Imagined Community

The Ashtray's Full

2009-12-20T17:37:00.003Z

Time to move.

Going Through the Motions. Again.

2009-10-18T12:06:00.002+01:00

Due Process and Draft Legislation

2009-09-21T11:16:00.005+01:00

There's still time to register concern at the introduction of draft legislation on an area which is still the subject of both a public consultation and a Select Committee inquiry. Whatever you think of the rights or wrongs of Home Education, this is surely a mockery of due process in drafting legislation.

Still, Ed Balls announced the very same day as Badman published that he accepted the recommendations in full. Must be a quick reader, eh?

This is my note to dlp@commonsleader.x.gsi.gov.uk Feel free to borrow any parts of it that seem useful (not my signature, though...). Carlotta's take is considerably more detailed.

Your message must be in today, though.

Dear Sir or Madam

I wish to express my concern at the inclusion of a section described as "improving monitoring arrangements for children educated at home" in the proposed Improving schools and safeguarding children Bill.

You must be aware that the recommendations arising out of Graham Badman's review into Elective Home Education (EHE) are still open for consultation until October 19. Likewise, you must be aware that the CSF Select Committee is conducting an inquiry into how Mr Badman went about that review; serious questions have been raised over his methodology and the soundness of his analysis. Indeed, Mr Badman himself has - via the DCSF website - recently called for additional information from Local Authorities. It is difficult to understand this last development as anything other than a tacit admission that his original research was inadequate. Mr Badman states in his covering letter that only some Home Educators take issue with only some of his recommendations. This misrepresents the true situation considerably.

Ed Balls announced his complete acceptance of Mr Badman's recommendations on the very same day that Mr Badman published them. After this inauspicious start, how can we have any confidence that the consultation and the Select Committee inquiry are to have any effect when we see that the areas covered are nonetheless to be included in the Bill?

I urge, then, that all clauses connected with "improving monitoring of home education" be removed until the consultation has ended and the Select Committee has reported. Draft legislation can then be genuinely informed by the outcome of these two exercises, as can the oversight provided by the legislators who have the final decision: our MPs.

I would be grateful if you would confirm receipt of this message, and I look forward to a more substantive response in due course.

Yours faithfully

Dr Ian Appleby

The Tale of Despereaux

2009-03-01T20:18:00.007Z

"I know, I know, there's this rat, see? And this chef, who makes soup..." Stop me if you saw that one already. Despereaux certainly hasn't been helped by studio scheduling that saw another rodent/liquid meal animation appear first. I have to say, though, that this offering is a lot more filling. Roger Ebert reckons the plot is all over the place, and there's some justice in his observations, but what interests me more, here, are the implicit messages of the movie: all the way through runs a meta-narrative about how story-telling, stereotypes, and power combine.

Let's look at the king, first; his domain is famed for its soup, which brings joy to his subjects. Indeed, soup becomes a metaphor for what makes life worth living -when it is banned, the sun ceases to shine, and the rain ceases to fall. I am very much drawn to an equation that makes soup=42: it's a simple, comforting, and nourishing dish, and as I get older if not wiser, that's increasingly what I want from life. Why ban soup? Well, the king's beloved queen espies a rat in her soup (all the obvious jokes are eschewed), which brings about her immediate demise. In his grief, the monarch bans soup.

And rats. Brilliantly, the opening scene of the film has Sigourney Weaver intoning a narration about how rats shun human company, and stick to the shadows, while we see Roscuro the rat enjoying the sunrise and chatting to his human companion. Already, then, we know not to trust all we will hear. This rat can talk, but because "everyone knows" they are vile, no-one considers that he might have an apology or explanation to make for his presence in the royal soup. The parallel is not explicitly drawn - after all, Roscuro's "crime" is in fact an unfortunate accident - but still we have an entire group demonised for the actions of a tiny minority - in this case, a minority of one. Remind you of anything? And the point is made that such demonisation costs the demonisers hard - there is no sunshine, no joy, no rain, no hope of rejuvenation or future growth. In short, no soup.

Ms. Weaver announces that societies only get heroes when they really need them. But then again, we already know she's an unreliable narrator. Cut to Despereaux's point of view from his cot, surrounded by anxious adult mice. Anxiety, we come to learn, is the mouse's natural state of being; these mice are specifically worried by Despereaux's lack of cowering. Mouseworld is depicted as a place of upright, bourgeois citizens. Initially, it seems to be a simple contrast with the anarchy of ratworld (which, it has to be said, is depicted through some rather disturbing "Skull Island" type imagery that implies that non-white society is somehow barbaric), but it soon becomes clear that these "decent" citizens live in oppressive fear of the council, and their unspecified "rules." Despereaux's father is caught in a dilemma - report his son's "deviant" behaviour, or risk it being reported by another informer. The council banishes Despereaux, invoking these same "rules," which are intended to keep society "safe." Amusingly, cats and carving knives are the two terrors invoked by school, but the clear demonstration of how shadowy terrors can be used to justify the removal of liberties is rather less likely to elicit a smile.

In passing, it's worth remarking on the recognition of schooling as a system of inculcating attitudes seen as socially desirable. The headteacher tells Despereaux's parents that "no-one starts out afraid." For that, you need schools... Naturally, I'm drawn to a film that clearly suggests schools suppress an individual's interests and intrinsic motivation.

The really subtle achievement of the film, though, is to undermine Despereaux's own motivation. As part of the attempt to make him a "proper" mouse, he and his brother set out to the library to nibble books; Rather than eating, Despereaux ends up reading a fairy-tale, which fills him with notions of chivalry and heroism. Now, I've argued in these pages before that our violent society is partially sustained by narratives of heroism in warfare. The chivalric values of an old fairy tale become Despereaux's moral code. If I'd actually read Don Quixote, I'm sure there would be a parallel to draw; certainly, Despereaux can get no support from his fellow mice.

He does convince Roscuro, however, who determines to apologise to the princess for causing her mother's death. The hollowness of this chivalric code is shown in two episodes: the princess, despite earlier having mourned the departure of the rats, cannot see past her stereotypes about rats to listen to Roscuro's apology, driving him literally and metaphorically back into the darkness.

Secondly, Despereaux uses it to convince the chef's muse, Boldo - a mixture of vegetable and kitchen utensil - to accompany him in his attempt to rescue the princess. Boldo is rapidly overwhelmed by the rats, who munch away at his vegetable parts. The final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth is often claimed as a touching tribute to pointless sacrifice; Boldo's demise is a more pointed denunciation of the power of tales of heroism to mobilise the young and idealistic to throw their lives away in protection of old power structures.

Given that I only seem to get to the movies with Ms Dynamite-E-e these days, I am fascinated by the implicit messages in children's movies. I am delighted, and amazed, that such subversive messages should appear in a big-budget, mainstream kids' movie. Would that many more would encourage such a critical reflection on the customary narrative arcs we are shown. The kneejerk reaction of an injured superpower, the demonisation of one group or another, and the depiction of a society living in fear are all too readily applicable to the world our children are growing up in. The film not only clearly rejects violence, it exposes the narratives that sustain it. Instead, it lauds tolerance and an openness to forgiveness and dialogue. I doubt we have ever needed the latter qualities more than now, in the face of the shadowy terrors dangled in front of us, and the restrictive and mysterious "rules" imposed upon us in the name of our safety. That soup tastes pretty good to me.

Tautology of the Day

2009-02-26T22:45:00.004Z

Despite the bashing he gets from the less thoughtful bloggers, Tim Ireland does some sterling work attempting to clear the Augean stables of the UK's public sphere (as in Habermas, not (just) blogo-). Actually, strike my first sentence - I'm sure much of the malice and slander comes directly as a result of his calls for high ethical standards among bloggers. It baffles me that the bloggertarians, especially, cannot see the merit in his arguments. Look what LabourList has done for the quality of political blogging in this country, and where do you think Draper took the template from?

But there's little less interesting than meta-blogging. Tim has been watching the newspapers for a while now; he's created the Sun Lies project, and now looks to be casting his net wider. It needs to be done. Tim has proved conclusively how both the Sun and the Daily Mail dishonestly manipulate their comments to imply unanimity with the papers' view. You might think that neither tabloid is any better than it ought to be; at least the broadsheets don't play that game.

Well, the Independent ran this travesty of an article today, which harmonises nicely with the mood music playing from the DCSF's open windows that tries to conflate Home Education with child abuse. Incidentally, the Victoria Climbié Foundation have emphatically distanced themselves from the NSPCC's attempts to link Victoria to Home Education:

VCF - The Victoria Climbié Foundation UK is genuinely concerned about the link being made between Victoria Climbié and home education, and Victoria as a hidden child. Victoria was neither home-educated nor hidden.

The reality is that there is no such thing as a 'hidden' child, only children who are allowed to fall through the gaps. The key issue here is how statutory services interact with children that are known within the child protection system. [Front page, 26.02.09]

Quite. I know from mailing lists that a number of people have protested about the Independent's coverage. Numbers of comments published as of going to press? Well, take a wild guess, why don't you. Yet, just as with the dodgy tabloids Tim highlights, the comments box remains ostensibly open, luring the casual reader into thinking there is nothing controversial (let alone plain wrong) in the article on the site. It's dishonest journalism, and there's your tautology for the day.

Twitter ye not!

2009-02-26T22:38:00.002Z

God bless Frankie Howerd for the obvious headline. Probably later than I should have, I'm switching Loudtwitter off. Let's face it, if you can't live without my 140 character doses of wisdom, you'll be following me already. Apologies for cluttering up your RSS feeds.

I'm leaving the updates in the sidebar, though...

140 Character References

2009-02-25T05:01:00.001Z

Putting the twit into twitter:

14:19 @therealsin_o I saw a flasher the morning of the day we went to see Mamma Mia. To this day, I am not sure which was the more disturbing. #

14:20 @therealsim_o I saw a flasher the morning of the day we went to see Mamma Mia. To this day, I am not sure which was the more disturbing. #

15:25 @robmanuel Be a dear and RT the likeliest suggestions, would you? I've just this minute got TD going on Debian, and reached same conclusion. #

15:46 @Goforth4halifax Linda. hi from further up the valley. If you put the http:// in front of the www, Twitter will recognise it as a hyperlink. #

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140 Character References

2009-02-24T05:01:00.001Z

Putting the twit into twitter:

13:34 Great exposition of Home Educators' current concerns at Liberal Conspiracy - tinyurl.com/dl7hke #

13:38 Semple replies: "since when are parents more qualified than teachers to choose what their children can and can't learn?" bit.ly/2cFO2 #

14:19 @therealsim_o I dunno, it could catch on: "Steptoe and Son front Boris's flagship sustainable transport policy for London. Hercules unsure." #

15:00 @ourman Are they casting the Sound of Music? If so, you're right to be scared. #

15:07 @ourman Regretting my levity, then. Sounds like you'd really value some safety and reassurance right now. Anything we can do? #

16:41 Working in a university office, why would I possibly need a stable internet connection or a working PC? All hail the Eee PC. #

16:41 10 mins to get the 16.51 Leeds train. Oxford Rd to Manchester Victoria. What are the chances? #

19:40 Twitux won't let me click-thru URLs. What's a good client to install on Debian Lenny? Tweetdeck? Gwibber? Any thoughts? #

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140 Character References

2009-02-21T11:45:00.001Z

Putting the twit into twitter:

18:26 Shamelessly stealing a meme from @chickyog, I give you your groove for today: tinyurl.com/8w9ah4 #

18:32 Strike that, @derekdraper has stopped following me. *drags needle uncaringly from vinyl* #

19:00 Coincidentally enough, as I tweet, the younger generation is watching a Russian adaptation of "The Wizard of Oz." The Heroine's name? Dolly. #

19:05 Right, time to introduce Lenny to that spare partition. Maybe I should liveblog it - what better way to show @derekdraper what he's missing? #

19:31 @mrpower Er, rob a train? Strange set of priorities , I agree. #

21:43 OK, that's Lenny installed. No hitches, grub even found the existing Arch partition automatically. So, next question: do I stlll hate Gnome? #

11:07 Hmm, according to sitemeter, visits to my blog have halved since I began loudtwittering. Coincidence or consequence? #

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140 Character References

2009-02-19T11:45:00.001Z

Putting the twit into twitter:

16:00 Right, crowdsourcing: an hour's worth of material on Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, in easily digestible 140 character chunks, please. #

18:49 You mean I'll have to write it myself? Hand me the T&Cs, I thought Twitter was supposed to boost productivity. Title: "The Soviet Perineum." #

20:17 Is there an equivalent to Godwin's Law that invokes the USSR as the non plus ultra of comparative tyranny. And if not, why not? #

08:05 Ack. Lemsip. Really not my breakfast beverage of choice. #

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140 Character References

2009-02-18T11:45:00.001Z

Putting the twit into twitter:

13:14 Wish me luck, somehow I ended up agreeing to take a little person to see Madagascar 2 this afternoon. Departure scarily iminent. #

18:48 Is it a fair remark that liberal/left political bloggers seem not to consider children's issues so often, despite many of us being parents? #

18:55 @Paul0Evans1 A caveat first: I've been preoccupied in work until recently, so I'm wanting to explore rather than lay down any laws. #

18:57 So one e.g., there's (rightly, I feel) big concern over the National Identity Register, yet I missed the noise over Contactpoint going live #

19:00 Another e.g. - doubts over the Every Child Matters agenda: what is desirable for children, and potential uses of these criteria. #

19:02 I wonder whether a] this is a consequence of the public/private sphere distinction and b] whether Twitter allows a proper exploration.... #

20:25 Is Graham Badman leveraging unfounded claims of child abuse among home educators just to shill Microsoft? tinyurl.com/ctlwug #

23:06 The Specials covering Dirty Old Town. Spotify or sleep-deprived hallucination? #

23:15 All too real sound - central heating pump wailing like a banshee, suddenly. Announcing imminent demise of system? How worried should we be? #

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Not Another Big Technological Fix?

2009-02-17T19:32:00.003Z

Kevin at the Facebook group "Stop the UK Government Stigmatising Home Educators" has been doing more digging around Graham Badman. A picture emerges of Badman's close links to Becta and thence to Microsoft, raising the theory that Badman is using the unfounded abuse claims as leverage to promote his own IT interests. Kevin suggests that the government may welcome a technological solution to deteriorating standards in schools and the associated outflux of children into Home Education. Intertwined with this is a worrying assumption that happiness is linked to income, and the glimmerings of a move to classify the absence of access to the internet as tantamount to child abuse.

My initial response is one of horror, and that despite what I already knew of the review. The government's obsession with huge IT projects has not gone well so far. Added to which, many Home Educators follow approaches that eschew testing, and that LEAs find difficult to understand - most of their education officers come from a schooling background, and are very often closed to the benefits of unschooling approaches. Such philosophies sit uneasily in the existing system, and I can't imagine them being catered for at all in a computerised set-up that will by definition require labelling and assessment. Lastly, and probably leastly, although my inner geek is spitting feathers, if those outside the school system are supposed to be tied into an IT-based way of working, given Badman's associations, what betting it will be, despite the obvious affinities between Home Ed and open-source software, a Microsoft package?

Kevin's piece was first posted in a discussion thread within the Facebook group, and is reposted in full here with permission (and my thanks):

Sorry people this is a bit of a long one.

Have been doing some more research on Mr Badman and his interests.

There is a load of stuff here, I've only scratched the surface of the
possible cross references of name and orgs so if anyone is interested there'
s a bit of googling to do.

I believe that there is a possibility that the tie between Graham Badman and
Becta is very significant. Badman is, IMO, a man with a message and mission
and I feel very influential as a tool of gvt. He is out to prove (sell) his
system of education led by technology to the gvt. The gvt wants an answer to
the disaster that they have created and so will easily be led the next
evangelist guru with a system (backed by Microsoft and Co).

The pieces below are about Badman + Becta and show I think where the drive
for the educational part of this is coming from. I think it highly likely
that Badman may have jumped on the band wagon of abuse following his
involvement with Haringey.

So the abuse issue is being used as the motivator and the educational aspect
is the bit he is actually really interested in. So any surprise that having
found 99% of stakeholders (non parent) agree that safeguarding is the
primary issue he is superficially surprised that HEers would do not place
safeguarding at the top of their priorities.

This is predominantly a story of turning around the UK gvts appalling record
on their treatment of children and the damming reports that place the UK at
the bottom of the table. They are in a trap - they have, in one of their
infamous mission statements said that the UK will be the best place for a
child to grow up in. So far they have embarrassingly failed on a massive
scale to even start to achieve this. They need an answer and they need a
guru to lead that - enter Mr Badman and possibly exit Mr Balls as he will be
needed in No 11 in the fairly near future. Mr Badman is being groomed for
something....

As a starter this is a Badman presentation entitled From Poverty to
Wellbeing.

Some of this I found pretty disturbing in terms of what it is saying and
what he perceives the problems with society to be. The basic message seems
to be that being poor means you will not be happy. The definition of
happiness maybe needs to be challenged given the wealth dominated society
that has been created where unhappiness seems to equate to not being able to
purchase all the love replacement objects to which the rich unhappy are
addicted to satisfy unfulfilled love.

http://www.changeforchildren.co.uk/uploads/Graham_Badman_GOEM_Child_Poverty_
Conf_31Oct08.pdf

A program called Mosaic seems to feature heavily for Badman, just starting
to look at this but any one interested just google "graham badman" MOSAIC
and there are loads of hits.

Then we have:

These three paragraphs seem to be very telling - from
http://foi.becta.org.uk/content_files/corporate/resources/policy_and_strateg
y/board/0801-jan/october_b
oard_minutes.pdf ( also see below for more quotes
and detail)

Minutes of the Becta Board Meeting held at the Manor House Hotel, Nr Bath,
Wiltshire 17 / 18 October 2007
51. It was agreed we needed to know more about informal learning and the way
this was developing outside the formal educational setting.
52. There was a need to ensure that there is more effective use of
technology to impact on standards and to show a move towards higher order
competencies. This evidence and linkage was important to Ministers in the
achievement of their targets.
53. Andrew Pinder finished the discussion saying that we needed to be more
convincing on the argument for using technology to improve the competiveness
and economic wellbeing of the country.

The message in the following links seems to be concerned with the link
between children not having access to computers with being disadvantaged and
therefore in the long term "poor". There is a lot of content here, what I
have read so far is very concerning. What is the definition of abuse?

The basic equation here seems to be that to deny a child access to the
internet is abuse : either on the part of the state or the parent.

I could argue that what we are witnessing is the panic of a political system
that has over a considerable period of history "controlled" it's subjects
via the mechanism of education (aka indoctrination), now those victims are
rebelling and rebelling in greater and greater numbers, this plus what we
are witnessing in almost every facet of our "society" is the turning point
from ordered, controlled and malleable subjects to people who are able to
think for themselves and say NO. This, for me seems an issue of control -
the mouse is on the point of turning and the cat does not know what to do.

http://schools.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=oe&catcode=ss_es_hom_02&rid=15
871

"Despite the growing body of evidence for the educational, economic and
wider benefits of home access to technology for learning, the digital divide
is not being narrowed. 1.4 million learners still lack access to the
internet at home and over one million children still do not have a computer
at home. It has been shown that home access can increase learner
achievement, increase motivation and can improve parental engagement, which
in turn raises their children's attainment."

http://news.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=38386
"Initially the programme will be piloted in two local authority areas in
early 2009. This will allow time to trial the purchasing logistics and
eligibility criteria, after which the wider roll-out of the programme is
planned for autumn 2009 with the aim to have universal home access by 2011."
http://schools.becta.org.uk/upload-dir/downloads/page_documents/partners/hom
e_access_report.pdf
"The importance of home access is clearly flagged in the Department for
Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) Children's Plan published in December
2007, which states: There are significant educational benefits associated
with having access to technology at home. This availability of technology
gives learners greater choice about where, when and how they study. Research
shows that this helps to motivate learners and improve attainment. We also
know that learning technologies in the home can serve as a focal point for
parents to become more actively involved in their child's education. This
collaboration between learner and parent can further enhance a pupil's
engagement and their achievement.. At the moment, there are over a million
children with no access to a computer in the home. These children are
disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds, and their limited access
to technology reinforces attainment gaps."

There is a considerable amount of information in this document. I am only
just starting to go through it but frankly it is leaving me wondering what
world these experts inhabit. It seems that there is a common thought in this
world that happiness id dependant on wealth - the absence of wealth =
unhappiness - and that the absence of both is as a result of the absence of
digital inclusion. Where in this are these experts gaining their insight
that allows such deformed views of life and happiness?

This document also includes the valuable insight:

"At the National Digital Inclusion Conference the new Minister, Paul Murphy,
called for support from policy makers and service managers, inclusion
practitioners and industry to stop the web "being a great divider in our
country and instead make it a great and powerful equaliser". He was
supported by Jim Knight, who said that "Digital inclusion can translate to
social inclusion and in today's world this is therefore about social
justice".

Thus we can conclude that a parent who, maybe on philosophical grounds says
NO the beige box, is soon to be labelled as abusing their child?

Also:
"The evidence base underpinning the home access initiative is largely
centred around the educational benefits that could be accrued from it.
However, it was also understood that the initiative might also contribute to
a number of other policy agendas, including personalising learning,
narrowing the attainment gap, raising standards to increase the
competitiveness of 'UK plc', and assisting the transition to a
knowledge-based economy, as outlined in the Lisbon Strategy
[http://europa.eu/scadplus/glossary/lisbon_strategy_en.htm]. Although the
primary beneficiaries of the initiative would be learners aged 5 to 19, it
was understood from very early in the scoping stages that the initiative
could have important spin-off benefits for parents, teachers and the wider
community."

So direct reference to the Lisbon strategy - thanks Neil - and a direct
reference to how our involvement as adults in our children's "learning" can
alter our behaviour perhaps.

Lots, lots more out there re the Badman - end game may be decided by what he
is really wanting for himself - where his own 5 outcomes are destined to
take him?

In the process the definition of abuse may change significantly.

140 Character References

2009-02-17T11:45:00.001Z

Putting the twit into twitter:

17:25 @corpselegs classy username. Is your Feb 14 post chosen for Walter's kiss of the visa stamp? Very romantic. tinyurl.com/afhg3f #

22:14 Education Otherwise have met with Graham Badman to express concerns over his home education review - minutes: tinyurl.com/bw4ekr #

22:39 @chickyog why the long face? You get them delivered by canine mail. Beautifully wrapped, too. #

23:09 @therealsim_o Hi Sim_O, other than plotting supper and murder for the inventors of tiny plastic beads, not so bad. Yourself? #

23:17 @therealsim_o Just realised I must sound like an Agatha Christie villain. To clarify: supper for me, grisly death for plastic bead purveyors #

23:19 @therealsim_o Incidentally, commiserations on the karmic troubles. You're not, by any chance, in the children's toy field? #

23:27 Staircase wit (terms and conditions apply) - plastic bead manufacturers should be strung up, it's the only language they understand. #

23:30 @therealsim_o Perhaps it's some sort of zen koan, or maybe just an overly literal reading of the assembly instructions. #

23:37 @therealsim_o They secrete themselves around the house, waiting for the unwary bared foot. Also, too much bending down in the tidying up act #

23:39 @therealsim_o Picture Donald Pleasance and his pin in the Great Escape. #

10:34 @mrpower Ouch - _less_ talented than Dale or Staines? That's got to hurt. Not saying it's wrong, mind. #

10:40 What panel might experts on prison reform, excluded children, daycare provision and school curriculum all be on? tinyurl.com/d4w7so #

10:47 @mrpower Do you want a bacon sandwich? I'm suddenly not hungry. #

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140 Character References

2009-02-16T11:45:00.001Z

Putting the twit into twitter:

19:07 Wondering whether to install Debian Lenny onto one of my spare partitions. Need something that contrasts with my current distro Arch. #

21:43 Surprising myself with actual blog content not derived from either Twitter or DCSF nonsense: tinyurl.com/agstfa #

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Russian Nostalgia for Communism

2009-02-15T19:26:00.005Z

If you've been paying attention to the nuggets of wisdom in the sidebar, you'll see I've got distinctly fed up with the Russian lolcats site that so many seem to find hilarious. Pootergeek, for example, has been both decent and gracious explaining to me why I'm wrong, if not physically deficient and Stalinist, to find it all a little, well, distasteful.

Petty disagreements and stylistic differences aside, I am struck by his reference to a poll selecting Stalin as the third most popular figure in Russian history. Granted, one TV poll is hardly a rock-solid source - ye gods, on this reasoning, teh British are all devotees of third-rate Leonard Cohen covers - but it does reflect a fascinating trend among certain sections of Russian society. It is remarkable that such sentiments could possibly be expressed by a population subjected to unimaginably awful treament under Stalin's rule: lest it be forgotten, around twenty million Soviet citizens lost their lives in an intense industrialised war against a state whose leader demanded that Slavs be treated as sub-human. And yet, although the exact figures are naturally uncertain, there's an academic consensus that twenty million is a reasonable estimate for the numbers of Soviet citizens killed by their own state in extrajudicial executions or following travesties of the court system.

So, rather than simplistically writing off a whole nation for holding views that are, clearly, beyond the pale, a much more interesting approach is to ask why a minority of Russians could possibly look back to Stalin as a positive figure. The Reuters article Pootergeek found alludes to what I think are the two major factors, although does not explore them in any great detail. These factors are both linked to the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991: the diminution of national status, and the economic and social uncertainty.

The USSR, like it or not, was one pole in a bipolar world, it was a force to be reckoned with. The ethnic Russians were the "elder brother" of the other Soviet nationalities. They were able to live and work as Russians throughout the Soviet Union, while the positive discrimination shown by Soviet policies tended to be restricted to specific territories. Indeed, the Communists paid great attention to fostering a sense of national identity within these territories, which were ethnically defined. The RSFSR, by contrast, was never such an ethnic polity. The Russian language has two words that are both rendered as "Russian" in English, only one of which - русский (russkii) - refers to Russian ethnicity. The other - российский (rossiiskii) - has connotations of state and territory as opposed to ethnicity, was the first R in RSFSR, and is also the adjective used in Russian for the Russian Federation.

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, then, the other fourteen Union republics had all the trappings of a ready-made nation [update 16/2/09 - duh, I mean nation-state, obviously]- a national elite, a bureaucracy, and a range of cultural institutions - that had been sponsored by the Soviet Union. In contrast, the Russian Federation was, in Geoffrey Hosking's arresting phrase, the "bleeding hulk of Empire." From being the first among equals in the might Soviet Union, Russians were reduced to a territory that many felt not fit to carry the name Russia, not least because so many of them (around twenty-five million) lived outside its borders. This blow to national pride still rankles among certain sections of society.

The other, related, phenomenon was the economic upheavals that followed the political crisis. As the grim joke had it, Russia suddenly found it had the best-educated prostitutes in the world. University professors earned more driving taxis than they did in their day jobs. Under Brezhnev, while life might not have been a bundle of laughs, it was at least predictable. There was no longer the fear of the midnight knock at the door (at least, not for the majority who were not active dissidents). Employment was secure, and, while not exactly well-rewarded, allowed plenty of opportunity for moonlighting: "you pretend to pay us, we'll pretend to work." And while a doctor might have more social status, he was not enormously better off materially than a tram driver. They were all in it together, and the system of informal favours (блат) and a parallel economy worked to foster a sense of identity. While blat is still important, those other ties have collapsed.

As someone recently said, I can't believe I'm having this argument. It ought to be obvious that there is not actually any real demand for a return to mass state terror. It is, however, a huge reproach to the free-market ideology imposed on the Former Soviet Union by international financial institutions post-1991 that such popular memories of stability under Brezhnev in contrast to the wide discrepancies and social uncertainties in post-Soviet Russia are being expressed in terms of a longing for, of all people, Stalin.

140 Character References

2009-02-15T11:45:00.001Z

Putting the twit into twitter:

19:45 Best hairdresser name evah - Val d'isere. NB Val's establishment is in Leeds. tinyurl.com/cklb93 #

20:56 @mrpower I wowed my other half today with my thoughtful gift: an organic white chocolate... christmas tree, reduction tag intact. #

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140 Character References

2009-02-13T16:33:00.001Z

Putting the twit into twitter:

16:51 I know I've missed the bus complaining about Leonard Cohen covers, but, blimey, there are some stinkers on the I'm Your Man soundtrack. #

17:10 Oh, and while I remember, that hil-aaa-rious Russian lolcats thing? This comment nails it - tinyurl.com/cbtsdn #

22:54 So, yeah, Russian weirdness without the crude stereotyping (if you don't go trudging through the comment sewers): englishrussia.com/ #

13:42 I could swear the opening line of the DEC ad on Spotify says "The BBC has launched an appeal to help people in Gaza..." #

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Watch the Skies, Keep Looking

2009-02-09T23:02:00.007Z

Stepping out of the Barnes Wallis building, appropriately enough, I heard a gnarly roar that I associate with piston-engined aircraft. Sure enough, quite low overhead was a strange looking plane with rectangular wings, and rectangular tailplanes, both perfectly perpendicular to the fuselage. There were twin propellor engines, one under each wing. The plane was green, and the play of light on its underside suggested that it might have actually been a seaplane, although I couldn't see any floats. It circled at least once more over Manchester city centre. Does anyone know what it actually was, and what it was doing there?

Maybe it's just me and my Porco Rosso fixation - I'm unlikely to get bored of the third floor of the Science Museum anytime soon. No-one else seemed to be paying attention. Mind you, I once stood on the playing field of a well-known Catholic boarding school in the North of England, transfixed by the Lancaster bomber circling overhead. Cloughie would doubtless spin in his grave to have his words corrupted by reference to rugby union - I've got to admit I'm reluctant to mention it myself - but just because the other 29 people on the pitch thought the game was more important doesn't make me wrong.

It struck me that I too was on 40s-era transport as I pushbiked off towards the Oxford Road. Mind you, the concrete campus of the old UMIST - now part of my own august institution - quickly shattered that particular daydream...

NHS forced to turn away women in labour

2009-02-08T00:45:00.001Z

Women in the final stages of labour were turned away by maternity units because of more than 550 closures last year due to a shortage of staff or beds, NHS figures reveal.
The mothers-to-be were forced to have their babies elsewhere, sometimes many miles away, when hospitals where they had planned to give birth shut their doors for up to 48 hours at a time.

source

"City Academies could be used as a cover for child abuse"

2009-02-07T14:25:00.007Z

I don't know how much the folk at B3ta are across the ongoing flawed DCSF home education review. They tend to concentrate on off-colour humour (just so as you know), bizarre internet content, and photoshop wizardry. But beneath the provocative bravado, they appear in the main to be a fine, upstanding bunch of people who make the internet a better place. Every week, their question of the week brings out some fine writing, filling the spectrum from genuinely hilarious to gut-wrenchingly sad.

How might the two be linked, you ask? Well, here's question one (of six) from the DCSF consultation for the general public:

1. Do you think the current system for safeguarding children who are educated at home is adequate? Please let us know why you think that.

And here's an extract from a response to a QotW about schooldays, by HaHa!Snakes!:

I could begin by trying to describe what it feels like to be very, very badly bullied.

The way I walked was funny, the way I spoke was funny, the way I crossed my legs was funny, the bag I carried was funny, the way I ate a sausage roll was funny.
I was funny-looking.

And the bitches just laughed and laughed at me. Every day. For seven years.

This one goes out to all the B3tans who don’t need to be told what that's like. If you are nodding and getting a sick, sad feeling inside – in the place where you would keep your happy memories, if you had any – then this revenge story is for you.

Of course, it's not just your schoolmates who can inflict misery and humiliation, ask FoxyBadger:

And then one day my mind just snapped. It was a damp spring day in 1996, and I was a 9 year old Foxy who had spent the morning frustratingly staring at cards of dots and told to recall the number I saw. I didn't see anything. I saw dots. Lots of little brown dots. After a lot of 'are you sure you can't see anything?'s from the man in the suit, I was diagnosed as colourblind and returned to class with a letter. Handing it over to my teacher, she read it aloud to the class, explaining that as I was now 'too retarded to even see properly', she would no longer address me as a member of this school. I did what every 9 year old would do in that case; I cried in front of a class of 30 laughing children. I ran from the room, slunk in the shadows in the playground and prayed for the day to end.

*THUMP*

Next thing I know, I'm on the floor. I'm bleeding from the back of my head. Maybe this is my punishment for being retarded. Pulled up by my hair, I'm held against the wall while the brains of the operation does a number on my ribs.

'You're a retard Foxy and we all hate you. Your mum hates you. Your dad hates you. Even Dodds hates you.'

Is it just me, or might the DCSF question be better phrased to ask about safeguarding children in schools? What is striking about the B3ta stories is how much they are concerned with the infliction of violence and cruelty on schoolchildren by their peers and those supposedly in charge of them. Existing mechanisms for protecting schoolchildren are clearly insufficient, and many children are home educated directly as a result of schools and Local Education Authorities failing to protect them from bullying and mistreatment. And yet, the LEAs are the ones who are supposed to be widening their remit to monitor these same children. Forgive me for failing to have confidence in this notion.

As Haha!Snakes! makes explicit, many of us have had experiences like this - they are far from rare. And this is not just anecdotal; Childline state that:

From the ages of five to 16, school is where children spend most of their time - a total of more than 11,000 hours on average.
Yet few children and young people turn to teachers when they have problems. In one survey, teachers came top of a list of people children would be least likely to speak to if they were worried about something.¹
30 per cent of children do not tell anyone that they have been bullied at the time.²
Just over half (54 per cent) of primary and secondary school children think that bullying is 'a big problem' or 'quite a big problem' in their school.³

[source and footnotes]

So Childline is very keen on evidence, and all credit to it. Childline, of course, is an off-shoot of the NSPCC, which has supported the latest review, despite being unable to point to any evidence whatsoever that home education has ever been used as a pretext by abusive parents. Jeremy Vine asked Vijay Patel of the NSPCC if they had any figures to support the insinuation that HE had been used to conceal abuse:

JEREMY VINE: Vijay, have you got any statistical base at all?

VIJAY PATEL: We.. the inf.. We don’t have the evidence there statistically, no.

So, why start the witch hunt? Bear in mind that the review is headed by Graham Badman. You can supply your own jokes about his surname; I don't find it very funny that simultaneously he is heading the enquiry into the Baby P case... And I don't think that witch hunt is too strong a phrase; I'll leave you with the last question of the DCSF consultation:

Some people have expressed concern that home education could be used as a cover for child abuse, forced marriage, domestic servitude or other forms of child neglect. What do you think Government should do to ensure this does not happen?

That, I'm sorry, is just risible. Some people think the world is run by a cabal of lizards in human form - what should the government do about that? Bugger all, unless there is actually some evidence of any danger. Likewise, there is no evidence whatsoever to support these allegations.

Education or Schooling?

2009-02-05T14:09:00.005Z

I know that title begs a number of questions, but I'll leave them aside for today. I was reading this post by Gill Killner, who, incidentally, joins that select band of bloggers I have met in the flesh, which again refers to the desperately flawed and apparently biased DCSF consultation on home education. Inter alia, she had this to say:

In my opinion, the deliberate over-riding of a child's natural curiosity is detrimental to learning, and therefore should be classed as abusive, if anything education-related is. That goes on in schools from day one, of course, and will in homes too if we're all to be required to jump through Local Authority checking and vetting hoops. And then, what sort of a society will we have? An obedient one. A treacherous one. An extremely frustrated, sick one I think. Is that good for business and industry? Yes, I think it probably is.

Never mind the wider issues, I can see what she's trying to say. I definitely concur that obedience is an appalling quality to aspire to, for society. But the narrow point is that, surely such a workforce is a dreadful prospect. Snake oil specialists make a bundle from easily-impressed managerial types seeking the latest motivational techniques. Just how motivated are sick, frustrated employees going to be? I've worked in enough big organisations to see the consequences, and, indeed, been daft enough to stay over a year in the last permanent job I had (come to think of it, I think it was the first permanent contract I ever had), just going through the motions, just like everyone else there. That's hardly gaining a competitive edge, is it? I'm no cheerleader for the corporations, but isn't it obvious that, even on their own terms, such policies are doomed to fail. I'd best shut up, I don't want to encourage them.

Next thing you know, I'll be advocating the spread of local WVO bio-diesel plants...

Never-Ending Story

2009-02-02T21:04:00.003Z

[If I wasn't having to concentrate on finishing the magnum opus, I think these are the sorts of points I'd be raising. My thanks to this Facebook group for drafting it. Oh, and yes, this is a different "consultation" to this one.]

HE PARENTS WELCOME CHILDREN'S SOCIETY REPORT

----------
Main points:

* Children's Society "Good Childhood Inquiry" states many factors of a happy childhood that home education is shown to provide.

* DCSF review of home education infers that parents will abuse or neglect their children if they are not supervised. DCSF appears to be family-hostile.

* Government attitude seems to be that childhood should be managed by the State at any cost. This is of concern to all parents, however they educate their children.

* DCSF review violates UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and may actually be illegal under equality laws.

* Over-stretched social workers are targeted for added duties.

* NSPCC admits there is no evidence for concern.

* Home educators organise opposition.

The Good Childhood Inquiry by the Children's Society will release the results of its study this week. Home educators have welcomed the review which reports that the children of Britain need more parental attention, more freedom to play, more access to the outdoors, and are harmed by junk food, peer pressure leading to consumerism and experimentation with alcohol and drugs, and the stresses of bullying, academic competition and exam anxiety.

These stresses and strains are some of the reasons why so many parents make the decision to home educate their children. Home educated children have greater familial contact and much less exposure to the negative social and academic pressures endemic in schools. They also have far more access to play and to the outdoors and are free of the rigours of constant testing and standardisation. Recent studies also show that most watch far less television than their schooled peers, and become more self-aware and community minded. [1] All of these are exactly what the Children's Society recommends for a happy, healthy childhood and by extension, a happy, healthy society.

"When I went to school I was bullied and I didn't get any help from the teachers. Now I'm doing home schooling, I get help if I need it and I don't get bullied." - H, aged 12.

"I am loved and cared for and have great fun everyday, exploring, exercising, laughing and talking!" - A, aged 11.

A 'slanderous' review

Home educators were angered on 19th January by the announcement by the Department for Children, Schools and Families of an Independent Review of Home Education [2], the fourth such consultation since 2005. The review was especially surprising as guidelines to Local Authorities on home education have only recently been issued as a result of previous consultations.[3] This review targets home educators as potential abusers, but has nothing to say about the well documented abuse of children within the schools system. Home education organisations have repeatedly asked for statistical evidence to back up these claims, but according to Vijay Patel of the NSPCC there is no such evidence [4] and requests continue to be ignored.

The DCSF is ignoring the problems with their over-worked, under-funded and under-trained social care workers [5] and instead is looking into adding to their workload with the monitoring of a home educating minority, justifying their stance with unsubstantiated rumour, hearsay and little else.

Criticism for the DCSF

The DCSF has been criticised for its methods from the start of this review. Home educating parents in their hundreds have decided to use FaceBook as a tool to organise their protests, contesting the rights of the DCSF to interfere with their freedom to educate at home unmolested by bodies who have a history of hostility towards them and little apparent understanding of them. Several conclusions have been reached:

The branding of home educators by this review as potential child abusers is discriminatory and incites prejudice which actively harms children and their families.

There are concerns that issuing press statements that home education may be a cover for abuse may violate Article 17 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. [6]

Article 17 says that the Government must not allow the mass media to publish things which harm children, but "the media, with Government backing, has inferred that many children are being abused by dint of the fact they are home educated," says Techla, a home educating mother from North Yorkshire. "My children are hurt and angry at the suggestion, and at the thought that their non-HE friends will think this is the case." Other children have also expressed their feelings that inciting suspicion against mum and dad is causing them distress.

Also, by not considering disabled children or those with Special Educational Needs the review's consultation of Local Authorities may actually be illegal. [7]

In-house Social Services and Local Authority publications have carried letters and articles criticising home education, and reports are that memos have been circulated advising on how the Local Authorities consultation should be answered. This will have undue influence over the results of that consultation.

Many children were removed from school because of bullying, abuse, neglect, or the lack of provision of a suitable education. In many cases the Local Authorities were at best apathetic, at worst openly hostile to the needs of the child. To suggest that these children and their parents should be investigated by the very agencies that failed them is insulting and dangerous.

Home education provides a good childhood

Independent research has shown home education provides many of the qualities that the Good Childhood Inquiry finds essential to a happy, healthy childhood, and therefore to a happy, healthy society. Home educators then ask why the Government is apparently intent on the regulation of HE in the face of yet another indictment of their failing schools system. The DCSF's attitude seems to be that childhood should be managed by the State at any cost. The conclusion seems to be that parents will necessarily abuse or neglect their children if they are not supervised. With their placing of the rights of Local Authorities above those of parents and children, as advocated in this Review of Home Education, it looks like the Children's Society report will fall on deaf ears.

As home educators and parents we support the findings of the Inquiry as outlined above and feel we demonstrate the positive nature of many of their recommendations. Home education should be seen as evidence of a supportive, loving and nurturing home, not as a potential cover for malefactors.

Issued by the Home Educators of FaceBook
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=45453211491 - "Stop the UK Government Stigmatising Home Educators!"

--------------
Notes for Editors:

[1] "How Children Learn at Home" by Alan Thomas, 2007.

[2] http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/ete/homeeducation/

[3] Elective Home Education: Guidelines for Local Authorities, October 2007. http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/localauthorities/_documents/content/7373-DCSF-Elective%20Home%20Education.pdf

[4] Jeremy Vine show, Radio 2, 20th January 2009:
JEREMY VINE: "Vijay, have you got any statistical base at all?"
VIJAY PATEL (NSPCC Child Protection Policy Advisor): "We... the inf... We don't have the evidence there statistically, no."

[5] UNISON report "Still Slipping Through The Net?" See http://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=8347

[6] http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm

[7] The LA questionnaire asks about children who are statemented for SEN. This ignores children with other disabilities and those which have SEN but are not statemented (parents of many home educated children with SEN prefer that they not be statemented). Government has a legal duty to consider disabled/SEN children (statemented or not) in all its documentation. http://www.dotheduty.org/

Naval Etiquette

2008-12-03T23:02:00.003Z

What's the correct way to address a retired rear-admiral?

Competition Time-ah!

2008-11-28T22:54:00.005Z

Using your skill and judgement, on the basis of this entire IMDB synopsis, name that movie and/or the novel on which it is based:

This guy kills this old lady. Then he turns himself in.

You Don't Didn't Know Me

2008-11-19T00:09:00.005Z

The News Huddlines was a vehicle for showbiz veteran Roy Hudd, back when Radio 2 wasn't exactly pushing any comedic envelopes - the punning title gives you a pretty good idea of the standard reached. Still, for some reason, I remember a line about scientists proving that a hearty laugh gives as much benefit as 10 minutes' jogging, "so you can watch Bernard Manning, and get really fat."

But news reaches us that, in fact, there is evidence that racist wankers can be funny: the publication online of the BNP's membership list is proving to be a rich comic seam. Larry Teabag, from whom more shortly, points us in the direction of this thread. It's full of once-anonymous fascists wondering if their name is on the list, as well as mischief-makers fearing for the safety of Ben Dover and R. Sole. Humourless commenters portentously announce that neither are on the list, although by the time Mike Hunt turns up, the penny, presumably, has dropped.

Funnier still is some disillusioned neo-Nazi complaining that "Griffin is a dictator." No? Really? Leader of a far-right party shows tendency to dictatorship? Wherever might he have got that idea?

On a more serious note, I'd have a lot more sympathy (ie some) for the BNP members fearing now their details are available for anyone interested to see - although, as some of the commenters on the above thread were saying, perhaps they ought to be reconsidering their employment choices anyway - were it not for, well, I can't say it any better than Professor Teabag:

Publishing the personal details of your political opponents for the convenience any passing psycho is a Red Watch tactic, and utterly irresponsible and contemptible.

So, no, I'm not that moved by their plight.

The material is out there, and can't be brought back - if you can't find it, how come you're reading this? I'm sure that many interesting stories will come to light as a result - Poons has already established that Albert Hurwood, propagandist for dodgy not-vigilante-oh-no-not-us-guv group Navigor, is on the list. The News Huddlines ran for over a quarter of a century; I'm guessing there's plenty of mileage left in this story as well.

(H/T Manic)

Mistaking School Attendance for Education

2008-10-22T11:49:00.004+01:00

Coming out of hibernation briefly to draw your attention to plans that will effectively remove the presumption of innocence from people who have chosen to educate their children otherwise than in school, and that will establish an adversarial relationship between home ed parents and LEAs.

One of the most distasteful aspects is that the new guidelines are being promoted as a means to ensure that tragic cases such as Victoria Climbie are not repeated. Why, then, is the emphasis on home educated children? LEAs already have the duty to report children they consider to be at risk. If existing procedures had been followed, that poor child may have been saved. Apparently, it will also cut down the number of forced marriages. As so often with this government, it seems that new rules rather than effective implementation are the magic bullet. The DCSF is leaving itself open to accusations of shroud waving, and even dog whistles, to deflect attention from the restrictive content of the new guidance.

What is worse, I doubt that even the frothier ideologues genuinely believe that for all imaginable children in all imaginable circumstances, a school will better suit that child's needs than his or her own parents. Schools are large, bureaucratic institutions, and while I will resist the urge to attack the entire institution of schooling (and there's another series of posts right there), they cannot achieve a more complete understanding of the individual child's needs than committed and attentive parents. I would argue at this point that the vast majority of people who have chosen to educate their child outside of school (obligatory and perhaps belated declaration of interest - that includes us) have taken a much more thorough and considered decision than those who simply send their kids off to school because "that's what everyone does."

And if schools can't do it as well as parents, then why should we expect an inspector from the LEA to make an informed judgement with even less time spent with the child? And, don't forget, this guidance allows the LEA to decide that the proffered education is not suitable, and to order school attendance. Now, if you were such an inspector, do you think you would be properly funded and supported? If there aren't enough health visitors to go round (and yes, I know HVs are not beyond criticism - how much information does their training contain on breastfeeding? Why are baby formula manufacturers funding provision for HV training?), then how many LEA inspectors will be chasing Home Ed kids? And what do you think they will be likely to do, to reduce their workload? It makes sense from a bureaucratic point of view for every child to be in school, but I'm old-fashioned, I still think systems ought to work for the benefit of people, not the other way around.

So what can you do? Well, there's alot more background here and here, and then there's an online consultation response, which shouldn't take more than ten minutes of your time, here. Alternatively, you could send comments via e-mail to CME.CONSULTATION@dcsf.gsi.gov.uk The consultation ends on Friday, so quick action is appreciated. Please feel free to link, cross-post and otherwise promote in appropriate ways.

I Need Cheering Up.

2008-08-01T04:02:00.004+01:00

Bugger this, I'm off to see Laughing Len.

More Nuclear Idiocy

2008-08-01T03:58:00.001+01:00

A week or so ago there was this news about thechaos at the heart of Britain's nuclear clean-up industry, which reported that, due to various flaws within the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency, £400 million had to be diverted from projects to boost sustainable energy to cleaning up nuclear sites. If that were not bad enough, the overall estimate for cleaning up these sites has risen by £10 billion over the last twelve months (when the figure was an entirely reasonable £73 billion). Do you really believe that this figure will not continue to be revised up? At the going rate, that's £833 million a month; just think how many illegal wars you could buy for that.

I have argued before that even the earlier figure (and even assuming US rather than UK billions) represented a substantial sum for each individual in the country that would be better invested in sustainable technology for each household, rather than these grandiose technological follies. If I can rehearse once again a metaphor I still like, here's another dreadful example of wizardry over witchcraft: your big flashy hi-tech solutions - Thorp, Mox, I'm talking to you - don't actually work. But to a certain mindset they are still a hell of a lot sexier than a couple of solar panels on every house that would unobtrusively do the job, they are gargantuan totems of a bold vision - which, as readers of Chris Dillow will appreciate, should immediately put us on guard - and I do think that the perception of size is important here: Nuclear power as a measure of national virility, and let's not mention the subtext of weaponry, even if it is the elephant in the room... The point about a white elephant, of course, was that it was gifted by the emperor to those he wished to destroy financially. Why the hell has Gordon put a dozen of the things on his own christmas list?

Hopefully, today's announcement by EDF that they are pulling out of their intended British Energy takeover will help hasten the collapse of this planned new generation of nuclear power stations. Nuclear is not the answer to energy security in the future, for the reasons laid out briefly here by Justin, and this new Greenpeace blog, to which the man McKeating will be contributing, should keep you up to date with the many flaws of the nuclear industry.

Joining the dots

2008-08-01T02:27:00.001+01:00

I'm not sure I buy into the current media-driven furore about knife crime, but I guess that's the hook Rachel North needed to get this in the paper:

as we hold up our hands in horror at teenagers carrying knives, we turn on the news and see Iran test-firing missiles, America saying it will not hesitate to defend Israel, Israel brandishing its military hardware, hawks circling. The old, old game of brinkmanship, that fatal human lust for more territory, possessions and power is reported daily on our television screens. And we wonder that youngsters are gripped by the same dark desires? Of course they are. These are our children. They feel and do as we do.

Just so. This is what you get when you suggest that violence can be a valid solution in some circumstances: while there, sadly, won't be much debate about the first part of the proposition, you can get into a dreadful mess over the last three words...

Dog Bites Man

2008-07-31T00:01:00.002+01:00

Two dolly birds advertise a motorbike.

No, I don't like the term 'dolly bird' either, but you will immediately work out from that gorgeous looking ES250/2 that this is the early 1970s here, so tell me you think the marketing team that came up with this shot didn't use the phrase themselves. It could be any one of a million publicity shots used in motorcycle advertising at that time, and for far too long afterwards, for that matter. To be fair, at least they are wearing riding gear. The only slight cause for interest might be that the MZ company was based in East Germany, which might have been thought rather too socialist to indulge in the kind of imagery favoured by the decadent imperialist West.

Ah, but: Compare and contrast that shot with this:

Is that a deliberate attempt to subvert decadent, imperialist motorcycle advertising convention? I am not a specialist on the DDR, but I never had the Soviet Bloc down as a bastion of support for same-sex relationships. To be honest, I am not sure the hairy-~~arsed~~chested biking scene in 1970s Britain would have been that much more tolerant. Granted, Hunter S. Thompson, in his classic "Hells Angels," reports LA HA accepting money from gay men in return for consenting to receive oral sex, but explains this as part of the whole HA performance of shocking conventional society. Maz Harris never broached the subject at all in his doctoral thesis about the UK HA scene.¹

You don't have to look at too many covers for the likes of Bash Street Heroes or 100% Biker (just about SFW) in order to conclude that a, shall we say, 'traditional' view of gender relations persists, at least in the mags that cater to the custom end of the biking scene. To be fair, like I said a post or two ago, what the media say and what people think don't always correspond, and I remember the vocal disapproval from BSH readers back in the 1980s when it ran a photoshoot of a model stripping next to some Russian bikes. Nonetheless, I can't help but wonder how many bikes that second shot shifted.

1. Harris, Ian Richard (1986), Myth and Reality in the Motorcycle Subculture, Unpublished Ph.d Thesis, Warwick University, Department of Sociology.

This Story Shall the Good Man Teach His Son

2008-07-30T00:20:00.004+01:00

Do you know what the outright highest-rated production, as voted for by viewers, on IMDB is? Nope, not Shawshank (9.2/10), nor the Godfather (also 9.2/10), but the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers (9.6/10). Google it, and it is clear that the series has gripped the imagination of millions. Not surprising, really: it has a superb ensemble cast, great attention to period detail (at least, as far as my inexpert eye can judge), and the story-telling savvy of Spielberg and Hanks (although, if anything, the liberties taken with the historical record seem remarkably few for a big Hollywood-style treatment of this kind).

I am feeling torn as I type, because the feats achieved by the men of Easy company were extraordinary, and by any usual mark they can be considered heroes: The very final scene is an interview clip with the real Major Dick Winters, who cites Bill Guarnere's response to his grandson: "'Grandad, were you a hero in the war?' 'Nope, but I served in a company of heroes'." The major can barely enunciate the words due to the strength of his emotion, and it is clear how sincerely he believes them to be true. The objections I am about to raise should not be taken as aspersions on the courage of the men featured in the film. My compulsion to write the previous sentence, though, while honest and sincere, sits strangely with the ideas I want to explore.

It is my contention that Band of Brothers, while genuinely intended as a tribute and memorial to the sacrifices of allied soldiers, unconsciously accepts a number of dubious positions that undermine this position. For all its good intentions and modern sensibilities, it ultimately becomes just another weapon in the arsenal of a culture that would have us believe violence can be a valid solution in some circumstances, that there does exist the concept of a just war, and the epitome of masculine virtue lies in the willingness to subordinate, not only one's fear, but one's feelings of empathy, compassion and mercy when facing people labelled the enemy - boys in our culture, of course, are taught such feelings are not manly, whether for one's friends or one's enemies. The damage inflicted on our society by this set of attitudes should not be underestimated, and yet these ideas are all too infrequently brought out into the light for examination.

In many ways, I agree with the broad thrust of this review; it is clear that WWII films have undergone a transformation from straightforward flagwaver - unquestionably having its roots in wartime morale booster films, and, I would suggest, continuing well into the postwar era in the attempt to maintain morale during austerity Britain. Having said that, of course, economic conditions in the United States post-war were much more favourable. In neither country, though, was there any real appetite to question the official narrative. Growing up in 1970s Britain, my childhood reading matter included Commando books, and the comics (comics!) Battle and Victor, reinforcing the idea that World War II was a just war. Certainly, that is a far more comforting story than the terrible moral quandaries of the Vietnam war unfolding prior to and during that era.

Certainly, I doubt Band of Brothers would have been possible without the legacy of movies about Vietnam, dealing with the shattering experience of war on US combatants (not so often the Vietnamese civilians, thoough; I will have to return to The Sorrow of War later) in that conflict.; the immediate message of the series is the toll inflicted on soldiers, regardless of whether they were injured or killed. But the idea of the just war is ever present, and episode nine - entitled "Why We Fight" - brings it to the forefront. The paratroops liberate a concentration camp, and are appalled at the vision which unfolds. What I find difficult here is not the liberties taken with the historical record - apparently Easy Company never liberated a camp - but the suggestion that the Allies could never do such a thing. Yet My Lai, Abu Ghrab and Guantanamo stain the conscience of the West, even if we do still purportedly, as victors, write the history.

The closest we come to facing Allied war crimes during World War II seems to be the Rape of Berlin. Let it not be forgotten that the legacy of the Cold War means many on "our side", not just the Nazis who saw Slavs as sub-human, fail to acknowledge ~~the Russians~~ Soviet citizens as people like everyone else: capable of great sacrifice and courage, capable equally of horrific acts of violence. There are rumours of Argentinian PoWs being shot out of hand in the Falklands... Towards the end of the war, an Easy Company lieutenant who freezes in combat is replaced by an officer who shot not only German PoWs, but one of his own men. The unit approves of this replacement... Episode Nine is, however, subtly undercut by the final episode, in which Major WInters hears the speech of a surrendering German officer to his men. The implication is that Winters would, had the tables been turned, have chosen very similar words. You put men into extreme situations, they behave in an extreme manner; it makes very little difference what they believe they are fighting for, if fighting is what you make them do.

I remain uneasy about the series, and I have scarcely touched on the issues that arise from it (it is notable, for instance, how many of the individuals featured in the series had been successful sportsmen prior to joining up - now what was it Wellington said about the playing fields of Eton? So why do we assume competitive sport is a good thing for our children?); indeed, I increasingly admire the ambiguity with which it approaches its subject matter. These men showed great courage according to the code of values that had been inculcated into them , but is this really the example we want to be holding up to our children? Where are the epic productions praising non-violent resistance? (*Update, later the same day: Gracchi coincidentally offers a potential candidate.*)

I think Band of Brothers comes closer than any similar production - by which I mean a mainstream western TV series or film - I know of to admitting the damage war inflicts on all participants. but it still stops short of saying what to me seems obvious, that any war is a failure of humanity: Even if you "win", you lose. We are invited to view these men as extraordinary in a good sense, that they could "professionally" set aside their fear and their compassion to do a job. Yet don't we all recognise the inadequacy of the "only following orders" defence? Gracchi posted a characteristically excellent article some time ago which could almost have been intended as a companion piece to this; surely true courage, the kind we should be offering as an example to our children, is the strength to act according to one's conscience.

There is always a choice.

You what?

2008-07-29T00:21:00.001+01:00

Passengers at British airports to be fingerprinted - Telegraph

BAA, whose airports include Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, has argued that scanners are needed so that all passengers can shop in its huge terminal shopping malls.

Working it out with a Pencil

2008-07-09T13:05:00.003+01:00

One of the fascinating features of our multimedia existence is the way in which we feel blogging is somehow at the forefront of social change. It is arguably true that the 'sphere offers a far greater variety of voices and opinions than are to be heard in more traditional media, but by the same token the readership for these voices are, with a very few exceptions - who arguably do not fit the definition of genuine individual blogs as opposed to political projects of one or another kind - tiny. If one had the time, we could monitor a wide range of blogs, taking due account of their authors, to try and gauge a "bottom-up" trajectory of social and political views.

It should not be forgotten, however, that traditional media have a much greater reach; the interplay between media portrayal and individual opinion formation is debatable and controversial: do I read the Guardian because it reflects my existing prejudices, or are my prejudices shaped by my paper of choice? I actually doubt that the complexity of human mental processes can be entirely reduced to this simplistic dyad - indeed, there is a fascinating strain of work suggesting that one's intellectual views owe a lot more to the emotions than is commonly recognised - but for the purposes of the series of posts I am contemplating, it is enough to accept that for many players, the value of the media in propagandising particular outlooks is sufficiently high to make it worthwhile trying to shape opinion. Given the various costs, not just financial, of gaining access to the media mainstream, it is fairly safe to claim traditional media outlets represent vested establishment positions, while still acknowledging that these positions need not be identical. It follows that one can much more easily trace the "top-down" promotion of ideology by examining the output of traditional media.

Further, even when there is no explicit agenda to be pursued, all cultural artefacts are a product of the milieu in which they were created, whether in celebration of or reaction to the prevailing way of seeing the world. At the risk of stating the bleedin' obvious, a children's story can tell us an awful lot about that society's attitudes to its children. There is, then, always an implicit agenda, whether or not there is an explicit agenda developed any further than the idea "I've got a great story to tell you". It is, then, always worth trying to deconstruct a narrative to work out what in fact it is telling us, and whether that bears any resemblance to what it claims to be telling us.

Is this removing the magic from story telling? I don't think so: Surely it simply adds further levels of enjoyment, as the various allusions, homages, messages and morals are uncovered. Furthermore, I personally find a philosophical value simply in asking "Why this? What is driving you to say this?" Thinking, questioning and striving to understand can never be a bad thing, can it? I think this post makes explicit the implicit agenda in those posts of mine I feel most proud of, and to which I hope to devote more attention in future.

People's Republic of Yorkshire

2008-05-20T11:04:00.003+01:00

So what exactly does all that have to do with Brown's current travails? Well, Liam Murray reckons that Labour supporters are having trouble believing that the Tories have genuinely changed. I don't disagree, per se, but I would argue that this scepticism is not simply confined within party affiliations. I'm not a Labour supporter, but I have real difficulty accepting that the nasty party might be becoming a little bit nicer. On a purely intellectual level, it shouldn't surprise; the New Labour project has followed a surprising trajectory that appears to have taken it lurching rightwards, so there's ostensibly no reason why the Tories shouldn't go in the other direction.

So why is it so difficult? I actually think there are constructions of regional identity at work that help explain why the Tories have failed to make bigger inroads despite the present government's woefulness, and why they have not been better represented in the traditional Labour heartlands in recent decades. What do you picture when you hear the place name "Sheffield"? Pound to a penny, it's steel. The North-East? Coal-mining, ship-building. Yorkshire? Coal-mining, steel, dark satanic mills. I've said before that I don't find Englishness a compelling identity:

For me, the word leads me to the Home Counties, cucumber sandwiches, and a certain froideur. It doesn't encompass the looming mills of my home town, nor the open moors around it. In my understanding, I'm not English, I'm Yorkshire.

If truth be told, I have to say that I would add big C Conservatism to the list of English traits I don't believe I share. I know that is ahistorical: let alone the mill-owners, there were plenty of small business people and independent traders who like as not voted Conservative, and even the West Riding is not short of Conservative clubs, but this is a quasi-nationalist narrative being constructed, not a history thesis. And I am willing to bet that if you interrogate your mental image of a Yorkshireman a little more deeply, you get past the flat cap and whippet to see him stood in front of a row of back-to-backs, and a pithead wheel, foundry or textile mill not far off. These are images that I grew up with in Bradford, too, even though the heavy industry was already dying.

And who was it that delivered the death blow? Step forward Lady Thatcher. Liam criticises what he sees as a lack of historical knowledge, seeing "only" the milk snatching, miners' strike and mass unemployment. Well, the death of entire communities is a difficult thing to see past. If I understand my history correctly, the miners' strike was a deliberate political ploy by the Conservatives to demonstrate to the unions that their time had passed, and, emphatically, their power had gone. It was also repaying them for bringing down the Heath government. Let's not forget, for Thatcher, the miners were the "enemy within". And after the dispute had ended in defeat for the miners, the mines began to be closed. Not just closed, but put permanently beyond use, although no-one could say that they would never be profitable in the future. This was more than an industrial dispute, it was a deliberate attempt to destroy a way of life. And it worked: in the late 1990s, I drove a white van round the ex-mining villages of North Nottinghamshire, and those formerly thriving communities were pretty much ghost towns, scourged by heroin and the attendant crime.

What was that we were saying about decossackisation? Politically inspired attempts to uproot an existing culture? Yes, of course, the miners were not rounded up and shot, but all the same that way of life is dead. It may already have been ailing, but it was murdered, not put out of its misery. And the death of the other heavy industries gets conflated with the miners' fate, and makes a big red mark in the debit column against the Tories. On the Kuban', distrust of any regime in Moscow persists from the persecution of the 1920s and 1930s. People have long memories, and the 1980s were anyway not so long ago. So for me, and I suspect many like me, Cameron still has a lot to do before my cross will go in his box.

Mythos Thatcher*

2008-05-17T13:00:00.000+01:00

So I'm in the park in the blistering heat, but enjoying the shade of a tree considerately planted just for my comfort by far-sighted gardeners thirty or so years ago. I'm with a man from Donetsk, Ukraine, and we're idly chatting as our daughters chase each other round the garishly painted playground furniture. I've sort of glossed over my thesis progress - this is, after all, idle chat - and we turn to the current troubles of Mr Brown; I make a remark, not startlingly original, that he would be even further in the eponymously-coloured stuff were it not for the memory of Thatcherism that still poisons the image of the Conservative party in the minds of many, myself included.Whoosh, I'm taken straight back to my thesis, and an intriguing parallel begins to take shape.

I've been concentrating recently on the importance of the myth of decossackisation for the contemporary Cossack movement, and particularly the Kuban' Cossacks. Let me state once again that here I am using the word myth not to imply a lack of truth, but to describe a narrative deployed by, in this case, a national movement to mobilise support, that may well have at least some basis in history (and, yes, I am aware that that is not an umproblematical remark. Still, I am only planning one draft of this. Anyhoo.) Essentially this particular myth states that the Bolsheviks employed a variety of measures, up to and including physical extermination, to remove any trace of Cossack ethnocultural identity from the territories traditionally associated with them. A 1919 letter from the Bolshevik Central Committee, signed by Sverdlovsk, is central to this myth, as it talks in clear terms about conducting "merciless mass terror" against Cossacks, defined in broad and ambiguous terms, which ambiguity was interpreted on the ground to dictate the fate of pretty much any Cossack, whether of high or low rank. This letter is inevitably cited by all present-day Cossack revivalists as evidence of the Soviet regime's murderous approach to the Cossack question, and there is evidence that in 1919-1920 on the Kuban' the Red Army conducted terror operations: indiscriminate shelling of Cossack villages, shooting people, and killing them with cold steel. Members of the Cossack movement privilege these accounts in constructing narratives of 'genocide' against the Cossacks, although the Sverdlovsk letter was in fact only addressed to the Don and Ural region Revolutionary Committees.

This strategy proved, unsurprisingly, counter-productive for the Bolshevik effort to bring on side the poorer elements of Cossack society - and there were plenty such. Sholokhov's magnum opus brings out the political divisions within Cossack society, which was not the unified pro-Imperial Russian whole that many of the emigre White authors would have you believe. Even the anti-Bolshevik forces were far from cohesive, indeed, Denikin executed some of the Kuban' Cossack leaders after they declared independence for Kuban' - Denikin saw this as treason against the Empire. Some commentators believe that the subsequent desertion of Kuban' Cossacks from the White ranks was the most important reason for the ultimate Red triumph in the Civil War. But, as one Russian commentator has it, although the tactics changed, the strategy remained the same: instead of trying to physically exterminate the Cossacks, the Bolsheviks began to use cultural re-education and population movements in order to achieve the dilution and ultimate disappearance of Cossack customs and identity. Mind you, it should be noted that the early 1930s saw collectivisation, and for Ukraine and the south of Russia, famine. This, too, is seized upon by the Cossack movement as further evidence of genocide: some Kuban' villages were exiled in toto, while extreme measures were taken against others that were accused of failing to meet their grain requisitioning norms.

This genocide myth is extremely widespread among the Cossack movement today; it justifies various privileges and benefits that have been granted to the Cossacks under Russian legislation on repressed peoples, and the Krasnodar Regional administration has been very supportive of the Kuban' Cossack movement. I think, though, that there is something more fundamental going on here: there is grave doubt among many observers that the Kuban' Cossacks can be considered a nation. The term 'genocide' implies a 'people' - gens - who are the target of the attacks, and are attacked purely because of their ethnic affiliation. If the Cossacks can establish the notion of a Cossack genocide, then they will be that much closer to establishing the idea of a Cossack nation.

What has this got to do with the spectre of Thatcher still dampening Conservative prospects? Ah, well, that's another post.

*I can't not acknowledge that I'm loving the fact that the common collocation for mythos is Cthulhu; you can make your own jokes about hideous, blindly destructive monsters lurking in the depths, that the insane still worship and implore to return.

No nukes is good nukes

2008-03-26T14:11:00.003Z

So John Hutton reckons that nuclear power is the new North Sea oil, does he? There is so much wrong with this it is difficult to know where to start. Let's take a leaf out of the minister's book, though, shall we, and ignore the huge questions such as over where we will keep the nuclear waste that will blight future generations - not that I think this is a trivial question - and concentrate on the economic side of things. Because, don't forget, in this post-Thatcherite caring New Labour world, it's making money wot counts more than anything...

So building a new generation of nuclear power stations could be a "$20 billion bonanza" for UK companies and up to 100 000 new employees, according to the Guardian's account of the minister's speech. Very nice, but why does it have to be nuclear? Why not stimulate the growth of renewable technologies instead? Nuclear technology is hugely expensive, and creates by-products that draw together surprising bedfellows in fear: not just the hand-knitted yoghurt sandal-wearers of Hebden Bridge, but the rare steak chomping right-wing Americans in the Bush administration. At least that's one of the reasons they put forward for wanting to stop Iran's civilian nuclear programme, because it could lead to a millitary programme.

Renewable technology is also at this stage still expensive: a solar hot water installation for our house would cost in the region of £5000, which is a bigger investment than we can make. But, even allowing for the fact that British governments seem woefully ill-equipped for negotiating with the private sector, a government-backed programme that guaranteed large orders would surely bring prices down. Before the libertarians get all angry about such big-state projects, consider the incremental closure of analogue TV. Like Andy at Spicy Cauldron pointed out a while ago (can't find the exact link, sorry), the government has effectively insisted that you pay a considerable sum to replace perfectly-working technology in order to continue watching TV. Never mind all the embodied energy in the old, useless sets, or the resources used to make compatible sets, what about the power to keep these new sets on? But I digress - this is a first-draft stream of consciousness back of fag packet post - the point is that the libertarians have kept quiet on this one, but you can bet they would be up in arms if we all had to pay £400 towards a solar heating/electric set-up for our roofs, regardless of the climate benefit. Like I have argued before, there could be all sorts of interests hiding behind a libertarian mask.

Yet the government reckons £20 billion would be invested in these new power stations. Bear in mind, though, that some estimates reckon £70 billion is needed to deal with the existing nuclear waste in this country. Even if those are US billions, that's over £1000 for every man, woman and child in the country. Even with the number of single-member households we have, with economies of scale, you could subsidise a solar system for everyone for that kind of money. Announce the plans, and watch as companies strive to develop technology and reap the rewards, creating jobs in the process. No, I don't know how many, but I wouldn't be surprised to find 100 000 on the back of a fag packet in John Hutton's speech-writer's waste bin, either. Plus we would have the moral satisfaction of not becoming world leaders in an industry that causes the proliferation of deadly waste products. Which reminds me, once we have become world leaders, who will we sell this nuclear know-how to? Iran?

I admit this post is all over the place, hardly rigourous, but, unlike some of the connected industries, this doesn't seem like rocket science to me. And we haven't even touched on the notion of peak uranium yet...

Congratulations, you're a woman

2008-03-08T09:28:00.003Z

So, it's international women's day, eh? Happy women's day, then, whatever gender label you prefer. Like fireworks at New Year, women's day appears to be a notion I first saw celebrated in Russia, then trickling into public consciousness over here. I always found it a dubious notion in Russia - social pressures demanded that women work all day in whatever profession, and then come back and single-handedly support the domestic front while the man of the family sat on the sofa waiting for his dinner to be cooked.

The October Revolution ushered in change in many spheres, but the Bolsheviks paid little attention to gender roles: getting women into the workplace was almost entirely driven by notions of the class struggle, not gender relations. But for this to work, the state had to supply creches, laundries, canteens, and in the few cases where these actually appeared rather than just being promised, guess who formed the overwhelming majority of workers within them? There's even a film "Усатый Нянь" (The Whiskered Nanny) that highlights the fact. But, never mind, here's one day out of 365 when for five minutes you'll get a bunch of flowers or box of chocs by way of thanks.

Mind you, have attitudes changed that much in the UK? It's probably safe to say that economic pressures rather than ideology have been responsible for increasing the numbers of women at work in the UK, although there is a discussion to be had over the role of feminist rhetoric. And there's not even one day when women are celebrated. Tellingly, the closest we get is Mother's Day - what does that say about our preconceptions of a woman's role? And even then, well, the way in which parenthood is undervalued in Western society is a topic I will return to.

Airports - stabbed or shot?

2008-03-06T09:00:00.000Z

Bretwalda Von Higham-Pseudonym is asking the question which airports are best. He cites Changi and KL as good ones, and from personal experience rates Moscow's Domodedevo highly while excoriating Sheremetevo. Can't quibble with any of that: I was one of the first into Changi's new Terminal 3 earlier in the year and, in the hope of burnishing my thinking blogger's award that must be a bit tarnished by three months of silence, have to praise the enormous plate-glass window against which the urinals stand in the gents. Years ago I came across the expression "an outback breakfast", which for some reason came back to me then.

But really there's no joy in flying at all, these days. I was 15 the first time I got on a plane, and I can still remember the excitement. For many years I could tell you instantly how many times I had been on a plane. I had bought into the fantasy of the champagne glasses and cigars of some 1930s golden age hook, line and sinker. I've done two trips already this year, and frankly just now I think you'd have to pay me to get on a plane again. Shuffling round in long lines in your stockinged feet with one hand holding your kecks up because your belt will set off the metal detector and the other hand clutching that ridiculous plastic bag with your squeeze of toothpaste in - when there was clearly no substance to the liquid bomb plot anyway - just to perpetuate some illusion that there is some sort of war on, what a farce. It's worth reproducing the final three paragraphs of that Register article:

It's a pity that our security rests in the hands of government officials who understand as little about terrorism as the Florida clowns who needed their informant to suggest attack scenarios, as the 21/7 London bombers who injured no one, as lunatic "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, as the Forest Gate nerve gas attackers who had no nerve gas, as the British nitwits who tried to acquire "red mercury," and as the recent binary liquid bomb attackers who had no binary liquid bombs.

For some real terror, picture twenty guys who understand op-sec, who are patient, realistic, clever, and willing to die, and who know what can be accomplished with a modest stash of dimethylmercury.

You won't hear about those fellows until it's too late. Our official protectors and deciders trumpet the fools they catch because they haven't got a handle on the people we should really be afraid of. They make policy based on foibles and follies, and Hollywood plots.

Russia still has a hot war within its territory, and some Chechen factions are not shy of terrorist tactics, but the Russians take a measured approach - they can manage to scan a laptop within its case, for example. They provide seats , at least in Domodedovo, for you to remove your shoes more easily, and even little plastic galosh things to keep your socks clean. Western airports could learn from that. The last time I went through Schiphol, as I think I've said before, it was like entering Bexhill-on-Sea, with the guards shouting and hurrying you along. And of course if anyone was to stop and question all of this, well, you can just hear the smack of the latex glove being pulled on, can't you? Plus they probably wouldn't let you fly...

Of course, maybe this is their way of discouraging aviation for the sake of the climate - a taxi from my house to the airport costs the same as a one way flight from that airport to Moscow, via Zurich, before taxes. That is surely an insane way of putting a price on resources, and cannot be in any way sustainable. Although naturally a politician looking at a four to five year re-election cycle has no interest in the long-term, which is why I daresay we'll be getting even more Heathrow. If I didn't have close relatives across continents, wild horses wouldn't get me on board an aircraft again; as things stand, the three day trip from here to Krasnodar on the train is looking tempting even with the attention span of a four-year-old to contend with. But not for a while.

Spot the Difference

2008-03-05T14:20:00.003Z

This man is perceived to be at risk due to his role with British armed forces becoming widely known. He is brought to safety in the UK in a matter of hours.

This man, and others like him, are known to be at risk due to their role with British armed forces becoming known to a particular section of society. Despite some fine words being eventually forced out of the government, they are - almost unbelievably - still in danger months after.

As ever, the estimable Dan Hardie has more details, and a plea for action.

Two Months' Grace

2007-12-01T18:08:00.000Z

(Image by Kenneth Moyle.)

2007-11-16T00:48:00.000Z

Stick your hand in your pocket, No2ID are calling in the pledge:

The Identity Cards Act 2006 is now law, and - despite growing opposition, significant delays and rising costs - the new Prime Minister shows no sign of calling a halt to the National Identity Scheme. In 2008, the government intends to pilot fingerprinting and to issue the first 'biometric residence visas' to non-EU foreign nationals as a precursor to registering British Citizens.

The legal powers to do these all these things will shortly begin to be applied. Now is the time to call in the legal defence fund part of the pledge.

H/T:Liberal Conspiracy

Born Free?

2007-11-15T19:02:00.000Z

I've come across a dreadful series of self-congratulatory assertions on a couple of the less cerebral right-wing blogs. It ties into the fairly widespread idea of a golden age in the past, when you didn't have to lock your doors, and kids could play out all day with no supervision. But the divergence from reality is such I'm willing to bet it never rained in this world, and, never mind qualifying for them, England always won football tournaments. It starts like this:

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.

Now, it should immediately be obvious what is wrong with that as an opening, but if not, I refer you to Unity's suggestion how to address the British Crime Survey's omission of murder as a crime:

1. Have you been a victim of murder in the last year?

It goes on:

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a tin, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

Geoff Adams-Spink was born in the target decades. His mother took one tablet of Thalidomide. I wonder how he reacts to this narrative.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a van - loose - was always great fun.

"Always great fun"? Remember, none of our respondents have been the victims of murder in the past twelve months.

Made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not poke out any eyes.

I'm going to get anecdotal for a second, here: I've hinted before that I nearly lost an eye to a bungee rope. I'll tell the story one day, but for now just let me say I was the only person to blame. The really bizarre thing, though, was that my girlfriend of the time had an elder brother. As a boy, he had lost his eye to his catapult - not from a missile, but from it twanging into his face. I still don't know how he managed it - I inevitably get images from the silent-movie era of the guy looking down the hosepipe, wondering where the water went...

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

Hmm, wasn't it Remembrance Sunday over the weekend? I believe the two world wars saw their fair share of risk-taking and problem-solving. And remind me again where the term "Renaissance man" comes from. But, again, it's a captive audience: you won't go too far wrong massaging the egos of your readers, who by amazing coincidence pretty much all fall into this generation.

The point that I am labouring is that the narrative is bollocks: obviously if you're around to read it today, you didn't go through the windscreen of your dad's car or meet your end in any other grisly way. The piece acts like the TV psychic who asks you the viewer to choose a number between one and five - he's bound to choose right for at least 20% of you. As I mentioned at the start, it also successfully intertwines itself into the notion of a golden age when things were simpler.

So what is it aiming to do? Is it just someone's lament for a bygone age that never was? No, I think this is the crucial sentence, tucked away at the end, just after another "CONGRATULATIONS" - the shouting is in the original - has softened you up:

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.

Ah, so that's what's going on. It's a quite cleverly-disguised propaganda piece boosting the idea that government regulation has made us all soft and namby-pamby, and has dulled our sense of responsibility. Whereas I think what really matters to those responsible for this garbage is regulation eats into their bottom line. Never mind a few crippled workers or children, or the odd bit of toxic waste, eh?

If anyone knows the original author of the piece I've been citing, please do let me know. Amongst other things, I'd love to give them due acknowledgement and credit.

Radio Silence

2007-11-13T23:35:00.001Z

Charlie Brooker describes the general feeling of sadness and disappointment at the news that Cerys Matthews is abasing herself in the jungle as "a bit like when Kirsty MacColl died." Funnily enough, I can sort of see where he's coming from. In the context of desperate has-been celebs - and she's not, really, is she? - it's fitting that I have a memory of Cerys doing a haunting cover of Kirsty's "Fifteen Minutes".

At the other end of the emotional spectrum, I also have a memory of the day DJ Fatboy Slim and celebrity radio presenter Zoe Ball announced their engagement line on-air. A dream died for me that day: for sure, Zoe was easy enough on the eye and seemed like she'd be fun to be around, but surely one of the very best reasons for being with her would be your father-in-law. The very same day, Mark Radcliffe announced the engagement of his partner Lard to none other than Cerys Matthews; Lard hadn't known Radcliffe was planning this, and Cerys sounded aghast when Radcliffe called her up live on air. I can still hear Lard's "I didn't know; we'll talk when we get home, love." Anyway, there was clearly tension between Mark and Lard, and an unwontedly long spell of music with none of the usual between-song banter you'd expect from the duo. In fact, Radcliffe faded his mic up only once in half an hour, to reassure listeners that "We're still here, just talking through things." Serious stuff, but they managed not to fall out on air. In fact, it was never mentioned again, except for once a few days later when a caller asked how the engagement to Cerys was going, at which Lard said it was off: his wife hadn't been keen on the idea. Hook. Line. Sinker.

Well, maybe you had to be there. But I started posting this in the vein of Radcliffe fading up the mic: I'm still here, just a bit quiet; wondering about my relationship with blogging, and what I want to do with it, whether I still had anything at all I wanted to say, and if I had, was this how I wanted to be saying it? Three paragraphs later... I'm actually not that much closer to any answers, but I can state categorically that, for once, I agree with Mr Euginedes: Homage to Catatonia could hardly be better named.

2007-11-05T15:04:00.000Z

Justin on Gordon's review of ID card technology:

Who says this government is lacking in new ideas? Here’s a stunning piece of innovative thinking from the Prime Minister on the subject of the much-hated ID card scheme.
[T]he PM was concerned enough about introducing such a huge multi-billion pound scheme to insist that the technology must work before it is introduced.
Sound thinking and it’s only taken ten years of a Labour government to come up with the plan. Makes you wonder if government ministers have been weeing before undoing their flies all this time as well.

And there's more

Ionoclast

2007-11-03T20:59:00.000Z

I don't know why I am so taken aback by my Blogpower colleague Mike Ion's phraseology over the past couple of days. Lord knows, there is no shortage of right-wing blogging that riles me - I wonder, mischievously, if I think they are beyond hope - and most days I would be cheering on anyone having a pop at Iain Dale. But Mike has two pretty bad examples right now. Firstly, he deplores the fact that certain Tories (guess who) and Lib Dems are "making political capital" out of the De Menezes verdict. I was calm enough earlier on, and simply asked Mike in a comment at what point expressing an opinion that differs with his becomes "making political capital". But the more I think about it, the worse it gets. His post concludes with this remark:

Trying to exploit the tragedy of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes for political gain is cheap - I expect many Tories and Lib Dems agree.

That sounds to me like the braying horns of a false dilemma: if you dare to disagree, you're cheap or, worse, exploiting tragedy. Try as I might, I can't help seeing that as an attempt to close down debate from the side that knows it has slipped up big time. Really, if the police shooting innocent people ~~on the streets~~ in the underground systems of our country is not a fit subject for politicians to discuss, and yes, deplore, then I don't know what is. So trying to prevent the discussion is bad enough, but reaching for burial shrouds to help you do so is, well, cheap.

The other post that has got to me also revolves around the law-and-order debate, although it also ties into a point raised by Gracchi (who I'm citing a lot, tonight), about glamour politics, in that political reporting seems much more concerned with who's up and who's down at Westminster than with the nuts and bolts of a given issue. Mike tells us that

There is speculation that Gordon Brown will use next week's Queen's Speech as a means to attack David Cameron for being weak on national security.

Apparently, Brown may make another attempt to introduce a longer term of detention without trial for terrorist subjects, and Mike's expecting 56 to be the magic number. Now, he doesn't ask whether we actually would be any safer with a longer term - and, frankly, given that previous Terrorism acts have been (ab)used to detain hecklers at Labour party conferences, for pity's sake, the prospect that I might be banged up for two months without trial makes me feel a whole lot less safe. Nope, Mike's question is "If true is Brown engaging in serious politics or clever tactics?" Me, I'm going for option [c]: Brown is engaging in macho posturing. Our civil liberties are rapidly becoming like Hebden Bridge second-hand bookshops, on their last legs, and I really don't appreciate them being made the stakes in a party political parlour game.

The More We Know, the Less I Understand

2007-11-03T19:21:00.000Z

The last second-hand bookshop in Hebden Bridge closed last week, although its demise is being drawn out: it seems the shutters won't actually go up until the very last volume has sold. It's a blow, my first adult memories of days out here involved pleasurable wanderings around the decent handful of shops selling previously-enjoyed books, and now we have none. Of course, having lived here a year, I must have only gone in once or twice. I already have more books than it seems I will be able to read in the one lifetime, and there's always next week, right?

But I did go in for a brief hello/last farewell, and came out with a fiver's worth of printed matter. The other day, Gracchi excoriated a list of humanity's ten toppermost geniuses, describing as "intellectual suburbanisation" the notion that we only need read the "top ten novels" (or whatever) in order to be well-read. As he argues, in fact, intellectual curiosity can never be assuaged: an enquiring mind will never cease its enquiries.

But, as Gracchi also pointed out, knowledge is becoming increasingly specialised: renaissance people are a thing of the past. I had a good academic school, I have two degrees, and I'm halfway or so along the way to my third. I could, then, make a reasonable case for being well-educated. But, if anything, the opposite is true, I have come so far along my own particular branch that it has taken on twig-like proportions. My tree grows in the field of Russian studies, but don't go asking me what the current consensus on Chekhov is. Still less can I hope to keep up with current medical trends, say, or contemporary classical music.

I wonder to what extent this is a function of being educated in England; I am regularly surprised by the way in which a Russian engineer, for example, can not only cite poetry, but can cite an appropriate quotation for the situation. I can't do that in Russian or English. C.P. Snow years back talked of the rift between the Two Cultures, Science and the Humanities, and it's certainly applicable to the route my education took. I was forced to specialise early, and my Earth-shattering decision at age 13 to learn Russian was based on no more compelling a reason than the fact I didn't want to study German... Well, what can you ask of a person barely into their teens?

Two of the books I purchased in Hebden Bridge's last second-hand bookshop, however, hark back to a time when it was thought possible to have at least a basic understanding of the current position in many fields. In 1956, Gollancz published The New Outline of Modern Knowledge, with articles ranging from "The Philosophy of Theism" to, simply, "Painting". Frankly, I may mock, but it will do me good to glean some understanding of representational art even if only in the period up to 1956, because I have very little as it stands. The other volume - a 1967 reprint of a 1936 original - has a rather more intriguing title: "The Story of Human Error", which is quite a clever title for a general history of science. Gracchi bemoans the fact he has no way of comparing the genius levels of Feynman and Bohr, or even whether they would play in the same league. My trouble is that I don't even understand which game they are playing. What I need is a 2007 "New Outline of Modern Knowledge", so that I at least have a baseline from which to start, an idea of what is canonical, but I guess that in our post-modern age the very idea of one volume to perform this function would be ridiculed. But I am genuinely open to suggestions.

Donald Rumsfled?

2007-11-01T23:47:00.001Z

Rumsfeld flees France fearing arrest
Sat. 10/27/2007 - 08:45

Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fled France today fearing arrest over charges of "ordering and authorizing" torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US military's detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, unconfirmed reports coming from Paris suggest.

US embassy officials whisked Rumsfeld away yesterday from a breakfast meeting in Paris organized by the Foreign Policy magazine after human rights groups filed a criminal complaint against the man who spearheaded President George W. Bush's "war on terror" for six years.

Under international law, authorities in France are obliged to open an investigation when a complaint is made while the alleged torturer is on French soil.

More (although the URL is down at the time of writing).

Matt Sinclair and the Morality of Capitalism

2007-11-01T23:14:00.000Z

Gracchi points us to a well-made argument from our newest colleague in Blogpower Matt Sinclair suggesting that capitalism actually promotes less selfishness than other ways of organising society, but I wonder if it is too abstract. He argues, for example, that "In a capitalist system my well being depends upon anticipating and satisfying the needs of others." Could it be the case that much actual commercial activity is devoted to persuading people they have needs they were previously unaware of that, just coincidentally, Acme corporation can meet with their new product.

Also, does it risk under-estimating the complexity and potential incompatibility of the recipient's needs? I shudder, for example, at the memory of my job in a well-known IT outsourcing company (the Company Sponsored Cycling, if that's a clue). The client's buyer wants the best deal for his company, by which s/he means the highest level of service for the cheapest price. The outsourcer's seller wants a commission, so promises the earth, or at least service level agreements that in practice have no earthly chance of being met. So the client's need for a low price is met, but watch out when the data centres go down... Admittedly, the link points to a public-sector IT contract, which notoriously provide excuses for private-sector gouging, but my experience was on a private sector account which saw also increasing cuts to the service provided. In my happy position as first-line support, I had direct testimony from the clients which left me in no doubt at all about the needs that were not being met.

You may retort that in this case the outsourcer will not see its contract renewed, as a competitor will come in offering a better contract. Well, maybe, but in practice there is only a handful of players who are realistically capable of bidding for large-scale IT support contracts, and they all play the same game. One contract is lost, but you'll get another when a rival/colleague's contract suffers the same fate. The free market has in fact led to, if not a monopoly, then a situation that bears many hallmarks of a cartel.

And I have to take issue with Matt's conclusion:

Social breakdown has come not because of capitalism but because it has been endangered: By welfare dependency (both personal and regional) that means people can advance their interests best by scamming or politically manoevring for more welfare. By the breakdown of the institutions of law, order and tradition that separate any system of government - capitalism in this case - from anarchy. Restoring true capitalist order is the way we might see our society healed.

In fact, surely the tendency to remove restrictions on managed capitalism in the name of the free market has had a significant impact on social breakdown - traditional industries have collapsed, whilst only mcjobs have replaced them. Say what you like about union dinosaurs, and I realise Matt is far from absurd positions that suggest the cuddly capitalists are actually responsible for the improvement in people's working conditions, but there was a real pride in craftsmanship and a camaraderie in the face of the shared physical danger that the heavy industries presented. It's all well and good if your grandfather then gets on his bike and looks for work, but what about the rupture in the community and traditions he leaves behind? And, obviously, he shouldn't cross any state boundaries, certainly not into ours... All of which is a very long-winded way of asking what Matt means by "true capitalist order".

*** Update: no sooner do I publish this than I see Vino has made a very succinct critique of the same piece. ***

Goolies and Ghosties...

2007-10-31T18:32:00.000Z

The monsters come out on all hallows' eve for a night of misrule before the saints bring order the next day. This evening's blogging is punctuated by the costumes at the door, and the ritual distribution of tokens to appease the monsters' wrath. I suppose it's relatively obvious to argue monsters are representations of the darker recesses of society's psyche, but for all the clear Freudian subtext of slasher movies, one of the great unprobed crannies of Western culture is male sexuality. How, for example, is the popularity of serial-killer movies explained, if not at least in part by the prurience of 50% or so of the viewers? It is my belief - hardly original - that men in Western culture are hobbled by the limited and limiting views of masculinity that are societally approved.

To touch on just one aspect for now, far from giving those of us that way inclined a cheap thrill, "just a bit of fun", our toleration of the semi-naked female form - for it is almost always the female form - throughout the media is enormously expensive, in that by objectifying women it cheapens and makes shallow the deep, complex, and, crucially, mutual pleasures of a loving sexual relationship (I speak as a fairly vanilla straight man, which is, of course, one of the only two sexual identities sanctified by our mainstream).

As a man raised in this Western culture, I speak from - often bitter - experience, but, at least for now, I will spare you the tawdry details, not least because I wish to draw your attention to a searingly honest examination of one man's experience of his sexuality, accompanied with supportive and insightful comments. It is suitable for work - although at least one commenter found problems of another kind - whilst remaining far more fully "adult" in content than anything the NSFW tag will ever be smirkingly applied to. There is still hope for the blogosphere while series like this can be posted. The sad likelihood that those among us who see themselves as "real men" will dismiss the content is by far the scariest thing I am contemplating this Hallowe'en.

"My Daughter's Vagina": Part One; Part Two; Part Three; Part Four; Part Five.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

2007-10-28T22:23:00.000Z

Paulie has picked up on my plug of Ashok and co's new forum Rethink, and cites my description of it as aiming to be less hierarchical than the standard blogpost-plus-comments model. He uses this as the starting point to suggest that this traditional model could in fact be an excellent way of encouraging a more deliberative and discursive model of interaction than a discussion board. He develops a really compelling argument that will seem highly counter-intuitive to bloggers who have been accustomed to seeing their tally of comments as a proxy of their success.

Paulie actually urges us to actively discourage long comments. I will have to summarise his reasoning, and I hope I don't do too much damage in the process, but essentially he argues that, even when the commenter is open to argument and persuasion, the ding-dong argument can rapidly become oppressive, taking on the nature of a debating society contest rather than a true conversation. He suggests that the long comment would do better as a standalone blogpost, with a trackback to the piece that sparked it. This would then inspire further posts by successive readers, and the conversation would take place over a diffuse and potentially infinite area of the 'sphere, and would be a true conversation rather than just an adversarial back-and-forth.

It is a compelling idea, as I say, and worth putting into practice, although it makes several demands of us: firstly, that we shed the egotistical attitude that "it was my idea, so I should host the discussion", which links into this idea of comments == success. In fact, you could argue that a better proxy of influence is the number of blogposts that are seeded in response to one of your own. Secondly, we need to be more disciplined about tracking back pro-actively, rather than relying on our stimulus blogger to check Technorati for incoming links. That suggests we also need to lobby for better cross-platform trackback tools (here's a good one, which I came across courtesy of Justin). Lastly, for now at least, we need to be more disciplined about our own comments to other blogs, and perhaps better prepared to fly kites in our own posts, rather than feel they should be complete and rounded arguments from word one. Ironically enough, Ashok commented on Paulie's piece that he felt a discussion board was a less threatening forum to kick around an idea than a comment, which he felt personally required more rigour. So how much more relaxed will we have to be about full-blown posts?

Paulie has described a really interesting scenario, and I will be interested to see whether it comes about. I still have my own concerns, too, that if the conversation becomes too diffuse it will be impossible to follow, although I wonder how much that is a function of my mindset still being too linear. What, after all, is the purpose of the <a href=... tag? But, even so, I can't help feeling Paulie is himself subconciously still in thrall to the traditional blogpost model: that in most cases each commenter is seeking the eye of the original poster, at least on the higher traffic blogs, rather than trying to engage with other commenters. A discussion board format renders this second scenario more feasible, at least until we can implement not just a way of hyperlinking to individual comments (apologies to those of you on grown-up blogging platforms), but of tracking back to them. But this is a minor criticism; I think Paulie is showing us one route to a 'sphere which truly does encourage a genuine cross-fertilisation and exchange of ideas, and it's well within our grasp to bring it about.

*** Update, 31/10/07: If you run Firefox, and have Greasemonkey installed, this article shows how you can automate trackbacks from within Blogger. ***

730 Days, and Counting

2007-10-27T00:41:00.000+01:00

Two years, eh? Who'd have thought it? The purpose of this blog, as much as it can be said to have one, has changed ever so slightly since that first earnest post; I have made contact with a few of those old friends, although Facebook has done a better job quicker, but others stay resolutely out of touch, especially the two in particular who I knew were upset at the attitude I describe. On the other hand, I've made some good friends through this blog: if anyone still requires an example of an imagined community, then surely Blogpower is it. There are other bloggers out there too whose contact I value greatly. I'd been quiet until very recently - I think the futility of liveblogging a government minister in the hope that he would reveal something extraordinary in a bread-and-butter interview has combined with this impending anniversary = blocked.

So, anyway, thanks for coming. Come in, give me your coats, and help yourself to the cheese-and-pineapple onna stick; Nick Cave's early band are playing on the stereo, and I'll introduce you to the meme I've been threatening for nearly a year. EFL activities are merely excuses to get people producing language, a meme by any other name would smell so sweet. One of my least successful escapades as an EFL teacher was the fantasy dinner party, but it may work well among bloggers.

I have been known to bang on about nationalism, and invented traditions. Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote a famous essay on the invention of Highlander traditions in Scotland, noting among many other things that a Lancashire mill-owner called, in a touch that pleases the Viv Stanshall fan in me, Rawlinson invented the kilt in the 18th Century. Initially, Rawlinson's kilt was very long, almost ankle length. but a worker of his named McGrew shortened it to above the knee, making it a much more practical garment to wear, and in effect creating the template for the garment we know today. With my professional interest in nationalism, I would love to talk to a man responsible for creating such a national symbol.

Heading slightly to the South and East, I have always had a fascination for Lindisfarne. There is something other-worldly about islands reachable by causeways, a fact implicitly recognised by other religious communities such as Mont St Michel and, indeed, St Michael's Mount. By all accounts St. Cuthbert was a man of great charm and humility, yet there seems to be a certain egotism in his retreat into his hermitage. On the other hand, he was one of the first people to take an interest in the protection of birds - way before the concerns of Victorian ladies at the depredations of the fashion trade led to the creation of the RSPB. I would hope that Cuthbert could overcome his reticence around our table.

I may have mentioned that I grew up surrounded by Methodism, although my parents had left off actually attending chapel by the earliest times I can remember, and so non-conformism always piques my interest. Its popularity in the northern mill towns is attributed to Methodist teaching that the working-class are equal to the property-owning classes in the eyes of the Lord. Methodism also gained popularity in Cornwall and Wales, areas in which, perhaps, not unsurprisingly, the Church of England was unpopular. I have only attended chapel for family funerals, so perhaps it is not unsurprising that I associate the place with sadness and discomfort, but I believe that mortification of the flesh is part of the Methodist tradition - my late grandmother used to get tipsy on sherry at Christmas and warn me of the dangers of drink. She's another I would love to see around the table, given that she died just as I was getting to know her as a person rather than a grandmother figure. but I'm excluding family and friends from this guest-list.

No, the man I would like to see seated would be William Pugh, who made his living by creating the most uncomfortable seating arrangements for chapels. He experimented with the angle and length of the pew bench, so that he could be seen as the spiritual forebear of those wretched sloping bars at bus stops that - presumably - are meant to discourage youth from loitering. Imagine listening to a sermon while perched precariously on a pew like this - truly one's devotion to the divine is proven.

Lastly, I'd like to invite a cartoon character. Whilst we did have the engaging stop-motion characters of Bagpuss and the Trumpton/Chigley/Camberwick Green triad on UK children's TV in the early 70s - programmes that still have a great influence on me to this very day - Top Cat (which I'm sure used to appear as Boss Cat on the schedules, despite the theme tune) was one of the many imported US cartoons that spoiled animation for me as a genre when I was younger. I now know the beautiful work of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, and the amazing array of animations produced in the Soviet Union, such as the young mammoth film I posted a while ago. I now know the emotional depth that animation can evoke, but back then all I thought cartoons were good for was a comedy frying-pan upside the head in the best Tom and Jerry tradition. If it didn't make me laugh, I didn't want to know. To be honest, like Sgt Bilko and co, the show that inspired it, TC never really made me laugh - I guess the humour was over my head - and I found his trick with the coin on elastic that whipped away a doorman's tip each time the opening credits ran did not endear him to me. So it's not TC I'd invite, but his arch-enemy officer Dibble, if only because Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of my favourite films, so it would be good to get a fresh insight into policing a toon town.

I think each of these individuals would have fascinating stories to tell, and that the interplay between historical location, occupation and outlook would make for a memorable evening. But the moment I would remember longest would be the moment I call them à table: "Pew Pugh, Bare-knee McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble: Grub!"

Still

2007-10-26T20:38:00.000+01:00

I've a quite trivial anniversary coming up very soon, which nonetheless is exerting an influence on my blogging way beyond its significance. Yesterday's post perhaps marked a nadir - at least, let's hope so, although I'm not sure the entrails bode well. On the cerebral side, I am splashing about in the shallows with pretty straightfoward conundra (and I can never mention that word without thinking of Roger Mellie's stint on Countdown), whereas deep thinkers like Ashok, Sharon and our own Gracchi have begun a forum for a less hierarchical model of online discussion than that offered by the blogpost plus comments model that dominates in blogging. Paulie recently posted a diagram (which he credits to David Wilcox) which illustrates this point well; I don't think I'm mistaken in thinking that the lower schema is what Rethink is aiming for. It looks a worthwhile project and I wish it well. I have signed up as Anomie, following a discussion some while ago (although it took me some while to decisively reject youdontknomie), in the hope that my analytical and intellectual faculties will someday regain some of their former rigour.

Emotionally, I have been touched by Crushed By Ingsoc's meditations on the importance of having a home. Most of my twenties were spent roving around, firstly in student flats, then shared houses owned by comically uncaring landlords - a trend that was continued by the cowboys who tend to run EFL schools in Russia. I now finally have a house to call my own, nestling in a beautiful part of the world, and all I ask is some time to enjoy it: the year feels like it has passed with me in transit to somewhere from somewhere else, and I have never been present in the place I happened to be at the time. The last time we passed through Schiphol, what with the amazingly callous and contemptuous attitude of the security personnel, you'd have thought we were going to Bexhill-on-Sea not Moscow.

When the Imaginary Friend and I announced to her parents that we intended to marry, my father-in-law responded he had hoped his daughter would marry a Vietnamese or Russian man. Our relationship then was not good, and thinking that I was, at best, third on his list of preferred nationalities did little to help... But with time, I have come to understand what he meant - he was, in his idiosyncratic way, trying to share his own experience of a multi-national relationship, and the added complications to family matters caused by thousands of kilometers' separation. My sister-in-law has announced she is to be married in early December; we have yet to recover from our most recent visit to Russia, and we are supposed to be returning to Vietnam early in the New Year to mark the first year anniversary of my grandmother-in-law's death. Heaven forfend we should actually want to travel anywhere of our own volition, and that's excluding the trips to London and Glasgow that will be forced upon me. I know, I know; I'm in a really privileged position to have three different cultures opened up to me much more than a tourist on a packaged itinerary would ever see, and it must sound like the worst kind of spoilt whingeing, but really, right now, I don't want to go anywhere outside my four walls, or think about anything at all. So of course tonight Crushed chooses to write about Nirvana...

The Strike's Over, Post Something

2007-10-25T19:34:00.000+01:00

What, anything? Well, if you're sure.

Can you identity the three errors in this sentence.

Miliband on Five Live Now

2007-10-17T14:02:00.001+01:00

Justin tips us off that David Miliband is being interviewed by Simon Mayo at 2pm today. As foreign secretary, he is responsible for the travesty that was supposed to proffer support to Iraqi employees of British forces in Iraq.

They start by joking about access to rugby World Cup matches for high-ranking ministers. Miliband outlines the "red lines" for the UK at the Lisbon summit. Firstly, that each country has a veto in EU foreign policy. Secondly, there should be a charter describing the rights of each EU citizen, but the EU should not reach further into each country's sovereignty. That tax and financial matters should be the prerogative of each country.

Miliband insists that this treaty is not the same as the 2004 constitution - it is different in its structure; also in its content - it says, for example, that national security is a matter for each country. Miliband says it is a reform treaty, so that EU institutions begin to work more effectively. Mayo says there are many politicians in other countries, he mentions Spain and France, who claim it is >90% identical. Miliband disagrees. He cites a Dutch group that has investigated this treaty, and concluded that it has "purged" the treaty of the constitutional aspects.

Mayo cites Blair's promise of a referendum; Miliband makes a poor show of comparing the constitution to Python's parrot, claiming that because it is not now a constitution, a referendum is not necessary. Mayo again cites foreign politicians and the commons scrutiny committee. Miliband repeats that both the structure and the content are different, and it is not a constitution. He claims that Europe is now longer heading for a super-state. He says that the red lines are irremovable, binding legal instruments. It is not the job of the European Court of Justice to alter these aspects of the treaty. Despite the mythology, and the confusing detail, Miliband believes that as people understand what is in the treaty they will not be scared.

Given the time lapse between the last referendum on the Common Market, and the amount of powers that have been transferred to Brussels, Mayo asks whether it is time to go to the people again. Miliband says that it's within a party's rights to ask for a referendum in its manifesto, but claims that people are more bothered about how services are delivered [Never mind the principle, eh?]. He goes on to say that the EU is ideally placed to deal with supra-national questions like climate change or liberalising global markets.

Miliband talks of "fundamental change", such as joining the Euro. He feels that the EU is still a coalition, and that this fundamental change has not yet happened. Answering listener emails as to, if he has such confidence in his position, why not have a referendum, he replies that no-one wants a government dictated to by opinion polls [really? So why the populist law and order stuff? Actually, that's unfair. It's driven by the tabloids...] Oh, and he quotes Thatcher, of all people in support of his position...

Mayo now asks about English-Russian relations. Miliband says that on the one hand the UK has rarely been so close in many areas to Russia, yet the lack of co-operation from the Russian side over the Litvinenko suspect was worrying. Miliband discusses using EU cooperation to arrest Lugovoi if he enters any EU country, but cannot touch him in Russia itself. Miliband also acknowledges the need to work with Russia on other issues. Lugovoi may become a Russian MP, which may offer him more protectio within Russia. But he says that the revelation of evidence against Lugovoi was not done lightly, and that judicial processes need to be upheld. Miliband doubts that Lugovoi's election will give him more publicity than he has already had, and that people will draw their own conclusions about Lugovoi's reluctance to face a trial here.

Token waffle about the richness that Russia can offer, but a big but - Russia should adhere to international law on climate change and arms proliferation. [Coming from a country that used dubious legality to enter Iraq...] Miliband sees Litvinenko's murder and Russia's withdrawal from the conventional forces treaty as more serious than "echoes of the cold war" like bombers entering EU airspace.

Miliband sidesteps Putin's remarks on eschewing force in Iran, saying he is focused on the diplomatic process. But that the last thing the Middle East needs is a nuclear arms race. Miliband supports an Iranian civil nuclear programme, but not a military nuclear programme. Miliband says "Look at what I do say, not what I don't say". He repeats his commitment to the diplomatic process, but conspicuously avoids endorsing Jack Straw's view that military force was "inconceivable". He emphasises there is a broad-based diplomatic effort, including Russia, against an Iranian military programme. Mayo quotes Senator Clinton's view that "all options must remain open", but Miliband will not be drawn. Mayo says it would be easy to rule things out. Miliband agrees, but does not. He reiterates what he sees as the economic benefits that culd come Iran's way if they co-operate. Says there is no bar on him meeting high-level Iranian officials, and met the foreign minister in New York. He would go to Tehran if he foresaw a positive result, but will not go just as a PR exercise for the Iranians.

After a break for the news and sport, Miliband hopes there will not be more trouble than is already being reported over the football match. Mayo puts Polly Toynee's criticism of the intellectual poverty of Brown's administration. Miliband rejects it, and claims that the government does have a clear vision. Chris Dillow recently made the point that vision is not important, it is how you are qualified to deliver on that. In contrast, Miliband says that a party's vision of the future is what a voter uses to decide who to vote for. He claims that Brown had never made a commitment to an election this year, and that he didn't therefore bottle over the Conservative bounce. Miliband says that he is excited by the question of how to build the next stage of a Labour government.

Mayo says the last issue will be the Antarctic, and the story that the UK will be claiming Antarctic territory. Miliband says that these claims are justified due to British historical ties with territories in the South Atlantic, but that the claims are only being considered at the moment, it is not definite. He attempts to spin this as an attempt to protect the environment from climate change [whihc sounds extrenely dubious], rather than it being an attempt to grab potential mineral and oil resources.

And that's it. No mention of the Iraqi employee question at all, despite the fact that at least one e-mail went in, and I suspect that other bloggers involved in the campaign wil also have contacted the programme. The only interaction was a couple of e-mails read out over the issue of a referendum over the EU, which, sadly, I suspect is probably closer to the heart of Radio Five's listeners. The station has become increasingly like the Daily Mail, although with the likes of contrarian Stephen Nolan at the weekend, the gormless Richard Bacon at night (what does Konnie see in him?) and the odious Nicky Campbell in the mornings, perhaps the Daily Star is a closer intellectual match. Mayo can be a good interviewer, and did press Miliband over Iran, but the rest of it seemed an easy enough ride. Shame.

What this clearly shows is that from the government's point of view, they think the issue has been dealt with, and the news cycle has moved on. What this means for us is that we should maintain the pressure on our MPs. As ever, the indefatigable Dan Hardie sets out just why the government's proposals are so bad. If you didn't already see it, Tim Worstall explains how the much-trumpeted announcement actually equals no extra help at all. If you haven't yet contacted your MP about this, it seems now would be a very good time.

Sicilian Community

2007-10-11T17:15:00.000+01:00

I have just managed to squeeze in a guest post of my own among the many high-quality pieces that have kept Sicily Scene warm while Welshcakes was in the UK. I gather she's back home today, so you'll have little to fear by way of more incursions.

Meanwhile, I'm off until Monday. Anyone know anything interesting to do with a small person in Bristol?

Humble Pie and Chips

2007-10-10T16:19:00.000+01:00

I had a pop at the Thunderdragon the other day, accusing him of turning a reasonable point into a partisan issue, and using that particular post as the basis for a general plea against creeping partisanship in political blogging. Someone (to whom my thanks) even saw fit to nominate my post for the Britblog round-up, so my attack on TD's aberrance may have been seen by more than both my usual readers (my stats have doubled since I went onto sitemeter, although I only have the one mother). Incidentally, I'd recommend a look at Paulie's piece on a similar theme that was included in the same roundup. [Paragraph edited to remove unintentional slight on TD's readership]

It would be remiss of me, then, not to draw your attention to this piece; TD has been scornful of Lib Dem election material in the three-way marginal Watford which suggests that only the Lib Dems can defeat Labour, despite the fact that there were fewer votes separating second (Lib Dem) from third (Conservative) than there were between first and second. If anything, he is even more scathing about Chris Philip, the Conservative PPC in ~~Hammersmith~~ Hampstead and Kilburn, who has pulled a similar trick. Now TD makes no secret of his Tory affiliation, so it must have been tempting for him to explain away this incident one way or another, but here's what he has to say on the matter:

When I was researching for this post, I had hoped that there would be some way in which his claims could be vindicated. I had hoped that there was a way in which his interpretation could have at least within a reasonable skip hop and a jump from the truth. But there really isn't. It is lying, pure and simple, and as bad as that constantly done by the Lib Dems - which is no excuse for it from a Conservative.

I have been appealing for political bloggers to hold all candidates and elected representatives to high standards of behaviour, regardless of affiliation. I'm hard pressed to think of a better example of what I had in mind than TD's post, and I applaud him for it.

Knight Night

2007-10-09T22:41:00.000+01:00

Ian Botham is to be knighted tomorrow.

He was looking well in Adelaide a few months ago...

Don't Let Him Through... Updated x2

2007-10-08T15:28:00.000+01:00

...he's not a doctor. The tireless Dan Hardie has been moving heaven and earth to bring the government to its senses over asylum for Iraqi nationals whose lives are at risk through their work for UK forces. He has been very badly served by the media: Nick Cohen's - I'll be charitable - casual errors may very well land Dan in the brown stuff good and proper. As the Yorkshire Ranter says, on the evidence so far, we can safely say Nick Cohen is not a journalist.

The Times, meanwhile, ran a story over the weekend that seemed calculated to take the wind out of the campaign sails, whilst carefully not actually making any specific promises. The Guardian's take this morning was that 500 places may be offered, although that is no longer available online. If this is the case, it seems remarkably petty, in that I understand the actual requirement is not that much larger in absolute terms - the figure of 20 000 put up some time ago was a despicable attempt to play down to fears of swamping. If the Guardian is correct, I can only conclude that government ministers have finally recognised that there is a case for granting asylum, but still cannot bring themselves to meet all the demands of a campaign that has caused them some embarrassment. Let's hope I am to be proved wrong, and that all the Iraqi workers and their families who are at risk, and have survived the interminable wait, will be allowed to come. Let us also hope that to announce asylum before the event will not make matters worse before they are better. Let's wait and see before we put up the bunting.

As I write, the Guardian now has the following paragraph:

He also told parliament that local staff who have worked for British forces for more than 12 months in Iraq would be able to apply for financial aid to settle there, elsewhere in the region or, "in agreed circumstances", in the UK.

Is it just me, or do those "agreed circumstances" sound distinctly ominous? The rest of it doesn't sound much better: mealy-mouthed and grudging. I have clearly titled this piece advisedly.

If that wasn't enough, two days before the meeting Dan has learnt that a Cabinet minister is pulling rank and has claimed a prior booking on the room in Westminster, and so the location has been changed to the Attlee Suite in Portcullis House. The time and date remain the same: 7-9pm, October 9th (ie tomorrow). I sincerely hope this was not a further attempt to undermine the campaign. This isn't over yet.

*** Update 6pm, 8/10/07: the tireless Dan has more:

The Government are saving some Iraqis threatened with death if they’ve worked for us for 12 months, and abandoning others, equally threatened with death but who’ve worked for less than 12 months. They’re playing a numbers game with people’s lives.

He makes four forceful criticisms in this post, which I highly recommend. As I wrote to my MP today, this announcement may cause people to think the issue is resolved, whereas it looks as though many people will in fact remain at risk. My original post talked of apparent measures to deflate the campaign; this announcement does little to change my view. You still have time to invite your MP: Attlee Suite, Portcullis House, 7-9pm, tomorrow.***

*** Update 11am, 9/10/07: It seems I'm not the only one who has doubts, putting it mildly. Also, I am sorry to say Chris McCafferty will not be going to tonight's meeting, but she "will make representations to the Minister on the issue." ***

Galileo- The Mistake the Church Never Escaped From

2007-10-06T14:33:00.000+01:00

One of the most powerful images in history is that of Galileo standing before the inquisition, forced to recant his belief that the Earth went round the Sun.
Legend has it, after his public recantation, he whispered under his breath 'But still it moves', meaning, the Earth.

That last bit, may be legend, but the fact is the trial happened.
And it is used over and again, to support the legend of a battle between the forces of reason and religion, as if the two have been eternal enemies.

Because this story is true, it allows other myths to survive; that the Church taught the world was flat, that the Church opposed Darwin, that the Church denies modern physics.

With regard to the first, it never happened, and we'll come to that.

With regards to evolution, the theory never provided much trouble for the Catholic Church, which even in the middle ages never insisted on a literal interpretation of Genesis. It embraced Darwin fully in 1908, two decades before the famous Scopes 'Monkey' trial.
Modern genetic theory was founded by a Catholic abbot, Gregor Mendel in the nineteenth century.

The Big Bang too, has always been a favoured child of the Church, one of its first proponents being a Catholic priest, Abbe Georges Lemaitre, and being embraced by Pope Pius XII in 1953.

Generally, the record of the Church on Science has been exactly the opposite of its general perception, so how on Earth did it make this stupendous blunder, one which destroyed its reputation in matters scientific- to the degree that it will carry this on its shoulders for ever after?

First, it's worth understanding what Catholic Christianity was in the Middle ages, and in a sense remains.
In my opinion, Catholic Christianity, was something different to any religion that came before. It was the first ideology. It wasn't a series of myths designed to explain the World. It was a system of values, designed to alter the world.

And one of its key values- certainly within its structure- was its aim to understand the mind of God, to seek knowledge for its own sake. One of its initial attractions, why it won so many converts, was because it had intellectual appeal. It succeeded because it was taken in droves by the intellectuals of the Roman Empire.

Up till then, empires had come and gone, cultures had advanced and retreated. Christianity set up a structure the main aim of which, was actually the protection, dissemination and development of knowledge- the monasteries.

Its often forgotten the huge advances that were made in these places between the fall of Rome and the Voyage of Columbus.
For example, ancient medicine was purely concerned with the wounded. The sick were considered unclean, and excluded.
It was Christian Monks who first made efforts to understand disease and contagion- because of Scriptural teachings on lepers.

Christian monks sought out knowledge and devoured it, reworked it, analysed it, put forward fresh opinions.
And more. They did what the ancients had been less inclined to do. They experimented.
Empiricism has its roots in the 'Test it, prove it', approach of Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus and Wiliam of Occam- the man who first put forward the sound scientific principle of always assuming the simplest explanation, Occam's Razor.

We hide from history by not realising the reasons behind the explosion of the west onto the rest of the world in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
It happened, because Europeans had lands which produced more people, dieing less and reproducing more than much of the rest of the world. They had more knowledge, more learning and more technology at their fingertips than any people they encountered. That's the brutal, controversial, but realistically unchallengeable facts.

And how had they achieved this?
After a thousand years of rule by an all powerful Church?

You see, it is undeniably true that the Church did use strongarm tactics to impose its authority, but impose it it did.

The advantageous position the West found itself in, is a direct result of the fact that after the crusades and the journeys of Christian Monks and Venetian traders bringing knowledge back to Europe, there was nowhere in the world where more knowledge was being collated and analysed anywhere in the world, than within the Catholic Church, in its monasteries and its universities.
Lets not forget, in those days universities were part of the Church.

It taught Aristotle, Plato, Galen- but also Muslim thinkers and scientists, Averroes, Avicenna, Al Geber (from whom the word algebra comes from). It never took the view that only the Bible provided answers. It didn't think the brains of pagans or infidels didn't work.

It also took the view that not everything in the Old Testament might actually have happened. Now that might seem startling. But it is nevertheless true. The medieval Church actually held, that some parts might be allegorical. Instead scholars looked for the hidden meanings. Genesis is a case in point. Many Church intellectuals doubted the time frame- some suggested Adam might be the first Jew, since a close reading of genesis implied God made other people first, maybe millenia before Eden.

In terms of the World and the Universe, the Church stood behind the best scientific model of the day, that of Ptolemy of Alexandria.

This stated- correctly- that the earth had a circumference of 25,000 miles. At the centre, was the point of gravity. Earth was at the bottom of the universe, clumped around this centre of gravity, then water (the oceans). For some reason, on one side of the globe, the land came out of the water- Europe, Asia, Africa, this was the world.
On the other side, just Ocean from Spain to Japan.
Think how big that ocean would be. Take the Americas off the globe, and imagine one Ocean, stretching across that distance.

Columbus wasn't derided, because people thought he'd sail off the edge of the world. He was derided, because it was assumed he'd starve.

Above the waters, was the sphere of air, stretching up 60,000 miles, then the sphere of the final element, fire.

All fire rose, to join the rest of fire, just as all earth sank, to reach the rest of earth. that how it worked. Lightening, comets etcetera, were events in the sphere of fire.

Fire stretched up to the Moon- correctly put at 320,000 miles away. They had its size and distance correct.

And then, the Universe.
Here most of the guesses were wrong. But they WERE founded on good observation.

The Sun was assumed to be about four and a half million miles away. That still meant it was twenty times the size of the Earth.

The rest of the planets, posed problems. They clearly didn't move in simple circles. We know now, this is because we are moving, and so are they.
But their movements were explained by Ptolemy by assuming each planet circled a point, which itself then circled the Earth.

Mercury, for example rotated every 88 days around a point which rotated annually around the Earth.
Mars on the other hand, rotated every 365 days around a point which rotated every 687 days around the Earth.

Now the fact that 365 days appeared somewhere in the rotation patterns of every 'planet', bar the Moon did mean, that the possible solution of everything going round the Sun had occurred to people before.

But rejected. And there was a very good reason for that.

At the edge of the universe were the stars. They didn't move. They were fixed in the firmament, seventy million miles away. The whole firmament rotated daily, east to west, around the Earth, carrying with it everything above the sphere of fire.

The fact is, when we see the stars, they look bigger than they are. We don't really see them, we see their light. But they ancients assumed, they saw their outline. They couldn't be as far away as we know them to be, because of how big they'd have to be- many, many times bigger than the largest planet, the Sun- which they assumed to be twenty times smaller than it is. They DID assume that several stars were as big as they assumed the Sun to be, therefore seventy million miles, was about how far away they'd be.

In which case, if the Earth DID move, we'd see changes over the year in the positions of the stars. They'd APPEAR to move.

They didn't. THAT was the scientific proof for the Ptolemaic system.

But Church thinkers weren't narrow minded. In 1378 the Archbishop of Paris started a debate by attempting to prosecute an author for suggesting multiple worlds. The Church came down on the side of the writer, saying it was unprovable that the creator HADN'T made other world like ours. No one could know. To say categorically he HADN'T would be to limit the possibilities of his omnipotence, thus the Archbishop should shut up.

Further, in the following century, leading Church thinker, Nicholas of Cusa, suggested that assuming the rotation of the Earth daily made more sense than ascribing it to the Universe.
Since no one could state WHAT was outside the universe, than it made no difference which was rotating, except that the Earth was smaller than the Universe, therefore it made more sense to assume the rotation of the Earth. If this was so, maybe the fixed stars weren't fixed in anything. Maybe what we saw was the distant light of other world like ours, with their own Suns and Moon circling them.

The Church made no ruling on this- it never felt it had to. Why?
Because no one was challenging its authority. Let these things be discussed. Eventually, truth would out.

Unfortunately, for these days of liberal thought, along came Martin Luther.

It wasn't just Indulgences, Papal corruption and the like that Luther fulminated against.

It was the eclectic thinking of the Church, its studying of pagan and infidel thinkers, its toleration (by his standards) of Jews, its views that bits of the old testament were true only in an allegorical, not a literal sense.

Luther taught that truth could only be found in scripture- well, those bits he liked. Catholics possess a bible with books Protestants don't possess, because Luther banished them. He tried to banish several New Testament books as well, especially the ones which support the teaching of Purgatory and Justification through good works, as opposed to Faith alone.

Luther forced the Church into defensive thinking.
And it was totally the wrong time for new thinking to appear on cosmology.

Copernicus published his treatise in favour of the heliocentric system on his deathbed. Luther denounced it. The Catholic Church made no statement.

Indeed, in 1582, it accepted it quietly, in a way no one would notice they had.
Pope Gregory XIII issued a new calendar, so accurate we use it today- the Gregorian calendar.
It was based on the assumption that the earth rotates around the Sun.
Now the fact was, only a few leading church thinkers could know that the inner body of the Church had come the conclusion that only a calendar based on this assumption could work.

But it couldn't risk stating it. There was still the issue of why the stars didn't move. It was a gamble, and the Church couldn't allow itself to back a theory, which could still be disproved, at a time when large parts of Europe were proclaiming it the Anti-Christ.
It could not afford to lose this ideological war, just because it made a rash judgement on the movement of planets.

And so things continued.
Until Galileo.

Galileo was convinced of the reality of the heliocentric model. Furthermore, he knew that the Church was sitting on the fence for political reasons. But he was so sure of himself, so sure that the Church had a chance to outsmart its opponents by publicly taking on a theory which he felt would win, whilst they supported the losing one

And so, he made an error of Judgement. The Pope at the time, Urban VIII, was in fact a man of scientific bent. He had shown himself open to discussion on the two opposing cosmologies, but maintained that in public anyway, it made sense to assume that the Earth at the centre of the universe, was reality.

But Galileo persisted. His aim was get the Church to publically support the Copernican model.
This, with the Thirty years war raging, it could not do.

When Galileo published a book called 'A Dialogue Between the Two systems of the World', set as a fictional debate between supporters of both positions, the character arguing for the Ptolemaic system used identical words to Urban VIII. Worse, he was given the name Simplicio- Simpleton.

How Galileo thought he was going to get away with it remains to be seen. During the worst Religous war between Protestants and Catholics, he had called the Pope a simpleton.
Since he hadn't exactly made friends with the key figure in the inquisition, he could expect retaliation.
And he got it.

Ironically, there is considerable evidence the Pope tried to extricate him. Partly, because they had once been friends.
But partly because, by trying Galileo, the Church would now have to do what Galileo had wanted to force them to do- get off the fence publicly.

And politics dictated, that if the Church really had to jump, it could only jump one way.

Had Galileo left it, it would be a matter of twenty years before the scientific argument would essentially have been over. And almost certainly, the Church would have publicly embraced the heliocentric model.

It was a dark day for religion when Galileo was forced to recant. A dark day for Galileo, maybe, but a darker day for the long partnership of faith and reason, one which never recovered. No one since has trusted the Church on matters scientific, it will never regain its lost credibility.

It is an irony perhaps, that it happened because Galileo was SO convinced he was right, that he wanted the Church he was likewise convinced was right, to back him up.

It's a funny old world going round the sun.

Free Burma!

2007-10-04T16:02:00.000+01:00

Phoney War

2007-10-03T14:52:00.000+01:00

Well, it hasn't been a vintage summer for either the weather or, by pretty widespread consent, for blogging. Still, we may well end up looking back at the past few months with a fair amount of nostalgia. The earlier part of the online year was taken up with Tim Ireland's pleas to keep blogging free from knee-jerk partisanship and underhand tactics, for which he attracted a great deal of hostility, but look what's happening now.

The country is on tenterhooks, waiting to hear if Brown will call an election - is it just me that finds it strangely appropriate that the first shots in a phoney war should involve claims of a phoney troop withdrawal? - and the infection is spreading among blogs: substantive points are being missed in the rush to score off the other side. For example: the Thunderdragon has not met his usual standards with a post on the fallout from pictures showing Tory aides blacking up. His initial point is valid enough, that we should not try and draw conclusions about whole parties from the actions of one or two individual members, but then the rest of his piece goes ahead and does exactly that: "why is it that Labour believe that only whites can be racist?" etc. etc. What, every last member? In fact, there is no link in this piece to show that even one shares this view. So a fair comment is squandered for the sake of scoring off the other side.

It doesn't have to be this way. Bel is a Tory blogger for whom I have a great deal of respect. When she jumped all over James Purnell and his embroilment in a photoshopping incident, both Bob Piper and I noticed that she didn't hark back to a similar incident involving Ann Widdecombe and a Tory candidate. In fact, as Bob went on to observe, the latter example is probably even worse (in that it reversed the meaning of the banners in the picture). But he too couldn't resist making a party political point at the end... The real point is that neither incident shows our party system in a good light, and I would have thought our energies would be much better expended holding all our candidates to a higher moral standard. So plaudits are due to Bel for subsequently clarifying her intentions for her original piece - a general commentary on levels of honesty in society - and for making clear her opposition to Widdecombe's actions as well. Surely this is the level of honest, open and nuanced interaction that bloggers should be aiming for.

Certainly, I still hope for such nuanced analysis in the political blogs I read of any alignment, which is why I tend to steer clear of the foamier-mouthed types who prefer to use terms like "socialists" or even "Marxists" when what they mean is the Labour party. If you can't even get such basic stuff as that right, why the hell should I waste my time on the rest of your 'analysis'? I can't decide which is going to be worse - that Brown goes ahead and calls the election, so that the partisan distortion and spin increasingly befouls the 'sphere; on the other hand, at least we would get it all out of the way relatively quickly, whereas this phoney war risks degrading the quality of blogging for an indefinite period, and we would still end in a shit-storm two years' or so down the line.

If you have a political blog, and also have any genuine affection for blogging as a pursuit, please, think on, before it becomes so devalued as to be useless. As the Usmanov affair showed, blogging can be used to take on vested interests and win, but, realistically, blogging has yet to make much of an impact on the wider world. The more libertarian element are very keen on the idea of freedom of expression - just bear in mind that, if the whole medium is seen as polluted, as a mere extension of the spinners' web, then no-one will want to listen to what any of us, you included, have to say. By all means raise a finger to the idea of self-regulation, but spare a thought to the direction we are headed in, and to whose interests will be served if the 'sphere is devalued. Like it or not, we're all in this together.

Start a Trend: Send an Invitation

2007-10-02T16:15:00.000+01:00

In early August, the government announced an "urgent" review of policy towards Iraqi nationals who were facing persecution, torture and death as a direct result of their work for British forces in Iraq. As we know, this announcement was used as an excuse for the government to do nothing, as it would, clearly, be "inappropriate to pre-empt the recomendations." Of course, it is much more "inappropriate" to upset some minister by not waiting for their considered thoughts than it is to prevent some swarthy foreigner in a far-off country meeting a horrible end by drill bit, a risk that increases each day our country does nothing. Despite the obvious urgency, we were told these recommendations would be forthcoming in, er, late September. Have you looked at a calendar in the past couple of days?

There are seven days until a cross-party meeting in Westminster which aims to call the government to account; if you have not yet contacted your MP, there is still time. If you have already been in touch, it would not hurt to send them a reminder. Chris McCafferty MP assured me on September 20 that my correspondence would be "dealt with," which is as much as I have heard directly from her on this matter. I am prepared to accept that this is not a euphemism for the round filing cabinet in the corner of the office, but I have given her a stronger nudge. Send your MP an invitation today - it really isn't hard - and, who knows, the government may finally get around to issuing the invitations it should have sent months ago.

Blogpower Roundup #2

2007-10-01T00:49:00.000+01:00

The month ends, we tear another page off the calendar. By its nature, blogging seems an ephemeral pursuit: today's blogpost nothing more than tomorrow's silicon chip wrapper. But as this round-up shows, bloggers compose their pieces on a range of subjects far wider than just yesterday's happenings in the Westminster parlour game. At times, we approach the wisdom of ages.

Alex reminds us this wisdom does not come easily, as proven by his attempt to physically enact his blog title . A warning to the as-yet childless, all-too familiar for those like me with children of a similar age, and perhaps a wry smile from those whose offspring have sprung off on their own. Lady Macleod has also known the heights of inspiration, scarcely able to type quickly enough to keep pace with her thoughts, only to then reach for the blue pencil, if not the waste-basket. This piece turns into a meditation on transcending our physical shortcomings, and ends striking an unexpected and unresolved chord. Westminster Wisdom offers us a solid treatment of the story of Djuradj, Prince of Montenegro: depending on who you believe, the first writer of love-letters, or a nationalist before the term was invented.

The Morning Star has returned to the ranks of Blogpower, and we are delighted to see him posting once again. He brings us down to earth again with a sober, nay, downright blunt assessment of the venom hurled at two PCSOs, pilloried for not diving into a lake to save a drowning boy. If those in uniform have been warmly treated by our members in this past month, there is a class of public servant who rarely enjoy the same acclaim. Who, indeed, rarely seem to remember that they are there to serve the public. The Morning Star's second nomination comes for his ruminations on a 21st Century Fawkes, a post which lives up to the high standard set by the title. The City Unslicker can see no economic sense in Gordon Brown's actions over Northern Rock, but cynical reasons are all too evident for him. Ordovicius is scathing about Welsh Labour's attempts to reconnect with their electorate. Stan likewise does not stint on the criticism of a US presidential candidate whose artifice and insincerity he excoriates. The Tin Drummer is another welcome revenant, although he has been sadly quiet since he posted on the dangers of "expert" culture superseding democracy. The Fake Consultant advises us how politicians may be given a more clear and immediate understanding of the travails endured by military families, let alone their members in the direct firing line. Indeed, there is not so much talk of the debt owed by the many to the few, these days, but Beaman remembers.

Journalists are far from public servants, but they enjoy, if that is the word, the same sort of popularity among bloggers as do politicians. Benedict White is unimpressed by the Independent on Sunday's spin on what Sayeeda Warsi had to say about BNP voters. Someone was kind enough to nominate the unflattering things I had to say about MSM coverage of Ahmadinejad's visit to the USA, from Fox News on the one hand to The Guardian on the other. The odious Nicky Campbell proves every weekday morning that Radio 1 DJs do not make journalists, however suited their personalities might be. Nevertheless, Colin Campbell - who shares the surname, but nothing else - has proof that Smashey and Nicey are not above misleading the public. Also down in this circle of hell are lawyers, at least those from Schillings: Bel is short and to the point, whereas Matt Wardman delights in the company's spectacular PR cock-up, and comes up with a fabulous punchline.

The most nominated post this month, by quite some way, is Ruthie Zaftig's tale of defying anti-abortionists on campus. Would that we all could show such moral courage in the flesh, rather than just ranting from the safety of a keyboard. Where Ruthie feels these ostensible Christians in fact have nothing in common with Christ's message, Chris Bradley is bemused by an apology, which he feels illustrates Christianity's fundamental hypocrisy. Ruthie is also, deservedly, most nominated blogger, with further plaudits for both her meditation on the homelessness industry and also her piece on why the case of the Jena Six is scarcely comparable to Rosa Parks sitting up the front of the bus. I almost hesitate to append Ellee Seymour's remark: "I cannot think of any reason why women bloggers should be singled out for special attention. At the end of the day, it is the content and personality behind it that counts." Were there still any doubt, the nominations to this roundup should allay them.

If Ruthie was livid at these attempts to discourage women from seeking a particular procedure, CalumCarr is provoked beyond endurance by the refusal of the NHS to take seriously the symptoms of a loved one with a life-threatening illness. Calum is the third of our returning members to feature in this roundup, and we are very glad to have him back. His nomination is a token of the esteem we hold him in, and the support we offer him at an unimaginably difficult time. Lord Nazh is another of our members presently concerned about the health of a family member; he is outraged that a mother should be seeking custody of her children, who she claims need a parental figure having lost their father. At the hands of their mother. The word chutzpah springs to mind.

Welshcakes brings us her account of a visit to a museum; it may sound a banal theme, but I have found it impossible to summarise the many facets in the text of this brilliant post, complemented by a masterful use of illustrations. James Higham shows that even your commute home is full of human interest - don't forget to read on past the fold - and still has change from a ten-rouble note. Rail travel is now hopelessly associated with asses braying "I'm on the train"into their mobiles. James also brings us tips on phone etiquette among business people in Russia. Is this applicable to sparrows? Transport has preoccupied many of our nominees this month, although at first glance I thought it was literacy twinned with illegitimacy that was exercising Jeremy. JMB has also pondered on the vanity plate. AP91EBY is sadly unavailable, not that I have made enquiries, being a firm believer that personalised registration plates not only rob old vehicles of their history, they leave the observer in no doubt about your personal wealth/sense ratio. In a slightly different context, the Thunderdragon would also prefer vehicles not to be seen as indicators of economic status. Shades, meanwhile, supports the notion that your conveyance can show you at an advantage.

As A Dodo specialise in another sort of travel, indeed, travellers to another sort of destination. It was not a good month for music of varied genres: we're all a tenor poorer, despite the Pistols reprising their filthy lucre tour. I saw them at Phoenix in 1996, I've heard pub covers bands do better sets. Of the same songs. John Lydon was taunting the crowd to make better heckles: I can't have been the only one shouting "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" His is not the only halo to be tarnished.

Here endeth the second lesson. Nominations open now for the October round-up, which will appear a month or so hence. Please make a note of the address: blogpowerroundup AT googlemail DOT com. Any post published by a blogpower member over the next month is eligible, and anyone, even non-members, can nominate. Vote early, vote often.

What Did He Say?

2007-09-29T22:15:00.000+01:00

There has been a lot of hilarity over the Iranian President - yeah, you know, the one with the name that sounds a bit like a tuxedo. If you squint. My, don't these foreigners have funny names? Especially the swarthy, bearded ones, it seems. Anyway, Ahmadinejad has copped a lot of flak for seeming to claim that Iran had no gay men. Isn't he a scream? He also referred to the myth of the holocaust, and repeated calls for Israel to be annihilated. So far, so Fox News.

First off, it's not clear to me how much of what Ahmadinejad said was in his own words, and how much was mediated through an interpreter. I have some little experience of both simultaneous and consecutive interpreting, and so some awareness of the difficulties inherent in the task. A good interpreter will do what s/he can to convey the nuances and subtexts of what is said, but some things will almost always be missed. A translator has the luxury of time to consider various options, an interpreter has very little. So, there is something a little, let's say, unfair, in relying on an inevitably compromised account of what was actually said.

Secondly, it's worth paying attention to the interpreted soundbite. Fox News have him saying ""In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country" which is being , yes, interpreted as him saying there are no homosexuals in Iran. As Ali Quli Qarai says, that would be a remarkable thing for Ahmadinejad to claim, as clearly no-one would believe it. Why is it so hard to believe that gay culture in Iran and in America might be very different? Seriously, can you imagine "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" on Iranian TV? I do not wish to claim that official Iranian attitudes towards gay men and lesbians are to be applauded, but I would like to argue that they are more nuanced than seems to be being argued. The Guardian, which you might think somewhat more lenient towards Iran than Fox News, rendered the key words even less ambiguously as "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals."

The other point I would like to bring out of Qarai's article - which is an object lesson in remembering that other cultures have other ways of making their points - is the discussion of Ahmadinejad's use of the word 'myth' in relation to the Holocaust. This blog has been known to use the word in a similar sense, albeit in different contexts: to say that the "Blitz Spirit" has become one of the British national myths is not to deny that a sense of dogged determination did actually bring people together, and to a certain extent still does. I find it hard to imagine a historical event more central to Jewish identity than their treatment at the hands of the Nazis - in this sense, it is a defining myth. Ironically, given the stereotypical anti-Semitism of the Cossacks, present-day Cossack national movements frequently refer to de-Cossackisation, whereby the Soviet authorities imprisoned, exiled and killed Cossacks in retribution for their perceived sympathy for the Whites in the Civil War. As with the Holocaust, there is clear evidence that this did occur, and for the reasons stated. Thus de-Cossackisation is one of the Cossack national myths. Unfortunately, whilst this is common usage , at least in academia, it is easily misunderstood. Bizarrely enough, in my research I have taken pains to emphasise the fact that the word myth does not imply no basis in fact, and had assumed I had done so here - that's an omission I will seek to remedy in future.

Does this mean I support Ahmadinejad's views? Well, no, [almost certainly, the doubts only arising from the fact I only know his views through hostile media accounts of interpreted speeches]. I suspect that anti-Israel rhetoric plays very well to his home audience, and that there is probably not so much concern to dissociate anti-Zionist views from anti-Semitism. But, again, look at Qarai's deconstruction of Ahmadinejad's widely-trailed remarks about the destruction of Israel. If Qarai is correct, then in fact Ahmadinejad means only that Israel should cease to exist, in the same way that both the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa have ceased to exist. I am sure that nearly all my readers would have had similar sentiments about at least one of the latter two. That - if it is in fact the case - is a different kettle of sabre-rattling entirely. Again, the same caveat applies, and where Qarai argues, correctly,in my view, that we all should have the opportunity to clarify our remarks, the corollary is that we all have an opportunity to backtrack and say, oh no, that's not what I meant at all.

Nonetheless, I think Qarai's piece a very valuable counter-balance to the rabidly anti-Ahmadinejad coverage we have seen in almost all sections of the media. There is a lot of speculation that the ground is being prepared for a strike against Iran. I find it very hard to believe that, despite the fiasco of Iraq, anyone might feel military action against Iran would be anything other than an unmitigated disaster. But then I felt that about the Iraq war, before it happened, as well. If we are to have any chance at all of preventing history repeating itself as tragedy once again, the least we should demand is more balanced coverage of the intended target, and attempts to understand what they are saying, and how. I may be treading on the toes of Five Chinese Crackers, here, but if you hold your nose and read the rest of the Fox News piece, it actually contradicts its assertions in the first few paragraphs. Which is more than you can say for the Guardian's account...

**Update 1/10/2007: Curious Hamster is very good on this subject **

My Earliest Political Memory

2007-09-24T22:04:00.000+01:00

Gracchi is a good friend of this blog, heroically stepping up more than once to provide sections of brilliance among the dross that you poor readers are customarily served. However, even he treads a narrow path when it comes to unleashing memes...

Uncannily, where Gracchi remembers Mrs T's resignation, my own memory revolves around her becoming prime minister. I can see it unusually clearly in my mind's eye. Unusual, in that there is an awful lot of my childhood that - I have to assume - I simply do not remember. It seems it was a cold, overcast day; the low clouds were a uniform white colour. I was standing somewhere just above the first bend in Moorside Gardens, although we actually lived at number 5, much nearer to the junction with Moorside Road. (If Google Maps still insist it is Queensbury, take no notice. I grew up in Eccleshill).

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I was with Richard Corbridge, who went to the same school as me. Our parents knew each other through the Methodist mafia that my mum and dad were still involved with. Although my dad had stopped his lay preaching, they were still involved socially. Richard and I had no idea of the political significance: the winter of discontent was way off our radars, but we did react to the fact she had become the country's first female prime minister. With the casual sexism (and I'm sure that's what we called it at the time...) of boys in the 1970s, we just assumed she would be terrible at it. Looking back at it now, I'm not so sure our predictions were that wrong, but I'll grant you it was not for the right reasons.

It was also on Moorside Gardens that I first got the horrors of nuclear war; the notorious "Protect and Survive" films must have been fairly new, and I must have watched at least one [update: a little research suggests they were never actually broadcast, but I clearly remember seeing excerpts - were parts shown on the news?], because one day I suddenly heard the same two-tone signal that had accompanied the section on fall-out. I was absolutely, stark staring, terrified. I think I must have been alone in the house (those were the days, eh?) and don't recall how I calmed down again. It was only recalling this earlier today that I realised it may have been a re-run of the film on a neighbour's telly. Like every other young person growing up in the 1980s, the shadow of the mushroom cloud haunted my days. I wasn't allowed to watch "The Day After", and only saw "Threads" much, much later. I have still to see "The War Game"... What astounds me now is that I cannot answer the question of whether the government actually believed that society would have survived in any meaningful sense, or were they trying to spread false hope. Yet, as these two posts by the Tin Drummer bring out quite clearly, hope is an odd word to reach for, even in the context of "Protect and Survive". Ye gods, Thatcher and the Bomb, what memories. Thanks, Gracchi.

This blog currently operates a policy of not tagging for memes, but this is quite a good one, and if you feel inspired, feel free to let me know the results.

Display of Unity, Dale, et al.

2007-09-21T22:33:00.000+01:00

The British blogosphere is currently undergoing a perhaps unprecedented show of unanimity in response to the closing down of Craig Murray's and Tim Ireland's blogs by their webhost in the face of legal threats from lawyers representing Alisher Usmanov. Much has already been said - at the risk of unfairly singling out one blogger, check Unity's musings on a blogger's duty should s/he be called as a juror on a libel case - and this post is, as much as anything, me saying "me too". Usmanov's lawyers complained about alleged libel in articles published by Murray, such as this one. Tim Ireland was targeted merely for linking and commenting on the piece. Clearly, if this action was to set a precedent, then blogging as a pursuit would immediately lose a lot of its value. I can't improve on Mr Eugenides' soundbite: "If you can be silenced for calling a businessman a crook, then you can be silenced for calling a politician a crook, too. Then it's everyone's problem."

Tom Paine says he cannot judge as to the veracity of Murray's claims, but that he now knows all he needs to know about Usmanov as a direct result of what he calls these "Maxwellian methods" That, surely, is the first point - that such heavy-handed tactics are bound to backfire, and there will now be a damn sight more interest in Usmanov's background than there would have been if he had left well alone. We saw this in microcosm with Guido Fawkes' attempts to silence allegations he had sought to collude with the BNP in his younger days - his clumsy threats of legal action caused far more damage to his reputation than the actual allegations - and I say this as no fan of the far-right myself.

The second point is that I do have a fair amount of time for Craig Murray; the very fact that the Foreign Office treats him with such scorn suggests that he has succeeded in touching a few raw nerves, and it should be noted that you do not become a high-ranking diplomat without considerable ability. So I would tend to give his account of Usmanov's career some credence.

Even if your mileage on Murray differs, it is worth considering the general oligarch template that formed in the Former Soviet Union. Yes, the stereotype is of dodgy dealings, but bear in mind that for some time the received wisdom was that, if a business was to pay all its taxes and obligations, it would pay out 130% of its profit. So no business could be entirely clean and also profitable. Bear in mind also the ideologically-driven monetarist reforms that were imposed by Western theoreticians with no account for local tradition. There is a centuries-old debate within Russia as to whether the West should provide a model for Russia to follow, or whether the country should look to its own traditions, of which this was the latest round. Those free-market libertarians who bemoan the influence of Marx on Lenin should maybe also examine more closely the consequences of this bout of foreign inspired dogma on the country. In practice, of course, many of the oligarchs grew out of the old nomenklatura, using their contacts and influence to take advantage of the dikii kapitalism then rampaging, and employing some very distasteful measures. If no small business was entirely clean, how much more murky the obscenely wealthy layer at the very top? Any lawyers reading will understand that I am painting in broad strokes here, and in no way have any particular individuals in mind. Anyway, Usmanov is, of course, an Uzbek.

But my main point remains that, even if Usmanov - who I am sure* is the exception that proves the rule - is holier-than-thou, he has done his image no favours at all by this action, and could scarcely have done more to guarantee that a] the articles he objects to are widely linked and b] that the fine-tooth combs will come out to sift through his background still more closely. One-nil, I think.

This story is moving fast; Chicken Yoghurt appears to be serving as a hub for all the interest.

"It Would Not Be Appropriate to Pre-empt the Recommendations"

2007-09-19T19:05:00.001+01:00

"The review group will present recommendations to Ministers in late September." [My emphasis]. Meanwhile...

Yes, I've been treated to the exact same boilerplate (lack of) response that Tim Ireland and Curious Hamster were both delighted to receive. CH's barely suppressed anger is impossible to paraphrase:

They say that the secret of good comedy is timing and again, this would be funny if it wasn't about people having holes drilled in their skulls.

Is it not absolutely unequivocally clear that this review needed to be completed and Ministerial decisions made before the British withdrawal from Basra city? Not for our government apparently. Perhaps that's why Des Browne's figure of around 20,000 Iraqis who may need assistance has now fallen to 15,000. A few more weeks, especially now that the troops are not inside Basra, and that may have fallen to even more manageable numbers.

If you are able not to think about the fact that we're talking about people who could be saved being abandoned by our government to be tortured to death, it all seems perfectly reasonable.

What can we do? Maintain the pressure, that's what - Dan Hardie sets out how: he's been instrumental in organising a cross-party meeting of MPs on October 9th. If you live in the UK, and you haven't yet contacted your own MP, I urge you to do so right now - Justin has a handy seven-point guide at the end of this post. I'll let you know if I ever actually get a response from Chris McCafferty herself.

Another Fantasy Shatters

2007-09-18T13:48:00.000+01:00

And I've never even been to New York...

Man: Do you wanna ride in the sidecar of my motorbike? My son does that all the time. We go really fast!

Teen girl: Yeah, sure, I'd love to go in your pre-war sidecar. With a bit of luck, all my friends will see me with some crazy bald man and that will be the end of my life. No, thanks!

I've not been to New York, but I have been to Russia. And now I'm back. Did you miss me? Almost certainly not. There are one or two names whose return is infinitely more welcome. Also I owe a big thank you to Gracchi for his sterling efforts here, once again. I can't raise myself to his heights, so instead, I'll reach shamelessly - not that I have that far to stretch - for the bottom of the blogger's barrel:

This is Baton, my first grandkitten; the proud mother, who is doing an uncanny Jabba the Hutt impression, is Filechka, who we had to leave in the tender loving care </irony> of my mother-in-law, back in the days when you couldn't get a pet passport to cover Russia. Ain't they cute?

The McCanns and the Public

2007-09-16T23:15:00.000+01:00

I vowed not to comment on this case and won't from now on either but this is perhaps the most ridiculous story of the year if not the decade. Apparantly only 20% of the public believe that the McCanns are innocent, apparantly this is a story. To be quite honest nobody at the moment knows anything about that question save those involved in the case, we have no idea. No idea whatsoever. They could be innocent, they could be guilty, until they are found guilty in a court its our duty to believe in their innocence and treat them as though they were innocent. Apart from that its our duty to respect the procedures of Portugese law, procedures which could be criticised after everything is concluded- but for goodness sake the views of the British public are about as relevant on this issue as they are on whether the Bayeux tapestry was composed under the aegis of Odo of Bayeux. They don't have the information, neither do the media. Everyone should shut up and hope that the girl is alive and is found, and that the perpetrators of whatever happened are brought to justice.

Arthur Conan Doyle

2007-09-15T12:03:00.000+01:00

An interesting piece appeared in today's Guardian concerning the life of the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Its interesting because Doyle was one of the main figures of the 19th Century, a novelist, poet and spiritualist, he bestrides the late nineteenth century and particularly its criminal world as chronicler and occasionally (through helping those wrongfully convicted) participant. Like his creation, Sherlock Holmes, its tempting to imagine that Doyle was the very soul of rationality- a person whose rational calculus interpreted the world and allowed him to understand it- but actually Doyle's life reflects the way that we build not upon foundations of reason but upon such insignificant cultural detail as his hero, Holmes, would have dismissed with a derisory nod.

Holmes and Doyle you see were men of the 19th Century and as men of the 19th Century they believed certain things. Holmes believed as he confesses in the tale following his resurrection from the Reichenback falls, that the heredity of a man is reflected in the growth of his character- a canker in someone's ancestors can reappear in their own growth. Doyle feared loss of respectability more than anything. He strove to work hard and acheive a lot professionally- and he succeeded. He found a wife to accompany him in life- but didn't find she suited him, he worried about her family's medical history, he had children with her. But he got a mistress- then on his wife's death turned her straight into his wife and cut off his children by his first wife, reminders of his mistaken marriage, reminders that he wasn't perfect. Like a dictator cutting off the roots of his past, so Doyle cut off his previous children. We must remember also how far Doyle feared becoming his father.

That isn't to exonnerate Doyle's behaviour at all- he behaved heartlessly to those children of his first marriage. But it is to explain it- Doyle reacted as a man of the 19th Century with his background might. The issue of course with Doyle was that he created a man of absolute professed rationality- but the more you look at Doyle, the more you look at Holmes the less rational they seem, the more emotional, the more culturally determined they appear. Men of their times, they believed they were men of eternity, they weren't.

Personal Depression

2007-09-14T23:47:00.000+01:00

Interesting new research has come out at Cambridge suggesting, using Brain images, that depression may be treatable in the future on a personalised basis. At the moment there are two ways of treating depression- either through therapy- and there are various means of doing that, the most popular being cognitive behavioural therapy which seeks to change aspects of behaviour which may help contribute to the depression and the other medically. Until now the medical treatment for depression has been in the form of changing diet, encouraging exercise and anti-depressants. Professor Bullmore and his team have experimented using imaging equipment to see what happens to the brain after anti-depressant drugs are taken. If from that they can identify a 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' looking brain, it may be possible in the future to tailor the treatment of a patient to the degree of unhealthiness their brain exhibits in the scanner. In that case for instance we may get to some idea of degrees of depression, instead of just a subjective and difficult to evaluate sense of feeling bad.

Personally I suspect that there is much more going on than this. The brain is incredibly complicated and I suspect that its hard to capture that complicated nature in a couple of slides. Professor Bullmore's work will no doubt have been made pallatable for public consumption. But alongside advances in councelling- particularly in CBT- perhaps it promises a future where depression rates actually fall and we can do something about the darkness that envelopes too many people within our society.

Charitable Giving

2007-09-09T12:28:00.000+01:00

Vino points out that most charitable giving by the rich doesn't alleviate poverty at all- only about 7.5% of it goes directly to help the poorest members of society- whereas most of us funds the arts, universities and other institutions. Vino is right to highlight this for the reasons he gives in his article- but I think there is something else here- it demonstrates in concrete terms what people mean by solidarity. One of the interesting things about the extension of sympathy to others and the expression of that extension in giving money is the way that it demonstrates the confines of one's community. Educational institutions or theatrical institutions are things that the rich come into contact with immediatly and intimately- consequently it is to those institutions that people automatically look to- they are more immediatly part of their community than say the beggar on the street. Furthermore what this reflects is the way that for example a university has a degree of power that a beggar doesn't to evoke that sympathy. In the UK students phone up alumni to request money every year- and universities have whole departments dedicated to helping people make bequests- the poor don't necessarily have that- don't have the luxury of employing people to request and protect the donations that are made. The turning of charity into an industry means that it like everything else flows to the most powerful in society. Once again its worth noting that fact, and the community that the rich live in, when thinking about what effects relying upon charity for the provision of social services might have.

Tom Lehrer

2007-09-05T04:18:00.000+01:00

I've been binging on Tom Lehrer one of the great American comics- and a Harvard mathematician- over at my own blog- but in order to share the love I thought I'd leave a youtube of him singing here one of the songs he thought the men at arms might sing as they headed off to World War Three (bear in mind that this comes from the height of the cold war, that should give you the context)- and sit back and enjoy!

Transformers: Genre and Judgement

2007-09-04T13:05:00.000+01:00

Matt Murrell went to see Transformers recently. Matt's post sums up exactly the point about the film

I went to see giant transforming robots blasting the crap out of each other and I got giant transforming robots blasting the crap out of each other. So on that level I can't say I was disappointed.

Matt is obviously right- he was satisfied and that is what matters- but in a sense what he says conveys some of the problem that occasionally I have with modern movie reviewing. Transformers has received bad reviews from almost every reviewer I care to mention- having just heard Mark Kermode on the subject on Radio 5 was enough for me. But it has an audience- and that audience were satisfied and on that level it was a good film. There are many films like it: one might think say even of the Hills have Eyes 2, a film I reviewed with distaste at Bits of News, that it appeals to a particular audience- and therefore that's fine and the duty of the reviewer is to recognise that. And it is- its the duty of the reviewer to insert the words- if you like transformers blowing each other up, this is your film- if you like hideous horror films (and by the way there can be no doubt that even though I haven't seen it Transformers is ten times better than the Hills have Eyes 2), you should go and see this film.

But there are also standerds which I think are there of aesthetically good stuff- complicated and interesting films that make you think. Gore and explosions are guilty pleasures like say devouring chocolate- and we all have them- whether its blood and guts or romance and happy endings- they are all guilty pleasures and films can deliver them. To be good though a film has to deliver a bit more- some complexity, good acting performances, a story and other things as well that we could all recognise but might not be able to describe. Reviewing is supposed to capture that sense as well- whether a film is good or not- which is why of course I said that I only occasionally feel upset that a film like Transformers is slashed. It offers guilty pleasures- and sometimes that's good (I often watch awful films and listen to awful music) but there is such a thing as a good film- and this isn't it.

Mind Your Language

2007-09-01T13:48:00.000+01:00

Paul Waldman's latest article for Prospect argues that the Republicans in the United States have done well over the last twenty years through their opponent's rhetorical missteps. The Kerry 'joke', the Gore 'invention of the internet' and other stories have given the Republicans he thinks an advantage in the political scene- and their success at manipulating these moments he contrasts to the Democrat's failure to manipulate for example Mitt Romney's claims about hunting or Rudy Giuliani's very public divorce. There may be some truth in the partisan argument- not being an American I'm hardly clear on that- but there is a lot of truth in what it illustrates- the importance of not misspeaking in politics today. Misspeaking can at times because of a media climate affect one party more than another- John Major's administration in the mid 1990s could never put a step right for example.

Politicians make two kinds of misstatements- and I would suggest that one kind matters and that the other is rather irrelevant- the problem lies in the fact that the second is often mistaken for the first. A politician's statements can matter when they reveal his real as opposed to his professed views. Take for example Trent Lott who said on the 100th birthday of Senator Strom Thurmond that if Thurmond had won the 1948 Presidential election then all the problems of the United States would be solved. Thurmond ran on a platform of segregation- he objected to federal bayonets forcing whites to integrate with Blacks. Lott denies that he is racist- but no racist can nowadays win election in the United States if they are outwardly racist. Lott though made a comment harking back to a time when the United States allowed racism in the South to perpetuate- in doing so he revealed that his true view was that blacks were second class people, fit to be segregated from whites.

On the other hand there is John Kerry's joke. When Kerry said

"You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

the target was obvious- it wasn't the soldiers in Iraq, it was the man who had got them there. The reality was that it was seen as an insult directed at the troops. To be honest though Kerry never meant it as so- unlike Lott he didn't reveal his opinions of the troops in this statement- he revealed his thought that George Bush was no Albert Einstein but he didn't reveal anything like Lott did that we should be shocked by. This kind of misstatement in my mind doesn't matter.

The thing is though that Kerry's misstatement ended up being almost as embarrassing to him as Lott's and that's because it was assumed that a botched joke was the same as a revelation about one's unpleasant views. A media always seeking for bad news jumped on it and Kerry like Lott had to publically apologise. Its always worth thinking about this distinction though when parsing the comments of politicians- like the rest of us they can make mistakes but some are more greivous than others.

Guest posting

2007-09-01T12:38:00.000+01:00

Ian is away for a while so I'm afraid- I'm back as a guest poster- till he gets back- so I'll try and post a couple of things here to keep people amused!

Mammon Undertaking

2007-08-29T17:48:00.000+01:00

Back to the theme of the week: my mother-in-law had been telling us that we wouldn't recognise her home town when we went back this summer, and she was pretty much right. What I like about Krasnodar is that the centre has been - mostly - spared the high-rise monstrosities that afflict many other Soviet cities: like so much of Russia, urban planning never really seemed to take account of aesthetics; indeed, urban mythology holds that the newer apartment blocks on the edges of Leningrad -as it was then - were planned in such a way as to best deflect the fall-out from any nuclear blast.

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Krasnodar, in contrast, enjoys many low-level, individual houses, in areas known collectively as chastnyi sektor, literally 'the private sector'. This is a typical example of the traditional style, overlooked by the contemporary incarnation - part of what James described as the "scramble for comfort".

Sadly, at least in my view, many of these low-profile dwellings, so redolent of the South of Russia, are slated to be demolished, so that shiny new apartment blocks, which could go in any country in the world, can go up in their place. Now, it's easy for me to grumble, I don't have to live in these houses, some of which still have very basic facilities. Others, though, have been made very comfortable; they are clearly still usable buildings, so why waste their embodied energy by tearing them down? Well, and again this will hardly be news, the land they stand on, close to the centre, has rocketed in value. Developers will get a much better return on the many apartments they can build on the footprint of just one such house.

The same is true of commercial outlets. The Russian legislature passed laws forbidding non-Russians to hold market stalls, the vast majority of which were indeed run by other nationalities. The law worked as a sop to the increasingly xenophobic tenor of (ethnic) Russian nationalism, but because there was not, for some reason, a rush of Russians to take up the new business opportunity - indeed, at least in Krasnodar, Russians who made living staffing market stalls for non-Russian employers have been hit quite hard - the law also had the happy side-effect of freeing up a lot of prime real estate. So characterful open markets are vanishing, while the same soulless supermarkets you find every-bloody-where else are appearing. The latest sensation in Krasnodar is the Krasnaya Ploshchad (Red Square) shopping mall: a vacuous air-conditioned temple to Mammon. Ikea are building a store on the outskirts of the city. Is this really progress? Sorry, Tim, you may well

believe that an American-style country club gated community just outside Krasnodar will be very popular with Krasnodar’s upper middle class and wealthier families.

but frankly it just fills me with horror: yes, of course I understand the impulse for a bit of luxury following the horrors of the Soviet era, the hardship of perestroika and the collapse of certainties in the immediate post-Soviet era, but isn't that the baby that just went flying with your lush-scented foaming whirlpool bathwater?

Shades of Community

2007-08-27T16:36:00.000+01:00

Pah, one post in, and already the theme is broken; anyway, we interrupt this important series of messages with the following important message: I have posted some thoughts on wood, quality, and rats on sticks across at Shades of Grey. I do, however, manage to shoehorn in references to Russia and Siberia. Were that not incestuous enough, there is also a link to a page containing, among other things, the thoughts of a third Blogpower member: Hatless shrugged. James, I'm making a start with the backlinks, ok?

Mammoth Undertaking

2007-08-26T20:17:00.001+01:00

As a build-up to my departure on a field trip this Friday, I'm trying to stick to a common theme for such posts as may appear this week. Churchill is probably second only to Wilde for quotable epigrams (and wouldn't Oscar be glad I have mentioned him?). Churchill's phrase "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" has become memorable to the point of cliche, and there are no shortage of the latter when it comes to Russia. But stereotypes are, paradoxically, easy to understand, which tends to make Churchill's apercu, well, difficult to understand. There is a Russian saying "You live for a hundred years, you'll be learning for one hundred years..." So far, so humdrum; after all, the English say "You live and learn". The quintessential Russian pessimism comes at the end of the expression: "... and you'll still die a fool." More than half my existence has been devoted to learning about Russia; whilst I'm 66 years shy of the first target, I'm well on course for the other. I hope to share some of that ignorance with you over the next few days.

One of the recurring images of Russia is the woolly mammoth disinterred in perfect condition. A very similar image opens Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's equally archetypal depiction of the horrors of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago. The archipelago metaphor refers to the fact that the prisoners were essentially inhabitants of a country within a country - a chain of islands of incarceration - of which the wider population ostensibly knew nothing, yet of which the initiated could detect signs in day-to-day discourse. The example is a report in Pravda of an archaelogical expedition which found extremely well-preserved specimens of prehistoric salamanders in the permafrost. Those accompanying the scientists, the report continued, devoured the thawed samples with relish. It is this enthusiasm with which the salamanders are eaten that reveals to the narrator that he is reading about labour-camp inmates - who else than a starving convict, he reasons, would let meat thousands of years past its sell-by date even pass their lips, let alone eat it with relish? [1] If you have read the book, you will know that the remarkably calm narrator goes on to describe events that make this opening seem like the opening of a Fortnum and Mason picnic hamper. Even if you have not, the labour camps are one of the abiding images of the Soviet Union - a state of the worst kind of murderous bureaucracy.

There is no shortage of bloggers keen to invoke Orwell's jackboot in relation to the Soviet Union, and rightly so: to ignore the impact of state terror on the country would be to ignore a particularly large elephant, indeed, a mammoth in the room. Never let it be forgotten that the
Soviet Union suffered the largest gross losses of any country during the Second World War - at least 20 million military and civilian deaths. An appalling toll, completely disproportionate to that of any of the other Allied countries. And yet, and yet, the scholarly consensus is that the Soviet Union was itself responsible for the same number of deaths again, which it inflicted deliberately on its own citizens. That is a fact that is less well-known, but if anything still more horrifying.

So your first enigma is how such a dreadful regime could also sanction such touching and human cartoons as the following. Even for those who don't speak Russian, the plot is still relatively transparent: a young mammoth wakes after millennia asleep in the ice. See? I told you it was an archetypal image. What does a good Soviet mammoth do in such circumstances? The same as any other lost child, anywhere - he misses his mum. It's a simple story, but very movingly told:

The obvious answer, of course, is that the Soviet Union was a complex place. As well as the organisations involved in coercing the population into accepting the regime, there were structures dedicated to persuading the populace that the promised Communist future was close at hand, while the existing Socialist present was also pretty good. Hence a cartoon that promised lost children would be looked after. But even that is too glib a reading: people working in the entertainment industry within the Soviet Union were able to slip certains things past the censor - this cartoon is, after all, a fairly overt allusion to children waking to find their parents vanished...

[1] My soon-to-be brother-in-law's father worked in a Soviet cold-store in the 1970s, and swears they had carcases with 1950s date-stamps still in storage.

Cornwall - separate kingdom, methinks

2007-08-22T13:42:00.000+01:00

The Witanagemot are well within their rights to point out that on the traditional 1579 Christopher Saxton map, the counties are as shown on the map top left but on the Obnoxious EU map, whilst Scotland, Ireland and Wales are treated as separate identities, England is not mentioned and instead, the NWO designations such as EU Region N2 are used for nine arbitrary divisions.

This is spitting in the face of the English and is yet another reason I'm diametrically opposed to these bozos. However, the Saxton map is also troublesome because of Cornwall, which this blogger is quite uneasy for the English to include in England.

Craig Weatherhill seems to have a point when he answers the question: "So, you don’t believe that Cornwall is part of England?"

No, and for many reasons. First of all, Cornwall was portrayed on numerous maps, including the famous Mappa Mundi, as separate from England right up until the mid 16th century. Henry VIII even listed England and Cornwall separately in the list of his realms given in his coronation address and, interestingly, Elizabeth I stated that she did not rule Cornwall (but Cornish was among the languages she was reputed to speak).

I don't thnk the true Englishman will dispute this and certainly in my education, we were taught that "The West" - Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany were part of other races, other nationalities.

Even the Telegraph seems to concede this:

Like Cornwall, Brittany has a Celtic heritage.

This is far more in line with what I understood to be the case and it appears to be claimed in the musical traditions as well:

Cornwall is that piece of land at the southwest corner of Great Britain that sticks out into the Atlantic. Historically, the culture had a strong Celtic element.

Trouble is, where does it stop? The dividing sign on the A1[M] used to say "The North" and Northern England certainly feels its Viking roots, not only in the Jorvik exhibition. Henry VIII certainly had no love for the region as any student of history will recall.

Wiki concedes:

The north may be considered to constitute the six ancient counties of Cumberland, Northumberland, Westmorland, Durham, Lancashire and Yorkshire. This region coincides with the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria before it expanded into Gododdin and the Vikings conquered the Kingdom of Strathclyde.

To return to Cornwall, In 2000, Dr Brian Sykes of the Institute of Molecular Research carried out a huge genetic survey of Britain that highlighted the fact that:

… even today, there is a striking contrast between the western side of Britain (Sykes specifically named Cornwall, Wales, the western side of Scotland and the Hebrides, as well as running down into the Atlantic coasts of Europe), and eastern Britain …

In the new Britain which I'd like to see, there would seem to be England, Scotland, Ireland, Ulster [the nine counties], Wales and Cornwall. What's it to us, except for retirement homes to write memoirs from, to claim Cornwall?

Further essential reading here.

Crossposted at N.O.

Imagined Wisdom

2007-08-22T02:07:00.000+01:00

In which I try and fail to fill Gracchi's shoes over at Westminster Wisdom. The post answers a question posed by Welshcakes some time ago, and incidentally puts me in mind of something my grandad told me recently. As a young lad in Leicester, he'd often play round the house of one of his schoolfriends, who was being looked after by his grandparents. These people could still remember the Crimean War, and they would call my grandfather and his mate "Little Roosians" when they were being naughty. I knew that the word Bolshy is derived from the word Bolshevik, but I'd never before heard Russian as a term of abuse. Now your starter for ten is "Which country were we in when my grandfather chose to tell this particular anecdote?" Clue: we were only about 300km from the peninsular in question for a while. Would I be being too much of a smart-arse to say I did laugh at the Russian-language joke in the Simpsons movie? Actually, I think I can answer that one myself... I am quite moved at the thought of people for whom the Crimean War was in living memory being themselves still in living memory.

I also am delighted, given I am currently reading his diaries, to say I have a Palin number of only 2, having appeared on screen with David Jason, who also appeared in Do Not Adjust Your Set with our Mike. This means I also have a Stanshall number of 2, which isn't bad, but still beaten hands down by my mate Pete, who actually once gave the great man a lift. Never mind the same film, they appeared in the same car. Now David Jason appeared in a 1975 film called Royal Flash with Bob Hoskins. Hoskins was in the 1995 film Balto. So, speaking of smart-arses, whom nobody likes, that gives me a Bacon number of 3. (It's much easier to work out with this handy device.)

We Can't Turn Them Away - Update Update

2007-08-15T22:57:00.000+01:00

Chris McCafferty (Lab., Calder Valley) is away from her constituency just now, and so has not yet replied to my letter raising the plight of those Iraqis who had worked for British forces being denied asylum here. Fair enough, I've been away a bit, myself. Her office staff have replied, however, and despite their apologies for contacting me* they have already passed on my e-mail to "the relevant minister". I am intrigued to know who this is - it could be any one out of the FCO, the MoD, or the Home Office - but as they have promised to send me any response they receive, I am content to wait, for now.

Tim Ireland has produced a typically forthright clip setting out the issues involved:

If you think there is merit in the argument - and, really, I'd love to hear from you in the comments if you think there isn't - then, yes, there is a petition to sign, but as Dan Hardie points out, it will be people like you who can make a real difference by taking the trouble to write individual letters to their MP, who will hopefully then raise it with the ministers concerned. Tim is happy for both the film and the button you see in the right-hand sidebar to be posted far and wide. It's not just the translators, it's anyone who worked in any capacity for British forces who is now at risk of the most appalling torture before they are finally killed. Whatever you think about the war, surely we owe them the chance to avoid such a dreadful fate.

*Update* Unity has some splendid banners available. Probably best if you link them to this piece.

* Yes, really: I sent them a message, and they were for some bizarre reason worried that I might get offended by them responding to it. I think that's really rather sweet.

11082007043

2007-08-11T19:40:00.001+01:00

11082007042

2007-08-11T09:32:00.001+01:00

Just another run to the shops

2007-08-09T11:01:00.001+01:00

Just another run to the shops
Originally uploaded by Imagined Community

I know I said I was going away this morning, and so I am, but this was what I was doing last night - you can just make out the cat litter strapped to the luggage rack. The bike is in foreign territory, but those hills are in Yorkshire, none the less.

You may remember Ms. Dynamite-E-e had been lobbying for a sidecar, after seeing my Wallace and Gromit T-shirt:

"You could ride on the motorcycle, and I could ride in the sidecar. That would be nice."

And you know what? She's right.

The Sound of One Hand Blogging

2007-08-08T13:44:00.000+01:00

If it's not the Former Soviet Union, then it's the Netherlands. Constant travelling is no fun, you know. Be that as it may, the next in my list of exotic destinations is looming up rapidly: for the next five days or so, I shall be in Ackworth. Er, does anyone know a good way of getting biodiesel out of car upholstery? Tough though you will doubtless find it during my absence, as well as the many delights among my blogrolls, I would particularly like to commend to you Matt Murrell's inaugural Blogpower roundup. I'm not saying that anything here written by me is worthy of nomination, but if you should come across a post by one of my colleagues in Blogpower that deserves a wider audience, do let Matt know: blogpowerroundup[AT]gmail.com

We Can't Turn Them Away

2007-08-08T13:18:00.000+01:00

This blogger once chanced his arm as an interpreter/translator - and please do get the distinction right - but I never chanced my head. The poor men and women who translated and interpreted for British forces in Iraq are facing much worse than a sparse pay packet, yet the UK government seems reluctant to grant them asylum. Davide Simonetti has created a No. 10 petition to sign, while Dan Hardie,who I believe was maybe the first blogger to highlight this issue, urges us each to write to our MPs. I am late onto this, having been away a fair bit recently. Dan has a follow-up; Justin at Chicken Yoghurt is collating responses from MPs, while Tim Ireland adds details of the US reaction to the equivalent problem. Many other bloggers are also on the case - see Davide's post for just a few - I am sorry not to be able to list them all here.

None More Pink

2007-08-07T12:36:00.000+01:00

Professor Teabag has taken time out of his mathematics to explore one or two linguistic oddities: 11 consecutive uses of the word 'had', a sentence consisting entirely of the word 'buffalo'. In the comments: five consecutive 'and's. We've both been able to shoehorn in references to the same great film, as well.

I love this sort of stuff; it's one of the reasons I found Stephen Pinker's "The Language Instinct" such an enjoyable read. It posits that language provides such survival benefits that the ability to acquire it becomes an advantage that evolution will select for - hence the "language instinct". It essentially builds on Chomsky's great insight that all languages are reducible to a very few basic differences, and that any child is capable of acquiring any language, a task greatly simplified by deducing which of these basic principles the language they are surrounded by follows, and that is an instinctive deduction. Whatever you think about Chomsky's political ideas - from the little I know, I'm quite a fan - his scientific contribution to linguistics was immense, comparable to Einstein's overturning of phyics. The irony is that, for a linguist, Chomsky is a lousy prose stylist, and so it falls to the fluent communication skills of someone like Pinker to convey the significance of Chomsky's work.

In and amongst, Pinker provides the buffalo sentence, the cheerleader chant "Oysters oysters oysters eat, eat, eat", and the following two sentences, which are not nearly as similar as they first seem:

"Time flies like an arrow."

"Fruit flies like a banana."

Another of our family myths is the fabled response "T'i'n't in t' tin", when asked where something was. What linguistic oddities do you have?

Grandfatha's Fatha

2007-08-06T22:04:00.000+01:00

Like nations, families have their myths that reinforce the bonds of kinship; this blog is, in fact, named after the idea that national myths do just this, except on a larger scale. Like national myths, family myths are just as prone to distortion and exaggeration, not to mention suppression... It should be emphasised here that the word myth should not be taken to imply no connection with the actual facts.

One of the many joys about taking my grandfather to Russia - he's 87, you know - was the chance to hear more of these; whether his son and daughter-in-law were quite so keen to have the familiar stories recapped for the nth time - on the same journey, mark you - remains unclear. Grandad's natural father died when my grandfather was quite young, and his mother remarried; his stepdad was the spitting image of Michael Palin: there's a fabulous picture of him stood arms akimbo, sleeves rolled up, fag dangling on his lip; there's another of him on my grandad's touring bike, with the point of the saddle almost between his shoulder blades - my grandfather has always been a tall man. When the family moved back to Calverley from Leicester, my great-grandfather, now a widower, came with them.

He was an eccentric man, by all accounts, but then again aren't we all? Well, in fact, no: I'm perfectly normal, thank you; you're a bit odd; he's a bloody weirdo. He'd lived in Calverley for over 20 years by the time he died, but always played the stranger role, unable to offer directions. One fine day, he was asked for Thornhill Street, and gave his stock answer: "I'm sorry, I'm a stranger here myself. Maybe this lady can help," he continued, and gestured to someone coming down the street, who happened to be his next-door neighbour. She gave a funny look and the required directions, then turned to G-GF and said "You daft bugger, you live there."

In his retirement, he turned to cultivating his own tobacco. I'm sure they've made this illegal by now, but it was apparently a common hobby fifty or so years ago, with even a Society of Amateur Tobacco Growers being founded. His plants came on well, but apparently at some stage or another the leaves need to be pressed; I should know this, I used to work in a tobacco factory. It wasn't a good place to try quitting: like the proverbial chocolate factory, you could smoke as much as you liked while you were there, but couldn't take any home. To the extent that you were supposed to check in your fag packets at the gatehouse, and sign them out again in the evening.

Anyway, it so happened that they were relaying the road outside his house, so he chatted up the steamroller operator, and got him to do the necessary. I gather he got a good smoke, in the end. But a friend of mine has a much worse story about grandfathers, cigarettes and steamrollers: his grandfather used to drive the steamroller for the council; every morning, he would go to the depot, collect the vehicle, and drive it to wherever he was needed. The depot was up a dead-end street, at the other end there was a newsagent on the corner. Our hero would set the machine in motion, and, when he got to the turn, put a bit of lock on the steering, and nip in through the side door. The newsagent would have twenty Woodbine and a box of matches waiting for him on the counter, he'd step up smartly, put down his two and six, pick up his smokes, step smartly out through the front door and hop back onto the steamroller which would by this time have lumbered round the corner, and off they would go, puffing out clouds of smoke in harmony. This all went swimmingly, right up to the day when it didn't: for some reason, our man misjudged his hop onto the machine, and went under the rear roller; of course, now that there was no-one to steer, the steamroller carried on turning, and demolished the newsagent's as well. Remember, kids, smoking is dangerous.

Oh, It Feels Like a Brand New Day

2007-08-05T10:13:00.000+01:00

A sunny Sunday morning, fresh melon that actually tastes of something for breakfast, and Van the Man providing the sounds; after umpteen repetitions of Country Roads, Take Me Home, there's an unutterable joy in being able to listen to music of your own choice. Let's face it, when Van's on form, there are few who can touch him: I had Moondance on on Friday night as I was clearing the kitchen... Now, I know that sometimes music and messy kitchens are not a good mix, but I swear there is not a duff track on that album: normally, I would rather stick pins in my ears than listen to jazz stylings, but even the title track gets past my Sterne critic - that's like a stern critic, only more prone to digression... I'd not listened to it since my cassette version - kids, ask your parents - got chewed up, there was a tearful reunion in our kitchen that night.

I'm a sucker for that gospel-influenced, slow-build style of song; I'm not sure whether you'd call it soul-flavoured rock or rock-flavoured soul, or something else entirely. Leonard Cohen can do it, too: Always is a good ten minutes of wit as well as sex, with a rich sauce of backing vocals and daubed with a brass section which comes in exactly where it needs to, and, more importantly, nowhere else - think that scene in The Commitments where they bollock the sax player for, you guessed it, jazz stylings. Hallelujah builds up to one of the best uses of silence I know of in music - it's just a moment, but, ye gods, what a moment. I'm still waiting for my last.fm recommendations to catch up, so in the meantime who else in this vein should I be seeking out?

Lo and behold, yesterday, in the car park outside John Street Market (he's Janet Street Porter's cousin, you know) in Bradford, who should we meet but the woman who set me onto Moondance in the first place? She and her partner came round on their bike last night, and another happy reunion took place. I was just reading this morning that there's no such thing as coincidence.

Clairvoyants and Psy-Ops

2007-08-02T18:02:00.000+01:00

I can't access the link to this MosNews article from August 15th, 2006 but this summary is as faithful as I could get it:

"Would you fear an international intelligence service which employed clairvoyants?

Correspondents of the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily said that not long before he passed away, Professor Alexander Spirkin, well-known scholar and co-author of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, admitted in an interview that the Soviet KGB employed clairvoyants to spy on their enemies.

Alexander Spirkin used to head a secret lab under the Soviet government and worked closely with clairvoyants hired to carry out special missions for the Kremlin.

“I used to work closely with hundreds of all sorts of extrasensory individuals,” Mr. Spirkin recalled in a conversation with Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondents.

“In the 1960s, when the [Khrushchev] Thaw began (the period between the end of 1950s and the beginning of 1960s, when repressions and censorship reached a low point) and people began to speak out, groups of people interested in telepathy met at the Moscow Polytechnic Museum.

”Wolf Messing who possessed a true gift of clairvoyance and telepathy was a key figure at those gatherings. I had known him since university. His posters reading: “Experienced in reading thoughts at a distance!” were all over the country.

“In those days I had campaigned for studying those phenomena, claimed they were incomprehensible, and, in terms of Marxist and Leninist ideology inexplicable, but we had no right to deny the fact they exist.

Eventually, I was summoned to the scientific department of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] Central Committee and offered a post of the chairman of the laboratory for biological information. Provided, of course, its operation would be closely watched by the KGB and the Central Committee.”

Spirkin’s task was to hire at least 200 “agents”. Each contender was to fill out a questionnaire containing such questions as: “Which extraordinary properties do you possess?”, “What kind of dreams do you have?”, “Are they of erotic nature?”, “Do you fly in your sleep?”, “Are you able to influence people?” and “Have you ever tried to heal?”

Candidates were examined by a commission made up of clairvoyants who had already proved their ability, and Spirkin himself.

One of the female agents possessed great healing power, as her body produced extraordinary heat. Ivan Fomin used his extrasensory energy to investigate all sorts of disasters and technical malfunctions.

His services are still in demand in Russia, Prof. Spirkin said. He used to work as an advisor to Boris Yeltsin and investigated aircraft accidents. Spirkin also mentioned Boris Shapiro, who possessed a very strong sense of diagnostics. These days, Shapiro consults wealthy entrepreneurs.

All employees of the secret laboratory were closely watched by the Soviet omnipotent security agency — the KGB. Some of the lab staffers, too, were KGB agents. One of such “students” once entered Alexander Spirkin’s office and introduced himself as KGB General Makarevich.

The official said that he was ordered to control the professor’s activities because they were of great interest for foreign intelligence and defense agencies, especially for the CIA and the Pentagon.

Spirkin responded that the laboratory had not developed a scientific base that could deserve such immense interests in other countries. The general replied that foreign intelligence officers wanted to know everything, even if there was nothing to know about. “Even the fact we have made no progress whatsoever also amounts to important intelligence data,” he said.

“In the end I had to leave the lab. New know-how and technical devices started to appear but I could hardly make them out. A special committee came to check our equipment, and they were shocked to see how obsolete it was. The laboratory was not closed. A younger scholar took over my post.”

Prof. Spirkin admitted he still did not know what the outcome of the research was. He knew that the military took great interest in the lab’s work, seeking to use clairvoyants for purposes of spying. The Soviets hired clairvoyants to report on the state of health of U.S. leaders or travel to the United States under the guise of tourists, so that they could report on local developments, using their extrasensory abilities."

ScotsToryB has suggested this as further reading. It is not a difficult article but it is certainly worth the read.

Lemuria- The Garden of Eden

2007-07-29T23:01:00.000+01:00

Lemuria- The land which first saw Ape-Man take his first steps to upright walking.
Maybe, the land where he learnt to make fire.
Where he learnt to speak.

The answer to the unanswered questions.

Or not.

Yes, another imaginary solution to a scientific problem.

Contrary to popular belief, very few people resisted Darwin's theory once it was put forward.
Never has a theory been accepted so quickly by the vast majority of the academic community.
But it did pose some problems.

Conitinental drift, the moving of conttinental landmasses is a theory only accepted in the sixties.
Before then, the geological record posed huge problems.

How did all these creatures spread?

Geologists assumed that continents rose and sunk, landbridges were created, then disappeared.

One Biologist, Philip Sclater, came to the conclusion Primate distribution could only be explained by assuming that Sri Lanka, Sumatra, Madagascar, and possibly Australia, were connected by a continental landmass for much of geological history.

Ernst Haeckel, more Darwinist than Darwin, (a much maligned scientist by Creationists and others who should know better), siezed on Lemuria.

This was why we hadn't found Missing Link.
Because Lemuria was his home.

Over time, Lemuria was roped in to solve most zoological distribution problems.

Along with the alleged Guiana-Senegal landbridge.

Or, in the view of a few experts (get this, you really HAVE to laugh, but it was how they explained marsupial distribution), the South America to Australia landbridge.

Oddly enough,the name Lemuria fell into disrepute, long before Science had finished with it, the opposite of what happened with the Martian canals. Few scientists after the thirties really believed they were the work of extra-terrestrials, but popular thought and literature, still retained that view.

Lemuria remained a valid scientific belief, whilst the name itself was taken over by pseudoscience and cultism.

The Theosophy Movement of Madame Blavatsky believed in Buddhism, Spiritualism, Evolution and Lemuria.
Bizarre as their ideas seem now, at the time two of those ideas were accepted Science, Spritualism was endorsed by one of the founders of Evolution Theory, and Buddhism had only really first met the west.

Lemuria was co-opted in to the New Age cult of the day.

There was no Lemuria sadly.
No egg laying Hermaphrodites, as Ms Blavatsky said.

And Eden was the Rift Valley, we hear.

But I suppose it was a good theory.

Now You See Me...

2007-07-28T11:53:00.000+01:00

One of these days I will get to grips with calendars; far from having, as I'd thought, a few clear days after my return from Russia, I'm actually getting on the pushbike/train/ferry tonight for a week or so in Holland. We will glide gracefully over the fact that we actually spent three hours in transit in Schiphol on Thursday; ignore the fact that, apparently, I was briefly a suspect in the Madeleine McCann abduction case - police banging on the door late on a Friday evening, so the neighbours say, but Inspector Knacker says they no longer need to talk to me... I won't post pics of my daughter on the 'net, but those of you who have been paying attention will have realised that Ms Dynamite-E-e has Vietnamese heritage, among others, and so bears little resemblance to poor Maddie, not that this stopped some eagle-eyed person at Leeds/Bradford airport assuming it was her; and fume over the absurdity of there only being two bicycle places on the train to Leeds, neither of which we can book, so if a cyclist gets on at Todmorden, we're knackered. Oh, and while you can reserve places on the train to Hull, there is only one place per train. That's right, only one bike per train. Madness. So much for encouraging people to use public transport.

So, you have been well entertained by Gracchi, Crushed By Ingsoc, and Lord Flatten-Guernica; if I can crave these gentlemen's indulgence a little longer, I hope they will feel free to continue posting here until I make another - fleeting - appearance a week on Monday. Yes, the exotic destinations continue: the following weekend I will be in Pontefract.

Imagined Community

The Ashtray's Full

Going Through the Motions. Again.

Consultation Questions

Due Process and Draft Legislation

The Tale of Despereaux

Tautology of the Day

Twitter ye not!

140 Character References

140 Character References

140 Character References

140 Character References

140 Character References

Not Another Big Technological Fix?

140 Character References

140 Character References

Russian Nostalgia for Communism

140 Character References

140 Character References

Watch the Skies, Keep Looking

NHS forced to turn away women in labour

"City Academies could be used as a cover for child abuse"

Education or Schooling?

Never-Ending Story

Naval Etiquette

Competition Time-ah!

You Don't Didn't Know Me

Mistaking School Attendance for Education

I Need Cheering Up.

More Nuclear Idiocy

Joining the dots

Dog Bites Man

This Story Shall the Good Man Teach His Son

You what?

Working it out with a Pencil

People's Republic of Yorkshire

Mythos Thatcher*

No nukes is good nukes

Congratulations, you're a woman

Airports - stabbed or shot?

Spot the Difference

Two Months' Grace

Born Free?

Radio Silence

Ionoclast

The More We Know, the Less I Understand

Donald Rumsfled?

Matt Sinclair and the Morality of Capitalism

Goolies and Ghosties...

Monkey See, Monkey Do

730 Days, and Counting

Still

The Strike's Over, Post Something

Miliband on Five Live Now

Sicilian Community

Humble Pie and Chips

Knight Night

Don't Let Him Through... Updated x2

Galileo- The Mistake the Church Never Escaped From

Free Burma!

Phoney War

Start a Trend: Send an Invitation

Blogpower Roundup #2

What Did He Say?

My Earliest Political Memory

Display of Unity, Dale, et al.

"It Would Not Be Appropriate to Pre-empt the Recommendations"

Another Fantasy Shatters

The McCanns and the Public

Arthur Conan Doyle

Personal Depression

Charitable Giving

Tom Lehrer

Transformers: Genre and Judgement

Mind Your Language

Guest posting

Mammon Undertaking

Shades of Community

Mammoth Undertaking

Cornwall - separate kingdom, methinks