Terrorist

I was a bit incensed by the main headline on the front of this evening's free London papers: "Child sent to live with Jet Bomber". Apparently a child was sent by Haringey council to be fostered with the family where a terrorist lived who was plotting to blow up a plane.

The paper referred to it as a scandal (without any quote marks). They quoted the local MP Lynne Featherstone as saying "Just when you think Haringey cannot get any worse, it does. This beggars belief".

The child was sent there before anyone knew the man was a terrorist. As soon as the council found out, the child was removed. The man was under police surveillance -- but the social workers had no way to know that. So, what exactly is the scandal?

I'm wondering what the MP and/or the paper think the council should have done? Should they have known psychically about the terrorist, perhaps? Or perhaps just assume anyone Islamic is a terrorist? And then the paper ritually mentions Baby P and Victoria Climbie, as if there was some similarity. There is no evidence the child in this case was harmed in any way whatsoever.

Just when you think newspapers and MPs cannot get any worse, they do. This beggars belief.

Compassion

I've wanted to write piece about "compassion" for a while. Various things I've heard and read recently have come together to trigger it. Compassion is a concept much referred to in Buddhism, and it's from there that I draw some of what I'm saying. Other of it comes from stuff I've been reading about psychological concepts of "emotional fusion" and "differentiation".

A while ago, I heard Billy Bragg on Any Questions, answering a question about whether the NHS should provide a very expensive drug that might extend the lives of kidney disease patients by about a year. "You can't put a price on a human life" he said, drawing an obligatory round of clapping. Strangely, when I typed his name above, I mistyped it as Bully Bragg, and that now sounds right to me. He has that air of menace about him: if you disagree with him, he's not going to present reasoned arguments, he's going to get angry.

That cliché about not putting a price on human life is fallacious. Try asking Oxfam -- they'll tell you exactly how much money they need to save a human life. Paddy Ashdown pressed him: if the drug cost ten million pounds, to buy one person one year of life, should we spend it? "Yes", said Billy: If you don't, your priorities are wrong. When he talks about wrong priorities, he must mean spending the ten million pounds on things like housing, education, foreign aid, pensions, or indeed other medical procedures and drugs.

Billy Bragg, to me, exemplifies the false form of compassion. An apparent "caring" very much about people -- but violent emotions close to the surface. I get the feeling that his "caring" is to meet his own needs, not theirs. What that need might specifically be is the avoidance of guilt.

As a general pattern, it goes like this: lots of bad stuff seems to be happening in the world but not in the part of it where I live. I feel guilty about that. How can I prove that it's not all my fault? I know, I'll make myself feel really bad about all the badness in the world. Very unhappy, very angry about it all. That'll show it wasn't my fault.

I think this unconscious pattern is formed in childhood, as they all are. If there's a playground altercation, make sure you're crying when the grown-ups arrive, because if you look happy, they'll assume you're the one to blame.

If you look at the Buddha, he's telling us the first Noble Truth: that to be alive is to suffer. He's seeing millions of people suffering; not just material suffering, but spiritual suffering. And he's sitting there smiling peacefully. What a bastard, eh? Doesn't he care?

To me, the Buddha's compassion consists of two things: first, he knows he's okay. He is not a deity or an immortal or a super-being or anything. He's just a man. (He dies of food poisoning.) But he's okay. And secondly, he knows that he's the same as the rest of us. That's the compassion. He knows he's in the same boat. He sees everyone doing their stupid stuff, and he knows he's no different. He knows that in the end either you'll get it, or else sooner or later you'll die, and either way, it'll be fine, really: don't worry about it. He doesn't think there's any "devil" or any "wicked people" making it bad; nothing to fight against or get angry about. Just things you should be doing. No “grown-ups” coming along to assign blame and punish the wicked. Either you'll get it, or you won't.

The other thing was an episode of The Secret Millionaire. This millionaire (worth £77M actually) dresses up poor and visits the needy. Just like a traditional fairy story. He thinks he's going to judge them and decide who best deserves a handout. He's one-up on them, both financially, and in terms of judging them. But what happens, of course, is that he soon realises they are his equals, if not betters. He helps out in a school for dropouts, and tries to tell a teenage boy that he needs GCSEs. The boy out-argues him, explains the realities of life to him, and leaves the millionaire in some doubt about the value of GCSEs. The boy is clearly intelligent and articulate.

The millionaire helps out in various groups, and rapidly finds that he's learning from them, and getting as much from them as they are from him. He no longer feels better than them. It's excellent drama. At least for a moment, he reaches a position of compassion, seeing them as who they really are.

The thing about differentiation and emotional fusion comes in here. I've been re-reading a favourite book in this area. Differentiation means having a stable sense of who you are, despite the circumstances and environment. The Buddha has it. It's what Mr Millionaire doesn't have. (Not that I dislike him or disapprove of him: he seemed nice, generous, and so on). He's one person at the start; then his sense of self wobbles as he meets the various people and learns some things, and then at the end he puts back on his suit of £77M and takes up again the identity that it lends him: he becomes "millionaire" again. Differentiation is stability: for example, being the same person with your parents as you are with your friends.

Emotional fusion is the opposite: taking your mood and state and sense of self from those around you. If you're emotionally fused with someone, you "care" a great deal that they should be happy . . . not for their sake, but for your own, because their unhappiness is intolerable to you. It's proper for mothers to be like that about their babies, up to a certain age. But in adult relationships, it's a big problem. If you can't stand someone else to be unhappy, then you have to control them, and if something bad does happen to them, it makes you resent them, and makes you angry. Which is where I think Billy Bragg stands with respect to humanity. He's emotionally fused. He wants kidney patients to be given all the treatment that money can buy, so that he can feel okay. But somehow, he never does feel okay. Always angry.

Playing in the big kitchen

I had a really good time last night, cooking dinner for the choir. It’s often one of the high points of my week. It works a bit like “Ready Steady Cook”, where some ingredients left over from shops and restaurants are kindly donated to us, and we have to conjure a meal using them. We shop for our own ingredients in advance as well, but that’s tricky when we don’t really know exactly what will be donated. It’s a lot of fun and usually turns out very well.

Last night, I saw some rump steak special offer in Tesco, about £2.60 a pound, and couldn’t pass it up. Nice tasty steak. So I got that. I knew I could use it with anything. As well as some tea bags, milk, and squash, all of which we turned out not to be short of anyway. And some chocolate digestives. Always a winner. We were told to expect some curry, some frittata, and some roast vegetables.

What turned up was a vast quantity of bread, which we gave the members to take home, some fruit drinks, and some roasted veg as advertised. No frittata, but fortunately some soya mince, half of which I froze for another time, and the rest of which I combined with some soup left over from last week to make a vegetarian dish. The “curry” turned out to be some spiced peas and cauliflower, not in a sauce, so I cooked some rice and mixed them into that. Then there was a tray of thinly sliced fried courgettes, so we cubed our steak, fried it, and mixed it with the courgettes and made a sauce. Oh, and there was a mixed salad, and a big dish of raw radishes, which we offered to people. An excellent meal, in all.

It’s always fun and interesting. I tend to overestimate on the food, but any leftovers are always eagerly taken home by the members. Many of the members seem to be used to eating quite little (or else they’ve had their tea before they come to choir!). I get burns on my hands. And I get to play with a big kitchen.

There’s nothing like that moment when people start to come in the door and say “oh, something smells good!”

Italian Restaurant

We've just had a very memorable lunch at an Italian restaurant.

Part of what made it special was that we didn't look at the menu or order things... the chef just brought us little bits different things to try, from time to time. It was very relaxed. (Usually I spend too much time trying to work out what would be "best" to have.) The lovely sunny day helped too.

The secret to how it's done? You find a nice Italian restaurant, where they make their own fresh pasta (they don't even have pizza on the menu). You go in and say you maybe want to book the whole restaurant for a big family lunch in a few weeks time, on a day when they'd otherwise be quiet. You talk about what kind of food they specialise in... and then you say, let's have some lunch now, and the manager just brings some examples of his cooking... some grilled vegetables, some olives, some sliced meat .... some unusual pink ravioli with asparagus .... a glass of wine .... a few gnocchi in a smoky sauce ... a cup of coffee ... some cheese with honey ... some grappa, the good stuff ... not too much of anything... whatever he comes up with .... while you chat about the arrangements ...

Calories

I saw an article in the current New Scientist about the calorie content of food.

Apparently the current procedure for calculating the calorie content is based on some quite old and out-of-date assumptions. It involves measuring the fat, protein and carbohydrate content of the food, and then multiplying by some constants (9, 4, and 4 calories per gram) based on the chemical energy of these substances and the presumed absorption rates. However, the absorption rates are not accurate, and not enough account is taken of the metabolic cost of digesting the different nutrients.

The result is that most calorie counts printed on food labels are too high, particularly for protein, which would be better estimated at 3.2 calories per gram. But it also depends (not surprisingly) on the texture and structure of the food.

Lenin

I'm very ignorant about history, generally. It's only in the last few years I've come to find it interesting.

Anyway, we were staying in this holiday cottage, and there were some books in there, as there often are. These were intended only for decoration, I think. Mostly volumes of an ancient encyclopedia, plus a book called "handbook of Marxism", which I began to read. It was condensed extracts from the writings of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, etc.

Reading a particular piece by Lenin, on tactics for overthrow of democracy in the UK, what struck me was how biblical it seemed. In the Bible, not that I'm all that familiar, I believe there is this tone where, after the resurrection and the ascent of Jesus to heaven, they believe he's going to come again, to rule the world, judge everyone, etc etc, and they think it's going to be pretty soon. Like, he's just popped home to get some things sorted out, but he'll be back in a few weeks. Certainly within their lifetimes. (Someone tell me if I'm all wrong about this).

Then later, it gets changed to the current view, where this is all going to happen way way in the future, and anyone who talks about the end of the world happening soon is a nutter.

Anyway, the Marxist thing seemed just the same. The revolution had happened in Russia, and Lenin was writing about how it would happen everywhere. And because of conditions in Russia, it had taken 15 years there, but it would be much faster in (for example) England. They expected it to be happening almost at once. Whereas, I think now, the standard Marxist view is that it's inevitable and guaranteed, but may be after a very long time, maybe not in our lifetimes, and we all need to work towards it.

Cafe Mad

I've taken to having breakfast every day in "Cafe Mad", really called "Casa Madeira", a lovely Portuguese cafe near my work.

I think breakfast is the best meal of the day to eat out. It's the time of day I can least be bothered to cook for myself; the food is cheaper, for some reason; and there's no expectation that I'll buy a bottle of wine marked up 300%.

It's the perfect start to my day, sitting in this lovely cafe, friendly waiter service, watching the world rush by, reading my book or doing the crossword, with a cup of decent coffee (good enough to be worth drinking black) and reminding myself that people who eat breakfast are generally healthier. And there's always space for a whole table to myself. Life doesn't get better than this! Ahhhhh

Daily Mail

I've noticed recently a tendency amongst people on RW to slag off "Daily Mail readers". I'm not a Mail reader myself; in fact, I tend not to read any newspaper, other than the crossword and horoscope parts and "Nemi".

I just find it amusing and paradoxical (those two often go together) that people I count as friends, and who regard themselves as liberal in orientation, react like this. They decry the Daily Mail for its racism and classism and general prejudice -- perhaps rightly so! They decry, for example, its anti-immigration stance. (For the record, I am anti-anti-immigration, of course, as I believe in free trade).

But in decrying not only the Mail, but "Daily Mail readers" as a generic collection of bad people, they are committing exactly the same fallacy. Lumping a highly diverse group of people together as if they were all the same, and deriving pleasure from labelling them as the bad people.

People who would pronounce themselves totally and committedly against "racism", for example, often seem happy to apply huge generalisations to "Americans". They can't see that it's the same dangerous thought pattern. Or they will apply a description to "bankers" and "top bosses" (they all look out for each other, they're rich and greedy, they pull the strings of the government behind the scenes...) which are exactly the same things the Nazis said about the Jews.

"But this time it's true!" they all say.

(Late breaking story from John Matthews: the proportion of Americans (boo, insular!) without passports is roughly equivalent to the proportion of Europeans (yay, cosmopolitan, accepting) who've never been outside Europe.) LOL. Thanks John.

Yeah, sure, you're dead against repeating the mistakes we made in the past: stereotyping women, black people, jews, gays.... But are you against stereotyping? Of Daily Mail readers? Do you fight vigorously against that whenever you see it? Or do you join in with the crowd like a sheep?

More deer

...with new furry antlers

Star Trek

So we went and saw the new movie. And thoroughly enjoyed it.

... despite a number of obvious plot and technology problems that nitpickers could obsess over, if they were minded to. You have to be willing to suspend disbelief a little.

But how lucky was that, that they found a young actor who looks like a young Leonard Nimoy, and he can raise one eyebrow!

And despite the fab modern CGI spaceships, there were a few tips of the hat to the good old '60s special effects, like the "alien" who is just a girl in her underwear dyed green (the girl, not the underwear) that Kirk ends up snogging at one point. Just like the good old days!

LOL at

. . . journalists giving ANYONE a hard time about dodgy expense claims!!

. . . . .

As far as I can understand the coverage, and shorn of the usual media nonsense, the main problem seems to be that MPs can designate a house as their MP house, improve it (e.g. get the central heating fixed if it needs it) on expenses, then designate another different house, improve that one, and so on, getting all the necessary repairs done on a whole portfolio of properties.

Proposal: any capital gain above inflation that they make on selling a property that they've designated as their MP house, at any stage, should be handed back.

You're on camera

One hears a lot of complaints from people about how much we find ourselves on surveillance CCTV cameras these days. I'm not sure whether this surveillance is a bad thing or not. "They" can keep track of us.

However, I am much heartened by the other side of the equation. The recent front-page footage of a policeman apparently making an unprovoked baton assault on a bystander illustrates how "they" can no longer count on getting away with what they would have in the past. They went through their usual manoeuvre of writing a press release saying that they'd been trying to save the man, and had been obstructed by protesters throwing things ... and then the actual footage comes out. Ouch!

And we can all see it on Youtube. Yes, Youtube is another part of the freedom equation. In the past, if you'd recorded that on your video camera, you might have had a hard time finding the right person at the BBC to look at it, or persuading a newspaper to listen to you -- you might not have bothered. Now, you can put it on Youtube, it's in the public domain. People tell each other. The media have little choice but to cover it, trailing along behind public information and public opinion, rather than deciding what we should see and what we should think.

Nearly everybody these days carries a mobile phone, and a significant and increasing proportion of these are cameras, and even video cameras. I used to think it would be a good idea to keep a disposable camera permanently in the glove box of my car, in case of a collision, but that hardly seems necessary now. I have a small, discreet video camera on me all the time, in my phone. We can increasingly keep tabs on "them" too...

The combination of mobile phones and the internet is a very potent one, and a big threat to both the conventional media and the bent copper.

Jacqui Smith and the porn on expenses

There was an article by Naomi Wolf in yesterday's Times saying that porn has become normal, and that the reason we're all shocked about the Jacqui Smith thing is because it was the taxpayer's money, not that her unfortunate husband looks at porn.

I'm not sure I agree.

First off, we're talking about £10. It was clearly not a deliberate attempt to defraud. Hands up anyone who really thinks he knew he was putting this through wrongly but hoped to get away with it? I think it's about as clear as can be that it was a mistake. If he wanted to rip off some expenses money, he'd choose something bland and boring, costing about £150.

And one thing I'd like to know is how the papers found out? I haven't seen that mentioned. But I haven't followed it that closely, so if anyone else has seen that, please let me know. At the moment I can only assume the papers are somehow scrutinising every detail of her expenses... otherwise how did they get this? And they haven't come up with a large list of other dodgy claims ... so I am assuming there are none. If there were, they'd be trumpeting them. So the extent of the fraud is .... £10? Big deal.

Would the papers have made a big story out of "Home secretary's husband accidentally claims £10 for stationery that he then used for his own purposes" ? I think not. I think it's the fact that it's porn that made them (and us) interested.

I also object to the way the media keep telling us how we feel: apparently we are "so shocked" or whatever. I haven't actually met anyone who is outraged or shocked -- just amused.

So no, Naomi, I don't think we're "so shocked" because someone carelessly overclaimed £10 of the taxpayers money. I think we're titillated that someone in the realms of the high and mighty, those who tell us how to behave, the great and the good, those who make the laws about porn ... is watching rubbish soft porn movies on pay per view while his wife stays at her sisters. They're human after all.

Funny what the unconscious can come up with

I have this humorous thing I do, occasionally, when I'm clearing up after a meal, bustling about with a tea-towel over my arm, putting things away, and encouraging people to leave the table: I say the words "aint you got no homes to go to?"

I nearly said it the other day. I was behind a counter, clearing up after a meal. The punters were on the other side of the counter, bringing their plates and cutlery back. This was at the choir. The choir for homeless people.

Fortunately I caught myself in time and didn't say it.

Sir Fred and the giant pension

I think I may be swimming against the tide here, but I am not at all happy about the government's media campaign against Sir Fred Goodwin.

Okay, I think top executives of big businesses are ridiculously overpaid, but you don't fix that by picking on one and having a media campaign of vilification. It all seems a bit maoist, with the denunciations.

"Sir Fred Goodwin should not count on being £650,000 a year better off because it is not going to happen," Harriet Harman told the BBC's Andrew Marr programme.
Doesn't that have a certain air of "we know where you live" menace? We're going to take the money off him, we just haven't figured out how to make it legal yet.

I don't particularly like the fact that these executives overpay themselves, but I (about a hundred times as much) don't want to live in a country where the government can just step in and find a way to confiscate money from anyone it doesn't like, because quote "The sum is unacceptable in "the court of public opinion," she told the BBC". I.e. We've worked up a lynch mob, so now we can do whatever we like?

In another era, it might have been "it's unacceptable in the court of public opinion" for a black man to earn that much, or a woman. We're fetching a rope.

Okay. A few points here.

1. Not everything that's immoral should be illegal.

2. If something IS illegal, you do it through the courts, not by ministerial announcements on the BBC.

3. If it's not illegal, then you don't mount vilification campaigns against one individual. The government should never "step in" directly against people it doesn't like.

4. Especially when it seems to be to cover up their own mistakes! (I.e. they approved it, without looking into it).

5. We keep being told by the media drones that Fred "presided over" the biggest loss in British corporate history. Scuse me, but I distinctly remember listening to radio 4 and hearing Gordon Brown say not once but 4 times that the causes of the banking crisis here were nothing to do with anyone in this country, but originated in the USA. So what are we punishing sir Fred for? For being in office when it happened? If so, does that principle apply to Gordon too?

To me it illustrates the huge, huge dangers of nationalised industries. Your employer is the government. The two bodies that have the most power over you (the state, and your employer) are the same. And the roles get blurred. The government should make the laws that control employers . . . so it should never be one.

I'd have been pleased if Sir Fred had voluntarily given some of it back. Since he hasn't, I would really not like to discover that I live in a country where the government can just seize his assets for being too much (they have not even attempted to argue that he actually did anything wrong).

Blogging

Wow. Ages since I've been on here. Does F***book remove the need for a blog? Shall I tell f***book to import these automatically?