Blimey, he actually did it. Just how poor a candidate must Hillary have been, with all the media, technical, organisational and financial advantages she had, to go down so badly to Trump? I'm guessing that Hillary 2020 is not going to be a thing.
I continue to feel very comfortable in my prediction of an unprecedent wave of butthurt about to appear from the Guardian opinion pages (and indeed all other articles) and the BBC US correspondents.
I thought that the chorus of butthurt from the why-didn't-the-plebs-listen-to-ME part of the Remain camp was finally starting to die down, but then May appointed Johnson as Foreign Secretary, and oh my goodness. My Twitter feed and Farcebook timeline have erupted in caterwauling once again.
Note that this has the effect of focusing the limited Guardianista attention on Johnson and his various alleged[1] faux pas, and there's been very little comment on the appointment of the sharp and strongly pro-Brexit David Davis as "Minister for Brexit". I rather suspect Davis is going to be the source of most of the actual heartache for the Remainers in the next couple of years.
[1] Most of which I suspect they're overselling. Johnson has his flaws, Heaven knows, but he's a smart cookie, extremely well travelled, with a highly multinational family. And I'd endorse him as Foreign Secretary solely on the basis of his trolling of the Chinese about ping pong at the Beijing Olympics.
Also known as Bitrex, Denatonium Benzoate held the record for the most bitter substance on earth until 24th June 2016. A teaspoon of the substance added to an Olympic size swimming pool (volume 2.5M litres) makes the water noticeably bitter. Bitrex has been a very successful additive to poisonous substances to prevent accidental ingestion, such as car antifreeze.
Sadly for manufacturer Macfarlan Smith, since 24th June Bitrex's record has been overtaken by the UK Guardian opinion page. One opening paragraph has the same bitterness impact as approximately 300ml of Denatonium Benzoate. Rumours suggest that Macfarlan Smith has opened negotiations with Jonathan Freedland, Nick Cohen and Polly Toynbee for purchase of their spleens as a manufacturing source of the Bitrex successor.
It is serendipitous that the name "Bitrex" is an anagram of the new product: "Brexit".
I was moved by an interesting yet flawed piece by John Naughton in the Grauniad, analysing the kinds of censorship applied by the Chinese government:
So they [researchers] clicked on the URLs associated with a sample of posts and found that some – but not all – had vanished: the pages had disappeared from cyberspace.
The question then was: what was it about the "disappeared" posts that had led to them being censored? And at that point the experiment became very interesting indeed. First of all, it confirmed what other researchers had found, namely that, contrary to neoliberal fantasy, speech on the Chinese internet is remarkably free, vibrant and raucous. But this unruly discourse is watched by a veritable army (maybe as many as 250,000-strong) of censors. And what they are looking for is only certain kinds of free speech, specifically, speech that has the potential for engendering collective action – mobilising folks to do something together in the offline world.
The study quoted is indeed interesting, and highlights one particular and significant aspect of Chinese censorship. Where Naughton fails, though, is in failing to note the unseen, and this is picked up by CiF commentator steviematt:
The Harvard research and Gary King's opinion are both flawed beyond belief.Indeed, Naughton fails to notice that many of the websites that the West takes for granted in being able to express their opinions are completely blocked in China. Within China, sites like Twitter and Facebook are essentially completely unavailable. YouTube: no chance. You can get to a limited set of Google sites (search and maps are on-and-off accessible in my experience), but it's very iffy. Blogger seems completely blocked. Bing search seems to work fine though. Why is that?
It only factors the number of posts that were originally published and then disappeared over the course of weeks and months. It ignores the fact that most posts that are critical never have a chance of passing through the filters in the first place.
It's because if you are a western firm who wants to provide an Internet site within China, you have to partner with a Chinese company and accept the conditions of serving users within China - key in this is agreeing to provide identity information of your users (source IP addresses , times logged on etc.) at the "request" of the government. The case of Yahoo and the Chinese dissident Shi Tao is illuminating:
According to a letter Amnesty International received from Yahoo! (YHOO), and Yahoo!'s own later public admissions, Yahoo! China provided account-holder information, in compliance with a government request, that led to Shi Tao's sentencing.Jerry Yang, then-CEO of Yahoo, got roasted by Congress for providing this information when this story came out. Truth be told, though, he really didn't have much choice - Yahoo had presumably agreed to these conditions when it started serving China-based users. If you don't want to play ball with those conditions, and it seems that Google, Twitter and Facebook don't, you're going to be serving outside China and prone to getting blocked by the Great Firewall.
So when Naughton comments "only some kinds of activities are blocked" it's actually in the context of "only some users are willing to discuss these kinds of activities on sites where they know the government has the right to waltz in and demand their details at any time" (before presumably visiting them at home and offering them an extended stay at a pleasant little camp out in the country, for a year or ten.)
Rumours suggest that Facebook might announce something aimed at Chinese users but it's not obvious how they're going to deal with the existing restrictions. Still, Zuckerberg's a smart guy and doesn't seem to be an obvious patsy for the Chinese regime, so it's possible he's got something clever up his sleeve. Stay tuned.
It would have to be a mathmo, wouldn't it? Sam Howison, an applied maths professor, looks at why the first 50 Fields medal winners were uniformly male and, refreshingly, comes up with a range of explanations with the starting point that there just aren't many female mathmos:
Data is scarce in this rarefied region, and hypotheses are hard to test; so, too, is the influence of the culture of their chosen field. Nevertheless, such astronomical odds of a woman winning the medal are disturbing, and they are just an extreme point of a range of evidence that women are underrepresented in mathematics at many levels.It's indisputably true that you don't find anything like a 50% proportion of women at the top level of maths, or theoretical computer science for that matter. On the other hand, in my experience the women that you do find there aren't obviously any less smart and capable than the men, so if you were making randomized choices based on intellect you'd expect women to be far more frequent in Fields medal holders than they are.
This year, Stanford professor Maryam Mirzakhani won a Fields medal. She's clearly a hard-core pure mathmo; I defy anyone with anything less than a Ph.D. in maths to read about her research interests and not have their brain leak out of their ears. This is not just "I don't understand what this is about", this is "I can't even picture the most basic explanation of this in my head". Compared to that, even Fermat's Last Theorem was a walk in the park - solving polynomial equations is standard A-level fare, and even if you can't understand what Andrew Wiles did to prove it you can at least understand the problem. With Mirzakhani's work, you have no frame of reference, you're like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie.
Howison's point about the astronomical odds of the Fields medal award gender distribution (50 tails in 51 unbiased coin tosses) is a nice point of probability, but of course the first place you'd start is to look at the eligible pool - top-flight mathematicians, generally at (UK) professor level, with a substantial track record of publishing. That will tell you your bias; if 1 in 10 people in the pool are female, you're tossing a biased coin which will show tails 9 times out of 10. Still, it's pretty clear that even with that pool the Fields medal gender split is way out of line with what you'd expect.
Howison makes an interesting point that I hadn't considered up to now:
[...] people with successful careers have usually had a high degree of support from a mentor. As well as providing academic guidance and inspiration (as Mirzakhani freely acknowledges she had when a student), the mentor will introduce their charge to influential colleagues on the conference circuit and elsewhere, and arrange invitations to speak at seminars and workshops. That is one way for a young mathematician to get their work noticed, and to improve their chances of getting a position in a world-leading department where they can thrive. Is this perhaps (if only subconsciously) difficult for women in a community where the majority are men?The usual reason for explaining the lack of women in senior positions in Fortune 500 firms (banks, Big Pharma etc.) is that they're not as good at men at talking their own book, preferring to be more even-handed in giving credit for the achievements in which they'd participated. However, Howison tantalisingly hints at a squaring function in gender representation here - will junior female mathmos only get good support and PR from a senior female mentor, and do such senior female mathmos pick up juniors with a blind eye to gender? It would be fascinating to get some data here.
I do wonder whether that perennial topic in gender discrimination, motherhood, plays a role here. Because the Fields medal only goes to people younger than 40 - Andrew Wiles, who cracked Fermat's Last Theorem, was a notable omission from its holders due to his age - if you take time out from academe to have children then this disproportionately affects your time where you're eligible for a Fields medal. The Guardian interviewed this year's sole female awardee, Maryam Mirzakhani but she didn't make any comment about her family life so I have no idea if she has kids.
So mad props to Maryam Mirzakhani for being the first female winner of the Fields medal, and here's to hoping for many more. Apart from anything else, if we can start to get some data on what factors determine female Fields medal winners we might have a hazy glimpse of what we need to fix in the academic lifecycle to get more top-flight women choosing to follow it.
Keen observers of the progress of unionisation in the USA have been following with interest the story of VW's Tennessee workers rejecting unionisation despite management neutrality on the issue. The Union of Auto Workers (UAW) - whose stranglehold in Detroit has worked out so well for that city - tried and failed to persuade Tennessee that their interests were aligned, despite VM management being studiously neutral on unionisation.
Now CBS staff writer Sadhbh Walshe desperately tries to put a pro-union spin on these events. (For those curious about the name, it's pronounced Sive).
In Germany, for instance, auto workers at VW plants get paid an average of $67.14 an hour. That's more than double the average hourly rate for an established unionized worker in Detroit, and it's more than three times what the non unionised workers in Chattanooga can hope to earn.Wow. Because, of course, the cost of living in German cities is totally comparable to the cost of living in both Detroit and Tennessee. I wonder why Ms. Walshe didn't bring up this point in the article? Amazingly, she doubles down on it in the comments:
I'm not sure what the rates are in other countries, but I do know that the cost of living in the US is comparable to Germany so salaries ought to be comparable too.Ah, "the US". Because 330 million people spread across 3.8 million square miles and 51 different states is just one entity for comparison purposes, despite Germany being 80 million people and less than 5% of the area. Heck, even in the single state of California the differnce in cost of living between the Bay Area (San Francisco to San Jose) and Fresno is huge. A $40K annual salary would be pretty comfortable in Fresno, but practically poverty-level in San Francisco. Contrast Chattanooga, with a median home price of $114K, with Kassel in Germany (home of a VW plant) where you'd be lucky to get a garden shed for that price.
That German earnings figure is extremely suspect even in isolation; as commenter GregUS notes:
Are you seriously claiming that assembly line auto workers make $67.14/hour? This works out to $140,000 per year, which is about the average salary of a primary care physician in Germany (€110,000/year).German workers are also nearly twice as productive as USA workers, so even if they are paid higher it would seem reasonable for VW to require USA productivity to rise before paying US workers more.
I particularly like Ms. Walshe's spin on right to work states:
It's true that with Tennessee being a so called "right to work" state, where wages are generally low and poverty is high, $19.50 an hour probably seems like a pretty good salary."Right to work" means (in essence) that you are not obliged to join a union or pay union dues if you join a unionized workplace. This would seem a no-brainer to most UK workers, but in fact state law bans this practice in about half the states. The non-right-to-work states are CA, OR, WA, MT, CO, NM, MN, WI, MO, IL, KY, OH, WV, PA, NY, VT, MD, NJ, NY, NH, ME, MA, NH, DE, CT, RI.
RI, NV, IL, MI (just changed to Right to Work), CA, DC, MS, KY, TN, AZ, GA, CT, AR, NJ, OH, NY, OR, MA, PA.See a pattern here? Of course, I can't claim causation with this superficial evidence - but at the very least, it seems that states without the right-to-work law seem to be more likely to suffer from unemployment.
Sadhbh Walshe is desperate to have us believe that the only thing standing between Tennessee auto workers and prosperity is them needing to join the UAW, but it seems that even compulsory unionization is more likely to cause unemployment than raise wages.
Now we're seeing just how well a centrally planned Winter Olympics can be run in a socialist country, for the bargain price of $50 billion so far shouldn't the Guardian be shipping Polly Toynbee over to Sochi to report on the benefits of central government planning and purchasing in this event? After all, she's so vocally in favour of it in the UK...
I'm watching @SochiProblems on Twitter with something between amusement and growing horror...
On the way to the media center. The street is not quite ready yet. #SochiProblems pic.twitter.com/5lA4tmGoNz
— Simon Rosner (@SimonRosner) February 6, 2014Favorite line of the week from the young Sochi volunteer on the bus, "we don't have problems in Russia, we have adventures".#SochiProblems
— Alan Springer (@alanspringer) February 5, 2014The Brazilians organising Rio 2016 must be down on their knees thanking Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin for this farce - no matter how badly they mess up, they'll still look like a well-oiled machine compared to Sochi 2014.
I appreciate that if someone wants to get paid for a "all Tories are racist" article then the first instinct is to head to The Guardian, but it would be nice if the editors imposed at least some kind of quality bar. I refer, of course to Lola Okolosie's piss-poor piece in today's edition: "Yes, you can have a Chinese girlfriend and still be racist":
[Tory candidate] Edward de Mesquita complains that he has had to fend off recurring accusations that his party produces "racist" polices. His strategy? To remind constituents that "Conservatives are not racist." The proof? Well, erm, "so many of the Conservatives have foreign wives after all".Okolosie's text drips with scorn as she recounts this conversation, but my sympathies are actually with Mr. de Mesquita. After all, how can you prove a negative: that you are not racist? There are undoubtedly racist (by any reasonably narrow definition, say "openly prejudiced against people with an African or West Indian background) Tories, as there are racist Liberals, Labourites, Quakers, preachers and atheists. If I were to claim, for example, that BME English teachers are racist - undoubtedly, some of them are - and ask Ms. Okolosie to show that BME English teachers are not racist, how could she do so? It's not her fault that I'm asking a stupid question.
She helpfully lists six reasons why you can have a wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend/best friend from a BME background and still hold racist views or prejudices, including that you might:
[...] subscribe to the exotification of BME women which casts south-east Asian women as docile, demure and able to "treat a man well" [...]An interesting prejudice she has there. It's an observable fact that in the UK and USA many of the younger generation of white male engineers have Chinese, Japanese, Filipino or South Korean girlfriends, fiancées and wives. It's equally observable that few white women have CJFK boyfriends or husbands - I've known precisely one female white engineer with a Chinese-ancestry husband. (The Indian male and female engineers seem to be pretty equally cosmopolitan in their choice of partners, by contrast). Having met a number of such couples, the CJFK ladies are significantly more vocal and have more drive than the white men. Perhaps they value the personality and earning potential of the man more than white women do?
Incidentally, Chinese parents seem to have a lot more problems with their daughter marrying outside their race than white parents do - and white fiances seem to be a lot more acceptable than other non-Chinese races. One Indian-Chinese couple I know ended up with the Chinese girl's father boycotting the wedding because her husband-to-be had such dark skin. Filipino fathers tend to look askance at black boys trying to partner with their daughters. I've even known a Filipino girl's father who applauded his daughter marrying a white guy because he thought Filipino boys were no good...
Okolosie also suggests that you may:
[...] believe in the idea of a model minority that is enterprising, while the majority within the BME community need to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and get with the programme of what life is like in the UK.Well, you could look at the financial profile of the various ethnic groups in the UK and discover that Indian families tend to be disproportionally wealthier than black and Pakistani families, with their median wealth pretty close to white families and more than double that of Pakistani families. Either the UK has a weirdly specific racial prejudice that affects Pakistanis but not Indians, or there's some explanation besides simple white racism for black and Pakistani poverty. You can also look at low income in Birmingham and discover that Pakistani, Bangladeshi and black ethnic groups are over-represented in poverty vs population, while white, Indian and Chinese groups are under-represented.
This is not saying that poverty is the fault of black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi families (I suspect that the sharply different economic profile of immigrants has a lot to do with it), but it does at least partially support the assertion that Ms. Okolosie scorns so much. But she's an English teacher, and they are famously scornful of such white patriarchical concepts as "data". (See what I did there?)
Let's assume, getting back to Ms. Okolosie's original point, that the Tories have policies which are objectively bad for the black community - since black ethnicity and poverty are somewhat correlated, policies which negatively affect the poor will likely negatively affect the black community. We might say that such policies are "racist" since they negatively affect an ethnic group. Except that Tory policies tend to support businesses - and hence benefit Indian and Chinese families who tend to work in or own small or medium sized businesses. If we assume that Labour policies benefit the poor but penalise businesses, aren't they racist as well? Indeed, unless you have no policies at all, it's likely that one or more of your policies penalise an ethnic group. So every politician is racist! Even (heaven forfend) Diane Abbott.
Okolosie's label of "racist politician" is hence information-free. Effectively every politician is racist, by her definition.
Anti-discrimination laws may do a lot but they haven't quite yet made us a post-racial society.As long as self-aggrandising divisive special pleaders like Okolosie (and Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Diane Abbott) are held up as arbiters of correct behaviour, you bet we're not post-racial.
The ever-enlightened Simon Jenkins in the Guardian has a fascinating insight into how to deal with terrorist attacks:
The modern urban obsession with celebrity buildings and high-profile events offers too many publicity-rich targets. A World Trade Centre, a Mumbai hotel, a Boston marathon, a Nairobi shopping mall are all enticing to extremists. Defending them is near impossible. Better at least not to create them.Is it just me, or does this sound awfully like "women shouldn't wear short skirts, because it's provocative and makes men want to rape them?" It's a rather odd sentiment, coming from the Guardian of all newspapers.
But let's run with Sir Simon's argument and see where it takes us:
A shopping mall not only wipes out shopping streets, it makes a perfect terrorist fortress, near impossible to assault. There is no defence against the terror weapons of guns and grenades.That does rather assume that the terrorists can take over the mall in the first place, of course. I invite the gentle reader to consider how far al-Shabaab would have got in a Texas mall. Remember that both the Washington Navy Yard shooter and the soon-to-be-very-ex-Major Nidal Hassan's Fort Hood shooting were only able to carry on as long as they did, and shoot as many people as they did, because both areas were gun-free zones. In both cases, once armed police officers turned up they engaged the gunman and ended up shooting him. From this we can deduce that if you want to stop a determined shooter, having guns and the training to use them is rather important.
You'll never be able to stop a determined shooter from getting off his or her first few shots at innocents. The difference is that in a Texas mall the volume of retaliatory fire will drastically limit the number of casualties, and give the gunman very little time to pick their shots before defending themself from imminent death becomes their overriding concern. For the record, despite the above video, I'd rather the civilians use pistols in a mall - high-powered rifles are probably not the best firearm in a crowded environment with solid flat surfaces everywhere.
As for bombs, it seems that Sir Simon would rather people didn't go to church because it's a near-irresistable target for bombers. I invite the reader to consider where such an approach would lead, and wonder at what an Oxford PPE must do to one's brain, not to mention spine.
One of the most immediate and painful results from the forthcoming bankruptcy of Detroit (no doubt followed by any number of high-spending population-declining US cities) is the plight of public sector pensioners. Since they are paid out of current city funds, once the city is bankrupt their pensions are worth pennies on the dollar:
Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr wants to reduce pension benefits for thousands of retired and current city employees. In its Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing, the city claimed $3.5 billion in underfunded pensions. That's nearly 20 percent of all of the city's total debts of $18.5 billion.Not included in that $3.5 billion is another $3 billion or so in retirement health benefits. Over 1/3 of Detroit's debt relates to current and future pensioners. It seems that the city was relaxed about pre-funding pension and health benefits, preferring to pay them out of annual taxation - which came a little unstuck when companies, jobs and taxpayers fled the city, slashing tax revenues.
Luckily for us, Helaine Olen has analysed the collapse of Detroit and drawn the appropriate lessons for prospective pensioners, blaming the 401(k) which is roughly equivalent in tax treatment to a UK personally funded defined-contribution pension plan:
However, the Reagan administration expanded the 401(k) allowing companies to offer the benefit to all employees. That's when the corporate bean counters stepped in. Realizing the 401(k) was cheaper on the company bottom line than traditional defined benefit plans, they began to freeze traditional pensions, and force workers to take full responsibility for their own retirement planning.Helaine seems (the logic is fuzzy here) to claim that if only companies had kept their workers on defined benefit pensions - thereby shifting all the risk to their employing company or city - and eschewed the 401(k) defined benefit plans, things would all have been rosy:
Pensions are not only more cost effective than the 401(k), they work better for the majority of people. With a pension, we don't have the responsibility of guessing the right amount of money to save and how to invest it so it will grow to the right amount.Mmm. Like the pension holders of Detroit, Stockton, and presumably soon Chicago, Sacramento, Los Angeles have benefitted from this approach. The reason that government pensions have been better (up to now) than 401(k)s is that 401(k) plans make clear just how much money you have to save in order to have a relatively miserly income. The connection between your government pension contributions and payments is, at best, tenuous. You are relying, each year, on the government bringing in enough money from taxpayers (less all the salaries and infrastructure spending that they can't do without unless they want to hang from lamp posts) to pay for your pension and healthcare. Because pensioners are living longer and healthcare costs are ever-increasing, this will be a rapidly increasing total pension and healthcare bill. As soon as the taxpayers have had enough of contributing 50%+ of their taxes direct to your pension and healthcare, and decide to move elsewhere, where is the money going to come from?
Oddly, Helaine seems to skip lightly over the question of where the money to fund government pensions comes from. I wonder why?
After more than thirty years of the 401(k) era, we no longer view pensions as something we must obtain for ourselves. We repeatedly tell pollsters we wish we had them but when it comes down to it, we don't protest when yet another group sees theirs cut or jettisoned entirely.Perhaps because we realise that in many cases we're paying for that group's pensions in our taxes, while trying desperately to save a tiny amount of pension for ourselves out of the remnants of our income?
Once I saw that George Zimmerman had been acquitted of the murder or manslaughter of Trayvon Martin I knew it was only a matter of time before Gary Younge weighed in. The speed with which he did so took me by surprise nevertheless. Perhaps he wrote "guilty" and "not guilty" versions of the article in advance:
There is no doubt about who the aggressor was here. The only reason the two interacted at all, physically or otherwise, is that Zimmerman believed it was his civic duty to apprehend an innocent teenager who caused suspicion by his existence alone.Well, Gary my old chum, it seems that there was considerable doubt about who was the aggressor. "Reasonable doubt" at the very least, given a unanimous "not guilty" verdict by the jury. And let us remember that Gary's hints at skin colour as a reason for prejudice don't really fly, given the range of skin hues of defence witnesses and media interviewees who testified to Zimmerman's character and concern for his neighbours.
My hat off to the jury, who discharged a very difficult duty and are no doubt relieved to be past this case:
A court public information officer said that members of the jury had no desire to speak to the media Saturday night. Identities of jury members are currently protected by a court anonymity order.I'll bet they don't want to speak to the media. Not when media pundits like Gary write bilge like this:
Those who now fear violent social disorder must ask themselves whose interests are served by a violent social order in which young black men can be thus slain and discarded.We must also ask ourselves how the violent social order arose in the first place. Here's a hint, Gary: broken families and dysfunctional education systems that produced people like the far-from-angelic Trayvon and the illiterate prosecution witness Rachel Jeantel are not unrelated. If Gary really is concerned about the lot of poor black families in the USA, and I see no reason to doubt his sincerity on this point, perhaps he should turn his writing and analytical talents to analysing why a nineteen year old woman cannot even read cursive writing, why black protests have a strong tendency to turn extremely violent and what considerable harm Al Sharpton is actually doing to the black community in his self-aggrandisements.
While we're here, let's note the firing late on Friday of an IT specialist in the state attorney's office who extracted all the photos and text messages from Martin's phone, and approached his attorney a couple months ago in concern that this information had not been turned over to Zimmerman's defence team in apparent violation of rules of evidence disclosure:
Kruidbos asked [lawyer] White in April for legal advice and described some contents of his report such as a photo of an African-American hand holding a gun, a photo of a plant resembling marijuana and a text message referring to a gun transaction.It's possible that the timing of Kruidbos's dismissal, immediately after closing arguments in the trial, was coincidental. I hope it was, because the implications of deliberate timing in this action are rather disturbing.
Predictable outrage by Barbara "Babs" Ellen in the Guardian in reaction to Katie Hopkins' comments about names as an indicator of class:
I felt wonderfully common, indeed militantly so, when I watched former Apprentice candidate Katie Hopkins on This Morning, telling Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby why she wouldn't allow her children to play with other children with "low-class" names such as Tyler, Charmaine or Chardonnay.I seem to remember the Freakonomics authors making some persuasive statistical arguments that naming of children in American schools provided similar indications towards their parents' social status. They also touched on how some of this tied into racial background, and how many of the poorer American families of Afro-Caribbean background were consciously choosing emphatically "black"-sounding names like DeShawn and LaToya. Overall, in each generation there were popular "classical" names that tended to point to higher social class, and more exotic names that pointed downwards. Interestingly, there were certain names that might show upper social classes in one generation but then be borrowed for middle class children in the next, and then lower class in generations afterwards - the "aspirational" names.
In Hopkins's view, a name was a useful short cut in her important life, providing vital information on a child's social status.
Frank Chalk, author of It's your time you're wasting described the game that his fellow teachers where they'd read out a number of first names of a particular class and then try to guess whether they were top, middle or bottom set in ability. It turned out not to be particularly difficult.
First names do convey significant information about children in aggregate. Of course, on an individual basis you don't know whether Chardonnay was so named because her mother liked a daily bottle of the same, or because that was the principal grape in her father's vineyards. Whether you should act on that information, by selecting which social groups your child plays with, is another question which I choose not to tackle at this time.
Annalisa Barbieri in the Guardian is properly concerned about the proliferation of abusive relationships and wonders what can be done to stop it:
We can teach our children about the correct way to deal with emotions such as anger and frustration, and that it's never OK to hit another person. Currently, where do our children learn about this? The top source is from soap operas, where the information may or may not be accurate. Only 13% had learned about it at school. The logical place would be in Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE), but even in schools where PSHE is taught, (it is not compulsory although the sex education element is) domestic abuse is rarely covered.PSHE is taught in the age group 10-16. Children (and I use the word advisedly) of that age do not in general have the emotional or social maturity to appreciate the implications of what they are being told. I can't see this making much of a difference to the problem, no matter how good the intentions.
If you want to know why modern young men are so prone to violence in relationships, look at the environment in which they grew up. The usual outlets of the violent impulses that arise naturally in young men (play wrestling with other boys, playing soldiers, physical playground games) have been systematically suppressed. Where else are these violent impulses - strengthening with age - going to be channelled? As Annalisa herself writes "it's never OK to hit another person" - but punching and grappling is what boys thrive on. What they need to learn, and indeed learn as they grow up, is the difference between a moderate punch to the arm or torso to score a metaphorical point, and a punch to the head aiming to cause injury or worse. Remove the opportunity to play fight, and you remove the place where they learn those lessons - where a playful punch grazes your buddy's nose, causes it to bleed profusely and generates remorse and moderate recriminations.
Rory Miller's Meditations on Violence made clear the distinction between playground violence, confrontations for territory / status, and then the third tier of violence intended to injure or kill. This third tier can be seen in UK cities when alcohol or aggression have young men throwing kicks at the heads of innocent victims. A kick at the head has only one purpose - to injure severely or kill. This is bottled-up violence finding an outlet that ruins the lives of people - the injured party, their family, and then the aggressor himself as he is sent down for a number of years.
Barbieri quotes Refuge's CEO Sandra Horley:
If the abuse is physical, she advises, "Never ignore that first push, that first shove."She's right enough; that's the sign of a man (or woman) who has not learned control over their violent impulses and found an appropriate channel for them. If you're the inappropriate channel, pack your bags and leave. But we want this to be a rare occurrence, we need to restore the time-honoured ways in which young men can relieve the pressure of their violence urges harmlessly. Feminising them is not helping.
I do try to stay away from Polly Toynbee's CiF columns. I swear, they're so bad for my blood pressure. But her latest opus breaches the dikes of my self control:
Published this week, The Entrepreneurial State, by Professor Mariana Mazzucato of Sussex University, offers a forensic analysis of how the state is prime investor and creator of most great innovations.Oh, this will be good. Mariana Mazzucato hasn't had a meaningful job outside academe in her entire life. So what does she say?
Not only the internet but its technologies sprang from vast state investment (such as GPS and touch screens, biotech and nanotech), where the state took the risk but others took the profit; Apple and Google rode on the back of state research;My arse, Polly. Apple (and, let's be fair, Microsoft) took inspiration for their operating systems lock, stock and barrel from Xerox PARC. Last time I checked, Xerox was a privately owned company - that had the crown jewels of the desktop computing revolution and just gave them away, but hey. Google built on the success of search engines like Alta Vista, coming up with their PageRank algorithm independently while students at Stanford University, following an education at private schools. A claim that "the state" was involved in any significant degree in either Apple's or Google's success fails even the laugh test.
Perhaps Prof. Mazzucato should stick to economics, because even my economic blatherings have more accuracy than her ventures into matters technological. She asserts:
Thus, while entrepreneurial individuals like Steve Jobs are needed, their success is nearly impossible without their ability to ride the wave of State investments. And if Europe wants its own Googles, it needs more State action, not less.Hmm, it seems that Europe has much more State action than the USA in general and Silicon Valley in particular. So why are all the Googles, Yahoos, Microsofts etc. popping up in Silicon Valley rather than Europe? Anyone? Bueller?
Texas-based English journo Alex Hannaford wrote an article for Salon about concealed carry in the USA where he went so far as to take a 1-day concealed-carry course and carry concealed where he lives in Texas:
To hold a Concealed Handgun License (CHL) in Texas, you must have a state ID, be at least 21, and not have committed any felonies or be addicted to drugs. The ten-hour class covers gun safety, the use of force and dispute resolution. There's also a shooting test at the range; to pass, you must fire off 50 rounds and score 170 points out of a possible 250.This actually seems pretty stringent to me; during 10 hours of instruction, especially in covering issues like dispute resolution, it should become clear to the course instructors whether any of their students show signs of being unstable. Of course it won't catch everyone, but it does seem to be a good-faith attempt to ensure that only stable people with reasonable gun proficiency get to carry-concealed legally.
Hannaford summarises his experience in an eye-poppingly poorly argued article in the Guardian, taking the traditional Guardian view of the NRA membership as a pack of xenophobic paranoid loons. This much was not a surprise. What was a surprise was how badly thought-out were his comments about the benefits of guns:
Where I live in Austin, there are about 82 home invasions a year – in a city of 820,000 people. You're far more likely to be injured by your own gun than to need one to use against somebody breaking in at night.Hmm, yes. I wonder why home invasions (breaking into a house with violent intent against the occupants) are so rare in a city where everyone and his dog have a gun? Compare with Oakland, California which has about half the population of Austin but much more restrictive firearms ownership laws, and an endemic of home invasions - many of them by armed ne'er-do-wells.
What really takes the cake is when he addresses the concern of Americans about government tyranny:
The research I did for those stories also reinforced my belief that it's a very vocal minority in America whose affection for the right to bear arms isn't anything to do with hunting or target shooting. It's about arming themselves to the teeth so they can rise up against an oppressive government should the need arise. Because, you know, that kind of thing happens a lot in America. And they're going to be really effective against the most powerful military force in the world, if the need should ever arise.Well, if I were a tyrannical US Government, I'd put Texas a square last on my list of states to take over. It has 25 million people and, quite probably, more than one gun per person. Even if you assume that gun ownership is concentrated, you're still looking at 5 million or more heavily armed and motivated citizens who know well the expansive lands of their state. Contrast this with a total of 1.4m active and 0.8m reserve personnel in the entire US Armed Forces and note that the actual gun-toting soldiery won't be even half of that. Unless you planned on levelling the entire state with high explosive, you'd be nuts to try to take on Texas. Britain, by contrast, should be a walk-over.
Certainly, the US Government has not yet tried to oppress the population. But then, given the above, how far would it get? And if you want precedent for a native population of North America being overrun and essentially wiped-out by better-armed Government forces, you might want to talk to the remaining Native Americans, such as the Sioux tribes.
The authors of the famous "equality is everything" text "The Spirit Level" argue in CiF that Margaret Thatcher failed to realise that equality is good for business:
International studies of OECD countries suggest a close relationship between the decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality. From a peak of 13 million in 1979, trade union membership had declined by 30% by 1990, and is now not much more than half what it was. In a world where most media talking heads come from the top few percent of income earners, unions are not only important in wage bargaining, they also provide some of the few well-informed voices whose job it is to speak on behalf of the less well-paid.Good gravy, I hate this kind of reasoning. Let's take it apart, shall we?
Trade unions benefit the below-average at the expense of the able. Given a free hand and a reasonably well-functioning employment market - the latter is important - an employer would rather pay his better employees more, and his lower-performing employees less, or indeed just fire the lower performers. This would be to the benefit of the employer and the benefit of the better-performing employees, but the detriment of the below-average employees. As it stands, the employer can only really pay his workers according to the amount of work he or she expects to get out of a below-average performer; otherwise, since the employer pays better than his competitors, he will attract poorly-performing employees like flies to jam. Such poor performers are remarkably hard to identify at interview; by the time they've been in the job several months, it's too late and the union won't let them be fired. So they're happy, but the employer (saddled with them) is not, and neither are their co-workers who have to cover for their inadequacies.
Now, we may argue that the welfare of the poor performers is more important than allowing employers and good performing employees to thrive, but let's be honest that this levelling-down is what we're doing. I've worked in unionised government and industrial workplaces where unfireable drones infested the environment, and it was terribly depressing to see the dragging-down effect on those workers who could have otherwise done well and risen rapidly. I've also worked in union-free brutal capitalist firms which hired and fired at the drop of a hat, and the ever-present threat of being fired was hard on people - but then, the firm thrived and made profits which yielded rather good bonuses for the hard workers. You may think that a unionised private firm is "safer", and it is - right up to the point where it fails completely and goes under, and everyone is fired. At this point all the union can do for you is stand around and blame "the management" for mismanaging the firm. They are suddenly completely irrelevant, just when you need them the most.
As for the argument that the media voices the concerns of the rich, and the well-informed unions are needed to counteract this advantage - bollocks. Union leaders spout just as much claptrap as journalists in the Guardian, Daily Mail, BBC or Telegraph. I can't remember the last time I saw the Beeb or Grauniad making an anti-worker, anti-union point. Why would they? Journalists and BBC employees are unionised too. Union leaders have the right to be heard, and indeed I'm all for getting Bob Crowe and Dave Prentis on the air as often as possible in order to shred the claims they use to rabble-rouse, but let's not kid ourselves that they are any better "informed" than anyone else.
I was also surprised to see authors such as these trotting out the standard misquotes:
Thatcher's infamous failure to recognise the existence of society was a double failure. A growing body of research now shows that the quality of social relations is among the most powerful influences on the happiness, health and wellbeing of populations in the rich countries.Interesting that they don't reference the original Thatcher quote source (an interview with Woman's Own magazine). I wonder why that is? Possibly because its actual content and context doesn't quite fit their narrative:
... and so they [people who expect the Government to help them with a problem] are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation....It sounds to me as if Thatcher was correctly pointing out that there is no one entity you can point to and say "this is society"; as such, the onus is on the authors to prove that such "society" as she referenced actually exists as a meaningful entity. Waving around an abstract and undefined concept such as "quality of social relations" is a rather weak refutation. For allegedly academic authors, this is fairly poor work. If this was a conference paper under review, I'd reject it out of hand for poor sourcing and unconvincing arguments. But this is CiF where "facts are sacred"...
It's rare to see a politican do something actually novel and courageous. US small-government Repulican Rand Paul went to the predominantly black Howard University in Washington D.C. to spread an unusual message for a Republican:
Paul reminded the crowd the GOP has always been the party of civil rights and voting rights, but also the party of limited government. "When some people hear that, they tune us out and say: he's just using code words for the state's right to discriminate, for the state's right to segregate and abuse. But that's simply not true."Bear in mind that the article is written by a self-proclaimed conservative black chick and so can't be regarded as a neutral point of view, but the basic facts are undeniable. Paul went to an environment that anyone would regard as explicitly hostile to Republicans in general, and white privileged Republicans in particular; he didn't apologise for who he was, but rather made a case to the audience that it was in their interests to vote Republican.
The last time Obama spoke at Howard University (a short drive from the White House) was in 2007, before he was president. Why should he speak there now? He knows that the black vote leans massively to the Democrats. Why waste time with solid voters when there are many marginal voters to chase? This is the calculus of politics, and it's what is guaranteeing that issues of real and particular concern to African Americans are of little concern to both Democrat and Republican politicians. Republicans know that the black population won't vote for them anyway, and Democrats know that the black population will vote for them regardless.
I hope that the Howard University students want their concerns to be taken seriously by politicians. To make this happen, they have to make it clear that their vote is up for grabs to whoever can deliver on those concerns. This same phenomenon, I am sure, relates to why inner-city areas in the UK languish in poverty; Labour can rely on those votes, so will spend the minimum possible in money and political capital to keep the inhabitants from outright revolt. The Conservatives and Lib Dems know they will never gain those votes no matter what they do, so why try?
If you want something from a politician, you have to have something to negotiate with. This "something" is your vote. Go cavort with your politician's opponents, let him know you're doing it, and you'll be amazed how quickly he appears to gain concern for your well-being.
Sure enough, the Philpott verdict is barely out the door when Zoe Williams is wailing about the implications in Comment Is Free:
But the [Daily Mail] paragraph that had me churning with impotent rage was this one: "Michael Philpott is a perfect parable for our age: his story shows the pervasiveness of evil born of welfare dependency.All is proceeding as I have foreseen. Zoe is terrified, and apparently impotent. Gosh, Zoe. If only you were a major columnist in a leading UK newspaper, eh? Then you might be able to shape opinions in the same way that the Daily Mail does.
Anyway, let's leave Zoe's puissance aside and address the substance of her complaint:
It is vitriolic, illogical depersonalisation to ascribe the grotesqueness of one wild, unique crime to tens of thousands of people on benefits. When any section of society is demonised on irrational grounds we have to take that seriouslyIndeed we should. But the Daily Mail is not (at least explicitly) saying that all welfare dependents are Philpott; rather, that Philpott is a phenomenon who required the welfare dependency culture to exist. After all, he burned down his house in the intention of obtaining a better one - and who gave him that house, and who would have given him a replacement? Why, the welfare state. Without the welfare state, Philpott's horrific crime would have had no purpose. Now we shouldn't therefore condemn the welfare state out of hand - the highest purpose can be turned to evil by a suitable twisted mind - but let's not fool ourselves that the current benefits system was anything but necessary to Philpott's plan.
So what of the tens of thousands whom the DM tars with the brush of welfare dependency?
At the weekend the Baptists, Methodists, the United Reform church and the Church of Scotland came out against the six myths routinely spread, by politicians, about the poor: that they are lazy, addicted to drink or drugs, not really poor, cheat the system, have an easy life, and that they caused the deficit. Set down on paper, they are astonishing, laughable. And yet these ideas are pervasive, written across the landscape of this miserable Tory Narnia.The UK unemployment rate is 2.5M. That is, 2.5M people are looking for work but cannot find it (and hence, must exist on benefits). It seems reasonable to assume that unemployed people and poor people have a substantial intersection - let's say that 2M unemployed people are poor. "Tens of thousands" is on the order of 1%-2% of this number. The DM claims that 1%-2% of unemployed people are taking the piss. Does this seem unreasonable? Heck, of the tens of unemployed people whom I've know reasonably well over the past few years, several (~ 10%) have been taking the piss. This is not a reason to demonise the remaining 98%, but Zoe fails to refute the numbers presented by the DM.
What about "troubled" families?
We're told there are 120,000 "troubled families", costing £9bn – the troubles relating to crime, drink, drugs and antisocial behaviour – when, on closer inspection, it turns out there are 120,000 poor familiesGuess what, Zoe? The Philpotts were not poor by any reasonable description. There was a poverty of aspiration, and certainly a moral poverty, but they had taxpayer-funded accommodation and plenty of welfare payments. That Philpott chose to spend the money on himself rather than his children was not anything that the State could affect. Again, assuming 15M families in the UK, you're talking about 1% of the population causing significant trouble to its neighbours. Every village of 100 families knows one or two families who take the piss, cause trouble, reap benefits and do nothing - or worse than nothing - in return. £9bn is £75K per problem family. Assume that every problem family occupies most of a community police constable's time, and you're more than half way towards that cost before any property damage or theft is taken into account. Does this £9bn now sound such an unbelievable number?
Zoe also misses a trick in her conclusion:
So much current political rhetoric relies on accepting the idea that the poor differ in fundamental ways, that they care less for their children, that they are less honest, that they are more stupid.Perhaps it does. But no such rhetoric is necessary in the UK. All that a politician need do is point to the examples of Mick Philpott, Heather Frost and similar fecund work-shy beneficiaries of the benefit system and ask "is that what you want your taxes to support?" If Zoe Williams wants to protect the poor, and she should, she should come up with proposals that will channel taxpayer funds away from these unsympathetic examples of welfare dependency. Your move, Zoe.
Veteran clown Seumas Milne "argues" in the Guardian that the recent 1514 to 3 vote in favour of continued British rule of the Falkland islands is a North Korean-style ballot:
No doubt 1,514 island residents really did vote in favour of continued British rule. The only surprise was that three islanders dared to spoil the rousing choruses of Land of Hope and Glory by voting against.Astonishingly, Milne appears unaware of the fate of previous Guardian columnists (Flavia Dzodan, Sean Penn, ambassador Alicia Castro) putting forward their ideas on Argentina taking over the "Malvinas". He gets swiftly set straight in the comments:
It's that the poll was a foregone conclusion and designed to miss the entire point of Britain's dispute with Argentina over the islands – which began 180 years ago when one of Lord Palmerston's gunboats seized them and expelled the Argentine administration.
The islands might be 8,000 miles from the UK (something that doesn't trouble other countries of the world with THEIR islands) but they are 400 from Argentina.It used to stagger me that a flagship journal for human rights and democracy, such as the Guardian styles itself, would support the military annexation of land and populations based on a flimsy-as-paper argument about a Huguenot, Luis Vernet, making a commercial settlement in 1828 under a joint Argentina-UK pact where Argentina refused to provide any warship to back his claim. Sadly, it appears that Seumas is happy to pursue any argument, no matter how absurd, as long as it is contrary to the policy of the UK government, even if that means backing the increasingly dictatorial and distasteful Argentine regime.
If distance is the issue, then it is still an issue with the Argentine claim. As would be the usual bollocks about "continental shelf."
There are numerous disputes - ones of a more serious nature - such as the islands disputed between the Japanese and Chinese, between North and South Korea, etc etc. I suggest that the Guardian gets stuck in there. Maybe send a journalist to stir up shit in China and Japan, North and South Korea.
As the above commenter notes, there are plenty of more unsavory regimes casting their island claims far beyond their shores. That Seumas does not see fit to remark upon these makes one wonder what it is about the Falklands that he finds so exceptional.
Seumas is sadly not immune from the occasional inconsistency in his argument:
[...] most of whom weren't born there but are subsidised to the tune of £44,856 a head to keep them in the Rhodesian retro style to which they are accustomed?I like the precision of that "44,856". The sly allusion to the racist imperialist rule in Rhodesia is also a nice touch. But what's this?
A generation on, the discovery of potentially large oil and gas deposits around the islands, development of fisheries and growing importance of the Antarctic sea lanes have changed the picture.Well, Seumas, either the Falklanders are financial dependents, or they're not. Which is it?
Lasy word to commenter Chrispytl:
So Milne wishes to now simply ignore the wishes of virtually the whole of the residents of the Falkland Islands?Seumas, I think you've met your match. Time for a piece on a less challenging topic.
The man must really hate democracy.
He must love the EU though.
EU tax commissioner Algirdas Šemeta[1] is telling us that the 11-nation Financial Transactions Tax scheme is a brilliant money-raiser:
[...] the tax offers substantial new revenues. Around €30-35bn (£26-30bn) per year will be generated from this small tax of just 0.1% on bonds and shares and 0.01% on derivatives.Even better, he seems to claim that it's free money for regular citizens:
Will the tax be borne by ordinary citizens? We have taken every measure to ensure that it isn't. [my italics] This is a tax on the financial sector, and 85% of liable transactions are purely between financial institutions. Day-to-day financial activities of citizens and businesses are outside its scope.I do like that weasel "we have taken every measure" quote, which to me seems to be a long way from the "no" which you might assume he means.
Of course, we can trust Algirdas's judgement about the impact on business given his no doubt no doubt substantial experience in the financial sector. Let's look at his professional career list on his CV:
Back to the FTT: one wonders, if the €35bn is effectively for free, why he doesn't double or even triple the rates. Surely if €35bn is good, €70bn is better, and the citizens still aren't paying according to Algirdas. Free money! Or perhaps, just maybe, TANSTAAFAL and Algirdas and his cohorts know this.
I'm with the esteemed Mr. Worstall on this article:
The route to the pockets of the citizenry is via the higher cost of capital for corporates leading to less capital investment. As your own fucking EU briefing paper pointed out.The financial drag on the economies of these 11 countries (and those trading with them) is going to be a lot higher than €35bn annually - all taxes have deadweight costs - but I'd bet that it's going to be diffuse enough that it will be hard to point to any one statistic in 1-2 years time and blame the FTT. Make no mistake, though, the drag will be very real. There are also the opportunity costs of passing this legislation - the companies that decide not to invest in the participating nations because of the increased costs of capital.
The really insidious and destructive impact is going to come from the extra-territoriality clause:
If there is an economic link to the FTT zone, it will apply, regardless of whether the other parties to the transaction are based in London, Singapore, Copenhagen or New YorkI would love to know what Deutsche Bank, SocGen, Santander and other large financial entities are thinking and planning right now. This looks to me as if e.g. the UK entity of Santander will be able to trade normally within the UK and US, but any transfers between the UK and Spanish entities are going to be hit by the tax. If I were Deutsche Bank, I'd be planning to do a whole lot less with my Germany-based operations and staff.
What I would like to see is how Algirdas is going to spend the revenue:
Our economic studies show that it will have no impact on jobs, and could even have a positive impact on growth if revenues are reinvested wisely.Yes, and if my mother's sister had testicles she'd be my mother's brother. The FTT spending is what the FTT opponents should demand to see in 2-3 years - it's unrelated to the actual impact of the FTT but would be a great stick with which to beat the FTT proponents. You can bet your bottom dollar that it's mainly going to be pissed away on subsidising sinking industries, funding dubious political movements, make-work employment schemes and grants for white elephant construction projects. When Algirdas suggests "growth-friendly investment, stabilising public finances or wider commitments such as development aid" I hear "green energy subsidies, bailing out Spanish cajas, and building railways to nowhere."
[1] Since Algirdas is from Lithuania, he has an inconvenient diacritical mark on the 'S' of his surname for which I do not recall offhand the corresponding HTML entity; I am including the UTF-8 character in this blog and hoping that older browsers can cope.