Do 97% of climate scientists agree that mankind is causing global warming? Apparently not

Is there anything more fun than a bad-tempered academic debate? It looks more and more that climate change fears are a lot of hot air but it is great watching warmists getting angry. 

I think the trouble all flows from liberalism, classical liberalism, with its overvaluing of reason and humanity. 

Here is today's blow in the prize-fight, yet another good jab by the sceptics.

Rethinking universities

Universities should only exist online (with a small number of exceptions like Oxford and Cambridge, which are needed to create an elite and provide a holiday camp for clever boys and girls). 

University lectures should be put online. Universities should be online. (Except Oxford and Cambridge and a small number of others where academics would be reared.) That would increase life chances, spread learning, reduce class discrimination and reduce student indebtedness.


Online lectures and courses already exist but it is not about online courses - it is about making degrees taken by distance learning have the same weight as conventional ones. In fact abolishing almost all conventional universities. It is about breaking the way education is misused to create unjustified stratification of society. Let universities be about learning not about tickets to get a job and let them be open to all regardless of brains or money.


Vocational training courses - such as accounting and business - should also be available online of course. I don't see why places that teach 'business' should be allowed to usurp the noble name of university but perhaps that is not so important as destroying conventional universities. These seem nowadays to be businesses, which provide their consumers with tickets to middle class jobs while, in the arts subjects, they also disseminate socially liberal or left-wing ideas.

"Academics say that traditional teachers' titles such as 'Sir' and 'Miss' should be axed"

Today's Daily Telegraph bears this baleful news:

"Academics say that traditional teachers' titles such as 'Sir' and 'Miss' should be axed, with pupils being expected to use first names to drag schools into the 21st century."

I remember how shocked I was to learn in 1996 that the boys at my grammar school, Westcliff High School for Boys, Essex, no longer call each other by their surnames. Even as sixth formers drinking illegally we did so. 

Anyway, here is the enemy of civilisation, hierarchy and tradition in clear sight. This is what we are fighting against. 

Why call schoolmasters by their Christian, sorry first, names? The reason is to do with sexual equality. 'Sir' apparently sounds well but not 'Miss' (which is rather working-class but this is not the point) or Madam or Ma'am. The article quotes,

Robin Lakoff, professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the US, said the traditional title for male teachers “always conveys respect” while Miss does not. 

“It’s very hard to create linguistic equality between people who, in many people’s minds, aren’t equal,” she said. “At school, we have children who are still really only learning language. They pick up on it very readily and then the next generation gets exposed to the prejudices of the previous generation.”

Once this kind of thing would have been laughed at by most people, certainly by most readers of the Daily Telegraph, but many of the opinions of what, in the late 1970s, was known as the Loony Left are now part of the ruling consensus. While the free marketeers concentrated on moving economics rightwards society and culture continued to be moved (it was mostly not spontaneous) in the opposite direction. We all know this but what do we do about it? Fight back, obviously - with laughter and argument. Instead of calling teachers by their christian names insist they wear gowns, as in Will Hay films - something they would love and which would cheer us all up. 

Once schools were supposed to teach the catechism, love of country, knowledge of national history, Latin and Greek, the manly and womanly virtues. Of course they did not do a good job of it and schools were awful places, but now schools, British state schools at least, proselytise a secular religion of equality and 'human rights'. To its adherents, who are include most teachers and opinion-formers, this philosophy is manifestly good, but objectively it is propaganda.

[I am an enormous Will Hay fan by the way - this can be the subject of another post. For now here is 'Good Morning, Boys'.]

Why we travel

I was so saddened to be told last night that there are now budget flights from England to Georgia.

I want Georgia to remain my secret country, like something out of a children's story, my secret garden. It's like learning there are now budget flights to Narnia.

I suppose this remark may indicate my intrinsic immaturity, but if so so be it.

After someone, I think it was Gertrude Bell made her way, with difficulty to Samarkand she was surprised to find that as she left they were organising charabanc trips there though I do not recall from where. Now Tibet is ruined by tourist tat and I wonder whether Xanadu is tourist-free. If so then it is some dreary Communist town in China.

The past is the undiscovered country and ones unconscious mind. It is ones unconscious that one is really exploring when one goes abroad. This is the attraction of all travel, a form of spirituality.

Great books not to bother with

What great books should we leave unread? An article in the Guardian asking this question prompted me to answer it.


I would start with all books by Henry James. Perhaps Fitzgerald and Hemingway too? And T.S. Eliot's poetry, but not his prose. Definitely The Scarlet Letter. Three or four people recently have assured me that Don Quixote is worth reading. I have grave doubts but may have a go. I did start and hugely enjoyed the Decline and Fall, then put it aside but shall finish it. I managed to get through and enjoy even Paradise Lost by listening to the BBC audio version. I started the Fairy Queen when I was 11 which was much too young (or perhaps was exactly the right age). Perhaps I shall go back but I know I am kidding myself.Looking at what I wrote it seems I like all books that are not American but I do like some Americans: Raymond Chandler, Mark Twain, Damon Runyon up to a point, Archy and Mehitabell, James Thurber sometimes, Dr. Seuss.

I am annoyed to find people who studied or even lectured in English are not particularly well-read but then the hero of Lucky Jim, was a university lecturer "whose policy it was to read as little as possible of any given book." Someone quite well-known, I forget who, who went to my college did a Ph.D. on Morte d'Arthur without having read it. I read it and loved it aged 11 -the only age when you can enjoy it - and was furious when I learnt about this.

Another article in the same paper gives an interesting list of overlooked books that you should perhaps read. I only read one, The Young Visiters, which is very funny. I have been meaning to read Oblomov all my adult life but have been too lazy.

Another overlooked novel is The King of Elfland's Daughter which I thought the best book ever written when I was 12. Then it was replaced by Taras Bulba which held the title till I was 26 and discovered Stendhal. Charterhouse of Parma still my fave but I am no longer the same person I was at 26.

My teenage tastes sound highbrow but I also read Conan the Barbarian which is the thirteenth stroke of the clock.

Why is Romania different? Religion has a lot to do with it

I realised only now that Romania's intense religiosity is not an Orthodox or Balkan thing. Serbia, Bulgaria and Russia are much less religious. About Greece I don't know. Quite unconsciously it is one of the reasons why Romania is so much more more attractive a country than her neighbours.

People go to India for spirituality - but I do not find India or the East very spiritual. They should come to Romania, especially Bucovina or the monasteries in Moldavia. Or for a very spiritual pre-Christian place, Sinca Veche.

On the subject of Eastern spirituality, I want to quote again Edward Norman, my favourite living historian, religious commentator and favourite Englishman:

"Through contact with liberal and Christian values the other world religions were sanitised and made acceptable to Western sensibilities: widows were no longer incinerated alive on their husbands funeral pyres, and the way was opened for that late-20th-century phenomenon, the Western idealising of Oriental religiosity, beads and mantras in Californian condominiums."

I finally got to Kosovo

I decided to get to Kosovo after many years of thinking about it. I took a plane from Bucharest to Belgrade as the night train has been discontinued for a couple of years. Then a bus to Novi Pazar, which I had wanted to visit for over twenty years, since reading about the Sanjak of Novi Pazar in Barbara Jellavic's History of the Balkans.


Enchanting Serbian countryside seen from the window of the crowded bus. It is good to leave the European Union and to be in a nice unglobalised country. The scenery and the monasteries are what Serbia offers - the towns are unremarkable. The same is true of all the Balkans except the towns that the Germans and Hungarians built in the Hapsburg lands.

The Hotel Vrbak, Novi Pazar, once considered an architectural gem. The reception was eerily empty when I went in to ask directions. Nothing is more dead than a future that has failed.

Novi Pazar was a rather typical Yugoslav town, albeit a Muslim one, with some headscarved and some veiled women. It was a public holiday - 1 May - and the town was closed and it drizzled. Yugoslav towns always abound in cafes, terraces that stay open very late, 1970s architecture and - in Belgrade at least - a kind of 1970s sexiness, like a film version dubbed into Serbo-Croat of a Jackie Collins novel.


I took a cab for EUR 35 to Mitrovica which is divided between the Serbian north and the Albanian south and put up in the North City Hotel. I enjoyed a typical Kosovar dish, prizrenska tava, in my hotel in the divided town of Mitrovica. It is made of minced veal, cheese and eggs. Rather good. Belgrade just offers grilled meat, but very good grilled meat. In Northern Mitrovica the main streets full of wooden shacks and kiosks from which goods are sold. Unlike in Novi Pazar where the town was dead because of the public holiday North Mitrovica at sunset was buzzing with activity and a sense of improvisation. It felt poor.

To my surprise the next morning I walked across the bridge that divided the Serbian north of the city from the main city which is purely Albanian and was not asked for my passport by the KFOR soldier who stood there. Checkpoint Charlie it is not. Serbs and Albanians can go freely from one part of the town to the other but they do not.

The bridge that divides Serbian, Christian Northern Mitrovica from the Albanian, Muslim side of the town. The KFOR man did not look at me when I crossed.

Jonathan Swift said, 'We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.'

We in the West are now busy creating an ethnic and religious mosaic like the one that used to exist in Eastern Europe before ethnic cleansing gave things a terrible simplicity.

In the 1990s I was certain Milosevic and Serbia were in the wrong in all the Yugoslav wars and wanted Western intervention. Since then Western intervention has almost always been disastrous. Were Messrs Blair and Clinton right about Kosovo? The atrocities committed by the Serbs were extremely exaggerated, we now know, and the Kosovo Liberation Army did terrible things. I suspect that this war too was a mistake, but I need to find out much more

The next day a driver recommended by a friend who lives in Pristina took me to the lovely old town of Prizren. The town was once the capital of Old Serbia but what can be seen today is Turkish. It reminds me of the wonderful Albanian towns of Berat and Gjirokastra but both of them were when i went there several years ago absolutely untouched by tourism, uncommercial, a place where old men sipped tea and smoked cheap cigarettes on stools outside cheap shops. Prizren too is innocent of tourism but is a buzzy warren of bars, restaurants, shops and life.

Castle half a mile outside Prizren

The interior of the beautiful old church was destroyed by Muslims in 2004 , five years after the Serbs were forced out, as, the keeper told me, were one thousand other churches in Kosovo. I am opposed to capital punishment but would happily see the perpetrators hanged in public.


Pristina proved an interesting place. It has two or three noble mosques (the mosques are noble inside, though from outside they are less so) but its interest is in its present-day political situation. I was shown around, unfortunately after dark, by a very intelligent American who loves there and who believes Kosovo was the 'last just war'. 

Two weeks later the Guardian published this article about Pristina's new mayor. It confirmed my intuition that the Kosovo war was not just, was unwise meddling. I was interested to read recently Andrew Rawnsley say that it was Tony Blair who persuaded bill Clinton into this adventure.

Prizren, Kosovo, the Sinan Pasha mosque: unusual non-geometrical frescoes.

Was the Cold War necessary?

This is a fascinating article by one of my favourite historians, Lord Skidelsky, about the Cold War and whether it will start all over again now. I did not known that the Cold War dismayed George Kennan "who claimed that containment was meant to be economic and political, not military. He was one of the main architects of the post-first world war Marshall Plan. He opposed the formation of NATO". This is exactly what I always thought - that the Cold War was unnecessary. The Cold War did however to a large extent keep the peace, if you were not living in Angola or Vietnam.