Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

The Supreme Soviet Demands the Liquidation of the Georgians as a Class!

I despair again at the vapidity and foolishness of the British press and public.  A few people run in circles slightly faster than some other people born elsewhere, and the Russians correctly calculate that they can shell cities without the risk of front-page coverage (not that our medals are for running: we win in nice, expensive sports like yachting and horse-riding where those nasty, third world countries can't compete).

David Milliband, British Foreign Secretary and would-be Prime Minister, has written a surprisingly well-judged piece for today's Times, on the subject of Russia's invasion of Georgia.  Given his position, he has to judge his words carefully, and so he cannot say aloud what the West has just been vividly reminded of: that Russia remains a backwards bandit state, flailing around and attacking its weaker neighbours

One facet that which has intrigued me, is just what constituency the Russians were playing to.  The Ossetians and Abkhazians are irrelevancies to Putin and his President, Medvedev: mere excuses upon which to act.  The key pipeline which runs through Georgia on its way from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea, bypassing Russian soil and denying them a monopoly on gas exports from the post-Soviet states, is beyond the reach of the Russian armies in any scenarios short of full occupation (although the Russians have been desperately trying to damage it).  The Georgians, far from being diverted from their pro-NATO course, will be confirmed in it, while NATO itself, far from seeing Georgia and Ukraine (the real prize for Russia) as the unaffordable liabilities the Russians seek to portray them as, will now be convinced of the need to secure their democracies.  And as Milliband states, the non-aligned movement will not be delighted by this rogue semipower.

It is unfortunate that Milliband has been rather less vocal thus far in his dealings with the Russians than his article would suggest.  The main fault there, however, lies with Brown, revealed in foreign affairs as in domestic ones as a vaccilating and weak man, perfectly happy to visit Africa and bounce children on his knee but incapable of associating himself with the tough choices that the British premiership demands of its holder.  His pusillanimosity and near-invisibility amount to nothing more than self-interested cowardice and a desire to lay low and ride out the storm.  Sarkozy may have been duped and embarassed by Russian lies when they agreed to his withdrawal plans, but at least he tried.  The British government is being shown up in international affairs by the moral stance of the French.  It's that bad.

Environmentalists should be delighted: more than ever, as this fresh episode reveals the foolishness of being beholden for fossil fuel energy to a rogue state, prone to erratic violence and unconstrained by the rule of law: ask BP about how the Russians are threatening their staff and stealing their investments, and just what Brown did for them; ask the British police about the Litvinenko polonium murder; ask the Chechens who have been purged; ask the Polish who have been threatened with a Russian nuclear strike for co-operating with the West.  Or ask the Russian state-owned television and press and see how far you get.

I also don't see George Galloway and his coalition of leftists, fascists and other religious extremists organising any marches through London, irregardless of the ethnic cleansing and targetted killings of the Russian state.  I don't see the simple-minded fellow-travellers of suburbia, nor their immature, irresponsible student cohorts, flooding the capital with their banners, despite finally getting to witness a genuine war for oil.  Is it because the Georgians are Christians, or because the Russians simply aren't American?

Shame on Brown and on England

Those who know me are aware that my views are hardly those of a right-on, Guardian-reading liberal.

However, to turn on the television today and see Gordon Brown whoring out the city of London to the single most murderous regime in the world today - China - in order to run propaganda for their brutal state and its oppression of Tibet live on rolling BBC news was sickening.

I knew Dr Brown, the father of our current Prime Minister.  He was a quiet, caring and principled minister in the Church of Scotland.  And while I am sure that he would be tremendously proud of his son's achievements, I wonder just what he would have thought of Brown's decision to give his stamp of approval, grinning on the steps of Downing Street, to an oppressive state run by geriatric killers and corrupt military-industrial concerns.  A decision informed not by principle but by import-export agreements, political prestige and by mutual back-scratching over London's 2012 chance to feed at the same trough.

And useful idiot after useful idiot is wheeled out to stand against a background of dancing morons in fancy dress to proclaim that "politics shouldn't interfere with the Olympics."  No politics, please... while Prime Ministers and ambassadors for murderers bare their teeth in ugly smiles for the cameras.  And a team of tracksuited Chinese Ministry for State Security  thugs are allowed to parade throught the heart of our capital, while their colleagues round up monks and peasants in a small, faraway country of which, it seems, Brown knows little.  And cares less.  While the BBC - the BBC - tightens the focus of its cameras each time crowds of protestors would otherwise be in shot on this jolly tour of old London town.

Never forget that the Chinese communist party has killed tens of millions of its own citizens since taking power.  Hitler was a lightweight pretender next to the Communist Party of China.  Even the Holocaust pales compared to what Mao and his successors have done.  Does that seem like hyperbole to you?  Then your historical knowledge is lacking.  Does it seem tangential?  Then you must love sports a very great deal to wish to banish all thought of how they are being used.

And how fitting, therefore, that the "eternal Olympic flame", like the tradition of the relay of the Olympic torch, was invented not by Greeks but by Hitler's National Socialists.

I'm a Scot, and one of my countrymen once spoke about far away trouble, using China as an example.  Read what economist Adam Smith said, and each time he speaks about an earthquake in China, think instead of state-run murder in Tibet.  And each time he talks of losing a finger, think of Brown worrying about his precious 2012 Olympics:

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that...

So the NUT have decided that army recruiting material should be blocked by their members in schools.  They have not, as the Daily Mail has it, banned the army from schools.  Thankfully, the teachers' unions have no such power, nor was that the intent of their motion.

Still, speakers at their conference played their game of petty politics in comedic and predictable style.  People like Paul McGarr - a man who could benefit from a stint in Helman province almost as much as the country would benefit from his prolonged absence - who tell us that the army is there to provide "imperialist occupation" (never mind that the Afghans want us to stay.. that doesn't fit in with the viewpoints of an good, old-fashioned Marxist like McGarr).  Young people who choose to serve their country, McGarr alleges with a good Marxist's condemnation of an entire class of people, will go abroad and "torture" the natives.  McGarr is, for all his progressive language and claims of sympathy for soldiers as individuals, simply another lower-middle-classed scoundrel, playing on some of the oldest stereotypes and tricks in British politics, perhaps from a sense of inferiority and resentment.  As Johnson would have suggested, maybe McGarr "thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier".

Wrapping himself in a pretence of concern for the young people whose routes out of unemployment and poverty he is seeking to block, McGarr expresses concern that soldiers may be injured and die.  He also claims that he has done such a poor job of educating those in his care that they don't realise that the army fights wars with the risk of death or injury, and that they will, instead, be signing up for the free parachuting courses and tobogganing.  I look forward to next year's conference, when this paragon of concern insists that students be denied access to literature - sorry, propaganda - from other such murderous organisations as the lifeboat service, the fire service or charities running gap years in the third world.

Kipling summed up the behaviour of McGarr's type in a way that such a vile little man will never appreciate:

"Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep

Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;

An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit

Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.

Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy 'ow's yer soul?"

But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll- "

George Bush Discovers Albanian Crime Problem First Hand

My father, who, having worked there, is rather fond of Albania and many its people, may not approve of me saying so but Albanians have a reputation in certain quarters for their extremely free-market attitude towards property.  By which I mean that some of them have a notoriously  relaxed attitude to ownership rights.  If a bit of Bulgaria goes missing then they know where to look first: an Albanian will already be trying to sell it to some Germans as spare Lebensraum. But the guts it takes to mug the president of the United States in front of a full security detail of secret service officers is impressive.  When I say that this could only happen in Albania, I am semi-serious.

Watch this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKDdF6vfjoo

If you look at it at around the 45-50 second mark, you'll see Bush wearing a dark-strapped watch. If you watch at about 1:03, he is no longer wearing it. And if you look really carefull at about the 57-second point, I think you see the watch deftly removed.

Chancers...

 

Edit: The comments on that Youtube page, which rapidly developed into Greeks, Serbs and Albanians hurling abuse at each other (mainly centring around each others' taste in sexual partners), are hilarious.  It is sweet that English is the universal language that allows such an exchange of brotherly understanding between each group.  I was tempted to heal the rift and join them together in universal condemnation by pretending to be a Macedonian.

Second Edit: The response by one of the President's minders is that he took the watch off, himself.  I've watched this pretty closely, and the only way this could have happened is if he actually took it off with his left hand (which diappears for just over a second and a half around the 0:58ish point).  Of course, since it is on his left wrist, he'd be doing bloody well.

All Hail Xenu!

BBC reporter John Sweeney has, for some time, been filming an investigative piece on famed sci-fi role-players Scientology, a group of dedicated hobbyists who pretend to live inside the fictional creations of child-kidnapping yachting enthusiast L.Ron "I'm going to invent a religion that's going to make me a fortune" Hubbard.

The piece will be shown this week on Panorama, and will doubtless be available for download from both the BBC site and youtube soon thereafter for those of you unlucky enough to live in heathen climes. That programme will no doubt show the usual, pretty hideous aspects of Scientology: families "disconnected" (Scientology members told by their organisation that they are not allowed ever to see their concerned relatives again); security guards, suborned police officers, undercover investigators and aggressively lunatic officials all sent to harass those who criticise them.  Here, for instance, is another reporter who took an interest in Scientology.  Note the police officer breaking the law, the provocation and aggressive crowding and intimidation from followers and so on.  The reporter is accused of being a wife-beater, a child-molester and more by some fairly vicious scientologists: "we're so much bigger than you, Mark...".

That reporter dealt with it well.  Sweeney, on the other hand, actually snapped at one point: within hours the Scientologists had disseminated the video of the event.  Frankly, I'm just glad to see he cares that much about his subject.  I'd have done that far sooner, myself, rather than after months of provocation.  Sweeney himself discusses the incident on the BBC's own site. He has said that "while making our BBC Panorama film "Scientology and Me" I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a "bigot" by star Scientologists, brain-washed - that is how it felt to me - in a mock up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers."

Scientologists in Clearwater were and are particularly aggressive, and have gone a long way towards infiltrating the local police department and local governmental departments..  At the moment there is a copy of fairly good piece on it on youtube, complete with court testimony, although I imagine they'll push to get it removed, so if the link is down, search youtube for "Clearwater Police Scientologist".  Some of the footage is deeply disturbing (like at 7:34, for instance).  More disturbing yet is the fact that the man who runs the organisation that made that film, Bob Minton, spent about ten million dollars down through the years fighting against Scientology.  Then, one day, during a court trial about the death of a young Scientologist under the care of the Scientology organisation, he called the lawyer in that case, saying "Ken, you have to help me, they've got me this time. If you don't drop the case Monday morning, the blood and death of my daughters, my wife and myself will be on your hands."^***

Scientology is a massive pyramid sales scam: members pay huge amounts of money - literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases - for access to a mixture of "treatment" (being hooked up to a machine that does nothing* and asked standard psych 101 questions, and oooh, do they hate the real psychiatrists!) and fairy stories.  Let's have a look at a story that, were you a Scientologist, you would pay a great deal of money to discover:

"one of these slaves suddenly got the big idea of mass" and Arslycus "broke to pieces and scattered around in that particular part of the sky as being of too great a mass to sustain itself". This was, apparently, "about the point where you got the law of gravity coming in strongly. And after that the law of gravity began to affect itself on the universe more and more and more and more and you started to get all kinds of suns and planets and the most fantastic array of things." (Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures, L.Ron Hubbard)

Hubbard was a huge drug user and addict himself, and that influence on his loony followers really shows through in works like "Have You Lived Before This Life?", which is a collection of past-life experiences as recounted, presumably with a straight face, by Scientologists in "auditing".  These experiences included:

• A past life as a robot working in a factory in space, which had gold animals hanging around it which "appeared solid but periodically imploded or exploded". It ground up discs to make small animals, which were then "inflated after blowing up through a totem and a cat devil" before being sent to other planets. A planet blew up, and the robot was blamed. He was drugged and forced to work the grinder.
• A past life "55,000,000,000,000,000,000 years ago" in which the being had to do outside repairs on a space ship. He suffered radiation burns and fell off, plunging into an ocean on the planet below. A manta ray killed him and he in turn inhabited the manta ray.
• A past life as a trouble-making free being on Mars "469,476,600 years ago". He tried to inhabit a "doll body", but he was captured and beaten up. The being was zapped with a ray gun by a Martian bishop in front of a congregation chanting "God is Love", before being run over by a large car and a steamroller. He was then frozen in an ice cube and dropped on Planet ZX 432, where he took another robot body and zapped and killed another robot. He took off in a flying saucer and died when it exploded.
• A past life in which a being went to a planet where the forces of good were fighting evil black magic forces. After 74,000 years of battle, implants and hallucinations, he lost the fight, and joined the black magic side. He went to another planet on a space ship, where he was "deceived into a love affair with a robot decked out as a beautiful red-haired girl."
• Being transformed into an intergalactic walrus which perished after falling out of a flying saucer.
• Being "a very happy being who ... strayed to the planet Nostra" 23,064,000,000 years ago.**

An intergalactic walrus.  Classic.  I'd say that you just can't make this stuff up.  But you can, if your name is Hubbard.

Here is what Hubbard said about facing up to investigation into Scientology:

(1) Spot who is attacking us.
(2) Start investigating them promptly for felonies or worse using own professionals, not outside agencies.
(3) Double curve our reply by saying we welcome an investigation of them.
(4) Start feeding lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence on the attackers to the press.

Don't ever tamely submit to an investigation of us. Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way. You can get "reasonable about it" and lose. Sure we break no laws. Sure we have nothing to hide. BUT attackers are simply an anti-Scientology propaganda agency so far as we are concerned. They have proven they want no facts and will only lie no matter what they discover. So BANISH all ideas that any fair hearing is intended and start our attack with their first breath. Never wait. Never talk about us - only them. Use their blood, sex, crime to get headlines. Don't use us. I speak from 15 years of experience in this. There has never yet been an attacker who was not reeking with crime. All we had to do was look for it and murder would come out. -- Attacks on Scientology, "Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter,"

Have a look at some of the more revolting elements of Scientology here on Wikipedia.

Hubbard is best summed up by Mr Justice Latey, a judge in the English High Court:

"... he has made these, among other false claims:
That he was a much decorated war hero. He was not.
That he commanded a corvette squadron. He did not.
That he was awarded the Purple Heart, a gallantry decoration for those wounded in action. He was not wounded and was not decorated.
That he was crippled and blinded in the war and cured himself with Dianetic technique. He was not crippled and was not blinded.
That he was sent by U.S. Naval Intelligence to break up a black magic ring in California. He was not. He was himself a member of that occult group and practiced ritual sexual magic in it.
That he was a graduate of George Washington University and an atomic physicist. The facts are that he completed only one year of college and failed the one course on nuclear physics in which he enrolled.
There is no dispute about any of this. The evidence is unchallenged"

Of course, it's not really funny.  People actually buy this stuff.  Apparently naughty Xenu collected 178 billion excess-to-requirements people up, froze them, flew them through space to Earth in exact replicas of DC-8 airliners with the engines taken off, packed them around volcanos and blew them up using nuclear weapons around 75,000,000 million years ago.  That, in 1997, would have cost you $17,500 to discover.  Leaving aside this tale's obvious nature as a dangerously seductive philosophy, we are left wondering why our Xenu didn't get a few hundred miles out of his atmosphere, strike his head with his hand, say "duh, how stupid am I?  Just jettison them here in space and save ourselves a journey of hundred of light-years!" and head back for tea and Thetans.  Come to that, just why the volcanoes were not, themselves sufficient to the task is not satisfactorily explained.

I'm off to watch a pirated version of Battlefield Earth.

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*"...the E-Meter has no proven usefulness in the diagnosis, treatment or prevention of any disease, nor is it medically or scientifically capable of improving any bodily function." - 1971 ruling of the United States District Court, District of Columbia (333 F. Supp. 357)

** Hubbard, L. Ron [1950] (October 1977). Have You Lived Before This Life?, 1977 edition, Los Angeles, California: Church of Scientology of California Publications Organization.

*** O'Neil, Deborah. "How Scientology turned its biggest critic", St. Petersburg Times, 2002-07-07

An infantryman's view of Iraq

On the Something Awful forums we've got a forum called "Ask/Tell", where you can post stuff like "Ask me what it's like to be a heroin addict" and people can ask a recovering smack-addict all the stuff they've seen in movies and find out it's nowhere near as bad as the real thing, or "Tell me about Glasgow, Scotland" because they're off there to uni there, and people will tell them all about it.

It's a pretty impressive forum - my favourite on the SA site - and the stories people are able to tell can be startling.  I have certainly learnt a lot about areas of life I thought I understood, but really didn't.  And I've also been able to offer some help in some of the "Tell me about..." threads.

Anyway, one that caught my eye was by a Goon (SA member) called "Roy of CA" who is serving in an infantry regiment in Iraq's worst hellhole. We have had a few thread like this from Goons  serving in Iraq of Afghanistan, but usually some time after they return, or from a position with the gear in the rear.  This bloke is in Ramadi, which is pretty much the worst place to be in the world right now, barring the caldera of a few of the more active volcanos.  The questions are a mixture:  some from people who are really interested and others from right- and (mainly) left-wingers trying to get him to say stuff that backs their preconceived positions. He's too smart for that, but at the same time sounds like a scary bastard.  He introduces himself by saying "I am a Specialist in the United States Army's infantry. I am the 'one man' on my team, meaning when we enter any building or go into an fire fight, I am the lead person."  His thread is a strange mixture of bravado, grim fatalism, heroic willingness, brotherhood, and brutal violence.

If you don't have a subscription to Something Awful you can only view two or three pages of the forums a day, so here are some of his answers to questions put to him, out of the hundreds he has answered:

"I have been blown up 7 times, 3 of them being from a car bomb. I have been sniped 3 times, all three missed (one bounced off my gun). I have been in too many firefights to remember."

Q: What do you think of the way that the current administration has conducted the war?

A: I do not think strategically, I think tactically. I don't think "I would move that brigade over there" I think "I need another guy on that rooftop".

Q: I would also like to know what you would prefer the government's next step be in the war. Would you prefer if they pulled out? Would you prefer if they sent in more troops/stayed? I'm really curious.

A: America can pull out everyone, just leave us here because most of us don't want to leave, we want to kill or capture more Al-qaida.

Q: My troop was just in Ramadi less then 8 months ago

If you are with the 506th, you are with the shittest unit I have ever seen in my whole life (band of brothers indeed). The 506th did absolutely nothing to secure the city, they sat on their base and stopped doing patrols, stopped counterfiring on mortar attacks, stopped everything.

If you are 506 then you have absolutely no reason to ever talk to me other than to apologize for leaving the sector like this (like your Battalion Commander apologized to our BC for leaving the sector like this).

Q: Is there anything you guys need/want that I could ship to you? Candy, books, movies?

When you guys send care packages, please don't send candy. No one over here eats the candy you send. Send tuna packages. Everyone here eats tuna, everyone.

Q: I'm headed into transpo pretty soon. Are there many supply convoys on the MSR that you see or provide security for?

Boy, did your recruiter *** you...I hope you are ready to get blown up more than me man, transportation sucks. Good luck.

Q: What is the freakiest or most surreal thing that you have seen or have happened to you while you were in an actual gunfight or battle?

The freakiest, by far, is one I will never forget. I saw a man accidently shoot an RPG in mid air. Both sides stopped firing for about 3 seconds (in a fight thats a long ass time) and we all were like "whoa...did that just happen?".

The Haaji shot an RPG from a rooftop down onto us and this guy actually shot the thing mid air (he obviously was just aiming at the Haaji). It was something I will never forget.

Q: Could you tell us about those? Obviously a car bomb/IED sucks because you never know when they're going to hit and it just instantly fucks anyones *** up without warning.

I really don't know what people see in the whole war story thing. I just don't get i into my own stories much. I guess because I was there and it's all a repeat of *** I don't wanna repeat sometimes.

What exactly do you wanna know?

When a car bomb goes off, everything is grey after. the sky, the ground, everyone's skin around you, all grey. Things are falling on you for the next few minutes. Body parts are all over everything, stuff you don't know what it is but you know it's human.

I got hit with a VBIED when I was checking for car bombs at a ECP (entry control point into the city) back during the elections. I remember running up to a guy I thought looked bad and I asked him "hey dude you ok....oh" It was just his vest. He had no head/arms/legs.

Q: When you return home do you retain your hatred for Haaji?

Absolutely. Every single person I even think is an arab pisses me off just by being anywhere fucking near me. Most of us can tell between an arab and an indian, a south american, etc etc. We know a Haaji when we see one usually.

I have snapped on a Haaji many many times in the states. My wife has helped me alot with that.

I can't look at them without wanting to smash their fucking face into the back of their head sometimes, and sometimes I can't look at them and not feel sorry for them, even if they're rich. It's weird, I dunno.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2409489

It's a strange thing about this conflict: the ability to speak to someone almost real-time who is serving on the very front lines.  He might not come back from today's operation.  Or he might just have been on a 4-day OP in someone's house and turn up again answering questions as if there had been no delay.

A Tale of Liars, Midgets and Incompetents

How lucky we are, during the ongoing crisis with the eschatological fruit-loops currently dominant in the Iranian government to have in place an incompetent intellectual midget in Margaret Beckett, who has been repeatedly shown to be nowhere near up to the task of dealing with the role of foreign secretary, and who has demonstrated an inability to speak on anything but domestic political matters.

As a bonus, we have a placeholding nobody in Des Browne in place at Defence, whose role is granted as a result of his his loyalties in Labour's inter-nicene struggle.

Britain has a strong and simple case over the Iranians' piracy and kidnapping, and are dealing with an administration that is anything but monolithic. In moments of dark hilarity, the Iranians even bungled their attempts to make up a location inside their own waters. And they did so not once but twice. But a largely sympathetic United Nations has been so mishandled that we can't even get a decent resolution in our favour. It is truly dismal when one considers that Jack Straw would have handled the situation better.

Laboucherie, Iraq, Strategy and Tactics

There is an interesting article on DefenceTech.org about Lieutenant Colonel David Laboucherie of the Queen's Royal Hussars, who is currently operating in Maysan province in south-eastern Iraq.  In part, it is interesting because it concerns one of the more successful elements of the current operation in Iraq.  But I was struck by how the writer, David Axe, had made the fundamental error of confusing strategy and tactics.

He writes about how Laboucherie has gone about gaining local respect, has been tolerant of the locals', erm, alternative means of conflict resolution (occasionally, noisily shooting lots of bullets in roughly each others' direction without great effect) and how he has learned lessons from the Northern Irish conflict.  He describes the extremely mobile deployment and light logistical footprint of Laboucherie's patrols, which seem to owe a debt to developments during the North African conflict in 1942-43. But Axe then goes on to suggest that the same tactics could work in places such as Bahgdad.  This is Axe's mistake.

Laboucherie has decided on a strategy.  His ultimate strategic goal is to choke off the flow of men and materials from Iran.  That strategy involves the need to win over local authority figures in the militia, religious establishments and the like, and, by acting sensitively around locals, to garner at least tolerance from the population.  The fact that part of the implementation of his strategy includes tactical aspects such as resupply of fast-moving patrols by helicopter, limited use of only very light armour contingents, and an emphasis on proven, low-technology solutions to challenges where appropriate is less important in determining the lessons to be drawn.  In areas with less homogenous populations, or with substantial conurbations, different tactical implementations must be considered.

Robert Leonhard, in his book The Art of Manuever:Manuever-Warfare Theory and Airland Battle says that the only battlefield system which has been unchanged for millenia is the human soul.  Force protection and the attrition of the enemy - the overwhelming concerns of American military thinking right now - are not means to defeat an enemy in themselves, although they may eventually, indirectly lead to victory.  To defeat an enemy you must persuade him that he has lost.  In manuevre warfare, for example, this can mean achieving breakout and operating in the rear of the enemy's formations.  But Leonhard makes it plain that the point of such manuevre is to persuade the enemy that he has lost and remove his ability to continue fighting at the logistical and moral levels.  It is not simply to kill him in large numbers.

In counter-insurgency - as is proven in Afghanistan and Iraq right now - merely killing the enemy in large numbers is rarely sufficient.  Instead, it is necessary to deny the enemy a safe operating base, to remove his ability to rely on local populations for support (whether he uses coercion or persuasion) and to render his operations politically unprofitable.  Of these, the latter is the most important.  Lenin, a key figure in creating the ideological and political frameworks of the modern terrorist struggle, said that "the present-day terrorists are really 'economists' turned inside out, going to the equally foolish but opposite extreme"*.  He condemned as foolish acts of terrorism that did not pursue specific and well-defined political objectives, and which was not directly controlled by a political organisation.  Pursuing a strategy in Iraq that merely allows newsreaders to quote optimistic body-count figures is an insufficient response to a political problem.

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* (Lenin, Revolutionary Adventurism in Collected Works, Volume 6 Moscow; 1961; p192.)

Limbaugh, Lecturing Others on Drugs

According to a BBC article, Michael J. Fox has appeared in an endorsement in the US elections, backing a candidate who supports stem cell research. Professional liar and drug addict Commentator Rush Limbaugh claimed 'he was either "off his medication or acting" in the 30-second clip.'

Presumably, if Michael was off his meds it is because Limbaugh stole them to feed his habit.  We could stabilise the loss of Amazonian rainforests for years if we could only tap the huge reserves of teak beams in Rush's eyes.  It really takes some going to be such a loathsome hypocrite that, despite only being a regional radio commentator, even moderately-right-wing individuals thousands of miles of ocean away despise all that he stands for.

 

Misbah, Stornoway and Lahore

The coverage of Misbah Rana's flight to Pakistan has been covered by UK news sources with a tacit understanding that the girl has done something rash, childish or even suspicious.  Initial assumptions were clearly that she had been kidnapped or duped.  I suspect that this is because London-based journalists don't understand what could make a teenaged girl flee to the potentially restrictive life of a woman in Pakistan.

These people have almost certainly never been to Lewis.  Misbah (previously Molly Campbell, and whose clear request to be known by her Pakistani name have been ignored even by the BBC) has fled a beautiful (when it isn't raining) holiday destination.  But I have asked two friends from Stornaway what it was like to be a teenager there, and their remarks are not printable.  She is now in Lahore which, excitement-wise, compares rather favourably.

As for the rights and wrongs of the custody battle which will ensue, I am not in a position to judge.  But I am certain that, had Misbah fled a guardian in Pakistan demanding to be with her mother in Scotland, and to be called Molly, there would be an uproar in Britain were she to be sent back against her will.  Petitions, marches, questions in Parliament: the works.  If, against her will, she is sent back here, I suspect that we will see rather less furore on the part of the supposedly liberal press.

Misbah and her mother clearly have problems: however little charm Stranraer held as a previous home, I suspect that the move from there to Stornoway and resulting separation from any friends and social networks Misbah had built up is going to be involved.  Many teenagers would love to be able to make the gesture of running away to another country to show their resentment of the treatment they have received ("This will show them what they did to me...") or to spite a parent they have grown to dislike.  Misbah may very well grow to regret her decision.  Or she may not.  Teenagers have been known to make decisions that seem rash with hindsight.  But the media's treatment and presumptions has been instructive.

Hezbollah and Israel

The media are notably bad at assessing how military campaigns are progressing.  Everyone will, I am sure, remember the prognostications of doom from CNN and the BBC (less so from Sky, whose coverage was more balanced) during the liberation of Iraq, when we were told that the offensive was stalled and that Baghdad would be the West's Stalingrad, inflicting tens of thousands of casualties upon the struggling infidels as the Fehdayeen and elite Republican Guard fought house to house.

So when the media says that Israel's military is rocked by the fierce resistance they are meeting from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, it is worth asking what the strategic aims of Israel are.

Israel's goals are not territorial aggrandisement.  They don't want a bunch of fly-blown villages and rebellious donkey-powered farmers.

Nor do they particularly want a strip of demilitarised land in Southern Lebanon, whether that is patrolled by themselves, te Lebanese or the UN.  They will accept such a measure, but it is a tool, not an aim.  Particularly given the fact that a 20-mile-wide strip would not prevent the use of 70-mile-range rockets.

What they want is the neutralisation of Hezbollah.  Luckily, that is what the USA, the UK, the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Iraquis, Turks and every other non-terrorist state in the region wants.  Only Syria and Iran - who almost certainly made the mistake of provoking this conflict using their Hezbollah stooges, in order to divert focus from their nuclear program, which a few weeks ago was beginning to come under extreme focus - wish otherwise.  Iran wanted, probably, to offer a ceasefire from Hezbollah in return for concessions over the nuclear issue.

And why is this relevant to whether things are going well for Israel?

Well, the nightmare scenario for Israel would have been Hezbollah melting away ahead of them.  They are an irregular force, and Israel could have expended much money and international opinion shelling empty buildings and levelling villages to no avail had Hezbollah simply retreated ahead of them.  This is what the Vietnamese did after they worked out that irregular non-Western troops cannot fight a Western army, and it worked.  Leave your superior opponent punching at air and connecting with civilians, all the time declaring your love of peace and sympathy for those suffering around you, and you have the makings of a successful terrorist force.  Lenin would have told them that, amd he would have told them, also, that trying to pick stand-up fights was reckless egoism that a revolutionary cannot afford.

So the Israelis must be delighted that they are getting a chance to do what they came to achieve: Hezbollah fighters are apparently standing and fighting, which doubtless means that they are dying in large numbers.  If they become too few, the problem will not be the Israelis - the moderate Arab world can only give Israel so long to do their dirty work for them against the Islamists - but rather the host country, who may despise the Israelis, but will also undoubtely know who brought the storm down upon them.

Zizou - dignified and self-controlled, apparently

If you were a writer for the Times, you might not be delighted that your glowing profile of Zinedine Zidane, written before the world cup final, had appeared the day afterwards (yesterday), saying things like:

There can be no more dignified and proud exit from football than to make the World Cup your point of retirement.

Oh dear.  Dignified as in the sense of "red-carded for doing an impression of a rutting stag"? Given the ease of editing in these post-industrial days, you would think that the journo, Penny Wark, might have popped in at the weekend to submit a couple of changes to alter the rather hagiographical tone of her piece:

He has also been lauded for his integrity...the motif of his mature playing years has been his control and self-discipline

It reminds me, just a little, of the change in tone of the coverage of Princess Diana after she decided seatbelts were for wimps.  The Private Eye said it best:

In recent weeks (not to mention the last 10 years) we at the Daily Gnome, in common with all other newspapers, may have inadvertently conveyed the impression that the late Princess of Wales was in some way a neurotic, irresponsible and manipulative troublemaker. . . We now realise as of Sunday morning that the Princess of Hearts was in fact the most saintly woman who has ever lived . . . (Private Eye, September 5th 1997)

Healey kinda gets it and Ahmadinnerjacket is a loony

I just watched Labour Party old-timer Dennis Healey being interviewed on Sky News's Straight Talk, by my fellow Scot, the moderately repugnant Murdoch sock-puppet, Andrew Marr.  When asked about his willingness to give up Britain's nuclear deterrent in the face of North Korean and Iranian proliferation, he said:

"These countries are a lot more organised and cohesive than in my day.  There really is no military point in keeping our own nuclear weapons.  They're really just a political gesture."

Ummm, this man was one of Britain's most senior politicians for five years of the Cold War, from 1974 to 1979, and he only just now realises that almost the whole point of nuclear weapons is political?  The fact that they are called "special weapons" wasn't a clue?  The whole thing about us focussing on having a "strategic nuclear deterrent" wasn't niggling at the back of his head the whole time saying "I really should look up that 'strategic' thingy"?

I mean, yes, intermediate and tactical weapons would have been useful in dispersing the Soviet 3rd Shock Tank Army as it swept through the Fulda Gap.  But dear old Mr H. doesn't seem to have spotted that we don't have any of them any more.  Strategic weapons, which have never been used, are not intended to have military roles on the battlefield.  If we ever used them then we have lost.  But they are very good at stopping anyone else using their own weapons.  So waiting until a lunatic like Ahmadinejad is on the verge of building his own nukes and then throwing them away is startling logic at best.   Remember, Mr Ahmadinnerjacket is a man who has, since his election, happily and openly stated that he desires nothing more than to imminentize the eschaton/reveal the Hidden Imam by provoking armageddon (ie nuke Israel 'til it glows).  He already has the ability to kill every man and woman on earth (I'm not going to do something as dumb as go into explanations of that statement here, but every physicist knows there are far more globally dangerous ways to use a moderate quantity of plutonium than to pack it into a critical mass).

And NATO's openness about its first strike doctrine - if the Warsaw Pact advanced successfully towards the Rhine then we would use medium-yield weapons to destroy their spearhead formations - should have pointed out that even this was political gesture.  Militarily, it would have been better to have remained quiet and gain surprise.  Here's a rule of thumb: if you publicise in advance exactly how you will use a weapon, then it is a political weapon.

The North Koreans are slightly less dangerous potential nuke-wielders.  They have, at least, a thread of sanity and rationality running through their provocations, which all aim at forcing concessions, defending their corrupt positions and warning off external interventions (this assumes that incometence and a tiny budget don't lead to some horrendous accident).  Ahmadinnerjacket is not just an ex-torturer with a personal history of murders and executions.  He is also fruit loops.  If you think I exaggerate, look at some of these articles.  When the Guardian and the Telegraph agree on the Middle East, it's got to be big.  George Bush got pelted when he used the evangelical euphemism that he felt God "spoke to him".  Ahmadinnerjacket actually believes that he was - quite literally - surrounded by a glowing green light while addressing the United Nations.  He says that every politician and diplomat there also saw this light, which served to protect him.  Uh-oh.

And the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament actually supports the Iranians in their nuclear research and enrichment program.  I'm not kidding.  But when trying to make sense of this it's worth bearing in mind that the Socialist Workers' Party, through a campaign of entryism, have dominated CND for several years now.

I don't ask Mr Healey, at his age, to go and read Clausewitz or Machiavelli.  But that one of the three most senior cabinet members should have, in a period dominated by a certain weapon, wholly misunderstood its nature, hardly bears thinking about.  Did he honestly think that Trident, and Polaris before it, were there for fighting battles with?  The Soviets understood as well as we did that they are there for stopping others fighting wars.  The problem comes when some loony eschatologist thinks that annihilation isn't really a deterrent.  But so long as he has people around him that might object to a thousand atmospheres of overpressure in a retaliatory strike, we need to have our own "political" nuclear weapons.

Date geekery

Two upcoming dates that display my varying forms of geekiness.

One is the 4th of May.  You know: May 4th?  Just after 1 in the morning?

Ach, let me spell it out for you.  At exactly three seconds after two minutes past one, on May 5th 2006, your digital clock will display:

"01:02:03 04:05:06"

I, for one, can hardly wait.  I may actually throw a party to celebrate this once-in-a-century event.

The other date that just struck me recently is of more political and historical consequence.  Next year, 2007, will the the three hundredth anniversary of the Act of Union, 1707, which marked the union of the Scottish and English parliaments, and the foundation of "Britain".  I will predict now that this will not be a date that anyone is rushing to associate themselves with.  In Scotland, even those who are anti-independence tend also not to be very pro-English at such times.  In England, Scotland and things Scottish - especially politicians - are for the first time in my life coming under scrutiny for our disproportionate success in a variety of public areas.  All in all, this anniversary will be marked, on the whole, with a few TV programmes, some staunchly unionist establishment voices saying how jolly good the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution turned out to be for all concerned, and much mainstream shuffling of feet and booking of fortuitous holidays.

Peace Activist Rant

I resisted the temptation to write anything in the immediate aftermath of the rescue of Norman Kember from his kidnappers.  On hearing that he had issued numerous statements, none of which had the good grace to thank those who risked their lives to rescue him (the British, Iraqi, Canadian, US and military and also the MI6 agents), my initial reaction was that I would gladly chip in the cash to pay for a flight back to Baghdad for him.

But I'm not sure how clear-thinking I'd be in the aftermath of such an ordeal, so I held my tongue.

Only cowards, the naive or the wicked wish to see us rid of our armed forces.  I am sure that Kember is one of the naive.  He is no coward, for sure - you wouldn't catch me in Iraq without a rifle and some heavily armed mates - and I refuse to believe that my co-religionist is evil.  I think he is thoughtless, selfish, reckless and senselessly careless of the lives of others, but not evil.  But he shares goals with evil men.  In the Canadian National Post, you can see how the Iraqi ambassador reacted:

"The Christian Peacemaker Teams practises the kind of politics that automatically nominate them as dupes for jihadism and fascism," the embassy's statement said.

"The statement shows they even share the rhetoric of the jihadists, even if they do it out of naivete. Despite their claimed affinity for 'non-violence,' this is false.

"Politically, they are on the other side of this war. Christian Peacemaker Teams are objectively on the side of the fascists, Saddam Hussein's loyalists and al-Qaida in Iraq."

I can see his point.  If you hope for something - in this case the rapid withdrawal of our forces from Iraq and the abandonment of the democratic, elected government of that country - look at the people around you who hope for the same thing.  In this case, they are Jihadists, Islamist, Wahabbists, Salafists and assorted, tag-along anti-Semites like the Socialist Workers Party.  If the goals of your allies are wicked, either they or you aren't spotting something about the outcome.

The repugnant Canadian hostages are more open about their disdain for those who saved them.  At least Kember was persuaded to release a graceless and clearly grudging "thank-you" to those who saved his life.  Loney and Sooden refuse to even help their rescuers by giving information that might save the lives of others in captivity.  They prefer to maintain their distaste for soldiers rather than help save others' lives.  I am quite serious when I say that they should stick to their glorious principles and hand themselves over to their kidnappers.  I hope that we make clear that any other such collaborationists will not be rescued.  If a soldier was scratched by a nail while saving them it would be too high a price.

Do I seem angry?  Do I seem harshly and needlessly judgemental?  I know of two young men who would have grown up, had families, bounced their grandchildren on their knees and died in old age surrounded by their loved ones but for the fact that they were called up to free Europeans from Hitler's Germany, in one case dying in a field in Normandy, victim of a sniper's bullet.  Those men might not have wanted to fight, and certainly didn't want to die.  But they understood that some evils will prevail until defeated in battle.  I have the greatest of respect for those "conscientious objectors" who served as medical aides in that conflict, and who suffered a great many deaths and injuries from amongst their ranks.  But they were wrong.

I cannot even understand those who say it is better to impose sanctions - to starve comfortably distant, unseen children to death while the elite eat caviar - rather than send our volunteer soldiers in harm's way.  And I am repelled by those who say that if we cannot interfere everywhere, we should not do so anywhere.  That is like saying that if the lifeboats only hold one hundred, and two hundred stand on the deck, all should drown.

When there are no more evil people in the world, we will not need men in uniform to defend us from them.  And until the Rapture, we have that need.

Agendas Beat Truth

In the Academy, there is a hierarchy.  Everybody knows that the physicists and theoretical mathematicians are extremely intelligent, work hard to get where they are, and base their results on reproducible results, the scientific method, rigorous proofs and the like.

At the other end of the scale are the softest subjects, which include many of the so-called "social sciences".  Of these, the politically-motivated areas that share a methodology and grounding in proof with, say scientology are the worst offenders: gender studies, queer studies and the like.  These are agendas looking for a subject.  Such is their (quite justified) inferiority complex that they attempt to obfuscate and complicate their discussions, cloaking what they say in pseudo-science and critical theory.  Ironically, while attacking the idea of objective truth and absolute proof (very problematic for a Guardian reader) they ape those very elements wherever they can.

I don't write flame posts.  Look back, if you can bear the tedium, at my previous posts.  I grew out of internet flame wars back in 1993 or 1994, although the usenet posts do survive.  But... oooh, this makes me mad.

Now, Bonnie Ruberg is a nice person with interesting things to say and a very explicit agenda.  But her ongoing obsession with what she calls "transvestism" (people using toons of the opposite gender) in MMO's has become a somewhat wearying and one-paced addition to the generalist, virtual worlds blog Terra Nova.

Her first post was, frankly, laughed out of court.  It addressed well-worn and cliched areas and almost everyone knew how the conversation would pan out, from long experience on a variety of forums.  I think that the unwritten rule in the Houses of Parliament - make your maiden speech interesting and uncontroversial - is a wise one to stick to whenever delurking.  Anyway, she threatened more ("You may have won this round, my pretties, but I have author rights on this blog...  You cannot stop me and you have no /ignore function!"), and now she has delivered.

She claims it is an informal "study" [Edit: "Survey", not "study".  Thanks Aaron] of why individuals use characters of the opposite gender in online games.  She starts from the idiotic presumption - unforgiveable for someone of her intellect - that this is simply a variety of real-world cross-dressing.  She offers no evidence for her confusion of terms, despite receiving a mauling last time out.  Proof by blatant and repeated assertion.

In fact, look closely and the "study" is her posting on her blog regarding why people represent as other genders and getting responses from her readers.

Did it not strike her that credibility requires that she point out one or two details about such methodology?  That what she got was a study of individuals who read a blog on sexuality and gender in gaming?!?  A self-selecting study constituted entirely of those who chose to respond, mainly publicly!  So she got a bunch of touchy-feely responses from people who read her blog.  We tend to read blogs whose tone we generally agree with (see the bloglists of any left- or right-wing American blogger for evidence here).  So Bonnie suggested a theory on a number of occasions on her blog, then asked a question on it, and presents the results as some sort of "science".  Thousands of years of progress in logic and scientific method and this is what it comes to.  Politics.

A proper study, for what it would be worth (very little, I suspect) would have a sizeable cohort selected and weighted according to the demographics of the players (someone like Nick Yee, who brings real credibility and rigour to the genre, could help here).  I'd give you huge odds that the results would be the stunning conclusion that the bulk of those representing as another gender are men who like to look at pretty girls.  Not a stunning discovery, and unlikely to get the plaudits clearly desired.  It's all, I bet, about the elf-boobies.  The Lara demographic.

-----------

Disclaimer  I should add, in the interests of openness, that although my main characters - Agamemnos and Gracci - are both male, they are Taurens, which presumably, in Bonnie's agenda-driven world, makes me some sort of furry.  In SWG I did play a female character for a while, because in the words of PvP Online, if I am going to spend dozens of hours looking at an ass, it had better be an attractive one.  Bonnie hates that argument, of course, and simply refuses to believe it when it is raised.  It doesn't advance her agenda.  Truth be damned.

Cash for Coronets

You can tell that I am a Daily Telegraph reader, as I am prone to shaking my head sadly and bemoaning the state of politics in Britain.  The fact is that things were better when those in parliament gained their money from non-political routes: when they were of independent means.

Tony Blair admits that £14.5 million were smuggled into the Labour party as "loans", in order to avoid the need to publicise who the donors were.  This was done to get around the legislation that he himself had brought in earlier in his government.  In return, the donors - sorry, lenders - were to be given peerages, although that has been blocked now that the story is out.  How I detest that sanctimonious liar.

The loans route seems, if anything, far more of a case for public scrutiny,  You give me 14.5 million pounds in donations and I will be grateful to you. I may even make a special effort to grant you the odd hearing.  But you have nothing over me.

If you lend me 14.5 million pounds?  Well, that is a different story.  And if, like the Labour party, I have no real means of paying it back, then you can write your own policy documents.  Consider my cap doffed.

Call Centre Hell

The BBC News website has a piece, today, about hostility experienced by Indian call centre staff dealing with western customers.  While interesting, the piece seems unusually "fluff" or human interest for the BBC's news page, packed with unquestioned opinions, and with no interest shown in inquiring into the motivations of either the customers involved, nor the interviewees.

As is obligatory, let me state for the record that anyone using the quote in the piece that "Indians are dirty and that they don't have brains and they are illiterates" is in the wrong, no matter what their motivations.

But look at the story.  Remove the racy and racist ineterpretation.  It says "people are being rude to call centre staff."  Twenty percent is the suspiciously round number. Well, fan my face and pass me a glass of water, I think I am on the edge of fainting.

Tony Benn stated a rule which deserves wider currency: he said that, if you want to know if something is worthy of being a news story, try reversing its meaning and see if that is not a bigger news story.  In this case "customers universally polite to Indian call centre staff" would be a big story for the business community.

The fact is that people hate call centres.  They loathe being called by their staff just as they sit down to dinner.  And a very large proportion of people are calling call centres because something is wrong, and are therefore entering the conversation frustrated in the first place.  For somebody who has not been exposed in their upbringing to a variety of accents - and not all those calling these centres is a cosmopolitan world-traveller - understanding somebody from Mumbai can be a genuinely difficult task.

I, myself, if called by a call centre employee of any nationality, will make the experience unplasant for them.  Thay have taken a job which involves invading my privacy and I make no apologies for using consumer-guerilla tactics to make their job correspondingly unenjoyable.  This will make it harder to get staff, which will raise the cost of the business model and eventually lead to less spam-calling.  And yes, I am on the "don't call" list, so I am talking about unethical companies here.

And when it comes to Indian staff, while I would never hurl racial epithets in their direction, I do resent the need to spell my name in full, my address in its entirety (including street and town, and Edinburgh is not an obscure village), and so on.  Is this unreasonable?  Their English is a thousand times better than my Urdu, for instance, but I'm not holding myself out as potential call centre staff.

And this is natural.  It is recognised by the provision of "local" staff for premium services.  Platinum American Express card services give me a UK call centre.  If forced to use the green card number, I am directed to India.

As an economist, I know the law of competitive advantage perfectly well.  I know that if we have more productive tasks for our ex-call-centre staff then we should be glad to offload such menial and skill-free tasks to lower-cost countries, so as to focus on higher-value areas where we have an advantage.  What did we have an empire for, after all, if not for such advantages?  But I rather think that this may fall on deaf ears to a middle-aged woman from a Sunderland housing estate who just saw her job head east.  I am firmly in favour of globalisation, and of sharing our wealth by employing those willing to do what we do not wish to do.I will not support protectionist legislation, but I think that some companies will gain customer goodwill by using local call centre staff.  This is why Mahal, in the BBC story, cannot complain when a customer politely enquires as to where the call centre is based, then chooses to boycott that company's services by discontinuing the call.  That person may be misguided, economically, but politically they are making a rational and understandable choice.

And ask the UK call-centre staff: they get equally rude people calling them, frustrated at getting their cable disconnected and lashing out at them.  The insults may not be racist, but they will be targetted as well as the customer can muster.  Until we find a better paradigm than sticking a few hundred unhappy employees in a large, air-conditioned, soulless warehouse and giving them scripts, then such abuse will continue.

Fetch me my (Danish) bacon roll...

That sound you heard over the weekend was of European popular opinion shuffling self-consciously several steps to the right.

I am not a habitual consumer of Danepak bacon and Carlsberg beer, but I think that I'll pop past the shops on the way home and buy both, tonight.  After all, in the face of widespread boycotts across the muslim world, the Danish pork and alcohol industries must really be feeling the pinch.  And it well help ease my conscience, which is currently embarrassed by the craven kow-towing of the British government to the sheer, unbridled fascism of the Islamist extreme right. The British government in general, and Jack Straw in particular, a man whose principles disappeared with his glasses in his pointless pursuit of an utterly unattainable prime-ministership.

I particularly resent the fact that the islamist response to the printing of some not-terribly-funny cartoons in a Danish paper is so extreme, so apparently universal, that I find myself sounding like a member of the BNP.  For instance,  I honestly believe that if people come to our country, with its long-established traditions of liberty and free expression, then they have no right to attempt to terrorise that society into conforming with the political and religious traditions of the dictatorships, gerontocracies, kleptocracies and assorted other murderously authoritarian regimes which they saw fit to leave behind.  This from a person who believes in free immigration without quotas!

I have had two discussions in the past twenty-four hours with baffled, liberal, middle-classed Scots, each openly feeling hurt by the islamist reaction, and wondering aloud how such a huge chasm could "suddenly" have appeared.  Of course, this is no sudden disjunction.

Our political traditions are traceable to 5th century BC Athens and her struggle against the Persian Empire: to what we see as the band of free citizens defending their liberty, their rights and their democratic traditions against the forces of despotism and oppression.  This is, of course, an arguable proposition on many grounds, but one grounded on truth, and important as our founding myth, still powerfully repeated again and again in every artistic sphere (Minas Tirith, anyone?).  And our traditions are shaped by the French and American revolutions, by the free pursuit of happiness, by liberté, egalité and fraternité.  They are refined by the political thought of a score of generations, of Locke, Hobbes and Payne.

All this has always been alien to islam, which absolutely and explicitly demands, in the qu'ran, a theocracy.  In muslim political terms, this would be the restoration of the Caliphate, which is a prospect too depressing to warrant discussing, but would involve an awful ot of hangings in Soho and liberal stonings of women throughout suburbia.

We already live in a state of fear.  We are already terrorised.  Why else have British newpapers and the BBC fought shy of publishing these cartoons?  I wouldn't post them on my site!  We accept the possibility of bombings on the tube in London with a stoic resolve, primarily because we're a well-educated citizenry who, in the main, know that we won't win the lottery and we won't be the ones that get blown up on the 09.34 to Ruislip.  But we also know that if we go drawing attention to ourselves then there's a far better chance that we'll end up getting stabbed, beheaded, or otherwise given the opportunity to go chat with muhammed directly about his madder disciples.

So long as our pussillanimous government finds some backbone - oh, the shame of being shown up by the French for moral courage - then this is a struggle that liberal democracy will win.  Not just because of our technological and organisational advantages, but because huge segments of society cannot allow us to lose: women, gays, Christians, Ba'hai, Bhuddists, Hindus, libertarians, would-be leaders of the Liberal party...  we all have too much to lose.

I hope that it is true, and that these people are not representative of the wider muslim community.  Lets see the much larger counter-protests.

Taking The Victim As You Find Them

File this one under "why the Scottish legal system is better than the English one."

In Yorkshire, a group of teenaged girls, of the repugnant bullying variety that end up pregnant by 15 [Edit: it turns out that one of them has done exactly this] and living off us taxpayers for the rest of their miserable and pointless lives, decided that they would physically attack another girl.  This girl, a fifteen year-old called Aimee Wellock, suffered from an undiscovered heart defect, and died as a result of the attack.  Originally convicted of manslaughter, the attackers have just had their convictions quashed, since in English law it was the heart defect and not the actual attacks that lead to death.

Well, in Scotland we know causality when we see it.  Were these barely-bipedal vermin to have committed their crime in Scotland, they would have ended up doing several years for culpable homicide (the Scottish equivalent of manslaughter).  Here, we have a principle, first established in a similar case of attack followed by heart failure, which covers exactly this.  You are said to take the victim as you find them.  England might take a lead on this one.

Praising Kamm's Indefatigability

Sometimes, you read something that reveals just how subtle and incisive a weapon the English language can be, in the right hands.  This paragraph, from Oliver Kamm's blog, in which he describes debating George Galloway's antics in "Celebrity" Big Brother with John Rees, national Secretary of Galloway's "party", is the sine qua non of damning with faint praise.  It combines hilarious wit with a series of gloriously precise criticisms.

I expressed sympathy for Rees for coming on the programme when his party had previously condemned Big Brother as 'sewer-dredgingly awful', and I said that Galloway's appearance had the merit of not being the least creditable thing or most egregious debasement of public office he had done. After George travelled to Damascus last July to tell the Syrian people, who had had no say in the matter, how fortunate they were to have Bashar al-Assad as their leader, there were few ways open to him to lose his dignity further, and he at least showed imagination in finding one of them.

Tiddles the MP

I am pleased that Tiddles, aka George Galloway M.P. has avoided eviction for another week.  The longer he stays in there, the higher approval for the liberation of Iraq will rise.  But I cannot wait for his return to the House of Commons.  Always a rare event, given his abysmal attendance figures, this one will surely be made extra-special by the chorus of meows by which he will be greeted from both sides of the floor.

Check Dumbledore's Criminal Record

By way of a diverting passtime, the popular press likes, every year or so, to play a game called "work the lower orders into a lynch-mob frenzy over paedophiles."  It's not a difficult game - in fact, they have never yet lost - but it keeps the editorial staff amused.  Thus, we have the usual mobs roaming the worse type of housing estates, daubing paint on the doors of paediatricians and generally making an argument for water cannon and tasers. Now, if the red-top papers are to believed, our schools are currently nothing better than dating agencies for kiddy-fiddlers, with hardly a classroom not occupied by a malicious deviant in a cordouroy jacket with patched elbows scheming to make G.G.Simmons in 2b his personal love-toy.  A bit like Belgium in miniature, then.

It's an easy sell: since most of us have more than a few moral blots on our character, we welcome the chance to throw stones at someone "unarguably" worse than ourselves.  You may beat your wife after a drink, but at least you ain't a nonce.  You might be claiming unemployment benefit from three addresses, or have beaten some bloke unconscious outside the Rat and Parrot at the weekend, or make your living selling pills out back of the Venue, but you ain't no beast.

I am amazed that the British government has, for thirty-odd years, been sensible enough to have a policy where a conviction for sexual offences does not automatically mean a ban for life on teaching.  I mean that: amazed.  It shows a liberality (stop it, Americans, your version of "liberal" is different from everyone else) of mind and a foolish willingness to touch the third rail that might run to bravery if I thought they ever really considered the consequences of making the call on individual cases themselves.  Obviously, no civil servant ever said to them "what a courageous decision, minister."

Clearly, the policy has been a success, too.  If any teachers had gone on to abuse those in their care after such a ministerial decision to allow them to work in schools, then you can bet we'd know about it: the papers will have been hunting through their archives for any sniff of recidivism.

I'm not saying those with convictions for child abuse should be allowed to work in schools. But what about someone who has been convicted for, say, the Gillian Taylforth offence of being caught dispensing favours to her boyfriend in a car.  These days, you'd be on the sex offenders' register.  But is such a woman a danger to kids?   Hardly.  Similarly, a man caught in a public toilets having sex with another man - I gather it is a popular passtime in some areas - may be in less trouble than a decade ago, but he's still going to get a conviction for a sexual offence and go on the register.  Does this mean that his tastes suddenly extend from closeted, middle-aged salesmen called Kevin to little Jennings of the lower third?

And even an offence for having sex with someone under age is not a rock-solid predictor.  When I was fifteen, most of the girls in my class seemed to be going out with seventeen or eighteen year-old blokes.  No wonder, given the maturity of the average fifteen-year-old boy.  Many of those girls had sex, although not as many as would do these days.  That would be enough to get the seventeen-year-olds in question, if caught, hauled off to chokey and landed with - at the very least - a caution for sex with a minor.  End of teaching career?  Even if, as is sometimes the case (and not a million miles away from one of the current tabloid cause celebres), they go on to get married, grow old and have kids together?

Hard cases make bad law.  The irresponsibility of the tabloids is understandable: they are malignant gossip-pimps for stupid people.  But the Conservatives and Liberals should, if the first had principles and the second a sober leader, be standing alongside Ruth Kelly and supporting her on the general principle, if not on specific cases.  But nobody ever won an election by honesty, let alone by taking a complicated position.  In fact, merely suggesting that the issue might not be quite such a manichean one is enough to put a dent in your career.  So the Daily Star- next to the Daily mail, the worst of all the hate-mongering rags - can continue printing condemnations of intelligent discussion of the topic alongside pictures of a fifteen-year-old singer's breasts.

Attack of the Hideous Orange Man

In the Ukraine, orange is the colour of the "Orange Revolution"*.  Here in Britain, it is the colour of Gorgeous George Galloway M.P.: narcissist and loony...  Oh, and big fan of Saddam Hussein, to whom he said, in 1994: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability."  It should be noted that he later said he meant courageous, strong and indefatigable in a bad way.

So what is this member of the Mother of Parliaments doing in the Celebrity Big Brother household?!?  Well...  it's actually rather in character.  Listen, ge