Facebook & the Pope's visit

There has been a great deal of froth about that pope fellow hasn't there? Personally, despite being the kind of "aggressive atheist" that the Pope's advisers are worried about, I think far too much of it has been anti-religious and anti-catholic rather than anti-pope.

(Note - I mean anti-pope, not antipope!)

Just look down your facebook newsfeed, and I'm sure there will be at least a couple of people spouting bile about the Pope's visit. Just to cheer you all up, here's the best linking of Facebook & the pope I've seen:



I've tried to be moderate - but to be fair I had a pretty snarky facebook status for Hu Jintao & King Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz too and b.) I'm fairly sure my (anti-pope rather than anti catholic) FB status is something that even if Herr Ratzinger saw, he's probably say something like, "ACH, JAH, ZE ENGLANDER IS GANZ CORREKT! ACHTUNG! ACHTUNG! SPITFEUER!!!"

Well, maybe not the last bit.

For a more erudite critique of the Pope's visit, I'd refer you to Hobbes' Leviathan:

.. from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.

The language also which they use, both in the churches and in their public acts, being Latin, which is not commonly used by any nation now in the world, what is it but the ghost of the old Roman language?

The fairies in what nation soever they converse have but one universal king, which some poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, prince of demons. The ecclesiastics likewise, in whose dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one universal king, the Pope.

The ecclesiastics are spiritual men and ghostly fathers. The fairies are spirits and ghosts. Fairies and ghosts inhabit darkness, solitudes, and graves. The ecclesiastics walk in obscurity of doctrine, in monasteries, churches, and churchyards.

The ecclesiastics have their cathedral churches, which, in what town soever they be erected, by virtue of holy water, and certain charms called exorcisms, have the power to make those towns, cities, that is to say, seats of empire. The fairies also have their enchanted castles, and certain gigantic ghosts, that domineer over the regions round about them.

The fairies are not to be seized on, and brought to answer for the hurt they do. So also the ecclesiastics vanish away from the tribunals of civil justice.

The ecclesiastics take from young men the use of reason, by certain charms compounded of metaphysics, and miracles, and traditions, and abused Scripture, whereby they are good for nothing else but to execute what they command them. The fairies likewise are said to take young children out of their cradles, and to change them into natural fools, which common people do therefore call elves, and are apt to mischief.

In what shop or operatory the fairies make their enchantment, the old wives have not determined. But the operatories of the clergy are well enough known to be the universities, that received their discipline from authority pontifical.

When the fairies are displeased with anybody, they are said to send their elves to pinch them. The ecclesiastics, when they are displeased with any civil state, make also their elves, that is, superstitious, enchanted subjects, to pinch their princes, by preaching sedition; or one prince, enchanted with promises, to pinch another.

The fairies marry not; but there be amongst them incubi that have copulation with flesh and blood. The priests also marry not.

The ecclesiastics take the cream of the land, by donations of ignorant men that stand in awe of them, and by tithes: so also it is in the fable of fairies, that they enter into the dairies, and feast upon the cream, which they skim from the milk.

What kind of money is current in the kingdom of fairies is not recorded in the story. But the ecclesiastics in their receipts accept of the same money that we do; though when they are to make any payment, it is in canonizations, indulgences, and masses.

To this and such like resemblances between the papacy and the kingdom of fairies may be added this, that as the fairies have no existence but in the fancies of ignorant people, rising from the traditions of old wives or old poets: so the spiritual power of the Pope (without the bounds of his own civil dominion) consisteth only in the fear that seduced people stand in of their excommunications, upon hearing of false miracles, false traditions, and false interpretations of the Scripture.

It was not therefore a very difficult matter for Henry the Eighth by his exorcism; nor for Queen Elizabeth by hers, to cast them out. But who knows that this spirit of Rome, now gone out, and walking by missions through the dry places of China, Japan, and the Indies, that yield him little fruit, may not return; or rather, an assembly of spirits worse than he enter and inhabit this clean-swept house, and make the end thereof worse than the beginning? For it is not the Roman clergy only that pretends the kingdom of God to be of this world, and thereby to have a power therein, distinct from that of the civil state. And this is all I had a design to say, concerning the doctrine of the POLITICS. Which, when I have reviewed, I shall willingly expose it to the censure of my country.


The above is of course courtesy of eminent materialist philosopher Will Jones Thomas Hobbes.

See you all for the resumption of normal service on Friday!

The Financial Crisis 2 - now in 3d!

In many ways we've learned nothing from this financial crisis - or indeed from any previous one. As a victim of Bernie Madoff, I was particularly enraged to see loathsome sleazy two bit fraudster Azil Nadir crawl out from under his Cypriot rock last week.



Above: A sleazy old pervert.

The above Pervert (Asil Nadir) was a major player in the City in the 1980s and early 1990s. He took a small east London textile firm called Polly Peck, and through a series of takeovers and canny deals he turned it into a serious conglomerate. It owned a slice of the Del Monte fruit canning brand, a majority stake in Japanese electronics company Sansui, and also owned companies making colour televisions and Betamax video recorders.

Wait, Betamax? The man from delmonte, he say, bad investment.

Still, like shoulderpads, hairspray, and movies with volleyball & fighter jets, it was all very, very impressive in the 1980s.



Above: Some things that looked good in the eighties look less good now.

Shareholders flocked in, quicker than you could say "Asset Bubble". If you bought into Polly Peck early enough, say, in the year Top Gun came out, you could turn a £1,000 investment into £1m - a huge return even by the champagne-soaked Square Mile standards of the day.

But to cash in, you had to know when to sell.

The downturn started when Nadir tried, and failed, to take Polly Peck off the FTSE 100 and back into private ownership. The party was really over when the Serious Fraud Office raided the company that ran his family's financial affairs, called South Audley Management. Six weeks later, the administrators had been called in.

The UK authorities moved with their traditional speed, and it was just three short years later that Nadir was facing the prospect of 66 charges of theft and false accounting involving £34 million. Instead, he hopped on a flight to Paris, and was soon in Northern Cyprus - a territory with which Britain does not have an extradition treaty.

There he has stayed. Until last week.

He's now back.

Prosecution lawyers and Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigators must now trace 183 witnesses, some of whom may have died since Nadir fled. Zillions of documents have to be recovered. In the meantime, he remains on conditional bail under curfew and, despite his lawyers' objections, electronically tagged.

A £250,000 bail security has been deposited with the City of London magistrates, and he must reside at his £20,000-a-month rented Mayfair home, where he is subject to a midnight to 6am curfew. He must report each week to Chelsea police station, and has already surrendered his Turkish and British passports.

I think this is ludicrous. He should be in a cell. Preferably sharing a bunk with a glue sniffing violent delusional transexual rapist. Well, that's not quite fair. And Michael Barrymore isn't in prison anyway.

But the truth is, we definitely shouldn't be letting Nadir keep his house, and generally lord it up while on remand.

Why?

Because fraud is a rational crime. It's not as though you turn around and steal £36 million through a complicated share swapping scheme in a moment of passion. Deterrence works well on rational criminals - especially ones in it for the money, who understand delayed gratification. If you think, well, "even if I get caught, I may only do seven or eight years in what amounts to a poor quality golf-club", then it's not nearly enough of a penalty to make them think twice.

On top of the deterrence factor, we treat white-collar criminals far too well - we as a society do not extract nearly enough retribution from them. The damage they wreak is enormous. The cost isn't in millions of pounds - it's in marriages broken up, houses lost, suicides, failed businesses, misery for thousands. The societal cost is at least as great as for acts like robbery - and robbery carries a minimum 20 year sentence.

Of course, this kind of white collar crime is going on all the time. No, really.

For example, recently JP Morgan won an award for providing the following service:

The process of rehypothecation allows institutions - in many cases hedge fund clients - to extract greater value from their collateral by reusing this collateral elsewhere in the market, increasing liquidity and reducing collateral costs.

Against this backdrop, JPMorgan's forward-thinking Rehypothecation Program stood out, directly addressing market misgivings regarding the practice while simultaneously allowing the practice to be safely extended to the benefit of clients. Winner of both this year's Chair's Choice and Innovation in Custody and Securities Services, JPMorgan Rehypothecation Program supports the multi-asset class, unlimited re-use of collateral.

Yes, unlimited re-use of collateral. Or, in other words, taking out as many loans as you can on a single asset. Disastrous? Short-Sighted? Of course. Sadly, they are unlikely to land up in jail - and lets face it, even if they do, they can probably evade justice as easily as Azil Nadir probably will.

Some people I know said to me recently that they didn't feel we didn't get enough concessions out of the banks during the financial crisis. To them I say, "don't worry - there'll be another one along in a minute".

Duke of York's (Eton) Mess

I attended a public school called the Duke of York's Royal Military School for a while, back in the 90s. Recently, the Duke's came third from bottom of the school league tables with an average pass rate substantially lower than that of the average state school.

Ahem. So, here's the public schoolboy dessert from a graduate of school whose pupils are very unlikely to ever threaten the global financial order.

Duke of York's Mess




Preparation time: less than 15 mins
Cooking time: As quickly as you can tip it into the glasses.
Serves 6


Ingredients

A big bag of pre-made meringue nests - at least 10 individual nests.
Pint double cream
Vanilla essence
2 heaped tablespoons caster sugar
Punnet of strawberries, sliced
Punnet of Raspberries
1 teaspoon good-quality balsamic vinegar
A half glass of port
Fresh mint leaves

This is a cheating version, but a.) cheating is all part of the public school ethos and b.) this is a super quick dessert

Whip the double cream with the vanilla and 1 tablespoon of your sugar until you have soft peaks. Don’t over-whip it or the cream will go thick and cloddy – you want it to stay light and delicate.

Take half the strawberries and half the raspberries and put them into a bowl with the rest of the sugar and the balsamic vinegar & port. Mash up with a fork.

Serve Eton mess in individual glasses. To assemble it, first, smash up your meringues. I find putting them into a bag and swinging it into a wall a few time produces a nice and suitably random mix, with some shattered to dust, and some almost whole and crispy.

Make SURE you hide the evidence of the pre-bought meringues - real public school guests/girlfriends will look down on you for not having your butler make your own meringues. On an aga.

Fold the vanilla cream and mushed-up fruit together till well mixed, then sprinkle in the rest of the fruit and fold again. Layer your crushed meringues and fruity cream into your serving dish or glasses, then sprinkle with the mint leaves as garnish.

Put everything together right at the last minute so that the meringue won’t go all soft.

Serve while commenting on an article you just read in the Economist on why poor people are poor because they don't work hard enough in Chinese slave-mills.

Carnival causes blogger to lose focus.

I swear, the peacock came right for me. It was huge. As big as a man. Full of the demon rum.




Apologies for the lack of a post (again!) on here.

It's easy to get out of the rhythm of blogging - this week the Notting Hill Carnival intervened. Still, I'll be back on the case soon, I promise!

Just one more snap from NHC to give you non-londoners a feel for it:

No Post this Week.

Due to an outbreak of weddings & charming American guests, there will be no blog this week. Congrats to Hannah, Phil, Rachel & Allan on their fabulous weddings. Normal service will resume on Friday!

Africa, War & Child Soldiers you've never heard of

Apologies for the lateness of this blog post - it seemed rude to write personal stuff when I had 9,000 words of work to produce. Fortunately, that's all out of the way, so now I can catch up. I assume most of you read it sneakily on Monday mornings at work anyway!

So, this week, in between producing large reports for work, I was bloody annoyed that a war crimes tribunal is devolving into what amounts to a bitchy fight between two talentless slags.

I am of course, talking about the Trial of Charles Taylor. He's currently on trial for a wide variety of assorted war crimes - most of which feature a recurring theme of recruiting of child soldiers, then either supplying them so badly they are forced to loot and/or commit cannibalism, all the while using them to guard the slaves digging your diamond mines &/or rape camps.



Above: Maybe if the child soldiers were white, there'd be more coverage.

The world's news media has decided that two not-even-that-famous any more celebs arguing over what happened at a particularly squalid dinner party is more important than the trial of man who has been accused of-

• Five counts of war crimes: specifically, terrorizing civilians, murder, outrages on personal dignity, cruel treatment, and looting;

• Five counts of crimes against humanity: specifically, state-sanctioned murder, rape, sexual slavery, mutilating and beating, and enslavement; and

• One count of other serious violations of international humanitarian law: recruiting and using child soldiers.

To quote one other witness, Joseph "ZigZag" Marzah, one of Taylor's erstwhile military commanders, "We executed everybody – babies, women, old men. There were so many executions. I can't remember them all." Taylor had encouraged his commandants - usually former child soldiers themselves - to cannibalise victims, in exchange for $200 of "cigarette money".

It is the prominence given to this squalid dinner party compared to other testimony from the trial that feels odd.

Both Sky News and the BBC News channel cleared their schedules for over an hour and a half, thus devoting more coverage to Naomi Campbell than to the whole of the rest of Taylor's trial since 2007.

In fact, Sky have not covered any of the other 90 witnesses – not even Taylor himself. The Guardian website & the good old Beeb led on the trial when the former president testified, but other outlets - ranging from the Today programme, Channel 4 News & even debaters-bible The Economist have all ignored the trial while in session.

This is at all surprising, but nowhere near as shocking as the lack of attention given to another child-soldier fuelled conflict, that has been rumbling on since the overthrow of appalling dictator of Congo Mbutu Sese Seko in 1997.

Congo's history often seems like an uninterrupted tale of woe. After decades of often brutal foreign rule, first as the private possession of King Leopold II of Belgium and then as a Belgian colony, Congo won its independence in 1960. But within months its first elected Prime Minister had been murdered by Belgium- and U.S.-backed opponents because of his growing ties to the Soviet Union, an assassination that eventually opened the way for army general Mobutu Sese Seko to grab power.

A U.S. favorite during the cold war, Mobutu presided over one of the most corrupt regimes in African history, siphoning off billions from state-owned companies and allowing most of the country to languish in poverty & disorder.

In 1996 neighboring Rwanda and Uganda jointly invaded Congo to eliminate the Hutu militias, known as the Interahamwe, that had been responsible for the Rwandan genocide and were hiding in Congo's eastern forests. As the invading armies advanced across the country, Mobutu fled, and the invaders installed a small-time rebel leader named Laurent Kabila as President.

But things got worse. In 1998, after Kabila got too friendly with the Interahamwe, Uganda and Rwanda invaded Congo again, triggering what became known as Africa's first world war. The scramble for power and resources dragged in forces from at least eight African neighbors, spawned a myriad of Congolese factions and set off campaigns of ethnic cleansing. Kabila, as nasty and corrupt as his predecessor, was shot dead by one of his bodyguards in 2001. His son Joseph, 29, has ruled since.

In Congo, a nation of 63 million people in the heart of Africa, a peace deal signed in 2006 was supposed to halt the war between nine countries, in addition to 20 separate private armies of indigenous Congolese. In short, you probably needed more space in the signing box than for the average, standard form peace treaty.

The war produced a record of human devastation unmatched in recent history. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates that 3.9 million people have died from war-related causes since 1998, making it the world's most lethal conflict since World War II. But you never even heard about it.

The suffering of Congo's people continues. Fighting persists in the east, where rebel holdouts loot, rape and murder. In particular, I was personally involved with a project to protect, arm & train the Northern Pygmy alliance from being preyed upon by militias who regarded them as "subhuman" - with some believing that eating pygmy flesh can confer magical powers. But you never heard about that, either.

The Congolese army, which was meant to be both symbol and protector in the reunited country, has cut its own murderous swath, carrying out executions and razing hundreds of villages. Even deadlier are the side effects of war, the scars left by years of brutality that disfigure Congo's society and infrastructure. The country is plagued by bad sanitation, disease, malnutrition and dislocation. Routine and treatable illnesses have become weapons of mass destruction.

According to the IRC, which has conducted a series of detailed mortality surveys over the past ten years, 1,250 Congolese still die every day because of war-related causes--the vast majority succumbing to diseases and malnutrition that wouldn't exist in peaceful times. In many respects, the country remains as broken, volatile and dangerous as ever, which is to say, among the very worst places on earth.

Yet Congo's troubles rarely make news headlines, and the country is often low on international donors' lists of places to help. After Sudan, Congo is the second largest nation in sub-Saharan Africa, a land so vast and ungovernable that it has long been perceived as the continent's ultimate hellhole, the setting for Joseph Conrad's 1899 book Heart of Darkness.

It is in part because of that malign reputation--and because the nation's feckless rulers have consistently reinforced it--that the world has been willing to let Congo bleed. Since 2000, the U.N. has spent billions on its peacekeeping mission in Congo, which is known by its French acronym, MONUC, and it is at the moment the largest U.N. force anywhere in the world. However, the troops number just 17,500, a tiny force to secure a country almost the size of the EU. Many of the battalions are besieged in their bases by the resurgent militias. But you didn't hear about that.

In February, the U.N. and aid groups working in Congo asked for $682 million in humanitarian funds. So far, they have received just $94 million--or $9.40 for every person in need. By comparison, Oxfam estimates that Haiti appeal last year raised $550 for each person. But you didn't hear about that - and they don't have a former member of the Fugees running for President to make headlines - so you probably won't.

In short, the message from The Hague today is you can have as many child soldiers as you like, but if you really want to impress the 21st-century western media, then no matter how brutal your crimes you do need to have a celebrity on board.

Depressing. What we need is a celeb to take up the cause...

Get Him To The Greek Opening - watch more funny videos

Of course, if you are interested in Africa, I can't recommend a better blog than the excellent Will Jones' "My name is not Muzungu"...

African Panga Stew

This is a stew recipe taught to me by an old friend, who I used to debate with.

He was a Ugandan, and had spent some of his childhood as an abducted child soldier in the Lord's Resistance Army. There are few University Debaters who are genuinely imposing; very few who you really believe when they talk about the problems of tiny African countries. However, there is something very convincing about having a 6'6" Ugandan who's eyes wordlessly proclaimed "real machete experience" telling you the way it is.

By the way, he advised getting a Panga, rather than a machete - they are bigger, even scarier knives that look a bit like this:



For a team from a tiny university in the middle of a glum swamp, we did pretty well. But there would always be a point where we'd have to discuss Africa, and then things would go horribly wrong. Some bespectacled Oxbridge gnome would insist that the problems of Africa were easily solved by a more neo-liberal economic outlook or something, which would prompt from my debate partner "the speech", as we called it.

This would usually start with the phrase "You - white man - want to tell ME how to solve the problems of AFRICA?!?!?" Then there'd be a story about growing up in the third world, told with a frankly terrifying chopping action with his hands. We'd often lose that round, usually at a crucial part of the tournament. Long on charisma and gut-wrenching terror, short on analysis & facts, tragically.

Looking back, I am impressed by the integrity of the judges - I'd have given him a string of firsts, just to avoid the possible bloodsoaked freakout on telling him he came last. Usually, after we got back to Bristol, the gentleman in question would cook me this stew - based on a recipe his mother taught him, improvised from easily available UK ingredients.

It's delicious, warming and spicy - it also spends a large amount of time unattended on the hob, so it's perfect for entertaining at short notice, or alternatively for saying "I can't believe the judge in round four gave us a third!"

Panga Stew

Serves 4

Olive oil
2 red onions
4 cloves garlic
6 sausages – about 400g
One pack of Supermarket Chorizo
Cheating lazy chillies - English Provender company does the best, in my opinion.
A glass of dry sherry, vermouth or Dry White wine - my chum was quite the Sherry drinker, oddly enough.
5 or 6 decent-sized tomatoes - or a couple of cans of tomatoes.
2 x 400g tins chick peas
small bunch parsley



1.) Warm the olive oil in a deep pan. I use a cast iron casserole. Peel the onions, roughly chop them and add them to the oil, stirring to coat them, then letting them cook. Peel the garlic, slice it (with a panga, if you like) and stir it into the onions. Cook until the onions are soft.

2.)Cut each sausage into about three fat chunks. Mix these in with the softened onions then add a teaspoon or so of the chillies. Then stir in the chorizo. Pour in a glass of dry sherry, vermouth or white wine and bring it to an enthusiastic bubble. Chop the tomatoes roughly, add them and bring them to the boil, then add the chickpeas, drained of their canning liquor and rinsed, then pour in a can of water, then season with salt and black pepper. Bring to the boil then turn down to a simmer and leave to cook, slowly, half covered with a lid for 45 minutes.

3.)Stir from time to time, and check the liquor levels. What you want to end up with is a brick-red sauce with a wonderful spiciness from the chillies and chorizo. Chop the parsley, but only roughly, then stir into the stew.



Serve in shallow bowls, making certain everyone gets a fair bit of sausage. Otherwise, there may be violence.