The BBC news headlines at 5pm. Second story: the Trident vote tonight.

So what was the main story, a story more important than the spending of billions of pounds and the future defence of the realm, not to mention the return of unilateralism to Labour's benches?

The kiddie programme Blue Peter is going to apologise later today because a prize was awarded to a child who had been asked by the producer to call in with the right answer.

You couldn't make it up.

(1)

This piece of lunacy passed me by until I saw it on Tim Worstall's blog:

Zimbabwe may gain the vice-presidency of the World Food Programme (WFP) — despite the collapse of its own agricultural sector.

All seven African countries presently on the WFP's 36-strong executive board are believed to support the bid of Robert Mugabe's regime.

If successful, Zimbabwe will be in line to become the president of the world's largest supplier of humanitarian aid next year.

Not that anyone should be surprised. There's a long tradition of such things...such as putting Libya in the chair of the UN Human Rights Commission (alongside such luminaries as Syria).

(1)

Genocide denial:

If Turkey joins the EU then we will have the comedy situation that denial of the Armenian Holocaust is a criminal offence in France, whilst mentioning it is a criminal offence in Turkey. The happy result of this could be that the entire population of France could be lifted and placed, Midnight Express like in Turkish prisons. Of course the entire population of Turkey could then find itself extradited to France and imprisoned there.

(via Tim Worstall.)

(2)

Dominic Lawson is a wonderful columnist. Today's piece is typically unpredictable, on the ludicrous nature of astrology. Anyone who believes in it is, by definition, an idiot.

This in particular I love, from Psychic Smith, the spoof astrologer which the Sunday Telegraph used to have:

One of my favourite Psychic entries was for "Scorpio" one week in 1988: "My apologies to all Scorpios for last week's misprint, the result of a transcription error. The entry should have read 'fantastic luck ahead' and not as it appeared. Thank you for all those who wrote in. Both the offended and the disappointed."

(2)

As a regular on South West Trains, this comes as no surprise to me:

I was travelling on South West Trains the other day when the announcement was made: "We regret to inform you that the buffet trolley is unable to come down the train as it is too wide for the aisles."

Think about it. Aisles must be a standard size. So must buffet trolleys. Was a batch of trolleys manufactured to the wrong specifications, then sent out anyway in the hope that no one would notice?

(UPDATE: I have rightly been taken to task by a commenter for the leaving out the words' to me' in my first sentence.)

FURTHER UPDATE: I stand corrected again in the comments section for my grammar...And the comments seem to have developed a new theme: Neil Clark. I am happy to let them run on, given that I do not want to start the new year with a post on the murderer-worshipper. (Bizarrely, given his support for capital punishment, one of his recent posts is devoted to attacking the appplication of the death sentence for Saddam: He was only on trial because he stopped doing the US's bidding. Beyond satire.

(10)

You are a successful research scientist. You spend your life developing consumer friendly products which give people solutions to their everyday problems. So what is the killer problem to which you decide you must now devote your time and scientific skills?

Yes, you got in one. Variable temperature gloves:

These heated gloves make cold hands a thing of the past.

Battery-operated. Your fingers stay lovely and warm. Ideal for winter sports and outdoor work.

Just place a D-cell battery (available separately) in the little pocket on the back of each glove. You will then have ‘heating’ for up to 6 hours, warming up the area between the palm and fingers. Even when the thermometer is below zero, your gloves will remain at room temperature. Whether you’re skiing, walking or working outside, numb fingers will be a thing of the past.
The thermal lining is breathable.
Inside the gloves, you will be able to feel the soft Thinsulate® lining. Your hands won’t sweat so much, because of the breathable lining. The strong, water-repellent nylon outer material protects your gloves from damp. There is even enough room to carry your keys or lipstick in the battery pocket (batteries available separately). Two-years’ guarantee.
When others are still rubbing their freezing hands together, you can just switch on your ‘finger heating’.

However did we live without them?

(3)

Do you think that maybe this chap is in the wrong job?

(2)

Some stories just make you throw up your hands in despair at the police:

A mother of two has been fined for swearing at yobs who terrorised her neighbourhood.

Donna Appleyard, 32, finally snapped after months of misery in which the youths jumped over fences, trampled through gardens and shouted and swore at residents.

Ms Appleyard said she had made several complaints to police about the gang outside her home in Knottingley, West Yorkshire, but no officers had been to visit her to take the issue further.

Instead, she found herself under investigation when officers received a complaint from a 13-year-old girl, after Ms Appleyard finally lost her temper and pleaded with her tormenters: "Please, just f*** off". Two weeks later, officers called at her house and issued her with the fine.

...Ms Appleyard was given an £80 fixed penalty notice following the incident on March 30. However, she refused to pay and was taken to court last month, when magistrates raised the sum to £120, which she must now pay or face a jail term.

...Sergeant Neil Haley, from West Yorkshire police, defended the force's actions. He said: "We appreciate that anti-social behaviour can be frustrating for people but they should not take the law into their own hands."

Time for some accountability and democracy.

(8)

Ok, I'm not a Christian, but I can't see what a man's HIV status has got to do with his suitability to be a vicar.

I assume that the priest concerned is a Christian.

Not that that's a reasonable assumption, given this bizarre story a couple of days ago:

A PRIEST with the Church of England who converted to Hinduism has been allowed to continue to officiate as a cleric.

The Rev David Hart’s diocese renewed his licence this summer even though he had moved to India, changed his name to Ananda and daily blesses a congregation of Hindus with fire previously offered up to Nagar, the snake god. He also “recites Gayatri Mantram with the same devotion with which he celebrates the Eucharist”, according to The Hindu, India’s national newspaper.

The Hindu this week pictures him offering prayers to an idol of the elephant god Ganesh in front of his house. However, he still believes he is fit to celebrate as an Anglican priest and plans to do so when he returns to Britain.

...“I have neither explicitly nor implicitly renounced my Christian faith or priesthood,” he said. The renewal of his licence was sponsored by the Rural Dean of Colombo in Sri Lanka.

Mr Hart believes that his change to Hinduism would be “read in the spirit of open exploration and dialogue, which is an essential feature of our shared modern spirituality”.

He also said that he would continue to celebrate as an Anglican priest when he visited England, but he would also visit a Hindu temple while there. “My philosophical position is that all religions are cultural constructs,” he said. “I am acting out God’s story in local terms.”

Beyond satire.

(4)

These were the top 3 stories on Radio 5's midday bulletin:

The UN Security Council's preparations for a cease fire demand to Israel;

A fourteen year old rapist walking out of court;

The Court of Appeal ruling against the Home Secretary's attempts to limit the rights of nine Afghan hijackers living in the UK.

How can one not despair?

(1)

Sometimes only Peter Briffa will do.

(2)

(The Leonard Cheshire charity, which has an income of £135 million a year and helps 21,000 disabled people in the UK, has decided to change its name because, according to its director-general, Bryan Dutton: “It’s important that the young generation know who we are and what we do.” To that end, it has suggested eQual UK, Equability UK or A-BL UK as possibilities. The charity has assured Lord Cheshire’s relatives that his name will be incorporated “ within” the new name.)

Forgive my using the pages of The Times for a personal announcement, but from now on I’d like to be known not as Stephen Pollard but as Rite4DoughSP.

I’ve realised that the words Stephen and Pollard are anachronistic. They are — sorry Mummy and Daddy — the product of a mind-set from an age long gone, and aren’t remotely hip enough to convey just what a swinging, urban, wicked and beating man I really am.

Rite4DoughSP, on the other hand, says what I am about, has my branding within it, and is dead witty — doesn’t the deliberate misspelling just crack you up?!

So hats off to the board of Leonard Cheshire, too. What a beating group they are. They’ve realised that the name of their founder is just so, well, old. Who wants to be known by the name of some dead war hero, when instead there are such cracking alternatives as eQual UK, Equability UK and A-BL UK? Only the frigid would point out that the possible new names sound more like an exam board, a club for the mild-mannered and the first three letters of the dyslexic alphabet.

And only the terminally unhip would care that incorporating the name of a war hero in a piece of marketing zing is an insult to his memory. What do they think a charity should be for if it’s not being down and dirty with street culture? As for sticking just with the name of its war hero founder: war is just so not cool. And charity is really cool. So how can a charity have a war hero’s name? Duh.

Yeah, it’s groovy. The street’s where it’s at. The yoof’s where it’s at.

(Oh, and as far as I know, until now there’s been no such street-word as “beating”, but as Rite4DoughSP, me is so cool that me only has to think something’s happening and it is. So it’s beating. Yeah.)

(27)

A commenter says this about my post below on Cardinal Murphy O'Connor:

[I]f someone made a comment about the Chief Rabbi along the lines of the one you just did about the Cardinal you would be screaming "anti-semitism".

I don't think that's right. But I do see that my words and phraseology are ill-judged, and one example of where an editor can be a very useful asset.

What annoyed me about the Cardinal's phrase is that he appears to be arguing that any criticism of Christian ideas is somehow phobic, when it is not necessarily in the least. Just as criticism of Muslim ideas - jihad, for instance - is not phobic but based on rational argument, so the same holds, for instance, for opposition to the Catholic Church's stance on abortion. The same goes for any religious ideas.

But that first par is, I realise, not one of my best. My contempt for O'Connor as a man who has, I believe, behaved disgracefully - and who has shown that he is not remotely fit to lecture others about morality - obscured the bigger point, and I should have expressed myself a lot better.

(31)

First it was Islamophobia. Now Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor - the pederast priest's protector - is moaning about "a sort of Christophobia in the intelligentsia and opinion-formers in our society".

In my book, the Cardinal is a man who can teach us precisely nothing. Whatever the merit or otherwise of his ideas, his disgraceful behaviour in protecting and then re-employing a known child-abusing priest means that he is not fit to read out the phone book, let alone offer lessons in morality.

(9)

I'm not sure if I should be amused or horrified by something a little Conservative birdie just told me.

It seems my Daily Mail piece (below) was distributed this morning to every Conservative MP by Dave's PPS.

Clearly, it was my penetrating analysis of the Education Bill which was of interest.

Maybe amused and horrified.

The Grauniad never fails to disappoint. I've just caught up with yesterday's Society section. It's a must-read every week, as its editors are clearly entirely unaware that it reads like an Onion of the Guardian.

This one you couldn't make up:

Locked in the past

The common sense view is that prisons work. But the evidence suggests they are failed, outdated and costly. Is it time to abolish them?

...prison is a useless, outdated, bloated Victorian institution that is well past its sell-by date. We know, in short, that prison is a fiasco.

There's only one, small, technical problem with Mr Wilson's idea that "prisons have got to go". Do you want Denis Nilssen living next door?

Sometimes you just have to scratch your eyes in wonder at the things people consider important. Someone called Tina Gaudoin has written an entire column in The Times on the necessity of getting men to pee sitting down rather than standing up.

There's even an organisation called Mothers Against Peeing Standing Up:

Our goal is to transform the way the world goes to the bathroom by year 2010.

No, it's not 1st April.

If you want to hear what normal life will be like in an ID card, health fascist world, have a listen to this wonderful ACLU advert.

Sometimes only Peter Briffa says what needs to be said.

Nick Cohen hits the nail on the head over the 'chattering class' reaction to Galloway on CBB:

Was it Galloway's support for every anti-American tyrant on the planet that did for him? Not at all. He could salute the 'courage, strength and indefatigability' of Saddam Hussein, Tariq Aziz and Bashar al-Assad with impunity. How about his apologetics for the 'martyrs' of al-Qaeda and the Baath Party who represent everything the liberal-left has been against since the Enlightenment? No, not at all, that was fine, too. Or perhaps his sickening attacks on 'quisling' Iraqi trade unionists when they were being murdered by those same al-Qaeda and Baathist terrorists?

Once again, polite society found no reason to take offence. Indeed, it cheered itself hoarse when Galloway dodged pertinent questions from US senators about how many starving Iraqi children had seen the profits from the option to buy 23 million barrels of oil Saddam gave his charity.

The liberal media have turned on Galloway because of a far more heinous crime: his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother.

...[A]ren't they weird? The liberals who think it is worse to appear on a TV show than in the court of a fascist tyrant; the socialists who believe that it is left wing to ignore Iraq as the forces of the far right blow it to pieces. Not just fatuous and immoral, but weird beyond measure.

I cannot recommend Anthony Browne's new book, 'The Retreat of Reason: Political correctness and the corruption of public debate in modern Britain', too highly.

Unlike many attacks on political correctness, it doesn't trivialise the issue with reference to silly examples, but deals with the real damage that the pc mindset and consequent lack of thinking does.

It's well worth reading all the book (which you can download here) but I think one of the strongest sections is when he deals with HIV. I reprint it all, because it is important that it gets as wide an airing as possible, and will hopefully prompt you to download and read the entire book:

It was a trivial event—the non-appearance of a pre-recorded interview on the BBC Radio 4’s Today prog-ramme—that sparked the train of thought that led to this pamphlet. It wasn’t just that the interview with me was dropped—an act of mercy on the listeners—but the contrast with the interview with a government minister that appeared in its place. The episode was an example of the increasingly frequent avoidance of public debate in Britain—the ‘politics of denial’—which is more than just a betrayal of the British public.

The absence of debate also led the government to announcing an inappropriate policy that would do nothing to tackle the problems it was aimed at. There was a conspiracy not so much of silence but of denial that stretched across the media and government from the lowest civil servants and reporters to the highest ministers and interviewers. There was endemic dishonesty towards the public, but because everyone was in denial to each other, few realised it because their virtual reality had become the widely acknowledged truth.

This received wisdom was in fact easy to disprove—it just required looking at some government tables—but everyone had an emotional investment in not disproving it. The collective denial so enveloped the media-political elite that they had little idea how detached their world-view was from reality. When I started putting the truth out in the public domain, I was met with an almost universally intolerant and intellectually dishonest response by people who preferred political correctness over factual correctness.

Even many of those who realised the intellectual honesty of what I had been reporting were unable to accept it emotionally, because for most people when intellect and emotion conflict, emotion wins.

The interview on the Today programme was on a highly sensitive subject—the exponential rise of HIV in Britain since Labour was elected in 1997. Figures from the government’s Public Health Laboratory Service were being published showing a 25 per cent rise in just one year, with almost all the increase being among heterosexuals. The government and media had been warning for years about the dangers of the new complacency among heterosexuals, ever since the number of heterosexual cases had swept past the number of homosexual ones, a well reported and much commented-on phenomenon.

The government minister was responding on the Today programme to the latest increase with a new sexual health campaign telling people to practice safe sex. If teenagers would just wear condoms, it would put a stop to the rise. But the trouble is that the increase in HIV had virtually nothing to do with British people practicing unsafe sex—it was almost all the result of HIV positive people (mainly Africans) coming to the UK, and being diagnosed with HIV once here.

I first wrote about the issue in a front page story in The Times, announcing that African immigration had overtaken gay sex as the main source of new HIV cases in Britain, according to government figures. The government’s epidemiologists with whom I had worked on the story had been worried about the reaction.

They needn’t have bothered. The reaction was incredulity. Clearly, in most people’s minds, the story couldn’t be true—everyone knew the increase in HIV was because of complacent and promiscuous Britons. The Department of Health’s director of communication, when I spoke to her about it, clearly thought I was bonkers —she was launching this safe sex campaign because everyone knew the rise in HIV was the result of unsafe sex. The only people who phoned me up to thank me about it were HIV doctors, who lived in the real world, not the politically correct virtual one. Their patients were now predominantly (and sometimes exclusively) African immigrants, and yet no one was talking about it.

Some doctors told me that when they had tried to bring it up in public with their local health authorities, they had just been shouted at. One of the government’s own medical advisers phoned me up secretly from within the Department of Health thanking me for highlighting the issue, and urging me to carry on: Britain was facing a massive explosion in HIV and ministers and civil servants simply refused to discuss the cause of it. ‘Ministers just won’t listen because they think it is racist’ he said, ‘but the public deserve at least honesty.’

Even when the truth became intellectually commonly accepted, media outlets such as the Guardian and BBC carried on reporting dishonest accounts, presumably because they had such deeply held emotional beliefs in the issue that they couldn’t bring themselves to write honestly about it. A cover story I wrote for the Spectator was directly attacked by a news story in my old paper the Observer, whose desire to disprove what I had written trumped their inability to do so.

In fact, although their tone was often somewhat sensational, the most intellectually honest media outlets tended to be Britain’s much maligned tabloid media. It isn’t the only time that Britain’s tabloids, so hated by the left, have actually been the torch-bearers for truth by daring to write deeply uncomfortable things that others refuse to.

Two years after my front page story in The Times, the denial about the whole issue of HIV finally crumbled. The Public Health Laboratory Service now openly reports that African immigration is the main cause of new HIV in Britain, and even left-wing media are enabled to report it.

One person told me that, even if it is true that the HIV epidemic is driven by African immigration, it shouldn’t be written about because it will just fuel racism.

But the result of that conspiracy of silence is that the government follows a policy that does absolutely nothing to combat the growth of HIV in the UK. Tackling the epidemic will fuel racism far less than allowing African immigration to spark an HIV explosion, a development allowed by government policy which is a political gift to the racist British National Party.

The one definite benefit is that the lives of HIV positive immigrants are saved. But if the cost of NHS treatment were spent in Africa, not the UK, it would save between 10 and 100 times more lives. There is also the human cost: the HIV epidemic that is being imported from Africa is now being transmitted within the UK. In fact, the majority of people who contract HIV from heterosexual sex in Britain are actually catching it from having sex with HIV positive African immigrants. In total, nearly 1,000 people have caught HIV from infected immigrants since Labour came to power, ironically finally giving a rationale to the government’s safe sex campaign. That’s 1,000 lives blighted, ultimately, by political correctness. Those who defend political correctness must accept that it can come at a heavy price.

Sometimes you just have to admire the sheer scale of other people's lunacy:

Hot tea is NOT ETHICAL. Adding boiling water is a way of COOKING FOOD, and cooking goes against the nature of ABUNDANCE. When you cook something you KILL it, and KILLING reducts the possibility of SHARING. The only way to ethically drink tea is to add water at ENVIRONMENTAL TEMPERATURE (being the temperature at which algae and other water-dwelling organisms such as fish can or could reproduce) and then wait for an ETHICAL AMOUNT OF TIME before drinking. Only then can you be ABUNDANCE.

(via Chez Pim.)

There are few more perplexing phenomena than the workings of the modern liberal mind. Take one growing sub-species, the animal rights obsessive. It is almost impossible to understand the thought processes of those who consider the rights of animals to be more important than those of human beings. The latest outburst from Sir Paul McCartney is typical.

On today’s BBC Six O’Clock News, the former Beatle and his wife, Lady Heather, are shown watching gruesome footage from China of cats and dogs being killed and then stripped for their fur. The practice is indeed sickening and no decent person could be other than horrified.

Where Sir Paul’s moral indignation becomes simply warped, however, is in his next sentence. “I wouldn’t even dream of going over there to play, in the same way I wouldn’t go to a country that supported apartheid . . . It’s against every rule of humanity.” Sir Paul and his wife then call for a worldwide boycott of all Chinese goods. “If we can hit them in their pockets, maybe they’ll do something to stop this.”

China imprisons and executes thousands of dissidents who dare to criticise the regime. Sixteen years after the protest in Tiananmen Square dozens of those arrested remain in prison. One man, Yu Dongyue, is still imprisoned for having thrown paint on the portrait of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, an act of “counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement” for which he was sentenced to 20 years.

Sir Paul and Lady Heather are so exercised by the plight of some cats and dogs that they will now refuse to travel to China, and are demanding a worldwide boycott of Chinese goods.

As for the imprisonment and judicial murder of thousands of dissident human beings, not a pip from either of them.

Not that anyone should be surprised. It is the same liberal mindset that lavishes praise on Fidel Castro as a hero, rather than condemning him as a tyrant. Castro learnt well from his Soviet backers, and rounds up and imprisons opponents just as they did. In March 2003, 75 prisoners of conscience (as Amnesty has designated them) were sentenced to prison terms of up to 28 years for peacefully opposing the regime.

Sir Paul has worldwide fame. He could do untold good campaigning for his fellow human beings. Instead, he chooses to try to save a few animals. Go figure.

Is this poll by Prospect - a magazine I usually enjoy - what is technically known as a piss-take?

It's billed as a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals.

Pathetic. Has no one there ever heard of Milton Friedman?

Whatever one's view of him - in my view he is incomparably the greatest living human being, given his contribution to increasing freedom and prosperity - he is on any definition one of "the world's top 100 public intellectuals".

But, of course the unspeakably vile Eric Hobsbawm, supporter of mass murder, is there.

UPDATE: I've been contacted by someone from Prospect who tells me this:

[W]e have in fact heard of Milton Friedman, as you would have realised had you taken the time to read the blurb accompanying the list in the magazine: "Candidates needed to be alive, and still active in public life... this ruled out the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Milton Friedman, who would have been automatic inclusions 20 or so years ago." And an individual's inclusion on the list should not, as I think is clear but as I worry you may believe, be taken as a Prospect endorsement of their views - forget Hobsbawm - what about al-Qaradawi, Naomi Klein or Negri?

I think it's a fair point about the likes of al-Quaradawi and Hobsbawm, however distateful I might find it. But to argue that Milton Friedman is effectively dead is simply perverse. He might not be the man he was 30 years ago, but he writes with all the elan - and influence - of old. So leaving him out, even on their own criteria, is bizarre.

As for my not taking the trouble to read the criteria; perhaps Prospect should take the trouble to provide a link to their (flawed) criteria somewhere on the page they are sending out with the list. There is no indication anywhere on it as to how or why they came up with the names.

...don't be helpful.

Here's what can happen to you when try to do a favour to a stranger.

I was walking along the street this morning, when I saw a lorry smash into the side of a parked car. And then - as is their wont - drive off. So I wrote down the lorry's registration number, and the name and phone number of the company written on the side of the lorry, and left a note on the windscreen of the parked car. And I also left my phone number should the driver want to call to have described what happened.

Ten minutes later, the phone rings. "Are you the owner of xxxxxx (reg number)?"

"No, I was passing buy when I saw it being hit so I left the note from which you have got my phone number."

"We need the car moved. It's on a yellow line and it shouldn't be here."

"Well I'm sorry, but it's nothing to do with me. I was a passer by and I have no connection with the car."

"If you don't come and move it we'll call the police."

"I have nothing to do with the car. It is not my car."

"Of course it's your car. How else did I get your number?"

"I was passing by, saw it being hit, and left a note for the owner."

"You are the owner."

"No, I'm not, and I am going to put the phone down now."

Which I did.

Ten minutes later the phone rings again. This time, it's the owner of the shop outside which the car is parked (I have no idea who the first person was to whom I spoke). We then have almost exactly the same conversation. And at the end, he says "Come and move your fucking car or I will smash into it myself." I then explain for the umpteenth time that I have no connection with the car. To which he then replies, "Right, that's it. I'm going the police now". And puts the phone down.

I cannot imagine what delights now await me. Kafka, eat your heart out.

I say again: is there anyone who wants to spend the rest of their lives paying to have the wretched Olympics here?

Fingers crossed, the French will be saddled with it, and not us.

(There is one enormously powerful reason for hoping that the games don't go to Paris: that Chirac's smirk will be unbearable. And if the salt was added to the wound by perfidious Albion triumphing, it would indeed be splendid watching Chirac sulk. But I'm afraid the cost is too high even for that delicious prospect.)

UPDATE: I'm left with no alternative. I'm moving to Paris.

Some people staged a pop concert yesterday. It was a big one. A lot of people went to see it. Even more watched it on the telly.

But far, far more of the country than watched it had zero interest in either the music (most of which, when I heard it on the news, seemed quite painful to listen to) or the deeply misguided campaign which prompted it.

In terms of news impact, nothing which happened yesterday in Hyde Park was of any more importance than what I chose to eat for dinner.

'Pop stars sing' is hardly news, although I grant that the sheer scale of the concert merited a mention in the news bulletins.

So why is every paper today stuffed full, almost to the exclusion of all else, with reports and pictures? And why are the TV bulletins today still banging on about it?

Tedious doesn't even come close to describing it all. Lord above: it's almost as boring as Wimbledon.

(UPDATE: This isn't something I say very often, but there's a superb piece by Sir Simon Jenkins in today's Sunday Times.)

I'm confused. There I was, thinking that bien pensant opinion was against a ban on headscarves. But no. Now, it seems, it's spot on.

Of course. They're all too busy condemning Israel for daring to defend its citizens.

999 times out of 1000 I want to scream when I read Polly Toynbee. But whatever I might think of her politics, she is a class act as a columnist. Today it's that 1 in 1000 column when I want to cheer. Her piece today on the reaction to the death of the Pope is Ms Toynbee at her best:

With the clash of two state funerals and a wedding, unreason is in full flood this week. Yet again, rationalists who thought they understood this secular, sceptical age have been shocked at the coverage from Rome.

The BBC airwaves have disgraced themselves. The Mail went mad with its front-page headlines, "Safe in Heaven" and the next day "Amen". Even this august organ, which sprang from the loins of nonconformist dissent, astounded many readers with its broad acres of Pope reverencing.

...The Vatican is not a charming Monaco for tourists collecting Ruritanian stamps or gazing at past glories in the Sistine Chapel. It is a modern, potent force for cruelty and hypocrisy.

...The Vatican's deeper power is in its personal authority over 1.3 billion worshippers, which is strongest over the poorest, most helpless devotees. With its ban on condoms the church has caused the death of millions of Catholics and others in areas dominated by Catholic missionaries, in Africa and right across the world. In countries where 50% are infected, millions of very young Aids orphans are today's immediate victims of the curia. Refusing support to all who offer condoms, spreading the lie that the Aids virus passes easily through microscopic holes in condoms - this irresponsibility is beyond all comprehension.

This is said often, even in this unctuous week - and yet still it does not permeate. He was a good, caring man nevertheless, they say, as if it were a minor aberration. But genuflecting before this corpse is scarcely different to parading past Lenin: they both put extreme ideology before human life and happiness, at unimaginable human cost. How dare our prime minister go there in our name to give the Vatican our approval for this? Will he think of Africa when on his knees today? I trust history will some day express astonishment at moral outrage wasted on sexual trivia while papal celebrity and charisma cloaked this great Vatican crime.

The editor of the Catholic Herald was somewhat Jesuitical when I argued with him in a BBC studio yesterday. He asked how the Pope could be blamed when all the church calls for is sex within marriage and abstinence. But abstinence and celibacy are not the human condition. If the Vatican learned anything about humanity, it would humbly meditate on 4,450 Catholic clergy in the US alone accused of molesting children since 1950, and no doubt as many in Catholic churches elsewhere still in denial.

The scale of it is breathtaking yet not at all surprising: most humans are sexual beings. A Vatican edict in the 1960s threatened to excommunicate anyone breaking secrecy on child sex allegations, and guaranteed that ever more children continued to suffer. And within its walls the Vatican shields an American priest from allegations.

Still the Vatican turns a blind eye to this most repugnant and damaging of all sexual practices, the suffering little children whose priests come unto them. Yet at the same time it thunders disapproval of sex in every other more innocent circumstance, blighting the lives of millions with its teaching on gays, divorce, abortion and unrealistic self-denial. There is no reckoning how many of the world's poorest women have died giving birth to more children than they can survive; contraception is women's true saviour.

The non-stop, fawning coverage on every channel, and in every newspaper, has made me despair. It was, of course, appropriate to mark the passing of a man who was clearly one of the most important figures of the past century. But OTT doesn't even come close to describing the coverage. Some of us, let it be pointed out, consider the Pope's edicts to have been those of a deeply misguided, dangerous man. Ms Toynbee is spot on.

And as for Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor; if I have to listen any more to his tones of supposed sweet reasonableness then I think I might throw something at my TV. This is the man, remember, who considered it appropriate to protect and then re-employ a pederast priest. Lord alone knows what else lies buried in his church's paedophile past. So far is he from being a man fit to act as a spiritual guide, he ought to pilloried at every opportunity for his behaviour.

And now we will no doubt have more coverage of the Cardinals' election of a new Pope. Stop the world, please; I want to get off. Will someone wake me up when it's over.

Before anyone points out the obvious, I realise that what I am about to say says more about me and my friends than it does about the rest of the country. But...

There have been two stories this week which have garnered wall to wall coverage: first, Ellen MacArthur's sailing trip on Tuesday; and now Prince Charles' marriage announcement.

I know of no one - literally, no one - amongst my friends and acquaintances who has the slightest interest in either story. What Ellen MacArthur did is, to my mind, one big yawn. I appreciate that it was an achievement but it is one in which neither I, nor any of my friends, has any interest.

But on Tuesday, when Ariel Sharon shook hands with the leader of the PA, there was only story across TV and radio: a woman who had gone sailing.

I thought that was bad enough. If only! Today - and, I suspect, for the forseeable future - there is only one story: the forthcoming marriage of our buffoon Prince of Wales. If he wants to marry, fine, but why on earth should a man such as he, with his numb-skull science and his New Age mumbo jumbo, have any claims on the public's attention?

I have long been a Republican, but I have come to despise the Royal family more with every passing day.

This week I feel like an alien in a foreign country.

UPDATE: It seems we're not alone. Martin Stanford, on Sky News, is standing outside Buckingham Palace and has just reported that 'to be honest', he has met with a wall of public indifference when asking passers by for their reaction. As he has just put it, the most common response has been 'where's the London Eye?'.

There is hope after all.

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The beneficent state.

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David Carr says Happy New Year.

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I know, I know. It's a serious piece and all that by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

But there's something gloriously typical about a piece by the head of the church which has the headline

Archbishop of Canterbury admits: This makes me doubt the existence of God

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Re my post below about Michael Meacher's latest conspiracy madness, a correspondent points me to this interesting piece in the Washington Post.

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Yes, I know. I also thought it referred to Beckham.

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Harry's Place has an excellent post on the absurd Animals At War memorial in Park Lane.

I can only secong what it says.

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Spend! Spend! Spend!

I feel an overwhelming urge to pop out and buy an SUV.

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Oh my. This piece by Michael Meacher on the US presidential election is more hilarious than one might dare hope.

All I can say is read and enjoy; and then weep at the thought that this man was a minister until June of last year.

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I've got a raspberry which looks like St Luke. How much am I bid?

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Sometimes a post - this - and a comment - this - so complement each other that additional words are superfluous

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There are few symbols more instantly recognisable than the red poppy. Last year’s poppy appeal raised a record £21.7 million. This year’s may well raise even more.

And there are few more deserving causes. If it was not for those who died fighting to defend the country, or those who were injured in the cause of freedom, we would not be the nation that we now are – free to decide for ourselves whether to donate money and to whom, or whether we wish to wear a poppy on our lapels.

But something has been lost somewhere along the line. Such is the proliferation of these symbols – the poppy itself, the red AIDS ribbon and the yellow cancer research bracelet, to take only three – that the poppy has become just another fashion statement. Poppies, ribbons and bracelets are now so ubiquitous that their message has been devalued to near worthlessness.

To wear a poppy is no longer to make a one-off expression of solidarity with a special cause but to don the latest in an ever expanding range of fashion statements. They are today little more than jewelry, albeit with a different intention to traditional embellishments. Instead of sending out the message that you are a person with style, they say something supposedly more important. They say – so their wearers think - that you are a deep human being. They say that you care.

Worse still, if you do not wear one, then you are apparently making a very callous statement. You are saying that you don’t care.

Last month it was the yellow Lance Armstrong cancer bracelet. This month it’s the poppy. Next month, who knows? Perhaps the red AIDS ribbon will be back in fashion.

The truth, however, is that wearing them does not remotely say that you care. They do not in the least indicate that you are deep. All they say is that you are victim of political fashion and emotional blackmail.

Let me suggest a test which will show why. Go up to the first person you see today with a poppy and ask them why they are wearing it; the meaning of the poppy should be clear to anyone who has one on.

I suspect that you will be in for a shock. For many, wearing the poppy is indeed a well-understood symbol of their respect for, and remembrance of, those who died to protect us. But survey after survey shows that many of us do not have a clue about the events which prompted the poppy appeal, and that ignorance of the first and second world wars is rife. A study earlier this year found that many of us think Adolf Hitler never existed; he is a fictional character. More than one in twenty of us think that HG Wells’ science-fiction classic, War of the Worlds (in which Earth is invaded by Martians) describes a historical event. Others believe that the Battle of Helm’s Deep from the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Battle of Endor from Return of the Jedi were real battles.

Only 28 per cent of secondary school pupils know that D-Day was the start of the Allied liberation of occupied Western Europe. 26 per cent have never heard of it. Only 39 per cent have heard of Winston Churchill.

The chances are that the poppy wearer you approach will be similarly ignorant. They will know it has something to do with war, but beyond that everything is fog. Last night Yasmin Alibhai-Brown told BBC Five Live listeners that although she bought poppies, she put them in her hand bag rather than wear them, lest it be thought she supported the Iraq War.

Her ignorance of their purpose goes to the heart of the issue. What others think of what fashionable label we wear is now what really matters, not using the poppy to express an individual debt of gratitude to our soldiers.

I recently took part in a BBC discussion. As we were walking towards the TV studio, a producer noticed that I did not have a poppy on my lapel. As she offered me one, she told me that “it looks so much better if everyone wears one”.

Who says it looks better? And to whom?

The same emotional blackmail has now been extended to almost every cause under the sun. A while ago it was the red AIDS ribbon which was de rigeur. This year it is the yellow cancer bracelet. But don’t think it stops there. There are now ribbons and bracelets for every conceivable idea: breast cancer pink, pancreatic cancer mauve, ‘youth mentoring’ blue, anti-racism violet, child cancer gold, ovarian cancer dark green, ‘chemical injury awareness’ entwined mauve and yellow, spaying and neutering cats brown, multiple myeloma dark red, feminists against dieting turquoise, ‘genital integrity’ (whatever that might be) entwined pink and blue and gambling addiction orange. (I made one of those up. I will be astonished if anyone knows which one.)

You might laugh at some them, with good reason. But you can be sure of one thing. At some point soon, at least one of those causes will have been adopted as the latest symbol of decency, the wearing of which indicates morality and the absence of which signifies immorality. (Not that some of them seem do be doing much of a job. Were you aware of ‘chemical injury’? Me neither.)

None of them are more preposterous than the latest fad – the Madonna-inspired red string bracelet. There really are otherwise intelligent human beings who think that wearing a piece of string will bring tranquillity.

Putting on a poppy should not be the same as putting on a piece of jewellery, or the latest fashionable cause’s ribbon. Poppies pay tribute to those who fought so that we may enjoy the freedoms we now have – not least the freedom to wear different coloured ribbons and make unthinking statements about fashionable causes.

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I don't think I'll be troubling Amazon for the works of the new Nobel Laureate.

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NYC has many merits as a city.

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It'll be here soon, don't you worry.

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Excellent piece by Jamie Whyte in The Times, putting into perspective the non-story of a poll by YouGov showing that 94 per cent of white people say that most or all their friends are also white, and Trevor Phillips' knee jerk reponse, proposing summer camps of whites and blacks.

As Whyte says:

If you have the wrong beliefs in North Korea, the Government will send you to a re-education camp. There you will be presented with the right beliefs and encouraged to embrace them. If you have the wrong friends in Britain, the Government will send you to a re-friending camp. There you will be presented with the right friends and encouraged to embrace them.

That, at least, is the proposal of Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. Mr Phillips thinks Brits do not have enough friends of other races. To correct this, he wants children sent to mixed-race summer camps where they will learn to love all the peoples of the world.

Mr Phillips got his idea about the inadequate racial diversity of our friends from a YouGov poll. It reveals that more than half of whites have no non-white friends and that only 20 per cent of whites have a Muslim friend. These statistics alarm Mr Phillips, but they should not. The problem is not racism; it is just that there are not enough non-whites to go around.

Consider Pakistanis. They make up just 1 per cent of the UK population, 92 per cent of which is white. For every white to have a Pakistani friend, the average Pakistani would need at least 92 white friends. That is surely too much to ask even of the friendliest Pakistani. Suppose every Pakistani had five white friends. Any anti-racism campaigner should be content. Yet the shocking statistics would persist: 95 per cent of whites would still have no Pakistani friend.

...The average camp of 100 children will have ninety-two whites, two Indians, two blacks, one Pakistani and three “others”. A child who made two genuine friends in a few weeks at camp would be doing well. Given the camp’s ethnic composition, however, these two friends would most probably be white.

Perhaps Mr Phillips intends his camps to include a disproportionate number of non-whites: 50 per cent, say. Alas, that could be achieved only by leaving out most whites, or by making non-whites attend 12 times as many camps as whites. If camps were two weeks long, that would be 24 weeks a year at re-friending camps for non-whites.

Statistics can be used to argue almost any case. It would, however, help if the head of the CRE thought - or, perhaps more likely, got someone else to think for him - before opening his mouth on such an important subject as racial integration.

(It should come as no surprise the poll was commissioned for the CRE, given that YouGov is widely referred to as Whateveryouwant, Guv.)

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I'm giving up all this. and switching to my true calling.

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Until Friday night I had no idea that, for the 135 years since its first performance, all renditions of Wagner’s Das Rheingold have been missing a central character. One might reasonably have assumed, as has every previous producer of the opera, that the only characters in it are those such as Alberich, Wotan and Loge, whom Wagner included in the score.

The English National Opera has, however, discovered otherwise. How else to explain the presence on the left-hand side of the stage of a man dressed wholly in black, making all sorts of facial expressions in reaction to the events being portrayed, flinging his arms around with abandon and spot-lit throughout the evening, just in case one’s eyes happened to wander from him.

Dramatically, I have no idea what his addition to the production was meant to indicate, since I found no reference to the character “man in black gesticulating enthusiastically” in either the synopsis or the cast list. But he took a bow at the end with the rest of the cast and no attempt was made to remove him, so he was clearly part of the conception rather than a madman who had wandered in off the street.

I am, of course, being disingenuous. I know full well what he was doing. He was signing the performance for the deaf. But that explanation of his presence is, surely, no more far-fetched than my alternative.

Has no one pointed out to the new director of ENO, Sean Doran, that he is running an opera house, and that opera is based on the fusing of music and drama? I am unaware of any successful attempts to sign Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for one simple reason: it is a piece of music and, as such, has to be heard to be understood. Opera is, certainly, a theatrical experience but the visual aspect is merely one component. Without the aural side, it is not opera but a wholly unsatisfactory piece of drama.

I have no idea how many deaf people were in the audience on Friday (more to the point, nor does the Coliseum — such figures are not kept). But I would venture a guess: none. The truth of it is that the presence of a sign- language interpreter has nothing to do with making life better for the deaf, and everything to do with complying with bizarre extensions of the notion of “accessibility” which, thanks to the subsidy culture and the political posturing which underlies it, has infected the arts beyond all reason.

Take the Coliseum’s London neighbour, the Royal Opera House. Because it performs operas in their original language, it uses surtitles to translate the libretti into English. Nothing, one might think, could make opera more “accessible” than such surtitles — and not just to the deaf. Yet that is not enough. Preposterously, and utterly pointlessly, the Royal Opera also employs signers to stand at the side of the stage. Does the Royal Opera House think deaf people cannot read as well as the rest of us?

Such signing ruins the experience for the overwhelming majority of those present. Since it is impossible to avoid looking at the signer, it is akin to having a man standing by every painting in the National Gallery continually shouting a description of how it looks, for the benefit of the few blind people who choose to go, and to the detriment of everyone else.

It may be, of course, that having operas signed does transform the artistic life of some deaf people. In which case, a way should be found to make it as discreet as possible — perhaps a small video screen to be held by those who want one in the same way that the blind are given earpieces to listen to descriptions of the stage. Anything, in fact, that avoids adding extraneous characters to, and ruining, the entire operatic repertoire.

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Andrew Sullivan on a glorious PC edit:

A lovely politically correct editing slip marred an opera review in the Los Angeles Times recently. The original sentence read that Richard Strauss' operatic epic, "Die Frau Ohne Schatten," was "an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean..." Fair enough. But you can't have the epithet "pro-life" in the Los Angeles Times. So the sentence was changed to "an incomparably glorious and goofy anti-abortion paean..." There is no reference to abortion in the opera. The paper was therefore forced to run not one but two corrections on February 25. The writer rightly insisted that the paper exonerate him personally from the idiocy. It reminds me of the occasion when a newspaper decided to remove all usage of the word "black" from its copy, when referring to African-Americans. it was deemed too offensive a term. Everything was fine until some tired copy-editor lazily edited an economics column. Suddenly, the federal budget moved from red ink "into the African-American." Hey, but no one was offended.

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You probably think the most important news this week was the Hutton Report. Or maybe the Commons vote on top-up fees. Perhaps even the down-grading of cannabis.

Well, you’re wrong. The biggest story, by far, was the decision announced on Tuesday by Professor Tony Minson, the Pro vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, to cancel plans for a laboratory which would specialise in primate research. The costs involved in securing such a facility against the activities of the self-styled “animal rights activists” – let’s call them what they really are, which is ‘human suffering proponents’ – have become so enormous that Cambridge decided it couldn’t go ahead with the project.

That one decision, and the context in which it was made, says pretty much everything about the country in which we live, what drives the way our lives are led, and the bankruptcy and cowardice of most decision makers. What Cambridge’s retreat amounts to is this: a group of ill-educated, vicious, warped thugs have so cowed the forces of reason and progress that the latter have simply given up.

One shouldn’t, for a second, blame Prof Minson and his colleagues personally for the collapse of the plans. The heroism of scientists who continue with such research, despite constant threats and attacks, is, in its way, awe-inspiring.

The real problem is far more fundamental, and explains not just why Cambridge University felt it had no choice but to walk away, but also the mindset which underlies two other, lesser, stories this week: top-up fees and Hutton. Life today is guided not by logic and reason but rather by emotion, fear and sentimentality. All logic and evidence point to the need for primate research. But that is irrelevant when faced with the non-arguments and threats of the opponents. Those monkeys are just like us, you know. And they’re sweet. And those scientists are awful – they’re like the doctors at Auschwitz. And I love animals.

When someone, or a body like Cambridge University, tries to take a stand in favour of reason, and is then confronted by the full forces of reaction, the response from the powers that be is not, as it should be, to confront them head on and smash them and their non-arguments into the ground; it is to run away.

So, too, with top-up fees. The opponents of the idea could only resort to emotional blather about ‘poor students’ (who won’t even have to pay anything back until they stop being poor students) and dewy-eyed scene painting, straight out of a Hovis ad, about the barriers which they will face. Sentimental nonsense, presented in opposition to clear sighted, convincing, factual evidence. What did the government do? It so neutered the proposal to try to buy off the unthinking opponents that the measure, if it does indeed pass, will barely be worth having.

And then there is, inevitably, Hutton. Lord Hutton was asked to do a specific job: to take evidence, sift it, and reach conclusions. The evidential process was praised to the hilt by almost every observer. Come his conclusions – tightly argued and backed up in fine detail - which paint the BBC in a none too favourable light, and…well, sit back and smother yourself in the drivel which is now pouring forth. The BBC is wonderful. And you can trust the BBC a lot more than the government (er, yes: that’s the supposed point of a public service broadcaster as opposed to a government which is - shock! horror! – political). And the BBC defines the nation. And I really like that Andrew Marr chap – he always tells the real truth.

It doesn’t matter which way the evidence points. What matters is what you want it to be. If that means that students should have their fees paid by money which doesn’t exist, so be it. If that means that the BBC is a blameless victim, so be it.

The real culprits are the leaders of opinion, who run scared of the fight against unreason instead of standing strong and pushing for what they know to be right. This week’s cannabis fiasco is typical. Instead of arguing that it’s either harmless or dangerous, both of which positions entail taking on vocal and troublesome opponents, the decision is instead to say it’s a bit dangerous but not all that bad.

I loathe the BBC. I find its funding method iniquitous and its left liberal bias offensive. There, I said it. Come on, then: take me on. Don’t run away from the fight.

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This from National Review's The Corner:

I work in a department of about 150 people for the University of California, Davis. We have been told that we can't even call it a "Holiday" party any longer. One sole kook decided that the word "holiday" implies religion and whined to our dean that the word offended her because of that. The dean promptly caved and told us that our party was now being called the "Annual" party.

I wo