'Nother Solent

Secrets of my mailroom

. Then there is the mail that a more decorous age would not have cared to publish. Geoffrey Barto of Turkeyblog and I are exchanging stuff about books to read in the lavatory. And by synchronicity, I also received this:

"I am a great admirer of your Thomas Crapper, who made civilization possible. I doubt that I would make it through the Atlantic Monthly without regular recourse to my cozy study, where my prize porcelain sculpture is on display along with my selection of reading material, such as Monster Trucks and a tasteful collection of colorful flyers from the Wal_mart (I especially value the Spring issue, with its emphasis on garden shrubbery)."

The writer, Ed Collins, was led to the subject of Mr Crapper's ingenious invention by a desire to expand on the linguistic difference between crap and crappy jobs. Interestingly, all the e-mail I received on that subject was literate and all the writers felt they had benefited or were benefiting from having to shovel a little of the metaphorical stuff in their time. I wonder if anyone has compiled any statistics on the correlation, if any, between having had to do a crap job (UK usage) to get through college and later success in life?

Here's a balanced way of dealing with mail

: Jack C Denny writes, regarding charity solicitations:

"I used to get all kinds of idiotic solicitations from non-profit and advocacy groups. When they would send these "questionaires-slash-fund raising letters" that always had highly skewed and nonsensical responses preprinted on them, well then I would look for the return-addressed envelope. Almost always they would be postage-paid, as the group was willing to pay the postage to get the donation/response. In that case I would write my reply (as you wrote one) and mail it back to them at their expense. However the more astute groups leave a space for comments on the form. On these I always put my own postage on, returning the respect they have given to me, whether on not I choose to donate to their cause. In this case I have let them have an idea of what I think, not what their pollsters are trying to elicit as a response. Now that's what I call grassroots advocacy."

Do not read this.

For the first time last week, my e-mail really got on top of me. I've lost stuff before. I've forgotten stuff before. And, no, I never did answer every letter - particularly as some of them really don't seem to expect it, being more in the way of voting than comment. But last week for the first time I felt the chill portents of a time coming when it would be out of the question to even aim at answering most of 'em. A telepathic reader (his name's on the "details" link, but he doesn't sign the e-mail proper. Not that it's a big deal: I'm just being obsessive, which is the point, oh get on with it woman...) where was I? A reader writes:

"Why do bloggers insist on the need to read and respond to all email. Sgt Stryker demonstrates why this is a bad idea. I am more interested in what the bloggers I read have to say then having the bloggers feel they have a duty to respond to everything. Maybe the readers should find a way to indicate in the subject line how interested the readers are in a reply.
I know that doesn't make a lot of sense but neither does spending hours reading email every day. I can't keep up with all the blogs I like. I generally ration them to a certain time each day and rotate through a list, although there are some including this one I read every day.

"Why not start a blogger discussion on what is the appropriate level of time and attention to pay to your blogs and the email. Post less often when it becomes a strain, as many are starting to do, stop racing to be the first to comment and worry more about the quality if your are still enjoying what you do.

"Please don't respond."

But you lot can.

Beware the Ides of March. And April. And May. And it might not be the Ides.

Airstrip One praises Instapundit for covering, when others didn't , the fact that the US administration had vague warnings of September 11. Actually I think Instapundit is a good deal too hard on the US government. The failure of local authorities to follow up on the disquiet about named pupils expressed by the flight schools was negligent. But, as for general warnings of terrorist activity to come, hey, everyone's always getting warnings of everything. The fact is most of them are issued by either cranks, excitable people, tail-coverers who want an insurance policy against every conceivable catastrophe, or professional doom-merchants who half want the kudos of being proved right. A good percentage are also issued by responsible and sane people, but daily life would be impossible if we acted on 100% of their well-intentioned warnings, let alone the ill-intentioned ones. Same goes for bad bits of track.

Another day. Another fisking needed. Isn't there more to life than this?

In this article praising Michael Moore's documentary, Gunning for the land of the free, which has just met such a favourable reception at Cannes, the Guardian presents such a multitude of targets - sorry - that I don't know where to fire -sorry - first. Perhaps I should keep my powder dry for now - sorry - and fire off my broadside - sorry - when I feel more inspired. But I can't resist one small target of opportunity. Mr Moore is careful to tell us that the NRA was formed to sell guns to whites only; will he be as forthcoming in telling us how many of the early US gun control laws were passed explicitly to stop newly freed blacks owning guns?

BBC partly forgiven.

I submitted a version of the post below to the BBC's Talking Point on our "readiness" for the Euro. They didn't publish it. They never publish my stuff. I'm beginning to get paranoid. However just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't... willing to publish letters containing a better anti-Euro metaphor than my stock market one, actually.

"Make no mistake, joining the euro will be a huge gamble. We will be surrendering control of the most important levers any country uses to run its economy to a group of people over whom we will have almost no influence whatsoever. You could liken it to trying to drive a car with someone else operating the brake and accelerator - someone you didn't choose and you can't get rid of (and who so far has a pretty poor driving record). - John Parker, UK. "

"We had no idea".

The staff of Arab News can hardly express their deep sense of shock and dismay. Did they really allow a racist nutter to sully their famously tolerant pages? Best of the Web explains. Ctrl-F to "David who" to find it.

Don't push your luck, Tony

, says Anatole Kaletsky in the Times.

Kaletsky makes some good points. I particularly liked the aside in brackets here:

This tilts the vote towards the pro-euro camp unless “alienated and perhaps rebellious anti-euro voters rush into the electorate and wreck the referendum”, says the leaked memo. But such “wrecking” tactics (also known as democracy) have recently broken out all over Europe and would in Britain.

In the past decade, in almost every case, there have been significant swings against closer European ties and in favour of the constitutional status quo during the campaign periods. These swings have occurred even when change was strongly recommended by popular governments and supported almost unanimously by political elites.

He makes too much, though, of the effect of the price rises in European goods. I can't help thinking that this is a one-off phenomenon, and people will know this. In general one of the good effects (see, I do admit there are some) of the Euro will be to make prices in the Eurozone more fluid and hence to settle at a generally lower level in the long run. In that same long run, of course, unemployment in Greece and Italy is going to reach frightening new levels, not to mention the feast and famine problems that a one-size fits all economic policy is going to cause all over Europe - but that's by the by.

Is Britain ready for the Euro?

asks this BBC News 24 Talking Point. This is a perfect example of BBC bias. "Readiness" is good. One works to become "ready" for events that one has already decided are either desirable or inevitable. "Are you ready for school?" the mother asks the child. "He isn't ready for marriage yet," the concerned father says of his feckless son. The patient gets ready for surgery knowing that unpleasant though the prospect may be, it is necessary. The football manager boasts that his team is ready to go out there and win.

None of these metaphors fit the question of whether Britain should or should not join the Euro. It's like being asked whether you are "ready" to buy a certain financial product that might go up or down, might be easy or impossible to disinvest from, and is offered by a company that might or might not be an ethical place to put your money. To suggest that the only question is your state of preparedness is an affront. As a correspondent called "Mike" puts it, "Britain is ready for the Euro, it always will be. It's also ready to reject it."

Disappearing Duke struck by mystery green projectiles.

Little Green Footballs spotted Arab News's little gaffe too, and has some funny comments.

The Case of the Disappearing Duke.

Instapundit has just flagged up the mystery. Nancy Drew, get on to it. Also just out is Professor Reynold's latest Fox News column, on the riot at the San Francisco State University.

Murder.

This is a politics plus quirky stuff blog. I don't usually post reports of "ordinary" crimes, however horrible. However, it does occur to me to wonder whether the murder by arson of five young children and two adults that took place in Huddersfield over the last few days might have a political angle.

The grandfather of the murdered family (it is terrible to think that he may no longer be a grandfather, unless he has other children) is described as a well-respected imam.

More on the Cristeros.

Jim Bennett writes:

"There was indeed a movement in Mexico in the 1920s generally called the Cristeros. I don't know what the formal title was. Guerilleros del Cristo Rey (GCR) was the name of a terrorist group in Spain active just before the end of Franco with roots in some of the ultra-traditionalist movements there.

"The Mexican Cristeros were originally a movement of small peasants opposed to the collectivization of land in the area of Mexcio known as Los Altos (the Highlands). Because the Mexican revolutionary government was also anticlerical, it eventually took on a pro-Catholic tone as well, combining two complaints against the regime. It was a bit like the situation with the collectivization of the Ukraine -- a program that
was received with mixed reactions in other parts of the country with less individual land ownership was very strongly resisted in areas with a strong tradition of individual land ownership.

"Although the Mexican government did not resort to outright large-scale populocide as in the Ukraine, it was rather nasty in suppressing the Cristeros, who responded in kind. One incident, the dynamiting of a train with hundreds of innocent passengers killed, got a lot of notice. In the mideast, of course, it would just be considered a good day's work by Noam Chomsky's friends."

Funny where one gets one's knowledge. 95% of what I knew about the Cristeros last week came from the works of the novelist Graham Greene. The Power and the Glory moved me greatly as an adolescent, but since Greene was distinctly friendly to communism, perhaps under the malign influence of his Mao-worshipping journalist brother Felix, I rather think "know" is too strong a word.

Eminent Americans.

You may recall I cited the Saudi "Arab News" as an example of the comparatively mild English-language Arab press? Yeah, right. The latest in their series of distinguished foreign correspondents is Neo-Nazi (oh, sorry, former Neo-Nazi) David Duke.

UPDATE: This is strange. I just tried to put in a link just now, but all I got was this. I copied the link from Instapundit. I certainly remember reading Duke's predictable remarks (he thinks the Jews carried out 9-11, natch.) Scroll up Instapundit and you find that Travelling Shoes seems to have read similar opinions from Duke, but on the man's own website rather than Arab News, so that proves nothing. But a poster on the Libertarian Alliance boldly states that "David Duke does Arab News". But now I search Arab News for "David Duke" and get nothing, and search for "Duke" and get uncontroversial articles about someone's cat's poo problems.

Which is it? Has Arab News been leaned on? Or is it yet more evidence of my computer incompetence? Please investigate!

While flitting from flower to flower in the Arab News website I sipped some more of that Saudi nectar. They say there's a public lecture in English coming up called "Let the Bible Speak." I assume the lecture seeks to prove that Islam is compatible with the Bible, or is the final flowering of it. Of course many respectable Muslims hold this view and legitimately seek to persuade others of its truth - but the title might raise a laugh in Saudi Arabia, where the practise of Christianity is banned, and speaking the words of the Bible in public can get you jailed and flogged.

A weird website.

I really ought to disapprove of this. But it made me laugh so much that I had to post it anyway. My Cat Hates You.

I never knew Janet Daley was American.

At a guess she's married to a British man, and that's why she's ended up here. But I might have known. Like fellow journalists with a foot on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Andrew Sullivan she has strong but nuanced views on identity and assimilation.

(While you are on the Telegraph pages, check out the piece about the BBC and the abortion debate highlighted at the bottom of Ms Daley's column.)

Tactics against alien infliltrators.

Do you remember I recently posted something about a couple I know who got into Eurosceptic politics? Heck, here it is again:

They met some great people, but also a worrying and incredibly persistent fringe of anti-semites and racists. Real nasties, not just unsophisticates who'd come a-cropper of the latest PC diktat. Trying to keep out the infiltrators was a task not unlike Signourey Weaver's task in Alien: no sooner had you zapped one than another one popped up someplace else.

My friend comments,

"Reading your blog, I liked your comparison of our (I assume) Eurosceptic politics experience to Sigourney Weaver in Alien... The crucial difference is that lucky Sig got to kill her enemies. Entryists need to be politically (at least :-)) slain (I got rid of one group but certainly learned something about why nice people don't go anywhere near politics in the process). It seemed to me that it is the very nature of an entry-is-easy / expel-is-hard, 'let's be nice' political group to be vulnerable to such a fringe. The local guy in charge was a gentleman and very nice; we needed an arbitrary autocrat."

The same reader takes up the recent campaign against smacking:

"We heard an amusing bit of PC logic on the radio this morning. A campaign has been launched in some newspapers to attempt to outlaw any right of parents ever to lay a finger on their naughty children. The advocate explained that a study had revealed the harmful effects such brutal parental behaviour caused; an opinion poll had shown a clear correlation between those who said they were themselves smacked if (sufficiently) naughty when young and those who said they might smack their own children if (sufficiently) naughty now they were parents. In short (and I do not caricature), this is a bad thing because those subjected to it will tend to do (shock, horror) this bad thing. I was reminded of the circular logic buried by Karl Marx in 7000 pages of heavy German text only to be exposed in that unintentionally funny book, 'Marx for Beginners'. To the accusation that he defrauds the workers of surplus value, the capitalist replies, 'But I put up the money.' 'Ah, but where did you get that money', replies the communist narrator; from exploiting the workers.is the book's answer.

"Applying the group's opinion poll to themselves, one may deduce that they were never subjected to anything resembling physical punishment when young. Was this the cause of their growing up into politically-correct statists? If so, there would seem to be a good case fror outlawing any failure of parents to punish bad behaviour with vigour, at least on the level of logic that they know and use."

Will you be my daddy, li'l Annie asked?

I've just discovered Daddy Warblogs. Would you believe that for a long time I thought this name was something like "Instantman", a joking reference to the Warblogger Emeritus, Instapundit?

Scroll down Warblogs and check out the surprising Neitzsche quote. My closest acquaintance with his philosophy is the line in the Philosopher's Drinking Song that goes, "There's nothing Neitzsche couldn't teach ya about the raising of the wrist. Socrates himself was permanently ...." In earlier years I had always assumed that Neitzsche was tainted with the Nazi brush. More recently I had put that opinion in the box of dodgy ones that could not be relied upon, but only because it shared the same batch number as other opinions I knew needed repair. Another author I must get round to reading someday.

I found Daddy Warblogs with the help of The Edge of England's Sword. The next item down (does that make it nearer the hilt or the point?) links to an article by Heather Mallick which Iain Murray as the worst he's ever seen. Come, come, Mr Murray. It is racist, complacent, malevolent and obscene. It praises Stupid White Men. But is it really the worst you've ever... Looks again at article. Mutters, "'Next up: The Netherlands, where a recently assassinated fascist could handily win the next election. I shall enjoy quantifying the Dutch.'"

Come to think of it, Murray old boy, I see your point.

No one was so naive as to think all those oppressive Canadian laws against hate speech actually applied to important people like Globe and Mail columnists, did they?

Don't it just warm yer heart.

Cyprus welcomes Palestinian gunmen. Apparently Greek Cypriots feel that they are the Palestinians in this drama and the Turks are the Israelis. It's interesting that the fact that their Palestinian friends and their Turkish enemies are both Muslims does not seem to affect the Greeks' feelings towards the Palestinians.

Climate of violence.

This open letter, found by Dawson, vividly describes a riot at the San Francisco State University when pro-Israel demonstrators were surrounded by antis. How long before someone gets killed?

"Not one administrator came to stand with us. I knew that if a crowd of Palestinian or Black student had been there, surrounded by a crowd of white racists screaming racist threats, shielded by police, the faculty and staff would have no trouble deciding which side to stand on. In fact, the scene recalled for me many moments in the Civil Rights movement, or the United Farm Workers movement, when, as a student, I stood with Black and Latino colleagues, surrounded by hateful mobs."

Optimists. Friends of the Earth sent me a begging letter today. It had a bunch of those either/or questions. It was indeed one of those inescapable moments of decision that confront us at climactic moments. Caesar led his troops across the Rubicon. Luther nailed his proclamation to the door. How would I measure up? Imagine the sweat breaking out on my brow and my mouth going dry as I realised that my only choices lay between these stern alternatives:

Genetically modified diet: I'm happy to eat food modified with virus or bacteria genes, even though no one can predict the long-term effects.

OR

Safe, natural food.

I would like to help Friends of the Earth ensure that we never again face a disaster like BSE.

With thumping heart I searched the columns for one saying, "Personally, I think that if Friends of the Earth really do not know that Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy has nothing whatsoever to do with GM foods then they are even more ignorant than I thought they were and I would not trust them to 'ensure' a biological recycling event in an organic brewery." But that option wasn't there. For a moment my heart quailed. How could I ever choose between the two terrible alternatives presented to me? Then with a rush of relief and gratitude I realized that I didn't have to choose at all. The only option that had a tick box at all was the one where you give money to Friends of the Earth.

My way ahead lay clear. With a decisive movement I tucked their leaflet under the flap of the kitty litter box. Recycling. I'm all for it.

Derail the peace process!

Byers to Northern Ireland now!

Cristeros.

Reader Jay Cantor writes:

I believe that the reference you were looking for in your post on the Lord's Resistance Army was to a group (or collection of groups) known as the "Cristeros" - I think their formal title was "Guerreros de Cristo Rey", Spanish for "Warriors of Christ the King", and were formed in Mexico in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1920s) as a counterrevolutionary/terrorist force to resist land and social reforms imposed after the Mexican Constitution of (?)1917 [and were a fairly nasty bunch].

Thank you. I had inserted a superfluous "h" into the Spanish spelling of "Christ" and had, by an understandable confusion of ideas, dragged in something of the word "pistolero" or gunman. What little I know of this group suggests that they were indeed nasty, but it is only fair to say that as the Mexican revolution enthusiastically persecuted Christians perhaps at the beginning it seemed as if they had some justification.

I'm miles behind on the e-mail. Sorry.

Sometimes I have nothing to say beyond "how dreadful".

I know very little about the background to the Ugandan group calling itself "The Lord's Resistance Army," except that they have followed the pattern established in some South American countries: namely a group that started off as a tribal Christian religious movement (Were they called "Christoleros", "Christolieros" or something else? Google is silent) has degenerated into banditry. Or in the case of the LRA, something far worse.

You've heard of road rage. Now it's Byers rage.

This Telegraph article starts with vulgar abuse of Mr Byers (nowt wrong with that) but goes on to make some serious points about what why pseudo-nationalized companies are even more likely to fall to bits than properly-nationalized ones are.

By now I don't have to keep telling you to read UK Transport Blog. The "bullshit" post I've linked to has lines to make 'em wince in every paragraph.

"There's Louise Christian solemnly telling us that there should be a full public enquiry. Will you be waiving your fee, Louise?"

"If you can't keep yourself together when there's an accident that hasn't killed or seriously hurt someone you know, in an industry where accidents are inevitable, at a time when you have to lead your staff - then you shouldn't be in it."

Guns at Downing Street: Blair emerges in his underwear with hands held high. Prescott, Byers to be flown to Ramallah. "Military rule only until order restored," says New President Gordon Brown.

Ignore me. The story here isn't the story. Look, you can click if you like, no doubt the Observer needs the hits, but it's a fairly ordinary account of how we Brits had some role or other in the negotiations that ended the Bethlehem seige. If our diplomatic boys were hard at work that is jolly admirable, but as part of the apocalyptic drama of the Last Days of the International Order, helping some thugs get a holiday in Cyprus does not get star billing. It's a little like that scene in The Mouse that Roared where the newsreader talks about the latest US moonshot and adds proudly that one of the astronauts is wearing a British made watch. The important point is that the headline reads How a British coup ended siege. What a wonderful headline, rich in possibilities. One so rarely sees the word "coup" used in its evocative Native American sense these days, meaning an act that gains a warrior glory-points.