Football

I hate football.

A quote people who know me well enough see as the gentle wind before a coming storm, a storm that often leads to argument and this week Violence.

I listen to football talk everyday at work and as my goodly wife is a fan, at home too. Every conversation i have with people not connected with our skate thing either centers around footy or footy is brought into the exchange as soon as a lull appears in the vocalising. This gives me what friends call "The Mike Standby Mode" whereby i nod, agree and occasionally intersperse the talk with random nuggets of football orientated twaddle such as " Midfield" "Attack" or "Rooney". Participants of these conversations also agree to this random outburst. However im not listening to any of it but still manage to participate in the discussion. This tells me two things....Football fans are imbeciles and anybody can have a discussion about footy however well (or not) you are informed. This is a sport without courage without honour and without the simple content which allows me to have any empathy with it at all. Talk to somebody who skates and you will have a conversation about 1000 things unconnected with skating....now talk to an average football fan.

When i get angry about football it always centers around Murdoch and Sky. I become Bill Hicks on Crystal Meth armed with a machete with barb wire whips. I ranted fully during the week at a good friend of mine while we were driving to work. I told him he was a boring bastard watching soccer, he said he was a fan. I said he was a fool for paying Murdoch the money, he said it was worth it. I said Murdoch was the devil and he was being shafted by Murdoch with horns and a big pointy tail....and as well as fucking you he was probably fucking your girlfriend as well..........up the ass. He said downhill racing is fat old men with beerguts shoved into leather suits. The conversation declined in pure debate and increased the volume. I am a fucker for shouting down the opposition as i have a very loud voice, i also point violently. He said "I work hard for my money and choose to spend it how i like in a Democratic society".....

This annoyed me(Shock Horror)you see money paid to Murdoch's empire doesnt go into some cosy retirement home for old Rupert in Israel. No it goes into shady deals made by Shady men in whispers and hidden transactions. Your money may get a clip of AK ammo in Pakistan or might have paid for the phone that sets off an IED on route Irish. Tentacles upon tentacles the money that flows out of our wage packets will pay for someones death or dismemberment. It also goes into one of the most clever propaganda machines that ever existed. This point escapes most football fans.

If you want to get shafted by Murdoch et al then by all means spread your cheeks and breath in, if your lucky you might get a stinkfinger primer. But please please dont fucking talk to me about it, im not interested at all by transfers and Managers and other shit. Pardew and Wenger have a scrap at the side of the pitch....headline news, break out the fucking gas masks and riot gear. Bollocks, it was a pansy gay slap or two neither of which connected. I want to read that Pardew called Wenger "A Bastard" and shot him with a 9mm concealed in a Lucozade calorie and sugar loaded "Sports Drink" whereupon Wenger stabbed him with a Katana. I would read that. Football is an overhyped pile of shite, football news is pseudo news read by pseudo people for couch mongs stuffing fast food in their faces shouting at players to perform when a gentle jog to the toilet would make most of them collapse with a heart attack. Let football die a graceful death ,let it go, let the Africans have a bit of fun with it and put some real news on instead.

Stuff read this week include Walden by Henry Thoreau, Everest by Chris Bonington and im listening to "The Gourds".

Pain

Went to Dings Chipping Camden course yesterday. 90% of the course is a gentle gradient which leads you on to a speed hump cunningly disguised for the occasion as a steel ramp . After the ramp you get a fairly level left hander, 30 yards of straight which pitches you into a sharp right hander. Mr Bastard on his second run lost grip flew down a bank and demolished a fence, mucho aches and pains today. I have a fairly good whack on my plated elbow, a bad back, bruised hip, wrecked gloves and a stiff neck. The aeroluge is bent including rear kingpin and front bars. I havent a clue where the luge went when i stacked it, just flew off. Pain and i have to go to work today, not a lot will get done.

Climate Change (again)

Climate chaos? Don't believe it

By Christopher Monckton, Sunday Telegraph

The Stern report last week predicted dire economic and social effects of unchecked global warming. In what many will see as a highly controversial polemic, Christopher Monckton disputes the 'facts' of this impending apocalypse and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting the truth

Biblical droughts, floods, plagues and extinctions?

Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the recent hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can find all my references and detailed calculations here.

The Royal Society says there's a worldwide scientific consensus. It brands Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. I declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer's shilling and advised Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red cent from Exxon.

In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond previous reports.
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This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.

Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people.

So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:

• They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).

• The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.

• They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".

• They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".


The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications.

Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.

The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.

The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.

In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming. Here's how:

• The UN dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from 1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900, when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler.

• Every "forcing" produces "climate feedbacks" making temperature rise faster. For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the air carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and polar ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature again. The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to allow for climate feedbacks. It didn't do the same for the base solar forcing.

Two centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell when the number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was right. At solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots showed, temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such observations show that even small solar changes affect climate detectably. But recent solar changes have been big.

Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.

The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and you get 1.9 watts – more than six times the UN's figure.

The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it.

Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from 33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions appear bigger.

Then the UN chose the biggest 20th-century temperature increase it could find. Stern says: "As anticipated by scientists, global mean surface temperatures have risen over the past century." As anticipated? Only 30 years ago, scientists were anticipating a new Ice Age and writing books called The Cooling.

In the US, where weather records have been more reliable than elsewhere, 20th-century temperature went up by only 0.3C. AccuWeather, a worldwide meteorological service, reckons world temperature rose by 0.45C. The US National Climate Data Centre says 0.5C. Any advance on 0.5? The UN went for 0.6C, probably distorted by urban growth near many of the world's fast-disappearing temperature stations.

The number of temperature stations round the world peaked at 6,000 in 1970. It's fallen by two-thirds to 2,000 now: a real "hockey-stick" curve, and an instance of the UN's growing reliance on computer guesswork rather than facts.

Even a 0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a fundamental physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report is a short but revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial factor converting forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate models had found lambda near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing.

You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics. Like Einstein's, it relates energy to the square of the speed of light, but by reference to temperature rather than mass.

The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the law, doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen says lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John Houghton, who chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until recently, tells me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling of airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C. Stern implies 1.9C.

On the UN's figures, the entire greenhouse-gas forcing in the 20th century was 2 watts. Multiplying by the correct value of lambda gives a temperature increase of 0.44 to 0.6C, in line with observation. But using Stern's 1.9C per watt gives 3.8C. Where did 85 per cent of his imagined 20th-century warming go? As Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT pointed out in The Sunday Telegraph last week, the UK's Hadley Centre had the same problem, and solved it by dividing its modelled output by three to "predict" 20th-century temperature correctly.

A spate of recent scientific papers, gearing up for the UN's fourth report next year, gives a different reason for the failure of reality to keep up with prediction. The oceans, we're now told, are acting as a giant heat-sink. In these papers the well-known, central flaw (not mentioned by Stern) is that the computer models' "predictions" of past ocean temperature changes only approach reality if they are averaged over a depth of at least a mile and a quarter.

Deep-ocean temperature hasn't changed at all, it's barely above freezing. The models tend to over-predict the warming of the climate-relevant surface layer up to threefold. A recent paper by John Lyman, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, reports that the oceans have cooled sharply in the past two years. The computers didn't predict this. Sea level is scarcely rising faster today than a century ago: an inch every 15 years. Hansen now says that the oceanic "flywheel effect" gives us extra time to act, so Stern's alarmism is misplaced.

Finally, the UN's predictions are founded not only on an exaggerated forcing-to-temperature conversion factor justified neither by observation nor by physical law, but also on an excessive rate of increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38 per cent year on year since records began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per annum, more than two and a half times too high. In 2001, the UN used these and other adjustments to predict a 21st-century temperature increase of 1.5 to 6C. Stern suggests up to 10C.

Dick Lindzen emailed me last week to say that constant repetition of wrong numbers doesn't make them right. Removing the UN's solecisms, and using reasonable data and assumptions, a simple global model shows that temperature will rise by just 0.1 to 1.4C in the coming century, with a best estimate of 0.6C, well within the medieval temperature range and only a fifth of the UN's new, central projection.

Why haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models predicted? Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong, and Herr Professor Ludwig Boltzmann, FRS, was as right about energy-to-temperature as he was about atoms.

Leary

The American Conservative

Jesse Walker

November 6, 2006


In September 1970, the Weather Underground helped Timothy Leary escape from a federal prison. It wasn’t a natural alliance. Leary was a hippie icon, but he usually kept the Left at arm’s length, preferring psychedelic spirituality to armed revolution. The Weathermen, meanwhile, came from the most Stalinist recesses of the New Left. Their heroes included Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong, and their methods were aimed less at blowing people’s minds than at blowing people up.

Nonetheless, Leary played his new role with gusto, issuing a “P.O.W. Statement” that reads like a parody of revolutionary rhetoric. “Brothers and Sisters,” he wrote, “this is a war for survival. Ask Huey and Angela. They dig it. ... To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act.”

Less than six years later he wrote another essay, this one gracing the less Mao-friendly pages of National Review. It was an unrestrained attack on the ’60s and its celebrities. The Weathermen who rescued Leary were dismissed (accurately) as a “bewildered, fugitive band of terrorists.” John Lennon was accused (less accurately) of ripping off the slogan of Leary’s aborted gubernatorial campaign in California, “Come Together.” (In fact, Lennon had written “Come Together” to be Leary’s campaign song.) Pages of bile were directed at Bob Dylan and his “snarling, whining, scorning, mocking” songs. At one point Leary declared, “Squeaky Fromme stands in a Sacramento courtroom … for believing exactly what [Dylan] told her in the Sixties” and blamed her attempted assassination of Gerald Ford on the fact that “she was unlucky enough to have owned a record player in her vulnerable adolescence.”

In 1997, reviewing a hagiographic documentary called “Timothy Leary’s Dead,” I cited those two essays as evidence that Leary was “a con man at heart, the counterculture’s own Madison Avenue huckster.” Now that I’ve read Robert Greenfield’s Timothy Leary: A Biography, I feel a little less confident about that conclusion. The book paints a deeply negative portrait of Leary, but it also reminds us of the context that produced those extraordinarily odd pieces of writing. At the same time, it makes it clear that there was more than a little Madison Avenue in Leary’s DNA.

A decade before his jailbreak, Leary was a respected Harvard psychologist known for his work in personality assessment. He was also one of several researchers around the world who were exploring the effects and potential benefits of psychedelic drugs, which still were legal at the time. It gradually became clear that where other scientists tried to maintain their traditional objectivity, Leary was an evangelist eager to spread the good news of acid and shrooms. His new enthusiasm eventually led to scandal, and he happily left Harvard behind. Soon he was preaching the virtues of LSD to every audience he could find, even as the government and the media started to view the drug as the nation’s leading menace.

Scholars today generally regard the LSD scare of the ‘60s as a classic social panic. “Of all the widely used recreational drugs,” the sociologists Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda note in their 1994 book Moral Panics, acid “is the one taken by users most episodically and occasionally, least regularly and chronically.” It certainly poses risks, but the most disturbing rumors about its effects—that it causes chromosome damage, that it prompts teens to blind themselves by staring at the sun—turned out to be false. What’s more, the media scare arrived at a time when LSD use was at a relatively low level; the hysteria actually faded as the drug grew more popular.

What’s fascinating is Leary’s relationship to that panic. Leary has written that his best-known slogan—“tune in, turn on, drop out”—was inspired by a lunch with the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who told him, “You call yourself a philosopher, a reformer. Fine. But the key to your work is advertising. … You must use the most current tactics for arousing consumer interest.” According to Leary, McLuhan even broke into a jingle: “Lysergic acid hits the spot/Forty billion neurons, that’s a lot.”

Leary was known to take liberties when recounting his personal history, and the McLuhan story sounds a little too perfect to be absolutely true. But the very fact that he tells it shows he was aware of what he was up to, as does his famous claim in Playboy that LSD “is the most powerful aphrodisiac known to man.” In his book The Politics of Ecstasy, Leary commented that if the Playboy interview “had been conducted for Sports Illustrated, the conscientious interviewee would naturally consider the question, How LSD Can Raise Your Batting Average.” Greenfield adds: “In other words, had he been talking to Popular Mechanics, Tim would have claimed that LSD could rev up horsepower and reduce engine knock while doubling miles to the gallon. Clearly, Tim Leary knew exactly what he was doing. In America, nothing sells like sex.”

Leary’s pitches for psychedelics oversold their benefits just as the media’s scare stories oversold their dangers. His ad campaign helped fuel the panic and, in less obvious ways, was fueled by the panic itself. Both Leary and his enemies had a stake in the idea that the boomers were becoming the Acid Generation. As the press grew increasingly obsessed with LSD, Leary was willing to ride that wave as he offered a rival narrative of his own.

Sometimes, to be sure, he tried to put the breaks on the hysteria. In 1966, for example, when it looked like a ban on possessing LSD was on the way, he testified to the Senate that the government should instead create a closely regulated system for people who wanted to experiment with the drug. Greenfield chalks this up to Leary’s habit of telling people what they’d like to hear. A more charitable interpretation is that he saw the likely consequences of a black market and hoped to minimize the damage by convincing legislators to adopt a more liberal system of controls. There’s little doubt, though, that his ultimate policy preferences were more freewheeling: almost immediately after the Senate hearings, he was rolling out the “turn on, tune in, drop out” slogan in an address in San Francisco.

You can only ride a wave so far, and eventually Leary plunged into the surf. Busted on minor marijuana charges, he soon found himself facing 20 years in prison. There’s no doubt that it was his message, not his rather petty violations of the law, that earned him his stiff sentence. One judge declared, as he ruled that Leary should be held without bond, “He has preached the length and breadth of the land, and I am inclined to the view that he would pose a danger to the community if released.” When Leary attempted an appeal, a DA argued to another judge that imprisoning him would prevent him from spreading his “messianic ideas about psychedelic drugs to young people.” Like the bottled goose in the Zen parable, it was words that got Leary into jail, and it was words that would get him out again.

Hence the “P.O.W. Statement” and the screed in National Review. Those two essays were radically opposed not just to each other but to everything Leary seemed to stand for before his imprisonment. But they were written for the same reason: to win his freedom. As Leary’s friend Robert Anton Wilson told Greenfield, “The letter for the Weather Underground when they broke Tim out of jail was the dumbest thing he ever wrote. But that was the price of getting out of prison. Writing propaganda for the Weathermen.”

And the National Review piece? It came half a decade and several lifetimes later, after Leary had passed through a topsy-turvy exile in Algeria and Switzerland and returned to the American penal system. Passed over for parole, Leary wrote the story when he realized that, in Greenfield’s words, “unless he could persuade those in power that he really did hate the sixties, he might never get out of jail.” Sure enough, U.S. Attorney John Milano offered the essay as evidence to the parole board that the prisoner really was rehabilitated. In April 1976, the same month the article appeared, Leary was freed. (One of his books reprints the piece with all the ’60s-bashing excised and with a paragraph praising Dylan inserted instead. In the introduction, Leary apologized for his earlier tone: “at this time I was alienated, a bit daft and given to occasional fits of irritation ... . I particularly regret my whining complaints about Bob Dylan.”)

Greenfield covers most of this in intense detail, but there are two substantial problems with his book. One is that Leary’s ideas are almost entirely absent from it. Leary could be wrongheaded or incoherent, but he could also be sharp-witted and prescient. Even his bizarre contribution to National Review had some genuine insights hidden among the bile. In a speech last year, Eric Garris, webmaster for LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com, recalled an address Leary delivered at the 1977 convention of the Libertarian Party. In Garris’s words, the doctor described “a network that would connect computers worldwide, allowing participants from around the globe to sign on and retrieve text, photographs, audio and video instantaneously, and to communicate in realtime with anyone in the whole world who also had a computer and a connection.” At the time, Garris noted, “We figured Leary had just done a little too much acid and his imagination had gotten the best of him.” Turns out he was onto something.

Leary himself prefaced one of his books with a comment that only a third of the ideas in it were worthwhile. But at their best, his latter-day writings offered a cheerful, funny vision of a post-industrial future, like Alvin Toffler crossed with Cheech and Chong. You’ll find none of this material in Greenfield’s book, which prefers to quote Leary at his least lucid and which skips quickly through the last two decades of his life.

The other problem is Greenfield’s blinding disdain for his subject. There is, to be sure, a lot to dislike in the man. He could be selfish and astonishingly irresponsible, especially as a husband and a father; and there isn’t much to admire in his apparent willingness to snitch on former friends as he struggled to get out of jail. But there’s something odd about a biography that almost inevitably assumes, whenever Leary’s account differs from that of another witness, that Leary’s the one who’s lying. (At the same time, Greenfield is willing to swallow obviously self-serving stories when Leary’s memoirs are the only source available.)

This book alludes to Leary’s charisma, but it never demonstrates it. By the time it’s over, the average reader might be forgiven for asking why such a man ever attracted any followers in the first place. That’s a pretty big failure in a biography of a pop icon.

Conversations with a mate

We were on patrol and had a Landy backup down an alley. We bumped into them by chance really as they were surprised as us. They immediately started unshouldering their AK's while we squatted down, everybody was shouting. One of the bad guys started firing and i felt a round brush my webbing then Marko who was next to me fired and pinged the guy solid in the chest and knee. I noticed two more bad guys firing from the hip and backing up fast, i was watching the bad guy who was shot first and he was making his way towards his weapon. I took aim and fired i think 3 or four rounds in him. An RPG exploded some 50-60 metres ahead of us as the two bad guys took shelter behind a parked car and laid down some pretty effective fire and pinned down the squad on the right of the street. By now the obvious rear elements of the enemy had moved upwards and to the right of our position and pinned our left side down in crossfire. Fortunately Dougie Stage of 2 squad had countermanded an order and encircled their position through tennis courts and laid down a good rate of rounds on the rear elements killing four bad guys before they retreated and we moved up meeting the occasional bad guy who got rapidly pinged either by us or by Dougie now met up by our right hand force.We had one guy with shrapnel in his foot and one with a badly nicked arse from an AK round.......