DUFF & NONSENSE!

Stunned, moved, and at a loss for words

Well, I'm lost for the right, fitting and proper words.  To explain, I am a member of PROBUS - and, no, I don't know exactly what it stands for, either, but I describe it as a club for boring, old, retired farts, so you can see where I fit in!  I am not, by nature, one of life's joiners, I am not big on sociability, but they asked me to give them a talk a few years ago and I thought it churlish not to join.  As it turned out, I was glad I did because we only meet once a fortnight in the morning at the local hotel for a cup of coffee followed by a guest speaker.  The variety of subjects is enormous.  As you can guess, alas, some of the most interesting subjects are occasionally made tedious by poor speakers, but on the credit side, some of the apparently dull subjects are illuminated by intelligent and enthusiastic speakers.  So, you pays your money and you takes your chances!  Today's subject struck me, from its title, as being worthy but dull and I almost gave it a miss.  It turned out to be the best talk I have ever heard there in the last 5 years. At the end I was emotionally moved and heartened as I have never been before.

The talk was given by a husband and wife from a nearby village, both very middle-class and both practicing evangelical Christians.  I mention that because so many of the bigots on the 'Trot-lot' and neo-Darwinist sites indulge in the sort of insults aimed at evangelical Christians that would give them apoplexy if anyone dared used it against Blacks or Browns.  The title of the talk was "Mercy Ships".  I had, very vaguely, heard of this enterprise before but I knew no details.  This couple enlightened me.  There is only one ship, a fairly large one now compared to the two older, smaller ones that had to be scrapped.   It is a former Danish ferry and has on board a floating (no pun intended) crew of 400+ which is comprised of doctors, nurses, dentists, teachers, public health experts and so on, apart from, of course, the actual sailing crew.  No one is paid!  Everyone is a volunteer and, moreover, they all pay their own fares to reach the ship in whatever part of West Africa it is anchored - for the last 4 years it has been almost permanently in action in Liberia. 

From the slide show and the descriptions I would say that if West Africa is the slum of the globe, then Liberia is the latrine!  Following a civil war in which the notorious warlord, Charles Taylor, was overthrown, civic society has almost disappeared.  The needs of the people who lack, not just some medical services, but all medical services, are crushingly immense.  When the ship docks it's sometimes necessary to have armed soldiers to keep order because thousands of people, some of whom have walked for days carrying their relatives, instantly form huge queues such is their desperation.  As is the way in these primitive countries, anyone born with a disfiguring condition is instantly cast out as being infected by witchcraft.  We were shown pictures of men, women and children with growths on their faces as big as their heads!  Another picture showed a stick-limbed child with a cleft palate so bad that he was barely able to feed himself and was on the point of death by starvation.  Even worse, if it is possible to draw a distinction in these bottomless scales of misery, was the description of the very many women who had been subjected to multiple rapes during the civil war - rape has only very recently been made illegal in Liberia - and who suffer with the dreadful condition in which the wall between the anus and the vagina has been ripped and destroyed so that all food and drink simply pass straight through them.  They, of course, are shunned by everyone not least because of the constant stench that accompanies them.  The lady told us of one nurse who approached a group of these outcasts who were waiting on the quay by the boat ignored by everyone else.  They wouldn't even speak to the nurse until she put her arm round one of them who instantly burst into tears because that was the first time any one had touched her in years.  There was a photo of a post-operative group of them and after they had been provided with new clothes and given a small farewell party.  Their smiles said everything.

As I said, every one on board is an unpaid volunteer, many of them using up their holiday time to spend two or three weeks on board.  One of our members asked why their publicity was not more widespread and was told, in no uncertain terms, that publicity and advertising costs money which the 'Mercy Ships' organisation simply does not have.  However, happily, Saatchi & Saatchi have recently agreed to act pro bono, so perhaps the word will be spread.

Regular readers will know that I am not exactly one of life's sentimentalists but this ship of hope, this ark of comfort, this ferry bearing the miracles, as the recipients see it, of western medical science is a truly great and generous gift from the rich to the poorest people in the world. Feel free to pass the word by linking to this post, or copy and paste it and send it on to others, then, please, go and read the 'Mercy Ships' link and, to the best of your means and abilities, gift them some money to continue their work ... please!

Additional:  The next time you hear some miserable lying liar responsible for running the filthy, disease-ridden hovels that pass for hospitals in this 'green and pleasant land' telling you that they are taking urgent steps, blah-blah-blah, to cut down on the incidents of MRSA in the wards, remember that the Mercy Ship is tied up in Monrovia, capital of Liberia, for ten months of the year and filled with African patients plus one relative/carer who sleeps on the floor at the bottom of the bed - and they have never had a single case of MRSA.  The entire ship is cleaned twice a day.

Additional, from below decks!  In case you don't have time to read the 'Comments' below, this was posted by Tyrone who appears to be a volunteer cook:

There are also personal website and blog links for people currently working with Mercy Ships, http://mercyshipslinks.blogspot.com/ it is not an official Mercy Ships site, but gives a wide range of links to choose from for several different perspectives of people 'inside' the organization.

Also I keep a menu and food info of the galley on board http://afmmenu.tyroneandstephanie.com/

Thanks for the personal 'promo' thru your blog and generous compliments for the organization.

A new kid on the block

There is a new kid on the blogging block.  He goes by the name of Don Francisco which makes him sound like a heavy from the West Side mob, and indeed, he does have a post on criminal activities, in this case, fraud - so he could be useful!  I met him over at 'Ratty's' place which I'm tempted to describe as being hardly a recommendation, but then I remembered that I hang around 'Ratty's', as well.  Anyway, the 'Don' has two things in his favour, first, he considers "Homicide: Life on the Street" to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, police series ever on TV thus establishing himself as a man of taste and discernment; and second, he is affable, which is more than you can say for most of the teeth-grinders you find hanging around 'Ratty's'.

Anyway, he's just started blogging so give him a try!

History can be just sooooo embarrassing!

I am obliged to the inhabitants of Harry's Place for pointing me towards this excellent piece of history which reminds us of exactly and precisely who said what to whom and when.  That is the delicious effect of living in modern times; so much of what our glorious leaders actually say is now recorded for posterity.  So, here's a little fun quiz for you, mes enfants, see if you can guess who said the following:

1: Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas, or biological weapons. . . . Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: he has used them. Not once, but repeatedly. . . . I have no doubt today that, left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.

2: You allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons. How many people is he going to kill with such weapons? . . . We are not going to allow him to succeed. [Emphasis added]

3: My position is very clear. The time has come for decisive action to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s WMD’s.

4: Every day [Saddam] gets closer to his long-term goal of nuclear capability.

Not very tricky, you sniff, almost certainly that idiot 'Shrub' in the White House, or that oil-monster, Cheyney and probably that sinister neo-con, Wolfowitz. Sorry, no prizes for any of you.  It was, in order:

1: President Clinton

2: Vice President Al Gore

3: Sen. Hilary Clinton (actually no surprise there, the lady has balls!)

4: John Edwards 

The essay I link to is by Arthur Herman, a distinguished historian, and is entitled "Why Iraq Was Inevitable".  As you read it, the truth of that proposition becomes ever clearer.  It would have been intolerable and highly dangerous to allow Saddam to flourish again as Anglo-American efforts to keep him in place with no-fly zones and UN sanctions were gradually sapped and subverted by the Russians, Chinese, French and Germans.  Not to take action against him would have amounted to a dereliction of duty on the part of the President.  Bill Clinton, and most of the Democratic party leadership (see above), knew it but lacked the guts to see it through during their term in office.  Whilst President Bush deserves the criticism hurled at him for the post-war shambles, there can be no doubt that our world is very much safer without a rampant, malignant Saddam Hussein in power.

However, five years on it is worth considering what, if any, progress has been made.  According to two recent articles in the London Times, perhaps there is cause for cautious (very cautious?) optimism.  Gerard Baker suggests that we are now winning:

[In Afghanistan] Consider the bigger picture. Between 1998 and 2005 there were five big terrorist attacks against Western targets - the bombings of the US embassies in Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, 9/11, and the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005. All owed their success either exclusively or largely to Afghanistan's status as a training and planning base for al-Qaeda.

In the past three years there has been no attack on anything like that scale. Al-Qaeda has been driven into a state of permanent flight. Its ability to train jihadists has been severely compromised; its financial networks have been ripped apart. Thousands of its activists and enablers have been killed. [...]

[In Iraq] We may never fully make up for three and a half lost years of hubris and incompetence but in the last 18 months the change has been startling.

The “surge”, despite all the doubts and derision at the time, has been a triumph of US military planning and execution. Political progress was slower in coming but is now evident too. The Iraqi leadership has shown great courage and dispatch in extirpating extremists and a growing willingness even to turn on Shia militias.

President Bush took all the slings and arrows for his failures in post-war planning so he is entitled to some kudos for the success of the 'big surge' which Gen. Petraeus has undertaken under the President's leadership.  And whilst on the subject of Gen. Petraeus, a comment in the Times by Michael Gove quite rightly bursts the British conceit that somehow American generals are simply cowboys in uniform with no proper intellectual underpinnings to their tactics and strategy:

On his watch, Iraq has turned a corner, with a dramatic decrease in violence, the pacification of provinces where al-Qaeda once held sway and the retreat of foreign-backed militias before a newly resurgent Iraqi national Army. Iraq is now on course to join Turkey and Israel as one of the Middle East's few functioning democracies.

Petraeus is an intellectual in battledress, a standing rebuke to the caricature of the American military as dumb Cowboy Colonels and dumber Imperial Storm Troopers. There's a proud tradition of scholars in the British Army, from Basil Liddell Hart to Rupert Smith, distinguished authors both. But a tradition of condescension towards America has blinded many Britons to the intellectual quality of the US military.

Well said!  But if 'Oprah' Obama gets the top job in November and pulls out prematurely will it all have been for nothing?

'Typepad' typos!

I have just composed a long, thoughtful, incisive, highly intelligent and brilliantly witty review of Michael Frayn's latest play "Afterlife".  I then clicked on my 'spell checker' - well, whilst my English style is much admired the length and breadth of, er, my study, my spelling isn't always spot on (what do you mean, you noticed ?)  - so imagine my incandescant rage when the bloody thing went wrong and I lost the entire post!  And this is the second time it has happened and those lying liars at Typepad told me it was all fixed three weeks ago.  My language was such that even the little 'Memsahib' took cover downstairs, and the spittle from my foam-flecked lips nearly shorted the key board.

I really can't be bothered to try and resurrect it, so just let me give you the summary: I can only describe the play as 'interesting', a dread word in a review but I would add that I, personally, would prefer to see one Frayn failure (by his high standards) than ten 'successful' Pinters.  Now I'm off to compose an e-mail to Typepad!

You want trend lines? I got trend lines!

My e-pal, 'Fallenmonk', a hopelessly soppy, old, 'Confederate' Leftie but a good egg, was unimpressed with 'my' graph in the preceding post.  That hurt because I was really proud of it, well not 'it' exactly, because I didn't produce it, but I managed, somehow, to re-produce it over here and regular readers will know that there has been a dearth of decent graphics on this site for some time ... well, for ever, actually.  This is because I am to software what the quill pen is to a word processor!  Anyway, 'FM' (as I call him), demanded a 'trend line'.  This was obviously a "cunning plan" devised by him to throw me completely because he was guessing, shrewdly and correctly, that for all I know a trend line is something you go fishing with.  However, with one bound I was free of his HAF (Hot Air Fanatic)  machinations and I can now produce not just an old trend line (I mean, sooo last century!) but a super-duper, brand new "loess line" - don't ask!  And, not just one new "loess line" but three of the little rascals!

What they show is confirmation that James Hansen, the chief honcho of the IPCC and spiritual leader to every HAF on the planet, made some alarming prophesies concerning global warming, predicting a "perfect storm" of disasters, to the US Congress 20 years ago but the consensus of satellite measurements (generally considered to be the most reliable instruments) shows that at best the global temperature is in a state of hiatus but at worst (from his point of view) it has actually cooled slightly.

Don't take my word for it, just pop over to Anthony Watts's place and read a very learned explanation by one of his regualr contributors, Basil Copeland.

Dr. Hansen shows his Dr. Strangelove tendencies!

What with this, that and the other, I almost missed this extraordinary pronouncement by the increasingly sinister and megalomaniac HAF of HAFs (Hot Air Fanatics), Dr. James Hansen of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. I am much obliged to the ever-excellent Anthony Watts for pointing it out in detail, here.  Hansen has long been the scientific leader of the global warmers' band and is not only the principle adviser to the ludicrous United Nations committee, the IPCC, but also to his eminence, Al Gore.  Need I say more?

Anyway, not content with making frantic prognostications for the End of the World, he has now gone a step further and demanded that amongst others, oil company executives should be "put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature" because they dare to contradict what he, James Hansen, has decreed is the state of the world.  Well, if he intends to ditch freedom of speech on this subject, and the threat to the oilmen will not be missed by his fellow scientists who also do not agree with him, then the least we can do is check his own credibility by seeing how good his forecasts have turned out.  Happily, the occasion for his Dr. Strangelove-like loss of control is the 20th anniversary of his speech to Congress in which he warned of catastrophic global warming.  Thanks to Anthony Watts and Joe d' Aleo we have a record from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, of the satellite measured global temperature from 1988, the year Dr. Strangelove Hansen harangued Congress on global warming, and today.  Yes, you guessed - it's cooler now than it was then!

Now the question arises as to whether the authorities should take legal action against Hansen.  I mean, isn't there a law against shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre?

Additional: No sooner had I finished my remarks above and posted them when I was reminded that some time has passed since I checked Steve McIntyre's site.  The very first thing I read was a typical example of the sort of obfuscation that the HAFs throw up in order to avoid answering any questions on the details of their 'scientific' methods.  This one is close to home - our very own Met Office.  Under the Freedom of Information Act (do stop sniggering, Jenkins!), a Mr. David Holland asked for details of the papers and e-mails produced by the Met Office's Chief Scientist, Dr. Mitchell, who was an adviser to the IPCC (Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change).  To begin with the Met Office claimed that all of Dr. Mitchell's papers and e-mails had been scrapped, but under further questioning they did a nifty quick-step and proclaimed that, after all, Dr. Mitchell had not been operating on their behalf whilst engaged with the IPCC but had been acting in his personal capacity. Presumably questions along the lines of who paid his salary whilst he was engaged on personal business, who paid his air fares and hotel expenses, and so forth, will follow.  What a shoddy lot these HAFs have become, and would you be happy to pay increasingly large 'green taxes' on their say so?

Great lines I wish I'd thought of: #1

"The truth is that Mandelson is too much the politician; he would not know a principle if it accosted him in a Brazilian nightclub wearing a G-string and a handlebar moustache."

Rod Liddle:  The Sunday Times, 23rd June

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rod_liddle/article4187483.ece

 

Barbara Tuchman (1912 - 1989)

My recent patrols into the no-man's land of the whys and wherefores of the Great War, here and here, reminded me of my personal debt to the late Barbara Tuchman whose book, August 1914 (or The Guns of August in America), first awakened my fascination with history.  An exchange with one of my commenters provoked me into re-reading it and my admiration for her has returned.  It is, perhaps, one of the highest compliments any historian could wish for to have their work cited by any American president but Jack Kennedy urged members of his Security Advisory Council to read it during the highly dangerous period of the Cuban missile crisis. 

For me, to be strictly accurate, it was Chester Wilmot's book, The Struggle for Europe, which opened my childish eyes to the real nature of politics, or perhaps I just mean the real-politik of international affairs, but that book dealt with the 2nd world war through which I had lived and unconsciously soaked up its propaganda.  Its revelations as to the 'true' nature of alliance politics was the literary equivalent of a cold shower for a young lad!  And anyway, as I had lived through it as a child it was not exactly history. 

However, Barbara Tuchman's book dealt with an era which was beyond my ken, although, like all Europeans of my age, it hung over us like a distant but threatening dark cloud.  I suppose her book comes under the heading of 'narrative history' which I believe some historians rather disdain and if so they are absolutely wrong.  That book has remained on my shelf for years and has led me to read others on the subject, but none of them has ever approached the immediacy of her work which in places had me almost crying in despair as this gallery of rogues and heroes, strong men and weak, the misguided and the malignant, one by one took to the floor for their dance of death.  It is, quite simply, a terrific book and even if the period and the subject are not of particular interest to you, I would still urge you to read it because not only is it excellent history it is also the equivalent of a great tragic novel.

'Hash' re-hashed!

Lefty dimwits (the words are synonymous) often rail against the The Mail for being virtually a mouthpiece for the BNP and thus compound their ignorance by never realising the variety of opinions that are on offer within the paper.  Today provides a prime examplefrom Peter Oborne who attempts to correct the general denigration, one might call it the de-construction, of Gordon 'Hash' Brown.  He starts by reminding us that Brown is a better prime minister than his predecessor.  Of course, the key word in that sentence is 'better' and the sense in which it is used.  Blair was obviously far more successful at parliamentary and political manipulation, but does that constitute 'better'?  Oborne points up Brown's financial rectitude, and that of his wife, Sarah, which stands in direct contrast to the money-gobbling antics of the previous pair in No. 10 during which the stench of corruption, in all its manifestations, emanating from Downing Street was sick-making.  It is, perhaps, Brown's patent inability to squeeze money out of people that accounts for the fact that the Labour party is within months of bankruptcy. Oborne reports that whilst Brown and company lie a lot, it is nowhere near the scale of mass-deception practiced by Blair and Campbell.  He also points out that under Brown a measure of Cabinet government has returned with both the Foreign Office and the Home Office, under their current ministers, enjoying a revival in power and independence.  Oborne has not gone soft - or native - and he insists that there is very much more that Brown could do to improve the quality of government, but at least he has made a start.  It is an interesting 'correctional', and I urge you all to read it.

David Davis: the beginning or the end?

In a post down below I mused on what exactly it was that drove 'Trooper' Davis, ex-SAS, to resign his office and force a by-election.  Last week The Spectator was unable to comment because they had gone to press but this week they offer two rather different explanations and forecasts.  The editorial suggests that Davis might have either stumbled or deliberately stepped, it doesn't make clear which, into a new political zeitgeist.  This new spirit of the age can be summed up as extreme fear and loathing on the part of the electorate for their parliamentarians.  The editorial points out that whilst the inmates of Westminster have more or less universally sneered at Davis's gesture of abnegation, the public appear to admire it even if, in their contrary way, they mostly support the idea of locking up terrorist suspects for 42 days whilst awaiting charges.  They rather like the almost unique sight and sound of a politician apparently taking personal risks with his career on a matter of principle.  The Spectator also points at the success of another highly unusual, not to say downright eccentric, politician, Boris Johnson, who seems to have tapped into a source of public support precisely because he was not like any of the other machine-made, machine-controlled, machine politicians whom they now hate and despise. 

By contrast, Fraser Nelson, a young but shrewd observer of the Westminster scene, dismissed Davis's action as misguided, or in the words of Sellar & Yeatman, "wrong but wromantic"!  He quotes remarks made by Davis at a dinner party in which he, Davis, intimated  that measures he believed necessary were unlikely to be implemented by a Cameron government.  He quotes someone else as saying that 'it wasn't 42 days that did for David but 42 Old Etonians'!  Personally I have some empathy with David Davis since both he and I were brought up by single, working mothers and both of us gravitated towards the military.  I can understand his frustration with the general soppiness of so many 'straight-backed chinless wonders' with public school, Oxbridge backgrounds who, to quote an old American adage, 'have never had to meet a payroll'.  Perhaps part of his motive was hidden in his secret knowledge that it was either, choose a suitable excuse to get out from under, or punch their lights out at the next shadow cabinet meeting!  I suppose we shall have to wait for the history books to find out the real reason - I should live so long, my life, already!  And who knows, perhaps fortune does indeed favour the brave - instead of giving them a posthumous VC which is the usual outcome.  The editorial finishes with these words:

"The Davis campaign and Boris's mayoral triumph are important symptoms of a radically changing political landscape.  So too is the decentralised, unregulated, sometimes anarchic energy of the web and political blogging: so-called 'wiki-politics'.  For more than a decade, New Labour has governed by central control, message discipline and spin.  The days of command and control are drawing to a close.  A new less predictable culture is emerging fast.  David Davis's actions, reckless though they are, must be seen in this new context.  It is a context that Mr. Cameron will simply have to get used to."