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?