Barefoot in the wilderness
in search of understanding

Hysteria in the police, media and government

The Register reports on a recent “terror trial” that was a resounding failure. Deservedly so. For the case was ridiculous, the evidence laughable and the motivation worrying.

Three men were last week cleared of charges after one of the global war on terror’s more ludicrous trials. They had been accused of an imaginary plot to produce an imaginary radioactive ‘dirty’ bomb using an imaginary substance. Imagination throughout proceedings was greatly aided by the efforts of Mazher Mahmood, the imaginary “fake sheikh” who produces scoops for the News of the World, which has been known to imagine itself a newspaper…
So, if the terror squad became involved in Mahmood’s operation because they genuinely believed in the existence of red mercury, we should worry. If on the other hand they didn’t believe it existed but pursued the case on the basis that people attempting to obtain terror weapons, non-existent or not, should be caught, we should still worry, but for different reasons.

pax et bonum

The myth of fingerprints

The Observer newspaper is reporting plans being made in the European Union to impose mandatory fingerprinting on all children in the EU down to 12 years old, and possibly even down to 6. This is part of the “biometric passport” system, but they are explicitly talking about retaining and sharing the data between countries and agencies. There’s even talk of allowing access to the intelligence agencies of non-EU countries.

Lest anyone say, “What’s the harm?” or “The innocent have nothing to fear”, I’ll say once more that this is only true if the system never makes a mistake. However, fingerprints are not infallible. Sure, everyone knows that everyone’s fingerprints are unique (although, interestingly, this has never been proved – it’s simply assumed to be true). But when we start to talk about taking fingerprints, it gets harder. A print isn’t a perfect representation of the finger (there are always splotches and gaps), and a crime-scene print is often smudged or partial. When it comes to matching imperfect prints against the similarly imperfect prints stored on a database, the assessment (which is done by a human being, with their own error rate) becomes subjective and dubious. One problem is that fingerprint matches are always given as “matches” – this is definitely the person you want. Everywhere else in scientific evidence, we talk about the probability of a match being chance (1 in a 250 000, 1 in 900 000 and so on). Why should fingerprints be treated specially? And if “they” are going to start matching crime-scene prints (or whatever) aganist a EU-wide database with hundreds of millions of prints in it, those error rates had better be very small indeed or hundreds of people will get convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Don’t think that could happen? Check out this, this article and this article from New Scientist (some require a sub to read fully) for an idea of the debate going on in the scientific community about this technique.

Are you worried yet?

pax et bonum

World trade talks collapse

Ekklesia reports the collapse of the WTO talks and their failure to carry through promises made last year after the huge Make Poverty History campaign. Yet more reason for cynicism – politicians forgetting their promises as soon as they walk out of the room, and failing to help the most vulnerable while propping up their own constituencies.

The talks ground to a halt as the European Union and the United States refused to stop dumping subsidised agricultural products onto world markets, a practice that distorts commodity prices in poor countries and cheats subsistence farmers out of a decent livelihood.
Despite the promises made last year at the G8, the EU and US also refused to give developing countries adequate choice over which sectors and products to open up to foreign competition.

pax et bonum

How can they think otherwise?

Heather at Driftwood asks some questions about the consequences of the current attacks on Lebanon. Most particularly, about the western (lack of) response to the indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure and many civilian deaths.

how can the Arab world believe anything else except that an Arab life is worth less than non-Arabs?? How can we be suprised by anti-western sentiment among Muslim communities? Why are we standing by letting these heinous crimes against innocent people go unstopped and practically uncriticised?

Notice that the issue here is the proportionality of the response and the recognition of basic standards of decency. The attacks by Hezbollah on Israel are also wrong.

pax et bonum

Bad analogies

OK, so lots of these have been floating around the net for ages, but they’re still fun. Miss Snark has posted a nice set, including these I rather liked.

• Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
• Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
• The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t. A bit Douglas Adams, but hey!
• The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

pax et bonum

Microsoft fined by the EU

The welcome news came yesterday that Microsoft is being fined 2 million Euros a day, backdated to December 2005, for failing to comply with a Commission order to document its network protocols. Despite all the time since then, Microsoft has blatantly failed to produce documentation. Why should we care? Two reasons spring to mind. First, and whether we believe Microsoft’s excuses or not, they have been flexing their monopoly power to keep competitors out of the market. No one is asking them to reveal sensitive information – the issue is their specific implementation of otherwise-public standards for letting computers talk to one another. Second, if Microsoft are telling the truth, they are incompetent software developers.

Microsoft commented to the press last week that 300 engineers are currently working “day and night” to fulfill the request of the public authorities.
“If we are to believe Microsoft’s numbers, it appears that 120.000 person days are not enough to document its own software. This is a task that good software developers do during the development of software, and a hallmark of bad engineering,” comments Georg Greve, president of the FSFE. “For users, this should be a shock: Microsoft apparently does not know the software that controls 95% of all desktop computers on this planet. Imagine General Motors releasing a press statement to the extent that even though they had 300 of their best engineers work on this for two years, they cannot provide specifications for the cars they built.”

(Thanks to GrokLaw for the info.)

pax et bonum

UK ID card scheme goes under

The Register is sounding the death knell for the UK Government’s mad, bad and dangerous to know ID scheme.

yesterday’s statements from the Home Office to make it a racing certainty that ID cards are dead in this parliamentary administration… Yesterday the Home Office said that the introduction of ID cards would be dependent on the review of Home Office operations being carried out at the behest of new Home Secretary John Reid, and a BBC report last night quoted Home Office sources as saying that within this, tendering had been postponed indefinitely… it’s not just a case of not happening as in missing it by a month, six months, slipping to 2009, but screwed, gone, off the radar unless somebody comes back with a spec for a viable project…
So outcomes – Blair accepts he’s been overwhelmed by the facts and backs off, or Shouty Blair resumes and a rebodged version collapses some more in the run-up, or even as a contributory factor to, his departure. Whatever, ding dong, the megaglitch is dead.
And next? A more sensible, and desirable Government approach to identity management now has a chance at a look in.

pax et bonum

UK ID card scheme near collapse?

The Register reports the current state of the UK’s National Identity Scheme.

An email exchange between David Foord of the Office of Government Commerce and Peter Smith, acting commercial director of the Identity and Passport Service, leaked to the Sunday Times, paints a picture of an impossible mission, a “Mr Blair” driving a cut-down “early variant” card and a Passport Service already making contingency plans in anticipation of ID cards crashing in flames.

So, there’s still hope, even as Mr Blair prepares to ride the ID scheme down to its final ignominious end. But, as The Register says:

The strong possibility of an early death for the ID scheme, however, still leaves troubling aspects to IPS’ “business as usual” plans. The organisation formerly known as the Passport Service has over the past few years been roadmapping the ID scheme into its long-range business plans. The removal of ID cards from the equation would therefore still leave the other ID scheme under construction, and it could not be readily disentangled from Passport Service planning without a conscious, politically-driven change of strategy. So it isn’t over by a long chalk.

pax et bonum

Cute

Anne’s posted some unfeasibly cute pictures of our daughter today. Awww

pax et bonum

Looking out the window

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Drowning in data

The Register discusses the recent report from the Home Affairs Committee into the issue of the police holding prisoners without charge. Historically, the police had only a few days in which to decide to charge someone or release them. In 2004, they were given up to 14 days and, in 2005, 28 days for suspects of terrorism. Various police representatives and the UK Government want to extend that still further to 90 days – in the face of opposition from various police representatives, UK Intelligence chiefs and others. After being held to 28 days last year, the Government are trying again.

A Home Affairs Committee report into police detention powers, published earlier this week, concludes that police powers to hold terror suspects without charge will need to be extended from 28 days to 90 days – and, once the flimsier justifications (e.g. time needed for prayers) have been stripped out, technology is largely to blame…

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Whitehall fights ID costs demand

The BBC is reporting the UK Governments strenuous attempts to ensure that we, the public, cannot learn how much the ID card scheme will cost, nor what the Government really thinks it will achieve.

The government is battling to ensure that estimates of the benefits and risks of identity cards remain secret.
The freedom of information watchdog ordered the Department of Work and Pensions to publish its findings about how the cards could fight ID fraud.
Now the department has decided to appeal against the information commissioner’s ruling.

pax et bonum

On my team?

Something that caused me pause for a moment today was reading a comment to me on someone else’s blog. We’d been discussing the interpretation of a particular passage in Genesis, and he quoted Bishop Spong at me, apparently believing that (because I’m not conservative evangelical) I must be liberal. I responded that I didn’t take Spong seriously and that I wasn’t liberal in the slightest (because I’m not).

The interesting point was his response – “I just chose the guy I knew wasn’t on my team!” This idea of “teams” in theology (indeed, in the Christian faith in general) is, it seems to me, profoundly unhelpful. Not only does it cast all discussions in adversarial fashion (with its ideas of winning and of “me versus you”) but it also reduces all difference to a binary axis – “if you don’t agree with me then you must agree with this other person who also disagrees with me”. Actually, of course, this is totally wrong. Any point can have many different opinions, and many different justifications for those opinions. Disagreement with one approach doesn’t imply agreement with any particular other approach.

Better, it seems to me, to see debate as a unifying process where possible – as a helpful rather than a destructive force. The objective is to convey one’s ideas to the other person, to correct their errors and to allow your errors to be corrected, to clarify areas where both were unclear before. The point is for both to ‘win’, for both to gain greater understanding, for both to move forward. If the participants can only see each other in terms of right and wrong, instead of in terms of progress towards a common goal (albeit from different directions), debate becomes argument and argument becomes fighting.

pax et bonum

Missional

Mike at WorD ponders the process of mission, and whether we need to change the emphasis of “evangelism”.

the process of modernization turned the gospel into information to be transmitted, received and processed…we must present evidence of redemption, transformation, etc. In other words, we need to demonstrate that the Good News actually “works”.

pax et bonum

Moving on from expository preaching

At The Great Giveaway, there’s some good food for thought about moving away from expository preaching towards something that lets us “explore how we might preach more faithfully in our times”. He makes four suggestions, each well fleshed out:

1. quit explaining and start proclaiming
2. come to the Bible as a drama, not a textbook
3. forget application points – go for liturgical response
4. preaching is only the tip of the communal iceberg.

Point number 2 seems particularly crucial to me.

Let us preachers resist all modernist temptations to see the Scriptures as a propositional textbook of religious facts. Instead, let us see the Scriptures as alive. Scripture is real accounts, testimonies and witnesses of God’s people, through the prophets and the apostles, to what God has done and said and will do. So let us read and speak as ones invited to see ourselves as invited in to participate in the continuation of all this!...
The hubris of pastors thinking they can exegete a text better and more accurately than the thousands that have gone before gets in the way of the Main Thing, the Glory of His Majestic Work and What He is working For in History…
Humility and the skill of listening are prerequisite for anyone being transformed by Scripture. These are the tools for the reshaping of imagination by the Holy Spirit. Humility and listening (i.e. patience) can only be learned in communities who practice worship and mission in ways that foster these basic Christian skills. Without becoming vigilant communities, I fear we all fall into modernist temptation, to believe that Scripture is perspicuous (to me), its meaning is automatically self evident to each individual (as long as they agree with me), and I know Scripture (well enough to justify my life to myself): the ultimate denial of the hermeneutic task.

pax et bonum

Living in the present

Maggi writes about encountering a man shouting at a small crowd while standing on a crate and shaking his Bible.

My son asked me why he was shouting. “He’s shouting about God,” I said. Mystified pause. “He knows about God? Then why is he so angry?” said my son, “doesn’t he know it’s Saturday and the sun is shining? He should be relaxing.”

“Doesn’t he know it’s Saturday and the sun is shining?” That sounds like wisdom beyond a child.

pax et bonum

Questions

Prodigal Kiwi makes some good points, initially quoting Richard Rohr.

Jesus is asked 183 questions directly in the four Gospels. He only answered three of them forthrightly. The others he either ignored, kept silent about, asked a question in return, changed the subject, told a story or gave an audio/visual aid to make his point, told them it was the wrong question, revealed their insincerity or hypocrisy, made the exactly opposite point, or redirected the question elsewhere!
Check it out for yourself. He himself asks 307 questions, which would seem to set a pattern for imitation. Considering this, it is really rather amazing that the church became an official answering machine and a very self-assured program for ‘sin management’.

pax et bonum

Fact and fiction in public debate

Father Jake has posted and commented on some excellent responses from episcopalians in Pittsburgh to recent debate about the Episcopal Church in the USA, its General Convention and the tension in the Anglican Communion. These responses are attempts to respond to accusations levelled against the Episcopal Church that misrepresent what really happened. In particular, these two issues (of the acceptability of women as priests and bishops in the wider Anglican Communion, and the failure of a motion that mentioned Jesus’ position as the one way to God) struck me.

Claim: That only two or three of the autonomous churches of the Anglican Communion accept women as bishops.
Fact: A chart provided by the Anglican Communion Secretariat in 2003 lists three autonomous provinces of the Anglican Communion (The Episcopal Church and the Churches in New Zealand and Canada) as having chosen and consecrated women as bishops. However, Brazil, Central America, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Scotland, Southern African, and the Sudan ordain women as priests and have no canonical bars to women bishops. The Church of England is in the process of amending its canons to allow women to become bishops, and Australia very narrowly defeated a similar measure at its last Synod…
Claim: General Convention proved its lack of orthodoxy by defeating a resolution that declared an “unchanging commitment to Jesus Christ as the Son of God, the only name by which any person may be saved” and “the solemn responsibility placed upon us to share Christ with all persons when we hear His words, ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No-one comes to the Father except through me.’”
Fact: The discussion about this resolution pointed out that the church had already committed to these concepts when it approved the Book of Common Prayer and Catechism, and, more importantly, raised objections to another section of the resolution that insisted on a specific (substitutionary) interpretation of the Atonement, noting that it was not in the Anglican tradition to insist on a single interpretation of basic doctrines.

pax et bonum

Discernment and morality

Father Jake ponders the issues of morality and justice, especially as they relate to the debate about homosexuality. What interested me, though, was the general approach to how we make moral judgements – do we simply follow instructions, or do we attempt to see why the instructions were given? In this, Jake is quoting Charles Hefling’s essay in Other Worlds, Other Voices.

one way of understanding our current tensions is to consider them as a continuation of the struggle between the Anglicans and the Puritans:
“There you have the real issue: the enormous difference between holding, in the tradition of Hooker and Sanderson, that there are understandable reasons for what God wills, and holding that what God wills, he simply wills – full stop…
On the Anglican position, the first divine attribute is wisdom. It belongs to wisdom to set things in order, and God orders all creation “sweetly and mightily”. On the Puritan position, the first divine attribute is freedom. Nothing precedes God’s deciding, much less restricts it. What God chooses is good simply and solely because God chooses it…On the Anglican position there is ultimate harmony between the moral duties that follow from natural tendencies, and the imperatives God has revealed. Biblical commandments and ‘natural law’ coincide…On the Puritan position, there is nothing morally relevant to be learned from the nature of things…ethics has no empirical element…”
From this, Hefling suggests that the Anglican position considers asking why as being not only legitimate, but our duty. The Puritan position would insist that asking why was a sign of pride and disobedience.

pax et bonum

Church of Nigeria splitting from Church of England?

The Church of Nigeria has released a communique that moves even further towards their self-centred, self-proclaimed “orthodoxy”. I wonder how much longer Archbishop Rowan Williams can continue to ignore their arrogance and contempt.

Synod is satisfied with the move by the Global South to continue with its veritable project of defending the faith committed to us against present onslaught from ECUSA, Canada, England and their allies. The need therefore, to redefine and/or re-determine those who are truly Anglicans becomes urgent, imperative and compelling...
The Lambeth Conference which is one of the accepted organs of unity in the Anglican Communion is due for another meeting in 2008. the Synod…believes strongly that the moral justification for the proposed Lambeth Conference of 2008 is questionable...
It therefore calls on the leadership of the Global South and Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa (CAPA) to do everything necessary to put in place a Conference of all Anglican Bishops to hold in 2008 should all efforts to get the apostles of ‘revisionist agenda’ to repent and retrace their steps fail…
[Emphasis mine]

Notice that their proposed “Conference of all Anglican Bishops” is clearly aimed at the same timeframe as Lambeth. And also that the intent is clearly (given who’s being suggested as the organisers) to exclude America and Europe from this Conference – and hence from their definition of “anglicanism”.

Given their acknowledgement that the Lambeth Conference is one of the Instruments of Unity between churches in the Anglican Communion, I don’t see how it can lack “moral justification”. It sounds far more like they want a ruling council than a meeting of equals. In other words, they don’t want historic anglicanism. They want a new anglicanism that they can control. They want to walk alone.

(_Thanks to Tobias for the tip._)

pax et bonum

Divided by a common language

It’s an often-repeated fact that the English spoken in the USA isn’t the same as the English spoken in Britain (or India, or Australia – you get the idea!). And it’s quite true. Although we can mostly communicate perfectly well, every so often something comes up that confuses matters totally, whether it’s a word used by one group that the others don’t know at all or a word both use but with different meanings (Brits and Yanks mean quite different things by being “pissed”, for example). And it’s the same with many other groups. For example, when evangelicals and liberals debate, they often come unstuck for just this reason – their words don’t always mean the same things. Simply insisting that our words are “right” and the other group’s “wrong” is nonsense; the word is irrelevant, it’s the meaning that counts.

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