Courts Out For Summer.

Do Italian courts routinely break up for a summer recess? It doesn't seem the most efficient process for a notoriously slow legal system to take.

The School Vetting Affair.

It's the story everyone is talking about-or were talking about yesterday- the decision by Phillip Pullman and other children's authors to refuse to submit to the governments vetting procedure for people who visit schools. I asked some of the leading figures in the debate to explain their positions:

Phillip Pullman, Children’s Author:

I’m sorry whilst I do appreciate that this scheme must apply to the little people, but do you know who I am? As Britain’s leading children’s author I shouldn’t be made to feel that I am being treated like a sex offender, or even worse an ordinary member of the public. It is preposterous and degrading.

We children’s authors should be exempt from the Vetting and Barring scheme, and we should also get a free pass for avoiding airport security and using the bus lane during the rush hour.

Ed Balls, Schools Secretary:

I understand the frustration felt by writers like Mr Pullman, but child safety is the number one priority for this Labour government. In my role as a cabinet minister I visit many schools and have been frankly dismayed at some of the people who hang out near them. At one recent visit to { name of school deleted in order to deter sex offenders} I often see sinister looking men lurking in the corridors with bulging eyes staring who terrify the children. I have since asked for all mirrors to be removed in future.

Beatrix Campbell OBE, Child Protection Expert:

If it is worth letting someone check your body and examine the contents of your bag at an airport, then it is worth letting the computer check whether you've committed crimes against children before you are allowed to attract their attention in their schools.

However as I have previously demonstrated most police officers in Britain are part of a giant conspiracy to abuse children and are likely to allow their fellow satanists off scot free. Therefore we need a more reliable method to ascertain whether unconvicted sex offenders like Mr Pullman are guilty. As we need an objective method that can't be compromised. If Pullman really wants to skulk around in schools then he should register with social services then we can set up a system where he will be tied to a chair and dunked in a lake- it is well known that Satanists float in these circumstances.


Maud Flanders, Cartoon Character:

The Children!!!! Won't someone please think of the children?

Gary Glitter, Musician:

Whilst Philip Pullman rightly raises the inconvenience cause to innocent people like him, the impact of the Vetting Scheme is felt even more strongly by us actual sex offenders. Instead of being able to wonder into schools to talk to/ molest the children we now have do so outside of school premises.

Julie Bindel, Lunatic:

The voices protecting someone like Pullman who I am not accusing of any crime are louder than those that speak up for his victims. Philip Pullman may not have been caught and convicted molesting any children yet but lets not be complacent. Unfortunately the legal system is set up to protect and perpetuate male violence so we can't simply ban all men from going within 100 metres of children.

Surprisingly I live at home with my cat, who has to wear a bell on her collar so that she can't sneak up on any birds or rodents, is it really too much to demand that men be required to wear these bells too. Are children less important than sparrows?

No Comment.

Cherie Blair has been diagnosed with suspected swine flu, it has been revealed.

The Euroweasel.

When David Cameron announced plans for the Conservatives to leave the European People's Party he essentially left two ways open for Tory Europhile MEPs to protest. They could either register their objection to the policy before the election and announce they they wouldn't join the new Euro grouping- thus putting their fate into the hands of the electorate. This would be a brave and honourable method of registering their disapproval.

If they aren't brave or honourable then Edward MacMillan Scott's approach is much less risky- you stand on the popular Eurosceptic platform for the the election, but then once you are elected and have your snout in the trough for the next 5 years you announce that you cannot in all principle go along with what you promised to do during the election held less than a month previously and jump ship.

EMS can't even go through the whole "my party left me" stuff that defectors usually engage in because David Cameron quite specifically waited until after the European election to withdraw from the EPP, had he done so beforehand the likes of EMS could legitimately claim that they were staying true to the principles they were elected on.

Dogs That Haven't Barked.

Despite the intervention of Al Qaeda and the Turkish Prime Minister the reaction of the fabled Muslim street to the ethnic unrest between the Muslim Uighurs and the Han Chinese has largely been a dog that hasn't barked.

A lot of issues negatively affecting Muslims get ignored by the Islamic states- Zimbabwe bulldozing mosques, the Kosovan war and of course the dozens of countries which persecute their own populations. On the other hand there have been comical over reactions to Danish Cartoons, Miss World, papal speeches, alleged mishandlings of the Koran and of course Mohammed the Teddy Bear.

The muted disapproval over the treatment of the Uighurs demonstrates once more that anti Western feeling isn't motivated by actual Western slights, but some incidents get taken as a pretext to cultivate a sense of victimhood.

A Lucky Man.

For someone who was too crazy to know what he was doing, you have to admire Kenneth Erskine- The Stockwell Strangler- for his sheer luck in:

• Selecting victims who were unlikely to be able to defend themselves.
• Doing his killings, which he had no control over, in private where no one could intervene to stop him.
• Setting up a web of different back accounts to launder the stolen money through in order to avoid capture.

If his mental illness didn't diminish his capacity to plan his killings in such a way as to reduce the risk to himself, then it doesn't seem like much of an illness to me.

Book Review: World On Fire.

Instead of just posting links to my book reviews at Amazon every once in a while, I'll cross post anything I write there to here, because if I go to all that effort I might as well make use of it. Here is a review of "World On Fire" by Amy Chua, which argues that:

"As global markets open, ethnic conflict worsens and democracy in developing nations can turn ugly and violent. Chua shows how free markets have concentrated disproportionate, often spectacular wealth in the hands of resented ethnic minorities - 'market-dominant minorities'. Adding democracy to this volatile mix can unleash suppressed ethnic hatred and bring to power 'ethno-nationalist' governments that pursue aggressive policies of confiscation and revenge.":

My review is as follows:

I'll assume that most people reading this are familiar with Any Chua's basic idea of `Market Dominant minorities' and the hostility that they receive. When I first read this a few years ago I thought it was fantastic and explained so much. However rereading it recently I have doubts.

The phenomenon certainly does exist in much of the world, the overseas Chinese (of which her family is part) have achieved enormous economic dominance in much of South East Asia and been the victim of mob violence repeatedly as a result over the course of many centuries. The Lebanese in West Africa, Indians in East Africa and Jews in Eastern Europe are also examples of ethnic minorities vastly out performing the indigenous population.

However there are some things that leave me unconvinced, Chua claims that these resentments are likely to be inflamed by democracy and free markets. It is certainly true that free markets exacerbate the differences but World On Fire gives examples of this kind of mob violence going back centuries, to well before the era of democracy. Some of the outbreaks of violence, such as the anti Chinese riots in Indonesia in 1998 were concurrent with democracy, but surely this is because the same forces that weakened the grip of the dictator, Suharto, weakened the states control of law and order.

Secondly she tries to fit the Market Dominant Minorities idea to too many conflicts, for example she emphasises that the Croats were much wealthier than the Serbs as a possible cause of the bloody Yugoslav wars. Yet Serbian nationalist propaganda and violence was initially directed to a much greater extent at the impoverished ethnic Albanians.

Thirdly think her concept needs refinement. Early in the book she refers to the violence against the Indians in Burma and in East Africa, interestingly though there wasn't a similar level of persecution of the whites, who were even higher on the economic ladder than the Indians. In Nigeria the Ibo suffered badly however the Yoruba, who are also quite wealthy weren't persecuted.

Thomas Sowell's concept of middleman minorities explains this better than Chua's idea. Sowell argues that the two factors which inflame particularly inflame resentment are when minorities act as economic middlemen and when they were once very poor but overtake the majority population economically. This refinement explains the outbursts of violence much better than Chua's idea in my opinion.

Lastly while the end notes demonstrate that she has been very broadminded and undogmatic about who she has used for the source material I do wonder whether there are quality control issues, particularly with the journalistic sources.

Update: I didn't say in the review, but the recent riots in East Turkestan do appear to be very similar to the outbursts of violence against the Han Chinese elsewhere in Asia. The Chinese have come in and been much more successful, economically than the Uighars. The success can't really be considered to be down to the prejudices of the Chinese state when the same pattern has occurred in countries where the Chinese have little political power.

Labour's Core Vote Strategy.

Labour are trying to limit the scale of defeat by attempting to create dividing lines to shore up their core voters:

• Professional Northerners- An end to the terrible problem of anti-Northern discrimination.
• Disgruntled Muslims- Arms sales to Israel stopped.
• Class Warriors- Charitable status of public schools could be revoked.
  
  

They've given up on winning the election.

Arise Sir Gok!

The Cabinet Office, which oversees the honours process, has told Whitehall departments submitting nominations to ensure that their lists include more female and non-white candidates.

....

In her letter, sent to John Ransford, the chief executive of the Local Government Association, Mrs Harris also made clear that there should be more candidates from two specific ethnic groups, "Black African" and "Chinese", which had allegedly been "under represented" in the past.

Oh ffs! If the Chinese or Africans want gongs than can damn well donate to the Labour Party like everyone else. Is there really a urgent shortage of Chinese OBEs anyway?

Alternative Approaches To Baby Dangling

An angry crowd in southwest China beat a suicidal man who threatened to jump off a ledge with his two-year-old daughter, state media reported.

More than 100 people attacked the man, 34-year-old Hu Binjun, after he had dangled his daughter from an eighth-floor window in the city of Chengdu, in Sichuan province, according to the China Daily.

"He deserved the beating because he was so inhumane to his own child," said a woman at the scene, according to the report.

Those crazy Chinese, don't they realise that dangling your baby out of a window is a sign of an eccentric genius?

Ali G, Bruno & Borat.

When Sacha Baron Cohen's creation Ali G first appeared on television it was one of the most brilliant satires in years. It wasn't so much the send up of the moronic elements of hip hop culture (although that is a target rich environment) or the phenomena of middle class white kids aping Jamaican culture badly, it was the reactions of the people he interviewed.

They were members of the establishment and were almost universally highly accomplished and very intelligent. Yet when they were faced with a Yoof TV interviewer who was clearly a halfwit they refused to pass judgement on his stupidity or his outrageous attitudes. If anything they largely pandered to him and sought his approval. There were a few exceptions to that rule such as Tony Benn challenging his references to 'me bitches', Donald Trump walking out as Ali G proposed a stupid idea or when Andy Rooney got sick of his idiocy here:


Borat was amusing but didn't really show anything that hasn't been done a thousand times before, be it dumb rednecks or funny foreigners. I haven't see the Bruno movie yet of course but as a TV character he hardly broke new ground as a flamboyantly camp fashionista and I doubt the movie will either. It may well work as comedy but it is a waste of talent for someone like Baron Cohen to do John Inman meets Zoolander when he has shown he is capable of making cutting satire that says something about society.

I think the difference between Ali G in 1999 and Borat and Bruno since then is that Ali G was exposing the cant and hypocrisy that was practiced by the sort of people who watched him, whereas Borat and Bruno don't hold up a mirror to the audiences own shortcomings but instead point and laugh at the little people.

Pressing The Reset Button.

It's too early to say that President Obama's foreign policy in in crisis. However the policy of building bridges, engaging and entering dialogue without any conditions, with countries that had fallen out with the USA needs rethinking.

It is one thing to repair some of the silly and pointless rifts that emerged between the USA and some European countries during the Bush administration. However applying this idea towards the likes of Russia and Iran isn't going to work. To present the Russian government with a symbolic reset button implies that the tense atmosphere between Russia and the USA was the result of US actions and had nothing to do with Russia's actions over the last few years.

Similarly his unconditional offer to engage with Iran not only undercut the EU 3 who had been trying to end Iran's nuclear programme with assorted diplomatic sticks and carrots it has also seems to have led the US government to react slowly to the ayatollahs election stealing antics for fear of imposing such preconditions.

The policy seems to have come about as a result of a gaffe in a debate with Hillary Clinton, but because a lot of his party's primary voters could only see foreign policy in terms of domestic politics- by which I mean they assumed that because they didn't like Bush, that any fraught relationships the USA had under his administration must have been the result of his failings- the gaffe became a very popular idea.