Posting hiatus ended

The last week has been consumed by my dissertation for my master's degree and the wind-down that follows it.  In the lead-up to hand-in I slept about 11 hours in nearly 72 hours, my brain racing with thought, swimming with ideas.  I had taken my supervisor's advice to have a break just to appraoch the review with a fresh outlook.  She recommended two weeks; I did two days but it was enough for the midn to dissipate the intellectual pandemonium.  I hadn't actually finished the dissertation when I came back to it but I had burst the 14,000 word limit and had a formidable bibliography of over 100 sources.
Thus it was about finishing it off in conjunction with my reviweing of it.  You can never review enough.  Even three hours before deadline, I was still appending material (to the introductuion no less) and hence editing other bits out.  I then submitted in online - one of the requirements - first so it wouldn't become a dangerous afterthought.  My search for a suitable folder in Medway was unncessary because the cheapest and classiest way to present the hard copies was thermal binding on campus.  And then the release of the hard-copy hand-in.
I am reasonably happy with what I presented.  There are tweaks here and there that I could have done and it certainly won't get an official publishing in an academic journal (as dissertations graded 80% and above get this kind of consideration), yet there is not too much more I could have done with the time left available to me.  Juggling looking after a baby, a full-time job and church administration business takes a real toll on the hours of the day when one isn't sleeping (or at least trying to sleep, when the mind isn't doing fireworks).  In the grading system used, with a bracket of 10%, the grade alights on either 2, 5 or 8.  If I get a 72%, distinction is mine, if I end up on 68%, while creditable, willl mean my overall course will be rated 69.4% and the university only rounds it up to a distinction is it is 69.5%.
That was Friday, 2pm, with 90 minutes to spare.  Thereafter, I felt the tiredness that had been postponed, as had happened with other essays that had cut it fine.  Wired for so long, the immediate finishing of such a long task brings with it a surge of sleepiness.  I kept going relatively well but had afternoon siestas on Saturday and Sunday., as I took advantage of having to do exactly nothing.

No tax without representation

King Edward I was known as the 'Hammer of the Scots'.  David Cameron and George Osborne should be known as the Hammers of the Railway Passengers.  A 4% hike in prices comes in next January as we are promised always jam tomorrow (increased capacity, better trains), never jam today.  Once again, the insidious distinction rears if head (begun under Gordon Brown) about how passengers must bear more of the cost and taxpayers less, as if rail passengers aren't taxpayers themselves.  I'm sure if rail passengers were to find a way to withhold their tax, a clever lawyer could put up a strong case of acquittal.  I'd like to see the Sir Humphreys at the Treasury suck on that!
The tragicomic thing is that rail fares are calculated at the rate of inflation (real prices index - RPI) plus one per cent (a reversal by Labour of the Major's government's legislation of RPI minus one per cent) and the previous Governor of the Bank of England said that the rise in rail fares is a major cause of inflation.  So it is a never-ending upward spiral - a Catch-22.  Inflation pushes up rail fares which push up inflation and so on.  Labour talk about renationalisation of the railways but commuters just want a rail service where they don't have to pay the Earth (again) - it is an open political goal if Labour were to pledge to limit rail prices to below inflation increases.  The trouble is that whoever is in power has chauffeur-driven cars (like the train company executives) and forgets the needs of the rail passengers.

Round object kicked by non-rounded individuals

Passions can leave us blind to the most obvious of injustices.  Spain kicks up a stink while tacitly ignoring their equivalent outposts of Ceuta and Melilla that gets up Morocco’s nose.  The USA criticises Russia and China for their intrusive security surveillance but itself runs the biggest one in the world, with security completely prioritised over liberty – when Edward Snowden reveals this, it brands him a traitor and goes to extraordinary lengths to apprehend him.

Jamie Carragher’s continued defence of Luis Suarez is despicable.  Of course, Carragher is Liverpool through and through and, in terms of ability with his feet, Suarez is The Reds’ best player.  Yet he is absolutely toxic.  He makes racial slurs, he refuses to shake hands with his victim, he admits to diving, he bites opponents (on more than one occasion), he refuses loyalty to a club that has backed him at such reputational cost.  When he bit Branislav Ivanovic, the match was preceded by a memorial to Hillsborough campaigner Anne Williams who died that week.  When Carragher said, in the wake of the match, that he had rather be bitten than have a broken leg.  This is the kind of warped logic that pervades Liverpool and was the moment I lost all respect for Carragher, given that defending Suarez was more important than the disrespect he had done on such a day.  In fact, Anne Williams seems to have completely slipped his mind, proving that Justice for the 96 is on a lower par than Suarez, irrespective of the bad example it sets (the very next day a schoolkid bit his friend in a game of football as he did ‘a Suarez).  For me, Carragher is just as much scum as Suarez.

Adopting a Millwall posture of ‘no-one likes us, we don’t care’, may build a siege mentality but is incredibly ugly and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Really, the defence of Suarez is incredible.  When Emre was accused of making racial slurs, whilst playing for Newcastle United, I hoped he would be cleared but would have accepted a ban.  If Loic Remy, a recent loan signing, is found guilty of the rape with which he has been charged, he should do the time, even if it hurts the Magpies in terms of league performance.  One gets the feeling that if Suarez committed a rape, Carragher would find a way of blaming the victim (as Liverpool, did with Patrice Evra).  No doubt, if Bashar al-Assad rolled back the years, displayed scintillating skills and signed for Liverpool, you would find Carragher talking about what a glorious Syrian leader he was.

I remember a report by The Independent in late December 2001, which hailed the ‘good guys’ of Newcastle Utd beating the ‘bad guys’ of Leeds Utd.  Then as Leeds declined, first Jonathan Woodgate was signed (who had been convicted of affray outside a nightclub against a person of an ethnic minority).  There was mutterings but it was reasoned that he was a young lad who had been led astray by bad apples and, to be fair, he was a model professional thereafter, despite his injuries.  Then Lee Bowyer was also signed from Leeds, which was even more contentious as he had been accused by a judge at the same trial of telling a series of lies, though he was acquitted.  He was regarded as a far nastier piece of work (he was banned in Europe for many matches for stamping on an opponent’s head) and it was a matter of some disappointment that he was signed for the black-and-whites (talk about Sir Bobby placing a grandfatherly arm round him was a half-hearted attempt at rehabilitation).  Under the combustible regime of Graeme Souness, he ruined Alan Shearer’s big reveal of signing a one-year extension to his contract to take him to a round 10 years at the club and brought huge shame to all at St. James Park by attacking his own teammate, Kieron Dyer, getting them both sent off.  It would be the same effect if Arsenal signed Suarez.  Brendan Rogers may want to give Suarez another chance if he apologises for publicly criticising the club for not letting him leave, but it seems anger was only forthcoming about his behaviour when he signalled his desire to no longer be at Liverpool.  Sometimes a break clause is inserted about a player’s moral turpitude, but it must be a first for a player to pursue that case (Liverpool would never agree to such a clause because they no longer have morals).  Let him rot at Liverpool and the Reds rot with him.

On another note, the traditional curtain-raiser to the season, the Community Shield, wasn’t a curtain-raiser for one side at all as Wigan Athletic had already played the previous weekend.  Manchester United polished them off with minimum fuss but the lack of tension in the game was palpable.  I saw a family with their two daughters wearing Man Utd shirts) as I made my way to Church, as it was scheduled on a Sunday purely for television commercial deals, especially in the Far East with Man Utd’s immense following there.  There was no other reason it couldn’t be on a traditional Saturday.  It adds to the drip-drip of disillusionment that is feeding into me.  Tribal loyalty among fans still matters (this should not extend to mercenary players) but with all the negative coverage of so many things football, the actual substance under scrutiny – 22 men kicking a ball around - seems increasingly pointless.  I doubt that this malaise will be reversed anytime soon.

With no LGBT love from Russia

While persecution of gay people is unacceptable, it can be a bit overblown in demanding every country in the world conforms to the norms of much of the Western hemisphere immediately.  Stephen Fry has been banging the drum about abuses in other countries for so long (and changing nothing) he has got a tinnitus ear.  His demands for a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi has led to intemperate language.  Russia is not Nazi Germany and the 2014 Games are in no way like Berlin in 1936.  His claim that homosexuals are being treated as scapegoats in Russia, proves a) that he doesn't understand the meaning of the word (because Russians don't blame this minority at being at the root of all their problems) and b) he is tying it to what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany, who were scapegoated (homosexuals were persecuted but not held up per se by the Nazis as being behind every bad thing).  Yet for Fry to use such exaggerated phrases just makes people tune out because it is patently not true, especially as the situation of Jews (or for that matter gay people) in the 1930s Germany is in no way comparable to that of homosexuals in Russia today.
But then we've here before.  When David Cameron re-aligned the Conservative Party in the European Parliament with some unsavoury Eastern European parties known for gay-bashing, of whom the largest was Polish, Fry popped up and said, "We know which side of the borders the ovens were on."  Any goodwill he had in Poland, Fry squandered instantly.  The death camps were conceived in Germany and managed by Germans but some just so happened to be built on Polish soil or soil that subsequently became Polish with the border changes in 1945.  Indeed, at the time Poland had been wiped from the map and replaced by the Nazi colony of 'General Government'.  It is illegal in Poland to state that places like Auschwitz-Birkenau were Polish.  And to use the Holocaust to protest the treatment of gays (who are not being exterminated wholesale, on an industrial scale or otherwise) is very, very low (note, again, the trading on association with what happened to Jewish people).  Fry's attempt to dissuade Cameron from his course of action was not just a failure but involved Fry being taken apart as well.
For his latest outburst, one of the places he suggest as an alternative venue for the 2014 Games is Utah - that bastion of LGBT tolerance!  This is despite the fact that at the time of the 2002 Salt Lake City Games (which was awarded after massive bribery), same-sex activity was criminalised under Utah's sodomy laws.  These laws were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003, but I didn't hear Fry piping up at the time about the USA being like Nazi Germany.
Boycotts of sporting events have a mixed history of success.  When the USA and many of its allies boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (something which the USA had covertly encouraged by funding Islamic guerillas in the country, the USSR did not pack its bags from Kabul and head home.  Indeed, British participation led by Sebastian Coe (against Margaret Thatcher's wishes) won the enduring gratitude of Juan Antonio Samaranch and after Madrid was knocked out, Samaranch swung his entire backing behind London's bid for the 2012 Olympics - where Britain could show off the benefits of diversity and tolerance to the whole world.  There were calls for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics over a myriad of causes (though not from Fry who seems to believe gay rights is the only cause worth pursuing).  Beijing's protest parks where no-one was allowed to protest were a Kafkaesque joke inside an Orwellian riddle, wrapped in a Bradburyan enigma, but would a boycott have made a difference?
Maybe Fry should stick to his love of technology because when he makes comments about geopolitics and history, he comes across as a more urbane version of George W. Bush and that we can all do without.

Excuse me for a moment of the day

Thought For Today is regularly lashed as bland, anaemic fare that should be scrapped at trying to be all things to all men and thus being nothing to no-one.  Occasionally, it surpasses itself through the shock of saying something that is actually important.  This happened several months ago when the Chief Rabbi ws asked (in an innocuous way, with its incendiary subtext disguised) his opinion on how to achieve peace in the Middle East and he offered some acute criticism of Israel.  There a big hoo-haa and the BBC apologised that it should have clarified to Jonathan Sacks that he was still on-air, though why it should apologise for uncovering the Chief Rabbi's true feelings towards the divisions in Israel/Palestine is a mystery.
Today, another lovely moment, if only because it is unexpected, occurred as the mobile phone of the guest went off as he concluded his homily.  There was a little dissonance as it was so bizarre that a ringtone would be broadcast, but it swiftly dawned that it was indeed from the studio itself.  Evan Davis, after apologising for the guest's insistent call (indicating that the latter was in a different studio - I only caught the end of the broadcast - and that it was none of the Today staff making such a lapse), nicely parlayed it, as if pre-planned, into the next news item which was about mobile phone theft.  The phone's jingle was not a crime however but one of those faux pas to be celebrated when serendipity strikes.  The guest may be humiliated and take a day or so to live it down but he'll make sure his phone is on silent if ever invited back again.

Exchange rate of the century

The kopeck is the denomination of the Russian ruble and other former Soviet countries - the equivalent to the British penny in name, if not in substance - being virtually worthless (given the ruble itself is equivalent to tuppence).  The Russians have a saying when times are tough that life is not worth a kopeck.  Well, yesterday on Pointless it was worth £11,750.  Asked for a word that began and ended with 'k' in the final round, the couple had two closecalls with kickback and kayak, before kopeck was in Alexander Armstrong's phreaseology "that all importnat pointless answer" that none of their 100 people in 100 seconds had selected.  The kopeck has never been valued at so much!

Learning one's lesson

In 2009, both the Iranians an the Zimbabwean administrations proved not only incapable of running thier countries in a moderate and tolerant fashion, but failed to even rig their elections adequately.  They were slightly cuaght off by the determination of millions against them and responded with state violence, leading to deeply illegitimate governments continuing in power.
Today, a 'moderate-among-hardliners', Hassah Rouhani, takes presidential office today in Iran.  He is not a moderate by Western standards and is a firm believer in his country's nuclear programme, but is more flexible and more likely to conciliate than Mahmoud Ahmahdinejad.  Of course, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wields aboslute power but he did not block Rouhani's victory as he did against the Green Movement's Mir-Hossein Mousavi.  Hence, a new president with a big mandate, instead of one governing repressively over a discontented and restive population.
There is more to play for in Zimbabwe as the office of president has very real power.  Morgan Tsvangirai had to call off his unexpected second-round campaign after finishing ahead in the popular vote over Robert Mugabe, following prolonged polictically motivated violence against his supporters and rallies.  At least 200 people died as the ruling party panicked.  While loathe to criticise a 'liberation hero' (and promptly shot down Botswana after it openly expressed disgust), the other leaders of southern Africa expressed disapproval of these tactics by Mugabe.  This year, Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party have taken no chances of failing to win, registering millions more non-existent people, including more than 100,000 people older than a hundred in a country with an average life expectancy in the mid-thirties.  But there is also comparatively little violence.  Thabo Mbeki (who was in awe of Mugabe after only being an exile rather than a fighter himself) is no longer South African president, but it would be impolitic for Zimbabwe's neighbours not to recognise Mugabe's victory in such relatively calm conditiions.  That recognition seems precisely what they are prepared to give.  Form is more important than substance in this instance and Mugabe has learned.

End of the alpha papa

Not Alan Partridge's big-screen moment but someone far more sinister who was more mafioso than prime minister - it's bye-bye Berlusconi.  Italy's highest court has upheld the verdict on tax evasion - appropriately what brought down Al Capone.  Ol' Silvio inflated acquisition costs for broadcast rights at his television company in 2002 and 2003 as part of a complicated tax scam and now, after 17 major trials in the last 20 years, justice has finally caught up with him and this will hurt more than the replica of Milan Cathedral that was thrown at his face a few years ago.
As he finds the prospect of community service - or 're-education' as he puts it - repugnant, he'll probably opt for house arrest.  Unlike Jeffrey Archer, who for a while was housed in one of Britain's harshest prisons, Berlusconi won't see the inside of a cell due to his advanced years (yet still capable of running a major political party, hmm).  But like General Augusto Pinochet, who also suffered the indignity of house arrest (albeit in England), this is a judgement from which he cannot come back.  Just before Pinochet died, he was convicted of massive corruption during his tenure as dictator, destroying his reputation for probity and wiping out his last bastion of middle-class support.  The Chilean did not go to prison but he died in disgrace.
Berlusconi surely has to bow out of politics now to avoid tarnishing his party (though he created it as his personal vehicle to power) and when that happens, hopefully Italian politicians can unpick the damage wrought to the justice system by this modern-day Machiavelli.  Even his prison sentence here has been reduced from four years to one because of a law he introduced in 2006, cutting three years off any conviction for a crime committed before that date.  There was also the changing of laws on fraudulent accounting to escape prosecution and the introduction of a statute of limitations where if a trial dragged on for too long (for the wheels of Italian justice grind slowly) it was thrown out once it reached its time limit, something endless appeals could achieve (in contrast to the Russia of his friend Vladimir Putin, where a dead man, Sergei Magnitsky, has been convicted).  The only reason this trial succeeded was because his customary appeal was placed at the head of the queue for appeals to ensure he got his just desserts.
It has been mentioned that his daughter Marina will take over his political mantle.  Do the similarities with Marine La Pen taking over from her far-right father in France extend beyond the similarity of the name?  Meanwhile, Berlusconi, who rose from a cruise ship singer to Italy's richest man through more than shady dealings, can focus on his appeals against abuse of office and paying an underage prostitute (carrying a seven-year jail sentence and a lifetime ban from politics) and obtaining and publishing a police wiretap that damaged the reputation of a political opponent (a one-year sentence).  He is also under suspicion for bribing a former senator to switch sides and join his political party.  He will not die in office like Robert Mugabe and must look enviously at the reigns of his chums Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan stretching off into the distance.  Even a commiserating telephone call from Tony Blair will not salve Berlusconi's woes.