Tiddles: a counterblast, by Sackerson

Yuval Noah Harari is a ‘public intellectual, historian’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Noah_Harari but since he is also said to be Klaus Schwab’s top adviser I shall refer to him as Tiddles, Blofeld’s cat (anonymous in the Bond films, Tiddles was producer Cubby Broccoli’s pet in real life.)

Embarrassingly, Tiddles completed his D.Phil. at my old college in Oxford in 2002 and I am sorry to say that for an intellectual his thinking on religion and transhumanism appears jejune and he does not seem to realise its implications. On the whole I prefer the anarchic yobs and Welsh drunks of Jesus in the late Sixties and Seventies, whose Junior Common Room once elected a goldfish as President on the grounds that like other leaders it went round in circles opening and closing its mouth (an interpreter was appointed to convey its rulings.) Bawling fools tend not to do much harm; it is the theoretical systematisers and world-reformers that led to the killing of countless millions in the last century.

Consider Tiddles’ facile remarks on religion in his 2017 Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/08/virtual-reality-religion-robots-sapiens-book

‘What is a religion if not a big virtual reality game played by millions of people together? Religions such as Islam and Christianity invent imaginary laws, such as “don’t eat pork”, “repeat the same prayers a set number of times each day”, “don’t have sex with somebody from your own gender” and so forth. These laws exist only in the human imagination.’

The Abrahamic religions postulate a God who both made the world out of nothing and set the rules for our behaviour: the Creator and Law-Giver; but according to Nick Spencer https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-problem-with-yuval-noah-harari/12451764 , Tiddles’ position is that ‘There are no gods, no money, no human rights, and no laws beyond the “common imagination of human beings.”’

if we accept that moral laws have no basis, then consider what this implies for a thoroughly consistent rationalist: a world entirely without moral laws that are binding independently of our wishes and opinions. David Hume said in effect that one cannot reason from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’; you can describe what people think is right and wrong, and even why they may think so, but there is no reason why you should privately adopt their view. In fact, it is convenient if you don’t: I should like everyone else to believe in queuing for the bus, so that I can jump the queue; this helps to explain why psychopaths are over-represented in positions of power. All that matters (if you have any care for yourself, and there is of course no reason why you should) is to work out how to minimise the negative consequences for yourself of society’s disapprobation of your actions.

This nihilism being so, it is difficult to explain why Tiddles is in Schwab’s caressing embrace. Schwab may have a grand vision for future society, but as nothing matters, there is no reason to help him bring it about.

Tiddles has expressed concern https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yuval-harari-sapiens-60-minutes-2021-10-29/ that in an AI data-gathering world humans are ‘hackable’, can be manipulated more comprehensively than ever before. Is this not the WEF’s plan, to design an environment full of blandly contented Stepford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stepford_Wives  people? Isn’t this what the Chinese are up to with their ‘social credit’ system https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4?r=US&IR=T , intended to nudge their citizens relentlessly towards absolute conformity with the CCP’s commandments? What is the point of creating a perfect world, but not for us as we have previously and in differing ways understood ourselves?

The resistance to this nightmare heaven may have to come from the irrational, the superstitious, the emotional, the capricious, violent, stupid, human-hearted humans.

Dig your claws in, Tiddles, and leap off Schwab’s lap.

THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 10 March 1962

 At #2 is Cliff Richard with 'Wonderful Land':

Giles cartoon for this week: RCP reports on links between smoking and diseases

(see 7 March, below)

Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

4 March: 'The Eighteen Nation Disarmament Conference, which included non-nuclear powers in addition to the U.S., the U.S.S.R., the U.K. and France, opened in Geneva.'

5 March: 'A B-58 Hustler jet, piloted by U.S. Air Force Captain Robert Sowers, and a crew of two, set three new records by flying from Los Angeles to New York in 2 hours, 01:15, then back again in 2 hours, 15:02. The sonic boom, from the jet's speed of more than 1,000 mph, broke windows in Riverside, California and Chillicothe, Missouri when it accelerated at 30,000 feet and during a refuelling, and emergency calls were made in cities beneath the flight path. The USAF received more than 10,000 complaints as a result of the flight.'

6 March: 'Rated by the U.S. Geological Survey as "The most destructive storm ever to hit the mid-Atlantic states" of the US, and as one of the ten worst U.S. storms in the 20th century, the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962 began forming off of the coast of North Carolina and continued for three days as it moved up the Eastern seaboard as far as New York. Heavy winds and rain coincided with a perigean spring tide, when a new Moon occurred when the Moon was making its closest approach to the Earth. The combined tugging of Moon and Sun made the tides higher than normal. Forty people were killed and $500,000,000 of damage was incurred.'

    'In a joint statement issued by U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Thailand's Foreign Minister Thanat Khoman, the United States pledged to go to war to defend any attack on Thailand by Communist guerrillas.'

7 March: 'In London, the Royal College of Physicians issued its report, "Smoking and Health", declaring that "Cigarette smoking is a cause of lung cancer. It also causes bronchitis and probably contributes to the development of coronary heart disease and various other less common diseases. It delays healing of gastric and duodenal ulcers." Sir Robert Platt, the president of the organization, led a committee of nine physicians to compile the research. A panel led by the U.S. Surgeon General would draw a similar conclusion nearly two years later on January 11, 1964.'

    'OSO I, the first of nine Orbiting Solar Observatory satellites, launched by the United States, was launched from Cape Canaveral put into orbit around the Earth, to measure radiation from the Sun.'

8 March: 'American drug manufacturer Richardson-Merrell Pharmaceuticals withdrew its request for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve the prescription of thalidomide, which the company had developed under the name Kelvadon. On the same day, the company withdrew the drug from sale in Canada. American marketing of the medicine, which had caused severe birth defects in 15,000 babies, primarily in West Germany, had been blocked by FDA reviewer Frances Oldham Kelsey, who was later given an award by President Kennedy.'

    'The Beatles made their radio debut, with a three-song session, recorded the day before, and broadcast on the BBC Manchester programme Teenager's Turn (Here We Go). They performed the songs "Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream)", "Please Mr. Postman", and "Memphis, Tennessee."' 

10 March: 'Newly independent from France, the Kingdom of Morocco adopted its first constitution.'

    'Scottish football club Kilmarnock's home attendance record was broken when a crowd of 35,995 turned out to see them play Glasgow Rangers in the Scottish Cup, at the Rugby Park stadium.'

UK chart hits, week ending 10 March 1962 (tracks in italics have been featured previously)

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm

1	Rock-A-Hula Baby / Can't Help Falling In Love	Elvis Presley	RCA
2	Wonderful Land	The Shadows	Columbia
3	The Young Ones	Cliff Richard and The Shadows	Columbia
4	Let's Twist Again	Chubby Checker	Columbia
5	March Of The Siamese Children	Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen	Pye
6	Tell Me What He Said	Helen Shapiro	Columbia
7	Wimoweh	Karl Denver	Decca
8	Forget Me Not	Eden Kane	Decca
9	Crying In The Rain	The Everly Brothers	Warner Brothers
10	The Wanderer	Dion	HMV
11	Stranger On The Shore	Acker Bilk	Columbia
12	Walk On By	Leroy Vandyke	Mercury
13	Softly As I Leave You	Matt Monro	Parlophone
14	Little Bitty Tear	Burl Ives	Brunswick
15	Hole In The Ground	Bernard Cribbins	Parlophone
16	Lesson No 1	Russ Conway	Columbia
17	Don't Stop, Twist	Frankie Vaughan	Philips
18	Theme From Z Cars	Johnny Keating Orchestra	Piccadilly
19	I'll See You In My Dreams	Pat Boone	London
20	Frankie And Johnny	Acker Bilk	Columbia

Are we a liberal democracy? by Sackerson

In the New Yorker interview https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine referenced last week by our editor https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/who-is-really-to-blame-for-the-war-in-ukraine/ , political scientist John Mearsheimer spoke of the ‘disastrous policies’ pursued by America as it tried to impose the ‘Bush Doctrine’ of liberal democracy on Middle Eastern countries.

That raises the question of whether the UK itself is a ‘liberal democracy.’ How do we define the term? The relevant Wiki article looks back at a 1971 book by Robert Dahl and lists ‘eight necessary rights’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy#Rights_and_freedoms shared by all varieties of such forms of government:

1.    Freedom to form and join organisations.

2.    Freedom of expression.

3.    Right to vote.

4.    Right to run for public office.

5.    Right of political leaders to compete for support and votes.

6.    Freedom of alternative sources of information

7.    Free and fair elections.

8.    Right to control government policy through votes and other expressions of preference.

 How does our country measure up against this yardstick? Not altogether perfectly, I would argue.

‘Freedom of expression’: we are familiar with the ill-defined constraints on ‘hate speech’ but also on dissident speech on subjects such as policy to deal with Covid and the efficacy and dangers of the new medicines to combat it. Yes, the new media giants are also acting as censors, but there is no sign that our government pushes back.

‘Freedom of alternative sources of information’: we have just cancelled RT online so that we cannot consider inconveniently different opinions and claims of facts from that source. Never mind ‘alternative’: who does not see gross propaganda in our mainstream press coverage of Ukraine? How are voters in a democracy enabled to make judgements in such a distorted information environment?

‘Free and fair elections’: the current system for General Elections means that many people like myself are in a ‘safe’ constituency where their vote has virtually no effect, other than in some rare convulsion such as the collapse of the ‘Red Wall’. We had a referendum on the Alternative Vote in 2011, but my recollection is that both the Labour and Conservative parties ‘bust a gut’ to rubbish the idea. By contrast, I was astonished that the referendum on Brexit was covered so fairly in the media, yet since then the Establishment has obviously been busting another gut to neuter the result. Also, the party system itself is a major problem – see how hard it is for independents to gain a seat in Parliament, and how even a veteran like Frank Field can be ousted when he fails to toe the Party line.

‘Right to control government policy etc.’ In a way it surprises me that the government is responsive at all, given a guaranteed five-year period before having to face the electorate again (unless they themselves choose to go to the country early), and the ability to abrogate civil rights by Privy Council rulings and passing laws such as the Coronavirus Act with its ‘carte blanche’ powers – which the Opposition allowed to renew without even a division in the House. The current proposals for a ‘UK Bill of Rights’ look like a further dangerous enabling for authoritarians https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/is-this-the-reform-of-our-human-rights-that-we-really-need%ef%bf%bc/ plus enshrining the principle that our rights are to be determined by government and so can be amended or cancelled at a later date. Goodbye the implications and traditions of Magna Carta and the Common Law.

If the UK were to sit a GCSE examination in ‘being a liberal democracy’ it might just about scrape a pass with 4/8, but hardly anything more.

Glass hearts: the danger to our liberal culture, by Sackerson

A young female student is tearing down community posters from a ‘Lennon wall’ and meticulously picking off the shreds that remain. She is Chinese and the messages that offend her are criticisms of her government. Tiananmen Square? That was 40-50 years ago (33, actually), before she was born, she says; why should she care?

She is not doing this in China, but in an Australian university (how tolerant is the host country! Can tolerance survive intolerance?) and she is one of very many Chinese who are enforcers worldwide – online as well as in person - for their nation’s narratives. As ‘Serpentza’ here demonstrates, dare to use social media to reveal inconvenient truths about the CCP and skilled trolls will appear, skewing the argument with accusations of racial prejudice against ‘Asians’; refute them and they become abusive and aggressive.

Why are they doing it? It’s not for pay. ‘Serpentza’ says it is because they have ‘glass hearts’: they have been through an educational system that gives them a myopic political view, and they live in a country that rigorously suppresses dissent. Diversity of opinion gives them real emotional distress, ‘triggers’ them into vandalism and even violence.

Does this seem familiar?

Of course it does; and now the ‘snowflake’ generation we have bred in the UK are getting older; soon enough they will become the troops of our totalitarian new ideologies, or even the leaders. ‘It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be,’ explained O’Brien to Winston Smith in ‘1984.’

Who is going to defend liberalism? It evaporates like morning mist in the hot sunshine of propaganda, as we see in our current war fever. The shimmering heat of emotionalism creates distorting mirages: already Facebook is full of amateur agitprop that betrays not the slightest understanding of what – and who - has split Ukraine in two.

The ignorance is not surprising; mainstream news excludes most dissidents. Only someone of Peter Hitchens’ seniority is allowed to put an alternative perspective, and even in his case, when he castigated the West for its arrogance and folly in continuing to treat Russia as an enemy after the fall of Communism, his piece was pushed back to page 13 in the print edition, and labelled ‘‘A personal viewpoint.’ Maybe we should be grateful that he appears at all; in 2015, when Geordie Greig was editor of the Mail on Sunday, Hitchens’ column was mysteriously absent from the editions (3 and 10 May) immediately before and after the General Election. I would give good money to see the submissions that were spiked, if that is what happened.

The ’legacy media’ mostly do not educate and inform; their main usefulness for us is to show us the current official line. For example, a word used early by Boris in his comments on the Russian incursion is ‘unprovoked’; I suspect this is to pave the way for an attempt to try President Putin at The Hague for ‘waging aggressive war,’ the charge that legitimated the executions of Hitler’s leaders. To accept the argument about lack of provocation, the court would have to ignore such matters as 7 or 8 years of shelling the Donbas, the million-plus mostly Russian-speaking people who have fled that area since 2014, the café-bomb assassination of Donetsk separatist leader Alexander Zakharchenko, and allegations of neo-Nazi ‘targeted killings’ and atrocities from 2014 through to now.

Then there is the wider provocation: the game of ‘What’s the time, Mister Wolf?’ played by NATO as, contrary to assurances given after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the EU progressively accepted country after country into its fold and so into the NATO alliance against, well, an enemy that had ceased to be. Who are the actors behind the scenes? The US State Department? The Pentagon? The CIA? The IMF? Did they know how this would go? Is this dreadful affair a miscalculation, or part of a greater plan?

To see things differently, we are forced to explore the wild lands of the internet.

Oddly, although an influential Conservative commentator has called the Stop The War Coalition ‘fifth columnists’ (a term often used to mean crypto-communists, though originally referring to secret supporters of Spain’s Franco), the Left here seem to be backing the eastern Ukrainians. Professor Dutton (aka The Jolly Heretic) suggests that this orientation is because Russia represents the opposite of wokery.

Craig Murray notes how exaggerating the strength of Putin’s military has boosted shares of armaments companies and helped to justify additional expenditure on ‘MI6, the Defence Intelligence Service, the British armed forces, of their American counterparts, and of all their NATO counterparts.’ 

‘Demirep’ traces the start of the mess back to the EU’s attempt to recruit Ukraine in 2013, and the subsequent overthrow of President Yanukovych when he demurred (please colour me sceptical when people ‘spontaneously rise up’.)

As yet still in mainstream communication Peter Hitchens, the licensed jester of the PTB, has been permitted to remind us of a deeper, longer-standing US foreign policy as delineated by Paul Wolfowitz; long may he continue to twit our political establishment; not that Lear’s Fool managed to dissuade the King from his folly.

Contrariwise, on chewing-gum TV news (Hannity on Fox), South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham is calling for the murder of Putin; we shall see how much it helps world peace should that ever happen.

How easy it is to sway the public! CIA official Frank Wisner boasted how his department could play the mass media and their audience like a ‘mighty Wurlitzer’ on which he could play any propaganda tune. The keyboards and foot pedals are busy again today.

It is not only the Chinese and their culture of censorship that is a threat to Western democracy. In fact the more democratic we are the more danger for us, if we are not provided with truthful, balanced information and taught in schools and universities to be open to contrarian points of view, to be aware that we may be mistaken. We need a Fourth Estate committed to liberalism; and stouter hearts, not glass ones.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Roy Orbison, by JD

Roy Orbison had one of the most easily identifiable and unique voices in popular music but tragically died far too young at the age of 52 in December 1988 just one year after being inducted into the Rock and Roll hall of Fame.

Roy Kelton Orbison was born on April 23, 1936, in Vernon, Texas. A year before Beatlemania overtook the United States in 1964, the four lads from Liverpool invited Orbison to open for them on their English tour. On his first night, Orbison performed 14 encores before the Beatles even made it on stage.

He dressed like an insurance salesman and was famously lifeless during his performances. "He never even twitched," recalled George Harrison, who was simultaneously awestruck and confounded by Orbison's stage presence. "He was like marble." What Orbison did have was one of the most distinctive, versatile and powerful voices in pop music. In the words of Elvis Presley, Orbison was simply "the greatest singer in the world."

https://www.biography.com/musician/roy-orbison

THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 3 March 1962

At #3 is Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen with 'March of the Siamese Childen':

Giles cartoon for this week: IRA Ceasefire

(see 26 February below)

Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

26 February: 'The Irish Republican Army officially called off its five-year Border Campaign in Northern Ireland. In press releases dropped off at newspapers there as well as in Ireland, the IRA publicity bureau wrote, "The Leadership of the Resistance Movement has ordered the termination of 'The Campaign of Resistance to British Occupation'... all arms and other materials have been dumped and all full-time active service volunteers have been withdrawn." With the exception of a series of 17 bank robberies to finance the organization, the IRA violence halted until 1969.'

27 February: 'After getting word that U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was preparing to fire him from his job as Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover gave the Attorney General a memorandum of an FBI investigation of Judith Exner, noting that she had made phone calls to the private line of Robert's brother, U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Hoover remained FBI Director until his death in 1972.'

    'The United Kingdom's House of Commons voted 277-170 in favour of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, designed to limit the immigration into Great Britain by residents of India, Pakistan, and the West Indies.'

28 February: 'A group of 15 American Jupiter missiles, with nuclear warheads, became operational at the Izmir U.S. Air Force Base at Çiğli [western Turkey], within range to strike the Soviet Union 1,000 miles away. The presence of American nuclear missiles in a nation bordering the U.S.S.R. became an issue during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Soviet nuclear missiles were brought to Cuba, within striking distance of the United States. The missiles were withdrawn from both Turkey and Cuba following the crisis.'

    'The Beatles appeared at the Cavern Club in Liverpool on a triple bill with Gerry & the Pacemakers and Johnny Sandon and the Searchers.'

1 March: 'Benedicto Kiwanuka became the interim Prime Minister of Uganda as the African colony was granted self-government by the United Kingdom. He would be replaced by Milton Obote the next month, before Uganda's independence on October 9, and would later be murdered by Ugandan President Idi Amin in 1972.'

    'The very first K-Mart discount store (now Kmart) was opened by the S.S. Kresge Corporation, in Garden City, Michigan, United States. Kresge CEO Harry Cunningham founded and oversaw the growth of what would be the largest chain of American discount stores by 1964. In 1990. K-Mart's #1 spot would be yielded to Wal-Mart, also founded in 1962.'

'"The Incredible Hulk" was introduced as the first issue of the comic book, by that name, on the shelves of US stores and newsstands. Issue #1 was post-dated to May 1962 in accordance with industry practice.'

2 March: 'In Burma (now Myanmar), General Ne Win and the Burmese Army staged a nearly bloodless coup d'état against the civilian government of Prime Minister U Nu. U Nu was arrested, along with the nation's president, the Chief Justice, and five of his cabinet members. Ne Win would rule the nation until his retirement in 1988, and military rule continued.'

    'In a nationally broadcast address, President Kennedy announced that the United States would resume atmospheric nuclear testing within six weeks unless the Soviet Union ceased above-ground testing while pursuing the proposed Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The U.S. would resume atmospheric testing on April 25 after the U.S.S.R. continued. A limited test ban treaty would be signed on July 25, 1963.'

3 March: 'The United Kingdom designated all land south of 60°S latitude and between longitudes 20°W and 80°W as the British Antarctic Territory, making a claim to an area of 1,710,000 square kilometres or 660,000 square miles. In addition to the wedge of the Antarctic continent, the territory included the uninhabited South Orkney Islands and the South Shetland Islands, while putting South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands under the jurisdiction of the Falkland Islands. The claim to the territories was not recognized by Argentina.'

    'Liu Cheng-sze, a second lieutenant in Communist China's air force, defected to Taiwan, bringing with him a Soviet-built MiG-15 jet fighter. Liu had broken away from a training mission, then flew the jet 200 miles south and landed near Taipei, where he surrendered to the Nationalist Chinese Air Force.[20] A parade was held in his honour on March 10, with 200,000 people turning out to honour him.'

UK chart hits, week ending 3 March 1962 (tracks in italics have been featured previously)

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm

The dead dead tree press, by Sackerson

How well informed would we be if we had only major newspapers and TV stations to go on?

I’ll accept that there is much misinformation online, but the difference there is that there are multiple narratives, despite the best efforts of media platform giants to downlist or outright censor the ones officialdom doesn’t want you to see. For example, our editor at TCW notes that Trump’s recent speech at CPAC was ‘difficult to find via Google.’ As for Facebook, I’d like its new ‘global affairs’ supremo, ex-LibDem leader Nick Clegg to define ‘Liberal’ and ‘Democrat’. (Me, I’d prefer Compo to Cleggy at the helm; Foggy’s not available: he’s already in charge of the USA.)

Although YouTube also participates in selective smothering, it still allows us many pleasures including Russell Brand, who rightly says he has to decode everything he gets from mainstream media news, and ‘we’re beyond the era of goodies and baddies; there are just baddies now.’

Brand goes on to suggest that the political and moral issues in WWII might also have been complex.

I’ll second that. A couple of personal anecdotes from that War: one afternoon in Wiesbaden, my grandmother invited an old man to tea with us so he could tell me his experience as a German submariner, destroyed in the Baltic. ‘Oma’ had no English and my German has always been poor, but I understood what he said: as he and his surviving crewmates struggled in the water, hors de combat, the British raked them with machine-gun fire.

In England, I listened to an old friend who had earlier been in the merchant navy, taking supplies to Archangel, and who later found himself serving in, I think, Sicily as the Allies moved up into Italy. A line of German prisoners was being led along a road by the side of a cliff, and the driver of a passing jeep deliberately swerved to crush them against the cliff wall. Seeing this, my friend immediately unslung his rifle and shot the driver. No trial followed: it was a case of ‘least said, soonest mended.’

Oh, and another. Despite the rapists and murderers of the Red Army that my mother and her family fled in ‘der Flucht’ from East Prussia, ironically it was a crazed American soldier in Allied-occupied territory that nearly killed her, wanting someone to get in revenge for the death of his buddy. Fortunately my mother was strong – the mandatory daily two hours of PE in schools under the Nazi regime must have helped – and so she broke his stranglehold and climbed over a wall. The best bit is that she came to see his CO the next day, to report it in order to prevent someone else being killed.

War is hell on every level, and I am shocked at the partisan, oversimplified (sometimes faked) and bloodthirsty coverage in the MSM. Was it in Mark Twain that I read of the cruelty of boys who tied two cats’ tails together, and flung them over a washing line to watch them eviscerate each other? That’s what this Ukraine affair brings to mind, and much of the mainstream media are trying to blame one of the cats.

Perhaps it is a miracle that our species has lived so long in the nuclear age. After the A-bombings in Japan a Scots engineer noted pessimistically in his diary: ‘There is no hope in man . . . The end is near – perhaps some years only.’

As it happens, this week marks the sixtieth anniversary (28th February) of the US making 15 Russia-targeted nuclear missiles operational in Izmir, western Turkey. This was a factor in Khrushchev’s agreeing to Castro’s request to site Russian missiles in Cuba, a business that came within an ace of getting most of us killed. Kennedy’s Joint Chiefs of Staff were gung-ho for bombing and invading Cuba; only the President’s strength of character prevented an escalation that could have started a brief and very hot WWIII. It is a prime example of why war should not be left to the military. If we are tempted to think ‘Doctor Strangelove’s’ General Turgidson’s cavalier attitude to mass casualties...

...is a caricature, we should remember that in WWI ‘The man who commanded [Dennis] Wheatley's division, General Sir Oliver Nugent, had boasted that a double decker London omnibus would hold all the men he intended to bring home alive.’ (p.139 here)

It was our great wartime leader and discipliner of generals Winston Churchill himself who said ‘Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.’ We must hope that Ukrainian peace talks are swiftly and successfully concluded and that powerful third parties reconsider the folly of severe and prolonged mischief-making in other people’s countries.

Especially, it would be good to see our Fourth Estate at least trying for independence, truth and accuracy, and restraint of expression. Otherwise, perhaps it would be best for the ‘dead tree press’ to die.