*** FUTURE POSTS WILL ALSO APPEAR AT 'NOW AND NEXT' : https://rolfnorfolk.substack.com
Sunday, November 15, 2009
The British taxman has become a laughing-stock
Saturday, November 14, 2009
In a tizz about guns
However, here in the UK post-Dunblane, we haven't actually banned handguns; only legal ones. What now?
The National Rifle Association in the USA (htp: John Lott) obviously has its own quite clear agenda, but their arguments don't seem easy to dismiss out of hand. Here are some extracts:
... Researchers, both public and private, have estimated total defensive gun uses at between 800,000 and 2.5 million times per year. To many, that's a difficult reality to accept since we don't hear the hundreds of armed citizen stories that should be reported daily...
... One of the first things we learn through analysis of media-documented self-defense episodes is that no place is "safe"—no matter the place, time of day, neighborhood or crowds, no matter how unlikely an area is for a violent confrontation...
...The most frequently reported crime prevented by armed citizens has been home invasion... Approximately 25 percent of documented defensive gun uses occurred in places of business...
... Many anti-gun advocates would grudgingly allow ownership of rifles and shotguns if they could ban all handguns. Armed citizens, however, beg to differ. Of stories identifying defender firearms, 79 percent involved handguns. Shotguns were used only 15 percent of the time, and rifles 6 percent. The message is clear: Banning handguns would remove the most common means of self-defense for most people...
... In confrontational shootings, studies show police hit their targets between 13 percent and 25 percent of the time. Of the incidents analyzed in this study, civilians hit their targets 84 percent of the time. This comparison does not account for the number of shots fired, only hits or misses. Nevertheless, it gives us a statistical basis to refute claims that only police should have firearms or that civilian shooters are largely ineffective in emergencies.
I'd like to pooh-pooh it all as gun-nuttery, but if opposing the right to bear arms, where would one begin?
What an irony that (allegedly) a man can single-handedly kill 13 and wound 31 on the biggest Army base in America, and be stopped only by a policewoman's pistol (or maybe a sergeant's, we're not sure).
Rude funnies that made my wife laugh
Friday, November 13, 2009
Frustration
Neurological studies show that talent in these areas seems to be genetic. However, the disregard for those with the talents, and the simultaneous embracement of the technology that results, is a cultural issue.
One does not have to look hard to see some of the enabling elements:
Popular culture has elevated all opinions to the same level. Sometimes, the level is based on the volume of the holder, or the number of adherants. Thus, the majority of the US public holds creationism at the same factual level as evolution theory, chiropractic as equivalent or better than evidence-based medicine, astrology equal to astronomy, and homeopathic medicines as better than those with active ingredients.
Our leaders make decisions based on the current polls and personal bias, even when the issues are highly technical, like defense, energy, medicine and education.
Our colleges of education teach that pedagogy trumps knowledge base. In other words, a 'good' teacher supposedly can teach material that they do not understand. Business colleges teach similarly that management skills are independent of the industry involved.
In higher education, we pretend that logic and analytical skills really don't matter, while claiming to teach 'critical thinking'.
I can give no better example than to summarize the discussion at a college meeting that I attended today. One highly-educated individual said: "It is all very well to have technical training (in science, technology, engineering and mathematics), but that is not 'real' education".
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Reds at St Catherine's College, Oxford
*With much deeper roots - e.g. Terry Eagleton was a protege of Raymond Williams.
Life insurance securitization
This will lead to problems. When setting premium levels, insurers factor-in the likelihood that the policy will not be maintained up to the point of a claim. This helps them cut the premiums in what can be a very competitive market, especially in term (limited-period) assurance. If insurers find that securitization leads to more policies qualifying for a claim, it will mess up their calculations and they will have to up premiums for similar new policies.
There is also a strong chance that existing policies that do not have fixed,"guaranteed premium" rates will be reviewed and repriced upwards. This won't help already cash-strapped households hang on to a vital part of their financial safety net.
Many policies are already being repriced because of the underperformance of insurance companies' investments in recent years, so overall it looks like a bad trend could develop in life assurance costs and consumer uptake.
There are other dangers, as UK investors in some Keydata Investment Services products have discovered. Their "Secure Income Bond" suite of investments was based on securitized "key employee" term assurance and following a tax investigation into their legal documentation, the plans were disqualified from certain exemptions. The resulting retrospective tax charge was laid at Keydata's door, and busted them. The incoming administrators, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, have found £100 million of underlying assets are now "missing". The situation is further complicated by the fact that the assets of the Secure Income Bond were held by a company set up in the secretive foreign tax haven of Luxembourg. Britain's Serious Fraud Office has been called in, and investors now await a ruling this week by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme as to whether they will be reimbursed for losses in what was supposed to be a safe, non-stock market-related investment.
The potential is huge - the New York Times reports $26 trillion in existing life cover policies in the USA alone, of which maybe $500 billion could be in the market for securitization. And the potential damage is equally huge. Will insurance companies end up needing bailouts like the banks? Could the US economy survive a second giant hammer blow?
Reds under the chaise longue
Andrew Neather's PHD and a follow-up article surface in several places on the Web, e.g.:
"Popular Republicanism, Americanism, and the Roots of Anti-Communism, 1890-1925"
Duke University Ph.D. dissertation, May 1994
"Twentieth-Century Communism and Anticommunism: the View After the Cold War"
Reviews in American History - Volume 23, Number 2, June 1995, pp. 336-341
Linkedin.com supplies details of Neather's experience - a year working for Dennis McShane; another doing editing work for the Labour Party; nearly 3 years with Friends of the Earth; a year speechwriting at the Home Office under Jack Straw and David Blunkett; a year speechwriting with Tony Blair; and now he's with the Evening Standard, writing on wine, cycling, travel and local issues, as well as editing comments. (There seems to be a lacuna of a year (1994-95) between completing the PhD and starting with McShane, but doubtless it was some sort of gap year-cum-looking for a career.)
I think he's probably harmless, and the track record suggests a touch of the Green idealist and instinctive-moderniser-against-the-wicked-Establishment. If he were a "sleeper", he'd not have blurted out the stuff about Labour's secret motivations regarding immigration policy.
But "as the twig is bent, so the tree will grow": we have to look at beginnings, try to find some of the warning signs.
I recall a tiny incident regarding Peter Mandelson's college, St Catherine's, Oxford, at the time he was there (1973-76 - why did Peter matriculate at age c. 20?). I'd gone over there one evening (summer '75) with some friends to see a Ken Russell film, and we had a drink in the student bar first. Noticing us, somebody at the other end called out "bleedin' poors". True, but why say it?
It's not what someone does that is most revealing; it's the context, the belief that what they're doing is acceptable. St Catherine's was rather nice - newish, and expensively-designed, right down to the knives and forks (I kid you not). We were impressed; it was time when we still wore thick jumpers because college rooms were cold, and drank beer from large Party Seven cans at parties. Ever get the feeling that you've been let in by mistake, and wonder when you can afford better-looking shoes and clothes?
Privilege and socialism went together in those times. Posh Marxist meddlers dined at the Elizabeth or the Randolph, wore expensive blue boiler suits as a political fashion statement, spoke contemptuously at the Oxford Union of "the talking professions" that, of course, they would soon join. In the street, I overheard two chaps discussing what they would do when they graduated; one said it was a toss-up between joining his father's stockbroking firm or the IMG (International Marxist Group).
Power is sexier than money. In the old days, bored toffs could shag debs at the Hunt Ball, knock the necks off brandy bottles at two in the morning, test themselves against professional boxers; but ah, the chance to lead Revolution...
Don't look for revolutionaries among the likes of John Prescott, a former "bleedin' poor" who knows which side his bread is buttered; look for them among the drawing-room drawlers, the tea-table traitors, the Kim Philbys.
Who is to say that forty years from now, one of our deadliest enemies may not turn out to have been in the Bullingdon Club?
Saturday, November 07, 2009
More on Al-Collider
Unless it just wanted a bit of Marmite on it?
The Pollitt Sanction
Time for conspiracy theory. Which of the following seems most likely?
Gordon Brown is authorising throwing more cash onto the bonfire because:
1. It alleviates a problem he himself, embarrassingly, allowed to develop as Chancellor
2. It will get us out of the mess, helping the economy recover
3. It will buy some feelgood leading up to the next General Election, limiting the damage to Labour
4. As a scorched-earth policy, it will leave Cameron nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat and as soon as Cam has heroically dealt with it, in will come another 1945-style Labour landslide as the population again votes for what it thinks it deserves
5. It represents an "Iceland strategy", so effectively ruining the country that we have to throw ourselves into the arms of our communautaire pals on the other side of La Manche
6. As (5) above, but part of a grander plan to advance the cause of international Communism.
There are little conspiratorial threads we can weave together if we wish. For example, we read this week that Brown's candidature for the Labour slave state (sorry, safe seat) of Dunfermline East was sponsored by the TGWU's Jack Jones, now revealed as a traitor in the pay of the USSR at a time of great danger to our country. Could this have been part of the entryist approach of Harry Pollitt? Is Gordon Brown a man of Pollitt's stamp?
Like the Communists, one-eyed Wotan may fantasise that the destruction is merely part of the process leading to the Millennium, for after Ragnarök and the ensuing Flood, "... the world resurfaces anew and fertile, the surviving gods meet, and the world is repopulated by two human survivors."
And if he's wrong?
Friday, November 06, 2009
Santa Fe railway: the new Coke?
On democracy in Britain
I believe this is completely mistaken.
You will find:
(a) the tremendous power of apathy (look how Karl Denninger has gone from making a personal fortune in equities to crying uselessly on the blogwaves about politics);
(b) when (if) you have split a log, it can be split further, until there is nothing but kindling and splinters.
We do not have democracy in this country, as the ancient Athenians understood the term. We have "representative" democracy, which ultimately reduces the population to two classes:
(i) practitioners
(ii) petitioners
The most we can hope for is to influence one of the two great power factions that take turns to rule us. As David Cameron and co. now feel their vulnerability, our maximum influence lies in the threat to his potential vote. By looking as though we may indeed shatter his support into a hundred pieces and so end with a hung Parliament or even another Labour government, we can make him listen, instead of pretending to listen.
But it has to be a simple, single demand, with the promise that the fragments will gather around it. I would suggest simply, a referendum on EU membership per se, "in or out", and purely on the issue of democratic legitimisation.
The arguments pro and con can come later; in fact, must come later: if you hear bletherskites like Ken Clarke (he so reminds me of ex-Bishop David Jenkins), they're always trying to confuse the referendum with the benefits of EU membership, so as to prevent you from asking for the vote.
Going for the split now uses the weapon without uttering the threat, and will be uselessly destructive.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Black holes and the collapse of democracy
And then I saw the ten o'clock news. The President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, with the unhappy face of a Neville Chamberlain, had caved in and signed the Lisbon Treaty, the enabling legislation that takes Europe over the event horizon and towards "ever-closer union". Klaus wrote to his country's constitutional court:
“Twenty years after the restoration of our democracy and sovereignty, we are once again dealing with the question whether we should — this time voluntarily — give up the position of a sovereign state and hand over decision-making on our own matters to European institutions outside of the democratic control of our citizens.”
And so the millennarian (it had been planned to be complete by 2000) madness sweeps another into the host. At the centre, now irrecoverably detached from the rest of the universe, the club gathers, surrounded by advisers and servants of every kind, all determined to live as high and as absurd as Marie Antoinette tending her washed sheep, as we career chaotically towards economic breakdown and the loss of law, freedom and security. The transfer of wealth and power without consent - without our consent - is crime and tyranny.
Centripetal forces create centrifugal forces. The overweening power-seeking of the mediaeval Papacy hastened the move towards a Europe of sovereign states and religious fraction. Now, the forced bureaucratic union at the top of our group of societies will lead to greater disunion lower down, of which the BNP's Nick Griffin is merely a small, scruffy symptom.
In the middle ages, the walled towns developed internally; there sprang up strong-walled houses for the wealthy elite, to protect themselves not only from each other, but from the desperate, hungry, half-naked mob outside.
In the dream is denial, and in denial is defeat.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Andrew Neather: social experimentation and education
Certainly Andrew Neather is using the Guardian to deny that it was the main aim. And I don't see the Labour Government as a sort of Doctor Evil, cackling over their latest scheme to ruin the country. It's not that simple, that cartoony.
But Neather has already admitted that:
- Mass migration to the UK was a "deliberate policy"
- It "especially" suited "middle-class Londoners"
- "A driving political purpose" was the fostering of multiculturalism
- He (Neather) had "a clear sense that the policy was intended... to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date", even though he himself thought that was going too far.
From what I've seen, read and heard, the political parties do relish giving each other one in the eye; perhaps that's why they can't clearly see the other consequences of their actions. And we need to be aware that driving motives are often not disclosed, even if they may have appeared in "earlier drafts". Indeed, the unstated motivation is often more important than the overt.
Education has always been a pit for these cockerels to fight in. In the nineteenth century, it was the Board Schools competing with, and seeking to supplant, the Church schools (and abolishing school prayers and hymns within my teaching career); in the twentieth, it was comprehensive versus grammar (since no-one dared go so far as to destroy the private schools). And, like Mao's Red Guard ripping up the bourgeois turf of parks, and Mao's peasants obediently exterminating the crop-eating birds (only to see the crop-eating insect population explode, disastrously), they bring in the reign of destructive ignorance and irrational hatred.
It is especially destructive in teaching, where individuals and society live with the consequences for generations.
When I came to Birmingham to train as a teacher, my first 3-week placement was at the George Dixon Grammar School. The boys' and girls' grammars had just amalgamated, and in the staffroom the women teachers still had their tea expensively served to them, whereas the male staff ran a separate, cheaper tea swindle. Two boys who gave another student teacher a mildly tough time (by the standards of that time) were instantly taken off the entry for English O-level as a punishment.
These decent, hard-working people could not have foreseen that within a few years, the Labour-controlled City Council would first build a new comprehensive smack on their cricket pitch (one of the finest in the Midlands), then amalgamate the grammar school with it, and then generally mismanage it with all sorts of fashionable political initiatives until it went into what is known as "special measures". An old-fashioned grammar-school-and-Cambridge-educated toughie, Robert Dowling (now Sir Robert) was brought in and the climb back began. I was interviewed by him shortly after he took over: the place was all echoes and empty rooms. 200 years of accumulated effort, expertise, tradition and dedication had come to this; for no good reason, and some bad ones.
I'm sure Andrew Neather is a decent chap - but both he and those he has worked with need to recognise that good intentions aren't enough. More and more, I see this government (and some before it) as resembling Homer Simpson, pushing a button on the nuclear generator console just to see what happens, and rewarded by the sight of people suddenly fleeing a wall of flame in the corridor.
You need, not just a good heart, but humility and caution.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Fears of a stockmarket correction
But Marc Faber (htp: Jesse) thinks not - as the dollar weakens, the market adjusts upward. And he is convinced of the "Bernanke put", i.e. money will be thrown into the system to maintain the illusion that all is well. Longer-term, Faber (in that smiling way of his) gives it around 10 years before the dollar simply collapses as public finances run completely out of control.
Andrew Neather: privilege and principle
To give the man his due, he is aware of the contradictions in his position. In the first article linked above, he argues for immigration, boasting of the mix in his children's school - but he does qualify it very briefly by a reference (my highlight) to the social exclusiveness:
"... in my children's primary school, the international influence is primarily the large numbers of (mostly middle-class) bilingual children, usually with one parent married to a Brit."
As it happens, I used to live in London - a flat in Mount Nod Road, Streatham - and I don't think Neather would want to send his children to the school opposite us, the way it was in the 1970s at least. My dad would regularly drift over to the bow window to check that his Morris Marina wasn't being vandalised. But maybe it's "middle class" now, what with the property bubble.
However, Neather doesn't live in that London, of course. He lives in a part where, according to nethouseprices.com, semi-detached houses have sold for between £400,000 and £900,000 this year. Melanie Phillips' comment seems justified: "In Neather's hermetically sealed bubble, the benefits of mass immigration were so overwhelming he couldn't understand why ministers had been so nervous about it."
I think the way that so-so socialists square the circle is to admit the contradictions cheerfully (brazenly) and ask you to concentrate on how things will be when they've finished. But what you do now, and its effects, are far more certain than a rosy, fuzzy future Golden Age. One might have hoped that a Cambridge education would have taught Neather not to think in that Johnny Head-in-air sort of way.