The Virtual Stoa

Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, born 9 April 1906, died 18 January 1963.

By special request, here’s a picture of Babar the Elephant (and Celeste).

They have a poster up in Blackwells café right now for “Babar et les ballons”, but the mood at the Stoa is that Babar looks best in a balloon when he’s waving his handkerchief from the balloon, as above.

Following Richard’s recommendation in comments below, I got myself a copy of Thomas E. Ricks’s Fiasco, and am now halfway through. It’s alright, though it’s a bit heavy-handed, and I still prefer the reporter George Packer’s book (The Assassins’ Gate) to the stay-at-home-and-swap-emails-with-the-troops approach of Ricks.

Anyway: my  favourite detail so far concerns the role of PowerPoint in the run-up to the war:

[Army Lt Gen David] McKiernan had another, smaller but nagging, issue. He couldn’t get [Tommy] Franks to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks passed along PowerPoint briefing slides that he had shown to Rumsfeld. “It’s quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD [Office of Strategic Defense] and Secretary of Defense… In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary] order, or plan, you get a set of PowerPoint slides… [T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides.”

That reliance on slides rather than formal written orders seemed to some military professionals to capture the essence of Rumsfeld’s amateurish approach to war planning. “Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD’s contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology - above all information technology - has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war,” commented retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a former commander of an armored cavalry regiment. “To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness.” It was like telling an automobile mechanic to use a manufacturer’s glossy sales brochure to figure out how to repair an engine.

[Thomas E Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Allen Lane, 2006, pp.75-6.]

G. D. H. Cole, Fabian, Guild Socialist and (with Margaret Cole) author of detective fiction, born 1889, died 15 January 1959.

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, murdered in Berlin, 15 January 1919.

(Older tribute posts here and here.)

David Robb (”Davy”) Campbell, Belfast protestant trade unionist and Home Ruler, leading figure in the Irish Trade Union Congress and Labour Party, later leader of the Labour group on the Belfast Corporation in 1920, shortly before the collapse of socialist politics in Ulster; born in Belfast, 1874/5, died, also in Belfast, 14 January 1934.

Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov, Soviet politician: briefly the successor to Stalin, later the manager of a hydroelectric plant in Kazakhstan; born 8 January 1902, died 14 January 1988.

Michael Young, principal author of the 1945 Labour Party manifesto, “Let Us Face the Future“, author of the funny novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy [see his later remarks on his neologism here], co-author of the classic study, Family and Kinship in East London, inspiration behind the Consumers’ Association, the Open University, et cetera, born 9 August 1915, died 14 January 2002.

I’ve spent a small chunk of the morning setting up my first wormery. It’s only a small wormery (one of these), but it’s moderately exciting, nonetheless. And if anyone’s got any wormery do’s and don’ts, do share.

Nikolai Podgorny, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 1965-1977; born 18 February 1903, died 12 January 1983.

As exceptionally long-term Stoa-readers will remember, I don’t really recognise Oxford as a part of the “South East”, but as far as elections to the European Parliament are concerned, we’re part of the “South East”, and although I do my best not to pay attention to who my MEPs are and what they’re up to, I couldn’t avoid noticing today that I’m now represented in the European Parliament by a rancid lunatic.

Ashley Mote — elected on the swivel-eyed loons ticket, but even UKIP doesn’t want anything to do with him anymore — has just signed up for the Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty grouping, which looks — at first and second glance, which is all I’ve given it so far — to be a bunch of fascists, Holocaust deniers and assorted rancid scum.

So he’ll sit in the Parliament alongside Alessandra Mussolini, a chap from the Austrian Freedom Party, two Le Pens, some Bulgarian kiddy hack, another Italian fascist (who claims his views on the Holocaust have been ‘misunderstood’, diddums), and various Romanian nationalists and Flemish separatists.

The Bodleian’s got one of his books: I’ll have a look at it soon.

Yuck.

The invincible ignorance of Stephen “the Tour de France is dull because the team element is missing” Pollard has long been a theme at this blog, so it’s nice to see a modicum of self-knowledge creeping into the man’s writing. [via]

Naomi Mitchison, writer and women’s rights campaigner, born 1 November 1897, died 11 January 1999.

… Can anyone recommend any good recent books?

I enjoyed Rory’s book (UK title: Occupational Hazards; US title: The Prince of the Marshes), and recently read through George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate, but haven’t really been paying a great deal of attention to what’s been coming out over the last couple of years. Is Patrick Cockburn’s book good?

If you missed it last night — and it’s just conceivable that you weren’t watching BBC News24 at 11.30pm — you can watch my friend Rory Stewart being interviewed on the HARDtalk show about Iraq. (I don’t know why it calls itself HARDtalk, which is a silly name for a show.) About half an hour. His books are both excellent, too, in case you’re looking for something to spend your Christmas book tokens on.

Jaroslav Seifert, Czech writer and poet, Nobel laureate, expelled from the Communist Party in 1929; born in Žižkov, 23 September 1901, died 10 January 1986.

James Forman, US civil rights organiser, born Chicago, 4 October 1928, died Washington DC, 10 January 2005. Here’s a piece on Democracy Now!.

Zhou Enlai, Communist prime minister of China, 1949-76; born 5 March 1898, died 8 January 1976.

Tony Banks, Labour politician, born in Belfast, 8 April 1943, died in Fort Myers, Florida a year ago today, 8 January 2006.

François Mitterrand, President of France, born Jarnac, Charente, 26 October 1916, died Paris, 8 January 1996.

Look, everyone. The important thing about Magnus Magnusson is not that he presented bloody Mastermind for so many years, or - relatedly - that he said “I’ve started, so I’ll finish” more times than most over the course of a lifetime, but that he translated a whole bunch of the Icelandic Sagas for the Penguin Classics series, including the greatest of them all, Njál’s Saga, and that these were later revised and improved (not least by incorporating the genealogies back into the main text, rather than shunting them off into the footnotes) and reissued as parts of a two-volume Folio Society set. Get your priorities right, please.

The brothers Hrút and Höskuld rode west to Reykjadalur and stayed overnight at Lund; it was the home of Thjóstólf, the son of Björn Gulberi. It had rained heavily that day; everyone was soaked, and the longfires had been lit. Thjóstólf sat between Höskuld and Hrút. Two boys who were in his care were playing on the floor, along with a little girl; they were chattering loudly because they knew no better.

One of the boys said, “I shall be Mör∂ and divorce you from your wife because you have not poked her.”

The other boy replied, “I shall be Hrút and make you give up your claim if you do not dare to fight me.”

They repeated this a few times, and there was much laughter among the household. Höskuld became angry and struck the boy calling himself Mör∂ with a stick. It hit him on the face and drew blood.

“Get out,” said Höskuld, “and stop ridiculing us.”

Hrút said, “Come over here.” The boy did so. Hrút drew a gold ring from his finger and gave it to him, and said, “Off you go, and never provoke anyone again.”

The boy went away and said, “I shall never forget your goodness.”

Hrút was much praised for this. Later they went home to the west, and so ends the episode of Hrút and Mör∂ Gigja.

That’s the end of the eighth chapter of Njál’s Saga.

I gave 50p to a chap in the street earlier this afternoon, who followed me into the Co-op in order to spend it, and, once there, asked me whether I was a relative of Hurricane Higgins, who is, or was, I think, a snooker player. I’ve never contemplated any possible physical resemblance between the two of us, and I’m not sure anyone else has, either.

But “who else does Chris look like?” threatens to become a new year meme. A friend sent me this image, just the other day, claiming to detect a “somewhat striking” resemblance. It’s Thomas Burke’s painting, “The Student”, and it hangs in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.

A couple of recent likenesses are below the fold, for people who want to engage in scientific comparisons.

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I think I envy cats most for their ability to make themselves comfortable pretty much anywhere. Here’s Andromache, relaxing on some books:

Thanks to a plug-in or two and the technical assistance of my friend Steve, we now have the News in Latin easily available on the sidebar, just below “last posts” and just above the blogroll. This is splendid.

More information about Finland’s gift to the world here.