The Angry Exile: Royal Air Fail

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Royal Air Fail

Having never served in the military I'm far from being an expert in such matters, but I'm reasonably sure that it's considered normal practice for an air force with ground attack capable aircraft to employ aircrew who do actually know how to drop a fucking bomb on someone. This is apparently not the case with the RAF in 2011.

The Ministry of Defence announced last week that RAF Typhoons would drop bombs on Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's tanks and other ground targets.
But so far this has not happened, because the planes' pilots are not considered to be properly trained in ground attacks.
In a further embarrassment, laser targeting pods for the Typhoons, which cost £160 million, have been left in packing crates because the RAF has not been able to pay for its pilots to train to use them.

And here I've been taking the piss out of Cameramong for his sabre-rattling at Mad Mo early last month with, to mix metaphors, a nearly empty gun cabinet, and it turns out that what's left in there can't be used because not enough people know how. Did you know that when you were talking tough, Dave? Did you actually ask the RAF what they could and couldn't do first? Or did someone at the RAF tell you 'Bombs? Oh, yeah, sure, we can do bombs' without checking and let you make a complete tit of yourself? Because committing the UK to action for which it does still have the equipment but lacks the rather important component of trained personnel means that someone has fucked up.

Eat this, Gaddafi! Bombs awa... oh shit, wrong button. *

And remember that with all this scaling back and cost cutting hitting the UK's ability to defend itself and its citizens, almost the only thing I think it's worth having a fucking government for in the first place, money wise the country is still chest deep in the shit and continuing to sink. The national debt is, as we all know by now, both eye watering and understated thanks to the Brownian practice - a little reduced by the Cobbleition - of pretending some things don't count despite still having to pay for them, and since overall expenditure is continuing to rise the deficit isn't shrinking either. A huge amount of money is being spent, and clearly a fair bit of it has to be going on interest on the mountain of debt Brown ran up as PM and Chancellor, but that's 'only' 47 billion quid or so.** Public spending is £702 billion and rising, and the rise is across most areas of spending (including defence, oddly enough). What the hell are they spending it all on?

Head of Quality & Efficiency Services
Salary: £57,288 - £66,762 pa
Following the realignment of Quality and Commissioning a new service area, Quality and Efficiency, has been created. We are now seeking to appoint an inspiring Head of Service to join the talented senior management team.
...

Lead Manager Policy and Strategic Partnerships
Salary: £60,192-£75,897 per annum
Part of the Chief Executive’s Office and reporting to the Head of Policy and Performance, you will lead on all corporate policy and strategic partnership issues. This will include:

working across the Council and with partners to develop innovative ways of improving outcomes for Surrey residents while reducing overall costs; and

maximizing the benefits of the Coalition Government’s approach to local government in Surrey.

...

Member Insight& Engagement Manager
Salary: £50000 - £60000 per annum
Morgan Hunt are looking for a Member Insight& Engagement Manager for a top government organisation until the end of December 2011.

The successful candidate will have responsibility for the following deliverables and activities:

working with the Head of Member Engagement to develop the member engagement strategy and plan

developing a deep understanding of key member segments and acting as a champion for their needs, both within the Department and across the organisation

Working with the marketing communications team to brief and deliver member engagement content and products

Planning and managing targeted communications to key member segments

Working with the Insight & Analytics team to deliver the 2011/12 member research programme

...

Oh yeah, I was forgetting. Well, I'm sure everyone will be happy that the country can still afford these and an Associate Director of Integrated Community Services when it wants someone to empty the bins, a Media & Stakeholder Relations Manager when it wants a nurse or a doctor, a Delivery Assurance Director when it wants a cop or a prison officer, and of course 300 or so town clerks calling themselves CEOs... when it needs someone able to drop a bomb from an aeroplane without missing the fucking ground, much less the target. A great comfort, I'm sure.

Frankly it's becoming increasingly difficult to decide whether the end of Britain is going to come as a result of being turned into the EU's second most western district, being invaded as a result of being forced to defend itself with nukes and shotguns and having kept next to nothing in between, or being taken over after all the loans are called in. What we can be sure of is that until Cameramong and his Cobbleition chums sit down and work out what the fucking essentials are and what the UK really cannot afford as a result of their predecessors' profligacy - QUANGOs and aid to countries wealthy enough for a space program and their own nuclear weapons, for instance - one of those situations seems increasingly likely, though to use the phrase of the late Douglas Adams, it is possible that this has already happened.

'Kinell.

* I found this photo of a Typhoon releasing flares on a UK airshows forum. The photographer - and I can't credit him or her with any name other than their forum ID, GyRob - has posted a number up there and to my eye they're rather good. If you like images of fast aircraft doing their thing click the photo I used above to be taken there for a look.
** Say it fast enough and it doesn't seem so bad. But it is though, really it is. It's not just money they're going to take from you to pay for their profligacy, it's Keynesian wealth redistribution the Keynesians don't like to talk about - taking money from middle and low income earners who are the majority of the tax base and giving it as interest payments to those who are wealthy enough to loan money to governments. Incidentally, the £47 bn spent on interest is nearly as much as is spent on the ability to defend Britain's borders and citizens.

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akvavitix 71p · 732 weeks ago

iDave is an utterly insufferable cunt of the highest order.

The RAF should be called Royal Al-Qaeda Force since they are now helping Al-Qaeda overthrow MG in Libya in the most farcical example of British Fucked up Foreign Policy ever encountered.

1 reply · active 732 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 732 weeks ago

I'm happy to wait and see on that score. Certainly there may be some Islamist types involved but I think it likely that there are vastly more people who'd simply like Gaddafi to go. But in either case the point really is the stupidity of sending people who've not been trained to do the task. It's equivalent to sending a fleet of shiny new coaches to an evacuation along with a bunch of people scratching their heads and asking each other if any of them knows how to drive one of these things. Whether iDave has any responsibility for this or whether it's ineptness at a senior level in the RAF making iDave look stupid is speculation, but it's farcical either way.

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chalky white · 732 weeks ago

The ground attack Typhoons weren't due into service until 2016. The Typhoons sent to Libya are the air defence fighter variants.
The problem seems to be that Dave decided to scrap the Tornado GR4 ground attack aircraft and quickly re confgure the Typhoon as a bomber to compensate . No one obviously thought to explain to him that training for bombing missions and training for fighter missions takes many months of conversion training. Plus the aircraft would need to be re configured ( cockpit controls, pylons, armaments,avionics, groundcrew training etc etc)
The long term plan for our aircraft seems to have been to keep the Tornados as bombers and the Typhoons as fighters ( air to air combat patrols) and hope the new JSF ( joint strike fighter ) would seamlessly fulfill the bomber role and replace the Tornado.
But Dave decided to pick fights with countries and scrap the Tornados at the same time.
It beggars belief really that a Prime Minister could be so incompetent. It must be part of some masterplan.

1 reply · active 732 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 732 weeks ago

To be fair I saw a ray of hope with the decision to make the carriers CATOBAR and get the carrier variant of the F-35 instead of the STOVL type that seems to be giving so many headaches. All that's a way off though, and I agree that it's pretty stupid to have scrapped things, and ditching the trained personnel, that the UK may need now. And that the PM will need if he's going to indulge in international grandstanding.

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AllSeeingEye 55p · 732 weeks ago

To be fair, chalky, the lets-really-fuck-this-all-sideways plan is hardly a new one. Brown scrapped the Jaguar, which would have been the best aircraft of the lot to have used in Libya.This is just rolling political cuntitude rather than some strike-out-on-your-own original groundbreaking cuntishness. Where did you get 2016 from though?

And (bloody hell, how much did I drink tonight...fairness twice in two sentences) if I had a Royal Air Force with planes that carried bombs, I'd sort of fucking assume that they knew which button to press to drop them. I wouldn't think that I'd have to check or anything. Killing things from above should be about two-thirds of the way through the course and merit a badge all of its own. Did they skip the module or something?

1 reply · active 732 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 732 weeks ago

This is just rolling political cuntitude rather than some strike-out-on-your-own original groundbreaking cuntishness.

Wonderfully put.

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@AmbushPredator · 732 weeks ago

"Frankly it's becoming increasingly difficult to decide whether the end of Britain is going to come as a result of being turned into the EU's second most western district, being invaded as a result of being forced to defend itself with nukes and shotguns and having kept next to nothing in between, or being taken over after all the loans are called in."

Right now, I wouldn't bet against all three happening at once...

1 reply · active 732 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 732 weeks ago

Mightn't be a bad thing. The EU and whoever held the nation's title deeds would be forced to get rid of the invader, or the invader would be successful and the EU and debt would both be given the flick. :)

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windy miller · 732 weeks ago

" To be fair I saw a ray of hope with the decision to make the carriers CATOBAR and get the carrier variant of the F-35 instead of the STOVL "
Purely political so that the French can use our carriers and vice versa. Stuck with a catapult/ rhag dependent aircraft is bad news. All part of the EU defence force. The navy already carry out EU patrols in the Gulf.

ASE " Brown scrapped the Jaguar"
It was well past it's sell by date. Slow and ineffective even in it's heyday. Apart from blatting a few Omani rebel outposts.
The 2016 for the Typhoon bomber was a way of trying to put off the cost of actually producing the Typhoon bomber. Hoping to scrimp and scrape to keep the GR4 going as long as possible.

1 reply · active 732 weeks ago

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Angry_Exile 90p · 732 weeks ago

Well, with the STOVL aircraft the RN has, er, had they could use other navies' carriers anyway. Didn't someone once put a Sea Harrier down on the deck of a freighter during the Falklands War (I don't recall hearing how they got it off again - would the deck have stood a vertical take off)? I don't know about the joint French/RN carrier time share idea that's been put about in the press but I'm not convinced that's the reason for the change. Partly perhaps, who knows, but there are enough good reasons for CATOBAR anyway. As I said I'm no expert but to me it seems the original carrier design was good for F-35Bs and not a whole lot else in the way of fixed wing aircraft. I've certainly read more than one article that questioned what the hell the RN was hoping to use for airborne radar, an altitude restricted helicopter that didn't exist yet and would require money for an R&D program or a modified Osprey that didn't exist yet either and would also require an R&D program.

Chucking the design and going for CATOBAR means the RN has the option of buying proven radar aircraft designs that already exist (or negotiating for a manufacturing license per the Apache helicopter) - the American E-2 was mentioned, and since the RN is already committed to a mostly Yank plane in the F-35 what's another one? Or another two since EA-18s would also be an option. And of course the F-35C they're talking about buying for it instead of the B version has a much greater range and I imagine will be cheaper to maintain as it doesn't have all the adaptations for vertical landing. And if the whole F-35 project actually goes tits up the RN could fall back on the newer model F/A-18s or perhaps Rafales. Australia has bought F/A-18Fs precisely because of the delays to the F-35 and because it's old F-111s were past it, and is talking about buying some more. 'Course, Australia doesn't have a carrier to land them on but they're for the RAAF, and the main thing is that they're heaps cheaper and ready now. Doesn't apply so much to the RN because the carriers are a few years away, but the worst case scenario if the F-35 gets further behind or falls through altogether is the RN having carriers that can't fly planes at all (bit like now =/ ). Looked at that way CATOBAR is a safety net.

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Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Royal Air Fail

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