“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 am perplexed - so what's new? - by the furore over security agencies collecting what amounts to several landfill sites of electronic data as a means of searching for some indications that X, Y or Z might, or might not, be contacting terrorist organisations. My instant re-action was that I would have been exceedingly cross if they were not doing that sort of thing. That, after all, is what we pay them for and as I have an aversion - a very strong aversion - to body parts being blown across tube trains and London buses then I don't mind if some mole at Cheltenham finds out about my frequent web-visits to the site of Miss Whackem's Institute for the Discipline of Naughty Young Gels because, of course, as you know, dear Reader, it is entirely innocent and is simply a means by which I can research the appalling lack of discipline in our 'skools' today - see previous post!
Also, I am equally perplexed at the notion that when you do anything on 'the net' it is somehow 'private' and 'privileged'. Of course it's not, it never has been and never will be. It is no different in essence from living in a 19th century village or small town in which the local squire is spotted paying the occasional visit to 'Widow Twanky', no doubt, he would say, for the puroposes of comforting her in her loss! All actions are public not private, the only difference is that some are spotted and some are not. So it is best to work on the assumption that sooner or later whatever you do will be noted by someone somewhere.
What is more important than the collection of information which will happen no matter what, is what the authorities do with it! If they, by which I mean the professionals in the security services, simply concentrate on the 'baddies' then I wish them well. Instantly, of course, that begs a definition of 'baddies' which you, me and the man in the street would have no difficulty in defining, but those twisted, psychopathic, mental retards who have allowed politics to rule their lives and who, by means of slithering and greasing their way up the political pole have reached positions of real power, only ever think that their political enemies are the real enemies of the state. We have just discovered a prime example of this with the current imbroglio in the USA where the enormously powerful Internal Revenue Service has been infiltrated by Left-wing activists raised in their youth in the hothouse of campus politics and who see it as their duty, no less, to use bureaucratic malignancy to attack their political opponents.
I leave you with one thought, in the event of the next Labour government would you want some paid Westminster minion of Len McCLuskey to have access to your collected data? Take that as a 'no', shall I?
'The Americans' is crap! And before DM gives me a hundred lines for bad grammar please note that 'The Americans' is a title for a new TV series based on the actual fact that the KGB inserted English-speaking agents into the USA where they adopted totally American lives, sometimes married and even had children. To all intents and purposes they were American - except, of course, when they slipped away for surreptitious meetings with their controllers. So, you, like me, might think, wow! a potentially fascinating scenario for a sophisticated, multi-layered drama series in which nobody is quite what they seem. Oh dear what a pity never mind! If only it had been produced by David Simon, main begetter of The Wire, the best TV series - EVER! And if only it had been written by le Carré, a writer of infinite patience and subtlety. But alas, neither of those people were engaged, instead it was produced by some pillock called Jo Weisberg who couldn't spell 'subtlety'! Thus, we were given some unbelievable crash, bang, wallops, a bit of what appears now to be statutary sex on recent American cable channel broadcasting, and the incredible - and therefore totally unbelievable - coincidence that an FBI man moves in next door to our all-American all-Soviet family! Total garbage!
Oh, no, say it ain't so!According to Ms. Anna Raccoon - and am I going to give her an argument? - not bloody likely! - yesterday marked the 50th birthday of Carnaby Street which makes me - officially - old! Of course, she acknowledges that Carnaby Street has been around since Dickens was scribbling his sentimental tosh (that's my opinion, not hers!) but she is referring to the (relatively) modern incarnation of Carnaby Street. I did, once, buy some 'gear' from there but I only wore it once because I looked an even more complete tosser than usual! Still, her post is worth reading.
No mercy for Mercer: Yet another raft of parliamentary rascals caught taking back-handers from dodgy PR companies according to The Telegraph and the BBC. I was forced to agree with Polly Toynbee - SHLOCK-HORROR! - who was on Sky News a few minutes ago and said, in effect, that it was not so much a revelation concerning their cupidity as their their stupidity! I was not too surprised to see that one of those taken in by this bogus PR company set up by the scrofulous hacks of 'Fleet Street' was Patrick Mercer MP, a particularly pompous and rather stupid ex-army officer who was wheeled out on TV every time some BBC know-nothing reporter needed a quote on military or security affairs. I can remember thinking how glad I was never to have been led into battle by such a donkey!
A pox on the lot of you! Well, not really, that's just my way of pointing you to these people "Schubert, Schumann, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Flaubert, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Wilde and Joyce with contentious evidence around Beethoven and Hitler" who, unlikely as it is, all shared something - they all suffered with syphilis! This is according to Sarah Dunnant in a grim but fascinating article in 'The Graun'. Someone must have been to blame and that man was Christopher Columbus who compounded his folly in discovering America by allowing his sailors to consort with native women and thereby introduce the pox to Europe. As she points out with considerable irony:
Though there has been dispute in recent years over pre-15th-century European bones found with what resemble syphilitic symptoms, medical science is largely agreed that it was indeed a new disease brought back with the men who accompanied Columbus on his 1492 voyage to the Americas. In terms of germ warfare, it was a fitting weapon to match the devastation that measles and smallpox inflicted travelling the other way.
It is generally reckoned that Winston Churchill's father, Randolph, was a member of this less than exclusive club, too.
Not a good day for the 'slebs': Do try to contain your emotions but several 'slebs' have recently suffered bad hair days. First, poor Tiger Woods, a world champ at the sport of 'Hockey at the Halt' took "two double bogeys and a triple bogey on the back nine for a 44". Oh dear, what a pity, never mind! I'm not exactly sure what all that means except that it is bad; very, very bad. Then, and I was shocked, I tell you, shocked, to hear that that that well-known religious irreligious icon, Madonna, has been savaged by her 'fans' and called "a fat face" because of something or other she has done, or not done, to her face. Still, I expect she'll cheer herself up by going home and counting her money - shouldn't take more than a couple of months! Finally, and I should warn you that this not for those of a delicate nature, poor Michael Douglas has blamed his throat cancer on human papillomavirus which is caught by an excess of the practice of cunnilingus. Pity that, because I had thought that when he finally croaks I was going to drop his wife, the delicious Catherine Zeta Jones, a line to say that, er, you know, I could be available and all that. Not any more! (Thanks to Drudge)
I discover Dexter: A delightful day yesterday. Off to Salisbury in the sunshine with the 'Memsahib' and a lady friend to see a production of Rattigan's Less Than Kind; written in 1944 it has more or less been lost to view in the intervening years. Billed as a light comedy, 'light' was exactly the word! It lacked that dark thread that all great comedy requires but Rattigan was still in his 'apprentice' years as a playwright so we cannot judge him by this early work. However, there was a bonus. As the ladies chatted in the sunshine whilst we waited for curtain time, I sloped off in to the shopping centre and stumbled upon 'The Works', a shop that is difficult to define but which always has piles of cheap 'pulp fiction' for sale. The sign said "3 for £5" so, natch!, I had to find at least three books which I might enjoy. Actually, it was hard going (I know it's hard to believe given my prediliction for pulp fiction but I do have some slight standards!) and I couldn't find a third. There were one or two on this character Dexter who now has a TV series to himself. I remember reading the blurb on them but as the eponymous, er, hero was a psychopathic killer I gave it a pass. Big Fail! I started reading it on the train home and didn't stop laughing the whole way. It is very, very funny; dry, sardonic, bloody and cynical and the good news is that Mr. Jeff Lindsay has written several of them so there is more, er, fun to come.
No wonder they're rioting in Yerdie-Burdle-Land: It's funny how one tiny item of news can change your mind, well, my mind, at any rate. As you know, if you read this blog regularly as I'm sure you do, I remarked earlier on the literally non-stop riots in Stockholm which have destroyed their reputation as a nation of 'Peace 'n' Love' dollops forever. Because I am somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun I instinctively sided with the forces of law and order without knowing any of the details. However, today I learn via those rascals at IHTMthat the Swedish police are busy, not with clamping down on rioters, but issuing parking tickets to the owners of the burnt out wrecks of cars left in the streets:
Were I the owner of one of those cars I suspect that I might feel like throwing a few bricks at 'the Plod', or, 'the Ploddle-loddle-lurbles' as they are know in Yerdie-Burdle-Land - er, how's my accent coming along?
For God's sake, give Dave a break! I gather there is a certain amount of grumbling in the prints today because Dave has done a bunk to the Mediterranean with his family for a holiday, and this, just after Drummer Rigby was slain. I would suggest that the 'shocked and appalled' engage their brains. The death of a single soldier is not enough to disrupt a Prime Minister's schedule, nor should it be seen to do so. Let's face it, Dave is definitely not the brightest PM we have ever had and I would prefer to have him operating his minimal skills whilst relaxed and rested rather than the flustered and flummoxed condition he normally appears to be in. I am reminded of Montgomery who informed his staff in no uncertain terms that he was not to be disturbed for anything whilst he took his usual four or five hour nap every night. It was essential, he reckoned for a commander to be always refreshed and alert, not ragged, bagged and shagged - well, perhaps not those exact words but you know what I mean!
Well, that's the last time I use Sainsburys! For the benefit of my foreign readers I should explain that Sainsburys is a nation-wide supermarket chain and I am shocked, shocked, I tell you, to learn that they are about to start selling Krug champagne, which is Good News, but the Bad News is that they are limiting sales only to stores in more affluent, up-market areas like Chipping Camden (sole prop: D. Cameron Esq.) Naturally, I assumed that my nearest store in frightfully posh Sherborne, jewel of the south west, would be chosen, particularly in view of the fact that I grace its portals at least once a week where it is reckoned that I could get a shopping trolly round their aisles quicker than Lewis Hamilton! But no, for some inexplicable reason the grocers at Sainsburys think we're not good enough for Krug champagne. Well, Tescos are attempting to open a supermarket in ancient Sherborne and the residents are up in arms but they'll get my vote!
Campus culture rules: One of the Fox News commentators, I forget who, remarked apropos the current scandals miring and wiring the American body politic that it was the culmination of campus culture at work. From everything I read and hear about American (and British!) universities that is exactly right. They are no longer centres of excellence attempting with humility to edge their way towards truths, instead they have become bastions of politically correct, Left-wing dogma which will allow no dissenting voice. The alumni of these establishments have gradually risen over the past 30 or so years to the highest levels in the government machine and now their blind fanaticism is clear to all, well, at least it's clear to those who do not share their views. How America is to rid itself of this metastasizing malignancy I do not know.
Look, I admit it, OK? To begin with I was an out-and-out Bercowist, mainly due to the revolting midget she married who daily reduces parliament from a farce which requires considerable skill to an end-of-the-pier show which usually does not. But then, as time and the reptiles of Grub Street got to work, she became one of the many - very many! - individuals whose all too regular appearances in the media reduce the sunny disposition with which I am imbued when I return home each day from my early morning swim into a grumping, growling sulk! Sight or sound of her, or her husband, would put me into a snapping, snarling rage leading to the cat being kicked, the 'Memsahib' ordering me up to the garret and, usually, an ill-tempered blog post. But no longer!
Yesterday was the culmination of Mrs. Bercow's equivalent of the charge of the Light Brigade in which, against all advice, I would guess, she insisted on defending herself in Court against a libel charge by Lord McAlpine following a particularly, even for her, stupid tweet which implied that he was a paedophile. According to the prints this little exercise in utter futility is going to leave her £100k poorer. 'Oh dear, what a pity, never mind' are the words that instantly leap to mind. The word is that 'Mr. Midget' was dead set against her fighting this in court perhaps not least because McAlpine, gent that he is, offered easy terms to anyone who just owned up and apologised. Little 'Georgie Moonbat' was quick to accept m'Lordship's offer and paid relatively small damages and agreed to work for nothing for a year on a charity of his own choice. But 'Battling Bercow' insisted on having her day in court and whether or not she thought it was worth the hundred grand we do not know. No wonder Mr. Midget, ooops sorry, Mr. Speaker is always so bad-tempered and bossy in the House of Commons because he obviously has no authority at home!
Even so, in my usual contrary way I am slowly warming to 'la Bercow'. She adds to the gaiety of nations and if, as I gather, certain old buffers in the gentlemen's clubs of Pall Mall and St. James do, you like tough, sinewy blonds who would look good in leather with a whip in hand, then 'our Sal' is the gal for you. So from now on I will not hear a word against the, er, delightful Mrs. Bercow and the fact that she obviously drives her little midget mad only adds lustre to her shining persona in my eyes.
If they are looking for a statue to go on that empty plinth in Trafalgar Square they need look no further than 'Bercow the Bold' and here she is, courtesy of the photo in The Mail, in a suitable pose. Perhaps they could place a discreet collection box under it to assist her in paying her legal fees!
What a pair of total and utter tits those two yobs are who slashed and stabbed an off-duty soldier to death yesterday. The fact that they obviously possess no more than 2.75 brain cells between the pair of them is all too obvious but what an embarrassment to the 'Allah-fathers' of Islamic terrorism that two of their 'fighters' are dumb enough to butcher their victim in broad daylight and then hang around to chat up the ladies! The police deserve a big 'well done' for only wounding them which means they will stand trial and then spend most of the rest of their lives rotting behind bars. In fact, thinking back over the various 'terrorists' who have tried to emulate the more successful Tube and bus bombers I really don't think we have much to worry about. They all seem to share the same dumb and dumber genes and their amateurish, stumble-bum efforts would be laughable but for the malignancy that drives them on.
In the meantime you will excuse me if I relish a quiet cynical smile to myself because as the media goes into gushing overdrive following the death of a soldier, the recent murder by stabbing of a 75-year old Muslim grandfather in Birmingham, possibly at the hands of a white terrorist racist has quietly slipped out of the headlines, not that it made that much of a splash in the first place.
"Oh, what a beautiful mornin'"! And, as it happens, it is indeed a beautiful morning here, all the more so given what seems like in retrospect six months of cloud, rain, snow and a non-stop freezing wind from even further 'ooop north' than the usual 'ooop north'. Even so, I am provoked to the opening quote not by the sunshine but by a filmed version of Oklahoma produced by the Royal National Theatre back in 1999 and which was shown on Sky Arts last night. I was curious to see it because it starred (a much younger) Hugh Jackman who later played Jean Valjean in the film of Les Misérables. I remarked at the time that whilst I had heard of him I had never seen him before. Well now I have seen him twice with a fourteen year gap in his career and I now realise what the rest of the world already knew, that he is tremendously talented. Unfortunately, Oklahoma suffers a little, as so many of those earlier musicals do, from thudding dialogue whose only advantage is that it gives one time to get up and make a cup of tea before the next brilliant, moving and/or witty song begins. In retrospect, what an act of genius it was when the producers of Les Mis decided to forego spoken dialogue and just let the songs tell the story. Even so, Oklahoma from the RNT was a superb piece of theatre and the director, Trever Nunn, is quite simply the very best.
Sometimes it gets personal: This morning, quite properly, the news bulletins are full of details concerning the Chinese earthquake with 200+/- killed and God knows how many injured and thousands bereaved and mourning. And yes, for a moment one is moved to pity and sympathy before moving on to the next story of the day. To be thus is to be human. But sometimes, somehow, a tragedy sticks beneath the skin and it will not be moved. For me, it is the tragedy of the man and his family - wife, two sons and a daughter - who went to the Boston marathon. The father was taking part in the run and his family were close to the finishing line to cheer him in. And then - personal apocalypse! The bomb went off, one son killed outright, a daughter maimed by the loss of a leg and a wife in hospital with brain damage. It beggars understanding. At one moment you are this, a happy family tied together with mutual love and affection; and the next moment you are that, a wreckage of hopes and expectations blown apart. "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport."
Sow and ye shall reap: Or something like that; but it was Heffer, I think, in The Daily Mail yesterday who reminded us with sardonic brutality that Boston was the main centre of financial and 'moral' support for the IRA whose atrocities 'over here' far, far exceeded the marathon bomb. Folly, to which we are all prone, does not deserve the non-linear retribution exacted lat Sunday but it is a salutary lesson all the same. Think before you drop a dollar in the collecting tin!
And talking of terrorist bombers there's always the president's old friends:
Whilst supping with the Devil (and his wife) it is usually good practice, or so I am told, to use a very long spoon. The President seems unaware of this as he enjoys a dinner with the convicted terrorist, Bill Ayers, and his equally despicable wife, Bernadine Dorhn. Both, of course, now major players in the Chicago mafia Democrat party which, as Emmett Tyrell of The American Spectator reminds us, is never totally averse to bombing atrocities. According to Obama they are "just good friends"! Yeees, quite!
Fitch the Fab! At last, and long overdue, the credit rating agencies are turning the screw. On Friday Fitch downgraded the UK to AA+ which is not much in itself but anyone with half a brain would take it as a serious warning of more, much more, to come unless Osborne stops borrowing m0ney! He can only do that by cutting government spending, not little bits here and there but wholesale slashing and burning whilst at the same time cutting taxation to those likely to produce wealth in the future. And, no, I'm not holding my breath!
Another great oxymoron - 'settled science': Well, they told us that global warming was 'settled science' and temperatures have barely budged for 15 years. Then again, we have been told that the origin of life took place down in the depths of the ocean where heated air from the earth's core erupted through fissures and set off a chemical re-action and, hey presto, suddenly what was inanimate was animate. So, the swots told us, 'settled science', move along, nothing to see here. But, you just gotta love those swots because no sooner is science settled when some rascal comes along and unsettles it. According to The Mail, a couple of computer nerds have used something called Moore's Law which explains the rate at which computers have increased their complexity and efficiency since they were invented. Using the same equations on life forms but working backwards they estimate that life actually began about 10 billion years ago and as the earth is a mere stripling of 4.5 billion years then it is obvious, innit?, that life began somewhere else in the universe and caught the equivalent of a No.29 bus to this old globe of ours. 'Settled science' - heh!
Actually, if you are American then the chances are you will not have read or seen anything of this topic because the American media have almost to a man - and woman - done their very best to stick their heads in the sand and their fingers in their ears whilst shouting loudly "nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah!" I am talking of a murder trial and, it goes without saying, that if the accused were gun-owners shooting college kids or white racists shooting blacks then American newspapers and TV screens would be filled with it all for days, weeks and months. But this case which involves the specific murder of eight people but could involve hundreds is totally ignored and to prove it, here is a picture of the courtroom concerned with all the seats reserved for the MSM (non-)reporters which have remained resolutely empty!
You see, this case concerns Dr. Kermit Gosnell who has, prior to his arrest, gone off to work each morning in order to kill babies because, you see, he's an abortionist. One can imagine his wife greeting him each evening with something like,'How was your day today, dear?' and him replying, 'Oh, you know, Honey, same ol' cut 'n' stab, cut 'n' stab' or some such. Of course, he is not the only one up on charges connected to his practice of aborting late period babies, so are his former staff - and his wife, actually - and they are ratting him out big time! And so we are getting all the gory details which, of course, will come as a huge shock to the pro-abortion lobby (if their stooges in the press ever get around to reporting it) because they never allow their delicate minds to actually dwell on the details of what is required to kill a late term baby.
At this point, if you are of a delicate nature, read no further!
In Gosnell's clinic police found severed baby feet of various sizes kept in see-through containers and bodies of babies in a freezer and in the basement. The upper spinal cords of some of the babies had been severed. This is a montage of photos from the grand jury report.
The top-left photo is of particular interest because it shows the end result of the favoured means of despatching a baby after birth by severing the spinal cord between the brain and the body. According to the report of court testemony by LifeNews:
A second Delaware woman who worked at Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic testified today that it was “standard procedure” to snip the necks of any babies that were delivered by patients before the abortion procedure due to labor-inducing drugs.
And Lynda Williams, 44, of Wilmington, said Gosnell taught her how to flip the body of the baby over and snip its neck with a pair of scissors and recalled one time when she followed these orders and saw the child move.
“It jumped, the arm,” she said, showing the jury by raising her arm.
And you really couldn't make this up, the irony is simply too rich, just guess what her defence was?
“I only do what I’m told to do … what I was told to do was snip their neck.”
In other words, I was just obeying orders - now where have I heard that before? Needless to say, the authorities charged with supervising abortion factories (I use the word with deliberation) never set foot in the charnel-house in seventeen years despite receiving numerous complaints! If and when Gosnell and his cohorts are sentenced perhaps the police could take a look at the bureaucrats - yeah, yeah, I know, fat chance!
Jill Stanek points a derisory finger at the ever-sensitive President of the United States who wept, yes, wept, I tell you, at the deaths of all those young students at Sandy Hook but, she wonders, as a pro-abortion politician how many tears would he have shed if they had all been 'snipped' immediately after their births?!
I am grateful to the always excellent Tallbloke who normally confines his interest to climate affairs but who picked up this story which has sinister potential. Apparently, Amazon have quietly "disappeared" all e-copies of George Orwell's books, 1984 and Animal Farm, not just from their own list of e-books on offer but from the individual Kindles of their customers!
It all stemmed from a dispute over copywright but the fact that Amazon did this without a word to the public, let alone their customers, provides an indication of just how fragile security of property is in this brave, new, electronic age. Tallbloke sums it up, thus:
Regardless of whether you believe Amazon’s promise to leave your Kindle alone, the company has tipped its hand and shown us the dark side of a culture where books are only available in electronic form. If the WhisperNet service from Kindle allows the company to delete books silently from your device, what other information might they have access to? Can the company monitor what you’re reading and when – and then hand that over to law enforcement? Can it replace a book file with a different file whose content is changed?
Er, that's after he's finished shagging her! (Honestly, with all these stories from top American universities recently would you want your kids to go to any of them?) This particular professorial perv teaches, or taught, political science (natch!) at Columbia University. In his spare time he shagged his daughter who, according to the report on ClashDaily.Com, was between the ages of 17 and 19 at the time - she is now 24 years of age. A Google search led me to the original story in The Daily Mail last October - how did I miss it?
Anyway, so far, so tediously commonplace - well, fairly commonplace. But the twist comes with the professor's defence as articulated by his scumbag lawyer. According to this worthy(?), the case should never have been brought because it was sex between consenting adults and no business of anyone but the participants. After all:
Matthew Galluzzo, defending Epstein, has said that even though his daughter had emerged as a victim in the case, she could 'best be described as an accomplice'. (My emphasis)
So perhaps what dear old pops is saying through his hired mouthpiece is that in a very real way it wasn't his fault and that the real perp was his daughter for being there in the first place as well as being so, well, so damn sexy! Mr. Galluzzo, doing his darnedest to justify his fee, also drew attention to the law in Switzerland where all consensual sex including incest undertaken in privacy is permitted. The Mail informs us that the Swiss 'rolls' are not the only 'liberals' in this matter:
Consensual incest is also legal in China, France, Israel, the Ivory Coast, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain and Turkey, according to a 2007 report from the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
To be honest, I'm not too sure about Norfolk where they all do appear to look very much like each other!
Gloomy 'Yerdy-Burdle-Durdles': I watched the first episode of the Swedish police story on BBC4 last night and went to bed even more depressed than usual. What is it, or, why is it, I wondered, that these Scandinavian 'Yerdy-Burdle-Durdles' always look so depressed and miserable? I mean, the story line was all about shooting high finance crooks so you would think there could be a touch of humour to be derived from it, but no, all the detectives in this special investigation squad continued to look as though someone had nicked the best bits from their smörgåsbord! Actually, I think I may have the answer to this Scandinavian mystery. Last week even I, your favourite 'Sunny Jim', began to feel distinctly gloomy and it was some time before I realised that it was probably this bloody-bloody arctic weather we have suffered not for days, not for weeks but for months! I am fed up with having to take about ten minutes to get dressed like an eskimo just to trudge through an icy wind to buy a paper. Of course, the estimated size of my forthcoming heating bill might have added to my misery. Oh, and the Scandi thriller failed to thrill. I'll give it one more chance next Saturday but if it doesn't cheer up then it's adjö!
Nippon No 1 . . .but No 1 what, exactly? Alas, dear reader, with the sort of efficiency which you have grown to expect from D&N I have mis-filed a report I saw during the week that provided a strategic over-view of the Pacific region. Recently I have become somewhat over-fixated on China and that has led me to ignore Japan. Big mistake because 'the times they are a-changin'' in Tokyo. A new government has introduced money printing as an economic tool which has led, naturally, to a devaluation of the Japanese yen which indicates a belligerent attitude towards what is beginning to look like a world-wide currency war. According to (my memory of!) this report there are also signs of an increase in Japanese military belligerency which is unremarkable given China's swaggering posture in regards to the South China Sea and the lunatic antics of 'Fat Boy' Kim in North Korea. Apparently many small nations on the Pacific rim actually want Japan to give up its non-aggression policy which has been in place since the end of WWII because they are looking for a counter-weight to Chinese hegemony. Watch this space . . .
Sir Edward Elgar . . . 'pompous and circumstantial' Edwardian toff and musician?
Nah! A deeply ambivalent man with a host of insecurities which, naturally, surfaced during his life and in his music which you may, just, detect if you listen to it carefully enough. Unfortunately, to fully detect the contradictions and the struggles within the man you need to be able to understand the language - music! I have mentioned before my deep regret at not having learned the two most important languages after English - music and mathematics! This personal deficiency of mine was embarrassingly emphasised by an excellent programme on BBC4 last week investigating Elgar's life in which various emminent musicians were filmed listening to his musical 'language' and obviously hearing things I could not detect. However, as a Catholic son of lower-middle-class parents born at the heights of the British Empire and in a society in which class was everything he had much to struggle with. In addition, he was a vain man - see the myriad of carefully composed photographs - and an intensely romantic one as well. Oddly, although his 'pomp and circumstance' music is taken as a musical portrait of the Victorian Empire and all it stood for there is throughout a vein of deep melancholy. A man worth studying but, dammit, I wish I could speak the lingo!
The lights are going out all over . . . er, my house, actually! And if I find the man responsible for fiitting all those smart, trendy lights that fit flush to the ceilings and which contain titchy little bulbs with two tiny metal prongs which have to be slotted into two equally minute channels which you cannot see, I will personally stick his fingers in a mincing-machine! In order to get at the dead bulb it is necessary to first remove the chromium 'thingie' which holds the fitting flush to the ceiling. In removing it, of course, you bring down half the ceiling - well, I do at any rate. Removing the old and inserting the new-fangled micro-bulbs is a test of intense concentration which must be sustained whilst standing on a wobbly step-ladder as the blood slowly but implacably falls down your arms leaving your hands and fingers looking like they will a day after you are dead! I am trying to convince the 'Memsahib' of the advantages of torches but so far . . . well, you can imagine!
I can't bring myself to write it: A few days ago I started to write a post entitled "I'm beginning to give up on America". I couldn't finish it, indeed, I had difficulty knowing where to start. And that was quite apart from the genuine pain and anguish in even attempting to marshall my thoughts. I simply cannot envisage a world in which the USA, with all its vices and virtues, was not around as final arbiter. I suppose British Edwardians living in the '20s and '30s felt much the same as they sensed the rapidly approaching demise of the Empire. I will not live long enough to see the full effects of the decline and fall of America - thank God. However, I will try and grapple with the subject later in a proper post.
Mark Steyn hones in like a guided missile: Happily, for you, I cannot improve on Mark Steyn's laser-guided wit which is impeccable even if the target was as soft and large as Maureen Dowd:
He who controls the language shapes the debate: In the same week the Associated Press announced that it would no longer describe illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants,” the star columnist of the New York Times fretted that the Supreme Court seemed to have misplaced the style book on another fashionable minority. “I am worried,” wrote Maureen Dowd, “about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don’t even seem to realize that most Americans use the word ‘gay’ now instead of ‘homosexual.’” She quoted her friend Max Mutchnick, creator of Will & Grace:
“Scalia uses the word ‘homosexual’ the way George Wallace used the word ‘Negro.’ There’s a tone to it. It’s humiliating and hurtful. I don’t think I’m being overly sensitive, merely vigilant.”
For younger readers, George Wallace was a powerful segregationist Democrat. Whoa, don’t be overly sensitive. There’s no “tone” to my use of the word “Democrat”; I don’t mean to be humiliating and hurtful: It’s just what, in pre-sensitive times, we used to call a “fact.”
OUCH! A direct hit!
You choose: Who would you rather be in a position of influence, an honest but dim teenager with a mouth, or to be precise, a tweeting finger, bigger than her miniscule brain; or Mr. Keith 'Vazeline' Vaz MP, a man who took payments as an MP but failed to declare them, a man who concealed payments from the Hinduja brothers via his wife's company, a man who made false accusations against a police officer and was suspended from the Commons, a man whose office expenses ranked 45th out of 647 MPs and whose second-home expenses ranked 83 out 647. Needless to say, he lives in Stanmore, a mere 45-minute journey into Westminster.
Read The Mail for the details of this young lovely who, in so many ways, stands for the contemporary 'youf' of this septic Isle and as an example of our wonderful nationalised edukashun serviss. The fact that she was placed in a position to be made a fool of is, of course, the result of the sort of soppy-daft, pc-non-think so beloved of our 'glorious leaders'.
This creepy-crawly politician is only stuck to the sole of my shoe because the mostly Asian voters of Leicester East are so dim they actually believe he is going to protect their interests rather than his own. What's "sucker" in Punjabi?
My rumbles for the day are now at an end - you will be glad to know!
Here is a simple question for you all: would you trust a politician who was a former plastic surgeon? I mean, when you think about it both occupations involve disguising the truth so our French neighbours should not be too shocked - not that I have ever detected shock of any sort amongst les Français - to discover that their former Budget Minister, no less, had tax-avoiding bank accounts around the world. According to Der Spiegel, this chancer lied, lied and lied again before he was forced to admit the truth and resign. It has all gone down like a shit sandwich with the French people who, like everyone everywhere in Europe are living in straitened(*) times:
As budget minister, Cahuzac was tasked with cleaning up France's state finances. The former plastic surgeon was supposed to use his scalpel to make precise cuts to pensions as well as health and social expenditures. In the meantime, however, he clandestinely multiplied his own capital income. For two decades, the self-proclaimed spearhead in the fight against tax evasion dodged taxes by having his money in undeclared accounts in Switzerland and Singapore.
You couldn't make it up! But there is more merde emerging from the woodwork:
And now a completely fresh accusation against a high-ranking politician is coming fast on the heels of the latest scandal: The Süddeutsche Zeitung, a leading German daily, has reported that Jean-Jacques Augier, Hollande's campaign manager, has two shell companies on the Cayman Islands. The report notes that Augier denies that there is anything illegal about this, quoting him as saying that he has "neither an account on the Caymans nor (has he) directly invested there."
I wonder if Google Translate can mange 'Nothing to see here, move along!' In the meantime, the 'collateral damage' to Hollande's socialist administration is enormous, to say nothing of the insidious distrust for their ruling caste building up amongst ordinary French people:
In the eyes of many in France, this group includes the members of an elite that, despite all the public rivalries between opposition and ruling parties, is joined into a secret conspiracy to pursue its members' own private interests. Widespread public suspicion focuses on the caste of high-level public servants, politicians and company executives who are often alumni of the same elite universities. This upper crust of the upper class is seen as continuously and incestuously striving to perpetuate their control over the country.
Hang on a minute! What does that remind me of . . . ?
So, a selection of mostly stupid, arrogant, overpaid expenses cheats with deep psychological flaws tells a another bunch of stupid, arrogant, overpaid expenses cheats with deep psychological flaws that they have "all been very, very naughty boys!" Well, takes one to know one, I suppose. Anyway the Parliamentary committee for banking - yes, that was 'banking', you didn't misread - finds that the nincompoops running HBoS were, to quote a phrase, "not fit for purpose". Well, yes, they were in charge and the bank went broke so I think we knew that without a load of wafflers, most of whom being incapable of running a whelk stall, spelling it out for us. But what I really want to know is who was responsible for forcing Lloyds, a reasonably well run bank, into a shotgun wedding with this wreck which ruined the Lloyds share price? Do the names Brown & Balls occur? Well now, I wonder whatever happened to them?
Here's a nice moral conundrun for you all to ponder upon. According to the BBC (and just about every red-top newspaper in the land) some beardie-weirdie artist and photographer by the name of Graham Ovenden has just been convicted of sex offences against children.
For what it's worth, these offences took place 30 or 40 years ago. He has enjoyed a fairly distinguished reputation in the art world - again, for what that's worth! He was noted for decades as specialising in pictures of young girls, often in a state of undress or sometimes naked - yeees, quite! This brought down on his bearded head several court actions, not just here but everywhere including the USA - natch! - where they were shocked, I tell you, shocked! You can read his Wiki entry for all the details which I couldn't be bothered to plough through. As far as I can see the authorities have had several goes at him and his work but nothing stuck - until now. I have had a quick look at some of his work and judged by that alone I would say that he is a good-ish artist but a man fixated on the bodies of young girls. Even so, throughout these decades of accusations and innuendoes, the 'Illuminati' of the High Art World have not just stood by him but rushed to praise him.
Today, the Tate, a gallery noted for displaying crap art at every chance they get, have swiftly withdrawn Ovenden's pictures - and here we come to the point of this tedious post. If a blackguard paints a brilliant picture does it matter what the crimes and sins were of its progenitor? Are we to be forbidden from seeing any art produced by villains? And who decides who is a villain? If Ovenden is in fact guilty of sexually abusing children then his balls should go on display at the Tate Modern which might, on consideration, improve the standard of that benighted rubbish tip on the South Bank. But if Ovenden has produced some great, or even interesting, works of art then I think I am entitled to see them if I wish to do so - particularly as it's my money that keeps most of these nationalised art galleries going.
What, precisely and exactly, is a 'hate' crime? I ask because the whole notion of a 'hate' crime is about as firmly constructed as a blancmange! If you punch someone in the nose then presumably at that moment you 'hate' them, assuming, of course, that 'hate' is a psychological feeling capable of being defined with the exactitude demanded by m'Learned Friends - pause for giggles to die down! Of course, you might 'hate' someone at the instant you take a swing but just before that you might merely have disliked someone a bit, but somehow a 'Disliked Someone a Bit' crime doesn't have quite the, er, punchiness of a 'hate' crime, does it? For example, if the yob I ordered to pick up his litter in Yeovil High Street a couple of months ago had punched me, or, more likely as my grumpy stupidity rose, I had punched him, would 'hate' have been involved - and if not, why not? According to the mighty Ass Law of the Land, a yob/old git punch-up does not involve 'hate' but if the yob in question had been a black, Seventh Day Adventist homosexual with a limp, then I might have stood trial accused of a 'hate crime' and, presumably, received 'double-bubble' by way of a sentence. But contrarywise, m'Lud, had he punched me then according to the Ass Law of the Land no 'hate' could be involved because being a bad-tempered, aggressive, old git is not a type (or sub-culture, to use the jargon) worthy of qualifying for victimhood - and as a fully qualified grumpy old git I demand to know why not?
I raise this complex subject because according to the BBC, the Greater(?) Manchester Police have decided, unilaterally, to widen the number of groups who, if punched, would qualify as victims of a 'hate crime'. This group will now include 'Goths' and 'Emus' - eh? 'Emus'? Ooops, sorry, I mean 'Emos' and no, I have no idea what an 'Emo' is and please don't bother telling me, I have managed thus far quite well in my ignorance, thank you all the same! Anyway, this blog is now mounting a hate campaign against anyone who opposes my class action to ensure that from now on the potential victims of 'hate crimes' includes GOGs. What was that? Who are GOGs? For God's sake, pay attention - Grumpy Old Gits, of course!
Of course, you didn't believe me when I wrote the other day that I was waiting for young Master Fraser Nelson of The Spectator to tell me whether or not I approved of the vile stew of festering rot that is intended to be the new Press Gagging System - er, you didn't, did you? It was just that young Nelson is much cleverer than me, as well as being a better writer, and I just knew that his critique would be informed and therefore deadly, where-as my old mis-firing blunderbuss might have missed targets.
Anyway, in this week's Spectator he confirms an earlier decision to ignore the "mess of pottage" cooked up by blow-job specialist Hugh Grant and chronic spanker Max Mosley which 'Edenoidal' Miliband and 'Chubby-Smuggy' Clegg couldn't swallow fast enough! Incidentally, you will now see the truth contained in my retitling of Clegg's party as the 'Il-lib-non-Dem' party. Clegg and his acolytes are as authoritarian as any commissar or gauleiter and their eagerness to set up a Board of Censors says all you need to know about them - and the sound you can hear in the background is the shade of poor old George Orwell howling, although whether it is with anguish or laughter I cannot say.
Nelson begins by a sort of back-handed compliment to Cameron:
Whatever else is said about David Cameron’s hand-ling of press regulation, there can be no doubt that the deal he struck on Monday demonstrated masterful sleight of hand. Just days earlier, his differences with Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg had seemed irreconcilable and the Prime Minister was heading for defeat in the Commons. But then, overnight, everyone united around a compromise: a state regulator which insisted it was no such thing. It was the political equivalent of Magritte’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’; Britain’s first piece of legislative surrealism.
What an utterly useless 'bendy man' Cameron is! I expect prime ministers to be both supple and subtle but there are some things which transcend our day-to-day politics and which deserve to be fought for as a matter of principle. Anyway, Nelson continues:
At first, the newspapers treated news of the charter with stunned silence. What started out as a sensible attempt to regulate the 21st-century press somehow ended up lost in the 17th century. The language was kept deliberately vague to allow every political party to claim victory: if no one knew what it meant, how could anyone object? But one thing was clear: a cabal of politicians had gathered in an office until 2.30a.m. on a Monday morning to stitch up a deal, with the campaign group Hacked Off in the next room. They were acting on a shared premise: that the press would at last be theirs to regulate.
It was Nigel Lawson, a former editor of this magazine, who observed that the most dangerous moments in our democracy come when all parties agree. Consensus means no proper scrutiny, and that glaring flaws go unnoticed. So it is with the Royal Charter. It is deeply illiberal, proposing a new system of ‘exemplary damages’ for non-licensed publications that may yet prove against European law. Worse, it solves none of the problems that have so dogged the British press and appalled the public, and by invoking the most egregious examples of press intrusion, and the disturbing notion of victims’ justice, the political class is attempting an audacious power grab. [My emphasis]
All the phone-hacking and document-theft are, and were, covered by existing law, and if the 'Plod' - from the top to the bottom - had managed to put down their mugs of tea as they counted the bribes they had taken from hacks and drag themselves out of their canteen to do a bit of policing, they could have taken action years ago. This new set-up - an exact description! - does not add or subtract an iota from the situation as it stood before all this furore broke loose. The imperative driving many of the 'Hacked Off' group, like Grant and Mosley, is obvious but that which drives so many of our Right dis-Honourable Members of Parliament is equally so. They are still smarting from the revelation that so many of them were rank thieves stealing from the public purse via their inflated expenses. They cannot wait to see the press bound and gagged forever.
See, this week you all get an extra 'funny' not because of anything you've done but because I'm kind and generous and a really good guy at heart - sorry, did someone say something? Anyway, one of Anna Raccoon's guest writers has turned all lyrical at the tragic plight of the 'Lesbian-straightener' and his former wife. Go and have a quick read, it's rather witty:
Do you want the rules and regulations concerning the liberty of our press influenced in even the smallest way by these two upstanding examples of British, er, gentlemen?
I confess to being as bewildered as you by the conflicting agitprop coming from all political parties and I simply await the decision of young Master Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, who has promised to refuse to sign up to any deal that he considers a threat to the freedom of the press. However, Guido reminds us bloggers that we should take heed because, apparently, we too will come under whatever deal is stitched up by those duplicitous, money-grubbing ratbags in parliament . . . ooops, was that a knock at the door, I heard . . . ?
Another Sunday rumble, or perhaps 'grumble' is a better word, as I awake to yet more global warming falling gently from an iron grey sky and settling nicely, thank you for asking! As usual, I shall add to this litany of moans and groans as the day goes on, so if you are actually feeling rather happy today, then read no further!
'And then they came for your bank savings': So now you know, and you must be deaf, dumb, blind and lacking a sense of smell if you didn't know it already, that to the apparatchiks who run the Berlin-Brussels axis nothing is sacred, least of all your hard-earned savings which you have entrusted to your local bank. The Cypriots have just found that out - the hard way - with banks closed until Tuesday whilst the authorities rip off up to 10% of their savings. Of course, they put it about that what they're really after is the untaxed il-gotten gains of various Russian crooks oligarchs who decided that Cyprus with its, er, Mediterranean banking laws was a haven of first resort. Call me 'Mr. Cynical' but I wonder how much Russian 'moolah' was shifted electronically on Wednesday and Thursday when, in return for a nice bung, various apparatchiks quietly tipped them the wink?
Mother Russia is a murderous old bitch! When I read Tom Rob Smith's best-selling book,Child 44, I promised myself never to read another book by him on the subject of Russia - well, I didn't have to really because Child 44 nauseated me - not, I hasten to add, that Mr. Smith isn't a first-rate writer, he's terrific! He seems to capture exactly the fear and loathing that existed within Stalin's Soviet Union in which everyone is seeking either to denounce others, or desperately trying not to be denounced themselves. Anyway, being a hopeless 'bookaholic' I wasn't too surprised to find that somehow, in some mysterious way - nuffin' to do wiv me, honest guv! - someone had slipped a copy of his book Agent 6 into my shopping bag. I only reached page 25 and already I could feel the nausea returning - when will I ever learn? Anyway, I was reminded of this by a review at The Atlantic by Benjamin Schwartz of a book called Moscow 1937 written by Prof. Karl Schlögel:
Schlögel’s book is a fragmentary yet meticulous social history of Moscow in the grip of the Great Terror—the period from the summer of 1936 to the end of 1938, when the already sanguinary Bolshevik regime let loose on itself its apparatus of suppression, purging, in waves, all Soviet institutions and at all levels of society, from the nomenklatura, the highest echelons of administrative, cultural, and scientific life, through the high command of the Red Army, to the engineers and apparatchiks, down to the factory workers and peasants. It is an almost impossibly rich masterpiece. [...]
In this chapter and throughout his book, Schlögel is the master of the chilling counterpoint. He subtly makes clear to readers that the 1936 Directory [the equivalent of our Dictionary of National Biography] is brimming with the names of people destined for the abattoir, and he notes that this edition of the Directory was, perforce, the final one: “No editorial board could have kept pace with the frantic rate at which people were driven from their posts and destroyed while their places were taken by others.” Completed on the eve of the Terror, this last Directory “encapsulates a moment in time in which the accusers and the accused, the perpetrators and the victims, the executioners and the executed of the morrow, still sit side by side.”
Once again, and not for the first time, I fall to my knees and thank the Gods of Good Fortune that I was born English!
There's no fool like an educated fool: And here I give you - no, no, please, there's no charge and he's all yours - Prof. Geoffrey Miller, not just a fool but a dangerous one, to boot. In a (thankfully) short article at Edge, this eye-swivelling maniac urges on us the advantages of Chinese eugenics:
There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state. Given what I understand of evolutionary behavior genetics, I expect—and hope—that they will succeed. The welfare and happiness of the world's most populous country depends upon it.
I cannot be bothered to take up all the hideous nonsense this man writes but I would remind him that there is nothing unusual about "close cooperation in China" because, you stupid, master-race theorist, it's a one party dictatorship in which everyone does what they're told - or else - so if you admire it that much, Prof. Miller, why don't you fuck off and live there! (Apologies for my language but I haven't read this sort of vile vomit since the late Herr Hitler did us all a favour and topped himself!)
How are your alkenones hanging? I ask, not that I have the remotest idea what an 'alkenode' is when it's at home, but because some less-than-scientific HAF called Marcott has just published a paper indicating 'The Hockey Stick' of all 'hockey sticks'! He and his little helpers base their record of galloping global warming in the last century by using ocean core samples as proxies. Very good, you might think, and quite rightly you will be alarmed at the way that temperatures have rocketed up, up and away such that the end of the world really must be nigh. Unfortunately, that meddlesome nuisance, Steve McIntyre, decided to take a closer look and - whodathunkit? - it appears that the HAFs concerned altered the dates of some of their data. This, shall we call it, carelessness with regard to dates had rather a significant result, as this diagram, courtesy of McIntyre's Climate Audit site shows:
'Les flics' finally spiral out of action: Yes, yes, I know it's a rather heavy-handed sub-title but last night Spiral 4 came to an end on BBC4 which is a personal catastrophe for me because the other two women in my life will be no more - unless they bring it back for a fifth serial. You have days left to watch most of the episodes on your I-Player-thingie (whatever that it is) or perhaps there are DVD sets available. Most of the time I had only the vaguest idea of what was going on in the series - so no change there, then! - but I didn't care just so long as my two ladies kept appearing. First, Caroline Proust whom I hope fervently will one day handcuff me and throw away the key!
And then there is the sexiest 'lawyer' I have ever come across - no, I admit, not a hard test - the gorgeous Audrey Fleurot. Whenever I am in legal trouble, and assuming that Ms. Anna Raccoon is unavailable, then this is the lady I want to defend me - and quite honestly I won't care very much if I lose!
Now I have a problem! What on earth am I going to do with my empty Saturday nights?
Zis iss ein German yoke: Which probably means you won't get it! However, as the new Gauleiters of Greater Germany (er, that's Europe to you and me) set about stealing money from people's bank accounts in order to teach them fiscal discipline so that they can be loaned more money - vich zey vill pay back on time viz interest - sorry, that's enough cod German - an article on the DW.de site will give you a smile. According to the story:
Highly indebted, without access to capital, viewed suspiciously by creditors - . Half the country's debts were canceled 60 years ago this week - the foundation of the "economic miracle." [...]
It was only with the London Debt Agreement of 1953 that the German economy was given room to breathe again, says historian Ursula Rombeck-Jaschinski of Stuttgart University: "One could even argue that the economic miracle would have been impossible without the debt agreement."
Ah, yes, now remind me, what exactly is the German for 'don't do as we did just do as we tell you - or you will be shot'?
It is, of course, an undoubted fact averred by all men of good sense and discernment that 'little Georgie Moonbat' is a prat! There is no cause too dotty for George Monbiot, for it is he of whom I write, to espouse with an enthusiasm which almost reaches fanaticism. In fact, the dottier the cause the better as far as he is concerned. And yet . . . and yet . . . even a bitter and twisted old reactionary like me has a soft spot in my heart for little Georgie, the greenest of the Green Lefties.. I cannot remember the details but some time back there was a kerfuffle over global warming, I think, and little Georgie reckoned his own side were out of order - and said so! Just recently, he became 'tired and emotional' (I assume) over the rumours being floated concerning the perfectly innocent and blameless Lord McAlpine and, over-excited, he allowed his tweeting fingers to outperform his brain which led him straight into the welcoming arms of M'Learned Friends acting for the blemished Lord. Now we learn, courtesy of Guido, that the good Lord instructed his litigators not to take little Georgie to the cleaners but instead to require of him that he carry out three years of charity work. It is a testament to his inherent good nature - and his self interest - that he has concurred without complaint:
“I accepted the suggestion immediately and without reservation. I feel the proposed settlement reflects very well on Lord McAlpine, who is seeking nothing for himself, but wants to see work done which could be of great benefit to others. I have been prompted by Lord McAlpine’s admirable proposal to do the right thing – something I should have been doing all along – and I hope very much that I am able to do it well.”
Let's be honest, we all drop fairly large bollocks from time to time during our lives, but it is how we deal with the consequences that tells the world what sort of a person we are - are you reading this, Chris Huhne? Anyway, I can only say that I would be prepared to go into the jungle with George Monbiot - even if it is likely that I would kill him after 24 hours!
I ask because they appear to be staggering about all over the place on the subject of alcohol pricing. That they are even considering the laying down of minimum pricing for booze is an indication that at the very least they have all lunched 'not wisely but too well'! Apparently they have fallen for the weepy line put about by sundry pokenoses that we must all be protected from the evils of acohol - along with smoking, eating, getting out of bed in the morning and anything else these busybodies can dream up as a hazard. Of course, the sight, sound and smell of our very own yobs and yobettes staggering out of pubs and clubs, vomiting profusely in all directions whilst directing a stream of abuse at everyone in earshot, is not one of which we, as a nation, can be very proud. For some, but by no means all, there may be longterm health considerations but that is their business not the government's. Of course, given that we are all enforced contributors to the Nationalised Health Industry, the cost of dealing with these weekend drunks is a factor but the answer is simple and, unlike the government's 'plan'(?) does not penalise those who do not misuse alcohol.
First, anyone who turns up drunk at an A&E should be charged a fee for any service they receive. Equally, any drunk who spends a night in the cells should be charged for the B&B service in addition to any fine they might receive from the magistrate. But more effective than any of that, the authorities should turn their attention to the people making money out of getting people drunk - the pub and club owners. They are, after all, licenced to sell alcohol and if they are obviously breaching their licence conditions by turfing out dozens of drunks onto the streets they should have their licences curtailed, or withdrawn if they are constant offenders. Closing down your local High Street pub/club for one weekend would concentrate the publican's mind wonderfully. The prospect of being closed down for a month would do even better. Suddenly the landlord/club owner would watch his customers very closely and refuse to serve anyone looking legless. This, of course, would mean that he would have to raise the price of his drinks in order to maintain his profits and that, in turn, would slow down the drinking.
As it stands, every weekend we have veritable battalions of police standing around (at huge expense) outside city centre pubs and clubs doing nothing much else except picking up the human detritus that falls out of them. Why don't they simply film the results and pass them on to the local licencing authority for appropriate action? And, yes, thank you for asking, I am indeed prepared to take over as prime minister . . . er, you did ask, didn't you?
Eight months - and he'll only serve three inside! After perverting the course of justice, that's the best one of our more useless 'Cocklecarrots' can come up with? And, yes, I know I'm sounding like one of those old ladies who sat cackling and knitting beneath the scaffolds of revolutionary France, but Huhne was a cabinet minister, a member of the Privy Council, a man looked up to and admired by the mental retards in the il-Lib-non-Dem party and he deserved at least eighteen months, not a measly eight with four off for 'good behaviour' served mainly in a holiday camp! And his wife deserves a gong from 'Her Maj' for exposing this arrogant hypocrite for what he is, not eight months inside! Let me be clear, if it was 'Joe Doe' up on this charge the punishment would be about right, I suppose. But Huhne, as a leading politician, had a greater responsibility to the country to behave well in adverse circumstances. As he has now admitted, he should have 'coughed' immediately, taken his punishment like a man and moved on to other activities. Instead, he huffed and bluffed - and thus blew his own house down. Good riddance, I say, and Big Bubba - do it - for England!
It's outrageous! I have been sitting here twiddling my thumbs for the last few months waiting for 'the Plod' to come calling in order to question me about the many, I would go so far as to say very many, instances of inappropriate behaviour I have instigated against various 'wimmin' - but not a sign of them! Well, I mean to say, everyone and his uncle have been interviewed about what they got up to with girls back in the '70s and '80s but not me - and, boy oh boy, could I tell them a tale or two, or six - or seven, or seventeen, if they want. Admittedly, mine date back to the '50s and '60s and my memory - like everything else, dammit! - isn't quite what it used to be, and it's also true that perhaps age adds, er, enchantment to the exact details, but even so, I have been sitting here patiently building up a profile - I think that's the word the police use - of my many conquering amorous campaigns and I am desperate to tell them all about it. Well, the chaps in my local Saloon Bar don't seem to want to know any more, in fact they tend to drift off to the Public Bar when I come in, but I don't care, I'm fed up with them nit-picking at various details which they claim keep changing over time. I put it down to jealousy because none of them enjoyed the success I had with the ladies 'back in the day'.
By the way, did I ever tell you when I met Elizabeth Taylor . . .
ADDITIONAL: Of course, I've just realised the answer to why the 'Plod' haven't come calling - none of my 'wimmin' have complained! And, of course, they wouldn't, would they?, because they loved me and my attentions - couldn't get enough of me, if truth be told - that's the answer - obvious when you think about it . . . "Ah, yes, I remember it well . . ."
Happily, because I am pressed for time, today I can lean on the stalwart figure of Stephen Glover writing in today's Daily Mail in order to add my vituperation to this disgusting collection of creeps, perves and hypocrites whose dishonesty is manifest in the name they have chosen for themselves - 'Liberal Democrats!' Glover, being an experienced political observer, has the memory to recall some of their worst offenders - Jeremy Thorpe (tried but aquitted for conspiracy to murder), the monstrous Cyril Smith (apparently, a serial kiddie-fiddler), Chris Huhne (liar and law-breaker), David Laws (£40k expenses cheat now back in government), Mark Oaten (rent-boy renter) . . . and so the list goes on. To be fair, which I am not really inclined to be, they are not the only party to have some deeply peculiar people in their ranks but, as Glover points out, for a small party they seem to have more than their fair share! Now we have the latest pair of 'dodgy geezers', Lord Rennard, former LibDem campaign manager with all the honesty of a latter-day Joseph Goebbels; and the LibDem leader himself, Nick Clegg, who sucked up all Rennard's rotten propaganda and spat it out to the electorate - some of whom were daft enough to swallow it.
Photos: Daily Mail
If there was one operation which sums up the nauseating nature of il-Lib-non-Dem activity it was the by-election in Bermondsey back in 1983, as Glover reminds us:
Lord Rennard appears to have been associated with one of the most infamous dirty tricks in political history. In the 1983 Bermondsey by-election, the Labour candidate, Peter Tatchell, was gay. He was demonised by Liberal activists because of his homosexuality – some of them wore ‘I’ve been kissed by Peter Tatchell’ badges – even though their own candidate, Simon Hughes, was secretly gay. (My emphasis)
Fortunately, today, there is no excuse for anyone not to know that the leading elements of the il-Lib-non-Dems contain a mixed bunch of hypocritical but ruthless perves and liars, and at their pinnacle stands the biggest lying hypocrite of the lot, nice, chubby-cheeked, smiley Nicholas Clegg MP.
First, a bulletin from the Home Front: Apologies for the quality and the quantity, as in 'lack of', posts on the blog this week. I am still trying to get to grips with running the house single-handed. I am learning, the hard way, that planning is essential but being a bit of a 'spur-of-the-moment fella' I'm finding that hard. However, to paraphrase the good Doctor, 'an empty plate for dinner concentrates the mind wonderfully'! Still, I am proud to tell you all that having qualified as a 'whites washer', I have now passed with distinction the test as a 'coloureds washer'. Amazing what those white boxes that stand around taking up space in the kitchen can actually do! Equally, my cooking skills have risen above the tin-opening stage they had been stuck at since 1959. Today is a big test though - roast chicken for Sunday dinner! Will it fly, I wonder - no, no, not literally - oh, you know what I mean! My vegetable cooking tends to extremes. Either they come out of the saucepan sodden, or as hard as when they went in, there is no soppy 'Lib-Dem' middle for me, I am an extremist! Shopping was tricky to begin with because of my inability to find anything but then I discovered the solution - I simply stop one of those obliging ladies who rush around stacking shelves, compliment her on how attractive the uniform looks on her, and with one of my modest, winning smiles (it always gets 'em - well, it used to, back in the day), own up to being a total male dunce and ask if she could point out to me the actual difference between the meat counters and the vegetable racks. Being nice ladies they invariably end up doing most of my shopping for me!
Must go now, 'er upstairs' is banging on the floor with her crutches, however, I will be adding to this 'Rumble' during the course of the day so please do keep looking in if your social life is utterly bereft!
A legal wet dream: My, how the lawyers must be rubbing their hands at the thought of the fees likely to accrue over the legal niceties involved in the, er, 'aquisition' and sale of the 'mural' by 'Banksy', the so-called 'street artist', which disappeared from the side of a shop in north London and re-appeared at an auction house in Florida.
I have only just seen this photo of the original in situ, as it was, and already that has added yet further legal complications. Hitherto, I had thought that 'Banksy's form of art was in the creation of murals, that is, painted directly onto the walls of buildings, but from this picture one can see that it must have been painted on some sort of board and then attached to the wall. At which point, m'Learned Friends, rubbing their hands with glee, will ask who owned the board? And who gave 'Banksy' permission to paint on it; and who gave permission to fix it to someone else's property; and most important of all, who actually owns the bloody thing - 'Banksy', the artist; or 'John Doe', the owner of the board; or 'Mr. Landlord', the owner of the building - or, possibly, the bloke who thought that 'free art' meant it was free and helped himself to it?! "M'Lord, I would be obliged if the court could adjourn for several days so that I may consult with m'Learned Friends and thus clock up a few more billable hours - know wot I mean, Judge?!" As for the 'art', well, in my opinion it is a very highly effective and skilfull piece of agit-prop and anyone taken in by it needs their brain cells rejuvenating.
More rumbles later, as and when . . . !
Dave's song:
And now, the end is here And so I face the final curtain My friend, I'll say it clear I'll state my case, of which I'm certain I've lived a life that's full I traveled each and ev'ry highway And more, much more than this, I did it my way
Regrets, I've had a few But then again, too few to mention I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway And more, much more than this, I did it my way
Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew When I bit off more than I could chew But through it all, when there was doubt I ate it up and spit it out I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way
I've loved, I've laughed and cried I've had my fill, my share of losing And now, as tears subside, I find it all so amusing To think I did all that And may I say, not in a shy way, "Oh, no, oh, no, not me, I did it my way"
For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels The record shows I took the blows and did it my way!
Yes, it was my way.
Songwriters: DUPRI, JERMAINE/SEAL, MANUEL LONNIE/RAYMOND, USHER
Well, yes, perhaps the greatest hymn to selfishness ever written but therefore entirely suitable for our prime minister, to say nothing of his chancellor. The only thing is that I suspect "Regrets, I've had a few" is a great exaggeration! Of course, he frequently expresses regret, for example, over the Amritsar massacre which happened nearly 100 years ago and for which he cannot be blamed, but that should not be confused with actually feeling regret. Equally, he 'regrets' nearly four times that number of British people being allowed to rot to death in NHS hospitals over recent years but cannot bring himself to sack the man who was in command at the time, instead he promotes him! No doubt his chancellor regrets boasting about Britian's AAA-rating from the international credulous credit agencies, one of whom has just stubbed its toe on 'the bleedin' obvious' and downgraded us. This appeared to have as much effect on 'smoothy' Osborne as a 75mm shell glancing off the glacis of a King Tiger tank!
There will be more . . . later
'Elf 'n' Safety' warning: Beware Falling Jaws! I will simply re-post a comment I left over at Deltoid, the High Church of the Global Warming Scientology cult:
Oh, no, say it ain’t so!!!
Even Mr. Pachauri, the well-known ‘dhobi-wallah’, ooops, sorry, I mean railway engineer, in charge of the IPCC has admitted that there has been no global warming for the last 17 years!
Even worse, this rascal had the temerity to suggest that people have the right to question the science, indeed, that questioning was good!
Whodathunkit?!
All I can hear over at the Deltoid site is the sound of severe spluttering which I can't help feeling might, in some obscure way, increase CO2 levels and bring about the end of the world as we know it, or rather, as the HAFs think they know it! Read more at Anthony Watts' excellent site.
So, are the LibDems a bunch of DOMs? Well, not all of them, perhaps, but given that they are a political party in receipt of what turned out to be stolen money and which they adamantly refuse to surrender, one is not too surprised that one of their 'grandees' may be a Dirty Old Man. Still, one must be grateful that this miserable bunch of muesli-eating, sandal-wearing flower-people are able to provide a good laugh from time to time in these frozen Isles as we all shiver under relentless global warming! The Lesbian-straightener was a class act and one can hardly wait for his final curtain. True, the smile fades at the thought of that old fatty, Cyril Smith, who was a perve of monstrous proportions. Now we can all look forward to the sight and sound 'Chubby-cheeks' Clegg dancing on the hot coals of press scrutiny as he rapidly changes his story and tells us that after all, God bless my soul, he did actually know just a teensy-weensy bit about the complaints from those ladies. In the meantime, the biggest loser in British politics, 'Call me Dave' Cameron, who couldn't land a knockout punch on Gordon Brown, now has the easy task of taking the Eastleigh seat formerly held by a proven liar and law-breaker from a party of perves and DOMs. Surely, even he couldn't lose that one . . . could he?
More later
In which the Duff cafe-brasserie-bar-restaurant is awarded 16 Michelin stars: Yes, well, I'm not one to boast but may I say that tonight's poulet rôti avec les légumes mélangés et des saucisses et pommes de terre au lard were, and I can find no more exact description of this gourmet delight - the dog's wotsits painted gold! True, the chicken was a little on the tough side which is perhaps why my stars came from the Michelin Tyre Company. The vegatables were only slightly soggy and the baked potatoes were, well, really baked, if you know what I mean. The 'Memsahib', with typical British pluck, smiled sweetly all the way through - bit like our sex life now I think about it. Anyway, my re-education continues!
And now I'm off to read a book and then go to bed because I'm knackered!
A friend of mine has just advised me of this petition. It speaks for itself so if you detest Sir David Nicholson the way I do then please sign it and send it off:
. . . But I just can't remember exactly what it is. The German word Schadenfreude qualifies technically but somehow it does not quite reflect that extra-special ingredient of truly malicious, vindictive delight in someone else's misfortune. Anyway, whatever the word is, I have it - BIG TIME!
First, there has been the unmitigated and disasterous crash into which Chris Huhne, metaphorically speaking, drove at high speed! What he did in pressurising his wife to take his penalty for speeding on her licence instead of his was, in the great list of wrong-doings, hardly commensurate with the almost complete destruction of his family life, his career and his hopes (or ambitions) for the future. I say 'almost' because I gather that he is still a wealthy man from his 'city slicker' dealing days and even after he has done his time on 'D-wing' it is likely that he will continue to earn a crust somewhere, somehow. But of course, even were he to build a successful business it will be ashes in his mouth when he considers what he has lost. He gained a lesbian and lost a son - what a rubbish exchange! I really do try hard to still the waves of vindictive pleasure which arise in my heart when I view the mangled remains of this hitherto vaunting politician but the truth is - I cannot. All I can do is try to avoid splashing about in them shouting with joy!
The other man who brings out the very worst in me is Sir David Nicholson about whom I wrote recently. He is the ex-Communist, creepy-crawlie bureaucrat who, in a career of slimy advancement, has managed to end up as the head of the Nationalised Health Service. Some indication of his skills in manoeuvring may be judged by the fact that prior to becoming the 'Boss of Bosses' he was the head of the organisation whose responsibility was to check the professionalism of the concentration camp known as the Mid Staffs Hospital Trust in which hundreds of people were left, in effect, to rot to death. One of his victims was the boss of another hospital group who had the temerity to speak out against the "monstrous regimen" being applied from above. For this, apparently, Nicholson made use of one his favourite underlings to bring about the dismissal of the irritating and embarrassing complainant in an arrangement that included a £500k 'gagging order'. As The Mail comments today in an editorial:
First, Sir David ignored warnings by Mr Walker that an obsession with targets was resulting in squalid conditions on the wards that were almost certainly costing lives. Then Sir David’s side-kick, Barbara Hakin (later a dame), began a campaign which led to Mr Walker being sacked as the Lincolnshire Trust’s chief executive – and gagged with £500,000 of taxpayers’ money. Who do these people think they are? They use our money to give themselves huge salaries. Then, when someone complains about their incompetence, they again use our money to gag them.
For some reason, probably not far from stupidity and/or ignorance, 'Dave' has yet to sack this useless miscreant and set in motion the means to relieve him of his knighthood but when he does, or, if he does, then I regret to tell you all that there will be much rejoicing at Chateaux Duff. If he doesn't, that will absolutely and definitely confirm my refusal to vote Tory at the next election.
A few posts down I drew attention to Putin and his 'thugocracy' as they hammered yet another harmless opposition blogger. Obviously when it comes to applying the full force of the state against the hapless and the harmless, the security police apparat suddenly finds reserves of efficiency. Needless to say, when it comes to actual large - and I mean eye-wateringly huge - crimes that severely damage the state, they are too busy beating up bloggers!
The amount of dirty money flowing in and out of Russia has more than doubled over the past eight years, robbing the country of productive capital and driving a massive underground economy, a new report has found.
Global Financial Integrity, a Washington think tank that studies illicit money flows, estimates that an average of $61.72 billion in money earned from corruption, human trafficking, arms smuggling and other illegal activities has entered or left Russia each year since the start of 2004, a 228 percent increase from the $27.06 billion in illicit funds seen annually on average in the prior decade.
This sort of thing is like a slowly metastatizing cancer in a society. Slowly but irrevocably it spreads through the system weakening and in the end destroying the sinews of state. Given that this is Russia and it's Putin's regime, then good luck to the crooks, I say!
Still, Russia only ranks fifth among developing economies for total illegal money flows, far behind China, which GFI estimates has lost $3.79 trillion between 2000 and 2011.
China saw an estimated $764.27 billion in dirty money between 1994 and 2011, GFI said in its report "Russia: Illicit Financial Flows and the Role of the Underground Economy," released on Tuesday.
The dirty money feeds a massive underground economy, equivalent to 46 percent of Russia's national economic output and 3.5 times more than the average for other major industrialized nations in the Group of Eight.
The shadow economy fueled by illicit flows enriches a small business and criminal elite at the expense of the broader citizenry, and it flourishes because Russia's government institutions are weak, with corruption and accountability measures worsening, GFI said.
And here's a prime specimen, a perfect example of one of those squirrelly types of vermin responsible for all sorts of mayhem but who are rarely if ever seen in daylight:
I give you - Sir David Nicholson! He is a 'They', as in, 'They did this', or 'They failed to do that' or 'They are a pain in the arse', in other words, he is your archetypal Jobsworth, a Pecksniff, a pen-pusher, a pox-doctor's clerk . . . he is one of that great multitude of faceless, anonymous bureaucrats who cock-up almost everything they touch. Only their innate idleness stops them from totally wrecking the country.
Normally we never know their names but the scandal of the North Staffs Hospital, part of our beloved Nationalised Health Service ("the envy of the world!"), has suddenly shaken a few of the rascals into the limelight, especially Sir David Nicholson who was running the supervisory body responsible for checking the management of this concentration camp institution. Subsequently - and I find this difficult to type because my rage is interfering with my typing - he was promoted to be the boss of the entire National Health Service! The fat, useless thickoe was on my telly last night pontificating behind a barrage of bureaucratic non-managment speak saying, in effect, 'nuffink to do wiv me, guv'.
I want that man sacked, stripped of his knighthood, strapped to a hospital bed, unfed, unwatered and uncared for just like the poor bastards that had the double misfortune of being ill and then being taken to Belsen to North Staffs Hospital. The only slightly good thing to emerge from this disgusting tale of stupidity and cruelty is that the reputation of nurses as being little angels of mercy is well and truly dead with a bloody great stake through its heart!
So, at last, the 'Lesbian-straightener' coughs - and about time, too! Huhne pleads guilty but his ex-wife battles on either claiming that she 'don't know nuffink', or, throwing herself on the mercy of the court as a wronged, put-upon wife. Good luck to her, she looked positively ill the last time I saw her on Sky News. The main thing is that Huhne is now dead meat and it's only a question of how long he will be hung up to rot. I hope and trust that it will be an exemplary sentence, at least two years given that he's supposed to set an example to us all. Of course, I do realise that it is not the done thing for a Christian gentleman to rejoice at someone else's misfortune but, then again, I am only nominally Christian, I am definitely not a gentleman and, moreover, I detest all 'il-Lib-non-Dems', so it will definitely be a champagne night tonight at Chateaux Duff. One trusts that 'Big Bubba' will do his duty - dammit, man, the country expects!
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.
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!)
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!
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!
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?
I am sort of delighted to tell you all that Chicago ended the year on a high, er, that's a high murder rate, of course! Shortly before Christmas, at a score of 500, they had reached the highest figure since 2008 but determined not to be out-done, and thereby risk gaining a reputation as a bunch of 'wusses', they really pulled their trigger fingers out and today I can tell you, courtesy of The Weekly Standard, that in 2012 they achieved a body count of 532 for the year!
I indicated above that I am somewhat reluctant to spread this news because I am aware that one or two of my regular readers hail from the 'Windy City' and I want to assure them that I do not mean to denigrate their great metropolis. However, I do want to ask them why the hell they keep voting in corrupt and utterly useless Democrat administrations in election after election after election?
I did wonder, for approximately half a nano-second, whether Mayor Emanuel might think that totaly disarming his citizens was really such a good idea? But then I remembered that Rahm Emanuel is a slippery, slithery snake only interested in sliding back into the mayoral office until his children are old enough to take his place - that being, I gather, something a Chicagoan tradition!
Well, whodathunkit? Just as I was giving up on Chicago and beginning to think they had all turned into model, goody-two-shoes, citizen wusses suitable for a model mayor like Rahm Emanuel to rule over them they demonstrated, with three days still to go before year end, the reality behind the ultra-strict gun-control laws operating in Chicago - someone shot the 500th victim of the year! That's the highest body count since the 512 in 2008. Way to go, Rahm, baby!
According to the Chicago-Tribune the dreadful murder stats were all the fault of 'global warming'! Er, well, perhaps not quite that - but almost:
Largely contributing to the spike was the unusual number of homicides that occurred during the early part of the year, when the city experienced unseasonable warmth.
Well, 'over here' we are used to blaming everything on the weather but I can't remember the murder rate figuring in the usual platitudes. Mind you, we haven't had any 'global warming' over here for yonks and if it doesn't stop raining soon I might go and murder little 'Georgie Moonbat'!
And talking, as I was in my previous post, about the MSM feeding us pap, there is perhaps more than meets the eye in the tragedy of the Sandy Hook school shooting. According to one source the family connections of the killer are far more involved than is apparent. For example, the Honda car used by the killer was not registered to his mother as generally reported but to a petty thief and drug addict with connections to the killer's family. Cue non-stop conspiracy theories from now on!
Honestly, I wouldn't be without my daily 'Raccooning'. OK, sometimes it's a bit uncomfortable when you realise how spoon-fed you are and how easily and unthinkingly you swallow the pap from the papers, but it is also very invigorating to be well and truly 'Raccooned' by having events tossed upside down and looked at from a totally different angle. Today, Ms. Raccoon turns her attention to the case of the little Pakistani girl 'abducted' by her 'wicked' father (all fathers tend, in our feminist-ridden MSM, to be 'wicked') and taken to Pakistan from whence she has been "rescued" and returned to her loving mum (all mums tending to be 'loving' in our MSM, as opposed to dads!) and so, you see, sometimes Christmas fairy tales do sometimes come true and, it must be said, that perhaps in this case it is true ... maybe ... possibly ... but then again ...
Looks harmless enough, doesn't he? Nice smile, properly dressed, respectable-looking chap, could be your local choir-master, perhaps. However, if like me you are an enthusiastic and determined opponent of HAFs (Hot Air Fanatics) then - be afraid, be very afraid - because this man, Prof. Pratcunt Parncutt, wants you executed- and I kid you not! He rates you as being worse, far worse, than that Norwegian mass killer who shot and blew up 77 people:
Even mass murderers should not be executed, in my opinion. Consider the politically motivated murder of 77 people in Norway in 2011. Of course the murderer does not deserve to live, and there is not the slightest doubt that he is guilty. But if the Norwegian government killed him, that would just increase the number of dead to 78. It would not bring the dead back to life. In fact, it would not achieve anything positive at all. I respect the families and friends of the victims if they feel differently about that. I am simply presenting what seems to me to be a logical argument.
But if you are against the theory of Global Warming that makes you guilty of the murder of, er, well, people who are not yet dead, and also those who have yet to be born, you see, you are a 'future killer'! This is a novel extension of legal theory and it will be interesting, albeit, painfully interesting, to see if it catches on:
GW deniers fall into a completely different category from Behring Breivik. They are already causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of future people. We could be speaking of billions, but I am making a conservative estimate.
I must confess that as I began to read Prof. Pratcunt's Parncutt's essay I fell about laughing on the assumption that it was a giant, satirical hoax but then, gradually, I began to realise that he meant it:
If my argument is correct, it has clear political consequences. Here is a scenario for what might happen if my argument is broadly accepted, both democratically and politically.
The universal declaration of human rights and every national constitution would be amended to include the rights of future generations. Incidentally, that would also make national debts illegal, because they oblige future generations to pay them. Getting rid of national debts would in turn solve an important aspect of the “global financial crisis” (more), which currently belongs to the list of common excuses for not investing money in the prevention of GW.
The proposed legal change would be announced and widely publicized for an extended period before it came into force. During that time, GW deniers would have a chance to change their ways and escape punishment.
The police would start to identify the most influential GW deniers who had not responded to the changed legal situation. These individuals would then be charged and brought to justice.
If a jury of suitably qualified scientists estimated that a given GW denier had already, with high probability (say 95%), caused the deaths of over one million future people, then s/he would be sentenced to death. The sentence would then be commuted to life imprisonment if the accused admitted their mistake, demonstrated genuine regret, AND participated significantly and positively over a long period in programs to reduce the effects of GW (from jail) – using much the same means that were previously used to spread the message of denial. At the end of that process, some GW deniers would never admit their mistake and as a result they would be executed. Perhaps that would be the only way to stop the rest of them. The death penalty would have been justified in terms of the enormous numbers of saved future lives.
Apparently, he is "Professor of Systematic Musicology" at the University of Graz. The coincidence that Austria is the birthplace of psycho-babble and that poor old Pratcunt Parncutt is obviously several sandwiches short of a picnic makes me wonder whether he's actually there to, er, 'take the cure', as it were! Anyway, his ravings have gone viral on the internet and apparently he has now withdrawn the whole piece and replaced it with something more anodyne. ("You zee, vee haf vays of making you zane again!")
In the interests of science I have conducted my own little experiment with the mouth-breathers over at Deltoid (pages 2&3). I pointed out to them that I would not hold them liable for the fact that some loony had attached himself to their cause but it was incumbent upon them to repudiate what the man had suggested. The silence has been deafening. Oh, plenty of abuse aimed at me - but no repudiation of 'Pratcunt', not one. By their inactions shall you know them!
An excellent article in today's Telegraph by the assiduous Andrew Gilligan on the subject of 'our boys and girls in blue'. He makes a strong case for believing that a large percentage of them constitute the biggest collection of villains outside of Pentonville!
England has 39 police forces, headed by 39 chief constables or commissioners. In the past 18 months, seven have been sacked for misconduct, suspended, placed under criminal or disciplinary investigation or forced to resign. That is not far off a fifth of the total.
In the same period, at least eight deputy or assistant chief constables have also been placed under ongoing investigation, suspended or forced out for reasons of alleged misconduct. No fewer than 11 English police forces – just under 30 per cent – have had one or more of their top leaders under a cloud.
If the head of our constabulary has rotted to that extent then how much decomposition has gnawed away at the main body? Quite a lot, apparently:
At lower ranks, in the three years to April 2011 – that is, even before “Hackgate” broke – there was a 55 per cent rise in referrals to the IPCC for corruption, from 215 cases to 333. And in a decade, the overall number of complaints made each year against the police has roughly doubled – from 15,248 to 30,143 – though there has been a decline in the last two years.
Even before the shocking possibility opened up by “Plebgate”, the police have been plagued by scandal and incompetence. We now learn that one of the reasons why the Metropolitan Police did nothing about the systematic criminality of the News of the World was because some officers were in the paper’s pocket, or even on its payroll.
Of course, much of this simply passes either over our heads or beneath our noses but sometimes police behaviour is rammed into our faces and becomes impossible to ignore. Such an example occurred at the London riots when the Metropolitan Police Force simply stood by and watched as they lost control of the streets they are paid - very well paid - to protect. According to one of Gilligan's sources I am not alone in suspecting that part of the motive behind the dilatory inaction of the Met was to let their political masters know how much they were suffering with so-called 'savage' cuts in man-power.
Well, bad behaviour by policemen is not new but as Gilligan points out, and as Charles Moore confirms in his commentary on the 'Pleb-gate' row over Andrew Mitchell, the former Chief Whip, the idea is growing that our police forces have become politicised and are determined to do anything to assist in the denigration of our democratically-elected government including outright lying. Time, perhaps, for 'Dave' to strengthen the hands of our newly-elected Police Commissioners and give some of these Police Chiefs a bit of a kicking - to say nothing of the increasingly militant Police union. But that, of course, would take guts - 'say no more, move along, nothing to see 'ere!'
I beg you, America, do not, under any circumstances, fall for the blandishments, the pleadings, the tearful implorings, the constant repetition of SHLOCK-HORROR stories, the stern rebukes from your 'Mr. Pompous President', and allow those lying-liar government reptiles to take away your 2nd Amendment right to bear arms. The Statists want you to be helpless and totally in their thrall. They know that if they can disarm the American population a huge barrier to their ambitions will be removed. Of course, it goes without saying that were you to give up the right to bear arms the state will not protect you, anymore than the Norwegian state protected its citizens this year, or Her Majesty's government protected her subjects at Dunblane and Hungerford. Governments are always and forever useless and untrustworthy. They will not 'ban guns' they will simply stop you from owning them whilst the evil and the mad will continue to buy and sell them at their leisure. If you doubt me, move to Chicago!
If some lunatic takes it into his or her head to kill as many people as possible they will find a way even if they cannot lay hands on a gun - a vehicle driven into a crowd will do the job nicely but I doubt that there will then be calls to ban vehicles by 'President Humbug' particularly as he and his government are now the principal shareholders in General Motors! The best defence against killers attempting mass murder with a fire-arm or anything else is to have plenty of armed people. One man with a concealed weapon would have saved several of the people killed around that Congresswoman who was shot and wounded recently. If you want some concrete examples of how mass shootings were thwarted by legally armed citizens then take a look at the GunWatch site.
Above all, America, just remember that if you are armed you have a very slight chance of defending yourself, not just against a malefactor, but against a rabid state determined to control every aspect of your lives!
(This ends my weekly broadcast to the American people who I know really appreciate my advice!)
ADDITIONAL: This is hot off the presses - er, well, actually, it was a few days ago but what with my social life serious studies I missed the reference at IHTMto a story in the Internation Herald Tribune in which China urges America to quickly adopt strong gun control measures. Well, they would, wouldn't they?! Needless to say, in law-abiding, peaceful China no-one but the government has the right to bear arms. Consequently, and with bitter irony, the story also reports that on the same Friday as the American massacre, a madman in Henan Province stabbed 22 children with a knife and wounded an 85-year old lady. Apparently, he failed to kill any of them but several had fingers and ears cut off. Odd, isn't it, when you really need a policeman with a big gun you can never find one!
AN ADDITIONAL ADD-ON! In the comments below, my e-pal, 'DM', links to an excellent, must read article in The Telegraph by Brendan O'Neill who has very pertinent comments to make concerning the East-West coast and mainly metropolitan-based animus against middle, and mostly Southern, America when it comes to gun laws.
Not much time this evening to write and nor, to be truthful, have I had much time during the weekend to follow the news in detail which, given the massacre of little children in Sandy Hook, USA, I am quite glad not to have done. However, I did read a quick headline describing the (crocodile) tears shed by Obama on his visit to the site of the killings. My goodness, what a very deeply humane and sensitive person he is, to be sure, so it's rather surprising that he never quite gets around to shedding some tears for the constant, year in, year out, slaughter of men, women, children, young, old and middle-aged, that takes place in his own city of Chicago every day of the year!
During the same afternoon and night of the random, unique and never to be repeated killing spree in Sandy Brook, back in Obama's political home town it was a case of the same old same old. Shootings:
No-one was killed probably because marksmanship is not high on the priorities of your average hoodlum and even if it was, crack cocaine would not aid it! However, at the end of October this year, Chicago had already taken its murder rate past the previous whole year total.
Should anyone be interested in writing one of those compilation books that are always so popular at Christmas time, say, something like: The Hundred Most Asinine Grunts Emitted by a Politician This Year, they should certainly include those words of Mayor Emanuel.
Amongst the plethora of SIFs (‘Single Issue Fanatics’ TM - the late, great Bernard Levin) perhaps the most odious in my eyes are the anti-smoking Gauleiters. They exemplify the very worst of human nature in that they seize upon a not unreasonable proposition that sometimes smoking might be bad for the health of some people whilst ignoring the obvious truth that the biggest risk of dying comes from living!
These swivel-eyed SIFs have managed to bamboozle the Australian government into passing a law that removes all logos from cigarette packaging replacing them with nasty pictures of diseased lungs and eyes. If, say, some ghastly rock group proposed putting such pictures on the cover of their ‘music’ album no doubt some other gang of SIFs would instantly leap up and down because of the effect it would have on their little kiddie-winkies! I stress the word ‘would’ because SIFs are never nuanced in their use of statistics.
Thus, at a ‘couldn’t care less’ stroke, other peoples’ property rights, the cartons belong to the manufacturers, are infringed; their freedom of speech, that is, their right to advertise their own brands is invalidated; and their customers’ rights to be able to pick and choose their preferred cigarette is denied – and all with the meek acquiescence of the Australian ‘Cocklecarrots’ who, being in some cases the descendents of ill-judged convicts, should have known better. It is only a matter of time before smoking is treated as a crime and then some people might complain but it will be too late.
There-in lies a lesson for all those minded to listen to the bleatings of the Dowlers, the McCanns, the Mosleys, the Grants and the rest of all those with claims, some more justified than others, against the scrofulous hacks of Canary Wharf who wish to cement their bitter recriminations into law. It always begins well with the best of all possible intentions and ends up in cold, immutable, heavy-handed, not to say, heavy-fisted, tyranny.
There you are, you see, two unbelievable headlines in a row you never expected to read here at D&N! Not only have I patted 'Dave' on the back, see below, but now I wish to cover Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, Mr Justice Fulford and Mr Justice Bean with kisses - no, no, your Lordships, no need to remove your judicial gowns and wigs! They have just reduced the sentence laid down on Sgt. Nightingale, SAS, by some military Cocklecarrot at a Court Martial with less than the statutory three brain cells in his noodle, and then suspended it so that in effect he is free to go home to his family for Christmas.
I know that sometimes I err on the side of excessive curmudgeon when it comes to the Cocklecarrots but, dammit, when they do it right I am also the first to praise them. When this case first arose I feared the worst but I resisted the urge to write about it because I have just sufficient faith that at the very top good sense would prevail. It has, and amongst my many Christmas toasts this year - before I fall insensible to the ground - will be a large slug of Scottish 'water' raised in honour to these three wise men!
They do try, my God, they really do try over and over and over again but somehow the mouth-breathing nose-pickers who waste their time and my money by idling away the daylight hours inside so-called Social Services offices still never quite reach the bottom of their pit of utter, brainless stupidity. This, from the BBC, says it all:
A couple have had three foster children removed from their care because they belong to the UK Independence Party.
Rotherham Borough Council said the children were "not indigenous white British" and that it had concerns about UKIP's stance on immigration.
And this from:
Rotherham Borough Council's Strategic Director of Children and Young People's Services, Joyce Thacker [shome mishtake, surely, that should be 'Thicker'!], told the BBC she did not regret the decision, which was reached after "a lot of soul searching".
No, dear, it's not your "soul" that you should be searching for but your intelligence and I'm sure that if you set the whole department looking for it over the next few weeks someone will find it and no one will notice your absence in the mean time.
Mind you, I suppose that Ms. Thicker Thacker must have been 'busy' searching for her soul when all those Asian sex-grooming gangs were gang-banging teen-age girls in Rotherham for years and her department did absolutely nothing!
Sometimes, just sometimes, this blog is lost for words - or at least, words that are printable.
Damn, damn, damn! How I would love to boast to you all that with my keen, sophisticated, political savoire faire I voted for Ms. Sue Mounstevens in the recent election for local Police Commissioners. Alas, not only did I fail to vote for her - I failed to vote entirely! I meant to, honestly I did. I was going out that evening and driving right past the polling station so I even made the effort to come right up here to my garrett to check who was who on the list of candidates. I noticed her name and the fact that she was listed as an 'Independent'. Well, of course, in my sublime male chauvinist way I dismissed her because she was a woman and therefore likely to be soppingly wet and useless - I know, I know, mea culpa and all that but I'm telling you the way it was! Anyway, having carefully memorised the name of the Tory candidate - I then drove straight past the polling station and only remembered my, er, 'civic duty' when I drove back again two hours after it had closed! (That's the sort of brilliance which has got me where I am today!)
Imagine my joy-mixed-with-shame when I heard on the news last night that Ms. Mountstevens had won the election and, in effect, fired the Chief Constable! Oh, joy unconfined - not, I hasten to add that I have anything against the Chief Constable, and not that I have any particular views concerning the Somerset & Avon Police Force but one knows, doesn't one?, that all the police forces in Britain are over-staffed, over-budgeted, over-paid and over here! And the biggest, most over-paid and over-cossetted of them all are the mostly useless Chief Constables as exemplified by the crass pronouncements of ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers.
Actually, she did not fire him exactly, instead she asked him to re-apply for his job, at which point he prompty resigned. According to The Mail:
Mrs Mountstevens, a former magistrate and married mother of three children, stood on a platform of cutting anti-social behaviour, burglary and violence. [My emphasis]
She also promised to keep party politics out of policing and act ‘without interference of national politics’.
An irritating morning today because, as usual, I left the house at 6.30 to go for my daily swim - er, have I mentioned lately that ... oh, right! - and the road to the swimming pool was closed presumably due to flooding from the tropical rainfall we have experienced lately - God, life is tough down here in the south west! Anyway, my usual time table has been completely upset which has put me in a real 'Mr. Grumpy' mood. However, all my irritations were soothed away by Ms. Raccoon's forensic examination of what sounds like yet another piece of televisual tosh masquerading as 'investigative journalism'. You may have noticed that I have become somewhat fixated with God recently. Whether this is due to intellectual curiosity or the knowledge that I am getting closer to finding the answer to 'The Great Question', I cannot say, but anyway I thank Him profusely for letting us invent this 'internet-thingie' which allows the likes of Ms. Raccoon to publicly 'slice 'n' dice' the sort of tripe that TV serves up especially when some moral hot-air balloon has arisen on a gust of popular hysteria. Please, take a few minutes to read her summary of what was, apparently, a TV "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing". She does not proveJimmy Savile's innocence because she has no intention of doing so. What she does do with scalpel-like accuracy is to lay bare the screamingly obvious lack of even minimal proof of any the accusations, or perhaps 'innuendos' is a better word, so far made against the man. Her post is entitled "Trial by Posthumous Innuendo" and if like me you loathe and distrust mobs led, fed and encouraged by thrid-rate TV programmes then it is essential reading.
So George Blake, born George Behar of a Dutch mother and an Egyptian-Jewish father, is 90 years old. I confess that if I had ever thought about him at all I would have assumed he had died years ago but not so according to The Mail which tells us that he lives comfortably in a flat in Moscow with his Dacha in the countryside, in other words, he lives the very comfortable life of a typical, bourgeois, Marxist commissar and I wonder if the irony, not to say, the tragedy, of it ever occurs to him? He chose Marxism as his creed whilst fairly young which was a sign of his immaturity, but then he continued in its service whilst an adult which was indicative of his infantile stupidity. The fact that he married and fathered three sons whom he deserted demonstrated his massive egotism. I can only hope that the incontrovertible and, for him, deeply uncomfortable fact that his beloved Soviet Union is no more and that Mother Russia has reverted to type and is now ruled by a fascist gangster mob makes him weep nightly. I doubt he sheds many tears for the men he betrayed and who died for an ideal far greater than his. I can only hope he eventually dies of a particularly painful, long and lingering cancer!
This is a depressing tale. An aquaintance of mine - I say 'aquaintance' not to distance myself but because I simply do not know him well enough to call him a friend - has just been 'outed' as former paedophile. I'm not sure how old he is but into his sixties, I imagine, and I gather from that source of all scandal, the 'grapevine', that whatever he did was done some time ago and that he was caught and served his time.
I met him about four or five years ago when I was engaged on a more than somewhat tricky project and this man, then a stranger to me, was extraordinarily helpful and enthusiastic. He was obviously a cultered man of considerable intelligence and I liked him immediately. We never mixed socially but we would meet occasionally and he was one of those people whom you are always pleased to see and to exchange a few words with. Then, suddenly, this appalling news crashes and smashes into his life and the ripples - perhaps 'tidal wave' is a better expression - flows inexorably outwards.
There is no escape for him, no mitigation, no comfort. However, I was interested in, and surprised by, my own re-action. Paedophilia is a disgusting crime and one deserving of heavy punishment . . . and yet . . . and yet . . . I still like the man and in a way I feel sorry for him. This whole business of living is one giant gamble. When the genetic dice rolled for him they landed in the worst possible configuration. The sex drive is enormously powerful, one might almost say, unstoppable. Of course, it is stoppable which is why the history of Mankind contains a huge number of voluntary celibates but I would suggest that they are extra-ordinary men and women and their will-power is not common. Most of us submit, usually eagerly, in fact, we can hardly wait, to our sex drives including those with tastes frowned upon, quite rightly, by society. That is not to exonerate the man's crime for which, quite correctly, he was jailed, but it is important to try and understand it.
Understanding my own re-action is more tricky. If he was a man I disliked or despised for other reasons would I be as understanding? I suspect not! And suppose he had been guilty of even greater crimes, say, war crimes against civilians, shooting men, women and children in the head as they kneeled by an open trench, what then? Even though I like him how much tolerance would I have found for him in those circumstances? Practically none, I reckon, because I would have been happy to shoot him myself! But in this case I cannot find it in myself to repudiate the man. I liked him before I knew, I like him now that I do - and there's an end on't!
And Brigitte Bardot! Oh, and that Sophia Loren, she never left me alone. Then there was that NAAFI girl who served the tea in the barrack canteen. And I was very young to be taken advantage of in that fashion. Worst of all was the year I was serving Her Maj and living in a tent on the end of runway #2 at Bahrein airport, those hussies kept abusing me on a constant basis, in fact the 'Tom' in the next camp-bed to mine complained about it! Anyway, I have consulted my distinguished solicitors, Messrs. Whyte, Lippe & Tremblin, although to be honest I'm not totally sure which one I saw because they all look alike. Anyway, Messr. 'whichever' was most encouraging and assured me that I had a very good case and they would be only too pleased to argue it all the way to the High Court; although, to be honest, I was a little hurt when he insisted on his fees being paid up-front! Anyway, as the entire country seems set upon suing everybody else for sexual harrassment I don't see why I shouldn't have my day in court, I mean, you'd never believe the things those women did to me . . .
ADDITIONAL: That old devil coincidence strikes again. My somewhat plodding satire on the current hysteria surrounding the late, and not very great, Jimmy Savile was no sooner written and posted when I began my usual trawl through my favourite blogs beginning, of course, with the redoubtable Anna Raccoon who is in the process of telling her life story. Apparently the corner-stone of this whole Savile broohaha emanated from the Newsnight story in which some former inmates of an approved school for girls in Staines claimed that Savile, with the connivance of the lady who ran the establishment, had sexually assaulted them. Ms. Raccoon was actually a resident of this school herself at that time and her views are well worth reading. They can be summed up in her own words, thus:
Abuse victims should be heard. They should be listened to intently. By the same token, those accused of such heinous crimes should be so accused by tested evidence, not newspaper circuses. This shouldn’t be a subject to push up newspaper circulation, nor for a Punch and Judy show between branches of the political media – the damage done by sexual abuse is too profound for that. What is happening, with a – shall we call it polite disbelief – in some quarters, that not all the ’400 victims who have come forward’ are entirely motivated by a desire for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, does a disservice to every genuine case.
I’m not afraid of the truth, I have nothing to fear from it. If other girls were cowering behind bedroom doors in 1965 and I failed to notice, nor even hear mention of the man’s name, let alone meet him – well then, after eating my Raccoon tail, I shall take myself off for counseling; I would obviously have a profound case of ‘false memory syndrome’.
I have absolutely no knowledge of any of it but her words add to my general unease which always arises when I see a mob in full pursuit!
And what a mighty smote it was yesterday when the 'only-just-appointed-but-about-to-depart-I-bet' boss of the BBC was shown up to be a walking-talking suit with about as much grip as a feather boa. Surely there has to be the makings of a corking new comedy series based on the BBC bureaucracy, something like "Yes and/or No, Director-General" or "Carry On Buck Passing" or "Don't Tell Me Anything I Don't Want to Know" starring Rowan Atkinson, of course. Now, to make the show complete, enter stage right, left and centre simultaneously (he's a slippery sort of chap) we have 'Fat Pan' Patten, our former man in Hong Kong who has adminstered a slap on the substantial bottom of our new Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, for daring to raise some serious questions concerning the behaviour of the BBC hierarchy. Patten intones from on high (as boss of the BBC Trust - which is a laugh in its own right) that Ms. Miller should mind her own business and not interfere in the independence of the BBC. To which I would reply something along the lines of - listen, 'Fat Pan', everyone in the country who own a TV set is taxed to pay for you and your circus even if they don't watch the unspeakable crap you slosh out every night, so it is entirely right and proper that if the BBC is shown up to be a bunch of lying kiddie-fiddlers then we are entitled to know and we have the right to haul your fat arse into Parliament to find out - so watch it!
Recent Comments