LinkedIn spam alert.

LinkedIn keeps raiding my MS Outlook contacts (1100 names) without my permission and spams everybody. Sorry people, wasn’t me!  

Out of Order, Order.

Michael Martin has had his peerage quietly confirmed.

“He don’t look like no pier to me”, says NY Port Authority Police Chief

See God Helps Those that Help Themselves below.

Georgia on my mind 2

This story was in the Guardian on Monday 24th August. ‘ PR groups cash in on Russian conflict: Russia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia are using public relations firms to influence the western media, writes David Teather

It amplifies my earlier blog ‘Georgia on my Mind. And look at the fees they are being charged! Read more.
 

Visit me in Tripoli, but hurry.

Apparently I had swine flu. I went to the Doc today as I’ve had this vicious earache, sore throat and a general feeling of malaise since returning from holiday.

‘I said, I think I have got something terminal, Doc. He said, that’s what you said last time you were here. I said, where is it written I can’t have two terminal diseases at once, if I want? I’m private, not NHS.’ 

The symptoms were so mild at first (cough) I didn’t know I had it. The secondary infection has laid me low. So low, they are sending me to Libya.

Georgia on my mind.

I was at a dinner in New York. We were discussing Georgia - no the other one. The Russians had barged through South Ossetia and feelings were running high. That was a year ago this week.
I said, somewhat provocatively, that the worst thing (for the West) about Mikheil Saakashvili, the charismatic President, is that he looks and sounds like the American educated lawyer he is. If he looked like the Georgian über-brigand with the big black moustache, we would dismiss him as a warlord and the whole disastrous escapade as a clashing of clans.
Various people jumped down my throat at the same time, explaining we had a duty to support newly independent democratic states; that he was a democrat, freely elected, an advocate of the free market and of open society. I know I know, I said, but a DUTY to support? I don’t think so. This is about oil again, only this time it’s in a pipe (2 in fact) not in the ground. I said I thought Saakashvili’s militant nationalism was foolish – the Russians baited him and he snapped; but NATO was much to blame for pretending that we could aid him. I added that NATO, stood for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and wondered which bit of the Trans-Caucasus littoral bordered our mutual Ocean. Cold Wars start with super power stand-offs and World Wars start because of treaties with faraway places that get invaded.
None of this won me friends on the Upper East Side. One year on, Georgia and Russia are simmering again. But surprisingly the anniversary went un-noticed in the West. The EU are monitoring the border, the Americans rightly refused. And mercifully talk of Georgia joining NATO is now demoted to a ‘goal’ along with shopping trips to Mars.
If Russia’s horizons ended on the snowy summits of the Caucasus, wrote General Fadeev in 1850, then the whole of the western half of the Asian continent would be outside our sphere of influence and … would not long wait for another master. He was referring, interestingly, to Great Britain! 
But why the change of heart – what happened to the Little Country that Can whom my dinner friends supported so passionately?
Well, sometimes I watch Russian TV (Russia Today) along with Al Jazeera and a lot of other stuff (Nigerian and Brazilian telly are fun) and I stumbled on this. Allegedly ITN’s Julian Manyon thinks Saakashvili is ‘a lunatic’, furthermore it is claimed by a Russian freelance, he is not allowed by his News Desk to say so.
Who knows if this hearsay is true? It was on Russian TV so it can’t be, It’s all anti Georgia propaganda. Innit?
I don’t know Manyon, but he might consider Saakashvili a bit nutty (for any foreigners reading this blog, this is slang not a medical term). After all who in his right mind would provoke a fight with a massive Russian army aiding South Ossetians who wish to be part of Russia not Georgia. Manyon knows better than most that every time anybody (mostly Muslims) cries independence in the Caucasus, they are ruthlessly suppressed. This was true in Chechnya, Dagestan as well as the Sufi-led revolts of the mid 19th Century to name just a few. No good comes of anything like that in the Caucasus, ever.
But it does raise the issue of partiality in news reporting. We are encouraged to side with brave Georgia and its telegenic President and not to trust the other lot. But, yesterday Helen Boaden, Director of BBC News wrote in the Times ‘our job is to represent all sides in an argument accurately and fairly and test them as rigorously as we can to allow audiences to reach their own judgements.’ So if one of the most experienced foreign correspondents in the English speaking world (albeit on ITV but governed by similar strictures) has concerns about Saakashvili - and has evidence to support it, I think we should be told more. It would clarify if this was just a lie (= ham-fisted Russian propaganda), or whether those New York diners were right in their support or very naive (see NY Times Aug 5). In the meantime I am reminding myself why Lenin ordered the Red Army into Georgia in 1921. It was to do with Ossetians and Abkhazians not wanting to be part of Georgia. Only back then there was no oil, no NATO, no US 6th Fleet and no President on TV in a Brooks Brothers button-down shirt and tassel loafers, to engorge liberal hearts in NYC but risk dragging the rest of us in into another load of trouble. Yes, I support Georgia, but a duty to support, because Saakashvili looks nice? Fiddlesticks. 

‘I’m sending out an SMS ..’

I never thought I would pray for a mobile phone not to work. No, I am not on a train, listening to some ****hole.  I am writing a book. It’s a novel, well, more of a thriller really, based on a handsome TV reporter – of course, what else. His name is Orlando Pound. I wrote another book about him some fifteen years ago. That one is on a memory stick somewhere. The modern equivalent of a drawer. The only fundamental change in the two stories is (are?) the gadgets I can place at his disposal.
Most gadget innovations created new exciting opportunities for the writer. Who can forget Q? Or The Wasp, John Buchan’s yellow and black Hispano Suiza racing up the Great North Road. Even Willa Cather’s settlers in covered wagons could give a redskin a run for his money with the ultimate gadget, the Colt 45, so cynically named the Peacemaker.
But the mobile phone screws everything. I feel like Anjelica Huston in that Orange advert – you know the one. How can I create dramatic tension if the victim just needs to call up for a bit of roadside assistance, or worse still somebody rings my hero to say danger lurks around the next twist in my plot.
To give myself any kind of a chance, I now have to manipulate handsets away from the characters, when they need them most. So the phone has to be lost, the battery flat, the signal nonexistent, just when a text could save a life but kill a story. To get around the problem, I am looking to set my next book in er, ….…  - I’ll twitter you exactly where later; when I find somewhere other than North Dorset where mobiles don’t work and a cry for help is a message in a bottle.