'Nother Solent

O wad some Pow'r

the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us / It wad frae mony a blunder free us, / And foolish notion.

- Robert Burns, To A Louse. And with that thought, readers and fellow bloggers, I wish you all a happy Burns Night.

Put not thy trust in princes.

It is safe to assume that the Iraqi who naively tried to claim the sanctuary of a UN Weapons Inspector's vehicle is now dead or longing for death.

Sectarian Worker

is one seriously cool blog, as the dauntless Dave Dudley would undoubtedly not put it. Go there for comradely fun. Cannonites, Vyshinkskyites and other soi-disant anti-sectarians excepted, of course.

One thing you can say about Den Beste

is that he isn't afraid to lay his bets on the table. He says when he thinks the war will begin, and how it will go. Reading a whole bunch of his posts one has a sense of a great, heavy machine being powered up. As one who fears the whimper more than the bang I found it reassuring and ominous at the same time. Some fine Macchiavellian observation in the asides, too: "...we don't need anyone else and quite frankly don't really want many others either because the cost of their cooperation would be too high."

Wrestling with Islam

. Over the last few months three or four different bloggers recommended this essay by David Warren and I still didn't get round to reading it until today. Don't you wait so long.

Or, as

Lileks puts it,

"But it’s time that the newspapers of the world just say no to the latest chunk of recycled fatuity just because it’s penned by a recognizable name. Better a thoughtful disemboweling of the post-Saddam strategy or lack thereof by Herbert Z. Nobody than another bloody gout of half-digested Quiche Cliché by someone whose name we remember from a tired trawl through an airport bookstore."

When AaaaahhK-tors attack.

"I really shouldn't be surprised at their ridiculous leftism. I SHOULD remember they are only AaaaahhK-tohrs." - spoken by Sharon, proprietoress of the Brazos de Dios Cantina, referring to the all too human humans behind the hobbits.

Sharon reports that Orlando Bloom's elvish charm wasn't enough for Greenpeace; Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd have also answered the call to ride out in the service of the great cause of our time. Ooh, just like the book innit, except could we not stress the fact that yer actual hobbits were small but doughty warriors and not averse to a pipe of baccy after the battle.

It is a mystery to me why anyone should think that one's skill at reading words written by someone else, while pretending to be someone else, while pretending that all those men with cameras are somewhere else counts as evidence that one's political opinions are congruent with reality.

Like, this is kinda sweet -

"Billy and I realized that these press tours are kind of a stage for us to talk about whatever issues we think are important. And with this movie, being Merry and Pippin up a tree, and a tree eventually doing his bit to save mankind, we think that it would be a good thing to get into the world's psyche through the media that we need to save the trees. "

- but it's not exactly transcendental wisdom, is it? Follow the link within the Brazos de Dios Cantina for the whole interview.

Now I'm not saying that actors don't have a right to voice their opinions. An actor at the peak of his or her powers represents one of the great flowerings of the human spirit. And like all great flowerings, if you rip them up out of the ecosystem that allowed them to flourish and transplant them into an artificial environment to which they are ill-adapted it only takes a week to turn them into rotting green mush.

Re: does ne one agree orli is gettin uglier

————————————————————————————————————---

I have to agree with you on one level. Orlando has definately gained weight, which is not in itself a bad thing - he was very skinny before. I am not sure that he is less good looking, but I haven't seen any particularly flattering pictures of him lately. The greenpeace picture was simply terrible - he looked fat and had seriously greasy hair, bleugh! And that picture at the EA games how much had those guys had to drink?!

You know, bar a few quibbles about pointless plot changes, I loved both the LOTR films. I was thrilled, moved, exalted. But when actors begin to believe that their capacity to thrill, move and exalt an audience extends to every word they say off the set, then they might care to remember what a hard-bitten director once said when the real work was done and the shot was set up: "Bring on the meat."

Alan K Henderson

has beat me to it on the Telegraph-watching front and spotted that Robin Page is launching a counter-suit.

And scroll down for a scholarly discussion of Roe v. Wade which as an aside has a fascinating link to an account of the notorious frontier Judge, Roy Bean, who when menaced by friends of the accused, showed his devotion to the law by saying, "Gentlemen, I find the law very explicit on murdering your fellow man, but there's nothing here about killing a Chinaman. Case dismissed."

Did I hear that right?

Just caught the end of a news item on the BBC1 lunchtime news. It seemed to be saying that this student who heckled Tony Blair at a speech last night had been invited to Downing Street to come and have a little heart to heart with Tony. Has Mr Blair ever heard of the term "peverse incentives", or does he just love being heckled? As a father himself he should know that it is bad for a child's character to reward attention-seeking behaviour. Here is a sample of young Iain Wilson's opinions:

Asked about Mr Blair's comment that such he would not have escaped with such heckling in Iraq, Mr Wilson replied: "I did not get away with it there.

"You can see them [refers to film clip] dragging me out and pushing me out. I do not see there being that much of a difference.

"I wasn't able to freely express myself."

I am very glad we do live in a relatively free country and the boy, having been escorted from the premises with no more than reasonable and necessary force, still has his eyeballs and genitals.

Meanwhile, back to Tony Blair. After a strong start with the line about the results of free speech in Iraq, Mr Blair has lost the plot completely. If he really has invited Wilson to a little fireside chat as a reward for his heckling then it will be months before he next gets to finish a sentence when speaking in public.

I would assume that I had misheard or misunderstood the whole thing, for no successful politician could possibly be so naive... except that I do seem to recall him doing this sort of thing before. Aha, gottit! Thank you Google. Back in 1999 he was going walkabout (cringe, cringe) on the Tube. A secretary on her way to work found it all a bit much when the great man approached her, and retreated into her Walkman. Instead of shrugging and moving on, Blair responded to this challenge to his own estimate of his importance in the world by inviting the woman to Downing Street. Better briefed this time, the lass responded as per the script and the unbearable breach in reality was healed.

Fascinating juxtaposition

of posts on Turkeyblog. First comes this jab at the French ("for once France isn't boasting about the longevity of its society" - and that's just the nice bit, I'm too kindhearted to repeat what he says about the origins of the Third Republic) then straight on to God, snails and speed of perception.

Did you know that "Chopra notes that snails take three seconds to process neural events, so if one is looking at an apple and you grab it, it will appear to the snail that the apple just vanished into thin air. Chopra says the same is true of us..." Me, especially. Finally there is a poem, modestly described by Geoffrey Barto as one "which I like to think Billy Collins might have written if he had a lot less talent and a lot more time on his hands," but which made me put one hand on another to test my own solidity, surely not a bad test of a poem.

Radio 4's Today programme this morning

reported that they had received a handwritten note in Arabic, presumably from an Iraqi opposition source, saying that Iraqi units in forward positions have been issued with nerve gas protection suits and atropine.

And if the last post mystified you

, think how much more it must have mystified all the readers of Biased BBC, where I posted it by mistake.

Bene Gesserit sayings. Many from "Chapterhouse of Dune", a few from "Children of Dune", none from "Dune" itself. The opposite of how it should be. But as the great Mother Superior Hasta Laveesta Bebi said, Is not an opposite a deeper reconciliation?

Speak not to me of syllogisms, you literal-minded dolts. That was a rhetorical question. Speak not to me of the mystery of beer, either.

Adventures on the Internet.

I found this useful site about toys for rabbits via Instapundit. Really - scroll down.

Die, evil waste paper bin! Know the wrath of my claws, human-thing. Midnight, the Killer Bunny, is happy.

Good news from Africa and India.

Small, cheap private schools are educating actual majorities of the children in some cities. If this keeps going, in a generation or two the stereotype of the wretched, illiterate African or Indian will survive only in Guardian editorials. So why can't we have this good magic over here?

A reader, Nick, writes

, regarding the post about Robin Page two down:

"I've just seen your blog and agree 100% with you. I'm a Londoner, vote Labour and am not pro-hunting.

It's unbelievable! The police are always saying how stretched they are yet have time to do this."

I replied:

"Yes - a point that needs to be made to both right and left-wingers is that "what they do to the people you don't like today they'll do to the people you do like tomorrow."

As for your very true point about how odd it is that the police have spare time for this sort of thing, I suspect that they sometimes prefer the easy, safe, unimportant task to the difficult, dangerous and important one. In that they are only human, but it is a human tendency which should be fought against."

Then I thought, if the point needs to be made, why don't you make it on the blog. So there you are.

The stupid Telegraph computer won't let me register.

If you are more favoured and want to see a sad story, buy the paper or scan the UK "other news" section for the story of a lecturer, Richard Browning, who was fired from his job as a photography lecturer at Doncaster college. Why? Not drunkeness. Not idleness. Not drug addiction. Not sexual indiscretions with students of the opposite sex, nor indeed the same sex. None of these things.* His offence was that he allowed a student to bring in and use a completely harmless toy plastic rifle - it didn't fire anything whatsoever, not so much as plastic ball bearings - as a prop in a photography assignment.

I feel so much safer now he's gone.

*He'd be well advised to claim to have done any or all of them and to be a victim of persecution on that account.

UPDATE: Thank you, Momma Bear, for supplying me with a link to the story mentioned above. (I still can't get in to see it myself - anyone know what I ought to be doing? I don't mind registering, and have even resisted the temptation to put myself down as a three year old male residing in Western Samoa. And I thought I'd done that "enable cookie" thing. My cookies, I said with pardonable pride, had self-esteem as high as any biscuit in the Home Counties. Alas they still seem to be, uh, differently-abled cookies who can't do the job I bought them for but do nonetheless have many meaningful skills and competencies not sufficiently valued by patriarchal and oppressive computer environments.)

Robin Page

gives his account of what happened to him after he was called in for police questioning after speaking at a country fair to urge support for the upcoming Countryside Alliance march.

Readers who think that far too much has been made of this, that Robin Page is bit of a troublemaker, that no one who rights for Right Now! magazine can possibly be deserving of sympathy, that really the police were just doing their job, responding to complaints and all, might like to consider this, the text of an advert in placed in Frampton's local paper by the police:

"Claims that Frampton Country Fair earlier this year was hijacked by the pro-hunting lobby are being investigated by Stonehouse Police. Countryside campaigner Robin Page was accused of bombarding visitors with pro-hunting propaganda during his commentary at the Country Fair in September. Sgt. Geoff Clark of Stonehouse Police would like to hear from anyone who was offended by the commentary. He can be contacted on 0845 090 1234."

Well. The first point I'd like to make is that country fairs are, in fact, pro-hunting. That's what they are for, and often what they were founded for centuries ago, to celebrate country amusements including those some consider barbaric. Like that or hate it there is no "hijacking" there. But that is a minor point. What astonishes me is that Her Majesty's Police are placing adverts in the paper trawling for informants to nail a named individual for... for what, exactly? For politicising an event that the other people think should not be political? That's not illegal. It happens all the time on the left; "the personal is political", as they rightly say. For bombarding people with propaganda? That's not illegal either. Happens all the time on TV, with the government and the police themselves propagandists-in-chief. Dammit, are you getting how annoyed I am by this? Some copper sits down at his desk and takes as his task for today in the battle against crime the initiation of an official police investigation of the possiblility that pro-hunting lobby might be getting too much influence at a country fair. (About this "hijacking" - the organisers of the fair must have known Page's views when they picked him as a commentator, and presumably picked him for the job because of them - did they complain of any "hijacking?" If not, then that word, placed on record in an official communication by the police, is close to libel.) Then the copper whips off a little advert looking for narks to come forward over this purely political offence. And the local newspaper, that exemplar and defender of our ancient liberties, prints it, yes Officer, thank you for your custom, Officer, always glad to help the boys in blue, that'll be £17.56 including VAT. And no one very much thinks that this is odd, this is new, this is not what Britain used to be.

UPDATE: I am reminded that it was not so many years ago that we did not even have "Wanted" posters in Britain, for fear that the presumption of innocence might be violated. And now the police ape the tabloids by asking, in effect, for any dirt readers can supply on a named individual. Funny how they don't do this for burglary, isn't it? It's almost as if the political offender has fewer rights than the old sort of criminal we used to bother about.

Buy, yes buy, a paper copy of the Mail On Sunday today.

They have a story about some TV chick the German Chancellor is shagging. You care not about the paramours of foreign potentates? Buy it anyway. The point is that it's a test case about whether British courts are supreme or whether the EU can over-rule them. Apparently Lover-boy Gerhart has got an injunction to suppress the story in Germany and is claiming that under EU law that means he can suppress it here too.