6:10pm
There's a new blog I'd like to point you towards.
Mu friend Emanuele Ottolenghi, director of the Transatlantic Institure in Brussels, has a blog on (mainly) Middle Eastern issues. You can be sure that his take on things is always worth reading. This latest post is typical:
Interviewed in the Sunday Telegraph, Daniel Levy—a former Israeli government staffer and policy analyst—was quoted as saying that Tony Blair, in his new capacity as special envoy to the Middle East, should negotiate with Hamas. Otherwise, Levy bluntly claimed, “he’ll fail.” Levy has now rectified the quote on his blog, claiming he meant something else:
"My argument is that the policy of isolating and excluding Hamas cannot work. The important thing is to open meaningful channels of dialogue to Hamas. Whether that is initiated by Blair or others is secondary. In fact, it would be unlikely (and understandably so) for Blair to take the lead role in this respect."
While you’re busy parsing his equivocation, one thing should be said about Daniel Levy: his career as a peacemaker uniquely qualifies him to know what failure is. He served in the Barak government as head of Jerusalem affairs when Barak proposed to divide Jerusalem. He served with Yossi Beilin at the Ministry of Justice, and was part of the Israeli delegation at the Taba talks in 2001, when the most dovish delegation Israel could produce failed to charm its Palestinian counterparts. He’s been an analyst at the International Crisis Group and was a party to the Geneva accords. Given his past accomplishments and his recipe for peacemaking, it would be arrogant to doubt his wisdom. Then again, given what Levy views as success, Blair’s “failure”, in this case, might not be so bad.
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6:23pm
Richard Dawkins may not br to everyone's taste, but he certainly knows the time of day when it comes to so-called 'alternative' medicine. I'll cite his views on homeopathy at length, because it is one of the greatest con tricks of the modern world. Homeopaths are quacks, homeopathy is uttter drivel, and those who give it any credence are utterly misguided. Here's Dawkins on it:
I don’t enjoy dashing people’s lifetime careers, but if their careers are based on claims that are simply wrong . . .” he lets the sentence tail off, implying a good dashing is what they deserve. Not that it does much good. In most cases he has discovered both practitioners and believers immediately invent reasons why the experiment was flawed or a fluke to keep their faith. “The forgivingness of the gullible is amazing,” he says. ...As Dawkins says: “There might be bad scientists, but that does not mean the methodology of science is bad.” For him the acid test is forever and always: “Test it!” This is a principle totally lacking, he charges, at the Royal London Homeopathic hospital, recently refurbished to the tune of £20m, including £10m from the cash-strapped NHS, and with a plaque certifying the endorsement of the Prince of Wales. (His title for episode two of The Enemies of Reason is The Irrational Health Service.) What is undisputed is that homeopathy derived from an early misunderstanding of the principle behind vaccination: that like cures like.
But actually a real vaccine stimulates the body’s own immune system to fight the disease. What makes homeopathy so truly absurd in Dawkins’s inexorable logic is the idea that a substance becomes more powerful the more it is diluted. The idea, widely believed though totally unproven, is that water retains a “memory” of the molecule, though if it did he points out – as the people of Gloucester might nowadays bear in mind – it would also “remember” the salt, mud and urine it once contained. He cites the statistical probability that “one molecule in every litre of water drunk once passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell”. Hardly reassuring for royalists.
“I say to doctors who use homeopathy: if you can identify this you’d have discovered a whole new force in physics. Either there is no effect, in which case you shouldn’t be charging people money, or there is an effect, in which case you should prove it and win the Nobel prize.”
The fact that homeopathic doctors and patients do claim there is a benefit he puts down to the human body’s power to restore itself when given the psychological boost of someone else’s concentrated concern and attention: the average half hour to an hour, rather than the typical eight-minute NHS GP consultation. “There was a time when old-fash-ioned family doctors used to hand out placebos but now they aren’t allowed to because it’s against medical ethics. Now it’s only the homeopaths who are allowed to benefit from the placebo effect.
“Homeopathy started out about 200 years ago at a time when conventional medicine was considerably more dangerous. At least they weren’t applying leeches.” Dawkins insists that phenomena including religion, myths, superstition and science need to be seen in their historical context. He quotes the science fiction author Arthur C Clarke’s Third Law, “any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
“But you can’t simply reverse that and say that because it calls itself magic now it must be future science.”
UPDATE: Oh dear - far too many typos in this post, which I have no corrected.
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3:21pm
There I was, thinking that the frontrunner for the Republican nomination was only a former NYC Mayor. It turns out that he's also one of the greatest conductors who ever lived. According to Virgin Records in LA...
(via Opera Chic)
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1:38pm
Now that Chris Langham has been convicted, I can write what I've wanted to write since his arrest. What is it with these people who, when they've been found with depraved dowloaded images of children, start pleading all sorts of excuses in supposed defence of their behaviour? Research, abuse as a child, blah blah blah.
You'd have to be dense in the extreme not to be aware by now that downloading such images is a strict liability offence. You download them, you're guilty. End of story. And that means there are no circumstances - none, ever - in which one should do such a thing.
So anyone who downloads them and then offers a spurious excuse is either a moron of the first degree, or someone depraved enough to be incapable of resisting the urge to look at such images of children.
Chris Langham is clearly not a moron.
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1:19pm
The always wonderful Simon Barnes has another terrific column today on the England cricket team's pathetic behaviour:
The taunting of an opponent by leaving sweets on the pitch is pathetic. It destroys a spectator’s pleasure in the game. It certainly made me switch my allegiance to India. I thought England deserved what they got. And I don’t think I was alone in that.
...The stump microphone picked up a classic piece of sledging wit during that second Test between England and India. “I’m driving a Porsche Carrera; what’s your car?” Thus the exquisite Wildean wit of the modern England cricketer is laid bare.
It is, of course, the sort of remark you would expect from a Porsche driver, a Porsche being the naffest car ever manufactured. But is it a suitable remark to make to a man from a Third World nation who is a guest in your country? The combination of vulgarity and insensitivity is mind-numbing.
...The England cricket team are suffering from confusion. The players believe to a man that behaving like an arsehole makes you a better cricketer. The fact is that it doesn’t. It only makes you an arsehole.
...One of the many great things about the Ashes series of 2005 was the respect between the players. The ultimate image of the series was Andrew Flintoff’s moment of commiseration with Brett Lee after England’s narrow win at Edgbaston in the second Test. We liked that – that’s how we want cricket played.
So what is Moores’s response to the present outbreak of nonsense? “There is an issue about whether the stump mike should be so loud.” No there is not, there is an issue about whether the England players should make such prats of themselves.
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1:12pm
I know Sven has been signing some odd players, but what are Bojinov seals, and why are they moving to Man City?
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10:56pm
The Economist makes a fair point in dismissing my piece on the religious divide within the EU:
Um, how to break this to Mr Pollard...? His entire thesis is based on a misunderstanding. Few people have realised the profound importance of footnote 18, because it is without importance. ...Having failed to win an opt-out, the Poles were allowed to salve their pride by inserting a unilateral declaration into the text, with no legal force to exempt them from one syllable of the Charter. It is the EU diplomatic equivalent of being convicted and sentenced on some charge, and being allowed to make a statement to the court before you are led away in handcuffs. It may help you feel a little bit better, but it changes nothing.
I could perhaps have phrased it better when I described the footnote as "one of the most important elements of the treaty". I realise, of course, that unilateral declarations have no legal force as such. But my point is not that the footnote is important because of its legal force in this particular treaty, but because the Polish declaration arose because of a huge issue - that there are some countries which will indeed ban such research and treatment. And the consequences of that will be profound.
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9:47pm
Melanie Phillips has a superb post on the idiocy of using Saudi Arabia as an ally against Iran:
Saudi Arabia is supposedly our ally against al Qaeda. While it may well be the case they that it has been useful to us in providing intelligence and so forth, it is also the intellectual and religious fount of al Qaeda. Having created this monster, Saudi then found to its dismay that it turned into its own most bitter attacker. So Saudi fights al Qaeda terrorism inside its own borders, but sees no reason to cease funding and promoting jihad against the rest of the world.
Now Saudi sees an even bigger threat to itself from Iran. On the ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ principle, the US is taking advantage of that to try to use Saudi as leverage against Iran. The US also seems to think that ‘solving’ the Israel Arab impasse will help defeat Islamist terror (which is, of course, precisely the wrong way round); or maybe President Bush is merely desperate to leave as his legacy a peace deal between Israel and the Arabs (dream on). Whatever. Either way, there is now a US/Saudi love-in going on. So the US has just given it a whopping $11 billion arms deal, and Saudi has graciously indicated that it may attend the Middle East peace conference the US is organising for the autumn which will consider, we are told, a revival of the Saudi Middle East ‘peace plan’.
People are hailing the prospect of Saudi sitting down with Israel as a breakthrough. It should be seen instead as the US forcing Israel to embrace a scorpion. The so-called ‘peace plan’ by Saudi — which has never recognised Israel and which forbids Jews to enter its own territory — requires Israel to return to the 1967 border, which is in fact the 1949 armistice line otherwise known as the ‘Auschwitz border’ because it would leave Israel undefended against genocide. Which is, of course, the intention.
The other arm of the Saudi pincer of peace is the demand for the return of the so-called Palestinian ‘refugees’ (they are as much refugees as I am a refugee from Poland from where my grandparents fled the pogroms in the early years of the last century) which is tantamount to the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. Which is, of course, the intention.
It is obvious that Saudi Arabia is making only rhetorical and deeply dishonest gestures to convey the impression that it is a serious player in the ‘peace process’.
Do read the rest of her post, on the uses to which the Saudis put their money.
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9:36pm
I've only just caught up with today's news. For me, the most interesting story by far is the Mirror's scoop of a Philip Gould memo.
Daniel Finkelstein's take on it is spot on:
Though it isn't the memo's intent, one of the clear messages is just how good... Lord Gould is.
As Daniel says, it is compulsory reading. Whatever one thinks of Labour's performance as a government, its strategic positioning has been consistenty stunning, and in large measure that has been because of the insights and rare skills of Lord Gould. To read that memo is to see top class strategic political advice. Anyone who wants to understand how politics works, how Labour works, and how campaignining works should read that memo.
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8:16am
I have a piece in today's magazine about the EU draft reform treaty - on an aspect which has been ignored. Here's an extract:
It’s a truism with EU documents that the devil is in the detail, but truisms are called that because they are, well, true. And few people seem to have realised the profound importance of footnote 18 to the proposed draft wording for a replacement of Article 6 on fundamental rights.
If you’re lost after that last sentence already, that’s probably why no one else has noticed it. But here it is. It’s termed a ‘Unilateral Declaration by Poland’: ‘The Charter does not affect in any way the right of Member States to legislate in the sphere of public morality, family law as well as the protection of human dignity and respect for human physical and moral integrity.’
Seems a bit obscure? It isn’t. It goes to the heart of EU society and presages — within the next decade — a revived social division across the EU based on religion. Because ‘...the protection of human dignity and respect for human physical and moral integrity’ is EU-speak for bans on new medical areas such as embryonic stem cell research, gene therapy and even the latest breakthrough, RNA (ribonucleic acid). The declaration is designed to ensure that member state governments will remain free to ban such research.
One should state at the outset that Poland — or any other member state — should of course be free to legislate as it sees fit on such matters. That Poland feels the need for such a declaration is because of the very issue on which most comment on the draft treaty has been based — that the new voting arrangements threaten to trample on member states’ freedoms.
But the issues raised by such technologies go beyond the capacity of democracies to resist.
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