Olympian Games

It's entirely predictable that the Olympics have become mostly about politics. In fact, it seems to me they've become a touchstone for who we are.

To take four (maybe five) nations, it seems clear the Olympics tell us a lot.

China's been face-spending from the start (normally they try and save face - this time they're spending it). All the chicanery with the opening ceremony (something I never, ever watch but heard about this time), and all the kerfuffles about their gymnasts, speak volumes about the nature of the Dragon, weaving a spell of invincibility through aggressive trickery.

Then there's Russia- who simply aren't trying to win the Olympics, but find them convenient for invading other people's lands. A country who've had enough lean times to know you can't eat, drink and be merry on old Gold medals from fixed events past.

The USA meanwhile, are taking it easy while sizing up the Bear. Not straining to beat the little yellow people they are just strolling along through the endeavours of their nuclear threat (Phelps) and their excellent missile defense (the entire basketball team). The trickery of the Chinese doesn't bother them none (well, they're not admitting it), and they can see that the Chinese mainly do well when there are judges involved in awarding medals.

Just a little aside now to look at the Australians. As ever their culture is defined by the glance sideways at Britain- and they never get much beyond that; part envious, part contemptuous, part lustful, part (maybe) affectionate.

Finally the Brits. It's golden time for the British competitors. Evidently we concentrated out lottery cash and made it worth people's while to stay in training continuously. And then the advertising revenue follows... But somehow it gives me only that instinctive pleasure I get from British success in anything, and sporting success from anyone, combined. Pleasurable yes, but... it's this hilarious success built on gambling which is so unreal. Truth be told, not many countries sail wondrous varieties of boats, or row in crews, or invest in all the cycling gear, or care about the Olympics the way we do. Not that it's wrong- it's actually good. Yet to build self-esteem on this flimsy and fake international festival seems to be so much bullshit. Is it me, or do things seem to be falling apart? The center apparently is partying in Peking, and cannot hold. The Russians are in Georgia, the Taliban is rising, the Pakistanis revolting, the economies on which we are founded dissolving in debt. Only Iraq is good- and they were nearly banned.

Can we burn the fiddlers yet?

"Swedish unemployment suddenly jumped from 5.9 per cent to 8.1 per cent"

Seasonally adjusted?

Anatole Kaletsky sounds an optimistic note concerning the world economy. Personally I'm a pessimist, but mainly relating to the UK economy. Others around the world will continue to grow as the banks reign in UK spending and the housing market goes way way down.

Yet what is interesting to me about the Swedish statistics is that they are so dramatic. I suppose it could be a routine matter, relating to the end of university courses in June/July, but if so then why is it highlighted?

The more I see of statistics in governments, the more I question. Of course I know there are lies, damned lies, etc, but I think that that very truism has been exploited to the limit. After all, when statistics are massaged- and dahhling they obviously are- you're left to "trust" the masseurs. But the truth is that at the end all statistics mean something concrete to someone somewhere and are not just means of manipulating paltry currents of franchise- ie. voters.

An interesting thing that Kaletsky points to is the division between economists and financiers- the latter being the pessimists- " The consensus view among economists, as opposed to financiers, at present is that the United States is experiencing, at worst, a mild recession"... . It occurs to me that that's because financiers are the ones who are performing the sums and to whom these sums have real-life consequences. Declining fortunes are real-life enough. Future income opportunities are real-life enough.

It all brings me nicely to Richard North's post about data manipulation. It rather disappoints me (naive as I must be) that people resort to crude data manipulation. It's a brutal but effective way of coralling those you distrust and dislike, and it doesn't require a terrible deal of intellect. Most boring and most damaging- I think it will be seen as most criminal too, in the long run.

'she was everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be. We should be modest enough to acknowledge when reality conflicts with our illusions. Rest in peace, Benazir.'

Mark Steyn says it so well.

I was thinking today about the distinction between fairytale and fantasy. Benazir Bhutto facing down the Islamists falls firmly into the latter category, if one remembers that fairytales contain a germ of human reality (the princess coming to her senses, the Prince ordering the garden, cutting down the undergrowth, seeing through the charade and inviting the modest girl to the dance, etc.- symbols of real action and change), fantasy drops from the sky.

One should give up on fantasies, but not fairytale. I've been sitting with my neice and nephew, watching such things- and now I'm following the Bhutto trauma online. Fairytales cannot lead anywhere but up or they peter out into fluffiness; fantasies can distort into nightmares, and almost always do.

Reason: from Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"reason dictates that you can only progress when you can analyze the circumstances and act accordingly"

Serious Considerations...

Another week and, sorry, another gap in posting, wasn't there? It's not really a sign of my getting tired of the weblog, more a symptom of me re-thinking a few things and that it's not always possible to be thoughtful and prolific, especially when time is short and other things crowd in.

Something that caught my eye in this week of the Labour Party conference was the neat way in which the BBC gave Gordon Brown a platform on the international stage as he responded to the upheavals in Burma. Also included was a nice image of Brown looking like a man of fortitude.

So many of these positive images of Brown floating around at the moment, aren't there? Reminds me of a contempory of mine at school- a bit wimpy so he got into judo, which was fine until he got his photo in the local paper, captioned: "Nick, ready for action". Too much. I had to laugh. Not his fault, of course, but ott.

In the new, unelected Prime Minister's case it makes me sick because there are real people on the end of these conflicts, and all Gordon sees fit to do is to introduce an element of surprise into his Conference package by appearing to be at the forefront in a crisis. It's almost as if Gordon is saying that anything Blair can do (ie. spin), he can do better- and with more chutzpah, as is shown by the fact that he announced on his ascension an end to spin. Since then it's been nothing but spin and proven that his image is paramount.

As often I have to acknowledge a "thought debt" to Mark Steyn, whose latest article is in my view among his very best,

"So much of contemporary life is about opportunities for self-congratulation. Risk-free dissent is the default mode of our culture, and extremely seductive."

Yes, yes, and Gordon has been giving us a masterclass recently- as if we needed one. That's one reason we miss Steyn in the UK these days since he walked out of the Telegraph and Spectator. Brown trotted onto the centre stage, full of righteous indignation about affairs in a country that he'll never have to sacrifice anything for, the epitome of risk-free self-congratulation.

And that's not even to mention Darfur. Or the cuts in the Navy. It's all virtual, this world, apart from the people who're dying.

"Isn't it obvious?..."

It seems to me these are the three most common words which occur to a conservative minded person.

Conservatism seems to be a habit of mind, in a way. Because it is a habit of mind, the idea that something ought to be obvious is often dismissed as thoughtlessness by the liberal establishment (the idea that today we have a liberal establishment is really a banal observation, given that great efforts have to be made to make the common view assent to the ministrations of that establishment. Good examples would be the death penalty, and EU membership, where the public feeling must be routinely turned aside by a combination of media, legal and political types). A "habit", after all, sounds rather boring, instinctive, not at all the grand effort of mind which humanistic liberals like to imagine.

And this, in turn, leads to a kind of self-censorship, especially today.

It might be better to call conservatism a discipline. Sometimes self-imposed, sometimes imposed by reality. Best when the two are combined. Most people have a bit in them somewhere.

I was thinking of this in response to reading about the latest film from Brian De Palma, a smash hit at the Venice Film Festival (inaugurated by Benito Mussolini, by the way). It's called "Redacted" and it's an Iraq war "expose", and the Financial Times raves about it here.

Well, knowing De Palma (The Untouchables), it'll be blood and guts and moral fervour, just as the FT describes.

But how about that reality? It comes from all directions, you know. In addition to the insecure, unstable and ill-disciplined, we have the disciplined, incredible and the brave, the understanding and the educated, the vainglorious and dishonest- and, the thing that real conservatives never forget, the enemy. And, under it all, the fallibility of things, which we all forget sometimes.

It was always going to be that way. Nothing has surprised me so far about the Iraq conflict. I am not pessimistic, but I will end on a conservative note:

As Bad as a Mile

Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,
Shows less and less of luck, and more and more

Of failure spreading back up the arm
Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.

(Larkin)

Time for a bitter Sunday evening conspiracy post... which could only be posted here.

And what encouraged me to post the below poem, was this article from Mark Steyn.

You see the article (registration -free- required) deals with an issue which I believe Philip Larkin intuited a long time past:

"one of the critical questions at the heart of the West's twilight struggle: what is a child?"

Worth registering to read.

Just how rubbish are they?

Climate scientists, I am talking about. We hear daily from the BBC about the assumed effects of global warming, but what we don't hear about is all those embarrassing slips which make global warming science the kind of mish-mash it is.

Today we discovered that 1998 was not the warmest year on record in the USA- among other things. Just one of those facts that are casually bandied around in the debates where people tell you the facts are all against you. The reason for this re-evaluation, made by Nasa itself? Oh, just some little Y2K hiccup they overlooked impacting their data. You can read the story of its discovery, by bloggers rather than by Nasa scientists described here.

Wiil the BBC report this? Is that the chirruping of crickets I hear?

Incidentally, I have reached the end of Anthony Giddens' "Europe in the Global Age". One of this guru's recommendations for the Euro-elite-

"We cannot treat climate change any longer as just a possibility for the future. We should act on the presumption that it is already happening, and that even in the short term its effects will worsen. This means taking measures now..."(p196, EitGA- "At the level of the EU")

Truly it's frightening that we have men with such drive allied to men with such incompetence.

I could be on to something, Watson...

Excuse my headline, but I've just been reading several Sherlock Holmes mysteries with English-Czech side by side translation. Yes, even lazy me wants to learn languages. These stories though I've been reading side by side with Anthony Giddens' latest potboiler, "Europe in a Global Age". Thrilling stuff.

Well, actually, less of the irony. Giddens's prose might have written by an android, but he has a cyborg-like kind of diligence in asserting his agenda which has affected you and I more than a bit since 1997. It is actually quite fascinating to see how closely the Left's project as manifest in our Government and in media like the BBC are to the musings of their maestro. According to Giddens (p99 EiaGA), "Welfare should be redefined in terms of personal autonomy and self-esteem". Note the replacement of the word "freedom" or "liberty"(a US concept these days) with "personal autonomy"- or freedom to choose (from a range of presumably defined options). Giddens goes on to say "self-esteem, or rather lack of it, has been shown to be involved with a range of social problems" and "a whole range of behaviour that centres around addiction, including eating disorders, alcoholism and even aspects of sexual violence, relates to self-esteem and a lack of a stable sense of self".

Well you know, what's new in that? The idea really that it's the state's responsibility to sort it out, to make you not just be good, but feel good, the mushiness of all that angst to be undergirded by the public purse (assisted by other "actors") for the "clients" of the social system. It's basically the kind of self-help psychobabble of the 80's brought to the aid of the statist extensivism of the Blair-Brown project. As ever, Giddens plays a socialist riff off Thatcherite radicalism.

Of course Giddens is very keen that non-state actors be involved... hey, what about the BBC? Couldn't they get involved? They could write articles warning about catching fatness, not feeling guilty about hating fatness; endless warnings to Mothers about their unborn children. They could create a whole section of fabulation and sensation and call it "Health"?

No, of course that wouldn't be possible without a stream of scientific papers and of course since scientists don't rely at all on the Government to fund them, it wouldn't be possible to engineer that, would it?

"Why are the global warmers so zealous? After a year of arguing with people about this, I am convinced that it's because global warming is first and foremost a political theory. It is an expression of a whole middle-class political world view. This view is summed up in the oft-repeated phrase "we consume too much". I have also come to the conclusion that this is code for "they consume too much". People who believe it tend also to think that exotic foreign places are being ruined because vulgar oiks can afford to go there in significant numbers, they hate plastic toys from factories and prefer wooden ones from craftsmen, and so on."

- Martin Durkin on the response to The Great Global Warming Swindle in Australia recently. Read the whole thing for a characteristically devastating summary against the dominant meme of our era. Via Greenie Watch.

Personally, I am not so sure that the term "Middle Class" has any validity any longer. The time is long past, it seems to me, for a more complex model. Still, Durkin is spot on in many respects- and in the central one where he identifies the armada of common causes which has assembled together to create an invasive ideology.

(btw. Sorry for the gap in posting. A variety of factors may be to blame, not least that nothing actually struck me that I felt the need to say. It is not likely to be a persistent condition.)

The great Melanie Phillips is back in action

I was always going to link to it and then I was stung into action by the Instapundit.

The fight in Washington with the army top brass has not just been over whether more or fewer troops are needed in Iraq. It’s also been over a major difference in strategic perception. In order to win in Iraq, it is essential to defeat Iran. This is for the blindingly obvious reason that the principal instigator of the war in Iraq is… Iran. I have never understood how anyone could think that you can win a war by refusing to fight the aggressors and instead running around trying vainly to put out the fires they are starting. As I said last month here and on many other occasions, the coalition cannot secure Iraq without first defeating Iran.

It triggers in me one of those occasions for updating the evolving philosophy of Ed.

Here goes...

The history of the 20th century was of course dominated by the rise and fall of communism. Even events such as the rise of Hitler and the eclipse of the Shah of Iran by Ayatollah Khomenei can be neatly seen as reactions to the rise and fall respectively of Soviet communism.

With the final collapse of Communism in 1989 came a kind of phony peace, where threats were evolving more quickly from their relatively unevolved forms once the settlement of the world order was freer and the USA refrained from asserting its authority. Events such as those transpiring in Rwanda, Somalia, and Bosnia were unusual in that they weren't fallout from some intractable international stasis owing to disagreements among powers, but rather the result of local factions struggling to assert themselves when no great power was really interested.

The lack of colonial policing in a world used to it has resulted in the evolution of threat into philosophy, into religion, and back into more violent threat once more.

The US, partially in Afghanistan, and wholly in Iraq, strode boldly back into the field of disorder. As Melanie points out, colonial policing is not a linear game: you attack one party partly to get to others or to achieve wider objectives. The question is, do the Americans understand that Iraq is the route to Iran? It's only geography, after all.