Yet again, last night, checking the kitchen before bed, my bare foot steps on something slimy. I have to evict the soggy-cigar thing with kitchen roll and wipe my foot repeatedly.
We now have a bunker-grade triple-glazed back door. How do they get in?
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World War Two: the Household Cavalry prepares for combat...
At the general's final inspection before the division left England for war, he had asked one of the Yeomanry colonels whether everything was in order. The colonel replied, "Oh, I think so, George." The general gently pressed for details - ammunition? Vehicles? Non-coms' training? Gas-masks? The colonel scratched his head and said, "Dash it, I don't know about any of that, George... but we've got forty dozen of champagne, well crated, and the pack of foxhounds is in fine fettle."
- from John Masters' autobiography, "The Road Past Mandalay."
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See right sidebar - answers by Twelfth Night, please.
UPDATE:
The question was: "It's another rainy bloody day. Do you..."
Put the world to rights on Blogger?
Watch Rhod Gilbert on Youtube?
Get your burnt-out car headlamp replaced?
Go shopping?
The winner - on a tiny poll - was the last. Personally, I found Rhod Gilbert far and away the best use of my time.
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Extract from the article on “The Muslim Enlightenment
Movement of the early 2200s” from the International Enseculopedia (2416
edition)
“… The Almustaniri ("enlightened") main motivation and aim was the
modernization of the Muslims, in accordance with the rationalistic and liberal
ideals of the Western Enlightenment. Members of the movement sought to acquaint
their people with European culture, have them adopt the vernacular language of
their lands, and integrate them into larger society. They opposed Islamic
reclusiveness and self-segregation, called upon to discard traditional dress in
favour of the prevalent one, and preached patriotism and loyalty to the new
centralized governments. They acted to weaken and limit the jurisdiction of
traditional community institutions - the Sharia courts, empowered to rule on
numerous civic matters, and the Council of Elders, which served as lay
leadership. The Almustaniri perceived those as remnants of medieval
discrimination. They criticised various traits of Muslim society, such as child
marriage - traumatized memories from unions entered at the age of thirteen or
fourteen are a common theme in Almustaniri literature - the use of anathema (laenatan) to enforce community will and
the concentration on virtually only religious studies.
“As long as the Muslims lived in segregated communities, and
as long as all social intercourse with their non-Muslim neighbours was limited,
the imam was the most influential member of the Muslim community. In addition
to being a religious scholar and "clergy", an imam also acted as a
civil judge in all cases in which both parties were Muslims. Imams sometimes
had other important administrative powers, together with the community elders. To
become an imam was the highest aim of many Muslim boys, and the study of the Quran
was the means of obtaining that coveted position, or one of many other
important communal distinctions. Almustaniri followers advocated "coming
out of ghetto," not just physically but also mentally and spiritually in
order to assimilate among non-Muslim nations…”
Couldn't happen? The above paragraphs are only very slightly adapted from this article on the 18th Century Jewish Enlightenment or "Haskalah". But surely the Wahhabite version of Islam currently tearing up the Middle East is too ferocious to ever permit liberalisation? So was Judaism at one point. Have a look at the Bible, for example the Book of Numbers, Chapter 25. Here's a snippet: "6 And, behold, one of the children of Israel came and brought unto his brethren a Midianitish woman in the sight of Moses, and in the sight of all the congregation of the children of Israel, who were weeping before the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.
"7 And when Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose up from among the congregation, and took a javelin in his hand;
"8 And he went after the man of Israel into the tent, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her belly." That (and other things) brought me up short when I was trying to read my way through the Bible as a child. Things will change, over time, once the worst have been dealt with. One hopes. In any case, the headbangers do not represent the majority, even now.
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He was one of that large class of purely mechanical and perfectly mediocre persons connected with the practice of the law who will probably, in a more advanced state of science, be superseded by machinery.
Wilkie Collins – Man and Wife (1870)
The other day I received an email from our electricity and gas supplier asking me to submit a new meter reading. Of course the email was composed and sent by a computer. I duly read the meters, entered my readings online and the machine calculated our latest statement. Mine was probably the only human role and a subservient one at that. One day smart meters will get rid of my job too.
Early in the New Year I’ll receive another email from another machine reminding me that our credit card payment is due. I’ll pay our credit card bill via the online machine and another machine which is our bank. Nobody else involved here either.
Later I’ll probably visit Tesco and pay for some groceries using that same credit card. When I reach the checkout a Tesco machine will validate my credit card and issue a receipt allowing me to take the goods. If I buy a bottle of wine a machine will tell the Tesco checkout operator to confirm that I’m old enough. One day it will already know.
At some point I may take the car to the unmanned fuel station at Asda to buy some diesel from yet another machine. Some machines have permanent human minders, but that may change. Supermarkets alone give us some pretty strong clues about our future – machine minders.
Picture a solicitor behind a desk a few years into the future. On the desk is a computer and this is where the solicitor’s professional expertise really is. The solicitor consults the machine but it is the machine which really sorts out the legal work. The solicitor is merely its trained minder, its human face.
How about teaching, job interviews, accountancy, driving a car, lorry, taxi, bus or train? How about delivery drivers, journalism, supervision and even management? How about politics? In many ways David Cameron is a machine minder. He looks after that little cog in the global machine, the cog we used to call the United Kingdom.
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We watched "Ice Cold In Alex" yet again, a few days ago. A classic, and a dream for lager marketing men (Dad used to recall the instant headache he'd get stepping out into Egyptian sunlight after a few pints of Stella.)
But the war took many other forms.
70-odd years on, we're familiar with WW2 war room scenes of girls plotting plane movements and communicating with pilots in-flight. What's less well known is that elsewhere in Britain, some were speaking to enemy airmen...
"Starting in 1943, Aspidistra was used to disrupt German nightfighter operations against Allied bombers over Germany. German radar stations broadcast the movements of the bomber streams en route to targets during RAF Bomber Command's Battle of Berlin. As part of their strategies to misdirect the German fighters, German-speaking RAF operators impersonated these German ground control operators, sending fake instructions to the nightfighters. They directed the nightfighters to land or to move to the wrong sectors."
Here is a Youtube recording of a 1973 radio programme about the deception work of Sefton Delmer, who set up a number of radio stations broadcasting "psyops" man-in-the-middle transmissions, ostensibly by Germans, to the German military and public:
Besides Delmer's own revelations in the second volume of his autobiography, called "Black Boomerang," there are accounts by R V Jones and David Garnett.
As the drama-doc above says, Delmer had hoped to fake the Germans into a premature ceasefire in 1945 but was told that it would not be good if the latter could claim afterwards that they had been defeated by a trick. (There is some merit in the objection, since WWI diehards had claimed that Germany was defeated not militarily but because of domestic treachery. No need to set up another propaganda hostage to fortune.)
But ironically, Delmer's apparently unfinished early '70s memoir "Tail of a Tale" begins with his own sense of betrayal - by our US allies as the British Empire was undermined and dismantled:
"I would have laughed at anyone who told me in that hour of triumph that our governments, Socialist and Conservative, would be competing over the next twenty years as to which of them could do most to liquidate the Empire and betray the trust of the colonial peoples that looked to us for sound administration untrammelled by nepotism, tribalism or corruption. Or that on the one and only occasion when a British statesman stood up to defend a lifeline of the Empire, the United States government with a dumbfounding blindness to its own long term interests and disregard for the international rule of law would join the Soviet Union in supporting the aggression of the Egyptian Hitler, Gamal Abdel Nasser. (Not that this deterred the Americans from reproaching us with a lack of loyalty and vigour in supporting them in the areas east of Suez - our line of communication with which they so rashly helped to sever - when they themselves in their turn became embroiled in Vietnam and the Middle East with the same forces they had supported against us in their post-war anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist fervour)."
Funny how "right-wing" and "left-wing" don't seem adequate to cover the full spectrum of political opinion. We're not what we were, but nor, as Delmer says, are yesterday's anti-imperialists.
Today, when Saudi Arabia is funding terrorism while ostensibly opposing it, Turkey smuggling oil from IS while sheltering Syrian refugees, and Russia and now China stepping in to help Syria's government against what is under international law an illegal attempt by Western powers to overthrow it, the fog of disinformation is rising again.
I guess that's what Delmer meant by the boomerang.
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One of the first things I learned from reading Donleavy's "The Ginger Man" was that WW2 veterans were entitled (among other benefits) to a free college education and living expenses.
Historians and economists judge the G.I. Bill a major political and economic success—especially in contrast to the treatments of World War I veterans—and a major contribution to America's stock of human capital that sped long-term economic growth.
But it seems that in the USA and UK it's just another way for the financial system to load people up with debt - at an age when they should be starting to buy a house and form a family.
What went wrong?
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