Don't forget to breathe

The secret of long life - play chess, eat porridge, laugh:

A man who bet £100 ($240) a decade ago that he would live to be 100 is preparing to pick up his £25,000 ($60,000) winnings.
So confident was bookmaker William Hill in 1997 that it gladly offered Alec Holden odds of 250/1.
But the retired engineer, born April 24, 1907, celebrates his century - to the bookies' dismay.
Mr Holden, from Epsom in Surrey, joked: “I've been very careful about what I've been doing in recent months. If I saw any hooded groups from William Hill standing in the street, I avoided them.”
“Forty birthday cards came for me this morning, including one from the Queen - in fact, I think I saw her delivering it on her bicycle this morning.”
The bet was placed on December 10 in 1997 when Mr Holden was 90.
Mr Holden, who has two sons aged 70 and 60, puts his longevity down to porridge for breakfast and “remembering to keep breathing”. He also plays chess every day..

An influential author

Apparently there's an 'influential author' who is no longer required to be studied for English degrees at most US colleges. Of the influential Ivy League colleges only Harvard considers this influential dead white male compulsory reading for a foundation in English. Well, it would be perfectly apt for this influential dead parrot. this passe' penman to be dropped from English courses altogether. He wrote about honour,duty,kingship,good,evil,the sense of tears in things and the sense of mirth in things; stuff which critical advances have revealed as mere semiotics. Brave new world.

Altogether elsewhere..

Campus shooting, Obama's ears, nappy-headed ho's, Reid's surrender, the Royal Navy playing ping-pong in Tehran; these are the foreground phantasmagoria. The plates are shifting for better or worse. Auden's The Fall Of Rome has a sense of these times:

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves...
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend...
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

"It's over. America lost"

Harry Reid : "What is our aim? Defeat at all costs and in spite of all terrors; defeat, however long and hard the road may be, for without defeat there is no victory for the Democrats. Saddam's dead, we lost. Saddam's not around to buy nukes to deter Iranian nukes; we lost. His sons are dead, we lost. There's an elected government in Iraq; we lost. US casualties are tiny in relation to past wars and present stakes; we lost. Terrorism is being fought oceans away from America; we lost. Or rather you lost, he lost, they lost, America lost, we won. Oh and we support the troops. Bring those children home; they lost. Don't take this as a come-on to terrorists and Iran; we lost anyway. Well, America lost, the Democrats won. How dare you question my patriotism."

The Constitution of the United States, Art. III, defines treason against the United States to consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort. This offence is punished with death.

Aborting Roe v Wade

Outside the Supreme Court nobody in America sincerely argues that Roe v Wade is good law as opposed to a desired outcome. Not liberal lawyers, not Justice Blackmun's doting clerk, not Jane Roe, nobody. Shouldn't that lead to something apart from killing 4,000 foetuses each day ?

Blogging for history

The Swift Boat Veterans ads against John Kerry were devastating - short,sweet,direct,irrefutable. Liberal iconography represents the SBV's as discredited. It's a big lie, but liberals are effective as a swarm. One of them states the lie, another takes it as a given and you need a disciplined effort to assemble the refutation, which you doubt will be accepted since liberals do not argue in good faith to establish how things are. They argue in bad faith to establish that things are as they want them to seem to be. (We need new words for Conservative and Liberal..Realist and Fabulist? Neocon and Neoconman? Babyhugger and Babycrusher?)

John Hinderaker of Powerline has assembled an efficient refutation in a single post. It's short enough and long enough and relevant enough to show in one place the truth of the SBV campaign and to discredit the meme that it's been discredited. The LSM is a numerous, agile, motivated swarm. If they say black is white and swarm over the shades of gray for imputed inconsistencies in the idea that black is black, then it takes an accurate, elegant mind to shove the big lie back down their throats.

Aborting abortion

Far more important than gun control is abortion control. Today the Supreme Court issued its first ruling against abortion in 35 years by holding that a law banning partial birth abortion is constitutional. Or, to speak plainly, it's now ok to prohibit inducing a baby to be partially born then crushing its skull to kill it. That's pretty controversial. Clinton, Barack and Edwards are vehemently opposed to the ruling. The Republicans are pro, even Giuliani who said in 2000 that he would not vote to oppose a woman's right to undergo the procedure (as tho the mother's head gets crushed and her brains sucked out). Of course the Democrats could try Democracy to overturn the ban, but how preferable it is that society should be dismembered by tenured judges.

To paraphrase Lincoln "If partial birth abortion is not wrong, nothing is wrong."

In praise of older men

I lean to Romney, but I could warm to a conservative who smokes Cuban cigars and when asked about being attacked if he declares as a candidate for President says:

That's the least of it anymore. It's not pleasant, but it's not that important anymore because you're straight with your family, you have a level of understanding and knowledge about your family, and they with you, and with the man upstairs, and that's that. You know, ain't really much past that. And it kind of frees you up in a way.

Pour encourager les autres

In this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others - Voltaire, Candide.

Voltaire refers to the execution of John Byng, Admiral of the Royal Navy, in 1757 for "failing to do his utmost" to engage the enemy, the French. 1 month ago on the 250th anniversary of Byng's death the Ministry of Defence refused a posthumous pardon petition from Byng's descendants. There is a view that Byng's death was unjust, but...

there was more truth in [Voltaire's] epigram than perhaps he knew, for the execution of Byng had a profound effect on the moral climate of the navy … the fate of Byng taught [officers] that even the most powerful political friends might not save an officer who failed to fight. Many things might go wrong with an attack on the enemy, but the only fatal error was not to risk it. Byng's death revived and reinforced a culture of aggressive determination which set British officers apart from their foreign contemporaries, and which in time gave them a steadily mounting psychological ascendancy. More and more in the course of the century, and for long afterwards, British officers encountered opponents who expected to be attacked, and more than half expected to be beaten - NAM Rodger, A Naval History of Britain.

I sentence the Minister of Defence, the First Sea Lord and the commander of HMS Cornwall, to be besuited by an Iranian tailor and be taken from this place to the quarterdeck of HMS Cornwall, which shall be berthed by Tower Bridge to permit spectators to pelt them with rotten vegetables, and then be executed by a firing squad of Royal Marines. The bodies shall be gibbeted from a gallows at Wapping to be washed over by 3 tides pour encourager les autres.

Piers Morgan makes a Boy Cry

This should be in the comments to Mick's post but I wanted to embed this clip:

In another post I wrote of Piers Morgan (the cad in the clip):

For an excruciatingly funny first-hand account of Grub Street in recent times, I recommend The Insider by Piers Morgan, editor of the Mirror, fired for publishing faked photos of British soldiers torturing Iraqis. His caddish, intimate witness to Murdoch, Diana and the Blairs will define them down the ages.

Green is the new black - hollow marketing

I have to link to this. As Apple is the least green (most black?) company in the demonology of the Church of Climate Change, Steve Jobs has been hanging upside down in his gravity boots to dream up some answers, such as:

Well, we can use more low-power-consumption chips from Intel. That's not exactly a big breakthrough. We can put a hand-crank on our MacBooks like the One Laptop Per Child machine.

Dung-powered laptops was another suggestion. Or how about a Difference Engine built from green Meccano?
Baby seal silhouettes dancing with iPod cords on their heads ?

Reality check

Military expert Col. Ralph Peters (rtd):

The once-proud Brit military has collapsed to a sorry state when its Royal Marines surrender without a fight, then apologize to their captors (praising their gentle natures!) while criticizing their own country. Pretty sad to think that the last real warriors fighting under the Union Jack are soccer hooligans.

A few miles away from from where the British sailors (rightly) surrendered, Michael Yon is embedded in the British Army:

..the Brits were going into extremely hostile terrain, outnumbered, without helicopter support, relying instead upon timing, terrain, maneuverability, firepower, and sheer audacity.

Thanks, Dean Barnett:

The British soldiers he’s embedded with notched 26-27 kills and suffered no casualties of their own while engaging the enemy in a major gun battle. Michael said to me in an email about the Brits he’s riding with, “These guys fight like animals!”

Carry On Up The Gates Of Fire

Just saw '300'. What a stinker! Cringemaking dialogue, mostly ordinary visuals disguised by colour-masking, laughable 6-packs up the wazoo, Celtic aery-fairie music and bombast served up as courage. I thought the Special Relationship meant that British accents in movies are reserved to badguys and psychopaths not bombastic tossers in sandals.

Maybe this clip isn't quite as funny as '300', but it does show how sex, sandals and sixpack movies should be done:

Carry On Up The Shatt al-Arab

Another caustically definitive post by the Telegraph's US editor on the Royal Navy's humiliation in Iran. Sample:

Our two interviewees should take the money and go off and do something else. They clearly aren't cut out for the armed services.
LS Turney? You tell it how it effing is. How about manning the checkout at Tesco .. or mucking out stables?
OM Batchelor? You're a chirpy, sensitive chap. Maybe you could work in a pet grooming salon or start a window-cleaning service - if you're not afraid of heights.
And the Navy? Back to the drawing board, I'm afraid. As a former naval officer and lieutenant on board HMS Cornwall, it gives me no pleasure to say that it will take a decade or two for the Senior Service to live this one down.

The British Army has had its own setbacks in Afghanistan as this clip from Carry On Up The Khyber illustrates:

"I felt like a traitor to my own country"

Faye Turney is not a traitor. She is a decent young mother put in a tough spot by blackguards, incompetents and PC commissars. Her first duty was to get home safely to her 3yo daughter and a woman should not have been in the front-line compromising the morale of the male captives, tho God knows quite a few of them compromised themselves.




3rd in line for Commander-in-Chief.
What's her excuse?

The Gospel According To Matthew

I prize this poster and propose this profound film for Easter. It is a life of Christ shot in 1964 by an atheist communist homosexual using amateur actors. Roger Ebert writes that the film

..tells the life of Christ as if a documentarian on a low budget had been following him from birth. The movie was made in the spirit of Italian neo-realism, which believed that ordinary people, not actors, could best embody characters -- not every character, but the one they were born to play.

Back in the UN/UK

Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail takes no prisoners:

... I don't hold the hostages responsible for what happened to them, or how they responded while in captivity. They and thousands more like them do a brave, thankless job on our behalf.

But I despair at what their ordeal and the response to it tells us about the kind of country we have become.

After ten years of Tony Blair, Britain is now a neutered, international laughing stock. The United Nations and our EU 'partners' hold us in contempt.

The feminisation of our entire society has utterly destroyed whatever credibility and moral fibre we ever had. The emotional incontinence which flooded the country at the time Lady Di popped her Jimmy Choos is now our stock in trade.

I wanted to retch when I saw the father of one of the captured marines cuddling his wife and sobbing on live television in front of a tree festooned with yellow ribbons.

Of course he's got every right to be upset, but he shouldn't be sharing it with Sky News. His other son looked deeply embarrassed, as if a dog had just peed up against his leg. It was the most skin-crawling moment I have seen since The Mellorphant Man paraded his family in front of a five-bar gate.

And What about the outside broadcasts from assorted pubs around the country, as various friends and relatives showed their solidarity by drinking themselves senseless?

...

The broadcast media covered the whole affair as if it were an episode of Big Brother. Gormless women cackled away about the hostages in the same silly psychobabble as they discuss 'relationship ishoos'.

I'd add that the British were right to surrender to overwhelming and unstable forces. The mock execution by the Iranians was a nice touch. Thanks. We'll remember.

And this in case you think Littlejohn's exaggerating:

As for Britain's government, perhaps the harshest comments issued during the entire fiasco came from British Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt. The object of her ire? Prisoner Turney's smoking. "It was deplorable," Hewitt tut-tutted. "This sends completely the wrong message to our young people."
..
But the fatuousness of Hewitt's comment perfectly echoed that of new U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon, who also "thanked" Ahmadinejad.

We salute you

In 1938 the English football side, including the great Stanley Matthews, gave the Nazi salute in Berlin as instructed by the Foreign Office. Now British Royal Marines apologize and smile to the Iranian hostage-taker-in-chief. In 1939 war broke out.

Update: A different angle -

The Falstaff Doctrine..

..in modern British Military training:

The one female crew member, Faye Turney, wore a blue headscarf and jacket.

An unidentified crew member said: "I'd like to say that myself and my whole team are very grateful for your forgiveness. I'd like to thank yourself and the Iranian people... Thank you very much, sir."

Falstaff:

What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air - a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it.