'Nother Solent

Astonishing.

""The Crown's case amounts to her assertion that, since he was in the car, it must be him. They have not asked why no traces of his DNA were found in her body or on her clothing, but that of another man was."

That was the judge talking.

As Tim Worstall says:

Oh, and by the way, this is the system where the Home Secretary wants the power to lock up anyone at all whenever he likes without a presentation of evidence in court.

An uppity Australian

has been defying my edicts. Under one "redirection" I commented

I think your redirections are very nice. There is no need to be ashamed of having to buy second-hand directions.

I republish it here because who the hell looks at the third comment under a post labelled "Redirection"?

Try looking up.

Laban Tall writes about a historic first in artistic depictions of disabled people.

I felt a little pang of guilt

about the last post. He's now a very rich little pang; I had to settle out of court.

OK, start again. I regretted that in the last post I had not stressed more that the trouble with that Telegraph article on workplace bullying and the survey it described was that both assumed that respondents' own assessments of how badly they had been treated should be taken at face value. It is sometimes difficult to know if one is being treated badly. One can be wrong in either direction. Sadly, some children grow up thinking that beatings and neglect must be what they deserve since that is what they get. Nearly everyone has seen, and all too many have experienced, marriages, "friendships" or workplaces where someone literally doesn't know enough to complain.

On the other hand... well, let me tell you a story. I was once done for misuse of power myself. But in the first minute of the hearing it became obvious that this chap hadn't told his own union rep anything whatsoever about certain events central to the case. I mentioned them. The union rep started to turn to face his client, then his brain visibly countermanded the order to his neck muscles. From then on he did his best but it was obvious that the meeting couldn't be about what he had thought it was going to be about. It trailed off, and later events made the whole business moot.

Afterwards I wondered why on earth my opponent had failed to tell his union rep the whole story. If the rep, who was good at his job, had known the weakest point in the case he had to make he could have prepared defences.

My guess (and it's only a guess) is that my opponent had wiped various painful memories from his mind. In their absence his memory presented him with a history that showed him as hard done by. People do that sometimes.

Perhaps he blogs the story differently. But that's the point. One's own assessment cannot be the only measure.

Bully for you.

In the Telegraph's Money section there is an article about bullying in the workplace.

Bullying in the workplace has extended into the boardroom, according to the results of a research study.

But has it? The next paragraph says

More directors are standing up and admitting they have been the victims of bullying either by colleagues or insulting behaviour from subordinates.

More directors admitting they had been bullied is not necessarily the same thing as more bullying. Men cry more now.

Almost one in three directors involved in the research said they had been subjected to some degree of bullying. The main complaints were verbal abuse, misuse of power, being squeezed out of discussions and threatened with the sack.

Bullying exists, I don't doubt that. However the same terms "verbal abuse", "misuse of power" or "being threatened with the sack" might describe intolerable cruelty in one instance and, er, management in another. The trouble is telling which. And, c'mon, being squeezed out of discussions? Every workplace from Lands End to John O'Groats has one person in it who simply has to be squeezed out of discussions if any work is to be done.

The way bullying has spread wider and deeper into the business hierarchy is one of the key results from a survey charting an increase in offensive behaviour.

Bullying may have spread wider and deeper. But I would need a lot more discussion of other possible explanations than this before I was sure. It might be that what has spread wider and deeper is whininess.

Companies are urged to adopt training programmes and an anti-bullying culture.

Blessed are they that have not seen and yet believe

. Letter writers to the Guardian say the full impact of Sure Start cannot be measured.

Yesterday was a dreadful day in Iraq.

The Scotsman reports that "more than 160 people were killed and hundreds wounded in the country's bloodiest day since the United States-led invasion in March 2003." No pretence is made any more that the bombs are targeted at men under arms:

In the worst attack yesterday, at least 114 civilians were killed and 160 injured by a suicide car bomber in a Shia district at 6:30am. Many of the dead were labourers who had gathered to find work.

...The bomber drove a van into an area where men were looking for jobs. After attracting their attention by offering employment, he detonated his device, causing carnage.

Apart from those whose husband, father or son did not come home yesterday, the world receives these accounts with a kind of numbness. Iraq fatigue. And in terms of news values, in terms of what will be mentioned in the history books, the Scotsman is correct not to lead with the numbers of the dead but with this statement:

AL-QAEDA'S leader in Iraq declared all-out war on Shiite Muslims

That's all Shiite Muslims everywhere, not just Iraq; the Scotsman's headline is belied by the text of the story.

Although for a long time Zarqawi's actions had suggested that his motive is to promote religious war between Sunni and Shia I had not heard that he had said so explicitly before. In the past I have sometimes thought of him as being like Charles Manson in more than sadism. (Manson sought by the murders of Sharon Tate and others to start a race war in America. His cult "family" were instructed to leave false clues suggesting that Black Panthers were the murderers. Manson belived that he and his group would emerge to rule over the ruins.) If these reports of an open declaration of war on the Shia are true then the parallel is not as close as I thought.

Is it definitely true? This account from the BBC is hesitant:

In a statement on a website, the group al-Qaeda in Iraq said it acted after US and Iraqi forces attacked insurgents in the northern town of Talafar.

In a separate development the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, purportedly declared "war against Shias in all of Iraq" in an audio tape released on the internet.

I think that when it describes the statement by Zarqawi as a "separate development" it means that the first statement, the one linking attacks by Al Qaeda in Iraq to Talafar, was made on a different website to the one that released the audio. There seems to be room for doubt that the audio was really Zarqawi.

These accounts from Al-Jazeera and the SITE institute also say that the identity of the speaker was probable but not certain.

I hope that it is true. If it is, I share a hope with Zarqawi: may his words be heard worldwide. I hope thus because I hope for his defeat. He has made his defeat more likely. Each time the message is repeated a few more Sunni in Iraq and the wider Arab world will recoil. Perhaps even a few more of our western supporters of the "resistance" will recoil.

Much of my parallel with Charles Manson still stands. Zarqawi doesn't wish to make war on the Shiites to benefit the Sunni. He didn't make all those women widows and take fathers from all those children yesterday so that other husbands and fathers should live. He wants his group to rule over the ruins.

The common weal.

We are often asked to make sacrifices for the common weal. Angie Schultz, writing in Biased BBC comments, wants to bring us to a greater affection for and understanding of what it is we are asked to help.

Obviously the common or garden weal is a species of weal distinct from the yellow-bellied sap-sucking weal, or the ruby-throated hummingweal, or the ferocious saber-toothed weal of the Pleistocene.

The common weal is often found in BBC cubicles, Labour functions, and Guardian pages, not to mention meetings of the Socialist Workers of the World. Many wealologists forecast a mass extinction of the common weal when its Communist habitat was drastically reduced, but there has been little actual evidence to bear out these predictions.

On your left

there is a new RSS thingy, as demanded by readers. It is that thingy labelled "RSS thingy" on the left.

The nature of the enemy.

Just a reminder: Taleban 'kill voters in ambush.'

And get to know George Galloway in his own words. (The latter link ultimately comes from Christopher Hitchens' website. I can't quite recall the chain of bloggers that brought it to me.)

Don't panic!

I've no strong opinions about this fuel protest, or rather I have conflicting opinions. Taxes are bad. So is stopping people from going about their lawful businesszzz. See how I gamely try to get myself interested, but fail.

Much more important is that all parties come together to denounce slovenly use of words. So pay attention.

Nine times out of ten, people who go out now and attempt to fill their tanks before everyone else does are not "panic buying." On the contrary, they are demonstrating their ability to think ahead and modify their habitual behaviour in the light of the likely behavior of others. They are perfectly well aware that if everybody restrained themselves all would be better off. "Unfortunately," they say, "that's not what is going to happen in the real world and I don't intend to be last in the queue. Some would call this coolly rational behaviour selfish, others prudent, but the one thing it is not is panic.

A man learned in strange arts

has told me that good tidings will follow if I do certain things. Therefore have I clicked Settings and Site Feed, changed Publish Site Feed to Yes, changed Descriptions to Short, clicked Save Settings, and for good measure walked widdershins three times round the computer.

And sure enough, I looked into a basin of water and saw my husband's face. He said, "Use the other bathroom, I'm shaving."

Get your priorities right.

Squander Two, having seen the riots in Belfast from close to, has a question.

The Orange Order need to ask themselves how important parade routes really are. Sure, they're right: people in the rest of the UK can organise marches without having them vetoed by political pressure groups, so why shouldn't they? But they well know that their uncompromising insistence on certain routes leads to rioting, and that rioting, especially in the light of the IRA's "ceasefire", makes the rest of the UK think that Northern Irish Protestants are an insane bunch of violent foreigners that the country could do without. That way lies Unification.

So what's it to be? Do you want to live in the UK and have an irritating politically stacked sectarian quango tell you where you can or can't march? Or would you rather be free to march wherever you like in the United Irish Republic? This is not a trick question.

UPDATE: Squander Two writes:

I should say that I haven't seen the riots close to. All I've seen is a traffic jam. It's like when I was brought up in Peckham in the 80s: didn't see the riots there, either. I should become a war correspondent.

Photon Courier

republishes his post from a year ago on the heroism of Noor Inayat Khan, executed in Dachau on September 11 1944.

Selwyn Jepson, the man who recruited Noor into SOE, never forgot her. "...not only in the dark hours of solitude, but at unexpected moments of daytime activity, it is as though a shutter opens in a familiar wall which I know has no shutter in it, and she is there, briefly, the light filling my eyes. She does not haunt me, as do some of the others...she is simply with me, now and again, for a little moment."

If.

You know how alternative world stories usually start with just one tiny change and then follow its repurcussions as they spread out until the whole world is a different place? Damian Penny does it differently. He describes an alternative timetrack that starts out with one whopping difference from ours and ends up, in one respect at least, scarcely distinguishable from it.

This one is perhaps the least significant difference. It caught my eye because I had thought of something similar myself:

Imagine if President Bush, upon being told that his country had been attacked, had abruptly stopped reading to these schoolchildren and leapt into action. Maureen Dowd and Heather Mallick would have sneered that, at long last, this chickenhawk man-child had the chance to play cowboy, regardless of how the schoolchildren might have been traumatized. Michael Ruppert's "9/11 timeline" would say this proved he had been tipped off about the attacks, because if he hadn't known about them he would have been too shocked to move.

- Although my version had them sneering at the panicky way Bush jumped out of his seat and scurried off, and adding that what a true combat veteran such as John Kerry would have done was calmly finish the story.

Go on, surprise me.

ANDY Kerr, the health minister, was forced to admit yesterday that the billions of pounds in extra funds going into the NHS in Scotland have not led to a corresponding increase in the treatment of patients.

- says The Scotsman. Later in the article we hear from the deputy leader of the SNP:

Citing the late Robin Cook in an apparent effort to embarrass the Labour Party, she added that the commercial culture of the private sector could undermine the public-sector ethos of the NHS.

It's not often I agree with either deputy leaders of the SNP or the late Mr Cook, but I have to admit they might be right.

Failure and success.

I got to thinking about all those New York firemen who went up into the doomed World Trade Centre four years ago today. Sure, they meant well, but what good did it do? As it turned out they didn't save any lives and lost their own trying. They failed.

That led me on to thinking about all those people who jumped out of high windows. All those future achievements they had thought lay within their grasp - varying from promotion to CEO of the company to being home in time for a child's birthday party - never came to anything, did they? Their field of free action narrowed down to taking the hand of a colleague, or a stranger, before death. If sucess is achieving your goals, face it, that's failure.

There were those who didn't even achieve that much. People who found themselves alone when the floor collapsed or the air ran out. What can words like "bravery" or "dying well" mean in such circumstances? Even supposing their last thoughts were any more sophisticated than mere animal horror, there was no one there to be edified.

Compare that to the success of their killers. Happy is the death of the shaheed, triumphant in the knowledge that his goals are now certain to be achieved! Furthermore their actions brought pleasure and inspiration to many.

There you have it. Failure and success, clear and indisputable. Unless you decide that for some reason it is better to judge by other criteria.

An account of rescue work in New Orleans.

Kerry Buttram, who I know as one of my fellow-contributors to the Biased BBC blog, writes:

I rarely forward emails but thought that you might find this of interest as you discuss the breakdown of civil order in New Orleans. I have no doubts about the genuineness of this email (see below) but have no way of verifying it. I do not know either "Eric" or "Rhonda".

Despite the best efforts of agenda-driven journalists paint the bleakest of pictures, many good things are happening here in Katrina's wake. Millions of dollars are being raised as reported, but mostly through non-governmental channels. Many people in our community here (upstate South Carolina) are seeking to house refugees. Our congregation of 1,600 received an offering this past Sunday which came to $74,000USD. One of the men in our church was on a trip to Houston, TX the other day. He invited a family he met in the hotel to come to stay in his home so they could look into the job market here since they've nothing to return to in New Orleans. This is being multiplied from coast to coast.

The next part of the email was this introduction:

The following message comes from a Louisiana State Patrol officer who also serves in drug enforcement with the FBI. He is writing to his sister Rhonda in Maryland who attends the same church as our son, Daniel. His sister shared it with us in order to help others understand what's really happening on the ground. It speaks volumes to the heroism of those who are doing the work instead of talking about it. They deserve our prayers and support because the hardest work is still ahead.

Eric

This is the account itself:

Rhonda,

I just returned from an operation in New Orleans and thought I would pass this information on to you to give to your friends. I worked the area between Causeway and Canal/Carrollton, and area between Veterans Blvd. and Airline. I do not remember seeing the church, but I can tell you that everything in that area is covered with 5 - 15 feet of water, depending on the block. As of now deceased persons are being left in place, due to the mission being the recovery of the living. Estimates on the death toll are a guess as of now, but will probably be in excess of 10,000. I'm making a guess based on the amount of live persons we are pulling out. I spent the last three days there and only found 5 deceased persons. Our fear is we will find a majority of the fatalities in the attics of homes once they are able to start pumping water out. The situation is like nothing I have ever seen. The devastation is something I am unable to explain.

The lack of leadership in New Orleans almost makes it non-existent. When we arrived over 100 New Orleans P.D. officers had already walked off the job. Rapides S.O. found other NOPD officers looting a store full of stereo equipment. The governor and mayor haven't tried to provide any leadership, they just constantly blame the federal government. FEMA was doing good about providing funds, but has failed to coordinate a true rescue mission. When my team arrived Wednesday we had to fight with everyone to get a boat in the water. That day we were only able to rescue 23 persons. On Thursday we arrived and were told we couldn't launch boats for a rescue because the local governments were saying the military was taking over. We had someone inform us there was about 300 persons trapped in Lafayette School, and the local authorities & FEMA still told us we were finished. I knew the military would be another 24 hours to muster so we decided to fight. We informed them that we were launching our boats to go get those people, and they would have to shoot us to keep us out. Luckily, my team of 12 was more heavily armed than they so we won the stand-off.

We traveled about 2-3 miles on Airline from the Causeway and began locating people; that was at 9 am. Eight hours later, we had rescued a little over 600 people from the Airline area. We rescued a 1 week old baby whose mother was in shock and refusing to bring the baby out. We were finally able to get them both out. We located approximately 700-800 more persons at Lafayette School and an apartment building. We couldn't get them out because the light was gone and we can't navigate a boat in this type of environment at night. We looted an abandoned store of all its food and water and took it to them. We promised them we would be back at sunrise.

That night we were ordered back to Monroe, because we were told we were needed there for all the refugees that were being bused there. They even sent a Captain to make sure we didn't ignore orders like we so often do. I believe there was probably another reason, because most of the law enforcement presence from around the state disappeared overnight. We offered to take our vacation time and stay, but the sheriff made us return home. My guys and I are crushed, because these people were counting on us. We made them a promise and their lives are reliant on that promise.

Pray for these people! These types of situations never disturb my guys, but this time is different. We all feel like we are responsible for these people. There was a lot of crying on the way home, and my guys never cry. We may head back Monday with our personal equipment and tell them we are taking our vacation now. Pray for these people! Pray for my guys! Pray that God will have a true leader rise up to help get the ongoing operation on track. There are probably 200 - 300 boats that never make it to the water every day because they are waiting for someone else to give them permission to save lives. Pray that men will stand up and be men!

I have added paragraph breaks to make it easier to read but not changed it otherwise. Of course I have even less means of verifying it than Kerry does, but I tend to think that there are fewer dishonest people making up stories of admirable behaviour than dishonest people making up stories of horrors.