Mad Mel on Annapolis

Melanie Phillips has written a piece on the Annapolis conference. In it she talks about how threatened she thinks Israel is and how important it is that Israel is defended. I may discuss Annapolis later, but consider: Phillips, a British Jew, was 22 years old during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. She did not at the time or later, go to Israel and join its armed forces. Surely the rational and honest thing to do would be to fight for what she believes in?

But I doubt if rationality and honesty are her strong suits. How can they be when she flirts with creationism (which she thinks should be taught in schools), when she believes in the media’s MMR hoax, when she — without the scientific background to understand the evidence — thinks global warming is a “fraud” and a “con-trick“? Indeed the only talent Phillips has shown in her entire worthless life is talking bullshit.

Subsidising marriage is wrong

The Tories propose giving money to median-income voters who are married, supposedly to ensure children are better brought up.

Chris Dillow explains why this won’t work:

New research suggests that the Tories‘ proposals to encourage marriage through the tax system would be a wasteful bribe to median voters, rather than a way of improving the way children are brought up.

Granted, there’s evidence that the children of married couples do better – on average – than those from single-parent homes. But correlation isn’t causality. It might be that the sort of people who get married are just better parents than the sort that don’t get married. If this is the case, giving financial incentives to people to get married won’t improve children’s upbringing. It’ll just mean kids live with bad married parents rather than bad unmarried ones.

And evidence from Sweden suggests this is the case. In 1989 a change to rules on widow’s pensions increased financial incentives to marry. The upshot was that 64,000 couples got wed in December 1989, compared to an average of 3000 in normal Decembers.And did the children of these additionally married couples do better than those from cohabiting couples? No.

I suspect intelligent Tories know this, and actually this measure is a cynical piece of electioneering aimed at bribing people with their own money.

Does Cameron count as an “intelligent Tory”? I suspect not, at least not in the sense that he understands the effects of his policies. Cameron is probably not lying when he says he believes this proposal will help children. Because to be lying, you would have to evaluate a statement as being true or false, and repeat it even if you think it’s false. Cameron’s thought processes do not, I believe, go as far as that. He thinks of a policy proposal, then immediately evaluates it not on the technicalities of whether it would work, but merely on whether it would make a vote-winning soundbite. In the words of Tony Blair, Cameron seeks “eye-catching initiatives” with which he can be “personally associated”.

In short, he’s a smarmy glib upper-class scumbag. Bit like Blair, really.

Religious schools

Mr Eugenides isn’t impressed with a new Hindu state-funded school in Britain:

If you want to teach your kids that chanting “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare” is going to bring about “a higher state of consciousness”, then you are entirely welcome to; Hindus tend to be fine upstanding citizens, and I am sure that Hare Krishnas are even more so. But please put your hand in your own fucking pocket, not mine.

The same goes for other religions, of course.

Want to buy a bear?

Mohammed Bear for sale:

For sale due to a change in the school curriculum.

Mo is a delightful little bear who all children would love, but not some adults.

Condition: As new, but by time of delivery may have 40 scratch marks on back.

Any proceeds to Prisoners Abroad http://www.prisonersabroad.org.uk/

Insulting religion

Some people don’t like it when you insult their imaginary friend. For example:

The BBC reports that Gillian Gibbons has been sentenced to 15 days in prison for “insulting religion”. The religion in question which has so exercised the slow-witted mullahs of Sudan is known as “Islam”, a 7th century personality cult invented by an illiterate camel trader with a penchant for warfare and pre-pubescent girls. Think of L Ron Hubbard in a tent.

Or:

While we wait for news from Sudan, another example of religious protectionism rears its ugly head in Turkey. There a prosecutor is seeking to press charges against the Turkish publisher of Dawkins’ The God Delusion for inciting religious hatred and assaulting “sacred values”.

Which is odd, when you think about it. Assume for one moment, that you are God, creator of the universe, and omnipotent and omniscient ruler of said universe. Would you really be bothered if some insignificant mammals on some insignificant little rock in an insignificant little corner of your universe said something nasty about you? You’d have to be a pretty insecure deity to be so. So I suspect that when theists are outraged at blasphemy, they are merely projecting their own pathetic insecurities.

The dollar will decline further

Brad Setser has produced a “scary graph” showing the sudden stop of the inflow of foreign capital into the USA:

Paul Krugman asks “Is this the Wile E. Coyote moment?“:

So, according to the story, one of these days there will be a Wile E. Coyote moment for the dollar: the moment when the cartoon character, who has run off a cliff, looks down and realizes that he’s standing on thin air – and plunges. In this case, investors suddenly realize that Stein’s Law applies — “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop” – and they realize they need to get out of dollars, causing the currency to plunge. Maybe the dollar’s Wile E. Coyote moment has arrived – although, again, I’ve been wrong about this so far.

Krugman adds that the Saudis are rumoured to be about to diversify into euros. Certainly, if they had been buying euros instead of dollar for the last 5 years, they’d be a lot better off now, as this graph shows:

(You can get a dynamic version of this graph from Yahoo)

So it seems likely that governments, worried about the fall in value of their dollar holdings, will not buy dollars in future and will diversify their existing holdings into other currencies, particularly the euro. This reduction in the demand for dollars will in turn cause further drops in the value of the dollar, prompting those countries that haven’t already shifted their holdings out of it to do so. It seems likely that we are seeing the end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

(via Salon)

Nick Griffin at the Oxford Union

A debate at the Oxford Union, which invited BNP leader Nick Griffin to speak about free speech, was a success according to this report:

BNP ABANDONS RACISM AFTER OXFORD DEBATE
THE far-right British National Party is to abandon racism after listening carefully to the opposing arguments during last night’s Oxford Union debate.
BNP leader Nick Griffin said the discussion had convinced him that all human beings were of equal worth and that everyone was descended from the apes, not just black people. He also agreed that black people did not smell really bad after being given a large African to sniff at the climax of the sometimes heated, but always good-natured, event.

Britblog roundup #145

Britblog roundup #145 is up at Liberal England.

If you have any blog entries you want put into the next britblog roundup, send your nominations to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.

Exams for terrorists

Do you have an A level or AS level in biology or chemistry? Then you must be one of those evil terrorists the government is always warning us about. At least that’s the conclusion one can draw from this report in Nature:

A British resident who is under surveillance for suspected terrorist activities is being prohibited from taking secondary-school-level science courses by the government, Nature has learned.

The man, referred to as A.E., is contesting the decision in court, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind. The preliminary hearing over whether A.E. should be allowed to take AS-level courses in human biology and chemistry took place on 16 November at London’s High Court. The UK Home Office, which has an order restricting A.E.’s actions and affiliations, argues that such coursework could be turned towards terrorism. His solicitors counter that the knowledge is public, and that the furthering of A.E.’s education poses no threat.

I was in Waterstone’s the other day and they had a whole shelf of revision guides for AS levels. I guess they must be in league with the terrorists too, which demonstrates that the terrorist conspiracy is much bigger than I had hitherto suspected, and that the government is therefore right to throw away all our civil liberties to combat it.

How secure will the ID card database be?

The government is proposing a national ID card with an associated database giving information on everyone in the UK. If you want to know how secure this will be, you only have to look at how they mislaid 25 million child benefit records:

Two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16 have gone missing.

The Child Benefit data on them includes name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and, where relevant, bank details of 25m people.

Chancellor Alistair Darling said there was no evidence the data had fallen into criminal hands – but urged people to monitor their bank accounts. Mr Darling apologised for what he described as an “extremely serious failure on the part of HMRC to protect sensitive personal data entrusted to it in breach of its own guidelines”.

Their national database of all children, ContactPoint, will no doubt be every bit as secure as the ID card database and the child benefit data. Not that the government could give a toss, since their kids will be exempt from the ContactPoint database.