cromwell on parliament - quoted in guardian review of book today

"Ye sordid prostitutes, have you not defiled this sacred place, and turned the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance."

couldn't say it much better could you...?

liberty in the age of terror

new fine book by AC Grayling - Liberyy in the age of terror - essential reading

2 things struck me while reading this (and I'm not talking about pieces of a flying suicide bomber or a policeman's truncheon:)

1. "nothing to hide, so nothing to fear" - why is this bogus

well one reason is actually that hte elasticity needed in a multi-cultural society needs space between differences - in some sense, ignorance (not in the sense of not knowing of something's existence, but not wanting to know the gory details) is bliss - while
I hate the things some people do in their privacy of their homes, I defend to the utmost their right to do those things - but in private. I'm squeamish...the only way this works is if we don't shine a spotlight into every corner of the world (panopticon/prison/bentham style). you need some grey areas, some slack, some DMZs in life....


2. the "what if the bad guys take over" is a weak argument - a more direct argument is that a surveillance state requires a lot of eyes - those eyes have absolute oversight, which means they are tempted. If you tempt enough people, you will systematically corrupt some of them (c.f. MPs expenses) - this is an all too easy intro into the "absolute power corrupts absolutely, but the technology is not magic - surveillance, control and so on will attract large numbers of the exact wrong types of operators, and they will misuse their positions and without guardians to guard them, nothing will stop rapid mission creep (police action during recent G20 demos etc etc)....the better solution is to ring fence their powers in the first place and time limit any special powers (as Grayling proposes)....otherwise we don't need to wait for the BNP to become national socialists,. we will simply be training our own everywhere

contrariwise

so in my usual bombastic way I overstated a couple of things in conversations with people yesterday

thing 1 was the size of the english language/vocab - if you get any
english/foo v. foo/english dictionary, you can see the asymmetry in the vocab
(for french, spanish, german, italian etc) - i think that english (according to OED) just made its 1 millionth word....

but when i say this, people assume I am making some moral superiority claim - I'm not - its just an observation - there is a cultural point (english survives by adaptation and laguages who have defense organisation like the Academie Francaise are doomed)

thing 2 was that a program which proves something cannot be patented and shouldn't and given in some senses all programmes are of this nature, then this should stay true - again someone decided I had some political agenda in saying this - i was merely commenting based o na shed load of law case transcripts I've been reading recently that it would be nice if the law wasn't just the product of a random walk through the set of cases that those people who can afford to bring against each other, and was, instead, actually thought out

british politics are now truly a fight between 4 or 5 dysfunctional families

having completely lost trust the tories and whigs can go jump - i blame them equally for the fiasco we now have of nazis and losers like bnp and ukip "representing" us
in europe

what a bunch of low life scum....and the bnp and ukip aren't a lot better either.

simon singh's libel problem...

In general, I support the idea that a medical (i.e. scientific) claim should be supported by objectively verifiable (or falsifiable) evidence, and that claiming some nostrum is bogus should not give rights to someone to declare open season on the critic - the normal laws applying to arguing whether something is true on a balance of reason, should suffice - whereas libel law quite clearly reverses the burden of proof in a weird way

however, I think there's another, stronger reason that one should support simon singh against the chiropracters (well, specifically, the British Chiropractic Association):-

unsupported medical claims endanger lives. there's a process which has a bunch of checks and balances for deciding which therapies are appropoved - sure, there are complimentary therapies (mostly they have some sort of value if you believe in them), but there are serious problems claiming a therapy will address something (e.g. asthma) which can have deadly consequences, when there are mainstream medical producedures which have efficacy, nd yo umight take attention away from them.

I would claim that false claims about an alternative treatment, just as false claims against an established treatment (e.g. MMR) are actually a crime, since they are effectively 1. appropriating medical expertise which the claimants don't have (this is a crime in the UK) 2. could be construed as criminally negligent, if they do not position the claim correctly in the ranking normally afforded to different current scientific theories

so aside from the possibility the Judge has made a mistake technicall in the current finding (that is being appealed) AND aside from establishing a new set of legal stuff in and around science, I think one could counter sue the BCA for risking peoples' lives - I am not a lawyer, but last time I looked at something similar, I asked a lawyer and was told that this was in principle do-able.

see sense about science for the background and lots of details.
usefully primary source is the article, annotated with primary sources and the BCA's press releases

Note that wikipedia's entry on Chiropractic clearly claims it is "not based on solid science."

So is the BCA going to sue wikipedia too?

Tai Ping - martial art with pen&paper

with nothing more than pen and paper we can wage war on a welter of witless with
mish-takes (a cornish pasty of concrete like rigidity) and agile use of the tittle-tattle-tottle (an ancient essex version of the namchuk)

Voodoo History and Slow Time

to summarise david aaronovitch's fine book on conspiracy theories, then,
conspiracy theorists are losers,
who develop paranoia as a way to gain (or believe that they have gained) attention

you can detect a conspiracy theory by (at least these) two failings:
first, failure to apply occam's razor (principle of parsimony) in choosing between the official story and the alternative;
second, failure to develop falsifiable theories (i.e. insufficient self-criticism or adversarial argument).

Common other failings: ellipsis (turn a blind eye to inconvenient facts); repetition of early erroneoys data; beggaring belief ("there is no evidence" == "there is a cover-up").


on the other hand, "In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed", by Carl Honore, confuses speed with synchrony - the problem for socieity of time is the problem of synchronising disparate activities and places - wander, jitter and skew in a large system lead to inefficencies which are pleasant for humans, whereas the lockstep mechanism of clocks on all railway stations so that the UK became the first synchronous society was the real culprit behing the "sense of urgency" in modern society.....

I think we need to start a campaign for bad time-keeping

voodoo history and imagination

i used to love watching tales of mystery and imagination - now I am reading the very good Aaronvitch book about Voodoo News (conspiracy theories) and it is clear that a lot of people who sustain conspiracy theories by writing best seller books that take them seriously are basically wannabe scientists and novelists who fail in some way to be either - but there's a legitimate genre here - a bit like SF< detective and horror genres, where writers lack some specific skill (famously, characterisation in SF), in these pseudo-science pieces, which are after all massively popular, whether docu-drama, or "historical" fiction like da Vinci Code, obviously have some of the requisite skills but just not all. And while Aaronovitch's book will do quite well, I bet he doesn't sell any where as many copies as all the Monroe doctrinaire - and that;'s sad as he actually can write:)

Meanwhile, I think that "imagination" (as portraied by Arthur Clark or Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett) is clearly in fact a sign that someone's mind is bing controlled by a vast eldritch distributed articifial intelligent force from the other side of the lesser Megallanic Cloud - the origins of AI meets Cloud Computing...and intelligent design

lashback MPs - insulting our intelligence

so i continue to watch MPs try to defend their positions with increasing astonishment - viz question time on TV twice now

don't these fools realise we are both their employer and their customer so criticising us for criticising them
is about the biggest career limiting move that they can possibly make.

the data

doh!!!

so if (as some apologists have argued) this happened as a "stealth" pay rise, then why don't they pay tax on it like the rest of us would? If it is expenses, then how come it isn't supported on a receipt only basis, and only justified for costs incurred as a result of the job that would otherwise not have been incurred. these guys want it both ways and are surprised everyone else doesn't see it their way, and yet (as we know) many MPs also have other jobs where such behaviour would be audited and quite possibly erported to HMRC and the police if they engaged in it, so the idea that they didn't know it was an unusual practice is also bogus....

i've been saving up some insults for people like this
e.g.
may your mother's milk be long life
or
may you lie on your mother's grave

etc etc

I mean like get a load of this dude who clearly is some kind of dinosaur!
what an insufferable basterd, to parafrase Tarentino

counterfeit novels...and other forgeries

steve toltz' very excellent "fraction of the whole" contains the alarming observation that while people forge paintings, they never forge novels.

in jazz, a lot of us use the "Real Book" which is a huhe tome with the words , chords and melodies of lots of "standards" (songs from the classic era's of jazz from dixie to swing to beop and cool and back again) - far as I know, the "real book" is a massive breach of copyright - luckily, nowadays, sheet music is not the Evil EMpire that it used to be when a) there wasn't P2P file sharing MP3 recordings to blame and b) people used to play the latest hits themsevlves on the piano in the "drawing room" - so slack has the copyright protection on sheet music become that people can get the "Fake Book" whcih is an "illegal" photocopy of the real book!
[bill bruford, in his amusing and interesting autobiography, cites some muso-socio-journalist as wisely pointing out that the "value" in music moved from medieval times being vested in the player, through vitorial times being vested in sheet music, to the 20th century being locked up in frozen recordings - a recent article in the guardian talked about new models of direct composer/player to audence via the web, which may be a final reversion to the oldest model, but usng the newest tech, which is a fine thing in my opinion)

in the world of software, you get things called "counterfeit" copies of Windows - but more interestingly, you get reverse engineered programmes...which actually involve some skil and are, basically, legal...

so why is the same set of law applicable to all these walks of life? weird.

george soros on recession &behavoural economics 101

so geo. soros, a man who has several cles, has a new edition of his book on "a new paradigm for financial markets" out - along with lots of other people he is saying "I told you so", although the original publication's date actually gives him provenance / prior art proof that he did so

but is his message so new? not really - basically he says that the model used by economics is flawed because it doesn't account for what he calls "reflexivity" - basically (my interpretation) this is that the idea that there is a "ground truth" to a value for goods/servies doesn't work with financial services since the "ground truth" is based in himan estimates - the humans doing the estimation (who think that laws of supply/demand and game theory based on a) those laws and b) rational selfish players) actually are flawed and unlike traditional goods and services, the financial instruments are all as much of a figment as the supply/demand figures.....

this is philospically a bit like Heisenberg (the observer perturbs the system so the observed value may not be what they thought) but is extremely familiar to psychology researchers (and therefore to peopel who do behavoural economics) since it is encountered daily in their experiments (tell a human that they are a subject, and they modify their behaviour - surprise - this is know to GPs who offer a DIY blood pressure test in the UK - some patients systematically produce a very high reading even when perfectly well - known as the "White Coat" reading, as their presure is raised by being in the doctors practice and about to see their GP...)

anyhow, the book is a good read for people that want to understand

meanwhle, I wish I lieved in a high tax country like sweden, finland or switzerland where they seem to have industry and be weathering the storm ok, and not everyone leaves the country at the drop of a hat - some sort of patriotism can be good (e.g. based in love of the culture and place one is from) and is not conditional....
and some industry (e.g. volvo, saab, nokia) doesn't seem to walk away from being created in countries which believe in progressive taxation and social servies.

National Treasure de-moated

Stephen Fry appears to have annoyed a few journalists - the guardian contained a particularly stupid piece claiming that the news had made him a "national treasure" and how he was "not getting it" about public anger over MPs bogus expense claims.

there are two things almost all the "angry of fleet st" articles on this topic tellingly omit from Mr Fry's remarks

1. he started by saying (and listing) some more important things in the world we should worry about that MPs did wrogn (the SAME MPs) - so he wasn't letting them off the hook on this - just saying that if we want to take them to task, lets start on something more serious (this is not the same as saying that this isn't serious - just that life&death might be more so)
2. he pointed out that journalists (who are the people drumming up more news about this than, say, Sri Lanka, where there are matters of life and death) are prone to exactly the same sorts of claims - he also tried to defuse any accusations of getting off the hook by pointing out that he too fiddled claims (and he is, in the main these days, a journalist)

I think the "national treasure" backlash folks should be VERY VERY careful - we will want to see your expense claims in detail real soon AND ask why you don't actually do the journalism job of reporting things that actually matter most, first

conservation of imagination

it is clear to me that there is a conservation law for imagination

the more there is somewhere, the less somewhere else

there may even be a field connecting the two in some way

the underserving rich

there's this lovely phrase about the working class which shews a marvelously British contempt - the "undeserving poor" - the "great unwashed" is another term of abuse for people that keep things like rubbish collection, primary school teaching, nursing, taxi driving, and other essentials working.

so i have a new one - the undeserving rich

this is not people in senior surgical jobs, or people that wrote a great tune or acted well in a great movie, or invented a cool new thing (for work or play)

these are the ultra rich and the people that inherited everything and added nothing.

this is to clarify - I am not against people becoming (or being) wealthy

this is to declare my utter contempt for those people who degraded a generation, and in the process, took the spoils. These guys would embarass Atilla the Hun or Ghenghis Khan
let alone Bill Gates or Frederick Sanger. Or even Paul McCartney or Steve McQueen (either actor or artist:)

Those are the people that should be paying 99% tax after the first 5500 pounds

the other guys deserve every penny - well quite a lot of them anyhow....

talk radio for the deaf - reminder

this is a reminder to people who read this (i know there's two of you, including me)

this is not my cambridge blog - thats the clog one;
this is not my net blog - thats the true history one;
and none of the three are to do with the university work i do.

this is my rant blog - if you take stuff here seriously, more fool you -
(as geo. bush junior so wisely said "fool me once...")

oh, and people accusing me of being a commie, pinko, liberal, socialist, leftie, etc:
you have no idea how completely and utterly wrong you are, you capitalist lacky, you:)

Deconstructing Wellington Boot

Wellington Boot is an interesting choice of nom de guerre - I think it behoves us to think about what a person is trying to convey by using such a moniker.

1. I don't think they mean they are claiming falsely to have invented soemthing (e.g. Duke of Wellington's claims to have invented a type of boot - sandwiched between the Earl of Sandwich's claim to having invented structured snack food and the Edison Lighthouse Family's claim to have invented the invention).

2. I doubt they intend to be a UK pharmacy in an antipodean city.

3. So do they want to inherit the dubious kick-ass honour of having routed the french?
odd? or do they mean that they are "booting wellington" i.e. kicking "brit" ass?

clearly they subscribe to some theories about economics. This is a bit like subscribing to private eye - amusing and occasionally informative, but hardly a fit activity for someone who asociates themselves with or against the british aristocracy of the early 19th century. Oh, wait - Wellington was a "west brit" (allegedly irish) and an anti-parliametary reform....no- that doesnt work

hmm - weird pseudonym. oh well...

hate the rich

seems like I am not allowed to tax the rich without hating them,
so let's cut to the chase and just hate them without bothering to tax them.

as long as there's no tax on hate, of course.

obviously we should get rid of government, state services and so on
and have zero tax and then use pure hatred to get trickle down to work
(if it doesn't get maundy money, it might at least extract blood from the stones).

meanwhile, those of us who are quite rich will use fear to combat the hate and trickle down - this will create a dynamic tension (so loved by Charles Atlas)
and build a fitter society.

of course it will.

Ayn Rand, I love you and your funny name. I love the politics of envy. I love the smell of revolution in the morning. So much healthier than starbucks.


This has been a lay brother's leveller rant, part 2
A self-hating rich guy:)

references:
Smith, wealth of nations
Marx: Das Capital
The Spirit Level; WIlson & Pickett
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
Naomi Klein, No Long (according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman
a malevolent thinker - so that is ok by me)
Collective Choice and Social Choice, Amartya Sen


expect more

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