately intended to be a counterpoint to the poetics that come before it.  The Greeks have been in the field for years of seemingly endless slaughter, indulging in a terrible outlay of blood and treasure - and for what?  For a woman whom contemporary Frenchmen would describe as "une grande horizontale"!  In that short, brutal phrase - "and that's the quarrel" - lies all the helpless, shrugging despair of a world in which war is eternal.

Or does it?  Now we come to my caveat.  Did Shakespeare have that in mind when he wrote it?  Or am I reading too much into it?  Perhaps, it was nothing more than his realisation that bar the first six words at the very beginning of the speech the rest is one sentence and therefore likely to leave an actor short of breath, and all he is doing with the short line is to provide the actor with a couple of beats as a pause for him to gather himself for the rest of the speech.  Of course, I am approaching his words from my century and my background and my personality and try as might (and I don't try that hard) I cannot step outside of myself.  What I do try to do is to discern his intentions, his meanings, his motives.  That is hard enough with any writer but with Shakespeare it is almost impossible.  At times you feel he is deliberately elliptical and evasive.  Of course, living when he did, he had good reason to tiptoe delicately around some topics because one slip could lead to the scaffold.  Take the Duke in Measure for Measure, is he intended to be a metaphor for God?  In this irreligious day and age it is tempting to think so because the Duke in this play, although all-powerful, is actually a bit of a bumbling old idiot who shirks his duty of care to his own state.  But if the censors of the early 17th century had even suspected that that was what Shakespeare was hinting at obliquely then his career would have ended rather abruptly - and bloodily!

Returning to the Sonnets, I am guilty as charged by Mr. Paterson of 'knowing' them but not really knowing them because I haven't ever read them all and those that I have I have not read properly.  Judging from his introductory words, I think Mr. Paterson will take me through them with great wisdom, considerable learning and some humour, and I can't wait to get started.

 

Luke 15:x

No, no, don't go dashing off trying to find your bible which you probably haven't looked at in years and will have forgotten where in hell you put it; here is the King James version:

[...] there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.

I am provoked to this bible-punching by a recent story in the Boston Globe by Leon Neyfakh, one of their staff writers.  He describes what must have been a Bateman-like(*) scene in Darwinian circles when, in March this year, Nature magazine published a paper by E. O. Wilson (or God, as he is known in biological circles!) and a couple of maths swots by the name of Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita.  In it they crucified (sorry, but this biblical stuff is catching) the long and dearly cherished notion of neo-Darwinists that altruism stems from kin relationships, that is, the closer you are related to someone the more likely you are to risk your life for them because they share your microscopically tiny bits of protein 'goo' called genes and which, according to 'Archbishop' Richard Dawkins, entirely rule our lives and behaviours - well, if you believe that, you'll believe anything!  But neo-Darwinists do believe it, indeed, they cling to it like ship-wreck survivors on a raft because, of course, according to them we are all entirely slaves to rule by 'gene-goo' which is, as Dawkins insists with eye-ball swivelling intensity, entirely selfish and thus, there is, there can be, no such thing as altruism.  What we assume is altruism, is in fact, selfishness because by helping our kin who, depending on how closely bred they are to us, also carry our 'selfish' genes, we are really helping ourselves, er, even as we drown, get run over, shot, perish in a fire, or whatever we do to save our brothers, cousins, second-cousins and so on.

The fact that a skim through the papers, made so much easier today via the internet, produces a steady stream of stories of incredible acts of bravery, sometimes terminal, by complete strangers on behalf of others is a fact not allowed to disturb the priestly serenity of 'Archbishop' Dawkins and his acolytes.  But now, E. O. Wilson, hitherto one of the most highly emminent members of the priesthood, a sort of papal figure in the neo-Darwinist sect, has arisen and claimed that all this kin altruism is wrong, and he goes on to make use of his two maths wizards to prove it!  The fact that it was Wilson, himself, who years ago first discovered William Hamilton's obscure paper proposing kin selection and made it famous and accepted by biologists across the world, makes his recantation all the more explosive.

What Wilson now proposes, some 30 years later, is what he calls 'group altruism', in other words, members of the same group will sacrifice themselves for other members of the group irrespective of any kinship, and apparently his mathematical assistants have proved it.  Under heavy bombardment from his erstwhile friends, Wilson, with sardonic humour:

paraphrases Arthur Schopenhauer to explain his current standing in his field. “All new ideas go through three phases,” Wilson said, with some happy mischief in his voice. “They’re first ridiculed or ignored. Then they meet outrage. Then they are said to have been obvious all along.”

(*) For the benefit of my foreign readers, H. M. Bateman was an English cartoonist famous and well-loved in the early part of the 20th century, particularly for a stream of cartoons with the catchphrase beginning "The man who  . . ." and followed by some dreadful faux pas committed by some poor sucker who didn't know the rules.

 

 

The madness of 'King' Gordon!

It is now quite clear from the Telegraph story that 'King' Gordon Brown was an endogenous growth theory short of a picnic!  Or, to put it another way, he was a sulky, psychotic spender of epic proportions who made Imelda Marcos look like a miser.  Obviously I don't know the man personally but even I, at the time, had my suspicions from the way he looked and behaved in office.  Those reporters on the fringe of Westminster affairs hinted strongly at his, shall we say, peculiar personality, and were roundly set upon by 'Blinky' Balls for doing so.  It is now clear beyond any doubt that Brown, and all the creepy lick-spittles who surrounded him, wreaked havoc with our national finances.  In other words, it wasn't the bankers wot done it - it was Gordon Brown and his arse-wipers-in-chief, that is, Ed Balls and 'Cain' Miliband.  Surely now, it will take decades before the British electorate trusts them with our money again.

Ed Balls might hope to blink away his current misfortunes but it must be dawning on him that he is finished as a potential leader of his party.  One doesn't expect too much in the way of political acumen, or even good, old-fashioned commonsense, from the 'Bruvvers and Sisters' but even they could not be stupid enough to elect this malignant little disturber of the peace as their leader.  Not only has he been shown up as a vicious and underhand plotter and political assassin, but even worse, he's not very good at it!  I think it was Quentin Letts who thought that this might offer an opportunity to his ghastly wife, Yvette Cooper, but Letts went on to suggest, only half humorously, I think, that Ed Balls would probably put her in the family way to stop her ambitions!

It is now apparent that 'Cain' Miliband is the only member of the Labour party who actually makes 'Field Marshal' Cameron look good!  It cannot be long before they cast about for a new leader.  Quentin Letts suggested Hilary Benn.  I haven't a clue, they all look and sound equally dim and dismal to me.  Anyone any ideas?

 

So it's farewell then, Glenn Beck!

What with this, that and the other I haven't seen much of Glenn Beck recently on Fox (sat. channel 509, 10.00 pm weekdays).  I had picked up the news that he was parting company from Fox but listening to him yesterday I was a little surprised that his show ends in a fortnight.  I shall miss him.  He over-came my English reserve, which recoils somewhat when faced with the sort of extrovert, American 'pizzazz' for which he is famous, because his non-stop 'yadda-yadda', when you listened to it carefully, was very soundly based on detailed research, not just on contemporary affairs but also much of the obscure history surrounding the beginnings and the subsequent growth of American Marxist-socialism.  The American MSM, with 'Huffpo' in the lead, fairly spat with fury at the wounds Beck inflicted upon them but he was able, time and time again, to quote the actual words of the early progenitors of the current progressive movement and expose their subversive and revolutionary aims and methods.  He was, and I use this word with deliberation, an educator in the very best sense of that word.

It is true that sometimes his style grates, particularly when he goes off on one about trust in God, and all that sort of thing, but his insistence that Americans must try and understand the meaning and the importance of their constitution and the philosophical imperatives which drove the Founding Fathers is crucial if a modern electorate is to understand the threat that faces them from 'the enemy within'.  Happily, his audience via radio and TV has grown and grown and with it his influence.  If, as I profoundly hope, Obama and his wretched wrecking crew are turned out of office next year then Glenn Beck deserves to take much of the credit.  I hope the next Republican president gives him a Medal of Honour, or whatever the civilian equivalent is!

 

FIrst he plotted to 'kill' his Brother, then he actually 'killed' his brother!

The revelations in today's Telegraph are no great surprise but the detail is fascinating.  Also it provides an answer to a question which has often puzzled me, to wit, why is it that apparently fairly well-educated men can become so utterly and completely useless when they gain political office?  They never seem to accomplish even a fraction of the things they claim are important.  The old theory, as exemplified by the famous TV series Yes, Minister, was that the mandarins in the Civil Service ran rings round them but it has become increasingly clear over the last 25 years that the these so-called 'mandarins' with their second class degrees from 'Hartlepool University' are as thick as planks, themselves!

Enter, stage left, Murderers I and II

However, now we can begin to see the real reason for ministerial incompetence.  It's because they don't bother with the 'day job', instead they concentrate all their energies and every waking hour on plotting against whoever is on their shit-list of the time.

At least irony lovers, like me, can hug ourselves with undiluted pleasure at the delicious irony that 'Blinky' Balls, the 'main man' leading Brown's repulsive campaign to stab Blair in the back, and who reckoned that after he had helped the 'One-eyed Jock' into No. 10 would naturally be the leadership inheritor after Brown had gone, has now found out to his intense fury (I guess) that despite his subversive plot to stab 'Brother' Blair in the back, it is his assistant, Murderer 2 as Shakespeare might have labelled him, Ed Miliband who, with Balls-like malignancy 'killed' his own blood-brother's political ambition, has now gone onwards and upwards to steal the crown from under Balls's beady eyes.  Oh, joy unconfined!

Now we have reached Act III, in which 'King' Miliband sits uneasily on the edge of his throne knowing at first hand and from bloody experience what a ruthless, conniving, murderous shit his 'Chancellor' is.  Even now, 'Cain' Miliband can guess from his own experience the nature of the cabals that are being formed, the secret memos that are being circulated and the plots and stratagems being hatched.  It's a bit like one of those assassination movies in which some bigwig target-figure suddenly becomes aware of a bright red dot on his suit and realises that it is a laser beam from a sniper's rifle.  And a minor irony can be enjoyed when we remember that in the Labour party they call each other 'Brother', as in, for instance, "Brother, can you spare a dagger?"

In the meantime, of course, the Labour party and all it's suckers members can go to hell, their leaders are far too busy on much more important matters than mere policy.

But if our lot are crap, take a look 'over there'!

After writing the preceding post I ambled over to The American Spectator - and then wished I hadn't!  The first thing I saw was a piece by Peter Ferrara and even the title was enough to give me the collywobbles - The Coming Crash of 2013.  In it, Ferrara spells out the incredible crash course that the Obama regime, cheered on by the New Democratic party, are pursuing with relentless ideological fervour.  I call it the 'New' Democratic party because no-one has ever seen it before, let alone experienced it, in such an ultra-Left-wing guise as it now appears.  In fact, just yesterday I caught on Fox News that some particular Democrat Congressman had decided that he would not stand for re-election and, according to the commentary, part of his reason was that he is a mid-western incumbent with moderate, left of centre views which matched his electorate but he and other mid-western Democrats were now well and truly outnumbered in the Party by the ultras from the east and west coasts and, tarred with their Marxist ideology, that made them unelectable.  To put this in British terms, think of a Labour party dominated by the likes of Dennis Skinner - dread thought!  The only good news to be derived from the story is the indication that in the coming presidential election middle America is likely to vote solidly Republican.  We must all hope they do because America is now standing in the Last Chance Saloon.  It will require a convulsive effort on the part of Americans but it is essential that they throw Obama and his wretched Leftist party overboard, that is, that they elect a Republican, and preferably a Reaganite one, to the White House and then ensure that both houses of Congress go to the Republican party.

Ferrara spells out the dangers of this not happening.  It isn't just the economic catastrophe which will smash America in 2013 (and whose shock waves will give us, over here, an enormous battering) but also the long-term strategic effects which will arise from a world in which America is no longer a super power.  As Ferrara puts it:

But what is the effect when that happens to the world's supposed superpower? America financed World War II by running up our national debt to its all-time record as a percent of GDP (for now). But that won't be possible when we have already run ourselves into national bankruptcy.

Our potential military enemies will be quite aware of this historic vulnerability of America. Just as Reagan brought us Peace through Strength, Obamanomics will be inviting War through Weakness. With a 2013 American economic collapse that will also disable the entire West, the world's uncivilized rogues from Russia, to China, to North Korea, to the Middle East Islamists dreaming of renewed world conquest, will all be tempted probably beyond resistance and reason to strike. They don't need even to attack the homeland to deal America a decisive defeat. They can just decimate our suddenly overwhelmed allies, from Israel to South Korea to Taiwan to our allies in the Middle East, let alone some even in Europe.

Remember, it is weakness which encourages war, not strength.  By and large I am not the praying type, except when I'm in a loose-bowelled funk when I tend miraculously to rediscover God, but as the next American election draws closer I might well find myself kneeling by the bed every evening before night-nights time!

 

Our government - a bunch of floundering, blundering stumble-bums

It seems like every morning I awake to news of yet another governmental re-think , or even, re-re-think, on this, that or the other policy, all of which raises the question of exactly how much, if any, thought went on beforehand?  I never expected much in the way of a honed political philosophy from an ex-PR greaser like Cameron whose only interest in life, like his hero, Blair, was to slide his well-tailored arse into the chair behind the No.10 desk and keep it there for as long as possible.  However, we were told that whilst in opposition some of his team had been thinking long and hard over future policies right down to the nitty-gritty details so that they would come to office ready to race away the minute the starting pistol fired.  Actually, what we have seen are several mis-starts, one or two prat falls and some ministers tripping over because they had tied their shoe laces together!  It would be laughable if it wasn't so serious.  It took the country several years and several wars to 'suss out' Blair but I reckon by Christmas just about everyone will be sick and tired of this collection of feeble-minded, incompetent, political retards.

Send for the lesbian-straightener!

The waspish Anna Raccoon carries out an exquisite scalpel job on the former MP for Redcar - and, no, I don't know where it is either but probably somewhere 'ooop north of the M25' where the sun don't shine!  The ex-MP concerned is a lady (well, I'm not sure of that exactly so let's just say she is of the female persuasion) called Vera Baird.  She it was who took over the Redcar seat following the death of the not-very-much-missed by me, Mo Mowlem.  Happily she did not last very long, the voters of Redcar, presumably, having come to their senses after being daft enough to keep voting for Mo Mowlem, the thinking man's box of rocks! 

Ms. Raccoon tells it all much better than I can so pop over and read the juicy details.  Of course, there is something deliciously exciting when women go for each other which is probably why I am such a fan of ladies wrestling in mud.  Also, she manages to throw vitriol at some 'collar and tie job' called Prof. Jill Radford who is Ms. Baird's other loving half, so to speak.

 

Vera Baird

Prof. Jill Radford

Anyway, read all about it at Ms. Raccoon's place but I can tell you now that there is only one thing to be done - call for the lesbian-straightener!  Chris Huhne's the man for this job.  He'll have these chaps gals straightened out in no time - what a man!

 

Blogdom's great plagiarist strikes again!

"Blogdom's great plagiarist".  Who he, you ask?  Er, well, me, actually.  Sorry and all that but sometimes, no, constantly, I find my fellow bloggers so much sharper and wittier than me and I just feel impelled to beg, borrow or steal their ideas, or, copy their copy, as you might, and they do, call it.  The fact that on occasions I steal from people I consider to be my e-pals fails to make me hesitate in my dastardly behaviour for even a nano-second.  Today, I plagiarise ruthlessly an old e-pal, Malcolm Pollack from waka waka waka (although really he deserves it for giving his excellent blog such a daft name!), who in a post yesterday sought to explain the prevailing, and worsening, economic woes in the USA.  He quotes from some outfit called the Small Business Administration which had produced a paper on the increasing burdens of regulatory costs imposed by central government.  All very interesting but then Malcolm, in a stroke of genius, proved yet again that one picture is worth a thousand words:

Says it all, does it not?  Thanks, Malcolm.

 

Never mind the bloody Arabs, what about a European 'Spring'?

It has been obvious since its inception that the euro common currency was riven with one huge and potentially catastrophic fault line.  You cannot have a common currency amongst sovereign states unless you have a common, that is, centralised, fiscal authority.  You need only look across the water to see the example of the United States of America.  In essence, the nations of Europe have to choose between sovereignty or a Federal government.  The early Americans had an advantage when they took their decision because they had fled from what many of them thought of as tyranny and, aided by high-minded, and mostly British, 18th century philosophy, they were able to draw up a constitution to which all were glad to sign.  But contemporary Europe is very different.  It remains the equivalent of a sack full of fighting ferrets.  Old animosities and grudges are still not forgotten and mutual trust is minimal.  (It still amazes me that some British politicians are themselves amazed at the venomous dislike with which this country is viewed from Europe.)  Similarly, these days of creeping socialism and statism have driven libertarian philosophy from the stage under a hail of boos and catcalls.  Thus, if and when the European nations agree to hand over ultimate power to Brussels (the branch office currently under the tutelage of the head office in Berlin) the 'consitution' is likely to be highly undemocratic and il-liberal.

The smaller nations of Europe - Ireland, Portugal and Greece - are already experiencing the results of losing their sovereignty and being forced to dance to the German oom-pah-pah brass band based in Brussells.  For those, like me, with a taste for irony, the pitiful spectacle of Ireland today is an example of a state of affairs in which it is impossible to decide whether to laugh or weep.  For centuries the Irish fought bloody campaigns in many of which they suffered grievously in order to rid themselves of a foreign overseer, the English, and then, having gained their liberty with sublime insouciance and stupidity they gave it all away to Brussels-Berlin.  To quote a phrase, 'you couldn't make it up'!

The Greeks and the Spaniards are beginning to 'kick off 'with constant street demos but when will the rest of Europe arise?  And when they do, will 'Field Marshal' Cameron send helicopter gunships to protect them, I wonder?  In the end, it will have to be us, the people, who decide because we cannot rely on our politicians to take a considered view.  It is necessary to constantly remind ourselves that politicians, by their very nature, are always and forever in favour of government, and the bigger the government the better they like it.  As far as this country is concerned, Cameron, Miliband and Clegg couldn't care less if Brussels grows and grows like Topsy and Westminster is reduced to the level of a county council.  The end result is just more and more and bigger and bigger government at which they can 'trough' themselves!

So the question remains.  Do we go quietly like lambs to the slaughter or do we follow the Arab example and tell our politicians, in a way which is incapable of being misunderstood, that now it is Springtime in Europe? 

ADDITIONAL:  This is the sort of thing which might eventually start it off.  From todays WSJ:

Greece is for sale—cheap—and Germany is buying.

German companies are hunting for bargains in Greece as the debt-stricken government moves to sell state-owned assets to stabilize the country's finances.

The Fashion Shoot of the Year!

Well, dear readers, you have waited patiently for it and at long last it is here - the fashion shoot of the year - and the word is "shoot", for goodness sake pay attention!  Perhaps I should begin by paying homage to two ladies who inspired me to this 'fash'n-crash'n' enterprise.  First, my very good e-pal, 'Sister Wolf' (aka 'Big Sis') whose site is frequently filled with mysteriously androgynous young men of great beauty.  Well, I pouted, anything they can do, I can do better, as I think you will all agree when you see the photographic results.  My second inspiration was my new Aussie e-pal, Andra, who was so smitten with my Long John fashion shoot that she sent me a beautiful Balinese sarong.  I decided immediately that if I was to model this elegant garment it must be in the right setting and so I decided on Majorca.  I think I can say with all due modesty that in this remarkable session, me and my team of top-class photographers, make-up artistes, dressers, security men, a pretty girl to dab the perspiration from my sun-bronzed body (what a job!), and, of course, the Memsahib my agent, have now done for the sarong what I did for Long Johns a couple of years ago.  Need I say more?

However, before you view the results I must issue my government 'Elf 'n' Safety' warning, that is, if you are of the female persuasion please be seated with a stiff drink to hand because you could become over-excited and emotional. 

Careful viewers of this first picture will instantly recognise a sub-text, as it were, to the 'dressage'.  As a compliment to my kind friend Andra, who supplied the sarong, I have embellished it with an 'Aussie' look which I'm sure you will find rather refreshing.  First, you can see that my straw hat has been carefully pinned up on one side to give that proper Aussie look.  Also, you will note the vest which, alas, was not a string vest of the type that I am told is absolutely de rigueur for Aussie chaps to wear on all occasions (shirts being optional), but it was the nearest I could get to it.

 

Of course, the high, but snug, fit of the sarong under my armpits is deliberate because, as always in matters of fashion, it is essential to have 'A New Look'!  Also, as my agent the Memsahib pointed out, it would hide what she calls my 'man boobs' - what can she mean?  The pose is deliberate, too, aiming as it does to replicate that typically Aussie approach to any 'Pom' unfortunate enough to be in their way!  The ankle-socks with sandals can only be described as simply too, too . . .  By the way, any resemblance to Mr. Gumby is entirely coincidental:

 

 

 

Next, to show my incredible versatility I have given you what Arnie and I call my 'girly man' look.  I thought this might catch the attention of 'Big Sis' who might then be tempted (how could she resist?) to publish it because I gather that sort of thing is highly favoured in certain parts of Southern California. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next is a rather staid and conventional shot likely to appeal to those of a conservative bent in which the sarong is worn properly.  However, you ladies should try and calm yourselves at the site of my naked chest! 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

Finally, I give you the Memsahib - no, honestly, she's all yours, absolutely no charge.  She's not too bad for 94, is she?  But why wouldn't she be after a lifetime of wedded bliss and tender, loving, care and attention from a slavishly devoted husband?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So there you have it, people.  Get on to your brokers immediately and tell them to sell, sell, sell Long Johns and buy, buy, buy Sarongs.  This picture shoot will move stomachs markets

 

Why are so many Eds utterly thick and useless?

That is the question of the day for you to answer whilst I tootle off to Berkshire to celebrate a friend's 40th wedding anniversary.

First, there is Ed 'Cain' Miliband who, and I congratulate him for this, has loaded up the Labour party in an old charabanc whose steering gear is so misaligned that it is going round in circles.  No one, least of all Labour supporters, has the least idea where he is trying to go but they all share the deep suspicion that in practice it would be more or less the same direction as 'Field Marshal' Cameron.  As always, it is the little things that give them away.  'Cain' is your archetypal 'modern man' who does not believe in all that marriage rubbish but so skin-deep are his convictions that once he feels the slightest breeze of condemnation which might, he fears, frighten the voters, off he trots to the Registry Office and has himself hitched up.  Truly and utterly pathetic!

Then today I hear from another Ed, this one is 'Ed the Malignant', he of the sinister blinky eyes.  His wheeze of the week is to raise a special tax aimed at bankers' bonuses, the results of which, he would have us believe, would go towards relieving 'youf' unemployment.  If anyone outside of a psychiatric unit for those with learning difficulties believes that, they should be locked up for their own good.  If, in fact, 'Ed the Malignant' really gave a flying fig for 'youf' unemployment he would propose an immediate cut in welfare payments such that the idle yobs might consider it worthwhile getting out of bed on a Monday morning and looking for work.  As for the bankers, they always have been and will forever be streets ahead of the likes of political spivs like Ed Balls, and his stupid tax would raise 0% of 0 whilst probably leading to the shrinking of the financial services in the City which in turn would lead, inevitably, to even more 'youf' unemployment.

As for the redoubtable 'Field Marshal', busy building model airplanes in his bunker, can anyone assure me that he does not possess the name of 'Edward' somewhere on his birth cerficate?

 

Never trust experts - especially if they're German!

In my last post I told you that I had spent most of my 'holiday' slogging through Fritz Fischer's magisterial/wrongheaded/authoritative/travesty/truthful/untruthful (delete to taste) but definitely heavy, weighing in at over 600 pages, history of Germany's Aims in the First World War.  In it, Fischer with impeccably German thoroughness takes the very many apologists for Germany's guilt in starting and pursuing WWI, and has them put against a wall and shot, er, metaphorically speaking, of course!  Honesty impels me to record that I did not read absolutely every one of the 638 pages.  I did rather skip and skim across the chapters concerned with the minutae of Balkan geopolitics, and also the finer points of various national interests in the Baltic states - although I did learn something of Finland's history during this period which I found rather interesting.  However, I did follow faithfully the main thrust of Fischer's history in which, with the tenacity of a terrier seizing a rat by the throat, he tore again and again into any efforts by anyone to exculpate Germany from the guilt of having deliberately planned, begun and fought the First World War during which they never lost sight of their deeply embedded war aims and ambitions.

Every European of my age holds a deep suspicion about Germany and the Germans despite the fact that whenever you meet them they seem to be very intelligent, polite and pleasant people, and yet . . . and yet . . .  they are obviously, and Fischer spells it out, a bunch of complete 'hatters'.  And I do not mean just their leadership.  In his book, Fischer makes clear that German war aims were enthusiastically supported by the population, and the only organised groups who were luke-warm were the ultra-Leftists who, of course, were equally bonkers but in a different direction!  As for their 'glorious leader', he was quite barking:

His naked hatred of 'peridious Albion', of 'that filthy cur, Grey', of 'that filthy nation of grocers' vented itself with elemental violence.  'England drops the mask the moment she thinks we are safely in the corral and done for, so to speak.'  [...]  'England alone is responsible for war and peace, not we any more!'  The Emperor's notes grow more and more sweeping.  Germany is encircled; the war of annihilation has been concerted; Germany is to go under; all this is purposeful 'anti-German world policy' . . .

And so on and on, and all this written on July 30th 1914 as German troops began the invasion of neutral Belgium, a neutrality signed and sealed by Germany itself!

Hitherto, I have approached WWI mostly from the military and naval history of the period.  Fischer's book virtually ignores this except where it intrudes in the main course of his desperately tragic tale.  The book is solely concerned with the history of the development of German political, strategic and economic policies which began almost immediately after the fall from power of a man who, I am now convinced, was one of the very few sane and intelligent Germans ever to hold power in Germany - Bismarck.  As soon as he was gone the lunatics took over the asylum.  From my previous knowledge I have always thought the Kaiser was deeply psychotic and encouraged in his psychosis by some prize nutters in the German General Staff, and later, others in the German navy.  However, I had never, before reading this book, quite taken on how equally lunatic the German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, and his minions in the Foreign Ministry were as well.  The often attested fact that the German system of the time meant that the soldiers and sailors went careering off on their own with their grandiose plans without the necessity of working together with the politicians and the diplomats plays an enormous part in this catastrophe which was 'written in the wind'.  The soldiers, the sailors and the politicians each went their own way and only needed the nod of approval from the indolent, vain, boastful, cowardly Kaiser, himself.  Not that any of these 'experts' ever disaggreed with the aims, it was just that their variously different methods were never subjected to outside scrutiny.  Or, to put it another way, there was never an opportunity for a non-expert to stand up and say loudly and clearly, "This is all bonkers!"

So what were these war aims which the Germans pursued blindly over the cliff to destruction, not once, but twice, because, of course, Hitler's dreams and ambitions in 1939 were no different in substance from Bethmann Hollweg's in 1914?  Quite simply it was the construction of a German-dominated mitteleuropa which would be made up of swathes of France, the whole of Belgium, the Baltic states, Poland and most of the Balkans leading down to Turkey and routes into the near east.  Their glove-puppet, the Austro-Hungarian 'empire', would eventually be incorporated into this system as underlings but with a modesty veil of purported independence.  Whole nations of peoples would be shifted here and there in order to achieve what some German loonies called Kulturlands, that is, areas to be populated by German ethnics.  The existing inhabitants would be shifted eastwards to provide 'safety strips' between German mitteleuropa and the dreaded Russians.  I have not set down their demands for a German empire in Africa but they were equally ambitious.

Of course, there is a sort of deliciously poisonous irony in all of this which will cause in lovers of irony deep shivers of delight - today, Germany has now achieved by peaceful means more or less most of what it utterly failed to do in 1914-18 and 1939-45:

Arthur von Gwinner, senior Director of the Deutsche Bank [oh yes, the bankers and the magnates were all in it up to their greedy armpits!] who was on friendly terms with Bethmann Hollweg, had similar ideas.  When the 'Wednesday Club', an association of leading men from the spheres of politics, economics, and cultural life [or 'experts', as I think of them], held its first wartime meeting in Berlin on September 2, he argued against 'blindly following a policy of annexations', pleading rather for a less conspicuous but all the more effective [my emphasis] course, namely that of 'establishing Germany's economic domination' (in Europe).  The Under-Secretary of State, Zimmermann [another 'expert' loonie], thought his ideas so important that he at once sent a copy of the speech to the Chancellor and Jagow in Coblenz, where it arrived in time to be utilised in the September war aims programme.

Today, as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and several other European 'nations' end up in hock (no pun intended) to Germany, does that remind you of anything contemporary by any chance?

Reading Fischer's superb book my previous suspicions have hardened into certainty.  The Germans just love 'Big Wheezes', that is, Big Ideas presented to them by experts.  During the first few years of the 20th century they had the 'mad monk' idea of von Schlieffen, head of the General Staff (an organisation consisting, as far as I can tell, of an equal number of expert but quite mad monks!), who dreamed of a 'super Cannae' in which the German army would annihilate the French in just 6 weeks!  Then there was the equally potty von Tirpitz who thought that his (and the Kaiser's) beloved 'risk fleet' would be so enormous that even if it was slightly smaller than the Royal Navy it would be too big for the Brits to risk a battle.  Later, all the German military 'experts' in the General Staff dismissed the entry of the USA because:

Dazzled by confidence in their own strength, the Germans underestimated the economic and organisational capacities of America.  Nothing betrays more clearly the convential limitations of the German soldiers' mentality than the fact that they measured America's military force by the strength of her standing army, counted up its cavalry brigades and infantry divisions and ranked it with the armies of Denmark, Holland or Switzerland [my empahsis].

Finally, of course, the 'expert' sailors assured everyone that unrestricted submarine warfare was a really 'Big Idea' that would absolutely and definitely win the war.

History is littered with the corpses of those who suffered from severe psychotic hubris.  Alas, they always take so many of the innocent down with them.  There are lessons to be learned from this recent history, not just for the Germans but for all of us.  The only thing you can bet on is that they will not be learned, or remembered even if they are.  And each generation will produce yet another bevy of 'experts' who will tell us, the great unwashed and ignorant, what is going to happen in the future.  If you spot one, pelt him with rotten veg!

There may be, indeed, I know there are, historians who dispute Fischer's book, but one thing stands out absolutely clearly from his history and that is the truth of the assertion that it was absolutely essential that Britain fought that war, despite the cost in blood and treasure.  Those who argue that it would have been better for us to stay out simply have no idea what Germany intended and the utterly dire consequences which would have flowed if she had succeeded in defeating the French.  There is very little to choose between Wilhelm II and Adolph Hitler.

All quotes from Fritz Fischer: German Aims in the First World War

 

So, how was it for me?

I confess that I have never been totally committed to the idea of holidaying away.  When I was working I could just about see the point but now that I am retired the expense, the efforts, the inconvenience, all conspire against the notion but, of course, the 'Memsahib' has other ideas!  Anyway, we tootled off to Majorca - and may I say to all those nit-pickers who pounced on my slightly careless geographical description that it was "south of Spain", that it really is time for you to get a hobby - or a life, even!  Alright, alright, strictly speaking its south east of Spain although a very good case could be made for saying that it is south of eastern Spain - oh God, you've got me at it now!  Anyway, Majorca it was and to be precise for those given to textual and geographical analysis, it was the seaside village of Cala San Vicenc situated in the north - well, up in the top of the island, anyway, so you geographers can look it up on your sat navs!  My guess is that 20 or more years ago it was a little gem of a place, totally unspoiled with several delightful bays and coves.  However, since then the builders have moved in to cater for the likes of, well, me, I suppose.  So now a huge 'tourist processing factory' lies along the sea front, and the attractively wooded hills are beginning to succumb to the dreaded villa builders who have ruined the south of mainland Spain - and many of whom are themselves now ruined by the slump. 

Even so, with my usual cunning/self interest (you decide) I went slightly early in the season and the little town was very quiet and peaceful.  Even more important, the hotel I chose, the Cala San Vicenc Hotel, was an absolute winner!  Very comfortable and very quiet.  It isn't cheap but then, the best things in life rarely are.  Because I had booked early I was up-graded to a 'junior suite' which is always worth it for the extra space and the extra comfort of armchairs and settees.  There are only 38 rooms and most of those were empty when we arrived but were beginning to fill rapidly as we left.  The best feature of the hotel were the staff - efficient but amiable.  Of course, I know that in a service industry they have to be but one sensed that these men and women were pleasant and friendly because that was their nature.  I have been to Spain several times and on each occasion I come away liking the Spanish more and more.  They remind me of the Brits of yesteryear, quietly confident of themselves, reserved but instantly prepared to be friendly, and with an ingrained sense of their own worth and dignity.   As I told the management of the Hotel, their greatest asset was their team of workers.

So, was it all lolling about by the pool and building up 'the bronzie' as we used to call it in the army?  Not a bit of it, you wretches, I worked, I slaved, I persevered, despite the incredible heat and the iced sangria in order to finish a 638-page book by Fritz Fischer called Germany's Aims in the First World War. This book stunned me!  Needless to say, you will hear all about it in my next post but you will have to wait until later today because even as I tap this out I can hear the sound of the washing machine starting up and the dulcet tones of the 'Memsahib' calling!

 

What an insult!

Like that mad old American general, 'I have returned'.  But a quick check of my visitor stats tells me that they barely sagged in my absence!  Is this, dear readers, just your way of telling me that actually you slightly prefer my blog when I'm not writing it?  I suppose I must console myself that the numbers did not actually rise whilst I was away.

Anyway, I'm back  but right at this moment I feel as though I'm working in a laundry with the 'Memsahib' lashing me up and down the stairs with laundry baskets full of dirty clothes and our washing machine threatening the national grid!  I have lots to bore regale you with but it will have to wait until tomorrow.  Just to keep you all at a fever pitch of excitement I can give you an exclusive tip - I have the results of a fashion shoot of me modeling Andra's sarong - now, now, 'steady the Buffs and remember you're British, er, well, some of you are, God help you!