The Ice Planet

It will take true bravery, as the French foreign minister has tried to show, to stand up to the junta’s horrifying intransigence
Nick Cohen The Observer, Sunday May 11 2008

The most politically successful of the French 1968 militants, whose 40th birthday we are celebrating at such length, developed a revolutionary doctrine by ignoring the revolutionaries around him.

Bernard Kouchner fitted the classic profile of a soixante-huitard. He came from a left-wing family and marched in the May demonstrations, but while his comrades blindly followed the causes of Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh, Kouchner went off in an unexpected direction. He joined the Red Cross and worked as a doctor in the bitter ethnic fighting in Nigeria.

The Biafran conflict meant little to the European left of his day. No struggle between capitalism and socialism was at stake. Biafra was just a terrible civil war and the only political response Kouchner offered was a demand to ease the suffering. He developed the doctrine of ‘the humanism of bad news,’ which ignored the old utopian dreams of creating the best possible society and concentrated on the basic task of mitigating the cruelty of the worst.

Kouchner carried on organising doctors to go to the conflict zones of the world until, in 1979, he caused a sensation in France by hiring a ship to rescue the Vietnamese boat people. Ho Chi Minh’s communists had triumphed and masses of Vietnamese were taking to the sea to save themselves. The world had a ‘responsibility to protect’ them, Kouchner declared, which overrode all other considerations.

In Washington, the Carter administration began to think that it should shoulder the responsibility as well and leftists everywhere were outraged. The overwhelmingly majority saw French and American imperialism as the sole causes of suffering in Vietnam and did not want to look at the crimes of the anti-imperialist ‘liberators’.

Leaving all political considerations aside, they said, Kouchner’s plan may well break international law. As Paul Berman, Kouchner’s biographer explained, the ‘mission in east Asia was meant to save lives and yet the mission could easily be interpreted as an intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state, the People’s Republic of Vietnam. The boat people were citizens of the People’s Republic and the People’s Republic had by no means granted permission to Kouchner or to anyone else to go trolling the sea for the purpose of rescuing the enemies of the People’s Republic. By what right, in the name of what international accord, could Kouchner go ahead with his mission? He invoked a higher right, but to be sure, scoundrels on the wrong side of the law always invoke a higher right.’

As the new ideas on human rights and humanitarian intervention began to spread, conservatives on the right and left were appalled. The ‘realist’ Henry Kissinger feared that they would undermine America’s dictatorial allies, rightly so as events were to turn out. The ‘anti-imperialist’ Noam Chomsky feared they would undermine America’s dictatorial enemies and again he was right to do so. Both upheld the principle that sovereign states were entitled to do what they wanted within their borders.

After the disaster of the second Iraq War, such views are everywhere, yet on paper at any rate, Kouchner has won. In 2005, the United Nations adopted his language and said it had a ‘responsibility to protect’ the civilians victims of crimes against humanity regardless of whether sovereign governments wanted them to or not.

Meanwhile, Nicolas Sarkozy transformed Kouchner from aid worker to statesman. And it was heartening to see last week that in his new role as French foreign minister, he upheld his old cause by demanding that the UN deliver aid to the victims of the Burmese cyclone. He was opposed by authoritarian regimes the world over. A Western diplomat at the UN Security Council meeting said objections came from China, Kouchner’s old enemies in Vietnam, Russia and South Africa, which might not be a one-party state but has in the ANC only one party which can hope to win power. All knew without needing to be told that if the Burmese military were held to be illegitimate rulers whose wishes could be overruled because they lacked a democratic mandate, the same criteria could be used against them or their allies, too, and their desperate arguments reflected their fears.

China’s envoy topped them all when he said the crisis in Burma was no different from the deadly heatwave in France in the summer of 2003, an imbecilic comparison which ignored the fact that the French authorities did all they could to relieve the suffering and would not have turned away foreign help if it had been offered.

Britain is sitting on the fence, as it so often has during Gordon Brown’s premiership. Ministers told me that the UN has no mandate to protect the victims of natural disasters, but I sensed that they would move closer to Kouchner’s position if the Burmese junta continued to frustrate the relief effort.

At the time of writing, however, Whitehall is pooh-poohing all practical suggestions. Human rights activists from the Burma Campaign echo Aung San Suu Ki and call for foreign troops to escort aid workers into the stricken areas. They point out that the Burmese army suffered as much as the civilians from the cyclone and, in any case, most of the junta’s troops are far away holding down Burma’s ethnic minorities.

Suppose they are wrong, say the realists, and aid workers are met with armed resistance. Is the UN going to start a war for the sake of delivering rice rations? Even the apparently modest proposal to airdrop supplies is, they continue, a violation of Burma’s sovereignty.

As always, there are 1,001 good reasons for doing nothing. But I don’t think passivity is an option for the UN. In America in particular, there are voices saying it should be replaced with an alliance of democracies to exclude China and Russia. Europe ignores them for now, but if the UN cannot deliver aid to the sick and hungry of Burma they will become harder to dismiss.

Kouchner’s minimalist conception of a moral requirement to uphold basic standards is far more radical than it seems. It has helped subvert 20th-century communism and the former dictatorial allies of Henry Kissinger in Latin America and Asia. If the international community doesn’t uphold it in the 21st, it may subvert the United Nations as well.

by Nick at May 13, 2008 08:57 AM

Here

by Nick at May 13, 2008 08:55 AM

Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom is convinced that academics have punished him for a ‘thought crime’. The distinguished astronomer exercised his right as an intellectual in a free society to speak his mind. His university responded by stripping him of his research fellowship and declared that it wishes to have ‘absolutely no association’ with him.

To make matters worse, Kollerstrom was denounced by University College, London, one of Europe’s greatest bastions of academic integrity, whose founder, Jeremy Bentham, defended intellectual freedom with the stirring words: ‘As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends.’

Admittedly, if the philosopher had lived long enough to hear the conspiracy theories of the 21st century, even his defence of free speech might have weakened. Once he was away from his scientific studies, Kollerstrom embraced them all. ‘Let us hope the schoolchildren visitors are properly taught about the elegant swimming pool at Auschwitz, built by the inmates, who would sunbathe there on Saturday and Sunday afternoons while watching the water polo matches,’ he said of the Nazi genocide. ‘Let’s hope they are shown postcards written from Auschwitz, where the postman would collect the mail twice weekly.’

Denying the crimes of the clerical fascists of today comes easily to a man who can deny the crimes of the secular fascists of the 1940s. Kollerstrom has opined at length on how the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon and the 7/7 London bombings were not the work of the actual bombers, but of Western security forces acting on the orders of - you’ll never guess - their ‘Zionist masters’.

As it happens, Hasib Hussain, the 7/7 suicide bomber on the number 30 bus, detonated his explosives in Tavistock Square, just round the corner from University College’s main campus in central London. The Islamist didn’t kill research fellows, but cut short the blameless life of Gladys Wundowa, a Ghanaian who worked as a cleaner at the college.

I can understand how the attempts of one of its fellows to exonerate her murderer repelled the college’s managers. Equally obviously, they must have thought they could safely dismiss him as a member of a loathsome group of extremists. Rachel North, a victim of the bombings, would not contradict them on that point. She described how respect for the dead and injured didn’t figure in his tormented mind. He harried survivors, she said, tracking them down and harangued them with ‘his barking “theories” that the bombers were innocent “patsies” executed by the state’.

A creep from the fringe, then, and a pestilential one at that. But the clearest trend in intellectual life is the fringe developing trends in the mainstream and magnifying them into grotesque shapes. To put it another way, Kollerstrom is not as far away from respectable academics as University College assumes. His faults are theirs too.

If a bomb were to explode outside University College today, mainstream voices would fill the airwaves and say that responsibility for the carnage lay with the British, American or Israeli governments. Their arguments would be passionate and convincing, but I don’t need to tell you every one of them would avoid mentioning the Islamist ideology that motivated Hasib Hussain and men like him. To divert attention from a criminal is not the same as pretending that the criminal is innocent. But it isn’t so far away from it either.

Media London is currently muttering about commissioning editors being intellectually crippled by a thoughtless version of multiculturalism that can’t take account of the differences between liberals and reactionaries, secularists and fanatics, within communities. The BBC caused the resentment by shelving a drama documentary on the 7/7 bombings after its researchers, several of them British Muslims, supplied a detailed picture of young men caught up by the theocratic justifications for slaughter.

The researchers are bitter, not least because the bombers’ families read the script and vouched for its authenticity. BBC people tell me that the grounds for postponing the documentary were artistic and it may yet be made for the fifth anniversary of the atrocities. I’m sure they’re telling the truth, but am equally sure that if they do come to film it, they will face internal opposition from colleagues who, in a vague and ill-thought- out manner, think it not quite proper to discuss such matters in public.

As for conspiracy theory, though Holocaust denial is not acceptable in the West, in academia, the scheming Jew is back as a cosmic force able to pull the strings of his dupes and order the world to his desires. American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argued to widespread acclaim that a conspiracy of powerful Jews decided to serve the interests of Israel by persuading America to invade Iraq in 2003.

Why the Elders of Zion didn’t direct the US administration to invade Iran, which wants to wipe Israel off the map, rather than Saddam’s Iraq, which was crippled by sanctions, they don’t say and, more interestingly, are rarely asked. Liberals would once have dismissed their thesis as far-right ramblings. Now the London Review of Books, house journal of liberal academia, repeats it.

Indeed, although he perpetuates Nazi doctrine, Kollerstrom presents himself as a man of the left rather than the far right. He says that he is not a member of a neo-Nazi organisation, but an active supporter of the Green party, Respect and CND. Given the political gyrations of our times, he may well be telling the truth.

Before Bentham died, he asked that his body be preserved so that it could be exhibited at the college he founded. The authorities agreed and Bentham sits in a wooden box in South Cloisters as if to remind academics and students to uphold his commitment to reason.

Rather than seeking to restrict Kollerstrom’s academic freedom, their successors would have done better to have agreed to preserve his body and place it next to Bentham’s as a reminder to liberal intellectuals of the state they may come to if they abandon liberal principles.

by Nick at May 13, 2008 08:49 AM

I still haven’t written about Cloud Cult’s new album, Feel Good Ghosts. For this there is no excuse.

Graham reminded me today by linking me to this excellent Wall Street Journal article about the band, and the live painting during their performances.

Feel Good Ghosts has been looped on my mp3 players, both portable and on the computer, for a ludicrous amount of time. It’s one of very, very few albums I can listen to multiple times without growing tired, and in this case, a ludicrous number of times. Last year’s Meaning of 8 was similarly worn through, and Feel Good Ghosts shows little sign of losing my interest.

A lot of the songs on recent albums are dealing with the death of lead singer and song writer Craig Minowa’s two-year-old son. (His mother was Connie Minowa, one of the band’s resident artists as well as Craig Minowa’s wife). But rather than a cloying query of whether they’ll met up in heaven or whatnot, these are much more involved explorations of the subject, often so obsfucated that you’d never make the connection without the prior knowledge. Instead the swelling, exploratory tunes tend to focus more on celebrating life, and mourning the notion that one could stop celebrating life.

They are defiantly ecologically thoughtful, ensuring their tours are carbon neutral, and all their CDs are entirely recyclable. The WSJ comments,

“The group had to put up about $15,000 to have its most recent CD pressed and packaged, which cost the band 93 cents per CD. That’s more than double the typical rate because Cloud Cult insists on using non-toxic inks and recycled packaging instead of standard plastic jewel cases.”

Most importantly, they are entirely independent, and self-funded. They’ve had offers from record companies, but have turned them all down in favour of maintaining their principles. That behaviour alone deserves support, let-alone when they’re one of the most stunning bands currently producing music. Their music can be bought here.

There’s a couple of new videos to accompany the new album. They’re here:

When Water Comes to Life:

Everybody Here is a Cloud:

And here’s a ludicrously cute video of two kids singing along to Meaning of 8’s Pretty Voice.

My favourite song on the album, Story of the Grandson of Jesus, isn’t available anywhere, so you’ll have to buy the album.

by botherer at May 12, 2008 05:21 PM

Daily Mail, 12 May 2008

Was this really what feminism was all about? According to Home Office statistics, to be published later this week, crimes committed by girls aged between ten and 17 have shot up by some 25 per cent over a three-year period.

Last week, a man died and a young woman was badly injured in an explosion in North London. It was thought to have been carried out by a girl gang which had previously been seen causing trouble in the street.

For several years, there has been a disturbing rise in the number of girls committing violent crimes at ever younger ages.

Last month, rival girl gangs used snooker balls in socks to batter each other in a mass brawl at a railway station at Shoreham, West Sussex. In March, a 15-year-old girl was jailed for using a mobile phone to film two drunken teenage male friends beating a man to death in Keighley, West Yorkshire.

Last October, a gang of teenage girls stoned a 72-year-old woman and forced her into a busy road, leaving her with a broken nose and two black eyes.

There has also been a string of murders committed by girls, often sickeningly sadistic. In 1999, for example, two 15-year-old girls murdered 71-year-old Lily Lilley, binding her mouth so tightly that her false teeth were pushed down her throat and giggling as they wheeled her body through the streets before throwing it into a canal.

In the same year, a girl gang was found guilty of murdering mentally-ill Angela Pearce after torturing her. And so on.

Of course, most girls live law-abiding lives. Nevertheless, it is highly disturbing that so many are now committing such acts of savagery.

What would once have been regarded as an aberration among a sex which was once (doubtless a touch misleadingly) a by-word for gentleness, order and self-discipline, has now become a shocking fact of life. So just what has gone wrong with girls?

Certainly, this has to be set in the context of rising crime in general. Only last weekend, a 16-year-old altar boy was killed when a fight broke out in a South London bakery shop, bringing the toll of teenagers killed in London so far this year to 13.

The Government’s claim that overall crime is falling, as this week’s statistics also reportedly show, bears scant relation to everyday life. Such figures — even in the supposedly authoritative British Crime Survey — are highly selective or manipulated.

The reality is that crime and disorder are rampant, along with a constant level of menace in many areas from people often fuelled by alcohol or drugs and whose aggression and hostility simmer just below the surface.

The reason for this parlous state of affairs lies in a combination of a collapse of family life and parenthood, depriving children of the love, security and discipline that are crucial in producing orderliness from within, and a parallel collapse in the willingness of the criminal justice system to impose orderliness from without.

On top of all this, however, modern feminism has added an extra and unforeseen twist. Little did those pioneers who fought for equal rights for women dream that one outcome would be equal wrongs by women. Yet that is precisely what has happened.

This is because, like the rest of the equality agenda, modern feminism recast equal rights as ‘identicality’. The notion that men and women behaved differently because they had different expectations and pressures was deemed to be sexist and discriminatory. Equality meant that men and women had to lead identical lives.

At the same time, however, feminism also held that masculinity was a problem. It was men, alone, who were held to be aggressive — crime was presented as intrinsically a male problem — as well as being emotionally illiterate and unfairly hogging the workplace, while women were chained to kitchen sink and family.

As a result of the feminist revolution, women have commandeered the freedoms and entitlements of the masculine world — while men themselves have now been largely reduced to sperm banks, walking wallets and occasional au pairs.

Women now claim to be equal breadwinners — but some of them will still go to court to fleece men for everything they have if their marriages break up.

Along with this has come an aggressive and self-centred approach to the world which apes the worst caricatures of male behaviour.

Whereas men were once associated with one-night stands, now women demand sex without strings and bring children into the world without a father as their ‘human right’. Told to be assertive, they have interpreted that as being aggressive. Female role models in movies, video games or rap music increasingly glorify violence too.

The outcome has been serious confusion among girls about their role in the world and how they should behave.

In the past, girls’ perception of where their interests lay meant curbing their own behaviour in order to attract men and safeguard the well-being of any children they might have.

But now they are told they can go it alone and have it all. So the brakes on their behaviour have been taken off. Assuming that to be equal means competing with boys on their own terms, girls try to prove themselves to be ‘one of the lads’ by drinking and drug-taking.

The number of women arrested for being drunk and disorderly has leapt tenfold over the past five years. And from alcohol and drugs, violent crime results as surely as night follows day. The original 19th-century feminist pioneers, who fought for women’s rights in a society where they really were second-class citizens, would surely have been appalled without measure had they been able to see into the future.

For their feminism was based on the belief that women were different from men — and worthier than them. Indeed, they wanted women to play an equal role in the public sphere precisely because they believed that women’s superior moral virtues — sobriety, chastity, self-discipline — would civilise public life.

Instead, just look at what we have done with their great legacy. Bob Geldof’s 19-year-old daughter Peaches has been reportedly filmed buying cocaine from a drug-dealer.

Photographs of Mick Jagger’s grandchildren published last weekend showed 12-year-old Amba clad in four-inch heels and a microdress posing with a sultry come-hither look at the camera; while her sister Assisi, at the ripe old age of 15, wore a skimpy little satin number and a knowing smile.

Even the likely future wife of Prince William, Kate Middleton, appears to spend half her life downing ‘Crack Daddy’ vodka and champagne cocktails at Boujis nightclub.

The solution to our crime problem must involve a ‘zero tolerance’ approach by the police. The instincts of London’s new Mayor, Boris Johnson, in outlawing alcohol from public transport and appointing apostles of this approach as his advisers, are admirable.

But we must have the same approach towards values. For too long we have made a fetish of tolerating the intolerable in the name of equality.

No one wants to turn the clock back to deprive women of equal rights. But we must recognise that equality is not ‘identicality’. Feminism never meant the degradation of women.

Somehow, we must restore the idea that women bring unique gifts and values to the national party. Reviving the traditional family would be a start. This would make men, women and children happier — and cut crime.

So what’s stopping us?

by Melanie Phillips at May 12, 2008 10:56 AM

Our third call was to the local council estate for a middle aged man who was, apparently, feeling depressed and suicidal. Now I like psychiatric patients. Maybe it’s because I’m a bit nuts too, but I seem to have a certain affinity with them and often find myself having long, drawn out chats with them on quiet night shifts.

We rang the intercom and Raymond, our patient, unhurriedly let us in. Silently, he beckoned us into his bedroom, flopped on to the bed and sighed. I wasn’t surprised he was depressed; his bedroom was one of the most depressing places I have ever been in. Walls stained nicotine brown, carpet sticky, furniture ancient, it was severely in need of a make over.

“So, Raymond, what seems to be the problem today?” said Steve cheerily.

“I’m feeling very depressed,” said Raymond in a flat drone. “Worn out and worthless. I shouldn’t be here. I need to be in a home. With people looking after me.”

“Well, I’m afraid we can’t take you to a home,” said Steve. “Do you want to go to A+E? Or have you been an inpatient at a psychiatric hospital before? We can contact them and see if they will take you back?”

“I don’t want to go to A+E,” whined Raymond. “They can’t do anything for me. And you have to sit there for hours. And I’ve been in the psychiatric hospital too. I don’t want to go back there. I tell you, I need to be in a home.”

I couldn’t see any reason why Raymond should need to be in a care home, but it is not the ambulance crew’s job to question this, so Steve suggested to Raymond that he should see someone who could arrange a care home - his GP. Steve’s crewmate rang the GP for an urgent appointment, and Steve told Raymond that we’d run him up to the GP surgery in the ambulance.

“Can you take me back home too?” muttered Raymond.

“Sorry, no - we’ll be sent on another job as soon as we drop you off,” said Steve.

“I don’t think I’ll go, then,” huffed Raymond. “It’s too far to walk. And I can’t afford a taxi.” The GP surgery was actually five minutes’ walk away, and Raymond had no noticeable mobility difficulties.

“Well, what would you like us to do then?” said Steve. “Is there someone we can call for you or something else we can do?”

“I’ve told you,” said Raymond. “I need to be in a home. I don’t know why I bothered calling you. You can’t help me. No one wants to help me. The whole NHS is useless.”

“Raymond,” said Steve, with an admirable show of patience. “I can’t help you get into a care home, because we’re an emergency ambulance crew and we take people to A+E. But I’ve told you how you might be able to get into one, and you don’t seem interested. We can’t help you unless you want to help yourself.”

“No,” said Raymond. “Thank you, but I don’t think I’ll bother. It’s just not going to work out.” And he opened the door and motioned for us to leave.

Since we’d made the appointment with Raymond’s GP, we decided to go anyway, even if our patient was not with us. We piled into the surgery and a very harassed looking GP sat us down, pulled Raymond’s details up on his computer and turned the screen round to face us. I could see that Raymond rang the surgery several times a day, usually demanding to be put in a care home but occasionally wanting other things done for him too. He had a history of not taking his medications and of accusing the doctors of mistreating him in various ways. He would be deliberately misleading about what the other doctors had said to him on previous visits, and because of this he was now only allowed to see one doctor (who I assume drew the short straw).

“Raymond’s been assessed and we don’t believe he needs to be in a home,” said the doctor. “He needs to comply with his care plan and start taking responsibility for his own health. I’ll give him a call when you leave, but it’s nothing he hasn’t heard a thousand times before.”

I found Raymond to be a most perplexing character. On one hand, I know it is the nature of depression that patients feel everything is hopeless and won’t work and that would partly account for why he was so unco-operative. On the other hand, and I know this is a total cliche and supposedly the worst thing you can ever say to a depressed person, but I really did want to say “Pull yourself together! Take some responsibility for yourself! You don’t need looking after, you need to look after yourself. No one else is responsible for the way you feel but you!” I know how the whole argument goes, Raymond can’t help being depressed, it’s an illness, you wouldn’t say that to someone who had cancer, would you? The thing is that while I agree that it is and illness and he can’t help having it in the first place, he can change the way he deals with it. You wouldn’t say “pull yourself together” to someone with cancer because you don’t need to. Anyone I’ve ever known who has had cancer has been determined to fight it. They grasp any opportunity to make themselves better and take any treatment, however painful or expensive. Whereas Raymond just wanted to lie back whilst someone else sorted out his life. Perhaps I should be more sympathetic. Perhaps I couldn’t possibly understand unless I was in his position. But then I thought back to Elaine, the old lady with the broken hip, and how brave she was and how thankful she was for our help, and I didn’t worry about Raymond any more.

by Mark Myers at May 11, 2008 07:39 PM

The second call was to the canteen of the local police station, for a member of staff choking on a fishbone. Great, I thought, a rare opportunity to watch a police officer get punched in the back without anyone getting in trouble! (I jest, of course I love the police. I couldn’t do their job, dealing with breaking bad news and horrible criminals all day long. It would drive me mad.)

Anyway, I was disappointed when we arrived because the patient, Alan, a) wasn’t a police officer, he was a handyman doing some work at the police station b) was standing up chatting to some other members of staff and it wasn’t entirely clear which one we were supposed to be attending to. It turned out that Alan wasn’t so much choking on the fish bone but had swallowed it and could now feel it in his throat. The “waste of time and taxpayers’ money” buzzer in my head started to sound.

Still, Steve and his crewmate were very professional and took Alan back to the ambulance for a full set of obs. Steve stuck something resembling a spatula and a torch down Alan’s throat and tried, without any success, to locate the offending fishbone. He explained that he couldn’t see anything, but if Alan wanted, we could pop him up to the hospital for an x-ray.

“Do you think this needs a blue call?” joked Steve’s crewmate. And I laughed my head off.

Then Steve took Alan’s temperature, and his blood pressure, and his oxygen saturation levels. And his pulse. And raised one eyebrow.

“I think there’s something wrong with this machine,” he muttered, using his fingers to take the pulse at Alan’s wrist instead.

In highly technical terms, a normal pulse is between 60-80 beats a minute and goes like this: be-dump, be-dump, be-dump. Alan’s pulse was 44 beats a minute and went like this: bump, bump, be-dump-bump, bump, bump, be-dump, be-dump, bump, bump. As Steve put it, it was almost regularly irregular. It was not at all the sort of pulse you’d expect from a otherwise healthy 40 year old with a fishbone stuck in his throat.

“Alan,” said Steve. “Have you ever had your heart tested?”

“No?” said Alan, a bit confused. What had this got to do with fishbones?

“Well, you’re about to,” said Steve, firing up the 12-lead ECG (a machine which records heart rhythms).

Minutes later, we had a print out. A normal ECG looks something like this. Alan’s printout looked something like this (or at least it did to the untrained eye). I understood the writing on the printout, though - the ECG machine’s option was that there was ST elevation and therefore Alan was having a heart attack.

Steve, his crewmate and I all looked goggle-eyed at the print out, then set about asking Alan if he had any other symptoms at all, in particular chest pain. Alan told us that he’d had chest pain on and off for the last two years, but at this moment felt absolutely fine. Except for the fishbone in his throat. He was looking at us like we were a bit mad.

“Do you think this needs a blue call?” said Steve’s crewmate again, and of course, this time he was serious.

“It could be a silent MI,” (MI = heart attack. Silent MI = heart attack without the normal symptoms of chest pain etc.) muttered Steve. “But he’s got no symptoms at all… and he’s only 40… and he’s had chest pain for two years… my guess would be that he’s got an ongoing cardiac condition which has been undiagnosed. Let’s take him to the nearest and get a doctor to have a look at the ECG, and if they suspect an MI, we can always take him on to the hospital with the cardiac unit.”

So with that decided, we explained to Alan what was going on and wasted no time in getting him to the nearest A+E and summoning a doctor to look at the ECG. She agreed that Alan almost certainly wasn’t having a heart attack and this was an ongoing problem, but nonetheless he was wheeled into Majors to be seen immediately.

“What about the fishbone?” whimpered Alan as we bade him farewell. “I can still feel it, you know.”

And the moral of this story is that you should always take a full set of obs, however rubbish you think the call is.

by Mark Myers at May 10, 2008 03:24 PM

Thunderstorms always make me want to write. Then I think I have to put in as much effort as I did that other time and don’t gather the energy. However, I think that time was a special property of having been woken up at 4am, along with all of Bath.

Tonight’s was pretty spectacular. Pretty, and spectacular. I’ve been so spoilt by Bath, and each time I think, “I’ve never seen lightning this good!” but of course I have. In fact, I don’t think that storm has been beaten since, although this one was pretty good.

It’s easy to mock ancient man for his superstitions (cue a thousand people snorting and making a joke about Jesus), but what on Earth were you supposed to make of a thunderstorm? The sky is filled with these vicious streaks of terrifying purple, and then the entire world furiously roars all around you. I feel like I have a fairly decent understanding of what causes thunder, but it’s still a conscious effort to fight off feelings of it being something more than ionic discharge.

I wish I were capable of more eloquent commentary when watching lightning. Tonight I found myself sounding horribly like Alan Partridge in The Day Today, saying, “Shit! Did you see that?!” But it’s just so overhwhelming when the sky suddenly gets dissected by the madly jagged violet electricity, and I either gasp, or swear in amazement. I feel like I don’t have enough response inside me to adequately reply to the moment.

My overriding thought this evening, however, was how sad I am that I’m the only person I see standing outside, dripping wet, with my face pointed at the sky. I don’t understand why every able person doesn’t immediately walk out their front door to watch it. What better thing are you waiting to see happen? Yeah, you get wet - you’ve been wet before, and your house is just behind you for goodness sakes. I’m really the only one?

by botherer at May 09, 2008 11:21 PM

Oh, this has been the best season of Survivor ever.

I know, you don’t care, you think it sucks despite never having watched it, you saw the abortive version ITV made about six years ago and think it’s that, but you never really watched it but read on a website that it was shit. Well, screw you, because you’re wrong. There - I came right out and said it.

It’s been an incredible season of back-stabbing, fantastic tactical voting, proof that the hidden immunity idol is the best new ingredient they could have added to the show about four seasons back, and a demonstration that experience is key, with a Fans Versus Favourites theme. The way the girls have manipulated the guys, managed to get two men in a row voted out despite their having the immunity idol to play, and then Amanda using the hidden idol to save herself in a wonderful shock moment, has been fantastic. But nothing compares to this week’s, where the four remaining girls somehow managed to talk the one remaining guy, 21 year old Eric, to give up guaranteed immunity so they could vote him out. It was a laugh-out-loud joy to watch as they tricked the poor boy into dancing like their puppet.

I don’t understand people’s prejudice against Survivor. Perhaps it’s reality-show fatigue, despite Survivor being one of the first, and consistently the best, and now bearing almost nothing in common with most unscripted nonsense. Perhaps it’s because for the first couple of years it wasn’t that slick. But now I cannot comprehend what problem people could have.

First: It’s about being stranded on a deserted island with only your wits to survive, only eating what you can find or catch (or win), building shelters, fighting hard to survive - surely that Robinson Crusoe fantasy touches us all a bit?

Second: It’s competitive. Watching people take part in ludicrously elaborate assault courses is always great! The work that goes into building these things is immense, vast structures erected out of wood and rope in these remote islands, just for an hour.

Third: The production. It’s shot on expensive film, with the most incredible aerial footage, helicopter shots, and Discovery Channel/BBC-esque quality nature footage. They’re now so damned good at making Survivor that you never nag yourself with the reality that there’s cameramen everywhere - they’re invisible to your brain as well as your eyes. It’s just so slick, so expensive-looking.

Fourth: The editing. Every episode tells a story. And of course it’s constructed from selecting 43 minutes out of 72 hours, and they could tell any story they wishes this way. But what they do is tell you enough story so that the vote at the end contains high drama. It’s about unbalancing your expectations, suggesting inevitability, but then the hint of a twist. When the decision seems so certain, they can edit it to introduce enough doubt in your mind that the result you expected surprises you.

Fifth: People. It’s people, interacting, in really odd conditions. And not like Big Brother, where they gather the stupid and the prod them until they start fighting. This is a genuine mix of people - and yes, some who want TV time to promote themselves - but others who are, say, sullen gravediggers who just want the money, or adorable quiet men who use wit and science to beat the others in physical challenges (seriously, Yau-Man was a hero, who genuinely applied physics to outdo muscles) or overweight nurses who turn out to be brilliantly smart players who control everyone from a position of apparent innocence, even on her second time out there. Man, I love Cerie. The first time I saw her on her first season I dismissed her as a fool afraid of touching a fish. And then realised she was brilliant. This time out, she’s doubly brilliant, and should win. I went off track. They’re not all the bimbos you think they are. Very few are, and it’s funny to watch them flail in the face of smarter, harder working people.

In conclusion, watch Survivor, you rubbish idiots.

by botherer at May 09, 2008 05:25 PM

A few weeks ago, I went on an observation shift with Steve and his crewmate. We had a touch of Observer’s Curse - only four jobs over the whole shift, about half what I’d expect for a busy station like theirs - but all the calls were interesting in their own way and I’d rather see four “real” calls than eight cases of flu!

There was also a rather amusing incident when we took our rest break at another ambulance station, and all the crews at that station, not knowing who I was or even that I wasn’t just another paramedic/EMT, decided to launch into a diatribe about how much they hate control staff, how evil we all are and how all we care about is screwing them over and giving them rest breaks. I covered my “Emergency Medical Dispatcher” epaulettes and sank into my seat. I now know how it feels to be a mouse in a room full of cats. All I can say is that if the offending crews were on my sector, I’d have them attending every projectile vomiting call I could get my hands on for the next week!!

Anyway, on with the four calls. I don’t have time to write about them all at once so each will get a separate entry. Just to keep you on tenterhooks, the last one is the most exciting!

The first call of the day was to an elderly female on the floor. In Control terms, this is about as simple as you can get - it is non life threatening, so you do not have to bust a gut getting someone there, but it is also a valid call, so as soon as someone is available, off they go. But I was about to discover that something simple for us is not so simple for an ambulance crew.

Elaine, aged 80, has lived alone her house since the death of her husband. Her younger friend, Sandra, comes to visit every day and helps out with the shopping. She also has meals on wheels and a home help. Despite having arthritis, bilateral knee replacements, heart trouble, mild confusion and depression, she gets by. On this bitterly cold morning, she was getting out her electric fire and, carrying it to her bedside, slipped over. She felt awkwardly against the bed and an agonising pain shot through her right leg.

Luckily, Elaine had fallen by the phone so she was quick to summon help. Not wanting to bother the emergency services so early in the morning, she rang Sandra. Sandra had come straight round but after a quick examination she had realised Elaine had hurt herself badly in the fall and that an ambulance was needed. Enter us.

Elaine was in good spirits and not a lot of pain when we arrived. Her sense of humour was intact, laughing at herself for falling, and she was very apologetic about calling us out. The genuine callers always are. I wondered if it was going to be an “assist only” job, where the crew lift the patient, put her back to bed and make her a cup of tea. However, as Steve straightened Elaine’s legs, I could see clearly that one was shorter than the other and drooping to one side - a clear indicator of a broken hip.

Seeing the concern on our faces, Elaine became worried.

“What is it? What have I done?”

“I’m afraid,” said Steve, “you’ve broken your hip”.

“Oh!” said Elaine, relief coursing across her face. “Is that all?”

I wondered what she thought we were going to say.

Now came the difficult and unpleasant part. With the aid of some Entenox (pain relieving gas), we tried to assist Elaine into the carry chair so we could get her downstairs and into the ambulance. But the slightest movement had her in complete agony. The gas seemed to be making her confused, too, and she forgot what had happened to her and kept yelling out: “What’s happened to me? What could be causing all this pain? I have never felt this uncomfortable in MY ENTIRE LIFE!” She was shaking and turning terribly white. It wasn’t pleasant to watch. As control staff, you are generally distanced to people’s pain. You get all the emotional upset and lurid descriptions of gory events, but the physical pain is something you don’t think about. You tend to think - broken hip - non life threatening - simple without really getting your head around what it is like to have one. Elaine’s agony is something I will remember every time I have a “broken hip” call waiting on my screen.

Once we stopped trying to move Elaine, her pain subsided somewhat and she returned to the cheery old lady we’d first encountered and apologised profusely for “being a big baby”. Meanwhile, Steve’s crewmate, who is a paramedic, decided Entenox alone was not enough to get Elaine out of here. It was time to bring in the big guns. He fired up a vial of morphine and injected it into Elaine. Then we sat around a bit and waited for it to work. Sandra conducted some breathing exercises whilst I helped pack up Elaine’s belongings. Eventually, Elaine started going a bit woozy and getting a big grin on her face and we were able to lift her into the carry chair. There was a lot of hollering as we moved her, but this was immediately followed by relief from everyone as we all announced “Well, that’s the worst bit done! Off to the hospital!” It’d taken over an hour to get her into the ambulance.

By now, Elaine was away with the fairies. Steve tried to get her to give a score to her pain. Earlier, she’d given it nine out of ten.

“Oh,” she said, flapping her arms dismissively. “Hardly anything!”

“I need a number,” said Steve.

“Erm, I really don’t know,” said Elaine. “I can’t remember any numbers!”

“Elaine,” smiled Steve. “I’m not taking you anywhere until you give me a number!”

“Um….. sixteen!!!” announced Elaine, and broke into fits of giggles. Steve gave up at this point and we went off to the hospital.

I am sure Elaine will be fine although it is clear her bones aren’t what they used to be and perhaps she will have to give up living in a two-storey house by herself. It is sad that such a lovely person who is so cheerful and friendly and has clearly lived such a full and rich life has ended up being let down by her own body and even sadder to think that whatever I achieve with my life more or less the same will happen to me. I shall never look at “old woman on the floor” as just a simple, boring call again.

by Mark Myers at May 08, 2008 07:58 AM

Trent Reznor seems to be becoming a Linux Torvalds. By offering his latest album on the web for free and then inviting people to remix it and send him back their efforts, which he then releases as ‘official’ albums, the parallels with Linux kernel development seem clear. A creative commons license rather than a GPL but the methodology is identical.

by levine at May 08, 2008 01:43 AM

Due to my protestant work ethic, when not in class, I spend most of my time in the library studying. Last term this meant I did not attend many of the lunch time talks from famous politicians, visiting academics or NGOs that occur almost every day on campus. I tried to rectify this somewhat this term, which has been made easier by my doing fewer classes. I’ve attended talks or conferences on the status of Middle Eastern studies, the state of Just War legal theories, Iranian politics and theories of Chinese International Relations but unfortunately missed Brahimi, Brzezinski and various ambassadors.

However today, I went to a lunch time talk with boy called Shin Dong-Hyuk. Shin was born in a concentration camp in North Korea and lived in this camp until the age of 23. He knew nothing of the outside world until he managed to escape and make his way into China and then onto South Korea 3 years ago. He has just written a book and is touring the US currently with an organisation called LINK. Listening to him describe his experiences and having the chance to ask him a few question was extraordinary. Without being facetious, it was as close as one gets to meeting someone from a different planet. Until he left the camp, he had no idea of anything beyond the walls of the camp. He had barely heard of Kim Jong-Il to say nothing of countries outside of Korea. The life he described was a combination of Orwell and Auschwitz. I was horrified to hear that he was kept under supervision by the government of South Korea for 6 months, while they confirmed that he was indeed from North Korea, but that they barely provided any transitional support at all. The centre they have for the (re-?) patriotation of North Koreans has 1 psychiatrist for 500 occupants. Meeting him today was truly a humbling and affecting experience.

If you want to read more about his life, there is a brief excerpt from this book here.

by levine at May 08, 2008 01:32 AM

1) I feel really sorry for Goths on hot, sunny days, but at the same time admire their dedication to layers and sleeves.

2) I’m really pleased that as an adult, I have no idea what High School Musical might be.

by botherer at May 07, 2008 09:23 PM

Right folks, this blog is back in business! And what better way to get things started but with my favourite topic, a rant about care homes?

The call went something like this:

Me: “Nee Naw Service, what is the address of the emergency?”

Care home worker gives an address which is not the address the phone is registered to. This is not unusual for care homes as they sometimes go via a switchboard. But I can’t get a match for the address she gives me. Computer says no. Computer says address does not exist. I try to get her to spell it, but she just keeps repeating the address. Then she gasps, and says “No, actually, it’s…” and gives me the address the phone is registered to which has been sitting in front of me all along. Great. Several minutes wasted.

Me: “What’s the problem?”

Care home worker: “She’s dying!”

I type “dying” into the computer and a similar uphill struggle ensues whilst I try to get this woman to explain what she means by “dying”. Unfortunately, it seems like suddenly “dying” is the only word she knows and that if she repeats it to me over and over again, all will become clear. It doesn’t. After all, someone with terminal cancer is dying. Someone who has just had their jugular slit is dying. A lot of the patients who ring with stomach ache *think* they are dying. If you want to be philosophical about it, we are all dying! The ambulance is halfway there by the time I manage to establish that the patient has actually stopped breathing. Not so much dying as dead then. But not necessarily irreversibly dead, if this has just happened. I press on with getting CPR started.

Me: Does anyone there know how to do CPR?

Her: Yes

Me: Have they started?

Her: No

Me: Are you right next to her now?

Her: Yes

Me: Right, get her flat on her back on the floor, remove any pillows and kneel next to her and look in her mouth for food or vomit.

Her: (instantly) Okay.

Me: Do that now.

Her: (instantly) Okay.

I can still hear her breathing at the other end of the phone so I know she hasn’t done it. We have to be very careful about calling the callers liars so I just press on with the next line - “Is there anything in the mouth?” thinking that she won’t be able to answer the question until she does it.

Me: Is there anything in the mouth?

Her: I don’t know.

Me: Have you looked?

Her: No. I am in the next room, I can’t see her.

Me: (Thinks: But you said you were with her! And you just said you were doing the instructions, you great big liar! Do you think I am telling you to do these things for fun?) Okay, go and do it now. Come straight back to the phone and tell me what you find.

Line goes silent. Caller goes away. Caller doesn’t come back. Five minutes pass. Two ambulances and a FRU approach scene, lights blaring. Caller still does not return to phone.

The FRU is a minute away by the time she gets back.

Her: “Cancel the ambulance! She’s fine! I put her on the floor and she complained and told me to get off her. I must have been mistaken! She was just asleep.”

Strictly speaking, ambulance service procedure is that if the caller says “cancel the ambulance”, we cancel the ambulance. However, there are exceptions to this rule and I decided that this was definitely occasion to make one. I had absolutely no trust in this care home worker who didn’t know her own address, could not answer a simple question and who appeared to have great difficulty in telling whether her patients were alive or dead. I noted what had been said on the ticket (since really it is the dispatch desks who should be making decisions such as sending an ambulance even when the caller says one isn’t needed) but finished the ticket as a complete call, rather than one which had been cancelled midway. Dispatch evidently agreed with me, and none of the ambulances were cancelled.

I kept an eye on the ticket, and nearly an hour later, one of the ambulances was off to hospital with the patient on board. Next, what should appear on the ticket, but blue call details! That means that the patient is in a very serious life threatening condition. The crew had established that she had actually had a seizure of unknown cause and now had a very rapid pulse, very low blood pressure and a GCS of 11 (ie. semi conscious). (Medical types - any idea what was wrong? All the other obs were normal and there was no mention of an ECG).

So, in summary, due to this “care” home’s incompetence, there was a delay of minutes reaching this critically ill lady, CPR was almost performed on her whilst she was still alive (which would have given her broken ribs to add to her problems) and she was almost denied medical aid at all because the care home went from thinking she was dead to thinking nothing was wrong in the space of five minutes!

And this is why no member of my family will end up in a care home, even if I have to move in and look after them myself. I appreciate there are a lot of care homes that aren’t like this, and plenty of care home workers who are caring and skilled, but incidents like this are far too common for me to ever take the risk.

by Mark Myers at May 07, 2008 08:54 AM

Daily Mail, 5 May 2008

Ouch. It was almost too distressing to watch.

The Prime Minister clearly thought that by touring the TV studios yesterday he could steady nerves after last week’s shattering local election defeats. Instead, he proceeded to display yet again all the charm, humility and insightfulness of a satnav directing a driver into a cul-de-sac.

Apparently, the sole reason for Labour’s annihilation at the polls was the international economic storm — and since helmsman Brown would now steer the ship of state safely through the hurricane, everything would be fine.

Once again, Mr Brown has completely missed the point. Yes, the economic downturn is important, as was the disastrous abolition of the 10p tax band. But public disillusionment with the Government goes far, far deeper than that, and it is terminal.

Virtually everything the Government touches seems to descend into chaos. Northern Rock, losing millions of child benefit records and misplacing thousands of illegal immigrants, the tax credit foul-up, the collapse of standards in schools, lethal superbugs in the hospitals, and endemic incompetence, corruption and cynicism at all levels of public life.

Voters have concluded that the Government is simply incapable of running the proverbial whelk stall. When they get to that point there’s no coming back for a government, not even with a change of Prime Minister.

Indeed, this rot set in during Tony Blair’s last term of office, when his closest acolytes all slid away because they grasped even then that the New Labour ‘project’ had hit the buffers. For a short while this was masked by the changeover in No. 10; but it rapidly became clear that Gordon Brown was very much part of the problem.

Moreover, none of his likely successors will be able to put this right because they refuse to acknowledge that the problem is rooted in their own party’s fundamental shallowness and incoherence.

Not surprisingly, the Tories are ecstatic at the local election results. And they are to be congratulated on running a smooth, disciplined and shrewdly judged campaign, not least in London where their strategy of getting out the anti-Ken vote paid dividends in the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor.

But there is a distinct risk that the Conservatives will misinterpret their great victory. Already, there are claims that it has vindicated the Cameroons’ strategy of tacking to fashionable Left-wing thinking in order to head off any charge that they are just the ’same old Tories’.

This is to misunderstand what happened in London. For Boris’s appeal was not as a representative of the new look, politically correct Conservative party. On the contrary — his appeal was to be the gloriously politically incorrect, anti-politics candidate. As one voter told canvassers: ‘I’m not voting for you Tories; I’m voting for Boris instead.’

It is the very things that get Boris into such trouble — his shambolic manner, his inability to be diplomatic, his grandstanding instinct to do anything to get a laugh — that make people adore him. Even though party minders zipped up his mouth during the campaign, his appeal is that of someone who will never be corralled by any political machine.

And Boris was running against the quintessential machine politician.

Ironically, Ken’s original appeal eight years ago lay in his image as the Labour anti-Labour candidate. A vote for him was a kick in the teeth for the out-of-touch political elite. But then Ken himself turned into a key member of that elite — and what a distasteful, corrupt and arrogant spectacle it was.

A vote for anti-politician Boris therefore does not necessarily mean a vote for the Tories. Boris himself grasped this immediately when, in his acceptance speech, he said people shouldn’t think for a minute that London was now a Tory city.

On the contrary, on a turnout of fewer than half those eligible to vote the Tories won only 37 per cent of the vote in London; and as political analysts have pointed out, the Tories have never won a General Election unless they have won at least 40 per cent of the London vote.

Around the country, it was Labour’s simply catastrophic drop in support to a risible 24 per cent — lower even than the LibDems — that brought the Tories to power.

The triumphant Cameroons are in danger of missing the point that what happened last week was a mighty vote against Labour rather than an endorsement of the Conservatives. Indeed, such an endorsement would make little sense since, among the issues that most cheese off the electorate, there’s precious little to choose between the parties.

There’s no more delicious example of this than global warming. For the Cameroons, green policies are their totemic proof that the party has moved with the times. But Boris is actually a green sceptic who has called environmentalism a religious phenomenon and mocked green policies as ‘pagan yammering for sacrifice’.

And on this, he is far more in tune with the public who, sceptical of global warming hysteria, are deeply unimpressed by the prospect of green taxes. Indeed, Mr Brown is reported to be about to ditch the proposed rise in fuel duty in a panicky attempt to assuage public fury. So where does that leave the Cameroon carbon crusaders?

In any event, the Tories’ success can’t be due to their strategy of tacking to the Left since, until the wheels came off Mr Brown’s bus, the public’s doubts about what the Tories stood for meant they weren’t making the breakthrough they needed.

Indeed, their support jumped only when they started playing to traditional Tory concerns, such as cutting inheritance tax or supporting marriage and repairing the damage done by family breakdown.

Now, with Mayor Boris controlling billions of pounds of public money, the spotlight will turn to the Tories who will be under scrutiny as never before. They have said they intend to use Boris’s London as a laboratory to test Tory policies.

This presents as many risks as opportunities, not least from Boris himself. For although the party will try to control him, it may not be able to do so. However ambitious he may be, the new Mayor of London may not take kindly to having his every move policed by Tory HQ.

At a deeper level, such scrutiny may expose the weakness in the Cameroons’ ‘don’t frighten the horses’ strategy.

For example, for all their talk about decentralisation and cutting out bloated bureaucracy they remain committed to matching the Government’s eye-watering spending levels.

They have pledged to hold a referendum on the EU constitution; but if it goes through they will apparently wash their hands of it — and British self-government — as a lost cause.

They agree that the destructive human rights culture has to go — but flinch from the root-and-branch revision of treaty commitments without which meaningful reform is simply impossible. And so on.

It is the public’s deep disaffection with the process of politics itself that caused last week’s Labour meltdown. That disaffection is fed by the refusal to tackle problems at source, courting short-term popularity instead by taking the path of least resistance.

The political prize is waiting for the politician who by contrast displays real political courage and leadership. All eyes are now on the Tories to do so.

by Melanie Phillips at May 05, 2008 10:07 AM

Spectator, 3 May 2008

What would Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion have said if, on the day that he declared the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, he had known that six decades thence Israel would be encircled by its enemies, hopelessly outnumbered and fighting for its existence? He would surely have said: so what’s new?

Next week, on 8 May, Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of that declaration. With every decade that it clocks up, people ask the same question: will Israel still be there for the next one?

It is indeed astonishing that it has not only survived but is flourishing. Its situation as a permanently embattled nation is unique.

On the day after Ben-Gurion declared its independence, six Arab armies invaded and tried to wipe it out. With the current exception of Egypt and Jordan, the Arab and Muslim world has been trying ever since.

Israel is the only country whose creation was approved by the UN; yet it is the only country whose legitimacy is called into question. It is the only country which the world requires to compromise with its Palestinian Arab attackers and accede to their demands, even while they are firing rockets at its schools and houses and blowing up its citizens.

It is the only country which continues to provide electricity and basic services to those attackers and routinely treats thousands of Palestinians in its own hospitals, even those who have Israeli blood on their hands. And yet it is the only country which, in the court of public opinion, is condemned for behaving ‘disproportionately’ when it uses targeted military means to defend itself, and is accused of causing the very ‘Nazi’ or ‘apartheid’ atrocities of which it itself is the victim.

At present, the situation looks particularly ominous. Israel is menaced on several fronts by Iran which, racing to develop a nuclear weapon, is threatening a new genocide of the Jews while denying the last one. In Lebanon Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Iranian-sponsored army Hezbollah, which is once again armed with thousands of rockets, says the next attack on Israel is not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

Since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 Iranian-backed Hamas, which is pledged to wipe out Israel and every Jew, has built a well-trained standing army of at least 20,000 men and a huge arsenal of weapons smuggled in from Egypt, and relentlessly attacks Israel with rockets and bombs.

It is widely expected that, once Independence Day is over and President Bush has returned home from his celebratory visit, Israel will finally mount a major incursion into Gaza to deal with Hamas. If it does, Western opinion, which largely ignores Israeli victimisation, can be guaranteed to cry ‘atrocity’ once again. And just as before, Hamas will deliberately place women and children in the line of fire to maximise civilian casualties in order further to inflame that opinion.

For Israel finds itself trapped by a pincer movement of military and psychological attack from not only the Arab and Muslim world but also the West. And Britain, whose intelligentsia has swallowed wholesale Arab and Muslim lies, is the Western leader of those baying for Israel’s head.

Thanks to the poison spread by the British media, the universities, NGOs and the churches, Israel has been systematically demonised and delegitimised.

Few are aware, for example, how both Hamas and Hezbollah deliberately position both terrorists and weaponry in densely populated civilian areas, using women and children as human shields. While British headlines scream at Israel for causing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, few are aware that Hamas has been stealing fuel supplies intended for Gaza’s population and blowing up the crossing points to provoke Israel into closing them, to escalate the conflict and inflame the world.

Even fewer are aware that many of the most inflammatory images from the region are fabricated, since both Hamas and Hezbollah routinely stage ‘atrocities’ or artificially exaggerate incidents using doctored footage — courtesy of British journalists who are threatened with murder or kidnap if they fail to toe the line.

More fundamentally, the obsessional demonisation of Israel is based on a false set of beliefs taken straight from Arab propaganda — that as a result of Holocaust guilt, Israel was created when a load of European Jews with no claim to the land were dumped on Palestine, driving out its rightful Arab Muslim inhabitants.

Ben-Gurion would today be surprised to find, for example, that Israel is regarded as illegally occupying the West Bank (and until 2005, Gaza). Along with modern Israel, this was part of the territory of Palestine within which in 1922 the League of Nations gave Britain the task of re-establishing the Jewish national home because of the unique claim by the Jews — the only people for whom it had ever been their nation state, hundreds of years before the Arabs invaded it.

In other words, far from being ‘Palestinian land’, the Jews are entitled to claim it under international law, which also gives it the right to hold on to it in self-defence. Yet ‘progressive’ opinion not only denies both law and history but demands (as do the Palestinians) the ethnic cleansing of every last Jewish settler from a putative Palestinian state (just as half Israel’s population was created by Jews driven out of their ancient homes in Arab lands). So much for anti-racism.

The denial and inversion of such facts has singled out Israel for vilification applied to no other country. Scapegoated for crimes of which it is in fact the victim, Israel has become the Jew of the Western world.

This is a victory for the Arabs in the new type of war in which they are engaged. Asymmetric warfare, whose principal battlefield is the mind, uses ostensibly powerless people (the Palestinians) who are in fact backed by powerful state actors (Iran). Such an inversion of strong and weak and the systematic use of deception are vital to the principal strategic goal of asymmetric warfare: to confuse and demoralise its victims and suborn world opinion to its cause.

Even Israel itself has weakened under this. For it has an intelligentsia which is no longer confident of the nation’s right to its own Jewish identity. This has created a dangerous vacuum. In Israeli universities, revisionist historians have told corrosive lies about their country’s history, portraying it as having been born in sin. In the schools, children have not been taught Jewish history and parrot Arab disinformation instead.

The country’s sense of national purpose has been further weakened by the 2006 Lebanon war, which punctured public belief in Israel’s military invincibility, and by the ongoing crisis of political leadership caused by a political system which is endemically corrupt and excludes the brightest and the best from public office.

The result of all this is that at present, both the Israeli Left and Right are consumed by a morbid despair. The Left thinks Israel is doomed to war in perpetuity because there is no prospect of a Palestinian state — which it remains convinced is the prerequisite for peace, despite this being contrary to all history, evidence and logic. The Right, on the other hand, thinks that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is Israel’s Chamberlain, about to declare peace in our time by giving away half of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and thus delivering Israel to the wolves of Arab annihilation.

But both are surely missing the bigger picture.

First, despite entering its seventh decade of living under existential siege, Israel is prospering. Its economy is booming, it leads the world in high-tech, and property prices in Tel Aviv rival those in London. Second, having stared over the edge of the cultural abyss it has started to realise the danger. It is beginning to turn education round, with a new awareness dawning among high school principals of the need to teach Jewish history, identity and values.

And although unprecedented numbers of mainly secular Israelis now choose to live abroad, there are rapidly growing numbers of the religiously orthodox who know exactly what they are fighting for and are prepared to die for it — as do the majority of middle-of-the-road Israeli citizens.

The same, however, can’t be said of the Palestinian Arabs, who are simply falling apart. The rise of Hamas, the progressive Islamisation and terrorisation of Palestinian society and the continued corruption and factional fighting within Fatah are all taking their toll.

Increasingly, Palestinians are packing up and leaving. It is they rather than the Israelis who are in despair. Their sense of national identity — always artificial — now lies finally shattered by the death cult that acts in their name. After all, with even supposedly secular Fatah being steadily Islamised, why on earth would any Palestinian in his right mind want to live in a repressive Islamic republic — which Palestine would without doubt become — where dissidents are thrown from the tops of tall buildings?

And here lies the paradox which offers the best hope for Israel’s future. For the very Islamism which so menaces it might finally unlock the door to peace. This is because both Islamism and Iran threaten not just Israel but the ‘moderate’ Arab world too.

Accordingly, the last thing those Arabs want is an Iranian-backed, Islamised state of Palestine. Egypt and Jordan simply cannot afford to have Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood on their doorsteps in a Hamas-dominated Gaza or West Bank. Currently, they rely on Israel to prevent it. But increasingly, talk of some kind of Jordan–Egypt–Palestinian confederation is in the air.

As the analyst Jonathan Spyer has noted, Jordan’s recent decision to connect Jericho to the Jordanian electricity grid is an example of its increasing involvement in the West Bank. And behind the scenes, the more realistic Palestinians have grasped that their best chance of having any future at all lies in just such a confederation.

Such an outcome would have history on its side. Some readers may feel the need to lie down after reading the rest of this sentence, but Jordan is historically the state of Arab Palestine. This was the original two-state ‘solution’ back in 1921, when Winston Churchill unilaterally gave away three quarters of the original territory of Palestine to the Hashemite dynasty, creating what is now Jordan, with the remainder supposed to go to the Jews.

But this chance of an end to the dispute is currently being undermined by the self-serving meddling of America which, like Europe, falsely casts the Arab war against Israel as a boundary dispute between Israel and the Palestinians and is trying to force the agreed outline of a Palestinian state by the time President Bush leaves office.

It is even pressuring Israel to accept Hamas’s ‘truce’ — by which Hamas means a period when Israel doesn’t attack it so it can equip itself for war undisturbed — so that on his visit to Israel next week Bush can pretend that Middle East peace in our time is imminent. But this is a virtual reality peace process, since even the ‘moderate’ Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas has said in terms that he will never recognise Israel as a Jewish state. So what’s to discuss?

Despite its sham nature, however, this appeasement process has had two baleful consequences. It has caused Olmert, under pressure from the Americans, the Israeli media and powerful Israeli oligarchs who want the economic advantages of peace at any price, to destroy checkpoints, release prisoners and float the possibility of territorial concessions — all of which promote and incite further Arab violence. And it has caused Jordan to put its own confederation idea on ice. Thus meddling America is destroying the best option for the Middle East to resolve its core dispute — that it is left to sort it out by itself.

Indeed, much of the responsibility for these six decades of conflict lie with a Western world which, from 1921 onwards, has chosen to appease Arab violence while shedding crocodile tears over its Jewish victims. But the future of Israel is the future of the West. If the front line in Israel were to go down, the West would be next.

Given its current internal appeasement of Islamism, however, the West may go down anyway. At least Israel knows it has to fight to survive. As a result, in 60 years’ time it will still be there.

Can the same be said for Britain or Europe?

by Melanie Phillips at May 01, 2008 08:40 AM

I am frequently asked why I decided to move from IT to study politics and one of the answers I give is that I listen to my bookshelf, as it usually represents my passions. 13 years ago my bookshelf was full of hacking, Linux and networking O’Reilly books. Over time, as a result of the reading time traveling for Claranet provided, my bookshelf morphed into books on the Middle East and International Relations theory. I followed my passions once before and had a reasonably successful career on the back of it, and so, I tell people that I am following my passions once again and seeing where it leads. Shortly before my 3rd Google interview, I decided that I really should follow through on this. I have started off down a new track, and while there will be opportunities for me to return to IT, the timing will be never be more suitable for me to explore my new track. The visa and money temptation of Google are also not as significant as I thought. Upon investigation, a visa for work in the non-profit sector is slightly easier to procure than I thought and as for the money… well I think I can lead an ascetic lifestyle for a bit.

Which is just as well as I flunked the 3rd interview with Google. I had an awful night’s sleep the evening before, as a result of pulling a muscle in the gym, [Yes - you read that right. I now go twice a week to the gym] and was off form but struggling through an explanation of TCP Syn Cookies, realised that my brain is just not in gear for IT stuff at the moment. I do enjoy it but the synapses are wired for Balance of Power not IP headers.

As previously mentioned, I had been offered a position with POMED which, despite being in DC, was very attractive for its activities and opportunities. But I also received an offer from an organisation called the Independent Diplomat, another interesting group setup by an ex-UK foreign office fellow who, with some financial assistance from George Soros, set up a consulting firm who advise political parties who are seeking independence, such as, until their recent success, the Kosovans. Based in New York, this was also an unpaid internship but would also provide me with some exposure to the political world, specifically at the United Nations. So - stay in New York and enjoy myself here a little longer or shwitz in DC for the summer and miss out on working with a good group?

Facing a Kobayashi Maru situation with both offers, I pulled my Captain Kirk manoeuvre and decided to do both of them. So, I start work on June 2nd for the Independent Diplomat and then move to DC in September for 3 months with POMED. This is going to eat into my savings much more than I thought but I am trying to see it as an investment. I will add some good organisations to my CV and then if no full time positions manifest themselves here in the US, I wil come away feeling I have given it my best shot and look to return to IT (although one other option might be worth pursuing…)

I am really excited to be staying in New York over the summer. It will mean I get to do a full year here and add a nice coda to my time at university. The Political Science department at school had an all day conference on Friday where 2nd year PhD students had to present papers and I was asked by a friend whether it had whetted my appetite to continue studying. I think it has. I have enjoyed my year at Columbia so very much and have been intellectually challenged and am going to leave with an itch which has been scratched but… not totally. I am not sure I am PhD material but you never know. As another friend said today over lunch, when listening to my enthusiastic accounts of Friday’s conference, I have got the bug.  But equally, I am looking forward to being part of a working environment again.

But until then, I have 2 weeks more studying to do before finals exams and then hopefully can look forward to my graduation ceremony which my mother is flying over to attend..

by levine at April 29, 2008 02:59 AM

Daily Mail, 28 April 2008

As if Gordon Brown didn’t have enough to contend with at present, along comes Lord Levy to put the boot in.

When he wrote his autobiography, Tony Blair’s erstwhile fund-raiser and tennis partner must have imagined that his disclosures would inflict untold damage on Mr Brown’s reputation.

But however embarrassing some of these revelations may be, Lord Levy could not have foreseen that, come publication day, Mr Brown would have inflicted so much damage upon himself that the peer’s attacks could hardly make matters any worse.

His revelation that Mr Blair believes Mr Brown can never defeat David Cameron is hardly earth-shattering news since it now appears that there is scarcely one single Labour MP who believes that he can.

The 10p tax band fiasco, in which a revolt of Labour MPs led by Frank Field forced the Prime Minister into a humiliating climb-down, is but the latest and probably the most damaging mess he has got himself into.

Cushioning the blow for vulnerable groups from a tax change he had initially denied would create any losers at all has destroyed the last vestiges of his authority over his party.

All the attributes on which he based his reputation as Chancellor of the Exchequer — a deft hand with the economy, granite-like moral integrity, decisiveness, consistency — have been progressively destroyed since he became Prime Minister. And the only person to blame is Mr Brown himself.

It has got to the point where one wonders whether he can now win any of the fights he has opted to pick.

There continue to be strong suggestions that he will reclassify cannabis upwards to a category B prohibited drug, in defiance of his own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs which is understood to be saying the opposite in its report today.

If the drug liberalisers on the ACMD do carry the day, it will be a disgrace. But facing them down requires political strength. Does Mr Brown still have the authority to carry through his intention to overrule this body, almost certainly provoking its members to resign en masse?

More doubtful still, he has committed himself to extending pre-charge detention for terrorist suspects to 42 days, in defiance of most political opinion — with the exception of the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, who warned ominously at the weekend that Britain would come to regret defeating this measure.

As with cannabis reclassification, 42 days has the support of the public. That’s what Mr Brown has been banking on all this time, insisting he will not back down over an issue of national security.

But if he ever had any chance of persuading Parliament to accept 42 days, he surely does not have it any more. And indeed, it has now emerged that the Government has prepared a climb-down in a proposal to give judges the power to impose tagging orders instead of detention — a compromise which is likely to please nobody.

By far the most serious damage of all, however, has surely been caused by the 10p tax band debacle. It’s not just Mr Brown’s original stubborn refusal to accept the hardship it would cause and then the U-turn he was forced to perform.

No, the really shocking thing about this affair — and undoubtedly the factor which has destroyed the Prime Minister within his own party — is that it has exposed the hollowness of his principles.

Here is a politician, after all, whose single most important stated goal, repeated to the point of obsession, is to eradicate poverty. Indeed, the big difference between him and Mr Blair — adduced by political friend and foe alike — was always that Mr Brown was the unreconstructed socialist who would fleece the middle classes to benefit the poor.

Yet the same Mr Brown cynically raided the pockets of the poor by abolishing the 10p tax band to fund a brazen piece of political opportunism in reducing the standard rate of tax to 20p.

That is what has so badly stuck in the craw of his party. With this move Mr Brown has simply destroyed the very basis of his political integrity — and dealt a scarcely less grievous blow to what remains of Labour’s ideals.

By showing that he is in fact indifferent to the struggle by poor people to make ends meet, to the extent that he is prepared to make them yet poorer if he can score a cheap political point, he has confirmed what has long been obvious to the rest of us about his whole approach to poverty.

It is not motivated by concern for the welfare of the poor at all. It is motivated instead by the belief that the state should control people’s lives.

This has always been apparent from his determination to trap people ever higher up the income scale into welfare dependency through the extension of means-tested benefits; to penalise and undermine marriage, the most effective institution for helping people live self-reliant lives; and effectively to nationalise childhood through ever more intrusive child care provision.

There was one anti-poverty campaigner who saw through all this from the start. He warned that Gordon Brown’s agenda was likely to deepen and widen poverty rather than alleviate it.

He warned that the extension of means-testing would spread the net of welfare dependency still further and suck more people into dishonesty as they succumbed to the temptation to fiddle the system. And he warned about the deserts of fatherlessness and uncontrollable children being created by welfare incentives for single parenthood.

The name of that far-sighted individual was Frank Field. It is indeed fitting that the revolt against the abolition of the 10p tax band has been led by Mr Field.

For not only have his prescient warnings fallen on deaf Treasury ears, but he has always held Chancellor Brown responsible for the abrupt termination of his ministerial career when, having been charged by Tony Blair to think the unthinkable about welfare, he was promptly sacked when he did.

Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold.

The subject of welfare goes right to the heart of both our broken society and our broken politics. Poverty - not just the financial sort, but moral, spiritual and intellectual poverty too - will never be addressed by pulling the strings of our welfare state this way or that.

This is because the core assumption of the welfare state itself, that individuals are not responsible for themselves or their families and that the state should provide for them instead, is what perpetuates poverty in affluent Britain.

It also sets the stage for public disaffection with politics, since the state can never satisfy such unlimited demand and therefore is always seen to fail.

The poverty afflicting our society can properly be tackled only by restoring individual responsibility. This can be done, for example, by supporting marriage; by freeing up school choice and removing the dead hand of educationists from teacher training and the curriculum; and by replacing Treasury-controlled benefits and health and social care provision with personal and social insurance schemes.

The problem with British politics is not just one dysfunctional Prime Minister. It is that the whole relationship between individuals and the state needs to be radically rethought.

Mr Brown will never do this. Will the still-timid Tories rise to this challenge?

by Melanie Phillips at April 28, 2008 05:40 AM

On 27 June 2007, when Gordon Brown went to see the Queen, he had not won a general election campaign or seen off his Labour rivals in a leadership contest. Brown was not the leading candidate to become Prime Minister, but the only candidate, the uncontested crown prince, a suitably monarchial figure at the gates of Buckingham Palace.

We forget how dominant he seemed. Uncontaminated by the grubby business of struggling for votes, Brown could stand above party politics as the father of the nation. From the right, Margaret Thatcher came to tea at Downing Street and the editor of the Daily Telegraph became his new best friend. From the left, trade unions welcomed him as a refreshing change after Tony Blair. Editors still confined reports about finance companies with strange debt vehicles to the business pages in those days.

It’s easy to be all things to all men when the economy is booming. When it turns, you learn who your friends are and Brown has found he has precious few. ‘Tories for Labour’ was a short-lived political movement; Baroness Thatcher hasn’t been back and the editor of the Telegraph has drifted right. Meanwhile, the unions are stirring.

I don’t want to exaggerate the revival of militancy. Compared with the mass walkouts of the Seventies, today’s protests are more like a sickie than a strike. A contact at the TUC put it all into perspective when he rolled his eyeballs at last week’s ‘Summer of Discontent’ headlines. ‘That’s the one cliche the Murdoch press has never fired a sub for using,’ he muttered.

Yet the threat that the golden era of low inflation and high employment may soon be over is toughening up workers for the same reasons it is making the government look old and unable to cope with harder times.

Before the economic crisis began, a strike by the National Union of Teachers would have flopped. Not only politicians but also many in the trade union movement had learnt to look on it contemptuously. Their disdain would have been strengthened by the sight of a member of the executive crying at a rally in Bristol on Thursday that Brown was ‘dragging young teachers into poverty’ and Birmingham activists breaking into a chorus of: ‘I’d rather be a picket than a scab.’ These were yet further examples of the union succumbing to its persistent fantasy that tweedy teachers can replace muscle-bound factory workers and become the new vanguard of the proletariat.

Indeed, when the NUT called for a strike, the other teaching unions shrugged their shoulders. Far from forcing impoverished teachers to subsist on bread and dripping, they said, Labour had given them above inflation pay rises for years. Admittedly, the current settlement was low, but independent reviewers had approved it.

NUT members appeared equally unenthusiastic. Only one-third bothered to vote in the ballot. A fiasco seemed inevitable. In the event, thousands of teachers turned out and a happy NUT is certain that they did so because of inflation. According to the government’s measure, it stood at 2.4 per cent at the time of the pay offer and that, said the teachers, was a penny-pinching underestimate.

Journalists are talking great deal of tosh about the government’s inflation figure. They are presenting the consumer price index as a kind of con - when it is used across Europe - and claiming it discriminates against the middle classes because it doesn’t include school fees, when the overwhelming majority of the middle class don’t pay school fees.

If anything, it discriminates against the low paid because it is not adequately reflecting the rising costs of food, fuel, gas and electricity, which no one can do without however hard they scrimp.

Labour has no hard-won experience to help it cope, as it hasn’t confronted inflationary pressures since it came to power. Cheap goods from China kept prices down.

The boys in the City could keep spending their bonuses and the Treasury could pump hundreds of billions into the public sector without fear of a price explosion.

Now demand from China’s growing number of wealthy workers is pushing up food prices while the thirst of Chinese and Indian industry for oil is pushing up the cost of fuel. The rise of China is taking Labour, and us, into a new world and it is not only teachers who don’t like the look of it.

Lower down the social ladder, poorer workers have more reason to be worried. Last week, the GMB held a meeting of shop stewards to judge whether dustmen, hospital porters, ambulance drivers and cleaners were ready to walk out. As always, they were reluctant to strike. Even if the management backed down, they reasoned, the rise they won may not cover the loss of wages.

Despite the lack of enthusiasm for a confrontation, there were ominous growls. Brown’s decision to tax the working poor so he could give a meagre, barely noticed bribe to the middle class was as unpopular as you would expect. Even more so was the rescue of the banks. If there was money for them, why isn’t there money for us? delegates asked. If bankers are relying on welfare payments from the state, will the state insist that bankers’ pay rises are kept as low as ours?

These are good questions, which once again Labour has no experience of resolving. The party’s dominance of modern politics began when the pound crashed out of the ERM in 1992 and the long boom started. Labour became so used to profits from the City providing the money for its vast programmes of public spending and redistribution of wealth that it forgot that when the authorities let financial bubbles grow to bursting point, the public is forced to redistribute its wealth to bankers.

Although political writers have insisted for a decade that Labour had to decide which side it was on, it found it easy to be all things to all men when the economy was growing. Gordon Brown used to be able please the editor of the Telegraph and the general secretary of the TUC. He must now be wondering whether he can please either.

by Nick at April 27, 2008 07:48 AM

Jewish Chronicle, 25 April 2008

Everyone is waiting. In Israel, they are waiting for the 60th-anniversary celebrations to be over and for President Bush to have visited and returned home. Then, they say, the IDF will make its long-anticipated major incursion into Gaza. Then at last the problem of the ever-intensifying attacks by Hamas will be dealt with.

Across the world, everyone is waiting for the interminable US presidential election to be over. Then, many believe, the paralysis over Iran will end. Then, they think, the prospect of a military strike on Tehran will either swiftly be realised or permanently be laid to rest (depending on who actually wins).

And meanwhile the hallucinatory Middle East appeasement process meanders ever onwards, accompanied by dark rumblings about a secret backstairs sell-out Israel deal being cooked up between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas and enlivened by the Israel-phobic Jimmy Carter, fresh from paying homage at the tomb of Yasser Arafat, announcing the prospect of peace in our time with Hamas.

But waiting comes with a heavy price tag. It provides alibis for putting off what needs to be done quickly; it results in the slaughter of yet more innocents; and it gives the advantage to the player for whom time is crucial. That player is Iran.

The reason Israel hasn’t done what it needs to do in Gaza is not because of anniversaries or official visits. It is because of Gilad Shalit, the IDF soldier who is now in his twenty-second month of captivity by Hamas.

Israel will not invade Gaza because of fears that Shalit will then be killed. Shalit is being used by Hamas as a hostage to prevent Israel from wiping it out. The result is that other Israelis are being relentlessly attacked and murdered. And the puppeteer pulling Hamas’s strings is Iran.

The West tends to put the various Middle East conflicts into boxes marked ‘Israel-Palestinian dispute’, ‘Iraq’, ‘Lebanon’, ‘Hamas’, ‘al Qaida’ and ‘Iranian nuclear threat’. The fact is, however, that all roads lead to Iran.

Iran is simply the centre of strategic gravity in the region and in the war against the free world. It has encircled Israel through Hamas in Gaza and through Hizbollah in Lebanon, where it has also all but snuffed out the Lebanese democracy.

In Iraq, Iran is the central player. The Petraeus surge may have been successful. And the Iraqis recently surprised many by deciding to fight the Iranian-backed supporters of Moqtada al Sadr in Basra, causing Iran to beat a strategic retreat. But the fact is that, in Iraq, Iran has suborned government, insurgent and religious leaders.

As for al Qaida, the idea that Shi’ite Iran would never ally with Sunni terrorists is a lethal illusion. Iran has had working arrangements with al Qaida for years, as it has with other Sunni terror groups in their common cause against the West.

And although the West may not realise it, Iran has spread there too. In Britain and Europe, it has a sleeping army composed of Hizbollah cells and Iranian intelligence which uses western Iranian embassies as explosives stores. If Iran is attacked, Tehran will respond by unleashing Iranian terror in the West.

The prerequisite for stabilising all these hotspots — including ‘Israel/Palestine’ — and dealing with global Islamic terror is regime change in Tehran. The question is how.

Far, far more should already have been done. There should have been earlier and fiercer economic sanctions along with diplomatic estrangement. It is extraordinary that Britain still has diplomatic relations with Iran while (along with the US) it proscribes the PMOI, the principal opposition movement which is committed to human rights, as a terrorist organisation.

The fact is that Iran declared war on the West in 1979 as soon as Ayatollah Khomeini came to power — the last great contribution made by President Jimmy Carter to world peace. Ever since, Iranian militias have been attacking Western interests; ever since, the West has refused to acknowledge this.

People say war against Iran would turn a largely pro-western people against the West. But war need not mean carpet-bombing Tehran. It can and should mean targeted strikes on the regime and its principal interests.

War should always be a last resort. But, as in the 1930s, the West once again has failed to take the appropriate intermediate steps. Such a failure of nerve makes war more likely, not less.

As a result, the choice is not between war and peace. War with Iran is almost certainly inevitable. The choice is between war on our terms or on those laid down by Iran. The longer we wait, the more that choice is loaded against the defeat of this most lethal of all threats to the free world.

by Melanie Phillips at April 25, 2008 03:19 PM

here

by Nick at April 24, 2008 06:08 PM

As both these shows reach the end of their limited runs this week, and both are currently on the bubble for renewal, it seems only appropriate to reflect on them both and work out why one worked so extraordinarily well, and the other disappointingly didn’t.

Simon asked me why TV was so good at the moment, and the only answer that sprang to mind was a realisation that the idiocy of “the pitch” might be helping shows at this point. Having to present your idea for a new programme to a broadcaster is often horribly hindered by being required to distill a complex and carefully plotted plan down into a soundbite that will catch someone’s attention. However, recently it seems that saying, “X but with Y” is providing enough new twists on safe formulas that imagination is surviving the pitch meeting. So while high-concept programmes like Lost and Heroes might be supposed as opening doors to broader fantasy ideas, instead they seem to be inspiring more subtle manipulations of trusted formats. So there’s these two examples. Eli Stone: X = a courtroom drama where a dedicated, high-powered lawyer defends the little guy, Y = but he’s a prophet, seeing visions that direct his work. New Amsterdam: X = a homicide detective who doesn’t follow orders and always catches the killer, Y = but he’s 450 years old and immortal until he finds his one true love.

So let’s start with the bad news, New Amsterdam. In reading the concepts above, it’s certainly the more ludicrous of the two. But as an idea, it has plenty of potential. Each episode becomes a compilation of whatever current case he’s investigating, and something else that reflects it, that happened to him at a previous time in his long life. Then there’s the running seam of his meeting a doctor and nearly dying, and believing she may be the One who will grant him mortality.

So why didn’t it work? It just doesn’t know how to tell a story. Each episode’s murder mystery is so remarkably formulaic that even trying as hard as you can to not guess the culprit is impossible. It’s, well, the only other person we’ve been introduced to other than the current suspect. Then the flashbacks - they’re just awful. While the previously cancelled Journeyman was especially guilty of having incredibly lame indications of the year he was in appearing in the background, Amsterdam’s are nails on a blackboard. His ludicrous adoption of the decade’s memorable fashion, and apparent ability to entirely change career, family and personality every ten years, made it excruciating. It also fractured each episode into two half-told stories, barely leaving room for the confusingly accelerated, and then abruptly aborted love story. But most weird was the show’s apparently racism. Each episode seemed to pick a different ethnic background to horrifically portray, from the cruel Indian family forcing marriage upon their oppressed daughter, to the cartoon presentation of the mafia. Black = poor, and the only black member of the cast was Amsterdam’s old-age mixed-race son, who worked in a bar and apparently lived as a servant/wise conscience to his immortal father. The episode that covered how Amsterdam met his son’s mother, and appeared to think it was confronting issues of racism in early 20th century America, was patronising and abysmally told.

It remains frustrating, since it had lots of potential to be interesting, and Amsterdam himself was a fun character, who never gave any thought to telling people he was present at events in history. His up-front nature led others to assume he was either being silly, or lying. It was refreshing that he didn’t tie himself in knots trying to maintain his current persona. But unfortunately, the writing just wasn’t there, and I’ll be astonished if it gets picked up for the Autumn.

Eli Stone, meanwhile, remained a constant joy from beginning to end. I found myself feeling like I should apologise for liking it so much last time I wrote about it, and I feel the same tug again. But no! No I won’t! I’m not going to apologise for loving a show about a good person doing good things, and things working out really well as a result.

The programme got all its tragedy out of the way at the very beginning. Eli is diagnosed with a near-inoperable brain aneurysm, breaks up with his fiance, and loses the respect of his colleagues because of his visions/aneurysm, all in the first two or three episodes (of the thirteen). From then on, while Eli struggles greatly with his situation - is he a prophet of God, or a madman - the results of his actions are almost universally positive. While one case in particular sees him sink low - bribing a judge so sure he is that his vision is true, and it failing to be so - even then the results of his actions have a positive effect on those around him.

Eli Stone is a show about a man who takes his cases based on visions he doesn’t trust, and the resulting changes to people’s lives. It’s also a show about his seeing WW2 battles in the firm’s boardroom, feeling earthquakes in his office, and watching George Michael perform live in his front room, or his colleagues and friends suddenly bursting into song and dance. It’s borderline a musical with the number of songs appearing, and the joyfully daft routines. It’s also a show that’s given me a complete change of heart about George Michael, whom I suddenly regard with a new-found respect based on his performances in his many appearances. But none of these things are the core message of the programme.

Eli Stone is a show about how one person can change the world. Eli’s changes in attitude and behaviour inspire everyone around him. The last episode of the season gives all the major cast members a chance to describe to Eli (in a manner) how he has changed them. He never preached to anyone, nor campaigned to his bosses to change the firms approach. He never “evangelised” his link with God. Instead, he just reacted to it, and his person and his actions deeply affected those around him. It’s inspiring.

It’s also incredibly funny, and fantastically happy. The final episode very smartly puts an extremely brief montage of highlights from the brief series near the end. It’s obviously only there to remind those commissioning next season’s shows quite how much they did, how fun it was, and how moving it could be. I hope they take notice. I really hope this show gets a full season. There’s so little that’s optimistic and enforcing, because it’s so incredibly hard to do without being cloying or sickening. It turns out the solution is to have your cast sing and dance, and have George Michael appear every other episode - you can forgive people for not having figured that out before. But someone has, so they should be given more time to demonstrate why it works.

by botherer at April 21, 2008 02:58 PM

If you don’t know how to sing happy birthday to a London railway terminus, Alan Johson shows you how.

by Nick at April 21, 2008 08:40 AM

For years, campaigners against the Burmese military junta have also been campaigning against Lonely Planet. If you can get hold of a copy of the first and most debased edition of its guide to Burma, you will see why.

The travel publishers pretend the dictatorship is ’sensitive to criticism’. They tell tourists not to worry about the conscripted workers who built their hotels because forced labour is ‘on the wane’. The true nature of the regime creeps out in embarrassed sentences hidden in the small print. ‘Be conscious that the Burmese are not free to discuss politics with foreigners and may be punished or imprisoned if they are caught,’ reads one. ‘Don’t compromise local people by raising political questions in inappropriate situations,’ chides another.

Burmese democrats assumed that Lonely Planet was a cynical operator which knew the truth about their country but euphemised for the sake of sales. Thomas Kohnstamm, co-author of Lonely Planet guides to various South American countries, raises the plausible possibility that Lonely Planet employees were so stretched they barely grasped the nature of Burmese autocracy before moving on to the next country.

In his memoir, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?, Kohnstamm shows a side of publishing which is at once decadent and mean. He explains a Lonely Planet recommendation for a Brazilian cafe by saying that the waitress suggested that he came back after closing time. ‘We end up having sex in a chair and then on one of the tables in the back corner. I later recount in the guidebook review that the restaurant “is a pleasant surprise… and the table service is friendly”.’

At least he was a gentleman about it and at least he went to Rio. Later, Kohnstamm cheerily admits to producing chunks of the Lonely Planet guide to Colombia from San Francisco. ‘I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Colombian consulate.’ In his book, he says he filled the gaps in her knowledge by relying on other people’s research. He worked on the principle that ‘what I can’t plagiarise, I can always make up’.

He now says he was joking, but is adamant that he couldn’t do a proper job because Lonely Planet wouldn’t even cover the cost of his flight to Colombia.

Kohnstamm’s story went everywhere because it challenged the belief that reference books, reports in serious newspapers, magazines, academic papers and journals are the result of a reliable process which produces accurate results.

For all the talk of the net changing the world, it remains a parasitic medium which depends on old-fashioned sources, which readers could more or less trust. Most bloggers bounce off online articles written and edited by professionals. Wikipedia tries to limit its inaccuracies by insisting that although it is ‘the free encyclopaedia anyone can edit’, users must back up their often dubious assertions with links to published sources. Journals across the world help them do just that. In the past few years, nearly all of them have put their products online, free of charge, and hoped that web advertising will make up for the losses of print sales.

Even bloggers who have made their name by lambasting the mainstream media - Matt Drudge in the US, Tim Worstall here - believe newspapers and television companies are letting themselves down. ‘Don’t these people have editors!’ Worstall bellows as he dissects another howler. They do, but maybe not for long. Or if editors survive, they may not have the resources to ensure that what they print is intelligently researched.

An apocalyptic mood is gripping publishing. JK Rowling fought back tears as she told a New York court how an online site had ‘plundered’ her work. Tracey Chevalier, who wrote Girl With a Pearl Earring, warned at the end of March that piracy on the net will make writing uneconomic.

She worried about work that can be cut up and pasted easily on to websites: poems, recipes, travel guides, short stories. But in south Asia, China and Turkey, it is not simply recipe writers who are being hit. At last week’s London Book Fair, Simon Bell of the Publishers Association described factories in Turkey producing enormous numbers of pirated copies of complete books by combining the net with modern printing technology.

He was joined by Akash Chittranshi, chief investigator for the Indian publishing industry, who showed pictures of police raids on underground printers who run off near-perfect copies on ‘an unbelievable scale’ for street vendors.

Pirated books are rare in the rich world because bookshops will not take them. But the arrival of the Amazon Kindle and similar ‘e-book readers’ will allow books to be downloaded in under a minute. What can be digitalised can be copied, as the music industry knows to its cost. There’s no reason why novels won’t soon be as easy to steal as ballads.

People will always write for love. But love won’t give them the time to write any more than it will help provide an accurate account of the fighting in Basra or a reliable guide to Burma. Good research needs to be funded. The optimists say authors and publishers shouldn’t panic. Web advertising and new ways of marketing will make up any shortfall.

If they’re wrong, and a recession will quickly show if they are wrong, we will look back on our time with regret. Briefly, the net allowed the transmission of professionally produced and edited news, books, music and analysis to anyone anywhere in the world with a connection. But the golden age couldn’t last because the net users weren’t prepared to pay for decent content and the web degenerated into mediocrity.

‘It is necessary to piece together second-hand information about things you are not able to see yourself,’ said Kohnstamm. His cynical voice may be the voice of the future.

Actually, you don’t have to vote for Ken Livingstone

Democracy is a system where voters hold politicians to account. In London, we’ve turned it on its head and allowed politicians to hold voters to account.

Allow me to explain. Ken Livingstone has broken the left’s one worthwhile taboo and embraced the far right. He has ignored London’s liberal Muslims and supported assorted homophobes, misogynists and racists. For good measure, he has presided over an administration against which there are far too many allegations of corruption and megalomania.

Fine, sling the creep out. Not so fast, say virtually every Labour MP and journalist. Livingstone may be a creep, but Boris Johnson is a clown. In other words, you have no choice. You must vote for Livingstone, without receiving any commitment that he will change his ways.

Gordon Brown and David Miliband don’t announce that they have forced Livingstone to listen to Muslim democrats and socialists rather than Islamist reactionaries and conspiracy theorists. Instead, they tell us to vote for a man they justifiably despise, regardless of who he will associate with on his return to power. Similarly, leftish broadcasters never ask Livingstone if he will meet leftish concerns by promising to drop his opposition to government plans to make foreign billionaires pay a modest amount of tax, for instance, or abandoning his support for shady property developers.

The normal electoral process of politicians responding to voters’ concerns has been suspended.

I won’t distract readers outside London with a technical analysis of how Brian Paddick, the ex-copper running on the Liberal Democrat ticket, could come through the middle. My point is merely that in a democracy, free people pass judgment on their leaders - they don’t give their leaders free passes.

by Nick at April 20, 2008 08:32 AM

Global Politics After 9/11:
The Democratiya Interviews
Edited by Alan Johnson, Preface by Michael Walzer
published by Foreign Policy Centre / Democratiya

Monday 21 April, 6pm, Committee Room 3a, The Palace of Westminster
A discussion on the future of progressive foreign policy to launch Global
Politics After 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews.
Speakers
* Charlie Falconer (Chair)
* Alan Johnson (Democratiya.com, Editor of Global Politics After 9/11)

* Denis Macshane MP (Labour Foreign Office Minister 2001-2005)
* Michael Moore MP (Liberal Democrat Spokesman for International
Development, tbc)
* John Lloyd (Financial Times and Reuters Institute, Oxford )
* Andrew Mitchell MP (Shadow Secretary of State for International
Development)
* Ladan Boroumand (Research Director, The Abdorrahman Boroumand
Foundation for the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran).
There will be a question and answer period. Copies of Global Politics After
9/11: The Democratiya Interviews will be available at a specially reduced
price of 7.99.
RSVP is to Julie Utting _Julie.Utting@JohnSmithTrust.org_

by Nick at April 18, 2008 07:40 AM

Here

by Nick at April 17, 2008 10:54 AM

‘Magna Carta is such a Fellow he will have no sovereign,’ snapped the Jacobean jurist Sir Edward Coke as he fought the arbitrary power of the Stuart monarchy. Lord Justice Moses and Mr Justice Sullivan might have lacked Sir Edward’s succinctness, but last week they delivered a defence of the rule of law that was as stirring.

The Saudis’ successful attempt to bully the Serious Fraud Office was a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, they said, a conspiracy that, shamefully, the Blair government had joined. ‘No one suggested to those uttering the threat that it was futile, that the United Kingdom’s system of democracy forbade pressure being exerted on an independent prosecutor whether by the domestic executive or by anyone else. No one even hinted that the courts would strive to protect the rule of law and protect the independence of the prosecutor by striking down any decision he might be tempted to make in submission to the threat.’

Brave and undeniable, but Whitehall did have a cynical argument against the judges, though not one that would stand up in court. Saudi Arabia is a special case, it runs. Most despotisms are like Zimbabwe, nasty, corrupt and poor. Saudi Arabia is nasty, corrupt but fantastically rich because of its oil wealth. So when it threatens to cancel orders for Eurofighters or suspend co-operation in the war against al-Qaeda unless we obey orders, we can appease it, safe in the knowledge that the Saudi monarchy is a one-off. No one else has the strength to