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.