Some much needed light relief; "The Daily Mash" is in prime form with a comment on Bernie Madoff's fundamental mistake.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/business/madoff-pleads-guilty-to-not-being-a-bank-200903131639/
The picture of the "Royal Bank of Madoff" is a quick adaptation of the "Royal Bank of Scotland". RBS's recently departed Chief Sir Fred Goodwin has pocketed a pension of well over $1 million a year after flying the bank into the ground - and thus into the pocket of the taxpayer.
Despite all the ludicrous huffing and puffing by the media and various politicians, there is no legal way of relieving him of the money. And he is only 50 and in excellent health, so we may be paying him the $1 million a year for the next 40 years.
Still, informal vengeance is often the best. Some one daubed "Scumbag Millionaire" in large letters opposite Sir Fred's home in Edinburgh - in the same neighbourhood where J K Rowling of "Harry Potter" fame lives. As you might guess, it is a rather different neighbourhood from that inhabited by Danny Boyle's Edinburgh druggies in "Trainspotting".
Friday, March 13, 2009
Because It's WRONG! (Part 3)
A further postscript on the ever-depressing subject of child protection from the news this morning (Friday 13th March - how appropriate). The eminent Lord Laming complained that his recommendations for improvements in Social Service child protection had not been implemented. These recommendations were made years ago after the horrible death of a little girl, Victoria Climbie, in London. The occasion for his protest was a further investigation after the more recent and equally horrible death of a little boy, Baby P, in London.
With all respect to the good Lord, one of his well-meant recommendations was that sufficient resources should be devoted to child protection. Given the scale of the problem, do you think the entire Gross Domestic Product might make up for the failures of parents? The inefficiencies involved are mind-bending.....not to mention budget bending.
One social worker described the follow up to a family visit. If she spent a hour with a problem family, on return to the office she might spend anything from 30 minutes to 3 hours on electronic paperwork and other actions. There has to be a full accounting for all actions; even telephone calls to other agencies (e.g. police, schools, National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, etc) have to be recorded. And that is excluding other "downtime" such as travelling to and from families, team meetings, training, sick leave, holidays, etc.
A classic theme in past inquests into the horrible deaths of battered children has been "failures of communication" between the numerous responsible agencies. Teachers' worries about a neglected child did not get passed to Social Services, Social Services' communications to the police got buried in police files, the hospital staff hesitated to breach medical confidentiality, etc, etc. So the remedy for bureaucracy is super-bureaucracy.
And of course while the social worker is covering his/her backside in the case of one family, he/she cannot give attention to the other problem families in the desk. A totally perverse set of incentives encourages the social worker to spend more time protecting himself than protecting little children.
But given the way in which Social Service departments, from the most senior to the most junior front-line worker, have been mercilessly vilified in the media every time another disaster happens, such self defence is inevitable. And the witch hunting media are not going to indulge in any self-criticism about the way in which they have promoted the sexual liberation agenda and hence the mass abuse of children.
One of the few thoughtful articles I have ever seen on the subject is in the ever-superb "Touchstone" magazine:
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=15-03-031-f
Carson Holloway's article "Dare We get real about sex" argues forcefully that you cannot promote the sexual liberation of adults without promoting the sexual abuse of children.
Which is why well meaning but unreflective politicians like Tom Harris are caught on the horns of a dilemma. He is rightly horrified at mass bastard breeding by vulnerable girls who are hardly more than children themselves. But to coherently argue for reform means far more than condemning such behaviour, however cautiously and diplomatically. You have to reject extramarital sex among consenting adults....and the gay agenda....and contraception...Er, hold on, Holy Cow, I want a few voters behind me come the next General Election. And the next General Election in Britain is barely a year way. All the New Labour chickens, from years of schmoozing bankers to PR spin to illegal wars to lying about education, are coming home to roost in quick succession.
With all respect to the good Lord, one of his well-meant recommendations was that sufficient resources should be devoted to child protection. Given the scale of the problem, do you think the entire Gross Domestic Product might make up for the failures of parents? The inefficiencies involved are mind-bending.....not to mention budget bending.
One social worker described the follow up to a family visit. If she spent a hour with a problem family, on return to the office she might spend anything from 30 minutes to 3 hours on electronic paperwork and other actions. There has to be a full accounting for all actions; even telephone calls to other agencies (e.g. police, schools, National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, etc) have to be recorded. And that is excluding other "downtime" such as travelling to and from families, team meetings, training, sick leave, holidays, etc.
A classic theme in past inquests into the horrible deaths of battered children has been "failures of communication" between the numerous responsible agencies. Teachers' worries about a neglected child did not get passed to Social Services, Social Services' communications to the police got buried in police files, the hospital staff hesitated to breach medical confidentiality, etc, etc. So the remedy for bureaucracy is super-bureaucracy.
And of course while the social worker is covering his/her backside in the case of one family, he/she cannot give attention to the other problem families in the desk. A totally perverse set of incentives encourages the social worker to spend more time protecting himself than protecting little children.
But given the way in which Social Service departments, from the most senior to the most junior front-line worker, have been mercilessly vilified in the media every time another disaster happens, such self defence is inevitable. And the witch hunting media are not going to indulge in any self-criticism about the way in which they have promoted the sexual liberation agenda and hence the mass abuse of children.
One of the few thoughtful articles I have ever seen on the subject is in the ever-superb "Touchstone" magazine:
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=15-03-031-f
Carson Holloway's article "Dare We get real about sex" argues forcefully that you cannot promote the sexual liberation of adults without promoting the sexual abuse of children.
Which is why well meaning but unreflective politicians like Tom Harris are caught on the horns of a dilemma. He is rightly horrified at mass bastard breeding by vulnerable girls who are hardly more than children themselves. But to coherently argue for reform means far more than condemning such behaviour, however cautiously and diplomatically. You have to reject extramarital sex among consenting adults....and the gay agenda....and contraception...Er, hold on, Holy Cow, I want a few voters behind me come the next General Election. And the next General Election in Britain is barely a year way. All the New Labour chickens, from years of schmoozing bankers to PR spin to illegal wars to lying about education, are coming home to roost in quick succession.
Because it's WRONG! (Part 2)
(Stan writes:)
Bill,
In the previous post on Right and Wrong, are you indulging in sarcasm or are we to take you literally? There are several places in this post where I had that question. I'm not saying you need to make it clear, as such ambiguity fosters thinking.
Stan
(Bill's response follows)
Dear Stan,
I meant it literally; the problem with Tom Harris's article, like many "conservative" commentators' writings on "morality", is that he makes moral declarations without any bedrock of seriously considered principle to give them credibility.
Consider his sentence:
Of course, if there were radical reforms in education to make it more relevant to deprived young girls' lives you might get some of them going for careers rather than diapers. God knows, Labour has poured more than enough money into state education to make some difference even in the worst areas. But Tony B Liar's mantra of "Education, education, education" doesn't seem to have reached the grass roots, at least in Tom Harris's constituency. What about a voucher system to promote new schools and draw educational innovators into providing for families who have never known the dignity of choosing their own private schools? Well, Tom's fellow Labour education bureaucrats and the teachers' unions would never stand for it, so I think we can forget that one.
And if he is condemning young girls only for having children out of wedlock at the ever-luckless taxpayer's expense? Well, that IS doubly wrong in a serious moral sense, both as an abuse of sexuality and recklessly making yourself dependent on the public purse. But Tom will have to do some serious arguing about the correct use of sexuality within the context of marriage and he's going to sound like the Pope, despite his unconvincing protestations that he is not promoting Christian morality. Or we are all going to suspect that he is picking a soft target for cutting public expenditure.
You can make a very convincing and purely rationalist case for encouraging people to have children within stable marriages by pointing out the terrible statistical outcomes for children born to single mothers. But these arguments always seem to lack practical effectiveness in the face of the libertines' ideology and their assertions that people are free to indulge their sexual preferences in any way they want.
In fact Tom almost endorses the libertines' position:
Tom gives a superb exhibition of delicate figure skating on very thin ice where he describes the grandfather whose immature daughter had just given birth. He did not want to condemn the father or daughter; after all, he is a politician and does not want to offend too many potential voters or seem to be religiously judgemental. But how are we going to reduce the incidence of illegitimacy unless it is again regarded as a target of serious social disapproval? The complacent acceptance of illegitimacy is plainly an important support for a girl's decision to get pregnant.
In short British politicians, even the sincerely well meaning like Tom Harris, are too compromised in too many ways to act as credible contributers to any serious debate. Merely lamenting the eyewatering expense of single mothers looks ludicrous when the Government and Opposition are united in continuing public expenditure at its present crippling level and in refusing to abandon anything: useless defence projects, useless computer systems, hordes of parasite consultants and Public Relations liars, expensive schools with appalling exam results, the 2012 Olympics, countless building programs which run way over budget.....and that is barely scratching the surface.
As for objecting to the killing of little children....well, some of us have problems taking any British politician seriously, given the scale of abortion in Britain and the near-impossibility of even reducing the number of weeks at which a baby can be aborted.
[More on the next post.]
Bill,
In the previous post on Right and Wrong, are you indulging in sarcasm or are we to take you literally? There are several places in this post where I had that question. I'm not saying you need to make it clear, as such ambiguity fosters thinking.
Stan
(Bill's response follows)
Dear Stan,
I meant it literally; the problem with Tom Harris's article, like many "conservative" commentators' writings on "morality", is that he makes moral declarations without any bedrock of seriously considered principle to give them credibility.
Consider his sentence:
Teenage girls shouldn’t choose to have babies as an alternative to getting an education and a career. Why? Because it’s wrong.This statement by itself is obviously silly beyond belief; it condemns a large percentage of our mothers, grandmothers, etc. It is wonderful that modern teenage girls have far more opportunities than their ancestors. But what about those who have no aptitude for or interest in formal education, especially given the abysmal quality of secondary school qualifications in Britain? There is nothing "wrong" in the serious moral sense, about choosing to have children at an early age. It might be a misguided, ill-advised or short-sighted decision.....but that's part of the risk of being alive. For some girls it might actually turn out to be a very worthwhile choice.
Of course, if there were radical reforms in education to make it more relevant to deprived young girls' lives you might get some of them going for careers rather than diapers. God knows, Labour has poured more than enough money into state education to make some difference even in the worst areas. But Tony B Liar's mantra of "Education, education, education" doesn't seem to have reached the grass roots, at least in Tom Harris's constituency. What about a voucher system to promote new schools and draw educational innovators into providing for families who have never known the dignity of choosing their own private schools? Well, Tom's fellow Labour education bureaucrats and the teachers' unions would never stand for it, so I think we can forget that one.
And if he is condemning young girls only for having children out of wedlock at the ever-luckless taxpayer's expense? Well, that IS doubly wrong in a serious moral sense, both as an abuse of sexuality and recklessly making yourself dependent on the public purse. But Tom will have to do some serious arguing about the correct use of sexuality within the context of marriage and he's going to sound like the Pope, despite his unconvincing protestations that he is not promoting Christian morality. Or we are all going to suspect that he is picking a soft target for cutting public expenditure.
You can make a very convincing and purely rationalist case for encouraging people to have children within stable marriages by pointing out the terrible statistical outcomes for children born to single mothers. But these arguments always seem to lack practical effectiveness in the face of the libertines' ideology and their assertions that people are free to indulge their sexual preferences in any way they want.
In fact Tom almost endorses the libertines' position:
Don't interpret this as any kind of "back to basics" crusade; I'm not remotely interested in what adults do in the privacy of their own homes, and I'm not sounding the rallying cry for Christian or religious morality. But when the actions of others has such a debilitating effect on the rest of society, it's time to stop being polite. It's time to stop worrying about how people's feelings might be hurt if we question the choices they've made.If he is not interested in what adults do in private, why does he regard it as wrong for young girls to be sexually active - unless he is hiding some religious agenda?
Tom gives a superb exhibition of delicate figure skating on very thin ice where he describes the grandfather whose immature daughter had just given birth. He did not want to condemn the father or daughter; after all, he is a politician and does not want to offend too many potential voters or seem to be religiously judgemental. But how are we going to reduce the incidence of illegitimacy unless it is again regarded as a target of serious social disapproval? The complacent acceptance of illegitimacy is plainly an important support for a girl's decision to get pregnant.
In short British politicians, even the sincerely well meaning like Tom Harris, are too compromised in too many ways to act as credible contributers to any serious debate. Merely lamenting the eyewatering expense of single mothers looks ludicrous when the Government and Opposition are united in continuing public expenditure at its present crippling level and in refusing to abandon anything: useless defence projects, useless computer systems, hordes of parasite consultants and Public Relations liars, expensive schools with appalling exam results, the 2012 Olympics, countless building programs which run way over budget.....and that is barely scratching the surface.
As for objecting to the killing of little children....well, some of us have problems taking any British politician seriously, given the scale of abortion in Britain and the near-impossibility of even reducing the number of weeks at which a baby can be aborted.
[More on the next post.]
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Because It's WRONG!
It was a strange and unnatural sight. Here was the word "wrong" being used in an article in the "Guardian". It was seemingly being used in the sense of "morally wrong", not in the sense of getting the answer to a maths question "wrong". Indeed, the article was headed: "The return of morality". 
How could such an article be published in the temple of secularism and liberalism, "The Guardian"? And, to stretch the eyes wider, it was written by a Labour Member of Parliament, Tom Harris [picture at right].
He was rightly horrified by the spectacle of young women, barely out of childhood, giving birth to children out of wedlock and preparing for a lifetime on Social Security benefits. In short, a member of the Labour party was prepared to see the downside of the Welfare State which his party had promoted for over 60 years. And Tom Harris is a Scottish Member of Parliament; they don't come more hard-core traditional Labour than the Scottish variety.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/05/welfare-children
The very conservative writer Peter Hitchens [picture at right] went into understandable outpourings of joy over this apparent repentance by one member of the party of sinners. He declared:
"Scotland on Sunday" on 8th March described one end result of multiple strands of the permissive society, aided and abetted by the Welfare State. The short and wretched life of Brandon Muir in the small city of Dundee came to a disgusting end just before his second birthday. With a junkie prostitute single mother who had just shacked up with a child-abusing paramour, his long term prospects were never promising. But to die in hours of lingering agony after a savage assault.....
It was a sobering reminder of the drugs underside of modern British life. Scotland's beautiful and prosperous capital, Edinburgh is famous for the biggest arts festival in the world. And its historic castle and other ancient buildings. And its Scottish Parliament. And its art galleries and film theatre. And the biggest theatre in Great Britain. (I saw "Les Miserables" there in the early 1990s). And the highest concentration of HIV sufferers in Britain, thanks to intravenous drug use.
You probably won't find any links to the Brandon Muir article on the Scottish Tourist Board's website (http://www.visitscotland.com).
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion/The-Forgotten-Children-How-society.5049981.jp
A few weeks ago Danny Boyle won the Best Director Oscar for "Slumdog Millionaire". I thought it was a grotesquely overpraised movie, especially in comparison with his earlier brilliant "Trainspotting", which depicted the lives of junkies in Edinburgh. Trainspotting's most unforgettable scenes appropriately featured a dead baby. [Picture at right: EWEN BREMNER the perpetually unfortunate druggie Spud in Danny Boyle's cult classic Trainspotting (1996)]
Now we had a real life dead baby coming out of the drugs underworld of central Scotland. Not the first and certainly not the last. One estimate puts the number of children living in the Edinburgh area with at least one junkie relative as 6,000. There are 143 social workers looking after families in the Edinburgh area. Doing simple maths, each vulnerable child might have as much as 20 minutes attention per week from a social worker, once each worker has spent hours on his/her laptop doing the electronic paperwork to cover his/her backside against the next Dead Child inquest. These children might as well rely on a paper napkin to protect them from armour piercing bullets. As one commentator noted after the death of yet another abused child in London, there was a perfect audit trail showing how the social workers had failed to protect the deceased.
All this ought to be good ammunition for any ardent social reformer seeking to arose public determination to reverse disastrous trends. Yet the limitations of Tom Harris' position become horribly obvious once you think about them for ten seconds. What particular moral authority has he? About as much as you or me or the resident bore propping up the bar who declares it is all "wrong" that these Poles are allowed to come over here and take British jobs.
Take his proclamation:
But, you protest, Mr Harris is merely objecting to such young women breeding at the taxpayers' expense. So what? Which paragon of moral authority decides that such actions are "wrong"? The British state pours about $150 billion per year down the toilet on wasted public expenditure of all kinds from useless defence equipment to useless computer projects to the 2012 Olympics. Who cares about a few billion spent on single parent families? As for ordinary people objecting to professional welfare claimants - who gives a **** about the opinions of our moronic tabloid reading masses?
And why is it "wrong" for underage girls to have sex, especially if they avoid pregnancy or seek an early abortion? The current age of consent (16) in Britain was imposed in the 19th century as part of the fight against child prostitution - and against the ferocious opposition of some senior politicians who wanted to continue breaking their sons in on child prostitutes. A girl's 16th birthday is a legal borderline as arbitrary as a tax percentage or a speed limit, with zero reference to objective morality. In other parts of the world, including Catholic areas, a girl can be married at 14. Tom Harris declares elsewhere in the article that he is not seeking to reimpose religious morality. So what basis of morality is he leaning on? The guy's a politician, after all. You can't help feeling that part of his Damascene conversion is down to the catastrophic recession - we just can't afford to fund a never ending stream of bastards out of the public purse. So is it just expedient to trumpet those fragments of "traditional" morality which assist public expenditure?
But surely some actions are visibly, indisputably wrong all the time, regardless of political ideology? Battering a little child like Brandon Muir to death is just plain "wrong". Well, at the moment, most people would agree. (What about the thousands of innocent Iraqi children killed horribly in an illegal war waged by a, er, Labour government? Er, well, er, that's different). But if Brandon had been two years younger many people would have reluctantly supported his termination right up to birth. What hope had he as a child of a junkie mother? Much better to eliminate him quickly and mercifully and avoid all the later pain and expense.
Tom Harris is notably silent on any other aspect of morality except the
is expensive moral failure of the underclass. But his confused and incoherent contribution is one hopeful sign that genuine moralists may have more public space and more sympathetic hearers for genuinely intelligent discussion than for decades past.
POST SCRIPT:
It was the Brandon Muir tragedy which sparked off Tom's article. On his website, Tom expressed his frustration that the Dundee child protection authorities hesitated about taking Brandon into care, even though his mother was a drug addicted prostitute with learning difficulties. But if he was taken into care, where would you stop? There are so many little children at varying degrees of risk from druggie parents; there aren't enough specialist social workers to supervise them or foster parents to care for them all. And there probably isn't enough capacity in the courts or legal profession to accommodate thousands of legal cases taking children into care and the resulting appeals....
[See following post for continuation of Bill's posts on this issue, and perhaps clarification of the problem facing all society.]
How could such an article be published in the temple of secularism and liberalism, "The Guardian"? And, to stretch the eyes wider, it was written by a Labour Member of Parliament, Tom Harris [picture at right].He was rightly horrified by the spectacle of young women, barely out of childhood, giving birth to children out of wedlock and preparing for a lifetime on Social Security benefits. In short, a member of the Labour party was prepared to see the downside of the Welfare State which his party had promoted for over 60 years. And Tom Harris is a Scottish Member of Parliament; they don't come more hard-core traditional Labour than the Scottish variety.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/05/welfare-children
The very conservative writer Peter Hitchens [picture at right] went into understandable outpourings of joy over this apparent repentance by one member of the party of sinners. He declared:I'd like to say a word in praise of the Labour MP Tom Harris, who this week very courageously spoke up for millions of respectable working-class people, long deprived of a voice by New Labour trendies who know nothing of real life.Peter's enthusiasm ran away with his normally sober brain, as I explain below. But it was forgivable; the sight of any British politician showing the smallest glimmer of sanity or courage is so rare that you tend to overreact in delight.
He said: ‘Teenage girls shouldn’t be having underage sex. Why? Because it’s wrong. Teenage girls shouldn’t choose to have babies as an alternative to getting an education and a career. Why? Because it’s wrong. Parents shouldn’t teach their children that a lifetime on benefits is attractive or even acceptable. Why? Because it’s wrong.’
As he rightly says: ‘The most vociferous critics of the dependency culture and of deliberate worklessness have always been those who live in the same communities, those who resent paying their taxes to help other people waste their lives.’
Welcome, Mr Harris, to the ranks of the wild-eyed extremists. And good luck.
"Scotland on Sunday" on 8th March described one end result of multiple strands of the permissive society, aided and abetted by the Welfare State. The short and wretched life of Brandon Muir in the small city of Dundee came to a disgusting end just before his second birthday. With a junkie prostitute single mother who had just shacked up with a child-abusing paramour, his long term prospects were never promising. But to die in hours of lingering agony after a savage assault.....
It was a sobering reminder of the drugs underside of modern British life. Scotland's beautiful and prosperous capital, Edinburgh is famous for the biggest arts festival in the world. And its historic castle and other ancient buildings. And its Scottish Parliament. And its art galleries and film theatre. And the biggest theatre in Great Britain. (I saw "Les Miserables" there in the early 1990s). And the highest concentration of HIV sufferers in Britain, thanks to intravenous drug use.
You probably won't find any links to the Brandon Muir article on the Scottish Tourist Board's website (http://www.visitscotland.com).
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion/The-Forgotten-Children-How-society.5049981.jp
A few weeks ago Danny Boyle won the Best Director Oscar for "Slumdog Millionaire". I thought it was a grotesquely overpraised movie, especially in comparison with his earlier brilliant "Trainspotting", which depicted the lives of junkies in Edinburgh. Trainspotting's most unforgettable scenes appropriately featured a dead baby. [Picture at right: EWEN BREMNER the perpetually unfortunate druggie Spud in Danny Boyle's cult classic Trainspotting (1996)]
Now we had a real life dead baby coming out of the drugs underworld of central Scotland. Not the first and certainly not the last. One estimate puts the number of children living in the Edinburgh area with at least one junkie relative as 6,000. There are 143 social workers looking after families in the Edinburgh area. Doing simple maths, each vulnerable child might have as much as 20 minutes attention per week from a social worker, once each worker has spent hours on his/her laptop doing the electronic paperwork to cover his/her backside against the next Dead Child inquest. These children might as well rely on a paper napkin to protect them from armour piercing bullets. As one commentator noted after the death of yet another abused child in London, there was a perfect audit trail showing how the social workers had failed to protect the deceased.
All this ought to be good ammunition for any ardent social reformer seeking to arose public determination to reverse disastrous trends. Yet the limitations of Tom Harris' position become horribly obvious once you think about them for ten seconds. What particular moral authority has he? About as much as you or me or the resident bore propping up the bar who declares it is all "wrong" that these Poles are allowed to come over here and take British jobs.
Take his proclamation:
Teenage girls shouldn’t choose to have babies as an alternative to getting an education and a career. Why? Because it’s wrong.Of course it's not wrong. This is a perfectly laudable and worthwhile ambition, as long as the teenager has a good husband to support her and the children. What is the glorious value of spending thousands of hours of your young life getting the transparently bogus British educational "qualifications", followed by years as a wage slave in some supermarket or call centre?
But, you protest, Mr Harris is merely objecting to such young women breeding at the taxpayers' expense. So what? Which paragon of moral authority decides that such actions are "wrong"? The British state pours about $150 billion per year down the toilet on wasted public expenditure of all kinds from useless defence equipment to useless computer projects to the 2012 Olympics. Who cares about a few billion spent on single parent families? As for ordinary people objecting to professional welfare claimants - who gives a **** about the opinions of our moronic tabloid reading masses?
And why is it "wrong" for underage girls to have sex, especially if they avoid pregnancy or seek an early abortion? The current age of consent (16) in Britain was imposed in the 19th century as part of the fight against child prostitution - and against the ferocious opposition of some senior politicians who wanted to continue breaking their sons in on child prostitutes. A girl's 16th birthday is a legal borderline as arbitrary as a tax percentage or a speed limit, with zero reference to objective morality. In other parts of the world, including Catholic areas, a girl can be married at 14. Tom Harris declares elsewhere in the article that he is not seeking to reimpose religious morality. So what basis of morality is he leaning on? The guy's a politician, after all. You can't help feeling that part of his Damascene conversion is down to the catastrophic recession - we just can't afford to fund a never ending stream of bastards out of the public purse. So is it just expedient to trumpet those fragments of "traditional" morality which assist public expenditure?
But surely some actions are visibly, indisputably wrong all the time, regardless of political ideology? Battering a little child like Brandon Muir to death is just plain "wrong". Well, at the moment, most people would agree. (What about the thousands of innocent Iraqi children killed horribly in an illegal war waged by a, er, Labour government? Er, well, er, that's different). But if Brandon had been two years younger many people would have reluctantly supported his termination right up to birth. What hope had he as a child of a junkie mother? Much better to eliminate him quickly and mercifully and avoid all the later pain and expense.
Tom Harris is notably silent on any other aspect of morality except the
is expensive moral failure of the underclass. But his confused and incoherent contribution is one hopeful sign that genuine moralists may have more public space and more sympathetic hearers for genuinely intelligent discussion than for decades past.
POST SCRIPT:
It was the Brandon Muir tragedy which sparked off Tom's article. On his website, Tom expressed his frustration that the Dundee child protection authorities hesitated about taking Brandon into care, even though his mother was a drug addicted prostitute with learning difficulties. But if he was taken into care, where would you stop? There are so many little children at varying degrees of risk from druggie parents; there aren't enough specialist social workers to supervise them or foster parents to care for them all. And there probably isn't enough capacity in the courts or legal profession to accommodate thousands of legal cases taking children into care and the resulting appeals....
[See following post for continuation of Bill's posts on this issue, and perhaps clarification of the problem facing all society.]
Friday, February 27, 2009
Free TV
Dear Stan,
I have recently seen reports that most of the major US newspapers are in terminal crisis or near-terminal crisis. The "Rocky Mountain News" in Denver is closing, the venerable (1865) "San Francisco Chronicle" is slashing jobs in what looks like its death spasms, the "New York Times" is losing tens of millions a year, the corporation which runs the "LA Times" and the "Chicago Tribune" has filed for bankruptcy....and can these titles survive much longer in their own right?
Part of the problem has been falling circulation caused by, er, giving the stuff away for free on their Web sites. Why should anyone in their home cities pay for these papers when anyone on the planet with an Internet connection can read them for nothing?
Is the BBC committing similar slow motion suicide? Apart from enraging people like me, who ought to be its core supporters, with garbage programs, abortion propaganda and eyewatering salaries for people of questionable ability, it has been giving its material away for months on the iplayer service - check it out on www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer. You can watch very recent BBC programs shortly after they are broadcast live to UK audiences, plus truckloads of other material such as David Attenborough's natural history documentaries.
I noted in earlier blogs that the BBC extorts $200 from every TV-watching household in the country, regardless of whether they watch BBC or not. I say "extort" because there is a consensus across all the political parties that the BBC licence fee should remain untouched, so there is no constitutional way of resisting it. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas and politicians aren't going to offend a major media player.
But you need a TV licence only for "live broadcast" material. As the iplayer content is not transmitted in "real time", you don't need a TV licence to view it. Well, seeing that everyone on the planet with a broadband connection can view it for free anyway, it would be doubly iniquitous to force a fee on British iplayer viewers.
So far the only way you could avoid the TV licence was by being over 75 or by living on those dodgy housing estates in Northern Ireland where the local Catholic or Protestant ganglords would break the legs of any TV licence enforcer. The obvious downside was that they would also break your legs if you offended them. Now that you can use iplayer to watch BBC for nothing, how much longer can it survive?
I have recently seen reports that most of the major US newspapers are in terminal crisis or near-terminal crisis. The "Rocky Mountain News" in Denver is closing, the venerable (1865) "San Francisco Chronicle" is slashing jobs in what looks like its death spasms, the "New York Times" is losing tens of millions a year, the corporation which runs the "LA Times" and the "Chicago Tribune" has filed for bankruptcy....and can these titles survive much longer in their own right?
Part of the problem has been falling circulation caused by, er, giving the stuff away for free on their Web sites. Why should anyone in their home cities pay for these papers when anyone on the planet with an Internet connection can read them for nothing?
Is the BBC committing similar slow motion suicide? Apart from enraging people like me, who ought to be its core supporters, with garbage programs, abortion propaganda and eyewatering salaries for people of questionable ability, it has been giving its material away for months on the iplayer service - check it out on www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer. You can watch very recent BBC programs shortly after they are broadcast live to UK audiences, plus truckloads of other material such as David Attenborough's natural history documentaries.
I noted in earlier blogs that the BBC extorts $200 from every TV-watching household in the country, regardless of whether they watch BBC or not. I say "extort" because there is a consensus across all the political parties that the BBC licence fee should remain untouched, so there is no constitutional way of resisting it. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas and politicians aren't going to offend a major media player.
But you need a TV licence only for "live broadcast" material. As the iplayer content is not transmitted in "real time", you don't need a TV licence to view it. Well, seeing that everyone on the planet with a broadband connection can view it for free anyway, it would be doubly iniquitous to force a fee on British iplayer viewers.
So far the only way you could avoid the TV licence was by being over 75 or by living on those dodgy housing estates in Northern Ireland where the local Catholic or Protestant ganglords would break the legs of any TV licence enforcer. The obvious downside was that they would also break your legs if you offended them. Now that you can use iplayer to watch BBC for nothing, how much longer can it survive?
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Reading Catholic Segmentation
Dear Stan,Many thanks for the blog update! Yes, the photo shows the sanctuary of St William of York - amazing. The composition does not extend to floor level, so you can't see the temporary wooden platform erected over the main sanctuary floor.
HERE'S A LINK to our two churches on which you'll find the latest bulletin with Mass schedules.
You will see that St William has a 3:00pm Hungarian Mass, on top of the 900am English, 1100am Latin and 600pm University. St James is hosting the Ukrainian Mass. For many years St James also hosted the regular Polish Masses, until 1981 when the Poles acquired their own church, few hundred yards to the south.
This "new" Sacred Heart was the former Anglican church of St John. It is a fine Victorian structure, sited in what is now designated as a historical conservation area. But the Anglican authorities were determined to demolish it and sell the site for development. The Poles and the Reading Victorian Society joined forces to fight this act of vandalism. The Anglican authorities actually obtained legal permission to demolish St John....until some wily legal eagle pointed out that they had only obtained permission to demolish the church, not the surrounding wall. And, until the wall was demolished, they could hardly get the heavy equipment in to demolish the church. At which point, rather than go through more legal exercises, the authorities surrendered and sold St John to the Poles at a very low price.With the mass invasion of Poles in the last 5 years, Sacred Heart is packed to the doors for 4 Masses every weekend. But,even though it lies well within St James' parish boundary, it might hardly exist as far as the "English" parish is concerned. You can see that it is not mentioned on the website or newsletter. And, despite the usual bureaucratic obsession with Mass attendance statistics, which you can see in the Blackfen parish articles you sent me, the very healthy Mass attendance at Sacred Heart does not appear in the Portsmouth diocesan statistics.
Despite the never ending propaganda about Christian Unity we have had for the last 45 years, these examples from churches within a two mile radius of Reading town centre give you a taste of the practical fragmentation of Catholics into multiple sub-congregations divided by language and liturgical preference. As I said in an earlier post, the logical end result would be the Protestant situation of every person being his/her own Pope and congregation.
Friday, February 20, 2009
St. William of York Latin Mass
I sent Bill links to posts about the Latin Rite controversy at Our Lady of the Rosary in Blackfen, England, asking if he knew about it. The links were rebuttals by two priests, Fr. Tim at Blackfen... HERE... and Fr. Z in the US... HERE.
Below is Bill's response, and a picture of the first Latin Mass at his Church St. William of York. (The web's amazing that these pictures exist.)
Dear Stan,
Many thanks for the link to this story. I am not familiar with Blackfen being as it is on the far side of London. But Fr Tim is locally famous in England. The Latin Mass is exactly what we have at St William of York every Sunday.
The St William Sunday timetable goes:
900am Start of English Missa Normativa.
1000am: Mass finishes, coffee starts in annex.
1015am: We, the choir, finally get started on rehearsal for next week
1030am: Choir practice finishes as the Tridentine Rite congregation start to arrive, a wooden platform is laid over the Vatican 2 -style sanctuary and the huge folding partition to the right of the altar is rolled out to seal off the annex area, which is normally an extension of the main nave. Perhaps they feel that the annex area with its serving hatch from the kitchen is too secular....
1100am: Latin Mass starts.
Between the 900am English Mass with organ hymns, the 1100am Latin rite and the 600pm University Chaplaincy Mass with guitar/keyboard/etc, it is like 3 churches in one building; a new metaphor for the Holy Trinity?? And of course we have the occasional Hungarian and Sri Lankan Masses at St William for those minorities.
So far the Latin Mass Society have not caused any noticeable acrimony in our parish, because they are so largely separate from the most of the St William parishioners, though a few St William parishioners do go to the Latin Mass. The Latin Mass parishioners converge from miles around; as far as I know, it is the only regular Latin Mass venue between west London and Oxford, which is quite a gap. The Latin Mass priests are entirely separate from Fr Dominic, who serves St William and also St James in the town centre; this is obviously not the case at Fr Tim's parish. (St James parishioners have even less reason to notice the Latin Mass presence in the little church up in the University area). And the Latin Mass people do help considerably e.g. by taking turns to clean the church. But I can see the potential for friction elsewhere, especially among those people who will sing the praises of every kind of diversity - except that which they don't like.
Below is Bill's response, and a picture of the first Latin Mass at his Church St. William of York. (The web's amazing that these pictures exist.)
Dear Stan,
Many thanks for the link to this story. I am not familiar with Blackfen being as it is on the far side of London. But Fr Tim is locally famous in England. The Latin Mass is exactly what we have at St William of York every Sunday.
The St William Sunday timetable goes:
900am Start of English Missa Normativa.
1000am: Mass finishes, coffee starts in annex.
1015am: We, the choir, finally get started on rehearsal for next week
1030am: Choir practice finishes as the Tridentine Rite congregation start to arrive, a wooden platform is laid over the Vatican 2 -style sanctuary and the huge folding partition to the right of the altar is rolled out to seal off the annex area, which is normally an extension of the main nave. Perhaps they feel that the annex area with its serving hatch from the kitchen is too secular....
1100am: Latin Mass starts.
Between the 900am English Mass with organ hymns, the 1100am Latin rite and the 600pm University Chaplaincy Mass with guitar/keyboard/etc, it is like 3 churches in one building; a new metaphor for the Holy Trinity?? And of course we have the occasional Hungarian and Sri Lankan Masses at St William for those minorities.
So far the Latin Mass Society have not caused any noticeable acrimony in our parish, because they are so largely separate from the most of the St William parishioners, though a few St William parishioners do go to the Latin Mass. The Latin Mass parishioners converge from miles around; as far as I know, it is the only regular Latin Mass venue between west London and Oxford, which is quite a gap. The Latin Mass priests are entirely separate from Fr Dominic, who serves St William and also St James in the town centre; this is obviously not the case at Fr Tim's parish. (St James parishioners have even less reason to notice the Latin Mass presence in the little church up in the University area). And the Latin Mass people do help considerably e.g. by taking turns to clean the church. But I can see the potential for friction elsewhere, especially among those people who will sing the praises of every kind of diversity - except that which they don't like.
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