Saturday, January 10, 2015

Windy day



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Friday, January 09, 2015

Chesterton’s Bind

source

But there can be little doubt, I think, that if some form of Collectivism is imposed upon England it will be imposed, as everything else has been, by an instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic and partly hypnotized.

The aristocracy will be as ready to “administer” Collectivism as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; in some ways such a centralized political power is necessarily attractive to them.
G. K. Chesterton – What’s Wrong With The World (1910)

Chesterton was right, the political class don’t care which system they administer as long as they are the administrators. The political class is an environment, a niche. As with any other niche it selects those best adapted to it.

So there is no point in expecting a political party to change the niche, rebuild it into something more democratic, spoil it for the current occupants. Why would they? They merely want to occupy it. Such an appealing niche too, and a staging post for so many others equally attractive.

We could call it Chesterton’s Bind - a centralized political power is necessarily attractive to them. Not an easy nut to crack.

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Wednesday, January 07, 2015

Lab-Con coalition: you read it here first!

From Peter Hitchens today:

"I have thought for some time that the only establishment solution to a jaundiced and disenchanted electorate is for the two twin parties to combine against the voters in a grand coalition..."

From Broad Oak Magazine, last August:



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Monday, January 05, 2015

Three birds with one stone

source

Sometimes it is a good idea to stand back and take another look at familiar issues. For example we could ask ourselves why the UK electorate has a tendency to vote for lying poseurs as their MPs. People who were recently discovered to have fiddled their expenses, lied about their main residence, employed family members on their official staff and tried to hide the whole sorry mess when it all came out.

Thinking laterally, maybe that’s the real point of electing them. After all, their expenses scams were somewhat petty in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps the electorate has been electing useless lying poseurs as a cunning plan

Hmm - so what cunning plan would that be Baldrick?

How about this.

The general idea is to pass the job of government to professionals – the permanent officials whose job it is to make sure government actually works. Thus taking it away from the sticky fingers of party hacks, loons, thieves, trouser-droppers, insane harridans and all those who only see the job as a route to better things.

So we prefer bloody useless bureaucrats to bloody useless politicians do we Baldrick?

It’s a tough choice, but given the paucity of options maybe we do prefer bloody useless bureaucrats. Why not? The growth in international standards covering everything from road signage to food standards to reptile imports has led to a marked decline in the work available to politicians. Much of it is beyond their ken anyway because of its complexity and technical detail.

This sounds the death knell for democracy, but at least the professionals, whatever their numerous shortcomings and inefficiencies, at least they have to keep the show on the road if only to retain a firm grip on their salaries and pensions.

It is far from being a satisfactory trend and things are likely to go very sour indeed, but perhaps it is better than relying on all those ghastly, know-nothing freaks propping up the House of Commons bar. They have no intention of doing anything useful under any circumstances and maybe voters have wised up to that...

Or maybe they haven’t wised up to anything Baldrick. They simply plod off to the polling station, scrawl their cross based on the party they hate most and that’s the real attraction of UKIP. Three birds with one stone. 

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Sunday, January 04, 2015

Did a Bond film inspire Monsanto's Terminator gene?

The James Bond film "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" is on ITV today. Released in 1969, the movie, scripted by Richard Maibaum, features Telly Savalas as the villain Blofeld. His scheme is to threaten the use of a biological agent that will permanently render infertile selected crops and animals.

In reality, the technology for this was developed much later in the USA - the patent application was not submitted until 1994. Its potential is, to use an overused word, awesome. Imagine the profit - and power - if you could make the world's farmers buy their seeds from you afresh, every year. Or refuse them.
 
"The technology was developed under a cooperative research and development agreement between the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture and Delta and Pine Land company in the 1990s, but it is not yet commercially available," says Wikipedia article on "genetic use restriction technology".

Monsanto bought Delta and Pine Land in 2007 for $1.5 billion, having previously (1999) pledged never to "commercialise gene protection systems that render seed sterile". (Note the careful use of the word "commercialise".)

That hasn't stopped Monsanto from patenting seeds and suing farmers whose crops have been inadvertently contaminated by GM plants. In 2011, the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association brought a lawsuit challenging what they saw as the aggressive pursuit of such patent claims, but it was thrown out and a year ago the US Supreme Court upheld the decision.

As Ludwell Denny said in "America Conquers Britain" (1930):

"We shall not make Britain's mistake. Too wise to try to govern the world, we shall merely own it. Nothing can stop us. What chance has Britain against America? Or what chance has the world?"


From the review of the book in the Sydney Morning Herald (7 April 1930)

Denny did not foresee that eventually it would be, not nation against nation or empire against empire, but multinational corporations over all. We shall be managed, farmed...

Bond villains are not so implausible, then.


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One problem, two Floridians, three ways

A few days ago, in the wake of recent controversy over police shootings, Karl Denninger posted a piece on violence and fecklessness in the black community, for which he blames misguided welfare interventions:

"We have spent the entire time since Great Society providing incentives for this behavior and we've gotten a hell of a lot more of it. The blame for this is ours -- specifically yours and mine."

He advocates cutting benefits to make a subsidised layabout lifestyle less comfortable, and one can see a certain logic to it - this kind of argument is also aired in the UK not infrequently.

But six hours away from where Karl lives someone has tried a different approach:

Twenty years ago, the Orlando, Fla. neighborhood of Tangelo Park was a crime-infested place where people were afraid to walk down the street. The graduation rate at the local high school was 25 percent. Having amassed a fortune from his success in the hotel business, Rosen decided Tangelo Park needed some hospitality of its own.

“Hospitality really is appreciating a fellow human being,” Rosen told Gabe Gutierrez in a segment that aired on TODAY Wednesday. “I came to the realization that I really had to now say, ‘Thank you.’’’

Rosen, 73, began his philanthropic efforts by paying for day care for parents in Tangelo Park, a community of about 3,000 people. When those children reached high school, he created a scholarship program in which he offered to pay free tuition to Florida state colleges for any students in the neighborhood.

In the two decades since starting the programs, Rosen has donated nearly $10 million, and the results have been remarkable. The high school graduation rate is now nearly 100 percent, and some property values have quadrupled. The crime rate has been cut in half, according to a study by the University of Central Florida.

"We've given them hope,’’ Rosen said. “We've given these kids hope, and given the families hope. And hope is an amazing thing."

Not that day nurseries are always the answer. Today, Peter Hitchens - scarcely a left-winger - repeats his support for the right of women to stay home to raise their children:

"A significant number of homes – four per cent – lose money by having both parents at work. Many – ten per cent – gain nothing from this arrangement. Yet they still do it. Many more gain so little that it is barely worth the bother. The most amazing statistic of the past year (produced by insurance company Aviva) shows that thousands of mothers who go out to work are, in effect, working for nothing. The cost of day orphanages, travel and other work expenses cancels out everything they earn. Many more barely make a profit on the arrangement. One in four families has a parent who brings home less than £100 a month after all the costs of work have been met."

There's too much polarisation in politics. It seems that either the police are murderous racists or infallible heroes who must be supported no matter what they do; either we throw money at the poor or penny-pinch them into work, either we raise the minimum wage or abolish it (we discussed this with Don Boudreaux of George Mason University* a few years ago)... And of course, as Denninger observes, there is the politician making himself seemingly indispensable on either side.

Yet Harris Rosen doesn't fit the false dichotomies. What he did was an act of private charity, practical help instead of either blaming or faux-championing the poor. And it worked.

What a shame if politicians became redundant; if their catastrophic broad-brush solutions, infested by office boxwallahs and lawyers, were replaced by intelligently targeted initiatives; if we had a fair society instead of a Great one.
_______________________________

* A university supported by the somewhat controversial billionaire Koch Brothers.


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Saturday, January 03, 2015

Useless data

(View interactive original at The Atlantic here)
(htp: Barry Ritholtz)

The above is a map correlating US military enlistment rates per capita by zip code. The note below it comments on the wide disparity in the rates, e.g. "in 2010, only 0.04 percent of the Upper East Side of Manhattan (zip code prefix 101) enlisted."

Looking up that area, we find that "the neighborhood contains the greatest concentration of individual wealth in Manhattan" and "the female-male ratio was very high with 125 females for 100 males."

Unless you factor-in age, gender, income, education, local employment opportunities etc you are wasting your time. More importantly, our time.

Bullshed!

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Friday, January 02, 2015

The still, cold hands of Power

source

For, after all, this deity of his, like the deity of every other man, was but his temperament exaggerated beyond life-size and put in perfect order — it was but the concretion of his constant feeling that nothing could be trusted to behave, freed from the still, cold hands of Power.

He had never trusted himself to act save under the authority of this peculiar deity, much less, then, could he feel that others could be trusted. This lack of trust — which was only, perhaps, a natural desire for putting everything and everybody in their proper places — had made him from a child eligible for almost any post of trust.

And Nature, recognising this, had used him a hundred thousand times, weeding him out from among his more irregular and trustful fellows, and piling him in layers, one on another, till she had built out of him in every division of the State, temples of Power. Two qualifications alone had she exacted; that he should not be trustful, and that he should be content to lie beneath the layer above him, until he should come in time to be that upper layer himself.
John Galsworthy - A Commentary (1900)

A fine fictional take on a real and intractable problem – the process-driven bureaucrat. Erosion of trust is not a new problem. People in positions of authority who cannot trust others, don’t value trust, don’t believe in trust. This is where our increasingly fanatical and repressive micro-audit culture comes from.

It is out of control.

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Thursday, January 01, 2015

A petal in the wind

A change to the Vienna New Year's Day concert:

"Since 1980 the flowers that decorate the hall have been a gift from the city of Sanremo, Liguria, Italy," says Wikipedia.

Not any more:

Floral Decorations by Vienna Parks and Gardens

Floral Arrangements - New Year's Concert 2015               |       








When Zubin Mehta takes up the baton for the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert on 1 January 2015, this will mark the premiere of the new co-operation between the famous orchestra and the Vienna Parks and Gardens department. Together with other Austrian gardeners and florists, the department‘s staff will turn the Golden Hall of the Musikverein into a shining sea of flowers. “The New Year’s Concert is a highlight in the florist industry and provides a unique opportunity to present the great mastery of Vienna’s gardeners to an international audience”, said Vienna’s City Councillor for the Environment, Ulli Sima.
 
Vienna’s parks and gardens department considers the new co-operation an exciting task. “The new co-operation creates a unique Viennese symbiosis – both in floral and in musical terms. Both institutions, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Vienna Parks and Gardens, have a long tradition and contribute to Vienna’s image, which is carried out to the world at the New Year’s Concert”, declared Vienna Parks and Gardens Director Rainer Weisgram.

Hmmm...

Is this one of those tiny signs that tell us all is not well in a relationship?

https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/michele-barbero/italys-unhappy-marriage-with-europe


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Say goodbye to spy drone misery!

(pic source)

Every season is drone season. They buzz about your garden, come through the door and follow you upstairs, bumble up and down your window panes, fall in your Weetos... enough!

Now you can do something about it:


Some species are protected by law. See the NSA's Facebook page for information and contact details.


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Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Hillary Clinton's secret career


Former U.S. First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has a little-known second string to her bow: novel-writing. Adding a scarf and dropping an "l" in her forename she becomes her alter ego, controversial author Hilary Mantel.

So what is her real opinion of Margaret Thatcher? I think we should be told.


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Tuesday, December 30, 2014

A Reflection on 2014


Yet another year seems to have flown by in a blur. Where does all the time go?
2014 saw the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of WW1 and a series of events throughout the UK were scheduled to commemorate this occasion. This is a recurring theme at many of the places that I visited over the year.
Our first holiday of the year was to Mechelen in Belgium. This was our Christmas present to each other. Mechelen is rich in history and is also a place of many bicycles that inspired me to purchase a new bicycle on my return home. Throughout the summer months I enjoyed cycling around the nearby lanes with my camera ever ready in the bicycle basket.
Our next break was a weekend in Salisbury where I was able to visit Stonehenge and Avebury, two places I have been promising to revisit for some time.  My Mum accompanied us on the trip to make up for last years cancelled trip to Oxford; we had promised to take her away for a few days as soon as her broken leg had recovered enough. Later in the year we also went to Oxford although not on my birthday weekend as we had planned in 2013.
2014 was the year that Mr C became a gentleman of a certain age.  We spent his birthday weekend in London so that we could visit the Natural History Museum’s exhibition on mammoths, the highlight of which was Lyuba, a well preserved baby mammoth found in the Siberian tundra.
Whilst in London we took time to visit the Tower of London to see the major art installation; Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red which was part of the WW1 centenary commemorations. We saw the ceramic poppies being planted in the Tower’s moat with a Yeoman Warder helping co-ordinate the proceedings. We returned to the Tower in November, just three days before the last poppy was planted. On this occasion we also heard the commemorative roll call and the playing of the last post, which I found moving. I had been following this project since it was announced on the Tower of London’s website earlier in the year so I was pleased to have had the opportunity to see it twice and also purchase one of the ceramic poppies which arrived in early December.
Due to unforeseen circumstances we had to shelve Mr C’s original plan for a birthday holiday abroad. Instead, we planned a more modest but no less interesting vacation in Winchester during September. The weather was kind to us and we were able to wander around without coats. I had the opportunity to revisit Avebury more thoroughly than we had managed earlier in the year.
I was lucky enough to meet up with blog friends when the Shutterchance group met at RAF Museum Cosford in May. A good time was had by all. I revisited Cosford later in the year and found that replica WW1 planes had arrived and were to be part of the museum’s WW1 centenary commemorations. I must go back for another visit now that the exhibition is fully open.  Another place we visited in connection with WW1 commemorations was Dunham Massey which is currently displaying some of its rooms as they were when it was a war time hospital. On the subject of blog friends there was a touch of sadness when the Vision & Verb collaborative project (of women of a certain age) reached its conclusion in July.
I visited the National Memorial Arboretum for the first time in May. In keeping with the WW1 commemorations I followed a WW1 centenary trail. My visit there was a very moving experience.
Other places I visited were; Hodnet Hall Garden, Berrington Hall, Westonbury Water Gardens, Weston Park, Wroxeter’s Roman City and nearby St Andrew’s Church (where I was able to take photographs after two previously failed attempts). I visited Attingham Park on more than one occasion, the most recent being a few days before Christmas to see the house decked out to a ‘Christmas Through the Ages’ theme;  just the thing to put me in the Christmas spirit.
I wonder what 2015 will bring...
I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy New Year.

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Bullshed!



Neologism announcement:

Since the recent appearance of the word "shedload", even though sheds are not used to carry loads, nor are carts normally piled high with sheds, I have decided that if I can't beat 'em I'll have to join 'em and take 'em further.

So, join me in calling "bullshed!" on all the fertiliser we anticipate reading and hearing in 2015.


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Monday, December 29, 2014

Daft advice

(Pic source)

Facebook is full of cornpone philosophy and snappy advice you didn't ask for, but this one is a peach: "10 Questions To Ask Before Getting Married". The fourth is my favourite, I think:

"What about your sex life?

"You should discuss and plan your sex life, if you are compatible in frequency and fidelity, how you will keep it fresh, and how you will handle changes. You should also thoroughly discuss boundaries and fetishes."

Can I suggest a couple of competitions?

1. Treat the above as a scripted scene involving the couple and their pastor/vicar/priest/rabbi in prenuptial discussion.

2. Alternatively, make up your own decalogue of questions (e.g. "What's your name?", "Are you married?" and the killer-decider, "Do you like Justin Bieber?")


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Sunday, December 28, 2014

Modern party politics trumps democratic representation and personal principle

Craig Murray, on his unsuccessful attempt to become an SNP Parliamentary candidate for Westminster:

"I was asked at assessment whether, as part of a Westminster deal with another party, I would agree to vote for the bedroom tax if instructed by the Party. I replied “No.” End of SNP political career. Problem is, I really believed we were building a different kind of politics in Scotland. I also knew that a simple lie would get me in, but I couldn’t bring myself to utter it...

"I’m afraid to say that the Panel did not feel able to recommend you for approval as a potential parliamentary candidate at this time. While you showed excellent qualities, you could not give a full commitment on group discipline issues...

"...the only question to which I gave an answer that could possibly be interpreted that way, was the one... on the bedroom tax. There was, incidentally, no corresponding question designed to test the loyalty of right wing people."

Party politics is ripe for culling. No wonder we have direct-democracy campaigns such as the Harrogate Agenda.


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Saturday, December 27, 2014

Season's Greetings!



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Wednesday, December 24, 2014

A few theological thoughts

The existence or non-existence of God is so, irrespective of people's beliefs and ratty quarrels. But if He does exist and is the creator of the universe then he cannot be described in terms of space and time, so His nature is ineffable.

Even in the purest of knowledge - mathematics - Kurt Gödel showed that there are assertions that even if true are unprovable and so there is no complete knowledge.

Academic theology was of little interest to either Jesus or Gautama Buddha (who said don't speculate on how the arrow got there, just pull it out). When St Thomas Aquinas had his mystical experience, all his theological writings seemed like straw to him and he stopped altogether.

Roll up your battle flags and show what you believe by how you are. That's quite daunting enough for me.


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Russell Brand begins his financial education



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Sunday, December 21, 2014

Russell Brand's Silly Ideas: Affordable Housing

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/new-era-estate-victory-residents-with-russell-brands-help-stop-takeover-of-their-estate-9937074.html

http://www.citylab.com/housing/2014/12/paris-wants-to-keep-central-neighborhoods-from-becoming-ghettos-for-the-rich/383936/

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/social-cleansing-londons-council-estates-4076556

... Remember Shirley Porter and the Homes For Votes scandal? Now criticise Russell Brand, again... What a silly old Hector he is!

(source)



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Saturday, December 20, 2014

Defending the bully-d*ckhead Russell Brand

A clever piece by "Squander Two", apparently going viral, about a confrontation with the poseur and unfocused protorevolutionary Russell Brand (htp: Anna Raccoon). And yet...

I've commented:

Brand is a blast from the past - about 1968 - 72-ish. And doubtless quite easy to rile, just like the American reporter who questioned Lennon in the 1969 bed-in and got a snarly Liverpudlian response.
 
On the other hand, your piece I find has a whiff of the disingenuous; artful stuff, all those references to food. Hungry bankers at Christmas... Skilfully done, some good points, and of course RB is not really much good at argumentation, which is why he uses so many words. Expect you'd beat him in a debate. Maybe that's why the BBC gives him airtime, to strike a faux balance between protest and the Establishment and weaken the former's credibility. That and his priapic reputation.

Shame so few people talk about the way the banking industry, encouraged by politicians, has messed up the economy with excessive debt and resource misallocation since at least the 70s, but that's a subject RB isn't up to analysing in his Michael Moore-ish way.

By the way, I'm given to understand it's noradrenaline, not adrenaline, that powers the fight or flight reaction. Either way, I don't blame you a bit for curdling at his invasion of your personal space.

If only there was a less vain and more penetrating advocate than the slightly addled Brand. The PPI and FX rows are tiny thunderrumbles compared to the gathering Force 5 financial hurricane caused by decades of monetary warming. Or maybe I'm wrong and it'll all turn out for the best in the end. Let's leave it to the experts as the economy "recovers", hey?


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