The cat i' the adage

Get Bakri where you belong

2005-08-09T13:42:00.000+01:00

We thought we'd seen the last of difficult-to-love Islamist firebrand Omar Bakri Mohammed, but today he has announced that he will be coming back to Britain - unless the government says it does not want him back. In the mean time he's taking a holiday in Lebanon to see his mother.

I can't say that I much relished the prospect of his standing trial for treason - he'd probably be successfully defended by Cherie Blair. "Incitement to murder" is another matter. Why he has never been charged under this is a mystery to us all.

Should he return I very much doubt he would be left unmolested for fear of inflaming islamic opinion (though we are assured that he is is completely out on a limb there).

Appeasement takes many forms. Mark Steyn has been watching developments:

Responding to Islamist terrorism in Britain and elsewhere, Germany is considering introducing a Muslim public holiday. As Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, put it: "A substantial fraction of Germany's government - and, if polls are to be believed, the German people - believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists."

That should fix it. And only employers have to shoulder the cost.

Conservative spokesman understands the cause of the London bombings

2005-08-03T11:45:00.000+01:00

I return without apology to the remarks of the Shadow Attorney General, Dominic Grieve:

I have to say that I find the suicide bombings totally explicable in terms of the level of anger which many members of the Muslim community seem to have about a large number of things.

By the same token, I might say that I find the rise in hate crimes since the bombings totally explicable in terms of the level of anger in the non-Muslim community, if it did not sound as if I were condoning the violence.

I really do wonder if the Conservatives are any use at all any more.

Stop and search

2005-08-03T07:18:00.000+01:00

Sometimes The Telegraph is touching in its naivety. Here the leader writer is addressing the consequences of the police adopting a stop and search policy based on racial profiling in order to protect the public from terrorist attacks:

No sensible commuter, of Asian or African extraction, could possibly feel insulted by being singled out in this way. On the contrary, he should feel comforted by the thought that the police are not wasting their time on searching white grandmothers carrying shopping bags from Peter Jones.

I fear that we will discover that there are lots of commuters of Asian or African extraction who are not sensible at all, but they can hardly be blamed for their sensitivity given the way that the polically correct lobby have been sucking up to them. If the Conservative spokesman on home affairs really said, "I have to say that I find the suicide bombings totally explicable in terms of the level of anger which many members of the Muslim community seem to have about a large number of things" then the problem is even worse than I thought.

This can't be right

2005-08-02T08:22:00.000+01:00

In another excellent and challenging article, Mark Steyn comes out with this purported fact:

In 2001, after a Dutch crackdown on benefit fraud, 10,000 Somalis moved from Holland to one East Midlands town - Leicester.

This is an astonishing claim buried away near the bottom of the article. Could one midlands town with a population of about 280,000 really absorb 10,000 Somalis in one year? It beggars belief. Presumably it happened after the 2001 census, though the figures there show the required scale of the subsequent ethnic upheaval.

Great day in the war against islamist terror but still a lot to do

2005-07-29T18:19:00.000+01:00

The remaining three failed London bombers have been arrested and Pakistan has announced that all foreign students at the country's madrassas must return home.

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn reminds us of his earlier insight into the link between welfare dependency and terrorism:

‘If you’re looking for “root causes” for terrorism, European-sized welfare programmes are a good place to start. Maybe if they had to go out to work, they’d join the Daily Mirror and become the next John Pilger. Or maybe they’d open a drive-thru Halal Burger chain and make a fortune. Instead, Tony Blair pays Islamic fundamentalists in London to stay at home, fester and plot.’

The extreme left has chosen to blame Blair for the London terrorist attacks on the grounds that he has inflamed muslim feelings in this country because of the war in Iraq. I blame him too, to an extent, for very different reasons. In defiance of common sense and, presumably, in the interests of appeasing the large labour voting islamic community, he has allowed conditions to develop in this country which are greatly conducive to islamist terror. He has allowed into the country people who have no interest in being assimilated; in the case of asylum seekers, he has prevented their working and provided them with cash from the public purse; meanwhile he has done little to prosecute the clear incitement to murder which is commonplace in many of our mosques, and which has proved very attractive to disaffected, bored, young men with too much time on their hands.

I fear that for this country it may be too late to turn the tide. Maybe it was already too late on 9/11. However the last four years have been wasted when they could have been spent addressing the growing problems presented by the "enemy within".

Another victory for community relations

2005-07-28T07:37:00.000+01:00

The Telegraph gives us this farce:

To improve community relations, West Midlands police yesterday invited the "moderate" chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque to take part in a press conference called to discuss the dawn raids on terrorist suspects in the city.

Dr Mohammad Naseem used the platform to brand Tony Blair a "liar" and to denounce the security services. He disputed the notion that Muslims might in any way be responsible for the bombing campaign in London, suggesting that the men sought for last week's failed attacks were probably just innocent commuters, then adding, for good measure, that DNA science could not be trusted.

But, of course, the police are on record for claiming that islam and terrorism don't go together so we shouldn't be too surprised.

Say your prayers

2005-07-27T07:36:00.000+01:00

A strange argument for extending the amount of time that a suspect can be held without trial from the present 14 days:

Police commissioner Ian Blair ... explained that two weeks were insufficient to question terror suspects and follow up on leads that often take officers overseas. Investigations also take longer due to the need to crack computer codes and because some witnesses need time for prayer.

July 21 bombers: some facts emerge

2005-07-26T08:43:00.000+01:00

Some facts have been emerging about the men involved in the failed suicide bombings on July 21 in London.

(1) All four attended the notorious Finsbury Park mosque,
(2) Two were receiving benefits to rent a council flat,
(3) Both are "thought" to be asylum seekers.

These 3 facts suggest that islamist terrorism in the UK is not such an intractable problem as many would have us believe.

Very disturbing numbers

2005-07-23T08:18:00.000+01:00

YouGov's poll of muslim Britains reveals the scale of the alienation between substantial sections of islamic society and the country in which they have chosen to live.

There are some horrendous numbers here. 6% of muslims think that the 7/7 bomb attacks were "on balance justfied"; 24% sympathise to some extent with the bombers; 44% believe that any muslim brought to trial for involvement in the attacks will not receive a fair trial.

I wonder how these figures would compare with other countries, but I suspect that there is something peculiarly amiss in Britain.

And how are the muslim leaders responding in this time of unprecedented security threats originating from within the islamic section of society? Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council of Britain says following the Stockwell shooting that quite a lot of Muslims are "distressed about what may be a shoot-to-kill policy". Thanks for your support, pal. Dr Azzam Tamimi, from the Muslim Association of Britain, goes one better warning that the threat to Britain would continue as long as its forces remained in Iraq, which, on the assumption that he opposes that military action, sounds very much like an endorsement of the bombing campaign.

I am increasingly disposed to see "moderate" islam at the central problem here. It is far too islamic and not nearly moderate enough. It is too ready to tolerate views completely at odds with a civilised society while undermining reasonable attempts by the authorities to respond to security threats arising entirely from within their community.

UPDATE

Massoud Shadjareh, chairman the Islamic Human Rights Commission, has said:

We know this wasn't a one-off, we need to look at ways of addressing the underlying factors that created it. I feel it's urgent to start addressing these before there is further loss of life.

Perry de Havilland asks, in consequence: "Does a voice for 'moderate' Islam in Britain actually exist?".

UPDATE

Pete_London attempts an answer to that last question:

Does a voice for 'moderate' Islam in Britain actually exist?

Yes, and Tamimi is that voice. What are commonly thought of as 'moderate' muslims are extremely thin on the ground. As I said in an earlier thread, the moderate Sir Iqbal Sacranie thought nothing of snubbing an invite to attend the 60th anniversay of the liberation of Auschwitz.

I've known many muslims for many years and made a point of asking about Islam and the West, global affairs, Israel, terrorism etc. I haven't met one, not even the drinking, smoking, clean shaven, jeans wearing ones, who who doesn't make Michael Moore sound like the voice of reason. For years I've heard from the mouths of muslims that Islam is everything, that the future belongs to them, that Britain and the West is nothing.

The entire left, Blair, Livingstone, the Guardian, liberals, multiculties, the whole lot of the we must reach out to them crew are in dreamland. There are no truly moderate muslims to reach out to.

Which leads me to repeat that I have known several moderate people of muslim background, but, without exception, they have given up their religion.

"As British as a police warning for flying the union flag"

2005-07-22T10:48:00.000+01:00

Anthony Browne addresses the question why Britain is the only western country to have produced its own suicide bombers:

The real answer to why Britain spawned people fuelled with maniacal hate for their country is that Britain hates itself. In hating Britain, these British suicide bombers were as British as a police warning for flying the union flag.

The only thing we are licensed to be proud of is London’s internationalism — in other words, that there is little British left about it.

Self-loathing in a nation, like self-loathing in an individual, is alienating. Someone who despises himself inspires greater contempt than affection, and a country that hates itself cannot expect its newcomers to want to belong.

Britain is one of the few countries where it is a source of pride to despise your country. We are all repeatedly taught the things to be ashamed of about Britain, but what about the things to be proud of? The truth is that Britain’s self-loathing is as unique as it is unwarranted. Britain really is great. These small rainswept isles off the western end of the vast Eurasian landmass have contributed far more to the well-being of the rest of humanity than any other country, bar none.

None of this is the least profound. Rather, it is obvious but no less welcome for that. At present, I feel there is a chance of our waking up to the threatened annihilation of our culture, but whether this will be a sustained recovery or whether it will be stifled by multicultural pieties and institutional anti-racism is a matter for conjecture.

Second London bombs - police on the case

2005-07-22T06:19:00.000+01:00

What is it about the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair (no relation), that fails to inspire confidence?

This is what he had to offer after the failed terrorist attack yesterday:

The intention of the terrorists must have been to kill.

No kidding? And of the possible connection with the attacks two weeks previously:

There is a resonance here. There were four attacks and there were four attacks before.

Brilliant. I suppose it must take years of police work before you can spot patterns like this in the seemingly chaotic maelstrom of events.

Sir Ian's refusal, two weeks ago, to see a link between Islam and terrorism was brilliantly dissected by Charles Moore in the written edition of last week's Spectator:

It is rather as if he said that there was no link between Jamaicans and drug-dealing, or teenagers and binge-drinking. In all cases, most people in those categories would not be involved, and yet you could not begin to tackle such crimes unless you understood that some of them were and that this reflected something about the state of their culture.

Spot on.

On a personal note, I was travelling yesterday on the Northern Line through Oval a few minutes before the failed bombing there. These bastards must be rounded up.

British to blame for London bombs

2005-07-20T14:30:00.000+01:00

I've been away for a blissful couple of days in provincial France and I come back to this.

Not much surprise to hear the far left and islamofascists playing this tune, but what of sane, moderate opinion? What, for example does Sayeeda Warsi, the muslim vice-chair of the Conservative party, think? Oh dear.

"We must start engaging with, not agreeing with, the radical groups who we have said in the past are complete nutters," she said.

Only if it makes them easier to kill.

"We need to bring these groups into the fold of the democratic process. As long as we exclude them and don't hear them out, we will allow them to continue their hate.

Sayeeda, it is clear from what you say that you do not understand these people at all: they have no interest in the "democratic process". They want sharia law.

"It may not achieve results immediately, but it may stop the immediate violence."

If this becomes anything like Conservative policy, I, for one, shall be tearing up my membership card.

The establishment has no consistent response to islamic extremism, though, for heaven's sake, they've had long enough to work one out. As Rod Liddle points out in this week's Spectator, they continue to treat us as fools. I like this anecdote:

...incessant eulogies to the indefatigable London Spirit are not, by themselves, necessarily harmful. Inaccurate and stupid, perhaps, but they may just serve to give comfort and succour to those few of us not directly involved who have been, for one reason or another, truly traumatised. For the rest of us, we’re left with a vague sense of irritation and the suspicion that we are taken for fools who can be cheerfully patronised. This suspicion manifested itself shortly after the first bombs detonated on the Underground and the authorities informed us, on the radio and television, that the trouble had come from a ‘power surge’. ‘They’re having a laugh,’ my minicab driver said as we made our way across a deserted Waterloo Bridge at ten o’clock in the morning, the drizzle slowly falling over the city, police helicopters buzzing hither and thither. ‘It’s them fuckin’ Mozzies again, innit?’ Yes, of course — or three or four of them, at least.

At least we can still count on London cabbies for good sense.

This gets worse...

2005-07-15T17:20:00.000+01:00

Now it looks as if the bombmaker is a lecturer at Leeds University!

Good news from Gleneagles

2005-07-15T11:38:00.000+01:00

Philip Stott recalls a letter he wrote to The Telegraph:

In the UK, "global warming" is a faith. Here the "science" is legitimised by the myth. This is something that even our august Royal Society has failed to grasp. Too many of us believe we are making an independent scientific assessment, when, in reality, we have subsumed Hume-scepticism to the demands of faith.

With respect to the science of climate change, the most fundamental question remains: "Can humans manipulate climate predictably?" Or, more scientifically: "Will cutting carbon dioxide emissions at the margin produce a linear, predictable change in climate?" The answer is "No". In so complex a coupled, non-linear, chaotic system as climate, not doing something at the margins is as unpredictable as doing something. This is the cautious science; the rest is dogma.

But now he feels:

Luckily, the Green dogma has failed and common economic sense is beginning to prevail. Perhaps, quite unexpectedly, the Gleneagles Summit may prove to have been a turning point. In the words of an editorial in The Australian on 13 July (3): 'As the G8 Gleneagles summit proved, there is no consensus on how to combat global warming today or tomorrow but the bell now tolls on a decade of illusion.'

Hope he's right.

Feeding the hand that bites you

2005-07-15T09:05:00.000+01:00

Not only is Britain the home of choice for Islamic militants unwelcome in their own countries, but it now transpires that British tax-payers' money is being used to radicalise young muslims:

Behind the respectable front of a government-funded community centre, the two youngest suicide bombers are believed to have been radicalised by mentors whom they saw as father figures.

On the surface the project, an offshoot of the main Hamara community building, was doing outreach work with young men and women in the deprived area. But an official working elsewhere in the community, who did not want to be named, told the Guardian that he had reported the goings on at the youth centre to police after he became suspicious that it was a front for radicalising young men.

Liberal society sows the seeds of its own destruction if it tolerates the intolerant. Britain has gone one better in choosing to subsidise them. No wonder, we've moved up the Jihadists' table.

As British as a wet bank holiday...

2005-07-14T07:26:00.000+01:00

Good old Boris in cracking form:

I have already had enough about how perfectly normal these young men were, and what charming fellows they were, and how there was nothing they loved more than serving in dad's chip shop or helping an old lady across the street or a good game of cricket in the park.

"All he wanted to do was have a laugh," said one of the neighbours last night, about one of the sick quartet responsible for killing themselves and at least 52 others in London. "He was sound as a pound." Yeah, right. If these four young men were perfectly normal Yorkshiremen, then what the hell is happening to this country? Of all the shattering revelations of the past few days, the worst has been that these suicide bombers were British.

Then a question that I think Jorgen was getting at:

We seem to have pulled off the rare feat of breeding suicide bombers determined to attack the very society that incubated them; and the question is why. Why does America import its suicide bombers, while we produce our own?

Johnson's answer is that we have given up on our national symbols and culture:

The disaster is that we no longer make any real demands of loyalty upon those who are immigrants or the children of immigrants.

We have ... created a multi-cultural society that has many beauties and attractions, but in which too many Britons have absolutely no sense of allegiance to this country or its institutions. It is a cultural calamity that will take decades to reverse, and we must begin now with what I call in this morning's Spectator the re-Britannification of Britain.

In 1990 Norman Tebbit was making a similar point when he said:

"A large proportion of Britain's Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It's an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?"

How he was reviled! Note, by the way, that Wikipedia writes that "the problem, if there was one, has disappeared" which is remarkably shallow.

Fourth bomber identified

2005-07-13T21:37:00.000+01:00

Police seem to know the identity of the fourth London bomber.

Just a wild guess on my part. Call me clairvoyant if I get all this right, but something tells me it's a young muslim whose friends think he is devoutly religious. I know it doesn't sound at all plausible.

Bombers were muslims!

2005-07-13T07:13:00.000+01:00

Astonishing news. Islam may not be the problem, as the worthies in the British islamic community keep telling us, but the correlation between islam and incidents of this sort is rather striking and details like the following are very familiar and, I think, telling:

Friends said Shehzad Tanweer was a keen cricketer and "a good Muslim" and expressed disbelief that he could have been involved in England's worst terrorist attack.

Sounds like the "walking angel" again.

If this is a perversion of islamic teaching, it is up to those communities to root out the evil, and to do that they first have to recognise it. While they continue to see these fanatics as "good muslims" we will be justified in asking whether they are doing enough to prevent terrorist acts.

UPDATE

The Telegraph leader makes a similar point:

It is inconceivable that, as four young men became sufficiently radicalised that they were prepared to immolate themselves and others, no one around them noticed. Someone - in a home, a mosque, a study group - must have had a suspicion of where things might be heading.

I'm not sure that I entirely agree that it is "for reasons which may be quite unconnected with the Islamic faith" that "Muslim communities harbour homicidal individuals who are committed to the destruction of the western way of life", but I'm prepared to go along with a certain amount of what Mark Steyn calls "multiculti pieties" if that is the price to pay to make those communities act to extirpate the poison that they have allowed fester.

UPDATE 2

The Belmont Club makes the point thus:

Although the public is being asked to oppose any "backlash against the Muslim community" one of the nagging questions will be how people in the 22-year old age range could have created a bomb factory and planned a suicide attack from this "run-down, mixed-race area dotted with red brick terraced houses" without anybody noticing, especially since the bomb factory may have been "near the Leeds Grand Mosque". As a rule, people don't go from being totally innocent and unmotivated persons to being committed suicide bombers armed with high explosives without passing through any intermediate stages.

US troops told to avoid London

2005-07-12T07:48:00.000+01:00

Of course, we shouldn't want them in harm's way.

Thousands of US military personnel based in the UK have been banned by commanders from travelling to London in the wake of Thursday's bomb attacks.

"We are concerned about the safety of our folks and are trying to do what we can to protect them," RAF Mildenhall spokesman Matt Tulis said.

We have been assured that the American people stand with us, but not, it appears, when we are waiting at bus stops in Piccadilly.

"Islam and terrorism don't go together"

2005-07-09T07:33:00.000+01:00

The most inane comments on 7/7 courtesy of the spokesman for the Metropolitan police, Brian Paddick.

Read Charles Moore's withering assessment:

It is true that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, or involved in terrorism, and this needs to be said strongly if people assert otherwise. But if the Metropolitan Police really believe what Brian Paddick says, if they really, truly think that the words "Islam" and "terrorism" must not be linked, then we have little hope of catching the killers, of understanding how the terrorism works, or of preventing new atrocities.

Islamic terrorism must be seen for what it is, and must be confronted within Islamic communities. If the desire not to give offence to racial minorities is to take precedence over the will to root out this evil, then our liberal values will be fatally undermined. And if the police cannot see this, then they become part of the problem.

War in Iraq, bombs in London

2005-07-08T10:19:00.000+01:00

I find it difficult to disagree with the Sun when it calls George Galloway “a disgusting slimeball” for his claim that “Londoners have paid the price” for Tony Blair’s policy on Iraq and Afghanistan, but there is a more modest and insidious form of the link between the war in Iraq and yesterday’s tragic events in London. The Guardian puts it thus:

Robin Cook, elsewhere on these pages, will speak for many when he writes: "President Bush is given to justifying the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that by fighting terrorism abroad it protects the west from having to fight terrorists at home. Whatever else can be said in defence of the war in Iraq today, it cannot be claimed that it has protected us from terrorism on our soil."

There appears to be something in this. It is very probable that Britain has raised itself higher on the list of terrorist targets as a result of our engagement in the war on terrorism, but, rather than seeing this as a failure of policy, I regard it as a source of great pride. As usual Britain has been tackling evil while other nations, equally at threat in the long term, have advocated or practised appeasement. To paraphrase Churchill, they have been feeding the crocodile in the hope that it will eat them last.

In judging whether our country is made more or less secure as a result of our military intervention in the Middle East we should take a longer view. Islamic extremism must be extirpated. In the short term it may be inflamed by our engaging with it but we shall need to do this in order to defeat it. There is no accommodation that we can make with militant Islam that would not surrender our essential freedoms. This is the thought to have clearly in mind as we reflect on yesterday’s slaughter.

UPDATE

Christopher Hitchens in today's Mirror:

I know perfectly well there are people thinking, and even saying, that Tony Blair brought this upon us by his alliance with George Bush.

A word of advice to them: try and keep it down, will you? Or wait at least until the funerals are over. And beware of the non-sequitur: you can be as opposed to the Iraq operation as much as you like, but you can't get from that "grievance" to the detonating of explosives at rush hour on London buses and tubes.

London's Olympic victory

2005-07-06T16:33:00.000+01:00

After Chirac's pathetic anti-British attacks it would be hard not to take pleasure at the defeat of Paris's Olympic bid, though a New York victory would certainly have been preferable.

Over at the Telegraph views are mixed:

The Olympics, ancient and modern, have always been about peace (and some hypocrisy). Therefore it seems strange to assign the 2012 Games to the capital of a country at war. Rev Göran Koch-Swahne, Stockholm, Sweden.

I shall assume the Rev. Koch-Sucker's point is lost in translation. If he has any education he cannot imagine that ancient Greece was a particularly peaceful place. He cannot be unaware that in more modern times the Olympic committee was quite happy to award the games to Nazi Germany. Perhaps he believes that the games should only be held in countries which are active in appeasing genocidal dictators. This would explain his disappointment at Paris's failure.

A Popperian challenge to climate scientists

2005-07-05T12:13:00.000+01:00

We're close to reaching the point in the summer when predictions of the hottest heat wave in a thousand years will give way to solemn assertions that, thanks to global warming, we must expect more cold and wet weather of the type that we have been experiencing at this time of year. This ability effortlessly to absorb apparently refractory experience is what is so troubling about the scientific credentials of theories of man-made climate change.

Most people who have reflected on the nature of enquiry have come to accept the value of Popper's criterion that for a hypothesis to qualify as scientific - as opposed to non-scientific, pseudo-scientific, religious or metaphysical - it must be capable of refutation. A scientific hypothesis should not be consistent with any conceivable empirical outcome: it should rule out certain phenomena, so that, if those phenomena are observed, the hypothesis itself can be ruled out. Furthermore, the scientific attitude consists of exposing hypotheses to potential refutation, rather than nursing them in the face of anomalous experience or bolstering them with more and more confirming evidence.

When Einstein said that he would abandon the General Theory of Relativity if the bending of starlight round the sun - as implied by his theory - was not observed during a solar eclipse, he was setting an example that climate scientists appear reluctant to follow. If they seemed more open to the fallibility of scientific enquiry, if they were prepared to identify the empirical circumstances that would lead them to reject their favoured hypotheses, I would take them - and anthropogenic global warming - seriously. In the mean time I shall continue to regard them as "mission-oriented" shills of the environmentalist religion.

Not the way to win the British over to the European ideal

2005-07-05T09:02:00.000+01:00

Putin and Schroder sit back sniggering while Chirac cracks feeble anti-British jokes. This would be a demeaning scene even if the individuals concerned were not the political leaders of the three fastest fading global powers. We would reprimand our schoolchildren for such puerile chauvinistic name-calling.

The French, I concede, are in a position to disparage British cuisine but I hardly think we need lessons on cooking from the Russians or the Germans for that matter. As for M Chirac, he is sorely testing my Francophilia. Were it not for the fact that the French sensibly hold him in deep loathing, I might be tempted to put off my planned gastronomic tour of Alsace.

Aid and poverty

2005-07-03T18:22:00.000+01:00

The Globalisation Institute reports on research that links aid to economic failure:

On the eve of the G8 summit, a report published by the Globalization Institute shows that that for every 1% increase in development aid received by a developing country, there is a 3.65% drop in real GDP growth per capita.

Concerning Live8, my feeling is that if people are prepared to spend their own money making things worse in Africa that's up to them; but if they want to spend other people's money to prop up the continent's kleptocracies they invite our lasting contempt.

Find oot aboot whit the Scottish Pairlament

2005-06-30T13:53:00.000+01:00

The Scottish Parliament is making strenuous efforts to get its message across; not just in English but in Scots:

We want tae mak siccar that as mony folk as can is able tae find oot aboot whit the Scottish Pairlament dis and whit wey it warks.

Furthermore:

You are walcome tae visit the Pairlament tae hae a keek roon or find oot aboot whit wey the Pairlament warks.

I certainly shouldn't want to get into a dispute about whether, properly speaking, Scots is a language at all: I'm sure these are very deep waters. But, if language it is, it's the only one that you can translate into English with the help of a spell-checker.

Fish off the menu in aquarium?

2005-06-29T12:25:00.000+01:00

More vegetarian lunacy:

LOS ANGELES - An animal rights group has called on one of the largest aquariums in the United States to stop serving fish to its visitors, likening the practice to grilling up "poodle burgers at a dog show."

Perhaps we should call upon botanical gardens to stop serving vegetables to their visitors on the same grounds.

Our survival as a nation

2005-06-29T07:46:00.000+01:00

John Keegan reflects on Trafalgar.

Charity begins at home. This week's events at Portsmouth should remind the British people that our future and our survival as a nation do not depend upon winning the approval of moribund pop stars and unthinking television producers but on our ability, with the assistance of our allies, to defend ourselves.

Dead Mann walking?

2005-06-27T17:00:00.000+01:00

There has been a significant development in the controversy over the Mann "Hockey Stick" graph and its role in the IPCC report on climate change. The US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee is demanding from Mann and his team disclosure of code used to generate their results and detailed answers to some searching methodological questions. This follows the devastating critique by McIntyre and McKitrick, and Mann's subsequent unwillingness to lay his work open to proper audit.

This gives a flavour of the letter from the Committee:

5. According to The Wall Street Journal, you have declined to release the exact computer code you used to generate your results. (a) Is this correct? (b) What policy on sharing research and methods do you follow? (c) What is the source of that policy? (d) Provide this exact computer code used to generate your results.

Over at McIntyre's ClimateAudit site there is feverish speculation that the end is in sight for the Hockey Stick and the highly contentious claim that the 1990s were the hottest decade of the millennium.

Poll finds many Britons believe global warming myths

2005-06-27T12:44:00.000+01:00

The Observer has been polling people about climate change.

The striking results of an Observer /ICM poll show that people are starting to realise that flying across Europe, often for less than £20, is damaging the environment.

The poll also shows that more than three-quarters of the population believe climate change is taking place and that humanity is to blame. A total of 58 per cent said they thought climate change now posed a significant threat.

Meanwhile in the US:

An American Cancer Society survey finds up to half of Americans mistakenly believe surgery can spread cancer, and more than one in four thinks a cure for cancer already exists but is being held back by a profit-driven industry.

What a lot of silly things people believe!

Climate change - the case for inaction

2005-06-21T15:15:00.000+01:00

Pat Michaels makes the case for inaction in the face of climate change:

The Bush Administration realizes that simply knowing that human activities are impacting the climate is not grounds for "urgent action" to do something about it. Especially given that the overwhelming majority of these human activities have made the world a better place and one capable of supporting a growing human population that now tops 6.5 billion people. A prudent person, or Administration, would think long and hard about scaling down such activities without compelling evidence that the results of not doing so will prove more detrimental than the active pursuit of their curtailment.

The precautionary principle cannot justify the taking of action that is probably unwarranted, hugely costly and certain to make almost no measurable difference to the climatic outcome.

Now if we really did want to make a difference perhaps we should adopt Roy Spencer's programme.

Islamic taxi drivers

2005-06-18T10:59:00.000+01:00

This may be an urban myth but it has the ring of truth:

An old lady called a taxi to take her home from shopping at Waitrose in Brighton. When the taxi arrived, the driver refused to carry her shopping bags because they contained bottles of alcohol and he was a Muslim.

If, the next time she wanted help with her shopping, she asked for a non-Islamic taxi driver, people would think she was the problem. Though it does seem to me that, if your religion is so important to you that you need to make a fuss about carrying someone's shopping bags because of their contents, then you ought to be prepared to put up with the inconvenience caused by your intolerance yourself rather than passing it on to the customer. A taxi company should be at liberty to discriminate in favour of drivers who have no hang-ups about people's shopping. And should they not be prepared to do so, the customer would have a very good reason for preferring a different taxi firm.

Environmentalists angry

2005-06-17T08:47:00.000+01:00

It quite cheers one up despite the awful summer weather.

A leaked copy of a document on climate change being drafted for the G8 summit suggests it has been watered down.

A version of the communique leaked in May treated climate change as a fact and pledged money to energy projects.

In the new version the words "our world is warming" appear in square brackets, meaning at least one country disagrees, and all financial pledges have gone.

Of course, the issue is less whether "our world is warming" and more (1) whether we are responsible for any warming, (2) whether this warming is, on balance, a bad thing and (3) whether, if it is bad, we can do much to stop it.

Environmentalist lobbyists like to portray global warming sceptics as flat-earthers in the pay of the oil industry. People may have all kinds of reasons beyond the scientific evidence for doubting the climate change orthodoxy, just as they may have all kinds of reasons for believing it - e.g. grants, membership of powerful committees, shares in alternative energy sources - but it strikes me as as betraying an ignorance of the history of science and of the fallibility of scientific enquiry to suggest that somehow the science is "settled" in this matter.

There have been many occasions in the past when a theory has been thought "settled" - Newtonian mechanics and the wave theory of light spring to mind - but this has always proved illusory. Science will always be, to quote Popper, an "unended quest" for truth.

In the case of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, there are already too many contrary indications - especially the lack of tropospheric and antarctic warming - to justify its proponents much confidence in its long-term survival. Furthermore, their attitude to these anomalies is rather too reminiscent of the Catholic Church's tenacious defence of the geocentric hypothesis against the arguments of Galileo, for them to be able to claim to be on the side of science against the obscurantists.

A small voice in the clamour

2005-06-07T13:18:00.000+01:00

Is climate changing? Yes, of course it is. That is what climate does. I learned that at school. Do humans influence climate change? Yes, of course they do, but in many different ways, most little understood, and only as one small factor out of the millions of other factors involved. I learned that at big school. Can we humans manage climate predictably by fiddling at the margins with just one selected human factor out of the many human factors involved - not to mention, of course, the millions of non-human factors?'NON', 'NEE', 'NO'
.

Thanks to Philip Stott

Back the bid...

2005-06-07T09:46:00.000+01:00

...the Paris bid, that is, of course...

Seems like the French have got the same idea.

LDL Cholesterol does NOT cause heart disease

2005-06-07T08:56:00.000+01:00

A brilliant polemical piece with a recent summary of the evidence by Anthony Colpo:

LDL cholesterol does not cause heart disease.

The above statement runs counter to everything your doctor, the media, and allegedly 'respectable' and 'impartial' health organizations have ever told you.

Nonetheless, it's true.

It's no big secret that, throughout history, those in power--and the network of individuals who rely on these powerbrokers for their livelihood--have often lied and misled the general public in order to preserve the status quo.

Our time is no different.

For the last four decades, the medical establishment has been successfully operating one of the biggest health scams of all time. Through the use of extensive propaganda, they have convinced millions of people the world over that cholesterol, especially LDL cholesterol, is a direct cause of heart disease. They have further convinced millions that the key to avoiding heart disease is to reduce cholesterol levels via the use of lipid-lowering drugs and diets low in saturated fats. This racket has produced billions in profits for drug companies and the manufacturers of low-fat food products.

Now read on...

Towards the New Europe

2005-06-04T12:26:00.000+01:00

Charles Moore has some interesting thoughts concerning the European crisis:

It reminds me of the spring of 1992, when people began to realise that the pound's fixed minimum value against the deutschmark of 2.7780 was a doctrine of officialdom, not a fact. In September of that year, the pound fell out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism and floated free. Since then, the reputation of the Conservative Party has never recovered, and our economy has never looked back.

I do not know whether the euro zone will break up (though I wouldn't mind taking a small bet that it has less than 18 months to go in its present form), but Stern's advice interests me for the same reason as the results of the Dutch and French referendums. They are all symptoms of that exciting moment in politics when reality starts to intrude upon the lives of statesmen.

This is part of the fun of following politics: the relation to reality is generally delayed, but is always there in the end. Unreal schemes often appear and even dominate for a time - fascism, Communism, the League of Nations are examples. But the truth eventually finds them out. I am sure that the "ever-closer Union" on which the European Union has been built from the beginning is one of these unreal schemes, since it believes in two falsities - uniformity where in fact there is diversity, and the primacy of government over people. The two main instruments by which truth reaches politics are votes and markets, which is why political Utopians instinctively dislike both. In Europe, the voters have told the truth, and now the markets are watching.

And Old Europe is fearful for the future. Der Spiegel offers this opinion:

“If the Franco-German couple breaks up, Great Britain will be handed Europe on a platter.”

I'm not sure that we want it. I'd settle for having my own country back.

Too small a minority for constitutional change?

2005-06-02T07:41:00.000+01:00

Mark Steyn on arrogant Eurocracy:

Most advanced societies are reluctant to make big constitutional changes on too small a majority — look at the level of support you need to amend the U.S. Constitution or to abolish the Australian and Canadian monarchies. But, in its own perverse wrinkle on this thesis, Europe says gravely that it won’t make big constitutional changes on too small a minority — if the French had rejected the constitution by, say, 92% to 8%, well, that might have prompted the E.U. to consider possibly perhaps at least partially rethinking clause 473 paragraph H.

The choice is obvious

2005-06-01T18:10:00.000+01:00

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende attempts to rally support for a "Ja":

"The question is: do we want to have progress today or do we choose a standstill, and for me the choice is obvious."

Should we move forward or would it be better to stand still? It very much depends where we're headed, I should have thought. If you were moving at speed in the direction of a brick wall, you might very well prefer the standstill option. That is why cars are fitted with brakes. It has been clear for many years that the people of Europe can have no influence on the direction of EU movement, but, mercifully, we can still hit the brakes.

"Fair trade" or "Free trade"?

2005-06-01T17:28:00.000+01:00

I came across this very clear exposition of the case against "Fair trade" in the comments section at Samizdata.

Suppose you buy Fair Trade marked coffee, with the idea that you wish to help the producers. Currently, around 25% of Fair Trade coffee is from Mexico. So, there's a good chance you've helped out a poor Mexican coffee farmer. Well done.

However, it's essential to also look at what else you could have bought, instead of the Mexican coffee.
Suppose you bought a packet of cheaper coffee from Ethiopia, not marked as Fair Trade. So, one would think that this is not as good, as surely the working conditions are not so nice etc.

But, and here's the point, average incomes in Mexico are $9000 a year compared with Ethiopia's $700. Also only 18% of Mexican labour is in the agricultural sector, compared with Ethiopia's 80%.

So what you are really doing is helping a Mexican farmer who, by Ethiopian standards, is rich. This comes at the expense of helping the genuinely poor Ethiopian farmer, by not buying the only product he can produce.

A better solution is to buy the cheapest coffee you can (keeping the quality constant, of course). So, in this scenario, we all buy Ethiopian coffee. The Mexican farmer will experience falling sales and so must either become more efficient or exit the coffee market.

In the former case, with such a labour intensive process, the Ethiopian farmer could probably still undercut the Mexican. So, the Mexican leaves the market. With the decrease in supply, the coffee price increases and so the Ethiopian benefits more.

With the increased trade with Ethiopia, the resulting growth in their economy will then eventually allow them to diversify away from agriculture and thus setting them on the path to an industrialised economy.

Thanks are due to James Silken for this example.

Chirac prepares for plan B

2005-05-27T09:32:00.000+01:00

How they all twist and turn to get their own way:

PRESIDENT CHIRAC of France is preparing to throw Europe into confusion and put Britain on the spot by backing moves to keep the European constitution alive if it is rejected in Sunday’s referendum.
French diplomats say that M Chirac is expected to urge other countries to proceed with ratification because France does not want to be seen to be blocking the European project. Any attempt to persuade other countries to go ahead will dash the hopes of those in the British Government who believed that a French rejection would make a British referendum unnecessary.

I like the sound of that. I'd love the British to have a chance decisively to kick these grandiose and archaic politicians' dreams into the long grass. But wait, what's this?

But one option being discussed in senior diplomatic circles is for candidates in the French presidential election in 2007 to promise to ratify the treaty in parliament rather than by referendum.

If the people won't vote for it, we won't ask them again. The referendum was only intended to give the whole thing a veneer of democratic accountability, but we'll make do without, if necessary.

French political students at Sciences Po would appear to share this dissatisfaction with the electorate.

Meanwhile in Holland there is reflection on what can go wrong when you ask the people:

On June 1, just three days after the planned referendum in France, the Netherlands is holding its own national referendum on the new European Union (EU) constitution. Polls indicate that the government of Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende is facing a serious defeat. A recent opinion poll showed the majority of the population is against the draft constitution, opposing the position of all major political parties in the Dutch parliament.

Sixty-two percent of respondents said they would vote “no” on the constitution, just 12 percent said they would vote “yes” and 26 percent were undecided. These figures mark a complete reversal of national opinion compared to even less than six months ago. In December of last year, the Eurobarometer survey reported 73 percent in favour of the constitution. Since then, the number of supporters has decreased with each passing month.

The apparent strong support for the constitution was a considerable factor in the decision to hold the referendum in the first place—the first ever in Dutch modern history.

The Dutch referendum is not binding on government. I doubt, though, that the government could afford to overlook a very clear result.

The Law of Scientific Consensus

2005-05-27T09:12:00.000+01:00

John Brignell isn't happy with the Royal Society's decision to pose as the modern-day inquisition in support of the scientific consensus on climate change.

From Galileo, through Darwin to Einstein, there is a clear law of scientific consensus:

At times of scientific contention the consensus is always wrong.

Mother lets daughter 11 have sex then blames school for pregnancy

2005-05-26T17:55:00.000+01:00

But the mother is not without a moral outlook.

"I have taught my children never to do anything behind my back."

Eurologic

2005-05-26T07:52:00.000+01:00

Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg and holder of the rotating EU presidency, captures in one sentence the contempt that the bulk of European politicians hold for democracy:

"If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'," he said.

Don't say you weren't warned.

UK referendum should go ahead whatever

2005-05-25T12:55:00.000+01:00

Latest opinion polls in Holland and France on the forthcoming referendums on the EU Constitution show a clear majority planning to reject the proposal. And if they do, what happens to the UK referendum?

LibDem foreign spokesman Menzies Campbell has said that there would be no point continuing with the UK vote. This is mischievous or mistaken. We shall not have seen the last of the Constitution and when it reappears in front of French voters I assume that some attempt will have been made to address their apparent concerns about insufficient protectionism. Here in the UK we fear the Constitution for quite opposite reasons and we should take the opportunity of demonstrating this or else when we do get to vote we will have in front of us a document more objectionable than ever, and one ratified, by that time, by all other EU nations.

I'm sure the Liberal Democrats, the most Eurofriendly party in British politics, would find it embarrassing and unpopular to rally behind the forlorn "Yes" camp. They would much prefer to take their stand when the argument from inevitability is at its most powerful. They should not be allowed this luxury.

Newcastle: the Venice of the North

2005-05-25T09:15:00.000+01:00

Lonely Planet has opted for a favourable view of Britain's industrial cities. Cities such as Newcastle, Birmingham and Leeds, it opines, are now as "unmissable" as Rome, Venice or Florence.

While urban regeneration may have made the English cities tolerable for the inhabitants, it hasn't provided them with Byzantine Cathedrals or Renaissance palaces. I suspect that the authors are attracted to lively "street culture" which, in my experience, means town centres overrun with drunken and threatening people, and which is something that Venice has mercifully avoided to date.

Viewers prefer BBC when staff on strike

2005-05-24T16:18:00.000+01:00

As BBC staff threaten to continue their industrial action, the employers might be interested to discover this report:

An extra 400,000 people watched the pared-down Ten O’Clock News compared to last Monday, while the One O’Clock News recorded an extra 300,000 viewers.

The complete removal of Newsnight from the schedules did not dent overall viewing figures either. A corporation spokeswoman said that its subsitute, a Timewatch programme on ancient Rome’s Colisseum, drew an equal number of viewers.

For my part, I found that strike action definitely improved Radio 3: much less pointless chat and more great music.

There is a substantial risk in withdrawing your labour: your employers may find that they are better off without you.

Milk good for the heart

2005-05-24T10:34:00.000+01:00

The medical establishment has held a prejudice against dairy products since the early days of the diet-heart hypothesis. But research announced today suggests that far from being harmful, consumption of milk is good for you and may even protect against heart disease.

The authors of the study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health conclude:

"The present perception of milk as harmful, in increasing cardiovascular risk, should be challenged, and every effort should be made to restore it to its rightful place in a healthy diet."

Let's recap. The diet-heart hypothesis claims that a diet rich in animal fat raises serum cholesterol which raises the risk of coronary heart disease. Yet those that drank the most milk had virtually the same cholesterol readings as those that drank the least. Something wrong here, but don't expect official dietary advice to change in the near future.

Seven reasons to sell the Euro

2005-05-23T09:37:00.000+01:00

Whither the Euro? The Morgan Stanley view is negative. They offer seven reasons to sell.

1) The euro is expensive
In terms of purchasing power a level close to parity with the dollar is suggested.
2) European growth continues to underperform
Europe is experiencing feeble growth with structural problems unaddressed.
3) Interest rate differentials should benefit the dollar
Higher US interest rates will support the dollar while European rates are held low.
4) The ECB’s credibility is eroding
It expresses concern about credit growth but appears unwilling to risk monetary tightening.
5) Fiscal deficits on the rise in Europe, declining in the US
The stability and growth pact is a dead duck and without its constraints Italy and Germany in particular are letting spending rip.
6) Europe is heading into a political crisisProtectionism is on the rise and the constitution is in peril.
7) A rise in global risk aversion will favor the dollar
Recent shocks in the credit markets are likely to result in greater risk aversion with the dollar seen as the safe haven.

Though it's fair to say that not everyone reads the runes the same way...

A bright time of the year in Cardiff

2005-05-18T11:43:00.000+01:00

In January, Dr Cliff Arnall, a psychologist at Cardiff University, came to our attention - "Miserable day, Miserable research". Arnall's thesis: January 24th is the most miserable day of the year. Some felt it lacked the elegance of Newton's laws of motion but there was a formula underpinning it so we felt it better not to raise awkward questions.

Now Arnall has surpassed himself with his second thesis: May 18th is the best day of the year for making resolutions.

There it is. Truly 2005 is an annus mirabilis for Cliff Arnall. He must feel like Einstein in 1905 when, in the same year, he published his revolutionary papers on special relativity, the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion.

The Climate Change Inquisition

2005-05-17T09:08:00.000+01:00

In the week that saw David Bellamy's environmental credentials attacked because of his refusal to accept the global warming orthodoxy, the Royal Society, no less, is putting frighteners on the science media to avoid the "distortions" of climate change dissent.

Neil Collins in the Daily Telegraph reports receiving a letter from the vice-president of the Royal Society with these choice passages:

We are appealing to all parts of the UK media to be vigilant against attempts to present a distorted view of the scientific evidence about climate change and its potential effects on people and their environments around the world. I hope that we can count on your support.

There are some individuals on the fringes, sometimes with financial support from the oil industry, who have been attempting to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change.

I should have thought that the Royal Society would have understood the need for constant challenge to the consensus. As a child fascinated by the liberating power of science I attended a lecture at the Royal Society to mark the 500th anniversary of the birth of Copernicus. As I recall, the lecturer did not revile Copernicus for having attempted to undermine the scientific consensus of his time.

The NumberWatcher can hardly contain his dismay.

Difference between the tragedy of war and the outrages of terrorism

2005-05-17T08:55:00.000+01:00

A thought from David Guberman over at Harry's place which many are too confused to see:

In the muddle linking terrorist suicide bombings with, variously, Soviet and Japanese pilots ramming military targets during the second world war and Christian and Buddhist martyrdom that risked no one else's lives, Ms Bunting misses the reason why such suicide bombings are morally revolting - namely, the intentional slaughter of people who are not legitimate targets of war. Our feelings of horror and moral revulsion do not arise from the means employed, but the targeting of the innocent.
David Guberman
Newton, Massachusetts

Very nicely put too. Were the people of Dresden legitimate targets of war, I wonder? That one still troubles me.

David Bellamy under fire for heresy

2005-05-16T12:26:00.000+01:00

The Sunday Times reports:

PROFESSOR David Bellamy is likely to lose his role as the figurehead of two leading wildlife organisations because of his refusal to believe in man-made global warming.

Can't have that, can we? To make matters worse, the man's a Eurosceptic.

Preserve us from Tory modernisers

2005-05-10T21:01:00.000+01:00

Best Tory strategy: sit tight, make a measured case for a smaller public sector with a lower tax burden, and wait for the wheels to come off New Labour.

Worst Tory strategy: change the name of the party, apologise for Thatcherite past, promise to make a better job of running what is left of the economy after the death of British manufacturing and the outsourcing of the service sector.

When everyone is heartily sick of New Labour; when the pensions crisis is really beginning to bite and the only people with secure futures are employed by the state, the electorate will be looking for a different way of doing things. I doubt they will then find much attraction in Brian Sedgemore's radical anti-war, high tax Liberal Democrat party. So they will be looking closely at the Conservatives. And if they find there a pale immitation of New Labour, they may very well stick with the real thing.

Euroscepticism and the Nazis

2005-05-09T19:14:00.000+01:00

The threat of a return to Nazi horrors was invoked yesterday by Swedish EU commissioner, Margaret Wallstrom.

A senior European Commissioner marked VE Day yesterday by accusing Eurosceptics of risking a return to the Holocaust by clinging to "nationalistic pride".

Margot Wallstrom, a Swede and the commissioner who must sell the draft constitution to voters, argued that politicians who resisted pooling national sovereignty risked a return to Nazi horrors of the 1930s and 1940s.

She blamed the Second World War on "nationalistic pride and greed, and … international rivalry for wealth and power". The EU had replaced such rivalry with an historic agreement to share national sovereignty.

I suppose you don't get to be an EU commissioner unless you're pretty keen on the project, so it is to be expected that Ms Wallstrom would be broadly in favour of it. However, she completely overlooks the case for scepticism. Is nationalistic pride such a bad thing? Must it always lead to war? If it were replaced with "supernational" pride, would that be very much better? Is the pooling of sovereignty a sure way to avoid future conflict? Why should historic rivalries and suspicions vanish with national boundaries?

Ms Wallstrom makes the mistake of imagining that those who are unpersuaded by her vision of an integrated European state are xenophobes with a latent desire to genocide. She does not grasp that it is precisely in the huge unaccountable monolith of a European superstate that we see the seeds of totalitarianism

The end of a decent man

2005-05-09T12:54:00.000+01:00

I don't think there are many decent people in politics but David Trimble was one. Following the disastrous performance of the Ulster Unionists he had to go. Under his leadership the party has declined from the majority voice in Northern Ireland to an irrelevance.

I suppose Trimble must take the blame for this, but his main fault was to trust that Blair would press the IRA to disband its private army in compliance with the Good Friday Agreement. The Protestant majority was very sceptical about this. They were persuaded by Trimble who used his considerable personal authority to assure them. They are persuaded no longer and they feel cheated.

Trimble had eloquence and integrity and was a steadfast worker for a peaceful and prosperous Northern Ireland. He was hung out to dry by Blair whose promises we have all learned to treat as empty.

More on disproportionality

2005-05-06T10:39:00.000+01:00

While reflecting on the injustice of an electoral system which builds in a substantial bias in favour of one political party, I came across this passage on Yahoo:

The Tories are forecast to win 198 seats, some way short of Labour's 1983 total of 209 seats, which was seen by some as a benchmark of success.

In the 1983 Thatcher landslide, Labour polled only 27.6% for their 209 seats. In this year's election more than 33% was required by the Conservatives to gain 198 seats. In the last election a similar vote only yielded them 166 seats!

I have a confession to make: as well as being one of the sensible 33% of people voting Conservative yesterday, I was one of the poor befuddled Labour 27.6% in 1983. Oh, what it is to be young!

English votes

2005-05-06T09:29:00.000+01:00

With 619 of 646 results in I thought it would be worth looking how things would have turned out if these were elections for an English parliament based on the existing English constituencies.

I don't have teams of researchers so I added up the figures myself. The results are as follows:

Labour 283 seats
Conservatives 191 seats
LibDemocrats 45 seats

In terms of votes cast:

Labour 7,859,479
Conservatives 7,986,393
LibDemocrats 5,110,807

There are a number of things to observe. First Labour won a seat in England for every 27,772 votes, while the Conservatives averaged 41,814 votes for each seat won and the poor Liberal Democrats needed 113,573. We already knew about this disproportionality. But I wonder how many people realise that the Conservatives actually won the popular vote in England while Labour walked off with a thumping majority of seats. Those boundaries need to be redrawn as a matter of urgency.

Those election predictions

2005-05-06T08:53:00.000+01:00

I concede that my election predictions (35% Lab, 35% Con, 22% LibDim) were a little generous to the Conservatives. If I were a polling organization I would point out that the results were within the standard margin of error. This is more than can be said for the woeful Populus tracking poll that has been scaring us for weeks every time we passed a copy of the Times.

Their eve-of-election shocker got the Liberal Democrat vote spot on, but gave 41% to Labour (actual vote 36.3%) and a ludicrous 27% to the Tories (actual vote 33.2%). The actual difference between the parties was 3% instead of the anticipated 14%. A predictive performance that can only be compared with Zogby's.

Post-election blues

2005-05-06T08:34:00.000+01:00

A little bleary-eyed this morning. I got up at about 2 a.m. to see how things were going and was very encouraged. After that point things never looked quite so good, though there were a few pleasant surprises.

The electoral arithmetic so massively favours Labour that it can win an unassailable majority with 36% of the vote. This state of affairs is scandalous and brings our electoral system itself into disrepute. It is the way in which the constituency boundaries are drawn which provides this imbalance, not the disproportionality due to the first-past-the-post system.

In truth, the Conservatives have not done very well. Their 33% share of the vote is unchanged from the last election and they have only won seats as a result of the Liberal Democrats bleeding away Labour votes.

I'm sure that the Liberal Democrats have not done as well as they expected either, whatever they may say. The "decapitation" strategy took the head of Tim Collins but otherwise failed miserably. Against the Conservatives, they were net losers, and, though they managed to make a few gains from Labour with anti-war votes, they hardly look likely to make the breakthrough they are always talking about.

For Blair the result is a near disaster. His personal unpopularity has clearly weakened his party and it cannot be too long before he hands over to the night's big winner, Gordon Brown, perhaps after the referendum on the EU Constitution.

Election Predictions

2005-05-03T08:37:00.000+01:00

Conservatives 35%
Labour 35%
Liberal Democrats 22%

Labour win by a landslide as a result of the distribution of constituencies which ensures that working class votes count more.

It must appear strange to outsiders that a party can command a huge overall majority with little more than a third of votes cast - and with the support of little more than a sixth of the electorate. The first-past-the-post system does NOT of itself produce inequalities on this scale. They are the result of the ludicrous provisions of the Representation of the People Act which entail that consituencies be smaller where there are greater concentrations of population.

If Mugabe could retain his grip on power with such slender support the whole world would be howling about the electoral injustice.

Pope not bothered about the bathhouse vote

2005-04-25T12:34:00.000+01:00

Some laugh-out-loud moments from this Mark Steyn interview on the press reaction to the enthronement of Benedict XVI.

Well, I think they [the media] were rooting for Ellen Degeneres or Rupert Everett. And the fact that the new Pope is, in fact, a Catholic, seems to have come as a great surprise to them.

I think he understands, for example, that Islam is the fastest growing religion in Canada, America, Britain and Europe because it's not like the Frank Griswold Episcopal Church. It doesn't say hey, man, whatever your bag is, we're cool with that. If you want a gay church, you want a lesbian church, you want an abortionist church, we'll go along with that. It's precisely because Islam is a demanding religion that it has an appeal. And no one needs a religion that merely licenses your appetites.

And what this Pope seems to realize is that it's better, if necessary, to lose members in Massachusetts, and hold on to the large body of Catholic believers worldwide, who want a Pope who gives voice to their belief, rather than the moral relativism that may win them a couple more theoretical votes in the San Francisco bathhouse.

I do not share the Pope's moral outlook, but, unlike him, I am not a Catholic. What I do share is his total horror of the moral relativism at the root of modern saecular western society, and I am strongly of the view that the Church will have no useful future if people turn to it merely to seek divine endorsement of their own lifestyle preferences.

Does England really have the best restaurants in the world?

2005-04-21T17:44:00.000+01:00

Restaurant magazine seems to think so, but I'm very sceptical.

It has become commonplace to hype the gastronomic revolution in Britain, and to disparage, in particular, the state of the French kitchen. British food is an exciting fusion of ideas from all round the world while the French, we are told, stick rigidly to their traditions and rest on their laurels.

Well if sardine-on-toast sorbet is your idea of innovative cuisine make for the Fat Duck at Bray. If, like me, you are repelled by this sort of showy, modish dish you will continue to travel to France where originality is not less common but technique and knowledge are far more assured.

Being overweight makes you live longer

2005-04-21T16:02:00.000+01:00

Timely research on the subject of weight and life expectancy from the US Government watchdog:

The scientists analysed death rates and BMI for their research. They found the lowest death rate was among those with a BMI of between 25 and 29 - who would currently be classed as 'overweight'.

The ideal bodyweight, associated with the lowest risk of premature death, was 25, which lies between 'normal' and 'overweight'.

As a result, U.S. government experts have dramatically cut the annual number of deaths they blame on people being overweight - from 365,000 to just 25,814.

Based on the calculations, excess weight drops from the second leading cause of preventable death - after smoking - to seventh.

Severe obesity is clearly not conducive to long life, but a little fat around the hips appears to be all to the good. Of course this does not chime with the spirit of the age, so expect to continue being encouraged to eat less of what you enjoy in order to lose the weight that is actually beneficial for extending your life.

What have the following in common?

2005-04-21T13:37:00.000+01:00

What have the following in common: Liza Minnelli, Liz Taylor, Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross?

Answer: None of them has seen how Michael Jackson behaves when he is alone with a young boy in his bedroom.

Which is why Macaulay Culkin's testimony is the key to the outcome.

A little learning and a lot of interference

2005-04-20T10:12:00.000+01:00

The EU intends to increase its interference in how food products may be marketed, reports MEP Martin Callanan.

The Commission's proposal for the regulation of nutrition and health claims made on foods would create a huge new bureaucracy to verify and authenticate all the "health claims" based on an emerging science called "nutritional profiling."

Among many serious shortcomings, a main problem of this legislation lies in food itself. Many foods do not necessarily fit easily into "good" or "bad" categories. For example, milk and cheese are both high in fat but also very high in calcium which is extremely important to children and women. Under this directive, foods' bad qualities would prohibit manufacturers from marketing their good ones.

But hold on. I think I'm warming to some of this:

Healthy eating options, such as Tesco's 'healthy eating' products and Sainsbury's 'Be good to yourself' range would also have to go. It is even speculated that using labels that tie into national government campaigns such as the British "5 a day fruit and vegetable" campaign .... would be prohibited.

I get so irritated by those "Be good to yourself" stickers encouraging consumers, amongst other things, to give up natural products for unhealthy hydrogenated spreads crammed with trans fats. As for the ghastly "5 pieces of fruit campaign", I shouldn't want to deny that many fruits are good sources of important nutrients, but, I suspect that the healthgiving properties of fruit are much overstated - certainly no research has been able to confirm that eating "5 pieces of fruit" a day has any beneficial effect on life expectancy.

But before I get too tempted to wave the EU flag, I think it reasonable to assume that the EU will only replace these poorly researched and intrusive campaigns with others which it will bully us into following. And now it's time for lunch.

Dumping scandal

2005-04-18T18:01:00.000+01:00

The Independent has a catalogue of British environmental failings, including this:

434,000,000 tons of waste is produced in Britain each year - enough to fill
the Albert Hall every two hours

This is outrageous. They should dump the waste in tips and leave the Albert Hall alone. No other nation would treat its premier concert venue in this way.

Hockey Stick, 1998-2005, R.I.P.

2005-04-14T21:56:00.000+01:00

Just come across this brilliant summary of all the problems with the "hockey stick".

The “hockey stick” was remarkable. And as such, it will be remembered as a remarkable lesson in how fanaticism can temporarily blind a large part of the scientific community and allow unproven results to become mainstream thought overnight. The embarrassment that it caused to many scientists working in the field of climatology will not be soon forgotten. Hopefully, new findings to come, as remarkable and enticing as they may first appear, will be greeted with a bit more caution and thorough investigation before they are widely accepted as representing the scientific consensus.

I wouldn't hold out too much hope.

Progress in the war on terror

2005-04-08T13:41:00.000+01:00

In a shoot out north of Riyadh, Saudi police have killed 14 Al Qaeda terrorists including Abdulkarim al Mejjati who it was believed had been involved with recent terrorist outrages in Morocco and Madrid.

James Dunnigan reports on developments in Saudi Arabia:

Saudi Arabia has one of the largest concentrations of Islamic radicals on the planet, and for decades it was a place where al Qaeda members could hide, if they kept quiet. But al Qaeda began a series of terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia after the United States invaded Iraq two years ago, and brought themselves into direct conflict with the Saudi Arabian government. This war has not gone well for al Qaeda. The attacks killed mostly Moslems, and many Saudi Arabians as well. This turned most Saudis against the terrorists, despite the Islamic conservatism of most of the population. In the last two years, about a hundred terrorists, and 39 policemen, have been killed. Early on, Saudi Arabia drew up a list of the 26 most wanted terrorists. Only three of these are still at large.

It is very difficult to measure progress in the war on terror, but this must mark a significant reverse for Al Qaeda even though the majority of Saudis continue, apparently, to support their aims.

People get paid for this

2005-04-08T13:34:00.000+01:00

Astonishing research discovery:

Adolescents who get daily vigorous physical activity tend to be leaner and fitter than their less active peers, researchers have shown.

This flies in the face of established understanding.

Labour: the favoured party of those who can't be bothered

2005-04-05T14:55:00.000+01:00

An interesting opinion poll in today's Financial Times suggests that the Conservatives lead Labour by 39% to 34% among those certain to vote in the General Election, whereas Labour lead by 38% to 33% overall.

Given that 55% of the electorate say that they are certain to vote on election day, a little elementary arithmetic reveals that among those that are not certain to vote the Labour lead over the Conservatives is 43% to 26%.

In the light of these figures, a Labour strategy of frightening its supporters to the polls is readily intelligible.

"Two cartoons worth" of abuse?

2005-04-05T07:46:00.000+01:00

The Michael Jackson trial continues to defy parody. Yesterday Jason Francia, the son of a former maid, was giving evidence:

Jason said the second incident also happened at The Hideout when he was between eight and nine as his mum cleaned another room. Again it occurred while they watched cartoons.

Asked how long it took, Jason replied: “Two cartoons worth. Say a Woody Woodpecker, four to five minutes."

The cat's away

2005-03-24T15:36:00.000Z

Back on April 4th.

Cholesterol and child mortality

2005-03-24T14:58:00.000Z

A nice piece from Marshall Deutsch who spotted the actual direction of the relationship between serum cholesterol levels and rates of child mortality with the help of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Any guesses?

Mortality rates were inversely related to the cholesterol levels listed by the NCEP (National Cholesterol Education Program) which was promoting a campaign to lower cholesterol levels in US children.

Of course, this does not imply that low cholesterol is killing children, but it does imply that high cholesterol isn't.

AIDS in South Africa: still waiting for the holocaust

2005-03-24T14:37:00.000Z

Anita Allen at Red Flags puts things in perspective.

The Predictions:

AIDS plan must make up for lost time (The Star 17 Dec 1999. Health-e News Service) quoted 4 million HIV infected in South Africa and 1600 new infections a day, of which 40% would die in five years (this equates to about 2,3 million deaths in 2004 compared to Statssa report of total deaths from all causes natural and unnatural from 1997 to 2002 of 2,8 million).

The Impending Catastrophe (June 2000. LoveLife Report of Henry J Kaiser Foundation) Aids deaths 120000 in 2000 rising to between 354000 - 383000 in 2005 (that equals 90% of total deaths from natural causes in Statssa report). Population 47 million by 2010 under best case scenario. Under worst case scenario population will peak at 46,7 million in 2008 and have negative growth thereafter. (Population in SA already at 46,3 million).

The reality:

Statistics must be compared to the reality of a more than 10% population growth in South Africa (SA) over the past five years - from 41.3 million to 46.3 million by 2004. Also, according to the Statistics SA report released last month (refer to my previous Letter from South Africa), 7000 to 10000 deaths from HIV and AIDS a year according to death certificates from 1997 to 2002.

Global warming hysteria

2005-03-24T13:01:00.000Z

Joseph Farah draws some conclusions from the recent National Center for Atmospheric Research report which argued that global warming is inevitable even if all carbon emissions stopped today.

Time will tell if global warming is a reality. If it is, we will never know the cause – manmade or natural. So, it seems to me there is little point in worrying, in changing our economic systems, in diminishing national sovereignty in favor of global treaties to limit carbon dioxide, in reducing automobile sizes and weights and killing tens of thousands more on the highways, in short, in doing any of the things the global-warming extremists have been suggesting for the past decade.

They admit it will do no good, so what is the point?

Why all the political hot air?

Because it fits a broad political agenda for further government control – in this case, international government control – over the lives of ordinary people. There is no other explanation for it. The global-warming doomsayers all believe Big Government is the only answer. We need more centralized power, more command-and-control bureaucracies, more regulations – all of which translates, like it or not, to less freedom.

This is a power grab. It's about stealing your liberty.

The science is so bad that it smells like that to me too.

Get back in the sunshine!

2005-03-22T10:46:00.000Z

Too little sun causes harm, cancer specialists say.

Cancer specialists around the world are rethinking their advice to cover up in the sun amid growing concern that staying in the shade may be causing harm.

Australia is revising its warnings about the risks of sun exposure because of fears about vitamin D deficiency, which increases the risk of a range of diseases from cancer to osteoporosis, in what doctors have described as a "revolution".

Bruce Armstrong, professor of public health at Sydney University, said: "It is a revolution. I have worked in public health and been preaching sun avoidance for 25 years. But this statement says that there are two sides to the story."

What is astonishing is that the experts should be so surprised. Once again it looks as though we would have done better to have ignored their advice - as most of us have.

Junk policies

2005-03-22T07:49:00.000Z

Labour is focussing on children in the run-up to the general election. Today we learn that junk food and internet paedophiles are going to be particular targets.

This sort of policy-making has many of the characteristics of junk food itself: superficially attractive, designed specifically for the least discerning and ultimately unsatisfying. Policies of this kind are what everyone thinks he wants until he finds out what goes into them.

Police crack down on swan fiend

2005-03-19T09:04:00.000Z

I think this story involving the Master of the Queen's Music neatly illustrates how the forces of law and order choose to criminalise the law abiding.

When the "charming" policeman and the "beautiful" young policewoman arrived at the door of his island home, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Music, was unperturbed.

They had come about a bird, they told him. He replied that they were welcome to either of his birds, and invited them in.

Sir Peter offered them a "delicious" swan terrine he had prepared earlier, but they politely declined and took the other bird instead - a protected whooper swan that was hanging outside his cottage in preparation for cooking.

Britain's most renowned composer and conductor, who lives on the island of Sanday in Orkney, was then cautioned over the alleged unlawful possession of a protected wild bird and told that anything he said might be taken down in evidence.

Read the whole thing. This is not a joke.

Kyoto: the economic damage starts

2005-03-18T11:43:00.000Z

Comalco, the aluminium producer owned by Rio Tinto and based in New Zealand, is considering relocating:

Comalco says the Government’s Kyoto protocol carbon tax could add about $60 million a year to its costs, possibly forcing it out of New Zealand.

Comalco, which controls New Zealand Aluminium Smelters’ Tiwai Point smelter near Bluff, uses about 15 per cent of New Zealand’s electricity production and earns about $900 million a year in export receipts.

But Comalco NZ managing director Tom Campbell said Comalco would be directly exposed to the carbon tax through its smelter emissions and indirectly through electricity prices. It could cost Comalco tens of millions of dollars.

"That would be more than we could afford."

I suppose Kyoto had to be adopted before enough people started to think of these highly predictable, though presumably unintended, side-effects.

A Popperian on climate science

2005-03-16T07:34:00.000Z

The distinguished climate scientist Hans von Storch is concerned about how theories of climate change are being presented. In this excellent article he makes a number of decidedly Popperian points:

The general belief is that in order to keep public attention focused on the issue of "climate catastrophe" ... it has to be presented "somewhat more attractively." In the early 1990s, just as Germany was being hit by severe wind storms, the German media were reporting that the storms were becoming more and more severe. Since then, storms of this magnitude have once again become less common in northern Europe, a fact now ignored by the media. They have also ignored the fact that changes in barometric pressure measured in Stockholm since the days of Napoleon reveal no systematic change in the frequency and severity of storms. Instead, the media are now filled with stories of heat waves and floods.

The media are now claiming that all kinds of extreme events are increasing in frequency. Using this logic, a drought in the German state of Brandenburg fits together seamlessly with a catastrophic flood of the Oder River and the two events don't contradict each other.

Unfortunately, the corrective mechanisms in science are failing. Public reservations with regard to the standard evidence of climate catastrophe are often viewed as unfortunate within the scientific community, since they harm the "worthy cause," especially because, as scientists claim, they could be "misused by skeptics." Dramatization on a small scale is considered acceptable, whereas correcting exaggeration is viewed as dangerous because it is politically inopportune. This means that doubts are not voiced publicly. Instead, the scientific community creates the impression that the scientific underpinnings of climate change research are solid and only require minor additions and adjustments.

This self-censorship in the minds of scientists ultimately leads to a sort of deafness toward new, surprising insights that compete with or even contradict the conventional explanatory models. Science is deteriorating into a repair shop for conventional, politically opportune scientific claims. Not only does science become impotent; it also loses its ability to objectively inform the public.

The principle that drives other branches of science should be equally applicable to climate research: dissent drives continued development, and differences of opinion are not unfortunate matters to be kept within the community. Silencing dissent and uncertainty for the benefit of a politically worthy cause reduces credibility, because the public is more well-informed than generally assumed. In the long term, the supposedly useful dramatizations achieve exactly the opposite of what they are intended to achieve. If this happens, both science and society will have missed an opportunity.

Kyoto has increased the economic advantage to mainstream climate scientists of presenting a united front and suppressing dissent. As a result, these wise words are likely to fall on deaf ears.

Kilimanjaro "wake-up call"

2005-03-15T11:38:00.000Z

Breathless reporting from Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - A photo of Mount Kilimanjaro stripped of its snowcap for the first time in 11,000 years will be used as dramatic testimony for action against global warming as ministers from the world's biggest polluters meet today.

Here's the photo. "Stripped of its snowcap" is it? I'll have to take the expert's opinion on that.

"The first time in 11,000 years"? Are you confident of that?

"This is a wake-up call and an unequivocal message that a low-carbon global economy is necessary, achievable and affordable," said Steve Howard of the Climate Group charity which organised the book and an associated exhibition.

That seems a lot to infer from a wild-life photo, but I'm not a climate science professional. If I were I might be able to explain how it is that all this local melting is going on while temperatures nearby are unchanged.

Should African nurses be prevented from working for the NHS?

2005-03-15T07:42:00.000Z

Let's hear from the BMA:

Doctors' leaders have strongly criticised the continuing reliance on medical staff from developing countries to fill NHS vacancies.

British Medical Association chairman James Johnson said taking much-needed staff is morally indefensible.

I can accept that it is ethically questionable to "poach" nurses from poorer countries which have payed for their training, but the point being made is stronger than this:

The BMA says African nations in particular are being damaged.

The government's tougher code to prevent the active recruitment of such workers does not stop those who volunteer to come to the UK, it says.

And they should be stopped, should they, even though they want to come? They now have the skills and training that give them the opportunity of escaping the hell-holes that they had the misfortune to be born in, but we would condemn them to stay there on salaries a fraction of what they can command within the NHS?

Isn't that morally indefensible?

Himalayas at risk

2005-03-14T13:37:00.000Z

Have you noticed that when a climate-related scare is reinvestigated it always turns out to have been underestimated? Today's story is the receding of the Himalayan glaciers:

"Himalayan glaciers are among the fastest retreating glaciers globally due to the effects of global warming," the WWF said in a statement.

"This will eventually result in water shortages for hundreds of millions of people who rely on glacier-dependent rivers in China, India and Nepal," it said.

I certainly shouldn't want to dispute the WWF's claim that the glaciers are retreating, but if we are to pin this phenomenon on global warming we would expect to find at the very least that Himalayan temperatures have been increasing. In fact a small cooling trend is detectable.

It must be assumed that the WWF has done sufficient research to be aware of this anomaly, yet it is happy to trot out the "global warming" explanation without any apparent embarrassment.

Explaining the rise of insurgence

2005-03-13T18:04:00.000Z

In an item about the dreadful suicide bombing at a Shi'ite funeral in Mosul, Reuters informs its readers of the "root" causes:

The insurgents' ranks have been boosted by frustration at the US occupation, shootings of Iraqi civilians by troops and foreign contractors, and by abuse of prisoners in US-manned jails.

Very helpful, but that must be a matter of opinion don't you think? Can you imagine Reuter's running with this:

The insurgents’ ranks have been boosted by weak border controls in neighbouring countries, the fear that Baathists have of a democratic Iraq, and by the weak responses to terrorist attrocities of some nations participating in the rebuilding of Iraq.

Neither can I, but I strongly suspect that it is closer to the truth.

Fox in the hen house

2005-03-11T08:27:00.000Z

John Bolton is just the man for the UN, argues Gerard Baker:

Mr Bolton’s appointment is a stroke of pure genius by the Bush Administration. It might finish the UN. It might save it.

But, surely the UN has done a wonderful job bringing freedom to the world?

After the Korean War, the UN stood by and did nothing for four decades as some of the worst crimes against humanity were committed across and within borders. It did nothing when the Soviet Union imposed its will by force on Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. It did nothing to stop Pol Pot’s genocidal wars in South East Asia or the Indonesian cremation of East Timor. Just as Mao Zedong was busy executing anyone who expressed the slightest reservation about the wisdom of the Cultural Revolution, he was rewarded by being given a seat on the Security Council.

That was a long time ago, wasn't it?

Since then things have changed. Look at the first Gulf War. Didn’t that show how international co-operation through the UN can confer legitimacy on the use of force in the defence of law and justice? Well, perhaps. Some of us would argue that it was the need to keep that unwieldy coalition from collapsing that the war was not prosecuted to its proper conclusion — the removal of Saddam Hussein.

I remember: the UN hadn't authorised more than the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait so Bush senior had to let Saddam off the hook.

More recently then?

The UN quickly fell back into its familiar torpor. It failed in the Balkans. It did nothing to stop genocide in Africa. And Iraq — well we know about Iraq. The truth is, if we had waited for the UN’s say-so to promote the cause of freedom in the past 50 years, we’d still be waiting.

All right. I give up.

Pyjama drama

2005-03-11T08:10:00.000Z

that's "pajama drama" for any US visitors.

Laurie Levinson, a law professor at Loyota Law School in Los Angeles, said: “I don’t think it was a great moment for the defence having Michael Jackson sitting there in his pyjamas, while the accuser talked about alleged abuse that occurred when he was wearing a pair of Mr Jackson’s pyjamas.”

You don't have to be a law professor to see that.

Will Clarke place McGuinness under house arrest?

2005-03-10T13:35:00.000Z

Boris Johnson has been looking closely at the Prevention of Terrorism Bill and reflecting on Sinn Fein IRA:

Listening to Sinn Fein, as it struggles to put the best gloss on IRA actions, one is struck by the amazing irony of the Government's current "war on terror". Westminster has been convulsed in the past few days by a Bill whose central provision is that the state should be able to detain, without trial, anyone whom the Home Secretary "has reasonable grounds for suspecting of being involved in a terrorism-related activity".

And if we study article eight of the Bill, we find that a "terrorism-related activity" is very widely drawn. It can be nothing more than "conduct that gives support or assistance to individuals who are known or believed to be involved in terrorism-related activity".

Now, we do not have to make any extreme claims for the activities of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to see how they are perfectly captured by this description.

Well spotted Boris!

Is the Arctic melting?

2005-03-08T18:50:00.000Z

Yes...but it happens from time to time and, in all probability, the trend will reverse over the next few decades as it always has before.

George Taylor gives an authoritative guide to the scientific studies which paint a far more ambiguous picture than you would imagine if you listened only to the mainstream media.

If we want to understand variability of Arctic sea ice (and, for that matter, sea and air temperature) we should take our eyes off greenhouse gases, at least for a moment, and study multidecadal phenomena. We should also avoid the temptation of taking the last 20-30 years of data, computing a trend, and assuming that that trend will continue for 50-100 years. History tells us that long-term linear trends will not occur. In the words of Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Or make bad forecasts.

IRA offers to shoot man's killers

2005-03-08T18:37:00.000Z

News from Northern Ireland:

The IRA has said it told the family of the Belfast murder victim Robert McCartney that it was prepared to shoot the men directly involved in his death.

This is the way they have traditionally handled things. Which is why no genuinely hopeful signs for peace will be seen until the IRA disarms.

Further evidence of the healthgiving qualities of cholesterol

2005-03-07T18:39:00.000Z

Strangely this one hasn't been picked up by the main media:

Cholesterol Plays Cancer-Prevention Role at Cellular Level

Scientists have discovered that cholesterol has a novel role inside the cell: anchoring a signaling pathway linked to cell division and cancer. This new discovery by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center is published in the March 4 issue of Science.

"Cell signals have to be tightly controlled," says Dr. Richard G.W. Anderson, chairman of cell biology and senior author of the study. "If the signaling machines do not work, which can happen when the cell doesn't have enough cholesterol, the cell gets the wrong information, and disease results."

Though it has earned a bad reputation for its role in heart disease, the fact that cholesterol is essential for the health of cell membranes long has been understood. The cell membrane, which is fluid in nature, contains cholesterol.

I don't think it is understood all that well by GPs who seem to think that the lower the patient's total cholesterol the better.

Sudan outrage

2005-03-07T17:30:00.000Z

According to the BBC

The government of Sudan is angry that a cancer-causing dye at the centre of a food scare in the UK is named after the north African country.

That might impact on their tourist numbers.

The right side of history

2005-03-04T10:25:00.000Z

A tour de force from Mark Steyn in this week's Spectator.

The other day I found myself, for the umpteenth time, driving in Vermont behind a Kerry/Edwards supporter whose vehicle also bore the slogan ‘FREE TIBET’. It must be great to be the guy with the printing contract for the ‘FREE TIBET’ stickers. Not so good to be the guy back in Tibet wondering when the freeing thereof will actually get under way. For a while, my otherwise not terribly political wife got extremely irritated by these stickers, demanding to know at a pancake breakfast at the local church what precisely some harmless hippy-dippy old neighbour of ours meant by the slogan he’d been proudly displaying decade in, decade out: ‘But what exactly are you doing to free Tibet?’ she demanded. ‘You’re not doing anything, are you?’ ‘Give the guy a break,’ I said back home. ‘He’s advertising his moral virtue, not calling for action. If Rumsfeld were to say, “Free Tibet? Jiminy, what a swell idea! The Third Infantry Division go in on Thursday”, the bumper-sticker crowd would be aghast.’

But for those of us on the arrogant unilateralist side of things, that’s not how it works. ‘FREE AFGHANISTAN’. Done. ‘FREE IRAQ’. Done. Given the paintwork I pull off every time I have to change the sticker, it might be easier for the remainder of the Bush presidency just to go around with ‘FREE [INSERT YOUR FETID TOTALITARIAN BASKET-CASE HERE]’. Not in your name? Don’t worry, it’s not.

If he keeps this up every fortnight, I might not cancel my subscription.

One in four 'touched' by ID fraud

2005-03-03T08:46:00.000Z

The BBC offers this headline: "One in four 'touched' by ID fraud".

What do they mean by 'touched'?

A quarter of UK adults have had their identity stolen or know someone who has fallen victim to ID fraud, a Which? magazine survey has suggested.

Is that it? 25% of people have had their identity stolen or know someone else who has?

So? 100% of people smoke or know someone who does, but this tells you nothing about the extent of smoking. Similarly the quoted statistic tells you nothing about the extent of ID fraud.

I imagine there is an attempt here to make the problem appear larger than it actually is in order to build unstoppable support for the idea of ID cards. We should be on our guard.

Muslims facing increased stop and search

2005-03-02T09:23:00.000Z

Counter-terrorism minister Hazel Bears has said that muslims will have to accept as a "reality" that they will be stopped and searched by the police more often than the rest of the public.

Quite a brave thing to say, though very necessary. Unsurprisingly, spokesmen for the Islamic community take a different view:

Massoud Shadjareh, chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, said: "She is demonising and alienating our community. It is a legitimisation for a backlash and for racists to have an onslaught on our community."

Statistics showed that of the 17 people found guilty of terrorist acts since 9/11 in the UK, only four of the 12 whose ethnic backgrounds were known were Muslim, Mr Shadjareh said.

For the sake of argument I shall accept these figures. So, a third of convicted terrorists of known ethnic backgrounds since 9/11 are Muslim. According to the CIA world factbook, there are 1.5 million Muslims in the UK out of a population of 60 million. By my calculations that is 2.5%. Even accepting that "only" 33.3% of terrorist acts are committed by Muslims, it would be unreasonable to deny that terrorism in the UK is disproportionately an Islamic problem. If the Islamic community refuses to see this they risk the deep suspicion of those of other ethnic backgrounds in this country.

UK drugs policy in disarray

2005-03-02T08:31:00.000Z

In 2002 David Blunkett announced a relaxation of the laws concerning cannabis. Possession of small amounts would no longer be considered an arrestable offence.

The justification for this move?

The decision to reclassify cannabis was in response to a report by MPs arguing that drugs policy should focus on tackling the problems caused by heroin addicts.

"There will be an increasing focus on class A drugs," the home secretary said.

As a result of this increased focus on hard drugs we learn today that the UK had the largest rate of heroin seizures and the third highest number of heroin addicts in Europe in 2004. Another triumph of unintended consequences.

A lesson Blair is unlikely to forget

2005-03-01T09:07:00.000Z

In one of the biggest blunders of his premiership, Tony Blair was persuaded to visit Damascus to chum up to Boy Assad. This was shortly after 9/11.

All did not go well:

The Prime Minister had to endure a lecture from President Assad, the new Syrian leader, who defended Islamic suicide bombers as "resistance fighters" and condemned civilian deaths in Afghanistan.

Mr Assad, 36 years old and British educated, insisted that Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizbollah, and the other extremist groups harboured by Syria were no different to Gen de Gaulle and the French resistance who were sheltered by London during the war.

The Prime Minister had hoped to win at least tacit support for the air campaign against Afghanistan, but was forced to listen as the Syrian president heaped criticism on the killing of Afghan civilians.

Assad is in our thoughts again as the disastrous consequences of his policy in Lebanon rebounds on him. I should be surprised if Mr Blair was losing too much sleep over the fate of his friend.

"Walking Angel" pleads guilty

2005-03-01T08:14:00.000Z

So Saajid Badat has pleaded guilty to his part in a plot to blow up a plane.

When he was arrested the Gloucester Islamic community was in uproar, and no one had a bad word to say about him:

Ahmed Goga, who has known Sajid Badat for many years, described him as: “A respectful, able, bright and polite guy, a model student who at a young age practiced Islam and went on to become a Hafiz.” This view has been echoed throughout the streets of Gloucester amongst the small Gujarati Muslim community numbering approximately 2,500 people.

At a nearby butcher’s, Abdul Jaffer, said: “He was a very intelligent boy who always spoke out if something was wrong. He was a very bright lad who respected things and people.

Of the arrest Jaffer added: “Straight away I said it can’t be. I still believe he is innocent. He’s a walking angel. He respected me and used to teach lots of boys how to dress in the Muslim way and how to be in a mosque. He always wanted to learn more about Islam.”

These are the people who knew him. I do not doubt that they were sincere. How then can they have been so wrong?

At the time of Badat's arrest Daniel Pipes had this to say:

That terrorists are (unsurprisingly) skilled at hiding their intentions has the unfortunate consequence of making them harder to discern and therefore spreads suspicion to the larger Muslim community. This in turn points to that community's heightened responsibility and incentive to ferret out potential terrorists in its midst.

The stability of the middle east fractures again

2005-02-28T17:32:00.000Z

The Lebanese government has resigned as thousands take to the streets in defiance of a ban forbidding such assemblies.

It seems we valued middle-eastern stability rather more than those unfortunate to live under its despots and puppet governments. If the idea of democracy gets momentum there are going to be some big surprises to come.

UPDATE

This man likes stability

And Captain Ed has some interesting thoughts on the subject.

If Assad thought that Karami's departure would satisfy the Lebanese, he has made another mistake. Assad or his intelligence services have provided a spark with the Hariri assassination that has turned into a firestorm of Lebanese nationalism, one that has united all of the factions in demanding a complete and immediate Syrian withdrawal. Momentum has turned into an avalanche, one that threatens to bury Assad and his Ba'athists in Damascus.

This is Assad's worst nightmare come true. With the Syrians, especially the Kurds in the northeast, watching the Iraqis vote in the first free multi-party elections ever on their east and the Lebanese on their west showing how fragile the Syrian grip on power truly is, the Assad government may wind up facing similar demonstrations in the streets of Damascus, demanding free multi-party elections -- which would end Assad's grip on power, unless he got in front of the effort immediately.

On voting Labour

2005-02-25T08:51:00.000Z

Here's Mark Steyn on the electoral choice we face in Britain.

If I lived in Britain, I’d vote for Tony Blair’s Labour Party. Yes, yes, I know he’s a nanny-state control-freak and you can hardly pull your pants on in the morning without filling in the form for the Public Trouser Usage Permit and undergoing inspection from the Gusset Regulatory Authority. But on the One Big Thing – the great issue of the age – he’s right, and he’s reliable. And, sad to say, the British Conservative Party aren’t. Their leader, Michael Howard, has been a cheesy opportunist on the war, supporting it at the time, backtracking later, his constantly evolving position twisting itself into a knot of contortions even John Kerry might find over-nuanced. Most other Tory heavyweights – ex-Thatcher cabinet ministers like Lord Hurd and Sir Malcolm Rifkind – are more straightforward: They’re agin the war. They’d have no time for his frightful American clothes or his ghastly hamburger diet, but, social distaste aside, they’re Michael Moore Conservatives.

Yes. Yes. I don't disagree with any of that. It's a question of weighing the relative importance of the one great issue of the age on which Blair (but not his party) is right, against all other issues (Europe, the growth of the public sector, IR 35, immigration and asylum, Kyoto, extending the powers of the executive, the constitution, interference in personal freedom, etc.) on which he is wrong.

I have heard it said of Arundel Cathedral that the further you are away from it the more attractive it seems. Much the same applies to Tony Blair.