My First Kindle- Hooray For Technology.

I bought my first Kindle this week and I have to say that I am quite impressed with it so far. It's the basic bog standard model, bought for £60. The battery life is extraordinary compared to mobile phones or laptops, the screen quality is more than adequate for the task in hand and the amount it can store is phenomenal.

It is true what people say about the special feeling of a real book but there are also disadvantages to paper books. For example where to put them- book cases are big, Kindles are small. When books replaced scrolls the replacement was almost total- I'm pretty sure this won't be the case for e-readers they will take a big chunk of the market.

I can also see how e-readers have potential to be very useful in a school environment- if the bulk of the textbooks children have to have can be transferred to an electronic device then they won't have to carry have their own body weight to school each day.

All in all it is already one of my favourite electronic devices.

Hatty, Patty & Jack's Friends

Personally I think the Paedophile Information Exchange were just fucking immature arseholes. I'll say one thing for them though- they don't hide behind a euphemism about what they are. Usually promoters of repulsive ideas go to a bit of trouble to muddy the waters a bit- think of the benign sounding Institute of Historical Review that is actually a front for neo-nazis for example.

Given the PIE's directness about who they were, the links between it and a number of Labour politicians- Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and Jack Dromey- really do require a very good explanation or an immediate deselection.

I don't think their behaviour is an aberration but rather a part of an extreme and marginal anti-family agenda that exists on the fringes of the extreme left. At the same time as linking up with the PIE, Hewitt & Harman coauthored a pamphlet titled "The Family Way" which claimed among other things that:

'It cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life, or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony and cohesion.'

So traditional two parent families- bad.

Mentally Ill Let Progressives Down.

Very good news to see that the suicide rate has fallen. I can only hope this becomes a trend.

 Of course it is a bit surprising, because as a regular Guardian reader I was under the impression that the government was driving people to kill themselves with cuts. For example this piece quotes irresponsible demagogues impartial experts about the impact of cuts warning that they will hurt the vulnerable. Which is why the very generous welfare states of Scandinavia have such low..... oh never mind.

Other hand wringing articles warn of the:

• Suicide and the unspoken side of welfare 'reform' 

Or ask:

• How can rising suicide rates be reversed in the face of cuts to mental health services?  

The Independent's Owen "the people's tribune whether they like it or not" Jones inevitably jumped on the ghoulish bandwagon:

But even as mental distress and the risk of suicide soar because of austerity, the support is being slashed back.

In fact this kind of voyeuristic exploitation of desperate people who had ended their lives has been very widespread on the left. There was even a website "Calum's List" devoted to them as detailed by Brendan O'Neill here.

No doubt all these people will now be revising their opinions in the face of new evidence....

Any.
Minute.
Now.

Money Is No Object.

The flooding in South West England must be awful for those living there, and the government are under pressure over the handling of it. This seems a bit unfair, considering it is the wettest winter since Noah it would be remarkable if there was not flooding.

It doesn't justify David Cameron making saying things like this though:

"Money is no object in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed we will spend it."

Money is always a limiting factor and making promises that inevitably have to be broken is foolish.

Age Is Just A Number- Just Like Braking Distances.

Yesterday I was in a crash on the A14, I was stationary in a line of traffic when someone went into the back of me at high speed writing off my car and his. No one was seriously hurt. The driver of the other vehicle somehow hadn't seen me until he was about 30 metres away despite it being a clear day on a straightish road, for reasons which soon became obvious.

He was born in 1921 and like most 92 year olds he could hardly see past the end of his car.

Had he seen me five metres later I could have been badly injured or killed which brings me to my point- people past a certain age should have to undergo medicals once in a while to make sure they are still physically capable of driving.

A ninety two year old might well have taken his test seventy five years ago- it is senseless for someone to be assumed to be competent in handling a powerful piece of machinery on the basis that they could control a much less powerful machine some time before World War 2.

Dogs That Don't Bark.

The horrendous terrorist attacks in Russia this weekend are probably best ignored- given that media attention is what the perpetrators want.

Whenever there are terror attacks, there are usually conspiracy theories. 9/11 trutherism is the most notorious variety but other forms exist.

However there don't seem to be many nutcase fantasies about attacks on Russian targets. This hasn't always been the case- a lot of people were suspicious about the apartment bombings in the 1990s for example. However none of the Chechen black widow attacks over the last decade have caused the "just asking questions" brigade to ask questions.

Could it be that Alex Jones and other leading lights in the conspiracy industry have pretty much sold themselves to the leading buyer of inane fantasies, Russia Today? It is the pretty much the only professional media outlet that will put these idiots on air and pay them so it isn't a surprise that they don't bite the hand that feeds them.

Things To Worry Less About

1. Romanians & Bulgarians coming over here. The migration from those two countries won't be anything like the scale of that which came with the entry of the central European states because they are a lot smaller in total and it isn't just the UK & Ireland to which they can migrate. Roma from Romania may cause problems but I doubt they are waiting until January the 1st so they can work here legally.
2. Food banks. There is no crisis of malnutrition among Britain's poor, food banks should be considered as melodramatic street theatre rather than a symptom of a real problem.

Putin Gay Update- Other People Are Noticing Now!

There's a joke going round this week:

People seem shocked that

1. Nelson Mandela died aged 95.
2. Tom Daley is gay.
3. England probably won't win the World Cup.

I'm thinking of becoming a fortune teller.

If anything Vladimir Putin's sexuality is more obvious than Tom Daley's was, but a biographer of the Russian president has noticed what I pointed out several years ago:

Author Stanislav Belkovsky claims Putin’s macho man image is a PR invention and his alleged affair with the gymnast Alina Kabaeva was made up.
In the book, Putin, Belkovsky adds: “Sex and a sex life to him are alien.”
He also speculates that Putin, famed for his topless wilderness shots, is “latently gay”.

I wouldn't go on about it, except for the obvious links with his anti-gay policies.

Quote Of The Day/Year/Century

Why don't people take the identity politics brigade seriously?

So what message does Movember convey to those whose moustaches are more-or-less permanent features? With large numbers of minority-ethnic men—for instance Kurds, Indians, Mexicans—sporting moustaches as a cultural or religious signifier, Movember reinforces the “othering” of “foreigners” by the generally clean-shaven, white majority. Imagine a charity event that required its participants to wear dreadlocks or a sari for one month to raise funds—it would rightly be seen as unforgivably racist. What is the difference here?

You really have to read the whole article to get the full effect of the article.

Anti-Roma Prejudice And Noticing Group Differences

The Roma people have endured awful persecution for generations- most famously they were one of the groups targeted for extermination by Hitler in the Holocaust. Even today they are met with hostility and prejudice by many people in Europe. I wouldn't claim to be wholly immune to that prejudice even though I find them an interesting group.

This article denouncing Nick Clegg and David Blunkett for worrying about Sheffield's new gypsy population is the standard liberal reaction to fraught relationships with the Roma.

When prejudices are based on nonsense they are easy enough to erode but the problem is that many of the prejudices about the Roma are not based on misinformation but come from people noticing patterns that exist. This doesn't mean that discrimination against blameless individuals is wrong but the existence of cultural traits that are destructive and unpleasant to the majority population. These include Romany attitudes to things like stealing from outsiders and violence. This article- by an almost cluelessly right on liberal offers many examples:

The following day, while chatting with a group of Gypsies in the small Transylvanian village of Dealu Frumos, I get an insight into a side of the Roma that I have been constantly warned about but have not yet encountered. A young man and his friends are telling me about tsigani de casatsi—house Gypsies—"bad ones, who don't work on the land like us but just steal for a living." Without warning, he wrenches my notebook from my hands and shoves me against the car. I am punched in the kidneys, and my arm is twisted behind me. A blade is held to the side of my neck, and suddenly I am surrounded by roaring Gypsies, maybe 30 of them, more appearing every few seconds from the surrounding houses. My translator, Mihai, is punched in the head. "Money! Money! Money!" his tormentors bellow. I am allowed into the car to retrieve my bag, but Mihai is kept outside, a hostage to my ransom. I offer all the money from my wallet, and Mihai pulls free and throws himself into the back seat. As we drive off, we do an inventory of our injuries. Apart from bruises and shock, my main injury is to my hitherto benign image of the Roma as a wronged and misunderstood people.

That reporter went to Eastern Europe had clearly intended to write an article about how gypsies are persecuted by bigoted Slovakians and Romanians- but when behaviour like that is widespread in a community then someone who refused to prejudge Roma might be admirable but would also put themselves at unnecessary danger.

In other words the only way prejudice against the group will stop is if there is a clamp down on anti-social behaviour within the group.

Denis Macshane's False Claims

Denis Macshane's guilty plea to the charges of false accounting mean that he is destined for prison. I can't say I'm unhappy about this.

It is not his political beliefs that made him poisonous but his modus operandi- which was spreading repulsive smears about his opponents for the most minute political gains. Macshane neglected his constituency in favour of stealing public funds to swan around in Europe yet had the nerve to blame the rise of the BNP in his backyard on..... Conservative euroscepticism. He lied non stop about the supposed Nazi sympathies of the Tories' allies in Europe even suggesting that the Conservatives supported the Holocaust.

He  is a genuinely terrible human being.

The most hilarious aspect of all this is that he is apparently in a relationship with Vicki Price, the ex wife of Chris Huhne.

Blairite Chutzpah

In the Independent John Rentoul attacks John Major's record on social mobility in comparison to St Tony. There is much in the article that strikes me as nonsense but this is particularly disingenuous:

But what did Major do to work to change the system while he was Prime Minister? He sneered at Tony Blair as “another public school-educated Socialist” in his 1995 Tory conference speech. That would be the Tony Blair who sent all his children to state schools, the first prime minister to do so. The Tony Blair who raised standards in state schools especially in London, under Major an under-invested disaster area for the education of working-class children. The Tony Blair who introduced academy schools to replace schools that had failed their disadvantaged pupils.

The state schools that Blair sent his children to were hardly "bog standard comprehensives", but the what is really incredible is praising academy schools.

Academy schools are a great idea but when Labour introduced they weren't exactly an entirely new idea. They are almost identical to the Grant Maintained Schools introduced by the Conservatives which flourished under John Major and were then abolished by Tony Blair. To compare Blair to Major favourably by pointing to Academies is simply ludicrous.

A Tale Of Two Cities

New York has just elected a mayor whose politics make Ken Livingstone look like Norman Tebbit and it is the first time in twenty years that this heavily Democratic city has elected a Democratic mayor.

The main reason for this is that New York used to have a horrendous crime problem until Rudolph Guliani took office and reduced it massively and Bloomberg continued the process. Under the two Republicans (very nominally so in Bloomberg's case) the Big Apple became a liveable city once more.

Washington has undergone a similar transition lately, with crime falling considerably. It used to be one of the USA's most violent cities, ranking alongside Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans but since 2008 the homicide rate has fallen by half from 31 per 100,000 to 14 per 100000. This is still a very high rate by most standards but it is a massive turnaround for a city that had seen rates over 80 per 100000 in the recent past.

New York rewarded the leaders who slashed the crime rate by re-electing them repeatedly over two decades. Washington has taken a different approach- with the mayor who presided over this unprecedented turnaround being unceremoniously turfed out of office.

National Treasures

I was going to do a post about how "national treasure" seems to be a code for overrated idiot.

However while preparing to take pot shots at smug celebrities like David Attenborough and Stephen Fucking Fry I came across a piece by Nick Cohen on rather more sinister national treasures, Cyril Smith and Jimmy Savile.

Well worth reading.

Keep Women Drivers Off The Roads Says Guadian Columnist

The Guardian publishes an article by a Saudi Arabian man about women drivers. As you will be aware women can't drive.... and in Saudi Arabia it's illegal too.

 [pause for laughter].

Anyway the Guardian has published this article about by a Saudi man about how women in the kingdom don't really want to be allowed to drive because... well I didn't really follow the line of reasoning. I'm just too flabbergasted that a mainstream paper that has been publishing countless articles suggesting that western society is insanely misogynistic recently would actually publish something like this.

Sample quote after surveying female students:

I offered them anonymity in their answers, but even so, some wanted to be recognized.

Exactly how they could be recognised while wearing sacks over their heads wasn't explained.

Shooting Nazis- Not A Good Idea.

Greece's Golden Dawn party is a neo-Nazi organisation that has apparent ties to political violence. Even so the people responsible for murdering two of their activists are as bad themselves.

They are also idiots. Assuming that the killers are far left activists- which seems reasonable given Greece's historic problem with murderous Marxists- the aim is presumably to curtail Golden Dawn's electoral appeal. We have seen this before.

Pim Fortuyn of the Netherlands was not in any way a Nazi but he was libeled as such by the media, so his killing provides a good example of what happens when the fight against supposed extremists is carried out by murder.

In the subsequent elections his party they gained so many votes that they won a place in the Dutch government, while this didn't last long (because Fortuyn wasn't a good party organiser and without him there was no real institution to act in a coherent manner) government is not where Golden Dawn should end up.

Diverse Influences

I was just reading the Wikipedia entry for Steven Pinker earlier today and see that among the "influences" listed in the article it names Noam Chomsky and Thomas Sowell.

There can't be many public intellectuals who are familiar with the work of two such diametrically opposed thinkers as Chomsky and Sowell.

Was Labour 1997-2010 The Worst Government Ever?

Over on the Telegraph blogs Sean Thomas outlines the case and it is hard to argue with.

I suppose worst ever might be pushing it- the governments that presided over the Irish potato famine or appeasement might be worse- but Blair and Brown surely led the most incompetent administrations in British post war history.

It's not that other governments didn't do worse in particular areas than Labour in this era- it's that there was full spectrum failure in pretty much every department- the economy, defence, foreign policy, education, welfare, immigration, race relations, inequality and health care were all disaster areas when Labour left office.

Can anyone think of any substantive successes associated with the last government>