'Nother Solent

I had a little joke

about US right-wing TV pundit Michael Savage a few posts down. Over at Biased BBC a reader spotted that a speech by a BBC bigwig, reprinted in the Guardian, had misrepresented something Savage said in a way that wasn't funny at all. Basically, he was wrongly portrayed as having advocated genocide.

A coroner in New Zealand

has said that the NZ agency responsible for health and safety in the workplace was partially responsible for the suicide of one of its own employees. Work-related stress drove him to it. The agency has sued itself for corporate manslaughter and the agency bosses face jail.

I made the last sentence up. It would never happen really. You knew that.

Find and replace justice.

As the re-launched Public Interest said, this is a superb satire.

[The post below was another one that "just growed" like Topsy as I added new thoughts. It has changed quite a lot since I first posted it. You might want to read it again if you're following the topic.]

Dean Esmay likes 'bright'. Most of his commenters don't. Good analogy from David Foster of Photon Courier:

If Dawkins wants to present arguments for his worldview, that's fine. But it's not intellectually honest to associate a word with positive associations ("bright") with a topic it has nothing to do with. It is if the religious people adopted the word "honorable" to mean "belief in God," and went around saying "I'm an honorable."

Dean Esmay himself raises a fair point:

Does that [the use of the word "gay"] mean that heterosexuals are "gloomies? I think not."

I think the answer to that one is that nobody else thinks so either. Perhaps because 'gay' was once a code for an unpopular and at that time illegal minority the question of what was its opposite did not come to the forefront for a long time. They were just "everybody else" or "normal people." The origin of the term we now use as the opposite of 'gay', namely 'straight', reflects this. I assume it had its origin in a denunciation of homosexuality. Both terms are now overlain with multiple layers of irony, not to mention history, and are no longer fighting words. But imagine if 'straight' were to be coined new today, as a non-ironic term for heterosexuals to describe themselves. Then it would be quite close in intention to 'bright.'

Thought experiment. 'Bright' has been in use for decades. 'Straight' is new. Excerpt from newspaper article promoting the 'straight' meme:

"Oh, I get it. [says your imagined interlocutor at a dinner party] It's a bit like 'bright'. So, what's the opposite of a straight? What would you call a homosexual person?"


"What would you suggest?"

Obviously, words like 'bent', 'twisted' or 'crooked' would immediately come to mind, and that's the whole idea. OK, some of you reading this are going to say, we can go with the analogy. Many Christians do indeed object to homosexuality on religious grounds and might well use exactly those words. The Anglican Church is likely to schism on this very issue. Why do I act as if pointing out that 'straight' (used un-ironically) follows the same pattern as 'bright' discredits 'bright'?

To answer that, I'd like to explain exactly what would I would find objectionable in the behaviour of the guy who introduces this new word 'straight' at your party. It is not his opinions per se. (In real life I know, socialise with and respect people with drastically different views on this question.) You can allow for openly held opinions. One strategy is not to mix incompatible people at all if it's going to generate more heat than light. Another is to make clear whether yours is the sort of gathering where vigorous argument is encouraged, like a political salon, or the sort where it's verboten, like your grandparents' Golden Wedding party. What is objectionable is that this word new word 'straight' is used, and is intended to be used, to slip in a highly contentious assumption over the canapés at the Golden Wedding, when those with differing views are going to be too 'thrown' or too polite to fight back, or, worse, too naive to spot what's being done. I hope it's clear that this objection actually goes wider than just parties - it's the same thing that so harmed the New York Times: editorial comment hiding in the news stories. It's the same reason, come to think of it, why I get so vastly more riled by the snide bias of the BBC than the open ideological commitment of the Guardian.

Getting back to the real world where 'bright' is the issue rather than 'straight', if you want an wide-ranging, self-chosen, positively-defined neologism for "non-supernaturalist", fine, but coin one that isn't deceptive. (And please don't co-opt 'freethinker'; it means 'rejects authority in matters of religion' rather than 'has no religion', and the distinction is useful.)

For those interested in what has become quite a widespread blogging debate, there's another post about 'bright' immediately below this one, and my first one from Wednesday can be found here.

A bright new law of politics.

"In the modern world, there is no minority group so oppressed, so marginalized, that the creation of an advocacy group cannot worsen their plight."

- A. Schulz, 2003. That's for starters. For the main course the Machinery of Night grinds up a dawkinsburger.

At that point I had yet to meet an atheist who wasn't narked by the whole thing - Chris Cooper had certainly not been impressed. However Google opens all doors, and Craig Ceely liked the idea, as did Wickens.ca. But a commenter called "N" on Reason magazine's blog trumped us all with this intriguing suggestion:

You folks are missing the point: this "bright" thing is just a way of testing the meme theory of idea propagation. They know the source, and they have all the tools (thanks to modern technology) to track the spread of the term, making this an ideal scenario for lazy scientists.

For the record, I was more nearly sympathetic to the first part of Dawkins' article, where he objected to the phrases "Muslim child", "Christian child" etc. than to the bright idea. It's no bad thing to remind oneself that children are not appendages of their parents. Only I won't be taking up the habit of saying "how dare you!" when I hear the phrase "an XYZ child", any more than I will leap up to defend the identity rights of millions of baseball-indifferent Americans every time someone says "the Americans play baseball." Unless the speaker has given evidence that he or she is culpably neglecting the possibility of exceptions to the shortcuts of common speech, it is better to refrain from being a schoolmarm to your dining companions.

[Like I ever have any. Can't get the babysitters. We're due to go to one of those murder mystery parties and every teenager in town is booked, I tell you, it's driving m-]

Where was I? Oh yes. Dawkins, no less than his opponents, can be accused of lacking respect for the autonomy of children. Firstly, even an uneducated assent is still assent. The description "Muslim" or "Christian" will, for most Muslim or Christian children, be simply true. They believe in those religions. They may not be well-informed about them, or about the alternatives, but neither are many adults. Or many atheists. An atheist child may be only an atheist because he has never heard of God, but that doesn't make him not one. It doesn't seem quite respectful to say that a Buddhist girl, for example, cannot be described by the term she uses to describe herself just because she hasn't yet attained a full adult understanding of the Eightfold Way.

Secondly it runs counter to all observation to assume that a child is incapable of independent religious belief (or atheism). For a fourteen year old that is downright insulting and even an eight year old may have plenty to say on his or her own account.

Some of it in their prayers.

Happy Smoking Fun.

Liberty Log's Christopher Berry has discovered the antidote for the increasingly strident "Smoking Kills" / "Smoking Causes Fatal Lung Cancer" / Smoking Gives Satan The Victory In The Coming Apocalypse" warnings they stick on ciggie packets these days.

Irresponsible? Scroll up one post for a restatement of libertarian principles on smoking that's very responsible.

In an astonishing move

, the former Ain't No Bad Dude has become a Michael Savage tribute blog.

Our reporter, Blayson Jair, interviewed a slightly bashful Brian Linse on his porch overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures of Los Angeles yesterday. "I know it seems odd," said the well-known liberal blogger, "But I just can't keep quiet about my admiration for this marvellous man any longer."

An Asian man,

a retired London Transport Engineer, a widower and a father, was kicked to death in Walthamstow, where I used to live.

This report says that two men have been arrested.

"Blowback"

. We hear a lot about how the Arab street is angry with us. Why so angry? Our riches, our Coca-Cola, our free women, our racism, our support for Israel, our failure to give them enough money, our not being Muslim, our meddling intelligence agencies, and past colonial oppression are all cited as causes with varying degrees of truth. One you will not have heard much about until now is our denial of the right to bear arms. The Independent reports, with a surprising degree of sympathy, that the attempts to disarm the Iraqi population may have had a role in starting the riot that ended with six British Mililtary Policemen dead.

There is acknowledgement among defence staff that a lack of understanding of the local people contributed to the fatal confrontation on Tuesday in which six members of the Royal Military Police died.

The people of Majar al-Kabir deposed the local Baath regime without help from the British or Americans and there is a tradition of independence in the area. Some senior British officers believe this was not taken into account in attempts to disarm the population.

The British commander in Iraq highlighted the resentment about the disarming process when he said that the violence might have been sparked by people believing they were about to be searched.

Maj-Gen Peter Wall said: "The townspeople expected searches for weapons to be conducted by our patrols. That was not our intent and this had been explained to the town council at a formal meeting earlier in the week, when the strength of resentment to searches had become clear."

And

A defence source said: "There is a realisation that asking people to give up their guns while the law-and-order situation does not improve is impractical and has led to a great deal of dissension. The idea of removing guns from the population is a sound one, but this has affected ordinary people who are not criminals, and we need to look at this whole matter very closely."

Fine. I still want the people who slaughtered our troops to be found and punished.

Have pity on this old grey head.

Poor old Comical Ali now looks about ninety. What did for his youthful good looks? The stress of a sudden inrush of reality, or was he just unable to send out for his usual supply of Grecian 2000 while under the floorboards?

Should we care? This man had Goebbels' job.

Blogs of War has a new site.

Inappropriate Response and Hell In A Handbasket have both commented on the atheism/"bright"/Dawkins meme-cluster.

I hereby announce my belief in James Rummel's newly-mown lawn. Now if I could only believe in mine....

Sad to say

, Mrs Lileks was sacked suddenly. Given that she was the spouse who went out to work and he the one who looked after their daughter during the day, I get the impression that they have suffered a big financial blow. Worse yet, various hints in yesterday's column suggest that her dismissal might have had something to do with her husband's writing. As you can imagine, this has ushered in a period of worry and disruption for the Lileks family, just as a similar situation did for the Murray family when Iain was sacked for blogging a few months ago.

(On a happier note, congratulations to Kris and Iain. All being well their second child will be born in a few months' time.)

A bright shining lie.

I was rather surprised to see Instapundit quote approvingly (I think it was approvingly) a lady who has adopted this deliberately created meme whereby the word "bright" equals "non-religious". Not that Reynolds gives any indication of being a believer, but he's not usually explicitly hostile or, one would think, an admirer of Richard Dawkins, who has been pushing the meme in the Guardian.

Steven Chapman certainly isn't an admirer of Dawkins.

Nor was Dr Frank, talking about an earlier article:

"Yet more supercilious Bush-whacking blather from Richard Dawkins. As Jeff Jarvis points out, Dawkins appears to be putting his own sentiments in the mouth of Osama bin Laden."

Still, let us be logical. One could despise Dawkins' Chomsky-lite quagmirism and admire other aspects of his work. I did. Man, I got The Blind Watchmaker in hardback - this is cheapskate me we're talking about! And I turned the pages of The Selfish Gene until three in the morning on first reading. I distinctly remember that one of the minor pleasures of his books on evolution was the way that he had imaginative sympathy with some of the people whose ideas he was arguing against. Somewhere he said that if he'd been a Victorian he too would have believed the Argument From Design, and you felt he believed it. So convincing was The Selfish Gene that I ended up as an amateur Assistant Hammer of the Group Selectionists, and so I have remained.

It took a while for me to realise that my idol had feet of mush. When I first read a letter from him in a newspaper that, ridiculously, condemned some religious group for thinking that they were right and other people were wrong, as if the same claim were not part and parcel of every opinion that ever was, I convinced myself that I was reading the clumsy hand of some sub-editor rather than the man himself.

But as the years went by, evolutionary biology dropped right off the radar. Now he's, what is it, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of How To Land a Guest Column. Like blogging really, but makes more money, and most bloggers try to maintain a wider repertoire than an unvarying 85% the awfulness of religion, 5% the stupidity of America and 10% the unique wickedness of Israel. (To be fair, Dawkins backed off from the racist boycott of Israeli scientists - but he drove into that swamp before he backed out of it.)

Anyway, returning to the "bright" meme. It's meant to be like "gay," sort of allusive and self-chosen and cool. But whatever you think of "gay" (and I can't help regretting, as does Dawkins, the loss of an old and useful word) one thing it does not do is include in itself a derogatory description of heterosexuals. The whole point of "bright" is the sneer within it against the "dull" or "stupid" or "dark" religious people. It cannot be used without signing up to that agenda.

"Oh, I get it. [says your imagined interlocutor at a dinner party] It's a bit like 'gay'. So, what's the opposite of a bright? What would you call a religious person?"

"What would you suggest?"

Ker-lunk. Yes. We get it.

Dawkins might reply, well, so he does sign up to that agenda. That's what his figure about 93% of top scientists being atheists is all about. (Did he ever wonder if the pressure to conform in order to be elected to the US National Academy of Sciences might be at least as great as the pressure to conform in order to be elected to the US Senate or Congress? Probably greater: the electorate is less diverse.) But the word "bright" doesn't honestly argue for the opinion that atheists are clever, it sells it by the colloquial association of the word "bright" with cleverness, the way a sexy woman on the bonnet sells a car.

In the abortion debate it's a cliche that "pro-choice" and "pro-life" are propaganda-in-a-pan, just shake out the package and you get a whole plateful of attitudes in one go. Yet both are true. I am pretty firmly pro-life but I can see why the English words pro-choice do express why some people think that abortion should be allowed. I would like myself to give women that choice if only I didn't think that her interests cannot override another life. Likewise a pro-choice person can probably see what I'm on about with the pro-life mallarkey. They do not deny the foetus has some sort of life, they just don't think it has enough to override the woman's right to choose. "Bright," in contrast to "gay", is intended to deceptively gain acceptance for an idea by other means than argument, and in contrast with "pro-choice" and "pro-life" its emotional sugar-coating has no redeeming core of explanatory power.

(May I note here that even if you accept the "atheists are cleverer" argument you are miles away from proving atheism true. It is, I suppose, a sort of indirect argument from authority, the collective authority of clever people... a militant atheist turning to argument from authority: it has its funny side. The fact that the "bright" meme is to be used in a sneaky fashion to bolster what was a poor argument in the first place makes it doubly removed from intellectual honesty.)

The first people to use the word "gay" did not intend to cut off the modern reader from appreciating many lines of poetry and phrases from literature; the people who spread the word "bright" boast that their meaning will take over. Worse, Dawkins makes a big joke of how "we" will at first scrupulously insist that it is a noun not an adjective, hoping and expecting all the time that the adjectival and propagandist meaning will take over. In other words, hoping and expecting that others will do the dirty work for you. Elsewhere in the article Dawkins makes a telling point that we should challenge language that presumes too much; how odd then that he advocates a term that presumes an unproven superiority in order to spread an opinion by snobbishness. "Bright" is not illuminating.

(I pressed "publish" too soon on this post. Some of you will therefore have seen it evolve. Hope you enjoyed the process.)

Test

New one on me.

In my first post today I linked to this list of happenings in 1955 in order to make the point that it was a long time before the Soviets let their German POWs go.

But look at the item two lines above:

July 27: An Israeli plane is shot down over Bulgaria killing 57 people.

I'd never heard of this. Google isn't helping much but I did find this account and this one.

Er - come to think of it, this post isn't going anywhere. I just felt odd that this rather large number of people were blown out of the sky in time of peace - at best a colossal blunder, at worst mass murder - and I'd never heard of it. I'd heard of KAL 007 shot down by the Russians in 1983, the Iranian civil airliner shot down by an American warship in 1988 and the downing of a Russian airliner by a stray Ukrainian missile in 2001 but not this.

The Journal of Comparative Fisking.

Marxist relic Eric Hobsbawm hasn't had so much attention paid to his delusions in years. This is what Nelson Ascher (backup general link here) made of a Guardian article he committed the other day. Ascher's fisking inspired Angie Schultz to produce her own (backup general link here) in which she finally puts a name to the philosophy behind all those die-hard believers in the overthrow of all existing power structures who have so suddenly discovered the joys of international law: Revolutionaries for the Status Quo.

(Ruddy confusing, that Europundit site. I originally had Ascher's piece down as being by John Chappell, since he posted it.)

Burgled Pensioners die earlier. To be precise, they are twice as likely to be dead within two years as people of a similar age who have not been burgled. This finding "took researchers by surprise."

I wonder how that burglar is getting on in his legally-aided case against Tony Martin?

Boobs want to ban boobs.

The Telegraph, with a fine eye for what will catch your attention, has chosen the example of Page Three grils to show what will have to go if a Euro-directive against sexual stereotyping becomes law. One trusts that the Telegraph is not appealing to the concerns of its own gentlemen-readers in this instance. One trusts.

I rather think the Telegraph is being public-spirited. Their aim is for other newspapers with a different demographic to pick up the story. Never mind if our competitors pinch our headline, says the Telegraph, the threat will be publicised and that's the main thing.

Whatever. It's not really that funny. There used to be a story like this every month or so. Now there are one or two each week. Is this what it feels like as a country begins to slip down into repression? There's no law of nature that says it can't happen to us because we speak English.

The Americans speak English, yet over there an alliance of religious kooks and tranzis already have control of textbooks.

(Yes, I know I said "grils". Figure it out.)

UPDATE: A reader from Florida by the name of "erp" writes to ask, what are tranzis and Page Three? and to say:

"You may be sure that anything, and I mean anything having to do with the ed biz is in the full control of teachers' unions which are themselves fully controlled by people who are far to the left politically and bent on making public education conform to their ideology.

Religious kooks are so far down food chain they don't even rate an asterisk and control nothing regardless of what you may have seen in the liberal media who like to make bugaboos out of the religious right. "

Too true. The National Educational Association, a collection of Luddites who make our own dear National Union of Teachers shine in comparison, are a subset of tranzis. The abbreviation is blogger slang rather than British slang, was coined by David Carr and is itself short for a term coined by John Fonte in an essay for the Hudson Institute: "transnational progressives".

As for page three - oh, it's all quite harmless really. You click on the "page 3" link and see what you see.

In the cavern of the lost-emails

there were quite a few saying that I was wrong in saying that the Japanese themselves must find it confusing to refer to the late Emperor Hirohito as "Showa". A work deadline bore down on me and I quite forgot to post them. Mark Sloboda's was typical:

You wrote that 'now that he is dead the Japanese refer to Emperor Hirohito his "reign name" of Showa' and posited that this must be confusing.

Actually, it isn't so confusing. "Tennou" is the word for emperor. While he was alive, he would be referred to in conversation as "tennou heika"
(roughly, his royal majesty). Never never never by name. It felt really
strange for me, after several years in a Japanese environment, suddenly having to refer to him as Hirohito while speaking English. It seemed sacreligious somehow, or at least extremely rude. If one absolutely had to refer to him in a context in which it wasn't clear that you were talking about the current reigning monarch, you'd say "Showa Tennou". Just as the current emperor is "Heisei Tennou". I don't even know the guy's name.

Dead emperors are normally referred to by their era names because there are so many: hence, Showa Tennou, Meiji Tennou, etc.

So

, six British soldiers were killed by a mob in Iraq. There's an argument that says we're doing this all wrong and Iraq should be more clearly occupied. All the Ba'ath party in prison, only letting out the POWs in dribs and drabs, and so on. Hey, the Soviets kept some German prisoners until 1955.

I don't think so. I think that the more relaxed berets-not-helmets strategy is more or less the right one. The Iraqis didn't have anything like the complicity in Saddam Hussein's crimes as the Germans did in Hitler's. We owe them for not fighting. Sadly, even the best strategy available isn't proof against everything.

I don't want to make too much of the fact that the violence started as a result of weapons searches. The most devoted supporter of the right to bear arms might still cavil at the thought of arms caches under the beds of active enemies.

UPDATE: Patrick Crozier does want to make something of it.

I must say

, if the picture at the top of the refurbished and re-addressed Harry's Place really is Harry's Place then socialism pays better than I thought. No wonder he has changed his background from austere grey to a sunny yellow colour.

Doesn't stop him showing a red rag to the Samizdata bull, though.

Iain Murray has an article in the New Republic Online. Subject: the EU constitution.

It starts off quiet and ends by calling Valery Giscard D'Estaing the Benedict Arnold of Europe. Do not get into a fight with this man.

Most scary three words? "It [the proposed constitution]... enumerates rights." Think about that. The US constitution enumerated the powers of the federal government. In other words it gave the federal government those powers and no others. The EU constitution enumerates not powers, but rights.

CORRECTION: The National Review, not the New Republic Online. John Thacker, who spotted my boo-boo, very charitably writes, "Yes, it is confusing having two of the big policy mags as NRs. You're not the first and nor will you be the last to make the typo."

George Monibot has changed his mind. He would no longer impose economic sanctions on every country in the world, as the Green party still would. That change is welcome. He still wants every country in the world to run a protectionist regime until it is "ready" - an adulthood that will never come.

Monibot claims in the article that it is the "founding myth" of developed countries that they built their wealth on free trade. That's nonsense. Our founding myth was that Britain was settled by a band of Trojan exiles who landed at Totnes, fought the giants until the last and wickedest of them, Gogmagog, was thrown off Plymouth Hoe, and married the surviving giantesses.

Much more fun. And at least as true as Monibot's own myth that developed countries built up their wealth behind tarriff walls. As Milton Friedman pointed out, the Japanese had low tarriffs imposed upon them (to their great benefit but also to their great annoyance at the time) during their crucial years of moving onto the world stage. The actual history of, say, the German versus the British chemical industries involves many policy zig-zags, but let's not fail to see the wood for the trees. Trading countries are rich. Non-trading countries are poor.

I can quote off the top of my head many examples of countries that have got much richer in my lifetime through trade. Just think "East Asia." I can quote off the top of the head many countries that have been "building up" their industries through protection for forty or fifty years now and are scarcely further along than the day they started. Think India, East Africa.

UPDATE: My first paragraph was over-snarky. I should have made clear that the insight that the economic policy he once supported, "localisation", was equivalent to economic sanctions came from Monibot himself, not me. It's a good one.

Why the Third World stays poor.

A Bangladeshi man waited 27 years for the state-run telephone company to install a phone. He wouldn't pay the customary bribe. Serves him right for stubborness - if he had paid the bribe he might have had to wait only ten years. Still, at least Bangladesh seems to be free of those rapacious multinational mobile phone companies.

You want C S Lewis quotations

, Google has plenty. You want C S Lewis quotations integrated into modern dilemmas better than I do it, go to Photon Courier. Funnily enough, this time that wasn't what he e-mailed me about. He asked whether I was interested in project to restore the Medway Queen, a paddle steamer that had its day of glory at Dunkirk and is of historical interest besides. Well, why not? After all, we had a wonderful time going round the gleamingly restored Victorian behemoth HMS Warrior, which my husband remembered seeing as a hulk at Milford Haven, and the only action that old lady saw was when the clapperboard slammed shut and the cameras rolled for another historical drama.

Returning to Dunkirk, many people have observed that if World War II had never happened, no one would believe that some of its real episodes could be so, if those who fought in it could forgive the phrase, dramatically appropriate. Operation Dynamo is one of those, yet Photon Courier is right to say it is not as widely commemorated as it should be. I suppose it is inevitable that the very good little "Museum of Remembrance" on the quay at Dunkirk, should be buried in a godawful post-industrial port zone, since that is where the evacuation had the bad taste to occur, but it is poorly signposted and publicised, and with some of the material not yet translated into English. (That said, perhaps the fact that I had to work my limited French to the utmost in order to talk to the volunteer custodian, an older man obviously devoted to keeping the memory alive, was one of the factors that made our visit so memorable. To men like him, "Anglo-French friendship" clearly meant something important and I feel a little stab now when I think what our two nations have come to.) I wonder the fiftieth anniversary of Dunkirk had so much less publicity than the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day four years later? Admittedly D-Day involved forces many times greater, and was a victory rather than a successful retreat, but one would think that the story of ordinary people, from yachtsmen to stokers pitting themselves against the all-conquering Nazi war machine would have enduring appeal. One might almost theorize that the times are not favourable to remember a story of non-governmental war...

...But no, I must contain myself. Scroll up one post in Photon Courier and you will see some hard-hitting remarks against our - and my - modern tendency to fit everything into an overarching theory. Just to show I can disagree with C S Lewis sometimes, I must remember to write a post saying what a wonderful, liberating thing theory can be...

Here's another picture of the Medway Queen. Couldn't fit it smoothly into the post above. Posting it anyway.

Stephen Pollard's blind spot. Strange to tell now, upon the first occasion that Stephen Pollard's name came to my attention I called him silly. It was because he wrote that The Lord of the Rings was a book fit only for children. Things change. These days, dozens of columns and hundreds of blog posts later, while it would be an exaggeration to say that I worship the ground he walks upon, I will admit to holding any paving stone touched by the Pollard shoe in the greatest respect. And ditto with knobs on for almost any newspaper column touched by the Pollard hand.

It's very odd, though. You'd think a man with his volcanic anger against those who whimper and equivocate when a clear issue lies before them would feel a particular affinity to some of the emotions expressed in epic literature. He doesn't, though, and I felt a twitch (just a twitch) of my old reaction returning as I read this column which claims that the Harry Potter series are books fit only for children. Of course, he has a better case with regard to JK Rowling's books than Tolkein's - for all the vigour of Rowling's books, it doesn't do to kick the scenery of her world too hard, whereas Tolkein's world was the product of decades of meditation by a man steeped in Western culture. A better case, but still not good. The blog review a few posts down was right (I was joking when I said not to read it), and right for grander reasons than its support of a particular political position I support also. Just as history lets you out of the prison of your own time, fantasy lets you out of the prison of your own actuality. Harry Potter lets you look at the clash of good and evil unencumbered by baggage about whether supporting Tony Blair on reform of the NHS might be taken to imply support of his position on the threat of WMD (or reform of the WMD and the threat of the NHS if you prefer): a high-level activity worthy of the human mind. And you get to play Quidditch, try on other people's bodies and face dreadful agents of evil power.

The last bit is important. Fantasy is not allegory: the One Ring was not the Bomb and Voldemort is not Bin Laden, or George Bush either. Yet when the grown-ups say, "There are no monsters," they lie. Nowadays, it's difficult to write stories on courage outside the fantasy genre. True, there are always inspiring adventure stories and historical stories; but not every good storyteller is a good observer or a good researcher. More than that, there is a positive pleasure in an intricate, sweeping and self-consistent act of creation. This pleasure need have no connection with age at all.

It's difficult to say anything about this subject that was not said better decades ago by C S Lewis:

"You will notice that I have throughout spoken of Fairy Tales, not "children's stories". Professor J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings has shown that the connection between fairy tales and children is not nearly so close as publishers and educationalists think. Many children don't like them and many adults do. The truth is, as he says, that they are now associated with children because they are out of fashion with adults; have in fact been retired to the nursery as old furniture used to retire there, not because the children had begun to like it but because their elders had ceased to like it."

He was making the point that most cultures tell fantasy stories to adults without any embarrassment. Elsewhere Lewis observed that there is nothing so childish as a preoccupation with appearing grown-up. It seems to me that the new openness of adults about that fact that they read books from the children's section may be, not part of our modern western infantilism (and I do agree with Stephen Pollard that there is such a thing), but part of the reaction to it.

Finally, repeating a point I have made before, much of the actual action in fantasy stories is very far from wish-fulfillment. All Frodo's courage and goodness was not enough stop him finally giving in to the power of the Ring; it was not his agency that defeated evil but that of a despised, mad creature. I don't know how the present Harry Potter book pans out, but on the evidence of the last one all his courage and goodness - and magic - may simply not be enough to stop the coming war and the deaths of many good people. My final example of non-self-indulgent moralising is Snape. Snape is still a mean, spiteful git despite being on the right side. My husband said that he thought it implausible that a man faced with such awful danger could keep up the animus against an ally, but history furnishes any number of examples. I predict that he'll still be a mean, spiteful git when he dies heroically in Book Seven.

The motto of the EU

is to be "United in its diversity." Hmmm, not bad. But isn't that one already taken?

Hall of mirrors.

I was checking out this morning's chicken entrails and I saw a mighty portent that the NHS is doomed.

This story from the St Albans Observer is completely incomprehensible. That's the portent. One bit of the NHS owes another bit 50 million quid. What for, you ask? Who knows, who cares, answers the waving grass. The debtors, it seems, have owed the creditors 50 mil for years but believed, with a Christian trust rare in these degenerate days, that they had been forgiven the debt. Now, however, it emerges that the creditors have not fully absorbed the message of the eighteenth chapter of Matthew. Although they do not propose to sell NHS staff in St Albans into slavery to pay the debt, they do propose to only let them off the first half, leaving £25 million to be paid. This unmercifulness is "prompting anger from Hertfordshire's PCT's and hospital trusts." NHS bureaucrats, like the rich, are different from us. If my bank manager were to forgive only £25,000,000 of my debts I would consider a little gratitude more appropriate than anger.

Anyway various dreadful and frightening consequences await. What consequences exactly, you ask? Who knows, who cares, answers the waving grass. Or "The spokesman was unable to specify what services might face the axe," as the article put it. Earlier the same spokesman had been quoted as saying, "There are several options which we are looking at. One is carrying on regardless and another is a reduction in services but obviously neither of those are preferable." Strange indeed is the message (and the grammar) of the oracle: why is "carrying on regardless" even an option? And if it is, the obviousness of its lack of preferability to - er - whatever it is obviously not preferable to is not obvious to me.

I dunno what's going on. And clearly the guy who wrote the article, a Mr Staff Reporter, doesn't either. But don't blame poor old Staffie, because this is only the latest and by no means the largest of a long, long line of stories describing incomprehensible money wrangles between different parts of the NHS, and no one could follow them all. Doomed, I tell you, doomed.

As promised, my considered advice on what steps to take regarding the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

First, do no harm.

What, not good enough for you? It should be. Similar advice made him famous, even though he probably never said those words. It is a testament to the merit of the sentiment that its uncertain parentage has been no bar to its acceptance in the best society. Googling the quotation, I came across this account, fairly old but still shocking, of a medical trial in Seattle where the testers appear to have been so mad keen to get a result that they quite forgot that the subjects of their trial were human beings. It made me see the initiatives for peace in the Middle East as a dodgy clinical trial: great words, great hopes - but the patients did not give their informed consent.

Naomi Klein is horrified that US NGOs were told that they were an arm of the US government.

I sympathise. How galling to be told that you have been bought and paid for! Especially when it's true.

Fortunately, dear NGOs, I have the solution: give back the money to Bush, then he can give it back to the US taxpayers from whom it was extorted. Then you will be able to walk non-vertically challenged again, knowing that you are non-governmental in fact as well name.

Next problem: Israel-Palestine.

Publisher's hype: department of total surrender.

Instapundit reports that the Instadaughter is on page 60 of the latest Harry Potter book. Perhaps assisted by the time difference, my similarly-aged daughter has nudged ahead at page 128, despite having had a pit stop in the neighbours' paddling pool. My husband, working in secrecy at night, shamelesssly violated the Reading The Last Page of Books (Prohibition Of) Act 1876, but has promised not to tell. Anyway, Instapundit links to this blog review which you can't possibly read because, as well as talking about libertarian themes in JK Rowling's work, it gives away minor bits of the plot like some people give away plastic toys in cornflake packets. It may not say Who Dies, but you still mustn't read it.

Naughty! Hands away!

If you absolutely must score a dose of analysis of libertarian themes in HP, I can help. Proudly reissued from my first days of blogging, I hereby re-present: Harry Potter and the Libertarian Subtext.