AN OUTSIDE VIEW

The teachings of the Catholic Church on the subject of property are neatly summed up in clauses in John XXIII's encyclical Mater et Magister of 1961. 19. Secondly, private ownership of property, including that of productive goods, is a natural right which the State cannot suppress. But it naturally entails a social obligation as well. It is a right which must be exercised not only for one's own personal benefit but also for the benefit of others. 43. Concerning the use of material goods, Our Predecessor declared that the right of every man to use these for his own sustenance is prior to every other economic right, even that of private property. The right to the private possession of material goods is admittedly a natural one; nevertheless, in the objective order established by God, the right to property cannot stand in the way of the axiomatic principle that "the goods which were created by God for all men should flow to all alike, according to the principles of justice a...

As this expresses my views on the subject so precisely, I am re-publishing it. There is a certain Spot The Deliberate Mistake quality to proposals to make the monarchy more egalitarian or (God help us all) "meritocratic". The Act of Settlement is good for us Catholics. It reminds us that we are different, and it does us the courtesy of taking our beliefs seriously by identifying them as a real challenge. I question the viability of a Catholic community which devotes any great energy to the question of ascending the throne while the born sleep in cardboard boxes on the streets and the pre-born are ripped from their mothers' wombs to be discarded as surgical waste. Far from being a term of abuse, the word "Papist" is in fact the name under which the English Martyrs gave their lives, and expresses the cause for which they did so, making it a badge of honour, to be worn with pride. The Protestant tradition is a fact of this country's history and culture. No good...

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

Buckingham Palace Originally uploaded by ©Yazeed Scene: Gordon Brown and HM Queen's weekly meeting. HM: I think you have been looking a bit tired lately. PM: No I am fine. HM: Don't you think you could do with a break? PM: No the country needs me. I am going to save it. HM sighs. A couple of weeks later, PM is taken to King Edward VII's Hospital with "chest pains". After a week in hospital, PM resigns.

Många undrar om de finns liv i rymden. Innan teleskopet uppfanns såg planeterna ut som små ljuspricka i rymden, som rörde sig runt jorden. Galileo var den första som tittade på planeterna genom teleskop och sedan såg planeterna ut som små rondellar. Genom teleskopen såg han också att Jupiter hade fyra små månar som kretsade runt planeten. På grund av hans upptäckt konstaterade han att alla planeterna även jorden kretsade runt solen. Kyrkan hotade Galileo eftersom den ansåg att jorden låg i universums centrum. Under 1800 talet blev teleskop kraftigare och sedan blev det möjligt att titta på planeternas ytor. En astronom som heter Schiaparelli studerade Mars och påpekade hav och linjer som såg ut som vad han kallade ”canali”, det betyder kanaler. Samtidigt observerades att planetens norra och södra poler var täckta av is som växte och krympte under året. På grund av denna upptäckter trodde man att det kanske fanns ett slags människor som bodde på Mars. Under 1900 talet byggde astronomer ...

Advertising abortion and contraceptive advice on TV is likely to be permitted soon. The reason given is the rise in teenage pregnancies, but in this age of secularism what else can one expect? The strange thing is that the use of IVF is also on the increase because there are so many couples who cannot have children. So we have mothers who do not want the children they have got pregnant with and other people who are desperate to have them. This is where ebaby would come in, by bringing the two together. Children from the unwanted pregnancies are born instead of being aborted, and the couples who want the children get to adopt them instead of having to go through with IVF. It really is possible to satisfy everyone.

There is a row about London MPs who are claiming that they need second homes even though they are in commuting distance from Westminster, with calls for reform. Apparently MPs are dissatisfied with their basic salary of £63,000. They think they work hard for the money. Performance-related pay? How about performance-related pay for MPs? It could be linked to a few indices: inflation; employment; crime; life expectancy; and the affordability of housing, for a start. There should be deductions for wars started, bonuses for wars ended, and stoppages for incidents like terrorist attacks and epidemics amongst humans and animals. But if this really happened, the government would just massage the statistics, like they are doing with inflation.

Obama has made yet another attempt to deal with the financial crisis in the US, with a complex scheme risking trillions of dollars of taxpayers' money. Taxpayers will become part owners of so-called toxic assets, and investors will have the opportunity of making a profit if they turn out better than expected. This sounds wrong. Toxic assets consist of bad debts, lent on the security of land which was overpriced due to excessively free lending. This bubble has to be allowed to go down to its right size, and nobody knows what that is. But the more governments interfere, the longer the trouble will continue. This cannot be prevented without causing damage somewhere or other. It seems to me that people and companies who have lent to people who cannot pay it back, they should be made to write off the debts unconditionally. This seems to be a reasonable price to pay for their bad commercial decisions.

Yet again I have had a post removed from the Guardian's Comment is Free site because it was allegedly off topic. The thread was about the Equal Pay Act and wage reform. I was astonished. The comment was off topic to the extent that I pointed out that women's problems with employment were part of the more general issue whereby nearly everyone has been having trouble earning a livelihood in Britain for the past 250 years. That is hardly off-topic. "Off topic" applied to nearly all of the torrent of 478 furious comments, including mine, that Gordon Brown's article published at midnight had elicited by after 18 hours, when the Guardian closed the article to further comments. If anyone had gone through them and deleted the ones that were off-topic by this narrow definition there would have been few remaining, and the Guardian would have made a lot of posters even angrier. The moderators also complained saying that, "On a separate point, your links to http://www...

"We are about to take the war against terror to a new level", says Gordon Brown in the Observer today here This has generated an avalanche of outrage from commentators. Their views are worth reading, because the summarises the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the New Labour project. The literal bankruptcy of the UK is, I suppose, a logical consequence. Personally, I don't blame Brown or New Labour. The British brought it on themselves by their complacency, ignorance, greed, and refusal to engage in politics at an intellectual level. The prevailing mood is rage. Soon the masses will be taking to the streets but there will be no coherence to their demands. There will just be an emotion of anger. What the British will not do is sit down and think.

Supposing the Pope is right on condoms? The evidence certainly points that way. They may indeed "aggravate the problem". Some of us who have been there and done it say he is spot on. Condoms are readily available in Brighton yet the incidence of HIV here amongst homosexual men is the highest in the country. Report on incidence of aids Taking one thing and another, it seems to me that the Pope is the best thing we have had for a long time and he is a victim of people's determination to demonise the Catholic Church in general and the Pope in particular.

An article in this week's New Scientist described the doomsday scenario that would result from a solar flare - an energetic outburst from the sun occuring when sunspots become particularly active. Huge current surges would be generated in electricity transmission systems. They would be ruined and much electronic equipment would be damaged. It would take months even to begin to get services started again. The last event was in 1859, and although telegraph transmissions were disrupted, life carried on much as usual. The next time the effects will be catastrophic. The lights would go out and telephones would stop working. Computer systems would shut down and possibly suffer irreparable damage. Gas and water supplies and sewage systems would come to an immediate standstill as electric pumps stopped. So would all electric railways. Fuel supplies would cease shortly afterwards. We are far too dependent on electricity and high technology information systems.

Rail passengers are being forced to use older trains as the average age of rolling stock reached a five year high, according to the Office of Rail Regulation. The figures were seen as a condemnation of the Government's record on the railways by Theresa Villiers, the Tories' transport spokesman. Commenting on this news, "This news is more evidence of Labour's failure on our railways. For years Labour have been promising extra carriages but they never arrive and the average age of rolling stock continues to climb. Three successive Secretaries of State for transport have promised 1300 extra carriages and yet passengers are still stuck on enormously overcrowded and ageing trains." It is depressing when this kind of comment is bandied about. It does not help public debate. The government's rolling stock procurement programme has got into a mess, but the age of the trains is certainly not the issue and politicians should not be raising the matter. Surely there is en...

The end really is nigh. The Guardian Comment is Free has the occasional piece on religion. I quoted the Athanasian creed. As the primary document is in Latin and English translations are various and unreliable, I quoted the Latin one, with apologies. It is easy enough to get translations and compare them, which is what one has to do. Presumably someone complained and the moderators were happy to comply. European civilisation must be at its last gasp if one cannot quote the Creed in a discussion on religion in a discussion group run by what purports to be a quality British newspaper.

It has been suggested that taxes on alcoholic drinks should be drastically increased to reduce binge drinking. In Sweden, alcoholic drinks can only be purchased from Systembolaget, with one exception, lättöl (weak, full flavoured lager) with an alcohol content of 3.5%, which is available from supermarkets and is modestly priced. Anyone would have to drink an awful lot to get drunk. Whilst there is much to be said against having a state monopoly retailer, making a distinction between 3.5% drinks and stronger ones could indicate a way forward.

Another useless outfit is the Tax Justice Network. Their campaign is against tax havens. It should be obvious that if one taxes people, some of them will move away to places where the taxes are less. It should be even more obvious that it is difficult to tax companies because they exist across many national jurisdictions and can make their profits pop up in the most advantageous places. The solution is easy in principle - taxation needs to be tied not to people and companies, but to the holding of land titles and based on the rental value of land. This would stop the problem dead in its tracks. The very large revenues that flow to some companies and individuals consist of mostly of land rental value so would be picked up at source. Land cannot be shifted to a tax haven, and compliance is readily enforced, ultimately through forfeit of title. I have made this point a few times on the TJN website but my comments are never posted for people to read, presumably because they make the origi...

Journalists Will Hutton and Polly Toynbee are the Guardian-Observer stalwarts. Twice a week, they produce some opinion piece which can be read on their Comment is Free website. Toynbee is a steadfast apologist for New Labour, which takes some doing these days. Usually she writes on social policy, the general idea being put across is that as we are nearly "there", Labour just needs to be given the chance to finish the job. For light relief, Toynbee also does 1970s-style atheism and feminism. Hutton writes about economic policy, though not in any consistent way. In fact he seems to work to no firm guiding principles at all, though there is a kind of sloppy version of Keynesian thinking there. He will never raise fundamental questions. Today, for instance, he wrote about inequality but carefully avoided talking about the underlying causes of this inequality. Sometimes one wonders if these are real people at all, and not just pen-names for a rota of journalists or possibly even ...

People criticise Leica for sticking to the M format with rangefinder (left), introduced in 1953 as a successor to the Leica III dating from the 1930s (right), saying it is just something to put in a glass cabinet. The real advantages of a Leica model M in practice apply to both film and digital versions. (1) It is significantly smaller than an SLR, which means it is not an encumbrance. (2) You can easily see what you are taking, and also what you are NOT taking, through the direct vision viewfinder, which has a feature to insert an extra eyepiece for those who wear spectacles. (3) Focussing by rangefinder is positive and the photographer can decide what to focus on. (4) The hardware is robust. If digital SLRs are just too big, the problem with compacts is that their ergonomics are poor. Direct vision viewfinders, if fitted at all, are inaccurate and hard to see through. LCDs at the back of the camera are difficult to see in bright sunlight and do not show the image in real time. For an...

Lake & Trees Originally uploaded by captainzep The G20 pre-summit meeting is being held in Lower Beeding, which is in a nice part of Sussex. As the politicians, being primarily responsible for the present debacle, cannot possibly have the foggiest idea what they are doing, they would do better to forget about the whole business spend their time walking round places like Leonardslee Gardens, near by.

Pope Benedict XVI has sent a letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church concerning the remission of the excommunication of the four Bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales has issued a statement and summary of the letter here Their statement has been widely criticised for giving a partial picture of what the Pope was trying to say, but there is a link to the original letter, which I downloaded and printed. I started to read it last night, but had not got past the second paragraph when I woke up at 3 am to find the lights still on. I eventually finished reading it next day and an excellent document it is once one has penetrated the complicated sentences, which presumably were translated straight out of the German, not the best of starts where clarity is needed, and goodness knows how - it might even have been done by some computer programme. I wonder how many people have managed to read the whole thing right through? In my...

I received an email recently with this under the signature. I find it disturbing but cannot quite put my finger on what is wrong... "My premise is that matter is spirit in another light and that the fullest form of spirituality lies within an understanding of the ceaseless creativity of life and the insistent reality of seeking to live in an economic order - or housekeeping mode - that works for everyone and protects the earth. Tho' that is full of theological resonance, I seek to express it in forms that don't let religiosity set us apart from our fellow human beings and other life-forms." It seems to me that matter is most definitely matter and not spirit in another light, and such a view is implicit in the doctrine of the Incarnation. It does not mean to say that what we apprehend of matter is all that there is to be apprehended " For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known....

Britain's civil servants, I am talking about. La crème de la crème. The system was invented in Victorian times. Recruitment of top civil servants is by examination and a selection board. Each year, the finest products of academia join the ranks of the elite who advise the government. Mostly, they are Oxbridge products, coming straight from university. They are chosen for their ability to absorb and digest and summarise complex information and for their powers of logical thinking and razor-sharp analysis. There is only one problem with this perfect system. Too often it gets things perfectly wrong. Why this should be is not immediately obvious. Betjeman remarked on it. Anyone who has written to their MP and received a response drafted by a civil servant will recognise the syndrome - a perfectly argued case will be presented, showing that the government's present policy is the best possible policy imaginable. One often knows it is wrong but it can be difficult to identify the flaw...

The Catholic Church is firmly opposed to abortion in nearly all circumstances. Abortion is regarded as murder, because an individual human life is considered to commence at the moment of conception. This is difficult to accept because at that point the human consists of what looks like a blob of jelly. At a later stage, the developing child looks like a tiny baby but is still an appendage of the mother. Only gradually does it appear to become sentient, though no-one is sure when this happens. The difficulty is that it is impossible to identify any specific moment other than that of conception when the individual human life begins. There are many cases of abortion where the procedure is carried out for quite trivial reasons because it would be merely awkward for the mother to have the baby. But a recent case of in Brazil tests the Catholic Church's stance to destruction: a nine-year-old child was pregnant with twins, after having been raped by her stepfather, and a doctor considered...

The Catholic Church in Britain is getting a rough handling from the liberal left at the moment. First there was the business with the holocaust-denying "Bishop" Williamson, whose excommunication has been lifted. I commented on the removal of the "Bishop's" excommunication a couple of weeks ago. Then there was the excommunication of the Brazilian parents who allowed their nine-year-old daughter to have an abortion, following rape by her stepfather and a pregnancy with twins. There was the case in Italy where someone in a persistent vegetative state had their life-support system withdrawn, against the opposition of the Church. Piled on to this are accusations of mass-murder by the Crusaders, the Inquisition and the people who put down the Albigensians. for which present-day Catholics are held fully responsible. Murder of witches is also regarded as a Catholic aberration, though in fact it seems to have been more of a Protestant thing, for which Catholics are stil...

When I got off the boat at Harwich there were three pretty young women in navy blue uniforms checking passports. They were pleasant and smiled, but the checks took a long time even though most of the passengers were Danes on a day out and the rest, OAPs coming back to the UK after a short break. I was asked what was the purpose of the visit. This stumped me because I wasn't sure whether she meant the visit to Sweden I had just made or the visit to Britain I was about to make. But I assume she was talking about the visit I had just made. But as I never really know why I am in Sweden when I am there - I just prefer being there to being in Britain, the question was one to which no ready answer came to mind so I mumbled something about being on holiday, which wasn't a quick reply because I had to translate it in my head first into English. Obviously she wasn't satisfied with the answer because I then got another question about what I had been doing while I was away, again not s...

The creator God isn't the only kind of God that atheists need to worry about. There is a sense in which the mind creates the universe. Humans receive data from the physical world through the senses. It is a small subset of all the data that is potentially available. Mathematicians talk about multi-dimensional universes that we cannot even visualise. The mind imposes an order on this data, in particular through the use of language. This is a kind of collective solipsism. The imposition of order on sensory data is an act of creation. The world we know is a product of mind. The mind is also capable of apprehending something labelled "God". This act of apprehension may be no more than an odd internal phenomenon of the brain, or it may be associated with an external reality. Whatever the case, it needs to be explained. For example, when a Catholic receives holy communion, they will often report certain subjective experiences which religion gives an account of, using narrative ...

Some local authorities have been using lotteries to select pupils for secondary schools. This is likely to be banned. What should be done? No system will work with over-sized classes. About 15 It is almost impossible to teach effectively if a class contains pupils with too wide a range of abilities There is a yawning class gap in Britain. From the point of view of education policy the difficulty is the existence of an underclass whose children do not want to go to school to work and are not encouraged to do so by their irresponsible parents. Some areas have concentrations of members of the underclass which causes difficulties for the schools within whose catchment areas they lie. Family life has become volatile amongst all social classes which makes for disturbed children who can be difficult to teach. Also within all social classes there are children who are difficult to teach and have special needs. There is the prospect of unemployment or drudge jobs for school leavers, which is a d...

That sounds like Africa or Latin America, doesn't it? And supporting lame-duck industries was something that happened in the bad old days of socialism. Not twenty-first century Britain, where politicians and bankers are all honest and above board and market forces rule, a faith demonstrated by the portrait of Adam Smith on the £20 notes. A failed private company, going cap in hand to the government for an advance of taxpayers' money, can expect to be sent packing, with the reminder that the free market is about capitalists taking risk and accepting the good and the bad together. It hasn't worked like that, with banks receiving hundreds of billions in "insurance guarantees". Only that is not what they are at all. These are guarantees on loans where defaults are certain on a large scale, secured on bubbled up land values which are now collapsing. Thus the bankers are being protected against their follies. What ought to happen is for the banks to be allowed to go ba...

"England" can be difficult for people who are not white, Anglo-Saxon/Norman and Protestant. Even Catholic is foreign which is ironical as England was Catholic for nearly 1000 years. There are also issues round the fringes, like Cornwall, where for perfectly good practical reasons there is resistance to being a member of the South West Region. And much of the debate ultimately comes down to money. As an RC Brit of largely foreign ancestry, I don't identify as English. In fact I feel more comfortable these days being abroad and speaking the local language badly with a foreign accent. That at least has a clarity and local people are happy when one is making an attempt with the language. I was OK with British but now the country has gone in for neo-colonialist adventures I just find it an embarrassment, and often get challenged as if I was personally responsible. Probably the best way forwards is to adopt the principle of subsidiarity - matters ought to be handled by the smal...