Thoughts About Petanque: Tips, Tricks and Vids

Welcome!

In this blog, I will try to share what I've learnt about this sport after spending hundreds of hours learning, experimenting (yes!), competing and as well as training beginners in this sport.

I've also watched many videos analyzing how the top players - especially those - competing in France  (though not necessarily French!) - play their game. Their style of throw, shooting and game play during masterclass and other competitions.

I know, starting out, it is difficult to get all information at once.... It is a bit like golf; the game is easy to understand and play, but mastering the finer points and skill seems to take a life time. Fortunately, petanque is not that complicated and doesn't require you to whack a tiny ball hundreds of yards into a small hole. Nonetheless, we are in awe of folks who can shoot and hit well, do high-lob pointing well, and generally just reach 13 points with relatively ease.

Well, as you compete more, you'll realize there is more to the game than outpointing someone (especially when you are just starting out and haven't learnt how to shoot). 

In this blog, I will try to highlight all there is to know to play well - the progression from amateur to semi-professional. 

Principally, there are a few areas:

1. Holding the Boule: Various grips explained.

2. Throwing the Boule: Again, various techniques will be discussed.
3. Shooting the Boule: How to do it, and with consistency.
4. Skill sets to learn and practice on.

5. Game Play and Tactics: Playing against amateurs and the pros.

6. Analysis of top players and recent masterclass plays.

As much as possible, I will use my own thinking and approach. I am both an engineer and concept artist, so I think you will find my insights pretty interesting. Plus all these insights come not just from playing and competing, but from also from countless hours studying the game, top players and watching master-class competitions whenever videos of them are posted.

For beginners, there are actually many resources out there, both in English and French. English is a welcome language as it is more familiar, say, in most int'l areas, esp Asia. Also, in America, interest in petanque is growing, as it is in the UK. A training video from that commonwealth of nations has just emerged this April.

So, yes. There are many resources out there online to learn the rules of petanque, choose a boule, etc. Also Youtube videos on everything petanque including "extreme petanquing" are out there also (haha), including regular postings of top competitions in HD (which is a good thing). I will include it all in a resource page and hope to keep adding to it as and when I come across any in the course of time and if my online schedule permits. (Actually this page is a revamped one form an old "all-in-one" page. It is easier to follow and allows easy amendment too (by subject).

I play many sports well, esp those involving a ball. Badminton, tennis, table tennis, volleyball, golf, you name it. Even darts! Now I add petanque to the list.

But most of all, I find petanque to be the most social. Besides darts, whcih other sport lets you drink and be pally on court? And it is a social game that can be played almost on any surface anywhere; and at any age. It is a very gentlemanly/lady-friendly game. Truly an equal opportunity sport. Lets keep it that way and encourage its take-up!

I do hope by doing this blog, I am helping folks to play better and to better enjoy the game. If you have any comments, I welcome it. Hopefully I'll find time to write an instructional manual to help one and all explore this game to its fullest extent.

Bien jourer (play well),

TC Lai, MTM

Petanque Player/Trainer/All-Round Sportsman ;-)

Next: Holding the Boule (for both Beginner and Advanced Player)
Back: All Things Petanque Resource

US Republicans & Democrats both addicted to war and militarism

[All copyrights rights belong to the author and RT. I reproduce the article here as it is a good read.]

‘US Republicans & Democrats both addicted to war and militarism’
- by Brian Brecker

U.S. Marines stand in front of amphibious assault vehicles (AAV)

When the global military empire takes money from programs that poor people depend on and gives it to rich military contractors - it is a theft and looting of the national budget, says Brian Becker, the National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition.

Donald Trump's administration has announced that it is seeking to boost military spending by 10 per cent in 2018.  The American military budget already exceeds any other country's by far and could be set for a historic boost.

According to US President Trump, the aim is to "reform" the US military so that it can operate more effectively. Many analysts believe, however, that the proposed boost would hurt other American sectors, not to mention slash already starved public programs. Others suggest the move might even provoke a global arms race.

RT:  What do you make of the proposal to give defense spending a historic boost?

Brian Becker: I think that the Republican Party now under the leadership of Donald Trump, but the Democratic Party, too, are addicted to war, they are addicted to militarism, they are addicted to ever-increasing spending for the US military budget. The last time the US was invaded by a foreign power was the War of 1812 - that would be 205 years ago. The US has one thousand military bases in 140 countries all over the world. It is truly a global military empire. It is ridiculous, and it is ludicrous when Donald Trump says “the depleted US military.”

The amount that he is proposing to increase - $54 billion - is just a little bit less than what Russia spends every year on its military. In other words, this is an unnecessary expenditure increase of an already bloated US military machine. Trump says “we have to start winning wars again”. And the fact of the matter is that the US should stop waging wars that it needs to win but can’t win. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan - the problem with these wars are not that they weren’t won, the problem is that they were waged in the first place because they were wars of aggression. It is going in the wrong direction.

RT:  Will it come at the expense of other sectors?

BB: It has to, because the defense budget is part of what is called the “discretionary budget”. Entitlements like Medicare and Social Security – those are exempt from the national budget. When Congress approves a budget every year, that is the discretionary budget. How much will be spent on defense. How much will be spent on education, on housing, on transportation, on the environment. When you increase the discretionary budget, the part of the discretionary budget for the Pentagon, for war by $54 billion - 10 percent - that means the money has to come from housing, from education, from environmental protections. This is kind of our Robin Hood in reverse: taking money from programs that poor people and working class people depend on and giving it to military contractors who are already rich. It is transference of wealth from the bottom to the top. It is a form of theft and looting of the national budget all in the name of making the American military great again. It is already great. The problem is it is too big already. It should be cut; it should be seriously reduced because this kind of military spending incentivizes new wars.

RT:Could the planned spending hike ignite a global arms race?

BB: Yes, it will because who are these new high-tech weapon systems going to be directed against? They will be directed against Russia, they will be directed against China. They are going to be directed against emerging powers that somehow provide an obstacle to complete US hegemony in key geostrategic or resource-rich parts of the world. What will Russia and China do in the face of a growing military expenditure, they must take counter-measures. Because of course, Russia feels NATO has expanded to the East. China feels that the US has taken the South China Sea and pretend that it is an American lake. So, yes, this will be a global arms race. Nobody wins that race.

Compulsive Liars Need Compulsive Believers

{This article first appeared in The Guardian, 5 Feb 2017. All copyrights belong to the author and newspaper. I reproduce here as it is a good read.)

Trump’s lies are not the problem. It’s the millions who swallow them who really matter
- by Nick Cohen, Feb 5 2017

[As the alt-right continues to set the agenda in global politics at a frightening pace, has the world reverted to a 20th-century era of totalitarianism?]

Believers: Donald Trump supporters attend the inauguration ‘freedom ball’ in Washington last month.

Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you. They can harm no one, if no one listens to them. Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you. Believers are the liars’ enablers. Their votes give the demagogue his power. Their trust turns the charlatan into the president. Their credulity ensures that the propaganda of half-calculating and half-mad fanatics has the power to change the world.

How you see the believers determines how you fight them and seek to protect liberal society from its enemies. And I don’t just mean how you fight that object of liberal despair and conservative fantasies, the alternately despised and patronised white working class. Compulsive believers are not just rednecks. They include figures as elevated as the British prime minister and her cabinet. Before the EU referendum, a May administration would have responded to the hitherto unthinkable arrival of a US president who threatened Nato and indulged Putin by hugging Britain’s European allies close. But Brexit has thrown Britain’s European alliance into crisis. So English Conservative politicians must crush their doubts and believe with a desperate compulsion that the alleged “pragmatism” of Donald Trump will triumph over his undoubted extremism, a belief that to date has as much basis in fact as creationism.

Mainstream journalists are almost as credulous. After decades of imitating Jeremy Paxman and seizing on the trivial gaffes and small lies of largely harmless politicians, they are unable to cope with the fantastic lies of the new authoritarian movements. When confronted with men who lie so instinctively they believe their lies as they tell them, they can only insist on a fair hearing for the sake of “balance”. Their acceptance signals to the audience the unbelievable is worthy of belief.

Hope against hypocrisy as Trump joins the swamp
“Rednecks” are also embarrassingly evident among Britain’s expensively educated conservative commentators, who cannot see how the world has changed. They say that of course they don’t support everything Trump does. Their throats cleared and backs covered, they insist that the real enemy is his “foaming” and “hysterical” critics whose opposition to the alt-right is not a legitimate protest by democratic citizens but an “elitist” denial of democracy itself.

Brecht wrote against the dangers of inertia in 1935 as Hitler was changing Germany beyond recognition : Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it, The drowning still cried out for their slaves.

As their old world is engulfed now, the sluggish reflexes and limited minds of too many conservatives compel them to cry out against liberal hypocrisy, as if it were all that mattered. There is more than enough hypocrisy to go round. I must confess to wondering about the sincerity of those who protest against the collective punishment of Trump’s ban on visitors from Muslim countries but remain silent when Arab countries deny all Israeli Jews admission. I too would like to know why there was so little protest when Obama gave Iran funds to spend on the devastation of Syria. But the greatest hypocrisy is always to divert attention from what is staring you in the face today and may be kicking you in the teeth tomorrow.

The temptation to think it a new totalitarianism is too strong for many to resist. Despite readers reaching for Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, strictly speaking, the comparison with fascism and communism isn’t true. When I floated it with the great historian of Nazism, Sir Richard Evans, he almost sighed. It’s not just that there aren’t the death camps and torture chambers, he said. The street violence that brought fascists to power in Italy and Germany and the communists to power in Russia is absent today.

The 21st-century’s model for a strongman is a leader who makes opposition as hard as possible, as Orbán is trying to do in Hungary, but does not actually declare a dictatorship, for not even Putin has done that.

To my mind, that does not make comparisons with the past fruitless, particularly in the case of the nihilistic and voraciously aggressive Trump. There are very few new ideas in politics. Parallels always illuminate. Aristotle warned of the “intemperance of demagogues”. Thucydides had the strutting Athenians sneer at the vanquished Melians that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. Both the warning and the threat from classical Greece are as contemporary as ever. Hannah Arendt described leaders who knew their followers would “believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism”. She was describing Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. But her words apply as well to today’s Trump supporters, who gulp down incredible falsehoods and then dismiss the “crooked media” when the stories collapse.

We are not reliving the 20th century, for how could we? Rather, ideas from the past have melted and reformed into a postmodern fascistic style; a fascism with a wink in its eye and a bad-boy smirk on its face.

Conventional politicians and commentators are stranded because they were wholly unprepared for the new breed of leader who lies as a matter of policy as well as a matter of course. They are flailing around, and inventing phrases like “fake news” and “post-truth politics” to capture a state of affairs they think is entirely novel. Instead of saying that we are seeing something new, it is better to accept that something old and malignant has returned like foul water bubbling up from a drain.

Comparisons with 20th-century totalitarianism are not wholly exaggerated. With Trump, the lies are a dictatorial assertion of his will to power. “I am in control,” he says, in effect, as he conjures imaginary crowds at his inauguration or invents millions of illegal voters so he can pretend he won the popular vote. “You may know I am lying. But if you contradict me, I will make you pay.”

No one in the west has seen Trump’s kind of triumph in politics since the age of the dictators. But look around your workplace and perhaps you won’t be so surprised by their victories. If you are unlucky, you will see an authoritarian standing over you. The radical economist Chris Dillow once wrote that, while the fall of communism discredited the centrally planned economy, the centrally planned corporation, with the autocratic leader who tolerated no dissent, not only survived 1989, but blossomed.

Dillow is not alone in worrying about the harm the little Hitlers of the corporation might bring. Since the crash, economists have looked as a matter of urgency at how hierarchies encourage petty tyrants to brag their way to the top. They exhibit all the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder: a desire to dominate, overconfidence, a sense of entitlement, an inability to listen to others or allow others to speak and a passion for glory. If you want to know how they can win the votes of those around them, remember Fred Goodwin’s vainglorious decision to takeover ABN Amro. Perhaps the single worst decision in UK business history, whose consequences we are still paying for, was not opposed by a single member of the RBS board.

In the right circumstances, compulsive liars can create compulsive believers, as Trump has done
Narcissists in business are more likely to seek macho takeovers and less likely to engage in the hard work of innovating and creating profitable firms, the researchers found. They are more likely to cook the books to feed their cults of the personality and make, if not America, then themselves look great again. Academics from the University of California have asked the obvious question: why would rational companies let the fascism of the firm survive? Surely they ought to be protecting their businesses, as free market theory dictates, rather than allow dangerous and grasping men and women to risk their destruction.

They found what most of us instinctively know to be true: in the right circumstances, compulsive liars can create compulsive believers, as Trump has done. “Overconfident individuals attained status” because their peers believed the stories they told about themselves. It should not be a surprise that Donald Trump, Arron Banks and oligarchs backing the Russian and east European strongmen come from business. The age of the dictators never came to an end in the workplace.

Long before anyone worried about the death of truth, Trump was showing that he might have based his career on the Don DeLillo character in Underworld, who says: “Some people fake their death, I’m faking my life.” (A motto that applies as well to Boris Johnson.) Of all his lies, none to my mind is more revelatory or more ominous for the future than the lies he told when people assumed he was just another loudmouthed tycoon.

In 1989, a white investment banker called Trisha Meili was horribly beaten and raped in New York’s Central Park. She had lost three-quarters of her blood and gone into a coma by the time the police found her. The authorities arrested five juveniles, four black and one Hispanic. In one of his first moves from business into politics, Trump said death was the only punishment they deserved. He took out adverts in the New York press declaring: “Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancour should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!”

Trump dealt with the accusations of racist scaremongering by rehearsing a self-pitying line that would serve him well in the future. Whites were the true underprivileged in American society, he told NBC television. “A well-educated black enjoys tremendous advantages over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. If I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black.”

You may oppose the death penalty. You may find Trump’s language reeked of the Munich beer hall. Cynical New Yorkers noted at the time that Trump was feuding with city bosses over tax abatements for his developments and was using the rape to attack a mayor who had damned him as “greedy”. For all that, you could think that this was still a legitimate response to a foul crime.

But mark the sequel. In 2002, a career criminal admitted to the rape and DNA evidence proved he was telling the truth. The police, it turned out, had forced confessions from their teenage suspects. The boys, now men, were released. But Trump refused to concede an inch of ground. He would not accept new evidence had put him in the wrong and the five were innocent. Even in 2014, when New York finally reached a compensation settlement with the victims of police abuse, Trump was still insisting that “settling doesn’t mean innocence” and the taxpayers of New York had been fleeced.

“It shows his character,” said Raymond Santana, one of the five Trump had smeared. So it does and, after that, nothing should surprise you. Connoisseurs of Don DeLillo’s American underworld will learn all they need to know about his character when they hear that Trump’s first lawyer was Roy Cohn, a grotesque figure from the McCarthy era of the 1950s. He persecuted real and imagined gays in public life who he claimed could be blackmailed. As so often with obsessive homophobes, Cohn gave every appearance of being a closet case and died of Aids in 1986. Before denying the human race the pleasure of his company, however, Cohn taught the young Trump to always attack and never conciliate. Whether Trump needed teaching is open to doubt.

This vision of life as a perpetual war you see so clearly in the Trisha Meili case is authentically totalitarian. Truth, reason, evidence, decency must all be sacrificed to the greater good of keeping the strongman looking strong. The weapons 21st-century technology provide for political warfare make me doubt that stopping Trump and his imitators will be easy. Just as Britain’s isolated Brexit government has no choice but to compulsively believe that Trump’s pragmatism will overwhelm his extremism, so Americans must hope that the checks and balances of the constitution will cage him. No one can see the future and both may be right. But, as I said, there is no evidence that they are. One reason for pessimism is that Trump’s character may make him worthless as a man but a success as a politician in our time of cyber-charlatanism.

After Trump’s victory, Hillary Clinton’s aide Ronald A Klain reflected with understandable shock on an election his candidate should never have lost. Trump tore up the rules of politics, Klain said, but still finished in the White House. The old wisdom was to apologise if you were in the wrong and move the conversation on with as much speed as you could manage. “If you’re explaining, you’re losing,” Ronald Reagan said, as he stated the commonsensical proposition that politicians should not dwell on their embarrassments.

Public relations in the Trump era: brand all media outlets as ‘fake’

But Trump understood that Twitter, Facebook and 24/7 news had changed the world. The modern chancer needed to stay with the scandal and arm his supporters with instant explanations. The Trump campaign would not apologise. When caught in a scandal, it doubled down within minutes. It knew its supporters wouldn’t care if the experts they despised as thoroughly as Michael Gove dismissed Trump’s explanations for refusing to release his tax returns or feminists said his advocacy of sexual assaults was something more than “locker-room talk”. “The point is,” Klain said, “Trump supporters were armed with an explanation that they accepted and could use to defend their candidate” on social media.

The same need to instil a party line and protect his supporters from reasonable doubt leads Trump and his sidekicks once again to imitate dictators and attack the whole of the free press. Not just opposition journalists, mark you, but the entire media. The reasoning is obvious. Every one of the many financial and political scandals Trump will surely generate will emerge in the media. Every media organisation must therefore be branded as lying and fake before they publish. Journalists need to learn, if they have not learned already, that no accommodation is possible with the alt-right because its ideology and tactics preclude it from wanting an accommodation. You cannot “balance” or appease such people – you can only expose them.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer… and a media cohort that is at a loss on how to deal with the new administration.

 White House press secretary Sean Spicer… and a media cohort that is at a loss on how to deal with the new administration. Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA
Unless Twitter bans him, which it should if Trump incites violence, the same tactics can be used against politicians. Republican legislators will think hard about exercising their constitutional right to check a president if they know that Trump can use social media to provoke their supporters back home to denounce and harry them.

I am sorry if I am being “hysterical”, but I cannot see how conservatives can argue in conscience that there is nothing monstrous about the 45th President of the United States. The Ku Klux Klan has endorsed him. He has brought Steve Bannon, a true postmodern fascist, to the centre of power. Bannon exemplifies the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s sinister ideal of a political leader who unites his supporters by creating enemies for them to hate. Bannon and the alt-right have made Islam – not al-Qaeda, Islamic State, or the Shia theocrats in Tehran but all Muslims – their enemy of choice. They unite their supporters on racial lines against blacks, Jews and Latinos too. As a former journalist on his Breitbart site explained, Bannon believes “in a nutshell that western culture is inseparable from European ethnicity”.

Nor, and even when all due deference has been paid to the learned objections of Richard Evans and other historians, is it a sign of hysteria to say that western democracies are seeing an increase in the indulgence of political violence that echoes the 1930s. Once, the apologetics were confined to the worst elements in the liberal-left. In the last decade, I could feel the thrill of satisfaction as they decided that the latest terrorist massacre was a just and righteous punishment for the wars of Tony Blair and George W Bush.

As late as 2015, an article for Jeremy Corbyn’s Stop the War was saying that the slaughter of civilians in Paris was “the result of deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies”, while the National Union of Students was deciding that it would be “Islamophobic” to criticise Islamic State. (A genuinely racist notion, incidentally, that implies, Bannon-style, that all followers of Islam welcome the mass murder of unbelievers and the sexual enslavement of captured women.)

Reacting with violence against Trump? That’s exactly what he wants…

Just as the far-left has moved from the fringe to take over the once mainstream British Labour party, so the far-right has moved in to take over America’s Republicans. Violence and fear are its fellow travellers. Look at Trump telling his supporters to “knock the crap” out of protesters at his rallies, or at the contempt with which the Daily Mail greeted the verdict and sentencing handed to the murderer of Jo Cox, or the loathing with which Nigel Farage treated her widower. Try, then, to put yourself in the place of a black or Muslim American and imagine how they feel about what is to come.

There are few reasons to be cheerful. But amid the despair, I hope I am not being naive in sensing new forces stirring and the will to fight back hardening. We are now at the beginnings of a new opposition movement, a liberal version of backlash politics, which feels the urgent need to drive the right from power.

Trump wants a violent reaction. He wants to be able to tell white Americans his opponents are 'professional anarchists'. It could all go wrong. Trump, Bannon, Farage and the Tory right want to polarise societies. They can look to the example of Bashar al-Assad and see a path to victory. The dictator won by shooting down the peaceful demonstrators of the Arab Spring and targeting moderate forces in the civil war that followed. By the time he was finished, there was no middle ground left. Assad could turn to the brutalised survivors and say: “See, it’s either me or Islamic State now. That’s your only choice. What’s it going to be?”

Understand the logic of polarisation and you will understand that Trump wants a violent reaction. He wants to be able to tell white Americans that his opponents are “professional anarchists”, as he said last week. He wants liberals to treat all his supporters as if they are as debased as he is. He can then turn to his base and say liberals hate them because they are white; that they see them as nothing more than stupid, deplorable bigots. Force me from power, he will conclude, and these hate-filled enemies will come for you and give the “tremendous advantages” he was pretending blacks enjoyed in the 1980s to their favoured minorities.

The alternative, and not only in America, is to go back to the despised and patronised working-class followers of the right. You should try to win them over in elections rather than march with the already converted at rallies. You should cordon off the true racists and fascists and listen to and argue with the rest with a modicum of respect. If that can happen, then perhaps the world will learn that the best way to end the power of compulsive liars is to break the compulsion of their followers to believe.

- The end.

Truth, trust and Trump's attack on journalism

(I reproduce this article here as I find it a good read. All copyrights belong to the authors. This story was found published in The Straits Times mar 5, 2017.)

Truth, trust and Trump's attack on journalism
- by Bret Stephens, Mar 5 2017

Mr Trump speaking to reporters at the Oval Office on Jan 28, after signing a memorandum directing US security services to defeat ISIS. By then, he had already begun his running war with the media, calling them the most dishonest people on earth. Some dismiss his rhetoric as pure trumpery, but the danger is that too many are becoming inured to his brand of reality, desensitised to the truth by the numbing onslaught of alternative facts.

[This is an excerpt from the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture delivered last month at the University of California, Los Angeles by Bret Stephens, a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Daniel Pearl was a WSJ reporter who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. I'm profoundly honoured to have this opportunity to celebrate the legacy of Danny Pearl, my colleague at The Wall Street Journal.]

My topic this evening is intellectual integrity in the age of Donald Trump.

When you work at The Wall Street Journal, the coins of the realm are truth and trust - the latter flowing exclusively from the former. When you read a story in the Journal, you do so with the assurance that immense reportorial and editorial effort has been expended to ensure that what you read is factual. Not probably factual. Not partially factual. Not alternatively factual. I mean fundamentally, comprehensively and exclusively factual.

And therefore trustworthy.

This is how we operate. This is how Danny operated. This is how he died, losing his life in an effort to nail down a story.

Substitute the words "truth" and "falsehood" for "justice" and "injustice", and there you have the Trumpian view of the world. If I had to sum it up in a single sentence, it would be this: Truth is what you can get away with. If you can sell condos by claiming your building is 90 per cent occupied when it's only 20 per cent occupied, well, then - it's 90 per cent occupied. If you can convince enough people that you really did win the popular vote, or that your inauguration crowds were the biggest - well then, what do the statistical data and aerial photographs matter?

It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina. It is no less stunning to watch people who once mocked Mr Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Mr Trump's "pragmatism" on the subject.

We each have our obligations to see what's in front of one's nose, whether we're reporters, columnists, or anything else. This is the essence of intellectual integrity.

In the 15 years since Danny's death, the list of murdered journalists has grown long.

Paul Klebnikov and Anna Politkovskaya in Russia. Zahra Kazemi and Sattar Beheshti in Iran. Jim Foley and Steve Sotloff in Syria. Five journalists in Turkey. Twenty-six in Mexico. More than 100 in Iraq.

When we honour Danny, we honour them, too.

We do more than that.

We honour the central idea of journalism - the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann said, "that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder".

And we honour the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with.

So that's the business we're in: the business of journalism. Or, as the 45th president of the United States likes to call us, the "disgusting and corrupt media".

Some of you might have noticed that we're living through a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business.

The President routinely describes reporting he dislikes as "fake news". The administration calls the press "the opposition party", ridicules news organisations it doesn't like as business failures, and calls for journalists to be fired. Mr Trump has called for rewriting libel laws in order to more easily sue the press.

This isn't unprecedented in US history, though you might have to go back to the administration of founding father John Adams to see something quite like it. And so far, the rhetorical salvos haven't been matched by legal or regulatory action. Maybe they never will be.

But the question of what Mr Trump might yet do by political methods against the media matters a great deal less than what he is attempting to do by ideological and philosophical methods.

Ideologically, he is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favour of the media he likes - Breitbart News and the rest. Another way to make this point is to say that he's trying to substitute propaganda for news, boosterism for information.

His objection to, say, The New York Times, isn't that there's a liberal bias in the paper that gets in the way of its objectivity, which I think would be a fair criticism. His objection is to objectivity itself. He's perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt - as long as it's on his side.

But again, that's not all the President is doing.

TRUTH IS WHAT YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH

Consider this recent exchange with TV host Bill O'Reilly, who asks:

"Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you can't back up factually, and as the President, you say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don't have the data to back that up, some people are going to say that it's irresponsible for the president to say that."

To which the President replies:

"Many people have come out and said I'm right."

Many people also say singer Jim Morrison faked his own death. Many people say former president Barack Obama was born in Kenya. "Many people say" is what's known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb.

We are not a nation of logicians.

I think it's important not to dismiss the President's reply simply as dumb. We ought to assume that it's darkly brilliant - if not in intention then certainly in effect. The President is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have an argument.

He isn't telling O'Reilly that he's got his facts wrong. He's saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don't matter: that they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn't have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them - or, in his case, both.

If some of you in this room are students of political philosophy, you know where this argument originates. This is a version of Thrasymachus' argument in Plato's Republic that justice is the advantage of the stronger and that injustice "if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer and more masterly than justice".

Substitute the words "truth" and "falsehood" for "justice" and "injustice", and there you have the Trumpian view of the world. If I had to sum it up in a single sentence, it would be this: Truth is what you can get away with.

If you can sell condos by claiming your building is 90 per cent occupied when it's only 20 per cent occupied, well, then - it's 90 per cent occupied. If you can convince enough people that you really did win the popular vote, or that your inauguration crowds were the biggest - well then, what do the statistical data and aerial photographs matter?

Now, we could have some interesting conversations about why this is happening - and why it seems to be happening all of a sudden.

Today, we have "disintermediating" technologies such as Twitter, which have cut out the media as the middleman between politicians and the public. Today, just 17 per cent of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper daily, down from 42 per cent at the turn of the century. Today, there are fewer than 33,000 full-time newsroom employees, a drop from 55,000 just 20 years ago.

When Mr Trump attacks the news media, he's kicking a wounded animal.

But the most interesting conversation is not about why he lies. Many public figures lie, and he's only a severe example of a common type.

The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.

REDEFINING THE DEVIANT

Nearly 25 years ago, Mr Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the great scholar and Democratic senator from New York, coined the phrase, "defining deviancy down". His topic at the time was crime, and how American society had come to accept ever-increasing rates of violent crime as normal.

"We have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatised, and also quietly raising the 'normal' level in categories where behaviour is now abnormal by any earlier standard," Mr Moynihan wrote.

You can point to all sorts of ways in which this redefinition of deviancy has also been the story of our politics over the past 30 years, a story with a fully bipartisan set of villains.

I personally think we crossed a rubicon in the Clinton years, when three things happened: We decided that some types of presidential lies didn't matter; we concluded that "character" was an overrated consideration when it came to judging a president; and we allowed the lines between political culture and celebrity culture to become hopelessly blurred.

But whatever else one might say about former president Bill Clinton, what we have now is the crack-cocaine version of that.

If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it'll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity. It's the same truth contained in Joseph Stalin's famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.

One of the most interesting phenomena during the election campaign was waiting for Mr Trump to say that one thing that would surely break the back of his candidacy.

Would it be his slander against Mexican immigrants? Or his slur about Senator John McCain's record as a prisoner-of-war? Or his lie about New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11? Or his attacks on TV anchor Megyn Kelly, on a disabled New York Times reporter, on a Mexican-American judge? Would it be him tweeting quotations from fascist leader Benito Mussolini, or his sly overtures to white nationalist David Duke and the alt-right? Would it be his unwavering praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin? Would it be his refusal to release his tax returns, or the sham that seems to have been perpetrated on the saps who signed up for his Trump U courses? Would it be the tape of him with TV host Billy Bush?

None of this made the slightest difference. On the contrary, it helped him. Some people became desensitised by the never-ending assaults on what was once quaintly known as "human decency". Others seemed to positively admire the comments as refreshing examples of personal authenticity and political incorrectness.

Shameless rhetoric will always find a receptive audience with shameless people. Mr Trump's was the greatest political striptease act in US history: The dirtier he got, the more skin he showed, the more his core supporters liked it.

Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called on Americans to summon "the better angels of our nature". Mr Trump's candidacy, and so far his presidency, has been Lincoln's exhortation in reverse.

Here's a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It's entertaining. Politics as we've had it for most of my life has, with just a few exceptions, been distant and dull.

Now, it's all we can talk about. If you like Mr Trump, his presence in the White House is a daily extravaganza of sticking it to pompous elites and querulous reporters. If you hate him, you wake up every day with some fresh outrage to turn over in your head and text your friends about.

Whichever way, it's exhilarating. Haven't all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you anywhere...

To tell a lie is wrong. But to tell a lie with brass takes skill.

So far, I've offered you three ideas about how it is that we have come to accept the President's behaviour.

The first is that we normalise it, simply by becoming inured to constant repetition of the same bad behaviour.

The second is that at some level, it excites and entertains us. By putting aside our usual moral filters - the ones that tell us that truth matters, that upright conduct matters, that things ought to be done in a certain way - we have been given tickets to a spectacle, in which all you want to do is watch.

And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance - of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for The New York Times says that Mr Trump's press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.

Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalise.

One of the more fascinating aspects of last year's presidential campaign was the rise of a class of pundits I call the "TrumpXplainers". For instance, Mr Trump would give a speech or offer an answer in a debate that amounted to little more than a word jumble.

But rather than quote him, or point out that what he had said was grammatically and logically nonsensical, the TrumpXplainers would tell us what he had allegedly meant to say. They became our political semioticians, ascribing pattern and meaning to the rune-stones of Mr Trump's mind.

If he said he'd get Mexico to pay for his wall, you could count on someone to provide a complex tariff scheme to make good on the promise. If he said that we should not have gone into Iraq but that, once there, we should have "taken the oil", we'd have a similarly high-flown explanation as to how we could engineer this theft.

A year ago, when he was trying to explain his idea of a foreign policy to New York Times correspondent David Sanger, the reporter asked him whether it didn't amount to a kind of "America First policy" - a reference to the isolationist and anti-Semitic America First Committee that tried to prevent US entry into World War II. Mr Trump clearly had never heard of the group, but he liked the phrase and made it his own. And that's how we got the return of America First.

More recently, I came across this headline in the conservative Washington Times: "How Trump's 'disarray' may be merely a strategy", by former editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden. In his view, the president's first, disastrous month in office is, in fact, evidence of a refreshing openness to dissent, reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet of rivals. Sure.

Overall, the process is one in which explanation becomes rationalisation, which in turn becomes justification. Mr Trump says X. What he really means is Y. And while you might not like it, he's giving voice to the angers and anxieties of Z. Who, by the way, you're not allowed to question or criticise, because anxiety and anger are their own justifications these days...

In his 1953 masterpiece, The Captive Mind, Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analysed the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland's post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists. In none of the cases that Milosz analysed was coercion the main reason for the conversion.

They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn't fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one's beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn't possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.

I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right.

It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina. It is no less stunning to watch people who once mocked Mr Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Mr Trump's "pragmatism" on the subject.

And it is nothing short of amazing to watch the party of one-time moral majoritarians, who spent a decade fulminating against Mr Clinton's sexual habits, suddenly find complete comfort with the idea that character and temperament are irrelevant qualifications for high office.

The mental pathways by which the new Trumpian conservatives have made their peace with their new political master aren't so different from those taken by Milosz's former colleagues.

There's the same desperate desire for political influence; the same belief that Mr Trump represents a historical force to which they ought to belong; the same willingness to bend or discard principles they once considered sacred; the same fear of seeming out of touch with the mood of the public; the same tendency to look the other way at comments or actions that they cannot possibly justify; the same belief that you do more good by joining than by opposing; the same Manichean belief that, if Ms Hillary Clinton had been elected, the US would have all but ended as a country.

This is supposed to be the road of pragmatism, of turning lemons into lemonade. I would counter that it's the road of ignominy, of hitching a ride with a drunk driver.

So, then, to the subject that brings me here today: maintaining intellectual integrity in the Age of Trump.

When Danny's father, Judea, wrote me last summer to ask if I'd be this year's speaker, I got my copy of Danny's collected writings, At Home In The World, and began to read him all over again. It brought back to me the fact that the reason we honour Danny's memory isn't that he's a martyred journalist. It's that he was a great journalist.

Here's something Danny wrote in February 2001, almost exactly a year before his death, from the site of an earthquake disaster in the Indian town of Anjar.

"What is India's earthquake zone really like? It smells. It reeks. You can't imagine the odour of several hundred bodies decaying for five days as search teams pick away at slabs of crumbled buildings in this town. Even if you've never smelled it before, the brain knows what it is, and orders you to get away. After a day, the nose gets stuffed up in self-defence. But the brain has registered the scent, and picks it up in innocent places: lip balm, sweet candy, stale breath, an airplane seat."

What stands out for me in this passage is that it shows that Danny was a writer who observed with all his senses. He saw. He listened. He smelled. He bore down. He reflected. He understood that what the reader had to know about Anjar wasn't a collection of statistics; it was the visceral reality of a massive human tragedy. And he was able to express all this in language that was compact, unadorned, compelling and deeply true.

George Orwell wrote: "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." Danny saw what was in front of his nose.

We each have our obligations to see what's in front of one's nose, whether we're reporters, columnists, or anything else. This is the essence of intellectual integrity.

Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognise and call them for what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we'd like them to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won't waver amid changes of political fashion or tides of unfavourable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.

The legacy of Danny Pearl is that he died for this. We are being asked to do much less. We have no excuse not to do it.

- The end.

[A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Sunday Times on March 05, 2017, with the headline 'Truth, trust and Trump's attack on journalism'. ]