England rugby

It was obvious, five minutes into their match against South Africa last Friday, that the only question was how much England would lose by. Even at that early stage, they were not chasing kicks, not harrying kickers, not going for the charge downs. In the end, as someone commented somewhere, they were lucky to come away with nil points.

There's no excuse at all for their lack of commitment. While fans of minor teams like Georgia can feel proud of losses, and Welsh supporters have enjoyed watching spirited performances, even if the opposition deservedly won on the night, We English can only wonder why the national disease has become so very obvious in this rugby tournament.

There's some good news about player availability ahead of the next game, but this isn't really the issue. If players don't put their bodies on the line, they won't win. The psychological problems that were temporarily hidden by the leadership of Martin Johnson have become all too obvious again.

This is a failure of management and leadership. It's modern England in microcosm.

A police economist

Apparently, the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire is also an economist and demographer. Even so, it's hard to understand why she needed to qualify these remarks:

The chief constable said immigrants often arrived with "different standards" from those in the UK, most notably over issues such as carrying knives and drink-driving, which has seen a 17-fold rise in arrests of foreigners in a year.

Mrs Spence said crime investigations could now involve trips abroad to interview relatives, and steep bills for interpreters. Officers must now be equipped to deal with people who speak a range of close to 100 languages, she said.

There is also a problem with "feuds" between foreign nationals being brought across to the UK, Mrs Spence told BBC Radio 4.

With this:

She said: "While the economic benefits of growth are clear, we need to maintain the basic public services infrastructure which means increasing the number of officers we have."

(emphasis added) While her remit clearly includes policing issues, it is less clear that it stretches to immigration policy. It would be more appropriate for her to restrict herself to the former, and not to make statements in support of one particular, contentious, approach to the latter.

Cannabis prevents mad cow disease

Or so a group of French researchers claim, according to the marijuana activism organisation NORML, New Zealand:

The French researchers, who noted that CBD may be a promising agent for the treatment of prion diseases, reported that the non-psychoactive cannabis constituent CBD inhibited the accumulation of prion proteins in both mouse and sheep prion-infected cells, whereas other cannabinoids were either weak or not effective.

Moreover, after infection with mouse scrapie, a prion disease, CBD limited accumulation of the prion protein in the brain and significantly increased the survival time of infected mice. CBD inhibited the nerve damaging effects of prions in a concentration-dependent manner.

God sued

Over acts of God:

[the] defendant directly and proximately has caused, inter alia, fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornados, pestilential plagues...

What's in a name?

Some say the South Lake Union Trolley had its name changed abruptly before coming into service. The developer of the area in Seattle where the streetcars are due to start service maintains this is an urban legend. But the name has stuck with residents.

I guess it's all a matter of what you want to say you're going to take downtown.

Google access blocked in Iran

The Spirit of Man reports.

A calumny against women

Norm explains.

Referendum blocker

I thought other people might comment on this, but it seems obvious why arch Europhile Menzies Campbell has called for a referendum not on the new constitution, but on the very fact of our membership of the EU. It's because it allows the constitutional referendum to be opposed - No! We want a bigger, better referendum! - while calling for something that no main party is committed to and that no party would actually hold.

It's meant to be a killer blow to the idea of a constitutional referendum, and that's all.

Confessions of a taxi driver

Dizzy writes today about government use of taxis - I know you'll be amazed, but apparently they spend eye-wateringly large sums on cabs.

In the late 1980s, I drove a mini cab in south London, on and off, and one of the firms I drove for did account work for one of the borough councils. A regular source of early evening work was the ferrying of Italian and Portugese aids sufferers, who were in London because they'd receive better, free healthcare than they would at home, to buy their smack.

That's right, minicabs drove health tourists to their drug dealers, with tax payers footing the bill. It was so regular that on several occasions I had a new arrival sitting in the back, craning their head trying to identify the flat they'd been told to visit, and since I'd been there so often and knew quite well what was going on, I'd end up just telling them which one they were looking for.

Competition and monopolies

One thing that both Milton Friedman and J K Galbraith agreed on was that industrialists and businessmen hate free markets. They are too uncertain. What any executive really desires is a nice, cosy monopoly or, in the absence of that, a trust formed with their competitors, so they can milk their customers, free from the risk and uncertainties that accompany the market.

In the past couple of decades, Microsoft has used monopolistic practises to cement such a comfortable position for itself, and these have frequently been illegal. The complexity of the technology and a cynical use of delaying tactics has allowed Microsoft to profit from these practises, then pay out, in total, billions of dollars in deals, fines and out of court settlements. It has been good business for them. It's worth paying billions to make tens of billions. I touched on some of the specifics in this post.

One of the few proper functions of governments is to prevent the formation of trusts and monopolies and thereby guarantee the presence of competition. Without competition, you don't have a market. Consumers are faced with the choice of buying, or not buying, instead of a choice between different suppliers with different offerings.

It's always depressing to see free market advocates writing in support of anti-competitive practices, and there's another example of this today, at the Adam Smith Institute blog. Writing about the fine that was recently confirmed against Microsoft by the EU, it is argued that:

The effects that this decision will have on traders' confidence could be seismic, with some firms shying away from investment or research and development of new technologies, as the requirement to share such information would negate the benefits. This neo-protectionist economic agenda is forming a policy cloak for the anti-Americanism of many European Commissioners, and it is European citizens who stand to suffer from it.

There certainly is anti-Americanism in the EU, and it is destructive. But no force has done more to stifle innovation in the computer industry than Microsoft. Illegal anti-competitive tactics should not be supported by the ASI, and when they do things like this they give strength to the attacks on free market economics levelled by the left: that they are just special pleading by or on behalf of the abusive rich. In this case, they are.

Islam again, a response

There have been a number of responses to my post suggesting that

Islamic tradition, as opposed to the Koran (with which there is also considerable fault), is what has given the Islamic world five centuries of underachievement and brutality. It is something to be contextualised and reformed, not perpetuated with absolutist and fundamentalist fervour.

They can all be read by following the above link. I'll try to respond to every point made by Ismaeel, while at the same time being as brief as I can.

I find this contradictory:

Mecca was not conquered by the sword, the people of Mecca surrendered the city to the Prophet (PBUH) and most of them became Muslims voluntarily despite being given a very long amnesty in which they were allowed to carry on with their pagan rituals. Yes those who were pagans had to eventually choose to leave or convert. That is because for 23 years they had been at the forefront of waging war upon the Muslims.

They weren't conquered, they surrendered? I think you just dislike the sound of the word "conquered", while being unable to deny the military aspect of the occasion. By way of contrast, St Patrick landed in Britain without a sword, and converted people who were heavily armed. You know I'm not a cheerleader for Christianity, of course, I'm just pointing out the difference. Islam was spread by the sword, even in what is now Saudi Arabia. You acknowledge this in your next sentence, with the word "war":

They however lost the war and they were treated in a far better manner than any contemporary victor treats it's enemies. Can you imagine Saddam Hussain or Mullah Omar being forgiven and recruited into high office by the US govt? No neither can I.

I have no idea how the Meccans were treated, but no I can't imagine the US government behaving like that. Unlike you, and this is something I'll come back to, I don't feel attracted by the "yes but" line of argument. I do feel that our experience in Northern Ireland, and that of the South Africans, shows the wisdom of letting even what might feel like unforgivable conflict, violence and oppression be forgiven, if not entirely forgotten, in order to find peace, and I feel this is a lesson that Israel has yet to learn. Even continuing terrorism by fringe or splinter groups should not be allowed to derail a more general peace.

As for the land of Sham (modern day Palestine/Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria)it is instructive to note that the Muslims were seen as and welcomed and aided by the indigenous population who wanted to be well rid of the oppressive intolerant and corrupt Byzantium Empire who had indeed spread the Orthodox faith by the sword persecuting any other form of Christianity within it's borders- I remember actually discussing this with you in Oxford and you agreeing.

I'm afraid I don't recall that detail of our conversation, but you're making a rather false distinction here. I said that this land was Christian, and you acknowledge that. As we both know, it is characteristic of different traditions of any given religion that they fight one another. But every reference I have been able to find considers the Islamic occupation of Jerusalem and the surrounding lands to have been a conquest. Every single one. If you want to maintain that it was not a military exercise, I'd appreciate a reference. What I suspect is the case, is that you are cherry picking some evidence of a particular response to the Islamic military invasion, and omitting the context.

Your discussion of the conquest of Constantinople doesn't tally with the accounts which i have read, it is important to note however that it was again the Byzantines who provoked the attack on Constantinople by encouraging crusaders to enter the lands as they felt the young Sultan Mehmet was not skilled enough to withstand a strong military attack. In the interests of securing the security of his state Mehmet had to attack Constantinople- a pre-emptive strike shall we call it?

The final, ninth crusade was in 1271/2. The conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans was in 1453. To suggest that pre-emptive action was taken in 1453 to protect against an attack in 1272 is completely absurd. But just as absurd is the suggestion that the conquest by Islamic armies of vast areas of land suddenly became pre-emptive when they reached Constantinople.

I will not pretend that there have not been tyrants amongst Muslim sultans and caliphs there have been and i will not pretend there have not been atrocities and intolerance perpetrated by such people either in the name of Islam or otherwise.

However it would be foolish of you to suggest that we could not find parallels in western tradition whether Christian or Secular. It is blatant denial of the facts to suggest that Facism and Communism weren't the children of an atheistic, secular modern world in the west.

That's fatuous, but it's a very commonplace fatuity. Whereas some atrocities have been, and continue to be, committed in the name of Islam, it is ludicrous to suggest that the communist and fascist atrocities were committed in the name of secularism, or atheism.

In fact, religion, communism and fascism have this in common: they are all totalitarian. They all claim the whole (the totality) of every person alive, their thoughts, property and actions, in the name of some greater good. Totalitarianism is the enemy, whatever clothes it might be wearing at any given time.

As you also know and again we have discussed, it was Muslim scholars who preserved, applied and expanded on the very same Greek philosophy which was then retransmitted by means of Islamic universities in Spain into western Europe which were the means of the succession of reformation, renaisance and enlightenment.
All of these scholars were acting on Islamic imperatives found in the Qur'aan to seek out knowledge and examine the natural world.

Nope. Those imperatives don't seem to have been very, er... imperative in the past half millennium. The scientists of the "Islamic" golden age were enjoying a period of religious abeyance. It ended in a context of war - Mongol invasions - but what actually brought it to a close, specifically, were the suppression of the tradition of ijtihad (independent reason) and the promotion of the tradition of taqleed (imitation), by religious authorities in the twelfth century. The religious shutters that continue to limit the power of the Islamic world slammed shut all those centuries ago, and there has been stagnation and barbarism ever since. It was your version of Islam, Ismaeel, that killed the Islamic golden age*.

You know as well as i do Islamic tradition is not monolithic and it is worrying to see an intelligent man as yourself allow yourself to be drawn into such a polemic.

If you read this blog you'll have noticed my support for Muslims who follow enlightened traditions, including Ali Eteraz (which is where we came in). I'm perfectly well aware that Islam isn't monolithic. It is, however, blighted at the moment in many of its traditions by backward-looking and violent forces.

Shaykh Faiz's words are particularly pertinent because they explain clearly the issues that concern you. Young Muslims who have not had the traditional spiritual training- in the jihad against oneselves in controlling one's desires and emotions, seeing a world in which Muslims are under attack and suffering horribly subject Islam to their own individual interpretation- thus the results we have seen, this is a characteristic of such things throughout histroy and of all people. Ali Eretraz's interpetations in this sense are no difference in their manner, they seek to submit the Divine to man rather than the other way around.

The characteristic pattern is, and has been for one and a half millennia, that of Muslims attacking everyone else. And once you insist on the submission of man to the divine then you open the doors, if such is your interpretation of the divine, to the most horrific brutality, with no room for humanity or rational moderation of behaviour. That's what we're seeing in radical Islam today. It is repugnant.

Now, you account for the decline of the past centuries as follows:

If we look back this has been the period of great internal strife amongst Muslims- of disunity, civil war, the breaking up into states and empires- all in contradiction to the entreaties of our Prophet (PBUH) to remain united under one Imam.
[...]
When we look at the modern Islamic world, the majority of governments are non-Islamic and even anti-Islamic and yet there is no progress materially. Instead the trend of corrupt rulers making themselves rich and fat (if not attacking their neighbours) continues whilst the people suffer.
The fact that this situation is subsidised by many western governments means that the natural inclination to identify with Islam as an alternative to this decadence means that people are inclined also to be anti-western.

I agree that it has been very wrong of Western governments to support corrupt leaders in the Islamic world, and elsewhere for that matter, but scientific endeavour has never flourished under religious governance, for very obvious reasons. Science is not the process of expanding on religious thinking, because religious thinking is wrong in so many areas. Science has always conflicted with received wisdom, even that found within science itself. The most important developments of the past couple of hundred years have directly contradicted religious teachings and, more importantly, religious authority. By saying that the problem with the Islamic world is that it isn't sufficiently Islamic, you're saying that the problem with a dead horse is that it isn't sufficiently dead.

Religious authorities suffocated the golden age of Islam and have kept the pillow pressed firmly to the face of people unfortunate enough to have been born into those theocratic societies ever since.

Then we have the classic "yes but":

Last century Germany tried to conquer Europe twice, Russia attempted to swallow Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the rest of the world. The British Empire, French Empire, Dutch and Portugese Empires were all dismantled last century. All of these were built on Enlightenment values and were hardly free of violence, conquest, slavery and supremicism now where they?

Yes, but the West has been nasty too! Well, yes it has. But the - totally inaccurate - implication in your words is that slavery, conquest, violence and supremacism were enlightenment values. They weren't. They pre-dated the Enlightenment and it was the Enlightenment that has enabled (most of) us to shed them. The same cannot be said of Islam: they are intrinsic to an absolutist view of Islam, and this is part of the problem.

Islamic tradition, as I said before, needs to be contextualised and reformed if you are to be rid of them.

Finally, I call your organisation extremist because you are seeking to dominate, however you dress this up in nice words like "civility". You are seeking to suppress those who dissent or dislike your beliefs. You have shown an almost sadistic wish to humiliate and control those who have offended you - take your demands of the publishers of the Danish cartoons:

A full apology by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten and all others who re-printed the caricatures for offending 1.6 billion Muslims, and:

o To hand over the rights of the cartoons to Muslims;
o To publish one saying of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) every day for 1 year, promoting civility, as selected by the Muslim Action Committee;
o The proceeds from the defamatory caricatures to be given in trust to children's charities.

But most of all, you seek to argue that human reasoning and morality must be suppressed utterly, and that religious teachings, as interpreted by you and the authorities you consider valid, should dominate human behaviour now and forever. How much more extreme could a person be?


*UPDATE: Note that by arguing that man should submit to the divine and not seek to interpret, Ismaeel is actually advocating the very thing - the suppression of independent thought in favour of imitation (tradition) - that killed the Islamic dawn.

They don't make 'em like that any more

A commenter at the Libertas, conservative film festival, website:

The older actors like Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Lee Marvin, Errol Flynn, William Holden, Ward Bond, Big Boy williams all these men were from the depression era they grew up fast and tough. They were all big boozers and would get into bar fights all over the southwest and in Mexico, I mean these guys would get so drunk they would take on a whole bar of patrons and kick ass. Jimmy Cagney would hit you so fast if he felt you insulted him or anyone he was with. Errol Flynn couldn’t go into a bar here in LA without someone trying to find out if he was as tough as he was on film. Errol was a wild crazy Tasmanian, who as twenty year old made his living sailing up the great barrier reef to New Guinea. He and buddies would hit all the bars when they came into port and to earn some money. The young Errol Flynn would bare knuckle fight in sea port bars to pick food and supply money to continue their 3000 mile trek in an open boat to Papua New Guinea. Robert Mitchum left home at 14 and lived on the rails as a hobo until he was 17. He escaped from a Georgia chain gang at 17 and walked home to Delaware with a gangrene leg.

Traffic report

Gosh. Nice hit rate the past few days, following my posts about the North West Passage. It's almost as though if you bother to research something a bit, instead of just sounding off, people will come and read it.

Quote of the day

From Libertas:

Madonna: “I Am An Ambassador For Judaism.”

And we Catholics breathe a sigh of relief.

The best possible taste

Text reads: “Exclusive to Al Hayat Al Jadida”

Palestinian Media Watch explains, by email:

Al Hayat Al Jadida, is owned by the PA and controlled by the office of Mahmoud Abbas. The only text on this cartoon is "Exclusive to Al Hayat Al Jadida," which means it was prepared specifically for the official Palestinian Authority daily.

Acid flashback

I knew I'd regret it. Nearly thirty years after taking my last microdot, the hallucinations have come back to plague me. I just imagined I saw an article saying this in the Telegraph:

Pupils should mark their own classwork and decide what their school tests should cover, according to the Government's exams advisers.

Teachers should train secondary school children to set their own homework and devise marking schemes, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said.

Pupils should then assess the results, grading their own efforts and giving "feedback" to their classmates, the latest National Curriculum guidance said.

Thirty years of clean living, then the darkness looms again. Horrible... horrible...

Disaster socialism

Fabian Tassano parodies a review of Naomi Klein's latest oeuf, to unsettling effect:

Academics and activists have spent the latter half of the 20th century developing a strategy for overcoming public resistance to overt left-wing agendas. This strategy, which has been called 'disaster socialism', involves waiting for a health scare, child abuse scandal, terrorist attack, climate-related catastrophe, banking crisis, or similar disaster. The upheaval throws citizens into a state of shock and fear, providing a window of opportunity for far-reaching changes in legislation, increases in the power of 'social workers' or other arms of the state apparatus, the lifting of restrictions on police and other interventionist agencies, and the proliferation of bureaucratic red tape.

Unsettling, because whereas Klein's theory is either inconsequential or absurd*, depending on how charitably you are inclined, Tassano is identifying a genuine trend. It's a strange old world where a parody is true but the original reads like a parody.

Disaster socialism has no better exemplar than global warming, an alleged, confected disaster that has been seized on by thousands of people from the left as an excuse for insisting that the societal changes they wanted anyway must now be made.

And this is completely unarguable. George Monbiot's forthcoming collected essays are titled Bring on the Apocalypse (you couldn't make it up). Al Gore is quoted by Fabian as follows:

Minor shifts or moderate improvements — these are forms of appeasement, designed to satisfy people’s desire to believe that a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary.

A socialist transformation, you understand.





* Either it's saying that when people with a free market philosophy get involved in the aftermath of events like Hurricane Katrina, their philosophy can be discerned, which is inconsequential; or she is alleging some kind of vast right wing conspiracy, which is, well... par for the course for leftists who drank in their own vast conspiracy with their mothers' milk, but absurd. Whereas socialism was born in conspiratorial meetings in cellars, complete with those funny round bombs with the fuses sticking out, trying to get free market advocates to conspire is like herding cats.

War news

First the Germans, and now the French:

The world should "prepare for war" with Iran, the French foreign minister has said, significantly escalating tensions over the country's nuclear programme.

Bernard Kouchner said that while "we must negotiate right to the end" with Iran, if Teheran possessed an atomic weapon it would represent "a real danger for the whole world".

The world should "prepare for the worst... which is war", he said.

In the Navy

Tell me I misread this:

The Royal Australian Navy is under pressure to explain why it has spent tens of thousands of pounds paying for female sailors to have breast enlargements.

Please.

Spinning climate change

A recent study has cast doubt on the idea that Neanderthals were wiped out by climate change. This seems at first sight like a potentially lucrative seam for researchers. Lifetimes could be spent cataloguing all the things Neanderthals weren't wiped out by. But of course, there's a special reason why climate change had been identified as a potential case of their demise. It's a depressing reason. Climate change has become a societal obsession. In the future, looking back, I think this collective madness will take its place alongside Tulip Mania and the South Sea Bubble.

This obsession was the only reason, incidentally. There's never been any actual evidence that climate might have been the cause of the disappearance of Neanderthals.

Of course, it's possible that human activity is affecting the climate. It's just that, again, there isn't really any good evidence that this is the case. Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and we've raised the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere. But measured changes in atmospheric CO2 don't correlate with changes in observed or measured temperatures, so climate alarmists have had to rely on models for their hysteria.

The most famous such model is the hockey stick graph of reconstructed temperatures, which was a major plank in the case made by the IPCC in 2001, on the strength of which so many taxes and costs, and changes to our society, are being advocated. But this graph is controversial, not least because it doesn't match the historical record of temperature. With the hockey stick, there was no medieval warm period and no little ice age, though we have always had excellent reason to think that both happened. One benefit of all this nonsense is that research has been directed at these two climate events, and strengthened the case for thinking they were real, and they were global in scope. That's potentially a problem for the alarmists; their case is built on the sand of a dodgy graph.

Not to worry, though. Even this problem can be spun into a piece of alarmism about climate change:

Diaries of day-to-day weather details from the age before 19th-century standardized thermometers are proving of great value to scientists who study today's climate. Historical accounts were once largely ignored, as they were thought to be fraught with inaccuracy or were simply inaccessible or illegible. But the booming interest in climate change has transformed the study of ancient weather records from what was once a "wallflower science," says Christian Pfister, a climate historian at the University of Bern.

The accounts dispel any lingering doubts that the Earth is heating up more dramatically than ever before, he says.

I can hear a low whistle of admiration from the direction of Downing Street. The alarmism of recent years has relied on there not having been a little ice age. Now it's impossible to deny there was, the subsequent warming in the historical record - a warming that has no correlation whatsoever with man made CO2 emissions - is taken as proof of... man made global warming.