DUFF & NONSENSE!

'Over there' is drifting even further away over there!

There is now no doubt about it, the ground is shifting.  From the deep and fundamental changes in global geo-politics, some of which are too obvious to be missed, and others which are to subtle yet to be discerned, the inescapable fact is that the world is in a state of flux and all the things which have held true for so long are now crumbling around us.  The whole subject is too immense and too complex for a pea-brain like me to come to any firm conclusions but I would like to dwell for a moment on just one aspect which impinges directly on Britain.

Ever since I read Chester Wilmott's book, The Struggle for Europe, when I was about 15 years old, I have never placed undue stress on 'the special relationship' with the USA, but neither have I ever dismissed it.  Since WWII, there has existed a sort of strategic symbiosis between Washington and London which has waxed and wained depending on presidents and prime ministers and circumstances.  However, it never, I believe, entirely disappeared and the well-informed tell us that at the level of officials, particularly military and intelligence officials, the links have remained fairly strong.  I refer to 'the special relationship' in respect of Britain and the USA but really I believe Churchill's description of 'the English-speaking peoples' better encapsulates the 'gut feeling' that by and large, and setting aside minor squabbles like an old married couple, we are in essence in favour of roughly the same things - and that is what binds us.

For the first time in my life I wonder if that is still true any more?  Amongst the factors nudging me to this doubt is, first and foremost, the ethnic demographic changes in America over the past 40 years which is now showing its full effects at the highest reaches of American polity and which have pushed out the old Anglo-Euro elite whose links to, and beliefs in, the Founding Fathers was strong, and thus, at second-hand, so too were their links to Britain from whence much of their inspiration arose. But today, Asians of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Indian stock are rapidly rising through the political ranks, as are the Hispanics whose numbers have increased so unbelievably in recent years.  Similarly, and thankfully, so have blacks at last taken their rightful place in their society.  But none of these people have any reason to care a jot for the United Kingdom, and indeed, many of them have every reason actively to dislike what we stand for.  Today, the perfect example of that stands at the very pinnacle of the United States - Barack Obama.

It seems to me that eveything he has done in foreign affairs since he achieved the presidency has been aimed at attempts to make friends with enemies and to discard old friends.  It is a piffling example (but I am a firm believer in the old adage that it is the small things that men do which tells you so much about them) that the on his very first day in the office he had the bust of Winston Churchill, a man who was, after all, half American, removed and sent back to the British embassy from whence it had come as a gift to a succession of presidents from this country.  However, Obama is, I think, not a cause but an effect of the change in American values brought about by several factors, ethnic demographics being but one.  Thus, even if my dearest wish is fulfilled and this dangerous man is evicted from the White House in 2012, I still believe that the loose, taken-for-granted alliance of the English-speaking peoples is definitely under threat, if not entirely ended.

Some time ago I half-joked that perhaps this country should take another look at Russia or China as allies!  As Palmerston made clear, "Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests."  I did not read the full reports of William Hague's recent speech in which he appeared to be promising to take a long, hard look at British foreign policy, but the fact that he appears ready to undertake some rigorous analysis is good news - if he draws the right conclusions.  Certainly there are three gigantic factors which he must take into consideration.  First, we have an American president who is, and I use the word carefully, hostile to this country.  By that I do not mean that he intends to attack us militarily or anything like that, but his whole demeanour during the gulf oil spill and his constant spitting out of the name 'British Petroleum' tells you all you need to know about his view of all and anything that is British.  Second, this is a president whose entire political and social values are the antithesis of ours.  He, and his cohorts are revolutionary Marxists.  Thirdly, the great United States of America is a weakening power.  It is still immensely strong, and it is possible that it may yet regain some of its strength, but for the moment it is weakening, and if I am right and it suffers a second dip recession, it will become even weaker.

Exactly the same enfeebling condition aflicts us and so we also must adjust to our new circumstances.  That is why I hope that the new government will combine the defence review and the debates on our new foreign policy together to form a coherent policy for the future.  Quite what form that should take I do not know but I may offer some ideas as and when I can.  You have been warned!

You can read a very much better informed observer on this subject - here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704862404575351090672146852.html?mod=WSJEUROPE_hpp_MIDDLETopStories

Oooh, stand by for a gay influx, my sweets!

Our Supreme Court, which is not supreme because above it lurks the European Court with a gang of judges from nations with distinguished histories of freedom, democracy and the rule of law developed over, er, well, decades, really, such as Germany, Italy and Spain assisted, at the moment, by Portugal, Slovenia and Slovakia, has decided that illegal immigrants may not be sent back where they come from if they are homo- or bi- or trans-sexual.  From now on you can expect a steady stream of young men entering the country illegally and kissing the first policemen they see and insisting that they're as queer as a nine bob note - until they collect their visas at which point their numerous wives and children will join them in the 'Land of the Open Door'.  Such fun, sweetie!

"Let slip the dogs of war"

Regular readers will know of my frequent 'thank yous' to my e-pal, Alan Sullivan, who seemed to be an almost endless source of interesting links around the net on an enormously wide range of subjects.  As I write, Alan is dying in hospital of the cancer which has plagued him for some time.  His regular readers are anguished in their indecision as to whether to wish him another brief respite or a quick end to his agonies.  I tend to the latter.

However, one of his commenters, in a sort of toast to Alan's blog-style, offered up a link to the Asia Times which contained an ominous message.  The writer, Victor Kotsev, is convinced that before summer is out the Israelis, with American assistence and a Saudi blind eye, will strike Iran.  Kotsev, in his article, links to an analysis by David Moon of the Asia Times dated 1st July in which he spells out how he thinks such an attack will be carried out.  Apparently the USA has re-enforced the Gulf area and now has three naval task forces close by.  According to Moon:

On June 18, the aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman and task group including the German frigate Hessen in the company of an unidentified Israeli naval vessel made a fast transit of the Suez Canal. The Egyptians not only closed the canal to all traffic, all fishing boats where docked, while the Egyptian military lined the banks of the canal. All facets of this passage rank as extraordinary.

As I write, Netanyahu is in Washington and he and Obama are trying to mend fences.  According to the WSJ, whilst it's all smiles and handshakes in public there is still considerable tension in private.  Quite how this fits with a US-assisted attack on Iran is beyond me but, of course, unless you are privy to the diplomacy no-one can be sure of anything. However, I am pretty sure that of all Israeli prime ministers, Netanyahu, with or without the USA, is never going to allow Iran to gain nuclear weapons - that, I feel, is a given!

"Accentuate the negative"

I take my title from an article in The Economist on Line.  In it they report on an an embarrassing error in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) picked up in Holland.  Various errors have come to light and most of them have been covered on the net and in the media.  The one that upset the Dutch related to claims about a huge increase in the area of land liable to sea-flooding in Holland.  Some wretched, dandruff-ridden hack from a Dutch newspaper decided to check it out and found the 'experts' had added to the total areas only at risk from the Rivers Meuse and Rhine.  Red, or perhaps orange, faces all round and the Dutch environment minister responsible for providing the data set up an inquiry by the independent Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL).  They have now reported.  Apparently they bent over backwards not to lay into the IPCC too hard but were compelled to point out numerous errors.  Above all, they stressed the constant tendency amongst the IPCC report-writers to always go for the worst case scenarios.  Where the 'experts' might offer a range of possible outcomes for any given possibility, the IPCC always go for the worst, the most dramatic, the one most likely to produce the headlines.  Thus it was when the IPCC boss, the ridiculous Rajendra Pachauri, adopted the dubious notion that the Himalayan glaciers would all have disappeared by 2035, and who screeched like a parrot when it was pointed out as nonsense, and then had to eat his words when he and the panel were proved wrong.

So, more of the 'same old same old', I suppose.  I must admit that I haven't written too much recently on HAFs (Hot Air Fanatics) and their silliness because only the purblind now could ignore the transparent shenanigans at East Anglia University and all those embarrassing - and incriminating - e-mails.  And yet ... and yet ... still the HAFs go on like the charge of the Light Brigade, apparently unaware that no one is following them any more.  In sensible circles they are treated with sniggers as though they had turned up at a black tie 'do' in fancy dress!  Why do they do it?  I think the answer is similar to the one I proposed in an earlier post concerning those eccentric Marxists who still go around like so many demented Plymouth Brethren spouting nonsense about 'the workers' and 'come the revolution' and all that sort of thing.  It's a hobby!  A hobby, I grant you, taken to extreme ends so as to almost verge on religiosity, but a hobby nonetheless.

Why can't they stick to model railways - or amateur theatricals? 

I am obliged - yet again - to Cafe Hayek for the pointer.

American exceptionalism: the biggest test since 1776

Just four months to go!  Four little but long months in which anything could happen.  Obama, with all the verbal fluidity of the traditional snake-oil salesmen has been telling the American people that the only way out of the financial predicament in which the nation is broke and the credit card maxed-out is to keep on borrowing and spending, and spending, and spending; or if you prefer a different metaphor, the house may be on fire but the way to put out the blaze is to keep pouring more petrol on it.  Well, the Americans have watched for nearly 18 months, transfixed, as the money taps were were opened to full and allowed to gush forth unhindered.  Results so far?  Nil, nix, or in deference to the increasingly Spanish-speaking electorate, nada!

With nearly 18 months of experience behind them, the 'Obama-nables' have taken stock, weighed up the situation, applied their ferocious intellects - and have decided to borrow and spend even more!  Of course, only the sillies and the corruptibles actually believe this lunacy will work.  One thinks of Ms. Pelosi, a woman who makes Polly Toynbee sound like a genius; or perhaps, the famous money massager, Mr. George Soros, and the masseur massager, Mr. Al Gore, both of whom are likely to earn more than a nickel and a dime from the $2bn (I'll repeat that - $2bn) of federal money sent express post by 'The One' to the green alternative energy industry of which these two gentlemen, I use the word loosely, are large investors.  The rest of the polit-bureau know perfectly well that this policy will end in a financial Armageddon and some of them still hope that this will occur before the November elections in order to provide an excuse for the imposition of emergency rules and regulations including postponement of the polls.  In any event, they will move heaven and earth to ram their financial weapon of last resort, the 'Cap and Trade' bill through the Congress before they lose control in November.

Americans fondly believe that somehow, in some indefinable way, they are different from the rest of us.  Of course, on the surface this is true but proves nothing, because viewed from 'over here' we are different from them, but we don't make such a song and dance of it.  However, that said, it is absolutely true that the traditional American ethos is exceptional.  Today, the question is whether this ethos still exists or not?  Next November we will be provided with the answer.  It will not be enough for the Republicans simply to retake, say, 30-odd seats, the answer must be very much louder and clearer than that, they must deal a bloody and fatal blow to the machine politicians, of both parties, but especially the Democrats.  They must be utterly ravished and savaged at the polls!  Failure to so so will tell us all the opposite truth, that American exceptionalism is dead.

 

'Shuggly-Wuggly' gets the dunce's cap

Forgive me for referring again to David Osler's excellent site but there was a recent post and thread of some interest (well, my contributions, of course, were fascinating!) on the subject of how history should be taught in schools.  This put me in mind of 'Shuggly-Wuggly the Feeble' who apparently teaches the subject whilst rehearsing his real ambition to become Censor-in-Chief to the next Socialist government!  Anyway, it was enough to provoke me into paying his blog a visit and, lo and behold, there was a perfect example of what passes for thinking amongst the teaching classes. (Pity the poor children ...)

According to 'Shuggly-Wuggly', there is an idea afoot in government circles to give benefit recipients food vouchers instead of cash.  This is an idea which I have long advocated because, irrespective of one's political philosophy, it is a prime example of straightforward commonsense.  But not to 'Shuggly-Wuggly'!  Somehow, and don't ask me how, he equates this idea with (some of) the old 18th/19th century mine and mill owners who paid their workers in vouchers which could only be spent in the 'company store'.  Now, dear reader, let me ask you, do you see just a teensy-weensy difference between these two propositions?  And I am not referring to the fact that in 'Lord Gradgrind's day he was dealing with people who did work, where-as today we are dealing with people who do not work - for a variety of reasons, many of which being entirely spurious.  No, the resolutely ignored elephant in 'Shuggly-Wuggly's classroom is that these vouchers will be exchanged for food parcels provided by a charity.  They in turn, presumably, will buy the food on the best terms they can from the supermarkets. 

Now, suddenly, 'Shuggly-Wuggly' stands up for libertarianism by insisting that benefit recipients should not be denied the freedom of having their own money - er, well, actually, 'Shuggly', old boy, it's not 'their money', it's my money!  But according to this most unlikely recruit to the Chicago School of economics, these people should be given 'choices' by having their own cash in hand, presumably so they can buy the occasional 'sawdust-burger 'n' chips' from the nearest greasy spoon (manned by people who do work!) and spend the rest buying their relaxation drugs of choice from the local dealer! 

In perusing 'Shuggly-Wuggly's piece, one thought kept recurring: were my son to have been taught the history of the industrial revolution by this great pedagogue would I have been forced to knock a load of rubbish out of his poor little head on a fairly constant basis?

 

The Duffs will rule the world, I tell you!

The Duff phenomenon is unstoppable, I tell you!  It is only a matter of time before we rule the world.  And when we do, all those people who have ever used the word 'duff' as a derogatory term - will be given 200 lines!!!  Here are two more Duffs.  Alas, no connection to me, although it must be confessed that there are one or three blank nights in my life, usually Saturdays, for which, shall we say, I was not responsible for my actions.  However, their mother is American and as I am terrified of American women it is exceedingly unlikely, even with the help of 6 pints of Black & Tan, that I ever managed to consort with one.  To be fair, it is equally inconceivable that any American woman would have voluntarily consorted with me!

The ladies above are the Misses Hilary and Haylie Duff - waddya mean, you know that already?  For years I have been plagued by Googlers trying to find links to Hilary Duff, who, I am led to believe, has some fame in pop-singing circles.  I have often wondered who she was and what she looked like, and now I know - and her sister came, too!  A credit to the Duff lineage, I feel.  To invert that old saying, 'I would not hesitate to breed from those gels'!

I am obliged to The Mail

Is David Osler-fied or ossified?

I refer to the Left-wing blogger, David Osler, who is an exception to the almost universal rule which states that all Left-wing blogs are written by tits for tits!  It must be stated for the record that his being a Left-wing blog it does attract a fair number of tits but that, alas, is the price you must pay for being Left-wing.  However, Mr. Osler (I must be formal to differentiate between us as we share a common Christian name and I cannot bring myself to use the diminutive) is anything but a tit.  He is wrong (in my opinion) about many things but I recognise the intelligence he applies in reaching his conclusions.  I recommend his site to you all as a place in which contrary opinions can be exchanged and, tits apart, debate is conducted in a relatively civilised manner.

However, that is not entirely the reason for this post.  What I wish to raise as a topic is one that demonstrates itself time and again on his site, and indeed, on almost all the Left-wing sites, and that is what I can only call their museum-like quality.  Stepping into them is rather like stepping into the Victoria & Albert Museum!  The whole thing reeks of 19th century Marxism with incessant complaints concerning 'the working class', either in support of them for their want of advantage, or against them for being fat, idle, ingrate layabouts in the never-ending 'working class' struggle .  You see, for these people, 'the struggle' never ends.

Now, had I lived in Victorian times I would have had no difficulty in identifying the 'working class', they were the ones who did manual labour, failed to speak proper, had very little money and were, perhaps as a result, a tad lax with personal hygeine.  But today, in the 21st century, who or what is the 'working class'?  I keep asking this question but I never receive a sensible answer.  The only people who are in a state of impoverishment (there are virtually no poor people in this country) are the people who do not work!  By and large, the people who do work, do alright, and the vast majority of them either already are, or are aspiring to be, property owners.  One of Mr. Osler's larger tits attempted to tell me that the 'working class' today was anyone doing a regular job, not necessarily manual labour, for a regular wage.  I pointed out that this would include East End lads with hardly any GCSEs earning a fortune on City trading floors, surgeons, and Trade Union leaders on £150k a year plus exes.  Are they 'working class', too?  On my very occasional mini-breaks abroad, the aircraft is full of enormous fatties under-dressed in sleeveless vests and shorts with broods of equally fat children off for an expensive fortnight's holiday in some Continental hotel or other.  Are they 'working class'?  If so, I have to tell Mr. Osler and his Left-wing friends that if they are seeking my support for what they term 'the struggle', they will have to come up with some new argument that does not include phrases like "the down-trodden masses" and that sort of thing!

So the question remains, why do all these people, some of them very intelligent like Mr. Osler, some of them less so, like Susan Press, keep up this travesty.  Of course, I recognise that all the talk of 'class struggle' and the like is highly romantic, and one could suppose that they are simply the political equivalent of all those chaps who dress up as Napoleonicn soldiers and go off every summer to refight old battles.  In other words, at its heart, all this Marxist-Trotskyite balderdash is simply a hobby!  Well, as I have remarked before, every man's hobby is incomprehensible to every other man - as I know when I try to explain mine to my friends!  But then, it is important to recognise that Mr. Osler and Susan Press are at the nicer end of the spectrum.  At the other end there are some real nasties.  Several of them emerged, blinking in the sunlight like maggots crawling out of a carcass, when Ken Livingstone took over London.  Similarly, 'over there' we can see the same infestation of malignant termites crawling all over the body politic of the United States, mouthing the same slogans but carefully hiding their real aim which is power for power's sake.

Still, it is rather fun visiting these Left-wing sites and going back in time, like dressing-up for a Victorian play.  On my book shelf is a slim-ish volume published 70 years ago and entitled Marxism: A Post Mortem written by Henry Bamford Parkes, an English-born American academic.  The title is indicative of his conclusions, and even 70 years ago he was far from being the first to shred the nonsense that is Marxism.  And yet it lives on in the romantic yearnings of Left-wing bloggers - ah, bless!

"Through a glass, darkly"

I am both be-mused and a-mused by the so-called spy saga 'over there'.  The main surprise to me has been the lack of 'SHLOCK-HORROR' headlines.  So far (and I stress the conditional), none of the 'spies' appear to have worked in any sensitive positions and apparently their brief was simply to insinuate themselves into American society and attempt to build up a network of contacts who would provide background on American affairs.  My first question to that is why bother?  Apropos the post that precedes this, surely the, er, mighty Russian intelligence service is capable of reading Drudge and watching Fox news, or even, taking out subscriptions for WaPo and the NYT - they are both feeling the pinch and would be awfully grateful for the money!  Well, of course, actual spying was not their real task which was in fact much more mundane.  It was, I guess, talent spotting, that is, trying to point their masters in the direction of American citizens likely to rise to high positions and who might be liable - or pliable - to pressure for any of the three usual reasons - money, sex or ideology.  But even if, and they probably were, successful in indicating possible recruits what would these recruits actually produce?  By sheer co-incidence, my visit to the Prospect site yesterday, which formed the basis of my last post, also took me to a link which is now 11 years old but which could not be more timely and apt.

In 1999, the former British ambassador to Moscow, Roderic Braithwaite, wrote a very measured essay for Prospect entitled Secret Sensations in which he mused on the pros and cons of spying.  He began by quoting Clausewitz on the vagaries and thus the usefulness of intelligence in wartime, but then immediately adds a corrective:

In his great book On War, Clausewitz wrote little about secret intelligence. What he did say was not complimentary. “Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain. This is true of all intelligence but even more so in the heat of battle.” In fact, Clausewitz was wrong. Wellington had just shown in the Peninsula war that good intelligence helps you to win stunning victories over superior forces; and in Belgium that, if your intelligence is inadequate, you risk being humbugged by Napoleon.

He takes a judicious view of recent intelligence operations:

Even the best intelligence must be subjected to five tests. Accurate? Relevant? Properly interpreted? Timely? Used effectively? Secret intelligence-like open information-often fails one or more of these tests. For example, the intelligence produced from Enigma was usually objective and accurate: it consisted of documentary evidence brilliantly extracted from the heart of the German war machine. But it was often difficult to interpret and use. In 1943 and 1944, those who favoured a second front read the intelligence as meaning that the Germans would be unable to transfer any significant force from Russia to the Atlantic Wall to counter an assault. Prudent British generals insisted on a certainty, well beyond what secret intelligence was capable of providing, that their German opponents would be too weak to throw the Allies back into the sea. The matter was resolved by judgement and politics, not by secret information. The Americans’ Venona project rivalled Enigma in intellectual ingenuity. It broke the KGB’s wartime codes and showed how successful the Russians had been in penetrating the Allies’ atomic bomb project and other operations. But most of the information Venona produced was too sensitive or too late to be used, and most of the Soviet agents it unmasked escaped or died before they could be prosecuted.

"Used effectively" is often forgotten but can be utterly crucial.  One is reminded of the absolutely acurate intelligence provided to Stalin prior to the German assault by the 'Red Orchestra' network in Germany, and by Richard Sorge in Tokyo, all of it either ignored by Stalin, or their reports watered down by underlings to frightened to give their master bad news he did not wish to know.

Braithwaite sums it all up, thus:

Those who agree with Clausewitz argue that the huge sums spent by governments on secrets would be better spent on new hospitals. With the end of the cold war, they say, the spying profession should be allowed to fade away. This goes too far. We still need the intelligencers and their agencies. The task of the British public is to ensure that they remain competent, relevant, under control and reasonably cheap. It is not a simple task. A less sensational public debate would be a good start.

Some "tiny pellets of social and intellectual nourishment", just for you!

A fascinating essay by Evgeny Morozov in Prospect, and I have taken the liberty of pinching their very attractive illustration.  Morozov, provoked by Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (to be published in Britain in September), begins by having some fun at the expense of The Spectator, happily the 1889 edition not the contemporary one.  In it, they warned ominously against the perils of that new-fangled invention - electricity!

They were happy to acknowledge the material benefits but deplored the certain harm to intellectual standards:

Foreshadowing Marshall McLuhan by almost a century, the magazine deplored a world that was “for purposes of ‘intelligence’ reduced to a village” in which “a catastrophe caused by a jerry-builder of New York wakes in two hours the sensation of pity throughout the civilised world.” And while “certainly it increases nimbleness of mind… it does this at a price. All men are compelled to think of all things, at the same time, on imperfect information, and with too little interval for reflection.”

That, magnified a thousand-fold, is a good description of the internet in all its growing ramifications.  Nicholas Carr, in his book, warns that receipt of an almost non-stop inflow of information will reduce intellectual stringency, not least, he supposes, because it will reduce the capactity to concentrate.  Morozov counters this gloomy assessment by pointing up the enormous benefits, not the least being the ability of 'the Net' in all its amorphous forms, to correct its own worse faults.

A fascinating article that I recommend you to read.