1. Why my voice disappeared under yet another bug. Did I become soft during a decade in the south?
2. Why my iPad gets the wifi signal, but won’t connect with the internet upstairs in my house when every other computer does.
3. How the Church of England can best respond to events in a single cathedral in one diocese when the story has an impact on all the other 43 dioceses – and the Church’s reputation.
4. What is causing the iPhone 4S battery life to be dodgy. Apparently, Apple engineers are working on it. No problem with my HTC.
5. How other bishops manage to read so many books and write intelligent stuff.
6. Why people subject themselves to the public humiliation that is X Factor.
7. What it means for Britain to be ‘European’ – wanting the benefits on our own terms, but without having decided what ‘belonging’ might mean.
8. Whether Nicolas Sarkozy was really narked with David Cameron – or just tired from sleepless nights caused by the new baby.
9. However justified the concerns of the ‘occupy’ campers, what their considered alternatives are.
10. How long the latest Chelsea manager will have a job before he heads ‘back to Europe’.
Off to Peterhouse, Cambridge, tomorrow to preach on ‘Bad Dreams’ in the college chapel at 6.30pm. Maybe I’ll have got some answers by then. You never know…
October 29, 2011 at 9:58 pm
2. Because Apple stuff only does what it wants to do – not necessarily what you want it to do.
6. Think that one of my parishioners is narked at me as I ayed into X Factor on my blog – a dangerous thing to do, we are after all called to bless the prejudices of our society
7. Of course, we want the benefits, do you really see the French or Italians or Spanish not wanting things on their terms? The only ones who have been prepared not to defend their national interests vehemently are the Germans.
By the way, if you see Isabella at Peterhouse, say hi, she is in her last year there.
October 30, 2011 at 12:29 am
How the Church of England can best respond to events in a single cathedral in one diocese when the story has an impact on all the other 43 dioceses – and the Church’s reputation.
Absolutely right.
However justified the concerns of the ‘occupy’ campers, what their considered alternatives are.
Again, absolutely bang on.
Didn’t add much did I.
October 30, 2011 at 8:25 am
Have just finished ” La Seduction” by Elaine Scoliono about the very real cultural differences between French and Anglo approaches to life – cultural/ social/ politics/ ethics/ intelectual marriage etc.
Plainly we bring very different mindsets, we see them as untrustworthy, they perceive us as unsubtle.
You have often encouraged us to expand our cultural breadth, and for those without the language this is a good access point to a society
built on greater difference from us than most realise.
Sarkozy is more sympathetic to the Anglo approach than most French ( being of immigrant origin) yet maybe even he reaches limits after the 3 am shift!
October 30, 2011 at 11:09 am
9. However justified the concerns of the ‘occupy’ campers, what their considered alternatives are.
I don’t think the campers are the ones who need to come up with, or are capable of coming up with, an alternative. We have plenty of clever financial minds in the UK who should be able to sort things out.
Having said that, our most senior financial experts don’t seem to have spotted that awarding senior bankers 50% pay rises year-on-year during a recession might not be very popular with the general population! Especially when the recession appears to have been caused by bankers’ greed in the first place.
Without knowing very much, I’d like to see a return to the old days of the Christian church, when charging interest was considered a sin (usury). Then people wouldn’t be able to make money just by having money. Interest fees lead to our current unstable system where the rich find it easy to get richer, by lending their money and making money by doing so, and the poor end up getting ever poorer, because they end up borrowing to pay the interest on their borrowings. But I suspect that interest, at least at low rates, is a useful thing to have.
The other financial problem we have, which isn’t ever explained, is why we need, and how we can have, an economy that grows by a given percentage every year. This results in a geometric progression, and a requirement for rapidly increasing growth rates tending to infinite growth in a year. Financial crashes, as we’re seeing now, are therefore inevitable!
October 30, 2011 at 1:18 pm
Anthony,
Two points, Wasn’t the topical controversy about
FTSE 100 companies Directors’incomes? Many of these such as BP & Royal Dutch Shell are half foreign owned with appropriate spread of Director nationality. The remuneration of major foreign banks such as Credit Agricole or Citibank
is just not our business. I may not like this any more than Carlos Texez being paid £200k pw for not paying football but every Mirror reader knows what would happen if you legislated against it.
You can’t outlaw everything you disapprove: we do not prosecute those who undermine the public welfare through adultery. Where public funds saved a Bank I can see a basis for action but even here one ought to be careful. My son was recruited in a non banker role with RBS immediately before the problems hit. Within 3 months he took his skills elsewhere.
Your call for a return of usury laws, overlooks the ingenuity of quasi -sharia ” partnerships” which reinvent the concept by another name.
You sometimes have to recognize that money like water has a trickle down self levelling capacity of its own.
October 30, 2011 at 2:29 pm
9. “However justified the concerns of the ‘occupy’ campers, what their considered alternatives are”.
This naïve and manipulative stance represents a serious flaw in our current political and philosophical attitudes. Could you explain the intellectual basis by which a criticism must always require an alternative? I’m with Anthony Cartmell on this; the campers have a full moral entitlement to say to the powers-that-be: “you’ve screwed up, go away and do better”, plus of course the proviso “… and we’ll cooperate all the way in helping you”. This of course is much the way that adults relate to their young children, and we can perhaps reflect that our bankers et al are in fact no better than spoilt children to whom society has foolishly allocated extreme powers which they exercise with no regard to the public good.
So what needs to happen now is a degree of maturity on both sides. However, my personal feeling is that there is little chance of that arising within our financial industry which has lost (if it ever had) any sense of a moral compass. So, we face a scene where the Church must necessarily find ways of aligning itself with the campers. This morning, there are signs that this could happen, and the publication of a report by the Church as requested by the campers would be a good start.
To end on a positive note, there are alternatives emerging. The monetary reform movement has worked for years on one such key alternative, and has draft legislation awaiting debate for any who would listen (positivemoney.org.uk). It may take time (months, years, …. ) for such alternatives to mature, but when the campers enter the next phase of their protest they will find plenty of assistance waiting.
October 30, 2011 at 3:22 pm
‘How the Church of England can best respond to events in a single cathedral in one diocese when the story has an impact on all the other 43 dioceses – and the Church’s reputation’ ?
Perhaps the Archbishops, of Canterbury & York, should say something in public?
I wonder what Jesus would have said about someone pitching his tent on His back lawn (sorry, cheap point).
October 30, 2011 at 6:43 pm
re St Paul’s
Without supporting the protesters ( most of whom IMO have a rich family to escape to at the end of this) I would point out:
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
My experience of the Church of England is that parish churches are run by business men who become big-shots in big-shot churches (often made so by the techniques of Rick Warren and his schemes to build church-halls, leading to massive debts) to give them cedit in the diocesan business networks, leading to new contacts, new markets, new profits.
Jesus cleansed the Temple of the money changers. Similarly, the churches (in all the denominations) should cleanse their involvement with the obsession of money, looking towards the concern for the poor, rather than sucking up to the rich and the powerful.
A valuable opportunity missed by a self-centered, complacent clergy.
October 30, 2011 at 7:19 pm
Re your point 1, chest infections are not man-flu!
Re your point 3, there seems to be a collaborative response after all – the Dean of Bristol Cathedral has asked Occupy Bristol to leave College Green.
For a (to my mind) outstanding response from the church – has anyone seen Bishop Alan Wilson’s interview with Channel 4?
http://www.channel4.com/news/catch-up/display/playlistref/291011/clipid/291011_WILSON_PAB_29
Point 5 – I have often wanted to ask you that question
Point 6 – SuBo
Point 7 – The Sunday Times nailed it with it’s report headed “Neighbours from Hell”. They’re usually the ones who no longer just do what I want because I’m always grumpy, but who now want to live their own lives without asking me if they can have a party every time.
Point 9 – alternatives are easy when it’s a question of being for or against a war, for or against tuition fees, for or against the EU. This current global crisis goes far beyond “alternatives” in the conventional sense. Global finance has become almost independent of politics and of economics – when where company shares last valued in accordance with the company’s performance? When did the wealth of a company last “trickle down” anywhere? There used to be an assumption among economists that a capitalist economy would always find its own equilibrium, a few ups and downs notwithstanding. That it would ultimately work to the best of everyone.
Other than America, Europa has long since understood that it’s not that simple and has supported various degrees of social market economies. Even they no longer appear to function as they used to. Even there, we’re not “all in this together”.
Reading the FT, the Economist, the Handelsblatt…. I get the impression that the major financial and economic minds in the world don’t truly understand what’s really happening and how to put it right.
Are we really expecting a tent-village of 200+ people from all walks of life to have the fine tuned economic plans the elite of the brains of world finance doesn’t have?
The protesters are a symptom of what’s wrong. They don’t need to have answers, they just need to tell those who could conceivably come up with answers that, actually, we really ARE hurting and NOW is the time to start thinking about what could be done about it.
October 30, 2011 at 7:54 pm
Let’s not forget that the poster boy of the anti- capitalists Hugo Chavez has re-ordered his Society and managed to engineer an oil rich country that depends on crony patronage internally yet with petrol at 4 p a gallon, massive resources, educated population and land- still cannot feed itself. ( Pre oil and ” reform” it could.)
For all its inadequacies, Capitalism delivers for most. The greatest famines have been in countries where State control over the market was promoted by those who thought they knew best.
October 30, 2011 at 8:28 pm
“I wonder what Jesus would have said about someone pitching his tent on His back lawn (sorry, cheap point).”
We all do this all the time, Kevin, because the earth is all His in the first place.
More to the point, He pitched His tent among us (eskenosen, John 1.14), and what did men say, and do, to Him? (v. 11).
I wouldn’t mind the protesters camping out in the London Stock Exchange, but I don’t know what their beef with St Paul’s is. Zeal without knowledge isn’t a good combination.
October 30, 2011 at 9:17 pm
All computers do what you don’t want them to do, like load updates when you least expect because you forgot to turn them off. The campers seem to be saying that greed is bad, but the whole capitalist theory is grown on greed and growth, using a finite resources pot. There will inevitably be a crash sooner or later. God told Adam to tend the land and look after the earth, perhaps that is what the campers want to do, become urban gardeners. They would probably make a better job of it than the current crop of bankers.
October 31, 2011 at 9:35 am
I ought to make clear that I am not an apologist for Capitalism because I like or approve many of the abuses/excesses, but because it seems to be the mechanism by which we discharge Jesus’
command to care for the poor and the weak.
I listened to Clifford Longley this morning describing the entrepreneurial charitable Jimmy Saville as a ” Holy Fool”. That I approve.
I worry about those in the Church who may confuse that, with the role of what Lenin described as ” useful idiots”.
October 31, 2011 at 9:44 am
Martin
“For all its inadequacies, Capitalism delivers for most.”
I think that raw capitalist societies create almost as much poverty as rigidly socialst/communist ones.
The system that has really proven it’s value is a social market economy where capitalism is balanced by a “contract” between rich and poor, old and young, that we help those who fall through the net to live lives free from the spectre of destitution and where everyone chips in through taxes to provide equal vital services for everyone.
The protests now arise becaue this system is seen as breaking down. In America even the much more limited welfare programmes are being cut, the public rhetoric is pure survival of the fittest with contempt for the poor (I will never forget Rush Limbaugh calling the protesters “human debris”).
In Europe we find that private and public finance are disconnected as never before and those depending on the public sector suffer disproportionately, while those who can buy private education and healthcare, “public” services and who don’t need any kind of benefit are doing extremely well for themselves, whereas those of us who depend on those things are bearing a disproportionate burden.
By what mechanism is it possible that in a year in which my private pension fund has depreciated by 30% and my daugher has been told that her education, for which we did not know we needed to save, will cost her £27,000 plus 8.6% interest/a for 35 years, those who manage my pension fund have received a salary increase of £49%?
And are we really to sit back and just say “well, that’s capitalism”?
Unless we re-discover the idea that we’re all responsible for each other and re-jigg the financial systems to take account of that again, we’ll lose the social cohesion on which our whole life together is based.
October 31, 2011 at 4:58 pm
You have probably already seen this but I thought this was a refreshingly balanced and informed article on the St Pauls issue, even if it doesn’t reach the clear conclusion of who’s in the right that some would like.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15497618
October 31, 2011 at 5:25 pm
Thank you. Run out of energy and this post on your blog made me smile, just when I needed one.
I often have questions. Glad not too many of yours were IT. They do count, but i find them frustrating and I’ll pass on the manager of Chelsea. Out of my league.
I’ll continue with your other Q’s and my list.
Hope Cambridge was good and that you had a good night’s rest afterwards!
October 31, 2011 at 11:04 pm
Martin says: “You sometimes have to recognize that money like water has a trickle down self levelling capacity of its own.”
If that were even slightly true, why are there people protesting outside St. Pauls? If this were true, why is the self-levelling not making the poor richer and the rich poorer at this time of such imbalance?
All we see is the richest getting 50% pay rises (that’s 50% of an average salary that’s already some 300,000 times larger than the minimum wage) and unemployment starting to climb worryingly and the poor going bankrupt because they can’t pay off their credit card bills.
And we wonder why there are people protesting?!
November 1, 2011 at 3:55 pm
Anthony, How can you doubt that the poor have shared in the growth of wealth over the years? Sometimes, the rate of keeping up with inflation has been better for the non working than those on modest income. My grandfather was one of 12 brought up in the East End in Edwardian times, his father was a simple baker. The life of the modern UK poor whose homes I have visited professionally for many years is vastly better than his.
That improvement is thanks in no small measure to the taxes delivered by the too often despised entrepreneurial rich.
You would hear howls of protest at the cuts that would follow the protesters securing a tenth of their incoherent programme
November 1, 2011 at 7:47 pm
Martin says “You would hear howls of protest at the cuts that would follow the protesters securing a tenth of their incoherent programme”.
My understanding is that as yet there IS no programme, nor would I expect there to be. The “Occupy London” website makes no mention of one (or have I missed something?); and the idea that protest has to have a programme is naive and manipulative, and without intellectual basis as I have said already (6 above).
It seems to me that what the protesters are seeking, (quite properly, because all accepted democratic channels are clearly failing) is an intelligent debate on the current abuses arising from capitalism worldwide; in their own words: “We need alternatives; you are invited to join us in debate and developing them; to create a better future for everyone”.
OK, so there are a handful of banners proclaiming “Anticapitalism”, and the media have predictably fallen for that simplistic slogan, but to accept that single word as adequately summarising the protests illustrates a very superficial capacity for observation and thought.
Your implication that the protesters have a quantifiable programme is in my view a lazy attempt to misdirect the thinking of the readers of this blog. If you wish to make further contributions I would be glad if you begin to engage with the real issues, which are being given increasing coverage in the media as the days go by.
November 19, 2011 at 2:47 pm
Re: pt 10. A word of caution of falling into the stereotyping of Chelsea managers…Andre Villas Boas will be really special because his is an unusual story and route into football. He got his first break in football at age 16 when he met Bobby Robson, then managing Porto and put him right on a few matters. Plus, Abramovic shelled out £13m to bring him in and is now showing good signs of wanting to get value from his spending. Wait and see, but AVB is here to stay. On the temptation to stereotyping, I visited Liverpool for the first time ever last month, and was delightfully surprised…, hubcaps on the car stayed on, understood most of the language, and lots of cultural highlights (Ken Dodd’s statue on the railway station,Museum of Liverpool was much more than the garden shed I’d expected, etc), and the renowned scouse friendliness was highly evident. On the bus to Goodison to see Everton play Chelsea, a young lady in bright yellow shell suit with two youngsters in pushchair asked ,”You Chelsea fans?. Me aunt’s a Chelsea fan…we call her Auntie Chelsea…Well, I call her me auntie, but she’s not really my auntie… she’s me mam’s sister”. “Er, that would make her your aunt”, we said. “What, you mean, she really is me auntie?”. She needed a bit of reassuring, but eventually accepted it, got out her Blackberry and announced to the bus, “I’m putting it on my facebook right now, ‘Chelsea fans have helped me find me auntie…me auntie has been me auntie all the time but I never knew it.’”