Pacifist Rim

I feel very concerned that Japanese PM Shinzo Abe is determined to reinterpret his country's pacifist constitution.  This liminal moment could have very serious consequences as, unlike Germany, Japan has never really had to come to terms with its actions in World War Two.  There are many top politicians who regard it as a war of self-defence.  Japanese school textbooks skirt around all the war crimes committed by their forces, if they mention them at all and this is mandated by law.  Propaganda aimed at young minds.
The USA and the Philippines (the latter the recipient of much Japanese donor aid) may want the Empire of Nippon to become more assertive in 'containing' China, but that may go too far in relation to the disputed Senkaku islands (I'm using the internationally accepted name).  Like Britain, as an archipelago Japan can be quite insular, but its elite have little conception how much they are hated by their near neighbours.  China and Korea (both of them) loathe Japan for its war crimes and its unwillingness to show remorse for them (Germans would never go to a war memorial site that included Nazi war criminals, if one existed), while Russia is irritated by Japanese provocation over the South Kurils.
There are many Japanese people of conscience who understand this and are opposed to Abe's aggressive move (bullying his Buddhist coalition partners by threatening to break up the coalition).  One man set himself on fire after denouncing the government.  Abe wants Japan to become a 'normal' country but first it must accept the enormity of what it did in the 1930s and 1940s.

The infection of the feet of clay

A commemoration in Sarajevo on the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the spark that set the fuse to the European tinderbox that would blow up as World War One, was attended by Austrians, Bosniaks and Croats.  But the Serbs and Bosnian Serbs stayed away.  For them, the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, a pawn of Serbian secret services, is a hero.  Killing the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, who was proposing greater autonomy and rights for the Empire's Slavic southern flank - a direct threat to Serbia posing as the champion of these peoples - was a victory for nihilism and power politics but at what cost - the deaths of millions and then tens of millions more in the Second World War whose genesis was closely linked with the events at the end of World War One.  The Serbs also have a morbid obsession with the scene of their greatest defeat (Kosovo) rather than focusing on their greatest ruler Stefan (IV) Dušan - choosing victimhood and martyrdom as some small nations in assuming a put-upon national identity.  Had Ferdinand survived, there would have been another clash further down the line that produced the Great War but this murder made it certain.  Princip was not a hero but a villain, a villain not just of the twentieth century but of all history.
Luis Suárez is not in the same solar system as Princip, let alone league in terms of his crimes and misdemeanours yet the antithesis of Roy of the Rovers has turned his country into a nation of rogues and his national team, the villains of the World Cup, exactly as he did four years ago when his handball prevented Ghana from becoming the first African representatives (at the 'African World Cup' in South Africa) to reach the semi-finals of the football World Cup.  Ghana failed to take advantage of the resulting penalty (which they missed) and man advantage and so it was Suárez's crime that allowed Uruguay to progress to the semi-finals.  No neutral wanted them to go any further though.  Far from being a pariah in his home country, he was fêted.
Now that he was captured on live television biting an Italian opponent (with the Italian revealing the bite marks on his shoulder), the third such time in his career, Uruguay went into meltdown, ranging from slating the victim as a tell-tale to blaming a FIFA and/or British media conspiracy.  Next to no-one in Uruguay thought Suárez had done wrong, even if they accepted that there were bite marks (an important exception was the final surviving member of Uruguay's last World Cup winning squad).  The president, a former urban guerilla, said footballers weren't role models and brandished Suárez on his balcony upon the latter's return.
Except footballers are role models.  At the England-Uruguay game, one English fan bit off the lower part of the ear of another English fan.  Would the assailant even thought of such an attack had Suárez not inspired him?  This is just one reported incident but how many kids in playgrounds will be tempted to 'do a Suárez'?  The Uruguayan president has made himself an ass and the bulk of the Uruguayan people have shamed themselves through abandoning concepts of rationality, decency and fair play, becoming a parody of a nation rather than a serious one.
I would have preferred Suárez kept his teeth to himself and lit up the World Cup with his skills, just as he did in the last Premier League season.  Liverpool almost won it but fell at the final hurdle.  We should not forget though that Suárez was banned for five games at the start of the season - a holdover he got from the ten game ban he received the season prior for biting a Chelsea opposing defender.  Those games he missed might have been the difference between Liverpool being crowned league champions and finishing 'second last'.  Liverpool fans (claimed under the name of Boris Johnson to be susceptible to a victim culture) were similarly ridiculous in defending the indefensible.  Feeling persecuted by outside forces, they closed ranks around Suárez, just as they did when Suárez was banned for racially abusing another player.  Liverpool's reputation has been dragged through the mud so often by their best player that they have forfeited the tag of the 'neutrals favourite', at the very point at the end of last season when they had reclaimed it once more.  Adopting an aggressive attitude not dissimilar to that of Millwall ('no-one likes us, we don't care') does them no favours.
The worst aspect of this whole farrago is that Suárez is unrepentant.  He is psychologically challenged but his biting actions are deliberate and there is no remorse afterwards.  Partially this is because when growing up, there were no consequences for his violence.  When an investigative reporter published accounts of Suárez's behaviour in the Uruguayan national youth squad, the president of the youth squad hired a hitman to bump of the journalist.  The gunman, however, took pity on his intended target and shot the reporter 'only' in the leg.  The would-be assassin wound up behind bars for grievous bodily harm and the president of the national youth set-up went to prison for attempted murder.  As Uruguay indulges in idol worship of Suárez, again the pressure if off him.  If Wayne Rooney had committed a third biting offence, there would be a national campaign for him never to represent England again.  Suárez's apologists are actually his worst allies - why should he modify his behaviour when there are so many telling him that he is not in the wrong.  Comically, Diego Maradonna and Joey Barton are the most prominent ones outside of Uruguay supporting Suárez - the former an exposed junkie who got away with his handball cheating against England in 1986, the latter one who has served time in jail for assault (in his free time) and later was banned for twelve matches following three violent actions in the space of 100 seconds.  Yes, a broken leg is worse than many a bite (unless flesh is actually ripped off) but you don't go on the football pitch expecting it to happen and person who will inflict the leg-break didn't intend to do it when they woke up that morning, will most likely never do it again and probably be sorry about it.  Yet now anyone entering the same pitch as Suárez will feel apprehensive about going near him - Suárez has gained an advantage when he returns to playing after his four month ban.  Suárez's latest excuse for what he did in the Uruguay-Italy match was that he had his mouth open and his teeth accidentally touched his victim (omitting the unnatural jerk of his head towards his meal) - sounding suspiciously like the sarcastic cuckold rationalising 'oh, you just happened to slip and fall on his dick, then?'  As silky as his footballing skills are, Suárez is probably not fit to be a footballer.

The heirs of Genghis Khan – Mongolia on the international stage

In 1962, one-time US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, said that “Great Britain had lost an empire and has not yet found a role.” Since 1990, it could be said that Mongolia has lost an ideology and is still seeking a path that is true to itself.

For much of the twentieth century, after re-establishing its independence from China in 1921 (the Mongolian elite’s loyalty was to the Manchu Emperor, not the succeeding Republic of China), Mongolia was under the tutelage of the USSR – treated more like a colony than the constituent parts of the Soviet Union ever were. Under Stalin, the Mongolian alphabet was changed to Cyrillic and a tremendous purge was launched against the ‘feudal’ Buddhist establishment (Karl Marx held that polytheistic religion was more backward than monotheism) – the population of Mongolia dropped by 7%. Nationalism and the history of the Great Mongol Empire were expressly forbidden.

Despite experiencing thorough ‘Sovietification’, Mongolia emerged from communism as a coherent sovereign entity with internationally recognised borders, unlike the identity crises suffered by all ex-Soviet republics (with the exception of the Baltic states). As with many post-communist countries, after being so long suppressed, nationalism has made a resurgence in Mongolia, particularly pride in the empire built by Genghis Khan (in Mongolian, Chinggis Khaan) and expanded upon by his descendants. With a population smaller than that of Wales, but with a land mass six and a half times the size of the UK, there is a certain fear of her two giant neighbours, Russia and China – especially the latter with its vast population – and this has produced prejudice to all foreigners from a particular section of society.

Mongolia’s position situated between two great powers is not unlike the mandala circle concept of first millennium India, where the ring of neighbours around it are natural enemies and the circle beyond contain potential allies. Though the democratically elected national politicians do not engage in overt xenophobia, they are mindful to develop links with other countries and blocs – the ‘Third Neighbour Policy’. In this regard, Mongolia has cultivated links with the USA, the EU, South Korea, Canada and Japan. Mongolia has implemented this ‘multi-pillared’ foreign policy using its rich mineral deposits to attract ‘third neighbour’ investment and adopting a free-market economy.

There have been cultural as well as economic exchanges, e.g. through its aid programme, the USA refurbished a communist-era monolith to serve as an American cultural centre with a fully stocked library of English-language volumes, serving as a nexus between ex-pats and Mongolians. In 2005, George W. Bush became the first serving American president to visit Mongolia.

There have also been some harder aspects to such relationships as well. After the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Mongolia subsequently sent ‘peacekeepers’ to assist the coalition effort, 750 years after their country’s soldiers had first entered that region (sacking Baghdad and killing the caliph along the way). Although the American defence attaché to Mongolia denies it, there is talk among the ex-pats that the USA has built a secret military airbase not far from Ulaanbaatar, the capital city. That Dutch soldiers have trained in the Altai Mountains in the west (in preparation for Afghanistan) and British soldiers have conducted exercises in the wilderness of the Gobi (ahead of visiting Iraq), to name but two such missions, makes the existence of such a facility plausible.

China has not given up on absorbing Mongolia into its polity, shown in a low-key way by the visa-free access for all Mongolians crossing its borders and the government in Taiwan refuses to recognise Mongolian independence. It was confirmed to me, by a Russian, that Moscow would never tolerate Chinese annexation of Mongolia because it would set a precedent for Beijing to occupy swathes of Siberia where there is already a significant Chinese immigrant influx. While not eschewing cooperation with China (on whom Mongolia’s economy is heavily dependent) and Russia (where a resolution of Mongolia’s Soviet-era debt was achieved on terms favourable to Ulaanbaatar), Mongolia has made a decisive turn to the West. Mongolia acceded to the World Trade Organisation and became a Partner in the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Still, there is an unachievable hankering for the glories of the distant past, evident in the replacement of the mausoleum of (socialist) national hero Damdin Sükhbaatar in front of the national parliament with three statues of the mightiest Mongol Khans, Chinggis Khaan, Ogedei Khaan and Kubilai Khaan, in seated repose. More expressive in display than the three Emperors of Germany inscribed on the Reichstag, a rosy view of the activities of these Mongol champions has taken hold – benevolent to Mongolian kin, their more ruthless, destructive aspects to other nations are downplayed, if not ignored altogether.

This is the challenge for Mongolian policy-makers in the years to come – to reconcile pride in the past with a pragmatic approach to its future dealings with important partners. There is this uncertain dichotomy but with the strong democratic institutions that Mongolia has built, with continued outside commitment, it is one, I am confident, can be overcome in time.

Lying as second nature

In 2004, Porter Goss was interviewed unknowingly by a team co-ordinated by Michael Moore. While some snippets made the film Fahrenheit 9/11, a section ended up on the cutting room floor where he said knowledge of the Romance languages was redundant, fluency in Arabic and Chinese essential and this was why he was completely unsuited to working at the CIA. This snippet emerged after George W Bush installed Goss as CIA Director. Goss was unrepentant about taking over the role and Bush the Younger administration pushed forward in the ruthless manner for which they were renowned. Criticism was worthless to them. One of Barack Obama’s first tasks was removing Goss from heading the CIA.
With the acquittal of Rebekah Brooks, her husband Charlie, her personal assistant and a security guard of all charges, the conviction of Andy Coulson on a conspiracy to hack phones has been minimised by the right-wing in the media. Mrs Brooks will almost certainly be fast-tracked back into a prominent position in Rupert Murdoch's sprawling realm, no matter all the bad publicity and her seeming incompetence at not knowing what was happening under her nose, if what she says at the trial is true. Coulson is facing a separate charge of perjury in Scotland after he said at a trial that he had no knowledge of phone hacking and that separate conviction now looks a fait accompli. But I think Brooks and her fellow defendants have also perjured themselves and I’m not the only one. A regular reader of the (now defunct) News of the Screws is one of those that shares that opinion.
The critical threshold in a CPS prosecution is that an allegation must be proved ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Brooks was cleverer than her ex-fellow adulterer Coulson in not leaving such an overt paper trail. When Coulson told a journalist ‘do his phone’ in an email exchange, the jury could not but convict David Cameron’s former press secretary. But the jury bought the story that even though Brooks and Coulson were involved in a passionate liaison, private, unrecorded talk about phone hacking never occurred. As I said, the test of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ comes into play.
The same was true for paying a public official. When Brooks authorised a payment to a ‘military contact’, why would such a payment be approved if they were a previous rather than serving public official. The language here was ambiguous enough for the jury to let her off the hook. It seems the jury was very lenient.
The inevitable corollary of Brook’s non-culpability meant that her husband and confidantes would also be acquitted. This is despite Charlie Brooks being caught on car park camera first dumping a laptop in a bin and then texting a team at The News of the World, that ‘the eagle has landed’. Why would he dispose of a laptop which had no criminal documents on it and ask a team from a newspaper being investigated by the police to take care of it with a pre-arranged code? Yet once the jury had decided to clear Rebekah Brooks, her husband was never going to be convicted.
John Prescott has been invading the airwaves making clear his indignation. But if I had the profile and the funds, I would state without the qualification of ‘I think’ that Rebekah and Charlie Brooks lied during their trial and dare them to sue me. At the very least, another court case would delay Rebekah Brooks’ reintegration into old Rupe’s empire. Of course, they might brush it off as who cares what [x] thinks, even though it has been declared a fact by [x]. This is because in a civil case, the bar is lower at the ‘balance of probabilities’, rather than ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ and they might well come unstuck. Cowardly pragmatism would be no bar to being at Murdoch’s side again, someone who he sees clearly as a younger (female) version of himself. This was evident in the distasteful party the Brooks’ were throwing after their acquittal (I don’t know of another famous defendant in such a partying mood after being cleared) and the The Currant Bun’s celebratory front-page headline that almost certainly came under instruction from the very top (had Brooks’ been convicted, no doubt the news would have been stuck away in one column on page 10). We should not forget Sun journalists are still being investigated for phone hacking.  Another action of the Dubaya regime was to issue an immediate presidential pardon for Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff who was convicted of perjury.  The ruthless always brush off the howls of protest and plough on regardless.
A separate item is the proxy war that is being fought over press regulation that was sparked by phone hacking. Neil Wallis, a previous important member of The News of the World, was claiming it was all a waste of time because it didn’t involve murder or drugs. By that logic, 95% of crimes shouldn’t be prosecuted. He also said that this cost £100m which by implication was a waste of money (though unmentioned that more than half that total was spent on the best lawyers News International could buy). Yet if the his ex-paper had not hacked on an industrial scale, racking up 5,600 victims, the police would not have had to contact every single person (many who weren’t celebrities) who had suffered their privacy being invaded to a gross degree, but unlike Wallis, the police care about victims (Wallis’ job was to create fresh victims to sell newspapers).  Thirdly, Wallis stated that the law had worked and there was no need for a new press regulator.  Let us recall that the Press Complaints Commission was an organisation run and paid for newspapers with some of most gutter and erroneous coverage around, an organisation that rarely delivered more than a slap on the wrist for guilty offenders, an organisation that expelled Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger for refusing to retract his paper's claims about phone hacking.  Newspapers don't want an independent regulator with teeth because it would curtail their ability to spread lies and misleading half-truths and might winkle out the skeletons in their own closets.
The Telegraph is also focusing on the acquittal of Brooks rather the conviction of Coulson and is critical of the expense of the trial. It is no surprise that The Telegraph is also a fierce opponent of independent press regulation (which is not as strict as Lord Leveson instructed). Philip Johnston has written a piece that Rebekah Brooks wasn’t a ‘wicked witch’ after all. This a further example of the weasel arguments those against independent (a facet that must be constantly emphasised to these people) press oversight.  Johnston might as well say (setting the terms of his own argument) that she did not fly on a broomstick and own a black cat.  Brooks was a vicious, mean adulteress who had to spend one night in the cells for assaulting her first husband, Ross Kemp and actively exploited the death of a child (Sarah Payne) and grieving, easily swayed, parents. Her campaign against paedophiles was slammed by both the police and child protection groups for being counterproductive and driving such deviants underground. According to Gordon Brown, prime minister between 2007 and 2010, she even acquired his family’s medical records and threatened to publish them unless he complied with a demand of hers. He refused and they were published, facts which were not in the public interest and could only have been obtained illegally (though not enough evidence for the CPS to bring a case that would survive ‘beyond reasonable doubt’).  And there is more, so much more.  But, according to Johnston, she is not a 'wicked witch'.  Logic doesn't matter to the ruthless if they can ignore it.
Ultimately, justice has been partially served.  Half a loaf though is better than no loaf and still could result in a system to control the worst excesses of a press that is notorious in the rest of the world (especially by the peoples of democratic countries) for its extremism.

No change

India is a magnificent country - a vibrant, buzzing present with a rich historical heritage.  Yet it is ill-served by people in positions of power.  I blogged recently about corruption in the Indian defence industry.  What is truly staggering is the attitude to climate change and the environment displayed by governments of either hue, both Congress and BJP.  Tony Blair, displaying the cynicism (and exposing the 'greenwashing') of his administration, once said that no country would help the environment at the expense of its economy but the Indian political elite takes this to extremes.
A few years ago, India, along with China, Brazil and South Africa, formed a bloc of four intended to resist pressure from western governments (and threatened island atoll nations) for reductions in emissions.  To the shock and embarrassment of the three other partners, the Indian representative defied the bloc's agreed statement that climate change was happening, his speech actually questioning the science and the facts on the ground (and in the air).  The environment minister in the Congress government confused consumption with generation, saying India would never cut carbon emissions as that would hurt its people's well-being.  Energy production does not need to come from massively expanding the grid of coal-powered fire stations, which will ultimately damage people's well-being directly through their health and indirectly via the vagaries of climate change (increased desertification, stronger typhoons in the Bay of Bengal, melted glaciers).
The BJP environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, virtually repeated his predecessor's assertion word-for-word, saying that India had a 'right to grow' and could not address climate change until it had eradicated poverty.  Of course, this is an open lie because India can address a space programme and maintain nuclear weapons apparently.  Moreover, what is defined as poverty can easily have the goalposts moved and Jesus said "you will always have the poor amongst you'.  It is a fact of life.
It goes further though as India's Intelligence Bureau is targeting Greenpeace and other international institutions, claiming that they are 'spawning' mass movements that would pose a 'significant threat to national economic security'.  In short, as more and more Indians are becoming environmentally aware, they are attacked by their own bureaucracy as little more than traitors. 'Anti-developmental activities' can be nothing to do with economic growth but just being opposed to genetically modified crops.  It is amazing that such stupid people as those who commissioned the report in the first place and those who compiled it can come to run India.  As one of those native Indians targeted, Dr Vandana Shiva called the leaked intelligence report an "attack on civil society."  She's right and I hope civil society triumphs.

Discounting the competition

News of the 'permanent' discounts (i.e. price cuts) by ailing supermarket chain Morrisons made it onto the Today programme news agenda.  Typical of the chattering classes, they lumped Aldi, Lidl and Netto together as the 'discount supermarkets' that Morrisons was trying to combat, the kind of places that BBC higher-ups and their projected audience would never frequent.  It reminds me of the immature comedian Russell Kane being disparaging of Aldi in the manner of selling items fallen off the back of a truck and I thought, "Someone's mum goes to Waitrose."
And it is Waitrose, Marks & Spencers and Fortnum & Mason where this media elite shop, occasionally slumming it with Sainsbury's, Tesco, Asda and the Co-op.  If you want a real bargain-basement store look at Nisa, but they aren't as prominent as competitors in the grocery business like Aldi.  And why is Aldi prominent?  Because they sell quality products - award-winning products - at reasonable prices, mostly by focusing on a line range of 2,000 items rather than the 10,000 that the more established companies operate.  People will choose quality and value-for-money over choice every time, something New Labour never understood.  Indeed, Aldi has won 'supermarket of the year' from Which? in 2012 and 2013.
I can't comment on Lidl as I haven't shopped there and the nearest one is on the other side of the River Medway, making it a non-starter when it comes to a weekly shop.  I have been in Danish company Netto many times as a student and it was always a joke how horrendous it was as a place, with products labelled 'meat' without any obvious qualification as to its nature.  But the fruit juice was usually up to scratch and they had hilarious 'limited edition' Scotty Dog long-life bags as their excuse for charging for them.  I haven't been in one of their stores for over a decade and I can't assess how things have changed, if at all.  Yet if we were to lump the 'discount supermarkets' together, I would have to rank Aldi at the top, with Lidl in the middle and Netto bottom.
It is a slight and incorrect to call such places discount joints, given that all supermarkets discount certain ranges for a temporary period.  These three chains have managed to make a splash because their business model adds up, not because they cuts prices by cutting quality (at least in the case of Aldi) or by undercutting the older supermarkets through dubious means; it helps that they are all foreign-owned, with both Aldi and Lidl German and Netto already mentioned as Danish, allowing them to manage the immense start-up costs.  That Sainsbury's has announced a partnership with Netto shows that it doesn't think it will be tainted by association.
Of course, when you are obsessed by the Westminster Bubble, it is not usual to broaden one's horizons. However, perhaps the BBC wouldn't be so patronising if their editors and newsreaders paid a visit occasionally and realised these chains were legitimate outfits with sustainable economic approaches that were not the sole reserve of the proles.

The sidelining principle

It is amusing that because of internal party politics David Cameron is seeking to block the appointment of Luxembourger Jean-Claude Juncker as EU commission president (with the Lib Dems and Labour, in the absence of any coherent policy themselves, tagging along), yet because of internal party politics, he seems doomed to fail.  On becoming Tory leader, he kept to his promise to the Eurosceptic grassroots (when outflanking his rival David Davis) to pull the Conservative party out of the mainstream right-wing EPP in the European Parliament instead forming a hodge-podge coalition of unsavoury elements further along the spectrum in being right-wing.  The Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, said had Cameron remained within the EPP his argument might have prevailed but as the EPP selected Juncker and 'won' the European elections, Juncker will be president.
But Sikorski gave Cameron a get-out-of-jail card, saying there could be widespread support for 'sensible' British proposals for renegotiation (lest we forget, Cameron's promise of an in/out referendum was again prompted by internal party politics): "We call it, in the Brussels jargon, the subsidiarity principle – to leave what is possible at the level of the member state and then do together those things where we all gain by working together, say on energy and defence."  It's small crumb of comfort to Downing Street but they have only got themselves to blame in sidelining themselves from having a say over the next commission president.

Backward-looking

I feel sorry for the peoples of Germany, Netherlands, France, Belgium and others to live in such technologically benighted countries because the biggest reason why England fail, according to all pundits (across TV, radio, newspaper) e.g. Alan Hansen, is that there are too many digital distractions like XBoxs and iPads for English children instead of the simple pleasure of blatting a ball against a wall for ten hours of the day. Spain and Portugal must have just caught up technologically this year with England.

The real reason England fail is clinging to outdated concepts. Such rot tries to take us back 50 years, ironically to the time of our greatest triumph as a national team in football. But after winning the World Cup, Alf Ramsay (shortly to become Sir Alf) said, “It has taken English football 100 years to realise that football can be played differently from the way it was when it was originated, but we have now caught up." Messrs Hansen et al have a message which is the antithesis of Ramsay's statement. 

 Liverpool didn't start winning European trophies until they switched their style when playing outside England; in the middle of the last decade when the Premier League was at its peak in dominating Europe, a slower 'continental' style was adopted in counterpoint to the hurly-burly of the domestic league. Liverpool's dominance ended when their fans got all English clubs banned for five years from European competition and when English clubs returned they were hopelessly antediluvian in their tactics; the Premier League's influence has waned considerably in recent years as the style which was appropriate then has ossified (much as it is now apparent the same with Spain, Barcelona and Pep Guardiola with their own distinctive style).

It is all very well lamenting the passing of old ways but it is a counsel of despair as these old ways will not return.  And rightly so.  With the exception of Euro '96 (and maybe Italia '90), England have been falling behind since hoisting the Jules Rimet trophy.  The closure of the Lilleshall academy was particularly egregious.  We now have St George's Park as a rival to Clairefontaine in France and others across Europe, where techniques will be a significant step up from the timewarp the pundits coo over. Who knows, with St George's, England might finally reach the vanguard of playing style once again, but with bad, old attitudes prevailing it is probably best no to be too confident.

Dizzying

When growing up, the Dizzy computer games by Codemasters were always enthralling, if incredibly taxing on the noggin.  Dizzy gets his name from the character's tumbles and somersaults while jumping, a feature inspired by the designers, the Oliver Twins, whose graphics software enabled them to rotate an image easily so each frame did not have to be manually drawn. The software distorted complex sprites so the character was required to be simple, hence the choice of an egg.  There was much British humour to leaven proceedings but the quests could be fiendish.  Even the walkthroughs published in computer magazines were not always straightforward, with the first games of the series, Dizzy, in particular requiring pinpoint precision in movement to avoid numerous lethal hazards, with ability to carry only one object and no restart positions.
Being a callow youth, I willingly used the walkthroughs once I had run into a dead end on the computer games, though it was largely the map I looked at and only the instructions where absolutely necessary. One game eluded me though: Treasure Island Dizzy (AKA Dizzy II) The walkthrough map and instructions were published in Issue 10 of one Commodore 64 journal and again is Issue 40 and though I amassed almost all these magazines (a source of great amusement too), these two issues in particular eluded me.
So, in the days before the internet entered homes, schools or libraries on any wide-scale basis, let alone finding what you wanted on there easily, I was left to try almost everything I could as the Codemasters had puzzles so obscurantist that one almost had to be inside the designers’ heads. Treasure Island Dizzy was a lazy port from the Spectrum, as were all in the Dizzy franchise, apart from the last one Crystal Kingdom Dizzy (perhaps because by this point the Spectrum machine had become a collector’s item), which, ironically, I never got around to purchasing and playing. Therefore, even though more than most when there should have been azure skies, it looked like Dizzy was exploring in the depth of night. The Commodore could have supported a far wider graphic package but it was just easier to rack up profits by not making adjustments.
I was quite pleased when I, literally, unlocked one of the puzzles – a crystal sword opened up a grave with its ‘ingenious’ lock (the game had, sometimes cryptic, explanatory scrolls and script in certain places) and I found the smugglers’ cave. This brought me more the game to get to my final object – buying a boat from a shop to take Dizzy home, but though I bartered a handheld video camera (lost by tourists in the treetop village) and microwave oven (used by pirates for midnight snacks) and bought another component of the boat with a bag of gold from an abandoned mine, the tight-fisted shopkeeper still needed one more item of value, so as to sell me the ignition key for the motor (“I’ve got my overheads to cover”). I searched everywhere, knowing that a second grave (with an obvious liminal slab) was crucial.
But I never did work it out. Over the years, I thought about trying to find out but it was always the case that I either didn’t have the time or access to the internet when it came into my head. This week, I did find the time and went to YouTube where there were two walkthroughs, the Amiga version (with incomparably superior graphics, an expanded quest and, arguably, more fiendish puzzles, such as having to collide with nominally deadly enemies to find gold coins) and the Spectrum version (i.e. identical to the Commodore, right down to the tinny music and extra points given for dissolving a ‘Spectrum abuser mag’ item in the sea). I watched the half-hour it took ‘Pancho’ to complete the Amiga game, which had a wonderful Raiders of the Lost Ark sequence and quite trippy screen panels. The Spectrum game (by another user) was about quarter of an hour quicker. Both held the missing clue.
Looking back, it seems incredibly obvious and I must have only overlooked it in my naivety. In the screen panel next to the impenetrable grave, there was a rope and wood bridge. One had to retrieve the axe from the other island and drop it on the bridge. In fact, I may have actually done this, just not in the right place. If I had dropped it at the edge of the bridge, nothing would have happened. Only if the axe was dropped in the middle of the bridge, did a hitherto invisible platform lower from it, to allow access to the river below and thus a new hidden cave, holding two new coins and ‘the cursed treasure’. In both versions, Dizzy had to hold a ‘A holy Bible/A Bible [it varied in the editions]’, presumably to ward off the ‘curse’ of the treasure or maybe to escape the grave through the liminal slab (which might have foxed me) and, ahem, a snorkel to navigate underwater. Treasure chest in the inventory and delivered to the shopkeeper, the Arkwright of the islands handed over the ignition key and Dizzy could traverse the sea back home and to the final coin.
I should have been contented but instead I felt deflated. I had been so close to winning the game in my youth. Maybe older, I would have been more comprehensive. The axe on the bridge (albeit the very middle) seems one of the more obvious puzzles that could have been solved. Had it been something virtually unfathomable, it would have been easier to take. Equally, had I done less, as with the other Dizzy games, it wouldn’t have mattered so much but I had given my all (in the absence of expert help) and wasn’t far off.
Like Dizzy, I have a new quest. To watch Youtube walkthroughs of Dizzy in the Amiga format, to see how the Codemasters should have rendered Dizzy, graphics-wise at least (or near enough, given the limited power of the Commodore). The egg with boxing gloves still exerts a hold over me.

Steppe Change – Mining and Inequality in Mongolia

Here is the first article to be published as part of my freelance work for a risk management company (Victvs) that emphasised cultural intelligence (they required bloggers with international experience in parts of the world less well travelled).

In the 1980s, Reaganomics had at its heart a desire to slash personal income taxes and was mirrored across the Atlantic in the UK, with the mantra “the man in Whitehall doesn’t always know best [in how to spend taxpayers’ money].” In the USA in particular, these policies unleashed a flood of spending power that went overwhelmingly into imports creating an unprecedented balance of payments trade deficit. Nevertheless, this ethos was enshrined in the ‘Washington Consensus’ and post-communist countries were advised to follow a neo-liberal agenda.
Mongolia, emerging from the shadow of one-party dictatorship in 1990, quickly allied itself with the US as a counterweight to China after the USSR pulled its troops out of the country. The second-longest lasting communist country after the Soviet Union divested itself of a command economy along with state socialism and engaged in ‘shock therapy’ leading to a wealthy elite, a small, pressured middle-class and an impoverished majority. Combined with unusually brutal winters (zuuds) reaching -50° Celsius, killing livestock and driving devastated countryside herders into the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, the phenomenon of street children developed, living in sewers and off scraps. So common did it become and such was the theft for scrap metal also that Mongolians still out of habit leap across or walk around manhole covers, ingrained as it is that the lids will be missing (many remain absent).
As the economy improved, largely thanks to a mining boom, the occurrence of street children receded. Until recently. Indigence of those with more precarious livelihoods has risen steadily, ironically due to government largesse.
Mongolia is a major source of gold, uranium, coal and above all copper, the latter crowned by the strip mining of an entire mountain in the north near the second city of Erdenet and an even bigger complex at Oyu Tolgoi in the south. After a public outcry at the signing of contracts in the early 2000s whereby a mere 2% of revenues would revert to Mongolian coffers, the provisions relating to profits were forcibly renegotiated by the government, damaging investor confidence in the stability of jurisprudence. If anything, it is because Mongolia has made such a strong democratic transition and has not fallen victim to overt clientelistic practices as seen in other central Asian republics that caused this political U-turn, hurting its reputation as a place to do business - Mongolia needs the technology that western companies bring.
That said, it did bring a windfall to Mongolia which in 2008 became the fastest growing economy in the world at a 25% increase in year-on-year GNP (with 15% growth recorded in 2010 and 2012). The government decided to distribute this wealth in the form of handouts – 20,000 tugriks (£6.50) per month to every Mongolian citizen (a further 70,000 tugriks (£22.80) per month was allocated to all university students). As Mongolia imports (almost entirely from China) roughly 90% of all products sold on its shelves and in its marketplaces, a spending splurge fed the balance of payments trade deficit. Further, this intermingled with a booming economy and monetary slackness leading to rampant inflation. In 2006, a loaf of bread cost 300 tugriks (10 pence); by 2014, this price had increased sevenfold. As wages are not increasing at anything like the same rate for most Mongolians, despite the payouts, the poorest are bearing the brunt of such price hikes. At the same time, the tugrik, the main unit of currency, is sliding in value against the dollar, the euro and sterling, reducing purchasing power parity (it should be noted, contrary to the experience of other resource-rich developing countries).
Such tension has manifested itself in violence already in Mongolia. In 2008, with opposition politicians claiming corruption in the national parliamentary election (regarded as free and fair by international observers) won by the incumbent party, riots erupted, leading to the gutting of the ruling party’s headquarters, the deaths of five people and the army deployed on the capital’s streets. Emergency law and curfews were lifted within the week, testament to Mongolia’s steadfast commitment to democracy, but commentary inside the country and out noted the circumstances for the disturbances – borne out of anger at the rapidly rising cost of basic foodstuffs and provisions rather than political malfeasance (a trend observed in other developing countries too) – stayed unchanged in their wake. It was, after all, economic imbalance in Tunisia that sparked the Arab Spring.
Some Mongolians now regret the distribution of monthly payments and think it would have been better spent on infrastructure projects, especially to relieve the choking traffic that clogs Ulaanbaatar’s streets (the example of Beijing in alternating the use of cars with number plates ending in odd and even numbers on different days has been adopted as a temporary palliative).
Though Mongolia has largely avoided the resources curse (albeit mineral extraction forms a worryingly large portion of its economic expansion), it is being engulfed in the middle income trap, a glass ceiling that prevents take-off into a truly developed economy. And as governments of differing hues struggle to reconcile this challenge with maintaining economic growth, financial inequality is skyrocketing and posing a threat to social cohesion.

Footballing sideshow

In the 2002 FIFA World Cup, one Guardian feature chastised the world for having its attention diverted from growing tension in the Indian sub-continent between Islamabad and New Delhi.  Hyperbole followed upon hyperbole, with the writer suggesting it was closest the world was to nuclear war for 40 years and that there was widespread racism through apathy if a few million died out of populations of hundreds of millions.  Well, ultimately, there no war, let alone a thermo-nuclear one, while I'm sure the writer went on to great and glorious things in the 'left-erati'.
Now, in 2014, ferocious jihadists are on the march through Iraq and although the World Cup is on, this corner of the Middle East is always the first item on the news.  These death-cultists have executed 1,700 prisoners who they had captured from the disintegrating Iraqi army.  This is callous and thoroughly despicable but possibly also rational, in the same way that a hard-pressed Henry V at Agincourt ordered troops guarding captured French nobleman to kill them, so the guards could join the close-fought fray.  The jihadists are only a few thousand in number and with their disregard for life reasoned why did they need gaolers - yet it is comparable with the worst excesses of the Khmer Rouge.
What was odd about the pictures was how many of these army 'personnel' were in western football shirts.  Were they caught in their barracks unawares?  Were they trying to blend in to the civilian population?  It seems clothing designed to outrage western-loathing jihadists, whether they belonged to the army or not.  Thus 'Nani' (in Manchester United garb) and 'Ibrahimovic' (in his Barcelona phase) were executed.  One Bosnian journalist said one thing the peoples of the fissiparous nation could agree on was that players like Ibrahimovic, who opted to play for Sweden instead of representing the country of his birth, were guilty of treason, but Sweden not qualifying for the World Cup and Bosnia-Herzegovina making it seems apt punishment for Zlatan at least.  The Iraqi 'Ibra' inspired deserved none of his.

Old/young divide

There were three christenings today (the parish diary just said 'mass baptism' yet Revd Suzanne remembered all the names) but though the church was packed, leaving almost no room for the regulars, it was clear a majority of the guests were there under sufferance.  This is to be expected but what was interesting was the division between the older and the younger 'irregulars'.
The more senior of the invited sat (and suffered?) in silence - one greybeard when standing resolutely held his hands behind his back, the service sheet left untended on the pew ledge (making others share theirs) and one could assume a fiction about him that here was a man of deep spirituality, rejecting the orthodox liturgy of the Church of England to commune directly with God.  But if he didn't care for the institution hosting the event, he had respect for the family engaging in the ceremony of baptism.
Younger members showed none of this.  The mother of one of the baptised went up to the communion rail and not just did none of her family go up with her, but a male friend had nipped in to chat to them and she came back to find her pew space occupied, as if she had been to a toilet break on a train and someone had nabbed her seat; worse, he wouldn't leave, eventually bunching up with the others in the pew row so at last the mum could sit down in a place reserved for her.  Others were similarly inconsiderate.  One can understand people given over to low-level chatter while people process up for communion but to be so addicted to it to continue doing so during hymns is just plain rude.  These weren't callow or iconoclastic youths but people in their late twenties and early thirties.
The godparents hardly gave themselves over to higher standards, mumbling their commitments to the extent that Revd Suzanne needed to get them to repeat it, like a scolding teacher, emphasising the importance of what they were saying as if they didn't understand the role they had accepted.  While the children were urged to fight valiantly against sin, the world and the devil, it seemed many of the godparents would not be able to uphold their godchildren against the world as they were very much of it.  Not so much godparents as God-less parents.  For them, a baptism is an opportunity for a knees-up with a bit more reason behind it than an impromptu Sunday afternoon barbecue.  However, this was the case for the older people too and the latter were prepared to observe the form, if not the content, of the service.  One does not need to go to church to learn good manners.

The cradle of civilisation and conflict

Under Shah Abbas the Great in the early seventeenth century, Persia extended over Mesopotomia for the first time in a century and retook Baghdad from the Ottoman Turks.  It wasn't to last though and the Ottoman Empire reconquered the area in the 1630s following the death of Shah Abbas.
Now, thanks to a very providential and incompetent US-led invasion of Iraq, Iran's biggest regional foe fell under its aegis in large part due to the predominance of Shi-ites resident along the banks of the Tigris-Euphrates.  However, the uselessness of their puppet government threatens to throw away their gains as the Iraqi military collapses in the front of a small but determined jihadist movement.  It wouldn't be cataclysmic only for the West were Baghdad (and the oilfields) to fall - it would represent a severe strategic reverse for Tehran too, as I said yesterday on Twitter.  It also dawned on the Iranian government, who are now sending troops or 'volunteers' (just as it is merely 'volunteers' who enter Ukraine from Russia) to fight the insurgents, just as they did (and continue to do) in Syria.
I'm glad Obama has also made US military help contingent on Iraq's leaders reversing the sectarianism they have been promoting in recent years.  American airstrikes and Iranian ground support should be irresistible - it remains to be seen whether Nouri al-Maliki and his kin gamble on relying on Iran alone, as Obama really does not want to get into another quagmire and only governmental changes will induce him back.

Extended luxury

Hints from both George Osborne in his Mansion House speech and from Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney that interest rates might rise sooner than previous announcements led to believe, bred the inevitable headlines that borrowers, especially mortgage holders, would have to endire higher repayments on their loans.  Well boo-hoo; we have had 0.5% interest rates for the best part of five years and when they were instituted, they were unprecedented in the 300 year history of the Bank of England.  We've been living this luxury for such a long time that we now take it for granted and if people overextend themselves, thinking the good times will never end (as they were doing in 2007) then they've only got themselves to blame.  If they didn't learn in 2007, I doubt a (slight) corrective will have any long-term impact now but that is human nature.  The Bank of England will only raise rates slowly so let's not get all mortgage-junkie tabloid about it.

Return of the Khilafat

As ISIS are on the march, almost everyone is claiming it is a strategic disaster for Iraq in particular and the West in general.  No-one thinks about Iran.  Iraq under exclusive Shia-dominated government is an Iranian client state and for it to fall to Sunni jihadists would represent a significant strategic reverse for Iran after a supposed Achaememnid re-awakening of aggrandisement through Babylonia to Assad's Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon.  It would be bad for Bashar al-Assad as land supplies through Iraq would dry up and overflights dangerous.
A caliphate or khilafat has not been in existence for almost a century, when Ataturk abolished it to create his modern Turkey.  There is little appetite for it to return, except amongst irresponsible oil-rich businessmen in the Persian Gulf who fund these jihadists.  A sense of western betrayal goes back to when the British government assured Muslims in the Indian Army that though fighting the Ottoman Empire in World War One, the caliphate itself would be protected.  But the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres gave the holy places of Mecca and Medina to the Arabs and then as Ataturk created his own settlement, there was only go to be one father figure in Anatolia and Eastern Thrace and the West allowed the caliphate to cease to exist.
Saddam Hussein was a man of unquestionable brutality and megalomania but he always kept Iraq secular and free of religiously motivated terrorism. He was also a bulwark against Iran, even in his post-1990 pariah days.  This was another reason against invading Iraq in 2003.  Yet it happened.  The agreement for complete troop withdrawal by 2011 was signed by the Bush administration yet Obama had no plans to reverse it and took the credit.  Now he takes the brickbats for not leaving a 'stabilising force' of several thousand soldiers behind, but Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki (like the intransigent Hamid Karzai) would not hear of it because it would interfere with his desire to make Iraq a satellite of Iran.  Such a stabilising force was not in the US-Iraqi agreement signed by the representatives of the Bush administration
Of course, al-Maliki has completely mismanaged the country, emphasising sectarian difference in a state that would disintegrate if aligned on such lines.  Maybe it is not so surprising that not only has al-Maliki allowed Iranian aid to be funnelled to Assad via Iraq but also that al-Maliki is incompetent at fighting jihadists.  He spent decades in exile in the Syria of the Assads and is clearly no democrat.  He has destroyed the delicate triad federal system of Shias-Sunnis-Kurds and foolishly persecuted the 'Awakening' Sunni brigades organised by US General David Petraeus that drove out al-Qaeda after 2006.  Now, he desperately calls on the US to launch airstrikes, in ominous echoes of the French on their knees at Dien Bien Phu.  Obama should play hardball only agreeing to such direct assistance if al-Maliki restores the religious/ethnic balance - if he refuses but the jihadists continue to make gains, the US must step into Iraqi politics to urge a leader who does recognise reality, as at the moment the Iraqi parliament are choosing who will be the new prime minister.  It will almost certainly be counterproductive but there are few options available to the USA.

You've not got Mayall

The death of Rik Mayall on Monday has led to a concerted outpouring of grief not seen since the death of Nelson Mandela last year, at least from British sources.  I caught up with The Young Ones on a VHS boxset of both series, saw bits of The New Statesman but never in a continuous run for some reason and laughed so hysterically while watching Bottom on BBC2 that my mum came to my room (where I had a telly of my own) to enquire why I was so loud and if I could keep it down.  Drop Dead Fred, Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis and Guesthouse Paradiso received such critical drubbings that I stayed away, though Bottom was also panned but brought me much joy.
Perhaps some of the appeal lay in what Caitlin Moran on Newsnight described as being a teenager in an adult's body.  Thus Mayall could tap into the same humour as that which delighted teenagers.  This could lead to trouble though as when he joined a group of comedians campaigning against the euro currency when it looked likely that a referendum on joining might be given.  In line with teenage predilection for conflating modern Germany with its Nazi antecedents, he played Hitler as an avid supporter of the euro (highly ironic given that it was France that forced Germany to give up the Deutschmark in favour of the euro as the price of reunification).  The Board of Deputies of British Jews slammed this section of the ad for making light of the suffering Hitler caused, an episode that found its way into the title of Mayall's autobiography.  The offensiveness of the comparison (Harry Enfield was much the same in his own show with his prejudice expressed in Jurgen the German) offers further proof that it's not so much the Germans to whom one should not mention the war, but certain British people who clearly cannot get over it in their minds, despite having not lived through it.

The war for Cameron's ear

In 1739, the 'long peace' under Robert Walpole (generally regarded as the first British Prime Minister, serving 1721-1742), dissolved in a welter of recriminations.  Ostensibly, the war with Spain was because an overzealous Spanish coastguard had sliced off part of the ear of British merchantman, Captain Robert Jenkins, whom the Spanish authorities suspected of being engaged in smuggling.  That this incident occurred in 1731 and Jenkins was only ordered to testify before the House of Commons in 1738 (allegedly presenting his severed appendage at the hearing) made it clear that a casus belli was being sought.  It was listed among a whole host of Spanish 'depredations' as British traders sought to break into the Latin American market and the Spanish were determined to maintain a near-monopoly hold of that market.  With commercial clamour and strong trading influences in the House, the Walpole ministry - reluctantly - gave way to war, which soon became continental in scope.  The historian Thomas Carlyle, writing a century later, labelled it "The War of Jenkins' Ear."
If Education Secretary Michael Gove has anything to do with it, this episode will be restored to school textbooks in which it once was taken up fondly by schoolboys (a distant precursor of the Horrible Histories series).  At the moment though, he has suffered a setback but not without taking Home Secretary Theresa May down with him.  Superficially, Gove and his Department for Education determined to pick a fight with the Home Office over the alleged radical Islamic takeover of some schools in Birmingham, alleging complacency until extremism morphed into terrorism.  The Home Office shot back leaking a ministerial letter asserting that the management of schools was Gove's bailiwick and that as his department were in possession of this information for the past three years, it was "scary" how incompetent they were in the Education offices.
All this came to a head on the day of the Queen's Speech, the final one of this parliament, which no doubt was a source of immense irritation to David Cameron.  The prime minister proceeded to knock heads together, making Gove abase himself in public and forcing the resignation of May's right-hand woman (primarily for leaking the letter to the press), illustrating Walpole's prophetic anger, "they're ringing the church bells now, but they'll be wringing their hands before long."
But the Birmingham schools row was the just the excuse.  The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, along with his coterie, must have watched with mounting concern as Theresa May manoeuvred herself into the position of bookies' favourite to replace Cameron as Tory leader and largely under the radar at that, making her seem all the more credible in such a role as she went about her tasks diligently and competently.  Gove, in the Osborne camp, sought to throw a spanner in the works, thereby weakening her in the eyes of Cameron and in the party at large.  Although Gove wasn't expecting such blowback, substantially hurting him as he was already in conflict with Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrat Education Minister David Laws over the provision of school meals and the issue of 'free schools', it aided his cause.  The Machiavellian nature of May's special advisor Fiona Cunningham in leaking her boss' fury (or should that be anti-Machiavellian given the disastrous outcome) and Cunningham's subsequent dismissal was all grist to Osborne's mill, as May emerged out the contretemps worse off than Gove.  As election strategist for the Tories, I can't imagine he would be above a little chessboard powerplay within his party too.  Better to sacrifice a (fanatical) bishop to take down an opposing queen than to be check mated further down the line.  All the while, he keeps his hands clean and so keeps ahead of May in having the ear of Cameron.  Gove may hope this martyrdom helps his chances of becoming Chancellor under 'Prime Minister Osborne' but as the former Selfridges towel-folder has shown in juggling election strategy with the demands of the Treasury, he may get a whiff of Gladstone in his nostrils and hog both roles of PM and Chancellor himself.  That might induce Gove to slice off part of Osborne's ear!

Becalmed before (and after) the storm

Well, if England wanted to dampen down expectations ahead of the World Cup, they couldn't have done better than a soporific bore draw with a poor Honduran side.  Roy Hodgson and the players will kid themselves that a 43-minute delay waiting for an electrical storm to pass allowed their adrenaline to dissipate and Honduras to regroup, but they should have beaten the Central American side really.  Thinking back to the nail-biting 1-0 win over Slovenia in the final group game of the 2010 World Cup, if England are still in contention to progress, the final group game against Costa Rica (for whom Honduras served as the equivalent warm-up) could be similarly nervy and if England do triumph, I can't see it will be more than 1-0 again.
Andy Townsend said Italy are nothing special but on this dross neither are England.  The only thing that counts in England's favour is that Italy are traditionally slow-starters in tournaments - ultimately, this can result in group stage exits, but, if they do get through, they often go a long way; so it is best that England face them first.  A failure to win in their last seven matches, including a humiliating draw with Luxembourg in Italy, means their squad can only be upbeat in the manufactured way that their English counterparts currently exhibit.
I may be iconoclastic here but I don't see why Daniel Sturridge is a guaranteed starter in the England first team.  He strikes me as another Andy Cole - a brilliant servant for his club(s), but a fish out of water on the international circuit.  Cole was tried by about five different managers, each seeking to harness his shooting talent that was displayed regularly in league football but he never got into his stride, scoring on his 13th and, ironically, last appearance (in injury time, the third goal of a 3-1 victory over Albania in Tirana).  Sturridge has slightly better stats than Cole with four goals in his 11 games for the England senior side, but burrowing down, the opponents were not titans of the game.  Sturridge scored a solitary goal in an 8-0 hammering of San Marino; he was allowed to take a penalty against Montenegro with the game already in the bag at 3-1; and he scored a single goal in a 3-0 pasting of an under-strength Peru side (you may be retired but Nobby Solano, where are you?) at Wembley.  The only goal of merit against a half-decent side was the winning (and only) goal of the game against Denmark in a friendly at Wembley (natch).
The inevitable retort is: who would you put in Sturridge's place?  I was disappointed that Peter Crouch has been cast into exile, though he has fallen foul of the international referees' union with negative briefings about him because Crouch's height means he falls down in stages.  Andy Carroll offers something different and should be fresh after being injured for the first half of last season - cruel commentators say he's a throwback to the Stone Age just because he's a big lad who heads a lot of goals; it is forgotten that this didn't do Alan Shearer or England any harm.  Maybe there was too much similarity with Rickie Lambert. Neither do I think Southampton's Jay Rodriguez has been given a fair crack at the whip (unlike his south coast alumni Lambert and Adam Lallana), a single cap for England hardly enough to demonstrate his talents.  Just as I am constantly amazed that the error-strewn Glen Johnson is an international player (primarily because no-one else can fill his position at England), Sturridge doesn't do it for me.  Danny Welbeck or Rickie Lambert should be ahead of him in the pecking order.  Then again, bar Joe Hart and Steven Gerrard, I am underwhelmed by the entire England squad and though I don't think they will do as bad as some people are predicting, it would be no shock if they lost all three of their World Cup group games.

The Spoiling ‘B’

In the USA, spelling bee competitions are the rage.  Also, in the USA, ‘B’ is the letter for raging Republicans spoiling for a fight with Barack Obama.  From the very start, there was the ‘Birther’ conspiracy myth, asserting that Obama had no right to claim Bruce Springsteen’s anthem Born in the USA with a straight face.  In election year 2012, there was the Benghazi controversy, where the US ambassador to Libya and his security detail were murdered – Obama was accused of failing in his role as Commander-in-Chief to protect American lives.  Now, most recently, we have the Bergdahl affair where the president is denounced for releasing Taliban prisoners without notifying Congress in sufficient time to protect an American life in peril, an American for whom right-wing commentators feel should have rotted forever in an Afghan dungeon.

You may notice that all these are technicalities to try and oust Obama rather than taking the man himself’s advice of “go out win a presidential election” if they didn’t want a Democrat in the White House.  It’s like trying to impeach Bill Clinton because he had ‘sexual relations’ with Monica Lewinsky but officially not because he had ‘sexual relations’  with Monica Lewinsky but because he lied about it.

The constitutional stipulation of being born in the USA, like well regulated militias being able to bear arms, is an anachronism when the Republic was young and feared being undermined by outside (notably British) efforts.  The first nine US presidents (based on formal recognition of the country in the Treaty of Paris 1783) weren’t born in the USA, as it didn’t exist, rather they entered this world in one or another of the 13 colonies.  Ridiculously, a man born on the Canadian side of the border with the USA, a day before his all-American parents return, before spending the rest of his life not setting foot outside the 50 states cannot become president, but Boris ‘The Animal’ Johnson can for he abandoned the womb in New York.  Think about that constitutionalists: if you were relived that Schwarzenegger could not make the grade (despite the fantasy of the film Demolition Man), BoJo could.  Be afraid, be very afraid.

Benghazi was a more serious case with the deaths involved. Hillary Clinton, as State Secretary, took the heat off Obama by claiming responsibility for the lives of all American ambassadors.  This was supposed to be the administration’s ‘Watergate’ moment, but though they bungled its handling, the only criminality lay with the Libyan jihadists.  Obama ‘manned up’ and said the buck stopped with him but Clinton’s intervention dissipated the electoral threat.  After striking a serious tone in a speech, Mitt Romney’s smirk (caught by a well-positioned camera) as he walked backstage, killed the issue for Republicans.

And now we have Bowe Bergdahl, a double ‘b’.  The side of logic rests entirely with the administration and it seems the Republicans have not heeded the assertion of their own Bobby Jindal to stop being ‘the stupid party’.  Okay, these five Taliban prisoners are high-ranking but with the US drawdown in Afghanistan, they would probably have been released in six months time anyway.  To get a US hostage in return is kind of like a free pass.  On Question Time, Nev Wilshire tried to single-handedly destroy the concept of the ‘celebrity panellist slot’, first by joking (or was he), that “as a businessman, five in exchange for one is bad deal,” like he was dealing with backroom stock, before going on so say that Obama’s desire to close Guantanamo always baffled him – with a hint of disdain, Wilshire pondered “maybe he just likes releasing people.”  A more hopeless assessment of Guantanamo Bay’s prison facilities would be hard to find, though the rest of the panel were fairly clueless on the Bergdahl story (Ed Miliband wouldn’t be, with his devotion to the RealClearPolitics website).

Such ignorance as displayed by Wilshire is typical of ‘debate’ in the USA.  When Supreme Chief Justice John Roberts mucked up Barack Obama’s first inauguration, we saw Obama stumble because Roberts had read out the wrong formulation of words and threw the president.  Except because of that, some right-wingers Obama wasn’t the president and even when a video was released of Roberts and Obama doing the procedure correctly in the Oval Office, they claimed the oath of inauguration was only valid on inauguration day, as if winning a presidential election by a crushing margin was irrelevant.  But people like Wilshire would have assumed Obama had goofed and not following up the story would have persisted in that belief.  And ‘something, something’ he heard about Guantanamo Bay means Obama doesn’t believe in the punishment of criminals.

But to return to the Bergdahl incident, it’s lucky that the USA isn’t Thailand where Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra was forced to step down by the elitist Constitutional Court not because she moved an official but because she did it too quickly (though this still didn’t stop the military coup that would take place weeks later).  And the legal charge against Obama isn’t that he released Taliban fighters per se but that he did it without notifying Congress 30 days in advance.  Knowing that such legalese won’t resound with the public at large, Republicans are wheeling out old members of Bergdahl’s platoon to argue that his life wasn’t worth that the release of the five Taliban (who will be confined to Qatar for one year as part of the deal, sleeping in their ‘embassy’ there).  There is talk of how he was a ‘loner’ and ‘weird’ and ‘not a team player’ but best of all, one said that Bergdahl bought Rosetta Stone tapes to learn languages like Pashto and Arabic.  The horror, that he was trying to educate himself and might be able to converse with the local population and with imams.  To criticise someone for learning foreign languages that American anti-intellectualism (like its British strain) is alive and well.

The destruction of Bergdahl’s reputation has forced his home town to cancel a homecoming celebration for ‘health and safety reasons’, namely they can’t guarantee the health and safety of Bergdahl after the council was inundated with threatening letters and emails.  It is all reminiscent of the attack on John Kerry when he was making his presidential run in 2004.  Kerry was mocked for speaking French and ‘looking French’ and the Swiftboat Veterans campaign, funded by Republican-affiliated organisations, told lies about his bravery in Vietnam (two purple hearts are fairly definitive contradictory proof).  George W Bush acted in the same scumbag way he treated John McCain in the 2000 primaries by refusing to condemn slanderous accounts against an opponent (by contrast, a CNN investigation into Dubaya’s cushy job in the Texan National Air Guard as part of the draft, which a role which in itself finished prematurely, ended the 24-year career of anchor Dan Rather).  Like the Swifties, some of Bergdahl’s platoon have thrown him under a bus for political advantage.  He has been accused of desertion and so causing the unnecessary deaths of a search party that went out to look for him – all before the facts are fully known and Bergdahl has had a chance to speak for himself.  Instead, his ‘unpatriotic’ parents are made into his avatars, bring calumny and obloquy down on the family in equal measure.

Why such hatred?  Because Bergdahl and his kin serve as proxies for the seething hatred felt for Obama by Republicans and the Tea Party in particular.  This anger has reached such a fever pitch that it has long passed the point of rationality.  Anything that Obama does must be attacked, nay, assaulted.  Bowe Bergdahl is made collateral damage by his own side, merely because Republicans can’t win presidential elections and are reduced to trying to impeach Obama on technicalities that always fail in their ambition.  This attempt will fall flat too.  Initially wary of invoking executive privilege after a feeling that it was abused under Bush the Younger, the Obama team confected a workaround that said the law about due notice to Congress could be circumvented because of the delicate nature of negotiations and time constraints.  This was held by impartial observers to be unsatisfactory from a legal standpoint, so ahead of the Normandy celebrations, Obama went ahead and used the executive privilege which trumps the Congressional law, namely that as Commander-in-Chief it is his duty to ensure the safety of all serving military personnel.  And for all the hue and cry, it’s not like Obama broke the Constitution as the sainted Ronald Reagan did with the Iran-Contra scandal and the activities of Colonel Oliver North and John Poindexter in that scheme.  But hypocrisy reigns in the Republican house and while focusing on minutiae, they miss the big picture.

Another twist in history

Today is the 70^th anniversary of D-Day and Operation Overlord is precisely the reason why I am alive.  In the war in London my grandmother was romanced by a Canadian of Ukrainian origin.  I never asked for her to spell the name but I do remember Leonard (Leonid?) Bukorski in her reminisces.  They got engaged and talked about moving to Canada after the war, then he went away for the battle which became D-Day and never came back.

Now, whether ‘Leonard’ died on the beaches or shortly thereafter or whether, having had his way with her (she would not surrender her crown jewels without a proposal, though she was always coy about this to me), this was a convenient escape route from early marriage, my grandmother never knew, though she clung fiercely to the former.  Maybe it is a little odd that no correspondence from the War Office came through but there was a rash of engagements in ‘The War’ and perhaps he may not have had time to give her forwarding details to the relevant authorities before battle (I don’t know the exact length of this relationship).  Being from Canada may have further complicated the lines of communication.

Had my grandmother moved to Canada, she would never have met my grandfather at an evening class in London, thus my father and eventually I myself would not have entered the world.  I have a lot to be grateful that D-Day happened, if for slightly macabre reasons.  ‘Leonard’ may have disappeared at a later stage in World War Two had things been different - my grandmother’s belief that he perished in the Juno Landings is credible enough in the absence of any other information.