Lavengro in Spain

Anglican morality strikes again

I wrote the other day about how Anglican morality did not extend Christian charity to a man who had sinned.

Now we see Anglican morality trying to throw its weight around in a way that would be absolutely and utterly 100% unconstitutional in Spain. In 1988 I saw Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ in Barcelona. Yes, there were demonstrations. But there were also police outside the cinema ensuring that citizens could exercise their right to see art as the artist envisaged it.

Vicar supports Life of Brian ban

Sue Jones-Davies (centre) with the Monty Python team on the film

A mayor's plan to end her town's ban on the 1979 Monty Python film Life of Brian are being opposed by the local vicar, who says it pokes fun at Jesus.

Sue Jones-Davies, who played Brian's girlfriend in the movie, was amazed when she became mayor of Aberystwyth that it was still barred at the cinema.

But Reverend Canon Stuart Bell said Christians he spoke to in Ceredigion were still against it being shown.

I say Anglican because it is an Anglican priest that has raised the issue. But really we are dealing with Welsh puritanism, which is still a great power in the land. The (Anglican) Church in Wales must be as Low as you can get and still be CoE, but still, it is CoE. There is an awful lot of frightful Chapel mentality remaining in parts of Wales, and it plumbs depths of Lowness (which we now call fundamentalism) that cannot be imagined by pragmatic English Anglicans who go to Evensong because it's what you do socially. Or because it's what you do to get your kids into the right school.

I have a PGCE from the University of Wales in Aberystwyth. For me it is particularly sad that a town that plays such an outstanding part in the nation's intellectual life should also be able to produce such medieval religious fundamentalism.

Geek speak

I have been invited by Firefox to install a certain add-on. When I ask what it's all about they say:

 

Why don't these computer people just write it in Klingon in the first place and have done with it?

How to get a cheap British passport

If I have to pay 180 euros for a British passport, I have a right to expect the British State to take its own passports seriously.

It doesn't.

Thieves who got away with 3,000 blank passports and visas worth around £2.5 million targeted the van as it stopped at a newsagent's, police have said.

The two unarmed thieves assaulted a security officer before driving off in the van in Oldham on 28 July.

...

The raid took place as the driver stopped off to buy a newspaper at a newsagent's in Long Lane, Chadderton, Oldham, Greater Manchester.

Christian charity and Anglican morality

Max Mosley has every right to run his private life in private, however sordid it may be. A prominent Anglican disagrees (my emphasis):

Lord Carey - Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002 - said free speech has been the "first major victim".

"But, as a Christian leader, I am deeply sad that public morality is the second victim of this legal judgement.

"Unspeakable and indecent behaviour, whether in public or in private, is no longer significant under this ruling."

 

What was that about Christian charity to sinners, especially those who have every reason to suppose that they are sinning in private? Carey, who is himself a sinner (by definition as a Christian), has some rather unusual tastes in the clothing that he and his friends adopt in public. Perhaps the News of the Screws should ask what he wears in private.

 

My own view is that the more the Screws is screwed -- and the rest of the cesspit that is the British media without exception -- the better public morality is served.

 

 

There is an excellent book called The Scarlet Letter. It should be read by people -- especially religious people -- who elevate their own personal prejudices into matters of public morality'.

Venezuelan oil

President Hugo Chávez has been in Spain on an official visit. Relations between him and King Juan Carlos have been restored and Chávez was joking about the ¿Por qué no te callas? (Why don't you shut up?) incident*.

He has offered Spain 200,000 barrels of oil a day at a price of $100 dollars a barrel. Spain's annual consumption is 1.1m barrels so this is a considerable offer. The price difference will be made up in the form of technology transfer programmes for Venezuelan development. Ken Livingstone also negotiated a cheap oil deal for London with Chávez. As far as I know, the price differential there was made up in the rhetoric of socialist solidarity.

Chávez has changed his tune lately and has become far less aggressive. A few weeks ago, a computer belonging to the leader of the FARC, and presumably holding sensitive information and details of FARC supporters, was captured. It is believed that these two facts are not unrelated.

*28 July

Chávez has given King Juan Carlos a T-shirt to commemorate the incident.

What about Iran?

The fact that a man has a brown skin does not mean that he is not a thoroughly nasty piece of work. Nor does the fact that he runs a country that was treated shabbily by the West. And especially not the fact that he is a Muslim.

So it is odd that so many people in Britain are anxious to find excuses for Muhammad Ahmadinejad. Or perhaps not. One thing about Britain is that you can take the most disgusting politicians in the world and you will find someone in Britain who will apologise for them: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, apartheid, the Greek colonels, Pinochet, Mugabe (till he became unfashionable), Castro, Chávez, the list is endless. There is always someone in Britain who will stand up for a strong leader of his people.

I am prompted to write this by the sympathy being shown to the thoroughly nasty man who is running Iran these days, Muhammad Ahmadinejad. Did he call for Israel to be wiped from the map, or merely from the pages of history? My views on the controversy have been put on Tony Hatfield's blog. To summarise: What he said about Israel is irrelevant; it is what he does that counts. And what he is doing is building Iran up as a nuclear power with the intention that it should take over the Middle East. Now, it may well be inevitable that Iran, with its peculiar history in recent decades and its unquestionable strategic position should feel ambitious. It is perfectly true that the geopolitical stupidity of the Bush administration has surrounded it with hostile states. Nevertheless, a diplomatic solution is being tried as Bush tries to prevent his legacy from being totally disastrous. Nothing will be decided of course until the new US president has taken office, and a big dance is taking place to influence the media. The Guardian seems to have decided that the time is right to give a breath of air to this dictator. I disagree. Once upon a time there was a European politician who said that he had no further territorial ambitions in Europe. Many people believed him, or wished to do so. They were mistaken.

Jonathan Steele’s article is entitled Lost in translation. It ends with this:

Let me give the last word to Juan Cole, with whom I began. “I am entirely aware that Ahmadinejad is hostile to Israel. The question is whether his intentions and capabilities would lead to a military attack, and whether therefore pre-emptive warfare is prescribed. I am saying no, and the boring philology is part of the reason for the no.”

I suppose that nothing has been lost in quotation so…

Note the assumption that Ahmadinejad’s hostility to Israel would lead to a military attack. I see no suggestion here that diplomacy might be tried, and might just find a peaceful solution. Mr Cole is saying no but it is not clear what he is saying no to, as the question that he poses is both loaded (it assumes that military option is inevitable) and dual: ‘The question is whether … and whether…’ An accomplished military attack is a fact but pre-emptive warfare is waged against a threat, so the logic of his argument falls to pieces. How about this:

“I am entirely aware that Ahmadinejad is hostile to Israel. The question is whether his intentions and capabilities might lead to a military attack that could not be averted by diplomatic means, and whether therefore pre-emptive action, supported and legitimated by the United Nations, might in those circumstances be justified.”

The prevalent idea in the West, or rather in Britain, that warfare is the only way of dealing with Iran is mistaken and malevolent. But doesn’t it just suit Ahmadinejad to have the West think that way? You bet it does!

I have described here how Ahmadinejad once made an obscene proposal to the Germans that they should support him in his genocidal designs on the Jews.

Am I surprised? No.

A lot of people in Europe will not be surprised by this from the BBC:

A plane was forced to make an emergency landing in Germany after two British women tried to open a cabin door mid-flight, police have said.

The women, aged 26 and 27, were drinking heavily and had to be held in their seats by security staff until the plane landed in Frankfurt.

They were arrested and released after two hours, Frankfurt police said.

The XL Airways plane was flying from the Greek island of Kos to Manchester when Wednesday's incident happened.

An airline spokeswoman said the women were thought to have been smoking in the plane's toilet, and were suspected of bringing their own alcohol on board.

She said they had started to swear at and threaten staff who refused to sell them any more alcohol from the bar.

The women had then said they wanted to open the door to get "some fresh air" into the plane.

Scrabble in Senegal

A man from Senegal has become the Francophone Scrabble champion. How does the BBC headline this? With a reference to French letters of course, ho, ho ho!

For any reader who may not know, a French letter is dated* English slang for a condom. How charming of the BBC!

*So marked in the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

The law applies to all

In 2003 a British athlete called Dwain Chambers was banned for life for doping. But even so, he would rather like to take part in this year's Olympic Games so he has gone to court to get the ban lifted. The court has ruled against him.

Well golly gosh, just fancy that, what a surprise!

Can he now be done for wasting public money?

Arriving in Britain

Passengers arriving in Liverpool’s John Lennon international airport – above us only sky (with practice you can say it with a straight face) have to walk from the plane to the terminal building. This walk can be anything from 100m to about 400m. There is no shelter and the airport is on the shore of the Mersey estuary, where the west wind howls in with only Ireland between you and America.

This morning Jane (my wife) flew there; she is not perfectly fit so it was fortunate that she only had to walk 100m in the rain. On the other hand, it was unfortunate that she had to wait for five minutes in the rain to enter the terminal building because the queue for immigration had backed up so far. This British immigration procedure is, of course, the result of the UK’s paranoid refusal to join the Schengen area because it’s run by foreigners. As she approached the immigration desks - after a twenty-minute wait - she fell into conversation with a New Zealander. He had to go thorough the non-EU channel, which was hardly used; everyone else had to wait for those granite-faced guardians of Britain’s borders who are specially tasked with dealing with European suspected terrorists, and logging their entry into the fortress in the data base. (Passengers from the UK have to pass through passport control on entering Spain because such agreements are reciprocal; the police desks in Barcelona airport are similarly labelled but passengers from the EU are always waved to pass through the non-EU desk if it is free, which is, obviously, always the case. The passport check is perfunctory. Spain is a country that welcomes visitors.)

When Jane was on the ancient rattletrap bus* from the airport to Liverpool South Parkway station, she realised that she might just be in time to catch a MerseyRail train (every fifteen minutes) that would connect with the train to Wrexham (every hour). Indeed she got to the platform in time, but … this week is the golf Open in Birkdale and the tall ships are in the Mersey. Because of these popular events, MerseyRail has changed its schedule and the trains run every, err, twenty minutes instead. She just missed a train on the rescheduled timetable, and thus missed her connection to Wales. Isn’t Britain wonderful!

*‘The last Atlantean for the domestic market rolled off the production line in 1984, the last of a batch for Merseyside PTE,’ (Wikipedia)**. The last time I boarded this bus I was followed on board by some Spanish people from my flight. As they got on, one said to the other ‘¡Uf, es un poco viejo!’ (Wow, it’s a bit old!) Such is the first impression that a Spaniard has of Britain. The second impression received on that bus route is that the first buildings seen are a boarded-up parade of derelict shops. This year Liverpool is the European City of Culture.

Anyone who cares for the English language might - or might not - like to look at my language blog.