petermullen – Page 24 – All Things Considered

19 Jun

Educashun

In a speech at the annual Festival of Education, Mr John Cridland, head of the Confederation of British Industries – “the bosses’ union” – said that for too long “We’ve just pretended to have an exam system that values vocational education, when in practice, exams have operated as stepping stones towards a university degree.”

Well said, Sir. But the matter is much larger than that. I should like to know why, after eleven years of full time, free, compulsory and hugely expensive schooling, supposedly at the hands of “professionally trained” teachers monitored, spied-upon and graded by an even more expensive, self-promoting bureaucracy, 43% of pupils still leave school unable to read, write and count efficiently? (By the way, that figure of 43% is not one plucked out of the ether by me, but the Department of Education’s own statistic).

Even to ask this straightforward question is to be denounced as an elitist and an educational snob. I know, for those words have been applied to me time and again – as if I’d been born with the silver spoon in my mouth and attended some posh, fee-paying private school. Actually, I went to Castleton County Primary in a Leeds industrial slum. There were never fewer than forty in our classes and we were very poorly equipped. And never mind elitism. I’m not talking about the binomial theorem or noun clauses but about being able to reckon up money in your head, do simple calculations using the tables up to twelve times and to be able to read a newspaper and a novel such as David Copperfield.

There is nothing abstract or theoretical about the examples I have chosen. All of us at Castleton school could do those things – not just before we left secondary school at sixteen, but before we left primary school aged eleven.

Why, half a century later and the country so much richer, the teaching profession never so well-paid and the educational budget astronomical – and rising – do nearly half our children leave school ill-equipped for daily life?

Standards of basic literacy and numeracy were higher in the late-Victorian age than they are today.

Not least of the reasons for the shambles of our schools is that they are the playthings of a privileged and paranoid state bureaucracy – a nomenclatura – which has come to exist not for those it was designed to serve – the children – but for the benefit of the highly-unionised professionals who operate it.

As Ronald Reagan said, “The most chilling words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you’.”

18 Jun

Coniuntio Oppositorum

I count myself fortunate indeed to be living in a world of infinite possibilities and for that we have at long last escaped that oppressive environment in which you had to take what you were given. For example, when I was a boy I supposed I would always be a boy. Only recently I have I heard the voice of the liberating gospel of sexual freedom whisper – what do I mean whisper? I mean of course shout – in my ear that I can become a girl if I like. And that I can get government help with the plumbing in order to do so. I also grew up with the shockingly unimancipated and repressive Christian notion that, if I wanted to get married, it would have to be to a woman.

Thank whatever gods there be – the old pagan gods actually – that Christianity is now inoperative, so that today I am free to marry a man and to become a woman. I suppose that’s as it should be really: a man married to a woman.

But I have a few questions. What if, exercising my pagan rights, I marry a man and then he decides to turn into a woman? Would this be grounds for my divorcing him/her? Would we, after the complicated plumbing involved, even still be married?

You might think such arcane issues are intractable and labyrinthine in their personal, moral and social ramifications. But their settlement is easy-peasy compared with something I’ve just been reading about.

In the USA Rachel Dolezal says “I do take exception because it’s a little more complex than me identifying as black or answering a question of, ‘Are you black or white?’”

I will try to get this as clear as I can and set it out in black and white, so to speak.

Ms Dolezal has resigned from her position as a big noise in The National Association for the Advancement of Black People because, while she had formerly always claimed to be black, she was recently exposed – by her parents! – as white.

I find this most disappointing, for clearly western society is not as enlightened and liberated as I had thought. Surely Ms Dolezal had no cause to resign just for telling that little porky about being black when she’s white? I thought we could all be whatever we want to be. Clearly this is not so and the forces of social oppression are not finally defeated.

Unfortunately, the matter is even more complicated. Ms Dolezal now claims she is black and indeed she worked tirelessly for an association which promotes the advancement of black people and denounces racial prejudice against them. But Ms Dolezal has form. Eleven years ago she sued her university because, she claimed, its authorities had shown racial prejudice towards her as a white woman by favouring some black people in her class.

So it appears we don’t have to be black or white; we can be black and white provided, as in the comparable case of sex – what they now call gender – we do these things sequentially.

At this point high imagination fails and I start to get all my metaphors more mixed up than even Ms Dolezal: kettles calling pans black; having your cake and eating it; one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and go, go go!

O brave new world that hath such people in it…

16 Jun

Laudato si

Pope Francis is proving to be a nippy mover. Following his encyclical denouncing capitalism, he has written to us all again in a long letter about climate change and what he refers to as “the planet.” Well, he was wrong to condemn capitalism which is the single economic system to have raised more millions out of poverty than all the other systems ever tried. Perhaps the Holy Father can make up for his earlier mistake in his new letter? And, contrary to popular opinion, the Pope is not infallible except when speaking ex cathedra on matters of dogma.

It’s a gloomy read. Climate change is a catastrophic threat to our well-being, and even to our survival, and most of it is our own fault. He adds, “The Earth is protesting for the wrong that we are doing to her, because of the irresponsible use and abuse of the goods that God has placed on her. We have grown up thinking that we were her owners and dominators, authorized to loot her. The violence that exists in the human heart, wounded by sin, is also manifest in the symptoms of illness that we see in the Earth, the water, the air and in living things.”

Is it really as bad as all that?

No, not really. The prophets of doom themselves in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – whose non-scientist chairman is a committed climate alarmist – reckon that global warming has latterly been occurring at the rate of 0.05◦C per decade. Effectually, there has been no warming for the last fifteen years.

Leave aside for a moment the apostles of the new secular religion of man-made apocalypse and instead bring on the experts and some facts. Professor Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, writes, “In the constant media barrage of possible greenhouse-related catastrophes, almost any event is now linked to climate change. We should not spend vast amounts of money to cut a tiny slice off the global temperature when this constitutes a poor use of resources and when we could use these funds far more effectively in the developing world.” For saying this, Lomborg has had death threats from the new politically-motivated apocalypticists. Other scientists who do not toe the global warming-is-happening-and-it’s-all-our- fault line have received the same. There are plenty of dissenters. A whole regiment of senior climatologists and meteorologists wrote to The Times last year to complain that they couldn’t get their research findings published – because they disagreed with the maniacal orthodoxy.

If we enjoy a warm spring, the fanatics and obsessives put it down to global warming. If we have an extra cold winter, they tell us it’s a result of global warming. If my nose feels cold or you get an attack of the gout, it will be owing to global warming. The same explanation will be given if England retain the Ashes – or indeed if we lose them. In short, global warming has taken upon itself the character of a fundamentalist religion. And it is the nature of such religions that nothing, but nothing, is allowed to count against them.

I can remember the 1950s and 1960s, colder decades, when the experts confidently threatened us with an imminent ice age. The records over the millennia show that the one thing we know for certain about the climate is that it is constantly changing. The regular cycle of climate change on earth is a series of ice ages interrupted by short periods of temperate weather. There are many eminent geographers and geologists, who have not swallowed the propaganda about global warming, and they tell us that actually we are overdue the next ice age.

Even in the period we call modern history, there have occurred much bigger climate changes than anything we are seeing now. Parts of the 18^th century were much colder than today. Dickens speaks of times when the Thames froze over for weeks on end. Whereas in the 9^th century, there were vines growing in Greenland. Are we to suppose that the warmth which produced vines at such a northerly latitude was owing to Vikings driving around in four-by-fours? Why do you think Greenland was so called? Because a thousand years ago it was fertile. Since then we have had global cooling. How do you think Hannibal got his elephants over the Alps – with skis and crampons? No, only because in his day there was hardly any snow or ice in southern Europe. Incidentally, the Greens are notorious for getting their predictions wrong. Again I can remember the oil crisis of the 1970s when they told us assuredly that the world would have finally run out of oil by the year 2000. Wrong again, spectacularly.

Furthermore, Global warming is reckoned to be caused by two gases: methane and carbon dioxide. The fact is that the amount of methane in the atmosphere has actually reduced in recent years. And, within the margin of error, levels of carbon dioxide have remained the same. Carbon dioxide is a gas necessary to sustain life on earth and most of it comes from plants and human exhalations. Actually, warming is good for us: there are far more deaths from cold than from heat and, given the chance, people migrate to warm countries.

Why is there this obsession with global warming, this fierce insistence that it is happening and that it is our fault? First, it’s a nice little earner for the university laboratories. Governments have been persuaded by the Green lobby that global warming is happening and so they are chucking money at research departments that will tell them what they want to know. After the fall of Communism, the Left has adopted pretended care for the environment as a stick with which to beat big business. Global warming is happening, they say, and it’s all the fault of the nasty capitalists. Green is the new Red. Strange how people who say they care for the environment deface it with useless wind farms.

The global warming apocalyptics is in reality a new totalitarianism. The government and the BBC will not even discuss climate change. Those who dispute it are shamefully called “deniers” – which is meant to compare them with Holocaust deniers. The former Climate Change Secretary, Ed Davey, says sceptics are dishonest and “wilfully ignorant,” and Prince Charles calls them “headless chickens.”

As Lord Lawson of Blaby has written, “There are hundreds of millions of people in dire poverty, suffering malnutrition, preventable disease, and premature death. Asking the poor to abandon the cheapest available sources of energy is asking them to delay the conquest of malnutrition, to perpetuate the incidence of preventable disease, and to increase the numbers of premature deaths.

“Global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked.”

I don’t expect this Leftie Pope Frank to be hearing many confessions from penitent members of the IPCC

15 Jun

What causes stuff?

“Britain’s youngest suicide bomber” – some appellation, eh? – Talha Asmal was described as “loving, caring, naive, innocent kind and affable.” I think those who thus praised him perhaps forgot to add “fanatical and murderous.” Now there is an investigation to discover what “caused” him to decide to become a murderer in the employ of Islamic State. There is a great industry in this business of looking for causes and I’m reminded of the case of Andreas Lubitz who committed mass murder by crashing a Germanwings aeroplane into the Alps. There has been a meticulous search for causes in his case too.

How about, in both cases, we were to say that they perpetrated those atrocities because they wanted to? Or have we suddenly become determinists and deny that there is such a faculty as freewill?

Determinism, looking for causes, is a very popular sport among those of a secular, positivistic, scientific disposition. This doctrine allows them to avoid having to take into account entities which they find problematic such as mind and will, moral qualities – or the lack of them.

The trouble with the deterministic view is that it logically entails the conclusion that, if no one is to be blamed for the wrong that they do, then no one can be praised when they do what is right. In short, ethics is abolished. There’s nothing either good or bad, but “causes” make things so.

So what of the Catholic nun who takes the place of a Jewish woman in the queue for the gas chamber? Or the policeman who dives for a second time into the freezing lake to save a child?

If all our actions are caused, then no villain is ever guilty and no hero deserves praise.

The deterministic world is one in which everything that we mean by a human being has been removed.

I have just enjoyed a duck egg on fried bread. I shall now spend the rest of the day trying to work out what “caused” me to eat my breakfast.

03 Apr

Bread and Circuses

These television events that are breaking out everywhere like a rash are not political debates. A debate is a verbal contest conducted according to rational principles, featuring the arts of sequential thought and rhetorical skills. Last night’s septet was just bread and circuses. So what’s the point of them?

They are done for the sake of the broadcasters. It gives them things to do: first the relentless trailers, billing, advertising and promoting the whole nonsense; then the farce itself; and then, for a bonus, the endless analysis. What analysis? There is no more genuine analysis than there was debate in the first place.

Such drivel is not susceptible to analysis. They’d be better off analysing the entrails of a dead cat.

But see how it fills up the air time – and that’s all the broadcasters want.

Actually, it’s not quite all. What they hope for – and usually get – is some solecism, some slip, some unguarded remark by one or more of the participants. Then they run over this again and again in endless gleeful repeats.

Would it be possible to have proper debates? It might be, but really there would be no point to them. A public debate is only as good as its public. And the British public is so intellectually debauched and linguistically deprived by generations of lousy schooling and the ravenous pop culture that it wouldn’t recognise a rational argument if it were to sit up and bite them on the bum.

Scrap the debates. Bring on the gladiators, the Christians and the lions. If we must, let’s at least have some real bread and circuses.

15 Mar

Mozart

The London Philharmonic came to Eastbourne today to play a Rossini overture, Beethoven’s first symphony, a Haydn piano concerto from about 1780 and Mozart’s last symphony, the Jupiter in C-major K551. The Rossini was fun as always – all those perpetually, postponed climaxes. The piano concerto was very dainty, but hardly the best work from a man of forty-eight who had had the opportunity to hear such as Mozart’s astonishingly original E-flat piano concerto K271. But the Jupiter – that was in a different category entirely.

It is one of three symphonies by Mozart composed in the summer of 1788 – the other two being the E-flat K543 and the G-minor K550 – and he died without hearing any of them performed. So the Jupiter was composed twelve years before Beethoven’s first. It is hardly imaginable: the Mozart is so far advanced of the Beethoven. I cannot believe he managed to stuff so much music into so little space. The constant invention of melodies is miraculous and the whole work keeps slipping from ternary form into fugue and back again, until the entire wonder of it constantly falls over itself, scrambling towards ever greater excitement and vivacity unto the consummation.

It is in C-major and there are military echoes of Non piu andrai – Mozart’s own favourite tune – from Figaro. But also some interludes which presage the Requiem. I find this symphony quite beyond all comprehension. It is gloriously tuneful and transcendentally inventive throughout. But the last movement is scarcely believable: a sonata movement which turns into a five part fugue – to which Mozart then adds a coda. The harmonies – firmly diatonic but then also daringly chromatic – are so complicated that it is as if the score were being read and played right way up and upside down at the same time. Yet it doesn’t sound confused. Quite the opposite. It contrives at once to be both intricate and straightforward, immediate, effervescent, affectionate, tender and mystical.

Above all, perhaps, it sounds so modern, as if it had been composed yesterday. What did Tom Eliot say? “All great artists are contemporaries.”

15 Mar

An every day story of psychopaths

The newspapers and TV continue their obsession with the three “vulnerable,” “straight A” Muslim girls who, on the proceeds of jewellery they stole from their parents, went off to Syria to join the enthusiastic representatives of the religion of peace and love. I hope this media obsession continues: we could have a new alternative soap opera on our hands here, even more exciting than The Archers whose writers and producers – though they are pretty good at producing lurid plot lines – have not yet got around to burning the village church in Ambridge or beheading the Rural Dean of Borchester.

The three “vulnerable” young ladies are now well set up in Raqqa where they live in houses confiscated from members of the local population. Here they await the arrival of their husbands-to-be, blood-soaked psychopaths of Islamic State. I do hope that, courtesy of continued co-operation between the IS website and the British Press, we get to see the arrival of these handsome young men and that there will be video footage of the weddings: the jihadi grooms in their fetching black masks and their brides smiling effulgently – we imagine – under their Halloween costumes.

It won’t be long before the children come along. In the nature of the case, we shall not of course see videos of their Christenings or Bar Mitzvas, but it is to be hoped that we might be let in to the boy children’s instruction in general misogyny and wholesale iconoclasm; and even that we might receive first-hand reports of the girl children’s genital mutilation.

Then at last will come the great day when the whole family goes out on a picnic during which the excited kids get to watch their very first beheading. The older children might even be allowed to participate.

This brilliant new soap opera will require a signature tune, of course: Dum dee dum dee dum dee dum; Dum dee dum dee da da: Smite the kuffars dum dee dum; Allahu dum dee Akbar

18 Feb

Infantilised pedagogy

I can manage only so much spiritual exaltation at a quarter to eight in the morning, so that’s why I needed a second cup of tea before listening to Lucy Winkett deliver her oxymoronically titled Thought for the Day. It began with that infantile pedagogical device, so beloved of the clergy: first, patronise your listeners by finding some item in the news and then stitch on to it a spiritual “message” so that we thickies will understand. Alan Bennett’s spoof sermon on Beyond the Fringe comes to mind with its “Life is like a tin of sardines. You open the tin and consume the sardines therein, but there’s always a little bit left in the corner, isn’t there? is there a little bit in the corner of your life? I know there is in mine.” Although Bennett’s offering was at a rather more elevated intellectual level than Ms Winkett’s contribution.

Back to the infantilised pedagogy then. She began by telling us about the planned expedition to send people to Mars. Those going would require courage and perhaps even a little foolishness, she said. And then she packed the real spiritual punch. Lent is like that trip to Mars. ‘Cos Lent too is a journey – geddit, thickies?

I weep, because this sort of stuff interferes with my attempts to earn a living, part of which I do by writing satirical articles for the newspapers. But, given the likes of Ms Winkett’s sermonettes, satire becomes impossible, for they are living parodies.

Best to stop talking about her then and think for a minute about Lent. This penitential season has become a consumerist gimmick. It features in the same sections of the newspapers that cover dieting and lifestyle. Are we to give up biscuits or booze?

As John McEnroe used to shout, “You cain’t be serious!”

Let us suppose for a minute that Lent is a time for trying to think and learn more about God. I know that sounds bizarre, but I ask you to entertain it, if only for a moment. How might this be attempted? In The Book of Common Prayer, the Psalms – all one hundred and fifty of them – are printed, a few to be said every morning and a few every evening in the month. You could read them each day, before breakfast and before supper. They are a treasure house of rare devotion and the Prayer Book uses Miles Coverdale’s sublime translation. I had a Jewish friend who could read the Psalms in their original Hebrew; but he claimed Coverdale’s version was an improvement – in much the same way that Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust is said to be better than Proust himself

So I suggest reading the Psalms. Then you can think about going to Mars – or at least you might eat a biscuit.

But if you must insist on giving something up for Lent, I suggest you give up Thought for the Day

16 Feb

Christianist terrorism

I haven’s been blogging this year so far because I’m trying to write a humorous book about the great philosophers, but recent events have encouraged me to open my blog again this morning.

All these terrorist atrocities in so many countries: it’s time we asked who is responsible. I think it’s religious people. Take those murders in Paris last month: the security forces know damn well that these were perpetrated by a lone wolf Primitive Methodist. The carnage in Libya? I’m afraid it’s those pesky Baptists again. Massacres in Nigeria? It’s those violent Lutherans. Beheadings in Syria? They’re all the fault of an extreme sect of the United Reform Church. Burning people alive in iraq? Look, this is obviously the work of the Salvation Army. And now the shocking murders in Copenhagen? I have it on good authority that these were carried out by a disaffected traditionalist in the Church of England who had for many years prior to 2012 been known to frequent St Michael’s Cornhill where he had been radicalised and gone on to receive training at a camp in Chipping Camden organised by the Prayer Book Society.

It is quite scandalous that these murderers on three continents are allowed to hide behind their religion. Our authorities are so hidebound by political correctness that they will not identify these vile people and root them out. I notice that the Archbishop of Canterbury has wearily trotted out the old lie: “These terrorists are not representative of Christianity which is a religion of peace and love.” If this is the case, Archbishop, why are all the perpetrators members of that faith? Justin Welby adds, “These people are not Christians but Christianists.”

Respectfully, Archbishop, that’s rubbish

What is to be done? The General Synod, the Methodist Conference and the Baptist Union must act together and send special forces into bring and buy sales and coffee mornings and root out the culprits. They must be given no refuge – no, not even at beetle drives, coffee mornings and the Church Lads’ Brigade hut.

22 Dec

Dying by euphemism

A man in Dijon has been described as “unbalanced” after he drove his car deliberately into pedestrians while shouting Allahu Akbar. A very creative use of a word, that “unbalanced.” It makes me think we should revise our vocabulary when describing perpetrators of atrocities. So, we might say, Hitler was “a little bit naughty” when he slaughtered six million Jews. And Stalin should be excused for murdering twenty million. He was probably feeling “somewhat off colour old bean” and perhaps he had been taking painkillers.

Come to think of it, there are more than a few people in the world who must be – shall we say? – “not feeling too clever.”

In Nigeria they burn villages and kill the inhabitants, abduct girls, rape them and make them convert to their perverted religion. There are similar goings-on at the hands of chaps who are perhaps “not feeling too good” in Mali, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya. Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. While in Pakistan feeling “not quite top hole” causes devotees of the same evil cult to murder Christians, burn down churches and shoot schoolchildren dead.

I blame the NHS. How about you?

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

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