The War Comes To The Times ...

Mrs Rod Liddle uses the Letters page of the Times to reveal that Viagra may be purchased in East Sheen.

A more sympathetic portrait of Ms Royce here.

BBC In '9/11 Relative Not Critical Of Bush' Shock

Driving home, listening to the BBC's "PM" programme as they reported on the 9/11 commission and the reaction of the victims' relatives. I expected the usual anti-Bush tirade (where was Greg Palast ?) and was fascinated to hear the views of a calm and articulate lady called Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles Burlingame, one of the Flight 77 (the plane which hit the Pentagon) pilots.

I'd never heard of her before, but a quick Google turned up this superb piece which seems to have been extensively blogged Stateside. Read the whole thing (henceforth RTWT).

So I'll just concentrate on a couple of the things she said in her interview (approx 44 minutes in - use the keys in the pop-up to navigate).

The link will expire tomorrow at 6 pm GMT, so here's an 860K mp3 version (right mouse click, 'save Target as'). Bloggers with more bandwidth than I are welcome to copy it and post elsewhere (then let me link to it).


On free speech and some 9/11 relatives

"They .. criticised the commission when they felt the questions were too soft, and applauded the commission when some of the questions were particularly partisan - I think they have alienated not only other 9/11 family members but also the public at large."

"Don't they have a right to do that ?"

"Absolutely. No one's ever saying they don't have the right to do that - but then you have to submit to the criticism as well. You know, one of the wonderful things about this right of free speech is it is a double-edged sword ..."


On George Bush

"I voted for President Clinton both times he ran for President, I supported Vice-President Gore in his bid for the Presidency, and I didn't particularly like President Bush - (laughs) in point of fact I didn't like President Bush - and then after 9/11 I wasn't really so much focused so much on the man as on the mission. I had the same caricature of him that I think a lot of people had - and still do have - which is this arrogant cowboy who will shoot from the hip - and I thought God help us. And he started doing things that completely thwarted that expectation. It's completely wrong that he's not particularly smart - he's a very smart man. He's deeply committed - I think he's quite a visionary, and he's staked everything on what he believes - very courageously.

I have been a lifelong Democrat and I haven't changed party affiliation. But I am supporting President Bush in this coming election - because I think he gets it, because he understands."

The AL Kennedy Fanclub ...

Just grows and grows. Rob Hinkley is the latest convert.

Sense Of Humour Crisis

In one Mary Honeyball, MEP, after UKIP's Godfrey Bloom joined the EU Parliament women's rights committee with the magnificent quip "I am here to represent Yorkshire women, who always have dinner on the table when you get home."

"Mary Honeyball, a Labour colleague on the women's rights committee, suggested an investigation of his business practices by a discrimination tribunal."

Brilliant. The new Labour elite at their finest. "I disagree with what you say, so I will use the State to harass you". In a previous existence Ms Honeyball was a probation officer, dedicated to keeping real criminals out of jail in order to make room for villains like Mr Bloom.

(Ms Honeyball is also a military analyst of repute ('war is indeed a gendered activity'), pointing out that "Almost all the fighters in Afghanistan and indeed every other war are men." Other website articles describe the sky as 'blue' and mention that water runs downhill.)

This woman makes Jonathan Freedland look like a democrat.




UPDATE - this blogger is undergoing a similar crisis to Ms Honeyball. "I would like any who meets Godfrey Bloom in a dark alley to beat the living daylights out of him". Sorry, what's that definition of fascism again ?

Government By Plebiscite ?

Jonathan Freedland's remarkable idea of democracy in the Guardian.

"... when close to a majority of the country reaches a settled will on a matter of great import, that surely shouldn't be ignored. Yet the war went ahead anyway, endorsed by a large majority in the House of Commons. Whatever your views on the Iraq question, this surely amounted to a democratic failure: the system did not fully reflect the views of the people it is meant to represent."

Apparently a large majority in the House of Commons amounts to 'democratic failure'. I think it's called representative democracy, Jonathan - we've had it for some years now.

On an 'either-or' issue like going to war, where the country is fairly evenly split (I like that 'close to a majority', Jonathan - doesn't that imply 'not a majority' ?), ANY decision will not fully reflect the views of the people.

And when did the views of the people count for much with a Guardian columnist anyway ? Aren't they populist bigots ? Of course they aren't - as long as they agree with us.

Democracy - Guardian style.

Crime And Moral Panic

I can't be bothered with why it's all the 1960s fault either, Norm. And I've been dismantling a greenhouse - somewhat tired. So here's an old bulletin board post and a few useful links.

Liberals say that crime has been falling since 1995 and that those who worry about it are guilty of ‘moral panic’. They quote approvingly the Guardian’s favourite criminologist Jock Young, of Middlesex University (formerly Hounslow Technical College).

Two teensy pointettes – it is true that overall crime has been falling since 1995, in line with the increased use of imprisonment pioneered, against the advice of the entire liberal establishment, by Michael Howard. It is the continuation of this policy by Jack Straw and David Blunkett which is deplored by the Guardianistas.
Jock Young was one of the first criminologists to accept that rising crime (1960-1990) was a reality rather than the result of ‘moral panic’. Despite this, he’s in the forefront of the ‘prison doesn’t work’ brigade. Those who wish to read more of him than a Guardian article are recommended to read his chapter in the book ‘Does Prison Work’ (available from www.civitas.org.uk) in which two anti-prison sociologists debate crime and punishment with two realists. I don’t find his arguments convincing – he’s VERY selective in his use of data and has that leftish propensity to avoid a losing argument by concentrating on the (perceived) political beliefs of his opponent.

One large pointette – the idiotic idea that people concerned about crime are guilty of ‘moral panic’. Overall crime has fallen since 1995 (though violent crimes including homicide have increased), but crime is still at historically unprecedented levels. At the Office of National Statistics there were in 2002 a few Jubilee pages comparing life in 1952 with 2002. The page on crime showed it’s running at something like 10 times 1952 levels (and the number of prisoners has doubled).

I wrote some time ago on another website

Stay in Denial - the way to keep your idealism.

The pro-criminal lobby have reacted to the enormous growth in crime over the last 50 years with three distinct and successive strategies, the Three Stages of Denial.

First, they denied that crime had increased at all - society was merely in the grip of periodic 'moral panic' on the part of the old or ill-informed, aided and abetted by those sinister forces in society (the Daily Mail again ?) who wanted more power for the police. The old had always criticised the morality of the young throughout history - therefore concerns about crime were not justified and were a cultural phenomenon - the result of the old failing to accept the new-found freedoms of the young. This argument was common in the 1970's - Stanley Cohen's book 'Folk Devils and Moral Panics' is a typical and influential example.

But as the 1970s rolled on the inexorable increase in crime figures could not be ignored - a new explanation was necessary. So secondly, it was conceded that reported crime had increased, but that this was not due to changes in the actual crime rate, but due to changes in society. 'More people have phones, so it's easier to report'. 'More people have insurance, and so must report offences which they previously wouldn't have reported'. 'People report crimes now which they would have accepted in past times'. 'The police are inflating the figures to justify demanding increased resources'. The riots of the 1980s and 1990s and the flood of reports from the inner-city terraced streets and edge of town estates provided the evidence which finally killed this 'theory'. To quote Norman Dennis, 'by the mid-1990s ... the pernicious consensus was crumbling under the sheer weight of the facts that contradicted it'. It had only taken 25 years, years of unremitting rises in crime, for the fact of increased crime to sink in. But hang on, it couldn't be the criminals' fault. Whose fault was it, then ?

Suddenly there was an avalanche of theories designed to explain the rise in crime that had previously been denied. Bad housing, unemployment, the design of estates - all manner of physical, mechanistic explanations for crime. And the greatest of these was poverty. From the Church of England's 'Faith in the City' report in 1986 to the many reports of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Child Poverty Action Group, the message, put simply, was 'they thieve because they're poor'. And there was great political utility in this view during the Thatcher years. The same people on the 'left' who in the 1970s had characterised paid employment as soulless capitalist wage-slavery, the cause of alienation, suddenly decided that paid employment was a basic human right the ABSENCE of which caused alienation, of which crime was one symptom. Again put simply, the answer to the question 'whose fault was it, then ?' was 'THATCHER !'. So we have the third stage of denial - that yes, there is a lot of crime, but a) it's caused by poverty and our unjust society b) nothing can be done about it without relieving poverty/creating social justice.

There is only one problem with this view - it's contradicted by all the evidence. The evidence in favour of the view is basically - 'many criminals are poor, therefore poverty causes crime'. Unfortunately our great-grandparents (or grandparents if you're decrepit as I am) lived in conditions of much greater poverty and committed practically no crime.

Ah, say the pro-criminals, but it's RELATIVE poverty that counts. Again, alas, relative poverty was greater in the 20's and 30's - and it was rapidly decreasing during the 60s and 70s when crime was rising fast. For a comprehensive demolition of the crime/poverty equation Norman Dennis' book 'The Invention of Permanent Poverty' available from www.civitas.org.uk is a rattling good read. But for the Howard League, NACRO and their many, many political allies it is is almost impossible to conceive of crime as being the result of rational decisions taken by rational if unpleasant people. It must always be someone else's fault. Personal responsibility isn't a concept they're terribly keen on.



Norman Dennis
'Rising Crime and the Dismembered Family' can be downloaded here.
'The Invention of Permanent Poverty' can be purchased here (you can never get anywhere, at any price, a product quite so thrilling).
'Families without Fatherhood' may be downloaded here.

Ray Mallon, Ray Bratton et al - 'Zero Tolerance' may be downloaded here.

Charles Murray
'Underclass' here.
'Underclass +10' here.

Also see my Crime links.

Summer In The City

Dalrymple on multiculturalism, Michael Beran on learning poetry by rote, Heather MacDonald on Hispanic street gangs - the new Manhattan City Journal is out. Read the whole thing.

A Problem Shared Is A Problem Halved

British Spin seems to be picking up my sick AL Kennedy fetish. That's the second time he's noticed - not so much that she's not very good (or we'd blog about Zoe Williams every week), but that she seems somewhat deranged.
 
Reading these commentaries is like talking to an alcholic with extremely bad breath. You know there is a point being made, but the fumes and the stink make you utterly unable to focus on it.
 
I think a penchant for reading her columns is more like spotting someone in the street with a hideous deformity. It's awful, but can you look away ?
 
Norm can.
 

Toynbee's Children - US Chapter

Whatever the reason, it should be enough that a woman does not want a child. How dare the state force them? How dare anyone judge them?
 
You said it - whatever the reason.
 
"I'll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise."
 
The sentiments, apparently, of a modern feminist.
 
 
Emmeline Pankhurst is currently rotating at 8,500 rpm.
 
 
 
Via Dumb Jon.

BBC Bias Part 872

So Blunkett has yet another crime initiative on the go, and the BBC Today programme feel the need for a 5-minute opinion piece at 8.10 am on a Monday. Who better to deliver it than Claire Fox, the Marxist director of the Institute of Discredited Ideas ?
 
Once again we marvel at the neutrality of the BBC, happy to criticise a Tory Government (from the left) but just as capable of criticising a Labour government (from the left). What could be more even-handed ?   
 
 

Rod Liddle - La Lotta Continua

Usually a Saturday just means the new Weekly Worker. But there's a super new slew of Rod Liddle links around, from his foul-mouthed wife bemoaning her "pathetically paid" HTV job to his Telegraph apologia. The more I read the sorrier I am about the breakup - people who can call their kids Tyler and Wilder were made for each other. Will any children by Alicia Monckton be called Harder, Faster and Deeper ?
 
And as for the horse, Strummer - that is perfect. Naming your horse - your horse ! - after the public school webel who sang the urban warrior but lived and died in rural Somerset. Show me a Clash fan and I'll show you some idiot politics.
 
But he's unfairly treated in the London News Review, in a story obviously written by a woman. A real misreading of the male psyche.
 
"It’s one thing for Liddle to say that he fancies Keira Knightley. That would be an understandable, if predictable, statement. But what his ex-secretary and girlfriend doesn’t want to read is that her lovely Rod is likening her to a 19-year-old film star. She wants to hear that he thinks she’s beautiful, not that she looks like Keira Knightley. And she certainly doesn’t want to hear him endorse the sad ladsmag sentiment: “Men always want other women.”
It’s all so horribly uncool, and – for such a lady’s man – a real misreading of the female psyche. At the core of Liddle likening Monckton to Knightley is plain old lust. Lust for Keira Knightley." 
 
Missing the point. Of course he shouldn't let her know that. But that it's lust for the (doubtless) lovely Alicia, with the added bonus that she has some filmstar resemblances, I have little doubt.
 
 
 
UPDATE - despite my remarks about the Clash, I do have fond memories of the 12-inch Magnificent Seven dance mix (aka Magnificent Dance), as heard in 1981 in the Lampione - a pub with (in those days) a tiny dance floor and only two records to play. Fortunately one was the Clash and the other was a James Brown live album. People danced every night to the same nine songs - but what songs !
 

Nice Story ...

What's your seat number, soldier?

It's 23-B, sir, the soldier told the businessman.

No, son, that's my seat. Yours is in first class.

As more soldiers boarded, similar offers quickly came from the other first-class passengers.

And eight soldiers heading home from Iraq for two weeks of R&R found themselves with their officers in the big seats up front instead of the center seats in coach.

U.S soldiers fresh from Iraq were surprised but grateful for the first-class seats on Flight 866 from Atlanta to Chicago.

That spontaneous act of good will transformed American Airlines Flight 866, from Atlanta to Chicago, on June 29.

 
 Via Michelle Malkin from the Dallas Morning News. Registration required ? Just another chance to try this.

The Caves of a Thousand Buddhas

BBC news Department of the Bleeding Obvious tells us that some BNP members are racist or that there's corruption in Kenya (great speech though). Thank heavens, yet again, for the wondrous Mirabilis, with its tales of fat monks, chess and now the Dunhuang caves.

These of course are the caves described in Capt. W.E. Johns scholarly work 'Biggles In The Gobi'.

"Did you ever hear of the Caves of a Thousand Buddhas ?"
"No. That's a new one for me."
"Well, the place is pretty well known, although as it is practically inaccessible, few Europeans have seen it. It consists of a cliff honeycombed with innumerable caves, most of them interconnected and all wonderfully painted or decorated with images of Buddha. The whole place is artificial and of great age. It is believed that there are still secret recesses that no white man has ever seen. These particular caves, for there are many similar shrines in Central Asia, were first made known by the explorer Sir Aurel Stein in 1908 ..."

Capt. Johns seemed to be fond of that part of the world, as I pointed out here.

Mirabilis also links to this useful site, for people tired of registering for US news content. With its aid you can read the whole NYT story on the caves.

Polly Toynbee ....

Defends parental rights in the great smacking debate.

"How dare the state force them? How dare anyone judge them?"

Oops - sorry. She's not talking about the right to smack children.

She's talking about the right to kill them.

MRSA Update

Hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA are still rising. But they only kill about 5,000 patients a year, and our rulers are full of bright ideas on what to do about it.

Let's get some experts from abroad. When in doubt - hire a consultant.

Another good managerial solution - appoint a Director Of Infection Control at each hospital. Doubtless to be followed by an Assistant Director and a project team, monitors, facilitators and co-ordinators. And some secretarial support. And a PA or two. But there may be problems. Are there enough reserved car parking spaces ? And are there enough good quality hotels for all those away days, conferences and team-building exercises ?

The Guardian reports that the patients can do the monitoring of the wards. After all, they just lie around in bed all day, except those who are still on trolleys. Or in wheelchairs.

The Guardian also reports that the cause may be full occupancy of beds or (surprise surprise) shortage of funding (after all, we know how expensive soap is these days) or staff. Apparently when bed occupancy rises above 85%, so do infections. Simple solution then - buy some more beds and leave them empty !

On the other hand hospital staff could just wash their hands and clean the f*****g wards properly.

But apparently that sort of thing takes months or years. The Kent and Sussex hospital, which will be cleaner by Christmas, was killing patients with MRSA (and apologising for it) in 1996.

Hell Hath No Fury ....

One should not take pleasure in another's misfortune. Tee hee. But his fellow columnists have found plenty of copy in the Rod Liddle brouhaha. They're round him like flies round a cow's bottom, as we say in these parts.

The Spectator contributing editor and ex-editor of the BBC's Today programme seems to have been unable to resist the lure of all that posh Doughty Street totty, leaving his 40something wife for the 20something Alicia Monckton. I can't work out if she's related to Christopher (who sounds a thoroughly decent chap) and Di's mate Rosa. It's a long way from that field in Yarm or wherever, though I don't think our Rod ever kept whippets in the bath.

Spurned wifie, following the iron laws of retribution, sells story to Mail, the paper of contempt for the Today-editing classes. The Mail links are pay-for, but the Indie has the details.

Zoe Williams in the Guardian manages her usual thousand words of instantly forgettable drivel, but yet again it's Yazza who hits hardest. The Mail is your natural destiny, Yasmin. Don't fight it.

"Treacherous, and physically not unlike a malodorous mop in need of chucking out" - steady on, old girl. I always thought he had a touch of the Howard Marks myself.


UPDATE - 15/7
Even Mr Liddle himself is trying to get a few inches out of it. I like the bit about the Mail being a 'down-market tabloid'. There speaks the true voice of the middle-class Left.

Portaloo ....

Gets the wet fish treatment from Oliver Kamm and Dumb Jon after his Sunday Times 'Vote Kerry' piece.

As usual, Oliver is Olympian, measured, full of historical references, lovely style. If that guy went to a State school I'll eat my copy of 'Adventures of Aeneas'. Jon's style is more like the guy who discovers that both pint AND girl have been pinched in the pub.

Yet he hits some parts that Oliver doesn't reach. Here's Oliver on Portillo on Abu Ghraib and its meaning.

"Michael Portillo maintains: “For America to brush away its recent disgraces, the electorate will have to bin this Administration.”

Yet that is frivolous reasoning. The tortures and deaths in US custody require expiation, not just symbolically but practically, to the people of Iraq, in the form of due process and the rule of law. Those values, so traduced by American jailers, are exemplified in the arraignment before an Iraqi court of a despot whose regime was founded on torture and killing."

Absolutely. Correct. But Jon picks up on a point just as important and of more general application - the way in which the whole of the USA can apparently be tarred by what a couple of dozen of people in US uniform did at Abu Ghraib - yet a couple of dozen people slaughtering thousands in the name of Islam doesn't tell us anything about that religion. Some logical inconsistency in the thought processes of Portillo and many others. Apparently that kind of stereotyping is OK for them, but not for us.

"Look at the first few 'graphs, the faux-agony as Mikey finds himself forced - forced! - to criticise America. He doesn't want to, but now he's found out about the behaviour of a half-dozen trailer trash on a single day in November 2003, why, there's no choice. I'll give him that if he accepts that the events of a whole 19 Muslims on a certain day in 2001 say all we need to know about Islam. Oops no - that would be bigoted, whereas spinning the behaviour of six perverted 'tards into a broadbrush condemnation of the US is tres sophisticated."

And On The Twelfth I Love To Update The Blog My Father Wrote

Where's the biggest folk festival in Europe ? Sidmouth ? Cambridge ? Dranouter ?

Try again. Think (assuming you grew up with the Guardian and BBC) bone-headed bigots in bowler hats. Think flute and drum. Think the 12th July in Ulster.

I can't recommend highly enough Ruth Dudley Edwards' book on the Orangemen of Ulster The Faithful Tribe, a book which (combined with talking to Ulster exiles, very few of whom had two heads) changed my views on subjects like Drumcree.

Read it. Visit the Orange Net and see the Grand Masters of Togo and Ghana.

And on the 12th raise a glass of Black Bush to an epoch-making event - the first known Observer column to have a good word for the Rev. Ian Paisley.

"Observing the mayor of London greeting the Qatar-based Imam, I wondered if Livingstone would ever extend the same warm welcome to the UK capital for, say, the Reverend Ian Paisley. Isn't it funny that sections of the British left regard Christian fundamentalists such as Dr Paisley with total contempt but will open the doors to a man who describes suicide bombings of men, women and children as 'martyrdom in the name of God'?

Because for all Dr Paisley's faults and for all his church's illiberalism towards the gay community, the head of the Free Presbyterian Church does not implore his followers to, for instance, go out and murder homosexuals and lesbians."

For years even the 'moderate' left talked of Adams and Paisley as being more or less interchangeable, the 'two extremes' of Ulster politics. It's a travesty of the truth. Paisley has never supported, directly or indirectly, the murders and mutilations carried out by paramilitaries, let alone organising them as Adams and co. have done.

And he's one of the few great speakers left in politics. Read this Hansard debate and you can hear those rolling, judgemental, thunderous tones.

Rev. Ian Paisley: I am sorry, but I am not giving way. The hon. Gentleman will have to contain himself for once.

Let me tell the House that this matter is not about postponing the election. I noticed that many speakers used the word that I used in the first part of the debate—cancelling. This is a cancellation. If it were a postponement, we could have autumn defined. I ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who comes from Wales, a beautiful Principality that I dearly love, when autumn starts and ends in Wales. Perhaps at the end of the debate he will do so through the mouth of the Under-Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office, who comes from Scotland. Then, I, an ignorant man from Ulster, will know when autumn starts and ends.

Blogger Appears To Be Crumbling Away ...

Judging by the sweets and radioactive squirrels appearing below, Blogger's servers have a hardware problem. More later ...

UPDATE - fixed. I gained an extra post full of Blogger HTML from God knows where. Found and deleted. Wonder if someone's got one of my posts on their blog ?

To Every Little Action ....

The anti-parent - sorry, anti-smacking campaign has long found greatest support in the most politically correct part of Britain - the Central Belt (sorry) of Scotland. Not that the inhabitants are particularly PC (far from it in my experience), but total left dominance has enabled the Scottish Parliament to host some particularly idiotic debates.

Already Dad's slipper and the clip round the ear have been consigned to the dustbin of history, and Scotland has an unenviable record on jailing tourists ('French children are so well-behaved') and sacking teachers for the grave offence of disciplining their own children.

I can't understand then why discipline in Scottish schools seems to be deteriorating so much. Look at the links from a report of the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association conference last year.

This year the conference of the largest Scots teaching union, the EIS, is reported as follows :

"The issue of increasingly violent pupils dominated much of this morning’s session at the EIS conference in Dundee’s Caird Hall.

Against a background of rocketing attacks, despite “massive under-reporting” of such incidents, repeated calls were made for teachers to be able to go about their work without fear of assault.

Some estimates show an increase in assaults by pupils on teachers over the last year of 20%. These concern reported incidents only with no figures available on the actual number of incidents.

Larry Flanagan, of the union’s Glasgow branch, told delegates that thousands of attacks were being made on teachers every year across Scotland and they were now in real need of protection. South Lanarkshire teacher Linzi Moore movingly described how violence in school had affected her entire life. She said it had shattered her confidence, reduced her to tears and reached a stage where she could not face going to work.

She said, “There must be effective sanctions against people committing these incidents.”

EIS executive council member Willie Hart said education authorities had to face up to the problem and not just sweep it under the carpet."

I don't understand. If violence breeds violence, surely Scottish school discipline should be a marvel, given that the dominie's tawse went out in the 1970s (I was talking at the weekend to a native of Fife, who remembered abolition and the worst behaved boy in the school asking for (and being given) the headmaster's tawse as a souvenir).


PS - I've written before about the reluctance of anti-family organisations to provide evidence to support their campaigns, but here's one small and idiotic piece of research from the NSPCC.

"Discussions with more than 70 children aged four to seven indicated that children felt smacking reinforced cycles of violent behaviour and did little to help build up a positive relationship between parent and child."

I like that 'indicated'. Our old mate the cycle of violence comes out for a pedal, too. And apparently children had 'negative feelings' on the subject. I think that's the whole idea, actually, without getting too B.F. Skinner about it all. The research boils down to 'children don't like being smacked'. I'd be worried if the results were anything else.