tax the rich

there's some serious lies going on to protect the rich - during the budget analysis yesterday, several people wih unstated but obvious vested interested said that there's no point in taxing the rich as you don't get much money, and you should raise the base rate of tax as that way you get much more.

are they completely stupid?

do these people actually believe that we can't look at graphs of wealth and see quite plainly that most of the wealth in the country is concentrated in a small number of hands (famously 7:84 is a ratio that has hardly changed in centuries)

the fact is that if you want more tax revenue, then you can get more of it without causing tax avoidance by taxing the great unwashed PAYE public, but the potential revenue is in the rich

what is more, during a world-wide recession, they have nowhere to run, especially with Obama et al closing down the havens.

no - i am sick of this - Labour?Darling did right to raise the tax tier to 50% above 150k - but as the liberals pointed out (especially the increasingly useful Vince Cable) he could haev done more (e.g. progressibvely higher tax on unearned income and earned income rising to (say) 90% at 1M per annum.

some people say this gets rid of incentives. well if people only do a good job because of money that is sad but there are two big errors in this statement anyhow
1. the highest paid people (directors, bankers) didn't do a good job, so its wrong
2. professionals (doctors, teachers, farmers, carers) do a good job despite not having great pay, so its wrong.

no, it's wrong and its a lie.
taxing the rich is fair and works - we just havnt tried it often and long enough.

(as per other postings, more level socieities are better for everyone anyway.)

I'm not sure about being a Leveller, but I'm sure starting to head that way.


update:- the nice thing about being a blog owner is I can change it. SO lets look at the evidence that increasing taxes reduces the wealth of the nation shall we. Ok, so tax burdens in much of europe over the last 100 years went from 0 for the poor to on the order of 20% and from 0 or close to for the rich to in the range 40-90% depending where you look. Did wealth decrease? did it?

so in the countries where state provision of services is high (lets say scandinavia)
how do they fare in average quality of life? how well does that correlate.

Maybe we need to ignore the USA as a pathologically weird part of the world. perhaps we need to ignore the frightened squeals of people who are wrong.
oh, no, wait, the US - now quality of life in Mass or Cal?

let me re-cite
the spirit level
which contains a wealth of evidence.
instead of ranting in a datafree way.

The history of tax might give some intersting indications about whether increasing the steepeness on the slope of progressive taxation (whether on income or on property or on goods and services) actually makes people move wealth elsewhere - it is fairly clear also that things have changed a LOT in the last 100 years - see the
HMRC's brief history in the uk
for a light read. US has similar figures - indeed, it seems to reflect the social moves from agricultural based population to an urban/industry or post-industry based one.

Certainly, raising a shed load of money purely by increasing slope of progressive tax on "earned" income is limited - but note there are many sources of income and repositories of wealth (and of unfairness) - Countries have redistributed wealth in lots of ways and I don't see a correlation with the sum total evaporating - of course you can get it wrong - that is irrelevant - we're arguing from a standpoint that the market model is bogus (always was - it just got lucky for a short time - gambler's streak) and its proponents are intellectually, morally, and probably sometimes economically bankrupt:)

lets move on...

why not arrest all foreign national students on arrival

see bbc story: about students held for 11 days without trial

we might as well save hassle and arrest all students as they arrive in this country and give them a brief spell in jail - many of them will then go home in disgust, freeing up places for all the unemployed 25 year old and younger who now need a place to study...
and the ones that stay wont need arresting abgain, saving many embarassing moments for policemen carrying secret documents openly or hitting them on the head in demos with riot shields...

we could call it speculative anti-terrorism

a modest proposal, #123

apologists for official torture and police violence

so cheney now says torure works and the uk police chiefs defend handling of G20 demo

are these people completely stupid?
do they think the world is a static, passive, punch ball?

do they think the "other side" is a fixed point with fixed behaviour?

they
a) create more enemies
b) escalate the violence the enemies are prepared to commit

how do we fire these people?

this is not about appeasement. it is about us taking control of our servants and
not letting them screw things up beyond all recognition.

If we don't reign in the dogs, we will deserve what we get.

I think Obama should get Mossad to assassinate Cheney

why we havn't seen any alients yet

there's this theory (conjecture/hypothesis) attributed to lots of different people that there cannot be any aliens else why havn't we seen any yet.

My explanation is that we are actually in a corner of the Universe that is an area of outstanding national beauty, and tourists are not allowed to visit here anymore
(viz, antarctica

why wouldn't they want to talk to us humans, I hear you cry.
why? would you?

E-mail smears handling defended

sounds like some sort of mud slide/rugby tackle kind of scenario

smears handling - hmm - maybe not - maybe this is marketing fr a new web based laundry service?

truth fairy

as often, A Softer World is so true...

G20 police state

so journalists and police behaved equally (almost) appallingly at the G20 demo - first off, around 30 photographers surrounded the guy throwing stuff the the RBS glass window - not one tried to stop him while 1 demo guy (the ONLY other one there) did try and reason with him

then 30 police surround an "innocent" bystander and knock him to the ground (and the only visible demo guy there is trying to help the chap on the ground, but none of the polis do) and he dies. like it would have been ok if he was on the demo, maybe, or brazillian:-(

if this was a python sketch, his dying words might have been
"...I didn't expect the IDF..."

see
bbc for various video links...including lovely police medical help and
culpable by ommission journalists.
In this video you can clearly see the chap trying to stop the yoofs bustin up the RBS window....

now we have this woman being slapped in face with glove then hit with baton

this is not proportionate behaviour by the police - it is assault.

fictional biograph of the mayor of london...

entitlted
the risable rise of Mayor Johnson - Tragic Tory

first sentence,


like gollum, boris was a creature of Hobbit...

three elephants in the G20 room

so the lovefest between Mr Brown and Mr Obama continues - but they seem to be completely ignoring the real problems - they are truly in lala land

the lessons of the Bush era are at least threefold

social capital is more important than banks

religion and terrorism go hand in hand

expansion and environment are incompatible

yet they are not doing anything about equalising the differences between rich and poor,
improving the education of masses so that religion is revealed as a distraction, and every statement about economy is about getting back to the expansionist days - what is wrong with them? they'be learned the superficial story and are treating the symptoms, not the cause.

frankly, I think we should have days where we
a) turn off the stock exchanges for 24 hours at random
b) anti-sabbath days where it is illegal to go to church/synagog/mosque
c) turn off the electricity grid for 12 hours at random to encourage people to lag their houses and fridges better.

Drugs Tests for Bankers

its time we instituted this = we need sober, level headed people in the financial world
and so we need people that don't down a bottle or two at lunchtime.

noone should be in charge of the world's future who isn't as sober as a judge...
[oops:=]

actually, someone sent me this article in the FT on
10 principles of Black Swan avoidance which looks pretty sane

clocks v. teardrop

massive+
coldplay

side by side - worth a remix, anyone?

the randomness of fish

so how come every country in europe has a different word from a completely different root for every type of european fresh and salt water fish except salmon and trout?

i mean ask a grek, german, french, or whatever for the word for
Bass, Bream, Cod, Dogfish, Hake, Haddock, Herring, Lemon Sole, Whitebait, etc etc
and you get a totally different answer

obviously the norman french in england didnt eat much fish or at least in english we'd have the same words (as we do for the meat of animals) as the french....

Taxing Bankers Bonuses - simple proposal

so how about we propose a very high tax on bonuses which were not earned.
to determine if they were earned should be easy -
case 1 - the company is in profit (i.e. profit share)
case 2 - company is moving into profit from loss (incentive)

case 1 is trivial - indeed both cases would be covered if bonuses were simply shares and people were patient, and paying stock as a bonus was only taxed as income.

In the counter example, senior staff at companies like AIG or RBS who made a massive loss AND only exist because of bailouts, would be taxed at (say) 90% on income over (say) 1M pounds. This would leave incentives intact, but recoup money from poor decisions by early shareholders meetings. at least to the government. who is, um, the biggest shareholder now.

bankers enbezzling

enbezzeling is like embezzelling only its the opposite, and thinner - just as an
en is thinner than an em, and it takes n en's to make 1 em.


lovely headline in the metro today - picture of said baker's waste bin with apparently discarded cardboard box for a piggy bank!! given their ability at the job, I am surprised the bin wasn't just full of 50 pound notes.

Meanwhile, the row about Sir Fred's pension rolls on and on. There seems to be some confusion in the world - people claim :-

i) you have to pay people this much to get good people. well the banks got idiots, so the pay is obviously not the key to attracting able and smart individuals
ii) you can't take away his pension.

well, yes you can - its called tax. we could have a 99% tax for unearned income - given RBS went broke, he obviously didn't earn the money - this would be neat as it wouldn't impact bonuses for people that actually increased the value of a company

Finally someone said (many times) we can't have a high tax, low income economy as we would drive the smart people away. How come Sweden has Saab and Volvo and Ericsson and so on then? THey have high taxes, plausible income, and still make stuff.

Ah, I know what it is thatcher and major and blair and brown wanted the right kind of
stupid bankers who don't make anything useful (not even trickle down). You can't get those in a country that just wants to build stuff people want and provide good health and education. oh no.

digital britain misses the point

lord carter's report on digital britain misses the point.

If it doesn't make stuff (buildings, food, entertainment, heat/light, transport)
more, or cheaper, or both, then it is no use.

services are out. manufacturing is in.

digital is just an enabler.

hall of shame for economists, think tanks, bankers

we really need a sort of "amnesty international" site for all the bloody economists, advisory think tank and quangoes, government treasury officials and especially bankers who got us in this mess. a sort of fc for these bozos.

it is so clear that beneath the veneer of fancy maths (and a few people that might actually get it but know their limitations), things like black swan, etc, the reality is that there is no economic theory of value whatsoever. all that talk about stopping boom/bust by controlling interest rates, and rate limiting computer based automatic trades on the stock market to keep the system stable, and similar things are superficial - fundamentally, the root of economics that seem to support the free market idea was
the Chicago school, rooted in Nash Equilibria and game theory - but these assume rational players - as we know, people aren't rational selfish, they can be barking mad, they can exhibit herding and they can be altruistic - all of these mean that a market doesn;'t operate - Behavioural economists try to capture this, but once you open the door to including a "psychological" element to your model of the market, you have to admit that it is essneitally not a predictive model any more - it is just descriptive - and you have to agree that not only are the arrival processes of information/value heavy tailed (i.e. hard to predict rare events happen when you don't expect - so large deviation theory models, but doesn't help you contain the rare large event) but also synchronised irrational behaviour is hard or impossible to predict - some of this behaviour includes paranoia (i.e. non sharing of information) which means that the market doesn't operate correctly (e.g. bankers don't pass on risk information correctly)

all of this means that we should be haning out all the free market morons to dry in the cold cold wind.

bu alas, noone in positions of power seems to have the guts.

my proposals

1. let all the banks go broke -
get their acount information details, and bail out all indivudal savers only.
let all debtors off the hook.

2. institute a usuary-free world, worldwide - lenders can
lend for
i) share of profit only (sharia style - or just like venture capitalists, amusingly)
or
ii) as mutuals
and
iii)
all risk assesment must be published. non secondary trading (i.e. you are not allowed to sell or buy money)

of course, all the people that gave money to the democrats, republicans and tories and labour would then be broke - so?

carp ark

this is what caused the willy-measuring excercise recently under the deep atlantic when the french and english navy tested the soundness of their nuclear subs....thee captains were momentarily distracted by a passing Carp Ark.

on the train recently , a joking driver said "please remember to take all their belongings with you ,and keep your seatbelt buckled at all times

meanwhile, Popco by scarlett thomas is an excellent book - it is the first time I've read a fictional work which has crypto jokes down to the main characters being called Alice Bob Carol, Dave, Esther etc....

I have to ask you, dear reader, are you an uncle or an aunt?

what do comedy, music, video have in common?

answer: beat

a beat is a pause to elicit a response - musicians use a pause (breath)
and comics use it, and videos use it - even xkcd uses it:)

when bonuses for maing money exceed profit...

is that what they call the "tipping point" ??? :-) :-):-)

bbc news uncritically shows israeli politician redefining war terms

yet again, western media allows an Israeli politician slightly to the right of le Pen, get away with claiming all the children killed in gaza were human shields used by Hammas.

Just as with the american redefinition of people to get away with locking up
random suspects in gitmo (neither civilian nor army), the israeli right are basically redefining "civilian in the way" to be "shield". unfortunately for them, despite not letting in western press, there is not only plenty of evidence of (and witnesses to) cases where the children killed weren't actually in front of anyone, but there are also plenty of people who aren't stupid - if you invade another territory, and its urban, then if you don't give the people a) a place to go and b) time and means to get there and c) make sure they have gone, then when you drop bombs on it, you are killing civilians - it doesn't actually matter that you might also kill people in the army of the "other side" - of course, if the "opposing army" was about to fire a rocket that killed a zillion of your side, you might make some sort of Hiroshima-like judgement call. But you better have a pretty strong case - since this is blatantly not the case, then the only interpretation is that this is a war crime.

of course, the Hamas charter doesn't really help matters, given its fairly insane repetition of 80 year old nazi distortions of reality.given the nazis would have very happily gassed the palestinians alongside the jews, (given they're all semitic and un-aryan) its fairly suicidally stupid of the author's of Hamas charter to mention this B.S.

but that isn't sufficient excuse

meanwhile (pace, godwin) Hamas aren't exactly doing themselves any favours with this self inflicted harm

banker bonuses - what's the problem?

in the tech. area, when you want to give someone a bonus, you give them stock - this strongly incentivizes them to think about
a) working for the company
and
b) working for the long term

why are banks different? why do they get cash bonuses? bogus.
give them stock and let them rise or fall by their own success/failures:)

bad science in the news again.....more mmr (but also copyright)

see for the whole shebang - I think it is tricky to post more than a small extract of audio (ditto text from writing) in copyright aw, no matter that it is hard to see how really stupid the Jeni thing is without hearing the entire thing. I suspect, legally, there's no argument (the copyright infringement will trump the right of the public to discuss the abuse of media to give wrong medical advice)

one simple solution is to take THEM to court for risking kids lives, and then the evidence will be part of the court case, and in the public domain ...

it turns out that fraudulent medical advice is criminal...

meanwhile, the times reports that the report that started this whole sorry saga was (probably) based on fudged data

legarchy - new (wrong) type of government...

so the government behaviour (in US and UK) in the current banking crisis and economic woes and excuse making (without any sorry) reminds me of the previous woes (iraq war, no weapon of mass destruction) and the NHS IT Programme, and other unapologetic massive mistakes of judgement and strategy that have gone on in the last 12 years.

Basically, the way the government(s) have gotten off the hook is by arguin the minutiae, like they are in court (indeed, actually in court when it came to the death of david kelly).

The minutiae aren't the point. they are lawyers tricks to distract people from the real
problem - huge failures of ethics and gigantic misunderstanding of the limitations of intelligence and market economics.

its like since Blair and Bush, everyone can get off "on a technicality" even though we all know they are guilty.

time for less credulous jurors.

wildlife in an urban winter garden

on saturday, at 11am, in quick succession, we had a large grey squirrel, a big black&white cat, a VERY large wood pigeon, and a huge fox, sitting in the garden.
I hope they are
a) all ok in the snow we now have
and
b) are not about to test the food chain

the squirrel looked to fast for the fox and too big for the cat - the pigeon was about right for the fox, but probably too big for the cat - i have no idea whether a fox would go for a domestic cat (I doubt it but it would be a big meal).

socialism 2.0 v. depression 2.0 - maybe governments will topple?

All over Europe (and elsewhere) people are starting to express their anger at the financial mess and it looks like the population at large (the great unwashed people that havn't stopped working harder and harder for the last 20 years, and can't see why they have to pay more tax to bail out banks whose bosses retire on multimillion dollar bonuses despite screwing up) are finally starting to demand some sort of significant change - one small aspect of this is the recent complaints about migrant workers taking local jobs - c.g. brown telling workers they are wrong to complain about people being moved 1000s of miles to provide cheap labour

The only reason this can work is that those people are coming from an area that
a) is in the EU (otherwise the availability of local labour would rule out work permit)
b) an area in the EU that has very low housing cost (otherwise the people moving would be paying for local housing and for housing their families back home)
c) apartment rent must be very low in the worker site compared with local labour's housing cost - if you move enough people, this will also impact local housing costs
and finally there is no allowance for carbon costs (let alone social cost) of moving people around peridocally

there's a short term argument (like shortselling shares) that this is just adjusting the labour market. but it doesn't allow for long term market (like transport and housing and so on - e.g. schools etc - if a person moves to Doncaster from Warsaw to do some work, then where do their taxes go to pay for infrastructure (schools, hospitals, police).

No sorry, this is not as simple as Brown likes to think it is and in the current climate, using free labour market arguments is really really going to annoy a lot of people.

interestingly the latest news appears to indicate the government has realised that allowing companies to move people from EU country A to B and to exclude employees who are from country B is not exactly the intention of "free" markets in anything...just dodgy company behaviour!

Davos - clueless - possibly as evil as Dr Who's Davros...

RIP John Martyn

jonny too bad - saw him at a bbc "live" recording once where he was supposed to do just 3 songs - he was skining up and asking bob harris (compere) for a light all the time, and after the 3 for the beeb, he played an hour and a half of requests for the audience

mostly stuff from solid air or before - unbelievable - what is cool is how he worked out the timing for his breathing so he could sing these very long lines, with all sorts of vocal trickery, while still playing a mean guitar (whether just straight acoustic like in Spencer the Rover or May you never or glory of love, or with fancy echo/slap effects as in Inside Out or Dealer or even a mix in a slow song like Dancing or One World ...)

sad day to see him go...says pneumonia - unnecessary - and that he was just starting a project with pharoah sanders - what might have been (recalls that hendrix was about to start recording with Miles Davis...when he passed away)

BBC not showing the DEC Gaza relief appeal

so i suppose one might just about argue that the "news" that the BBC won't show the
DEC's Gaza appeal on TV today has made the appeal more newsworthy - indeed, the BBC's website has had updates (e.g.) on the BBC's position on this every day since the DEC first said it was going to run an appeal, and one suspects more people have seen that than would watch a "live tv appeal" nowadays.....


ironic really

on the other hand, the BBC's position on neutrality is completely bogus in this case.
ANY appeal for help surrounding a war will be seen by some as partisan. The point of the DEC is that they are very specifically neutral in what the conditions for relief are. The BBC has a public duty to report this, and license payers should complain if they don't.

If I was into conspiracy theories, I'd say it was yet another example of the power of the Jewish lobby (board of british deputies) in the UK. I'd point out it has backfired (see first point in this post), and would refer people to Avi Shlaim's fine letter in the guardian today

Note that the Beeb's senior people made at least one provably false claim when saying that audeicens might confuse footage used during the DEC appeal with BBC coverage of the "conflict" - Israel didn't allow foreign journalists in to cover the conflict, so we know all the BBC footage during the conflict was from outside Gaza. The DEC footage is from AFTER the conflict and is obviusly not during wartime (you can see this clearly in the appeal on TV today). So the beeb are immoral and bad at lying too.

atheist bus driver...

so this guy refuses to drive the bus with the atheist bus slogan on it - i wonder if he refused to drive buses with adverts for jobs in the army (given he's an evangelical christian, shouldn't he have problems with the "shall not" and "kill" thing?)

perhaps he should also read
this

the whitehouse agenda

is public - see
obama's agenda

lots of good stuff - especially support for science and technology and
re-build programmes

but i still say he should re-paint and re-name it the Black House...

my only disappointment is his unequivocal support for Israel on the same page as talking tough about Pakestan and Iran (but he does say specifically good things w.r.t Palestine)

doesn't seem too joined up there to me:(

gitmo closure will be its own epitaph

basically it will be impossible for any of the remaining prisoners in guantanamo
bay to get a fair trial anywhere n the world - evidence obtained by torture, distortions by their captors and the risk to them in their own contries are all factors - this is why Bush was so DAMN stupid having hte place setup, as there's no doubt amongst this lot, were some bad guys- but how will they ever be filtered out? what a mess

the whole point of european and US justice systems is that they evolved a number of checks and balances over the last 1000 years to give a good chance of catching bad guys, a low chance of false conviction of good guys, and incentive alignment (so police/government aren't incentivised to cook up false evidence or torture people) - this stuff stood up for 1000 years despite despots, revolutions, wars, terrorism and so on - even nazi war criminal accuses after Nuremberg were handled carefully, despite all the massive complexities of getting witnesses (alive, not taken into darkest russia etc)

then a bunch of jumped up no-good redneck pig-ignorant (sorry, pigs) newbies who have NO discipline and do not understand this, think they can idly change the rules over night.

morons.

bush (and blair)'s legacies: crap justice; crap security; crap governments; crap economics.

meanwhile, see the slate for a report on the first inkling that there might be legal cnsequences for bush's administration - I wonder if Blair can be got similarly (or extradighted to the US for trial) because of contrituting via the extraordinary rendition (aka abduction).?

so i suppose the real explanation of gaza is...

....that the israelis need a holding position for when they cease getting the US support (8 days from now) that Bush has been giving (even to the extent of overruling Condaleeza Rice recently on the UN vote where the US abstained).....

so this is the ultimate cynical pre-emptive strike...

Irony used to be part of native jewish humour

so the repeated cant that Hammas are terrorists
holding innocent victims in front of them while the israeli army has to shoot them to stop the missiles is based in a model of Hammas as some invading force in Gaza rather than a representative government (however dodgy)
the recent demo by pro-israeli supporters in london led by England's chief rabbi in trafalgar square repeats this sadly incorrect view of the world, which is simply not going to help anyone understand where to go next.

the sad irony is that the british army viewed early israeli settlers just before the declaration of the state of Israel as terrorists - indeed it is pretty hard to see how the Stern Gang's blowing up of the King David Hotel which killed 92 people (significantly more than the last 3 months of Hammas missiles) could be viewed as anything other. Yet the british went on to embrace the state of israel only 2 years later.

one more point: pro-israeli apologists like to say that Hamas cause the civilian deaths by hiding their weaponsmasters behind women and children - aside from the absurd contradiction inherent in this (Hamas are a govnemnet in gaza - they can go anywhere they like - the IDF choose to shoot at them, and could equally choose not to. the Israeli's kill palestinian civilians and must take 100% of the blame. But more critical still, the Israeli's 300,000 settlers in the westbank are doing EXACTLY the same thing (hiding a settlement behind civilians) and then getting a certain level of IDF support (bulldozoing any homestead of a Palestinian daring enough to object with actual action).

perhaps the israelis learn something new again from their own history. in particular, they should learn how long the memories are of victims, since that's where they start from themselves.

IDF cowards - goliath versus david...

so the striking thing about the current conflict in israel/palestine is the inversion of the old story - when the 6 day war happened, everyone looked at the Israeli's as the underdog - and the brace "david" fighting the mad arab invaders. Indeed, up until the recent fights in Lebaonon with Hezbollah, this was still somethigng the IDF could coast on

nowdays a new generation of wishy washy 3rd generation israeli soldiers don't cut the mustard and the image is one of a lumbering Goliath of Zion, ironically against the brave david of Gaza....

now we have a classic inversion

what a shame to make a mistake of such biblical proportions. I used to respect them

the final figures (1300 dead to 13) are basically proof of a crime. Olmert was quoted as saying that this was "inevitable" again (seems like the Israeli propaganda machine only has one word) and that a lower death count of Palestinians could only have been achieved at a higher death count of Israelis. Not true - if israel had kept previous agreements to open up borders (as per Egyptian brokered deal in summer 2008) then Hammas might have fired less missiles - and no deaths. Typical distortion of realty.

How many dead palestinians does it take to change the equation "X wants Y totally destroyed" from X=Hamas and Y=Israel, to X=Israel and Y=Palestinians. ?

When would you start to call it genocide?

bendy buses, boris johnson, bikers

I still havn't met anyone who admits for voting for boris for mayor of london - I never understood how his "policy" of getting rid of bendy buses was going to attract the (generally alt) biker community anyhow

i think some people thought they were voting for the elizabethan Playwright, Ben Jonson
(author of the aptly titled "the devil is an ass" :-)

mullah versus moulah [b|w]ankers

this is the replacement for the cold war - the new crusade will be capitalism versus islamism....i suppose lotsa people have said this, but it seems more and more obvious - even Obama's US seems to be aligned this way during current events...

madness

the word "banker" used to be a euphemism. now wanker is too polite for them.

no alternatives to war crimes in gaza?

Israeli Defense Minister Tzipi Livni claims that there is "no alternative" to bombing Hammas and associated diverse innocent bystanders back to oblivion.

Well there is - there is doing nothing. she claims Hammas will just go on lobbing missiles over the border. sure - at the current rate it would take them a year to kill as many people as Israel has done in 5 days. But would they? how does she know?
And what will they do as Israel goes on killing? does she think that support for Hammas (a US and Israeli supported democractically elected government in Gaza) will suddenly evaporate because of the assault? at which deathpoint will this happen? at what point will the death level and support level be "right" for Israel? what if she is simply wrong and the support for missiles is _proportional_ to the number of Gaza strip inhabitants killed? then what she is doing is not "the only alternative" - it is (as many people propose) the cause of the problem.

basically, as I've said often before, the state of Israel right now is behaving like one of the two optional behaviours for victims of child abuse (if you figure the Holocaust as massive chld abuse) - abusers either become extremely withdrawn, and difficult/autistic people, or else they become abusers. They perpetrate abuse. and they are perptetrating it on Gaza, and what will Gaza do in response? most likely, exactly the same thing again.

alternatives? Lizvni and her like do not understand the meaning of the word. this is fairly typical for fascists.

the latest in this line of control is that Israel won't let reporters into the area. They were happy to show off the "missile" (more like firework) damage caused by Hammas over the last few months, but are unhappy to let people around the world see the massive destruction they are wreaking on a re-nascent nation state. This is against Israeli law (by the way). I note that the Israeli primeminister is well versed in the art of misrepresentation ("how many rockets would be proportionate?", he asks. Well, doh, how many deaths/lives might be the question. "they shouldn't have started it" he says. well doh, how about not blockading their airspace and shoreline, so they can trade, get middle class and stop being terrorists then!).

what amazes me is that Israeli's vote for their stupid long-term suicidal governments instead of waking up and smelling the coffee ("Hell") and reading the writing on the wall (it's in their holy book) and crossing the rubicon.

here's what hammas has. fairly pathetic inaccurate, 10lb of fertlizer bomb.
in contrast, the IDF's kit includes 3rd generation laser guided kit at least as powerful as the old bolt which had 750lb of high explosive.

the IDF also has antimissile missiles and good radar. oh, and controls 100% of the sea and airspace in, around and above Gaza. oh, and UAVs. This is called a "killing ground".

yeah, Hammas should declare that Israel has a right to exist - co-exist might be a better way to put it- as that would kind of hint at reciprocation (e.g. rights for Palestinians in Gaza to live according to norms like abilty to travel, trade etc freely - the BBC have your say sight asked what should be done to get peace - as usual a bunch of ignorant right wing nutters dominate the contributions with calls for Hammas to "do something first". oh well - asking the public was always a stupid idea:)

Gimme Shelter - Gaza's just a shot away

Israeli's like to bang on about how small and fragile Israel is - one factoid oft mentioned is that it is a rifle shot across (from the occupied west bank to the meditterranean).

Well, how do they think people in Gaza feel? its narrower still, and blockaded and bombed.

The continuing hypocrisy of Israel's use of the history of the holocaust as a blanket excuse for perpetrating current war crimes (300 people so far in response to 1) is really astounding.

I don't like petitions, but this one
http://www.avaaz.org/en/gaza_time_for_peace/?cl=161516404&v=2605>from Avaaz seemed as worth signing as others.

Why are western "leaders" so muted in their condemnation?

science versus faith

there is more meaning in entropy than religion
and
there is more entropy in religion than meaning.

go figure

Campaign for Real Money.

I expect everyone is getting thoroughly sick of yet more financial service downturn news
whether its Madeoff-with-it, sub-prime, short-selling, etc etc

While I don't have a concrete theory to offer to underpin the idea, I would claim that economists are intellectually now as bankrupt as their concrete bemodiements of their ideas and the time has come to get rid of all this stuff they have produced - we (as medics, scientists, engineers) have MADE stuff that works (better longer lives, more cheaper travel, safer food and water, more sources of entertainment, even self-generated entertainment, communications, safer cheaper nicer buildings you name it) - a century of stock markets are NOT why this all worked - we exponentially improved medicine and technology - the market returns go up and down, up and down, and lurch into criminally in competent (or just plain criminal) collapse at the drop of a hat - Ben Goldcre's wrath at nutritionists and liberal arts journalists and so on could easily be redirected (by me:) at economists - they have been proven WRONG - their models dont work - why do governments seek to bail out the market ?

SHUT IT DOWN. NOW. FOREVER. do something new based on new thinking. Hey, we have the compute power - maybe a combination of Sharia Law Venture Capital, and central planning and barter would work

Vote for a new system - down with the old....out with a 100 years of rubbish!!!!!

MMR-- => measles++ and autism??

So one thing occurred to me reading the chapter in Bad Science on the MMR fiasco.

We can thank Wakefield for causing the UK to do one experiment no
ethics committee would have let us do - which is to massively decrease
the level of vaccination against measles, mumps and rubella, and see
how long it takes for the diseases to pick up abgain in the
population. This must be a source of invaluble data for
epidemiologists.

But (I didn't see this in the book, maybe its there and I was
laughing at the funny bits too much to spot it) we also ought to be
able to detect any other changes - crucially for example, if the
MMR-gang were a tiny tiny tiny bit right, then the drop in MMR levels
(proved by the current measles outbreak) would lead to a drop (or
slowdown in increase) in Autistic spectrum kids....has anyone done
this study? [I know I know it shouldn't be necessary) - hey though, what if autism went up even more and it appeard MMR protected people slightly from autism or else the people that worry about things like MMR are more likely to have autistic kids and some element of the way the kids are treated or the spectrum is diagnosed or whatever other effect) could be fascinating to find nothing or something!

how to stop people wearing hoodies

start a rumour that they are all people on the sex offenders lists (i.e.
"All Hoodies are Paedos" maybe write a letter to the Sun and Mail about it
that ought to see if go out of fashion faster than Guy Ritchie britgangsta movies... :-)

today's random 3 thoughts before jetlagged breakfast

1. there should be celebrity celebrity charts

2. we need to have counterfeit economists

3. sex is basically a programme for recursive replicating meat machines

4. Heroes is Lost (I mean that televisually, literally , and metaphorically)

black holes and recessions

There's a black heart
at the center of the Galaxy and
at the center of the Economy

surely some connection?

The Bicameral Nativity

with apologies to xkcd and Julian Jaynes

Mary had a real friend (Joseph) and an imaginary friend (the Holy Spirit)
and she oscillated between them until one day, she underwent a singular transformation
on the plane of Gallilee
and finally wound up in a stable relationship.

No-one, not even the shepherd, could figure out the problem of the three wise bodies.

I got the "no blues" blues...

in wisconsin
all gods children
cannot play the blues

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yfjTrrBE_eI

intelligent design proved

the bbc reports that religious people are shunning nanotechnology. Aside from the idea of shunning technology being rather surreal ("LCD TV, I refuse to talk to you - I am sending you to Coventry with the iPhone"), stranger still is the idea that people who need all the help they can get would avoid any evidence that intelligent design is actually feasible...

I suppose the same thing might be true of GM too...

i think the indicator lights on mercedes are fake

i think people thqt buy mercs and beamers have spent so much of their hard won dosh that they can't afford fitting s like indicator lights

otherwise why else is it that these cars never signal on turning?

i mean we can excuse poor cyclists as they can't even afford 4 wheels...

I knew I had a buggy upbringing

That the direction of travel as a baby affects affection should be obvious really...

cell phone as ID card...

I quite like the idea of my cell phone being an ID card for 2 reasons

1. if I lose it, the government can help me find it - i think we should demand mandatory tracking of id cards for this reason.

2. there's a really strong incentive for people not to nick it as it is a way worse crime than just nicking a phone.

all sorts of benefits accrue from this, including really accurate driver (rather than car) based congestion charges, and all sorts of useful tricks in emergencies (instead of broadcasts on trains saying "is there a doctor on board" one would just ask the doctor to go the the right carriage).

why on earth would any honest people object to these advantages just because of some sentimental attachment to some fictional notion of privacy?


:-)

living in a newspaperbound world

so i've noticed commuters, even on heavily overcrowded trains, will open up a broadsheet newspaper as a means of establishing their space, and as a barrier to intrusion on their patch - this supports what I suppose we all know that people that read those papers (times, guardian, telegraph, FT, indy) are smarter than people that read tabloids:)

its a sad day when they ban happy hours...but there's light...

so i pubs are not allowed to have happy hours by this puritanical scots led government, can I propose a solution:

haev 23 sad hours, and one not so sad hour.

game over.

democracy and advertising

the US democrat mantra reminded me of a brilliant advert/logo
for the Metal Box Company - it just says "we can"

meanwhile, change sure gonna come - but maybe small change, and maybe it'll get rained on with its on 38 if their aint some fast moves in the middle east and on the economy

igpay atinlay and council bans on use of

English is the Lingua Franca of the World

which is Latin for french language, but is meant to mean
"the language used everywhere between people that otherwise might
speak other, different languages"

on the other hand, English is a union of pretty much every language,
hence when someone invades or immigrates into England, rather than make them learn
English, we just glom their language onto the base, and everyone else has to learn to grok it.

If it was "vice versa", then the amount of work,
"pro rata", would be the same, but would be
"via" the immigrants, rather than the indigenous peoples.

Although it is an "ad hoc" arrangement, and leads to
"ad lib" creativity, the "quid pro quo" is that English
is a richer language than any other in the world, although
it is fair to say that in some sense or other, it isn't a
"bona fide" language, more a meta-language.
with many e.g.s of weird juxtapositions
such that geeky literati anoraks
will frequently incur schadenfreude amongst
naive readers of their utterances.

hence councils should not ban the use of any weird bits
viz bbc article on same
is silly:-)

"QED"

Gruelty, thy name is Woe, Man

Too Gruel to be kind, he was washed up
on the shore of the Gruel Sea, where
he pitched up at the Salvation Navy
only to be served a thin soup
by a Gruel Sister.

"We Grew L-shaped bannanas back in
the Generous Isles" he moaned.
"Grr. You'll just have to put up
with this thin soup" she retorted,
measuring it out with a retort.

"grate", he described

the customer is always wrong

as a frequent railway traveller, i am bombarded with signs by networkrail
about how "we take very seriously assaults on our staff"

why? i mean why the "on our staff" bit? I dont see why the employment role of the victim affects the seriousness of the assault - it is always serious, and don't the railway companies and operators have an equal duty towards their customers, who are paying after all, to give them a safe and pleasant journey in all regards?

I have frequently been dealt with by abusive staff, and I dont see why the companies, by implication, think I am in a "second class" role in the relationship. This is a dodgy culture - see how it influences staff behaviour in airlines, where the customer is basically treated worse than cattle, under constant threat, stress and even danger.

no, the customer is always right was always a good motto; but when someone assaults someone else, whatever the relationship, that is wrong. the two situations are orthogonal.

i want 5% of my license fee back

at least 2 shows I wanted to see have been pulled due to the BBC "suspension" of My J.Ross. Given they are not going to pay him 1M pounds, that means they've saved money - however, tonight they are showing Speed (an old movie I've seen many times) and this is an unacceptable replacement for the J Ross show (which was to have had David Attenborough and Frank Skinner). Last night they showed an episode of Buzzcocks without Russell Brand, who had been billed as going to appear - it was the most boring episode of that usually very funny programme I have every seen.

This is not good enough, and I want my money back

y'know some people that should know better have written about this - today(saturday nov 1) guardian said that what went wrong is that ross/brand picked on the weak, "breaking the first rule of comedy" - well, doh, y'know I could have sworn that the first rule of comedy was "be funny".

have a go nazi "have your say" commentators - spinless, clueless bbc

to the 27000 people who in the last 24 hours complained on the bbc "have your say" feedback site about a more than 1-week-old bbc radio 2 broadcast which only had 2 complaints on the day:

sheep

thats not "your say" - that is following the lead of sky and the mail and other media fascists who tell you what to think

shame on you

you know of bbc radio 1 listeners interviewed (and prepared to say to someone's face, rather than anonymously on a wen site) 6:1 were in favour of ross and brand staying on the beeb and don't understand what the sense-of-humour failure is all about

well i understand - its about ownership of channels and if you are a follower of the complaint lobby, you deserve to be locked in a room with american cable tv and fast food for a year to understand what you are really "voting" for

idiots. there are over 4000 articles on the net about this - this is more than google finds about Barack Obama's TV ad 5 days before the final voting day for the US presidential election.....so what does this tell you about the media's priorities ? or ability to do a professional job in interpreting what is important for the public? frankly, I think the media at large are hipcritical, incompetent and corrupt, and their overreaction is many many many times more dubious than the original actual event.

the bbc doesn't help with its on bland blandishments...

not only that, but the bbc believes other people's interpretation -for example, newsnight reported "27000 complaints" on have your say -actually at that point in time, there were 27000 comments - many were not complaints.

and treating people it pays to be outrageous like naughty public schoolboys , "suspending" them while it "investigates - what is that suposed to mean - we all have the audio of the radio programme - we've seen sach and his gradndaughter interviewed and we've seen apologies - what is "suspend" anyhow? what does their employment contract say? surely it says they were doing their job; they ddnt break the law; they didnt bring the bbc into any more disrepute than they had already or were likely to again...

today Brand is suposed to be headin up a team on never mind the buzzcocks, a fairly "in your face" (but very funny) programme, as well as a ppearing on channel 4 later on another show. ross is supposed to be doin his friday nite thing, which had attenborough and also frank sinner (another risky but much funnier comedian)

here's my view - if the bbc pulls those programmes, I want my money back. these aren't obscure late nite or mid day soaps - these are 3-4M viewer programmes. what the hell is the beeb doing responding like it is running some sort of 1950s boarding school, instead of a 21st century broadcasting empire with a duty to all its paying customers, not to freeloading morons who type rubbish at have your say, which is full of vitriol - some lovely "recommended" comments there like
1. "sack them coz they cos the license fee payers millions of pounds - actually, popular programmes like they are both in get sold to the US and subsidise a lot of other stuff
2. claims that they make racist/homophobic comments! frankly, have people actually looked at their shows? what fantasy world are these commentators and people who "recommend" their comments living in - russel brand is bi- - ross has a gay piano singing group -

this bboard is supposed to be "moderated" - i don't see any evidence it is even checked for factual accuracy, let alone moderation of opinions. it frequrntly contains homophobic, mysoginisitic and racist comments (e.g. about US presidential candidates)
and this is supposed to be a source of "evidence" that the viewers disapprove of popular (tasteless, admittedly, lowbrow, for sure) entertainers.......

if there were actually statements like that in any of the radio or tv shows, then there would be a case for legal action, but it wouldnt be a subject for a nanny-state reaction like the beeb has......

stop being so defensive bbc - attack back.

puhlease!

why should we listen to complaints when they are press led?

the "press" is full of complaints about a certain Ruseel Brand and Jonathan Rss
tasteless item recently - see this news item for some of the back story (althoguh it is lamentably bad reportage in terms of actually tracking down precisely who is in control of pushing this item, understandably given it is from the bbc, and therefore by definition, on the defensive:(

But what you need to look at closely is who is leading the attack - as usual, someone on the far right is desperate to find big sticks to hit the BBC with - why? because their paymasters are the same people that want to dumb down tv (yes, Sky) and the easiest way to do that is to remove the subsidised competition (namely the BBC) that still sets a minimum standard that some broadcasters (e.g. channel 4) attempt to meet, but some cannot be bothered.

while the quality of material is variable, the best is very good - the constant whingeing by the incredibly rich people that own private vertical near-monopolies like sky is purely self-serving and nothing to do with public interest at all. while the "humour" ross and brand perpetrate is hit and miss, it is popular, and, partly because it is risky, offensive to some people - that is the nature of humour - deal with it. if someone has a legitimate legal complaint, they can take it up in court - they don't need the right wing press on their side- they can have have the right wing judges and barristers who have a whole lot more sense and less prejudice, if there is a case. if there isn't, GO AWAY.

life and politics

so how come US pro-life anti-abortion are often
pro- capital punishment, eh? and I am talking
self-proclaimed christians here....

bizarre (frankly, string 'em up, is what I say - but I never claimed
to be against abortion - in their case, we should extend it to post-birth,
a la Philip K Dick satire:(

religious hypocrisy, rights, obligations etc

so an interview in one of the papers about the
Atheist Bus camapaign, contained thinly veiled threats from a religious "christian") spokesperson - things like "if yo uput signs like that up, you've gotta expect retaliation" - well, excuse me, but I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition. I thought there was an moral imperative, an ethical framework, and indeed, a simple rule of thumb, that Christians "turn the other cheek" - what is more, the campaign doesn't even actually explicitly attack religious groups specifically.


THe fact is that we (the campaigners) have not only a right to free speech, but we have a right to expect other groups who disagree with our speech to follow their obligations not to threaten other people who are not threatening them.

I think un-transubstantiated threats by self-appointed religious spokesmen under a wafer-thin veil of obscurity should be investigated by the church as a matter for excommunication, frankly. Where are their principles (or principals)?

who's to blame for this financial mess we're all in?

So i've seen a zillion posts on the web and newspaper articles and tv discussions
in Europe and the US (particularly, in UK and US) and it is really sad to say that
people are really really o na hiding to nowhere blaming "the other side" politically, whatever side they are on, simply because no-one saw it coming, at least no significant warnings were given (since we have the web going back to 1992, we can trawl old articles without having to go to newspaper print archives etc, and this is just clear).

Lets just take the classic Cameron argument that Brown let it happen in the UK because of de-regualtion. Well, firstly this de-regulation started with Thatcher's de-mutualization of the mortgage lenders, and then went on to deregulation of markets, but secondly, the tories applauded Brown's hading over of power over interest rates to the bank of england. No. Sorry. Doesn't wash - they are all equally to blame. I've read a similar line of argument (republicans blaming Clinton policy), but exactly the same thing applies - the entire lot of them are as much or more to blame as the greedy idiots on Wall Street and in the City, who are really just trained monkeys when it comes down to it.

so after Cameron, the Scottish parliament leader jumped on the "let's bash brown" bandwagon - what is especially grotesque about this all is that the financial crisis was obviously global - US, plus most of Europe, Russia, and Japan, and even, slightly, China and India - to blame this global turmoil on one local (albeit G7) country's behavior is pretty surreal - i'd assert that people who do this (and didn't say anything about it for the last 11 years) are both hypocrits, and incompetents.

in the meantime, I noticed an old guardian article from 1 week ago listed banks in trouble in each country in Europe, with a comment from the Swiss government that there was "no problem there" - hah - tell that to UBS:(

denial, denial, everywhere is denial

titus andronicus redux

goths versus romans
chaos v law:

chaos is represented by the Goths;
law is the romans

chaos is crows;
law is the lark

chaos is headless - loss of heads is chaos;
law is hands&writing - loss of hands is loss of law

all the images above
(lark v. crow, heads v. hands,
goths v. romans, law v. chaos)
occur explicitly many times

some images also related - caterwauling versus singing ;
(also relates obviously to the raven/crow versus the larksong)

everyone dies.

Amy, Madge and Men

Amy has her Blake
Madge has her Man

Ma Blake, and Ma Donna?

end of the line for open system macro economics?

so here is my theory
most the macro-economics worked ok in a system that was to all intents
and purposes
infinite (in the sense of unbounded).

what has finally happened is that the expanding economics of US, Asia,
south america and europe finally coupled in a complete, bounded system

the bounds put completely different conditions (in the sense of
boudnary conditions) on the behaviour than in a system that expands -
basically ,you can get all sorts of oscillations from "reflections"
and so on...

bail me out here

so bank B won't lend to bank A
because it things bank A is lending
to people C who constitute
too great a risk,
so bank A starts to lose business
(lending people money) to somewhere (not sure where if this is a global problem, but
somewhere - oh, ok, so they are not "expanding" so shareholders start to panic)

so the US and UK governments propose to
i) borrow money from somewhere (bank B) and
then ii) themselves lend it to bank A

now let me get this right: the government has a better credit ranking than bank A
so I can see why it might lend it more money. But, surely, once the government
starts doing risky things like lending to bank A, then bank B will downrate its credit
rating, and around we go again, except this time, there's nowhere left to run

right?

oh, and say this is not purely about perception rather than reality, and bank A was always ok, but B was poor at judgement and believes correctly
that the government is magically better than bank A.

this might make sense if the government is going to pay bank B
a) a higher rate of interest
or
b) will successfully cause bank A to collect debts from people C
more successfully (or aggresively)

right?

bail me out here.

really really obsolete newspapers

so the current financial turmoil shows how pathetically obsolete printed newspapers are - the rate of change of circumstance is so far adrift from the 24 hour cyclic report/print latency, that it really looks daft to spend so many resources on so much
out of date rubbish - of course, we already new most the news is just a re-hash of wht is sent out by industry and government marketing departments (see the Flat Earth News
book for details of statistical studies of the percentage of actual "fresh" journalism present in a typical daily)....but the situation in the last few days makes even the editorial aspect of the "posher" papers ludicrously outdated.

pundit

at a party yesterday, someone I hadn't seen for 20 years said they'd heard me on the radio and that I seemed to be a pundit:-) at the same party, someone pointed me at the fact that their band from 1983 was now on youtube
(see yip yip coyote)
which i think is 11 gazillion times more cool.

Going for broke...

I think the US is right to not do the bail out

1. the moral hazard is too high to reward bad banks
2. some banks go bust - so?

in this scenario, my understanding is that
someone will realize their assets
by acquiring them cheap -

that organisation will not foreclose on all their
customers mortgages because
a) if anyone does that to a significant size of hosuing stock, the
price will fall so fast they wont realize much money
b) the people they foreclose mortgages on will then buy the property
for cash cheap

instead, they will foreclose on hopeless caes, extend the loan on
others and quite a lot of people will find themselves renting
accommodation they were formerly trying to buy, but without a debt.

the price for buy/rent, and the confidence level in remaining loans
will stabilize....

making the organisation that acquires the bust banks,
the government makes no sense to me at all. bailing out broken lenders
makes even less sense.

alternative: make usury a crime as well as a sin:)

scientific ad hoc disease

as gregory bateson commented in one essay in the seminal work "Towards an Ecology of Mind" a lot of science is deployed in a very ad hoc way - so one example of this is the treatment of scizophrenics by use of electric shock therapy - it was noticed that
monkeys that were schizoid and epileptic had a reduction in symptoms of psychosis after a fit. it was noticed that shocks induced fits - so some bright spark (pun intended) had the idea of shocking human psychotics in the vain attempt to cure them. the rest is a sad sad history

there are other examples where the arbitrary relationship between symptoms is used, metaphorically, to establish a bogus cause/effect, which, at first, has the appearance of effectiveness...

they should all be fired.

all sexed up and nowhere to go

i just finished cherie blairs memoir/autobiography, and quite an interesting read it is

I wonder if all the folks involved in or connected to government at the time of the
gilligan/kelly "sexed up" weapons of massed destruction dossier (which the hutton report and others found to be "unsexed up" but was nevertheless simply wrong:(
have conspired to make sure their story of events is consistent? Certainly Alistair Campbell's diaries and Cherie Blair's bio are what a lawyer on a tv copshow might call
"remarkably" consistent - so if one does evntually find something wrong about their memories of events, and their reports are consistent in the error, would that be reasoanble evidence to doubt the veracity of their entire version of events?
[wouldn't that be ironic:- to catch out a bunch of legal types:-) of course it won't happen - it is much more likely that the dossier was rubbish because the secret service (and US) were rubbish at their job, than it is that they faxed it - frankly, if they faked it, then theyd have known that they'd get into all saddam's secret places and fail to find any WMD and they'd have pulled the whole mission to avoid that later embarrasment - so its more likely that they just believed bad info....especially since the US couldn't actually get a competent level of covert info out of the middle east since allegedly, the CIA wasn't able to persuade people to work there due to the food/climate etc:)

I found BLair's early life much more interesting than the later stuff - the tories about liverpool and her parents and other older relatives were fascinating, whereas most the later stuff is well documented in too many other places - and I dont care for the politically correct reportage on the royal family, the bushes, the pope, etc etc....
but the Booth and other earlier characters in this fable are definitely worth readin all about...

how long ago the world was created

so here's a question (apologies to isaac asimov who wrote that amusing story about the last trump and the problems of figuring out when Ragnarok should really be).

why do creationsts say the world was created in 4000 BC? why not in 1900? why not in
2001? that would get rid of all sorts of problems surely (like the millenium bugs).


Indeed, if, as Sarah Palin says, god created the world with dinosaur fossils intact already hundreds of millions of years after the alleged Jurassic, who is to say that he didn't create the world last tuesday, and that Sarah Palin is a figment of our imagination (or God's or both).

Solipsists unite. We need to be revisionist about creationism every nanosecond.

Richard Dawkins is disingenuous because....

because his timing for the attack on religion is atrocious in terms of clear targets

he is disingenuous because he thinks that the "madness" (delusion) that possesses people is separable from politics and yet religion is likely to be about to be the biggest political
cause of problems for a long time - the problem is not the fundamentalist Muslims - the problem is the continuing ascendancy of the American fundamentalist christian, but the problem is not their religion, but the politics that it aspires to - contrariwise, the politics many muslim's aspire to might actually evolve to be harmonious (i don't count jihad as politics - perhaps thats a bit naive of me since it is often used as a method to enlist the poor by failing leaders in failing economies) - the difference, I suppose, is that jihad is so far a flea, whereas the worlds markets tumble and fall and trash entire economies - and yet these people that think that dinosaur fossils were created 4000 years ago as the devil's lizards, are in the driving seat.

well doh - i suppose they think a hedge fund is for the plants by the white picket fence outside their house, and that a derivative is a poor copy of a Tammy Wynnette song.

why the US thinks everyone else hates them, when really , we love them, but tough!

here's a theory about why the US may perceive everyone as critical

I've noticed that in outher countries i've been in recently (e.g. France, Italy,
Spain, Greece) it is rare to make a big deal out of doing something positive -
perople don't really celebrate success in the way I have noticed in the USA (e.g.
my brother-in-law's family) do - when someone "does good" everyone
ring sbells claps hands and CELEBRATES it - which is good. but when this happens
in the UK, everyone mutters "pretty good" and gets on with things

I've noticed this in professional life too - people are always getting awards in
the US for best teacher or best researcher or best paper - this is almost frowned
on in much of Europe in my experience

so it is entitrly possible that people like myself are guilty of only every
emitting critical remarks and never saying congratulatory remarks on the plus
things that the USA has done for itself and everyone else, and so, very much like
newspapers (and TV news) we are seen as only commenting on (reporting) negative
things.

this reminds me of the scene in Life of Brian when the people's republic of judea
(or whatever) are moaning - "so what did the romans do for us"...and one says
"well, good roads" , "oh ok, roads. but apart from roads what did the romans do
for us", "well,, law" - "oh, ok apart from roads and law, what did the romans ever
do for us..." etc etc...

------

meanwhile, given we all have to pay for oil in dollars, and the exchange of other
currency for dollars is subject to charges, I think this is a tax - so since I am
a US taxpayer, how come i don't get a vote? eh? eh? this weas a founding
principle and principal cause of the indepenence of the USA from England :-) :-)
:-)

sarah palin seperated at birth from...

sharon osbourne - uncanny similarity - see
sarah and
Sharon

do we really want the apparent sister-in-law of a bat eater as possible commander in chief of nuclear family USA?

my mum says Palin is "common" - explaining this to americans, i said, by contrast, McCain has class - class=katherine hepburn, common=shirley temple - bizarrely, it turns out they were in one film together - viz
American Creed, which it is hard to tell if is a horror movie, a religious tract, or a documetary about a Native North American Tribe (are there any differences in these three subjects,either?).

meanwhile, BBC had a nice article on
rednecks
which is quite helpful:)

last word on arthur c. clark - The Last Theorem

i just read the not very goood last book (called the last theoren) by arthur c. clark (with frederick pohl) - i'd love to know how much ACC actually put in to this - it has some typical arthurian moments, but is in general not great - i was also dismayed at the (airport edition) number of typos - two things struck me
1. the use of the term "oxcam" to describe a 4th generation indian-uk immigrant's accent - oxbridge, surely? and the phrase "arab republic of egypt" - i wasn't aware egpytions called themselves arabs...oh well (wikipedia claims similar)

but worse was to come - despite Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem, one of the author's claims that there will perhaps never be a "short" proof (in the sense that Fermat probably thought he had found, as the problem might be allegedly "undecidable".
That's plain wrong, since we have a proof, we can terminate any checker on another proof. Does the author mean that the existence of a shorter proof is undecidable, perhaps? that might well be true...or do they mean something more subtle?

metrics for balance in journalism - disproportionate warfare and reportage

so whenever someone is killed on one side of a war where each side claims the other is terrorist, or another there's a demand by the other side for balanced reporting.

However, what really constitutes balance? is it number of events, or body count?

certain lobbies exist to make sure every event is balanced by a report of all the events of the other side. However,. recently, sides have complained about "disproportianate responses" in war. However looking at recent press on Georgia and Russia (and Ossetia etc), and older events in Ireland, South Africa, Israel, and many others, one can surely say that asymmetric warfare is carried out just as much in the information domain as in the real world, and not necessarily (ever) in a correlated way between the two domains/worlds. Indeed, one expects since many clashes happen in the edges between the tectonic plates of 1st, 2nd and 3rd world, and that asymmetry in weaponry and information/media power are not simply connected, one might expect to see big seismic shifts between the two ways of shooting your neighbour and shooting your mouth off.

good site for this is cardiff journalism:http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/research/researchgroups/mediatizedconflict/fundedprojects/index.html> which has great stuff about iraq for example

towards a theory of bums

on the nudist beach in Paleochora, I cannot help noticing the remarkable similarity between men's bums and their faces - i wonder if one can read the character of a man by his bum - loosely caricaturing, a bum is basically an inverted 'T' _ ffeel that the width of the T is corrolated with the man's compassion, and the depth/height with his intelligence - I think this could be a new form of phrenology...

also, one cannot but help notice that nudists stand around a lot doing nothing but pont their schlongs at the sun. people wearing bathing costumes dont do this - they play batball or build sandcastles or whatever - perhaps a nudist's intelligence is left in their trunks?

personal and collective revisionism

modern historians are (apparently) taught to interpret - so
every decoding is an encoding - i.e. each time we re-visit the sources of
"true" information and we write our interpretation, we translate (with errors and biases and so on) - as with post structralism, the reader also introduces distortions

so this is also the current view of how humans remember scenes from their lives - typically, each recall is more than just a "read-only memory" access, but entails re-interpresting and even writing back to memory a new strucure, context, and so on

thius we all live in an imagined universe, of our own, and each others' making

and it is dynamic, continually changing and refreshing and moving forward

applying this sort of view to the web, then, or to news stories, why should we be surprised that wikipedia is no worse (and no better) than Nature or Science, or that a blogger in bagdad or a georgian government agency is no better (or worse) than the BBC or the Voice of America?
is there no absolute reality (echos of the argument about absolute morality)?

well yes there is - the closes thing to objectivity we migh thave would be to base information on our own 2 eyes (modulo above) - at least we could all agree that this is somethign we can agree about (except that what we see is different:) - next, we can extend this via our social network, using a model of trust (those closer to us in family or friendship are closer in trust to those more distant acquaintences and friends of friends, and so our viewpoint could be then that a collective, socio-centric view of the world is at least a wider (and possibly more trustworthy) objective reality than just what we see with our own two eyes.

of course, once upon a time, primative societies and these social groups, and news and information were all the same thing - now, we extend our information gathering to many places far and wide, and our trust diminisheth, exponentially quickly - and the revisionism (the rapid shifting sand of what constitutes collective understanding of reality in different places) changes ever faster.

olympic doping competition

i think just liek they have the parolympics for people with missing limbs, they should have the metolympics for people that take drugs

that way one could get what one is paying for and have ones cake (!) and eat it
if you see what i mean

[1]: cake: fictitious drug introduced in Brasseye in a notorious spoof tv mocumentary format that fooled some unwitting famouss celebs who were interviewed about it:)

new neocon con

so the rampant anti-russian propaganda sduring the current georgia/ossetia/abkhazia
crisis is interesting -

Here's my 2 cents:

the neocon agenda has failed. this plan (abandon the Munrow doctrine and create the american empire)
didn't include problems of the rest of the planet just not liking americans as much as they like themselves.

plan b was to distract people's attention from that by declaring war on Islam (oops, sorry, terror) This failed as Islam controls the west's oil supplies.

plan c: revert to the cold war. This too wil fail. Reasons economic: there are not only 2 superpowers - there's the EU, India and China - these are each nearly as big as the US or wil lbe within 10 yeare- the US depends on EU already and wil ldepend on the others more and more - this is not a 2 legged stool anymore. reasons military: there are other nuclear powers and the US has demonstrated repeatedly that it cannot win (outright) remote wars. reasons political: people are not stupid

assuming the russians are stupid (like bush seems to) is stupid - they did what they said they'd do - the georgians tried to take compelte control of the two semi-independant areas of southern ossetia and azkhabia by force - these guys (at least a sizeable fraction of them) didn't want this - the russians called ht georgians bluff and sent the military in - basically the georgians
can't play poker. note the russians understand the EU depends on them, and aren't going to risk their current growth (9%) for the sake of empire building - they know that - what the russians want is a stable border and contro lover oil/gas delivery.

realpolitik is alive and well in the 21st century

A very good article about this says much the same but with lots of juicy nato details

USA :- can you not say "Cuba" ???

gregory bateson - ecology of mind FAQ

what is mind? - no matter
what is matter? - never mind

writing about music is like
dancing about architecture

qed

final destination part 13

the earth is about to be hit by a giant asteroid, and the human race builds a huge spaceship to escape.

a teenage girl is about to board with all her friends, but she has a vision in which the spaceship is subject to a massive inter-space hyperspace pileup and everyone dies horribly. she pusuades her friends not to board

the last 10 humans are on earth, and death is stalking them, one by one...

(with apologies to douglas adams and Final Destiantion 1-3, and john carpenter's
assault on precint 13)

darwin award

eponymously, surely the most deserving case for a darwin award ever?

I'd love to be the polis man arresting them " you have the right to remain stupid, and anything you say will be taken down and used in evidence against you, year unto the ultimately low IQ ever for a mighty international fraudster - not even woodyt allen in "take the money and run" was this dumb. not even dumb and dumber or dumbest. not even raising arizona llustrates the heights of daftness to which your miserable failure of an excercise raised itself"

just awsome

dance, dance, dance in NY city

I'm currently in Manhattan for a couple of meetings (the ITA project "bootcamp" and a Cisco shindig on how to do all things Mobile properly for IP in the future:)
and staying in the comfort inn - this is a stones throw from the currently being re-de-un-meta-furbished entire (oops, sorry, empire) State Building and a mere hop and a skip and a jump from CUNY's Graduate center (at the amazing address of 365 5th Avenue! way cool!)

anyhow aforementioned hotel is undergoing entirestatement, no sorry, refurbishment - my room is on 11th floor, but i chose to go down the stairs today to avoid the ultra slow elevators (lifts would be a misuse of english - more like "tugs") - all the floows from 10-5 seemed to be empty - I say seemed - in fact it was occupied by a number of refugees from the novels of Haruki Marakami

Needless to say, I ran - I ran pursued by the wind-up black sheep of the family, through a forest of Ikea furniture to the tunes of strawberry fields, down below three glitterballs turned sinisterly, while all the time my phone kept randomly playing snatches of different thelonius monk tunes as if trying to find the most fitting ring tone with which to knell the parting day.

The Pitch is Back - with apologies to Elton John

Once again, going forward with nothing on her mind but
the idea of showers, our product evangelist has decided to
incentivise the workforce to meet the
challenges of picking the low hanging fruit with an
holistic, cradle-to-grave approach,
looking under the bonnet in this space,
sprinkling our magic from the get-go,
thinking outside the box about
pre-preparing ourselves for
360-degree thinking,

She'd like you to step up to the plate and
capture your colleagues, cascading daily paradigm shifts
four our already really cool train set.

A the close of play, let's touch base about this offline,
to ensure that the door is open on the issue,
where we can feed through the sales and delivery pipeline
and loop back, auspiced by gettting all our ducks in a row,
not letting the grass grow too long on this one.

We realize that 110% is not enough bandwidth to
wrongside the demographic with
the requisite granularity and unyielding integrity
for the key stakeholders, the service users climbing the
strategic staircase from negative territory
before drilling down impactfully.

eric clapton-by-name-and-nature

i saw this picture of eric ("god")guitar hero claptop nthe other day on
youtube and he looked like a constipated meerkat. - i wonder what thought he had while straining on the loo or with that whole-tone-bend in the blues...

unsearch engine

so i'd like a search engine that ooks for the web pages
least relevant to my query
for a change

for fun...

Memorial to Suicide Bombers - victims of the God Delusion

I think it is time we had a memorial to Suicide Bombers- probably without listing their names- just their victims, but they are victims too.

As the UN unveils a memorial to reporters killed in the line of work (I won't say duty, but at least they were trying to inform the world, not destroy it), it is time we had a way to record the numbers of people that die because of a sickness in the head. It is clear when you look at many (not all, but many) suicide bombers that they are targeted by people more ruthless and selfish, and less courageous (and dim) than themselves, and then programmed to blow themselves up in some greater cause. How many times have suicide bombers done other than prolong the misery of their own side, let alone have a significant impact on the outcome of a war or action? I can't find one in history. From Kamikaze pilots, to Iraq, it seems like it is now part of the wallpaper of modern life. The impact on the victims is not a lot different if the perpetrator dies in the doing, than if it was a bomb from 10000 meters.

No-one is impressed any more. especially since the bombers usually come from a society where life is "cheap". It isn't as if there aren't peopel that blow things up and walk away to fight again.

No. we need a memorial to remind everyone of how many victims there are of the bastards who pull the strings and push the buttons on naive, usually young, almost always male, deluded,sad and confused weapons of mass destruction, for no useful end whatsoever.

I wish someone would silence that T

so reading the story about the mad 16yr old who wants to sail around the world, I cannot help but notice the use of the phrase "treacherous cape" when talking about the famous two southern tips of continents he has to negotiate.

Why "treacherous"? since everyone knows they are bloody dangerous, what is wrong with just saying "dangerous"? It's not like he wasn't forwarned...

Same goes for "tragic" - tragedy (whether ancient greek or shakespearean or modern) refers to a subtle concept irony - irony refers to the dissonance (actually, lets not be poncy- it refers to superiority of knowledge by one group over another - e.g. audience (and author:) over character, or in ancient classical Greece, Gods over mortals). When a family burn to death, this is NOT tragic. It is bloody awful, but it isn't tragic - actually, this topic was covered superbly by ed byrne (see Ed Byrne's hysterical routineon how Alannis Morissette misunderstands the word Ironic (probably proxying for a lot of americans, oh ok, she's canadian - well THATs ironic:)

Terrorism:- um, don't get me started on the abuse of the word.
"We won't negotiate with terrorism" is basically a substitute
for "We won't negotiate with you, coz you're winning and we need to stop
making it clear in the news" so then the only difference between a tterorist and an enemy combatant is negotiation. Now, lets speak plainly here.
Saying "We wont negotiate with them" on TV is a negotiating position for god's sakes.
Like putting your hands over your ears and saying to someone "I'm not talking to you", it is a communication of a kind. obviously.

and another STUPID phrase that drips from journalists pens like it was nectar, but is basically pooh: "now we are at the crossroads" - so after the Irish voted against the euro-constitution a BBC wit used this gem. we were at the crossroads BEFORE ireland voted - now they've made a decision noone else had the gumption to make, we have gone down a particular road (to use another cliche) - we aren't at crossroads any more

idiot.

doh

A sharp wit that is wafer thin

paper cuts - painful, but harmless

like political humour - requires sharp wits, but no depth.

fire women and dangerous things

men: when they are born, women chase after them to save them from dangerous things

as they reach adolescence and buy fast cars, they chase after women in dangerous things

when they get older, they just want to sit by the fire and have women bring them a cup of tea and talk about when they were young and dangerous

george lakoff clearly didn't understand what this was all about. :-)

accelerando europe

i've been living and traveling in contintal europe the last 8 months and fascinating it is (earlier this week, I was on a train between two london airports and there thinkly disguised was Cate Blanchett -my ability to recognize faces is (for some weird reason) completely useless, but when she got off, a couple of people sitting next to me said "wow, what's she doing on the gatwick train getting off at East Croydon?")

Anyhow, what is interesting is, coming from the UK where post thatcher, we have now been the subject of around 25 years of free market everything, and anyone active (i.e from just voting first time, to near retirement age) has spent alnmost the bulk of their existence in a world where the varieity of models for markets (whether utilities, retail/wholesale shops, online goods and services, financial services) is second nature, I see countries like france and spain only slowly stsarting to understand the rhetoric, let alone the realities. fasciniating

Accelerando is an "extreme" sci fi book where the far future is predicated on humans being better and creating new market models faster than alients - if those humans are from the UK, this is probably assured. if the future is franco-hispanic, don't bet on us beating the borg at all:)

Quirkology #101 - 2 more e.g.s

so airport abbreviated names are good - I just went between two
spanish cities, known as Bar y Mad :-)

I wonder if this affects pilots' judgement?

meanwhile, the exchange rate between pound, dollar and euro continues to amaze - but, and here's a question worthy of Dr Wiseman,
does it affect people's judgement of other metrics - specifically, do distances in
europe in Kilometers seem longer to people from the UK and US now that their pound and dollar don't get them as much mileage with the Euro?

I think we should know:)

Al Qaeda on the run, CIA say

according to the BBC today the CIA think they are winning the war on Al Qaeda

well, how would they know?

remember, this is the organization that didn't detect the threat in the first place.

Frankly, I think they'd do better to worry about the fact that all the candidates for the next president of the US of A are more concerned with what the US's mad mullahs (oops, sorry, Christian Fundamentalist preachers) are saying about them behind their backs (when allegedly supporting them) than about economic stability, prosperity, health, education and other things. Time to overthrow the future government from within before they even get in, that's what I recommend. It never stopped the CIA in the past (or MI5 in the UK for that matter - viz spying on Harold Wilson).

A Peer of the Realm - escaping the Internet Balkanisation via technology

so imagine instead of an Internet, we had a network of networks.

oh, yes, so that was what the Internet was.

but now we have broken it into little fiefdoms and we need to reconnect it.

so the classic thing to do is to build an overlay. IPv6, with tunnels to get you around - think of the tunnels like phone lines which glued together the original IPv5 intenret -stafeful, but soft stateful (soft, as in democracy, as opposed to hard state which is like royalty:)

another way to do this is to provide address translation rather than encapsulation - realm specific IP - getting between realms needs either a small number of nodes which are intra-realm reachable, but also have globally reachable addresses, or else a mapping service and a ream naming system (think IPNL _ use Fully Qualified Domain Names and map them to places -) - this COULD use a hash function for each realm - indeed the set of nodes that get you between realm A and realm B could just be a DHT.

You could put the info in border routers, and combine this with a scheme to get better scaling of addressing and routing and still retain multi-homing, but providing mapping, encapsulation and a service to find the nodes that will get you between the above. If the map is from an end system identifier (IPNL used FQDN but you could just use, say, realm specific or legacy IPv4 addresses) and a location identifier (also known as a route hint), then maybe LISP is your friend:
http://www.lisp4.net/

Perhaps, although for me, the protocol overhead in LISP looks a bit messy - you could use my mad idea of sending multiple packets with different addresses to punch your way through the address translation points (TNA - see
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/talks/tna.ppt
for a daft take on this:)

but this is mostly so i can use the phrase
Peer of the realm:)

(this should really be on my internet blog, or compsci blog, but i liked the balanisation political aspect too much:)

aposite street names in spain

well, only two
but
Diagon Alle
in Barcelona (cf. harry potter)
and
Calle Luna, in Leganes/Madrid (street with a Mental Hospital on it!)
will serve as a start

cult's and initials

apparently it is offensive in the UK (in terms of the legal definition of insulting a religion) to refer to Scientology as a cult.

this is very odd. cult, when referring to a religion, is (in all the dictionaries I referred to) explicitly not insulting - indeed it simply refers to the set of practices that aren't part of the formal church for example.

It is potentially insulting to call something a cult that
is not a religion, since in that context, it has the implication of being outside the mainstream - of course, for some adherents of non-religious cults (e.g. cult followers of rock bands like the grateful dead) this is not an insult at all. Indeed, being recognized as outside the mainstream (e.g. goths, punks, skins, etc) is the entire point.

So if someone is insulted by being called a cult, then they are either confused or not religious. If they are confused, this is not a fault of the person using the term. If they are not religious, then the UK law about insulting does not apply.

If the church of scientology is not a religion, then it has some interesting questions to answer about charitable status and other matters.

I personally have no opinion about this one way or the other. I just found L. Ron Hubbard's pre-Dianetics writings to be marginally worse than EE "Doc" Smith's.

If you want to start a religion, or a cult, get a poet (Arthur C Clark would be great as he has initials, and is poetic, and is also dead, but of course he would never have signed up to anything like a religion, so I guess I will just have to start a cult in his name:)

Update: Apparently, the Crown Prosecution Service realized they were on to a lose-lose scenario with this and have dropped the case against the student - but what a stress on poor person who was only using their right to comment on things in a fair and reasonable way.

obama sin laden?

what's in a name? heavy with the burden of something
the possible, chrstian, future democrat president of the
united states of amerika sometime will have to stand
half naked....

i really think there should be an opera - i can see the production already -
Andrew Lord Webber with lyics by Mohammed Bin Elton...

an instant hit in bradford

yech or perhaps not yech

This increibly sentimental exhibition of britishness might just, just possibly be a Cure for Cynics

burma tweak

sitting on my garden bench I notice that it is made of teak from burma (which is nice)
but then i have to think of all the people sick and tired and dying
to get rid of their insane government - how can one use that word "govern"
for an organisation whose sole goal appears to be self enrichment at any cost
to the ostensibly "governed" population?

I guess it is bordering on autogenocide what these guys are up to right now - you know
they are charging import duty on aid workers food deliveries?

there's sometimes got to be an excuse for ignoring sovereign rights and just wading in their and taking these guys out of office....maybe John McCain could propose this as part of his presidential new sweep:(