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An Opponent Speaks
Some of you may enjoy this post-match analysis of the recent debate on the death penalty at Stationers' Crown Woods Academy, by my main opponent, Toby Pereira.
Some of you may enjoy this post-match analysis of the recent debate on the death penalty at Stationers' Crown Woods Academy, by my main opponent, Toby Pereira.
Here those who wish to may watch the opening segment of a debate on the death penalty in which I recently took part, at Stationers' Crown Woods Academy, a school on the South-Eastern fringes of London
Gluttons for capital or other punishment may watch the whole thing here
Link to playlist- http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY4JQ3kcsI_sB-umwmgJDEsBlO62Yvig-
Link to video 1/4- http://youtu.be/6fsjo4jry9Y
Link to video 2/4- http://youtu.be/pj081BXdEvo
Link to video 3/4- http://youtu.be/prKOhySyY1I
Link to video 4/4- http://youtu.be/5pT8cOHgSqk
I noticed a couple of statistical announcements last week which received less attention than I think they should. I am, before the Thought Police detect any secret hidden message, saying no more than that they are all interesting, tending to undermine conventional wisdom. I am emphatically not connecting the slackening of law enforcement on cannabis with the rise in homicides.
The first is an extract from a story last Thursday in 'The Times'
' The number of murders committed in England and Wales has risen for the first time in five years,
There were 573 murders last year, 56 more than in 2014 — an increase of 11 per cent. Incidences of gun and knife crime also jumped … figures released by the Office for National Statistics yesterday showed. Recorded rapes were up by 30 per cent, to 34,700 David Wilson, professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, said: "It is not just murders that are going up, it is the kind of murders that are happening and the way people are being murdered. They are often much more violent, in ways that are shocking." Incidents of violent crime recorded by police jumped by almost 200,000, a trend which some analysts suggested could be linked to having fewer officers on patrol, and the recovering economy allowing more young men to drink too much.
(By contrast ….'figures released by the Crime Survey of England and Wales, which bases its estimates on interviews with members of the public about their experience of crime. It reported that, overall, crime fell by 7 per cent in 2015, from 6.9 million incidents to 6.4 million.)'
And the in the Daily Mail of Saturday 23rd April, soon after a story on 5th April showing that arrests for cannabis possession had fallen by almost half between 2010 and 2015 ( 'The number of cannabis users arrested by the police has fallen by almost half in the last five years amid claims the drug is being decriminalised by the back door. Police in England and Wales recorded 19,115 arrests for cannabis possession in 2015, compared with a high of 35,367 in 2010 - a fall of 46 per cent.), more news of the ever-slacker aopproach of police to the possession and now the growth of cannabis:
'PROSECUTIONS for growing cannabis have plummeted - while the number of young people using the drug has rocketed.
Shocking figures reveal that the number of people hauled to court for cultivating marijuana fell by 84 per cent between 2011 and 2014 - from 944 to just 127 - while arrests for possession have almost halved.
But a fifth more 16 to 24-year-olds admitted using cannabis last year than two years before.
Critics said the figures show the authorities are turning a blind eye and that drug possession is being decriminalised 'by the back door'. And medical experts have renewed warnings over the harmful effects of the Class B drug.
A total of 1,025,000 people aged 16 to 24 admitted using cannabis in 2014-15, compared with 849,000 in 2012-13, a rise of 21 per cent. Some 2.2 million adults aged 16 to 59 used the narcotic - up by 7 per cent. (PH asks: How can these figures possibly be arrived at?)
The number arrested for possession fell from 35,367 in 2010 to 19,115 last year.
And the statistics, uncovered in a Parliamentary question from former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, showed prosecutions for growing cannabis in England and Wales fell from 944 in 2011 to 319 in 2012, 214 in 2013 and 127 in 2014, the latest figures available.
Despite increasing warnings over health problems linked to cannabis, police chiefs in four forces last year signalled that cannabis users and growers were no longer a priority, and Sara Thornton, head of the National Police Chiefs' Council, admitted forces had given up investigating small-scale cannabis farms. Keith Vaz, Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: 'This is a huge drop in the number of prosecutions for cultivation. It seems either the police or the Crown Prosecution Service have decided that this is not a priority. Those involved should be hauled before the courts. We will be pursuing this matter with the Home Secretary.' Lucy Dawe, of anti-drugs group Cannabis Skunk Sense, said: '[The police] have decided cannabis is not a big issue for them. But unfortunately a lot of young people who end up in the courts have cannabis somewhere in their stories.
There is increasingly a tacit acceptance of cannabis use but many do not understand the true dangers of it - the risk of mental illness and the strong connections with acquisitive crime and violence.' David Spencer, of the Centre for Crime Prevention think-tank, said: 'This is a worrying development and raises urgent questions for the Government to answer. Is it a result of the police wilfully ignoring the law they are there to enforce, or has the Government authorised such changes, in which case this appears to suggest the creation of legislation by the back door.' Academics warn that cannabis is highly addictive, can cause mental health problems including psychosis, leads to violence and is a gateway to harder drugs. Earlier this month international drugs experts said the risk of mental illness was so serious it warranted a global public health campaign.
The Home Office said the proportion of users aged 16 to 59 has fallen from 9.6 per cent in 2004 to 6.7 per cent last year. (***How can they possibly know, let alone be so precise? PH) Bill Jephson, the National Police Chiefs' Council cannabis spokesman, said: 'We are committed to tackling the criminals at the source of wholesale cannabis cultivation...We will continue to enforce the law in a practical and proportionate way.' Guidelines for sentencing say someone growing nine plants for their own use should be let off with a fine. Those who grow it on a larger scale can be prosecuted for production of cannabis, with a maximum sentence of 14 years.'
In some bafflement, I watched on Sunday night the opening episode of a new BBC-TV series 'Undercover'. I had been looking forward to it, as I am most interested in its theme. This is the terrible error of infiltrating undercover police officers into protest movements. Several of these men have actually lived with and fathered children by the people they were spying on.
I find this inexcusable in a free society, and cannot begin to imagine the betrayal felt by those involved, when (as must always happen) the treachery is uncovered.
It is an excellent subject for a drama.
So I was puzzled to find the action beginning on Highway 110, so-called, in Louisiana. I wondered if I was watching the wrong programme, as it seemed to be about the US death penalty, not British undercover police officers. I also think highway 110 may have been the wrong road, mistaken for a similarly-numbered route that leads from the state capital, Baton Rouge, to the Louisiana State Penitentiary (known until recently as Angola).
This prison was made famous in a tendentious Hollywood propaganda film, 'Dead Man Walking' starring Susan Sarandon as a dedicated nun opposed to the death penalty, and Sean Penn playing an unquestionably guilty rapist and murderer.
Following the good Sister's intervention, Penn has a character transplant and becomes regretful, after many years of denying his crime.
Both murderer and nun are based on real people. You can look it all up. No doubt some readers will think the nun is doing good. I think she may have misunderstood the gospels.
As I recall, heavenly choirs warble as a (finally repentant) Penn is melodramatically lifted on high in a semi-crucified position, strapped to a gurney, during his lethal injection (a largely fictional depiction of what is in fact a surprisingly dull and totally horizontal event, as I can testify, having witnessed one such in Huntsville, Texas).
Anyway, back to the BBC: The series heroine, played by Sophie Okoneda, was obviously in some way connected to an execution, which was being gloated about in a hateable Southern-fried voice on her car radio .
Then her phone, on the empty front passenger seat, started to trill.
If I were on death row in Louisiana I am not sure I would want a lawyer who responds to this by accidentally dropping the phone on the car floor, groping for it, then slamming on the brakes and taking the call while her car stands askew in the middle of a main road ( a giant truck bears down on her as this happens).
Nor would I want a lawyer whose phone battery starts to go flat (as it later does) during a crucial last-minute appeal to the State Attorney General. Didn't she know it was going to be a busy day? Now would I want an advocate who leaves her car in a field with the door open. Is it still there? We weren't ever shown her going back to find out.
If I were the State of Louisiana (which is clearly identified in this programme) I would… well, I'll come on that later.
But first, here are some interesting extracts from the unpopular newspaper reviews of the programme:
Daily Telegraph: 'We first met Maya fighting desperately to get a stay of execution in Louisiana for a falsely convicted Death Row client about to die.'
Guardian:' In two hours' time, Rudy Jones, who has been on death row for 20 years for a murder he did not commit, is about to be executed. The woman behind the wheel is his lawyer Maya … an impassioned and embattled London barrister on her way to make a last-ditch attempt to save him.'
Times : 'She was introduced as a John Grisham hero, racing to rescue, then console, her Louisiana death-row client, Rudy… as the seconds ticked away to his execution.
Independent: 'Only it opened in the US, where she was defending death row convict Rudy Jones …, a man falsely imprisoned for murder.'
Very interestingly, the reviewer for the 'Independent' went on to note: 'If I hadn't read the episode synopsis before I watched the programme, I think I would still be clueless about 90 per cent of what happened'.
I'm not sure what synopsis she means, but could it be a special one, given to TV reviewers when they preview programmes? Because I hadn't seen any such synopsis and, while not wholly clueless, it did take me some time to grasp what was going on. I could have done with a synopsis myself.
And how else were we supposed to know that the convict was wrongly-convicted? We were told nothing of the alleged crime, the trial or the case. Anti-death-penalty campaigners (as I have observed for myself) are quite ready to use all available means (including the sobbiest of sob stories) to prevent the executions of convicted killers they know or at least strongly suspect to be guilty.
I think we were supposed to assume he was innocent, to assume that the American justice system (which is undoubtedly flawed) is a seething mixture of redneck prejudice and insouciant racist callousness (the condemned man was portrayed as Black), against which civilised and enlightened multicultural Brits struggle in vain with the feeble tools of justice.
Is this so?
In New Orleans alone, the biggest city in Louisiana, there were 200 murders in 2011. I think there are about 500 killings a year in the whole state.
So presumably, if the BBC's idea of reality is true, the execution chamber at Angola is busy day and night prejudicially killing unjustly convicted Black citizens in defiance of the evidence.
Well, not exactly:
Louisiana has executed 28 murderers in the last 40 years. But it has something in the region of 500 murders a year, around twice the murder rate in New York. Yet it hasn't held an execution of anybody, just or unjust, botched or unbotched, Black or White, since January 2010.
On 10th January 2010, the major local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, reported 'State's death penalty becoming a rarity ; Bordelon's execution was first since 2002'
'Thursday's execution of Gerald Bordelon, happened only because the convicted killer waived his appeals, hastening his death by many years. His was the first execution since 2002, when Leslie Dale Martin was executed for the rape and murder of a Lake Charles woman in 1981.
'The dramatic decline in Louisiana executions since 1987, when the state briefly led the nation in that statistic, comes at a time when, nationally, both executions and the imposition of new death sentences have waned significantly.'
Bordelon, by the way, had strangled his 12-year-old stepdaughter, after kidnapping her at knifepoint and forcing her to, well, I won't go on, it's too distressing, look it up if you must. There was no doubt of his guilt. He showed police where he'd put her poor defiled body. But the crime was committed in 2002, and he was convicted in 2006. And he waived his right to appeal. And in the period during which his was the sole execution, approximately 5,000 murders were committed in that state. Call that a death penalty? Call it a deterrent?'
Since others appear to wish to make skin-colour an issue, I will note here that photographs of Bordelon, easily viewable on the Internet, show him as not being black.
There have, as far as I can discover, been no executions in Louisiana since Bordelon's despatch. I can find no record of any botched execution by lethal injection there, either.
Before Bordelon, the last to be executed had been Leslie Dale Martin (also white, or pinko-grey, if photographs are anything to go by). He was executed in May 2002 for the rape and murder of Christina Burgin. The details of this crime (which took place in 1991) are too revolting for me to record them here.
Since the introduction of lethal injection by the state in 1991, 25 years ago, eight persons have been executed. Not such a good story, I know, but is it right or responsible for the BBC to portray the USA as it did on Sunday night? People take its dramas seriously, especially when they are based on real life events.
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column
Do not underestimate Jeremy Corbyn. Labour's Blairites lie dead and dying all over the place because they made that mistake. Tory Blairites such as David Cameron might be wise to learn from this, especially given last week's dismal, shrinking manufacturing and export figures, which were pushed far away from front pages by other stories, but which cast doubt on the vaunted recovery.
If (like me) you have attended any of Mr Corbyn's overflowing campaign meetings, you will have seen the hunger – among the under-30s and the over-50s especially – for principled, grown-up politics instead of public relations pap.
Mr Corbyn reminds mature people of the days when the big parties really differed. He impresses the young because he doesn't patronise them, and obviously believes what he says. This desire for real politics isn't just confined to the Left. Ken Livingstone is right to call Mr Corbyn Labour's Nigel Farage. Ukip appeals to a similar impulse.
Millions are weary of being smarmed and lied to by people who actually are not that competent or impressive, and who have been picked because they look good on TV rather than because they have ideas or character.
Indeed, ideas or character are a disadvantage. Anything resembling a clear opinion is seized upon by the media's inquisitors, and turned in to a 'gaffe' or an outrage.
Actually, I dislike many of Mr Corbyn's opinions – his belief in egalitarianism and high taxation, his enthusiasm for comprehensive schools, his readiness to talk to terrorists and his support for the EU. Oddly enough, these are all policies he shares with the Tory Party.
But I like the honest way he states them, compared with the Tories' slippery pretence of being what they're not.
My hope, most unlikely to be realised, is that a patriotic, conservative and Christian equivalent of Mr Corbyn will emerge to take him on, and will demonstrate, by his or her strength of conviction, that there is an even greater demand for that cause than there is for old-fashioned leftism. In any case, I think any thoughtful British person should be at least a little pleased to see the PR men and the special advisers and the backstairs-crawlers of British politics so wonderfully wrong-footed by a bearded old bicyclist.
On Wednesday the BBC marked the moment when the Queen became our longest-reigning Monarch by broadcasting (on Radio 4's The World Tonight) a weird, portentous three-minute republican diatribe by the idiosyncratic feminist Beatrix Campbell, who in 2009 accepted an OBE from what she called a 'horrible imperial regime'.
The attack was personal as well as political, criticising the Queen as a parent and accusing her of 'deceiving and disrespecting' her daughters-in-law. No doubt Ms Campbell has a legitimate point of view which ought to be heard. But an uninterrupted harangue during a flagship news programme? How can the BBC claim to be impartial when it does this sort of thing?
Death by drone is not justice
I would cheerfully bring back the death penalty tomorrow, as long as it came with unanimous grown-up juries and a restored right to silence.
But I'd never seen David Cameron as an ally in this. When it comes to defending us against actual heinous murderers in Britain, Mr Cameron (like most politicians) is an excuse-making anti-gallows liberal softie.
How does he square this with his enthusiasm for executing people without trial in the middle of someone else's desert, using a remote-controlled chunk of high-explosive?
No doubt the victims of this are not very nice, though nothing resembling evidence has been produced against them. But that shouldn't blind us to the principle involved. If we think killing people we don't like with drones in other countries is legal and OK, we have licensed everyone else to do the same, even to us, here.
It is all part of a confused and delusional policy towards Syria and ISIS. George Osborne, the Chancellor, still seems to want to attack Syria's President Assad, whose army is now one of the main barriers against an ISIS victory.
Last week he said Parliament's vote not to bomb Assad in 2013 was 'one of the worst decisions the House of Commons has ever made'.
On the contrary, if we had bombed Assad then, we would have helped the people who soon afterwards became ISIS. Given this confusion at the highest level, Parliament should be very careful not to allow Mr Osborne and Mr Cameron to make the same mistake again.
The people who want to make life coarser never, ever stop. A bookmaker has just got away with using a partly-asterisked F-word in a newspaper advertisement. The gutless, useless 'Advertising Standards Authority' rejected a complaint, saying it was 'light-hearted'. It won't be long now before the whole word is allowed, everywhere. Those of us who think that is a pity will be derided for caring. And so the cultural revolution goes on.
Feminism has many faces. Compare and contrast Charlotte Proudman, the censorious Thought Policewoman who publicly denounced an internet bore when she could have slapped him down in private, and the singer Chrissie Hynde.
Ms Hynde lived the entire dream and nightmare of 1960s liberation, and is impressively honest about the bitter depths to which this took her, and the sadness this caused her parents.
Last week she was questioned on this by the high priestess of po-faced British feminism, Jenni Murray. The exchange didn't go quite as Ms Murray expected. Chrissie Hynde's thoughts about feminism and knicker-displaying rock stars have been much publicised. But this was the bit that really impressed me: 'I don't think it's liberating at all to think that you can behave like a man… When this false commodity of sexual liberation came along which made us think that we could act like them – actually women don't act like men and they also respond emotionally very differently to men. It took me a long time to find out, and I don't think it was any kind of liberation. I think it was more enslavement.'
Jenni Murray immediately changed the subject.
A glancing reference to the death penalty received more responses than almost anything else I wrote in my MoS column on Sunday. Here and on Twitter people were astonishingly anxious to disagree with me, to trundle out ancient arguments on the subject that have many times been exploded here for anyone who was really interested. Most especially I have disposed of the deeply tedious evasion about unintentionally killing an innocent person, which (as any thoughtful person knows) is not in reality considered an obstacle to any other policy whose general effects are considered good.
Why is it that one's opinion on the execution of a few heinous murderers has become (more or less) the supreme test in our society for who is and who is not a civilised person? There is not the faintest possibility of the death penalty being reintroduced in this country unless and until it becomes a left-wing despotism (it is in such polities that execution is most widely used as a penalty in the modern world – Cuba until recently, the Chinese People's Republic and Vietnam for example, and of course the USSR ).
It is simply not a live issue in our politics and is most unlikely to become one. As I freely admit the conditions under which I would find it acceptable no longer exist in this country, especially proper independent juries whose verdicts must be unanimous.
I only state my support for it because I refuse to pretend that I accept the feeble, unreasoning, ill-informed and emotive arguments deployed against it, and because (as a former abolitionist) I changed my mind through the study of facts and the exercise of logic. It would be an act of self-betrayal and cowardice to keep my position secret just because it was generally despised. The only parallel is abortion, but the fury on that subject has subsided since the most fanatical pro-abortionists (young men terrified they might actually have to take responsibility for getting a girl pregnant) realised that the chances of this happening are now virtually nil. The ritual choruses of women claiming that killing unborn babies is a human right don't ever have quite the same urgency as the adolescent male's fear of the nappy, the mother-in-law and the shotgun wedding, now vanished.
Asked a little while ago why I described myself as 'The Hated Peter Hitchens' on Twitter I explained that this was because it is in fact the case that quite a lot of left-wing persons (who often have the sketchiest idea of who I am or what I think) do regard me as a hate-figure. Asked to explain why this might be, I concluded that it was because I do not act or speak as if I were ashamed of being a moral or social conservative.
I am not apologetic about holding these views, nor am I embarrassed. I regard myself as having a coherent, defensible moral position. I am also quite familiar with the techniques of mockery and raillery used by the left against their opponents, and am happy to use them (rather more fairly and in a more measured fashion) against the Left. Why shouldn't I? If I did nothing else but act, speak and think as if I believed what I do believe, and wasn't ashamed of it, my very existence would still be 'offensive' to my critics. I suspect some of them (who say this on Twitter from time to time) genuinely wish I was dead.
For the modern Left is not just about holding left-wing opinions and propagating them in the hope of achieving a socialist society. It is a sort of secular state of grace, in which the person who adopts the full set of 'correct' opinions regards himself or herself as morally good, simply by the act of embracing those opinions. It is, I think, a caricature of the Evangelical Protestant belief in Salvation Through Grace Alone, about which I have always had some doubts (well expressed in the General Epistle of St James, especially the Second Chapter, which I once heard read at a memorial service, and which struck me, that day, so hard in the heart that I could barely think about anything else for some time afterwards). In fact, it is the Left-Wing attitude of 'Salvation by Correctness Alone' which has made me wonder all the more about it. But I digress.
There's another religious parallel to this, which is the status known as 'Dhimmitude' under which Christians and Jews were in the past permitted to live in Islamic countries. Though much relieved by the Ottomans, under pressure from Western Christian empires, the rules of the 'Pact of Umar' persisted in the Muslim world for many centuries
I won't go into the full details of its past enforcement, of dress codes, doorway height, permitted mounts, inferior legal status, the carrying of weapons or the exaction of special and punitive taxes, sometimes accompanied by a ritual public slap in the face. Apart from anything else it varied a great deal from place to place, and many of its victims have left scanty records.
Perhaps the most striking restrictions enjoined by this form of tolerance were bans on the repair of existing churches or the building of new ones, or on making noise during funerals. I believe that bells were also removed from churches, and church towers pulled down, to avoid any kind of challenge, either to the call to prayer from the muezzin or to the height and magnificence of the mosque.
Under these conditions, forbidden to convert or to appeal for help from co-religionists abroad, the Christians of the region were permitted to remain in humble existence, quietly and apologetically practising their rites and ceremonies in crumbling buildings. This was, as anyone with an imagination can work out, a very effective way of seeing to it that the non-Muslim monotheisms shrank and shrivelled under Islamic rule. No wonder few people now realise that Christianity predated Islam in the Middle East , and was once dominant there.
The parallel is of course not at all complete or exact, and I would rather by far be a moral and social conservative in modern Britain than be a Christian living in the mediaeval Levant or Maghreb under the Pact of Umar.
But there's still an interesting similarity. Both systems claim to be tolerant, and (to the extent that they do not actually employ violent persecution) they are tolerant. But both in practice require an acceptance by the dethroned belief system that it acts at all times as a defeated and humbled thing, not worthy of respect.
Thus it becomes harder and harder simply to express certain opinions, once universal, such as favouring lifelong marriage over divorce, serial marriage or cohabitation, or (come to that) Christianity over any other religion, or academic selection, or the freedom of parents to exercise authority over children, or national independence, or secure borders, or the blazingly obvious wrongness of abortion on demand.
But the death penalty is by far the greatest of these. And I think the reason for this is simple. It is the keystone of the arch of an former legal and moral system, which regarded people as wholly responsible for their own actions.
The stated purpose of the pre-1914 Prisons Commission, for instance, was 'the due punishment of responsible persons' . Nobody would dare say that now. Prisons hesitate to punish at all, and the punishment is said to consist solely in the deprivation of liberty, which is why the prisons, being chaotic much of the time, are in many cases far more terrifying than they were when they believed in punishment. Responsibility has been abolished. And a lot of people are very glad, and hope it will stay that way. Even the faintest hint that it might return disturbs and unsettles them.
I recently gave an interview to the Polish website Prosto Z Mostu
My Polish-speaking readers may see it here
But those of you without Polish may see the English version below:
***Very much so. I had believed the Conservative Party was so decrepit that it could never win another election. I've also found that opinion polls are usually broadly right, if you read them carefully. I was wrong. I've tried to explain, in various blogs, why I think I might have been wrong, but I think the very careful targeting of certain seats, and unscrupulous propaganda uncritically swallowed by most of the media achieved this unlikely victory. The first of these was made possible by very successful fundraising among the super-rich, as big money can keep alive parties which are otherwise dead. Since 1997, there has been a tendency on the part of the great bulk of the British media to approve of one party, which is awarded the title of 'the centre'. This title was granted to the Conservatives after they adopted a broadly left-liberal, pro-EU, politically correct programme under Mr Cameron. Labour *might* have won it back had they chosen the establishment candidate, David Miliband, as leader. But by choosing Ed Miliband, who actually dared to have some opinions, they lost all chance of media backing.
****FPTP is good in two ways. It allows strong decisive government and tough discipline opposition from a second party which knows it could be the government tomorrow and so is forced to be realistic about its opposition. And it allows the electorate to throw out an unpopular government. Neither of these things is possible in PR systems. I think they suit our country, with its strong adversarial tradition in law, debate and politics, and its potent class system. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone else. I think UKIP's support for PR is baffling and opportunist. To get a British exit from the EU, they need an overall majority in the Commons. With PR, they will never get this. With FPTP, they might, or a future party might. Perhaps they have been diverted from their political aim by the joys of official recognition
***Of course not. The Conservative Party has from the start been in favour of British integration into the European project. All its major leaders since Macmillan have been keen supporters (including Margaret Thatcher for most of her political life) David Cameron wants an EU extending to the Urals, and has said so. Some Tory MPs feel the need, from time to time, to pretend to be patriotic. But it's just posing, and not to be taken seriously.
***Indeed they are, but so what?. A 'Eurosceptic' is a person who criticises the EU when he is out of office, or at elections, but supports it when he is in office. It is a silly expression anyway. What is there to be 'sceptical' about? The thing exists. You can be in it or out of it, and that's the choice. You might as well be 'sceptical' about breakfast, or the Moon.
***Because plebiscites (except in Switzerland where voters rather than the state decide the question, the timing and the conduct) are devices by which governments legitimise with votes what they want to do anyway. They are never fair, or fairly conducted. If by any chance they go wrong, they are soon afterwards re-run and reversed. This referendum is a baited trap. Once it has happened, and the pro-EU side has won, opponents of the EU in Britain will be told that the issue is now settled for good.
***I cannot imagine how the Tories, in practice one of the most socially, morally, educationally and left-wing parties in Europe, manage to sustain this image. It's much as if people still expected London to be full of people in bowler hats, groping around in smog. One visit to Britain should be enough to dispel this outdated rubbish. The Tory Party has always been a cynical organisation for gaining office at all costs. At times this may have given it a conservative appearance, but surely not in living memory? The Thatcher era was one of economic and social liberalism, not conservatism.
***Labour's original welfare agenda was long ago accepted by all major parties, and it is left with very little to say about this, apart from making false claims that the Tories are dismantling the Heath Service and the welfare state, which fewer and fewer people believe. It has become the party of the metropolitan bohemians, but again, their sexual, social and educational politics have now been adopted by the Tories.
*** More or less .Increasing state funding of political parties, supported by broadcasting rules which favour existing parties and discriminate against new ones, plus the huge donations of the super-rich, have enabled both these parties to survive long after they had lost any reason to exist. They are now just career-ladders for professional politicians. If either of them tried to raise money by collecting it on the street a)they would not have enough people to do the collecting and b) nobody would give them anything. Each British election is a sort of street theatre in which the electorate are persuaded to legitimise one or other of these unrepresentative, internally dead organisations. The ballot box is one of the few sacred things left in our culture. Truly sacred things are scorned.
***In a dialectical way, they fuel each other. And don't forget the economic collapse as well.
***You'll have to read the book. I can't summarise more than 300 pages here. But our lunatic entry into the First World War is probably the single greatest cause.
***I've no objection to female clergy, some of whom are conservative and much-valued. Same-sex marriage is a tiny non-issue, set beside the general acceptance of divorce and of remarriage after divorce, and the almost total collapse of lifelong marriage. The church's failure to defend marriage (described in detail in 'Abolition of Britain') was the thing that utterly destroyed it. Penitence-free new liturgies and baby-talk Bibles, plus modern music, are awful, but they are symptoms of a deeper loss.
***So should the Archbishop of Canterbury have been. The 39 Articles of the Church (Article 37 specifically) support the execution of heinous murderers ( as does the Roman Catholic catechism, the last time I looked) , and Ingram was a heinous and unrepentant murder, whose guilt was in no doubt at all.
***Because I am English, and of my generation, and Roman Catholicism seems to me to be wholly foreign, also because, while I regard Roman Catholics as friends and allies in the struggle against the modern world, I personally find aspects of Roman Catholic worship and doctrine difficult to accept or support. I think the Anglican compromise between the Catholic and the Reformed versions of our faith is actually a very sensible and thoughtful one.
***Try as I may, I cannot become a Chesterton enthusiast. On this, as on many things, he seems to me to have been wrong. But he wrote some good poems.
***That would depend on where you were. The USA, where Muslim immigration is small, tends to have many neoconservatives who are very militant on the subject, and their allies in Europe are the same. The trouble is that neo-conservatives are also supporters of open borders and unrestricted immigration, so, in Europe but not the US, they are ensuring the growing power of Islam in formerly Christian societies. I think this may be why they are so obsessed with terrorism and the Islamic State. They can give themselves the illusion of being 'tough', while actually supporting the very process that will (in my view) eventually make Islam supreme in much of Europe, quite peacefully and legitimately – the growth of the Muslim population.
***I think British people are worried about all mass immigration. The problem is that they have understood the nature of the problem far too late. It has happened. I suspect it is easier for UKIP to talk about migrants from Europe because they can then not be accused of racial bigotry.
*** I think I've said quite enough, thanks.
They seldom, if ever, think. They know no history. They are fiercely resistant to any facts that might upset their opinions. They take no trouble to find out what is actually happening.
Here is an example. Ian Austin MP, a member of Parliament's Home Affairs Committee, last week extruded the following opinion: 'The police's number one job is to catch criminals so they can be convicted.' He was objecting to a scheme that gave priority to contact with the public.
I am pretty sure the same dim view is shared across Parliament, in every police HQ and in most media outlets in the country. Yet it is utterly, totally mistaken. Every arrest and prosecution is, in fact, a failure by the police. It's necessary, but it's also secondary.
Their job, the reason we hired them in 1829, was to prevent crime and disorder. That's what the constable's oath says, and they successfully did prevent huge amounts of crime and disorder for more than a century, by patrolling on foot.
And so it continued until the country went mad 50 years ago in the first heady years of the Age of Mistakes in which we continue to live – the era of instant mashed potato, Jimmy Savile, Watney's Red Barrel, tower blocks, comprehensive schools, votes for teenagers, inner ring roads, the Common Market and Dr Beeching's railway massacre.
What use is a police officer after a crime has been committed, unless he can do first aid?
Most of those errors were made in public view, cheered on, as usual, by the political and commentating classes who invariably mistake novelty for progress.
But the decision to abolish police foot patrols went unnoticed at the time. It was only afterwards that British people of a certain age wondered where the police – once visible everywhere – vanished to.
For the decision was taken in secret, by an unknown body called the Home Office Police Advisory Board, on December 7, 1966. It was adopted by new, unwieldy and unresponsive merged police forces that were created soon afterwards.
Since then, the police do not prevent crime or disorder. They wait for it to happen, and then come rushing along to the scene of their failure, accompanied by loud electronic screams and wails and flashing lights.
What use is a police officer after a crime has been committed, unless he can do first aid? He cannot unstab, unshoot, unburgle, unmug or unrape the victim.
Nothing he does can bring back what has been lost. The chances are that he cannot find or catch the culprit – and if he does, the miscreant will get off anyway, and skip, laughing, down the steps of the courthouse, as two did last week.
If you wait for people to commit crimes before you do anything, you will never, ever be able to build enough prisons to hold them.
It's obvious if you think about it. It's not obvious if you don't.
Proof the Tories stand for nothing
I suppose if a Left-wing political party sought cash from pornographers, it would make a kind of sense.
The Left, after all, cheered on the liberation of pornography by ripping up the obscenity laws and deriding poor old Lord Longford when he tried to warn against this.
But if a party that calls itself 'Conservative' readily seeks the money and friendship of such people, it robs itself of its right to use this name.
If conservatism doesn't stand for faithful marriage, unselfish love, constancy and modesty, then what does it stand for? Anyone who still deludes himself that the Cameron Tories offer any hope to the country will deserve what he gets.
We should pick our 'friends' with a bit more care
Here is a Chinese billionaire, Liu Han, being hauled away by the police. He looks terrified, and with reason. He is now dead, having been executed a few days ago. He may be shouting: 'I've been framed!' He certainly did so during his sentencing hearing.
Because China has no independent courts, no juries, no presumption of innocence, and because its press is not just unfree but chained to the state, I have no idea if he is guilty of the charges of gangsterism laid against him.
This is interesting because this country and its leaders have good and close relations with China, whose government famously massacred its 'own people' in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and got away with it. It seems we send a trade delegation there every week, begging for business and stifling misgivings about the appalling lack of freedom.
In the same way, we are still on good terms with Saudi Arabia, a heavily armed and secretive despotism which bans the practice of Christianity, stages public beheadings and sentences polite and cautious dissidents to murderous floggings. Yet we snarl and snap with righteous moral outrage at Vladimir Putin's Russia, supposedly a unique demon among nations.
This is silly, and if we do not grow out of it we may find ourselves in a futile and dangerous war in Ukraine, no affair of ours anyway, under the delusion that it is some sort of crusade.
I should point out here that Ukraine is no angel. To say it is corrupt is like saying that the Atlantic is a bit damp. Its leader, Petro Poroshenko, threatened to impose martial law last week. A Ukrainian journalist, Ruslan Kotsaba, was detained last week for protesting against highly unpopular (and widely ignored) efforts to impose conscription, which have led to a temporary ban on foreign travel for men of military age.
Poroshenko is not in full control of the piratical ultra-nationalist militias which are doing much of the 'pro-Western' fighting in and around Donetsk.
In fact, I suspect he fears to make peace on sensible terms in case these people violently overthrow him – as they did to his predecessor Viktor Yanukovych.
To those who persist in making out that this is a simple conflict between good and bad, I can only say: Grow up.
There's a serious gap in the regulation of charities. What are we to do when worrying questions are asked about the running of much loved charities that do a great deal of good?
We want to be sure our money is being effectively spent. Last week, The Spectator magazine raised questions about Kids Company, run by Camila Batmanghelidjh.
The Charities Commission, which most people assume keeps an eye on such things, has limited powers and is reluctant to use them.
The best solution, for charities and the public, would surely be a new body with the power to conduct a wholly independent audit of any charity.
Now that the baseless campaign against cream and butter has at last been exposed as the rubbish it was, can we please see the end of the tyranny of skimmed and semi-skimmed milk, horrible in tea or coffee, and probably bad for you.
Amazingly, many coffee shops don't even stock or use whole milk. Boycott them till they end this stupid policy.
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
Defeats are easy to understand. Victories can take decades to reveal their meaning.
The triumph over Soviet Communism in 1989 faded pretty quickly. The Kremlin menace – easily resisted by resolve and deterrence – was gone.
But in its place were subtler threats from Berlin and Brussels, the unwanted revolution of mass immigration from the old Soviet Empire, the sinister rise of China and the deep, menacing clouds of Islamic militancy.
So I see the Scottish referendum as the start of something, not the end.
Alex Salmond never wanted to have his vote so soon. If it hadn't been for the solid old-fashioned common sense of the over-60s, he would have won on Thursday night.
In any case, he has won in many important ways. The Westminster panic in the last week was a huge victory for the SNP.
The pledge of maximum devolution was a giant retreat. David Cameron refused to have this option on the ballot paper at the start of the campaign.
Fearing he would lose all, including his own job, he conceded it after the voting had actually begun (so proving that it was done out of frenzied fear, not a long-term plan)
It will now be redeemed right down to the last inch of power and the last penny of cash.
And so what was left of the United Kingdom – which is not that much – will be even more threadbare than before.
The old magic of shared flags, shared wars and shared adversity looks pretty thin after this ruthless examination of the leases, bank accounts and family secrets which actually hold us together.
The general feebleness of the 'No' campaign was not the fault of those who ran it. They just didn't have much to say. They haven't really believed in the Union for years.
Much of what they said was arrant rubbish. There is no such thing as a 'British passport'. They would be illegal under EU law.
The same establishment which urged Eternal Union on the Scots urged the opposite on the Protestants of Northern Ireland in the shameful, dishonest surrender referendum of 1998, whose bitter implications few in mainland Britain will admit.
And – in the key betrayal of all – that establishment supported the end of our Protestant, independent, offshore Union in the Common Market referendum of 1975. Now what are we to do?
Well, I urge you all to be extremely suspicious of any attempts to offer the people of England 'devolved' regions, which are designed to Balkanise England and make her more easily swallowed into the EU.
Such things are the opposite of what we need – the return of our lost power to make our own laws and govern our own borders.
It was exactly that aim which many Scots quite reasonably sought – which is why part of my sympathies will always lie with them in this cause.
I wish we in England had one tenth of their spirit and determination.
Let Putin enjoy his Ukraine victory
Last week the 'West' was roundly beaten by Vladimir Putin in the First Ukrainian War. The EU not only delayed a crucial part of its imperial deal with Kiev. It openly admitted that this was a concession to Moscow.
The resulting compromise could have been had last winter, before the EU and Washington mounted their violent mob putsch against the elected President of Ukraine, ludicrously claiming they did this in the name of democracy and good government. All the thousands of lives lost since that putsch were needlessly sacrificed. There is no magic formula which says that Ukraine, under Western domination, will cease to be grossly corrupt, lawless, bankrupt and unfree.
Russia has shown quite clearly that it means what it has patiently said for years, and will fight against any further Western expansion of the EU.
Yet intelligent friends of mine, influential among policy-makers, are urging that we refuse to accept this verdict, and prepare for another, similar conflict a few years from now by arming and training Ukraine's feeble armed forces. Why? How is this in Britain's interest, or the interest of the human race in general?
Our history is more than cigarettes and miniskirts
Sheridan Smith is astonishingly good as the young Cilla Black in ITV's Cilla. But as always in recreating the past, this programme can't quite face the truth. They don't mind dwelling on the old religious divide, largely gone. But was 1960s Liverpool really as racially tolerant as shown? Old cars, old clothes and lots of smoking aren't enough to recreate the day before yesterday, the trickiest bit of history.
The war against the machines
How I sympathise with the 76-year-old woman who, driven to rage by the needless complexity of her new mobile phone, lost her patience and swore at the device. How I also sympathise with her horror and amazement when the thing replied in a voice of maddening electronic calm: 'Have I done something wrong?' She was alone in the house at the time, late at night. Her daughter says she has yet to recover. I'm not surprised.
Gordon's predictable rehabilitation
I long ago predicted last week's rehabilitation of Gordon Brown, similar to what happened to John Major. It was just a matter of when and how it came about.
Mr Brown could never possibly have been as bad as his propaganda foes claimed. The same is true now of Ed Miliband. Perhaps we could grow up a bit, and judge people by their actions rather than by reputations which are often false?
Why won't liberals kill to defend the good and gentle? They have nothing against death as such
One of the strongest arguments for hanging heinous murderers is that it is more humane than locking them up till they die. Anyone who has seen inside a prison would much prefer a quick death to wearing out his days in such a place.
I know that some people actively argue that notorious convicted killers should live in fear of attacks and perhaps a violent death at the hands of their fellow inmates.
I pity anyone with such a shrivelled conscience. The expression 'Hanging is too good for him' was first uttered by Mr Cruelty, an unlovely character in John Bunyan's (alas) neglected masterpiece The Pilgrim's Progress.
Now I read that a Belgian serial killer, Frank van den Bleeken, has won the 'right to die' under that country's laws, which I suspect we will soon adopt. I don't think he'll be the last.
I find this quite funny. Modern liberals lack the moral courage to defend the gentle with strong laws, so won't directly kill even the worst criminals.
But the ludicrous twaddle of 'Human Rights', with which they try to replace Christian morals, allows them to euthanise the people they won't execute.
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down
The unpleasant, distressing scenes at the execution of Clayton Lockett in a prison at McAlester, Oklahoma, will of course be used by anti-death penalty propagandists as an argument against execution itself. Are they right to do so? I do not think so. Here are some reasons for my opinion.
First, let us do what so few of these reports do, and none do prominently (for that might get in the way of the campaign) , and discuss why Clayton Lockett had been sentenced to death in the first place. As is usual in American executions, the murder was a long time ago, 15 years, the usual interval. Brace yourselves even so. At any distance in time and space, these events make unhappy reading, as indeed do accounts of Mr Lockett's death.
But one always has to remember the beginning of these stories. How many anti-execution campaigners could name, without a pause for research, the people who died in the Timothy Evans, James Hanratty or Ruth Ellis cases? How many of those who tell the story of Ricky Ray Rector, pathetically hoping to finish the dessert of his final meal after his notorious Arkansas execution, know why Mr Rector's brain was damaged (he shot himself in the head in a botched suicide) , or what he had done immediately before this (he had murdered a police officer in distressing circumstances)
Here is a partial account of Mr Lockett's undoubted crime (it does not describe the gang rape and the sodomy, though Lockett was also convicted of these crimes) , plus a little about the life he snuffed out, that of Stephanie Neiman. It was published in the 'Tulsa World' and was written by Ziva Branstetter :
'[Stephanie's] parents had taught the teenager to stand up for "what was her right and for what she believed in."
Neiman was dropping off a friend at a Perry residence on June 3, 1999, the same evening Clayton Lockett and two accomplices decided to pull a home invasion robbery there. Neiman fought Lockett when he tried to take the keys to her truck.
The men beat her and used duct tape to bind her hands and cover her mouth. Even after being kidnapped and driven to a dusty country road, Neiman didn't back down when Lockett asked if she planned to contact police.
The men had also beaten and kidnapped Neiman's friend along with Bobby Bornt, who lived in the residence, and Bornt's 9-month-old baby.
"Right is right and wrong is wrong. Maybe that's what Clayton was so scared of, because Stephanie did stand up for her rights," her parents later wrote to jurors in an impact statement. "She did not blink an eye at him. We raised her to work hard for what she got."
Steve and Susie Neiman asked jurors to give Lockett the death penalty for taking the life of their only child, who had graduated from Perry High School two weeks before her death.
'Lockett later told police "he decided to kill Stephanie because she would not agree to keep quiet," court records state.
Neiman was forced to watch as Lockett's accomplice, Shawn Mathis, spent 20 minutes digging a shallow grave in a ditch beside the road. Her friends saw Neiman standing in the ditch and heard a single shot.
Lockett returned to the truck because the gun had jammed. He later said he could hear Neiman pleading, "Oh God, please, please" as he fixed the shotgun.
The men could be heard "laughing about how tough Stephanie was" before Lockett shot Neiman a second time.
"He ordered Mathis to bury her, despite the fact that Mathis informed him Stephanie was still alive."
Bornt and Neiman's friend "were threatened that if they told anybody about these events, they too would be murdered," court records state.
"Every day we are left with horrific images of what the last hours of Stephanie's life was like," her parents' impact statement says.
"We were left with an empty home full of memories and the deafening silence of the lack of life within its walls. ... We feel that the only thing left to do is let Clayton Lockett serve out the sentence of death that a jury sentenced him to. Anything less is a travesty of justice."
Wikipedia records that at his murder trial (14 years ago) both DNA from the dead victim, fingerprints from the duct tape used to bind the victim, and eye-witness testimony led to his murder conviction. I do not think anybody has ever suggested there was any doubt about his guilt.
Obviously, the execution went wrong. Obviously any civilised person must regret that greatly , as I do. The purpose of execution is to kill, not to torture. Torture is absolutely wrong.
But why did it go wrong? Not because anyone actively wanted it to, but because of several circumstances, some of them brought about by anti-execution campaigners.
One of the reasons it went wrong so was because of the problems inevitably associated with this method of killing. Lethal injection, though a pseudo-medical procedure, is not generally carried out by practising doctors because it would violate their Hippocratic Oath. Yet it requires medical skills and knowledge.
The campaigns of anti-execution partisans have made simpler forms of execution (such as the former British method of hanging) legally problematic. This is because those partisans have never sought their aim through open, democratic means. But sideways, by attempting to claim that the US constitution outlaws capital punishment, when it actually doesn't.
(Something equally devious happen in In Britain. Here the anti-execution zealots abolished hanging through a 'Private Member's Bill' which was no such thing , but was in fact guided through Parliament with a great deal of help from the then Labour government, which crucially provided Parliamentary time. Most genuine private members' bills die for lack of such time. But this aid was never openly acknowledged, nor did Labour ever mention its plans to act in this way in its 1964 manifesto.
And, because the vote was 'free', that is to say the party whips gave no instructions on either side of the House, no MP ever had to justify his vote at a General Election, since it was never, before or afterwards, an issue in the Labour or Tory manifestoes, and MPs' individual voting records seldom play much of a part in general election campaigns. So the vote was 'free'; in the sense that it was 'free' from electoral consequences for the MPs involved).
In the USA, anti-execution campaigners knew that the voters of most states (for the US Congress had no power to tell individual states what to do) would not countenance abolition. Those voters would punish legislators if they voted for it in America's very different political culture (in which party matters less, the individual matters more and 'free' votes would be found out and proclaimed for what they really were) . So they concentrated their efforts on the third, unelected chamber of the US Congress, the nine-man Supreme Court (the nomination of whose justices if probably the single most important task faced by any President) .
Their chosen route was to get the Supreme Court to rule that the death penalty was 'Unconstitutional'( as they would later rule that the laws against abortion were unconstitutional) so at one stroke undermining the freedom of all death penalty states to take individual decisions on this. A small minority of states had abolished the death penalty by proper open procedures, as they were free to do. As it happened, executions were already in sharp decline at the time. In the 25 years from 1900 to 1924, US states had executed 2,995 people. In the 25 years between 1925 and 1949, that had risen to 3,644. Between 1950 and 1972, when the Supreme Court eventually did rule it unconstitutional, there were by comparison 916 executions. I'd be interested in any researched explanations of this drop, but would suspect that a general growth of social and moral liberalism in that period had something to do with it.
Politicians might publicly support the death penalty at election time, and keep it on the books. But lawyers and campaigners sought ( as they still seek) to frustrate it by endless appeals, so causing long delays and preventing many executions (By the way, from 1976 -when the penalty was reconstitutionalised - to 2002, there were 780 executions, broadly comparable with the pre-1972 period, but not with the pre-1950 era).
This brings to mind an interesting point in the excellent (because thorough, measured and intelligent) but essentially inconclusive Royal Commission on Capital Punishment of 1949-53. This pointed out that, as capital punishment's abolition usually followed a long period of suspension or reduced use, so direct 'before and after' comparisons of crimes supposedly deterred by the death penalty were not easy to make.
Anyway, when the Supreme Court ruled on Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, it recognised (as Britain's Parliament never has) that it had gone too far in 1972, especially in believing that execution was outdated. Voters in some states had demonstrated clearly that hey still though it justified and moral, as had several state legislatures. One result of this was the rather laudable system of a two-part trial, in which guilt and innocence were decided at one stage, and the question of execution or some other penalty at a second hearing. But the hangover from 1972 has been the desire to avoid any accusation of cruelty, hence the abandonment in practice, of all methods of execution except injection. This has led to the welcome (to me) disappearance of electrocution, a method I have witnessed myself, In Georgia, and which might well be extremely painful, though we would never know unless we underwent it ourselves. Though a supporter of the penalty in principle, I think the former British method of hanging, which was very swift, is paradoxically the most humane.
So the State of Oklahoma was using untried chemicals to achieve what was intended to be a painless death, and certainly wasn't painless in practice. Why was this?
At least partly it was because lethal injection was adopted by those US states which wished to restore the death penalty after the US Supreme Court had ruled in 1972 that execution was 'cruel and unusual', but later accepted that it was not. And so at least partly it was because of anti-execution campaigns, which adopted sideways methods because they knew that in a free society they could nto achieve their objective by open, direct legislation. .
In 1972, in the case of Furman v. Georgia, the US Supreme Court employed the Bill of Rights prohibition of 'Cruel and Unusual' punishment, because it was the only part of the US Constitution which gave them the power to intervene in the matter anyway. None of those ruling that it was 'cruel and unusual' appear to have agreed with any of the others about precisely why it was so. Two just said it *was* so, because of the changing times, much as people now seek to end an argument by saying 'don't you realise it's the 21st century?'
Three of the four pro-execution Judges said that the 14th Amendment's reference to the taking of life as a recognised state power made it clear that the drafters of the Constitution had not seen execution as cruel or unusual or contrary to the principles of that constitution. They also pointed out that the death penalty was part of the Anglo-American legal tradition.
But one of the anti-execution Justices, Potter Stewart, came up with this not-very-legal formula 'These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual. For, of all the people convicted of rapes and murders in 1967 and 1968, many just as reprehensible as these, the petitioners are among a capriciously selected random handful upon whom the sentence of death has in fact been imposed.'
This is in itself interesting, as it contains within it strong evidence that by 1972 the death penalty in the USA was being carried out in an arbitrary, random fashion, as it is now. In a way it could be taken as a plea for *more* executions. The same is true of arguments that not enough white murderers are executed, or not enough rich murderers are executed.
(Before 1940, perhaps this was the case. Executions were certainly quicker in the USA of those days. An interesting example of the death penalty's rather different, and much quicker application in the USA in the age before liberalism is the case of Giuseppe Zangara, who tried to assassinate President Franklin Roosevelt in Miami, Florida, on 15th February 1933. Mainly because he was standing on a wobbly chair 25 feet away and using a handgun, Zangara missed Roosevelt altogether, but hit Anton Cermak, the Mayor of Chicago. Cermak died of his wounds 19 days later. Zangara pleaded guilty to Cermak's murder and was executed (by electrocution) on 20th March. His last words were 'Push the button!' In these times, he would have lived on, on 'Death Row', for 15 years)
Then of course there is the European Union's high-minded ban, which began in 2011, on the export to the USA of one of the drugs used in lethal injection. This has compelled death penalty states in the US to seek new and different drugs, as happened in Oklahoma. Had it not been for this, there is every reason to believe that Mr Lockett's execution would have gone ahead without problems. Now, it is quite possible to argue that the Oklahoma authorities should then not have gone ahead with the execution at all, since they could not be sure that their substitute drugs( which are being kept secret) would work. I sympathise with this logic , but only up to a point.
And that point is this. Is it any business of the European Union (or of some nice liberal-minded person living in a soft part of London where rape and shooting, followed by burial alive in a shallow grave, is not a strong likelihood), how the State of Oklahoma conducts its criminal justice? In my view, it is no more their business than it is Oklahoma's business how murderers are treated in Rotterdam or Milan. If you really, really want to stop executions in Oklahoma, then go there and persuade the voters and legislators of that state to agree with you. And if you fail to do so, accept that opinions can differ on such things. And, if you are really thoughtful, accept that you just might be mistaken.


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Restaurant Review
Heart of the Plate
The Shop scores a home run
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Ty Bannerman reviews one of Nob Hill's newest cafés and exhausts his baseball metaphors.
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Resource Conservation Funds 2004 Consolidated Solicitation
The summary for the Resource Conservation Funds 2004 Consolidated Solicitation grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the Environmental Protection Agency, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.
Resource Conservation Funds 2004 Consolidated Solicitation: The purpose of this grant program is to provide funding for projects which are unique and innovative. Special emphasis will be on the following Region 9 goals.
|Federal Grant Title:
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Conversion of the Capcom arcade fighting game that spawned the superior Street Fighter II and thus started the fighting game craze in the '90s.
An adult-oriented poker game. Win a hand to catch a glimpse of some buxom beauties.


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Eddie is angry at Sheila for contacting Maxwell and reveals why he disappeared. The minister gives Alice some advice on her current situation with Bob.
- July 2016
- June 2016
Episode 524 (15/03/1988)
Donald's recent behaviour of drawing on walls has caused Alice and Mrs Lachlan to argue. Lady Margaret distributes letters about a meeting she'd like the residents to attend.
Episode 525 (18/03/1988)
Isabel and Effie's chat in the shop makes Effie suddenly interested in Fergus. Mrs Mack confronts Lady Margaret for not consulting the Rural Committee before the excursion.
Episode 526 (22/03/1988)
Effie in particular is curious as to why Fergus didn't deliver the post. Bob accuses Alice of not wanting to move with him, giving her an ultimatum.
Episode 527 (25/03/1988)
Alice asks Mrs Lachlan if Dougal would reconsider letting her take Donald. A man by the name of Maxwell shows up looking for Eddie.
Episode 528 (29/03/1988)
Brian knows there's more to Isabel's short disappearance than she's letting on and tries hard to find out what's wrong.
Episode 529 (01/04/1988)
Effie and Fergus have a chat about relationships before Lorna arrives, while Alice tells Brian about Isabel for fear that she won't look out for herself.
Episode 530 (05/04/1988)
Isabel is angry at Alice for betraying her trust. Meanwhile Effie comes up with ideas on how to impress Fergus, and Donald gets himself into a bit of bother.
Episode 531 (08/04/1988)
Alice insists that Donald be given no more money until the thief problems are cleared up. Effie wracks her brain to find a way where she can cook Fergus a meal.
Episode 532 (12/04/1988)
It's the day of Isabel's operation and she's finding it hard to keep it together. Dougal's concerns for Donald are growing, and Eddie returns to the village but not in a good state.
Episode 533 (15/04/1988)
Effie and Fergus' dinner date didn't go quite as planned, which comes as a great amusement to Archie and Lorna. Brian, whose main concern is Isabel, has no idea that he has no job to return to.
Episode 534 (18/04/1988)
Eddie is examined by a doctor and finally reveals the true cause behind his shoulder injury.
Episode 535 (22/04/1988)
Dougal decides that Donald should stay with him when Bob and Alice move. Over at the big house, Eric is worried about Joanna and Ruiri being subjects of gossip.
Episode 536 (26/04/1988)
Sneddon wants Eddie to tell the police he wasn't on estate land when he was shot or he'll tell about the traps, and Brian receives some bad news from the Big House.
Episode 537 (29/04/1988)
The minister thinks that Fiona is marrying Ruiri out of duty for her son. As a result of her operation, Isabel gets the results she wants to hear.
Episode 538 (02/05/1988)
Brian is happy about Isabel's release from hospital. Inverdarroch's sister is coming to visit, which makes Morag smile. Fiona and Sir John discuss those in the running for employment at the estate.
Episode 539 (06/05/1988)
Eddie is angry at Sheila for contacting Maxwell and reveals why he disappeared. The minister gives Alice some advice on her current situation with Bob.


text:
Blistered Fingers
Family Bluegrass Music Festival
August 24, 25, 26, & 27, 2016
Litchfield Fairgrounds - Litchfield, Maine
Gate opens at 8:00A.M. Sunday!!!
As of: Sunday, April 03, 2016-Subject to change
Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver (TN) Fri.
The Gibson Brothers (NY) Sat.
Band Of Ruhks (TN) Sat.
Nothin' Fancy (VA) Thur., Fri.
The Baker Family (MO) Wed., Thur., Fri.
Zink & Company (MA) Fri., Sat.
Amy Gallatin & Stillwaters (CT) Fri.
Phat Burger Deluxe (ME) Wed., Thur., Sat.
The Zolla Boys (CT) Sat.
Original Condition (ME) Thur., Fri.
Bluegrass Gospel Sing & Jam (MA) Sun.
And Your Host Band
Blistered Fingers (ME) Sat.
Sandy Cormier
Click Here To Get A
Printable Flyer!
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Ticket Info. Location Hotels, Motels & B&B's
Pictures Performance Schedule
We would like to thank our
Sponsors and ask that you please
patronize them! Without their support this festival would not be possible!
For more information:
Blistered Fingers
Or Phone:
(207) 873-6539
Or Write:
Blistered Fingers
263 Trafton Rd.
Waterville, Maine 04901
Last Revised: Sunday, April 03, 2016


text:
Nagarjuna's Guide To The Bodhisattva Pathby Arya Nagarjuna
This is The Bodhisambhara Shastra ("Treatise on the Provisions for Enlightenment"), written by Arya Nagarjuna, the early Indian monk (ca 2nd c.) who is one of the most famous figures in the history of Indian Mahayana Buddhism. This work describes the essential prerequisites for achieving the complete enlightenment of a buddha while also describing the most important practices to be undertaken by bodhisattvas. The text is accompanied here by an abridged version of its only commentary, originally written by the early Indian Bhikshu Vasitva, a monk who lived sometime in the middle or first half of the first millennium.
This volume includes facing-page source text for the stanzas in both traditional and simplified scripts.
Abridgement, notes, and translation by the American monk, Bhikshu Dharmamitra.
Product Details
- 9781935413028
- Publisher:
- Kalavinka Press
- Publication date:
- 02/15/2009
- Pages:
- 208
- Product dimensions:
- 0.48(w) x 6.00(h) x 9.00(d)
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text:
All right, Vikings fans, we've made it to Bye Week. With four weeks down and a .500 record, there have been some ups and downs to the season thus far. Looking back over the games under our belt, which Vikings player has impressed you the most? Check out our answers, and as always, leave us a comment to let us know your opinion!
Carl: Adrian Peterson, RB
Mike Zimmer has put his stamp on the 2015 Minnesota Vikings football team, and the result is a roster full of players buying into a team-first approach. Yes, this question is a bit harder to answer because so far this season both the offense and defense appear to be playing good "team" ball. But individually, Adrian Peterson has impressed me the most after four games. His 372 yards leads the NFL in rushing and his 5.0 yards per carry average has been a shot in the arm for the offense. After seeing the run game struggle in the preseason, it has been a joy to see some explosiveness back in the backfield.
Brent: Anthony Barr, LB*
There isn't any doubt that expectations of Barr were sky high going into his second year, but nagging injuries that lingered into the preseason created some cause for concern. Barr has been outstanding thus far and outside of Harrison Smith is having the best season of any Vikings defender. What has been most impressive is Barr's improvement in coverage through four weeks. Picking off Peyton Manning will be on Barr's highlight reel for a long time and for good reason. Imagine if he were to have come away with the second INT.
*(other considerations: Joe Berger, Linval Joseph & Eric Kendricks)


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Unselfish play not unnoticed by Gottfried
Published: Friday, November 14, 2008 at 3:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, November 14, 2008 at 12:36 a.m.
TUSCALOOSA | The University of Alabama mens basketball team scored plenty of points in its second exhibition game and grabbed an abundance of rebounds, but Crimson Tide head coach Mark Gottfried was more pleased with some other numbers.
Alabama pounded Belhaven, an NAIA visitor from Jackson, Miss., by a 97-43 margin. But Gottfrieds focus was on the Crimson Tides 26 assists and 20 steals in the game.
I was pretty pleased, obviously, with a lot of things, Gottfried said. I like our unselfishness and I like our quickness on defense. Those are great personality traits for this team.
We wore them down with our pressure and that created a lot of opportunities for us. Those two numbers (in assists and steals) really jumped off the page when I looked at the statistics.
As I am watching the team I am pleased with the unselfish play. I think thats contagious and will be the trademark of this team.
Sophomore guard Senario Hillman led all scorers with 21 points. Senior forward Alonzo Gee scored 18 points, with 17 of those coming in the first half.
A lot of Senarios offense came from his defense. Hes able to create havoc defensively. We need that from him.
In the second half, we put him in the middle of the zone and he was effective there. But hes able to make things happen.
Early in the game, he was just playing and not creating but I thought he got more active as the game went on.
At one point in the second half, Hillman scored 12 consecutive points for the Crimson Tide.
Freshman JaMychal Green had 14 points, seven rebounds and five steals in the game.
Hes just a good player, period, Gottfried said. Hes smart, hes active and he gets involved in a lot of plays. I think hes going to get better and better.
Senior point guard Ronald Steele played 25 minutes, scoring seven points and handing out eight assists.
Health-wise, I think Ron is 100 per cent, Gottfried said. He feels great. But basketball-wise, hes not there yet. He just needs to keep playing.
Im getting more comfortable every game, Steele said. Im still not all the way comfortable but Ill get there.
There was little suspense in the actual game.
The Blazers were within a basket, 14-12, with 10:40 remaining in the first half. At that point, Alabama went on a 15-0 run to put the game away, even though the Crimson Tide struggled to shoot the ball from the field. At one point, Alabama had made just five field goals (including one 3-point basket) but was 16 of 20 from the free throw line.
Alabama built its lead to 44-23 by halftime and pulled away to the eventual 54-point margin.
Dax Miller and Korey Whiting scored nine points each to pace Belhaven.
The Crimson Tide will open its regular season against Mercer on Sunday at 6 p.m. at Coleman Coliseum.
In college basketball, you fear nobody but you respect everybody, Gottfried said. I think our players are ready to get started.
GOTTFRIED OFFICIALLY announced a five-man early signing class for the Crimson Tides 2009-2010 season.
As recruiting went along and we saw that it was going well, I just felt like we should add a player at each position and we were able to do that, Gottfried said. Im really excited about this class.
The five Crimson Tide signees are 6-foot-4 guard Charvez Davis (Montgomery/Northwest Florida State Community College), 6-8 forward Chris Hines (Evergreen/Southwestern Illinois CC), 6-10 forward Shawn Kemp, Jr., (Canton, Ga.), 6-6 forward Tony Mitchell (Swainsboro, Ga.), and 6-0 guard Cully Payne (Schaumburg, Ill.).
Reach Cecil Hurt at email@example.com or 205-722-0225.
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For decades, Philadelphia's city government has struggled to cope with an abundance of vacant land and chronic tax delinquency, two closely related problems that have fueled blight and depressed property values in neighborhoods across the city.
Last month, a pair of laws were introduced in City Council that would upend the city's approach to vacant land and tax delinquencies. If adopted, the bills would create a powerful agency, a land bank, and give it the authority to snap up tax-delinquent properties as it chooses.
The measures would also compel the city to foreclose on or seize tax-delinquent property within one year. That change alone would have a massive effect on the city's real estate market, as there are more than 100,000 tax-delinquent properties in Philadelphia, or roughly 19 percent of all parcels in the city. Philadelphia has the worst property-tax-collection record of any big city in America, as detailed last year in an Inquirer/PlanPhilly investigation.


text:
Our mission is to ensure the Housing Government-sponsored Enterprises operate in a safe and sound manner so they serve as a reliable source of liquidity and funding for housing finance and community investment. Together these institutions provide more than $5 trillion in funding for the U.S. mortgage markets and financial institutions.
Read about the agency's 2015 examinations of Fannie Mac, Freddie Mac and the Home Loan Bank System.
Submit comments and provide input on FHFA Rules Open for Comment by clicking on Rulemaking and Federal Register.
Goal: Help restore confidence, enhance capacity to fulfill mission, and mitigate systemic risk that contributed directly to instability in financial markets.
MAINTAIN foreclosure prevention activities and credit availability, REDUCE taxpayer risk, and BUILD a new single-family securitization infrastructure. Read more in the 2016 Scorecard and Conservatorships Strategic Plan.
Plans and Reports
FHFA experts provide reliable data, including all states, about activity in the U.S. mortgage market through its House Price Index, Refinance Report, Foreclosure Prevention Report, and Performance Report.
Jan. 26 - Monthly
Feb. 25 - Quarterly
March 22 - Monthly
April 21 - Monthly
May 25 - Quarterly
June 22 - Monthly
July 21 - Monthly
Aug. 24 - Quarterly
September 22 - Monthly
October 25 - Monthly
Nov. 23 - Quarterly
Dec. 22 - Monthly
HARP - the Home Affordable Refinance Program was created by FHFA specifically to help homeowners current on their mortgage payments, but underwater on their mortgages.
FHFA economists and policy experts provide reliable research and policy analysis about critical topics impacting the nation's housing finance sector. Meet the experts….
Key Topics pages provide information about FHFA's work on a range of issues facing the nation and highlight the most relevant related news releases, reports, statements and web pages on the respective topics.
The Honorable Melvin L. Watt of Charlotte, NC sworn in on January 6th to a 5-year term as the first Senate-confirmed Director of FHFA.
Read more about Director Watt
Washington, D.C. – The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) today reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac completed nearly 65,900 foreclosure prevention actions in the fourth quarter of 2014, bringing the total foreclosure prevention actions to more than
3.4 million since the start of the conservatorships in September 2008. These measures have helped nearly
2.8 million borrowers stay in their homes, including
1.8 million who received permanent loan modifications.
Further detail can be found in FHFA's
fourth quarter Foreclosure Prevention Report, which also includes data on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac home retention actions, delinquency data and real-estate owned (REO) inventory. FHFA publishes the report data in an online, interactive
Borrower Assistance Map accessible through FHFA.gov.
Other foreclosure prevention data for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac noted in the quarterly report include:
The number of 60+ day delinquent loans declined another 3 percent during the quarter to the lowest level since the start of conservatorships;
The serious delinquency rate of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans fell to 1.9 percent at the end of the fourth quarter;
Approximately 33 percent of all permanent loan modifications helped to reduce homeowners' monthly payments by over 30 percent in the fourth quarter;
There were 10,800 short sales and deeds-in-lieu completed in the fourth quarter, bringing the total to approximately 605,000 since the start of the conservatorships.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency regulates Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks. These government-sponsored enterprises provide more than $5.6 trillion in funding for the U.S. mortgage markets and financial institutions. Additional information is available at www.FHFA.gov, on Twitter
YouTube and
Media: Stefanie Johnson (202) 649-3030 / Corinne Russell (202) 649-3032 Consumers: Consumer Communications or (202) 649-3811
© 2016 Federal Housing Finance Agency


text:
what does a vent solenoid do and how much should it cost to replace.
repair on 2001 Ford Explorer Sport Trac
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1 answer
The vent solenoid on your 2001 Ford Explorer Sport Trac opens and closes to seal the fuel vapor (EVAP) system as necessary according to the commands from the PowerTrain Control Module. My information shows that the vent solenoid may be part of the Vapor Canister which stores the fuel vapor until it can be routed to the engine and burned in the combustion chambers. If indeed the vent solenoid is part of the vapor canister the cost to replace the canister should be in the $100 - $140 range.


text:
Sounds Like: rain over me - marc anthony ft pitbull, Drake, The-Dream
Label: Fly Latinos Music
Manager: Wise Movements
Bio: ManniFe, an urban tropical vocalist, was born in the Dominican Rep, Barrio Villa Juana Santo Domingo. At a young age ManniFe began developing an appreciation for music and songwriting.
His cousin Luyo was born and raised in Southwest Florida with a natural talent for banging on everything. L...See Full Bio


text:
MATLAB and Simulink resources for Arduino, LEGO, and Raspberry Pi testLearn more
Opportunities for recent engineering grads.Apply Today
New to MATLAB?Learn MATLAB today!
All you need to do here is submit your solution a prime number of seconds after the top of the hour. Any hour at all... Easy, right?


text:
Southern Regional Meetings
Save the Date
2017 Southern Regional Meeting
February 16-18, 2017
New Orleans, Louisiana
Participating Societies:
AFMR Southern Section
Academic Pediatric Association
American Society of Nutrition Southern
Southern Society for Clinical Investigation
Southern Society for Pediatric Research
View Abstracts in JIM
Chair Elect, AFMR Southern SectionTerm: Feb 20, 2017Abeer Moanna, MD
Secretary-Treasurer, AFMR Southern SecTerm: Feb 20, 2019Viranuj Sueblinvong, M.D.
Past Chair, AFMR Southern SectionTerm: Feb 20, 2017Cherry Wongtrakool, M.D.
CouncilorTerm: Feb 28, 2017Marian L Evatt, MD, MS
CouncilorTerm: Feb 28, 2017David E. Green, M.D.
CouncilorTerm: Feb 28, 2018Elvira Gosmanova, MD, FASN
CouncilorTerm: Feb 20, 2019Jeff House
CouncilorTerm: Feb 20, 2019Bashar S. Staitieh
CouncilorTerm: Feb 20, 2019Jesse T Jacob
CouncilorTerm: Feb 20, 2019Stephanie L. Baer, M.D.


text:
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Search engine optimization (SEO) has been around for a while, but with marketers juggling multiple priorities, it easily finds its way to the bottom of the marketing to do list. Learn what you can do to drive improvements in SEO and enhance where your HFA website shows up in keyword search results. Attend this session for an overview of SEO, practical ways to increase your website traffic, and tips on how to maximize the effectiveness of your agency's most critical communications channel: its website.


text:
Naruto Fanart. This time Sakura Haruno.
I've changed to much the design :c and few things could be better.
I've changed to much the design :c and few things could be better.
Wow, this is just amazing! Congrats
This is one of my favorite pieces of Sakura . But I have to admit that I would love to see a redesign of this artwork with more details,like in the case of your newest Temari artwork
really cool version!
No Tenten? awwww you suck lol
Love the new hair style.
Stunning, <3
Can you please give me some art lessons?
She looks so good!!!
Beautiful! Love the outfit!
Oh my stars! It's like I can actually touch my computer screen and feel the texture of her clothes, good job!
Amazing is hardly the word for it is the only thing I can say.
Wow, It looks amazing!
so cool!!
Excellent work!
She Mega-Evolve to MegaSakura. Gain Rock typing
Wow, I like your art style of Sakura! She rocks in that outfit.
Nice artwork!
sakura is the best! ^_^
the way you rendered the clothes is so realistic o:
amazing work!
amazing work!
What would a girl have to do to get you to design Karin (also from Naruto) in this style?
*breaks fav button* Gorgeous work.
Cool pictures
Awesome work!
amazing. one of my faves.
Great work!
Ooh is better than the original ! At first I didn't think it was sakura haha
Awsome art
What does Sukura see through 'her' eyes?
WHAT, she is Sakura?!
Looks beautiful and sexy
Gaah!! This is so awesome!!!


text:
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