What the Rhine maidens really wanted

(From the Bayerische Staatsoper's 2012 production of "Götterdämmerung")

Synopsis:

Having lost their gold to the Federal Reserve, who in turn foolishly leased it to Alberic (the gnome of Zurich), the Rhine maidens cling to the false gold of the Euro for comfort, though it will ultimately lead to the destruction of the Gods and all Southern Europe.

Prizing wealth and power above love, they have poisoned the wellspring of natural affection and driven away their lovers so, doomed ever to remain maidens, they are left lamenting, "Viagra, Viagra" (at 4:00 below).




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Gasless

83% of UK homes are heated by gas and much of our domestic electricity is supplied by gas-powered generating stations. Some estimate future supply at 40 - 50 years, so if you have children of school age they will live to see the end of gas in the home.

What's the plan?

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Professional trouser hunters

From dailymail.co.uk

From nknews.org

An acquaintance of mine, a North Korean refugee currently living in South Korea, told me how, in the early 2000s, she broke a bone. The incident happened one afternoon when she was on the way home. A few streets away from her house she encountered a patrol of regular police and militia, and she instantly knew she was in trouble because she had done something seriously improper. She had no choice but to run, and while trying to get away from her pursuers she broke a bone in her feet. But she still escaped the hand of law.

What was the crime she had committed? She was wearing trousers while walking the streets of a major North Korean city.

This story might seem strange. As every visitor to North Korea can testify, there are a great number of women clad in trousers on the streets of major North Korean cities. Nonetheless, a theoretical ban on women wearing trousers has existed since the late 1970s. Its enforcement has, however, been rather patchy at best.

My acquaintance did not blame her pursuers for the above-mentioned incident, instead she blamed herself. She knew that patrols of professional trouser hunters could be encountered only in certain parts of the city and only at certain times of the day, and she believes she was foolhardy to venture into such a high-risk area dressed in such an “indecent” way. 


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Oceans protecting us from global warming? For how long?

Are the scientists researching climate change allowing sufficiently for the moderating role of water?

Water has a high specific heat capacity. The same energy that raises the temperature of water by 1°C, will make copper hotter by more than 10°C.

This Time article (November 2013) reports "the vast oceans carry 93% of the stored energy from climate change, compared to just 1% for the atmosphere, with melting ice and landmasses making up the rest." Some of that energy goes to raising the temperature at certain depths.

But water has other ways of processing heat. It can expand, so that could be one of the reasons sea levels are rising.

There is also water's tendency to form chains of molecules - or even rings - and presumably heat energy will be used in the breaking of these structures, and there's a lot of them in the Earth's 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of ocean.

Another energy-employing phase change is evaporation. “The atmosphere’s water vapor content has increased by about 0.41 kilograms per square meter (kg/m²) per decade since 1988, and natural variability in climate just can’t explain this moisture change," says this article.

And then there's claims and counterclaims about melting ice. The argument is plagued by complexity because of the warming, cooling, evaporating and precipitating effects of wind currents and the difficulty of measuring ice thickness as well as extent.

The thermal absorption properties of water may have bought us more time, but they don't let us completely off the hook. Just as we are learning to discount climate change alarmists, we should look more skeptically at the sanguinists. There's a huge difference between "small chance" and "no chance", as we have found in financial matters; also, between "a long time ahead" and "never".

And then there's the at present theoretical concern about all that methane currently trapped in the oceans - by the water structures known as "clathrates", structures that heat energy can break.

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Blown away by harpsichord

I've got the CD, and play it loud on the motorway. The combination of Frisch's powerful and authoritative playing, the pindrop recording and the tremendous sonorousness of the period (1751) instrument make other harpsichord recordings I've heard seem dull greyscale by comparison. This is not a geek thing - you will be hypnotised, moved, exalted. And when you've heard it, I hope you'll be fair to the artist and buy it.



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Extraordinary guitar opening

I have to share this with you, perhaps it will move you as it does me. The first minute or so of Almir Sater's "Flor do Amor":



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The future of education: £1-an-hour schoolteachers, billionaire directors

A Daily Kos article currently circulating on Facebook compares American schoolteachers and childminders and calculates that teachers are far cheaper, at $1.42 per child per hour.

How about British teachers?

The main scale annual pay for classroom teachers runs from £21,804 to £37,124 (if you break through into the upper pay scale) and the statutory minimum hours (not counting marking, preparation and voluntary self-development) are 1,265 per year. Given a class of 30 pupils, that works out at 57p - 98p per child per hour (in London, 72p - £1.20.)

Nationally, the pupil-teacher ratio is lower, because some classes are smaller (e.g. with "A"-level groups) and there are teaching roles outside the classroom. On the other hand, teachers actually work much more than the statutory hours (ask anyone who's married to one), so if the pupil-teacher ratio is a third less but teachers work 50% extra hours, the rate remains unchanged.

By way of comparison, the Daycare Trust reckons toddlercare costs average £4.26 per hour.

But we're not comparing like for like: day nurseries have overheads, and so do schools. Overall, including additional amounts for some special needs provision, "core funding" across primary and secondary schools is around £4,000 per head. Even that is an under-estimate. It doesn't take into account higher levels of special needs, or other educational expediture. Three years ago, the average spend per pupil in England was £6,199 per year.

Also, if we're using the consumer model, we need to look at children's hours, not teachers'; but they're not fixed. The old law provided for at least two hours of secular instruction in the morning and two in the afternoon (as to subjects, only religious education was compulsory); today, in England and Wales, there are no minimum school hours, only a requirement for schools to be open for 380 sessions per year. However, a child's entitlement is generally taken as 25 hours a week, which multiplied by 38 weeks equals 950 hours a year.

That suggests a cost per child (in England in 2010) of £6,199 / 950 = £6.53 per hour.

Then you have to add on the cost of capital expenditure programs. At a guess, if it were run as a business, the compulsory education system would probably have to charge something like £10 an hour.

Which brings us to the question of privatisation. As with other formerly publicly-owned assets, there is a potential bonanza in education. The trick will be to get the State to pump in resources first, then transfer them into private hands at an unrealistically low price, together with a ready-made workforce for which the new business hasn't had to pay the costs of training and recruitment.

It would accelerate the process if nominally independent inspectors ran round the country denigrating schools which have a more challenging intake, putting them into "special measures" in preparation for rebirth as semi-autonomous "Academies" and eventually, privately-run outfits.

Oh, the money to be made! For you can squash down the salaries of the teachers, cut corners in all sorts of ways, boost administrators' remuneration and maybe even organise a massive debt-funded sellout-and-run, as Southern Cross Healthcare did with old people's homes.

A fantasy? No, look to the USA, where we started this piece, and see what's happening with "charter schools", educational publishers and testers, and the banks: Yes! Magazine's infographic here is very disturbing.


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Once a generation

1914
1939
1964-ish (young v. old)
1989 - the crumbling of communism
2014 ?

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"China to merge with Russia" - Classic FM

6.30 am: the Classic FM bulletin said "China" was to have a referendum on unification with Russia. Morning eyes. But this is something Russia has long feared, so I understand, and what with Russia having the lowest ratio of population to arable land of any major nation, plus wood and water aplenty, and China heavily overpopulated in relation to their natural resources, and thinking that Russia's eastern lands rightfully belong to them...

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UKIP and low information voters

They have been called low information voters or LIVs, people who vote but know next to nothing about political trends, issues or possibilities. People who don’t even know the names of major cabinet ministers or the role of the EU in making UK law.

Yet they vote.

In my view and no doubt quite a few others, the main function of the EU has been to sideline all voters simply because the governing classes regard us as too thick and politically idle to be allowed into policy-making.

Whatever its original purpose, the EU clearly intends to sweep away the untidiness of democracy and smarten things up with a makeover of professional policy-makers. Nothing must be left to chance or the whim of voters in the fanatical pursuit of extreme, micro-managed political tidiness.

Anarchy is the enemy of liberty, and so, at its highest pitch, is mechanical efficiency. The good life can be lived only in a society where tidiness is preached and practised, but not too fanatically, and where efficiency is always haloed, as it were, by a tolerated aura of mess.

Aldous Huxley – Themes and Variations

We used to refer to extreme political tidiness as fascism, communism, totalitarianism or whatever. Take your ideological pick. Soft fascism melds well with modern trends.

Whatever we choose to call it, the EU has created a situation where the main function of national politicians is the covert implementation of EU policy. This leaves them plenty of spare time to waffle their way through faux public debates on unimportant, preferably non-EU issues.

So is democracy worth saving and is UKIP the party to give it the kiss of life here in the UK?

Well UKIP is hardly likely to resolve the LIV issue even if against all the odds it makes inroads into EU domination. So we may as well face the possibility that LIVs don’t give a toss about democratic principles because they don’t analyse political issues beyond their own superficial and largely inflexible allegiances.

It takes a lot to shift us out of our comfort zones because here in the early twenty first century those zones are voluptuously comfortable. Especially when compared to living standards of only a few generations ago.

We don’t take to the streets, agitate for general strikes or vote for a dwindling number of folk who actually want to make democracy work. Life is simply too comfortable to be bothered with all that reading and thinking malarkey.

So LIVs vote for the mainstream every time. Democracy is on the way out and what the future will usher in as its replacement is not easily guessed at. The change will be slow though, so LIVs won’t notice until it is too late.

Maybe it’s too late already and UKIP is no longer relevant apart from being a repository for protest votes – but LIVs don’t do protest votes.

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Luck of the draw

From telegraph.co.uk

Do you count yourself as lucky? I do, but I suppose it mostly depends on the comparisons we make or fail to make.

I was lucky in all kinds of obvious ways from the time and country of my birth onward. In the developed world there are millions of us living our comfortable lives with worries previous generations would have treated to a tubercular splutter of disbelief.

We have our ups and downs of course, but materially most of us are lucky. We have our personal tragedies too because death comes to all and is so often untimely or painful. Yet in spite of the omnipotence of death we are lucky compared to earlier generations.

So are some people more lucky than others? David Cameron was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, but do we count this as luck? I think we do.

What about Blair? Bonkers in my view, but lucky enough to be charming in a way I’ve never quite fathomed. Maybe if I’d met him I’d know.

I’m sure luck plays a major part in our lives. I’m lucky to have made a reasonable career decision when I discovered I was passably good at chemistry. I could have given chemistry a miss and opted for something with deeper appeal, but I didn’t yet the choice turned out reasonably well.

However I wasn’t well equipped to make the choice anyway – there was a hefty element of luck. Maybe my parents buying me a chemistry set for Christmas had a hand in it. A proper fifties chemistry set it was too, one where you could discover the combustible delights of sulphur and iron filings.

The books and comics of the time were stimulating too and my parents believed strongly in the educational value of regular reading. Another stroke of luck – I was born at a time when books were available to borrow free of charge from public libraries.

Looping back to political careers - are politicians such as Cameron and Blair talented, lucky or a bit of both? Which is the more powerful asset? Impossible to say of course, but I think with a enough talent, politicians are often able to twist lady luck around their little fingers.

Doesn’t say much for the present lot though does it?

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The rise and rise of stupidity

As the world becomes more and more complex, we are presumably obliged to become more intelligent in order to cope. Otherwise, relative to a general increase in social, political and economic complexity, we might expect to see a corresponding rise in stupidity.

Oh dear!

Intelligence is supposedly dictated by genes and upbringing – good old nature and nurture. We can’t yet improve on nature, so how does nurture respond to steadily increasing complexity?

I think the simple answer is that it doesn’t. Intelligence is a social construct and when social complexity increases, the bar is raised. As the bar is raised, we understand less and less about our own society. In relative terms we become less intelligent - less able to devise rational responses to complex situations.

To my mind this is why modern politicians seem so stupid. Increasing complexity has raised the bar beyond their capabilities. Their best bet is to look after number one as the complexity of political and economic problems takes viable solutions beyond their intellectual reach.

To some extent this is offset by more accessible sources of information, but checking sources and comparing narratives still takes time and many can't because there is already an official narrative. Political leaders and senior bureaucrats for example.

They must rely on official sources and official narratives plus the opinions of their pals and paymasters. They don’t have the time to check any of it, so the bar rises and leaves them floundering. Misinformation, irrelevance and outright lies are their inevitable coping strategies. 

Reducing complexity is a much better coping strategy, but complexity creates powerful vested interests leading to even more complexity as its beneficiaries line their nests. So what can we do about a rising tide of complexity?

Not much. It is possible to glean insights from those people who find ways to describe aspects of complex situations without pretending to have all the answers. Insights can be found anywhere, from the Simpsons to a philosophical analysis and they do give some relief from endless streams of futile narrative.

Apart from a few genuine insights, it is still possible to locate good sources of information. Another way to cope with that rising bar is a sceptical and even cynical personal philosophy. Yet how many of us have one of those?

And tomorrow the bar rises again.

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A bit rich: Richard D Hall's conspiracy club

It took two passes through Alvechurch to find; Google Maps can be a bit approximate. Having wedged the car into sort of a parking space, I went up the stairs of the Sports and Social just in time, showing my email ticket to the girl, who stood at the door with the man himself. He gave me an appraising glance: maybe I didn't quite look like his typical audience, some hundred of whom were already settled with their pints and partners.

My phone lit up with a new text. My friend, who'd long recommended Rich Hall's website to me, had come down with pneumonia again. I stood at the bar, which was already out of Banks' and the alternative ale, but still had mild on tap.

The lights dimmed, and off we went on a wild ride through conspiracy country.

There was more than met the eye about numerous killing-spree cases, including that of Derrick Bird, a balding 52-year-old man described by one eyewitness as in his twenties and with short, spiky black hair, whose taxi had its roof bar both on and off at different points in the day, and who was allegedly captured on CCTV the second time past the cab rank in Whitehaven when in his car, but (for some unexplained reason) not the first time a few minutes earlier, when the gunman had stepped out of the vehicle with his shotgun and would have been more easily identifiable.

The 7/7 bombers were innocent.

9/11 didn't happen the way they say. Flight 175, a Boeing 767, could not have been travelling at 500+ mph at that low altitude, and the steel construction of the South Tower was too strong to be penetrated by an airliner; though a cruise missile could have done it, perhaps disguised in some outer shell or hologram.

As to the last, yes, aircraft can fly faster in higher, thinner air, but according to this internet forum there is a difference between the maximum permissible speed and the maximum possible physical speed. Hall's own computerised flight path reconstruction shows the craft descending, then levelling out before impact; parts of the same internet discussion suggest that the appearance of its still being under pilot control might be given by its safety program, which automatically lifts the nose when the speed limit is exceeded. Also, even if the steel skeleton of the tower was impenetrable, the windows and cladding weren't, and thousands of gallons of volatile, burning aviation fuel travelling at half a thousand miles an hour would be quite sufficient to make a bomblike explosion.

And yet...

It was no news to the audience, or to me, that the mainstream media lie, distract and trivialise, and that the alternative media are now infested with shills, spooks and trolls; that we are in an era of competitive empire-building and the largely muslim Middle East has been targeted for systematic destabilisation.

It was also no surprise that the entertainment media have a socially disruptive tendency, endlessly picturing family squabbling and breakups as the norm. Nor that one group is set against another, as for example in the case of benefit claimants - Hall showed a snap of the Channel 5 poster that asked unemployed locals for their views, which merely suckered the volunteers: this is not the first time that I have seen the media invite people to dine without letting them know that they were on the menu. American lawyers and police confirm that you should say nothing to police, even if (especially if) you're innocent; that also goes for the apparently sympathetic interviewers for TV and radio.

Well, since my friend wasn't there and I had to work next day, I left at the nine o'clock break to catch BBC1's Question Time, another heavily steered program (told by the ever-garrulous David Dimbleby to hurry her answer, Melanie Phillips retorted that he only wanted her to come to his conclusion).

Yes, if not exactly comfortable with it, at least I'm used to the idea that we're continually lied to and bamboozled, made giddy and daft. We now have the documentary evidence that Ted Heath knowingly misled the nation about the constitutional implications of the 1972 Common Market vote; Julian Assange is still holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy so that he can't be extradited by a vengeful American government furious at, not his lies, but his revelation of inconvenient truths; Edward Snowden voluntarily kissed his successful life goodbye in order to unveil the creepy surveillance of the people by over-resourced spying organisations.

There is organised evil abroad. I just wish Richard Hall wouldn't over-egg his pudding.

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Cameron warns EU to respect UK independence

"We are particularly concerned by the situation in England - every country should respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the United Kingdom."

- Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking at a press conference with Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel on Wednesday 26th February 2014 (see 3 p.m. note):

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10664833/Ukraine-crisis-Ukraine-searches-for-missing-billions.html

Corrections and clarifications: for "England" and "United Kingdom" substitute "Crimea" and "Ukraine". Apologies for any misunderstanding caused.

However, we wish to point out that Mr Cameron has pledged a referendum on EU membership in 2017 if the Conservatives win a majority in the next General Election, or "When the moon is in the seventh house/ And Jupiter aligns with Mars" or "the twelfth of never", whichever comes last.

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How we laughed

 

 - I've just opened another washing up liquid, I don't know if you want to get a spare.

- I'll wait and get one of those big Fairies for 99p from Lidl.

- Big fairies? Are they like the dog-poo fairy, clumping around picking dogshit off the pavement and bemoaning their genes? Not pretty and petite so they can't be used in Disney? "These f-ing wings are useless, it's all about power to weight ratio."

- "I'm big boned. I know I could lose a bit off me front but me arse is perfect."

And off she went, laughing and saying "You've brought on me old trouble again."

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That double-faced companion

Above all things he feared imagination, that double-faced companion, friend on one side and foe on the other – friend in so far as one distrusts it, and enemy if one goes trustfully to sleep to the sound of its sweet murmur.

Ivan Goncharov – Oblamov

Spinoza distrusted imagination, seeing it as the primary form of defective and deceptive thinking. However, both his view and Goncharov’s may have been influenced by the absurdly superstitious worlds in which they found themselves.

These days we value our imagination, often equating it to creativity. Yet I think Spinoza and Goncharov had a point and we should distrust its sweet murmur. It seems to me that vast swathes of political reasoning are little more than the sweet murmur of imagination swirling around some more or less nebulous utopian core.

Impossibilities dressed up as possibilities, like a dream where we swoop and soar through fluffy clouds supported by nothing better than the power of the unconscious mind to pooh pooh physics.

One day there will be an app for people who hanker after a more active imagination. An app which knows our habits and limitations will trawl the web to find some imaginative yet personalised possibilities complete with bespoke ads and special offers...

...and that’s enough imagination for one day.

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Where our enemy hides

In my view a significant proportion of the public sector generates junk. This is largely achieved by ignoring efficiency and by gold-plating regulations.

The private sector also generates junk via market logic – if the customer can be persuaded to accept it, then junk it is.

So we end up with two broad types of junk and have been conditioned to accept both. This is politically convenient because it generates an endless source of misdirection over those we see as the political good guys and those we see as bad. Good junk versus bad junk.

In order to form an idea of an unknown situation our imagination borrows elements that are already familiar.

Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu

The real problem seems to be one of power – obviously. If governments, bureaucracies or global companies have too much power then they abuse it by filling our lives with junk. They don’t necessarily abuse it because ratbags are running the show, although that’s often the case, but because there is no adequate opposition. We are insufficiently junkphobic.

So we have far too many regulations, far too many constraints on individual freedom and vast global companies buy their way into the corridors of power and our lives. These trends are obviously not desirable, but the surest way to misunderstand them is to present modern politics as an antiquated left/right dichotomy.

There is no left/right dichotomy except in our political traditions which have long outlived their usefulness. The same applies to traditional political parties.

The only political issue is who has the power, what they are doing with it. If those with the power collude as they now do, then we have power structures which cannot be effectively opposed from a traditional left/right standpoint.

So the only political reality is global trends in political and economic power. The old left/right dichotomy doesn’t even come close to an adequate narrative.

This is not where our enemy hides.

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A letter to Mr Nigel Farage MEP

Dear Mr Farage

EU debate with Nick Clegg: suggestions

 

Please accept my congratulations on your accepting Nick Clegg’s challenge – one that, I hope, he will have good reason to regret having made.  May I offer some points to raise in the debate?

 

Not “why should we leave?” but “why should we join?”:  Some argue – and I think they’re right – that the English Constitution cannot be altered without the express consent of all parties, including the Commons speaking for themselves, not through elected representatives. If that is so, then all acts to date of the British Government and Parliament implying surrender of sovereignty in any degree, are ultra vires.  Why not offer Clegg that as a hypothetical starting point, and ask what reasons he could give for us to surrender our sovereignty to the EU? This shifts the onus to him.

 

College of Europe: What exactly did Clegg learn in his year there, and did he make any oaths or give any undertakings that might conflict with his duty as a British MP and Minister?

 

UK Parliament: continuing the conflict of interest theme, should all in either House who have been EU Commissioners or otherwise stand to lose their EU pension and privileges if they fail to represent a pro-EU point of view, not merely declare their interest but recuse themselves from voting or taking part in any debate that has an EU dimension?

Yours sincerely

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Frankenjigsaw

Politics has become the art of the impossible.

We have a dysfunctional economy because we have a dysfunctional society, and vice versa. The pieces in the jigsaw box don't match up with the picture on the lid.

The picture shows people providing manufactures and services for each other. Families are holding together through thick and thin, and raising their children with love and discipline. Tax rates are low because money velocity and employment are high and few need to call on the safety net of the Welfare State. After paying for the necessaries of life, there is money left over to save for emergencies and old age, and saving is worthwhile because the currency keeps its value. The country is self-governing and at peace with its neighbours. Our leaders work for our best interests, arbitrating fairly between the demands of different groups.

The pieces we have now don't make that picture, and they don't even fit each other.

Our leaders have given our law and governance to the EU, effectively abandoned border controls, sold our economic base to foreign interests and combined to oppose electoral reform that would make them more answerable to the voters.

So to distract from their comprehensive failure, they select victims to be the lightning-rods for our anger. The recent "life means life" ruling on prisoners is to give us the illusion that our judicial system is independent of Europe; benefit claimants are demonised so that we don't ask why we haven't got jobs for them to do; economic immigrants, because they cannot be excluded, are to be treated as second-class citizens (in terms of social benefits) when they arrive.

This is reminiscent of Mao's Cultural Revolution, the cynical sowing of factional discord to secure control at the top. It feels like an era is ending, and those in the know are looting the system before the collapse. If Martin Armstrong's theory is correct, it's all inevitable, part of the long-cycle economic pulse that is bringing both Marxism and representative democracy to an end.

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For Wisley, read the UK

In the latest edition of the Spectator, Melissa Kite is distributing leaflets on behalf of a local action group, about the proposed massive (2,175 houses) residential property development in Wisley. The beneficiaries, she claims, are based in the Cayman Islands (though in 2012 there was also some legal dispute in Jersey, another offshore tax haven) and stand to make a billion pounds, tax-free.

Kite says that she has been warned off her campaign by people who told her they would "wear her down"; Surrey County Council seem to have managed it in the case of another residents' association chairman at the back end of last year.

The nominee company in the Jersey case was Prestigic (Wisley) Nominees Limited Company, whose address appears to be the same as that of Prestigic Holdings Limited (Chairman: Adrian Goldsmith). It also shares that address with a chi-chi Indian restaurant called Gymkhana; the horsey connection might vaguely appeal to an equestrian fan like Melissa.

We in the UK already have to import half our food, and I don't know of any program to convert housing back to arable land. Once it's gone, it's gone, and Heaven help us if we're ever in a food crisis again as we were in the 1940s.

In any case, I have long thought that we don't have a housing shortage. Here is what I wrote two years ago (3 September 2011):

"Panellists on Radio 4's Any Questions? and Charles Moore in this week's Spectator magazine agree (with lots of others, it seems) that there is a housing shortage in the UK and the only question is how to satisfy it. I beg to differ, or at least think we can question the assumption.

1. "According to The Empty Homes Agency, there are an estimated 870,000 empty homes in the UK and enough empty commercial property to create 420,000 new homes", according to the BBC website section on Homes.

2. There are over 245,000 registered second homes in the UK, according to Schofields home insurers.

3. The 2001 census showed that average home occupation in England and Wales had declined from 10 years before, from 2.51 to 2.36 persons.

4. According to the official Housing Survey of 2008/9, 7.7 million households were couples with no dependent children; there were also 6.2 million single person households (up from 3.8 million in 1981).

5. The same survey showed that the average (mean) dwelling had 2.8 bedrooms, rising to 3.0 bedrooms for owner-occupiers. Fewer than 3% of households were defined as overcrowded.

6. According to a 2005 Home Office study, there were 310,000 - 570,000 illegal immigrants in the UK, a figure which MigrationWatch thought to be underestimated by 15,000 - 85,000. This is a separate issue from the 8.7% of the population who are economic migrants to the UK, and whose real net contribution to the economy (after taking into account all benefits to which they and their dependants may be entitled) is a matter of debate.

We are not in the situation we faced in 1945, when soldiers returning home from war squatted on military sites and even caves. The modern "housing shortage" is an arbitrary notion."

Fight on, Ms Kite.

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Breaking windows

From Wikipedia

The broken window parable has interested me for years, because much of what we do seems akin to breaking windows.

Much of what we do seems :-

Designed to fail so we can do it again.

Designed to fail so we can buy another one.

Designed to fail so we need regular maintenance.

Designed to fail so we need regular policing.

Designed to fail the vagaries of fashion.

Designed to be laborious so we need more staff.

Designed to be complex so we need more consultants.

And so on and so on. It seems to be a feature of almost any society - promoting wasteful activity once we have a full belly and a warm hut. When we can afford some illusions to keep reality at bay.

Even a Dark Age village may have been able to feed a travelling story-teller in return for a night or two of entertainment - to keep reality at bay.

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Byways

AK Haart wonders about the uselessness of much research, calling it "remunerated gossip" (a phrase that might be re-used to describe modern Parliamentary proceedings). 

Yet we never know where a line of enquiry might lead, and how profitably. Look at penicillin: Alexander Fleming was not the first to discover its bactericidal effect, and when he did he soon gave up trying to exploit it. 

Edward de Bono, the "lateral thinking" man, noted that we come to useful ideas or solutions in roundabout ways and only then build a straight path from A to B. The internet - which itself has developed into something nobody expected - is bound to result in countless fruitful connections being made, by the sort of creative intellectual bummeln that web-surfing allows. 

Granted, there will also be rubbish and (apparent) dead-ends, but if one in a billion notions gets us somewhere, then 2.4 billion users playing with the Net on pretty much a daily basis are certainly going to come up with something.

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Blair "has not volunteered for Mars mission"

http://olivierpere.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/mission-to-mars.jpg

 Our sources say that Mr ACL Blair has not yet put his name forward as a candidate for the 2023 expedition to establish a colony on Mars, though it could have certain advantages for him.

He would be safe there from attempts by members of the public to perform a citizen's arrest. Nor could he be called back to explain what he meant when advising Mrs Rebekah Brooks to establish a "Hutton style" enquiry that would "clear" her.

However, some say that Mrs Blair might be tempted to nominate him for the one-way trip, should further embarrassing evidence come to light suggesting a romantic link between him and the wife of Rupert Murdoch.

Although Mr Blair would then be aged 70, Mars One sets no upper age restriction. More important are qualities of intellect and character. We are confident that he would qualify in most, if not all respects - "The astronauts must be intelligent, creative, psychologically stable and physically healthy" - and the jaunt would certainly satisfy his well-known delight in travel.

The full astronaut specification can be seen here: http://www.mars-one.com/faq/selection-and-preparation-of-the-astronauts/what-are-the-qualifications-to-apply.

Readers may care to suggest others who might be similarly suited to go, or whom it would suit us to send.

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Fishy business

Well, we visited Torcross after all, yesterday.

You can see the sky through the fire-damaged roof of the only recently-refurbished Boat House restaurant; half the windows in the street are boarded up, and one door caved in at the bottom. Not only was the road temporarily beachified, but the beach itself is considerably narrower and is no longer a shingle beach but a bucket-and-spade sand one.

Yet the Start Bay Inn seems completely unscathed. We had half-expected to be choosing our lunchtime fish off the carpet in the lower room, but all was well, and the food as good as ever.

Thank goodness for the 1980-built sea defences; otherwise it could well have been another Hallsands clearout.

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Gi’ em what they want

Eighteenth century creamware teapot

A few decades ago we tried our hand at antiques dealing. Those were the days when every leisure centre and church hall held an antiques fair at least once a month and they were usually full because people had seen lots of antiques on the telly.

We were nervous about our first fair because we weren’t sure what to expect on the dealer’s side of the stall. Would the other dealers turn out to be supercilious experts? Well we already knew that was unlikely because we’d been to so many as browsers and occasional buyers.

Our stall was next to a guy who just sold bric-a-brac, anything from vinyl records to toys to bits and pieces of tat nobody could possibly want. Except they did want it and he was busy all day.

“I just gi’ em what they want,” he said almost apologetically after running a doubtful eye over our stall.

It was our first hard knock and a timely one too. It isn’t just a case of buying well, but of buying what people want at a price well below what they might be prepared to pay. It’s no good following your own tastes either – you have to buy what the market likes.

All this is obvious stuff and nothing we didn’t know at the time, but somehow it isn’t as easy to do as it sounds. I found it very difficult to put my interests and preferences to one side. It’s no good finding a piece of china with a rare mark if it just looks like a cruddy old teapot. To the market that’s what it is.

Cruddy old bits of china don’t sell unless there is something seriously special about them such as turning out to be early Ming. Even then it might be a fake and who can tell these days without expensive scientific tests?

It’s a strange and fickle market. For example, today you can buy good solid antique furniture for peanuts. Furniture which will easily last a hundred years.

But it isn’t as fashionable as junk from IKEA made from chipboard or lumpy furniture which looks as it was made by taking a chainsaw to some old railway sleepers. Or faux antique shabby chic which costs as much and is less well made than the real thing.

Gi’ em what they want – it's almost a philosophy.

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UK not in EU: Edmund Burke would have agreed

In 1790, while English radicals lost their heads in admiration for the French Revolution, Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" fought the flames that threatened to reach and engulf Britain: "Whenever our neighbor's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own. Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident a security."

Presciently - three years before the killings of the French King and Queen and the Reign of Terror - he warned that the abstract principles and powerful enthusiasms so dear to Richard Price and other progressive thinkers had to be contained and co-ordinated by institutions, lest they become highly destructive:

"When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with solidity and property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too; and without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate, insulated, private men. But liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power,—and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers."

To us, that last sentence may serve equally as a warning against the (supposedly ex-) Communists and other cabalists influential in the modern European Union, as about the Robespierres and Napoleons who were then still bubbling their way to the top of the French Revolutionary froth.

Richard Price's "A Discourse on the Love of our Country" (4 November 1789), to which Burke's book was a riposte, claimed that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had established the principle that we could arbitrarily choose or depose our rulers. Burke countered that although it was true that William had not been first in the royal succession and so it appeared that we had then instituted a new Constitution, yet the link with our ancient Common Law had not been broken, and had been amended by statute only so far as was necessary ("to the peccant part only") to correct the malfunction in the British body politic caused by James II's Catholicism and its concomitant threat of ceding power to persons and entities outside the kingdom.

"Though a king may abdicate for his own person, he cannot abdicate for the monarchy. By as strong, or by a stronger reason, the House of Commons cannot renounce its share of authority. The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the Constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender. The constituent parts of a state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other, and with all those who derive any serious interest under their engagements, as much as the whole state is bound to keep its faith with separate communities: otherwise, competence and power would soon be confounded, and no law be left but the will of a prevailing force. On this principle, the succession of the crown has always been what it now is, an hereditary succession by law: in the old line it was a succession by the Common Law; in the new by the statute law, operating on the principles of the Common Law, not changing the substance, but regulating the mode and describing the persons. Both these descriptions of law are of the same force, and are derived from an equal authority, emanating from the common agreement and original compact of the state, communi sponsione reipublicæ, and as such are equally binding on king, and people too, as long as the terms are observed, and they continue the same body politic."

The people, it should be unnecessary to remark, are an essential "constituent part of the state" and their part is an inalienable element in "the engagement and pact of society". Burke's stress on the continuity of the Common Law means that he could not possibly have approved of the surrender of national sovereignty implied in our unconstitutional (and therefore unlawful) entry into the Common Market in 1972, much less of the considered deceit and treasonable collusion by high officials whereby they usurped the immemorial social pact of the nation.

Though a Whig (progressive) himself, Burke is viewed as the founder of modern political Conservatism. (The Tories, believers in absolute authoritarian rule, supported the 1715 rising that tried to reinstate James on the throne; so to be a Conservative is to be opposed to Tories.) Today's Conservative voters and MPs, if they do indeed stand in the line of Edmund Burke, should be against EU membership to a man and woman.

"You will observe, that, from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our Constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity,—as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our Constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors."

"Though a king may abdicate for his own person, he cannot abdicate for the monarchy." Nor may a Parliament, or treacherous Ministers, Prime Ministers and civil servants abdicate our sovereignty for us. Our "entailed inheritance" of national freedom and self-determination is to be "transmitted to our posterity" and cannot be sold, mortgaged or gambled away.

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Blogging is not dead, but evolving

AK Haart regrets what seems to be the decline of the blog - but what are we regretting?

Are we after numbers of readers (millions would be nice) or quality? Popularity, or influence? Number of visits, or average length of visit? Number of comments, or content of comments?

In the battle between the MSM and the Internet, Goliath is still pulverising David: Martin Langeveld estimates that, even though readership has declined in recent years, 96 per cent of newspaper reading is done in relation to print editions, with only some 3 per cent online.

Similarly, Paul Grabowicz says, "A visitor spends an average of a little over 1 minute per day on a newspaper website. Compare that with the 27 minutes per day that newspaper readers say they spent perusing the print product on a weekday, and 57 minutes on Sundays, according to a 2008 survey by Northwestern University's Research Institute."

But, as Grabowicz observes,  you can offer more online: "More in-depth stories and richer content can be published on a website than in the relatively short snippets of information distributed to people via mobile devices, on YouTube and Flickr, or through blogs and micro-blog postings. Providing deeper content fulfills the public service function of journalism and can help form online communities at news websites where people can gather to discuss issues of importance to their communities, both geographic and topical."

This reminds us that people read in different ways, and for different purposes. In 2006, Holsanova, Rahm and Holmqvist studied eye-movements of a group of readers to test assumptions about types of readership and concluded, "there are three main categories of readers: editorial readers, overview readers and focused readers."

Which leads us to ask, how much of what we write is actually read? In 2008, Jacob Nielsen found that "on the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely." Grabowicz's article (linked above) also observed an increasing tendency to skim and hop about: "while the total number of unique visitors and pageviews at the newspaper websites has been increasing from 2004 - 2009, the average time spent by each person on a site declined." This jackrabbit reading was turned into a very funny Radio 4 series in 1999, called "The Sunday Format."

Writing can take into account readership tendencies, so WikiHow shows us the art of composing adverts (for example, don't use punctuation in headlines, as this encourages the reader to stop).

But unless you're doing it for money, is the reader you whore after the one you should be concerned to attract? Perhaps we need to worry more about why and what we write, and less about who and how many are reading. Posterity and the estimation of one's peers outweigh meretricious éclat.

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Why the UK is not in the European Union

U.S. Supreme Court

Norton v. Shelby County, 118 U.S. 425 (1886)

Norton v. Shelby County
Argued March 24-25, 1886
Decided May 10, 1886
118 U.S. 425

Following the decision of the highest court of the Tennessee in Pope v. Phifer, 3 Heiskell 691, and other cases, this Court holds that the Board of Commissioners of Shelby County, organized under the Act of March 9, 1867, had no lawful existence; that it was an unauthorized and illegal body; that its members were usurpers of the functions and powers of the justices of peace of the county; that their action in holding a county court was void, and that their acts in subscribing to the stock of the Mississippi River Railroad Company and issuing bonds in payment therefor were void.
 
While acts of a de facto incumbent of an office lawfully created by law and existing are often held to be binding from reasons of public policy, the acts of a person assuming to fill and perform the duties of an office which does not exist de jure can have no validity whatever in law.

An unconstitutional act is not a law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection; it creates no office; it is in legal contemplation as inoperative as though it had never been passed.

The same principle, that the Constitution overrules local and national law, means that until the people have spoken, the United Kingdom remains wholly outside the EU.

Hat-tip to Karl Denninger for the legal reference.

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Australia goes easy on tyrannical Fiji government, plans to dump asylum seekers there

- that's David Robie's anaylsis of the current rapprochement between Australia and Commodore Bainimarama.

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Love, Chinese-style

Like the Elizabethans, the Chinese are conscious that the fires of romantic love are dangerous. Roseann Lake's cultural and scientifc report suggests that the lessons are: love carefully, and refrain from criticism.

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Plus ça change

"The potentates of this world are [...] apt to consider themselves as possessed of an inherent superiority, which gives them a right to govern, and makes mankind their own; and this infatuation is almost every where fostered in them by the creeping sycophants about them, and the language of flattery which they are continually hearing."

Richard Price, "A Discourse on the Love of Our Country" (4 November 1789)

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Storms and man-made disaster

"We are apt to believe that today we experience more violent upheavals of Nature than in past generations, but this is not so. Heavy storms and exceptional weather phenomena occurred much the same in past years as now."

Reginald M. Lester, "The Observer's Book Of Weather", Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd (1955)

But we can make things worse, whether it be the EU-directed failure to dredge rivers that has exacerbated the flooding this year or the late-19th-century dredging of the pebble beach at Hallsands that led to the sea's destruction of the whole village in 1917.

We've been planning to revisit possibly the best fish and chip restaurant in England (the Start Bay Inn at Torcross in Devon's South Hams), but fear the worst after the recent weather:





Some think efforts to stop coastal erosion at Slapton Ley are ultimately doomed, anyway.

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I like ice cream

From Wikipedia

Back in the seventies when Big Questions were generally sorted out at the pub over a game of darts, a philosophically-minded friend said something to me I’ve always remembered.

“In the end you have to say I like ice cream.”

What he meant was obvious enough – we have our preferences and allegiances and in end we have to admit that’s all they are. We usually pad it out with reasoned argument, but may as well admit what’s behind it all – a liking for our own conclusions.

Most of us are not open to verbal persuasion and although the arts of argument can be good for the soul, it is worth remembering why we like ice cream. Or whatever else takes your fancy.

I like that cheap synthetic swirly stuff with a chocolate flake shoved in. I’m not so keen on proper ice cream full of genuine dairy products.

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A piece of human soliloquy

A quote from Santayana on the systems framing our ideas.

No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right.

A system may contain an account of many things which, in detail, are true enough; but as a system, covering infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our logic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and a piece of human soliloquy. It may be expressive of human experience, it may be poetical; but how should anyone who really coveted truth suppose that it was true?

George Santayana - Winds Of Doctrine Studies in Contemporary Opinion

My reading of this is that experience is one thing, but framing into some kind of congenial narrative is another, much more problematic matter.

On the whole I am a data man. The data of experience may not be entirely trustworthy, but generally it is often more trustworthy than data framed by some prior allegiance, especially those covert allegiances of self-interest.

Not only that, very often the art of life lies in allowing the data of experience to tell its story, especially where the subject is complex. Unfortunately, as complexity increases so does the commercial, institutional and political value of those framing narratives. Leviathans to which we hand over our allegiance without so much as a whipped whimper.

Yet there are many times when data does tell a story if we are prepared to listen. Many folk seem to know this instinctively. They live life from day to day, being wary of confusing the data of experience with airy speculations.

I can’t help thinking it’s a good policy, but then another airy speculation comes along and off I go a-framing.

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