One Big Cheer

US forces "took custody" of Bin Laden's body, Obama said.

Huzzah ! And fair play to Obama.

The US stressed Islamic practices would be respected.

If my memory serves the Brits were less sensitive to the religious needs of a killer, back in the days when James Abbott restored to the Muslim population of Hazara the religious freedoms which were suppressed under Sikh rule. The 1853 assassin of Colonel Frederick Mackeson in Peshawar was hanged before being sewn into a pigskin ('most abhorrent to Muhammedans' said John Lawrence, who gave the order) and cremated in the Hindu fashion before the ashes were thrown in a river.

A/c/t this Google Maps link* at Steve Sailer's, Bin Laden's compound was just up the road from the Pakistan Military Academy. Make of that what you will - he certainly has.

Pakistan had to know. This location can't possibly be a coincidence. Pakistani government insiders put him right in their pocket so they could protect him. They hugged him to their bosom.

On the other hand, it's not as if the Pakistan Military Academy seem to have turned out to protect the compound - although there are conflicting reports about what happened to one helicopter. Did it just malfunction/suffer small arms damage, or was it shot down by a missile? And was it a US helicopter?

UPDATE - Christopher Hitchens seems to agree with Sailer:

If you tell me that you are staying in a rather nice walled compound in Abbottabad, I can tell you in return that you are the honored guest of a military establishment that annually consumes several billion dollars of American aid. It’s the sheer blatancy of it that catches the breath.

UPDATE - a/c/t Wikileaks Pakistani intelligence are allegedly heavily involved with the Taleban and Al Qaeda :

American diplomats were told that one of the key reasons why they had failed to find bin Laden was that Pakistan’s security services tipped him off whenever US troops approached. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) also allegedly smuggled al-Qaeda terrorists through airport security to help them avoid capture and sent a unit into Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban.

UPDATE - via commenter Mark, this 2002 Seymour Hersh story alleges that thousands of Pakistani intelligence and military operatives, Taleban and Al Qaeda fighters and their hangers-on were airlifted by Pakistan out of the city of Kunduz, just before it fell to the Northern Alliance in November 2001. The Americans co-operated, setting up an air corridor to allow the flights safe passage.

According to RAW’s senior analyst for Pakistani and Afghan issues, the most extensive rescue efforts took place on three nights at the time of the fall of Kunduz. Indian intelligence had concluded that eight thousand or more men were trapped inside the city in the last days of the siege, roughly half of whom were Pakistanis. (Afghans, Uzbeks, Chechens, and various Arab mercenaries accounted for the rest.) At least five flights were specifically “confirmed” by India’s informants, the RAW analyst told me, and many more were believed to have taken place.

In the Indian assessment, thirty-three hundred prisoners surrendered to a Northern Alliance tribal faction headed by General Abdul Rashid Dostum. A few hundred Taliban were also turned over to other tribal leaders. That left between four and five thousand men unaccounted for. “Where are the balance?” the intelligence officer asked. According to him, two Pakistani Army generals were on the flights.

Now due allowance must be made for the fact that India and Pakistan hate each other's guts. But unnamed US officials seem to have confirmed the story, off the record, to Hersh.


* Google allows reviews. Best one - "Aside from the complimentary dialysis machine use, easy underground access to Pakistan's beautiful vast cave system, and free toaster waffles, it's a pretty big dump. The food wasn't organic, the wifi was spotty at best, absolutely no cell coverage, (yelp reviews were so wrong on that one) and no one spoke English. To make it worse, the country's best basketball player, some 6'7" dude with a turban, gets shot our first night there. And the coffee was cold. We're so not coming back. "

Shame

I yield to no one in my detestation of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. But the decision not to invite them to today's bash seems petty - and in the case of Brown, downright vindictive - talk about kicking a man when he's down. What must his wife think ?

Blair was a snake-oil salesman, Brown a magician whose house of cards finally tumbled. But Blair was elected Prime Minister three times - as many as Margaret Thatcher - and Brown was PM this time last year. Questions of personal like or dislike shouldn't have come into it - they should both, as former leaders of Britain, be at what in all but name is a full State occasion.

It will give a degree of aid and comfort to Labour Party republicans - although recognising political realities*, none will be going to the scaffold for Blair or Brown - but that's not the main objection.

Stephen Glover nails it :

"it is highly regrettable — indeed, I would say constitutionally irregular — that the two most recent prime ministers of this country, who happen to be Labour, have not been invited to Friday's Royal Wedding... whatever the explanation, this is a decision that will damage the monarchy more than the feelings of Mr Blair and Mr Brown. Once the Crown appears to be taking sides — and that is the impression, if not the intention — our delicate constitutional arrangements are imperilled."

* the Mail comments are overwhelmingly anti-Blair and Brown. As I've written before, the Mail comments are where you can see the real damage that's been done to British culture over the last 40 years. Whatever happened to fair play?


I almost forgot to say. In Martin Kelly's words : Best wishes to the happy couple for a long and fulfilling married life; and also to everyone else who has married yesterday and today, who is getting married tomorrow, and who will get married from now until the end of time.

Separated At Birth

Daniel Knowles, Assistant Comment Editor at the Telegraph.













Grabber, Head Boy of St Custards, "Captane of Everything, and winner of the Mrs Joyful Prize for rafia work".

Unbelievable Fact Of The Day

via the comments at Socialist Unity, the revelation that the father of jazz-funk maestro Gil Scott-Heron (try this for a happy holiday sound) played football for Kidderminster Harriers.

Happy Birthday !

You've always done your duty (with the possible exception of a failure to send Heath and Blair to the Tower ... admittedly it would have been controversial at the time, but a monarch's place is to think of the survival of the nation, not just the institution. I guess you could respond that we voted for them, after all).

"Is this going to be used to kill the English?"

I admit to finding this story hard to believe. But a lot of hard to believe things happen in Israeli politics, as anyone taking even a cursory glance at the subject will notice.

Telegraph :

Israel secretly supplied arms and equipment to Argentina during the Falklands War due to Prime Minister Menachem Begin's personal hatred of the British, a new book discloses. Interviews conducted by the author of the book, the Argentine journalist Hernan Dobry, reveal that Begin saw the deals as a form of revenge for the hanging of a personal friend, Dov Gruner, by the British Mandatory Authorities in Palestine in 1947.

After the Argentine Air Force contacted Isrex, the Israeli defence company, a meeting was arranged between representatives of the company and Begin. Israel Lotersztain, a salesman for Isrex Argentina, said Begin interrupted the Isrex officials as they tried to explain the situation, saying: "You've come to talk badly about the British. Is this going to be used to kill the English? Kadima (go ahead). Dov [Gruner] up there is going to be happy with the decision. Obviously, it must be all done perfectly."

Gruner was sentenced to death for his part in an attack on a police station by Irgun, the Zionist underground paramilitary movement which Begin commanded before the state of Israel was established. As he awaited hanging, he wrote a letter to Begin, thanking him for his support and emphasising his belief in Irgun.

"He [Begin] hated the English above all; everyone had forgotten the British occupation, but not him" according to Lotersztain. His colleague Jaime Weinstein agreed, saying: "He did all that was possible to help Argentina, selling her weapons during the Malvinas [the Argentine name for the Falklands] conflict."

Well, if this is true, the dirty dog. Since when was any country's foreign policy the vehicle of its leader's personal prejudice, outside of a dictatorship ? No wonder Ben Gurion looked upon Begin as an extremist, and denounced his terror group Irgun as the “enemy of the Jewish People”. No wonder Einstein and Hannah Arendt described his immediate post-war party as "a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties".

There were five flights in total from Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires via Lima, loaded with equipment such as gas masks, radar warning systems to prevent fire from enemy missiles, air to air missiles, duvet jackets and spare parts. Additional fuel tanks for fighter bombers supplied by Israel were particularly important for Argentina's war effort as they enabled pilots to fly to the Falklands and return to the Argentine mainland without stopping. Dobry discovered that Israel sent 1,500-litre tanks rather than the standard 1,300-litre models and writes that this meant the British Task Force had to move its fleet further east to prevent further bombings.

They did indeed move the Task Force east, after the loss of HMS Coventry and Atlantic Conveyor. But a/c/t Max Hastings' book on the conflict, the Super Etendards which sank the Conveyor were refuelled in mid-air by other Etendards, and the Argentinians were 'chronically short' of drop-tanks. The Israeli intervention probably killed far fewer people than were killed in the anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic bombings of the next decade in Argentina. But it's the thought that counts.

What's even stranger is that apparently the Brits were aware of Begin's dastardly deeds, and kept schtum AFAIK.

However, British intelligence services kept track of aircraft landing in Peru and even photographed some of the arrivals. "A newspaper once published a picture showing the loading on to an Aerolineas Argentinas plane and the British ambassador in Israel took the photo to Begin and hell broke out," said Lotersztain. "They were aware of the whole operation to the extent that sometimes when we discussed whether some supplies had arrived we would say, 'let's ask the English'".

Imagine that a British Prime Minister once had a young friend killed in the Falklands. Thirty-five years on he remembers that fact, and starts supplying weapons to Hezbollah via Syria, asking the Syrian purchasers "Is this going to be used to kill the Israelis?". Wouldn't happen. Who was it who said that a nation has no friends, only interests ? But what we see here, if true, is .. well, for once I'm lost for words.

The Curfew Tolls The Knell Of Parting Day

A source said that the two men, both black, were known to each other. It is believed they were both from Slough. Other witnesses said there had been a confrontation between the two men and that one had tried to flee from the other. A local shopkeeper, who asked not to be named, said: 'One man was trying to run away from the other one. A black taxi was flagged down and both men jumped in. They were arguing and one of the men then pulled out a knife and did the stabbing. There was blood over the seat and on the pavement as the door was still open. The taxi driver, who I think was a Sikh and had been on his way home at the time, then panicked and took the men to the police station.'

Thames Valley Police confirmed that the death was being treated as murder. A spokesman said: ''The major crime team from Thames Valley Police is investigating the killing of a man who arrived at Slough Police Station in Windsor Road in a taxi. An ambulance was called but unfortunately he was declared dead before he reached hospital. An area at the police station has been sealed off for forensic examination, along with an area of Stoke Poges Lane."

It was in the churchyard at Stoke Poges that Thomas Gray wrote that most English of poems, the Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard.

"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

"strengthening the family and increasing the birth rate"

I've covered the Russian demographic disaster previously. Now ...

"Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has unveiled plans to reverse Russia's declining population. The government will spend 1.5tn roubles ($53bn; £33bn) on raising the birth rate and extending life expectancy."

Not only that, this summer they'll be hosting in Moscow what's described as the first world pro-life and pro-family demography conference. Ironic, considering that Russia is still the world's abortion capital. Maybe Mr Putin needs to consider figures like these :

"In 2001, 1,320,000 children were born in Russia, while 1,800,000 abortions were performed. The abortion rate in the USSR peaked in 1964, when 5.6 million abortions were performed, the highest number in Russia’s history."

Makes the UK, where about 25% of pregnancies are aborted, look a model of restraint.

Russia also shares with the UK the demographic feature that some ethnic groups have a lot more babies than others. Encouraging more Russians may, for example, encourage even more Chechens.

Quite how you encourage people to have more babies is an interesting point. I'm generally inclined towards Steve Sailer's theories on Affordable Family Formation, but there are a host of other cultural factors. AFF is IMHO generally valid as a pointer to relative fertility within a given group - say working and middle-class white Americans or Britons. But that wouldn't, for example, explain why those of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage have so many more babies than white Brits - my guess would be that rearing five children on housing benefit in East London compares most favourably with raising them in Sylhet or Mirpur. 'Affordable' means different things to different cultural groups.

The Japanese are from 2010 paying parents £175 per month per child, something this father of four would have loved (and although UK child benefit stops when they leave school, strangely the student grant people consider them to be dependent up to the age of 25). Be interesting to see if it works, although remembering the insane house prices in Japan family formation still isn't exactly affordable.

But there's more to having children than affordability. What sort of country will they grow up in? When I look at a possible UK future, I often wonder what possessed us - and I encourage my children to have an exit strategy. Over the last week, I read two books on Russia - Roderic Braithwaite's 'Moscow 1941' and the late Anna Politkovskaya's 'Putin's Russia'. In many respects - incompetence, corruption, despotism at local and national levels, the cheapness of human life, the country doesn't seem to have changed that much in seventy years.

Politkovskaya's book is almost unreadable in its depressing quality. Her Russia isn't a place you'd ideally choose to sprog in. One tale of brutality and corruption after another - to the point where you start to wonder whether things can really be this bad. Then you remember her murder. Which le Carre novel is it where the quality of information is attested to by the murder of the provider ?

Along with AFF (with allowances made for group differences), I'd suggest that confidence is key to sprogging in a world with freely available and effective contraception, just as we're always told that confidence is key to business investment decisions - and what greater investment than children ? The hope and expectation that your children will have a better life than their parents will IMHO be a key driver of fertility, all else being equal. True for the baby-boomer parents of the post-war West, true for the Bangladeshis and Mirpuris of Bradford and Tower Hamlets. But for today's Russians ? And today's Brits ?

Innsmouth

"It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed “widow’s walks”. These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition."

Light Blogging ...

Unless I can find an internet cafe in the Innsmouth of Yorkshire. Taking a few days away.

"No Irish Need Apply"

The (American) liberal myth of 'No Irish Need Apply'.

The fact that Irish vividly "remember" NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one. This is especially strange since signs were primarily directed toward these others: the signs said that employment was available here and invited Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. The courts are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through the window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend?

As every Brit liberal knows, the streets of 1950s London were full of 'No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish' signs. Yet on the Web there's only one photo which looks as if it could be authentic - source unknown to me - and in an admittedly cursory trawl of the web I've not found any contemporary reports of them - just hundreds of "are we returning to the days of" blog posts and dozens of "my father came to London at a time when" pieces. You really would think that it might turn up in Hansard - I must take a look. Maybe it's yet another liberal myth aka libel against the native Brits. Not that there aren't similar signs to be seen in London to this day - only strangely, no one makes a fuss about them. Can't imagine why.



















(cropped photo from ruskin51's photostream)

Now I've got no real problems with an Asian family wishing to share their house with people of their own culture or ethnicity - or even rent it. You want as tenants/lodgers people you can trust, and as the late Emperor Claudius puts it 'the knee is nearer than the shin'. For good reasons, people tend to trust people who are like themselves, and as Robert Putnam points out :

"the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor"

But these signs are presumably illegal under British law. I suppose the reason we're not seeing these cases in the court reports is that the law was designed to stop natives putting up these kinds of advert.

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Mail :

"A massive surge in crimes committed by pensioners has sparked a 'grey crime wave' and seen the number of offences carried out by over 65s rise almost 50% in the last five years. OAPs have been charged with a variety of crimes which include carrying knives and guns, theft, fraud, shoplifting, drink-driving and sexual offences.

Cambridgeshire Constabulary today revealed that crimes have risen by a staggering 47 per cent for the age group since 2007."

Crime's a young person's - usually a young man's - game. Peak offending rates are I believe in the 15-21 years. But a small proportion of criminals will continue as they get older - especially in fields like selling stolen goods where contacts and trust are important.

Crime more than doubled between 1955 and 1965. A 20 year old in 1965 will be 66 now.

But look at the increases in the 70s, 80s (as the underclass grew) and early 90s. The over-65 crime rate has plenty of room for expansion as those generations age.

Those Damn Normans

Coming over here, slaughtering our nobles (who in their turn had slaughtered many Romano-British nobles), building their castles on our monastic cemeteries - and hanging onto their ill-gotten gains...

Telegraph :

"People with "Norman" surnames like Darcy and Mandeville are still wealthier than the general population 1,000 years after their descendants conquered Britain, according to a study into social progress. Drawing on data culled from official records that go back as far as the Domesday Book as well as university admissions and probate archives, Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, has tracked what became of people whose surnames indicated their ancestors had come from either the aristocratic or artisanal classes. By studying the probate records of those with “rich” and “poor” surnames every decade since the 1850s, he found that the extreme differences in accumulated wealth narrowed over time. But the value of the estates left by those belonging to the “rich” surname group, immortalised in the character of Fitzwilliam Darcy, in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, were above the national average by at least 10 per cent. In addition, today the holders of "rich" surnames live three years longer than average. Life expectancy is a strong indicator of socio-economic status."

But not always :

"Throw up your chin a moment, so that I may catch the profile of your face better. Yes, that's the d'Urberville nose and chin—a little debased. Your ancestor was one of the twelve knights who assisted the Lord of Estremavilla in Normandy in his conquest of Glamorganshire. Branches of your family held manors over all this part of England; their names appear in the Pipe Rolls in the time of King Stephen. In the reign of King John one of them was rich enough to give a manor to the Knights Hospitallers; and in Edward the Second's time your forefather Brian was summoned to Westminster to attend the great Council there. You declined a little in Oliver Cromwell's time, but to no serious extent, and in Charles the Second's reign you were made Knights of the Royal Oak for your loyalty. Aye, there have been generations of Sir Johns among you, and if knighthood were hereditary, like a baronetcy, as it practically was in old times, when men were knighted from father to son, you would be Sir John now."

"Ye don't say so!"

"In short," concluded the parson, decisively smacking his leg with his switch, "there's hardly such another family in England."

"Daze my eyes, and isn't there?" said Durbeyfield. "And here have I been knocking about, year after year, from pillar to post, as if I was no more than the commonest feller in the parish…"

Cognitive Dissonance Alert - Daily Mail Edition

In the Money section, Jonathan Portes (Gordon Brown speechwriter and author of the report "Migration: An Economic And Social Analysis", famously revealed by Andrew Neather as "aimed to make Britain more multi-cultural for political reasons") :

"There is not a single serious economic study that suggests immigration has had any significant impact on the employment of British workers. Immigration may have had some effect on wages, but not very much. A report last year from MigrationWatch found that unemployment is higher in those areas of England that have experienced the highest levels of immigration. True. But those areas had higher levels of unemployment to start with - so it wasn't the immigrants who caused it. Even more to the point, during the period MigrationWatch looked at, the areas with more immigration actually did better in terms of unemployment.

Nor are immigrants a drain on the state. Some immigrants claim benefits, use the Health Service, have children at school, commit crimes and so on. But they pay taxes too. And on average, they pay more in tax and use less in services than natives. This is hardly surprising since many, if not most, immigrants come here to work or study. So overall they reduce the tax burden on the rest of us. Fewer migrants will mean higher taxes or cuts in services."

Alas he gives no references for these remarkable claims. I point readers towards the ONS figures for unemployment by ethnicity.





















Given that "Mr Portes remains an enthusiastic advocate of the benefits of immigration. He wrote a report for the Department of Work and Pensions last year rejecting claims that Eastern European workers had stolen the jobs of British counterparts, arguing Britons lacked the skills and motivation", I think we can probably take the attitude to his writings that Mary McCarthy took to Lillian Hellman's ("every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'").




I digress. In that same edition of the Mail, news section :

"Migrant crime wave revealed: Foreign arrests have almost doubled in just THREE years"

"The number of foreigners arrested for committing crimes in Britain has almost doubled in the past three years, police revealed today. Figures show that in 2010 more than 91,234 non-British nationals were held for crimes including murder, burglary and sexual offences. By contrast, only 51,899 foreigners were arrested in 2008 - meaning there has been a worrying increase of 76 per cent over the past three years."

Yes campaign denies it kept white actor off leaflets

(As seen in all papers.)

By Kunal Dutta

Monday, 4 April 2011

Tony Robinson: The actor's endorsement of the Yes campaign was printed on leaflets for the Home Counties, but not for London, where Benjamin Zephaniah was used instead.

Campaigners supporting the alternative vote have denied accusations that they "airbrushed" the white actor Tony Robinson out of leaflets distributed in London.

The campaign used Robinson's picture as an endorsement on literature in the Home Counties, Hampshire and Cornwall, but in London the leaflets featured the black poet Benjamin Zephaniah, prompting accusations from rivals that the Yes campaign was "ashamed" of the actor's backing.

A Few Cowslips From The Curate's Coppice

It's not going too well at Fukushima. I think the words "sawdust and newspapers were also used" are the giveaway - never words you want to hear in the context of a leaking nuclear reactor.

A complete history of radiation incidents - I see that Russian criminals seem to be able to get hold of radioactive sources, while in Taiwan and China people use them to attack their co-workers. Many remote Russian lighthouses are powered by radioactive sources - which foolish crooks try to steal for scrap - a usually fatal decision. But the scariest stories of all are the criticality accidents. You're experimenting with a ball of plutonium and accidentally drop a piece of metal too close to it - a blue flash and a wave of heat - you swipe away the metal, but in those seconds you receive a fatal dose of radiation.

I mentioned flight JAL123 the other day, in the context of the downside to Japanese acceptance of responsibility. What I didn't mention was that the Japanese pilots kept the plane in the air for 32 minutes (passengers wrote farewell letters), despite having lost ALL the main controls - rudder, ailerons, elevators. The only control they could exert was differential thrust on the wing-mounted engines. When pilots attempted similar control on simulators as part of the post-crash analysis, they couldn't match the performance of Captain Tamahaka's crew in terms of keeping the aircraft aloft.

JAL123 lost control near mountains and nearly all the passengers and aircrew died. When United Airlines Flight 232 lost all controls after an engine failure, they were over level country. Using only the engines to steer the plane (they could only turn right, so moved in a series of loops), they found an airport and crash-landed on the runway - the majority of passengers survived though over a hundred died. The cockpit recording transcript is as gripping as any novel, and Captain Haynes lecture at Edwards Air Force Base shows you one impressive character.

I missed this one - Julie Bindel treading carefully on the subject of Charlene Downes.



UPDATE - commenter Brian says : "The story of the radioactive boy scout isn't mentioned (in the radiation log - LT)."

Oh yes it is.

Praise Japan - Up To A Point

Katharine Birbalsingh in the Telegraph lauds those Japanese executives with whom the buck stops.

"These Japanese men have a code of honour that tells them that they are responsible simply because they were in charge. These days, that way of thinking is so alien to us in the West. We used to think like that once upon a time, long before I was even born. When the terrible events in Japan first happened, I looked on with admiration at their ordered and sensible behaviour. Now I look at two men and wish not only that my kids could know their sense of honour and duty, but that I might have the privilege of being like them too."

Well, up to a point - or maybe several points. One is that a sense of honour and duty can be associated with very unpleasant behaviour. The Japanese sense of honour and duty - bushido - led their soldiers to fight unto death in WWII. At Iwo Jima "of the 22,785 Japanese soldiers entrenched on the island, 21,569 died either from fighting or by ritual suicide. Only 216 were captured during the battle.". The flip side of this was that Japanese troops despised those Allied soldiers who did surrender - and this attitude enabled the dreadful treatment of Allied prisoners, among other war crimes.

Another point relates to the sense of personal, corporate or national responsibility. Twenty five years back, a younger Laban was impressed by the reported response of Japan Airlines executives to the JAL123 crash, where one of their planes lost all control and flew into a mountain, killing more than 500 people in what remains the world's worst single-plane disaster. According to press reports at the time, JAL executives accompanied relatives of the dead on the difficult climb to the crash site - and they carried or supported frail or elderly relatives up the mountain as a token of contrition. The JAL president resigned and a maintenance manager committed suicide, as did the engineer who supervised the repair which failed and was the cause of the crash.

All very noble, and accepting of responsibility. But ...

"United States Air Force controllers at Yokota Air Force base situated near the flight path of Flight 123 had been monitoring the distressed aircraft's calls for help. They maintained contact throughout the ordeal with Japanese flight control officials and made their landing strip available to the airplane. After losing track on radar, a U.S. Air Force C-130 from the 345 TAS was asked to search for the missing plane. The C-130 crew was the first to spot the crash site 20 minutes after impact, while it was still daylight. The crew radioed Yokota Air Base to alert them and directed an USAF Huey helicopter from Yokota to the crash site. Rescue teams were assembled in preparation to lower Marines down for rescues by helicopter tow line."

Now we see the other side of "accepting responsibility".

"The offers by American forces of help to guide Japanese forces immediately to the crash site and of rescue assistance were rejected by Japanese officials. Instead, Japanese government representatives ordered the U.S. crew to keep away from the crash site and return to Yokota Air Base, stating the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) were going to handle the entire rescue alone."

But by now darkness was approaching. The JSDF helicopter didn't get to the site before dark and couldn't land. It could see no signs of life, and so rescuers didn't start out to the site until the following morning.

"Medical staff later found a number of passengers' bodies whose injuries indicated that they had survived the crash only to die from shock or exposure overnight in the mountains while awaiting rescue. One doctor said "If the discovery had come ten hours earlier, we could have found more survivors."

Yumi Ochiai, one of the four survivors out of 524 passengers and crew, recounted from her hospital bed that she recalled bright lights and the sound of helicopter rotors shortly after she awoke amid the wreckage, and while she could hear screaming and moaning from other survivors, these sounds gradually died away during the night."

Those people died because the Japanese authorities did not want to lose face by making the rescue an American one, despite the fact that the Americans could have had medics on site within an hour of impact. Responsibility also meant that the responsibility for the rescue must be Japanese. I can't but feel there's a parallel here with the behaviour of TEPCO (and, to some extent, the Japanese government, with whom the buck finally stops) in the first week after the tsunami hit the Fukushima nuclear reactors. It was only after two major explosions, a series of fires, and efforts which revealed to the world that they were running out of ideas, that outside help was brought in.

Radical New 'Welfare-To-Work' Scheme

People often knock the travelling community. I've done it myself. But I've never said they were stupid people.

If the allegations in this report are correct, the Government need to consider whether handing out welfare-to-work contracts to Serco or Vertex really provides bang for the taxpayer buck, compared with the innovative strategies allegedly pioneered at Beggars Roost Caravan site by the Connors family.

"'The allegation is that the defendants offered accommodation and work to vulnerable homeless individuals then moved them into virtually uninhabitable caravans. They then required them to do manual work for excessive hours for payments of no more than £20 a day and in some cases no payment at all.They were given minimal amounts of food. Movements are restricted, mobile phones are not allowed and victims are kept in fear of reprisals if they attempt to leave. Identity and benefit documents are removed from them for so called safe keeping. We say they were retained by Breda Connors in particular.'

Men would be forced to work for up to 14 hours a day and moved from location to location around the country, he said. 'Many of the victims are homeless alcoholics, the most vulnerable persons in society.'

Mr Dono said police observed 22 alleged slaves living at Beggar's Roost caravan site. They were sent to work in Worcestershire and the West Midlands tarmacking and block paving driveways.

'It is clear from police videos that the slaves have minimal clothing, they are always dirty and disheveled, they look extremely unhappy and there is evidence of members of the Connors family at the locations in charge of the workers.'

On March 22nd, said Mr Dono, police raided Beggar's Roost with a search warrant and arrested William and Breda Connors. A travellers site in Enderby, Leicestershire, was also raided and Miles Connors was arrested there while eight alleged vicitms were found. A site in Common Lane, Pleasley, Derby, was raided at the same time and John Connors was arrested and seven victims discovered. An address in Stanway road, Coney Hill, Gloucester, was searched by police and documentary evidence was seized. Mr Dono said it was alleged that the caravans in which victims were kept had no running water, minimal heating, haphazard and dangerous cooking facilities, and no proper washing facilities. Victims who had tried to leave sites had been tracked down and returned by members of the Connors family, he alleged.

'These victims are extremely vulnerable and are now in a safe house. We say some of them have been indoctrinated for as much as 20 years working in this way, They are people who are clearly fearful. Twenty victims have so far been recovered from the Connors family but inquiries are at an early stage and it is expected there will be more. Some of them have allegedly been exploited and beaten for years and they have described their living conditions as appalling.'"

Now obviously I can't comment on some of the wilder allegations being made here, and which are anyway sub judice. But it seems clear that, given the right incentives and tightly defined business requirements, even homeless alcoholics, a client group which ATOS Origin or EDS would run a mile from, can potentially play a useful role (for up to 14 hours a day) in the important block paving sector. If Mr and Mrs Connors are acquitted, their undoubted management and motivational skills could surely find a place in the consultancy world. Accenture are always on the lookout for talent - and the Connors sound like partnership material.



UPDATE - the legendary Johnson family, stars of their own BBC series, had a chap who lived on their site, described as a 'drifter', who died mysteriously. And Julia has a story of travellers who cared for a man with learning disabilities, and were big-hearted enough to build him a house.

And It Begins ...

18th March :

23:44:Libyan state television cites a senior security source as saying that Libya has decided to "absolve itself from taking responsibility for stemming illegal immigration to Europe"

Gaddafi, until recent events, was paid by Italy (I don't know what's happened to those payments) to police his Med coast - something he seems to have done effectively.

Now :

By Associated Press, Sunday, March 27, 11:32 AM

ROME — Boatloads of illegal African migrants have resumed setting sail from Libya for Italy, authorities said, overwhelming tiny islands and towns in southern Italy already struggling to host thousands fleeing unrest in Tunisia. Before dawn Sunday, Italian coast guard vessels escorted a boat crowded with 284 Somalis, Eritreans and Ethiopians to shore, the first boat to resume the long-established routes of smugglers’ boats toward Italy from Libya’s long coastline.

Since Lampedusa, a tiny island off Sicily, is already straining from sheltering the thousands of Tunisians, who have taken to sleeping on docks and fields after housing space ran out, the boat from Libya was diverted to Linosa, an even tinier island in the Pelagie archipelago south of Sicily.

Authorities said at least two other boats coming from Libya with hundreds of migrants aboard were spotted by fishing boats or coast guard air and sea patrolling the southern Mediterranean Sunday.

A Few Orchids From The Curate's Wood

Fascinating (though some dissent in the comments, both from outsiders and insiders) Telegraph article on the ultra-orthodox Haredi Jews of North London, who are to Judaism what the Jehovah's Witnesses are to Christianity. I think these are the same people (she calls them Hasidim, which is IIRC a subset of Haredi Orthodoxy) who the Indie's Christina Patterson hasn't a great deal of time for (a view returned by non-Orthodox writers with interest). What I'm certain of is that the Hasidim/Haredim will be the people driving the Orthodox population boom.

"It is a deeply conservative community that venerates religious learning above all else and in which Yiddish is the primary language. Following the Biblical commandment to 'be fruitful and multiply’, families of seven or eight children are common; relations between the sexes are stringently policed, and arranged marriages are the norm. It is a community where a lack of secular education means that economic hardship is rife, and dependence on benefits is high. A community where television, secular newspapers and visits to the cinema are forbidden, where the internet is frowned upon, and where outsiders are treated guardedly."

I guess one man's 'guardedly' is Ms Patterson's 'damn rude'. I can see the point of not wanting to engage with the secular world more than can be helped - a problem that all religious people face in our modern Babylon, be one Christian, Jew or Muslim. But good manners cost nowt. I wonder if the problem is that unlike Muslims and Christians, the Orthodox show little interest in converting the heathen ? I digress. Here's Rabbi Pinter of the (state-funded) Yesodey Hatorah school on sex education :

When the school became voluntary aided, Rabbi Pinter told me, there had been some parental concern about having to follow certain aspects of the national curriculum.

'For example, the law is that you have to provide sex education. But parents can choose to opt out. 100 per cent of our parents opt out. Sex education is something we deal with on our own terms through the Jewish curriculum, based on very strong family values.’

At my child's Catholic primary, the sex education policy used to be that there was no sex education. Alas, not so at secondary level. But surely, with no sex education, the school must be riddled with teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections picked up by the poor ignorant girls. After all, you can't stop them, can you ?

'A question I’m asked is, “How many teenage pregnancies do you have in the community?” To which I reply, “Are you talking about inside or outside marriage? Outside marriage, none.”’

Most odd. Haredim, like Pakistanis and Indians, seem to defy the conventional wisdom that only lashings of sex education can save us from the negative consequences of lashings of sex.



Another community who keep themselves to themselves - the Afrikaners of Orania (who like their Voortrekker forebears set off into the wilderness in search of a place of their own) mourn the death of their founder, Carel Boshoff III.

In the early 1990s, Boshoff, a genteel theologian who favored delicate spectacles and a George Washington-esque ruffled coiffure, abandoned the intellectual life in Pretoria and led a troupe of his fellow Afrikaners to a ghost town in a blasted desert that scarcely supports animals, forget about libraries or concert orchestras. Boshoff thought the soon-to-be black government would rule in a manner so hostile and alien to South Africa's European descendants that retreating en masse into the wilderness -- he predicted the exodus would swell to 2 million, half of South Africa's Afrikaner population -- was the only way to survive.

As it turned out, while there's been a steady bleeding of Afrikaners, murdered on their farms, since Mandela took over, it's not been as apocalyptic as feared :

But instead South Africa's irrepressibly genial black leaders kept following him out there. And so Orania became an accidental symbol not of racial reconciliation's unfeasibility, but of its robustness. Nelson Mandela traveled to Orania in 1995 to drink tea with the smiling widow of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the infamous "architect of apartheid." A decade later, President Jacob Zuma toured a dormitory for poor white laborers and commended Boshoff's ethnic awareness, comparing it to his own pride in being Zulu.

The problem for his community and vision is a simple one - whites in South Africa have always employed other, non-white people to work for them - to really and truly do the jobs they don't want to do :

Whites in South Africa remain a privileged class dependent on black labor, said Boshoff, and this position is untenable. To defend themselves against rising discontent among the other half (actually, the other four-fifths) they rely on "good fences and good dogs."

He wasn't totally wrong. The best part of Boshoff's vision of a self-sufficient white community was always the self-sufficiency part. In Orania, white Afrikaners have to do all the work, even the service jobs. Unfortunately for Boshoff, however, this requirement also cut directly against his ideal of preserving Afrikaner traditions. Construction, fruit-picking, janitorial work is not a traditional part of white South African culture. When they realized they would have to do the manual labor blacks do in the rest of the country, some Orania settlers left -- and this was undoubtedly a reason many more whites never came.

And via Capitalists at Work, a little insight from the London Review of Books into the working world of Russian business - in this case TV production :

To get to our office you had to walk down an unlit concrete corridor and turn sharp right up two flights of narrow stairs at the top of which you were confronted by another black, unmarked metal door. There you rang the bell and an unfriendly voice would come through the intercom: ‘Who are you?’ The question was ridiculous: the guard on the other side of the door could see you on his monitor – he saw you every day. But still he asked and still you answered, waving your passport at where you guessed the spy camera to be. Then came the beep-beep-beep of the door being opened and you were inside Potemkin Productions.

Suddenly you were back in a Western office with Ikea furniture and lots of twentysomethings in jeans and bright T-shirts running around with coffees, cameras and props. It could have been any television production office anywhere in the world. But there was a difference. Going past the reception desk, the conference room, coffee bar and casting department, you reached a closed white door. Many would turn back at this point, thinking they’d seen the whole office. But tap in a code and you entered a much larger set of rooms: here the producers and their assistants sat and argued, here the accountants glided around with spreadsheets and solemnity, and here were the loggers – rows of young girls staring at screens as their hyperactive fingers typed out interviews and dialogue from rushes. At the end of this office was another door. Tap in another code and you entered the editing suites: little cells where directors and video editors sweated and swore at one another. And beyond that was the final, most important and least conspicuous of all the inconspicuous doors, with a code that few people knew: it led to the office of Tim and Ivan, and the room where the real accounts were kept. This whole elaborate set-up was intended to foil the tax police. That’s who it was the guards’ job to keep out, or keep out long enough for the back office to be cleared and the hidden back entrance put to good use.

I asked Ivan whether all this was necessary. Couldn’t he just pay his taxes? He laughed. If he did that, he said, there would be no profit at all. No entrepreneur paid their taxes in full: it wouldn’t occur to them. Taxes, he said, were just a way for bureaucrats to buy themselves holidays in Thailand. As for the tax police, they were much happier taking bribes than going to the trouble of stealing money that had been paid in the orthodox fashion. In any case, Ivan’s profits were already squeezed by the broadcasters. Around 15 per cent of any budget went to the guy at the channel who commissioned the programme: in Russian these kick-backs are known as otkat, ‘backwash’. A British producer who refused to pay the ‘backwash’ was out of the country within a year.

Hmm.

For my Russian colleagues the tax police raids were a reason to celebrate: the rest of the day was invariably a holiday (deadlines be damned) as Ivan haggled with them to keep down the size of the pay-off. ‘Only a dozen people work here,’ he would say with a wink as they looked around at the many dozens of desks, chairs and computers still warm from use. Then Ivan would bring out the fake accounts from the front office to support his case and they would sit down to negotiate, with tea and biscuits, as if this were the most normal of business deals. And in Russia it was. The word ‘bribe’ was never used. The officials would look at the fake books, which they knew perfectly well to be fake, and extract fines in line with legislation they knew Ivan did not need to comply with. So everything would be settled, and every role, pose, and line of dialogue would reproduce the ritual of legality. It was a ritual played out every day in every medium-sized business, every furniture company, restaurant, modelling agency and PR firm across the country.

So far, so crooked - we're in William Browder territory where everyone conspires to rip off the State. But the cultural rot is much deeper, embedded in the consciousness of ordinary people.

The fundamental premise for most Western reality shows is what people in the industry call ‘aspirational’: someone works hard and is rewarded with a wonderful new life. The shows celebrate the outstanding individual, the bright extrovert. For the Russian version of The Apprentice, Vladimir Potanin, a metals oligarch worth more than $10 billion, was recruited to be the boss choosing between the candidates competing for the dream job. Potanin goaded, teased and tortured the candidates as they went through increasingly difficult challenges. The show looked great, the stories and dramas all worked, but there was a problem: no one in Russia believed in the rules. The usual way to get a job in Russia is not by impressing at an interview, but by what is known as blat – ‘connections’. Russian society isn’t much interested in the hard-working, brilliant young business mind. Everyone knows where that type ends up: in jail like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or in exile like the mobile phone billionaire Yevgeny Chichvarkin. Today’s Russia rewards the man who operates from the shadows, the grey apparatchik, the master of the politique de couloir – the man like Putin. Promotion in such a system comes from knowing how to debase yourself, how to suck up and serve your master, how to be what the Russians call a holop, a ‘toady’. Bright and extrovert and aspirational? Not if you want success. The shows that did work were based on a quite different set of principles. By far the biggest success was Posledny Geroi (‘The Last Hero’), a version of Survivor, a show based on humiliation and hardship. This chimed in Russia – a country where being bullied by the authorities is the norm.