Cleggeron Gets Desperate

Does anyone else think that Cameron & Clegg's latest effort at selling the public on the coalition is both undignified and patronising?:



See also.

Thoughts On The Winter Olympics

• It's quite impressive that in the Winter Games the men's double luge is only the 2nd gayest event (after the men's figure skating of course):

• The baggy outfits the snow boarders wear are ridiculous. They've essentially fossilised what was a cool look back when snowboarding took off in the early 1990s and they look incredibly dated. Nothing dates as badly as cutting edge fashion. It's similar to the way clerical vestaments basically preserve what was the fashionable look of the late Roman era.
• The action for the Vancouver Games takes place in "Whistler" which is about one hundred miles from Vancouver. Were Ryanair involved in the bid somehow?
  

Equal Right To Brain Damage

The introduction of women's boxing to the Olympics has been greeted as a step forwards for equality not least by Olympics minister Tessa Jowell. I'm not sure why giving women an equal chance to experience brain damage as men is so brilliant, although given concerns over the decline in the number of female cabinet ministers I can see why Tessa is interested in increasing the available pool.

As I've said before I'm not a fan of boxing although I can't see a rational reason to actively discourage it for women in particular (although I do feel a greater instinctive opposition to it) but nor does it make sense to actually encourage something that has clear harmful effects.

I doubt that the number of women who box would be sufficient to merit a slot in the Olympics for reasons other than sheer tokenism. The reasoning appears to be that anything women and men do in differing proportions must be a problem to be solved.

Oh well, at least they haven't introduced men's rythmic gymnastics yet.

Toad Denounces Lizards

David Aaronivitch has churned out his latest piece denouncing the "lizards" who don't believe that under Labour, tractor production is reaching heights barely believable under previous governments:

In 1996, after 17 years of Conservative government, the past six under the premiership of the cricketing Major, Great Britain went to the Atlanta Olympics and won precisely one gold medal. We ended that Games in 36th position, just behind Ethiopia and just ahead of Belarus. It wasn't just that Greece did better than us - Kazakhstan got four golds. If one were to take the Olympics as any kind of indicator of national health (and why should we not?) we would have to conclude that the past 12 years have been very well spent.

So on Aaro's reading by 1996 Britain was in a worse state than Ethiopia and Kazakhstan? I wonder how he would explain the 1988 table where the two leading countries ceased to exist by the time the next games came around, no doubt to the consternation of the East German and Soviet Aaronivitches.

Random Olympic Thoughts

• Why do swimmers get the opportunity to win medals for different swimming styles, like the breast stroke, the butterfly or back stroke? It's like giving track & field athletes the opportunity to win medals for doing the 100m whilst hopping, mincing or moonwalking.
• Laban Tall discovers Times columnist Matthew Syed rehashing a piece he wrote last year almost line for line, with just a plagiarised paragraph to change things since last year.

• Syed's column was a critique of Jon Entine's theory, that he explained in his book "Taboo: Why Blacks Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk about it" that black people are better natural athletes than white people. The book includes this priceless paragraph:

"When stripped of the drug factor, what appears in the history books as a decades-long duel between European and African American female sprinters has been a fraud. Black female sprinters are a cut above, much like their male counterparts. Marion Jones is the indisputable top female sprinter...the epitome of an elite athlete...gifted with the explosive speed and jumping ability that mark the prototypical athlete with West African ancestry.... Although she now trains feverishly, Jones is as close to being a born athlete as exists in sprinting."

• What sort of people tell a little girl that she's being kicked out of her role in the Olympic opening ceremony because she isn't attractive enough? Chinese communists that's who.
• Isn't it sad that despite a British competitor putting in thousands of hours of hard work in order to win a canoing silver, he will still be less famous than John "Canoe Man" Darwin.
• Is spell check right to insist that "Canoing" is the correct spelling and "Canoeing" is wrong?
  

Olympian Excess.

I was watching the TV earlier today and saw an enormous stadium being filled with thousands of strangely dressed people dancing excitedly with delirious expressions of joy on their faces, whilst choreographed ceremonies designed to exalt the leaders were performed and BBC journalists whispered in a hushed tone of awe. "Why is the BBC screening an Obama rally?" I thought to myself, but it turns out that it was actually the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

There's an interesting piece on the economics of the Olympics in Foreign Policy. In short the games make a lot of money.... for the IOC. The host country is pretty much screwed. The effects of hosting the games include:

• Costs that are well over estimate. China's games were originally supposed to cost about $2 Billion but have now had more than $40 Billion spent on them.
• Hosting the games in usually a precursor to slower economic growth in the following year as investment tails off and big unused facilities have to be dealt with.

Roll on 2012.

The Olympics.

Although I have frequently expressed my opposition to London hosting the 2012 Games, I don't believe I have said anything about Beijing hosting the 2008 event. The thing is whilst I do thoroughly oppose China's treatment of Tibet and East Turkestan as well as it's human rights record in general, this is actually why they actually deserve to have the expensive and bloated farce that is the Olympic Games. Let's give 2012 to them too.

Olympic Costs Rise Faster, Higher, Stronger.

So Tessa Jowell, aka Mrs Shit-for-brains, has admitted that she doesn't have the foggiest idea how much the Olympics are costing us.

More than seven months after Jowell announced the project would cost £9.3 billion, she admitted in the House of Commons on Monday that "line by line" analysis of what she called the "baseline budget" was a work in progress.

Bearing in mind that the budget has already risen from £2.5 billion to £9.3 billion this is just taking the piss. Yet it misses the point, the real cost of the Olympic Games isn't merely the amount of taxpayers money the organisers pay out to get the facilities built but the economic ruination of a large part of London. The talk of regenerating London is nonsense for the simple reason that littering the landscape with large sporting facilities that will almost never be used to capacity ever again creates a black hole of economic activity. How many people will a Velodrome employ in years to come? A couple of dozen at most, but it will take up space that could be filled by productive businesses employing hundreds or even thousands of people.

I linked to the Telegraph's report of Jowell's admission but really they should bear some of the responsibility for this looming disaster too. They were by far the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for the Games in the press and can in some ways take the credit for the London bid being launched in the first place. I even heard that they actually banned any of their journalists coming out against a games bid". This is from an article back in 2003:

The Daily Telegraph has unashamedly campaigned for London to bid for the 2012 Olympic Games for the last three months on the basis that it would be one of the best things to happen in sport for generations. Beyond sport, it would electrify the capital, its populace and the country as a whole.
....

Increasingly isolated, the sceptics have droned on about cost and past failures. Nothing else.

Those failures, including the Dome, Picketts Lock and Wembley, are beyond dispute, but it is time we left them behind. In this context they are easily dealt with. No one - politician or serial sports administrator - who had anything to do with any of those fiascos should be allowed within a marathon distance of an Olympic bid.

Cost - which has ranged between a possible profit according to the Arup report, and a deficit of £10 billion (Tony Banks!) - is a much more emotive subject, but the official report put the worst case scenario at less than £2 billion

Even Tony Banks had a better idea of what was likely to happen than the Olympics propagandists at the Daily Telegraph whose predictive abilities make Paul Ehrlich look like Nostradamus! So it cannot be argued that the problems could not have been forseen. Is it too late to withdraw?

Olympics- How To Waste Slightly Less Money.

The Olympic Games are a complete waste of money which no city anywhere ought to bid for based on any rational consideration. Whilst the idea of simply withdrawing from hosting the 2012 games is enticing it is pretty obvious that this will not happen and we are lumbered with it. Hpwever this doesn't mean we can't think of ways of reducing the cost a bit, so I'm glad to see that someone has had the obvious (to me) idea of converting the new Wembley into an athletics stadium for 2012. Much of the literature promoting the stadium over the last month has highlighted the versatility and I have seen it said that it is suitable for athletics, so by using the white elephant we already have instead of building it a mate, we can save hundreds of millions of pounds. Even if we do end up spending the money on crappy logos instead.

Olympic Costs Spiral, Sun Rises In The East.

When even the Kenyan and Somali press consider the UK's wastefulness worthy of comment you know that we have a disaster on our hands. London 2012 would have been a mistake even if it was likely that we would build it on time, the principle justification used by the advocates is that the Games will be used for urban regeneration. This argument is nonsensical, if east London needed improved transport links what was stopping the work being done before now?

Since when does an area regenerate by evicting hundreds of small businesses employing thousands of people and replacing them with large sports facilities like an athletics stadium, an aquatic centre and a velodrome which will lie unused for most of the year and even when they do get dusted down they will never be filled to capacity again once the games finish? When Ken Livingstone is in charge I guess. American sports economists such as Andrew Zimbalist have looked into the claimed economic benefits of publicly subsidised baseball stadiums in the US and found that the benefits seldom if ever materialise, this is despite the fact that Major League Baseball grounds are full close to capacity 80 to 100 times a year, which is around 80 to 100 times more often than the Olympic stadium will be.

Still it isn't as if the government could have predicted that this Grand Project would be a disaster after all their experiences with the Millenium Dome, Wembley, the Scottish Parliament building, the Royal Opera House, Sadlers Wells and Picketts Lock had been so positive.

On a vaguely related note check out the Field of Schemes blog which documents the efforts of American sports oligarchs to extort publicly funded stadiums for their teams.

See also Foreign Dispatches on this subject, this post is basically an extension of my comments over there.