27% is not a Majority, and Leaving the EU Requires an Act of Parliament

Update some years later: The UK finally did leave the European Union on Jan 31st 2020. After 2 General Elections and several bumps in the road, the decision to leave was enacted by Parliament, and the particular worry that the referendum result might encourage Britain to ignore Parliamentary Sovereignty has been put to rest.

It's now a couple of weeks since the Brexit referendum. The question on the ballot was "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" and a majority of the votes cast were for "Leave". Since democracy is the rule of the majority, and the majority voted to leave, some say that the decision to leave the EU has been made democratically, and any objections to this decision are anti-democratic sour grapes.

I disagree, and I've been asked (in this case, by my mother) to explain why I disagree. Here are the reasons why leaving the EU without an Act of Parliament would be both undemocratic in the short term and destructive to the UK's democratic constitution in the long term.

Of course, our constitution is unwritten, and so the process for changing it isn't formalised. We go by tradition, precedent, common law, and common sense.

The mandate for constitutional change is insufficient

In the referendum, 17.41 million votes were cast for "Leave" and 16.14 million were cast for "Remain". The population of the UK is 64.1 million (World Bank estimate). So about 27% of the population voted to Leave, about 25% voted to Remain. Moreover, the largest disenfranchised group (those under 18) would probably have voted strongly to Remain.

So the statement "A majority of the people voted for Brexit" is not true, not even close. If we had a formal constitution and an official process for changing it, I would wager that a popular vote of 27% to 25% would not be enough. (In the USA, for example, one of several conditions such as "ratified by three quarters of the State Legislatures" must be met.)

The campaign and result could probably not be repeated

We're used to election campaigns involving contested claims and exaggeration, but this one was extreme. This has been pointed out many times already, so I'll be brief. There's no £350 million a week coming back, immigration is not being curtailed, for those who wish to curtail immigration the path is entirely unclear, but the House of Commons has voted by 245 to 2 to guarantee that EU citizens living in the UK will have the right to remain. Given the obvious public unravelling of the Leave campaign's promises and its leadership, and some already clear economic damage, it is very unlikely that the referendum result could be repeated.

The referendum is not a mandate for a particular policy

In the weeks since the referendum, the UK's position is less clear than ever. It's clear that a deal with the rest of the EU to maintain free movement of goods but not of people is very unlikely, and that there are a baffling array of options in between staying in the EU and abandoning free trade between Britain and Europe altogether. The Leave vote is not a vote for anything except "not being in the EU". It did not set forth a particular option for relations with the rest of Europe, and almost every member of Parliament was elected on a manifesto that advised staying in the EU. The British people may have voted about something that's not wanted, but have not voted about what is wanted.

The only legitimate way forward involves Parliament

There isn't much precedent for using referenda in Britain, but what precedent there is says that referenda can be used in conjunction with Parliament, not instead of it. In the process whereby the UK joined the EEC in the 1970's (the only real precedent), the referendum result was much stronger (67% majority), but it was never used instead of passing laws in Parliament.

So far the only legal alternative to Parliament I've read about is the idea of using Royal Prerogative to pass laws relating to leaving the EU, apparently suggested by government lawyers. You don't need to be a constitutional lawyer to know that in theory the Crown can pass and rescind whatever laws it likes, but a monarch who does this in practice risks losing a Civil War, getting their head chopped off, and bringing down the monarchy. Of course I don't mean this as a threat, I certainly don't want it to happen! But the Queen is probably more aware of her role than anyone else alive, and the idea that she may make an exception from her well-known avoidance of politics and abolish an Act of Parliament without consulting Parliament, on an issue so controversial that England and Wales might go one way and Scotland and Northern Ireland another - well, even if that's legal it's still preposterous. If the government or the monarchy wants to nullify laws passed by Parliament, they have a perfectly legal and practical way of doing it - by asking Parliament.

This does leave the option that the Government might try to invoke Article 50 (giving notice of an intent to withdraw from the EU) without Parliament's consent, presuming that Parliament will cooperate later in repealing the 1972 European Communities act and many other pieces of legislation. But presuming that Parliament will comply with all this is a very risky alternative compared with asking first!

What if Parliament doesn't cooperate?

Let's briefly consider the reasons for not consulting Parliament.

•  Parliament might vote against triggering Brexit by invoking Article 50.
• It might. The alternative, "Don't ask Parliament because they might disagree", sounds utterly illegal and contrary to  Parliamentary Sovereignty, which is the very first principle of British politics.
• Parliament might vote in favour of triggering Brexit, but that's against the manifesto promises of most MPs.
• MPs are representatives, not delegates. If they choose to vote differently from their manifesto promises, that is legal and has many precedents.
• The Government needs to negotiate with other EU countries before it can bring a bill before Parliament.
• Nonsense. There is nothing stopping the Government from bringing forward a bill that asks for permission to negotiate.
• It might lead to enough controversy to bring down the Government in a vote of no confidence, triggering a general election.
• If the Government can't pass its most important legislation through Parliament, that's exactly what a general election is for. General elections are a costly, uncertain, and time-consuming process - but given that the whole Brexit process is already all of these things and more, the notion of doing something unconstitutional instead of holding a general election is crazy.

Can these arguments be dismissed as motivated reasoning? Something like "You wanted Remain to win anyway, of course you'll throw obstacles in the way of a Leave victory". Well, I do want the UK to remain part of the EU, but in this case that's not the point. The point is that overriding Parliamentary Sovereignty using an unlikely alliance between a 27% referendum vote and Royal Prerogative would set a terrible precedent. If the Government passes proper legislation to leave the EU, I'll be disappointed, I admit that. But if the bill is honest, properly worded, sensibly debated, and passed by Parliament, I'll be the first to accept its legality.

The Crown can be asked to dissolve Parliament, but not to ignore it. The people have the right to replace Parliament, but not to ignore it. These are the cornerstones of Britain's rather ad hoc but surprisingly robust democracy. It's not perfect by any means, but over the centuries it's done pretty well, particularly at avoiding the worst forms of oppression. Let's not give up our most cherished principles because of a narrow vote on a single day.

What should you do?

If you agree with this conclusion, please feel free to share and promote this article. But much more importantly for those living in the UK, write to your local MP. If you're below voting age, or a foreign national not allowed to vote in the referendum, they are still your local MP and you should write to them. This is not just for Remain supporters - if you're a Leave supporter, please write to your MP and say that Parliament should immediately put its authority behind the referendum result. This is one of those times in our history when Britain urgently needs Parliamentary leadership.

Why Britain Should Remain in the European Union

If I was voting with just my head tomorrow, I would vote Remain.

It should be enough that the UK pound and financial markets have taken a battering on just the fear of leaving. It should be enough that so many major economic leaders and institutions advise us to stay. That in spite of the popular myth to the contrary, actual data shows that immigrants are net contributors to the benefits system, not net takers. That millions of British retirees in other European countries are likely to be victims of Brexit, as well as younger working-age people in Britain. That stories about freeloading European countries taking Britain's money and Britain getting nothing in return are so easily debunked. That surveys demonstrate that "average British beliefs" about how much of our tax money flows to and from the EU are utterly misinformed. That I and my children can live and work in so many places from Ireland to Greece, and that's not something we would risk lightly.

But the referendum has clearly not been about voting with our heads. We're voting with our hearts as well. Would I vote differently?

The Remain campaign has looked lacklustre. It doesn't get people whipped up or nearly so passionate. As a parent I understand that: it's hard to make "Don't risk hurting yourself just to prove your independence" an inspiring message. If you show a picture of what hurting yourself might look like, you're scaremongering. If you don't, you're just being a wimp. But if I can explain that to a child about jumping down the stairs in a pillowcase, it shouldn't be so hard to explain it to grownups voting about their political and economic future. Perhaps my heart isn't immediately excited about staying in the EU. But is excitement really the point?

By contrast, the Leave campaign has looked ugly. Pictures of how wicked foreigners are. How we're being either overrun by underling dark-skinned swarthy types, or overlording light-skinned calculating types. About how everything is "us" versus "them". About how all the "them" must be kept away from "us". Not facts, not data, not research, not all the boring nerdy stuff that should go into actual policymaking. Just appealing to the idea that I should belong to a tribe, and feel threatened by every other tribe. The Leave campaign, and nearly all the material I've seen shared and circulated to promote it, does stir my emotions. It makes me ashamed that anyone would think that this is what being British should mean.

If I was voting with just my heart tomorrow, I would vote Remain. 

The Weakness of the Arguments Against Hillary Clinton

I've been staying mute on politics but I'm going to make an exception.

Wave after wave of anti-Hillary mouthing is gradually making me gently but firmly pro-Hillary. Just reading random news and other people's feeds over the past week I've heard all of the following arguments:

"She won't be able to win in all-important swing states."
Like Ohio and Florida?

"It's wrong that all those superdelegates are going to vote for her."
She's currently nearly 40% ahead in the regular delegate count.

"I have lots of friends who say they won't vote for her. Like really really won't vote for her ever ever."
That's not how national elections are decided.

"She sounds shrill."
The person behind the microphone should have a deeper voice - but it's not about sexism?

"She must be dishonest, look at all those investigations into her."
When investigation after investigation leads to no indictment, that sounds like an ever-more-desperate smear campaign.

So I guess in my own way I too am done with politics-as-usual and angry at the establishment. There isn't any other person in the United States who's been more targeted by the establishment over and over again than Hilary Clinton. The more successful she is, the more specious the arguments against her become.

At this rate, I'm probably going to vote for her.

The Day Marriage Equality Became the Law of the Land

On February 14th, 2004, thousands of couples were lining up to get married at City Hall in San Francisco. In a strange quirk of fate, we found ourselves in a great crowd of people - we accidentally chose to get married the same weekend that the city began to suddenly issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples! After some initial confusion about where to line up and how to get the papers we needed in the pandemonium, the historic nature of the events gradually dawned on me. Like being an immigrant for the first time, sometimes it takes a jolt of someone else's reality to see the basic wrongness in classifying people as "normal" and "other". And of course I grew up in Yorkshire, not San Francisco, so a lot was still new to me. It gave me a lot to ponder for several days, and among other things I wrote and we recorded this song.

Six months to the day later, on August 14th, we were back in San Francisco. We'd moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but we got a slot for a green-card interview back in San Francisco, and so back we went. While we were there, the court ruling came through that the marriages from that day six months earlier were null-and-void. Luckily again for us, the headlines were one bit overblown - it wasn't all marriages from that day, the court was, ahem, discriminating enough to let the handful of straight marriages stand. It was unfair and depressing, and all too aware of the situation, we had a lot of survivor's guilt.

In a surprise turn, Maryl and I found ourselves invited to speak and even sing in front of a rally that evening, in front of the same City Hall where we were married. We were introduced, not surprisingly, as "a couple whose marriage would stand", and understandably when they saw us, most of the crowd were probably as surprised as we were. I remember, we talked of the privilege of marriage, how as an international couple it was crucial to our being able to stay together, and how irrational it was to make immigration and any number of other legal decisions based on your partner's gender. We said it was wrong, and that we would do our best to help put it right, which people appreciated.

Then what I remember saying was something like the following:

"Our culture does not protect freedom by restricting freedom. We don't protect democracy by saying that only males can vote. We don't protect liberty by saying that only white people can be free. We don't protect the Bible by saying you can only read it in Latin." (A few chuckles.)

"And we don't protect marriage by saying that only straight couples can marry!" (Reverberating cheers.)

"Today we're still together, still married. But for the sake of freedom to love each other, our marriage will not be fully complete, will not be fully consecrated, until everyone shares that freedom." And then we sang the song, and people started to join in the chorus, "Those who love has joined together ever will united be."

And it came to fulfillment today, June 26th 2015. The Supreme Court of the United States issued a ruling saying that barring same-sex couples from being legally married is in conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which includes "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States".

It has come true, we have come so far together, cherishing the love we had then and seeing it grow so much already. My heart goes out to the whole nation, especially to those whose rights are sundered no longer. May those who are hurting find peace in their hearts across the country. May we all find freedom from the very idea that freedoms for one group must be taken from another. But selfishly, my heart is at home tonight. For some of the years in between, we thought we'd glimpsed something that was right, that was coming, but that was not to be for decades. We were wrong. Tonight I'm happy as well for us, for our freedom to marry, that was once restricted, is consecrated today.

Round the World

The Earth is roughly spherical in shape, as everyone reading this knows. What's often more of a surprise is that this part of core science has been known to humans for some millennia, and has remained generally accepted and largely uncontroversial. We see mountaintops in the distance before we see the plains below, and we see that masthead of an approaching ship before we see the hull. We see the shadow of the Earth upon the face of the moon during a lunar eclipse, and it is always circular. At different latitudes, we see different stars at night, and the sun casts shadows of different lengths during the day. These pieces of evidence are all documented in ancient times, and were gathered together in Aristotle's treatise On the Heavens (Book II, Ch 14), which means they were all known by around 350BC at the latest. This led to the prediction that you could travel in a particular direction and eventually return to the place from which you started, a hypothesis that was confirmed by the Magellan expedition nearly 2000 years later.

The practical importance of this discovery appears in many engineering situations. It's often necessary for planning and executing journeys of more than a few hundred miles. It's vital for understanding weather patterns. It's vital for long-distance communication: once the railway and the telegraph were standard, it became apparent quite quickly that some system of coordinated time and corresponding time zones was necessary to synchronize watches around the planet. Software engineers dealing with any kind of geographic application learn very quickly that trying to treat latitudes and longitudes as Cartesian coordinates is asking for trouble: and if we go back into the history of mathematics, we find that this is just what sines and cosines were invented for.

In about 180 BC, Eratosthenes of Alexandria used the difference in lengths of shadows at midday at different latitudes to estimate the circumference of the Earth, and this gave a much more accurate figure than the estimate used by Christopher Columbus to convince Queen Isabella that the east coast of China was within reach of a well-provisioned sea voyage. Like many children in school, I read that Columbus was one of the first people to believe that the Earth was round. Not true: instead, he was the first to place enough faith in an optimistically small estimate of the Earth's circumference that he was willing to risk a westward voyage from Europe to China. In the event, his ignorance of geography was turned into good fortune thanks only to the intervention of an unexpected continent in between.

In between the mathematicians of the ancient world and the European renaissance lies the period of the Middle Ages. Readers of many standard histories may be left with the impression that in this period at least, Europeans in particular believed that the Earth was flat. This is generally false: the overwhelming majority of writers who touched on the subject assumed that the reader knows that the Earth is round. These include Augustine, Bede, Aquinas, over 70 other medieval churchmen, and of course a whole range of Arab, Indian and Chinese scholars and sailors. From around 1000AD, the knowledge assumed increasing practical importance as the mariner's compass and sailing into the wind made regular longer voyages possible, particularly over the Indian Ocean. The European renaissance and voyages of discovery did not come from nowhere, but from centuries of gradual technological advances during which common knowledge of the shape of the Earth played a central part. By the time Copernicus was able to write his pivotal work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, he could state firmly in his second paragraph that the Earth is spherical, give a short list of demonstrations similar to those above, and know that every educated reader would agree with his book thus far.

Given the importance of the Earth's shape in the day to day life of many professions, why is the story of this knowledge relatively obscure compared to that of the Earth's movement in the solar system? Most educated people today can give a reasonable estimate of when it became known that the Earth goes round the sun: many will say Copernicus; others will guess at Galileo which is roughly accurate to within a century. By contrast, if asked "At around what date did we know that the Earth was round?" many educated people will admit to not knowing at all, or will guess at a similar time in the early modern period.

In the rest of this brief essay, I will propose three reasons for this absence: one scientific, one literary, and one religious.

The scientific reason is that the Earth's daily rotation is intimately linked to its shape, but was demonstrated much later. Ptolemy of Alexandria (who knew of course that the Earth was round) considered but dismissed the idea that the sunrise and sunset were due to the Earth itself rotating, because the surface of the Earth would have to be moving so fast that there would be enormous windstorms everywhere. This is the claim that Copernicus challenges first, before going on to discuss the movement of planets and the Earth around the Sun. Copernicus argues a kind of least-action principle – if the Earth rotating once a day is "too fast to believe", then how much harder is it to believe instead that the sphere of the immeasurably distant stars rotates once a day? To explain the lack of permanent hurricanes, Copernicus suggests that even though gases are attracted to the Earth's surface less strongly than liquids and solids, still they are attracted and pulled round as the Earth itself spins. He even goes so far as to suggest that the moon and sun may similarly attract the things near to them: to explain the lack of perpetual hurricanes, Copernicus even anticipates the law of universal gravitation! So Copernicus did contribute crucially to our knowledge of the Earth's circular motion, and the history of this discovery can understandably be confused with the history of our knowledge of the Earth's circular shape.

The literary reason is that the story of the Earth's shape lacks drama. It's like trying to write a love story about a couple who stays happily married for decades – it's dull! There is no hero thrown in jail, no individual of brilliant insight rejected by an ignorant public or a corrupt establishment, no centuries of darkness redeemed by a final enlightenment. Even worse, there's nothing that makes us today feel superior to people at other times and places with whom we feel no intellectual kinship. It doesn't fit with the narrative of modernity: instead of a revolution in thought that throws out everything that went before, it is an example of continuity, in which ancient and medieval science built a platform upon which modern science was built. If it's a dull story that doesn't fit with the standard narrative, much better to ignore it than to dwell on it. Or romanticize it: any sensible movie-maker would probably prefer the popular myth of Columbus as a steadfast and unique believer in a new idea, rather than an opportunist adventurer who got lucky in spite of using some very bad data.

The third and most controversial reason is to do with religion. During the 19^th century, books like John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science and Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom dwelt considerably on a few medieval authors, particularly Cosmas of Alexandria who taught of a flat earth in a 6^th century work called Christian Topography. Though we know today that such flat-Earth believers were the exception rather than the rule, this mistake about the middle-ages spread into the 20^th century and is still with us (see the Wikipedia article on the Flat Earth Myth). The Flat Earth Myth seems to me like an unfortunate and very human accident – Cosmas' choice of title suggests that he wanted to promote his views as decidedly Christian, and later antitheist critics have been more than happy to agree with him on this score. The story reminds us that we're prone to believe things that fit with our pre-existing biases, and that fact-checking assertions about what most scholars did or not did believe in a time as distant as the middle-ages is difficult.

Science offers two important and readily accessible methods for avoiding such errors. The first is to read primary sources. For example, to find out if Copernicus could assume that the Earth was round, and what other prior knowledge could be safely assumed, who better to read than Copernicus himself? In his first and most revolutionary chapter, parts of which were mentioned above, Copernicus cites the Pythagoreans, Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Plutarch, Averroes, Martianus Capella's medieval encyclopedia, and Psalm 92:4, to name but a few. Even in the cases where he proposes different explanations (for example, Ptolemy on the movement of the Earth and Averroes on that of Mercury), he assumes that their observations were correct. His "prior art" quote for the relativity of motion comes from Virgil's Aeneid, and that for the sun lighting all things comes from Sophocles' Electra. So much for the irrelevance of a liberal arts education! His demonstrations emphasize continuity with the past wherever possible, partly because he wants his theory to have the best possible chance of being accepted by his contemporaries. You might hear a scientist today claim that the scientific revolution threw out everything that came before: this has become standard in the retelling, and deriding distant people is always easier than taking the time to understand them. But for many of the pivotal minds who made that revolution, their debt to the past was gratefully and humbly acknowledged.

The second, and most important method, is to observe the world. Take the time to convince yourself that the Earth is round – don't take someone else's word for it. Take a pair of binoculars to the top of a hill and watch the ships at sea. Note the date of the next lunar eclipse (there's one coming up on April 4^th 2015, mainly visible over the Pacific regions) and look at the Earth's shadow (and first, look at the way the full moon is opposite to the sun in the sky and convince yourself that what you're seeing is the Earth's shadow!). If you travel to a distant place at a different latitude, look for a familiar constellation like Orion and see that it is higher or lower in the sky at the same time of night. These are the things that can make us fall in love with the system of the world: these are the things that make us scientists. And if you see them, remember with pride that for thousands of years, people have seen the same things with their own eyes, and in so doing, have seen beyond themselves.

Should anyone be offended by "objective truths"?

The following quote has recently been circulating:

"Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them." (Neil deGrasse Tyson, quoted from here.)

It sounds good and rational and noble for a moment, but only for a moment: objective truth alone is not a sufficient motivation for making a statement. As parents, of course, we've had this discussion with our children many times.

"Look, that girl's bigger than me and she still has to ride with training wheels!" 

"Don't shout that across the playground, sweetie, you might make her feel bad and then she might give up and not improve. It's also boasting about being better than other people and that makes you sound unkind, which isn't fair to yourself." 

"But it's true, she is bigger than me!" 

"Of course. But there are some things that are true that we don't say, because they are unkind, and saying unkind things can hurt other people and ourselves." 

And so it begins, and continues as we develop and mature. Outward appearances are an obvious place to start: if someone has a physically obvious blemish or disability, you don't remark upon it when you're introduced. If someone's giving a presentation and you see a spelling or grammatical error in their slides, you don't interrupt just to point it out. If someone farts in a meeting, you don't point across the table and say "he just farted".

Why not? Why do we have to abide by all these sensitivities? It's because communication is about much more than conveying facts. Communication has a host of complex purposes in developing and maintaining social relationships. In an increasingly complex society, we depend on these relationships and must nurture them carefully. If it is necessary for some even more pressing purpose, we may present some unpleasant-but-true statements that risk upsetting people, but this is not something we should do lightly.

Gradually we learn a range of more subtle and intangible sensitivities. When we learn someone's racial or national background, we don't list facts about how those people have been oppressors or oppressed at various times. There are several words related to sexuality and race that we are told not to use at all, even in the objectively true statement "People like you used to be called such-and-such". If some such observation is a relevant and important contribution to an ongoing conversation (for example, in a discussion about the language used by authors from other periods), we try our best to find a polite and sensitive way to proceed.

More subtle still are statements that are true but distort the truth. For example, most people can't program computers. No problem so far, most people haven't learned. It pretty much follows that most men can't program computers, and that most women can't program computers. Now, suppose I start a conversation with "Most women can't program computers". Being true doesn't make this statement good - the fact that it's true makes its use to promote a groundless sexist judgement even worse.

I'm guessing - at least, I hope - that if the reader has made it this far that we're in broad agreement. "It's true" is not normally considered a good excuse for deliberately upsetting people.

Sadly, these norms are sometimes ignored when we discuss politics or religion. As a case-in-point, consider a popular scientist's messages on Christmas Day (quoted above), saying that it is Isaac Newton's birthday (which it is), in the USA it is a "shopping holiday" (somewhat true, but a partial distortion), and that people should be enlightened not upset because this is objective truth. Much of the rest is predictable: people vilify one another, some Christians end up with a worse impression of science than before, and those who dislike Christianity say the whole thing is the fault of Christians because obviously Christians can't think rationally.

If you don't see anything wrong here, consider similar actions with a different target. For example, we celebrate Passover at home. Public figures never intrude by publishing messages saying that in the USA it's an "eating holiday". If they did, there would be an outcry: not because the statement is false, not because it causes material harm to people, but because it's going out of ones way to insult Jewish families.

If you change the nouns used in an argument and no longer agree with the conclusion, then the argument is a fallacy. That is the very bedrock of logic. So if you think such a statement made to Christian families is jolly good fun, but made to Jewish families would be reprehensible, you must question your motivation.

This behavior is bad for at least two reasons. First, it's a bit cruel. As the messages were published, millions of American Christians were celebrating with their families, staying home, and bothering nobody else on this particular day. If they're not hurting anyone, a cheap put-down brings but a moment of glee, paid for by a lasting increase in resentment. That's a bad deal for everyone. Secondly, it fuels a contemporary presumption that scientists and other rational people should not be religious. With this comes some nasty put-downs, which are a disgrace to the legacy of great scientists such as Copernicus, Newton and Einstein, who were not only deeply religious, but are also remembered as showing great compassion for others.

We need to promote the use of science to guide the survival of life on our planet through the coming centuries: to honor the great scientists of the past, there can be no more fitting and no more pressing tribute. For this to work, we all have to find common ground and work together. If scientists use their position to insult large groups of people, are they striving for a good outcome for everyone, or like so many politicians, are they satisfied with a bad outcome so long as they can blame it on "the other side"? If you want religious people to hear the word of science as clearly as they hear the word of God, stop putting them down.

If we truly revere Sir Isaac Newton (as well we should), let us follow some guidance from one of his many tracts in his lifelong quest for true religion:

"We must love our neighbour as our selves, we must be charitable to all men for charity is the greatest of graces, greater than even faith or hope & covers a multitude of sins."

The Sea Dog, or The Ducking Fog

The ducking fog!
Flits on the shore,
The nub of the rose
Pains his trooping.

The ducking fog!
Locks his keg.
Disguised as mere duck,
Proud of stinging clench.

The ducking fog!
Marks at the boon,
Nicks his leathers,
Buckles his sum.

Plot A: A pirate smuggler comes ashore, struggles through a rose garden and a barnyard, leaves his rum, and cuts his hands to grab some treasure that he secretes in his coat and his belt.

Plot B: I really date my hog sometimes.

The Old Testament God of Peace?

This is rough-hewn for now but thoughts have been percolating for a while and I wrote some of them down earlier. I'd like to particularly thank Gary Holt and other friends from the Bible study group at work for leading me through some of the learning that's gone into these ideas.

A lot of people have pointed out at different times that "the Old Testament God is brutal and vengeful", and it's very easy to find evidence that may be used to support this. Several times in Judges "God" apparently orders the execution of entire populations; in Genesis God's angels mete this out to Sodom and Gomorrah; and in the flood story God himself decides to put all mankind to death. Every one of us would condemn anything like this as genocide today. This is in no way unusual among stories that have come down to us from the late bronze and iron ages - consider the Iliad, Mabinogion, Viking Sagas, most any national founding myths.

What I think is emphasized much too little is that this is only part of what we see of God in the writings that have come to form the Torah / Tanakh / Old Testament. We also see a tender and peaceful God, which in many ways is much more foundational.

The story of Jacob is particularly curious among national myths. He's a relatively normal guy who by faith, sheer hard work and a certain amount of hook-and-crook builds the best life he can for his family. Compare with Romulus, Theseus, King Arthur, George Washington? (Of course, this is one of the reasons why Benjamin Franklin is my favorite American hero of all time!)

The story of David is particularly curious among dynastic founding myths. Yes, he's a great military leader, but this is always a side issue compared with his joy in the Lord and what God has done for him. He is generous, magnanimous, conflict-avoiding and forgiving whenever he can be (and when he's not, in the story of Uriah, he's deeply shocked at himself and penitent). David is a very deliberate contrast with Saul, Gideon, Samson, and the other Judges - they are all jolly efficient at destroying their enemies, but there is a very clear message that David and David's line deserves the reader's loyalty because of his faith and his goodness from God that shines from within. His whole story even begins with everyone saying "it can't be this one, look at him!" and Samuel saying "you only see the outside, God sees within".

All Biblical scholars to my knowledge - Jewish, Christian, conservative, liberal, etc - at least agree that the most important parts of the canon were compiled and edited some centuries after the events depicted. The editors probably had to include the blood and guts and destruction of enemies because any national myth without blood and guts and destruction of enemies was unthinkable at the time. (It's still largely unthinkable today, look at all the monuments and movies we have about war leaders.) But among ancient founding stories, the editors were clearly not content with just this, victory in war is not the purpose of Deuteronomic histories, it's the shallow and often frowned-upon starting point.

So the editors of the canon clearly and deliberately chose to highlight the stories of people like Jacob and David. What do we think was so important for them to communicate?

Please contribute your favo[u]rite Americanisms here!

There's a challenge below - please post comments with words and phrases that, unlike rock'n'roll, haven't made it to Britain yet!

The BBC just produced a reader-contributed list of most noted Americanisms. Dismal stuff - "take away" is correct and "take out" makes me want to faint without a scrap of a reason, film is better than movie because it's the language of Beowulf, and "gotten", with its couple of dozen appearances in the King James Bible and at least a handful in Shakespeare, is a cringeworthy American neologism. The Economist, bless its heart, has already published a scholarly debunking of many of these Anti-Americanisms.

Come on, folks, let's do something more fun! Britain's done really well from the New World in terms of music, entertainment, and crazy oversized consumer goods. Calling a movie after the film that used to be in the projector, or shortening refrigerator to fridge, these things just don't upset us here in the New World, and if the folks back in Blightly decided to call a big-ass TV a big-arse TV or even a big-bum TV, well, that would make us smile not grimace. And every time American music gets exported to the British Isles, it comes back with interest - we could fill a book with the wealth of blues and rock'n'roll guitar licks that have become cornerstones of British popular culture and returned to America as big hits. We couldn't be happier to share, we benefit enormously, e pluribus unum and all that.

But if the blokes and blokesses back in Blighty think modern British English is complete enough for Chaucer so it's complete enough for anyone, we should help them out. Many many of my friends and nearly all of my family have one time or another lived on both sides of the Atlantic. We know that sometimes there's a perfect word for something in Britain and there just isn't in the New World, and sometimes it's the other way round.

So please, all you transatlantic travelers out there, lend a hand! Instead of listing 50 words and phrases we hate without reason, let's try to gather a list of words and phrases we enjoy in North America that they might enjoy back in Britain, if only they knew! Just post them as comments below for now, email me if you have trouble, and in the unlikely event that this gets popular I'll try to find a more sustainable structure.

I'll start with a few to get the ball rolling and will add more as I think of them. Please please, if you think of anything send it in!

On Becoming a US Citizen

I was asked to speak at the swearing in ceremony, on April 29th 2011 in PIttsburgh, Penssylvania, at which 51 of us became American Citizens. After thanking the judge, the attorney, and all who work for the court and the immigration service who had helped us along the way, this is what I said:

At Jewish Passovers, it is traditional for a young member of the family to ask “Why is this day special?”, whereupon one of the grandparents tells the moving story of a nation’s founding, a nation’s freedom. Every year on our own Independence Day (also my daughter Elinor’s birthday), I find myself wishing that we had the same tradition: amid the pleasures of a good meal, a cold beer, and the anticipation of fireworks, to stop and ask “Why is this day special?”

If you’re British in America, you have a special advantage here - every year on Independence Day you can’t avoid the question! And so it was for me, on my first Independence Day here, and every year: and it is a wonderful and moving journey. Schoolchildren in England are usually taught something about the French and Russian Revolutions, but not the American Revolution. It is never mentioned in political or social history, and in military history, American Independence is skated over in shuffling embarrassment, something of a hiccup in an otherwise clean slate from King Alfred to Francis Drake, to Nelson to Churchill. Coming to America, Britons have to learn afresh and question themselves.

The American Revolution was about much much more than whether people on one side of the Atlantic should govern people on another. The Revolution took the best of English and European traditions: Magna Carta, the Religious Settlement under Elizabeth, the French Enlightenment and the Rights of Man, and made something real, practical, resilient, sustainable, something we could implement as the cornerstone of freedom. Government of the people, by the people, for the people: however imperfect we the people are, it is our way to the Creator’s endowment of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The American Revolution did not end in chaos or dictatorship. It cannot be placed in one period of history, the student can not finish the chapter and move on. It led to a new law, the Constitution, which governs each of us as individuals, but is itself governed by the people as a whole. It is part of a great campaign of the rights of humanity spanning centuries: that freedom cannot be restricted by religion or color, that voting cannot be restricted by wealth or gender. The Revolution spread, winning converts who made it their own. After two generations, in 1832, Britain passed its own reform act, so that, as in the USA, representation in government was based on population, not on ancient privilege. In 1867, Canada moved peacefully to its own democratic independence. People throughout every continent have thrown off old overlords and forge their own destinies: France, Germany, Russia, Turkey, Japan, India, Australia, Brazil, South Africa, a daring, growing list that would have amazed our founding fathers. And with events in the Middle East, the reach of freedom may even be spreading further than any of us would have imagined only a few months ago.

Every nation is unique, every people brings its own insight and value to the world table. But we believe there is a unifying theme to all humanity: that we all share rights including Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. These rights, though divinely endowed, are for many people today as distant as the dreams that must have sustained the American Revolutionaries through some of their bitter, doubtful winters. To this day, it is a hope for all people, a natural birthright, worth the devotion of a lifetime.

To this, I too dedicate myself. I am here today not because my story is inspiring: I am here because America’s story is inspiring. I am honored, I am grateful, to take part. Thank you all.

Talked with the Governor of Pennsylvania!

Earlier today I got to have a good and very direct chat with Governor Corbett.

He was visiting Google Pittsburgh, there wasn't an organized "question and answer" session, but I hoped that if I positioned myself between the photo ops and the cafeteria he might just bump into me and say hello, which is precisely what happened.

We were very friendly and polite to each other, but nonetheless traded opinions on some tough issues. In particular, I wanted him to know that his statement "I don't think anyone here wants to pay any more in taxes" does not speak for me, and I know many other Googlers who it doesn't speak for. If more money in taxation is required for good schools for our children, then we'll pay it. People who work for Google are choosing between many options in many parts of the world, so if Pennsylvania is competing for tech talent (as the Governor emphasized), the state needs to be aware that we care about issues like education.

Of course, the Governor didn't say "Wow, you're right, I should change the budget proposals". But he did listen. We both agreed that Google employees are privileged and not-your-average-citizen. He did talk about longer term options for paying for schools and universities, voucher systems and choice. He recognizes that long-term, we need better education, it builds stronger communities, lower crime, more prosperous societies. And (something I haven't heard so much in the public speeches) he emphasized that the stop-gap budget he had to come out with in 6 weeks is not his long-term vision for Pennsylvania: longer term we need to have a much more strategic and visionary approach.

There is much we disagree on, and I'll still be surprised if we come to agree enough about his concrete proposals for me to vote for him next time. But we were both receptive and respectful, and I very much appreciated his taking the time to talk with me. He said "watch this space, we're not always going to be in crisis mode", and I will certainly watch it carefully, look at subsequent budget proposals, and consider his record and manifesto carefully if he stands for reelection.

I really appreciate opportunities like this. There might be a few jobs where you get to talk to your State Governor in person, but I bet I have one of the only jobs where you get to talk to your State Governor dressed in shorts and sandals and nobody thinks it's at all unusual!

Counting the Cost of Nuclear ... and Road Traffic Accidents

Massive gulf oil spill. Answer: Find a way to blame BP.

1.2 million road deaths in 2010. Answer: Subsidize the auto industry. Don't dream of stopping driving.

One bad nuclear accident (impact unknown). Answer: Remove this evil from the face of the planet!

Why? Because nuclear accidents are rare enough we feel we can get upset about them and solve the problem by changing others, not changing ourselves.

***

We're hearing a lot about the Fukishima nuclear power station at the moment - a recent BBC headline reads "Japanese police say 15,000 people may have died in one prefecture alone, as efforts to tackle the Fukushima nuclear crisis go on." One could be forgiven for reading that and thinking that the nuclear crisis has killed 15,000 people. But as far as we know, it hasn't killed any yet.

First of all, the most important thing is the tsunami disaster and survivors. There is a lot you can do to help: one of the many responsible organizations accepting donations and organizing relief efforts is Mercy Corps.

Secondly, it's still way too early to say "mission accomplished" on the reactors. Another BBC article says that the incident has been raised to a "level 5" by the Japanese authorities. This puts in on a par with the other two level 5's in history, Windscale 1957 (eventually causing an estimated 120 deaths) and Three Mile Island, 1979 (eventually causing an estimated 0 deaths). So even if the worst radioactive emissions are over, the reactors can be cooled, and the situation brought under control, there may be long term illnesses and even some deaths caused by the incident. We will need to monitor carefully and learn - an obvious lesson being "don't put a nuclear power station near a well-known fault line". This lesson appears to have already been learned in most of the USA, according to a map made by Rhiza Labs. (We're not quite sure why there are a couple in California, that doesn't seem too smart, and apparently one in Humboldt County, CA, was closed in the ’70s precisely because of seismic activity.) Europe (Northern Europe particularly) has a lot less earthquake activity in general.

Thirdly, and my main point: in spite of there being no confirmed deaths, there is a chorus of voices (including many good friends of mine) saying that enough is enough, we should altogether get rid of nuclear power. Enough of what? Enough injury and death and suffering caused by nuclear power?

Let's compare with road traffic accidents. According the the World Health Organization:

"Worldwide, an estimated 1.2 million people are killed in road crashes each year and as many as 50 million are injured. Projections indicate that these figures will increase by about 65% over the next 20 years unless there is new commitment to prevention."

So every single year, 10,000 people die in road traffic accidents for every person killed as a result of the Windscale fire, which (according to the rankings) is a comparable incident to the Fukushima incident. To put in in context: I remember watching an hour's documentary about Windscale. To devote a similar attention-span-per-fatality to road traffic accidents in 2010 alone, I would have to spend 10,000 hours, which is over 1 year, watching documentaries about the accidents and the people killed.

An obvious question is "Hang on, what about Chernobyl?". Estimates for eventual fatalities from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 are hard to verify, ranging from about 100 to about 1 million, with a figure of 4,000 quoted in between. The 4,000 figure is disputed as too small by anti-nuclear and too big by pro-nuclear commentators. (This is a good example of how, most of the time, we don't weigh the evidence and choose our position accordingly, we choose our position first and then weigh the evidence accordingly.) If 4,000 is the correct number, then 300 people died in road accidents in 2010 alone for every person killed in the worst nuclear accident ever. Also, much has been learned from Chernobyl, and given the sort of funding required and precautions taken for each nuclear power station today, a incident from the declining nearly-bankrupt years of the USSR is not a typical case.

If we are so less likely to die of nuclear fallout than we are in road traffic accidents, why are people so eager to ban nuclear? I think the answer is not that we're really threatened, but quite the opposite. We're not really threatened. Nothing really bad has happened in quarter of a century. So when something bad might happen it makes it very easy to get hot under the collar, to get really worried about how terrible this is, because it's so unusual, and the unusual is newsworthy. And we could get rid of nuclear and feel much better about ourselves and how much we've done for the planet, without actually impacting our lives very much either way. Sure, there'd be more pressure on natural resources, the pro-drilling lobby would be thrilled, and we'd see some price rises in electricity. Perhaps we'd see more investment in renewables. But we wouldn't really have to behave differently on a day to day level, would we?

And the moral upside of getting rid of nuclear would feel huge. As Greenpeace puts it in describing the Chernobyl museum:

"These powerful images are a timely reminder that human lives are more than just numbers. For each statistic there is a person paying the ultimate price. Anyone who doubts the dangers of nuclear power should visit the exhibition and see for themselves one of the reasons why we oppose nuclear power. Twenty years on, every nuclear power plant bears the legacy of the nuclear industry's victims; and every nuclear power plant represents the threat of becoming the next Chernobyl."

Powerful stuff. So what if we replaced a suspected 4,000 deaths with a confirmed 1.2 million, and said "every new motor car bears the legacy of the auto industry's victims"? Ban cars now?

A quick response from me to Senator Toomey's statement on Guantanamo trials

Senator Toomey recently wrote “I am pleased President Obama has decided to resume trying detainees in military commissions at Guantanamo. I now look forward to hearing the president announce that murderous enemy combatants, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will go before military commissions instead of American civilian courts. Pennsylvanians do not want terrorists such as Mohammed being tried in their communities, and our citizens must be kept safe from the security threats that would arise from such high-profile trials,” (http://toomey.senate.gov/record.cfm?id=331724).

Here is my response, which I thought I would share:

Dear Sir,

I am not one of those you speak for when you say "Pennsylvanians do not want terrorists such as Mohammed being tried in their communities".

I believe in the rule of law, and have perfect faith that the authorities of the United States could both execute the rule of law and keep me and my family safe from an unarmed accused terrorist and any who would seek to help him.

The fear expressed by our leaders in this matter confuses "how wicked someone is" with "how much harm they can do". This is not fitting for the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Please be aware that at least some Pennsylvanians believe that our government should be competent to protect us from unarmed well-known bad guys in custody.

Yours faithfully,

Dominic Widdows

Sout Al Horeya Link and Lyrics

Sout Al Horeya is a wonderful song and music video has been going round the web. In case you're a Roman alphabet reader like me who wants to try to sing the Arabic lyrics, here they are transliterated into Roman type (with thanks to alielsokary).

To see the meaning translated into English, turn on the "CC" (closed caption) link in the YouTube video player.

Sout Al Horeya

nezlt w 'oolt ana mesh rageAA

we katabt bdamy fe kol shareAA

samAAna elly makansh sameAA

wetkasaret kol el mawaneAA

selahna kan ahlamnaaa

we bokra wadeh odamna

men zaman bnstanaa

bndawar mesh la'ieen makanaa

*

fe kol shareAA fe bladiiii Sout Al Horeya bynadi

fe kol shareAA fe bladiiii Sout Al Horeya bynadi

*

rafAAna rasna fe elsamaaa

we elgooAA maba'ash byhmnaa

aham haga ha'ienaa

we nkteb tarikhna bdamnaaa haaa haaa

lw kont wahed mnnaa

balash trghi we t'olinaaa

nemshi we nsiiiib helmnaa

w batal t'ool klmt anaa haaaa haaaaaa

*

fe kol shareAA fe bladiiii Sout Al Horeya bynadi

fe kol shareAA fe bladiiii Sout Al Horeya bynadi

Protesters and Students and Thugs at the G20 in Pittsburgh

During the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, there has been some much publicized damage in Oakland (the University district). But before you condemn the protesters as wanton vandals: the local press records that most of the damage was done by students who went out to taunt the protesters and were forcibly dispersed by the police.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/pittsburgh/s_644908.html

I just passed the "Free Tibet" protesters in Squirrel Hill - organized, respectful, quiet but clear. They are an important example of our freedom to dissent, and to draw the attention of our governments to those issues we think are important.

Don't get me wrong, there are a few idiots who have come into town just to cause trouble. It is a crying shame that, thanks to a few deliberate thugs, excitable students, nervous police, and the press who follow (and encourage) all of them, one would think that the right to dissent publicly is a freedom we no longer merit.

A Sober Bicentennial

Today - March 25th, 2007 - is the 200th anniversary of the passage of the Act of Parliament that outlawed the Atlantic Slave Trade. Within 18 months of the Battle of Trafalgar, and with 8 years of war still to rage on the European continent, the now undisputed naval superpower declared an intention to see the end of a trade on the high seas that had supported Britain's economy for hundreds of years. And, unlike many such initiatives, the intention was followed more or less adamantly. The Royal Navy appointed itself policeman of the seaways, and with force and treaty over many decades, set to the task of apprehending, boarding, searching, and if necessary prosecuting and hanging suspected slavers. At times, up to one sixth of the world's most powerful navy was devoted to the task of blockading the West African coast, to prevent the continuance of the Slave Trade. To my knowledge, this determined use of military resources in the enforcement of a humanitarian principle is unprecedented before or since.

This hardly makes amends for the evil of slavery in general or the Atlantic Slave Trade in particular, for which a formal apology from Britain and other nations is long overdue. Slavery throughout the British Empire was not abolished until 3 more decades had passed, and some argue that its final abolition owed more to Sam Sharpe's slave rebellion in Jamaica than William Wilberforce's persistence in the House of Commons. That one was decorated and the other hanged makes history's selective accolades even more sorrowful. Other European and American countries persisted in legalised forms of slavery much longer still. In Brazil, slavery was not abolished until the 1880's, and in Russia, the institution of serfdom persisted until 1859, one of a host of important reminders that the history of enslavement of one person by another is complex and insidious, and is not just an issue "black and white". Other countries were ahead of Britain - for example, Denmark abolished slavery and slave trading in 1798.

The situation in North America was much more varied than many people think. Non-Americans are often taught only that the United States came to blows over slavery in paving the way for a late emancipation in 1865, branding the USA as an kicking-and-screaming latecomer in this aspect of human rights. Though slavery is still sometimes described by historians as "America's birth defect", the history of slavery in the settlements that became the United States spans the whole period, and exemplifies some of the best, as well as the worst of the morality of the time. The Pennsylvania Assembly voted to penalise the slave trade with prohibitive taxes during colonial times, but this legislation was outlawed by the Government in London. After Independence, Pennsylvania and Massachussetts outlawed slavery as early as 1780, though even they were pipped at the post by Vermont in 1778. Since Vermont was at the time an independent republic, it retains the honour of being the first sovereign state in modern times to outlaw the practice of slavery. Similar honours are due to West Virginia, formerly part of Virginia, whose secession from the mother state at the outset of the Civil War was in rebellion against slavery.

The United States banned the slave trade on the high seas in the same year as Britain, two hundred years ago, but the fledgling US Navy lacked the means to prosecute the policy. Britain did much to harm the possibility of American cooperation, because of another endemic form of enslavement that the Royal Navy could not do without - the Press Gang. The terror of British ports, the Press Gang's job was to ensure that the Royal Navy had sufficient "recruits". For all its glories, the Royal Navy was an abominable place to serve, and recruitment to the gun decks depended on conscription. In the port cities themselves, this conscription often took the form of capturing merchant sailors who had drunk too much, who waking up on board ship at the pleasure of His Majesty may have had good reason to regret "the draft". On the high seas, the Navy assumed the right to board ships in the hunt for deserters. Given that many, if not most, American sailors at the time had at one time been, at least arguably, British subjects, and were hence prime suspects for "deserters", a clash was inevitable. If I knew the history better I might see other sides to the argument, but in the meantime, my sympathies with respect to the issues that led to the War of 1812 are wholeheartedly American. For decades to come, American ships were naturally suspicious of armed British boarding parties, including those who claimed to be arriving on board ship purely out of humanitarian concern.

Looking back to the issues that were so hotly debated in 1807, I see startling resemblance to political divides today. (Similarity, or "made in our own image" - who knows?) Abolishing slavery would be terribly damaging to commercial and national interests - at a time when the Enemy (at this time, the French) were ready to pounce on our every weakness. (William Wilberforce was actually decorated by the French Revolutionary Government for his efforts, which did his cause in Britain no end of harm.) Things were at least better for the slaves in the Caribbean than in the starving wilds of Africa, so it was humanitarian to transport them. ("If they weren't working in our factories, they'd be even worse off.") Given these typical objections, it is a marvel that the legislation to abolish slave trading passed Parliament, especially in time of War. The idea of the sugar industry being made to do without forced human labour was as prabably as unthinkable as the idea of many modern industries doing without fossil fuels. The idea of Africans deserving basic rights and freedom from exploitation was probably to some as outlandish as the idea that marine ecosystems should be accorded basic rights and freedom from exploitation today. But somehow, against all the odds and the economic practicalities of the situation, change did take hold, and with the simple hindsight of 200 years, we are of the confirmed opinion that anyone who supported the Slave Trade was clearly a self-seeking scoundrel.

The conservatives, then and now, had a literary heavy-hitter on their side: the Bible. The Good Book is clear in its support of slavery. It is carefully regulated in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. You have to set male Israelite slaves free after 6 years (not their families, and foreigners are fair game forever); you have to sacrifice in the temple if you rape one of your female slaves who turns out to be married or engaged (no penance required if the female slave is single); you shouldn't beat your slave to death (you can beat them, but if they can't walk again after 2 days then that's too hard). Even the New Testament, in its explicit statements about slavery, is largely supportive - St Paul exhorts slaves to serve their masters as we all serve Christ, and requests that his friend Philemon give him the slave Onesimus who has been a useful and devoted servant to Paul. Granted, Paul also made a few explicit statements that, under the Kingdom of Christ, there would be no distinction between free and bonded, Jew and Gentile - but that would be then, this is now.

But, as is well known, William WiIlberforce, the British Abolitionists, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, were deeply Christian in their motivations as well. They argued that the Love of God trumped all laws that sanctioned oppression - even Biblical laws; that the early laws given to the Hebrews may have been appropriate only in less civilised times; and that our understanding of right and wrong should be advancing, not fixed in tribal documents. For some Christians, "If parts of the Bible say slavery is right, then slavery is right." For others, "If parts of the Bible say slavery is right, then parts of the Bible are wrong."

There have been similar debates in the history of the Church, and it is being repeated today over the issue of homosexuality (the only substantial difference is that those who claim that the Bible is "incontrovertible" have picked different “incontrovertible” verses). The other side of the debate within the Church is also still with us - less vocal in the USA, but more than alive and well in Europe. They are the people who are involved in Trade Justice, Drop the Debt, and the Make Poverty History campaign. They include my parents and their friends, and I sill have a child's pride in what my wonderful parents do. They go to political events, they make banners and march in the streets, they bring the enthusiasm for justice back to their home town, they put on a host of events, they given people tea and coffee and cake and pamphlets, they host the Korean War Veterans, the Tank Regiment, and the Stop-the-War protesters under the same roof. They make people confront and talk about things that none of us really want to hear about.

Yes, we should make amends for slavery and other evils, but speeches and written words won't cut it without action. Unfair trading agreements, unfair prices for raw materials and labour, the Third World debt - these are the modern legacy of the slavery and the causes of slavery, and they must be thrown out.

We don't need to cast our eyes abroad to see the evil consequences of slavery. The evils of slavery are on our shores, and apparently are growing. An estimated 4000 women were trafficked to the UK in 2006, tempted by "family friends" or "boyfriends" to be trapped into sex slavery. Slavery has moved from the legal to the illegal sphere, but it persists. An estimated 10 million people were slaves in 1807: an estimated 27 million people are slaves today. In the meantime, the House of Commons has voted 8 billions pounds (over 15 millions dollars) to update our fleet of Trident nuclear submarines. It is hard to see how nuclear submarines can protect us against modern threats, let alone what role they have to play in pursuing the suppression of the Slave Trade to its determined end. As a diminished nation, perhaps the best Britain can hope for in the 21st century is that, if we are attacked by a handful of terrorists, we can destroy the cities they came from.

On this bicentennial, should I be proud or ashamed of Britain, the country where I was brought up, or of America, the country I seem to have adopted? I don't know, I don't think sentiments of pride or shame really hurt or help either way. But there are some lessons I'm willing to draw from this.

We have a natural tendency to make excuses for the way we harm to our fellow humans, and we have developed a huge machine that enables us to hide from these harmful realities.

Religion motivates the best humanity has to offer, and sanctions the worst.

Laws are only the beginning. Committing the will, the resources, and the persistence over decades to see them through is what counts.

Bringing about change for the better involves long uphill struggles to change opinions, win hearts and minds, make sacrifices, compromise, take it a bit at a time, three steps forward and two steps back. But great changes are possible, they have been wrought before.

Within 200 years, the moral imperatives of an apparently complex situation will be distilled down to blinding simplicity.

The only way we can ever hope to make the future better than the past is to act in the present.

---

Sources: There were a number of very useful sources for this essay, written and word-of-mouth, along with many dates half-known and half-remembered. I was writing this in Cincinnati airport, so didn’t have access to sources, and it’s now late at night. Please write to me if you want corroboration of any of the facts and figures I have cited, and I will retract any that turn out to be wrong and qualify and that turn out to be misleading.

Some useful and interesting articles are available at the following websites:

BBC panelists
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/6474225.stm

Biblical quotes and some analysis
http://www.religioustolerance.org/sla_bibl.htm

Antislavery
http://www.antislavery.org/

Wikipedia article on abolitionism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism

Some Naval History
http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/discovery/themes/lane.navy.html

Royal Naval Museum
http://www.royalnavalmuseum.org/visit_see_victory_cfexhibition_infosheet.htm

Keeping up with life in Pittsburgh

Walking into the main Carnegie Library in Oakland, next to the Universities, the Phipps Conservatory, and a 400 acre park, one can't help but be reminded that Pittsburgh abounds in the basic necessities for high civilization, and even better, it's right on your doorstep. Or rather, to be more exact, it's about 5 minutes drive from home and 7 minutes drive from work. Right on our doorstep, opposite the Spanish immersion elementary school, is the other 400 acre park, where Rolo happily snuffles every morning and fondly imagines that some day he has a hope of catching a squirrel, a bunny rabbit, a chipmunk, or a deer. So far he hasn't come anywhere near, though he has got himself lost in the woods a couple of times trying, given up, and turned up back home several minutes before his chapperone stops calling for him in the park. Which is always a completely harrowing several minutes, as every dog owner knows. Fortunately Rolo only crosses one road on the way, and has absolutely no chance of getting lost on the way back. As well as a symphony, ballet, big theatre district, respectable art and natural history museum, and the National Aviary, all within a 12 minute drive, we also have waterfalls, white water rafting, forests, falling leaves, skiing and snowboarding within an hour's drive. In the spring, for a month or so, the city blooms like no other I've ever lived in. Cherry, apple, dogwood, and many others that one day I'll photograph and publish somewhere online so that flower lovers who would never have dreamt of visiting can put Pittsburgh in their calendar.



By now the blossoms have given way to leaves and fruits. We're very lucky to have a cherry tree in the garden, and the cherries themselves are now turning from green to pink to red. Hopefully there'll be plenty to share with folk for a few weeks. We've also been working on bookshelves, plastering, painting, rewiring, planting flowers, and generally way too many things to do at once, especially since in the past two or three months I've been travelling to England, France, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and a trip to Maryland. As well as some chance for holiday, there has been a lot of travel to present some of MAYA's work to communities that are interested in what we're doing, sharing information, reusing resources, merging and combining information in the biomedical domain, building smarter devices, smarter networks, and all that good stuff. If anyone's interested, there are a few papers at my local MAYA webpage, and there will probably be more to come. And if you're more interested in the house projects, here's a picture of the bookshelves (and Rolo and me).



So, as usual, there's a millions exciting, harrowing, predictable and surprising things happening in the world and at home. I just thought I should scribble something down, and for once I thought I should skip politics, science and religion and write about a couple of the things I concentrate on in real life.

Oil and Coca

The front page of the BBC website was interesting on Wednesday (which gives some idea of how busy I have been in the meantime).

The main story was the tragicomical spectacle of George Bush urging the USA to reduce dependency on foreign oil. Rather like the pyromaniac who's burned the street down finally accepting that fire is dangerous and the community should invest in fire extinguishers. So finally, the Republican leadership is accepting that the streets of Baghdad aren't full of cheering Iraqis draping American flags from every lamppost, the price of oil is sky high, and the war is not going to pay for itself by improving the oil supply - quite the opposite (in contrast with the rosy picture presented to us before the war began, that it was going to cost $60 billion payed for by Iraqi oil, whereas the current cost is some $400 billion and counting).

It's probably too late to turn around the American Imperial machine, as real events since the speech have demonstrated. More money for the war in Iraq, specifically for military expenses not reconstruction, hikes in US defense spending across the board, and cutbacks everywhere else. According to friends and former research collaborators who receive funding from the military budget (there are many defense research programs in the USA), those cutbacks are eating into information systems research. I don't recall the 9/11 report recommending that resources be diverted away from information integration programs, nor stating that the reason for the 9/11 attacks was that the USA wasn't spending enough money fighting insurgents in foreign countries - nonetheless, that is the priority that has been set by the current US administration. The people who could implement the overhaul of information infrastructure recommended by the 9/11 commission aren't receiving the necessary funding - they're afraid of losing their jobs to pay for Iraq. Compare the State of the Union address with tomorrow's budget and make your own judgment. (There a preview on MarketWatch here.)

Sadly, that's all very predictable. We will remember this regime as the one that spent the USA out of global influence, both fiscally and morally. Many may rejoice. I don't - as a traditional European social liberal, I have a lot of bones to pick with the USA, but I would still much prefer US hegemony to Chinese.

However, a much more interesting story was about legal coca growers (you can find the story at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4623350.stm). Since the election of Eva Morales in Bolivia, himself a former coca farmer, there has at last been some interesting debate and awareness raising about the role of crops in the "war on drugs". The article describes the varied uses of the coca leaf for making drinks and medicine, just as the hemp plant has been used for centuries to make rope and textiles. There are many farmers worldwide trying to build a living out of the legal and beneficial uses of the coca plant, instead of using huge amounts of it to make small amounts of cocaine.

If we can just make the right connections between these coca farmers and the right markets, we can bring a variety of great new products to consumers and cut the narcotics out of the business. The two main enemies of this strategy are of course the drug barons and the (somewhat ignorant) drug warriors. As with the global "war on terror", and almost every other conflict there is, the warriors on both sides would much rather have the war continue than to face the challenge of peace.

Having lived in Bolivia for a time, I have some good experience of the coca leaf - my Bolivian host once heard that I had a stomach ache and literally stuffed some into my squeamish Western mouth, and within a few minutes the stomach ache went away. It's quite a miracle - it seemed to cure both constipation and diarrhoea with equal effectiveness, don't ask me how.

Needless to say, us prissy western Christian kids were terribly worried that we were getting hoodwinked into "taking drugs", whereas our hosts had no idea what the fuss was about and of course, thought we were refusing hospitality and saying that their plant wasn't good enough for us, while we were obviously suffering from ill effects that the plant was known to cure in many cases. It was an interesting situation, as you can imagine, and it will surprise none of my readers to hear that, for me at least, the "conquer evil by force of will and force or arms" rhetoric of Cromwellian Protestants was soon quietened by the humble but wise coca plant.

Some of my teammates had a little more difficulty letting go of the rules, of course, but we had very different attitudes on a range of topics and the positions we chose on the coca leaf debate were very predictable.

"You should pray to God for relief from your stomach ache."

"I did. God heard my prayers and gave me coca leaves."

Of course, this idea is many world's away from the way the USA has traditionally fought its "war on drugs", fighting violence with violence, because overmonied idiots in the USA encourage tons and tons of perfectly good coca leaves to be condensed down to mere grams of cocaine so they can get high, do dangerous things, and damage their health. Just as you can distill large amounts of grain to make small amounts of whisky, which we all know to be a dangerous and harmful substance.

Imagine that the year is 1760 and the whisky problem in Britain is getting out of hand. And suppose that it's easier to sneak a barrel of whisky into England than to disguise the cultivation of a grain and the nearby distillery. To prevent the uncontrollable surge of illicit whisky across the Atlantic, the Redcoats start marching around the American countryside burning grain fields, on the grounds that the British, the world's most sophisticated people and the champions of liberty in the modern world, can't be trusted not to use all that healthy grain to get horribly drunk, act violently, and go blind. Sadly but seriously, this is very much how the American "war or drugs" has been perceived in Bolivia, and with good reason. It doesn't sound like such a good policy when you try and put the boot on the other foot, does it?

So, thumbs up to Auntie for publishing such a jolly good article on its international frontpage. And if there is any unifying theme to this little essay (except that the source articles both appeared last Wednesday), could we please in future try to connect some of the dots before we decide to go to war? It might even be more profitable.

A Vote for Gulf Coast Relief is a Vote for Arctic Drilling?

I probably should not be surprised by this, but I am. There is an important vote / fillibuster / lobby / pantomime expected in thhe US Senate soon, on a bill that seems to

i. allocate billions of dollars to defence spending
ii. part of this includes relief and rebuilding for the Gulf Coast
iii. there's something about fuel subsidies for the cold weather, to sweeten the pill of
iv. cutting billions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid

and there's

v. an Alaska Senator seems to have got Arctic Drilling onto the same bill.

The story I read is here. I may have confused some of the seemingly crazy array of issues that have been rolled together into one story, though it sounds like the US Government has done this for me.

I gather that US history is rife with crazy bills where different politicians insist that they'll support a bill for one thing, provided that their constituency gets another. But seriously, a vote for winter fuel aid and rebuilding the Gulf Coast is a vote for Arctic Drilling and cutting Medicaid? Is this really the will of an educated, enfranchized and free people? Sounds more like an arcane medieval theocracy to me.

In other news, I've laid hardwood floors throughout our ground floor, built a baker's wrack, been sealing the house, making pieces of banister rail, coat hooks, finishing wood furnitred, and learning to use all kinds of tools that I'd never even heard of. Just in case you were thinking that all I ever do is moan about conservatives who couldn't even conserve a jar of marmalade, I wanted you to know that in fact, I devote very little time to politics and a lot more to home improvement! I will hopefully post pictures of some of these projects on the internet, many readers may find this more interesting than my sporadic political rants.

Truthfulness and Weapons of Mass Destruction

Amongst the to and fro about the war in Iraq, I read this morning about Dick Cheney's condemnation of those who would complain that the governments of the USA and the UK were deceptive in the way they led us into war. Many excerpts from the Vice President's speech can be found here. By now, the Republican leadership is on the defensive, in a predictably offesive fashion. It's worth noting that everything I read in the transcript of the Vice President's speech is arguably true - but whenever a politician follows a statement with a phrase like "those are the facts", the people should probably be extremely sceptical.

What has happened (Dom's personal expert analysis, don't confuse this with "facts", folks) is that the past two years have seen a shambles in Iraq, more and more reports of deception and twisting of public opinion in the run up to the war, the scandal of Abu Graib, the Katrina disaster, clearer and clearer signs of China's rise (this will be about China's 6th rise - the main thing China can teach the US is the virtue of staying power), as the US spends its way into the honourable club of once-great empires, and the slow but perceptible fading of September 11th 2001 into the perspective of history.

Back in 2001 and 2002, the Republican leadership successfully whipped public opinion into war frenzy, with the traditional goads of indignation and fear - get the people angry and frightened, and war becomes the only patriotic decision. I clearly remember the run up to the Iraq war. As war became more inevitable, the question wasn't "will it happen", but "will you stand with the majority?" At the time, Maryl and I didn't. We, and thousands of other people in America, joined hundreds of protests, stating as firmly as we could that we were being misled, that we were being foolish, that in spite of September 11th 2001, going to war in Iraq was not just wrong, it was stupid. Even from close friends and family, we faced shocked questions like "Surely you're supporting the troops?" To which we always said "Yes, we are. Are you supporting them by sending them off to the wrong war for a made up reason?" Oh, how marginalized we were. Had we been Democrat Senators, our political acumen would doubtless have warned us off such foolish idealism in the face of public opinion.

Now, some of the Democrat Senators are finally coming out and saying "we were wrong to go to war, and the administration was wrong to lead us into war". Thanks for speaking out, guys. Now that Bush's approval rating is about one third of the Amrican people (and lord knows what on a worldwide scale), those brave Democrats are coming out and saying that the whole thing was wrong.

So the Republican leadership was decisive but evil and stupid. The Democrats were either wrong, or if they were right, they were too spineless to say so, and now they're trying to capitalize on the fact that public opinion was swayed. And, I've said it before and I'll say it again ... the do-gooder peacniks, the liberal academics, the soft-hearted fools who took the time to read histories of the middle east and the history of previous "wars on terror" ... well, they were right all along.

No WMD, 2000 US soldiers and uncounted Iraqi civilians dead, no sign of the Al Qaeda leaders, the moral high-ground of Western Democracy in tatters, habeus corpus suspended (so long as the administration promises not to torture people).

What are the finest aspects of Western Civilization? What are we going to do to preserve and enhance them? Who will lead us?