This is certainly a classic case of closing the barn door after the animal has fled. Yet, the measure is probably no going to pass, even in the face of solid evidence that the plant was already in partial meltdown from the earthquake before the tsunami hit.
James Pilant
MM comments on my previous post (which can be found here)
It’s even better (ie, worse) than the excerpt you’ve posted. Here’s the full email: http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Mother-In-Law-Email-Carolyn-Bournes-Stern-Etiquette-Message-To-Heidi-Withers-Goes-Viral/Article/201106416021513
I very much appreciate the comment and the link to the whole e-mail which I now post below – James Pilant
:: This is the full email from Mrs Bourne to Miss Withers:
It is high time someone explained to you about good manners. Yours are obvious by their absence and I feel sorry for you.
Unfortunately for Freddie, he has fallen in love with you and Freddie being Freddie, I gather it is not easy to reason with him or yet encourage him to consider how he might be able to help you.
It may just be possible to get through to you though. I do hope so.
Your behaviour on your visit to Devon during April was staggering in its uncouthness and lack of grace.
Unfortunately, this was not the first example of bad manners I have experienced from you.
If you want to be accepted by the wider Bourne family I suggest you take some guidance from experts with utmost haste.
There are plenty of finishing schools around. You would be an ideal candidate for the Ladette to Lady television series.
Please, for your own good, for Freddie’s sake and for your future involvement with the Bourne family, do something as soon as possible.
Here are a few examples of your lack of manners:
When you are a guest in another’s house, you do not declare what you will and will not eat – unless you are positively allergic to something.
You do not remark that you do not have enough food.
You do not start before everyone else.
You do not take additional helpings without being invited to by your host.
When a guest in another’s house, you do not lie in bed until late morning in households that rise early – you fall in line with house norms.
You should never ever insult the family you are about to join at any time and most definitely not in public. I gather you passed this off as a joke but the reaction in the pub was one of shock, not laughter.
I have no idea whether you wrote to thank [your future sister-in-law] for the weekend but you should have hand-written a card to her.
You should have hand-written a card to me. You have never written to thank me when you have stayed at Houndspool.
[Your future sister-in-law] has quite the most exquisite manners of anyone I have ever come across. You would do well to follow her example.
You regularly draw attention to yourself. Perhaps you should ask yourself why.
It is tragic that you have diabetes. However, you aren’t the only young person in the world who is a diabetic.
I know quite a few young people who have this condition, one of whom is getting married in June. I have never heard her discuss her condition.
She quietly gets on with it. She doesn’t like being diabetic. Who would? You do not need to regale everyone with the details of your condition or use it as an excuse to draw attention to yourself. It is vulgar.
As a diabetic of long standing you must be acutely aware of the need to prepare yourself for extraordinary eventualities, the walk to Mothecombe beach being an example.
You are experienced enough to have prepared yourself appropriately.
No-one gets married in a castle unless they own it. It is brash, celebrity style behaviour.
I understand your parents are unable to contribute very much towards the cost of your wedding. (There is nothing wrong with that except that convention is such that one might presume they would have saved over the years for their daughters’ marriages.)
If this is the case, it would be most ladylike and gracious to lower your sights and have a modest wedding as befits both your incomes.
One could be accused of thinking that Heidi Withers must be patting herself on the back for having caught a most eligible young man. I pity Freddie.
“Islam: Message of Peace” is the internet name of one of my blogging friends.
Here are his comments on a previous post which can be found here.
(The following is two comments which I have folded into one.)
James Pilant
“If a man like Muhammad were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world, he
would succeed in solving its problems that would bring it the much needed peace and
happiness.” –George Bernard Shaw
“Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational
dogmas, of a cult without images; the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one
spiritual empire, that is Muhammad. As regards all standards by which human
greatness may be measured, we may well ask, is there any man greater than he?” –Lamartine, HISTOIRE DE LA TURQUIE, Paris, 1854, Vol. II, pp. 276 -277
“He was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope’s pretensions, Caesar
without the legions of Caesar: without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a
palace, without a fixed revenue; if ever any man had the right to say that he ruled by the
right divine, it was Mohammed, for he had all the power without its instruments and
without its supports.” –Bosworth Smith, Mohammad and Mohammadanism, London, 1874, p. 92.
My point is… if only Middle East follow the footstep of this Man (Muhammad – peace be upon him), in all aspect of social, economical, financial, legislative, institutional, judicial, leadership (…etc) matters of life, no dictator would assume leadership.
Islam cultivates these values from self, to family to society, (just like a pyramid) so when everyone is prepared to live a life like Muhammad (peace be upon him) did, there won’t be any chance for dictators to play with people’s lives.
Andrew often comments on this blog and I am pleased to bring his thoughts to you.
The original post is here.
Here’s Andrew –
I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine the other day regarding the odds of successfully establishing self sustaining representative democracys in the Middle East. He borught up a good point. Every facet of our lives, and what is expected from us as citizens, is based on our cultural system of values. While an individual can easily become “enlightened” to the ideas of freedom and democracy, its much harder to change the cultural value system of an entire society to progress one way or another. When you look at different scales of human interaction (from the individual, to the family, to the community, to the state… all the way up), you see different sociological mechanisms becoming dominant.
These dictators remind me of the Joker in the new batman movie. What they are telling the masses has a ring of truth to it. The problem is that they pervert the line of reasoning towards their benefit, or they take it too far to an extreme. It is true that it takes a lot longer for a culture to naturally develop into a new system of values. In the West, we had our Enlightenment period in the 18th century in which the inertia of cultural values finally gave way to the way to our current system of values. The middle east didnt really go through that period the way we did. So while you can easily find a middle easterner to agree that freedom and democracy are good for values for the middle east, the emotional need to break that cultural inertia seems to not have reached that critical point yet.
I predict that it wont be 30 years after we are completely out of Afghanistan and Iraq before their democracies (that we gave to them, they didnt earn it like we had to.) are in shambles and new dictators arise to take power.
Should you pay the full fine or pay a bribe?
Please read the attached blog post for the correct answer.
James Pilant
Some of the best outrage is generated overseas. I hope you read this with as much delight as I did.
Here’s a sample paragraph –
Move on to what, though? Where does one go after a dictator? How to let go of a mental lifestyle that’s been seeded by a lifetime’s worth of democracy-talk? We are the generation that’s been weaned on talk that a country has to be at a certain point on the development chart before its peeps can even begin to comprehend democracy, much less enjoy its fruits. The country shouldn’t have so many freaking poor people, for starters, because you just can’t trust poor people. They never ask for much. A litre of paraffin and some cooking oil is fine, really. We have spent half our lives listening to life-presidents perpetuating the idea that, while we might never be ready for democracy, we are always ready for dictators. It would appear that we have a proclivity for despotism. That’s our lot.
This is good writing expressing that universal yearning for a life free from manipulation and control.
James Pilant
via Diasporadical
Valerie Gribben writing a guest editorial in the New York Times discussed life as a doctor in relationship to stories.
Fairy tales are, at their core, heightened portrayals of human nature, revealing, as the glare of injury and illness does, the underbelly of mankind. Both fairy tales and medical charts chronicle the bizarre, the unfair, the tragic. And the terrifying things that go bump in the night are what doctors treat at 3 a.m. in emergency rooms.
I believe in stories. I teach my students that humans think in two ways, through reason and by stories. Often, the stories win out over facts and reason. There’s a good reason for that. Stories are the older of the two methods. We humans have only been trying in any large numbers to use reason and logic since the Enlightenment in the 18th century. The Iliad was being repeated over and over again around campfires for hundreds of years before Christ. And for many thousands of years before that, the storyteller had been working his craft.
In many ways we live by stories. We live several narratives at the same time. In the United States, we have running at the same time, the “city on a hill” narrative along with the “American Dream” story. (Maybe that’s why we foolishly equate success with goodness?) We have our personal story running in synch, opposition to and in tandem with, everybody elses’ dreams.
But Ms. Gribben points to Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I have read a good number. Generally speaking when we think we are familiar with one (Cinderella), our knowledge is based on a Hollywood sanitized version.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales are stories from a world of sadness and terror, fear and danger. They were used to warn and teach about a dangerous world where even the smallest most innocent child was in danger.
I worked with juvenile delinquents for some years. I believe that the sadness in those stories was often mirrored in my clients. And certainly our author here, has found a world of application for these stories.
So, please read her guest column and enjoy.
James Pilant
This story has been generating a great deal of media attention. My inclination after reading about the case was to let other people criticize and move on with my other issues. Then I read the e-mail message the future mother in law sent.
Here it is.
from: Carolyn Bourne
to: heidi withers
subject: your lack of manners
Here are a few examples of your lack of manners:
When you are a guest in another’s house, you do not declare what you will and will not eat – unless you are positively allergic to something.
You do not remark that you do not have enough food.
You do not start before everyone else.
You do not take additional helpings without being invited to by your host.
When a guest in another’s house, you do not lie in bed until late morning in households that rise early – you fall in line with house norms.
You should never ever insult the family you are about to join at any time and most definitely not in public. I gather you passed this off as a joke but the reaction in the pub was one of shock, not laughter.
You regularly draw attention to yourself. Perhaps you should ask yourself why. No one gets married in a castle unless they own it. It is brash, celebrity style behaviour.
I understand your parents are unable to contribute very much towards the cost of your wedding. (There is nothing wrong with that except that convention is such that one might presume they would have saved over the years for their daughters’ marriages.)
If this is the case, it would be most ladylike and gracious to lower your sights and have a modest wedding as befits both your incomes.
One could be accused of thinking that Heidi Withers must be patting herself on the back for having caught a most eligible young man. I pity Freddie.
This is the bottom of the barrel wretched. I want this woman to have to hide in her house from a vengeful press for many years to come.
However, I do have one belief in common with the “Mother in Law from Hell;” – I pity Freddie, not because of his future wife but because of his current mother. Maybe, his mother-in-law will be an improvement.
James Pilant
My favorite sentence –
Another investor shouted that Tepco’s executives should jump into their stricken reactors and die to take the blame for the fiasco.
Enjoy the article and remember that TEPCO has paid out more than 19 billion dollars in damages but that if this happened in America, the responsible utility company would be out less than a hundred million dollars due to our government protecting them from losses.
James Pilant
via MY VOICE
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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