'Nother Solent

Getting your priorities right.

The BBC (credit to them on this occasion) has written an unflinching account of the excavation of an Iraqi mass grave.

One trench contains only women and children while another contains only men.

The body of one woman was found still clutching a baby. The infant had been shot in the back of the head and the woman in the face.

"The youngest foetus we have was 18 to 20 foetal weeks," said US investigating anthropologist P Willey.

"Tiny bones, femurs - thighbones the size of a matchstick."

Mr Kehoe investigated mass graves in the Balkans for five years but those burials mainly involved men of fighting age and the Iraqi finds were quite different, he said.

"I've been doing grave sites for a long time, but I've never seen anything like this, women and children executed for no apparent reason," he said.

Then, a little further down, we read this:

Mr Kehoe said that work to uncover graves around Iraq, where about 300,000 people are thought to have been killed during Saddam Hussein's regime, was slow as experienced European investigators were not taking part.

The Europeans, he said, were staying away as the evidence might be used eventually to put Saddam Hussein to death.

Tell the police immediately

if your estranged husband is coming to murder you. They can give you "advice and support" until you are killed. They can't actually come to the house until a few hours after your death in case they meet a violent criminal.

(Via The England Project, whose comments on the case are well worth reading.)

Your child is intellectually challenged. Or as we teachers like to say... stupid

. A real teacher's teacher comments on his young charges.

My husband's secret favourite among the many reports he has written was for a child who had burned down the boys' lavatories. "We must hope," he said, "that the improvement in X's behaviour since his exclusion was not just a flash in the pan."

"But we can immediately read it anyway"

Brian Micklethwait links to and comments on an article about Ken Bigley by Mark Steyn that the Telegraph refused to print. I think the Telegraph was correct not to print it. Seeing those words in a national newspaper would have caused vast offence to some people who have suffered enough already. Yet I also think Steyn was correct to put it on his website. Think of a see-saw with causing pain at one end and getting out a message that may save lives on the other. The size and type of readership it is going to get on a website tips the see-saw one way; exposure in the Telegraph would tip it the other.

Brian's comments about the fact that the editor's veto may have stopped Mr Steyn from being paid for it but didn't stop us (informed, obsessive, connected us) reading it are equally interesting. Expect more of this. Eventually people will become much more aware that a newspaper is a selection. This should have been obvious all along but hasn't been.

The way I hear it, there is a pent-up desire on the part of many to say the sort of thing Steyn did. Up bubble these thoughts and words like water from a thousand springs. Some streams taste sweet, others bitter. They all want to reach the sea - the public arena, if you will forgive me changing metaphors mid-sentence. Some of them join great rivers almost immediately; other rivulets divide and recombine and meander; water from some must even evaporate and re-condense many times before finally getting to their destination.

For the sake of the next hostage, and Iraq, and the world, I want the key elements of Steyn's message (which I stress again is not unique to him) to reach the sea. Having his column read by some atypical internet WoT wonks, then repeated and re-intepreted along a chain of increasingly normal intermediaries before it eventually becomes commonplace may be the way of doing that that involves least pain overall.

ADDED LATER: ... and, come to think of it, might also be the best way of spreading the message. Ineffective attempts at supression can get you a wider hearing. Suppression is not quite the right word; as I said, I think the Telegraph had a point - but I turned to the column with all the more interest knowing it had been pulled, and I'm sure you did too.

I have a post that mentions Wayne Rooney

up at Biased BBC. Mr Rooney is a football player.

How I really write posts - or fail to.

I wanted an excuse to wallow in Chesterton's demolition in verse of a pompous remark by F.E. Smith concerning the Disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales. I felt sure I'd find somewhere among this week's controversies a similarly overwrought denunciation that I could hang it on.

Nothing doing. Here's a clip from it anyway.

"A Bill which has shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe." -- Mr. F. E. Smith, on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill.

Are they clinging to their crosses,
F. E. Smith,
Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,
Are they, Smith?
Do they, fasting, trembling, bleeding,
Wait the news from this our city?
Groaning "That's the Second Reading!"
Hissing "There is still Committee!"
If the voice of Cecil falters,
If McKenna's point has pith,
Do they tremble for their altars?
Do they, Smith?

Click the link to see the rest.

Antidisestablishmentarianism is not the longest word in English as sometimes claimed but I think it is the longest word that ever had a regular place in the newspapers. Floccinaucinihilipilification doesn't count. It was made up to attract tourists.

Locked out of me own home.

I have a guest post up at Daily Ablution. That man Burgess has strange powers. This post I am writing now is the first time that Blogger has let me in all day.

I have purchased a book, on actual paper, called "Improve the performance of your PC."