Climate change makes me right

We have become accustomed to reading about all the things caused by climate change:

Agricultural land increase, Africa evastated, African aid threatened, Africa hit hardest, air pressure changes, Alaska
reshaped, allergies increase, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end,  amphibians breeding earlier (or not),  ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, Antarctic grass flourishes, anxiety, algal blooms, archaeological sites threatened, Arctic bogs melt, Arctic in bloom, Arctic lakes disappear, asthma, Atlantic less salty, Atlantic more salty, atmospheric defiance,  atmospheric
circulation modified, avalanches reduced, avalanches increased,  bananas destroyed, bananas grow, beetle nfestation, bet for $10,000,  better beer, big melt faster, billion dollar research projects, billions of deaths, bird distributions change, bird visitors drop, birds return early, blackbirds stop singing, blizzards

And so on.

A new, but depressingly inevitable, development is the use of climate change to prove a previously held opinion right, and there's a glint of serious fanaticism in this. Two examples:

A subscription-only piece in the WSJ, reproduced here quotes Clare Short, from a recent UN Israel hate-fest:

Claiming that Israel is actually "much worse than the original apartheid state" and accusing it of "killing (Palestinian) political leaders," Ms. Short charged the Jewish state with the ultimate crime: Israel "undermines the international community's reaction to global warming." According to Ms. Short, the Middle East conflict distracts the world from the real problem: man-made climate change. If extreme weather will lead to the "end of the human race," as Ms. Short warned it could, add this to the list of the crimes of Israel.

And in a comment on this blog, David Wildgoose tells us this:

I play Go on Sunday nights and we had a visit from an extremely left-wing Go player who claimed that the Taleban were, and I quote, "on the side of the Angels because they have a lower carbon footprint than the British Army".

Not only, it is being claimed, is the debate on climate change "over", but this can be extrapolated to other issues at random. The effect of another issue on climate change, even if that effect is merely to take the focus off it, renders the debate on that other issue "over" as well.

It's the perfect conversation stopper. For a maniac.

Investigation by leak

This is crazy:

Sources close to the case said the traces - understood to be blood - were being treated by Portuguese detectives as strong evidence that Madeleine died in the apartment before her body was placed in the car.

Police in the Algarve apparently now believe they have enough evidence to charge her parents, Kate and Gerry, with "accidentally" killing the four-year-old and hiding her body. A file on the case will today be sent to a prosecutor who could order the couple to return to Portugal to face charges this week.

These details should not be in the public domain. Maybe the parents are guilty of something, maybe not. But this is just throwing lumps of meat to the lynch mob. The police should investigate, and if there's a case against anyone then they should bring it, and that's when it should be reported. If an investigation is closed, then it should be open to reporting. But what's developing now is a pattern where to fill a news agenda accusations are levelled aginst innocent bystanders (if the parents are guilty of something here then Robert Murat is not, and vice versa), lives are raked over and destroyed, just so people sitting in front of the TV, chewing the cud, won't switch channel.

We need an extension of the sub judice rules to include the period of the investigation.

Ambassadors call for censorship in Sweden

Or did they?



The above drawing of the head of Mohammed on the body of a dog has caused some offence to Muslims in Sweden and elsewhere. Last Friday, the Swedish Prime Minister met with a delegation of ambassadors from Muslim countries:

After a meeting with his Muslim colleagues on Thursday, the Egyptian ambassador had indicated that the group wanted to see "action, not just nice words."

But [Prime Minister] Reinfeldt said that the ambassadors did not present a list of demands at government offices in Rosenbad.

Just the one, then? It's hard to tell.

The ambassadors agreed earlier in the week to condemn the publication, which they described as a "humiliating action", and to hand over a letter to the government pointing out the importance of reaching a long-term solution.

"We reject all forms of violence, psychological as well as physical," Iran's ambassador Hassan Ghashghavi told TT after the meeting.

"Diplomacy needs to be employed for issues such as this. It is my view that the Swedish government has handled this situation well. Causing offence does not belong to the concept of freedom of speech," he added.

Causing offence is central to the concept. And offence is no great issue. Get over it.

Of course, many Muslims have done just that - get over the concept of Neanderthal face-saving:

But now two groups - the Secular Muslims in Sweden (Semus) network and the magazine Minaret - have taken a joint decision to exhibit the sketches.

"This will take place at an established musical and cultural venue in Stockholm. Negotiations are underway and I think it will be ready at the beginning of next week," Semus spokesman Hooman Anvari told news agency TT.

Vicious circle

If you get hysterical enough about drugs, you'll start claiming people who've taken them commit crimes as a result. What happens next is inevitable in the way a car crash you watch in slow motion is inevitable: people who have committed a crime say it woz the drugs wot done it and get lighter sentences if they promise to enrol for some gesture therapy. This makes the people who got hysterical about drugs feel doubly convinced that people who take them commit crimes as a result. Then people who committed crimes...

You get the picture. So did a kid in Richmond, Virginia:

A teen charged with raping and killing his sister may have been under the influence of marijuana during or after the crime, his defense attorney suggested in court yesterday.

Also in court, the boy's mother suggested her son is insane and needs help.

I'm halfway with Mom there. The kid is clearly insane. Quite why this should be seen as a defence escapes me though. Can it be sane to rape and murder your sister?

But I digress. The attorney is an opportunistic... well, attorney. But why should anyone take this seriously for a moment? "Well, I smoked a reefer, felt all vague, a bit sleepy after a while, got an irresistable urge to eat pate and marmalade sandwiches... then I raped and murdered Sis". That doesn't follow.

OpenMarket sums it up:

The fact that this defense would even seem plausible to anyone is a negative side effect of the War on Drugs and its overheated rhetoric and exaggerated claims about drugs. Marijuana doesn’t make people kill. Marijuana smoke is unhealthy (it contains carcinogens), and is certainly not good for developing adolescent minds — but it does not foster violence. Yet over-the-top government propaganda has depicted marijuana as causing “Reefer Madness.”

Quote of the day

From a post about... quotes of the day at Muck and Mystery:

Authoritarians unable to grasp the idea that people do things when not forced or even authorized to do so are stonkered by climate change. There's no work for them, and they can't imagine work being done without them. We can feel sorry for them - this is a hard way to discover that their high opinions of themselves are unwarranted, and they are redundant - but there are limits to how far we can go to humor them. They have nothing to offer here and need to find something useful to contribute to society.

Improving cohesion

The succinctly named Ed Balls, Schools Minister, believes that by sorting the population into religious groups and educating them in isolation from one another, he will improve "social cohesion" in England. Apparently.

Strange compulsions of the human heart

There's some understandable soul-searching going on in Israel at the moment, after it was revealed that popular 1960s pornographic novellas called Stalags, which depicted sexual torture and humiliation of POWs by buxom, whip wielding Nazi officers in boots, were produced by Israeli teams of writers and artists and not the English authors they were previously attributed to:

The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.
[...]
“I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women,” said Ari Libsker, whose documentary film “Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel” had its premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July and is to be broadcast in October and shown in movie theaters. “We were in elementary school,” he noted. “I remember how embarrassed we were.”

At first sight, it's strange that in Israel of all places the memory of the Holocaust period should have been transformed into a popular series of titillating books, but then the relationship of sex to power is a strong one.

A mainstream novellist friend who has also written for the erotic imprint Black Lace told me about a survey that publisher made of their readership - almost entirely female, mainly affluent. Ravishment is the thing, it seems. Pirates and Highwaymen featured strongly in the fantasies. And of course, the Bondage, power-exchange and sado-masochistic subcultures have never been more mainstream, nor more popular. As the BackLash campaign points out, people involved make up:

an estimated 10% of the adult population, i.e. up to 4 million people (a News of the World survey found that around 50% of people had at sometime engaged in some form of BDSM activity)

But this government wants to criminalise people who act on this sort of desire by seeking out relevant pornography. There's a deeply puritan element to Labour, coupled with a feminist agenda: while male submissiveness is most notorious, by far the majority of this sort of conduct involves submissive women, and they hate that fact.

This is a process of totalitarianism by salami slicer. H.L. Menken understood the need to defend people with whom one does not necessarily sympathise:

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

And so the attacks begin with smokers and people with minority sexual tastes, for whom it might be hard to generate widespread public sympathy. But they won't end there, and we are all part of some minority or another. But even if we weren't, the only reasonable function of a state is to guarantee as much freedom as possible, and thereby the maximum possibility for personal fulfilment, to each individual. The persecution of a minority by the majority is grotesque but, though that is widely accepted, such persecution is also increasingly commonplace.

Puritanism, man hatred and a hatred of women who make themselves available to men on terms which are disapproved of all come to bear on the subject of prostitution. New legislation has been proposed:

Men who pay for sex could be prosecuted under new government plans to cut down on prostitution.

Ministers are debating whether to make the purchase of sex illegal instead of the sale of sex as is currently the case.

Individuals caught kerb-crawling would also be named and shamed as part of the proposals currently under discussion.

The government is trying to stop the growing problem of sex trafficking in the UK with increasing numbers immigrants coming here to work as prostitutes. According to the latest statistics, 85 per cent of women in brothels are from overseas.

No, the government isn't trying to do that. The way to curb what sometimes boils down to straightforward slavery is to legalise, license and regulate prostitution. No consensual adult activity has ever been prohibited successfully, and prostitution is often entirely consensual. Prohibition has always resulted in horrors - the handing over of entire industries to organised crime - and it always will.

Alongside the willing whores, the unwilling ones will remain. Just imagine the levels of coercion that a gangster would consider appropriate to intimidate unwilling smuggled prostitutes to the point where their newly vulnerable male clients might feel confident that no identities will ever be revealed. This is a recipe for horror piled upon horror. The rise of sex slavery has accompanied not a decriminalisation of the purchase of sex, because that hasn't happened. It has accompanied changes to immigration laws, changes that are held dear by the ministers who are proposing these changes. They have created the problem and now they are proposing to punish men they dislike, while making matters worse for the women involved.

Presumably, their pleasure at the prospect of the former outweighs any conscience they might have about the latter.

[UPDATE: I ought to make it clear that people with minority sexual interests are not "scoundrels". That just happens to be a word Menken was particularly fond of. People are entitled to engage in whatever consensual sexual activities they wish, preferably in private.]

Late news

Apparently, while I was watching the rugby this weekend, a cave-dwelling psychopath with a dyed beard released a recruitment video, offering America a return to the Iron Age.

That's going to be a tough one to counter.

Petrol, the solution

... to fire.

From Iraq The Model:

The problem with Maliki who's the leader of the Islamic Dawa Party is that he's just like all other Islamists who insist that Islam is the solution and that clerics are the ones who can deliver that solution.

But reality proved that political Islam is in fact the problem, not the solution. And this is true not only in Iraq but in many other countries in the region that are full of political Islamist movements.

The Fascism Delusion

A review from The Valve:

[Dawkins’s] sense of ‘Fascism’ is lamentably error-strewn. Dawkins has only a superficial knowledge of Mein Kamf Kampf, or the poetry of Marinetti; and he seems entirely ignorant of the much more subtle and intellectually stimulating work of Fascist philosophers such as Hermann Graf Keyserling, Alfred Baeumler, Martin Heidegger, Giovanni Gentile, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, Alain de Benoist and many others. Only somebody who has mastered the complete works of all these thinkers could even conceivably be in a position to advance an anti-Fascist argument. The lack of that necessary body of knowledge fatally undermines Dawkins’s right to attack Fascism in the first place.

Via B&W.

Raping Gaia for the kiddies

Here's an unusual global warming study:

The effects of burning fossil fuels today will extend long beyond the next couple of hundred years, possibly delaying the onset of Earth's next ice age, more properly called a glacial period, says researcher Toby Tyrrell of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.
[...]
In the most recent glacial period, sheets of ice covered all of Canada and most of the northern United States, as well as all of Scandinavia and most of Britain and Russia.
[...]
To understand how beneficial global warming could turn out to be, it helps to understand that for the past 40 million years, the Earth has been getting steadily colder, not warmer.

Continental drift has brought more land closer to the poles, and the Antarctic and Arctic ice caps have gradually grown, with intermittent periods of contraction.

Those periods of contraction, when it gets briefly warmer, are called interglacial periods, and we've been in one — the Holocene interglacial — for the past 10-12,000 years.

Unfortunately, interglacial periods don't last long. The previous one, the Eemian, lasted 15-17,000 years before another ice age set in.

Glacial periods last, on average, 100,000 years, steadily getting colder until temperatures suddenly shoot up again.

Without human industrial activity, we would be already at least halfway through the current interglacial. A new glacial period would be due in 5-10,000 years.

So now when someone complains to you about the pile of smouldering tyres in your frontyard, you can say "It's for the kiddies...".

To be less partisan, ice ages are a bummer. It's easier to deal with coastline erosion than with two kilometres of ice above your head. The dangers of ice ages were dwelt on thirty years ago during the global cooling scare. It's good to see a little perspective for once.

Pregnancy grants

There's been a lot of comment about the UK government's (re-)announcement of a plan to give a cash grant to all pregnant women, with the stated aim of:

encourag[ing] them to eat better and improv[ing] the health prospects of their unborn child.

Chris Dillow points out that this won't be the effect:

... if couples get an extra £1 of child benefit, 49p is spent on drink, and 40p on adults' clothing. If single parents get an extra £1 of child benefit, 71p goes on women's clothing.
If child benefit doesn't get spent on children, it's unlikely that support for foetuses will be spent on foetuses.
[...]
What Alan Johnson is doing here is the politics of symbolism. He wants to signal that he cares about the ickle-wickle kiddie-widdies. Results don't matter

But this is more than just symbolism. It's vote buying, and results do matter.

Senior Iranian affiliate apprehended in Iraq

The BBC doesn't seem to have got round to adding this to their news pages yet, so I thought I'd mention it. Bill Roggio reports:

As Coalition and Iraqi forces maintain the pressure on al Qaeda's network throughout Iraq, the Shia terror organizations are also being hit hard. Over the past several days, Iraqi and Coalition forces have conducted numerous raids against the Iranian-backed Shia terror groups known as the Special Groups. On September 5, Coalition forces announced the capture of "a highly-sought individual suspected of being an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) affiliate" during a raid in Karbala.

The Special Groups agent, who has not been identified, is "suspected of coordinating with high-level IRGC-QF officers for the transportation of multiple Iraqis to Iran for terrorist training at IRGC-QF training camps." The suspect also serves as a logistical operative and "is closely linked to individuals at the highest levels of the IRGC-QF. Coalition forces are still assessing his possible connection to the Special Groups." Documents, photographs, communications equipment, and computers were found during the raid on his home.

Information obtained from this latest raid likely will shed more light on the leadership and organization of the Special Groups, the identity of their Iranian Qods Force handlers, and their current plans in Iraq. In the past, the capture of senior Special Groups operatives has led to a wealth of information on the Iranian network. The most significant operation occurred in the spring of 2007, when the US captured Ali Mussa Daqduq.

Daqduq is a senior Hezbollah operative who was tasked by Iran to organize the Special Groups and "rogue" Mahdi Army cells along the lines of Lebanese Hezbollah. Documents seized during Daqduq's capture, along with statements made during interrogations and information given by other captured Special Groups operatives confirmed Iran's significant role in the Shia terrorist insurgency.

Recently, Muqtada al Sadr admitted in an interview with The Independent that his Mahdi Army trained and received guidance from Hezbollah. Sadr's aide later denied the interview took place. Lebanese Hezbollah is essentially the foreign wing of Iran's Qods Force.

Via In From The Cold.

A convenient suicide

In Egypt:

One of the key witnesses and defendants in the trial of Egyptian opposition leader Ayman Nour was found hanged in his prison cell in central Cairo yesterday morning, security sources said.

Ayman Esmail Hassan, who during Nour's trial retracted his testimony against the politician, hanged himself with a sheet in the prison where he was serving a five-year sentence on a charge of forging documents, they added.

Hassan said he had made up his testimony under pressure from state security police, who had threatened members of his family.

"I confessed to forgery under pressure from officers from state security," Hassan told reporters on June 30, 2005, after his lawyer told the court he had changed his plea to not guilty.

The court disregarded his retraction and went on to sentence both Ayman Nour and Ayman Hassan to five years in prison.

Nour, who came a distant second to President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt's first multi-candidate presidential elections in September 2005, says the authorities fabricated the case against him to exclude him from politics.

Via Sandmonkey, who comments:

You kind of get the feeling that the Egyptian government isn't even trying to pretend or save face anymore.

Exploring Europa

I've long felt excited at the prospect that the oceans of Europa might be explored in my lifetime. Now a British engineer, Carl T. F. Ross, a professor at the University of Portsmouth, has proposed a submarine design that might be appropriate:

Ross’s paper weighs the options for constructing a submarine capable of withstanding the undoubtedly high pressure within Europa’s deep oceans. Scientists believe that this moon’s oceans could be up to 100 kilometers deep, more than ten times deeper than Earth’s oceans. Ross proposes a 3 meter long cylindrical sub with an internal diameter of 1 meter. He believes that steel or titanium, while strong enough to withstand the hydrostatic pressure, would be unsuitable as the vessel would have no reserve buoyancy. Therefore, the sub would sink like a rock to the bottom of the ocean. A metal matrix or ceramic composite would offer the best combination of strength and buoyancy.
[...]
Ross concedes that a submarine mission to Europa won’t occur for at least 15-20 years.

That seems optimistic, but I hope he's right.

Climate change news

Via Benny Peiser's estimable newsletter, one of his readers has pointed to a perfect exposition of the Unfalsifiable Theory on the BBC website:

Dr Mark Eaton, an RSPB scientist, said: "We feared the numbers of red-throated divers might drop because the warming of the North Sea seems to be reducing stocks of the fish they feed on.

"The black-throated diver could also be at risk in the future, despite the recent increases. If climate change causes loch temperatures to rise, the small fish the birds feed on could grow too large to eat."

Let's just paraphrase that: Fish might thrive, or they might not. Either way, climate change will be to blame, and either way it will be a bad thing.

who are you a hiding zionist?

Wise counsel from the "prince of truth", in a comment on an earlier post:

what is this rubbish?? those murderous armies have no right to be in Iraq, they kill innocents by the hundreds of thousands, and you're complaining about neighbors helping people fight off terrorist occupation??? who are you a hiding zionist? speaking of british troops, british agents post as terrorists to kill innocent iraqis in roadside bombs, what about that? why would Iraqis kill their own people in a marketplace rather than soldiers? because they're NOT iraqis, just false-flag operations.

Turns out the paranoid loon currently known as prince is Canadian, probably keeping flat to the ground right now, watching for those black helicopters with the muffled blades coming up from the south.

Conscription news

There's a lot of would-be conscription about nowadays. Educational conscription and conscription as social work have been suggested in the UK. A commentator on the latter link asks if I'd draw attention to Draft Resistance. My pleasure. Let's also remind ouselves of Milton Friedman's famous exchange with General Westmoreland:

"In the course of his [General Westmoreland's] testimony, he made the statement that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. I [Milton Friedman] stopped him and said, 'General, would you rather command an army of slaves?' He drew himself up and said, 'I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.' I replied, 'I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries.' But I went on to say, 'If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.' That was the last that we heard from the general about mercenaries."
- Milton and Rose Friedman, Two Lucky People, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 380.

Iranian morality

That essential source of news about the Iranian despotism, Azarmehr, reports:

While the Islamic Republic has poured so much of its resources into harassing respectable Iranian women for showing a few strands of hair, something very sinister has been happening under the disguise of pilgrimage to the tomb of the eighth Shiite Imam in Mashad, North East Iran.

A human trafficking gang has been using the Islamic Republic as a transit country for transferring prostitutes from the ex- Soviet Republics to the Persian Gulf countries. To do this the gang had to obtain Iranian visas for the women under the disguise of pilgrims to Iran's holy Shiite shrines.

Deafeatist crap

There's a report in the Telegraph today about British casualties in Afghanistan:

Two British soldiers have been killed during a firefight with Taliban rebels in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan.
[...]
Meanwhile, survivors of a "friendly fire" tragedy that killed three British soldiers in southern Afghanistan last month have demanded a swift and open inquiry into how and why their comrades died.

Nowhere does it mention the Taliban casualties, which in past engagements have been very high indeed, thereby giving the impression that British troops are just being picked off.

It does say:

Despite the tragedy, British troops bear no animosity towards the American military, whose role in protecting them they see as vital.

But doesn't point out what an understatement this is. Because Britain has been under-investing in its armed services, we rely almost completely on US air support, and this during very close quarters fighting. It's a miracle... no it isn't, it's a testament to the professionalism of the American pilots that although they routinely drop munitions within a hundred metres or so of British troops there have been so few of these friendly fire incidents.

Unelected leaders meet

It seems that the former heir to the British throne has met with Prince Charles in Scotland:

The Prince of Wales and Gordon Brown have met secretly in Scotland and are determined to forge a close working relationship as the heir to the throne develops his role as "shadow king"

I can see the logic there; "shadow king" is a role Gordon knows well.

Reversing the statistic

David Aaronovich recommends that to get the true measure oif a statistic, you should reverse it. Dave Allen agreed. On hearing that 25% of road accidents were caused by drunk drivers, he took another sip of whiskey (he was Irish) and pointed out that this meant that 75% were caused by sober drivers.

Another quote of the day

"It is as if we are an over generous doting Father who can never say no to his spoilt, ungrateful child. We allow rights to those who mock our own."

From the comments to a Times opinion piece arguing for the legalisation of firearms for law-abiding citizens. Worth a read, and a trawl through the comments. There are a few Weenies from the USA in there, and few non-Weenies from this side of the pond. A snippet:

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.

Free speech explained

By J.F. Beck:

Causing offence is the essence of free speech, dickhead.

Quote of the day

"One of the reasons I am in favour of less government, is that when you have more government industrialists take it over"

Milton Friedman.

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Isn't it strange how the left hated him?

The Maestro sleeps tonight

You'll know by now, of course.

To depart from the Nessun Dorma thing for a moment, here he is with James Brown:

Innovation

Trawling YouTube, I notice someone is running a "most innovative use of a guitar" competition. I have a feeling that if Mr Eugenides ever met Gordon Brown, he'd find a winning approach. And he wouldn't use lubricant.

This is wonderful stuff:

The crucial question is not whether Brown is sincere in his desire to create this new consensual politics, but whether we are stupid enough to believe him when he waffles on about it. Yesterday it was praise for Thatcher (“we've got to have a work ethic that works... I'm a conviction politician like her”) when everyone knows that the woman was more loathed by the Labour movement from which Brown hails than it’s possible to express in a few words. The man is a liar, pure and simple - a plodding, workmanlike liar, to be sure, compared to the all-singing, all-dancing freakshow that preceded him, but a liar nonetheless. How much bile did he have to choke back to come out with that horseshit yesterday, one wonders? Will it be worth it?

Read it all.

House of War

Radical Islam in Belgium. Not as a fringe problem, but as the dominating force in Muslim areas.



Even in this report, "Dar el Harb" is translated as "the non-Muslim world". In fact, it means "House of War".

Stealing babies

To meet government targets. That's what I call liberal.

A pregnant woman has been told that her baby will be taken from her at birth because she is deemed capable of "emotional abuse", even though psychiatrists treating her say there is no evidence to suggest that she will harm her child in any way.

Social services' recommendation that the baby should be taken from Fran Lyon, a 22-year-old charity worker who has five A-levels and a degree in neuroscience, was based in part on a letter from a paediatrician she has never met.

Fighting Iran

According to the commander overseeing the withdrawal from Basra, that's what's been happening:

"We are engaged - or we have been engaged - effectively in a proxy war," Lt Col Patrick Sanders, commanding officer of 4th Battalion The Rifles, told the BBC.

British authorities have already warned Teheran about its interference in its neighbour's affairs, particularly with regard to the smuggling of sophisticated explosives capable of penetrating armoured vehicles.

Coalition casualties have been rising in recent weeks, in part it is believed because the insurgents have access to more effective weapons. In one incident last month, three British troops died in a roadside bomb attack in Amarah, north of Basra. In another last week, 14 US marines were killed by one of the new devices near Haditha.

Here's a suggestion. The next time an Iranian gunboat approaches British Marines, the Marines should take them captive.

Staying the course

A few chinks in the wall of negative coverage of Iraq. The Times reports:

An American ‘martyr’ is being hailed in the Sunni Triangle for restoring peace to a town where soldiers now fight only water leaks

While even liberal American anchor Katie Couric comes to the realisation, after a visit to Iraq, that:

... all U.S. and Iraqi soldiers patrolling the streets have my renewed respect and appreciation. One-hundred-and-ten degrees with full-body armor and heavy uniforms. I don't know how they do it. But they do, and we should be grateful.

That's after quoting an Iraqi family:

They have three children ... nine, seven and eight months, and the older boys looked dazed. It's too dangerous for them to play outside. It was heartbreaking. The parents said they don't blame it on U.S. forces, and said they hope American troops stay, because if they don't, the "militias will kill everyone."

War against Islamism

Mark Steyn is uncomfortable with the phrase "War on Terror". As I pointed out last year, so was Donald Rumsfeld. And as I said then:

We are at war with Al Quaeda and various other Islamist groups, some of whom are sheltered by or connected with specific overseas governments, some of whom live in countries that are our allies. We should say so, identify them, identify objectives and most important of all identify what we would consider a victory. If we don't, we face an unending intensification of erosions of civil liberties in the name of a civil emergency, appropriate only to time of war, but with no conceivable end in sight.

That still stands.

Conscription

Guess what. The consequences of "liberal" attitudes to children - ill discipline, lack of boundaries, poor educational achievement, delinquency and violence - are to be met by the introduction of the most illiberal policy since the end of the Second World War. At least, they will be if David Cameron gets his way. He wants to reintroduce conscription.

I think we can see the pattern emerging now...

leftist "liberal" policies

LEAD TO

dreadful consequences

THAT ARE MET WITH

grotesquely illiberal policies

STFUMedia

I'm not going to speculate about how the questioning of the mother of missing child Madeleine McCann will develop. That's just the point. In recent years, we've seen a growth of trial by media that has resulted in false and life destroying accusations being levelled against innocent men like Colin Stagg, Tom Stephens and, perhaps, Robert Murat.

Legal protection for suspects, as well as defendants in cases of rape, until convicted, are necessary.

Dumb outrage

Apparently, people who bought iPhones are outraged by a $200 price cut. That's kind of dumb. The pricing policy of technology is always to sell at a big premium over production cost when the product is brand new, to recover development costs, then sell at a lower rate when the next big thing or enhancement comes out.

Admittedly, this has happened pretty quickly with the iPhone. But it's always the way.

Leadership

As the build up to the Rugby World Cup continues, the man many held responsible for England's win last time, Jonny Wilkinson, has been ruled unfit for up to six weeks.

Meanwhile, the man who was really responsible for that victory, Martin Johnson, has been voted captain of a fantasy best-of team by rugby fans around the world.

Johnson was responsible for the win because he just refused, ever, to accept defeat and he refused to let anyone around him drop their head either. His leadership as captain motivated the English team to win in exactly those circumstances - close matches, or matches where they are trailing, as the final whistle approaches - in which they had consistently lost before his captaincy.

We won with the attitude, the self-belief and refusal to quit, that has made the All Blacks, the Australians and the French (when they are on song) so great. The English disease, an innate belief in the inevitability of failure, was not in his genetic makeup, and as such he is a throwback to an older, better type of Englishman.

And he didn't care whether he was liked, so long as he won.

We need more Martin Johnsons, and not just in sport.

Wikevolution

A team from the University of California, Santa Cruz, has developed software that flags up questionable lines in Wikipedia entries:

By diving into Wikipedia's open volumes of edit histories, the software counts the degree to which any given contributor's work survives subsequent edits by other people. In general, the less tinkering your work on Wikipedia engenders, the more trustworthy you are deemed to be.

It's a kind of consensus audit.

Obviously this is indicative rather than authoritative. One Wikipedia entry I edited repeatedly, because the entry was repeatedly reverted to false information by someone, was subsequently locked at my suggestion by the editors. In other words, while I could show good, evidenced reasons for my concerns, good enough for action to be taken, this edit history would be flagged.

But it is an example of how innovative tools can deepen the analysis on entries such that we can learn things about them that are not accessible in other types of reference media. Detractors of the project might reflect that as it becomes increasingly sophisticated, it will also become increasingly reliable.

Integration

Chris Dillow commented recently on a paper(pdf) from the US Institute for the Study of Labor that suggests:

Muslims integrate less and more slowly than non-Muslims. A Muslim born in the UK and having spent there more than 50 years shows a comparable level of probability of having a strong religious identity than a non-Muslim just arrived in the country. Furthermore, Muslims seem to follow a different integration pattern than other ethnic and religious minorities. Specifically, high levels of income as well as high on-the-job qualifications increase the Muslims’ sense of identity. We also find no evidence that segregated neighborhoods breed intense religious and cultural identities for ethnic minorities, especially for Muslims. This result casts doubts on the foundations of the integration policies in Europe.

The report itself comments, inter alia:

Religious traits tend to be very resilient. Historical examples of religious groups mistakenly singled out for their “inability to assimilate” abound. Between 1815 and 1860, for instance, the large inflow of Catholic immigrants in the U.S., and their “clannishness and separatism” aroused anti-Catholic and anti-foreign resentment among large fractions of the Protestant majority (see, in particular, the essay on “American Identity and Assimilation”, in Thernstrom et al., 1980).

So though Muslims seem unusually resistant to assimilation, such resistance isn't in itself unique. One thinks of Orthodox Jews, for example, who have not really mixed at all in many western cities, but there has been little hand-wringing over this. Why the debate about Muslim integration?

It's reminiscent of the controversies over "faith" schools. Christian and Jewish schools have operated for centuries and nobody has been very concerned by them. But now there's been a fuss over Muslim schools. Why?

The answer in both cases is, of course, lies in the word "Muslim". People aren't really so concerned about integration, they are concerned about Muslims. And rather than being concerned about faith schools, they are concerned about Muslim schools. Is this Islamophobia?

Well, no. That's a dishonest word designed to stifle criticism of Islam. And there's plenty to criticise in the week that saw major terrorist plots uncovered in Frankfurt. But even without the terrorism we have racism, justification of slavery, a history of aggression and invasion against all other peoples, second-class status for women, appalling prejudice against homosexuality, justifications for paedophilia, second-class status for non-Muslims... the list is long and horrific. The two main Islamic states, Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Iran (Shia'a) are nightmarish places with - literally - dead bodies hung on display in the streets.

The concerns about integration and education are really concerns that these attitudes have come into our midst, and that centres have been set up in which children are indoctrinated into them. They are specifically concerns about Islamic ideas and practices.

Cultural relativism that says a religion is just a religion, like any other, is to blame for this debate by proxy. It would be much better if we were to address the problem directly.

If we do so, we can stand with those people, many of them Muslims, some ex-Muslims, in Islamic countries and from Islamic backgrounds, who are trying to stand against these appalling legacies of the Iron Age. And if we do that, recognising that while we are targets for Islamists, the biggest victims are those who have to live under Islamic laws in Islamic countries, we can stand shoulder to shoulder with people like the Egyptian academic and blogger Nah�det Masr, who felt moved yesterday to break a long silence with a post entitled "Today, I'm ashamed to be Moslem". He wrote:

It's not enough anymore to say that these thugs don't represent us or the great values of Islam! for one thing, our voices in condemning these heinous acts are very low, and for another thing, our hate spreading Imams are still spreading their venom in many corners or the Moslem world and beyond.
[...]
I wouldn't blame any westerner who becomes prejudiced against us Moslems. We were complaining about the Popes speech which mentioned how violent Islam teachings were, yet, we don't let time pass without reminding the whole world that we are the most violent bunch!

His voice has been raised, although that places him at some risk in Egypt. He campaigns for an Egyptian Renaissance. Such a rebirth would mean the confinement of Islam to the realm of the personal, not the public or political, and the outright condemnation, contextualisation and rejection of its more archaic and revolting doctrines.

Muslims are trying to achieve this all through the Islamic world. By supporting maniacs, even the more "moderate" maniacs, from that religion, Western politicians like Ken Livingstone and George Galloway are making the lives of reformers more vulnerable and difficult, and making the eventual (and inevitable) success of their work more remote.

Inseminator's rights

The State Legislature of Ohio has before it a bill that would prohibit abortions being carried out without the written consent of the "father of the fetus". The only exceptions are in cases, proven by the production of a police report or genetic test, of rape or incest, or where the life of the pregnant woman is at risk.

Butterflies and Wheels links to this with the comment: "Women's Rights? What Are They?" I don't recall a link from B&W that referred to Men's Rights.

I don't support his bill, for practical reasons apart from anything else. Not knowing who the father is does not present a defence. But in a small number of cases this would be the case and injustice would result. It is intolerable to expect a woman to go through a pregnancy at the command of another person. But while I don't support the bill, I do sympathise with it.

You really can't exclude fathers entirely from all involvement and decision making with children, force them to be reluctant parents when women have absolute control over whether they go to term, then bitch about "deadbeat Dads".

Conservatives and Libertarians

It's strange how so many libertarians in Britain think of themselves as uber-conservatives. Sean Gabb writes about the "Quisling Right", for example, as though by failing to advocate ideas they have never ever advocated, conservatives are somehow betraying their own political tradition. But by failing to be libertarian, conservatives are no more quislings than leftists who are not libertarian. Conservatism has always tended to be protectionist, attached to censorship and prescriptive about what it sees as morality, especially that derived from religion. Even the apparent attachment to the free market that some conservatives show often reduces merely to an advocacy of unfree market tactics that are perceived to be of benefit to the conservative personally.

The divide is more obvious in the USA, and has become clear in microcosm on the conservative, anti-Jihadi blog Little Green Footballs. One of the contenders for the Republican candidacy, Ron Paul, is a pretty strong libertarian. This has led him to adopt a "get out of Iraq" policy, something that is logical for a libertarian. And lgf hates this.

See here, for example, where an online poll was closed because news of it reached a Ron Paul supporting forum and people clicked through to vote.

UPDATE: For the record, Ron Paul is wrong. A disengagement now would cost a lot more lives in the future than staying the course.

Gay marriage

An excellent observation from ambivablog:

Conservatives always argue the case for traditional marriage in terms of the ultimate purpose of bearing and raising children. Liberals argue that if that were the only rationale for marriage, then infertile or older couples should be forbidden to marry.

There's something unstated there, and it is this: marriage is not only how we take care of children. It's also how we take care of adults. The need for family doesn't vanish when you turn 18, or when your kids fly the nest. We're dependent, social beings, whose joys are more intense and burdens more bearable when shared. Adults can choose to live alone as children can't, yet the great majority still seek to pair up. Times of independence are can be exhilarating interludes, but in the long run, for people to be bonded and stable is healthier for them and for society. That's why the instinct is somewhat independent of childrearing.

Conservatives will rejoinder that gays can still choose heterosexual marriage. That is cruel, and you can say it only if you don't know any actual gay people. If you do, you know that the word "homosexuality" puts too exclusive an emphasis on "sex." What's primary, actually, is who you have deep feelings for, the kind that lead to bonding. Sex is only an expression, except when it's an addiction, and that is a problem that transcends orientation.

It's the heart and the whole being that's oriented. If you're straight, think about how you fall in love. Does it begin in the genitals? Is it all about the genitals? Nonsense. Gay people, same thing. It's a shame that this even needs saying.

Via Booker.

Not ice free

Although they reported in misleading terms about the suggestion that the Arctic is unusually free of ice this year, the Guardian doesn't seem to have been able to find space for the story of Adrian Flanagan, the British yachtsman who has had to pause during his attempt to cross the Arctic Sea because he has encountered... unexpectedly heavy ice.

Fly Nepal Airlines

It'll be safe. They've sacrificed a goat:

Faced with technical problems on an aging Boeing 757 aircraft, Nepal Airlines' representatives told local media the sacrifices were made to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god.

Drunk in charge of a dog

We read that:

The grandmother of Ellie Lawrenson was nearly twice the legal drink-drive limit when the five-year-old was mauled to death by the family dog, a court has heard.

That was a terrible case, but what does it matter that she'd had a couple of drinks? The drink driving limit is incredibly low, by design. It's supposed to be the level at which drink doesn't affect a person's judgement or reactions to any significant degree. That's the point. Double it, and you have a person who is still pretty sober.

The puritan thread in this news report is obvious. Drink! She'd had a drink!

She failed to take proper care with a dog and a child. From the other reports of the case, the dog had been scared by fireworks and she should have handled it accordingly. She should not have let it near a child if it was behaving strangely. Drink has nothing to do with it. This is important, because most of the authoritarian, restrictive, ineffectual legislation we're burdened with now was the half-assed, populist response to some subsidiary issue in a notorious crime or incident. Next thing you know, after half-witted reports like this, there will be laws restricting the amount of drink you're allowed if in charge of a dog.

Make people responsible for the consequences of their actions, and leave it at that.

My grandfather's axe

It's an ontological paradox: this is my grandfather's axe. My father replaced the haft, and I put a new head on it. It's my grandfather's axe. It's supposed to make you think about what the essential quality of an object is. Designing a new business system for a company about three years ago made me think of it.

Because that's what the information and processes of a business - or an individual come to that - should be like. Technology changes, but the nature of a company's business need not. So their software and information should move smoothly through these changes so that, after a sufficient period of time, while they think their business system is the same as it ever was, bar certain improvements and adaptations, in fact none of the components are those they began with.

It's not like that in real life, though. This particular business is probably the world brand leader in an area of add-on components for cars, ranging from motorsports through to exploration. They're an engineering company. They started out in the days of drawing boards, then bought one of the early CAD systems. Drawings were scanned so they were accessible on the network, along with the CAD files. Then they bought into AutoCAD, then more recently SolidWorks. They used a Novell server, then moved to NT4, then Linux, then FreeBSD; WordPerfect gave way to Microsoft Office.

This gave them four file formats for CAD drawings and two for documents. But Word can read WordPerfect files, and some file conversion moved their CAD drawings into AutoCAD at least, which SolidWorks can read. Not too bad so far.

The fly in the ointment was the accountancy software, because it contained the bills of material - more than 15,000 products with over 75,000 components. And there they got stuck, with a legacy DOS system that was deeply unsatisfactory, but achieved lock-in just because of the amount of disruption any move to a new system would entail. Eventually, though, they had to move.

With niche applications like CAD or media editing and playback, proprietary file formats are unavoidable. But they are now very avoidable for documentation, thanks to XML. XML is a way of describing the relationships between pieces of information (books in a library or the elements of a letter) that is agnostic about how these are presented to the user. So you can state that a certain block of text is the address a letter should go to, and leave it up to some other application, which can change, to decide what font should be used, and what position on a page. I'm using a trivial example, but it's a non-trivial technology, and there are other approaches to this that work equally well. So there's really no excuse for locking documentation into closed file formats any more.

But what about a company's core processes, which necessarily include the financial accountancy system but in the case of this particular business also included their crown jewels - the bills of material: what their products are made of, and how the bits go together?

I wanted something like my grandfather's axe, so I started with a simple abstraction of the system into components: data and how it is stored, the business logic of the system (what it actually does), and the interface by means of which users interact with it. Three layers.

Data storage consists of at least one file system and at least one database. It doesn't matter what the file system is, so long as it stores and retrieves files. Similarly, it doesn't matter what the database is so long as it works. That means either or both can be changed as technology changes without there being any impact on the overall system.

I wanted a user interface that was platform agnostic - that didn't care what sort of computer it was running on. There's only really one obvious candidate for this: a web browser. Web browsers can do sophisticated things nowadays (play with Google Apps or Maps). There'd be a certain amount of code specific to web browsers to enhance the user experience (auto-completion, AJAX stuff) but none of it would be actual business logic. That way, the specific browser can change, or even be replaced by some sort of application I can't foresee, and the only work needed would be on the enhancements to the user experience.

That leaves the business logic. If we're using a web browser, we're using a web server. There are lots of environments in which to develop we server software, ASP, .NET, PHP, perl, even C. I chose PHP because it's also platform agnostic (runs on pretty much any web server on pretty much any kind of operating system) and it's where the action is right now. Changing the logic of the system, even doen to the language it's written in, might be a biggish job (though decent object orientated design minimises this) but has no effect on either of the other two layers.

This way, any element of the system can be changed without much effect on the other components. And we have my grandfather's axe. We also have the LAMP/WAMP stack - the basis of all web applications offered today.

So, why am I blathering on about this? In his most recent column John Dvorak warns against the use of web applications, based on a recent outage at Microsoft:

Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage plan became a genuine disadvantage two weekends ago when the server that verified users went down and began to disable operating systems around the world.

At least, it disabled the operating systems of computers that checked into the home base to affirm their legitimacy.
[...]
The bigger issue here, though, is the genuine threat to "software as a service" and the entire online model for applications.

This is because network outages can make it impossible to connect to your application server. That's true, but so long as the inability to connect doesn't actually disable your computer that needn't be an issue. In the case mentioned above, manufacturing was outsourced to central Europe, and the manufacturers needed access to the system. They were supplied with a satellite server that used database replication and periodic file system synchronisation to stay up to date. Radio links were installed onsite to connect buildings. It all worked fine, even over dial up connections.

The point I think Dvorak missed is that the internet is a network of networks. No business could operate today without an internal network on each of its sites. The internet connects these together. If your work is mission critical, you can build in redundancy to compensate for occasional internet problems, though these are very rare.

The computer is the network, as Sun used to say. They were right. Once you embrace this idea fully, the machine you're sitting in front of is just a window into the network. If it fails, change seat and carry on working.

And once you really embrace this idea, the application you're working on ceases to be a binary installed on your stand alone computer and becomes a cloud, composed of myriad components, with redundancy and resilience, and capable of evolution.

BYOMP

Bring your own MP - to Parliament. From Dan Hardie:

The letters are working. Twelve days ago I met with my MP: ‘Ah, the letters’ was almost the first thing she said. ‘We’ve all been having a lot of them, and we’ve all been on to the Home Office to get the policy changed. What are you hearing? They haven’t changed it?’ Policy is going to change, but slowly. There’s a distinct lack of speed.

What I’m hearing from soldiers who have hired Iraqi employees, and who are now in contact with these people as they flee to Syria and Jordan, or hide out in Basra, is: lack of speed is killing. One ex-Royal Engineer told me on the phone last night about a man he recruited in 2003 who hoped to build a new Iraq, then fled the country, and then was murdered at some point in the last few weeks.

What can you do?

If you’ve already written to your MP, write or email him or her again: and this time, invite them to a speaker meeting at Parliament on the second day of the new session, Tuesday 9th October.

If you haven’t already written to your MP, please do so. You can find out about your MP here. utline what’s happening and why we should be concerned, ask them to contact the relevant Ministries (particularly the Home Office but also the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and also invite them to the meeting. Talking points for both letters are below. Any blogger who has participated in this campaign is invited, and so is any blogreader who successfully invites their MP: just email me at danhardie.blog@gmail.com and an invitation will be heading your way. Stress to MPs that mainstream print and TV journalists will be present: that is the kind of thing that tends, for some reason, to attract them. And stress that this is the first blog-based campaign in the UK: this is how politics is going, and they need to see what it looks like.

Talking points for an invitation letter- if you’ve already corresonded with your MP on this subject:

• The Government has not yet altered policy, despite calling an inter-departmental review, and in the meantime Iraqis who worked for the British are successfully being hunted down by death squads.


• There will be a cross-party meeting, organised by the online campaign for Asylum rights for Iraqi employees. It will take place in Parliament in Committee Room 14 (St Stephen’s Entrance) from 7-9pm on Tuesday 9th October. Please arrive early to avoid hideous disappointment, etc.


• The main speaker will be a British soldier who hired a number of Iraqis and is in contact with many of them now, including many who have fled Iraq ahead of the death squads: he will give an up-to-date, detailed picture of events on the ground.


• There will also be speeches by Ed Vaizey (Conservative MP for Wantage, Spokesman for Culture, Media and Sport) and Lynne Featherstone (Liberal Democrat MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, Spokeswoman for International Development), and by at least one senior Labour backbencher.


• Stress this: It will be reported by Channel Four News and probably other TV news organisations, BBC Radio Four and Radio Five Live, and by reporters and columnists from The Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Evening Standard, The New Statesman, The Observer and The Evening Standard.



• The event is supported by Amnesty International, The Refugee Council and Human Rights Watch, who will all have people present.

To write a first letter on this subject to your MP:

Use these talking points, then give them the location and timing of the meeting, and don’t forget to tell them about the TV crews.

Thank you.

Litigation news

In a variant on the theme of "man bites dog", we have woman sues dog:

A pet dog left £6 million by the late billionaire Leona Helmsley may have to fight for her inheritance after a former housekeeper said she planned to sue the fluffy white heiress for biting her.

My other passport is...

I am half Australian. Good:

“[Australian troops] will not be reduced or withdrawn. A close ally and friend such as Australia should be providing the maximum presence and indication of support to our very close ally and friend in the person of the United States,” Mr [John] Howard said.

Iraqi Translators

My MP, James Paice, has replied to my letter asking his position on the subject of Iraqi translators:

Dear Mr Risdon,

Thank you for your email of 29 August with regard to the issue of the 91 Iraqi translators.

I entirely agree with the points you make and, although I understand the Government has agreed to reconsider the matter, it was seriously inept in failing to understand the duty which we owe these people.

One of the good guys - Conservative, SE Cambridgeshire.

UPDATE: First, Dan Hardie, who started the excellent campaign to persuade our political class that they should behave honourably towards Iraqis who have helped out troops, asks if any readers of this blog who have themselves contacted their MPs would consider saying so in the comments and perhaps saying what their MP's reply was. If any readers haven't contacted their MPs about this issue, please consider doing so. Dan's original post on this subject can be found here.

Secondly, although my email to James Paice was framed in terms of "the right of asylum to Iraqis who have worked supporting the British Army in Basra and elsewhere", Mr Paice hjas chosen to limit his response to the translators. The point in fact extends to all Iraqis who have helped our troops, including people like laundry girls:

‘Shaimaa Falih and Likaa Falih were sisters aged 16 and 18, who worked in the CPA laundry. Both spoke excellent English and worked 12-hour shifts uncomplainingly in the tiny laundry-room area for about $350 a month. Both of them were warm and friendly girls and they’d smile and chat with us when we dropped off our laundry.

‘One evening after work they were being taken home by taxi as usual when the vehicle was confronted by four masked gunmen in a street just a few hundred yards from the girls’ home. One of the gunmen fired a bullet to stop the taxi while another tried to pull one of the sisters out of the car. She resisted and was shot in the head. When the other sister got out of the car she was also shot. The men then drove off in a getaway car. It was clear that Shaimaa and Likaa were murdered simply because they’d been working for foreigners. A few days later anonymous leaflets were left in the city denouncing the ‘traitorous’ and ‘immoral’ actions of the sisters for working with the CPA. They also threatened more attacks on Iraqi staff.’

I am writing back to Mr Paice, asking him to extend the terms of reference of his support for this campaign.

Drumming

on a guitar. And more. Amazing stuff.

It's so full of Jews

Belsize Park, of course, according to Sebastian Horsley.

That's a quote in the comments at Harry's Place. At some point, the left will wake up to the fact that anti-Semitism isn't just some kind of weird aberration in its midst. But not yet.

Because then, they'd have to accept that racism and sexism aren't anything to do with the left-right divide, and that the Nazis were in fact left wing. And that the BNP are left wing.

Meanwhile, the original post quotes a Labour MP to good effect:

We are at the beginning of a long intellectual and ideological struggle. It is not about Jews or Israel. It is about everything democrats have long fought for: the truth without fear, no matter one's religion or political beliefs. The new anti-Semitism threatens all of humanity. The Jew-haters must not pass.

Damn right.

White Horse in her hip pocket

and a wolfhound at her feet.

Richard Thompson.

New blog on the block

Monkey Tennis Centre, full of climate-change/war-on-terror/biased-media goodness. Check it out.

One for the diary

October 27th 2007, London.

Pro Referendum Rally:

The sole aim of the Pro Referendum Rally organisers is to create a public event through which all British people may focus their efforts to regain their right to a vote on the latest European Treaty.

Be there, or be square.

Update - Whoops, via Jackart.

Hold the front page

Men like good-looking women, a new study reveals.

No sloganising

A breath of fresh air from Gordon Brown, via Polly Toynbee. Brown said:

This old tired sloganising politics of the past should not resume.

Brown also said there should be:

a new type of politics

And:

a hard look at the tough questions

And:

consensus not division

And:

no more "quick fixes"

Wargames

After actually firing lasers at US satellites, to test whether this effectively blinded them, China has now actually hacked into military computers at the Pentagon and disabled them.

Obviously, these are two pressure points were any conflict to break out between the two powers - the eyes and the brain as it were. But to actually make such attacks, rather than simulating them, seems to be taking the idea of wargames a step further than normal.

We live in dangerous times.

Stop Press

It seems that men and women are different:

Women with heart problems may need to be treated differently than men, doctors said Monday. Research presented at the annual European Society of Cardiology meeting in Vienna suggested that surgeries which typically save men's lives can be deadly for women.

Wild atheism

Yasmin Alibhai Brown is a strange character. I was a guest on a radio programme last year with her, a Muslim Brotherhood MP from Egypt and callers from around the world on the BBC World Service. She arrived late and launched into an impassioned attack on the MB MP about Darfur, attacking him for failing to condemn the slaughter of fellow Muslims. It was a wonderful show of passion, but why should it matter that they were all Muslims? Why does the religion of the raped and murdered matter, or for that matter of the outraged? And why didn't she point out (I couldn't get a word in at that stage of the programme, because she had missed some of it and was being given time) that the regime in Khartoum is linked with the MB and so the lack of condemnation was not least because the man was a part of the very group responsible for what was happening?

She has condemned the attitude of Muslim men in Britain towards white women, a rare thing and very honest. Yet she can write this sort of dishonest drivel:

There are no experiments and tests to explain love, empathy, longing, the agony and ecstasy of the heart, the wild and wonderful creativity of the brain, that thing that happens to you when a full moon appears above the sea and is reflected in it. Sorry, but knowing the science of why the moon shines is irrelevant to the experience. Faith is the light of the moon above and that light in the sea, reality and spirituality, both making you tremblingly conscious of forces vast and beyond words. Impertinent scientists cannot know what they speak of.

Apparently, she hasn't heard of evolutionary biology, which can at least formulate explanations of all those things. From this lofty height of ignorance, she condemns "impertinent scientists". Knowing the science of moonlight is not necessarily irrelevant to the experience. If you know anything of it, it augments the other reactions that Yasmin herself feels, without in any way diminishing them. And you can see where the gears of her brain are missing teeth: faith is not moonlight. People without faith experience this just as she does. To claim beauty for a mental trick - the ability to believe something that is plainly untrue, as faith is - is deceitful. Beauty is available to people of no faith, whether or not they are happy with that absence.

Here's another example:

Some aspects of our nature are not susceptible to scientific enquiry, cannot be dissected, categorised and validated in terms that would satisfy the "rational" disbelievers, whose intellect is colossal but imagination puny.

This is just untrue. Every aspect of our nature is susceptible to scientific enquiry. Yasmin doesn't like that fact, but has a - again the word is appropriate - dishonest way of putting that into words.

There's good stuff amid the dross:

Since 9/11 Islam, Judaism and Christianity have become dangerously politicised. Too many people today have developed an intensified religious identity. I also believe strongly that public spaces and institutions should be wholly secular. An established church, state-funded faith schools and increasing encroachment of religion into politics are bad for us all.

But ultimately it is she who has an inability to understand, and either this makes her mind whirl so much that she becomes incapable of coherent thought, or she believes she can slip this sort of thing past her readers:

In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins proclaims that faith instruction to the young is worse than paedophile abuse. John Cornwell, the Cambridge ethicist who has just penned an elegant riposte to the Dawkins' rant, points out that this was the imagery used by Nazis too, for whom their country was a healthy body invaded by multiplying, Jewish bacilli.

(emphasis added) The imagery - paedophilia on the one hand, disease on the other - is different in these examples, but she claims it is the same even though she has quoted the very words that show her to be misleading. And the really obvious point is missed, perhaps because it would condemn her too. She says:

Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao were driven to genocide not by religion but cold, cruel power. None of these men feared God.

But of course the thing that united these monsters, and in turn unites them with Jihadists and the ghosts of the Spanish Inquisition, is totalitarianism. They all claim the whole of their subjects, the whole of every person alive. This scope permits, even demands, atrocities in the names of communism, fascism and religion alike.

From there to the most stupid but predictable thrust of the religious is but an inevitability:

Fundamentalist atheists want to replace old religions with their own. To them all previous prophets were false. Their fervour makes them as blind and uncompromising as those following the religions they detest. Science gave them no immunity – they too are infected by the virus of faith.

While it is funny to see a religious person use the language of religious observation - fundamentalist, atheism is a religion - as a condemnation, it is so depressingly inaccurate that it becomes a labour to hit the keys to point out the lie. But of course atheism, and more particularly science, come from a lack of faith, from a scepticism, a refusal to believe, even in the work of other scientists and atheists.

By writing these hysterical sentences, Brown and others move from the arena of debate into that of psychological study. What should have remained a private sorrow between Yasmin and her analyst becomes public knowledge - a blind anger at the irreligious that mutates into a rant that has abandoned any pretence of rationality.

Want to buy a big horn?

No? Then I guess this isn't so surprising:

Scientists predict that Uganda’s indigenous Ankole cattle—famous for their graceful and gigantic horns—could face extinction within 20 years because they are being rapidly supplanted by Holstein-Friesians, which produce much more milk.

Ugandans are following the money, just like we do in our day jobs, and if this made it worth keeping their Ankoles:

During a recent drought, some farmers that had kept their hardy Ankole were able to walk them long distances to water sources while those who had traded the Ankole for imported breeds lost their entire herds.

Then they'd keep them. That's not to say short-sightedness never happens, but rather to bet on the Ugandan farmers' aggregate self interest rather than the wisdom of these guys.

Gene banks are a good idea, of course, so this is welcome:

With the world’s first global inventory of farm animals showing many breeds of African, Asian, and Latin American livestock at risk of extinction, scientists from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) today called for the rapid establishment of genebanks to conserve the sperm and ovaries of key animals critical for the global population’s future survival.

But if we really want to see a range of farm animals survive, we need to buy their horns. Or their meat.

Soay, and other rare breed, sheep, produce meat that makes you say "Ah! That's what lamb tastes like!". Not for everyday eating necessarily, and necessarily more expensive than standard lamb, because they grow more slowly and to a lower weight, but definitely for an occasional treat.

Welcome to proper, viable conservation - saving breeds by eating them. It works, it's delicious and - perhaps best of all - it will make the nearest bearded vegetarian cycle nazi's head explode.

Don't fly

Unless you're an environment minister:

Germany's environment minister is usually famed for his tough stance on climate change but yesterday attention switched to his allegedly extravagant flying habits.

Under the headline: "How our environment minister poisons the air," the newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported that Sigmar Gabriel often took planes to meetings. Citing a list from the defence ministry, the paper said he had taken more flights with military-run planes than any other minister in the first half of the year.

Bild am Sonntag said about 425 flights had been made using military planes and helicopters in the first six months of 2007. While most of these flights carried a large delegation, 34 had only one or two passengers. Mr Gabriel flew seven times alone or with one colleague.

The Bild am Sonntag noted that Mr Gabriel and the family minister, Ursula von der Leyen, often flew from their home town of Hanover, especially at the start or the end of the week. Spokesmen for both politicians insisted all the flights were essential, adding they would otherwise have missed important meetings.

And you understand that the minister's meetings are much more important than yours.

Via Benny Peiser.

The failure of socialism

Gary Becker:

Much has been written about the rejection of socialism by major powers like China and the former Soviet Union. But nowhere is the failure of socialism clearer than in the radical transformation of the Israeli kibbutz.
[...]
Utopian socialistic experiments like the kibbutz movement, and countries that tried to create large-scale efficient socialism, all failed for the same reasons. They did not realize that while the zeal of pioneers, and the result of revolutions, could sustain a collectivist and other-serving mentality for a short while, these could not be maintained as the pioneers died off or became disillusioned, and as circumstances became less revolutionary. Basically, they ignored the evidence of history that self interest and family orientation is not the product of capitalism, but is human nature due to selection from evolutionary pressure over billions of years. Sure, there is abundant altruism toward one's family, and some altruism toward others, and the latter might sustain a society for a brief time. But it shows a depressing ignorance of history to believe that a little propaganda and the enthusiasm of some leaders can organize an effective long-term society on the basis of any altruism and desires of mostl persons to help institutions, such as a kibbutz or a country, rather than themselves and those close to them.

Irreligious psychiatrists

Interesting:

A nationwide survey of the religious beliefs and practices of American physicians has found that the least religious of all medical specialties is psychiatry.

And religious doctors are the least likely to refer a patient to a psychiatrist. What to conclude? The study's authors, from the University of Chicago, draw a lesson that is not complimentary to faithless psychiatrists:

The mismatch in religious beliefs between psychiatrists and patients may make it difficult for patients suffering from emotional or personal problems to find physicians who share their fundamental belief systems.

Is that really a problem? I guess it is if the patient is, as Mia Farrow once said of Woody Allen, basically seeking counselling in order to obtain permission to carry on as they are.

But one explanation for this might be that psychiatrists have more reason to be aware of the reasons why a person might be religious, and aware that it has less to do with the reality of the universe than the religious might hope.

Stalin slammed

By Pete Seeger:

Decades after drifting away from the Communist Party, the 88-year-old banjo-picker has written a song about the Soviet leader that is as scathing as any protest tune in the folk legend's long career.

"I'm singing about old Joe, cruel Joe. He ruled with an iron hand. He put an end to the dreams of so many in every land," Seeger wrote in "The Big Joe Blues."

Better late than never, I suppose.

Mythical creature found?

I'd never heard of it, but:

Canion believes she may have the head of the mythical, bloodsucking chupacabra.

Others think she's just found a strange dog. One that likes drinking the blood of chickens.

For a Republic

The City Unslicker wants to see a British Republic with an elected second chamber and fixed terms of office. In the comments to his post, he expands:

I am a staunch Republican and would pack the Queen and her ilk off to Canada or wherever wants them.

We will never have an aspirational and democratic society as long as we have this relic of feudalism at the top of the Government.

Where do I sign?

Chavez threatens Britain

With "revenge":

IN a new outburst of antiwestern sabre-rattling, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has threatened Britain with “revenge” for the Falklands war of 1982. The belligerent Latin American leftist warned last week that his recent build-up of sophisticated Russian and Iranian weapons would be used to destroy the British fleet if it attempted to return to the South Atlantic.

Speaking on his weekly television show Alo Presidente (Hello, Mr President), Chavez denounced what he described as Britain’s “illegal occupation” of the Falklands and repeated his call for a regional military alliance against Britain and the United States.

“If we had been united in the last war, we could have stopped the old empire,” Chavez said, as he gesticulated to maps showing how Venezuelan aircraft and submarines would intercept British warships. “Today we could sink the British fleet.”

Chavez has often expressed support for Argentina’s claim to the Falklands, but his latest broadside was notable for both its antiBritish vitriol and its unprecedented threats. He declared that British history was “stained with the blood of South America’s indigenous people” and demanded revenge for the “cowardly” sinking of the General Belgrano, the Argentine cruiser.

So, let's get this straight. London's Labour Mayor has sought to whip up support for a man who threatens to kill British people:

It is the duty of all people who support progress, justice and democracy to stand with Venezuela.

That's the Ken Livingstone we've learned to loathe.

Anniversary

Of horror:

Nineteen years ago, during the months of August to September, a hideous crime was taking place in Iran. As Ayatollah Khomeini drank the "posion chalice" and signed the peace treaty with Saddam Hossein, he feared the release of the Iranian political prisoners would result in organising the mass discontent of how the war was handled, into a serious political challenge to the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Thus personally, in his own handwriting, Khomeini gave the go ahead for the massacre. He wanted absolute fear to reign over the population in the aftermath of the war.

Iran's political prisoners were called in to face kangaroo courts of three clerics. The prisoners were asked two questions each, "Do you believe in Allah?", "Are you prepared to renounce your organisation?". The prisoners had no idea about the consequences of their replies. In fact a 'No' to any of the above questions meant immediate execution. Many of the prisoners had already finished their prison sentences but were still not released, some were even brought back after they had been released.

The victims included teenagers, whole families, men and women. During the months of August and September, all prison visits were cancelled, families were told not to bring any medicine or food for their loved ones. All this time the killing inside Iran's prisons continued.

Those executed were buried in unmarked mass graves on the outskirts of the towns. In Tehran, one mass burial was accidentally discovered by an Armenian priest who had become curious as to why stray dogs kept digging there for bones.

Anglian heroes

The Royal Anglian Regiment has been fighting heroically in Afghanistan. A Telegraph reporter and photographer have just reported back from an embed. And now two men have been nominated for the Victoria Cross.

Last month Capt Hicks, 26, refused morphine when mortally wounded in order to lead a counter-attack against a Taliban rocket assault.

In May L/Cpl Ruecker fought off Taliban riflemen to rescue a badly wounded comrade from a burning armoured car.

Immigrants stripped of free healthcare

British ones. In France:

THE dream of a new life in France for thousands of Britons is to be dealt a blow by Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president, with plans to strip them of their subsidised healthcare.

Expatriates, many of whom have cashed in on the boom in the British property market to take early retirement, have been told to surrender the documents that entitle them to French state healthcare.

Now they face potentially crippling private healthcare bills in France and the prospect of having to sell their homes abroad if they wish to receive free National Health Service treatment in Britain.

For some strange reason

It seems that:

NEARLY half the British think that religion is harmful, according to a poll carried out by YouGov.

Terrorism solved

At last:

NEW citizenship lessons have been proposed to prevent Muslim pupils from becoming suicide bombers and increase their participation in British society.

Young Muslims will be asked to consider the impact of the 7/7 bombings on their victims; encouraged to report terrorist plots to the police; and women advised not to wear the full Islamic veil to “avoid confrontation”.

That'll do it. Let's read on:

A lesson on the “sacredness of life and property” aims to teach pupils “that it is unlawful to make oneself into a suicide bomb and kill others in a country where Muslims have given a religious promise to respect its laws”.

Ah.

And if Muslims haven't made that promise? I guess it would be lawful.

Sources at the Department of Communities and Local Government, which has been monitoring the programme, confirmed that it wanted it to be used nationally.

Quiet weekend

Enjoy the break. Posting will resume on Monday.