400 Glorious Years

Since the first edition of surely the greatest work ever produced by a Government committee, the King James Bible.

(Three BBC progs about the production thereof here)

Unbelievable Fact Of The Day

I noted in the post on Kate Middleton's family tree that the English are pretty much all related to each other. And of course the colonies which became the USA were English projects.

Every single US President bar one (Martin Van Buren) is a descendant of King John I of England.

Including Obama (who's also descended from (inter alia) King Edward I (Longshanks) of England, King Henry III of England, King Henry II of England, King Henry I of England, King William I (the Bastard) of England, Count Baldwin of Flanders and his daughter Matilda, King Robert Capet I of France, King Louis I of France, and Charlemagne). Obama also shares a common descent through Richard Eltonhead with Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain.

Not to mention apparently being descended, along with George Washington, from Halfdan The Old and through him from the Norse god Odin.

Savour The Diversity

Well, we know now where some of the hippy boomers and alternative types went. I bet they've got more than a few Type 2 girls.

The irony is that a Green council in Brighton actually does bring a bit of diversity, in the real sense rather than the 'not white' sense, to UK politics. I, for one, welcome Brighton's new Green overladies, and am very glad I'm not bringing up children there.

Lament For The Makars

Wiiliam Dunbar's great ode to the Bards of medieval Scotland and England, freely adapted from the original by Laban the other night when feeling a tad deflated after the Baggies lost to Wolves.

Dunbar's also noted as being the first writer to get his four letter words printed. It's interesting to see that his great English contemporaries rank so high - no "effete ****holes" in the Dunbar bestiary - not English ones, anyway - and it's sad that many of the Scots he praises leave no surviving work. There's a worthy task for antiquaries and researchers - to find the verses of Stobo, Herriot, Blind Harry and the rest.

I, that hearty was and hale,

Am troubled, sick and like to fail,

Enfeebled by infirmity;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Our pleasure here is all vainglory,

This false world is but transitory,

The flesh is bruckle, the Fiend is sly;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The state of man does change and vary,

Now sound, now sick, now blithe, now sorry,

Now dancing merry, now like to die;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Nought of this earth here stands securely;

As the wind shakes the growing barley,

So trembles worldly vanity.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

On unto Death go all estates,

Of Court, of Church, all potentates,

Both rich and poor of all degree;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He cuts the knights down in the field,

Full armoured under helm and shield;

Victor he is at all melees;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

That warlord merciless and wild

Tears from the mother's breast the child,
And sorrowing he leavès she;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He takes the warrior in his power,

The captain in the strongest tower,

The bowered beauty, all takes he;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He spares no lord for elegance,

Nor clerk for his intelligence;

His deadly stroke may no man flee;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Magicians and astrologers,

Logicians or theologers,

Their wits help them no more than me;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

In medicine the best practicians,
The leeches, surgeons, and physicians,
Find Death to have no remedy;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Poets and playwrights of our day

Play out their pageant, then away;

Spared not for their great faculty;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He has impetuously devoured,

The noble Chaucer, of poets the flower,

The Monk of Bury, and Gower, all three;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The good Sir Hew of Eglintoun,

Also Herriot, and Wyntoun,

All taken out of this country;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

His sting has left the world bereft
Of Master Clerk, and James Affleck,

Of ballad-making and tragedy;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Of Holland, Barbour we're bereaved;

Alas ! He would not even leave

Sir Mungo Lockhart of the Lee;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The Clerk of Tranent's also gone,

That wrote Adventures of Gawain;

Sir Gilbert Hay - ended is he;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He has Blind Harry and Sandy Traill

Slain with his shower of mortal hail,

Can Patrick Johnstone from it flee ?

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He's given Mercer his goodnight,

That did of love so lively write,

So short, so quick, of sentence he;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He has ta'en Roull of Aberdeene,

And gentle Roull of Corstorphine;

Two better men you'll never see;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

In Dumfermline the race is run

Of Master Robert Henryson;

And Sir John Ross embraced has he;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

And he's now ta'en, last of all,

Good, gentle Stobo and Quentin Shaw,

All men might wish he'd left them be:

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Good Master Walter Kennedy

At point of death lies verily,

Great pity that such thing should be;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Since he has all my brethren ta'en,

He will not let me live alone,

And I shall be his next, you'll see;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

For death there is no remedy,

So for our death, prepare must we,

That after death, new life may be;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

A Few Rabbits From The Curate's Back Lawn

Victor Davis Hanson returns to the transformation of his home town into Mexifornia. First covered by him here.

Three little tales from the Heavy Woollen District :

Goodbye to one Working Men's Club.

Hello to three lapdancing clubs - run by a failed asylum seeker.

Having 'massage parlour workers' beating each other up over one - not something I've experienced.

It's our very own Crow Creek Massacre - only this time the women were not spared.

Nearly half of children can expect their parents to separate by the time they turn 16.

Abusing the girls the locals just don't want to abuse in Blackpool.

I've always thought of maths as the subject that really sorts the clever-clogs from the rest, but there can be other tests. Law and logic is one - I sometimes read the Times law reports and find I'm lost in a maze of conditional clauses, can't tell what they're saying, and have to go to the first or last lines to find out who won - and even then I don't know why. OK, I might be able to work it out by making notes, but I can't hold all the logic in my head.

When I first learned programming we did Assembler, which IIRC is as low-level a language as you get before you have to start worrying about what hardware you're writing for. One of our exercises was a simple task - read a file, print the contents to a page, keep a linecount for the new page, print a pagecount on each page. It took me about a page and a bit of code, written on a coding form - you didn't actually get to see a keyboard back then, as the training section also trained data entry staff, and they typed the code in. Most of the people in the class wrote a similar amount.

One guy wrote it in 6 or 7 lines of code - and it worked. We looked at his code and how he was using the registers - and we could then see how it worked. What none of us could understand was how he'd seen that way of doing it, which was so obvious to him. His brain worked on a different level.

At another level, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen on recognising when you're in the wrong intellectual league :

I was decent in math, and Bill (Gates) was brilliant, but by then I spoke from my experience at Washington State. One day I watched a professor cover the blackboard with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felt a little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was O.K. with being a generalist.

For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester, and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his Ph.D. at 16.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to 30 hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in 10 million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.

'KeyWalk' marches sparked by Toronto officer's remarks

A new protest movement sparked by a policeman's ill-judged advice to motorists "not to leave their keys in the dash" has taken root in the US and Canada.

Thousands of people are arriving at car parks, some leaving their cars unlocked, others leaving the key in the dash provocatively - and then taking part in marches round the car park, or "KeyWalks".

The aim, say organisers, is to highlight a culture in which the victim rather than the car thief is blamed.

About 2,000 people took part in a "KeyWalk" in Boston on Saturday.

Boston organiser Siobhan Connors explained: "The event is in protest of a culture that we think is too permissive when it comes to car theft and break-ins.

"It's to bring awareness to the shame and abuse car owners still face for expressing their ownership of their own cars... essentially for behaving in a healthy and non-paranoid way" the 20-year-old told the Associated Press (AP) news agency.


Police Constable Michael Sanguinetti had been giving a talk on health and safety to a group of students at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto when he made the now infamous remarks.

"You know, I think we're beating around the bush here," he reportedly told them. "I've been told I'm not supposed to say this - however, car owners should avoid leaving the vehicle unlocked, or the keys in the dash, in order not to be a victim of car crime."

He has since apologised for his remarks and has been disciplined by the Toronto police, but remains on duty.

Some 3,000 people took part in the first "Keywalk" in Toronto last month. The Keywalk Toronto website said the aim of the movement is to "re-appropriate" the phrase "perhaps not the wisest thing to do".

"Ownership of a motor vehicle should not mean that we are opening ourselves to an expectation of theft of property or of the vehicle, regardless if it is locked or unlocked," it says.

"KeyWalks" have now been held in Dallas, Asheville in North Carolina, and in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, and are planned for Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Reno and Austin.

Everybody, from singles, couples, parents, sisters, brothers, children and friends, are encouraged to join in.

The rallies typically end with speakers and workshops on stopping car crime and calling on law enforcement agencies not to blame victims after break-ins or thefts, AP says.

In a similarly-inspired protest, thousands of demonstrators failed to turn up at the first 'MoWalk' planned for Bethnal Green, London yesterday. The protest, where marchers were to wear T-shirts showing cartoons of Mohammed, was planned after a senior Metropolitan police officer said that anyone planning to wear a T-shirt bearing an image of the Prophet Mohammed in East London "needs their head examining", "must be tired of life" and would be "arrested for their own safety".

The aim, said organisers, was to highlight a culture in which the victim of an assault rather than the assailant is blamed. But they were disappointed with the turnout, as no marchers turned up. It is believed a mass outbreak of a little-known disease called timor mortis caused the no-show. Other "MoWalks" planned for Bradford, Burnley and Balsall Heath have been cancelled.

Of course the protesters are right. If you drive to New York City, and leave your keys on the hood, it is never, ever your fault if the car or its contents are stolen. The fault lies fairly and squarely with the thief. Nonetheless, the fact is that there are car thieves in the world. The cultural history of the twentieth century tells us that cars are very desireable objects, the subject of thousands of pieces of verse, art, literature and music. As Steven Pinker, in his review of Randy Thornhill's controversial "A Natural History of Car Theft" puts it :

"Men will spend huge amounts of money on cars; will spend hundreds of hours underneath them, repairing, restoring or enhancing them; will devote their leisure time to studying them. Many people desire cars that they do not own, cannot afford and never will be able to afford. It would run contrary to everything we know about human beings if they were NOT prepared to steal them."

The fact of leaving keys in your car, or doors unlocked, can be interpreted by unscrupulous and unethical people as an invitation to steal your goods or your vehicle, despite the fact that you have every right not to be violated in this way. I can see the unfortunate police officer's point - it's probably true that fewer cars would be stolen were their owners to lock them up and not leave the keys on show.

But that, in the end, is not what this issue and these demonstrations are about. They are about the absolute and unfettered right of car owners to conduct themselves (within the law) in any and every way they wish, with no limits or restrictions.

BNP activists 'gang-raped Hindu women'

... apparently "the barbarous act was intended to force them to leave the country".

These rapes took place nearly ten years ago, but are only now being investigated.

DHAKA, Bangladesh : A judicial commission has concluded that over 200 Hindu women were raped following the 2001 parliamentary election, forcing many terrorized families to flee the country.

The acts were allegedly committed by cadres of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its ally Jamaat-e-Islami who won the 2001 polls, the report said, citing the involvement of many top leaders and lawmakers of the alliance that is now in the opposition.

Kate Middleton and Social Mobility

There's been a lot of comment about the coal miner's great-great-granddaughter marrying a prince. This provisional and incomplete family tree illustrates a few points :

a) Kate Middleton is very English. Not a Welshman or Irishman to be seen, one Scottish great-great-grandfather. And you have to go back 10 generations to find Gaston Martineau, a surgeon who fled France in 1685 (presumably a Protestant threatened by the Edict of Fontainebleau), and his wife Marie Pierre. The Goldsmith connections don't appear to be Jewish (5 generations married in church, apparently) - in the 1700s they're Kentish carpenters.

b) social mobility

The background of each of Kate Middleton's great-great-grandparents, as far as is currently known, can be summarized as follows:

• Middleton - Tradesmen in Yorkshire rising to professionals (attorneys)
• Asquith - Tradesmen in Yorkshire
• Lupton - Background of his grandparents:
  • Lupton - Tradesmen in Leeds
  • Darnton - Tradesmen in Leeds
  • Greenhow - Professionals from Yorkshire
  • Martineau - Clergymen and professionals from Norfolk and Northumberland
• Davis - Clergymen and professionals from Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and elsewhere in western England
• Glassborow - Tradesmen from Surrey
• Elliott - Tradesmen from Surrey
• Robison - Clerks from Scotland
• Gee - "Gentlemen" descending to tradesmen
• Goldsmith - Labourers from Kent and Hertfordshire
• Dorsett - Labourers in London
• Chandler - Labourers from Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, rising to tradesmen
• White - Tradesmen from Somersetshire and Buckinghamshire
• Harrison - Miners in Northumberland and Durham
• Hill - Mariners in Durham, later tradesmen
• Temple - Miners in Yorkshire and Norfolk
• Myers - Agricultural labourers in Yorkshire

Around 50% middling men and women (the Luptons were a well-known Leeds family - there's a university hall of residence named after one of them), 50% working people. One jailbird, Edward Glassborough, an insurance company messenger - wonder what he was in for ?

c) the seeming total absence of bastardy. Everyone has two parents, and they are married to each other. So much for the historical revisionists.

d) I see one of the Harrison miners married a Jane Liddle. Hopefully there's a Rod Liddle link. What has apparently been established are links to Guy Ritchie, to her husband Prince William, and to various other aristocrats*. The native population of these islands being a partially inbred extended family**, there are bound to be links. Go back 10 generations and you have 2 to the power 10 i.e. 1024 ancestors, which takes you back to the 1600s. Go back another 10 generations, to the 1300s, and you have over a million forebears. There are around 50 million native Brits in the UK, each with getting on for a million forebears in the 1300s - but there were less than 10 million Brits around in the fourteenth century. Obviously we*** have an awful lot of ancestry in common.



* as you go back and records are scarcer, those for whom records ARE available tend to be the great and the good, so a tree gets biased towards higher classes as you go back.

** the inbreeding being generally inside the distinct populations of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, at least until the greater mobility of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

*** those who are not, like myself, the son of an immigrant father. That's most of the native Brits.

One Big Cheer

US forces "took custody" of Bin Laden's body, Obama said.

Huzzah ! And fair play to Obama.

The US stressed Islamic practices would be respected.

If my memory serves the Brits were less sensitive to the religious needs of a killer, back in the days when James Abbott restored to the Muslim population of Hazara the religious freedoms which were suppressed under Sikh rule. The 1853 assassin of Colonel Frederick Mackeson in Peshawar was hanged before being sewn into a pigskin ('most abhorrent to Muhammedans' said John Lawrence, who gave the order) and cremated in the Hindu fashion before the ashes were thrown in a river.

A/c/t this Google Maps link* at Steve Sailer's, Bin Laden's compound was just up the road from the Pakistan Military Academy. Make of that what you will - he certainly has.

Pakistan had to know. This location can't possibly be a coincidence. Pakistani government insiders put him right in their pocket so they could protect him. They hugged him to their bosom.

On the other hand, it's not as if the Pakistan Military Academy seem to have turned out to protect the compound - although there are conflicting reports about what happened to one helicopter. Did it just malfunction/suffer small arms damage, or was it shot down by a missile? And was it a US helicopter?

UPDATE - Christopher Hitchens seems to agree with Sailer:

If you tell me that you are staying in a rather nice walled compound in Abbottabad, I can tell you in return that you are the honored guest of a military establishment that annually consumes several billion dollars of American aid. It’s the sheer blatancy of it that catches the breath.

UPDATE - a/c/t Wikileaks Pakistani intelligence are allegedly heavily involved with the Taleban and Al Qaeda :

American diplomats were told that one of the key reasons why they had failed to find bin Laden was that Pakistan’s security services tipped him off whenever US troops approached. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) also allegedly smuggled al-Qaeda terrorists through airport security to help them avoid capture and sent a unit into Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban.

UPDATE - via commenter Mark, this 2002 Seymour Hersh story alleges that thousands of Pakistani intelligence and military operatives, Taleban and Al Qaeda fighters and their hangers-on were airlifted by Pakistan out of the city of Kunduz, just before it fell to the Northern Alliance in November 2001. The Americans co-operated, setting up an air corridor to allow the flights safe passage.

According to RAW’s senior analyst for Pakistani and Afghan issues, the most extensive rescue efforts took place on three nights at the time of the fall of Kunduz. Indian intelligence had concluded that eight thousand or more men were trapped inside the city in the last days of the siege, roughly half of whom were Pakistanis. (Afghans, Uzbeks, Chechens, and various Arab mercenaries accounted for the rest.) At least five flights were specifically “confirmed” by India’s informants, the RAW analyst told me, and many more were believed to have taken place.

In the Indian assessment, thirty-three hundred prisoners surrendered to a Northern Alliance tribal faction headed by General Abdul Rashid Dostum. A few hundred Taliban were also turned over to other tribal leaders. That left between four and five thousand men unaccounted for. “Where are the balance?” the intelligence officer asked. According to him, two Pakistani Army generals were on the flights.

Now due allowance must be made for the fact that India and Pakistan hate each other's guts. But unnamed US officials seem to have confirmed the story, off the record, to Hersh.


* Google allows reviews. Best one - "Aside from the complimentary dialysis machine use, easy underground access to Pakistan's beautiful vast cave system, and free toaster waffles, it's a pretty big dump. The food wasn't organic, the wifi was spotty at best, absolutely no cell coverage, (yelp reviews were so wrong on that one) and no one spoke English. To make it worse, the country's best basketball player, some 6'7" dude with a turban, gets shot our first night there. And the coffee was cold. We're so not coming back. "

Shame

I yield to no one in my detestation of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. But the decision not to invite them to today's bash seems petty - and in the case of Brown, downright vindictive - talk about kicking a man when he's down. What must his wife think ?

Blair was a snake-oil salesman, Brown a magician whose house of cards finally tumbled. But Blair was elected Prime Minister three times - as many as Margaret Thatcher - and Brown was PM this time last year. Questions of personal like or dislike shouldn't have come into it - they should both, as former leaders of Britain, be at what in all but name is a full State occasion.

It will give a degree of aid and comfort to Labour Party republicans - although recognising political realities*, none will be going to the scaffold for Blair or Brown - but that's not the main objection.

Stephen Glover nails it :

"it is highly regrettable — indeed, I would say constitutionally irregular — that the two most recent prime ministers of this country, who happen to be Labour, have not been invited to Friday's Royal Wedding... whatever the explanation, this is a decision that will damage the monarchy more than the feelings of Mr Blair and Mr Brown. Once the Crown appears to be taking sides — and that is the impression, if not the intention — our delicate constitutional arrangements are imperilled."

* the Mail comments are overwhelmingly anti-Blair and Brown. As I've written before, the Mail comments are where you can see the real damage that's been done to British culture over the last 40 years. Whatever happened to fair play?


I almost forgot to say. In Martin Kelly's words : Best wishes to the happy couple for a long and fulfilling married life; and also to everyone else who has married yesterday and today, who is getting married tomorrow, and who will get married from now until the end of time.

Separated At Birth

Daniel Knowles, Assistant Comment Editor at the Telegraph.













Grabber, Head Boy of St Custards, "Captane of Everything, and winner of the Mrs Joyful Prize for rafia work".

Unbelievable Fact Of The Day

via the comments at Socialist Unity, the revelation that the father of jazz-funk maestro Gil Scott-Heron (try this for a happy holiday sound) played football for Kidderminster Harriers.

Happy Birthday !

You've always done your duty (with the possible exception of a failure to send Heath and Blair to the Tower ... admittedly it would have been controversial at the time, but a monarch's place is to think of the survival of the nation, not just the institution. I guess you could respond that we voted for them, after all).

"Is this going to be used to kill the English?"

I admit to finding this story hard to believe. But a lot of hard to believe things happen in Israeli politics, as anyone taking even a cursory glance at the subject will notice.

Telegraph :

Israel secretly supplied arms and equipment to Argentina during the Falklands War due to Prime Minister Menachem Begin's personal hatred of the British, a new book discloses. Interviews conducted by the author of the book, the Argentine journalist Hernan Dobry, reveal that Begin saw the deals as a form of revenge for the hanging of a personal friend, Dov Gruner, by the British Mandatory Authorities in Palestine in 1947.

After the Argentine Air Force contacted Isrex, the Israeli defence company, a meeting was arranged between representatives of the company and Begin. Israel Lotersztain, a salesman for Isrex Argentina, said Begin interrupted the Isrex officials as they tried to explain the situation, saying: "You've come to talk badly about the British. Is this going to be used to kill the English? Kadima (go ahead). Dov [Gruner] up there is going to be happy with the decision. Obviously, it must be all done perfectly."

Gruner was sentenced to death for his part in an attack on a police station by Irgun, the Zionist underground paramilitary movement which Begin commanded before the state of Israel was established. As he awaited hanging, he wrote a letter to Begin, thanking him for his support and emphasising his belief in Irgun.

"He [Begin] hated the English above all; everyone had forgotten the British occupation, but not him" according to Lotersztain. His colleague Jaime Weinstein agreed, saying: "He did all that was possible to help Argentina, selling her weapons during the Malvinas [the Argentine name for the Falklands] conflict."

Well, if this is true, the dirty dog. Since when was any country's foreign policy the vehicle of its leader's personal prejudice, outside of a dictatorship ? No wonder Ben Gurion looked upon Begin as an extremist, and denounced his terror group Irgun as the “enemy of the Jewish People”. No wonder Einstein and Hannah Arendt described his immediate post-war party as "a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties".

There were five flights in total from Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires via Lima, loaded with equipment such as gas masks, radar warning systems to prevent fire from enemy missiles, air to air missiles, duvet jackets and spare parts. Additional fuel tanks for fighter bombers supplied by Israel were particularly important for Argentina's war effort as they enabled pilots to fly to the Falklands and return to the Argentine mainland without stopping. Dobry discovered that Israel sent 1,500-litre tanks rather than the standard 1,300-litre models and writes that this meant the British Task Force had to move its fleet further east to prevent further bombings.

They did indeed move the Task Force east, after the loss of HMS Coventry and Atlantic Conveyor. But a/c/t Max Hastings' book on the conflict, the Super Etendards which sank the Conveyor were refuelled in mid-air by other Etendards, and the Argentinians were 'chronically short' of drop-tanks. The Israeli intervention probably killed far fewer people than were killed in the anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic bombings of the next decade in Argentina. But it's the thought that counts.

What's even stranger is that apparently the Brits were aware of Begin's dastardly deeds, and kept schtum AFAIK.

However, British intelligence services kept track of aircraft landing in Peru and even photographed some of the arrivals. "A newspaper once published a picture showing the loading on to an Aerolineas Argentinas plane and the British ambassador in Israel took the photo to Begin and hell broke out," said Lotersztain. "They were aware of the whole operation to the extent that sometimes when we discussed whether some supplies had arrived we would say, 'let's ask the English'".

Imagine that a British Prime Minister once had a young friend killed in the Falklands. Thirty-five years on he remembers that fact, and starts supplying weapons to Hezbollah via Syria, asking the Syrian purchasers "Is this going to be used to kill the Israelis?". Wouldn't happen. Who was it who said that a nation has no friends, only interests ? But what we see here, if true, is .. well, for once I'm lost for words.

The Curfew Tolls The Knell Of Parting Day

A source said that the two men, both black, were known to each other. It is believed they were both from Slough. Other witnesses said there had been a confrontation between the two men and that one had tried to flee from the other. A local shopkeeper, who asked not to be named, said: 'One man was trying to run away from the other one. A black taxi was flagged down and both men jumped in. They were arguing and one of the men then pulled out a knife and did the stabbing. There was blood over the seat and on the pavement as the door was still open. The taxi driver, who I think was a Sikh and had been on his way home at the time, then panicked and took the men to the police station.'

Thames Valley Police confirmed that the death was being treated as murder. A spokesman said: ''The major crime team from Thames Valley Police is investigating the killing of a man who arrived at Slough Police Station in Windsor Road in a taxi. An ambulance was called but unfortunately he was declared dead before he reached hospital. An area at the police station has been sealed off for forensic examination, along with an area of Stoke Poges Lane."

It was in the churchyard at Stoke Poges that Thomas Gray wrote that most English of poems, the Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard.

"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

"strengthening the family and increasing the birth rate"

I've covered the Russian demographic disaster previously. Now ...

"Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has unveiled plans to reverse Russia's declining population. The government will spend 1.5tn roubles ($53bn; £33bn) on raising the birth rate and extending life expectancy."

Not only that, this summer they'll be hosting in Moscow what's described as the first world pro-life and pro-family demography conference. Ironic, considering that Russia is still the world's abortion capital. Maybe Mr Putin needs to consider figures like these :

"In 2001, 1,320,000 children were born in Russia, while 1,800,000 abortions were performed. The abortion rate in the USSR peaked in 1964, when 5.6 million abortions were performed, the highest number in Russia’s history."

Makes the UK, where about 25% of pregnancies are aborted, look a model of restraint.

Russia also shares with the UK the demographic feature that some ethnic groups have a lot more babies than others. Encouraging more Russians may, for example, encourage even more Chechens.

Quite how you encourage people to have more babies is an interesting point. I'm generally inclined towards Steve Sailer's theories on Affordable Family Formation, but there are a host of other cultural factors. AFF is IMHO generally valid as a pointer to relative fertility within a given group - say working and middle-class white Americans or Britons. But that wouldn't, for example, explain why those of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage have so many more babies than white Brits - my guess would be that rearing five children on housing benefit in East London compares most favourably with raising them in Sylhet or Mirpur. 'Affordable' means different things to different cultural groups.

The Japanese are from 2010 paying parents £175 per month per child, something this father of four would have loved (and although UK child benefit stops when they leave school, strangely the student grant people consider them to be dependent up to the age of 25). Be interesting to see if it works, although remembering the insane house prices in Japan family formation still isn't exactly affordable.

But there's more to having children than affordability. What sort of country will they grow up in? When I look at a possible UK future, I often wonder what possessed us - and I encourage my children to have an exit strategy. Over the last week, I read two books on Russia - Roderic Braithwaite's 'Moscow 1941' and the late Anna Politkovskaya's 'Putin's Russia'. In many respects - incompetence, corruption, despotism at local and national levels, the cheapness of human life, the country doesn't seem to have changed that much in seventy years.

Politkovskaya's book is almost unreadable in its depressing quality. Her Russia isn't a place you'd ideally choose to sprog in. One tale of brutality and corruption after another - to the point where you start to wonder whether things can really be this bad. Then you remember her murder. Which le Carre novel is it where the quality of information is attested to by the murder of the provider ?

Along with AFF (with allowances made for group differences), I'd suggest that confidence is key to sprogging in a world with freely available and effective contraception, just as we're always told that confidence is key to business investment decisions - and what greater investment than children ? The hope and expectation that your children will have a better life than their parents will IMHO be a key driver of fertility, all else being equal. True for the baby-boomer parents of the post-war West, true for the Bangladeshis and Mirpuris of Bradford and Tower Hamlets. But for today's Russians ? And today's Brits ?

Innsmouth

"It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed “widow’s walks”. These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition."

Light Blogging ...

Unless I can find an internet cafe in the Innsmouth of Yorkshire. Taking a few days away.

"No Irish Need Apply"

The (American) liberal myth of 'No Irish Need Apply'.

The fact that Irish vividly "remember" NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one. This is especially strange since signs were primarily directed toward these others: the signs said that employment was available here and invited Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. The courts are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through the window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend?

As every Brit liberal knows, the streets of 1950s London were full of 'No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish' signs. Yet on the Web there's only one photo which looks as if it could be authentic - source unknown to me - and in an admittedly cursory trawl of the web I've not found any contemporary reports of them - just hundreds of "are we returning to the days of" blog posts and dozens of "my father came to London at a time when" pieces. You really would think that it might turn up in Hansard - I must take a look. Maybe it's yet another liberal myth aka libel against the native Brits. Not that there aren't similar signs to be seen in London to this day - only strangely, no one makes a fuss about them. Can't imagine why.



















(cropped photo from ruskin51's photostream)

Now I've got no real problems with an Asian family wishing to share their house with people of their own culture or ethnicity - or even rent it. You want as tenants/lodgers people you can trust, and as the late Emperor Claudius puts it 'the knee is nearer than the shin'. For good reasons, people tend to trust people who are like themselves, and as Robert Putnam points out :

"the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor"

But these signs are presumably illegal under British law. I suppose the reason we're not seeing these cases in the court reports is that the law was designed to stop natives putting up these kinds of advert.

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Mail :

"A massive surge in crimes committed by pensioners has sparked a 'grey crime wave' and seen the number of offences carried out by over 65s rise almost 50% in the last five years. OAPs have been charged with a variety of crimes which include carrying knives and guns, theft, fraud, shoplifting, drink-driving and sexual offences.

Cambridgeshire Constabulary today revealed that crimes have risen by a staggering 47 per cent for the age group since 2007."

Crime's a young person's - usually a young man's - game. Peak offending rates are I believe in the 15-21 years. But a small proportion of criminals will continue as they get older - especially in fields like selling stolen goods where contacts and trust are important.

Crime more than doubled between 1955 and 1965. A 20 year old in 1965 will be 66 now.

But look at the increases in the 70s, 80s (as the underclass grew) and early 90s. The over-65 crime rate has plenty of room for expansion as those generations age.