Why do British people associate the metric system with Europe?
Topic: Misc.
AOL has a poll asking users whether the UK should switch its road signs from miles to kilometers. Here is a typical comment from an angry opponent:

Malcolm62001:

"It's only because the goons in Brussells want to run our country, and a lot of our MPs are letting them. We were a once a world leader but now we are a mixture of everywhere. Let's not lose our English ways - lets stay with miles."

Do people like 'Malcolm' not realise that Australia, New Zealand and Canada all use kilometers? Did they succumb to pressure from Brussels or did they just figure that life is easier when your measurements are based on the number 10? I don't have strong views on this topic, but I do feel grateful that the old imperial money system of pounds, shillings and pence was scrapped when I was two. So perhaps future generations will be grateful to us if we switch away from miles. When I was in school in the seventies, every textbook used Kms. It frustrated me that I never encountered them in daily use.

There are many things that are worth conserving in Britain. The imperial system of measurements probably isn't one of them.

At last, a Tory rethink on housing.
Topic: Politics
Last year, on election day I wrote here about my frustration with the Conservative Party's protectionist attitude to new housing construction:

Quote:

"The one policy where I find myself in agreement with Labour is on housing. The Conservatives vilify Prescott for wanting to build more housing on the Green Belt, but I think Prescott's got this right. There is an urgent need for more housing in the South East of England and I feel that he's facing facts, while others bury their heads in the sand. I do feel sickened listening to some middle-class southerners prattling on about defending the Green Belt. While they may think that they are speaking for the defence of rural tranquility, what they are actually saying is that people who live in overcrowded and overpriced towns and cities should be made to stay there. It sickens me. The Tories express their opposition to 'Prezza's digger' in terms of giving local communities a voice, but we all know what this means because nobody has any incentive to say 'yes'. Every community would say no to more housing, because the people consulted are those who don't benefit from greater supply. The poor and the homeless wouldn't have a voice in this process.

Before anyone leaps to the assumption that I'm wanting government interference in the market to suit my own needs, I should stress that I'm not. What I would like is for the market to be made more free. What we have at present is unrestricted demand, but highly restricted supply. The number of bodies who have the right to object to new housing construction has risen in recent decades and the result is a big anti-development bias. This must be reversed. The Tories are supposed to be the party of free enterprise and it disappoints me to see them being so protectionist on this matter."

It's therefore a great relief to read this article in the Times today:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25610-2031797,00.html

which reports:

In a speech that ignored much of last year’s election manifesto, George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, said that he would change the tax regime, planning system and supply of public housing to increase the number of affordable homes.

In 2005 the Tories said that they would oppose all of John Prescott’s homebuilding plans in the South East and establish more green belts with even tighter planning regulations. Although popular with traditionalists, the policy was a turn-off for young families looking for affordable homes. In an attempt to revive the spirit of Margaret Thatcher’s "homeowning democracy", Mr Osborne said that the party would help first-time buyers.

"I want the modern Conservative Party to become again the champion of affordable and sustainable homeownership," he told a housing industry conference in South Wales. "I want us to look afresh at the planning system, and tackle the delays and obstruction that is damaging the the affordability of our housing."

I would love to think that someone in the Conservative Party had read this article about 'Affordable family creation', but I doubt it.

Affordable family creation

Worth reading if you have the time, but the executive summary is:

"In parts of the country where it is economical to buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with a decent public school, you’ll generally find more Republicans."

If I worked in Tory Central Office I would paint that message in large capital letters on the walls.

What chance, romantic love?
Topic: Misc.
An article in the Observer titled "Women demand tougher laws to curb abortions" caught my eye last week. It reports that that a "survey by MORI shows that 47 per cent of women believe the legal limit for an abortion should be cut from its present 24 weeks, and another 10 per cent want the practice outlawed altogether." On first glance it seems a surprising finding, as there is nothing like the same hostility to abortion in the UK that one sees in the US. What has happened?

It got me to thinking about the so-called Roe effect in American politics, which basically states that the introduction of legalised abortion leads to a fall in support for legal abortion, as pro-choice parents will have fewer children than they might otherwise have had, while anti-abortion parents will have larger families as a consequence, as they will not exercise their right to a termination when faced with an unwanted pregnancy. Looking at the last two presidential elections, I think that the theory holds a lot of water.

Taking the idea further, I have begun to wonder about the long-term future of romantic love. How did your parents meet? The chances are that if you're reading this, you're in a Western country and you take it for granted that you have the right to choose your future marital partners and indeed the right to have none at all if you wish. But how common is that world-wide?

I don't know, but I'm starting to think that it's going to be a lot less common in the future that it is now. Check out this pictorial representation of the world, as illustrated by fertility rates.

http://www.pregnantpause.org/numbers/fertility.htm

The countries coloured in red are those with fertility rates below replacement level, countries that can expect declining populations. Those in blue are countries where the average woman has more than four children in her lifetime, where the population can be expected to rise greatly. Note that the countries with the high birth rates are places where arranged marriages are common and where younger people have far lower expectations about romantic happiness and instead take it as their duty to produce a family. The countries with the declining birth rates are those where people are led to believe that they will meet and attract their 'one-true soulmate' by themselves. Reality, as indicated by the high divorce rates, low birth rates and rising number of people living alone, suggests otherwise.

Assuming present trends continue, how many generations will it be before romantic love becomes the exception rather than the norm on a global basis? Perhaps it will account for less than half of all marriages at some point during your lifetime!

Hints and cheats.
Topic: Misc.
I completed URU: Ages beyond Myst this morning. It's a puzzle game based on the idea of exploring an ancient but extinct civilisation. Actually, I say I completed it, but I needed a lot of assistance. In fact without the hints I found online, I don't think I would have ever done it given a million years.

Spoiler:

Take the final scene for instance. In order to know that it exists at all, you have to realise that a comment you hear from a recording of a woman's voice talking about giving back what you have taken, means that you should return to all four levels that you've visited and undo the last thing you did while there.

Doing this takes you to another place, where you are supposed to note down the symbols drawn on the floor. You then return to the place where you started, from which you're meant to go back to the room where you first encountered a hologram and select those symbols on the .... Oh sorry am I losing you?

My point is that I'm struggling to believe that ANYONE could have completed this game without going online for hints. So many times I got half-way through a puzzle, having done the hard part of sketching out diagrams of stained-glass windows or hieroglyphics before coming to a dead end. Sometimes consulting the hints led to a reaction of 'but of course!', but on most occasions, it was 'how the hell was I supposed to figure that out?'.

Spoiler:

A case in point - in one level, you find that you can't access an area of a cave because it's pitch black. You're supposed to realise that you have to go to a different area of the same level and walk into a swarm of fireflies, some of whom will follow you.

Except it's not that simple. The fireflies only cluster around you if you walk. As soon as you run, they vanish. They also don't like rain, so if it starts raining you have to get under a covered passageway until it stops. In the least logical bit of all, you have to somehow figure out that the flies will follow you if you cross water ONCE but not a second time. This is supposed to drive you to devise a river crossing using some discarded barrels.

I honestly don't think that a team of Stephen Hawkins, Alan Turing and Albert Einstein could have worked all that out. In my case, I never even noticed the fireflies in the first place. I thought they were spores from the nearby plants.

Having said that, I did have fun with the game. The landscapes and the soundtrack are amazing and when you do figure something out and advance to the next level, there is a real sense of accomplishment and excitement at the coming revelations.

But no more jumping in puzzles games ... EVER, please.

Rejoice, eh!
Topic: Politics
Rejoice rejoice! Canada has elected a Conservative government. Another country swings to the right. In Canada's case, levels of corruption and crony-capitalism that exceed anything we're used to in the UK have finally pushed Canadian voters to reject the Liberal Party, which had become hopelessly tainted with sleaze.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4641954.stm


Meanwhile, a new survey by the BBC reports that people in Afghanistan and Iraq are the among most optimistic people in the world when it comes to their economic future.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4641396.stm

I wonder what those two countries have in common!

My obsession, in any language.
Topic: Misc.
It's about time I told readers of my curious obsession. I love buying teach-yourself language books. I don't mean the ones that only aim to impart a few phrases for people on brief holidays. No, I want the ones that teach the entire grammar and syntax.

I've long admired those who can learn the language of another country. When I came out of the film 'JFK', I was struck by the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald had learned to speak fluent Russian. I can speak reasonable German and French and a bit of Russian and got into Portuguese for a while in the late 90s. But I'm not fluent in anything. It remains my fantasy to become fluently multilingual, rather like the Matt Damon character in The Bourne Identity. I know that's utterly absurd, but a man can dream, can't he?

For the time being though, buying the books is about as far as I get. I hate myself for not finishing any of them, but that's one of the drawbacks of having played so much online poker in the last few years. You feel that you should be at the PC earning money all the time.

Somewhere in the middle of the photo below there is 'Teach youself Norwegian'. I bought that because I wanted to be able to read Vampus Verden, written by the 'Nordic Eva Braun' (copyright Jamie) who commented about Hurricane Katrina here.

I'm reminded of her today, as I've just learned that she won the 'Best Political Blog' award in Norway's second biggest Newspaper, Dagbladet. There's hope for Norway yet!

Former Vice-President of Syria demands change.
Topic: Politics
Only one news story seems important to me today and it's not the resignation of Charles Kennedy.

Khaddam calls for Syrian revolt.

Former Syrian Vice-President Abdul Halim Khaddam says he wants to see President Bashar al-Assad ousted through a popular uprising. Mr Khaddam told the BBC that Syrians were frustrated with the current regime and should be mobilised by the opposition groups in the country.

This is exactly the sort of positive knock-on effect that the invasion of Iraq was supposed to produce.

It's also nice to see someone having a conversion on the journey back from Damascus. :)

Moderately, socially, as you well know.
Topic: Politics
So the worst kept secret in British politics is out at last. Charles Kennedy admits he has a drink problem. If you've never seen a politician lie before, check out this interview with Jeremy Paxman:

Moderately, socially, as you well know.

UPDATE:

It occurs to me that some readers might think that there is an element of gloating in the above. They are of course right. I can't stand Kennedy.

Here's why.

The death penalty.
Topic: Politics
This is a puzzle. A site devoted to American gang culture tries to argue the case against the death penalty, yet manages to achieve the opposite. Referring to the execution of Tookie Williams, it reports on a voluntary handover of arms by members of the LA Bloods gang, with some members stating: 'If they can do this to Tookie, they can do it to any of us.'

By George! I do believe they've got it!

http://thaspot.thuglifearmy.com/blogs/roberts_blog/archive/2006/01/03/19.aspx

I have conflicting feelings about the death penalty. While I oppose it on the grounds that I fear the execution of an innocent man, I feel strangely envious of those US states where murderers are executed, rather than allowed back on the streets like they are here. It's what the public of those states wants. Contrast their position with that of Britain, where it's likely that popular opinion favours the death penalty, but governments think they know 'best'. Take this for instance:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1865864.stm

where a British death penalty opponent says:

"Governments lead by example, so in Europe the government leads by opposing the death penalty," to which the BBC, to its credit, dryly replies: "Of course, British public opinion is actually said to favour capital punishment. It is just that in the UK it has never been a serious election issue."

Exactly. So I find myself in the curious position of opposing the death penalty, while at the same time opposing anti death-penalty campaigners who display such arrogance.

Don't tell Vicky Coren, but supercasinos are no big deal.
Topic: Poker
Interesting profile of the Head of the Gaming Commission:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1967668,00.html

BBC2's dictionary expert disagrees with him:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1334782,00.html

Does Bin Laden read the Guardian letters page?
Topic: Politics
A few months ago, a reader of this site wrote to me, asking me to link him to transcripts of Bin Laden's declarations. In the course of comparing his earlier writing (1996) to his later declarations (2002 and 2004), I remarked in my e-mail back:

"I have to confess that I find the last two quite amusing in some ways. The 2002 letter to the American people mentions the US's failure to sign the Kyoto protocol. This has always looked odd to me. It's almost as though bin Laden was reading the Guardian letters page and decided to chuck it into the list of grievances on a whim. It sits very oddly with the decision to bomb London on the week of the G8 conference when climate change (as well as addressing poverty) was on the agenda."

Well I'm not the only one who has noticed this.

Replying to a 9-11 conspiracy theory.
Topic: Politics
Over at the Hendon Mob forum, 'Lancy Howard' links to a documentary that alleges a US conspiracy on 9-11. I have watched it and wish to refute its conclusions:

Lancy,

I sat and watched that documentary as you suggested and do feel that it raises certain questions and displays some inconsistencies in the official version of events. But I don't think that the evidence presented supports the conclusion that the US government was behind the attacks. In any large event, it's not hard to find inconsistencies. The documentary itself shows how eye witnesses can often disagree on vital details. Merely showing differences isn't enough to persuade me of a conspiracy. A similar tactic is used by Holocaust deniers who look for inconsistencies in the survivors' accounts to promote the idea of a hoax. In an event that involved so many millions, it's not hard to find inaccurate accounts and conflicting versions of events from traumatised people. But this doesn't mean that the holocaust didn't happen.

Physical evidence is of course preferable and the video does a decent job of finding inconsistencies, but it's not hard to find a site online that refutes the Pentagon issues:

A refutation.

I've not had time to examine all of this fully.

Much of the story suffers from another problem - the "comparison with a vacuum". For instance, we're shown fireman talk of explosions. So what? What other word would they use to describe what they say? None of them had scene a jumbo jet fly into a skyscraper before, so they used the vocabulary that they knew.

Another instance - the point that no building has been brought down by fire before. Well, on how many other occasions has this exact same thing happened before? We're told that the fuel doesn't burn to a high enough temperature to cause the alleged damage but unless you recreate the exact same circumstances again, you don't know whether there were other reactions within the buildings that took place for 'innocent' reasons that could have caused the damage.

I don't know what the grainy footage of the plane's crashing was meant to suggest. The shiny rectangle on the site of the plane just before it hit one of the towers didn't prove anything to me. Neither did the dark shadow under the other. The film was much too grainy to discount the possibility of simple shadows and reflections.

Furthermore, it's worth pointing out that the Pentagon is not a typical building. What a plane does hitting a normal building says nothing about what a plane would do hitting the world's largest office, with the toughest security wall in the world. And I also think it would take a very confident Donald Rumsfeld to place himself anywhere in the building knowing that it would be hit, regardless of how well planned his supposed adventure was. His own life would have been on the line!

We are invited to believe that a conspiracy occured that would have involved thousands of people in a cover-up. And none of the conspirators have had an attack of conscience after four years? How hard would it be for one of them to travel to a hostile or neutral country to spill the beans? Once one does it, other would follow. Yet we hear nothing.

Even if you do accept a government conspiracy to plant bombs in the twin towers, it wouldn't necessarily have to be the govt of the US. Iranian agents have been caught taking photographs of the tunnels leading into Manhattan (Lincoln and Holland).

The video makes no serious attempt to explain where the missing planes are that 'didn't' hit the WTC. It leaves that totally in the air, so to speak. Nor does it follow through its own logic and explain how at least TWO conspirators were persuaded to fly suicide missions. What would you have to be paid to kill yourself?

Then there is the question of motive. None is supplied. Bush had won election less than one year earlier and had three years left to run. It's hardly an election year 'October surprise', is it? If the purpose was to support a war to bolster his popularity then you have to ask why Bush would think that war would boost his popularity. His own father had fought and won a war against Iraq, yet still lost the next election, just as Bush's hero Winston Churchill did in 1945. If this was to somehow support war against Iraq, would they not have planted fake evidence of Iraqi involvment? And why did they wait so long afterwards before going to war?

If the purpose was to support war against Afghanistan, then why? What vital resources does it have? None! What possible strategic benefit would there have been? Don't believe that rubbish about a vital pipeline. That has been thoroughly debunked.

Not a lot makes sense here.

Bush wrote (or had written) a book of his philosophy a few years before. In the book 'A charge to keep', one chapter is devoted to explaining his opposition to the entire idea of 'nation building' - the total oppositie of his current plan in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If the purpose had somehow been to make Bush look like a heroic leader, why was it timed to happen when he was being filmed reading a book about a girl's pet goat to a group of young schoolchildren? Nothing he did on that day has ever been made to look heroic.

I could sit and think of other problems with this video if I had the time and energy, but for now I think that will do. I'm sure that the official report made some mistakes. It may have cut corners. But that's a million miles away from supporting a conspiracy theory.

DY

What does a kidnapper have to do to get a bad press?
Topic: Politics
Nothing to see here folks.

Three Britons captured in Gaza. No big deal. Business as usual, just an internal dispute. Everything will come out all right in the wash.

That's the feeling you're left with if you read this report:

Gaza kidnaps not drive by hatred.

I've heard of Stockholm Syndrome, but this is Stockholm Syndrome by Proxy.

Libya rewarded for blackmail
Topic: Politics
I'm saddened by a footnote in this story:

Relief over Libya medics reprieve

It concerns the trial and conviction of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor for deliberately infecting Libyan children with AIDS.

Just ask yourself how likely that really was.

What upsets me is that the Bulgarian government is going to pay money to Libya. It is being rewarded for charging foreign doctors on a ridiculous trumped up charge and holding them for seven years. Doctors and aid workers working overseas in needy countries have just had a price put on their heads. A sad day.

Israel makes a mistake.
Topic: Politics
As many of you know, I'm mostly on the Israeli side when it comes to discussing the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. I don't intend to elaborate for now on why this is. Instead I want to talk about a dilemma that it faces and why I think it could be about to make a mistake.

I refer to the announcement that it plans to prevent voting in East Jerusalem during January's Palestinian parliamentary elections.

http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/news_service/middle_east_full_story.asp?service_id=10414

In any normal situation, it would not be controversial to say that a country should never interfere in another country's elections. But in this instance, I can see their concern. Israel is worried that Hamas could achieve power and that does have consequences, because the Hamas charter declares that Israel should not exist. If taken to its logical conclusion, the election of Hamas should surely mean war.

Yet it's not all about war. As Hugh Miles reports in his book 'Al Jazeera' (page 72) "... most Palestinians do not support Hamas because it is violent: they support it because it is kind". And that's part of the problem. The Palestinian Authority is associated with "nepotism, flashiness and hordes of hangers-on" (same source). Hamas's leaders are considered more charitable, just and austere. It's truly tragic to see the more honest party being the more violent one. Imagine if the BNP were known for good works and charitable donations.

Faced with this dilemma, I still think that Israel's best bet is to let events take their course. If Hamas takes power, it will be faced with responsibilities for managing roads, hospitals and schools etc. If they chose to go to war then Israel, then Israel should have no difficulty in pointing out that it has the right to defend itself. But it's also possible that the burden of actual government leads to some moderation.

This point of view might surprise some readers, but it fits with my neo-con views. One of the biggest disasters of the last two decades was the decision to cancel the 1992 Algerian elections. Again the concern was that fundamentalists would take power. For me that isn't a problem, as long as the constitutional arrangements continue to exist by which the people could vote them out of office. Many expressed the view that this would not happen and that there would be 'One Man. One vote. Once'.

But that's being pessimistic and cancelling the election has proved to be the cure that was worse than the disease. Islamic extremism retains its appeal in part because it hasn't been tried (outside Iran and Afghanistan, where it proved massively unpopular after time). Fundamentalists can shout empty slogans like 'Islam in the answer' and never be disputed as long as they are kept out of power. Islamism must be given the chance to fail, democratically.