The end of Swiveleyesation as we know it?

Another magnificent coinage by the great Steve Bell:

Yesterday Malcolm was attempting to find some kind of historical context — or, failing that, the comedy of errors — which has led to the present Great Tory Bad-Hair Day.

Today Benedict Brogan writes his Morning Briefing for the Telegraph blogs, and sweepingly assumes it’s all water down the sink. Happy Days are Hair Again. The skies above are clear again. So we’ll sing a song of cheer again:

Well, almost:

Cast your eyes along the waterfront this morning after the night before and you might conclude that things are fairly dire for Dave. He’s suffered another major rebellion (I know, I know it was a free vote, but he still failed to persuade his colleagues to follow his lead), there’s lashings of backbiting, and he’s been reduced to sending a pleading ‘Dear Mr Loon, I still love you’ letter to his members, something even American commentators have picked up on as a bad look. Nick Watt, a keen reader of Tory runes, spots a sea-change in attitudes to Dave among MPs and raises the prospect of a move against him in The Guardian, with more letters going in to Graham Brady. As I mention in my column, grown ups inside No10 realise that they are stuck with a number of what they refer to as ‘legacy issues’, from not winning the 2010 election to the gay marriage idea.

The rest of Brogan’s musings stretch for, but don’t quite reach a Panglossian optimum:

Much of what has excited us in recent weeks will have passed the voters by, and after tonight’s vote gay marriage will be on its way to becoming law, and passing out of the current political debate. With the economy slowly improving and Labour wallowing, the Tories surely should be able to claw themselves off the rocks. This will require a fair wind, and a commitment by Mr Cameron and those around him to sharpen up. It also means not surrendering to the bullying disguised as advice from those agitating against Dave, whether it’s David Davis or Lord Ashcroft. The recess starts today, a good opportunity for everyone to calm down and for the PM to have a think about how he organises himself from now on.

[For the record, Voltaire in 1759 is parodying Leibnitz of 1698: not many people know that.]

Legacy issues

Such was the vein into which history-mining Malcolm was driving his shaft with yesterday’s piece. Let us then consider what rich ore Brogan has found:

Gay marriage served as a stark reminder of just how far removed Dave’s world view often seems from his troops. As The Guardian notes, the inter-generational divisions in the Tory party were particularly stark. Sir Gerald Howarth, the former defence minister last year knighted on the PM’s advice, warned in yesterday’s debate of an “aggressive homosexual community” in the country. Edward Leigh lamented that the “outlandish views of the loony left of the 1980s” had become “embedded in high places”.

Really? Really! It’s all those gays? Hardly!

Brogan concludes by passing us and the tar-baby onto Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times. Ganesh asserts it’s 2010 and All That:

… the election that should detain David Cameron is the last one. The prime minister’s estrangement from his party has many causes – the inexhaustibly vexed question of Europe, the same-sex marriage bill he takes to Parliament this week – but the rancour really set in with his failure to win in 2010. This original sin led to coalition with the Liberal Democrats, a political miscegenation that turns Tory stomachs, and broke the unspoken covenant that allows a leader to be as autocratic as he likes as long he delivers. Last week, a prime ministerial ally was reported to have disparaged the party’s grassroots as “swivel-eyed loons”. “Arrogant losers” tends to be the rejoinder.

Ganesh then reprises the course of the 2010 Tory election campaign, concluding:

For all the campaign’s haplessness, the Tories ended it with roughly the same poll lead over Labour as they began it. Mr Cameron was still preferred by voters to his party. The campaign was a non-event, as they usually are. The real reason for the Tories’ failure had more to do with the economic insecurity that nagged at voters when shown blueprints for austerity by a party they already mistrusted. That the economy was slithering out of recession at the same time hardened their risk aversion. Fiscal clarity made for bad short-term politics, and yet the blame has somehow gone to other, softer aspects of the Tory offering.

The Conservatives did not fail because they were seen as high-minded metropolitans, but because they were too redolent of the same old Tories. They had changed too little, not too much. The people who should have been vindicated by 2010 were the modernisers. But their chronic passivity, their lordly distaste for a fight, has allowed a misremembered version of that election to become the definitive history. This is undermining Mr Cameron and shaping a future in which only the ideologically orthodox can lead the Tories.

That is indeed the “high-quality journalism” that the FT prudently reminds low-life, thieving types (like Malcolm, shamelessly ripping of those extracts) needs paying for. [Again, for the record, Malcolm happily pays for the print edition, especially at weekends, if only to pre-empt what he knows the Sundays will regurgitate as original thought.]

Two small details (1):

Those televised debates (and Cameron’s foolish participation in televised debates that he flunked) really screwed up the opinion polls. In a different context (to which we may come in a moment), Malcolm was reviewing just how the 2010 polling went. The answer is not very well:

Got that? The main impact of the televised debates was to flatter the LibDem vote by anything between 3% and 6% (which amounts to gross “data artifact“), while under-rating Tory support just slightly, and Labour’s quite significantly. One might feel that Cameron & co. have been blinded by those errors ever since.

Two small details (2):

On their perception of the election result, and of the “reliability” of the LibDems, the Cameron & co. “modernisers” entered their Mephistophelean pact with Clegg & co. — two capitalist combines monopolising the market for their short-term profit. Let’s have another 18th-century great intellect’s view on that:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (see page 111 in this e-text)

An alternative history

Wind back to Friday, 7th May, 2010, with the last of the 649 results coming in (the 650th, a safe Tory seat — Thirsk and Malton, was delayed by the death of a candidate). This is what we saw:

• Tories: 305 (and bound to be 306);
• Labour: 258, plus Caroline Lucas, the Green for Brighton Pavilion, and Sylvia Herman, likely to attend infrequently but then vote with Labour (so call it around 260);
• Lib Dems: 57, plus Naomi Long for Alliance in East Belfast (so 58 at a pinch);
• DUP: 8;
• SNP: 6;
• SDLP, Plaid Cymru: 3 apiece.

The Speaker is neutral, though votes for the government in a tie, and Sinn Féin are non-attenders (so, n=650-6). A cynical calculation is the cash-strapped sand bruised Labour and LibDem contingents aren’t too keen on a quick re-run; but, more to the point, there are at least a score of odds-and-sods turkeys there who can’t afford to vote for Christmas (sayn n=650-26). The most basic “working majority” would be, in practice, well short of the nominal 326 (the calculation above suggests 312 at most)— and Dave’s Tories are within a spit of just that.

So, in the short term, Dave’s Tories could talk the talk, cobble a “confidence and supply” arrangement with even the DUP (306+8=314), and walk the walk through until a second election in the autumn. By which moment Tory coffers, uniquely among the main operators, would be topped up by the grateful and expectant clique of bond-traders and hedge-funders.

A second election, please note, that could have been contrived by losing a vote of confidence on some populist issue (immigration?). A second election, too, in which the Tory economic record would be buffed up by the tail-end of Alistair Darling’s economics (it was only in the autumn of 2010, thanks to Osborne’s austerity, that the UK economy went into flat-lining).

In short, had Cameron done the right thing, the Tory thing, he would now likely be sitting on a secure Tory majority, and figuring his way to calling the next election at his choosing, on his terms, and not on those of the LibDem dictated Fixed-term Parliaments Act. He would also have enjoyed the benefits of a greater patronage for Tory backbench nonentities, not having to service the self-esteem of LibDem nonentities.

All the Tory back-benchers, and the wannabes out in the cold have done that math. The iron has entered their souls.

One last thing

We were looking there at how the polling companies had cocked it up. Enter the new-boy on the block, Survation. Ben Brogan (see above) gave that a nod in passing:
The fightback could just start here. Though from a low base if you believe a new Survation poll in The Guardian. It has the Tories down to 24 pc – just two points above Ukip.

Look closer, and we find The Guardian, doesn’t give Survation more than the time of day.

Andrew Sparrow counters with the YouGov/Sun numbers:

Last night Survation released a poll showing the Tories just two points ahead of Ukip.

Here are the figures.
Labour: 39% (down 1 from YouGov in the Sunday Times)
Conservatives: 31% (up 2)
Ukip: 14% (no change)
Lib Dems: 10% (up 1)
Labour lead: 8 points (down 3)
Government approval: -34 (up 5)

Finally, let’s hear it from Anthony Wells (whose shock-factor is also set to minimum):

Survation have put out a new poll, the topline voting intention figures are CON 24%(-5), LAB 35%(-1), LD 11%(-1), UKIP 22%(+6). The 22% for UKIP is the first poll to show them breaking the twenty percent mark.
In many ways the high UKIP score here shouldn’t come as a surprise, for methodological reasons Survation tend to show the highest levels of UKIP support so if ICM have them at 18% and ComRes at 19% I would have expected Survation to have them in the low twenties. Striking it may be, but the increase in UKIP support is actually in line with what weve seen elsewhere, just using a method that is kinder to UKIP.
More interesting is the drop in Tory support, down five points on Survation’s poll in April. The poll was conducted on Friday and Saturday so at least partially after the “swivel eyed loon” story broke (it came out in Saturday’s papers, so broke about 10pm on Friday night). All the usual caveats I apply to any poll showing sharp or unusual results apply. Sure, it might indicate a shift in support, but just as likely its a blip – wait to see if it is reflected in any other polling. As Twyman’s Law of market research says “anything surprising or interesting is probably wrong”.

As Wells implies, there, swallowing Survation might not produce the glorious summer the Kippers expect. More likely, “up like the rocket, and down like the stick”: UKIP is hardly the best-presented pyrotechnic in the box.

Swiveleyesation may endure yet.

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

“Easy!” says Malcolm. “Shylock to Salarino, Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene 1″. And so it is.

For pricks have been a big topic around these parts of late. The matter had been raised (ahem!) by Ms Treneman of The Times, in connection with James Wharton MP:

His majority was tiny (332) and he had made the news for being linked with a company that sells stone statues of giant penises.

What Malcolm had not fully appreciated was the full story of …

James and the Giant Peach Penis

The full story is courtesy of the Chronicle (Malcolm’s regular read in his first teaching post on Teesside), under the arresting title:

Stockton Tory MP’s bid to get cash for his pal
A NEW Tory MP tried to help a former Conservative colleague who sells giant penis statues get £30,000 in Government aid.

The credited author, Adrian Pearson, continues:

Stockton South MP James Wharton is facing criticism after he wrote to jobs quango One North East asking them to speed up a grant to Trocabart, a company run by his former Conservative party pal Jason Hadlow.

The newly elected MP asked spending chiefs to hand over £30,000 as “a priority” to his mate whose other company Simply Dutch was at the centre of a media storm earlier this year when police seized a four-foot tall sandstone statue of a penis following indecency complaints.

Mr Hadlow, a former chairman of Yarm’s Conservative Association and now an independent councillor, hopes to create dozens of jobs in Teesside by expanding the secondhand goods market. To help his business plans, Mr Hadlow asked One North East for a grant but soon hit a problem after the Conservative party nationally ordered the development agency to freeze business support.

As the cuts began to bite, Mr Wharton contacted One North East in June saying he had met with the firm and wanted to know why it hadn’t been given any cash yet. The MP had campaigned against the need for a jobs agency in the run up to the General Election. When spending chiefs explained to him that they were powerless to act because his own party had ordered a freeze, Mr Wharton took the issue to Parliament and asked written questions to the Department for Business in July to see when the grants would be freed up again.

Let’s get that straight:

• Our James had campaigned for one policy, and promptly (once elected) reversed his position.
• He was lobbying against a ConDem policy he had voted for in Parliament.
• He was doing so out of personal friendship and fellowship.
• He had the notion that a national policy could be reversed for his political and local ends.

Yes. We’ve got that. Sounds eminently … err … reasonably. Well, subjectively so.

… his former Conservative party pal Jason Hadlow

Malcolm knows when he is hearing a bit more than is said.

Jason Hadlow is a fifty-something (+/-) who was six years the perpetual mayor of that nice little, tight little town of Yarm.

• In October last year he announced his intention to resign his position.
• He walked out of a council meeting, and declared that any subsequent business was illegitimate.
• He had been involved (literally) in a spat with a fellow councillor (an elderly lady, Cllr Marjorie Simpson of the Yarm Independents, whom we shall meet later in this post). Hadlow said she had spat upon him and punched him. Despite his submission, the Police did not proceed with any charges.
• He had deliberately infringed the parking restrictions, as a way of challenging the regulations (this whole business — Yarm versus Stockton — cost Yarm some £70,ooo in legal costs).

Simply Dutch

That was the curious name of Mayor Hadlow’s store in Leeming Bar, North Yorkshire. Last year he suddenly closed it, sacked his staff, then as suddenly re-opened:

selling unusual furniture, homewares and antiques.

It was, apparently, all the fault of the weather. Simply Dutch seems also to operate via the Internet, with strong lines in replica guns, samurai swords and  “militaria” (as right).

That apart, let’s be honest: what do things “Dutch” imply in the lowest popular mind? Oak furniture (Mayor Hadlow’s version)? Or could it involve 200 hundred coffee shops — which are definitively not the same as cafés — in Amsterdam and their Bond van Cannabis Detaillisten (and there’s a clue)?

On that basis, what was HM Customs to believe when Mayor Hadlow imported a vast fibreglass dinosaur through the port of Hull? Right! They impounded it, and sent for the sniffer dogs, on the possibility that it might have “contents”.

Subsequently Simply Dutch went for the Big Time. A huge sandstone phallus, apparently one of 200 hundred made in Indonesia for which English gardens were in crying need, was put on public display in the shop window. Susceptible passers-by complained. The Police (spoilsports!) confiscated the object. A public order offence was issued: Mayor Hadlow was fined £80. He fomented a “Free Willy” campaign (Geddit?), and involved Janick Gers of heavy-metal rockers Iron Maiden,  a North-Easterner from Hartlepool, whose family home, coincidentally, is in Yarm.

Further back …

The earliest connection Malcolm sees between Hadlow and Wharton is in October 2007:

Following the local elections in May 2007, Yarm Town Council was made up of 9 Conservative councillor and 2 independents. Four months later James Earl resigned. The Local Government Acts 1972 states that once a resignation is received by the appropriate person, it takes effect immediately. Four days later James Earl withdrew his resignation.

The Council Chairman, (then-Conservative Councillor), Jason Hadlow, took the advice of a trainee solicitor, James Wharton, already the prospective Conservative candidate for Stockton South. At the subsequent Council meeting Hadlow first admitted he had read the letter (which made the resignation absolute and legal — that was also the advice of David Bond, the Director of Law and Democracy of Stockton Borough Council), then was advised by our trainee solicitor Wharton that he had not read the letter. So he hadn’t.

“Excellent”

It is remarkable, too, how often in Mr Wharton’s estimation Mayor Hadlow makes “an excellent speech”: not only at Yarm Fair (October 2009) but again at the lighting of the Christmas tree (December 2009). Was it the same speech? And then there are those repetitive mentions of Yarm’s excellent Conservative run Town Council and how Jason leads an excellent team of Town and Borough Councillors.

As to how many occasions Wharton spent some time discussing the issues facing Yarm with Town Council Chairman, Jason Hadlow, only Google may tell us.

♥ It must be love ♥

Not all are so taken.

Andrew Calcutt does a blog at newscompositor. He did a little skit on Clockwork Orange (where a giant penis is also a participant):

There was me and my three droogs, that is Dave, Georgie and Dim, and we sat in the Metrovia Milkbar trying to make up our rassodocks what to do about Europe. Dim, also known as Jim Whart, announces he’s up for a bit of the old in-out, in-out referendum on EU membership. Better to resolve the situation, he says. Release the pent-up frustration among grassroots activists so that afterwards we can focus on that which ordinary malchick- and devotchka-voters are worrying about all the time, namely ‘the cost of living’.

When he used that antiquated phrase – viddy well, oh my brothers, ‘the cost of living’ was last spoken of before there were even videos – the bile in me started to rise. I thought I could hear the blissful music of dear old Ludwig Van urging me to visit some actual ultra-violet upon Dim and his ilk; upon all the mad, swivel-eyed loons who populate the party with their outdated, provincial customs and embarrassing clothes.\

I looked across the table at Dim-Jim: still in his twenties and already the first signs of the-comb-over-to-come; veteran of the Officer Training Corps at Durham University where he studied law – making him the conservative conservatives’ conservative.  Why, oh my metrosexual brothers, is the party stuffed with such Dim antediluvians, dinosaurs who would stamp the life out of our ultra-modern, frictionless Westminster Village with their flat feet encased in socks and sandals? Watching his pudgy round face – surely the face of a boy who’s been carrying a briefcase since his first day at secondary school – I thought of the giant, model penis we had nicked from an artist’s house earlier that night, and I couldn’t stop thinking of ramming it right into him.

The latest thing

There is a delicious account, in — of all places — the Daily Star, of Hadlow’s more recent doings. It begins:

A MAYOR has quit after claiming he was assaulted, spat at and punched in town hall bust-ups with other councillors.

Tory Jason Hadlow alleged one of his political rivals turned up drunk for a town council meeting clutching a pint of cider, then chased him and another councillor out of the chamber.

The mayor said he has been sent poison pen letters and last May found posters all over his neighbourhood alleging he ran the town like former Chilean dictator General Pinochet, who tortured and killed political opponents.

Other posters appeared portraying the mayor of Yarm as Pinocchio – the Disney character famous for telling lies.

We are deep into Miss Marple territory here:

Last October Cleveland Police confirmed a man had been cautioned for sending poison pen letters to the mayor.

The notes had been sent to Mr Hadlow’s home, his ex-wife’s house and to Yarm Town Hall. He said he also received abusive fax messages, some calling him a “little shit and liar” and others saying “I hope you die”.

Welcome back an earlier acquaintance:

But the mayor’s rivals on the council claim the only person to turn up worse for wear from drink at meetings was him.

Councillor Marjorie Simpson said: “People who sit near him at meetings know he’s been drinking before he comes. He goes to the Black Bull. I’ve got a 100% attendance record at the council meetings and I’ve never seen the mayor or anyone else being chased out of the town hall.”

Let’s end at our beginning, with the ex-Mayor and his willy:

Back from the future

Malcolm would have to admit Mark Pack came as close as anyone yet to defining why UKIP causes cringing:

Some of UKIP’s support comes from places the Liberal Democrat should leave well alone — especially those yearning for a 1950s-style society of white men at work, white women at home and gays in the closet.

Why only LibDems, Mark? And why only Some of UKIP’s support?

An agenda for retrogression

Meanwhile, there are the opening four paragraphs of Tim Montgomerie’s piece in this Monday’s Times [£]. These provide as good a check-list of the present Tory malaise as you’ll find; so let’s rip them from behind the pay-wall:

Spend most of your time as Tory leader ignoring the issue that matters most to your activist members: Europe. Launch your bid to be leader by promising to introduce a tax allowance for married couples and then, once you’ve won power, fail to deliver that pledge at four successive Budgets. Tell parents that they can set up any school they want as long as it’s not the one they most want, a grammar school.Stop Gordon Brown holding a honeymoon election in 2007 by promising to abolish inheritance tax but then put it up in office. Spend the general election campaign talking about an issue that no one understands — the Big Society — and don’t talk about immigration, an issue that three-quarters of voters do care about. Subsidise expensive renewable energies at a time when families are struggling to pay their electricity bills.

Form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats even though 80 per cent of your members want you to lead a minority government. Promise not to reorganise the NHS, then reorganise it anyway. Oppose press regulation but then embrace it. Keep pledging to tackle European human rights laws but do nothing when Abu Qatada proves again and again that Britain is run by inventive lawyers rather than democratically-drafted laws.

Insist that you want to reach out to northern and poorer parts of Britain but stuff your Downing Street operation with southern chums who attended the same elite private schools as you. And, just for good measure, insult people who normally vote for your party as clowns, fruitcakes and closet racists.

There are six policy-points there, and counting, that Malcolm, as most decent types (probably including Mark Pack) must find close to abominable; but we’re not Tories, and we’re not seduced by Farage’s forked tongue to bite his rotten apple.

Even so, as Clegg was so emphatic that Europe was his main reason for urging Gordon Brown not to resign, to allow more time to knock sense into the Tories, we might reasonably ask: “How well is that one going, Nick?”

The light of evening, 11th May 2010

No election is a “good one to lose”; but that last one came close.

Any incoming administration was going to have to spatchcock a programme out of nowhere. Alistair Darling had already gone a fair distance in sketching one out. That Gids Osborne, not Darling, was the recipient of the poisoned chalice will tax future historians in finding enough ordure to chuck.

Instead we got Alec Issigonis’ (attrib) horse is a camel designed by a committee. The committee being the now-infamous “quad” of Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, and Alexander. Read that as an interior decorator’s otherwise-unemployable son, an EU apparatchik, a huckster for a Scottish ski-lift, presided over by the:

PR man for Carlton, the world’s worst television company. And a poisonous, slippery individual he was, too.

No! No! Who was spawned was even more hideous! The ConDem creature came straight out of Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein:

The Monster: For as long as I can remember people have hated me. They looked at my face and my body and they ran away in horror. In my loneliness I decided that if I could not inspire love, which is my deepest hope, I would instead cause fear. I live because this poor half-crazed genius, has given me life. He alone held an image of me as something beautiful and then, when it would have been easy enough to stay out of danger, he used his own body as a guinea pig to give me a calmer brain and a somewhat more sophisticated way of expressing myself.

What could possibly dissuade us from confidently predicting a quick ride to Hell in a handcart? Who could doubt there was something even more horrible and unprincipled waiting in the wings, stage right?

And then all our fears were doubly underlined: it was going to be gothic Dickensian as well:

• Veneerings in 10 Downing Street: bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London.
• Thomas Gradgrind for education minister: A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over.
• Josiah Bounderby slashing-and-burning what was left of local government:  A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was the Bully of humility.
• Culture courtesy of the Dodger: as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; … all the airs and manners of a man. … He was, altogether, as roystering and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six, or something less, in his bluchers.
• Health in the claws of Quilp: … his complexion was one of that kind which never looks clean or wholesome. But what added most to the grotesque expression of his face was a ghastly smile, which, appearing to be the mere result of habit and to have no connection with any mirthful or complacent feeling.
•  Bumble the Beadle for welfare:

Oh yes, this is looking distinctly due for disaster.

Let’s change the literary media and revert to Young Frankenstein for Gids Frankenstein’s economic experiment on the British body politic:

[after failing to bring the creature to life] Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Nothing.
Inga: Oh, Doctor, I’m sorry.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: No. No. Be of good cheer. If science teaches us anything, it teaches us to accept our failures, as well as our successes, with quiet dignity and grace. [starts beating up the creature] Son of a bitch! Bastard! I’ll get you for this! What did you do to me? What did you do to me?

Laugh and the world laughs with you

At least one is allowed to laugh at, and with Mel Brooks. The imperial and imperious Cameroonie ukase has gone out that UKIP are no longer “clowns”. Well, respectable thesps do tend to look down on lesser theatrical species.

And that is a shame.

For, if there is anything more ludicrous than the pantomime camel that rules us, it is the troupe of performing Kippers.

What other “party” has been so prone to splits and harbouring frauds? How many kipper MEPs have cast themselves adrift, unable to stomach any longer the overweening pump and pomp of Farage?

And, what — may we ask — are kipper policies? The next mile-stones are the EU-elections (in which the kippers expect to do well) and the Scottish referendum (on which they might be expected to have an opinion). Try the Scottish UKIP websites and you find:

Not Found

The requested URL /scotland was not found on this server.

Hielan laddies

UKIP have a “Scottish chairman”. He is one Mike Scott-Hayward, a former Tory councillor … a former army major and ex-coastguard officer. And then we have the amazing political-chameleon,

UKIP’s first Scottish spokesman is Mike Haseler, an energy sector researcher from East Dunbartonshire. He was a Liberal Democrat candidate in Watford in the 1990s and stood for the Greens for the Holyrood elections in 2003.

Haseler has a blog, which explains what a well-rounded specimen he is: a self-proclaimed expert in physics, electronics and some philosophy, studying archaeology, learned Danish to understand the competition, worked in the wind industry (surely, a given for a politico) but is now a climate-change doubter. According to his blog, he joined UKIP as long ago as March, 2013. A “March violet“, indeed. Yet, a person of outstanding merit, to have risen so quickly from aspirant member to “first Scottish spokesman”.

As for “policy”, the aim seems to be to render Scotland into an administered colony:

Although UKIP wants to scrap MSPs, it says it would hold on to the Scottish Parliament, with MPs handling affairs on their doorstep three days a week and UK matters at Westminster the other two.

Presumably, some Tory presence would be required in Edinburgh were there ever to be a Tory government in Westminster. So we can confidently expect the Dáil Éireann solution of a nominated “taoiseach’s eleven” to keep the natives in order.

Slugging it out

Much of this came together in Malcolm’s recent recollection of Julian Critchley.

Critchley was a close buddy of Michael Heseltine, a dandy, a bon-viveur, a man-about-town, possessed of considerable wit, a sharp pen and a waspish tongue. As the Tory MP for Rochester between 1959-64, then retreaded for Aldershot for 1970-1997, that absence cost him promotion in the interim. He was a “country member” of the Westminster club, commuting for whipped votes from Ludlow. He was , by any contemporary standard, wringing”wet”, as the Guardian obituary summed him —

a liberal Tory, supporting one-nation social policies, membership of the European Community, and a defence policy based on Nato and a nuclear strategy. He would have been a natural and able young ally for Edward Heath, campaigning for him against the Conservative right, which was increasingly hostile to the Rome Treaty and current levels of public spending.

Everything that the present Tory tendency is not.

His saving grace was as a gad-fly to whom Thatcher never took (and whom he mocked disgracefully — it was he, not as frequently-cited Denis Healey, who stuck on her the moniker, “the Great She-Elephant”). As a result the ministerial team was denied one of the brighter sparks in sight.

Malcolm’s reason for this memory is that Critchley deplored the dumbing-down of the Tory Party, and the arrival of the “garagistes” (we stand correction on that spelling, though we can be sure Critchley would have made it as effete as possible). The “garagistes” were the golf-club nineteenth-holers, the wide boys, the “Essex men” who came to infest the Tory Party under Thatcher.

So, three decades on, and the change of a single initial letter F for g, we are fulfilling his prophecy, with Nigel of the cheesy grin and the ever-ready pint, as the apotheosis of all things garagiste.

Getting there, song wise

Friday, so slow views-day.

Sooner or later every long-term blog-artist is reduced to this one: songs with a common meme or — if you’re really unlucky and can’t click elsewhere quick enough — a common theme.

So:

• Dolly empathetically came Down from Dover —

• The Bangles were Going Down to Liverpool (with, in this case, a justifiably-unconvinced Mr Nimoy);
• The Drive-By Truckers, all coked up, were bound Greenville to Baton Rouge;
• Lee Ann Womack, having made it A Little Past Little Rock,  was in her two-bed waterfront flat reflecting on the million-miles and half-a-day trip from Montgomery to Memphis. We can pass over that one (though anything by and with Womack is worth the earing), to recall it was a more political distance for Martin Luther King.

There are many, many more.

Malcolm is not looking for the standard songs-with-placenames shtick here: it the A to B (and preferably via C, D, E …) that’s keeping him checking. And, of course, someone tried to get there before him and spoils the fun.

Yet, there’s a bit more to be said about these “distance songs”.

First they should be something better than a list of names, which rules out, for this purpose anyway, I’ve Been Everywhere, Man — originally Australian, more widely recognised in the Hank Snow US-specific effort. It also takes off the list stuff like Dave Loggins’s excellent (especially the Joan Baez rendering) Please Come to Boston — although it states a westward migration (Boston, Denver, L.A.), that isn’t entirely explained. Aw, shucks: let’s have it anyway:

Into the drossy zone

One that always has Malcolm a bit leery is C.W.McCall’s Convoy. Yes, yes: he knows he should scorn it (especially the “PG-variant” variant, which makes no geographical sense whatsoever), but Sam Peckinpah made a decent fist of it:

Bobbie Troup’s seminal Route 66 qualifies as a prime example of what Malcolm has in mind, because it does take us logically from place-to-place.

What intrigues is the YouTube vid is from 1964. So, who is following whom? Did Troup learn to swing it from the Matt King Cole classic? Or did Cole get it from an earlier Troup (who was, after all, no mean practioner)?

Number One?

Well, Malcolm is opting out on that — because he reckons there should be a separate posting on railways journeys, and the all-out Number One is on steel wheels. More, anon. And he’s not sure whether Highway 61 Revisited qualifies. At which point despair sets in: how to do proper justice to Highway 61, Roosevelt Sykes, Mississippi Fred McDowell and all. The problem is that US61 is not the entirety of “Highway 61″: that is more metaphorical than cartographical for the whole migration from the Deep South.

But for a walking journey (although she got on this airplane just to fly)  Emmylou is the pace-maker, with the elegy to Gram Parsons, going Boulder to Birmingham:

Incomprehension

Good fences make good neighbors

Robert Frost, of course, hence the spelling:

There where it is we do not need the wall: 
He is all pine and I am apple orchard. 
My apple trees will never get across 
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.

As is generally accepted, the proverb goes far further back than Frost in 1914. Benjamin Franklin had it in Poor Richard’s Almanack, in the form:

Love your neighbor; yet don’t pull down your hedge.

Clearly it was a well-worn axiom, even then.

Or, as Dominic Behan — ambiguously — had it:

The sea, oh the sea is the gradh geal mo croide
Long may it stay between England and me
It’s a sure guarantee that some hour we’ll be free
Oh! thank God we’re surrounded by water.

Somehow that was transported (like much else) to Newfoundland, where Joan Morrissey gave it new life:

The whole point of the relationship of the Celt and the Saxon is mutual incomprehension. It is a gaping chasm dividing the nearest of neighbours. A couple of the Great Moments of Anglo-Irish history were:

• Queen Elizabeth I being verbally lambasted (in Irish) by Shane O’Neill (6th January 1562):

John Onell the Frenshman who had don much myschief the sommer past in Ireland cometh by save condytt into England and was receved gentelly in the courte in his saffron shorte the twelveth day at night. He accuseth the erle of Sussex of great crymes, crueltie, breache of promyse, putting to death of divers contrary to promyse and saue conduytt, pilling and polling etc.

O’Neill and his party were the subject of much chatter at Court. They were so unlike us, my dear. The version given on electricscotland.com is strong on romantic imagination, if nothing else:

Few scenes could be more picturesque than this visit of the great Ulster chieftain to the capital of his unknown sovereign. As he came striding down the streets of London on his way to the Palace, attended by his train of gallowglasse armed with the battleaxe, his was indeed a figure to strike the imagination. Like the great golden eagle from far-off Donegal, when seen among homely surroundings, Shane the Proud impressed those who gazed at him as being indeed a king of men. He stalked into the Court, his saffron mantle sweeping round and round him, his hair curling on his back and clipped short below the eyes, which gleamed from under it with a grey lustre. Behind him followed his gallowglasse, their heads bare, their fair hair flowing on their shoulders, their linen vests dyed with saffron, with long and open sleeves, surcharged with shirts of mail which reached to their knees, a wolf-skin flung across their shoulders, and short, broad battle-axes in their hands.

The redoubtable chief had no reason to be dissatisfied with his reception. The Council, the peers, bishops, aldermen, dignitaries of all kinds, were present in state, and the assembly included ambassadors from the King of Sweden and the Duke of Savoy.

O’Neill, later that same year, sweetened the occasion by sending Elizabeth, through Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, a present of two horses, two hawks, and two Irish wolfdogs.

• Then early in September 1593, Gráinne Ní Mháille (a.k.a. Grace O’Malley), de facto (leaving aside any legalistic details) lord of Umhall Uachtarach, came to Greenwich to make her complaints.

Let’s hear it from Mary O’Dowd, writing for the Dictionary of National Biography:

On her husband’s death, O’Malley, according to her own account, ‘gathered together all her own followers and with 1000 head of cows and mares’ went to live in Carraighowley Castle, co. Mayo, on part of her late husband’s territory, where she continued to ‘maintain herself and her people by sea and land’ . She may initially have established friendly relations with the new president of Connaught, Sir Richard Bingham, but she and her sons soon fell out with his regime. Owen was killed by the president’s brother George Bingham in 1586 and O’Malley was imprisoned and threatened with death. Theobald was maintained in the president’s household for some time as a pledge.

O’Malley was implicated in the Burke rebellions of 1586 and 1588 by Sir Richard Bingham, who accused her of drawing Scottish mercenary soldiers into co. Mayo. Her actions suggest, however, that she was primarily concerned to protect the interests of her immediate family and particularly those of Theobald. By 1591 Theobald had emerged as the leading Burke and the strongest contender for the position of MacWilliam but despite submitting to the government he was still regarded with suspicion. Her son’s arrest precipitated O’Malley’s visit to Elizabeth I in the summer of 1593. A remarkable aspect of O’Malley’s petitions was that she acted as spokesperson for the men in her family. She asked the queen for the release of her son and of her brother, who had also been arrested by Bingham. She also requested that her two sons and two other male members of the Burke family be given letters patent for their lands. As a widow under English common law, O’Malley also laid claim to dower from the land of the O’Malleys and of the O’Flahertys. In a much quoted passage she explained that a widow under Gaelic law had no right to her husband’s land. The royal visit was a success from O’Malley’s point of view. Bingham was ordered by Elizabeth to release Theobald and to grant O’Malley maintenance from her husbands’ lands. As a demonstration of loyalty, O’Malley claimed that she had ‘procured all her sons, cousins and followers of the O’Malleys’, with a number of galleys (some newly built on her return from London) to assist the Elizabethan forces in the Mayo area . The Irish administration was, none the less, slow to implement the queen’s instructions and in 1595 O’Malley made another visit to London, renewing her requests for herself and her male relatives.

There are umpteen accounts of the meeting of O’Malley and Elizabeth — the number of them alone testifies to the strangeness of the occasion, of two worlds colliding. Here is E. Owens Blackburne, doing one of those mid-Victorian (1877) shelf-fillers,  in Illustrious Irishwomen: Being Memoirs of Some of the Most Noted Irishwomen:

Tradition says that Grainne O’Mailly and her retinue performed the entire journey by sea, and sailed up the Thames to the Tower Gate. In this case tradition does not seem to be far wrong, for her little son, Theobald, or Toby, who was born during the journey, was called, Tioboid-na-Lung, or “Theobald of the Ship.”

The meeting of the two royal ladies must have been a strange sight, — the light-haired, light-eyed, fair-faced and rather shrewish-looking Elizabeth, and the swarthy, black-eyed, and black-haired Queen of Connaught. That the latter and her retainers were not attired in the then prevailing mode is pretty certain; but it may also be positively stated that, whatever was the fashion of their habiliments, the texture and workmanship would have borne comparison with any to be found at the Court. For in Ireland, from the earliest ages, skilled needlework was held in the highest esteem.

There are many traditional accounts of this memorable interview, but the chief and best result of it was that it consolidated the treaty already made between Grainne and Elizabeth. At the same time the Irish chieftainess although expressing herself grateful for the protection afforded by the English Government did not cede one inch of her royal dignity. The English Queen offered to create her a countess ; to which Grainne replied that she could not do so, as they were both equal in rank. But she said she would accept a title for her little son Toby, who had been born on the passage from Ireland. Accordingly, the infant was brought into Court, and then and there created Viscount Mayo ; from whom the present noble family of the Earls of Mayo is descended.

When the Irish chieftainess arrived at the English Court, she described herself as “Grainne O’Mailly, daughter of Doodarro O’Mailly, sometime chief of the country called Upper Owle O’Mailly, now called the Barony of Murasky.” This statement rather puzzled Elizabeth, who knew that Grainne was a married woman, until it was explained to her that it was customary amongst the Irish for the women to retain their maiden names after marriage.

They haven’t gone away, you know

The cultural differences extend well into the 21st century. Hence the Celt (who has a more intimate experience of the pained relationship) views the Saxon with amused contempt; while the return glance — when it is deigned to be afforded — remains devoid of real understanding.

The whole thing was writ small and neatly summed by a letter on The Guardian website, reproduced in the Saturday Review section. It’s from a regular contributor to the Books pages, poet, and publisher. The topic is Hilary Mantel’s London Review of Books article:

Given Cameron’s role in this affair, it’s difficult for an Irish person not to take some unwonted pride in a recent speech by much-maligned Irish poet-president Michael D Higgins; Joyce, Beckett, Marx, Sartre, de Beauvoir were all name-checked by a career politician who has read their works.

BillyMills

Give me land, lots of land …

… under starry skies above,
Don’t fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide-open country that I love,
Don’t fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evening breeze,
Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever, but I ask you please —
Don’t fence me in.

There’s a story in how Cole Porter, of all unlikely metrosexuals, came up with that one (as wikipedia will tell you, he didn’t). Equally, there’s scope for historical sociology in why it became the hit of post-D Day 1944.

That, however, isn’t relevant now. That retort by Doubting Thomas to the earlier thing is:

Unlike you, I’m a thorough-going land reformer and if you had a spare few moments, and of course if you had not come across it before, there is a blog on http://www.andywightman.com which although scottish in emphasis is nevertheless aimed at exposing the influence of the landowners in politics.

 Well, actually no: Malcolm hadn’t encountered that before; and it was (and is) worth the trip.

So, Malcolm, are you a thorough-going land reformer?

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

A long while back, and he cannot quite recall the context, Malcolm did a spot of research on land-ownership in Norfolk. It surprised him that the number of big land-holders and the acreage they held were not greatly changed since the tithe maps of the 1840s. What was the squirearchy then is agribusiness now.

Hence a heave of Malcolmian spleen, and throttled yells of The expropriators must be expropriated!

Across the whole UK, 0.6% of the population (36,000 persons) still own some half of the rural land [Source: Country Life, 10 November 2010]. The top ten landowners named in that article were:

1. The Duke of Buccleugh;
2. The Duke of Atholl;
3. The Duke of Cornwall;
4. The Duke of Westminster;
5. The Duke of Northumberland;
6. The Laird of Invercauld, Captain Alwyne Farquharson;
7. The Earl of Seafield;
8. The Countess of Sutherland;
9. Baroness Willoughby de Eresby;
10. The Viscount Cowdray.

All good sons (and a daughter) of the soil. Of the earth, earthy. Significantly, a bare majority of those names are big in Scottish lands.

On top of that, the “State” owns vast tracts of land. The biggest single holdings are by the Ministry of Defence (241,100 hectares — over 930 square miles — across the whole UK) and the Forestry Commission (260,000-hectares in England alone — around 1,004 square miles). On the whole they have been “good” landowners: we may quibble, but … well, Malcolm recalls a sentimental summer stroll across MoD land to Lulworth Cove, with small blue butterflies aplenty, wild orchids, and a ginormous adder dozing in the sun.

Quite how the situation would be improved by delegating responsibilities down to local councils is difficult to appreciate: the continuing scandal of Cotswold Water Park and Cotswold District Council (see Private Eyes for months back) should be an awful warning. Yet that is what seems to be in Andy Wightman’s mind:

I wrote an article for the Observer at the time arguing that if folk want public forests they needed to think about ownership and consider a new model of public ownership that is removed from Government and is more local and accountable to “the public”. I cited the example of public forests in France, for example, where 20% of public forests are owned by 11,000 communes (30% of France’s 36,700 communes or municipalities).

There are local precedents, though, for small communities having democratic control of their environment. There is the Isle of Rum Community Trust, in Kinloch village, a functioning community of fewer than a score enfranchised souls. But, seemingly, flourishing. How that could be applied to urban and suburban communities, where one is ignorant of the neighbours three or four doors way, would stretch any imagination.

And none of us actually own our plots without qualification. There is, by necessity, a superior power — what in the UK is called “compulsory purchase” and in the US “eminent domain”. That, too, is right and proper — in extremis, the needs of the whole community must take precedence over any property rights of the individual. Those whose origins lie in Tyneham and the Elan Valley are entitled to differ. Similarly, nobody about to be expropriated by HS2 or a nuclear power station feels any rightness or propriety applies: suddenly it all comes down to that magic word, “compensation” — and when the compensation has been spent, all that remains is the grievance.

Now, to the practical: what can be done about next door’s creeping bamboo, which is infesting the bottom corner of the Redfellow Hovel garden? Or that damned crapping cat?

Good choice, Eastleigh!

As Owen Paterson stews in his own Bisto (see the Slugger O’Toole exchanges for how it is seen outside the Westminster enclosure — and how Malcolm elucidates thereof), the good news of the evening is that John O’Farrell waves the scarlet banner high in the by-election.

It’s quite amazing how Louise Mensch (Desperate, New York City) and John Prescott (good old Labour, Hull) can both find something positive to say about the nomination. Prescott wins, by capturing the O’Farrell wit and wisdom — Malcolm always preened more party feathers in pubs and with cheap sherry than in GMCs or Labour Group meetings (which must be why the Corbynistas of Haringey and Malcolm never saw eye-to-eye).

With all due respect to the other two worthy candidates, it had to be O’Farrell and the modicum of national recognition he drags with him. For crying out loud, neither of the two front-runners, Tory and LibDem, look anything more than old nag in-a-fancy-lasagne-packet.

Scrapbook (2) — from Old Master to modern Mijnheer

The BBC website noted:

George Stubbs’ kangaroo and dingo paintings get export bar

The UK government has taken steps to keep in the country two oil paintings that gave the 18th Century British public their first chance to see what a kangaroo and a dingo looked like.

A temporary export bar has been placed on the two George Stubbs works, which went on display in London in 1773.

It a Stubbs. It’s charming. It’s beautiful. It’s elegant. It may be The Kangouro from New Holland. Only … it sure ain’t any kangaroo we’ve seen.

Apparently Stubbs was working from a pelt, which he somehow inflated. The head is obviously ‘borrowed’ from a passing rodent (at worst) or deer (at best).

The image on the BBC website was clearly trimmed (and forcibly stamped with the copyright of the Press Association). So Malcolm went looking for a better, and found quite a few. Even the one above, from the Guardian, has lost the creature’s tail.

His rooting also located another delight: a website — The Library of Curiosities — written by Steven de Joode, who seems to be a Dutch bookseller. Only the last eight (as of now) posts are in English, and Malcolm’s Dutch is non-existent. Still, that includes:

From De Bruyn to Pasteur: Early Illustrations of the Kangaroo

This, as the self-explanatory headline has it,  tells the story of the first European encounters with the beast; and how it was depicted. It also a reproduction of a book engraving (inverted left-to-right) taken from the Stubbs.

Missing links

The first is the hoary old Australian joke that Cook, or Banks, or someone spotted kangaroos in the distance, asked a strolling aboriginal what they were, and heard some version of “kangaroo”. Hence the name in English, but not realising that what the aboriginal had meant was, “Bugger me mate. Haven’t a clue.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, in its refined way, repeats that anecdote as:

Etymology:  Stated to have been the name in an Australian Aboriginal language.

Cook and Banks believed it to be the name given to the animal by the aborigenes at Endeavour River, Queensland, and there is later affirmation of its use elsewhere. On the other hand, there are express statements to the contrary (see quots. below), showing that the word, if ever current in this sense, was merely local, or had become obsolete. The common assertion that it really means ‘I don’t understand’ (the supposed reply of the local to his questioner) seems to be of recent origin and lacks confirmation. (See Morris Austral English s.v.)

Then there is the real mystery.

It is well-established that the Dutch reached New Holland/Australia long before Cook: de Joode has that as:

… the fateful voyage of the Dutch merchantman Batavia, wrecked off the coast of Western Australia in 1629. The disaster would lead to mutiny and the massacre of almost half of the crew. This tragedy, however, also resulted in the first European sighting of an Australian marsupial. The Batavia was wrecked on a reef of the Houtman Abrolhos, and on these islands Francisco Pelsaert, commander of the ship, discovered numerous ‘cats’: “creatures of a miraculous form, as big as a hare; the head similar to [that] of a civet cat, the fore-paws are very short, about a finger long.

On the shelves of Redfellow Hovel is a 1977 book by Kenneth Gordon McIntyre, “an Australian lawyer with a lifelong interest in the history of discovery”. The book is The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 200 Years Before Captain Cook. It contains a large dose of induction, based on some crude maps of the southern ocean (to which McIntyre applies any manner of abstruse ‘corrections’) .  In particular he argues that Cristovão Mendonça —

a man of superior importance, what we would call a Royal Navy Captain … a man of some birth … a man of considerable prowess [page 241]

— was in and around northern Australia in the 1520s. He lost a set of keys at Geelong in 1522, which were rediscovered in 1847, though —

the keys themselves have been lost, and cannot now be examined … Probably even if the keys could be found, they could only be identified as common European keys, not especially identifiable as Portuguese.

Ummm … pretty thin stuff, don’t you feel?

McIntyre also makes play of the title page of Cornelis de Jode’s Speculum Orbis Terrae:

That dates from 1593. In de Jode’s map of the world, there is a definite lump of land vaguely in the area of Australia. That doesn’t mean, as McIntyre would want, that strange pouched creature in the bottom right quadrant of the title page is a kangaroo.

Finally —

Among Steven de Joode’s other posts (More! More!) is a nice little reflection on —

Why do we collect books? Much ink has been spilled over this question. A well-known attempt at solving the mystery is Muensterberger’s Collecting: An Unruly Passion, a curious study brimming with psychological gobbledygook. According to the author, collecting is nothing more than an attempt to overcome a traumatic experience or to compensate for a loss suffered in early childhood. The collector surrounds himself with “magic objects” allowing him to conquer traumas.

Conclusion:

… books are more than mere (magical) objects: they also have a rational appeal, which is their intellectual content.

What was Malcolm’s traumatic experience?, he wonders.

Before I sleep ….zzzzz

Here’s a magnificent pun that Malcolm will treasure:

Meet Ron Johnson, the Randiest of the Ayn Rand Republicans

It’s John Nichols at The Nation, celebrating the Senator from Wisconsin.

Nichols vamps lightly on the propensity of GOP figures for trite “Objectivism”:

Rand’s books serve as an ideological touchstone for a new generation of Republican politicians who have built their politics around the writer’s cold delineation of distinctions between idealized “makers” and disdained “takers.”

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, the party’s 2012 vice-presidential nominee, peppers his remarks with Randian references and once admitted, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”

Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann employed the Rand lexicon during her 2012 presidential run. California Congressman John Campbell gives interns copies of Rand’s opus, Atlas Shrugged, whileHouse Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-California, tweets: “Still reading Atlas Shrugged—it’s quite the read.”

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul says he’s really a “Randy”—not a namesake of the author. “But,” he adds, “I am a big fan of Ayn Rand. I’ve read all of her novels.”

Malcolm admits to a total reading block here. He’s tried. He’s failed. Repeatedly. Life is too short for such stuff. He reaches page 10 and the heat death of the universe totally overwhelms him.

Nichols — bless his little cotton socks — deconstructs the effete Senator Ron Johnson, the Tea Party favourite — after Johnson had been cut down to size by Secretary of State (as he now is) John Kerry.

However, Malcolm interposes one small quibble against Nichols, who writes:

While Johnson may not be prepared for Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, he’s entirely up to speed on Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. Never mind that Dorothy Parker said of the book, ”This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” Ron Johnson thinks Atlas Shrugged contains 1,168 pages of life lessons.

1,168 pages to grind through! How does anyone manage it? Is life that long, or does it just feel eternal? Meanwhile, Malcolm is currently pecking and picking, yet again, at Tristram Shandy — some 700 pages in this delicious Visual Editions version — and that is something that could, and should go on for ever.

That isn’t Malcolm’s grief over Nichols: it’s that gratuitous involvement of the Dorothy Parker. The oft-quoted, and most often mis-attributed quotation was produced as a review of Benito Mussolini’s The Cardinal’s Mistress. That was originally published, in 1909, as a pull-out serial in La Vita Trentina  as Claudia Particella, l’Amante del Cardinale: Grande Romanzo dei Tempi del Cardinale Emanuel Madruzzo.

Nichols’s  punch-line pays for all:

Paul Krugman reminds us, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

Which came originally from a 2009 blog by Kung Fu Monkey.

What?

For more of the same: https://www.facebook.com/DigitalGlobeInc

Well worth the trip.