Compare and contrast.

This latest WikiLeaks business seems to me to be treading a fine line between secrecy and privacy.  A secret is something which you are trying to stop others from finding out about, and I think there is some merit in at least looking at your motivation for so doing and, if it is considered merely self-serving, exposing the secret for the world to see.  On the other hand, a private message which was always intended to be for the recipient's eyes only is a different matter and it can be argued that that privacy should be respected.  Think how you would feel if your personal correspondence was published for all to read.  However innocent it might be, I imagine you would feel violated. So are these latest documents secrets or private correspondence?  Tricky one.

Get in line.

Much discussion recently about who should be our next King.  Calls in the popular press for it to be William, whilst he himself is on record as saying he is content to wait his turn.  All this ignores the clear constitutional position.  Upon the death or abdication of a monarch, the next in line succeeds automatically and immediately - hence the saying "The King is dead, long live the King".  Charles - assuming he is still alive - will succeed the present Queen, whether he wants to or not.  He might then of course decide to abdicate, in which case William would then succeed him, but it would be his (Charles') decision to make - there is no provision for the succession to skip a generation as it were.

Rattle, rattle.

It's that time of year.  Scarcely a day goes by without a letter from some charity or other.  Like I say, it's the same every year, but year by year it seems to me the tone has changed.  No longer do charities beg for a donation - they don't even ask for a donation - they now demand a donation, and what's more, they want the donation to be on their terms.  They want a direct debit set up for a minimum of £5 a month for instance.  And what about those people who stand at the exit door of supermarkets and stick their collecting tins under your nose daring you to pass them without putting something in.  Don't know about you, but it really annoys me.  I decided some time ago which charities I was going to support, and I do so as and when the mood takes me and finances allow.  All these other charities are good causes, but the choice is mine to make and I will not be bullied.

Words again.

This is what Tory MP Howard Flight said - "We're going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it's jolly expensive but for those on benefit there is every incentive. Well, that’s not very sensible."  Howls of outrage, and yet...  substitute "having children" for "breeding" and you're left with a perfectly sensible comment with which many people would agree.  Who was that comedian who used to say "It's the way I tell 'em"?

Words, words...

How do you measure happiness? This is a question being much discussed at the moment, as a result of the Government's proposal to try and do just that.  I think the question is - can you measure happiness?  As I see it, happiness is a transitory state - I may be happy one moment, and not happy the next.  That doesn't necessarily mean I'm unhappy - I may be simply content, but no more.  I think contentment - or discontentment - is a ongoing state of mind, and you could measure that, but I'm not sure about happiness.

What are exams for?

Daft question?  You may think so - surely exams are a way of testing how much a student knows about a subject?  Well, they may have originally been designed with that objective, but things have changed over the years.  Today it seems to me that exams are trying to do two things - and two things which are fundamentally incompatible.  From the point of view of the government and schools, exam results are a way of assessing how well a school is performing. So both government and schools want to see as many A and A*s as possible. But exam results are also used by employers and further education establishments to try and identify candidates worthy of consideration for a job or a University or College place.  And they want results which clearly separate the wheat from the chaff - if everybody is coming to them with A and A*s how are they to differentiate?  So I come back to the original question - what are exams for?  We need to make up our minds.

Read all about it...

I'm beginning to wonder to what extent the present economic uncertainty is being generated by the media.  It seems that the glass must always be reported as half-empty - any article must always stress the negatives.  Monday's papers were all reporting that Ireland was being bailed-out by the EU and a major crisis was thereby being averted - almost glass half-full.  But yesterday it was half-empty again - was the bail-out enough?  Would it succeed?  Would the crisis spread to Portugal and Spain?  Problem is of course that such comments can become self-fulfilling prophesies.  I'm sure it helps sell papers and attract listeners and viewers, but to what extent do the media have a duty not to make a bad situation worse?  Are they reporting the news, or helping to make it?

Confused....

Man wins big lotto jackpot - several million - wife from whom he was divorced ten years ago says she is entitled to a share.  And gets one - though apparently not as much as she wanted.  But why?  I've argued this before - why following a divorce should either party have any claim on the other's future assets?  Child maintenance of course is a separate matter - what we're dealing with here is a claim by one spouse for a share in money which the other spouse has come into - by whatever means - after their marriage has ended.  I just don't get it.

Unbelievable!

A 65-year-old woman, who has lived in this country since she was 6 months old, married and brought up a family here, has now been told that she is an illegal alien.  All this because she was actually born in Canada, and has never applied (nor it would seem up until now, had any reason to apply) for British citizenship. She has now been threatened with deportation unless she does so.  That in itself would be bad enough, but just to put the icing on the cake, she has to pay £840 for the privilege.  She has described the situation as "absolutely stupid, ridiculous".  Frankly, I feel she is showing admirable restraint - I would use far far stronger language.  Surely someone in authority ought to be able to sort this out.  It reflects very poorly on us as a nation.

Foot in mouth.

I think Lord Young's "never had it so good" statement was not so much inaccurate as simply ill-judged and badly expressed.  The point he was making - quite correctly - is that those on a variable-rate mortgage have seen the cost of servicing that mortgage drop dramatically as a result of interest rates coming down to an all-time low, and that this has put significant money into such people's pockets.  What it ignored was that for a lot - maybe even most - people, such comments are academic, because they are in rented property, or on a fixed-rate mortgage.  And of course for retired people like me, low interest rates simply mean less return on our savings.  I don't think selective reporting helped, but he sure could have chosen his words better.

Season of mists...

Have I mentioned before how I hate this time of year?  I don't know what Keats was on when he wrote his famous ode, but I can't find anything to raise my spirits when it's dark to get up, as often as not it's wet and windy, the garden looks a mess, it's dark again come tea-time, and winter's round the corner.  Ugh!!  Mind you, to be fair, Keats' poem is more about harvest-time so probably relates to late September / early October rather than mid-November.  Still, I'm depressed - roll on Spring!

Out of the spotlight.

I would imagine the Chandlers - the couple recently released after being held by Somali pirates for over a year - would be quite grateful to Prince William and Kate Middleton.  Were it not for the announcement of their engagement, the return of the Chandlers to the UK would have been the front page news, and they would have been hounded by the press, and if I read them right, this is something they would not have enjoyed.  So it's an ill wind...

OMG...

....they've really gone and done it,  Wills and Kate that it.  So now we're in for Gawd knows how many months of sick-making mawkishness.  I wish them all the best but would really like to go to sleep and wake up when it's all over!
P.S. I did like Prince Charles' off-the-cuff comment "They've been practising long enough".

Ha ha.

This from my local paper -
A British couple were driving on holiday in the US, and they were approaching a  place called Kissame.  They were discussing how it would be pronounced - is it Kiss-a-me, Kiss-ay-me, or maybe Kiss-aim?  They stopped there for something to eat and the husband said to the waitress "We were wondering how you pronounce the name of this place - could you say it very slowly for us?".  The waitress gave them a strange look and said "Buuurrrggerrr Kiiinnnggg".

Formula One

Despite the best efforts of the TV commentators - particularly Eddie Jordan - to convince me otherwise, I have found the current season frankly rather boring.  With no refuelling, the majority of races have been effectively decided in the first few laps - often indeed the first few corners - and thereafter been decidedly processional. The exceptions have been the few rain-affected races, but overall I have not managed to generate any real enthusiasm.  So, what of the overall result?
Vettel - not really a terribly convincing champion - it should have been so much easier for him.  For most of the season he was in the fastest car and he was on pole no less than 10 times, but amazingly only managed to turn 3 of them into wins.  The title is his, but the jury is still out, I feel (and I seem to remember making the same comment last season).
Alonso - I know I shouldn't feel that way, but I was rooting for anybody but him to take the title.  He hasn't got a particularly good history with me, as the posts on previous seasons will show.  I have to admit that he got the best out of what for much of the season was a rather ordinary Ferrari, but the fact that he found himself in with a chance at all owed more to good fortune and cynical manipulation of the rules than to his driving.
Webber - the one I feel most neutrals wanted to win.  Had to play second fiddle to Vettel and yet led the standings for much of the season.  If only he could have kept it on the island in Korea...

Music Man.

Recent programme on the telly about the life of Edward Elgar, who regular readers of this blog will know is a favourite composer of mine.  Can't understand this general obsession with probing into the private lives of artists - just sometimes it helps to understand why they produced a particular work, but for the most part it just seems to be intrusion for its own sake.  Why can't we just accept that Elgar produced a lot of good music, some really great music, and every now and again some absolutely sublime music - what more do you need to know?

Home truths.

Maybe just coincidence, but several times over the last few weeks I've come across that thought-provoking quote from E. M. Forster - "I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country".

By George, I think I've got it!

I am struggling to see the connection the Chinese are seeking to make between our wearing of poppies to remember our war dead, and the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century between our two countries.  The poppy tradition only goes back to the First World War, best part of a century after those rather shameful trade wars.  But whilst writing this, I've just had a thought - is it poppy = opium?  That makes more sense.

The morning after...

So now it's over.  The bugles have sounded the Last Post, the Scouts and the Guides have marched off wondering what it was all about, the old men sporting their medals have planted their crosses and walked away with their memories, and, if my personal experience is anything to go by, many if not most people have got on with their lives without giving it much of a thought. So how long do we go on with this official national act of remembrance?  We don't after all make a big thing of remembering Crécy, Agincourt, the Spanish Armada or even Trafalgar.  I don't think there are any veterans of WWI left now, and not that many of WWII.  Have we reached the stage where it should be for individuals to decide for themselves whether or not - and if so, how - they wish to mark the day?

We will remember them.

Went the day well?
We died and never knew.
But, well or ill,
Freedom, we died for you.
Went the day well?

John Maxwell Edmonds

No easy answer?

Apparently, according to George Dubya's memoirs, the use of "waterboarding" on prisoners in the US prevented, among other things, attacks in this country.  So does that make it right to use such techniques?  He certainly thinks so - as he saw it, and presumably still sees it - his job was to protect America, and to that end, anything goes.  So what do we think?  Let's get one thing out of the way from the start - waterboarding is torture.  Whatever his legal advisers may have said, putting someone in immediate fear of an unpleasant death is torture by any civilised standards.  So we then come down to the age-old dilemma of - do the ends justify the means?  If doing something bad produces a good result, does that justify doing the bad thing?  Even more so, does it justify continuing to do the bad thing in the hope of producing more good results?  Philosophers have argued about this for centuries, and I don't claim to have the answer.  I do think however that it pays to concentrate more on whether the "good" thing really was all good, rather than looking at the bad thing which is obviously bad.  So as a result of torturing these individuals, potential attacks may have been prevented, but equally it may have resulted in many more people becoming "radicalised" and as such a future threat to this country.  So is it really such a "good" result?  It's a bit like the "does prison work" argument, isn't it?  Short-term pluses versus long-term minuses.  At the end of the day it's a moral argument and we must all make up our own mind - or stick our heads in the sand and hope it goes away.

No free lunch?

Much fuss being made over the Government's plans to force the long-term unemployed to do "unpaid manual work" like picking up litter or tending for public parks and gardens.  I have no particular views on the rightness or wrongness of such a plan, but I do take exception to the idea that such work would be "unpaid" - what about the benefit they are getting?  At present they are effectively being paid for not working, so at least this way they would be doing something for their money.

Ha ha.

As someone who could well do with losing a stone or so, I liked this one -

Mr Smith was overweight and went to the doctor for help.  "What I want you to do" said the doctor "is eat normally for two days and then skip a day.   Do that for a fortnight and then come and see me again, and you should have lost about five pounds"
Two week later Mr Smith returned to the doctor, who weighed him and was amazed to find that he'd lost twenty pounds.  "Good heavens" said the doctor "and you did that just by following my instructions?"  "Yes" said Mr Smith "mind you those third days were tough.  I thought I was going to die!"  "What" said the doctor "from hunger?"  "No" said Mr Smith "from skipping!".

Watch this space!

So any candidate in an election who tells lies about any of his/her opponents is now likely to find themselves up before an Election Court with the possibility of the result of the election being declared void.  Now that should make future general and by-elections interesting!

The Lazy Cook

I posted on April 24th about new potatoes.  I am grateful to my daughter for the following tip - you don't have to fog up your kitchen by cooking them on the hob, you can do them in the microwave.  Put them in a bowl, cover them with boiling water and give them between 10 and 15 minutes (depending on the wattage of your microwave) on full power.

Here I go again!

At the risk of flogging to death a hobby-horse of mine, it seems to me that the present debate about which prisoners should and shouldn't have the right to vote says at least as much, if not more, about our approach to the use of imprisonment as a punishment as it does about the electoral process.

Oi - behave yourself!

Following on from yesterday's post, Professor Nutt's report also considered the effect of alcohol and drug taking on society in general rather than simply on the taker, and here you cannot really argue with the report's finding that society is much more widely affected by alcohol-fuelled behaviour than by drug taking.  Again though, I'm not sure this has anything to do with any difference between alcohol and drugs as such, but is more down to the fact that people tend to drink in public, but take drugs in private, so anti-social behaviour as a result of alcohol is there for all to see, whereas any such behaviour as a result of drug taking tends to take place behind closed doors as it were.

There's lies, damned lies and....

Suppose you have two activities, A and B, each of which carries a 1% chance of harm - in other words about one in every hundred people who engage in these activities is likely to come to grief.  Now suppose that a million people engage in activity A, whereas only 20,000 people take part in activity B.  Statistics will indicate that some 10,000 people have come to harm as a result of activity A, and about 200 from taking part in activity B.  Presented with just these figures you might come to the conclusion that activity A is far more dangerous than activity B, whereas, as we have seen, the risk associated with them is identical.  I haven't read Professor Nutt's report on the comparative harm caused by alcohol and various other drugs, but certainly as reported in the press, he seems to be saying that because far more people end up in A & E or at the doctor's or in hospital or dead as a result of drinking alcohol than do as a result of taking heroin or other drugs, that alcohol is more dangerous than these other drugs.  But of course, it is exactly what you would expect - given that both drinking alcohol and taking drugs carries a risk to health, the fact that far more people drink alcohol than take drugs means it is inevitable that more people will cause damage to their health by drinking the former than taking the latter.  It may be that Professor Nutt covers this point in his report, but if not, it's a basic statistical error.

I'll put a spell on you...

My granddaughter dressed up as a witch for Hallowe'en and we got talking about witchcraft and I spent most of the time trying to correct her assumptions which (no pun intended) were for the most part based on modern misinformation.  An awful lot of the supposed "history of witchcraft" has been reverse-engineered as it were.  Yes there were pagan religions in this country well pre-dating Christianity but there is no evidence that any of these were called witchcraft or wicca or anything like that. The idea of witchcraft was essentially a Christian invention designed to (a) demonise those who didn't subscribe to Christian beliefs and (b) help explain (at least to the satisfaction of Christians) the existence of evil and suffering  - these were clearly the work of the Devil and as they happened in the real world required real-world agents of the Devil to bring them about, hence witches (and to a lesser extent warlocks) were born.  There was also a healthy dose of misogyny here - the Church was (and to a certain extent, still is) terrified of the idea of women having power and so any woman who "put herself about" or who seemed to the Church to be trying to usurp it's claim to have all the answers ran the real risk of being accused of witchcraft just as a way of keeping them under control.

There is précis, and then there's....

I know newspapers have to have arresting headlines in order to attract readers, but is this going too far?  Referring to the "ink cartridge" bomb threat, one paper's headline claiming we were "Seconds from Lockerbie II" went on to say the bomb was "primed to bring down plane over UK, says Home Secretary".  Really?  Let's see what she actually said:  "The target may have been an aircraft. Had it detonated, the aircraft could have been brought down. The device was viable and could have exploded.  We do not believe that the perpetrators of the attack would have known the location of the device when it was planned to explode."  Not quite the same thing, is it?