Downed Robin

Car hat man

2012-02-09T13:52:00.000Z

It's freezing outside. So cold that I've driven the car half a mile down the road before I've realised that I'm still wearing a hat. In a car. This is not acceptable.

As any fule kno, only two types of male wear hats in cars:

Doddery little old men (usually with sticking out ears), who drive slowly and erratically. Hat of choice - the flat cap.
Spotty boy racers, who drive fast and erratically. Hat of choice - the baseball cap. The baseball cap effect is scalable, with levels of uncontrolled speed and spasmodic manoeuvring increasing in a predictable way as the in-car baseball cap count increases (immediate evasive action is recommended if the number of baseball caps in one vehicle is equal to, or greater than, four)

My hat comes off and I wait for the car heater to kick in. Hats in cars. There's no excuse.

Unquiet flow the Dons

2012-02-07T18:16:00.000Z

... we need to find the stars to wear the cow-suits.Chairman Pete Winkelman said: "These are key members of the team... It will be hard work, but a lot of fun."

Candidates should be around 5ft 10ins - 6ft 2ins tall and be fit. They will need to entertain the crowd and be available for home matches and other club events... Auditions will be held, and you can apply in writing to The National Hockey Stadium, Silbury Boulevard, Milton Keynes. MK9 1FA, marking your correspondence as 'MK Dons Mascot'.

From the pre-launch publicity for the MK Dons' official mascots, Donny and Mooie, back in 2004 More than seven years and a shiny new stadium later, some disgruntled Wimbledonians are still resisting the relentless progress of the MK Dons' branding juggernaut:

The Wimbledon Guardian is calling on MK Dons FC, which was Wimbledon FC until it was relocated to Milton Keynes and rebranded, to drop the Dons nickname to respect fans of AFC Wimbledon, which returned to the Football League this season.

Hours earlier, Mitcham and Morden MP Siobhain McDonagh, had raised the issue in the House of Commons, calling on the Government to support our campaign and take steps to prevent similar franchise deals in which football teams leave their communities.

The Wimbledon Guardian, on their "Drop the Dons" campaign (now endorsed by Ken Livingstone). Karl Robinson, the Manager of MK Dons is not amused:

We're MK Dons and we always will be, and they need to shut up.

It's left to a journalist at the Milton Keynes Citizen to try to develop Robinson's belligerent grunting into something approaching a coherent defence of the "MK Dons" brand:

The ‘Drop the Dons’ calls come despite:
Wimbledon having left the Borough of Merton to play at Plough Lane 12 years before the move to MK
Previous statements by high profile WISA [Wimbledon Independent Supporters' Association, a fans' campaigning organisation, opposing the move to Milton Keynes] members referring to the club as MK Dons
Dons season ticket holders still travelling from Wimbledon to watch the club at stadium:mk
Pete Winkelman having spent considerable money maintaining the Wimbledon youth sides and employing staff members from that club
AFC Wimbledon playing in Kingston Upon Thames: outside the Borough of Merton

The Citizen's first point is, like Bill Clinton's assertion that he'd never had sex with Monica Lewinsky, true only if you take a ridiculously narrow view of what happened, ignoring obvious questions, like what those affected (Hilary and Chelsea, or your average Wimbledon fan) would have called the goings-on in question.

What did the club's previous move involve? Plough Lane, in Wimbledon was the home of Wimbeldon FC from September 1912 to May 1991, when the club moved and started sharing Crystal Palace's Selhurst Park stadium. The Wimbeldon FC board decided to move to Selhurst Park after the Football League's post-Taylor Report decision that all clubs in the top two divisions must have all-seater stadiums. The board had decided that it would have been too difficult and expensive to bring Plough Lane up to the necessary standard (the local council had also approved plans for a new 20,000 seat stadium in the London Borough of Merton in 1988, but these never went ahead, presumably due to cost considerations). The move to Selhurst Park was only intended to be temporary.

Having to travel about nine miles to Selhurst Park to attend home matches that used to be just round the corner might have inconvenienced local fans, but it wan't the end of the world. It's another thing altogether to see your local club moved to a location sixty-odd miles away by road or a four hour round trip away by public transport (once you've factored in local transport links to and .from the main train / coach station at either end of the journey).

As for the second point, WISE spokespeople may well have referred to MK Dons by their brand name. So what? Using the words hardly constitutes something akin to formal diplomatic recognition. They call the re-branded club "Franchise FC", too, but I don't see The Milton Keynes Citizen making anything of that.

Yes, some season ticket holders still travel from Wimbledon to MK. Now imagine that the local football team that you've supposed all your life is suddenly re-branded with the name of a town you've no connection with and moved to a ground sixty miles away. What you gonna do? If your club means so much to you that you're not prepared to give up your season ticket, or switch allegiance, you might decide to suck it up and make the journey to MK. All that means is that you've got no alternative. It doesn't mean you like it.

If the Milton Keynes Citizen is so confident that former Wimbledon-based MK Dons fans are just fine with the move, maybe they should commission an independent polling organisation to ask them how they feel about their team's relocation and squash, once and for all, any baseless rumours that they're not entirely delighted with the move.

Pete Winkelman may have spent money maintaining the Wimbledon youth sides and employing staff members from that club. Maybe that's what they call a "sweetener", or maybe it's just because he's a nice bloke. Who knows?

Wimbledon AFC, Wimbledon's recently-formed local club do have their ground in Kingston Upon Thames. Which is less than five miles from the centre of Wimbledon. Five miles. Not sixty. See my rebuttal of the Citizen's first point. With knobs on.

It's the corporate pretence that fans have somehow bought into a move that was driven by commercial imperatives that they had no knowledge of, and no control over, that makes the MK Dons saga so interesting and so dispiriting. It's all part of the modern ideology of "free choice" which, when you look more closely, turns out to be an incredibly narrow range of unpalatable options on offer from powerful vested interests, who will spin the most grudging acquiescence to look like enthusiastic endorsement of their self-interested plans. Ignore the PR and follow the money if you want a clearer idea of what's going on:

The stadium would not exist without the enabling powers of Wal-Mart, the monolithic American retailer and now the parent company of Asda, famed for denying its staff union rights and killing off small family businesses wherever it sets up shop. The deal for 73 acres of land was done between the owners – the council and regeneration agency English Partnerships – and prospective tenants Asda and Inter MK, the holding company that took Wimbledon FC out of administration three years ago.

Asda/Wal-Mart wanted a foothold in Milton Keynes but needed the Trojan horse of a football stadium to dodge planning laws restricting out-of-town retail development. A third tenant, IKEA, was soon on board to complete a holy trinity worthy of our consumerist age...

Cynics might suggest that the ideal core business for Inter MK is events and concerts, which is certainly a business Winkelman knows. He made his money in music, some of it promoting 1980s cartoon girl punks We’ve Got A Fuzzbox & We’re Gonna Use It, and now hangs out at his manor-house recording studio and his football club. It is easy to sneer at Winkelman. For starters, there are his many style crimes and gushing platitudes. Yet if he was a slick corporate clone he would be loathed for who he is, rather than simply for what he has done. It is not necessarily his fault that he cannot convince genuine fans of football who trust their own eyes that the whole Milton Keynes Dons project is actually about the club.

When Saturday Comes

At this point I'll have to declare a lack of interest. I represent one of the UK's quietest minority groups - straight blokes who aren't really that interested in football. But I live in the MK area and I'd like to feel, if not pride, at least a lack of shame, about my local team. Heck, I might even summon up enough interest to go along to a game, if only the "local" team wasn't such an outrageous manufactured monstrosity (even MK-based fans who feel that Wimbledon should get over it and move on, feel more than a bit defensive). As things are, I have to agree with Ken Livingstone that the "Dons" tag is a bit of a joke.

Without getting too thin-skinned and parochial about it, I would take issue with one of Ken's comments, though. 'Who in their right minds would leave London to go to Milton Keynes?' I've lived in London and I've lived in Milton Keynes. There's more of a buzz about London, more to do, but there's more access to space and peace and quiet in MK. Both places have things going for them.

I lived in London up to the late 1980's (when it was still a vaguely affordable place to live on a modest salary) and gradually moved further away, via Watford, Leighton Buzzard and Milton Keynes, ending up in Newport Pagnell, on the outskirts of the MK conurbation. This isn't entirely unconnected with the boom in property prices that's underpinned much of the economic havoc blighting the economy here in the UK and elsewhere. London, at the epicentre of the UK's property bubble, is now an insanely expensive place to buy or rent a place to live.

'Who in their right minds would leave London to go to Milton Keynes?' A lot of ordinary people who can't or won't pay a fortune to live in a shoebox, Ken.

Milton Keynes is OK. Hardly the planned earthly paradise promised by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation but it still a reasonable place to live. Nowhere's exactly thriving at the moment, but MK is weathering the current economic downturn better than many places and, on the whole, it's a lot nicer than most outsiders imagine. It would be improved by having a football team that wasn't such a total embarrassment, though.

Always

2012-02-06T18:12:00.000Z

Listen up shoppers! TK Maxx always have some items on sale that cost "up to" 60% less than either the recommended retail price, or TK Maxx's non-sale price, or the price that their main competitors are charging, or whatever the hell other unspecified benchmark they're using. "Up to" being an unspecified percentage lower than, or equal to, 60%. Maybe 25%, maybe 5%, who knows? And they they throw in an extra letter "x" at no additional charge!

Is this what marketing people call a "price promise"?

It's a modern platitude that today's consumers are way more savvy and sophisticated than the poor benighted simpletons who used to buy stuff in the past. If so, why is so much marketing ostensibly aimed at adults calibrated to appeal to rather dim children? Could it be that passive, needy and not very bright people are the ideal demographic?

Maybe that's the real point of all the apparently counterproductive educational reforms of the past generation or so - training up the next generation of consumers.

Cryptid of the day...

2012-02-02T20:36:00.000Z

... is the "Gloucestershire Growler", a savage mystery beast with staring green eyes that's prowling Gloucestershire, tearing livestock limb from limb, so they say. Luckily, Frank Tunbridge is on the case. Frank who? Frank was interviewed on Radio 4's Today programme this morning:

'I like to describe myself as an intrepid big cat detective'. Frank's main job is organising car boot sales...

Ace quote and a brilliant alter ego, right up there with the late Reg, (alias Merlin of Avalon).

Good on Frank and Reg. Wouldn't it be great to know that beneath your workaday Clark Kent exterior, you had a fascinating secret identity, which you assumed to live an extraordinary second life, packed with excitement, and adventure, and really wild things? I'm not quite sure what my unique alter ego would be, what with many of the best ones, like Operating Thetan VIII, International Man of Mystery, Genius, Gentleman Explorer, French Cabaret Chantoose and Small Bets Placed, being already taken, but I'm working on it.

In the meanwhile, here's a free marketing tip for any micro-breweries down in the South West. Your actual Gloucestershire Growler might sound suspiciously like a normal-sized black cat seen, after closing time, by some bloke who thought it was a bit further away than it really was, but the name's pure branding gold. If there's not a real ale called "Gloucestershire Growler" on sale within the year, then my name's not Shadow Wolf The Adventurer (as I now like to describe myself).

The 'F-word'

2012-02-01T18:11:00.000Z

There are a few words that I'm not comfortable with. The 'N-word' for example. I don't see any reason to tolerate, still less use, racist abuse. I'd find it hard to say, even in the context of reported speech, and I'd draw my own (unflattering) conclusions about anybody using such language (with exceptions for the victims of racial abuse reclaiming such words, or the simple reporting of racist language from the past - you can't learn from history by censoring it).

I don't have such any such principled objections to swearing, but I'm still uncomfortable with it. Just a personal preference and the way I was brought up, I suppose. Obscenities will come out, under extreme provocation but, mostly, I do without. Apart from anything else, endless repetition robs the words of their power and leaves you with nothing in reserve for those, mercifully rare, occasions when a volley of unrestrained swearing really is the only adequate response to some really outrageous situation.

Another of the fringe benefits of of restrained swearing is pain relief. Recent studies suggest that swearing may give relief from physical pain. But you do have to ration your swearing - the more you swear in everyday life, the less emotionally charged the words become and the less effective swearwords are in reducing pain. I saw somebody demonstrate this effect on telly, in an experiment featuring Brian Blessed and a bucket of iced water, so it must be true.

There's one F-word that I've never, ever been able to force myself to say, though - fiancée. I got engaged a while ago and, all being well, will be married this summer. I'm quite happy with the situation, but the first time I had to refer to my significant other after our engagement, I just couldn't say the F-word and found myself falling back on the tried and tested "partner". I've never yet been able to refer with a straight face - or indeed refer at all - to "my fiancée".

It's not surprising in my case. Self and partner are both well on in our fourth decade, have a school-aged child and have been cohabiting for years, so the term sits a bit oddly, rather like "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" when applied to people beyond a certain age. But even for younger people the word has an odd, archaic ring to it.

First off, it just sounds too la-di-da, like calling a napkin a "serviette". Damn your French fads! At least "partner", sounds practical and down-to-earth. Come to think of it, Peugeot make a van called the Partner, but even the French would have to draw the line at making a commercial vehicle called the Peugeot Fiancée.

Second, The Glums. Post-Second World War Austerity Britain entertained itself by tuning in to Take It From Here, a radio comedy show written by a couple of young iconoclasts called Frank Muir and Denis Norden. The most popular part of Take It From Here was a sketch called The Glums, featuring the misadventures of the desperately perky Eth (June Whitfield) and her gormless fiancé, Ron (Dick Bentley). The Pismotality blog cites David Nathan's book The Laughtermakers: Quest for Comedy to highlight how the show reflected and mocked what was happening to the institution of engagement at the time:

It was about an engaged couple, sending up the relentlessly cheerful families then prevalent on radio, possibly a hangover from the wartime need to maintain morale. The comedy was fairly broad ... but with an undercurrent of reality, reflecting those times when long engagements were a matter of economic necessity.

Sexual intercourse may have begun in 1963, as "Chuckles" Larkin maintained, but accordin' to Norden ... there had already been stirrings in the undergrowth:

What we ... did … was to send up … family relationships, things that were fairly sacrosanct at the time.

Ron and Eth started from a sketch we did about an engaged couple. We suddenly realised that one of the most hilarious and ludicrous positions to be in was this state of being engaged. It doesn’t apply now. We described it in one of the programmes as driving with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake. Nowadays it is driving with both feet on the accelerator.

Strangely, there was something very sexual lurking behind it, though it could never be made explicit in those days. But that was what we were on about, that was what we found funny, that state of having to hold back all the time. Frustration. It was possibly the first glimmer of the permissive society struggling to be born. People sort of recognised that if you were engaged the question was why don’t you go to bed together. But one never dared say it, never mentioned it. It was just simply this blind groping, this aching state, the tension.

Of course we weren’t allowed to indicate any of this for a second, but I think it caught the public at a time when they were becoming aware of sexuality.

Ron’s voice was funny, grotesque, June's voice was absolutely true – we knew who she was founded on. There were a lot of cosy family serials and soap operas on the radio, so it was a slight send-up of them too...

... Eth was the sort of girl for whom women’s papers published photographs of ideal kitchens. .. we used to read them just to get the picture of Eth. .. What was extraordinary though was the number of letters we got from girls asking how we knew that when two people are alone they talk like Ron and Eth ... The obvious answer was that your fiancé is a moron, but they didn’t see it like that. They saw him as the ideal fiancé, completely infatuated and dominated by both parents and girl. That was how a fiancé should be ...

Read the whole thing here If you're not familiar with The Glums, the blog post has a link to a later TV recreation of the characters that captures their uniquely grotesque sound (the original recordings aren't readily available on line due to BBC copyright issues, but they're occasionally rebroadcast on Radio 4 Extra). I doubt whether the word fiancé(e) ever recovered from the association with the simpering Eth and her twit of a boyfriend.

Moving from the 1950's to the '60's, the economic conditions that made long engagements a standing joke, eased, but so did the puritanical attitudes towards sex outside marriage. Look at the figures for marriage in Britain and you'll see marriage rates rising in the 1960's presumably reflecting increased prosperity and a decline in long engagements for couples who couldn't afford to get wed just yet. But after the early 1970's, the figures go into an inexorable decline (although remarriage rates go up to a plateau that persists into the early 21st Century).

There are probably other factors at work, but the world that came after the 1960's marriage boom was different from the one that had gone before. In the old world, the institution of marriage and its preamble was Not To Be Trifled With (at least for "Respectable" folk). In the early part of the 21st century, nobody bats an eyelid at people cohabiting, or having a child out of wedlock (things unseen and unspoken of by people like my parents). People in the '50's may have laughed at The Glums, but engagement was still seen as the prologue to Something Very Serious Indeed:

DEARLY beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee; and is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men: and therefore is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men's carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God; duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained.

First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name.

Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body.

Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity. Into which holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined. Therefore if any man can shew any just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace.

That's telling 'em. Compare and contrast those splendidly thunderous words from the Book of Common Prayer with the more inclusive, less scary (and, frankly, rather drippy) form of language in common use in these more permissive times:

In the presence of God, Father, Son andHoly Spirit,
we have come together
to witness the marriage of N and N,
to pray for God's blessing on them,
to share their joy
and to celebrate their love.

Marriage is a gift of God in creation
through which husband and wife may know the grace of God.
It is given
that as man and woman grow together in love and trust,
they shall be united with one another in heart, body andmind,
as Christ is united with his bride, the Church.

The gift of marriage brings husband and wife together
in the delight and tenderness of sexual union
and joyful commitment to the end of their lives.
It is given as the foundation of family life
in which children are [born and] nurtured
and in which each member of the family,in good times and inbad,
may find strength, companionship and comfort,
and grow to maturity in love.

Marriage is a way of life made holy by God,
and blessed by the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ
with those celebrating a wedding at Cana in Galilee.
Marriage is a sign of unity and loyalty
which all should uphold and honour.
It enriches society and strengthens community.
No one should enter into it lightly or selfishly
but reverently and responsibly in the sight of almighty God.

The clergy aren't going to terrify anybody with that. In a world where marriage itself is optional and the language of the marriage ceremony is commonly reduced to a few neutered, inoffensive, feel-good words, stripped of any vestige of awe and majesty, it's no wonder that the word fiancé(e) is being quietly slipped into the drawer where "doily", "antimacassar" and other words too ridiculously quaint to continue existing, are put away to be forgotten.

Inappropriate politicisation

2012-02-01T13:14:00.000Z

There are valid arguments for not putting Fred Goodwin on the Naughty Step - chiefly, that it's a dramatic gesture that gives the impression that politicians are "doing something" without actually obliging them to do any of the big, hard, complex, systemic, mindset-changing things needed to regulate an out-of-control financial services industry and neuter its capacity to lobby policymakers, nationalise its losses and destroy the prosperity and well-being of everybody else.

Then there are invalid arguments, like this, from Simon Walker, director-general of the Institute of Directors:

To do it because... you don't approve of someone, you think they have done things that are wrong but actually there is no criminality... is inappropriate and politicises the whole honours system.

If leading members of a society decide to honour certain achievements and not others, that's a political act. If they choose to honour certain people and not others, that, too is a political act. It's all about what and whom we value as a society, (not to mention politicians using patronage to reward loyalty or favours). What could be more political? The idea that the honours system is apolitical and that the decision to withdraw an honour somehow brings the nasty, rough world of politics into a system too high-minded to bother itself with such grubby considerations must be the daftest thing I've heard all week.

Walker gets an extra bonus bullshit bingo point for using the weasel word "inappropriate" to imply that his own personal distaste represents some universally agreed standard of behaviour.

Interesting historical fact of the day

2012-02-01T08:25:00.000Z

Benito Mussolini, Premier of All the Italians, received the order of Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath from King George V. He is now at liberty to appear in the 1924 issue of Who's Who as Sir Benito Mussolini, G. C. B.!

Time

His title was annulled in 1940

We all say, 'Naughty!'

2012-01-26T13:29:00.000Z

If the leaders of Britain's two and a half main political parties are looking for a new speechwriter, children's writer Michael Rosen (best known for We're Going on a Bear Hunt) seems to have the knack of puttiing the all-party political and economic Plan A (there is no Plan B) into words everybody can understand:

We're in trouble at the moment. Every single one of us. But why? It's simple. Poor people are too rich. Many of them work in places like hospitals and schools. This has brought the world economy to its knees.

Rich people have told us they need more money so what we're doing is rolling up our sleeves and taking money from the poor people and giving it to the rich people. Then the rich people will roll up their sleeves and save the world economy.

Of course there is a tiny minority of rich people who do bad things. And we take this very seriously indeed. We say to them, 'Naughty!' And I'm pleased to say that even the Labour Party - who brought the world economy to its knees - are saying much the same thing. We all say, 'Naughty!' So no one accuse us of not taking this matter very seriously indeed.

There's you're problem in a nutshell; poor people are too rich. Quick, give that man a job, while there's still time for him to e-mail a keynote speech over to Davos!

via

In-depth analysis

2012-01-25T11:18:00.000Z

Speaking of benefit reform, you will, as always, find some of the best analysis in two of my favourite news sources:

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith insists that the current system means that there is little incentive for people to seek employment, but critics have claimed that actual jobs being available are also vital when it comes to finding work.

“In principle, encouraging people to find work is something that few people will argue with,” said Professor of Unpopular Opinions, Dr Evan Jessop.

“However, a major factor in someone’s ability to become employed is the existence of a job to become employed in.”

“A more sensible approach would be to encourage people into jobs that are actually there rather than ones that aren’t,” he argued

NewsThump

Julian Cook, chief economist at Donnelly-McPartlin, said: "Welfare reform is always complex and controversial but I think we can safely say that this time it is going to be perfect."

Long-term claimant Nikki Hollis said: "Don't get me wrong, while raising two kids in a bedsit on eighty quid a week has been a hoot, I finally have to accept that play time is over.

"I just can't decide whether to work for a major clearing bank or a traditional, high street retailer. Talk about your dizzying rainbow of life-changing opportunities."

The Daily Mash

Carey in the community

2012-01-25T10:53:00.000Z

God, apparently, takes a keen interest in welfare reform. Spokespeople for the Lord of hosts have already put forward a successful House of Lords amendment, intended to water down government proposals to impose a £26,000 household benefit cap. The Bishop of York warned that the cap would have ‘a deleterious and chilling effect on children’, making it 'harder for parents to carry out their God-given responsibility'.

The Almighty has now clarified His position on the issue, via another of His representatives, former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, who has told the Daily Mail that the £26,000 benefit cap is a Good and Virtuous measure, reforming a welfare system that robs 'hard-working, hard-pressed churchgoers' and 'rewards fecklessness and irresponsibility'.

So there you have it. There is, we are being told, a God who tales a special interest in humankind and offers clear moral guidance on specific issues via His representatives on earth. We can find out a lot about the nature of God by listening carefully to what His spokespeople are telling us.

His pronouncements on welfare reform tell us that God is a liberal, Guardian-reading type who always believes the best of the despised, the rejected, the poor and the needy, an interventionist, who believes in social justice and a strong welfare state. He is also a judgemental authoritarian, who believes in personal responsibility. He is an admirer of the hard-working squeezed middle classes and isn't afraid to castigate the the feckless and undeserving poor.

God's guidance on the subject of welfare reform, as reported by the people who claim to know him best, sounds inconsistent, even schizophrenic. Perhaps it's because mere mortals are incapable of appreciating the subtlety of His messages (He does, allegedly, move in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform), or maybe our minds must be too highly trained, or something like that.

I prefer the obvious, simple explanation that Man* created God in his own image and that the "will of God" is no more than the beliefs, cultural assumptions, priorities and prejudices of the individual citing it, given spurious authority by being attributed to an invisible, but all-seeing and all-wise entity. In political debate, coming out and saying 'I believe in x', is fine. 'I believe in x because [insert reasoned argument to support x]' is better. But 'I believe in x and so does my invisible friend, God' doesn't bring anything to the party.

You can debate the moral and practical pros and cons of any issue perfectly sensibly without any reference to God. Bringing God into an issue is just adding an unnecessary complicating factor. Without God, you can at least argue about the facts of the case and the merits or otherwise of what you intend to do about it. If you add 'and God thinks so, too', you are inviting at least three types of completely unhelpful response that take the debate away from the issue at hand, namely:

'Gosh, I'd never thought of that. I believe in God, too, so what you're saying must be right'.
'I disagree with what you're saying and I happen to know that God disagrees, too, because He told me so Himself'.
'I don't believe there is a God, so your argument is invalid' [either agree to differ or waste potentially endless time arguing about an unprovable / undisprovable assertion about a supernatural being, rather than the issue that God has been cited as being for or against]

I always thought that Alastair Campbell, Director of Communications and Strategy in the Blair government and cynical corrupter of youth in Jamie's Dream School. was a vile bully, and I haven't seen anything to make me revise my opinion, but he does deserve a tiny bit of kudos for one glorious sound bite. If only a few more people in public life (including his former boss) would just stick to the issues and say 'we don't do God'. Keep God out of politics, I say, (at least until He can come up with a consistent message and stick to it).

*The sexist language is deliberate - the Abrahamic religions show every sign of having originated with a set of rules imposed by high-status males to establish stability (and cement their own authority) within a tribal society.

Treason!

2012-01-22T09:53:00.000Z

According to the Sunday Times,* Iain Duncan Smith thinks bishops should think more about people who work and pay taxes while some unemployed people live in large houses at public expense:

I would like to see their concerns about ordinary people, who are working hard, paying their tax and commuting long hours, who don't have as much money as they would otherwise because they're paying tax for all of this. Where is the bishops' concern for them?

Off with his head!

*Link to the BBC report, rather than the News International toll booth.

News management

2012-01-20T13:17:00.000Z

Apparently, around 371,000 people who weren’t actually born in this country claimed work-related benefits last year. It’s estimated that98% of these people had worked and paid taxes for long enough to be entitled to make a claim for jobseeker's allowance, income support, carer'sallowance, disability living allowance, or whatever.

The Department for Work and Pensions is said to beinvestigating the "small number" of cases where claimants had “nolawful immigration status”. Employment Minister Chris Grayling admitted thatthe vast majority of the claimants were perfectly entitled to the benefits they’dclaimed.

I understand all that. What I don’t understand is why thisunremarkable non-story morphed into the top story on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme thismorning, with Sir Andrew Green from MigrationWatch UK trying to scare MiddleEngland witless with apocryphal stories of Bulgarian Big Issue sellers claimingto be self-employed (citation?) and Chris Grayling trying to reassure the samedemographic that our ever-vigilant Government was ready crack down at the firsthint of Bulgarian charity magazine-related misconduct, or similar.

It’s almost as if somebody in government is trying to divertattention from the government's own ill-thought out, failing, misleading, or just plain bonkers policies and big, bad news stories by encouraging journalists to focus onsome trivial side issue that really is so tiny that the politicians can crediblyclaim to have it under control.

With no sign of Her Majesty's Opposition coming up with any alternative ideas the Coalition need to respond to, the Coalition will probably get away with this sort of news management.

The new mood in Britain

2012-01-19T21:55:00.000Z

Ultimately, all this was about big money. Just like Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, Damien Hirst knew how exactly to tap the big, corporate market. He is probably the richest artist there has ever been, and in September 2008, just as world markets collapsed, he sold works worth
£111 million at a Sotheby’s auction.

The Telegraph's Peter Oborne comes to bury Damien Hirst and to praise David Hockney. Oborne doesn't know whether Hockney is a big C Conservative, but asserts that he's certainly a conservative painter, whilst the "progressive" Damien Hirst was the closest thing New Labour had to an officially approved ambassador for Cool Britannia.

It's not often that I find myself thinking like Peter Oborne, but I actually found myself nodding in agreement in quite a few places. I respect the fact that Hockney has painstakingly acquired the skills of his craft, whereas Hirst seems to be all managerialist vision, subcontracting out the skills and had work needed to actually realise that vision to anonymous artisans, then hoovering up the cash and celebrity for himself. I remember seeing some of Hirsts pencil sketches once and thinking that that this guy either couldn't draw, or just wasn't trying very hard.

And I do like the fact that Hockney respects his audience, that he takes an interest in making sure his paintings are hung high, so everybody gets a good look.

So unlike the home life of our own dear Damien, who was too busy trying to flog pieces like Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything that his assistants had made earlier to gilded members of the overclass like Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton* to worry about whether the little people were getting a good view. Exclusive art for very exclusive people.

Even the concepts are exclusive. Be honest, you don't even know what Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything is about, do you? That's because Hirst's a clever multi-millionaire and you're just a peasant.

I must admit that I have the occasional twinge of regard for Hirst (there are more ways to express yourself than putting pigment on canvas and anyone who doesn't think it's jaw-droppingly awesome for an artist to actually get one of his paintings sent to Mars must be dead inside) but, on the whole, I agree with Oborne that he's an over-hyped BS merchant, the product of a society that values self-belief, self-promotion and money over the less showy attributes of skill, diligence, questioning, observation and patience, And I don't for one second buy the argument that pieces like his diamond-encrusted skull make Hirst an outsider, making an ironic critique of our shallow, materialistic society. 'I was doing it in an ironic way' is just 'the dog ate my homework', sent to art college. Hirst's definitely inside that particular tent, pissing out.

As far as the narrow point about Hockney Vs. Hirst goes, I can't find much to disagree with. The wider lessons that Oborne draws from the comparison don't really stand up, though. The idea that all conservative, traditional art is an intrinsically Good Thing and difficult, "progressive" art is A Bad Thing doesn't stand the briefest scrutiny. For a start, half of the "great art" in our galleries was initially derided for being "difficult" modern rubbish. Even such firmly middle-of-the-road-National-Trust-notebook-cover-fodder as Monet and the Pre-Raphaelites was once thought daringly avant garde and "progressive". Not to mention the fact that the world's most notorious tyrants seem to have liked their art understandable, representational and artistically conservative - think the Stalinist school of Socialist Realism, not to mention (Godwin's Law alert) a certain frustrated artist from Austria who had major issues with progressive (or as he called it "degenerate") art.

Oborne's political pop at New Labour has some truth in it but it's also deeply disingenuous. Yes, people like Mandelson were 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich', when they should have been intensely worried about the economy-busting pyramid schemes that were enriching the few. But in a not-too-difficult-to-imagine counter-factual world where the Conservatives were in power at the height of the boom, does anybody seriously think that the post-Thatcherite party of the free market would have behaved any differently? If it'd been the Tories in power, nobody would have even bothered to come up with the 'intensely relaxed' sound bite - everybody would have assumed that the Tories were in favour of that sort of thing anyway.

Hirst's over-priced, over-hyped art is certainly emblematic of a gilded age of excess that's crashing down around our ears, but anyone who thinks that the madness was purely the fault of the New Labour and that we're now entering a blessed era of Conservative stability and sanity is living in cloud cuckoo-land. Despite failure on a superhuman scale, the all-party neo-liberal consensus that presided over the disaster is still in place.

If ever a financial order deserved a 30s-style repudiation, this one did. Its gods were false. Its taste was bad. Its heroes were oafs and brutes and thieves and bullies. And all of them failed, even on their own stunted terms.

Still the skull-faced God of greed glitters and grins down at us.

*I'm not actually sure whether M. Arnault eventually acquired the Hirst he was haggling for, but with a job title like that, you can be sure he was one of the select few who could afforded the exorbitant asking price

Cool for copycats

2012-01-16T16:16:00.001Z

The recognition of a new faith group caused a bit of incredulous hilarity earlier in the month:

A "church" whose central tenet is the right to file-share has been formally recognised by the Swedish government.

The Church of Kopimism claims that "kopyacting" - sharing information through copying - is akin to a religious service.

BBC

But, as Melvyn Bragg discovered in a recent edition of The Written Word, it's not an entirly novel idea. The relevant Wikipedia entry summarises a long-standing religious precedent:

In Buddhism, great merit is thought to accrue from copying and preserving texts , the fourth-century master listing the copying of scripture as the first of ten essential religious practices. The importance of perpetuating texts is set out with special force in the larger Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra which not only urges the devout to hear, learn, remember and study the text but to obtain a good copy and to preserve it. This ‘cult of the book’ led to techniques for reproducing texts in great numbers, especially the short prayers or charms known as dhāraṇī-s. Stamps were carved for printing these prayers on clay tablets from at least the seventh century, the date of the oldest surviving examples.

I'm cool with that. The ideaof Kopimists accumulating good karma through the act of digitally sharing the works of the Lady GaGa* seems no more wrong-headed or ridiculous than many long-established religious beliefs (like the doctrine of original sin).

If you're a copyright holder whose work is being ripped off, you may be a bit less relaxed with the idea. I can sympathise with that viewpoint, too. Maybe somebody should point out to the Kopimists that claiming exemption from the norms of reasonable behaviour and from criticism on the grounds that your actions are religiously motivated is a bit arrogant and rather unfair on everybody else. But not before they've pointed the same thing out to the spokespeople for Christianity, Islam and all the other major organised religions, who've been getting away with this sort of thing for centuries.

Issuing a stream of petulant demands may be counter-productive for political parties, but it doesn't seem to have done organised religion much harm - yet.

* Who's not averse to a spot of copying herself - at least according to some people.

If only

2012-01-13T10:29:00.001Z

Underperforming education secretaries can be removed within a term under powers being introduced in September.

Only kidding.

As usual, the smack of firm discipline only applies to the junior ranks. As you were.

Viva Las Vegas!

2012-01-08T20:45:00.000Z

A leader writer in The Economist speaks up for the City of London, usiing a truly bizarre analogy. I love the concise put-down in the comments:

'Strangely, California doesn’t talk down Silicon Valley.'

That is because Silicon Valley produces tangible, useful things (in addition to less useful things such as Facebook). Financiers produce nothing and enrich themselves by skimming from other people’s transactions.

The article could have been improved by using a more precise analogy:

Strangely, Nevada doesn’t talk down Las Vegas.

via

BS, created for you by Dave

2012-01-04T10:51:00.000Z

Politically, there's not been much good news in the past year, but I'm moderately cheered to find out that nobody seems that interested in Dave's DIY Flatpack Self-Assembly Society idea:

A good thing, too. In hard times, there are few things less cheerful than listening to the enormously well-off lecturing those struggling to get by about how there's more to life than money.

But the BS is something worse just than a return to the Victorian Values of self-righteousness and hypocrisy. It's nothing less than a government sponsored job-destruction programme. It's about throwing people who do useful work to support themselves and their families onto the scrapheap, in the hope that some mug will step in to do their job for free. The BS merchants have implicitly admitted that the jobs being destroyed to make way for their fantasy volunteer army are useful ones. If those being 'let go' were the holders of useless non-jobs who never would be missed, why the urgent need for volunteers to step in and take up the slack?

What really confuses me is that all this volunteering stuff doesn't even make sense from a conservative / libertarian / free market prospective. After all, every True Believer in The Almighty Market knows that where there's a need, the Invisible Hand will surely provide. A society stuffed with do-gooding volunteers can only interfere with the smooth operation of the market and the entrepreneurial incentive to cater for every need at the right price.

Mind you, from the point of view of the practical exploitation of labour, as opposed to right-wing ideological purity, BS volunteering is right up there with unpaid internships as a way of keeping opportunity out of the proles' grubby hands and normalising the idea that people should be grateful that they're doing something rather than nothing, without aspiring to any high-flown notions of actually being paid for doing a useful job.

It might be dressed up in vague, fluffy, communitarian-sounding language, but on closer examination, Dave's BS is one of the nastiest, most divisive and most cynical initiatives the Nasty Party has ever come up with and I'll be delighted to see it fester away to nothing on the muck heap of history.

From the fury of the chicken ships deliver us, O Lord

2012-01-02T21:10:00.001Z

Watching our hens fussing and bobbing about in the back garden, I've been thinking that they reminded me of something, but I couldn't, for the life of me, think what. It's just come to me, though. They've got the same proportions as old sailing ships. From the generously rounded curves of the lower hull to the upward sweep towards the jutting forecastle and the sprightly, upturned stern, the craft that kicked off the European Age of Exploration looked like nothing so much as giant sea-going chickens.

It would be really neat to say that galleons were the ships most like Gallus gallus domesticus but, sadly for alliteration fans, galleons lacked the high, ungainly forecastle of the earlier carrack, the most hen-like ship of all. Look at the top picture of Portuguese carracks off a rocky coast. Not only do these ships have the bodies of wooden chickens, but the flapping mainsail of the foreground vessel will ring a bell with anyone who's ever seen a running hen steadying itself with an outstretched wing.

Columbus, Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Vespucci and Jacques Cartierall sailed these quaint, gawky-looking carracks to to the blank spaces on the maps to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no European had gone before.

It was an exciting time, but also a brutal one. A time of trade, of discovery and of armed men being disgorged from the wooden bellies of the floating Trojan chickens, bringing conquest, disease, slavery and genocide.

There's something almost deceptive about the unthreatening, domesticated shape of these vessels. So unlike the low, spare, purposeful menace of a raiding viking drangonship:

Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Danevikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold.

Death's a sly customer, who doesn't always appear in the shape we expect. Death can easily bob into your life in a disguise as absurd as a big, floating chicken. Aeschylus, they say, was unexpectedly killed by a falling tortoise. If the tortoises don't get you, the flying bears might. But whatever form your ship takes, it will come in one day:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to a mouth's kiss.

So here's a late New Year's resolution - treasure every finite moment, of life, however confusing, infuriating and absurd it may seem:

Ah, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears
TO-DAY of past Regrets and future Fears:
To-morrow—Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n thousand Years.

May your years be long.

Supping with the Devil

2011-12-31T14:26:00.000Z

Don't drink fake vodka that could kill you or make you go blind and if you know of anybody who's supplying this illegal, toxic muck, shop them to the police; it might save somebody's life and being nicked is no more than these criminal entrepreneurs deserve.

It's quite a simple good guys / bad guys story. Think about into the legal, but scarcely less harmful, tobacco industry and things get a lot more complicated. The industry continues to invest the profits from harming its customers into advertising, where it's still legal, lobbying, misinformation, moving to less regulated markets, sockpuppetry and fighting any form of restriction every inch of the way, with just the occasional tactical retreat. Operating on the right side of the law, the industry has a lot more freedom to market its product, to openly (if discreetly) influence movers and to shakers and recruit potential consumers than a criminal enterprise producing dangerous knock-off booze or selling illicit drugs.

On the whole, I think it's best to have regulated drug production on the right side of the law. The tobacco barons might be worse than socially useless, but at least they don't generally add the victims of turf war shoot-outs to their tally of avoidable casualties, or create violent, lawless ghettos where society can't protect ordinary citizens, or generate armies of desperate addicts, reduced to robbery, mugging or prostitution to feed their habit.

Looking at the reality of big tobacco is still a sobering experience for people like me who favour a relatively liberal harm reduction approach to drugs over that good versus evil fairy tale called The War Against Drugs. To make licencing and control work, policymakers would have to deal with people who don't mind harming their fellow creatures for profit. And somehow, restrict and tax their activities to the extent that they do the minimum amount of harm, yet not so much that it's not worth trading legally and substantial numbers of suppliers are driven back underground and trade illegally, like the knock-off vodka merchants.

That, I think, is why we're stuck with so much inefficient and punitive anti-drug legislation. Introducing a controlled market in drugs, calibrated to cause the minimum harm seems like the best way to go, but a portion of the benefits would inevitably be neutralised by the drug suppliers bending every rule in the book to translate some of their profits into barely legal ways of promoting their product and growing their market. People would die, making the policymakers who did deals with ruthless and socially irresponsible suppliers look weak and compromised. And saying what you're for and against in stark black and white terms, rather than dealing in the precise shade of grey that yields the least worst solution in the real world, just sounds so much more sincere and satisfying.

It's easy to be angry at the irrationality and injustice of it all, but damn near impossible to imagine how to effectively sell harm reduction in a way that will trump the emotional appeal of going after the bad guys.

God rest ye (in peace) merry gentlemen

2011-12-29T21:02:00.001Z

I belatedly spotted a bit of seasonal decoration in Newport Pagnell today. Most of the local shops have put some sort of Christmas display in their windows, as you'd expect. What I didn't expect, or notice until today, is that the funeral director has joined in. White and silver baubles and a bit of tinselly stuff draped over the black marble headstone in the window.

Is it just me who finds this odd, or are there some places where festive jollity and glitter are just wrong?

Hail to the Chief

2011-12-29T20:47:00.001Z

Between Christmas and New Year Radio 4’s Today programme gives a select group of prominent public figures a golden ticket become the programme’s guest editor for the day. This morning it was the turn of former banker and businessman Sir Victor Blank, who commissioned series of reports, exploring, with suitable reverence, that magic fairy dust called ‘leadership’ by respectfully asking why certain individuals were blessed with this superhuman talent.

By a fluke of timing, Sir Vic’s attempts to explore the mysterious essence of leadership were surreally undercut by news reports of the carefully choreographed obsequies for the late Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, and the synchronised ascension of the Glorious Successor, Kim Jong-un, to the status of Supreme Leader.

Accounts of the Kim-fest should have been enough to put all but the most sycophantic off Sir Vic’s attempt to enlist them them as star-struck groupies on his leader-worship tour.

My big fat Nazi wedding

2011-12-19T15:09:00.000Z

Marriage is not just a piece of paper. It pulls couples together through the ebb and flow of life. It gives children stability. And it says powerful things about what we should value.

David Cameron

There's a little bit of what Cameron says here that that I could just about agree with. When children are planned, or come into the picture, for some couples, a public commitment to try to make their future as a family work, in front of friends and family, might help to cement the relationship. In which case, fine.

But that's about as far as it goes. Couples and families can function (or be dysfunctional) in all sorts of diverse ways and I'm quite happy to be a true localist and trust couples who are old enough to wed or not to wed to make their own decisions, based on the immense variety of individual circumstances, relationship dynamics, beliefs and sheer idiosyncrasies that make every person, every couple, and every family, unique.

As the head of an allegedly pro-individual choice, Big Society / small state government, Cameron seems strangely keen on using public resources in a top-down attempt to vet people's domestic arrangements, using the tax system to 'nudge' them towards officially-documented, state-approved relationships

I can see that some people don't approve of some kinds of relationship. Sometimes the way other people choose to conduct their relationships doesn't impress me much. Take the forthcoming wedding ushered in by that Nazi-themed stag party recently attended by disgraced MP, Aidan Burley. I'm not particularly concerned about Burley, as it's long since been common knowledge that some of the most select members of the establishment find a spot of Third Reich cosplay rather jolly, but the bride-to-be should be having some serious second thoughts about being betrothed to somebody with such a peculiar idea of fun

Some bits of stag party foolishness are forgivable, even endearing to a potential spouse. Ending up blotto in your underpants, singing a medley of Queen's greatest hits with a traffic cone on your head, for example, might mark you out as a bit of a daft lad, but might it also show that you've got a fun side and don't take yourself too seriously. But slipping into a SS uniform, insulting waiters, drinking toasts to 'the ideology and thought processes of the Third Reich' and chanting Nazi slogans? Surely, the only appropriate response from any sensible bride-to-be would be 'the wedding's off, creep!'

In the event that the guy's fiancée already knew of, and tolerated, his behaviour, I'd think it depressing that people like that might actually end up breeding. Mind you, celebrating your forthcoming nuptuals with a "heil Hitler" is so inauspicious that, matters of taste notwithstanding, we might not need to worry about them procreating. Many modern marriages don't last, but at least most are more lasting than the Hitlers', which endured for less than 24 hours and dispensed with the traditional honeymoon in favour of a suicide pact in an underground bunker.

There are lots of people who do and don't want to get married. A few of them might be obnoxious, boorish prats but that's a problem for them and their nearest and dearest. If I find them obnoxious, I'm at perfect liberty to say so, but not to stop them getting hitched, or whatever else they might decide to do as consenting adults.

It's not a matter for the state to approve or disapprove of, either. In any case, the "tax breaks for married couples" idea is such a blunt instrument that it wouldn't distinguish between the anschluss cementing some oaf with an SS uniform in his dressing-up box to his little Eva and other, more wholesome, relationships, so I don't think much of it as an agent for upholding moral rectitude, even if I was a fan of the 'morality police' concept (which I'm not).

I'm not saying there's no role for the state in helping families - Scandinavian-style affordable, high-quality childcare provision alongside comprehensive parental leave policies seems to have a positive effect in decreasing child poverty and increasing the level of female employment (with a resulting increase in tax revenues) - but giving people a small tax bribe to get married, (whether or not children are planned or involved), without such convincing evidence that the expenditure might pay dividends, seems like an dogma-driven, intrusive and poorly-targeted piece of state intervention to me.

Friends in high places

2011-12-18T16:26:00.000Z

Kevin Trudeau, the king of too-good-to-be-true late-night TV scams, must pay $37.6 million in fines and restitution after he ignored an FTC order to stop making infomercials.

A federal appeals court has ruled, after thirteen years of litigation, that the feds were within their rights to ban him from making TV ads for his books, which include "The Weight Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You To Know About" and "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You To Know About."

The FTC's pursuit of Trudeau goes back to at least 1998, when the FTC fined him $500,000 for deceptively advertising Eden's Secret Nature's Purifying Product, which falsely claimed to improve your immune system.

After that, Trudeau graduated to perhaps his most cynical infomercial in which he claimed that eating coral calcium could cure cancer.

According to Business Insider.

Me, I just love informercials.

For most people a $37.6 million dollar legal bill would be inconvenient, at the very least. Fortunately for Kevin Trudeau, he just happens to be an 'ex-member of The Brotherhood' [that's The Illuminati to you, peasant], who, along with 30 other members of various seceret societies have [sic] created a BRAND NEW elite, private organization that YOU are allowed to join.' This elite, private club was, apparently, 'created to empower the masses.'

With friends like these, not to mention the ablity to achieve the apparently imposssible feat of creating a club that is at once elite and private, yet open to a mass membership consisiting of absolutely anybody who can click on a web link, Mr Trudeau is clearly not a man not to be trifled with.

In the almost infinitely unlikely event that anyone at the Federal Trade Commission is reading this, please guys, save yourselves while you still can! Don't keep upsetting Mr Trudeau. A man with connections like that could crush you all like ants.

via

War (what is it good for?)

2011-12-15T10:13:00.000Z

Here's a dramatic1940's colour photo of some workers helping to build a Liberator bomber. I love the tight composition and the old-master-style chiaroscuro effect (photo courtesy of The Library of Congress).

It's a small reminder of the vast amount of material and labour diverted from productively satisfying everyday human needs and desires into the destructive business of war. Writing in post-war austerity Britain, George Orwell lamented the waste in his fictionalised account of a nation inured to total war:

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

1984

There are contrasting views, and they don't come more contrasting than this:

But it was not until government spending soared in preparation for global war that America started to emerge from the Depression. It is important to grasp this simple truth: it was government spending—a Keynesian stimulus, not any correction of monetary policy or any revival of the banking system—that brought about recovery.

Joseph Stiglitz, in an essay for Vanity Fair

I know it's supposed to be a text-book example of Keynsian economics, but still find it quite mind-boggling that such a vast material effort, diverted to ends that weren't just unproductive,* but were actively destructive, could apparently bring about economic recovery. It makes me realise that I need to find a clear economic history of the period that explains what was going on in language accessible to a non-economist.** Such a book ought (assuming Stiglitz and other kindred economic historians are right about cause and effect) to be required reading for policymakers in these post-bust times.

Maybe what the world needs now is war, sweet war (preferably a toned-down version, with none of that unpleasant killing people business).

*I'm talking in purely economic terms here, without any reference to the morality of the conflict.

** Any suggestions gratefully received

Occupy your bank account (UK)

2011-12-13T18:02:00.000Z

There's an overriding problem with the Occupy movement. The majority of people have responsibilities that mean they can't put their lives on hold to sit in a tent and protest for weeks on end. And the fact that there are people who can do this leaves the movement open to the charge that the people doing the protesting are just an unrepresentative, pampered or workshy minority (as I've mentioned before).

It's a bit of a Catch-22 situation. Most of the political class seem either unable to comprehend the seriousness of the situation, or are unable to stand up to those lobbying on behalf of a broken system that's dragging the rest of us down, yet the people with the time and commitment to press for change are marginalised.

The best way forward I can see for the Occupy movement is to become a catalyst for the sort of mass activism that involves the majority of people who can't just take a month off to man the barricades. There's already something along these lines, an idea that, I think deserves some support. The Move Your Money project in the US 'aims to empower individuals and institutions to divest from the nation's largest Wall Street banks and move to local financial institutions'.

I'm no great fan of consumer activism when there's any other alternative, being old-fashioned enough to believe in one person, one vote, regardless of that person's spending power, but the call to "Occupy Your Bank Account" is at least something a lot of ordinary people could get involved in and something that could potentially make a difference, if enough people could be persuaded to take their money out of 'Too Big To Fail' banks and put it somewhere else - Move Your Money suggests community banks and credit unions.

Could this work, either in the US or here in the UK? Inertia sticks most people to their existing bank accounts - the faff of changing, (especially if you've got a few direct debits) is enough to put people off moving their money. On the practical side, a lot of people also stick because of the convenience of having a local branch of Whatever Megabank Plc in their area, with gives them access to a network of ATMs more or less wherever they are.

On the ideological side, there's also evidence that a lot of people just don't care or, even more depressingly are venting their anger and frustration on the victims of the financial chaos, rather than on the perpetrators.

There is hope, though. If I google the slogan "occupy your bank account", I find quite a few bank web sites popping up among the activist Facebook groups and so on. NatWest tops the list and, hilariously, that embarrassingly ungrateful state-subsidised amalgam of arrogance, greed and failure, the Royal Bank of Scotland, comes second. Maybe they're just a little bit scared.

If the megabanks have been tweaking their Search Engine Optimisation to assimilate anti-megabank slogans (You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile), it might be a signal that they're a little bit worried that people might get angry enough to empty their accounts.

The Credit Unions suggested by Move Your Money might be a good place for a savings account, should you be lucky enough to have savings but, as far as I know, they don't offer a full range of services, such as, for example, a debit card you can stick into a Link ATM (although it looks as if there are some Credit Union Debit Cards out there). Still, you can find out if there's a Credit Union you could join here.

But if you want to punish the big boys and still be with a big(ish) name on the high street, with Internet banking and a usable debit/cashpoint card and all the other services the average account holder wants, you could always bank with the Co-op:

The Co-operative Bank is still the only UK high street bank with an Ethical Policy voted on by its customers. So, as a customer, it's you who has the final say about where your money goes and where it doesn't...

Being owned by a co-operative, we're accountable to our members and customers, not stock markets and speculators. Also, because we don't have shareholders to consider, we can aim to deliver stable and sustainable growth and whenever possible avoid taking excessive risks.

From the Co-operative Bank's web site. Things aren't quite as ethically perfect as the blurb on the web site makes out - the Co-op Bank still has substantial investments in Imperial Tobacco and British American Tobacco - but I reckon you can keep a clearer conscience banking with the Co-op still than with your average high street bank and, if you join, you have a vote and a voice to change things. They may not have many local branches, but they've got Link cash machines.

I like to think that the Co-op appear third in the search results for "occupy your bank account" because their ethical principles genuinely set them apart from the other banks who just seem to be trying to cynically co-opt the phrase to airbrush their image (the most cynical being the executives at the disgraceful Royal Bank of Scotland, who should hang their collective heads in shame for trying to appropriate an ethical finance slogan whilst having gone further than any other bank in denying 1.1 million of its basic bank account customers access to the majority of free cash machines). Fred the Shred may be gone, but the foul stench of his spirit lingers.

Or you could join the Nationwide, the world's largest building society and the largest UK building society not to be swept away in the suicidal wave of demutualisations of the '80s and '90s (despite the carpetbaggers' attempts to take them down). Remember when the bits of the of the last demutualised society, Bradford and Bingley, had to be nationalised or sold off to Santander?

For the past decade the banks, building societies and other specialist lenders have all taken part in the biggest house price, and mortgage lending, boom in the UK's history.

One thing that has helped the banks in particular has been their ability to borrow money from other financial institutions, rather than just from savers, to fund their mortgage lending.

Building societies are restricted by law to funding just 50% of their lending this way and the average among societies is much less, at about 30%.

It is this borrowing, and the current difficulty in repaying it, that lies at the heart of the problems that have been experienced by the Northern Rock, Halifax and now the B&B.

Noted the BBC at the time. A responsible organisation that didn't participate in the speculative, bubble-inflating madness that the rest of us are still paying for seems like a pretty good place to put your pennies, especially when it gives you access to Link cash machines, Internet banking and possibly even a branch near you.

I'm not sure that any movement can arouse the necessary levels of political engagement and solidarity needed for a mass closure of accounts in the big banks, given current levels of cynicism and scapegoating (if the big banks had attracted the same level of vitriolic abuse as their victims, like the unemployed, the disabled and public sector workers, the buggers really would be running scared).

Maybe the message needs to include an appeal to self-interest, too - after all, come the next, or next-but-one, crash the country might run out of money to bail out reckless banks and then where will you be if you trusted one of them with your life's savings? I'm sure of one thing, though - the current political parties and their leaders aren't up for delivering any real change in the balance of power.

If the politicians had the desire or the ability to deliver real change and sustainable finance, we might have seen it when the time came to dispose of the failed Northern Rock bank. But they weren't able to do anything bold, like breaking it up and selling the bits to responsible mutual building societies, (partly due to European Commission rules putting a time limit on how long the Rock could stay in public ownership). The resulting deal saw the big financial institutions partying like the global financial crisis never happened:

To sum up: the Virgin deal guarantees big losses for the taxpayer, uses exotic financial techniques analogous to those which caused the Rock to collapse in the first place, and leaves us with a bank which is measurably less safe.

And, as we've just seen, the City of London has only to whistle for its toy bulldog, Cameron to come trotting obediently to heel, so it's not too difficult to work out that you've got a better chance of seeing magic unicorns floating down from the clouds to make everything better than you have of seeing the current generation of politicians putting the interests of the people who elected them before those of massive financial institutions. If change doesn't come from below, it's not coming at all.

Emptying bank accounts might work, as might other forms of activism; targeting political parties and their events and conferences, exposing the lobbying and PR industry that trumps democratic mandates, maybe even putting up parliamentary candidates in the style of Martin Bell, the "anti-sleaze" candidate in the 1997 UK general elections. Putting up some tents and making a lot of noise is absolutely necessary to keep the issue at the top of the news, where it belongs, but I don't think it's sufficient any more.

Choice cuts

2011-12-11T10:21:00.001Z

Too lazy to post tonight, but here are a few things that caught my eye recently. First up, a bizarre slice of hot, steaming 'Obama's a Muslim' teapottery from my all time favourite Internet loon.

Next, Cameron's euro-tantrum on behalf of his City paymasters inspired my favourite blog post title of the week; The Bulldog Flaps its Jowls (second prize goes to From Chamberlain to Churchill to Blimp).

There's an interesting piece on our current age of austerity and historical parallels at Flip Chart Fairytales. The killer quote is from Will Hutton, but don't let that put you off:

[T]he last time Britain endured such an extended period of depression and falling living standards – the 1870s and 1880s – saw the mushrooming of the co-operative movement and the emergence of the Labour party as the more moderate expressions of anger that wanted to challenge the very basis of capitalism.

I've always thought it was a good idea to keep religion out of politics, on the grounds that I've never found 'because God says so' to be a convincing argument for doing or not doing anything. Unity at The Ministry of Truth, has come to a similar conclusion, but after applying a bit more intellectual rigour and a lot more research:

So, the moral of the story is that if you’re after a fig leaf for some of the nastier aspects of human prejudice, then nothing comes close to a hefty dose of That Old Time Religion, but if its civil right and liberties and a robust, fully-functional democracy you’re after then its best to keep all the god-bothering to a minimum and at a safe distance from government.

'If you can keep your head when all around you have lost theirs, then you probably haven't understood the seriousness of the situation' - Nick Cohen takes a peek through the scary door:

Observer journalists are embarrassed because we thought in 2008 that the world would have to change. Naive fools that we were, we imagined that the severity of the crisis would make reform of the banking system inevitable. We believed that we would no longer live in a country where the media greeted roaring house price inflation as a cause for celebration and where ministers could get away with leaving the unemployed to fester on the dole...

...With leaders providing no guide to the future, the public has decided to keep their heads down and plough their own furrows. The suffering of others, the hundreds of thousands whose hopes are falling faster than Icarus from the heavens, no longer concern them. Support for tax increases to improve public services is diving, according to the British Social Attitudes Survey. Half the public thinks that unemployment benefits are too high – presumably the half that has never been forced to live on them. Many more say that if children are poor that is because their parents do not want to work, not because they cannot find work.

Give up and stop pretending that electorates and prime ministers can control the world, they mutter to themselves. Bolt the doors, lock the windows, yank the curtains shut and hope that when disaster comes it will hit your neighbours and leave you and yours alone.

Read the rest here, if you don't freak out too easily. Sweet dreams.

Christmas Carols, Doris and Cleopatra

2011-12-07T16:13:00.001Z

Some not particualrly original festive thoughts on our Christmas traditions and the only two canonical gospels that mention Christ's childhood (Matthew and Luke):

We three kings of orient are

Matthew writes about wise men, but doesn't directly say that there were three of them,* or that they were kings. Luke doesn't mention them at all.

Once in royal David's city / Stood a lowly cattle shed and Away in a manger, no crib for a bed

Really? Matthew doesn't mention Mary and Joseph having to travel to Bethlehem to be counted for any census, or getting turned away from any inns and ending up in a stable. He just writes 'Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king'. When the wise men arrive in Bethlehem they see the star standing over where the child was and go into the house. Just a house - no mention of an inn, or a stable and no indication that Joseph and Mary are away from home. If Matthew was your only source, the whole back story about the prospective parents wandering around far from home and ending up in a stable would be lost and you'd conclude that Joseph and Mary lived in Bethlehem and had a home birth.

But it's in Luke, isn't it?

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

Well, it's there in the King James version, but the word 'inn' is apparently a very loose translation of the Septuagint's katalemna, which means something more like "temporary shelter". Innkeepers have been getting a lousy rep for countless generations on account of this one.

As for the manger, the word used in was thaten. Depending on context this word could mean an animal's feeding trough, but it could also mean a child's crib. Given the context, it's far more likely that the child was laid in a crib rather than a trough, and that the translator has probably just used the wrong sense of thaten.

Allthose carols, all that art, all those nativity plays, all those children's crib scenes, all those jokes about Joseph and Mary being in a stable relationship, down to a simple translation error.

Herod, the king, in his raging / Charged he hath this day / His men of might, in his own sight / All young children to slay

At last, something that's definitely in one of the gospels, Matthew. Luke makes no mention of the massacre of the innocents. Some scholars have pointed out that, not only is this story omitted from Luke, but there are no independent records of this atrocity, (for example in Josephus). There is a relatively reasonable counter argument, often used by Christian apologists. These were brutal times and there were probably many atrocities that would seem shocking to us today that contemporaries wouldn't have thought extraordinary enough to mention, (also, history is usually written by the winners, who don't tend to advertise their misdeeds, and countless documents haven't survived the passage of two thousand years).

I could just about buy that, but it's the discrepancy between the two gospels themselves that makes me suspicious. Say you're a a Roman historian and you decide not to record that a paranoid puppet ruler in one of the provinces killed a few local kids. Or maybe you mention it in passing, but the last copy of your account is lost five hundred years later. Both scenarios are quite plausible.

Now imagine that you're Luke, writing an account of Christ's childhood. Your story isn't a general history of Caesars and other celebrities, it's a biography of Jesus. Don't you think that if the king, no less, tried to have the baby Jesus killed, slaughtering innocent children in the process, forcing Jesus' parents to flee and live abroad as refugees, it might be worth a mention? Especially as you've found time to mention unremarkable details like the infant Jesus being circumcised.

You just wouldn't hold the front page to report that Jesus had the snip like any other Jewish kid, but not think it newsworthy that his parents also smuggled the baby hundreds of miles to a foreign country to escape an attempted high-level assassination attempt that resulted in numerous collateral casualties. It sounds as if either the massacre didn't happen, or Luke was the kind of guy you wouldn't want editing a newspaper. No Pulitzer Prize for you, Lukey boy.

The missing massacre underlines the fact that we're being told two separate and incompatible stories. In Matthew, Jesus is born in Bethlehem, then his parents get a tip-off from the wise men and flee to Egypt to keep Jesus safe from Herod. Eventually, an angel appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him that Herod's dead and it's safe to go back home. Joseph and Mary have trust in God, so they head back home. But not that much trust, because when they find out that Herod's son is now on the throne in Jueda, they decide not to return to Bethlehem, but divert to Nazareth, just to be on the safe side.

In Luke, Joseph and Mary start off in Nazareth, then we have that odd story about Caesar Augustus telling everybody in the Empire to up sticks and return to their ancestral homes to be counted and taxed (if the Romans really had faffed about like that, ordering everybody to return to their birthplace every time they wanted to raise a few sisterces, their empire would have fallen a damn site sooner). As a result, they wind up in Bethlehem when the baby's due. From Bethlehem, the couple take Jesus to Jerusalem 'to present him to the Lord'. After that, they go home to Nazareth.

Both versions of Jesus fulfil earlier prophecies by being born in Bethlehem and by being a Nazarene, but there are two conflicting back stories. Matthew's inclusion of the flight to Egypt gives him a chance to throw in another authoritative prophecy, but means that his account and Luke's are irreconcilable,

Lo, he abhors not the Virgin's womb

The virgin birth is there in both accounts, but it's very well-known that the idea of a virgin birth might plausibly just be another simple translation error. In the authoritative Hebrew text, Isiah uses the Hebrew word "almah", which could mean "maiden," "young woman," or "virgin," which was translated into the Greek "parthenos" in the Septuagint. It may well be that Matthew and Luke decided that Jesus had to be born of a virgin, to fulfil Isiah's prophecy, but Isiah never had a virgin birth in mind in the first place. The argument isn't a clincher, but taken together with the other discrepancies, it makes the whole tinsel-covered edifice look a bit wobbly.

At this time of year we're used to hearing clerics telling us to pause and think about the real meaning of Christmas, but it seems to me that if more people looked clearly at what was written in the gospels, rather than the familiar, cosy, soft-focus, fuzzy amalgam of two different accounts that now passes for the Christmas story, their reflections might lead to more sceptical conclusions than the clergy would like. Be careful what you wish for, guys - after all, there are plenty more discrepancies where these came from.

But what's with Doris and Cleopatra? Nothing significant, just a quite interesting factoid I stumbled across when reading round the subject. King Herod the Great , I discovered, was an even more enthusiastic proponent of serial matrimony than Hernry VIII. Herod wasn't content with a mere six wives, but seems to have got through nine in his infamous career. According to Wikipedia (and why would anyone lie about it?) his first wife was called Doris and wife number five was called Cleopatra. There's even a rumour that Herod's wife Cleopatra was that Cleopatra, in which case the old girl certainly got around a bit, (sounds more like a case of mistaken identity to me, as it's as hard to reconcile with the other accounts of her life as the two gospels are to reconcile with each other).

I can't help regretting that there's no place for Doris and Cleopatra in the Christmas story. After all, we know to next to nothing about the wise men, not even whether or not they were real, but they've traditionally been given names - Melchior Caspar and Balthasar -and assigned a starring role, which is a tad unfair on some of the other people who were around at the time who unambiguously did exist.

Anyway, however flaky the Christian stuff tacked on to the pagan midwinter festival is, it's still as good an excuse as any to take some time out, get together with friends and family and pop open a bottle of your favourite tipple, so I'll happily drink to that bit:

*As the unspecified number of wise men gave three gifts, or three types of gift, gold frankincense and myrrh, it's not surprising that the tradition of three wise men emerged, but it ain't necessarily so.

All I want for Christmas

2011-12-04T10:34:00.001Z

This season's must-have boy's* toy is a tank. None of your puny radio-controlled 1/24th scale rubbish, mind, but a full-sized kick-ass 60 ton steel killing machine. Finance? No problem...

* or tank girl's

via

Releasing a powerful dose of austerity

2011-12-04T10:00:00.000Z

A lovely little advert for the quack medicine du jour. Just becaus it's your fault doesn't mean others can't suffer for you. Video embedded or here:

via

Without the bare necessities

2011-12-02T09:23:00.001Z

So Mowgli went away and hunted with the four cubs in the jungle from that day on. But he was not always alone, because, years afterward, he became a man and married.

But that is a story for grown-ups.

Rudyard Kipling The Jungle Book

My first introduction to the mythical archetype of children raised by wild animals was probably a showing of Disney's 1967 version of The Jungle Book at the Scarborough Odeon* but the idea goes even further back than those distant days when I were a lad. Right back to some of civilisation's founding legends, in fact, and the tales of Enkidu, Atalanta and Romulus and Remus.

Did these legends have any basis in reality? I find it hard to believe. Human babies at the suckling stage are so vulnerable, helpless, immobile and relatively big that I can't imagine any wolf or boar being capable of keeping them alive, even making the massive assumption that such a wild animal might be so awash with maternal hormones that it would categorise a human infant as "offspring" rather than "snack". Toddlers aren't much more self-sufficient and I'd have thought that to have the tiniest hope of survival in the wild, a human child would have to be at the very least four years old or so and remarkably self-sufficient and lucky (by which stage some humans must have been involved in keeping the child alive through infancy, so this wouldn't be a true "wild child").

Real life-examples of children raised by animals have been claimed, from an Irish boy allegedly brought up by sheep, cited by Dr. Tulp, the star** of Rembrandt's painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, to "Mowgli's Sisters", Amala and Kamala, two wild children allegedly raised by wolves in Midnapore, India and discovered by a missionary in the 1920's. In the absence of much surviving evidence, I'm happy to put Sheep Boy down to somebody puckering up to the Blarney Stone, whilst the more recent and better-documented tale of Amala and Kamala looks pretty dodgy under examination.

There are more credible stories of feral children who have lived wild after presumably being abandoned or losing parents or guardians at a later stage (some, but not all, of these stories involve the child allegedly being raised by animals, or living with them in the wild). Most of these children appeared to have no language; possibly because they were been abandoned before having leaned to speak, or, more probably, so early in their language development that they lost the ability to speak.

As we move from legend to better-documented facts, the story gets bleaker (although the fate of Amala and Kamala was itself pretty bleak, whatever the children's true story was):

Feral children have long fascinated scientists. Apart from the sheer pathos of their stories, they raise some gut issues: how do we become human? If we fail to learn critical skills as children, is it impossible to do so later?

Most feral children have been severely stunted and remained so all their lives, suggesting that early human contact is essential to normal development... Being a wild child may conjure up visions of some Blue Lagoon-type idyll, but the reality is unspeakably cruel.

Cecil, The Straight Dopes's über-polymath

For obvious reasons, nobody today is prepared to perform a controlled experiment on the effect of withdrawing human contact and interaction from small children. According to Herodotus, the Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus had no such ethical worries and ordered two children to be raised without anybody speaking to them, in order to settle a hot debate about whether Egyptian or Phrygian was the world's most ancient language. The idea was that the first sounds the children produced without prompting would represent humankind's primordial tongue.

Herodotus wrote that the children were heard to make a sound that resembled "becos", the Phrygian word for bread, so Psammetichus' researchers concluded that Phrygian was the more ancient language.

In modern times, children aren't deliberately withdrawn from human contact in the name of academic research, but a lot of academics have spent a lot of time studying the effect of isolation on children who have been raised without human contact due to abuse or neglect, like "Genie", the pseudonymously famous victim of horrific childhood incarceration and abuse from the 1970's. A common theme is that language skills, emotional development and the capacity for independent living are stunted, usually irreversibly, by lack of human contact in the early years.

It's a tragic reversal of the archetype of the heroic child of nature, freed from the stifling, artificial straitjacket of human society, flowering into an independent, emotionally unconstrained free spirit.

Spinoza 1 - Rousseau 0

* Scarborough's Odeon closed over twenty years ago, which makes me feel very old. More happily, the 1930's art deco building escaped the usual destiny of old cinemas - demolition or a shabby afterlife as a bingo hall - and still survives as the well-maintained home of the Stephen Joseph Theatre.

** Or maybe just the impresario. The real star real of the show is the pallid cadaver of just-hanged ex-robber Aris Kindt, laid out on the slab for our instruction.

The fretful porpentine

2011-11-28T20:45:00.001Z

I'm generally immune to the urge to share other people's YouTube videos of animals allegedly being adorable. Maybe my standards have started to slip, or maybe the sound of a porcupine's displeasure at having its dinner interrupted really is hilariously cute. You decide:

via

I think I can just about get away with a porcupine. But if I ever start sharing kitten videos, for the love of God, just kill me.

Why we must act now, according to Chris Dillow

2011-11-27T10:22:00.001Z

The politicians’ syllogism: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done.”

A brilliant summary of the boilerplate justification for way too many many policy announcements. The rest of the post isn't bad, either.

Dialogue

2011-11-27T09:47:00.001Z

My beleated contribtion to Lieutenant John Pike's fifteen minutes of fame (with apologies to Ring Lardner).

After they were annexed...

2011-11-22T16:02:00.001Z

Concerning The Way To Govern Cities Or Principalities Which Lived Under Their Own Laws Before They Were Annexed

WHENEVER those states which have been acquired as stated have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom, there are three courses for those who wish to hold them: the first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you. Because such a government, being created by the prince, knows that it cannot stand without his friendship and interest, and does its utmost to support him; and therefore he who would keep a city accustomed to freedom will hold it more easily by the means of its own citizens than in any other way.

Nicolo Machiavelli The Prince

Pay attention, children

2011-11-22T11:34:00.001Z

That nice Dr Heather McGregor* from executive search firm Taylor Bennett will explain all about executive pay. A silly man on the radio said it didn't seem fair that top executives' pay has grown so much more quickly than everybody else's over the last 30 years.

That was silly of him, wasn't it? Big boys and girls don't worry their darling little heads about babyish ideas like fairness, now do they? This is what Dr McGregor told him:

Anyone over the age of seven who says things are not fair needs to have a reality check.

Some people think that employees might sit on Renumeration Committees, the way they do in those nasty socialist countries like ... er ... Germany. What a lot of silly billies! Dr McGregor explained why they were just being silly:

You would not give your children a say in how much money you allocate for clothes, for haircuts...

I know most employees are old enough to have families, drive cars, have bank accounts, save for pensions and do other grown-up things, but we mustn't forget that they are really only like dear little toddlers, and it would be ever so silly if toddlers told their mummies and daddies how to behave, now wouldn't it?

I wonder where McGregor, educated at the independent St Mary's Hall girls' school (which, despite benefiting from tax relief by virtue of its status as a "charity" and charging fees of £12,609 to £20,817 per year, got into "financial difficulties" in 2009 and was taken over by the exclusive Roedean school), picked up the ideas that fairness is a foolish notion, fit only for children, and that the lower orders lack the maturity and intellectual capacity to have a meaningful opinion on the entitlements of their betters?

Any ideas?

*Salary £108,000. If her recruiting skills are as lacklustre as her debating skills, Taylor Bennett could save a few quid by replacing her with somebody on a nursery school assistants' wage, without any loss of intellectual rigour. If they recruited an actual nursery school assistant, the candidate would benefit from already having experience of talking down to people as if they were infants.

Word of the day

2011-11-19T20:03:00.001Z

Petrichor (PET-ri-kuhr)

The distinctive aroma of rain falling on dry earth. I never knew it had a special name until now.

2011: Arab Spring, Euro Winter

2011-11-19T16:18:00.001Z

Democracy is good enough for the Arabs, but the wise old heads of Europe are apparently too canny to let unpredictable voters get in the way of the serious business of running countries. First Greek democracy fell to an unelected Austerity Junta. Then came Italy. Which dominoes will be the next to fall? Spain, France?

The lamps are going out all over Europe. I hope we see them lit again in our time

A big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere...

2011-11-19T12:52:00.000Z

...And to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

A long while back, I was at a friend's house, listening to records. More specifically, he was playing a few tracks from his collection and inviting those present to 'name that tune'. I was successfully able to name the theme tune to the original radio version of The Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy - or so I thought. That was when I discovered that it wasn't an original theme tune, but a piece by The Eagles, called Journey of the Sorcerer. Apparently, I'm not the only person to have made this mistake.

Anyway, shout out to the other seven billion confused B Ark descendants out there on Earth 1.0. Your chill-out tune for today is...

The Eagles - Journey of the Sorcerer

Mock the weak

2011-11-17T14:47:00.001Z

A lot of people make fun of Milton Keynes, which is fine by me. I think it's a better place to live than most outsiders imagine, although the reality falls short of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation's original vision of a beautifully planned, orderly, harmonious place to live with no building higher than the highest tree. If people want to make fun of concrete cows and the grid roads and all the roundabouts (which really do keep traffic congestion to a minimum), I don't have a problem with that.

In fact, I rather welcome the fact that people treat the place as a bit of a joke, because it means there's less of the thin-skinned, self-important local pride that makes other places look even sillier. I lived in Leighton Buzzard for a short while, at the time when Jeremy Clarkson made a throwaway remark about in a car review about Leighton Buzzard being 'the fifth-best town in Bedfordshire'. The Pages of the Leighton Buzzard Observer carried a furious rebuttal from the affronted council leader (or some such local dignitary), raging and spluttering as if somebody might have actually noticed this remark, or could have cared less.

I'm no Clarkson fan, but this was practically the least offensive thing he's ever said. A comment from Clarkson shouldn't have even been local-newsworthy unless he'd at least called the local council lazy, feckless and flatulent and preferably accused them of murdering prostitutes in between meetings of the planning committee.

What does rile me is comfortably-off people sneering at everybody who lives on the city's poorer estates. Take this nasty little "satirical" e-mail from earlier this year, as reproduced in the Anna Raccoon blog

An Earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale hit the new city of Milton Keynes on Wednesday morning.

Casualties were seen wandering aimlessly saying “bang out of order”, “mental” and “sorted”. Some are still confused that something interesting actually happened in Newport Pagnell! Some residents of Fishermead were woken before their ‘giros’ arrived and it caused quite a panic!

The earthquake decimated half of the Fullers Slade area causing in excess of £17.55 worth of damage.Several priceless collections of mementos from Ibiza, Corfu, Rhyl and Blackpool were damaged beyond repair including a cute little donkey that ‘broke wind’ when you clapped your hands.

At a time when unemployment is soaring, the numbers of the working poor are at a record high and desperate people are killing themselves after being thrown on the employment scrapheap, isn't it good to know that there are people out there unafraid of mocking the poorest and weakest members of society? I guess, as it becomes less acceptable to taunt people for their race or sexuality, the sort of inadequates who always need somebody to look down have to find a new target to kick, (preferably somebody too weak to kick back). "Chav" is in danger of becoming the new "queer".

What I love is the irony of the thrusting, aspirational suburban golf club set sniggering at the poor for their lack of taste. It's a bit rich, coming from the class that's spent years disfiguring the countryside with a rash of unsightly mock Tudor "executive" homes. These Petit Trianon playhouses for the petit bourgeois are just the architectural equivalent of a flatulent ornamental donkey for people with more money than sense.

The poor, of course, don't get much of a say about what their accommodation looks like. In Milton Keynes this led to some very strange results on the older estates, where 1970's architects were given free rein to design radical, modernist machines for living to house the "overspill" from Greater London. Some of the designs were pretty stark and brutal. The linear, angular, gleaming, metal-clad lines of the '70s buildings in Netherfield, for example, certainly have what Kevin McCloud would call 'integrity', but it's the hard, uncompromising integrity of a housing project designed by daleks.

I hardly need to add that, being low-cost pre-fabricated social housing, they haven't worn tremendously well. The years and individual redecoration can't disguise the uncompromising geometry, but they have destroyed the pristine, chilly unity of the facades, which look patchier and shabbier by the year A lot of MK's original buildings were only supposed to be temporary, built to house the people who came to build the city, then to be torn down to make way for something better. Forty years later, we're still waiting.

I was in Netherfield the other day, when I spotted something rather extraordinary. I'm a bit conflicted about sharing it as, after all I've said about mocking the poor, it might seem like more middle-class piss-taking, but this is such an astonishing collision between the aesthetic of the suburban executive home and the stark functionalism of '70's prefabricated social housing, that you really have to see it to believe it. Sorry about the quality of the following picture, taken with a low-quality mobile phone camera with a scratchy lens - at least it saved me the job of pixellating out the car number plates:

Yes, somebody has actually looked at one of these Mies van der Rohe-inspired brutalist dwellings and decided that what it really needed was a mock-Tudor facade.

No matter whether the person responsible was rich or poor, (for all I know it might have been the landlord) this is just so wrong it's off the scale. Somebody actually took something from the Decade That Taste Forgot, hybridised it with its opposite and came up with something this unspeakably what-the-hell-were-you thinking?. It's so wrong it's almost right. 'As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table' as somebody once remarked. If you want to marvel in higher quality, somebody's posted a far better picture of the building in question here, or you could just put Farthing Grove, Milton Keynes into Google Maps and find it for yourself on Street View.

Milton Keynes - you've just gotta love the weirdness.

Update (Occupy Milton Keynes)

Having posted this, I think I belatedly get it. Seen from the point of view of a resident, maybe this isn't so mental after all. You've got the powers that be pouring people, like so much fungible human overspill, into their anonymous, generic boxes, then one day one of the residents decides to stop being the passive recipient of somebody else's aesthetic and stick two big fingers up at the people who designed these anonymous hutches. What you see before you is an act of defiance and individuality, a sane protest against an absurd world.

It still looks bloody ugly, though.

Update 2 "Civic" amended to "local", as I ended up talking about Leighton Buzzard, which isn't a city by any stretch of the imagination.

Yay! Techno party!

2011-11-16T18:49:00.001Z

Not only have the people not been consulted, sending for the technocrats is openly praised as a mechanism for avoiding consultation, whether by referendum or a general election. Instead, "governments of national unity" - a euphemism for something like one-party state - are sworn in as though there's a war on. There's not a war on. Nor has society collapsed, not even in Greece. It's just a common-or-garden economic crisis, no worse than that which British democracy sailed through in the late 1970s.

Top blogging from the Heresiarch on the rise of technocracy at the expense of democracy. What worries me about the new governing class (apart from the little matters of legitimacy and accountability, or total lack thereof), is the basis on which these people have been appointed. Mario Monti, for example, is a former adviser to Goldman Sachs and Coca Cola and a.'convinced free marketeer with close connections to the European and global policy-making elite'.

Yes, he was an an advisor the Goldman Sachs the company that 'helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules' and best mates with the European and global policy-making elites (you know, the ones who were in charge of the Eurozone and were totally unprepared for the global financial crisis in 2008). All very cozy. He sounds more like part of the problem than part of the solution to me.

I do believe that there are people with exceptional talent, intellect and technical skills who can change the world for the better. I just don't believe that it's this bunch of conventional insiders.

If you want to put some faith in experts as saviours, you'd be better off following the scientists at Wellcome Trust's Sanger Institute, who've been studying how the malaria parasite infiltrates red blood cells and may have pointed the way to an effective vaccine against a disease that kills about a million people every year, most of them children under five.

Or Neil Gershenfeld of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, prophet of what might just be the next industrial revolution and 'a bottom up culture of distributed innovation'.Techno utopianism, maybe, but unlike the EU version of rule by technocrats, at least some of his dream might come true and could potentially put a lot people in control of their own lives, rather than reducing them to the status of voicless serfs, toiling to preserve a broken system.

Beats as it sweeps as it cleans

2011-11-16T08:17:00.001Z

Some people have been making unfortunate claims that the UK's intelligence services were complicit in the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects who were detained and tortured overseas. The Foreign Secretary is concerned. 'The very making of these allegations undermined Britain's standing in the world as a country that upholds international law and abhors torture'.

Lessons have been learned. According to the BBC, there are plans to restrict what can be said about the security services in open court so, if abuses like the ones being alleged were to ever happen in future, the public need never know.

James Dyson secured Britain's standing as a world leader in bagless vacuum cleaner technology. Good to know that we also maintain our lead in sweeping potentially embarrassing information under the carpet. Makes you proud, doesn't it?

Red China - perfect for that special Tea Party

2011-11-14T18:06:00.000Z

“The ‘Great Society’ has not worked and it’s put us into the modern welfare state,” she said. “If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security…They don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.”

From The Thoughts of Chairman Bachmann

A leading American right-wing, über-libertarian evangelical praising the achievments of the Communist Party of China? Not long ago, you'd have thought anyone positing a Bible-Belt-Beijing Axis must have skipped a dose of anti-psychotics.

Although I don't consider the Tea Party/Communist Party model a remotely desirable terminus for any political journey, I've got to give Bachmann credit for spotting the obvious* fact that the red flag is flying over a full-on, devil-take-the-hindmost Gilded Age. Comrades, we don't need no stinkin' welfare state! Hell, these guys can execute as many criminals as they like and they don't let no jailbird-lovin' pinko liberal bed-wetters stop 'em. Yep, them good 'ol chicom hordes are just the sort of folk Michelle and her fanbase could happily invite round for Thanksgiving dinner, if only they weren't so darned godless.

Like Lenin, Bachman seems to imagine that her revolution will eventually result in the withering away of the state and a truly complete democracy. It's an interesting theory, but the parallels between America's own Gilded Age, with its grim factories and corrupt plutocrats, and modern China aren't encouraging. In both cases, large doses of laissez faire went hand in hand with Tammany Hall-style graft and cronyism. Real unfettered plutocrats (unlike the idealised fictional libertarian, John Galt) didn't even want to shrink the state becuse of some high-falutin' principle, but were quite content to chow down on juicy government contracts, without getting too pernickerty about 'only trading for mutual benefit' (see the Crédit Mobilier of America scandal).

Apparently, Deng Xiaoping probably never said 'To get rich is glorious!' but Mark Twain really did say, tongue-in-cheek:

What is the chief end of man?--to get rich. In what way?--dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.

I'd argue that Twain's critique of a lightly-regulated Gilded Age in a developing economy is rather more balanced than Deng and Bachmann's uncritical propagandizing.

Hat tip.

* To be fair it's probably not that obvious from the vantage point of Tea Party voters who believed that Sarah Palins's proximity to Russia made her some sort of foreign policy guru.

Don't panic! Don't Panic!

2011-11-13T09:28:00.001Z

We have a plan … there's a lot of scenario planning, thinking about all possible outcomes. We have to deal with the world as it is... I don't think we should be panicking...

Said ~~Baldrick~~ ~~Lance-Corporal Jones~~ Vince Cable this week, discussing the Eurozone crisis, before reassuring us all by dropping that phrase about a potential 'Armageddon narrative' into the interview.

Thant's what he says, anyway. I've got a little theory that what the managers* of UK PLC, Deutschland GmbH, et al. actually want is to spread a few warning doses of fear and panic, in the hope that we'll stop thinking, not get too uppity and keep on voting to maintain the status quo, for fear of something worse. Margaret Thatcher's tireless old cheerleader TINA (There Is No Alternative) is still doing her stuff.

Sound advice at the moment would be to really not panic, switch off the noise machine, remember that Britain's not facing a real Armageddon and hold onto the thought that there is always an alternative.

If you want to know what Britain seriously preparing for a real Armageddon looked like, take yourself back to the Cold War and sit yourself down in the driving seat of a Vulcan V-Bomber. With the nuclear doomsday clock at a few minutes to midnight, this is where some lucky soul might have been sitting, poised between being shot out of the Russian skies by a SAM missile** and unleashing the plane's own Blue Steel nuclear missile to incinerate a few hundred thousand souls in the blink of an eye.

Claustrophobic, cramped and functional, this was your office if your job was convincing the other power bloc that we were really serious about Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Real-life Dr Strangelove hardware and quite chilling. I've got a feeling that with a bit more awkward questioning, thought and flexibility and a bit less raah-raah-ing from TINA we could muddle through the Eurozone "Apocalypse" rather better than we'd have survived a nuclear holocaust.

Mind you, have you seen where the Doomsday Clock is at the moment? We're not out of the woods yet, are we? Maybe we should all be having a little panic - just not about the things the political class want us to panic about.

*They're getting to look a little less like politicians with some connection to voters and more like members of a managerial overclass every day.

** Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome strikes again

The devil woman wants to know...

2011-11-11T11:57:00.001Z

... if you've been involved in an accident that wasn't your fault.

Oh, hang on, those are specs on her head.

Top advertising tip for ambulance-chasing lawyers. Subliminal satanic imagery rarely inspires trust, except among Faustian dabblers in the dark arts, who are probably playing for bigger stakes than a few grand for their dodgy whiplash claim. And don't ever ask your clients to sign up using a red pen...

Spotted on the back of the Thomson Local directory for Milton Keynes.

From The Illustrated Uxbridge English Dictionary

2011-11-10T09:10:00.001Z

ductile [ˈdʌktaɪl]

Noun: A tile with a duck on it.

Image courtesy of Nemo's great uncle's Flikr stream. Silliness courtesy of The Uxbridge English Dictionary.

Church of St Peter and St Paul, Newport Pagnell

2011-11-10T08:26:00.001Z

At night to Newport Pagnell; and there a good pleasant country- town, but few people in it. A very fair — and like a Cathedral — Church; and I saw the leads, and a vault that goes far under ground, and here lay with Betty Turner’s sparrow: the town, and so most of this country, well watered.

From The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 8 June 1668

Image courtesy of Ned Trifle's Flikr stream

The 99% were 'just asking for it'

2011-11-08T18:34:00.000Z

It started with the banking crisis of 2008. A myth has grown up that 99 per cent of us were innocent in that, and have been forced to bail out the guilty 1 per cent. Actually, a majority of us were probably borrowing more than we should, and we can't just blame the banks for forcing the money into our hands, or the politicians for failing to regulate them.

Writes Mary Ann Sieghart in the Independent. I'm sick of hearing this sort of pious nonsense about how we are all being miserable sinners who should turn the other cheek and forgive the bankstas and the politicians who told us that There Is No Alternative because we're all, in a very real sense, just as guilty as our abusers.

No we're bloody well not.

I wasn't borrowing more than I should have been, (due to a combination of instinctive risk aversion and dumb luck), but many of those who were didn't think they were being reckless. With house prices climbing further into the stratosphere with every passing year, many people took what they thought was a calculated risk to get an eye-watering mortgage, rather than wait until the tiniest starter home was way out of their reach. The poor saps believed the politicians and financiers who swore that everything in the market was for the best, now that we'd arrived in best of all possible economic worlds. Not to mention being ground down by the relentless hard sell of commission-hungry debt salesmen and the soft soap of the Property Ladder promise of securing your future by canny property speculation.

'But we all voted for the politicians who failed to regulate the banks, so it's our fault, isn't it?' This highly disingenuous claim would only hold water if we seriously assumed that a significant proportion of the population avidly hung on to the newsreaders' every word about the the state of the Hang Seng, the Dow Jones, the Nikkei and DAX, without their eyes glazing over, took a subscription to the Economist and actually had a clue about complex financial engineering, then, in full knowledge of what was going on, recklessly voted for politicians who they knew were negligently ignoring a coming crisis.

They didn't. Even an obsessive economics wonk like Gordon Brown got it memorably wrong, so it's a bit rich to turn round and blame the average guy or gal next door for not knowing about the problems of over-leveraged financial institutions, the US sub-prime market, collateralized debt obligations and sovereign debt. Not to mention the fact that politicians don't always deliver what they promise at election time - just ask anybody who voted Lib Dem last time round.

The argument that we all share the guilt because nearly everyone is in some sort of pension scheme which benefited, in the good years, from financial jiggery-pokery, this is just another unwarranted assumption about how well informed informed consumers are.

How may normal people have a clear idea of how their pensions work? If your eyes don't grow heavy when somebody starts going on about pension provision, then you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. I've no idea whether my pittance of a works pension is invested in Italian government debt, pork bellies, ostrich farms, none of the above or all of them. Most of us just signed the dotted line and hoped that the out pension provider wasn't actively ripping us off, out of some vague idea that having a pension would be less likely to leave us destitute than just stuffing any spare cash under a mattress and hoping for the best.

Power and knowledge matter. The rest of us don't share the guilt of those who knew what was going on or had the power to change things. We weren't 'asking for it', any more than the rape victim who's accused of contributory negligence just because she wore a short skirt on the night in question. No ifs, no buts, no excuses.

Burn his body from his head

2011-11-05T10:52:00.001Z

Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society. In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate.

Pope Benedict XVI

Now's the time of year when we get together, in a spirit of Christian tolerance, to celebrate those good 'ol cultural expressions and traditional values. All together, now:

Remember, remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent
To blow up the King and the Parliament
Three score barrels of powder below
Poor old England to overthrow
By God's providence he was catched
With a dark lantern and burning match
Holloa boys, holloa boys
God save the King!
Hip hip hooray!
Hip hip hooray!

A penny loaf to feed ol' Pope
A farthing cheese to choke him
A pint of beer to rinse it down
A faggot of sticks to burn him
Burn him in a tub of tar
Burn him like a blazing star
Burn his body from his head
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hooray!
Hip hip hooray!

Makes you proud, doesn't it?

It is no exaggeration to say that civilisation itself is indebted to our Christian heritage. As Johnston writes “Impartial law and politics are near to the very essence of principled civilised communal living. From such study came the democratic ideal of representative Government, with universal adult suffrage and regular elections. This in turn is founded upon concepts of accountability and human dignity, which themselves derive from the Biblical view of man made in the image of God. It is no accident that these ideals emerged in the Christian West (and nowhere else), a civilisation uniquely tamed and moulded by the Gospel.”

Happy bonfire night, everybody!

So unlike the home life of our own dear Queen

2011-11-03T13:53:00.001Z

I see Liz Jones, queen of the censorius net-curtain-twitching journalistic busybodies, has taken time out from sticking her disapproving nose into other people's private grief and decided to put some of her own dirty linen on public display. And, by gum, it's mucky!

Engage warp drive, Dr. Dan!

2011-11-02T18:41:00.000Z

Simpletons with a little spare money and a vague sense of unease about life may wish to try one out of the many new-agey spiritual entrepreneurs who specialise in lightening clients' spirits, and wallets. I don't recommend it myself, but if you really must give all your spare cash to a self-appointed guru, you could do worse than Dr. Dan Mathews, whose web site I stumbled upon by accident the other day. This guy is quality. Hell, you could tick every box on a New Age Bullshit Bingo card before reaching the end of his awesome first paragraph:

Dr. Dan Mathews had a near death experience in August of 1992. On the other side of the veil he was ordained into the priesthood of Melchizedek and was given specific information about the “paradigms” which are defined as the level of consciousness that exists on earth. He was told that since the original downfall of man only three paradigms or realities had existed: one which began at the dawn of time, the second beginning with Abraham and the third emerged during the life of Jesus. Dr. Dan was told that beginning in 2003 humanity would enter into a warp-speed evolution of consciousness by moving through another twelve new paradigms of consciousness.

After Dr. Dan was given this information he was gifted with HOLY DIVINE HEALING. He was instructed to return to his body and use this gift by helping people reconnect to the parts of their soul which have been fragmented since the dawn of time and move gracefully through shifting paradigms with a complete connection to the God Presence within. Since this experience in 1992 Dr. Dan has assisted many people in their transitions through one-on –one sessions completed in person or by phone, group healings and lectures...

Dr. Dan’s private appointments are dedicated to your personal situation and are approximately 30 minutes each. The pricing is a sliding scale $85 -$148 and payment is reflective of your feeling toward the service. Cash is preferred.

Bargain! Sign up here. Dr. Dan also does group sessions (subject to a minimum 'love offering' of $35). I wonder if he does spiritual development courses, too?

Seriously, though, is this stuff any more bonkers than mainstream religion? Try to make sense of the doctrine of the Trinity. The BBC has tried to explain:

The idea that there is One God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit means:
There is exactly one God
The Father is God
The Son is God
The Holy Spirit is God
The Father is not the Son
The Son is not the Holy Spirit
The Father is not the Holy Spirit
An alternate way of explaining it is:
There is exactly one God
There are three really distinct Persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
Each of the Persons is God

Common mistakes

The Trinity is not
Three individuals who together make one God
Three Gods joined together
Three properties of God

What the hell's all that supposed to mean? Maybe a diagram would help:

No, it all still looks like complete balderdash to me (although it's considered rude to suggest that believing in a complex set of assertions without the benefit of any supporting evidence might just be a bit silly).

Whatever. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to connect with the God Presence within by moving gracefully through some shifting paradigms at warp factor 5. All love offerings gratefully recieved (cash or PayPal only, please).

The Occupy protesters can’t win

2011-11-01T21:45:00.001Z

Here’s a bit more fact checking, this time from fullfact.org. Guardian journalists have been disputing the Telegraph’s claim that only one in ten Occupy London protesters at St. Paul's actually occupied in their tents overnight. In this case, it looks as if nobody has definitively proved or disproved the original assertion. There are clearly a few facts to be nailed down here, to do with the sensitivity of the equipment, the time when it was used, whether tents been occupied for long enough to grow warm and show up on the equipment being used, (depending on how sensitively it was calibrated), etc, etc. Those facts are simply facts, regardless of your point of view.

What interests me here, though, is the way the disputed facts are framed, and how sections of the media feel free to dismiss and marginalise the protesters for doing one thing and for doing the opposite.

I don’t know what the real occupancy rates are in the encampment, but there are two ends of the possibility spectrum.

At one end of the spectrum, if there’s any truth to the Telegraph’s story, people aren’t camped out 24/7, but coming and going, presumably because they’ve got other pressing things in their lives to attend to, such as jobs, study, family, etc. At the other end, maybe there are protesters there all the time, people without such constraints who could conceivably be more-or-less full-time protesters; students with some flexibility to their schedule, perhaps skipping the odd lecture, the jobless, spoiled trustafarians and other family-supported well-off kids who don’t have a job to go to and so on.

It seems to me that some sections of the media have framed the debate so that the protesters can’t win. If they’re not full-time, hard-core protesters, sleeping out night after night, they’re dismissed as lightweights who don’t have the courage of their convictions and their protest is rubbished as a hypocritical publicity stunt without any real commitment behind it. If they are on the street night after night, then they’re dismissed as members of a jobless work-shy rent-a-mob with too much time on their hands, who can only afford to spend their lives protesting because they don’t have anything more productive to do.

Catch-22 lives.*

*If this sounds familiar, just think about all the anti-immigrant stories you've read in the papers over the years. Bloody foreigners, coming over here and stealing our benefits. What, they're working? Bloody foreigners coming over here, stealing our jobs....

Increasing avoidable misery for no coherent reason

2011-10-30T14:19:00.000Z

Concludes Channel 4's FactCheck blog. Here are three more succinct reactions:

Adrian Beecroft’s report is based on two flawed assumptions; that employment law is holding back economic growth (it isn’t) and that the law stops employers from sacking underperforming workers (it doesn’t).

If scrapping employment protection is your best idea for creating jobs, you don’t really have any ideas.

“The current laws are restrictive to an employers need to feel massively superior to everyone they employ”

I don't think even Adrian Beecroft or our cabinet of millionaires really think this is good for the whole economy. Like any ruling elite, they'd just like to see a bit more deference from the lower orders.

Imperial purple

2011-10-29T15:27:00.000+01:00

The imperial stool is capacious enough for a sultan of the most morbid corpulence.

From Millennium by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, which I'm re-reading at the moment.* It's over-written and the clarity of some of the points is drowned in a sea of purple prose but, on the other hand, they don't generally write 'em like that any more and, every now and then, the over-wrought language is a thing of joy in itself. The moody extravagance of the sentence above puts me in mind of Yeats' Byzantium:

Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

*OK, dipping into would be more accurate.

Apocalypse now?

2011-10-27T20:09:00.000+01:00

As the system started to reach inevitable collapse, the state moved in with bank bailouts and quantitative easing, both of which simply moved yet more money from ordinary people to the super-rich. In fact the last three years have seen the biggest transfer of resources from poor to rich in human history.

It cannot last, and whether it is Greece or Italy or Spain which is this week’s fashionable media focus is irrelevant. In making these vast levied and leveraged transfers of resources from poor to rich, states have exhausted the capacity of their people to actually pay them. That is true all over Europe, the UK and US. The currency crises are a tiny symptom of a very large impending crash.

That is why I am not blogging about today’s EU meeting or a specific statement of the US Federal Bank Chairman. They are all pissing into the wind that is shortly to be a tornado. I expect before I die I will see a genuine social revolution. I expect that, as always happens, middle class liberals like me will start by being elated by it, and end up being shot by those who seize on the change, to take their turn to use the power of the state to corner resources for themselves.

Craig Murray: blog post entitled Capitalism in Crisis.

I don't know whether we're really looking at an apocalyptic future that includes a violent reaction to the class war started by the rich in the Reagan-Thatcher years (which they have been winning ever since), followed by an Animal Farm-style purge by the post-revolutionary elite, or just a few more dreary years of our culture's obsequious Stockholm syndrome-style love-in with the tiny minority who keep slapping the rest of us about (while we channel the resulting anger and frustration into slapping the even more weak and powerless about).

It's starting to feel less like business as usual and more like the prelude to interersting times.

I'm sitting on the fence here

2011-10-26T06:32:00.002+01:00

Is parliamentary democracy the best available system of government? What about a bit more direct democracy? I must admit that I've never really thought seriously about the alternatives, but a couple of bloggers have just raised the question. The title of Miljenko Williams' post 'Referendums - the coward's way into democracy', leaves little doubt where his sympathies lie; he thinks that referendums don't change fundamental power structures (if parties are able to skillfully manage which questions do and don't get put to a vote), are open to abuse, depending on how you word the question and oversimplify complex issues.

He's not the only one to be suspicious:

I've said it before but it bears repeating: the only time governments and opposition parties call for referendums is when they think they'll yield the result they want. If they don't think this, they avoid them.

Chris Dillow sums up what's perhaps the strongest argument for referendums:

The case for a referendum is simply that, in unbundling options, public preferences can be more clearly expressed.

I like the phrase "unbundling", which sounds quite attractive if you've ever voted for a political party with gritted teeth, because you think they've got the least worst bundle of policies, mixed in with a few horrendous ones. I know I have.

Switzerland, which ranks pretty high on both the Economist Intelligence Unit's Quality of Life Index, 2005 and the Satisfaction with Life Index, 2006, is the most famous example of a country where direct democracy plays a far larger role than it does in the UK. Are the Swiss just happy with a sub-optimal system of democracy, or have they found a way to get round the problem of political parties managing some referendum questions to get the answers they want and ensuring that other questions that don't fit their agenda are never put to a vote? I don't know the answer, but it's a question worth asking.

Like a giant object over troubled water

2011-10-24T17:41:00.000+01:00

When you're weary, feeling small
When tears are in your eyes
I will show you a web site dedicated to Large Canadian Roadside Attractions
And you'll probably cheer up a bit

I will ease your mind with Vulcan, Alberta's very own starship Enterprise , the diving moose of Toronto, the drain chicken of Tweed, Ontario, Ernie, the World's Largest Turtle, the giant raspberries of Abbotsford, BC, Altona, Manitoba's giant tricycle (it doesn't actually look that big in the picture, but maybe the house in the background is also hugely embiggened), the Glass Bottle Church of Treherne, Manitoba (churlish of me, I know, but I was vaguely disappointed to find that it was made of bottles, as opposed to being a full-sized church inside a giant glass bottle, which would have been incredibly impressive), Lesia the Ukrainian Girl, a hefty lass from Canora, Saskatchewan, a photograph quizzically entitled Tire People? Daphne, Saskatchewan, (there really should have been a 1950's B movie entitled Attack of the Tire People), another photo with the charmingly undogmatic Canadian claim 'World's Largest Pig (maybe)' and, of course, the World's Largest Beaver, currently residing inBeaverlodge, Alberta.

I need a hip replacement

2011-10-23T10:11:00.001+01:00

I thought that the Internet search term "the cake is a lie" was just amusingly left field and blogged accordingly. It turns out the phrase was a quotation and meme that I just wasn't hip enough to recognise. It's from the computer game Half Life* 'which took the PC gaming world by storm upon its release on November 19, 1998' but is still an unknown quantity around these parts in 2011. I have, by the way, heard of Half Life, even if I'm oblivious to any pop cultural references it has spawned.

It wouldn't be too bad if I was self-consciously trying to emulate Ian Hislop, who was buffing up his carefully-crafted fogey-ish image like a well polished pair of old brogues on Radio 4 the other week (when challenged with buying his first ever pair of jeans for a mildly amusing comedy programme, he quipped that they were surprisingly comfortable and 'I might wear them to evensong'). But I'm not, and I'm left raging against my unwanted decent into old buffer-dom.

Apparently they even know about this in Oklahoma! Where the wind comes sweeping down the plain (note the up-to-the-minute pop cultural reference from 1943).

* Update - no it isn't, it's apparently from Portal, as Meridian has just kindly informed me. D'oh! Less old fogey and more just old and confused.

Tech news

2011-10-21T10:19:00.001+01:00

Here's Allison Barrie at Fox News, uncritically regurgitating some press release for an anti-terrorist surveillance system which she breathlessly tells us has attained a genius-level IQ (in other words, more than smart enough to replace Bill O'Reilly).

Before working in defence, Allison worked as a professional ballet dancer performing at the Royal Opera House, London Coliseum, Theatre Royal Drury Lane and the Kennedy Center amongst others. She also acted as a consultant on the dance aspect for some films shooting in the United Kingdom.Allison is qualified in English law and practiced in London as a solicitor.

She is a graduate of Cambridge University and King's College War Studies.

I'm sure we're all going to sleep more soundly from now on.

Conspiracy theory of the day

2011-10-20T11:36:00.000+01:00

Max Schrems, a 24 year old Austrian law student, had been a Facebook member for three years when, prompted by some disquiet about how much "deleted" personal data Facebook was retaining, he asked Facebook to provide details of the personal data it was holding about him.

After some stalling, they sent him a CD, containing what seemed to be his entire Facebook history, including deleted messages from years back, along with masses of other personal data, divided into 57 categories. Printed out, the contents of the CD covered 1,200 sheets of A4 paper.

I was like WOW 1,200 pages! No KGB or CIA ever had 1,200 pages about an average citizen.

I don't want to get too paranoid about this. After all, Facebook operatives haven't ever knocked on anybody’s door in the middle of the night and bundled them off to a Siberian labour camp for ten years, or had them flown half way round the world by private jet to be roughed up by Middle Eastern security goons.

But this off-the-cuff comment about the security services does leave me with a little conspiracy theory of my own; namely that governments and bureaucracies have left it to individuals like Max Schrems to challenge Facebook about data retention and security, and dragged their own feet on the issue, because they rather like poking around in Facebook's mother lode of personal data and information about who talks to who. It's a free gift for politicians and securicrats who'd like to keep an eye one activists and the disaffected. I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I'll give this one the time of day because:

1. It doen't require a massive conspiracy to hide the truth, sucking in thousands who must be sworn to silence. All it requires is for those who'd like to keep an eye on dissenting elements to sit back and do nothing whilst Facebook and Facebook users do the heavy lifting required to create and populate a massive database of personal information about large portions of the population.

2. National and trans-national bodies are clearly quite keen to spend a lot of time and legislative and bureaucratic effort on slurping up personal data. Britain has its Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), (not to mention the last Labour government's failed attempt to introduce identity cards, complete with a £1,00 fine for the crime of not keeping your data up to date) the USA has the Patriot Act, the EU has Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC, etc, etc.

There are people on whom it would be perfectly reasonable to spy; criminals and that tiny subset of society in the spreading-violent-hatred-and-blowing-stuff-up business. The worrying thing is that most people don't fall into that category, but a lot of them are on Facebook. If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear, right? Well, I'm not so sure.

The UK headlines are full of stories about undercover police officers infiltrating protest groups, acting as agent provocateurs and even going to court under false names, so as not to blow their cover. Think what you like about Reclaim The Streets (I think they've got a point, but I've no particularly strong feelings), but they're overwhelmingly non-violent and hardly Al Qeada. UK police already have extensive powers to curtail protests.

There are, in short, a lot of people out there who don't fall into the spreading-violent-hatred-and-blowing-stuff-up category, but who are still "of interest" to the authorities. Often quite law-abiding people who become activists, organise demonstrations, or try to draw attention to this issue or that injustice. Not all of them are right, by any means, but they all ought to have the right to freely organise and to protest. And right now there are a hell of a lot of things to protest about and to get politically active about.

Given the proven lengths the authorities have gone to in order to spy on activists and to keep the lid on protests, I don't imagine they've overlooked Facebook's massive potential as a tool for tracking dissenters and their activities. The worrying thing is that the sort of people vulnerable to this sort of spying and the sort of protests and campaigns that can be disrupted by Facebook watchers aren't started by dangerous extremists. Hardcore terrorists, at least competent ones, will be aware of data security. A law-abiding activist could be merrily putting all sorts of information onto Facebook, unwittingly grassing up fellow campaigners without even considering the possibility that spooks, police officers and their political masters might be hoovering up every detail in order to thwart what they have unilaterally deemed to be subversion.

It wouldn't be the first time that surveillance initially intended to protect the populace from hardened terrorists has moved quickly down the food chain. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) envelope has famously been pushed to accommodate not only spooks trying to catch terrorists, but local councils investigating dog fouling, fly tipping and school catchment area fiddles.

Being snooped on by the authorities is less of a clear and present danger to Facebook users than criminal identity theft, but it's another reason to think twice about putting your information out there. As it stands, it's down to awkward individuals like Max Schrems to initiate action to protect their personal data, as I suspect that there are plenty of nation states with a vested interest in their citizens leaving a massively insecure data trail.

via

Hardly the Profumo affair

2011-10-19T16:16:00.000+01:00

Katia Zatuliveter, 26 year old Russian aide to Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock has denied being a spy, but says that she did have a four year affair with the MP for Portsmouth South. Not only are alleged romps with an obscure backbencherhardly the Profumo affair, but, as pointed out here, there are far easier ways to winkle secrets out of the British establishment:

And if she is a spy, then could someone please sit the current version of the KGB down with a cup of hot, sweet tea and give them a friendly talk about how it's much easier to infiltrate the Ministry of Defence just by being chums with whichever numpty has been put in charge of it.

Or by going through the bins once Oliver Letwin's had his morning constitutional.

Any blog post containing the words...

2011-10-18T16:37:00.001+01:00

... 'The slow loris is anxious about the fate of Belgium' has got to be worth five minutes of anybody's time and I accordingly urge you to drop whatever you're doing and read this.

Relocation, Relocation

2011-10-18T16:32:00.000+01:00

Israel is celebrating the return home of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, held captive by Hamas for five years. Hamas are celebrating the high price they've exacted for Shalit's freedom, namely Israel's agreement to release more than a thousand Palestinian militants, many of whom were serving life sentences for killing Israelis.

Hamas must be relieved to have something to celebrate, given all the embarrassing unpleasantness their friend and neighbour, that nice Mr Assad, has been experiencing:

The Hamas leadership is seeking to relocate its headquarters from Damascus, in the wake of continuing unrest and pro-democracy protests in Syria, now in their eighth month.

Sounds like a job for Kirstie and Phil.

Strange search engine queries

2011-10-18T12:37:00.001+01:00

I'm not the first blogger to try for a cheap laugh, courtesy of some of the eccentric search queries that have lead people to his or her blog and I certainly won't be the last. Here are a few of the search terms that have brought people to my humble abode in cyberspace over the past couple of months:

reflexive entertainment: I fear my blog's some way from provoking this response, but thanks for looking anyway.

angry screaming: Angry screaming is a lot closer to the Pavlovian response you can expect round here.

cake is a lie: Especially a Jaffa cake.

gender confused palm tree: Is Jeremy Kyle presenting Gardeners' World these days, or what?

hope solo body issue: I haven't googled to find out who Hope Solo is, but the related search for 'hope solo naked' suggests that there are people out there who don't think she has body issues.

edwina currie red knickers: Lovely to see John Major dropping by, but you really need to stop living in the past and move on, John.

george bush full body: George! Don't do that.

election poster ideas: It all seems a long time ago now, but I vaguely remember that George W only won the 2000 election thanks to some hanging chads in the Florida vote-o-matic machines and the wise decision by his campaign team not to run with the infamous George Bush full body election posters, all copies of which were subsequently destroyed.

Why I call myself an agnostic, not an atheist

2011-10-17T18:37:00.000+01:00

This cartoon from The Far Left Side, illustrates why I don't choose to define myself by things I don't believe in. Not to mention the fact that it's theists who are making an arguable series of claims about the existence and the detailed nature of an invisible but all-powerful being, claims that they tell us are really, really important and which we should all be listening to. It seems perfectly reasonable to put the onus is on theists to support their assertions, not on the rest of us to prove them wrong.

I first saw this cartoon reblogged on Galileo Unchained, posted by a writer who has taken a contrary view and chosen the label 'atheist', for the reasons given here. I still think that the terms 'agnostic' is more precise, neatly summing up a state of being comfortable with not having all a neat set of dogmatic answers to banish all doubt and uncertainty, but it's a fine distinction and I'm happy for fellow non-believers to choose the label they're most comfortable with.

Differences in terminology aside, there's some good stuff on Galileo Unchained. This is from a clear and concise post on religious education:

We all have inside us what could be called a “Nonsense Detector”—that common sense that helps us believe as many true things and reject as many false things as possible. For example, present most American adults with a case for Islam or Hinduism or Sikhism, and they will be extraordinarily unconvinced.

As adults, we’re far better at sifting truth from nonsense than we were as children. And that’s why Christians must be indoctrinated as children, before their Nonsense Detectors are mature. This is the idea behind the Jesuit maxim, “Give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man.”

Read the rest here. I was particularly struck by the force of this argument as someone who's come late to parenthood. I'm old enough to have forgotten a lot about what it's like to be a child, so having a small person around the house is a constant revelation. One thing I've rediscovered is that when children develop the first traces of guilt, they sometimes tell small fibs, rather than admit to having done something 'naughty'. I don't have a problem with this, but the inexpert nature of these first fibs gives an interesting window into the mind of a small child.

For example, I've questioned the offspring about the unexpected appearance of a small pile of soil in an inappropriate place and have been solemnly assured that a bird had flown over and dropped the soil. Similarly, when a small pool of liquid appeared where it shouldn't have been, I was told a story about a very small cloud and what must have counted as the most localised shower in recorded meteorology.

All of this has driven home the point that children can reach a point where they can form a picture of what other people are thinking, make up stories to suit a given audience and be quite articulate, but still lack the life experience to distinguish a plausible narrative from an utterly fantastic one. A fact for which which Sunday schools and madrassas must be truly thankful.

The indignant

2011-10-16T19:53:00.001+01:00

Across the world, the indignant rise up against corporate greed and cuts

Headline from the Independent on Sunday

This harmful quack cure

2011-10-16T19:49:00.000+01:00

For a year now, Britain’s economy has been stuck in a vicious cycle of low growth, high unemployment and fiscal austerity. But unlike Greece, which has been forced into induced recession by misguided European Union creditors, Britain has inflicted this harmful quack cure on itself.

Editorial, New York Times

Window frame

2011-10-16T15:59:00.000+01:00

I'd never come across the concept of the Overton Window before today, but I'm glad I did. If you want to think about the way some ideas are marginalised and some become unquestioned orthodoxy, you need the language to talk about it, so the Overton Window is a worthwhile addition to the lexicon.

Gleaned, approprately enough, from musings on the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Update

2011-10-16T14:54:00.001+01:00

As I wrote earlier:

Adam Werritty, the man at the centre of the Liam Fox cash-for-access scandal, has been involved in an audacious plot to topple Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it was claimed last night.

They say it like it was a bad thing.

Well, it might have been a bad thing, if an indiscreet fantasist like Mr Werritty was actually caught up in some serious cloak-and-dagger stuff, putting real people in harm's way.

I still think it's more likely that Werritty was the sort of professional bullshitter who bigged up his involvement because telling whopping fibs was what came naturally and he was no more a secret agent than he was a Formula 1 racing driver, an astronaut, a lion tamer, or an accredited advisor to Liam Fox.

But I may be proved wrong.

Adam Werritty's saving grace

2011-10-16T10:34:00.001+01:00

Jane Merrick and James Hanning, writing in The Independent on Sunday publish some interesting assertions about Adam Werritty, the dodgy-sounding geezer who got Liam Fox into so much trouble:

Adam Werritty, the man at the centre of the Liam Fox cash-for-access scandal, has been involved in an audacious plot to topple Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it was claimed last night.

They say it like it was a bad thing.

How refreshing to see somebdy standing up for bloodthisty serial human rights abusers. I'm especially fond of the ones with lots of oil and uranium-enriching centrifuges. The article continues:

Mr Werritty, 33, has been debriefed by MI6 about his travels and is so highly regarded by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad – who thought he was Mr Fox's chief of staff – that he was able to arrange meetings at the highest levels of the Israeli government, multiple sources have told The IoS.

A fine compliment to Mr Werrity, if true, but I hope and trust that it isn't, and that plonkers like Werritty aren't really Mossad's first line of defence in the battle against the people who want to wipe Israel off the map.

Supporting the single and lazy

2011-10-14T18:34:00.000+01:00

All politicians say that they want to support hard-working families and a lot of bloggers have already written about how tired they are of seeing the tick-box phrase 'hard working families' unthinkingly shoehorned into every political speech and manifesto. I think this knee-jerk bias towards industrious people who are in a relationship and have, preferably, reproduced is getting so serious that it's time for idle singletons to get together and form their own political party (always assuming they can be bothered).

If they did, they'd get my vote. As a fully paid-up family man, who isn't spectacularly idle,* I don't have a dog in this particular fight, so to speak, but I still believe that everybody deserves a fair share of pie. Besides, I think that what's good for the lazy and unattached would be good for the rest of us:

1. Everybody who hasn't been thrown out of work by macroeconomic chaos seems to be complaining about overwork and stress. I resent politicians who ratchet up the Stakhanovite rat race by encouraging the sort of can-do idiots who solemnly promise to give 110% to selling more mobile phone contracts or whatever other form of soul-sucking wage-slavery they've signed up to. If we've simply got to out-perform our neighbours every minute of the waking day, then I'd prefer it if a few of my neighbours goofed off, took it easy and cut me a bit of slack.

It'd take the pressure off everybody, hard-working parents included. I remember the days before parenthood; lazy, indulgent Sunday mornings, leisurely breakfasts, followed by a bit of lounging around with a coffee and the Sunday papers and doing a lot of nothing in particular. No longer possible with a small child in the house and no grannies or other rellys less than an hour or so's drive away. Do I resent singletons who can still do this? Hell, no. Good luck to them, I say, and to hell with the workaholic freaks who squander their precious free time taking work home to prepare for that all-important, boss-impressing regional sales meeting on Monday.

2. Stressed-out, overworked lives would be enhanced by increasing the pool of happy-go-lucky underperformers who are actually fun to be around, and draining the swamp containing the smug, serious, driven, monomaniac, sour-faced, control freaks who thrive on stress and beating their personal best times for sucking every trace of joy out of a room.

3. Whatever happened to "working smarter, not harder"? Was this phrase from the management handbooks as meaningless as a fortune cookie motto? If it did actually mean something, we should be praising people who work more efficiently, not just harder. People who marshal their resources and don't end the day drained, because they've been giving 100% all day. People who don't make stupid mistakes because they're dog tired from trying to work as hard as the hyperactive insomniac without a life who just got a certificate in a plastic frame for being employee of the month, but won't have any friends at his funeral when he works himself into an early grave.

4. If you're idle and single, but not actually out of work, I'd like to thank you. Your taxes are helping to educate my son, an expense that doesn't benefit you directly, but which you can't avoid. You contribute to stuff you don't use, but you're probably too good-natured to whine and bitch about it. I'm suitably grateful and I fully support your right to have as loud a voice as any member of a hard-working family. And if you are out of work, I'm cool with that, too, because it's probably not your fault.

5. The crash that put millions out of work was largely the fault of the allegedly brilliant Wall Street weirdos who got up at bugger-me in the morning and worked their butts off till after what-the-hell-time-do-you-call-this at night, scorning wimpish human needs like lunch and toilet breaks in pursuit of the almighty dollar. They, and their counterparts in the City of London, undoubtedly worked hard, and screwed up even harder. Wouldn't the world have been a better place if the Sir Fred Goodwins of this world had taken a decade off from beavering away at deals to enrich themselves and just loafed around a bit, gone fishing or even sat around on the sofa watching daytime telly? Useless activities, no doubt, but what they worked so hard to do proved to be far worse than useless.

6. Virtue, they say, is its own reward. The vice of idleness is, likewise, its own punishment. Ceteris paribus, if you don't work hard, you probably won't be able to afford the lifestyle you want. The number of people so attached to idleness that they'll willingly forgo a comfortable lifestyle is probably too small to worry about. There is, therefore, no need for self-righteous prigs to endlessly lecture the feckless on the error of their ways, as the problem is self-regulating, with people's internal thermostats balancing the desirability of idle time with the necessity of earning enough money to make that idle time endurable.

7. Politicians, especially very senior ones, generally work very hard. The hours and workload are punishing and only the truly driven can hack it. They also generally have traditional families - there are a few single or openly gay politicians, but it still seems to be considered good PR for politicians to have a photogenic family for the election leaflets.

This makes me suspect that the "hard-working families" trope isn't ubiquitous merely because such families represent a target voter demographic. People tend to think that other people share their own circumstances and values, so I reckon that workaholic politicians with families like to talk about "hard-working families" because they imagine they are talking to people just like themselves.

Unfortunately, the home life of senior politicians isn't exactly a template for happy families. The immense pressures of the job take a terrible toll on politicians' families and relationships. Cast your mind back to the philandering Bill Clinton, or to the unfortunate daughter of John Selwyn Gummer being force-fed burgers on TV at the height of the Mad Cow Disease scare, or Jonathan Aitkin's daughter being forced to lie in court, in an attempt to save her high-flying daddy's rep, or Strictly star Edwina Currie's notorious horizontal mambo with John Major, or the Milibands' fratricidal struggle for the Labour leadership. If this is life in a "hard-working family", you can keep it.

As far as I'm concerned, the next politician who feels compelled to stick a bit of boilerplate about "hard-working families" into another keynote speech can bugger off. I'm voting for the lazy singletons' party next time. If they can ever be bothered to get their finger out.

*According to me - other opinions are available.

I am a resonator

2011-10-14T10:37:00.000+01:00

By all means speculate on the macro picture; I resonate with that.

Interesting use of language from a doctor being intereviewed on Radio 4's Today programme this morning. I was preparing breakfast and encouraging a tardy child to perform some element of his pre-school routine at the time, so I missed most of the context around this remark,* but the phrase has lodged in my head like a tune you can't forget, whether you like it or not.

*It was about the Care Quality Commission's report into the dismal standard of care some elderly patients have been getting in hospital, but I missed most of it.

Delusional bus advert of the week

2011-10-12T14:14:00.000+01:00

I've always thought that the people who make the best case for Richard Dawkins and the "new atheists" are their critics, with their rather feeble counter-arguments. So there's some pretty stiff competition out there for the title of Worst Attempt to Refute Richard Dawkins. Ever. I think I've found a clear winner, though.

Step forward Premier Christian Radio. In 2009, you'll remember some atheists paid for a bus advert that read:

There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

Umbrage was taken by faith groups. But having had two years to think up a devastating reposte, Premier Christian Radio have stepped up to the plate with their own bus poster. This is what it says:

There’s probably no Dawkins. Now stop worrying and enjoy Oct 25th at the Sheldonian Theatre.

So, take that, Professor smarty-pants Dawkins. You think God doesn't exist. Well, we at Premier Christian Radio think you don't exist, so there. And you smell. There, that told him.

Well, if nothing else, it's fresh and original. I look forward to more crazy adverts from Premier Christian Radio, fearlessly challenging the reality of other people and things we'd previously thought it reasonable to accept as actually existing:

There's probably no Bill Gates. Rafael Nadal and Oprah Winfrey are just figments of your imagination. Only a fool would believe that Steven Spielberg is a real person. Giraffes, they're not real. Nobody seriously thinks that chickens exist. Cows ain't real. Gravity's just a fairy story and there's no such thing as aluminium. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

The event at the Sheldonian Theatre is an appearance by Christian philosopher William Lane Craig, who's touring the country on a debating tour, hoping to take on a few academic atheists (Dawkins was invited to attend but presumably decided he had better things to do, a decision validated by quality of the publicity for the event).

World domination is just a click away, honest

2011-10-09T20:45:00.001+01:00

I notice that somebody's been linking to one of my posts. Not just anyone, mind you, but the Illuminati, no less, or at least an 'ex-member of The Brotherhood, Kevin Trudeau' (memorably described in Wikipedia as an 'American author, radio personality, infomercial salesman, and convicted felon best known for promoting alternative medicine', ).

Personally, I find these charges hard to believe, as his sales pitch sounds entirely credible and not even slightly dodgy. Apparently, if you want to share the secrets of the hidden rulers of the world, make LARGE amounts of money, work with multi-millionaires, celebs and best-selling authors, etc, all you have to do is click on the link at meetilluminatimembers dot com to join for FREE. Nope, that doesn't sound even slightly suspicious to me.

I must admit to having wondered why a secret society of conspirators bent on world domination would let any old Tom, Dick or Harry who clicked on a web link join their exclusive inner circle but, hey, if it's on the interwebs it must be true, right?

BATman versus Catwoman

2011-10-08T11:56:00.000+01:00

The Telegraph sums up everything you need to know about the Ken Clarke / Theresa May argument in three lines:

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, says something untrue.
Ken Clarke, the Justice Secretary, points out that it is untrue.
Commentators call for Ken Clarke to be fired.

It's almost as if karma works in the real world.* Agree or disagree with what he stands for,** Ken, does come across as a human being, saying what he thinks, who should easily be able to outshine the standardised, image-controlled, pre-screened, focus-grouped, on-message political partybots who surround him. But, even when he's plainly right and his opponent is exposed as wrong for all to see, his voice seems doomed, Cassandra-like, to fall on deaf ears.

It's as if Ken's murky past as Deputy Chairman and a director of British American Tobacco (BAT), is coming back to bite him. BAT, you'll remember, was lobbying hard to water down health warnings on cigarette packets aimed at the rising generation of new addicts in developing countries. As an example of socially worse-than-useless corporate irresponsibility, inflating the market for a product that causes massive, avoidable, levels of illness, suffering and premature death, is right up there with pedalling dodgy collateralized debt obligations, trading junk bonds or flogging arms to dictators.

I suppose Ken deserves some kudos for walking the talk - he's clearly a man who likes a good cigar, which makes him less hypocritical than a non-smoking tobacco company executive who smugly prolongs his worthless existence with a healthy, balanced diet and regular visits to the gym, courtesy of the millions of consumers he guides, spluttering, into an early grave.

Of course, it's not really karma, just the fact that Clarke's fact-based criticism of May's immigration fairy tale doesn't chime with what the party spin doctors and powerful, xenophobic, elements of the press imagine the public want to hear. Telling truths that contradict the powerful is, it seems, a serious offence.

"Catgate" may seem like a trivial storm in a saucer of warm milk, but if you want to know why people are disengaged from party politics, look no further. Why would anybody take party politics seriously when a truth-free assertion that happens to conform to the prevailing groupthink trumps the plain truth? That Daily Mash headline Government must not get bogged down by facts, says May was absolutely spot-on.

It'll be interesting to see where evidence-free politics takes us in future. Maybe the chancellor could announce that he's sorted out the national debt by having a quiet word with Father Christmas, who's agreed to have his magic elves conjure up a few billion gold bars, to be gift wrapped and left at the Treasury on the night of his annual present drop. It would be a complete lie, but it's a story people would like to believe which is, apparently, all that matters these days.

*I'm don't really believe that karma operates in any real sense. You don't need to look very far to see bad deeds rewarded and bad stuff happening to folk who do good (I'll leave assertions about ultimate cosmic justice in some future incarnation / afterlife to the clerics and theologians who have cornered the market in being dead certain about unprovable things).

** I mostly disagree.

via

Pushing the Channel 4 envelope

2011-10-06T09:41:00.000+01:00

With the entertainment industry reeling from the sad, but unsurprising, news that the inexplicable celebrity idiot, Sarah Palin, won’t be running for US president, and Shellow Bowells still on my mind, I’ve come up with a cracking idea for a TV show.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a celebrity in possession of a failing career must be in want of ritual humiliation on reality TV. Also, nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the viewing public. The time is, therefore, right for Celebrity Embarrassing Bodies ©.

Channel 4 executives wishing to acknowledge the genius of the concept, and arrange a power breakfast to develop it, may contact me via the comments section of this blog. Please note that all Blackberries should be turned off for the duration of the meeting and adequate supplies of good, hot coffee, smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels and champagne should be provided to keep the creative juices flowing.

Facebook quarantine

2011-10-05T15:50:00.001+01:00

Here's a thought:

I've started browsing with Facebook open in my secondary browser and all other browsing in my primary. Will that help keep Mark Z at bay?

Sounds as if it might work, up to a point. I only use one browser for most of the time, but I'm going to start using a different one on the rare occasions I log in to Facebook (and never for anything else). Of course it wouldn't address a lot of the other question marks about keeping control of your personal info on FB, so I'll still be turning the privacy controls all the way up to 11, not giving any more than the bare minimum of personal information required and making sure there are a few outrageous lies on my profile, just to be on the safe side.

All of this mucking around partially cripples FB as a social networking tool, but at least it still allows me to occasionally keep up with a few people I actually know in real life (I don't do FB-only "friends"), without inviting world + dog to help themselves to what nation states would class as "information useful to the enemy".

Crazy cat lady is running the Home Office

2011-10-05T13:15:00.000+01:00

I used to think that Theresa May wasn't too bad (for a Conservative cabinet minister). I suspect that the pressure of being Home Secretary would cause the soundest mind to crack, so I'm not entirely surprised to see her losing her grip on reality (rather like almost every other holder of this impossible job in recent history).

In her case, the insanity seems to have caused her to morph into the crazy cat lady from The Simpsons, talking gibberish and throwing made-up stories about cats at passers by. As always, your best coverage of the story is in The Daily Mash:

Theresa May has demanded the Home Office be free to do its vital work unhindered by reality

Speaking from inside her claw-resistant spittle chamber, May insisted it was unrealistic that she should be able to talk about things and know what she was talking about at the same time.

May said: "On any given day I might want to say that the previous government housed immigrants in a network of underground bunkers filled with champagne and chimps serving crack cocaine from bongs in the shape of Russell Grant. I don't have time to check whether any of that actually happened".

Read all about it here.

A series of unfortunate names

2011-10-03T18:38:00.000+01:00

1. Unfortunate product name of the day.

My partner and helpmate has been shopping. She decided that I needed a new can of deodorant (guided by her innate sense of stock control, rather than her sense of smell, honest).This is what she got. I'm really not sure about that name.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that "Pure Game" is a rubbish name for a personal freshness product, at least for one aimed at consumers who don't want to exude the gamey aroma of a well-hung pheasant.

2. Unfortunate English place name of the day.

The Essex village of Shellow Bowells. It sounds like the sort of embarrassing medical condition the Queen might suffer from:

Excuse one, but one really must pay a visit to the ladies'. Shellow bowells, you know; they run in the family. Philip dear, mind the corgis while one's gorn...

And don't even get me started on Steeple Bumstead, Foulness, Mucking and Ugley...

Rainbow over Newport Pagnell

2011-10-02T20:46:00.002+01:00

If you look very carefully, you can just make out that this is a double rainbow. The second bow became brighter and more distinct a couple of minutes after this was taken. Precisely at the moment, in fact, when my camera battery ran out...

Smoke on the water

2011-10-02T20:36:00.000+01:00

The Wall Street Journal thought it worth giving Scott Adams a column to expand on his quaint notion that the world's wealthiest citizens will one day migrate to floating tax havens. I agree, but only because this stuff is silly enough to be entertaining, especially when Scott warns the world's mega-rich of the coming socialist tax-apocalypse:

The final phase will involve a tax rate on the top 1% of earners that is so high it can't be described without the Viking word for pillage.

Yeah, right.

Mention of Vikings makes me almost regret that the great floating tax havens will always be a figment of the over-heated libertarian imagination, though. The funerary rituals of such a seagoing elite could be quite spectacular. I can't imagine the ex-Masters of the Universe being content with just being wrapped in some sailcloth and quietly dropped over the side when their time comes. Something more spectacular and ostentatious would be in order.

I'm thinking of a full-on flaming ship-burial (think Kirk Douglas's dragon ship funeral pyre at the end of The Vikings)* to speed the dear departed to the high net worth Valhalla.

From the fury of the hedge fund managers deliver us, O Lord.

*Although these guys could presumably afford to outdo a warrior from the dark ages and sign off with a grand gesture to match the Graf Spee's final moments.

Quotation for the day

2011-09-28T19:55:00.000+01:00

In today's smug, self-righteous world of "rights and responsibilities", where we're all supposed to be furiously networking with anybody who might give us a bunk up the greasy pole and providing outstanding service to the almighty customer, whilst caring nothing for the economically "undeserving" poor, here's a deeply unfashionable thought:

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.

James D Miles (after Goethe)

I approve this message.

Bankers challenge serial killers for moral high ground

2011-09-28T13:09:00.001+01:00

It's been a hectic few days, hence the light posting and the time it's taken me to get round to posting a link to this little gem:

Dr Harold Shipman murdered 52 infirm old women in order to steal money from their wills, but bankers, get bonuses. Who is the real criminal, eh??

OK, my post title is a bit unfair - there's a lot more to the argument than this out-of-context piece of rhetoric (clearly intended to parody the more indiscriminate outbursts of furious people ranting on about how everybody who has ever worked for a bank is some kind of psychopathic Nazi looter who strangles kittens for breakfast and deserves to be strung up from the nearest lamp post). As such, the whole post and the extensive comments are very well worth ten minutes of your reading time.

Having said that, as an example of damning yourself with a homeopathically faint dose of praise, this one still takes the entire selection tin of all-butter luxury assorted biscuits.

The broad argument, for which I have some sympathy, is that 'bankers' is an incomplete shorthand for those responsible for the troubles that kicked off in 2008 and are still far from over. Other groups of people certainly dipped their hands in the blood. There were politicians who were supposedly more economically literate than the rest of us, but believed in (and took the credit for) a magic bubble that was supposed to inflate for ever without popping. There were mortgage brokers and estate agents, who shared a vested interest in the bubble with the banks and other loan providers. The credit rating agencies hardly covered themselves in glory. There were buy-to-let investors and ordinary house buyers who bought into the Property Ladder dream of homes as idiot-proof investment vehicles in an endlessly rising market, rather than just boring old places to have a life in. There was a government that systemetically lied about its deficit (ably assisted, it has to be mentioned, by bankers). And plenty more besides.

So there you have it, brethren. We are all guilty. We are all sinners. Do we all not look upon the mote in our brother's eye, yet consider not the beam in out own? I know I do.

This is all very well, up to a point, but you can spread the blame jam so thin that you discover that everybody and nobody is to blame. Many people went along with what was happening and were complicit, by what they did or failed to do, but the law has a concept of "controlling minds" in an organisation, the people with the knowledge and executive power to make things happen. In that sense, the fact that lots of other people went along with what was happening, were greedy or were dupes, doesn't get the controlling minds in the banks off the hook. As TG eloquently puts it in the comments:

A confidence man may prey on the ignorance, stupidity and greed of his marks; that doesn’t make him an honest businessman.

Agree or not, kudos for an interesting blog post that kicked off an intense, passionately-argued debate that I enjoyed reading and which mostly stayed far above tit-for-tat abuse.

Plutocrats ahoy!

2011-09-23T11:36:00.004+01:00

Does anyone think the rich won't someday migrate to floating islands?

Asks Scott Adams. Short answer; I think they won't, because:

1. Why on earth (or on water) would the rich migrate when they're already doing very nicely, thank you, right where they are?

2. Say the rich are the first to take to the high seas to escape allegedly 'confiscatory levels of taxation'. At home (using the US example), a lot of those tax dollars fund a colossal military machine that makes damn sure that few people imagine they can mess with US nationals with impunity. Anyone care to guess how afraid pirates and terrorists are going to be of attacking giant undefended cruise liners full of immensely rich tax exiles, ripe for plunder and kidnap? Or do the the plutocrats intend to tax themselves sufficiently to support the immense cost of creating their own private army / navy, so they can continue to sleep sound in their luxury staterooms?

3. I'll start believing when the mighty "Freedom Ship" starts being more than just mouth and trousers.

I've got immense respect to Scott Adams for having created the superb Dilbert strip and escaped the corporate rat race using his own creative talent, but some of his blog posts are lurching towards the wilder fringes of teapottery.

Be careful what you wish for

2011-09-22T20:23:00.003+01:00

Before the last general election, I was one of those people who quite fancied the idea of a hung parliament. I hoped we might end up with this sort of scenario:

Belgium’s lack of government has one huge advantage in the current crisis: No one can pass austerity measures. Having no government may be the best option for Belgium right now, not because the underlying issues are intractable (although they are both intractable and, IMO, lame) but because no one can pressure a non-existent government to reduce deficits.

Jammy Belgians. All we got was this lousy coalition.

Rats.

Dr. Pangloss meets Samuel Beckett

2011-09-20T10:40:00.000+01:00

The Fat Man on a Keyboard manages, in less than one sentence, to sum up the most astonishing and depressing feature of contemporary politics, namely 'the extraordinary strength of the ideological belief in the economic consensus in the face of its failure'.

It would be hard to come up with anything more succinct, although the people tasked with coming up with catchy slogans for the current political party conference season might also want to try Voltaire's ironic 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds' or Samuel Beckett's 'No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' to urge us forward on our shared journey towards the ultimate fulfilment of the ideologically correct Plan A.

There is still no Plan B.

Why science education matters

2011-09-19T18:30:00.000+01:00

I'm looking wistfully at our four chickens and wishing I'd studied harder in science class. Don't get me wrong, I quite like the chickens. They're starting to reliably produce fresh eggs. They're even quite companionable. With their round, staring eyes and jerky, mechanical head movements, they're not the sort of creatures you can get sloppily anthropomorphic about, but they're quite pleasant to be around as they fussily scratch in the dirt, cluck gently and do that comical little run when you throw them scraps to eat. OK, they seem to expel the equivalent of their own weight in bodily waste every couple of days, but nobody's perfect. and, besides, it's good for the roses. But they could be so much more

When Arkhat Abzhanov (who clearly worked very hard in science class) looks at chickens, he sees something far more exciting. He sees a Lost World of genetic possibility. Archimedes was supposed to have said that, given a big enough lever and a place to stand, he could move the whole world. Abzhanov thinks that, given a big enough research grant and some chickens, he could recreate dinosaurs. How cool is that?

Just think, a bit more concentration and it could have been me, elegantly clad in my Blofeld-style Mao suit, sitting in my executive swivel chair, meditatively stroking a chicken and contemplating the day when I will dominate the world with my dinosaur legions. There would be a few minor technical challenges, like attaching frickin' laser beams to their heads, but my loyal henchpeople should be able to sort those out. The one serious problem with my master plan might be one of scale. Apparently the dinos Abzhanov is trying to recreate are of rather sub-T Rex dimensions. In fact, they would be about the same size as .. er ... chickens.

Mind you, if the world domination idea didn't work out I could at least have opened Newport Pagnell's equivalent of Jurassic Park. Given the diminutive size of the Maniraptors, it would have been less of a safari park and more of a petting zoo, but it would have been a start. Although even the petting zoo idea might be challenging if the little critters turned out to be bad-tempered. As Basil Fawlty said of Manuel's pet rat, 'Cuddle this, you'd never play the guitar again!'

Maybe a few legal disclaimers would sort this one out:

All children under the age of fifteen must be accompanied by an adult.You must be at least 1.8 metres tall, and unable to play the guitar, to cuddle the dinosaurs. Dino World (Newport Pagnell) Ltd accepts no liability whatsoever in respect of any loss of limb(s) and/or face suffered as a result of cuddling the dinosaurs.

I'm no lawyer, but it might just work; if not, maybe it's for the best that I'm stuck with boring old genetically unmodified chickens.

A point of view

2011-09-18T17:12:00.000+01:00

When Richard Dawkins goes off on one about religion, I usually find myself in agreement, but very occasionally I wish he'd change the record. He's bang on the money when it comes to fundamentalists of the Islamic or Christian variety, patriarchy and the oppression of women, paedophile priests, the wilful blindness of creationists, the bloody history of religious wars and the way that religion fuels the tribalism that keeps such conflicts going.

There are, however a lot of religious people in the world who don't fall into any of these categories; perfectly decent, good people who happen to believe in something I find unbelievable, but who display kindness, integrity, courage and any number of other qualities that would do credit to any human being, regardless of his or her belief system. In the world's more open and liberal societies, most religious people are like this, getting on with their own lives and believing in their own beliefs and allowing other people who live by other belief systems to get on with their own lives unhindered.*

So, for a lot of the time, in a lot of the world, the fact that many people believe in what I'd consider to be weird things, doesn't strike me as a pressing problem. I think, for example, that the happiness of this nation would be better served by a reduction in the number of people without work, or more equal access to a good education, than by a reduction in the number of people sitting in pews listening to self-appointed wise men telling improbable fairy stories on a Sunday.

All quiet on the home front, then? Well, not exactly. Just when I feel like saying, 'good point, well made Professor Dawkins, I totally get it, but can you move on and talk about something else now', up pops some affronted talking head with a killer argument that's supposed to put all these uppity secularists back in their place. And, invariably, the furious rebuttal is so slippery and shoddy and badly thought out, so condescending that I feel that I'm having my intelligence systematically insulted by somebody too lazy to frame a convincing argument and remember why Dawkins (and Hitchens and P Z Myers and all of the other eloquent free thinkers out there) need to keep turning up the volume. If they didn't, their signal would be drowned out by counterblasts of incoherent noise.

The philosopher John Gray made a bit of incoherent noise on Radio 4's A Point of View this morning. Gray's a respected philosopher and J G Ballard, no less, was impressed by the quality of his philosophising. The quality of his talk about the things that "extreme atheists" don't understand was considerably less than stellar, though. There's a short precis of his talk on the relevant BBC web page and the whole things's available in iPlayer for a while.

His talk purports to be a well-considered demolition of the naive misconceptions of the more vocal secularists. All he can actually manage to do, as far as I can see, is to furiously mow down straw men like a runaway combine harvester at a scarecrows' convention. Viz:

Straw men 1 and 2:

'Extreme atheists do not realise that for most people across the globe, religion is not generally about personal belief. Instead, "Practice - ritual, meditation, a way of life - is what counts."'

1. Extreme atheists?

How are they extreme? They don't force anybody to think the way they do. Their only weapons are argument and persuasion. People we call religious extremists, are described as "extreme" because they seek to enforce their beliefs on others, using methods including ostracism, the threat of supernatural punishment, caste prejudice, intimidation and the murder of people who disrespect their beliefs or even dare to believe different things. At the very least, a person would have to subscribe to a set of beliefs that is untenable without denying a large, coherent body of well-attested evidence before they deserve to be called "extreme". Moderate religious people who don't do any of these things don't get labelled as extremists - why do middle-of-the-road secularists who don't threaten anybody deserve this sort of name-calling?

2. Religion is not about personal belief?

This is Gray's strongest argument, but that's not saying much. Granted, religious observance has plenty of fringe benefits that have nothing to do with supernatural beliefs. For a Christian these might involve a quiet moment in the week, the whole community getting-together-with-friends-and-neighbours vibe, a cup of tea and a hob nob with the vicar after service, singing in the choir, the rota for cleaning the brass rubbings / arranging flowers, bell ringing, putting a penny or two into the charity box, an Easter egg hunt for the kiddies, celebrating the life's rites of passage, etc, etc I'm certain that equivalents exist in other traditions.

I don't believe the stories told in holy books about how the universe was created, or about supernatural events or about supernatural beings and their actions. Where required, however, I'll turn up for carol services, hatch, match and dispatch events, and so on, that happen to take place in a church or equivalent.

Is John Gray really saying that people who label themselves as religious and go to regular devotions are like just me - agnostics who don't believe in the truth of the creed being preached, but just turn up occasionally because it's what people do? If so, that's another dirty secret the Pope's been keeping very quiet.

I don't know, but it's reasonable to assume that for most people who practice some sort of religion it is, at least partly, about belief. If John Gray can cite some research that convincingly suggests that a substantial proportion of people who are motivated enough to regularly attend religious services don't actually care whether the creed being preached is true or not, I'll start to be interested in his point.

Straw man 3:

'Central to religion is the power of myth, which still speaks to the contemporary mind. "The idea that science can enable us to live without myths is one of these silly modern stories."'

I wonder who these scientists are who think we can live without myths? Presumably the ones who have never read a fictional story, have never seen any films other than documentaries, have never seen a TV drama or a play, or a musical, or an opera, have never played a video game and wouldn't have a clue what you were talking about if you mentioned Prometheus or Procrustes or the Trojan Horse. We're all of us, scientists included, surrounded by myths and consume them daily. I can't think of any scientists - "extreme" atheists included, who call for humanity to live without myths.

Gray seems to think of scientists as cartoonish, dessicated Gradgrindian calculating machines, as emotionless as Science Officer Spock, or a brain in a box, self-absorbed geeks cut off from "normal" society and its culture. And then he's got the brass neck to accuse rationalists of caricaturing the religions they criticize.

There are quite a few scientists who think that people ought to be able to distinguish myth from reality, but that's something else entirely.

Straw Man 4:

'In fact, he argues, science has created its own myth, "chief among them the myth of salvation through science....The idea that humans will rise from the dead may be incredible" he says, "but no more so than the notion that humanity can use science to remake the world"'.

Really? I'm not exactly deafened by a chorus of scientists preaching 'salvation though science'. I hear plenty arguing that knowledge is better than ignorance and that humanity has gained incremental improvements to the quality of human life on the back of scientific discoveries - antibiotics, transistors, that sort of thing. But salvation, ultimate truth and such like are religious concepts that you don't generally hear hear serious scientists claiming they can deliver. If you were desperate to find a scientific/technological prophet, you could cite people like the computer scientist, Ray Kurzweil with his millenarian vision of the "singularity", but he's hardly mainstream.

In reality, most scientists I've read or heard make cautious, testable, evidence-based claims about specifics, leaving the sweeping generalisations about the nature of things to the clergy.

It doesn't take another high-falutin' philosopher to refute John Gray's caricature - I'm quite happy to leave it to comedian Dara O'Brian to finish off this straw man. People who come up with the auld 'well science doesn't know everything", as if scientists had ever claimed such a thing, get on Dara's nerves because:

Well, science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise it'd stop... Just 'cos science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.

Just when you find yourself about to say 'Dawkins! Leave it! 'He's not worth it!' up pops somebody like John Gray and makes you remember that he's not just there to speak up against the crazies in the world's unfortunate Islamic Republics or the Tea-Partying Bible-Belt of the USA. He's also there to remind us that some of our own respected talking heads and public intellectuals need to raise their game and sharpen up their arguments, rather than clogging up the public's ears with this sort of chicken shit for the soul.

* With a few exceptions.

Never mind the bollards

2011-09-17T14:15:00.002+01:00

It's (almost always) good to get feedback. It's better still when it brings something to the party. Michael Greenwell sees my cunning anti-wire-cutter-theft scheme and raises me one masterclass on how not to deploy no-parking bollards.

I'll be scouring the internets for more top quality fails, but that'll take some beating...

This is why I care (and why you should too)

2011-09-17T13:32:00.002+01:00

Having just welcomed the coalition's move to put equal civil marriage for same-sex couples onto the political agenda, this piece is too damn good not to share. Required reading for anybody who might be consulted on this issue:

I've had people ask why I am so vocal about the issue of LGBT equality. Why is a heterosexual, married father so concerned with what gay people can or can't do? I don't have a dog in this fight, do I?

I find those kinds of questions to be puzzling (and telling), as if we should value the rights of one group of humans over any other group, or only be concerned with the welfare of a group to which we belong. As Elie Wiesel said, "I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

So, anyway, this is why I care (and why you should too)

via

Reasons to be cheerful. part 3

2011-09-17T08:54:00.002+01:00

It's not very often that I have a good word to say for Britain's coalition government, but this is terrific news and long overdue:

"I am delighted to confirm that early next year, this Government will begin a formal consultation on equal civil marriage for same-sex couples," she [equalities minister Lynne Featherstone] said. "This would allow us to make any legislative changes before the end of this Parliament.

Sadly, it's not a done deal, as the consultation process will undoubtedly bring forth attempts to wreck or neuter any legislation from the usual pious bunch of sour-faced, busy-body killjoys determined to frustrate a thoroughly benign measure that would bring happiness to those affected without doing the slightest harm to anybody else.

Apparently, David Cameron is backing the change (I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he really means this and isn't just parroting something his SPADS have told him about changing British social attitudes). The Tories may have a dismal record on economic inequality, but when it comes to prejudice against minority groups, boy, they've come along way since Section 28.

Reasons to be cheerful. part 2

2011-09-16T07:18:00.000+01:00

I was going to move on, but I can't resist going back to this old lament from James Delingpole and squeezing the last drop of good cheer from it:

It is extremely unlikely that a Tea Party movement could ever take off in Britain: the main reason being that, unlike in the US, the British simply lack the political vocabulary and intellectual building blocks to demand one.

On Monday, CNN journalist Wolf Blitzer asked Tea Party presidential candidate Ron Paul what should happen to a 30-year-old uninsured man who needs expensive medical care. Should the state pay his bills? Paul replied:

That's what freedom is all about: taking your own risks. This whole idea that you have to take care of everybody —

He never finished his point, being drowned out by the approving cheers and whoops of the Tea Party faithful in the audience.

Kent Snyder could have finished his point for him. Snyder was a volunteer who eventually became a campaign manager for Ron Paul’s previous presidential bid in 2008. “It was Kent more than anyone else who encouraged and pushed Ron to run for president,” said a Ron Paul spokesperson.

Kent Snyder caught pneumonia during Paul's 2008 campaign. On June 26, 2008 he died from complications from his pneumonia, but not before running up a $400,000 in medical bill. He didn't have health insurance. His family couldn't pay the bill and it was left to an on line campaign by friends to pay off his debt to his health care providers.

Even with the National Health Service in the tender care of the Tories, such a thing couldn't happen in Britain, at least for the foreseeable future. The British simply lack the political vocabulary and intellectual building blocks to demand such things and I, for one, am very, very grateful that we do lack them.

What's wrong with this picture?

2011-09-15T16:38:00.000+01:00

Every so often you come across something so elegantly, concisely, perfectly wrong that it's like a tiny acidental poem. Think of this as your fail haiku for today:

My boss was tired of our wire cutters getting stolen. I'm not sure this will solve it.

via

Shameless

2011-09-13T21:02:00.001+01:00

I had a bit of a grumble recently about independent fee-paying schools in England and Wales being able to define themselves as "charities" and bag a nice little subsidy from the sort of ordinary tax payers who will never be rich enough to have a hope sending their own kids to a private school. It's interesting to get a bit of historical perspective here and remember that our "public" schools started off as perfectly respectable charities in the sense that any reasonable person would understand. They were, after all, first established to provide a free education for children of the poor.

Nick Davies, the investigative reporter responsible for helping to overturn the News International rock and expose the grubs and maggots crawling around underneath, told the inglorious story of how our public schools stopped helping the needy and turned into an exclusive network for of the privileged offspring of the rich and influential. It's an old article, but it bears repeating:

All of these schools were founded for the free education of the poor – that is why they were originally called ‘public’ schools. When Henry VI founded Eton in 1442, for example, he instructed that “No one having a yearly income of more than five marks shall be eligible”. In 1382, the founder of Winchester, William of Wykeham, declared that the school was to be made up of 70 “poor and needy” pupils, although as a concession to those whose patronage he sought, he agreed also to take ten “sons of noble and influential persons”. Rugby, Harrow, Westminster, they were all founded as free schools for the poor. And yet, all of them eventually were hijacked by the wealthy, who paid fees to attend. The headmasters were happy to take their money and were quite clever in helping the hijack.

Thomas Arnold preserved Rugby for the rich by closing its free lower school so that, unless the children of the poor could afford to pay someone else to teach them, they could not learn enough to get into the main school. The schools insisted that new pupils should be able to speak Latin, with the same result. At Harrow, the head man took the register at noon when the poorer pupils, who were day boys, were all at home for lunch and, just to make sure of their absence, he forbade them from riding horses to speed up their journey home. Westminster wriggled out of its legal obligation to the poor by arguing that Queen Elizabeth I had never confirmed its statutes. Winchester justified its behaviour to the 1818 Brougham Commission by explaining that, in truth, its current pupils really were poor – it was only their parents who were rich.

With the Public Schools Act of 1868, these ancient schools completed the theft by capturing any remaining endowments which were still dedicated to poor pupils. A year later, following the lead of the Schools Inquiry Commission, the Endowed Schools Act organised a far grander larceny, seizing from towns all over the country a fortune in endowments which had been left for the benefit of the local poor but which were now used to pay for a network of new fee-paying private schools for the middle class.

You almost have to admire their sheer brass neck. It is a truly breathtaking perversion of the idea of charity. It's as if Shelter, the housing charity, decided to give up on trying to help people who are homeless or living in squalor and re-launched itself as an organisation to subsidise the purchase of holiday homes in Cornwall or Tuscany by people who already own mansions in fashionable areas of London. And still claimed to be a charity. And successfully persuaded the Charity Commission to nod it through and say 'well done, keep up the good work'. And lobbied so successfully for their idiosyncratic definition of "charity" that anyone who objected to the injustice was routinely accused of "the politics of envy" or "social engineering".

Our society, and in particular our education system, seems to be at the mercy of a feral overclass, utterly free from shame and remorse and cut off from the mainstream in everything but its materialism. This is worse than unfair - it's anti-social behaviour on an epic scale.

I'll leave the last word to former Conservative education minister, George Walden, as quited by Nick Davies; 'The screening out of the sons and daughters of the affluent and influential from the rest of society… and the consequent indifference of their parents to what goes on in state schools is more than a traditional quirk in the English system. It severs our educational culture at the neck. … No country has evolved a high standard of public education while the top seven per cent of its citizens have nothing to do with it'.

The only inescapable of lesson from 9/11...

2011-09-11T14:29:00.000+01:00

... is that confirmation bias is a force more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

via

The summer's gone and all the roses dying

2011-09-11T13:44:00.000+01:00

The beginning of autumn can be a wistful, melancholy time in these latitudes; the year's first step on the dreary road to cold and darkness. So, in a spirit of resolute good cheer, here's a more stirring and upbeat interpretation of the season, courtesy of Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov:

I notice that one of the commentators on YouTube thinks that this music was used in the film of The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe's hymn to supersonic jets, space rockets and all things fast and dangerous. It wasn't (although if you listen to the film score, about three minutes in, you can hear the similarities). To my ears, the climax of the film score sounds as if it was nicked from Tchaikovsky's violin concerto (listen to this at about 6' 14" to see what I mean).

A carrot a day keeps the spin doctor in pay

2011-09-11T08:12:00.000+01:00

The carrot, as any fule kno, is an unrivalled source β-carotene, which the human body can metabolise into vitamin A.

The carrot is also a versatile propaganda tool, useful for raising the brand profile of your royal family or spreading disinformation in time of war.

The Spartan-Satanic-Illuminati Axis of Evil

2011-09-10T22:02:00.000+01:00

It is extremely unlikely that a Tea Party movement could ever take off in Britain: the main reason being that, unlike in the US, the British simply lack the political vocabulary and intellectual building blocks to demand one.

Thinks James Delingpole in an opinion piece so hysterical it deserves to be mocked more than once.

Sean Wilentz in the New Yorker has an interesting piece on the "intellectual building blocks" of the Tea Party. Media pundit Glenn Beck seems to be the movement's most influential ideologue, punting his idiosyncratic version of history on his Fox news show and via his very own online "Beck University". Beck acknowleges his own intellectual debt to the historical ideas of Robert Welch and Willard Cleon Skousen of the right-wing cold-war-era John Birch Society. The John Birch Society isn't very well known here in Britain, which is a pity, because the belief system concocted by Welch's and Skousen is an entertainingly improbable world of fantasy, a sort of Disneyland for paranoids. One of Robert Welch's more interesting notions was that the commie hordes were themselves the mere tools of a far larger, and more ancient, conspiracy:

This master conspiracy, he said, had forerunners in ancient Sparta, and sprang fully to life in the eighteenth century, in the “uniformly Satanic creed and program” of the Bavarian Illuminati. Run by those he called “the Insiders,” the conspiracy resided chiefly in international families of financiers, such as the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, government agencies like the Federal Reserve System and the Internal Revenue Service, and nongovernmental organizations like the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Since the early twentieth century, they had done a good deal of their evil work under the guise of humanitarian uplift. “One broad avenue down which these conspiratorial forces advance was known as progressive legislation,” Welch declared in 1966. “The very same collectivist theories and demagogic pretenses which had destroyed earlier civilizations were now paraded forth in the disguise of new and modern concepts.”

Spartans, and Illuminati, and Satanists! Oh, my!

Willard Cleon Skousen brought Welch's conspiracy theories up to date with a few interesting assertions of his own. Franklin Roosevelt's advisor Harry Hopkins, Skousen claimed, had been passing large supplies of uranium to the Soviet Union. He also thought that the Soviets had stolen the plans for the first Sputnik from the USA and that the commies the were creating “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters”. In short, the sort of fantasist who could mistake The Manchurian Candidate for a documentary.

It's hard to find much to smile about Austerity Britain, but the fact that the Brits apparently lack the 'political vocabulary and intellectual building blocks' to take this sort of hogwash at all seriously is cause for hope and pride.To borrow a phrase, the teabaggers are entitled to their own opinion, but they aren't entitled to their own facts.

Unfortunately, an evidence-based rebuttal of their quirky beliefs seems unlikely to cut much ice with the entrenched Tea Party demographic in the USA. Maybe those conspratorial Spartans had a better idea about how to settle disputes with arrogant blockheads.

Half a century and two portraits

2011-09-09T20:25:00.000+01:00

The Danish-Norwegian soprano, Nina Hagerup, (1845-1935), painted in Rome in 1884 and photographed fifty years later, at an unknown location. Nina Hagerup is better known by her married name, Greig, having married the composer Edvard Greig (her first cousin) in 1867.

Happiness is...

2011-09-06T18:27:00.000+01:00

... submission to Godzilla.

This makes perfect theological sense to me. The evidence for the existence of Godzilla is precisely as compelling as that for any other deity. Also, as The Book of Common Prayer reminds us, the primary purpose of the institution of matrimony is to frighten the kiddies:

First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name.

OK, got that, number priority numero uno is scaring the offspring witless. Unfortunately, churches tend to undermine the clarity of this message by making the incarnate daity rather less than terrifying. Not only does He bless the peacemakers and advocate turning the other cheek, but children actually get to sing about how He was 'little, weak and helpless' and that:

Christian children all mus be,
Mild, obedient, good as He.

If your mission statement for marriage is explicitly about scaring the bejeezus out of the wee ones, a God who manifests Himself as little, helpless, meek, mild, obedient baby just isn't going to cut it.

The obvious solution is to worship a two hundred-foot-high, radioactive, fire-breathing mutant lizard instead. That'll frighten the little blighters into unquestioning obedience. Job done.

Move aside, Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster; there's an even newer religion on the block. Make way for the First Church of Godzilla©.

Come to think of it, a confrontation between The Flying Spaghetti Monster and Godzilla would make one hell of a great film. Now I'm in L. Ron Hubbard mode, I might as well be thinking about the movie rights:

I'm not enough of an expert on Pastafarian theology to know whether the Flying Spaghetti Monster can actually fire laser beams from what we'll call, for the sake of convenience, His head, but it just seemed artistically right.

Hat tip.

Convair versus the aircraft carrier (part 2)

2011-09-04T20:09:00.000+01:00

As I blogged recently, the US aircraft manufacturer Convair unsuccessfully attempted to consign the aircraft carrier to the history books with its experimental Sea Dart waterborne fighter.

The Sea Dart wasn't Convair's only attempt to do away with the Navy's floating airfields, though. Meet the Convair XFY (AKA the "Pogo"), a shiny turboprop that sat on its tail and rose vertically, like a rocket, with no need for an inconveniently big ocean-going runway.

The Pogo was also supposed to land vertically on its tail. To land the craft, the pilot had to look back behind himself to properly stabilize the craft, a mighty tall order on an airfield and practically impossible on the rolling, pitching deck of a sub-aircraft-carrier-sized vessel. This, combined with problems with getting into a hover after high speed flight, so the craft could make the perilous tail-first descent, killed the project.

End of story? Probably, although, maybe somebody might want to look at this idea again. The Pogo was a flop as a piloted vehicle with 1950's technology, but we're now in the 21st century, with highly capable drones beginning to supplant the military's crewed aircraft

Take away the pilot, add spoilers and air brakes to help the craft slow down and stop for the descent phase and you might have the makings of a usable craft. For an on-board computer linked to gyroscopes / rear-facing radar or lasers, the tail-first descent that would tax a human pilot to breaking point might be achievable. And with no human on board to be crushed by the g-forces, it could be launched by some form of rocket or catapult, so it wouldn't waste huge amounts of fuel in a vertical take-off.

Probably a daft idea, based on nothing more technical than watching too many episodes of Thunderbirds as a kid, but in a nation that's currently paying billions for aircraft carriers that won't be ready for years and won't have any planes to fly from them for even longer, the idea of replacing the Queen Elizabeth with VTOL drones launched from something much smaller and a few billion pounds cheaper sounds tempting. Mind you, I guess we've already paid for a substantial chunk of aircraft carrier, and given Britain's past record in defence procurement, we'd probably just end up with a fleet of drones that cost even more than an aircraft carrier, ten years later than promised.