Romanian shed menace

"The Register" unearths a mother lode of unintentional humour in a terrifying piece from the "Daily Fail". If you're not yet quivering with fear and spluttering with incoherent outrage, Dan and Dan have a few more "Daily Mail" headlines for you - set to music. Shocking.

Unreal gates and hen's feet

"The Great Gate of Kiev" is the best-known piece from Mussorgsky's famous piano suite "Pictures from an Exhibition". I'd always assumed that the piece's title referred to to a painting of a real landmark in Kiev, but I recently discovered, after listening to a radio programme on the subject, that the gate existed only as an architectural design by the architect and painter Viktor Hartmann (see above).

Other things I didn't know were that the full title of the suite is " Pictures from an Exhibition – A Remembrance of Viktor Hartmann" and that the full title of the movement about the gate at Kiev is "The Bogatyr Gates (in the Capital in Kiev)". The titles of the individual pieces allude to works by Hartmann, a friend of Mussorgsky, who died at the early age of 39. "Pictures from an Exhibition" was written soon after Hartmann's death as Mussorgsky's tribute to his late friend. Some of Hartmann's drawings and watercolours have been lost, but his design for the Bogatyr Gates is one of the surviving pictures.

The Bogatyr Gates were themselves intended to be a memorial. In 1866, the revolutionary Dmitry Karakozov tried to assasinate Tsar Alexander II. After the attempt failed, Viktor Hartmann sketched a design for a monumental gate to commemorate Alexander having survived the attempted assassination. I can't say I'm a huge fan of Hartmann's design - it's a strange compound of self-conscious gingerbread cottage ornateness and Imperial grandeur. It's the sort of royal kitsch that puts me in mind of the Prince Regent's plaything, the Royal Pavillion at Brighton.

Unlike the Royal Pavilion, The Bogatyr Gates, never got beyond a sketch on paper. It's always a possibility that some post-soviet oligarch might decide to spend a few million on making Hartmann's design a reality, but I rather hope not. In any case, the gates were a rather premature monument as, after three more failed assassination attempts, Tsar Alexander II was finally dispatched by a group of bomb-throwing revolutionaries in 1881.

Perhaps the next most famous of Mussorgsky's musical "pictures" is "Baba-Yagá (The Hut on Hen's Legs)". Baba-Yagá is a witch-like character from Russian folklore, who flies around on a broomstick or mortar, kidnapping children and living in a hut on hen's legs. The Hartmann painting that inspired this piece is of a clock made in the style of Baba-Yagá's hut - imagine a cuckoo clock resting on chicken's feet and you get the picture. The surprising thing about The Hut on Hen's Legs is that unlike The Bogatyr Gates, which never existed as more than a sketch, the fowl-footed hut is probably based on a real structure. According to Wikipedia, the fairytale description of Baba-Yagá's hut:

may be an interpretation [citation needed] of an ordinary construction popular among hunter-nomadic peoples of Siberia of Uralic (Finno-Ugric) and Tungusic families, invented to preserve supplies against animals during long periods of absence. A doorless and windowless log cabin is built upon supports made from the stumps of two or three closely grown trees cut at the height of eight to ten feet. The stumps, with their spreading roots, would give an impression of "chicken legs".

To give you an idea of how a hut built on tree trunks could look like a hut on hen's legs, check out this extraordinary picture of a Sami storehouse in Sweden. It really does look like something straight out a fairytale or any fantasy novel from "The Hobbit" onwards:



Photo by M Prinke on Flikr.

Frozen music

Architecture is music in space, as it were a frozen music.

(Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling)

This could explain a lot...

People in power make better liars, study shows

This may well be true, although I don't necessarily believe it on the basis of this study (devised by academics at a business school, as opposed to proper scientists).

I suspect that, if true, it may be the other way round. A talent for effective lying could be one of the ways people gain power in the first place. From the first well-judged untruth on a CV, to the tangled webs of deceit and manipulation woven by the ambitious schemer heading for the top, a talent for misleading may smooth the path to power. Once you are on top, though, controlling information and answerable to very few others, I guess you can tell huge porkies with more confidence and less risk than a subordinate who, subject to more oversight, runs a greater risk of being caught, and who has less power for self-defence if caught.

It's all about you

I love the title of this blog post at Obsolete:

Intensely relaxed about getting filthy rich comes full circle.

A person could write paragraphs about the "Lobbygate - Reloaded" affair, about pots calling kettles black, about how it's not just a few bad apples [insert your own favourite cliché here]... The writer could highlight the erosion of the public service ethos, the starry-eyed worship of power and money, the corrupting lust for fame - but compressing the essence of all that into the title of your blog post is sheer bloody poetry.

It's hard to top that as a summary of all that's been most disappointing about New Labour™, but the people at Nescafé almost did it, when they came up with a short, superbly vague, vacuous, aspirational, me-generation phrase to flog instant coffee. I'm almost surprised that the spin doctors didn't borrow the slogan for the forthcoming election campaign:

New Labour™ - it's all about you

Well - we had fair warning warning that these people were living in a gilded bubble of self-obsession. Cast your mind back to 2001:

It was said that I was facing political oblivion, my career in tatters, apparently never to be part of the political living again. Well, they underestimated Hartlepool and they underestimated me, because I'M A FIGHTER, NOT A QUITTER!

My political opponents can have their pound of flesh - and they do - but they will never eat into the core of my beliefs; what I stand for, what I have done in politics and what remains to do and that is the inner steel in me.

That speech told you everything you needed to know about the passions that really move wannabe X-Factor contestants the most ambitious, narcissistic New Labour™ career politicians. It's all about me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.....

And don't get me started about the teeny-tiny people in the little blue house next door...

Energy crisis

This is stating what ought to be obvious, but is all too often overlooked:

You might say that energy is only one of several necessary traits that a leader needs. Perhaps Churchill's lack of sleep had more to do with his workload than his energy level. Maybe the candidate who has the most energy can shake hands and kiss babies for more hours each day, and it's the campaigning that makes the difference. But I give you Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and any other bat shit crazy leader with an IQ of 90, scary hair, and nothing much else going for him but lots of insane energy. Energy attracts followers, even when it isn't backed up by anything else.

So says Scott Adams in his blog. It's a simple point, but one that sadly needs making in today's marketing-led, image-crazy, PR-driven world. All the drive, energy, determination and charisma in the world counts for nothing, if what you're trying to do is wrong.

You're all paedophiles too!

This comment piece from Andrew Brown in the Guardian is a few days old now, but I'm still in awe of its sheer badness - possibly one of the flimsiest attempts at damage-limitation I've ever seen:

The most detailed statistics on child abuse for the Catholic clergy that I can find come from the John Jay Institute's report drawn up for the American Catholic bishops' conference. From this it emerges that the frequency of child abuse among Catholic priests is not remarkable but its pattern is. Although there are no figures for the number of abusers in the wider population, there are figure for the number of victims. These vary wildly: the most pessimistic survey finds that 27% of American women and 16% of men had "a history of childhood sexual abuse"; while the the most optimistic had 12.8% of women and 4.3% of men. Obviously a great deal depends here on the definition of abuse; also on the definition of "childhood". In some of these surveys it runs up to 18, which is a couple of years above the age of consent in Britain.

The Catholic figures show that between about 4% of priests and deacons serving in the US between 1950 and 2002 had been accused of sexual abuse of someone under 18. In this country, the figure was a 10th of that: 0.4% But whereas the victims in the general population are overwhelmingly female, the pattern among American Catholic priests was quite different. Four out of five of their victims were male. Most were adolescents: two out of five were 14 or over; 15% were under 10.

This is vile, but whether it is more vile than the record of any other profession is not obvious.

In this piece, Brown has set himself the tricky task of defending the indefensible and proceeds to fail in epic style. Most people will work out for themselves what's wrong with Brown's sorry excuse for an argument, but some of the comments on this article dissect his errors succinctly and with some style. The biggie, of course, is that Brown isn't comparing like with like. We don't necessarily have the figures for every "other profession", just an overall figure for the whole American population. And who are the biggest perpetrators of abuse?

Offenders are most often acquaintances (approximately 50%) followed by family members (approximately 25% to 33%) and strangers (7% to 25%) (Douglas & Finklehor, 2005).

With a few exceptions, we don't know about the profiles of particular professions in this respect, but we do know that the majority of abusers are known to the abused child - friends of the family or somebody who had befriended the child (a category which could include people like your friendly parish priest), followed by members of the child's own family. This comment from AllyF hits that particular nail right on the head, (with the proviso that he should have mentioned acquaintances, followed by family members, rather than just family members):

Hard to know where to begin with this utterly shameful, ignorant, offensive screed.

Just on the statistics, the estimates of prevalence of child abuse include abuse by immediate and extended family members, which account for the overwhelming majority of child sex abuse cases.

If you were to remove family members from the equation and only look at children who were sexually abused by non-family trusted professionals, I suspect you'd find that the prevalence of abuse by catholic priests is wildly disproportionate to the amount of contact they have with children.

Indeedy - if you're going to deploy the "you too" version of tu quoque, it kind of helps to get your stats right.

Other comments falling into the "better than the original article" category, include:

The Catholic figures show that between about 4% of priests and deacons serving in the US between 1950 and 2002 had been accused of sexual abuse of someone under 18.

As the vatican have been making huge efforts to protect paedophile priests it's a bit naive to accept their estimates. I personally know two people who have been abused physically and sexually by priests.

This is vile, but whether it is more vile than the record of any other profession is not obvious.

Oddly enough though we haven't anywhere near the number of people coming forward to complain about sexual abuse from other professions like medicine to back that up. Bearing in mind the position of absolute trust that a priest has amongst Catholics, it's safe to say that most cases of abuse are probably never reported.

(Danot)

Many Catholic priests and religious have abused children in their care. But is the church's record worse than the world's?

Oh dear.

What a dreadfully wrong question to be asking. You probably should be asking whether the Catholic church's record is worse for the society in which it operates, and the answer would be 'yes'. The you should ask whether it is worse for that Catholic church because they operate from a position of trust, and the answer would be 'yes'.

One of your daftest articles, Andrew. Which means it's ahead of some pretty stiff competition.

(Lord Summersisle)

The other point that makes the Catholic abuse is that it is nowadays very widely reported. It may be the best reported crime in the world: that, too tends to skew perceptions.

This is manipulation of the word "reported". There's a difference between coverage in the press, and reporting of individual incidents of abuse. You may be right that the phenomenon is more widely reported but it does not follow that individual cases are more often notified. As with all crimes of this type, it is very hard for victims to report them.

(nongovernmental)

The second important aspect to note is the unmediated access to children priests have and the trust they command from both parents, the wider community, and the boys themselves. Simply, if a member of holy orders (until very recently in our history at least) was accused of child rape/abuse, the church would often cover the thing up and deal with it internally. Often, priests who were accused of such crimes were not withdrawn from duty but simply relocated to another parish, often where they could reoffend.

It also must be taken into account that children are often told from a young age that members of the church are not only people they can trust, but also people who demand respect from them. If a child is abused by an authority figure - especially one whom others regard highly - how is this infant able to know that what is taking place is wrong? Is it really likely that they will be able to articulate their experiences in the same way they could if a less-respected member of society abused them?

(dementedbear)

Oh, for goodness' sake.Hey, our church is okay, because we only child molest at the same rate as the general population. Forget the aspirations to the moral high ground, gloss over the cover-ups and hush-money,ignore the abuse of power and trust, and the institutional blind-eye, and omit to mention the sheer affrontery [sic] of Denis Brennan asking parishioners to pay the Church's guilt money, and generally miss the whole bloody point.

(alisdair cameron)

Many Catholic priests and religious have abused children in their care. But is the church's record worse than the world's?

Read the above statement again except this time replace child abuse with Bank Robbery, Fraud, Mugging or virtually any other crime.

Many Catholic priests and religious have Robbed Banks. But is the church's record worse than the world's?

See how daft it sounds?

(Valten78)

I know proportion, like perspective, is a difficult concept for some people to grasp. It looks as if Andrew Brown's in need of a Father Ted figure to do some explaining....