Second-rate minds - by Richard... Saturday, March 19, 2011

Second-rate minds - by Richard... Saturday, March 19, 2011

I wrote this on 16 August 2009 – arguing for an engineering solution in Sangin, where the setup of the town prevented effective or safe policing. Over 100 soldiers have since died there - I've lost count. And now, yesterday, we read this:

In a war where winning the hearts and minds of Afghans is the ultimate goal, damaging homes with powerful explosives and bulldozing a mosque and scores of other buildings may not sound like a wise idea.

But U.S. Marines in this key Taliban sanctuary say that's sometimes the only way to make progress, even if it risks angering the same people whose loyalties are required for success — a difficult trade-off that troops have grappled with throughout Afghanistan.

"We are here to rebuild, but sometimes that takes destruction," said Capt. Matthew Peterson, a company commander whose Marines were tasked in late December with clearing a key part of southern Helmand province's Sangin district.

The whole piece is worth a read – it is not very long – and then my piece linked above. What is particularly depressing is the experience at Wishtan – about which we wrote, on many occasions, where too many British soldiers were killed.

This current article tells us that the Marines initially opted not to use the base at Wishtan — part of a broader strategy to free up troops to do more patrolling. But they eventually decided it was critical to controlling key terrain, forcing them to launch their own operation to clear the area.

Since then, the Marines have managed to keep the main road clear and have yet to suffer a serious casualty in the base since the operation began in late December. They do say, though, that fighting has dropped throughout Sangin during the winter months – as it often does.

But the fact remains that the USMC are adopting the "engineering solution" that I was suggesting nearly two years ago, and are seeing a drop in casualties – even though they have not gone to the full extent I would prefer. We need to get rid of those walls (above) - all of them.

However, in 2009, my suggestions pointed in the right direction. They went up as high as they could go at the time, but the obstacles, mainly in the minds of men who call themselves soldiers, were more formidable than any the enemy could erect. And so we withdrew from Sangin – as we had done elsewhere in Afghanistan, and before that from Iraq.

Wars are won and lost in the minds of men. We have second-rate men, with second-rate minds. That is why we lost in Iraq, and that is why we will lose in Afghanistan. In this one instance, the USMC are showing us how we could have won.

But with the people we have, we cannot win - they cannot learn the lessons. They are incapable of learning. That is why there is not a great deal of point in writing about the campaign - other than occasionally to place a marker on our journey to defeat. And that we have done in this piece today.

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Theft is all around us. - by Pete... Friday, March 18, 2011

It isn't just the government, local councils and the police who are indulging in collective micturition - the abstraction thereof. Legitimized theft is now an everyday fact of life. I have just put the phone down on a customer "service" individual, or rather they hung up on me, as I attempted to explain why the taking of monies for no service provided is by anyone's estimation, theft.

You've all seen it. In this instance, it was www.quickcreditscore.co.uk. You go through their sign up procedure, for a "free trial period", as all of them require, before you can get what you need. Only then do you find their system cannot find your details and thus cannot provide you with a service. But when you to check your account, you find that they have taken the money anyway.

Now comes the fun bit: you ring up for a refund to be told by a brainless automaton, masquerading as a human being that there is an implied membership renewal, by way of signing up with them. You may not have realised it, but since you did not call in order cancel it, you are not entitled to a refund. Another player in this game is www.lovefilm.com, which does exactly the same.

And although in this case, it is only a matter of fifteen pounds, the effect is quite disproportionate to the amount. A lesser mortal might contemplate locating their offices (if indeed they're in the UK and not just a registered PO box) and shoving a burning rag through the letter box. But our kind of people don't do this. We might briefly in our imaginations rehearse rampaging though their offices, floor by floor, pumping magazine after magazine into anything that moves, Terminator style. Such is the value of a good education.

But people like us don't do such things. We do not resort to violence. We're the nice people who go to trading standards, taking weeks to be told that these thieves have a perfect legal right to steal our money. So we smile sweetly and wait for the next gang of thieves to steal our money. We know that if we protest too much, it is us, not them who end up with the criminal record.

However, even nice people like us do not have endless patience. And while we would never dream of storming down to the offices of the thieves and ripping throats out - in the immortal terms of that age-old advert - we know a man who can.

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Bootnote - by Richard...

I don't really rate Lewis Page – too full of himself, and only I'm allowed that privilege – but my opinion of him has just soared. He writes:

As one who earns his living in the media these days, I can only apologise on behalf of my profession for the unbelievable levels of fear and misinformation purveyed this week. I have never been so ashamed to call myself a journalist.

Good for him ... and how interesting that we see now three disparate commentators (including myself) not how far over the top the media have been. They won't recognise it, of course, but this is something of a watershed – the time they regressed from being merely childish to fully-fledged babyhood.

Page is right to be ashamed. But the shame is that the people who should be, won't be. They wouldn't even begin to understand why they should.

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Preparations continue - by Richard...

Soon there will be the perfect no-fly zone. Then we start on the cockroaches.

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They know not what they do - by Richard...

Keep this up and eventually someone is going to get killed. This is precisely the sort of thing that does it, brought about when officials forget who they work for, and get out of control. And when it happens, it isn't murder ... it's suicide.

Strangely, it is the little things that engender the blind fury ... like the unfair parking ticket, getting done for doing 32 mph in a 30-zone, a fine for putting out bin on the wrong day, or being fined for littering when you accidentally drop a tenner on the pavement. The Daily Mail is mining a hugely rich seam when it publishes stories such as these - but they all have a cumulative effect.

I don't know for certain why it should be the case that people get so worked up, although it is probable that people get most worked up about things they can relate to, or affect them personally. Thus, while the lofty bureaucrats so airily dismiss the concerns of the plebs, little do they realise that, letter-by-letter, they are writing their own suicide notes.

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Laugh or cry? - by Richard...

I am not quite sure which to do at the moment, but the thought of Euroslime Dave turning out to be the great war leader is almost as bizarre as the idea of Libya being elected a member of the UN Human Rights Council, or BBC staff being taught how to catch a bus.

Could never happen.

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Settling down - by Richard...

And after the hyperventilation comes this report:

"This is not a serious public health issue at the moment," Malcolm Crick, Secretary of the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, told Reuters. "It won't be anything like Chernobyl".

One would like to think that all the media jeremiahs might possibly show a little shame, but there's more chance of a Japanese nuclear reactor blowing up than that - or those irritating little Beeboids not waving their hands as they prattle. Where did they get this from?

This sad little episode, however, underlines how utterly untrustworthy the media has become. We should be able to rely on it for dispassionate, factual reporting and sensible, informed analysis - such as this. Instead, in the main, we get hysterical babies squealing about the end of the world.

We deserve better from our media than this, but we're not going to get it – not in any hurry. It's gone too far down for a quick and easy recovery. But at least a lot more people have seen the media for what it is. That is a start.

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Barriers to understanding - by Richard...

Two things have intervened in the media coverage of the Japanese nuclear plant crisis to make it misleading to the point of incomprehensible.

The one is the frequent use of the Chernobyl disaster as a comparator, where there are absolutely no comparisons with the incident at Fukushima. The second is the childish refrain of "meltdown" by scientifically and technically illiterate journalists, who seem to be incapable of understanding what is happening, yet seem determined to spread their own incomprehension far and wide.

Fortunately, a little clarity is beginning to emerge, although few press reports are without errors which could so easily mislead unless one already has a firm grasp of the basics. Thus, I am in a position of eating humble pie, having assumed that the earthquake disaster was one which the MSM was best equipped to handle.

On balance, as it has fallen prey to extravagant scaremongering, it has done an execrable job. Compare, for instance, the level-headed reporting of Captain's Journal with the hyperventilation of the babyish Daily Telegraph, which is so luridly over-the-top as to be useless as a source of information. Then we have the BBC – quite literally – indulging in point scoring. Truly, we are dealing not with children here but babies - the regression is quite alarming.

Making do with the best of what we have, one article worth reading is this one in the New York Times, and this one in the Guardian. Revolting though the paper might be, it still seems to have one or two grown-ups on its staff. Then, with very great caution, as it is littered with errors, there is theReuters report. For some up-to-date information, have a look at this one.

Culling the detail from these, it would appear that the crisis now rests not with the reactors per sebut with the "pools" in the reactor buildings used to store spent fuel rods. The storage pool in reactor 4, is said to be completely empty, and the Japanese workers are focused efforts on the storage pool at reactor 3, for reasons which do not seem to be entirely clear, but related to the fact that it is a MOX reactor and hence less stable than the rest.

It is this pool, in reactor three, on which helicopter crews and teams of police officers in water cannon trucks, together with fire trucks, have been trying to direct water, in an attempt to "douse overheating fuel rods". Storage pools at reactors 5 and 6 are also said to be leaking.

Now, as to the dangers, "meltdown" is not an issue. The great danger is that the spent fuel - as the water evaporates or leaks away – will overheat to such an extent that they catch fire. The emission of combustion products could release huge amounts of high-level radiation into the air, which could spread a considerable distance. With over 1,000 tons of spent fuel stored, the potential for a serious event is high.

The effects of this, disastrous though they would be, are likely to be relatively local. We are not looking at a Chernobyl-type disaster, where an active reactor exploded, ejecting material into the upper atmosphere, which then spread thousands of miles.

Japanese authorities are, however, talking about the possibility of "re-criticality" in the fuel rods, if they have become bunched up together in such a way that critical mass is achieved, and the nuclear reaction restarts. That, as they say, could have interesting consequences, as high volumes of decay products would be emitted to atmosphere.

At the moment, though, the worst case scenario would appear to be localised, high level emissions, sufficient to make the plant and the immediate area uninhabitable for some years, with dangerously high levels of radiation downwind of the reactor for tens and possibly even a hundred or so miles. With the wind in the wrong direction, residents of Tokyo could be at risk.

On the plus side, engineers have been reported as having reconnected the plant with an electrical supply, and are working on restoring on-site pumping facilities, which may take the edge off the crisis.

Altogether, then, we have a very serious crisis here, even if it is by no means as serious as some of the more lurid press reports would have us believe. Latest reports suggest that the efforts so far have been "somewhat effective" and it could be that the worst of the crisis is already over.

The media though, has not come out of this well. The lack of technical knowledge of so many of the writers, together with an obvious enthusiasm for disaster scenarios has so distorted the coverage that most journalism, rather than informing, has been a barrier to understanding.

It is unlikely that any lessons will be learned. They are beyond that, so utterly self-absorbed that not one of them would even begin to understand that they have done anything wrong. And thus this period of exaggerated and inaccurate reporting marks another step in the decline and fall of the industry.

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