How many psychologists does it take…?
Did you hear about the man who drowned in a bowl of muesli? He got pulled under by a very strong currant. It’s the way I tell’em. Actually it’s not. What decides whether or not you think that’s funny is, apparently, who you think I am. Suppose I’m Frank Skinner in disguise; then your laffometer will be predisposed to rise. But if a ‘non-humourous’ celebrity lies behind my byline – Peter Andre, say – watch the fickle finger flicker downward. read more…
FollowMuch has been made, in debate over the disposal of the body of Osama bin Laden, of the burial of the corpse at sea. For those of a conspiratorial bent, of course, it has raised doubts as to whether he was dead at all. But, for most, discussion turned on whether a burial on land would have risked creating a dangerous shrine. Bin Laden’s Wahhabi/Salafi tradition, of course, rejects Sufi notions like shrines. But terrorists have not always proved logically consistent in their application of Islamic theology.
What was perhaps more interesting was the anxiety of the American authorities to stress that the body had been buried in full accordance with Islamic law. Muslim tradition requires the dead to be buried as soon as possible, and bin Laden entered his watery grave from the deck of the US aircraft carrier the Carl Vinson within 12 hours of being shot in the head. Traditional procedures for Islamic burial were followed, with the body ritually washed, shrouded in white cloth and prepared ritual prayers, read by a military officer, translated into Arabic by a native speaker.
Not all Islamic scholars were happy, insisting that proper attempts had not been made to secure the preferred land burial. But it seems that the US authorities had not had time to negotiate for that with other countries once Saudi Arabia, the place of bin Laden’s birth, had refused to allow the burial there. Other scholars, by cointrast, said that a sea burial was permissible where there is a risk of enemies digging up a land grave and exhuming or mutilating the body – a rule that could plausibly be applied in this case.
It beggars belief that Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, has been living just 800 yards from Pakistan’s equivalent of Sandhurst, without the military, intelligence or civilian authorities knowing he was there, despite couriers coming and going for five years.
There can be little doubt that Pakistan faces both ways on terrorism, as David Cameron once put it. Everyone knows that, not least the United States which spends $2bn a year arming the Pakistan military and $7bn on civilian aid there. For years the West has tolerated Pakistan’s double game because it needs its support, even half-heartedly, in Afghanistan. That is more true than ever if Washington is to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan this summer.
Pakistan has lost more civilians than any other nation to Islamist terror attacks but it also has high levels of support for extremists in its population. With its nuclear weapons Pakistan would be a far greater prize for al-Qa’ida than arid Afghanistan. The generals and spymasters who are seeking to appease both sides are playing a dangerous game and could yet become the terrorists’ next victims.
Yet civilian rule is a fragile flower in Pakistan. The ruling coalition is fragmenting, the economy is in crisis and the Taliban is conducting a homegrown campaign of suicide bombings. The danger is that post-bin Laden pressures will lead Washington to bypass the government and deal direct with the Army, which is Pakistan’s only strong institution.
That would be a mistake. The delicate task is to support democratic government while pressurising it to do more to combat Pashtun terrorism and to assert democratic values on tackling corruption, building a modern taxation system and reform of the blasphemy laws.
Britain has made the right moves in increasing aid to education in Pakistan where more than 40 per cent of children under nine do not go to school. Improving education is the way to make youngsters less vulnerable to becoming radicalised. But that aid has been “backloaded” so that it will only continue if the first tranches show good results. We must not flinch from turning off that aid if necessary. The Pakistanis must know we are serious about our support, but also about the need to see progress.
I took my 11-year-old to the cookery school attached to Betty’s famous tearooms in Harrogate just before Holy Week. His one-day Easter Eggstravaganza course began with Hot Cross Buns, encompassed decorating a chocolate Easter Egg and baking chocolate brownies – which he then “enrobed”, to use chocolatier jargon, with a mixture of melted plain and milk chocolate. But there was something other than the high-quality of the scoff which caught my attention. read more…
Sri Lankan war crimes must be prosecuted.
There’s a surprise. The government of Sri Lanka is contesting a report by the United Nations which reveals that tens of thousands of civilians died in its final offensive to end the country’s civil war two years ago. Most of them were killed by government shelling which targeted hospitals and UN and Red Cross centres, a UN panel of experts has pronounced. The acts were war crimes, the report says. read more…
You would think that Roger Ebert churned out enough words in the course of his professional life without the need to add more on the side. After all, the Pulitzer-prize winning film critic writes movie reviews that are syndicated to more than 200 newspapers worldwide every week. Then there are his 15 books and his Emmy-nominated tv programmes. So much so that he has been described as “the most powerful pundit in America”. read more…
It is the school holidays but there is a fierce look of concentration burrowing the brow of my 11-year-old son. Yet he is not absorbed in Rome Total War on his computer or playing PS3 online with his classmates. He has a piping bag in hand and he’s decorating an Easter Egg.
Welcome to Betty’s, the cookery school attached to the high-class bakers and chocolatiers which make Harrogate the north’s most genteel destination for afternoon tea. Not, you might imagine, an apt Easter holiday for a red-blooded boy. But you would be wrong.
The one-day Easter Eggstravaganza course begins with Hot Cross Buns which brings together science, artistry, physical dough-pummelling, bowl-scraping and spoon licking in equal measure. There are five chefs to 18 pupils, half boys, half girls, aged 10-11. They teach one another.
“Anybody know what yeast is?” asks Richard, the school manager – who has worked in a five star London hotel, a Yorkshire stately home and been the chef for a band of touring rock super-stars – as he sets out the ingredients.
“A fungus,” says one boy, who was clearly paying attention in school science. “When it breathes it gives off CO2 and it’s that gas that makes the bread rise. It feeds off the sugar and starch in the flour.”
“Why do we put a pinch of salt in the chocolate sauce,” asks Melissa, another demonstrator as they move onto making brownies and then smother them in homemade chocolate sauce. “Because salt makes sweet things taste sweeter,” replies one of the girls.
They even add a bit of folklore. “Why do we put a cross on the buns?” asks Lisa, who has worked at Betty’s for 25 years. “Because if it didn’t have one it would just be a Hot Bun,” says a boy. “Because Jesus died on a cross,” says one of the girls as Lisa shows them how to work fast with the sugary paste to pipe the cross on the risen buns before the paste sets.
But Easter was originally a pagan feast – Eostre was the hare-headed Saxon goddess of dawn – and today its primary fare is chocolate.
The chocolate eggs at the school have been hand-moulded in Betty’s craft factory across the campus by Claire Gallagher, a Member of the Academy of Chocolate. Betty’s poached her from Raymond Blanc’s Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, where she made the chocolates for the Queen Mother. The Harrogate firm wanted a master-chocolatier to launch a Finest range of chocolates in the tradition of Frederick Belmont, the Swiss exile who founded Betty’s legendary tea-rooms over 90 years ago.
I was asked to go on the radio the other day to explain why Easter has been so long coming. The feast is almost as late as it can get this year. Sunday is 24th April, and that is only one day before the latest permissible date on which the festival can fall, the earliest date being 22nd March. This seriously messes up the school holidays and parental childcare planning, I was told. Whatever happened to the Easter Act of 1928? read more…
Is the Alternative Vote the answer? Is it even the right question?
Does Christianity have anything distinctive to say, a reader asked last month, about how we should vote in the referendum on the method we use for electing our Members of Parliament? How Would Jesus Vote, as the Votiness Movement might put it.
The search for ethical integrity is an understandable impulse, given the wild dishonesty of both sides in much of the debate over whether our First Past the Post system should be replaced by the Alternative Vote. It’s not been an attractive ad for modern politics. The advocates of saying No to AV have resorted to some pretty crude tactics, dismissing it as too complicated and too costly – with emotive ads like the one showing a bawling new-born baby with the words: “She needs a maternity unit NOT an alternative voting system”.
The AV enthusiasts, on the other hand, have resorted to ad hominem associations, as if being on the same side as Colin Firth or, heaven offend, Richard Dawkins, were some kind of argument. If the BNP are against AV it must be a good thing, their argument goes. This is all as paltry as suggesting that we should say No to AV to give its most prominent advocate, Nick Clegg, a bloody nose for his Great Betrayal of progressive politics.
So how do we determine the common good? The first step is to strip out vested interest. It may be understandable for individuals to moan: “I’m in a safe seat so my vote is always wasted”. But that impulse is as partial as that of the opponent who says “we don’t need change because my party gets into power fairly often”. Personal interest is no argument. Nor is that of those politicians who work out what will give best results for their party and then construct the argument backwards from that desideratum.
But systems are not value-free so let’s start with some values. AV is more honest, advocates say, because it removes the need for tactical voting, producing a more truthful result in which politicians get a much better idea of the support, and mandate, they actually have. But a tactical voting is still possible under AV, as a perceptive paper by the Ipsos Mori Social Research Institute revealed in February – and in ways which sound completely counterintuitive until you see the maths. Voters could easily change their current behaviour faced with a new system. AV tactical voting might be even less “honest” than the current system.
So which produces greater justice? AV means that parties will need to listen to a wider range of voices. The Conservatives, for example, will need to pay greater heed to social justice, or green issues, since they will want to attract the second preferences of voters who are not party of the core Tory vote. But that will also make politicians more bland and centrist in their caution not to alienate anyone. The system will squeeze out maverick politicians who have traditionally put principles before popularity – on nuclear weapons, abortion, gypsy rights, faith schools, religious liberty or anything outside the metropolitan consensus.
So what exactly was Andrew Lansley apologising for? For the over-hasty nature of his planned changes to the National Health Service? For the fact that his ideologically-driven raft of reforms were not adequately mandated in either the Conservative or the Liberal Democrat manifesto? For the fact that he was a smug middle-class southerner in the last northern fastness of working class radicalism, Liverpool, where the Royal College of Nursing annual conference voted by a humiliating 99 per cent majority that it had no confidence in him as Health Secretary?
No, none of the above. What he was sorry for – and said so no fewer than four times – was his failure to put across how brilliant his ideas were. “I am sorry if what I set out to do has not communicated itself,” he told a select group of nurses, after declining to face the wrath of the full conference. Not even, you will notice, that he failed to communicate. No, it was “what he set out to do” which failed.
Sorry is not the hardest word, as Elton John’s lyric-writer once suggested. In politics it is one of the easiest. But there is sorry and sorry. You can pick very carefully exactly what it is that you decide to be sorry for.
Compare Andrew Lansley’s apology with that of the Spurs goalkeeper, Heurelho Gomes, whose side collapsed after he fumbled a key save in the match against Real Madrid in the Champions League. “It was a mistake and I accept it,” he said afterwards. “This was not my first mistake and I know it will not be the last one in my career”. Commendable candour from a naturalised Cockney keeper who has regularly shown he can lurch from the sublime to the gorblimey. But it will not do him a lot of good. The word is that his manager Harry Redknapp has decided to give him the boot.
So what is the point in owning up and saying sorry? Clearly there are those for whom an apology is a damage limitation strategy rather than an act of heartfelt remorse. “Sorry we got caught” is how many will read the abject admission of wrongdoing by the News of the World when it apologised “publicly and unreservedly” for its phone-hacking. But guilt-free grovelling is not always wrong.
Why New Atheists invent false polarities
The row over the Astronomer Royal and the Templeton Prize for science and religion has thrown interesting light on the increasingly proactive tactics of the New Atheists in their opposition to religion in any aspect of public life. The annual £1m prize was denounced by several prominent evangelical atheist scientists as an “underhand” attempt to promote religion by linking it with science. Quite how publicly giving away £1m can be described as underhand gives a clue to the attempts at redefinition that are going on here.
There are many kinds of atheism but the noisy fundamentalist type, which arrogantly proclaims itself to be the default position – and fools an ignorant mainstream media into agreeing – is that religion is irrational and dogmatic and is therefore inimical to scientific reasoning.
This is not the position of all atheists; many, perhaps most, adopt the position that science and religion are, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould, “non-overlapping magisteria”, or NOMA to use the short-hand from Gould’s Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. Most people accept that science does not generate its own moral values and can be used for good or ill.
But even if science and religion concern different domains of existence – with the former dealing with ‘how’ queries and the latter with ‘why’ questions – that doesn’t mean there is no scope for a conversation between them, which is what the Templeton Prize implies.
Fukushima: Openness can be the only policy
The temptation to withhold information about a nuclear incident is understandable. Yesterday we saw why. “Fukushima as bad as Chernobyl”, headlines shouted all across the world. Prices fell sharply on the Japanese stock market. The problem was that this was not what the Japanese authorities had admitted when they announced that they were raising their assessment of the accident at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station to the most serious level on a seven-step international scale. read more…
