Fun new game!

Thanks to, um, someone at the BHT, I now know of a fun applet called Wordle. You put text in, and out come pretty pictures like these. They're books of the Bible (AV): the game is to guess which. One's really obvious, one has a strong clue in it and one is probably a bit harder to pin down exactly.

EDIT: to clarify, you can click on the pictures to see them much-enlarged. And actually, if you look really hard, you should be to get the one I thought hardest, too.

Question Time, 26-Jun-08

This week's Question Time was a bit of a hoot. The potter Grayson Perry was on, which caused all sorts of un-PC thoughts to come rushing through my mind when Yvette Cooper, in the context of Harriet Harman's "Legalisation of Discrimination against White Males" bill, talked about "part-time women" [1].

Anyway, in another question, Perry claimed that he would be quite happy to pay an extra 10% tax or whatever because it would be going to help people who needed it. And you should have seen the round of applause he got for that line; how magnanimous of someone to be willing to pay more tax!

But this is one of these lines I've never quite understood: the phrasing always implies that the individual is paying less tax than they think 'fair'. But the option of paying the 'extra' is entirely open to him. He could write a cheque to Her Majesty's Robbers and Crooks; they'll be quite happy to accept it, I'm sure. Or alternatively, he's highly likely to have an accountant: so just instruct him to maximise the tax bill, rather than to minimise it. It'll be a refreshing change for the chap, I'm sure.

I would surmise that in all probability, that doesn't happen: Perry doesn't write cheques to the Revenue to cover whatever shortfall he thinks he's left unpaid in his tax, and he's probably never instructed his accountant to maximise his tax bill. Reason? He'd only be happy to pay the extra if everyone else in his circumstances did so.

So I never believe anyone who says they'd happily pay more tax: if they'd really happily pay more tax, they would be sending donations to the Exchequer already. Therefore, it is in fact a charitable pretence, aimed at achieving control over other people's pockets; it hides a deeply unpleasant impulse under a smiling face. And I plain don't like it.

[1] Actually, the bill's idea isn't quite so stupid when you inspect it closely: it's only meant to protect firms against lawsuits when they select a female or ethnic minority candidate over a white male in cases where the candidates are basically indistinguishably qualified. But as someone in the QT audience pointed out, if you've only got one job, it's got to go to someone. So why bother?

So do we eat it, or burn it?

The law of unintended consequences is hard at work once more. This is relatively old news, of course; it's just that Oxfam has published a report which points out that the push for biofuels is exerting upside pressure on crop prices. What's interesting to me is where you take something like that.

Oxfam is calling for the EU to drop its 2020 target of 10% renewable-fuelled transport in order to help the poor. And centrally-driven EU targets are unlikely to do much good, it's true. But as I've argued before, and as the BBC says President da Silva of Brazil points out, increases in crop prices are generally good news for Third World farmers, who can get a better price for their crops and therefore afford to feed, clothe, house and educate their families.

Incidental objections

Oxfam's objections to the policy are its effects: they claim that the high price of fuel crops causes the destruction of the rainforests, labour standards are practically non-existent, that small landowners are marginalised and that food security is adversely affected. But all those are merely incidental to the industry. In fact, you can see that none of them is inherent to the question of fuel crops, even the food security argument. Let me convince you.

Rainforests are logged because logs command a price and because the land can be used for—well, just about anything. Labour standards are poor in the Third World for various reasons, none of which is to do with the crop being raised: weak labour laws, poor governance and corrupt officials are particular scourges in that regard. The problems with small landowners are all related from Indonesia: whether they exist elsewhere is not known. Even so, most of the problems are again to do with a lack of strong contract law, little recourse to the courts and a poor education.

Food security

As the report recognises, for fuel crop-exporting countries, the rising cost of fuel crops will counter-act the rising cost of food: which wins is anyone's guess, I suppose. But as they point out, other countries have problems due to internal conflict, poor infrastructure and the like. However, those countries would retain the problem of lack of food even if food prices completely collapsed, since their problem is that they have little access to, and therefore little influence from, the world market.

Those countries which have no real access to world markets need help to gain that access: since many of them will be near-warzones, I can't see what that help would be. But for those countries which are well able to supply their own needs, we don't need to worry so much. We cannot tell whether higher crop prices will help or harm them, so how can we tell what lower prices will do? Oxfam are right to call for the EU target to be dropped, but wrong to suppose that this is because lower crop prices will necessarily help Third World farmers. We should drop the target because we don't understand its implications well enough.

And because this is another post concentrating on the EU and Third World farmers, let me end with a phrase I could have nicked from Cato: CAP delenda est.

Northern Rock repossessions begin

This is Money reports.

Christina Georgiou and their three children live in a five-bedroomed house, valued at £385,000 in April, in Goff's Oak, Hertfordshire. Or used to. They've been served with papers and must vacate within a month.

They illustrate the massive failure that the recent banking spree has been: he a taxi driver, she a part-time cafe worker, and yet they obtained £300,000 in mortgage credit followed by a further £60,000. Of course, they're not the only borrowers to be evicted, or probably the first; but she's the first willing to talk about it. This is Money claims there are estimates of six families a day who are having to forfeit their homes, because they cannot keep up with payments and are in negative equity.

Of course, we knew this would have to happen, and Mrs. Georgiou accepts freely that both borrower and lender have been irresponsible. But can the buck stop there? Will politicians let it?

Although some people would claim that we need more government support and money to solve the problem, I'm not convinced that would be anything more than a sticking plaster. While throwing money at people who've lost their homes may help those individuals, I believe that no Chancellor will ever, as Gordon Brown notoriously claimed, abolish boom and bust. Instead, the only alleviation will come from schools and colleges, in partnership with parents, teaching financial responsibility to the nation's children.

I was watching a DVD based on the story of Joseph last night, and I was reminded that we have excellent precedent for the idea of saving during the fat years in order to survive during the lean ones. And yet, this seems to have passed by modern Britain, a nation which treats its houses as money trees and, spending the lot, denudes itself of the shelter it needs when the storms come.

And they call him the Justice Secretary

On my good days, I tend to think that, by and large, the government have their hearts in the right place; it's their heads I really worry about. But Jack Straw, of whom I've generally thought as one of the particularly good guys, wants to enshrine, in law, the opposite of this decision of the Law Lords. The Law Lords ruled that witnesses cannot be completely anonymous, since this would make defence impossible. According to the BBC,

the Law Lords argued it has been a fundamental principle of English Law that the accused should be able to see his accusers and challenge them,

a line almost exactly parallel to Festus' explanation of his conduct in Acts 25:16:

I answered them that it was not the custom of the Romans to give up anyone before the accused met the accusers face to face and had opportunity to make his defense concerning the charge laid against him.

Indeed, the way the Deuteronomic handling of witnesses is presented, it sounds like it was a condition of law in Ancient Israel, too. Clearly, not every aspect of Israel's legal system can be copied in our present day: I would argue, to take a counter-example, that the existence of prisons makes certain punishments prescribed in the Torah to be unnecessary.

However, the way we handle witnesses is simply a function of human relations and the way we exercise justice. As long as we believe in the value of evidence in law, we need witnesses. And as long as we believe in the aim of justice as the fiding out of truth, we must believe in testing those witnesses for their reliability. Finally, as long as we believe Blackstone's ratio to be greater than one, we must ensure that, subject to the normal standards of behaviour, the defence is not hampered in its efforts.

It would be yet another erosion of justice as preserved within our common law tradition—a tradition with roots in British history, Roman law and also biblical example—for the government to abandon the principle that witness testimony must be open to dispute by the defence.

Where's the front-line?

It's a commonplace to hear from the Government that our Armed Forces are fighting in hot and dusty countries in order to preserve our security, our way of life and our freedoms. It is also a commonplace to hear from senior Cabinet Ministers that we must support them in their work.

So why does our Government think that it can best serve those honourable men and women by dismantling the very freedoms they are fighting to protect? Last week, I think we saw that the real front-line in the fight for historic British liberties appears to be the Palace of Westminster.

Islam "stuck in the Middle Ages"

That's what the Times is reporting Hans Kung as saying in a lecture delivered in London and to be broadcast later this month. And of course, he'd know a thing or two about religions stuck in the Middle Ages. *ahem*

But what if—just, what if?—Wahhabi Islam, or its supermovement Salafi Islam, were the Islamic Reformation? If you're looking for similarities, how's about these?

• Wahhabism is fundamentally a movement of the written word.
• Salafism credits the Qur'an with inerrancy.
• Wahhabism believes in an ad fontes approach to the Qur'anic canon.
• Wahhabism holds to Mathison's famed "Tradition I".
• Wahhabism advocates the necessity of the individual conscience in matters of religion, and yet is willing to enforce moral conduct.
• Wahhabism calls on the wider Muslim brotherhood to abandon the veneration of saints and the seeking of their intercessions.

It's not the case that you can produce a point-for-point exact replication of the Protestant Reformation in Wahhabism, clearly! If I thought that, I'd have more serious personal worries than simply whether calling for an Islamic Reformation is not without its dangers. But it is interesting that, as far as the more "generic" aspects of the Reformation go, Salafism/Wahhabism sounds quite close. And without wishing to attribute guilt by association, it's Wahhabism which gave rise to Osama bin Laden.

*snigger*

From the programme for the Lambeth Conference:

On July 17th and 18th in Canterbury Cathedral, and on the 19th July on the campus of the University, the Archbishop of Canterbury will lead all delegates in a time of retreat.

What's new?

Favourite verses

People have favourite verses of Scripture; I do, too, although often I suspect mine are a bit different. Hebrews 12:18–24, for instance, which is a rather wonderful passage about the church's gathered worship, presented in classic Old/New antithesis. But I'm not going to write about favourite verses of Scripture; I'm going to write about favourite verses of hymns, 'cos I've collected a few in my time.

One favourite comes from the conclusion of Wesley's "Jesus, the Name high over all". It's

His only righteousness I show,
His saving grace proclaim;
’Tis all my business here below
To cry “Behold the Lamb!”

In a sense, it sums up what we as Christians are all about. It's Christ's righteousness that we have, not any of our own; his saving grace which gives to us all that is needful. And that induces in us a response of grateful evangelism, as we are pleased to take hold of chances to tell other people about the Lord who gave everything for us.

From Davies' "Great God of wonders", a verse that isn't sung so often, but for all that is quite something.

Angels and men, resign your claim
To pity, mercy, love and grace:
These glories crown Jehovah’s Name
With an incomparable blaze.

It's a wonderful image, starting with all creation declaring that before the God of the universe, we can pretend no claim to pity, or mercy, or love, or grace, and moving us swiftly to see that these qualities, which belong to him alone, are, as a blaze of light, his crown.

What an epitaph!

While looking up the story of Edward Mote, the Strict Baptist pastor behind the hymn "My hope is built on nothing less", I discovered that his old church has a photo of his memorial tablet.

Note the middle lines:

The beloved pastor of this church, preaching Jesus Christ and him crucified, as all the sinner can need, and all the saint can desire.

Of course, some may say that perhaps one only needs preach Christ and him crucified some of the time. Not so Mote! Once when he was offered the title deeds of the church by his grateful congregation, he said, "I do not want the chapel, I only want the pulpit; and when I cease to preach Christ, then turn me out of that."

Would that Mote's spirit animated pastors in Britain today, eh?

My word, the man's a mind-reader

This is exactly how I think about it…

The best things in life…

I bought New Song's Psalms of Praise from Crown & Covenant a month or so ago, and very good it is too. They do go a little quickly, especially compared with Sing a New Song, but by doing so they fit about forty psalms into seventy minutes, which isn't bad going. Included are a very nice version of the ending of Psalm 22, and an absolutely brilliant setting of Psalm 148 which is great fun.

Not twenty minutes ago, I discovered that it is possible to get the entire lot for free from Geneva College. And you can see loads of the Book of Psalms for Singing (the source for Psalms of Praise and also Sing a New Song; it's not the whole lot) from Google Books. Go get 'em!

Is FairTrade such a good deal? - 2

So, one of my main concerns about FairTrade is a kind of historico-political one. FairTrade appears to function as a kind of neo-colonialist enterprise, in which FairTraders communicate to Third World producers that Westerners know what's best.

For instance, the FairTrade "social premium", paid to the farmer or community for development purposes, is wrapped in all sorts of rules about how it may be spent, and who may administer, and about the democratic structure that has to be set up, and it's all terribly bureaucratic and cumbersome. It smacks of a Western colonial mindset, in which the ex-patriate governor thinks "I'd awfully like to help them develop, but I can't possibly trust them with the money". Why can't traditional social structures be used to administer the money? Why must Westerners insist that Africans and Latin Americans follow Western social patterns?

Or take, on the other side of the coin, labour-saving machinery. So far from offering advice on appropriate ways to improve yields and decrease labour costs by using new techniques and chemicals or acquiring modern machinery, noises one hears now and again from the FairTrade lobby tend to suggest that some of them are Ludd redivivus. Take the socially-acceptable but ill-informed fascination with "traditional techniques" and "organic farming". Take, for example, this, from Global Exchange [1].

Q. Are Fair Trade products also organic or shade grown?
A. No, but Fair Trade criteria require sustainable farming techniques, and offer an extra premium for organic production. Revenues from Fair Trade cooperatives are often used to train producers in organic and sustainable techniques like composting and integrating recycled materials. Most Fair Trade coffee and cocoa are shade grown and organic because these are the traditional methods used by small farmers- approximately 80-85% of all Fair Trade coffee farms do not use pesticides. Organic and shade-grown methods are important for the health of local communities and the earth, so look for these labels on Fair Trade to support the best of all worlds.

Sustainability, of course, is a good aim, but is organic produce really better for local communities—better even than being able to produce enough crops to pay for food, school, medicines and more besides? We must leave traditional techniques well alone, they say. Never mind that we in the West had our own "traditional techniques" to grow out of in order to make progress in growing more food with less labour. Never mind that agricultural advance frees labour to stop working in the fields and start working in the factories. Never mind that industry, not agriculture, makes a nation rich.

Well, that's all quite negative, and I have a lot of friends at church who are deeply into FairTrade, to whom I'm just not sure I have the heart to explain that there are deep cracks in the FairTrade system. Additionally, it can be hard to argue against the point that a Third World farmer receiving more money is a good thing rather than a bad thing.  Indeed, FairTrade does help some farmers and alleviate some problems.

But I can make a positive case, which is for something a little different, and which would have far greater effects than any amount of FairTrade subsidy. Briefly, the problems at our end surrounding this question are not to do with the prices paid for cocoa beans but, as I hope you've realised by now, the fact that we don't see many chocolate bars which say "Made in Cote d'Ivoire."

I wrote to the FairTrade Foundation recently asking this question. One thing the reply said was that some producers are investing in First World processing facilities. That was more concerning than comforting, in that it's probably more important for the plant to be in the Third World than its owners. They only take the profits, whereas the workforce gets the wages.

More helpfully, the reply did highlight a few problems with getting manufactured goods exported from the Third World to Europe in particular. Of note as things we in the EU can change are tariffs designed to protect home industries and regulatory standards— some standards are necessary, but I'd lay good money some are simple protectionism. In other words, freeing our trade with the rest of the world and eliminating that monstrosity called the CAP will give us access to cheaper goods and give the Third World access to richer markets, as well as encouraging investment into those countries which so desperately need it. So who's the loser in that story?

Old-fashioned free trade, you see, is the best sort of FairTrade there is.

[1] Fair Trade Q&A, Global Exchange.

Is FairTrade such a good deal? - 1

FairTrade is one of those things that sounds like a great idea. And even a few months ago, I was very positive [1] about Tate & Lyle's decision to get their entire product range certified FairTrade. However, there are indications that FairTrade may not do as much good as you'd think. Tony Payne, of Matthias Media, wrote about them not so long ago [2].

A recent report [3] from the Adam Smith Institute—who, of course, have a laissez-faire axe to grind—suggested that the FairTrade Foundation is trying to achieve a "moral monopoly", which should be enough to worry anyone. And it seems to be true: how many other "fair trade" certification schemes are there? And yet, if the FairTrade Foundation is not doing as good a job as it could, it needs competition in order to keep it honest. So there's criticism number one: they are distorting the free market in moralising!

But there are others, too. Perhaps the strongest economic argument, to my mind, is that, to coin a slogan, "FairTrade won't help until we get FairIndustry." What I mean is that no amount of extra payment for agricultural products will really help farmers in the Third World, when what they need is mechanisation and in-country processing. Most of the value of any product is added in manufacturing, so until industry moves to the Third World they will, in all probability, remain poor.

Another good argument is that FairTrade products will necessarily be of a lower quality than their "non-fair" equivalents. After all, put yourself in the position of a farmer with two bags of cocoa, one of which will command a price on the open market in excess of the FairTrade price, and the other, a price below it. Which does he sell where? He sells his "good" bag on the open market and fobs the FairTrader off with his lower-quality produce. Therefore, we can see that FairTrade subsidises bad producers. That's not fair!

I'll carry this on tomorrow, with one of my main concerns, which isn't particularly economic, although it involves some economics, and also outline what I think is the real course of action we should be taking.

[1] Who said no news is good news?, The Melangerie.
[2] Smell the coffee, The Sola Panel. I ought to point out that The Sola Panel is not an arm of MM.
[3] Unfair Trade (.pdf), Adam Smith Institute.

I make that two of four

Well, I got the "saved" references spot on, and I reckon my second attempt at the "girl in the library" was pretty good: she had been saved, just not when I thought; and the computer was going a bit spare. If I'd guessed she was the mainframe, I'd still not quite have been right, she was both.

So, I ain't bad.

New prediction

I was chatting about the Doctor Who episode with some friends last night and I had another idea. And of course, I need to get it out before tomorrow night, or it'll look ex eventu if I'm right and really stupid if I'm wrong.

So the shrink tells the girl that the world of nightmares is real, and that the "real world" isn't. That wouldn't make sense if she's a 21st century human, or similar, as this world is definitely real, even in the Doctor Who universe. She's somewhere which isn't the real world.

Now, think about the security camera and the telephone and the television remote. She's connected to the library. And she refers to it as "her" library.

Finally, the library has been "saving" people, which I am quite convinced means storing them in computerised memory, or something similar. So there's a group of people who are already connected to the library quite intimately (and Donna, of course, has joined them).

So what? I reckon there's a synthesis of the three facts: the girl is one of the people saved from the Vashta Nerada (or however we're meant to spell it), but perhaps something's gone a little funny in the computer, and she's awake and conscious, albeit in a fantasy world generated within the computer. She's in the Matrix!

On errors in mediation

The problem, to which I hinted earlier, about Roman Catholicism and Charismaticism, as far as reading the Old Testament is concerned, is this: they don't read it through the person and work of Jesus Christ. They have an unmediated Old Testament.

Take an example from the charismatics. On the tendency of charismatics to pronounce solemnly "touch not the Lord's anointed" whenever more conservative evangelicals express disquiet about, say, an egotistical violent nutcase, John Halton commented at the Boar's Head Tavern that, all too often, they forget that the way the New Testament applies the epithet "anointed of the Lord" is to Jesus [1].

And that happens with so much else. Ultimately, charismatics read of the Old Testament prophets, and fail to understand that Christ is the true Prophet for the people of God. They want to resurrect the Old Testament notion of prophecy, failing to understand that prophecy in the New Testament church means something far more amazing: everyone is gifted to speak forth the word of the Lord, because we all have his word in front of us.

The same, although differently, is true of Roman Catholics. By failing to read the Old Testament through Christ, they fail to appreciate the fullness of his priestly work, and so believe that there must remain a priesthood today. I think it might be possible to make a similar argument as regards the office of king as it seems to be perpetuated in the papacy.

The mirror is this: the charismatics read about Old Testament prophets and want them still to exist, while the Roman Catholics read about Old Testament priests and want them still to exist.

And when you watch some of the American televangelist channels, as I have done occasionally, you can see how the two errors are not so far apart. In its excesses, charismaticism and pentecostalism, for all that its main proponents are probably quite anti-Romanist, reflects a lot of medieval Roman Catholicism in its activities. I have seen the constant drumbeat for money; the sale of 'sacred items', prayed over by ones of the leaders; the excessive interest in and speculation surrounding the miraculous and the supernatural; and the undue elevation of human leaders. All these errors have direct analogues in medieval Roman Catholic practice, and they are all, at one level or another, a malign influence, tending to draw people away from the Gospel.

[1] Actually, John never really made it clear of whom he was thinking, so technically, that's what we call "abductive reasoning". Less technically, it's an educated guess.

For you bear it if someone … puts on airs, or strikes you in the face.

To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that!

Thanks to Puritan, whose comment put me on the trail of this video. This adds to the somewhat preponderant evidence against any notion that Todd Bentley is truly acting in the name of God.

Incidentally, I had a thought about Roman Catholicism, rampant Charismaticism and an inability to read the Old Testament. But I'll keep you in "suspenders" for a while, and write it up shortly.

To all you taxpayers out there…

I wish you (Un)Happy Tax Freedom Day. The government takes about 40% of British net national income in its various taxes, which, if you look at that as a percentage of the calendar year, works out as making the 2nd of June the day when the average Brit stops working and spending for government, and starts to feel the benefits himself.

No matter how you feel about taxation—necessary evil, intolerable intrusion or anything in between—it's worth reflecting that in 1963, Tax Freedom Day (had it been marked) would have fallen on the 24th of April.