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You don’t notice it when it’s gone; only when it returns. I’m talking about that smell which disappears at the end of autumn and only comes back in the spring. The best moment is when you step out of the office at the end of the day, and it hits you. Right through winter there’s nothing there, just the smell of traffic: then one evening you step out, take a breath, and there it is. A hint of things coming to life again.

I got that this evening, though it being Friday helped, and mild as well. But I definitely got that lift. Of course we’re used to that: every February you get a spell of mild weather, maybe some sunshine, and you think, here comes spring. And then winter settles back in again and March is miserable.

o paradise.

Maariv has more details:

Rabbi Eliezer Moshe Fisher, of the Jerusalem Rabbinical Court, ruled on Wednesday that “there is no halachic ban on using bags of lard in buses and other places” when saving lives is concerned. The halachic permit says bags of lard may be used in any place that might be a target for suicide bombings, such as schools, shopping malls, railway stations etc.

The rabbi also said that if the police do not use pig fat in buses, tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews will arm themselves with spray guns filled with liquid lard, which they will spray on terrorists whenever the need arises.

On the Maariv front page you can cast your vote on “Will pig fat be an effective deterrent against suicide bombers?” Latest count: Yes, 45%: No, 27%: Maybe, 29%.

g ground,” argues the British Humanist Association which is playing a key role in the campaign.

About the situation here:

In Britain, where unlike the United States religious observance is weak, there are strong concerns among secularist groupings over the promotion by Prime Minister Tony Blair, a professed Christian, of “faith-based” education.

The Labour government has allowed creationists to take over funding and administration of at least one state school where pupils are taught creationism.

Other schools may follow, Keith Porteous Wood of Britain’s National Secular Society says, unless critics speak out.

After Iraq it’s comforting to be able to oppose Tony Blair – or Blair, as he should be referred to in this context. It seems like the natural order of things.

And this comes as no surprise:

But in Muslim countries, proponents of Darwin Day say the idea is a non-starter, for the moment. In many, the non-religious and even scientists who take a Darwinist view can face prison, or death, for propagating agnosticism or atheism.

up. First of all, we have evolved not to be ruthless proto-capitalists, but to “enter into mutually beneficial forms of co-operation.” It is the evolutionary psychologist’s work in explaining how ‘survival of the fittest’ translates into co-operative behaviour which has been, arguably, its greatest success. Secondly, there is the “is/ought” gap. To say a certain type of behaviour has evolved is not to say it is morally right. To accept a need to understand how our minds evolved is not to endorse every human trait with an evolutionary origin.

Update: Hmm, well…. that is perfect. In response to this post, Norm points out that he has actually written a book called “Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend”. Not having read it I’m clearly not in a position to make any comments, and I will certainly accept Norm’s assertion: “in any event, that Marx rejected the idea of an unchanging human nature is, at the very least, no longer consensual within Marx scholarship”. In which case it is unfortunate that so many Marxists have taken this as a fundamental principle.

Michael Gove has a good piece in the Times on Charles’ latest travels:

Prince Charles’s trips to Saudi are only the most visible evidence of his interest in a state where public displays of Christianity are impossible, while women are denied the right to drive, walk alone in public, dress as they wish or follow the profession they choose. He has fêted Saudi royals and businessmen, inviting them to dinner at Highgrove and supporting their sponsorship of educational ventures.

One wonders whether the Prince has ever used his close relationship to inquire into Saudi funding of suicide bombing in the Middle East? Or has he questioned Saudi support for extremist madrassas across the Islamic world? Might he even have taken his Saudi friends to task for their countrymen’s habit of buying off fundamentalism in their own country by providing it with the funds to wreak havoc elsewhere?

I suspect not. In a speech he gave in 1993, to mark the opening of the Saudi-funded Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, the Prince went out of his way to see only the best in the Islamic world, arguing that it had retained an “integrated, spiritual view of the world in a way we have not seen fit to do in recent generations in the West”. He went on to say, “There is much we can learn from that Islamic world view in this respect”.

The Islamic world has an “integrated, spiritual view of the world in a way we have not seen fit to do in recent generations in the West”. Well, that’s one way of putting it.

ker of a major language: the bigger the better, and English best of all. Not because English is intrinsically superior, but because so many people and so many cultures speak it. If you’re one of the last speakers of Hixkaryana (a Brazilian language that reverses sentence order to put the object first and the subject last, apparently) then the conversations would tend, I would imagine, to be fairly limited. “Caught any fish today?” Or rather “Fish today, any caught?” (Or, “White men with tape recorder today, any seen?”, except they won’t have a word for “tape recorder”.) Basically it’s moribund. English, on the contrary, is thriving, constantly growing and changing, and the wonderful thing is, it’s all available to us. We understand and appreciate US writers, Australian writers, Anglophone Indian writers, and it’s pure gain: we don’t at the same time lose our appreciation of English culture. On the contrary we’re now better able to judge and appreciate it.

So yes, I’m all for the preservation of dying languages in theory: how can you possibly disapprove? But I’m very glad it’s not me who’s one of the few remaining speakers.

gs that could have been done, approaches the South Korean government might have made, diplomatic channels the U.S. government might have opened, pressure the Chinese might have applied.

Historians in Asia, Europe and here will finger various institutions, just as we do now, and demand they justify their past actions. And no one will be able to understand how it was possible that we knew of the existence of the gas chambers but failed to act.

Winds of Change has a good briefing on the situation in Iran (via Instapundit, again), with plenty of links. This is the sort of thing the web does so well (I can’t quite bring myself to use the blogo- word). There’s stuff on the regime’s violent suppression of protesting workers, the situation after the earthquake in Bam, and the sex slave trade – which may sound grim (well, it is grim), but the overall impression is one of things changing. We should be hearing more about this if the press wasn’t so obsessed with their post-Hutton campaign against Tony Blair.

Postscript: is it always the case that reference to “Tony Blair” goes with a generally favourable attitude, while “Blair” goes with an unfavourable attitude?

Sky News has video footage of Saddam supposedly paying money to a terrorist group (via Instapundit).

New footage has been released purporting to show Saddam Hussein paying large sums of money to a terrorist group.

Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Nicholson says the footage is “incontrovertible proof” of the former Iraqi dictator’s links to international terrorism.

It appears to show the former Iraqi President plotting crimes and paying money to members of an international terrorist group.

Baroness Nicholson says the group of men in the footage looked after Saddam’s chemical and biological warfare.

The footage given to Sky News was reportedly looted from one of Saddam’s palaces.

There has been no independent confirmation of the tapes and Sky News cannot verify their veracity.

However, Baroness Nicholson says there is no doubt the footage highlights Saddam’s links to terrorism and chemical weapons.

“This is incontrovertible proof of Saddam Hussein’s involvement in international terrorism,” she said.

I wonder how Baroness Nicholson gets on with Charles Kennedy.

The quashing of charges against Anver Daud Sheikh is welcome news, and sign of a dawning realisation that the whole scare about rampant abuse of children in care was yet another witch hunt. Not of course that such abuses never happen, but when the police go trawling, along the lines of “if you were at this home at this time, and were abused by ***, there could be some compensation in it for you”, then you’re liable to get some dubious testimony.

This case, though, was particularly absurd:

At the trial, the jury was given incorrect dates for Mr Sheikh’s employment at the home. After his conviction, he instructed new lawyers who established from Contributions Agency records that his employment at the home had ceased by August 31 1980.

The main complainant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, only took up residence at the home during August 1980. His testimony was dependent upon the involvement of another youth who did not arrive until a year later.

Richard Webster , who published a short book, “The Great Children’s Home Panic”, back in 1998, has more details on this case:

There was no evidence other than the testimony of the two men who made the allegations. But nor, twenty years after the alleged incidents, was Sheikh able to produce an adequate defence. Like countless other care workers trapped by similar retrospective allegations all he could say was that the offences alleged against him had never happened.

The jury, faced by two highly prejudicial complaints, one of which was an allegation of buggery, declined to believe him. He was convicted and sentenced to eight years.

Since then, however, as Bob Woffinden reported in the Times last year, one former resident of the same home, who had himself made an allegation and then retracted it, made a new statement. He said that the complainants ‘were racist and saw [Sheikh] as a “Paki bastard”‘. The witness added, in words almost identical to those which have been used by many many others who have been caught up in police trawling operations: ‘It was easy to make the allegations . . . the officers kept encouraging us.’