Catholic London: It's Anecdotal

When a catholic priest tells anecdotes about well known and less well known people levitating around the power center of Britain, don't expect earth shaking revelations. Have some fun laughing about people you don't like anyhow and get some insights into some people you shouldn't like, but did so far. Sinners And Saints by Father Michael Seed was published by Metro Publishing. 

Mother Teresa

Father Michael Seeds is one of many catholic priests who have spent too much time with the high and mighty and too little with the poor and needy; ask Pope Francis. It is therefore hardly surprising that his collection of little stories involves a spate of names dropping. The book packed with amusing anecdotes involving power brokers in the united Kingdom. He makes it quite obvious: Power corrupts.
 
He shows up the sheer lunacy of religious people when relating to the dying days of Cardinal Hume. When announcing his coming death due to terminal cancer, Basil Hume received the answer: ‘Congratulations! That’s brilliant news. I wish I was coming with you.’ This came from the Abbot of Ampleforth. But as ecumenical advisor to the cardinals at Westminster, lunacy is the least of Michael Seeds' problems. Eccentrics, hobgoblins, and sleazes abound in his narrative.
 
There was someone called Ann Widdecombe, While still into politics (and before her reincarnation as a comic) she pulled a major publicity stunt with her conversion to Catholicism. She hid paparazzi in the crypt. She even managed to top that feat later on. Organizing an exorcism at the Home Office, she hoped to rid the rooms of the evil aura of Michael Howard who had ‘something of the night’ about him, after he left office.
 
Tony Blair was more circumspect with his sneaky conversion to Catholicism. He demanded that Michael Seeds enter through one of the ground floor windows at No 10 Downing Street to read mass to the Blair family in corpore. Alan Clark treated him as his servant priest. After once telling him that having talked to God he now felt completely at ease, he continued by showing him his collection of Nazi memorabilia.
 
Mother Teresa of Calcutta used to descend on London and demand a 30 room mansion for herself and her entourage; and would get it. Cardinal Hume said: ‘She always wants things and I always give them to her.’ Basil Hume himself is described by Michael Seeds as childish, petulant and immature while throwing tantrums when missing a football match due to his duties. And driving past No 10 Downing Street he would shout ‘Maggie out!’ But Cardinal Hume was known to never give anybody any lifts in his personal car (paid for by the faithful): ‘My car is not a taxi.’ So, how does Seeds know this?
 
There are numerous funny stories in between some plain names dropping, so the book is quite a good and amusing read. All of it obviously has to be taken with a pinch of salt, to put it mildly. Or as my grand-mother used to say: ‘Si non è vero, è ben trovato.’ (If it is not the truth, at least it’s well invented.)

Further reading
History Distortion With Criminal Intent
Eccentric Aristocrats' Stories
Roger Moore Biography

Another Public Humiliation For Carl Hirschmann

Millionaire Carl Hirschmann, heir and grandson to Jet Aviation founder Carl Hirschmann Senior, took another rap from the Swiss High Court in Lausanne. It wasn't all bad news, though, in this particular case involving his former girlfriend. The publicity attached to the sentence is probably the worst punishment.

Carl Hirschmann was the owner of the now closed VIP club Saint Germain on Zurich's prestigious Bahnhofstrasse; he has an estimated fortune of over £100 million. He was sentenced to publish an apology to his former girlfriend on the internet for calling her a liar on various websites. The Swiss High Court felled the sentence on principle while referring the details back to the district court in Meilen, canton Zurich.

With this final sentence, another lackluster episode in the life of Carl Hirschmann comes to an end and once again it needed a trial in front of the Swiss High Court. Four years ago, a former girlfriend testified to the police that he had grossly abused her. Carl Hirschmann subsequently published his allegations of a "revenge of a disappointed ex-lover" calling her a liar at the same time. His verbal attacks were made to people; he also published a written version on various websites.

The former girlfriend lodged a complaint against Carl Hirschmann as she saw herself injured in her personal rights. While the district court agreed with her and decreed that Hirschmann must apologize on the internet to her, the cantonal supreme court came to a different conclusion. The supreme judges surmised that media reporting over the processes had made a separate apology redundant. The plaintiff didn't accept this verdict and took the case to the Swiss High Court in Lausanne. The panel of high judges followed her argument: Carl Hirschmann has to publish a full apology in social media. Media coverage of the connected trials was not sufficient and doesn't count as an apology.

In another point, the judges followed Carl Hirschmann's lawyers' argument: The Swiss High Court came to the conclusion that the risk of a repetition of the incident wasn't to be expected in this case. Therefore, the judges desisted from including an in injunction in the sentence.

The district court in Meilen is now called on to clarify where exactly Carl Hirschmann has to publish the apology. While a personal website of Carl Hirschman's is still active, two Facebook profiles on which the slurs had also been published were meanwhile deleted.
 
Carl Hirschmann was sentenced to publish the following text in full:
"Carl Hirschmann and the Saint Germain Ent. AG have injured the personal rights of Lulu M. with the publication of the posts 'photographic proof exonerates Carl Hirschmann' and 'photographic evidence exposes Lulu M. as a liar' and use of the image of Lulu M. was illegal. Carl Hirschmann has explained in a letter to Lulu M. that he was sorry to have hurt her personal rights. He has apologized in the letter to her."

Further reading
When a Sassy Headline Becomes an Embarrassment
The Hirschmann Family Saga
Carl Hirschmann Appeals Against Prison Sentence

Anna Goeldi, Last Witch

Anna Göldi was one of the last victims of the superstitious belief in witches in Europe. The legal proceedings took place in Glarus, Switzerland, a Republic that had been very reticent on holding such trials through the entire witch craze. Historians had been puzzled why a witch trial should have been held as late as 1782 there, until they discovered proof that there had been two trials going on at the same time.

Anna Göldi was born in 1734 in Sennwald, a small village that at that time was subject to the Republic of Zurich. Subject meant that the village or region was governed and taxed by Zurich. Its inhabitants on the other hand had no legal rights under the laws of the republic they were subject to. They were nothing but serfs by another name. Though not a serf herself, she was born into a poor family. She took up the only career option open to her and became a servant in the household of a wealthy family.

Being obviously a good worker, she moved from family to family to serve several of the ruling families of the Republic of Glarus. As in all good republics, democracy was only a nominal affair (American readers know how that works), and all the posts in the government, the parliament, the law courts, and the church were doled out between a few families, the same person often serving in several capacities. Anna’s last employment was with the Tschudi family whose head was a judge and sat in parliament.

While she was serving there, the child of the Tschudi family fell sick, and Anna was accused of poisoning her. To be exact, she was accused of having committed acts to make the child grow needles in its stomach and vomiting them. She was subsequently charged with and condemned as a poisoner and executed by the sword, after she had admitted under torture to have been incited by the devil. Glarus held a rigid censorship over the press at the time, and therefore neither the outcome of the proceedings (today called an injunction) nor the proceeding itself nor the injunction on the proceeding (today called superinjunction) should have become public. (British readers know how censorship works today.)

All the same, the German press got wind of it and attacked the Glarus authorities with vigour over what they called a witch process. The sham process was rightly ridiculed. The sickness of the child had been diagnosed by a veterinary surgeon, and his description of symptoms and sickness met with incredulity, not only with the press, but even with the called and paid for ‘witnesses’ of the prosecution. It was this process that led to the coining of the German word Justizmord (judicial murder).

It took until 2007 to uncover that there had been a second process going on at the same time. The process was held not in the law courts of the Republic of Glarus, but in the ecclesiastical law courts of the Reformed Church of Glarus. It was the law suit of Anna Göldi against her employer for sexual harassment and rape. The process ended in a complete clearing for the employer by his brother, oops, the ecclesiastical judge, and church justice was free to operate once again to protect the poor, the weak, and the underprivileged.

Anna Göldi has meanwhile been rehabilitated by an act of parliament. As her belongings had been confiscated at the time of the process, the worth in modern terms of these belongings was established in a guesstimate and the money has been placed into a charity in her name by the Glarus government. The newly formed charity promotes human rights with special regards to women rights.

What I find most interesting in the whole thing is the fact that we quite easily and summarily call the press restrictions placed by the Glarus government of the time censorship, while the exact same mechanism today is loftily called a legal injunction or superinjunction. Is it really all just in the name, or are we systematically deprived of our rights by these so called law courts that approve these injunctions? And I haven't even started on all the secret trials that work very much like the church trial above. And then we get an idiot PM David Cameron who attacks the Guardian over defending us against leeches like him.

Further reading
The Knights Templar in Switzerland
The Queen Astrid Chapel
Zurich is More Than Banks

Monica Seles on Yo-Yo Diets

JR Books published Getting A Grip by Monica Seles. The autobiography gives an insight into women’s tennis, dieting, and binge eating. Monica tells the story of fame, her very own nightmare and the demons hounding her.

Monica Seles

In 1993, Monica Seles was on top of the tennis world. At 19 she was the number one in women’s tennis with eight Grand Slams to her name and looked like going on a record breaking career to equal Martina Navratilova or even to surpass her. Then the unimaginable happened when a demented German attacked her and stabbed her in her shoulder. While the attacker got away with a probationary sentence, Monica was sentenced to a life of fear, nightmares and depression.

Instead of a famous career entitling her to multimillion dollar sponsor deals playing tennis, she entered a period of coming to terms with what had happened and miserably failed, joining a multitude of other crime victims mostly unnamed and unknown in misery and depression. At the same time, her father and coach was diagnosed with cancer which proved to be terminal.

Trying to get back into the game during the nineties, she was constantly hampered by panic attacks, nightmares and a weight gain of 20 kilograms. She never got back into top form and numerous stress injuries bore prove of her weight struggle. As the link between her injuries and her weight was obvious, she became progressively obsessed with getting her weight down to her former sporting weight of 57 kilograms. Buying just about every book on dieting she could get her hands on, she became convinced that regaining her former weight was the key to success.

This set-up would make a perfect misery memoir so far. But Monica shows a sense of humour throughout and self-deprecatingly sees the funny side of many of the situations.

Obviously, the more she tried to diet, the more time she spent before the fridge stuffing her face. She hired a food coach whose duties included emptying the mini-bars in the hotels she was staying in and instructing the staff to not deliver any orders she might place with room service. When not in a hotel, he slept next to the kitchen to stop her midnight excursions to the fridge and the larder. This didn’t stop her from hopping round the corner to the next convenience store and getting just anything sweet she could get her hands on.

She also tells the story behind the scene of women tennis, the frostiness in the locker room and the strange atmosphere at the tennis events around the world. Quite opposed to men’s tennis where the top seeds are able to be not only respectful to each other, but might even be friends of the court, women tennis players seem to feel a need to keep other top seeds at a distance.

These days, Monica Seles is her confident self again, after realising that dieting was not solving her problems, but getting to grips with her past, her demons, and her grief for her father.

The book is very readable for everybody interested in tennis and personal achievement. Obviously, believers in Weight Watchers and other money generating scams will be highly disapproving, but for me it just showed again that eating and drinking don’t make you fat.

Further reading
The Body Image of Man
Giving Up: Key to Success
Jerzy Janowicz and Andy Murray

Roger Federer Has Created a Monster

Roger Federer will end the season with an ATP world ranking position of 6. He hasn't been ranked so low since 2002 when he ended the year on the same ranking. Has the career of Roger Federer ended because of that? Ask the guys ranked in above the 100 mark what they would think of being ranked in the top 10. So what can we expect for Roger Federer in 2014?

The ATP ranking never lies, even if tennis commentators usually pretend it does when talking their countrymen's ranking up and others' down. Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray were much more successful this year than Roger Federer, David Ferrer was more constant, and Juan Martin Del Potro won 4 tournaments to Roger Federer's 3. This inevitably means a ranking at 6, as it did in 2002. 2013 has a bottom line for him: disappointing. That goes for everyone who has watched his career. He did not achieve the goals he set for himself on one side, and he certainly didn't perform on a level of previous years.

Flashback: Shanghai in November 2002. A 21-year-old has a fantastic first Masters participation throughout the group games. In the semifinal, he fails to get through in an impressive fight against the reigning number 1, Lleyton Hewitt. The tennis world was delighted and celebrated the skills of the newcomer; Switzerland was over the moon and hoped for more magic tennis to come.

The sequel to the story is well known. The sequel is also the problem when we try to judge Roger Federer's performance these days. The Swiss master collected titles like other people collect stamps. He did it with such ease that many were shocked when he lost a set at times. Roger Federer was so superior to the competition at times that he said. "I've created a monster."

He was right. The monstrous success of his best years (from 2004 to 2007, he won 11 of 16 Grand Slams and 3 of 4 Masters) are the bar everyone and most himself have to contend with. He pushed the bar up so high that failure was the inevitable result of it. But because he managed to keep near to these high marks to the end of 2012, the year 2013 appears to us as a veritable catastrophe. Commentators are quick in ending his career again due to that. Many nations would take him or Stanislas Wawrinka thankfully as their number one players.

The facts for 2013: 1 tournament won at the lowest ATP level (Halle, Germany), 1 Grand Slam semi-final (Melbourne), 2 ATP finals (Rome, Basel) and the semi-finals at the Masters; these are the best results in 2013. On the negative side, he had back problems, defeats against low ranked players, and a failed racket test in the middle of the season. Roger Federer himself emphasized in a recent interview that back pain was the root of the problems, all the rest was just a result of it.

In fact, his performance since the disappearance of the health symptoms are up again. This trend is expected - if all goes to plan for Roger Federer - to continue in 2014. He wants more than just to compete with the best, he wants to beat them, too. He has reset the bar, which is still pretty high by any standard, against which he can be measured and should be measured, too. The old bar he set between 2004 and 2007 should be banned from use and only be applied when discussions about "greatest ever tennis player" are coming up again. 

Further reading
Giving Up: The Key to Success
Jerzy Janowicz and Andy Murray
Tennis: Mr Darcis Says Nada

Wilhelm Lamszus: Human Slaughterhouse

Wilhelm Lamszus wrote a disturbing prophecy with his bestseller "The Human Slaughterhouse – Pictures of the Coming War". In 1912, the German teacher anticipated the horrors of World War I in his novel.

In 1908, the German philosopher Rudolf Eucken won the Nobel Prize for Literature; in 1910, the German novelist Paul Heyse followed him in this honor; in 1912, the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann was another German following both of them. But none of them, nor any other known German poet, writer, author or scholar, wrote of or against the threat of an impending world war. The government and the arms industry it belonged to saw to it that there was no fame to be gained in telling the truth. Parallels to today are not completely impossible.

At the turn of the last century, a lot of generally pacifist writings were publishes, such as Bertha von Suttner's famous novel “Lay Down Your Arms!” published in 1889 or “The History of War and the Future of Peace” by French physician Charles Richet published in 1907. They were in a minority and published in the sense you would publish the latest interpretation of Nostradamus: as curiosities which also sold a few books. But for the exponents of exalted modern literature, war was not an issue except to idolize and adulate it much like today’s print media and games console producers do. And so it was left to an elementary school teacher from Hamburg to utter the great warning. His novel, you may call it his prophecy, “The Human Slaughterhouse - Pictures of the Coming War” was published in the summer of 1912. It triggered a scandal, or rather a series of scandals.

Wilhelm Lamszus’ slender work had been intended for a young adult readership, but it still amazes by its eloquence and visionary description of the world war horrors that would unfold two years later. His vision is more realistic than any of the hero mongering movies produced by government agencies for lots of money under the guise of a free market.

Wilhelm Lamszus was born in Altona in 1881. He grew up there as a single child of a shoemaker. He discovered early that he was passionate for education. In 1902, he joined the public school service of Hamburg as a teacher. He became part of a group of teaching rebels that went against an education system they perceived and recognized as completely rusted and inhumane; a system that was nothing more than the breeding ground and recruiting station for the army. At that time, he wrote educational pamphlets exposing the shortcomings of the system. Their style, polemic force and emphasis carried them far beyond contemporary literature.

Wilhelm Lamszus had the idea for “The Human Slaughterhouse” while on a military reserve training course. "What a marvel of technology people had invented and constructed," he wrote later about the beginnings of his famous book. "The war machine had become ingenious, had developed into an art form. Someone was allowed to let a machine gun purr and it squirted bullets denser than rain falls! As if death had thrown its scythe on the scrap heap and had become a mechanic instead!"

Further reading
Evacuation From Yalta 1919
Lost and Found: Britannic's Lost Organ
Surviving Shipwreck Three Times

President Thomas Jefferson Was a Slave Owner

Who said: "We believe that all men are created equal"? I suppose it all comes down to what definition you apply to "men." One of the first presidents of the United States was a well-known slave owner. Meanwhile, we have the first Afro-American President in the White House. Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses Of Monticello: An American Family was published by Norton as it a timely reminder of a second family of a historic president.

Thomas Jefferson

American President Thomas Jefferson is the lynchpin in this story shedding light on his two families, a white one and a slave one. Firstly, there was his wife, Martha Wayles Skelton who was the daughter of a fellow slave owner in Virginia. Her dowry consisted of slaves, of which at least one was a half sister: Sarah ‘Sally’ Hemings. It makes you wonder how it felt owning and selling your own children as slaves.
 
Sarah Hemings was nine when Martha Wayles Skelton died. Later, she became the mistress of Thomas Jefferson. She accompanied Thomas Jefferson to Paris when he was posted there as US ambassador to France. The French looked at these affairs differently and would not object, and the fellow slave owners in Virginia might think it normal, if a bit eccentric, to take your slave mistress on an assignment of such importance. 

American political circles frowned on such antics as inappropriate. Abigail Adams was the wife of John Adams who would precede Thomas Jefferson in the White House. Writing from London where John Adams was ambassador to the court of King George of the United Kingdom, she admonished him not to commit such an outrage. Keeping slaves was quite in order, but having an affair was completely unthinkable.
 
When Jefferson was called back to the United States, Sarah Hemings felt disinclined to follow him there. Slavery was outlawed in France;  legally, she wasn't a slave but a free woman as long as she didn't return to the United States; the same principle would apply to all her children. She was pregnant with his child when the recall came. Being promised that her children would be freed at the age of 21 made her agree to go back with him to the country of the free.
 
Thomas Jefferson didn’t take great care to conceal their relationship when they returned to the United States. Their relationship produced four children and endured unto his death. It also laid him open to political attacks and other base and abusive vituperation. The high point in abuse would be reached during his Presidency when rabid racists constantly attacked him and his policies over it.
 
Eventually, he freed their children as promised, two of them by deed of will. Sarah was not freed in his will. She was also not sold in the estate auction when the other ‘130 valuable negroes’ mentioned in the auction catalog were sold off. It seems that she was given ‘free time’; this would have spared her from having to leave Virginia. As a freed slave, she would have been bound to leave the state within a year of being freed.
 
Annette Gordon-Reed’s book covers the whole of Thomas Jefferson’s adult life. It contains a lot of historical information without being boring at any point. It also makes you wonder about the thought processes of the men who founded the United States.

Further reading
Abolition of Slavery: A Purely Financial Decision
The White Sex Slaves of 1874
Sex Workers of Georgian London