Any Chemists or Physicists Out There ?

My daughter has a question - and not a bad one, either.

When a radioactive substance decays by alpha emission (I told you she was precocious) , the alpha article is a helium nucleus i.e it has no electrons and a positive charge of 2.

What's left has lost two protons - so its atomic number is two less and it's a new element.

Here's uranium decaying to thorium :


Uranium has 92 protons (and hence 92 electrons), thorium has 90 protons and hence 90 electrons.

Her question is - if the uranium fires out an alpha particle, what happens to the 2 surplus electrons left on the thorium atom ? It's now got 90 protons (having lost 2 in the alpha particle) but still has 92 electrons.

Answers on the Web are :

Health Physics Society :

It is possible that the two excess electrons associated with the thorium could find their way to the alpha particle and neutralize it, but this would likely not be a one-step process, since the alpha particle is emitted with appreciable velocity and moves some distance away from the decay site before coming to rest. More likely excess thorium charge is transferred to some other atoms or molecules in the system; eventually the alpha particle is neutralized as it picks up two available electrons to yield a neutral helium atom, and charge remains conserved.

Physics Forums :

When the U (Z=92) transforms to Th (Z=90) as a result of alpha decay, the two electrons are lost to the nearby medium. The decay nuclide is like surrounded by similar material, or if at the surface of a solid, it is in contact with air or some gas. Likely though the alpha particle rips away some electrons on its way out of the nucleus, but those electrons are quickly recaptured.

As charge particles (alpha and beta), and even gamma rays, pass through material, they interact with atomic electrons and excite or ionize atoms (hence the term - "ionizing radiation"). The range of an alpha particle in solid material is very small - on the order of microns, so it does not travel far from the nucleus from which it originated. Because it has a +2 charge, the alpha particle will ultimately attract two electrons. There will be an effective net migration of 2 electrons along the path the alpha particle took while slowing down.

Advanced Physics Forums :

It's an interesting question that whether the atom of the new element now have a negative two charge or does something else happen to these electrons. Electrons are not exactly static charged particles. They have a good deal of fluidity in practice, and in fact one could go as far as saying that they are inherently fuzzy objects, like a photon of light. In most solids (and even in gases) any non-equilibrium electronic state is almost instantaneously readjusted. It's rearrangements of atomic nuclei which take time (so that, while chemical reactions technically involve only electrons, any reaction which requires movement of whole atoms will have a measurable rate). Essentially what happens in a-decay is that the a-particle knocks electrons loose from one or more nearby atoms, then picks up two of the loose electrons to form a neutral helium atom. Meanwhile, the other surrounding atoms (including the "dianion" parent atom -- the scare quotes are deliberate) very quickly reshuffle their electrons in order to have the most energetically stable configuration. This reshuffling energy, by the way, shows up as heat; strong a-emitters like radium are typically a little warmer than their surroundings, and radioactive decay is a prime source of the earth's internal heat. Hope this answers your query.

So while the answers make sense in terms of charge conservation, they're all a little vague on the actual mechanics. Does the thorium atom spend time as a thorium ion ? Are the electrons lost by the thorium atom to spend time as free electrons, or do they immediately attach themselves elsewhere ? Or does that depend on what kind of atoms or molecules are around for the elecrons to attach to ?

And a question from me - at any time, how many ions or free electrons are around, say in air ? If you drew a virtual metre-square box in your living room, what proportion of the molecules therein would be ionised ?

All Liberal Life Is There ...

Cheesed off with a world where feral child-torturers get five years and anonymity on release ? From the comments on another Guardian "they're victims too " thread.

"It's Thatcher's Fault"

"It's the legacy of Thatcher and the Tories, their crusade against the primary industry has produced children who have grown up with parents who have never had a job"

"Society was brutalised through industrialization and the aftermath and the denial of "society" by Thatcher, and the complete social-moral disintigration she caused"

"Most torturing of small children takes place within the family"

I think in the media-fuelled moral panic about 'stranger danger', people have ignored the fact that the greatest damage done to children tends to be within their own homes at the hands of their own families.

"You're worse than they are"

"I feel that people who seem to want to inflict punishment on small children are themselves in need of treatment."

"The lynch-mob attitude of some of the comments and the call for throw- away-the- key justice reflects just what a brutal society Britain is"

"Who knew that the true sociopaths dwell in this thread"

The all-purpose Guardian editorial seems to have been a pretty good predictor on this occasion. I see the Indie borrowed from it too :

Laban :

The natural horror felt at (insert appalling crime here) should not blind us to the fact that (crime is actually falling/it is all Thatcher's fault/such crimes have always been with us).

If we surrender to (the tabloid agenda/the Daily Mail hysteria/knee-jerk populism/the politics of the soundbite) and take the easy option of (jailing more of our young people/bringing back the birch/bringing back hanging/walling off the cities then bombing them/demonising our young people) we run the very real risk of (actually achieving something/alienating a generation/an invasion of killer bees).

There is only one answer. An enormous increase in the funding of (Sure Start schemes/outreach workers/emotional intelligence mentors/youth projects/anti-racist 5-a-day smoking cessation co-ordinators).

Indie :

"No cause for moral panic"

In the ongoing dialogue of the deaf which recurs whenever feral youths or children commit dreadful crimes, there are only a few liberal arguments, picked up in criminology class and amplified by the Guardian/Indie/BBC, and they come out every time.

a) 'it's always been like this' - aka 'moral panic'.

b) "one case doesn't tell us anything about British society" (except the Stephen Lawrence murder)

c) "it's Thatcher's fault"

d) "crime is actually going down" (having risen by 1,000% since 1950, it started to decline when we locked more people up)

e) "anyway, most torturing of small children takes place within the family" - not the married one it don't.

f) "you're worse than they are" - if you call for evil criminals to be punished, you're even more evil yourself !


One commenter links to this piece, about a classic Guardianista - a woman with empathy for everyone except her neighbours. Kind of reverse-Christianity.

"Who is my neighbour ?"

"The outcast, the rapist, the criminal, the thug"

"And what about your ...er.. neighbours ?"

"Those straights ?"

I had been a foster carer for just over a year when James came to us, and had worked for the council's mental health service for 10 years before that. But I wanted to help the teenagers who had been in the care system for a long time and had suffered serious trauma.

I did every training course on offer. Central Bedfordshire council was brilliant: I studied attachment theory, behaviour management, the problems caused by drug and alcohol abuse, and how to work with sexually abused children. I even did a BTec in advanced fostering.

No problem, then - all boxes ticked.

I was realistic enough to recognise that he was a danger to himself and to everyone he came into contact with, and so I was nervous about the young children who lived around us, but because I knew what a hurt, vulnerable side James possessed I wanted to believe that, deep down, he was a good lad.

We soldiered on. I refused to reject James like everyone else in his life had done, but 10 months after he had come to live with us my neighbour of more than 20 years sold her house and moved away. She told me she couldn't live near him a day longer.

Then, last July, James was accused of raping an 11-year-old local girl and forcing her to perform a sexual act on him.

So a woman is forced from her home of 20 years and an innocent child is raped - and all because "I wanted to believe".

That's religion we're seeing.

Rejoice ! Rejoice ! (Tentatively...)

I must confess to having been a tad depressed by the Cadbury sale. It was all of a piece with the 'Globalisation In One Country' strategy which Labour have been so keen on, and it also brought to mind the deeper currents of the last 20-30-odd years in which British capitalism forgot all about the 'British' bit, in a mirror-image of what was happening to British socialism.

Capitalism is a very fine thing. But too much of a good thing can kill you - and more to the point, there is always a cultural setting within which capitalism operates. I mentioned the cultural setting of Adam Smith's time way back.

That fine blogger and canny investor CityUnslicker wrote of the Cadbury deal :

No doubt there will be plenty of harumphing about another UK company being sold abroad. People seem to forget the effect is a net inflow of money in the UK, to staff, to banks, to pension funds; all of which can be re-invested in new companies.

Invested in new companies. Like the 'new products and services' that the redundant Longbridge workers would soon ('perhaps') be producing, 'for which the UK can find ready markets'.

All through the 80s/90s/00s I kept hearing how trickle down would work - yacht manufacturers would expand on the Hamble and riven slate shower cubicles would be produced in Bethesda to feed the expenditure of the new rich. But what actually happened was that property prices soared. Assets were the thing.

On consideration, this desire for safety, to preserve value, reflected a real, though unexpressed, crisis of confidence. The new City money, and the doubled then quadrupled relative pay of top executives ('The chief executives of the UK's 100 largest companies will earn 81 times the average pay of all full-time workers in 2009') didn't think of a home in hi-tech start-ups outside of a few dot-coms- after all, where were these start-ups ? All the top UK physics and maths grads were at the next terminal in your office working on trading algorithms, not soldering cables together in some small industrial unit. That sort of thing happened in other countries - by strange chance, the ones whose markets were the most exciting (and volatile).

So our rich guys bought houses and land (no inheritance tax on land), and the countryside rapidly became unaffordable. Where I live, average house prices are now nine times average local wages. Like many of my neighbours, I live in a house that I could never afford to buy at its current market value.

I came to the conclusion some time ago that what we'd been seeing over the last twenty years was a vast transfer of assets from the working and middle class to the rich and super-rich. Individual working people (the old lady in the idyllic but crumbling cottage, the canny local builder who snapped it up and made it some director's weekend bolt-hole) made some money, but the end result was that a whole generation grew up for whom even a small house was either way beyond their reach or required two full-time incomes ('we can't afford to have kids').

I could never understand the media assumption over this period that rising house prices were A Good Thing. Didn't these people have any children ?

So I was interested to read the words of one of my favourite economic commentators this morning, Albert Edwards, chief global strategist at French bank Societe Generale, quoted at the FT Alphaville blog :

Mr Bernanke’s in-house Fed economists have found that the Fed wasn’t responsible for the boom which subsequently turned into the biggest bust since the 1930s. Are those the same Fed staffers whose research led Mr Bernanke to assert in Oct. 2005 that “there was no housing bubble to go bust”?

The reasons for the US and the UK central banks inflating the bubble range from incompetence and negligence to just plain spinelessness. Let me propose an alternative thesis. Did the US and UK central banks collude with the politicians to ‘steal’ their nations’ income growth from the middle classes and hand it to the very rich?

The US and UK have seen a huge rise in inequality over the last two decades, as growth in national income has been diverted almost exclusively to the top income earners. The middle classes have seen median real incomes stagnate over that period and, as a consequence, corporate margins and profits have boomed.

Some recent reading has got me thinking as to whether the US and UK central banks were actively complicit in an aggressive re-distributive policy benefiting the very rich...

Indeed, it has been amazing how little political backlash there has been against the stagnation of ordinary peoples’ earnings in the US and UK. Did central banks, in creating housing bubbles, help distract middle class attention from this re-distributive policy by allowing them to keep consuming via equity extraction? The emergence of extreme inequality might never otherwise have been tolerated by the electorate... it is clear in my mind that ordinary working people would not have tolerated these extreme redistributive policies had not the UK and US central banks played their supporting role. Going forward, in the absence of a sustained housing boom, labour will fight back to take its proper (normal) share of the national cake, squeezing profits on a secular basis. For as Bill Gross pointed out back in PIMCO’s investment outlook ‘Enough is Enough’ of August 1997, “"When the fruits of society’s labor become maldistributed, when the rich get richer and the middle and lower classes struggle to keep their heads above water as is clearly the case today, then the system ultimately breaks down”. In Japan, low levels of inequality and inherent social cohesion prevented a social breakdown in this post-bubble debacle. With social inequality currently so very high in the US and the UK, it doesn’t take much to conclude that extreme inequality could strain the fabric of society far closer to breaking point.

I've quoted before Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist who believes that 'the finance industry has effectively captured our government' - that the US and UK are not so very far from post-Soviet Russia, or say 1980s Argentina.

Here's a condensed pdf presentation that he posted at Baseline Scenario:

How the U.S. economy will fare over the next few years will depend on the outcome of a likely power struggle between politics and finance, an outspoken economist said Monday.

The U.S. economy could face a similar financial crisis to the one it’s emerging from unless the government tackles the problem that some banks remain too big to fail, Simon Johnson, economist at the MIT, told a panel at the American Economic Association.

The U.S. Congress has proposed legislation to drastically overhaul financial sector regulation, including measures to seize control of troubled big banks and to cut the powers of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. central bank.

The crisis that ended in 2009 has only exacerbated the problem because of the resulting financial sector consolidation, Johnson said. There are now six big banks that could soon engage in the sort of excessive risk-taking that led to the recent crisis because of a belief that the government would bail them out if they’re in trouble.

“Goldman Sachs has become the world’s largest hedge fund underwritten by the U.S. government,” the MIT economist said. The other five banks he mentioned as posing system risks to the economy are Bank of America, Citibank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo.

It will be harder to deal with any new crisis because the U.S. Federal Reserve has likely exhausted its ammunition to counter a financial meltdown after it cut rates close to zero and took other emergency lending steps, Johnson warned.

“A crisis strengthens the oligarchs who survive,” Johnson said.

Well, cometh the hour, cometh the man. Or at least it's a start. Johnson's 'power struggle between politics and finance', which appeared up to now to be a total walk-over for the oligarchs, has kicked off in earnest with Obama's 'Glass-Steagall III' proposals - effectively a reinstatement of some Depression-era legislation obliging banks taking retail deposits to avoid the kind of gambling which dropped them in deep doo-doo - from which the taxpayer is pulling them.

Bank shares and the QE-inflated stock markets are down - and the questions now are two.

First - can Obama actually do it ? Will the banks shimmy round him as they've shimmied round so many other rules ? And second, what will the Republican view be, buoyed as they are by the gain of Edward Kennedy's Massachusetts seat ? They have the power, should they wish, to shaft his legislation.


On the first, I dinna ken. Those Goldman Sachs guys are clever. Too clever. Will they be clever enough to knuckle under ?

On the second - well, some idiot commentator in the Guardian (where else) said :

Watch the reaction of the Republican party, which probably be squealing with rage and fear right now

I'd have thought Republican voters would be pleased but suspicious that Obama's all mouth and no trousers. For the Republican leadership - they may be paid lots of dosh by Wall Street but even they could see that any attempt to defend the banks would see them strung up by their own voters. As RBS Bob Janjuah (again at Alphaville) put it :

The Obama defeat in Mass is HUGE…….even a freshman can figure out that ‘Obama’s’ defeat in Mass is a move towards a lame duck president AND, most seriously, is a move that will directly and indirectly cause de facto FISCAL TIGHTENING – the Republicans have seen some serious and seriously UNEXPECTED gains in Washington since Obama’s inauguration and are now at the point where they COULD block Obama’s fiscal recklessness….

most seriously, the message out of Virginia, New Jersey and now Mass is that the Republicans will do really well in the mid-terms…they will do ‘really well’ because they are going on the tkt of anti-big govt, anti-bailouts to all, & anti-big deficits, all of which is clearly hitting the sweet spot with the US electorate….

I don't see the tea-party crowd coming onto the streets to defend Goldman's bonuses, do you ?

furthermore, Obama has become a guy who folks either perceive or believe (I’m in this latter camp) has merely bailed out Big Wall St & Big Corporate America, all at the expense of the lower strata of the US economy (the youth, Black and Hispanic people, the SME sector, regional banks) – Yes, that’s right, the very folks who voted Obama in

Well, that's what remains to be seen. But there can be little doubt that what he's attempting to do is the right thing. He's shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, all right - but the horse has been enticed back into the stable at the cost of billions of taxpayer bucks . He might have been better advised to shoot the horse and buy another one with the money, but we are where we are. Shutting the door is the right thing.

Can he do it ? I wish him luck. Never knew he had it in him. It's a hell of a volte-face for him, too. Bernanke and Geithner have been more in the print-money and inflate away the debt "Gordon Brown mode". Paul Volcker don't like inflation. I don't either.

'Sing now ye people of Minas Anor
for the age of Bernanke and Greenspan is ended for ever
and the Dark Tower is thrown down.

Sing and rejoice, ye people of the Tower of Guard
for your watch hath not been in vain,
and the Black Gate is broken,
and Obama hath passed through,
and he is victorious.

Sing and be glad, all ye children of the West
for Paul Volcker shall come again,
and he shall dwell among you,
all the days of your life.

And the Tree that was withered shall be renewed,
and he shall plant it in the high places,
and the City shall be blessed.

Sing all ye people!'

Dies Irae 3 - Kate McGarrigle

My middle son is a big Rufus Wainwright fan - he's at the piano most nights giving 'Dinner At Eight' a bash. When he told me it was about Rufus' dad (Loudon Wainwright III), I said 'so's this song from 30 years back' and played him Kate McGarrigle's heartbreaking 'Go Leave'.

The whole family saga is here in great detail. I did wonder if Rufus' sexual orientation was a result of trying to find that elusive lost father-figure, but he seems to be a nature-not-nurture kind of guy. And IMHO he has his mother's celestial harmonies.

Kate has died today age 63. I like to think she's doing a few Scots ballads with Bill McLaren right now.


It looks as if youtube have scoured all the recorded stuff off, so you'll have to suffice with this :



and for all those Rufus and Martha fans, the whole family doing Stephen Foster songs. Rufus was singing pretty good at 16.

Dies Irae 2 - Bill McLaren

Another great British icon gone. Teacher, Cassino veteran, and an enthusiast whose love of the game went straight to the heart of the listener.

Dies Irae I - Cadbury's

Another British company bites the dust. Now all our chocolate will have processed cheese in it.

It's Longbridge (followed by Longbridge II, no doubt) all over again. The A38 south from Brum looks set to become an industrial wasteland to compare with the north of the city, where the remains of the Ansells brewery and the HP factory are long gone, and only the redeveloped Fort Dunlop remains as a reminder of past glory. The east has been mostly deindustrialised (and the natives displaced) as far out as Solihull and the Land Rover plant - only in the west do you still find people making things.

A very long time ago my primary school class sat in the dining room to watch "The Story Of Bournville" - chocolate from Africa to Brum. Now (I might have been 6 or 7) I knew the full story of the Cadbury trucks and tankers we passed on the Bromsgrove to Birmingham line, in their sidings opposite 'The Factory In A Garden'.

The open spaces and gardens around the factory are used by staff during lunch breaks. There are sports grounds. Men play football. There is a swimming bath for the women and an open-air pool for the men. Scenes in Bourneville village, the Day Continuation School, Selley Manor and Minwirth Greaves, the Friends Meeting House, the Church, the Almshouses and the school. Young employees are seen at summer camp under canvas, washing-up, playing cricket, on an excursion in a boat, sea-bathing and playing music in the evening. The nightwatchman says "It's pretty wonderful, isn't it?"

Flickr photoset here. Wonderful description of a 1920 factory visit here :



Kraft said all the nice things about investment and the brand when it took over Terry's of York. Now the York factory is empty and the chocolate oranges are made in Poland.

Already the first talk of redundancies is coming from the company. I guess it was nice while it lasted.

"Your Slappers Are Driving Our Young Men Crazy"

The mighty Yazza (for it is she yet again) on the difficulty of being a good Muslim male in a world of half-dressed drunken "dancing slags":

On blogs now thought to be written by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a plane over Detroit, you are given the impression from news reports that he was a lonely boy, unhappy with his peers who drank and partied. At university he apparently cut himself off, tried to hold on to Islamic Puritanism in a country of no shame, no restraint. Millions of Britons of all backgrounds are alarmed by the dissipation and debauchery that now defines Britain.

For Umar Farouk and many other Muslim men like him, living in such a landscape is literally intolerable. He confesses that he does try to lower his gaze in front of females, wonders if he should get married because he is getting too aroused. You could make a movie, a Taxi Driver for our times, about just such an anti-hero, the hormonal male who is expected to live a life of total abstinence in the middle of licentiousness.

She's got a point - and it's one she's made before. But it doesn't take full-on slapperdom to arouse the ire of the faithful. Sayyid Qutb, spiritual guru of the Muslim Brotherhood, wasn't too impressed with a church dance in late 1940s Greeley, Colorado.

"And they danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire."

(Qutb also noted 'The American Temptress' - a paragraph on the American Girl which made it quite plain that he had clocked every seductive thing about them. What would he have made of Mindy Jones ?)

Now I know that even back in the 40s the Septics were considered 'fast' by UK standards (now we've long since left them behind), but the atmosphere has always contained a greater or lesser amount of desire wherever young men and young women have been in proximity to each other. The genius of pre-cultural revolution Britain (and I'm sure to some extent the States) was that this desire was constrained and controlled - as I wrote here :

Christianity and the other major world religions have been around a long time. They understood, accepted and respected the power of sexuality, which was precisely why it was bound in with all manner of prescription, proscription, culture and custom. Procreation, the link between sexuality and the family, then and now still the chief transmitter of culture between the generations, was similarly attended.

Alas, the same cultural collapse that causes drunken slappers is the one that brought Yazza - and lots of other Muslims - here (I'm not saying she's not an ornament to this country - but under a pre-deluge administration Uganda wouldn't have got premature independence, Idi Amin would have hit his ceiling at Captain, and Yazza's family would still be making a good Ugandan living). Good Muslims and drunken slappers don't go together like a horse and carriage, but you don't seem to be able to have one without the other. Not a situation that will endure, though. Though the current, hypocritical accommodation (fornicate with said slappers but marry your own) will doubtless suffice for the moment.

A Few Sledges Fron The Curate's Porch

Riots in Calabria :

The rioting began after Thursday's shooting, in which two men - one from Nigeria, the other from Togo - were lightly injured. The foreigners angrily blamed that shooting on racism, and groups of protesters stoned police, attacked residents and smashed shop windows and cars. Friday, angry migrants, mostly from African nations, some armed with metal bars or wooden sticks, scuffled with police and residents in the streets of Rosarno. Other residents were holed up in their homes, state radio reported, and schools and shops were shuttered.

Christians murdered in Egypt :

Thousands of Coptic Christians clashed with police in southern Egypt on Thursday during a funeral procession for seven people shot dead as they left a Christmas service hours earlier. The protesters pelted cars with stones and set fire to ambulances in the town of Nag Hamadi, 40 miles from the ancient ruins of Luxor. The riots were sparked by a drive-by shooting. Three men sprayed automatic gunfire into a crowd leaving a midnight Mass to mark the Coptic Christmas.

Christians attacked by Muslims in Malaysia :

There have been more attacks on churches in Malaysia, in a growing dispute over the use of the word Allah by non-Muslims. The police say petrol bombs were thrown at a church and a convent school in the northern state of Perak, and at a church on the island of Sarawak. Another church in the south of the country was daubed with black paint. The attacks come days after four churches near the capital, Kuala Lumpur, were hit by petrol bombs. Religious tensions in Malaysia have increased since a court ruled last month that a Roman Catholic newspaper could use the word Allah in its Malay-language edition to describe the Christian God.

The Lancashire town with an 8,000 population - and plans for a 5,000 pupil Islamic boarding school.

On the banks of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, the old cotton mill stands as a gigantic ghost-like relic of England’s industrial past. It seems unthinkable that this immense sprawl, a key source of employment for a century and a half, should have been idle for three years.

But an ambitious project to give the cluster of buildings a new lease of life, converting them into a boarding school for up to 5,000 Muslim girls, has bitterly divided the local community.

The eager support of parents of prospective pupils is rivalled by a deep hostility that has been shown in responses ranging from anxious questions in parliament to extreme right-wing allegations of plots to “Islamify” Britain.

Another extreme right-winger, former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, adds fuel to the flames of hatred :

We have had to wait decades for this moment, but it has finally happened. A leading British clergyman has said something sensible about immigration.

Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, this week signed a declaration by the Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration calling for an urgent tightening of borders to stop the British population reaching 70 million by 2029. He also gave an interview yesterday in which he called for a tougher Church. "We Christians are very often so soft that we allow other people to walk over us, and we are not as tough in what we want, in expressing our beliefs, because we do not want to upset other people," he said.

Adn two damn stupid articles in the New Statesman, which moderates its comments but can't afford to have anyone doing it over the weekend.

Jon Cruddas :

Labour, like the wider social-democratic tradition, has been unable to build a counterculture that can offer an alternative ethics of living and working. As a result, it has colluded in distinguishing morally between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor.

It has ? You could have fooled me, mate.

History has shown us that economic crises generate middle-class panics about a "dangerous" underclass and its racial and sexual transgressions. In the 1980s, the new right embarked on a project to theorise an underclass in Britain. It drew on the work of the American political scientist Charles Murray, whose research had revived eugenicist debates about race and intelligence. Murray was invited to Britain by the Sunday Times in 1989 and his ideas were taken up by Digby Anderson's Social Affairs Unit. The American academic Lawrence Mead was also influential in reviving the belief that poverty was about behaviour and dependency, rather than economics and justice. The problem was not environment, but individual failing. The work of the new right laid the foundations for New Labour's welfare reforms.

Moral panic ! Moral panic ! It's just like the Garotting Panic of 1862 !

(Laban's Charles Murray posts here.)

The government calculated that it could triangulate the Conservatives and subject the underclass to punitive measures without alienating Labour's core supporters. Its refrain of "hard-working families" attempted to codify this division. But the so-called underclass is not a class apart as the new right and the social investigators of the 19th century tried to prove. It is an imagined body of people - chavs, hoodies, junkies - projected on to single mothers, the sick and parts of the working class impoverished by the impact of recession and unemployment.

Against stupidity the gods themselves battle in vain, what ?

And something even more weird by one Francis Beckett. Who he, you may ask ? Oh. Not an encouraging upbringing for anyone, really. Poor little rich kid.

His basic thesis - that the baby-boomer generation messed up big time - is one that few would dispute. Even the Magistrate is on board.

Magistrate :

I am one of the lucky-sod generation, born just after the war. I have had to cope with economic ups-and-downs, but I went to a grammar school, thanks to the 1944 Education Act, and thence to a university that was flush with funds, and at which I received £360 per annum grant. There were no tuition fees to pay, and a handsome room with full board cost me £6 per week. In the student bar beer was (in new-fangled money) 9p per pint.

Beckett :

The idea that one might have to pay for education, at any level, seemed to us primitive and backward-looking. In the Thirties, my grandmother used to save pennies in a tin in her kitchen, fearfully guarding against the day when one of her children might require medical attention. In the week that the National Health Service was inaugurated in 1948, GPs' surgeries were overwhelmed with patients whose painful and often life-threatening conditions had never been treated or even shown to a doctor. When we baby boomers were ill, we expected, as a right, the best treatment available. Paying for it never occurred to us.

There was full employment, and the slums were torn down and replaced with council housing, built to Aneurin Bevan's high standard. And what did we do with this extraordinary inheritance that had eluded our ancestors, and that an earlier generation had worked and fought to give us?

We trashed it.

It's in the 'why did we trash it' bit that he seems to lose touch with reality. Indeed I can't actually understand what, if anything, he's trying to say. We did indeed 'use up' the manifold blessings showered upon us - but how, exactly ? He almost seems to be suggesting that if only the Sixties had gone on for ever ...

Religion, royalty, government: nothing was sacrosanct in the Sixties, and everything could be questioned. But we used up the time when nothing was sacred. The age of deference seemed to be over, yet the baby boomers, who now run things, have seen how useful deference in for the governing class and are bringing it back as fast as they can.

How about - 'we trashed the existing culture and didn't replace it' - save with the dreadful secular liberal nostrums with which our rulers attempt to put back the ruins of the house, so carefully built - no, not so much built as grown organically on the bedrock of patriotism and Christianity, over generations, so easily destroyed in one.

Tin Foil Hat Alert (Agrippa Value - 549)

Not since the Bishop of London presided over an act of necrophilia at Buckingham Palace have I felt in such need of a tin-foil titfer.

Bristol Indymedia correspondent dizzy dissident tells all about Charles de Menezes, Blairs Tony and Ian, Ur of the Chaldees and Aleister Crowley.

Please note that this is gematria and is distinct from numerology and bible code. Do some research first if you're going to remark on the gematria and please be assured that I probably know far more about it than you do...

'Kratos' was formally signed off operationally and legally at a meeting on 22 January 2003 at MI5 headquarters in London.

Jean Charles de Menezes was killed 911 days after the introduction of the shoot-to-kill policy known as Operation Kratos. To clarify - I am saying 911 days after the introduction of Operation Kratos. If you do the math there is a difference of 912 days but it is still 911 days after. There is a similarity here that the event known as the Madrid Bombings or 3/11 occurred 911 days after the event known as 9/11 in New York.

An entry for 911 at the Aleister Crowley's 'Sepher Sephiroth' reference reads "beginning" and this is what I have come to understand the number 911 to mean...

The astral chart of Jean Charles de Menezes death is very similar to the Goat of Mendez showing an inverted pentangle. Also present is the alchemical symbol for water - the downward pointing triangle...

Occult gematria is based on the Hebrew alphabet and language. Water corresponds to the Hebrew letter Mem. This gives us a clue that Mem is a letter to watch out for in gematria. Hebrew is written right-to-left. The Mem-final or the left-most Mem is the one to watch out for.

There follows the application of gematria to Jean Charles de-Menezes' name. Remember that Jean Charles was Brizzle-ian...

Brizzle-ian ? Took me a moment to get that one.

I suppose it's just as big a waste of time to be in front of the telly every night.

Heatwave

Round here the snow has stayed as perfect powder since it fell on Tuesday - it's been so cold. Not good for snowballs as it doesn't cling, but lovely to kick up in great clouds. Yesterday it took three kettles of boiling water to unfreeze the chickens' drink dispenser.

This morning it feels positively tropical - only half a kettle needed for unfreezing, and walking the dog you could feel the snow compressing under the feet. It must be only around freezing or possibly a tad above.

It's Political Correctness Con Rad

"The N-word of the Narcissus"

(not a bad book actually - I have an unbowdlerised copy at home. And I note from the Wikipedia entry that the title's been bowdlerised for 100+ years. It was first published in the States as 'The Children of the Sea')

"reacting to the moral uncertainties of the Western world"

More canaries in the coal mine. I must confess I didn't know that Boris Johnson's first wife ("the Zuleika Dobson of his year" according to Toby Young - another portrait of the marriage here) is now a convert to Islam.

Let Yazza (for it is she) reveal all :

She was the first wife of Boris Johnson — clearly not a woman to shirk challenges. But then I find out that she has married a much younger Lahori man and imagines her future as an ageing wife who will happily accept her lot within an orthodox Islamic set-up and welcome a younger wife to produce children. It is her choice and one wishes her well.

Several of my close Pakistani and Arab friends are happily married to European wives, with both sides compromising on lifestyles and values.

That is not what Mostyn-Owen has opted for. First she has married a much younger, fit man and maybe feels excessively grateful. Then she is going for complete surrender, an uncritical acceptance of the most regressive practices of some of my co-religionists. The reactions of her family are subtly xenophobic and must hurt. But her actions are as inexplicable to Muslims like myself too. My mother's generation fought for equality and monogamous marriages, a struggle that carries on. To see the daughters of Britannia carelessly surrendering these rights is almost unbearable.

It is happening elsewhere in Europe too. Since 9/11, vast numbers of educated, privileged middle-class white women have converted to Islam, often the most restricted forms with tediously long rulebooks. Surveys suggest they are the fastest growing group of converts in the West. Here they include women at investment banks, TV stations, universities and in the NHS.

Four years ago, when the trend first became clear, Dr Haifa Jawad, of Birmingham University, said: “The women were reacting to the moral uncertainties of the Western world. Many convert out of conviction and not because they are in love.”

Mostyn-Owen says her husband is “untainted by the jaded confusion of western urban life”. Such images of contamination and purity are often used to explain the decisions. Three such converts told me last year their nun-like apparel makes them feel less objectified and they feel “cleansed”.

I get a distinct "wishy-washy standards of contemporary Christianity" vibe here, although to be fair in Mrs BoJo's case it's probably "the wishy-washy standards of contemporary liberalism". The Mail story linked above quotes her mother thus : "Boris is a man who needed someone very obedient and silent, who would be willing to stay in the background and create a soothing home life, while giving him space to build a glittering career. My daughter wasn't that kind of person." Slightly strange that she's opted for that yet again, or am I stereotyping ?

Talking of Charles le Gai Eaton, there's an interesting snippet of biography here, pinched from his 'Islam and the Destiny of Man'.

UPDATE - the lady herself, quoted in Readers Digest :

"I've never regularly attended church, yet I have been to this mosque, my mosque, more times than I can remember. It's a place where I sometimes feel spiritually transported. As I busy myself on the carpet sorting colours and papers after what is always an exhausting class, I am soothed by the azan of evening prayers, the haunting and sometimes pained invocations to the Almighty. I feel my humility, and then realize this is my act of worship, my submission, my Islam. Forget the fact that only men take part in communal prayers, I am a token Christian discreetly trafficking through the men's space with my bags of materials, pretending I'm not really there. I am there, I am accepted, and this is all that matters."

UPDATE 2 - from the comments to Yazza's piece :

In places like Morocco - there is a whole sub industry in marrying mainly older western women - to gain papers and passport to Europe, America - even Japan.

I don't mean to offend - but Muslim men are usually married to first cousins or other family members - before a Muslim girl marries - she must undergo a virginity test at the doctors -

I have spent time in the Muslim world - hard to call everyone who sees this thing for what it is - a racist. But there I was told that women who cannot produce a virginity certificate - are laughed at, called whores, and can remain unwed for the rest of their lives. Many turn to prostitution.

If one of these same man marries a western woman - who is older and not a virgin - then he only sees her as a way to escape his country's conditions.

How the game works - is these guys are prepared to enter into long term relationships with you - in one case - a young girl having a relationship with a young Muslim man - was meant to return there and bring the foreign marriage papers - when she turned up without them - the relationship was called off - she probably had some sense talked into her by her parents - but she was there after referred to as the 'stupid' girl who did not bring the papers. And I was approached to take money to marry this guy and bring him back to Europe.

Other cases EU ladies in relationships with these men have sent them money - the guy then took the money, brought a house and married a cousin as his family wished.

- Rebecca, uk

Just One Cornetto (Friday Night Is Elvis Night)

75 years ago yestreen the man was born - Mark Steyn reveals all about 'It's Now Or Never' aka 'O Sole Mio' aka 'Just One Cornetto':

It was Elvis' biggest hit, selling some 25 million copies worldwide, Number One for five weeks in the US and for eight weeks in Britain. For the rest of his life it was Presley's personal favorite out of all his records. And it was "It's Now Or Never" that spurred Barry White's Pauline prison conversion from a life of crime to a life of heavy-breathing luuuuuurv ballads. Yet it took a long and tortuous path before it fell into the hands of Aaron Schroeder and the King. "It's Now Or Never" has its origins in ...go on, guess.

Naples?

Close. The Ukraine.

Odessa, to be precise.


In tribute I'd like to introduce you to this remarkable take on 'Just One Cornetto', sung by what sounds like Lisa Gerrard's little sister. Love the guitar, too - and I especially love the unexpected, falling last line. Sing more, sister !





It's a long way from Tupelo to Bulgaria. But while we're on the subject of women with exceptional voices ...






And finally ... bear with me on this one. I've always been fond of stuff with sequencers - 'Baba O'Reilly' - type music. The song, such as it is, is merely the bread either side of the extended jam sandwich in the centre. Kicks in after about 45 seconds. The studio version is better.

But this is almost worth watching for the clothes and the 'dancing' alone IMHO - a real 1972 cultural artefact. Curved Air.

Well Strike A Light

Last year I noted the sad case of Brum Labour Party's Elaina Cohen, who applied to be the party's candidate for the Lozells council seat and was told by another councillor "They will not vote for someone who is white and Jewish. My Muslim members don't want you because you are Jewish".

As it turns out, not all Muslim members feel the same way about her :

Khalid Mahmood, who is the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, claimed a total of £1,350 for nine nights stay over a four-week period in 2004, when he stayed at The Bentley hotel in Kensington. He also claimed £1,225 for five nights stay in 2008.

Mahmood used the hotel after separating from partner Nasim Akhtar, with whom he lived in Wembley, though this address was not given on his 2004 claims form. He checked into the hotel with then girlfriend Elaina Cohen under the fake names Mr Khaled and Eleine Mahmood.

I'd have thought, given the first story, that Mr Mahmood (about whom I know little except that
he made a pretty decent stab at keeping 'community tensions' down at the time of the Lozells riots) might find he's peeved some of his constituents by his dalliance - unless of course he could persuade Ms Cohen to 'do an Osborne' and convert to Islam.

More Canaries

George Osborne's brother Mohammed (ne Adam), shown below reprising Kenneth Williams' unforgettable role as the ruler of Khalabar :

'Rahala explained to her three brothers and two sisters that she was deeply in love and wanted to marry Adam. I don't think they were too keen. Her older sister, who had an arranged marriage, was especially resistant.

'Over time, however, and after meeting him on a few occasions, they came around to the idea. And when Adam announced that he was going to convert to Islam, it enabled everyone to accept the relationship.'

And perhaps at the other end of whatever spectrum there might be, Ibrahim (ne Maurice) Anderson, composer of 'A Means for Dawah' and currently facing trial on charges of using threatening, abusive, insulting words and behaviour at a homecoming parade in Luton for the Anglian Regiment.

Alas, Poor Tunny

When I was a wee lad, we used to eat tinned 'tunny fish', caught in the North Sea. Tasted great.

Then they were fished out, and we ate tinned 'tuna' instead, caught not in the North sea but more exotic waters. Came in varieties like 'skipjack', 'yellowfin' and 'bonito'. Not as nice as tunny, we thought, but we got accustomed to the new stuff, and now I can't remember what tunny tastes like - must be 45 years since I ate any.

If this site is right, we were actually eating Northern bluefin tuna - and it's now a critically endangered species.

This is a public information post.

Grit-Banditry ...

.. the shame of our cities.

"We know all about equality and independence — we've been there"

The practicalities are all, it seems - Marie Claire (!) on Russia's classes for millionaire-hunters :

To the Western feminist mind, it might seem a bit retrograde, yet Varra insists that Russian women are the ultimate post-feminists. "We know all about equality and independence — we've been there," she tells me. During the Soviet era, which ended in 1991, millions of men died in wars and labor camps. Women often ran their households alone, while also working in factories. The problem is that Russian men, says Varra, remain deeply patriarchal and still expect women to be subservient. "Rather than try to change men, which will take another 200 years," she says, "we might as well get whatever we can out of them now."

NYT - "20% of UK Students Are Muslim"

Is this true ? Seems like a high number to me, although I'd expect 10%ish - after all, a Government report in 2006 said that "in 10 years time, 15% of the workforce will be Muslim".

Where did the New York Times get these figures from ? Anyone know ?

Investigators are now, in fact, turning a sharper and retrospective eye to the passage in Mr. Abdulmutallab’s life that began immediately after his summer in Sana, Yemen, in 2005, when he enrolled as a $25,000-a-year mechanical engineering student at University College London. In recent days, officials in Washington and London have said they are focusing on the possibility that his London years, including his possible contacts with radical Muslim groups in Britain, were decisive in turning him toward Islamic extremism.

That view, if confirmed, would offer a stark reaffirmation that Britain, the United States’ closest ally, continues to pose a major threat to American security. Critics in Britain and the United States say the British security forces, despite major increases in budgets and manpower in recent years, have not yet succeeded in adequately monitoring, much less restraining, the Islamic militancy that thrives in the vast network of mosques that serve the nation’s 1.5 million Muslims — and on university campuses across the country where nearly 100,000 of the 500,000 students are Muslims, including many, like Mr. Abdulmutallab, from overseas.

UPDATE - Muhammad Abdul ('Two million Muslim terrorists') Bari of the Muslim Council of Britain, quoted at Socialist Unity : "there are approximately 100,000 Muslim students at universities across the UK, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding and play a full and active role in student life."

Money From (potential) Misery

As the Walkman generation was succeeded by the mp3 and Ipod generations, and an increasing number of us walked around with plugs in our lugs, I became convinced that we were likely to see and increasing number of not-terribly-elderly with hearing difficulties. Young people just don't like turning it down.

At that point it also became apparent that hearing-aid manufacturers were likely to benefit. But who makes hearing aids ?

This blog gives some investment suggestions. I know nowt about the blog or the companies they suggest (except Siemens), so caveat emptor.



(inspired by this Clive Davis post)