"Deny" does not mean what you think it means

You'd think that an English Lit undergraduate would understand the meaning of common words. Reni Eddo-Lodge writing in CiF would seem to contradict that thesis:

It is an absolute scandal that young women are being denied access to the [HPV] vaccine on religious grounds. Not only are some of these schools opting out of providing the injection, but they're also neglecting to inform GPs of their decision – thus preventing young women from accessing the vaccine altogether.

Let's just dissect this, shall we? These "young women" are under 16 years of age, and therefore "girls" in the same way that "young men" under 16 are "boys". The school are merely opting out of making it easier for the girls to get the HPV vaccine. They have absolutely no obligation to fulfill that role. It's up to the girls' parents, who after all are in loco parentis, to arrange for the girls to get that vaccination - if they so choose.

Reni thinks that she has a killer stat:

The human papillomavirus claims 1,000 victims a year in the form of cervical cancers, and the HPV vaccine prevents 70% of them.

700 lives saved (in the UK) isn't bad. Of course, the HPV vaccine Gardasil causes 1 death per month in the USA according to the FDA, so parents might figure that they'd rather their child protect themselves by refraining from promiscuous sex rather than receive a vaccine that may (however unlikely) kill them.

Reni's perspective is made clear:

Projecting adult paranoia about promiscuity on to young women helps no one. At the crux of religious opposition to the HPV vaccine is a belief that young women cannot be trusted to make decisions about their own bodies.

A lot of young women (and men) are promiscuous, by any reasonable definition. If they weren't, we wouldn't be having the STD outbreak that we are currently having. So perhaps young women (girls) can't be trusted by their parents -- who, after all, are responsible for them and deal with the consequences of their decisions.

Hat tip: JuliaM at Orphans of Liberty.

This would really tick me off

According to the Daily Mail (and if you can't trust them, whom can you trust?) some tick bites can cause the victim to become allergic to red meat. Strewth.

There's a particular irony here:

Experts traced the delayed allergic response to bites from a tick - specifically the Lone Star tick.

The Lone Star tick, presumably from the Lone Star State - Texas - famed for steaks the size of your dinnerplate. I have a horrible thought - is this the result of some fiendish genetic manipulation by the cows on whom the ticks normally prey? Mark Wadsworth, please call your office.

Social is hard

When you see a headline such as Police force tells residents to stop reporting crimes on Facebook then you know you're going to enjoy the story. Apparently the ease of posting on Northants Police's Facebook "Wall" has led to a huge wave of real but vague, dubious and odd, and outright fake crime reporting there. Who'd have thought?

I particularly enjoyed:

Earlier this year Strathclyde Police announced the arrest of Andy Coulson, the former Downing Street communications chief and News of the World editor, on its Facebook page.
But because of the design of the site, it was unable to stop members of the public clicking on a button to say they "liked" the development and adding comments about it.

When they say "the design of the site", of course, they actually mean "a fundamental property of Facebook". Oopsie.

I've long wondered whether 999 should charge a standard £1 for calls from private and mobile phones (with the proviso for mobiles that if you're under £1 of credit then you can make the call but the charge is made when you next top up). If something bad enough to make you call the police has happened, you really won't mind spending that money.

Cristina Odone spectacularly misses the point

In an otherwise reasonable article arguing that paying cash for plumbing / building services is perfectly fine no matter what the Government may think, the Torygraph's Cristina Odone has a corker of an argument:

A buoyant black economy kept Italians prosperous for decades even when their Treasury was bankrupt.

OK, Cristina, so why do you think the Italian (and indeed the Greek) Treasury is bankrupt. Shortage of income, perhaps? Tax, perchance? Gah.

I am not suggesting that Britons adopt the illegal Italian way, where paying taxes is seen as a task for stupid people.

Thank goodness. I'm no more fond of paying tax than the next person, but a government has certain vital social and national tasks that can't be done without money. A situation where most citizens take more from the government in benefits than they receive is simply poisonous.

There is a more nuanced argument to be made, and I'm surprised Cristina doesn't advance it (perhaps she hit the word limit for her column?). If the natural tendency of governments is to spend all their income plus X%, and the behaviour of governments to date gives us no reason to disbelieve this proposition, then minimising the government's income will bring forward the point (when N years times X% forms nearly 100% of GDP) when the government is forced by the markets to realise that things can't go on like this.

$21tn free for the taking!

At least, according to the Tax Justice Network and the BBC:

A global super-rich elite had at least $21 trillion (£13tn) hidden in secret tax havens by the end of 2010, according to a major study.

View 6-page report summary directly here.

At least $21,000 billion. Wow. This implies the wealth of 21,000 billionaires from 139 countries. This gives an average of 150 billionnaires/country, though assuming unequal distribution (say America is 40% of this (8000+ billionaires); Russia, China, India, UK another 30% and the rest spread over the smaller countries. For millionaires instead of billionaires, that's 21 million.

How many billionaires are in the USA? 403 as of 2010. How many $ millionaires in the world? Maybe just short of 11 million in 2011. And for these sums to work, most of them would have to hold most of their assets in cash in offshore havens, rather than in (say) property where I suspect the majority of the USA millionaires come from. I think I see a tiny problem with this chap's calculations.

Minor problems like that aside, what should be done about it? Report author Mr. Henry has no doubts:

"The lost tax revenues implied by our estimates is huge. It is large enough to make a significant difference to the finances of many countries.
"From another angle, this study is really good news. The world has just located a huge pile of financial wealth that might be called upon to contribute to the solution of our most pressing global problems."

Of course! We can just take it. I can't see any problems with that, none at all. How would you seize it? Annex Jersey? Invade Switzerland? (good luck with that.) Beach landing in the Caymans? Then walk into the banks and seize all their computers. I'd pay money to watch that. Presumably it's held in a mixture of US dollar / CA dollar / GBP / Euro / CHF accounts rather than anything physical. You could just induce vicious inflation to deflate the value of the savers' accounts, which is the approach the US and UK governments seem to have taken anyway.

Sarcasm aside, the sheer cheek of Mr. Henry and the Tax Justice Network assuming you can arbitrarily make a claim on wealth by dint of wanting it ("society needs it") appalls me. Can he show any laws were broken in accumulating this money? Which governments get the claim on which assets? Do they claim on the wealth or on the alleged unpaid taxes? If taxes weren't paid that were due, why not lay a lien on the offender's public assets?

The issue of corruption and mass theft in poorer countries is a valid concern. Look at Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos - they probably took billions of dollars of assets out of the Philippines during the period of Marcos dictatorship. It's quite believable that this is stashed in tax haven accounts, but the Philippines hasn't been able to get any of it back as far as I know. This is one of the best examples of wealth that should be reclaimed, and yet the world can't make it happen - why not? Let's talk about African governments systematically looting their countries, and the Chinese senior Party members and military officials salting away their gains. Does the TJN report address this issue? Mr. Henry, I would bet the Chinese in particular will just roll over and give you their hard-earned cash. You should definitely go ask them.

What's going to happen to this tax-sheltered wealth? Eventually it needs to be spent, otherwise there's no point in having it. So it's going to be transferred into a US/UK/whatever bank account and spent on luxury goods or property, at which point the Govt. will take the appropriate tax cut. If you want to get hold of this money, your country needs to make things or services that the wealth holders want. Strangely, the record of governments in producing such goods is somewhat thin.

Of Ayn Rand and modern day politics

Probably my achievement of the month; I managed to slog all the way through Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Holy Hoppin' Hippos. I'm glad I did it, but don't think I'd choose to do it again - maybe dip in and out of the more interesting parts in future.

As a book of its time, I'm frankly astonished that it got published at all, and more astonished that the editors let it go out as-is. (Perhaps they didn't, and this is the cut-down and cleaned up version of some behemoth original. What a thought.) I think there's a far better and more conventional book in there somewhere, weighing in at maybe 400-500 pages of the current 1100-odd. The 70+ pages of Galt's radio speech are, frankly, masturbation. Perhaps the success of The Fountainhead gave Rand more leverage with her editors than a first novelist would have had. I also hate, hate, hate the ellipsised semi-monologues that pepper the book. The Project X digression feels like an unnecessary branch line from the main track of the story.

Having said all that, I'm going to go against what seems to be popular opinion - I actually liked the story. It's very imaginative without really veering off into the truly implausible, the villains (and there are many) are unusual and interesting, and the denouement is nicely done. I even enjoyed a few of the characters, notably Ragnar Dammerskjöld who's a very likeable and imaginative pirate, and Cherryl the unfortunate waitress. Dagny got annoying about 30% of the way into the book and never quite redeemed herself. I'm still not sure how I feel about Hank.

Where the book really scores in my opinion is the way in which it truly nails 2012 politics. Given that we're 55 years beyond the book's publication, one can either ascribe this to astonishing foresight on the part of Rand, or some good guesses associated with a sizeable dose of luck. I'm torn. Obama's recent "You didn't build that" speech came serendipitously when I was in the middle of reading the book, and we can only imagine what trenchant comments Rand would have made about it; sadly, she died 30 years ago so never really got to see her predictions come up trumps. Characters such as the weasels Mouch, Thompson and Ferris are all too common in modern day political life; one hopes that their real life counterparts would balk at the collectivisation implemented in the book, but given their thirst for control one would never be quite sure of this.

I'm now actively curious to see Atlas Shrugged - the film (part 1). It's just possible that they do a good job of keeping the wheat and throwing away the chaff.

The unseen is as important as the seen

Via Professor Bainbridge, a fascinating and pithy dissection of the fallacy that businesses only succeed through government's munificence from Tom Smith at Californian blog "The Right Coast".

Unlike much other discussion around this topic, Smith turns it on its head and points out an issue that politicians have been much less keen to mention: how much has state and federal regulation prevented potentially successful and profitable business from even starting?

I don't see our young president taking credit on behalf of the state for all the failures it help cause, all the ideas that never got off the ground because the regulatory hurdles were so high, or all the established companies that never had to face competition because they had managed to get their rents written into law. This is part of the seen and not seen insight of Bastiat.

Intuitively it's obvious - make it harder and more expensive to start a business, and fewer businesses will be started. Existing businesses will be better entrenched and more prone to increase prices without fear of competition. If my plans for a cat shaving business require six months of filling in forms to register the business with the local chamber of commerce, monthly inspections by PETA consultants that I have to fund, and punitive "animal service taxes" in the unlikely event that I make a profit, then those Californian cats are going to stay furry, hot and bothered; I'm going off to Texas (where at least I can enjoy foie gras for lunch) and actually make something approaching a profit.

Read the whole thing.

Don't call it gerrymandering...

The Labour MP for Wigan, Lisa Nandy, is proposing that 16 year olds be allowed to vote. Apparently:

...lowering the voting age to 16 was a way of "this generation showing respect for the next generation" and giving them a share of power.

In this game, you must earn respect, Lisa my old chum. And part of that earning could be, for instance, paying some tax and NI. Essentially what you're proposing is that an age group which are massive net receivers of income from the state be allowed to determine how much more income they receive. What could possibly go wrong?

The usual suspects are crawling out of the woodwork and expressing enthusiasm:

Neal Lawson, head of Compass, added: "Young people don't just need policies, they need power – then they'll have a stake in the nation's future".

I think that "need power" is a "want power", actually Neal. They clearly don't need it as they've managed several hundred years without it. This is nothing more than naked self-interest by the Labour (and, probably, Lib Dem) politicos who see themselves as disproportionate beneficiaries of the youth. I'd bet that the reason for their concern at this time is hinted at in the article:

The report follows the publication of the first tranche of the 2011 census results, which show the UK population is older than ever: over-65s now make up 16% of the population.

Damn all those Tory-leaning old people with money! Let's enact a pre-emptive demographic mugging with 16-18 year olds!

The truly terrifying prospect, however, is self-righteous 16-18 year olds appearing in the Question Time audience and random BBC interviews, being respectfully interviewed by journos.

Foxworthy had it right, but wrong country

Jeff Foxworthy ("You might be a redneck if...") in early 1996:

The Olympics in Georgia... God, you know we're gonna screw that up... Hell, the Olympic rings will be five old tires nailed together.

He could have equally well been talking about London 2012. On our first opportunity to make an impression on foreign athletes, what happens?

The opening of a special 'Olympic Lane' today was meant to help athletes and VIPs make the 45-minute journey from Heathrow Airport to Stratford in effortless ease.
Try telling that to US hurdler Kerron Clement, who tweeted his frustration this morning after he was left stranded in traffic for four hours when his bus driver got lost en route to the Olympic Village.

Oopsie.

Even once they'd made it to the village, their travails weren't over:

USA Track and Field confirmed the American athletes were heading to the Village just to pick up their accreditation before travelling to their pre-Games training camp in Birmingham.

Birmingham? We're hosting our American cousins in a slightly warmer version of the South Side of Chicago?

Still, at least the driver found a road where he could drive legally. No such comfort in Southampton Row where the new Olympic lane makes it impossible for any non-Olympic non-bus driver to proceed.

The closer we get to these games, the more I think it's going to go horrifically wrong.

Hollande, meet reality

In a welcome rebuke to those believing that posturing politicians are extinct, Hollande is claiming that Peugeot Citroen's planned 8000+ redundancies near Paris are "unacceptable".

I'm not quite sure what Hollande proposes that Peugeot does. Keep the workers but slash salaries for everyone to keep the wage bill down? Keep the workers on the same salary and keep losing money until the entire company goes into administration? Perhaps he should nationalise Peugeot and get civil servants to run it. I can't possibly see anything going wrong there.

It is perhaps unsurprising that when asked for specifics, Hollande weaseled:

However, Mr Hollande said on Saturday that the government would consider broader measures to help automakers and create incentives for consumers to buy French cars.

Tax citizens to raise money to subsidise cars for them to buy. Words fail me. Still, I suppose we should be grateful that so far he hasn't proposed bailing out the union shareholders at the expense of the senior debt holders of the firm. Yet.