From :

1. Okay, just a few hours ago, we saw the white smoke, a new Pope has been chosen… What do you think of Benedictus XVI? I actually met him in 1988, as noted before. He visited Cambridge while I was an undergraduate, and I remember being one of the gofers for the Catholic Chaplaincy on the great day; he received a friend of mine into the Catholic Church at a student Mass in the morning; I may well have shaken hands with him, I forget now; I attended a talk he gave in the evening attended by over a thousand students.

   He’s very intelligent. He’s friendly but not warm. And he really doesn’t understand people who have different approaches to his. (It’s telling that his only real pastoral experience in a fifty-five year career in the Church was four years as Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1981.) I fear that he will emphasise the bits of John Paul II’s teaching that I had most difficulty with (on sexual morality issues) and soft-pedal the things about John Paul II that I found most attractive (opposition to war and to the death penalty; social justice).

   I will of course pray for him to find wisdom and be guided by the Holy Spirit, as I do for everyone in his position. And I certainly am not one of the people who’s now muttering about leaving the Catholic Church in protest – I mean, c’mon folks, we’re no longer in the time of Pope Pius IX who expected his Syllabus of Errors to last for all time. And let’s face it, as said, “On the up side, he is 78.“. We may be having this discussion again before many years have passed.

2. What do you like most and what do you hate in Belgium? Two questions, hé Maartje? OK… The Belgian health system really is the best in the world. I remember living in Belfast, and having to argue with the doctor’s receptionist about whether I was ill enought o qualify for an appointment with the doctor in ten days’ time. Living here, I’ve never had to wait more than 24 hours for a routine consultation, and never longer than a week to see a specialist. Most of my British friends have the idea that it’s better to have a health service that’s free at the point of delivery, and put up with the bureaucratic inconvenience. Rubbish. Far, far better to pay the small, largely refundable fee to see the doctor if it means you don’t have to wait for months. (I could also go on about the level of care for children with disabilities but I have less direct comparative experience.)

   As for what I hate: there is a Belgian attitude that you don’t overtly question what the government bureaucracy does, you just try and undermine it by subtle means. I read a book a while ago that scraped the surface of this. It’s a bit frustrating when you’re looking for direct answers to anything; the secret code of how Belgians interact with their authorities is not at all obvious or accessible to the foreigner. (Of course, it does mean that a fascist takeover here is extremely unlikely – see below.)

3. If you could give one person a gift, no matter how expensive or even impossible to give. Who would you give a gift and what would it be? Since I have two daughters with learning disabilities, the only difficult part of the question is which one I would give the gift to…

4. If you would get the chance to do a complete carreer change, what would you want to be/do? That’s easy. Back in my earlier postgraduate days I got entangled with the obscure area of medieval astrology. I’d love to go back to that now; there’s something about dealing with medieval manuscripts, the feeling as you turn over the pages of vellum that perhaps ten other poeple have looked at in the last five hundred years, the crossword puzzle aspect of working out what the medieval scholars were trying to say (between the constraints of the normal paleographical abbreviations and their underdeveloped technical vocabulary), the fact that it has to do with historic concepts of the fundamental nature of the universe – I’d go back to it like a shot. If I could afford to.

5. Ten years ago, where did you think you would be right now and doing what? Hmm. At that point I was getting deeply into the Northern Ireland peace process, as a representative of one of the smaller and less exciting political parties. I thought that the best my future career might offer would be a second-rate academic track in a subject I wasn’t especially interested in, with trhe very outside possibility of a decently paying political job if there were ever a peace agreement in Northern Ireland, or if I had to move to England, a chance at a parliamentary seat with the British Lib Dems somewhere I’d never heard of.

   The turning point for me actually came in November 1996. But that’s a long story, for another occasion.

From :

1. Somebody tells you, “Decide what to do with Northern Ireland. All government bodies involved, including the semi-official ones, will do whatever you say.” What do you do with it? This is much the most difficult question to answer of this run of fifteen. I think a) disarm and disband all the paramilitaries, b) reinstall the rest of the Good Friday Agreement government systems which were working OK, c) abolish segregated education between Protestants and Catholics. I enjoyed my Catholic education but frankly the system allows all the churches to collude in perpetuating sectarianism.

2. What long-term hopes/expectations do you have for your children? Jeepers, you ask the guy with two daughters with learning disabilities… but to be honest, the answer comes out the same whatever the level of ability of the child: I’d really much rather they were happy in themselves than that they felt that they had to satisfy my expectations of them.

3. Who have you met in the course of your work (or otherwise) about whom you had the most, “Wow! I’m actually in the same room with X!!” reaction? As I’ve progressed up the tree this becomes more and more difficult to answer. Perhaps the first person of whom I had that kind of reaction was the British TV astronomer Patrick Moore, who I met a couple of times in my late teenage astronomy years in Ireland. As noted above, being in contact with Cardinal Ratzinger was pretty thrilling even in 1988. Around the same time I attended a lecture by Karl Popper which was also pretty cool. Also around the same time I attended two talks given by Terry Pratchett, which was pretty awesome. (Leaping forward fifteen years, the only two sf conventions I have attended in the last three years or so both featured as a guest of honour an favorite author of mine, who was gracious enough to blog one of my jokes).

   Since I got into politics, I’ve met more and more such people. I was always pretty thrilled to work with John Alderdice, the Alliance Party’s leader when I was most heavily involved, who managed unusually to combine a keen intelligence with leading a political party. At the initial stages of the peace talks in 1996 I was closeted with most of the senior party leaders from Northern Ireland, but to be honest none of them is so very impresive. I met Mary Robinson during one of her pre-election campaign meetings and again a couple of times while she was President, and while she’s not the warmest of individuals she nonetheless did more than anyone else to get Ireland out of the nineteenth century. (I also have met Garret Fitzgerald on several occasions, and while he’s very weird, he’s also very interesting.)

   Working in Bosnia in 1997-98, I encountered Biljana Plavsic, admittedly a very dubious person but she was the local president at the time. Working in Croatia in 1998, I had some dealings with Stipe Mesic, at that time deputy leader of a small opposition party and the last president of the old Yugoslavia and now just starting his second term as President of Croatia. And in Macedonia, I always got on well with the late President Trajkovski. In my current job, I have actually shaken hands with Kofi Annan; I also work a bit with Chris Patten, who I really admire (even though he’s a Conservative). [Edited to add – I’ll also cheer for George Soros, who’s done more good than most governments.]

   But the person who still stands out for me, despite his limitations (which he’s disarmingly made manifest by publishing two volumes of his diaries of being a British party leader), because of the important role he played in keeping a third option open in British politics and also because of the important role he’s playing now in repairing the worst damage of the wars of the 1990s, is Paddy Ashdown. When he stood as leader of the new party in 1988, I was determined I was going to vote for the other guy until the moment I read and compared the two platforms, and realised that his was far far better. And then I decided that Ashdown would be a risky but exciting choice. (I told him this 13 years later; he said “I’m glad it worked – I’d spent six years preparing it.”) He did more good for the party than three generations of Liberal leaders; he has done more good for Bosnia-Herzegovina than three centuries of externally imposed rulers. Definitely my favourite international statesman.

4. What one thing would it make your job immensely easier if everybody knew and accepted? (“I’m always right,” doesn’t count.) It’s along the same lines though. “The reason the other guy says what he does, is not because he’s evilly trying to destroy you, but because he’s sincere in his beliefs and by his own lights a good person.” I wouldn’t mind people misunderstanding my motives if it meant they spent more time thinking about and trying to understand other people’s.

5. What were you expecting me to ask you? Something about the comparative relationship between the Israel/Palestine situation and the Northern Ireland situation!

From :

1. What is your favourite language to hear? That’s an easy one. I barely understand Italian, but hearing those beautiful vowels cascade from a native speaker is fantastic. The woman in the next office to me is from Naples, and though I can’t hear what she says when she’s on the phone I love listening to the intonation. Finnish is a close second, but I don’t get as much exposure to it. (Except when I’m listening to Sibelius’ Kullervo Symphony: Kullervo, Kalervon poika,/ sinissukka äijön lapsi!)

2. What was your worst visit to a foreign country? Back in 1993, my future wife and I were inter-railing (as has been mentioned before). We were due to spend Easter weekend with friends of hers in Portugal, and I had certain business in France to conclude earlier in the week (which I’ll write up one of these days) so obviously the thing to do was take an overnight train to Madrid, spend a day looking around, and move on to Porto.

   Alas, the refuse workers in Madrid had been on strike for the ten days before we arrived, and the streets and even the metro stations were piled high with stinking garbage. The restaurant workers were also on strike and it was impossible to get a decent meal. We then headed out of town on another overnight train which, unlike the more northern European trains, did not have those seats you can pull down to make a bed-like arrangement in the middle of the carriage. So there were eight of us sitting on really uncomfortable seats as the train pounded through the Spanish night. Suddenly and abruptly one of the other passengers vomited copiously all over the place. Anne and I retreated to the corridor of one of the first-class carriages and spent the rest of the night on the floor there.

   On the way back from Porto we found a train that (as far as I remember) didn’t even stop in Spain en route to France, let alone oblige us to set foot on Spanish territory again. I haven’t been back since.

3. Would you ever consider coming back to live in Norn Iron? I love the place dearly, and (see earlier answers to other people) would happily go back if I could afford it. At present my dream is to either move back when my career reaches the globe-trotting point that I can work equally well from anywhere and when the family reasons for staying put are less compelling, or just to plan on retirement in twenty-five years’ time.

4. If Belgian turned into a fascist dictatorship, would you speak out? Even if it meant death? I should note that it’s unlikely to happen, and even if the Vlaams Blok, god forbid, were to become coalition partners in a Belgian or Flemish government, the rule of law is such that the damage they could do is fairly minimal. (And the Belgian attitude to authority is such that even if they co-opted the judicial system, it still wouldn’t work.) But having said that the answer to your question is: No. My loyalty to Belgium is not so great that I would stick around and fight for the country’s soul; I’d move somewhere else, and oppose the forces of darkness from a relatively safe external vantage point, which is after all what I already do for a living with regard to certain other countries. That in itself wouldn’t be completely risk-free, of course, but it certainly isn’t the high-risk option either.

5. And for curiosity’s sake, what Order did your ex-girlfriend join when she became a nun? The IBVM, linked to the Loreto Sisters of Ireland. But it’s almost nine years since she came out (and, er, came out).

English -> German -> French -> Portuguese -> English:

Before long a long time,
I can myself I remember myself calmly,
aboveas this music used,
to smile I form

and knew, if it had my probability
that could make it to dance these people
and could perhaps be happyfor a moment.

But me the Shiver with each paper
that me bad information to the stage of door,
had not formed February me
one another stage to undertake

not could me can remember me, above were cried
that I read the must on of widowed,
something me in the day however
afectasse deeply that music died

Tschuess Mrs. American Pie
Drove thus mine chevy was raised however to Raised dry
and they drank good aged youngsters Whiskey and rye,
the Singin ‘ this ‘ ll the day that meurs,
this ‘ ll I am, was the day that me meurs.

OK, so when did you guess it?

…my boss just happily countersigned the childrens’ passport declarations. The form states that the countersigner must be “a British citizen, other British national or Commonwealth citizen who is a Member of Parliament, Justice of the Peace, Minister of Religion, Bank Officer, Established Civil Servant or professionally qualified person, e.g. Lawyer, Engineer, Doctor, School Teacher, Police Officer or a person of similar standing”. I guess an Australian QC, who was a member of parliament for 21 years and foreign minister for 8 years, will do. Now let’s just hope we can get them processed in three weeks rather than four…

[QUB press release, covered in NI papers]

A Queen’s University researcher has launched an international competition to predict the outcome of the Westminster and local government elections on May 5.

On that day Northern Ireland’s 18 Westminster seats and the 582 seats on 26 district councils will all be up for grabs.

The competition was introduced to inject some of the “thrill of a game” into the political process, and to help counteract one of the greatest threats to politicals – voter apathy.

Nicholas Whyte, an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Governance, Public Policy and Social Research at Queen’s, said: “When I invited people to predict the results in 2001, 131 entries were submitted, but only four got all 18 Westminster seats right.

“I think this year’s election will have fewer surprises, so I’m asking punters to also give their best guess of the local council election results.”

Since 1998, Nicholas has run five prediction contests on the elections site within ARK, the Northern Ireland Social and Political Archive, which makes social and political material on Northern Ireland available to the widest possible audience. The last contest coincided with the 2004 European elections and a record 173 predictions were received.

Anyone from around the world can submit an entry from the Elections website at www.ark.ac.uk/elections/ .

The 2005 Northern Ireland elections prediction contest is now up and running!

Ohmygod!!!

Just did a radio interview, live, in Dutch. Doing live stuff is something I can generally manage OK but when it’s in a foreign language it’s a bit more intimidating. I thought I had slipped several times and they went back to the ex-Belgian prime minister a bit sooner than I had expected to finish the piece. Oh well, I thought, chalk it down to experience; shame to have started the week with a weak performance in public, but there you go.

Then I was cheered up immensely by an email from a Dutch friend:

Ik heb me al die tijd niet gerealiseerd hoe goed je nederlands is, bijna beter te verstaan dan je engels, omdat je dat zo snel spreekt.
Bij deze mochten we elkaar weer eens tegenkomen, dan weiger ik verder engels te praten.

So she says she will never speak in English to me again, because my Dutch is easier to understand, because I talk too fast. A slightly barbed compliment, but I will accept it anyway.

6) Cities in Flight, by James Blish

The full series in a single volume, containing They Shall Have Stars, A Life For The Stars, Earthman, Come Home and The Triumph of Time (aka A Clash of Cymbals).

The first book, They Shall Have Stars, is set off from the other three by being set in the near future, on a recognisable Cold War earth; I was slightly amused to note mention of Eritrea and Latvia as independent states, which must have seemed rather less likely than the end of the Cold War back when it was first written in 1957. (Heck, here I am in the capital city of a country that nobody had heard of a hundred years ago.) Story not especially engaging, a reflection really on contemporary US politics, McCarthyism, the space program, J. Edgar Hoover, the likelihood that the West would lose to Communism. The central character, Senator Wagoner, starts a trend for the rest of the series by working out a complex plan manipulating his political enemies into allowing his ideas to triumph.

I think I first read A Life For The Stars perhaps even before I left primary school – I seem to remember having to look up the word “concubine” in my dictionary. It was the last to be written,  certainly the best of the four I think. A Bildungsroman of young Chris deFord, who accidentally leaves earth with the flying city of Scranton Pennsylvania; using the techniques sponsored by Wagoner ni the first novel, cities have been flying around the universe for ages by now. Chris ends up on New York and saves the day. Generally good stuff, although Chris’ only close friend (the one with the concubines) gets treated pretty badly by the author.

Earthman, Come Home is supposed to be the real classic of the series, with one of its component novellas winning a retro-Hugo last year. I didn’t completely understand why (well, I suppose the fact that the other stories in the running for the retro-Hugo were much more obscure may help explain why). Mayor Amalfi of New York (Blish having disposed of Chris deFord in a casual half-sentence) feels a bit like Doctor Who but in a city-sized TARDIS, advised by the computers known as the City Fathers, zooming from one episodic scrape to another, in the penultimate episode saving humanity at the cost of eternal exile. I didn’t think it really hung together all that well, and by this stage Amalfi’s habit of working out a complex plan manipulating his political enemies into allowing him to triumph was beginning to annoy me.

The series ends with a bit of a whimper. The Triumph of Time has lots of grand ideas, stabs at character development both of the established characters from earlier volumes and of a romantic young couple, and the end of the world as we know it; but doesn’t really deliver on any of them. A bit disappointing. There’s a rather pointless essay postscript about Blish and the historical theories of Spengler, by one Richard D. Mullen; perhaps I was just tired by then but I didn’t feel it had added much to my understanding of the book.

However the audacity of Blish’s vision and his ability to make you suspend your disbelief in flying cities do help the series as a whole succeed. And apart from the end the plotting is generally solid. Good old-fashioned stuff.

The centre of the city is surprisingly small – there’s one long boulevard, running from the historical core, Scanderbeg Square, across the very small river to the hotel I’m staying at which is just past the Prime Minister’s residence. The government buildings near Scanderbeg Square, built by King Zog in the 1920s, have been recently repainted at the orders of the mayor, and look very nice. I understand the city centre as a whole has been drastically cleaned up over the last couple of years. It’s still tangibly Balkan but has a certain relaxed feeling about it.

Things are different here in a lot of ways – our conference is on general security issues, and one voice from the audience yesterday asked about the war in Iraq – did the panel share the questioner’s concern that Albania might not have enough troops deployed there? (Luckily this was not the panel that I was on.) I asked an EU representative to explain their visa policy, and he gave a pretty poor answer. I also managed some historical research.

Last night I almost missed dinner – we were supposed to go to the former residence of the late dictator, Enver Hoxha, for a reception, but couldn’t find it and arrived half an hour late; the host of the reception then pulled me aside for a 20-minute chat and by the time he’d finished the food was all gone! But we found a small restaurant with a small meal in the end. Insubstantial, but also cheap.

Conference over, weather not too bad, I think I’ll sit by the pool.

The story about the acrobat is absolutely true!

Left my camera in the office. So I won’t be posting any pictures of downtown Tirana.

The bitter and twisted peaceniks of Lund have been having another go at my employers, this time getting quite personal. In fact, they have a go at me personally:

The CVs of the staff list what Crisis Group members have done before joining, but conspicuously leaves untold educational background in quite a few cases. About Nicholas Whyte, PhD and director of Europe Program, it is written that he is Trifun Kostovski Research Fellow. You wonder who Trifun Kostovski is? He is an MP in Macedonia, founder of Kometal Trade Gmbh, supported as Mayor of Skopje by the opposition and – you guessed it – member of Crisis Group’s board. One looks forward with excitement to Whyte’s forthcoming independent research reports on Macedonia’s future.

Now, while of course it’s true that the reason the subject of my Ph D isn’t stated is that it’s not especially relevant to the work I do, the fact is that Trifun has been pretty good about our Macedonia work – especially last summer, when our report and our press statements basically ran completely counter to what he was advocating.

The whole tone of their piece is just resentment at the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t bow down before their glorious academic qualifications – hence repeated sneering at our lack of higher level degrees, and resentment at the fact that governments listen to us. In fact, if the main distinction he can draw in substantial terms between his organisation and ours is that people seem to listen to us more, then it’s a distinction I can live with.

Right, I’m off to Albania now. See you on Sunday.

I see that they’ve decided not to have elections in one part of County Tyrone…

Also I see six candidates for five seats in Ballymoney Town, Moyle/Giants Causeway, Larne Lough, Cookstown/Drum Manor, Strabane/Glenelly, Armagh/The Orchard and North Down/Holywood. And seven candidates for six places in Banbridge Town, and eight candidates for seven places in Omagh Town. While in Larne Town, 14 candidates are chasing five places, so nine of them will lose…

Prize for the first person to identify the man I’m talking to here:

Since it’s that time of century, I thought I would dig out of my memory four books I remember having read where the protagonist becomes Pope. I’ve lost my copies of them, if I ever had them, long ago.

Peter de Rosa, Pope Patrick. Written in 1995, set in 2009 after the death of John Paul II. This has got some quite good reviews, but I don’t know why; I thought it was a load of rubbish. Irish country priest gets sort of accidentally elected Pope; outlaws banking (or at least banking with interest); bonds with the (Catholic) US president who defeated Sylvester Stallone in the 2008 election; eventually wiped out in a nuclear war with the Islamic world. Full of cod-Irishry.

Morris West, Shoes of the Fisherman. Written and set in 1963, the year of the death of John XXIII. Starts dramatically as a Ukrainian is elected pope without a ballot, the cardinals being suddenly inspired by the Holy Spirit. Nothing much then happens; the Church attempts to bridge the gap between the Soviet empire and the West, and somebody resembling Teilhard de Chardin gets into theological trouble. Made into a 1968 film with Anthony Quinn, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud. Unlike the other three books I list here, the Pope lives on for two sequels, which I have not read.

Fr Rolfe (Baron Corvo), Hadrian the Seventh. Written and set in 1904. Total wish-fulfillment of the author, himself a failed priest; the Cardinals, unable to agree on the new Pope, come and beg him to take over; he duly does so, sorts out the entire world by allocating large chunks of it to the Germans to run more efficiently, and is, inevitably, assassinated. Horrendously right-wing, even I suspect for 1904, but more passionately written than the above two.

Walter F. Murphy, Vicar of Christ. I think I have listed these in reverse order of when I read them and this was the first. Written and set in 1979. The hero in this case is much more interesting, an American war hero who has served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and then abruptly retires to a monastery after his wife is killed in a car crash. Like de Rosa’s book, set after the death of John Paul II (but in this case after a one-year rather than a thirty-year reign); like in Hadrian the Seventh, the cardinals are deadlocked and go for an outside candidate, ie our protagonist. He proceeds to reform the Church drastically (reforms that are all still needed) and is, of course, assassinated at the end.

All of these books veer from earnest to silly, and I haven’t read any of them for around a decade. To be honest I think Murphy’s Vicar of Christ is the only one I would seek out again.

Republished here from the original report because I suspect nobody will ever see them otherwise. Most are sensible enough and behind the cut; the two I’ve left are issues where the US is particularly deficient in terms of democratic practice IMHO.

XIV. RECOMMENDATIONS

The OSCE/ODIHR is pleased to offer a number of recommendations for consideration by the U.S. authorities. In view of the decentralized nature of U.S. election administration, it would appear appropriate to formulate such recommendations within the framework of the minimum federal standards approach as demonstrated by HAVA [the Help America Vote Act]. While HAVA implementation is due for completion in January 2006, ongoing electoral reform efforts to address an array of issues as cited in this report should be considered. In this process, structured consultations between election officials, voter advocacy and domestic non-partisan observer groups to discuss perceived administrative or other obstacles in relation to effective participation would enhance public confidence in the election process.

1. POSSIBLE AMENDMENTS TO EXISTING MINIMUM STANDARDS
   
   
   1. Provisional ballots. In the context of provisional balloting, the legislature should provide a precise definition of the term “jurisdiction”. Election officials should ensure that, at the time of announcing initial unofficial results, these include the totals of provisional ballots cast and ultimately the number counted. This would provide for a comparison of the margin between leading candidates and the number of provisional ballots cast in a concrete contest, with a possible estimate for the impact of provisional balloting on the outcome.
      
   2. Absentee (out–of-country) voting by fax. The practice of allowing voters to send completed ballots by fax, permitted in some states for voters residing abroad, discloses the secrecy of their ballot. Given that the secrecy of the vote is a broadly accepted principle, further consideration should be given to developing voting mechanisms for out-of-country voters, which preserve the secrecy of the vote, in line with OSCE commitments.
      
   3. Voter identification and voter challenges. Serious consideration should be given to address both voter identification and voter challenge rules simultaneously, with a view to amend both of them and achieve guarantees for integrity while removing perceived intimidation. In the absence of broadly used voter identification rules requiring each voter to show an identification document with photo when he or she goes to the polling station to vote, voter challenges may be perceived as a possibility to enhance the integrity of the polling process. However, they can equally be perceived as intimidating, depending on personal attitudes and respective circumstances.
      
   4. DRE [Direct Recording Electronic] voting equipment. While the ultimate deadline for implementation of DRE voting equipment, to satisfy the requirements of HAVA, expires on 1 January 2006, the following measures could prove essential with a view to enhance voters’ confidence in such new voting technologies:
      
      
      1. Inclusion of provisions that will permit competent individuals, academic institutions or civil society groups to comprehensively and independently test DRE voting equipment subject to reasonable limitations related only to patent or copyright law. However, such testing should not be perceived as a substitute for the establishment of inclusive and transparent certification procedures.
      2. Approval of provisions that will ensure against possible conflicts of interests of the vendors.
         
      3. As the requirements of HAVA include that DRE systems produce a permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity, serious consideration should also be given to ensuring a voter verified auditable paper trail (VVAPT).
         
      4. Establishment of a clear division of responsibilities between vendors, certification agencies and election administrators, to fully ensure accountability and an effective response in the case of failure of DRE equipment.
      
      
   5. Poll worker training. During the implementation of HAVA, consideration should be given to enhance individual states’ efforts in training poll workers to manage new voting equipment, by releasing additional federal funding for training activities. Such measures have also the potential to further accelerate processing of voters on election day.
      
   6. Early voting sites. Based on experience from the 2 November 2004 election, consideration could be given to increase the numbers of early voting sites, and ensure their balanced distribution, with a view to reduce waiting times, further encourage voters’ participation, and ensure equal access to this provision.
   
   
2. POSSIBLE NEW MINIMUM STANDARDS
   
   
   7. Access of international observers to the polling process. Congress and individual states should consider how to ensure unimpeded access to all stages of the election process for international observers who have been invited to observe U.S. elections by the U.S. Government, in order to bring state laws fully in line with the United States’ OSCE commitments.
      
   8. Domestic non-partisan observation. Consideration should also be given to developing criteria to determine which civic groups are accredited as domestic non-partisan election observers. This would further enhance transparency and bring state laws fully in line with the United States’ OSCE commitments. Additionally, regulation of involvement of civil society groups in voter registration has the potential to streamline such activity, to the benefit of voters.
      
   9. Civil and political rights of ex-felons. In regard to restriction of civil and political rights of ex-felons, federal and state laws should ensure that the principle of proportionality between offense and sanction is upheld. This will also enhance uniformity of voter qualifications for federal elections and avoid any discrimination in respecting the principle of universal suffrage.
      
   10. District boundaries. With a view to ensuring genuine electoral competition in congressional districts, consideration should be given to introduce procedures for drawing district boundaries that will be based on information other than voters’ voting histories and perceived future voting intentions.

I’ve mentioned this a couple of times before, but the OSCE/ODIHR report on the November elections in the US has now been published (PDF, dated 31 March). I will read it and report back.

So, I didn’t get offered the NGO job. No particular sad feelings; I spent three hours in a car with my boss today and he was actually not too bad despite toothache, jetlag and traffic jams. I can bear to do this a little longer.

It’s always difficult to be 100% sure with these things, but I think I did OK. I was slightly blind-sided by realising at 10.05 that the interview was at 10.30 not 11.00, but still made it over to the European quarter in time to step through the door on the stroke of half past and find that the previous candidate was still being interviewed. Found important bits of paper lying around the office including the list of candidates; I know one of the others quite well, and one of the other two had a familiar sounding name though not sure where from.

Interview panel was huge – the two current senior staff members (both younger than me) and six members of the Board (mostly older than me). They zeroed in on my lack of fund-raising experience, which is my biggest weakness in terms of the profile they are looking for. They also probed me about weapons of mass destruction, partly in French to test my French, and then coaxed out of me my own rather few encounters with the issue (basically from three years ago when I was interviewing people who’d worked on the Yugoslav nuclear weapons programme to see if anything could have gone from there to Iraq).

However, on a depressing note, one of the other pieces of paper I saw lying around the office before the interview indicated the likely range for the salary. Admittedly the responsibilities are less – half the number of staff, a quarter of the budget that I’m currently responsible for – but I’m keen to maintain my current lifestyle, and in addition my boss has been much nicer to me recently so I’m no longer quite as incentivised to move as I was in January. I rather expect that if they do make me an offer, it will probably not be (quite) enough to tempt me to accept.

Having said that, my boss and I are driving to Mons together tomorrow to see SACEUR (the Supreme Allied Commander Europe – yes, there is such a person), so we’ll see if my current good mood towards him survives the encounter. And, of course, there’s still the other plan.

Hearty congratulations to the other person reading this who has just managed to negotiate a new job in the Brussels maelstrom…

The Guardian’s play-by-play coverage of the Royal Wedding. The one I went to was more fun from the sound of things.

(Thanks to , who’s also directed, oh, seven extra people to my website this evening.)

Just received this from an old friend who seems to be running the Make Votes Count Democracy Challenge campaign. Non-UK residents and unbelievers can look away now:

Now that the election campaign has officially started, it’s looking increasingly likely that the result will take no account of the way most people vote. The parties have already identified the 2% of voters who will decide the result, so they can safely ignore the rest of us. This is all due to our outdated voting system.

Have a look at the new Democracy Challenge web site and sign up if you agree.

Oh, and pass this message on to all your friends and colleagues.

5) Collision Course: NATO, Russia and Kosovo, by John Norris

John Norris is a colleague of mine, but previously worked as director of communications for Strobe Talbott, then the US Deputy Secretary of State. This book is an insider’s account of the April-June 1999 negotiations behind the scenes of the Kosovo crisis, largely from the perspective of Talbott’s entourage. John is as modest on the page as he is in real life, and does not use the first person, either singular or plural, even once as far as I can tell.

There are two big policy lessons that come out of the book for me. First, it was a very big mistake for NATO (and especially the US) to rule out the use of ground troops right at the start of the conflict. Wars are not about being nice to the other side. Much better to have said “We’ll use them if we have to”, which is always the real policy position; NATO’s initial determination not to use ground troops made the air campaign look half-hearted to the Serbs. I have always believed that it is very significant that Milosevic’s unexpected acceptance of the first draft of the mediators’ peace terms happened within a few hours of the first serious meeting at the White House to discuss a ground war. Serbia’s intelligence services are dilapidated but I’m sure they picked up what was going on.

Second, as I was saying earlier, the role of Russia is of crucial importance to multilateral diplomacy, or at least it was here. Just understanding what was going on in Yeltsin’s Russia was difficult enough. John adds to the stock of stories that I’ve already heard about disjointed, rambling phone calls from Boris Yeltsin to Bill Clinton, and adds an account of a meeting with the foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, which was interrupted by a phone call from the newly appointed prime minister Stepashin to tell him if he was being sacked or not (he wasn’t). The Russian army then shifted troops from Bosnia to Kosovo without telling anyone else, except President Yeltsin, who omitted to let the foreign ministry know about it. I’m still myself getting to grips with the power structures in Moscow; I hope that the professional diplomats out there are doing the same.

There are some interesting personal vignettes of people I know, or know of: Wesley Clark being gradually cut out of the decision-making matrix as his relations with the Pentagon deteriorated; Richard Holbrooke likewise, as Talbott and his team got tired of his undermining them; Vladimir Putin’s late but suitably sinister appearance in the narrative; the negotiating back channel that almost opened up between Robert Gelbard and Bogoljub Karic; President Ahtisaari of Finland, accidentally locked into a small room during a break in negotiations, reassures Talbott that “One of the good things about being president is that they never let me go missing for very long”.

And in general it’s a pretty good picture of the blow-by-blow coalition-building that is the essence of international diplomacy. Here of course the emphasis is on two quite different but crucial coalitions – the US and European coalition with the Russians that in the end imposed terms on Milosevic, and the coalition of different interests within the Washington/NATO power structures, especially the uneasy relationship between the US military, US allies (specifically the British military) and the diplomats, which while not quite as dysfunctional as the equivalent relations in Moscow still sounds pretty tense. The third aspect, the US relationship with NATO and the EU, gets somewhat less coverage than one might have expected – presumably because this was mainly finessed by the regular US diplomatic missions in European capitals rather than by Talbott’s team – but it’s there nonetheless.

I think the book’s one weakness is that, while we get a very good sense of the size of the trees, we don’t really get a feel for the forest. By the time the story properly gets going, NATO’s air war on Kosovo has been going for several weeks, and the uninformed reader might have difficulty working out how we got there; likewise the account of what happened after the crisis of the Russian troops in Kosovo had been resolved covers five years in about as many pages, an abrupt shift of gear after the minute-by-minute narrative of the previous chapters. The odd expository paragraph is dropped in here and there but it might have been better for the general reader to consolidate them properly at the beginning. Since I’m living and breathing this stuff every day, it didn’t really detract from my enjoyment.

As compressed by :

Drop me a comment; I’ll ask you five questions; you do same on your LJ, if you like.

Her questions:

1. What consistently drives you nuts when you see it in a sf/f novel or short story? I have several pet hates.

1. One of them, which is widely shared by most readers, is when the characterisation is so weak that the reader utters the Eight Deadly Words first forumlated by Dorothy Heydt: “I don’t care WHAT happens to these people!” I’m actually fairly tolerant on this one, and it doesn’t usually prevent me from finishing the book; though I do remember thinking, at the end of Larry Niven’s The Integral Trees, as the enemy closed in on our heroes, that I was rather glad there was no third volume in the series.
2. Another peeve which I suspect is less widely shared is some kind of linguistic credibility. It doesn’t have to be up to Tolkienian levels of complexity – George R.R. Martin or Juliet E. McKenna satisfy me perfectly well on this score. Robert Jordan, in his awful Wheel of Time series, does not.
3. One type of story that irritates the hell out of me, and I think I must be unusual in this regard, is the “cute robot” story. The classic of this genre is Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man, deconstructed by me hereHugo nominee last year along the same lines, which I thought completely crap. I would admit that Chris Beckett’s The Holy Machine managed to subvert the theme to my satisfaction.

2. Where would you like to visit that you haven’t been to already, and why? This time next week I should be in Albania for the first time in my life, which will fill in a space on my personal map. The only other European countries I haven’t yet visited are Belarus, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Turkey and Ukraine, and I’m scheduled to go to Ukraine in November. Reasons for going there: to fill in gaps on the map.

However there are several other countries that attract me just because of their exotic aura. Uzbekistan, to see Tashkent and Samarkand. Brazil/Argentina, for the Iguaçu Falls. Egypt, for everything – Pyramids, Alexandria, Sinai, Nile, Sphinx, temples, etc. Nepal, for the Himalayas (just to look at them – no ambitions to actually climb). Pitcairn Island, because of its bizarre and disturbing human story.

Sorry, was I meant to pick only one?

3. What one area of international politics would you recommend a skimmer-of-news focus on, right now? Before I answer the specific question, I have to say that the best tool for skimming news is the Google Alert system. I hardly have to tell you that the international news available through mainstream media is pretty crap, especially in the USA. At least with Google you can get what there is on your country of interest. That and the Economist.

I’m in the unusual position that I’m so heavily dug into the countries I work on that if I hear something important from the mainstream media first, that means my other information sources have screwed up, so my perspective is a bit skewed. Having said that, I believe that the single international issue that is under-reported today and has the biggest potential knock-on for us all is the question of Russia’s changing foreign policy – they may no longer be a superpower, but they are still the big kids on the block. If you want to follow this, as well as Google’s service, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty do a free daily emailed bulletin (alas, with little deeper analysis and often reflecting their own Cold War roots) and Transitions On-Line do several good pieces each week (though you have to pay for some of them). Also for an often horrifying and dispiriting look at daily life in Russia, check the eXile, updated fortnightly.

4. How did you become interested in medieval history? Probably since I was thirteen and trying to work out for myself the truth behind King Arthur – I guess I have Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave to thank for that. Also at around the same age I read a friend’s copy of E. L. Konigsburg’s superb young adult novel, A Proud Taste For Scarlet And Miniver, which gave me a life-long fascination with Eleanor of Aquitaine. Another, much later formative influence was W.L. Warren’s biography of her second husband, Henry II of England.

It remained pretty much an occasional reading topic until I found myself doing an M Phil in History and Philosophy of Science, and one of the lecturers in the Department offered me his transcription of a medieval astrology text to try and make sense of. I was given Richard of Wallingford’s 14th century astronomical clock as a sort of trial piece, and enjoyed it. I knew enough about both astronomy and astrology to at least work out what the author in the lecturer’s transcript was getting at in a technical sense; and read myself into the deeper reaches of the medieval stuff. To my astonishment, I realised that part of the manuscript I was looking at included a birthchart for Eleanor of Aquitaine, for 14 December 1122 or 1123. At the time the scholarly consensus was that she was born in 1122, but that has now shifted to 1124 as a result of a contemporary account’s statement that she was thirteen when her father died at Easter 1137, shortly before her first marriage. (That of course fits a December 1123 birth equally well if not better than most dates in 1124.)

Since then my career has taken me away from that area, but once you’ve handled medieval manuscripts you can never lose the bug. In the garage I still have photographic copies of three of the four surviving manuscripts of Roger of Hereford’s theorica planetarum, and if I ever have four months with nothing to do I’ll try transcribing them. History of science isn’t so much pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge as more accurately mapping where they used to be; if I could afford to I’d be back at it like a shot.

5. Where do you think George R.R. Martin is going with the SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series, since I am A Feast for Crows-deprived? Jeepers, aren’t we all? I reckon that Jon is Eddard’s nephew, not his son; and in the end will fall in love with Daenerys and quite possibly rule the kingdom with her – let’s face it, the death rate among other potential claimants is pretty rapid. Stannis is destined for some heroic end. This leaves the surviving Stark siblings with at least a chance of living to serve a renewed kingdom… of course, they may not all survive. I think that’s as far as I can go without massive spoiler warnings. A Feast for Crows is the only book for which I have a confirmed pre-publication order from Amazon, made in July 2002. I see the current publication date is next September. We can but hope.

This is in spiritual preparation for the interview meme that’s going round.

Some time back, asked me for my worst interview stories. The one that still rankles most was in my year as a student union deputy president – actually there were several bad media experiences for me that year, but only one that strictly came out of an interview I gave. It was the time when I had to set the union’s budget for the next year; one of the student journalists decided he would do a hatchet job on me, and grilled me for hours about the finances; I gave clear and honest answers (as I had nothing to hide), and he wrote it up as a complete smear job. What really pissed me off was that the article focussed on my very modest proposed increase of the student union officers’ salaries from their unbelievably low rate; they shot a full reel of pictures of me, picked the one where I was looking most stupid (probably wishing they would go away and stop taking pictures) and printed it with the caption: “Nick Whyte: Laughing all the way to the bank” (when in fact the proposed raise would only have taken effect for my successors). The guy who wrote the story is now, god help us, a political correspondent for a London newspaper. I don’t normally bear grudges, but this was an exception; for what little revenge it’s worth, I tell my English political contacts who move in his orbit that he’s a wanker and not worth bothering with. In fairness, they have usually worked this out already.

My worst interview in my current job was only a few months into it, when an Australian journalist ambushed me in Macedonia with questions about my boss’s past career, and like a fool I answered. For all that my boss drives me mad sometimes, his response to me personally (sent even before I had completed writing my grovelling apology to him) was pretty decent:

Nasty little piece from our good friends in Macedonia and the diaspora. I propose to ignore it and suggest that you and everyone else do likewise.
‘No comment’ is a very useful expression.

My only bad interview moment since was a year or so ago when I thought a Balkan journalist was asking me really stupid questions, and told him so on camera (it wasn’t live, but I understand the exchange was in fact broadcast). I forgave him sufficiently to give him a lift to his next appointment; he insisted on taping another interview with me in the car, and again asked such stupid questions that I almost threw him out halfway there. When I checked out his credentials with other journalist friends from the same country, they expressed incredulity that I’d wasted my time with him, and regret that I hadn’t asked them about him before the interview. So I’ve been refusing to return his emails and phone calls with a clear conscience. (Slightly similar is the case of a blogger who wanted to interview me for his website; since he’d failed to make adequate corrections to an earlier inaccurate piece about me, I declined vigorously.)

God, it felt good to write all that down.

The only way to avoid such situations completely is to not do media interviews. However, it should be noted that in the first two cases here, the problem was that the journalist was actively malicious and determined to do a hatchet job on me or my colleague; and that’s unusual, and there’s no way of preparing for that. I do a dozen or so interviews a month these days, and the fact that I’ve had only two real disasters in the last fifteen years (and one of those a student) speaks pretty well for the journalistic profession.

, , any views from the other side of the fence?

Well, , good to have met you! Tea and cakes were eaten. My jet-lag is slowly improving (witness the timestamp on this post).

We had great fun assembling a new ball-pit, bought at the local supermarket, for F. Then he insisted on putting it away again…

Taken I think from here, but increasingly seen elsewhere.

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

I’m assuming that everyone else will have made sure most if the various classics survive in their own heads; so my choice is an unusual one, combining politics, history, art and culture with some beautiful – if completely wrong – prose: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia, first published in 1940. It’s massive in length; most of it broken up into short chapters about particular places – in the very first chapter, she writes of “the blue lake of Ochrid [ie Ohrid], the mosques of Sarajevo, the walled town of Korchula [ie Korcula]” which are three of my favourite places as well. She gives a typically witty warning about getting too involved with the subject (writing of the late nineteenth century):

English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.

And then of course she completely ignores her own advice, by adopting the Serbs and swallowing their side of the story without question – at one point she even refers to the Albanian population of Kosovo as “fellow Slavs”. But it’s a brilliant and memorable book, along with its flaws, which should not be lost, and which I would enjoy re-telling and discussing as we sat around the campfires.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

As a seven-year-old Enid Blyton reader I remember developing a fascination for Colin from the Secret Seven. Since puberty it’s tended to be female characters rather than male; most recently I think Phèdre from Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel trilogy.

Banner of Souls by , while wandering around New York and needing something to read over dinner.

The Snow Queen, by Joan D. Vinge.

Nearly finished:
Collision Course: NATO, Russia and Kosovo by my colleague John Norris.

Started:
Banner of Souls by
Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois
Brian W. Aldiss, by Michael R. Collings

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

This is very tricky. At the end of last year I did a couple of long posts on books to read in general and sf in particular. I read very fast, so considering I’ll have a lot of time, I’d need very long books, preferably ones that are difficult to get into. Using that criteria of course means that the list looks pretentious, but so be it.

1. Ulysses by James Joyce – read this once before, and really enjoying but not sufficiently engaging with the feed. But I don’t think even a desert island could drive me to tackle Finnegan’s Wake.
2. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust – in translation, though, since I’m not quite brave enough to try it in the original French. This is the only book on my list that I haven’t even opened as far as I can remember.
3. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon – as with Rebecca West, the history may be questionable but the prose is just fantastic. I’ve only ever had time to read excerpted highlights from it, and on a desert island I should be able to finish it.
4. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer – I would dare to try this in the original (provided there was a decent appendix); I’ve dipped into it in the past and enjoyed.
5. (inevitably) The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien – weighty, bears re-reading, and would be light relief compared to the other four.

Thanks to :

You are Pope John Paul II. You are a force to be
reckoned with.

Which Twentieth Century Pope Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Which, combined with the proclamation of the Unitarian Jihad, seems as good a reason as any for me to gather my thoughts about the Pope and the Church, now that I’m back from my travels.

I was brought up in the somewhat constrained and conservative Catholicism of Northern Ireland, but with a couple of unusual wrinkles – both my grandmothers were converts from Protestantism (one an Ulster Presbyterian, the other an Episcopalian from New Jersey); we spent a year living in the Netherlands when I was 13; we were a very academic family. So although I accepted without question the rituals of my Catholic school (the Mass for all pupils at the start and end of each term, compulsory O-levels in Religious Education, the prayers at the start of each class – which the more enthusiastic teachers would insist on us saying in Irish – do any of them still do that, I wonder?) I was also prepared to not accept authority where the Church’s teaching made no sense – in particular, the line on contraception seemed to me, by the same logic, to apply equally well to other artifical aids for other physical activities, for instance shoes.

At Cambridge I was fortunate enough to come under the influence of Christopher Jenkins, a Benedictine who was the chaplain to the University, and the Catholic Chaplaincy became one of my social centres. I served on the St John Fisher Society Committee, was the rep for Clare College, and helped out behind the bar and organised weekday lunches. I also sometimes attended Father Chris’ talks. Although he was politically and theologically very conservative, his approach to Catholicism was based on intellectual inquiry much more than the blind acceptance of tradition that I was used to from Belfast, and his red lines were not on contraception but on understanding what God was all about. He used to regularly castigate the Christian Union for doctrinal error on their interpretation of the Crucifixion.

I’m very grateful to Father Chris for enabling me to move on from the Church’s magisterium, and to feel comfortable in disagreeing with its “traditional” teachings (some of which are actually very recent) on premarital and gay sex, on women priests, on papal infallibility, on the ontological proof, and ultimately (though this took me a bit longer) on abortion, without being made to feel that I was excluding myself from the Church as a result – unlike most of my friends in Ireland, who once they had made the same intellectual adjustments felt (probably correctly) that the Church wanted little to do with them. There was a knock-on effect on my relationships; my first serious girlfriend was English, and an atheist, and eventually I realised that the question of God was one of a number of indicators of a deeper incompatibility. (My next girlfriend was a Catholic convert, and became a nun after we split up. Obviously, after me, only God would do; or so I comforted myself at the time. That didn’t last either; she’s now an Anglican, and has a very nice girlfriend of her own.)

Back in Belfast in the early 1990s, I soon got married to Anne who was in training to become a Methodist lay preacher, and I was also heavily engaged in politics. Catholicism took a back seat in my order of priorities, and also I realised that in a sense I had been spoiled for the Northern Irish version by my Cambridge experiences and by my encounters with the Methodists. My sweeping generalisation is that Irish priests have a (decreasing) captive audience, and don’t feel the need to make any effort to preach an interesting sermon. Too many of them prefer to complain to the congregation that not enough people are coming to Mass rather than to think about incentives for people to actually attend. Of course, as a political activist in Northern Ireland, even in the cross-community Alliance Party, my religious identity was inescapably part of my political identity.

We then became expatriates. In both Bosnia and Croatia we found local English-language Catholic congregations, which we attended with the then very tiny B. In Banja Luka it was the British army barracks which had a Catholic chaplain; normally there were only half a dozen military personnel there besides us, but I remember a packed out Midnight Mass, jointly celebrated with the Protestants, at Christmas which was very moving. In Zagreb it was a British diplomat who had organised it in collaboration with the Jesuits, but the congregation were mostly Americans, including a surprising number of my professional contacts. In our first years in Belgium we occasionally attended the English-language services of Our Lady of Mercy, but felt very dissatisfied with their lack of pastoral engagement.

Since we moved here three and a half years ago, I’ve been a fairly regular attender at the local Flemish church. This is a radically different environment from the Catholicism I grew up with. The local hierarchy have decided to dispense with the painfully wrought compromises of Nicaea, and we profess our faith in a God who is father and mother of us all, and in Jesus the friend of the poor. Normally one of the Bible readings is replaced with a reflective passage from a more modern writer (though I remember once there was a reading from the Koran instead). The parish has an activist engagement with international development issues. We don’t spend a lot of time on it, but it’s a place where I feel at home. (It should be noted, of course, that the Church in Belgium is linked with the centrist Christian Democrats – this is a country where the Liberal Party is on the right wing of the political spectrum.)

My time as an active Catholic more or less coincides with the reign of the late Pope. I have of course been worrying a bit about his likely successor. I really do hope that it isn’t Cardinal Ratzinger, who I actually shook hands with once when he visited Cambridge in 1988, or any of his proteges. While it was good to see the Church take strong lines under John Paul II against poverty, war, and the death penalty, I think that Ratzinger and the Pope have painted themselves into a corner on matters to do with sex, and I hope that the next reign will see a different approach. (I don’t go along with those who blame the Pope for either the population explosion or the AIDS epidemic in developing countries – it’s not obvious to me that these are strongly correlated with Catholicism – but I still think his teachings on contraception and sexuality were grievously wrong.) It’s probably too much to hope that the ultra-liberal Cardinal Danneels of Belgium might have a chance, but it would be great if it ends up being someone like him.

In the end, I remain in the Catholic Church for a number of not very good or rational reasons. I’ve come to feel that everyone should be “free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true”; that anyone “may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation, and arrive at eternal salvation”; that “Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ” and that “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church”. (These four statements were all condemned by Pope Pius IX in his Syllabus of Errors.)

In addition, I do feel some attraction to the weight of historical tradition. Hilaire Belloc said something along the lines that he was sure the Church was divinely instituted because no purely human institution that had been so badly run could have survived for almost two thousand years. (If anyone can tell me the exact quote, I’d be very grateful.) I’m irrationally reassured by the fact that our local priest is part of a line of historical ordinations going back to Jesus summoning the Twelve. I find places of pilgrimage fascinating, but also sometimes funny (some time I’ll write up my feelings about St Peter’s in Rome, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem).

But basically, I believe in God, I want a regular means of communication with Him, and there seems to me no compelling reason to abandon what I’m used to, especially as its local form feels like it’s politically on the right wavelength. I have no intention of thrusting it down anyone else’s throat, but it seemed like a good moment to write it all down for myself.

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Cattle Prod of Patience.

Get yours.

Bah, I see the pupils at my old school got today off because of the Pope’s funeral. I don’t think we got that in October 1978.