[scherf] and the problem of scholarship

Key figures, L to R: Martin Bormann [in sailor's uniform], Mother Scherf, Scherf Jnr in the centre [also in sailor's uniform], Reinhardt Gehlen [front centre right], Josef Mengele [behind], Scherf Snr [beside son], Otto Skorzeny [back right corner]

I've just been wading through* a long, rambling* document from the Idaho Observer about George H. Scherf and it's not the content itself but the issues of scholarship I take issue with.

In a nutshell, George H. W. Bush and Scherf are one and the same person, i.e. Bush is the son of a Nazi. That's the contention.

My issue with this is not whether he is or isn't - I think it's entirely possible he is and it would certainly explain a lot and is consistent with what I know of the powers that be in America but I am quite sure that this author has not proved it.

Big on detail and quoting substantial references, the document initially impresses until one realizes that the most detailed attribution is that which anyone might have made. The assertions underlying the whole piece though are rather more poorly supported.

The author, Don Nicoloff, goes to great lengths, including photographic evidence, to support the contention that Hitler's offsider Otto Skorzeny, Martin Bormann, Reinhardt Gehlen, George H. Scherff, Sr. and George H. Scherff, Jr. were all connected and the photo alone admits that. He then leaps* to:

George H. Scherff, Jr., became the 41st President of the United States as GHW Bush and George H. Scherff, Sr., was Nicola Tesla’s “trusted assistant.”

Nicoloff then inserts the section:

What you are about to read is another step beyond research … the various leads … have been followed up and tend to support what, at first blush, would appear to be the unbelievable rantings of an embittered old man.

"What you are about to read" is an immediate red flag for me, along with capitalization and the use of adjectives. That the author finds it necessary to tell the reader what research is:

… systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources …

is another red flag. He goes on to trivialize the financiers' control of power with talk of "ruling the planet" and then brings Nicola Tesla into it:

Since Tesla was often buried deep in research at remote labs, many of his financial and legal affairs were supervised by his closest associate, George H. Scherff.

Where he is on safer ground is in the anomalies surrounding the Bush family history, for example:

The Bush family “history” claims that the young Prescott “attended the Douglas School,” also in Columbus, Ohio. The problem with this claim is that there was no Douglas School in Columbus in 1900, nor for most of the 20^th century.

He gives a lot of detail and almost establishes that the Bushes lied through their teeth about who was born where and to whom. He also shows that Scherf also had fictionalized details in his background upon entry to the United States.

From this, Nicoloff concludes that Bush is Scherf.

Pity really, as I think he really was onto something and if he hadn't seen fit to embellish his hotchpotch and had stuck to the anomalies - these might have been sufficient to raise the eyebrows.

But like many conspiracy lovers on the net, he couldn't resist the temptation to insist, to talk down to the reader to reveal secret information to which only he was privy and to punctuate his work with largely irrelevant tracts on Nazi criminals and the Jesuits and so on without first laying the groundwork.

What do I get out of it? That the Bush background is quite murky and conflicting - yes. That the port of New York seemed to bend the regulations with certain individuals - yes. That the Nazis wished to infiltrate America - yes. Paperclip is in keeping with this. That Scherf is Bush?

Maybe but certainly not from this document.

* emotive term

[climate sceptics] wish you'd been here

Last evening we had a storm.

Not just any storm. It is the third of this kind this summer, the like which has never been seen before in this location. I don't know how many million dollars damage was done or whether the electricity and water are back in other parts of the city or even what happened to the flora and fauna.

I do know that whilst I was physically holding the 10th floor balcony windows from blowing out [they were swinging through an arc of two metres when first I clapped eyes on them] and the rain was sweeping into my living room and hitting the computer table, I was thinking of Lord Nazh. I've never seen such ferocity before and this is someone who knows the Michael Fish storm.

I do know that when I finally got back in, a fine soot of dust and dead mosquitoes had blown in through the central vents over everything - beds, coverings and so on. I do know that my power cord had exploded into pieces and that the house was plunged into darkness.

I was thinking of Lord Nazh, Daily Referendum and others at this point and muttering certain things to myself.

Today I read an interesting piece by Neo Jacobin and the tone was what was interesting. He didn't poo-pooh the notion of global warming per se but was sick of the way it is being used by people to push their own barrows:

For example, every time we need to build new roads, the miserable greens shout 'No - what about global warming?' Every time we need to expand our airports, again we hear 'No - what about global warming?' Every time we need new power stations, 'oh no - what about global warming'? Every time we need new desalination plants, 'err no - what about global warming'?

I agree with him on this. It's nauseating the way it's being used. I want to reach for a paper bag each time I read this sort of thing. However, it would have been good to have seen Lord Nazh, Daily Referendum and Neo Jacobin on this balcony last night and to hear what they had to say.

Then again, we'd probably have been too drunk to care.

[snatch] up there with the best

The thing about Guy Ritchie's Snatch which will keep it off many people's Top 100 list is:

1] Its gruesome and street-focused subject matter, certainly not elevated in the manner of Schindler's List or timeless in the manner of Gone with the Wind;

2] It's uncompromising dialogue which, even for a Brit, is hard to follow at times, let alone for an American.

And yet, as a piece of film making, it is right up there with the best. I've seen Citizen Kane and the Third Man, which were required viewing at Drama and AV lessons and they rightly occupy their place but I think this film has something I can't quite define.

So, rather than define it, I'll ape Ritchie's own technique and throw in a potpourri of comment which somehow gives a whole by the end:

It may turn out that British maverick filmmaker Guy Ritchie has only the taste and talent to make one kind of film - but, if every salvo he fires is as snappy, funny, and energized as his initial two movies, does that kind of limitation really matter? After all, not every director has to be like Martin Scorsese and dabble in costume dramas and would-be epics about religious figures. [James Berardinelli]

Ritchie is a zany, high-energy director. He isn't interested in crime, he's interested in voltage. As an unfolding event, "Snatch" is fun to watch, even if no reasonable person could hope to understand the plot in one viewing. [Roger Ebert]

Aside from two or three, ridiculous coincidences (which are beautifully realized on film, btw), the progressions are sometimes violent, always gritty, and most often starkly funny. [Ross Anthony]

Snatch is constantly freeze-framing, jump-cutting, under-cranking and even turning the camera upside down--but for no discernible reason. It's just swinging-dick showoff filmmaking that blatantly ignores the needs of story and character in favor of whatever happens to look "cool" at the moment. [Sean Burns]

Everything in this movie is either a flashback or a flash-forward to a flashback that has a flash sideways right out of the realm of giving a damn. [Erik Childress]

Ritchie spices the picture tastefully and artfully with fast speed, quick zooms, and rush cuts that add to the humor and intensity. [Ross Anthony]

Snatch is raucous and crude, but never boring or predictable. It is bold, brash, and cartoonish, and never takes itself seriously. In interviews, Ritchie has claimed not to have been influenced by Tarantino, but the video clerk-cum-filmmaker's trademarks are littered around Snatch's colorful landscape (both in terms of technique and plot contortions). [James Berardinelli]

For Guy Ritchie, the style is the substance; it's the whole reason for the movie to exist, the whole reason for making it, and the whole reason for seeing it. The character work is nonexistent, there's no thematic material to speak of, and the plot is ludicrously complex. [Shay Casey]

Everything is left to the imagination, teasing the audience, which may actually be a worse sin than allowing us to witness whatever brutal carnage a filmmaker can come up with since the human psyche is capable of the unspeakable. [Erik Childress]

There is one addition of considerable wit: In the previous film, some of the accents were impenetrable to non-British audiences, so this time, in the spirit of fair play, Ritchie has added a character played by Brad Pitt, who speaks a gypsy dialect even the other characters in the movie can't understand. [Roger Ebert]

Highlights?

The "Brad Pitt taking a hit in slow mo" scene is one of the sweetest boxing sequences I've ever witnessed on film, going the extra surreal mile to clinch a place in silver screen history. [Ross Anthony]

For me, the classic sequence was the car with the boxing promoters discussing the history of milk and the throwing of the carton out of the window, the thugs in the Jag discussing the diamond and then crashing when milk sprays across their windscreen, the Russian thereby escaping from the trunk of the car, only to be hit by the black pawnbrokers in the stolen vehicle.

And to make it doubly classic, it wasn't shown in chronological order.

And you can't go past the monologue by Vinny Jones in the pub, using high-falutin vocabulary you'd never in a thousand years expect to hear from an ex-member of the Crazy Gang and one time visitor to Gladiators.

Also, Pitt can act. The boy can certainly act.

Also, also, one of my favourite but unsung actors is Mike Reid [Doug the Head] and in his little dialogue with Benicio Del Toro, it's the little chuckle he gives at the end which shows the man's class.

In the end, the film is fun and a triumph of filmmaking technique. That's it. You'd go to the cinema for the entertainment value. What's cinema for, in your opinion?

[beijing games] babel all over again

Here we go again.

Man is a magnificent creature [ye are gods] - a bio-engineering marvel - but the icing on the cake is his intellect, his reasoning powers, the ability to subjugate his environment to himself.

Like all fabulous machines, he needs to operate within his design parameters. A Ferrari or Aston Martin is at the pinnacle of design but doesn't do so well as a heavy lifting truck or off-road. It's not designed for it.

We operate in an eco-system which is very delicate. We start playing about with this and we're inviting trouble. Tower of Babel trouble. In our overweening arrogance lie the seeds of doom.

Take the Beijing August 2008 Olympics Games preparation, for example: Next month, the city plans to fine-tune "rain prevention" techniques to ensure good weather prevails during the Games:

"We are still in the experimental stage," the China Daily quoted Zhang Qiang, an official in charge of the capital's artificial rain-making and prevention programme, as saying. "Cloud dispersal is more difficult than seeding and we are working on it."

Wang Yubin, a Beijing meteorologist, said the weather bureau, which is well-practised at firing chemical-infused rockets into clouds to prompt much-needed downpours, would use "catalytic agents to force rain clouds, should there be any, to burst hours before the opening ceremony", to ensure good weather.

Uh-huh and maybe he should add "ensuring far reaching catastrophic consequences in the long term by altering the balance of the troposphere which in turn impinges on the spheres above and on the earth and oceans below".

This is the sort of thing this blog is railing against. This is the arrogance of the other side in all its mindless ill-glory. This is the humanistic ideal. This is Saruman in Lord of the Rings. This is Hitler and Stalin, the Bruderheist, Pol Pot, Zarathustra and on and on and on and on and on .........

This is sheer stupidity.

[my hero] one cool dude

My friend's waterpipes burst last night and he's still tied up in this. I have the nightmare of MOT, insurance and car maintenance coming up, the floor needs cutting back and lacquering, the new kitchen cupboards are on their way and so on and so on.

All I'm saying is that the existence [or not] of our Maker is not the uppermost concern just now. And yet I'm peeved by something - misrepresentation. Just as I'm concerned about not misrepresenting a particular blogger as BNP, I resent the misrepresentation of Christianity. I really do.

Read it through and decide against it - fine. Look at the philosophical aspects and reject them - fine.

But please don't look at the Crusades, the Religious Right, the State High Church torture and burnings over the centuries, the Jimmy Swaggarts and Billy Grahams and say that is what it's about.

It's not.

If there's one thing that sticks in the craw of the opposition it's the redemptive nature of Christianity, the rebirth. No matter how far someone has slid - he or she can always be brought back and not through some Molochian fire ritual but in reality.

It's a living thing. I came back.

The second immensely powerful aspect is its social code, as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount and throughout the gospels. For example, turning to the Pharisees who were following Him about, He asked:

And I will ask you one thing - is it lawful on the sabbath days to do good or to do evil? To save life or destroy it? And looking round about upon them all, he then turned to the man and said: "Stretch out your hand."

Later, in a similar situation, He asked:

Which of you, if his ox falls in the ditch, will not pull him out on the sabbath day? You hypocrites.

He wasn't above the odd bit of invective. He set the cat among the pigeons. For me there is no religion here. There is sheer common sense from a man who knew what he was about, who must have been personable to get the following he did and who cared nothing for consequences. He cared about exploding hypocrisy and went around healing people. There were no Jonestown or Manson sexual orgies.

To not feel the power of such an individual, when we can feel the power of an Augustus, Julius, Alexander, Dr. Livingstone or Mother Theresa is sheer wilfulness.

For crying out loud, if such a person was doing this today and it became clear he didn't give a toss about taking over the government, he'd be in the Beckam [formerly Beatles] class of hero-worship.

To me He's one cool dude. And yet people will admit other documents of the time as authentic but go hell-for-leather to debunk these equally historical documents. So what if they're derivative? To be derivative, they must have been derived from something equally historic. Come on! Get real.

Have a lovely Sunday.

[dog days] summer in the city

Loving Spoonful's summer in the city

Back of my neck getting awfully gritty

Choking heat - really not so pretty

Can't seem to reach the forest it's a pity

So tonight a different scene

Forget the girl I know it's mean

Curse the blistering day it's been

Never mind the supper

Sipping cuppa after cuppa . . .

Forecast - just won't bring the heat down

All the car and truck fumes - ain't nowt but to sit down

Cool change - a dream that just can't be found

Doesn't seem to be a shadow on the baked ground

Toss and turn the whole night through

Dreams of winter things to do

Turn the lights down - mosquitoes too

Waiting for the first snow

Only have to lie low . . .

[blogfocus saturday] post hiatus blues

After quite some hiatus, Blogfocus has returned and some of the newer readers might not know the format. You soon will.

1] Sometimes a blog can hardly be called a blog in the sense which we know it. Sueblimely runs a "help" blog which can lead you to help hints, templates and anything you need to know about the mechanics of blogging. Plus she does my own trick and introduces new blogs. A useful site to stop by. For example:

A couple of sites appealed to my perhaps slightly offbeat sense of humor this week.

· Halliburton's One-Size-Fits-All Climate Change Solution

· Winners of the "I Look Like My Dog" Contest

2] Also in the help and advice category is Simply Social, with Caroline Biggs. More than useful if you're a woman with conservative leanings:

"Simply Social is great, it has taken me to events that I would never have gone to on my own and many which I would not have even heard about! I have had a great deal of fun and in addition I have made new friends. I am happy to recommend Simply Social to any woman who likes to go out and have a bit of fun". [Yvonne]

3] Staying with the Carolines for now, Caroline Hunt is not just a honey, she's the 56th best Conservative blogger on the internet:

Anyone who follows movie news will have seen the various reports coming out of Germany about Tom Cruises next role. He plays Col. Claus von Stauffenberg and it's going to be awful. Sorry but it just is. Hollywood does assassination of Hitler with the director of X-Men. It's just not going to work.

4] David Johnson is wandering the ether on the other side of the pond and now he's wandering the park:

It's been several years since the last time I watched the fireworks. Mostly because It's been several years since the last time I felt patriotic, or that America deserved to celebrate anything. Here in town, going to see the city works meant going to a park and laying down a blanket or setting up lawn chairs amidst a sea of strangers, over top soil soaked with old beer and last week's event.

5] I'd like to count Oddiya as one of our own Blogpowerers and many of you out there are not yet fully aware of the blogpower we have in our midst:

It is estimated that the mountain pine beetle has destroyed 40% of British Columbia's lodgepole pine since 1993. University researchers have now found evidence that the beetle is adapting to spruce as well.

6] The hillside is a great place to observe from and why go any further than another of our own Blogpowerers - MJW?

I saw something rather unpleasant on Saturday afternoon and it wasn’t just a scrappy game of rugby; on the way back from Twickenham, my fiancé and I broke our journey home in Croydon, to do a little bit of shopping. Walking across North End, which is basically the main pedestrian shopping district, going in to Debenhams, we walked past a group of black youths, males in their late teens, who appeared trying to get two bull terriers to fight each other.

Read the rest yourself.

7] Pink Acorn is not a bad name for a site and here she is in action:

Today I visited Second Life (SL), a virtual reality site. Like I need any more reality. I have been reading the "Sicily Scene" blog and the author was nominated for a BlogPower Award. Another blogger set up a room in SL to have the awards presentation. Once you register you can choose your wardrobe, among other things. So any-hoo, the first thing I do is change my clothes because, to me, I look like a slut. The choices I had weren't much better, but hey, it must have been good for someone as this guy walked up and asked if he could kiss me. I said , "NO", I must ask Uncle Guido first.

8] Bringing up the rear this evening is Phishez Rule's Sanity Optional and this blog is already attracting quite some attention:

So I got tagged by Ingsoc. There's this completely new and unheard of meme going around where you list eight random things about you. What? You've already heard of it. Damn. Here they are

1. I have size 10 feet. 9 and 1/2 in dancing shoes.

2. I always put my left shoe on first.

3. I once thought I could be a professional writer. This is not as close as I'll get.

4. I like old cemeteries. They feel so peaceful.

Next Focus will feature The Lone Voice. See you Wednesday.

[dancing] tripping the light fantastic

Quite frankly, I detest dancing.

Let me make that a bit clearer. I love dance - good dance is wonderful to behold and the way those men and women can move, especially on ice, is breathtaking. Torville and Dean were two of my favourites.

I'd love to be able to step onto the dance floor , stride up to the loveliest woman and then transport her around the room on light feet, never once stepping on her toes. I almost did this in Second Life. Alas, that is the virtual world.

Looking through history, it was never a question, pre-war, so I believe. One supposedly learnt to dance. One learnt to foxtrot and tango to tolerable levels [today that's moved on to the Salsa] and the waltz was a piece of cake. The days of dancing lessons really died out towards the end of my youth and though I was taught the moves, they were never later utilized.

Where the average girl will start gyrating the hips to the strains of the latest song, we just tap our feet and nod in time, then go out and kick a football round or bounce a basketball and slam-dunk it. For the average girl, on the other hand, dancing is in the soul, in the physionomy - she's done it since two years of age. She knows all the moves. She feels the dance inside her.

Therein lies the problem.

There are so few guys for whom dancing is more than piston-pumping arms and feet two-square on the floor, drink in hand. For them, clubbing is just the scene, the girls, the atmosphere, the beat, the rhythm. A proportion realize it's much more and adore it.

I honestly think there should be a medal awarded to any mother who gently guides her young son into dance so that by the time he needs it, he's a natural.

Scene

Our hotel in Tenerife some years back. My girl is an accomplished dancer in the "knows-all-the-moves" tradition. Everything, right down to the moonlight, has been custom-ordered for the evening. A flamenco show of great skill gives way to the guests pouring onto the terrace looking out over the sea and what are we going to do?

I feel trapped. Hers, I know full-well, is club dancing and at home, she puts on some music and immediately breaks into dance. Mine is the move-swiftly-on-the-feet-and-hope-for-the-best variety. I haven't danced for years.

I hate it.

You see, years earlier a particularly obnoxious woman, not even my own partner, laughed at my two left feet and at the time I'd wanted to say:

"Yeah, well can you spin a rugby ball vertically over ten metres and land it two metres in front of your fly half or glide through the pack over the gain line? Can you tackle a man four stone heavier and bring him down? Can you score a basket 7 times out of 10?"

We only do well at those things we practise and we only practise that which we love and we only love that which we do well. That which we know we're not adept at - we shy away from.

I'd shied away until this night. Some woman thinks I'm a klutz? OK - that's the end for me. Never mind that I once went to a dance party and danced with almost every girl there. I'm a klutz with two left feet and my current partner this night shows this in her eyes.

So the horror begins and I do what I can. She's doing all these fabulous moves and I'm meant to stand a metre and a half away in this stupid modern manner and do mine. Except I don't have any moves, so I have to make some up but we're not dancing together - she's for her and I'm what I can be.

I hate it.

Then comes a slow number and I'm back in business. With physical contact again I can guide her a little, use the body, I feel lighter on the feet, she suggests this with her body and we try it, I suggest that. It almost works and she's intoxicating me.

I love it.

Back to the fast number and hell begins again and I'm sick of it. I steer her to the side and go and get some drinks. An old, wizened and yet debonaire twinkle-toed Spaniard moves up and compliments the two of us on our dancing.

Yes? Truly? A small smile breaks out on the Higham visage because we'd been watching his partner and him earlier and they were mighty good for that age.

Back with my partner I tell her what he'd said and she laughs sardonically. So we go through with it until the wee hours and then the walk on the shore and the moonlight and the rest of the night I'm on safe ground with.

Next day I look back on the night with relief that the situation was somehow recovered afterwards with the aid of the moon and the shore but as for that horrid modern metre-and-a-half distant, chemistry killing so-called "dancing" - I secretly resolve never to dance again.

And I never have since that night.

[virtual world] ventures into the real

The police are rightly worried:

"Our environmental scanning tells us that even with some of the cloning of human beings - not necessarily in Australia but in those countries that are going to allow it - you could have potentially a cloned part-person, part-robot," Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty said. "You could (also) have technology acting at the direction of a human being, but the human being being distanced considerably from the actual crime scene."

Mr Keelty said scams had sprung up in online virtual worlds such as Second Life, where people can spend real money via credit cards to buy products such as virtual real estate and gifts. "Policing that is going to be quite difficult," he said.

There is a point, it seems to me, where the clear hijacking and brazen usage of the security forces by the cabal groomed political leadership to remove citizens' rights must be tempered by the need to circumvent genuine crims. I feel much sympathy for the security services today, especially the ordinary officer doing his or her duty.

[rachida dati] les planchers pour les récidivistes

Think it's completely the right way to go:

Rachida Dati était attendue, elle fut observée, au Sénat, où elle présentait hier le projet de loi antirécidive. Pour la première fois, la fille du maçon marocain, élevée dans une famille de douze enfants, garde des Sceaux depuis près de deux mois, affrontait l'arène parlementaire.

Face à une opposition rompue à la polémique, Rachida Dati, épaulée par Roger Karoutchi, secrétaire d'État chargé des Relations avec le Parlement, excellent connaisseur du Sénat, dont il fut longtemps membre, pratique la méthode diplomatique : ton serein, argumentation délayée dans le but de convaincre plutôt que d'écraser l'adversaire.

Female of Moroccan extraction introduces the recidivist act and undercuts the predictable polemique in the coutious and measured manner of its introduction. Politics at its best in my eyes.