A young boy thinks girls are genetically programmed for housework

Victor Beltran, a 12 year old boy, has won the Junior Masterchef competition in Spain but become notorious for saying, when contestants were asked to clean their stoves,

“My goodness, I’m surrounded by girls, and girls already know how to clean because of genetics.”

Rocío, a 12-year old girl, immediately warned him,

“Eh, eh, eh, watch what you say.”

He was then ordered to clean the entire kitchen as a punishment but his punishment has continued in the media. His mother was abjectly apologetic, the Spanish media mortified. 

How far things have changed since General Franco's day. The Generalissimo forbade married women to go out to work.

The Guardian, unsurprisingly, felt the story would appeal to its readers and you can read the article here. The comments under the article are fun, the ones that the Guardian moderator did not remove. I wonder what the ones that were removed said.

I liked this informative comment:

He couldn't be further from the truth

Women may enjoy cleaning more, but the average female's kitchen is about 5x more dangerous because they use the same wash cloth on multiple surfaces, generally spreading bacteria around, whereas men rely more on antibacterial products 

Also interesting to note a woman's handbag harbours more bacteria than a toilet 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2324247/Womens-handbags-contaminated-bacteria-average-toilet.html

And the inevitable immediate response to this comment:

The Daily Mail? Nice choice. 

The comment on the Mail got 47 likes. On the internet, whenever anyone posts a link to or quotes the Daily Mail, the subject immediately changes from whatever was being discussed to the Mail. The Daily Mail is the sin eater of British life.

The Guardian readership inhabit their own time-space continuum, contiguous with but distinct from our world. The legendary editor of the Daily Telegraph (and model for William Boot in Scoop) William Deedes used to read the Guardian letters page each day for laughs but it has always frightened me.

Sexual and racial equality and homosexuality have taken the place of the sacred in Catholic Spain as much as everywhere else in Western Europe and the boy has gravely offended against this secular religion's fundamental tenets. Being only 12 mitigates the offence, but only partly.

Still the Guardian writer possibly felt slightly sorry for the boy, despite everything. She ends her story with his poignant words

“Everyone took it as if I were an adult, but I’m just a kid.”

More about the Charlie Hebdo massacre, if you can bear any more

A French police commissioner has reportedly killed himself after meeting relatives of a victim murdered in the Charlie Hebdo massacre. These very sad stories that reality writes. If it were in a novel you would throw the novel down and not pick it up again. Such grand guignol. I wonder why, when I was growing up, I thought the age I lived in was grey and dull.

Meanwhile the wife of the al-Qaeda man who mentored the Charlie Hebdo murderers is living on benefits in Leicester. She came to England with her children in search of a more "Islamic environment". 

Andrew Gilligan has a ghastly story about how many dangers Britian faces from Muslim extremists here.

A Syrian Facebook friend posted these moving words.

I am Iman, a Syrian citizen. I hereby declare to all, that I am against any form of terrorism, of any kind, likewise; I'm against any kind of sarcasm against ANY RELIGION. Those who killed the journalists in Charlie Hebdo are the same extremists who've been sabotaging my country for almost four years now under a fake goal that is called FREEDOM, and they have nothing to do with Islam, nor with any religion on earth, so let the whole world make an effort to demolish the devil, let the whole world rise against the enemies of God and all mankind. Blessed be my country and all our martyrs! Bless all Humanity!

'Liberals', not Muslims, are the enemies of freedom

In France it is the government, not Muslim extremists, who prevent free speech and in the UK it is, of course, exactly the same story. 

Our old enemy the ideas of the French Revolution are behind the disgraceful Charlie Hebdo cartoons, but this does not mean murder is any less dreadful. This is an explanation of why the leaders of Europe are not interested in free speech - only free expression of liberal ideas. 

You can offend religion, or the religious. That is fine. But you cannot offend the secularists Gods of Equality and Diversity for instance.

Had Charlie Hebdo been an anti Islam, nationalist paper the deaths wouldn't have been mourned by politicians in the same way, but they published these things for republican (in the French anti-clerical sense of the word), liberal reasons. That's why the leaders turned out, not abstract belief in free speech. Imagine had the Le Pens been killed.

French satirists had demanded that Pegida (the German anti-Islam movement) should not commemorate their killed colleagues using their demonstrations. To ridicule Pegida, the satirists used a 80s-type bald, tattooed skinhead. The problem with that is that the caricature is pretty much off target: Pegida is a crowd of regular folks worrying about job security and the confrontation with novelty.

German officials forbade Pegida to use the Charlie Hebdo caricatures during their demonstrations. And one German minister demanded that the Pegida demonstrations should be forbidden. The irony is that during these demonstrations there was never any mockery or hate speech - organisers always demanded a respectful tone from their participants knowing they were being observed world wide. So much for the German government's commitment to free speech.

Meanwhile, a French police commissioner has reportedly killed himself after meeting relatives of a victim murdered in the Charlie Hebdo massacre. These very sad stories that reality writes. If it were in a novel you would throw the novel down and not pick it up again. Such grand guignol. I wonder why, when I was growing up, I thought the age I lived in was grey and dull. (But the 1960s and 1970s were grey and dull, even though a man landed on the moon and the Cold War divided the world into two.)

And the wife of the al-Qaeda man who mentored the Charlie Hebdo murderers is living on benefits in Leicester. She came to England with her children in search of a more "Islamic environment". 

Andrew Gilligan has a ghastly story about how many dangers Britian faces from Muslim extremists here.

A Syrian Facebook friend of mine, the daughter of a mixed marriage (Christian-Muslim, these almost always end in divorce in the Arab world), posted these moving words.

I am Iman, a Syrian citizen. I hereby declare to all, that I am against any form of terrorism, of any kind, likewise; I'm against any kind of sarcasm against ANY RELIGION. Those who killed the journalists in Charlie Hebdo are the same extremists who've been sabotaging my country for almost four years now under a fake goal that is called FREEDOM, and they have nothing to do with Islam, nor with any religion on earth, so let the whole world make an effort to demolish the devil, let the whole world rise against the enemies of God and all mankind. Blessed be my country and all our martyrs! Bless all Humanity!

'Fellini didn't make me famous. I made him famous.'

Anita Ekberg who died at the weekend aged 83 here makes a, to me, much more alluring sight than Ingrid Bergman. But de gustibus.... Or perhaps, de bustibus.

Ingrid Bergman hoped for a Nazi victory in the Second World War. I don't know if Miss Ekberg took sides in the war but Marcello Mastroianni said she reminded him of a German officer who arrested him. I think one can see something of that in her performances and her pictures.

I saw many years ago a television documentary about her in old age and she was a very sad, vain and self-absorbed old woman, of hideous aspect, who knew herself to be a star as exiled royalty knows itself to be royal. It reminded me of what Lytton Strachey said about the death of the egotist.

"While he is alive, he devours all the happiness about him,like a grub on a leaf; but when he goes, the spectacle la not exhilarating."

In Anita Ekberg's case she had ceased devouring happiness many years earlier, one saw. 

However, she was one of the most beautiful women who ever lived. This is important.

Neagu Djuvara: the killings in Paris are part of an inevitable Muslim conquest of Europe

The distinguished Romanian historian Neagu Djuvara, who is 98, said on Saturday that he believes that the recent murders in France are a step in a process by which Europe will be conquered by Muslims, who are taking a revenge for the conquest of Muslim lands by the European powers in the 19th century. There is now nothing that we can do, he says, to stop this process. 

Neagu Djuvara outlined his theory of the rise and fall of civilisations in 1975 in his Civilisations et lois historiques, Essai d'étude comparée des civilisations.

His bleak prognosis, for those who read Romanian (or for those who understand Google translate), is here. He thinks Europe will, in time, be ruled by Arabs and gypsies.

American hegemony, which kept world peace for so long, will not last much longer. Europeans lack ideals and have stopped having children. The West has thus created a vacuum which people from the Third World will fill. It is a universal law, he says, that civilisations burn themselves out and disappear.

I think that his points about immigration being about to transform Europe for the worse are right and that Western civilisation is in decline. What great writers, painters, artists or thinkers have appeared since 1950? None. I am not sure I believe in a Muslim conquest of Europe but it is possible. I am sure, however, that a war on Islam would be exactly what the extremists most want. As they wanted the Americans' reaction to September 11th. 

The German television station ZDF recently reported that half the population of Germany would be immigrant-descended in fifty years' time. A German Christian Democrat MP, one Martin Gillo, even apparently put this on his website (but then took it down).

“According to current calculations, people with an immigration background will be the majority of the [German] population as early as 2035. That is less than a generation… A new age begins in 2035! It will be an age when we ethnic Germans become a minority in our country. How will we be treated then? Friendly, courteously and as belonging to the “Future Germans”? Or will we be satisfied to at least be tolerated as a protected minority?”

He welcomed this new age but 2035 was a big mistake on his part and much too soon. Only about 5% or 6% of the population of Germany are probably Muslims nowadays. 9.1% of all newborn babies in Germany had Muslim parents back in 2005.

I agree with Robert Reich who made made this point yesterday.

Few ideas are as wrong-headed and dangerous as the notions that the West is engaged in a "clash of civilisations" with the Muslim world, or that we are at "war" with radical Islam. The vast majority of Muslims are moderate, they have nothing to do with radical Islam, and they eschew violence. Radical Islam itself is not a unified force or a movement; it's a set of gangs manoeuvring for dominance over other gangs, and using violence mostly against other Muslims. But the extremists would like nothing better than for the West to embrace the notions of a clash of civilisations, or a "war" against a coherent organisation, because these ideas give them legitimacy, enhance their appearance of power, and give them more resources and recruits.

Did we learn nothing from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq?

Muslim extremists represent a fifth column in Europe, a huge danger and a strong argument that mass immigration into Western Europe was not a good idea. However, nothing could be more disastrous than a situation where most Muslims in Western Europe resent the governments which rule them and the non-Muslims around them.  This development is possible, is what the bad men want and must be avoided at almost all costs.

At the same time, we should reduce immigration into Europe from the developing world to a trickle, otherwise indigenous Europeans will in time, perhaps in less than a century, become a minority in Europe.

In praise of hot baths

Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.

So said Dodie Smith in that wonderful book,  I Capture the Castle, but I think she was talking about feeling low, not about depression. 

On the net I just came across hot baths described as liquid psychotherapy, which makes me feel I should not rush them so fast. I have some back problems after going around Europe with heavy baggage and I find somewhere else on the net that tells me that hot baths not ice are the best treatment. How nice to know.

In any case baths are wonderful. Sir John Betjeman made fun of them though, in 'Business Girls':


From the geyser ventilators
Autumn winds are blowing down
On a thousand business women
Having baths in Camden Town

Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,
Steam's escaping here and there,
Morning trains through Camden cutting
Shake the Crescent and the Square.

Early nip of changeful autumn,
Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,
At the back precarious bathrooms
Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions
Business women lie and soak,
Seeing through the draughty skylight
Flying clouds and railway smoke.

Rest you there, poor unbelov'd ones,
Lap your loneliness in heat.
All too soon the tiny breakfast,
Trolley-bus and windy street!

Baths I realise are zen and about finding calm. If, as Gibbon said, solitude is the school of genius calm is too - and hot baths the mothers of many deep thoughts. One of the very few blogs I actually read, Zen Habits, agrees, though I have no wish to have bubble baths or a subsequent cold shower.



I bath every day though I consider it rather middle-class for men to do so - or to shower each day. Showers are un-English and newfangled, for continentals, Americans and commercial travellers.




A textbook in English that we used at school when I was 8 in the 60s but published in the 30s (even at a young age I always looked first at the copyright date when I opened books) mentioned in an exercise for teaching grammar that it was normal to bath once a week. In my first job at the House of Lords i noticed my 2 great friends, one Eton and Oxford, the other Winchester and Cambridge, both related to peers, wore their shirts two days running, as in those days did I. We all took our clothes home to our mothers to be washed, except the Etonian, whose father's housekeeper did it and our two married colleagues who had their wives do it.




I wonder how often Dr. Johnson, who had 'no passion' for clean linen, bathed, no doubt in a hip bath. Old man Steptoe had his weekly bath in the kitchen sink in Steptoe and Son. This was eccentric but it was usually for working class men to bath once a week in the 1940s.



However I feel women should be much cleaner than men and was surprised to see that in England four out of five women don't shower every day or bath. Still, as one might expect, frequent showers and baths remove natural oils that the skin produces and thereby dry up the skin. Doctors advise against daily baths and advise only washing the hair once a week, apparently.

Death in Paris and the revolution in Europe

Coming back from my holiday the taxi driver told me at 3 a.m. about the murders of twelve people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris because the magazine published a couple of years ago a cartoon of Mohamed.

This morning I see that a propos of the cartoons, someone in the Guardian has opined: 

"Observant Muslims anywhere would be angered by such images... Islam is not unique. Judaism forbids the use of “graven images”

So far, so laughably predictable, I thought. 

Someone on Facebook has equally predictably posted a wiki link to Anders Brevik, reminding us that it's not only Islam which commits atrocities and someone else a comment that the professionalism of the two men points to them being a false flag French SAS style attack. Sky News pointed out that these people aren't real followers of Islam. 

The freedom to cause offence is sacred and we are losing it. I'd like Europe to return to freedom of speech and decriminalise offensive behaviour and hate speech. I also think we should also bring to an end immigration into Europe from outside but, even if Europe does so - and it won't - hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers will continue to pour in. 200,000 people sought asylum in Germany last year, many of them from Syria. 

But life is very complicated. When I saw the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo I saw they were not innocent jeux d'esprit. The cartoons below are the ones that led to this murder and I have to say that they are very wrong.  So I found myself partly changing my mind.





This is a weak joke about copies of the Koran not being able to stop bullets. It uses the word 'merde' which means excrement to describe the Koran, though in French 'merde' is used so much that it has lost its force and means something like 'crap', not 's-t'. 

These things are wrong, even though I do not think that they should be illegal in a Christian country or in a secular country like France. That they should never have been published does not in any way ameliorate or justify murder but it does, unfortunately, explain it.  I realise that this is not a very satisfactory conclusion.

There is something infuriating about advocates of immigration and multiculturalism expressing outrage about these killings - the same people who extol the merits of diversity. They combine great dislike of conservative religion with an inordinate love for Islam, along with love for feminism and homosexual rights. Instead of getting angry with the murderers I find I am angry with Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande and David Cameron. And yet for people who want Europe to become increasingly multicultural, increasingly an ethnic and religious mosaic, Islam is the threat to their project.

This is another Charlie Hebdo cover from the past. 

The caption reads:

Muhammad Overtaken By Fundamentalists: "It's a drag being loved by a-holes."

But I wonder whether Muhammad would have disowned the murders or not. I am not sure. I do think he was probably an Islamist. I say 'probably' simply because we know nothing for sure about Muhammad - even his very existence, though supported by evidence from  Christian sources, is not certain. I suspect that the murderers may have been good Muslims in killing the journalists, though who am I to judge? 

I have recently acquired a Muslim Facebook friend who posted this.

So many toss pots will come forth and say "not in my name" -
Most Muslims will agree - inflicting punishment is the job of the state - and will not agree with the shootings /

But please don't ask me to feel sorry for those that insulted my Prophet - pbuh
And for those that pray for them - May the curse of the Prophet be upon you -/

I suspect he speaks for many, perhaps most Muslims.

One of my most intelligent Facebook friends, a libertarian and republican atheist, made this comment with which I tend to agree:

Donald Trump has been reported as having said in a "Twitter rant" that if the Charlie Hebdo journalists had been armed they'd have had a chance. This is of course true, and it's the only way they could have had a chance. It's the only way massacres could be prevented in shopping centres and the like, and it's only a matter of time before one of these happens.The choice might be between a police state, an armed society, or a society that suffers regular random large scale massacres.

Actually I am not sure what I think about gun control laws but I get cross with all those annoying people who read the Independent and who bore on about the subject with much moral superiority. They may be right or wrong but no-one in the UK seems to care anymore about freedom. They seem to now after these murders in Paris but they don't really. They still want hate speech to be illegal (and probably rude remarks about homosexual marriage too) -  and all the rest of the curbs on freedom.

We must demand free speech but Islam does not brook offending God and never will. Islam is a warlike creed. We are at the limits of the liberal imagination. They were always fairly narrow. 

Things were easier, perhaps, when the law of blasphemy protected the Christian God from insult, as it did in England and Wales until Tony Blair's government abolished the offence. There is no going back to that. I wish it were just France that has a problem (and things are worse in France than elsewhere) but Western Europe has the problem - because of a small minority of Muslims. 

I don't think this problem has a solution.

If you know of one please tell me.