This morning while I was searching for a suitable, January 18-related image for our banner I came across this historical entry:-

18 January 1951:  Hermann Flake sentenced to death for “hate campaign against German Democratic Republic”.

Intrigued, I googled as many likely combinations as I could come up with but the information-safe remained firmly shut.  Does any MR-reading student of twentieth-century history know Flake’s story and the true nature of his crime?

Yesterday morning, when I started up my PC and opened OE, I found there a veritable barrage of mail from just one correspondent.  Let me say at once that he is no low-life spammer.  He is a currently self-absented reader and commenter and, to be sure, an interesting and determined fellow.  Although the subject matter of his e-mails was diverse there was, it must be said, a common thread running through them.  As threads go, some might consider it, on occasion, overly common.  No doubt, it will re-appear eventually on this page.  But I am not going to short-circuit that process now.  Anyway, one of the orphaned communications spoke of something more interesting to me - not Jewry but Conservatism, and dead Conservatism at that.

So, with thanks to Wintermute for this link to a seemingly funereal but, in the end, uplifting OQ article by the late John Attarian I am going to kick around a few Conservative notions and notions of Conservatism – not at all the same thing -  and, hopefully, spark off some interesting comment.  I shall do so in two parts.  This first one will commend realism and try to sketch out what that might amount to.

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Naturally, there’s no irony whatsoever in The Guardian, of all newspapers, finding fault with big government ... not a hint of hypocrisy in their critique of the “multi-agency approach” to, for example, the exploitation of illegal migrants by criminal gangmasters.  No, the hot-button plight of oppressed and abused workers calls forth an altogether too blinding and pavlovian response for wider considerations to apply.  So we get this:-

The tangle of Whitehall responsibilities for illegal working and gangmaster activity reflects the fact that they touch every aspect of the UK’s economic structure. So many authorities are involved that the tangle is almost impossible to unravel:

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A new study by a team of psychologists from Florida has revealed an alarming aspect to the modern Ms when she gets behind the wheel.  And before you run away with the not improbable notion that interviewing four hundred female twenty-somethings and late teens in America and Japan might have had an ulterior motive, these girls are something else.  They could, it seems, frighten the crap out of anyone.

“We need to recognise that male drivers aren’t necessarily the biggest threat on the road,” says John Houston (no, not the Late Great - one of the psychologists), “Women don’t seem to be following the rules any more. They may have been more cautious drivers in the past, but that no longer holds. We were very surprised by our findings.”

The study is due to be published shortly in the American scientific press.  Its subjects revealed high levels of hostility, sensation seeking, susceptibility to boredom, and competitiveness.  American women were particularly hostile.  “I’m in a hurry. Move it or lose it,” was the typical attitude.

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As our cocaine maker in Peru happily told us: ‘People want our cocaine because it is good and, for a while at least, makes them happy.’

So ends an interesting account in today’s Observer by Angus Macqueen  of a journey through the drug-growing badlands of South America.

There is no respectability whatever in drugs trafficking and only pathos or tragedy in drug-taking.  But the intellectual argument for drug liberalisation is becoming increasingly respectable because the alternative of prohibition has so manifestly failed.  Macqueen worries chiefly about the warfare and violence that drug moneys fuel in grower countries.  But he then makes what has become the standard case for liberalisation:-

This journey has left me thinking the politically unthinkable. With an election looming, the Blair government has made the war on drugs a populist law-and-order priority, once again conflating the taking of drugs with the crime and violence that surrounds them. But it is the war itself that is the problem. The politicians rightly warn that demand will go up if it is legalised. Not good but not the nightmare they summon up. Neither cocaine or heroin is a cancer. In quantities it destroys your nose and is bad for your brain, but it very rarely kills - unlike that other addictive plant we can use legally: tobacco.

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Hat tip to the redoubtable Pericles for this marvel of Arabian logic.

A Muslim Saudi professor says the earthquake and tsunami in south Asia were punishment from Allah for homosexuality and fornication committed by residents and visitors of affected countries at Christmastime.

A television interview of Sheik Fawzan Al-Fawzan, a professor at the Al-Imam University, was translated and posted on the Internet by the Middle East Media Research Institute TV Monitor Project, or MEMRI TV. The interview can be viewed on MEMRI’s website.

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Such a unique natural disaster as the Asian Tsunami should not go entirely unmarked on any news-based comment blog, and to date it has done so here.  So we will correct that.  It behoves us to acknowledge the human suffering the great waves caused and, also, the humility with which Mankind, however Westernised and modern he may be, must stand before such total, elementary and blind force.

We are of the natural world and not the master of it - not even the master of ourselves, though many a political fool of liberal mein may think so.  We do not yet truly understand the natural world, much less control it.  We have only really reached the callow stage where we may observe it systematically.

The sense of awe that follows upon that exercise is, perhaps, no longer awe of the Almighty.  But who among us, thinking on their own thoughts and feelings as they study the images on this link to News@Nature, can say with any certitude that the quality of those feelings is any more refined, better or even different to those of our faithful forefathers.

Well, it’s Faversham actually, in the green and watery, ancient county of Kent.  Not some mug-scarce inner-city blessed with that precious New Labour phenomenon, automatic weapons.  Aagh, didn’t mean that to slip out!  No, diversity – that’s what I meant to say.  Obviously, diversity.  And a jolly good thing, too, if you ask me.  And it’s entirely possible that Her Majesty’s new breed of politically correct, people’s policemen will knock on my door and ask me some time very soon (after Griffin you never know).  So we don’t want to be too white, do we?  Not too stuck in a chalky Kentish rut, so to speak, not too un…vibrant.  Decidedly not.  Constable.

So … back to Faversham, twixt the Kentish Swale estuary and the Kentish North Downs.  Beautiful, quiet, hardly troubled middle-England, all apples and beer and old church towers (hiding new and deeply dubious phone masts, but anyway we’ll not let that spoil the image).  Undeniably, though, there are too many cars.  Too few children.  Sufficient Conservatism, however.

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