Violent Gordon.

These allegations against Gordon Brown are so explosive that if they weren't by Andrew Rawnsley-a Labour leaning reporter with an established track record as a journalist- would seem too extreme to be true. If his much rumoured temper is so extreme that he physically assaults the people who work for him then he has to go.

Politically it is potentially disastrous if the television stations lead on the allegations tomorrow- it is hard to imagine what could make someone look worse than a revelation that he physically man handles secretaries who displease him and has the temper of a five year old. The fact that he doesn't seem to lose his temper so badly with people who would be in a position to fight back, cabinet colleagues for example, is revealing.

I suppose those who called him the Prime Mentalist can feel vindicated.

Update: Apart from the Daily Mail no publication is picking up on this story. Have the lawyers been wheeled out?

Just Hold The White Stick Outside The Window.

Hooray for Portsmouth City Council for providing suitable braille materials for blind taxi drivers.

Okay I'm guessing they aren't really intending to have blind taxi drivers being guided by dogs in the front seat and it is probably just an automatic braille translation services that they offer for all official forms.

Of course severe visual impairments are practically a requirement in the minicab industry.

Alcohol Good.

Is it me or is the message of this story that drinking will help you get a better job.

Reality Overtakes Satire.

The plot of a satirical novel:

Welcome to the United States of Europe, where incompetence is a way of life. According to Article 13199 of the Pan-European Constitution, “No person shall be prejudiced from employment in any capacity, at any level, by reason of age, race, creed or incompetence.” In other words, knowing how to do a job is no longer a prerequisite for being hired...and not knowing how to do it can’t get you fired.

The real world:

Employer told not to post advert for 'reliable' workers because it discriminates against 'unreliable' applicants

Social Problems All Intertwined.

Some stuff about the increase in teenage pregnancy rates here. Last time I wrote about teenage pregnancy I did a comparison between the nation American rate of 15-19 year olds getting pregnant and the homicide rate and found a positive correlation of 0.85.

This is a very strong correlation and I think an important point can be inferred from it that needs reiterating. Whilst public discussion of crime rates focuses on things specifically related to crime, such punishment, policing and rehabilitation, and teenage pregnancy rates are discussed in terms of sex education, family values and access to contraception; there is clearly a common factor at work that does not appear to directly relate to either problem.

I don't claim to know what that factor is, but assuming that we don't think that abstinance programs decrease stabbings or that the death penalty has an effect on whether teenagers have unprotected sex there is clearly something else at work. It could be the economy, education or something I haven't thought of but that isn't the point.

I just picked two indicator to compare but I'd guess that if other social indicators were compared we'd find more examples of good things correlating with other good things and bad things with other bad things.

Society is complex and trying to evaluate the causes and effects of ideas is extremely difficult to do. It is not effective to try to ascertain what causes x cannot be done soley by looking at things which were explicitly done to effect x.

Evolution In Action.

Interesting article on the development of stray dogs in Moskow in the Financial Times. They are no longer merely domestic dogs on the loose, but have evolved physically and behaviourally over the years (maybe even decades or centuries) into something separate that is more wolf like. The different niches the dogs occupy is also remarkable:

Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. This happened gradually, first as a way to broaden their territory. Later, it became a way of life. “Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?” he asks.

“They orient themselves in a number of ways,” Neuronov adds. “They figure out where they are by smell, by recognising the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals. If, for example, you come every Monday and feed a dog, that dog will know when it’s Monday and the hour to expect you, based on their sense of time intervals from their ­biological clocks.”

It possibly shines a light on dog evolution, if domestic dogs didn't exist then the "beggars" who have attuned themselves to human feelings would be good candidates for domestication.

Tomorrow's News Today.

I see, via Autonomous Minds, that the public is much less supportive of tax and spend than they were a few years ago according to the "British Social Attitudes" survey.

I discovered this back in August.

Alastair Darling Is Right- Sign Of The End Times?

He certainly seems more right than either the Obama administration or George Osborne:

“It is always difficult to say ex ante that you would never intervene to save a particular sort of bank,” he said. “In Lehman, for example, there wasn’t a single retail deposit, but the then American administration allowed it to go down and that brought the rest of the system down on the back of it.

“You could end up dividing institutions and making them separate legal entities but that isn’t the point. The point is the connectivity between them in relation to their financial transactions.

“Equally, the large-small thing doesn’t run. Northern Rock was very small in global terms but systemically it was quite important when it got into trouble.”

Breaking up banks into smaller entities isn't going to prevent one bank collapse destabilising the rest. If small banks were the solution to economic stability then the Great Depression with it's unit banking laws and a separation of commercial and investment banking ought to have been a golden age, which as the term "Great Depression" it really was not.

Latest Human Right Discovered

He asked: "If it's thought that it's the right of adults to see drama that reflects their lives, then why isn't that a right for children too?

It's not a right of adults to see drama that reflects their lives, so the premise of the question is wrong. Although if it is a human right then charging for the licence fee must be a violation of that right.

Anyway the fuss over American culture being represented by children's television programmes to the point of crowding out British culture seems misplaced. First of all there is precious little incentive to make programmes for children when advertising to them is heavily restricted. Secondly this sort of cultural exchange works both ways, the success of Harry Potter has probably influenced American culture at least as much as British culture has been influenced by American imports. I don't see any complaints about that though.

via Atlantic Crossings

Subliminal Racism.

The government is urging employers to use a prejudometer in order to determine how racist they are. The test is based on the Implicit Association Test produced by Harvard and supposedly determines subconsious racial prejudice. It's an interesting idea, most people demonstrate a preference for white faces in the test, in fact the results for everyone who takes the test are:

27%- Strong automatic preference for white people
27% Moderate automatic preference for white people
16%- Slight automatic preference for white people
17%- No automatic preference
6%- Slight automatic preference for black people
4%- Moderate automatic preference for black people
2%- Strong automatic preference for black people

When I took it it I scored a "Slight preference for white people", which means that at least 61% of the population have more prejudons than me. Obviously I'd hoped to to register "no preference" but my result isn't bad.

On the other hand when a liberal hand wringer who is zealous about using heavy handed measures to punish racial transgressions takes the test he discovers that he has a “strong automatic preference for European Americans compared to African Americans”.

So this is my first hypothesis; the people who are most obsessed with the idea that the general population are a simmering cauldron of racists whose prejudices need to combated by endless 'anti racism' campaigns, community outreach and all that crap are assuming that everyone in the population shares the deep felt racial prejudice that they themselves feel.

Here's my second hypothesis; the constant focus on race and racism, serves to deeped and entrench racial attitudes.

Via Obnoxio.

They Are Here

Alien life, if it exists at, all is likely to be just like us, a leading scientist has claimed.

This seems more or less plausible, given how convergent evolution tends to produce remarkably similar looking species to occupy similar ecological niches in completely different parts of the world it seems logical that the same principle would apply to other planets. What I don't understand is the "leading scientist's" next statement:

However he also thinks that because much of the Universe is older than us they would have evolved further down the line and we should have heard from them by now.

He believes it is increasingly looking like they may not be out there at all.

"It is about time they turned up," he said. "It is very, very quiet out there. Suspiciously quiet. Where on Earth are they? I personally don't think that there is anything out there."

If they look like us, how does he know that they aren't already here?

Can We Sack Him Now?

Isn't it time for Alan Duncan to be sacked now? Alright maybe wait until after the election just to maximise his disappointment.

In a series of highly controversial remarks, Mr Duncan reportedly told a prisons conference:

• It is ‘repulsively simplistic’ to say that prison works.
• ‘Lock ’em up’ is ‘Key Stage 1 politics’.
• Prisoners should be ‘met at the gate’ on release from jail.

It isn't so much that I think he's wrong, although he is, it is the fact that he goes around in private not only sucking up to extreme left wing figures like Frances Crook and feels the need not only to express his policy disagreement with his party but to denounce those who disagree with him as being mentally subnormal (Key Stage 1 politics) or morally bankrupt (repulsively simplistic).

Naturally his criticisms, as reported at least, don't actually contain any actual arguments about what the likely effects of prison policy will be, but are primarily about ingratiaitng himself with the people who despise the voters who actually vote for him. This also applies to his numerous appearances on panel shows.

Terror Red Alert!

The terror threat has been raised to "severe". I believe that the decision making process behind this update is something like this:




Thank God they haven't run out of red bulbs at GCHQ just yet.

Quote Of The Day

David Frum, as part of a speech delivered in Venezuela:

Since 1990, more people around the planet have emerged from poverty than at any time in the whole previous history of the human race. They did so not under red flags and with clenched fists, but by buying and selling in the international economy.

Guardianism Of The Day

Years of neglect or heavy-handed western 'aid' have left Yemen destitute and unstable. We must share the blame.

There's a "head we win, tails you lose" quality to this. Neglect and heavy handedness are almost mutually exclusive so it's difficult to see how we could avoid either .being one or the other but equally difficult to see how we have committed both sins.

I'm pretty sure this is a cookie cutter Guardianism that can be applied to any poor country that is in the news, in fact the article may well have been about Haiti when the writer began it.

New Counter Terrorism Plan

Now the terrorists will be forced to get a connecting flight. That will stop them in their tracks.

Direct flights from the Yemen to Britain will be banned as a key part of new anti-terrorist measures following the failed attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner, Gordon Brown announced yesterday.

Whilst I'm not an enthusiast for travellers from Yemen, how is banning flights from that nation on the tip of the Arabian peninsular a response to a failed attempt to blow up a transatlantic flight?

Curbing Enthusiasm.

The pessimism of the Tories' electoral message, which is basically that the country is in trouble and painful spending cuts are necessary to fix it, is not one to fill voters with wild enthusiasm.

The recent decline in the fortunes of Barack Obama suggests that this might not be such a bad thing, the enthusiasm that Obama generated in some quarters was never likely to be fulfilled by actually governing, so the reality has disappointed many of his supporters.

Keeping expectations realistic is a much more likely route to maintaining public goodwill in the long term.

Preparing For The Iraq War

The latest news from the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war make depressing reading. Geoff Hoon's revelation that Gordon Brown blocked funding for helicopters and the news that Tony Blair delayed preparations for the war for months in order to pretend that the decision to invade had yet to be finalised is appalling.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of going to war, and I believe the case for removing Saddam was persuasive, there can be no justification for going to war knowingly unprepared. Blair always seemed to like being hailed as an international statesman by committing British troops to action but was unwilling to make the political sacrifice of confronting his Chancellor in order to secure the funds to pay for it.

There is no justification for going to war incompetently and this is the real reason why the war has become so unpopular not the arguments about the legality. The public were largely supportive of the war when Baghdad fell to the allies and previous wars of similar legal status have been generally supported if they are successful.

Most of the above also applies in spadesto the inept American handling of the invasion too, at least under the mismanagement of Donald Rumsfeld.