The Womble of Westminster

I am proud to be ginger and rodents do valuable work cleaning up the mess others leave behind.

Members of the commentariat, like this one in The Speccy have been impressed by Danny Alexander's allegedly witty response to Harriet Harman's 'ginger rodent' insult. Some people are easily impressed.

Harman's original comment wasn't the smartest thing she's ever said - making fun of ginger people in Scotland was about as astute as naming an accident-prone submarine "Astute", but Danny boy's sound bite was hardly Dorothy Parker either. Rodents 'do valuable work cleaning up the mess others leave behind'? I think Danny's getting rodents mixed up with the Wombles. Maybe he believes that mice and rats just flit around the house like furry 1970's environmentalists, doing a little light dusting, taking out the bins and sorting out the the recycling.

Trick or treat

Parents groups have begun lobbying government to insist that the entire country is CRB checked in preparation for them to take their inappropriately dressed children to the houses of complete strangers for Halloween....

Caroline Farquharson, spokeswomen for Altringham Concerned Parents Association said, “It’s simply unacceptable that we can’t be sure of the safety of our children when we send them out at night begging for sweets from the doorsteps of complete strangers... And we are simply no longer prepared to send them out alone in the dark to threaten and harass our neighbours in an environment which could pose a potential risk to their safety.”

From this spot-on parody, summing up exactly why I'm more of a Guy Fawkes night guy.

Get me to the church on time

I've never met anybody who wanted to marry a table or a clock. I didn't even know that such people existed. Luckily, there's a timely heads up on the looming menace of furniture betrothal from Rebecca Kleefisch, the Republican candidate for Wisconsin lieutenant governor, as reported in the Wisconsin Daily News, (via) .

Bang go our traditional nursery rhymes:

Hickory dickory dock
The mouse (with a fully functioning human brain)* ran up the clock
The clock and mouse
Became espoused
And, supported by taxpayer-funded domestic partner benefits, lived happily ever after...

Won't somebody please think of the children?

*OK,  it's old news, but the Christine O'Donnell human-mouse hybrid vid was still the funniest thing on HIGNFY last night....

The price of bread and circuses

There is a really interesting new book by an economist Raghuram Rajan called Fault Lines. He argues that what led to the change was not just greedy banks, but growing social inequality in the West.

And - to put it crudely - when western governments were threatened by growing protests and dissatisfaction with this inequality, they simply bought the people off by giving them a mass of cheap money.

Raghuram Rajan has an extraordinary statistic. That if you look at the the growth in real incomes between 1976 and 2007, 58% of it went to the top 1%.

Faced with this, governments made a political choice. Rather than reform society, they removed all restrictions, gave up on their moral disapproval, and allowed a system to be created by the bankers that let everyone borrow.

It was better to give in and allow the "little people" to borrow rather than let them keep on striking and threaten social order. And what's more you could make lots of money out of it.

The BBC's Adam Curtis, back in June, summarising Raghuram G. Rajan’s Fault Lines. Rajan's book has just won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. Yet the housing bubble, which was an integral part of the debt crisis. is being quietly airbrushed out of the picture and our patrician rulers are endlessly - if inaccurately - trying to pin the blame for our troubles on the welfare state and public services that at least went some way towards ironing out the massive inequalities that caused this almighty mess in the first place.

It'll be interesting to see what happens now that the social lubricant of worry-free debt has dried up. "Interesting" as in the famous curse "may you live in interesting times"...

'As bright as Moscow on a cloudy day in June'

But quite a bit hotter...

Punching above their weight

A former British special forces soldier speaks out on some of the kit being used in the Afghan war. For a change, he's quite impressed:

“I’d say the appeal is pretty simple,” he says. “You can’t underestimate the value of having a vehicle that is fast, will never break down, and is strong enough to mount a heavy weapon in the back.”

Oh, wait a minute - he's talking about the enemy's kit. Namely, a Toyota Hi Lux with a big gun on the back. To use a tired expression, somebody's 'punching above their weight' - but it's not the Brits.

We probably wouldn't want British squaddies riding around in those things - at least, not until Top Gear demonstrates that they're also roadside bomb proof (Jeremy Clarkson + Improvised Explosive Device = pure television gold), but it's still a graphic illustration of how much defence spending is wasted on kit that's not that much better than something you could buy cheaply off the shelf (after all, as numerous grieving relatives have found out in tragic circumstances, a lot of expensive military-spec vehicles used by our armed forces haven't been IED-proof either).

Plentiful, good enough, and here right now might serve our forces better than perfect, scarce and probably ready some time this decade.

Although, if the exit strategy from Afghanistan involves bringing the bad guys back into government, maybe we could save even more money by just bringing everyone back home from Afghanistan right now. Human rights in Afghanistan have been abysmal, and elections are better than warlords and crazed fundamentalists, but when I read things like this, I wonder how long any changes for the better will last:

The new negotiations involve agreements to allow Taliban leaders positions in the Afghan government and the withdrawal of US and NATO forces according to an agreed timetable, the newspaper said.
The White House on Wednesday backed the idea of Afghan government reconciliation talks with the Taliban...

(AFP)  Maybe, when NATO has packed up and gone home, the Taliban ministers will play nicely and not get up to any naughty human rights abuses or seizing power, but I wouldn't bet the house on it.

Lightbulb joke

There's a very, very old joke that goes like this:

Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None - Microsoft will just redefine darkness as the new industry standard

It just popped into my head when I read this:

A German entrepreneur is bypassing a European Union ban on light bulbs of more than 60 watts by marketing his own brand as mini heaters.

Via