Abortion switch

One issue on which I changed my mind only a few years ago is how we should describe abortion. Although it has never affected me directly or indirectly, I always tended to see abortion as some kind of unfortunate necessity of the modern world.

For me it was a matter of words. I joined no debates and rarely read the writings of either side, yet I was happy enough to use words such as abortion and foetus. I absorbed the progressive meme, happy enough to veer away from issues such as when this tiny scrap of humanity becomes a baby and oh so inconveniently human.

I can’t claim to have had any kind of Damascene conversion, but eventually modern verbal contortions over the issue became - well they felt absurdly furtive. Even somewhat silly if I’m to plumb the depths and admit all of it. I felt I’d been foolish in going along with such a transparently evasive narrative.

Abortion involves killing unborn babies.

I know it seems a little thin and bloodless to see the abortion issue as a matter of verbal behaviour, but to a great extent these highly-charged issues are exactly that. We must have our justifications whatever our sins, so we are obliged to analyse them, but too often we don't.

It was strangely refreshing to discover I’d changed my mind, especially on a socially significant issue. As I say, it was no Damascene conversion so I can’t put my finger on exactly when I made the switch. It must have seeped in into my mind over a number of years because it was never an issue I gave much thought to.

But there we are. Abortion is killing unborn babies – currently numbered in the millions. Yes there are special cases where impossibly difficult moral choices shake almost anyone’s principles, so I want nothing to do with any fanatical pro-life lobby.

So for me it is not a crusading issue, but verbal behaviour is important. Even morally important because this is how we are morally deceived. We usually begin by deceiving ourselves - as I did.

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Stem cell therapy in tenth century Japan

Taira no Sadamori (picture source)

"The tale of Masakado offers a grotesque window into the superstitions and savageries of combat in the tenth century, not merely in his own behaviour, but in that of his opponents. In one of its sidebars, we hear of Sadamori's quest for a male foetus - the crucial ingredient in a magical cure for a bad wound that he has sustained. He first orders his pregnant daughter-in-law to give up what she is carrying, and is only thwarted by a doctor who tells him that his unborn grandchild would not be suitable. Instead, he slices up a pregnant kitchen maid, although her foetus is female, and hence useless. It is only with yet another death among his retinue that he finally obtains the foetus required. The horrific story may be an invention, although its details are true to folk remedies of the period, in which powdered foetus was indeed used as a cure for battle wounds."

Jonathan Clements, "The Samurai: A  New History of the Warrior Elite" (Robinson, 2010)

Superstition? Magic? Or pragmatic medicine?

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My first public execution

From Vice News, the appalling story of Kim Joo Il who served eight years in the North Korean army. :-

I was ten when I saw my first public execution. I sat there thinking, "He committed this crime, he threatened our paradise, he should be punished." The man was my classmate’s brother-in-law. They said he’d been to China and stolen something from a Chinese museum. The whole school had to witness it. Everyone had to go to public executions, so they’d do them in big stadiums.

One idea the government keeps pushing is that, in North Korea, no one dies of starvation. As a captain, I had to report soldiers’ deaths, but I couldn’t say they’d starved. We wrote that they'd had acute colitis—an inflammation of the colon that can lead to weight loss, fever, and bleeding, among other symptoms—on their death certificates. A lot of female soldiers died, and a woman's hair will fall out before she dies of starvation. So when they died, they would be bald and totally flat chested, meaning you could no longer tell by looking at [the bodies] whether they were women or not.

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2014 Budget summary (pictorial edition)

What the new-style pound coin will resemble:
 

The flower is called "thrift"... (source)

What the modern pound is worth:

 

(There were 80 of these to the old pound)

What Osborne and the Coalition have done to guarantee savers against inflation:

http://img.tfd.com/wn/88/6C789-zilch.png

What will happen as a result of personal pension changes allowing the investor unlimited access to the fund:

(source)

What's going to happen long-term anyway:

(Source)

What the Government is planning for its own future:

Leading the way...

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False proximity

In 1996, Princess Diana died in a car crash. As an extremely glamorous member of the British royal family, she was a major celebrity whose death was followed by an enormous amount of grief expressed by many who never knew her personally.

Mostly simulated one assumes, but why grief?

Surely we feel no genuine grief at the death of a celebrity we don’t know. Yet presumably many people felt close to her – a false proximity nurtured and encouraged by the media and by Diana herself.

False proximity seems to be an extremely common illusion, applying to abstractions as well as people. Celebrities are part abstraction of course. The Diana virtually all of us knew was mostly a glossy image nurtured, refined and endlessly fascinating to millions...

...Knock, knock, knock.

Two members of the Labour Party came to the door in the middle of writing this post. Canvassing for the EU elections no doubt. I waved them away and shut the door. I don’t want real proximities to mess up a post on false proximity do I?

Yet those two political toilers were presumably motivated to bang on my door by a false proximity to both people and political abstractions. Ed Miliband even! Plus equality, fairness, a just society and suchlike. Proximity to a Cause on my very own doorstep but no thanks – that’s not how detachment works.

Our ancestors were heavily influenced by a false proximity to God, ghosts, demons and even the local priest or vicar. Although I tend to wonder how common even that level of piety really was among horny-handed drudges with little to look forward to apart from a mug of sour ale at the end of  a long day.

Now we foster a sense of false proximity to everything from the latest teen idol to holiday destinations. What else is an exotic holiday but the illusion of false proximity to a more interesting or desirable location?

We foster a sense of false proximity to celebrities of course, but that about other abstractions? Royalty, honesty, integrity, intelligence, social class, other cultures, professional standards, science, the arts, places, the boss, style, football clubs, disasters, human suffering, conflict, the supernatural, the environment, whales, dolphins, furry animals, trees, forests and even the whole universe.

False proximity sells myths.

Even simile, metaphor and simple comparison may create a sense of false proximity between one idea and another, one situation and another, one event and another, a historical figure and one from the present day.

The distorting lens of the media presents unusual people as being fascinatingly closer than they really are. We get the same beguiling effect of false proximity when the media present us with rare events such as terrorist bombings or freakish murders.

• A community is in shock after a young man was shot…
• The film premiere was held last night - the stars were…
• Armed police chased him across this road… 

It all adds up to a dramatic but distorted version of what is going on in the world. False proximity stirs up emotional confusions and sidelines detachment. 

Which of course is the whole idea.

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Ukraine: Belarus gets the message

Source: http://eurodialogue.org/Druzhba-Pipeline-Map

"Belarus will make all efforts towards returning Ukrainian-Russian relations to brotherly and good neighbourly ones, helping find options to settle all the existing contradictions and preventing armed confrontation," said the Belarusian Foreign Minstry on Wednesday.

This outbreak of reasonableness may have been prompted by the annexation of Crimea and the ongoing campaign to grab eastern Ukraine, across which runs a major Russian gas pipeline towards Turkey and (via the future South Stream spur) to Western Europe.

But it may also have to do with a sense that the game is up for the gas (and oil - see above map) bandits of eastern Europe. Yevhen Bakulin, the chairman of the Ukrainian national gas company Naftogaz Ukrainy, has just been arrested for corruption.

Four years ago, the President of the Ukraine claimed that his Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko had driven the company into insolvency in order to forge a closer cooperation with Russia.

At the same time (2010), Vladimir Socor commented on Jamestown.org:

"In Belarus, however, the presumably Russia-oriented president Alyaksandr Lukashenka has all along resisted Russian control of the oil processing plants and transit pipelines. The Kremlin is arm-twisting Belarus by shifting oil transit volumes into the Baltic Pipelines Sytem (BPS), which circumvents Belarus to reach Russian Baltic ports for tanker transportation to Europe. Similarly, Russia threatens to bypass Ukraine’s gas transit system by laying pipelines on the seabed of the Baltic and Black seas. Moscow uses the threat of circumvention to pressure Belarus and Ukraine into sharing control of their oil and gas sectors, respectively, with Russian companies. In that eventuality, Russia would presumably maintain the supply and transit flows by overland pipelines through Belarus and Ukraine.

"While the threat of bypassing Ukraine through the Baltic and Black Sea is hardly credible, the circumvention of Belarus is credible and indeed in progress through BPS Phase One, which is already operational, and the incipient construction of BPS Phase Two. The pressure is now growing through the threat of abolishing oil subsidies to Belarus, following Minsk’s attempts to improve its relations with the EU."

It's the old story. Middlemen taking "protection money" from traders in transit, whether it be exotic fabrics along the Silk Route or the ancient, Brittany-bound exports of Irish copper and gold across the Cornish peninsula that made King Arthur's court so wealthy.

Sadly for us who like the idea of democracy, it takes an autarch to beat the oligarchs into submission. Putin is taming Belarus and Ukraine by a combination of muscle and (with the threat of Nord and South Stream pipeline developments) Thatcherian "competitionanchoice". At least he appears to be acting broadly in his nation's interests, unlike the treacherous claques of Westminster.

There is a passage I recall from a biography of Armand Hammer, where the American entrepreneur was transporting much-needed pencillin by rail into Soviet Russia. At one rural station, the train was delayed by an official looking for a certain consideration. A telephone call was put through to Stalin, the man was shot, the train moved on.

Putin may not be a nice man, but he is, to use Mario Puzo's words, a "reasonable man". This is business. as Hyman Roth said:

"I let it go. And I said to myself, this is the business we've chosen; I didn't ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!"

If you want the luxury of freedom, be prepared to turn off your gas and electricity.


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Ukraine: never mind the Fascism taunts, follow the money

"... while the focus has most recently been on Crimea, eastern Ukraine is expected to be the next hotspot, with the action centring on Donetsk, the regional capital of the industrial heartlands. Pro-Russian activists say they are ready to fight against Kiev and its "fascist" backers in the West. And upon the outcome of this struggle will depend on whether the country splits between east and west."

- says Richard North today (htp: Raedwald).

As I said on Wednesday:

"... was the whole thing [anti-government Ukraine protests] set up by Russia in the first place, to provoke a crisis aimed at the annexation of Crimea, near which will run the South Stream gas pipeline?

- and possibly, in due course, eastern Ukraine, which is also predominantly Russian-speaking and across which runs Blue Stream?"
The core curriculum in our schools should include history and map-reading.

See also my Monday post on how Putin has for years been building up infrastructure on the shores of the Black Sea, using the Winter Olympics as cover. Some echoes of the 1938 Munich Games, perhaps; but unlike Hitler, Putin's not mad. Let him have his Sudetenland.

For really, it's business as usual: he's selling what we want to buy.

For the third time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Major_russian_gas_pipelines_to_europe.png

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