Those Dreadful Tory Cuts

"Spending in April was 5 per cent higher than a year ago at £54.1 billion. This was mainly caused by a 26 per cent rise in interest payments to £1 billion as the Government services its growing debts and interest rates rise along with inflation.

The Government's deficit reduction plans were dealt a blow today after official figures revealed that last month's borrowing figures were the highest ever recorded for the month of April.

Public borrowing, excluding financial interventions such as bank bail-outs, hit £10 billion, compared with £7.3 billion the previous year, said the Office for National Statistics (ONS)."

I don't understand. Gilt rates don't seem to have risen - where's this extra 5% spending coming from ? And anyway, 'Daily Mail Reporter' can't do maths - if interest payments rose 26% to £1bn that means they rose by £206 million. If spending rose by 5% to £54.1bn then it was £51.5bn a year ago - a rise of £2.6bn, of which less than 10% is attributable to increased interest payments.

So where's the extra spending going ?

Daily Mail really are no good. Page 4 of this pdf shows :

Central government account
April Financial year
2011 2010 2010 /11

Current expenditure
Interest 4.6 3.6 43.2
Net social benefits 14.7 14.0 173.2
Other curr expndture 34.8 34.0 387.1
Total curr expndture 54.1 51.5 603.5

So interest is £1bn more, social benefits £0.7bn more, other £0.8bn more, total £2.5bn extra of which 40% is down to increased interest - presumably not because of increased rates but because of increased gilt issuance.

You expect most journalists, as Arts grads, to be functionally innumerate. But they could have found someone who could add up for this story.

(sorry the formatting's no good. And H/T Brian for the pdf)

More Grooming ... on a Sunday afternoon

They had picked up the girl – whom they had never met before – after seeing her in a drunken state outside the care home as they drove around the city.

The girl fell unconscious inside the car due to her intoxicated state, but when she awoke she found herself in a state of undress.

OK, maybe this one shouldn't be under grooming but a more serious offence - although the two are often related.

"Just because a child does not live with their parents, it does not mean no one cares"

Unfortunately it all too often does. Care homes have always been a target-rich environment for predatory males both inside and outside the institutions.

In other Lancastrian news, this week's prize for politically convenient ignorance goes to Detective Inspector Dave Massay of Oldham CID :

A 27-year-old woman was walking along Cooper Street in Oldham when a small white van pulled up. The passenger grabbed her arm and swore at her, telling her to get in the car. The woman managed to escape from his grip and ran off. The incident happened between 10.10pm and 10.20pm on Wednesday, May 18.

Hmm. Two young men attempting to abduct a young woman at ten o'clock at night. What could possibly be their motivation?

Detective Inspector Dave Massay, based at Oldham CID, said: "The intentions of these men are not clear: they might have been playing a prank and trying to frighten people for their amusement and, in this case, they have succeeded in terrifying this woman.

I guess he'd rather be thought stupid than suggest the most likely possibility.

(I wouldn't want to give you the impression that every groomer, abductor or rapist in Greater Manchester is Asian. Far from it. The native Brits have a fair bit of form - especially those evil knife-carriers - what ever happened to the mandatory jail sentence? But there is a tendency, no more than that, although I'm sure a statistically significant one, for the varieties of Mancunian crime to reflect the diversity of the area.)

Up To A Point, Mr Allison

Lincoln Allison at the SAU blog is touring that fascinating country, India :

So there are two Indias, as there have always been two versions of Italy. One bristles with enterprise, the other with Soviet stupor. There are the hotels which cannot do enough for you and the tailor who will do a perfect alteration in ten minutes flat. And there is (or was) the guy who sold me my first Indian railway ticket. I slowly and dismally became aware that there was nothing in it for him if I reached Pune, but a certain amount of power, satisfaction and schadenfreude if he could stop me. Of course, he probably just wanted a bribe; the more complicated the form or procedure, the more likely you are to make a mistake which you will have to pay for as atonement or rectification. And seen in its broad context corruption is not a redistributive mechanism because the big guys do it big, the little guys do it little and the poor don't get to do it at all.

I think Indian enterprise will triumph in the end, but I'm an optimist.

He certainly is :

I don't buy the idea that India has put the Raj behind it, an idea which is dutifully trotted out by many western writers... I'd have liked them to sit with me on the Shatabadi Express last week, Delhi to Amritsar, first class compartment, with four English-language newspapers to choose from, all stuffed with IPL cricket reports, all to be digested with the free Indian Railways Morning Tea biscuits as you listen to the English conversations going on between Punjabi and Hindi speakers.

It may not be the India that the post-1858 full imperialists imagined? I don't know. But it is surely a world that more Liberal or earlier, less racist, imperialists would have happily conceived. It involves the greatest cultural exchange in history because they got cricket and we got curry, without any of us losing what we had in the first place. Globalisation at its best and anybody who tells me that curry is un-English should get as short shrift as anyone who says that cricket is un-Indian.

Globalisation at its best, eh ? A 50-50 swap from which we all benefit and no one loses?

Well, none of us have lost what we had in the first place - except the former native inhabitants of large parts of London, Birmingham, Manchester and larger parts of Leicester, Bradford, the Black Country and the former mill towns of the Pennines. Over the last 30 years I've been able to observe first-hand massive demographic change in Bradford and Birmingham.

During the Raj there were doubtless similar demographic changes to a few very small areas of India and Pakistan - I have a 1902 Guide to Simla with maps showing large areas of housing which could, from the names, be in suburban Surrey. But these involved very small numbers of people in a very large country - and were substantially reversed after independence. The demographic changes in England (and a few towns in Wales and Scotland) involve the movement of very large numbers into a very small country, and not only is reversal very unlikely, but the process, with its accompanying loss of native habitat, shows no sign of abating.

AFC Wimbledon - You Can't Kill The Spirit

The Dons are back - having beaten Luton 4-3 on penalties in the Conference playoffs - and I'd just like to say how hard it must feel for Luton supporters and players, losing on penalties. Last time I saw them play Luton it was an FA Cup semi-final.

Guardianistas are always on about the evils of money in the game - and for once they are right. There are plenty of examples of it - not least the loss of Plough Lane and the sale of the club to Milton Keynes. There can't be many better instances of localism than the recreation of the club :

In June 2002, in order to assemble a competitive team at short notice, AFC Wimbledon held player trials over three days on Wimbledon Common, open to any unattached player who felt he was good enough to try out for the team. From these trials, the club's squad for their inaugural season was chosen.

While Kingsmeadow hasn't got the atmosphere that made a trip to Plough Lane so difficult for big teams twenty years back, it's a nice little place - and the artwork's always something to look forward to. Best of luck next season - it's great have them back where they belong. Where the eagles fly ...

On Ken Clarke and Rape Stats

Clarke is a let-em-all-out Euro fanatic, and I will unsay no word I've spoken about him. But his main failing in his now-notorious interview was to be ill-prepared and ill-briefed to discuss what he should have known is an incendiary topic.

The good Inspector speaks - I merely report :

As a serving policeman, there are several things I am not allowed to talk about.

There are plenty of operational secrets we cannot discuss, but I’m not referring to those. I’m talking about the taboo subjects. The ‘detection’ rate for rape is one of these.

It’s very frustrating to sit and listen to pundits talking about the low number of rape convictions in Court, when as police officers we all know what lies behind these poor numbers.

For example, I couldn’t possibly tell you that out of every ten rapes which are reported in Ruraltown, at least eight turn out to be nonsense. To be fair, eight out of ten of everything reported at Ruraltown police station is nonsense, why should rape be any different?

I couldn’t tell you that of the remaining two, an existing alcohol-fuelled chaotic drug-based relationship is a factor in at least one of these, and ‘consent’ is probably present in the other to some degree. In my whole service I can only recall three stranger rapes and a half a dozen where consent was withdrawn at the time and he carried on. But I can’t tell you that.

I can’t tell you that most of the adult rapes reported in Ruraltown represent either the latest in a series of allegations designed to score points against an ‘ex, lies designed to fend off an angry parent when a curfew has been missed or a defence mechanism when a jilted ‘partner’ discovers an infidelity.

A rape once reported, even if withdrawn later, is in the system and a failure to bring someone to justice, even if it never happened, shows up in the ‘detection’ rate. The ‘detection rate’ is low because the number of rapes which actually happen is low. I couldn’t possibly say that though...

The facts about rape seen from the street are this: most genuine rapes are against children under 13 years old and are within the family or family circle. Genuine adult rape is rare and nearly always charged to Court; what a jury do next is for them, but it usually comes down to ‘consent’ issues, and being as they were not in the bedroom at the time, and we are not simply proving intercourse because that is already admitted by the defendant, it’s not really within our gift to prove or disprove consent. Consent can amount to one word, said in a half whisper six months before in a darkened room where no one else was present.

But we can’t possibly say any of this. We will simply accept that it’s all our fault and promise to do better in the future.

I don't know. The one thing I'll say is that from purely anecdotal evidence, the chats a young man has with young women, is that an awful lot of girls seem to have had some kind of assault in their early teenage years - from the groper on the bus who you dread to see getting on board (and of course you've not told your parents although it's happened several times) to the one-off stranger exposing himself as you take a short-cut though the churchyard. There are definitely some bad people out there.


Meanwhile, back in lovely Croydon - into what category would the inspector put this alleged attack :

A teenager was chased down a residential street after being raped by her new “boyfriend” and his flatmate, a court heard. Cousins Corrie Pinney, 35, of Yardbridge Close, Belmont, and Jermaine Kraftner, 27, from Poole, Dorset, also invited Desmond Enwright, their uncle and father respectively, into the room to join in the attack, Croydon Crown Court heard on Monday... the group stayed up drinking, smoking cannabis and listening to music before Mr Kraftner said: “You don’t know what you’ve signed yourself up for.”

Charming. I keep hearing that most sexual assaults take place within the family, not with the participation of a family.

Mr Pinney and Mr Kraftner deny charges of rape, sexual assault, false imprisonment and ABH against two victims in separate attacks. They have admitted charges of ABH relating to a second alleged rape, which Cassie Webb, 20, from Croydon, denies aiding and abetting. She also denies false imprisonment during the attack in 2010.

Hmm.

Also in Croydon :

The mother and daughter were visiting Taryn’s boyfriend Jason Stevens, who had lost his 17-year-old sister in a car accident in August, when the trio spotted Georgia Marney walking down Cudham Drive. She had been banned from the road pending her upcoming court case for causing death by dangerous driving.

As Mrs Price was driving towards Marney she shouted at her out of the window of her car. She told the court: “I said ‘What the hell are you doing here, you are not supposed to be here. I did call her a murderer, which I should not have done. She was shouting rubbish at us, f-ing and blinding.” Marney walked towards the car, punching the window three times to make it shatter. Her daughter Taryn jumped out of the car to protect Mrs Price, whom she feared Marney was going to punch, and began grappling with her in the street. She also admitted calling the teenager a murderer as they fought and pulled each other’s hair, before Mrs Price stood on Marney’s hair so her daughter could escape.

As Taryn Price got up to collect her phone from the middle of the road, Marney kicked her mother in the face, breaking her glasses and leaving a cut above her eyebrow which required hospital treatment.

Ho hum.

Friday Night Music - Ivan Koslovsky

A year or so back I found a video (which I can no longer find !) of Paul Robeson singing in Moscow in the Fifties alongside the Ukranian tenor Ivan Koslovsky. I thought he sang beautifully, and it was a shame that he could never perform in the West :

Kozlovsky was never allowed to perform in the West because his brother Fedor Kozlovsky, who was also a singer, had left Ukraine to tour Europe with Oleksander Koshetz in 1919. Upon hearing of the Bolshevik takeover of Ukraine he refused to return.

Here he is, singing in Moscow aged 79 singing the Neapolitan 'Fenesta che lucive' - and still ripping the floorboards off the stage - not to mention the scarf off his (much younger) accompanist.

Croydon (V)

I noted Julia's post on the recent Tamil gang fighting in Croydon, and put it down as one more milestone on the road of diversity.

I forgot they've been at it since at least 2008 :

Gangs of violent men from Sri Lanka are "constantly tooled up" and "ready to go", according to police.There have been a number of violent clashes involving groups of Tamil men in Croydon and other parts of south London in recent years.

It's because of this sort of thing that I wasn't in the chorus of righties a few years back demanding that all the Gurkhas (and their families) be allowed in. Admittedly the Tamils of Sri Lanka have a violent recent history, whereas the violence of the Gurkhas has always been directed against the Queen's enemies. But it struck me that there were three objections to the idea :

a) do we want to recruit soldiers for whom the family immigration pass is the chief motivation?
b) is this not likely to impact upon Gurkha society back home, if the (hopefully - see (a)) bravest and best don't return to form a respected elder statesman class?
c) what's going to happen to their children and grandchildren, brought up in the culture of the UK? Will they retain both their fearsome warrior credentials and their dignified Nepalese culture, going straight into the forces as their fathers did? Or might they perhaps keep the warrior bit, but turn out like the children and grandchildren of those highly respectable people who got off the Empire Windrush, or those who arrived in the textile mills of the Pennines? The Gurkhas seemed OK to me just as they were, although there was always a case for upping the pensions.

I noted this killing a couple of years back :

Morden residents Rocky Gurung, 21, from Haig Place, and Kemik Thakali, 21, from Legion Court, both pleaded not guilty to murder during the trial last month but were found guilty of the manslaughter of the 23-year-old waiter.

During the trial, the court was told Bishal Gurung, who worked at the Sherpa Kitchen in Esher High Street, was chased along the Thames Embankment by a gang of 10 to 15 men including Rocky Gurung in the early hours of April 13, 2008, after being falsely accused of hitting Kemik Thakali with a bottle during a boat party to celebrate Nepalese new year.

He was kicked and beaten before being rolled into the Thames by Rocky Gurung and Thakali, the court was told.

Now I doubt that these people, though Nepalese, were the sons of Gurkhas. There's been no time for that. I just wonder what the streets of Aldershot, admittedly never the safest place to be out on the lash, are going to be like in twenty years time?

A town risks being 'overwhelmed' by Gurkhas and their families in the wake of the landmark decision to grant former servicemen the right to live in Britain, an MP says. Gerald Howarth, MP for Aldershot, has made a plea to the prime minister for more funding to deal with an issue he said was of 'grave concern' in the area, following an influx of thousands of former soldiers and their families. The former shadow Defence Minister's letter to David Cameron, reported in getHampshire.com, said: 'This has had a very significant impact over a very short period of time and it is now estimated that 10 per cent of the borough of Rushmoor’s population of approximately 90,000 is Nepalese.'

Ancestral Voices Prophesying War

BBC news journalism to a very large extent relies on reporting stories that fit an existing left-liberal narrative and ignoring stories which challenge this narrative - the classic example being the enormous disparities in their reporting of racist murder - those disparities relating to the ethnicity of both perpetrator and victim.

Where BBC journalists go looking to make the news, by unearthing new facts or obtaining an admission from a politician or businessman, the same rules apply. Sending undercover cameramen into BNP meetings hoping to hear bad things being discussed? Sure. Sending them into mosques with the same brief? Er ... we'll leave that to Channel Four, thanks very much.

A favourite sport of Today presenters is to try and create the lunchtime news headlines by getting some interviewee to either "drop a clanger" or "reveal their real agenda", depending on your viewpoint. Even a Victoria Derbyshire can do it if the interviewee is ill-briefed and ill-prepared enough.

But sometimes the quest for what's perceived to be the killer admission can ruin the interview - for some reason I always think of Evan Davies interviewing anyone at all on drugs policy, where he seems incapable of keeping his personal enthusiasms in check.

And sometimes the quest for a not-very-important admission can blind the interviewer to the most remarkable statements being made by the interviewee - which go straight past the journalist's head because they're nothing to do with the little verbal traps he's setting.

That failure to actually listen to the interviewee constitutes IMHO diabolical journalism. John Humphrys (for it is he) should listen to his Patrick Mercer interview from yesterday morning, then tear up his NUJ card and announce his retirement.

The subject of the interview was a leaked letter written by Defence Secretary Liam Fox to the Prime Minister, expressing concern that the Government planned to make a legal commitment to increasing its overseas aid spending at a time when armed forces budgets are being cut heavily. The subtext of the interview, as Humphrys revealed, was Conservative division.

In the studio were Patrick Mercer, a former army officer and former Conservative security spokesman, broadly sympathetic to the Fox concerns, and Lib Dem MP Malcolm Bruce, very much against them. You'd imagine Mercer is reasonably close to current military thinking, and current M.O.D. thinking.

It was near the end of the interview, emboldening is mine :

Mercer :

"At a time when the armed forces are being cut and cut hard, when they're at war in Afghanistan, Pakistan and indeed in Libya, with other conflicts on the horizon ... you can see why the defence secretary is concerned"

Humphrys, completely missing the above and intent on his 'Tory division' narrative (I paraphrase) :

"But .. Liam Fox wrote to the Prime Minister and addressed him as 'Dear David Cameron' .. now we know he would like to be Tory leader - isn't there an ulterior motive?"

Mercer :

"at a time when money is stretched ... at a time when we are at war on at least two fronts, and probably a third front to come, no doubt Liam Fox is fighting his corner as any other Secretary of State would do".

Now it may be that Mercer's statement that we are at war in Pakistan is a slip of the tongue, and he's thinking of the Americans, who do seem to have made one or two trips across the Durand Line recently. But what are these "other conflicts on the horizon"? What is this "third front to come", assuming Front 1 to be Afghanistan and Front 2 Libya? Have I been asleep lately - should I know all about this war to come?

Syria ? Seems unlikely. Iran ? Ditto. Are the Argentinians planning another crack at the Falklands (and if they were, how could we possibly form a front down there once Mount Pleasant was lost, having no carrier capability?).

I would really love to have known what Mr Mercer was talking about - and I imagine BBC listeners might have been interested, too. Pity the BBC couldn't find a journalist to ask him!




(cross-posted at Biased-BBC)

Topical Tunes

I don't know why, but people seem to be linking this old song all over the Web :



While we're on Neil Young, there can surely be fewer finer exponents of the jangly guitar than he.

'Tis 40-plus years since a chap walked into the Lower Sixth Common Room and put on this, by a band we'd never heard of called Crazy Horse.

Bad Timing

I suppose publishing a piece on how Socialist candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn may be a bit of a lad with the women (but the sophisticated French electorate won't let that bother them) on Friday the 13th was always tempting fate.

"There was a fuss last year when a young French author, Tristane Banon, described her encounter with him. She explained that she had interviewed him for a book about public figures and their missteps, and claimed she had to fight him off physically. She said she hadn't made a complaint at the time, because she didn't want to be "the girl who had a problem with a politician".This side of DSK's life has almost become folklore in France. In 2009, humourist Stéphane Guillon even dedicated his comedy slot on the popular morning radio show La Matinale de France Inter (the French equivalent for Radio 4) to this particular side of the politician:

"Exceptional measures have been taken at Radio France in order not to awaken the Beast. Here are the measures, as detailed by the trade unions. I quote: 'In order to guarantee the safety of the personnel, female workers are asked to wear long, unrevealing and anti-sex clothes. High heels, leather pants and chic lingerie are banned. The head of information, who will greet DSK, will wear a burqa. Dark corners like the toilets, car park, some cupboards, have been momentarily closed off." He added: "But no panic. We have put bromide in his coffee ... and we have two cameras, the usual one on the table and a second under it.'."

Will DSK's reputation matter in the election? Do we, female voters, care about male politicians' sex lives? We all heard the stories in the news, and it is true that he might not be really popular among feminists. But the answer is no. As old-fashioned as it might seem, French voters tend to judge politicians according to their projects...We will have to keep an eye on him. But not in his bedroom."

Or, as another Guardianista put it a while ago, "Womaniser? He's just French".

Well, either the author has very bad timing, or ("puts on tinfoil hat") someone in Chateau Sarkozy has very good timing.

He was taken off an Air France flight by officers from the Port Authority of New York and turned over to Manhattan police, according to a spokesman from the agency. Plainclothes officers boarded the flight at 4.45pm, moments before take-off, and took the 62-year-old out of the first-class cabin and into custody. He had been due to meet German chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday. "It was 10 minutes before its scheduled departure," said John Kelly, a Port Authority spokesman.

Port Authority officers were acting on information from the New York Police Department, whose detectives had been investigating a brutal alleged attack on a woman employee at the Sofitel New York on West 44th Street in the heart of the city's theatre district. The 32-year-old woman told police that she entered Strauss-Kahn's room at about 1pm on Saturday and he emerged from the bedroom naked, threw her down and tried to sexually assault her (a/c/t this story he's alleged to have done more than try - not to mention this story - LT), NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. She broke free and escaped the room and told hotel staff what had happened who called the police. When New York City police detectives arrived moments later, Strauss-Kahn had already left the hotel, leaving behind his mobile phone and other personal items. "It looked like he got out of there in a hurry," Browne added.

In the UK an extremely wealthy economist and lobbyist with a reputation as a sexual harasser wouldn't necessarily be top of the list when choosing a Labour leader (Labour leaders are supposed to lay the groundwork during office for self-enrichment after office) - but they do things differently in France, where Socialist leaders are quite happy to use the Security Services and tax authorities as private enforcers of their personal interests.

"Among other verifiable events, Hallier's telephone conversations were continually eavesdropped on by the Elysée palace from 1985 onward. He and any potential publisher were hounded by tax inspectors dispatched to instill the fear of "God" (Mitterrand's nickname) into them, his apartment burned, etc."

400 Glorious Years

Since the first edition of surely the greatest work ever produced by a Government committee, the King James Bible.

(Three BBC progs about the production thereof here)

Unbelievable Fact Of The Day

I noted in the post on Kate Middleton's family tree that the English are pretty much all related to each other. And of course the colonies which became the USA were English projects.

Every single US President bar one (Martin Van Buren) is a descendant of King John I of England.

Including Obama (who's also descended from (inter alia) King Edward I (Longshanks) of England, King Henry III of England, King Henry II of England, King Henry I of England, King William I (the Bastard) of England, Count Baldwin of Flanders and his daughter Matilda, King Robert Capet I of France, King Louis I of France, and Charlemagne). Obama also shares a common descent through Richard Eltonhead with Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain.

Not to mention apparently being descended, along with George Washington, from Halfdan The Old and through him from the Norse god Odin.

Savour The Diversity

Well, we know now where some of the hippy boomers and alternative types went. I bet they've got more than a few Type 2 girls.

The irony is that a Green council in Brighton actually does bring a bit of diversity, in the real sense rather than the 'not white' sense, to UK politics. I, for one, welcome Brighton's new Green overladies, and am very glad I'm not bringing up children there.

Lament For The Makars

Wiiliam Dunbar's great ode to the Bards of medieval Scotland and England, freely adapted from the original by Laban the other night when feeling a tad deflated after the Baggies lost to Wolves.

Dunbar's also noted as being the first writer to get his four letter words printed. It's interesting to see that his great English contemporaries rank so high - no "effete ****holes" in the Dunbar bestiary - not English ones, anyway - and it's sad that many of the Scots he praises leave no surviving work. There's a worthy task for antiquaries and researchers - to find the verses of Stobo, Herriot, Blind Harry and the rest.

I, that hearty was and hale,

Am troubled, sick and like to fail,

Enfeebled by infirmity;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Our pleasure here is all vainglory,

This false world is but transitory,

The flesh is bruckle, the Fiend is sly;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The state of man does change and vary,

Now sound, now sick, now blithe, now sorry,

Now dancing merry, now like to die;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Nought of this earth here stands securely;

As the wind shakes the growing barley,

So trembles worldly vanity.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

On unto Death go all estates,

Of Court, of Church, all potentates,

Both rich and poor of all degree;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He cuts the knights down in the field,

Full armoured under helm and shield;

Victor he is at all melees;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

That warlord merciless and wild

Tears from the mother's breast the child,
And sorrowing he leavès she;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He takes the warrior in his power,

The captain in the strongest tower,

The bowered beauty, all takes he;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He spares no lord for elegance,

Nor clerk for his intelligence;

His deadly stroke may no man flee;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Magicians and astrologers,

Logicians or theologers,

Their wits help them no more than me;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

In medicine the best practicians,
The leeches, surgeons, and physicians,
Find Death to have no remedy;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Poets and playwrights of our day

Play out their pageant, then away;

Spared not for their great faculty;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He has impetuously devoured,

The noble Chaucer, of poets the flower,

The Monk of Bury, and Gower, all three;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The good Sir Hew of Eglintoun,

Also Herriot, and Wyntoun,

All taken out of this country;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

His sting has left the world bereft
Of Master Clerk, and James Affleck,

Of ballad-making and tragedy;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Of Holland, Barbour we're bereaved;

Alas ! He would not even leave

Sir Mungo Lockhart of the Lee;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The Clerk of Tranent's also gone,

That wrote Adventures of Gawain;

Sir Gilbert Hay - ended is he;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He has Blind Harry and Sandy Traill

Slain with his shower of mortal hail,

Can Patrick Johnstone from it flee ?

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He's given Mercer his goodnight,

That did of love so lively write,

So short, so quick, of sentence he;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He has ta'en Roull of Aberdeene,

And gentle Roull of Corstorphine;

Two better men you'll never see;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

In Dumfermline the race is run

Of Master Robert Henryson;

And Sir John Ross embraced has he;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

And he's now ta'en, last of all,

Good, gentle Stobo and Quentin Shaw,

All men might wish he'd left them be:

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Good Master Walter Kennedy

At point of death lies verily,

Great pity that such thing should be;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Since he has all my brethren ta'en,

He will not let me live alone,

And I shall be his next, you'll see;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

For death there is no remedy,

So for our death, prepare must we,

That after death, new life may be;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

A Few Rabbits From The Curate's Back Lawn

Victor Davis Hanson returns to the transformation of his home town into Mexifornia. First covered by him here.

Three little tales from the Heavy Woollen District :

Goodbye to one Working Men's Club.

Hello to three lapdancing clubs - run by a failed asylum seeker.

Having 'massage parlour workers' beating each other up over one - not something I've experienced.

It's our very own Crow Creek Massacre - only this time the women were not spared.

Nearly half of children can expect their parents to separate by the time they turn 16.

Abusing the girls the locals just don't want to abuse in Blackpool.

I've always thought of maths as the subject that really sorts the clever-clogs from the rest, but there can be other tests. Law and logic is one - I sometimes read the Times law reports and find I'm lost in a maze of conditional clauses, can't tell what they're saying, and have to go to the first or last lines to find out who won - and even then I don't know why. OK, I might be able to work it out by making notes, but I can't hold all the logic in my head.

When I first learned programming we did Assembler, which IIRC is as low-level a language as you get before you have to start worrying about what hardware you're writing for. One of our exercises was a simple task - read a file, print the contents to a page, keep a linecount for the new page, print a pagecount on each page. It took me about a page and a bit of code, written on a coding form - you didn't actually get to see a keyboard back then, as the training section also trained data entry staff, and they typed the code in. Most of the people in the class wrote a similar amount.

One guy wrote it in 6 or 7 lines of code - and it worked. We looked at his code and how he was using the registers - and we could then see how it worked. What none of us could understand was how he'd seen that way of doing it, which was so obvious to him. His brain worked on a different level.

At another level, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen on recognising when you're in the wrong intellectual league :

I was decent in math, and Bill (Gates) was brilliant, but by then I spoke from my experience at Washington State. One day I watched a professor cover the blackboard with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felt a little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was O.K. with being a generalist.

For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester, and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his Ph.D. at 16.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to 30 hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in 10 million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.

'KeyWalk' marches sparked by Toronto officer's remarks

A new protest movement sparked by a policeman's ill-judged advice to motorists "not to leave their keys in the dash" has taken root in the US and Canada.

Thousands of people are arriving at car parks, some leaving their cars unlocked, others leaving the key in the dash provocatively - and then taking part in marches round the car park, or "KeyWalks".

The aim, say organisers, is to highlight a culture in which the victim rather than the car thief is blamed.

About 2,000 people took part in a "KeyWalk" in Boston on Saturday.

Boston organiser Siobhan Connors explained: "The event is in protest of a culture that we think is too permissive when it comes to car theft and break-ins.

"It's to bring awareness to the shame and abuse car owners still face for expressing their ownership of their own cars... essentially for behaving in a healthy and non-paranoid way" the 20-year-old told the Associated Press (AP) news agency.


Police Constable Michael Sanguinetti had been giving a talk on health and safety to a group of students at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto when he made the now infamous remarks.

"You know, I think we're beating around the bush here," he reportedly told them. "I've been told I'm not supposed to say this - however, car owners should avoid leaving the vehicle unlocked, or the keys in the dash, in order not to be a victim of car crime."

He has since apologised for his remarks and has been disciplined by the Toronto police, but remains on duty.

Some 3,000 people took part in the first "Keywalk" in Toronto last month. The Keywalk Toronto website said the aim of the movement is to "re-appropriate" the phrase "perhaps not the wisest thing to do".

"Ownership of a motor vehicle should not mean that we are opening ourselves to an expectation of theft of property or of the vehicle, regardless if it is locked or unlocked," it says.

"KeyWalks" have now been held in Dallas, Asheville in North Carolina, and in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, and are planned for Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Reno and Austin.

Everybody, from singles, couples, parents, sisters, brothers, children and friends, are encouraged to join in.

The rallies typically end with speakers and workshops on stopping car crime and calling on law enforcement agencies not to blame victims after break-ins or thefts, AP says.

In a similarly-inspired protest, thousands of demonstrators failed to turn up at the first 'MoWalk' planned for Bethnal Green, London yesterday. The protest, where marchers were to wear T-shirts showing cartoons of Mohammed, was planned after a senior Metropolitan police officer said that anyone planning to wear a T-shirt bearing an image of the Prophet Mohammed in East London "needs their head examining", "must be tired of life" and would be "arrested for their own safety".

The aim, said organisers, was to highlight a culture in which the victim of an assault rather than the assailant is blamed. But they were disappointed with the turnout, as no marchers turned up. It is believed a mass outbreak of a little-known disease called timor mortis caused the no-show. Other "MoWalks" planned for Bradford, Burnley and Balsall Heath have been cancelled.

Of course the protesters are right. If you drive to New York City, and leave your keys on the hood, it is never, ever your fault if the car or its contents are stolen. The fault lies fairly and squarely with the thief. Nonetheless, the fact is that there are car thieves in the world. The cultural history of the twentieth century tells us that cars are very desireable objects, the subject of thousands of pieces of verse, art, literature and music. As Steven Pinker, in his review of Randy Thornhill's controversial "A Natural History of Car Theft" puts it :

"Men will spend huge amounts of money on cars; will spend hundreds of hours underneath them, repairing, restoring or enhancing them; will devote their leisure time to studying them. Many people desire cars that they do not own, cannot afford and never will be able to afford. It would run contrary to everything we know about human beings if they were NOT prepared to steal them."

The fact of leaving keys in your car, or doors unlocked, can be interpreted by unscrupulous and unethical people as an invitation to steal your goods or your vehicle, despite the fact that you have every right not to be violated in this way. I can see the unfortunate police officer's point - it's probably true that fewer cars would be stolen were their owners to lock them up and not leave the keys on show.

But that, in the end, is not what this issue and these demonstrations are about. They are about the absolute and unfettered right of car owners to conduct themselves (within the law) in any and every way they wish, with no limits or restrictions.

BNP activists 'gang-raped Hindu women'

... apparently "the barbarous act was intended to force them to leave the country".

These rapes took place nearly ten years ago, but are only now being investigated.

DHAKA, Bangladesh : A judicial commission has concluded that over 200 Hindu women were raped following the 2001 parliamentary election, forcing many terrorized families to flee the country.

The acts were allegedly committed by cadres of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its ally Jamaat-e-Islami who won the 2001 polls, the report said, citing the involvement of many top leaders and lawmakers of the alliance that is now in the opposition.

Kate Middleton and Social Mobility

There's been a lot of comment about the coal miner's great-great-granddaughter marrying a prince. This provisional and incomplete family tree illustrates a few points :

a) Kate Middleton is very English. Not a Welshman or Irishman to be seen, one Scottish great-great-grandfather. And you have to go back 10 generations to find Gaston Martineau, a surgeon who fled France in 1685 (presumably a Protestant threatened by the Edict of Fontainebleau), and his wife Marie Pierre. The Goldsmith connections don't appear to be Jewish (5 generations married in church, apparently) - in the 1700s they're Kentish carpenters.

b) social mobility

The background of each of Kate Middleton's great-great-grandparents, as far as is currently known, can be summarized as follows:

• Middleton - Tradesmen in Yorkshire rising to professionals (attorneys)
• Asquith - Tradesmen in Yorkshire
• Lupton - Background of his grandparents:
  • Lupton - Tradesmen in Leeds
  • Darnton - Tradesmen in Leeds
  • Greenhow - Professionals from Yorkshire
  • Martineau - Clergymen and professionals from Norfolk and Northumberland
• Davis - Clergymen and professionals from Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and elsewhere in western England
• Glassborow - Tradesmen from Surrey
• Elliott - Tradesmen from Surrey
• Robison - Clerks from Scotland
• Gee - "Gentlemen" descending to tradesmen
• Goldsmith - Labourers from Kent and Hertfordshire
• Dorsett - Labourers in London
• Chandler - Labourers from Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, rising to tradesmen
• White - Tradesmen from Somersetshire and Buckinghamshire
• Harrison - Miners in Northumberland and Durham
• Hill - Mariners in Durham, later tradesmen
• Temple - Miners in Yorkshire and Norfolk
• Myers - Agricultural labourers in Yorkshire

Around 50% middling men and women (the Luptons were a well-known Leeds family - there's a university hall of residence named after one of them), 50% working people. One jailbird, Edward Glassborough, an insurance company messenger - wonder what he was in for ?

c) the seeming total absence of bastardy. Everyone has two parents, and they are married to each other. So much for the historical revisionists.

d) I see one of the Harrison miners married a Jane Liddle. Hopefully there's a Rod Liddle link. What has apparently been established are links to Guy Ritchie, to her husband Prince William, and to various other aristocrats*. The native population of these islands being a partially inbred extended family**, there are bound to be links. Go back 10 generations and you have 2 to the power 10 i.e. 1024 ancestors, which takes you back to the 1600s. Go back another 10 generations, to the 1300s, and you have over a million forebears. There are around 50 million native Brits in the UK, each with getting on for a million forebears in the 1300s - but there were less than 10 million Brits around in the fourteenth century. Obviously we*** have an awful lot of ancestry in common.



* as you go back and records are scarcer, those for whom records ARE available tend to be the great and the good, so a tree gets biased towards higher classes as you go back.

** the inbreeding being generally inside the distinct populations of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, at least until the greater mobility of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

*** those who are not, like myself, the son of an immigrant father. That's most of the native Brits.

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.