Seventy years ago today 300 German bombers attacked London, killing over 400 people and leaving 1,600 badly injured – nearly all of these were ordinary civilians either in their homes or at their work.

In May 1941 London was bombed in one last massive raid, killing 1,500 people, again mainly civilians – including children, women and old folk.

During those eight months of the Blitz London had been bombed on a daily basis and several other cities had also been attacked at a cost of 43,000 dead and 51,000 seriously injured. Many urban areas had been reduced to rubble.

But after May ’41 the raids petered out. Hitler had received his first setback. His Luftwaffe bombers had caused untold misery, death and destruction – but there had been a price. Many German aircraft had been destroyed, thousands of aircrew killed or injured in what became known as The Battle of Britain.

During those few months the fate of Britain and the free world lay in the hands of a few hundred young men, pilots of Royal Air Force Fighter Command – and in those sunny September days of 1940 the ordinary people of South East England became witnesses of their bravery as they clashed against the enemy over sunlit fields…..

It was Churchill who hammered home the realities of Britain’s desperate situation once France had surrendered. Yet, without trying to cover up the risks, his speeches stiffened the sinews of his countrymen with a message of defiance against the odds – and also recognised the debt we owed to The Few, Churchill’s own description of those young men of the RAF who faced and pushed back the onslaught of what many others had defined as an irresistible force.

Today in quiet ground on the Kentish coast a pilot sits and looks out across the Channel to the coast of France. He is surrounded by the badges of the RAF Squadrons of Fighter Command involved in the Battle of Britain and, nearby, is a wall containing the names of those who made the ultimate sacrifice. This is The National Memorial to The Few.

It is a place for tears and also a place of hope for lessons to be learned – above all a place of thanksgiving for those who paid the highest price to save us from a long night of terror…. 

When you go home, tell them of us and say

For your tomorrow we gave our today

Alexandra Gutierrez, a left wing hack from Alaska, has been inducted into a highly selective Hall of Fame – but first some background……

Liberal website Slate needed a local take on the Alaska GOP Senate primary so they hired Alexandra Gutierrez, news director at KUCB, a non commercial Alaskan radio station to do some good, old fashioned shoe leather research. They reasoned that her background knowledge and contacts would provide a better feel for the way the race was going .

Alexandra didn’t disappoint. She cut to the chase by tracking down Ivan Moore, an independent pollster based in Anchorage and asking him his assessment of the contest between the Palin/Tea Party endorsed outsider Joe Miller and the incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Moore’s polling predicted that Miller was heading for a crushing defeat and the reasons were crystal clear. According to Moore Miller was being dragged down by his association with the Tea Party

“From the very beginning, he has positioned himself so far to the right of the ideological spectrum and attached himself to the Tea Party movement, which even in Alaska is perceived as being a pretty extreme right organization,”

But for Moore the biggest drag anchor was the Palin endorsement. Polling consistently showed that Alaskans did not think much of Palin, said Moore.

“When someone with those kinds of numbers endorses someone for public office, believe me, the effect is on the whole negative,”

Gutierrez agreed with that appraisal. In a separate article for “Prospect” she dismissed Palin as yesterday’s woman.

As Sarah Palin works to become nearly ubiquitous in the Lower 48, many of her former supporters in Alaska are trying just as hard to forget her. When Joe Miller loses the primary today, hardly anyone in Alaska will be surprised that Palin’s chosen candidate did poorly. Palin’s influence in the state started to slip when she agreed to be John McCain’s running mate in August 2008, and it only eroded further when she resigned as governor last July. Now, Palin is mostly a reality TV nuisance in the very state she’s always gushing about.

So Gutierrez came up with a punchy headline for her Slate article

WHY THE CANDIDATE OF SARAH PALIN AND THE TEA PARTY EXPRESS IS LOSING IN ALASKA.

Whoops…..what a banana skin!

And the selective Hall of Fame?  Right beside Arthur Sears Henning, Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune in 1948 – DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN – and  Mohammed Saeed al-Sahar, Saddam Hussein’s Minister of Information in 2003 –    THERE ARE NO AMERICAN INFIDELS IN BAGHDAD. NEVER!

Oh and here’s a suggestion for Slate. Next time you want a prediction don’t waste a few hundred dollars on some hack from The American Prospect (“A fresh voice of committed, thoughtful, practical liberalism” – Sen. Ted Kennedy)….just do it the Roman way. Kill a chicken and look at it’s liver……..

So Sarah Palin attended a shabbaton and accepted a gift of a Jewish scroll. She spoke about her love for the Book of Esther.

The symbolism is electrifying.

Put her on the same list as Thatcher and Churchill.

Jew lovers – the sneer once again echoes across from pogroms of the past.

What’s that sound? It’s Andrew Sullivan’s head exploding.

Wait a minute. His head is still there. It’s another part of his body that’s gone.

It’s where Andrew Sullivan keeps his brains……

No more blogging for a couple of weeks. The lovely Mrs P and myself are hitching our caravan to the Toyota Verso and heading for Normandy via the Channel Tunnel. After a couple of days we head past La Rochelle and meet up at a campsite with our son and his family.

So plenty of wine, cheese and fish and, hopefully sun, sea and sand. We’ll try to take some pics to show when we return at the end of August…..meanwhile – the caravan….

and us in camping mode……

In the earliest days of the Obama presidency the UK press was as sycophantic and complicit as their colleagues in the US. But there are two important differences between newspapers in the two countries. A significant tranche of the British press is right wing and, more importantly, these papers dominate the market. Many more Brits read the Telegraph, Mail and Sun than any of the other titles.

In addition British hacks, even on the left, tend to be less obsequious to “the great and the good” and much more robust in uncovering their idiosyncrasies and misdemeanours. Politicians of all shades are generally classed on the same level as estate agents, car salesmen and lawyers – professional hucksters who will use deception and half truths to squeeze as much money as possible out of the pockets of the naive and unsuspecting.

Thus the clay like nature of Obama’s feet are beginning to be noticed over here.

The First Lady’s ill-conceived trip to Marbella and the complete disregard for public opinion and concerns over excessive government spending is symbolic of a far wider problem with the Obama presidency – the overarching disdain for the principles of limited government, individual liberty and free enterprise that have built the United States over the course of nearly two and a half centuries into the most powerful and free nation on earth.

The Pravda style tunnel vision of the US media in it’s attitude to the administration is also coming under the microscope…

While the liberal-dominated US mainstream media have largely ignored the story, it is all over the blogosphere and talk radio, and will undoubtedly add to the President’s free falling poll ratings. As much as the media establishment turn a blind eye to stories like this, which are major news in the international media, the American public is increasingly turning to alternative news sources, including the British press, which has a far less deferential approach towards the White House.

And the conservative backlash, initially ignored and/or belittled by the UK media, as it still is in New York and Washington, is beginning to be treated with a little more respect in London.

There is however a political revolution fast approaching Washington that is driven not by mob rule but by the power of ideas and principles, based upon the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution. It is a distinctly conservative revolution that is sweeping America and is reflected in almost every poll ahead of this November’s mid-terms. It is based on a belief in individual liberty, limited government, and above all, political accountability from the ruling elites. The Obama administration’s mantra may well be “let them eat cake”, as it continues to gorge itself on taxpayers’ money, but it will be looking nervously over its shoulder as public unease mounts.

This doesn’t mean that the UK press has gone Tea Party or that every hack has sold their Obama stock. But there are slight shifts in the wind. One or two articles are even beginning to be a little bit less disdainfulof Governor Palin. Above all a newly crafted image of Obama is beginning to take shape – an empty, vacuous windbag, elevated to a position way above his experience or abilities by a claque of shifty snake oil salesmen and now spinning helplessly in the conflicting winds of gathering storms like a broken weather vane.

Here in the UK Obama might be starting to go Ozymandias……

The totally sane and rational Shannyn Moore (just a girl from Homer, Alaska) was vindicated today in her long struggle against Sarah Palin and her reign of terror in Alaska. She managed, with the help of fearless SEIU blockade runners, to smuggle out a video showing how Palin had to run in fear from thousands of Alaskans demanding their basic human rights.

With Palin in hiding Shannyn Moore (still in disguise after threats from Bristol Palin) held a secretly filmed rally of her fellow left wing Progressive Alaska bloggers ordering them to spread the message of resistance throughout the land. ……..

h/t  victor 82, from Hot Air comments

Though as a schoolboy and then a university student in the 1950s my first love was for the rawness and energy of rock & roll I found that sometimes it felt important to lay back with music that was a little more reflective and experimental yet which still possessed a rhythmic beat – and that was when I got into cool jazz….

The heat and urgency of bebop began to relax with the development of Cool Jazz. Starting in the late 1940s and early ’50s, musicians began to develop a less frantic, smoother approach toward improvising modeled after the light, dry playing of swing-era tenorist Lester Young. The result was a laid-back and even-keeled sound bearing a facade of emotionally detached “coolness.”

Even to this gangly South London teenager in the 1950s appearing to be cool and laid back seemed the very mark of a man especially in the presence of those mysterious feminine figures suddenly manifesting themselves on my radar – and the idea of being Jimmy Giuffre gliding in and out of the music with his sax was just the essence of cool (yes the clip is a little scratchy but just watch the lean way he moves….and sounds…)

But the father figure of cool jazz was Miles Davis

Trumpeter Miles Davis, one of the first bebop players to “cool it,” emerged as the greatest innovator of the genre. His Birth Of The Cool nonet recordings of 1949-’50 are the epitome of Cool Jazz lyricism and understatement.

In 1959 Davis cut what is often called one of the greatest jazz albums of all time – Kind of Blue – with colleagues who were giants in their own right….John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans……sublime….

Bill Evans, who played on that seminal Davis album, is widely regarded as one of the most innovative and influential  pianists of modern times. Unfortunately drug addiction led to an untimely death but, like many creative artists, once his hands touched the keys all weaknesses and burdens were thrown aside and pure, unadulterated genius reigned…

Dave Brubeck, on the other hand, was a brilliant jazz revolutionary whose experiments in unusual time signatures produced what is probably still the most famous modern jazz number of all time – and he continued to play well into this 21st century….

I first came across Chico Hamilton in the gritty 1957 film noir “Sweet Smell of Success” where his band provided background to that taut urban tale of media corruption and nightlife hustling. but this piece is far from that world, a beautiful piece of chamber jazz drawing an elegant picture of a…..nice day……

…and next….the MJQ….no need to say any more, the coolest of the cool……

Not forgetting those cool vocalists – and none cooler than Anita O’Day. If Brubeck’s Take Five is the insrumental number most people associate with modern jazz then Anita’s gig at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, captured forever on film in “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” is the essence of style – the hat, the dress, the heels, those gloves and the voice……jazz nirvana……

Keith J Roberts (Mr Forever Cool) recommends these albums as the core of any cool jazz collection – it’s a personal choice (like my clips) but a good start. If you fancy getting any of these then do me a little favour and order them from the Amazon links on the sidebar…..it will help augment my pension….lol….

In the meantime – stay cool…..

For a pensioner like me, living on a fixed income, these are hard times – so any extra money coming in is always very welcome. Therefore, in a blatant and unashamed  punt for your support PLEASE USE THE LINKS ON THE SIDEBAR TO BUY YOUR STUFF FROM AMAZON.  You’ll get something you wanted and I will get a modest financial reward from Amazon so EVERYONE’S A WINNER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for your anticipated support.

End of shameless plug……

BTW…..top link = Amazon USA

                    bottom link = Amazon UK

                     for other countries – go to US site and scroll down to bottom of page

Greg Mitchell at The Huffington Post (why am I not surprised?) thinks the USA should apologise for Hiroshima. Likewise, in Britain, there is a steady stream of books and articles proclaiming the bombing of Dresden as a war crime.

I have no tolerance for those who condemn the bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima. The Germans and the Japanese were brutal in the extreme against civilians and POWs. They both celebrated the cult of racial superiority and used slave labour. There is very little evidence that these regimes lacked popular support in their countries. One has only to imagine the nature of the world had the Axis powers won – and they very nearly did.

The Allied leaders did not have the advantage of hindsight. There was no reason to doubt that the Japanese would have resisted an invasion with massive fanatacism. Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved millions of lives, both Allied and Japanese, in the long run.

Terrible things happen in war and sometimes political and military leaders have to take brutal decisions but that is the nature of conflict. Why is it that in the UK and US there are always these characters whose first reaction is inevitably “my country, always wrong”?

Mitchell should be down on his knees every day of his life in thanks to those who paid the price in blood, bone and mind for his right to play the weasel….

Sarah Adams lost her 21 year old son, Private James Prosser, when he was killed by an IED in Helmand last September. Unable to face Christmas at home she went with her family to Barbados, partly because previously in 2004 James had won a holiday in Barbados in a competition and he had given it to his mum.

While in the Caribbean she and her other children wrote letters of love to James, saying how much they missed him – they then decided to put the letters into an empty Sambuca bottle (James’s favourite drink) and threw it into the sea.

Mrs Adams said she wrote how much she missed him and also wrote an open letter to whoever found the bottle.
She said: “I wanted to make everyone aware that we’re responsible for the world we live in, not to forget the soldiers who have given up their lives and to be aware that we are a country at war.”

She also wrote a note to her dead father, asking him to look after James.

Seven months and 1,300 miles later the bottle was found.

The bottle was found by team from Progressive Pipe Management on July 15, who were working on Horn Island, Mississippi cleaning up oil leaking from a BP pipeline off the coast of Louisiana following the explosion in April.

Each member of the team took a letter and read it. They wanted to get in touch with Mrs Adams but couldn’t make out the address although they knew it was in South Wales. So they contacted The South Wales Argus.

Crew supervisor Doug Kirchoff, 38, said: “It’s taken everybody by heart. It’s amazing how we’re thousands of miles away but how we’re drawn so close by something we’re all affected by. It’s pretty touching, it’s like we actually know the family just by reading the letters.”

When they got Sarah’s address they wrote her a letter.

Words cannot express our heartfelt sympathy for your family over the loss of James.
Your letters describe a remarkable young man who was very loved by his family and friends. We extend our gratitude to James for the service he did in Afghanistan and we recognise the courage, the strength and the bravery it requires to serve in the armed forces. You and he are in our thoughts as we all continue to pray for the safe return of our soldiers worldwide.”
As we are certain he did before his death, James has continued to touch the lives of many people in a positive way. Finding that bottle is something we will never forget.

Sarah Adams was deeply touched by their reply, which reached her just before her birthday, always a difficult time after a loved one’s death, looking for the birthday card that will never come.

Sometimes I feel disheartened and miserable about life but there are people there and people who we’ve met who are so caring and thoughtful.

Amen to that……