Clodhoppers

culture warsis

2012-02-16T11:17:00.021Z

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi

House of Lords

London

SW1A 0PW

Dear Baroness Warsi

Good show!

Mrs Root was just saying how encouraging it was that somebody in the establishment is standing up for good old traditional faith values even if they’re not sure what values they mean or what faith it is they’re standing up for.

Well, let them stew Sayeeda! We jolly well know what we mean, don’t we? And let me assure you, Mrs Root and I have no problem at all with an unelected, muslim Cabinet Minister without portfolio representing a protestant country delivering Islamic gifts to the head of the Catholic church. Don’t let these liberal loud-mouths tell you any different. You Go Girl!

Could you just give His Holiness a bit of a heads up though. We still haven’t had word on the non appearance of Vatican back-up during our Re-Evangelizing of the West tour, and we’re nearly in Clitheroe now! We urgently need remittance of the expense claims submitted by ‘The Ordinary Folk Against The Rising Tide Of Filth In Our Society Situation Society’ - (TOFATRTOFISSS for short). Just give the Vatican Treasury a nudge for us would you? We need the money urgently now in order to continue on with our re-evangalisation mission all the way to Morecambe.

Champion! Keep up the good work! As Mrs Root put it, over a nice bit of breaded haddock last night, “We didn’t get where we are today by not being a judeo-christian culture, did we?” Quite right too!

You and I both know full well, that if these loud mouthed, extremist, fanatical, fundamentalist, heretical, ignorant, aggressive, hostile, twisted, warped, uncivil, peevish, contemptuous, coarse, hostile, rude, dogmatic, shrill, strident, viscious, rancorous, boorish, savage, irascible, spiteful, amoral, cynical, depraved, crusading, subversive, bigoted, thuggish, intolerant, unprincipled, sadistic, petty, vindictive, crusading terrorist secularists, have their way, we’ll all be in an atheist concentration camp before you can say Jack of Kent; and we’ll be made to concentrate and do all sorts of demeaning reasoning. It’s unthinkable isn’t it?

Let’s head them off at the pass!

Oh, by the way Baroness, someone altered your Wicki entry yesterday. Straight off the top it read…” Sayeeda Hussain Warsi, Baroness Warsi (born 28 March 1971) is a British lawyer and politician who has difficulty grasping the concept of Separation of Church and State". Bloody cheek! I hope you can get your hands on whoever was responsible for that and chop one of theirs off!

Yours Insha'Allah

Henry Root
(Suppliers of Judeo-Christian Wet Fish to the World's Jihadis)

PS: I forgot 'curmudgeonly'
PPS: Sorry, I also forgot to enclose a pound. Just ask Jo if you're caught short, he's loaded!

mental caries

2012-02-11T12:21:00.002Z

Richard Cary [ex Archbish of Cantebury] has said that Bideford coucillors should continue with prayers before meetings.

By doing so he is actually advocating breaking the law as Mr Justice Ouseley has written - 'there is no specific statutory power to say prayers or to have any period of quiet reflection as part of the business of the Council.' And, from a prior case, 'The precepts of any one religion and belief system cannot by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of another. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy which is necessarily autocratic.

The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people, not made by their judges and governments. The individual conscience is free to accept such dictated law, but the State, if its people are to be fee, has the burdensome duty of thinking for itself.

So it is that the law must firmly safeguard the right to hold and express religious beliefs. Equally firmly, it must eschew any protection for such a belief's content in the name only of its religious credentials. Both principles are necessary conditions for a free and rational regime.'

Accordingly Justice Ouseley has concluded [that]...'the Council has no power to hold prayers as part of a formal Council meeting, or to summon Councillors to a meeting at which such prayers are on the agenda.'

IMO this is the correct conclusion in law and the former Archbishop Carey's comments amount to little more than the usual special pleading and complaint that religion is being marginalised in society. It is not being marginalised: it is simply being put in its rightfull place as one interest group amongst many many other interest groups in society and has no 'as of right' claim to special priviledge or exemption from the law.

As has been noted elsewhere, there is nothing in his ruling that precludes Councils from holding prayer or meditation or whatever meetings prior to the start of official Council business. Attendance at those would be voluntary and would therefore not be discriminatory of any of other faiths or of none.

Difficult to see why Carey doesn't grok this but easy enough to see why he doesn't want to.

another brick in the wall?

2012-02-10T14:14:00.002Z

Prayer sessions were a formal part of Council meetings with required attendance. However the High Court today ruled that "The saying of prayers as part of the formal meeting of a Council is not lawful under s111 of the Local Government Act 1972, and there is no statutory power permitting the practice to continue".

Mr Keith Porteous-Wood (Exec Director of the Secualr Society said: "This judgment is an important victory for everyone who wants a secular society, one that neither advantages nor disadvantages people because of their religion or lack of it. This is particularly important for activities which are part of public life, such as council meetings.

"There is no longer a respectable argument that Britain is a solely Christian nation or even a religious one. An increasing proportion of people are not practising any religion and minority faiths are growing in number and influence. This underlines the need for shared civic spaces to be secular and available to all, believers and non-believers alike, on an equal basis."

Syriana

2012-02-10T11:59:00.004Z

Who gets to decide whether something is legitimate or not? I'm thinking here about Syria and about how you hear that the regime of Asad is no longer 'legitimate'. Usually, in this context, we'd be looking at a definition along the lines of being in compliance with the law. However, law, like religion can legitimate anything it chooses and then turn to outsiders and say 'you may not like this but you've no right to interfere'.

Syria's population is 74% Sunni muslim, 16% other muslim sects and 10% Christian. The ruling elite are from the minority Alawi muslim sect (12%) who make up most of the socialist/secularist Ba'athist gov't.

The Syrian muslim brotherhood, who regard Alawi's as borderline heretics, have engaged in armed uprisings before based on the city of Hama. In 1982 the gov't used heavy artillery, levelling parts of the city and causing thousands of deaths, to crush the fundamentalist opposition which has been relatively quiescent until spring 2011.

When Asad's father died in 2000, they had to immediately ammend the constitution to allow his son Bashar to take the presidency: the constitution previously mandated 40yrs as the minimum allowed - Bashar was only 34. The referendum in 2007 confirmed Bashar al-Asad in power for a futher 7-year term.

So, is the west saying the Asad administration is illegitimate because it's basically an authoritarian, totalist regime masquerading as a democracy? Sure people vote there, but the votes are rigged and the choice is limited. Doesn't that remind you of somewhere else?

So the accusation of 'illegitimacy' seems to be based on the observation that the government is, in reality, a stitched-up, totalitarian state and the claim that it is a free multi-party democracy a mere projection, a hologram to present to the outside world which fools nobody.

The command and control of the military and the internal security services is all in Alawi control, but many of the conscripts, (compulsory since late 2011), to the army are Sunnis - so defections from the ranks is likely to grow as they will refuse to kill their Sunni brothers.

But the insurgency seems unlikely to succeed against a vast, well armed regime and ruthless internal security forces, unless they get the active backing of external forces which Russia and China will veto. Russia's interest is presumably to keep a toe-hold in Arabia, maintain it's naval base in the med on Syria's coast, and keep a valuable customer for its arms sales. China's interest is, I suppose, to protect its now billion dollar investments in the country. It's not clear to me that their support for Syria will not badly backfire on them later on so this may be quite a big gamble for both.

Maybe Asad could've headed this off by engaging in some meaningful reforms much much earlier, ones that would have compromised sufficiently to make the insurgents back off yet still leave him in overall control. Who knows?

Where is the Arab League in all this? What happens if the Asad regime falls and a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy is the outcome? What will Israel do then? How far is Turkey going to take its opposition to the Asad regime?

What a mess!

[EDIT] Some further reading: The Long Road To Damascus

Tally Ho! part 4

2012-02-07T13:30:00.000Z

So, what motivates the rapacious greed of market traders and bankers and what can mitigate against it? In primitive society, checks on such behaviour were built in. Because such societies were very small, often tribal goupings, where everyone knew everyone else and knew their place within the social norms of the group, it was easier to spot those who were not players, or who's behaviour was antisocial or exploitative, so that, even if their personality inclined them towards sociopathic tendency, they would quite quickly hit the buffers of group toleration and thus they have a fairly powerful incentive to curb, to reign in their cheating hearts or they would have to face the consequences.

In very large complex societies, there is a much bigger niche available for such people to operate in: their activities are much easier to hide away from public scrutiny; there are many more ways of legitimating their activities; there are more opportunities to associate with like minded people for mutual benefit; it is easier to justify their exploitative activities as part of the norm or as social/economic necessity, even inevitability; it is a lot easier to hide away from shame and humiliation in large societies: if you've been caught out fleecing one group of people, well, just move on a bit and fleece the next group. You see that a lot in the shady, (real or vitual), world of scams and get rich quick merchants.

In such societies, one need have little care or concern for the 'marks' of one's scams: because there is no need to have any close personal relationship with them. Often there are several layers of secrecy and insulation between the exploiter and the 'mark' which isolates them from any serious social consequence, or the need to feel shame or remorse, for their activities or face any damage to their position or reputation.

The MP's expenses scandal was a pretty good example of this. It was all fine while it was an in- house secret and while more or less everyone was 'at it'. When the lid was taken off, the disgust and contempt towards politicians was so thick in the air you could cut it with a bulldozer. The truth though, is that the politicians are probably no better or worse than any of us, faced with the same opportunity to work a system we are in to our own advantage. How many have not fiddled expenses, exaggerated an insurance claim, returned goods as faulty that we damaged ourselves, helped ourselves to 'resources' from the workplace, and so forth? No, the problem for the politicians was that they are public servants and can't afford for their reputations to be so fatally damaged without facing the chop. Apart from the Chris Huhne case now in the media, there are dozens of examples of this going back to the year dot.

The bankers, by contrast, don't really have to bother all that much about what we think of them. They are at another level of remove from the general public: more isolated, mostly not public servants, but operatives of private commercial banking enterprise, not responsible for public policy, and for the most part, deeply suspicious of regulation, critical of interference, and very defensive of the culture in which they operate and of the rewards they feel they are entitled to. The economist Will Hutton put it thusly.."the huge bonuses...trashed the need for individuals to worry about integrity." Such people, he continues, "don't need to be concerned about their reputations; they just need one deal or one year at the top and they need never work again."

In 'The Surprising Science of Reputation', John Whitfield writes "..extreme wealth damages society not because it corrupts, but because it isolates. Inequality severs connections, splitting people into groups whose members cannot influence one another. This may be one reason why more unequal societies suffer more crime and mental illness, regardless of their wealth. Making connections, on the other hand, forces people to confront the consequences of their actions."

Exactly so. The bankers are divorced from the consequences of their actions. More, they are even protected from the consequences of their actions. The temptation of the massive rewards and the incentive to take huge risks whilst knowing that if things go belly up the gumment will step in to bail you out, even continue to reward you for failure was too much. What kind of sane society permits this?

Banker Stanislas Yassukovich has said that investment banks came to see scandals as an advertisement, rather than an indictment. "Reputational risk is no longer a meaningful element of corporate policy. It is no longer a question of knowing right from wrong: it is a matter of knowing what you can get away with and what might be the cost of getting caught."

If any good is to come of this mess, social policy must move towards removing the protection bankers enjoy. They, as well as us, should be made to feel (and to suffer), the social consequences of their actions and the harms that unfettered, unregulated, irresponsible capitalism meet on us all.

Wool I Never! (Tally Ho part 3)

2012-02-06T20:41:00.025Z

It isn't the first time the excesses of the banking industry have left European economies in a mess. Edward III effectively put the country in hoc to the rapacious Lombardi bankers of northern Italy by signing over all his revenue from wool tax in the 14th century: effectively creating a bank controlled monopoly of the wool trade, which was Edward's main source of income. At the time the custom due on every 26 stone bale of wool was 6 shillings and 4 pence. But because the trade was seasonal in nature, (whereas Edward's wars with the French and the Scottish were not), he would borrow heavily on wool futures to get the finance he needed. The trade was so important to the country that, at one time, there was a law which stated that every man had to wear a woolen cap, and another, that the illegal black market exportation of wool, (a practice that went by the term of 'owling' - presumably because it took place in the dark), was punishable by the chopping off of the left hand.

The family run banks, the Bardi, Peruzzi and Acciaiuolo, became the first European 'superbanks', (too big to fail), but fail they did in 1345. They got too greedy: during the 100yrs war they tried to impose a rate of exhchange on Edward which overvalued their gold Florin by 15%, which cut into Edward's revenue and provoked the English king to say STFU and to default on his debts: he effectively said 'Can't pay, won't pay'. He did a runner. At one point Edward had left his wife and children abroad as collateral for his massive debts, but he managed to get them out and substituted a couple of expendable earls and the crown jewels instead. The Lombardi banks played much the same game all across Europe but when they failed, they left pretty much the entire European monetry system in tatters, apart from the Hanseatic League bankers of Germany, who had had the sense not to let any of these ruinous Italian banks and merchant companies anywhere near their cities.

When Mr Papandreou stood down as Greek PM on 9th Nov last year he said, "Today I want to send a message of optimism to all Greeks. Our road, our path, will be more stabilised. Our country will be in a better situation. We will be stronger."

It isn't that easy. The markets know that the economic cracks in the Greek economy were papered over to allow it entry to the EU. They also know that it is not a state that has an economy which can generate the income needed to repay the debt, and even the selling off of capital assets and austerity savings won't be enough. As Paul Mason said "the problem is that.....if you choose to bankrupt states instead of banks, (which we have done), and you then impose austerity measures as the cure for bankruptcy...Greece is a country which cannot recover through austerity...it cannot grow faster than its debt is growing?"

Greece is no stranger to default. It last did it in 1932 when it was broke and took the begging bowl around the capitals of Europe and was refused any money. Is there not always a point when one realises that throwing good money after bad is a mugs game?

The difference is that Edward III ran a feudal economy. He held the power and the authority to unilaterally walk away from his debt, and he could (and did), recover his fortunes in further warring escapades across Europe. Today, the whole of capitalism is based on a global sovereign debt market of ~$20 trillion and its annual interest payments of 100's of billions of dollars!

When you start considering the effects of defaults from countries like Spain, Italy, Portugal, it's no wonder there's a lot of very worried capitalists fiddling with their worry beads. Even in Edward's time the defaults were contagious, but in todays world of complex global financial markets where no one really understands the degree of financial exposure faced (because everyone has borrowed from everyone else and loaned to everyone), and it's all wrapped up in hopelessly and deliberately opaqe complex financial instruments, who knows where it all goes?

6th May 1339 - REVOCATION - On account of the Kings Necessity, of all assignments of money or other things made by him or his Ministers, before or after his passage to parts beyond the seas, other than those for defence of castles and towns in Scotland, and to the merchants of the societies of the Bardi and the Perruzi and of all respites of his debts made since his last crossing over - AN ORDER - That until his return, no fees be paid to any Justices, Barons of the Exchequer, Clerks Promoted, or Other Ministers who have other means of support. - Witness - The King

In Edward's time, some of the bankers who had contributed to all of this chaos ended up in the notorious Fleet debtors prison in Farringdon Street London. These days they seem to get awarded million pound share options or put out to grass with an obscenely large pension. Odd, that. I wonder if her maj could be persuaded to issue a declaration and bung a few of these modern day Bardi's and Peruzzi bankers in clink rather than just take a an honour away here or a bonus there?

Wampum Magic (tally ho part 2.1)

2012-01-24T19:49:00.018Z

You're a wealthy person if you have a lot of what you value.

You're rich if you have a lot of whatever currency your culture trades in.

In the good ol' days Lancaster folk could trade in the 'Lune', a currency named after the beautiful river that flows through our fair city. Being a practical sort of chap I was damn near a milluneair by the time the system fell into disuse. I could trade plumbing and building skills for a lift with something heavy in the garden, or for a massage, or an old bicycle, or whatever.

The Lune was a printed token in various denominations of riverwater that the Lune traders could barter their deals in. When the currency collapsed, I became a poor Lune and my tokens became worthless bits of laminated paper. C’est la vie, apparently!

Anyway, the point is that currency can be anything. When the new world settlers started to trade with the five tribes of the indigenous Iroqois peoples in north America, pounds were no use: they didn’t have them anyway, so they had to find an medium of exchange, a form or reserve currency that was accepted locally: this was the Wampum, a black or white bead, the white ones fashioned out of a whelk shell and the black ones out of a quahog or poquahock clamshell, both found around Long Island Sound. – hence Iroquois ‘People of the Longhouse’.

The beads were often fashioned into beautiful belts as a convenient way of carrying a lot of them around. You can still see them in the British Museum.

So it was a very local currency in the same way that the Lune was a very local exchange mechanism. It was not much use anywhere else: but in the locality, could be used as a store of value and a medium of exchange for valuable beaver pelts or anything else of utility. Not that we have many beaver pelts in the Lune valley, as far as I know.

So trade, as a driver of communication and exchange and development between cultures, has always been crucial and we’ve developed ever more sophisticated and clever ways of lubricating the mechanisms of trade ever since, along with all its positive and negative consequences.

In England, up until the latter part of the 17th century, the lubrication of English trade was in hammered coin, created by placing a piece of metal between two dies and striking the upper die to imprint an image on both sides of the coin.

A laborious, labour intensive and inefficient process that simply wasn’t up to the job of lubricating trade at all. There wasn’t enough of it to go around, so even if you wanted to start up a business you could struggle to get enough to pay your suppliers or your workers or whoever else. The coinage was very irregular, it could be forged pretty easily, (by 1696 10% of the coin in circulation was forged), and at one point it made more sense to melt the metal down, take it to the continent and sell it as bullion because the metal content was worth more than the coins face value, so that’s what people did.

In short, it was a total mess and didn’t stand a chance of being able to lubricate the vast increase in trade that was coming just round the corner in the beginnings of the industrial revolution. So, on 10 June 1696 a Proclamation was issued requiring “all Receivers and Collectors of the Publick Taxes to take hammer'd Silver Money at five shillings and eight Pence an Ounce” and change it for nice shiny new machine minted money of a standard weight and metal content. It still wasn’t a total success because the silver bullion value of the coinage exceeded the face value until it could be worked out how to make coins out of cheaper metals: so they had another ‘Great Recoinage’ in 1816.

Oh well, the idea was there, and it gave Isaac Newton (who they'd made Warden of the Royal Mint), a nice day job; at night he could mess about building the first refracting telescope, work out the laws of universal gravitation, develop differential and integral calculus, work out the laws of mechanics and motion and optics, figure binomial series out, have a bash at turning base metal into gold and work out how to make holes in jam doughnuts (only joking). Lazy sod, he was!

Still, by the time Newton died in 1724, we had a money that could service the development of trade and commerce properly, we had the Bank of England (1694), we had paper money in circulation, we had a reliable coinage of standard weight and quality that was much more difficult to forge than the old hammered coin and we were set up to service the industrial revolution and a continuous rise in living standards for the next couple hundred years.

Onwards and upwards, tally ho! What could possibly go wrong?

Tally Ho (part the second)

2012-01-22T17:54:00.007Z

By the beginning of the 13th century, there was a fully functioning market in government debt. One that came about as a result of a very simple technological innovation: namely the use of the Tally Stick.

After William the Conker had clocked us all and our land holdings and property and chikkins and wotnot in the Doomsday book, he was in a much better position to levy tax from us all and had the requisite paramilitary inland revenue force to do it. Or else!

Thereafter, the king could agree, with John O' Gaunt say, that Lancashire would pay £1000 tax to the realm and it would fall due on April 1st. Then they would get a stick, any old stick, and carve notches on it indicating the amount owed, who from etc and then split the stick in two. A handle would be carved on the stick and this was called the stock - hence stock market.

["the distance between the tip of the forefinger and the thumb when fully extended ... The manner of cutting is as follows. At the top of the tally a cut is made, the thickness of the palm of the hand, to represent a thousand pounds; then a hundred pounds by a cut the breadth of a thumb; twenty pounds, the breadth of the little finger; a single pound, the width of a swollen barleycorn; a shilling rather narrower than a penny is marked by a single cut without removing any wood".]

The king kept one half and our John the other. When time came for payment the two halves of the stick were brought together - tallied up - and the debt settled. The king usually couldn't wait for April 1st though as he had a pressing need to go and trash the French, or the Scottish [again], and he needed instant cash to pay his army and provide them with Bovril and so forth.

What to do?

He could sell his half of the tally stick to someone in return for the cash he needed immediately. This is how a whole market in government debt was built up and the market got pretty good at trading in, and working out a market 'value' for it. The value might be dependent on when the debt fell due, how far away it was to go and collect it, and the liklihood (confidence) in how probable it was that this debt would be honoured and reliably paid up. If it didn't look too promising, the debt could be 'discounted' or written down in value.

So, Tally sticks formed the basis of the money markets we know today. They were in use up until 1826, but then withdrawn and stored in the Palace of Westminster. By 1834 there was a mountain of sticks to be got rid of, but instead of being sensible and giving them to the poor to burn as firewood, they stuffed the whole lot into the Palace furnaces and the flues got sooooo hot they set the whole building alight and burnt it to the ground. Turner witnessed the event on 16th October 1834 and immortalised it in this famous painting.

You couldn't make this stuff up, could you?

The point is that this market came about as a [possibly] unintended consequence of the application of technology to manipulating finance. Which brings us to what the digital age is going to further do to money, given that it's already well on the way to doing away with cash.

Tally Ho (part the first)

2012-01-20T11:40:00.004Z

Both Cameron and Milliband are trying to position themselves as the reforming white knights of capitalism: they want a fairer, sharing, caring and responsible sort of capitalism, one which, sais Cameron “….recognises that people are not just atomised individuals, and that companies have obligations too.” And, “…is a genuinely popular capitalism, which allows everyone to share in the success of the market." Milliband is whingeing because Cameron is stealing the moral high ground from under his nose…."I welcome the fact that other leaders are coming onto the ground that I set out last September... about the need to tackle predatory capitalism." Adding that he [Cameron] would be judged "on his deeds and not his words". “Banks should not be able to get away with fleecing their customers,” he said yesterday with charming naivity, adding ….."Many people feel they are being ripped off in their everyday lives." No shit Sherlock!

Cameron and Milliband seem to think that playing the dumb innocents, who’ve only just come to realise how wikkid and unfair capitalism can be, and how they are both going to step in and change all that, is going to sit well with the electorate. I think maybe we’re a bit beyond all that…..twenty years ago….perhaps.

This is no passing ‘little local difficulty’ that a few political blandishments can reassuringly banish.

Since the collapse of Lehman Bros in 2008 the crisis has escalated from concern over the bankruptcy of banks (too big to fail), to the bankruptcy of sovereign states, despite all the frantic and desperate measures being undertaken, like bank bailouts and quantative easing [read: printing money] and the rest.

So, there IS a lot of wringing of hands and soul-searching going on (at least, there is amongst those politicians and economists who have a conscience, and who are not totally sociopathic). They are beginning to question the basic assumptions used in the economic modelling they use to determine policy; they are beginning to question the wisdom of having allowed a credit free-for-all to build up layer upon layer of both private and public debt – as though it ever made any sense, at all - ever.

Across the world, a gullible public are told of the inevitibility of reduced public spending, raised taxes, lowered wages, falling standards of living, pension reform etc etc, all to be accepted with a gritting of teeth and a tightening of belts, (because ‘we’re all in it together’, are’nt we?), while out of the Capitalist 1st aid box are dragged the stikky plasters of tougher financial regulation, debt reduction, bigger capital cushions for the banks to survive downturns, and other measures to make banks less vulnerable to crisis intervention.

One of the assumptions was that sovereign debt was without risk and so was a good source of credit – and that may be true up to a point - but in the case of the EU, (which was structured so that the sovereigns within it were no longer currency issuing authorities – the European Central Bank having adopted that role), they are in the difficult position of being hamstrung by the remit and powers given to the ECB by Europe. This is such a structural flaw in the EC that it may yet well kill the European project unless the ECB can be freed up to act in a way that, say, the Bank of England could do in dealing with a crisis in the pound sterling.

But, setting aside the origins of the crisis, you have to wonder whether the patience of the Germans and the French will crack at the profligacy and corruption of states like Greece and Italy and begin to seriously consider what is in it for them, whether the EU project is worth the candle, or whether they wouldn’t be better off pulling the plug and going it alone again. Who knows?

But that’s not really the purpose of this screed, which is to look at why capitalism was suited to the agricultural and industrialisation phases of society, but why it isn’t to the digital information age that we’re now in. That will be Tally Ho part the second, coming soon to a cash point near you.

ticky tacky

2012-01-12T19:27:00.005Z

What does a world beyond capitalism look like? What does global justice mean? How does it work? It's pretty obvious to all that capitalism hasn't produced a fair or just social system, not even for those countries that are at its apex, never mind the billions in the third world for whom even the poorest of us are rich beyond imagination.

One of the products, (apart from the 'stuff' - together with the demand that we 'consume' the stuff), of capitalism, is the social structure itself in which some people are rich and a lot of people are poor and are obliged to work for the rich in one way or another. In a way, the more the poor produce for the rich to sell at a profit, the more they are entrenching the priviliged position of the rich and contribute to their own domination by the rich by being increasingly dependent upon them. In this social structure people are alienated in damaging ways, not only in the classical Marxist sense of being alienated directly from the fruits of their labour, but from the social structure itself which underpins it. Taken as a whole, the structure removes from humans the ability to productively pursue those things which most make humans what they should be, creative, free, passionate and productive: with drives towards beauty, music, art, literature, relationship and so forth.

Capitalism drives a wedge between those things in that the frenetic drive towards endless production and economic growth reduces humans to the level of a machine working a production line and that what we produce turns toxic and comes back to haunt us as pollution, as environmental degradation, as disenfranchised, alienated, marginalised citizens without a sense of worth or communal purpose. The whole thing is like a snake eating its own tale, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it will destroy itself in the process: and that seems to me to be a decent enough metaphor to descibe how the whole of global capitalist system operates. Worse than that, an effect of the system is to divide us from one another and put us in our little boxes. So, you go to work and produce one thing (or more likely, a part of a thing), I go to work and produce another, or provide a service, and someone provides another, health, education, whatever, and each function might be specialised, even very highly specialised, and from the outside it looks like the system works because this whole co-ordinated division of labour produces vast quantities of goods and services that we can go out to the marketplace and buy and take home to our little boxes and enjoy. But that in itself alienates us from one another because the currency of our relationship becomes reduced to a financial transaction rather than human contact: and thinking about [read: not thinking about] what the effect of that has on other human beings, our communities, our planet, is turning us lemmings rushing towards the edge of the abyss.

So, what's the alternative? We've only had civilisation on this scale for a tiny fraction of historical time and we're just in our infancy at it, so let's not be too hard on ourselves about it. But we do have to come out of our little boxes now to try to find out what social morality, what global justice is going to mean in the 21st century.

Brown...Nooooooo's

2012-01-06T20:56:00.004Z

Andrew Brown's latest screed in the Grauniad "Assisted suicide is never an autonomous choice" scrapes the barrel of mindless inchoherence so thoroughly that the bottom just fell out. He sais

"The arguments over assisted suicide are mostly conducted with obvious flaws on both sides. Defenders of the status quo are wrong about the sacredness of life; those people trying to change it are wrong about humanity."

OK. Good...nice humble start: Everyone is wrong except me.... good job I'm around to straighten you all out then. He goes on.....

"The actual, practical issue is tiny. No one wants either to prolong the life of the elderly into a grotesque torture, or to bump them off as soon as they become inconvenient, although these spectres lurk in the shadows of the argument."

Wrong on both counts. Many religious seriously do want to prolong the life into grotesque inhuman torture of not only the elderly but also those suffering from incurable, terminal or untreatable illnesses against their wishes while mouthing platitudes that all that is required is better palliative care which, however good it is, is evidentially shown to be incapable of dealing with intolerable levels of pain in some instances. On the second count, there are people whose may want to relieve some people of their inconvenient lives. Often they are called dictators. Sometimes they are even called doctors! In either case the word he is looking for is murder - not assisted suicide.

"There is clearly a point in many lives after which life is no longer worth living and should be ended as painlessly as possible...."

Really? Sais who?

"....The question is who should decide when it has been reached. Under the old dispensation, doctors chose, and their decisions were tacitly accepted. Surely it is more modern, less authoritarian and more reasonable if patients make the choice, quite openly, for themselves?"

No, doctors didn't choose like that. They might have made tough palliative care decisions which had the secondary effect of hastening death in a greatly suffering end of life patient bu they have to operate within the law and sometimes on the boundaries of it too. It was never as simple as Brown attempts to make it sound here.

"The difficulty I have with this has nothing to do with religion, or with the supposed commands of a supposed God. It is about the nature of humanity. The thing that worries me about allowing patients to choose is that this isn't the kind of decision that we can reasonably make alone."

Rubbish. It has everything to do with religion: the vast majority of the lobby opposing assisted dying is religiously motivated: it is a projection of the religious idea that (human) life is sacred and comes under ~God's jurisdiction, not yours. It's truly appalling how terribly worried Mr Brown is about decisions we can reasonably make alone. Obviously it would be much better if we all consulted Mr Brown about our decision making in case we get it wrong. But who will Mr Brown consult about his decision making about our decision making? Or will his decisions just be the right ones every time?

"Some people make the decision to die entirely on their own. They talk to no one, not even the Samaritans. They just do it. And, perhaps, if you have no one at all to talk to, this can be a reasonable decision. But it is almost always wrong to suppose that there is no one with whom you can talk: although it is one of the most common feelings in depression, it's false and wrongly reasoned."

This is just gibberish. He is trying to equate suicide with depression in the mind of the reader by talking about the Samaritans. He is confusing issues. Of course there are correlates between suicide and depression and mental illness in general. This is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about the issue of assisted dying in the context of persons suffering intolerable suffering or terminal illness and about taking control of how those deaths play out in a civilised society. So why is he trying to confuse the issue I wonder?

"Either way, there are always people to talk to in the context of assisted suicide. It's at this point that the notion of autonomous choice breaks down. Once other people's opinions are called into the picture, so are their interests. And these interests do not necessarily align with the patient's.

Professionals can be trained to strict neutrality. But they aren't the people on whom our self-esteem and self-worth mostly depend. Those come from the people who like us, or even love us, unprofessionally. And that's a feeble crutch. There aren't enough of them, and their sentiments are much more mixed than we would like."

More inchoherence. Is he saying because you talk to someone your autonomy to make a decision is forever compromised? You can never make an autonomous decision uncontaminated by the sentiment and feelings of others? Jeeeezus! It's enough to make me want to quit right now!!

"In this context, it's worth remembering that it is believed Harold Shipman killed well over 200 people before any relatives became suspicious: suspicion followed only after he began changing the wills of his victims so that he profited, and their relatives to an equal degree lost money. Until then the deaths of the old were seen as part of the natural order."

Oh, fuck off Brown! Harold Shipman was a serial killer. He was a murderer!! Get it? M u r d e r e r!! You are not even remotely on context trying to make equivalence here.

"I have known personally only one old person deliberately killed by their carer for the money. Even then nothing could be proved, despite his remarkable feat in signing into his online bank account half an hour after his own death to transfer to his carer £10,000 in recognition of services rendered."

See response given above with the obvious modifications.

"But I know many whose children will not unduly lament their passing. Some older people are unsentimental about this. Mary Warnock has on occasion said that she would rather pass on her money to her children while it is useful for them, and my own mother has said much the same. They don't want to be a burden, and they do want to be useful. I feel something of this urge towards my own children, but it's essentially asymmetrical. I am a reasonably loving and thoughtful son; nonetheless I would hesitate to die for my mother, whereas if I really had to choose between my life and one of my children's I would give up mine without much dithering."

More non-sequiturs, turning his non-points into an unintelligible morass of mangled confused thinking.

"It's already abundantly clear that Britain has hundreds of thousands of old people whose lives are worth very little to anyone else, and who are neglected at best, abused at worst. Let's suppose that only one in a thousand of them thinks their lives are hardly worth living – and that's a very low estimate. That still means hundreds of people who would take the chance of assisted suicide if it were offered without pain or condemnation; and if we treat their decisions as wholly autonomous there is no reason to argue with them."

More emotive poppycock. The country has millions of old people, who mean the world to their loved ones and who are cherished and cared for to the very best of the ability of families and professional medical and nursing carers. Because this is not universally the case, we must treat all of them like babies unable to decide things for themselves?

"But we know that in fact their actions and decisions would not be really autonomous....."

It's getting difficult to tolerate any more if this utter bullshit Mr Brown.....

"They are reactions to a world that others have made, and that we all have a part in. The fraudulence of this kind of autonomy talk is obvious when it's applied to poverty. Rich and poor alike are free to choose to sleep under the bridges. We can all now see the damage that was done to society in the last 30 years by talking about choices that the powerless just don't have as if they were real. When Tony Blair's old flatmate Charlie Falconer extends this style of argument to judgments about life and death, the only sane response is to call it nonsense."

Oh..now what? More obfuscatory red herrings, caught under the bridges where the rich sleep in the staterooms of their luxury yachts sipping their martinis?

And are we all now thoroughly clear and settled in our minds as a result of Mr Brown's laser-like focus on this gem of impossible human pain and anguish? No?

I really am terribly cross with him this time. Only the last nine words of his piece made any sort of sense.

Robin Regio Circa

2012-01-06T15:25:00.001Z

My loyal subjects,

One understands from one’s advisers that there has been some bother with money this year. Ordinarily such trifles would not trouble one, but it seems that the small screen may now be a luxury that many of my subjects cannot afford, so this year one has committed one’s regal musings to paper the better to communicate with the commoners.

It has been another eventful year for the Windsors. One’s highlight was of course William and Kate’s wedding. It was a wonderful day: William looked regal and Kate was divine, although her sister’s arse caused a bit of a stir. Poor Philip got a crick in his neck craning to get a better view. One wishes William and Kate every happiness for the future, but William is his father’s son so we were sure to set up a cast-iron pre-nuptial agreement – and Philip has a contact he can call if ever things get out of hand.

One’s eldest granddaughter Zara Philips also married this year. Her husband is a sportsman of unique looks, but sadly one nearly had cause to call on the SAS to offer him advice after he committed an indiscretion in New Zealand. However, one has been given to understand that dwarf throwing is a long-established tradition among those who work for a living, not to mention an excellent form of preparation for the catching and throwing skills required at the highest level of rugby union.

We just now need to marry off young Harry. However, like a finding a backer for a corgi at the dog track, one fears those particular royal goods may only appeal to a niche market.

There have been no funerals this year, but Charles is keeping his spirits up.

One is afraid to report that Andrew got into a spot of bother again this year, but then he’s always had a weakness for improper relationships. Over the years many have criticised the royal family for being out of touch, but we are just like every other family in the UK and accordingly have the misfortune to possess one child that brings us nothing but disappointment and embarrassment. And for someone who travels the globe as UK trade envoy, one would imagine that Andrew could be a little more inventive with his Christmas gifts than to give us a BAE fighter jet each year stuffed full with unmarked Saudi banknotes.

For William and his grandfather Philip, professionally it has been a year of contrast. William’s work in the RAF saw him saving foreigners by plucking them out of the sea, while Philip took a turn at throwing them back in when he volunteered to check passports as a stand-in immigration officer at Dover during the recent strikes.

This year we have holidayed in a number of delightful places. In Dublin one took the opportunity to express regret for incidents that had taken place in the past between Britain and Ireland, and they seemed to buy it because there was not a single mention of potato on the menu. We also travelled to Australia, our 16^th visit since 1954. The media described it as one’s ‘farewell tour’, and in truth one will be glad to see the back of those uncouth beer swilling convicts. One made sure never to let one’s handbag out of one’s sight the whole trip!

During May we had the Obamas to stay at Buckingham Palace. Philip had forgotten they were coming and there was one awkward moment when he returned to see them examining some silver in the banquet room and called the police. After that he was always chaperoned during their stay and blotted his copybook only once with an unfortunate remark about ‘mid-tan boot polish’.

Unfortunately my horse was beaten in the Derby by that whipper-snapper French jockey. How Nicolas Sarkozy has time to ride horses and govern France one can only wonder.

Next year one celebrates one’s Diamond Jubilee. How those 60 years have flown. One is 85 now but with public sector pensions coming under fire it seems one will have to continue working for a while yet. Though one won’t be striking because one doesn’t want to give Charles a sniff.

Wishing all one’s subjects the very best for a divorce-free and anti-republican 2012.

Elizabeth R.

gobble gobble goblins

2011-12-24T10:37:00.004Z

Happy Christmas Clodhopperers - Herewith your pressie.......

User Manual:

1. Grab 20 mins

2. Pour large glass mulled wine - (mince pie & cream optional)

3. Find comfy chair

4. Plug in headphones

5. Relax

6. Click on pressie:

for optimal enjoyment have large bowl of fruit nearby.

Best wishes for a happy and peaceful year to come....

clod xxx

Goblin Market appeared in 1861 when Christina was 31. She was of a very devout high anglican persuasion and her epic can be read, (if you like), as an allegory of temptation and salvation; but in the unconscious erotic imagery, I hear more the 'baulked desire' of a young womans' love thwarted by the angst of an overworked religious conscience one time too many.

Her life was featured in a recent 'In Our Time' - the podcast is still available if you're minded to discover more about her life.

Sorry about the odd glitch here and there: no time to re-record it now........

squelch

2011-12-13T01:44:00.000Z

The allotment is a quagmire! Stop bloody raining!

Zeig Fail

2011-11-18T14:13:00.005Z

Talking of the Nazis, I remember when Ratzi the Natzi came to the UK, he said...

"Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny” (Caritas in Veritate, 29).

Deary deary me. You’d think the man had never read Mein Kampf or read any other of that deluded meglomaniacs speeches. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.

"I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator." [Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp. 46]

"I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work." [Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936]

"What we have to fight for...is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator."
[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp. 125]

"This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief." [Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp.152]

I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so" [Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941]

"The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 1 Chapter 12]

"Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the 'remaking' of the Reich as they call it." [Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 1]

"Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise." [Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 1]

"For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant changes in its outward structure? ...Here, too, we can learn by the example of the Catholic Church. Though its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and research, it is none the less unwilling to sacrifice so much as one little syllable of its dogmas... it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body the character of a faith." [Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 5]

"The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life...." [Adolf Hitler, Berlin, February 1, 1933]

"The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated. For God's will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will." [Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf]

Well...alright, let's not. Ratzinger knew exactly what he was doing viz trying to put the frighteners on everyone by equating Nazism with secularism and atheism. The sad thing is, people will buy it because it's the Pope saying it...and he knows it.

Well, go read it for yourself and it quickly becomes apparant that Hitler was an out and out Creationist and white supremacist and anti-evolutionist, as well as being a Kit Kat short of a picnic.

The Pope should be ashamed of such intellectual duplicity..though one knows, he isn't.

Panzie Tanks?

2011-11-17T20:02:00.004Z

THE NAZIS CREATED NATURE RESERVES, championed sustainable forestry, curbed air pollution, and designed the autobahn highway network as a way of bringing Germans closer to nature.

A snip at £20.50 on Amazon...that's my crimbo sorted then.

The sound of creaking leather from their collective greatcoats broke the silence as the assembled Wehrmacht officers leaned forward to examine the huge table map of the Spreewald, the vast forest area standing between the XI SS Panzer Corps and the Red Army.

The problem was clear – vast stretches of gorse in the forest (Ulex europeus) were in flower and it was the nesting season of the rare inversely-spotted bark-spitter.

“Well, gentlemen” General Busse announced to his colleagues “there is no way we can attack them through the forest – the damage to the environment would be too great. Our panzer tanks still emit excessive CO2 and the electric hybrid version is still on the drawing-board.”

The other officers grunted in assent. There were those amongst them who could still recall the terrible Battle of the Somme in 1916 – how entire woods were destroyed, how the crash of the shells broke the noise abatement regulations as far away as Camden and how the noxious exhaust from the infernal English tanks caught the back of the men’s throats.

No, that was the carbon footprint to end all carbon footprints. Never again!

“However” the General continued, “I have developed a strategy that I believe you will find is sufficiently eco-friendly. The XI Panzer will move forward by bicycle on the left flank, the SS Mountain Corps will take the right flank using public transport – there is still a regular bus service from Lűbben after 10 o’clock – and we will sent a small diversionary unit through the forest. But I must spell out one important message for them: keep to the paths and no shooting!”

............................Tim Sanders

losing the plotinus

2011-11-16T21:43:00.002Z

Plotinus held that to wish for the absence of ‘evil’ was to wish that there be nothing at all. That if there is to be a world at all, that that world MUST contain the evil(s) it does simply because it is made out of matter. That there could be no essential, no ultimate essence of evil because it has no ‘Form’ (in the Platonic sense), so really there’s no such thing as evil qua evil.

So when we talk about evil, what we are really talking about is a perception of the absence of goodness - and the degree to which we perceive it to be evil is the ability to perceive how much goodness is missing.

Now Plotinus held that matter (everything) originates from a 'Source', which he termed ‘The One’ or ‘The Good’, and that it (the source) holds no will, no desire, no intention, not even any sentience. So nothing like the conventional theist interpretation of a creator God - a being that actively willed the universe into existence. It seems to be more like a light bulb - if it’s on, you get light, you just do. If it’s off, there’s nothing. So, insofar as things exist at all, they partake of the goodness but it is hardly the fault of a light bulb (goodness), say, if a dirty mirror does not reflect that light (goodness) perfectly.

I can’t argue with that. I don’t think we know what matter is, do we, or where it comes from, if it comes from anywhere? Einstein expresses some of that here:

“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.” Albert Einstein - Berlin 1927

Plotinus is side-stepping the logical and evidential problems of evil with which atheists love to plague theists so frequently. But insofar as this is a very deist interpretation of reality we can’t say much about it except to note that Plotinus thinks that the metaphysics of physical objects (humans included), means that they must be imperfect to some greater or lesser degree and that that movement towards a greater reflection of the good is our job and that it is a very rational one.

Or else, he was just trying to make The Matrix and hadn’t figured out who Neo was yet. :-)

Haught 'n Jerry #2

2011-11-15T00:39:00.004Z

John Haught’s paper ‘Does Evolution Rule Out Gods Existence’, has been published over at the American Association for the Advancement of Science website. The Association’s strap line is ‘Advancing Science, Serving Society’.

It’s part of an ongoing attempt to reconcile science and religion, but I’m left wondering just exactly how the above paper Advances Science or, indeed, Serves Society.

From the world view of a theist, science and religion MUST be reconcilable for the declared aim of both is to discover that which is true, that which is real.

Therefore, whatever science may discover MUST, eventually, if somewhat reluctantly and possibly painfully, be incorporated into the religious world view. How could it be otherwise?

The scientific ethos, moreover...”is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity.” Benedict XVI – Sept 2006

Fair enough: let’s agree for now that science and religion are both seekers after truth. Is there a difference in how they go about it? I think so. I’m going to suggest that science is obedient to truth in that it will follow truth, by the nose, wherever it goes and that, on the contrary, religion has already staked out its truth claim, and is both obedient to that truth and to what it thinks that truth demands of everyone. Since, however, the truth claims of the various religions are mutually incompatible, we are left with the options of either declaring one of them to be true, none of them to be true, or to discover in some verifiable way of discerning the validity of such claims to truth.

Religion itself is characteristically highly resistant to ‘truth’ it does not like. (Rome only got round to apologising for the Galileo debacle in 1992), and of course the tussle over evolution runs and runs – the Catholics perhaps slightly ahead of the game here, in their acceptance of the theory, and with their current efforts to incorporate evolution into their theodicy.

If any such rapprochement between science and religion is to work, religion is going to have to radically refine its notions of what is acceptable as ‘evidence’.

In Haught’s earlier debate with Jerry Coyne, Haught seemed to be suggesting that personal experience fell into the category of ‘evidence’. Humans of all religious persuasions (and none) have, throughout history, had numinous and transcendental or peak experiences.

"There is no doubt that great insights and revelations are profoundly felt in mystic or peak-experiences, and certainly some of these are, ipso facto, intrinsically valid as experiences. " "The peak-experience is felt as a self-validating, self-justifying moment which carries its own intrinsic value with it" (Maslow, Religion, Values and Peak Experiences).

Alas, however peak your peak experience was, it simply will not do as reliable evidence: how will you distinguish between the one who experiences Christ from the one who experiences Vishnu from the one who experiences a Fuath?

The word of God as revealed through scripture is a similarly suspect candidate for ‘evidence.’

.As Haught says of the Creationists:

“….. [they] close their eyes to modern historical awareness of the time-sensitive nature of all human consciousness, including that expressed in the sacred texts of religion. They are unable to discern the different types of literary genre--symbolic, mythic, devotional, poetic, legendary, historical, creedal, confessional etc.--that make up the Bible. And so they fail to read the scriptures in their proper context.

The difficulty is to distinguish words that proceed from God from those that proceed from godly men. From, what is to be taken literally and what metaphorically; and who gets to decide, and when, (and on who’s authority?). What was to be taken as canonical truth and what apocryphal? Ancient sacred texts simply will not do as adequate evidence to establish the veracity of religious claims, however beautiful, inspiring or poetic the language may be.

To paraphrase Sam Harris:

Can literature or testimony…..”even slightly increase the probability that the Book of Mormon was delivered on golden plates to Joseph Smith Jr. by the angel Moroni? Do all the good Muslims in the world lend credence to the claim that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse? Do all the good pagans throughout history suggest that Mt. Olympus was ever teeming with invisible gods?”

No, of course not. So what is left for us to call on in our endeavour to unite science and religion?

"Certainly, love’ transcends’ knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Ephesians 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is logos. Consequently, Christian worship is "logic latreía" -- worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason.” (cf. Romans 12:1). – Benedict XVI – Sept 2006

How do you crawl out from beneath this stultifying mountain of opaque theology to get at truth? Why certainly? Transcends knowledge how? Perceives what, exactly? And because of all that…. Christian worship harmonises Word with Reason? Eh….how?

[Cartesianism and Empiricism]…..”on the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: This basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature's capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.

This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity.

A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.

We shall return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology's claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: It is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science" and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. [my emphasis]

The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.” - Benedict XVI – Sept 2006

The questions raised about the origin and the destiny of humanity, questions raised about morality, ethics and community are NOT solely in the purview of the church. There are many churches and only one humanity. The pope cannot hijack such questions from humanity and glibly claim that we haz failed to construct an adequate morality out of science, or the humanities, a scant couple of hundred years after the first electric light bulb was invented.

But that is what it wants to do. It wants to claim these for its domain and claim that it has parity with science because it has this logos based on its understanding of a divine. What it really believes is that it is far superior to science and would very much like to claw back some territory by hitching a ride on the coat-tail of sciences’ demonstrable success by re-integrating science and theology.

In his debate with Haught, I think Coyne unceremoniously pulled the threadbare rug of this reasoning apart and demonstrated that theology is actually content and knowledge free, while at the same time presenting evidence to show how religion convinces people that they have this ‘other’ knowledge together with the rationale and righteousness to act upon that knowledge... with disastrous and poisonous consequences for individuals, communities, cultures, societies, not to mention the entire world.

One simple and effective way of such hijacking and coat-tailing is to lay down a claim that genius is a form of divine inspiration and that significant scientific discoveries may be taken as yet further ‘evidence’ of the beneficence of the divine...beckoning us ever onwards and upwards towards our celestial destiny. I predict a lot more of that sort of thing.

...to be continuerated...sometime....eventually....possibly.

On War and Morality

2011-11-07T19:07:00.007Z

When Bush and Blair collaborated to invade Iraq they may both have been convinced that it was the right thing to do both morally and legally. The concept of a ‘just war’ is very old and can be traced back even before the likes of Aquinas and Grotius. Still, there are millions of people who differ and think that their action was neither moral nor legal. Clearly the legality was questionable and some would argue that both the legality and the morality were shoe-horned into place to justify the action that had already been agreed.

We don’t seem to have moved on all that much in our understanding of either the legality or the morality of war, (except perhaps in the formulation of international treaties, charters and conventions and the refinement of customary law between nations), and given the way war has changed in both practice and reason, it is perhaps time we tried to make things clearer.

It would help because to be asked to leave your home, travel to some distant land and be required to kill people is neither a trivial thing to do, nor to ask of someone. If you wanted me to do such a thing, I would want to question you very closely on your reasons and motives for asking it of me, even if I was in the armed services and you were a commander tasked, with handing out the orders.

In the case of Iraq, the reasons, the motives, the justifications, seemed to be a movable feast: a spectrum of imminent threat to us from WMD; Iraq’s possible connection with terrorist outfits like al-Qaida; getting rid of a brutal dictator who, when he wasn’t gassing his own people, was ruthlessly oppressing them. It depended when and of whom you asked the question. It all sounds as cobbled together as was the intelligence that supported the action. Why was that?

One answer seems to be that it all came about as a consequence of 9/11. After that, the concept of pre-emptive or preventative war moved much higher up the political agenda but without a corresponding refinement of either the legal framework or the moral considerations which frame such actions. It might be time to update both, but how?

The justification for both pre-emptive and preventative war seems to rely on a couple of premises: that the intelligence provided is accurate, reliable and complete and that the outcome is achievable and worth the expenditure of life, money and material it will entail. In the case of the Iraq war, both of these premises seem to me to be entirely questionable. One of the difficulties is that wars in olden times look to be much simpler, transparent and base in their motivations, though no less horrific for that; while modern war, seeming as it appears to be moving more towards more pre-emptive or preventive strategies, looks to be not only more complex, but also seems to go very much against notions of what a just war is.

Of current concern is the widely reported and disturbing news that Israel is seriously considering a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities near Tehran in the conviction that such facilities are for anything but civil and peaceful purposes. That may be so, I don’t know, but if they do strike, it takes us yet further down the road of normalising pre-emptive strike strategies setting yet another precedent that such actions are permissible.

Israel has form in this regard both with its preventative strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in June ’81 and, arguably, with its pre-emptive strike in the ’67 Arab-Israeli war. Preventative in the first instance because there was no immediate threat to Israeli security and pre-emptive in the second because seven infantry divisions, several hundred tanks and jet fighters clustered on your border, coupled with Egyptian pacts with neighbouring Arab states to lend military support if required, could be construed to be a tad threatening. In the first instance the UN Security Council condemned the raid while in the second, they mounted no objection.

It could be that Iran is attempting to produce a nuclear weapon. It is conceivable that they are just crazy enough to use it against Israel. It could be, indeed, seems likely, that Israel will strike pre-emptively to prevent this. What is as difficult as figuring out the legality and morality of such action, is working out the second and third order consequences for the Middle East and the rest of the world.

War is always terrible, if not always immoral. If we are asking our young people to kill and be killed in our name, we should, at very least, be clear about the moral and legal frameworks we use to justify such action. It seems self evident to me that we are not.

Haught n Jerry

2011-11-05T11:03:00.004Z

Recently catholic theologian Prof John Haught debated biology Prof Jerry Coyne on the topic 'Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?'

The debate generated a bit of on line fuss, because Haught attempted to block the release of the video of the event, but it is now online and linked to above.

Anyway, it seems to me that Haught was persuing the NOMA (non overlapping magisteria) tack and concluding that science and religion are compatible and are just different ways of knowing stuff about the world. He said that there are different levels of understanding and gave some examples: a monkey looking at a book just sees black squiggles on a page, a todler recognises the odd word, an older child can understand the text, an experienced adult can recognise deeper meanings, understand metaphor and so forth. So, he's saying that your understanding can be transformed by experience and that if, say, you have a deep personal experience of Christ, then that can radically transform your understanding of the world.

The problem I have with that is that experience is conditioned and what is true is going to be true independent of what anyone believes is true. So, the hindu might experience brahma, the muslim, allah, the catholic, jesus and any of those experiences might be personally transformative but what can the experience reveal about what is actually true?

He uses another analogy which is to do with meaning and purpose. Imagine a pot of boiling water. Why is it boiling, what is its purpose? On one level, energy applied to the pot is causing the water molecules to bump into one another and heat up until it reaches the phase transition point where water turns to steam. On another level, he sais, the water is boiling because 'I want a cup of tea.' His idea is that the universe has purpose and that that purpose is supplied by an external higher intelligence - the 'I want a cup of tea' level.

The problem I find with that one is that he is conflating causation with purpose. Meaning and purpose seem to me to be human attributes. An aardvark is seldom heard asking itself 'what is the point of being an aardvark?' The purpose of being an aardvark is to be an aardvark. Humans, perhaps uniquely, I'm not sure, have brains capable of asking the question: for what reason do I exist? That does not mean that the question is a valid one: that just because we are capable of asking the question, that there therefore must be an answer to it over and above the brute fact that we exist. In asking the question one can supply the answer on as many levels as you can ask the question. Haught is saying that there is one 'true' answer to that question. I beg to differ. So did Prof Coyne, evidently to Prof Haught's considerable annoyance.

You can judge for yourself.

There is much more to be said, but today, I have a higher purpose... :-)

the tent is nigh

2011-11-02T18:42:00.001Z

On one level the protest outside St Pauls has distracted the debate away from throwing a spotlight on financial criminality and corporate greed and broadened it's beam to include the inner workings and moral integrity of both St Pauls and the wider Anglican church. I'm inclined to think that that is not necessarily a bad thing and probably even a good one: it forces a public response from sections of the community who might otherwise have chosen to stay more or less silent and let it all blow over. But the inequality, injustice and unfairness in the system we have now are not just matters of opinion, they are matters of observable and objective fact - and those who lay claim to be the harbingers of moral values in our society ought not to be trying to hide from these uncomfortable truths but should be tackling them head on. As some church person said somewhere...'just because the church is established doesn't mean it shouldn't challenge the establishment.'.....or something like that.

Pell Hell

2011-11-01T12:33:00.004Z

Oh...that Pell....right. What an idiot.

"Some of the hysteric and extreme claims about global warming are also a symptom of pagan emptiness, of Western fear when confronted by the immense and basically uncontrollable forces of nature. Belief in a benign God who is master of the universe has a steadying psychological effect, although it is no guarantee of Utopia, no guarantee that the continuing climate and geographic changes will be benign. In the past pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions." - Legatus Summit Speech 2006

Let me count, oh lord, the ways this is stupid.....nope....can't do it....too many....you have a bash.

Sin and Sex

2011-10-31T20:13:00.003Z

In consideration of Catholic opposition to the use of condoms in the fight against the spread of Aids, what are the arguments being used and do they hold water?

1. The use of condoms will encourage promiscuous casual sex and thus actually increase the spread of Aids.

That's an empirical question and can be tested. My bet is, it won't, but I suggest that that is not the main focus of the churches viewpoint nor reason for the position they take on this.

2. The God given purpose of sex is procreative and generative and therefore anything that interferes with either of those natural ends is sinful.

So, if you have a married couple who are knowingly infertile where the man is HIV positive and the woman isn't, and the man uses a condom to prevent his wife getting aids, would that be sinful?

If you have a married couple, this time not infertile, but still HIV discordant as above, who practice the rhythm method with the aim of preventing a pregnancy and who also use a condom with the intention to protect the wife from getting aids, would that be considered sinful?

The intent in the use of the condom is solely to prevent disease transmission, not to prevent pregnancy. This brings us to the principle of double effect, which even catholic doctrine will allow to operate without moral condemnation in certain circumstances. For example, the use of the contraceptive pill is allowed for medical purposes so long as the primary intent in its use is not the prevention of pregnancy. A pregnant woman diagnosed with uterine cancer where the prognosis is death before term will be allowed a hysterectomy even though the outcome will be the death of the fetus. The death of the fetus is a secondary effect, it is not the prime motivation of the surgeon performing the operation.

So, if that is the case, even considered from within catholic doctrine, if the intent in the use of the condom is medical, (prevention of disease), and the secondary effect of this is interference with the (assumed) natural purposes of sex, whence then the moral teaching against the use of condoms?

Leave the mind reading to your supposed God and instruct every HIV positive person to use protection.

You know it makes sense.

In Defence of The Realm

2011-10-12T06:36:00.010Z

Rt Hon Dr Liam Fox MP
Secretary of State for Defence
Whitehall
London

T O P S E C R E T

Dear Liam

I am writing to apply for the post of 'Special Advisor' to the Secretary of State for Defence, (assuming you still are), and enclose my CV.

I've already taken the liberty of printing my business cards, and don't worry about the vetting: I signed the official secrets act in 1975 and I've been to the vet several times this year.

Never mind all this carping in the lefty press - what do they know? To be honest, I had a 'best man' too once but lost him in similar circumstances. It happens. I'm sure Mr Wherrity's done nothing wrong and paid all his own travel and accommodation expenses on the eighteen trips abroad on Mod business. I've no idea what the fuss is all about! Anyway, Mrs Root likes the look of the chap and we're prepared to offer him the back bedroom and a wet-fish franchise.

In my undergraduate years I developed a network of highly trained haddock able to detect enemy submarines off our coastal waters from the smell. This was a top secret project - so mum's the word! The network is still active and I would be more than happy to sign it over to your defence research department for a nominal remuneration.

Nil bastardo carburundum old boy. Here's a pound.

Look forward to working with you. Let's go!

Yours sincerely

Dr Henry Root. Dip. Fsh, MoD, CoD.
(Aquatic Defence Specialist)

Hose Anna?

2011-10-11T10:22:00.004Z

Q. What today unites - Roman Catholics, Mormons, Presbyterians, United Methodists, Seventh-day Adventists, Hindus, United Sikhs, Muslims, Episcopalians, Reform Jews and Orthodox Jews, National Association of Evangelicals, the National Council of Churches, the devotees of Santeria, Yoruba and a bunch of other religions? Is it love, peace, truth, justice, compassion, mercy?

Nope....it's discrimination. The case is Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School versus Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, et al. Where the the fight is for the legal right to hire and fire employees at will within their organisations upon religious grounds....notwithstanding Equal Opps Laws.

The case is here...

Background....

SCOTUS:

How do you think the Supreme Court will vote, with or against the respondent?

Perich's brief notes…..this is not in essence a religious dispute.

“Perich asserts only that she was wrongly terminated

from her teaching responsibilities in retaliation

for asserting her right to sue for disability discrimination.

Resolution of that question does not require

the court to resolve a Lutheran doctrinal dispute.

The civil court need not consider whether Lutheran

doctrine in fact requires called teachers to follow

the Synod’s internal dispute resolution procedures.

It can take the church’s assertions about Lutheran

doctrine as a given, but nevertheless determine

that Perich’s termination violated the ADA’s

retaliation provision—a neutral law of general applicability

that does not give way to religious conviction,

no matter how sincere or important. Smith,

494 U.S. at 879.

Nor does it matter that Perich was a called

teacher or commissioned minister. The fact remains

that she taught secular subjects in a commercial setting.

And the question whether Hosanna-Tabor retaliated

against her for threatening to assert her

rights under the ADA is a secular question for a

secular court, not an ecclesiastical question for an

ecclesiastical court. Indeed, called and uncalled

teachers had “identical” duties. Pet. App. 4a; see supra

at 5-7.

The question in this case thus is the

same as would have been presented if Hosanna-

Tabor had fired an uncalled teacher of the same

secular subjects in the same commercial setting in

retaliation for her exercise of ADA rights.”

My own view is that, while it is not the business of the state to interfere with freedom of religious expression, no exclusions from civil protections to employment rights should be conceded to religious organisations.

JUSTICE SCALIA: “What is the legal definition of "minister"? What is it? That you have to lead the congregation in their religious services or what? What is it?”

That's the issue. If you grant the religious exclusion from employment law citing the 'ministerial exception' rule, then they (religions) have to know who their ministers are and so does the state, because the state has an interest in protecting employees. Granted, not all religions have heirarchic structure, so they could choose to define everyone as a 'minister' of that religion. But if that was defined in law, then any person choosing to be in the employ of such a religion, would do so knowing that the ministerial exception rule applied to them (in whatever capacity they work for the organisation), and they would be free to accept or decline the job knowing the implications of that. The state is required to legislate to make that clear and religions are likewise required to make their position clear by either keeping a ministerial list or granting across the board ministerial status to everyone or whatever.

Then it becomes...does the state have the bottle to do it? It remains in religion’s interests to have the situation remain murky and it will turn on the states determination to protect its citizens employment rights, if necessary, with constitutional amendment/s.

Because I'm Probably Not Worth It

2011-10-10T17:26:00.008Z

Dear Ms Bettencourt - Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, Paris.

I am writing to inform you that Mrs Root and I are considering becoming L'Oréalists and would like to seek your advice on how we might go about this.

To be blunt about it, we’ve examined all the major philosphophies: from the tub-dwelling Dodgynees of Sinope in classical times, right through to the nicotene-sodden existentialists of the modern era and, quite frankly, they’re all whingeing namby pambys, liberal wets, barking mad, or worse.

Your own philosophy on the other hand, seems to grasp the essential truth of modern life with such a deceptive wisdom yet dynamic profundity, somehow all encapsulated in one simple aphorism…. ‘Because We’re Worth It.’ [TM]

Sheer genius….it’s got ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ knocked into a cocked hat, I can tell you!!

We know where you’re coming from too Lilian. As proprieters of a multi-thousand pound, wet fish distribution empire, we know when to call a spade a spade and the importance of developing a dialectic of olfactory capitalism to enlighten the early 21st century.

I say ‘dynamic’ because yours is a living breathing philosophy which moves with the times. I remember the slight look of dissapointment on Mrs Root's face in the early years when the slogan was ‘Because I’m Worth It.’ [TM]

Well obviously, YOU are - €34 million a month, or approx 25,350 times the French minimum wage, so I hear (LOL).

But then came the look of delight when it changed to ‘Because You’re Worth It.’ [TM] By golly, you should have seen the growth in Mrs Roots volume and confidence after that one! It was staggering.

But even that palls into insignificance besides the sheer transcendent bliss and ecstatic realisation that became hers when you delivered the ultimate teaching - ‘Because We’re Worth It.’ [TM]

Obviously there’ll be one or two points of doctrine to clear up before we join because, well, let’s not beat about the bush, not everybody is 'worth it', are they? You wouldn’t, I imagine, be including such wooly minded liberals as Germaine Greer or Polly Toynbee or Shami Chakrabatti as being ‘worth it’ now, would you?

Also It might be worth clarifying just what the ‘it’ is that those that are worthy of it are worth, if you get my general drift. If you could also say what the age is when people start to become ‘worth it’ is and what age they stop being ‘worth it’ and if you could clarify which groups are not ‘worth it’ and probably never will be and maybe how those who are not ‘worth it’ may proceed to become ‘worth it’.

Marvellous! I’m sure you’ve got all that worked out by now.

Can’t wait to hear from you. Here’s a pound in advance of membership fees.

Do you want references? I know the Pope quite well and am in frequent ongoing correspondence with him.

Yours in L'Oréalfactory anticipation

Henry Root - Supplier of Pure Protein from the Sea.
“There is nothing more sublime than the smell of wet fish on a Monday morning”

PS - [TM] - stands for trademark...not transcendental meditation.

Roll Mops and Reverends

2011-10-04T17:27:00.004Z

Reverend Ratzinger

What’s going on?

I wrote to you last September following your triumphal visit to this green, and once peasant land, offering our help with your avowed ‘Re-evangelising of The West’ program. You’ll doubtless recall that I offered to meet Archbishop Fisichella of the Pontificial Council for New Evangelisation, (PCNE for short), in Whitby to get the ball rolling. He didn’t turn up: and we’d even brought him a brace of Craster Kippers!

I hope we can rely on you to initiate the required disciplinary procedures and provide us with an explanation of why the Archbishop failed, by his absence, to support this important catholic grass-roots initiative?

After we’d eaten the kippers, Mrs Root and I decided to begin the process of evangelising of the east coast anyway starting in Scarborough, (just down the road from Craster).

In the absence of any representatives from the Holy See, we decided to employ tactics that Mrs Root and I developed some years ago during our hectic campaign to eradicate all the pornography that was flooding into our area at the time. In that instance we formed an organisation called ‘The Ordinary Folk Against The Rising Tide Of Filth In Our Secular Society Situation Society’ - (TOFATRTOFISSSS for short). We achieved considerable success with this venture organising weekly gatherings for lively, no-holds-barred discussions over wine, cheese and roll-mops and sometimes with a guest intellectual delivering a short paper.

Building on this success I am pleased to inform you that we have initiated similar organisations in Scarborough, Throxonby and Ugthorpe thus far and are gradually working our way west.

We sent invites to most of the top turns in the Catholic heirarchy to the inaugral meetings but none of them turned up. It’s possible they were all busy setting up the new clerical anti-paedo monitoring units that are now such a feature of everyday catholic life.

Whatever, Mrs Root and I will continue the campaign in the assuredness that it has your blessings. I enclose an invoice for start-up expenses incurred so far: accommodation, petrol, publicity, office costs, room hire and so forth. I trust you will remit and oblige through the Vatican treasury at your ealiest convenience. Can’t have the good guys running out of the readies eh?

Good luck in Berlin, though God knows why you’re going there. We’ve already done them twice!!

Could you oblige with a signed photo for the Mrs?

Here’s a pound.

Yours......going great guns!

Henry Root

PS Don’t mention the war!!!

Fish Enrichment Technology

2011-09-30T11:50:00.004Z

Dear President Ahmedinnajacket. –

Splendid!

Me and Mrs Root note that Iran will execute Yousef Nadarkhani shortly. Quite right too: you can’t just have people believing what they want to believe and let them get away with it, can you? Where would we be then? It would be chaotic. Much better to tell people what they have to believe and kill them if they don’t..

Mrs Root notes that Iran has already executed 97 people this September and sais they are only the ones she knows about: “goodness knows how many others there are,” she said, gutting another sturgeon at the wet fish counter… “the reporting systems are not quite what they should be.”

She later added that it would be quite good if we were allowed to kill everyone that eat meat, as we would sell far more wet fish that way.

I don’t think it’s altogether that simple though do you? I mean, if say the christians also executed people for believing the wrong thing, (alas, they stopped it a while back), then, say if Mr Yousef recanted his christianity in Iran and sought asylum in Britain, well then, we would kill him too for deciding not to believe his christianity anymore.

Well, you can see where this is going: a lot of people might just conclude that belief itself was just too dangerous and drop them altogether, and start to rely on what we actually know to be true instead.

Heaven knows where we’d end up then!!

All the best.

Henry Root
(Bespoke Suppliers of Wet Fish Enrichment Technology to the Worlds Elite)

PS - Mrs Root sends her love and asks will you send a few more male escorts over as she’s done the last lot.

Encl: A pound for wear n tear on the ropes.

aloha u akbar

2011-09-28T11:08:00.008Z

Way to go King Abduller!

Allowing women to drive indeed!…Whatever will they want next? Give em an inch eh? I never allow Mrs Root out without a male escort ….she complains a bit now and again but buckles up in the end.

Mind you, you should have seen the last male escort!

Quite right to give the misguided wench 10 good lashes – but watch they don’t pad out the burqa with a life vest or some wet fish: they can be a bit crafty like that you know?

Mrs Root, (cod be upon her), thinks it might have been a big mistake to allow them to vote too: at the moment they’re only worth half a man but, mark my words, they’ll vote to be worth as much as a man, if not more than a man, at the very first opportunity.

Don’t worry though, they’ll calm down in a bit and see sense when you’ve made an example of the first few uppity females and published the photos of their bleeding backs in the Riyadh Observer.

If it’s any consolation, the pope has the same problem. Some of them think they’re even entitled to be priests just on the grounds of being human. Imagine that?!?

Enclosed a pound for your court expenses.

Aloha u bugber (Cod is Great)

In solidarity

Henry Root (and half the Mrs)

(Purveyors of Wet Fish, some condoms and the odd bit of porn)

PS – We can supply wet fish at cost: they're very effective for a good flogging.

The Root of Cloyne

2011-09-07T20:49:00.004Z

Hey Jo

Never you mind that Enda Kenny Taoiseach fella. He’s an eejit, so he is. You're bound to get one or two bad apples in every barrel. Ah beejayzus, tis just bad luck that you’ve got thousands of them, is what it is.

Mrs Root thinks it’s probably all Obama’s fault since he visited Ireland.

It’ll probably be a good idea if you put a stop to your fellas buggering and torturing children for a bit till things settle down again. Take the long view, that’s the ticket!

If you’re reluctant to get rid of them we’d be happy to supply you with ice-filled cod pieces for the friskier priests to wear. Mrs Root thinks that’ll be more effective than giving them three hail mary’s, a how’s yer father and moving them to a new parish. No need to be bothering the Garde with it eh? Red tape: all that nonsense?

If Enda won’t toe the line stick some canon law up his backside on a short fuse. Remember the good ‘ol days Jo?

It’ll all blow over soon sais Mrs Root, (she’s at the wet fish counter – bless). One or two excommunicerations will see the end of all this nonsense.

Enclosed a pound for your legal fees.

Chin up Jo.

It’s not like you actually employ the buggers, is it?

Your affectionately

Henry Root

Liquorice and Pom Pom

2011-08-06T14:02:00.002Z

Liquorice and Pom Pom hatched out under a hen but she didn't want to look after them so we are hand rearing them.

Cloyne Report

2011-07-20T21:43:00.008Z

Recent BBC reporting on the Irish Parliament's reaction to the Cloyne report simply do not capture the determination and strength of feeling among the Irish to confront the Vatican's non-compliance and prevarication child protection legislation. The Irish PM's recent statement in the Dail captures this so I've extracted it as an mp3 audio which is here if you want to listen to it.

https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/Public/Taoiseach%20on%20Cloyne.mp3?w=65ba5460

Given everything else going on, I suppose it's not very surprising that it's not higher up the news agenda. But what I find interesting is the contrast to be made between the phone hacking scandal where people are getting arrested, high ranking police officers are resigning, CEO's and chief executives are getting grilled in front of parliamentary committees and a raft of public enquiries are instigated all because of shennanigins in the media and the met. As opposed to the response to an organisation corrupt to its very core engaged in active cover ups of its criminal activities carried out over decades in which its employees destroyed the lives of thousands upon thousands of children and which STILL responds with denial, prevarication, obfuscation and a generally self protective modus operandi. How do they get away with it? Why do we let them?

EDIT: An organisation accrues so much power, over a sufficiently long period of time, and there develops a culture where the organisation begins to think it's above the law and accountable only unto itself. So, for Canon law in the church, you could substitute Wapping Law, in the Murdoch empire - a culture in which any wrongdoing/lawbreaking is to be reported, and dealt with, [read - mangaged away], internally only, with the priorities being the survival of the organisation and the insulation of the heirarchy from any meaningful accountability ie something more than an insincerely mumbled 'sorry'. It will be made very difficult for anyone to operate within the organisation without toeing the party line and there will be very harsh penalties for anyone attempting to do otherwise. It's hard to break such cultures when they become that powerful, but their fall from grace can be a fairly rapid, spectacular and dramatic event,if it ever happens.

peaz meanz pwizes

2011-07-10T17:10:00.004Z

In which clodhoppers wins second pwize in a booty contest of local plots and Cathy gets to cuddle fairly famous local gardener beefy Bill.

Our allotment friend and neighbour Holly made a mini-garden and she got first prize for that too!

We gottid a £3 seed voucher so we iz stinky rich and well famus to boot.

The Rapture Tracks

2011-05-27T06:04:00.002Z

And we'll all go together when we go...all suffused with an incandescent glow...

2011-05-15T10:07:00.005Z

Or maybe not.

What happens in your head on Saturday 21st May at 6pm

local time when you discover that there’s no global earthquake, no

judgement day; you haven’t been Raptured up into glory and neither has anyone else?

What happens when you’ve pulled your kids out of

school, resigned your job, sold your house to buy into the wagon train of doom trundling around America bringing the '‘good’ news of damnation & destruction to everyone?

Do you stand around muttering ‘oh…..er……well’, and wonder what to do next? You’ve spent years preparing yourself for teh 2nd coming and He's stood you up.

You’ve already written off humanity as a bad job deserving of damnation and tribulation (but not you). Everything humans do is poisoned, sinful, loathsome in God’s eyes; you’ve no hope for the future, no faith in all the endeavours of humanity to progress, to get better, to live at all. All that is pointless and you want it to end next Saturday.... and it doesn’t. What happens in your head?

Was it a mistake in the math? It’s still going to happen, right? The Bible can’t be wrong on this can it? No, that's not possible: there’s just been a temporary postponement: armageddon is on hold...….wait….it’s just been revealed to brother XYZ that the new date is to be..blah blah blah and we’ve been blessed with more time to get the new date for the apocalypse into as many peoples diaries as possible.

Is that what happens? You retrench into some miserable little end time cult, growing ever more dissociated from reality; alive in the world, but not living in it, part of humanity but taking no part in it.

But all that’s for later. What do you feel as the great day approaches? Fear, trepidation, expectancy, transcendent joy? What do you feel for the unraptured, the damned: the ones that will be left behind to experience unspeakable levels of torture, terror and torment? They’re getting what they deserve, right? No need to feel bad for them.

And polls suggest that somewhere around 40% of Americans, (123 million people), believe in some such apocalyptic scenario, and many believe it will happen in their lifetime.

On one level this is funny, but on another it’s tragic - as well as bewildering: that so many can abrogate responsibility for humanity to some fantasy going on in their heads beggars belief.

The trouble is: the more they dream of heaven, the more likely becomes hell on earth.

New Chicks :-)

2011-05-07T09:36:00.000Z

Flatlining

2011-05-04T19:35:00.002Z

I’m not doing a good job of working out how I feel about OBL flatlining at the bottom of the ocean.

Flat, actually, is about right.

I don’t feel like celebrating, I don’t feel any sense of closure, I don’t feel like the world is suddenly more secure, I don’t feel any thrill of retributive justice, despite the thousands and thousands of people who have died either directly or indirectly because of that insane lunatics skewed view of reality. I don’t feel like it’s drawn a line under anything or settled anything or nudged the world an inch closer to sanity.

In the decade since that dreadful Tuesday on Sept 11th, I’ve watched, listened and read about all the casualties of the ideological and religious warfare that’s plagued humanity for thousands of years. It never goes away. No politician will make it go away, no religion, no guru, no masters from outaspace, not the second coming, not Dr Who. It can only be made to go away by humanity coming to its senses one day.

Alice in Interland

2011-05-01T10:15:00.003Z

'Oh dear, oh dear. Not again!' exlaimed Alice, falling down another rabbit hole, this time promising to herself not to drink
anything that said 'DRINK ME' on the bottle, or to eat anything that said 'EAT ME' on the label, no matter how sugar coated or jam filled or otherwise tempting it looked.

She landed on a sand dune next to some, (possibly American, it was hard to tell), special services personnel operating laptops.

'What are you doing?' asked Alice, trying to shake the sand out of her dress.

'We're sending drones to attack the Gaddaffles with rockets,' answered one of them, poking the ENTER key with a grubby finger.

'Oh, I see,' said Alice, who didn't really at all. 'Will it hurt?'

'Oh, I expect so.... probably, very much.' said the soldier.

'But you won't actually be there to see?' queried Alice.

'Well, no, not exactly: but we will see it, sort of, on the screen,' said the soldier, turning his laptop round for Alice to watch the buildings explode on the little screen.

'Ahhh, I see,' said Alice 'it's a sort of computer game then? The Gadaffles must be very naughty,' observed Alice. '

'Some of them are VERY naughty and some of them are a bit naughty and some of them are not really all that naughty at all.' replied the one who seemed to be in charge.

'Your rockets,' queried Alice, seeing through the eyes of the distant drone, 'can tell the difference then?'

'Ah, well, no, not exactly, that is, not precisely, not 100% accurately, no, they can't,' admitted the leader.

'You really mean not at all, don't you?' exclaimed Alice, thinking 'I am beginning not to like this particular Rabbit Hole all that very much.'

the pen and the s word

2011-04-18T19:16:00.003Z

Anyone would think I hadn't written a damn thing for a whole month. It wouldn't be true though. The pen may be mightier than the sword but it's a damn sight easier to ignore.

The Red Nose Academic Bus Company Ltd

2011-03-18T14:55:00.001Z

Our roving reporter interviews the CEO of Red Nose Academic Bus Co on the benefits of deregulation.

RR: Are we likely to see improved productivity and performance following nationwide academic bus deregulation?

CEO: Yes, certainly.the freedom to choose our own passengers and create our own routes will allow us to fulfill our ambitions by investing in our shared destiny in innovative ways.

RR: Isn't the destination marked on the front of the bus?

CEO: Well, for operational reasons, sometimes it is necessary to change the destination during the journey.

RR: Won't that be confusing for the passengers?

CEO: Not really. They will all end up in the same place eventually.

RR: How will you go about choosing the passengers?

CEO: Obviously, we want passengers that can get on and off the bus quickly and who don't slow us down too much, or take up too much of the drivers time trying to find their bus passes or purses.

RR: All the other bus companies are academic now too. Won't they all be choosing the most profitable routes and passengers?

CEO: Possibly. Some restructuring of services is inevitable. Market forces will weed out inefficient or failing bus services which can then be liquidated or taken over by more efficient and successful bus companies.

RR: Won't that mean, inevitably, that some areas and passengers get poorly served or find there is no local service at all?

CEO: Well, you must remember: anyone can set up an academic bus company now....anyone with a double garage or an old barn can build and run a bus company. No expertise or special qualifications are required; so, where a need is perceived, hopefully the market will develop a service to meet that need.

RR: Good. It all sounds rather jolly exciting.

CEO: It is: and at weekends we can strip out the seats and do house removals too!

RR: Lovely. Well thank you very much. Can I get the 11.15 to Preston now?

CEO: Er...um....sorry, that bus left at 10.53 apparantly. It seems you've missed the bus. There'll be another along shortly I imagine.

stuff

2011-02-09T18:42:00.005Z

I expect the annoying clatter of glass, or the grumble of wheely bins being pulled by grumpy men in flourescent jackets in cobbled back alleys every other tuesday morning. It's nearly light at 7 now: not enough for the world to have colour, but enough for it to be washed in grey.

The neighbour knocks. She is worried the slate on the kerb is from her roof. I tell her it isn’t (because it’s from ours :-(). She is old and has those eyes that always look puzzled and afraid at the same time: because the world no longer makes any sense and she doesn’t know who to trust or listen to anymore. She won’t take any advice anyway because she wants her own control of the world back. It must be so frightening to lose your grip like that: for the world and its meanings to draw in and become incomprehensible, till your safe world shrinks to the boundaries of your own house, and then things, even in that world, no longer seem to make sense: the tv remote, the combi boiler, the washing machine, the fuse box; all a mystery, a hopeless mess of fiddly incomprehensible buttons. Mastery of your place is a big part of who you are. If I wasn’t in Lancaster among familiar things, I wouldn’t know who I was either this morning; my head is a fog of headache and cotton wool struggling to behave like proper neurons. This is not good.......

Today they will pretend there is a leak at the power station; people will talk earnestly into radios - in studiedly calm voices - and assure each other that all that can be done is being done. The public will ring and ask me what to do…and I will feel like telling them. Men will be placed on standby, as the pretend radioactivity drifts north towards sheep; their jackets will already be fluorescent, as, shortly, will be the sheep. Hey Ho…..

Macademy

2011-02-06T19:26:00.006Z

Thatcher began her attack on the state education system by doing everything she could to undermine comprehensive schools in the 80’s. Blair carried on where Thatcher left off and paved the way for the privatisation of education. Cameron, Clegg and Gove are now pushing the policy to its logical conclusion by inviting all schools to leave the state sector and apply for Academy status, which frees them from the control of local education authorities and allows them, barring a few legal constraints, to teach whatever they like.

Politically naïve heads and governing bodies are falling for the government spin, the lure of extra cash, not to mention the inflation of their egos and the supersized head teachers (?) salaries. As too are other bodies with an ideological or theological axe to grind. (See for example this article in the Times Educational Supplement about an evangelical creationist academy in Newark). Academy Pastor Gareth Morgan, the church leader and the driving force behind the free school bid, confirmed that creationism would be taught across the curriculum, should the school be given the green light.

"Creationism will be taught as the belief of the leadership of the school," Pastor Morgan said. "It will not be taught exclusively in the sciences, for example. At the same time, evolution will be taught as a theory."

The church website carries a video that states: "If creation is true, there is a purpose to life. If evolution is true, there is no purpose to life." It adds that "if creation is true, then man is a fallen creature and we need a saviour. If evolution is true then man is an evolving creature and we don't need any saviour"

You can easily see why this new regime appeals to religious organisations of all flavours. They have the funds and the wherewithall to set up such academies, and all the major faith groups are rapidly making moves in this direction. Right at the top of their agenda is the inculcation of their belief systems into young minds and if scientific facts like evolution happen to get in their way, then their fiction must take priority.

Other schools or prospective academies not driven by such motives may be tempted by the large financial carrot the government is dangling in front of their noses. At a time of severe cut-backs in public service provision, it must be very tempting for schools to take advantage of any extra cash on offer and to seek some degree of protection from further cuts to come. This is understandable, but the money for the large financial inducements offered to schools taking this route must come from somewhere, and if comes at the expense of deeper cuts to libraries, elder or youth services or even to wider education support services, then the rationale for such a change seems rather shaky to me. It is a curious morality that seeks advancement in isolation at the expense of those less fortunate.

It is not clear to me how much short term financial gain will be off-set by academised schools having to buy in services previously provided by LEA’s. I am thinking of such services as: education and welfare services; pupil support services (behavioural, psychological, clothing grants, music, outdoor education, SEN support); central staff costs (maternity, sickness, redundancy, early retirement, legal); asset management; repair and maintenance, the costs of devolved statutory and regulatory duties; museum and library services…the list goes on and on. If large numbers of schools opt for academy status, services previously provided at ‘at cost’ basis by local authorities will presumably be provided by private companies on a ‘for profit’ basis, thus very likely increasing the overall costs to the school budget.

Those not biting the finacial carrot may be tempted by the increased autonomy that academy status offers. But schools already have a high degree of autonomy, constrained, to a degree, by the demands of government, curriculum requirements, testing, Ofsted inspection and so forth. Crucially though, in my view, schools that remain in LEA’s can retain an overview of the broader needs of the communities in which they are situated rather than operate in isolation in their own interests. They may also be subject to control of the provision of school places and the schools admissions process in the interests of the community at large. This curtails what must be a very large temptation for academy schools to craft admissions policies with a view to creaming off talent, enhancing their reputation and status and attracting yet more funding and the more able pupils at the expense of other educational establishments and the interests of the wider community.

Academy school status does bring greater autonomy for schools to modify the terms and conditions of employment contracts for teaching, administration and other support staff. This further inculcates a competitive ethos into the whole system. Education is not a competition. It seems to me there is nothing to gain and much to lose from breaking away from nationally negotiated salary scales and terms and conditions of employment. Promises that teaching and other staff will not lose out in the long term are effectively meaningless as academy status affords the power to change terms and conditions at will according to localised priorities and circumstances.

Finally, there is the lure of status and the promise of raised standards and high pupil attainment. Unfortunately, the word academy is not a synonym for quality. It is not the name a school calls itself, “foundation” “academy” “technology college”, nor its strap line, nor even its results, or its place in the league tables, by which the quality of an educational institution should be measured. It is the skill, dedication and commitment of the staff; the involvement of the parents; the interest and enthusiasm of the pupils; the quality of support services and so forth. Educationalists should not narrow their focus to the success or otherwise of any particular educational establishment or any group or set of children. It is not just ‘my child’ or ‘your child’ that is important, it is every child. A ‘best and then the rest’ approach to educational policy is, in my view, both narrow minded and morally impoverished.

In any case, the available evidence does not support a conclusion that academy status is either driving up standards or improving pupil attainment levels, nor does academy status prove to be any defence against decline, failure or closure. Seems to me the whole exercise is just a part of the wider project of dismantling more of the architecture of our society and selling what can be sold off into the private sector.

So, all in all, it is disappointing that clodlet’s school is going to look at going down this route. I’m not worried that the school would begin to teach garbage to him so much as for the other reasons given above.

eden & horseradish

2011-01-25T18:39:00.004Z

I went to the Garden of Eden in the early 70’s - having steamed up the Shatt al Arab waterway. That’s the one they’ve been arguing about ever since the Shi’tes and Sunnis fell out in the 7th Century. It was dodgy then and is even dodgier now: one side or the other is bound to arrest you for straying across an invisible border.

We got off at Basra where the security guards were smelly and looked threatening. Lizards and heat and me crawled up the wall while they fingered passports and wondered if they could clap us in jail for something. Eventually we realised they just really really needed some dinars to oil the wheels of international diplomacy. Baksheesh.

Don’t know what bought that to mind today. Anyway, I do remember it was rubbish: a few date palms, some scrubby grass and lots of sand. I wouldn’t trade my allotment for it. There wasn’t even a shed. And some stupid rule about not eating apples. Bollocks. God was a perfect allotment committee chairman but a lousy landlord. Now if he’d said, “don’t eat the horseradish”, that would’ve made sense. I could understand that.

Horseradish is rubbish. Yeughhhh!

[pic of rubbish horseradish]

popepourri

2011-01-24T21:15:00.005Z

Popepourri

“In the digital world, transmitting information increasingly means making it known within a social network where knowledge is shared in the context of personal exchanges. The clear distinction between the producer and consumer of information is relativized and communication appears not only as an exchange of data, but also as a form of sharing. This dynamic has contributed to a new appreciation of communication itself, which is seen first of all as dialogue, exchange, solidarity and the creation of positive relations. On the other hand, this is contrasted with the limits typical of digital communication: the one-sidedness of the interaction, the tendency to communicate only some parts of one’s interior world, the risk of constructing a false image of oneself, which can become a form of self-indulgence.”

So….what is it then….a sharing of information or a one-sided interaction? Bless me internet….it is 50 seconds since my last digitisation. I have had lewd thorts, cussed in tongues and dissed religion something chronic and created 25 false idols of meself.

“Entering cyberspace can be a sign of an authentic search for personal encounters with others, provided that attention is paid to avoiding dangers such as enclosing oneself in a sort of parallel existence, or excessive exposure to the virtual world. In the search for sharing, for "friends", there is the challenge to be authentic and faithful, and not give in to the illusion of constructing an artificial public profile for oneself.”

Er…..parallel existence? Give into illusion? Artificial public profile? You looked in a mirror recently?

"Is there is a risk of being more distracted because our attention is fragmented and absorbed in a world "other" than the one in which we live?"

You tell me.

"In the digital age too, everyone is confronted by the need for authenticity and reflection. Besides, the dynamic inherent in the social networks demonstrates that a person is always involved in what he or she communicates."

Rubbish…who’s typing this….get off my keyboard!

“….It follows that there exists a Christian way of being present in the digital world”

So, there must be a Hindu, a Buddhist, an Islamic, a Zoroastrian way, right?

“The task of witnessing to the Gospel in the digital era calls for everyone to be particularly attentive to the aspects of that message which can challenge some of the ways of thinking typical of the web”

The web thinks?

“First of all, we must be aware that the truth which we long to share does not derive its worth from its "popularity" or from the amount of attention it receives.”

MEMO: Benedict to Vatican IT. How come we only got 5 hits last month?

“I would like then to invite Christians, confidently and with an informed and responsible creativity, to join the network of relationships which the digital era has made possible.”

Gee, thanks, thought you’d never ask.

“The web is contributing to the development of new and more complex intellectual and spiritual horizons, new forms of shared awareness”

Yup, no hiding place now.

“Believers who bear witness to their most profound convictions greatly help prevent the web from becoming an instrument which depersonalizes people, attempts to manipulate them emotionally or allows those who are powerful to monopolize the opinions of others.”

Wouldn’t dream of it, would you?

“On the contrary, believers encourage everyone to keep alive the eternal human questions which testify to our desire for transcendence and our longing for authentic forms of life, truly worthy of being lived.”

As opposed to inauthentic forms of life not worthy of being lived…?

“I invite young people above all to make good use of their presence in the digital world.”

By learning what a thoroughly corrupt, despicable and evil cult of misery you lead? Good idea.

From the Vatican, 24 January 2011, Feast of Saint Francis de Sales (patron saint of communication workers everywhere).
BENEDICTUS PP. XVI

The Master and his Emissary - reviewed

2011-01-18T13:23:00.004Z

The Master and his Emissary - The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

In which Ian Mcgilchrist takes an interesting idea and stretches it to breaking point.

The Master and his Emissary tells an old tale......

The basic idea is that we have evolved with an asymmetrical split brain, the two hemispheres of which have different 'takes' on the world, different ways of 'seeing' reality, both of which are crucial to optimal functioning. The left hemisphere is more analytical, reductionist, particular, linear in viewpoint; it will help you break a problem down into its component parts, it will 'see' the detail, it can focus on a grain of food and pick it out against a background that looks similar. The right hemisphere takes a more global and overall view of things. It 'sees' context, it's aware of the surroundings - it's aware of the storm approaching and the predator behind those bushes; watching you while you eat the grain. It can see the big picture. It is holistic, empathic, emotional, connected.

Apart from the few wild places left, the world we've created is built by our brains interaction with the world. The cities, the cars, the credit cards, the shopping malls, the banks and the town halls, the theatres and the zoo. All of it. So what have we created? A mess, it seems: and the reason, according to Mcgilchrist, is that our brains are out of balance, the left hemisphere (the emissary), has taken over from the right hemisphere (the master), which it is now effectively suppressing and has taken over the reins, and fashions our lives according to its dictates.

To explore this idea, he takes us on an (enjoyable) and very detailed journey through neuroscience, history, anthropology, art - all of civilisation in fact. At the end, he paints an apocalyptic vision of what a world dominated by left hemisphere thinking would look like: not a pretty picture, to say the least. He looks (through rose tinted glasses, I feel) to times in the past where he believes the left and right hemispheres have been more balanced - ancient Greece (circa 600BC) for example. He states, without providing evidence, that this power shift to the left, is not as prevalent in India say, or in Japan. He seems to have a somewhat romantic view of these more right hemisphered societies, seemingly able to put to one side the vast social inequalities, grinding poverty, feudal hierarchies and religious divisions contained therein.

At the end, I don't think his thesis can be supported by the current evidence available. I think it is too soon to reach the conclusions he has. At the very end, he sais that he won't really mind too much if his theory turns out to be incorrect. I don't really believe him though.

Essentially, it is an old old story. Plato or Aristotle would have deemed it a battle between good and evil, between god and the devil, between reason and the soul.

Mcgilchrist re frames it into a battle between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, between the master and the emissary. vying for power and control. It's a great read, even if you don't buy into the theory....

There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted. Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he most trusted to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not wisdom, and on his missions on the master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.

good days

2011-01-18T10:50:00.001Z

There's a slow rising mist over Hala beck and golden light from the sun as it peeks its head over a cloud bank. All the birds are singing like crazy: as if they know something. Everything looks a sort of golden green colour: the boughs of the trees, the walls, gates, fenceposts and sheds, even the greenhouse glass and sheets of corrugated iron; like everything has been painted with bacterial greenwash - I suppose it has been.

All the chikkins are in a fine perky, peckky mood. They rush out of the coop as soon as you open the door - it's funny - I call it the charge of the light sussex brigade. They've left a mountain of poop to clear up after our weekend away, but it's all good fertiliser which I will mix into the greenhouse soil when I dig it over.

Things seem simple and uncomplicated up here. I like the stillness and just sitting watching and listening to the birds and the warming sun lift the moisture off the damp grass in swirls of mist. I like not thinking sometimes; it's like a waking dream - you sometimes get it when you're playing music really well, and it just flows and feels effortless. Good days.

Can you punch yourself in the face hard enough to break your nose?

2010-12-07T12:22:00.005Z

If you stop and think about that for a while, I bet it would be difficult to come up with a scenario where such an action may seem reasonable.

On the other hand, imagine your hand is mangled up and trapped in some farm machinery, you’ve left the mobile in the cab, no one will be coming to look for you before it’s too late. There’s a hacksaw in the toolkit – which you can reach - and if you can summon courage out of insane desperation and use it, you could save your life.

What makes the difference between these two situations is that there is no justification for the first action, but there is for the second. Both involve harming yourself, but one action is reasonable, given the circumstance, while the other is not. To do either, reason must overide emotion, which it can do, even though emotion is much older and more primal in evolutionary terms than is reason.

Being a relative newcomer on the scene, reason is a bit sluggish, it’s hard work and it’s better if someone else does the slog. It likes duvet days. We often prefer to get our reasons all packaged up, ready to heat and serve piping hot. Many of the meals have already been served up anyway by our parents, for survival reasons: DON’T TOUCH THAT SNAKE! RUN FROM THAT ANIMAL! CATCH AND EAT THAT ONE! So we are used to accepting ready made reason from authority because it’s a useful shortcut that has survival value.

We also accept it from our culture, from our elders, from religion and so on, and build it all into a nice solid edifice of sacred values – not sacred in the religious sense of that word - but more in the sense of things that are so important and precious to us, so bound up with our sense of identity, of who we are, that to challenge them may well evoke an aggressive or even violent response.

I think this why it is diffult to make progress in resolving intractable conflicts. Both sides are defending what they see as their ‘sacred values’ - which lie deeper than what the dispute may appear to be about superficially. Scott Atran describes this well in this book. Such conflicts are not amenable to rational discourse.

The dispute between the religious and rationalist/skeptik mindset is of this nature. Rationalists tend not to trust their senses as a satisfactory method of determining truth. Science tells them, (and can demonstrate), that their perception of the world is a very limited mental construct or model of the real, packaged up in a way that enables humans to operate, survive and reproduce in the world. What truth, what reality is - says science - needs constant tinkering with the model, needs constant re-framing, testing, experimentation designed to rule out the bias of our senses (which we must then interpret with our senses!), then more testing when a bunch more data comes in.

The religionist also does not trust their senses because authority tells them how reality is. It is fixed, certain and immutable, and to back it up, they have scripture and may have had experiences, or may have interpreted experiences, in such a way which confirms their point of view.

Both see their position as having reason and being reasonable. Both may (or may not), be desirous of similar outcomes, but find themselves unable to get beyond the dictates of their ‘sacred values’ and limitations of theoretical and impersonal debate (esp in cyberspace), to the human underneath. It’s like a debate between Aristotle and Rousseau:

A: It’s obvious innit?

R: Leave it owt, mate.

A: Get some nous, and stop being shrill.

R: Nous causes cancer, dunnit?

………………oh dear. It's almost tempting to share Rousseau's view that the world would be better off without reason and language and everything that flows from it. We don't seem equipped to handle it properly. Reason is most difficult to deal with when furnished with attitude, and some weapons.

vatican ribbed

2010-11-22T19:35:00.005Z

Dear Jo

Top Hole!

Can't tell you how delighted Mrs Root and I are that you are going to allow all those cheeky chappies to use condoms!

All the alter boys are over the moon, one less thing for the poor darlings to worry about eh?

We sense business opportunities here Jo, and, if we may be so bold, think you must be aware of them too?

Being forward thinking Catholics, Mrs Root and I installed a machine next to the wet fish counter some years ago and now we eagerly await our first consignment of Vatican Ribbed(TM).

We'll take a dozen boxes of Haddock flavour, two dozen King Prawn - arf arf - they should go well, and we'd better have a half dozen of Sole flavoured too.

We quite understand that they are only to be sold in exceptional circumstances and we will get totally rigid sticking to that. But as you know Jo, Aids is like shares: it can go down as well as up, so we'd better sell them to everyone that's at risk. Sinful but safe - that's our watchword.

The first step is always the hardest Jo, but you've taken the church on its first one towards morality. Congratulations.

Here's a pound for the advertising campaign.

Roll them rubbers! Get it on Jo (not literally of course)

Your avuncular friends - Henry and the missus - still Rooting for you.

ferret property law

2010-11-17T19:04:00.002Z

I knew it would go to his head.

*sigh*

[click the pic to enlarge it!]

on pringles and strings

2010-11-16T18:46:00.020Z

If nothingness is limitless and there is an infinite amount of it within which thingyness can take place then there is no problem with either an infinite amount of nothingness or an infinite amount of thingyness is there? It’s not really going to bother you much one way or the other.

If there are a couple of hundred billion or trillion universes out there, or if string theory is correct, and there are teensy weensy bits of strings vibrating one way to make protons and another way to make gluons and gravitons and wot not, or if there are multiple dimensions wrapped up hidden within our own, I see no reason for coffee not to taste good or sleep to be not sound.

It doesn’t seem even that hard to envisage – at least not to my cloddish mind – I twang an open 1st on my guitar and get the note E or play it on the third fret and get the note G. Curled up dimensions hidden from our perception?….Hmmmm, bit more problematic: but if I roll up a sheet of A4, and show it you side on, you're going to have a problem knowing if it’s rolled just once or twice or three times, and the exquisite drawing I made on it when it was a flat sheet is going to have disappeared into dimensions you can’t easily see that will also play havoc with my fine artwork. Ha!

A squadrillion universes? Kind of exciting to think of it actually – but not a problem if it’s not so; this universe is quite entertaining enough for one lifetime, thank you very much. If our universe is held on an M theory brane – with other universes snuggled up alongside it - like a nice loaf of medium sliced wholewheat Hovis or a box of Pringles, with only gravitons being able to make the transition between the different universes/branes/slices?....Nope, still not going to lose any sleep over it - unless vodafone release a pulsed graviton mobile to enable me to converse with other internet sloggers (they’re called that there - in the parallel universe), then I would like one for Christmas please, pretty please.

One thing.... in a world of spontaneously generating and disappearing universes, the concept of god becomes about as useful as a Planck length on a pirate ship - unless it's Christmas.

Shan't lose any sleep over that either.

[edit: the Planck length, denoted ℓP, is a unit of length, equal to 1.616252(81)×10−35 meters = kind of small.]

the world is watching

2010-11-16T11:15:00.006Z

I'm celebrating the release from house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, a truly remarkable woman, and hoping that it may eventually lead to the democratisation of Burma which has been ruled by a military government for over a generation.

Regimes have to be terribly brutal to repress citizens' freedoms and those that do it have to do it with ruthless violence because, if people want anything, they want not to be oppressed by government and they want freedom of speech and the right to associate freely and a place in the sun to grow.

Regimes that deny this can persist for generations, but only at the cost of much pain and suffering and by suppressing oposition and maintaining an iron grip on power. Most regimes that do it seem to fall apart eventually, either because of internal conflicts and rivalries within the regime, or because the people rise up and seek to throw out the oppressive rulers, whether peacefully, as Aung San wishes, but often with violent confrontation.

In releasing Aung San therefore, the Burmese regime has taken a big risk, or perhaps sufficient numbers of its leaders have had a change of heart. I don't know. I hope for the latter.

The hard religious right wing in America that campaign for, what is in effect, a theocracy - a government run on biblical principles, the christian equivalent of sharia law - with punishments of like kind for adultery and homosexuality and so forth, should be wary of what they ask for, because if they wish to do that, they will have to do it with a similar brutality, ruthlessness and violence that characterises the Talibans, the North Koreas, the Irans, Chinas and other such oppressive and dictatorial regimes of this world.

If America relinquishes its separation of church and state for a move towards the above, it is in deep trouble - for a people who have tasted secular democratic government will not relinquish it lightly or without a fight - and in the end, it is only such a government that can actually defend religious freedoms for all.

May your freedom last long, Aung San, and may your people soon taste of it too. The World is Watching.

glass act

2010-11-14T17:21:00.003Z

The gales gusted at about 80mph: they were bound to cause some damage. The owner of this plot is by no means the only one to plonk a shed down and expect it to stay put without any foundation or anchoring. As sure as night follows day, this is inevitable. Next time I see someone do that, I'll have a quiet word with them I think. Ours rests on bearers attached to concrete flags and has old scaffold poles driven into the ground on each side. It ain't goin nowhere. The old rotting wooden greenhouse we inherited is a mess though and another gale like that may do for it.

Now all the produce is out of the greenhouse, the chikkins are enjoying having it as part of their territory once more. Best of all, the soil is dry and they can have luxurious dust baths to their hearts content.

As well as the six sheets of roof glass we've lost to the winds, I'm having to replace all the horizontal bearers round the bottom of the glasshouse as they are all rotting away. This involves taking all the glass out, removing the rotten timber from the bottom and cutting back any rotten bits of the uprights to get back to sound wood. Then laying a new 4x3" bearer and fixing it into position and attaching the upright supports making sure they are all lined up properly so the glass will fit back in. Last bit is fixing the glass back into the frame with pins and silicone sealant (I'm using that because it's quicker and easier than putty).

The job will have to be tackled in (probably) 4 sections as I don't want to leave too much of it exposed to more high winds that may come along.

Pity glass is so expensive these days; I would be tempted to replace some of the other cracked pieces here and there if it was.

The ducks and chikkins are curious about it all but have a tendency to get under your feet while carrying chunks of glass around. Don't worry, they all survived. One section done, three more to go... *sigh*....

sorry

2010-11-14T12:04:00.001Z

coming up rosettes

2010-11-08T15:22:00.003Z

It's too wet to do anything on the garden so we went up to Crooklands to see our friends from Cumbria Ferret Rescue centre at their ferret show.

Clodlet entered Pan in the sandy hob class and won first prize. It will go to Pan's head, I know it. Clodlet also won third prize in the young handlers section.

There were a gazillion ferrets there. It's nice to see a 'pong' of ferrets all cuddled up together in a hammock....looks so cozy. A man came up to me and said he was just passing in the car and came in for a look. 'Are these all working ferrets?' 'No,' I sais..'they're all on job seekers allowance, this lot.'

We don't make a habit of going to shows....don't really believe in them, but it was a fun day out and somewhat gratifying that Pan won against all the ferrets that get tarted up for the show with coat conditioner and vitamins and fur-brushed to death. Pan goes in straight out the cage and beats the lot.....go figure!

The End of Atheism?

2010-10-12T21:13:00.003Z

My friend Steve in this article champions an uncompromising form of atheism which takes the ignostic viewpoint championed by Rabbi Sherwin Wine in the 1960's.

In brief it says that, although the concept of god is meaningful, the word god is not - in that there is no coherent definition of what that word means, or there are perhaps as many meanings to it as there are users of it.

As science advances, and with ever increasing desperation, believers seem to be retreating god further and further into the realms of the unfalsifiable, and the - is there, isn't there? - debate rumbles on with both theists and atheists approaching boiling point, at which time, of course, a nice hot cup of tea will be in order.

I see it slightly differently however, in that I see it as quite a gentle form of atheism: because although it sais we can't know what the word god means, we understand the concept and how and why it has developed in humans, we nevertheless have lots of important things to discuss even if we do lay the word to one side.

duck or grouse?

2010-10-10T21:04:00.007Z

It has seemed such a short growing season this year: already we are digging the beds and getting out their duvets of compost and muck to keep them cosy overwinter. The last of the sunflowers droops and no longer bothers to find the sun; 'Is that it then?' It mutters as I walk past.

We took all the old rasberry canes out: they were'nt up to much anyway and we'll probably put a strawberry bed there next season.

So clodlet and I took to the moors to cheer ouselves up. Up on the tops the wind was gusting at 30+ mph and you struggled to open the car door against it.

It fanned the burning heather up on the grouse moors; they flapped indignantly around - as you do when someone sets fire to your house. It was a southerly wind, so not at all cold, and in the shelter of the valley quite sunny and warm enough to be without a coat.

I've been teaching clodlet to lead me astray (not difficult) and to navigate with map and compass. He guided us across our chosen route very well. Just basic stuff really: orienting the map with the terrain and getting to grips with the compass and direction finding.

We marked the car on the GPS before setting out and he was most indignant that, on getting back, the GPS said the car was not where it was supposed to be.

'I suppose we'll pass it on the way home,' he sais, getting into the car...

Chip off the old block, I'd say.

Ignoracio

2010-10-06T20:10:00.003Z

Dear Jo

Lovely to see you last week. Sorry about the damage to the popemobile…. it would have to be a wet fish lorry we hit wouldn’t it….. :-((

Anyway Mrs Root said that Ignacio, the head of the Pontificia de Academia Pro Vitro , wasn’t terribly chuffed about Robert Edward getting the Nobel prize for medicine for his pioneering work in IVF treatments. Mrs Root was a little dissapointed about this because we’ve have just signed up for another round of treatment with Rob.

We’ve been going at it like rabbits for ages now, trying to do it the natural way, but it just isn’t working…. and who will take over the wet fish counter when we’ve gone?

Mrs Root got very upset when he said there were millions and millions of embryos in freezers all round the world. ‘We’re not having any of that nonsense with ours,’ she said indignantly, ‘”Fresh is Best”, when it comes to fish, and embryos, eh Henry? Womb temperature or nothing, that’s the ticket?’

If the boffins do make a little Rootlet in a test tube though, will we have to bring it to the Vatican to have the soul installed and can we add a couple of drops of holy water to help things along a bit?

I’ve no idea what God does with the embryos of atheist and secular riff-raff, but given that there are ten million spontaneous abortions every day… well… a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat, isn't it Jo?

Yours in Utero

Henry Root

Why might you mistake a shadow for a burglar but never a burglar for a shadow?

2010-09-29T06:30:00.002Z

If religions are a human construct our task is to find out why that might be the case. There is, after all, no agreed method by which its competing truth claims may be settled and the damaging divisions brought about in humanity by adherence to differing religious belief systems ameliorated.

Fortunately, as this presentation from Andy Thomson suggests, we are getting much much closer to an understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that have evolved in the human brain over evolutionary time that help to explain why humans are prone to (and will continue to), adhere to religious ways of thinking.

Knowing yourself is half the battle. The other half is changing it. I hope we can.

Popeular Ice Cream - Tut Tut Tut Frutti.

2010-09-20T18:23:00.005Z

Dear Jo

Well done! What a fantastic four days that was. We’re all exhausted now and hope you are too.

Mrs Clod sais she really hopes you enjoyed the wet fish – not the ones in Westminster, the kedgeree. She was a little dissapointed you couldn’t visit our wet fish counter, maybe next time.

Boy, you really gave them what for this time didn’t you? Plain speaking or what! We particularly enjoyed your subtle pulling apart of those nonsensical enlightenment values so beloved of the great unwashed.

We’re even more excited about you re-evangalising the West and would like to help Archbishop Fisichella on the Pontifical Council for New Evangalisation. Can I suggest we start in Whitby and work our way west from there? Next thursday would be a good day for us to start?

We just wish more heads of state would come to this country and tell us how to live our lives like you did. What do you think of Ali Khameni? He’s a supreme leader after all - though Mrs Clod thinks he might not be as fond of kedgeree as you.

Do you want us to bring the popemobile back? We thought we could bring our tomato plants over to Italy on holiday with us – they should ripen nicely in the back there - we could pop into the Vatican to discuss evangalisation arrangements if you like? Don’t worry if you need it to sell ice cream to the tourists.

Tally Ho Jo! Let's roll back these dark ages.

All the best.

PS. Here’s a pound to get the PCNE up and running.

(with humble apologies to Henry Root - and Claudio for nicking his picture)

Bread and Dripping - It's Traditional

2010-09-17T16:00:00.001Z

The thing about ‘traditional values’ is that they are imposed rather than realised. The politicians and religious leaders that talk of them don’t seem overly fond of democracy with a capital D.

When they use the phrase it seems to be in order to get a ‘feelgood’ response from you; rhetoric designed to get you to think that whatever it is that is being proposed is the only sensible thing. After all, traditional = strong, dependable, solid, trustworthy, honest, reliable, secure, tried and tested, wholesome, moral, good. What could possibly be wrong with that? Apple pie and custard all the way down. What could possibly be wrong with ‘traditional values’?

Well, for one thing, you will notice that the appeal rests on the horns of two logical fallacies: the appeal from authority and the appeal from tradition.

You will notice that you are not supposed to question ‘traditional values’.

You might notice that they often stem from very patriachal and authoritarian attitudes in cultures and societies determined to maintain the status quo. Thus has it ever been.

You will notice the implication that ‘modern values’ are conversely bad: modern = fickle, impermanent, faddish, liberal, shallow, self-serving, dishonest, relative and transient.

You might find an appeal to ‘absolute moral values’, with the certainty of ‘rightness’ derived from an interpretation of religious doctrine and tradition. This will be similar in all cultures with differing religious traditions. The technique will be the same and will accuse modern society of moral relativism and tend to cast doubt on legislation designed to eliminate discrimination on grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation and so forth - because it seeks to maintain the right to discriminate based on its traditions.

You will find that it will oppose, (nor recognise the value of), the principle of separation of church and state and will seek close coupling to the power structures of the state so that its own values may be woven into its policies and legislation.

The appeal will include a demand for automatic respect rather than a request for the stage upon which to earn it.

It is like bread and dripping: traditional, but not necessarily good for you or anyone else.

Brittania's Lament

2010-09-17T09:14:00.007Z

I watch you drag and drone and bluster,
Light the candles, flap and fluster,
Silken robes and cups of gold,
Ancient when the world was old,
Cloaked in culture’s faded glory,
Heaven, Hell and Purgatory,
Saints and spirits through the ages,
Silver crosses, gilded cages,
All the trappings man can render
Asking faith in faith’s defender.
I watch you simper, fawn and scrape,
Tugging on the pontiff’s cape,
Out you reach, at every whim,
To shower praises onto him,
Lapping up the words he spills,
And ranting on the nation’s ills,
Some are earnest, some are cynics,
All are supine, all are mimics,
Do you think that I, of yore,
Have not this pageant seen before?
An ancient line have I to boast,
Of glories heaped from coast to coast,
And boastful often have I been,
About my blessed fields of green,
About my people, fair and strong,
Who love the right and shun the wrong,
Of all the battles they have fought,
Whom pain and pride have wisdom taught,
Who mapped the skies and sailed the sea,
And cast off wretched tyranny.
And, yes, their pride has often led
To horrors heaped upon my head,
To slavery and pointless war,
Repression of the humble poor,
The flames of hatred often fanned,
Across my green and pleasant land,
Such wisdom rarely comes for free,
The price, too often, agony,
But slowly, though the cost was vast,
They learned the lessons of the past.
I picture now a flame-haired queen,
With lustrous locks of auburn sheen,
Atop a chariot of pine,
Her image now the cast of mine,
By war usurped from hearth and home,
Resisting all the might of Rome,
A woman, powerful and great,
An image that you roundly hate,
For you, oh lordly Pontifex,
Decry the worth of female sex,
Condemn full half of humankind
Unwilling still to change your mind,
To free from bondage to the womb,
And let their chained potential bloom,
And rather numbers be increased,
Than even one become a priest.
I see another, ‘neath a horse,
She bleeds her last upon the course,
A sacrifice to free her nation,
Know I stand for Liberation.
I picture now a doctor brave,
He sweats to find the means to save
The lives of thousands wracked with pain,
Applying skills of hand and brain,
To isolate and grow in mass
The mould upon the moulded glass
Penicilium Notatum
Thanks to which his patients hearten
That their suffering is ended
Lives renewed and bodies mended,
Hope resounds and interest swells,
In new research on human cells,
And means to combat all diseases,
Come as what we know increases.
Yet, you would see progress thwarted,
Lives unnumbered blithely slaughtered,
Just on dogma’s ancient teaching,
‘gainst the hand of man o’erreaching
Deadly philistine defiance,
Know I stand for Good through Science.
Now I see a man has died,

An apple laced with cyanide,
Never mind he changed our lives,
And from his works our world derives,
That mathematics overjoyed him,
Still my people have destroyed him.
Like they did with witty Wilde,
Yet another darling child,
Both were hounded, for the same,
Love that dare not speak its name.
But, at last, my people learned,
Ancient attitudes were turned,
Love was vaunted over hate,
Man or woman, gay or straight,
Rights to marry, rights to love,
Shouted to the stars above,
This you scorn, and evil call,
Vaunting shame and hurt for all.
Turn from such a sordid sequel,
Know I think that All are Equal.
I watch you prostitute my fame,
By trading on my hard-won name,
By selling out on all I gave thee,
All your history has made me,
Writ in grease, a coward’s charter,
Spitting on my Magna Carta,
Spurning Hume and Hobbes and Milton,
Telling lies to tortured children,
Acquiescing in corruption,
Trading truth for pained induction,
Welcoming this king of priests,
To share the bounty of your feasts,
Vilest hatreds flat ignoring,
All my noble virtues whoring.
This is not your finest hour,
Led by fools obsessed with power,
Greeting critics with derision,
All to pander to religion.
Well, you’ve made your choice, now bear it.
Know Britannia does not share it.

(with thanks to my friend VP for permission to reproduce his wonderful poem which encapsulates how many of us feel)

Balls and Burqas

2010-09-09T22:15:00.025Z

The formulation of law at the intersect between civil liberty, individual freedom and control by the state has always been thorny territory: a patchwork of compromise, a no mans land where we all must live.

The libertarians and the anarchists can’t be doing with it. They would rather kick the law up its backside till it goes nee-nawing off into the wilderness.

The control freaks would prefer to see every inch of our land covered by CCTV and by laws governing when and where you can hang your washing out and sneeze or fart in public.

Thus the protracted debate on the proposed law to ban the wearing of the burqa in France and other EU countries rumbles on and on, supported, it has to be said, by majority public opinion in most EU countries except perhaps the UK. Mind you, popular public opinion has never been a productive basis on which to build legislation, though clearly, some politicians are so tempted.

Obviously the debate goes way beyond what rags you are (or are not), allowed out in. Emotions run high, tempers flare, misunderstandings occur. It is definitely not a debate about fashion. But it does seems to take place in a fog ridden no-mans land, where it is easy to get lost, side tracked into argumentative cul-de-sacs. To get exasperated and confused by the demands to manifest religious expression in the public sphere (regardless of issues of security, equality, social cohesion, womens rights, employment law, integration and this that or whatever else. Equally, to get waylayed by arguments about the oppression of women within patriarchal fundamentalist religious cultures;with people second guessing what is going on in the mind of a women wearing a burqa and, (even if you could know that without asking), to reject it out of hand because of ones own cultural prejudice. All of that is going on and I suppose, in the end, it is all an attempt to get to the nitty gritty at the heart of the issue.

Which is what, exactly?

I have been lost in this fog too, havering between this or that position, getting confused, trying to juggle too many complex issues in my brain at once, or swayed by passionate arguments and, in the end, tending to side, (but not wholeheartedly), with the view that it would be contrary to our ‘values’ to impose such a law. That could be very wrong.

So here, I just want to avoid all these cul-de-sacs and focus very narrowly on considerations that will stem from an examination of EU Human Rights Legislation in the hope that it will help blow some of the fog away from my brain.

We enact laws that do, to a greater or lesser degree, reflect the core values society holds. If not that, then at least they give some indication of what those values might be. In the case of the French rebublic then, the notions of liberty, equality and fraternity, of laïcité.

Whether such laws shine or not in practice will not be my concern here. I don’t want to get lost in other arguments about whether laws are impractical, inoperable or unenforceable. We don’t, (or shouldn’t), shy away from creating laws because they will upset someone or be difficult to enforce. We create them because we have a notion that they will contribute to the common good somehow: they will have a net benefit to society, enhancing fairness, equality, justice or some other quality we consider desirable – (and yes, I know not all laws are created for these reasons).

So let’s fast forward then to the point where a law banning the wearing of the burqa in public is on the statute book in an EU country, and a test case is placed before the Strasbourg court for consideration. Of the EU countries, Belgium is the one furthest along the road to imposing an outright ban, with France following close behind.

Let us suppose that the respondent brings a case under article 9 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms - as follows.

Article 9 – Freedom of thought, conscience and religion

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.

2. Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Article 9 then, enshrines the absolute right to hold a belief 9(1), and the qualified right to manifest that belief 9(2). The court will then have to consider whether there is justification under 9(2) for limiting or interfering with a muslim womans choice to manifest her belief by wearing a burqa.

And let us not get side tracked into considerations of a particular woman, in a particular place such as a university, a bank, an airport, a government office, a hospital, a place of employment or some other institution where limitations of freedom under 9(2) are justified for more or less obvious reasons and will be upheld by Strasbourg. We are talking of a woman in a public space and considering in 9(2) where and why a limitation on her freedom to so dress may be justified in law. Remember, for the time being anyway, to set aside such arguments as: because I don’t like it, because it makes me feel uncomfortable, because the women is being oppressed. All those things may be true but they are not relevant here. The French government is bound (as are we) by this convention and must therefore get any law they choose to adopt through the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) where a challenge is bound to end up.

The appellants case must turn then on one or a combination of the following from 9(2): the interests of public safety, the protection of public order, health or morals, the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. The EHCR will, presumably, concern itself with whether or not the respondants Convention rights have been violated, and if so, will put the reasoning put forward under 9(2) under intense scrutiny. Would the court consider it a proportionate response to the problems being addressed, or, as Poole sugests - (Of Headscarves and Heresies, 2005, p691-695) - "a recipe for judicialisation on an unprecedented scale." I think he is wrong and is placing too much emphasis on the ‘slippery slope’ argument.

Here again, we might get side tracked into arguing that since Islam itself denies the freedoms outlined in 9(1) it would be somewhat hypocritical of it to then rely upon its protections. Or we might point out that it is all very well protecting the rights and freedoms of others, but what about protection for the rights and freedoms of the poor women compelled to wear a burqa? One might take the view that the wearing of such garb symbolises an aggressive challenge to laïcité, promotes parallel communities in society. living alongside but not with each other, and profoundly hinders social cohesion and integration within those communities. We might argue that a ban on the burqa and niqab will worsen the plight of women and make them prisoners in their own homes. We should explore all of these avenues of course but I am still going to stick with law here.

I think a respondents claim of article 9 violation will fall, not at 9(1), where interference may well be granted, but at 9(2) based on precedence (see Sahin v Turkey (2005) 41 EHRR 8). Here the European Court said:

"The Court observes that the role of the Convention machinery is essentially subsidiary. As is well established by its case law, the national authorities are in principle better placed than an international court to evaluate local needs and conditions. It is for the national authorities to make the initial assessment of the 'necessity' for an interference, as regards both the legislative framework and the particular measure of implementation...

Where questions concerning the relationship between state and religions are at stake, on which opinion in a democratic society may reasonably differ widely, the role of the national decision-making body must be given special importance. In such cases it is necessary to have regard to the fair balance that must be struck between the various interests at stake: the rights and freedoms of others, avoiding civil unrest, the demands of public order and pluralism.

A margin of appreciation is particularly appropriate when it comes to the regulation by the Contracting States of the wearing of religious symbols in teaching institutions, since rules on the subject vary from one country to another, depending on national traditions, and there is no uniform European conception of the requirements of 'the protection of the rights of others' and of 'public order'."

Although this case related to a headscarf prohibition in an educational establishment it went on to say that the "Turkish Constitutional Court was entitled to consider the headscarf prohibition necessary to safeguard the principle of secularism which guaranteed freedom of individual conscience, equality before the law, protection from external pressures and the rights of women." And it is difficult to see why this principle of safeguarding the principles of secularism should be not be applied to the wider society.

I used to hold the view that it was no business of the state what one wore in the public arena. I now think there may be justification for a limitation on freedom to wear partial or full face coverings on the principle that everyone should be identifiable in public and that Strasbourg might well be minded to uphold this on grounds of public safety and security. We shall have to wait and see. It depends on how the law is drafted.

Is it a minor opression to counter a major opression.? Probably.

Are there suitable dress alternatives for muslim women that fulfill the requirements of Islamic dress code without partial or full face coverings? Certainly, many.

Will political Islam scream discrimination from the rooftops? Certainly.

Will there be worse than that? Possibly.

Will the outcome in the end bring a net benefit to society? I don’t know.

Perhaps it is just that I am in no mood at the moment to compromise with a culture that enshrines the brutal suppression of womens human rights and freedoms and hands out barbaric degrading, and inhuman punishments to women on a daily basis.

Seeking Forgiveness & Declaring All Out War

2010-08-23T16:44:00.003Z

So why did we lose half a dozen chikkins?

The short answer is we are numpty amateurs at poultry keeping and not sufficiently alert to pest and disease hazards: specifically those from red mite infestation and coccidiosis infection, and even more specifically from a combination of the two things.

Yes, we knew there were red mite in the hen house but assumed wrongly, that it was sufficiently under control; it wasn't.

The red mite (actually grey until they have drunk blood), are smaller than a pin head and inhabit the nooks and crannies in the timbers, particularly at perch ends, and come out at night to suck the blood of the roosting hens. This weakens the birds, making them anaemic and (more) vulnerable to other infections.

Which brings us to coccidiosis: a single celled protozoan gut parasite, endemic in all poultry but, under normal conditions, and in otherwise healthy birds, will not cause them undue harm. In birds weakened by red mite infestation, it can however, be fatal.

Thus, at clodhoppers, we seek the forgiveness of Capt Mannering and Black Adder and the other fine birds we have so carelessly lost, while at the same time, declaring all out war on red mite and coccidiosis.

The battle commenced with an attack on all fronts: a thorough cleanout and disinfection of the henhouse with Jeyes fluid. Then a full frontal assault on red mite with a blowtorch - the heat penetrating the nooks and crannies and killing them - (to be done with care obviously: it's a wooden hut). Then an attack with WMD (aka chemical warfare) with mite kill spray, and a dusting of the birds feathers with red mite powder.

Concurrently, the coccidiosis infection was treated by mixing a sulfonomide powder into the birds drinking water which they drank for 3 days followed by 3 days clear water and then another 3 days on treated water.

Rapid improvement in the flocks health, appetite and production quickly followed.

While this strategy has been effective for the acute phase, we are about to try a tactic (new to us), for the long term control, maybe even eradication of, red mite.

This involves the use of diatomaceous earth (aka diatomite or kieselgur) which is made from the fossilised remains of a type of hard shelled algae crushed to a fine white powder (particle size 10 to 200 microns) which, to us, feels like talcum powder, but to red mite is razor sharp and lacerates their waxy exoskeleton and absorbs all their fluids & lipids, dehydrating them to death.

See? I have no mercy now.

It is harmless to the birds and can even be given in their feed to destroy internal parasites.

All this should get us well back on top of the situation. I still feel bad though, and I'm going to kick myself round the block a few times and never evva evva, go away on holiday, evva, again. Not EVVA.

Ratzi Taxi

2010-08-20T22:38:00.003Z

Dear Papa Benedict

Can't wait. Only a month to go now!

We're thrilled you're bringing the popemobile with you, but don't forget to get it taxed, tested and insured: very important that, and do watch out for our traffic wardens, they can be demons you know.

I know the cost of your visit is soaring to over £50 million, but don't let that bother you: there are plenty of ner-do-wells and protestants we can get that off. Besides, Mrs Clod sais she can supply any amount of wet fish if that will help cut costs ,and she is sure you will enjoy a good kedgeree for breakfast.

Anyway, it will be worth it just so you can give Harriet Harman a good talking to: God knows she needs it! Just ask him! All that nonsense about equality and not allowing Catholics to discriminate. What IS she thinking of?

There may be one or two other recalcitrants protesting your visit: probably spurred on by that disreputable primate inter pares Mr R Dawkins. Don't worry Jo, our security chaps are more than up to dealing with that sort of riff-raff.

Besides, most of them are harmless and will only be carrying placards saying 'Less Of That Sort of Thing'. Goodness only knows to what they refer.

Some misguided individuals are even harping on and on about the importance of seperating church and state. Thank goodness you are coming to put them to rights. We've never fallen for any of that nonsense and, with your divinely guided assistance, I trust we never will.

Mrs Clod sais she notices your state is only 0.44 square kilometers, and she hopes you can make it bigger one day. Me too.

Anyway, we'll all be rooting for you in Westminster Hall. Give 'em hell Jo..... Oh!

Yours

Clod

PS - Here's a pound for the parking meter. Just don't leave it in Liverpool.

peachy

2010-08-12T14:20:00.002Z

Tis all very going off on holiday but there is always a jungle when you get back.

At least the greenhouse if full of lovely grapes, peaches and tomatoes.

Oh, and the chikkins have coccidiosis, but that's another story for another day.

General Petanque de Plantagenets et Madame de Camping Oye Plage Formidable

2010-08-10T10:20:00.007Z

I'm no longer surprised that we have had so many wars with the French over the years. They are really terribly easy to start. As we drove into what looked like the parking area in front of the accueil at the campsite we were given the hairy eyeball treatment by a squadron of elderly French gentlemen with silver balls.

How were we supposed to know it was a boules pit?

A boules pit with one of the most important and serious games of boules ever played anywhere, ever, in progress. It didn't help when I gaily said "Bonjour, je suis General Petanque de Plantagenets." Should've just backed the car up quickly really.

Anyway, the accueil is firmly ferme but there is a button to push. There is nearly always a button to push. So you push the button as you do and wait dix minuites for a response which arrives with a surly 'Oui?' 'Ah Bonjour madame, je cherche pour un place pour camping pour un nuit seulment, c'est possible?' Nobody would've understood the reply. Not even a native French speaker. "I think we have to wait, do you think she said we have to wait?"

We wait. The old men are still eyeballing us and muttering. I think they think that we have plantagenet electro-magnets installed behind the headlights and are switching them on and off to ruin their game.

We wait more. I decide to go off and see if there are any places left, it looks pretty full. [translation] - man runs off in abject fear of facing Madame de Camping Oye Plage Formidable, leaving better, (at French), other half to do the bargaining.

I wander off pondering how the game came to be and why it is taken so seriously. It occurs to me that during a thirty years war or a hundred years war, or one of the (how many?) other wars, there is bound to be a certain amount of sitting around in abject boredom with sod all to do before the next bloodbath commences. One can only engage in so much cannon polishing.

One such day, an unknown soldier (let us call him Henri), will have idly tossed a cannonball a distance and said to his mate 'Je bet you can't hit that mon ami'. 'Bof,' sais mon ami, spitting out his last Gouloise, 'pas problem'. 'Vous missed mate,' chuckles Henri, 'prochain!' And so it begins.

I think it best not to tell them we are of the House of Lancaster whence came Henry IV, V, and VI who I think all gave the French some right royal kickings at one time or another in our glorious history.

I wander the site and come across the piscine and contemplate whether I am fit to be seen in speedos. Then I remember, with not a little relief, that I don't have speedos, only a pair of shorts - and I probably won't be allowed in with those. Clodlet will be pleased though. Opposite the piscine is a nice little plot, plot 150, with some shade and nice fresh looking grass. Perfect.

I rush back to the accueil to give the good news but am passed by a golf buggy driven by Madame de Camping Oye Plage Formidable with Clodlet riding shotgun and beaming. I am beckoned to follow. Madame Le Golf Buggy drives us to a burnt out desert of a pitch on the main path opposite the toilet block. It has at least six bits of grass left that might be living. Everything else, 'desole monsieur', is booked.

I walk back to the car and crank up the electro magnets behind the headlights.

canadian poppy

2010-06-21T12:10:00.001Z

A Canadian poppy in full sun. At night, they curl up and hug themselves to sleep.

We all have to do that occasionally.

Gryffydd ap Adda ap Dafydd

2010-06-21T11:55:00.002Z

The world famous Welsh poet Gryffydd ap Adda ap Dafydd described maypole dancing in a poem written in the mid-14th century. Its origins are not really known but the clodlet seems happy enuf to keep the tradition alive despite our being incapable of providing him with trousers that fit.

Putting all the woopity woo infested mythology and symbolism aside for a moment, I actually find maypole dancing very aesthetically pleasing to watch - unlike Morris dancing which should be outlawed forthwith.

this much I know

2010-06-12T16:09:00.002Z

Someone is biting their nails...and it isn't Pan.

(pic by keiran)

mamaduck

2010-06-12T15:34:00.003Z

Early morning drink for mamaduck and the little ones. They are big enough to be let out in the daytime now without getting into too much mischief. There are four ducklings with mama; the one with the hen sadly didn't make it.
(pic by Keiran)

Toot Toot

2010-06-11T20:14:00.004Z

At the end of the line at Boot, the engines go onto a turntable and are turned round by hand for the return trip. How clodlet bamboozled his way into the cab and got to drive it is quite beyond me - and probably against every rule in the book. Still, not every boy gets to fulfill the ambition to blow the whistle on a steam train and drive it to boot.

Fair play.

L'al Ratty

2010-06-11T20:03:00.004Z

The narrow gauge railway between Ravenglass and Boot. Eight miles of beautiful wooded valley and Lake District hills plied by half a dozen steam trains and, in this picture, the diesel train that does the first and last trips of the day along the line.

Certain Canuks look to have sent a thinly disguised Arthurian guardian to watch over us and grandma gravy and cousin El. He did a good job.

Bird in Boot

2010-06-10T15:35:00.004Z

Been trying to process the feelings from being so close to the murderous Derrick Bird when he went on his killing spree in Cumbria. Not finding it that easy. We were on a campsite near Boot when he shot someone just down the road and someone on the next campsite. I don't think they were fatalities though. Mostly I felt angry at the time and think I would (probably stupidly) have tried to take him out if he had come anywhere near us. Now I just mostly feel sad, but I've stopped twitching at the sound of helicopters and police sirens at least. We will never know why, though the question keeps rolling round my head. Killing for a motive I can at least partly grok. Killing in the way he did, at random, anyone he came across, just bewilders me. I simply do not believe the characterisations of 'a happy go lucky chap', a 'caring family man.' I do not believe that smile, I don't even think it is one.

PS - normal service will resume asap.

new life

2010-05-24T09:09:00.002Z

Chicks hatched yesterday and some last night: this one all fluffed up and ready for the party, the others still wet and wriggly and staying warm under mum's feathers. Won't disturb her till they've dried and fluffed out a bit.

flutes & co

2010-05-23T09:48:00.005Z

Cartmel Priory last night.

The flute quoir played the best I've ever heard them: dynamic, fluid, accurate and passionate: playing a set of compositions both full of fun and playfulness while at the same time evoking a range of emotional response from joy to great sadness to sheer delight with the range, depth and beauty of tones produced. Just lovely. Awesome in fact - and that is never a word I use lightly. Well done you lot! So young too, most of em :-)

I do however think that my Cathy should not be encouraged to use the contra bass flute to remove unsightly earwax.

I tried to play it and achieved considerable success, even on the low notes, though you need an air compressor up your ass to maintain the note. I don't know how she does it.

I'm looking forward to playing Bohemian Rhapsody with them though I've no idea how I will emulate the sound Brian May gets out of his 'red special' guitar for the solo part.

everybody take offence day

2010-05-21T12:23:00.005Z

Here is a picture of the prophet Mohammed. Muslims think that it is sinful to portray the prophet in any way. They are up in arms about the group on Facebook called 'Everyone Draw Mohammed Day'. Pakistan has blocked Facebook and now the page has been withdrawn by admin.

Well, whatever the rights and wrongs of the page, this demonstrates once again that the right to freedom of speech can be curtailed by the assumed right not to take offence. There is no such right, and the taking of 'offence' assumes too passive a role whereas IMO people are all too ready to take offence, will go out of their way to take offence or will actively choose to do so if it suits their purposes.

Anyway, I blogged in some depth on the topic of Religion and Respect last year and would direct readers with any interest in the subject to go here.

PS: The picture also shows Jesus, Thor, Vishnu, Isis, Zeus, Kali, Ra and 38,000 other deities. Only the pure of heart will be able to see the images clearly.

activate the queen

2010-05-13T17:23:00.006Z

Strangers to these shores may have noticed that we had to 'Activate The Queen' the other night. Why?

Well no political party got a clear enough lead in the general election to be able to form a government so it wasn't clear who was going to be prime minister for a while.

The Queen, bless her, has lots of prerogatives, as well as corgis, and amongst them is the prerogative to invite someone to form a government.

I did say I was available, but she didn't ring me. We still had to 'activate' her though and it's not easy - she's getting on a bit so you need a bit of intravenous isoproterenol with an adenylyl cyclase activator and a bit of prothrombotic stimulus direct to the adrenoceptors.

None of that's trivial, but the hardest, (and probably most painful bit for her), is the removal of the control rods from the regal inhibitors - she takes this very well on the whole and puts a brave face on any discomfort involved; I'm sure Prince Charles would whinge like mad.

Anyway, she's seen off 12 prime ministers during her reign so we certainly didn't expect The Queen to Save the Gawd and neither did she. It would totally ruin the song.

Carl on Troubled Waters

2010-05-09T16:13:00.003Z

Is it clod, enjoying a moment of tranquil meditation? Nope, it's Carl Fuerman, and Carl is going to stop the hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico from the stricken Deepwater Horizon Rig.

He is going to do this through the power of meditation, believing that if enuf people visualise the closing of valves and the activation of the blowout preventer then the 200,000 gallons of oil a day spilling out into the Gulf will be shut off.

"I'm very known for fixing things and making things work," sais Carl, adding that he believes his meditation helped fix a friend's Flip video camera. "I visualize things working and hold the belief that they actually work."

Well, good luck with that one mate, but I think you've set the bar for your magical thinking a tad high on this occasion. Why not start off with a drippy tap and see how that goes? You just visualise the cracked washer disobeying all the known laws of physics and creating new material out of nothing and repairing itself. Should be a cinch. Let us know how you get on.

hang 'em high

2010-05-04T20:49:00.009Z

Well, the silly Labour woman that knocked on my door to harangue me about the 'two horse race' in our constituency got it all back to front didn't she? She forgot (as have several gov't ministers today apparantly), who works for who. Nah, forgot is too kind: I think they've grown used to the idea that we are there to serve them, not the other way around.

I hate to disillusion the poor lass, but you just had your job interview and I regret to say that on this occasion you have not got it.

What is a vote for anyway? Is it to vote for a bunch of people you don't believe in to stop the other bunch of people you don't believe in getting in? Or, is it, by Isis, to vote for something you actually do believe in? If you don't vote for something you do believe in, however will you ever get something you do believe in?

Ah well, they have what's coming coming, and I can't say I'm sorry about it. Hang 'em high.

Hogwash

2010-04-26T19:18:00.003Z

I just want to

live a little

in the sun

and scrat about

by moonbeam

in leaf litter

and compost heaps

and I will not

claim benefits

nor pester

the national

elf service

I will however

vote for

anyone who

can get me a

20 mile an hour

speed limit

on the statute book

thank you

and

goodnight

red rum?

2010-04-26T12:44:00.003Z

Someone from the labour party knocked and asked if I was voting for labour on May 6.

I told her I wasn't and she asked if I realised it was a two horse race.

I told her it wasn't really a good idea to have horses running the country. She looked a bit glum.

mon cherry

2010-04-25T12:03:00.001Z

The cherry tree, planted in early feb, in full bloom and looking really healthy.

Ponderosa

2010-04-25T10:48:00.005Z

Digging out.

No, it's not level. The ground slopes so not a lot I can do about it.

The liner looks excessive but it gets sucked into the pond as it fills. Better a bit too much than too little. Under the liner is some old carpet and visqueen to protect it.

Trimmed off the excess. The ducks just can't wait!

I need some thin slabs to cover the liner but it will always show a bit on the top side of the slope.

Happy Happy ducks!!!!!!

Memory Schtikk

2010-04-20T19:52:00.005Z

Today I have found something for which I was looking. I had forgotten it was on a memory stick, which is ironic really.

But then.....you know......male brain......

I am a bit upset that there is no portion of my brain identified as thinking about allotments or chikkins or religion or philosophy though. I do you know. Really.

BCA vs Singh

2010-04-15T12:49:00.004Z

The BCA have decided to drop the case: a very sensible course. The BCA should now lick its wounds and pay all Simon's legal costs and ponder very deeply upon how they should respond to such things in the future.

BCA V SIMON SINGH - PRESS STATEMENT – 15th APRIL 2010

Having carefully considered its position in the light of the judgment of the Court of Appeal (1st April 2010), the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) has decided to discontinue its libel action against Simon Singh.

As previously made clear, the BCA brought the claim because it considered that Simon Singh had made a serious allegation against its reputation, namely, that the BCA promoted treatments that it knew to be “bogus”. The Honourable Mr Justice Eady, the UK’s most experienced defamation judge, agreed with the BCA’s interpretation of the article and ruled that it made aserious factual allegation of dishonesty.

The Court of Appeal, in its recent judgment, has taken a very different view of the article. On its interpretation, the article did not make any factual allegation against the BCA at all; it was no more than an expression of ‘honest opinion’ by Simon Singh. While it still considers that the article was defamatory of the BCA, the decision provides Dr Singh with a defence such that the BCA has taken the view that it should withdraw to avoid further legal costs being incurred by either side.

As those who have followed the publicity surrounding this case will know, Simon Singh has said publicly that he had never intended to suggest that the BCA had been dishonest. The BCA accepts this statement, which goes some way to vindicating its position. The BCA takes seriously its duty and responsibilities to members and to chiropractic patients.

The BCA has considered seeking leave to take this matter to the Supreme Court and has been advised there are strong grounds for appeal against the Court of Appeal judgment. However, while it was right to bring this claim at the outset, the BCA now feels that the time is right for the matter to draw to a close.

-----------------------------------------------------
Yes indeedy. Time for you to take your complementary medicine with a large pinch of salt. And three hearty cheers to all the hard working bloggers that supported Simon throughout this campaign. Now, if you haven't already done so, head over and sign the petition for libel reform because Free Speech Is Not For Sale.

Rowan

2010-04-14T14:28:00.002Z

SWMBO piloting the narrow boat 'Rowan' through the deepest lock on the English canal system at Sowerby Bridge. Hope they don't open the doors too quickly!!!

Marred

2010-04-04T11:02:00.005Z

I like listening to Andrew Marr's show 'Start the Week' on a Monday morning. It kicks my [somewhat reluctant] brain into gear and gets the neurones firing. That, and several cups of tea.

Tomorrow morning, so I hear, Rowan Williams (The Archbish of Cantebury), will tell listeners that the catholic church has lost all credibility in the wake of the sex abuse scandals that currently beset them. Well, like his own church, they never really had any credibility in the first place. I think it is more that people, society, us, are rapidly losing our gullibility and willingness to take what these self appointed guardians of morality say at face value. And they keep digging themselves deeper and deeper into the mire with almost every response they make. The latest being the comments of the Pope's personal preacher [what is that? Is it like a personal trainer?] the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa preached the other day that the trauma and persecution faced by the catholic church at the moment is like that faced by the Jews during the holocaust. What, WHAT! Do you see catholics being herded into ghettos, stripped, forced into cattle trucks, sent to concentration camps, burnt, gassed, shot, used for medical experimentation? Do you see ANY violence towards catholics? Do you see anything other than a demand for them to accept responsibility, a demand for apology and compensation for the abused and justice for the abusers? And it wasn't the Jews that committed any crime was it? Unless it be that you (despite assertions to the contrary) still regard them guilty of deicide? Unless it be a crime just to be Jewish. Is that it? That he made such a monstrous comparison is beyond belief and very revealing of the institutional sickness that pervades the catholic church.

EDIT: And in todays news. The Popes preacher aplologises for comparing the churches suffering to the persecution of Jews. Rowan Williams apologises for saying the catholic church has lost all credibility. The Pope apologises for nothing. His senior cardinal (Angelo Sodano) conducting Easter Mass calls it all 'Petty Gossip'. He hasn't apologised for that yet...........sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorrysorrysorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorrysorrysorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry. Really?

The Fools The Fools

2010-04-01T15:10:00.004Z

YIP YIP! Simon said.

If alternatively he had said that Judge Eady was a donkey, it could be said that that would be a matter of verifiable fact (or not), by any appropriately qualified zoologist. On the other hand, he could have ended up in court for defamation of character with lawyers earning hundreds of thousands of pounds while arguing for 6 months over the metaphorical meaning of 'donkey'. As it happens, he did end up in court, charged with libelling the British Chiropracters Association by implying that their claims that a bit of a back rub could cure, well, almost anything really, was bogus and that there was 'not a jot of evidence' to support such claims. Today the Court of Appeal has passed down a judgement that it was fair comment and it's a damn fine day for freedom of speech - and a chill, miserable morning at work has turned into a bright sunny day and restored a little of whatever bit of faith I had left that there is some justice and common sense left in the law.

Congratulations Simon!! It's a grand day for all of us...and well done you Judges too. Good Job.

BCA - Look at the date and grow up.

The full decision is here.

Sushi QC

2010-03-19T19:59:00.001Z

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