“That one can convince one’s opponents with printed reasons, I have not believed since the year 1764. It is not for that purpose that I have taken up my pen, but rather merely to annoy them, and to give strength and courage to those on our side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.”
G.C. Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799), courtesy of 'Deogolwulf'
I still remain fixated, well, fixated for five minutes at a time after which my head aches, with this problem of the very first incident of inanimate matter becoming suffused with life. What's the problem you ask? Well, after the 'Big Bang' it is surely the Singularity of Singularities. Absolutely everything that has ever lived, that lives now and that will live in the future depended utterly on that single little chemical burp which resulted in biology. As Matt Ridley puts it:
The three-letter words of the genetic code are the same in every creature. GCA means an arginine and GCG means an alanine - in bats, in beetles, in bacteria. They even mean the same in the misleadingly named archaebacteria living at boiling temperatures insulphorous springs thousands of feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic ocean or in those microscopic capsules of deviousness called viruses. Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug or blob you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary and know the same code. All life is one. The generic code, bar a few tiny local aberrations, mostly for unexplained reasons in the ciliate protozoa, is the same in every creature. We all use exactly the same language. This means - and religious people might find this a useful argument - that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born.
Matt Ridley: Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, 1999, p21.
"One single event"! Can that be right? It seems like it because we all, from people to plants, bacteria to baboons, share the same genetic 'language' and presumably if some other bits of matter had been kick-started in the same environment at that time then there would have been a plethora of different languages - and one shudders to imagine the chaos that would have been created! As it is, the human genome which was thought likely to contain at least 100,000 genes turned out to consist of only 26,000, and that is a mere 5,000 more than - a blind, millimetre-long roundworm! So, one single event, in one single place in certain very specific conditions. What are the chances of that? Of course, the 'Dawkinistas' will propose, on nil evidence so far, that life probably exists on other planets in the cosmos, hence their desperate hopes that signs of life will be found on Mars. There may well be signs there but if and when they are found they need to be treated with great caution and scepticism because, like global warming, inference will become fact overnight!
Anyway, we are left ruminating on the great, nay, humungous, singularity of the start of life on our planet and then we have to consider those absolutely critical, six physical constants which, had any of them varied by a hair's width (or the physics equivalent thereof) then the whole bloody universe would not have been possible. Makes you think, doesn't it? Well, it might make you think - it gives me a headache!
Incidentally, I'm on an away-day tomorrow, back on Wednesday.
No, not another military anecdote, although it is concerned with the 'war' between philosophers and scientists. Not, I hasten to add, that I qualify under either title, my part, as always, is to act as an unreliable cheerleader who supports one side and then the other!
But let me begin with young Brian Cox, 151/2, a super-science swot from the Upper Fifth who somehow has managed to get himself an entire programme on BBC2 teaching us all how life began and why. Except, of course, that he didn't quite explain how life began and nor did he convince me of his reason why. Partly, this was due to the retards in the BBC production team who seem to think that we, the plebs, will never understand science unless there are never-ending and totally incomprehensible computer graphics showing abstract shapes expanding and surging to the sort of ghastly 'musak' you hear inside hotel lifts. Of course, Prof. Cox is not really a schoolboy, he just looks like one, as this photos shows:
Now, I was one of his earliest fans because he and a colleague wrote a book promising the irreducibly stupid, er, that's me, in case you're wondering, to explain Einstein's theories of relativity. Big Fail! But as I wrote at the time, 'the fault, dear, dim Duff, lies with you, not in your stars'! Even so, I remain a big fan of Prof. Cox and, as regular readers will know to the cost of their diminishing patience, I remain captivated by some of the many mysteries of existence. Like, how did it all begin?
As far as the beginning of biological life is concerned, I'm afraid to say that young Cox was no more illuminating than his peers. I concentrated as hard as I could, despite all the BBC visual effects crapulata and the vomit-inducing 'musak', but all he offered was what I more or less knew from others. That is definitely not a criticism of Prof. Cox who was not on my 'telly' to offer a new theory, he was just there to explain the old one, because the fact is that none of these science swots actually know quite what the spark was that turned inanimate material into living, reproducing organisms. They seem to have a fair idea on the ingredients and the conditions required, and the likely place in which it probably occurred - way down deep in the ocean amongst the nooks and crannies on the seabed - so it's farewell to the old 'primordial mud' which used to be the favourite as the start point of life years ago - pity, really, I quite like the idea of us all crawling out of mud! Anyway, that missing 'x' factor continues to plague science and it is interesting that every effort to reproduce the conditions inside a lab have all failed.
So, needless to say, I tottered off to bed with a headache and awoke this morning pondering on the problem as I drove to the swimming pool - have I told you before about . . . right, moving on - and it was still festering in what passes for my brain when I sat down at the computer and virtually one of the first items I came across, courtesy of Arts & Letters, was a review in the New York Review of Books by Prof. H. Allen Orr, a biologist, of a book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. The title of his book appears to sum up the content: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. 'Luvin' it already,' I thought because I will always offer to hold the coat of anyone taking a swing at 'Archbishop' Dawkins!
In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel continues his attacks on reductionism. Though the book is brief its claims are big. Nagel insists that the mind-body problem “is not just a local problem” but “invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.” If what he calls “materialist naturalism” or just “materialism” can’t explain consciousness, then it can’t fully account for life since consciousness is a feature of life. And if it can’t explain life, then it can’t fully account for the chemical and physical universe since life is a feature of that universe. Subjective experience is not, to Nagel, some detail that materialist science can hand-wave away. It’s a deal breaker. Nagel believes that any future science that grapples seriously with the mind-body problem will be one that is radically reconceived.
I could feel my headache returning! However, it soon became obvious that Prof. Orr's mum and dad had brought him up properly because, unlike the insufferable Dawkins, he admitted some of the doubtful areas in modern biological explanations whilst applying a cool but critical attutude to some of Mr. Nagel's other theories, especially his main one which was to propose a teleological imperative behind the universe whilst simultaneously excluding any sort of God. And, no, I'm not sure how Nagel pulled that one off but with great courtesy Prof Orr expressed his doubts.
Anyway, it's five to eleven and time for my life-saving caffein injection which I hope will cure my headache. I recommend Prof. Orr's review, an example of the very best sort of scientific writing for the non-scientist and if it gives you a headache too, well, I like to share my troubles, I'm generous like that!
Daft Dave in Davos: Is there something in the air in Davos or is it just that vile Swiss drink that is moving 'Dim Dave' further into the incoherence of being 'Daft Dave'? He complains about the EU threatening to inflict their tax rates on British companies but then rushes around trying to get international agreements on tax rates for companies. Happily, Starbucks has just given him a kick in the pistes, as it were, by warning him that if he goes on slagging them off then they will take their business elsewhere. I think the term Starbucks coffee is an oxymoron and I wouldn't even take a sip if I was dying of thirst but in this instance I'm their cheerleader.
How old do you have to be to play Macbeth? 'Gildas the Monk' poses the question in the course of his excellent review of 'Les Mis' over at Anna Raccoon's place. Apparently, 'Dear Larry' thought an actor had to be at least 40 before attempting the role, saying:
“When you’re a young man, Macbeth is a character part. When you’re older, it’s a straight part.”
From my own less than distinguished experience I would agree because, as I point out in the comments, I am very conscious of the fact that the older I get the more sympathy I feel for that daft old coot, King Lear.
Is it time time to bomb North Korea? Yes, yes, I know, a little drastic, you might feel, a bit OTT, but the fact is that they are jam-packed full of nuclear weapons, plus a few other nasties, I would guess, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that the entire leadership is crazier than a box of frogs! The old, worn out saying about so-and-so 'living on a different planet' is actually true when it come to North Korea. How dangerous is a country where paranoia is the norm? If the Chinese are in fact the new swaggering kid on the block let them prove it by sorting out the loopy-loos in Pyong-Yang.
Sticking CO2 back up the arse of the 'warmers'! Being of a cruel and insensitive nature, I have been enjoying myself over at 'Deltoid' ramming home the fact of a huge increase in CO2 emissions over the past 15 years which has failed to result in any increase in global temperatures. Instead of a quiet acceptance and an admission that perhaps they should look again at what exactly is the strength of CO2 as a forcing agent on global temps, all I get is, er, well, denials. But . . . but . . . I'm supposed to be the 'denier' - the bastards are stealing my lines!
The anti-Reagan gets ready for a final 4-year burst: I could weep! America, oh, America, why did you do it? Well, never mind that, what is done is done and you and your descendents 'unto the fifth generation' will have to live with it - and pay for it. As 'The Kraut' hammers home with his impeccable judgment:
After all, Obama had unveiled his transformational agenda in his very first address to Congress four years ago (February 24, 2009). It was, I wrote at the time, “the boldest social-democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.”
Nor was it mere talk. Obama went on to essentially nationalize health care, which is 18 percent of the U.S. economy — after passing an $833 billion stimulus that precipitated an unprecedented expansion of government spending. Washington now spends 24 percent of GDP, fully one-fifth higher than the postwar norm of 20 percent.
But, as 'that woman' told the greatest president of the 20th century, "You ain't seen nothing yet!" 'The Kraut' spells it out in grim detail:
Monday’s inaugural address reinstated yet another grand Obama project — healing the planet. It promised a state-created green-energy sector, massively subsidized (even as the state’s regulatory apparatus systematically squeezes fossil fuels, killing coal today, shale gas tomorrow).
The playbook is well known. As Czech president (and economist) Václav Klaus once explained, environmentalism is the successor to failed socialism as justification for all-pervasive rule by a politburo of experts. Only now, it acts in the name of not the proletariat but the planet.
If he kills shale gas then he will have inflicted a worse blow on America than Hirohito and Hitler combined because at least WWII galvanised American industry as will shale gas if it is left to progress. And it's no good Americans complaining, they voted for it and now they are going to get it:
Obama is the apostle of the ever-expanding state. His speech was an ode to the collectivity. But by that he means only government, not the myriad of voluntary associations — religious, cultural, charitable, artistic, advocacy, ad infinitum — that are the glory of the American system.
For Obama, nothing lies between citizen and state. It is a desert, within which the isolated citizen finds protection only in the shadow of Leviathan. Put another way, this speech is the perfect homily for the marriage of Julia — the Obama campaign’s atomized citizen, coddled from cradle to grave — and the state.
No effort will be made by Obama and his cohorts to deal with the fiscal problems as the national debt races up to the $20 trillion level. They will follow the European model and spend and spend and spend in order to establish their socialism and then they will set it in concrete and dare anyone to undo it.
A cheerful post-script to all you grandparents from Ogden Nash:
Come on in, the Senility is Fine
People live forever in Jacksonville and St. Petersburg and Tampa, But you don't have to live forever to become a grampa. The entrance requirements for grampahood are comparatively mild, You only have to live until your child has a child. From that point on you start looking both ways over your shoulder, Because sometimes you feel thirty years younger and sometimes thirty years older. Now you begin to realize who it was that reached the height of imbecility, It was whoever said that grandparents have all the fun and none of the responsibility. This is the most enticing spiderwebs of a tarradiddle ever spun, Because everybody would love to have a baby around who was no responsibility and lots of fun, But I can think of no one but a mooncalf or a gaby Who would trust their own child to raise a baby. So you have to personally superintend your grandchild from diapers to pants and from bottle to spoon, Because you know that your own child hasn't sense enough to come in out of a typhoon. You don't have to live forever to become a grampa, but if you do want to live forever, Don't try to be clever; If you wish to reach the end of the trail with an uncut throat, Don't go around saying Quote I don't mind being a grampa but I hate being married to a gramma Unquote.
However, if you are a masochist of the Max Mosley Tendency and of your own volition you read further into the story you will see that it actually states: " Johnson did not directly challenge the Chancellor." So the headline is good (or bad) old-fashioned agit-prop, or, lying, as I call it.
As Fraser Nelson explains, what Boris was complaining about was the language used by the Chancellor - and the Prime Minister - in which they both seem to relish the self-inflicted lash of austerity talk. Whenever politicians constantly repeat a mantra all of one's suspicions should be aroused! In this case, of course, there is no austerity - never has been and will not be until the money markets turn on the tossers in the Treasury to teach them a lesson. The imminent loss of our AAA-rating will be the very least of our woes when real-life lashes are administered to our economy and ministers are forced to speak the truth.
For example, as a reader of this blog you are by definition shrewd and thus will understand that our Posh Boys may not be cutting the national debt, as such, but at least they are cutting our over-spending and thus reducing our deficit. Wrong! In fact, Big Wrong! One might say Mega Big Wrong!
As Nelson puts it in his article:
Can you see the cuts? Neither can the City — and it judges people like Osborne by what they do, not what they say. It also notices his habit of shunting the pain past the election with every budget.
Even I realised some time ago that Cameron and Osborne had missed their chance in the first half of this administration, when people were still bleeding from the crash of 2008 and blaming it on the Labour party, to administer the nasty medicine needed to help us to recovery. Now they are in the second half it's all too late as they stare down the barrel of a forthcoming election. What's their answer? Simple, just keep spending and borrowing and put off the pain until after the next election when who knows who will be sitting in the Chancellor's chair?
Incidentally, and apropos the photo above of that ugly, mumbling, charmless, Jock tennis player, isn't it wonderful that nature plays its part and so at least his mum loves him even if no-one else does!
I am obliged to my regular commenter and fellow blogger, A. K. Haart, for nudging me into this contemporary tale of journalistic incompetence. Incidentally, I recommend AK's blog. He manages to say in a brief but elegant paragraph what would take me several pages to express. This is because he thinks before he writes, unlike, er, well, moving on . . .
I expect, like me, you picked up from the MSM out of the corner of your eyes or ears the 'news' that incidents of asthma in 'likkle-kiddie-winkies' had dropped in the UK since the imposition of the smoking ban. Since, by definition, all my readers are wise I expect that like me you muttered the word 'crap' under your breath and forgot about it. Well, if you stopped and actually thought, let alone investigated all the crap stories in the MSM you wouldn't have time to read my, and 'AK's, excellent blogs, would you?! And again, you know that you can rely on us - er, well, him, actually - to seek out one of those many and tremendous brain-boxes who inhabit Blogdom and who seem to have the necessary qualifications to investigate all the crap in the MSM; that is, they possess brains, time and diligence. Thus it was for this story and 'AK', in just one sentence (unlike the two paragraphs it's taking me!), pointed me towards Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, whose owner, Mr. Christopher Snowdon, has pure, unadulterated scepticism flowing through his veins.
I will not attempt to summarise his analysis because I want you all to take the time - oh, go on! - to read it for yourself. However, I will add, in view of my recent post concerning the less than imperial standard science emanating from Prof. Joanna Haigh of Imperial College, that as this insitution has associated itself with the unscrupulous agit-prop activists who wrote this garbage, I fear for their reputation. Perhaps my other regular reader and commenter, 'DM', a university science swot, himself, might have something to add to that particular aspect. Well, there's nothing like an academic punch-up, beats a WWE bout any day of the week! Where was I . . .?
Oh yes, the main point of this particular post - which has now only taken three paragraphs to reach! - is the perennial problem that is the MSM. Actually, the problem may be diminished somewhat because the printed version of it, as opposed to the broadcasters, is dying on its feet and deservedly so. The myth, perpetrated by Hollywood and bolstered by sundry 'novels', of the truth-seeking journalist battling against the odds to 'tell it the way it is' simply reduces one to giggles these days. The fact is that most journalists, most of the time, simply suck off the teat of ersatz crap like this non-story concerning asthma cases in children. They swallow it whole and then regurgitate it onto us and, as I indicated above, we mutter 'crap' under our breath and move on - so is it any wonder that the prints are dying?
I realise that time is money and that the newspapers blame the denizens of Blogdom for their falling circulation but why have none of them spotted the bleedin' obvious? If, in fact, it is the likes of Mr. Snowdon who have the time and brains to produce the facts about a story then why not pay them for their trouble - or better still, just steal it, like I do from time to time (although I do always try to give acknowledgments)! If, perhaps for near tragic reasons, you are interested in the subject of asthma in children then you would find Mr. Snowdon's report much more interesting than the obvious bilge provided by those anti-smoking fanatics which the prints repeated without comment. Perhaps it is that "old common arbitrator, Time" which is the problem and perhaps that is an explanation of why the weekly Spectator actually flourishes and makes a profit for its owners. 'The Speccie' has the time over seven days to consider its articles and, whilst it leans towards the libertarian Right, it is prepared to publish articles from Right, Left and Centre provided they are thoughtful. If I were an editor of a daily newspaper I would have at least one page reserved for follow-up stories taken from the internet to correct or expand on original reports. This might actually make them worth reading again.
In the meantime, get over to Mr. Snowdon, via 'AK', of course, and thereby edge a little closer to that damnedly tricky essence - The Truth!
You know how it is, you stumble and bumble along on your life's journey, mostly smoothly but sometimes hitting the odd bump or three which can cause alarm or despondency, or both, but you keep on pedalling and then suddenly, without warning, you come across someone else's life and for a few minutes your own stops dead! Thus it was for me when I read this last night:
"Max Ostro was a young Jew living in Poland when the Nazis came. He and his family were rounded up. Together with one of his brothers and his father, he was herded into a cattle truck in a train bound for Treblinka. No one came back from Treblinka. It was an extermination camp. There, many of Poland's three million Jews were gassed, burned and turned to ash.
In the train, barely able to breathe, his father held his two sons. He said to them, 'Mein kinder, if you stay on the train you will die. It belongs to malch hamoves, the angel of death. I want you to davven maariv - pray the evening prayer. Then I want the two of you, when the opportunity presents itself, to jump. The Nazis will shoot. But one of you will survive. This I promise you: one of you will survive.'
The sons prayed. Both jumped from the train. The Nazis saw the movement and started firing. Max's brother was killed instantly. Max, under cover of darkness, survived.
The family had hidden a sum of money which Max was able to recover, and with it he paid a farmer to hide him in his hay barn. Max survived this way for some time. Then came November 1944. The Nazi effort to round up and exterminate all remaining Jews intensified. Max later told his son that he had a dream at that time. In it he saw the Rebbe, the holy teacher his father had admired. The Rebbe told him, 'It is no longer safe for you in the barn.'
So Max came to an arrangement with the farmer. He had himself buried in a grave in the ground with only a narrow space open to the sky. Through it Max was able to breath. Once a week the farmer would come and bring something for Max to eat and drink. He survived like that, buried alive, for two months until the war came to an end.
Max eventually came to Britain, built a business, married and had two children. He went to the synagogue regularly, prayed every day, lived his life as an Orthodox Jew and gave much of his money to charity. He never spoke bitterly about the Holocaust, and though sometimes he wept for the family he had lost - he was the only survivor - he and the other survivors in Britain became a kind of extended family to one another.
I did not know Max well - I saw him from time to time at gatherings of Holocaust survivors. I knew his face, but not his story. While I was writing this book, he died and I went to comfort his son Maurice, whom I knew. That was when I heard his story. A book has been written about it."
Jonathan Sacks: The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning; ch. 10, pp182,183
No doubt there are a thousand and one stories like that, not just from the Holocaust but from all the other man-made catastrophes we have inflicted upon each other. As you come across them, they give you pause and once again you marvel at the human spirit and the strength that lies in the will to live.
Der Spiegel has been kind enough to provide a summary of German views of Dave's Europe speech. Most of them are thoughtful and also totally dependent on their own internal political stance - so no difference from our press then! However, Bild, which is a German tabloid, has its own idiosyncratic take on us Brits and offers eight reasons why they don't need us or want us:
"… because they drink stale beer +++ because they drive on the wrong side of the road. +++ because they consider black pudding, Marmite and vinegar and chips to be delicacies +++ because their electrical plugs are different from those on the Continent +++ because they don't use the metric system +++ because Germany's currywurst (sausage) tastes better than fish and chips +++ because they have greater debts than Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland together +++ because even without your bagpipes, we will still have plenty of idiots in Brussels."
Fair enough, can't argue with too much of that, although at least we don't go around dressed in tight-fitting leather shorts (well, outside Brighton, that is), but anyway, it's auf Wiedersehen, Pet, and do try not to kick off on one like you did the last two times we left you on your own!
Sorry for the bad language but sometimes the sheer amount of blatant, unrepentant and deliberate lying by our politicians becomes too much to suffer in silence. Let me put it in clear English:
David Cameron is a deceitful lying liar!
I am sick of him and his equally untruthful pal in the Treasury telling us all bare-faced lies by claiming that they are "paying down Britain’s debts.”
David Cameron’s policy is to increase Britain’s debt by 60 per cent, more than any European country. To increase it more over five years than Labour did over 13 years. Just yesterday, we learned the national debt had hit £1,111 billion and it’s heading to £1,400 billion.
You will not be surprised to know that his chubby-cheeked deputy, Nick Clegg, is also lying through his teeth:
His deputy, Nick Clegg, has previously boasted that his government is “wiping the slate clean of debt”. An utterly misleading analogy. Here are the Treasury’s published plans:-
And they get away with it by relying on the fact that 99% of the population do not understand the difference between a deficit and a debt. Yes, you can cut your deficit by not over-spending quite as much as you did the year before but if you are still over-spending then your debt increases!
And if we allow this to continue the result will be catastrophic, as this superb YouTube explanation of the real fiscal cliff the Americans are heading towards - not the pretend one they keep avoiding - makes clear. Please, I do urge you all to watch this video, he has the ability to make the complicated easy to understand.
You will also note that 'Ed 'n' Ed' say nothing because they would be telling the same lies themselves so they have no desire to educate the voters!
ADDITIONAL:Isobell Hardman at The Coffee House reports that Fraser Nelson's accusations of falsehood were repeated at a Downing Street briefing this morning - so hopefully the MSM will pick it up and run with - particularly in teh future if they repeat those lies:
Fraser has explained the reality – that Cameron is in fact increasing Britain’s debt by 60 per cent – in this post with two unnerving graphs, and the Prime Minister’s spokesman conceded that ‘the debt as a percentage of GDP has risen’. Asked whether the Prime Minister understood the difference between the debt and the deficit, he said: ‘Yes, he does.’ By way of explanation for the broadcast, he added:
‘The point the Prime Minister was making is that it is the Prime Minister’s government that is taking the tough decisions to deal with the economic crisis the government inherited and we are making progress with that.
‘We have a long-term fiscal consolidation plan set out across this Parliament which will see debt as a percentage of GDP falling by 2016/17, that’s how we are getting debts under control.’
To be fair to 'Ed 'n' Ed', they have picked up on it:
Naturally Labour – regardless of its own plans for borrowing – is making as much of this as it can, complaining today to the UK Statistics Authority about the claim in the broadcast.
As you lie awake at night wondering how to find the money to pay your heating bill which is that much bigger because you're paying subsidies to the likes of Tim Yeo MP and his company to produce hideously expensive non-carbon energy, I thought you would like to know that all that screeching from the HAFs that carbon emissions were going to boil the globe were, well, hot air, actually!
Here, courtesy of WUWT and one of their regular readers, Mr. Burt Rutan, an aerospace engineer, is a diagram comparing the emissions of 1983 to 1997 against those of 1998 to 2012. As any 'fule do know', courtesy of China, India and most of south east Asia, the amount of CO2 pumped out has hugely increased, by about a third, actually. And guess what, the earth has cooled not heated!
HEALTH WARNING: The essence of this diagram appears to be accurate but the design exaggerates the visual effect! Read the 'comments' thread at WUWT.
Stand by for the screech of brakes and the sight and sound of the HAFs doing 'a hand-brake U-iee' as the campaign against carbon emissions continues but this time because it is absolutely, and definitely, 'on me muvver's eyes', going to cause global freezing!
In the meantime, sensible people will watch and measure carefully the effects of CO2 emissions but not leap to conclusions about its effects without hard evidence.
ADDITIONAL: Here's another chart showing the same data:
I ask because 'The Tall Bloke' reckons she's a bit dodgy, know wot I mean, John? Like, you'd need ter check the mileage twice over, see! Just kidding, I'm sure Prof. Haigh is impeccably honest in her personal dealings but when it comes to a scientific dispute she does need to be watched most carefully.
The other day you may have noticed dear old Boris going off on one of his inconsequential rambles this time on the subject of so-called global warming of which, he intimated, he had some severe doubts. This provoked Prof. Haigh into dashing off a letter to The Telegraph:
SIR – As a professor of atmospheric physics, at Imperial College London, I’m delighted that Boris Johnson maintains his interest in weather and climate (“It’s snowing, and it really feels like the start of a mini ice age”, Comment, January 21), but he should be wary of drawing generalised conclusions from his observations. He suggests that the cold weather is due to declining solar activity – but the sun is more active now than it has been since 2009, and about the same as it was in 2004 and 1998. What we have is the lovely variability of British weather sitting on top of a long-term global average warming due to greenhouse gas increases. This is not an issue of opinion, but one of basic physics.
We don’t need to invoke mysterious solar particles to understand long-term trends.
Professor Joanna Haigh London SW7
Naughty, Professor Haigh, I can only give you an 'E' for Effort for that one!
You see, what she has done is to take the top of the very weak and feeble peak of the current sunspot cycle #24 and compared it to a couple of points only halfway up and halfway down on the preceeding cycle #23! The proper comparison would have been between the peaks of both which would have shown a remarkable drop in activity - which may, or may not, be a factor in global climate.
To paraphrase the learn-ed Professor rather naughtily: 'What we have is the lovely variability of British HAFs sitting on top of a mirage of non-existent long-term global average warming not due very much to greenhouse gas increases'. Yes, that's more like it!
These 'cli-scies', honestly, it's the way they tell 'em!
H/T to Paul Matthews, a commenter on the Telegraph blogs who kept his eye on the pea!
What a very odd ceremony the presidental inaugeration has become. It strives, quite rightly, to become a piece of serious political theatre but then manages to turn the whole thing into a Neil Simon comedy! Perhaps the funniest 'gag' was some shrieking diva called Beyonce who slaughtereed the national anthem, not inadvertantly due to nerves, but deliberately by having recorded it earlier and then 'lip-syncing' it before an audience of the Great and the Good - and the not-so-good - according to thelavalizard.comwho told us:
Standing less than three feet away from the newly reelected President Barack Obama, Beyonce pretended to be singing live as she shamelessly basked in the glory of her crazed fans who praised her for her so called “flawless” vocals. Meanwhile, Obama’s mother-in-law looked visibly upset, probably because she isn’t a fan of silent comedy.
There then followed a magisterial procession of, well, Secret Servicemen, actually. Dozens of them, hundreds possibly, all marching steadily along with narrowed eyes, their top coats carefully unbuttoned so they could reach those nasty, horrid gun-thingies that kill little kiddie-winkies and should be banned except that Obama and his missus want to live, all of them desperately trying to look like Clint Eastwood. They were preceded by a phalanx of what looked like several thousand motor-cycle cops which must have made it a Whoopie Day for any speeders on the motorways around Washington. They were followed by an enormous fleet of cars - all big, all black, all anonymous except that they all screamed just one word - 'Government!' Of Mr. and Mrs.' O' there was no sign which was, as they say 'over there', tough tittie for all those suckers folks who had spent fortunes and wasted hours if not days trying to get there for a view of 'The One'. Eventually the cavalcade stopped and the doors to a limo opened and out stepped the POTUS and his missus, the FOTUS. Graciously, they walked about a hundred yards to prove they really were there and hadn't sneaked back to the White House for a quiet G&T before facing what was obviously scheduled to be a ghastly evening.
You see, they knew what others did not, that a certain Ms. Jennifer Jones - no, me neither - was scheduled to sing the song that would accompany the POTUS and the FOTUS as they took to the floor for the first dance of the Presidential Ball. Judged by the report in thelavalizard.com there should be a law rushed through Congress against cruelty to songs:
Speaking of unbridled yelling, Jennifer Hudson proved that nobody can do as far over the top as her this evening at the Commander-In-Chief’s Ball. The big-mouther singer was given the chance to serenade newly reelected US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama but completely ruined the moment with her wails.
Hudson was loud and obnoxious as she bellowed Al Green’s “Let Stay Together”. Honestly, she clearly forget how to use her indoor voice as she tackled the Obama’s favourite song as though she was charging for the last whole wheat bun at Subway. You know, because she’s on a diet.
If you are of the 'Max Mosely Tendency' then feel free to visit the 'Lava Lizard' site and listen to it but this blog holds no responsibility for your ear drums. Finally, of course, we come to the star of these peculiar American celebrations - Lady Gaga! Words fail me so instead here is a picture:
And, yes, those really are gun-thingies on her tits! Is this really what entertains them in The White House? Incidentally, in the linked piece below from The Independent (the favourite reading of my e-pal 'Dearieme'!) someone called Nick Hasted gave her 'performance-lite' a truly tremulous, gushing review.Perhaps they should rename him 'Nick Hasty'! I trust it resulted in a Bill Deedes-style response: Surely shome mishtake here: Ed.
Waddya mean, what's a 'Feigenblatt'? It's a 'fig leaf', for goodness sake, and if you can't speak the language of our European friends and allies - and stop that sniggering now! - how can you expect to follow the nuances of the forthcoming European debate which Dave started this morning with an almighty, er, well, bang isn't quite the word but you know what I mean!
Anyway, I'm sure our friends and allies - I'm not going to tell you again! - understood the message Dave was sending them which was, roughly translated: Look, give me something, OK, it doesn't have to be much, just something that I can drape over my weeny bit of political capital so that I can be seen in public at the next election. Meanwhile, our European friends and allies - right, that's it, you will all stay in tonight for detention - are forced to hold each other up because they are so helpless with laughter! They now have Dave exactly where they want him. He was asked twice by reporters if he would campaign for an 'OUT' if he failed to get anything meaningful from 'Brussels-Berlin' and twice he dodged an answer. So, if they think he's worth saving all they need do is toss him a political scrap which he can then inflate and take to the country as he campaigns for an 'IN'. On the other hand, if they don't fancy him much, and who would?, they can play hard ball, give him nowt for his troubles and watch him lose the next election because anyway they would much rather deal with young Miliband especially if he's in coalition with Clegg and his bunch of Euro-fanatics.
If Dave really had any sort of core belief in his being he would tell the Europeans that he intended to change the arrangement between us and them, without being specific at this early stage, and that if they failed to produce something worthwhile he would throw himself and his party wholeheartedly into a 'OUT' campaign. That, more than anything else, would improve his chances at the next election and would provide a big stick with which to beat up Labour if, as seems likely, they refuse to contemplate a referendum.
As it is he has chosen a weak central positon which is the worst of all possible worlds, not just for him (which he deserves) but for all of us.
I can just imagine that little rat-trap mouth of Mrs. Merkel practically disappearing as it tightened in displeasure at the news that her party had been pipped to the post in yesterday's election in Lower Saxony. She had expected an easy win given that the leader of the opposition party, the Social Democrats (SPD), simply does not have enough mouths to put his feet in! The man, Peer Steinbrück, is a practitioner of the art of 'opening mouth and letting belly rumble' - for which this blog extends its admiration given that it is commonplace here! Anyway, his party stumbled down the polls with every utterence but ... but ... it still won!
According to Spiegel, Herr Steinbrück at least owned up to his gaffes:
He went further, saying that the party had done well despite him, rather than because of him. "I'm very aware of the fact that there wasn't much tailwind from Berlin and I'm also aware that I'm partly responsible for that," the notoriously outspoken former finance minister, who has confounded his party with a series of gaffes in recent months, told party supporters as the results came in on Sunday night.
Well, there's a novelty, a politician and truth in the same room! This man bears watching:
Steinbrück's pet projects are tax and finance policy. He proved his worth as a crisis manager during the 2007-2009 financial and economic crisis when he was finance minister under Merkel in her first term.
But his no-nonsense pragmatism and focus on finance are at odds with the working class idealism of the party which is proud of its roots in the 19th century labor movement. Part of his charisma is that he doesn't avoid a fight, which sets him apart from the far more cautious Merkel. But his combative nature sometimes makes him speak out without immediately thinking of the consequences. He can come across as arrogant.
So he appears to understand finance and economics and is not lost in a welter of sentimentality of the sort indulged in by Lefties everywhere (see: Obama, Barack; inaugeration of.) Hopefully, he is equally clear-eyed when it comes to matters European. The election is due next September (I think!) andit may be more interesting than observers thought. In any case, one important result of this local election is that the SPD now control the Upper House outright which means that Madame Merkel cannot pass any programmes without their approval. What's the German for 'interesting times' - can't be arsed to Google Translate it.
Needless to say, in the finest traditions of this blog that title has very little connection to the content of this post except that it is concerned with the warning words of Herr Jens Weidmann,' ze boss of ze' German Bundesbank and therefore a man of whose opinion on financial matters one should take seriously. And he, himself, is being very serious according to the FT which reports that Herr Weidmann is concerned that politicians are increasing their efforts to subvert the independence of their central banks with the aim of bringing about a devaluation of their currencies in order to give their nations a distinct advantage in the competition for overseas markets. You might call it 'the Lance Armstrong effect'! He points the finger at Hungary and Japan but warns that it could spread.
Mario Draghi, the boss of the European Central Bank needs to be watched like a hawk because one suspects that the likes of 'Mr. Rompoy-Pompoy' would love to shove his hand up the back of Draghi's beautifully cut Italian suit and pull his levers! Meanwhile, I can't wait to bid good riddance to Mervyn King, our useless and compliant Governor of the Bank of England who had about as much fight in him as a soggy sandwich! Now all eyes are on Mr. Mark Carney, the most famous Canadian since, er, well, I can't think of any famous Canadians, who is about to take over at the BoE. He shouldn't have much trouble slapping those posh public schoolboys into place but how will he stand up to 'Bruiser' Balls in a couple of years time?
Suffice to say that even the possibility of a global exchange rate war makes me shiver!
This blog stands proudly on the rubble of its forecasting reputation, it being the product of the daft old coot somewhat myopic old gentleman who runs this place! However, when it comes to getting things hopelessly wrong on a regular basis we have nothing on the peer-reviewed (as they constantly remind us!) prats who constitute what I call the HAFs - the Hot Air Fanatics. Nobody, surely, needs to be reminded of Paul Ehrlich's daft bet (with Julian Simon) that his even dafter forecast of huge rises in the cost of raw materials would come true over ten years - it didn't but to his credit he paid up.
Then there were the sundry sillies who forecast the end of those nice 'cuddly-wuddly' polar bears. Back in 2008, Prof. Armstrong of Pennsylvania University, wrote to Sen. Boxer, one of the dippiest Democrat politicians to rise to emminence in la-la-land California:
We found the forecasts of declining polar bear numbers contained in the government’s administrative reports were not the product of scientific forecasting methods. Given the large current population of bears and the upward trend in the population, our findings lead to the conclusion that there is no scientific basis for listing polar bears. Indeed, a reliance on evidence-based forecasting suggests that it is more likely that the polar bear population will increase rather than decrease.
“The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region, which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba, is critical because it’s considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing elsewhere in the Arctic.”
Well, as the late Mr. Freddy Mercury put it, "Boom-boom, boom-boom, and another one bites the dust - heh-heh!" But there are more, as the indefatigable Anthony Watts reports:
“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”Paul Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.
And what, according to yet more experts, is the major problem facing this country today - mass starvation? Er, no, obesity, actually!
The Limits to Growth (1972) – projected the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and natural gas by 1993. It also stated that the world had only 33-49 years of aluminum resources left, which means we should run out sometime between 2005-2021. (See Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind.
Pity, Ms. Meadows, that you didn't live long enough to see just how daft you were, but then again, you were so daft you could have lived to be a hundred and still failed to notice the elephant in your living room!
Claim: In 1974, the US Geological Survey announced “at 1974 technology and 1974 price” the US had only a 10-year supply of natural gas.
Data: The American Gas Association said that gas supplies were sufficient for the next 1,000-2,500 years. (Julian Simon, Population Matters. New Jersey: Transaction Publications, 1990): p. 90.
Heh, that trouble-maker Julian Simon again! And today, thanks to fracking, the USA is on the way to being self-sufficient in energy.
Claim 1970: “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”Paul Ehrlich, speech during Earth Day, 1970.
Has anyone been more wrong, more often and with greater consistency than Paul Ehrlich? Anyway, moving closer to home on this snowy, freezing day, here is a report in “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” The Independent. March 20, 2000:
“Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.” “Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and … are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters–which scientists are attributing to global climate change–produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.” “London’s last substantial snowfall was in February 1991.” “Global warming, the heating of the atmosphere by increased amounts of industrial gases, is now accepted as a reality by the international community.” According to Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years “children just aren’t going to know what snow is” and winter snowfall will be “a very rare and exciting event.” Interviewed by the UK Independent, March 20, 2000. “David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, says ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow.”
What can one say? Except possibly to ask if Messrs. Viner and Parker have been fired and are today employed on road-gritting duties on our snow-covered highways? Take that as a 'no', shall I? Anyway, always positive, let me make a useful suggestion. Burning Guy Fawkes's effigy every 5th of November is becoming rather pointless because our 'Skool Sistum' no longer teaches any history prior to the 1960s when sex was invented so it means nothing to our kiddie-winkies. So instead, let's have an 'Ehrlich Day'. We don't have to burn effigies of him, just have enormous blow-up balloons of him which, as the fireworks go off, we can release into the air and watch him whizz around in circles and deflate as all the hot air rushes out. Can't wait!
And this from one of my commenters who will not be named and shamed, I will merely ask him if he's sitting comfortably:
A man, while playing on the front nine of a complicated golf course, became confused as to where he was on the course. Looking around, he saw a lady playing ahead of him. He walked up to her, explained his confusion and asked her if she knew what hole he was playing.
I'm on the 7th hole," she replied, "and you are a hole behind me. So you must be on the 6th hole." He thanked her and went back to his golf.
On the back nine, the same thing happened and he approached her again with the same request. "I'm on number 14, and you're still a hole behind, so you must be on the 13th hole." Once again he thanked her and returned to his play.
He finished his round and went to the clubhouse where he saw the same lady sitting at the end of the bar. He asked the bartender if he knew the lady. The bartender said that she was a sales lady and played the course often.
He approached her and said, "Let me buy you a drink in appreciation for your help. I understand that you're in the sales profession. I'm in sales also. What do you sell?"
"I'll tell you, but you're going to laugh," she replied.
"No, I won't."
"Well, if you must know," she answered, "I work for Tampax."
With that, he laughed so hard he almost fell off the bar stool.
"See," she said. "I knew you'd laugh!"
"That's not what I'm laughing at," he replied, "I'm a salesman for haemmorrhoid treatments, so I'm still a hole behind you."
As I have remarked before, little things say so much about people. For example, I read that on the most auspicious day in the American political and social calender, the inaugeration of the President of the United States, they have chosen this lady to entertainthem at the White House ball:
She is called, so I am informed, 'Lady Gaga'. Yeeeeeees, quite! At this point let me hasten to add that I have no opinion concerning her 'Ladyship' either personally or professionally because, of course, I know absolutely nothing about her - although I confess, because you regulars are already well aware of it, that ignorance is not necessarily a bar to me offering an opinion on any subject! Anyway, idly curious I turned to her 'Ladyship's' Wiki entry and was amazed to see that it was one of the longest I have ever come across. I really couldn't be bothered to plough my way through it but I gather she has battled her way up through the jungle that is the popular 'music-sleb' scene and reached the pinnacle - so good luck to her. Even so, I am left pondering on the gloomy thought that the American political elite, those powerful 'movers and shakers' whose decisions on grand strategy will cause reverberations around the globe, actually choose to spend an evening being 'entertained' by a sort of raunchy, 'shake, rattle and roll' artiste. It says so much about them - and all of it bad!
In the meantime, thank God, 'The Kraut' has used the National Review to offer some exceedingly shrewd advice to the Republican party. Currently it is at sixes and sevens as to how to deal with a triumphant president prepared to use any and all of the levers of power at his disposal to ram through his programme. The GOP is split between the pragmatists and what I might call the ultras. The latter are prepared to go to the wall by refusing a hike in the debt ceiling, whilst the pragmatists are, well, pragmatic! 'The Kraut' sides with them:
The other view is that you cannot govern from the House. The reason Ryan and John Boehner finally voted yes on the lousy fiscal-cliff deal is that by then there was nowhere else to go. Republicans could not afford to bear the blame (however unfair) for a $4.5 trillion across-the-board tax hike and a Pentagon hollowed out by sequester.
The party establishment is coming around to the view that if you try to govern from one house — e.g., force spending cuts with cliffhanging brinkmanship — you lose. You not only don’t get the cuts. You get the blame for rattled markets and economic uncertainty. You get humiliated by having to cave in the end. And you get opinion polls ranking you below head lice and colonoscopies in popularity. (My emphasis because you just 'gotta' love that sentence!)
I should have emphasised the sentence in which 'The Kraut' reminded the GOP that they cannot rule the country from the House of Representatives. And anyway, America voted for Obama so let America have a good dose of 'Obamanomics' and see just how 'they like them apples'. To huff 'n' puff 'n' bluff, and then have your bluff called simply leaves you looking ridiculous:
The debt-ceiling deadline is coming up. You can demand commensurate spending cuts, the usual, reasonable Republican offer. But you won’t get them. Obama will hold out. And, at the eleventh hour, you will have to give in as you get universally blamed for market gyrations and threatened credit downgrades.
The more prudent course would be to find some offer that cannot be refused, a short-term trade-off utterly unassailable and straightforward. For example, offer to extend the debt ceiling through, say, May 1, in exchange for the Senate’s delivering a budget by that date — after four years of lawlessly refusing to produce one.
Not much. But it would (a) highlight the Democrats’ fiscal recklessness, (b) force Senate Democrats to make public their fiscal choices, and (c) keep the debt ceiling alive as an ongoing pressure point for future incremental demands.
Now that's more like it because it leaves Obama and the Dems owning the problem they created - and soon, very soon, that problem is going to be frighteningly huge! His advice to the Republican party is succinct:
Want to save the republic? Win the next election. Don’t immolate yourself trying to save liberalism from itself. If your conservative philosophy is indeed right, winning will come. As Margaret Thatcher said serenely of the Labor Party socialists she later overthrew: “They always run out of other people’s money.”
I haven't read anything so sensible since I last read this blog!
I am not a frequent visitor to the site of my e-pal Louise who occasionally comments here because, frankly, I am a bit of a moral coward. Her site is sometimes painful and upsetting to read. Louise, herself, suffers with that most elusive and sometimes destructive of disabilities, the ones that 'bend' the mind. It has always been a remarkable fact that people may experience an event together, taking in information through their senses, and yet still come out with different descriptions of what occurred - as any experienced police officer will tell you who has regularly interviewed witnesses. This 'normal' characteristic is made 'abnormal' when those concerned suffer with some sort of mental impairment which alters not only their view of individual events but also of their entire world view including, perhaps especially, their view of themselves inside this world.
In a recent post she describes the travails of Michael, an ex-soldier, mentally impaired to the point that he has fallen, or perhaps marched, through the cracks in society to end up as one of life's derelicts. Now confined to a mental hospital he refuses, like Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, to take his meds and nightly the staff are required to use "reasonable force" (ie, six big men!) to administer them. At this point one's sympathies are stretched to opposite poles, yes, one feels desperately sorry for Michael who is obviously a man with some considerable character but equally one cannot help but feel for the staff, too. They are not, I am sure, all the equivalent of the repellent Nurse Ratched in Ken Kesey's one-sided drama. People with disabling mental problems must be taken under care and control and those whose job it is to administer them must do what they think is necessary even if the state of knowledge of mental disorder is still in its infancy.
In other words, it's a 'no win' situation and I feel real anguish for the people concerned - on both sides of the meds! Thank goodness Louise is out of hospital and continues to fight her own lonely battle with some success judging by her excellent blog.
Golly-gosh, the disappointment on hearing that Dave's big speech - no, really, I mean, like, really BIG speech - on Europe has been postponed was, well, barely discernible! However, it gives us time to do what very few of the denizens of the Westminster village do which is to look at it from the point of view of Berlin-Brussels. Just imagine - oh, go on, give it a try - that you were 'Mr. Rumpoy-Pumpoy' and you knew that Dave was on his way to renegotiate the British agreement with the European Union, what would be your re-action? Probably, to issue forth a stream of profanities because it's not as though you haven't at least a dozen other seriously huge problems needing your attention without some smoothy-chops, Old Etonian twit coming over and adding to them!
However, given that he is unlikely to be put off how would you deal with him? Well, first of all you would work out what his plan is. Clearly, from what he has already let slip, he intends to negotiate a new deal to be ready to display proudly to the British public just in time for the next election with an absolutely, definitely, word of honour, cast-plastic guarantee that the British people will be offered a referendum on it after his party is re-elected. So, the first and obvious thing to do is kick the negotiations as far as possible, not just into the long grass, but better still into the forest! As the election date draws closer, Dave will become increasingly desperate to take something - anything, really - back to his voters, so his resolve will gradually weaken.
But then you - still playing the part of 'Mr. Rompoy-Pompoy' - might ask yourself exactly what the chances are of Dave actually winning the next election? No need of hugely expensive - and mostly useless - pollsters, simply go to Bet Fred, or Paddy Power, or any of the major bookies and they will tell you now that Dave's chances of winning are miniscule. Possibly even Dave knows this in his heart which is why he carefully promises a referendum only after the next election. So why not just leave him to kick his heels in your ante-room whilst you get on with more important and pressing matters?
And of course, one of the most pressing items on your agenda is your plan to drive Europe in exactly the opposite direction from that desired by Dave, that is, into even closer union than hitherto. So tell your secretary to give him a sweetie if he bursts into tears!
To be fair, not too many of us are forced to make serious moral choices in our lives. Well, of course, except in the field of sexual temptation which, happily at the age of 73, I personally am now well past. Actually, now I understand the immense relief in the tone of the late Malcolm Muggeridge (a noted swordsman in his day) when, as an older man, he admitted that lack of a sexual drive was like having a weight lifted from his shoulders - or perhaps he said 'elbows', I don't recall! Anyway, that aside, most of us are not often forced into moral decisions - except perhaps, sportsmen.
The world and his uncle are waiting to lay into Mr. Lance Armstrong, the well-known 'pedalist', once his mea culpa is broadcast by that contemporary High Priestess of Public Morals Mores, Ms. Oprah Winfrey. There is something particularly reprehensible in cheating in that sort of sport which is, mostly, an individual competition between individuals. I am still sickened by the loss of (relative) purity in the Olympic Games track events whose winners were heroes to me in my innocent boyhood. But they at least only enjoyed a brief hour in the sunlight of adulation but Mr. Armstrong has had half of his life basking in the praise for his apparent 'achievements'. What, I wonder, was he thinking during those years as he accepted honours and kudos for his incredible - literally incredible as we now learn - series of victory after victory after victory? Was he ashamed, I wonder, or did he simply gaze out at the sea of adoring fans and think to himself, "Suckers!"
The interesting post-script to this bounder's life of lies will come, for me, during the subsequent court hearings if and when all those giant American corporations who once poured money over him in the form of endorsements now sue to get it back. Were I the judge I would show them little mercy. For the last thirty years (at least) no individual sport has been above suspicion of drug cheating and, as these self-same corporations, or their lawyers, would quickly point out to any wronged punter who sued them - caveat emptor! So, what goes for 'Joe Doe' goes for the likes of Nike et al!
Another brand of cheating is more nuanced. Just recently - well, almost every week these days - some footballer either surreptitiously uses his hand to guide the ball into the net, or, in the penalty area a defender passes within six inches at which point the attacker falls over - and over - and over - as though he had been hit by a truck and lies crying on the ground holding his leg which appears from his performance to have been broken in several places. However, having been given a penalty by a ref who should have gone to SpecSavers he makes a remarkable recovery and within seconds is racing up and down the field once again. There are motives for this type of cheating - a desire to help your team win and, perhaps a certain amount of money in the form of a win bonus. However, given the eye-wateringly huge salaries paid as a norm, the win bonus is relatively small beer. Perhaps part of the motivation to cheat lies exactly in those huge salaries such that the player feels it is only fair - delicious irony - to do whatever it takes to make sure his employers get the result they are paying him for.
Happily, never having taken part in 'games' since I was sixteen, my sporting morals have never been tested. However, if any multi-zillionaire footie-player requires coaching in the art of acting, of course, darling, I am available at a very modest fee - well, modest compared to you, you big, useless, over-paid, cheating, waste of space! (Jealous? Moi? Certainly not!)
Well, if it was good enough for Jesus it should, just, be good enough for this lot! However, there might be an etymological quibble on the exact meaning, in these contexts, of the word 'suffer'. What is it, one wonders, about power-mad politicians that they have to use little children as props?
Last night a group of us went to see the 'simulcast' of La Bohème broadcast directly from the Royal Opera House. I, personally, came out disappointed. Not, I hasten to add, just because the work was sung (quite correctly) in Italian and the English subtitle system failed - they should have sought the advice of an experienced electronics engineer such as myself! (see below) - and certainly not because the famous tenor playing Rodolpho was down with bronchitis and his part was sung (superbly as far as I can judge) by a young Russian, Dmytro Popov, and absolutely not because the leading lady, Maija Kovalevska as Mimi, looked, despite her elegant beauty, a tad too old for a really young girl, but because . . . because . . . well, it just didn't happen for me, that's why!
I do realise that that first paragraph is not likely to earn me a place in the gallery of distinguished opera critics since it amounts to no more than me opening my mouth and letting my belly rumble and thus disclosing, what you had already suspected, that I know nothing about grand opera. Guilty as charged, m'Lud! But, as I have written many a time and oft' in these columns, art is visceral! It either does the business, that is, raise your emotional temperature - or not. This did, but only on an intermittent basis. The story is simplicity itself - nothing wrong with that - boy meets girl, girl gets sick, love affair sundered under enormous strain, boy and girl get back together, girl dies - and that's it! What few alternative sub-plots that exist are insubstantial and do not catch our attention, let alone our hearts. So, it's all down to Rodolpho and Mimi - and, of course, the music.
The performers, I think, suffered under the withering eye of the cameras in this simulcast. In my piece on Les Miserables I pointed out that if some of the singing might not have been of the absolutely first rate (but it was good enough for me), the acting was. The problem for opera singers is that the very form of their art places huge demands on their singing abilities which leaves them little room - almost literally and physically little room - for them to act. Alas, the prying cameras showed that up where-as, I suspect, were you in the Opera House and viewing from a distance you would not notice it to the same degree. I hasten to make clear that everyone in that performance was trying their best to act, as well as sing, and they very nearly brought it off but with acting, brutal business that it is, you either do or you die!
On the subject of the music, of course, there is the famous duet between the two lovers which most people know and it is truly a lovely and deeply moving piece which haunts the memory. But that's it, or at least, that's it for an opera ignoramus like me. Sorry, Signor Puccini!
Well, perhaps my eloquent, landmark talk failed to lift the roof but at the end there were a few desultory claps followed immediately by some snorts and snores as some of the audience woke up! However, I bring you glad tidings - and I know that some of you were very worried for me! - because all the electrical thingies did as they were told. First of all they obeyed my orders to remain in the various pockets and flaps I had assigned to them. (I know you'll find this hard to believe but sometimes I put all the bits and pieces in specific places but just as I come to the part where I unload them prior to assembly I find that they have moved during the night! Either that or the 'Memsahib' creeps down during the night and moves them around!) Anyway, today all the 'thingies' were sitting in their allotted places waiting for me. Thus, with absolute confidence, I quickly joined A to B and B to C and so on and the only real hitch came when I could not, absolutely NOT, open my PowerPoint file. Panic ensued and I nearly broke my finger clicking that bloody-bloody useless mouse-thingie but still nothing happened and, with the sweat trickling down my back, I was about to announce that the talk was off when suddenly I realised that someone - total bastard! - had plugged my remote control stick into the place where my memory stick, containing the entire PP programme, should have been. The red mist was about to descend but just in time I remembered it could only have been me who misplaced the device and so, with a nonchalent, good humoured chuckle (what an actor!) I quickly changed them over and everything worked - pheeeeew!
I began by admitting that this talk on historical grand strategy was going to be delivered by a man who only just made Corporal, which caused a few eyebrows to rise amongst those who were obviously former military officers. Then I told them that it was mainly concerned with events during six short weeks in August/September 1914 - and they all smiled - but that I would begin in the year 216BC with the Battle of Cannae - that wiped the smile off their faces and watches were surreptitiously consulted. Anyway, with that, I was up, up and away until God knows how long later I ground to a halt like Tiger tank running out of fuel. I was gratifed to see that several members of the audience had their eyes closed presumably to concentrate even harder on my words. Spendid chaps, all of them, and they deserve Long Service and Good Conduct medals all round.
Tomorrow morning spare a thought for an innocent group of gentlemen who are to be regaled with my PowerPoint talk on How the Germans Lost WWI in the First Six Weeks. Yes, indeed, what have they done to deserve that - except being daft enough to book me? However, today you may spare a thought, a sympathetic thought, for me, that's me, as in me, me, me! You see, unlike my Shakespeare talks which are just non-stop yadda-yadda, my military ones come in the form of all-dancing, all-singing PowerPoint presentations which require the services of a computer, a projector, special speakers, a remote control, two memory sticks (in case I lose one!), a computer mouse (because I cannot get on with those touch-pad-thingies) and they all have to be connected up to each other which requires several miles of cabling (well, it seems like several miles) in various forms and lengths - and all with different plug designs requiring different sockets which I can never find. Now, at this point you may already have an inkling of the problem. Yes, indeed, the final requirement is a man who is capable of putting all those 'thingies' together and not just together but together in the right order - and all inside 20 minutes under the barely disguised, sniggering hilarity of the audience as they await the opening! Of course, there are always one or three wiseacres amongst them who claim to know all about computer/projector electrics and who insist on offering their advice and even, on occasions, actually stepping in to plug this or that into that or the other! How I haven't actually murdered any of them them is a testament to my innate good manners.
I have been giving these talks for several years now but the military ones are relatively rare and because I keep putting my memory down somewhere and forgetting where, so, each time I have to put myself through a re-education course in electrical and computer engineering in order to relearn the exercise. I do this in our kitchen/diner and so far today I am glad to report I have only kicked the cat once and had two rows with the 'Memsahib' who seems to regard the kitchen much as France regarded Alsace-Lorraine! Anyway, it has taken me hours to get everything together and I have just paused to allow time for my blood pressure to settle and then I shall go downstairs for one last rehearsal of exactly how all those bloody-bloody bits and pieces and odds and sods all join up!
Oh my hat, I've just read a corker! True Crime by Andrew Klavan which I purchased from one of my rather high-class local bookshops - er, the hospice charity shop, actually! - and which had me on the edge of my seat. It was published in 1995 so I'm only 18 years late! Of course, I have seen Mr. Klavan's name as a commentator on various Right-wing news sites but had no idea that he wrote thrillers, too. Anyway, this was a corker in that not only did it have me absolutely on edge to the very last page but it also made me convulse with laughter at various points mainly because the 'hero' is an appalling, A1 shit of the first order who as much by accident as anything else finds himself on the side of, er, 'Truth 'n' Justice'! To be absolutely honest, I do think that in places the story is somewhat over-written and thus I did indulge in a little bit of skim-reading - rather more towards the end because I could hardly contain my excitement in rushing to find out what happened. Anyway, if you see a Klavan book try it and also keep your eyes open for any by Kevin Peterson, his nom-de-plume on some books.
Apparently the Russians have sent us their weather. In Russia they think that's a joke! So as you shiver your way into the office here are a couple of 'funnies' to cheer you up, courtesy of my e-pal, Andra, so blame her not me!
An elderly, retired sailor, looking to relive 'the good old days', dons his old uniform and heads off to the docks to find himself a tart and once again do what he was good at back in the day. He's soon going at it hammer and tongs, in fact, going rather well for an old boy of his age.
But for re-assurance he asks the girl how he's doing.
After a pause, the girl replies that he's doing about three knots.
'What the hell does three knots mean?' he asks.
'You're knot hard, you're knot in and you're knot getting your money back!
Jane and Arlene, two elderly ladies are outside their nursing home, having a drink and a smoke, when it starts to rain.
Jane pulls out a condom, cuts off the end, puts it over her cigarette, and continues smoking.
Arlene: What in the hell is that?
Jane: A condom. This way my cigarette doesn't get wet.
Arlene: Where did you get it?
Jane: You can get them at any pharmacy.
The next day, Arlene hobbles herself into the local pharmacy and announces to the pharmacist that she wants a box of condoms.
The pharmacist, embarrassed, looks at her kind of strangely (she is after all, over 80 years of age), but very delicately asks what brand of condom she prefers.
'Doesn't matter Sonny, as long as it fits on a Camel.'
Well, why not? After all, Sen. Chuck Hagel was only a sergeant in the Vietnam war and I was a corporal - substantive, mind! - in the British army at roughly the same time, even if I was idling my time away living amongst the fleshpots of Singapore whilst he was up the sharp end in Vietnam earning serious medals. And anyway, now that he, as a putative Republican, has been chosen by President Obama to be the next Secretary of State for Defence then as far as I am concerned he has assumed the character of one of those targets they used to hoist up at the end of our firing range at which I used to waste quids worth of ammo as my shots went everywhere except near the picture of a charging enemy infantryman at which I was supposed to be aiming! Of course, being of a peaceable nature myself I would not do this without provocation but the fact is that just about everyone and his uncle are taking potshots at poor old Chuck. He must feel as though he's back in Vietnam.
The puzzle of the Chuck Hagel nomination for defense secretary is that you normally choose someone of the other party for your cabinet to indicate a move to the center, but, as the Washington Post editorial board points out, Hagel’s foreign-policy views are to the left of Barack Obama’s, let alone the GOP’s. Indeed, they were at the fringe of the entire Senate. [My emphasis]
So what’s going on? Message sending. Obama won reelection. He no longer has to trim, to appear more moderate than his true instincts. He has the “flexibility” to be authentically Obama.
According to 'The Kraut', there are three main areas of policy with which to judge Sen. Hagel's approach. The first, is military spending which is scheduled to go under a $600 billion scalpel, a policy vehemently opposed by Sen. Hagel's predecessor which might have been the cause of his early demise. But 'Sgt.' Hagel, having looked at the army from the bottom up, knows the unbelievable amount of waste and profligacy, to say nothing of kick-backs and profiteering, that goes on inside a defence budget. So in this he may be right, as Mark Steyn makes clear in The National Review:
But beyond the politics is a real question. He’s [Hagel] not wrong to raise the question of Pentagon “bloat.” The United States has the most lavishly funded military on the planet, and what does it buy you? In the Hindu Kush, we’re taking twelve years to lose to goatherds with fertilizer.
Something is wrong with this picture. Indeed, something is badly wrong with the American way of war. And no one could seriously argue that, in the latest in the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll call of America’s un-won wars, the problem is a lack of money or resources. Given its track record, why shouldn’t the Pentagon get a top-to-toe overhaul — or at least a cost-benefit analysis?
Quite so but I can't help wondering how much of baby will be thrown out with the bath water, by which I mean, the really slick technology required for research and development of the very latest in weaponry costs zillions even with Scrooge in charge of the Pentagon. The Chinese have zillions, not in cash terms but in science graduates prepared to work for peanuts provided they get a flat in one of those empty modern cities that litter their landscape. What I'm trying to say is that if government is hopeless at running over-spent budgets which at least produce the goodies in the end, how efficient will they be at cutting back budgets without ending worthwhile research projects?
The second Hagel policy item ' The Kraut' concentrates on is Israel:
The issue is not Hagel’s alleged hostility but his public pronouncements, his refusal to make moral distinctions, for example. At the height of the second intifada, a relentless campaign of indiscriminate massacre of Israelis, Hagel found innocence abounding: “Both Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a war not of their making.”
I'm not sure one can afford "moral distinctions" in international affairs but whilst the Israelis no doubt have much blood on their hands it as nothing compared to the corrupt, vicious and self-perpetuating war policy of the Arab regimes which they have maintained as a means to maintain themselves. That has now failed and even worse collection of loonies is in charge of their various asylums. There is also a real-politik argument in favour of supporting Israel, particularly now. The new Islamist regimes will hate us whether we support Israel or not, so we might as well keep the Israelis going for as long as possible in order to keep otherwise idle and mischievous Arab hands and minds busy. It is an Obama-rish fancy that playing 'nicely-nicely' with your sworn enemies will somehow placate them. Read some history, Mr. President, and you, too, Sen. Hagel!
Thirdly, of course, comes Iran, and 'The Kraut' spells it out:
Hagel doesn’t just oppose military action, a problematic option with serious arguments on both sides. He actually opposed any unilateral sanctions. You can’t get more out of the mainstream than that.
He believes in diplomacy instead, as if talk alone will deter the mullahs. He even voted against designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.And most tellingly, he has indicated that he is prepared to contain a nuclear Iran, a position diametrically opposed to Obama’s ostensibly unalterable opposition to containment in his first term. What message do you think this sends the mullahs?
And that’s the point. Hagel himself doesn’t matter. He won’t make foreign policy. Obama will. Hagel’s importance is the message his nomination sends about where Obama wants to go. The lessons are being duly drawn. Iran’s official media have already cheered the choice of what they call this “anti-Israel” nominee. And they fully understand what his nomination signals regarding administration resolve about stopping them from going nuclear. [My emphasis]
Mark Steyn makes more or less exactly the same point but adds in a gloomy assessment of the future in the first half of the 21st century:
The rest of the world can see coming the Pentagon downsizing — and the inevitable, commensurate decline of U.S. power. Pacific Rim countries will have to rethink reliance on the counterbalance of the U.S. Navy and consider acquiescence to Chinese regional hegemony. Arab countries will understand that the current rapid decline of post-Kissinger U.S. dominance in the region is not cyclical but intended to become permanent.
Hagel is a man of no independent stature. He’s no George Marshall or Henry Kissinger. A fringe senator who left no trace behind, Hagel matters only because of what his nomination says about Obama.
Meanwhile, in The Spectator, Andrew J. Bracevich, turn his fire onto the Chiefs of Staff themselves. He is amused by General Martin E. Dempsey, the COS Chairman, who continues the Pentagon custom of holding regular strategy meetings in which all the 'brass', with plastic booties on their shoes, stride around a map of the world painted on the floor of an enormous room deciding on their strategy for this or that eventuality which he describes as "a made-for-Kubrick set-up" inviting hilarity and scorn. I'm not so sure of that. Generals are supposed to think of the strategic threats to their country. In fact, if the COS had done a little more of it, as well as doing it better, in the 1930s they might have been better prepared for the 1940s! But Mr. Bracevich will not have it:
Yet Dempsey’s map hints at the dirty secret that members of the fraternity of strategists, civilian and military alike, are loath to acknowledge. The formulation of strategy begins by assuming away complexity, reducing reality to a convenient caricature. Strategic analysis is almost by definition dumbed-down analysis. To conjure up solutions, you start by simplifying the problem.
Reading his essay I decided that what Mr. Bracevich is really complaining about is not strategic thinking but poor strategic thinking! Well, we'll all drink to that, especially the poor old 'Grunts' and 'Toms' who get left with the job of putting it into action. But that sort of 'conclusion' does take you very far. Von Schlieffen, von Moltke the Younger and the entire German General Staff went in for arguably the greatest exercise in strategic thinking the world has ever seen, even down to the intervals, measured with Prussian exactitude down to minutes, between hundreds of trains moving across Germany in 48 hours. Six weeks after the war they started, they lost - even if it did take them another four years to own up!
Anyway, all those of you (and there are a few not a million miles from my regular commenter, DM!) who pray for a docile America kept so busy turning swords into plough-shares that it will quietly ignore the rest of the globe going to hell in handcart may be about to live your dream. Let's hope it doesn't turn into a nightmare!
And rabbles tend to be defeated! There is, I sense, a very large faction in this country made up of those who have always known, and those who have recently realised, that membership of the EU is not only a disadvantage but coming close to a disaster. Events of the past four years have certainly added to their numbers. However, we - oh yes, I was against it from the off! - suffer one crippling weakness - we lack a leader. Every movement needs a focus upon whom we, and our opponents can concentrate, someone who can direct our attacks and counter-attacks against that great, amorphous, squidgy, conglomoration of fudge that is the British establishment. It cannot, I think, be Nigel Farage of UKIP. Somehow, in someway, he is not yet considered a serious political figure - although that could change particularly if his party follows through on their poll ratings at the ballot box in the forthcoming European elections at the expense of the Tories. Thus, it is incumbent on us all to vote UKIP in our European consitituencies if the Tories look as though they might win - only a huge, headline-winning, Tory defeat will frighten Westminster Tories into rebellion against 'Dim Dave'. No-one with more than three brain cells believes Dave's heart is in the fight against the Berlin-Brussels axis, least of all those apparatchiks who inhabit that region. He will go through the motions and like Tory prime ministers before him will come back and wave a bit of paper claiming peace and prosperity in our time! My guess is that most Tory MPs already realise that they are not going to win a majority at the next general election but if enough of them realise that they, personally, will definitely be on the casualty list because of UKIP running interference, then maybe, just maybe, they will rebel - now! And if one or two suitably heavyweight hitters from the Tory front bench come out and declare for the anti-European movement we will have the sort of leadership we need and given my suspicion concerning the yellow streak running up Dave's back, he might well change course accordingly. Today's headlines are full of blather from past Europhiles like Heseltine and Clarke who, despite being completely wrong all those years ago, are still peddling the same old guff. We need concentrated, co-ordinated counter-fire from some 'big guns' - and we need it quick!
That Abe Lincoln has a lot to answer for! First of all, the trailer for the current film was on last night as I waited for Les Mis to begin. Obviously one cannot judge the film by a few quick takes here and there in a trailer but I must say that Daniel Day-Lewis's shouting, peremptory, desk-banging attitude got up my nose! The second thing that Abe has to answer for is finally provoking me into buying a good biography of his life. I have one which has remained on my book shelf untouched since I first bought it from a charity shop. It is a slim volume written by Jan Morris but I am somewhat reluctant to start it because one of the reviews describes it as "blending fact, narrative and imagination"(!) which is not what I am looking for. As that old American TV policeman used to say in every episode, "Just gimme the facts". And I want the facts even more now that I have read a letter in today's Telegraph (can't find a link) from the historian, Alan Sked, in which he says that:
Lincoln was a racist who deliberately started a war that killed more than 650,000 people. He had no intention of freeing slaves, who freed themselves by fleeing to Unionist lines during a war that was going badly for the North and in which they became needed as recruits. [...]
Until the day he died, Lincoln's ideal solution to the problem of blacks was to "colonise" them back to Africa or the tropics.
Eh? What? Is that really true? Tell me it ain't so - but better still, recommend to me as honest a biography as you know of. 'SoD' gave me a fistful of book tokens for Christmas and, on your advice, I will invest some of them into a good biography of the man about whom I know nothing other than the 'saintly' glow which emanates to this day from his historical persona; a glow, incidentally, which, in so far as I ever think about it, I view with some suspicion!
Les Misérables was simply superb! At the end of the film, six of us sat in the back row utterly silent, not trusting ourselves to speak, whilst in the row in front a young girl sobbed. Very slowly the cinema emptied and I haven't seen such a silent, contemplative audience leave an auditoreum since Schindler's List. Of course, the film is an emotional sledgehammer and you would have to have had your emotional nerve-endings cauterised to resist it, either that, or be absolutely determined to cut a pose as a young, dead hard, post-modernist critic eager to make a name for yourself like the teenage prat who wrote a pathetic review in The Independent.
Of course, the film, like any other great artistic enterprise, is not perfect. For example I thought the very opening scene in the shipyards with convicts dragging a ship into dry dock was unconvincing and heavy-handed - in all senses! I admit that at that point my heart sank and I thought I was in for two hours and forty minutes of the worst sort of melodrama. However, once past that, the film found its feet and took us all on Victor Hugo's epic journey through sin, mercy and on to final redemption. I have seen the stage show four times but I had not taken on board the tremendously strong message of Christianity that it contains. This story really is Christianity in action. Of course, there is a dollop of soppy socialism in the story - not at all the same thing as Christianity! - because it is set against the backdrop of the mini French revolution of 1835, but predominantly the story is one of personal tragedy laced with the optimism of final redemption.
No doubt there will be no end of 'Clever Dicks', like The Independent's critic, who will complain that the singing is not perfect to which I would reply that if you want perfect singing, go to the opera but if you do, do not expect to see perfect acting! The point about the performers in this film is that their slight imperfections in singing actually added to the realism of their performances - it persuaded us that these were real people enmeshed in the all-too-real drama of their situation. (I was reminded of a concert performance of West Side Story I saw on TV once featuring trained opera singers - they drained the emotional blood out of it and left a dessicated corpse on stage!) I will not describe each and every performance because they were all just excellent. However, I must just mention Hugh Jackman because, although he is constantly in the press and has, I gather, a string of film performances to his credit, I had never seen him before so at least now I know why people rate him, rightly, as a truly first-rate actor. (There was a man who could have played Jack Reacher!)
Instead, let me heap my praise on the director, Tom Hooper and the entire cast and crew of this terrific film - most of whom are British - HOORAH! This joins the other 46-odd films which constitute my Top Ten Favourites. Thinking about it, I am taken with how many musical films go into my Top Ten. For a man who does not know the difference between a crotchet and a quaver, that is very odd!
ADDITIONAL: I have just come across this earlier piece in The Telegraph which provides some interesting background to the way this film was made - worth a quick read.
First the 'Good News'. That bastion of politically (in)correct thinking, aka, NASA, has taken a gigantic step shuffled forward a tad! Hitherto it has represented the High Church of the Anthropogenic Global Warming cult with its insistence that global warming was entirely due to man-made production of CO2. For years they have resolutely turned their backs on that enormous ball of burning plasma in the sky and insisted that it was 'CO2 wot dunnit'. Needless to say, they now find their backs scorched and blistered and have been forced to turn over.
Sorry, too much sarcasm and too many metaphoricals, so let me get to the point. The ever-excellent WUWT reports that NASA has concluded a grand meeting of experts in just about every field concerned with the viciously complicated causes and effects of our global climate and finally they have admitted, cautiously and hedged around with various 'ifs', 'buts' and 'maybes', that there may be something in the theory that solar energy, in all its various forms, may have something to do with the earth's climate.
As a result we now have a fascinating and new debate on the pages of WUWT in which the 'usual suspects' in the AGW camp have been totally ignored because they are now irrelevant and instead a ferocious argument has broken out between what I am tempted (and I never resist temptation!) to call the 'Sun Worshippers' and the 'Sun Infidels'. The latter are led by the stiff and unyielding, Dr. Lief Svelsgaard (a major sun-swot), who refuses absolutely to take any step in any direction without solid scientific proof. Then there are his opponents who, so they maintain stoutly, keep offering him proofs which, they say, he keeps ignoring.
It's always a shame when friends fall out but at least those scattered remnants of the AGW cult have been put back where they belong - on the outer fringes. That they have been shoved there by NASA, the spritual home of the likes of James Hansen and Michael Mann, spells doom for them and their potty ideas - at last. I urge you to read the article and the comments thread, as good an example of controversial science at work as you will see anywhere.
I ask the question because President Obama has offered up some cove called Jack Lew to be his next Secretary of the Treasury. I know nothing about Mr. Lew other than two things. First, he cannot manage joined-up writing, it is quite beyond him, as his signature indicates:
Now, I am not unsympathetic to Mr. Lew's plight because in this age of electronic typing and the fact that signing cheques has almost disappeared, I, too, have to pause and think before I sign anything. However, Mr. Lew, as Secretary to the Treasury, has to sign every single dollar bill that is produced - well, he doesn't sign each and every one, of course, but his signature is reproduced, and frankly, the signature above might confirm to the world what it has suspected for some time that the kids have taken over the financial nursery in Washington! The only good thing about it is that you might be able to check the validity of your dollar bills by counting the whorls and loops which are likely to fool your average counterfeiter.
The second problem with Mr. Lew's infantile scribble is that according to RT.com, a handwriting expert has analysed it and come to the conclusion that:
Jack Lew might be the cuddly type.
“Such strokes are common among those who prefer a ‘softer’ approach to problem-solving,” the newspaper quotes Kathi McKnight as saying. She also concluded that the signature is similar in style to the handwriting of Princess Diana.
On my way to the swimming-pool this morning . . . oh yes, crack of dawn, five mornings a week, haven't I told you before? . . . I heard on the radio a little of the interrogation by a Commons committee of Sir Humphrey Sir Jeremy Heywood, The Grand Panjandrum of All Panjandrums, who is the bloke pulling Dave's strings, as per this excellent cartoon from The Coffee House:
He it was who was tasked, not 'instructed' because'Dim Dave' wouldn't dare to 'instruct' Sir Jeremy, to find out the truth concerning the Plebgate incident. Well, from what I heard on the BBC, and what I read in Isobel Hardman's excellent summary at The Coffee House, very little in the way of truth was discovered by Sir 'Mandarin' Heywood who appeared to be incapable of spotting a discrepancy if it was any smaller than an elephant! The only interesting, and utterly depressing, truth to emerge from this whole farago is that the man with his hand up the back of Dave's suit operating the levers is a total twat!
As for the 'perp' himself, a man whose smugness is only exceeded by his dimness, the jury remains out.
In The Spectator last week there was an excellent article by Jonathan Foreman detailing the futility and waste of much of our so-called 'overseas aid', the department formerly run by Mr. 'Smug Features' Mitchel, above. Apparently, he has written a response in today's Spectator in which he claims not to have seen anything other than total benefice flowing from our overseas aid programmes, so I don't care whether he's guilty or not guilty of the 'Plebgate' affair, he should stay sacked for the simple and obvious reason that he is a total tit!
In an unusual example of prescience - highly unusual on this blog! - I intimated a few days ago that the calibre of foreign service officers with the American State Department was beginning to make the members of our very own 'Ministry for Foreigners' look positively bright by comparison. I still remember the slight shock I felt when 'Hillbilly' was given the job of Secretary of State and upon arrival at the office she was met by a large crowd of cheering (so-called) public servants. Hang on a minute, I thought at the time, you are supposed to be politically-neutral civil servants not cheer leaders for the Democrat party. (Yes, yes, I know, how pathetic to still be a silly naive boy at the age of 73!)
Anyway, one of these third-raters, the US assistant secretary for European affairs Philip Gordon, opened his mouth and let his belly rumble, in public, by telling Britain it should remain in the EU. Now, the United States has every right to hold an opinion on foreign affairs which it is fully entitled to express in private but only in the most extreme of cases should it voice that opinion out loud. Whether or not this worthy did so on orders from his master in the White House I do not know, so perhaps the stricture contained in the title to this post is unwarranted. It could well be the case because I don't think President Obama has an opinion one way or the other about Britain and the EU except, possibly, that he prefers the latter to the former!
So what did Mr. Gordon think he would achieve by his public arm-twisting? Apart, that is, from stiffening the resolve of all those anti-EU Tories and placing Cameron in a position which will allow Mr. Farage of Ukip to call him an American puppet if he fails to come out of the EU. Needless to say, this country, like just about every other country in the world, possesses in its population a brooding body of anti-American opinion which is normally quiescent but can be quickly revived by the sort of crass interference perpetrated by the likes of Mr. Gordon. If my American readers are somewhat bemused by all of this (I doubt it because they are too bright) then they should ponder on what their re-action would be if Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador to the USA was to advise the White House publicly on how to conduct its proposed gun law legislation, or, how it should behave in order to control its debt, or any number of other matters which are no damned business of the UK!
Those canny fellows at NightWatch had a very pertinent commentary concerning the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Senkaku Islands - no, me neither, but it concerns some specks of Islands in the South China Sea which the Japanese 'own' and the Chinese think they own. It's a bit like the old Schleswig-Holstein Question of which Lord Palmerston remarked:
“The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.”
Thus it is with the Senkaku Islands but the fact is that there has been a steady rise in tension between the two countries which is not helped by memories of WWII and the murderous cruelty of the Japanese army in China. So far the tensions have expressed themselves in economic terms with mutual boycotting of goods and according to my 'NightWatchmen', both have suffered but crucially the Japanese have suffered the most:
The key point is that global economic integration magnifies the consequences of international disputes. Interdependency means both sides seriously suffer economically, although security incidents result in no casualties. Japan might have sustained a .5 per cent decline in GDP in the last quarter of 2012, essentially because of Chinese hostile, nationalistic responses to the islands dispute.
Both sides got hurt, but China can absorb the consequences more than Japan.
Another shrewd insight was offered which I do hope 'the cousins' have noted and underlined:
Another key point is that the dispute shows how the Chinese fight in every kind of battle space - at sea, in the air, on the land, in cyber space in international political space and in economic space. Total warfare means total to the Chinese. They are experimenting with that in the Senkakus dispute.
My emphasis was apropos my previous comment on our apparent lack of ability in this field.
He was not what Sorenson had been expecting. Not exactly. He wasn't a gorilla and he wasn't like something out of a slasher movie. But she could see why he had been described that way. He was huge, for a start. He was one of the largest men she had ever seen outside the NFL. He was extremely tall, and extremely broad, and long-armed and long-legged. The lawn chair was regular size, but it looked tiny under him. It was bent and crushed out of shape. His knuckles were nearly touching the ground. His neck was thick and his hands were the size of dinner plates.
For those not already aquainted with him, allow me to introduce Jack Reacher, the hero - and, boy, do I mean heroic! - of the fifteen or so thrillers written by Mr. Lee Childs who is, surprisingly, English by birth and upbringing. Anyway, as I have told you before, Hollywood has just released the first film of Jack Reacher's exploits and the actor playing him is Mr. Tom Cruise. Now, Mr. Cruise has played, many a time and oft', in various action-packed thrillers and it is true to say that he keeps himself in shape but the little midget is only 5'-7" tall. Even I'm taller than that - just! Zillions of people with nothing much better to do, like me, have read, or perhaps devoured is a better word, the many books and we know exactly how Jack Reacher should look - and it definitely ain't like 'Titchy Tom'!
I'm all bitter and twisted about this because I have just finished the very latest Jack Reacher tale, A Wanted Man (absolute corker!), from which I took the quotation above. I can only assume they are all born congenitally stupid in Hollywood because all those zillion Jack Reacher fans who could have been expected to queue up for seats are never going to see their ridiculous film in which it is quite possible that the female lead will be taller than the hero!
However, to cheer me up, I am going to see Les Mis on Friday - can't wait!
Yes, yes, I know, cod Shakespeare (sorry Will!) but today I have a huge, 'gi-normous' dollop of irony, enough for me to surfeit on for weeks! You see, that 'solitary, nasty, (Leftish), brutish and short' little thug who runs Venezuela (sorry, Hobbes, old chap!) is dying of cancer in a Cuban hospital. Truly now it may be said that 'El Presidente-Comisario' Chavez is dying for his beliefs. Being (allegedly) a true red Marxist he has swallowed whole the lying lie, which was helped on its way round the world by the lying liars' lying liar of choice, Michael Moore, that Cuba's socialist health service is terrific, one might almost suggest that it has taken over from our very own, dearly beloved Nationalised Health Service as being "the envy of the world". The fact, of course, is that the Cuban health service is total crap,as reported by Investors.com:
Cuba by contrast, remains substandard, with average Cubans forced to bring their own bandages, water and sheets to hospitals that haven't seen repairs in years.
Recent reports say Cuba cut medical spending from $209 million in 2009 to $190 million last year — "bending the cost curve" by giving less care. Sound familiar?
When Chavez was first diagnosed with cancer he was offered the services of the Sirio-Libanese Hospital in Sao Paulo, Brazil which is considered to be a world leader in cancer treatments.
His expected demise will be entirely due to his gullibility to leftist propaganda and bad choices that came of it.
"In July 2011, during (a)... summit in Caracas, Brazil's President, Dilma Rousseff, told a few of her colleagues — in private — that Chavez was likely to die as a result of 'his excessive paranoia rather than as a consequence of his serious — yet treatable — cancer,'" wrote Venezuelan consultant Pedro Burelli in a newsletter.
"What she meant to say," Burelli added, "was that by choosing secrecy in Cuba over medical competence at the Sirio-Libanese Hospital in Sao Paulo (where she had been treated successfully for lymphatic cancer) Chavez had condemned himself to a shorter life."
Perhaps he was conned by Michael Moore's 1998 propaganda film, Sicko, which praised 'Castro-Care' to the heavens. If so, it is obvious that one lying liar couldn't spot another even if they were both together on a desert island!
As Chavez suffers through four surgeries in Cuba, it's instructive to note it was the Brazilian hospital — a teaching institution with top-of-the-line tomotherapy equipment, 2,000 doctors, and a record of success for beating cancer — that cured Rousseff as well as then-President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay. But it gets no recognition from the likes of Moore, who still promotes CastroCare on his Web site, while ignoring the private U.S. hospitals the Brazilians model themselves after.
To be fair, Chavez is far from being the worst of South American gangsters masquerading as national saviours but even so, he had choices and he took one - and you know what those beastly American gringos say about giving a sucker an even break - "Never"!
Sometimes there are no words but this picture must be worth, oh, what, say, about whatever the extra tax was that Obama just took out of American pay checks?
No, I don't know whether or not the picture is a set up but, as Obama & Co might say, what's a little fib between friends?!
Well, given the rate of price inflation indicated in the diagram, perhaps we should say 'a picture worth a billion words'! It appeared on Zero Hedge which is lucky because I have been meaning to bookmark that always interesting and perceptive site and now I have done so.
The author reminds us that the first ominous rise in price inflation began with the creation of the Federal Bank, the equivalent of the Bank of England 'over there'. However, the rocket fuel was injected when Nixon took the USA off the gold standard in 1971.
James Arbuthnot, committee chairman, said: “"It is our view that cyber security is a sufficiently urgent, significant and complex activity to warrant increased ministerial attention.
"The Government needs to put in place – as it has not yet done – mechanisms, people, education, skills, thinking and policies which take into account both the opportunities and the vulnerabilities which cyberspace presents."
The catastrophic shambles that would ensue across the country if a cyber attack was only partially successful hardly bears thinking about. I don't believe many of us are even aware of the huge complexity of the networks which support almost all aspects of our lives and daily business. It is only when one breaks down, usually due to human error, that we are momentarily shocked, like that recent bank 'snafu' when suddenly cheques and money transfers failed. Imagine if, say, 50% of our networks across a whole range of activities were damaged or destroyed - what then? Even more to the point would be the effect on our armed forces:
The defence committee report concluded: “The armed forces now so dependent on information and communications technology, should such systems suffer a sustained cyber attack, their ability to operate could be fatally compromised," the committee said.
It said there was an “inevitable inadequacy of the measures available to protect against a constantly changing and evolving threat” and that it was not enough for armed forces just to “do their best” to prevent an effective attack.
The extent of information and communication technology in weapons, satellite and intelligence systems means “many more points of vulnerability”.
Currently, there are some major cuts slashing away at our armed services, and quite right, too, in my opinion, but some serious money should be spent on the creation of a joint military and civil agency to combat cyber warfare. This will not be cheap - the top people in 'computeronics' (there, a little neologism just for you!) demand and receive top money but it has to be done and done quickly. It's no good depending on the generals and admirals, they don't understand it any more than you or I, and frankly, if it doesn't go bang they are not very interested! What we need is a leader from the computer/software industry, provided with a massive budget to set up an entirely new agency. It needs the Prime Minister to get behind the project and push it through as a matter of urgency - oh dear, why do I suddenly feel depressed?
That's the order from the 'Tallbloke' and as I am not particularly tall, I'll just do as I'm told! And it's worth it because he neatly eviscerates a paper produced by some of the cult leaders of the 'AGW scientology' movement, the likes of Ben Santer, Susan Solomon, Tom Wigley, Julie Arblaster and Peter Stott. These worthies have produced a paper entitled: ‘Identifying human influences on atmospheric temperature’. In it, they attempt, quite rightly and admirably, to differentiate between solar influence, man-made influence and "the noise [my emphasis] of internally generated variability" influence as causes of the rise in global temperatures in the latter part of the 20th century. But now it becomes necessary to watch the pea!
What they have actually done is to conflate outside influences, the sun, etc, with man-made influences so that now the 'anthropological' element of so-called 'Anthropological Global Warming' (AGW) is quietly lost in the 'noise':
The main bone of contention in the climate debate is the question of whether the late 20th century warming was predominantly caused by the more active than average Sun, some longer term modes of internal variability, or by increasing human emission of carbon dioxide. Now the ‘Team’ is trying to conflate the solar influence with human influence and contrast these two entirely different factors with internal natural variability, which they call ‘noise’.
This panicking effort to hide the effect(?) of CO2 is essential because, of course, it is man-made CO2 which the hystericals have pointed at and blamed for causing global warming. However, in the past 15 to 20 years there has been hardly any warming at all and yet China, India and most of South East Asia has been pumping out CO2 in, literally, eye-watering amounts. If in fact, global variations in climate are simply the result of natural cycles, or, the sun having a bout of acne and throwing out a gale-force of cosmic rays, or whatever, then the political red meat in the AGW movement simply disappears - along with all of their wretched agitators.
The fact that it is their so-called experts who have been forced to own up even as they try to obfuscate the truth is utterly damning.
Well? Didja see 'em, didja, didja? No, me neither! It seems the entire country went on about its business yesterday utterly disinterested in what our prime and deputy prime ministers had to say as they extolled the virtues of what they had achieved in the first two and a half years and enthralling us - not! - with their plans for the next two and a half. Personally, I was far too busy fighting off the mass vandal attack by Google/Imgres (see below) but even the MSM seem less than interested, preferring, I assume by the absence of much in the way of commentary today, to do their tax returns or paint the mother-in-law's kitchen rather than listen to these two A1 crashers pretend that they really, really, are grown-up statesmen.
Mind you, I suppose, when I ponder on't, better this pair of obvious lightweight chancers than some swivel-eyed fanatic filled to busting with "that vision thang"! When you think about it, 98% of politics is total humdrum tedium that only the social inadequates who take up politics could put up with for more than five minutes because in return it allows them to "strut their hour upon the stage". In other words, boring politics is, on the whole, by and large, taken in the round, better than exciting politics! Even so, one occasionaly yearns for some sense of direction, some indication of a world view, a hint perhaps that our inglorious leaders have something more in mind than just staying in the job long enough to nail down a Blair-style sinecure for the second half of their lives that will bring in enough moolah to soften the loss of sundry creeps constantly muttering , "Yes, Prime minister", "Thank you, Prime Minister" and "It's time for your press conference, Prime Minister".
Returning from my daily swim this morning - by the way, have I mentioned . . . alright, alright, no need to shout! - I came upstairs, switched on and thought for a moment the software provided by my new best friend Bill had not so much gone awry as gone completely bonkers! Either that, or those delicious Californian blondes who roller-skate to work at TypePad HQ wearing bikinis (well, a man can dream, can't he?) were playing a joke on me. You see, the opening page of my TypePad-thingie has a graph at the top which tells me how many hits per day I have received and usually it is in or around 300. This morning it was - 3,342! And it was only 8.15am!
Scrolling back - and it took ages - through the nightly tally I now see that it all began at 04.48 hours when I began receiving hits from www.google.com/imgres on one particular old post of mine from June last year entitled: A special treat for DM in recompense for commenting above the call of duty. In it I featured several paintings and sketches by Turner the artist who I know to be a favourite of my old e-pal 'Dearieme', aka, 'DM'. Anyway, for some reason that has gone viral and as I type this the hit score is now 3,794! Surely a dour, old Jock like 'DM' can't have that many friends!
What is irritating is that that particular post consists mostly of Turner's paintings with very few of my wise and perceptive words for which I am famed the length and breadth of this garret! I mean, if it was one of my political or philosophical treatises I could understand the attraction - but a damned dauber, well, words fail me . . .
ADDITIONAL:I have now deleted the entire post in an effort to foil bloody, bloody Google/Imgres!
ADDITIONAL ADDITIONAL: Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the hits from Google/Imgres stopped at 3.45pm. My 'score' for the day is - wait for it - 9,500! The only problem is that on my monthly graph, today makes the rest of the month look positively weedy! Ah well, normal crap service is resumed!
It's the solar rays wot dunnit! Once again this blog was wrong - so no surprise there, then! In fact, this blog is pissed off with having to keep owning up to errors but then again, no-one in their right mind pays any attention to what is written here, so what's the problem?! Anyway, my frequent dire warnings and my shaking, accusatory finger-pointing at those nasty little sun spots as being the cause of all our good/bad weather was wrong. At least, that is according to Dr. Leif Svalgaard, the well-known Scandinavian spelling mistake and the expert of all experts when it comes to solar matters. He has written an article over at WUWT which I urge you all to read, not least because I don't see why I should be the only one with a headache this Sunday. It is also worth reading the entire comments thread - just take a handful of paracetamol first - because sundry swots add in their expertise and slowly - very slowly as far as I am concerned - you begin to grasp, not the absolute truth of the matter, but the complexity of it all and the way in which first-class scientists, like Svalgaard, inch their way slowly and carefully towards some tentative conclusions. One of which appears to be some sort of correlation between cosmic rays emitted from the sun and the formation, or not, of cloud cover on earth which, of course, even a scientific twit like me can see would alter our climate to some extent.
The '50s: Heaven or Hell? I grew up during the 1950s in the pleasant county of Surrey. As a 'family' unit my Mum and I were exceedingly hard-up although I never sensed it at the time because whilst there were never any luxuries equally there were never any shortage of absolute essentials. So for me, the '50s were heaven, or as near to it as you can get on earth. Of course, it was a time when public propriety went hand-in-hand with private promiscuity as, according to the reviews of An English Affair by Richard Davenport-Hines, was the case with the Profumo affair. So no change there, then! From the reviews I gather that Davenport-Hines was shocked - shocked, I tell you - by the rank hypocrisy of the ruling class to which I can only respond with a yawn. One only requires a slight knowledge of 'dear Bertie's' efforts to shag for Empire, or, going further back, to the dear old 'Duke of Boot' and his 'heroic' efforts to defeat 'feelthy' French hints that we Brits were not really up to the job whilst on the job! Anyway, one result of the scandal was that henceforth hypocrisy, that is, the wilful practice of hiding one's sins because of shame, has disappeared and today anyone and everyone is advised to 'let it all hang out' so shame has been banished. Well, bring back the era of hypocrisy, I say. (By the way, Profumo once shook my hand and if I had known then where it had been I would never have washed it again!)
Chicago should follow LA: Let not Mayor Rahm Emanuel put it about that this blog has it in for his 'Windy City'. Absolutely not, even if the body count last year was at record heights and that in the first three days of this year, five more people were murdered. Despite all that, this blog is eager to assist the mayor in his valiant efforts to cut the killing - er, he is making efforts, isn't he? Anyway, eager to be of assistance might I suggest that he begins by introducing strict hammer and club control laws because according to the FBI, no less, more people are killed with those implements than with rifles! Next, he should begin a vigorous campaign to attract Latinos to his city because according to a city cop with the Los Angeles Police Department commenting on the drop in crime stats in his city, a goodly part of it is due to the influx of Latinos pushing out Blacks. Ooops, perhaps that was a tad blunt, so allow me to re-phrase it in 'PC-lingo for the cringo', let's just call it a "demographic shift", there, that's much nicer, isn't it?
The Plods get it right and wrong: I noticed somewhere, I forget exactly where, someone moaning that Scotland Yard were wasting public time and money in putting 30+ officers onto the task of investigating the so-called 'Plodgate case' involving the ex-Chief Whip, Andrew Mitchell. I care nothing either way for Mr. Mitchell whose efforts at the Ministry of Overseas Aid should have led to him being put naked in the stocks in Parliament Square so that we could all pelt him with rotten veg. However, if - and it still remains an 'if' - there was a concerted effort by a gang (I use the word deliberately) of police officers to 'fit up' a government minister then absolutely every effort should be made to uncover it. It strikes with deadly accuracy at the very heart of our democracy. What they should do, is cut down on the ridiculous investigation, now verging on a witch hunt, into various elderly gentlemen (er, well, men, anyway) accused by sundry old biddies of having touched them up as young girls but none of whom, as far as I know, were exactly kidnapped and raped! I am also slightly miffed that I have not been questioned as yet! I consider it a slur on my manhood because I certainly spent a considerable amount of time and energy attempting to touch up inappropriately as many young girls as I could get to stand or lie still long enough for me to do it. Alas, truth will out, and the fact is that the number was distressingly tiny. 'E' for Effort - again!
In all the New Year broo-ha-ha I forgot to share my amusement at the annual release of classified documents under the 30-year rule. This year, of course, it covered, amongst other things, the Falklands war, or perhaps, now that we know what went on, we should rename it 'the Washington war'! Dr. Tim Stanley, an English history prof who specialises in America, wrote a summary for the Daily Telegraph. According to the prof (who looks about 14-years old!), Mrs Thatcher, as she was then, quickly learned that "the special relationship is only special when it's convenient". This was made clear when the Americans told her that they felt the need to inform the Argentinians of the forthcoming British landings on South Georgia in order to maintain their stance of neutrality. Of course, they assured her, they would only do this at the last possible moment so as to avoid British casualties but . . . Well, needless to say, out came the handbag with the lead weight in it and perhaps Reagan felt that, on the whole, being shot was less painful! I frequently bemoan the useless, when not actually harmful, activities of our very own 'Ministry for Foreigners' but the American State Department reminds me, constantly, that it could be worse. Were there really educated, knowledgeable, sophisticated people at the highest level of American foreign affairs who thought that tipping off the 'Argies' to our landing, even at the last moment, would do anything other than utterly rupture the Atlantic alliance? Every British casualty, fairly or unfairly, would have been laid at the door of a treacherous White House and an alliance that had lasted through two world wars would have ended instantly. Was that really worth being thought well of by a bunch of drunken, debauched, Argentinian thugs dressed in ridiculous uniforms and well past their sell-by date, General Haig and Mrs. Kirkpatrick?
Mind you, whilst it is easy - alas, all too easy - to deride the many imbeciles who inhabit American governments we should not forget our very own. By a sheer fluke we had the most outstanding prime minister since Churchill but just pause and consider what might have happened if that doddering, old fool, Michael Foot, had been running the country - yeeeees, quite! And also, before we lay into the (so-called) American elite with our base-ball bats, let us pause and raise a glass to the memory of (Sir) Caspar Weinberger, a man who could definitely see the British wood for the Argentinian trees!
Well, after 30 years, it's all "blood under the bridge" but as Dr. Stanley reminds us, it behoves British statesmen to keep a very clear eye open when appraising likely American responses to this or that. What we do not need is the sort of moon-calf love exhibited by 'Dim Dave':
Alas, whenever David Cameron takes a romantic break in Washington DC, it’s truly love that we see in his eyes as he hangs on Barack’s every word. Some of us will never forgive him for describing the UK as America’s “junior partner” during the Second World War. Given how much an Eton education costs, you’d have imagined that Dave would’ve paid a little more attention in history class.
According to two newspaper reports I have read, Benjamin Netanyahu is losing popularity in the run-up to the forthcoming election. Of course, he is still going to win but given the vagaries of the Israeli proportional representation system he will, as always, have to share power with one or two minority parties. His problem is that the particular party growing in popularity at his expense is even further to the Right than he is! He, and all of Israel, now know without a doubt that they no longer enjoy the support of the White House. Even worse, they now know that the always somewhat mythical 'Jewish lobby' is a busted flush. American Jews continued to vote for Obama despite his hostility to Israel. As one wiseacre (I forget who) put it, the vast majority of Jews in the USA are second or third generation away from the Holocaust and they are now far more Democrat than they are Jewish. Oddly enough, in reading about Anne Frank (see previous post) an American Jew who wrote a play about her was quoted as saying that he had spent eighteen months in Israel and hated every minute of it!
There is now little doubt that Iran (with a little help from its North Korean friends) will not only possess a nuclear capability but also a means to deliver it. Netanyahu has played a mean game of bluff poker so far but if his power is to rest in the hands of politicians even more nationalist than him then he may be forced to put up or shut up! Who would want to be a small, independent, democratic country whose threatened defences depend utterly on Barack Obama? Hmmmn, perhaps that's a question we should be asking ourselves!
NOTE: I'm not sure whether it's MS8 or TypePad but now, everytime I write a post, it automatically offers up linked articles. I will try to pick out relevant ones but of course I have not necessarily read them. There you are, you lucky people, all part of the excellent service you enjoy here at D&N!
Yes, I was enjoying a quiet day, sitting up here in my attic scrolling through 'Blogdom' and then I hit the name "Anne Frank" who is the subject of an article in Der Spiegel. That led me on to read her Wiki entry which left me, and I really do not want to sound soppy here, in a state close to tears. I should make clear that I have never read her diaries, partly because the intimacies of a very young, teenage girl held, and still hold, little interest for me but also because I knew and still know that I would be hugely distressed by her words. So, yes, good, old-fashioned, moral cowardice 'rules OK'!
There are so many examples in existence, particularly in science, where the nature of being alters depending on the focal range. For example, proteins, elements, molecules and atoms are one thing which studied en masse give one appearance of reality but sharpen the focus to the sub-atomic world and the picture changes utterly. Thus it is, I think, with human affairs like the Holocaust. I can look at it from a distance and mutter the usual pieties - and they are not hypocritical, I mean what I say, and to an extent I feel what I say. But in doing that I am emulating the boffin, or the history professor, as he draws general rules from general observations taken at a distance. With the story of Anne Frank, suddenly, you rocket downwards to the very closest of close-ups. She is of statistics but is not a statistic. Absolutely the opposite, she is herself, in all her varied aspects of being a human. To be honest, I simply cannot bring myself to, as it were, look her in the eye. Pathetic, I know, but there it is. I honour her memory. I pray that she may escape the worst attentions of both the well-meaning and the malign, and that she may continue to exist in her own right, not other people's.
In expressing her fervent desire to become a writer she used these words:
I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me!
Who can read that knowing the outcome and not weep?
Even by my elliptical standards that is one of my more obscure titles. However, regular readers will recognise the name of Donald Pittenger, the sole proprietor of the Art Contrarian site. I tend to save up my visits to his excellent blog because there is always such a mix of unexpected pleasures to be found there and scrolling through his site is rather like strolling through a real art gallery. There is nothing I can say that would improve on his always intelligent commentary so I will simply confine myself to showing you just some of the illustrations to the various posts to be found on his site today and I will leave you to go over and look for yourselves:
I have been banging on for weeks about the book written by Rabbi Sacks called The Great Partnership. Christmas festivities interrupted my reading but I have now restarted. I bring the subject up again but instead of me blathering on and probably distorting his words in my paraphrasing I thought I would give a direct quotation thus providing you all with a tasting:
Social cohesion is precisely what religion sustains and much else undermines. When societies grow affluent, when the burden of law-abidingness falls on the state and its institutions, when people define rights and wrongs in terms of externalities - punishment and rewards - and in terms of what other people do and are seen to get away with, when people focus, as they naturally do, on immediate benefits not long-term sustainability, then society begins to erode from within and there is little anyone can do about it. The signs are unmistakable:
"People lose a sense of shame. Rudeness is taken as a sign of sophistication. People pursue the pleasure of the moment. They lose respect for elders. The young no longer defer to the old, and the old behave as if they were young. The difference between the sexes is blurred. People get irritated by the least touch of authority and they dislike any rules that inhibit their freedom to do as they like."(*)
A Christian evangelical bemoaning secularism today? No: Plato speaking about the democracy of Athens.
A law of entropy governs societies. They rise to power and affluence and then begin to decline as individualism saps the collective spirit that brough them greatness in the first place. When this happens, only a counter-cultural force can revive flagging energies, renew institutions, defeat cynicism, generate trust and restore altruism. The Abrahamic monotheisms are the most powerful counter-cultural forces the world has ever known because they speak to something indelible in the human spirit: the dignity of humanity as the image of God.
So Dostoevsky was wrong and Tolstoy was right. Morality does not suddenly break down when people stop believing. People do not conclude: God does not exist, therefore everything is permitted. But they do in the long run, like an orchestra without a conductor, lose the habits that sustain the virtues that create the trust that preserves the institutions that shape and drive a moral order. That is when you see the first signs of discontent with secularisation. People, even those who do not practice a faith, start sending their children to faith schools. Children, even if only a few, start becoming more religious than their parents. Religious voices begin to be listened to with respect, if only because so many other voices sound cynical or self-seeking. The moral sense is not a blazing fire but a flickering flame, and it seems to have been the fate of faith to keep it burning even when the winds of individualism are strong.
God and good are connected after all.
Magnificent stuff; quietly passionate, elegantly phrased and mostly, in my opinion, accurate. I should add that I, personally, still do not believe in God but I do believe in the influence, for good or ill, of what he calls the "Abrahamic monotheisms". The big question remains: will they survive?
I confess immediately that when it comes to North Korea I rely utterly on those shrewd fellows at NightWatch who kindly sent me their overnight assessment of the New Year speech given by Kim III. (There have been three Kims running the dump since WWII and to avoid confusion, well, I get confused at any rate, I will number them.) There has been a minor flurry of excitement in the MSM for two reasons. First, that Kim III actually gave a live New Year speech at all because his father, Kim II, never did. However, my 'NightHawks' tell me that the reason Kim II never spoke was because he had a high-pitched woman's voice that might actually have raised a few laughs in that miserable dump of a country! The other reason for excitement was a mention in the speech of an end to confrontation with South Korea. However, my 'NightHawks' assure me that it was almost an afterthought in the speech and was only mentioned as an adjunct to Kim's urgent encouragement to the workers to produce a badly-needed economic miracle! That is likely to have been met not by giggles but by yawns (in private, of course!) because when do political leaders ever stop encouraging workers to work more?
The bulk of the speech concentrated on real matters, or real-politik, if you like, in that Kim III has obviously cast his lot in with the Party rather than the military. The people were urged to put their confidence and their weight behind the Party which was, is and will forever be the supreme arbiter of the nation's affairs. All those hideous, emaciated, be-medalled generals with their ridiculous ex-Soviet hats which are big enough to land a helicopter on, had better watch out. Or perhaps plump little Kim III should watch his step even closer! Anyway, the 'NightHawks' sum it up thus:
The message to the outside world appears to be a plea for forbearance while domestic issues get settled. Kim's detractors do not share that view. They think that provocation and tension promote the safety and security of the North Korean state.
Sounds like 'interesting times' - and we know what their Chinese neighbours say about that!
. 'Luvin' it already,' I thought because I will always offer to hold the coat of anyone taking a swing at 'Archbishop' Dawkins!
.jpg)
Recent Comments