Serious Disrespect

Two of my favourite commentators' paths converged recently. Peter Hitchens in England and Steve Chapman in the "Chicago Tribune" both noted the impact of security mania on free speech and insulating politicians from legitimate protests. The occasion of Peter's reflections on 22 December 2008 (http:/www.hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk) was the Iraqi guy who threw his shoes at George Bush - this is apparently a seriously offensive gesture in the Middle East. Peter ponders the most appropriate footwear - ordinary slip-ons are legitimate protest, while heavy boots might count as a weapon.

As Peter notes, more robust politicians used to accept heckling and rotten eggs as part of the democratic process. Before the days of the mass media, politicians had to go out and make loads of speeches in numerous places, without benefit of present day security. They inevitably faced the direct wrath of the electorate. It kept them in touch with ordinary people. Examples abound, but my favourite was the Victorian politician who was denounced by a voter at a rally:

"I wouldn't vote for you if you were the Archangel Gabriel".

"If I was the Archangel Gabriel, sir, you wouldn't be in my constituency...."

Steve Chapman on 24 December (http:/www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped1224chapmandec24,0,32491.column) notes the example of two peaceful protesters at a Bush rally, which was allegedly open to the general public - not just the Party faithful. They simply displayed two T-shirts with mild anti-Bush slogans and were immediately evicted by the police. Evidently a "balanced" Bush audience is divided between those who like him and those who love him.

Peter notes a similar example from the 2005 Labour Party conference, where debate used to be vigorous and uninhibited, to put it mildly. A 82 year old delegate, Walter Wolfgang, had been a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. He shouted "Nonsense" at some particularly ludicrous speech and was promptly seized by two of Blair's goons and evicted from the hall. Most of us felt that his intervention was excessively polite, given the indescribable garbage spouted at such events. Fortunately the whole affair was captured on camera and even Tony B Liar was forced to apologize.

What on earth would the security thugs do with Catalan protesters? I was introduced to this aspect of Catalonian culture at Midnight Mass at Douai. A know-all friend and I were admiring the simple Manger scene erected at the side of the high altar. He told me about the "caganer" or crapper who is a key character in Catalan manger sets. Along with Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the animals, shepherds and the Three Wise Men, there is a guy taking a dump in a corner of the stable. He has been a disreputable hanger on at the Nativity in Northern Spain since the 16th century. Often he is portrayed as some public hate figure. So guess who this year's favourite caganer is? Squat forward, GWB...... see this wonderful article by a New Zealand writer living in Barcelona http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0512/S00250.htm .

Thank You For Those Emails

Dear family member and Friends



As we move closer to the end of another year I wanted to thank you for all the e-mails you have forwarded to me over the past year.



I must send a big thank you to whoever sent me the one about rat shit in the glue on envelopes, because I now have to use a wet sponge with every envelope that needs sealing.



Also, I now have to wipe the top of every can I open for the same reason.



I no longer have any savings because I gave it all to a sick girl who is about to die in the hospital for the 1,387,258th time. But that will change once I receive the $15,000 that Bill Gates and Microsoft are sending me for participating in their special email programs. Or from the senior bank clerk in Nigeria who wants to split seven million dollars with me for pretending to be a long lost relative of a customer who died inestate.



And I need no longer worry about my soul because I have 363,214 angels looking out for me.



I have learned that my prayers only get answered if I forward emails to seven friends and make a wish within five minutes.



I no longer drink Coca-Cola because it can remove toilet stains.



I no longer can buy petrol without taking a friend along to watch the car so a serial killer won't crawl in my back seat when I'm filling up.



I no longer go to shopping centres because someone will drug me with a food sample and rob me.

I no longer answer the phone because someone will ask me to dial a number and then I'll get a
phone bill with calls to Jamaica, Uganda, Singapore and Uzbekistan.



I can't use anyone's toilet but mine because a big brown African spider is lurking under the seat to cause me instant death when it bites my bum.



I can't even pick up the five pounds I found dropped in the car park because it was probably put there by a crazed axe murderer waiting under my car to grab my leg.



If you don't send this email to at least 144,000 people in the next 10 minutes, a large pelican with an acute case of diarrhoea will sit on your head and fleas from 12 camels will infest your back, causing you to grow a most unsightly hairy hump. 

I know this because it actually happened to a friend of my next door neighbour's ex-mother-in-law's second husband's cousin's plumber - and it was on the Today Show.



By the way.... did you know that a South American scientist has, after a lengthy study, discovered that people with low IQs who don't have enough sex, always read their emails while holding the mouse. Don't bother taking it off now, it's too late.



Regards,


Your good friend in the UK

Christmas Greetings to the USA form the UK

Sunday 21 December. A short drive west of Reading to Douai Abbey on the shortest night of the year for the Advent service of music, scripture readings and reflections by the monks. The exquisite music was conducted as usual by Dr John Rowntree, who has been running the music at Douai since the year dot. Driving home through the dark Berkshire countryside I was trying out a recently bought Johny Cash CD. Track 9 is introduced by merrily strumming guitar chords:

"My name it is Sam Hall, Sam Hall,
My name it is Sam Hall, it's Sam Hall,
My name it is Sam Hall,
And I hate you, one and all....."

It's always good to have an alternative voice at this time of compulsory love and peace to all mankind. I bought this album some weeks ago, and had put off listening to it until now, for the same reason - Track 2, "Hurt". I was introduced to this searing confessional piece by Madeleine Bunting, a presenter on "Something Understood", part of BBC Radio 4's early Sunday morning Godslot. Her subject for that week was pain and suffering and "Hurt" was one of the songs she played. The Man In Black, as usual, tells it like it is. There can't be many songs about injecting yourself for diabetes - I don't know of any others. Some have called it Cash's epitaph; it describes like few other songs the torments of physical disintegration and loneliness as your contemporaries die off.

Speaking of pain, I was doing some last minute shopping in Waterstones (the British equivalent of Barnes and Noble) on Tuesday 23rd when I spotted a whole new section within the wall of tomes in "Biography". I am not making this up - this ceiling-to-floor bookcase was headed "Painful lives". And who was featured within this bookcase? The greatest shelf footage was given over to biographies of Princess Diana, one of the most over-privileged humans in history. Is it too late to persuade Tom Lehrer to come out of retirement to write a suitably brutal piss-take of a song?

This is the time of year when God makes a temporary break out of the Godslot and appears in some unlikely corners of the British media. Monday 22nd saw a discussion of Christmas traditions on "Beyond Belief", a 25 minute general religious discussion program at 430pm on Radio 4 which runs for only part of the year. On 15th December "Beyond Belief" covered religious attitudes to eithanasia. At other times of the year this slot is occupied by an even more unlikely subject. "More or less" enlightens you on the subject of mathematics and statistics. Such programs must be even rarer than songs about diabetes and "More or less" is always straightforward, informative and thought provoking - as is "Beyond Belief".

The trouble is that 25 minutes is hardly long enough to do justice to any serious topic, secular or sacred. On top of which, you can't help feeling that the time of day reflects the importance which BBC bigwigs attach to essential subjects of which they know nothing and care less. 430pm is almost another graveyard slot, like the 600am-9am place for the Godslot. 430pm is too late to include such material in schools programming. It is too early for the drive time listeners coming home from work. And even full time homemakers will be preoccupied with children fresh home from school. Yet maths and religion are at the heart of the modern world and modern science. Statistical information and disinformation is essential to all policy development in every area of public life and propaganda, from economics to climate change to social security decisions.

The local papers do huge spreads of photographs of Nativity plays from most of the local primary (elementary) schools, both religious and secular, a happy reminder that there is no separation of Church and State in Britain. Children dressed up as shepherds, the Wise Men plus Jesus and Mary, get almost as much coverage as the local sports teams for a day or two. Local clergy may get quoted on the meaning of Christmas, though, as ever, our asinine Archbishop of Canterbury is guaranteed a bigger quote as he opens his mouth on the possibility of disestablishing the Church of England. If even the guardians won't guard the national church, what hope has it got? It seems strange that it takes a practising Jew to make the case for retaining the Church of England's current privileged status in British society: see www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=631

Even that temple of secularity, "The Guardian" gives a few column inches to God - even if it is only the appalling Polly Toynbee, their star columnist, heading her Christmas message: "God probably does not exist". Well, at least she declares her vested interest - as "President of the British Humanist Association and honorary associate of the National Secular Society". One of the most heartwarming sights of nearly every week is the ferocious savaging which Polly receives in the reader comments posted after every column she writes. Any other columnist on any other paper would have been politely requested to retire years ago before she became a total embarassment to the editor and owner; I can assume only that she has a bomb proof contract for life.

This year we have not one but two Midnight Masses in the parish. St James, in the town centre, is having Mass in English, while St William of York, in the University area, is having a full-blown Tridentine Latin celebration, probably with excellent choral support. Apparently they had Latin Midnight Mass at St William in 2007, but it was not publicised widely. I shall be paying a return visit to Douai on Wednesday evening for the 900pm Mass. You have a magnificent sung celebration, Benedictine hospitality afterwards with mulled wine and mince pies, plus you get to bed at a reasonable hour.

With fondest greetings to all in the USA.

Websense

As you might have guessed from earlier posts, I have a very soft spot for the politically and religiously deranged of all persuasions. I recently tried checking out one of my favourite nutcase websites which I had not visited for some time. I tried accessing the pompously named Institute for Historical Review at our local library and a reproving message from "Websense" covered the screen: "The websense category "Racism and Hatred" is filtered. Your Websense policy blocks this page at all times". Er, excuse me? MY Websense policy? I have no such policy banning entry to any website. I had to access www.ihr.org from home.

Plainly some opinions are more vile and abominable than others. The Institute for Historical Review is so far beyond the pale of decency that grown adults are not allowed to access it from a public library and make up their own minds as to whether it has any merit or not. The most unacceptable stance of the IHR is, almost certainly, its reputation for Holocaust denial, though its website contains a mass of material on other subjects.

Does Websense maintain similar vigilance with regard to other unacceptable opinions? It seems highly variable, to put it politely. I had no trouble using the library's PCs to view the "Monthly Review" website, which has peddled Marxist theory and apologias for Communist tyrants for years. I never have any difficulty getting onto the "Guardian" website, which regularly runs articles attacking the family. In fact, like every British public library, Reading stocks the hard copy of the Guardian so that local people who won't use computers can read its ludicrous drivel in print form. The peerless Theodore Dalrymple pointed out a particularly priceless example http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon1204td.html. Dalrymple's typically superb article covered the cases of "Baby P", a little boy murdered by his "parents" and Shannon Matthews, the little Yorkshire girl who was the victim of a ludicrous "kidnapping" staged by her depraved mother. The tragic fate of these children was obviously the result of the breakdown of any "traditional" family structure. But what does the "Guardian" do? Run an article headed: "Marriage is a form of prostitution".

Where have I heard that before? Of course, it is yet another offspring of Marxist theory on the economic analysis of society's class and power structures. Given that such theories are as utterly discredited as Holocaust denial, you might have thought that society's moral guardians would have shielded us from such dangerous opinions. But some opinions are obviously more equal than others, to adopt George Orwell's dictum.

Incidentally, who was "Baby P"? His real name was Peter Connolly, a fact that you could discover from a few seconds on Google. But evidently the British courts and media feel that we should not know that fact either. Not a single newspaper or TV station has mentioned his re

Obama and premature death

Peter Hitchens in suitably acid tongued form. Maybe I've missed something, but I haven't noticed any of the British commentariat who hailed Obama's election as The Second Coming rushing to comment on the stench of corruption coming from his home base. Even by Tony B Liar standards of shameless corruption, the Illinois story is a cracker.
________________________________________________________________

Obama worshippers preparing for a Multiple Obasm when The Wonderful One is inaugurated next month must be shocked - deeply shocked - to find that their idol’s political base, Illinois, is a swamp of corruption where the Governor is (allegedly) trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder.
Is it at all possible that Mr Obama (who recently endorsed that same Governor) could have spent years as a full-time politician in Illinois without noticing this? Oh, come on.
________________________________________________________________

What a strange society we are, squeamish about hanging guilty murderers, increasingly enthusiastic about dispatching the old and innocent.
Supporters of ‘assisted suicide’, especially if they own their own houses, should watch out lest one day they find their own suicide being enthusiastically assisted by people who don’t fancy seeing the family savings squandered on care-home fees.

Mercy Killing

As ever, Melanie Phillips provides a cogent commentary on the strange legal attitude of the British authorities to euthanasia. As Mr Bumble protested "The law is an ass" on so many matters. It was particularly good to see Melanie reiterating the blindingly obvious - that "assisted suicide" is simply killing by the medical profession.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3078041/in-the-public-interest.thtml

Every Child a Wanted Child ?

One of the woes of getting older is that your memory isn't what is used to be. But didn't I recall an old slogan from my youth: "Every child a wanted child"? This was the war cry of the proponents of birth control and, by extension, abortion. The only children born after a few years (or decades) of free contraception and abortion would be genuinely loved and cared for by parents who had deliberately chosen to have them. Well, unfortunately, there seem to have been a few hiccups along the way. One of the most recent and extreme examples concerned a particularly unlucky 9 year old girl from Yorkshire. Shannon Matthews was one of 7 children who her "mother" had conceived by 5 men. So far, so normal British underclass. What made this unusual was that her "mother" cooked up a particularly ludicrous plot to have her daughter kidnapped and then "discovered" in return for a large reward. She and her dim witted accomplice now face long prison sentences. Somehow the message of only having children you really want fails to penetrate all parts of British and American society......

You can read more about it HERE.

UnReality TV

Dear Stan,

Another brilliant piece by Peter Hitchens. It underlines the sinister effect of TV on so many people - if you see it "with your own eyes" it must be real and true. The most unreal of all are of course "reality TV" shows like Big Brother or, the mother of them all, "The Family" which depicted the "real life" of a Reading family in 1974 and which I described in an earlier post. As proof that you cannot keep a bad idea down, a 2008 version of "The Family" has just been aired, showing the dreary life of a family in Canterbury, 40 miles south-east of London. Needless to say, that city's peerless cathedral and Christian heritage were not much in evidence.

I particularly loved Peter's observation on men wearing makeup. A few years ago Reading Crown Court was under media siege because of the trial of a woman accused of murdering three of her children. As I walked past the court building and the satellite trucks, a young man was powdering his face and studying the results in a small mirror. It was a particulary creepy and unsettling moment; I assume he was a reporter for one of the numerous channels I do not watch, as I did not recognise him. Even a purely "factual" report evidently could not be delivered straight without the reporter adjusting his own image.

The young mother was acquitted of all three counts and all the channels displayed her joy at being "proved" innocent. But, in the best whodunnit tradition, it was revealed afterwards that she had been investigated separately for the attempted murder of a fourth child.....

Peter's comments on our two biggest icons, Tony B. Liar and Princess Diana, are particularly revealing. Both were plainly utterly unworthy of the status and public influence they were given; Tony's catastrophic appointments to Government positions alone show how completely unfit he was for public office. But somehow on TV they were highly convincing performers. Princess Diana must have been the most "recognisable" person in history; yet Peter did not recognise her at first meeting.

===================================================================================

........the perniciousness of TV would be just as bad even if it were used to promote causes I like. I can say this quite safely since I know that it won't do so, but it also happens to be true. TV influences the human mind in ways which defy and avoid reason and ignore facts. It is also seduced by appearances, and extraordinarily bad at picking up the subtle negative signs that humans give off when you meet them personally. I have often pointed out that TV is good at making bad people look good, and also at making good people look bad.

Two striking examples of this are Princess Diana and Anthony Blair ( and of course now Barack Obama). I am not suggesting that any of these were or are personally wicked. But I am suggesting that their effects on our society have generally been bad, and that without TV they could not have achieved those things. Diana's televisual glamour was astonishing, and made people ignore her many episodes of bad behaviour, most notably her erratic private life (surely unwise in the mother of young boys) and her incredibly destructive BBC interview with Martin Bashir. Compare the response to Prince Charles's equally destructive TV interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, which rightly rebounded hard on him and has done him damage ever since.

In the case of Mr Blair and Mr Obama, I have never seen Mr Obama in the flesh so I can only comment on his record, but he seems to me to be a rather ordinary and undistinguished politician who once made one good speech but generally contents himself with imitations of Martin Luther King. Those who have the 'I have a dream' speech imprinted on their brains, as many of my generation do, must have noticed how similar Mr Obama's voice, cadences and inflections are to those of Dr King. As I scurried through various US airports during the election campaign, Mr Obama's speeches were often relayed on TVs in the concourses, and more than once I thought I was actually hearing Dr King. But how can this be? Dr King's voice and vocabulary were the product of a specifically Southern and deeply Christian upbringing and background, especially an intimate knowledge of the Authorised (King James) version of the Bible.

Mr Obama has never lived anywhere in the American South, he did not have a Christian upbringing and his acquaintance with the Bible only began when he signed up to Trinity Church. If he sounds like Dr King ( and he does) it must be because he - consciously or unconsciously - seeks to do so. You think this unlikely? You're welcome to do so. But politicians are very concerned about how they sound. We learned on Sunday from my colleague Simon Walters that the teenage Tory Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, has used a voice coach, apparently in a (not wholly successful) effort to make himself sound less posh.

In the flesh I expect Mr Obama is a fairly ordinary person, who I suspect smells quite strongly and unglamorously of cigarettes if you can get close enough to him. Princess Diana, likewise, was so beloved by the camera that the reality was deeply disappointing. The first time I saw her in person, from about ten feet away, it took me 30 seconds to realise that this was the face that launched a thousand headlines. This angular, awkward figure was the monarch of glamour? Surely not. Yet it was so.

As for Mr Blair, my own experience and that of many others who have dealt with him directly has been that he is a person who knows very little about the world, rarely reads, and is of rather limited intelligence. Yet TV has managed to make him look like a world statesman.

That is one of TV's faults, its creation of wholly false images. But because it enters the mind unmediated, a word whose significance Mr Lewis seems to have missed, it bypasses all kinds of important filters. A child dealing with an adult, be it a parent and teacher, gets its impression of that adult not just from a screen persona which may or may not be true, but from a complete experience. the child will see that person when in a hurry, on the mornings when that person has overslept or missed the bus or had a puncture, or left a label standing up at the back of a shirt. The child will have seen that person in good and bad moods, tired, irritable, distracted. In short, it will be much better able to judge what that person says. TV persons are too good. They never make mistakes or have spots. They are always on their best behaviour, always combed and properly dressed, always carefully lit to their advantage, always anxious to show their good sides and conceal their bad ones. Even the men wear make-up, and (I speak as a person who has appeared a few times on TV) the relaxation of tension when the cameras finally turn away and the microphones are off is considerable, as is the difference between the behaviour and language of TV people off and on screen. People on TV are consciously not being fully themselves.

Then there is the difference between books and TV. A child who reads books forms his own pictures of the characters, sometimes aided by verbal description but undoubtedly his own. He imagines their voices and mannerisms. So does the author. But each experience is individual. This is why, for those of us who were brought up before TV was the overwhelming master of our culture, the filming of beloved classic books is always a disappointment. We know the characters did not speak or look like that . Similarly, once TV or movies have taken over a classic, there is only one image. Sherlock Holmes will now always look more or less like Basil Rathbone (actors who play him until the end of time have to pass this test) Inspector Morse, who didn't look in the least like John Thaw in Colin Dexter's early books, came in the later books to be identical to Mr Thaw, and acquired a red Jaguar too. Even 'Brideshead Revisited' was so taken over by the Jeremy Irons version that the miserable movie remake often copies the TV series in visual imaging (the casting of the minor character Hooper is particularly striking. The film actor is obviously based on the TV actor). As for 'Pride and Prejudice' , this is now rapidly ceasing to be the property of Jane Austen. In the end, Andrew Davies will have remodelled most of English literature.

St. Barack Worship

Stan,

Thought you might enjoy Peter Hitchen's comments on the Obama media mania.

=======

St Barack’s Expensive Schools and Sneaky Cigarettes.

Still the Obama-worship continues. Scores of Americans denounced me for suggesting last week that Mr. Obama was not divine. How do these people cope with the fact that the President-elect, following a fine old Left-wing tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, is seeking to send his daughters to terrifyingly expensive private schools in Washington DC?

Surely, in between curing cancer and mending the hole in the ozone layer, Mr. Obama can fix the US capital’s atrocious state schools?

And have any of you ever seen a picture of Mr Obama, a heavy smoker, with a cigarette in his mouth? No, nor have I. Why is that?

Remembance Sunday

Sunday 9th November was Remembrance Sunday and our parish newsletter had the following poem on the front, which I am sure you would like to share:
--------------------------------------------------------

If I should never see the moon again
Rising red gold across the harvest field,
Or feel the stinging of soft April rain,
As the brown earth her hidden treasures yield.

If I should never taste the salt sea spray
As the ship beats her course against the breeze,
Or smell the dog-rose and the new mown hay,
Or moss and primroses beneath the tree.

If I should never hear the thrushes wake
Long before sunrise in the glimmering dawn,
Or watch the huge Atlantic rollers break
Against the rugged cliffs in baffling scorn.

If I have said goodbye to stream and wood,
To the wide ocean and the green clad hill,
I know that He who made this world so good
Has somewhere made a heaven better still.

This I bear witness with my latest breath
Knowing the love of God, I fear not death.

(Lines found in the Bible of Major Malcom Boyle,
killed in action after the landing on D-Day, June 1944)

The night we waved goodbye to America... our last best hope on Earth

Dear Stan,

Here is Peter Hitchen's ever razor sharp dissection of the Obama hysteria. He is perhaps unfair in comparing it to the frenzy on the demise of Princess Diana. Having had the misfortune to be in England in 1997 for that tsunami of garbage, hypocrisy and falsification, I don't think even the torrent of drivel written so far on Obama by the British media quite approaches their week long abandonment of sanity that September. It was particularly good to see Peter reminding the British public of the inglorious cesspit of corruption and cronyism behind the Democratic machine in Chicago.

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The night we waved goodbye to America... our last best hope on Earth

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.
I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama’s victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn’t yet a children’s picture version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn’t worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America’s Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton’s stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to.

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’). He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr. Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don’t try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated – but rather hesitant – invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will – ‘Yes, we can’. They were supposed to thunder ‘Yes, we can!’ back at him, but they just wouldn’t join in. No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He’d have been better off bursting into ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’ which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.

They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther King – in schools, streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joint. The difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.

If Mr Obama’s election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically anyone. But it doesn’t. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered families and gangs which are the lot of so many young black men of his generation.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn’t get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them.

And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn’t vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

AMERICA BUYS ALL THAT CHANGE BULLSHIT

Dear Stan,
 
Excerpt from the ever-acidic "Daily Mash" on the election result, which came through at about 5am London time (I was listening with one ear to the bedside radio). I should explain that "Lord Dimbleby" is David Dimbleby, one of the BBC's long time presenters. The fact that he and his younger brother Jonathan are always on our screens has, of course, nothing to do with the fact that their late father Richard was for decades the British equivalent of Walter Kronkite. Keep the family business in the family, I say.
 
 
AMERICA BUYS ALL THAT CHANGE BULLSHIT

"Change... yeah... of course"

BARAK Obama swept to victory last night as millions of Americans lapped up all that bullshit about change.

The Illinois senator made history as the first black American to become President and the 44th man to win the office with a lot of vague platitudes and an army of creepy spin doctors.

He told a crowd of 250,000 supporters in his home city of Chicago: "Remember, change is something that happens in the middle of the night when we're all fast asleep and very often the next morning no-one can tell that anything has actually changed.

"I promised you change you can believe in, I did not promise you change you can actually see."
He added: "You believe in Jesus don't you? Right, but have you ever seen Jesus? Exactly. Just making sure we're all on the same page."

Mr Obama said he would bring about change by working closely with the vast and terrifying multi-national corporations that had funded his campaign and pledged to end the war in Iraq in order to create a much bigger war in Afghanistan.

"But instead of some middle-aged white guy doing it, it'll be me and I'm half-Kenyan. What's that about?"

Bill McKay, a college student from Denver, said: "I can't believe I now live in a country where an African American can be elected to the presidency after spending just $600 million on advertising."

He added: "Give me a hug!"

Meanwhile, in the UK, thousands of people talked about staying up all night to watch the drama unfold, but then didn't.

Martin Bishop, from Oxford, said: "I was going to follow the coverage and have the significance of every result explained to me by Lord Dimbleby but then, at the last minute, I decided to go to bed because I don't care."

Denys Hatton, from Guildford, added: "If your life is such that you're placing all your hopes in one politician, then may I humbly suggest you get yourself a crate of superlager and a cardboard box and stop wasting everyone's time."

How the Stock Market Works

Great parable for investors in stock market.....or for people following any short-term panic. (Sent by friend at church)

It was autumn, and the Red Indians asked their New Chief if the winter
was going to be cold or mild. Since he was a Red Indian chief in a
modern society, he couldn't tell what the weather was going to be.

Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, he replied to his Tribe that the
winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village
should collect wood to be prepared.

But also being a practical leader, after several days he got an idea.
He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and
asked 'Is the coming winter going to be cold?'

'It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold indeed,' the
weather man Responded.

So the Chief went back to his people and told them to collect even
more wood. A week later, he called the National Weather Service again.
'Is it going to be a very cold winter?'

'Yes,' the man at National Weather Service again replied, 'It's
definitely going to be a very cold winter.'

The Chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect
every scrap of wood they could find. Two weeks later, he called the
National Weather Service again. 'Are you absolutely sure that the
winter is going to be very cold?'

'Absolutely,' The Man replied. 'It's going to be one of the coldest
winters ever.'

'How can you be so sure?' the Chief asked.

The weatherman replied, 'The Red Indians are collecting wood like
crazy.'

This is how Stock Markets work.

Speaking in Tongues

One of the fascinating aspects of my visit to Scotland last June was the reminder that English is not the only British language. The extraordinary little resort of "Tongue" on the far north coast was originally the Gaelic Tonga. The language is still spoken by over 60,000 people on the Scottish mainland and islands, where geographical isolation has helped to ward off the all-conquering English dominance. This was the depressing statistic cited in a recent "Scotland on Sunday" article, where specialists fretted that this "60,000" was the figure below which its long-time survival was unlikely. "Scotland on Sunday" pays lip service by having about a quarter of a page each week devoted to an article in Scots Gaelic. But it is otherwise as marginal a presence in the Scottish media as it is in the population.

The occasion for this gloom was the very expensive launch of a BBC channel dedicated to the Scottish Gaelic language (not to be confused with the Irish Gaelic, which Irish friends assure me is as different from its Scottish relation as German is from English). I wondered if this pessimism was justified. Minority languages hang on in the most unlikely and surprising corners of the world.

The example which surprised me most was the various dialects of Sorbian, a Slavic language spoken by small communities in Eastern Germany. Despite being immersed in the German speaking majority for centuries and persecuted or ignored under Nazi and Communist regimes, they have preserved their language and culture. Estimates of the number of Sorbian speakers vary from 45,000 to 60,000, close to that of Scottish Gaelic speakers. This seems to be a magic survival number, at least for the rational computerised models which predict the number of speakers, and the extinction of the Sorbian language at some point in the 21st century has been similarly forecast . But I would not bet on it.

If you drive in the west of England and scan the radio waves, you may find an unusual text appearing on the radio display: "BBC CYMRU". Yes, you have hit the BBC Welsh channel, which caters for a much larger number of speakers than its Scottish counterpart. Cross the Severn Bridge into Wales and bilingual signs appear by the roadside. Go deep into Wales and you actually hear people speaking Welsh in the street.

You are very unlikely to hear it in the capital city of Cardiff, where Welshness is flaunted mainly by sticking a dragon on everything from the sides of buses to the postage stamps. But go to the wild and beautiful north and you hear young men out on their lunch break in small town centres in animated discussion in their native tongue (most likely of Rugby results). With 600,000 speakers, its survival looks mor assured than that of Scottish Gaelic.

I stopped at a farmhouse in North Wales for the night during a brief holiday in 1991 and my charming hostess served me tea and biscuits (cookies). The phone rang and she immediately switched to high speed Welsh talking to a friend. She took me upstairs to the bedroom, which was obviously the children's bedroom on other occasions. The brightly coloured spelling chart on the wall did not show "A for Apple" and "B for Bird". The Roman alphabet was taught using Welsh words.

In the 1970s I worked with a colleague whose second language was English. He had spoken only Welsh up to the age of seven. But then he was of an older generation, immediately before the all-conquering power of video and TVs in every child's bedroom showing multiple TV channels. The seductive attraction of this beautiful language was vividly illustrated in the recent film "The Edge of Love" about two of the women in the crowded love life of the poet Dylan Thomas. In one very telling scene Thomas and Vera, one of his old flames, sing a song in Welsh in front of her English husband. The bond of a common childhood language is something which the husband cannot share.

Many Welsh schools provide education in Welsh as well as English and universities still offer first and higher degrees. A friend has recently achieved first class honours in Welsh studies at Aberyswyth University.

Also there is official endorsement for Civil Service puposes. If you write to a Government department in Welsh, your letter should be answered in Welsh. After all, it is a much more ancient language than English. For a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s I maintained the Department of Social Security's collection of standard letters - about 2,500 WordPerfect files covering all the major benefits - sickness, incapacity, widows pension, etc. One initiative which was proposed was to duplicate all these letters in Welsh. Two major problems were immediately obvious. One was finding enough skilled translators to turn all these documents into legally accurate Welsh. The second was how to shoehorn these extra 2,500 files onto the ancient PCs in local offices around the country. Even with the help of data compression software, their tiny hard drives were already bursting at the seams. Fortunately I moved on to other tasks and dumped my paperwork with my successor before we reached that impasse.

The Welsh, Scottish, Irish and Sorbian languages are all recipients of substantial amounts of public funds to assist their survival. There is good reason to doubt the effectiveness of public subsidy in the face of the overwhelming English linguistic imperialism. When even major European languages such as German and French are challenged on their home ground, it would be amazing if marginalised language groups could hold their own. One scathing Irish commentator described the results in the "Gaeltacht", the Gaelic-speaking western fringe of the Irish Republic, "We are spending millions to subsidise a Gaeltacht of rural slums where the everyday language is English, employment is unobtainable and a once proudly independent people have been corrupted into relying on public handouts". That was written well before the "Celtic tiger" revolution in the Irish economy transformed the prospects of people in the poverty-stricken west. But this financial transformation has had other utterly unpredicted results; the minority language you are most likely to hear in the west of Ireland these days is Polish. The regional centre of Limerick was grimly portrayed in "Angela's Ashes" as a place that dynamic young people of the 1940s and 50s were desperate to escape at any price - to England, Australia, America, wherever. Now it is invaded by dynamic young Poles to the extent that Polish shops, restaurants, banks and a medical centre have sprung up.

We are prepared to spend huge sums to conserve ancient buildings and works of art. A language embodies the essence of a living culture. Imagine if English disappeared as a living language and all the works of English literature could be appreciated only in translations and by a few eccentric academics studying dusty texts. It seems equally necessary to keep languages alive as to keep threatened species of animals in being; to have a living population of speakers rather than a mass of neglected textbooks and forgotten classics in the corner of a library.

At least one neglected language needs no public subsidy to keep it alive. At St William of York I go to the 900am Mass on Sunday. We cannot linger too long afterwards for coffee and conversation. The cups have to be washed and stored away because the Latin Mass Society (LMS) have arrived for their Mass at 1100am. A whole new wooden platform is quickly assembled in the sanctuary, so that the post-Vatican altar for Mass facing the people can be used for Mass where the celebrant has his back to the congregation. A sizable congregation turns up, some from as far as 20 miles away. Minivans carrying large families crowd the car park; even the parents are clearly too young to remember the Latin Mass as it was said up to the 1960s. You can hear the traditional Latin Mass in many parts of the country, but the next nearest venues would most likely be in Oxford 30 miles to the north or London 40 miles to the east.

I say "hear" the Mass because for most of the service the congregation is silent and the priest alone recites the prayers. I have been to a couple of these Latin Masses and they are a striking reminder of what a recent innovation the dialogue Mass is. It is a 1950s innovation. For 19 centuries Mass was recited as the LMS arrange it today.

It is also a reminder of how recently the Church was so powerfully united by one language. Wherever you went in the world, it was as if the curse of Babel had been temporarily suspended, for at least one sacred hour. We could all share the same words without a translator. Like the first Pentecost, people from all over the known world could hear about the marvels of God, simultaneously, albeit not in their native languages.

Go to Lourdes or some other major international religious site nowadays and you get a taste of linguistic bedlam. As if the major services at Lourdes were not long enough, you get some sections recited 4 or 5 times in French, English, Italian, Spanish and German - plus extra repeats if the Poles or Flemish-speaking Belgians (as opposed to French-speaking Belgians) are in town..... 50 years ago it was one united service which everyone could share spontaneously. It is a reminder of the tensions between the advantages of linguistic unity and preserving precious jewels from the margins of human genius.

Human Perfection and Imperfection

[This post by Stan. Bill sent me the article below, and here are my comments on it.]

Click HERE for the full article by Amy Becker about her reflections on her Down syndrome child Penny, pictured at the right with her husband Peter. The title link will take you to FIRST THINGS' website. (More links to her stuff below.)

The article begins below, but I encourage you to read it to the end and try to fully understand Amy's take on what it means to be perfect and imperfect, especially as we automatically apply the concepts to babies, but also to ourselves.

"What shall it gain a man if he should gain the whole world but loose his soul?" (Jesus' words from somewhere in the Gospels.)

At first glance this article looks like it might be an argument against abortion when the child has Down syndrome, and indeed it is that. (cf. Sarah Palin and the fear people have of her because she sees perfection in babies at a different level than most. Her insight into this is supernatural and transcendent...a valuable asset for a world leader.)

But the article is more significant than just an argument against abortion. As Becker explains there is an extra chromosome that gave Penny the disease (something extra that apparently "distorts" physical perfection). Becker inmplies, but never says it, that there is a more serious affect of adding extra "chromosones" -- to our lives and culture. Such "extras" have a more serious impact on our spiritual perfection before God. Penny's chromosome "problem" is small compared to what we do otherwise to our "spiritual" chromosomes.

But her point is actually better than that.

She writes, "humanity includes limitations and dependence on one another." But what she is really saying is that humanity is not defined by culture's view of physical "perfection" but by God's view which NECESARILY includes limitations and dependence. That is "humanity is DEFINED as something that includes 'limitations' and 'dependence.'" To be truly human is to be dependent on others and God. If we believe we are independent we buy into Satan's lie that we can be like God. Humanity IN ITS PERFECTION requires, demands, begs, screams for limitations and dependence. IN THOSE THINGS we are made PERFECT (James 1).

She writes, "when we conceive of healing simply as miraculous cures for abnormal states of being—blindness, deafness, cognitive delays—we miss the point." Indeed! Some years back I began to look at all the aged and mentally dependent senior citiziens I was meeting in several churches that ministed to such folk. It occured to me that one of their purposes in life was to teach us abled body, and mentally "capable" people to CARE for them. By their "disabilities" they were teaching us to love, to be charitable, to give of our time and resoruces, to be like Christ. Just as we can never pay back Christ for all he's done for us, so these aged and mentally dependent people I was meeting could never pay back their caregivers. But that was the point. When society sees them as "disabled" or "not living fully" or as "unnecessary" we should be seehing them as just the opposite, if we have any interest in seeing heaven and God. Humanity was designed as a DEPENDENT DISABLED specese for a reason... so we could accept God's love, and share it with others.

Indeed, Penny, in the ways that matter most (eternal values) is more perfect with her Downs than many others. Pray for us Penny. (More pictures of Penny at link below.)

BABIES PERFECT AND IMPERFECT
by Amy Julia Becker

Copyright (c) 2008 First Things (November 2008).

Our daughter was born at 5:22 p.m. on December 30, 2005. Two hours later, a nurse called my husband out of the room. When he returned, he took my hand and said, “They think Penny has Down syndrome.” As this news began to make its way into my consciousness, we heard shouts from the room next door. Another child had been born. “She’s perfect!” someone exclaimed about that other baby. “She’s perfect!”

Amy's website, with more pictures and her other writing is HERE. She's working on a Masters in Divinity at Princeton, and has a book coming out. Her blog is THIN PLACES. Thanks to my bogging-pal Bill Murphy for sending this. This is also posted on my blog at CROSSING NINEVEH.

British View of U.S. Events

Dear Stan,

Here is Melanie Phillips' typically cogent view of the US election fray: (I'm going to post this on my own site, Bill. Her summary is very cogent and to the point.) See HERE.

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=618

Further to the financial meltdown: the headlines in one paper yesterday described our boss Sir Fred Goodwin, chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, as falling on his sword. Falling on several sackfulls of money, more like. He has quit his job after RBS was forced to accept a £20 billion ($35 billion) bailout from the Government (i.e. the ever-luckless taxpayer), but will be consoled by a £580,000 ($1 million) a year pension. Also it's nice to see that someone's doing well out of the Lehmann Brothers debacle....the lawyers of course. It will cost $350 million in legal fees to sort out the mess. At $950 an hour, some lawyers are going to have a very Merry Christmas.

I loved the explanation of one American legal firm whose hourly rates were at the top of the table for US lawyers. Their rates were inflated because they had two partners in London who were billing at British rates. With the currency conversion rates at the time, they outstripped the most expensive US lawyers. Of course Shakespeare said it all in Henry VI: "The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers..."

The Finaical Crisis in the UK

Dear Stan,

Thanks for the news. The financial disasters are heavily dramatised in the media, as you might expect, though the wise have been warning about the unsustainability of our housing-price boom for years. The bail-out proposed for the big 4 British banks, including the royal Bank of Scotland where I work, is £500 billion ($850 billion). This is more than the fortune proposed for the US economy with 5 times the population, but the figures are so insanely huge it is like talking about the distance to the "nearest" galaxy - still beyond human understanding.

Most unbelievable of all is the heavy British involvement in Icelandic banks - around $7 billion invested in the Icelandic banks by all sorts of British institutions, due to the favourable interest rates offered. Major charities, hospital trusts, local councils.... I didn't know the SOBs had so much of our cash to invest. I bet some of them have an extra hard time fund raising once the dust has settled. One cautious council which did not take the Icelandic bait said that they thought the offers were "too good to be true". Spot on. I sometimes think that our more rabid political bloggers are far too vicious, cruel and foul-mouthed about our politicians. Then something like this happens and you realise that they are too kind and tolerant about them.

The "Daily Mash" had merciless fun at some of the investors in Icelandic banks, quoting one appalled "financial expert": "I thought Iceland was a huge economy next door to Belgium. Now, after checking the internet, I realise it is a stinking volcano in the Arctic inhabited by 3 weirdo singers and six fishermen....no one warned me." Slight exaggeration, but its total population is about that of Reading. Given the amount they owe British investors, we probably own the whole country lock stock and barrel.

The weird thing about being at the centre of this storm is how little everyday life is affected. At the bank, there has been frantic business as customers spread their funds between multiple banks - the Government is guaranteeing up to £50K per person per bank. But even that has not been as manic as you might expect. Given that the Government has taken huge numbers of preferential shares in all 4 big banks to prop them up, we have had no clear guidance as to whether our status has changed - are we all going to be civil servants now?

Thanks for the news about your changing parishes (our liberal priest got to me - sw.) Part of the problem with Reading is that we are part of an extremely liberal diocese (Portsmouth), so the rot afflicts all parishes to a certain extent. I have not done the obvious thing and crossed to a parish on the north bank of the river - the Thames marks the boundary with Birmingham diocese.

Abortion and Families

Dear Stan,

As a follow up to earlier posts:

Here is a typically superb article from Theodore Dalrymple in "City Journal", looking at the state of childcare in Britain. Part of it heavily overlaps with one of my earlier posts. Of course, his experiences as a prison doctor and a doctor in a grim inner city area of Birmingham colours his outlook, but you cannot accuse him of dishonesty. The state of physical neglect, emotional abuse and spiritual vacuity inflicted on helpless children by grossly inadequate or depraved parents beggars belief. The ultimate consequences can be seen in prisons where the dedicated workers find themselves helping prisoners who have no concept of family life and have never sat at a table for a meal.

Of course, many children suffer in a way which is not quite bad enough to force decisive action by social services and/or the police, whereby they are taken into care or subject to supervision orders. One of my friends works as a teaching assistant in a school on the west side of Reading. This school is by no means the lowest of the circles of Hell in British education, but in a "remedial class" she tries to teach 12 and 13 year old students who do not know left from right or simple concepts such as North and South. One of the pupils is visibly filthy with ingrained dirt in his skin. As children are notoriously merciless to any child who is slightly odd or different, you can imagine what his school life is like. Another teacher friend recalled how she used to wash a little girl as part of the weekly swimming lessons at school. Each week she took a fresh sponge because, after a thorough scrubbing down in the shower, the sponge was black. The poor child confessed how lovely it was to feel clean.

Of course, there have always been inadequate parents. And in the past children from otherwise good homes suffered terrible deprivation due to desperate economic conditions. But now that we have standards of living beyond the dreams of people 100 years ago, we still have large numbers of deprived and neglected children. A significant part of the problem, as Dalrymple clearly describes, is the attitudes of people in positions of authority. Plainly the lunatics have taken over the asylum when esteemed commentators regard grossly disordered families as a valid lifestyle choice. No one should criticise such choices and everyone, including the cruelly "judgemental", should be forced to subsidise them.

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_3_otbie-british_children.html

Of course, such "commentators" in the pages of the Guardian or Observer would regard incompetent parents as blameworthy only insofar as they had failed to use contraception or abortion to prevent the birth of children who they couldn't look after. Further to my recent posts on medical experiments, I remember the autobiography of A J Cronin, another of the distinguished company of doctor/authors, along with Dalrymple and Chekhov. Cronin wrote the "The Citadel", which was made into the 1938 classic starring Robert Donat. Robert Donat's dedicated doctor loses his way and by implication his soul when he moves to the big city and starts making truckloads of money treating the wealthy. Cronin was also the author of "Doctor Finlay", a huge favourite of my 1960s childhood when it was a long running BBC serial. It portrayed the lives of two Scottish doctors in a small Scottish town in the 1920s. Cronin recalled as a matter of undisputed fact how any doctor performing abortions was an utter outcast and pariah, a lost soul. Cronin was Catholic, but he was clearly describing the matter-of-fact professional assumption of his generation of doctors. How things have changed. Now movies get made about experimenters who conducted sexual abuse of little children (like Alfred Kinsey).

The Humane Concentration Camp

Dear Stan,

Many thanks for the latest posting. I forgot to mention that Lord Moran was Winston Churchill's personal doctor for many years. Talk about having friends in high places. Obviously you don't get such a job and hold it for decades unless you are more of a politician than a physician. So the chances of him or any of his medical pals facing embarassing questions about British and American medical experiments were less than zero.

Lord Moran of course kept a diary of his time with Churchill and made a further truckload of money by publishing it. He clearly heeded the wise advise of Mae West: "Keep a diary, honey, and one day it will keep you". Obviously the old fashioned notions about patient confidentiality don't apply at that level.

And if you have no qualms about medical experimentation on the helpless or coerced, are you going to have any greater qualms about abortion or euthanasia? The wholesale corruption of the medical profession was not something which suddenly fell from the sky onto a few nasty German doctors in the 1930s. Plainly the ethical rot started decades before throughout the Western world.

Here is the link to a highly revealing review of H M Pappworth's groundbreaking book "Human Guinea Pigs."

Pappworth had the courage to make himself very unpopular with his medical peers, who obviously resented public exposure of their practices. Scariest of all in this review was the description of experiments at a New York hospital, with patients being threatened with having their legs plunged into freezing water. This was powerfully reminiscent of the unforgettable scene in "Downfall" where an SS doctor kills himself and his whole family as the Russians close in on Berlin in 1945. Not surprising; the doctor in question was responsible for freezing Russian prisoners of war to death in tanks of icy water, so his chances of survival in Russian captivity were just about nil.

My acid tongued friend at church (who thinks Moran and Co should have been in the dock and on the gallows at Nuremburg) tells me that "Human Guinea Pigs" may be about to be republished by an American medical charity. It is available on Amazon.com and Ebay through second hand book sellers. The really interesting read would, of course, be a fully updated edition, as Pappworth's book is 40 years out of date.

The most recent scandal I am aware of was the 2006 fiasco in London were 6 healthy young men were nearly killed by trials of a new drug TGN1412. They survived (just) by grace of some incredibly skilled treatment by doctors who were plainly making it up as they went along - no one anywhere in the world had ever treated such bizarre effects before (at least, none which have been widely publicized). But the last I heard was that their health is permanently compromised and they may well be prone to early development of cancer and other horrors. See link: Human medical experiments go terribly wrong in "nightmare" TGN1412 drug trial

The Humane concentration camp

Professor Leo Alexander explains the results of German medical experimentation on a Polish student, Jadwiga Dzido, carried out at Ravensbruck concentration camp.

Dear Stan,

Further to my recent post on the dodgy ethics of the medical profession, HERE is an enthralling extract from the archives of the revered BMJ (British Medical Journal). Plainly there was little difference between the ethical attitudes of British, American and German doctors in the 1940s. It is the first time I have ever seen Dachau described as a "reasonably humane" concentration camp. And this phrase was not used by some Nazi lunatic. Among its other horrors, Dachau was the imprisonment site for 2,000 Catholic priests who had upset the Nazis in some way.

I particularly loved Lord Moran whining about his expenses, showing yet again how Mammon is the main motive for some doctors. "50 guineas a day" was £52.50 a day or roughly $240 a day in the 1940s exchange rates. In other words, one day's pay for Lord Moran was more than a month's pay for a working joe in Britain or the USA at that time......

Plainly the most senior people in the British medical establishment did not like the prosecution of Nazi doctors or even free reporting of the "experiments", obviously suspecting that they might find themselves on the gallows if the general public knew too much about their practices.

Click link for article: NUREMBERG DOCTORS' TRIAL: Human guinea pigs and the ethics of experimentation [BMJ 1996;313:1467-1470 (7 December)]

Death of the Inconvenient

What was the point of fighting the Nazis?

The thought had occurs to me many times, especially on the countless occasions I have heard WW2 described as the "Last good War". You had the Nuremberg Trials, where all those nasty people like Herman Goering were called to account for their sins against humanity. Obviously there were problems about what you were going to charge them with. The British, Belgians and Dutch could accuse them of wanting to build a huge empire, the Americans could accuse them of blatant racism, the French could accuse them of Antisemitism (and building a huge empire), the Russians could accuse them of running torture chambers and concentration camps.

It was not just the big fish like senior politicians and generals who were dragged into the dock. Little people like doctors who practiced euthanasia found themselves in court, even though they could truly protest that they were not "obeying orders"... they were acting voluntarily to relieve suffering. And people like the medical experimenters in concentration camps were held up to public condemnation as obviously the vilest of the vile.

Unfortunately the message did not get through to numerous British and American doctors. Vulnerable people have always been at the mercy of the medical profession. George Orwell, writing in the 1930s, referred to "a sinister minority of doctors whose motives are suspect". In a grim Paris hospital around 1929, he had seen two doctors almost kill a poor patient in a mischievous experiment which they probably would not have dared to try on a wealthy client with influential friends. After the Nuremberg trials, you might have thought that even the doctors would have learnt their lesson.

But, only a few years after Nuremberg, British doctors were experimenting on military personnel. In the 1950s, they tested poison gas on soldiers at the Porton Down research laboratories. This is one of the most sinister places in England. Set in lovely countryside, only a short drive from the magnificent Salisbury Cathedral, it is the centre for research into chemical and biological weapons. Of course, the experiments went too far, as they always do, and they killed at least one soldier and maimed several others. One writer found at least 300 experiments on humans in the 1950s and 1960s by trawling through the British and American scientific literature. And these were obviously only the results which were published, albeit in the specialist pages of the medical reviews which few non-medical people ever read. The ones where they killed or maimed too many of their victims would be suppressed or circulated only in discreet home-produced documents. Obvious experimental subjects were people in asylums, old people's homes or orphanages, with no concerned relatives outside to defend them. Prisoners and military personnel under strict discipline were also good material.

The Nazis are slowly sliding into forgotten history, despite the best efforts of the movie makers and British tabloids. One widely traveled German friend commented to me that she had never visited any country which had such an obsession with WW2 as Britain....not even France, which was occupied for four years.

But it is obviously the wrong lessons which are being remembered. How else do you explain any person in public life daring to suggest killing the most helpless members of society? And this was not a Nazi nutcase. It was Lady Warnock (pictured with Geoffrey), one of our most influential ethical pundits and a long time participant in any number of public enquiries and commissions into medical issues. In a recent article she stated:

"If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives – your family's lives – and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service".

This must be the first time I have heard a yearly budget of £75 billion ($140 billion) described as "very limited", though I suppose it is by Government standards. When there are more urgent needs, like pissing $35 billion down the toilet on a useless computer system for the NHS and paying doctors enough to buy new Audis (see the ludicrous Michael Moore's "Sicko"), I suppose elderly people count for very little.

Lady Warnock's Article (A Duty to Die?) was at least a useful corrective to Moore's typically fatuous documentary, which seemed to imply that the British NHS treated any sick person immediately for free. Of course, this has never been the case. Any number of people have been denied treatment that would prolong or improve their lives because it was not available on the NHS. I have lost count of the number of appeals for various people who need £x thousand pounds to go abroad (usually to the reviled and overpaid US doctors) for treatment which is unavailable in Britain. With the opening up of the East European economies, medical care is available in Budapest and other cities for a fraction of the price British private doctors charge. And even when "free" care is available on the NHS, it is seriously deficient compared with the best available. So even though artificial limbs are provided on the NHS, some patients go to private companies which provide more comfortable or more functional alternatives, even for thousands of pounds a time. Talk about costing an arm and a leg......

But enough of my rantings... Read Melanie Phillips' hatchet job below.

September 22, 2008

The Dehumanised Landscape of Planet Warnock

Daily Mail, 21 September 2008

Has there ever been anyone who has displayed more inhumanity towards her fellow human beings, and yet had more influence over British society, than the noble Baroness Warnock?

In an article for a church magazine, Lady Warnock has declared that elderly people with dementia are ‘wasting’ the lives of those who care for them, and have a duty to die in order to stop being a burden to others.

On pitiless Planet Warnock, people are valued in proportion to their ability to lead an independent life. If they can’t do so, they are to be written off as valueless — and even more nauseating, they are being told they actually have a duty to end their lives.

The elderly and chronically sick - — indeed, anyone who constantly depends on others for care — often dread being a burden on their nearest and dearest. To be told that they must end this burden by finishing themselves off can only increase their guilt, despair and suffering.

On Planet Warnock, it seems that ties of family and kinship, acts of selfless love, the deep satisfaction from bringing comfort to those who are helpless or who are so poignantly leaving us — essential aspects of our common humanity — mean nothing at all.

To be sure, those who are forced to watch a spouse or close relative descend into dementia often suffer immeasurably from this tragic process. All the more reason, therefore, for protecting those who have lost their minds from any pressure from relatives to end their lives, and not — as Lady Warnock is doing — adding to that pressure still further.

Sufferers and relatives should be helped through the provision of better treatments and improvements in care. To say that the demented should instead end their lives shows a quite chilling absence of elementary human sympathy.

And just how does she propose such people should bring this about? She is, after all, talking about people who have lost their minds. How can people who are mentally incapable possibly be expected to take such a decision?

Does she mean they should take it their minds have disintegrated — in which case, their quality of life will still be good and the pressure on relatives will be relatively light? Should their ‘duty’ to die perhaps kick in the very moment they receive the diagnosis of dementia?

Or does she mean that all of us should sign living wills instructing doctors to end our lives if we should ever suffer from dementia in the future — without knowing whether we would be a burden on anyone at all, or indeed whether, if such a disease did strike us down, we would still rather like to continue to live, thanks very much?

One gets the feeling that such practicalities don’t matter much to Lady Warnock. What drives her is simply the belief that lives which she considers to be worthless should be ended. Down this particular road, of course, lie the historic spectres of eugenics, the concentration camp and the gulag.

Tempting though it may be, it would be a mistake to treat this elderly philosopher as an eccentric who can be safely ignored. Lady Warnock is a key figure in the development of medical ethics in this country, from research on embryos to the debates over euthanasia.

Although the days when governments called upon her to serve on such committees of the great and the good may be over, her thinking provides graphic evidence of the slippery slope down which we are sliding at terrifying speed.

What she originally presented as the ‘right to die’, for example, soon mutated into the ‘duty to die’. The claim that euthanasia would benefit sick people by ending their pain is thus revealed as a fraud. The real point is to benefit the sick person’s relatives, in whose interests the patient must be expected to forfeit life itself.

For the ‘right to die’, therefore, read instead ‘no right to live’.

The impulse to end lives considered to be worthless is sliding from cases involving people in an irreversible coma to people who still have their senses, but have lost the power of rational thought.

The watershed was the Law Lords’ judgment in 1993 that allowed doctors to withdraw feeding and hydration from Anthony Bland, the Hillsborough victim who had been left in a persistent vegetative state.

Subsequently, the Mental Capacity Act, which came into force last year in the face of huge disquiet and after a fudged to die’ is a ‘wholly bogus distinction’.

It is a view she carried into practice when she watched her incurably ill husband, Geoffrey, accept the help of a family doctor to take lethal doses of morphine in order to end his life.

This is because Lady Warnock’s thinking follows the ‘consequentialist’ doctrine which looks at the result of an action, regardless of its motive. Hence, she sees no distinction between a drug administered to alleviate a dying patient’s suffering that ends up hastening that person’s death, and a drug deliberately given to bring about death.

But intention is the essence of morality. It means the difference between murder and manslaughter; between an attack and an accident; between killing and allowing someone to die.

Consequentialists similarly think there is no intrinsic value in a human life; the only value lies in the quality of the life that is being lived. That’s why Lady Warnock thinks that if people have lost their faculties, they should forfeit their existence to benefit others whose lives are — in her eyes — worth more.

This is indeed the path to barbarism. But Lady Warnock is by no means alone in holding these views. They are mainstream among our secular, anti-religious elites - and alarmingly, nowhere more so than in the medical profession.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, for example, said two years ago that ‘active euthanasia’ should be considered to spare parents the emotional and financial burden of bringing up seriously disabled newborn babies. These doctors were advocating killing newborn infants for the presumed benefit of others.

A terrifying, amoral landscape is opening up before us, brought into being by the philosophy embodied by Lady Warnock — the garlanded intellectual, whose epitaph will be a dehumanised society where the weakest are being steadily sacrificed for the benefit of the strong. This is the way civilization dies.

Church on the Cheap

I was walking past the Comfort Inn, an unremarkable hotel on Christchurch Road, when I saw a banner attached to the railings: "Potter House Christian Fellowship". The banner told me that they meet in the hotel at 11:00 am and 6:30 pm on Sundays and 730pm on Wednesdays. After 150 years we have a second place of worship in Christchurch Road. The fine Victorian structure of Christchurch itself is 50 yards away on the other side of the road.

Can market differentiation go much further in Christian worship? In Reading we already have Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Quakers, United Reform, plus multiple flavours of Anglicanism. These are the most subtle and confusing. Christchurch itself is mainstream Anglican (judge by the reference to "Sunday Eucharist" on the noticeboard outside. St Giles, ten minutes walk away is more Papal than the Pope. There was talk of St Giles defecting en masse (if you'll pardon the expression) to Rome after the uproar over the ordination of women in the 1990s. St Marys, five minutes from St Giles, would have a fit at the suggestion of anything Romish and is sternly devoted to the Book of Common Prayer. Greyfriars, less than 5 minutes walk beyond St Marys, is the exemplar of happy-clappy evangelicalism.

Yet all these long established congregations, in solid purpose built (and often historic and beautiful) premises, do not satisfy all the spiritual requirements of the local population. there is constant multiplication of small "churches" that do not fit any established pattern, beyond an apparent devotion to the Bible. In an earlier post I mentioned the fellowship which has established itself in a large house on Wokingham Road, plus the mysterious "Brethren" who have large modern premises on Redlands Road and are moving to much bigger accommodation ten minutes drive away. A longer established "Mount Zion" church is tucked away in a little road off the Wokingham Road.

All these involved serious money to build and maintain. Something like "Potter House" involves only paying rent for a hotel lounge as and when required. The pastor needs only a cheap family computer for email and printing off newsletters and service sheets (if it is a style of worship which requires written guidance). The congregation would bring their own Bibles, if needed. If the pastor has a full time job and officiates only on Sunday and Wednesday, costs are minimal. Given the meeting times, the hotel might well provide the lounge for free as long as the congregation paid for a buffet lunch/supper. It is another regular income stream which hotels never thought about 20 years ago. It is not the first example in town; the Christian Science group meets in the Ship Hotel in Duke street.

The "Potter House" banner displayed a quotation from Jeremiah. How it actually interprets Jeremiah or any other part of Scripture might be open to interpretation. The more talk there is of "Christian unity" in theory, the more visible disunity there is in practice. As the official efforts on "Ecumenism" accelerated in the 20th century, doctrinal and morality splits between churches and within churches multiplied like a metastatic cancer. Contraception, divorce and remarriage, ordination of women, the nature of God, the Resurrection, the Incarnation, the role of Mary, the Eucharist..... As heroic efforts were made to achieve union between Rome and Canterbury, internal divisions and disputes made the exercise ever more fatuous. The expansion of "House Churches" and mini-churches seems to have no limit - except the ultimate limit where very family and eventually every person is his/her own church, Pope and congregation.

Calling for Help

It was a Saturday evening in mid summer on Caversham Road. I was walking back to the car park when I came across a man collapsed on the sidewalk with a man and a woman standing over him. He was sitting up, but could not rise to his feet. He was perhaps in his late twenties and plainly in a confused state. It was difficulty to tell if this was some mental problem or a result of drink/drug abuse, but he was visibly in no condition to help himself for the next hour or so. The man and woman had no previous connection with him; they had found him a minute or two earlier and were plainly as clueless as me as to how to effectively help him.

I called the ambulance service using my cellphone. This was only the second time in my life that I had called 999 (the UK equivalent of 911) and the first time I had ever called for an ambulance. Now the young woman on the other end was giving me a hard time...."Did he ask for an ambulance...does he want an ambulance?" This was tricky when I was standing close to the guy and did not know how much he understood of what he NEEDED, as opposed to what he wanted. Also it was difficult to convey the urgency of what I thought might be needed without possibly seriously offending him. He seemed to have twisted his ankle as he collapsed, but of course none of us knew if it might be broken or how much pain he was feeling (or would be feeling if he was not in such a fuddled condition). He was not in immediate danger (unless he staggered into the busy road eight feet away) and was hardly likely to die of exposure even if he stayed on the sidewalk all night. But I did not want to leave him without getting some assurance of professional help.

Finally she agreed to send an ambulance. I was getting seriously uptight by this time, seeing that I was struggling to explain a delicate situation with the background roar of traffic on one of the busiest roads in town. The fact that the ambulance depot is barely 300 yards away off Caversham Road did not improve my temper.

As we waited two policemen on bicycles approached and I flagged them down. It felt like a Good Samaritan situation, but circumstances have changed since AD30. You can imagine the reaction if I had taken this man to a hotel, given them my credit card details and asked them to look after him. I could have given him a ride to my own house and put him in the spare bedroom. Or given him a ride to his own place...but we were having problems getting any coherent information out of him, much less a name and address. And we plainly had no authority to go through his pockets for ID. I could have taken him to the Salvation Army hostel less than 600 yards away, but I doubt if they would have accepted someone under the influence of unknown chemicals. I should add that none of these "Good Samaritan" actions occurred to me at the time. It was much easier to wash my hands, leave him in the care of the two young constables and head on to the car park.

Incidentally these police looked hardly old enough to shave. It used to be said that you were getting old when the policemen started looking young. I passed that some time ago. You have to get really worried when the new mayor of Reading looks young. But these kids....are they protecting us from Bin Laden????

As I approached my car, the two young constables reappeared on their bicycles. They had not chased after me; it was just another part of their patrol route. They said that the ambulance had come and the man just had a sprained ankle. And I have not seen him since or seen any reports of unidentified bodies discovered. On reflection many weeks later, it struck me that the guy might have suffered a stroke, which might have resulted in slurred speech and paralysis, but it plainly did not occur to me or the ambulance lady at the time.

It is surprising that you see so few people in such straits. The mass drinking and drugs abuse culture has been in full swing for well over 10 years now. Many of the carefree young revellers so noisily visible around town in the early 1990s have doubtless progressed to alcoholism, the acute liver disease specialists and even the graveyard. But I have not noticed as much of the grim results as you might expect.

Perhaps I should get out more, as the old jibe says. But then I don't want to "get out" in town at the times when so much of the drunken revelry is in full swing. We have already had several scary public order incidents around town, the worst being in March 2002 when the police lost control of part of the town centre for a few hours after a riot outside a night club in London Street.

So who do the police call when they need help? In that case, it was more police from neighbouring forces who finally arrived in sufficient numbers to regain control of the town centre. Presumably all the senior police were fervently praying that there wouldn't be an incident in one of the towns from which they had taken officers to support Reading......or that there would not be a bad accident on the M4 motorway which would similarly require officers which they did not have. On that occasion they got away with one bad incident on one Saturday night.

I suppose I should be grateful that my incapable guy in Caversham Road was merely passive and helpless. One of the inmates at a local charity house was 6 foot two, built like a gorilla and had a weakness for vodka, LSD, cocaine, heroin and amphetamines in various combinations. Thus he could be a seriously scary guy once he was out of control. Mercifully I have never met him in Caversham Road or any where else. We would have been calling for more than one ambulance.