Society

Wednesday

Daniel Jackson

Atheists are embracing Gods and creationism

Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor and entrepreneur, the twenty-first century’s answer to Howard Hughes, believes we are living in a computer simulation. The chances that we exist in ‘base reality’ are billions to one, he says. Last week he told an audience of Silicon Valley tech evangelists: ‘Forty years ago we had Pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were.’ ‘Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. Soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality.’ ‘If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even

Helen Nugent

Encouraging news for homeowners but motorists will not be happy

House prices have grown faster than predicted, The Telegraph reports, despite concerns that buyers would hold back ahead of this month’s EU referendum and a lull in the market after the buy-to-let-surge earlier in the year. The annual rate of growth in May was 9.2 per cent, unchanged since April, according to Halifax. Prices had been expected to rise 8.9 per cent in the year to May. House prices in the three months to May were 1.4 per cent higher, after a dip of 0.8 per cent in the three months to April. The fact that house prices have not dropped off substantially is ‘encouraging’ said Jeremy Leaf, a former chairman of the Royal

Tuesday

Rob Crilly

Donald Trump must be delighted that Bernie Sanders won’t back down

Feeling the Bern lasts only so long, it turns out. Now for the hangover. One of my friends posted a message on Facebook at the weekend that sums it up. ‘What is on my mind this morning is Sanders. I voted for Sanders but right now I really want him to step aside and let Ms Clinton fight the fight against Trump,’ she wrote, going on to explain how worried she was about the future of the US. ‘If I have to go knock on doors to get Democrats to vote for Hillary, I will. The prospect of a Trump presidency terrifies me! I will seek asylum somewhere!’ Whoever thought it would

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Muhammad Ali embodied everything lefties hate about ‘lad culture’

Every wet leftie has been paying tribute to Muhammad Ali over the past 72 hours. Which is kind of weird considering Ali embodied everything they loathe. Male bravado, urban swagger, cockiness, masculinity by the bucketload: the things that made Ali great are the things his right-on mourners normally agitate and commentate against. Their hailing of Ali is as mad as a bunch of zebras turning up to the funeral of a lion. Nothing rattles today’s liberal-leftists more than the idea of the powerful bloke. Especially cocksure poor ones who are mouthy and — oh my God — use their muscle to get ahead in life. Indeed, this week’s New Statesman

Helen Nugent

Euro 2016 will be bad for the nerves but good for the economy

Here we go again. As the nation prepares itself for the glory and the pain of Euro 2016, supermarkets and DIY stores are readying themselves for a run on beer, crisps, pizzas and barbecues. And there’s the rub. While our natural inclination is to expect the worst on the field (and no Sir Geoff Hurst, I don’t think England’s squad is the most exciting since the World Cup winning team of 1966), there is a glimmer of good news for the economy. If you’ve seen the glut of booze offers and cut-price fast food on the shelves of your local shops, you’ll know what I mean. According to Lloyds Bank, the countries

Helen Nugent

Money digest: today’s need-to-know financial news | 7 June 2016

Gloomy news on the front page of The Times this morning: according to a poll for the paper, one in three middle-class people could not pay an unexpected bill without resorting to borrowing. According to research by YouGov showing the squeeze on household finances, 31 per cent of middle-class voters — so-called ABC1s including professional, junior managerial and administrative workers — would struggle with a sudden bill of up to £500. Forty-six per cent of manual workers and the unemployed would not be able to afford the bill. Since the financial crisis, wages have fallen by up to 10 per cent on some calculations when adjusted for inflation. According to the Office

Monday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

There’s a grim reason why Belgium has plenty of organ donors

A discussion between two medical ethicists on the Today programme this morning ended with them agreeing on one point: whether or not it is right to breed pigs so that their organs can be harvested for transplantation into humans (as the University of California is experimenting with), the first thing we should do in order to solve the shortage of donor organs is to move to a system of ‘presumed consent’, where the organs of dying patients are considered fair game for transplantation unless they have signed a form excluding this. To leave the pigs for a moment, what is so ethical about presumed consent for human donors? In the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Muhammad Ali opened British eyes to America’s race problems

A question for those of you of a certain age. Who was the first articulate black person you ever saw or heard? My guess is that it would be Muhammad Ali or, if you are a little older, Cassius Clay. Obviously if you yourself are black the question should be a little different. Then it would be who was the first articulate black person you saw on TV? Of course there were plenty of black people in the world before Clay came along, loads of them. Back in the 1960s they impinged on the rest of us largely as entertainers, if they were famous black people, or as the unwitting

Dominic Laurie

Rip-off Britain: paying for services that should be free

Life would have been much more simple if I’d been born with the same surname as my wife. The hassle she is going through since our recent wedding changing her surname on such things as pensions, credit cards and bank accounts is a pain. To alter the details in your passport though – as we’ve found out – is an extra layer of annoyance. The UK Passport Office charges £72.50 to change surname letters (in our case, six) on the particulars, even if the expiry date of your previous one is still many years off, as my wife’s was. It seems grossly unfair to the hundreds of thousands of (mainly) women who might want

Helen Nugent

Money digest: today’s need-to-know financial news | 6 June 2016

A story on the front page of today’s edition of The Times warns that holidaymakers risk being stranded abroad with huge bills after buying travel insurance that turns out to be worthless. It has emerged that many cheap policies fail to protect families against even the most basic of mishaps, including missed flights, lost bags and medical bills. Some policies were sold for as little as £13. In many cases travellers were hit with such high excesses — the compulsory payments on a claim — that they made the policy almost valueless. Researchers at the comparison site comparethemarket.com, which compiled the study based on an analysis of single-trip policies, found that about

Sunday

Murray Kempton

‘I’m still pretty’ – Muhammad Ali’s 1964 fight with Sonny Liston

In February 1964, shortly before taking his new name, Muhammad Ali defeated Sonny Liston to become boxing’s heavyweight champion. From our archive, here is Murray Kempton’s piece on the fight. Miami, Florida There was this moment, just before the bell for the seventh round for the heavyweight championship of the world when Cassius Clay got up to go about his job. Then suddenly he thrust his arms straight up in the air in the signal boxers use to greet victory, and we laughed at his arrogance. No man resigned to the laws of organised society who had seen Cassius Clay that morning could have believed that he would be on his feet

Declan Clowry

The rich are getting richer – the poor are getting robbed

Much fuss is made about financial inequality, but what about inequality of crime? It’s a question that has never been properly answered. Last year, The Spectator put out an appeal for help with social questions that weren’t being addressed by politicians or academia. One was whether the much-lauded fall in crime has been concentrated in richer neighbourhoods. Strangely, the Home Office seems never to have looked into it. It’s an area I know something about, having previously worked on profiling areas across the country based on their inhabitants’ wealth, health, and various other factors for a number of demographic studies. So The Spectator commissioned me to carry out the study. The

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: ludicrous laws

Your latest challenge was to propose a new and ludicrous piece of legislation along with a justification for it. Although Basil Ransome-Davies makes it into the winning line-up, some might argue that his proposal is far from ludicrous, given that cats are taking over the internet. Another suggestion that struck me as eminently sensible was Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead’s call for a ban on the wearing of protuberant rucksacks in busy places. Chris O’Carroll’s neat meta entry, which demands a ban on ‘journals of news and opinion …sponsoring competitions that award prizes for light verse and frivolous comic prose’, made me smile, and I also commend D.A. Prince, who was not alone

Charles Moore Charles Moore

If it’s forbidden to call a baby Cyanide, should Chardonnay be allowed?

According to a recent law report in the Times, the Court of Appeal has just forbidden a mother to name her daughter Cyanide. The child was born to a schizophrenic woman, as the result of a rape. The girl is in local authority care. The mother’s lawyers argued that it is a statutory duty to register a child with a name and that the law has no provision to refuse offensive names. But Lady Justice King (itself a striking, though not offensive name) found that the choice of name was an act of ‘parental responsibility’. Because of the care order, this responsibility had devolved upon the local authority, which did

Taki

‘Tennis is a soulless game’: Why I won’t be watching Wimbledon

Write about things you really know was the advice Papa Hemingway offered wannabe writers, so here goes: the French Open is still on, Wimbledon is coming up, and I’ve just read a lament by some French woman about how professional tennis and big-time sports have become ever more ubiquitous and ever more out of reach. Duh! A former model by the name of Géraldine Maillet has made a documentary about the 2015 French Open, not exactly a stop- the-presses kind of story. It was released on DVD just as the 2016 Open began. The French Championships, as they were called before the Open era began in 1967, was my favourite

Friday

Rebecca O'Connor

I’m a saver, get me out of here! Navigating the new savings maze

Every time George Osborne takes hold of a red box he seems to come up with another tax-free savings vehicle. Or so it appears to Individual Savings Account (ISA) savers, who two years ago had two straightforward choices: cash or stocks and shares. Cash for the risk averse, stocks and shares for the risk aware. Now, depending on your home ownership status and attitude to risk, there are two more options in the mix – the Help to Buy ISA and the Innovative Finance ISA, and one on the way – the Lifetime ISA. Which to choose? How much to save in each? Navigating the new savings maze requires more

Helen Nugent

Money digest: today’s need-to-know financial news | 3 June 2016

Ker-ching! Children’s pocket money has reached its highest level for nine years, according to an annual survey that has been running since the 1980s. Children now receive £6.55 per week from a parent or guardian on average, an increase of six per cent compared to last year, according to Halifax. But there’s a gender gap, even at this age. Parents gave boys 13 per cent more pocket money every week than girls in the past year with the gender gap growing from 2 per cent the year before. Halifax’s survey, which involved more than 1,200 children and 575 parents, found boys between eight and 15 received an average of £6.93 a

Ben Southwood

The case for lowering taxes

There’s a saying that when you tax something, you get less of it. Sometimes, this is a good thing. The government taxes smoking, alcohol, and petrol partly because we think these things have costly side-effects—like pollution or burdening the NHS—that we want to discourage. But most of our taxes do not fall on activities with costly side-effects: they fall on things like working, travelling, and socialising. And because we have such a high tax burden—this year we’ll work for the chancellor for 154 days before we start working for ourselves on Tax Freedom Day, today—we almost certainly have less of those things. With lower taxes we’d be happier, and our

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Life on the edge

The grandmaster Nigel Davies has just written a new book on the Pirc Defence, a variation in which Black sacrifices immediate control of the centre to White’s pawns, in the hope of a later counterattack, designed to paint the centre of the board black instead of white. Davies is a solid, dependable and reliable guide to an opening that was once considered heretical but is now mainstream. The game I have chosen to illustrate the principle theme of this defence is the victory I achieved against the ten-times British champion Jonathan Penrose in 1971. This game was instrumental in my winning the British Championship that year. I first annotated this

Raymond Keene

No. 411

Black to play. This is from Cherin-Pedini, Italy 2016. Black has just sacrificed some material as he could foresee a simplifying manoeuvre leading to a winning ending. How did he continue? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 7 June or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.   Last week’s solution 1 … Nxb4 Last week’s winner Roderick Adams, Dalkeith, Midlothian