Stephenson's delayed action rocket to power.

So it looks as though despite the tough talk about the 'Muscular Mayor's' shake up at The Yard, Smudger Smiff, our even more muscular Home Secretary, who sadly also hasn't yet lost her job in the great exodus of women from the workplace cited by Yazza, has prevailed and Sir Ian Blair's ex-Deputy, currently holding the fort, has landed the job. A little embarrassing for the Speccy mag., which yesterday publicised a leak of a conversation between Boris and Blair about the Stockwell nut job. It is worth reading through the post and commentary (click on caption). If today's Sky revelation is correct, it makes amusing reading. Not too late to influence events, Boris, if that mayoral muscle really exists. Otherwise business as usual at the Yard. Birds of a feather copper together at that level. I wonder if Roger Graef will do a fly-on-the-wall documentary of his selection board interview. Now that would be interesting.

Dear God, why can't one of them be hers?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: 'Our struggle for equality has just become more difficult'

"Female job losses are calculated to be happening at twice the rate of men's"

The Independent
Monday, 26 January 2009

We Need More Honorable Men in Manhattan and Washington DC (and London)

I hate to write anything positive about the French. I really do. But I have to mention that in this case we find a Frenchman who some may say is a coward... but I say is a hero. Now, yes, I am not at all a fan of suicide. Not for the least part because of my particular religious beliefs. But, to be honest with you, I find something appealing in the act of this particular Frenchman. In the way he went out.

Here is why: assuming he was not a coward (as in he was just afraid to face the music), his act, though again not to be praised, demonstrates he was capable of shame. And embarrassment. And guilt. That is... he appears to have been... human. It also appears that he was not given to pointing the finger at others for his mistakes. That means he felt responsible for his actions.

I like him. And in particular, I like him because he is dead. I think the US/Britain could benefit from this sort of culling of the herd.

God forgive me. But I really think we would benefit.

Instead, the power-centers are populated with shameless creatures that represent the most base Humanity has to offer.

So Farewell then, Samuel Huntington (died 24/12/2008)

If you haven’t read ‘The Clash of Civilisations?’ (1993/6) yet, I think you probably should. Huntington's analysis can be queried, and subjected to the death of a thousand academic qualifications, but he is definitely on to something.

Writing well before 9/11, Huntington argues that the old ideological certainties of the Cold War would be replaced by older religio-cultural (aka 'civilisational') divisions. Far from being drawn together by globalisation, the different civilisations would increasingly conflict. Liberal capitalism would not automatically triumph, as his former pupil (and utter charlatan?), Francis Fukuyama, had claimed. Democracy is a result of certain specific cultural circumstances; and it cannot easily be transplanted.

In 2004, he made the obvious point that American culture is the product of Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, and he went on to claim that the recent huge influx of Latinos would unmoor the USA from its cultural roots.

Now, the US is not my country, but his point resonates with me. Dan will say that the Latinos are hard-working, and Enoch will applaud their overwhelming Catholicism, but I cannot help seeing such a huge migration as a threat to the West as a whole and to the country that leads us.

A high-breeding racially and linguistically distinct people with a partly non-western cultural heritage are colonising the USA. Latinos are not merely New World Spaniards, but Spanish-speaking people of mixed race who are largely of non-western descent. Inevitably, their arrival in the USA will change the linguistic basis of the US; and their attachment to democracy and classical liberalism will not be so strong. And ultimately those states in which they come to be a majority may wish to secede from the union…

Meanwhile, things are worse over here...but that is another story and another post...