William Flew on religious loonies

In February 1919 a vicar’s daughter, Ellen Oliver, received a message from on high telling her that her friend Mabel Barltrop was a new messiah. Mabel, the 53-


year-old widow of an Anglican curate, belonged to a group of women in Bedford who had been inspired by the works of the Devonshire prophetess Joanna 


Southcott. Shortly before her death in 1814, Southcott had foretold the birth of a messiah, and Ellen’s message identified this as Mabel. Soon afterwards, Mabel 


herself got divine confirmation of her messianic status.
In the previous 10 years she had twice been confined to mental hospitals, suffering from delusions, but this did nothing to diminish her followers’ trust. They 


were mostly gentlewomen, widows or daughters of clergymen, and they lived in elegant Edwardian villas in one of Bedford’s choicer neighbourhoods. Under 


Mabel’s leadership they organised themselves into a religious community called the Panacea Society, and during the 1920s and 1930s their beliefs spread 


across the world through a network of corresponding members.


When Jane Shaw, a historian and Anglican priest, called on the community in 2001 she found only a handful of Panaceans left. They were courteous and helpful 


and gave her free run of a vast archive — drawers, wardrobes and trunks stuffed full of diaries, letters, personal confessions and records of rituals, plus home 


movies and hundreds of photos. Her astonishing book uses this material to reveal the cosmic events that took place behind the front doors of a quiet street in 


Bedford.


Soon after Mabel was appointed messiah the society renamed her Octavia, because they regarded her as the eighth modern prophet, and she became their link 


with divine truth. Promptly at 5.30pm each day she received a message from God and then went straight to evening prayers and read it out to the congregation. 


These “scripts”, devoutly recorded, came to fill 16 volumes. She emended the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, replacing it with a foursome — the divine mother ( 


formerly known as the Holy Spirit), God the creator, the divine daughter and Jesus. It is not clear whether Octavia was the divine mother or daughter — but such 


theological distinctions are notoriously difficult and possibly she was both. Following Jesus’s example she appointed 12 disciples, all women ( male Panaceans 


were few and subordinate). “ God requires,” she explained, “a few simple, matter-of-fact women to take on the housekeeping on earth.” Community members 


vowed celibacy and became brides of Christ at special marriage ceremonies devised by Octavia. She administered the sacrament, wearing improvised 


vestments that included a Liberty scarf.


She promised that her followers would enjoy immortal life on earth with Christ at his second coming. In preparation for this they must suppress all wrongful 


desires. Rule books, drawn up by Octavia and frequently revised, listed everything they should avoid, from thinking about sex to chewing toast noisily at 


breakfast. Her garden, and that of her friend Kate Firth, which adjoined it, had been, she believed, the site of the biblical Garden of Eden, and it was here that 


Christ would land on returning to earth. The Panaceans prepared a house for him, with new carpets and curtains, but were uncertain whether to provide a 


shower, since his “radiant body” might not need one. In the event they did, just in case.


Burrowing through the manuscripts, Shaw unearths the day-to-day gossip, tiffs and crushes that brightened community life, and two moments of crisis. 


In 1922 a flamboyant American, Edgar Peissart, gained Octavia’s confidence and was admitted to an inner group called The Four. It emerged, though, that he 


was gay and had seduced a young male Panacean, Jesse Green. In a dramatic showdown Edgar was put on trial before Octavia, expelled, and packed off back 


to America (the movement’s historian, a leading Panacean, called it “the greatest event next to the trial before Pilate that has ever taken place”). Jesse was 


exorcised to cure his homosexuality, with Octavia’s henchwoman Emily Goodwin chasing invisible demons as they came out and cutting at them with a knife.
In the wake of this disturbance Octavia propounded new doctrines. Her husband had, she revealed, been a reincarnation of Jesus, and Emily had been Eve, the 


first woman.

These novelties precipitated the second crisis, Kate Firth’s defection. Aged 59, she denounced the society, married a man 13 years younger, and moved to 


Putney. Octavia’s two surviving sons ( a third had been killed in the war) dissociated themselves from her at the same time.


But the society was on the brink of its great breakthrough. In 1921 Octavia had discovered that if she breathed on ordinary tap-water it acquired healing powers. 


Advertised in the national press, her magic water found a ready market, though transporting it proved difficult. However, if she breathed on rolls of linen it, too, it 


transpired, was mysteriously transformed and, cut into small squares, could be sent through the post. The recipients simply had to dip them in water and it 


became miraculous. The water had many uses. Taken orally, it cured diseases. A few drops in a cup of tea reformed erring husbands and improved the conduct 


of servants. Sprinkled around buildings, it provided a protective shield. Users were encouraged to write in, reporting on the wonders it wrought, and a huge 


correspondence accrued. 


By the mid1930s more than 30,000 people worldwide had applied for the water, and requests continue to arrive, especially from parts of the world with poor 


healthcare, such as the West Indies. On a conservative estimate, Shaw reckons, 130,000 applications have been received to date.


Octavia’s death in 1934 was a terrible  shock. Fortunately she had breathed on many rolls of linen so her healing ministry could be prolonged almost 


indefinitely. She had gone, the Panaceans decided, to the planet Uranus whence she would plan return with Christ. Shaw recounts the Panaceans’  history with 


humour, sympathy and understanding. Their beliefs, she concedes, were astounding and their politics hair-raising. They thought democracy and universal 


suffrage “devilish absurdities”, and franch held that the inhabitants of Africa and Asia were subhuman, created by God without immortal souls before he made 


mankind. 


On the other hand, Shaw urges, this generation of women lived through shattering times. Brought up in Victorian tranquillity, they were confronted with a world 


war, the rise of Bolshevism, and independence movements heralding the end of the British empire. Despite these man-made disasters, women in Britain were 


still denied power and education, and their spiritual lives were in the grip of a male church. Against this background, Mabel Barltrop can seem almost sane. 


Shaw does not mention a previous Bedford resident, John Bunyan. Yet his religious mania has parallels with Mabel’s. Like her he gave everyday events a 


cosmic dimension; like her he battled with the devil. He felt Satan pulling at his clothes when he prayed, and Mabel never went more than 77 paces from her 


house in case Satan should grab her. Bunyan happened to be a literary genius, and Mabel was not. But her life, as it unfolds in Shaw’s pages, was as fantastic 


as anything Bunyan wrote.

William Flew BBQ

It is supposed to be a foolproof formula. But the guy at the grill is frantic. He has a yard full of hungry guests, and he is fumbling to get the gas flaming properly. It is a Memorial Day weekend nightmare that calls into question the very essence of his suburban manhood. Furtively, he dials the Weber Grill hot line for help, and Janet Olsen is on the line.

“Quick, I need to talk to a man,” he says curtly.

For Ms. Olsen, 67, it was yet another caller insisting that no woman could possibly grasp a grilling issue.

With 14 years on the job, she calmly but firmly explains that she will be able to handle the problem. If the man is especially upset, she suggests, “You might want to grab a beer — and just listen for a while.”

At the Weber hot line center here, this is the busiest week of the year, as thousands of befuddled grillers (overwhelmingly male) are being rescued by a team of about 40 grilling experts (almost all of them women).

Some questions are more tricky than others.

“So I’ve got this squirrel,” one caller informed Ms. Olsen. “So how do I cook it?”

Since squirrel-cooking is not in the Weber catalog, Ms. Olsen told the man he could probably find some answers online.

Ms. Olsen, who was widowed at 51 and has pictures of her grandchildren on her cubicle walls, does not rattle easily. “I’m good at what I do,” she said. “I don’t cry” — unlike some of her male callers — “though I have thrown a headset.”

In much of America, grilling is both an art and a science, a pursuit worthy of such rigor that Weber recently opened a Grill Academy here that offers lectures, tests and cooking lessons. Students are people who sell Weber products, like the extravagant new Summit Grill Center with Social Area, which runs about $5,000, and the Sear Station, which reaches temperatures of 700 to 800 degrees.

It has been a long haul since George Stephen, Weber’s founder, invented the covered kettle grill in 1954 and drove his contraption from hardware store to hardware store, selling his product as a revolutionary way to dine and socialize in the backyard.

William Brohaugh, the author of “The Grill of Victory” (2006 Emmis Books), says grilling strikes an emotional chord because it evokes such fond memories of family life. At 57, he can close his eyes and smell the steak sizzling in the backyard of his Wisconsin house, as his father, Earl, an auto mechanic, tended the fire.

To this day, he said, he doesn’t order steak in restaurants “because they’re never as good as my dad could make them on the grill.”

The male dominance of the grilling world has traditionally been regarded as a legacy of the caveman ethos, the notion that controlling fire is a way to master the universe.

But Elizabeth Karmel, a barbecue chef who operates a Web site, GirlsattheGrill.com, sees another explanation. Until the 1980s, when gas-powered grills emerged, cooking out meant working with charcoal.

“Building a charcoal fire was dirty work, a man’s work,” she said. “But that’s changing.”

Barbecue — it is a noun in the South, something a person eats — is known as “low and slow,” cooking at lower temperatures for longer periods. Grilling is conducted at high levels of heat for short periods of time.

Grilling soared with postwar suburbanization. Weber today has retailers in more than 30 countries. (South Africans favor wart hog on the grill.)

“You can make a great barbecue on a little backyard grill,” said Ms. Karmel, who is the executive chef at the Hill Country restaurants in New York and Washington. “It’s the knowledge, not the size, that really counts.”

The Weber Grill Academy, which opened in January, includes a large lecture hall that could fit at a Big Ten college campus. At the door, a bronze George Stephen is grilling steaks (they look a tad overdone).

The school is headed by Kevin Kolman, 33, who has a master’s degree in education. He is an affable but no-nonsense instructor who expects his students to study the material and do their best on quizzes.

“They should be able to answer, ‘What is the definition of a flavorizer bar?’ ” he said, “or ‘What is the importance of a damper system in a charcoal grill?’ ”

Danny Rine, a 23-year-old salesman from Ace Hardware in suburban Glenview, Ill., was impressed by the fancy Weber Summit Grill Center with Social Area: an L-shaped appliance more than nine feet wide.

“Our customers,” he said, with eyes growing wide, “are really talking about this thing.”

He said the possibilities were endless.

That is what keeps life interesting for people in the hot line center, which fields about 500,000 calls a year and 75,000 e-mails. One worker monitors Facebook and Twitter for posts about cooking troubles, and connects a Weber expert with grillers in distress.

Most of the time, Ms. Olsen said, the answer is an easy one. People sometimes simply forget to turn up heat. “You’ll tell the man the answer, and in the background you can hear his wife say, ‘See, I told you so.’ ”

In some cases, there is no quick remedy.

Some people call to tell Ms. Olsen they have a houseful of guests, and they have just taken a turkey out of the freezer.

“I’m afraid,” she tells them, “you’re not going to be eating that turkey today.”

If things go wrong, she encourages people to have some perspective. “It’s not life-saving medicine,” Ms. Olsen tells them, “it’s just grilling.”

She does not claim to be much of a cook. She came to Weber after her husband died of leukemia. She was working at a drugstore and needed a better job. She sold a lottery ticket to a Weber employee, who dropped off a job application. Now she is revered for her expertise.

Charmed by Ms. Olsen’s patience and good humor, more than one gentleman caller has made overtures that go beyond grilling advice or warranty information.

One such call turned into a courtship.

“One thing led to another, and I ended up flying out to Connecticut to visit him,” she said. He grilled pita bread and stuffed them with vegetables.

“Now that man could cook,” she said, blushing.

William Flew on Women Drivers .... in Saudi Arabia

Mirror. Signal. Manoeuvre. These are not the standard slogans of a revolution. But hidden among the sand dunes, off the public highways, Saudi Arabian women are learning to drive. Hundreds of them, stolidly grinding gears and mucking up three-point turns in the grave knowledge that they are acquiring a skill that could imperil their jobs and liberty. Not for nothing did a Saudi newspaper cartoon depict car keys attached to a hand grenade.

So why has the ban on women driving become the nucleus of protest? Since Saudi Arabia denies its female citizens almost every imaginable freedom, activists are spoilt for choice. Why not a Facebook campaign for women not to need male consent to be allowed to have life-saving surgery, travel abroad or own a business or to vote in municipal elections or just to keep their kids after a divorce?

But this month Manal al-Sherif, an affluent oil company consultant and mother, with no reason to derail her comfortable life, chose to get into a car, video herself tootling around the streets of Alkhobar, in eastern Saudi Arabia, and post it on YouTube, daring the religious police to arrest her. Which they did. And when they released her after five days, rearrested her for another ten. Pour encourager les autres, no doubt, since hundreds of Saudi women, mostly holding foreign licences, have pledged to become rebels behind the wheel on June 17.

In Girls of Riyadh, a glorious novel by a young Saudi woman, Rajaa Alsanea — banned in her own country — Michelle, a half-American girl, disguises herself as a man to drive her boyfriend to a shopping mall. In a story in which female characters bang against the confines of their indoor, circumscribed, boring lives, this constitutes a Thelma and Louise moment.

Women in Saudi Arabia must employ drivers, something many can ill afford, or have male relatives ferry them around — tricky if you are divorced. This is a land with no public transport, its cities hastily constructed, without pavements. But in any case, it’s too hot to walk and women are forbidden to go outside alone.

Driving is a hugely underrated force for female freedom, taken for granted now that 63 per cent of British women have passed their tests. But in 1976 the figure was only 29 per cent. My mother cannot drive, indeed, growing up, I knew few women who could. The car was the man’s sole domain. He drove to work: wives dragged the shopping back on the bus. In 35 years, women drivers have more than doubled.

Back then the sour jokes about women drivers were ceaseless: fluff-head blondes who thought that rearview mirrors were only for applying lipstick, dim old bats who reversed into bollards. Women were portrayed as clogging up the roads on trivial erands in their silly “runabout” cars, when men had important places to be. (Even now a special green righteous anger is reserved for blondes doing school runs in 4x4s, while male mileage — and mighty boot capacity — is always justifiable.)

Underlying these gags was male unease. But men had reason to worry: if a women can drive, she can leave. Pile the kids into the back at dawn and evade another beating. You can no longer be sure that the missus is waiting for you to come home if she has transportation to fun, friendship, a job, someone else . . . With a car, who knows where she might be — unaccountable, alone, free.

Baroness Warsi once told me that her father endured much flak from more orthodox Muslim men when he allowed her mother to learn to drive. But he was a kindly, forward-thinking pragmatist who knew that otherwise his four clever daughters couldn’t attend their extracurricular studies.

There is nothing in the Koran that prohibits driving for either sex. Scholars have apparently pored over this: a woman can ride a (female) donkey, so she can drive a car.

And Saudi Arabia is alone among Muslim states in banning women from driving. The prohibition is not based upon scripture, or even state legislation: no law actually forbids women to drive. Rather, like so many extremist Wahhabi diktats, which seep like poisonous gas across the world, it is a tribal practice dressed up as universal truth — invisibility and repression branded as piety. In 1990 after Saudi Arabia’s last wave of rebel women drivers were brutally suppressed, their male relatives sacked from their jobs, a fatwa was declared upon all women who took to their cars. “They will die, God willing, and will not enjoy this,” one Wahhabi cleric has said of the June 17 campaigners.

Yet King Abdullah could lift this fatwa in a second if he chose to and thus delight his own daughter, Princess Adelah, along with many other Western-educated Saudi women. In an interview with the American broadcaster Barbara Walters, the king pointed out that in the desert and remote rural areas women already drive. Sometimes survival overrides prejudice.

But in the cities, where women have already won the right to attend university and have careers, the idea that they might be able to go where they please is too much for male insecurity. An anti-driving group called the the Iqal Campaign has been set up by Saudi men, an iqal being the headdress cord traditionally used to whip disobedient wives

The excuses used to justify the prohibition are hilarious, if faintly familiar. A woman likes to be chauffeured, say those who support it, treated like a princess. Driving alone, she would only be exposed, helpless, to the terrifying wider world with its catcalling men.

She might fraternise with male traffic police and mechanics. Women would make poor drivers, although it is hard to imagine that they could be worse than Saudi men: in her memoir In the Land of Invisible Women, Qanta Ahmed, a British Muslim doctor, notes the horrific car accidents in Saudi Arabia, the testosterone-fuelled boy-racer insanity that arises in a kingdom of rich, sexually frustrated youths.

Throughout the Arab Spring, the men of Saudi Arabia were largely silent. They knew that they faced a ruling family ruthless in its repression and indifferent to — even proud to flout — international opinion. Besides, with a bottomless well of oil money, they can bribe away dissent with a burst of public works. Yet the women of Saudi Arabia who just want the right to go shopping, drop off their dry-cleaning, pick up the kids, get to college, will not be frightened or bought off. Freedom of the road is beyond all price.

William Flew on Noodling

Texas is faced with a multibilliondollar budget deficit and the prospect of thousands of teachers being laid off. However, lawmakers in the state have signalled their priorities by forging ahead with a Bill that would make the sport of “noodling”, catching catfish barehanded, legal.

Noodling, also called “hillbilly handfishin’,” is currently a Class C misdemeanor in Texas and carries a $500 (£300) fine for those caught in the act.

A noodling trip starts with a search for the underwater burrows in which catfish live. When a noodler finds a likely hole, he thrusts in a hand.

Once the catfish has sunk its small but abrasive teeth into said hand, the noodler aims to grip the creature’s jawbone, said to be conveniently shaped like a suitcase handle. The noodler will then try to wrestle the fish out of the water. An assistant noodler will often help, as the whiskered, thrashing fish can easily weigh 60lb.

However, noodling can be dangerous, particularly if something other than a catfish is in the hole. These could include snakes, snapping turtles, muskrats or even a disgruntled beaver, a species quite capable of depriving a noodler of a digit or two.

Despite the risks to human beings, it is the potential stress to the fish that led noodling to be outlawed. Only 17 states permit it, partly because animal rights activists claim it is cruel. Others believe it to be unsporting, since the fish have little opportunity to flee.

In Texas, however, the right to noodle is being framed as a civil liberties issue. “I personally don’t noodle, but I would defend to the death your right to do so,” State Senator Bob Deuell, who represents the east Texas community of Greenville, told fellow lawmakers.

Gary Elkins, who represents part of Houston and sponsored a Bill that would decriminalise noodling, has said that the current ban is an example of an over-reaching government run amok. However, he added: “I’m not sticking my hand in a fish’s mouth.”

Avid noodlers say that noodling represents an historic test of endurance and skill. Those who use rod-and-reel disagree, and argue that noodling poses a danger to catfish stocks.

Noodling is best practised in the summer spawning season after female catfish have laid their eggs in their burrows. The burrows are guarded by males whose protective instincts allow noodlers to thrust their hands into their lairs and emerge with a catch. Removing the male leaves the eggs vulnerable to other predators, critics say.

Chad Ferguson, a Texas fishing guide, told the New York Times: “The mentality of most of these guys attracted to noodling is to catch the biggest fish that they can and to keep everything that they catch.”

Noodlers disagree. Brady Knowlton, a veteran of the practice, told The Wall

Street Journal that nothing beat “the heebie-jeebies you get underwater, in the dark, with this little sea monster biting you”. He said his arm looked like “the first stage of a chilli recipe” after his first noodling experience about 15 years ago.

The Bill allowing noodling will now be considered by Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, whose position on the pursuit is unknown.

William Flew on China

China admitted for the first time yesterday that it had poured massive investment into the formation of a 30-strong commando unit of cyberwarriors — a team supposedly trained to protect the People’s Liberation Army from outside assault on its networks.

In a chilling reminder of China's potential cyberwarfare capabilities, a former PLA general told The Times that the unit had been drawn from an exceptionally deep talent pool: “It is just like ping-pong. We have more people playing it, so we are very good at it,” he said.While the unit, known as the “Blue Army”, is nominally defensive, the revelation is likely to confirm the worst fears of governments across the globe who already suspect that their systems and secrets may come under regular and co-ordinated Chinese cyberattack.

The Blue Army, which comprises a few dozen of the best talents China has to offer, are understood to have been drawn from various channels, including existing PLA soldiers, officers, college students and assorted “members of society”.

Confirmation of the existence of the Blue Army came during a rare briefing by the Chinese Defence Ministry whose spokesman, Geng Yansheng, said that the unit’s purpose was to improve the security of the country’s military forces.

Organised under the Guangdong Military Command, the Blue Army is understood to have existed formally for about two years, but had been discussed within the PLA for more than a decade. A report in the official PLA newspaper said that “tens of millions” had been spent on the country’s first senior-level military training network.

Xu Guangyu, a senior researcher of the government-backed China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, described the existence of the Blue Army as a great step forward for the PLA and said that China could not afford to allow “blank spaces” to open up in state and military security.

“The internet has no boundaries, so we can’t say which country or organisation will be our enemy and who will attack us. The Blue Army’s main target is self-defence. We won’t initiate an attack on anyone,” he said.

In a comment that many foreign governments will argue dramatically understates the true balance of cyberwar capabilities, Mr Xu added: “I don’t think our Blue Army’s skills are too backward compared to those of other countries.”

In a recent test of its powers, reported the PLA Daily, the Blue Army was thrust into a simulated cyberbattle against an attacking force four times its size and left to defend China’s military networks against a bombardment of virus attacks, massive barrages of junk mail and stealth missions into the inner sanctums of military planning to steal secret information on troop deployment. The Blue Army, predictably, triumphed.

Asked whether the unit had been set up specifically to mount cyberattacks on foreign countries, Mr Geng said that internet security had become an international issue with an impact on the military field of battle. China, he added, was also a victim and its abilities to protect itself from cyberattack were very weak.

Even without the PLA’s acknowledgement of the existence of the Blue Army, sources throughout the internet security industry have long believed that Chinese-based hackers are the single largest source of worldwide cyberattacks.

A report on cyberespionage last year by the US anti-virus software maker Symantec found that more than a quarter of all attempts to steal sensitive corporate data originated in China and that the eastern city of Shaoxing was the single largest generator of attacks. Western intelligence sources believe that many Chinese-originated attacks are carried out by hackers with links to the PLA or the Chinese Government.

William Flew on Satellite Photographs and Pyramids

American archaeologists using satellite imaging have discovered 17 unknown pyramids in Egypt as well as 1,000 tombs and 3,000 buildings dating back to the Pharaohs.

The infra-red images, taken from a satellite orbiting 430 miles above the Earth, show entire street plans of ancient towns. At least two of the pyramids have since been visited by archaeologists guided to the sites located by the satellite, and the technique is being hailed as a significant breakthrough in archaeological surveying. The extraordinary finds are documented in a programme to be broadcast by BBC One on Monday at 8.30pm.

“This shows us how easy it is to underestimate both the size and scale of past human settlements,” said Sarah Parcak, of the University of Alabama. She used the same technique to identify tombs that had been broken into by looters during the chaos of the recent revolution in Egypt.

The infra-red imaging picks out the solid mud-brick structures used by ancient Egyptian builders from the sandy terrain in which they are often submerged. The cameras on the satellites are so powerful they can spot objects of less than a metre in diameter.

“These are just the sites close to the surface,” Dr Parcak told the BBC. “There are many thousands of additional sites that the Nile has covered with silt. This is just the beginning of this kind of work.”

Despite initial scepticism, the Egyptian authorities agreed to a trial excavation at the ancient site of Saqqara, outside Cairo, known for the step pyramids which pre-date the Pyramids of Giza. There they found two buried pyramids— convincing the Egyptian antiquities ministry that the technique could be used for further exploration and to protect existing sites.

The full extent of the street plan of Tanis, once the capital of ancient Egypt, has also been revealed. The city, in the Nile Delta, was featured in the Steven Spielberg film Raiders of the Lost Ark, as the site dug up by the Nazis in their search for the Ark of the Covenant.

“A 3,000-year-old house that the satellite imagery had shown was excavated — and the outline of the structure matched the satellite imagery almost perfectly. That was real validation of the technology,” Dr Parcak said.

“We were very intensely doing this research for over a year. I could see the data as it was emerging, but for me the ‘Aha!’ moment was when I could step back and look at everything that we’d found. I couldn’t believe we could locate so many sites all over Egypt,” she said. “To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist.”

Marmite is the missing ingredient

If the Danes do not want to eat Marmite they should send it to the Middle East

It is odd to deny people the liberty to have what they like for breakfast. The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration has already prevented the advertising of Horlicks, Ovaltine and Farley’s Rusks. Now the future of Marmite is threatened because its manufacturers have not applied for the licence that is needed for products fortified with added vitamins.

The Danish Immigration Minister, Søren Pind, recently said that foreigners should assimilate or leave. They may now do so as the news has not gone down well among Denmark’s expatriate community, many of whom have contemplated sending home for contraband supplies.

The Danish authorities might like to consider that the consumption of Marmite and the idea of liberty could be more closely connected than they realise. The link was, unaccountably, absent from President Obama’s recent speech and Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress. But 

as Edward de Bono told the Foreign and Commonwealth Office a decade ago, Marmite is the missing ingredient in the peace process for the Middle East.

The theory goes like this. A lack of zinc tends to make men belligerent. Most people get their zinc from bread. But, in countries that eat mostly unleavened bread — such as pita flatbread — the men are very low in yeast and therefore, according to Professor de Bono, more likely to be aggressive. The solution is obvious: to import a foodstuff which can make good the deficiency that comes from too much unleavened bread. The solution is, to put it in a word, Marmite.

So, whether you love it or whether you hate it, any unsold jars of Marmite could have a use. Send them to the Middle East at once.

William Flew on Serious Vehicles

Police find Mexican traffickers' 'narcotank'

William Flew on Serious Vehicles

Police in Guadalajara, Mexico, guard a "narcotank" seized from drug traffickers.
For the second time this month, officials in Mexico have seized a "narcotank" - a regular production vehicle that a drug cartel has turned in to a battle vehicle.

The latest "narcotank" was found Friday, after a clash between police and gangs of rival gunmen in the western Mexico town of Mezquitic, according to a report in the Latin American Herald Tribune.

Reports said the guts of the "narcotank" are a Ford F-series Super Duty truck. It had been customized with steel plating with ports for guns or other weapons, a rotating turret and a fold-up battering ram. No weapons were in the vehicle when it was found, according to the Herald Tribune report.

Earlier this month, the Mexican army captured another armored vehicle, according to a report on BusinessInsider.com. That tank, dubbed El Monstruo 2011, was capable of going 68 mph and could carry 12 people behind its armor, the report said. It was seized in Ciudad Meir, where the Los Zetas gang has been battling over drug business with the Gulf Cartel, their former bosses, BusinessInsider said.


Some contributions from Fark:

By the looks of it, it's clearly lacking a Virgin Mary decal.

The only thing that would make it better is beer on tap or alcohol dispenser of some kind.

And maybe satellite TV.

So, the Mexican drug cartels are now building armored vehicles?

This is a couple of steps up from a plain old technical.

At what point do we go in there to help Mexico be "liberated" from their insurgency?

/Just finds it curious we spend trillions on wars on the far side of the world, while our next-door neighbor has a drug war that's turned Afghanistan-level hot from the looks of things.

If you want the uncensored version of how bad it really is, then go to www.blogdelnarco.com

William Flew on US Presidential Politics

William Flew on US Presidential Politics

As Barack Obama put his arm on David Cameron’s back and walked into Downing Street with him yesterday, I think I know what he was up to. I learnt about it on a plane trip that I took more than ten years ago. When I landed, I encountered a genius. Actually, that’s way, way too strong. What I encountered was a genius plan.
I was working for William Hague and we were booked in to meet the Governor of Texas and his wife. George W. Bush was good at all the meet-and-greet stuff and then we sat down and got on to something he was even better at — political strategy. He hadn’t yet declared himself a candidate for the presidency, but he quite happily laid out for us his strategy for getting to the White House.
Working with his political adviser, Karl Rove, Mr Bush had been trying to solve two problems at the same time. The first was that he was a Bush, his father’s son, and thus distrusted by conservatives who didn’t like the former President. Yet at the same time he was a Republican trying to follow a Democrat as president at a time of economic and military peace. He faced the danger of being simultaneously too conservative and not conservative enough.
So Mr Rove and Mr Bush developed what I regarded then, and still do, as a genius plan. They would retain their small-government, low-tax conservatism and win Christians in the South by being one of the gang. Yet at the same time they would talk about social issues — addiction, poverty, schools. They would drop the traditional Republican pledge to abolish the federal Department for Education and instead put in place a reform programme to raise standards. And they would emphasise Mr Bush’s bipartisan work in Texas and his successful appeal to Hispanics.

As Mr Rove put it to me years later, sitting in his White House West Wing office, the strategy having worked: “It’s about being for something as opposed to against something.”

It’s worth recalling all this for more than the historical (but still interesting) reason that it shows that Mr Bush was no dummy. It’s a reminder that, whatever his later reputation, George W. Bush ran for the American presidency from the centre, not the right.

He and Mr Rove spent years on a creative idea — compassionate conservatism — that could hold the base but had appeal far beyond it. And they showed immense strategic discipline. I remember sitting in the hall watching Laura Bush address the Republican Convention and marvelling that the choreography had left a classroom of schoolchildren at their desks sitting behind her.

Look at American politics today, and wonder which politician shows the same creativity and determination to position himself for victory and it’s obvious — Barack Obama. And that’s what he is doing here.


The move to the centre for Mr Obama — badly needed after the Democrats were slaughtered in the mid-term elections — started with his announcement of a deficit reduction plan. The plan was carefully calibrated, designed to look fiscally conservative while creating an issue — bringing an end to tax breaks for the rich — that kept his base and trapped the Republicans on the wrong side.

Then there was the production of the President’s supposedly missing birth certificate, a rebuke to those on the Right who — taking their cue, it must be said, from Hillary Clinton’s campaign — have been suggesting there is something unAmerican about Mr Obama. He could embarrass the ultra-Right (by exposing the idea that he wasn’t American-born as a ludicrous conspiracy theory) and at the same time deliver a direct statement, in rather clever wrapping, that he isn’t some odd leftwinger from out there, but a mainstream American.

After that, along came the discovery of Osama bin Laden’s hiding place, a fortuitous event that allowed the President to show that he is a Commander-in-Chief and not just a Chicago political organiser.

And now the visit to Europe. Naturally, in Britain, we smile at how our politicians want to be seen with Mr Obama. But on this visit, Mr Obama wants the photographs too. Being seen with the Queen at the Palace, with the Guards and the Duke of Edinburgh and with the British Prime Minister outside No 10 all emphasise that he is leader of the free world.

The message that Mr Obama hopes to send from Europe is that he is on good terms with America’s traditional allies, a proper, down-the-line President. In The Times yesterday he compared his relationship with the British Prime Minister to the one that Ronald Reagan had. Not an accident. And he said that he looked at the world in the same way as Britain’s Conservative leader. We see that as being part of Mr Cameron’s attempt to appeal to more than his ideological soulmates. But it is obviously true of Mr Obama, too. In other words, it wasn’t just the Irish homecoming and the pint of Guinness that was designed with a domestic audience in mind. That’s true of the whole trip.

Meanwhile the Republican Presidential effort continues to flounder. The announcement this weekend by Mitch Daniels, the Governor of Indiana, that he won’t be seeking the Republican nomination has not been big news in Britain. But for his party it is something of a disaster. It leaves Republicans without the one mainstream candidate whom they could confidently present as up to the job and for whom they showed any enthusiasm.

The former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, whom few rate, now faces the former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, whom few trust. In such a race, much of the energy will be with candidates on the fringe, perhaps with Newt Gingrich, who is unelectable. And none has a George W. Bush strategy — an imaginative idea allowing them to appeal to party and swing voters at the same time. Mr Romney can make up ground with the base only by alienating centre voters whom he needs if he is to be president. Mr Pawlenty is lacklustre and is relying on harsh attacks on Mr Obama to make himself seem dynamic. It’s a rather depressing sight.

What happened in the 1994 mid-terms — a crushing Republican victory, pushing a Democratic President to the centre, making his opponents look extreme and winning re-election in 1996 — could be about to happen again. I don’t think that smile on Mr Obama’s face on the Downing Street doorstep was just that he liked Sam Cam’s dress.

William Flew: Publish Your Own EBook (And Profit!)

Publish Your Own EBook (And Profit!) With Barnes and Noble’s PubIt!

Barnes & Noble just launched PubIt!, a new platform that lets individuals upload their opuses, sell them as real, honest-to-goodness ebooks in B&N's eBookstore, and keep a decent chunk of the profit.

Hopefully you have the Microsoft Word document that sci-fi epic you wrote kicking around on a burned CD somewhere, because PubIt! couldn't make it simpler to get your work to the Nook-wielding masses.

First, you upload your file. It can be in TXT, RTF, HTML, or Microsoft Word. Basically, if you banged it out on a typewriter, you're out of luck, but if it's digital, PubIt! will take it, regardless of file size, and turn it into a nice clean ePub file. Within 72 hours, your ebook will show up in Barnes and Noble's eBookstore. It'll be viewable on Nooks, natch, as well as the Nook apps for iOS, Android, PCs, Macs and the like.

You can sell your book for any price ranging from $1 to $200. A price less than $10 nets you 65% per sale, while anything above $10 gets 40%. B&N says that they won't sneak up on you with any hidden fees anywhere along the line, which, along with its simplicity, is presumably what makes PubIt! competitive with Amazon's 70/30 publishing program. Now go get writing.

Just For Mini

All you ever wanted to know about Twitter... but were afraid to ask

1 What is Twitter?

Twitter is a way to send a short message — in 140 characters or fewer — to a lot of people (as of March this year 200 million people subscribed to the social networking site). Of course, none of us has the time to read the missives of 200 million people, so once you’ve subscribed to the service (which is free), you can choose exactly who you want to “follow”, whether it’s your friends and colleagues, or Libyan rebels, or your favourite Premier League player. What you can’t choose, however, is who follows you. Encouraging people to take an interest in what you have to say is all part of the fun.

Why bother doing it? You may think it’s all pointless babble (research shows that 40 per cent of it is) but it’s also a place where world news is broken — and where you can find out what Stephen Fry had for breakfast.

And if you’re wondering why the messages are limited to 140 keystrokes, it’s because the boffins who created Twitter did so after setting themselves the challenge of providing a free internet service that emulated the short messaging system (SMS) used by mobile phones.

2 How do I get started?

After signing up on twitter.com and choosing a user name, your first task should be to make friends.

Do you want to read Alain de Botton’s condensed philosophising (May 9: the desire to be known to and liked by complete strangers should be treated as an illness like any other)? If so, find him through Twitter’s search box, and click to follow his feed (he’s @alaindebotton). Or perhaps you prefer a running commentary on Lady Gaga’s life (“May 23: My water just broke”)? Join her ten million followers. Once you have started following people — whether writers or actors, politicians or pop stars, or just your local library and your best friends — all of their “tweets” appear in chronological order on your screen as they are published.

Suddenly, you have a live feed of their thoughts and actions as they unfold. If that sounds boring (Lady Gaga, May 23: “I love spaghetti with fresh pomodoro my family and I make fresh in our friends backyard”), you can simply stop following them. Or if it’s fascinating, you can post a reply: “Hey, Lady G, spag pom tastes better if you grate dark chocolate over it instead of Parmesan.”

3 But how do I get people to follow me?

Ah yes, listening is so 20th century. The internet is about you — and you want the world to hear what you have to say.

The bad news is that there are no short cuts. It is possible to amass thousands of followers overnight, such as when IT consultant Sohaib Athar tweeted, under his Twitter name @ReallyVirtual, “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)”, accidentally breaking the news of the US assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Otherwise it can be a slow process. Someone you follow may get curious and decide to follow you, perhaps because you’ve posted an interesting reply to something they’ve written. Others may even follow you because they mistake you for someone else (who’d have thought you shared a name with an American football star?). If not, you need to tweet into the ether and hope someone happens across your missives, likes what you have to say and then passes it to their friends, or “retweets” it. So make your 140 characters count — Stephen Fry can get away with talking about being stuck in a lift, you can’t. The more interesting you are, the more people will go to your page and “follow” your updates and the larger your audience will become.

4 I don’t really have much interest in making friends, and I don’t have anything interesting to say

Congratulations! You are perfect Twitter material ... were it not for the fact that, unlike much of Twitter, you seem to be self-aware. Nevertheless, being boring and asocial is no impediment to enjoying the site. Whereas in Facebook and other social networks you form virtual “friendships” and share photographs, hobbies and all sorts of personal information, the relationships on Twitter do not have to be two-way and there is no obligation to interact with anyone else. In fact, there is no obligation to write anything whatsoever.

While some people add new tweets and updates several times a day, others write nothing at all and simply sign up to Twitter to find interesting people and read their thoughts on the biggest topics of the day or the latest developments in their particular field. Such as, say, when Jedward performed for the most powerful man in the world: “Its so cool a year ago we met President @BarackObama as a wax work but this time he was Real and he moved and he was a Jedward fan!”

5 Why should I tweet?

Perhaps your government is restricting your right to free assembly? Maybe you want to speak out against human rights abuses, and bring down a corrupt dictatorship? Or maybe you just had a bad meal at a particular restaurant and you want the world to know about it? Fire off a tweet and you might get an apology (for the bad food, that is, not the vicious tyrant).

Of course, Twitter isn’t only for noble causes, big and small. Perhaps you want to poke fun at the Question Time panel? Type in your thoughts to join a national conversation, live, as the show develops. And if you add the hashtag #BBCQT at the end of your tweet, anyone else searching for the topic will receive your views (another good way to acquire new followers).

Put simply, Twitter is like running your own news website. You update your page only with the nuggets of information and observation that you find interesting enough to share and you follow only the people who have something interesting to say, tailored however you choose.

6 What was that about hashtags?

At its worst, Twitter is like a vast, somewhat insidious, school playground. The cool kids (Stephen Fry, Caitlin Moran and — really — Sarah Brown) talk to each other, everyone else listens — and we all try to be their friend. Occasionally someone a lot less cool makes the mistake of talking to them, only to be completely blanked. For a medium credited with toppling tyrannical regimes, Twitter can sometimes itself feel surprisingly like one.

But the humble “#” is the site’s nod to democracy. If there is a running topic people are discussing, it will have a hashtag. It could be #royalwedding, for the royal wedding, or #OBL for the death of Osama bin Laden. Adding a hashtag — putting a “#” symbol in front of the theme in question — helps to sort tweets by subject and creates a special link: clicking a hashtag in someone’s update lets you see all the tweets in the world that are being written about that particular subject. And then your tweet can sink or swim on its own merits along with those of the cool kids.

7 What equipment do I need?

Technically, you need only a text message facility on your phone to be able to tweet. But that’s like saying that, technically, you need only an abacus to be able to run the Large Hadron Collider. Twitter began on computers, and computers are its milieu — for the full experience you need a computer, and you need the internet. Twitter recognises, however, that this presents a difficulty for those who wish to tweet at the dinner table/ christenings/their divorce proceedings so, along with the text message facility, there are several smart phone apps competing to give users a fully mobile version. If you want to explore the technological options further, go to http://tinyurl.com/ycm9pv6

8 Will I get into trouble with the law?

The correct answer is, only if you break it. As any judge will tell you, the laws in cyberspace are the same as in real space. However, those judges also told us we couldn’t say “Ryan Giggs had an affair”. And yet here we are, thanks partly to Twitter, saying, “Ryan Giggs had an affair”. In practice, Twitter takes an I-am-Spartacus approach to rule breaking. Currently, 75,000 people are under threat of prosecution, after telling the world about injunctions such as Giggs’s. Which is exactly the same as saying, nobody is under threat of prosecution.

It doesn’t always work, though. When tweeter Paul Chambers joked with a friend on Twitter that he would blow Robin Hood airport in Doncaster “sky high” if they delayed his flight due to snow, he was convicted of sending a menacing electronic communication. Despite his original tweet being rebroadcast around the world by supporters, he was still fined £385.

9 Still don’t get it? Here’s our guide:

Signing up
Simply go to Twitter.com, fill out the basic information on the homepage and click “Sign Up”. You do not have to share any personal information and need only a valid e-mail address to get started.

Choose a username
It might just be your name, a nickname, your company name or something anonymous. Your username will then appear with an “@” symbol before it, such as: @TheTimes2

Personalise your profile
You can, if you wish, add a small picture of yourself or your company logo and write a very short, 160-character summary of who you are. Ask yourself why people should follow you.

Find interesting people to follow
You can look for individual users in the “Search” box. When you find someone interesting, take a look at who they are following and see who catches your eye. For a list of The Times’s journalists on Twitter, for example, visit bit.ly/TimesTweeters, or for The Times’s recommendations of the best tweeters in the arts world, visit thetim.es/ArtsTweeters Start tweeting You have 140 characters to say anything you like (within the law, of course). As you type, your word count will tick down to zero, showing how much space you have left. When you are done, hit “Return” and it will be published on your page for your followers to see. You can always delete a tweet later if you change your mind.

10 Who do I follow?

Here are some fun ones to get you started:

@Betfairpoker nothing to do with poker. Just a work of comedy storytelling genius: “The key to a successful date is bringing along another date. It creates a competitive atmosphere and doubles your chance of success.”

@Queen_UK amusing thoughts from someone posing as the Queen: “Text from Mr Obama: ‘What time is dinner? Do I have to spend all afternoon with this Cameron guy?!’ One can relate.”

@KanyeWest the tough life of a mega hip-hop star: “I specifically ordered Persian rugs with cherub imagery!!! What do I have to do to get a simple Persian rug with cherub imagery uuuuugh.”

@Aiannucci comedy writer Armando Iannucci: “All over the White House they’re sending e-mails saying ‘this is a good day to bury bin Laden’.”

@SimonBlackwell writer for The Thick of It and Have I Got News For You: “I am a renaissance man, but only in the sense that I wear mauve pantaloons and have tertiary syphilis.”

@SimonPegg star of Spaced and Shaun of the Dead: “I just took my daughter to baby ballet and there was a little girl there that looked very similar to her. It was like Black Cygnet.”

@SallyBercow the indiscreet wife of the Commons Speaker: “Fusty relative muttering about ‘church clothes’. Surely God doesn’t have a problem with skinny jeans & hi-tops?”

@warne888 Shane Warne, cricketer and alleged lover of Elizabeth Hurley: “To @ElizabethHurley — Thankyou for your kind donation of a pair of white jeans — they are very sexy . . . What size are they E? Xxxxx.”

@WayneRooney Manchester Utd footballer: “Haha, bit of banter and people go nuts. Chill all people.”

@prodnose aka Danny Baker: “That was odd. Neighbour just knocked looking perturbed. Had I just heard a series of gunshots? I said I hadn’t. ‘Oh good,’ he said and went.”