Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in We need to talk about David's LiveJournal:

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Monday, May 21st, 2012
9:56 am	Citius, Altius, Fortius Well, the Olympic torch has arrived in Britain, and will now spend the next seventy days travelling from Land's End to London. Which, if you've ever used First Great Western Trains, will sound pretty much par for the course. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 18th, 2012
10:04 am	Does anyone else think... ...that Daniel Craig is looking increasingly like Norman Wisdom? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
9:43 am	Kookery Korner My old chum Bree runs the Average baker blog, in which she cooks things. Averagely. She never specifies whether she is a mean, median or modal baker - which some might consider important - but she misses a trick and focuses on that cookery stuff instead. However, as she was recently on holiday she invited guest posts, and that's where I come in to this. You see, if there's one thing I'm good at its thinking I'm really good at stuff on the basis no evidence whatsoever, so naturally I reckon I'm an ace cook. So I wrote about it. It's here: http://averagebaker.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/guest-post-pizzas-ones-you-make-yourself/ (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 17th, 2012
10:27 am	I'd buy that for a dollar Some of this summer's upcoming cinema releases. Wall Street 3: Printing never sleeps Gordon Gecko makes yet another fortune when he discovers he can lose as much money as he damn well pleases on risky investments and Barack Obama will just print more and give it to him. A room with a boo! A new adaptation of EM Forsters classic novel, in which repressed young Englishwoman Lucy Honeychurch discovers her sexuality whilst staying in Florentine rooms which are haunted by Timothy Claypole out of Rentaghost. Starring Russel Brand. Argie Bhaji! New comedy from the team behind the successful East is East, the Patel family move to Buenos Aires and open a curry house just before General Galtieri seizes power. Venezuelan president-for-life Hugo Chavez described the scene in which the foul-mouthed and politically incorrect granny is thrown out of a transport plane over the South Atlantic as "The funniest thing I've ever seen." (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, May 14th, 2012
12:01 pm	Sense of security Reading the paper the other day, I came across the story of a London-based chap who'd recieved a letter from the army informing him that that roof of the block of flats he lives in will be used to station an anti-air missile battery during the Olympics. For reasons I cannot even begin to comprehend, his reaction to that wasn't "This is just so cool, can I have a go, please?". Instead he was in fact complaining. Complaining!God alone knows what his problem was. If the army wants someone to volunteer to have astoundingly dangerous ordnance on their roof during the Olympics, I'll be fisrt in the queue. I've tried and I'm not actually physically capable of thinking of anything at all cooler than having missiles on your roof for shooting baddies. Volunteer? Hell, I'd pay. Anyway, with that in mind, I got to thinking of other security measures they might take during the Olympics which would not only make London safer, but also more awesome. Ninjas on the tube With the tube being a common target for bearded nutters with a grudge and some peroxide, what is clearly needed is a silent and invisible deterrent who can strike unseen at any threat before vanishing back into the shadowed tunnels. Forget classic fights like Pirates vs. Robots. I predict the conflict on everyone's lips in 2012 will be Ninjas vs. Terrorists. Underground. Boris Johnson with a death-ray Now he's seen off one appalling threat to London and got re-elected, what is clearly needed is for some sort of science-based weapon to be mounted on the front of Bozzer's bike so he can obliterate any Cads, Rotters, Scoundrels, or Ne'er-do-wells he might encounter whilst cycling round to some girl's flat. Airships As East London was protected by blimps during the blitz, so some sort of dirigible-based defense will clearly be needed again during the Olympics, just in case any of the less-sane end of the political spectrum decide to try and ruin the 4x400m relay semi-final by crashing something airborne into it. If these airships were manned by women dressed like Dejah Thoris out of the recent John Carter film, it would be a massive boost for both morale and tourism. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 12th, 2012
2:42 pm	Stop! Hammock time. Posted via m.livejournal.com. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012
11:34 pm	Election Day It's a truism of contemporary politics that 'All the candidates are the same'. This isn't quite true - I doubt you'd have much difficulty in telling the difference between Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone in the dark - but there's a lot to be said for the argument that you can't tell the difference between candidates based on their policies. As political engagement wanes in the wake of the great ideological fights of the twentieth century being won or lost, a lot comes down to the 'feel' of a candidate. Do they seem decent, trustworthy and like one of us? It's an interesting view, especially as there's an election for the Mayor of London today. The campaigning has got down and dirty and really it's a two-horse race, and most of it has been personal rather than on policies. I, naturally, have read the manifesto statements of all the candidates for the position of mayor of London, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to test whether you can tell the difference between candidates based solely on their policies, sight unseen. With that in mind, a poll. No peeking at the results. Can you tell which candidates of which political persuasion support which policies, according to their manifesto promises? Poll #1837842 Which candidates in the London elections support these policies? Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5 More affordable homes for Londoners View Answers UKIP 3 (12.0%) BNP 4 (16.0%) Independent 4 (16.0%) LibDem 4 (16.0%) Conservative 4 (16.0%) Green 3 (12.0%) Labour 3 (12.0%) More police on the beat View Answers UKIP 3 (12.5%) BNP 4 (16.7%) Independent 3 (12.5%) LibDem 4 (16.7%) Conservative 4 (16.7%) Green 3 (12.5%) Labour 3 (12.5%) Improve the London healthcare system View Answers UKIP 1 (8.3%) BNP 2 (16.7%) Independent 2 (16.7%) Libdem 2 (16.7%) Conservative 4 (33.3%) Green 0 (0.0%) Labour 1 (8.3%) Create more jobs View Answers UKIP 2 (10.5%) BNP 3 (15.8%) Independent 2 (10.5%) LibDem 2 (10.5%) Conservative 5 (26.3%) Green 2 (10.5%) Labour 3 (15.8%) Improve the public transport network View Answers UKIP 3 (12.5%) BNP 2 (8.3%) Independent 3 (12.5%) LibDem 4 (16.7%) Conservative 5 (20.8%) Green 3 (12.5%) Labour 4 (16.7%) Create more green spaces. View Answers UKIP 1 (7.7%) BNP 0 (0.0%) Independent 1 (7.7%) LibDem 2 (15.4%) Conservative 5 (38.5%) Green 4 (30.8%) Labour 0 (0.0%) Reduce Tax View Answers UKIP 2 (16.7%) BNP 2 (16.7%) Independent 1 (8.3%) LibDem 2 (16.7%) Conservative 3 (25.0%) Green 1 (8.3%) Labour 1 (8.3%) ( Click for Answers ) How did you do? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 1st, 2012
8:54 am	The benefits of a classical education In her ongoing and ultimately doomed attempts to turn me from the unshaven and scruffy oaf that I am into a suave metrosexual who is in touch with his feminine side, the she-David has been trying to get me to do more housework. After a lengthy debate this morning on whether I should do some ironing, it was agreed that I would do it 'once I've finished my book'. You'd think she'd learned to check my premises before agreeing to this stuff by now. I'm currently on page 24 of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 30th, 2012
10:16 am	[Economics] A long post with numbers in it. Well, the economy is back in the news again. Most obviously the headlines this week that the UK economy has slipped back into recession. Chancellor George Osborne has put on his serious face and shaken his head meaningfully and talked about global problems bringing the otherwise vibrant and lively British economy down. In the meantime Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has adopted his more-in-sorrow –than-anger tone and toured the media offices to explain how if George had just done like he suggested everything would be fixed by now and we’d be bustling along like nobody’s business. There’s been a certain amount of lively debate between supporters of the main parties about which one is right but that debate has as far as I can see missed the most important single point: they’re both lying. I give them both credit for being intelligent fellows who’ve got a good idea of what is actually going on. Ed Balls is a pathetically delusional figure so hung up on his own correctness that he’s incapable of acknowledging any flaws in his own thinking or any personal responsibility he might hold for the economy being in the hole it is in, but I don’t consider him thick. In the same light Osborne isn’t dumb, but he can’t tell the truth about the economy because if he did then the ratings agencies would have stop pretending they think we’re a good credit risk and giving us a AAA thumbs up. When anti-Osborne people say that what he should be doing is creating a ‘plan for growth’, they’re either making political hay from a safe distance (in which case they’re playing games with the hopes and live of millions, and I despise them), or they haven’t the faintest of just what things are actually like, in which case they should just keep their traps shut because anyone talking about a ‘plan for growth’ fails to acknowledge the simple fact that right now there’s no such thing. It’s been observed that in 2009-10 Alistair Darling as Chancellor delivered four consecutive quarters of economic growth, and the figures would seem to support this. Anti-Osborne voices use this to demonstrate just how superior Labour’s economic management was, but clearly they’ve never heard the market term ‘relief rally’. The truth of that growth is simple: if you let me print two hundred billion quid like Darling did, I can give you all the illusion of growth you like until the artificial liquidity that pumps into the economy is spent. Then you’re either back where you started with the option of either printing more money (and who likes having savings anyway?), or tackling the underlying problems. Like blowing more air into a balloon with a hole in it, you can keep it inflated but it doesn’t fix the hole. At best all you’ve done is bought a little time, and what is desperately needed at the moment is time. The growth figures are so artificial as to be meaningless. They’re seized upon by economic and political commentators and activists to support their personal ideologies and advance their position in debate, but the reality is that it is very unlikely that the UK economy has come out of recession at all since 2007. In the meantime, the Eurozone has announced that they will be abandoning austerity and ‘going for growth’. This is rather like a morbidly obese coronary patient saying they’re abandoning the starvation diet and going for donuts. When what is needed is an entire change of lifestyle, what’s being tried is wild swings between what got them into this mess in the first place and desperate expenditure reductions. When Mario Draghi pops up on the day Spanish unemployment went over 25% to explain how the problems with the Euro are fixed and then the very next day the President of the European Parliament says that the breakup of the EU is a very real possibility what you’ve got to take away from that is that the cracks are really starting to show. It’s instructive to understand how we got where we are now. In the dying days of his pathetic, failed leadership, Gordon Brown used to bleat that the crisis ‘started in America’. Like Dr Manhattan says at the end of Watchmen ‘In the end? Nothing ever truly ends’, it’s nigh impossible to put your finger on where the crisis actually started. You can point to the collapse of the London gold pool in the 1960s and Nixon taking the dollar off the gold standard and the subsequent exponential growth of credit if you like, but there are several major moments in the last decade and a half which were critical. The removal of London bank capital restrictions in 1997 was pivotal. Before this Retail banking (your money) and Investment banking (the bank’s money) were held legally separate. Afterwards, the banks were allowed to start investing – or gambling, call it what you will – with your money in London. This caused the global banking industry to shift to the city wholesale and in turn led to Clinton repealing the Glass-Steagall act (you may have heard of it) to prevent the entire US financial industry heading over the Atlantic pronto. In the wake of the dotcom bust and 9/11 interest rates were dropped worldwide in an attempt to forestall a recession and encourage a return to growth. This worked, but created a credit and property price boom. As cheap money expanded – over the next half decade UK personal debt increased by over £1trn – two things happened. First, a this personal debt fed back into the economy resulting in growth, as had been intended, and a great increase of state taxation revenues which allowed a spending spree of unprecedented proportions. Secondly it created an asset price bubble. As the state was taxing savings, and interest rates reduced any remaining saving values people (I may have said this was going to happen back in 2005, but I never go on about it) piled into property as a ‘safe haven’ for their money and drove up the prices into a bubble worldwide. ‘Sub-Prime’ (i.e people with no jobs, income or collateral for loans) lending against mortgages grew hugely. These loans would be bundled and sold on the derivatives market; oodles of cash was made in commissions and also tax revenues. It was in nobody’s interest for it to stop. Well, when I say ‘nobody’s’ what I mean is ‘nobody in either government or the financial services industry’. It was totally in yours and my interest for it to stop, but nobody wanted to hear it for as long as they could believe that Brown had ended boom and bust. To put this into perspective, when you look at the GDP growth figures and compare them with the actual productivity growth figures for the last decade, it appears to there was no real growth in the UK economy whatsoever from 2002 onwards. All the appearance of growth thereafter was based on the expansion of cheap credit. The thing about cheap credit is that it leads to what’s called ‘malinvestment’; instead of borrowing money to invest in things that grow and produce a return in future, people borrow money to pay for holidays and the like. Leisure activity, which creates no growth or return. As a result, there has been no real productivity growth in the UK for a decade at least, and all it took was for a generation to be indebted. Estimates are that once this has all been unwound, the average standard of living in the UK will return to what it was in 2005. It will be hell. People might have to do without Ipads. The economy is chaotic; a Massively complex system with containing millions of discrete, independent agents from which patterns emerge. Chaos theory predicts that as patterns begin to fail you will first see ‘judders’ within the system which presage that collapse. The failure of Northern Rock in 2007 was such a leading event which was mathematically telling. The government rescue of the Rock was an attempt to shore up the system as it began to fail – an act which only made things worse (You know, I could have sworn I said that at the time). The true failure came a year later. Most believe call this the ‘Lehman event’ – the failure of Lehman brothers, but that wasn’t the actual point of failure. The point of failure was the London office of insurers AIG where a fellow by the name of Joseph Cassano and his team were selling Credit Default Swaps (CDSs), a form of insurance on credit. The idea is that if you lend someone money you take out a CDS contract to indemnify you against the possibility of them defaulting. Cassano and his team had sold US$2.7 trillion in CDS insurance against the mortgage market and – this is the important bit – didn’t have a bean in back it up with. So long as the housing market kept going up and defaults were offset by new people entering into the market, the team could pay up. The instant the housing market slowed and more people exited than entered, the jig was up. The mortgage derivative market seized as the security – the mortgagee – defaulted and the insurance didn’t cover the loss. The entire system cascade failed as suddenly nobody knew which derivatives had value and which didn’t. Banks would not lend to each other as they couldn’t be sure if they’d get their money back (as the assets banks were claiming were largely derivative backed, and suddenly their value had collapsed) and they couldn’t even be sure their own assets had any value. This is where the phrase ‘credit crunch’ came from. So governments stepped in and guaranteed the assets, allowing banks to start lending to each other – and, more importantly, you. As your money was allowed to be used as investment capital and collateral (thanks to the 1997 ruling) it wasn’t just the bank money which had gone, it was yours as well. For a moment, the entire system teetered. The thing is, when governments guaranteed those dodgy assets there’s no way of knowing how much they actually were. The way derivatives were sold meant it was very hard indeed to tell what was good and what wasn’t (deliberate? Maybe…) and so a lot of what was called ‘contingent liability’ was adopted by the taxpayer. The derivative assets being held by banks are being shown on their books at face value, and their balance sheets of profit and loss reflect that. The thing is, nobody has the first clue what these derivatives are actually worth until they go wrong – or don’t – but this isn’t reported. When people say that the bank baiulouts will show a profit, they can’t know that. The contingent liabilities – the assets which nobody has the first clue about – could well be worthless, and this risk isn’t shown anywhere in the financial reporting. All that is shown are those debt and derivatives which have already gone bad. Do any of you believe that it’s all out in the open and all the bad debt is now dealt with? Anyone? No? Some people say that the state bailouts saved the system. That your money is safe. This ain’t necessarily so. You see, your assets, your money, can still be used as collateral for loans and deals, and are being. And there isn’t enough money anywhere to save the system twice. When MFGlobal, a major clearing house, collapsed last year, they held hundreds of billions of client assets – money and goods belonging to savers and investors like you which legally did not belong to the bank. They even held physical assets like gold for clients. In the aftermath of the collapse, these assets – which, remember, neither the bank nor their creditors had any legal right to – had gone. The term used was ‘evaporated’. It’s likely that none of those investors will ever see their money or assets again. To date, nobody has gone to prison, or even been charged. So why is London the epicenter of all of this? Well, you see; when your bank lends you money, it creates what your bank calls an asset. That asset is your debt, and it has value. If you take out a mortgage for, say, £100k the banks holds an asset which is your debt secured against your house. It can then use this asset as security to borrow money itself, which it then lends on again and so forth. This process is called ‘hypothecation’ (the bank hypothetically has your house) and ‘rehypothecation’ (the bank uses your house as security on other debt secured against your ongoing ability to pay) So long as you keep paying your mortgage all is well. Now in most places in the world, there are limits to rehypothecation. The most you can rehypothecate is 140% of the value of the asset (so if you have a 100k mortgage, the bank can use that as security against 140k of additional debt). However, in London there are no limits on rehypothecation whatsoever. So long as you hold an asset, you can borrow as much as you damn well please against it subject to how much risk you’re prepared to take. Rehypothecation of up to 400% is not unusual (So if you have a 100k mortgage the bank has borrowed 400k against your ability to pay, and what happens if you can’t pay? Oh, yeah, that.), and what’s more, rehypothecated assets do not have to appear on bank balance sheets. Like Gordon Brown keeping PFI 'off balance sheet' to help his pretence that he was competant and hide the true state of the national finances, so rehypothecated assets and their liabilities are off balance sheet too. When a bank says it has liabilities of so many billions, they’re missing all this stuff off. Welcome to the shadow banking system. What’s more, the thing you really have to remember is that it wasn’t just the hundreds of billions in dodgy sub-prime mortgages which were rehypothecated. The same has also happened to trillions of Eurozone debt; and that’s where it’s instructive to take a quick look at the EU. The inherent problems of the Eurozone have been covered in so much depth recently that it’s probably not worthwhile to go over them here, but the short version is; different economies in Europe are differently efficient, but they’re all using the same currency. However, they’re all allowed to set their own tax rates, print their own cash, borrow on their own account etc without any central coordination. Without full currency union, the weaker members can leverage themselves against the productivity of the stronger in order to support their own economies and hide their own failings, and there’s nothing to stop them. This is precisely what happened. This works just fine until credit dries up and interest rates rise, at which point the interest on money raised by the economically weaker nations becomes unaffordable. This was another of those things that ‘nobody saw coming’ and that’d be believable if I hadn’t been saying this was going to happen in 2009. There’s a great arcticle about how Greece went wrong here if you care to glance over it. Now, the European Parliament has been saying – for most of the last year – that the problems with the Euro have been solved. They haven’t been telling the truth up until now, and they’re haven’t suddenly started. Greece is the poster boy for the ills of the Eurozone, and it’s well known that they agreed a 75% writedown on their debt a few months ago. Thus, we are told, the problems with Greece were solved. Bullshit. I don’t swear much on there, but sometimes you just have to. To understand why this this is rubbish, you have to understand the bond markets; the way government bonds work is that they issue a bond for, say, E100,000 over ten years. This bond will pay you 1.5% of the face value (E1,500) every year until the ten years are up and then you get the 100K you paid for originally. Under normal circumstances a Triple A rated nation will sell bonds at about 2-3% interest – so that’s a discount to the 100k the bond is worth as the E1,500 a year is 2% of what you paid for it. That’s why when the news says that bond interest rates have gone up it’s a bad thing. Even after the 75% writedown, Greek bonds are trading at 13.75%, meaning that you can buy 100k of Greek debt for about E10,000. As a general rule, anything of 6% is bad news. Nobody, even now, thinks Greece can pay its debts. And they can’t. You see, the problems is that most bonds are issued under the laws of the issuing country – it’s how they can force a writedown if they need to. You, as the bondholder, can agree to take the loss, or the country can re-write its laws to make the bonds you hold worthless. The problem Greece has is that about 20% of state debt was sold on bonds issued under English law, and that’s not getting changed to get them off the hook – so that’s about E28bn they have to find regardless. What’s more, what hasn’t been mentioned is the Greek state companies – like the Greek railways – which also issued their bonds under English law. There’s another E100bn in debt sitting there which the Greek government is also on the hook for and everyone is staying very…quiet…about and hoping it will go away. If it were just Greece, this wouldn’t be so bad, but it isn’t. Spain, Portugal and Italy are in the same boat – they can’t pay their debts. It’s looking like Ireland may need another bailout despite introducing the stringent austerity measures demanded of them. And the stronger Eurozone nations? Well, lets look at some numbers, shall we? • Take Belgium; With a GDP of E467bn, they have public sector debt of E466bn, and when the bank Dexia went under last year the government bailed it out by underwriting another E116bn of bad debt not counting contigent liabilities. • When Greece was bailed out, we were told that Greek debt would peak at 120% of GDP in five years and then start to fall. It's already there. • Portuguese public sector debt is 140% of GDP and rising. • In order to offset outstanding liabilities falling due within the next few years the ECB will need to print at least an additional 2 trillion Euros. • French and German banks are estimated to have over E200bn in unfunded liabilities and, unlike the British, the French and Germans haven’t even started recapitalising their banks yet. • According to the European central bank, Eurozone banks are E2.78trn short of the capital required to make them safe in the event of future financial shocks. • One third of Eurozone banks cannot meet even 'tier 3' funding requirements of 3% of liability. • The ECB is accepting from Eurozone banks as collateral for loans those self-same dodgy derivatives and Eurozone debts which are unpayable, and it is accepting them at face value thereby saddling the EU taxpayers with the liabilities. Across the Eurozone, total net debt liabilities are estimated to be well in excess of ten trillion Euros. And that brings us back to London, because thanks to unlimted rehypothecation of assets – i.e. the debts held by London institutions - in the shadow banking system is it estimated that anything up to another eight trillion Euros in liabilities is sitting there off balance sheet and unreported. If you stop and think about it, suddenly everything George Osborne is doing makes sense. He has to buy time for the London financial services industry to unwind its Eurozone position, as if the Euro splits then it will take London with it and for as long as the government of the UK is reliant on the financial services industry for 40% of tax revenues that’s just not going to be something to take risks over. Similarly if London goes under it’ll take the Eurozone with it, so he can’t push for the stupidity taxation on the city. Like King Lear and his fool clinging to each other for fear of the tempest which rages about them, London and the Eurozone are inextricably linked until the entire sorry situation can be unwound. The colossal, unfunded liabilities of the Eurozone and the financial services industry. So Osborne drips liquidity into the system; a bit of tax here, a bit of QE there, a donation to the IMF to prop the Euro up for another day, buying time for the city to get out of the hole it dug for itself. There aren’t many ways out of this. A decade of slow – if any – growth, cuts and austerity may be the best solution. Monetising debt, by which I mean printing money and buying the debts and then just forgetting about them, is another route being pursued. This has the side-effect of inflation which might reduce the value of your savings but at least it means they won’t evaporate when your bank goes under and it’s found all your money not only now belongs to someone else, but in same cases never even existed. Globally, things look the same. The distant flushing noise you hear from the East is Chinas’ growth estimates vanishing down the lavatory as their construction sector grinds to a halt; 30-40%% of Chinese government tax revenues are generated by the construction sector. India is relying on the monsoon this year being a particularly good one to restore their economy to growth. The US is US$16trn in debt and that figure has risen 16% in the last 24 months. If you want a prediction, it’s that the US will announce a further QE programme of between 5-700bn at some point between July and September this year. Global GDP is estimated at US$59trn. Global debt liabilities are estimated at US$220trn. As some southern European countries attempt to ban large transactions taking place in cash to clamp down on tax avoidance (the Spanish are talking about introducing a law that any cash transaction of over E1,000 must be carried out in the presence of a tax inspector), people are shifting from money to barter as globally the financial system strains. From this town in Greece where people have given up on money and gone back to barter, to China buying US21bn in oil from Iran with a combination of goods, services and gold rather than actual money. Economists – especially ones who aren’t going to lose their jobs if they turn out to be wrong - have said that the way out of the credit crisis is, ultimately, to increase the money supply. Or maybe we can ‘abandon austerity and go for growth’. You know, the next time someone says that, point out that the UK has taken on liabilities of almost two trillion quid in the last decade or so and printed two hundred and seventy five billion more. You might ask them, given that this printing and borrowing doesn't seem to have resulted in all that much growth, just how much more we need to borrow before it starts working. Alternatively, just punch them in the face. It’ll be quicker. In the light off all that increase in debt and printing, the best performing asset class since the start of 2012 has been bullion. Hang on, wasn’t I saying that would happen last August? Why, yes. Yes I was. I do hope you were listening. Some people have said that the way for the UK to cut the deficit and still avoid state spending cuts is for the rich to pay their 'fair share'. To put that into perspective, if Britain's two richest men (Lakshmi Mittal and Alisher Usmanov) were to write cheques to the treasury for their entire net worth tomorrow, that'd just about cover the deficit and cuts until the middle of June. If everyone in the top 1,000 richest people in the UK were taxed every single penny they own, it'd get us until about this time next year. Who, precisely, are we supposed to tax 'fairly' after that? It's no more a long-term solution than printing money is. Economically, the current level of state debt, liabilities and spending are not sustainable - and the one thing you can say with absolute certainty about things which are not sustainable is that they will not be sustained. Just sayin'. (38 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
9:58 am	"High taxes don't make the poor better off, they just make politicians richer." I was stopped by a pollster on the way to work this morning, who wanted to know how I planned to vote in the forthcoming mayoral elections. Naturally I said Ken Livingstone, because I enjoy helping give him that doomed glimmer of false hope. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 19th, 2012
9:45 am	Stories In a cultured mood the other week, I headed off to the theatre. It was, in fact, the Battersea Arts Centre which, according to the Guardian, is “Britain’s most influential theatre” – a fact which is usually enough to make me react like Scooby Doo to a scary old house whenever I walk past. Still, Mother Theresa associated with the lepers of Calcutta, so it’s the least I can do to periodically hang out with artistic Guardian readers in the hope that something might rub off on them. The play I went to see was You’re not like the other girls Chrissy, a one-woman show set in liberated Paris in 1945 where Christiene, a French girl whose engagement to an Englishman six years before had been rudely interrupted by the Wehrmacht coming over the border, sits at the Gare de Nord waiting for her train to England to see her fiancée again – and marry him. And whilst she waits, she tells her story. Not the sort of thing I’d usually go to see, but hey, I thought. It takes all sorts. The play itself was actually very good; engaging, funny, well scripted and generally a perfectly acceptable evening of entertainment. However, there was one massive, massive problem with the show as far as I was concerned. The flyer gave away the ending. You see, the flyer described the play as ‘funny, touching and ultimately poignant’, and when a play about a girl waiting for her boyfriend is described as ‘poignant’, that can only mean one thing. He’s going to let her down. You’re going to get an hour or so of heartwarming anecdotes, tales of overcoming adversity and a little bit of human drama, and then the bloke is going to turn out to be a flake who never shows up or to have married someone else in the interim. I was thinking about this because I’m interested in stories, and how they’re structured. I’ve written a fair few of them in my time, and the act of writing a story is a process of limiting possibilities. When you start writing, you can take a story anywhere. But as the tale progresses, you reduce the possible outcomes until at the end you’re limited often to a binary choice. In the example of a girl waiting for her boyfriend, really your options are: he turns up, or he doesn’t.* What’s more narrative convention demands that stories are structured just so. You can break the conventions once you know what they are, but the entertainment –consuming audience is so aware of postmodernism these days that it’s very difficult indeed to genuinely surprise people with a twist. If I were feeling pretentious, I’d suggest that stories are actually represented by a subatomic particle – we’ll call it a Narrat-Ion** - which begins as a wave but the more you write the more you reduce its potential until at the end you’re left with a binary choice of which slit to go through, and thus forcing the wave to become a discrete story-on particle. But I'm not feeling pretenious and I don't want people to think I haven't read any Feynman, so I won't say that. However, I think that’s why I prefer writing games to writing stories – whilst you create the initial conditions you just never know where they’re going to end up because there’s more people than one storyteller creating the narrative and so there’s more potentials than you alone are capable of creating. And so it was with the play I went to see; it was created by one person, so the completely left-field events of a collaborative creation method like playing a game simply aren’t going to appear. It’s a story, the potential events of the story are going to collapse during the telling of it as hurdles to their relationship are met and overcome and at the end, barring aliens or zombies her boyfriend is going to turn up or he isn’t. Telling me the story was poignant just ticked me off. Anyway, Christiene sits on the platform of Gare du Nord and talks of dodging German patrols during the occupation and sneaking illegal foods and all that surviving-during-wartime stuff, and then her problems with the post-occupation bureaucracy and how she had to overcome endless delays and barriers to getting a visa to England and then, at the end, sitting on the platform, she told how she’d done everything she could but there were no tickets left on the only day her visa was valid for. The ending was indeed poignant. She couldn’t get to England to her wedding. Except… to my great surprise the play was based on a true story, not a created narrative where the rules of storytelling have to apply. A passing soldier, touched by her tale gave her his ticket to England, so she got there in the end. Apparently the tale was one of those ‘happy ending in wartime’ stories that the papers love and it made it into the Paris papers of the time. She travelled to England, married her boyfriend, and lived a long and happy life into her nineties, dictating a lengthy reminiscence about the events of her youth shortly before she died. It was a useful reminder that no matter what the rules of writing stories, real life doesn’t have to obey them at all; and that in real life, happy endings can be poignant as well. *Okay, you could have her abducted by aliens or there might be an outbreak of zombies, but if you don’t want your audience to think you’re a proper wanker you probably won’t do that. Instead, like I say, he shows up or he doesn’t. And calling your tale ‘poignant’ narrows down your options still further. **I’m pretty proud of that one, though I say so myself. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
10:17 am	Biology is ideology There was a piece of research which hit the news a few months ago, which concluded that left-wing people tend to be more intelligent than right-wingers. The story was picked up upon and linked to on facebook and LJ by a lot of the sort of people think you can prove you’re more intelligent than other people by linking to an article written by someone else. The research – reported here - studied more than 15,000 people and found that low academic results in childhood were a statistically significant predictor of ‘right-wing’ views later in life. Disappointingly, the views tested for were only social, not economic, so whilst it was possible to infer from the results that the less intelligent the person the more intimidated and fearful they feel of things like crime and immigration, there was nothing on the opinions of high and low intelligence on things like quantitative easing to offset the dangers of rehypothecated eurozone debt in the shadow banking system, which is really what I’d’ve been most interested in. There seems to have been a bit of a flurry of psychosocial analysis of political opinions to seek neural or mental indicators of what people believe politically lately. The recent book by Jonathan Haidt: The righteous mind examined the belief systems of people who described themselves as left and right- wing and found some interesting correlations. To quote: They asked two thousand Americans to describe their political leanings (liberal, moderate, conservative) and fill out a questionnaire about morality, one-third of the time as themselves, one-third of the time as a "typical liberal", and one-third of the time as a "typical conservative". The clear answer was: self-described conservatives and moderates were much better at predicting what other people would believe. Liberals, especially the "very liberal", were by far the worst at guessing what people would say, and especially bad at guessing what conservatives would say about issues of care or fairness. For example, most thought that conservatives would disagree with statements like "One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenceless animal" or "Justice is the most important requirement for a society". Looking into belief systems, Haidt identified six factors - care for others, liberty from oppression, and fairness, loyalty to one's group, sanctity and sacredness, and respect for authority. In left-wing people, Haidt noted that the first three on that list were primary, whereas right-wing people held all six as being of roughly equal importance. This difference of relative weighing of importance within the belief selection appears to explain most difference in political opinion between the sides of the political spectrum, and so it’s possible for right-wing people to console themselves that lefties are just people without faith, loyalty and respect, whilst lefties can nod and observe that right wingers don’t half believe some outdated nonsense. Just because you know the causes of differences doesn’t mean any solutions immediately suggest themselves, you know. Anyway, amongst the recent pieces of political belief research, one really stood out for me: a recent study by Griffith university in Australia which concluded that big, strong men are more likely to vote conservative. The research noted that the greater the physical prowess of a man, the greater his sense of entitlement and the more likely he is to hold political views which are more of the rugged individualist type than the touchy-feely. To my mind, this explains several things. Firstly, it explains why expansionist imperialism by the Soviet Union quailed, retreated and ultimately collapsed when confronted head-on by John Wayne and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and secondly why all the lefties I know seem to be flabby, pasty weeds a foot or so shorter than me. I’d always sort of thought their growth had been stunted by years of lonely onanism hunched over the works of Karl Marx and pictures of Laurie Penny, but it runs out they were actually born like that. Who knew? Some people have suggested that the major political conflict of the 21st century will not be old 20tyh century definitions of left and right, but a conflict between liberty and state control. However, the research outlined above which apparently shows weedy but clever lefties and big, strong right wingers instead suggests that things may be different. I’d like to suggest that the defining political question of the next century will not be liberty vs. communalism. Instead I've put together a short questionnaire based on what I think the defining political question of the next century will be: Poll #1834247 How many lefties can you take in a fight? Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 14 Your physique is: View Answers Puny, like Walter the Softy or Ed Milliband. 4 (28.6%) Normal, I suppose. 7 (50.0%) Mighty. Six feet seven inches and three hundrd pounds of solid muscle. 3 (21.4%) How many pressups can you do? View Answers None. The struggle of the proletariat is not advanced by pushups! 7 (50.0%) A fair few. I like to keep myself in shape. 3 (21.4%) Hundreds. I can do pushups all day – and night, if you catch my drift, ladies. 4 (28.6%) Have you ever been in a fight? View Answers Only the fight against capitalist oppression! 0 (0.0%) I try not to - violence is intimidating 8 (57.1%) Every time someone looks at me funny or spills my pint. 6 (42.9%) What is the best thing in life? View Answers Helping the underprivilidged with my superior ideology. 2 (14.3%) A few pints with my mates, and a fag or two. 6 (42.9%) Crushing my enemies, driving their cattle before me, and hearing the lamentations of their women. 6 (42.9%) Your answers: Mostly 'A's. You're a soft girly-man and probably couldn't beat up even a single lefty. In fact, you might even be in danger of becoming a lefty yourself! However, you can save yourself by joining a gym. Mostly 'B's. You are an ordinary, everyday sort of human being, and so probably unable to beat up more than five or ten lefties without having to sit down for a breather and a cup of tea. Mostly 'C's. Watching you beat up lefties is like watching a professional gamer playing Doom on 'Easy', or possibly God mode*. They fall before you like wheat before the scythe. Or like Communists in Rambo: First Blood Part 2. Which you probably watch quite often. *IDDQD (32 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 16th, 2012
7:57 am	A mouse at poo corner “David”, she said to me. “What have you been doing in the corner of the living room?” Now, when a girl asks you a question like that, it’s wise to think before you answer. No, you think to yourself. I’m pretty sure she can’t know about that. And if she knew about that other thing, she’d’ve dumped me without asking any questions at all. On due consideration, I decided that the best defense on this occasion was to answer a question with a question. “Why?” I said. “What’s wrong with it?” “There’s a really funny smell there.” Phew, I thought, that’s several of the things I might have been doing in the corner struck off the list immediately. “A funny smell? Why do you think I - notable for my fragrant and punctilious personal hygiene - might have anything to do with it?” “Well, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me.” I got up and wandered into the living room and gave a deep sniff. There was indeed peculiar – in fact rather unpleasant – smell. “Are you saying”, I called through, “that you reckon I’m behind this…honk?” “You’ve got form, David. A record as long as my arm.” “What the heck to you think I might have been doing to make the room smell like this?” “Something unsavoury, I bet. Have you taken a poo in the cupboard?” ”What?!” “It just seemed like the sort of thing you might do.” The thing was, there was a pretty unpleasant smell in the corner of the room. It smelled for all the world like something had died and gone off there. “Hang on”, I said. “Going to own up?” “No!” “Hmph.” “I think I’ve got it. I reckon something like a mouse has died under the floorboards and is, um, going off.” “Ew!” She held her nose. “It might take a few days for this to clear.” “What can we do?” “Short of taking the floor up, not a great deal I don’t think.” “So you’re telling me that the living room is going to smell like…like…your underpants for days?” “Maybe a week.” “God, it’s not like the house doesn’t smell badly enough when you’re in it, without this as well. “You know”, I said, contemplatively. “If ever your body is found bobbing down the Thames, no court in the land will convict. I’ll have too many character witnesses.” “Oh? Why?” “They’ll have read my Livejournal…” (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012
10:00 am	In which David and Monty quit drinking. "I've got to warn you", I said as we sat down to dinner. "I'm off the booze at the moment." "Oh?" "Yes, it's Lent. Liquor is on the huge list of things I've given up for the duration." He nodded. "That's fine. I'm on the wagon at the moment as well." I was surprised. "You? Given it up for Lent as well?" "No, nothing like that. I'm just on an economy drive at the moment, and I thought it'd do me good to cut out alcohol for a few weeks. Give me system a chance to recover, cut down on calories, all that sort of thing". He turned to the waiter. "Gin and tonic, please." "Hang on!", I said. "You just told me you weren't drinking. Off the booze. Saving money, health kick, cutting down the calories, all that. Not sixty seconds ago you said that!" "Yes, but a G&T hardly counts, does it? And anyway, I've had a rotten day at work. I need to settle my nerves. That's almost definitely the same as giving up drinking entirely. Anyway, it's just the one. That won't hurt." I nodded. "Fair enough." The waiter leaned in. "And with your main course, sir?" "Ah, yes", said Monty. "What would you recommend with the pork?" "If sir is not drinking, might I recommend..." "I think I could make an exception to that rule now we're here, don't you? Do you have a decent white?" "What happened to not drinking?" I asked. "Well, I'm not, hardly. A single glass of the Falanghino will suffice, don't you think?" "Your definition of "on the wagon" seems a remarkably flexible one?" "I've not fallen off the wagon, old man. Not at all. Gently toppled, perhaps. A minor lean towards the edge. Possibly a slump-ette. But not a fall by any means." The waiter turned to me. "Anything for you, sir?", he said, eyeing my glass of water. "Oh, needs must when the devil drives. Gin and tonic, please." (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012
11:03 am	Hang on, isn't there an election on the way? This calls for... ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOBORIS (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 2nd, 2012
10:41 am	And this is what passes for history? I was chatting to ria_saakshi a while ago about her family history, as it's quite an interesting one. Her ancestors were amongst those who fetched up on these shores as a result of the British figuring out that combining aggressive trade and a debt-financed standing army was a recipe for success before anyone else, and a personal view of history is something I'm always up for hearing. Her great-grandparents were originally from the subcontinent. The thinking in the family was that as the youngest there was little land or inheritance available and therefore a limited future. Her Great-grandfather was therefore attracted to an offer made by the British to manage farmland in different parts of the Empire. It was not exactly explained that the terms were a period of indentured servitude in return for the land, or the fact that you would be enforceably quarantined for months... However, the big difference, she told me, between the British and every other bunch of Imperialists of the time - the French, Germans, Italians, Americans, Japanese, Russians - was that once their contracted period of service was complete, the British paid up as promised. Her grandparents got their patch of jungly land to clear and farm and begin the slow climb from indentured servants to respectable middle-class farmer-dom. As it turned out, the climb was rather faster than anyone expected because after a certain amount of slashing, burning, and digging it turned out that the land they'd been given had a gold mine on it. So Imperialism worked out pretty well for them, all things considered. I was reminded of this the other week whilst I was watching How God made the English, a documentary series about the history of the relationship between the English and religion. It's not actually a very good series - it's quite lightweight and rushes through history without pausing for breath or giving enough detail to allow you to get a real understanding of the subject - but it was informative enough. Anyway, as the narration talked about the British Empire, he hit the point where his voice took on a sombre tone and he said how being an unrivalled power led to a risk of arrogance and high-handedness which sometimes led to dark results. I wondered which example he'd pull out to illustrate this - the Amritsar massacre? Concentration camps in South Africa? The complete annihilation of the indigenous people of Tasmania? It's not like they aren't there if you go looking. But no. The example he used to illustrate the arrogance and high-handedness of the British Empire was the supression of the transatlantic slave trade by the Royal Navy. Some expert in international law was wheeled on to explain how this should have been done within a framework of treaties with other nations and how it just wouldn't be allowed now. I couldn't help but think; if you're going looking for dodgy stuff the British Empire - any Empire - did, you can find it. But the Royal Navy going out and stopping the wholesale transportation of entire peoples from Africa to the freedom- and democracy-hating United States to work in slavery isn't it. Historically, I can't actually think of a better use of empire by anyone, not just the British. He may as well have added that giving gold mines to random landless Indians was right out of order too. Tsk. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 30th, 2012
10:13 am	All right, Hollywood, this has to stop now. There have been times in the past when I've suspected that I'm being spied upon* (or at least people are reading my LJ and mining it for ideas). There was this time years ago when my content started showing up on Radio 2 a few days after it was posted. Or there was that time with Panda Master/Kung Fu Panda. Anyway, from time to time I post spoof lists of TV programmes. These are usually just an excuse for me to run throwaway jokes I couldn't find any space for elsewhere, such as this entry from 2009. I'd like to take a moment and highlight part of that entry: "Saturday, 9pm (FILM): One Trillion Years BC The director of Independence Day and Godzilla presents the story of a plucky primal atom who must leave the safety of nul-space and seek his destiny. Big-budget special effects blockbuster with a truly explosive ending. Features an 'astonishingly lifelike' performance by Hayden Christensen as an utterly blank void. " You'd think that nothing could be done with that, wouldn't you? Nobody would ever, ever make an animated film about the adventures of a plucky subatomic particle featuring Hayden Christensen as a blank void, right? Right? WRONG. May I direct you to Quantum Quest, an animated film (from 2010, after my post) featuring the adventures of a plucky subatomic particle and Hayden Christensen as a blank void. I mean, what do I have to do, eh? WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO? The plot summary from IMDB reads: Quantum Quest takes place in atomic world, where the forces of the Core and the forces of the Void battle for the fate of the universe. The Core is a kind being, who lives inside all suns, his children are protons, photons, and neutrinos, which are created inside each Star, and are sent out into the universe to bring life, light, and knowledge. The Void, is that which existed before the big bang, he hates everything and everyone in the universe for invading his nothingness. The Void has an army of anti-matter that he uses to try and destroy the forces of the Core. An endless battle rages at the edge of our solar system, between the VOID and the Core's forces. Just send me a cheque, Hollywood. It's the decent thing to do. *Actually I was once actually spied upon, but that's what stalkers are for, right? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
9:37 am	Angela Merkel arrives at Athens airport... "Good morning", says the immigration officer. "Name?" "Angela Merkel". "Occupation?" "No, just visiting." (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012
10:54 am	Holiday destinations. On a whim the other day I picked up a copy of Scan magazine; it's a publication about Scandinavian culture distributed in Britain and other English-speaking lands in order to promote Scandinavian tourism. Now if I were given the 'attract people to Scandinavia' brief, my thoughts would immediately turn to things that people would be interested in - vikings, and scantily-clad girls cavorting in Icelandic hot springs - and keep darned quiet about anything which might be considered wierd, boring or just downright depressing. But no! To my delight, whichever (doubtless Nordic) copy editor put the magazine together obviously decided that people might not be interested in bikini-clad blondes and might instead be interested in, well, the wierd, the boring and downright depressing. Or "culture", as some bright spark has optimistically christened it. So we have tourism features like: The Depression Museum Sweden's largest museum devoted to Scandinavias historical association with clinical depression, the Miseryhüs in Goteborg holds the famous noose wing, a massive gallery of grainy, black-and-white photographs of popular bridges, railway crossings and isolated lakes, and the biggest collection of brightly-coloured pills outside Russia. Entry is free to the unemployed, disabled and the unfit to breed. The Miseryhüs is easy to find as it stands right next to Sweden's largest distillery - the Alkehälle - and straight over the road from a massive clock which shows just how many weeks it's been since the sun last came up. and The Müüstrek Enjoy this three-month long celebration of the annual Moose migration in northern Finland - with nothing to do but watch the stately progression of the moose across the tundra whilst drinking heavily. Locals make much of the trek, which is widely agreed to be the most exciting thing which happens to them all year. Ideal for children of five and over. All this and not a single mention of Shako Paul City. Do they want to attract people to their countries or not? (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 26th, 2012
9:57 am	Words. Reading my etymology over the weekend, I was intrigued to note that the word 'crown' apparently originally derives, via latin, from the Greek corone, or 'crow'. The Crow, an oracular bird, was believed to represent the souls of dead kings and would be consulted for advice. They'd be kept around for live kings to have a chat with their forebears. It's reassuring to know that when her Maj is sat there enthroned in all the panoply of state that she has such luminaries as Edward I, Richard III and Henry VIII muttering their advice in her ear. I wonder what they're saying? (5 Comments |Comment on this)