DUFF & NONSENSE!

"Dumb-brella"!

I am obliged to James Hudnall over at Breitbart News for providing me with a witty title and a cartoon that says it all:

Well, it gave me a giggle, anyway!  And some of Hudnall's commenters made me laugh out loud:

"Two more HARVARD GRADS who can't pour piss out of a boot...

"It must be Bush's fault."

"Hell no that umbrella has moving parts no way is he qualified to operate it. He could talk about it, tax it and regulate it but in no way could he work it. Understanding how things work is not his specialty."

"Must be the answer to our economic problems under that umbrella, they look puzzled"

"In his defense, the teleprompter usually travels ahead of him and handles these sorts of things."

There are more, go and enjoy!

 

 

An intellectual problem - or an intellectual's problem!

They, by which I mean the cognoscenti in the MSM, keep telling me that Bush was as thick as a spanner and Obama is possessed of the highest intellectual powers of any president - ever!  However, he appears to have encountered a bit of problem here but I have it on very good authority that it only took him about 45 minutes to work out the solution with the help of his secret service detachment.  In the meantime, Michelle was soaked and all her colours ran - ooops, no, er, I didn't mean that sort of colour, honestly, I just meant her dress . . .

Thanks to those ratbags at 'IHTM'.

Mr. Bean or 'Red Ed'? Do I care?

And so, finally, at long last, the most intensely tedious, eye-stabbingly boring, inconsequential election campaign limps into its final lap.  It has been a bit like watching the last runner in the London marathon!  For me, the most interesting outcome will be the exact magnitude of humiliation which will be excreted over, and then shared between, the fat, black hypocrite and old 'Blinky' Balls.  Both of them deserve bucketfulls! 

After that, I suppose, one must contemplate the winner who, it appears, will be either Miliband D., or E.  Contemplation of that results in the spread of a veritable tundra of frozen indifference although I must admit, perhaps, that it may be due to my ignorance on the exact philosophical differences (stop giggling at the back!) between these two scions of a spectactularly dim-witted Marxist dad - who, I read, is buried in Highgate close to Karl Marx.  They deserve each other!  I gather that because of the election 'Red Ed' has moved to the Left with all the subtlety of one of those massive oil tankers turning to port, and thus leaves us all, well, me, at any rate, with the distinct suspicion that he will almost certainly move back to the Right when the moment suits.  'Mr. Bean', his brother, having trodden in huge amounts of Brown stuff, finds it more difficult to shake off his past 'crimes and misdemeanors' and needs must defend some of them. 

Even so, I feel I must attempt an opinion if only to appease the curiosity of my first reader, and the mirth of my second, two being the probable maximum here at D&N.  My first thought was an intense desire for 'Red Ed' to win on the grounds that it would make Labour unelectable for over a decade.  But, I thought next with all the guile of my Machiavellian brain, there has to be more than a good chance that the pathetic pair of prats who are sharing the leadership of my country today are likely to make such a complete cods of it that it might give Labour a chance to get back in - dread thought!  Even if 'Red Ed' turns out to be 'Pink Ed', do I want a prime minister who actually believes in things like AGW?  (Ooops, I've just remembered, I already have one!)  Anyway, if the unions and the markets between them, bring down the 'CamClegg' edifice then I think, on the whole, that 'Mr. Bean' would be preferable to 'Red Ed', and if that reads as an under-whelming endorsement, it's because it was meant to be!  The fact is that in exactly the same way that it was impossible to put a fag paper between Blair and Cameron, so it is with Cameron and 'Mr. Bean', so I doubt I will notice much difference.

In the meantime, there is some gallows humour to be enjoyed watching the 'Ultras' in the Labour party as they scrabble about, lost, confused, angry and squabbling, without a single candidate who comes anywhere near their dotty aspirations.  Such fun!

 

And another one bites the dust

Apparently some Lefties are lionising Henry Ford - of all people - on the grounds that back in 1914 he doubled his workers' wages to $5 a day so that they, themselves, could afford his cars.  Donald Boudreaux runs over this nonsense and squashes it flat, not in his car but in a letter to The Los Angelese Times reprinted at Cafe Hayek.  In doing so, he also points us to our very own Tim Worstall writing on the subject recently at The Adam Smith Institute.

Between them, they point out that in 1914, Ford employed 14,000 staff whilst his production was 170,000 cars per year, so hoping his employees would buy his cars was marginal.  Actually, Ford had huge problems with an excessive turnover in staff which was costing him in constant re-training and this was the main motive for the pay rise which in fact was not as straighforward  as it might appear.  Most of it was in the form of a bonus which was earned not so much on the shop floor but by the behaviour of his workers at home!  To earn it they had to live respectable lives and foreign immigrants had to learn English and the American way of life, as Tim Worstall quotes from the Michigan Historical Society:

The $5 a day rate was about half pay and half bonus. The bonus came with character requirements and was enforced by the Socialization Organization. This was a committee that would visit the employees' homes to ensure that they were doing things the American way. They were supposed to avoid social ills such as gambling and drinking. They were to learn English, and many (primarily the recent immigrants) had to attend classes to become "Americanized." Women were not eligible for the bonus unless they were single and supporting the family. Also, men were not eligible if their wives worked outside the home. 

If Lefties want to use Ford's example in support of things like increasing the minimum wage they should be careful what they wish for! 

 

A Brit with balls - and brains!

A fascinating exchange over at the American Spectator in which a 'Brit prof', John Keown, puts forward the amusing and interesting proposition that the American War of Independence was in fact America's first civil war on the grounds that the vast majority of colonialists were opposed to the rebellion.  Not content with saying out loud the equivalent of 'bollocks to the bishop' once, he goes further by asserting that the British were entirely justified in attempting to put down the rebels under 'Just War' provisions.  The comments thread resembles the characters in a Bateman cartoon.

I have no idea whether or not he is right but it does prod the tender spot of my ignorance of American history, and anyway, Glenn Beck keeps telling me that I must return to the Founding Fathers.  Of course, he places them on a dais but I suspect they were no more and no less than small-town, local politicians with several axes, personal as well as political, to grind.  Oddly enough, if that is true, it only adds to my admiration for them for inventing the splendid American constitution, a remarkably robust construction but which is now facing perhaps its fiercest test.

 

'Down there'!

I refer frequently, too frequently some of my regular readers might complain, to 'over there', or 'over here', and even 'just over there' but this, I think, is the first time I have used 'down there' and I do so now with some genuine trepidation. Via the media I read about various catastrophes and whilst I do feel pity for the people involved I have to be honest and admit that it is, so to speak, perfunctory.  However, the fate of those Chilean miners touches me to the quick and I simply cannot get them out of my mind.  The reason is simple, I suffer with chronic claustrophobia and were I in their position I would be a gibbering, sniveling wreck curled up in the corner with the contents of my bowels all around me.  The evidence of their good spirits, as shown on TV, is quite beyond my understanding but my admiration is boundless.

I am not certain when and how my claustrophobia was induced but something caused it because for most of my life I never suffered with it, unlike vertigo which has been with me since I was a child.  I think it might have begun 'over there' during my one and only visit to the USA.  We stayed one night in a modern hotel, something I was not, and still am not, used to.  Thus, I failed to notice that it was impossible to open the sound-proofed, double-glazed windows which were screened at night by immensely thick curtains through which not a photon of light could pass.  I must have gone to sleep before the 'Memsahib' so I didn't notice this light-tight feature.  The bed was actually bigger than my bedroom at home and so, when I suddenly awoke from a dream into a black nothingness I had no idea or remembrance of where I was.  I slowly realised I was in bed and so, like an infant reaching for mum, I instinctively stretched out a hand towards the 'Memsahib' - who wasn't there  - because she was on the other side and you could have fitted a platoon of Guardsmen in the gap between us!  My terror was instantaneous.  I must have let out something rather louder than a whimper because she woke up and put the light on, and slowly I came back down to earth!

I must admit that earlier in my life I did once experience this fear of the pitch black.  It was when, as a young soldier, I was on jungle warfare training in Malaya.  During my first night in the jungle it was my turn for sentry duty.  We had spent most of the late afternoon making our 'bashers', it being imperative to sleep off the ground in the jungle lest several zillion creepy-crawlies pick you up and carry you away, and also cutting down long vines which we tied round trees to act as 'handrails' to mark out pathways, our Gurkha trainers having assured us that once the sun went down it would get very, very dark and those vines would guide us as we moved about.  'Very, very dark' was the understatement of understatements!  I had never experienced pitch blackness like it.  Foolishly, as I carefully walked the 'path' during my 'stag', I let go of the vine and took a few steps into the undergrowth because I heard a noise.  I then turned to retrace my steps - and couldn't find the vine!  Oh God, the sheer, trembling funk reduced me to jelly.  In a panic I stumbled about until I crashed into what I thought was a particular stubborn shrub and an irate voice told me to 'eff off' because I was the second silly sod who had walked into his 'basher'.  He never knew it but I very nearly kissed him, such was my relief!  I realise that fear of the dark, or in my case, fear of pitch black is not exactly the same as claustrophobia but I think it is allied.  Anyway, thereafter I have never liked being locked into any sort of enclosed space.

My sympathy for those miners is heartfelt and only equaled by my admiration for their stoic courage.  I hope, with as much passion as I can raise, that all ends well for them and does so as soon as possible.

 

Oh, no, what am I going to do?

I expect many of you have been in that tricky situation in which two of your friends fall out with each other and you are left uneasily in no-man's-land unable, and unwilling, to choose between them.  As many of you know, I am a dedicated reader of The Spectator without which I would not be the immensely knowledgeable, wise and balanced commentator whom you all appreciate so much - sorry, didn't quite catch that!  Anyway, imagine my horror when I opened this week's edition to read an excoriating attack on my belov-ed Sarah Palin by, of all people, my hero Alexander Chancellor, a former editor, no less!  In it, he accuses my darling Sarah of being "a greedy celebrity" but on close examination of his essay that accusation seems to be based on the fact that she resigned the governorship of Alaska and then wrote, or had ghosted for her, a book which earned her $7 million.  She is, apparently 'writing' another book and has entered into a TV deal to present a documentary programme based on her home State.  Also, evidently to Mr. Chancellor's extreme ire, or could it be envy, she is charging £100k for a single speech.  He also spends nearly half of his polemic attacking her daughter and the lay-about oaf who put her in the family way which can only be of marginal interest in assessing Mrs. Palin's worth as a politician.  Much of his attack on her is based on her malapropisms as a public speaker, as quoted by a man who specialises in picking up her errors with the same eagerness with which he pursued George Bush's - in order to sell a book!  So there we have it; Mr. Chancellor dislikes? despises? perhaps 'detests' is not too strong a word, my darling Sarah and for the reasons given above believes she is unfit for political office.

Well, I'm sorry to say this but everything Mr. Chancellor has written reeks of old Etonian and Cambridge snobbery, they being his principal places of learning during his youth.  There-after, he has flitted here and there in the small, incestuous world of 'hackerdom' (like Mrs. Palin I have a weakness for neologisms), mostly in London but with occasional forays to New York.  The latter cannot have helped broaden his mind to the myriad and mystifying ways of 'the cousins' since most of his time was spent writing the society page in the New Yorker magazine where, presumably, he spent most of his time wining and dining with the East Coast smart set.  This, I guess, is about as far removed from the politics, red in tooth and claw - and I don't mean the grizzlies - in Alaska.  Nor, from his pristine heights in the British upper-middle - and moneyed - classes does he seem to appreciate that 'over there' making money is still considered a virtue.

Nor, it seems to me, does he appreciate the irony that today we have a president who, whilst his antecedents might be a touch dodgy, old boy, has been to a frightfully good university and does at least walk, talk and dress in a manner that makes him acceptable in decent society - almost one of us, really, although one wouldn't want him to marry one's sister - but who has turned out to be so stupid that he makes Jimmy Carter look really rather bright! 

It's no more, no less, than all that 'intellectual vs. non-intellectual' stuff again.  If you haven't been to a university - and not just any old university but one of the top notch ones then, really, you're simply not up to the job.  If you add to that disadvantage by displaying a positive desire for some money, well, sorry, dear boy, or dear girl, but you are quite beyond the pale.  Any attempt to remind the likes of Alexander Chancellor that Winston Churchill was an abject failure as a schoolboy scholar and never went to any university at all, unless you count Sandhurst into which he only just scraped, and who displayed throughout his life a keen interest in aquiring money, would no doubt be shrugged off.  Similar indifference would be shown to the long list of university-educated intellectuals who were abject failures as politicians, the more so, of course, because their very intellectuality abetted them in their profound arrogance and belief that they knew better than anyone else (see Brown, G., passim).

Mrs. Palin may well turn out to be a failure as a politician but as I have said here before, you will never know the true worth of the man or the woman until they are in the job.  In the meantime, I will repay Mr. Chancellor's essay by grading it 'E-' on the grounds that it was an idle, not to say downright lazy, piece of August journalism of the sort that any decent editor would have rejected if written by an intern!

 

They have Cocklecarrots 'over there', too!

First of all, an apology.  Typepad, in their infinite wisdom - not! - have seen fit to change the layout definitions including reducing my choice of font size from this(#5) ...... to this (#4).  Now I know that if the typeface is too small I shall receive a terrific bollocking from 'DM' because he, like me, prefers an easy read.  However, the larger size does seem a tad too large - it's one up from my former font size - so I will try this #4 and it is up to you, dear reader, to tell me which you prefer.

Anyway, back to the subject in hand - American Cocklecarrots.  I am frequently rude about the dimwitted, soppy Lefties who have captured so many of our judicial benches because their pratfalls are the stuff of news 'over here'.  It is more difficult to catch up with their American counterparts but one story has just broken and not only is it stupidity magnified but also highly dangerous.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, basically the western states, have granted the government leave, without need of a search warrant, to bug anyone's car anytime they like in order to track their movements on GPS.  They have allowed this on the grounds that, and try not to throw up:

This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.

What?!

Apparently this bunch of Cocklecarrots, in considering a particular case in which the police bugged a man's car on his driveway, said that because his driveway was open and unfenced he had no privacy rights.  A dissenting judge (appointed by Reagan, of course) pointed out that if he had been rich and lived in a gated development the law would have protected his rights but because he was poor it would not!

Thanks to Don Parker of The American Thinker for pointing the way, full story here:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2013150,00.html#ixzz0xo2AjMEX

I'm away overnight, back tomorrow, hopefully to read your comments on the font size.

 

 

'Known knowns, unknown unknowns' and all that sort of thing!

Donald Boudreaux, proprietor of the invaluable Cafe Hayek, was faced with a tricky question when a correspondent asked him for the best summary of Hayek's philosophy in the great man's own words.  After some considerable thought, I guess, his answer was some extracts from chapter 1 of the first volume of the magnificent and magisterial Law, Legislation & Liberty.  In it, Hayek points to the common fallacy(*) held by many unthinking people, and by all constructivists, that the immense organisation of societies and markets has arisen because of the power of, so to speak, uber-men who have been able to see clearly the range of influences which have brought their societies to this pitch and thus are able to redirect their societies accordingly and lift them to new levels of excellence.

Of course, it doesn't bear a moment's thought. 

No one man, or even a group of men, or even a group of men armed with the latest computers, can ever totally encompass all the factors at work in a modern society.  To give but one obvious and deadly (to constructivists' fond dreams, that is) riposte, no one can be aware of technological inventions just around the corner.  Thus, the socialists of the 1930s could not possibly have imagined, say, computers and fibre optics and the galvanising effect these have had on society.  But still, the arrogant belief persists like the religion it is.  So here, with thanks to Donald Boudreaux, I reproduce the excerpts that he chose which point up the fallacy(*), and the fallibility, of constructivists everywhere:

This ‘rationalist’ approach, however, meant in effect a relapse into earlier, anthropomorphic models of thinking.  It produced a renewed propensity to ascribe the origin of all institutions of culture to invention or design.  Morals, religion and law, language and writing, money and the market, were thought of as having been deliberately constructed by somebody, or at least as owing whatever perfection they possessed to such design.  This intentionalist or pragmatic account of history found its fullest expression in the conception of the formation of society by a social contract, first in Hobbes and then in Rousseau, who in many respects was a direct follower of Descartes [p. 10]. 

…

The fact of our irremediable ignorance of most of the particular facts which determine the processes of society is, however, the reason why most social institutions have taken the form they actually have….  [M]ost of the rules of conduct which govern our actions, and most of the institutions which arise out of this regularity, are adaptations to the impossibility of anyone taking conscious account of all the particular facts which enter into the order of society.  We shall see [in Vol. 2], in particular, that the possibility of justice rests on this necessary limitation of our factual knowledge, and that insight into the nature of justice is therefore denied to all those constructivists who habitually argue on the assumption of omniscience [p. 13]. 

…

Yet it is the utilization of much more knowledge than anyone can possess, and therefore the fact that each moves within a coherent structure most of whose determinants are unknown to him, that constitutes the distinctive feature of all advanced civilizations. 

In civilized society it is indeed not so much the greater knowledge that the individual can acquire, as the greater benefit he receives from the knowledge possessed by others, which is the cause of his ability to pursue and infinitely wider range of ends than merely the satisfaction of his most pressing physical needs [p. 14]. 

…

We shall find too that such current notions as that society ‘acts’ or that it ‘treats’, ‘rewards’, or ‘remunerates’ persons, or that it ‘values’ or ‘owns’ or ‘controls’ objects or services, or is ‘responsible for’ or ‘guilty of’ something, or that it has a ‘will’ or ‘purpose’, can be ‘just’ or ‘unjust’, or that the economy ‘distributes’ or ‘allocates’ resources, all suggest a false intentionalist or constructivist interpretation of words which might have been used without such connotation, but which almost invariably lead the user to illegitimate conclusions.  We shall see that such confusions are at the root of the basic conceptions of highly influential schools of thought which have wholly succumbed to the belief that all rules or laws must have been invented or explicitly agreed upon by somebody.  Only when it is wrongly assumed that all rules of just conduct have deliberately been made by somebody do such sophisms become plausible as that all power of making laws must be arbitrary, or that there must always exist an ultimate ‘sovereign’ source of power from which all law derives [p. 28].

…

Reason is merely a discipline, an insight into the limitations of the possibilities of successful action, which often will tell us only what not to do.  This discipline is necessary precisely because our intellect is not capable of grasping reality in all its complexity [p. 32].

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Law-Legislation-Liberty-Statement-Principles/dp/0415098688/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1282826964&sr=1-1

 (*) Corrected and another 100x lines to write - see comments!

 

I want Joyce Bert to have my babies!

You lot probably think I spend all day here in my pyjamas tapping out rubbish highly intelligent analyses of world affairs but you would be wrong.  I have certain household duties to attend to and God help me if I fail to do them!  One of them is changing the beds as and when required, and that of course, entails changing the duvet covers.  Thus, at regular intervals I enter a duvet wrestling competition in which the best of three falls wins the day and, shamefully, I must confess that usually the duvet wins.

However, all that is nearly at an end because riding over the horizon to my rescue comes the splendid Ms. Joyce Bert:

This lady, who came originally from Kenya, has a young son and thus is well aquainted with the difficulties of changing duvet-covers, but unlike me, a mere male from England, she is actually intelligent and after applying her intelligence she came up with - the 3-button-sided duvet cover!   In my book that puts her up there with Einstein and Bohr.  If only all Kenyan expatriates had her brains!

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1306006/Joyce-Bert-set-make-fortune-sided-duvet-cover.html#ixzz0xhTF5SZD

Did you feel that tremor?

It wasn't excitement, it was fear!  Here we all are, sitting on the beach, wondering why the sea gradually disappeared over the horizon?  Now we begin to feel a few tremors through our feet.  Enough metaphorics!

Markets dropped yesterday and again today, whilst the bond dealers are looking nervous following Ireland's downgrading by the credit ratings companies and that trusty bellwether, the Swiss franc, reached record heights. There are plenty of problems to share around but most of them reside in the USA where there are signs, at long last, of a split between Obama's politbureau and some of the State directors on the board of the Federal Reserve.  Bernanke, the Chairman, remains a mystery, or at least, a cipher, but even he must realise that Obama's profligate printing and spending is going nowhere, although it is achieving many of the hopes of the Marxists in his administration who are using it to gain domination over vast tracts of the US economy.

There will be tears before bedtime, but I am hoping - and even praying a little - that the brown stuff hits the fan during September and October, just in time to concentrate the minds of the American electorate so that they may savage the Congressional big-spenders in the bloody way they deserve.

In the meantime, the Republicans need to concentrate on what they intend to do, either from November this year, or November 2012.  I would strongly urge them not to begin with too much fresh legislation but instead to start by repealing almost all of the bills which, over the last 20 years have increased the power of the Federal government.  There absolutely must be another Reaganite drive to minimise government.

 

It's a Klee day today

I can only find one word to describe the overal effect that Paul Klee's paintings have on me - they delight me.  Of course, some of the later works created when the threat from Nazi Germany was rising, and when Klee, himself, realised that his own death was approaching, are more menacing or sombre, but on the whole, 'delight' is the best word to encapsulate my immediate response on seeing almost any of his works.

They tend to hover, and tease, in the no-man's-land between reality and abstraction.  Many of them arose as a result of Klee experimenting with differing balances of colour, form and weight.  This picture, entitled Ancient Sound, is a typical example.  The darker tones surround the lighter, brighter colours which almost seem to be bubbling upwards and outwards from the surface, rather like a

primitive life-form evolving from the primordial mud.  Or, as someone once described it, rather like looking into the semi-closed dark leaves surrounding the bright petals of a gorgeous flower about to unfold.  These naturalistic explanations of the painting arise, of course, because Klee deliberately makes the 'squares' ungeometrical, almost freehand.  But you don't have to think about all of that, instead, just look at it, as I once did, some 55-odd years ago - and simply be delighted!

I tracked back an unknown visitor to my blog which led me to a huge and marvellous collection of j-peg illustrations of Klee's works.  I will share these with you from time to time - when I feel you need cheering up!  Here's another:

Red Balloon, 1922.

Again, gorgeous colouring, and you can almost feel him struggling to get the balance of shapes, colours and line into balance.  Notice the little touches of blue here and there - they are not where they are by accident but by design, to contrast and give relief from the red, and also to balance the composition.  Don't worry about meaning, just think of it as an experiment in red.

Where I lead(*), Fox News follows!

No sooner had I written a post down below indicating the possibility that Obama might not even run in 2012 than I watched Neil Cavuto on Fox News last night and he proposed much the same thing, albeit, for a different reason.  His line was that Obama could feel satisfied that he had successfully rammed down the throats of an unwilling American electorate the biggest dollop of unwanted socialism that any previous socialist president had ever attempted, indeed, even larger than any of his predecessors would have dared to hope for.  The Federal government now owns enormous swathes of the American economy which means that millions of Americans are now government employees.  He has also succeeded in forcing Americans to surrender to a national socialist health service.  Finally, by clever use of Federal diktat, agreed to by a supine Congress, he is now able to pass huge changes of policy simply by manipulating the regulations and ignoring 'the folks on the Hill'.  Cavuto's point was that Obama could walk away in 2012 with his head held high and confident that he will go down in history as a hero of the socialist Left.

(*) To be fair, I was only following Toby Harnden from The Telegraph.

Patriotism - a coat of many colours?

I have already confessed to being a regular listener to the early morning show on 'TOOORKSPOOORT' - I spell it thus as the best indication of how the announcer, in a deep, coarse voice, pronounces the name!  I do so mainly because it saves money buying new radios which I tend to hurl round the room if they are tuned to the BBC morning programme in which a never-ending series of lying liars from Westminster are either shouted down if they are Right-wing or licked and cuddled if they are Left-wing.

Now, whilst it is true that the vast majority of the TalkSport output is mindless drivel - so restful when you wake up with a hangover! - occasionally they touch on a subject that makes me think.  For example, today they were bemoaning the fact that some Spanish footballer who had lived in Britain with his family for over 5 years and had successfully applied for UK citizenship (subjecthood, strictly speaking) had let it be known that he would be happy and proud to play 'footie' for England.  This gave rise to many 'phone calls of complaint in which, mainly, he was told to 'eff off'!  But I wonder  . . .

Sometimes immigrants are more patriotic than the residents.  I mean, they actually chose to come here, and they have the advantage of not having lived here long enough to see the downside, let alone the underside.  To give but one example, there are now a huge number of Gurkhas in the Hampshire area who have finished their military service and chosen to stay here.  I would hesitate to question their patriotism, and indeed, in a fight I could not wish for better companions.

Speaking personally, I could, when I was younger, have been happy to move to America and would have served in the American army with as much enthusiasm as I did in the British, er, not that I was exactly an enthusiastic soldier but you know what I mean.  Increasingly, I look upon the USA as my 'other country' which is probably why I spend so much time reading and writing about it.  Oh dear, does that qualify me for the Tower, I wonder?

Not so much 'will he, won't he?' as 'does he, doesn't he?'

Thanks to Drudge who pointed me to a fascinating piece of speculation by Tony Harnden, the American correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, in which he wonders out loud (such lese majeste!) whether Obama actually wants a second term as president.  Apparently, the unfortunately named David Plouffe, His campaign manager in 2008, said then that Obama was "not concerned with his re-election".  When one thinks about it, virtually all of Obama's actions since becoming president appear to confirm it.  As Harnden points out, the President's intervention in the 'Ground Zero mosque' controversy was pointless as well as ineffective - in fact worse than ineffective, it was positively damaging to the point where even Democrat pols up for re-election shun his presence.

Harnden supposes that Obama simply doesn't care because His gaze is fixed on higher things - more of which later.  I, on the other hand, reckon it's because He's as thick as a sack of spanners!  And I mean 'thick' in the truly stupendously stupid, thick, arrogant way of Left-wing intellectuals the world over.  Think: - any French intellectual you care to name, throw in either, or both, of the Miliband brothers, add, with relish, George Monbiot and stir vigorously with Gordon Brown, and you will get the flavour of what I am hinting at.  To provide you with a little taste of this glutinously thick stew, here is what this particular well-heeled, East coast, 'liberal intellectual' told the voters of Milwaukee the other day: "Don't give in to fear [and I bet at this point his head swung from left to right to catch his auto-cue], let's reach for hope".  God, how that man despises American voters!  Let us hope they take their revenge although He will only take any rebuff as further proof of their lack of taste and discernment.

Harnden thinks that Obama, having decided that the American century is over before it began, has His eyes on becoming how He described Himself in Berlin, that is, "a citizen of the world".  If I was the nonentity in charge of running that mafia cabal in 'Noo Yawk', surely the biggest gangster 'family' in the world, I would fear for my future after 2012.

Gulf Contaminated with Bullshit - SHLOCK-HORROR!

Yesterday, President Obama, belied his 'nice guy' image and berated American farmers for polluting the Gulf of Mexico.  Apparently, scientists report that the mighty Mississippi(*) pours into the Gulf 198 million gallons of water every minute and this is replete with all the nitrogen-heavy polluted run-offs from farms in the mid-west who border the river and which creates an enormous 'dead area' in the delta. This inflow of chemicalised water compares to BP's paltry 172 million gallons of oil over three months.  Then he tore into American fishermen for ransacking fish stocks by over-fishing and trawlers raking the sea bed in their greedy pursuit of profit.  His most bitter attacks were reserved for the citizens of Louisiana who, in a century of irresponsible behaviour, have stripped the wetlands of native trees and reclaimed the natural habitat in order to create farmland at an annual rate of between 25 to 35 square miles per year.  He has urged Congressional committees to haul in the farmers, fishermen and mayors of coastal Louisiana townships for a ritual humiliation in front of the cameras whilst he instructs his adminstration to undertake punitive legal action against these violaters of America's land and sea.  NOT!

Here's a rarity, a word of praise from D&N to the American press, or at least, one member of it, the Associated Press, who have canvassed a wide  range of opinions and facts from a variety of scientific sources with expertise in the Gulf's ecology.  I am grateful to those very naughty boys at 'IHTM' for pointing me in the right direction and they will be allowed to stay up late tonight!

(*) Thanks to my e-pal, 'JK', for pointing out my spelling mistake, now corrected, and I was so chuffed a few weeks back when I managed to spell Massachussetts Masachusets Masachusetts Massachusetts correctly - pheeew!  Anyway, I'll get on with the 100x lines now, shall I?

Emergency! 999, or is it 666, or 911 which 'the cousins' use - I dunno!

Sorry, sorry, everyone but 'SoD' has put his back well and truly out and, alas, his little 'bouncing Czech' is visiting her family so we are going up to play at 'mummies and daddies' again - such fun!

Should be back on Monday, and because 'SoD' indulges in a full range of Sunday pap papers, I should return fully armed with buckets of bile to pour all over you.  Bet you can't wait, can you?

ADDITIONAL:  Happy to report that all is well.  Not unreasonably, 'SoD' panicked on finding that he could only crawl to the telephone.  However, by the time we arrived his back had eased up and he was moving more freely and by today he was moving fairly well and insisted on collecting his little 'bouncing Czech' from the airport himself, so we came home.

It's the way they tell 'em!

I have, willy-nilly, become something of an expert on radio commercials.  This has come about because of my shameful addiction to 'TOOOORKSPOOOORT'.  I write 'shameful' because, of course, 99.8% of their output is dedicated to 'footie' and it is a well known fact that only the brain-dead, or at least, the brain-less, are interested in 'footie', a game financed by morons, played by morons and followed by morons.  Of course, that doesn't apply to me because I only take an interest from a detached, not to say, lofty, position of intellectual neutrality occasioned by my scientific and social curiosity - and also, as it happens, the fact that all Liverpool fans are rubbish like their club, that Arsenal are a bunch of effete 'Frenchie-poohs' and Chelsea are simply the overseas branch of the KGB.  The only noble and decent fans are to be found at Molineux supporting the greatest team England ever produced - Come on The Wolves!  Ooops, sorry about that, let me just wipe the spittle off the screen - now, where was I?  Ah yes . . .

It is just too tiresome to keep switching off the ads whilst listening to the radio and anyway I usually have it on whilst I am doing something else.  Thus I have become a bit of a critic.  Being a former member of that splendid band of brothers, the second-hand car trade, I do listen to the car ads and think to myself what a complete waste of time and money they are.  Some actor comes on and rattles off the advantages of this car or another but is then forced, at the end of the ad, to have his voice speeded up in order to list all the caveats and exclusion clauses lest the manufacturer is hit by legal proceedings.  Consequently, I doubt that many people take any of it in.

Honda, however, are the exception.  They have hired Garrison Keillor, the author of the Lake Wobegon books, but even better, the superlative reader of those books. His morning recitals from his stories delivered in that slow, rich, baritone voice of his were a radio delight.  The Honda ad agency have written an excellent script for him  which allows him to slow down the delivery and savour every phrase.  It is the exact opposite of a fast, hard sell and the result is that you listen.

I have also been amused to hear ads for TV sports channels using ordinary language but arranged in rhyming couplets.  Again, some clever chap in the copy writing department of the ad agency recognised what Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew 400 years ago, that there is an instinctive attraction to rhythmic verse that makes you pause and listen.  And whilst I am on the subject of advertising, their industry's equivalent of the 'Oscar' must go to the chaps who created the 'Spec-Savers' ad.  To succeed in getting your punchline into mainstream English is what every ad man, and his customer, must dream of.  I put it up there with "We try harder" and the old Hamlet cigar ads.

Anyway, as I was saying, I'm no 'footie' fanatic, far from it, but 'Arry and 'is boys were dead lucky last night because when they play the return  . . . (Led off by his nurse before he starts playing his vuvuzela!)

I remember watching but can't remember why!

It's 'True Confessions' time, I'm afraid.  Well, be fair, we all have our little guilty secrets and when you reach my age there are just more of them.  Anyway, the fact is that sometime back in the '80s I became hooked on watching enormously fat men in nappies - wrestling - but I can't remember clearly what the attraction was.  Shameful, really, I mean, it makes watching ladies wrestling in mud sound normal.  Sorry, what was that?  Oh, right, I'll get to the point then, shall I?

Years ago I became hooked on sumo wrestling.  I never quite understood the finer points, or even the rules, come to that, but I did enjoy the ritual and the obvious fact that it was a very ancient sport.  At that time the first foreigners, in the form of some huge Hawaiians, were gaining success at the highest level and I shared the unspoken Japanese disapproval because it seemed to me that sumo wrestling is quintessentially Japanese and should have stayed that way.  Anyway, in particular, I remember a wrestler called 'The Wolf' who was not huge by sumo standards, he was just a very big man with an impassive face but deadly cold eyes and he was a terrific wrestler.

Anyway, in the usual way of these things I lost touch with it and so I was sorry to read in today's WSJ (Euro Ed.) that the sport has lost its way and become mired in gambling and criminal activities.  It has fallen in popularity and declined to being a fringe activity, now taken up by scrawny little students at Tokyo University - led by a Czech!  Well, even so, I salute them.  I have a weakness for lost causes and so I wish them well in their efforts to keep a grand tradition alive.

 

 

'Edukashun, edukashun, edukashun'

I hope, very sincerely, that those words are engraved on Tony Blair's headstone after we have hung him, quartered him, driven a stake through his heart and then buried him!  Regular readers will know that my default mode is grumpy but when it comes to the monstrosity that is our current education system I am moved to deep anger.  I mentioned in a previous post that an article in 'Rupe's Rag' by the distinguished classical actress, Imogen Stubbs, had depressed me.  In it, she describes her daughter's efforts to obtain an A* grading at 'AS'-level in Theatre Studies.  Apparently the girl had a Shakespeare and a Chekhov text to study and be examined on.  Naturally, with a mother such as Ms. Stubbs and a father called Trevor Nunn(!), they both offered their daughter insights and suggestions and you would expect her to sail through.  Not these days!  She received a very poor grade.  Her university place depended on a good grade and so her parents asked to have her paper re-marked and were then allowed to see the results.  All of the ideas she put in and which were imparted to her by her parents received no marks at all - because, as they learned later, she had "deviated from the objectives"!

Objectives?!  Apparently, as the horrified parents discovered, there are set 'objectives' to be taught in the study of these great theatrical texts, or to put it another way, there is a 'party line' which must at all costs be adhered to lest 're-education' be threatened!  As an experiment, her husband, Trevor Nunn, and a friend who is one of the founders of The Reduced Shakespeare Company, took on one of the questions from a recent 'A'-level paper and attempted to answer it under exam conditions and the results were 'marked' by a senior examiner who did not know their true identities.  The question was on Hamlet and both men were given poor-ish marks - Trever Nunn was given a mid-'B' grade.  This man, the premier classical director in British theatre for the last 30 years, has directed Hamlet three times!

According to Ms. Stubbs the examining authorities have certain agreed concepts which are applied to English literature and drama studies and those are the only acceptable answers which students should present at an exam.  In other words, the 'art' of studying a text in depth and drawing your own conclusions which can be supported by your knowledge of that text, your ideas on the sub-text, what you may have learned of the background to the writer's life and times, or indeed, anything which is not specified in the 'party line' is strictly verboten! 

Consequently, as Ms. Stubbs has discovered, students do not even bother to study the entire text, they simply learn the bits which will support the answers that their 'teachers' (useless, spineless shits!) have told them that the examiners (even more useless and shitty) are looking for.  Of course,the reason for all this is to ensure that anyone with brains and originality and imagination is kept out so that the plodders may plod on, learning nothing but getting the 'A' grades by ticking the right boxes and thus preparing themselves for lucrative careers in government employment.

The utterly crass, stupid, ignorant and arrogant pieces of intellectual detritus who teach and mark such non-exams should be taken out, buried up to their necks in the same shit which constitutes their brains and then stoned to death by heavy volumes of the complete works of William Shakespeare! 

And yes, I do feel better after that, thank you for asking! 

 

It's the waiting that gets me

As you may have deduced from my previous post I actually forked out £2 for 'Rupe's Rag', The Sunday Times, today.  To call it a rag is rather unfair because it turned out to be quite a good read but the fact is that I am rather cross with 'Rupe' who has not only stopped me from reading his rag free of charge on the net but has also hidden one of my favourite bloggers, Oliver Kamm, behind his wretched pay-wall, too.  Anyway, finding myself far from home and next to a newsagent this morning I treated myself to a copy.

I was impressed by an article from Michael Portillo, and depressed by one from Imogen Stubbs, of which more later.  Sticking with Portillo who, unlike so many astute but outside commentators, has actually been on the inside of government where the blood is spilt, I was interested to see his suggestion that 'Cameron's savage cuts', as they will undoubtedly be labelled by the Left, will likely fall far short of expectations - not that that will save them from a chorus of wailing and gnashing of (false) teeth!

Portillo describes the scene in the 'Star Chamber', of which he has prior experience, when the chairman, Danny Alexander, and a phalanx of senior ministers call in departmental heads one at a time and go through their meagre and pathetic 'cuts' and insist that more is needed.  However, Portillo warns that whether or not ministers buckle will depend on their sense of whether the Prime Minister will or will not flinch at the bad headlines which will almost certainly flow, along with the blood, when they are announced.  One not very promising augury lies in Cameron's hasty retreat from the very sensible idea that it is not the business of HMG to buy milk for nippers.  Terrified of being labelled 'Maggie Mk. II', he instantly turned, er, milky, himself, and ran away.  That will have been noted by departmental ministers!

Portillo reckons that the hopes engendered by the 'bliss in that dawn' when the coalition was formed and expectations were for fiscal cuts to be four-fifths of what was required to deal with the deficit and only one-fifth of tax hikes, are almost certainly doomed to failure.  Even 'that woman' only managed 50-50!  The real test will lie in the welfare budgets.  According to Portillo there is no chance that the coalition will actually cut benefit rates and the various bullying tactics (much needed in my view) to force claiments back to work (assuming there is any work to go back to!) is never going to save a quarter of the £150 billion budget of the Department for Work and Pensions which is needed.

So, expect an equal amount of smoke and mirrors from the government as they duck and dive to match that of the opposition led by 'Mr. Bean' as they forecast the end of the world as we know it.  As always, we shall have to depend on the 'red-braces brigade' in the City to tell us a sort of truth as to exactly how effective 'Cammy & Cleggy' really are.  In the meantime, we can only sit nervously on the beach and watch as the sea mysteriously recedes over the horizon and wonder what it presages.

 

Heavens to Betsy, who'da thunk it?

Well, I 'thunked' it some time ago and have never stopped repeating it, here, at D&N; so here goes again for the umpteenth time: the Crown non-Prosecution dis-Service is not fit for purpose because it takes too many guilty pleas to lesser crimes in order to gain easy verdicts and thus tick boxes and win kudos in Whitehall.  I am delighted to say that the Chief Inspector of the CPS agrees with me, according to a report in The Sunday Times which, of course, lurks behind a pay-wall these days with its 7 readers one of whom is probably 'Rupe', himself!  Nationally, anywhere from 10% to 20% of offences are wrongfully pursued on lesser charges, and if you are unlucky enough to live in Nottinghamshire 19%, in Brent 15% and in South Wales 17%, are the specific numbers.  I remember complaining about the ridiculous charges brought against a baker in South Wales who bumped off some child with his rotten, unhygenic bread and got away with pleading guilty to illegal parking, or some such equally piffling misdemeanor.

But stay!  Here is a man who denies it all.  Step forward, Mr. Keith Starmer, who told the world last year that he was unaware of any evidence of under-charging.  Who is Mr. Starmer, you ask with but a single voice?  Why, the Director of Public Prosecutions, no less, and I repeat, he claimed to be unaware of what was going on in his own department which his outside inspector instantly spotted.  What does this tell us about Mr. Starmer - apart from the obvious fact that he should have gone to Spec-Savers?  Well, a neutral, judicious, fair-minded man might come to the conclusion that Mr. Starmer is not fit for purpose, that he is, on the whole, by and large and taken in the round, a complete prat who cannot see beyond the no doubt enormous desk behind which he hides in Whitehall whilst he counts the ticks in the boxes sent to him by his equally useless minions.

To be fair, and regular readers will know of the very high standards of fairness we strive for, here at D&N, the report did find a very high level of performance by specialist CPS units dealing with organised crime and terrorism.  Not that it helps you when your house is burgled, your treasured possesions stolen and the thieves defecate all over your furniture and when caught are charged with a misdemeanour in return for pleading guilty to several hundred burglaries, and then come up in front of the likes of Judge Christopher 'Cocklecarrot' Ball who will tell them they are very, very naughty boys but he will not send them to prison if they promise, scouts' honour, not to do it again.

Some-one pass the sick bag . . .

 

It's pants!

No, those are not mine and please remember I do the jokes round here!  Anyway, they're not real pants, it's a sculpture by some comedian artist called Colin Wilborne and it's called, er, Rusty Steel Pants - oh, come on, what's the matter with you people, where's your sense of humour?

Anyway, according to Paul Waugh, Mr. Wilborne is not as daft as that particular example of his work might lead you to believe because he was paid £75k by the Homes and Communities Agency (Who? What? Why?) when it was under the command of the Labour party.  However, that was not for pants, rusty steel or otherwise, but for a miners' memorial which I show below in an unfinished state.

I do not begrudge the miners' a memorial, and this one looks as though it will be a rather fine piece of work,but I do object to paying for it.  The Armed Forces Memorial statuary was paid for by public subscription and so too should this one commemorating miners.  After all, they're always banging on about the unity of the working classes and how the miners were their praetorian guard, so let the miners dig a bit deeper and pay for their own memorial.

 

Would I really fight for my country? Hmmmn . . .

Let's not jump to a hasty decision.  I am provoked to these jaundiced doubts by an essay in The Spectator by Douglas Murray.  (Too early for a link but the whole thing is re-printed in The Mail; also, I give you the Wiki link for Murray, himself, but I have the impression that some of the views are slightly spun.)

Murray re-tells an old news story concerning a meeting of Medway Council during which a certain Cllr. Bamber told a joke during a recess.  As Murray reports it:

'A man walked into a Dublin bar and saw a friend sitting with an empty glass.

"Paddy, can I get you another?" he asked. Paddy replied, "Now, what would I be wanting with another empty glass?" '

So far, so unfunny - but, it was to get even unfunnier!  Some humourless Paddy prat called Brian Kelly (you will not be surprised to learn that he was the local UNISON shop steward, a dead ringer for 'Fred Kyte', if you ask me) took umbrage on the grounds that he was a Paddy Irish and that the joke was offensive:

A complaint was launched. A lengthy legal process ensued, at the end of which Mr Kelly was awarded many thousands of pounds in compensation, paid to him by the Council and Cllr Bamber. You and I, of course, paid for the cost of proceedings. 

Apparently Mr. Murray reported this ludicrous story and invited his readers to send in any Irish jokes they could spare, at which point the peat hit the fan, as they say in Ireland:

The phone began to ring with predominantly Irish journalists wanting comment. Editorials were written on the case of the Scottish sounding man who had incited jokes against the Irish. As the case dragged on, I started to wonder whether I could leave the house without committing a hate crime.

Apparently, I didn't have to. The Irish embassy issued a statement and the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs proclaimed that it was precisely because of articles like mine that hate-speech laws existed.

And, of course, utterly inevitably, some self-appointed harpy who claimed to be an Irish 'community leader' reported me to the Press Complaints Commission and police.

Mr. Murray sums both episodes better than I can:

A society in which authority decides what you can hear and say will not only be a society lacking in humour, it will be one lacking in humanity.

Well, just in case Po-faced Kelly is reading, here's a little something to cheer him up:

Paddy was in the delivery room when the midwife handed him a black baby "Is this yours?" she asked.

"Probably." said Paddy "She burns everything else!"

Well, all of that depressed me when I read it in 'The Speccie' but then the Memsahib arrived back from the shops with The Mail and, alas, in his usual jocular fashion Richard Littlejohn almost convinced me to emigrate to - horror of horrors - Australia!  He tells this story of 'every day English folk':

Every day for the past nine years [my emphasis], bird-lover Russell Burt has been taking his pet owls out for a walk. He's a popular attraction in the picturesque Devon town of Plympton.

Russell and his collection of owls tour care homes, village fetes and agricultural shows, raising money for the Woodside Animal Welfare Trust.

There's seven birds in total  -  Ben, a Bengal eagle owl; Spot, a spotted eagle owl; Mika, a tawny owl; Scoppy, an African Scops; and three barn owls, called Misty, Chas and Scuff.

Here he is with three of his friends:

In this day and age in this, 'our septic Isle', you can guess what happened next: 

But now Russell, 74, has fallen foul of animal rights fanaticism and, you guessed, elf'n'safety.

Someone described as 'a member of the public' reported him to the police for animal cruelty, complaining that owls are nocturnal creatures and should be sleeping during the day, not parading on the streets of Plympton.

My guess is that this 'member of the public' is a card-carrying, lentil-chomping, foxy-woxy sentimentalist  -  probably a madwoman with a house full of smelly cats and a subscription to PETA.

Instead of telling this interfering busybody to take a running jump, the police approached Russell and informed him they would be passing the complaint on to the council.

Shortly afterwards, he was visited by a dog warden (presumably, they don' t have a dedicated owl warden) and another official who arrived in two separate vans. They said he was banned from taking his owls out on the streets.

If you are not yet ready to join me on a slow boat to Australia, ponder on this little gem unearthed from Littlejohn, again, (what would we do without him?) on the subject of ex-Chief Plod, Ms. Juliet Spence, about whom I wasted several minutes of my life down below.  This lady is not satisfied with 'spending a penny', in the old fashioned sense of the phrase and apparently does not wish to be caught sitting down on the job, as it were,  so she decided to spend nearly £3k to enable all her female plods to pee standing up, tall and true, like their male colleagues:

Mrs Spence attacks the new Government over public-spending cuts, which she claims will lead to an ‘anorexic’ police force. Previously, she has complained about having too few ‘resources’ to provide adequate patrols.

Elsewhere, however, it is reported that Cambridgeshire Police is planning to spend nearly £3,000 on ‘Shewees’. For the uninitiated, which until Monday included me, these are plastic funnels which allow women to use male urinals, like Mrs Thatcher’s puppet in Spitting Image.

Following successful trials, Mrs Spence is said to be ordering 380 Shewees for her female officers. They cost £7.50 apiece and are available in five colours, including bright pink and ‘desert sand’.

It gets better. Shewees were designed by the appropriately-named Samantha Fountain, who was laughed off TV’s Dragons’ Den when she tried to obtain backing for her invention.

I do like the nice personal touch of offering different colours, don't you?  It's soooo important to pee into the right colour, I think.  However, I do wonder how the Plodettes are going to carry them?  I mean, with all that kit they wear hanging off various belts and straps you wouldn't think there was room for a shewee; and also, of course, there is the possibility of a mix-up as a Plodette reaches for her taser to deal with a brutish bank robber but instead pulls out her shewee and says, "You're nicked!"  I suppose there's a chance that he might just fall onto the pavement kicking his heels and howling with helpless laughter!

Anyway, returning to the main question, would I be prepared to risk my life defending my country and the intolerent and intolerable idiots who people it these days?  Hmmmmnn, need time to think that one through  . . .

Honestly, I'm just a slave to my readers!

I don't know why I do this, really I don't!  Day after day I slave away here at the coal type face producing some of the most intelligent and perceptive insights into current affairs - and what do I get?  Complaints!  Yesterday I reported on the mysterious - mysterious in the sense of 'why are they bothering with this tittle-tattle - story concerning Ms. Naomi Campbell, the well-known, er, model.  Do I get any thanks?  Not a bit of it.  Instead, Hank, a regular here at D&N moans that there was no picture.  As a result of that I have had to spend several minutes hours crawling through hundreds of pictures of beautiful women, I mean, hundreds and hundreds!  Still, nothing is too much trouble for my readers, so here she is:

Drop dead gorgeous, I must admit, but even so the silly girl never answered any of my letters!

I have visitors today and overnight so I might be 'off air' for a while.

Is it just me?

That, I must tell you, is a question which arises constantly in my life as I watch other people hopping up and down over this or that issue about which I either know nothing or care even less.  Sky News has gone completely overboard on this 'blood diamonds'/Naomi Campbell affair with its non-stop coverage.  I know it's August and real news is hard to come by but still, there are zillions dying in distress in Pakistan, India and China, to say nothing of the fact that poor old Putin is stumbling about in the Kremlin barking his shins on the furniture because of all the smoke and smog over Moscow.  On top of all that is the real 'Shlock-Horror' news, well, it's got poor old Councillor Piper in a proper tizz, that the Aston Villa manager has walked off the job - if you are one of my foreign readers don't ask me who or what 'Aston Villa' are, just ask Councillor Piper - if you have several hours to spare or you are not sleeping too well.  Where was I?  Oh yes, this 'blood diamonds' fuss about nothing.

Several bloggers, mostly socialist ones, have taken the opportunity to vent their (envious?) detestation of Naomi Campbell and hint darkly at her venality but I can't see it.  A particularly stupid and brutal mass-murderer of the sort for whom socialists used to agitate on their behalf, gave a bag of uncut diamonds to Ms. Campbell no doubt hoping? expecting? something in return which apparently he did not get which is yet another proof of his crass stupidity because even dumb clucks like me know that you only pay a whore - afterwards!  And so far as I know, Ms. Campbell who, whilst she might be the sort of woman about whom my old mother would have hinted, darkly, probably does not wear knickers, is not a whore.  In this case, just the opposite, she is on the side of the angels because she solicited, if you'll excuse the word, the diamonds in order to give them to a charity, which she did.  The former boss of the charity apparently, and so far inexplicably, failed to pass them on, but that has nothing to do with Ms. Campbell.

In fact, her predicament, if such it be, raises an interesting but theoretical moral dilemma.  If you are a beautiful woman who is anxious to raise as much money as possible for a worthwhile charity for homeless, hungry children and a lustful but rich old monster lavishes you with riches in the hopes of sexual favours which is the moral course of action?  To take the money for the charity and 'do the business', or take the money but not follow through, or refuse the money and let the starving children starve a bit more?

If I'm missing something in this story, no doubt someone will tell me!

 

Chief Constable Plodette, goodbye and good riddance!

Chief Constable Judie Spence is, I am delighted to tell you all, about to be the ex-Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire because she has just retired to a rose-tinted future of happiness hand in hand with her eye-wateringly huge pension.  On her way out she saw fit to lecture, not the criminal classes but the middle classes, although in what passes for her brain they are one and the same thing:

“Speeding is middle-class anti-social behaviour,” she says. “People think we should be able to get away with it. They wouldn’t tolerate lawbreaking by somebody else but they do it themselves without thinking.

“It all seems OK until something tragic happens, like their child dies because of a road traffic accident.” [...]

Mrs Spence, 55, [Cor, wish I could have retired with a pension at 55!] says that while anti-social behaviour is usually defined as rowdy youths or vandalism, “for too many it is the antics of drivers who refuse to accept that speed limit signs apply to them.

When the likes of Simon Heffer and Christopher Hitchens tell you that the police, in all their idle stupidity, target the middle classes because they are an easy pinch, perhaps you will believe them because now you have it straight from the cow's horse's mouth!

I couldn't be bothered to do an in depth investigation but a quick Google of crime stats in Cambridge told me this for 2008-2009 per 1,000 head of population, from http://www.upmystreet.com/local/crime-in-cambridge.html:

Cambridge//England Average

Violence against the person:    19.4// 15.0

Sexual offences:  1.2// 0.9

Robbery offences:  2.3// 1.0

Burglary -dwellings:    9.0//4.3

Motor theft: 2.1 2.3

Theft from a moter:  8.5    6.3

Well, goodbye, Ms. Spence, don't think we won't miss you because we won't!

My thanks to the story from The Daily Telegraph

 

Stop moaning about the queue in your post office - or else!

Actually, I rarely moan about the queue in my Post Office because we still have a tiny village one and there is rarely more than one person in it and even if that one person is Mrs. Babbage who insists on regaling the Post Master with the Babbage family history beginning circa 1952 which he has only heard 382 times before and which I have also heard several times before because she tells it in the Butcher's and the Newsagent's which provides me with the time either to wrestle with the temptation to murder Mrs. Babbage and her entire family, or, simply give up the will to live.  Oh, the joys of village life in the West Country.  Where was I ...? Oh yes, queues!

If you do have a problem with queues, fret no more, instead go over to Tim Newman's always fascinating site and first of all read how many proles it takes to sell a light bulb in Russia, and then enjoy(?) the fun and games to be had in Mother Russia, where old habits (and people!) die hard, and where all visitors are required to register with the KGB authorities.

I am guilty sometimes of undue nervousness when it comes to Russia now that it is in the hands of a criminal gang but Tim's first-hand reports on the hopeless inefficiency of the place cheers me up no end.

 

Ever wondered what a real live 'Cocklecarrot' looks like?

Then look no further!  Today, courtesy of Peter Hitchens in The Mail, I will provide you with a mug shot (he's the mug) of one the most dimwitted 'Cocklecarrots' of all time, in fact, so stupid is this man that he really should not be allowed out on his own and I shall not be surprised to learn that he puts his trousers on back to front.  His name is Judge Christopher 'Cocklecarrot' Ball and whilst I know that it is unreliable to judge a man by his face, let's all be honest and admit that this bloke actually looks like the utter prat that he undoubtedly is.

I first read about him, without knowing his name, a few days ago and it was one of those stories that leaves you pounding your head against the wall because although it hurts like hell it's better than contemplating the almost criminal stupidity and negligence of His dis-Honour, Judge 'Cocklecarrot' Ball.  He was faced in court the other day with Bradley Wernham, 19, a career burglar of almost Stakhanovite energy who pleaded guilty, not to ten, not to a dozen, or a score, or even a hundred burglaries - but to 600 of them!  Here is his photo and I must say the little runt looks about ten times brighter than 'Cocklecarrot' Ball - because he is!

Anyway, faced with this one-man crime wave what did our Guardian of Law and Order do?  I will let Hitchens spell it out in his own inimitable style:

What happened to him would be ludicrous in any other country. But in this mad nation – under rules which the current Government has no plans to change – a deluded judge gave this creature a ‘last chance’ after hundreds of robberies.

Three months ago, in defiance of all common sense, Judge Christopher Ball arranged for Wernham and his girlfriend to live rent-free at your expense, in a town where he was until then unknown, while he supposedly did ‘community service’. (My emphasis)

That's nice, you are most certainly not thinking, I expect he was ever so grateful and probably did some good works for the local church to show his gratitude to Judge Ball.  Well, you, and I, and the rest of the world, always excepting the dork in the wig above, will not be surprised by the actual outcome which was obvious and predictable:

To the surprise of nobody except that judge, Wernham learned the only lesson possible from this treatment – that the police and the courts are pathetic and feeble and can safely be laughed at. So he carried on committing his crimes.  (My emphasis)

But hey, old 'Cocklecarrot' Ball is not a judge to be trifled with, oh dearie me, no:

Mr Injustice Ball has now sentenced Wernham to what is officially called ‘five years’ in prison, but which will, in fact, add up to 18 months. These daily lies from the lips of judges should be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act.

And of course:

No wonder the thief smirked as he was told his fate. During his imprisonment, Wernham can relax, play pool and watch TV among people just like himself. If he wants to, he will also be able to take illegal drugs, which our prison regime tacitly permit in the hope of keeping the convicts quiet.

Still, now we have the stern-faced, hard-hearted Tories in government, the people who stand up for property rights and law and order.  Now, remind me, who is the Minister for Justice? - oh, yes, I've just remembered - 'Fatty' Clark, the man who wants to open the prisons and set as many inmates free as he can.

Can anyone spare me a ticket on a slow boat to China?

 

Hurrah for Ron Rosenbaum!

Who? 

What?  You mean you have never heard of Ron Rosenbaum! 

Oh, alright then, I 'fess up, neither had I until today but now he is my new best friend, although the news may not have reached him yet.  Courtesy of the ever-excellent Arts & Letters Daily I was pointed to an essay in Slate written by Mr. Rosenbaum.  I suspect he might be Professor, or even Doctor, Rosenbaum because he is obviously fearfully knowledgeable and mixes in high academic circles.  However, his greatest intellectual virtue is that he agrees with me!

I cannot compute the number of times on this blog and others when I have come to verbal fisticuffs with militant athiests.  Oddly enough, I cannot remember a single occasion in which I had a fight with a theist, but the atheists, or the New Atheists, as exemplified by the apoplectic Richard Dawkins, come across as born-again fundamentalists which is why I normally refer to him as 'Bishop' Dawkins.  The reason for the mutual antagonism is that I remain a convinced agnostic.  On every occasion I point out to them that the proposition that God exists, and its negative, cannot be proven.  They are propositions outside the scope of science.

Rosenbaum, being more intelligent than me, puts it better:

Faced with the fundamental question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually.

That their beliefs are faith-based is something I have hurled at atheists many a time and oft'.  It drives them potty.  But the fact, uncomfortable to them, is that the very fundamental and basic question of how something can come of nothing remains unsolved and unsolveable.  Rosenbaum contemptuously dismisses the wilder thrashings of the scientific community to answer the unanswerable:

Recently scientists have tried to answer it with theories of "multiverses" and "vacuums filled with quantum potentialities," none of which strikes me as persuasive. (For a review of the centrality, and insolubility so far, of the something-from-nothing question, I recommend this podcast interview with Jim Holt, who is writing a book on the subject.)

He continues:

Atheists have no evidence—and certainly no proof!—that science will ever solve the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Just because other difficult-seeming problems have been solved does not mean all difficult problems will always be solved. And so atheists really exist on the same superstitious plane as Thomas Aquinas, who tried to prove by logic the possibility of creation "ex nihilo" (from nothing). His eventual explanation entailed a Supreme Being standing outside of time and space somehow endowing it with existence (and interfering once in a while) without explaining what caused this source of "uncaused causation" to be created in the first place.

However, what I like about his essay is his militancy which advocates, in effect, Agnostic Pride!  Well, if the gays can have pride why not us agnostics?  We might take the title of his article for our placards:

   AN AGNOSTIC MANIFESTO

At least we know what we don't know!

Paraphrasing Shakespeare, I am tempted to shout

Now, Gods, stand up for agnostics!

but the delicious irony might excite my delicate temperament too much.  Rosenbaum sums up the new agnostic pride, thus:

[T]here are really two claims agnosticism is concerned with: Whether God exists or not is one. Whether we can know the answer is another. Agnosticism is not for the simple-minded and is not as congenial as atheism and theism are.  The courage to admit we don't know and may never know what we don't know is more difficult than saying, sure, we know. (My emphasis)

Rosenbaum's essay is worth reading in full.

 

No permanent allies or enemies, only permanent interests!

The truth of that Palmerstonian paraphrase is illustrated in a fascinating essay by Elliot Abrams in the WSJ.  (Incidentally, the WSJ is a seriously good serious newspaper.)  He points out the gradual and mostly surreptitious rapprochment that is growing between the Israelis and the Arabs, or to be precise, the Sunni Arabs who are becoming increasingly fearful of Persian Shia power.  This is taking place during a time in which the usual middle east muddle is becoming even more intractable:

The Shia in Iran seem to be building a bomb, Iran's ally Syria is taking over Lebanon (again), Yemen is collapsing (again), Egypt's President Mubarak is said to be dying and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is back on the front pages.

What's more, no one is sure who's in charge these days. The American hegemony, in place at least since the British left Aden in 1967 and secured through repeated, massive military operations of its own and victories by its ally Israel, seems to be fraying. Who will stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program, the Arabs wonder; they place no faith in endless negotiations between earnest Western diplomats and the clever Persians.

Hitherto, any talk of co-operation between Arabs and Jews was kept private but now some Arabs are going public:

The Arab view that someone should bomb Iran and stop it from developing nuclear weapons is familiar to anyone who meets privately with Arab leaders, especially in the Gulf. Now, the curtain is being pulled back: Just last month, the United Arab Emirates' ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba, spoke publicly of a "cost-benefit analysis" and concluded that despite the upset to trade that would result and the inevitable "people protesting and rioting and very unhappy that there is an outside force attacking a Muslim country," the balance was clear. The ambassador told an Aspen audience, "If you are asking me, 'Am I willing to live with that versus living with a nuclear Iran?' my answer is still the same: 'We cannot live with a nuclear Iran.' I am willing to absorb what takes place." By speaking of "an outside force," Ambassador Al Otaiba did not specifically demand U.S. action; he left the door open for volunteers.

One particular 'unknown unknown' (to quote a phrase!) is the future of Egypt,  not quite the powerful player of the past but still important in the region:

For Egypt, there is one worry: Mr. Mubarak's health. With a presidential election coming in the fall of 2011, will his 30 years in power (since Sadat's assassination in 1981) end with a free election, or will the ill, 82-year-old Mr. Mubarak demand another term or the installation of his son Gamal as his successor? Meanwhile, Egypt's dominance of Arab diplomacy and its overall influence in the region are declining steadily. The Arab League is still headquartered there, but it was symbolic of Egypt's diminished status that the key figure in the foreign ministers' meeting held there last week was Hamad bin Jassem of Qatar, the rich Gulf sheikdom with about 350,000 citizens, not Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt, with a population of 80 million.

Of course, after half a century of constant war, tension and terrorism, there might be a certain amount of wishful thinking in suggesting a new era of co-operation between Arabs and Jews:

Perhaps the enemy of my enemy is not my friend, if he is an Israeli pilot. In that case, all gestures of friendship will be forsaken or carefully hidden; there will be denunciations and UN resolutions, petitions and boycotts, Arab League summits and hurried trips to Washington. But none of that changes an essential fact of life well understood in many Arab capitals this summer: that there is a clear coincidence of interests between the Arab states and Israel today, in the face of the Iranian threat. Given the 60 years of war and cold peace between Israel and the Arabs, this is one of the signal achievements of the regime in Tehran—and could prove to be its undoing.

What a delicious irony that would be, that the mad Mullahs of Persia were the cause of an eventual Arab/Israeli peace!

Abrams' essay is worth reading in detail.

Does the Autumn equinox herald storms? Not half!

A gloomy but, I think, an accurate assesment of America's condition by Peggy Noonan in the WSJ. She is sometimes sneered at but there are not too many political writers who can quote themselves comfortably from articles written 14 years previously.  She detected then, and has had it confirmed in spades now, that there is a dangerously large void opening between governors and governed in the USA.  Even an amateur and foreign observer from afar like me can detect a burgeoning anger arising in the American public.  Interestingly, it seems to me to be somewhat unfocused from a party political viewpoint, although naturally the Dems are taking the most damage because they have 'enjoyed' the total power of controlling the White House and the Congress.  However, it is worth noting that even in Republican primaries, the machine pols of old are being ousted by 'outsiders' who refuse to enter the party's big tent and who are insisting that the party bosses start to rethink.  The Tea Party manifestation is a sympton not a cause of this malaise in the Great Republic.

The so far unanswered questions are how large this rebellion, for lack of a better word, will go, and then, how long it will last?  If in November it only gives the House of Representatives to the Republicans then I will be disappointed and I will write off this malcontent as a mere bubble.  However, if the Senate changes hands, too, then something quite remarkable is on foot and where it will end no-one knows.  The culmination, of course, will be two years hence when Obama would almost certainly be defeated.  All will depend on who takes his place.  If it is just another machine pol then I really do fear the consequences.  If it is a member of the 'awkward squad', such as Ms. Palin, whose main attraction is her authenticity, in the sense of doing what it says on the tin, then my hopes rise accordingly.  What it says on Ms. Palin's tin is that she will shrink the federal government in both political and financial terms, and that can do nothing but good for her country.

However, one has to consider the re-action of the anti-reactionaries!  Progressives always preach 'love 'n' peace, man' but are ruthless in applying murderous stratagems if they sense that their aims and desires are being baulked; so what they will do if they see the gains they have made over the last few years actually being unwound and reversed is difficult to contemplate.  Remember, the Obama regime is heavily infiltrated at all levels by revolutionary Marxists some of whom are guilty of terrorist acts, including murder, in the past.  An Autumn mist approaches and it is difficult to see through it but come November, all will be revealed.  Interesting - and you know what they say about interesting times!

Those Autumn leaves presage equal trouble 'over here'.  It is quite clear that the unions are plotting and planning in detail a campaign of disruption and chaos which will bring the country close to a complete halt.  It will make the 'Winter of Discontent' look like a squall.  I only hope that Cameron & Co are making equal efforts in planning how to combat this attack on our parliamentary democracy, for it will be nothing less than that.  The fundamental philosophy which drives our new-fangled coalition government remains "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma", not because of the secrecy imposed by Stalin on Russia which provoked Churchill's witty aphorism, but because they all seem to chatter away far too much.  Cameron seems to say the first thing that enters his head, and in the way of these things, sometimes he's right and sometimes he's wrong but usually he shouldn't have said it at all.  The rest of them blurt out contradictory nonsense to the point where no sensible man would bother to listen any more.

Only one thing matters, and that is whether or not they wield the Treasury axe, not just on programmes but on public employees as well.  Here, according to reports I have read, they are likely to trigger the judicial IEDs left behind by a retreating Brown, Balls and Harmon in the form of anti-discriminatory laws which will allow unions to fight any cuts on the grounds that they fall disproportionately on one group or another - and we all know which side the 'Cocklecarrots' tend to take!  If Cameron fails to carry out an early and major unwinding of Labour's past programmes he and his administration will be forever hobbled.

We will only know Cameron for what he really is by the results and my own personal litmus test, because it is only wonks and cranks who can follow every nut, bolt and washer in detail, is the BBC.  If by this time next year the BBC is reduced to a shadow of its former grandiloquent glory then I will be convinced that not all is lost.  Rod Liddle in today's 'Speccie' (no link yet) pours some much needed lavatory cleaner down the financial drain that leads to this over-mighty corporation.  He picks on, just as an example of dozens of others, some utter shit called Peter Salmon who, and I advise you to pour yourself a stiff drink before reading further, earns £400k a year as 'Director BBC North' (my emphasis) but who refuses to leave the delights of metropolitan London and follow his minions who have been ordered under pain of dismissal to re-locate to Salford.  Liddle asks, not unreasonably, what a 'Director BBC North' actually does for his £400k, especially from London?  In turn, I ask, would we miss him if, in Python language, 'he was no more and ceased to be' and we had our £400k back every year - to say nothing of his enormous pension pot?  So, when it comes to young Cameron we shall know him by his BBC.

In the meantime, stockpile your rations and start digging the slit trench - it could be a long war this Autumn!

 

The man in the moon has packed his bags and he's off!

Well, he's had enough!  He reckons we're the worst neighbours in the universe, what with all the crash-bang-wallops of our never-ending wars and now we're actually firing rockets into his back garden.  The Milky Way, hitherto a rather pleasant cosmotic neighbourhood, is being dragged down by our behaviour and inter-galactic property prices are beginning to fall.  If he had his way he'd slap ASBOs* on the lot of us.  Anyway, he's off.  How do I know?  Because unlike you lazy lot I am rapidly turning into a swot.  All this science stuff is beginning to fascinate me, particularly as told by young Cox and Forshaw of the Lower Fifth in their book, Why Does E=mc2?

According to this pair of very bright adolescents** - I do hope they get into university, they deserve it - the gravity field of the moon shifts our oceans about.  (Yes, yes, alright, I knew that as well as you!) What I didn't know was that all this water sloshing about puts a brake on our celestial speed as we spin around our own axis, and that in turn means that the length of our earthly days is increasing by  - wait for it - two thousandth of a second per century!  Crikey, time for the seat belts, I think.  Anyway, because of something called 'the invariance of angular momentum' (don't ask!) which has to be preserved at all costs such that, so to speak, the loss of a grain of sand here, needs must a grain be added there, otherwise the universe will go pop, or more probably, several golden scientific laws will turn out to be rubbish and the boffins will have to start again.  Anyway, because our spin is slowing the moon must speed up by a comparable amount in order to keep the Universal Accounts Book balanced, and that acceleration is slowly but surely driving the man in the moon further and further away.  Franky, I'll miss him when he's gone.

Oh, do wake up at the back, there!  I'm not telling you all this stuff for no reason.  It has exceedingly practical application in your everyday lives.  You see, the next time you are at a tedious dinner party in which death seems enticing compared to an endless 'conversation' about property prices, this year's hols and who is sleeping with who (should that be 'whom'?), you will be able drop this little gem into the chatter and bring about an early end to the evening - no, no, please don't thank me, just the usual cash in plain envelopes!

* For the benefit of my foreign readers ASBO stands for Anti-Social Behaviour Order under which young thugs who should be placed in town centre stocks and pelted with rotten fruit and veg, or better still banged up for a long time on bread and water and heavy labour, are instead told they are very, very naughty boys and they will have to stay at home in the evenings, an order which they mostly, and rather shrewdly, ignore on their well-founded knowledge that government bureaucrats do not work after hours, and in fact, not much even during hours.

** To be strictly accurate, never a high priority here at D&N, Brian Cox is professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester.  Jeff Forshaw is Professor of theoretical physics at the same university and is the recipient of the Institute of Physics Maxwell Medal.

 

Especially for you, Councillor Piper, with my, er, compliments!

Councillor Piper is one of those socialists with a soft sympathy for murderous dictatorships, provided, of course, that they are the right, or should I say, Left, sort of murderous dictatorships.  For example, he is rather fond of holidays in Cuba where he stays at nice hotels situated carefully up-wind of the state prison where-in languish various 'traitors to the working class' in need of urgent re-education, some of whom, in their despair and anger, succeed in starving themselves to death.  Still, he speaks highly of the chilled daiquiris!

Thus, I was intrigued by this graph produced over at Cafe Hayek which compares the life expectancy against the per capita income of Portugal and Cuba from 1959 to 2009:

Starting in 1959, Portugal and Cuba have about the same life expectancy but Cuba about 25% more prosperous than Portugal. After 50 years of communism, life expectancy has gone up dramatically (about 25%) in both countries. But now Portugal is more than twice as prosperous as Cuba.

Defenders of Cuba like to point out that they have a great education system and a great health system. Even if this is true, this graph reminds us that in a poor country being really good at one thing means being really bad at other things.

So when Councillor Piper and his ilk sing the praises of Fidel's revolution and claim, against all historical evidence, that 'socialism works', just send them a copy of this graph because, as they say at Cafe Hayek, one picture is worth a thousand words.  I should add in fairness that Bob Piper is not a bad chap, just a very short-sighted one, suffering as he does from rose-tinted, mono-occular vision!  But there again, "there's none so blind as them wot don't want to see!"

 

Mr. Heffer takes over from Miss Woods, Eng. Lit. & Lang.

I have mentioned before my paranoid worries over spelling, grammar and such like in this blog aware, as I constantly am, of the shade of Miss Woods, my English teacher, c. 1950-55, whose presence hangs over my typing fingers.  I still tremble at the memory of those pursed lips and the cold-eyed stare that would greet my every mistake of which there was a surfeit.  (Actually, she was a very nice woman and an excellent teacher, particularly given the lumpen material with which she had to work - me!  Anyway, I am grateful to Paul Waugh (always worth reading) for printing this missive (or perhaps 'missile' is a better word) from Simon Heffer to his colleagues in The Telegraph:

Dear Colleagues

We must make sure we stick to the rules on how to describe people, because to stray from consistency causes confusion. The suspect in the Wikileaks case is an American soldier called Private Brad Manning. He is also known as Specialist Brad Manning. We should stick to the familiar, and refer to him at all times (until he is convicted of anything) as Pte Manning. We have started to call him Mr Manning; which, as he is not a civilian, is just plain wrong. The only exception is with officers (usually of the rank of Lt-General or above) who have also been knighted; in which case they should be called (for example) General Sir David Richards at first mention, and then may be either Gen Richards or Sir David. Many of our readers are or have been in the services and have great attention to detail on matters of rank. Since they know at once when we get it wrong, we need to have that attention to detail too.

If you find yourself using a word of whose meaning you are unsure, do look it up in the dictionary. When we get a word wrong it is embarrassing. It demeans us as professional writers and shakes our readers’ confidence in us. In recent weeks we have confused endocrinology – the study of the body’s endocrine system – with dendrochronology, which is the study of dating trees. More embarrassing still, we accused the eminent broadcaster Sir David Attenborough of being a naturist – someone who chooses not to wear clothes – when in fact he is a naturalist; and during a story about a coach crash in Paris the nationality of the driver changed from Austrian to Australian. Homogenous and homogeneous are not interchangeable and their respective meanings should be studied in the dictionary. Like embodied and embedded, which we also confused, effecting and affecting and eligibility and legibility, these pairs of words almost come under the heading of homophones, as do prostate and prostrate.  We must take more care and ensure we are using the right word.

   Homophones remain abundant and show up the writer and the newspaper or website. We are quality media, and quality media do not make mistakes such as these: “the luck of the drawer”, “through the kitchen sink”, “through up” “dragging their heals” and “slammed on the breaks”, all of which are clichés that might not be worthy of a piece of elegant writing even if spelt correctly. We have also confused Briton and Britain, hanger and hangar, hordes and hoards, peeled and pealed, lightening and lightning, stationery and stationary, principal and principle, peninsula and peninsular, licence and license and, in something of a pile-up, born, borne and bourn. If you are unsure of the meanings of any of these words, look them up before proceeding further.

   Many of these mistakes are caused by carelessness and not properly reading back what one has written. We have had an increasing number of literals in recent weeks, both online and in the paper, which suggests the problem is getting worse rather than better. Heads of department have a particular responsibility to ensure that their staff perform to the best professional standards in this respect. We managed to perpetrate one of the worst literals of all recently – pubic for public- which may seem a laughing matter, but is not.

   Some Americanisms keep slipping in, usually when we are given agency copy to re-write and do an inadequate job on it. There is no such verb as “impacted”, and other American-style usages of nouns as verbs should be avoided (authored, gifted etc). Maneuver is not spelt that way in Britain. We do not have lawmakers: we might just about have legislators, but better still we have parliament. People do not live in their hometown; they live in their home town, or even better the place where they were born.

   Sometimes we do not properly think of the sense of what we are writing. There is a marked difference between the meanings of convince and persuade that is not recognised by some of you. If you are unsure of the distinction, look the words up. We wrote that “too many bomb disposal experts” had died in Afghanistan, which prompted an angry reader to ask what an acceptable number of dead experts would have been. We wrote of “an extraordinary killing spree” and were asked, in similar fashion, what would have constituted an ordinary one. We wrote about someone’s youngest child being her first, which was obviously not the case. Be careful too of the distinction between renting a property and letting it. And readers also asked us how there could, as we reported, be an 18-month long investigation into a crime that was committed only 14 months ago. We need to ensure that our facts, like our arithmetic, add up.

   There have also been some grammatical difficulties. The style book (which, in case you have lost your copy, is also online) specifies the distinction between “compared with” and “compared to”, and it may be worth examining. One of our writers began a sentence with the phrase “us single ladies” which suggests we need to brush up on our pronouns. We should always write one in four is, not one in four are, since one is inevitably singular. Bacteria is plural. Put adverbs in a sentence where they make the most logical sense, if you have to use them at all. This will never be by splitting the infinitive, but to write “to go speedily to town” will always be preferable to “to go to town speedily”, or any other such variant. It is different from, not different to. Under age, like under way, should be written as two words.
   Finally, may I mention some factual matters? Ottawa is the capital of Canada. Air Chief Marshal is spelt thus; and Mark Antony thus.

With best wishes

Simon Heffer

I am somewhat pressed for time today so I reprint the whole thing for your edification - and my education! 

If at first you don't succeed then fail, fail and fail again!

That has been and remains my motto in life.  I am reminded of it by the latest in a series of efforts through my life to try and understand the theory of relativity.  If the procedure follows the usual pattern then it will end just short of the 'eureka' moment.  What usually happens is that I shut myself in my 'study', draw the curtains, take the 'phone off the hook and open the latest book in which an author promises that all will be revealed even to 'O'-level maths & physics failures like me.  I then concentrate really hard and suddenly, somewhere in the quagmire of my mind, there is a faint glimmer of understanding which begins to grow stronger and the revelation is almost at hand - when one of several things will occur.  Either the cat who has sneaked in undetected kicks off with a racket because it wants out, or, the 'Memsahib' shouts up the stairs demanding to know whether I want my eggs fried or scrambled, or, I suddenly spot a book on a shelf which I had thought long-lost - whatever, my paltry concentration is blown and once again I am reduced to harrumphing that the notion that the watch (and therefore the heart) on a fellow whizzing past me on the Exeter Express whilst I stand on Sherborne station is running slower than mine is palpable nonsense!

Well, you must give me 'E' for Effort because I am having another try.  Whilst waiting on Waterloo station last Saturday my sworn oaths to my local chapter of Bookaholics Anonymous went out the window and I sidled into W. H. Smiths with the surreptitiousness of a vicar entering a porn shop - just to have a look round, you understand, I really, really did not intend to buy anything, and came out 20 minutes later with three books which subsequently I had to smuggle past the 'Memsahib'.  One of them was a modest little volume entitled Why Does E = mc2? written by a couple of terrific 'swots' called Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. From their photos they appear to be approximately 14 and 15 years old respectively!  Anyway, they promise, 'honest injun', that they will definitely explain all this relativity stuff and, given my past record, I look upon myself as the litmus paper in their teaching experiment.  If they succeed with me then their book is established as a universal means of education.

I must say I am fairly impressed so far.  They provide one easily understood example of the 'flexibility' of time and space by reporting on the brief lives of muons - don't ask, they're very titchy things which whizz about and only 'live' for 2.2 microseconds.  Apparently some swots in America have a 14-metre doughnut-shaped ring in which they can accelerate these poor little muons up to 99.94 % of the speed of light.  (My first question was why do those wretched Euro-swots need a ring several miles long at a cost of several zillion euros a mile?)  Anyway, the muons, if left to their own devices, would manage 15 laps before expiring in their allotted life-span of 2.2 microseconds.  However, when the swots press the accelerator the muons gallop round 400 times and their lifetime is extended by a factor of 29 to just over 60 microseconds!

But all that is how things look to the swots on the outside, looking in.

To the poor old muon, he still only lives 2.2 microseconds and succeeds in galloping round 400 times only because, to him, the doughnut ring has shrunk!

It was at this point, only 55 pages in, that my first headache came on and I have set my book aside in order to regain my strength before attempting a second effort.  No wonder that Einstein looked a sandwich short of a picnic, the whole thing is Monty Python via the Goon Show!

 

"The great globe itself"

There are simply insufficient words in my lexicon to praise the late Sam Wanamaker whose passion for Shakespeare led him into the quixotic determination to recreate Shakespeare's Globe Theatre more or less on the same site on the South Bank of the Thames.  Against all the odds he succeeded, and I bless his memory every time I go there.  To my dying day I shall remember seeing a special performance of 'The Dream' at the Globe which began at midnight on midsummer's night and we all spilled out onto the South Bank at around 3.30 when dawn had broken but the sun was not yet up and the view across the river to St. Pauls and the City was unspoiled by fumes and dust and looked like a Tintoretto painting.

Unforgettable, like my experience on Sunday when I saw the two parts of Henry IV, that quintessentially English play with universal applications.  From court to battlefield, from the low-life Boar's Head tavern to the rustic charms of the Cotswolds, all of England is here - with an occasional satirical nod in the direction of Wales and Scotland.  Nowhere, in my poor opinion, does Shakespeare better mix the personal and the political.  The troubled, usurping king and his Machiavellian son misunderstand each other and thus miss each other by a mile.  Swirling around them a host of lords and commoners all intent on picking the right side, that is, the winning side, with the one exception of the much abused Lord Chief Justice who struggles to maintain the King's laws in a time of lawlessness.  And towering above them all the immense but overblown figure of Sir John Falstaff, surely Shakespeare's greatest creation.

The staging of these two plays (one single play, really) was absolutely traditional.  Each began with the Mummers bursting in amongst the groundlings and providing a lewd but funny cod-version of the story which, as they ended their nonsense, led seemlessly into the play itself.  Also, the Globe company have revived the tradition from Shakespeare's time of ending their plays with an ensemble dance which sends one from the playhouse filled with good humour.  Again, like the company at the Old Vic (see previous post), there was a terrific feeling of ensemble playing as actors, some of them playing up to four different roles, rushed hither and thither, to make their entrances and exits.  This was high-powered teamwork and one sensed that they were all enjoying themselves and from the constant spontaneous applause they must have know that we, the audience, were with them every step of the way.

There was enormous skill and talent throughout the company but the whole enterprise depends on Falstaff, in this case, played by Roger Allam.  He was superb.  In the beginning, all was roistering fun with only the occasional glimpse of the venality and corruption that sours his soul.  The director, Dominic Dromgoole, avoided the temptation to over-emphasise that key early moment in the tavern when Prince Hal play-acts his father, the King, and the fat rascal in mock apprehension asks if he will banish Jack Falstaff and the Prince replies, "I do.  I will."  That's the thing with Shakespeare, you have to watch those short, almost unnoticeable, little lines but, having once spotted them, not point them up too boldly.  In the second half, Allam's Falstaff displays more of the cold, bleak nature that is at the centre of his corrupted soul.  When, on hearing that his 'friend', the Prince, is now the King and he shouts in triumph "Now, all the laws of England are at my command", one shudders.

This was simply a terrific and unforgettable day at the theatre and I would urge you all to kill or sell your loved ones for a ticket - but see both halves!  Finally, indulge me with a personal insight which struck me during the performance.  It is not a very keen insight, in fact, it's bloody obvious when you think about it for 3 nano-seconds but it had never occurred to me before.  You see, when you sit in the Globe and half narrow your eyes, you really do feel transported back in time to the 16th and 17th centuries.  In the course of the play much fun is had of a poor dim-witted waiter called Frances who is obviously rushed off his feet serving ale hither and thither to a noisy and impatient crowd of drinkers,and his sole answer to the many calls for his service is "Anon, anon, sir". The Prince and his cronies have much fun at this poor man's expense by constantly calling to him and receiving the endlessly repeated "Anon, anon, Sir."  Simple fun, but sitting there chuckling away I suddenly realised that 'Frances' must have existed.  It dawned on me that some 400 years ago, there really was a slow and easily hassled incompetent waiter in one of the taverns frequented by Shakespeare and his acting company and his constant recitation of "anon, anon" must have made him the butt of jokes by the witty and intelligent actors from the original Globe.  Sitting there, hovering between then and now, I thought of the long-lost and forgotten 'Frances', plucked from total obscurity and courtesy of the greatest theatrical genius the world has ever known, given the chance to strut, if not his hour, then at least his minute upon the stage.

 

Four plays in two days

Well, I did it!  Four plays in two days - what a terrific weekend.  To the Old Vic on Saturday to see As You Like It in the afternoon.  I had forgotten this was a "Bridge Project" production in which Sam Mendes has formed a company divided equally between American and British actors.  Slight shock when I heard the first American accent but gone in an instant, and nothing compared to the shock on seeing Ron Cephas Jones, a tall, slim and elegant black man enter wearing a well-cut dark grey suit and tie and for just a second I thought, my God, it's Obama!  I am not overly familiar with As You Like It and in response to Shakespeare's somewhat off-hand, take it or leave title, I think on the whole I would leave it.  Even by romantic comedy standards the plot is absurd, and even by convoluted Shakespearean standards the word-play is sometimes tedious.  However, what fascinates, me, at any rate, is the mysterious and melancholy Jaques who threads his glooomy way through the plot, neither adding to, nor subtracting from, the story, except at the very end when all the knots have been unravelled, the young couples reconciled and ready to be married and the Duke is about to start the happy , rustic revels - he suddenly and dramatically announces that he will withdraw from the company and remain in the wilderness!  What a mysterious character he is and I must find time to examine him more closely.

Then to the evening performance of The Tempest, Shakespeare's farewell  to theatre.  Exactly the same company but this time in a play of great profundity.  In this Mr. Cephas Jones played Caliban - excellently.  Stephen Dillane played the marooned Prospero, erstwhile Duke of Milan, and now a self-taught wizard who deploys his magical powers to control - well, nothing much really, a typical piece of Shakespearean irony - just poor, old brutish Caliban and the trapped and enslaved spirit, Ariel.  Dillane received much criticism in the prints for mumbling his lines and the message seems to have struck home because he was as clear as a bell on Saturday.  He delivered the final, and deeply moving (to me), epitaph with great clarity and quiet sincerity, and as always, I was clenching my jaw to stop the tears.

I like these ensemble company productions.  Being part of such a company and working together on two plays so that everyone is involved to a greater or lesser extent in both of them produces a cameraderie which is evident to an audience.  Without any doubt the leader of the pack was the radiant Juliet Rylance who played Rosalind and Miranda.  Possessed of tremendous energy, spirit and  talent, she helped drive these two productions along to the success they deserved.  I suspect, given the different traditions of American and British theatre, the possibilities of division in the ranks were manifold with a 'them' and 'us' attitude ready to spring out at any moment.  Happily, actors, like soldiers, face a common enemy; in the former's case - the audience!  In the end, however much blood is spilled in the rehearsal room, the audience must be faced and the ranks must close and teamwork rules.  To me, from the outside peering in, this seemed like a happy company doing good work and knowing it and enjoying it.

I will pause here and return later to tell of you of the 'Henries'.