Three birds with one stone

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Sometimes it is a good idea to stand back and take another look at familiar issues. For example we could ask ourselves why the UK electorate has a tendency to vote for lying poseurs as their MPs. People who were recently discovered to have fiddled their expenses, lied about their main residence, employed family members on their official staff and tried to hide the whole sorry mess when it all came out.

Thinking laterally, maybe that’s the real point of electing them. After all, their expenses scams were somewhat petty in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps the electorate has been electing useless lying poseurs as a cunning plan. 

Hmm - so what cunning plan would that be Baldrick?

How about this.

The general idea is to pass the job of government to professionals – the permanent officials whose job it is to make sure government actually works. Thus taking it away from the sticky fingers of party hacks, loons, thieves, trouser-droppers, insane harridans and all those who only see the job as a route to better things.

So we prefer bloody useless bureaucrats to bloody useless politicians do we Baldrick?

It’s a tough choice, but given the paucity of options maybe we do prefer bloody useless bureaucrats. Why not? The growth in international standards covering everything from road signage to food standards to reptile imports has led to a marked decline in the work available to politicians. Much of it is beyond their ken anyway because of its complexity and technical detail.

This sounds the death knell for democracy, but at least the professionals, whatever their numerous shortcomings and inefficiencies, at least they have to keep the show on the road if only to retain a firm grip on their salaries and pensions.

It is far from being a satisfactory trend and things are likely to go very sour indeed, but perhaps it is better than relying on all those ghastly, know-nothing freaks propping up the House of Commons bar. They have no intention of doing anything useful under any circumstances and maybe voters have wised up to that...

Or maybe they haven’t wised up to anything Baldrick. They simply plod off to the polling station, scrawl their cross based on the party they hate most and that’s the real attraction of UKIP. Three birds with one stone. 

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Did a Bond film inspire Monsanto's Terminator gene?

The James Bond film "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" is on ITV today. Released in 1969, the movie, scripted by Richard Maibaum, features Telly Savalas as the villain Blofeld. His scheme is to threaten the use of a biological agent that will permanently render infertile selected crops and animals.

In reality, the technology for this was developed much later in the USA - the patent application was not submitted until 1994. Its potential is, to use an overused word, awesome. Imagine the profit - and power - if you could make the world's farmers buy their seeds from you afresh, every year. Or refuse them.
 
"The technology was developed under a cooperative research and development agreement between the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture and Delta and Pine Land company in the 1990s, but it is not yet commercially available," says Wikipedia article on "genetic use restriction technology".

Monsanto bought Delta and Pine Land in 2007 for $1.5 billion, having previously (1999) pledged never to "commercialise gene protection systems that render seed sterile". (Note the careful use of the word "commercialise".)

That hasn't stopped Monsanto from patenting seeds and suing farmers whose crops have been inadvertently contaminated by GM plants. In 2011, the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association brought a lawsuit challenging what they saw as the aggressive pursuit of such patent claims, but it was thrown out and a year ago the US Supreme Court upheld the decision.

As Ludwell Denny said in "America Conquers Britain" (1930):

"We shall not make Britain's mistake. Too wise to try to govern the world, we shall merely own it. Nothing can stop us. What chance has Britain against America? Or what chance has the world?"

From the review of the book in the Sydney Morning Herald (7 April 1930)

Denny did not foresee that eventually it would be, not nation against nation or empire against empire, but multinational corporations over all. We shall be managed, farmed...

Bond villains are not so implausible, then.


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One problem, two Floridians, three ways

A few days ago, in the wake of recent controversy over police shootings, Karl Denninger posted a piece on violence and fecklessness in the black community, for which he blames misguided welfare interventions:

"We have spent the entire time since Great Society providing incentives for this behavior and we've gotten a hell of a lot more of it. The blame for this is ours -- specifically yours and mine."

He advocates cutting benefits to make a subsidised layabout lifestyle less comfortable, and one can see a certain logic to it - this kind of argument is also aired in the UK not infrequently.

But six hours away from where Karl lives someone has tried a different approach:

Twenty years ago, the Orlando, Fla. neighborhood of Tangelo Park was a crime-infested place where people were afraid to walk down the street. The graduation rate at the local high school was 25 percent. Having amassed a fortune from his success in the hotel business, Rosen decided Tangelo Park needed some hospitality of its own.

“Hospitality really is appreciating a fellow human being,” Rosen told Gabe Gutierrez in a segment that aired on TODAY Wednesday. “I came to the realization that I really had to now say, ‘Thank you.’’’

Rosen, 73, began his philanthropic efforts by paying for day care for parents in Tangelo Park, a community of about 3,000 people. When those children reached high school, he created a scholarship program in which he offered to pay free tuition to Florida state colleges for any students in the neighborhood.

In the two decades since starting the programs, Rosen has donated nearly $10 million, and the results have been remarkable. The high school graduation rate is now nearly 100 percent, and some property values have quadrupled. The crime rate has been cut in half, according to a study by the University of Central Florida.

"We've given them hope,’’ Rosen said. “We've given these kids hope, and given the families hope. And hope is an amazing thing."

Not that day nurseries are always the answer. Today, Peter Hitchens - scarcely a left-winger - repeats his support for the right of women to stay home to raise their children:

"A significant number of homes – four per cent – lose money by having both parents at work. Many – ten per cent – gain nothing from this arrangement. Yet they still do it. Many more gain so little that it is barely worth the bother. The most amazing statistic of the past year (produced by insurance company Aviva) shows that thousands of mothers who go out to work are, in effect, working for nothing. The cost of day orphanages, travel and other work expenses cancels out everything they earn. Many more barely make a profit on the arrangement. One in four families has a parent who brings home less than £100 a month after all the costs of work have been met."

There's too much polarisation in politics. It seems that either the police are murderous racists or infallible heroes who must be supported no matter what they do; either we throw money at the poor or penny-pinch them into work, either we raise the minimum wage or abolish it (we discussed this with Don Boudreaux of George Mason University* a few years ago)... And of course, as Denninger observes, there is the politician making himself seemingly indispensable on either side.

Yet Harris Rosen doesn't fit the false dichotomies. What he did was an act of private charity, practical help instead of either blaming or faux-championing the poor. And it worked.

What a shame if politicians became redundant; if their catastrophic broad-brush solutions, infested by office boxwallahs and lawyers, were replaced by intelligently targeted initiatives; if we had a fair society instead of a Great one.
_______________________________

* A university supported by the somewhat controversial billionaire Koch Brothers.


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Useless data

(View interactive original at The Atlantic here)
(htp: Barry Ritholtz)

The above is a map correlating US military enlistment rates per capita by zip code. The note below it comments on the wide disparity in the rates, e.g. "in 2010, only 0.04 percent of the Upper East Side of Manhattan (zip code prefix 101) enlisted."

Looking up that area, we find that "the neighborhood contains the greatest concentration of individual wealth in Manhattan" and "the female-male ratio was very high with 125 females for 100 males."

Unless you factor-in age, gender, income, education, local employment opportunities etc you are wasting your time. More importantly, our time.

Bullshed!

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The still, cold hands of Power

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For, after all, this deity of his, like the deity of every other man, was but his temperament exaggerated beyond life-size and put in perfect order — it was but the concretion of his constant feeling that nothing could be trusted to behave, freed from the still, cold hands of Power.

He had never trusted himself to act save under the authority of this peculiar deity, much less, then, could he feel that others could be trusted. This lack of trust — which was only, perhaps, a natural desire for putting everything and everybody in their proper places — had made him from a child eligible for almost any post of trust.

And Nature, recognising this, had used him a hundred thousand times, weeding him out from among his more irregular and trustful fellows, and piling him in layers, one on another, till she had built out of him in every division of the State, temples of Power. Two qualifications alone had she exacted; that he should not be trustful, and that he should be content to lie beneath the layer above him, until he should come in time to be that upper layer himself.

John Galsworthy - A Commentary (1900)

A fine fictional take on a real and intractable problem – the process-driven bureaucrat. Erosion of trust is not a new problem. People in positions of authority who cannot trust others, don’t value trust, don’t believe in trust. This is where our increasingly fanatical and repressive micro-audit culture comes from.

It is out of control.

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A petal in the wind

A change to the Vienna New Year's Day concert:

"Since 1980 the flowers that decorate the hall have been a gift from the city of Sanremo, Liguria, Italy," says Wikipedia.

Not any more:

Floral Decorations by Vienna Parks and Gardens

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When Zubin Mehta takes up the baton for the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert on 1 January 2015, this will mark the premiere of the new co-operation between the famous orchestra and the Vienna Parks and Gardens department. Together with other Austrian gardeners and florists, the department‘s staff will turn the Golden Hall of the Musikverein into a shining sea of flowers. “The New Year’s Concert is a highlight in the florist industry and provides a unique opportunity to present the great mastery of Vienna’s gardeners to an international audience”, said Vienna’s City Councillor for the Environment, Ulli Sima.
 
Vienna’s parks and gardens department considers the new co-operation an exciting task. “The new co-operation creates a unique Viennese symbiosis – both in floral and in musical terms. Both institutions, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Vienna Parks and Gardens, have a long tradition and contribute to Vienna’s image, which is carried out to the world at the New Year’s Concert”, declared Vienna Parks and Gardens Director Rainer Weisgram.

Hmmm...

Is this one of those tiny signs that tell us all is not well in a relationship?

https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/michele-barbero/italys-unhappy-marriage-with-europe


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Say goodbye to spy drone misery!

(pic source)

Every season is drone season. They buzz about your garden, come through the door and follow you upstairs, bumble up and down your window panes, fall in your Weetos... enough!

Now you can do something about it:

Some species are protected by law. See the NSA's Facebook page for information and contact details.


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