Thursday, 14th February 2008
6:07pm
If Prince Charles wants to make deeply political speeches to the European Parliament then he should renounce his position as heir to the throne and run for election to it.
What he should not do is abuse that privileged position by offering his thoughts on controversial issues to anyone who will listen.
It's nothing to do with whether he is right or wrong (although he is dangerously wrong on homeopathy and other quackery). It's his inability to stick to the deal under which we have a monarcy - and so keep his trap shut.
.
The man is simply not fit to be monarch.
UPDATE: One of my commenters says it's all very well but I wouldn't have said all this if I agreed with Charles. Small problem there: I do agree with him on climate change. But as I made clear, this has nothing to with whether he is right or wrong.
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1:22pm
Clive links to a piece on what he rightly calls "some of the murkier stuff' washing around the internet" about Obama.
I hate to link to the Brussels Journal again, but I think a recent post there is a pretty typical (and typically obnoxious) example of what we are in for. The headline gives it away: The First Muslim-Born Leader of the West
The piece begins thus:
If I had been asked two months ago “Which Western country runs the greatest risk of electing a Muslim-born leader and how soon do you think this is going to happen?” I would have bet on the Netherlands somewhere in the next decade. Today, it looks as if the first Western country with a Muslim-born leader might very well be the United States next year, when President Barack Hussein Obama enters the Oval Office.
You get the picture:
...In America, Mr. Obama’s Muslim family background (unlike Mr. Romney’s Mormonism) is a non-issue because he attends a Christian church. Nevertheless, being born from a Muslim father, raised by a Muslim stepfather, having been enrolled at school (in Indonesia) as a Muslim and having attended Friday prayers at the local mosque as a young boy, he cannot be seen by Muslims as anything but a Muslim, especially because he has never explicitly rejected the faith of his fathers nor said anything negative about it.
So he might call himself a Christian but we all know he's really, ugh, a MUSLIM.
Now if you think the piece itself is bad enough, have a read of the comments - comments which the Brussels Journal is clearly happy to have. Here's a selection:
BHO has a big-big "debt" that will come due, at just the right time, from his childhood Islam and Muslim fathers. This note will be collected, from B. Hussein make no mistake...and like Europe, many of us will accept it, happily. If anything Barack says AND does proves me wrong...I will be the first to re-cant. I don't think that Obama even knows what America, Christianity, or the West truly is. With the MOST leftist voting record in all of the Senate, how could he?
I wondered when you Americans would realise that you are about to put a Muslim into the White House , with his finger on the nuclear trigger .
Obama reminds me of an unexploded bomb: he comes across as someone who's trying to hide or suppress strong emotion. Whether or not he's strongly influenced by Islam, there's no doubt he has one thing in common with Muslims: he has a deep resentment for whites, perhaps an outright hatred. Remember that liberals fawned on Mugabe too, before what non-liberals saw from the beginning became obvious even to liberals.
UPDATE: Some of the comments and emails I have received miss the point, saying that I believe Obama's race means he should be above criticism. Not in the least: I'm a big McCain supporter and want to see Obama defeated by HRC in the primaries. But that's because of his his policies. Why is that so difficult to understand, for those who think that comments about his "big-big "debt" that will come due, at just the right time, from his childhood Islam and Muslim fathers" are acceptable?
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12:58pm
I want to believe this. I really want to believe it.
But what about this?
Imad Mughniyeh was a master of deception. He was also Hezbollah's chief of security and its strategist. His alleged role in bombings and kidnappings earned him a place on the "Most Wanted Terrorists" list of the United States.
He reportedly underwent plastic surgery in Iran to change his appearance. Mughniyeh was often reported to be in Iran or Syria or on a plane between those two countries. Tehran and Damascus always denied any knowledge.
So forgive me if I greet the news of his demise with considerable skepticism. His life's work was deception and it would pain me not to take that into account when reporting his death.
Do read the whole piece.
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7:54am
I have a piece in today's Times on the scheme I referred to last week. Here's an extract:
What a genius idea: break the law and get free job training. That's not punishment; it's a reward. But then much of the criminal justice system long ago stopped being about justice and started being about the criminal.
On Saturday my front tyre was slashed. I had parked a few paces from a newsagent and was walking along the street when a gang of young thugs walked up to me. “Buy us some fags,” they demanded. I ignored them. “Buy us fags,” they repeated with an increased air of menace. I ignored them again and walked into the shop. By the time I had come out, they had disappeared, leaving a parting gift of a slashed front tyre.
I haven't reported it to the police. What's the point? The police can't even be bothered to deal with assaults. In my previous experiences as a victim of crime - two minor assaults - the police did precisely nothing, not even stirring themselves to follow up the incidents with me. They'll probably simply laugh if I report a punctured tyre.
Even if this time they do their job and track down the tyre slashers, the only punishment the thugs would receive is a slapped wrist.
Oops. I forgot. Punishment isn't appropriate. The poor dears are doubtless demotivated and need to have their self-esteem boosted. It should come as no surprise that, at the end of the Skills Builder course, the participants are applauded as they receive their certificates.
Welcome to British criminal justice in the 21st century. Commit a crime, be put on a training course, and then be applauded.
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Wednesday, 13th February 2008
3:49pm
As Tim Worstall puts it:
Mark Steel: Idiot
Quite.
This is what Mark Steel, idiot, writes:
New Labour certainly keep their promises. Before they were elected, they promised to reform the loophole that enables the super-rich to avoid paying tax, by claiming "non-domicile tax status". And now, 11 years later, they’re still promising to do it.
This ruse involves living in Britain while not being an official resident, and is one of the main ways in which the richest 54 billionaires in the country have paid on average 1 and a half per cent tax.
Steel is, of course, not alone. I have read the same sort of 'NonDoms pay no tax' thing so many times. But as Tim writes, this is complete nonsense:
If you are not resident in the UK you do not pay tax at all in the UK. Non-doms are resident in the UK which is why they pay full UK tax on their UK earnings and full UK tax on earnings from other countries which they bring into the UK. But because they are resident but not domiciled they do not pay UK tax on money that they earn in other countries and do not bring into the UK. If they were not residents we would call them non-residents: the fact that we call them non-domiciles rather than non-residents might be the smallest of clues to the fact that they are not "living in Britain while not being an official resident".
Steel isn't just an idiot. He's also one of
that breed of lefty comedians who aren't remotely funny.
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2:34pm
The poor dear:
"I'm being made to feel like a leper," [Dwain] Chambers told the Sun newspaper on Wednesday.
"A terrible stigma has been attached to me but people need to know I am clean."
Maybe he's being treated like a leper because he should be. Maybe he's being treated like a leper because he is a cheat who should't be allowed near a race track for the rest of his life. Maybe he's being treated like a leper because he has - to be polite - a bloody cheek in coming back.
And maybe the athletics authorities have only themselves to blame, not least for readmitting Christine Ohuruogu into the fold. As Jeff Powell puts it:
As Dwain Chambers galloped away with the 60 metres dash in Sheffield...this convicted steroids abuser was said to have created a nightmare for UK athletics officials apparently obliged now to put him in their team for the World Indoor Championships.
If so, he is the monster of the sport's own creation. When the British Olympics Association excused 400 metres world champion Christine Ohuruogu and top triathlete Tim Don from their Beijing ban on convicted drugs cheats or banned test evaders, they surrendered not only the moral high ground within world athletics but the finishing line to Chambers.
Since, in the statute book, missing three tests is as much a crime as being caught drugspositive, no wonder British fans applauded Chambers yesterday as loudly in Sheffield as they cheered Ohuruogu in Tokyo.
They are as confused as they are misguided. The officials will be in a legal pickle themselves if they refuse to pick Chambers, all the more so if he goes on to sue for the right to Olympic selection citing Don and Ohuruogu as his precedent.
And they will have only themselves to blame.
Can there be a more morally corrupt sport? As if the drugs abuse wasn't enough to damn athletics, or the financial black hole of London 2012 which forces us to take money from deserving causes and carry on paying for decades so people can round round in circles, this year's spectacle in China is simply sickening.
Thanks heavens for men of principle like Steven Spielberg.
Football is regularly accused of being without any sense of shame or decency. But athletics is a sport which, at its core, prostitutes itself to the demands of tyrants and cheats.
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1:26pm
If you want a lesson in how not to help a country's poor, and how not to take advantage of a country's natural resources, take a leaf out of Hugo Chavez's book:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's policies have cut the South American country's oil output by 1.2 million barrels a day, enough to supply 80 percent of U.S. East Coast demand, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
Production from Venezuelan fields has plunged by more than one-third since Chavez assumed the presidency in 1999 because of a lack of investment by the country's state oil company, Rene Ortiz, a Cambridge Energy Research Associates senior associate, said today in an interview in Houston. Another factor was the replacement of engineers with military personnel ill-equipped to manage oil fields, he said.
Agh! Who cares! We're getting it cheap. And who cares if it's the
poor who'll get screwed. As Oliver Kamm explains:
Chavez uses oil as a means of coercive diplomacy (or buying friendship in international forums). It hurts other nations (Trinidad & Tobago, e.g., is a hydrocarbons producer which loses business because it isn't in a position to sell below market price) and subsidises rich-world consumers at the expense of poor Venezuelans. It's particularly disturbing that the deal is in the form a barter rather than a market transaction, because there's no way of properly comparing the services that Venezuelans will receive.
The strong suspicion is that Chavez is using the country's oil wealth, which ought to be stored against future fluctuations in the oil price, for securing services of value to him but that are not transparent. The poor financial nature of the deal doesn't affect him, but it's a way of obtaining services that are quite plainly going to be used against his political opponents (see article in Times business section on this).
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8:32am
Daniel Finkelstein is bang on in his column today. It's all about the norm:
At a conference organised by the Centre for Policy Studies, Greg [Clark] asked the audience how much they thought it appropriate to leave as a tip in a restaurant. Everyone had a view - answers ranged from 10 to 15 per cent. Leaving a tip in an eaterie to which we may never return is an odd thing to do really, but we all acknowledge the social norm and almost all abide by it, even when no one else is looking.
Then Greg asked this - what proportion of your salary should you give to charity? There was a confused silence. Nobody knew. There isn't a social norm.
Now estimates of how much we do give to charity vary. One survey suggests it is as low as 0.5 per cent on average. But the most widely accepted figure is that provided by the Charities Aid Foundation - 0.73 per cent. Greg provided the audience with the result of a simple calculation. If the average could be raised to 1 per cent it would bring £4 billion a year into the coffers of charities.
That would be far more useful to charities than anything that could be achieved through politics or changing the law.
So the idea, the wheeze, is this - to create a new social norm, in which people feel they should give at least 1 per cent of their income to charity. Even if it only partly succeeds, it could raise £1 billion a year at least.
Take Jews. I was brought up to believe that you should always give a proportion of your imcome to charity (and not just Jewish charities); so was every Jew I know. It's as much of part of a Jewish upbringing as beigels and chicken soup.The
last report of which I am aware (published in 2003) found that:
80 per cent of those in the lowest income bracket had given to some non-Jewish charity, while for those with incomes over £75,000 the figure was around 90 per cent.
It's absolutely about what is viewed as the norm. When, as Jew, you hear of someone who hasn't given money to charity then you think they are, at the very least, weird - and they are frowned upon.
Change the norm. That's the anwer.
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