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Under a glorious blazing
sun, Ireland's biggest public demonstration of the year took place last
Saturday 8th June. But if radio, TV and newspapers are your source of
information you would scarcely have known that it was coming, nor that it had
taken place.
That is because it was a pro-life rally whereas Ireland's media are
wildly enthusiastic for abortion and more abortion, and don't want
people to know there are other widely held viewpoints.
The organization of the crowds was superb as was their behaviour; the
visuals and sound systems were top-class. Big screens and speakers meant
that wherever you stood you could see and hear exactly what was happening in
the massive stage that had been set up.
Packed into two sides of
Merrion Square, the turnout looked huge, though
estimates vary.
The few newspapers that made passing mention talked of
“thousands”.
The police said there were 15-20,000 though didn't say where they
got such numbers.
The official organizers put the number at over 40,000.
I did my own counting and calculating and came up with a figure of
30,000 +/- 20%, ie between 24,000 and 36,000. Here is how I did
this:
Along Merrion Square West, where I was situated, I counted:
35 heads from one side of the road to the other,
50 heads between large, distinctive lamposts,
7 lamposts along the area occupied by people.
Thus 35 x 10 x 6 = 10,500 people filled this stretch of road. The
South side of the square which was also jam-packed, is twice as long as
the West side.
Hence the total was 31,500, say 30k to be safe. This would not
include any overflow into adjacent streets.
This is all a bit academic, but it is important to demonstrate that the
estimates of the media and the police are undoubtedly far too low, because
it illustrates their prejudice on the subject.
The reason for Ireland's vigorous pro-life campaign is that its
government, a coalition of a rightish party Fine Gael and a strongly leftist
Labour party, is gung-ho to introduce abortion into Ireland for the first
time ever, supposedly only to save the life of mothers. However, Fine Gael made
a pre-election promise not to introduce abortion, but under pressure from
Labour its leadership has made a complete U-turn. By
steadfastly
ignoring not only its pro-life promise but all medical and psychiatric
evidence that shows beyond doubt that it is never necessary to directly
target the baby's life in order to save the
mother's life,
while avoiding every opportunity to debate or to explain why
it is so keen to abort and
whipping party members,
the Coalition is doggedly
pushing through its legislation.
I won't use this post to argue the pros and cons. I only want to
tell people what I can remember about the rally.
Four speakers stood out as far as I was
concerned. It was not only the content of what they said, but the
clarity, passion and brevity with which they delivered their message, which
I imagine were the result of much coaching and rehearsal.
Maria Steen, a brilliant speaker and debater for the pro-life cause,
went through the main points of the so-called
“Protection
of Life during Pregnancy Bill”,
exposing each as a deception, such as that this will help the health of
pregnant women, or that the European Court of Justice is demanding
abortion. She had a great line as she systematically demolished
each such falsehood: “It does no such thing!”.
She saved her best for last when she pointed out that the title of bill
most certainly does not “do what it says on the tin”.
Adele Best spoke movingly of her own
two abortions. The first she willing chose; the second her
boyfriend coerced her in to. In each case she was stricken
afterwards with extreme depression and mental issues, adding up to some
fifteen years of misery in all, until she received help from
Women Hurt, an
organisation for post-abortion women. Subsequently she gave birth to a
child, who has become the light of her life. She now wants to warn
other post-abortion women not to stay silent about their suffering and
not to harbour shame.
Another woman spoke of having her
unborn baby diagnosed with a serious and rare illness (whose name I
forget). Her Irish obstetrician immediately advised her
“to go to England” [for an abortion].
When she refused, she was given extremely frosty treatment from him and
from other maternity staff for the rest of her pregnancy for having
failed to follow his admonishment. Nevertheless, the little girl
survived, was born, and thanks to some wonderful heart surgery is now a
fully functioning healthy three-year-old. Who was delighted to
smile and wave at the cameras (Minute 0:31-34 in the above YOutube clip,
with her daddy).
John McAreavey,
whose beautiful new wife
Michaela was murdered while on honeymoon in Mauritius in 2011, spoke
movingly of the need to protect the unborn, no doubt thinking of the
unborn children he and Michaela never would have. Michaela was the
only daughter of a highly successful and popular GAA football coach.
But
the coolest thing of all was this
“SpiderSkyCam”
drone, powered by eight rotors with an HD camera in the middle, which
buzzed and hovered overhead in the bright sky taking video and stills of the
event, some of which feature in the video above. Contracted in by the
rally organisers, it buzzed around and up and down the crowd throughout the
meeting, controlled by some unseen technician, while giving some of us a
crick in the neck.
It would be handy to deploy one of them to
the Cabinet meeting room to eavesdrop on the abortion
“deliberations”
such as they are.
The purpose of the rally
was to get the attention of the ruling politicians, to demonstrate that
there is a huge pro-life constituency passionately opposed to the proposed
legislation and that there will be a bitter electoral price to pay if it is
passed.
Time will tell how
successful the overall pro-life campaign will be. And how many tiny,
innocent lives will be saved - or snuffed out.
Rugby referees have at their
disposal four grades of punishment for errors or foul play.
For minor infringements, a penalty kick is
awarded to the opposing team.
For particularly cynical infringements, the
offending player can in addition be sent off for ten minutes (yellow
card).
Where the infringement has prevented the scoring
of a try, a penalty try is a further sanction.
For the worst of offences, the referee will wave
a red flag, sending the player off for the rest of the game.
In addition, however, a player may be cited, meaning
further action is warranted, in respect of behaviour that has been
viewed on television, whether or not the referee has spotted it or
imposed his own punishment. If cited, a player is called up before
a panel of rugby judges, the evidence is reviewed, he is allowed to
present his defence and a verdict reached. If guilty, further
punishment is often administered, usually a ban for a fixed period,
which involves shame for the player involved but also, for a
professional, loss of earnings.
Recent such bans have highlighted a curious anomaly in
regards to punishments meted out to top European rugby professionals:
Ireland's
Cian Healy earned a
three-week ban for
stamping on the leg of Dan Cole in an Ireland/England game on
10th February 2013 (which Ireland lost 6-12)
The
sanction for Ireland's star Brian O'Driscoll's was a penalty, a
yellow card and a
three-week ban for
stamping on the stomach of Simone Favaro in an Ireland/Italy
game on 16th March (which Ireland lost 15-22)
Munster's
captain Paul O'Connell was neither penalised nor cited for a
brutal, albeit accidental kick on Dave Kearney's head, in a
Munster/Leinster game on 14th April (which Munster lost 16-22);
Kearney had to be stretchered off with concussion and couldn't play
for nearly five weeks. (Yes, the victim received the
punishment of an effective ban, not the perpetrator!)
Meanwhile ...
Stade
Français scrum-half Jerome Fillol was awarded a
fourteen-week ban for spitting in the face of his opposing
scrum-half Peter Stringer of Bath on 6th April; Bath lost 20-36.
Dylan
Hartley, captain of Northampton, brought upon himself a penalty
kick, a red card and an
eleven-week ban on 25th May for calling referee Wayne Barnes
“f*****g cheat”;
unsurprisingly, with Northampton a man short went on to be soundly
beaten by Leicester 17-37. The timing of the ban was such that he
was kicked off the much cherished
Lions
tour of Hong Kong and Australia, which began a few days later.
The reason I am bringing these recent cases up is to
highlight the difference is punishments that the citing committees award
for what might be termed virtual violence as compared with actual
violence.
No-one doubts that virtual violence needs to be
vigorously stamped out, as it were. As does actual violence. Young
children (and their mums) must never be given the impression that such
behaviour is acceptable, or else rugby's reputation will crash and fewer
and fewer will play it.
Nevertheless, it is exceedingly odd that spitting and
rudeness should be deemed to be FOUR TIMES as serious as
the stamps and kicks that in these particular cases could have broken,
respectively, a leg, some ribs and a skull, and in the latter case have
even caused brain damage.
I would think that mums would far prefer to see their
precious sons spat and sworn at than kicked in the head.
A third rate
“comedian” decides he knows
what drives certain types of people to murder.
There seems to be a lot of this particular affliction around.
The renowned international psychiatrist, Islamic scholar and
philosopher Russell Brand concluded on 26th May in
his Sunday column in the Sun tabloid newspaper that the Jihadist beheaders of Drummer
Lee Rigby are in fact “severely mentally ill”. Why?
How so?
Because they’d just
murdered a stranger in Woolwich, London. QED. The act is the diagnosis.
Absolutely nothing to to do with Islam at
all because, as he
gravely informs us,
“the main
narrative thrust of ... the Koran is:
Be nice to each other because
we’re all the same”.
Nice? All the same? Who knew?
No doubt the eminent Dr R Brand listened intently to
decapitator Michael Adebolajo’s own words:
“Allahu
Akbar[Allah is the greatest]”
while slicing up his victim.
But perhaps Dr Brand is right. For surely you would
indeed have to be
“severely mentally ill” to swallow such guff.
Meanwhile, world leaders seem to feel the need to utter
their own inanities, which only go to show that they too share symptoms
of being “severely mentally ill”:
Barack Obama:
“The best way to prevent violent
extremism is to work with the Muslim American community – which has
consistently rejected terrorism.”
Oh yes? Any examples
of
“consistently rejecting terrorism”?
Thought not.
So here,
thanks to the inestimable Robert Spencer, are four
unchallenged examples showing that 80% of US mosques - ie 1700
of them - teach Jihad, Islamic supremacism, extremist ideology,
and hatred & contempt for Jews and Christians:
In 1999, Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani,
a Sufi leader,
gave
testimony to this effect to the Senate
after visiting 114 US mosques
In 2005, the Center for Religious
Freedom made similar
findings in a
study,
In 2008 the Mapping In Sharia Project
did so also.
In 2011 another study showed that
only 19%
of American mosques
don’t teach Jihad violence and/or Islamic
supremacism.
David Cameron:
“There is nothing in Islam that
justifies this truly dreadful act.”
Oh yes there is!
Has the Prime Minister even read the Koran?
Sura 8:12, for example,
which reads,
“I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore
strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them”.
Clearly, the
assassins are nothing if not devout Muslims.
Meanwhile, Drummer Rigby remains dead.
Drummer Lee Rigby, 25, Second Battalion the Royal Regiment of
Fusiliers,
brutally assassinated in broad daylight on a London street on 22nd May
2013.
On 25th May, the
Saturday
Live Programme on BBC Radio 4
invited my sister Frances to recount an incident in her youth
when a woman stepped into the road to halt her car – and saved her life.
This is Frances' story.
This is Frances' story.
Spoken as broadcast ....
And as written ...
My thanks are to a Chinese peasant who saved
my life in June 1966.
I was
driving slowly home, up the Peak in Hong Kong, during a tremendous
rainstorm – not a typhoon. In Hong Kong we were used to typhoons but this was just heavy
and non stop rain. In town the 12-ft deep storm drains were overflowing
and water was fountaining up through the tarmac. Time to go home .
In low gear I crawled up the Peak but just as my flat appeared ahead, a Hakka woman
(identifiable by her unique headgear, as depicted) stood in front of my car
remonstrating that I should stop. She pointed to the road surface. It
looked like bubbling pastry and she signed that I must not proceed.
I
have great respect for the Chinese (the fishermen always knew more than
the Met Office which typhoons were the most dangerous) so I smiled,
nodded my thanks, reversed my car down the hill and tucked it into a
sedan chair path – these follow the lay of the land so survive bad
weather well.
I arrived home absolutely soaked through and put on the
kettle for my desperately needed cuppa tea. I never got it – the gas
went off. The road I had just walked over had become a giant landslide.
Would the weight of my little Singer Gazelle have been enough to
initiate that landslide ? Who knows. We were cut off for weeks until a
sort of Bailey bridge could be built to reconnect us to the town and had
to have our food delivered by helicopter. But I was alive.
There is no way I can ever thank that wonderful woman
but I am forever grateful.
An eyewitness
account (sort-of) of those momentous days of surrender
Today, 8th May, 68 years ago, Nazi
Germany surrendered unconditionally, bringing to an end, after six long and
painful years, the European part of the Second World War.
Or was it yesterday the 7th? Or
tomorrow the 9th?
All three as it happens, as my
98-year-old and still sprightly father Walter, a dental surgeon, relates in
the recent reissue of his
memoirs. A squadron leader with the RAF, he was part of the
Normandy invasion of Europe, storming across France, Belgium and Germany,
striking terror into Nazi hearts, with a dental drill in one hand and a
forceps in the other:
Q U O T E
Shortly
after my orderly Harrington and I had settled near the northern German town
of Lüneberg
into our spacious, comfortable Luftwaffe quarters (recently vacated by the
hastily departing Germans), we heard, to our delight, the news on the radio
from the BBC that Germany had signed an Act of Military Surrender at Rheims
in France on 7th May 1945, thus bringing the European war to an end.
However we also learnt that Germany had already, three days
earlier on Friday 4th May, signed another unconditional surrender, of its
forces in northern Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. This ensued after
Hitler had blown his brains out in his Berlin bunker the previous Monday,
and proved to be the first of three surrenders.
At
1830 hours on the Friday, in a large tent at Lüneburg Heath in northern
Germany, Field Marshal Bernard Mont-gomery (“Monty”) accepted the
unconditional German surrender . It was signed for Germany by Admiral Hans
Georg von Friedberg of the navy and General Eberhard Kinzel of the army,
both of whom committed suicide a few weeks later by taking cyanide, and by
Major Fritz Gustav Friedl of the Gestapo who was tried for Holocaust war
crimes and later killed in a car crash.
At the time we ourselves, as mentioned, happened to be
billeted outside the town of Lüneberg only a few miles away. That evening,
just 2½ hours after the surrender to Monty, I received a signal informing me
officially of the order to cease hostilities as from the following morning
and directing that work “should continue as usual”. I have kept that
signal form carefully as a treasured memento (illustrated below). I
recollect as a schoolboy in the 1920s visiting a war museum in France with a
party from my south London school,
Rutlish, and
seeing a similar order among souvenirs of the Great War which had ended in
Europe on 11th November, 1918.
Transcript:
4 May Personal for Commanders –
From AOC
All hostilities on second army front cease at
0800 hours tomorrow May 5.
Work will continue as usual until orders are issued to contrary.
GCRAFR [General Command Royal Airforce Regiment] requested
instructed
RAFR units Date Time: 042055
[1945]
It is noteworthy that the Americans continued fighting right
up to the formal cessation of hostilities at 0800 hours on the Saturday. We
reckoned that many of them – especially the newer arrivals – regretted that
they could no longer kill any Germans.
An interesting story emerged in 2012 concerning the date of
the second surrender in Rheims on 7th May 1945, known since and commemorated
every year, as VE-Day, for “Victory in Europe”. (Actually, depending on what
country you are in, VE-Day is commemorated on the 7th or the 8th or the 9th
of May. This is because, as explained below, the third surrender was signed
late on the 8th which, further east, was already the 9th due to the time
difference.)
Edward Kennedy, then the forty-year-old Paris bureau chief
of the Associated Press news agency, was one of seventeen journalists
secretly flown by the military across France in a C-47 transport plane to
witness Germany’s second surrender in Rheims to the Americans and British at
0241 hours on that fateful morning of 7th May 1945. As a condition of this
privilege, they were sworn to secrecy under a news embargo that lasted for
the following 36 hours.
This was because US President Harry Truman and British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill had privately agreed to keep the historic
ceremony covert until the following day, when the Soviet Union would accept
the capitulation of German forces in Berlin. As a symbol of Allied
solidarity and a sop to the USSR’s tyrant Josef Stalin, the Big Three wanted
to announce the end of the war together and declare 8th May to be VE-Day.
Thus the third surrender, almost identical to the second, was indeed signed
in Berlin on that day, just before midnight, which for the Soviets was of
course just after midnight on 9th May. Hence the three VE-Days.
However Kennedy ruined their cunning plan for the surprise
announcement that they wanted to make only after the third surrender.
Having forewarned the US military censor of what he was
about to do, he then rang AP’s London office to dictate a story on the
(second) surrender on 7th May. This broke the embargo and ensured that the
bombshell exploded on the front pages of every newspaper subscribing to the
agency’s service the next day. Many consider this to be the greatest scoop
of all time.
Kennedy was promptly thrice denounced and excoriated –
by the sixteen
correspondents who had obeyed the rules,
by the Allied
authorities, and
by his boss
Robert McLean, then president of AP.
But Kennedy was unrepentant, pointing out that the embargo
had been imposed solely for political convenience, not to save lives or
protect military secrets. Moreover, Germany itself had alr eady announced
the surrender, at 1403 hours on 7th May in a radio broadcast from the city
of Flensburg then under Allied control, which was 670 km from Rheims.
Kennedy argued that from that moment the embargo was invalid: the news was
out and no harm could be done by declaring it to the world. He found it
absurd to bottle up an announcement of such magnitude and import.
At the time, however, his arguments fell on furious deaf
ears. Kennedy was expelled from France by the Allied authorities and his
career with AP was over. He died, still reviled by the establishment, in a
car crash at the age of 58 in 1963.
However, in 2012, 67 long years after his momentous scoop,
AP suddenly had a change of heart. Its CEO Tom Curley issued a
posthumous apology, to the joy of the intrepid reporter’s sole surviving
daughter Julia. Curley declared that Kennedy’s dismissal was a “great,
great tragedy” and hailed him as a reporter who did the “right thing”
and “stood up to power”.
My colleagues and I had no idea about these machinations,
but certainly the capitulation ceremony to the Soviets never made big news,
no doubt because Kennedy had effectively neutered it.
We enjoyed a tremendous VE-Day celebration that Monday
evening of 7th May. The fireworks (mostly signal rockets) and miscellaneous
pyrotechnics were fired in such profusion that we must have emptied the
magazines. Unfortunately we could find very few stores of liquor to empty.
Quote: “Please, as a 16-year-old who has no say in his death
sentence, who has no choice in the pain he is about to cause and who would
take any chance at even a few more months on this planet: appreciate what
you have, know that there are always other options and help is always there.”
Donal Walsh, 16, while dying
at home in Kerry of a tumour in his leg,
pleads eloquently for fellow teenagers to desist from suicide.
Quote: “Abortion is a crime against humanity ... Since Boston
College has not withdrawn its invitation and Mr Kenny has not declined it, I
shall not attend the graduation.”
Cardinal Sean O’Malley is boycotting a
graduation ceremony at
Boston College, a Jesuitical (and thus supposedly staunchly Catholic)
institution,
because it has invited as its keynote speaker
Enda Kenny, to whom it will also award an honorary degree.
Mr Kenny is Ireland's Taoiseach (prime
minister)
and the invitation reflects the college's long association with Ireland.
The Cardinal is taking this action because
Mr Kenny, who presents himself as a practicing Catholic,
is “aggressively
promoting abortion legislation” in Ireland,
which has hitherto been abortion-free.
Quote: “We wanted to send more
reinforcement to Benghazi. ... The people in Benghazi had been
fighting all night. ... But he told me he had not been authorized to go. The
vehicles needed to go. ... Lt
Colonel Gibson [commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command in
Africa] was furious. ... I had told him to bring our people home.
Apparently no one had been authorized to go.”
Gregory Hicks, former top US diplomat in
Libya.
He was testifying on 8th May in front of
the House Oversight and
Government Reforms Committee,
concerning the
seven-hour Jihadist attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi on
the eleventh anniversary of 9-11,
which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens
and three other Americans.
The Obama/Clinton administration refused to
send military help
that fateful night, then lied about the cause of the attack
- and the President went to bed.
As a result of his refusal to support the
Obama/Clilnton lies
about what happened, Mr Hicks, a career civil servant,
was
demoted from deputy chief of mission to desk officer.
Mr Hicks is a registered Democrat, who voted
for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries
and for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Yet he chose to speak the
truth.
Quote: “This land [the Gaza
Strip] has never
once been a Jewish land. Palestine is for the Arab Islamic nation.”
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a prominent
Islamic scholar and cleric, based in Qatar,
made famous by his popular TV show
and widely respected in the Muslim world.
Truth, objectivity and overall morality
have never been this cleric's
strong points.
“The Lemon Tree”, by Sandy
Tol (2006),
is a delightful novel-style history of modern Israel and Palestine told
through the eyes of a thoughtful protagonist from either side, with a
household lemon tree as their unifying theme.
But it's not
entirely honest in its subtle pro-Palestinian bias, and therefore needs
to be read in conjunction with an antidote, such as
This examines events which led to BP's 2010 Macondo blowout in
the Gulf of Mexico.
BP's ambitious CEO John Browne expanded BP through adventurous
acquisitions, aggressive offshore exploration, and relentless
cost-reduction that trumped everything else, even safety and long-term
technical sustainability.
Thus mistakes accumulated, leading to terrifying and deadly accidents in
refineries, pipelines and offshore operations, and business disaster in
Russia.
The Macondo blowout was but an inevitable outcome of a BP culture that
had become poisonous and incompetent.
However the book is gravely compromised by a
litany of over 40 technical and stupid
errors that display the author's ignorance and
carelessness.
It would be better
to wait for the second (properly edited) edition before buying.
As for BP, only a
wholesale rebuilding of a new, professional, ethical culture will
prevent further such tragedies and the eventual destruction of a once
mighty corporation with a long and generally honourable history.
This is
nonagenarian Alistair Urquhart’sincredible story of survival in the Far
East during World War II.
After recounting a
childhood of convention and simple pleasures in working-class Aberdeen,
Mr Urquhart is conscripted within days of Chamberlain declaring war on
Germany in 1939.
From then until the
Japanese are deservedly nuked into surrendering six years later, Mr
Urquhart’s tale is one of first discomfort but then following the fall
of Singapore of ever-increasing, unmitigated horror.
After a wretched
journey Eastward, he finds himself part of Singapore’s big but useless
garrison.
Taken prisoner when Singapore falls in
1941, he is, successively,
part of a death march to Thailand,
a slave labourer on the Siam/Burma
railway (one man died for every sleeper laid),
regularly beaten and tortured,
racked by starvation, gaping ulcers
and disease including cholera,
a slave labourer stevedoring at
Singapore’s docks,
shipped to Japan in a stinking,
closed, airless hold with 900 other sick and dying men,
torpedoed by the Americans and left
drifting alone for five days before being picked up,
a slave-labourer in Nagasaki until
blessed liberation thanks to the Americans’ “Fat Boy” atomic
bomb.
Chronically ill,
distraught and traumatised on return to Aberdeen yet disdained by the
British Army, he slowly reconstructs a life. Only in his late 80s
is he able finally to recount his dreadful experiences in this
unputdownable book.
There are very few
first-person eye-witness accounts of the the horrors of Japanese
brutality during WW2. As such this book is an invaluable historical
document.
+++++
“Culture of Corruption:
Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies”
This is a rattling good tale of the web
of corruption within which the American president and his cronies
operate. It's written by blogger Michele Malkin who, because she's both
a woman and half-Asian, is curiously immune to the charges of racism and
sexism this book would provoke if written by a typical Republican WASP.
With 75 page of notes to back up - in
best blogger tradition - every shocking and in most cases money-grubbing
allegation, she excoriates one Obama crony after another, starting with
the incumbent himself and his equally tricky wife.
Joe Biden, Rahm Emmanuel, Valerie Jarett,
Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Steven Rattner, both Clintons, Chris
Dodd: they all star as crooks in this venomous but credible book.
ACORN, Mr Obama's favourite community
organising outfit, is also exposed for the crooked vote-rigging machine
it is.
+++++
This much trumpeted sequel to
Freakonomics is a bit of disappointment.
It is really just
a collation of amusing
little tales about surprising human (and occasionally animal) behaviour
and situations. For example:
Drunk walking kills more people per
kilometer than drunk driving.
People aren't really altruistic -
they always expect a return of some sort for good deeds.
Child seats are a waste of money as
they are no safer for children than adult seatbelts.
Though doctors have known for
centuries they must wash their hands to avoid spreading infection,
they still often fail to do so.
Monkeys can be taught to use washers
as cash to buy tit-bits - and even sex.
The book has no real
message other than don't be surprised how humans sometimes behave and
try to look for simple rather than complex solutions.
And with a final
anecdote (monkeys, cash and sex), the book suddenly just stops dead in
its tracks. Weird.
++++++
A remarkable, coherent attempt by Financial Times economist Alan Beattie
to understand and explain world history through the prism of economics.
It's chapters are
organised around provocative questions such as
Why does asparagus come from Peru?
Why are pandas so useless?
Why are oil and diamonds more trouble
than they are worth?
Why doesn't Africa grow cocaine?
It's central thesis
is that economic development continues to be impeded in different
countries for different historical reasons, even when the original
rationale for those impediments no longer obtains. For instance:
Argentina protects its now largely
foreign landowners (eg George Soros)
Russia its military-owned
businesses, such as counterfeit DVDs
The US its cotton industry
comprising only 1% of GDP and 2% of its workforce
The author writes
in a very chatty, light-hearted matter which makes the book easy to
digest.
However it would
benefit from a few charts to illustrate some of the many quantitative
points put forward, as well as sub-chaptering every few pages to provide
natural break-points for the reader.
+++++
This is a thrilling book of derring-do behind enemy lines in the jungles
of north-east Burma in 1942-44 during the Japanese occupation.
The author was
a member of Britain's V Force, a forerunner of the SAS. Its remit was to
harass Japanese lines of
command, patrol their occupied territory, carryout sabotage and provide
intelligence, with the overall objective of keeping the enemy out of
India.
Irwin
is admirably yet brutally frank, in his
descriptions of deathly battles with the Japs, his execution of a
prisoner, dodging falling bags of rice dropped by the RAF, or collapsing
in floods of tears through accumulated stress, fear and loneliness.
He also provides some fascinating insights into the mentality of
Japanese soldiery and why it failed against the flexibility and devolved
authority of the British.
The book amounts to
a very human and exhilarating tale.
Oh, and Irwin
describes the death in 1943 of his colleague my uncle, Major PF
Brennan.
But
the coolest thing of all was this 
The renowned international psychiatrist, Islamic scholar and
philosopher Russell Brand concluded on 26th May in
I was
driving slowly home, up the Peak in Hong Kong, during a tremendous
rainstorm – not a typhoon. In Hong Kong we were used to typhoons but this was just heavy
and non stop rain. In town the 12-ft deep storm drains were overflowing
and water was fountaining up through the tarmac. Time to go home . 
Lt
Colonel Gibson [commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command in
Africa] was furious. ... I had told him to bring our people home.
Apparently no one had been authorized to go.”
never
once been a Jewish land. Palestine is for the Arab Islamic nation.”
