October 15th, 2008 § § permalink
I listened to Thought for the day on Radio 4 the other morning and just remembered to blog about it now.
It was Rev Dr Alan Billings and some bits are just plain wrong. Not counting the bits about god. That should go without saying.
We have all helped ourselves to the fruits of their [the financial markets] activities and shut our eyes to the risks.
First off, ‘we’ haven’t all helped ourselves to the fuits of their labour [labour? Ha!]. Some have benefited more than others, and some have done even worse, but I wouldn’t call having to get a mortgage of 5x your salary to be able to afford half a house inconjunction with a housing association a fruit of which many people would relish.
As far as shutting our eyes to the risks, that is absolute bollocks. It’s not the shutting of eyes that’s been the problem, it’s the wool being pulled over them.
Some of the politicians who now decry the money-men are the same politicians that previously lauded their boldness and creativity. Some of the clergy who denounce them were quite happy to accept the better stipends they made possible. If we are to learn from our mistakes we need to turn from moralising to morality.
And you won’t get a moral business environment without regulation.
Despite the turbulence and the risks, it’s hard to see any alternative system with the same capacity as capitalism to lift the world’s poor out of poverty – which is surely what any social ethic demands.
Because caitalism has done such a wonderful job of getting the poor in Africa out of their mudhuts and the utility privatisations that capitalism required in Argentina (or was it bolivia?) and the neo-liberal experiment, by Thatchers’ friend Pinochet, in Chile worked wonderfully in converting those countries to a land of luxury.
We’ve hardly had a good go at any alternative systems to capitalism, have we. As far as I can see there’s been various forms of capitalism, from the fairly strict laissez fair to what most people would call socialism. There’s also been tries at various forms of dictatorships too, the corrupted form of communism in the Soviet Union and state capitalism of the Chinese to dictators proper, all over the place.
Surely social ethics, and your religious ‘be nice’ morality, would be interpreted a ‘nicey nicey look after everyone’ way of doing things, not you cut and thrust of capitalism.
However, this crisis has revealed that we have all become less motivated by that concern for common good commended in that book of Prayers and Hymns. It is a sharp reminder that while ethics without capitalism may be impotent, capitalism without ethics can bring ruin on us all.
Capitalism and the common good are incompatible. If a company starts doing things for the common good it will soon go out of business.
Ethics without capitialism we’ve yet to see on a grand scale, capitalism with or without ethics will bring ruin on us all
October 15th, 2008 § § permalink
Scrapping the SATS for key stage 3, or 14 year olds to you and me, is undoubtedly A Good Thing.
But listening to Ed Balls, the schools secretary on the Today program on Radion 4, he couldn’t actually give a proper reason for the decision.
Said that 15 years ago when they were introduced it was The Right Thing and now these tests were Wrong and could go. The reason he did give was that the SATS weren’t needed because the GCSEs at age 16 were the best signifier of how pupils/school were doing.
And how is that different from the last 15 years?
Also, concerning the different parts of the UK and England being the only country that still has SATS for the 7 & 11 year olds. When Mr Balls was asked about that and why that is, he waffled on and to paraphrase, “it is A good Thing”.
Well, fucking tell us why then! Why can’t any cunt answer a fucking question properly anymore? Don’t they listen? Are they fucking stupid are has everyone got a hidden agenda.
Answer the question. It’ll be ok, everything’ll be alright in the end. I promise.
October 13th, 2008 § § permalink
BBC:
Riots have broken out in the mixed city of Acre, reportedly triggered when an Israeli Arab man drove his car during the Yom Kippur religious holiday.
Dozens of cars and shops were damaged as hundreds of people took to the streets, Haaretz newspaper reported.
For Jews, Yom Kippur is a sombre day of fasting, during which it is considered offensive to drive in much of Israel.
Considered offensive, not illegal.
Whilst Israel is considered and sees itself as a Jewish state it doesn’t matter if the Palestinian Israelis have equal rights or not, they will never be equal in society as the Jews will feel able to oppress and punish non-Jewish citizens as they see fit.
October 13th, 2008 § § permalink
October 8th, 2008 § § permalink
The Economist September 2008:
[[image:economist_cover_oh_fuck_september_2008.gif::center:0]]
Via
October 7th, 2008 § § permalink
The Washington Post:
“Palin was loosely on topic, but a couple of times she really bungled the pivot,” said Daniel J. Simons, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has studied how people can miss things that are right under their nose. “In one case, she made it explicit she was going to switch topics. That was not a smooth transition, whereas if you had watched a McCain or an Obama or a Biden make that transition, they would not have said, ‘I want to talk about taxes,’ they would have answered the question in a way that led into taxes.”
A review of the debate transcripts shows Obama, McCain and Biden all repeatedly dodging questions, adroitly transitioning from questions they were asked to questions they wanted to answer.
In a series of particularly relevant experiments, psychologists Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton recently showed that most people are extremely poor at spotting even dramatic discrepancies between questions and answers. They found the failure was especially acute when answers were semantically linked to questions — for example, when a question about the war on drugs is parried by an answer about health care. Audiences seemed to notice dodges only when answers were completely unrelated to the question — such as responding to a question about illegal drugs by discussing terrorism.
The psychologists found that irrelevant answers delivered fluently and with poise scored higher with audiences than answers that were accurate, on-topic, but halting. And when they had actors deliver the same answers to audiences — once fluently and once with “ums” and “ahs” — audiences judged the hesitant responses as intellectually inferior to the fluent ones.
Via
October 5th, 2008 § § permalink
October 3rd, 2008 § § permalink
Protect the Human (Amnesty):
This autumn the Government wants to push through a Bill allowing police to lock people up for 42 days without charge if they are suspected of a terrorism-related offence. When the Counter-Terrorism Bill comes back to the House of Commons, your MP will have a chance to help defeat it: the Bill only passed by nine votes last time, so it will be close.
Allowing police to lock people up for a month-and-a-half without charge will undermine basic human rights to which everyone in the UK is entitled. It will also damage community relations, make intelligence gathering more difficult and possibly ruin the lives of innocent people. This Bill needlessly sacrifices important civil liberties but gains nothing in the way of security.
The only way to convince MPs to vote against 42 days is to show them how many of their constituents are against this unnecessary and counter-productive piece of legislation.
42 days detention is completely unneccesary, sign the petition, and a copy with just an MPs’ constituents signatures will them as well as full copy to the government.
October 2nd, 2008 § § permalink
BBC:
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair has announced his resignation after three years in the job.
He said London mayor Boris Johnson, who took over as chairman of the police authority on Wednesday, had told him he wanted a “change in leadership”.
Sir Ian said that “without the mayor’s backing I do not think I can continue in the job”.
Update:
“I am resigning in the best interests of the people of London and of the Metropolitan Police Service.”
It a bit fucking late for that, isn’t it.
Elsewhere:
Chicken Yoghurt – Sir Ian Blair resigns
Mike Power – The second Blair goes
Tory Troll – Boris Johnson, power politics and the end of Blair
Bloggerheads – Ian Blair resigns
Via
October 1st, 2008 § § permalink
The Market Ticker:
If you think the cost of this bill is $700 billion, you’re wrong. The cost is actually infinite and the entire bill constitutes a giant money-laundering scheme.
Paulson can (and presumably will) buy up to $700 billion of these “assets”, then sell them. Let’s say he decides to buy them at 60 cents on the dollar and sell them for 10. You, the taxpayer, will eat the fifty cents, for an immediate cost of $350 billion dollars.
Having done so, he is then authorized to do so again, since the $700 billion is no longer on the government’s balance sheet.
In fact, he can do this without limit, other than possibly due to the federal debt ceiling, which of course Congress will raise any time we get close to it. Oh yeah, this bill does that right up front too. No need to bother with it the first time around.
Folks, $700 billion isn’t even close to the total cost of this monster.
I don’t know if the above is true or not as I’m not really understanding it all (does anybody?), but what would be cheaper is a suggestion by an American stopped in the street and asked about it on the news the other night, would be for the US government to give every citizen* a million dollars.
I reckon that would do a fuck lot more good than pouring bucketfuls of money down the drain like there’s no tomorrow.
*There’s only 303,824,640 US citizens.
