Lansley starts the long walkback...

The Telegraph, The Times (paywall) and The Independent have all got on the front page Andrew Lansley's announcement that there might be a rethink on the NHS reforms in the face of ferocious opposition from the BMA, the Lib Dems, think-tanks, the health select committee, medical journals and, The Independent notes, "even David Cameron's cardiologist brother-in-law." Why this isn't on the front page of The Guardian (or, for that matter, the FT) is beyond me.

But the point is the same as on the forests - if you fight these bastards long and hard, they'll back down. Lansley is no expert and everyone knows these reforms were cobbled together last minute. He hasn't got the courage  of his convictions - he'll blink before you do. Remember Egypt - don't leave the square until you've got everything you asked for. Don't give up until they give in.

The news from North Korea

Really interesting piece in The Atlantic this month about grassroots journalism getting information in and out of North Korea:

[S]ince 2004, a half-dozen independent media organizations have been launched in Northeast Asia to communicate with North Koreans—to bring news out of the country as well as to get potentially destabilizing information in. These media insurgents have a two-pronged strategy, integrating Cold War methods (Voice of America–like shortwave broadcasts in; samizdat-like info out) and 21st-century hardware: SD chips, thumb drives, CDs, e-books, miniature recording devices, and cell phones. And as with all intelligence-gathering projects, their most valuable assets are human: a network of reporters in North Korea and China who dispatch a stream of reports, whether about the palace intrigue surrounding the choice of Kim Jong Il’s successor, or the price of flour in Wŏnsan.

Motherhood as class warfare

Sandra Tsing Loh has a piece in The Atlantic this month about Amy Chua's memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Tsing Loh has a very different perspective on being raised in an Asian family that's worth hearing about in and of itself, but she makes a good point about the relationship between child-rearing and class.

I scratched my head also at Chua’s unabashed description of her extravagant arrangements for Sophia’s debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill concert space. Along with buying Sophia a “charcoal satin floor-length gown” from Barneys (“No David’s Bridal for this one!”), Chua reserved the Fontainebleau Room at the St. Regis, ordering up a magnificent feast of sushi, crab cakes, dumplings, quesadillas, a raw-oyster bar, jumbo shrimp, a beef-tenderloin station, a Peking-duck station, a pasta station, Gruyère profiteroles, Sicilian rice balls with wild mushrooms, and a giant dessert station. Chua argues that this is typical of “Chinese mothers,” who go overboard, but, raised myself by a notorious Shanghainese skinflint (who threw even my $1 book purchases across the room in fury), I find this expense less uniquely Chinese than perhaps, dare I say (brace for Internet firestorm), upper-middle-class suburban Jewish?

Chua claims she fears “generational decline,” in which the first generation of immigrants works hard to get a toehold in the country, the second generation (hers) becomes the educated professionals who make the money, and the third generation squanders the money. However, I don’t know exactly which generation the habit of spending half a million dollars per classical-music prodigy would belong to.

 She goes on:

I think of the time I attended a meet-the-donor dinner for a well-regarded theater in New York. My tablemate, an elegant 70-something gentleman, was a top executive at Credit Suisse. He lovingly showed me photographs of his children, all three of whom had gone to Harvard (which he assured me was full of surprisingly ordinary kids, not elites at all). To what did he attribute his children’s success? Clearly a favorite speech of his, here the fist went down, jingling our wineglasses: “Because I read to them! I came home as late and tired as any Puerto Rican janitor, but I made sure I always READ TO THEM EVERY NIGHT.” A twitchy mother at the best of times, I couldn’t help pointing out that, by his own admission, he had also spared no expense in sending his children to Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools, and in engaging a flotilla of private tutors and nannies to drive them to one-on-one training with the very best teachers for 18 years. Perhaps a better test of the banker’s theory, I argued, would have been to let his kids attend P.S. Whatever with the Puerto Rican janitor’s kids and let them flail on the playground afterward in the same crappy after-school programs … but still to make sure to do that all-important BEDTIME READING.

But no one defends America’s “meritocracy” more heatedly than the stratospherically affluent and privileged.

Not every Muslim is a terrorist; not every terrorist is a Muslim

From The Washington Post:

When a series of bomb attacks ripped through Muslim neighborhoods, mosques and shrines in India in recent years, suspicion fell firmly on a familiar culprit: Islamist terror. After each incident, scores of Indian Muslims were rounded up, and many were tortured. Confessions were extracted, the names of various militant “masterminds” leaked to the media and links with Pakistan widely alleged. [...]

But those investigations, and the assumptions behind them, were turned on their head early this year by the confession of a Hindu holy man. Swami Aseemanand told a magistrate that the bomb makers were neither Pakistani nor Muslim but Hindu radicals, bent on revenge for many earlier acts of terrorism across India that had been perpetrated by Muslims.

His statement, subsequently leaked to the media, alleged that a network of radicals stretched right up to senior levels of the country’s Hindu nationalist right wing. It also exposed deep-seated prejudices within the police against the country’s minority Muslim population.

"Swelled legs imply debility, and the remedy is beans."

Hilarious review in The Daily Telegraph of a vicar's memoir of ministering in the West Country in the 1840s and 50s. It reads like a screwball comedy:

In those times, the law stated that wedding vows must be exchanged before noon. One day, Thornton waits by the church in the village of Parracombe to marry a feckless couple who are terribly late. When they arrive, the bridegroom explains that the parish clerk is so jealous of him for marrying the girl he fancies that he has run off and hidden the keys. Thornton relates: "I rushed at the iron gates of the church, put my shoulder against one of them, heaved, and lifted it off its hinges. Down it came with a crash."
Next he gets the best man to climb on the bridegroom's shoulder and break a window in the church to dive in head first ("I can almost see his forked legs as he went down"). The bride says: "This, sir, is what I do call a regular jolly lark." "Silence, you scandalous woman," cries Thornton, and desperately tries to get the vows said on time. The groom puts the ring on the wrong finger and it gets stuck.
"You stupid jackass," shouts the bride. Leaving the church and declining to take a fee, Thornton turns to the couple and "blew them up sky-high, and rode off, declaring that Parracombe people might in future marry each other with whatever horrid rites they thought proper, but that I would never again be party to 'burgling' a church."

"You killed Rosie Blossom Brownpatch."

Entertaining op-ed in The Independent today by Tom Hodgkinson about pet deaths. Funny at the beginning:

I remember vividly the grisly ends that met our pets when I was a child. The worst was perhaps the unfortunate demise of our rather pretentiously named tortoise, Shelley. It was hibernation time, and we dutifully followed the instructions in our tortoise book to pack Shelley and our other tortoise, Keats, in a tea chest, give them some slices of banana, put them in the attic, and let them be. About two months later, I crawled up into the attic to get something, and was overpowered by the most appalling stench. I inspected the tea chests. Keats seemed to be dozing contentedly, but all that was left of Shelley was indeed a shell, out of which a brackish goo oozed. Her name had been a prophecy.

Serious (ish) at the end:

Death is all around us. Bereavement is a fact of life. In fact, for this among other reasons, I think that the whole of idea of "happiness" is flawed. There are countless books on happiness and countless courses, conferences and improving CDs which peddle the goal of being happy. For one thing, happiness is a kind of bribe for slavery. In 1936 Aldous Huxley said "the problem of happiness" is the same as the "problem of making people love their servitude". And for another, constant happiness is just not possible, because just when things are going well, you run over the dog.

From home front to front line

Chilling news from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: newly-minted Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has just quietly given businesses a $200 million tax break, and because he's announced he won't raise taxes, the Inquirer he'll be paying for it by slashing education and Medicaid funding. Corbett's budget is being announced on Tuesday. We'll see how it goes. I am not optimistic.