This is not an exercise

Given this lack of preparedness among the higher echelons of the Pacific navy, it should come as no surprise that when the attack [on Pearl Harbor] began men and women on the base and on those ships simply could not believe their eyes...

...Commander Logan Ramsey was on Ford Island when a Japanese pilot dived down: he and another officer ran out to get the number of whatever young idiot had decided to pull off such a dangerous stunt.

Harry Mead was astounded that American planes were bombing a hangar: ‘Boy… is somebody going to catch it for putting live bombs on those planes’.

Frank Stock, a fireman on the Vestal was struck by how red discs had been painted on the attack planes to add realism in a military exercise.

A marine Roy Henry bet another Marine that it was the Army surprising the Navy with false torpedoes.

Harry Mead saw something drop from a plane and thought ‘some mechanic is going to catch hell for that’, as explosions began he asked himself why they were using live ammunition.

Sailors on the USS Sumner were struck by the army flying planes on a Sunday.

Joseph A. Pesek thought that the bombing was strange but assumed that the navy was out to destroy a target in the water.

A group watching on Ford Island saw the Navy practising with water bombs and when an oil tank exploded in flame one commented that the pilot would get in trouble. When a disc was spotted on the wing of a plane, meanwhile, another commented: ‘There goes one of the red team’...

This piece in Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog perfectly captures the reality lag after a black swan has glided into plain sight. Everybody from the overlords of the Westminster/press bubble to this obscure English blogger knew that Scottish Independence was a theoretical possibility, but complacently assumed that it might happen some other time, maybe never. Now the captain and crew are about to find out whether that's a real torpedo heading for the ship of state.

As Sir Walter Raleigh said of Elizabeth I...

I see that the spoof Jacob Rees-Mogg Twitter account, previously closed down due to 'threat of legal action' has reappeared, complete with a profile pic straight out of Monty Python's "Upper-Class Twit of the Year" sketch. Link here (for now, at least - don't be too surprised to find this link broken if the latest iteration gets taken down). Bonus blog link here.

I am told @DouglasCarswell 's alma mater is the "UEA" not the "UAE". I have never been to either; the one being too flat, the other too hot.

[on Alex Salmond] One is unlikely to trust a man to lead his country when he has failed to notice a lectern less than a foot from his elbow. 

Utterly appalled by EU ban on high powered carpet cleaners. Mrs Trower has been batting my rugs for years at no risk to herself or others

Meanwhile, the bona fide Rees-Mogg has been expaining to Sunday Stürmer readers that "we" 'must give Clegg's job to Nigel Farage ... and get in bed with Ukip.'* in an article almost as funny  as the spoof version:

Perhaps as a sign of good faith even the Minister for Europe could be a Ukip MP ... If the Prime Minister were to do this, no longer could his critics say – as Sir Walter Raleigh said of Elizabeth I – that he ‘did it all by halves’.

Sadly, the real Rees-Mogg's mots fail the <140 characters test, although he does get bonus points for unintended irony by actually being Jacob Rees-Mogg and being able to write, presumably with a straight face, that '[Farage] appeals to not only traditional Conservative members but also to those who have felt disenfranchised, people who feel that politicians are part of a too-cosy establishment while Ukip is shaking it up.'



*No link provided, as I'm sure you're smart enough to find the article if you're that interested. I leave it up you to decide whether clicking Mail articles is more likely to give aid and comfort to the enemy, or to crash and burn their business model.

Thoughtcrime must not go unpunished

Universities and colleges may, equally, encounter high performing employees who, although academically brilliant, have the potential to damage their employer’s brand. This could be through outspoken opinion or general insubordination. Irrespective of how potentially valuable these employees may be to their institutions, the reality is that, in consistently accepting unacceptable behaviour, institutions may be setting dangerous precedents to other employees that such conduct will be accommodated. From a risk perspective, it is also much harder to justify a dismissal, or other sanction, if similar conduct has gone unpunished before.

As much as employers may hope that unacceptable behaviour from key employees will be curbed without sanction, in reality the problems will persist, needing to be addressed further down the line. It remains to be seen whether Suarez is right when he says that he will never bite another player again, but he has made similar statements before. 

David Browne, writing on law firm SGH Martineau's corporate blog, as quoted here.

You heard that right - according to today's managerialist ideology, the 'insubordination' of daring to have independent opinions that that don't fit in with your employers' carefully-curated corporate brand image is a bizarre, pathological aberration, just like footballer Luis Suarez's weird compulsion to keep biting opposing players.

Remember that the employees Browne's talking about here are valued, capable ones in reasonably high-status occupations, working in institutions which ostensibly nurture enquiry, debate and questioning. Imagine what it's like for people who work in the sort of places where 'we don't pay you to think.' Browne just validated Nick Cohen's sobering observation that 'the moment you enter your place of work, you no longer reside within a governed democracy, but instead are enslaved to a systematic dictatorship.'

In a less screwed-up world, David Browne, would be in massive trouble with his bosses for irreparably damaging his firm's brand* in the minds of all reasonable people by blogging this astonishing attack on freedom of speech on the firm's website. After all, a reasonable reader would conclude that any firm which endorsed such views, must have a sinister, authoritarian, bullying ethos and would have no qualms about advising bosses to use legal threats and sackings to punish thoughtcrime.

In the topsy-turvey times we live in, Browne was able to get away with merely 'clarifying' his comments in response to the justified twitterstorm that his horrific blogpost provoked. A key passage of the "clarified" post reads thusly:

This [brand-damaging behaviour] could be through outspoken opinions (where these fall outside the lawful exercise of academic freedom or freedom of speech more widely) or general insubordination, e.g. a failure to comply with the reasonable requests of an employer, or other behaviour such as bullying or harassment of colleagues.

So, there you have it - you can open your mouth, but if you upset your bosses, they and their corporate lawyers might be alert for anything that might be construed to fall 'outside the lawful exercise of academic freedom or freedom of speech more widely' and won't hesitate to use it to get you sacked (see "chilling effect"). Plus you get a lecture on bullying and harassment from more powerful people who think it's fine to push uppity subordinates out of a job for daring to speak out of line.

Thank you for sharing your opinions and clarifications, Mr Browne. They have been duly noted. Now bite me, weasel boy.



*You owe me for one broken irony meter, Browne.

Dulce et decorum est

A hundred years on from the Great War, another cohort of youngsters ardent for some desperate glory is discovering that war's not that great after all:

One jihadist, claiming to represent 30 others who feel the same way, contacted university researchers in the past fortnight to say there is a feeling of disillusionment, as some who travelled to fight against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime are instead being forced to get involved in in-fighting among rebel groups.
He told the researchers: "It's not what we came for but if we go back (to Britain) we will go to jail. Right now, we are being forced to fight - what option do we have?" 

Irish Independent

Now this could be confirmation bias on my part, but it does tie in with a couple of things I've suspected from the start:

1. The fighting in Iraq and Syria is a clear and present danger to the people living there,* but the much-hyped threat of hordes of radicals coming back to Blighty to murder us all in our beds at home is self-interested fearmongering by the usual suspects.
2. The rush towards passport-snatching and state-sponsored re-education camps (AKA "de-radicalisation") is a counter-productive waste of resources by an unholy alliance of politicians eager to be seen to be doing something (preferably something "tough"), securocrats, self-appointed "community leaders" and "experts" and platitude-wielding members of the "British Values" brigade. An alliance that looks set to undo the good work of disillusioned Jihadis coming back to spread stories of Isil's lies and futile waste by alienating them from their home country, or re-framing their sobering reality checks as official propaganda (welcome back to the low-trust society).

*A danger that the US and its allies probably can't reduce by simply throwing a few extra bombs into the mix and hoping for the best. By the way, did Bill Kristol's infamous remarks remind anyone else of abbot Amalric's instructions before the massacre at Béziers ('Kill them all, God will know His own')? Better to have no strategy than Amalric's strategy, IMHO.

Use enemies to develop a bond with your prospects

Effective marketing in a low-trust world means developing a bond with your prospects through your content marketing. One great way to do this is to share a perceived common enemy with your readers.

Dave from PR, who, along with his light-fingered chums in big finance has spent the last few years moving us towards a a big low-trust society, totally gets this.

But he could still take a few tips from Vladimir, who has a lifetime's experience of getting ahead and prospering among the managing elite of an even lower-trust polity. Vlad could probably give detailed lectures on how to in use a common enemy to bury bad news and persuade downtrodden members of your big society that they really are all in this together. Even an ex-public relations professional, tasked with fronting for City kleptocrats, voyeuristic spooks and corporate über-scroungers could take cynicism lessons from the KGB's most famous alumnus.

You have to hand it to Putin - only a truly epic bullshitter could successfully bury a generations-deep pile of misery like this by taking his shirt off and blaming everything on foreigners:

In the seventeen years between 1992 and 2009, the Russian population declined by almost seven million people, or nearly 5 percent—a rate of loss unheard of in Europe since World War II. Moreover, much of this appears to be caused by rising mortality. By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner...

...Russians did not start dying early and often after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “To the contrary,” writes Eberstadt, what is happening now is “merely the latest culmination of ominous trends that have been darkly evident on Russian soil for almost half a century.” With the exception of two brief periods—when Soviet Russia was ruled by Khrushchev and again when it was run by Gorbachev—death rates have been inexorably rising...

...Another major clue to the psychological nature of the Russian disease is the fact that the two brief breaks in the downward spiral coincided not with periods of greater prosperity but with periods, for lack of a more data-driven description, of greater hope. The Khrushchev era, with its post-Stalin political liberalization and intensive housing construction, inspired Russians to go on living. The Gorbachev period of glasnost and revival inspired them to have babies as well. The hope might have persisted after the Soviet Union collapsed—for a brief moment it seemed that this was when the truly glorious future would materialize—but the upheaval of the 1990s dashed it so quickly and so decisively that death and birth statistics appear to reflect nothing but despair during that decade.

The Dying Russians - Masha Gessen in the New York Review of Books blog

Look and learn, Dave. If Vlad can carry on belligerently distracting his people from such catastrophic amounts of existential despair until he retires, he'll probably go on to command even bigger fees than Tony Blair on the leadership guru lecture circuit.

The greatest threat ever (since the last one)

Now/more than a decade ago is/was a good time to panic, because we live/lived in uniquely terrifying times:

"Why now?", people ask. I agree that I cannot say that this month or next, even this year or next, Saddam will use his weapons. But I can say that if the international community, having made the call for disarmament, now, at this moment, at the point of decision, shrugs its shoulders and walks away, he will draw the conclusion that dictators faced with a weakening will always draw: that the international community will talk but not act, will use diplomacy but not force. We know, again from our history, that diplomacy not backed by the threat of force has never worked with dictators and never will.

If we take this course and if we refuse to implement the will of the international community, Saddam will carry on, his efforts will intensify, his confidence will grow and, at some point in a future not too distant, the threat will turn into reality. The threat therefore is not imagined. The history of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction is not American or British propaganda. The history and the present threat are real.

Tony Blair, September 2002

What we’re facing in Iraq now with Isil is a greater and deeper threat to our security than we have known before.

In Afghanistan the Taliban were prepared to play host to al-Qaeda. With Isil we are facing a terrorist organisation not being hosted in the country but seeking to establish and then violently expand its own terrorist state.

We could be facing a terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean bordering a Nato State.

We are in the middle of a generational struggle against a poisonous and extremist ideology that I believe we will be fighting for years if not decades.

David Cameron, end of August 2014

The endless note of urgency reminds me of those never-ending sales out-of-town furniture stores used to keep having. 'Hurry! Crazy bargains! Get your new existential threat while stocks last!'

If there's anything real behind the current rhetorical panic, it probably has more to do with the Ukip* insurgency than the Isil one. After all, finding a respectable-sounding excuse for getting tough on scary foreigners/non-white Brits might be Dave from PR's last best hope for plausibly ingratiating himself with the restive 'kipper-leaning wing of his party.

But maybe some things have changed in a slightly ironic direction. Where the ostensibly liberal-left Tony Blair looked embarrassingly hungry for the approval of his new best friend, George W, Tory Dave might not actually care about how much he's impressing right-wing Americans right now, so long as he can get Mr Angry of Clacton back on side.



*From now on I'll have to type "Ukip", rather than "UKIP", as the former spelling apparently offends some of the party's more paranoid supporters. Since choosing not to offend people would clearly be political correctness gone mad, which as any fool angry Ukip voter knows, is a contemptible form of tyranny, I am therefore obliged to uphold my freeborn birthright by being as casually offensive as possible, whenever possible. Nothing personal, you understand.

Cold calling update

I blogged about The Cold Call Elimination Team a while back. It's an outfit that makes telephone cold calls, then paradoxically tries to sell the callee an almost useless electronic gizmo which purports to block telephone cold calls (called "Call Blocker Pro"), along with an alleged listing on a suspect-sounding unregulated register of people who'd prefer not be cold called by telephone salespeople (without mentioning that a perfectly legitimate, regulated, free register called the Telephone Preference Service exists).

Turns out they're every bit as dodgy as they sound.

I've just witnessed The Cold Call Elimination Team in action for myself. They rang an elderly person and took a debit card payment in return for their useless gadget n' listing combo. Family members then alerted the victim to the existence of the free Telephone Preference Service and to the fact that signing up with The Cold Call Elimination Team is almost certainly a complete waste of money. The victim, who had no idea what to do with the electronic doohickey anyway, returned it with a note saying that it was too difficult to operate, and asked for a refund.

A less dedicated team of shysters would have simply ignored the request for a refund and hoped the complainer would eventually give up. But the enterprising scumbags at the Cold Call Elimination Team decided to go the extra mile.

Having retained the victim's debit card details, they decided to offer some unsolicited "help" by "upgrading" the victim to their "platinum" service, which is the same widget-plus-listing deal as before, except that "platinum" customers get a "pre-programed" Call Blocker Pro device. They seem to have used the retained debit card details to charge the victim an additional eighty-odd quid for the "upgrade" (although merchants can't legally retain the 3 digit security number on the back of a debit card, which would have been needed to process the new transaction), before sending out a confirmation letter with a new, "pre-programmed" Call Blocker Pro.

On the further advice of family members, the victim has now told the Cold Call Elimination Team that a refund, not an upgrade, was clearly requested. The Cold Call Elimination Team have promised to process a refund (at least of the "upgrade"), although, at the time of writing, the victim's bank account still needs checking to make sure that the refund is forthcoming.