Mugabe-Phobia

Yes, that phrase has actually been used.

Will Hutton- Doesn't Get Rent Seeking

Will Hutton writes about football in the UK. It is pretty much all nonsense but consider this passage in particular:

Britain is a rent-seeker's paradise, as many more football clubs other than Birmingham City can testify. We have created a looters' charter, with football as a playpen, within which the super-rich can do what they want. A recent flash point is the price visiting fans are charged for their tickets. (Manchester City fans protested at the £62 they were asked to pay for today's game at Arsenal.) If the price of admission, along with travel, is prohibitive, then the game is played to only one set of supporters in the stadium with one set of chants. The experience of a game shrivels.

 The idea that football attracts rent seekers is preposterous. Three days ago Chelsea FC reported their first profit since Roman Abramovich took over, but in reality it was just an accounting quirk. Overall the Russian oligarch has spent around a billion pounds on Chelsea football club. Manchester City's owners have also spent an amount they will never claw back. Promotion and relegation ensure that clubs continually have to spend almost all their surplus cash on higher wages just to keep up with their rivals.

Owning a football club is not an opportunity to seek rent but rather a rich man's hobby which he may enjoy but won't profit from.

It is different in league systems with no promotion and relegation such as the major American leagues, because there the pay roll can be capped and the scarcity value of a place in the league can be leveraged to encourage extravagant subsidies from tax payers.

Is That A Communist Manifesto In Your Pocket Or Are You Just Pleased To See Me.

Disputes among the far left are tedious to outsiders at the best of times so I largely ignored the story about the Socialist Workers Party's infighting over allegations that senior members used their positions to sexually exploit women in the party.

Until I realised that one of the men accused of doing so is Martin Smith, who also leads the Unite Against Fascism front group. So can I just point out this post by myself from 2009 pointing out the uncanny resemblance between Martin Smith and a younger "anti fascist" activist.

I was joking at the time but who knows, maybe I was right.

Quote Of The Day

I saw a copy of the Sun today and this is what page 3 girl Sylvia had to say about the forthcoming Destiny's Child reunion:

Seeing the girls sing on stage again will be amazing. In the words of the American theologian Tyron Edwards "Every parting is a form of death, and each reunion a type of heaven".

Failing To Understand The Concept Of "History".

Lester Holloway isn't happy that Michael Gove wants school history to have more Cromwell and less Seacole*:

The 2012 Olympics were surely evidence that he cannot turn back the clock to a bygone age.

Er, that is kind of the point of history.

* Mary Seacole seems to have been a remarkable woman but the apparent role she has in school history is out of proportion to her importance as a historical figure. Also school history needs to give a rough grounding in the development of the nation rather than projecting current obsessions with race and sex backwards.

Lead In Your Pencil.

The theory that the fall in crime over the last generation has been due to the phasing out of lead additives in petrol has received another airing recently.

The last time I mentioned the idea on this blog it was to ridicule the idea, but over the last few years it seems to have stood up fairly well- to the point where it is perhaps the biggest underlying global cause of long term fluctuations in crime trends. (When I'm admitting I was partly wrong I tend to waffle).

However there is a danger of neglecting cultural and policy impacts on crime levels in affecting crime levels even if they aren't the only factors. For example there has been a major difference in the homicide rate of the northern and souther United States going back to before the country was actually formed- and long predating the use of lead in petrol. Even today the much vaunted fall in crime experienced by New York cannot really be explained by lead alone, because the rate in New York fell in relative terms compared to other cities (to the point where the much small city of Chicago has more murders in total than New York). So there still is a significant role for effective policing and sentencing in cutting crime.

If the theory continues to hold water then it is a significant victory for environmentalists- at least the saner ones- because it seems that pollution caused side effects far more severe than could have been predicted based upon the best evidence available at the time. The precautionary principle has in this case at least been vindicated.

Say No To An EU Referendum

In referendums the status quo option tends to do better that the initial polls suggest- this was seen in the referendum on electoral reform last year.

Currently a majority (or maybe a mere plurality at worse) of people favour leaving the European Union, but in a referendum the Europhile campaign will be free to scaremonger about the prospect of being "isolated in Europe" and taking a leap into the unknown. The worst the Eurosceptic camp can do is point at the present which cannot be made to seem unrealistically terrifying as an imagined future with less constraints of reality. Politically Ted Heath was quite clever to make the UK join the EEC and then let his successor have a referendum on whether to remain in- so the Europhile case became the status quo.

In a campaign the Europhiles will certainly close the gap on the Eurosceptics and may even overtake them to win the campaign. If that happens there will no constraint on UK governments who wish to surrender more power to Brussels as the issue would be "settled" for a generation.

Unless the support for withdrawing remains comfortably above 50% for a few years it would an enormous gamble to hold a referendum on the matter now.

Told You So

I said at the time that it was unlikely that the nurse who killed herself after receiving a prank call from idiotic Australian DJs did so because of the call.

It has since emerged that she had attempted suicide twice previously- long before the Duchess of Cambridge's hospitalisation.

The Australian radio presenters are still responsible for something unpleasant- posing as a concerned relative in order to find out about someone's medical condition- but they do not have blood on their hands.

The Right To Other People's Money

Why the outrage over plans to restrict what benefit claimants can spend those benefits on?

If it is authoritarian to ring fence what people can spend welfare payments on then surely existing benefits such as housing benefits should also spark outrage- forcing the claimants to use the money for accomodation rather than fags even if they prefer the latter. Instead, most people accept that it is a good thing that money given over to provide housing is spent on housing.

The same is true of money provided for food and clothing.

Taxes are collected by force with the moral justification that they are redistributed for essential services, such as providing food and clothing to those in need, it is hardly excessive to ensure that this money is not spent down the bookies and off license.

Plebgate

It looks like the evidence for Andrew Mitchell's supposed tirade against the police was made up. A major injustice has been done to him but there is another aspect to consider.

If the police are willing to frame a cabinet minister and make up witnesses, even when it is a 100% certainty that there will be CCTV footage that contradicts them then what do you think they do with people without the resources to fight back, who com into contact with the police in areas not covered with cameras?

What Causes Massacres?

You can divide the causes into two categories- what motivates the inadequate to commit the crime and what factors enable him to actually do it.

The availability of guns does provide a partial answer to the second part of the question. The day before the killings in Connecticut a Chinese primary school had been attacked in a similar way but in this case the weapon was a knife rather than a gun. A lot of children were injured, some severely, but no one was killed.

That said the more important aspect is surely what makes someone want to commit a massacre- it isn't simply the case that someone out there will always want to do something like this. After all gun ownership has been widespread for generations in the USA and some other countries yet these kind of spectacular rampages are a relatively recent phenomenon. There seems to be a desire for notoriety and a perverse kind of fame as well as a kind of narcissism in which only their anger and hurt feelings matter.

Update: Just realised that I wrote a similar but better written post a couple of years ago.

Dead Terrorist Still Dead.

I see that an investigation into the murder of Pat Finucane has found that he was murdered on the encouragement of someone within the security forces.

If so that is terribly wrong but it does not change the facts that Pat Finucane was not a "human rights lawyer", he was a member of the IRA and was therefore a supporter of murdering people. If he was killed by the flames he fanned that is not a tragedy.

Most of his family seem to have been in the IRA as well, so it is hard to take the portrayal of them as brave fighters for justice very seriously.

What You See Is Not All There Is

Daniel Kahneman- the psychologist who won an Nobel Prize for Economics- has uses a concept of "What You See Is All There Is"- which states that humans tend to form impressions based purely on the information available to us, even when that information is very minimal. We do not stop to consider what important information may be missing.

I think the reaction to the nurse who killed herself after receiving a prank phone call from an Australian radio station is an example of this. All the public "know" about her are that she received the call and she killed herself therefore the assumption is that the phone call led to her death.

This may be right but given that it seems such an odd reaction to the prank call and that people have all sorts of relationships and ambitions that are far more likely to affect their well being that a two minute radio call, it seems unwise to assume that her apparent suicide was related to the prank without knowing more about her life.

Technical Help Please

Sorry been busy lately.

Could anyone help me with the following pieces of technology.

Printer:

I want a new printer as I currently have a crappy Epsom Stylus that breaks down frequently, especially when it has generic non-Epsom ink and the ink costs a fortune. So what printers are reliable and aren't rip offs in terms of ink costs? It cannot be an Epsom as they are shit and make cheap printers with the intention of ripping off customers with extortionate ink costs.

Mobile Phone:

I have an HTC phone and the memory has been playing up for months, so most of the Apps have had to be removed. How do I change this, does it happen with all phones and get the phone working properly again?

Sat Navs:

Need a new one. Any recommendations on what is good. I need it before Monday so any comments before Sunday afternoon will be appreciated.

Fat Man & Little Boy

Some say that Fat Man and Little Boy were crimes but I say we have to remember that at this stage nothing has been proved about Cyril Smith's sexual proclivities.

Toynbeeising Soaps

Polly Toynbee's call for soap opera's to become more politically engaged has inspired me to have a go at writing a Polly approved script for Coronation Street:

Betty: Pint of your usual Ken?

Ken: How can I drink when child poverty is increasing by 13% a month according to an Institute of Studies report and the Tory government are determined to throw the poor onto the bonfire?

Betty: Oh I know luv, I've tried getting a grant to turn the Rovers into a Sure Start Centre but it was impossible thanks to vicious Tory Cuts.

Ken: I don't have time to drink anyway, as I've got to get home to watch Ed Miliband's speech to the TUC now.

If anyone has any other ideas for Toynbeeising the soaps please feel free to offer your contributions.

Tom Watson- Crusader Or Sleaze Monger?

The retracted Newsnight allegations about a paedophile ring involving senor Tories followed on from allegation made by the MP Tom Watson in Parliament.

During the Damian McBride affair- in which Gordon Brown's aide was outed plotting to smear various Conservatives, usually by making up sexual rumours- some attention was paid to the role of Tom Watson.

Watson shared an office with McBride and was on good terms with the other man involved in the scandal- Derek Draper- but no emails emerged to prove Watson's involvement and he got a bit litigious when it was suggested that he was part of the scheme.

Yet it has to be said, his "exposure" of a paedophile ring linked to the Thatcher government does seem to have had a very similar effect to that which was intended by the McBride plot. A number of senior Conservatives have had false rumours spread about them online as a result of dark hints dropped by Watson (with the help of Newsnight) without any actual evidence.

It does make you wonder whether Tom Watson actually believed that there was substance to the paedophile ring which he referred to or whether he was using the Jimmy Savile scandal and parliamentary privilege as an opportunity to slime those on his enemies list.

The Guardian & Paedophiles

A few stories from the Guardian over the years:

Sun shame after paedophile mix-up

 

Tabloid's naming of paedophiles condemned by police chief

 

After the vigilantes

 

The paper's decision to drop its drive to "name and shame", announced last night, gives us all a chance to reflect on what can be done to reconcile these conflicting emotions. Clearly, random vigilante publishing was not the answer. If its objective was the protection of children, then it simply failed. In fact it served the opposite purpose, driving paedophiles underground, where neither police nor probation services could keep track of them. Already the relevant agencies have told of convicted sex offenders, once under their watch, who have now moved off-radar. That has increased the risk to children, not reduced it. It is only a pity the News of the World took so long to realise it.

Well that was then and back when the terribly vulgar red tops were doing it. When a progressive hero like George Monbiot smears an innocent man as a child rapist that's fine and dandy.