Latest casualties in the American Civil War

The Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in context.

The USA has been involved in a ground war in Afghanistan since 2001. At the time of writing, over a decade of war has cost just over 2,000 US lives.

Back in the US of A, over 9,000 people are murdered with guns every year.

 A lot of those murders will have been committed with illegally held guns, but it seems unlikely that the death toll on the home front is unrelated to the fact that the USA leads the world in civilian gun ownership, with 88.8 guns per 100 people. It doesn't take a great stretch of the imagination to conclude that having all those guns in the system is a risk in itself, regardless of what proportion of perpetrators got access to part of this arsenal illegally, as opposed to having a licence.

In short, The National Rifle Association is probably a greater threat to ordinary Americans* than the Taliban ever was.


*And Mexicans, if you factor in the narco-funded American guns flooding south of the border to arm Mexico's drug gangs.

Studio Schools - the unreported scandal

Almost any business can set up a studio school by paying a voluntary subscription of just £8,000 to the government. In return, the government builds and maintains a school, but the power to run the school remains firmly in the hands of private sponsors. National Express, GlaxoSmithKline, Sony, Ikea, Disney, Michelin, Virgin Media and Hilton Hotels are just some of the corporate players who have bought into the scheme.

So what is in it for these investors? First, they hope that graduates of studio schools will work for them in the future – the taxpayer is paying to train their future employees. Second, pupils must spend up to 40 per cent of their school lives working for these companies. Predictably, these sponsor firms only pay the minimum wage – and that’s only for their over-16 students.

Under-16s, meanwhile, must work at least four hours a week for local sponsors unpaid. It is perhaps ironic that a system that is supposed to teach children what it is like to work in the real world does not pay them to do a job. Moreover, the introduction of cheap child labour into the workplace is likely to drive down wages for adult workers doing similar jobs. 

Red Pepper

Why isn't this scandal the subject of a Panorama special? Why isn't that vile pipsqueak, Gove, being grilled to an inch of his life by Paxman and Humphrys? Is it because the BBC's become too cowed, after being slapped down by successive governments, to ask challenging questions? Or is it just that we've absorbed so much propaganda and self-loathing that we no longer believe that our children merit a decent all-round education, or that their work deserves to be paid for? For a government that claims to stand shoulder to shoulder with 'strivers', this lot seem very keen on schemes that should only appeal to people with the most miserably low expecatations.

Borrowed clothes

Fashion is merely a form of ugliness so unbearable that we are compelled to alter it every six months.

 Oscar Wilde

I have the feeling that a lot of people who borrow Oscar Wilde's wit too freely are educated but not quite as clever as they'd like other people to think they are. Still, I like this quote and I'll make an exception in the case of Roy Bainton, who used Wilde's words back in 2010 to preface a splendid rant on the subject of fashion, for the last post on his now-dormant blog Over the Hill:*

In any case, they might argue, fashion is for everyone. Yet that’s the view from their side of the gulf. It’s the gulf of reality, the gulf between the rich and the poor which continues to expand, thanks to lack-lustre, materialistic politicians who have long since lost any decent convictions or a desire to improve the world, and will persist in their political inertia no matter who wins an election. The world of fashion, populated as it is by vacuous prima donnas, self-serving celebrity air-heads and over-pruning martinets, exists solely to sell to and entertain their own rapacious, gormless celebrity class. Whilst they continue to indulge in their mutual, design-inspired onanism in their elite, hermetically-sealed magazine feature world, the rest of us will continue to keep out the cold courtesy of Tesco and Primark, with many of us grabbing a suitable bargain from Oxfam, Help The Aged or the Heart Foundation charity shops. If there is some kind of heaven, and the departed generation before mine are looking down, then only the rapture brought about by their death could relieve the vision of despair they might witness down here on 21st century earth.

If my ranting here seems a severe observation, consider the Blair family. In her autobiography, Cherie Blair makes the staggering claim that she remains ‘a socialist’. This is a woman with a £3.6 million house, whose husband, elevated to his world status by the old Labour Party and the contributions of thousands of hard working union members, has taken on a six-figure deal to promote Louis Vuitton handbags. The deal appears to have had its genesis on board the luxury yacht of another paragon of compassion, the rock star Bono. 

Read the whole thing here.

I'm with Roy nearly all the way on this one. Fashion seems to distill some of the worst elements of our society: the epic wastefulness of planned obsolescence, the conspicuous consumption of stuff we don't need in order to impress people who aren't worth impressing, the herd mentality and a vapid obsession with style and presentation. The only thing that gives me pause for thought is the feminist critique that holds there's something misogynistic in holding fashion in low esteem. The argument is that, on average, women are more interested in fashion than men and that fashion is therefore perceived as more 'trivial' than more male-dominated industries.

I don't quite buy this idea - there's as much needless conspicuous consumption of things that are generally considered boys' toys, from Rolex watches to high-end Beemers. An obsession with status symbols and being part of the in-group is prevalent -and, in my view, equally unattractive - in both sexes. Criticism of the fashion biz only becomes sexist when it's used as a cover for dismissing women and only women, as empty-headed bimbos who never think about anything except hair and shoes. There are women that shallow, but there seem to be just as many empty-headed himbos whose life seems to revolve around the possession of an office swivel chair with arms (thus asserting superiority over the losers who haven't graduated to such dizzy heights of middle managerdom), a plasma TV the size of a billiard table, or some ridiculously expensive item of branded clothing.



*Roy's current on-line home is at roybaintonwrites.com.

Lucifer Our Lord

As any fule kno, David Cameron liked to sign off his texts to Rebekah Brooks with an affectionate 'LOL.' Now we all know what he really meant.

via

Out of the mouths of fruitcakes and loonies

You have the charisma of a damp rag, and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk. And the question that I want to ask, [...] that we're all going to ask, is "Who are you ?". I'd never heard of you. Nobody in Europe had ever heard of you. I would like to ask you, President, who voted for you, and what mechanism...oh, I know democracy isn't popular with you lot, and what mechanism the people of Europe have to remove you ? Is this European democracy ? Well, I sense, I sense though that you are competent and capable and dangerous, and I have no doubt in your intention, to be the quiet assassin of European democracy, and of the European nation states. You appear to have a loathing for the very concept of the existence of nation states - perhaps that's because you come from Belgium, which is pretty much a non-country. But since you took over, we've seen Greece reduced to nothing more than a protectorate. Sir, you have no legitimacy in this job at all, and I can say with confidence that I speak on behalf of the majority of British people in saying: we don't know you, we don't want you, and the sooner you're put out to grass, the better.

The rising star of the Britain's new political Third Force, Nigel Farage there, laying into Herman Van Rompuy (crazy name, crazy guy)* with the wit and charm for which Nige is so justly famous. I’m rather torn by his most famous sound-bite. On the one hand, Farage comes across as a thoroughly nasty piece of work – a single-issue obsessive, a pied piper for cranks and small-minded xenophobes, a sneering ex-stockbroker with a snobbish disdain for the very idea of a ‘low-grade bank clerk’, a man who values presentation over substance (even if Van Rompuy did have 'the charisma of a damp rag', it would be the least important question at issue) and an arrogant little jingoist, bursting with contempt for a small nation which he dismisses as ‘pretty much a made-up country.’

On the other hand it’s impossible to ignore the Eurozone catastrophe and the hijacking of former democracies by EU officials who nobody voted for. You don’t have to be a kipper to question the authority of these unelected satraps who seem happy to sacrifice the futures of millions of their fellow citizens rather than face the embarrassment of having to rethink an obviously flawed project.

European democracy is important. Our political class is in a sorry state, when it’s left to the leader of a single-issue pipsqueak party of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, who are still waiting to elect their first MP to come up with Britain’s most quotable sound-bite on the subject.

Just in case you’re left with the thought that, underneath all the bluster, Nige might be a decent bloke, I’ll leave you with a selection of quotes from an interview given by the man himself to Robert Chalmers in The Independent early in 2012:

I think that the policies Margaret Thatcher brought in – while they did bring a huge amount of misery to people in the north of England – were necessary to turn Britain into a modern global economy.

It became necessary to destroy the north of England to save it. Nice.

I hate this myth that Blair started in 2004, to defend the open border, suggesting that [Eastern Europeans] work hard, implying that people here are useless …
… inflation isn't our biggest worry at the moment. Youth unemployment is."

OK, so youth unemployment is our biggest worry, but the mass unemployment resulting from Thatcher’s Harrowing of the North was ‘necessary.’ And you hate the idea that East European immigrants might be snaffling jobs by coming over here and working hard (or even worse, pulling the wool over employers’ eyes by pretending to work hard, when they can’t really be working hard because if they were, that would obviously mean that British people are useless).

Let's pull the threads of your thinking together, Nige. The free market global economy is just spiffy and any poor sods who end up on the scrap heap are just the regrettable, but inevitable casualties, of modernisation. The free market global economy is simultaneously terrible because it leads to sneaky foreigners coming over here, stealing our jobs by pretending to work hard. Consistency's not really your strong point, is it? But never mind, the dog-whistle's coming through loud and clear.

"What precisely did you love about the City?"
"It was competitive. It was quite brutal. It was tough but very exciting."

His first brush with death occurred that night in Orpington, returning from the City at a period when, according to his first book, "I was handling millions and drinking more or less continuously." He was run over after stopping off at an Indian restaurant, where he had been arguing against the Anglo-Irish Agreement while drinking Jameson's.

Just the kind of politician we need in to re-balance the economy in the wake of a global crash caused by the dominance of an out-of-control finance sector. At least he drinks a half-way decent brand of whiskey. I'm guessing that, in his own head, Nige is a latter-day Churchill, fighting them on the beaches, with an iron constitution fuelled by the finest booze known to humanity. More recent precedents might be less promising, if you happen to be the rising leader of a third party with an unfortunate taste for the hard stuff.

Well, I was a keen golfer. Part of  the golf-club set. So of course I had a bloody blazer. I have a blazer. I have several.

The prosecution rests its case.


*If Herman's ever caught out in the slightest sexual misdemeanour, the British tabloids will have their headlines ready to roll before you can say 'Rompuy-pumpy.'

Lie detectors, as seen on Jeremy Kyle and in real life

I'm no fan of the Jeremy Kyle show, but I was doing some work at a guy's house the other day while this everyday story of dysfunctional folk was playing loudly on the TV in the next room.

The overheard episode included, among other tales of cruel and unusual relationships, a couple being quizzed over alleged extra-marital exploits. A supposedly errant partner had agreed to submit to a lie detector test, with the results to be confirmed on TV, in front of a rapt studio audience and spouse. My first thought (after, 'where the hell do they get these people?' and 'this sounds as phony as those old wrestling matches between people with names like Big Daddy* and Giant Haystacks') was, 'does anybody, even on reality TV, still believe in lie detectors - I thought they'd been exposed as bunkum years ago?'

Then I went back to what I was doing and forgot all about it. Until I came across an interesting blog post on the subject of lie detectors. Apparently the older "Voice Stress Analysis" system for detecting stress that might be associated with lying was thoroughly debunked some time ago. A system involving "Layered Voice Analysis" has been punted more recently, but doesn't sound much more impressive:

To sum up, then, the scientific evidence say that system doesn’t work and that it is, in fact, incapable of generating any kind of meaningful information about the unconscious emotional or cognitive content of speech without reporting to retrofitting the statistical noise it generates to known or desired outcomes.

I've no idea what "lie detector" system they were using on the Jeremy Kyle Show, but it probably doesn't matter, as there's probably no such thing as a working "lie detector" and I wouldn't be surprised if the confrontations on the show are as fake as staged wrestling matches anyway.

Well, you wouldn't expect much from the Jeremy Kyle show, which is just a piece of light entertainment (in the same, delightful tradition as bear baiting and ducking witches). You might expect a little more from local authorities, trialling ways to combat benefit fraud, but you'd be wrong. Despite the lack of any compelling evidence that it works, Southwark Council are using a "Layered Voice Analysis" system in an attempt to identify benefit fraudsters. Read the full story of how council leaders and other people who should know better (namely insurance company bosses) fell for the lie detector scam here.

There are a couple of interesting twists to the story. First, although "Layered Voice Analysis" itself sounds practically useless, it is used in conjunction with well-structured interview scripts which have been used, with some success, in the criminal justice system for years. Why not just junk the lie-detector mumbo-jumbo and stick to the proven method of using well-prepared interview scripts? If you follow the money, everything becomes clear:

Of the two core components of the Voice Risk Analysis system used in the DWP trials, the only one that has any scientific validity is the scripted interviews – there is a solid body of published research on the psychology of, in particular, witness interviews in criminal justice settings, on which the scripted questions used in Voice Risk Analysis are based but, in purely commercial terms, this scripting has very little value attached to it. All the relevant research is already readily accessible in papers published in scientific journal, so much so that any competitor looking for a way into this particular market could easily develop their own scripting from first principles at not much more than the cost of hiring a halfway decent psychologist to do the work.

Only when the scripting is tied into Nemesysco’s patented software system is there any commercial value, or advantage, in this system because the chain of licensing deals, from Nemesysco to Digilog UK and on to Capita means that only Capita has access to both the software and scripting and so, as long as Capita can sell local authorities the idea that the system might actually work, it has an advantage over its competitors when bidding for contracts and an opportunity to try and recoup some of the £6.5 million is laid out in 2004 when acquiring the rights to what is, in reality, a complete and utter steaming pile of worthless pseudoscientific bullcrap.

Second, the phrase "lie detector" has apparently become so discredited that even the people trying to flog lie detection systems don't like to use it:

A spokesman for Capita said they preferred not to describe it as a lie detector test, insisting it uses the voice checking together with "behavioural analysis by trained operators." 

I guess the preferred phrase, 'voice checking together with behavioural analysis by trained operators,' had too many big words to use on the Jeremy Kyle show.

The conjunction of daytime telly's regular freak show and Southwark Council's uncritical willingness to adopt an unproven but science-y-sounding method for weeding out benefit cheats makes me wonder whether the unknown genius on the council who pushed for this system to be adopted was inspired by sensational tales of low-life scallies being exposed by Jeremy's all-seeing lie detector. Maybe  that person responsible was gullible enough to believe that they were watching reality (as opposed to reality television, which is something completely different). Or maybe he or she was sufficiently Machiavellian to decide that it didn't matter whether any of it was true, so long as the audience kept applauding. Which is a dangerous insight for anyone in a position of power to have.



*According to a source cited in the relevant Wikipedia entry, Margaret Thatcher was 'said to be a fan' of Big 'I am serious and don't call me Shirley (Crabtree)' Daddy. Make of that what you will.

(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction

The scene is a tangled bank, some time between 1848 (when Cecil Frances Alexander's hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful was first published in Hymns for Little Children) and the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859.

Enter a BELIEVER and an UNBELIEVER, deep in conversation, as they contemplate endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful:

BELIEVER

Do you not see the Creator's handiwork all around? See the irises, the dragonflies and the kingfisher. As Mrs. Alexander so charmingly puts it , 'He made their glowing colours, He made their tiny wings.' Truly, the Lord God must have made them all!

UNBELIEVER

I beg to differ.

BELIEVER

How, then, do you explain the wonderful artifice and intricacy we observe in even the humblest creature?

 UNBELIEVER

I confess that, although I find your explanation fantastical, I do not know. It is a mystery.

 BELIEVER

I offer an explanation, but you can say nothing.  I have the better of this argument, I fancy.

Although unbelief predates Darwin by many centuries, I've always been impressed by Richard Dawkins' argument (in The Blind Watchmaker) that it must have been very hard to be an intellectually satisfied atheist before Darwin. 'God did it' might not be a wholly satisfying explanation for apparent design and complexity in nature, but it must have sounded a lot more plausible when the best nonbelievers could come back with was 'I don't believe that God made complex things, but I've got no idea why they exist.'

A century and a half later, the boot's on the other foot. Unbelievers have an explanation that's far more robust, plausible and rigourously tested than the theistic 'the thing that made the things for which there is no known maker and that causes and directs the events we can't otherwise explain and doesn't need to have been made, made them all.'

More thoughtful and intelligent believers are now the ones on the back foot. Instead of challenging unbelievers with anything as compelling as the analogy of the watch from Paley's Natural Theology,* they're now reduced to arguing that, although they can't provide an intellectually satisfying argument for the existence of God, God's existence is just not the sort of thing you can conclusively disprove.

Scriptural literalists and creationists who'd like to challenge unbelievers more forcibly are hampered by being completely, and demonstrably, wrong.

The best lack all conviction:

I can't prove it. I don't know that any of it is true. I don't know if there's a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn't the kind of thing you can know. It isn't a knowable item.)

...while the worst Are full of passionate intensity

*If you're looking for a better argument for the existence of God than 'well you can't conclusively prove He doesn't exist,' I suppose there's still the argument from fine tuning, but it sounds like clutching at straws to me.