There's a thunderstorm outside and the air is humid...

Well, anyway, to cut a long story short I'm off on my hols tomorrow- I've been doing quite a bit to get ready and get stuff done which explains my absence the last few days. Anyway, somewhere even warmer than it is this evening beckons- that's Croatia, actually.

So, rather than leave you bereft, I'm going to link to a few places and posts that keep/have kept me entertained.

Keeping you in touch with all things globally warmed and otherwise- with his own thoughts- Czech theoretical physicist Lubos Motl is supremely worth a visit.

Robert Spencer has done a great job in response to a critic of his book comparing Islam and Christianity. One of the few people on the internet with his feet not in the ether but on the ground. His Jihad Watch can be found here.

Speaking of Islam, if you don't visit Memri, you should. All that weird Islamic gobbledygook thoroughly translated and often in video form.

While we're on the subject of information, there is no more informative and educational blog than EU Referendum. Stodgy title, but straight up. I particularly liked this post recently. Helen's always illuminating.

Oh, and if you want a laugh you stand a chance of some fresh posts at Peter Briffa's place.

I'll be back in just over a week. I might get fortunate and find a way, sans cumbersome laptop, of posting something here. Chances are I'll have some thoughts to share.

One thing...

But it's a good thing. I'll point you to Richard Miniter's exemplar of how to deal with a story- and how not to. Hope you enjoy it.

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

To follow up the video below, the excellent- if potentially too clever by half- Pat Condell has his say on the Mayor of Brussels' ban on the anti-Islamification march (via ATW).

Here's a nice video to protest the Brussels' Mayor's ban on freedom of association. Something of a first for me, but in a good cause.


Online Videos by Veoh.com

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.

The greatest conservative poem, ever, maybe.


Well, that would be Phillip Larkin's "Breadfruit", which is so short it can be posted here without difficulties. I know I regularly overlook the "poetry" element of this blog, mainly because it's been an open question in my mind whether poetry has died or not. The following seems to live. I will explain my view afterward...

Breadfruit

Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit,
Whatever they are,
As bribes to teach them how to execute
Sixteen sexual positions on the sand;
This makes them join (the boys) the tennis club,
Jive at the Mecca, use deodorants, and
On Saturdays squire ex-schoolgirls to the pub
By private car.

Such uncorrected visions end in church
Or registrar:
A mortgaged semi- with a silver birch;
Nippers; the widowed mum; having to scheme
With money; illness; age. So absolute
Maturity falls, when old men sit and dream
Of naked native girls who bring breadfruit
Whatever they are.

This poem has all Larkin's typical laughing irony and serious ambiguity. The irony, for example of dignifying the boys' fantasies as "uncorrected visions", which is itself an oxymoron. The serious ambiguity of "absolute maturity falls"- what does this mean, exactly? Just the end of life, burbling in an old people's home. I don't think so, actually, and for me that's the most interesting thing. While Larkin undoubtedly mocks the cheap pleasures of working class youths, he seems to be saying that those cheap pleasures at least had the virtue of gradually imposing the discipline of experience. The open ended question is what happens when "church or registrar" etc. no longer operates. To borrow from another Larkin poem, High Windows, it seems to me that the ending sets itself similarly, pointing to "the thought of high windows:/The sun-comprehending glass,/And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows/Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless."

In a cleverly muted way, Larkin is again the social conservative, questioning "everyone young going down the long slide". In the debate over youth and maturity, Larkin got there before any of us- a sentence I am sure he would find satisfyingly ambiguous.

Interesting post to follow up what I posted yesterday, from Ealing Councillor Phil Taylor here, a man in the thick of London politics.

Really just recycling

Something that DumbJon pointed out. He highlighted this rag:

(click to enlarge)

It's obvious that Boris is target number one for the "black community". But is it really the black community that has it in for Boris? In my experience, black people know irony when they come across it; there's no commentator more ironic out there than Boris Johnson. He's absolutely never quite serious.

The thing is that this "Black newspaper" is undoubtedly just funded by public money, whether meted out by London boroughs or by the Mayor's office itself. This kind of hit piece is reminiscent of nothing so much as the activities which the GLC (Greater London Council) used to get up to.

So that's the first thing. The second thing to notice is that Labour MPs were involved in the attack. The third thing is that the attack was covered, first by the Press Association, then by the BBC, and finally by these goons at the Black Information Link. It's all so orchestrated, it's difficult not to believe that Red Ken's hand was in there somewhere.

Of course what it means most importantly is that Boris has them running scared. The intelligence quotient and personable nature of the candidate leaves them grubbing around trying to smear him as a racist. Certainly this will convince the "Black Information Link", which owes its existence to the likes of Livingstone. I think more highly of the black inhabitants of London than to believe that they'll agree with them. That, though, is what propaganda is for: the apolitical non-believers, to convince them that no smoke would exist without fire.

And the final point: leopards do not change their spots. Red Ken is still Red Ken, dirty tricks and all, and the Labour party still finds him useful. They don't really change either.

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.

Something to be ashamed of...

Whilst I am often sceptical of the need for national apologies, especially those that go back over the centuries and involve the latest fashionable racial groupings, I do think that if this story transpires it will be time to hang the head in shame.

Britain's coming home, they're coming home.

This brings it home. There has become a depressing regularity about UK casualties in Basra.

"The British have basically been defeated in the south," a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as "surrounded like cowboys and Indians" by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months."

Article here.

Obviously I am not a military person, but I would say a few things about this.

1)It's not primarily been a military problem, but a political one. From instilling the rule of law, to suppressing harmful political forces such as Moctada al Sadr, to being modest when times were quiet, to protesting and acting against Iranian interference, we've made the wrong decisions.

2)Both our politicians and our military top brass are arrogant and unrealistic- the politicians in thinking that our military must be expert diplomats just because they're British; our top brass because they thought that, being British, we would have the nouse not to stick our noses where they were not wanted and would be automatically secure and respected through technical prowess and military discipline. The politicians because they thought they could just make assumptions based on favourable metrics and bring troops out of the area before anything had truly been secured; the military because they took every setback as evidence of unrealistic political aims rather than as military problems which they had a responsibility to solve.

Overall it's been a big cock up, which had everything to do with the contempt the British establishment by and large has had for the Iraq expedition, and little or nothing to do with historical inevitability. We haven't seemed to understand that sometimes it's better not to do things rather than to do them badly and unwillingly, while to do them willingly and positively would be the only actually good option. I don't blame the soldiers specifically, but the military culture hasn't exactly vindicated itself.

Of course I have no "overwhelming moral authority" to talk about this, but I feel things could have been so much better.

Libel Scandal

Yes, it's pretty shocking. So much seems to slip past the British blogosphere it's scary. I've long been suspicious about our strict libel laws, and now it seems they're being used in a meaningful way by the kind of person who'd like nothing better than to bring an end to all our laws in favour of Sharia law.

You can find out about the attempt to stifle free speech at HotAir, here and here, and Mark Steyn has an opinion piece about it today. If you want to find a copy of "Alms for Jihad" however, you may have more difficulty...

This a big story because:

A)Cambridge University press has issued a craven apology rather than stand up for a respectable book by a respectable author.

B)It's one of several such cases.

c)It's using UK law to impinge on the freedoms enjoyed by US writers and readers.

d)It's undermining national security by disengaging the public from matters which concern them, and creating an ever closer relationship between Islamist interests and the UK authorities.

When to break the law...


When the law tells you to turn your back on your responsibilities, ignore your instincts, countermand your judgement... leave your children in the hands of a madwoman.

Step one, forget the idea that the State knows best.

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?

As a football lover and a fan of Iraqi freedom to boot, I just loved this.

Omar, blogging at Iraq the Model, gets better and better in his command of English. Actually I find his writing inspiring just for its style, let alone all the other qualities he brings.

Asian Cup final match highlights here

While the BBC is lavishing attention on Gordy's Toady and his Baptism of Fire- ooh look, adventure, colour, that dashing jawline- JK Rowling's profile on Wikipedia had a rapid update, I notice:

"According to The Guardian, Rowling is a close friend of Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife, Sarah, with whom she collaborated on a book of children's stories to aid the charity One Parent Families."

Don't know if the update was simply that of altering Brown's title, or if the whole entry was added after Gordon's ascension. Either way, someone cares about Gordie's image (not least the Guardian, source of one of those articles blatantly appealing to sexist stereotyping, "Gordon's Women")

Frankly I have to say I'm sick of all the Gordon-boosting I notice on the BBC and elsewhere. Gordon does not head a new government, is not an unknown quantity or in any way exciting, and does not represent a new direction for Britain. He has been merely the heir to the media coronation and spin which Blair inaugurated.

It's a wrap.

Mark Steyn does his final analysis of the Black trial. Hugh Hewitt, something of a legal ace, pays him a great compliment:

"If any of the struggling papers had a clue, they'd break the bank and sign Steyn to as near-an-exclusive as they could manage, and then turn him free to write at length about anything going on anywhere in the world, but nudging him towards complicated courtroom dramas"

Warning: the Steyn summary is looong. But good.

The case of the shaken BiasedBBC...

Basically, let me just say, ... I don't understand!!

For those who know nothing about this, I'll just link to Biased BBC and a post where the matter was addressed by Andrew, the leading advocate of comment moderation.

It does however seem sad to me that those concerned about BBC bias cannot work together. The imposition of moderation has had all sorts of curious side-effects, such as the emergence of sites like this, and this . There was this, but it seems to have gone.

I've always had a very merry view to comments- the more the merrier. Of course I don't like people being rude, spouting ignorant rubbish and whatnot, but in my view that's just as (or more) likely to come from some passing BBC staffer as from some anti-Beeb fanatic- to whom I would probably just say, "keep it real, bro", or something like that :-). I could wish that anti-Beeb types like myself didn't feel the need to be vociferous. A more serious point might be that in the end comment threads that are endless are accessible only to the monomaniacal commenter, and there are thankfully not too many of those. Slashing and burning has some virtue, in that the wood emerges from the trees. In the right spirit, people should accept that their comments (and mine!) are not "precious" and unexpendable, but temporary and for a purpose. Carefully thought out comments should never be a victim and where they are I personally would be aggrieved as well. The reason I allowed the comments here on this blog to stay absent when they disappeared as a byproduct of upgrading the blog was simply because they weren't attracting many comments, and it was getting boring looking at 0.

As for the idea of being landed in court over something someone says about the BBC in unmoderated commenting- can anyone be rude enough to make their case indefensible in front of reasonable judges or a jury? It doesn't seem likely, when as John Trenchard points out, TV licensing employs "around 1,700 staff in five offices" just to enable the coercion of TV owners into funding the BBC. Truly an obscenity.

It's not only rudeness though, there're also libel and slander. Well, in those cases what I would say is that as long as it's an allegation of BBC bias, rather than some criminal accusation, everything should be ok. If you say John Simpson is a murderer, then I'll back away from you as fast as from any rabid dog; if you say his bias has potentially dangerous consequences, I have no problem with that. Sometimes the latter can sound like the former, if you're clever in the way you put it ;-).

Well, since the BBC's rottweiler, JR, described me as engaging in casuistry recently, I trust you'll take the above statement of ambiguity in accusing BBC journalists with a pinch of salt.

Summary: I suspect those in opposition to the BBC are closer to each other than we imagine. Misunderstandings are very easy on the web. Understanding differences would also be useful, where they exist. Flexibility is a virtue. Apologies and common resolve are admirable.

BTW- I think I will put comments back from here on. Not that I expect many, or any necessarily, but why not? As a gesture.

At his visionary best, Wretchard of the Belmont Clubturns attention eastwards, to where China is starting to feel the heat of an Islamic reaction to its ruthless ways. When at his best, like this, he raises some of the biggest questions out there.

"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 enviro-scam

How fundamental is the enviro-scam to the thinking and ascendancy of today's Left?

That's the question I am pondering more and more. The idea of dwindling resources, the need for management, for restraint, for taxes, for censorship of ideas- all the profound needs of the Left can be satisfied by their mantra.

It makes the sell-out of the modern Conservatives look painfully foolish.

The BBC are of course among the main culprits in causing this skewing of data and ideas, and of course the BBC have been the most stable platform for leftwing ideas for decades (they have in fact been a vital long-term incubator of all leftish ideas). Where would the Left be in the UK without the BBC?

EU Ref points out a series of items in today's Telegraph which call into question both the "fact" of MMGW and the BBC's behaviour.

Then there is this latest example. It's also very wintry in Australia- almost as if El Nino were still playing itself out.

The bottom line for the BBC (unchanging, we know):

"Scientists say the unseasonable droughts, heavy rains and frosts are due to climate change."

In fact it seems ever more likely that it was the Sun wot did it, or the lack of it.

See also what Lubos Motl has translated from Vaclav Klaus. Choc full of ideas. Motl is a great Czech, as is Klaus.

"There has been with each passing day an ever-swelling cast of BBC Television staff, and BBC Radio staff, and BBC World Service staff and BBC News 24 staff and no doubt BBC Papua New Guinea Service staff, none of whom attended a moment of the trial but turned out en masse to capture live the march to the scaffold. The trial wasn’t worth sending a solitary Beeb reporter to, but the hoist to the gallows merited dozens of ’em."

Steyn on the circus which assembled at the Conrad Black trial, which ended negatively for Black and his colleagues today.

Of course I am disappointed, and the BBC are trying hard to restrain themselves now that there is a guilty verdict to clap along to. Their summary has already calculated Black's possible jail-time. But not so fast, Beeboids. I realise that winning on a majority of points doesn't help Black directly, though that's what he did. He won nine of thirteen counts in a trial of great ladle-fuls of detail- most of it obfuscatory, it has seemed to me. If one believed in the US justice system at all, one would be inclined to say, as the jury seem to have, that's there's no smoke without fire.

So in a way, given the appeal which has been announced, it's really nine down, four to go for Lord Black. Maybe a narrower range of charges will make the air clearer for his continued defence.

Tandem thoughts

In the battle against Islamofascism, we don't appear to have had a lot of success. Most people would say it's got worse rather than better. Such is the nature of the rising tide.

If we were though to follow the central understandings offered by our more responsible commentators, we'd be getting things more or less right from here on.

Hassan Butt may be a former Jihadi, but he provides one fundamental when he identifies "the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.". The question is, do we know what that really means? (by the way, I don't mean to say that I actually trust this guy Butt- but the point is a sensible one).

Mark Steyn, meanwhile, identifies another core point: "Liberty is a 24/7 condition, not merely a trip to the voting booth every few years."

So, do we understand the attraction of the theo-Islamic-ideology, and do we know what it means to be at liberty?

Fascinating short interview with Robert Spencer- in my opinion the best person and most reliable expert for analysis of Islamofascism- on the London-Glasgow attempts and the "educated jihad". I wholly agree, and have always thought the same. A follow up to the post below. HERE.

(btw, I may be out of range of a computer for the next couple of days; the countryside beckons this weekend.)

"When I think of the long and arduous work that goes into preparation for a medical career, of the investment that is made by some institution or institutions in their training, for nobody pays the full cost of medical training, and then to be willing to blow themselves and possibly hundreds of others up, I am utterly horrified. We are confronted by a nihilism so total that it is unreachable and unredeemable."

(an email commenter to Pamela of Atlas Shrugs' blog, part of an interesting post here).

Now, don't get me wrong, I can follow that thought and it's got some sense to it- but another occurs to me. What does it say about our jihadi enemies if they can take half a dozen doctors and direct them into blowing themselves up in non-medical spaces? Why didn't they wreak carnage through the obvious means of their medical facilities? If Dr Harold Shipman could, for pleasure apparently, carry off tens, what could deeply motivated doctors of death do? If you ask me, Shipman was the nadir of deepest nihilism. By contrast these guys wanted to raise a spectacle, and carried their motivating focus throughout the madness of their acts. That they ignored the special status of their careers in society was their idea of transcendent values, rather than a rejection of values per se.

Oh, and that they were inept (if they were inept, rather than simply unlucky) just goes to show that intelligent people may be quite impractical when outside their specialisms.

Update: related.

Two clever women: The Bat Yeor interview conducted by Pamela of Atlas Shrugs. The wide perspective.

This ruling class...

On Sunday afternoon I watched the Marr interview the Brown, and I must say the time went as quickly as might a Sunday afternoon nap. Marr of the Beeb conducted one of his usual chummy interviews, a mellow and replete after-dinner-style (it was probably actually for a morning show) chat which enabled Gordon to pose as a calm sober influence guiding anti-terror activities and steering the good ship Britannia through her squalls/storms. A manse-like calm prevailed.

Although I fully believe that the terrorism attempted over the last few days has been real- as it was on other occasions- it is immensely easy on Brown that he has this fluffed attack in which to wallow, aided and abetted by his sympathetic media friends.

Melanie Phillips has a series of points which Marr might have raised, but didn't. One day this ruling class might come to very much regret the chummy games they have played with their hegemony, rather than making serious preparations for the challenges we face.

Phillips does though praise Gordon for his initial appointments- Sir Alan West from the Navy and Sir John Stevens. Yet I would have a question of her: is it enough to appoint better leadership at home, when the indications from the same batch of appointments are that Brown is about to back away from the "taking it to them" strategy that Blair was able to hold? Even finding the best deckchair on the Titanic and putting the best lifeguard in it wouldn't stop anyone from drowning.

The End is Nigh.

Mark Steyn gets busy on the summing up of the defence and the "rebuttal" by the prosecution as the Black trial comes to its close- the "rebuttal" being one of the (many) novelties of the US legal system which I wasn't familiar with. Actually, it's been quite an eye-opener, and made me quite fascinated by the relative high level of the UK legal system which I know rather better. Having absorbed quite thoroughly the Steyn line, I'm rooting for Black and co, as if I was ever doing anything else. Either Steyn's a genius propagandist though, or the Govt. case and the Government prosecution service is deeply unattractive.

Aayaan Hirsi Ali. So elegant as ever.

Pakistani dreaming.

"The politician is an acrobat. He keeps his balance by saying the opposite of what he does." (Barres)

Mark Steyn says

"It seems Her Majesty's Government in London was taken entirely by surprise by the scenes of burning Union Jacks on the evening news. Can that really be true?"

Well, my answer would be no, it can't be true and it isn't true. Steyn goes on to make hay out of this notion of a government without knowledge of even basic facts about Salman Rushdie. Fair enough, in a way, but Pakistan is now on the British radar in rather a dramatic way.

There is the basic fact that the 7/7 bombers were mainly of Pakistani origin.

There is the fact that most aspiring terrorists in the UK now receive their training and support from Pakistan.

There is the case of Kriss Donald, whose attackers fled to Pakistan and were tracked down with the help of British mulsim MP Mohammed Sarwar, who is now retiring following death threats which are, according to the BBC, unrelated to his retirement. According to the Guardian however,


"The multimillionaire MP used connections in Pakistan to help arrange the extradition of Imran Shahid, Zeeshan Shahid and Mohammed Faisal Mushtaq to the UK, where they were jailed for life for their part in the kidnap, torture and murder of the teenager Kriss Donald in 2004. The trio, part of a violent Glasgow gang, fled to Pakistan after the crime but were returned after 18 months of negotiations between the Pakistani and British governments, assisted by Mr Sarwar.

"Life is not the same, to be honest with you, since I brought them back. I was subjected to threats"

Aunty telling fibs again, methinks.

Still, this provides me another opportunity to ask an exit question: just why was the Bob Woolmer case so radically re-evaluated? After all, what could be easier and less controversial than to accuse the Pakistani national cricket team of murder?

The EU treastitution.

To analyse this sleight of hand by the resurgent Merkel and Sarkozy, and the no-longer-needing-to-tread-with-care Blair, you have to take a step back. Of course it is correct to say that it is practically the same as the EU Constitution which French and Dutch voters rejected. Back in October 2004 Blair said "There will not be a referendum. The reason is that the constitution does not fundamentally change the relationship between the UK and the EU."

Well said, Mr Blair! Bravo!

Now he is saying almost the same thing! Here's principle for you:

"If it's not a constitutional treaty, so that it alters the basic relationship between Europe and the member states, then there isn't the same case for a referendum,"

Phrasing slightly different, meaning the same. Yet in between these two occasions, in the three years that have passed, he has continually reiterated either the commitment to a referendum on the matter on the table then and now, or its obscurity as an issue out of consideration. Three years of rhetoric- denied, as Frank Field affirms in EUbusiness:

"One of the more popular things Tony Blair did was promising a referendum... Going back on that is against all the rhetoric of a government which says it wants to reconnect with a disillusioned if not hostile electorate"

That's it, win popularity where you need to, backtrack when you can, and return to the idea you first thought of because you're too pig-headed to think of anything else. That's Blair, and he'll make a fantabulous EU president no doubt.

Piccie of Britain. Canadian-American conservative Steyn writes:


"the dolly birds staggering around paralytic, the pools of "pavement pizza", the baying yobboes gagging for a shag and hurling bollards through the bus shelters to impress the crumpet - is a natural consequence of what happens when the state relieves the citizen of primal responsibilities."

How much of the first three lines do you imagine the US readership would understand without effort? Classic stuff. Personally, I've always felt that the type of characters outlined above were always subliminally aiming for the Hogarthian effect. I preferred to keep it to cartoons.

The Big Picture.

David Warren in visionary mode.

Hamastan wondering:

“If we get Alan Johnston back, will Britain recognise Hamas?”

It's a question. First hand reporting, here.

Putting lipstick on the pig

The BBC hasn't been too candid in reporting events in Gaza and the West Bank. Surprise!

What they have reported represents a vain attempt to retain the perception that there is a "good" party of Palestinians in whom to place trust, money, and diplomatic hopes. Not that the BBC particularly blames Hamas for anything, but that there are some very prejudiced types in the West who just might, y'know.

Of course Jeremy Bowen is a known quantity on these issues, but since he's the head honcho in the Mid-East coverage, it's sensible to listen to what he's got to say.

Well Jeremy finds that the defeat of Fatah is in fact our fault, for isolating Hamas. I agree that it would have been been better not to isolate Hamas; we should have isolated both Hamas and Fatah.

The truth is, as Bruce Thornton points out, "U.S. tax dollars are sent to Fatah, in the weird belief that it makes sense to help Fatah, who believe Israel should be destroyed in “phases,” prevail over Hamas, who believe Israel should be destroyed right now". Bowen manages to blame the "powers" for Fatah's defeat, when in fact without the support of the "international community", Fatah and Abbas would be in even more of a no-man's land than they are today.

Maybe one day we will find a Palestinian partner-for-peace, but that day will only come when there is a genuine battle for the soul of the Palestinians, not a squabble between aggrandised gangsters and overweening Islamofascists. The subsidies of the "powers" amount to support for a corrupt status quo, invalidating any genuine democrats, who can only emerge when reality bites the Palestinian polity and practical politics prevails over Islamofascistic or mafioso fantasy.

Excellent analysis of the decline and fall of Fatah, and the rise of Hamas, here.

Simply unbelievable

The BBC news report confirming the authorities' conclusion that Bob Woolmer's death was of natural causes, omits a vital and elementary point: how he actually died.

Pretty inept, huh?

Also inept to the point of straining credulity, the police investigation which claimed 100% certainty of foul play, fingerprinted all the players, and now proclaims that the investigation which was apparently 100% barking up the wrong tree was excellent. Apparently they have also been praised by Scotland Yard.

As usual it is left to the Pakistanis ,in the guise of aspiring pol Imran Khan, to assert the cause of Woolmer's death, with an innuendo of his ill-health which rather suggests they were saints to tolerate such an obvious physical and mental basket case for a moment as their national coach.

"Bob Woolmer had diabetes, he had blood pressure, an enlarged heart, he had respiratory problems. On top of it, the depression of losing and then he drank a bottle of champagne. They should have first ruled out natural causes before this whole drama about the murder"

Khan truly is egregious, leaving it to his nation's cricket captain, his beard a little more clipped than I remember during the World Cup, to act all magnanimous:

"Inzamam-ul-Haq says Pakistan should not take legal action over how the team was treated during the Bob Woolmer affair."

"I don't feel court action would be of any use now.", says Inzamam Ul Haq, Pakistan Captain.

Well thanks Inzi. I am frankly amazed that the Woolmer family so meekly accepts the current word of this mazy investigation. I feel deeply sorry for them. It seems to me that what this badly needs is a court case to clear the air- if it's the incompetence and irresponsibility of the police that's under scrutiny, and if heads are on the block, maybe then we'll find out the real reasons for their uneqivocal statements and initial enthusiasm for the murder investigation. After all, it wouldn't have been hard to sustain the scenario of death by natural causes from the beginning and indefinitely, and sane people would have been inclined to were it not for strong counter-arguments. What were they and why are they now irrelevant in the wake of the UK intervention of a few weeks back?

Nice chap that he is, nevertheless a student of mine was tut-tutting, in that slightly distant, airy way that Euros tend to have, about problems on the Mexico-US border.

To be fair to him he had actually visited the Mexico-US border, and he was commenting on the fence he saw there. I pointed out that the fenced areas were comparatively small- concentrated on urban areas. They do intend to expand them though.

But the difference between Europe and the US can be seen in the fact that in the US the debate on immigration is open, is transparent, a source of conversation across the whole nation.

In Europe the border issues may be more acute, taking "borders" to mean the borders of the EU. The problems are primarily to the South, although it seems to me that immigration from the East is just more tolerable to the Euros, in part because it isn't as visually obvious.

As so often with Europe though, the disgrace is so immediately under our noses we can't see it. There's a mechanism, it seems, that enables us to switch off to problems in other EU countries, while claiming them for our own when there's something positive and noteworthy going on in them. It may be the fact that we're just not Europeans at all ;-).

Ok, ok, and the issue is: the scandalous deaths and hardships endured by immigrants from Africa in Morocco and on the high seas.

According to the Goethe Institute, "Between November 2005 and February 2006, 1,300 people died en route to the Canary Islands alone.".

But you want fences, right? Well, the EU's got 'em, all right. And they're 6 metres high, backed by over a thousand border guards, tear gas, watch towers, rubber bullets- all of which are quite liable to be brought into action. The fences enclose those little colonial enclaves which the Spanish have never wanted to give up in North Morocco, even as they desired the return of other alleged real estate.

I dare say there is some heated rhetoric in the US about a war on immigrants. In Europe, or on Europe's edge, it's a reality. One episode illustrates:

"on 28 September 2005, the refugees decided to storm the fence. Night after night, hundreds of them scaled the barricade using homemade ladders. The guards shot at them, and at least seven died in the hail of bullets. 1,200 were locked into buses by the Moroccan Army and driven to the southern border of Morocco in the Sahara, where they were left in the desert without any food or water. Even weeks later the local inhabitants reported that they were still finding bodies".

In fact, what appears to be the case in Europe's border strategy is an approach of Darwinian selective cruelty- make the crossing so hard, so vicious, that only the fittest either attempt to make it or succeed in making it. And even when they have, that's not the end of the story.

This all happens under our noses, without much of a murmur. Indeed, how would we affect it, even if we considered it our problem? It's a policy so extreme that it has all the hallmarks of never having been discussed in an open forum, but instead imposed by some shadowy securicrats. That, there, is the Euros' democratic deficit. Right there.

Enigma Bush

Well, it's good to see a good speech from Bush again. Many things closed in Prague today. Many people were ambivalent to say the least about his visit. Yet the speech he put forward managed to be eloquent, informed, flattering to his hosts, and honestly his own, as well as consistent with past messages.

On the other hand, what Bush doesn't seem to realise is that in the Czech Republic, even the dissidents were in some sense elite- educated, descendents of the affluent upper-middle class dispossessed by the Communists. Havel was a great example of that, if he could even be termed middle. His Grandfather built the Lantern theatre which Bush alludes to in his speech- a grand affair far from the ideals of the ordinary people. Havel was criticised too for having his head in the clouds, when president. People prefer the more bruising Klaus who isn't frightened to take on and slag off such luminaries as Al Gore. With Klaus there is content and courage, a recognition that flattery is no good and hard-headed decisions must prevail. With Bush there is courage, now and then, and content if you believe.

But believing oughtn't to be the condition for content where battling Islamofascism is concerned, and it's a problematic legacy if that becomes accepted wisdom.

Globalised sensitivities

I couldn't help being interested in this article about Tony Blair's foreign policy principles (via Con. Home), and one particular quote, in the light of the Woolmer case discussed in the post below.

Tony said:


"What happens today in Pakistan matters on the streets of Britain."

It's ironic too in his choice of language:

"Be a player not a spectator"-

and certainly whatever you do don't be a coach.

In a way the Woolmer case would be the perfect illustration of the "Pakistan point", were it to be the case that the British had decided to close down the Jamaican investigation to prevent another inflammatory anti-British issue for the imams in the madrassahs to ponder, and for the Pakistani population in the UK to absorb as another "grievance". That Mark Shields must be a rubbish policeman- he said at one point that he was 100 percent certain that Woolmer had been murdered... or maybe he's just amenable to a good talking to from his erstwhile colleagues from Scotland Yard.

By the way, Pakistan has a population of 165 million with 37 percent below the age of 14.

Still No Cricket.

So, from the BBC we receive the news that Bob Woolmer was not murdered after all. Or at least we think we do. Who knows what to think now? It was held to be certain after a decent period for initial investigation that Woolmer had been strangled. Then that was questioned. Then it was asserted that he was poisoned and strangled. What was noticeable was the interventions of the Pakistani cricket authorities, again and again pushing for a naturalistic explanation. Then the UK police stepped in; and the UK pathologists. My reaction to that was twofold- good to have extra police weight behind the investigations; bad that they were becoming internationalised and politicised too early in the process.

Whatever Woolmer's state of health (and the family stated he had no serious health issues), he was a lifelong sportsman who still exercised with his team. How unhealthy could he have been? The only cause of such sudden death brought on by stress that is generally known is a heart attack, and this is so easy to determine it could have been immediately announced.

If this is the final resolution by the authorities then there is nothing more to be said (the motivations for a cover up are quite obvious); but that still doesn't make it cricket.

I feel a pattern emerging...

Maragaret Hassan, Ken Bigley, the British navy servicemen, Alan Johnston, the five contractors kidnapped in Baghdad. Horror. Manipulation. Cat. Mouse.

Who needs money?

What LGF says about kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston's statement is all too true:

"unfortunately, what he says isn’t that different from the BBC’s day-to-day reporting under normal circumstances"

I feel a touch of the old Humbert Wolfs coming on. Sing along:

"You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to."

Nowadays no-one is scared of the British polity, so why bribe when you can just take hostages?

Yet one could reaonably ask, why bother when the Beeb are so pliable to the cause of the terrorist anyway? I think it's something in the criminal mind- they just want to make sure. And anyway, criminality is fun, innit?

Legal Calculation

When I make a few remarks on the British legal system, one of the things I have to explain to the uninitiated is how numbers just mean different things in Britain. Take the case of Sheik Abdullah el-Faisal. He's the guy who preached serious hate and went to jail for a hefty nine years. four years. And now he's out and sunning himself in the Caribbean (which, after all, is what he should have stuck to).

According to the BBC at the time "The judge recommended that el-Faisal, from Stratford in east London, should serve at least half of the sentence and then be deported."

Maybe we're there now, taking into account custodial time before the trial. Or maybe we're not. And maybe that too is a point worth arguing. In any case, it's simply absurd to append the tag "nine years" when we only mean four.

But that's me naively assuming that a crime carries a price, rather than prison as being a form of social management. We're all part of that continuum.

When a comment is a rebuttal.

Matthew Parris has one of those typically high-handed moments of his, concealed under his trademark upper-class self-deprecation, as he debates the insufficiency of democracy.

A commenter sets him straight:

If you can't trust democracy, who can you trust? For the last 900 years (approx) in England we have been moving towards greater democracy because of the failures of kings (King John, Charles I, James II and others). Our rulers are not necessarily wise.

Taxation without democracy is nothing more than demanding money with menaces.

For a democracy to function, the electorate must be fully and impartially informed. Therefore the press must be free and impartial. I am not sure how this could be achieved but could the owner of this newspaper please take note.

Ian Wyld, Marlborough,

I agree with almost all of this, but it seems pretty clear how a "fully and impartially informed" public could be achieved, and that is by imposing a free market on the UK media through the progressive privatisation of the BBC. Naturally legal powers would need to be buttressed against monopoly interests (which should be the number one priority of the Government of the land in all sectors), and obviously the public would perforce have to wake up to the idea that there is no "given" view to be held, but all this would be to the good, and democracy the winner.

Christopher Hitchens comes home, and finds it another country (well he has settled in America, but that's not quite what I mean...)

Scary and real

I had this article about Britain's coming disillusion pointed out to me, and it really struck home. The fiddling of figures in the UK has reached desperate proportions; the imperative to deceive out of control. From immigration to education to unemployment there has been a general whitewash of data, leading to a bubble of false confidence and false alarms to go with it.

All due to burst sometime soon, according to a book written by former Guardianistas Elliot and Atkinson, reviewed by Jeff Randall.

Yes, they're Daily Mail themes, and yes, such things sell books, and no these authors are not the only two good apples in the rotten basket. In fact though, the greatest disservice done by our fetid media, as well as our fetid politicians, is that they have so promiscuously oversold the truth, mingling it with their little lies to such a point where truth and lies are indistinguishable. I won't be reading the book, I don't think, but it seems to me that it's a truth in this case only slightly oversold.

Hope for Gaza and the West Bank: gangs of fascists are fighting each other in what might ironically be titled a "civil war". The BBC chooses to avoid the irony, for some reason.


So what's the good news (apart from the above)? Well, as noted by Instapundit from this Times' report, "Some Palestinian analysts predict that a collapse of the Palestinian Authority would pave the way for Jordanian custodial rule in the West Bank and a similar arrangement for Egypt in Gaza."

Which would mean the reunification of the Palestinian ethnic grouping, and an end to the farcical pretense of a nation used by the Arab world to undermine Israel, more or less.

The Wall is working, t'would appear.

Oh, and the second hope would be that such rule of law would end the Kassam missile attacks into Israel.

The Big Story you haven't heard about.

The BBC is usually all over stories of violence from America, especially those with a racial dimension, like this.

Curiously enough they're not all over this story, which comes via the excellent la Shawn Barber. And saying that the US media would rather ignore it is not an excuse: Greg Dyke boasted once that the BBC covers topics too hot for the US media (he was actually talking about Iraq, but the same would be true regarding white on black crime, which would be generally referred to as race hate crime). Not on this occasion, it seems.

It made my blood boil. Swift and accurate justice would stop people such as the criminals concerned from getting as far down the line of evil callousness as to commit such crimes against the very humanity of us all.

Update: HotAir now has a barnstorming vent on the subject which pretty much says it all.

"I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it makes me cringe."

Sweeney Crawling

The above quote is from John Sweeney, of the BBC's Panorama, and is a calculated attempt to make it look as though he was just out of control when lambasting the Scientologists. In fact, I'd say he seemed to have an icy control behind his bellowing, as though indulging a whim out of contempt for his subjects.

Hello again.

Black is not the conspiratorial type.

Mark Steyn is in danger of turning me into a Conrad Black trial-geek. His coverage is getting hotter and sharper by the day, as is the nature of the case. The point, however, that I have summarised above, is the Black may be an intellectual dreamer, an other-worldly oddly patriarchal figure out of his time- but he is no conspirator, whereas David Radler clearly is.

I only hope US justice is strong enough to demonstrate that, since it wasn't strong enough to prevent the abuse of Black's name and twilight years up till now. And, yes, since you ask, I am buying the Steyn line on his former boss and friend.

If you view one thing on the internet this week, I recommend this, a Bloggerheads discussion between Robert Wright and Eli Lake. Bloggerheads, in case you are wondering, is a site where two way video conversations are broadcast. Robert Wright's a liberal, Eli's a conservative journalist. Eli's embedded in Iraq, following the "surge" of US troops there; Robert's back in the USA. It's nighttime in Iraq when this is recorded, daytime in the USA. Eli's account is full of excitement and tension- the real thing in other words. (via Instapundit)

Also fascinating, to get into the mood of Lake's reporting, this from Michael Yon- Rattlesnake- embedded with the British army and active on night missions. Again, electrifying.

I should also add that I will be away for the next few days, visiting relatives. I may be absent from these pages for five days or so. Then again, maybe I won't be.

Ah, happy days. Some joke, perhaps? The BBC had it as their front page photo all day.

As Mark Steyn said about the BBC in a recent column, "On the European Union, on the Iraq war, on Northern Ireland, on Islam, on America, the BBC trends not merely well to the left of the Conservative Party but well to the left of Tony Blair’s New Labour."

Is the IPCC doing harm to science?

Look out for a big BBC climate change splash this weekend, unless that is they think the weather's too cold in London or they think people are looking the other way. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), you see, is due to release another climate change paper on Friday.

Der Spiegel have written an interesting analysis of the current state of play, explaining the international wrangling that goes on about the use of language, and how the EU (with the UK) has tended to have its way in hardening forecasts.

What struck me most was this concerning CC "denier" Richard Lindzen:

"Lindzen's arguments sound convincing, but they are still nothing but claims, popular theories as opposed to a transparent global process, a global plebiscite among climate researchers."

I grew up in a family headed by a scientist, and this was not the way I understood it should work. Politics and science just don't mix, which appears not to be good enough for some.

Oh, another highlight from the Spiegel article (unserious one), concerning Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC:


"When colleagues describe him they mention his beard, the way he combs his hair straight across his head and his diplomatic skills."

Ah, I think this is the polite German way of saying that he has a wicked comb-over.

Nations Run Deep : France's positive moment.

I've heard recently from several sources of an old quote from the perennially influential Adam Smith:

"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation"

True enough, but the corollary must be that there is a great deal of repair required from time to time.

I am glad to hear of Nicholas Sarkozy's victory in the French Presidential elections, but Commentary's Michael Gurfinkiel sounds a cautionary note, and with good reason.

It's difficult reading his analysis of the situation, with France dominated by elite bureaucrats in Government, and by numerous, youthful and active Eurabian inmigrants on the the ground, to see how Sarkozy will be more than temporary respite for France. Maybe he will show people what needs doing- ie. a massive and alien revamping of France's political culture and social ideas. It's doubtful that he can actually do this himself, but perhaps he can be a trailblazer who buys France some time.

It would be nice for Europe if he can be more than that.

My comparison of the French situation with that of Britain, meanwhile, would be that while the French need to swallow their pride and accept alien solutions to their problems (and I mean more traditional Anglo-Saxon ones), Britain needs to awake to its own interests and show even greater robustness in its elected War on Terror. What we have seen in France is creeping Islamisation; in Britain we are vulnerable to the sudden terrorist shock. The French need to take their self-imposed blinkers off; the British to wake up. Neither is in a good position, but the French have taken a step forward today, undoubtedly.

By the way, I rather enjoyed the sour grapes BBC comment that "the BBC's Caroline Wyatt in Paris says he will have to work hard to unite the French, and try to win round those who voted against him". Clearly since this vote was a choice of two philosophies, it would be a betrayal of Sarkozy's voting base to pander to the Royalists. But that's, I expect, the Beeb's only consoling consideration at the moment. I wonder whether the Beeb will ever tire of their boilerplate.

Beeb-based observations

Ordinarily I ignore local elections. There seems to be a pretty good case for ignoring the most recent ones. That, one can imagine, is what the attuned folks at the Beeb concluded when they analysed the Conservative performance primarily through the prism of a notional national voting percentage barely increased on the previous year's less comprehensive local elections results (40ish percent versus 40ish percent). Yet there I was on Thursday night poring over the results at 3 in the morning. True, it was really just the consequence of insomnia- but somehow I had begun to care.

I wonder if others are beginning to feel that way? The Beeb are probably shuddering at the thought. A litmus test though of whether Cameron is really a statist or is actually a pretty good conservative liar would be whether (assuming- big assumption- his election in three years' time) the BBC was permitted to continue as the state sponsored global broadcasting monster which it has evolved into, or whether Cameron would engage in some conservative-minded natural selection of BBC functions, with the aim of stimulating the free media market.

Also in my mind during the coverage was the Beeb's very own Lothian question- where they gave primacy to the decision making processes of less than an eighth of the British population by headlining the elections to the assemblies in Scotland and Wales.

I wonder if that would have happened had Labour enjoyed a relatively relaxed Thursday night south of the border? It must be a comfort to lefty Beebites that they can always retreat to covering a truly leftist country when they need to get their breath back. Something similar has usually been true of conservatives in England- there was always the South East. Though we never had a giant broadcaster to cater for such escapism, news tends to follow the money, so...

I very much like Scotland, actually. The main reason, aside from motive, that I can't imagine ever locating there is the suffocating essentialness of the state to people's existences there. The same for me would apply to Sweden, probably Norway too. Where I currently reside, in the Czech Republic, the state has a bit of an image problem, having had a forty year term of office statifying (stultifying?) everything. The roll back from that is therefore instinctive and there's an instinct to leave alone; as well as the imperative of not actually being a very rich state to begin with.

I fear for Scotland though, or rather for its people. A retreat from the Union would be a fundamentally unserious step, a step towards EUification and away paradoxically from national identity. The fact that the deciding factor would be the opposition of the Lib Dems to such a move says it all really.

The Beeb thinking what I'm thinking, part deux.

The Beeb, it would appear, consider that the murder of Bob Woolmer may be linked to Islamic radicalism. According to this article via ATW

"PAKISTAN'S cricket coach Bob Woolmer may have been murdered after angering radical Muslims, according to a BBC investigation.

The Panorama TV show suggests some players followed the extremist Muslim movement, Tablighi Jamaat."

There is also the fact that "preliminary toxicology tests confirm Woolmer was rendered helpless with a powerful poison before being strangled."

Maybe in the light of these things I would venture to suggest that not only Islamic radicals linked to the team, but the team too, may be responsible for the murder.

Why? Because cricket is a very personal game- there's no other game where you are around the same people for such a long time, often engaged in idle chat and casual observation. The things Woolmer apparently criticised his players for were part of their lives and only the players would have heard them and felt their effects. Only the players, meanwhile, were going home to Pakistan to face the ridicule of their formerly adoring public. How to respond to the Englishman's "oppression" and save face at home?....

"Everybody's watching, everybody's gloating..."

-Sandmonkey on the world reaction to the political retreat of the US Congress and Representives from Iraq. In a fascinating interview with the ubiquitous Atlas the Egyptian blogger talks of a political thaw in Egypt following Bush''s reelection in 04, and a crackdown following the election of the Democrats last year. Some things needed to be above politics- unfortunately the pols lack the imagination for things like that.

Cat. Bag. Open. Heh.

Dangerously Good

If you're not following the Conrad Black trial as blogged by Mark Steyn for Macleans, I strongly suggest that you do. Writing with such unpolitical perspicuity Steyn does what the great satirical writers have always done: open their opponents to ridicule while remaining scrupulously observant. I suppose none of the jury will get to read any of it, but if they did...

Blogsweep

In which Max Boot makes it seem as though my pessimism on Iraq is premature (again), Dumb Jon makes most excellent and chewy toast of a former BBC journalist, while Norm Geras and Oliver Kamm demonstrate which of them is the Professor of Philosophy as they debate that high art, The Blog.

Ironic how the roles of philosopher king and man of letters are reversed- the academic offering tolerant and social solutions, the journalist offering draconian bloviation.

Then again, the US media could get worse (see below post).

Iraq revisited- what does go down the toilet.

Melanie Phillips has a fascinating post up on Iraqi WMDs.

Mmm. Kind of retro now, isn't it.

Yet I think it is instructive, and I have more respect for Melanie Phillips than for any other journalist.

It's almost a welcome relief to think about Iraqi WMDs than to think about mounting death tolls of US and British troops.

In truth I never expected anything else. I did hope for a miracle though, given that the goal was certainly a noble one. The really interesting thing is to reflect on the weakness of a military giant that can allow an insurgency to defeat it despite, and this is key, the overwhelmingly receptive nature of most Iraqis to an occupying force in place of a terrorist regime.

When you consider it, victory in Iraq is critical- yet it is not apparently happening. The opponents are very active- the Iranians, the Syrians, even the Saudis one suspects, at a distance. But America and its allies should have been able to enforce their will. So it's imperative to examine in detail why they haven't, and I'd start here:

"The docile US media, dependent as it is on government sources and handouts, is all too easily intimidated or bought off by pressure from a myriad different sources which all have their own conflicting reasons to suppress such politically damaging revelations. Too many important reputations in the media now rest on the ruthless suppression of the faintest possibility that they might have been wrong."

The US media, I would add, is docile when it comes to things which feed its preening narrative, and totally reactionary when it is contradicted. The poverty of the US media in understanding and reporting the stakes and the realties of the big wide world mirrors the starvation of intelligence which characterises the involvement in Iraq. Idealism remains, but is not enough. To know friend from foe and rightly estimate their designs is the key, and the media love throwing such realities down their toilets after the fashion of top mag Newsweek.

The Bias Masterclass

As an epicure of media bias, I have to link to a couple of recent posts from the well-known US blog Powerline. These lawyerly types are particularly good at highlighting the liberal bias of many media outlets there; the BBC's relentless pap represents a far tougher challenge here though.

Lesson One

Lesson Two

I may add more as they arise.

Allah's Moneyed Enslavers

I've not come across anything that exposes the utter evil of the people the US-led coalition are confronting in Iraq more than the story of a handicapped 13 year old, bought- yes, BOUGHT-, by Al-Qaeda to do its bidding.

It's Oliver Twist, Iraq-style, and instead of picking pockets, we find that the lad is assisting in attacks on US forces.

The difference in this story is that although motherless, like Oliver, unlike Oliver "Barack Muhammed" was sold by his father for 10,000 dollars.

Quite a lot of money, when you think about it.

Oh, "source" I hear you asking?

The UN, actually.

Thanks to the excellent Pamela from Atlas Shrugs for the link.

It's a little cruel, and perhaps slightly unwise, but I have to confess I found Allah very funny is his riff from the Iran debacle/kerfuffle/distraction.















I also have to confess that, though I should have known better, I thought young Batchelor was a girl. Those doe eyes!

ps. Devil's Kitchen, I notice, is a tad more up front along similar lines.

Compare and contrast

Zimbabweans write. Here and here.


"Every day, every night, hitmen in smart, unmarked vehicles arrive and drag people out their houses, or beat them senseless, because they don’t support the ruling Zanu PF."


"Mugabe has always left his people licking their wounds. He stops at nothing to take out his frustration, his anger and what he sees as his God-given right to lead on the people...The man jumps at shadows and orders his police and army, together with the CIO, the youth militia and the war veterans to beat his own people - the very ones that voted him into power."
[ I don't think Mugabe ever got in in a truly straight election process, even at the beginning there were thousands of reports of intimidation on big M's behalf- ed]

Comfy non-Zimbabwean western marxists write. Here and here


"Morgan Tsvangirai is a Western sponsored "terrorist", he plotted in London to assassinate Mugabe and overthrow the elected government. There is nothing democratic about the MDC, unlike the Mahdi army and Badr Brigades in Iraq, Hamas in Palestine or Hezbollah in Lebanon."


"Ever since veterans of the guerrilla war against apartheid Rhodesia violently seized white-owned farms in Zimbabwe, the country’s president, Robert Mugabe, has been demonized by politicians, human rights organizations and the media in the West."

Given the general apathy towards meaningful actions against Mugabe, given the laissez faire approach that has given the main role to quiet diplomat Thabo Mbeki, given the catastrophic (no understatement) decline of every aspect of Zimbabwean life taking Mugabe's reign in its totality, isn't it clear that far too much credit has been given already to the marxist take on that country, without the BBC giving it some more? (see where they link luscious lawyerly lefty Steph's blog- 1st marxist link above).

Kamm is rong

On, the contrary. to Kamm, most blogs are well ritten and a fare amount of time is given to rite spelling two.

But of course it isn't just that ;-). The blogosphere gives room for counterbalancing opinions to the dominant media. Really. Speaking as someone who was always antagonised by the BBC's simplistic socialistic version of Britain and the world, the blogosphere gave the first opportunity to fight back directly and honestly.

The Telegraph could be said to be the nearest thing to an opposition to the BBC, as long as one isn't hung up on the notion that the Times is Murdoch's personal Beeb-bashing vehicle. Yet the Telegraph has enjoyed journalistic contacts with the Beeb, swapping correspondents from time to time (Andrew Marr, for instance, has written for the Telegraph). It is also true that the Telegraph would probably be happy with a conservative-oriented state broadcaster, if such a thing be possible .

I would never be happy while a state organised news network retained centre stage in the British media. I was also deeply unhappy with the complicity of Dyke's BBC with New Labour, which is marginally less noticeable in today's corporation following the Hutton watershed. That's not to mention its closeness to the British Foreign Office with all its designs.

So, the blogosphere has given me the chance to say directly what I so deeply feel- that the BBC, through accident of history and malchance, has become a deeply rooted disseminator of half-baked reality.

Gazillionth confusing headline from the BBC

London attacks suspects in court

Yes, it's probably pretty unusual to wonder at this who Mr London is and why he has attacked people in court...

Happy Easter!

About that photo..

Claudia Rosett weighs in.

Aww, What a sweet little grandma...

Reality Checks

It's occurred to me that anyone regularly following this blog might imagine that I forget the issues I've taken an interest in once they're off the media radar. Well, Pakistan, Somalia and the vacuity of the modern Conservatives (dangerous in the light of the dangerous world we're in) are very much in my thinking.

Here's Douglas Farah on the looming menace of Pakistan-in-Afghanistan and vice versa, the Washington Post on the rising violence in Somalia (what a menace these jihadi are; what a rabble rousing, violent, coercive and devious bunch of evildoers), and Sean Gabb on Cameron's dodgy doyen, courtesy of the eponymous Fawkes.

Truth be told I've only been following the Pakistan situation passively, with a certain fear and trembling- such a vast potential for mischief, especially for the UK.

Clinton sets fundraising record
Pope 'moves closer to sainthood'

Headlines found side by side at teh BBC

Sweet, sweet article from Mark Steyn on the Iran hostage crisis, complete with LoL moments such as this:

"Patrolling the Shatt al-Arab at a time of war, the Royal Navy operates under rules of engagement designed by distant fainthearts with an eye to the polite fictions of "international law": If you're in a ''warship,'' you can't wage war. If you're in a ''destroyer,'' don't destroy anything. If you're in a "frigate," you're frigging done for.

"I think everyone regrets that this position has arisen. What we want is a way out of it - we want it peacefully and we want it as soon as possible."

So spoke Margaret Beckett today, according to the Beeb.

However I am not so sure that "everyone regrets" this situation. The Iranians certainly took their hostages deliberately, have not backed down, and have taken every opportunity to parade their captives and claim victory.

It's been disgusting how the BBC have alternated screenshots of the servicemen sitting in various poses, including one odious shot of them stuffing their faces with western style food. "eat, eat!", you can almost hear the minders saying.

Mind you, it's always interesting listening in to the Iranian discourse, as the above link to Memri enables. From it we get the old Islamic boilerplate about how the West wants them weak and puny, and is the big bad aggressor; with the twist that terrorist armies have explicit Iranian support and blessing, to put it mildly.

The truth is that Iran is weak and puny, but that is not the West's design. And like weak and puny people they are inclined to behave pathetically, as they did and do habitually in taking hostages, and to seek advantages way beyond their strength, as they do in furtively scrabbling for nuclear weapons. But weak and puny people will cave when pressure is applied, and strong action against them is a magnet for allies- who rather enjoy the spectacle of an idiot exposed.

Which leads me to suspect that in not taking a lead in demanding immediate sanctions from the EU Blair and Beckett have made a craven error. Note how the BBC covers this up nicely. While the Times exposes it faithfully.

Obviously absolute sanctions would just be a first, momentum building event, but they should be in place yesterday, or earlier. "Good" to hear from the BBC that our Euro-friends are standing "shoulder to shoulder" (odious phrase even when Blair said it; rank hypocrisy- and frankly up yours- coming from the EU in the circumstances).

"I have made up my mind, yes, but let me sleep on it first."

Bob Woolmer's last words to the media, to the BBC in fact.

Priorities and Consequences

"It is the welfare of the people that have been taken by the Iranian government that is most important."

So spoke Tony Blair recently when faced with the Iran hostage crisis (something familiar in the ring to that?). Some have noticed a degree of brave rhetoric from Blair generally, but it's these little nuances you have to watch. If the welfare of our servicemen were most important, they wouldn't be there at all. If that's Blair's priority then we'll give the Iranians whatever they want. But probably what they want is to weevil their way into the British diplomatic and military system. Are Blair and Beckett clever enough to stop them? Ahem,, I don't think so.

I think the BBC are thinking what I'm thinking about the Woolmer case, which happens, occasionally.

Manual asphyxiation. Entire team fingerprinted. More than one person necessary for the killing to take place, according to police; the death of Bob Woolmer, coach of the Pakistan cricket rabble, is looking more and more suspicious.

Still, at least they beat Zimbabwe. It really is sad how destroyed a sport can be.

Peter Briffa brings a personal perspective, or retrospective.

Commonsense, wit, openness, generosity- all qualites displayed by writer and journalist Cathy Seipp, who died on Wednesday at the age of 49.

I will miss that click. Her work is archived though, here.

Sorry for my absence.

I've been really busy and then when had an hour or two a strange phenomenon of non-connectivity came over my computer. Back now.

I have been taking a few mins most days to follow Mark Steyn's coverage of the Conrad Black trial.

Following this and some of the stuff surrounding the Scooter Libby trial makes me wish America had a Dickens to follow these Jarndycian affairs. No offence to Mark Steyn, he's doing a great job, and maybe the novel is waiting until later, as it was with Dickens.