AN OUTSIDE VIEW

As a supporter of Israel, I despair at times. I was sorry to see that the moratorium on settlement in the West Bank was allowed to run out. I have no great expectations of the talks between Israel and the Palestinians, nor of the Palestinians' ability to run a peaceful and stable state. But the Israelis need to be careful not to put themselves in the wrong. The moratorium should have been extended and the Israeli government should have had the courage to stand up to any opposition. It seems that the settlers are mostly "orthodox" Jews from the USA and it would not be unreasonable to describe them as religious fanatics, with much in common with the US Protestant Christian religious right. This kind of worship of land has nothing to do with traditional orthodox Judaism as it has been understood for the past 2000 years. It is little more than a pernicious and dangerous form of idolatory.

Direct action: opening blocks putted by the Israeli army. Shufa. Palestine, 10/5/2008. , originally uploaded by activestills . Most people alive today where not even born when the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began. Too much comment is made without an understanding of the background.After 1948, the Gaza area of Palestine was annexed by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan. This was the situation until 1967. After the 1956 war, a contingent of United Nations troops was placed in Gaza, in a buffer zone between Egyptian and Israeli territory. In the early part of 1967, the Egyptians built up a concentration of military forces in Gaza and then asked the UN force to leave. The aim was an invasion of Israel. Considerations of sheer numbers made it certain that the Israelis would be wiped out, with an invasion from the Jordanian side to deliver the final blow. It is said that there was some kind of agreement made with the Jordanians that they would not attack Israel, the rational...

DSC_5763 , originally uploaded by abcharlie . Last night I saw the premiere of a film about Israelis who protest against the occupation of the West Bank. They are a handful of people who are making a brave stand against the Israelis, often at considerable personal risk. The film showed the degrading conditions the Palestinians are having to endure with the constant security checks at an increasing number of barriers where they are caged in whilst they wait to be searched and have their papers examined. And to add to their problems are the settlers, often from the USA, who are stealing land and then abusing the local Arab population - even the young children of orthodox Jews in Hebron are behaving in this way. And then there is the hideous concrete wall. The trouble is that the Israelis have not done this for no reason at all. The draconian security is largely a response to the suicide bombings that were a regular feature of Israeli life before these measure were introduced. One difficu...

A few months ago, I wrote that it ought to be possible to produce a camera with a much reduced specification that will do most of the things the Leica M9 will do at a fraction of the price. It would incorporate a bright optical viewfinder like that on the M, but with a simple fixed projected frame. The sensor would be between 20mm and 25mm square and somewhere around 12 to 15 megapixels - no more. The lens would be fixed and wide-angle, with an equivalent focal length of about 30mm and an aperture of f/2.8 or f/2. It looks as if Fuji has come up with a camera that comes close to this specification, and will presumably be followed by others. It is not precisely what I was proposing, which was for a square format sensor, and it has power-focussing, which I am not keen on, but it appears to provide most of what I have been looking for in digital cameras. And at a price of well under £2000, it should give Leica something to think about.

The Pope has duly come and gone, and seems from this distance to have made a good impression. The aggressive atheists duly made their protest and seem to have made little impression at all. But what kind of impression is the Catholic church as such making? We have plenty to say about sexual morality, abortion, euthanasia and so on, and we need to because no-one else is making a stand. It sets us well apart from the mainstream secular way of thought in modern Europe. You cannot win a debate about the immorality of abortion with someone who thinks that an embryo is just a blob of jelly. If you argue that the individual comes into existence at the moment of conception, they will look at you with blank incomprehension. Mention of the human soul cuts no ice at all. So this not a useful way to conduct discourse. Yet adultery, abortion, homosexuality or contraception have consequences that are readily discovered by empirical observation. There is no need to invoke revelation. Then there is Ca...

This headline from the BBC web site is not quite right, as the trains in question are not new but in fact some of the oldest in Britain, dating from 1976. Originally used for local services in London, they are being transferred for South Coast routes, including Brighton to Portsmouth, a ninety minute trip. The trains have no toilets, which is unacceptable but people will just have to accept it. This is another one of the indications that Britain is turning into a third world country. At one time there were toilets on the stations, but these got vandalised and were closed. There were few complaints as there were toilets on the trains at that time. Putting toiletless trains on a ninety minute run is probably going to cause the train company more trouble than they bargained for as desperate passengers are going to use the gangways between the carriages to satisfy the call of nature. These use of stock is stupid, because there are trains used on short journeys in the London area, with toil...

A conference next week will discuss the threat from electromagnetic storms from the sun, which could paralyse high-tech infrastructure. The last such storm was in 1859, and blocked telegraph communication, then in its infancy. But the low-technology systems then in use were little affected. Electromagnetic storms are caused by solar flares but similar damage can be caused by electromagnetic pulses from nuclear explosions. Most affected will be - it is only a matter of time before this happens - extended power lines such as the electricity grid, and satellites and the systems that depend on them, including GPS. But the disruption could potentially be far more widespread, as heavy current surges in the grid would damage switchgear and transformers, and it could take years to get everything back into service. The most vulnerable services are the pumps that keep the water supply and sewage systems running. Failure would quickly lead to flooding, contamination and outbreaks of disease. Elec...

The Pope, on the first day of his visit to Britain, has warned of an aggressive atheism, and in particular, anti-Catholic emotion, at large in the country. That is certainly my impression. I have noticed this even with old friends. But if one is any doubt, take a look at the comments in the Guardian's Comment is Free page. There is plenty to criticise the Catholic church about, and anger is by no means out of place, but there is a crude, ugly and vicious tone to what is being written which suggests that something else is going on in the country. Britain is, of course in a bad way, with the public finances in a dire condition. That itself points to moral bankruptcy, since it indicates that politicians have been offering the voters goodies without regard to the cost, and that the electorate have failed to question how they are to be paid for. And underneath that has grown up a culture whereby people think they can make a packet by scrambling onto the housing ladder, thereby playing ...

Cardinal Kasper has been criticised for referring to Britain as a Third World country. In a critical article in the Guardian, Catholic progressive Catharine Pepinster hinted that it verged on the racist. I don't know what the meaning behind the statement actually was, but in my experience, Kasper was spot-on. I come into the country twice a year, at Harwich. You get overwhelmed by the smell of Jeyes Fluid when you step off the boat, the immigration officials are gratuitously offensive and the trains to London are carefully timed so that you have to wait an hour for the next one. Then one gets onto a cramped and uncomfortable train which is well overcrowded by the time it gets towards London. Definitely not First World any more.

This accident, with one fatality, appears to have involved a train and a heavy construction vehicle. The exact cause remains to be discovered. According to one report, the train was going too fast past a site where repairs were in progress. However, a union commentator has been critical of the practice whereby work is successively sub-contracted to the point that those actually doing the work are unaware of the correct safe working practices. Does that sound familiar? In the UK, track maintenance these days is usually done with a complete line possession, the trains being diverted or replaced by buses. Despite all the complaints this leads to, perhaps there is more to be said for the practice.

"Trams are very expensive to install, especially on UK streets. Where ever the track goes, the road has to be dug up and all the services (water, gas, elec, phone) have to be moved 50ft to one one side. For miles." You are talking about on-street trams. Outside the city centres, most of the mileage of tramways in many European cities is off-street anyway, the same goes for Manchester and Croydon. The expense of renewing services for on-street tramways must be compared with the alternative of underground railways. Buses can only carry a limited volume of traffic before they become inefficient and cause environmental problems of their own. Cities need tracked electric transport if they are go grow beyond a certain point and still flourish. Stockholm, with a metro, has also supplemented it with a new tramway, the first section of which opened last month. Many British cities have had, or will soon have, their underground services renewed anyway. If a decision is made to relocate ...

The spread of the Tea Party is a manifestation of the beast named ANARCHO-CAPITALISM (A-C). Its prophets are Ayn Rand, and its high priests are Murray Rothbard, Bruce L. Benson. The economic theory comes from the Austrian School via Chicago, and it is founded on the fallacious theory of property rights put forward by John Locke. This leads them, paradoxically, into the same trap that Marxists fall into - that land and natural resources is a form of capital or nothing other than capital. That particular error makes it impossible to analyse contemporary economic and social problems. A-C was the guiding principle behind Thatcherism, possibly having entered the political bloodstream via academics at St Andrew's University. Early UK advocates included Keith Joseph, and the principles of A-C underly the utterances of such as John Redwood. In a diluted form it was and remains a strong influence on both Labour and the LibDems. With Marxism discredited, there is nothing much el...

Station dwell time is the time a train stands at a station while the passengers get on and off. In the days of slam door trains (above), with ten doors on each side of the carriage, this could be less than 20 seconds. This was possible because passengers were well disciplined and closed the doors after them. Circumstances change and some time in the 1960s, the decision was made to replace slam door trains by trains with power-operated doors, a changeover that was finally completed about five years ago. One effect is that station dwell times have become a matter of concern, due to, amongst other things, the operating time of safety devices; for instance, plug doors do not open until 15 seconds after a train has come to a stand. When there are many stops on the route, the extra time builds up. Commuter trains normally have doors at the 1:3/2:3 positions, which is intended to give better access than the alternative end-door location, but this layout has disadvantages. When bodyshells are ...

An article in Göteborgs Posten recently referred to the growing list of defects occurring on the Swedish X2000 tilting trains (picture in blog title) and predicted that they would be replaced after a relatively short service life. New trains such as the Regina have better acceleration and bogies which are easier on the track, giving similar journey times without the need for the same top speed and the associated complications of tilting. There is probably a more effective alternative to premature scrapping. The X2000 trains could be provided with new bogies and the power cars rebuilt or converted to driving trailers. An off-the-peg type of locomotive such as the Bombardier TRAXX would provide the traction. This ought to offer very much better value for money.

Mary and Jesus , originally uploaded by bweston23 . The Koran is an unpleasant book. Some authorities have attributed it to an Arian Christian source. Arians were a heretical group of Christians who asserted that God did not become incarnate in Jesus Christ, which is the orthodox Christian doctrine and is one of the reasons for the spread of the image of Jesus as a child in the arms of his mother. Moslems venerate both Jesus and Mary, and follow the same teaching as the Arians on the matter, which suggests that there may be something in the view that there is a connection. In any case, ideas spread. But essentially, Islam is a religion of the book. In fact, in this respect, it differs not at all from the heretical version of Christianity followed by the mad pastor who wants to burn the Koran. Such an act will actually be counter-productive. If one wants to challenge the Koran, use the intellect, not the methods of half-literate street mobs.

marmite , originally uploaded by dontcallmeikke . I asked a friend of mine to bring a couple of pots of Marmite with him from Britain. They were impounded at Stanstead airport on the grounds that the jars contained more than 100 ml of fluid. This confiscation of property is unacceptable. In the first place, my friend would not have gone to the trouble of buying the stuff if he had been informed about the restriction, so the publicity was obviously inadequate. In the second place, the security officer could easily have ascertained that the contents was indeed Marmite and not something that could have been used to blow up the aircraft he was travelling in, so this is just the usual story of officials deliberately being awkward. In the third place, he should have been able to leave the offending item somewhere and retrieve it on return, or post it back to his home address. But the most worrying and serious matter is that the 100 ml limit is not sufficient to prevent anyone from doing seri...

A friend of mine mentioned how disappointed he was about the performance of the Christian Democrats. His objection was that they were too liberal, especially in relation to abortion and "gay marriage". He suggested that they had become too concerned with chasing votes and lost sight of principles. The two issues he referred to need a whole discussion in their own right, but there is a more general point, which is whether there is a place for parties which describe themselves as "Christian"? In some European countries, notably Germany and Italy, Christian parties are major political forces. In others, such as the UK, they have never gained a foothold and the idea is alien. In the UK, committed Christians of various persuasions have found a place in each of the three main parties. Amongst the most famous was Hilaire Belloc. In 1906 he ran as Liberal candidate in the marginal South Salford constituency where the electorate was overwhelmingly Protestant and Belloc’s ...

"As an atheist I will make this admission. God exists, but only in the mind of the believer. " That applies to the entire universe. What one actually knows about everything is a construct of the mind as it interacts and interprets bodily sensations. Even basic concepts like hot, cold, salt, red, blue, pain, pleasure. "There is actually no God out there in space," Of course not. But what is space? Nobody even knows how many dimensions it has. At one time, the figure was three, then Einstein came along and it went up to four, now cosmologists are coming up with all sorts of bids - eleven, if I recall. "What you believe to be true is true for you." No, that is when people are mad. If belief is out of line with experience and reality it is not true. One can believe in, say, Father Christmas but this being untrue, it has no interpretative value and it would be very foolish to lead one's life on the assumption that he exists.