Gone for a soldier

2006

Like all Officer Cadets at Sandhurst, Prince William considered a number of regiments before applying to join The Household Cavalry. He based his decision on the variety of roles which the regiment undertakes, from reconnaissance support to airborne forces, right through to ceremonial duties. The Prince was also attracted by the Regiment’s outstanding record in recent decades, most notably during the Falklands Conflict, the 1991 Gulf War, Bosnia and Kosovo, in Iraq and in Northern Ireland.

2008

Sub-Lieutenant Wales, as he is known in the service, will spend the next three weeks undergoing basic naval training, to learn core skills such as navigation and sea safety. The remaining five weeks will be spent aboard the frigate HMS Iron Duke on duty in the North Atlantic where he will join patrols searching for drug runners in Caribbean waters.

2010

Prince William has successfully completed the final phase of his RAF helicopter flying training and is now a fully-qualified Search and Rescue pilot. Flight Lieutenant Wales recently passed the last stage of the Operational Conversion Unit (OCU) course at Royal Air Force Valley, Wales and will join Number 22 Squadron, C Flight as a fully-operational pilot flying the Sea King Mk3 helicopter after his graduation in mid-September.

2011

Prince William, though a serving search-and-rescue helicopter pilot with the Royal Air Force in Wales, wore the dress uniform of the Irish Guards regiment for his wedding yesterday to Kate Middleton.

The decision apparently caused some surprise within the RAF, but the prince’s role as colonel of the Guards is the highest position that he holds in the British armed forces.

So, let's get this right. Prince William (Eton, St Andrews) goes to RMA Sandhurst and chooses the Household Cavalry; but then he goes to BRNC Dartmouth and trains for the RN; but then he goes to RAF College Cranwell and trains for the RAF. Finally finding a Service that can rely on him, he trains as an SAR pilot. But then, when it comes to marrying his long-term on-and-off girlfriend, he turns up in the uniform of the Irish Guards, a regiment with which he has never served but of which he is a Colonel. One would have thought he would have worn his RAF dress uniform but clearly, this man has commitment issues.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan:

As Prince William gets ready for his wedding, members of his former squadron in the Household Cavalry Regiment have been out on patrol in Afghanistan.

D Squadron has been based in Helmand province since last September, maintaining security in and around the town of Gereshk alongside soldiers from the Afghan National Army (ANA).

James Blount (Harrow, Bristol), on the other hand, served as a Captain in the Life Guards, prevented the outbreak of World War III and went on to lose his O and to sing about being in a club in 1973, the year before he was born.

Billy Bragg (Barking Abbey Secondary School) completed basic training for the Queen's Royal Irish Hussars, there being no Queen's Republican Irish Guards.

Eats peas, roots and leaves

The process now is for Don to join the party. His membership will be accepted by the Board on Saturday. I have asked our whip John Boscawen to organise a caucus for Saturday where Don will have my full support to be leader, and the Board will reconvene that afternoon to ratify his leadership.

Paging Dr Kübler-Ross... I cannot help but feel sorry for Rodney Hide. Not only is he replaced by a carpet-bagger, he feels obliged to write this rambling farewell Had I been him, I would have just said "arse" to the lot of them.

But then, that is the nature of ACT: not so much a political party, more a cult. Convinced of their own rectitude and charged with the duty of saving New Zealand from itself, ACT members are an odd bunch. Most of them don't seem particularly well off, yet they are in thrall to the mysterious plutocrats who finance the party. Mr Hide may have erred but Dr Brash really has nothing to offer, nothing but huge amounts of dosh:

In the afternoon, Ms Calvert and Sir Roger meet Dr Brash in his Auckland apartment. Among the issues discussed are Dr Brash's position on the Treaty of Waitangi and Maori issues in general. This strikes a chord with Ms Calvert, who has been a fierce opponent of the Government's position on the foreshore and seabed legislation.

Dr Brash also talks about the considerable funding he is likely to bring to the party.

What indignity for Mr Hide: wrong-footed by the ghastly Sir Roger and the imbecilic Calvert, replaced by a man who has never won a popular vote in his life, who could not even unseat Bill English, who wouldn't recognise loyalty if it was printed on the banknotes, a man without a reflection.

And what this awful bunch seem to have forgotten is that Mr Hide won an electorate, took it from the Tories and held on to it. He also has a sense of humour and some humility.

No wonder they got rid of him. Rodney Hide is a human being.


Image shows Dr Brash among the pods containing others of his kind. From deep space the seed is planted. Here's the Charlatans:

Porta Maris Portus Salutis

During a Facebook discussion in which he said he wanted to "settle down with someone decent", Mr Tamiz claimed it was "impossible to find someone with morals and a bit of self-respect".

He continued: "It's the ones that look respectable and decent but underneath it all are complete sluts that you got to watch out for."

Payam Tamiz made the comments before he was a Conservative Party member.

The University of Westminster law graduate also said women in the area were "completely shameless".

Mr Tamiz may have done more for Margate than he could imagine. Not only does the town have a new Turner Contemporary Gallery designed by David Chipperfield, it also has, if Mr Tamiz is right, completely shameless women: the perfect weekend getaway-and-have-it -away. Margate also has the highest number of closed shops in the country, so there will be no vulgar commercial activity to distract one from the pursuit of beauty. As Mr Tamiz says, It's the ones that look respectable and decent but underneath it all are complete sluts that you have to watch out for; oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.

Speaking of which, the surprisingly and sadly short-lived Stroppery managed to tell us of the forthcoming Slutwalk Aotearoa before it closed down.

In other smut news, The picture of Dorian Gray is now available with even more mephitic odours:

"it is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents – a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction,"

Cultural anxiety for pleasure and profit

This mass cultural shift towards the desire for "educated taste" has led to historic levels of cultural insecurity. Who can doubt that many of the people who drag themselves through a Booker winner are doing it out of a sense of "self-improvement" rather than a real hunger for literature? Similarly, a significant portion of the audience sitting through any production of Krapp's Last Tape are there because it makes them feel a cut above.

Are things different abroad? It's difficult to know, but I suspect that the French and Italians, say, are far less worried about what people think of their tastes. This is partly cultural arrogance (they know they are classy while the English live in dread of their own crudity), but also blissful ignorance. Many Europeans, steeped in a superior history of painting and music, are still clear about what they mean by "art", in a way that we are not. But then, those same cultures are not necessarily up to speed where the cultural lines are more confused. Could Tracey Emin's My Bed have been created, and received such a response, by an Italian artist working in Florence? It's doubtful.

Is Tim Lott talking rubbish? It's difficult to know, because this is perhaps the most hesitant and confused piece of writing on matters of taste to have appeared in years; but it probably is rubbish as well. In fact, I am being too kind: it is rubbish. It is nothing more than sneering at stereotypes: aspiring middle class people, the cultural elite and sophisticated Continentals. And how are the record levels of cultural insecurity among the middle class measured? Does the Arts Council have devices; is there a recognised scale?

There is a simple reason why Jack Vettriano's paintings are not held by any public art gallery in Scotland, or anywhere else for that matter: Jack Vettriano's paintings are crap. They are crudely-painted illustrations of forced quirkyness; so, so surreal, so empty, so what?

Teenage Fanclub on the other hand; now there's a real work of art:

Last year in Maidenhead

In Madonna's recent videoclip, "Open Your Heart," she performs as a stripper inside a room surrounded by spectator booths. The spectators presumably pay to view for a certain period of time; the blind on their window raises. When the pay period is over, the blind descends. I hear there really are such facilities somewhere, one of the more bizarre variants of the commodification of desire predicted by Lenin as symptomatic of late capitalism.

My Essay on Postmodernity

Eric Michaels

Art and Text 25

June-August 1987

pp86-91

In a spirit of admiration for Robyn , who has studied all Madonna's videos, I thought I would share with you this passage. Being critical thinkers and theorists, you will notice the characteristics of late 1980s academic discourse: the subject, the distance from it assumed by the critic and the use of the term late capitalism. Bonus marks will be given to gentle readers who noticed that the author failed to notice the reference to Paris, Texas in the Madonna promo.

The author, Eric Michaels had been an editor of Screw magazine, so his innocence of peepshows is surprising. Sadly, he was lost to us by that other discovery of the 1980s - AIDS. The field of Madonna Studies has passed into legend, occasionally appearing in rants about the decline of educational standards.

A little bit Rorty, a little bit Rock 'n' Roll

What, then of the place of the philosophical profession in the culture as a whole? For philosophers who think of themselves as quasi-scientists, this is not an important question. Analytic philosophy has little influence on other academic disciplines, and little interest either for practitioners of those disciplines or for the intellectuals. But analytic philosophers are not distressed by this fact. It is natural, given their scientific metaphilosophy, that analytic philosophers are content to solve philosophical problems without worrying about the source of those problems or the consequences of their solution.

By contrast, non-analytic philosophers typically dislike the thought that philosophy is (or is only) an academic discipline, merely one more Wissenschaft. They would like their work to be continuous either with literature on the one hand or with politics on the other, or both. Insofar as they succeed in making their work continuous with literature, they cease to belong to a separate institution: they are simply writers who happen to be familiar with a certain literary tradition (a tradition that starts with Plato and runs up through Hegel to the present). Thus there is little point in drawing institutional lines between the study of Sartre's treatises, of his critical essays, and of his stories. There is equally little point in worrying whether Nietzsche counts as a figure in the history of German literature (as he used to, before Heidegger helped him to a place in the philosophical canon) or in the history of philosophy. Anyone who is interested in Derrida's treatment of Socrates in La Carte Postale is likely to be interested in Valéry’s treatment of him in Eupalinos and Nietzsche's in The Birth of Tragedy, and is unlikely to know or care that only one among these three great writers earned his bread as a philosophy professor.

When it comes to attempts to make non-analytic philosophy continuous with politics, however, things become more complex and problematic. For non-analytic philosophy is, with some exceptions, dominated by a Heideggerian condition of the world rather than by social hope. Because the typical member of this tradition is obsessed with the idea of ‘radical criticism’. when he or she turns to politics it is rarely in a reformist, pragmatic spirit, but rather in a mood either of deep pessimism or of revolutionary fury. Except for a few writers such as Habermas, ‘continental’ philosophers see no relation between social democratic politics and philosophizing. So the only sort of politics with which this tradition is continuous is not the actual political discourse of the surviving democratic nations, but a kind of pseudo-politics reminiscent of Marxist study-groups or of the thirties - a sort of continual self-correction of theory, with no conceivable relation to practice.

Rorty, Richard
Essays on Heidegger and Others.
Cambridge University Press, 1991;
pp23-24

This is why we can't have nice thoughts; this is why some Analytic philosophers take pride in not having read Nietzsche and why Continentals prate on about Late Capitalism. It also shows that Rorty was smarter than the lot of them.

Without thinking or knowing

It is unfortunate that some people, without thinking or knowing, labelled this the plastic waka or the Tupperwaka when in fact the materials being used are all technologically sound. Rather than be disrespectful to Maori culture I would suggest the waka building is a pointer to the place Maori will take in our society in the coming decades.

In which Sir Ron Carter, the Patron of something called The Committee for Auckland, misses the point. It is not the technological soundness that is at issue; it is the cultural naffness.

Without thinking or knowing, I would suggest the waka building is a pointer towards self-pastiche. New Zealand is littered with buildings that look like things that are not buildings. They are neither clever nor funny. The waka is worse still: it is neither clever nor intended to be funny. It is deadly serious, a rather sad attempt to represent Maori culture with what might be an oversized copy of a toy floating in Pita Sharples' bathtub.

The powers that be might have chosen an architect, perhaps a distinguished Maori architect (PDF), to design a building that would represent Maori culture as progressive, innovative, those sorts of things. Instead, they chose a big, dumb literal thing. It's like Britain representing itself with images of the Household Cavalry. You don't really find it anywhere else but here and in the Old Country: other cultures have enough wit, courage and trust in architecture to choose new ideas.

Here, we hand the opportunities to make public sculpture to movie model makers and engineers and we fill our landscape with giant vegetables, so what hope for architecture?

Dog: Tirau

Lest we ask

Just five days before Anzac Day it was revealed that SAS troops were part of an operation in Afghanistan last August in which nine Taleban fighters were killed. Critics of New Zealand's deployment there have sought to portray the operation as some sort of "revenge killing" following the death in action of Lieutenant Tim O'Donnell. This suggestion was not only incorrect but was also an affront to the SAS.

Undoubtedly SAS troops would have been angry at O'Donnell's death but these soldiers are also part of one of the most professional and disciplined military forces in the world, which does not undertake unauthorised revenge or rogue operations.

In which the Press not only claims to know the purpose of the SAS mission but the motives of its members, and tells its readers that to question either is an insult to the SAS. This "don't ask, don't tell" policy would seem to be at odds with the notion of an independent media which asks and tells but, clearly, even to think that Our Brave Lads of the SAS would do something bad is tantamount to treason. So unthink that thought and hang your head in shame.

But wait, there's more:

Less edifying over the past week has been the renewed controversy over where the Anzac poppies are to be made in coming years. The Royal New Zealand Returned and Services Association have opted to buy poppies manufactured in Australia from Chinese components.

This will undoubtedly be hard on locally based Kilmarnock Enterprises, which has employed intellectually handicapped people to make the poppies, the more so as the Christchurch quakes have already impacted on its operations.

But today is April 25. On Anzac Day the priority must be to remember the sacrifices made by heroic New Zealanders in past wars and those serving overseas today, not to wrangle over where the poppies that symbolise our day of remembrance are made.

Today is not a day to think of solidarity with intellectually disabled people, those who have made poppies for years, doing work that gives them an income, a sense of purpose and a sense of pride. Today is not a day to think of solidarity with workers in China, many of whom are virtual slaves and many of whom are actual prisoners. Today is not a day to consider that many returned servicemen suffered head injuries that left them in similar intellectual states to the people who work at Kilmarnock. Today is not a day to consider that the freedom for which heroic New Zealanders fought many years ago is still denied to people in China. Today is a day for quiet reflection, but only of the right timbre and on appropriate topics.

The motto of the Press is “nihil utile quod non honestum” or "nothing is useful that is not honest."

Bohuslav Martinů - Thunderbolt P-47:

The fag end of life

"Retail tobacco displays impact on vulnerable consumers, such as people still experiencing nicotine withdrawal, and can prompt impulse purchases."

Apa wrote that the "key aspect" of her paper was to minimise costs to retailers and "allow for flexibility" over compliance methods.

One would have thought that the key aspect of her paper would be the vulnerable consumers, otherwise known as addicts, what with Ms Apa being the Deputy Director-General of the Ministry of Health and not DG of the Corner Dairy Preservation Society.

And what's with this "tobacco companies are looking at Facebook and YouTube to promote their products if New Zealand introduces new anti-smoking legislation?" Where is the evidence for this claim? It cannot be found here:

"There is also a risk tobacco companies will divert their marketing efforts into unregulated channels, such as internet social networks and product placement in entertainment media, such as Facebook, YouTube, films and video games," the paper said.

There is a difference between saying something might happen and saying that it will. The fag companies are drug pushers and have the morality to match; they probably will push their products on social media, given the chance; but they haven't done it yet and Mr Reid (him again) cannot say that they will do it, yet.

Speaking of smoking, Christopher Hitchens can no longer speak, as this letter reveals (H/T Russell). Here is Martin Amis writing about Hitchens; and here is Amis talking about Hitchens, and causing difficulties with his own smoking habit:

And since this is Easter, here is Hitchens talking about God in Virginia (where the tobacco comes from).

Discipline and punish

Calling all gays, calling all gays. Does this image look straight to you? I only ask because it is the cover of a new book published by Mr Ian Wishart's Howling at the Moon Publishing. I suppose the image is designed to make readers fearful of the menace of criminals stalking our streets but, at the same time, that dangerous criminal does have a white singlet and lot of muscle tone.

Anyway, the book received an extensive puff job, sorry in-depth analysis, on the cover of the Sunday Star Times. Gentle readers might notice the absence of any opposing viewpoint. We can only suppose that Neil Read, the author of this story, was too busy to contact anyone from the Howard League for Penal Reform or any other organisation which might have a view about the imaginative idea of throwing criminals into jail. Gentle readers might also notice that Mr Read describes Mr Fraser, the author of the book, as an international law and order expert in the first line of his story, only later revealing that, by this, he means Mr Fraser worked as a probation officer and then as an analyst for the NCIS in Britain. Probation officers are hard-working and decent people but their expertise is in probation, not in the efficacy of locking up the crims and throwing away the key.

Gentle readers might further note that this book has two forwards [insert rugger joke here], one by the ubiquitous Garth McVicar, the other by the equally ubiquitous Theodore "not his real name" Dalrymple. So, this is a book written by a retired probation officer and forwarded by a farmer and a retired prison doctor. I guess they couldn't get anyone with expertise in crime and punishment.

That last comment wasn't ironic. They couldn't get anyone with expertise; nobody who knows about this subject, who works in the field, believes that prison is a solution to crime. That pretty boy on the cover is a model and his gun is a toy, just as crimes, for the most part, are not committed by dangerous professional criminals who swagger round the photoshopped streets of an imagined metropolis with guns. Prisons are full of people who should have received help with their various life problems a long time ago, before things got really bad for them and for the rest of us.

Perhaps if Mr Reid were to talk to someone who knows about this issue, rather than assisting Mr Fraser et al to frighten us, we might start making some progress. But that wouldn't happen because fear sells more papers than thinking.

Here's a really rough video of the original lineup of The Heartbreakers, with Richard Hell on bass, vocals and coolness.