Big blue

Yet another unfortunate pairing of headline and image, courtesy of Google News.

"Blue whale takes centre-stage at Natural History Museum"

So that's why they call high-profile politicians "big beasts." Mind you, that looks more like a picture of a white elephant than a blue whale to me.

Mar a Lago Italia

Florida boasts the perfect vacation spot for holiday makers with a major crush on an authoritarian buffoon with weird hair, but where in the world do you go on holiday if an authoritarian buffoon with no hair is more your thing?

No worries, we've got you covered...

"Behold, Donald my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man"

Tories crash and burn

Well, not literally - just another fortuitous headline image pairing fail, courtesy of Google News:

The image probably belongs with the recent fire at Camden Lock market.

Meanwhile, from the world of proper blogging comes some more solid evidence of Tories in trouble. It's not that original to notice that the Conservative Party has a demographic problem, due to the advanced age of many of the people who voted for Ukip-flavoured conservatism.

Things get more interesting when you dig into another piece of received wisdom - that the Conservatives are starting to appeal to a working class who don't identify with Jeremy Corbyn's brand of Islington socialism. Except, it turns out, that the National Readership Survey's socio-demographic classifications "deal with pensioners by classifying them all as working-class unless they are rich enough to be considered independently wealthy."

This sounds like fairly bad news for the Conservatives, if the replacement of their older voters by younger, working-class ones is just an illusion, caused by the way the NRS assigns class to demographic groups. Which it apparently is:*

The following chart, from Ipsos MORI, gets to the point. If you look at the cross-break of age groups by class, you find that the effect pretty much vanishes. Labour won the working class, defined as such, handily, and lost the retired by a distance.

Original and important, I think - see The Yorkshire Ranter's full post, including chart, here.





*Corrected from "Which it apparently does" (I pressed "publish"before realising that reordering that line had turned it into gibberish).

Oops, did we just forget something?

Now that we're all alert to the menace of corporations reflexively hassling us in the most patronising ways imaginable, I'd like to share the text of an automated e-mail I just got from Wordpress. I must have inadvertently clicked, then abandoned, a paid upgrade button while setting up a free site, because I somehow provoked an e-mail with the subject line "Oops, did you forget this important step?":

Hi [Wordpress username],

It looks like you were this close to investing in an upgrade for your WordPresscom site, [yoursite.wordpress.com]. What a great decision you were about to make!
Did you forget to finish putting in your information?

If so, no worries. We just wanted to shoot you a quick reminder.

Feel free to click the link below to finish your upgrade and to build the site you’ve always wanted.

Click Here to Finish Upgrading Your Site

"We just wanted to shoot you a quick reminder", indeed. When you talk down to me like this, I just want to shoot you, period.

Independence day

That old popcorn blockbuster Independence Day was was an unoriginal, but popular, take on a well-worn Sci-Fi trope where squabbling humanity finally learns how to work together and forget its differences in the face of a looming alien menace. And just in time for Independence Day 2017, somebody's noticed an inhuman menace that makes me want to make common cause with humans everywhere - even the person leading the charge, a self-proclaimed American neocon:

...a phenomenon that’s grown more and more frequent over time: the stupendously annoying coercive forced-choice. It is presented by the pop-up window that offers you something you don’t want and didn’t ask for—be it an update or a service or a product or a website link—and then gives you a choice of responses. But the responses aren’t a simple “yes” or “no.” And definitely you never get to choose “go away and leave me alone forever.”

Instead, you get a variant of something snide and sarcastic, where the supposed “no” response reads something like “I don’t want this wonderful free service because I’m a moron.” Or you get a response that isn’t “no” at all but “later.”

I'm a liberal-minded lefty and even I approve this message.

If you really want to unite all humanity, harnessing our shared hatred of patronising nagware is clearly the way to go.

Whoa ... "No thanks, I'm not interested in saving money" it says here. Right, that does it. I am so going to nuke you, you condescending assholes ...*

via




*Image © 20th/21st Century Fox, I guess. Fair use, whatever...

Buzz feed

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

John F Kennedy speaking at Rice University, September 12, 1962.

Five and a half decades later, another president addressed the nation on the subject of space exploration. But for added awesomeness, this time he was in the very presence of Buzz Aldrin, a man who actually realised Kennedy's vision and walked on the goddam moon. And Buzz also fed the current president a pop culture reference which even he might be able to understand, by quoting his demi-namesake from Toy Story. How cool is that? What could possibly go wrong?

 So, I just want to tell you that we are now going to sign an executive order, and this is going to launch a whole new chapter for our great country. And people are very excited about it and I can tell you, I’m very excited about it. Thank you all very much. (Applause.)
(The order is signed.)

COLONEL ALDRIN: Infinity and beyond. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: This is infinity here. It could be infinity. We don’t really don’t know. But it could be. It has to be something -- but it could be infinity, right?

Okay. (Applause.)

END

3:10 P.M. EDT 

OK, what just happened there? Did somebody just spike Trump's cookies with something psychedelic, or simply fire his speechwriter into low earth orbit, to be replaced by a monkey picking random words out of a bag? I don't really don't know. Or do I?

Deliciously bizarre.

via

Hope versus despair

First hope, courtesy of Simon Wren-Lewis:

There was a lot of indignation yesterday from committed Remainers about Corbyn sacking those who supported the Chuka Umunna amendment on the Single Market. I’m a committed Remainer, but I couldn’t see what the point of the amendment was. That is because we are almost certain to leave the EU still in the Single Market.

In March I wrote that the outline of the Brexit deal was fairly clear. Crucially, there would be a longish (many years) transitional arrangement to enable a bespoke trade deal to be negotiated. During this period we would preserve our position in the customs union and Single Market (and pay money to the EU to do so). The UK side may dress this up as something a little different, if they have the wit and energy to do so and if the EU lets them, but to all intents and purposes that means nothing changes on the trade side for some time. That conclusion didn’t require any great powers of foresight at the time, but simply followed from the length of time it takes to negotiate bespoke trade deals (see, for example, Alasdair Smith here).

My only uncertainty back in March was whether May would choose (or be forced to choose) No Deal. With the election giving more power to soft Brexit elements among the Conservatives (e.g. Hammond), I think No Deal is now very unlikely because parliament will vote it down. As a result, towards the end of 2018 we will know how much we have to pay in order to formally leave the EU, but things will otherwise stay pretty much as they are now.

So maybe some of us over-reacted. I'm willing to consider that possibility. Maybe there's some chance of a less-than-totally catastrophic outcome. But it's still the silver lining of a very, very dark cloud. Here's Frances Coppola with your daily dose of despair:

But [Leave voters] were sold a lie. Every day, the damage that Brexit will do to our complex tapestry of local and international relationships becomes more evident.

Briefly, I promoted the lie. I accepted the referendum result, and agreed to the Brexiteers' demand that everyone "pull together" to make Brexit work. But since then, I have found it increasingly hard to write. Because I sold my soul, I lost my voice. I cannot write what I do not believe.

Brexit is bad. It will always be bad. There is no version of Brexit that can ever be anything but bad. The people who overwhelmingly voted for Brexit will not suffer much, because they are old and relatively insulated: but Brexit is incredibly destructive for the young.

My emphasis.

And just to really cheer you up, here's how an economist from the University of Groningen sums up the various probable outcomes:

Conclusion. There is no option that is better for trade than Britain's current situation. There is no alternative that will grow Britain's trade, apart from trying to get a deal that essentially copies what they have with the EU right now.

Thr really scary part is that the economists based their "Global Britain" scenario on the unfeasibly optimistic assumption that the UK will somehow mange to strike trade deals with every single country in the world outside the EU. Even under this best case scenario, the UK's value added exports dropped by 6%. This was the best case scenario - the results of a soft Brexit were worse, those of a hard Brexit worse still. You can't win and you can't even break even. Here's the vid, which comes with a content warning - it includes material that some viewers may find disturbing (it scared the hell out of me):
I'm aware that the Brexit horror show is becoming something of a regular fixture on this blog, which I didn't intend it to. I'm starting to think that my ventings about Brexit really need a site of their own, so from now on, I'm either going to go to my happy place and pretend that the UK's collective nervous breakdown just isn't happening, or start a separate Brexit-themed blog* for this sort of thing. Probably in Wordpress, since I've been meaning to get to grips with it for a while.


*Update -  from now on any new Brexit-themed posts will be exiled to their own blog. Roll up for the Tragical Mystery Tour, step right this way!