DUFF & NONSENSE!

Colourful legal quibbles

As usual I find myself in a state of confusion over the law and its ramifications, particularly the law regarding the use of racial epithets.  For example, if I call a Negro ‘a black bastard’ am I likely to be charged with using the word ‘black’, a specific and impeccably accurate adjective; or for saying ‘bastard’, a term of insult and abuse?  I can see no harm in the former which is merely descriptive but, if said loudly in a public place, even in this day and age, such a mild epithet might cause someone somewhere to be offended.  (Of course, if in fact it does turn out that the target of my language actually is a bastard, then how does the law stand then?  All I have done is tell the truth!)

I gather also from the media that a young man has been sentenced to 56 days in jail for using racial abuse in a series of ‘tweets’.  In other words, they were not said face-to-face and therefore were unlikely to cause a breach of the peace, although given the state of British streets on a Friday and Saturday night another breach of the peace is unlikely to register on the police radar!  I thought Kenneth Clarke had laid down that prison sentences were to be confined to hardened criminals only, so why a twit of a ‘tweeter’ should end up being housed and fed at my expense I do not know, particularly when the number of burglars getting off scot free so-called ‘Community Service Orders’ is steadily rising.

Finally, we have the brave Guardian publishing the recorded comments of a copper allegedly using ‘racist language’ to a young man he was arresting.  This was reported at the time and all the facts were studied by the Crown Prosecution Service and the Independent Police Complaints Authority who decided that no prosecution was warranted.  Now, however, The Guardian is bellowing from the rooftops and every black loudmouth in the land is on TV demanding a trial.  If it turns out that one or both of the authorities change their minds, not on the grounds that fresh evidence has arisen but because they are under public pressure, how can a judge do anything other than throw the case out?  Unless of course, the authorities, to use the current jargon, ‘name and shame’ – and fire – the officials within their bounds who made the mistake.  Do not hold your breath!

Is intelligence like pornography?

You remember the old adage that it is impossible to define pornography but you know it when you see it!  Well, I am wondering whether intelligence is the same.  This whole concept of 'intelligence', as in the IQ assessments I touched upon in the preceding post, has been going round and round in my brain.  What is it, exactly?  How do you define it?  How do you measure it?  Does it only exist in one part of your persona or does it permeate your whole being?  Needless to say, my own fairly moderate intelligence only took me so far in seeking answers!

Most people, if asked, would equate intelligence to 'book-learning' or success in academic fields.  Alas, it only requires a nano second of thought to start listing the really stupid 'stoopids' who are weighed down with 'book-learning'.  One instantly thinks of Gordon Brown, one of the few men in the country who actually understands "endogenous growth theory" but who demonstrated without doubt his total inability to run a whelk-stall!  Even so, as I understand it, he has now gone on, in a very 'intelligent' way, to build a new career in which he will earn considerable amounts of money and enjoy a very exciting, international life-style.  So not totally unintelligent then!

Perhaps we should infer that intelligence is partial, that it can appear in one part of your life and be missing in other areas.  Well, that's pretty obvious from everyday life where one observes otherwise educated and 'intelligent' friends with good careers who then enter into disasterous marriages which are blindingly obvious to all the witnesses but not to the participants.  So, if that is the case, what is the point of measuring 'intelligence' unless you can pinpoint where it is working inside a person?

And how do you meaure it?  I have never taken an 'intelligence' test so I am not qualified to judge their efficacy.  I assume they are a series of increasingly difficult 'problems' which people are asked to solve.  The problem here is contamination.  The tests are 'designed' by people who may or may not be very intelligent themselves, and they are marked by those very same people!  Whilst some of the tests might be of a mathematical nature with a right or wrong answer, I suspect many of them are really matters of judgment and, I would remind you, the judgment of the testers is on the line as much as that of the testee, so to speak.  Is my lifetime's refusal to take any sort of intelligence test a sign of my intelligence?  Or lack of it?

Perhaps - no, almost definitely - I have the wrong end of the stick.  Perhaps it is not the ability find a right answer which these IQ testers are after but the evidence that the 'testee' is actually attempting to think of a way through to a conclusion whether it is 'right' or 'wrong'.  I suppose there are many (most?) people in this world who fail to think on a medium or long term basis and merely act on short term considerations.  We saw a few thousand of them doing so during the recent riots.  Were they unintelligent?  Not necessarilly, I would suggest.  If you are greedy for fashionable electronic goods which you cannot afford and you see a shop being ransacked, it is not unintelligent to help yourself.  Fleetingly you might do the intelligent thing and think of the consequences but were you to do so you would assume that the powers of the authorities to find each and everyone of the perps is limited and even if caught you know from experience that it will be an easy doss in jail - and you will still have the goods you nicked stashed away for when you come out.  So quite bright, really!

Now let us examine the long-term thinkers.  Are they more intelligent?  Take a young man who has set his sights on a career as an officer in the Royal Navy.  He knows that certain exam results will be required and that he will have to dedicate his life to this chosen path which has little equivalence in 'civvy street'.  Part-way through his career the government cuts the Royal Navy to shreds and he is out on his ear, middle-aged and with none of the right qualifications to gain employment at the sort of remuneration level he has been used to.  How intelligent was that?  Perhaps that example teaches us (the obvious) that being intelligent does not guarantee success.  In which case, why set such store by it?

In considering this subject of intelligence I am reminded of Mr. Cruddas, the unfortunate 'Get Rich Quick Merchant' who was the subject of a Sunday Times investigation into Tory donors.  He is a man with absolutely nil academic qualifications who, by circumstance, found himself in the right place at the right time.  He quickly turned his ability to understand and use the latest communications wheeze - at the time it was teletype or some such - and had the imagination to realise its wider applications.  He set up what was, in effect, a 'bookie's shop' in which foreign currency dealers could quickly and easily bet on price fluctuations.  He made a million, or to be precise, several hundreds of millions!  Was he intelligent or was he - and I deliberately used the word earlier - simply imaginative?

At this point I turn without shame to my Thesaurus because, the English language being such a tremendous tool for the expression of thought that I wanted to lay before you some other words for 'intelligence': wisdom, thinking power, intellectualism, wit, common sense, understanding, cleverness, gumption, sagacity, discernment, acuteness, shrewdness, foresight, craftiness . . .  and so on and on.  Again I ask, in this ocean of words and subtle differences of meaning, where-in lies 'intelligence'?  What is it?  How do we test for it?

And that, of course, brings us full circle!

 

I wish I had been at that lunch!

Well, for a start, the guest was Charles Murray, he of The Bell Curve book fame, or perhaps that should be infamy!  The host was Edward Luce, the America correspondent of the FT who has written an article on it.  And a second reason for wishing to be there is that Charles Murray, already fairly high on my favourites list, began the lunch with a dry martini and thus moved himself several notches higher.  Lastly, they began with black truffle pasta at $90 for two portions, so, using my American lingo, 'what's not to like?' - apart from the price!  And, of course, the conversation was rather interesting, too.

I never read Murray's book which proposed, so I gather, that IQ, more of it or less of it, is the big divide in society and he (and his co-author) left open the strong possibility that race and genetic heritage was an important factor in how much IQ you were likely to have or have not!  This, of course, brought down the wrath of the liberal hordes upon his head.  Personally, I have doubts concerning the exact meaning of IQ.  Several questions nag at me;  what is it? how is it measured?  what is the difference if any between IQ and academic ability? or IQ and commonsense?

Now he has written another book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.  In this, apparently, he points to the growing gap between the ruling class of white America and their working class counterparts.  Both are moving further away from each other:

In his most recent book, Coming Apart, which has sparked heated debate since its publication last month, Murray depicts the atrophying of America’s white working class over the past generation. It also charts the growing separation of a new lower class from a new upper class – the latter a “cognitive elite” that tends to do all the things its blue-collar counterparts have forgotten how to do, such as get (and stay) married, read to their children, quit smoking, eat salad and get educated.

He offers the following reasons:

To Murray the culprit is entirely cultural – the loss of the Tocquevillian virtues of industriousness, marriage, honesty and religiosity on which he says the republic was built.

At the same time, the elites in America have become so tolerant – afflicted with such “ecumenical niceness”, as Murray calls it – that they cannot bring themselves to “preach what they practise”. Partly because of their moral squeamishness, they tend to shield their children against even the tiniest risks in life, Murray says, including mixing with Americans from less fortunate backgrounds.

Hmmn!  A good lunch, by the sound of it, and a fascinating conversation.  Wish I'd been there!

You can read the whole article here:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/628d8524-690b-11e1-956a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1qOfj777D

 

Aren't coincidences creepy?

Just two days ago I was telling you about the mysterious death of an Englishman in China.  I mentioned that he worked on a part-time basis for a British outfit called Hakluyt & Co which had been set up by some ex(?)-MI6 officers.  I remember pausing for a milisecond over the rather odd name but then shrugged and assumed it was an amalgam of two names, probably the two main directors.

Today, exhausted after finishing the first cut of the year on my patch of the churchyard, I was relaxing and reading my latest book The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer (a 'Five Corker' read!)  Mortimer tells of the incredible voyagers of the late 16th century starting, quite rightly, with Francis Drake, the first man to captain a circumnavigation of the globe.  As these fantastic travels and explorations took place people began to write about them (my emphasis):

By far the most influential of these is Richard Hakluyt, who publishes "Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America in 1582" and the first edition of his greatest work, "The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation", in 1589.

So there you have it!  Two mentions of that odd name in two days.  Creepy or what?

 

 

"Stand your ground!" Love it - only in America!

I really do love American English.  They seem to encapsulate quite complex matters in one neat phrase.  "Stand your ground" is a perfect example.  For those Brits and Euros not familiar with it, let me explain that it has suddenly hit the headlines 'over there' following the shooting to death of a young black man by an armed community cop.  The proper local police investigated the matter and decided that the community cop had no case to answer on the grounds of the fairly recent "Stand your ground" law enacted in Florida and other States.  Needless to say, like just about every law ever written it is mired in a mixture of myth and half-knowledge and misinterpretation. which, of course, instantly confuses the peanut brains in your average news-room!  Over at The Cato @ Liberty site, Walter Olsen explains with great clarity the finer points of this law:

Let’s start with one of the most common misreadings of the law, namely that (in the words of Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne) it sets out a rule of “Feel threatened, just shoot.” Florida law justifies lethal self-defense in a public place only under reasonable belief that force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm.

Belief that’s not reasonable is of no account. No wonder, according to Sentinel reporting, Central Florida police regularly arrest people who try to claim self-defense after committing violent acts, and courts regularly convict them. That’s consistent with the “stand your ground” law.

The best-known provision of “stand your ground” rejects the so-called “duty to retreat.” Under that rule, prosecutors could sometimes overcome an otherwise valid claim of self-defense by arguing that you could have safely fled your attacker.

But — to clear up another misconception — the old duty of retreat would not have put Zimmerman at fault for following Trayvon around the neighborhood. Instead it came into play only when a confrontation had boiled up to a point of imminent violence.

The defence rests, m'Lud!

 Thanks again to Cafe Hyek

 

Art from 'over there'

To start with, a slightly unusual picture from the always ambiguous Edward Hopper.  The fact that it features one person, a woman, sitting alone in an anoymous motel room, is not at all unusual for Hopper, the man who painted 'the man in the street' for 'the man in the street'!  What is unusual is that in this case the woman is actually looking at us.  Normally Hopper's subjects never look at us, nor indeed, do they even look at each other if there are more than one of them.  Mostly what they seem to be doing is looking into themselves.

I like this one also for the way in which it combines the abstract with the real, by which I mean that if you remove the realistic objects from it, the room, the window, the blocks of light and shade on the walls, and the outside 'scenery' could be an abstract painting. 

Here's an example of what I mean:

I like the way he shows both the outside and the inside with the stairs hinting at more spaces beyond.  Also, the contrast of the moving sea and the absolute stillness of the interior.  As so often with Hoppr you are left wondering at the nature of the 'back story' - who lives there, why is it empty and the door wide open?

And next, another of my favourites.  In fact I have a prints of these two pictures hanging on my wall which I bought in New England at the Norman Rockwell Museum:

Sorry about the warning sign across the bottom.

Yes, yes, I know they reek of sentimentality but you always feel better after you've looked at most of Rockwell's pictures and there's nothing wrong with that.  The 'doom 'n' gloom' merchants who relish capturing the squalor of life are entitled to their place in the gallery; but so too are the painters who delight, and who offer us an uplifting image of ourselves.

 

I fear for the Supreme Court of the United States of America

Even stalwart Left-wing lynchpins of the MSM, like the NYT and the LA Times, are expressing their very real fears that the Supreme Court is going to strike down 'Obamacare' in its entirety.  As I reported earlier, there is a view that if this happens, in effect, it will remove the "the albatross off his [Obama's] neck" and do more than anything else to help him be re-elected.  Maybe, maybe not.  But there is an even greater danger looming if the Supreme Court not only defies a Democrat Congress (as it was when this bill passed) but also breaks the habits of the last century during which a whole series of Congresses, with the benign assistance of a supine Supreme Court, has moved the socialist agenda further and yet further into American life.  As Jonathan S. Tobin puts it in Commnetary:

For most of the last century, liberals have preached that the Constitution is a living document that needs to be interpreted and re-interpreted to fit the needs of the times. In the name of this legal faith they have championed a vast expansion of government power as well as the enumeration of various rights that are actually nowhere to be found in the actual text of the document. Generations of liberal activist judges have consistently thwarted the will of both the legislative and executive branches of government without a blush as they imposed their own ideas about every conceivable issue on the country. In doing so they changed the way we think about government and established its presence in our lives in ways that the founders would have thought unthinkable.

But today, "the times they are a'changin'" and by the slimmest of margins the balance has now tipped slightly to the conservatives, led intellectually, by Justice Clarence Thomas, a man deeply imbued with a belief in the wisdom of the Constitution against which all acts by the legislative or executive branches must be tested.  Should the Supreme Court defy not only Democrat politicians in the Congress but also those in the White House, to say nothing of the mass of Left-wing liberal opinion in the media and in the country, then the backlash will be ferocious.

Already there are mutterings to the effect that in future the powers of the Supreme Court will have to be limited.  America, wake up! - you'd better watch out!

 

If 'MDA' thinks he's groovey then so do I!

'MDA' ('My Darling Ann' for newcomers to this blog unaware of my deep and on-going passion for all things Ann Coulter) makes us (or me, at any rate) look at presidential candidate Mitt Romney in a new light:

Any Republican governor of a blue [= Democrat, for my Brit readers] state who manages to balance the budget without raising taxes should be a nominee for Mount Rushmore, to say nothing of president.

Mitt Romney was governor of a state so blue, it's North Korea with more Irish people, and he balanced the budget without raising taxes.

"it's North Korea with more Irish people" - oh God! that is the most perfect summation of Massachusetts I have ever read, wish I had thought of it first!  Anyway, Romney somehow became Governor and did what it said on his tin, he balanced the budget every single year he was in office, and, when he departed he left the State's emergency fund over triple the size of the one he inherited.  He did all this without cutting income taxes!  As 'MDA' points out, he failed to cut them because he couldn't:

And yet, Romney balanced Massachusetts' budget each year he was in office and left the state with a surplus, without raising taxes.  To the contrary, every single budget Romney submitted included income tax cuts -- all of which were rejected by the 85-percent Democratic Legislature. (The last time Massachusetts legislators approved an income tax cut was when it was attached to a bill raising their own salaries by 55 percent.) [My emphasis]

As she reminds us, Romney's 200-seat legislature in Massachusetts had only 29 Republicans!  He achieved these remarkable, against-the-odds results by doing it the hard way, what Arthur Laffer, Reagan's economics guru, called the "green-eyeshade" budget way in which you spend many, many long hours going through budgets line by line slashing, cutting or trimming.  That is what Romney did in Massachusetts and in the circumstances I would describe it as 'heroic'!

I confess that I have found Romney a rather dull, almost mechanical, candidate.  How much more exciting it would have been if 'MDS' (My Darling Sarah) had been running!  But that was not to be and now it looks as though Romney is the man.  I have said before, and being prone to the old man's habit of repitition I shall say it again, don't pay too much attention to what a man says but watch like a hawk the things he does or has done!

As a post-script it is worth noting that 'MDA' tells us that :

his successor, Deval Patrick, Democrat and friend of Obama, with a "rainy day fund" of $2.1 billion, more than tripled from $640 million when Romney took office. (Of course, as soon as Romney was gone, Patrick raided the rainy day fund, increased government spending and raised taxes.)

 Why am I not surprised?  Read her article, it's a breeze!

 

When academics fall out - watch out!

Why is it, I wonder - and not for the first time - that when academics fall out it makes a WWF bout look like a tea party?

The two gentlemen above, Mr. Chris Jericho and Mr. Shawn Michaels, and I stress for reasons of self preservation as well as strict accuracy that they really are absolute gentlemen to their fingertips, could well be replaced by these two gentlemen below.  In the blue corner, ladies and gentlemen, we have Prof. Daniel Everett, the new kid on the block threatening the crown of the world heavyweight champ of linguistics, Prof. Noam Chomsky, know to his friends and comrades as 'Lefty'!

Another question I frequently ask myself is why so many otherwise intelligent men of science having in their youth overthrown the orthodoxy then pass into intransigent middle or old age insisting that 'the science is now settled', thus ignoring the entire history of science which is a never-ending tale of orthodoxy after orthodoxy being severely unsettled!  Still, at least in this dispute over linguistics you will enjoy the self-hugging delight in the irony that the entire subject of linguistics is so abstruse as to be almost incomprehensible to anyone outside the discipline!

Personally, I blame the Pirahã!  Not their fault, of course, because they sound like a rather intelligent tribe of people living in the depths of the Brazilian forest.  Rather sensibly, they have no religion and no hierarchy, not least because they also lack any sense of history or the future.  In other words, they do what we, er, advanced peoples are constantly told not to do, that is, they don't even think of the past and don't plan for the future because there isn't any!  The other thing the Pirahã lack is a sophisticated, or even a mildly complicated, language - such bliss my friends would mutter, not to hear Duff droning on and on and on - and in certain situations like hunting they communicate by whistling.  Anyway, the poor old Pirahã were minding their own business when suddenly Prof. of Linguistics, Daniel Everett, enters their domain.  Even worse than being a professor of linguistics he is also a devout Christian and is intent on converting them all.  After a few years, rather sensibly, Everett gives up his Christianity and concentrates on learning their language which is, according to him, amongst the most basic and under-developed ever found before.  As he gets to grip with the Pirahã's alnguage he realises that it is, and excuse me if I become slightly technical here, non-recursive.  In other words, their sentences are so short and to the point that they lack the ability to insert sub-clauses into their sentences.

So far, so tedious and so what, you might ask?  Well, it was upon this discovery of a language which was non-recursive that the linguistic brown stuff hit the fan!  You see, 'Lefty' Chomsky who, as I told you, is the World Champ in this division, had laid it down from on high that all - repeat ALL - human language, being a product of the human brain, is recursive.  Oh dear, academic handbags at dawn then ensued and continues until this day.  You can read all about it, complete with very recursive sentences, at The Chronicle for Higher Education.  It's a long-ish piece but worth reading not least for the unintentional but delicious ironies on display.

 

If Obama loses he wins!

Even by my elliptical standards that heading is dafter than a daft thing so I had better explain.  'Over there' the Supreme Court has just 'enjoyed' their second day considering Obama's Healthcare bill.  As I explained the other day, it hinges on whether it is legal for the Federal government to order, under pain of punishment, citizens to purchase health insurance from private companies.  The Hill reports the reaction of a Left-leaning Democrat:

Jeffrey Toobin, a lawyer and legal analyst, who writes about legal topics for The New Yorker said the law looked to be in "trouble." He called it a "trainwreck for the Obama administration." [My emphasis]

From what I heard on Fox News, the government lawyer was not very strong and came under a severe grilling from some of the Justices and most observers, even government supporters like Mr. Toobin, think that from what they have heard in these first two days means the bill is more likely than not to be tossed out.  Mind you, everyone warns that strong conclusions cannot be drawn with certainty based on oral questions and answers at this early stage.

However, if it does sink without trace, J. D. Homnick at The American Spectator, thinks that will absolutely and positively ensure Obama's re-election!  A quirky view on the face of it but his argument goes as follows.  Dems and Repubs account for about 80% of the electorate and barring anything truly monstrous they will stick to voting 40/40 the way they always do.  However, this Healthcare bill is a monster and might well create weakness in the Dem vote.  It will certainly effect the 20% independents who always swing the electoral decision.  But, if the bill is dead and buried then, in Mr. Homnick's words with my emphasis:

Bottom line, if the Supremes toss Obamacare, they take the albatross of his neck. Then he probably wins, so he gets to dump our nukes and sink Israel and who knows what else. If they let it stand, the country reacts by putting in Romney or Santorum, plus a Republican Senate, so they can vote the nasty thing out of existence.

Well, it's a point of view, I guess!

 

More 'spookery'!

Honestly, the spies are coming out of the woodwork!  No sooner had I written the piece below offering you the job of head of MI6 when I turn to the WSJ and find a story of an ex(?)-MI6 operator called Neil Heywood who met a mysterious death in China.  He acted on a free-lance basis for a firm called Hakluyt & Co. which was set up in China by ex(?)-MI6 officers offering their services to international companies wishing to do business there.  Apparently, Mr. Heywood died in a Chongqing hotel room in November and if that name rings a bell it means you were paying attention to my last post concerning China in which I reported the sacking of the political boss of the Chongqing region, Bo Xilai, who was also a member of the national Polit-Bureau, the highest political organisation in the country.  You may remember that his police chief 'did a runner' to the nearest American consulate who refused him asylum lest they upset the Chinese government and he was discreetly whisked off to Beijing to, er, 'help the Party with its enquiries'!  Apparently, he has claimed that Heywood was poisoned but it is rather difficult to substantiate that because the local authority concerned claimed he had died due to excess alcohol and promptly cremated his body.  Friends and aquaintances maintain that Mr. Heywood never drank!  Finally, and rather deliciously given the sad nature of this tale, there might be some fun and games in Washington:

Mr. Wang's case is raising interest in Congress, as leading lawmakers are seeking to find out if the Obama administration denied him political asylum.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R., Fla.) is requesting access to State Department communications concerning Mr. Wang's case. A spokesman for Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen said she has yet to receive a response.

The State Department said last month Mr. Wang left the Chengdu consulate under his "own volition." Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland Monday declined to comment further.

Needless to say, every potential Chinese defecter or possible intelligence source will have read this story of brave Obama's 'welcome' to such people and drawn their own conclusions!

 

Well, now you can play at being Smiley!

Suppose that you have just been 'tapped up', frightfully discreetly, of course, at your club - no, no, not the British Legion Club, and certainly not the Diamond Spangles Club for Men Only, I mean your very private but up-market gentlemen's club just off St. James - by a smooth, anonymous chap with Old Etonian written all over him, who invites you to head up MI6.  Naturally you accept but with some premonitions of doubt when you are told that your predecessor was the canny, shrewd, old veteran, George Smiley.  Never mind, you say, let's give it a try!

The first report you receive is, of course, stamped TOP SECRET despite the fact that the whole thing has appeared in today's American Thinker.  The source is 'Reza Kahlili', not his real name, naturally, because he is an Iranian who was a member of the Revolutionary Guards and who was also a source for the opposition - ooops, sorry, I mean - our allies, the CIA.  Anyway, he brings news of big splits in the Iranian hierarchy:

Many within the Revolutionary Guards, the very force that has protected the clerical regime since its inception in 1979, have become disgruntled.  Former high commanders have publicly criticized Khamenei, something that courts execution, as the regime's clerics have stated that obeying the supreme leader is like obeying Allah; those disobeying him will be considered a "Mohareb," an enemy of God, and therefore killed as justified under Islam.

Former senior Revolutionary Guard commander Hossein Alaei, in an op-ed in a state-owned newspaper, openly criticized the Islamic leadership for suppressing the people and not allowing criticism of the supreme leader and of the direction of the country.  He came immediately under attack by Khamenei's supporters, the piece was pulled from the paper's website, and radicals attacked his home.

The report goes on to list several other members of the ruling hierarchy who appear to be very dissatisfied with the Iranian leadership and who are prepared to risk all in saying so .  The point is, as an intelligence officer, how do you evaluate this report?

I ask the question because it is one that faces every intelligence officer practically everyday.  Of course, the news he brings is very welcome to our ears because such splits might presage a change of government in Iran.  On the other hand, we all know to our cost at the end of the Iraq war that intelligence sources like to tell their handlers what their handlers want to know!  And in turn, the handlers themselves like even better to tell their political masters what they want to know, especially if it means a knighthood and possibly even a seat in the Lords.  Just think, you could become Lord 'M' of 'I6' - very mysterious!

'Reza Kahlili's report is of interest but exactly how much weight one would give it is a matter of controversy, I feel.

 

Oh, no, surely not, here comes some Good News!

This blog, like many others, has a distinct tendency to indulge in the 'glums'.  Somehow bad news is exciting whilst good news is boring.  Well, here and now, as I whistle Python's famous anthem, "Let's all look on the bright side of life", I bring you some good news courtesy of the City-Journal whose headline says it all:

The State of the Anglosphere

The decline of the English-speaking world has been greatly exaggerated.

 

The fact that this cheerful article is written by Joel Kotkin and Shashi Parulekar, hardly typical or frightfully Anglo names, actually makes their point all the stronger.  Indeed, on the dominance of the English language they say this:

English is an ascendant language, the primary global language of business and science and the prevailing tongue in a host of key developing countries, including India, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Kenya, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. Over 40 percent of Europeans speak English, while only 19 percent are Francophone. When German, Swedish, and Swiss businesspeople venture overseas, they speak not their home language but English.

Long-run trends in the developing world also point to the expansion of the English language. French schools have been closing even in former French colonies, such as Algeria, Rwanda, and Vietnam, where students have resisted learning the old colonial tongue. English is becoming widely adopted in America’s biggest competitor, China, and it dominates the Gulf economy, where it serves as the language of business in hubs such as Dubai. The Queen’s tongue is, of course, broadly spoken in that other emerging global economic superpower, India, where it has become a vehicle for members of the middle and upper classes to communicate across regional boundaries. In Malaysia, too, English is the language of business, technology, and politics.

'Over here' and 'over there', much is made of what is called 'the greying' of our populations and the fear that there will be insufficient workers to support the elderly.  However, according to the authors of this essay, things are even gloomier in China:

Meanwhile, the nation that so many point to as the twenty-first-century superpower—China—now has a fertility rate of 1.6, even lower than that of Western Europe. Over the next two decades, its ratio of workers to retirees is projected to rise from 11 to 23. Other countries, such as Brazil and Iran, face similar scenarios. These countries, without social safety nets of the kinds developed in Europe or Japan, may get old before they can get rich.

And when it comes to the brute facts of economic lfe:

A little-noted fact these days is that the Anglosphere is still far and away the world’s largest economic bloc. Overall, it accounts for more than one-quarter of the world’s GDP—more than $18 trillion. In contrast, what we can refer to as the Sinosphere—China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau—accounts for only 15.1 percent of global GDP, while India generates 5.4 percent (see Chart 1). The Anglosphere’s per-capita GDP of nearly $45,000 is more than five times that of the Sinosphere and 13 times that of India (see Chart 2). This condition is unlikely to change radically any time soon, since the Anglosphere retains important advantages in virtually every critical economic sector, along with abundant natural resources and a robust food supply.

There!  Feeling better, are we?  Well, go to the link and read the whole thing and cheer yourselves up because I know, and don't ask me how I know, there is some bad news hurtling towards us as even as I write!

 

Theodore Dalrymple tells it the way it is

By and large, if you are of a tender, delicate disposition, I would advise against reading Theodore Dalrymple.  Shades are lifted to let in the light, blinkers are removed and in a perfectly polite but relentless way he calls a spade a bloody shovel!  The main target of his brutal honesty recently was some twerp called China Miéville, a 'novelist' - and, no, I haven't read him either, nor indeed have I ever heard of him.  Apparently he is leading light amongst Left-wing, er, 'intellectual' circles.  He is quoted by Dalrymple on the City-Journal site as saying:

“Oh, London, You Drama Queen,” novelist China Miéville writes: “The aftermath [of the recent riots] was one of panicked reaction. Courts became runnels for judicial cruelty, dispensing sentences vastly more severe than anything usual for similar crimes.”

In one brief salvo, Dalrymple sinks him:

This is the statement of a typical intellectual whose indifference to the actual lives of the urban poor masquerades as compassion for them. Miéville fails to mention that most of the sentences handed down were for people with criminal records, no doubt in many cases long ones. The real judicial cruelty—not to the criminals but to their victims—was the leniency before the riots that gave the rioters a hitherto justified sense of impunity.

Aided and abetted by our benign and utterly useless Minister for non-Justice, Ken Clarke, who will do almost anything to avoid actually jailing anyone for anything.  Dalrymple offers some facts and figures which seem hardly to have impinged on Clarke, probably because the chances of him ever being knifed or burgled are vanishingly tiny, not least because of his constant police protection:

Some figures: in 2011, there were 12,699 knife attacks in London known to the police (up 13.6 percent from the previous year); 58,160 burglaries (up 8.8 percent); and 68,754 street robberies (up 13 percent). The average national detection rate for burglaries is about one in 12, though even this is an overstatement, due to police manipulation of the figures. Approximately 800,000 domestic burglaries took place in Great Britain in 2009; this means that some 67,000 were detected by the police. In that same year, 6,136 people went to prison in Great Britain for burglary (for an average of 17 months each). Considering the 800,000 burglaries annually, a domestic burglary attracts on average four days’ imprisonment: hardly indicative of judicial ferocity, and not much of a deterrent to burglary.

This very morning my breakfast was ruined by the sight of the plump, smug features of Ken Clarke on my TV telling us all what a wonderful world it will be when the very latest technology in satellite-monitored bracelets will mean that criminals on so-called Community Service Orders can be closely controlled.  I give the 'latest technology' about three months before the scallywags have found a way round it.

 

 

This is why the Obama election is critical

I have said it before and I shall say it again - well, that's what boring old farts are supposed to do - the defeat of Obama in the next election is critical for the medium term future of the United States.  Not because of any of the hopeless, helpless and hapless policies he might try and shove through, but for one huge, over-riding consideration - if he wins he is likely to choose the next Justice of the Supreme Court.  At the moment, there are four Democrat nominated Justices.  It is generally reckoned that being ideologically driven they vote as a bloc and they vote in favour of anything that increases Federal government power.  The remaining five Justices are republican picks but, in the nature of conservatives, they can differ on matters of ideology and therefore, legal interpretations.

The Washington Times sums it up in a report on the case facing the Court today:

For the past 70 years, liberal-minded justices have taken more uniform views of how far federal power extends while the lines are much more jumbled when it comes to conservative jurisprudence, court watchers say.

Hmmmn!  Let me see, 70 years back, that would take us back to Roosevelt's time -need one say more?!

Virtually everyone agrees that the four Democrat-appointed justices will move to uphold the law. Few doubt that Justices Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, appointed by Mr. Obama, will join Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, appointed by President Clinton, in upholding as constitutional the mandate that individuals obtain medical insurance and the massive Medicaid expansion.

But, in the nature of conservatives, the Republican pick are much less likely to be the slaves of ideology.  Some of them actually remember that they are supposed to use the Constitution as the basis for judging whether an act is legal or not:

But among the five other justices, conservative stalwart Clarence Thomas is the only one viewed as a sure vote against the mandate and possibly other parts of the law.

So court watchers are left scratching their heads over Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. While these four are generally regarded as conservatives, conservative jurisprudence isn’t as ideologically predictable on the issues the case raises.

The matter they are considering is the legality of Obama's much vaunted Health Bill which requires, nay, it orders, American citizens to take out health insurance with private companies.  If the court takes the decision that such an apparent infringement of the rights of the individual is unconstitutional, then Obama's dream boat turns into a Titanic!  Nobody is certain but the odds are on Obama's law squeezing through.

However, that is not my main point.  There are two Justices on the court who have a history of ill health.  One is 'Democrat' and should she die and Obama picks her replacement nothing changes.  However, the other is the Chief Justice, a Republican pick, who has suffered with some sort of seizures from time to time.  Should he die or take early retirement then, assuming he wins the next election,  Obama picks his successor and the Court swings definitely to the Left.  An Obama win with a decidedly Left-wing Supreme Court will inflict lasting damage on the United States.

 

If the not-very-reverend Al Sharpton is involved - it's BS!

'Fun and games' of an exceedingly tricky nature are going on 'over there' following the shooting of a black youth by some sort of semi-official policeman, a sort of community cop, I gather.  I haven't followed the story in great detail because the minute the Rev'd(?) Al Sharpton put in an appearance I knew that it would all degenerate into a PR blizzard in which the truth would end up 'deader than the kid'!  Needless to say, the Great American Public, for whom I am beginning to feel an increasing sense of sympathy, have been wickedly served by their so-called 'free press'.  Here is a prize example, via those watchful critters at IHTM (God bless their smelly socks!), who pointed me to the Riehl World View which ran this story:

Among a few interesting items uncovered in trying to examine the facts behind the shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin without drawing any conclusions, was that a widely viewed photograph of Martin appears to have been altered, somewhat.

Here is the original photo:

Not a good image, is it?  I mean, you would be quite right to avoid going down a dark alley with a 'youf' who looked like that.  However, appearance is not proof of guilt or innocence.  Appearance is just that, appearance, and no more.  However, that was not good enough for the picture editors of the MSM who had to - how shall we put it? - lighten the image up a bit!  This is the picture that appeared in the papers:

Now, that's more like it.  Looks like a proper boy scout, doesn't he?  But, of course, I say and stress again, looks do not prove guilt or innocence.  Or do they?  I mean, why would the MSM go to all that trouble to alter a photo if it wasn't important?  Dan Riehl ends his story with two cryptic sentences:

However, [the confusions in the story] did not stop Barack Obama from weighing in, claiming if he had a son, it would look like Trayvon Martin. That may depend on what photo of him he's seen, of course.

The whole tragic incident is sounding like a plot line from a Tom Wolfe novel.

Dumb and Dumber and Cameron

Honestly, what do they teach them at Eton in return for all those gigantic fees?  Well, obviously not commonsense!  First we had a budget which was a train crash in terms of public relations, or rather, it showed up yet again that in the end public relations jiggery-pokery simply does not work.  They leaked everything they could beforehand, making great play of the likely cut to high earners's income tax and then tried to slip the "granny tax" through in the small print.  From the scribblers' point of view, they had run out of things to say about the leaked topics so they had the time and the inclination after the budget announcement to dig a little deeper for something new.  The result is that the government come out looking like a gang of OAP muggers.

Then we have the Cruddas crash.  According to today's Telegraph (and every other MSM outlet), Cameron has hosted several dinners at No. 10 for the biggest Tory donors.  I see nothing wrong in that, per se, because I suspect that the big donation and the chance to have dinner at No. 10 has far more to do with the wishes of  'Mrs. Moneybags' than it does with her rich husband.  However, keeping it secret and, when found out, refusing to disclose the names, is the equivalent of dousing a fire with a can of petrol!

I understand, of course, that Cameron is a busy man who cannot attend to every detail but he's surrounded by young smarty-pants special advisors who are supposed to pick up on that sort of thing.  All they have to do is ask themselves constantly, if such and such became public knowledge would it be "A Good Thing" or "A Bad Thing".  If the latter, then it is best, Prime Minister, to announce it now because if we're found out later it will become a perfect shit storm!  But then again, Cameron has a history of picking the worst possible advisors as we found out when he chose the ex-editor of the 'Screws of the World' to be his right-hand man - DUH!

The man at the heart of this mini SHLOCK-HORROR story, Peter Cruddas, is an interesting fellow.

According to Wiki he was born and raised in Hackney where he lived on a council estate.  His father worked at Smithfield Market and Peter left school at 15 with precisely nil qualifications.  He put his consequent success down to his membership of the Boy Scouts and the discipline it gave him.  He managed to get a foot in the door working as a trader on various trading floors eventually specialising in foreign exchange.  He started his own company which flourished to the point where he is now a multi-millionaire with houses in London and the south of France.  In a total refutation of the lazy characterisation of the Left that all rich men are bloodsuckers on our society, Cruddas gives away an enormous amount of money to various charities each year.  He should be a Tory poster-boy!

 

Gooday an' good noos from down under!

Well, you have to say it in an Aussie accent to fully appreciate my language skills - oh, alright then, don't bother!  Still, there is some sort of good news from Oz, or at least, one part of it, Queensland to be exact, where the people have just voted in a state-wide election.  I am deeply obliged to 'SadButMadLad', a contributor to Ms. Raccoon's excellent site, who reports that their Labor party (that's how they spell it 'down under there') has just been defeated, well, not exactly defeated, more like routed, massacred, eviscerated, well and truly squidged and anything else you can think of which means annihilated.  Labor, apparently, has been in power in Queensland for around twenty years and now they are no more.  Like Monty Python's famous parrot:

This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

It seems likely that they will fail to reach the bare minimum of 8 seats and that means they will not even count as a proper political party!  Oh, joy unconfined - but!  As the SadButMadLad reminds us, the Oz equivalent of the Tories, which has not so much swept the board as smashed it to smithereens, is made up of more or less the same sort of lying liars and toads as the other lot, so nothing much will change.

Remind you of anywhere, by any chance?

 

Chinese puzzles

This is my first faltering step in the process of educating myself, some might call it 're-education', on the subject of China.  After all, if I can flounder about in American politics and pretend I know something about it, then it is surely time for me to do the same with the second (for the time being) greatest power on the globe.

Earlier this week, the Chinese 'branch' of the internet went 'viral' (I think the expression has it) with rumours of a heavier than normal police presence in Beijing and even reports of tanks entering the city.  This ended abruptly when the Chinese authorities stamped down on the social networks spreading the stories.  According to the WSJ:

Among the legion of social-media fanatics, there has been fevered chatter of a political struggle inside the towering walls of the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in downtown Beijing.

This followed the sacking of a powerful local chief called Bo Xilai.  He had fallen out with his chief of police who then fled to the nearest American consulate to seek political asylum.  Fat chance of that with President 'peace 'n' love, man' Obama in charge and the man was quickly whisked off to Beijing.  Bo, apart from being the Party boss of the Chonqing province, was also a member of the  Politburo of the Communist Party of China; so, a very big cheese, indeed!  He was also a 'princeling', that is, the son of man who had been part of Mao's entourage and who taken part in the Great March.

No doubt there was a falling out over the spoils of corruption which seems to go hand in hand with almost all Chinese government activities.  However, there also appears to be the beginnings of a great political schism which reaches as far as the Central Committee:

One theory, widely explored: A battle is brewing between Zhou Yongkang—the country's domestic security chief who is believed to be a strong supporter of Mr. Bo—and President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao and other leaders who analysts say likely supported Mr. Bo's ouster. Mr. Zhou is a member of the party's all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee, and one of the country's nine most powerful political leaders.

This division is exemplified by Bo's reputation as a Leftist who favoured a return to the Maoist policies of The Great Leap Forward.  The 'China model', so admired by the likes of George Soros and Francis Fukuyama, was instituted after the death of Mao and it has galvanised the Chinese economy.  But now, it is running into real difficulties with a delicate (putting it politely) banking system and a property bubble of eye-watering magnitude.  The era of cheap labour and cheap capital is ending.  Chinese workers want their share of the wealth by means of their wages, and on top of that, the European and American markets which once swallowed anything and everything produced by China have suddenly gone soggy.

This poses a dilemma for the leadership, as described by an admirable article in The Spectator (not on link yet) written by Jonathan Fenby(*):

It can turn left in the direction of even more party control and state power.  That was Bo Xilai's route, which now seems to be blocked.  Or it can veer right by helping private companies which have been squeezed by privileged state enterprises and embarking on a major programme of reform.

In a way this is a prize example of how easy dictatorship is compared to democracy!  As the record shows in the 'liberated' black African nations of the British empire and the current, so-called 'Arab spring', which is almost certainly going to end in a "winter of discontent", it is hugely difficult to change political horses whilst at the gallop.  We, the English, managed it better than anyone before or since but, of course, it took us several hundred years of mostly gentle trotting to pull off the trick.

Hovering over all of these manouvres is the Chinese army.  They are described as being highly nationalistic (so just like everyone else's army, then!) and they are watching these political moves with a beady eye.  The incoming president, Xi Jinping, about whom I wrote a few weeks back, seems to be a highly intelligent man.  I do hope so because he is going to need every ounce of it over the next ten years.

A further report on last week's events can be read at The Washington Times.

(*) Jonathan Fenby is author of a new book on China: Tiger Head, Snake Tails.

'If this be global warming, give me excess of it'!

Yes, yes, I know!  It's been thin pickings round here for the last few days but don't blame me, blame this incredible weather.  Last year we had summer in April and this year it seems to have started in March.  Anyway, long and mostly bitter experience has taught me that if you get a warm snap early in the year it is best to take advantage of it and get stuck into the garden.  If you leave it you can guarantee the next two months will be solid rain at the end of which your garden will only be good for hiring out to the army for jungle warfare training.  Also, there is something about these occasional early sunshine breaks we have completely out of season.  They really do give you the zest for a hop, skip and a jump of energy after the gloom of winter and so, for once, gardening doesn't seem that much of a chore.

Anyway, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!

Also, to be honest, after the bliss of that Romeo and Juliet production (see below) I really haven't had much to say for myself.  The news of the day is stultifying in its tedious, trivial, 'itty-bitty' unimportance.  I am aware, of course, of the dangers of living in exciting times so I am not entirely averse to boring political affairs.  However, there is one subject which I cannot dislodge from the back of my mind - China!  No doubt your eagle eyes have spotted a slight change to the list of categories in my side-bar - er, you did notice didn't you? - because I have inserted a new one under the heading of 'China'.  I do so for the blindingly obvious fact that China is going to dominate the 21st century by which I do not mean that they will impose world domination, they might but they probably will not!  What I mean is that everything they do will have ramifications around the globe and I suspect I am going be writing quite a lot on the subject. There is a big piece in The Spectator this week which I must get round to reading.  Needless to say, my ignorance on China is immense but I hope gradually to rectify that.

Anyway, back to the garden for now but I shall return later today.

 

Well, did you see it? 'Didja'? 'Didja'?

I mean, of course, the 'cinecast' at a cinema near you - where-ever you are in the world - of Romeo and Juliet by The Royal Ballet.  I stress the global nature of it because during the interval they ran on screen some 'Tweets' (I think they are called) from viewers from Prague to Buenes Aires, all watching simultaneously.  If you failed to see it you can take a hundred lines instantly!

I have heard the expression 'fusion art' several times but never quite understood what it meant but now I think I know because this ballet is the perfect form in which several distinct art forms are required to fuse together so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.  Last night, Shakespeare's version of the tale joined hands with Prokofiev's exciting and beautiful music which in turn linked to the genius (I use the word advisedly) of Kenneth MacMillan's choreography, all of which were expressed with almost unbelievable skill and passion by the dancers of  The Royal Ballet to produce, for me, an evening of sublime happiness despite the tragic nature of the story.  The whole thing was - and here I use a word I try to avoid over-using in theatrical events - excellent! 

I have confessed before to my ignorance of all thing balletic but to my untutored ears and eyes there were two revolutionary choreographic creations in the 20th century.  The first was Nijinsky's creation for The Rite of Spring which, along with Stravinsky's music, actually caused a riot at its premiere in 1913.  The second was MacMillan's superb work on this ballet.  Here, the dance serves the story and the characters not the other way round, which is the impression I gain from watching more classical ballets.  Everybody is left gasping by the choreographed (and highly dangerous) sword fights but it is in the intimate dancing that MacMillan's dancing design reaches the heights of emotional drama.  No-one, surely, can watch the balcony pas de deux between Romeo and Juliet without being profoundly moved; and when, in the final scene in the tomb, the dance is reprised but this time with Romeo carrying the supposedly 'dead' body of his young love . . . well, I for one was blinking back the tears.

I cannot, for the reasons stated above, offer any useful critique on the specific abilities of the dancers' techniques except to say that it looked terrific to me, but I can say something useful about their acting skills, and the word that springs to mind is - superb!  I am running out of superlatives so let me just re-use one word in relation to the two principals, Lauren Cuthbertson and Federico Bonelli, again, quite simply - excellent!  In the course of three hours, Ms. Cuthbertson moved, apparently effortlessly, from young girl to womanhood, to married bliss and then to tragic widowhood and suicide.  She was so sublime that you almost wanted to get up and shout , "STOP - please don't go any further!"  Bonelli, apart from his acting and dancing skills had one great advantage as a Romeo - he looked the part.  Tall, handsome, youthful but manly!  Both of them were supported by a terrific company of dancers and musicians.

Just an excellent evening and an experience not to be missed - so if you did miss it, despite my advanced notice of it, then a little peice of your life will forever remain dry and sterile and it serve you right!  Now, if you have children or grand-children to amuse let me tell you that Cineworld are offering La Fille Mal Guarde on May 16th and from the trailer it looks like being terrific fun for all the family.

One last thing, keep an eye on The Royal Ballet website because they must - surely they must - offer a DVD of last night's show and I do urge you all to buy it - but try and watch it on as big a TV screen as you can beg, borrow or steal!

 

Richard North deflates me - again!

Every morning whilst I am swimming - by the by, have I mentioned that every  . . .  oh, right, I'll move on then, shall I? - anyway, as I paddle up and down I mull over various possibilities to write about when I get home.  However, before I write anything I usually skim through my favourite blogs including EU Referendum the blog of Dr. Richard North.  As I have mentioned before, it is a blog only suited to the brave and the hardy because it is rather like stepping into a freezing cold power-shower!  If you are feeling rather pleased with yourself and the world, believe me, Dr. North will blast the feeling away within seconds.  But my complaint is not against the icy winds of realism that whistle around his blog, it is against the number of times he has pre-empted my thoughts.  Is he a mind-reader?  If so, I'm thinking of sending him an invoice - unless, and this has only just occurred, perhaps it is a case of 'great minds with but a single thought'.  Yes, that's more like it!

Anyway, I have  become more and more irritable because for the last two days (and for the next two, as well) I have been unable to watch or listen to the news because it is filled with nothing but vacuous ramblings about what's in, what's out, what's up, what's down, in the farce which we still continue to call our 'Budget Day'.  Driving back from the pool, and switching radio stations to avoid the aimless budgetary chatter, I determined to write a really cranky piece about what a complete waste of oxygen it all was but then, clicking on EU Referendum, I see that Richard North has already done it and, bugger it, done it much better than me.  So I might as well quote him:

Today, I am told, is Budget Day, when the preposterous George Osborne is going to tell us how our administration is going to screw us this year. There will be some changes around the margins, and some people might end up being slightly less screwed than they have been, while others will suffer more.

As such, the actual budget speech has largely become a media event, missing from which will be any serious indication that Osborne and his merry little men have any grip at all on our public finances. And those who need an illustration of this need look no further than the Proverbs 26:11 type situation with carbon capture, where £1 billion of our money is poised to make its final nose-dive to oblivion.

For you ignoramuses, er, like me, unable to remember quite what words of wisdom were written in Proverbs 26.11, allow me to inform you and suggest that they are entirely appropriate:

As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.

Dr. North finishes his post, and believe me it is by no means the most severe I have read, thus:

Such is the nature of the media circus, though, and the triviality of its coverage – together with the administration's ability to set the agenda – that the news headlines today (and tomorrow) will be dominated by budget fluff, while our wealth pours down the drain virtually unrecorded.

And, hard though it is to believe, very few people will even notice, preferring as they do the soap opera to the cold wind of reality.

See what I mean?  Er, about Richard North, that is, as well as the useless MSM dancing to the tune of the government's puppet-masters.
 
Now, my problem is, what the hell do I write about next?

 

Chicago politics makes a midden attractive

In a post down below I asked a question.  Given that everyone and his uncle knows that the Chicago Democrat party is rotten from the nasty little thug, Rahm Emanuel, who sits in the mayoral chair, which I hope he wiped before he did so given the A1 shits who have sat there before him, down to the street-level, so-called 'organisers', why do they go on electing them? 

Should you doubt their inherent malignancy consider, if you can stomach it, the less than distinguished Democrat State Representative Derick Smith, seen here courtesy of Sun-Times Media, being arraigned on a charge of accepting a bribe.

State representative Derrick Smith leaves the Federal Building after his arraignment Tuesday March 13, 2012. Federal agents arrested Smith today on a federal bribery charge for allegedly accepting a $7,000 cash bribe to write an official letter of support for a daycare center that he believed was seeking a state grant, federal authorities announced. The 48-year-old Smith, who represents the 10th District on the West Side, was charged with one count of accepting a bribe. | TOM CRUZE~Sun-Times Media

Well, so far, so Chicago, move along, folks, nothing special to see here!  But, hang on!  The wretched man is due to face his voters in an election next Tuesday and his opponent is a Republican who for some reason, probably to confuse people, has just switched parties.  What is the re-action of the Democrat party under the inspired leadership of Gov. Pat Quinn and Mayor Rahm Emanuel (formerly Obama's consigliore) to this embarrassing arrest?  Simple, the local Democrats held a rally and urged the electorate - to vote for the crook!  Their explanation for this extraordinary action was that it was better to have a crook in office than a Republican!  And even more depressing, should you be unfortunate enough to live in Chicago, they probably will!

Incidentally, if you would like to read a personal account based on experience of Chicago politics in action, read the comment from 'Umbongo' in the comment thread to my earlier post.

 

A delicious French casserole!

There's all the relish you could ever desire in the political casserole bubling away nicely 'just over there'.  First of all, you can breath in the delicous odour of sour grapes because the 'Kaiserin' has taken the hump at the Hungarian dwarf changing his mind about her sharing his electoral platform - never trust a smooth-talking Frenchman, dear!  Sarkozy suddenly realised, what even a political idiot like me could have told him, that the French people would never take to a German Chancellor interfering in their election.  According to Der Spiegel:

Last Wednesday, he made his change in campaign strategy public when he said in a radio interview: "The election campaign is a matter for the French people."

By then, Merkel had already heard he was turning down her help, and she complained to confidants about the Frenchman's erratic behavior. A few days later, she took Sarkozy aside during the EU summit in Brussels at the beginning of March and asked him what was going on. He agreed to hold at least one joint appearance with her.

But sources say that Merkel would now no longer be unhappy if she didn't have to travel to France before the election, because she wants to avoid being associated with Sarkozy's recent right-wing populist statements about foreigners.

Oh dear, isn't it awful when dear friends fall out?  You need 'a heart of stone not to fall over laughing'! 

But poor little Sarkozy has mounting problems to surmount in his fight for re-election.  According to the WSJ, he is facing pressure form the Left, the Right and the Centre!  Marine le Pen, leader of the hard Right, is pushing for protectionist policies and abandoning the euro!  She has 16% of the poll numbers so far and Sarkozy must hope, because there is no certainty, that most them will come to him in the final run off election.  However, observers believe that about one third of the Centre candidate's votes, currently 13%, are likely to switch Left rather than Right in the final showdown.

On the Left there is an even greater threat.  François Hollande, a socialist Left-winger already fairly far to the Left is coming under pressure from the 'nutcase wing':

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who leads a hard-left coalition that includes the once-moribund French Communist Party, is gaining traction with calls to reject austerity measures springing from Europe's sovereign debt crisis through "civic uprising."

Mélenchon's hard Left policy proposals has increased his poll numbers :

Mr. Mélenchon's rise in polls—he is now credited with as much as 11% of the vote, compared with half that level two months ago—has forced Mr. Hollande to veer to the left ahead of the April 22 election. In the same poll, Mr. Hollande came in at 27% and Mr. Sarkozy 27.5%.

This pressure from the hard Left has caused Hollande to come out with some very extreme proposals of his own:

In recent weeks, Mr. Hollande has proposed increasing the top income-tax bracket to 75% from 41% for people earning more than €1 million ($1.3 million) a year, and forcing French banks to exit tax havens.

Of course, Sarkozy will hope that with the extremes pushing ever further Right and Left he will be able to march triumphantly through the centre.  However, he needs to beware because politics is not formed in a straight line but in a circle where extreme Left and extreme Right join hands:

"The National Front and the Left Front are after the same voters," said Stefan Collignon, a professor at Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. "In the past weeks, Mr. Mélenchon is the one who has been on the rise."

Mr. Mélenchon's growing appeal to French voters was witnessed by the success of an electoral rally in Paris on Sunday. Tens of thousands of people marched through the city and gathered at Bastille square to listen to his speech.

In the meantime, the 'Kaiserin' sulks in her bunker!

 

What you get in the most gun-restricted city in America ...

. . . are lots and lots of gun-shot murder victims.  Like last Saturday night/Sunday morning, for example, as reported by the Chicago Tribune:

Five people were killed and at least 12 other people wounded in shootings Saturday night and Sunday morning across the city. 

Well, as dear old Frankie told us so memorably:

On State Street, that great street I just wanna say
They do things they don't do on Broadway

Things like:

Police were questioning two suspects after Deering District officers were able to chase down the occupants of a car who fired on three people, killing a 24-year-old man, about 1:50 a.m. on the 5300 block of South Loomis Boulevard in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. The 24-year-old who died was shot multiple times and taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was declared dead.

It is worth noting that back in the '30s the "Back of the Yards" district was 'organised' by that ultra-Marxist 'organiser', Saul Alinsky, a role-model hero to that later Chicagoan 'organiser, 'Comrade' Obama!  But let us continue our lively tour of Chicago, er, hotspots that flourish under a regime that resolutely refuses to allow its own citizens the means to defend themselves:

The evening attacks follow the fatal shooting of a 6-year-old girl and the wounding of four other people in Chicago within an hour Saturday afternoon, and 16 shootings, including the slaying of a 42-year-old man, overnight Friday and early Saturday morning. [...]

A 36-year-old man was killed on the 7500 block of South Wolcott Avenue in the Gresham neighborhood about 1:20 a.m., police said. He was at a party on the block, in a back yard, when someone drove by and opened fire, police said. [...]

A 24-year-old man was found dead in a car at the University of Chicago Medical Center about 10:30 p.m., according to authorities. He's believed to have been shot in the back in the 6300 block of South Ellis Avenue in the Woodlawn neighborhood

And so, on and on ad nauseum.  Even the WaPo in an editorial recognises the wickedness of a situation in which the hoodlums can carry guns and the private citizen cannot:

Illinois has the worst gun laws of any state. Only police officers and the taxpayer-funded bodyguards for ex-Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley have the right to carry a handgun outside their homes. Everyone else is out of luck.

And it's not as though the evidence isn't all around them:

[S]tates with generous concealed-carry provisions are safe places to be. The wild-west shootouts that the gun grabbers predicted have never materialized. In the 23 years since Florida began allowing concealed carry, 1,976,774 permits have been issued. A mere 0.008 percent of permit holders have been nabbed for using a gun in the commission of a crime. As gun ownership soars to an all-time high, the crime rate continues to plunge.

My only question, which is not solely directed at my e-pal, regular commenter and proud Chicagoan, Hank, is why on earth do the people of Chicago keep voting these corrupt jerks into office?  And whilst I hardly dare raise a whisper of criticism against the greatest singer of them all, I really don't think Frankie told the whole story:

Bet your bottom dollar
You'll lose the blues In Chicago

I suspect you stand to lose a lot more than just the blues on a Saturday night in Chicago!

 

I just don't know what London's coming to!

What in hell's name is going on in our capital city?  I ask because of this report of an incident near the churchyard of St. Paul's:

"Suddenly there is a great commotion near the market.  'Repent, England!' yells a man at the top of his voice.  He is dressed in black, handingout printed leaflets as he stridea along. 'Repent!' he shouts again and again, 'Christ Jesus is come with his fan in his hand to judge the earth!'  This man is no mean fool; he is a prosperous London citizen, Mr. Edmund Coppinger.  Another gentleman, also dressed in black, is following him, striding down the alley called Old Chamge in Cheapside.  He too calls out, declaring that 'Judgment Day has come upon us all!  Men will rise up and kill each other as butchers do swine, for the Lord Jesus has risen'.  The printed bills they hand out declare that they are intent on a complete reformation of the Church of England."

Well, I know the Archbishop of Canterbury has just handed in his notice and that there is likely to be a fierce competition for the job but this is going too far:

"For the illiterate majority in the crowd, they call out their message: 'The bishops must be put down!  All clergymen should be equal!  Queen Elizabeth has forfeited her crown and is worthy to be deprived of her kingdom.  Jesus Christ has come again.  The reborn Messiah is even now in London in the form of William Hacket.  Every man and woman should acknowledge him as a divine being and lord of all Christendom.'"

Of course, the whole thing is a con trick in the worst possible taste and everyone knows where these tricksters live so even the London 'plod' can find them and they are soon arrested.  From now on you will realise, in the unlikely event that you have not already guessed, that this is the London of yesteryear.  So you will not be surprised to discover that, instead of being given as is the process today, the services of a barrister free of charge, the ministrations of a psychiatrist, the tender care of a trauma counsellor and the possibility (at the most) of four weeks community service, they are charged with high treason and sentenced to death.  On 28th July [1591], Hacket is:

 "dragged on a hurdle to the gallows, hanged whilst he spits abuse at the hangman, then cut down and beheaded and butchered in the traditional manner, his headless body being cut into four parts, each with a limb attached.  Mr. Coppinger dies in prison: the authorities claim he starved himself to death. ['Yeah, yeah, sort of like, well, he fell down the prison stairs trying to escape, know wot I mean, m' Lud?']  Mr. Arthington enlists the support of powerful friends on the privy council and thereby saves his life, publishing his renunciation of all the things he has said as part of his penance."

All of this is to be found on the first two pages of the Introduction to Ian Mortimer's absolutely marvellous book, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England.  Er, actually, I have only read the first two pages before I rushed upstairs to tell you lot all about it so I really have no solid grounds for telling you that it is a terrific book - but it is - so there!  Go buy it - now!

 

The Foxconn con: ever been had?

Remember the Foxconn/Apple factory SHLOCK-HORROR! story of yesterday, or was it the day before, or perhaps a week ago - well, a week is a long time in the news cycle as well as politics?  Anyway, it was all about some Chinese factory crammed to its bursting seams with poor, il-nourished, sick, under-aged, old-aged, single black one parent lesbian cripples oh, no, not them, but the rest and there were simply zillions of them, and were all being treated despicably by their employers as they sweated for pennies, 15 hours a day with only 30-second toilet breaks once a day as they assembled I-Pods or Pads or whatever and other techie thingies for those ghastly Yankee capitalists.

 Good story, well, good if you like SHLOCK-HORROR! headlines but not so good if it all turns out to be total BLX.  The main sucker news organisation who reported the story have now been forced to recant the whole thing.  The original fantasy came from some Leftie actor/polemicist called Mike Daisey who had used it as part of his performance.

Picture courtesy of The Guardian

It all goes to show, yet again, that you must not ever believe anything reported by the MSM unless and until it is verified by Duff & Nonsense, High Class Purveyors of Beauty and Truth to the Gentry since 2007!  I am obliged to 'M' Lord Bishop Hill' for once again pointing me to the Way of Truth.

 

The Battle of Britain

My e-pal, Dr. Richard North, has just published a book whose content, I guess because I haven't read it yet, is neatly summarised by its title: The Many Not the Few: The Stolen History of the Battle of Britain.  In it, I think, he attempts in his usual iconoclastic fashion to dismantle many of the myths that surround that particular bit of our history.  Alas, my guess is that his labours will eventually be filed under 'Gallant but Futile Effort' for I fear that nothing is so strong as the myths that swell our national pride.  Not, mind you, that everything our country did in WWII was myth because there was much that was deserved of the very highest praise and which should be set in the scales of historical judgment against that of which we should be ashamed.

However, it reminded me of the very excellent library of photos covering the whole of WWII which is available courtesy of The Atlantic.  I have published some of them and I needed a reminder that it was time for more.  These examples come from The Battle of Britain section.

This brings back memories although I cannot remember practicing this at my infant school.  However, the mother of the wonderful family who took me in as an evacuee from blitzed London used to make us sit under the kitchen table when the sirens went off.  Quite howmuch protection that would have afforded I did not ask at the time!

This might have been a safer haven but were it taking place today, with my incipient claustrophobia I think I might take my chances with the bombs!

On the other hand, I suppose I might have got over my claustrophobia!

And whatever, darlings, the show must go on, as these Windmill girls demonstrate.

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

'Don't worry, Gordon, I have your back . . .'

. . . and I've just stuck a bloody great dagger in it!'  Thus spake that epitome of loyalty and friendship, the Right Honourable Despicable Ed Balls MP!  Not exactly those words, of course, but see if you can spot any difference in meaning:

The quotation that gives the interview its headline is an eye-opener, coming as it does from Ed Balls. ‘Nobody is going to look back at any point in history,’ he says, ‘and say that Gordon Brown was a great Prime Minister.

This quote taken from Peter Hoskins's post at The Coffee House and is based on an interview conducted by The Times with Ed Balls.  What an utter and despicable little shit he is!

ADDITIONAL:  At the request of my regular commenter, DM, here is a picture, courtesy of The Mail, of 'überstormfuhrer' Balls practicing for the future in his university days.  I am led to believe that he was singing "Tomorrow belongs to me":

 

Dammit! Now the Germans are doing 'irony'!

Isn't it enough that the Germans regularly out-produce us, out-design us, out-sell us and embarrass us at our national game of football?  Must they now destroy our much-loved notion that they have no sense of humour and that like all foreigners they don't understand irony?  It's really too much when one of them produces an essay on 'Greenery' that had me chortling and chuckling as the irony positively dripped from every paragraph.  I blame Alexander Neubacher at Der Spiegel.  I am about to paraphrase him in my usual sneak-thief fashion and, honestly, you would do much better to pop over and read the whole thing - simply too, too delicious!

He begins by writing German rubbish - no, that's not quite right - he's writing about German rubbish, in particular, the utterly brain-dead stupidity of the 'Greenie' madness that controls it - as it does here!  To give but one example, amongst the plethora of different coloured bins into which 'free citizens' are forced to segregate their rubbish is one for plastic.  This is duly sent to the re-cyclers who dutifully recycle exactly 35% - and then incinerate the rest!

Herr Neubacher also tells of the non-stop agit-prop  indoctrination government advice that is aimed at everyone but especially the young in order to get people to use less and less water.  It has worked.  German water consumption has fallen enormously.  And the result is an equally enormous stink because now there is not enough waste water flowing through the sewers to clear, er, the waste!  I think even we know the dangers of the new 'Green' lightbulbs.  Being very exact, as they are in Germany, they conducted a test in which a bulb was smashed inside a room and the mecury level measued 5 minutes and then 5 hours after the event.  In both cases the levels of this highly toxic element were above limits especially for children and pregnant women.  Needless to say, these 'eco-friendly' bulbs are so hazardous that it required the design of a special machine to suck out the dangerous mercury which then has to be packed in special containers and buried in a mountain - thus providing future Germans with another problem!  God knows what happens over here.  I suppose they could dump it all in Liverpool and they'd all turn green but no-one would either notice or care!

Finally, he describes the unforseen ignored problems which have beset old buildings which have been lined, inside and out, with thermal insulation and which are now erupting in mould and damp patches.  Herr Neubacher finishes on a surprisingly mild note:

People who shop in organic grocery stores, eat a vegan diet or drive an electric car are free to do so. But this should not give them the right to lecture others on the environmentally correct way to live their lives. Things are sometimes more complicated than they seem at first glance.

Yes, yes, Neubacher, that's all very well and good but remember your heritage!  Just take every third 'Greenie' outside and shoot him!  That will soon solve your problems.

 

Rape stats and tractor stats!

I have just caught a news item on Sky News telling us all, yawn, that yet another 'survey', bigger yawn, has concluded that 10% of women are raped, a jaw-breaker yawn!  This total waste of oxygen and effort comes to us via the good offices of some outfit calling itself Mumsnet - yeeees, quite!  I suppose I had better make clear immediately, before a flock of harridans attacks me, that my sympathy for women who have genuinely been raped in the old-fashioned sense of the word, that is, sexually assaulted against their will with violence or the threat of violence, is considerable.  I use that word rather than total because I suspect that in some rape cases, even under my definition, there are complicated circumstances which would give one pause for thought.

However, I tend to treat these never-ending 'surveys' of rape stats with the same degree of scepticism as I treat similar 'surveys' in the, er, raunchier types of men's magazines which aim to tell us how many women the average man has slept with before the age of 40.  The fact of the matter is that we all know, do we not, chaps?, that the only certainty is that men always, but always, lie about their sexual prowess.  Also, I am not at all sure what Mumsnet defines as rape and sexual assault.  I suspect that if they actually have a definition it is rather loose, in fact so loose that it is possible that 'back in the day' my furtive fumblings might have made me guilty, too, m'Lud! 

IRONY ALERT!  And this one is delicious.  Further doubts might arise from the Mumsnet survey when The Daily Mail reports the following:

[T]he founders of Mumsnet are facing a rather delicate problem after their well-educated members began using the parenting website to exchange information on rather spicier activities.

Justine Roberts and Carrie Longton have been forced to delete dozens of highly explicit messages posted on the discussion boards after they were deemed pornographic.

But many of the explicit online conversations between the middle- class mothers remain, with new messages being posted daily. Editors at Mumsnet's headquarters in Kentish Town, North London, appear to have abandoned efforts to stop many of the X-rated discussions.

By Jove, a jolly lot these Mumsnet gals, what?  Ding-dong!

Needless to say, all these so-called 'surveys', far from clarifying a problem simply obfuscate it.  It is significant that the ladies of Mumsnet describe their 'survey' as "Our new campaign"!  (My emphasis) Oh, I see, just another bunch of axe-grinders, then.  And theyhave given their 'campaign' a rather twee name - "We Believe You" - which means in my book that you can safely reduce their figures by 90%.

 

It ain't over 'til the fat Italian lady storms off!

In keeping with the strong traditions of this blog, the only news worth printing is that which is at least two weeks old!  Thus it is that I ruin your Saturday morning by re-introducing the topic guaranteed to bring about groans and headaches.  Yes, people, the European non-Union!

Thought it had all gone away, did you?  All settled and sorted by that nice little hausfrau in Berlin?  All the naughty little Euro kinde sent to bed without any supper until they have learned how to behave?  No way, José!  A couple of weeks ago the new Spanish prime minister simply told the EU Commission to: meter la nariz en el culo de un oso muerto!  I am assured by Google Translate that this is the correct translation of an old Australian saying: stick your nose up a dead bear's bum!  You may wonder why I feel the need to insert an Australian saying into this European post but my regular - my only? - Australian reader, Andra, feels there is too much "kultur" and she needs something to make her feel at home.  One does not lightly disregard the feelings of Andra!  Where was I?  Oh yes, España - long may she, er, viva, and all that sort of thing, because she has told the EU appatchiks that she has no intention of following their budgetry diktats and intends to set her own economic course and targets.  The Spanish, I suspect, are probably the most nationalistic of all Eurpean nations.  Stuck out into the Atlantic on their peninsular behind the massive Pyrenees, the Spanish have developed a strong sense of their own being, not unlike the English on their Island.  (More of the geo-politcs we discussed earlier.) 

Things are quiet on the European front for the moment, not, I suspect, because anything has been solved but simply because of the exhaustion of all concerned.  However, Spring has sprung and shortly the temperature will rise.  The Greeks have an election pending and by all the accounts I have read the result will be a Greek dog's dinner with the main parties brought to their knees and a host - a rabble? - of tiny extremist parties elected whose support will be required for anyone to form a government.  A weakened Greek government, of course, plays into the hands of the EU Commissars but will do so only for a time.  Eventually the anger and frustration of the Greek people will find other outlets and then the real trouble will begin.

The Spanish, of course, are in a different position.  They have just completed their election and they have a new prime minister who knows that standing up to and even defying the Eurocrats makes him even more popular with his people.  But still I wait, patiently, for the fat Italian lady to throw a wobbly!  I have maintained for some time that the key as to whether or not the EU shatters lies in Rome.  The Italian economy, even with their 'Grecian abilities' in creative accounting, is still very large and any threat to it will set off alarums in Berlin-Brussels.

So for the moment we have the equivalent of the Christmas truce in 1914 but it will not last and soon the economic guns will begin their rumble.

 

Talking of cinema, don't forget the ballet!

I was waxing enthusiastic down there somewhere on the subject of the latest film at my Cineworld and it reminds me to remind you that next Thursday 27th there is a 'cinecast' (I think they call it), anyway, a live filmed performance of Romeo and Juliet with music by Prokofiev and choreography by Kenneth MacMillan.  Do not miss it!  I am not a particular fan of ballet although my admiration for the skill, stamina and artistry of the dancers is second to none.  For me, however, first and foremost, the music has to be superb and in this case, Prokofiev is at his very best.  Second, it has to tell a story and the dancing must be part of the story telling, just in the way that actors as they move in and on and around a stage help, by their movements, to underline the movement of the plot.  I am always intensely irritated by traditional ballet in which the action stops every so often so that the principal dancers can then do their 'showpiece' routine.  MacMillan's choreography always illuminates the story and the spirit of each scene.  I will go this far - given a choice I would rather watch this version of R&J than a stage version by the RSC.

These 'cinecasts' are absolutely superb.  You really do feel as though you are in the theatre with the performers.  If you check the schedule for Cineworld you will have a choice of the very best of theatre, opera or ballet productions, and even if I hate Cineworld with a passion, I am minded to forgive them for these 'cinecasts'.

 ADDITIONAL:  Yet more cinema!  Thanks to those rascals at I Hate The Media, I am reminded that yesterday was the 40th anniversary of one of the very best films ever made - The Godfather.  Pop over to their place and you can watch a short clip.  (Note to self: must buy the DVD!)

What chance do we stand when even backbenchers are screwed?

John Redwood MP brings to light one of those obscure governmental manouvres which rarely hit the headlines, or even a brief mention, in the MSM.  After the swinish behaviour of MPs a few years back had reduced parliament to an even lower regard in the public eye, a change to procedure was made in which a backbench committee - the (House of Commons) Business Committee - was set up and given the right to introduce debates on any subject  of their choosing on one day a week.  This committee was freely elected by all members of the House:

Several of the Backbench debates have highlighted important issues that would otherwise have been ignored or played down – the European Court of Human Rights, the Hillsborough disaster and the plight of circus animals were other examples.

Needless to say, none of the party hierarchies liked this arrangement and so now the government, part of which, I would remind you, is made up of so-called Liberal-Democrats(!), has forced through, using the weight of their payroll vote, a change to procedures so that in future members will be elected on a party basis, that is, Labour will vote for Labour members only, and so on.  Thus, the party managers think they will be able to exert greater control over what the committee decides in future.

It is only a small matter, no more important, I suppose, than a dog turd on the pavement, but it is an indicator of the shit that still sticks to everything and everyone in the Westminster sewer!

 

A Panetta panic

My headline is a dreadful slur on Mr. Panetta, the Americana Sec. of Defence, who almost certainly knew nothing of the decision taken, so to speak, in his name.  He has just visited his troops in Afghanistan and was due to address two hundred US marines.  However, according to World News, some-one gave the order that the marines should be disarmed.  Of course, a spokesman bluffed and blustered that it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that a US marine had recently run amok and slaughtered several Afghani families:

"You've got one of the most important people in the world in the room," Maj. Gen. Mark Gurganus told reporters at Camp Leatherneck, dismissing concerns related to the shooting. "This is not a big deal."

He said he had given the order because the two dozen Afghan soldiers also there were unarmed and he did not want to treat them differently.

Not too bright, Gen. Gurganus, who could have detailed two senior marines to watch the Afghanis and be prepared to shoot them if they made a move.  I couldn't help thinking of the grumpy face Her Maj might have pulled if some general ordered the Guards to leave their rifles back in barracks.  And Prince Phil's comments would have been unprintable!

My thanks to IHTM.

 

A 'romcom' for wrinklies!

I, along with several hundred other wrinklies, went along to the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel last night. It was as excellent as the reviews have indicated.  The main protaganists are played by seven of the very best British troupers around today and they did their stuff with what looked like, deceptively, effortless ease.  However, it was a pleasure to see young Dev Patel more than hold his own in that celebrated company.  He is a very good actor and I was interested to read that, being British born and raised, he had to take coaching lessons in order to perfect the Anglo-Indian accent needed for the role.  The film was a delight although I expect the social realists amongst us (or, ' The Glums', as I think of them) would sneer at the romantic veneer which covers the whole film.  Actually, there are one or two black threads running through the story which is good because all comedies need them.  Despite the sheer hell that is your average Cineworld complex - why do they raise the sound volumes for the utterly useless adverts which leave you wondering what the hell they are advertising? - you really do need to see it on a big screen in order to get the feel of the Indian street scenes - a sort of living, throbbing, pandemonium proof of chaos theory.  Don't miss it!

 

It's always the little things that tell you so much

The NYT had an article last week on a tiny 'incident' which occurred in Israel.  Their Supreme Court was bidding farewell to a retiring judge and at the end of proceedings the Israeli national anthem was sung.  However, one judge, a Christian Israeli Arab by birth, stood respectfully still but failed to sing the words.  I gather that, like most national anthems, it goes somewhat overboard, in this case, on the ardent dream of Jews to return to 'The Homeland'.

Anyway, cue the usual hoo-ha-ha from the usual quarters.  The 'Rightists demanded that he be removed and that a new law should be passed making past service in the Israeli Defence Force a requirement for any new judge on the Supreme Court.  The Leftists, needless to say, took the line that the man himself, as an Arab, was simply a fig-leaf designed to cover the real lack of democracy in Israel.  (Why is it, I ask myself yet again, that the Left always believe utterly and completely that they, and only they, are the ones who can see the real truth of any situation?  For a group which seems to be eternally wrong about everything it is quite remarkable!)  According to the writer, most Israelis think that the Arab Justice, standing respectfully but not joining in with the words, was entirely right and proper and understandable.  One wonders how a reverse case in, say, Iran would have owrked out?

 

"Coriolanus" by William Shakespeare

This post is provoked by the release of Ralph Fiennes's film version of Shakespeare's Coriolanus.  No, I haven't seen it because it has only opened 'over there' and has yet to appear 'over here' but not seeing something is no bar to me pontificating remarking on the subject.  I have never acted in or worked upon this play but it is one of my favourites.  James Bowman at The American Spectator has seen the film and his review is available.  I will confine my opinions to the play itself.

For those unfamiliar with it let me explain that it features one of Shakespeare's many 'Tragic Heroes' and it is important to understand this theatrical device upon which WS relied in plays like Othello, Lear, Anthony & Cleopatra and so on.  The idea is as old as ancient Greece and is based upon the notion of a flawed hero.  A 'great man', a leader of men, capable of inspiring love and devotion through his personal courage and virtue - but!  Ah, yes, the 'but'!  Through these men runs a fault line, sometimes more than one, and then "events, dear boy, events" play upon those weaknesses and ultimately destroy them.  So it is with Coriolanus.  He is a young man, an aristocrat, in ancient Rome where class divisions run deep - well, where do they not?  He is immensely brave on the battlefield, and immensely proud off it.  He despises the plebs particularly when they appear en masse in the form of a mob. It is difficult when analysing WS's plays to avoid the conclusion that Shakespeare, himself, detested and distrusted mobs of which he must have observed some from time to time in London.  However, in this play his hero has yet another fault line running through him - anger.  He simply cannot restrain it.

I would suggest that his other fault, if fault it be, is honesty.  Coriolanus simply finds it excruciatingly difficult to be anything other than honest and if that means brutal honesty, then so be it.  Needless to say, the other characters in the play, just like us, praise honesty as a virtue - up until the time someone tells them, and us, some home truths!  Suddenly, truth is downright uncomfortable and unwanted and the anger and resentment it provokes is unleashed on the truth-teller.  So it is with Coriolanus.

Like all of the great Shakespearean 'Tragic Heroes', Coriolanus is very difficult to pull off successfully.  Unlike Lear where at least you have the manifest hardships he suffers to help swing an audience round to sympathy, in Coriolanus it is mostly the arrogant, proud and angry young man that you remember and his virtues can easily be missed.  Even so, it is a great play and I do hope that Fiennes has pulled it off.

 

 

Bats in the belfry? No, the windfarm actually!

'M' Lord Bishop Hill' points to yet another problem facing the 'Greenie' madness that are wind-turbines which is their habit of slaughtering birds wholesale.  That problem, of course, is above and beyond the fact that they never work if the wind is too weak ,or too strong, and they all need good, old-fashioned power stations to kick in when they stand there, as they frequently do, utterly useless and unmoving.  Now, however, there is another problem.  It looks as though they will have to be switched off at night because it is reported from America and Europe that they are killing night-flying bats, as well.

'M' Lord Bishop' points out that even building a wind-turbine might be an offence:

According to this document:

...throughout Europe high-flying bat species are most frequently killed and most fatalaties are of the Nyctalus and Pipistrellus spp.

These two subspecies are both found here in the UK, where they are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, along with all other kinds of bat. The legislation makes it a crime to:

1. Deliberately capture, injure or kill a bat
2. Intentionally or recklessly disturb a bat in its roost or deliberately disturb a group of bats

It is interesting to wonder if building a windfarm, in the full knowledge that it will kill bats, counts as "deliberate". No doubt there are legal precedents here. If it does then no doubt windfarms across the UK will be closing down at dusk, at least during the warmer months of the year.

So, if the authorities fail to nail the Lesbian-straightener for perverting the course of justice, perhaps we can get him for murdering poor, little bats!

 

Nah, it's yer Jesus gene wot does it!

Some more 'idle thoughts of an idle fellow' on the subject of the previous post because it is one of those topics which is inherently fascinating, well, it is to me, at any rate.  First, I think poor Ms. Chiao deserves a slight apology because, of course, her hard work was being paraphrased for a national news-sheet and was then further paraphrased by an ignorant oik like me, so the chances of her being misreported are high, certainly higher than the notion that a particular gene makes one race act differently from another.  Should a learned geneticist stumble into these columns by mistake I'm sure he or she will correct me but as I understand it, no single gene causes something else.  It requires other elements (genetic or bi0-chemical) to act with it and that combination is not a 'given', it is only a possibility, maybe a probabality, or perhaps it is merely a tendency.  We need to keep reminding ourselves that actually God does appear to play with dice despite what 'our Albert' said!

Even so, given a range of possible behaviours from 'a' to 'z' there seems to be a tendency for one group, be it racial or national, to choose one set of possibilities rather than another.  I stress "there seems to be" because, as I indicated in my previous post, one must be constantly aware that some of this perception is in the eye of the beholder, or even worse, it is simply an oft-repeated piece of folk-law which does not bear scrutiny. 

Despite that I can give you one example to which I have alluded before on this blog because I do think it is very solidly founded in historical fact, and also because it is a subject which I have studied at some length.  I refer to the North German 'tendency' to aggression.  This goes way back to the primitive tribes whose ferocity was legend.  Even the mighty Roman Empire drew a line at the Rhine and the Danube and, by and large, refused to cross over into what they considered to be an ungovernable hell-hole - the Afghanistan of their day!  The best explanation for this trait lies in geo-politics rather than genetics.  The plains of North Germany are flat and possess very little in the way of natural defensive barriers.  Consequently, they early tribes learned the advantage of 'getting your retaliation in first'!  It would be simplistic (the sort of thing you expect here at D&N!) to suggest that this idea of attack being the best form of defence was always and forever an automatic response from the North Germans, however, there is a considerable historical record covering their development from tribes into a nation state (Prussia) to support the notion that they attacked aggressively more often than defended placidly.  Von Scharnhorst in the early 19th century expressed it exactly, “Prussia should never conduct a defensive war, her geographical position and her lack of natural and artificial means of defence do not allow that option.”  Of course, their behaviour might be induced by genetics but my bet is on geography!

However, even geography is not the final arbiter because over the lat 300 years our sense of geography has been altered radically and those changes in perception have speeded up dramatically in the past 50 years with satellite observation, intercontinental air services and all the paraphenalia of this modern age.  Today, we are all looking at ourselves in a totally different geographical context from that of our predecessors of even just 4 or 5 generations ago.  What happens in Iran really does matter to us here in Britain with an immediacy not felt before!  So as circumstances alter so too will behaviour, or at least, it ought to because failure to change usually results in destruction.

Returning (at long last) to the sorts of differences that obviously fascinated Ms.Chiao and her colleagues, I would offer up a different explanation.  I will call it, only slightly joking, the Jesus gene!  The pathetic little runts who constitute what they like to call 'the revolutionary class' of today and who defiled the grounds of St. Paul's cathedral in London recently, seem to have forgotten that Jesus Christ, whoever and whatever he might have been in the spiritual sense, was far and away the greatest revolutionary in history.  I am still amazed that in a mere 300 years his teachings had toppled the ancient religions from their primacy to the point where the Roman emperor himself converted.  I would suggest that not the least of his revolutionary teachings was that all men, from kings to commoners, were equal before the eyes of God.  Suddenly, kings were no longer to be worshiped, only God.  It was only necessary to 'render unto Caesar what is Caesar's', the remainder is God's.  The knights and barons at Runnymede took the revolution a step further by ensuring that henceforth the laws of the land governed kings as well as subjects - and that reallywas revolutionary.

The Chinese (to use one example) did not have the benefit of Christianity until the late 19th century.  Until  then all power rested with whatever emperor or war-lord ruled.  There was no private space for Chinese individuals as there was for practicing Christians in Europe and without that there was no chance of change.  Today in China, I would suggest, there is a new factor which will definitely alter things forever and that is private wealth based on capitalism.  Today, the Chinese have their 'private place', it is their homes which they have bought and paid for.  There is nothing like private property as a baulk against over-mighty government.  Hence, changes will occur in Chinese behaviour and I don't suppose they will be that different from western Europe.

 

It's all in yer serotonin transporter gene, innit!

I don't quite know what to make of Joan Chiao, from the department of psychology at Northwestern University.  As far as I am concerned anyone from a psychology department anywhere must have a beard and constantly play with a yo-yo as they babble mostly nonsense.  Ms. Chiao being a female of the species might find the beard bit tricky!  On the other hand, I am full of admiration for the lady in publishing in an American university a piece of research that is blatantly racist.  How she has escaped tarring and feathering by the ever-vigilant 'thought police' and 'language commissars' , I do not know.  Anyway, according to The Mail, she and her colleagues have been investigating cultural sterotypes (SHLOCK-HORROR - don't tell the 'Graun'!) and they have paid particular attention to the differences between "British individualism and Chinese conformity".  Actually, I suspect the "British" slant is emphasised by The Mail because, well, because it's The Mail, innit!  I think Ms. Chiao and her learn-ed colleagues were comparing western culture with the Chinese and other Asians.

Racial, or even national, traits are a very complex and slippery subject.  For a start, much belongs in the eye of the beholder.  Even so, it is Marxist nonsense to suggest that such traits do not exist at all.  In a way investigating such things is similar to the study of gases which are measured not by the individual actions of each and every molecule but by mathematical averaging.  The difference, of course, is that in gases the molecules never alter but people are forever changing to the intense irritation of politicians. 

Even so, Ms. Chiao maintains that the individuality she observes in western people should be compared with the conformity of the Chinese.  Oddly enough this chimes with some thoughts attributed to the late Mr. Jobs of Apple fame who maintained that the whole computer revolution of recent times could not have occurred anywhere else but the free-living, free-wheeling and free-dealing society of California in the last three decades.  By implication he was saying that the Chinese were only good for copying not inventing.  Ms. Chiao, in effect, confirms that opinion by telling us of their investigations into the genetic differences:

Chiao and her colleagues combined data from global genetic surveys, looking at variations in the prevalence of various genes. The findings were matched with other research which ranked nations by levels of individualism and collectivism.

 So which little genetic 'critter' was to blame, if indeed, blame is involved:

The team focused their attentions on the gene that controls levels of serotonin, a chemical in the brain which regulates mood and emotions.

Their studies found that one version of the gene was far more common in western populations which, they said, was associated with individualistic and free-thinking behaviour.

Another version of the same gene, which was prevalent in Asian populations, they said was associated with collectivism and a greater willingness to put the common good first.

Why is it, I wonder, when I read articles like that the one word which keeps drumming away at the back of mind is - bollocks!  I don't know but perhaps it's something to do with my serotonin level!

 

Most of them bounced off 'The iron Dome'

An interesting report in Arutz Sheva, the Israeli National News Service, to the effect that 90% of the rockets fired last week by Hamas into Israel from Gaza were taken out by the Israeli counter-missile system known as 'The Iron Dome'.  One problem for the Israelis is that where-as it only costs Hamas a few hundred dollars per rocket, the (home-made) Israeli missiles come in at roughly $50k each!  However, its very effective use last week has stymied efforts by Hamas to mount a serious attack.  Apparently, the Americans are providing financial assistance to help the Israelis build more of these anti-missile missiles because at the moment Israel lacks sufficient numbers.  It is also interesting when seen in the light of the much greater threat to Israel from some future Iranian missile carrying an atomic weapon.  A counter-missile system to take out ballistic missiles would need to be even more sophisticated and hence will be even more expensive.  Also, of course, in that scenario 90% would not be good enough, only 100% would do! 

Hat tip to Drudge.

 

Excuses! Excuses!

Sorry for my unwarranted absence yesterday but I became involved in a gardening task that, like Tony Blair's wars, escalated!  My own garden (I am delighted to say) is the size of a postage stamp but our communal gardens are fairly large by comparison.  Yesterday I undertook to power-wash the flag-stones that form the path round the lawn.  I had forgotten that I had changed my machine since the last time I did it.  The old one weighed a ton because it had a hefty electric motor in it and produced a blast of water that would not only take the skin off your arm, it might easily take off your entire arm!  I replaced it with a much lighter machine (and cheaper!) and to be honest, give me a few pints and I could piss harder than it can blow water!  Consequently what should have been a 2 - 3 hour job lasted all day.  Staggering indoors I did suggest to the Memsahib that she might like to dust the cobwebs off the baby oil and give me an all-over massage.  I ducked just in time!

It's an ill wind and all that sort of thing so being away from the 'telly' for most of the day did at least spare me from seeing too much of chubby-cheeks Clegg and that pathetic, puffed-up bunch of middle-class semi-socialists 'strutting their hour upon the stage' at whatever God forsaken dump is hosting their exercise in oxygen wastage.  They truly are an example of the semi-educated en masse.  It takes one to know one but many of us who are, ourselves, semi-educated at least have the humility to acknowledge that we probably wouldn't be much good at running the country.  The Cleggites, on the other hand, are so swollen with the semi-education they received which has, just, raised them higher than dimwit status that they now believe they can run the world.  The most dispiriting thing of it all is that 'Dim Dave' and most of his ruling so-called-Tory claque are all 'Cleggites' at heart.

What an opportunity Cameron missed before the last election!  The country was so fearful of Brown & Balls, the Brokers Men (that is, the men who will make you go broke) that he could have won an outstanding victory based on a programme of Austrian school economics and carried out another, and even greater, Thatcherite revolution.  Of course, part of his problem is that he hardly knows what the Austrian school is and, given his recently revealed riding proclivities, he probably thinks it's that training school for white horses in Vienna!

In the immortal words of the late, great Terry Thomas, "What an absolute shower"!

 ADDITIONAL:  I have just read this at The Coffee House - says it all!

The motion passed by Liberal Democrat conference this morning means that the party is neither supporting nor opposing the Health Bill. The rebels having lost the vote on whether or not to debate their ‘Drop the Bill’ motion, but managed to amend the so-called Shirley Williams’ motion to remove the line calling on their peers to vote for it.

End of the week - time for an arty fart!

It is almost possible to suggest that none of Paul Klee's paintings were ever 'the finished article'.  All the way through his painting life his works demonstrate a continuing search on his part for just the right balance between line and shape and colour and composition.  Here is a mysterious beauty which I have hanging on my wall - but alas, not the original!  (The blue markings in the bottom corner are, I think, a security device by the poster company to stop reproductions)

And next we have another of those Anglo-American society beauties who John Singer Sargent painted not only so well but so shrewdly because he must have earned a fortune from it!  This is Mrs. Waldorf Astor (Nancy Langhorne) - ain't she gorgeous? And look at the way Sargent has painted that dress.  I could look at her for ever.

Finally, here are some from Ben Shahn who was a terrible old Leftie but a very fine illustrator.  The first seems to be a record cover using one of his famous paintings called 'Handball' and the origianl work is below it:

And the last one has been a favourite of mine for years.  It's called 'Liberation' and neatly and joyously shows the paradox of Europe after the war with the irrepressible playfulness of children amongst the wreckage that was reality.

Right, that's enough culture for today - now get on with your work!

 

Iran war? Place your bets!

I would like to recommend to your attention Robert Wright of The Atlantic.  The link takes you to his accumulated columns which are well worth reading especially on the Iran imbroglio.  He is a senior editor at the magazine and he seems to me to take a cool, judicious and intelligent look at this ferociously complicated game of bluff, double bluff and so on ad infinitum, or so it appears to me.  In his most recent article he refers to the "betting on the Intrade.com proposition "USA and/or Israel to execute an overt air strike against Iran before midnight ET 31 Dec 2012."  He concludes that there is good news and bad news.  The former stems from the betting pattern showing people are discounting the possibility of an attack this year, but the latter arises from a big gain in the odds for next year! 

He points out the obvious, that there is no love lost between Obama and Netanyahu.  Of course, Obama is a Leftist in tune with his base which detests Israel.  It is one of the ironies of the last 60-odd years that the Left has spun 180 degrees from support to hatred of Israel; where-as, the Right has overcome its original disdain for all things Jewish and is now a voluble supporter of the Jewish homeland.  Robert Wright points out the highly important nuance between Netanyahu and Obama in their approach to Iran and its nuclear ambitions.  The former draws a line in the sand at the point where Iran gains the capability of building a bomb.  The latter insists that it is the actual manufacture that would be a trigger point.   At this week's meeting, the Israeli PM was trying to bounce Obama into his script but he was having none of it.  With some dextrous footwork he stuck to his position that actual manufacture was the American line in the sand.  However, under the pressure he did commit his administration to the policy that America would not allow Iran to possess a bomb.  If he wins in November he will be held to that policy commitment sometime during the next four years.

In later article Robert Wright considers precisely what sort of an attack would be possible, be effective and be lasting.  His analysis is gloomy.  Almost all the experts are agreed that an air attack would only delay Iran's ambitions by a few years.  There-after, similar air attacks would be useless not so much because they would bury their equipment deeper but because they would disperse it into multiple locations none of which would be easily identifiable.  In other words, it wouldn't be like looking for a needle in a haystack but more like looking for a hundred of them!  A partially successful air attack would simply unite (even more) the Iranian people around their government and make them ever more determined to have their own bomb.  Thus, it becomes clear that the only way of ensuring that all Iranian facilities are destroyed is by putting 'boots on the ground' by means of a full-scale invasion and take over of the Iranian government machine.  Anyone fancy that?  Not too many, I reckon.

On the other hand, who fancies an Iranian bomb with a matching delivery system that could reach western Europe?  Or even just a small Iranian bomb, a crude one would do, that could be passed on to its proxy terrorist hangers-on to use as they see fit?  You see the difficulties.  Sometimes, not often, I agree, but you have to feel some sympathy for the politicians. But read Robert Wright, he's worth it.  For what it's worth from an ex-corporal like me, I do not think that the Israelis will permit an Iranian bomb, irrespective of what Obama or anyone else thinks.  They will bomb and they will keep on bombing until they think the job is done.  Forever in their mind is one word, one memory, one horrific scar - Auschwitz!

 

'Mantyhose' - where I lead others seek to follow

It's not an easy responsibility being a fashion icon constantly in the eye of an adoring public, to say nothing of all those nosey hacks following me around desperately hoping to spot the very latest changes in male fashion, but I bear the responsibility with great fortitude in the knowledge that my decisions on what is in, what is out and what is quite, quite beyond the pale, will be of enormous benefit to my fellow men - particularly to the likes of 'JK' who spends all day dressed in cowboy gear and 'DM' who, to the despair of his lovely wife, I just know wears thick Scottish tweeds year in year out and irrespective of climate!

For some time now I have been extolling the virtues of Long Johns and a year ago I offered you a photograph of my grandfather wearing his:

I think you will all agree that he cuts a very manly figure - sorry didn't quite catch that!  Anyway, beauty in design never stops and, my idea having caught on, it has now been developed to a more elegant level.  This time, I am proud to announce that it is me modelling this version of The New Long Johns for The New Man:

You may have noticed that I have lost a little weight and developed some pretty impressive abs!  This is entirely due to the fact that whilst you lot are festering in your respective pits, I am down the swimming-pool six days a week doing at least, oh, say, five lengths!  Then the rather nice life-saver lady, a bit like the model with me in the picture above, very kindly helps me out of the pool!

Anyway, I am obliged to, er, Daisy Dumas (no, honestly, that's her name) from The Daily Mail for writing this important story: 

If you thought men in tights was a sartorial statement best left to medieval jesters, think again.  The underwear staple for women is making its way into wardrobes of the opposite sex - and the look is gaining popularity.  If any were in doubt as to the strength of the trend, it even has its own name: Mantyhose.

"Mantyhose"!  Doncha' love it?  And remember, you read it here first, you lucky people!

 

But this makes me tremble - with rage and fear!

As you regulars will know, I have just finished two histories of the Korean war which left me with my chin sagging onto my chest!  I had intended, with courage above and beyond the call of duty, to begin a history of the Vietnam war but, alas and alack, the biography of von Manstein intervened and has been followed up by David Glantz's very detailed version of Operation Barbarossa and, as I haven't even reached Moscow yet, you will understand my delay in turning to Vietnam.  Well, to be absolutely honest, I was so shocked at the revelations disclosed in my books on Korea that I was sort of looking for any excuse not to touch Vietnam because I just know that is going to be even harder to take.  Now, courtesy of Cafe Hayek, I have been pointed to a memoir printed in History News Network by Lt. Gen. Charles Cooper, USMC (Ret.)

The General describes a day in November 1965, very early in the Vietnam war, when he was on the staff of the senior admiral in the USN who was also, of course, a member of the Chiefs of Staff (CoS).  All three Joint Chiefs plus their chairman, the Head of the CoS, were extremely reluctant to follow the strategy as laid down by Sec. of Defence, McNamara, which involved a huge increase in soldiers to put as many 'boots on the ground' as possible. The CoS, in their efforts to come to a sensible and if possible an agreed strategy, turned to the CIA for help.  The General's description of the result is hilarious until you think of the blood and treasure about to be spilled:

The CIA was of little help, though it produced reams of text, executive summaries of the texts, and briefs of the executive summaries-all top secret, all extremely sensitive, and all of little use. The principal conclusion was that it was impossible to predict with any accuracy what the Chinese or Russians might do.

How much did they cost - even back in those days?  Anyway, rather than commit to a protracted land war, an end to which they could not see, the CoS agreed that a better policy was to impose a naval blockade of North Vietnam and it's ports thus severing supplies from Russia, and mount a massive air campaign against Hanoi to force the North Vietnamese government to come to terms.  (As far as I can tell from this memoir, there was no discussion on the possibility of simply walking away!)  Anyway, the CoS had been pressing McNamara for weeks for a direct meeting alone with the president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief which was their right.  After considerable delaying tactics they were eventually granted a meeting.  It was Gen. Cooper's job, he was then of much lower rank, to bring in to the meeting a large map upon which the CoS could make their points.  An easel was to be provided for this map and he would then leave this very secret and private meeting.  However:

Precisely at two o'clock President Johnson emerged from the Oval Office and greeted the chiefs. He was all charm. He was also big: at three or more inches over six feet tall and something on the order of 250 pounds, he was bigger than any of the chiefs. He personally ushered them into his office, all the while delivering gracious and solicitous comments with a Texas accent far more pronounced than the one that came through when he spoke on television. Holding the map board as the chiefs entered, I peered between them, trying to find the easel. There was none. The President looked at me, grasped the situation at once, and invited me in, adding, "You can stand right over here." I had become an easel-one with eyes and ears.

What ensued defies belief!  The Joint Chiefs, all experienced officers with active service credentials and at the very pinnacle of their various services, presented their reasoned case for a totally different approach to this war.  They might have been right or they might have been wrong but what happened then is jaw-dropping:

Normally, time dims our memories-but it hasn't dimmed this one. My memory of Lyndon Johnson on that day remains crystal clear. While General Wheeler, Admiral McDonald, and General McConnell spoke, he seemed to be listening closely, communicating only with an occasional nod. When General McConnell finished, General Wheeler asked the President if he had any questions. Johnson waited a moment or so, then turned to Generals Johnson and Greene, who had remained silent during the briefing, and asked, "Do you fully support these ideas?" He followed with the thought that it was they who were providing the ground troops, in effect acknowledging that the Army and the Marines were the services that had most to gain or lose as a result of this discussion. Both generals indicated their agreement with the proposal. Seemingly deep in thought, President Johnson turned his back on them for a minute or so, then suddenly discarding the calm, patient demeanor he had maintained throughout the meeting, whirled to face them and exploded.

I almost dropped the map. He screamed obscenities, he cursed them personally, he ridiculed them for coming to his office with their "military advice." Noting that it was he who was carrying the weight of the free world on his shoulders, he called them filthy names-shitheads, dumb shits, pompous assholes-and used "the F-word" as an adjective more freely than a Marine in boot camp would use it. He then accused them of trying to pass the buck for World War III to him. It was unnerving, degrading.

Rather as the Joint Chiefs were at the time, I am left speechless.  However, I make the same judgment against them as I do against their predecessors at the time of Korea - they should have had the guts to resign.  Men together use profane language but for the most senior officers in their country to be harangued in that fashion should have resulted in their joint resignation.  They didn't, and like Hitler's generals who were similarly treated, they must share the blame of what was to come.

 

It's enough to make you shiver

It has been perfectly obvious for some time now that 'Dave 'n' George' lack that 'vision thang' - that's pronounced in the voice of George Bush, by the way.  Even the bloke appointed to sit at Dave's right hand and invent a 'vision thang' for him has departed to California in a huff, or perhaps for a puff in order to dream up some new 'vision thangs', after all there is that song California Dreamin' .  And now old stumble-bum Vince Cable has peered over the top of his reading specs and noticed that the government (of which he is a senior member!) appears to have absolutely no 'vision thang' at all.

So why do I shiver?  Well, because I expect senior politicians to come to office prepared with their own 'vision thang', let's call it by its proper name, ideology, already developed.  I may not agree with it and I will understand that events will conspire to knock them off course but, and this is crucial, there should be a course set from the first day in office.  The thought of our cabinet sitting around in a mild panic trying to think of a quick 'vision thang' fills me with dread.  Apart from anything else you just know it will involve spending money.  The 'ideology' of Cameron and Osborne is perfectly simple, do whatever it takes to ensure that we are re-elected!

And talking of money, have you noticed the way the so-called 'coalition' are all thrashing about trying to save their blushes over this cock-up with child allowances?  You would think that there is absolutely no other area of government spending which could possibly feel the sharp edge of a pair of scissors.  Well, they could start with the overseas aid budget via which we send zillions to nuclear-armed India despite the fact that they have asked us to stop.  In fact they could shut down the entire overseas aid department and sack the ministers and all the civil servants, that would save a few bob!

 ADDITIONAL:  Oh God, I forgot - I'm starting a severe bout of Man-flu so I must be forgiven everything - but I am deeply grateful to Anna Raccoon for reminding me that if you want a prize example of a dimwitted political prat in search of a 'vision thang' you need look no further than 'Edenoidal Ed' yesterday, urging British manufacturers to be patriotic and stamp all their goods with 'Made in Britain'.  Ms. Racoon spotted this quote from Ed:

“There are three words we don’t hear enough, or see enough. Those three words are ‘Made in Britain’.

I would suggest three other words we don't hear often enough - fuck off, Ed!

(I must go and find a Disprin.  I've been shouting down the stairs for one for the last ten minutes but nothing has appeared.  It's very difficult to get the staff these days!)

 

To bomb or not to bomb the bomb!

Der Spiegel has a long, detailed and excellent summary on the background to the Iran-Israeli stand-off, to say nothing of the Israeli-American stand off!  This latter situation was exemplified yesterday by the carefully choreographed dance between Obama and Netanyahu conducted before the press.  Oh, how I would love to have been a fly on the wall during their private meeting!  There is no love lost between the two men and as one commentator pointed out, Israel, the only real democracy in the Middle East, has never received a visit from Obama, the supposed defender of democracies.  Netanyahu must suspect that once Obama gains a second term the pressure of public opinion on him to support an Israeli attack will be lessened considerably.  However, in the remaining few months of the presidential election race, the sitting president will be forced to offer considerable support if Israel strikes or be painted a moral coward by his opponents.  Thus, irrespective of the exact state of Iranian nuclear preparations, Netanyahu has every imperative to act before November.

The Spiegel report offers a very good analysis of the likely state of play within the Iranian leaderships - I use the plural deliberately.  Like Saddam, their refusal to open up their weapon resources merely serves to re-inforce intelligence, or rumour, that they are poised to complete their work on a nuclear bomb.  Like Saddam, they may pay a severe price for their unwarranted secrecy - assuming that it is, indeed, unwarranted.

A reader of James Fallows in The Atlantic sends in an interesting and intelligent letter which ends thus:

I would advocate that we must recognize the differences between the present controversy and the precedents [preceding wars].  I see several critical differences between Iraq/Vietnam (in which our intervention was founded upon a false premise) and Iran, in which the issues are not necessarily the same:  1) Iran appears committed, not only to disputing Israel's legitimacy, but to eradicating Israel as a state altogether; 2) Iran's development of nuclear capability threatens the stability of the Middle East in a variety of other ways, such as intimidating Saudi Arabia and other pro-Western countries in the region.  If Iran rejects the internationally-recognized principles of nuclear nonproliferation and becomes a nuclear state, what are the consequences of other countries in the region, in addition to Israel, following suit? 3) Our choice in Iran may not be merely between peace and war, but whether we let Israel go it alone, or we support them.  Israel's calculation is different from ours, both because of its proximity to Iran and because, given the history of the Jewish people, the Israeli government can never again risk their extermination.  Given those realities, are we better off with the risks of a preemptive attack to try to maintain a non-nuclear Middle East, or the risks of a Middle East in which the Saudis, Egyptians, Iran, Israel, the Pakistanis, and perhaps Hamas, Hezbollah and others, have nuclear capability?

I'm not advocating the neo-con approach, nor of talking up a war.  But I think Obama's measured approach rightly recognizes that the risks here are very serious, and that "existential" risk to Israel may be more real than we care to admit.  The real problem, as with Iraq, is that it's difficult to have a serious public debate about the issue when we don't know what we don't know. We won't know if our intelligence sources, or Israel's are privy to information that would make a decisive difference in what we should do.  As with Iraq, we'll only find out after the fact, whether we made the right choice.

Somewhere I read that Washington was taking steps to top up its oil reserves.  Can we rely on 'Dim Dave' to do the same?

 ADDITIONAL:  I just caught the tail end of an interview on Fox News with Roger Bolton, the former American ambassador to the UN.  He emphasised his belief that Israel should have attacked in 2008 whilst when there was a sympathetic president in the White House.  Even more important, he said, was the fact that by now Iran will have duplicated their manufactures and hidden them in secret places unknown to anyone else and consequently any raid would be ineffective. 

 

Hu Jintao out Xi Jinping in!

If you say my title out loud and very fast in your local Chinese restaurant you might well get three sweet and sour pork, two 'flied lice' and a 'spling loll'!  (OK, that's enough cheap Chinese pronunciation jokes!)  My title actually refers to a forthcoming political event which in geo-political importance dwarfs the efforts of the Hungarian dwarf in France and even the 'Kaiserin's coming efforts in Germany.  Xi Jinping, pronunced, roughly, in English as SHEE jin-PENG according to Wiki.  He is the man who has risen, seemingly effortlessy, through the Chinese Communist Party ranks and is now due to take over the top job next year when Hu Jintao retires.  In today's terms that makes him the second most important man in the world and in time, with the way things are going, he might become the most important!

Before I go further I should declare my prejudices: I like and admire the Chinese.  Intellectually, of course, that is a daft thing to say because how can you 'like' one ethnic bunch of people and perhaps 'dislike' another when you know full well that both groups will have roughly the same proportion of saints and sinners and inbetweeners as every one else?  Well, I will leave that to the psycho-babblers to sort out and simply repeat my admiration for the Chinese.  I am also pleased that their country has finally flourished and is now bestowing, albeit patchily, the benefits on its tough, hardworking population.  Having said that, I should also add that I fear for the Chinese, too.  Their nation has always been subject to centrifugal political forces  likely to tear the country apart unless the centre holds strong.  Also, I should add, that I don't trust Chinese economic statistics further than I could pee into a gale.  I keep picking up hints and rumours that their banks are in a woeful state.

Anyway, 'Comrade' Xi Jinping is the coming man who will guide the massive Chinese ship of state over the coming years.  I place inverted commas around the word 'Comrade' because, of course, he and the rest of the Central Secretariat are about as Communist as Mrs. Thatcher!  Despite what they might claim for propaganda or historical reasons they are now running what might be called state-controlled capitalism, or, you might say it is a version of syndicalism.  At this point, regular readers will know that I am hugging myself as I relish the delicious irony that syndicalism was the favoured economic model of the fascists!  But there is yet more irony to come because the great problem with state-run capitalism is that it suffers with - wait for it - 'internal contradictions'.  Poor old Marx, hoist with his own pedantry - too, too delicious!  Dealing with that problem will require very astute handling because if he lifts the hands of the Party off the capitalistic enterprises the danger of the regions of China flexing their muscles is very real.  Similarly, any move to open democracy would be equally risky.

'Chairman' Xi Jinping has some immense problems to face in a very uncertain future so it is worth considering his background.  His father was one of the original revolutionaries who helped fight the war that put Mao into power.  He was rewarded in the usual way of mad dictators by first being given a top job and then being purged and imprisoned!  Xi Jinping was a young boy at the time and what he thought of it we do not know.  However, on the death of Mao, 'dear old Dad' was released and welcomed back into the new regime.  This allowed his son to flourish through various universities (he obtained a degree in chemical engineering) and party channels.  In a series of increasingly important appointments he gained a reputation as a tough, incorruptible and efficient operator who was dextrous enough to avoid any embarrassments or scandals.  A few days ago he re-visited America where he had spent time as a young man and he took the trouble to call in and pay his respects to the American family who had housed him.  Given that sort of history I suppose you could say that 'he knows his enemy'!

George H. Wittman writes an interesting column in The American Spectator and sums up his view thus:

Certainly this future president of China has allowed nothing to stand in the way of his getting ahead. One only can expect the same dedication to success in Xi Jinping's period as primus inter pares among the Chinese leadership. It is not unreasonable to assume he will continue to provide justification for the growth of China's military, whether it's its space and missile program or its effort to build a combat-ready blue water navy.

In the end Xi Jinping can and will be judged only by what occurs during his presidency, which under his predecessor has included, among other things: intelligence operations to penetrate U.S. cyber systems (civilian and military); placing the South China Sea under PRC domination; support for Iran's unfettered nuclear development; vetoes in the UN Security Council on motions to intervene in Syria; refusal to accurately revalue China's currency, and so on. If such issues are approached differently during the presidency of Xi Jinping, he will come to hold a unique position in China's global relations. However, his biography notwithstanding, it would be a major surprise both to China and to the world.

Xi Jinping gives every appearance of being a highly intelligent political operator with a very clear view of his nation's interests and ambitions.  The problems are likely to arise in Washington which, in the nature of big, sprawling, messy democracies, tends to throw up the very lowest common denominators as leaders.  America has a history with China, as I pointed out in my recent posts on the subject of the Korean war, and most of it reflects very badly on the United States.  We can only hope that cool, steady intelligence will prevail as they try to come to terms with this new Chinese leader.

Interesting times, as some Chinese chap once said!