Nicholas Dyson

Complicated

2012-01-30T07:43:00.002Z

Distracted chief executive

The non-executive chairman of RBS has 'declined' a £1.4 million share bonus which, apparently, he was not going to qualify for anyway. The chief executive has been awarded a £1 million bonus, which was necessary to retain and incentivise him, but has decided to decline it because it would have been a distraction to him in his continuing work at the bank. The bank's shares, 80 per cent of which are owned by the state following its rescue from collapse, have halved in value over the past twelve months. The chief executive, it is reported, could still receive other share awards bringing his total remuneration package this year to about £8 million. He is probably too busy to have noticed that. His 'basic' salary is £1.2 million per year.

This may be thought a foolishly facetious observation, but my point is that senior people's pay may be set by a market (though it is clear that it is not currently an efficient market), but any market is always a cultural, and sometimes a quite deliberate, construct. The market within which senior executives operate is now quite separate from that within which more lowly people find themselves, but not only are the two part of the same functioning body, the former, at least as it applies to banks, is now completely underwritten by public support and guarantee. Such a state of affairs cannot flourish.

Sauve qui peut - or captains and bankers first

2012-01-29T07:02:00.004Z

Bail out: the global economy sinks

http://londonbanker.blogspot.com/2012/01/survivor-bias-and-tbtf-tyranny.html

And, changing the headline to something altogether more sombre, 'The protection of the law' perhaps:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/subordination-101-walkthru-sovereign-bond-markets-post-greek-default-world#comments

There is much convolution before one gets to this rather wipe-out possibility:

Before we proceed we would like to also point out one very curious Catch 22, in that if indeed Greece succeeds with its own exchange offer with the world not imploding, the natural next step would be for the other PIIGS to proceed with just such an exercise in order to cut their own debt load by up to 70%. Because while Greece may have the advantage, the question now become who will be second. Paradoxically, the more success this global strategy has, the deeper it sows the seeds of Europe's destruction, as more and more bondholders will actively shy away from all weak bonds first in the PIIGS, then in Europe, then in the world. Until at the end, there is no end-market demand, and the only buyer remains the central bank.

The New Socialist

2012-01-23T06:41:00.000Z

Perhaps we should start reading The Daily Telegraph more - and more.

An afflictive phenomenon

2012-01-23T06:31:00.000Z

It was in this year also that the Hogarth Club was started - 'that afflictive phenomenon' as Carlyle called it: 'a club not small enough to be friendly and not large enough to be important, a room to which nobody sends things and Friday night meetings to which nobody cares to go. Funerals are performed in the shop below through which one passes.

Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet 1812-1888 by Angus Davidson, 1938

We can be heroes, just for...

2012-01-22T08:05:00.000Z

I am indebted to the blog Viable Opposition for these quotations from the recently released US Federal Open Market Committee's (FOMC) minutes from their meeting on 31 January 2006 shortly before things went a little wrong in the US and world economy. The blog post itself has much more substantial comment on which to reflect.

"MR. POOLE: ... Mr. Chairman, many around the table have commented about their experience serving here. I will, of course, echo those. I would like to put a little different angle on it. Of the people who have had a major impact in my life, you are certainly one. I mark on the fingers of one hand the people who have had extraordinary influence on me. You have influenced me mostly in my professional life but also in many aspects of leadership that go beyond economics and policy in a narrower sense. So I thank you for that. I am also looking forward to continuing to learn from you. I understand that you have some books, at least in your head. And given my interest in making sure we have clear communication, I have a suggestion for a title for your first book. And it is in line with some books by your predecessors. So I suggest “The Joy of Central Banking.” [Laughter] And I suggest that your second book be “More Joy of Central Banking.” [Laughter]

"CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN. How to Be a Joyous Central Banker, Even Though We Don’t Have Hearts.” [Laughter] Can we end the speculation on the title? [Laughter] Thanks very much, Bill. President Stern."
...

"VICE CHAIRMAN GEITHNER. Mr. Chairman, in the interest of crispness, I’ve removed a substantial tribute from my remarks. [Laughter]

"CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN. I am most appreciative. [Laughter]

"VICE CHAIRMAN GEITHNER. I’d like the record to show that I think you’re pretty terrific, too. [Laughter] And thinking in terms of probabilities, I think the risk that we decide in the future that you’re even better than we think is higher than the alternative. [Laughter]"

Consider the hedgehog

2012-01-19T07:28:00.000Z

In my childhood hedgehogs were a common sight, including, distressingly, squashed dead on the roads. Yet live ones were common too. Now I very seldom see one, dead or alive.

That seems unsurprising when I read that their numbers in the Uk are thought to have declined from 30 million in the 1950s to 1.5 million in 1995 and that there has been a further decline of 25 per cent in the last decade. So the number is likely to be just 1 million or less now, about 3 per cent of what I used to see as a child.

It seems that roadkill could not be responsibe for such a decline and conservationists blame loss of rural habitat in hedgerows and grassland, and intensive agriculture including the use of pesticides. We often forget that pesticides were used scarcely at all, by today's standards, in the 1950s. One did not see then the routine wide-boom sprayer and the tell-tale tramlines in arable fields. (Nor were gardeners troubled by slugs, a change which I think fits somewhere into the overarching development of land use and management since then.) Badger depradation is also thought to be partly responsible for the hedgehog's decline, and, in urban areas, more chemical and 'hard' gardening.

Piddock

The disappearing hedgehog is not the only aspect of wildlife depletion that is part of the comon experience of ordinary people in their sixties or so. Were are the teaming rockpools of our childhood seaside holidays? The hedgehog, the piddock and the shore crab have, less spectacularly, less wantonly, gone the way of the bison and the passenger pigeon.

American bison

One cannot believe that the cause is anything else than the effluents of our modern chemical lifestyle, which the populations of Asia are about to emulate.

Kill or cure

2012-01-17T08:46:00.001Z

"American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials. ..."

Is there a similar panel for foreigners?

The recently late Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan and son

The as yet 'wonderful' Rick Santorum

China now and now

2012-01-17T08:10:00.001Z

The new democracy - or new barons?

2012-01-17T07:51:00.000Z

New boss?

Wikipedia and some other much used websites (including the 'the Cheezburger websites, which attract 16.5 million visitors a month to look at funny cat videos and photos') threatened to 'go dark' on Wednesday in protest at the proposed US SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), although I believe President Obama has effectively scuppered it by saying he will not give such an act his assent.

Regardless of thoughts of the merits or demerits of online piracy or of Wikipedia, I wonder what will be the public and politic reaction if protests such as this are in future extensively mobilised. They could have considerable impact, but what will the mass of the people think as they vainly click on the unavailable sites in their daily routines? Will it be much the same as the commuters turning up for non-existent trains for work after the unions have called strikes? Perhaps the lack of Wikipedia will most affect government officials as they strive to write their private and public briefing papers. Will frustrated governments condemn this new 'unaccountable' power and pass legislation requiring ballots of users, advance notification and all the other panoply of restrictions that organised labour, or, as some would see it, their undemocratically elected leaders, have been subjected to, at least in this country?

Whose social responsibility?

2012-01-17T07:50:00.001Z

Implementing the Act

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2010-11

Key areas

• replaces police authorities with directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners, with the aim of improving police accountability

• amends and supplements the Licensing Act 2003 with the intention of ‘rebalancing’ it in favour of local authorities, the police and local communities

• sets out a new framework for regulating protests around Parliament Square. Relevant sections of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 would be repealed and the police would be given new powers to prevent encampments and the use of amplified noise equipment

• enables the Home Secretary to temporarily ban drugs for up to a year, and removes the statutory requirement for the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to include members with experience in specified activities

• introduces a new requirement for private prosecutors to obtain the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions prior to the issue of an arrest warrant for ‘universal jurisdiction’ offences such as war crimes or torture. The Government's aim in introducing this change is to prevent the courts being used for political purposes.

Royal assent 15 September 2011

Move along, there's nothing to see

2012-01-16T07:16:00.000Z

In a separate development it has been disclosed that Cheryl Gillan, the Welsh secretary, sold her home in Amersham 500 metres from the proposed route [of the new HS2 high speed railway line] two months before the project was approved. An aide said the sale, which leaves her without a constituency home, was necessary because her elderly husband had difficulty with the stairs.

Modern retailers receive detailed sales data at the end of every day so Noel "Bob" Robbins, UK chief operating officer at Tesco, surely knew on 4 January that the chain had had a lousy Christmas. That was the day he sold 50,000 shares in his employer at 404.5p apiece. One profits warning later, Tesco's share price is 316p, so Robbins is about £44,000 better off by selling eight days ago rather than on Friday.

A Fistful of Dollars

2012-01-13T08:40:00.001Z

‘Despite the fact that they lay down explicit limitations on capital movements, the Bretton Woods agreements delineated an international monetary system that, in practice, made these movements indispensable. At this point we can see how the Bretton Woods agreements opened the way to the post-war ‘dollar gap’ and to the subsequent international ‘dollar glut’ the consequences of which we are still paying for.’

Amato and Fantacci: The End of Finance

Blurred picture

2012-01-13T08:16:00.000Z

In-store "virtual mirrors" are turning shopping into a social network, he added, where customers can drag clothing items on to their reflected virtual image, post this to Facebook or other networking sites, and get instant feedback from friends.

Technology is also being developed into the tracking of mobile phone users in shopping centres, as well as enabling viewers to buy items through digital TV and interact with adverts.

But ... the growth of online will not see the end of bricks-and-mortar shops. "It's just going to become more blurred. The two will fuse together."

... More 'click and collect', more buying under one roof with people shopping for non-food and food at the same time. It will be the specialists that will suffer.

... supermarkets of the future will also be influenced by so-called "amateur economics" and a backlash against "the big, impersonal, alien shopping experience".

I expect you knew all that.

The value of oil

2012-01-11T07:30:00.003Z

It is often claimed that physical control of oil supplies lies behind geo-political moves by western nations, especially the United States, but there is an argument that the interest in oil is subservient to the interest in controlling the international monetary system and that the OPEC oil-price shock of the 1970s was actually engineered by western interests to that purpose.

"...Such is not the case in the United States, whose number one export product is the dollar itself. This unique arrangement is largely due to the dollar’s World Reserve currency role, which is underpinned by its petrodollar role. Every nation needs to get dollars to purchase oil, some more than others. This means their trade targets are countries that utilize the dollar, with the U.S. consumer as the main target for export products of the nation seeking to build dollar reserves."

We may be seeing the beginning of the end of that form of economic dominance through the unexpected but fatal consequence of the spiralling growth of unregulated financial trading as a cancer within our western material prosperity.

See http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=114x14286

This line or argument possibly places in a new light the United States' reluctance to move away from oil energy dependence in response to concerns about global warming.

There is a further irony in that what made such a ploy necessary, according to this line of reasoning, was the cost of the Vietnam War (just as the cost of consequent US military ventures may be accelerating their economic decline), and so the west's engineering or accelerating the collapse of the Soviet empire is overshadowed by the potential collapse of the west as a final consequence of its armed struggle against communism.

It's all about central banks?

2012-01-10T10:30:00.000Z

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD14Ak02.html

http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2012/01/a-new-reserve-currency-to-challenge-the-dollar-whats-really-going-on-in-the-straits-of-hormuz/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-new-reserve-currency-to-challenge-the-dollar-whats-really-going-on-in-the-straits-of-hormuz

Cometh the hour; cometh the Thatcher?

2012-01-10T07:46:00.000Z

There is an interesting account, with a historical perspective, of the current impasse of Western capitalism and it's loss of democratic consent in the Financial Times by John Plender.

He concludes with the thought that the way forward could be indicated by the work of the late Mancur Olson, who argued that national decline was brought about by effective political dominance by social/economic interest groups, acting alone or in combination, which serves to undermine the broader efficiency of the economy and society. In Olson's time the dominant interest groups were seen to be trades unions and corporate cartels, but in our time they have been replaced by financial elites and allied professional groups (in accountancy, law etc.) which have escaped accountability and achieved an extractive hold upon national and international wealth and resouces.

The full article is available here and well worth reading.

Comments

2012-01-09T07:10:00.000Z

Something has to be done about Comments. Simply not allowing them, following my own practice here (although I don't delude myself that anyone would, even if allowed), is not the answer. The Guardian appears to follow a fairly pragmatic practice in whether or not it allows comments, to avoid the actionable or tedious, but an interesting article, such as this on reason and faith, will still rack up hundreds of comments. Entering there is like starting to wander across Morecambe Bay sands at low tide.

The only answer is for us all to be intellectually and culturally ranked. Perhaps Moody's, Standard and Poor's and the other ratings agencies - they must be looking for a new line of business the way things have been going - could do the job (or is it something for Experian?). Then we could sort all the comments by ranking them through a handy drop-down list by intellect or culture, just as we can do it on internet commerce sites by price or most popular or whatever.

A job well done

The misty crystal glitter

2012-01-09T07:05:00.000Z

The dam site before construction

Now the world holds seven wonders
That the travellers always tell
Some gardens and some towers,
I guess you know them well
But now the greatest wonder
Is in Uncle Sam's fair land
It's the big Columbia River
And the big Grand Coulee Dam

She heads up the Canadian Rockies
Where the rippling waters glide
Comes a-roaring down the canyon
For to meet that salty tide
Of the big Pacific Ocean
Where the sun sinks in the west
In the big Grand Coulee country
In the land I love the best

In the misty crystal glitter
Of the wild and windward spray
Men have fought the pounding waters
And met a watery grave
Why, she tore their boats to splinters
But she gave men dreams to dream
Of the day the Coulee Dam
Would cross that wild and wasted stream

During construction

Now Uncle Sam took up the challenge
In the year of thirty three
For the farmer and the factory
And all of you and me
He said, "Roll along Columbia,
You can roll down to the sea
But river, while you're rambling
You can do some work for me."

A year's worth of logs from one camp heads down river in 1906

In the misty crystal glitter
Of the wild and windward spray
Men have fought the pounding waters
And met a watery grave
Why, she tore their boats to splinters
But she gave men dreams to dream
Of the day the Coulee Dam
Would cross that wild and wasted stream

Now from Washington and Oregon
You can hear the factories hum
Making chrome and making manganese
And white aluminum
Now the roar of the Flying Fortress
For to fight for Uncle Sam
On the howling King Columbia
By the big Grand Coulee Dam

In the misty crystal glitter
Of the wild and windward spray
Men have fought the pounding waters
And met a watery grave
Why, she tore their boats to splinters
But she gave men dreams to dream
Of the day the Coulee Dam
Would cross that wild and wasted stream

Now the world holds seven wonders
That the travellers always tell
Some gardens and some towers,
Why, I guess you know them well
But now the greatest wonder
Is in Uncle Sam's fair land
It's the big Columbia River
And the big Grand Coulee Dam.

Woodie Guthrie 1941

The dam now

"Replication and accommodation drove Western Hemisphere expansion and settlement. Individuals who came to new land brought ideas about how to use it based on the place or places they left behind. They aimed to establish New England, New France, New Spain, or New Amsterdam. They wanted a fresh start but, plagued by the twin diseases of culture shock and homesickness, also worked to recreate familiar surroundings. None of the participants lost their desire to replicate what was familiar to them. Those in the West have always wanted to make it as much like the East as possible, while at the same time keeping it vigorous and untainted. The result is a West that is both a continuation and a place unique. Look at the people who came, the ideas they carried with them, and the changes the new environment and association with different peoples forced them to make, and you can understand American history."

Grand Coulee: harnessing a dream, by Paul C. Pitzer, Pullman, Wash.: Washington State University Press, 1994.

See http://content.lib.washington.edu/grandcouleeweb/book-excerpt.html

The categorical truth

2012-01-06T09:13:00.000Z

In celebration of Professor Stephen Hawkin's seventieth birthday, The BBC has organised a programme in which a wide range of 'ordinary' people put their questions to him. One example given in this morning's announcement of the programme asked what happened before the big bang.

Stephen Hawkin's reply was to the effect that nothing happened, or rather that the question was a category error. Using an analogy to explain (surely a technique close to a category error itself), he said it was like asking what was south of the South Pole.

I don't think it will entirely satisfy (though perhaps there was more in the full answer) most 'ordinary' people - or at least will not prevent the question recurring. Were we to stand at the South Pole we would have a sense of something further 'south', although strictly speaking we had reached the ultimate. Yet above our heads, still in the direction we falsely though understandably label 'south', we perceive, not more land, but other matter in sky and space beyond. I think Profesor Hawkin's questioner was probably asking the nature of that otherness 'before' 'time'. I suppose the answer is that we cannot know, or perhaps, signalled by the increasing need to put 'ordinary' words here into inverted commas, we can know only in abstruse mathematical notation. 'Ordinary' people may find a requirement to accept that time has a beginning as problematic as the requirement to accept that space has no end, and wonder whether any image they can summon up of the boundary of time would be less fanciful than the image of the finite universe as a saucer balanced on the back of an elephant.

Progress

2012-01-06T06:59:00.000Z

In the film Padre Padrone, based on an autobiographical book by Gavino Ledda, who participates in the film, Gavino's father, as he removes his young son from primary school to tend the family flock alone on the mountainside, observes to the young school-mistress, "It is not education that is compulsory, it is poverty."

To modern English eyes it is shocking to realise some way through the film, when the father has to accept a reduced price for the produce from his newly acquired olive grove (which is intended to be the family's passport to a new and much yearned for prosperity, because of new European Community regulations, how recent is the film. A few years later the prized olive trees are killed by a late frost and "this little brain", on which the peasant father proudly relies, leads him to sell almost all the family land and aim at that elusive prosperity and security by investing the money in the bank at ten per cent interest, whilst sending out his children as day-labourers.

The book was completed in 1974 and the film made in 1977, but the near inescapable poverty of rural Sardinian society and the attendant brutality and bestiality seem a world away from our lives. Yet the 'compulsory' primary education was in fact introduced in 1859, and had, it would appear from the film, at least brought about a general and basic level of literacy, and an awareness of a world beyond local horizons, if not a generosity of spirit. Perhaps, as Italian banks and governments now collapse and the international financial technocrats take over, thirty years and more of international tourism have changed the picture.

It is military call-up, and some of those whom he meets there, another manifestation of the grinding administration of the state, rather than any globalising prosperity, that eventually enables Gavino to break free. For those of us so distant from the kind of rural society which the film depicts, and out of which one would indeed be grateful to be 'lifted', it is almost impossible to judge whether the almost complete depression of spirit shown is a universal feature of such a life - although still lingering narrowness and resentments in relatively affluent rural societies might persuade one that it is.

Friends

2012-01-05T07:36:00.001Z

Staying at Combe Florey, Jack and I went one afternoon for a walk and Jack, wanting a stick, rather stupidly chose a light cane. This he broke, and on our return went shame-facedly to Evelyn to apologise. Evelyn was really upset and angry - he loved this small, rather dashing cane - and Jack felt an ass. When we got home he wrote to Evelyn asking him to send it to Briggs to be mended but Evelyn replied 'Tonkin has been spliced locally', and Jack forgot the incident.

Some weeks later I said to him, not thinking much about it:

'Annie has a letter from Evelyn in which he said: "The Donaldsons came to stay. He broke my cane.".'

'Oh no,' Jack cried. 'How beastly of him.'

Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of a Country Neighbour, Frances Donaldson (1967)

Their first halting-place was Yenidje, and Lear, armed as usual with letters of introduction, was staying with the postmaster. As they were drinking coffee in the evening an incident occurred which, though unfortunate in itself, provided an example of Oriental good manners which filled him with delight. In his awkward, shortsighted way (in a room where there was neither table nor chair) he stepped heavily on his host's handsome pipe-bowl. He apologised profusely through his interpreter, to which the postmaster, bowing as he sat cross-legged on the floor, replied: 'The breaking such a pipe-bowl would indeed, under ordinary circumstances, be disagreeable; but in a friend every action has its charms....'

Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet 1812-1888, Angus Davidson (1938)

Both Waugh and Lear travelled, sometimes alone (though I think Lear was the more intrepid) in remote parts of Europe and adjoining continents. Both were men for whom humour (of utterly different kinds) was essential in their relationship to the world.

This is the bicentenary of Edward Lear's birth - see A Blog of Bosh

Unicredit - and others

2012-01-04T19:44:00.002Z

Shares in Unicredit - the largest Italian bank by assets - were suspended forty-five minutes after trading began at 8am this morning, during which time they fell by ten per cent.The trigger was the news this morning that Unicredit's emergency €7.5bn cash call was going to be priced at an even deeper discount than feared. The bank, which needs the funds (second only in quantity to those required by Santander) to shore up its capital reserves, is selling shares at a 43% discount to their market value, which had already fallen by fifty per cent over the past year.

Yet, least we should be feeling too comfortable here in the UK, look at this table courtesy of Morgan Stanley:

It seems we'd all be doing quite well by international comparisons if it weren't for the green column, courtesy of our much vaunted and nation-saving financial sector. For fuller and more balanced commentary refer to the article in Business Insider.

And consider also:

Bank share prices show a clear pattern of two waves of ‘collapse’ among large retail, or retail/investment, banks.

The 1st wave saw falls of 90% plus in the shares of banks such as Citigroup, Lloyd’s and RBS. No significant recovery in their share prices has taken place since – which is why they may, in terms of share prices, be characterised as ‘collapsed’ banks.

A number of other large banks – of which Barclays, Bank of America and Société Générale may be taken as examples – initially suffered very severe share price falls during the international financial crisis but then saw a significant recovery. Their share prices are, however, now again falling towards the level of the 1st group of banks. It, of course, remains to be seen whether this trend will continue, but a current tendency of a 2nd wave of banks being drawn into crises which essentially destroys share prices is clear.

Democracy in action

2012-01-04T14:27:00.000Z

Mitt Romney has won the Iowa Republican caucus ahead of Rick Santorum by the narrowest of margins - eight votes.

Romney polled 30,015 votes. Total votes cast were 122,255. The total population of the State of Iowa was estimated by the US Census Bureau in July 2011 as 3,062,309. If one asumes that roughly half the population is entitled to vote in the presidential election, approximately 2 per cent of the electorate have just given their backing to Mitt Romney.

Republicans, we are told, seem set to save Obama's bacon by choosing from a pool of candidates that neither they in general, nor the country as a whole finds very attractive. Yet much may change in the outside world between now and the election.

A shiny, capacious new identity card?

2012-01-04T08:39:00.001Z

World enough

2012-01-04T08:13:00.000Z

And you should if you please refuse
Till the Conversion of the Jews

To early Christians belief was not of overwhelming importance, if one is to judge by the incidence of forced and mass conversions and conversion by conquest. Perhaps that was the cynicism of the powerful; perhaps a reflection of the hard realities of temporal allegiance; perhaps an acceptance that the rites of conversion established a reality of themselves.

To most modern Christians belief is essential to conversion, but for some denominations conversion takes place through selection by god, and is therefore irresistable.

My impression is, that in the modern polemic against religion, it is belief that is excoriated; faith escapes with its skin intact. By faith here I mean, not the sense of the corpus of belief, as in the Christian, Jewish or Muslim faith, but the word used in the sense of a personal experience. In religious discussion the it is, unhelpfully, often used simply to mean a religious belief, but there is a real distinction between belief and faith. Faith has necessarily elements of trust and adherence; there is something more reciprocal about it than with belief, which is rather more a subscription to an externality. Perhaps that is why belief draws the polemical atheist's fire, intent as he often strangely is on establishing the non-existence of any god. Notions of keeping faith, of good and bad faith, have a currency in modern non-religious thought with which it may be more enlightening to tangle.

The Mower against Gardens

2012-01-03T08:11:00.009Z

Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use,
Did after him the world seduce,
And from the fields the flowers and plants allure,
Where nature was most plain and pure.
He first enclosed within the gardens square
A dead and standing pool of air,
And a more luscious earth for them did knead,
Which stupified them while it fed.
The pink grew then as double as his mind;
The nutriment did change the kind.
With strange perfumes he did the roses taint,
And flowers themselves were taught to paint.
The tulip, white, did for complexion seek,
And learned to interline its cheek:
Its onion root they then so high did hold,
That one was for a meadow sold.
Another world was searched, through oceans new,
To find the Marvel of Peru.
And yet these rarities might be allowed
To man, that sovereign thing and proud,
Had he not dealt between the bark and tree,
Forbidden mixtures there to see.
No plant now knew the stock from which it came;
He grafts upon the wild the tame:
That th’ uncertain and adulterate fruit
Might put the palate in dispute.
His green seraglio has its eunuchs too,
Lest any tyrant him outdo.
And in the cherry he does nature vex,
To procreate without a sex.
’Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot,
While the sweet fields do lie forgot:
Where willing nature does to all dispense
A wild and fragrant innocence:
And fauns and fairies do the meadows till,
More by their presence than their skill.
Their statues, polished by some ancient hand,
May to adorn the gardens stand:
But howsoe’er the figures do excel,
The gods themselves with us do dwell.

Andrew Marvell
Latin Secretary for the Council of State of the Protectorate
Member of Parliament for Kingston upon Hull

See also Cannons: a tale of wealth, property, art and patronage

Infidels

2012-01-02T10:05:00.000Z

A new year, if not a new age, dawns.

In modern polemical debate, 'belief' is spoken of as referring almost exclusively to religion. Those arguing that the persistence of real or token religious observance in present-day western society is illogical and pernicious can refer to 'believers' confident, in a mirror image of the use of 'infidels' by some modern Muslims, that their readers will be thinking of a duality between Christians, mostly, and atheists.

It is almost as though a deity were the only significant object of belief, and if religious observance were to disappear, as many hope for and consider inevitable, so too would the phenomenon of belief, as a perversion of knowledge and experience uniquely, and deplorably, manifested in religion. Yet belief, like love, fear, hope, hate, trust, delight, is just one in the range of modes of human experience, although those are intellectual abstractions of states that seldom, if ever, exist in individual isolation. We all believe in many things, from the mundane to the profound, and religious belief occurs in many forms, colours and admixtures.

It will probably be objected that this is defensive sophistry: there remains a hard distinction between those who do and those who do not believe in a god. Yet what that constitutes, what, exactly, a god is understood to be, has varied greatly through history and societies. Even now it is a question of legal debate as to what can claim the state's indulgence as a 'religion'. Current argument tends to focus on the idea of god as a 'supreme being', a term not wholly unambiguous but certainly inconsistent with many past and present forms of religious belief. The concept of course was the distinctive development of Judaism that has been passed on to Christianity (sometimes a little insecurely) and Islam, and it is both something of a religious peculiarity and a notion sympathetic in overall form to modern scientific understanding of the world. As such, it is perhaps seen as distastefully competitive.

The strangely active atheistic argument in our society directs little of its fire against the non-Judaic religions: Hinduism, despite the violence sometimes conducted in its name, appears to get off relatively lightly, and Buddhism, as the 'religion without a god' gains a little of the dispensation allowed to an emasculated appreciation of the B Minor Mass or the Sistine Chapel ceiling, although its priest-ridden structure and deference to a supreme earthly authority makes it vulnerable to disapproval.

Religion is chiefly scorned for its irrationality, but the charge sheet seems to be headed with utilitarian objections. One wonders what the modern disputants would think of the gentlemen in Addison and Steele's coffee house, with their over-riding concern that religion should be free of 'unseasonable passions' and that gentlemen (and ladies - though it would be impolite to doubt their destination or manner of arrival) should 'go to heaven with a very good mien' - or of Edward Gibbon's lament at the destruction of civilisation wrought by 'barbarism and religion'.

The plight of savers

2011-12-28T10:45:00.001Z

Of the 489 billion Euros that the European Central bank lent to European commercial banks at a concessionary interest rate just before Christmas, to ease their liquidity/solvency situation whilst US banks refuse to lend to them, 412 billion Euros were placed on deposit by the banks back with the ECB over the Christmas period. It will there earn the banks even less in interest than the low rate they are having to pay to borrow it, but they clearly do not trust their fellows as borrowers.

The cost of privatisation

2011-12-28T08:05:00.000Z

http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)60005-2/abstract

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)60719-4/fulltext

The great and good Mr Handel

2011-12-28T07:50:00.001Z

George Frideric Handel

Whisper of the Heart

2011-12-27T19:33:00.002Z

Forests lost

2011-12-27T19:31:00.002Z

Once upon a time Corsica was entirely covered by forest. Storey by storey, it grew for thousands of years in rivalry with itself, up to heights of fifty metres and more, and who knows, perhaps perhaps larger and larger species would have evolved, trees reaching the sky, it the first settlers had not appeared and if, with the typical fear felt by their own kind for its place of origin, they had not steadily forced the forest back again.

The degradation of the most highly developed plant species is a process known to have begum near what we call the cradle of civilization. Most of the high forests that once grew all the way to the Dalmatian, Iberian and North African coasts had already been cut down by the beginning of the present era. Only in the interior of Corsica did a few forests of trees towering far taller than those of today remain, and they were still being described with awe by nineteenth-century travellers, although now they have almost entirely disappeared. Of the silver firs that were among the dominant tree species of Corsica in the Middle Ages, standing everywhere in the mists clinging to the mountains, on overshadowed slopes and in the ravines, only a few relicts are now left in the Marmano valley and the Foret de Puntiello, and on a walk there a remembered image came into my mind of a forest in the Innerfern through which I had once gone as a child with my grandfather.

A history of the forest of France by Etienne de la Tour, published during the Second Empire, speaks of individual fir trees growing to a height of almost sixty metres during their lives of over a thousand years, and they, so de la Tour writes, are the last trees to convey some idea of the former grandeur of the European forests. He laments the destruction of the Corsican forests 'par des exploitations mal conduites' ('by mismanaged exploitation'), which was already becoming a clear menace in his time. the stands of trees spared longest were those in the most inaccessible regions, fro instance the great forest of Bavella, which covered the Corsican Dolomites between Sartene and Solenzara and was largely untouched until towards the end of the nineteenth century.

The English language painter and writer Edward Lear, who travelled in Corsica in the summer of 1876, wrote of the immense forests that then rose high from the blue twilight of the Solenzara valley and clambered up the steepest slopes, all the way to the vertical cliffs and precipices with their overhangs, cornices and upper terraces where smaller groups of trees stood like plumes on a helmet. On the more level surfaces at the head of the pass, the soft grounds on which you walked was densely overgrown with all kinds of different bushes and herbs. Arbutus grew here, a great many ferns, heathers and juniper bushes, grasses asphodels and dwarf cyclamen, and from all these low-growing plants rose the grey trunks of Laricio pines, their green parasols seeming to float free far, far above in the crystal-clear air.

'At three the top of the pass ... is reached,' says Lear, 'and here the real forest of Bavella commences, lying in a deep cup-like hollow between this and the opposite ridge, the north and south side of the valley being formed by the tremendous columns and peaks of granite ... which stood up like two gigantic portions of a vast amphitheatre', with the sea beyond them, and the Italian coast like a brush-stroke drawn on paper. these crags, he writes, 'are doubly awful and magnificent now that one is close to them, and excepting the

heights of Serbal and Sinai, they exceed in grandeur anything of the kind I have ever seen'. But Lear also comments on the timber carts drawn by fourteen or sixteen mules which even then were making their way along the sharply winding road, transporting single trunks a hundred to a hundred and twenty feet long and up to six feet in diameter, an observation that I found confirmed in 1879 by the Dictionnaire de Geographie edited by Vivien de Saint Martin, in which the Dutch traveller and topographer Melchior van de Velde writes that he has never seen a finer forest than the forest of Bavella, not even in Switzerland, Lebanon or on the islands of Indochina.

W.G. Sebald, 'The Alps in the Sea' collected in Campo Santo, trs. Anthea Bell

St John unfolds the great mystery of the Incarnation

2011-12-25T07:36:00.003Z

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.
There was a man sent from God whose name was John.
The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.
He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.
That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
He came unto his own, and his own knew him not.
He came unto his own and his own received him not.
But as many as received him, to them gave he the power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:
Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, not of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:1-14

Athens

2011-12-24T08:38:00.001Z

Sale of assets

Consider the lilies

2011-12-24T08:17:00.000Z

The Chancellor's family firm is finding times hard. It has just announced a loss for a third year in a row. The firm has responded by cutting staff, increasing borrowings, and maintaining directors' remuneration.

As George Osborne said, "It's been a part of my family for the whole of my life. I was always aware as a child when things were going well and when things weren't going so well, so it's given me a strong understanding of what's involved in running a business – the risks, the hard work and the commitment."

Christmas past

2011-12-23T08:09:00.000Z

This picture an readily be found on the internet when one searches under 'Christmas truce'. It is used on several web sites and blogs but none seem to tell one exactly when or where it was taken. What were the circumstances in which these two soldiers of opposing armies shared a cigarette? Who took it? How did the photographer come to be there? It was once known, and somewhere perhaps still is, but for most viewers it is now unknown. Yet the picture has undoubted emotional power.

It is as if the internet is turning our recent past into the state of our knowledge of long distant societies, from which evocative but little understood artefacts surface after successions of unsystematic and unrecorded archaeological digs that have detached them irrevocably from their context and meaning.

Christmas

2011-12-22T07:34:00.003Z

The European Central Bank has just lent 500 billion Euros at a concessionary interest rate to European banks against low grade security. There was an even greater rush than expected from the banks to apply for the money. As I understand it, the motive was that European banks currently have liquidity (or is it solvency?) problems and American banks are unwilling to lend to them directly. The ECB and European national central banks had a little while ago struck an arrangement with the US Federal Reserve to supply dollars to Europe.

However the ECB is unable to determine what the banks will do with these new funds. The operation is about saving the commercial banking system rather than directing the way in which it operates. Banks might, it seems:

a) lend them to private and commercial borrowers;

b) hold on to them in order to increase their solvency;

c) use then to buy up high-yielding and therefore risky debt such as the bonds of economically stressed European states

d) use them for some even more clever ploy that the rest of us have not even thought of.

It's up to the banks, not the Bank. If they use them to buy up stressed European nations' bonds, (c), there will be a short and shallow sigh of relief but the inter-connection between vulnerable banks and vulnerable nations will be knit a little closer and the wonderful construction of financial instability raised to a slightly greater height.

A couple of weeks ago the international accountancy firm Deloitte estimated that the total value of 'non-core and non-performing assets' held by European banks (i.e. candidates for the kind of operation just carried out by the ECB) is 'at least' 1.7 trillion Euros. Deloitte reckoned that in the previous twelve months (before this latest ECB intervention) banks had managed to dispose of about 60 billion Euros worth. Without the ECB's deus ex machina it would have taken 28 years at that rate for the banks to get rid of their unwanted assets.

Of that European total the largest national holding was in the UK at 536 billion, closely followed by Germany at 522 billion. UK GDP in 2010 was approximately 1720 billion Euros, whilst German was 2536 billion. Italy the new sick man of Europe, with a GDP of 1572 billion (but with a third more industrial manufacturing than the UK within that total - woodworkers, much like handbag owners, know that their machinery has little chance of being manufactured in this country but may well come from Italy) had only 102 billion of these assets in their commercial banks' hands. Of course, these are only estimates, by an organisation not without complicity in our financial travails, of figures that banks are careful to conceal.

Foreign travel

2011-12-22T07:02:00.002Z

The British government has asked Washington to hand over a man held by US forces in Afghanistan after the appeal court ordered a writ of habeas corpus be issued seven years after he was detained.

The court ordered the writ last week after hearing that Yunus Rahmatullah was detained by UK special forces in Iraq in 2004, and then handed over to US forces who flew him to Bagram prison, north of Kabul.

The court heard on Wednesday that the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence had asked the US government to transfer Rahmatullah to British custody so that he could be released.

However, the US defence department replied three days later that the responsible official "is currently on travel", and that it would respond at some unspecified date in the future....

Rahmatullah, 29, is a Pakistani man who denies being a member of a terrorist organisation, but whose lawyers admit was in Iraq to wage jihad. For several years after his detention his family assumed he was dead.

He was one of two men captured by the SAS and handed over to US forces who were subsequently rendered to Afghanistan. The transfer to US authorities was permitted under the terms of a memorandum of understanding between the two countries that also allows the UK to demand their return.

The court also referred to an article of the Geneva conventions which forbids occupying powers from removing civilian prisoners from an occupied country other than in narrowly defined circumstances....

Ministers of the last Labour government repeatedly denied any knowledge of the matter before finally admitting in February 2009 that it had known about it for the previous five years.

Kafka goes to the movies

2011-12-21T17:45:00.001Z

The innermost mystery of secular metaphysics is this strange sensation of physical absence, something evoked by what might be called an over-developed gaze. Significantly, the customers coming out of the twilight of the peepshow and going back into the street always have to give themselves a little shake before they are fully in control of the bodies they had to shed as they were absorbed in looking at the panorama.

Kafka's comments on photography suggest that he felt there was something fundamentally uncanny about this way of copying life. Friedrich Thielberger. for instance, remembers once meeting Kafka in the street when he himself has an unwieldy box for making photographic enlargements under his arm. Thielberger writes that Kafka asked, in surprise, 'Taking photographs?' adding 'That's really rather sinister.' Then, after a short pause, he continued, 'And you enlarge them as well!' Kafka's books too contain many indications of the vague horror he felt at the impending mutations of mankind as the age of technical reproduction opened, mutations in which he probably saw the imminent end of the autonomous individuality formed by bourgeois culture. The freedom of movement of the heroes of his novels and stories, which is not great to begin with, steadily undergoes further restrictions in the course of the action, while figures already called to life by an inscrutable series of laws take over, characters such as the court functionaries, the two idiotic assistants and the three lodgers in The Metamorphosis, executives and officials whose purely functional, amoral nature is obviously better suited to this new state of affairs. In the Romantic period the doppelganger which first aroused a fear of mechanical appliances was still a haunting and exceptional phenomenon; now it is everywhere. The whole technique of photographic copying ultimately depends on the principle of making a perfect duplicate of the original, of potentially infinite copying. You only had to pick a stereoscopic card and you could see everything twice. And because the copy lasted long after what it had copied was gone, there was an uneasy suspicion that the original, whether it was human or a natural scene, was less authentic than the copy, that the copy was eroding the original, in the same way as a man meeting his doppelganger is said to feel his real self destroyed.

'Kafka Goes to the Movies' by W.G. Sebald, collected in Campo Santo, trs Anthea Bell

How things have changed in less than a century. Now the camera and the computer do not just capture and copy reality and identity but create and manipulate it, and, as the techniques have become available to us all individually, not just to the "sinister" ones, we no longer feel our own identities threatened or diminished. Our sense of our own reality is no longer challenged: we have instead a sense of our own ability constantly to renew and recreate ourselves. The doppelganger is now a mere amusement. We have cheated not only death and dissolution, but life itself. Feeling ourselves in control, we no longer feel the need to confront external forces. Yet our auautonomy is of course exercised within a system provided for us - "we play happily and child-like in the gardens created for us by the evil giants of Google and Apple". We have become licencees of our own reality, forever checking the box that declares "I accept the terms of this agreement" without ever actually reading it or bothering that we have no choice.

Tolerance

2011-12-19T11:45:00.000Z

The UK government is embarked on a pruning of senior ranks within the military:

"The simple truth is that the defence senior cadre is larger than we can afford, is judged to be out of proportion with a reducing manpower base and also with modern working practices and societal tolerances."

The work of the Office of Societal Tolerances (OffSoT) within Number Ten is less recognised by society than it should be. David Cameron's recent comments on multi-culturalism, recycled into his speech on the King James Bible are a direct result of its work:

"Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism. A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them."

OffSoT unfortunately has had to close down the section of its website where members of the public could post suggestions for topics for its investigations because of the regrettable facetiousness of most of the proposals, but its recent reports on, for example, the Bullingdon Club, Angela Merkel's wardrobe, the Supreme Being, the odour of sanctity, the smell of money and the order of merit, have led to major new developments in government policy.

Correspondence

2011-12-18T07:58:00.004Z

I have a faith in the power of correspondence - literary correspondence that is, but with the deeper meaning of the word given full weight - to create reality. a belief that if a letter (or even an email) expresses with sufficient skill and power the interweaving of the recipient's history, statements and opinions with one's own concerns and desires it creates a version of reality that cannot be gainsaid.

It is, I suppose, a belief little different from a belief in witchcraft spells, or in voodoo - of from a belief in, an understanding of, the power of poetry, or indeed of any form of art.

Yet it is inferior to voodoo (or witchcraft or art) in that, unlike them, it requires for its efficacy that the recipient should be a believer too. Whilst the modern sceptic dismisses the pricklings in his limbs until he rapidly and unaccountably expires, the recipient of the letter passes his eyes over it without its logic and architecture impinging upon him in the slightest. So that it is, ironically, not a lack of superstition that causes my literary witchcraft to fail, but a lack of imaginative faith in rationality and the inter-relationship of expression, thought and truth.

The heyday of my faith was probably the eighteenth century , when sense was a matter of general agreement among educated gentlemen, and the great example of the power of literary correspondence was to be found in Dr Johnson's famous epistolary rebuke to Lord Chesterfield:

"The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind: but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it."

Lord Chesterfield was so much a fellow believer that, rather than attempt the impossibility of replying to such a letter, he kept it on display and exhibited it to his friends and visitors as an outstanding work of expression.

I like to think (probably erroneously) that it was a recognition of the possibly over-weening power of expression to create its own reality that lead Dr Johnson to advise aspiring writers to strike out anything in their work that they thought particularly fine.

The eighteenth century is normally regarded as a prosaic culture, but there was something heroic in its belief in the power of rationality and human agency, which in some of its strongest authors resulted in outbursts of exuberance, malice or even madness, as one may find, for example, in Alexander Pope or Jonathan Swift. Elsewhere, as T S Eliot observed, 'It crushed a number of lesser men who thought differently but could not bear to face the fact.'

Language, especially figurative language, has the power not only to encapsulate our thoughts but to betray us, almost seamlessly, into accepting further ideas that were not part of our original perception.We all know the feeling of 'swimming against the tide': finding that our efforts do not produce the results we think they should, that they are resisted by some large force 'out there'. But the strength with which we recognise part of the metaphor can blind us to how badly the rest of it fits. Those of us who indulge in sea bathing (including Le Corbusier) know vividly that swimming against the actual tide always gives a far greater sense of achievement, of disciplined productive effort, of pleasure and progress and an enhanced fitness for further work, than does swimming with it - when you may get somewhere faster, but in something of a physical mess. Some people might even be more likely to get a few admiring glances from people on the beach. Is that the metaphor or the thought doing the work?

Spirit of the fifties

2011-12-18T07:25:00.000Z

Inherited by Ryanair

Heading for the exit?

2011-12-16T07:32:00.002Z

"Nonetheless, Fitch continues to be of the opinion that, however well-managed, the structural aspects of their funding, earnings, and leverage, predispose GTUBs to vulnerability to market sentiment and confidence, particularly during periods of exogenous financial stress. Furthermore, the complexity of their business models and exposure to fat tail risk make it more difficult to assess the size of loss that could emerge rapidly from unexpected events."

"Fat tail" or fatal? Not a typo.

Dog eat dog

2011-12-16T07:08:00.000Z

But nearly two years on, European banks are under enormous pressure in credit markets and only very large banks have scope to expand. Credit Agricole may be the first of several banks to drop commodities trading, said the senior commodities trader:

"The major players - Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank - are still hiring to replace people who leave to funds and trading houses. But small and medium-sized banks are just shutting everything down."...

A senior oil trader at a major European bank said only very large players could now survive in commodities: "They (Credit Agricole) wanted to have a commodities arm but the appetite for risk was so small it was impossible to do big deals."...

Cargill is not alone among trading houses responding to a disappointing 2011 performance, Swiss-based coal traders said.

Coal has been a particularly tough market for traders this year because prices have been largely stagnant and liquidity has been lower. Without liquidity and volatility, trading profits have been hard to come by....

"In 2008-2009 everybody made money because prices were so volatile but this year prices have been stagnant and for the first time in a decade, even the big trading houses are facing a downturn in earnings," he added.

Last month Cargill former head of coal based in Geneva, Patrick Bracken, left to return to the U.S. and Peter Biston, Geneva-based head of power and gas, a junior gas trader and a power trader lost their jobs.

Cargill Ferrous International in November shut its physical steel trading desks in Hong Kong and Geneva and its top sugar trader, Jonathan Drake, left in early December.

"That (restructuring) makes sense. In the previous structure oil made a lot of money and they couldn't bonus traders as power and gas were down. Now oil can live or die by its own performance," said Peter Henry, senior consultant with Commodity Search Partners.

Reuters US

Massive attack: Dawkins hits the ceiling

2011-12-15T19:06:00.001Z

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-%26-technology/'god-particle'-does-not-believe-in-god-201112134669/

Pop goes the weasel

2011-12-15T17:39:00.001Z

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=198650

http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/12/plan-b-how-to-loot-nations-and-their-banks-legally/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=plan-b-how-to-loot-nations-and-their-banks-legally

and, for some light relief:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/12/the_bitch_the_stud_and_the_pra.html

Financial crisis - latest

2011-12-12T08:19:00.001Z

Astronomers have announced the discovery of the two biggest black holes ever seen, each one around 300m light years from Earth and with a combined mass equivalent to more than 30bn Suns.

These cosmological objects are some of the strangest in our known universe, where the laws of physics seem to break down and space gets very strange. One thing we know, however, is that getting close to one is a bad idea.

Black holes begin as giant stars (at least six times the mass of our Sun) and, after billions of years they collapse in on themselves into a point smaller than the full-stop at the end of this sentence. Nothing nearby can escape the pull of the resulting gravity.

Even at some distance outside the edge, it would take all the effort in the universe to resist getting pulled into orbit around the hole. Closer still, because of the sharp rate of increase of the forces, if your head was nearer the hole than your feet, the atoms in your hair would feel a stronger force than those in your toes. This difference would quickly tear you apart, turning you into a spaghetti-like line of atoms.

But a black hole would not need to suck the Earth in to cause us trouble. If one wandered within a billion miles of our solar system, its gravity could knock the Earth into a dangerous elliptical path around the Sun, where winters would drop to -50C and summers would reach hundreds of degrees Celsius. Or, if one knocked us out of the solar system, our planet would wander through deep space. Without our Sun, life on Earth would freeze to death within months.

New found land

2011-12-10T07:14:00.000Z

I wonder how Newt Gingrich's idea that the Palestinians are an 'invented people' is received by native Americans.

Italy in Europe

2011-12-07T19:11:00.001Z

Italian police have just caught one of the country's most wanted men, 16 years a fugitive from justice and the alleged boss of one of its most savagely violent organised crime syndicates, the Casalesi clan of the Camorra.

A true success - but look at that car. What does that tell us about the position of Italy in relation to its European neighbours and its present troubles? Where are the Alfas?

The elect

2011-12-07T19:00:00.002Z

Well, it's an election, stupid, I say to myself, but nevertheless it did catch my attention when Mitt Romney was reported as attacking Obama's foreign policy:

"Abroad, he's weakening America. He seems to be more generous to our enemies than he is to our friends. That is the natural tendency of someone who is unsure of their own strength, or of America's rightful place as the leader of the world."

I suppose, a century and a half ago, a British person might well have made the same unhesitating and unreflecting claim to a "rightful place as the leader of the world", but we are, all of us, usually a little more circumspect now. I just wonder wherefrom Mr Romney thinks that right derives, and whether he does not reflect that he has just given a hostage to fortune, or to history. Can he truly be confident that the right will not soon be migrating to another national brow?

Russia looks up

2011-12-07T11:15:00.001Z

Activists from the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi (Ours)

and, elsewhere, Interior Ministry troops

Greece reposes

2011-12-07T08:48:00.000Z

6 December 2011 - anniversary of the death of a student protester

Choose your slogan

2011-12-07T07:16:00.000Z

'We're All in This Togeher' or 'United We Stand'

A new road map for Europe

2011-12-07T07:10:00.001Z

Need a loan?

2011-12-07T07:03:00.001Z

As I publish a new post on this blog, the page on which Google confirms to me that it has succeeded includes, quite beyond my control, a link to an advertisement offering "Small loans in an hour".

Perhaps I should ask them how long a few trillion dollars/euros would take.

As I said in my talk "we the public, the consumer play happily and child-like in the gardens created for us by the evil giants of Google and Apple".

But, did I imagine that? Do I malign Google? I cannot find find it next time around.

New dawn

2011-12-07T06:56:00.002Z

People may be inclined to think that concerns about the loss of democratic control in the economic decisions being imposed upon distressed European countries - Ireland, Greece, Italy and others to come - as a condition of the loans being granted by the IMF, the EU and the ECB are an over-nice indulgence of liberal sensibilities rather than a real concern for genuine popular interests.

That might be wise and worldly if these 'rescue' packages did not amount to deeply political choices that attempt to entrench structures in national economies and society that massively favour highly sectional interests and commit societies to paths leading to major practical and cultural consequences.

It is a time for political choices and if they are not made democratically, when peoples believe themselves to live in democracies, we shall reap as we have sown.

http://michael-hudson.com/2011/12/europe%E2%80%99s-transition-from-social-democracy-to-oligarchy/

http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/12/the-hammer-of-debt/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-hammer-of-debt

Turner revisited: the triumph of the concrete

2011-12-06T07:16:00.003Z

Monday saw the announcement of the winner of the Turner Prize, the predictably controversial modern-art award, even though none of the nominees is terribly controversial. So the judges would do well to consider a late contender who has entered the fray with an audacious piece of work in the past week: the mysterious reimagining of Stonehenge on a hill on Achill Island, in Co Mayo, by the serial controversialist Joe McNamara.

Dubbed Achill-henge by locals, the huge structure was erected by McNamara and his associates last weekend on a scenic hilltop overlooking the village of Pollagh, despite attempts by Mayo County Council to halt the work...

Martin Boyce: 'Do Words Have Voices'

One can read a report of the actual award of the prize to Martin Boyce here although you should be warned that, apart from the picture, the article, which reads a little like a report of the Oscars ceremony, will make you struggle to learn much about the work itself.

Meanwhile, back at the pre-concrete version, there is a proposal to give it a lighting installation to 'add a little magic'. Ah, how different things might have been for Tess of the d'Urbervilles if they had thought of that before!

A bright dawn at Stonehenge

Guilty or not?

2011-12-05T07:49:00.000Z

Love and hate in Moscow today.

War is the Health of the State

2011-12-04T05:59:00.001Z

The growth of pervasive state control, so often a response to crisis and social, economic or national collapse, finds its ultimate, expression in the creation of state-sponsored groups outside the established mechanisms of government and democratic control. Its most sinister and rebarbative manifestation was seen in the elite groups of fascist European states, but something similar is found now in the unaccountable patriotic groupings of modern Russia or the shadow government of party and people's army in China.

The process is of course less hindered in any effectively one-party state (Does that include coalitions of previously bitterly opposed rival parties?), and where there exists a shadow institutional apparatus of power. No doubt many will see it as a grotesque loss of a sense of proportion to find something similar, in kind, if not scale or overt intention, in the proliferation in our own country now of 'partnerships', 'pathfinder' projects, fora, and all the coming apparatus of 'localism', that ersatz handing of power to the people that bypasses established forms of democratic accountability, which national governments have been so keen to erode at local level for decades, and passes effective control to energetic interest groups. For politicians, 'localism' comes out of a different phrasebook from 'nationalism'.

Private and public art

2011-12-03T07:24:00.000Z

Architecture new and old at the Venice Biennale

A Ponzi landscape

2011-12-02T07:38:00.000Z

In this time of economic collapse, a tottering banking system, vanishing consumer prosperity, one looks around the physical landscape and thinks, not how it might grow and develop, what new might be added, but which parts are most devoid of energy and truth, devoid of any wealth of spirit, that they might collapse from our physical consciousness, now that something even more meretricious is less likely to be created or manufactured to give them some relative substance and permanence. The sense of relief is palpable as one imagines the earth swallowing them up: a relief from sensory and mental din.

Land

2011-11-30T15:05:00.001Z

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has just published its first global asessment of the world's land resources.

It finds that most of the potential agricultural land is already being farmed. Of that, 25 percent is assessed as highly degraded, 8 per cent as moderately degraded, 36 per cent stable or slightly degraded and 10 per cent as improving. The degradation takes the form of soil erosion, water depletion and degration, and biodiversity loss.

The dramatic increases in agricultural yields brought about by the 'green revolution' begun in the 1960s have now tailed off and in part the very farming practices introduced by it have themselves resulted in the land and water resource degradation.

Whoso list to hunt

2011-11-30T14:29:00.001Z

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Debt or taxes

2011-11-23T14:47:00.000Z

An interesting post by Golem XIV that elaborates a point I made in my talk to the Northern Contemporary Furniture Makers. See the Talks and articles page of this blog.

Transpiration

2011-11-21T08:11:00.003Z

Egg in the batter, egg in the batter!
We make cake and nothing's the matter.

(With apologies to Maurice Sendak.)

Whether it be Tony Blair justifying military attack on Iraq, the US administration describing the death of Osama bin Laden, or the Metropolitan Police accounting for the deaths of Jean Charles de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper seller caught up in the G20 demonstrations, or, more recently, Mark Duggan whose fatal shooting by the police was the immediate stimulation of this year's London riots, the pudding recipe seems always to call for much egg. We are offered copious detail which, usually when things have quietened down a little (it may be days, it may be years) has to be withdrawn. Quite how it got there in the first place is never explained.

Truth will out; but it knows its place.

Junk

2011-11-21T07:14:00.004Z

In the old days a person's address was usually a piece of public information, and one could send a letter to more or less anyone without thinking one had transgressed basic standards of civilisation. One might not get a reply, or it might not even get read, but that was a different matter.

Now that we are most of us on the internet, knowledge, or, worse, use of a person's email address without their explicit sanction is regarded as the most intimate kind of personal violation, even though an email can be consigned to oblivion with a single jab of a finger, whilst a letter had to be torn and thrust into the fire (preceded of course by an exhaustive risk assessment).

We should take a lesson from the eighteenth century, when they managed to combine a pronounced idea of the Polite with the most pointed kind of personal communication and remark, and decorum and scurrilousness could rub shoulders. It is perhaps because we nowadays have no real notion of politeness that we hem ourselves around with absurd protocols of appropriateness.

Perhaps in these times of unemployment we should all be enabled to recruit the kind of personal 'filter' that royalty has long relied upon: "Her Majesty desires me to convey..."

Sub prime

2011-11-17T21:55:00.000Z

http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/11/buckle-up-credit-crunch-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=buckle-up-credit-crunch-2

Greece and Germany

2011-11-16T14:16:00.002Z

And this:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,769703,00.html

and this:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,797584,00.html

Making it up

2011-11-16T10:16:00.001Z

I would recommend everyone to read this:

http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/11/risk-tricky-stuff/

Silver Lining

2011-11-16T08:57:00.001Z

A few weeks ago I gave a talk to the Northern Contemporary Furniture Makers in which I attempted to paint, in a very roundabout way, the changing world in which I think we find ourselves. I don't know how many were interested but it is posted now on the Talks and Articles page of this blog.

Italy

2011-11-15T07:41:00.000Z

Fifteen-minute rule

2011-11-12T07:20:00.000Z

The cabinet office minister, Francis Maude, has suggested that public sector workers protesting against cuts in their pensions should confine their proposed strike to fifteen minutes' duration.

This is an idea that should spread. I propose:

fifteen-minute jail terms for fraud and malfeasance in public office;

fifteen-minute jobs for the unemployed;

fifteen-minute mortgages for first-time house-buyers;

a fifteen-minute nuclear exchange between the United States and Iran;

fifteen minutes of fame for Mr Abramovich;

fifteen minutes of silence from John Cage

I might add to the list later.

Clochemerle-Babylon

2011-11-12T07:01:00.005Z

The Church needs a firm hierachy and is forced to distrust such of her underlings as show a tendency to become too holy. It would be no less disquieting for a bishop to see his clergy setting themselves seriously to live in the imitation of Jesus Christ, than for a general to see his corporals drawing the inspiration of their behaviour directly from Napoleon. Virtue, merit and talent must be kept within decent limits.

Gabriel Chevallier, 1954

Addison and Steele and the gentlemen in the coffee house (and I expect Lord Digby, as he maintained the port of his quality) would have thoroughly approved.

From eighteenth-century barrels to Global

2011-11-10T07:17:00.000Z

James Man (1755–1823) was the founder of Man Group, the United Kingdom's largest alternative investment management business and a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. Born in Whitechapel and apprenticed to a William Humphrey as a barrel maker, James Man decided to establish his own business as a sugar-broker in 1783. In 1784 he secured a contract to supply the Royal Navy with rum. This business grew into Man Group, one of the largest investment management businesses in the world. He retired in 1819 and moved to Dartmouth, Devon where he died in 1823.

'MF Global a US-based futures broker that can trace its roots back to 18th-century London, yesterday [30 October] became the first major US casualty of the eurozone debt crisis by filing for bankruptcy protection, putting 3,000 jobs at risk after a rescue takeover failed to materialise.

'As Barclays did with Lehman in 2008, potential bidders may emerge to cherry-pick the best operations out of bankruptcy from a business that can trace its roots back to 1783 when sugar broker James Man – who provides the M in the firm's name – set up in the City of London. He also provided the name for Man Group, the hedge fund listed in London which spun off what was then Man Financial - later MF Global - in 2007 and sold out entirely in 2009. Man Group stressed yesterday that it no connection to the firm or any exposure.'

Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau ... Olli Rehn

2011-11-09T08:12:00.001Z

According to Wikipedia, 'The social contract is an intellectual device intended to explain the appropriate relationship between individuals and their governments. Social contract arguments assert that individuals unite into political societies by a process of mutual consent, agreeing to abide by common rules and accept corresponding duties to protect themselves and one another from violence and other kinds of harm. Social contract theory played an important historical role in the emergence of the idea that political authority must be derived from the consent of the governed.'

Olli Rehn, well-known as a philosopher in his spare time from his role as European Union economic and monetary affairs commissioner, has developed the theory a little further:

Olli Rehn said that Papandreou's unexpected decision to call a referendum over the bailout agreement had been a "breach of confidence" that had thrown Greece's commitment to its fiscal adjustment programme into question.

"We now have to repair the social contract between Greece and the euro area which should be done in writing," he said, insisting that without written confirmation a critical €8bn aid instalment would not be released.

Demos

2011-11-09T07:25:00.000Z

Until recently comment on the steady growth of non-democratic decision-making groups and practices in the handling of the European debt crisis has been mostly confined to free-lance comment such as that found on David Malone's blog. It is interesting to find the point now being argued very forthrightly by Larry Elliott in the Guardian

My debt is bigger than your debt

2011-11-09T07:17:00.001Z

Promethean

2011-11-02T07:43:00.001Z

Michael Roth, Europe spokesman for the opposition Social Democrats in Berlin, said Papandreou's move showed courage but he was "playing with fire".

By which he meant the exercise of democracy in times of financial crisis.

The Lives of Others

2011-10-21T09:45:00.000+01:00

'Transcripts of those recordings have now been obtained by the Guardian, along with other police materials relating to Kennedy's deployment marked "restricted" and "confidential".

'They shed light on the extent of surveillance undertaken to keep tabs on a group of environmental campaigners. They reveal the minute details about the activities of campaigners being relayed by Kennedy, from discussions about football teams to types of biscuits eaten at a planning meeting.

'In one document, marked "secret", police chiefs lay out what they believed to be the legal justification for Kennedy's surveillance operation, stating that the environmental campaigners could cause "severe economic loss to the United Kingdom" and an "adverse effect on the public's feeling of safety and security".'

State secret

Windfall fines - confidential briefing

2011-10-19T07:04:00.002+01:00

Not for Publication (NfP)

The Department will be announcing at the next suitable opportunity (Breakfast-time Christmas Eve - BCE) that the Windfall Licencing Fines and Penalties Bill (WLFPB) will be withdrawn from the current legislative programme due to unforeseen pressure on the legislative schedule and the Ministerial Mind (MM).

We shall not, however, be abandonning this vital piece of Public Service Reform (PSR) and it will be reintroduced at the earliest opportunity. The Consultative Process (CP) has now been concluded and positive representations will be incorporated into the Bill. The Tendering Process (TP) for the Enforcement and Oversight Contract (EOC) is well under way and the Windfall Agency (WA) has already been set up as an arms length body under Ministerial Directive (MD).

The legislation will not apply to Scotland (NOB), but fruit is not thought to form part of the Scottish National Provender (SNP), and as there are many times more sheep than Scotsmen they would probably have got round it anyway (GRIA).

Pease Pottage

2011-10-18T07:45:00.001+01:00

Last December our coalition government, in the form of deputy prime minister Nick Clegg promised that child detention would be ended this May. The “shameful practice that last year alone saw more than 1000 children – 1000 innocent children – imprisoned” would end. There would be not only a “big culture shift” (How did he imagine one shifts culture – or was his imagination, rather than his articulation, actually engaged at all?), there would be a “totally new process” for dealing with families in the immigration process. It is with immigrant families or children entering the UK or about to be forcibly removed after the failure of their appeals against refusal of their applications to stay that child detention mostly arises.

What we have is less a change of process than – if one were to be uncharitable – an interior design exercise. The grim and prison-like Yarl’s Wood has been replaced by the country retreat of Cedars. Families will be detained for much shorter periods. However, the numbers of children detained have not much reduced since May.

Cedars looks very different from Yarl’s Wood, inside and out, but inside it is staffed by G4S and outside there are security fences. It is inspected by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons.

Controversially Barnardo’s, the children’s’ charity, has contracted to work with G4S and the government advising on both the fitting out and the running of Cedars. The chief executive of Barnardo’s describes Cedars as looking like an upmarket holiday resort, perhaps a bit like Center Parcs. One can see what she means, but the irony of the UK state’s willingness to extend this level of comfort and ease to would-be immigrants, many of whom will have no doubt been motivated to make their risky attempts to settle here at least partly by economic poverty, for something like an away-break, but not a life-time, will not be lost.

One regrets also that in our times our government no longer has within its own ranks the ability to envisage and implement a civilised and unintimidating environment for these people but must contract with a charity to achieve it. Likewise, it now almost passes unremarked that it must contract with a commercial organisation (much criticised for competence and humanity, but profitable none the less) to run its detention centre in all but name. The government has outsourced not only its executive functions but also its imagination. How far have we come from Victorian values and practices when the government no longer regards detention of the individual as the proper preserve of the democratic state? At least the décor has improved.

Dominoes

2011-10-11T22:49:00.000+01:00

Dominoes, thine hour hast come. Vietnam was a terrible disappointment, but wait long enough ...

Counterfactual

2011-10-11T08:18:00.000+01:00

http://www.shadowstats.com/

http://londonbanker.blogspot.com/

UAV

2011-10-09T07:36:00.002+01:00

The heat of battle

He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

Many Reapers and Predators don’t encrypt the video they transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S. forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.

Software is being developed to move the decision on whether to launch a strike against a particular target from human operators to computer programs. That probably costs more than $26.

Cry havoc

Wealth

2011-10-08T10:02:00.000+01:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/06/ed-miliband-george-osborne-martin-wiener

Labels

2011-10-08T09:25:00.000+01:00

Edward Gibbon by Sir Joshua Reynolds "This man [Reynolds] was hired to depress Art." William Blake

Increasingly I feel like labelling all my posts just Decline and Fall.

"I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion."

"I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I adore his chivalry, and I can even forgive his superstition..." Gibbon of Burke

Gibbon's grandfather lost all of his assets in the South Sea Bubble but later recovered his fortunes to enable him to leave a substantial estate to his son.

Jobs

2011-10-08T09:24:00.001+01:00

"iPod, iPad, iConquered."

Dermot Byrne

Royston, Hertfordshire

Windfall fines update 2

2011-10-07T07:07:00.002+01:00

One matter is to be withheld from the Consultation Process (CP). Bids are already being considered for the Contract for the Execution of the Capital Penalty (CECP) for unauthorised tree felling. The Department has received a representation from the National Association of Licenced Executioners and Disembowellers (NALED) claiming that, their membership now being reduced to five and the youngest member being aged 95, they would require Substantial Public Subsidy (SPS) to enable them to keep up with the Targetted Capital Conviction Rate (TCCP) on a Contracted-out Basis (CoB). There are no funds in the Departmental Budget (DB) for such purposes: this legislative project is meant to be Revenue Positive (RP). A Loyal Address (LA) has also been received from the Worshipful Company of Hangers, Drawers and Quarterers (WCHDQ) respectfully drawing (do they have a sense of humour (SoH)?) the Departmental Attention (DA) to the fact that their activities are now restricted to the consumption of ceremonial dinners (with beverages) and the creation, in a purely figurative sense, of Deadmen of the City of London (DCL), where there are thought to be few fruit trees but plenty of windfalls. The Department will not be deterred from this Essential Reform (ER) of a Vital Public Service (VPS) by such self-interest and nimby-ism. Self regulation is Not an Option (NaO). There Is No Alternative (TINA). If nothing is done the nation's orchards and gardens face collapse into the mush of uncollected windfalls. The National Apple and Pear Service (NAPS) is Safe in Our Hands (SiOH). There will be no Top-Down Reorganisation (TDR) of the Nation's Apples. This is a Ticking Time Bomb (TTB). Accordingly I have directed that a Youth Employment Training Initiative (YETI) be established to create Apprenticeships in Modern Execution Necessities (AMEN). It's either that or the Predator Drones (UAVs).

Pass me the water.

The policemen look so young these days

2011-10-06T08:33:00.000+01:00

One Nation - No Sog

2011-10-06T07:56:00.001+01:00

We need to be cautious when political leaders with substantial but minority support come to government in times of economic woe and danger, and of a popular sense of grievance and powerlessness, promising to unite the nation with resolute, bold measures, simultaneously warning that they need to overturn old ways and appealing to past glories and achievements.

Read the history, especially in Europe.

Windfall fines update 1

2011-10-06T06:25:00.001+01:00

Typical English orchard

My Departmental staff have drawn to my attention that Minimum Flock and Herd Levels (MFHLs) would need to be set to avoid abuse of the Sheep and Pig Exemption (SPE). Otherwise anyone could avoid the tax with any doddering old ram (DOR) in their orchard. Following publication of draft MFHLs, the Department received representations from the Society for the Preservation of Ancient and Historic Orchards (SPAHO) pointing out that some historic varieties of apple and pear trees (APTs) have low cropping ratios (LCRs) and that they consequently require a lower flock or herd level to consume the likely Total Windfall Amount (TWA). (Why are shepherds called shepherds when they look after flocks? A Departmental Working Group (DWG) is currently examining this question and will be reporting in 2015.) The Department has also received a vigorous communication from the Guild of Goose and Swanherds (GGS) complaining that their exclusion from the SPE or similar scheme will cause the elimination of historic goose varietiess (HGVs) that have roamed the nation's orchards for centuries and form part of our historic heritage (HH). I have therefore announced a Listening Pause (LP) in the legislative process, following which I shall proceed with my original intention (POI).

Windfall fines

2011-10-05T08:01:00.000+01:00

I shall shortly be introducing legislation to make it an offence to allow windfall fruit to remain uncollected. Teams of inspectors will tour the land counting windfalls and imposing on-the-spot fines of 50 pence per fruit. To prevent evasion it will become a capital crime to fell a fruit tree without a permit. Exemptions will be available for those who keep sheep or pigs in their orchards.

Media lens

2011-10-05T07:33:00.000+01:00

http://www.medialens.org/

The blue pill

2011-10-05T07:31:00.000+01:00

Charles Wheeler October 4, 2011 at 4:36 pm

The blue pill’s been pretty effective for 30 years because debt has papered over the deep fissures caused by the startling polarization of wealth and economic power – most starkly in the US (http://goo.gl/SY5ZY) and UK. It’s enabled a majority to cling on in the housing market, finance tuition fees and hospital and school building programmes and retain the remnants of a safety net for those mired at the bottom.

But the arithmetic is changing. Pretty soon most young people will find themselves shut out of the housing market and denied social housing – doomed to serve up an increasing share of income to the rentier class; many more will find the prospect of student debts of £50k too much of a disincentive (particularly those who’ve already drawn the short straw of substandard ‘sink-school’ education and low expectations – leaving the field open to their less able but wealthier peers, exacerbating the divide between the Herberts and the Henrys). The elderly are already finding that the crippling costs of ageing are being transferred to the individual and the family. Disability benefits are effectively being abolished even for most of the most severely disabled, again pushing the financial, physical and psychological burden onto those least able to bear it.

As a result, confidence in the future is plummeting and the next generation are growing up with the realisation that they will be expected to worker harder and longer for less than their parents.

And this is before the effect of the cuts has fed through.

In the nineteenth century, as the ‘residuum’ grew liberals like Charles Booth set out to prove that the scale of the problems of the underclass had been exaggerated by socialists – only to find it was much worse than imagined. He then sought to scapegoat the casual labourer as the cause of society’s ills in much the same way that today’s economic liberals pin the blame on those at the bottom of the pile (the poorest of the 50% that share just 5% of the nation’s wealth). But it wasn’t just the poor that suffered insecurity, the drop for even the relatively comfortably off had become so precipitous that only a tiny proportion were unaffected by the psychological effect of the gravitational pull of poverty.

For the post-war generation life without a welfare state is just a distant memory. It’s a while since the majority have had to live with the concern that a chronic illness might bankrupt us; that a disability would leave us totally dependent on family, charity or face life in an institution; that any kind of incapacity in old age would wipe out our life savings in a few months (so much for the incentive to save!); that being born into poverty wouldn’t be an insurmountable obstacle to advancement or bar to opportunity. But, with the collapse of social care, the time-limiting of disability benefits and the slow death of the NHS, and the ‘marketisation’ of higher education, all those fears that plagued our Victorian forebears are coming back to haunt us.

In a sense, social democracy was a victim of its own success – the fact that most of us grew up expecting to be educated, receive healthcare and some help should we suffer a disability or live long enough to need some assistance in old age, as a right has led us to take these benefits for granted, or even to assume such guarantees are no longer necessary. But Polanyi’s announcement of the death of laissez-faire has proved premature. Beveridge’s ‘Giant Evils’ of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease are being uncaged.

As more and more income has been taken by the top 10%, the tax burden on top earners fallen, and ‘trickle down’ morphed into ‘hose up’, only rising levels of debt have kept the boats afloat. Where, in 1980 a manual worker could finance a mortgage, run a car, take a holiday and see his children through university on a single wage – it now takes a couple working full-time to keep up with the rent and the car loan (see: http://goo.gl/xAO0 on decline of the middle income worker in the US). This is the root cause of the financial crisis, as ever more exotic financial instruments have been created to mask the growth of inequality. Instead of taking a share of growth in higher wages as happened in the immediate post-war period, this has been substituted with rising debt + compound interest (and even now the orthodox continue to chant the mantra from page 1 of the neoliberal playbook: wages are too high at £6 an hour!) – an ultimately unsustainable combination in a slow-growth economy. As a result even those back-stops we may have thought inviolable are being removed: universal healthcare, decent education, adequate pensions, the right to a life of more than mere subsistence for disabled people, the attenuation of child poverty.

Perhaps, under this assault, the effect of that blue pill is going to start to wear off.

See post and other comments at http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/10/china-10-7-trillion-yuan-of-debt-going-bad/

Good for us

2011-10-03T07:32:00.000+01:00

Britain is being urged to follow the example of the Danes, and introduce a 'fat tax'. According to the National Obesity Forum, it's not a matter of whether we should do it, but when. Or follow the example of the Hungarians, the Swiss, the Austrians, the Romanians, the Finns, and introduce sugar, caffeine or salt (following the example of seventeenth-century France?) taxes. (The French had the right ideas. They not only taxed salt; they obliged every individual over the age of eight to purchase a minimum weekly amount at a fixed price.)

Is this the best we can do to rescue our doomed culture? Tinker with ill-adjusted financial penalties imposed on everyone's behaviour by right-thinking people of comfortable means and minds, who will themselves hardly notice the effects in their own lives - though they will minutely measure it in the lives of others? Slap 25 pence on the price of a food like butter that mankind has made for millenia. How about a Tesco tax instead?

A man after my own heart

2011-10-03T07:09:00.000+01:00

'Sendak is in search of what he calls a "yummy death". William Blake set the standard, jumping up from his death bed at the last minute to start singing. "A happy death," says Sendak. "It can be done." He lifts his eyebrows to two peaks. "If you're William Blake and totally crazy."'

'On the day of his death, Blake worked relentlessly on his Dante series. Eventually, it is reported, he ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her, Blake is said to have cried, "Stay Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me." Having completed this portrait (now lost), Blake laid down his tools and began to sing hymns and verses. At six that evening, after promising his wife that he would be with her always, Blake died. Gilchrist reports that a female lodger in the same house, present at his expiration, said, "I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel."

George Richmond gives the following account of Blake's death in a letter to Samuel Palmer:

"He died ... in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ — Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten'd and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven."'

'He loves Middlemarch, although "Daniel Deronda, oy gevalt! She put aside her hard hat and was determined to be sweet and understanding. That won't get you anywhere, honey."'

1 Beach Road

2011-09-30T19:07:00.000+01:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/sep/26/1-beach-road-review

http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/33673/1-beach-road

I read the news today

2011-09-29T19:44:00.000+01:00

http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/09/the-monstrous-fact-from-bail-outs-to-debt-peonage/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-monstrous-fact-from-bail-outs-to-debt-peonage

Leaning towards the sea

2011-09-27T07:36:00.001+01:00

"Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."

The name of the chair

2011-09-26T07:15:00.002+01:00

The Windsor chair makers in the forests were probably doing it since the 16th century but it may be that it was first done not by forest bodgers but, as a sideline, by wheelwrights in their shops. It wasn't called the Windsor or acquired the distinctive steam-bent bow back until the 18th century. And why 'Windsor', in Berkshire, when it was mostly made in the beechwoods of Buckinghamshire? It is thought to be because it was middle-men in Windsor who were first responsible for buying up the chairs and shipping them off to markets in London. Another nail in the coffin of the idea of the self-sufficient craftsman and an early case of London being where the money was. Metropolitan domination plays a role in the development of the Buckinghamshire beechwoods too. They were first actively managed on a large scale to send coppiced firewood for the domestic hearths of nearby London - nothing to do with furniture and bodging. But the canals and coal put paid to that trade and only then did the bodgers move in, finding a convenient and underused source of small-section timber. They continued to coppice much of the woodland but towards the end of the nineteenth century furniture manufacture in High Wycombe had become sufficiently mechanised in factories for it to be using a significant number of local large timber trees. It was, however, a short-lived phenomenon, because it very quickly became cheaper to import beech timber from Europe. Thus the substantial markets for both the coppice wood and timber of the Buckinghamshire beechwoods disappeared, leaving them to become 'amenity' woodlands (at least for the owners, if not for the masses). And, of course, it soon became the case that the complete chairs themselves, at least for the mass market, were imported.