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Nobody on this blog has yet commented on the terrible events near Smolensk in Russia yesterday morning, so I will take a brief moment to do so myself.
President Lech KaczyŠ„ski of Poland was probably best described as a conservative rather than a liberal, and was not someone who the people on this blog would agree with on everything. However, he was someone who lived under tyranny, and when faced with the question of whether you give in to such a tyranny or stand up to it, he stood up to it, and he spent a considerable time in prison as a consequence. Most of us are fortunate not to be tested in such a way, but here was a man who was tested and passed the test. For that he deserves immense respect. He was also about as pro-American and pro-Western as possible. For that also, he has my thanks.
I am shaken, I suspect with much of the population of Poland, by the horrible historical irony. 88 members of the Polish elite, including pretty much the entire top brass of the Polish armed forces, died near Katyn forest yesterday morning. This is terrible. My sympathy to the friends and family of all these good people.
One of the interesting exhibits in the pantheon of attempted explanations for the current financial crisis is the Kingdom of Spain. Spain had a massive real estate driven asset bubble, which has since collapsed. There is high unemployment, horrible public sector budget deficits, and lots of abandoned, half built housing projects around the coast. (In January, I struck up a conversation with some Australian engineers at the next table in a restaurant at lunchtime in the business district of Hanoi. Upon asking them how business was, they told me that there are lots of construction projects going on, but they were being undercut on price by Spanish and Italian companies. When domestic demand collapses, you look elsewhere).
And yet, Spain has not had a financial crisis. Spain’s banks are generally solvent and in good shape. One explanation of this is that financial crises in other economies are more a symptom of the economic crisis rather than its cause. Asset bubbles end badly. Government overspending has consequences.
One of Spain’s banks, Grupo Santander, has been expanding steadily throughout the world for a little over a decade. Unlike certain other banks of an expansionary nature (Royal Bank of Scotland, cough), Santander did not combine the acquisition of foreign banks with stupid lending, and so when the global banking sector fell in a heap a couple of years ago, Santander did what sound companies often do, and went looking for cheap assets. These included the small UK bank Alliance and Leicester, and the branch network and savings business of Bradford and Bingley (after its toxic assets had been nationalised by the UK government). Santander was an attractive buyer from the perspective of the UK government, as its expansionary frame of mind meant that it was unlikely to close branches and shed lots of employees.
My general inclination here is to compliment the management on running a good business. However, there is something disturbing, just the same. I have felt this for a while. Spanish financial institutions (and in truth Spanish organisations of all kinds) have a thing for building office complexes in the suburbs of Madrid that look like something out of a James Bond movie. It would be mean to say something about lingering residues of fascism here, so I will not do this.
However, the new headquarters (er, sorry, I mean the Ciudad Grupo Santander) shown in the above video really does appear to be a doosey. Professor Parkinson would no doubt have something to say here, but I feel oddly positive. However much I sometimes think that people who make corporate videos of this kind are best when placed on the B-Ark, being driven around by bright red Spanish banko-robots is certainly going to make marketing visits to foreign financial institutions a lot more fun. (Do they bring in Lewis Hamilton to race them on AGM day? Jokes about “augmented reality” in banking could go on and on, too).
It’s a shame that they have to build this sort of thing in Madrid, though. Building it (perhaps on an artificial island?) next to the private zoo in King Alfonso XIII’s weird coastal folly in the actual Ciudad (non-Grupo) Santander would be fitting, in some unexplainable way.
Link via Bruce Sterling.
A quick link from me today to a recent talk given by Dr Stephen Davies at the Oxford Libertarian Society. Excellent piece, well worth your time. He absolutely nails the silly idea, put about both by communitarians of the left and right, that individualism is the same as lack of interest in a strong civil society. Quite the reverse.
Here’s an interesting paper he wrote about crime and morality many years ago for the Libertarian Alliance. Also recommended. And he is giving the annual Chris R Tame memorial lecture for the Libertarian Alliance on 10 May in London. I’ll be there and hopefully, put up a review on what he has to say.
According to “Messenger”, a guest poster at Bishop Hill blog, they – in the form of the Climate Change Schools Project – are “bringing climate change to the heart of the national curriculum.”
So far the the Climate Change Lead Schools network only consists of 80 schools from across the North East. But fear not, says the Project’s website, “They are helping to pave the way for what is hoped will become a national programme of positive climate change education and action, led by our young people.”
I have a feeling that the words “led by our young people” are strictly conditional on said leadership being in one particular direction.
The “Climate Cops” activity that so angered Messenger, in which children “book” their friends or parents for crimes against climate, has already reached beyond the area of the North East in which the “Lead Schools” were situated. I saw a leaflet about it in my local library. Creepy website here. It is sponsored by nPower, the gas and electricity company – another example of how big energy corporations, far from opposing climate change activism, frequently pay for it.
This headline caught my eye:
Alan Greenspan to Testify on Subprime Lending, Securitization, and GSEs, Wednesday, April 7
Shame he was not grilled a bit more about the Fed’s free-money policy that fuelled much of the credit crisis back in the days leading up to the housing bubble. Goodness knows what his old mentor would have made of this charade.
When David Cameron spoke to activists on the Embankment yesterday morning, one was at once splashed in the face by the cold water of the obsession with image: almost everyone in sight was young, several of them (including a man Mr Cameron ostentatiously embraced with that warm insincerity that is his trademark) from ethnic minorities, a correct proportion of them women. His approach has always been about ticking the boxes of militant superficiality. His main argument is that he is not the Labour Party. Well, not in name, at any rate.
– Simon Heffer
The Prime Minister has announced the date of the UK general election between the Party of Big Government Regulatory Statism and, er, the Other Party of Big Government Regulatory Statism.
Of course the media and quite a few bloggers will spend the time between now and then obsessing over the 3% margin in the purview of the state which differentiates them as if they were comparing chalk and cheese, whereas in fact they are arguing which is preferable for the terminally ill patient: pneumonic plague or bubonic plague.
But nevertheless we will see an endless stream of Tories harrumphing that Dave Cameron’s brand of regulatory statism is in fact both the Small Government Society Friendly Ideal, The Saviour of the National Health Service, Market Friendly, Eco-Regulation Friendly and indeed all things to all people.
And as a result, I urge people who feel the overwhelming urge to vote for anyone to put their X down for Britain’s only conservative party… and of course that means do not even consider voting Tory, unless a more inept version of Tony Blair (i.e. Tory Blair) is actually what you want.
But please be clear on one thing: if you fear not voting Tory will give Labour more time to wreck the country, that is simply not the choice on offer…nothing meaningful will change in Britain as long as the two main parties are essentially as one on the size and scope of the state, which at the moment they most certainly are…
…and if you vote to endorse that fact just because you (quite rightly) loath Gordon Brown, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
“The Obama administration came into office promising to press the “reset” button with the rest of the world after eight years of the so-called arrogant, swaggering Texan cowboy blundering his way around the planet, offending peoples from many lands. Instead, Obama pressed the ejector-seat button: Brits, Czechs, Israelis, Indians found themselves given the brush. I gather the Queen was “amused” by the president’s thoughtful gift of an iPod preloaded with Obama speeches – and, fortunately for Her Majesty, the 160GB model only has storage capacity for two of them, or three if you include one of his shorter perorations.”
Mark Steyn.
It is amazing how a foreign leader can get away with being brusque to allies so long as he or she does not speak with a Texan accent. After all, Mr Obama got the Nobel Prize for Peace!
Iain Dale, the UK blogger and wannabe Tory MP, gets himself into a fearful mess in arguing as to why owners of privately owned businesses, such as hotels and the like, should be forced to accept any type of client, even if that offends the moral sensibilities of the owners. Much as I share Mr Dale’s dislike of bigotry, he’s just plain wrong when he writes:
“This is not about property rights. If you open your house to paying guests, it is no longer just your house. You are running a business, just the same as anyone else, and you should be subject to the same laws as anyone else. If you do not wish gay people, black people, Jews or anyone else in your house, don’t open it to the public. Simple as that. No one would accept a shopowner refusing to serve a particular type of person, would they?”
He’s wrong here. So Mr Dale imagines, does he, that as soon as a person sets up – at their own risk and cost – in business, and chooses to make money in a particular way, that they suddenly forfeit any right to choose with whom they wish to make a living if the powers that be decide that such reasoning is prejudiced in some bad way? How the expletive deleted does that work, Mr Dale? Does this mean, for instance, that a business owner should be forced to serve anyone? Suppose a nightclub, say, insists on a dress code for its clientele (as happens). Does this mean that the scruffy are being discriminated against?
I don’t like homophobia any more than Mr Dale, but as a supposed Tory, he ought to realise that the best protection any group of persons have against bigotry is competition and several ownership of private property. In a free, robust market unimpeded by state privileges and taxes, bigotry carries a significant economic cost to the bigot. And I think it was Voltaire back in the 1740s who observed, how people of all faiths, for example, could and did transact in the early London Stock Exchange of the time. Filthy lucre is often the most corrosive solvent of bigotry that there is.
There is also an ancilliary point here. As a free marketeer in favour of honest money and competition in currencies, I think it should be the right of any businessman to refuse to accept payment in certain currencies that he, rationally or otherwise, does not trust. If we adopt Mr Dale’s line of reasoning on how a business owner’s property rights go up in smoke the moment a client comes through the door, he’s all in favour of forcing people to accept payment in whatever the state decrees is the “proper” form.
Sorry Mr Dale, but you just don’t accept the concept of free association as it applies to commerce. Property rights is most definitely what the issue is about.
I am not going to talk about religious beliefs but about matters so obvious that it has gone out of style to mention them. I believe in my neighbours. I know their faults, and I know that their virtues far outweigh their faults. “Take Father Michael down our road a piece. I’m not of his creed, but I know that goodness and charity and loving kindness shine in his daily actions. I believe in Father Mike. If I’m in trouble, I’ll go to him. My next-door neighbour is a veterinary doctor. Doc will get out of bed after a hard day to help a stray cat. No fee – no prospect of a fee – I believe in Doc. I believe in my townspeople. You can know on any door in our town saying, ‘I’m hungry,’ and you will be fed. Our town is no exception. I’ve found the same ready charity everywhere. But for the one who says, ‘To heck with you – I got mine,’ there are a hundred, a thousand who will say, “Sure, pal, sit down.” I know that despite all warnings against hitch-hikers I can step up to the highway, thumb for a ride and in a few minutes a car or a truck will stop and someone will say, ‘Climb in Mac – how far you going?’
I believe in my fellow citizens. Our headlines are splashed with crime yet for every criminal there are 10,000 honest, decent, kindly men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up. Business could not go on from day to day. Decency is not news. It is buried in the obituaries, but is a force stronger than crime. I believe in the patient gallantry of nurses and the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that goes on quietly in almost every home in the land. I believe in the honest craft of workmen. Take a look around you. There never were enough bosses to check up on all that work. From Independence Hall to the Grand Coulee Dam, these things were built level and square by craftsmen who were honest in their bones. I believe that almost all politicians are honest. . .there are hundreds of politicians, low paid or not paid at all, doing their level best without thanks or glory to make our system work.
If this were not true we would never have gotten past the 13 colonies. I believe in Rodger Young. You and I are free today because of endless unnamed heroes from Valley Forge to the Yalu River. I believe in – I am proud to belong to – the United States. Despite shortcomings from lynchings to bad faith in high places, our nation has had the most decent and kindly internal practices and foreign policies to be found anywhere in history.
And finally, I believe in my whole race. Yellow, white, black, red, brown. In the honesty, courage, intelligence, durability, and goodness of the overwhelming majority of my brothers and sisters everywhere on this planet. I am proud to be a human being. I believe that we have come this far by the skin of our teeth. That we always make it just by the skin of our teeth, but that we will always make it. Survive. Endure. I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will endure longer than his home planet – will spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency. This I believe with all my heart.
– R. A. Heinlein.
An unfolding saga in the game of cricket in recent years has been the question of whether technology should be used to aid umpires in the case of close or potentially controversial decisions. Like many things in life, the question of whether to do this has turned out to be more complex than it may at first have appeared to be. There have been situations in which the on field umpire has asked for a replay, and the replay has been unclear but has none the less been used to overrule an on field umpire who probably saw more. There have been situations in which the players have appealed to a video replay that didn’t show anything, when they likely knew themselves what had happened and the situation would previously have been resolved with a gentlemanly code of conduct. There have been situations when the television company did not manage to produce the appropriate replay in time, and the umpire then made a decision that was revealed to be incorrect five minutes later. Many decisions depend on whether the batsman hit the ball, and a mixture of sound and picture is used to make these decisions, and determining which items of the bat, ball, ground, clothing, safety equipment etc came in contact with each other is often no clearer using the technology than not.
Fans of other sports are no doubt nodding at this point, as similar issues have come up in most sports that have attempted similar things. Cricket has one further issue, not unique to it but relatively central to it, which is the question of how technology should be used in the interpretation of the leg before wicket rule (LBW).
One of the principal ways of getting a batsman out is for the bowler to bowl at the batsman, for the batsman to miss the ball, and for the ball to then strike the wooden stumps behind him. It would be possible for a batsman to avoid getting out this way by his simply standing in front of the stumps at all times. In order to avoid this, the rules of cricket allow for a batsman to be out if he is standing directly in front of the stumps, the ball hits his leg, and the ball would have gone on to hit the stumps. (The rule is actually more complex than this, but the complexities are not relevant to the point I am making). The umpire stands in a good position from which to judge whether the ball will hit the stumps, and traditionally the umpire’s judgment has been used to decide whether the ball would have hit the stumps.
Umpires inevitably make mistakes, and there have been many accusations of umpire bias over the years. For a long time people have been watching replays in slow motion on television in order to second guess umpires, but these have never been conclusive. Occasionally an umpire will make an obviously wrong decision, but most of the time there is as much of an element of doubt watching at home as there is for the umpire. Or perhaps more: the umpire is in a better viewing position than the TV cameras.
In recent years, however, things have changed. The “Hawk-eye” system was initially used by television companies, and there was then pressure for it to be used in assisting umpires as well. Basically, this system looks at a number of video replays, and from them constructs a three dimensional model of the ball, the pitch, the bat, etc. From the this model, the path of the ball is extrapolated going forward. Television viewers see a computer graphic image of the ball hitting (or not) a computer graphic image of the stumps, and are told whether the ball would have hit the stumps and whether the batsman was or was not out.
Every since this system has been in place as part of television coverage, there has been pressure for it to be used in umpiring decisions. When people have asked me about this, I have stated my position with unexpected vehemence, particularly given that I am generally in favour of using video replays as part of the adjudication process. For I am, at present, unequivocally opposed to the use of Hawk-Eye and similar decisions in umpiring decisions.
My reason for this is as follows. → Continue reading: Of cricket and climate
That James Lovelock is a strange case, as discussed by Natalie here on Monday. After hearing him on the Today programme the other day, I had to interrupt my bath and rush off to make notes, yelling to my wife as I went that he’s an old charlatan. The immediate provocation was the claim that’s bothered me in the past and had me quarrelling with fellow members of a science journalists’ mailing-list – the claim that global warming could cut the world’s population to a billion. I don’t know where he got this from, but it’s fixed in his head now – he keeps saying it. He talks of the scientific sin against the Holy Ghost being to fudge the data, but there’s another mortal sin too – lending the weight of your authority to pronouncements made in a field in which you’re not actually expert. Calculating the demographic effects of such a geophysical change, if it’s possible at all, would be the province of a team of – what? – geoscientists, economists, geographers, sociologists (sociologists – right, yeah, duh, like they’re really going to be any use – as the young people say). It’s not something that can just be dreamed up in the noggin of an old greybeard who did some useful geophysics decades ago and then got deified for the barmy green non-hypothesis of Gaia.
When I read the notes of his Guardian interview published by Leo Hickman on the paper’s environment blog, I found the charlatanism mixed with all sort of stuff that sounds superficially congenial to libertarians. But it’s clear that he’s got no clear ideological compass to make sense of it all. He seems to think that climate science is in a mess because all these terrible oiks were churned out by state-funded education instead of the right sort of chap, like himself, that we had in the good old days. And the journalists are to blame too, presumably for demanding sensationalist answers from those naturally bashful creatures, the climatologists.
Whereas the journalists, when they do their job right, are part of the solution – part of the scrutiny that all specialists need.
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