Free Trade is Fairer

In spite of his bad press Gordon Brown is right about one thing.

"Coming down strongly against protectionism (at the Google Zeitgeist Conference) he argued once more for free trade:

"The two great protected industries of the moment are the two industries that are causing us the greatest problems today: the oil industry, with a cartel run by Opec; and the food industry, with high levels of subsidy.

"It is well known that one of Brown’s personal concerns is poverty. He is absolutely correct in highlighting the iniquity of protectionism, and that it is holding back the economic development of the world."

Welcome to The Gambia, the smiling coast of Africa

Afrik.com, a news aggregator of the African press has a terrifying headline.

President plans to kill off every single homosexual

The stand-first elucidates:

Gambian President Yahya Jammeh says he will “cut off the head” of any homosexual caught in his country.

The story continues:

He said the Gambia was a country of believers, indicating that no sinful and immoral act as homosexual would be tolerated in the country.

He warned all homosexuals in the country to leave, noting that a legislation “stricter than those in Iran ” concerning the vice would be introduced soon.

According to pan-African LGBT organisation Behind The Mask, Gambia already has fairly draconian antigay laws.

Quoted in Pink News, the President Jammeh, who also claims he can cure AIDS with bananas, said:

“Any hotel, lodge or motel that lodges this kind of individuals will be closed down, because this act is unlawful. We are in a Muslim dominated country and I will not and shall never accept such individuals in this country.”

Saviour siblings

Andrew Brown has a few sharp and witty observations in response to a Telegraph comment by George Pitcher.

If little Leo (Blair) grows up to resent that he was the result of a contraceptive failure, he should get over himself. Isn’t the whole point of Christianity that god has a purpose for you even if it is invisible to the outside world, and to your parents? And, from a non-christian point of view, why should the world acknowledge any legitimacy to the teenager’s complaint “I didn’t ask to be born”? No one asked to be born and it’s absurd to think that your parents wanted you in particular. They took their chances at conception and hoped for the best. They may have got lucky. You and they may have collaborated to produce a decent human being. But no one could have foreseen which decent human being this would be at birth, still less at conception.

. . . How many Telegraph readers have had babies because they didn’t want their other one to be a lonely only child? How many have had babies because they wanted a boy, or a girl, and hadn’t had one yet? Isn’t it the duty of an aristocratic family to produce an heir? In all these cases and throughout human history, babies are born for the purposes of the family or the tribe to which they belong. In other contexts, Telegraph readers understand this very well. If some fifteen-year-old on benefits starts having babies just because she loves them, they see her as a threat to society. But sentimentality and cruelty have always gone hand in hand. Neither gives religion any credit. You would have thought, however, that an ordained priest like Pitcher would be familiar with the story of one baby who was born “for us men and for our salvation” with consequences generally agreed by Christians to have been wholly beneficial.

Nature or nurture

'Research shows' that parents of autistic children are twice as likely to have had psychiatric illness. The finding suggests to Ian Sample that autism and psychiatric problems may sometimes have a common cause and genetic link.

But surely this begs the question of whether psychiatric illness, and indeed autism itself, is an environmental disorder.

Grieving mother of two boys found dead in car says they did not deserve to die

A baffling headline in The Guardian.

The trouble with heroin - it's very moreish

I've blogged before about drug addiction and my own personal and family experience. I have come to agree with those doctors who have judged that addiction to illicit drugs like heroin is not stronger than that to legal drugs like cigarettes.

This message has not yet reached the public and has therefore not prevented the emergence of a huge therapeutic bureaucracy. Theodore Dalrymple, who has worked as a prison psychiatrist, analyses this therapeutic community in his new book Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, which is dedicated to the war against withdrawal symptoms. He thoroughly debunks the disease model of addiction claiming that we should be really talking about a moral and spiritual problem requiring changes in behaviour.

In it he makes the following, extremely telling, points:

• Just as with smokers the vast majority of people who try heroin either never use it again, use it just a few times, or only use it intermittently.
• Even among heroin users, the heroin addict is the exception.
• Experiments have shown that withdrawal symptoms were eliminated with placebo injections of saline solution.
• Histrionic addicts…who complain of horrible discomfort in the presence of doctors…to obtain narcotics but act normally both before the visit and after.
• Patients who repeatedly receive large doses of narcotics for pain... rarely become addicted.

Breaking point

Sigmund Freud has been described as the "prose-poet of the heart's desire to break". I think he was a kind of artist who gave us a language in which to express our deepest griefs. For the most part we are not able to do this in anything like a direct way, by simply naming them. We need a vocabulary which expresses and yet conceals them at the same time. Freud supplied it, or at least one possible version of it.

In the Old Testament there is a teaching that God loves a heart that is broken, indeed that brokenness is the only sure way to approach God.

Freud must have been well acquainted with it.

Thoughts on Travel

Maverick Philosopher has some wisdom from Albert Jay Nock:

Wherever we are, we see the world through the same pair of eyeballs, and filter its deliverances through the same set of conceptions, preconceptions, anxieties, aversions, and what-not. If I travel to Naples, thinking to get away from myself, what I find when I wake up there is “...the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.” (Ibid.) Shift your spatial horizon as you will, you may not effect any change in your mental horizon. If you can’t find enlightenment in Buffalo, where the water is potable and mosquitoes are rare, what makes you think you will find it in Benares where mosquitoes are ubiquitous and the water will give you dysentery?

I once had a conversation with a young Austrian at the train station in Salzburg, Austria. He told me he was headed for Istanbul “to make holiness.” But could he not have made holiness in Salzburg? Could he not have found a Pauline ‘closet’ somewhere in that beautiful city wherein to shut himself away from the world and pray to his Father in secret?

Stay home. Cultivate your garden in peace and quiet. Sink your roots into the soil of solitude. But travel a little so to appreciate the foregoing.

Here for a season

Human life is not to be judged by its longevity alone but by the quality of its brief encounters.

Irene Lancaster

Emily

One of our visiting children who have what are called learning disabilities was getting upset about the weather. It was cloudy and damp. This isn't called Greater Manchester for nothing. Pointing to the sky, she cried, "The clouds! They're working!"

John and Ted

I met John in prison. I was chaplain, he an inmate. I had kept publicly on the right side of the law. He had been caught briefly on the wrong one.

John's sixteen year old daughter had fallen in with a bad lot. Her boyfriend who was a bit older and should have known a bit better, had introduced her to a new circle of friends. One of the things they did together was inject heroin. In a vulnerable state he had 'taken advantage' of her and she was pregnant.

John, a man with no history of or known capacity for personal violence, had reacted like any father might. He hit the boyfriend - hard, with the nearest object to hand - an empty beer bottle. It caused the young man severe though short-term injury. Most people, including the prison officers who came to know John, thought his outburst perfectly excusable. They made life inside for him as easy as possible, even supplying him with an internet connection so that he could continue to manage his successful business of waste-disposal from his prison cell.

John was a Roman Catholic. He spoke to Father David, the RC chaplain. Two things worried him. He feared the incident had exposed a tendency to violence in his nature which contradicted his previous self-awareness. Secondly, he was not able to feel sorry for what he'd done. Father David quoted St Paul writing that our lower nature is often in conflict with our higher or spiritual nature. John found no consolation in this.

When John told me I tried to reassure him. He was plainly not a man given casually to violence. As for feeling sorry, it seemed to me that his concern about this was ample evidence of the kind of moral sense he feared he might have lost. If he couldn't feel sorry for the injury he had visited upon the miscreant, he did at least regret not feeling sorry, and could offer this to God in confession of his sins.

As you will appreciate John was more troubled by matters of moral motivation than the average inmate. He was a decent man, and a good Catholic. But there was one area where his conscience acquired what you might call a little elasticity. In his impending interview with the parole board, which could lead to his early release, his contrition would be as impressive as it was false; anything to get him out of that hell-hole and back to the family he missed so much. Honesty before God in prayer mattered deeply to him; honesty to civil servants less.

Truth-telling in prison can get you into a lot of trouble - and keep you there.

Ask Ted. Ted was a 'lifer'. He had strangled his wife in a drunken rage. That was fifteen years ago, and he too was due to appear before the parole board. If he behaved well and convinced them that he was no longer 'angry with women' he might be moved to another, more open, prison, a prelude to his eventual release. One member of the board was, as he put, right snotty to him - made him feel like a piece of shit. It happened to be a woman. He didn't like being treated like that, and he said so. If he could have held his tongue, shown less spirit, been more humble, seemed more sorry, he might have made it. But he couldn't. So he had to stay inside, for the offence of emotional honesty.

Spreadsheeting bad behaviour - which column?

Sue at Dicombobula is always worth reading.

The Australian Federal government is trying to address teenage binge drinking by proposing a tax hike for premixed alcoholic beverages like vodka and orange and bourbon and coke (two personal favourites in my teenage years, when I had the dosh).

The government believes that making these drinks more expensive will stop teenagers getting together and getting shitfaced. I wonder, do any of them really believe this, even a smidge? I know we are all economically rationalised to death and feel constrained onto spreadsheet columns, but does anyone at all involved with the government, including the toilet cleaners, really think that is anything but some sort of lip service? Surely not. And surely they don't think we're that stupid. And surely this is why listening to the blatherings of the world is so damn tiresome. It's enough to make you want to go and get shitfaced :)

This kind of thing really pisses me off. What a waste of time it all is. It's talking about issues without talking about issues. So much fluff, full of soundbytes and infuriatingly signifying nothing.

Teenagers get drunk because it feels really good to be pissed. Because they are full of angst and don't know who the hell they are and are suffering under the weight of living in a world where nothing gets discussed in ways that really make any kind of goddamned difference at all and because no one would listen if they said that Uncle Harry was doing bad stuff to them when no one was looking, or that they felt like losers because they didn't know what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives and therefore which VCE stream to set themselves onto at 15 years of age. Or that they felt like they would never ever belong and it didn't seem like there was all that much to belong to anyway and hey, how bad does that make you feel when we are the lucky ones and the rest of the world is being flung about by tempestuous weather?

Teenagers get pissed because it is so nice to quell your fears and shame - and that is surely the absolute crux of it, for mine. Or at least, that was always the reason why I got drunk. To get me out of myself. To have a blast. To tell my friends I loved them (love ya mate, I'll luv ya forever, mate. Now excuse me while I go over here and vomit). To give me a bit of Dutch courage to talk to that boy and maybe get a pash (or more). Fear and shame pursue every single person down through the days and to not address that is to not address anything in the end.

But then, what column would that fit into on the spreadsheet? And is that the responsibility of the government anyway?

Taxing alcopops will make teenagers resort to drinking beer, or they will buy wine and mix their own orange juice in it. Or whatever. Or maybe - heaven forbid - they will buy Blackberry Nip or Brandivino and mix it with Coke. However far your dosh spreads. 'Cause it's not about the taste so much as it's about the high and about the quell. And I really just don't know how that one can be regulated. 'Cause you can stuff it down and keep on going, but so far I have really only found one Place where fear and shame have been nailed. And it's got nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with Love.

A scientist speaks out

Roy W. Spencer is a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. His book, Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor, will be published this month.

Who to believe?

Surprising to find the (Eddie) Stobart Group so upbeat.

Stobart Group shrugged off fears of a UK recession yesterday and boasted that it was seeing record trading despite rising fuel costs.

. . . confident of strong profit growth over the next year despite the uncertain economic outlook.

Our business last week was the busiest week in the history of Eddie Stobart," he said (Andrew Tinkler, the chief executive). "I haven't seen any signs [of a UK recession] and neither have our customers, who are hitting their targets. Even the building [industry customers] are still hitting their forecasts. The sub-prime market really damaged the banks but [other] businesses are carrying on as normal.

Yet on the same day the Financial Times headlines "Mounting signs of economic slowdown."

Whatever are the humble poor to believe?

Miscarriages and misreporting

This from Harry's Place.

And our sanctimonious media elite wonder why politicians ’spin’?

Susan Hill on Boris

I think he will do well so long as he is true to himself. They had to gag him to get him in but now he is in, I hope the gag comes off, that he continues to be his own man, and that above all he does not become Cameron`s puppet. Because Cameron is a man to be wary of, and a man not to trust if ever I saw one. He is just the sort of smooth, slippery, bland, bend-whichever-way-it-takes politician we should dread. And any man whose wife is boss of a shop that flogs fuchsia pink suede bibles at £150 a pop and handbags named after her daughter for £1,000, should be viewed with the gravest suspicion. The wives say it all and they do count for a lot, like it or not.

Sarah is the best reason I can think of for giving Gordon another chance.

Honestly

I've just heard another discussion on the Today programme about whether politicians will ever stop being devious. I do get sick of this self-righteous moaning. The answer is obvious. Politicians will give up telling lies when the rest of us do. They're only human after all.

A touch of class

Overweight, barely comprehensible, infamous womanizer; it could be John Prescott - or Boris Johnson. One thing's for sure. Boris will never be as unpopular as Prezza who was never forgiven for being plainly working-class.

Gas guzzling

Perhaps it's my lack of appetite for travel, but I can't help noticing how much respect is shown to those who can't find enough to entertain, intrigue and stimulate them in these beautiful British Isles of ours.

Take Tory MP Ann Widdicombe who was asked in a recent broadcast about her visits abroad. Her only regret seemed to be that she hadn't been to more places and in particular 'I'd like to see the penguins in Antarctica'. Miss Widdicombe often promotes herself as a devout Christian woman with self-denial as a major component of her moral and spiritual life. Yet is not her wish to travel the globe to spend time with a flock of flightless birds the most shameless fantasy of self-indulgence? What possible good would accrue to Antarctica, its inhabitants, or the planet as a whole, from such personal extravagance?

Another interview, this time with Michael Palin, in which he shared his experiences in foreign lands, concluded with the question, 'Is there anywhere you'd still like to go?' But why are such people never asked, 'Don't you think you've done enough globetrotting? Do you think it's necessarily a good thing for you, the human race and the environment, that you should continue your international perambulations?

Carbon footprints

If global warming and carbon emissions really do pose such a threat to the planet and its peoples, why does the UEFA Champions League Final which must now be fought out between two British clubs take place in Moscow? Or was Bill Shankly right about soccer being more important than life and death?