Both these items are from Libby Purves in the Times (what an unfortunate surname) many of whose posts have been entertaining recently.

(I will pass gracefully over the slur to “guardinistas” in her recent post on a guardian blog about religion and how us atheists shouldn’t upset the bloggers Irish Catholic family with our strident atheism.. 🙂 Most of the comments she saw as ranting from enraged guardianistas seemed at least perfectly rational to me – whether I agreed with the commenter or not. Which is in itself a novelty, given the mad ranting that so often pops up on CIF)

First, the lasermonks who sell printer cartridges, with a range of other monk-producd products you can buy:

In the UK, more modestly, Gorton monastery will provide fridge magnets among other things, and Ampleforth offers Old Amplefordian braces, damson gin, cufflinks , and a link to some Norwegian Cistercian nuns who market moisturizer and “St Olav’s Skin Treatment”, made of pomegranate, aloe vera, peach kernel, yarrow, rosemary and green tea in a bottle with a “real wood” top. No flies on them. Get your Christmas shopping done now.

There’s a great comment from Philip in the USA:

Monks made a lot more money back in the day, when they sold penance. Oh, but then there was that Reformation thing. My bad.

Fridge magnets, braces, cufflinks and moisturiser? Small scale stuff. A bit charming and olde-worlde really. The church used to film “4 Weddings and a Funeral” is more up to date, using the advantages that come from being a Hollywood brand.

The Priory Church of St Gregory the Great (the church made famous by Four Weddings and a Funeral) has installed cash registers at its doors and is charging visitors to come in. It’s the first parish church to demand a fee, seven cathedrals already do so. £4 will get you in – if you’re not there for a service – or for £30 you can go as many times as you like in a year.

I’ll have to set aside the idea that anyone would be drawn by Four Weddings and a Funeral to want to do anything like visiting the church where the aforementioned rites of passage took place, as opposed to, say, giving the director and actors a good kicking. If anything, you would think the association would have driven even the most devout parishioner to think seriously about trusting their spiritual welfare to a different City church.

Turns out it’s for its roof – the archetypal church roof fund – rather than for massive US-pastor-style personal enrichment. What is it about church roofs? Why are they always so crap?

However, this is interesting in itself. It’s the City of London, (to you Americans, it’s like Wall Street, but generally richer….) A fair proportion of its regular visitors could probably buy a new roof without seriously breaking into their annual bonuses. Doesn’t this imply that the City of London’s Christian commodity traders may be a fair bit more in thrall to Mammon than to their supposed Christianity? Perish the thought.

Libby Purves, writing in the Times took up the call of Keith Jarrett, the retiring president of the National Black Police Association, for the re-introduction of stop and search to combat rising numbers of youth murders.

If you aren’t British, you won’t know that stop-and-search practices have a long and disastrous history in UK policing. They contributed to terrible relations between police and young black men, in particular, when the criteria for looking “suspicious” enough to get stopped and searched in the street rested almost entirely on whether you were a young black male or not.

Maybe Keith Jarrett is considering that the policy would cut the number of young civilians killed by turning the anger of young black men against police rather than each other. Hmm, that seems a bit mean to his police colleagues. But, otherwise, it’s very hard to understand how alienating young people further from society is going to do anything to cut crime.

I suspect that Keith Jarrett just knows full well what type of soundbite will get picked up by all the British media and he’s thinking of a less arduous and better-paid career in politics or television. Bugger the consequences.

Libby Purves presents Jarrett’s silly argument in a really odd way. It’s a “challenge to political correctness” etc…. So far, so predictable. But she ties it in with a trend for other people saying the supposedly unsayable, as if they are all part of a wave of new anti-PC thinking, thus implying a spurious authority for Jarrett’s nonsense.

For instance, she includes Trevor Phillips – of the soon to be defunct, if it’s not already closed down, Commission for Racial Equality – saying that multiculturalism is a farce. Well, yes, but Trevor Phillips was demanding real integration, not proposing an increase in bigotry.

She includes the Chief Constable of North Wales who called for the legalisation of heroin. A perfectly rational call from someone who can see the social effects of prohibition and suggests a reasonable solution.

Have you spotted the difference yet? These people were not challenging an imaginary “political correctness.” They were making rational arguments about social policies that are producing effects that are exactly opposite to those they are supposed to be aiming to achieve.

Jarrett is not doing this. He is calling for the adoption of a strategy that has clearly failed on any measure. Repeatedly. There is nothing like getting stopped and humiliated in the street when blamelessly going about your business for building a deep and abiding hatred of the police among the generally law-abiding.

With modern technology, the horrors of the old Sus laws would be increased exponentially. Under new proposals, the police are to have laptops on which to record details of “suspects”. Identity documents and DNA databases and all the panapoly of an authoritarian modern state will each feed into the mix. Already the UK DNA database is a world leader (in a shameful league.) The proportion of black males whose DNA is stored is an unspeakably scandalous feature of this.

Libby Purves presents the arguments against this mad policy, albeit sneeringly (OK, it’s not as if I am stranger to the sneer, myself.)

Until now the lazy mantra has been that the police are “institutionally racist”, as the Macpherson report put it, and cannot be trusted. They have to record every instance of searching, and have been threatened with legal action by racial equality watchdogs and accused of poisoning community relations. The riots of 1980, 1981 and 1985 in Bristol, Brixton and Handsworth were triggered by heavy-handed police action against black suspects, mainly in search of drugs or stolen property.

She infers that this may have been all very well in those distant days

But this is 2007, and the crimes that police have to prevent are not predominantly drugs or burglary, but murders: often by teenagers, of teenagers

.

She then lists some recent murders. This is clearly to make it seem as if the evidence supports the proposed solution. She presents no evidence for why or how this will work except that Keith Jarrett claims that black parents whom he knows support the idea.

Let me do the same. Young people have been shot and stabbed in my my neighbourhood. Kids from my old primary school have both murdered and been murdered. I will face magnetic north and say “K’plah” repeatedly at random intervals. That will sort it out then?

Stop and search will prevent murders? How? How on earth?

The comments have some predictable responses. For instance, Liz Scott, Gutersloh, Germany says:

The truth hurst, and no matter how hard these white, “liberal”, fat, rich old men try to cover it up, the crime figures are real, and real solutions must be made to overcome them.

Another cover-up? By mysterious white, “liberal”, fat, rich old men? (Aside, I love the way liberal is capitalised. I love the way fat is even in there.)

Jane, Birmingham, UK

I am all for stop and search – if you have nothing to hide then why should you mind afterall it is done to protect us from the maniacs carrying knives and drugs.

But there are comments that bear repeating.
Donald Ideh, London, UK:

… As a black professional, I have experienced the ugly face of policing, the ordinary prejudice with which they carry out their duties. I have had an innocent family member tortured by the state in the infamous Stoke Newington Police Station. These youths are already over represented in prisons and police data bases. The sad irony is that that they are also most likely to be the victims of violent crime.

JonB, Glasgow, UK:

“the crimes that police have to prevent are not predominantly drugs or burglary, but murders”
What!?!?!? Are you mad?? You’re claiming there are more murders than drugs or burglary offences?

The pope has apparently begun ensainting Franco’s clergy (or whatever the word is for declaring them to have been “saints” rather than “active supporters of a dictator who overthrew a democratically elected government by force.” Think Guernica). According to the Times, a fight broke out

outside a church in Rome yesterday after the Pope beatified 498 priests and nuns killed in the Spanish Civil War.
Members of the congregation attacked left-wing protesters carrying a banner that read: “Those who have killed, tortured and exploited cannot be beatified.”

Franco? The 1930s fascist who clung on to power for decades by the simple expedient of not joining his fascist chums in the Second World War. According to the Times, again,

Bands of Communist and Anarchist irregulars on the Republican side burnt churches and killed thousands of priests and nuns. Falangist death squads executed tens of thousands of Spaniards suspected of harbouring leftist sympathies

So, if we are stacking up bodies to measure levels of atrocity, it looks as if even the Times sees that Franco’s toll was the highest.

This isn’t just a historical point, there are current resonances.

The country’s Socialist Government has clashed repeatedly with the Roman Catholic Church. The Prime Minister, José Luis RodrÍguez Zapatero, whose grandfather was executed by Franco’s forces, has caused howls of protest from conservatives after introducing a law aimed at redressing the injustices suffered by victims of the regime. Among other measures, the law orders the removal of any symbols of the dictatorship, which arguably include the shrines in many Spanish churches to the dead on Franco’s side. Republican victims still lie in dozens of unmarked mass graves around the country.

Why draw the line in Spain? Why not go the distance and start beatifying the Ruandan clergy involved in promoting genocide.

Doesn’t this act seem like calculated provocation with the Pope intervening to show which side he’s on in the current climate?

The prime suspect. (Image from 4Halloween costumes.) (Messed about with a bit. Please don’t complain it’s free advertising)

From the Diana inquest – which Marina Hyde so memorably described as being about “a conspiracy so fiendishly clever it could have been foiled by the wearing of a seatbelt” – comes a bizarre “revelation”

Spies apparently bent on murder do not just specifically pick a time and place for their skullduggery when the world’s paparazzi is on the spot and primed for some momentous event. They also make themselves inconspicuous by dressing in a style that would raise an eyebrow at a fancy dress parade.

… in the Alma tunnel Jacques Morel trod on the foot of a man wearing pointy western boots. He says he spoke to Mohammed Al Fayed hours after the crash and when he told him this, the Harrods owner said: “I knew they were there. They’re the bastards that did it, the secret service.”
For many in the court it was the first time they had learnt you could tell a spy by his boots, though Mr Al Fayed was supplied with other descriptive details.
The suspected agent with sore toes was muscular and had a moustache like Salvador Dali’s, or a beer drinker in Ireland. (from the BBC website)

I was going to be uncharitable about Mohammed Al Fayed’s grasp on reality but the BBC report says that he himself has ‘no memory’ of this telephone conversation.

This bizarre nonsense comes straight from a Mr Morel. Surprisingly, ahem, he has written a book about the deaths…. (This book is reportedly ‘based in part on a secret “explosive” dossier,’ according to the BBC again.)

Oh yes, and…

He fears for his family’s safety because of what he knows. He wants to move to a Caribbean island

Well, don’t we all? I myself can provide the real answer to the entire Diana death “mystery” so easily. I am, naturally, waiting for the Caribbean hideaway to materialise before I divulge the whole cunning plot.

But , just to whet the appetite of the big publishers – Basically, a secret cabal of evil clowns were in one of those circus cars that dozens of people can fit in. They jumped out in the tunnel, sprayed alcohol into the face of the driver from their comedy flowers then pulled off the steering wheel and the car turned into incoming traffic. The assassin clowns all got back in their circus car and disappeared in a puff of red smoke.

One was too slow, because his comedy boots got stood on by Mr Morel (isn’t that a mushroom?) so he got spotted but he managed to grab a trapeze that had been rigged in the tunnel roof for the getaway and swung out of the tunnel just before the flashbulbs popped.

Pretty convincing hey? Beats the crap out of any of the popular conspiracy theories anyway.

In an amazing piece of pseudo-history, Worldnet daily is bizarrely claiming the Ku Klux Klan as an invention of the Democrats, set up to target Republicans, no less. (With an implicit suggestion that this is where Democratic politics really lead, in sharp contrast to Republicans’ tolerance and diversity.) Snurfle. Choke on your coffee. You think I’m joking?

I am going to quote WND. (Sorry.) Richard Barton is the author of:

….”Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black & White,” which … that not only did the Democrats work hand-in-glove with the Ku Klux Klan for generations, they started the KKK and endorsed its mayhem.
“Of all forms of violent intimidation, lynchings were by far the most effective,” Barton said in his book. “Republicans often led the efforts to pass federal anti-lynching laws and their platforms consistently called for a ban on lynching. Democrats successfully blocked those bills and their platforms never did condemn lynchings.”

Now, I am pretty certain that enough Democrats were implicated in the activities of the KKK. However, there is something that could politely be called “disingenuous” in the WND attempt to whitewash the Republican’s major role. Indeed to present the Republicans a dogged fighters against the KKK hamstrung by Democratic opposition. (It could less politely be called lots of things, such as “barking mad”, “lying” and so on. For any WND readers who’ve strayed here by the grace of Google, I’ll have to admit “Yes, that is in fact what I mean. I was using the word disingenuous, because I was pretty sure you wouldn’t know what it meant.”)

All the same, I do recognise there has been something of great leap forward in the US. At least, the actions of the KKK must now be recognised as so universally repellent that you can really harm your political opponents by making spurious attributions of relation to them.

I found some interesting observations on Christian Ethics Today about Nicholas Barton whose spreading this crap.

Barton has become the guru of Religious Right antiseparationism.

(referring to the separation of church and state)

A careful look at that material, however, shows that “Mythbuilders” would describe it more accurately than “Wallbuilders,” for the essence of his message rests on eight historical fallacies regarding the Constitution

Basically, they are politely saying he’s a far-right nutjob and that Wallbuilders is a pseudo history site with anti-separation of church and state agenda…. This point of view is put rather more forcefully on Right Wing Watch blog, where a Sept 19 post said

A Right-Wing Three-Fer
Right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton will be addressing the Regent Law School chapter of the Federalist Society….

In fact, now I’ve got to Right Wing Watch, I see that there’s an much more elegant deconstruction of this ludicrous David Barton story than I can manage. (Because I’m too busy laughing at the effrontery of it)