This week’s mailing from critters, the online writers workshop:

Because of Christmas and New Years travel/festitivies etc., this batch is a TRIPE batch.

Sure, some of the stories are not very good, but to say that they are all tripe is a little harsh!

I’ve discovered that someone has been deliberately setting up my work email address as a target for spam emails. As far as I can see the sender of this message says that I am a homosexual (the actual word used, peder/педер, is much ruder) who is spreading shit about Macedonia, and suggests that people send me spam.

As recently as yesterday he’s been posting my address in the hope that spammers will pick it up and use it. His messages seem to come from the IP address block 62.162.226.* which means that he’s a broadband customer of Macedonian telecoms company MTNET.

I must say I don’t think his lonely little campaign has had much effect – I’ve noticed a lot of Russian spam sneaking though our filters in the last few weeks, which may or may not be related – but otherwise our work spam filters seem to have had an effect.

Still, it’s a bit weird to be thought of as sufficiently important by some sad little guy in Skopje or wherever that he leaves such an obvious trail in his fury to get even with me for my imagined offences against his country (which incidentally is my favourite of the countries I deal with).

Any suggestions, apart from the obvious one of reporting him to his service provider?

The link between these people:

Brian Faulkner (1922-1977), ex-Prime Minister of Northern Ireland
Betty Harvie Anderson (1913-1979), ex-Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons
Walter Monslow (1895-1966), ex-Labour MP
Stephen King-Hall (1893-1966), sailor, writer and ex-Independent MP
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), composer
Tom Driberg (1905-1976), ex-MP (and supposedly KGB agent)
Nicholas Ridley (1929-1993), ex-Conservative minister
Joan Lestor (1931-1998), ex-Labour MP
Frederick Erroll (1914-2000), ex-Conservative minister (this one arguable)
James Chuter Ede (1882-1965), ex-Labour minister

is that all of them died less than a year after getting a life peerage.

I should have realised that David Boothroyd had already compiled this list at the end of this very long page.

Congrats to who worked it out.

Erroll is a marginal case because he had been given a hereditary peerage in 1964, got kicked out with the other hereditary peers and was then allowed back in again because he was a former cabinet minister who would have had a life peerage if they’d been more usual in 1964.

For hereditary peers, I learn that:

Wilfred Carlyle Stamp, 2nd Baron Stamp, was killed in a German air-raid on London on 16 Apr 1941. His father, the 1st Baron, was killed by the same bomb. However, it was assumed that the son had died after the father, even by a split-second, and on that basis the 2nd Baron was held to have succeeded to the title… Charles Brandon, 3rd Duke of Suffolk succeeded to the title on the death of his brother on 14 Jul 1551 and died half an hour later.

Morbid stuff, sorry.

From :

U is two today. Last night she carefully sorted out some alphabet blocks, grouping together those with the letter “f” and also putting the “i”s next to the “j”s. Still asleep as I type.

I occasionally have a look at the extremely tasteless stiffs.com to stay aware of who’s alive and who’s dead. It seems that a lot fewer celebrities have died this year. Only three of the top ten predicted deaths have actually taken place (Ronald Reagan, Fay Wray and Barney Kessel, whoever he was) compared to six last year (Warren Zevon, Bob Hope, Strom Thurmond, Lester Maddox, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and Katharine Hepburn) and four the year before. I doubt if I will try entering it myself.

One of my colleagues and my brother-in-law are off to Ukraine tomorrow to help monitor Sunday’s rerun presidential election. I don’t know how many of you tried your luck with the various possible means of getting out there, but just FYI here is the list of elections that are scheduled in the OSCE area for the first half of next year:

2 January: Croatia Presidential
27 February: Kyrgyzstan Parliamentary
February: Tajikistan Parliamentary –
February/March: Moldova Parliamentary
February/March: Macedonia Municipal
11 and 13 March: Liechtenstein Parliamentary –
March: Andorra Parliamentary
June: Albania Parliamentary
June: Hungary Presidential
June: Bulgaria Parliamentary

Plus of course likely UK elections for the House of Commons in May.

Moldova, Albania and perhaps Macedonia could be quite big missions looking for observers – though of course none as big as the present mission in Ukraine.

If there’s anyone left in the world reading this who doesn’t have a gmail account and wants one, I seem to have ten more invites…

Interesting piece in yesterday’s New York Times (bugmenot) describing a CIA agent’s relationship with one of her sources in Macedonia. I will keep an eye out for the book this story is lifted from, to be published next February – though it’s had at least one bad review so far!

Two people on my friends list have either taken the plunge or are thinking about taking the plunge into student politics, so I’ve been reviewing my own thoughts about it. (Recommended link for those who are thinking about it themselves: What sort of student politician are you?)

I did my undergraduate degree at Cambridge, but was lucky to end up with an upper second after the time I put into various extra-curricular activities. Along with various temporary musical and vaguely religious commitments, I was the second president of the Diplomacy Society which is still going strong; I was the founding president of one of many incarnations of the Irish Society, which apparently gets reinvented every four or five years; I served briefly (until I realised I was overcommitted) on the committee of the Science Fiction Society (with and
But in those heady days, politics was what really interested me. It seems so long ago now; I know there are people reading this who are too young to remember Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister, and who may have difficulty relating to the sheer revulsion felt for her by many people of the centre, never mind the left. I believe things have changed these days, but Cambridge student politics at university level was very politicised between the “University Left” coalition, which included not just the (relatively left wing) Cambridge Organisation of Labour Students but also various other factions; the SDP/Liberal Alliance, of whom more later; and the Cambridge University Conservative Association, who to the dismay of the left (broadly defined, ie including me) managed to win the presidency of the students union in 1988. The fact that the winning Tory candidate was a loud Glaswegian lesbian almost added insult to injury.

The elections for the Clare College JCR committee took place a week or so later, and I had decided to stand as the External Officer, ie the person responsible for links with the central university students union and with the National Union of Students. At the time I regarded those who had achieved high office in student politics as exalted beings, clearly specially selected above the rest of us. I had not taken in the simple truth that the only really essential thing you need to succeed in politics is the desire to succeed in politics; if you have that, then sooner or later luck will come your way, though obviously if you pick a larger rather than a smaller political party and ally yourself with rising stars within it you will get lucky more quickly. Nobody stood against me for this particular exalted position and I got 70% of the votes. (Two other positions were uncontested and both got around 90% of the votes cast; I suspect I was too nerdy, or in some cases perhaps just too unknown.) My future wife ran for Women’s Officer and lost; my future sort-of girlfriend ran for Treasurer and won.

Clare College was a small community of about 450 students and my main role was giving moral support to our president against the immature impulses of some of the younger committee members. (The president, very sensibly, stayed well out of politics after graduating and now runs a chateau in the Dordogne.) It also meant participating in meetings of the central students union council where you could actually make policy on behalf of Cambridge University and try and get the National Union of Students – or, more boringly though more operationally useful, the University authorities – to take it seriously. I also got myself elected onto the Societies Syndicate, a nice little committee which has the task of giving start-up grants to student societies (four-fifths of which would then fold, of course, but there you go).

Now comes the bit that many people who were adults at the time will have forgotten. There used to be a political party in the UK called the SDP. They were founded in 1981 as a splinter group from the Labour Party which in those days looked unelectable (I know, ancient history; now the reverse is the case). I had become a bit of a fan by staying up late the occasional night to watch by-election victories which they seemed to have frequently. At the time, under Foot and in the early Kinnock years, the Labour Party looked unreformable; also for me the crucial issue was switching to a proportional election system, which seemed then (and still does) just to make much more sense, and would prevent a government as extreme as Mrs Thatcher’s from ever winning power again. (Interestingly, as far as I can tell from Paddy Ashdown’s pubished memoirs, Tony Blair still doesn’t understand this.) But once at Cambridge I joined not the SDP but the old Liberal Party, which just somehow seemed more comfy.

As an elected officer at college level, who was also a Liberal member, of course I was then of interest to the university SDP/Liberal hacks looking for candidates for future elections. This was a very bad year for the two parties as a whole, as in the wake of Mrs Thatcher’s stunning third election victory in 1987 the leadership of the Liberals and most of the SDP – though unfortunately only a minority of their MPs and worst of all not including the leader – were negotiating a merger between the two parties to produce what are now the Liberal Democrats. However I was persuaded, with little difficulty, to run for election for my first time as a partisan candidate in the choice of Cambridge University delegates for the National Union of Students Conference in winter 1988.

I was one of a slate of four candidates, for twelve places elected by preferential vote (single transferable vote in some dialects) of all the university’s students. I was, I think, a modest 7th or 8th in terms of first preferences but had easily enough support to be one of the lucky twelve. I then stood for and won the exalted position of the Cambridge University delegation’s official leader at the conference; I’d spotted this as being something nobody else would be much interested in, with the only responsibility being to get people out of bed in time for the conference sesions (admittedly I wasn’t completely successful in that) and a job that looked much more impressive on the CV than it was actually worth (almost the only time I have made such a calculation).

Nowadays the NUS holds only one conference a year but at that time there were two. Part of the reason for the change was what happened in Winter 1988. The conference came just at the moment that Mrs Thatcher was introducing the Poll Tax, a local government tax that was (such a stupid idea I can hardly believe I’m typing this) a flat rate of several hundred pounds per adult, and had I think already done so in Scotland. Lefty Scottish students, with no Conservative ministers to protest against, instead disrupted the last evening of the conference by occupying the platform. It’s not as if this prevented the conference from doing anything useful, but it was still rather a shock to have proceedings interrupted by direct action.

In due course, I was persuaded to stand for the position of Deputy President of Cambridge University Students Union the next year, a sabbatical position, ie paid and full-time. The incumbent was actually both a Liberal and also at Clare College, but in fact it was his predecessor who actually persuaded me to take the plunge. (They are now respectively making games machines for English  pubs and merchant banking in New York.) Unusually the election was a straight fight between the three main parties, me representing the Liberal Democrats, with University Left represented by a fellow Ulster Catholic (now a chemical engineer in California) and the Tories by their current candidate for Hammersmith and Fulham. Of course, I did nothing else for two or three weeks before the vote other than campaign. When I did win (I was ahead of the Left guy on the first count, and got loads of Conservative transfers which saw me safely in on the second count) I was completely ecstatic for three days. I had joined the ranks of the elect. Or, rather, the elected.

Well, I wish I knew then what I did now. My year as a Deputy President was one of the most miserable of my life. It wasn’t just that the Left were vocal and nasty on the students union council to an Executive where three of the four sabbaticals were Liberal Democrats. (The Left weren’t even a majority on the council, which also included eminently sensible people like , but they were the loudest and best organised.) It wasn’t just that a new gruesome student tabloid newspaper was founded that year and took cheap but very nasty shots at us every week. (I see its disgusting founder turned up on a Guardian list of the young new rich four years ago, but has been quieter since.) The fact that my father died that year was not the fault of the students union either. No, really the problem was me; I wasn’t organised enough to take on the role of seeing political projects through to a  conclusion, and while I liked the talking side of things – usually, though not always, depending on who I was talking to – the doing side of things was not my forte. It did at least give me my first experience of management, in the very congenial form of the two staff of the CUSU shop (since, alas, closed) so at least I felt that the people side of things was something I handled well.

Being a CUSU sabbatical was I think a formative experience for all of us; it’s striking that all four of us who were in office that year have veered away completely from what looked like the obvious career paths for us at the time – the President, a law graduate, is now Head of Corporate and Community Affairs at the Premier League, while her friend who was one of the other Deputy Presidents was a management graduate and is now a lawyer; while in a weird bit of symmetry, I studied astrophysics and am now a political analyst, while the other Deputy President (who was also at Clare College) was a lefty political science graduate and is now the science correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. My immediate predecessors I’ve mentioned above; my successor was a radical Green who is now a high-flying civil servant in the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs. Her successor was another bloke at Clare who I persuaded to stand for the office, and he seems to have been one of the most efficient holders of it.

Anyway, you live and learn. Subsequently doing an M Phil and Ph D taught me much more about time management than I had learnt as an undergraduate or student politician. I dipped my toes in student politics again as a Ph D student in Belfast, but now knew enough not to take it too seriously. I’d still recommend it as an interim career choice for people who are better organised than I was then, and particularly those who either won’t take it too seriously or who will use it as a springboard to other things. Some time in the future I will post about my experiences as a candidate for election to public office in both 1990 and 1996.

Enough for now. writing this has taken two Sunday evenings. More autobiography to follow…

What do the following British public figures of varying degrees of celebrity (or obscurity) have in common? They are listed in order.

Brian Faulkner (1922-1977), ex-Prime Minister of Northern Ireland
Betty Harvie Anderson (1913-1979), ex-Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons
Walter Monslow (1895-1966), ex-Labour MP
Stephen King-Hall (1893-1966), sailor, writer and ex-Independent MP
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), composer
Tom Driberg (1905-1976), ex-MP (and supposedly KGB agent)
Nicholas Ridley (1929-1993), ex-Conservative minister
Joan Lestor (1931-1998), ex-Labour MP
Frederick Erroll (1914-2000), ex-Conservative minister (this one arguable)
James Chuter Ede (1882-1965), ex-Labour minister.

Answer later in the week.

1. What did you do in 2003 that you’d never done before?
Visited Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I made a set of six-monthly resolutions in January, and have by now kept most of them – apart from the one about doing another set of six-monthly resolutions on July 1st! The one I didn’t keep was to do NaNoWriYe, and I realise now that with my current set of obligations there’s no way I’ll be writing vast amounts of fiction soon (though less vast amounts remain a possibility).

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Two work colleagues. A diplomat friend. , though I hadn’t renewed contact with her yet at the time.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Danijela Dabic, a former colleague from Bosnia, of brain cancer. Boris Trajkovski, a friend from Macedonia, in a plane crash.

5. What countries did you visit?

20 in all: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia mentioned above; I live in Belgium; long holiday in Northern Ireland in August (and other UK trips); odd visits (ie incluing at least one night) to Ireland, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Croatia, Switzerland, Hungary, Serbia/Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova and Georgia. Also drove through Luxembourg four times and changed planes in the Czech Republic and Austria without staying overnight.

6. What would you like to have in 2004 that you lacked in 2003?

More time with my family. (Same as last year.)

7. What date from 2003 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

March was not a good month. Apart from bad news on the 12th, which fortunately now turns out to have been unsubstantiated, the Kosovo riots which started on 17 March set my work agenda for much of the following months.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

I was particularly pleased to give evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. Also finally finishing the pan-Albanianism report, and then months later seeing it used as evidence in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Didn’t really manage the big reorganisation of the Northern Ireland elections website I had been hoping for.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

A long-lasting flu-type bug in March.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

The DVD player.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

My wife’s, as ever. Many of my colleagues. 74% of the voters of Macedonia.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Kosovo politicians. Serbian politicians. The antiwar.com crowd. 60,608,582 American voters. The au pair who we had to sack.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Books. Travel. (Less on wine, this year.)

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

The US elections (unjustifiably).

16. What songs will always remind you of 2004?

Hmm, none really.

17. Compared to this time last year,
i. are you happier or sadder?
No big change.
ii. thinner or fatter?
No big change.
iii. richer or poorer?
A bit richer, now that we no longer have an au pair.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Book reviews for Infinity Plus. Creative writing. Seeing films with my wife.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Procrastinating.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
We’ll stay in Belgium. I shall cook boar for the family.

22. Did you fall in love in 2003?
No.

23. How many one night stands?
None.

24. What was your favourite TV programme?
University Challenge and Mastermind.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
No.

26. What was the best book you read?
Best books: Felaheen, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood; Kushiel’s Avatar, by Jacqueline Carey; Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold; Ilium, by Dan Simmons; Singularity Sky, by Locus Awards collection; Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Seddon; Persepolis, by Marianne Satrapi; Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelmann; J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, by Tom Shippey; Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin; and Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Much enjoying the set of 8 Sibelius CDs I got last time I was changing planes in Vienna.

28. What did you want and get?
DVD player. A swim in the sea (twice, Ireland in August and Portugal in October).

29. What did you want and not get?
Explained here.

30. What was your favourite film of this year?
ROTK, though with honourable mentions for Before Sunset and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
Age 37; had a meal with work colleagues (in the course of which two of them fell in love, and have since moved in with each other).

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Swimming in the sea. Missed a chance in Ireland in the summer and again in Montenegro in September.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2003?
As usual – smart at work, sloppy at home.

34. What kept you sane?
Reading, cooking, my wife.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Dig those Bush twins! (joke)

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
The EU’s stupid visa regime policy.

37. Who did you miss?
As usual, my father (who died in 1990).

38. Who was the best new person you met?
More of a year of consolidating and renewing old acquaintances and friendships.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2003
No matter how well you plan, in political life events can always overtake you.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year
This is very difficult. I think I need to be buying more music.

The discussion continues.

Free and fair elections.

Top Commenters on ‘s LiveJournal
(Self and anonymous comments excluded from rankings)

1		101
2		90
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Total Commenters: 128 (56 with only one comment not shown)
Total Comments: 1611
Report generated 18/12/2004 17:57:12 by ‘s LJ Comment Stats Wizard 1.4

Michael Karadjis: good to see someone blogging the Balkans who isn’t from the wingnut antiwar.com tendency, even if I don’t agree with everything he says.

Ruth Kelly is the only member of the current cabinet who I have met – I organised a speech for her in Brussels back in March 2002, an evening that is engraved vivdly in my memory because as I was driving home afterwards my current boss phoned me to offer me my current job. I thought then that she was very intelligent and very competent. It’s a bit surprising that we had never encountered each other in student politics – whereas Stephen Twigg, a year older than her and the same age as me, was ubiquitous at that time, and Lorna Fitzsimons was also emerging on the radar screen. She obviously spent her energy more sensibly. Anyway it’s very annoying interesting to see someone a year younger than me and also from an Ulster Catholic background achieving high office…

Interesting statistics from http://www.nationmaster.com/ – of course, to be taken with a pinch of salt in some cases, especially given the fact that they don’t have statistics for an awful lot of countries.

Ireland has the top score for countries surveyed in:
* Agriculture – Fertilizer use
* Economy – Development assistance to LDCs
* Economy – GDP growth (1998-2002)
* Economy – Import growth (1993-2002)
* Economy – Targeting of foreign aid
* Education – Student attitude – Find school boring
* Health – Circulatory disease deaths
* Health – Growth in health expenditure (per annum)
* Health – Respiratory disease deaths
* Labor – Working time to buy a car
* Labor – Working time to buy chicken
* Lifestyle – Beer consumption
* Lifestyle – Confidence in social institutions – Civil service
* Lifestyle – Political orientation – Far right (self-described)
* People – Average size of households
* People – Home ownership
* People – Households with more than 5 people

Ireland has the lowest score for countries surveyed in:
* Agriculture – Exports to USA – Kohlrabi kale and other edible brassicas (no surprise)
* Crime – Suicide rates in ages above 75
* Economy – Government spending in research and development
* Education – Educational attainment – Senior secondary
* Education – Total expenditure as % of GDP
* Environment – Expenditure pollution control as % of GDP
* Environment – Known reptile species (again, no big surprise)
* Labor – Employment rate of lesser educated women
* Lifestyle – Coffee consumption (that is more surprising)
* Lifestyle – Members of voluntary organisations – Environmental
* Lifestyle – Members of voluntary organisations – Professional
* Lifestyle – Not proud of their nationality
* Lifestyle – Undesirable neighbours – Heavy drinkers (ie not very many people object to living next to them)
* Lifestyle – Undesirable neighbours – Immigrants (ie not very many people object to living next to them)
* People – Disabled persons employment
* Taxation – Contribution by poorest 30%
* Transportation – Airports – with paved runways (2,438 to 3,047 m) (per $ GDP)
* Transportation – Cars

The high score in how long you have to work to buy a car or a chicken, and the low scores for government investment in education, came as a surprise to me.

United Kingdom is ranked top in:
* Economy – GDP per capita in 1820
* Economy – GDP per capita in 1900
* Education – Private school enrolment – secondary level
* Energy – Nuclear energy consumption in 1965 (per capita) (why on earth is this relevant?)
* Health – Obesity in men
* Immigration – Asylum Seekers (per $ GDP)
* Language – English speakers (per capita)
* Lifestyle – Confidence in social institutions – Armed forces
* Lifestyle – Tea consumption (Ireland is second)
* Military – Exports to developing nations (per $ GDP)
* Military – Exports to developing nations (per capita)
* Taxation – Components of taxation – Property tax

United Kingdom is ranked bottom in:
* Agriculture – Exports to USA – (lots of obscure things)
* Crime – Bribery victims
* Crime – Murders with firearms (per capita)
* Crime – Suicide rates in ages 55-64
* Crime – Suicide rates in ages 65-74
* Environment – Pollution – Carbon Dioxide from fossil fuels 1990
* Environment – Pollution – Sulfur Oxides per capita
* Environment – Waste water treatment expenditure
* Health – Death from cancer
* Internet – Broadband access
* Labor – Working time to buy bread
* Lifestyle – Confidence in social institutions – Press
* Lifestyle – Members of voluntary organisations – Education
* Lifestyle – Members of voluntary organisations – Parties
* Lifestyle – Members of voluntary organisations – Unions
* Media – Television reception through cable (surely out of date by now!)
* Mortality – Bitten or struck by other mammals (and many many others)
* Transportation – Airports – with unpaved runways (2,438 to 3,047 m)

Surprised by the low rates for suicide and cancer deaths; I suspect this may reflect a small sample of coutries.

Belgium ranks top in:
* Democracy – Female ministers
* Education – Share of vocational tertiary qualifications awarded to females (first degree) (per capita)
* Education – Student attitude – Will not go to school
* Education – Students from households with dictionary (age 13) (yeah, with three official languages not so surprising)
* Environment – Non-wildness
* Environment – SO2 emissions per populated area
* Health – Transplants – Heart and lung (per $ GDP)
* Health – Transplants – Heart and lung (per capita)
* Health – Transplants – Liver (per capita)
* Industry – Car production (per capita)
* Industry – Motor vehicle production (per capita)
* Internet – Internet charges
* Labor – Working time to buy a television set
* Lifestyle – Undesirable neighbours – Different race
* Lifestyle – Undesirable neighbours – Immigrants
* Media – Pay TV subscribers
* Media – Television reception through cable
* People – Divorces per 100 marriages
* Taxation – Total tax wedge (single worker)

Belgium ranks last for:
* Agriculture – Meat production (per capita)
* Economy – Difference between male and female median full-time earnings as % of male median full-time earnings
* Lifestyle – Confidence in social institutions – Police
* Media – Television reception by terrestrial means
* Media – Television reception through satellite
* People – Attitude of women – Women are better off now
* Transportation – Airports – with paved runways (914 to 1,523 m) (per $ GDP)

The high taxation I’m well aware of, and the ubiquity of cable TV doesn’t surprise. The high rates of divorce and organ transplants are news to me. And the fact that men and women earn more equal rates of pay here, rather than anywhere else is a bit surprising – why here?

United States ranks top for many many things including:
* Agriculture – Banana imports
* Agriculture – Cotton exports
* Crime – Adults prosecuted (per capita)
* Crime – Prisoners (per capita)
* Crime – Rapes
* Crime – Software piracy losses
* Crime – Total crimes
* Democracy – Presidential elections – Voting age population
* Economy – Debt – external
* Economy – Exports
* Economy – GDP
* Economy – GDP (PPP)
* Economy – GDP in 1970
* Economy – GDP per capita in 1950
* Economy – Gross National Income
* Education – Average years of schooling of adults
* Education – Literacy – Adults with at least moderate literacy (female)
* Education – Tertiary enrollment
* Education – Total expenditure as % of GDP
* Energy – Electricity – consumption
* Energy – Electricity – production
* Energy – Nuclear electricity generation
* Energy – Nuclear energy consumption
* Energy – Oil consumption
* Energy – Oil imports {net}
* Energy – Oil production in 1972
* Energy – Oil production in 1982
* Energy – Usage per person
* Environment – CO2 Emissions
* Environment – Threatened species
* Food – McDonalds restaurants
* Food – McDonalds restaurants (per capita)
* Health – Plastic surgery procedures
* Health – Teen birth rate
* Health – Teenage pregnancy
* Health – Teenage pregnancy (per capita)
* Health – Teenage pregnancy (share)
* Health – Total expenditure as % of GDP
* Immigration – New citizenships
* Internet – Hosts
* Internet – Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
* Internet – Linux web servers
* Internet – Livejournal users
* Internet – Users
* Labor – Female decision makers
* Labor – Gender division of housework (ie most evenly divided between mena nd women)
* Language – English speakers
* Lifestyle – Confidence in social institutions – Church
* Lifestyle – Members of voluntary organisations – Parties
* Lifestyle – Soft drink consumption
* Lifestyle – Undesirable neighbours – Criminal record holders
* Lifestyle – Undesirable neighbours – Heavy drinkers
* Lifestyle – Very proud of their nationality
* Media – Cinemas
* Media – Films produced
* Media – Personal computers
* Media – Radios
* Media – Telephones – main lines in use
* Media – Telephones – mobile cellular
* Media – Television viewing
* Military – Expenditures – dollar figure
* Military – Exports to developing nations
* Military – WMD (all categories)
* Mortality – Handgun discharge (and many many others)
* People – Divorce rate
* People – Marriage rate
* People – Nobel prize laureates
* People – One person households
* People – Teenage birth rate
* Religion – Jehovahs Witnesses
* Religion – Jews
* Sports – Summer olympic medals {all time}
* Transportation – Aircraft departures
* Transportation – Airports
* Transportation – Highways (total)
* Transportation – Motor vehicles
* Transportation – Railways (standard gauge)
* Transportation – Railways (total)

United States ranks bottom in:
* Agriculture – Banana exports (per $ GDP)
* Agriculture – Banana exports (per capita)
* Crime – Software piracy rate (ie proportion of software in circulation that is pirated)
* Economy – Commitment to foreign aid
* Education – Educational attainment – Junior secondary
* Education – Literacy – Adults with at least moderate literacy (male)
* Education – Spending per primary school student (per $ GDP)
* Education – Spending per secondary school student (per $ GDP)
* Health – Stomach cancer deaths
* Labor – Unemployment benefit as % of GDP
* Lifestyle – Wine consumption
* People – Age at first marriage for men
* People – Age at first marriage for women
* Taxation – Components of taxation – Goods and service tax
(and a number of other statistics derived from dividing by population or GDP twice)

The high level of crime comes as little surprise. I am surprised that such a high proportion of educational expenditure seems to have so little result – and particularly that it’s not reaching the schools – where is it all going? on the universities? The “age at first marriage” and other family-related stats (loads of marriage, loads of divorce, loads of teenage pregnancy) are interesting too.

While the US has the youngest average age at first marriage for both women (25) and men (26) Belgium, of all places is second – at 26.6 and 28.9. It’s a small sample of countries of course with Sweden at the other end of the scale (30.4 and 32.9).

Anyway, that’s enough of that.

Have you seen this?

I never properly wrote up my sojourn in Utah back in October. But Teresa Nielsen Hayden just linked to this fascinating interview with Grant Palmer, a Mormon historian who has published a book challenging the received version of the early history of the Latter Day Saints – at least as it is taught to them – and that has reminded me to put down my own impressions .

First of all, the physical landscape of Utah is just amazing; the two lakes nestling in valleys under the craggy mountains; the Great Salt Lake itself appeared to have mineral deposits crystallising on the water, glinting in the sunset glow as we landed. The people are hospitable, and tolerant of outsiders’ barbaric quirks like wanting to drink wine, or coffee. On the second evening we went for a lovely dinner at the Sundance Village, owned by Robert Redford. The university students to whom I lectured – both at the businesslike Utah Valley State College and at the more rarefied Brigham Young University – were intelligent and asked tough but courteous questions. One of them offered an opening prayer before my second lecture, invoking God to help the audience profit intellectually from my words, which I am selfish enough to find rather gratifying (even if they were just being polite).

Brigham Young University markets itself on the fact that all students have signed up to its “Honor Code“, whereby they agree to behave well in general, including dressing modestly and abstaining from drinks, drugs, and premarital sex – a friend of mine snorted on hearing this, “So what reasons does that leave for going to university?” But I can see that for a lot of people, not necessarily Mormons, attending college in a relatively sheltered environment like that may well be a positive choice. (I would note, however, that the ban on premarital sex does seem to encourage students to marry young, which is not necesarily a good thing.)

The great project of building a new society in the wilderness, the trail that tens of thousands followed across the continent in the mid-19th century for the sake of an idea, is I think a tremendous human story. Of course there were crimes committed, evil deeds done by leaders who cared more about themselves than their ideals; so it’s rather like Communism, or indeed any great philosophical ideal which people have tried to build a society around – one can, I think, admire the spirit of endeavour and idealism while also deploring the bad stuff that came with it, and indeed while disagreeing with the ideals themselves.

Because the fundamental thing is that the LDS beliefs are pretty difficult to take seriously, even by the standards of Western Christianity which I was brought up in and to which I largely still subscribe. I have a copy of the Book of Mormon, given to us by an optimistic LDS chimney sweep many years ago in Belfast, and basically it loses all credibility in the very first few pages. Where are the golden plates, folks? What happened to the special scrying stone through which the prophet was able to translate them? And why have no documents written in “Reformed Egyptian” ever been located in, er, Egypt?

I guess I will never know.

Later edit: Just came across ‘s own story.

http://letitblog.com/epic/

Christopher Hitchens writes, for once, much that I agree with on the war on drugs. However I think it’s over-optimistic of him to hope that the entire policy will be scrapped just because it is bad for Afghanistan; he points out himself that it’s also bad for Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico, and as far as I can tell that hasn’t caused the slightest blip on the political radar screen in Washington.

Ideas for a web page:

Which four vice presidents concluded their terms of office by being elected president?

Which seven vice presidents served two full four-year terms?

Which two vice presidents served under two different presidents?

Who was sworn in as vice president eight days before the president under whom he served?

Which vice president’s career ended when he shot and killed a political rival?

Who was sworn in as vice president in Cuba and died there a month later without setting foot in the USA during his term of office?

Which vice president gave his name to a questionable political practice?

Which 71-year-old vice president married his 38-year-old girlfriend, the only VP to marry in office?

Which vice-president’s grandson ran for the presidency twice?

Wich vice-president, while running for re-election, died six days before the vote?

What do Hannibal Hamlin, Charles Dawes and Lyndon Johnson have in common?

Who were the only vice preseidents from the following states:
Alabama? – King
California? – Nixon
Iowa? – Wallace
Kansas? – Curtis
Maine? – Hamlin
Maryland? – Agnew
Michigan? – Ford
Missouri? – Truman
New Jersey? – Hobart
Pennsylvania? – Dallas
South Carolina? – Calhoun
Wyoming? – Cheney

Who won election to the vice presidency eight years after losing at his first attempt?

Who ran for the presidency and came third, sixteen years after being elected vice president? (Van Buren)

Who ran for the presidency and came third, twelve years after being elected vice president? (Fillmore, T Roosevelt)

Who ran for the presidency and came fourth, eight years after being elected vice president?

This won’t mean much to anyone – apart from those of you who actually watched it happen “live” – but I found this record of the demolition and reconstruction of my old school strangely fascinating.

There has been a large foam-rubber statue of a baby in the middle of Rondpoint Schuman for the last week or so. Thanks to Zoe, I now know why. Well, it’s a really serious issue (not very surprisingly, I became very aware of it when living in Bosnia – there’s nothing like driving through a minefield to concetrate your mind on this one), and I hope that the Finns, Latvians and Poles get around to doing the right thing very soon. But it’s still a really ugly statue. According to Zoe it will be “dismantled and destroyed” today. I’m not awfully sorry.

My brother in law is involved with the Brussels headquarters of an international student group called AEGEE. Their Kyiv (Ukraininan for Kiev) branch are looking for volunteers to observe the 26 December re-run of the presidential elections in Ukraine. More details here

4) The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

Gosh, just occasionally I find a novel that really chimes with the romantic in me and this is it for the time being (I think that the last love story I read and really enjoyed was Ali and Nino, the great novel of Azerbaijan). I mean, looking through the books I’ve read and enjoyed recently, there were indeed a few where there are strong romantic elements – Primary Inversion, Rebecca, Kushiel’s Avatar, Paladin of Souls – but none that were really romances in the way this is (apart from the awful collection Irresistible Forces).

The time-travel bits are almost as important as the romance, but not quite. I very much enjoyed Poul Anderson’s There Will Be Time, David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself, and most of all F.M. Busby’s story “If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy”, which all have similar themes, though it must be twenty years since I read them. Interesting that all three of those stories are by men, and all three focus on the effect the time travel has on relationships. (Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5, of course, is in the same mould but concentrates much less on the personal life side of things.) The Time Traveler’s Wife almost reads like a woman writer’s riposte to Anderson, Busby and Gerrold, except that I doubt if Niffenegger has read any of them.

For Niffenegger the time-travel seems to be a metaphor for the things we know and don’t know and can’t know about the people that we love. Of course I’m curious about what my wife was like as a child, or even before I knew her well; and of course I’d love to know now what our children will grow up to be like. Yet although Henry and Clare in the novel have some access to each other’s pasts and futures in that way, the mystery remains.

I couldn’t put this down, and I’m really surprised that it has made so little impression in sf circles.