I really wanted to bleach Strummer and then dye her yellow.

Mrs Martial put the kibosh on that one. Probably for the best.

Not all crises win world's attention

Attention is in short supply. Will to act is in even less.

The horrors of the world may build in the absence of television cameras, but not in the absence of witnesses. Every place where there are people suffering, there too are people striving to mitigate that pain.

There are also those like Jan Egeland who watch closely and who see the clouds on the horizon; who sound the warnings and call for action. And who are told calmly, rationally, oh so blithely that there is no money, no will, no options, that those people have to work it out for themselves, that they have always been that way, that it is not in our national interest, that it is arrogant of us to interfere, and so on. And when people like Jan persist, they are ignored, tuned out, told to stop being a buzzkill.

Finally, inevitably, disaster overtakes wilful blindness and the politicians frantically wonder why no one ever brought this to their attention and the editorial pages sagely speculate on the lack of early warning systems.

Fuck you all.

UPDATE: Wow. Grumpy. The extra hour of sleep did nothing but make me ornery.

I've been in Nepal and Macedonia in recent weeks. I've been talking to people working in Kosovo, Liberia, Bhutan, Eretria, Jordan, the West Bank. Many of the issues are clear, if difficult - and out of the scope of humanitarian agencies. Political problems require political solutions. Who is working on them? For the most part, nobody is.

For example, twice in the past few months I've heard Bhutan compared to Rwanda. Didn't see that coming, did you? Not quite sure where Bhutan is, are you? You certainly don't have a clue what the issues are and why the dire specter of genocide might be raised. Don't worry overmuch: if there is a genocide, rest assured that the media will cover it and the politicians deplore it.

The parade route of the World Champion Boston Red Sox (sounds kinda nice, don't it?) took them from Fenway Park, down Boylston Street, over to City Hall Plaza, and then up to the Science Museum where the Duckboats the team was riding in went into the water. The Sox were then taken up the Boston side of the river and down the Cambridge side.

So where were we? We were sailing on the river, of course. Buzzing the Duckboats! It was awesome.

All sorts of links to the Lancet story about the invasion of Iraq leading to 100,000 excess deaths. Well, I could quibble up one side of the street and down the other, though my heart really isn't in that (one excess death is bad enough). However, there is one very serious problem with the story - and with all the blogging on it: the incessant repetition of this quote,

"Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children"

What if I were to say, for example, "most individuals killed were men and women"? This would be just as true as the above line - but you'd rightly regard it as meaningless because it appears to include everybody. Or how about "most individuals killed were men and children"? Not quite the same emotional resonance as "women and children" is there?

The problem here is that the group "children" is sufficiently large that including it with "women" (or "men") automatically yanks the sample over 60% no matter where you are. For example, in Iraq, 40% of people are under 15, which means that "women" are another 30% - and so we begin with a population sample of 70%. In such a case, it would be very difficult for "most" of the excess deaths to come from men dying before their time.

The "women and children" thing is so common that people have clearly never quite thought through the implications. It is meant to be gender sensitive, but is in fact profoundly lazy. Seeing the world through a "gender lens" (as we say in the humanitarian world) means looking at the roles played in society by both women and men (and, yes, children) and developing responses that take all roles into account.

They won it for:

For Else, the immigrant from post-war Germany, who taught me how baseball should be played and who also taught me that many managers don't know even so simple a thing as that.

For my grandfather, who remembered 1918 (though, he always said, sitting in boot camp that year he was a little more concerned with the hostilities in Europe than with the World Series) and who took me to my first ballgame - at Fenway, of course. The Sox lost to the Brewers and my grandfather pointed out the nearly done Hank Aaron as "the best ball player you will ever see".

For my grandmother in Louisville who became a Reds fan - a serious Reds fan - so that despite the sixty years between our ages we would have baseball in common.

For my father, a boy from the Bronx, but always a Dad from Boston. For my mother, who took my tears in 1978 very seriously indeed.

For Debby and Rich who got married in 1975 and honeymooned to the crackling radio sound of that year's West Coast swing.

For my buddy Chris who always insisted that he wanted this title to come without drama, without stress, with eleven runs in the first inning - and who answered the phone last night by screaming "Sweep! Sweep! Sweep! Um, who is this?"

For Mrs Martial who, when we fell in love, decided that in order to stand a life with me she would need to learn one (but just one) sport. She picked baseball and the Sox repaid her by breaking her heart, never more so than last year.

Welcome home, all of you.

This is the strangest - and coolest - feeling. All I have to do is think, "the Red Sox beat the Yankees and are going to the World Series" and I can actually feel the endorphins drenching my brian.

Yes!

I'm still three thousand miles away. Every morning I rush to the computers at the training center and check the score.

I can't describe the feeling because I've never had one quite like this before. But it feels good.

I get back this weekend. Wow.

As is my wont, I took a walk this morning. In this case, around Bad Godesburg, the suburb of Bonn where I'm staying. Climbing the hill to the castle, I wandered for a time through a cemetary. Most of the dates on the cenotaphs were toward the end of the last century, though there were also occasional leaps back a century and a half.

Without fully realizing it I began to look for particular dates - and I found them. Some were identified with a military cross, some just by where they fell.

geb. 1920 - ver. 1943
Bonn 1899 - Russland 1944
and finally, nearly overwhelmingly, 1926 - 1945

He wasn't even nineteen yet.

It's geography.

The CIA dots their "i"s and crosses every "t" and makes it clear that Saddam's desire for WMD was driven by regional geopolitical interest. According to the Los Angles Times as they discuss Duefler's report and testimony, " [Saddam] believed it was vital to his own survival that the outside world - especially Iran - think he still had them. "

According to De Spectaculis:

" I ... have absolutely no difficulty in figuring out why [Saddam wanteed the world to believe he had WMD capacity] - because I know how to read a map. ... Chemical weapons, the easiest WMD to make and to deploy to good effect on the battlefield, are practically a necessary accessory in a dangerous neighborhood such as the Middle East - whether you actually have them or not. "

I don't claim any insight here. Anyone who actually looked at a map of the region around Iraq and put an iota of thought into the implications arrived at the same conclusion some time ago.

I am very, very lucky.

A week ago, my plane emerged from Kathmandu's late monsoon cloud cover and we were even with the very top of the world. Directly opposite us, the crest of the Himalayas marched into the sublime distance. I stared, enraptured for . . . a half hour? a quarter? . . . until the plane turned south toward Delhi and the encroaching night.

Today, crisp with early fall, I walked an hour along the Rhine. The sun streaming through the clouds revealed strands of gossamer - thousands! - tossed as sails to the wind by Bonn's spiders as they let go the turning leaves and whirled into the sky.

All this week, I have been conducting training in the room from which George C Marshall set in motion and implemented the plan that bears his name. For this particular development worker that space is hallowed ground, headquarters of the greatest and most successful of all development programmes, foundation of the greatest peace the world has known. And I had the opportunity to pass on to others my small store of knowledge about development and peace there, in that very room!

Oh, I am a lucky man indeed.

Two more weeks before home . . .