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| Beryl Seel is puzzled by this creature ... |
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| Clare and peanut butter milk chocolate ... (and cat mat) |
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| Neo and Starship Troopers chick |
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| Someone is going to adopt a little friend ... God help them! |
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| Alex with another perfect gift - haw haw! |
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| Paddington Bear with posh family Brown |
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| The Bear creating havoc in the Brown's posh London house |
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| Nicole Kidman wants to stuff you, bear! |
"The Czech novelist Milan Kundera made a famous observation*. "Kitsch," he wrote, "causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!"Scruton criticises much modern art as superficial anti-kitsch: an attempt to shock, rather than pamper the emotions of the audience. But shock alone is not art - and neither is shallow irony:
"Kitsch, in other words, is not about the thing observed but about the observer. It does not invite you to feel moved by the doll you are dressing so tenderly, but by yourself dressing the doll. All sentimentality is like this - it redirects emotion from the object to the subject, so as to create a fantasy of emotion without the real cost of feeling it. The kitsch object encourages you to think, "Look at me feeling this - how nice I am and how lovable."
"That is why Oscar Wilde, referring to one of Dickens's most sickly death-scenes, said that "a man must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell".
...
"Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious, when in fact he feels nothing at all."
"Take Allen Jones, whose art, currently on display at the Royal Academy, consists of female lookalikes contorted into furniture, dolls with their sexual parts made explicit by underwear, vulgar and childishly nasty visions of the human female, the whole as frothy with fake sentiment as any simpering fashion model. Again the result is such obvious kitsch that it cannot be kitsch. The artist must be telling us something about ourselves - about our desires and lusts - and forcing us to confront the fact that we like kitsch, while he pours scorn on kitsch by laying it on with a trowel. In place of our imagined ideals in gilded frames, he offers real junk in quotation marks.
"Pre-emptive kitsch is the first link in a chain. The artist pretends to take himself seriously, the critics pretend to judge his product and the modernist establishment pretends to promote it. At the end of all this pretence, someone who cannot perceive the difference between the real thing and the fake decides that he should buy it. Only at this point does the chain of pretence come to an end, and the real value of this kind of art reveals itself - namely its money value. Even at this point, however, the pretence is important. The purchaser must still believe that what they buy is real art, and therefore intrinsically valuable, a bargain at any price. Otherwise the price would reflect the obvious fact that anybody - even the purchaser - could have faked such a product."
"Since the Senate committee published its torture report last Tuesday, Washington has been engaged in a full-scale civil war, which has pitted Democrats against Republicans and the CIA against liberal institutions such as The New York Times.Good to hear someone taking the issue seriously.
...
"But the most interesting battle is not partisan or institutional but philosophical: the battle between soft hearts, who think that torture is an offence against fundamental moral principles, and the hard heads, who think that it is justified if it saves lives. The soft hearts say that good people don’t torture, full stop. The hard heads say that that is self-indulgent pap."
"Is this distinction between hard heads and soft hearts correct? The torture report poked some holes in it. On the basis of a detailed study of 20 cases, the report argues that enhanced interrogation played no role in disrupting terrorism plots, capturing terrorist leaders or finding bin Laden.This is sophistry - the specious argument of the inutility of torture. Any interrogation of the nuclear-bomb jihadist is going to be met with initial silence or obfuscation. Suppose torture is the only way to make the jihadist say anything? Suppose you can rapidly check answers and persist until you get the truth? Suppose you have a scanner which can reliably detect the act of lying (so keep applying the current until the subject gives the right leads)?
"But the more I reflected on the report, the more it struck me that conventional wisdom is upside down. Hard heads such as Cheney were motivated by a mixture of outrage over what happened on September 11 and fear of something worse: Cheney’s friends have repeatedly argued that 9/11 changed him fundamentally and transformed a measured figure into a warrior. But there is also a hard-headed case against torture.
"The classic hard-headed argument in favour of torture — the ticking timebomb — is less convincing than it sounds. Imagine that a nuclear bomb has been placed in the heart of London and you have half an hour to extract the necessary information from a jihadist before the device goes off. Will he really give you the right information as you apply the electrodes? Or will he waste your time by giving the wrong leads and then rejoice as you are all blown to smithereens?"
"Public opinion has been so thoroughly focused on the CIA report that the revelation that last month alone jihadists killed more than 5,000 people passed almost without comment."Torture divides serious people ...". Of course it's not alone in that, you could make the same case against drone attacks.
"It is precisely because the stakes in this war are so high that we should avoid using torture. The war is fought on the home front: you have to keep the people on your side in a world where patience is limited and the enemy can disappear for long periods of time. Torture divides serious people and gives succour to the frivolous looking for an excuse to argue that “we” are not so wonderful and “they” are merely misunderstood."
"The most interesting thing about the terrorism report is what it reveals about the internal state of the CIA. Torture took a toll on morale: in August 2002 some officers in a black facility in Thailand found torture so harrowing that they petitioned for a transfer. It created internal divisions: in January 2003 the CIA’s chief of interrogations sent an email to colleagues saying that “enhanced interrogation” was a wreck “waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens”. It forced the agency to engage in endless lies and cover-ups — not just to Congress but even to the more sympathetic Bush White House."Again, there are many cases where military exigencies clash with liberal ideals. Pacifism and unilateral disarmament have durable and vocal constituencies. Not a slam-dunk reason to desist from doing what states sometimes have to do, even against their own public opinion.
"Democracies that have given in to the use of torture — Britain in the Cyprus emergency in the 1950s, the French in the Algerian War and the Americans in Vietnam — have always come to regret it deeply not just because they lost the moral high ground but also because torture has a peculiarly corrosive effect on democratic institutions.What it comes down to, I think, is Wooldridge's statement that "torture has a peculiarly corrosive effect on democratic institutions". There is something uniquely unpleasant about torture, not just that it's horribly painful (many battlefield injuries are also agonising), but that the pain is inflicted with intent.
"It is easy for people who take the war on terror seriously to dismiss the terrorism report as a charade. The Democrats who are baying for the CIA’s blood this week were as one in demanding tough action in the wake of 9/11. They will be as one in condemning the CIA for negligence if jihadists mount another attack on the West.
"But this temptation should be resisted: the West must do what it can to ensure that the dubious decisions taken in the wake of 9/11 are not repeated — for hard-headed reasons rather than soft-hearted ones. Eschewing torture is not just the right thing to do morally. It is the right thing strategically as well."
"James Watson, one of the world’s greatest living Nobel laureates — joint discoverer of DNA, titan of 20th-century science — leant in closer. “I’m really missing him,” he said. He was talking to me about the death of his friend, mentor and co-laureate, Francis Crick. I nodded sympathetically. “The existence of Francis was very important,” he said. Another compassionate nod. Why was Crick’s existence important? “Now that he’s dead,” Watson explained, “I think I’m brighter than anyone else.”Watson is an incorrigible joker - surely he couldn't have been mocking the earnest, bien-pensant Tom Whipple?
"To be clear, he meant “anyone else in the world”. And, suddenly, I felt a little less sympathetic.
"It has been a bad decade and an excellent week for James Watson. Since claiming in 2007 that people of African descent are less intelligent — or, as he puts it, being “outed as believing in IQ” — Watson says he has been shunned by the scientific community. He has lost positions on boards, lost income and been made an “unperson”.
"So, citing penury, he sold his Nobel.Things began to look up: not only did he get £3 million for it but its buyer, Alisher Usmanov, part-owner of Arsenal FC and the richest man in Russia, gave it back to him. Watson may get Usmanov’s sympathy. He doesn’t get mine."
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| Tom Whipple - Times science correspondent |
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| Modelled after Stourhead house |
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| Straggly maybe; it normally lives on the porch |
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| Plant-as-butterfly |
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| My colonoscopy report |
"Homosexuality is anathema in the world where swordsman Ringil Eskiath, a weary, gay, middle-aged war hero, lives and fights. With his friends Archeth, last of the immortal Kiriath race, and Egar the Dragonbane, he sets off to find the Illwrack Changeling, supposedly the evil-sorcerer scion of a powerful race, the dwenda or Aldrain, that once ruled the world.With so many back references to volume 1, The Steel Remains, and volume 2, The Cold Commands, the complete trilogy should be read in just a few sittings to keep the whole thing in your head.
"However, the instructions given by Anasharal the Helmsman, a grouchy and supercilious Kiriath robot, are irritatingly imprecise. If the rumors about the Changeling and the return of the dwenda are correct, Ringil will need to develop his understanding and control of the ikinri ‘ska, a demonic magic powered by otherworldly glyphs. Even worse, the dwenda possess an irresistible weapon, the Talons of the Sun—though nobody knows what it might consist of.
"He soon becomes separated from Archeth and Egan, who locate a Warhelm, an ancient Kiriath combat installation that seems to have had much of its programming and capabilities purposefully damaged—by Archeth’s father. This time, Morgan’s ultraviolent narrative, while still crackling with intensity and expletives, bloats up into doorstopper territory, with a corresponding loss of focus.
"Still, for the most part the prose remains atmospheric and highly textured, complete with subtexts and sexual interludes. Add on a conclusion that contrives to be both enigmatic and less than fully satisfying, and maybe doesn't even add up—yet such is the quality of Morgan’s vision, and few readers will feel short-changed or disappointed."
"Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a wilful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses."Enjoy!
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| Stourhead in the winter sunshine |
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| The house is decorated for Christmas |
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| The Christmas-themed drawing room |
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| A Jihadi training camp in progress - who knew? |
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| Real bad hijab from the new Jihadi bride |
Hey guys, I know this post was flagged by ECHELON on account of keyword hits but .. seriously, it's a joke, right? We are allowed still to joke? You guys have a sense of humour? No, wait, ...
