European empires

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

Philip

"A spinster lady can, and very often does, turn into something of a battleaxe with the passing years"

People bemoan our politically correct age because, of course, people spoke such good sense when they were allowed to puke their minds. This example from the Director of the Trade Commission, Australia, 1968. He saves the best for the last line on the page. The second page is in many ways more interesting though less hilarious.

Via Boing Boing.

Pictures of Barack Obama

The first 167 days.

Not so bad on climate change policy

I was expecting the UK to be near the bottom.

Seed bombs

For the guerrilla gardener.

Pretty outrageous

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/jun/21/fit-watch-kingsnorth-arrests

Whatever you think of these people's political views/activism, this is wrong. Police should always be publicly identifiable and it is clear to me that those "stress positions" were being used violently. I get the feeling that this sort of thing is widespread and quite routine, not just peace protesters but all sorts of people who annoy the police.

David Curry`s expenses

An interesting attempt by the Guardian to crowd source expense scrutiny:

Eg. the Skipton MP, David Curry. Apparently, Mr Curry paid for public service broadcasting out of his public service expenses.

I had a correspondence with Mr Curry about all this when MPs, including Mr Curry, were trying to obstruct access to these details.:

Me:

Dear David Curry,
I am writing to you from Japan but you would be my local MP in any UK election, via postal ballot. I am writing to ask you to vote against the draft Freedom of Information (Parliament) Order 2009 this Thursday and to sign Jo Swinson's Early Day Motion.
I feel strongly that the public money spent on MPs expenses should be subject to the greatest degree of transparency and accountability possible. Democratically elected representatives spending money given to them by the taxpayer should be in a position to share with their constituents precisely how that money is spent. The measure being decided on Thursday would have the opposite effect and the arguments for it are essentially attempts to justify the concealment of expenses that MPs could not justify publicly. If MPs have embarrassing expenses, they should still have the courage to vote against this order because the measure is wrong in principle. I am appealing to you to vote against it.

David Curry:

I am sorry but I believe you are wrong. No-one is trying to conceal expenses. It is a question as to what is a sensible level of detail. As for EDM I cannot see the earthly point of signing an EDM when the issue has to be voted on in the Commons itself. It has the whiff of sanctimoniousness about it. DC

Me:
Dear David Curry,
Thank you for replying to my message about the draft Freedom of Information (Parliament) Order 2009 this Thursday. I realise you must get hundreds of messages from your constituents every week and I appreciate the time you spent in making your position clear. I have no expectation of a second rebuttal but would like to give one pence extra to my initial tuppence worth. I have no detailed knowledge of Commons procedure and I must accept your point that the Early Day Motion is unnecessary and sanctimonious.
On the substantive point, you seem to be relying on the word "sensible" for the entirety of your positive argument for voting for the concealment from the voters of the precise detail of how their money has been spent. As I understand it, the information has already been collected and will be fairly easy to publish if MPs do not vote to stop it. So, the "sense" you talk of (but do not specify) must not be a claim about what is practicable but rather some sort of privacy claim about MPs' right to blur or generalise the information they give the taxpayer.
I am afraid that many members of the public will take the simple position that democratic representatives using public money should fully account for every jot and tittle that they spend and that they should account for it to their voters rather than in a private auditing process. We hear all sorts of gumph from politicians seeking to be elected. One piece of information that would seem to be relevant to our choice is precisely how they spend our money on their own expenses and how they define what is a claimable expense.
One of the Government ministers supporting the order is quoted in a newspaper as saying: "MPs' expenses should not be an entertainment show for the public." Failing any significant saving of public money or building of openness between representative and voter, I can't see any earthly reason why we should not at least get some entertainment from the money we are paying. I feel many, perhaps most, voters would agree with me, especially in the current economic climate.David Curry:

There is a real issue of cost and it is a recurrent cost because of the neeed to scan every single receipt etc. into the machine. There is a vital word in all legislation which is "reasonable" - what is a reasonable level of disclusure taking into consideration the cost and the benefit.. The costs are, of course, incurred by the taxpayer. I have no great personal isue riding on this- my expenses are a long way below the maxima. DC

So far, I think, more than 400,000 pounds worth of expenses have been repaid.

Was there fraud in Iran?

A very sober, not to say impenetrable, from a Michigan University statistician, who specializes in election forensics: "While it is not possible given only the current data to say for sure whether this reflects natural complexity in the political processes or artificial manipulations, the numerous outliers comport more with the idea that there was widespread fraud than with the idea that all the departures from the model are benign." *linking to Pdf.

Iranian election

http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/stealing-iranian-election.html

Good source:

http://niacblog.wordpress.com/

Soccer forum is another good source of photos and videos:

http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?p=17946433#post17946433

This will be fun:

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=97328&sectionid=3510211

Zionism and the Canadian Government

A Christian fundamentalist minister seems to want this conference stopped. Comparing the conference details and his statements about the conference, I can only conclude that he is trying to suppress free debate of perfectly respectable points of view.

Personally I think that a two state solution is the only way forward, but it is quite obscene how some Jewish groups accuse anybody who believes in a state based around historic borders and allowing everyone equal citizenship of being "antisemitic". In the long run, that sort of talk is not only offensive but dangerous because it is about extremists/propagandists taking factional ownership over the fight against anti-semitism, which requires as broad a spectrum of opinion behind it as possible.

A full screen, high quality version of Obama's Muslim world speech at Cairo University

I wanted to watch a full version of Barack Obama's big speech to the Middle East at Cairo University. Most versions are cut and spliced with journalistic comment but this one seems to be straight. Double click to watch full screen:

North Korea

The dead land.

"We have a wretched govern­ment here which has completely mucked up the system and caused the resignation of me and many others, because it was this government that introduced the Freedom of Information Act and it is this government that insisted on the things which caught me on the wrong foot, which if I'd been cleverer it wouldn't have done."

Wretched the government may be, in other ways, but isn't Sir Anthony Steen missing the point? He seems to be living in a completely solipsistic world.

"Cameron also forced the former Tory minister Sir Peter Viggers to announce his retirement after Viggers claimed £1,645 for a floating duck island."

These Conservatives really are going to be a hard blast of fresh air when they get into office, aren't they?

PS. Interestingly, that top quote disappeared from the article moments after I linked to it.

There is an ad running against same sex marriage in the US:



There has been some fun with the audition tapes of the people who applied to play act fear:



I liked this response:

Obama

Action figure

On Subsidies

from Calvin and Hobbes.

Sampling Obama

How long will it take for these to be sampled.

Turns out those boring people who went on about maintaining our manufacturing base were right after all

or Reports of our death have been greatly understated.

By A Very Fearful Fellow Who Does Not Have a Clue What he is Talking About

The situation: British people buy a lot of their stuff from abroad. Electronics, toys, food; it feels like most of the things we live on come from abroad. However, most British people do not make anything that foreigners might want to buy. We have been paying for our inflated lifestyles by selling foreigners paper. Let's not get into why they bought it but they did.

The crux: The underlying value of that paper, our money, essentially relies on what things foreigners can buy with it from us. Unfortunately, Pounds Sterling is not worth very much because we do not produce things that foreigners might want to buy. We used to make ships and cars and things but we gave that up a while back. Pity really, because they would be really cheap now that our overweight currency has collapsed. I suppose we still have that financial expertise and cutting edge management advice that we used to sell to people. Enough said. What have we got left? A few Harold Pinter plays? So the Pound is basically worth very little and has been worth very little for a long time.

The revised situation: There are huge piles of Pounds in foreign vaults and those Pounds are worth nowt. The economy is going tits up so the Government is printing more of that paper to try to give it a "kick start". Sadly, there is no engine on the bike apart from debt. The printing of more money is just going to make our money worth even less. Drastically less.

The foreigners who own rooms full of paper are realising it is worth nothing and are selling it for what they can get. The price of our money is going down very quickly and is likely to stay down. The financial sector of our economy, which has warped our public policy for decades and has provided the fig leaf for our national lethargy, is going down with us (or, to be more precise, just slightly ahead of us).

The crisis: The printing of money, the piling of debt upon debt and the inevitable (and partly consequent) fall of the Pound will all result in hyper (or at least super) inflation and further currency collapse.

The resolution: Panic! If you have any money, buy land! I mean land you can grow carrots on.

Or, don't panic. We are not in this alone. The rest of the world is damned too if this system collapses. I would not be surprised if the Dollar does the same sort of thing the Pound is now doing. And that would not be a sideshow, that would be the the Big Top falling over. The producers in the East are going to be just as screwed as we are if the global trading system stops working and we enter the Second World Depression (I suppose, like "The Great War", they will have to change the name of the first depression). So, perhaps, somehow, they will cover over the cracks with all that useless paper and allow us to stagger on a little further as the world economy's necessary fat men.

I still say land where you can grow carrots would be a good idea though. You could always build a mobile phone kiosk or a dodgy mortgage brokerage on it if things don't go so badly.

Disclaimer: I know nothing at all about what I am talking about. My opinions may go up as well as down, on a daily basis.

Obama's inauguration speech

Here.
And the benediction (great ending!).